Well, the first thing is that, along with this optimistic scenario from the point of view of uniting the conditions of the working class globally, there was a more pessimistic consideration in the essay, pointing to something that I’ve always considered a very serious flaw in Marx and Engels’s Manifesto. There is a logical leap that does not really hold up, intellectually or historically—the idea that, for capital, those things that we would today call gender, ethnicity, nationality, do not matter. That the only thing that matters for capital is the possibility of exploitation; and therefore the most exploitable status group within the working class is the one they will employ, without any discrimination on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity. That’s certainly true. However, it doesn’t follow that the various status groups within the working class will just accept this. In fact, it is precisely at the point when proletarianization becomes generalized, and workers are subjected to this disposition of capital, that they will mobilize whatever status difference they can identify or construct to win a privileged treatment from the capitalists. They will mobilize along gender lines, national lines, ethnicity or whatever, to obtain a privileged treatment from capital.
(...) [Adam Smith:] Substantively, the action of the government in Smith is pro-labour, not pro-capital. He is quite explicit that he is not in favour of making workers compete to reduce wages, but of making capitalists compete, to reduce profits to a minimum acceptable reward for their risks. Current conceptions turn him completely
(...) There is evidence that the Chinese authorities are worried about the environment, as well as about social unrest—but then they do things that are plain stupid. Maybe there is a plan in the works, but I don’t see much awareness of the ecological disasters of car civilizations. The idea of copying the United States from this point of view was already crazy in Europe—it’s even crazier in China. And I’ve always told the Chinese that in the 1990s and 2000s, they went to look at the wrong city. If they want to see how to be wealthy without being ecologically destructive, they should go to Amsterdam rather than Los Angeles. In Amsterdam, everybody goes around on bicycles; there are thousands of bikes parked at the station overnight, because people come in by train, pick up their bicycles in the morning and leave them there again in the evening. Whereas in China, while there were no cars at all the first time I was there in 1970—only a few buses in a sea of bicycles—now, more and more, the bicycles have been crowded out. From that point of view it’s a very mixed picture, very worrying and contradictory. The ideology of modernization is discredited elsewhere but so far is living on, rather naively, in China.
(...) If you look at the way in which China has behaved towards its neighbours historically, there has always been a relationship based more on trade and economic exchanges than on military power; this is still the case. People often misunderstand this: they think I am depicting the Chinese as being softer or better than the West; it’s nothing to do with that. It has to do with the problems of governance of a country like China, which we’ve discussed. China has a tradition of rebellions that no other territory of similar size and density of population has faced. Its rulers are also highly conscious of the possibility of new invaders from the sea—in other words, the us.
(...) So I had the luck—from the point of view of analysing the capitalist business enterprise—of going into successively larger firms, which helped me understand that you cannot talk about capitalist enterprises in general, because the differences between my father’s business, my grandfather’s business and Unilever were incredible.
(...)
(...) First of all, we should not exaggerate the extent to which China has broken the pattern. The level of per capita income in China was so low—and still is low, compared to the wealthy countries—that even major advances need to be qualified. China has doubled its position relative to the rich world, but still that only means going from 2 per cent of the average per capita income of the wealthy countries to 4 per cent. It is true that China has been decisive in producing a reduction in world income inequalities between countries. If you take China out, the South’s position has worsened since the 1980s; if you keep it in, then the South has improved somewhat, due almost exclusively to China’s advance. But of course, there has been a big growth in inequality within the prc, so China has also contributed to the world-scale increase in inequalities within countries in recent decades. Taking the two measures together—inequality between and within countries—statistically China has brought about a reduction in total global inequality. We should not exaggerate this—the world pattern is still one of huge gaps, which are being reduced in small ways. However, it’s important because it changes relationships of power between countries. If it continues, it may even change the global distribution of income from one that is still very polarized to a more normal, Pareto-type distribution.
(...) From the 1980s and 1990s, in particular, the more important development has been the bifurcation of a highly dynamic and upwardly mobile East Asia and a stagnant and downwardly mobile Africa, and particularly southern Africa—‘the Africa of the labour reserves’, again. This bifurcation is the thing that interests me most: why southern Africa and East Asia have moved in such opposite directions. It’s a very important phenomenon to try to understand, because to do so would also modify our understanding of the underpinnings of successful capitalist development, and the extent to which it relies or not on dispossession—the complete proletarianization of the peasantry—as happened in southern Africa, or on the very partial proletarianization that has taken place in East Asia. So the divergence of these two regions brings up a big theoretical question, which once again challenges Brenner’s identification of capitalist development with the full proletarianization of the labour force.
(...) The relationship is very close, because, first of all, contrary to what many people think, the Chinese peasants and workers have a millennial tradition of unrest that has no parallel anywhere else in the world. In fact, many of the dynastic transitions were driven by rebellions, strikes and demonstrations—not just of workers and peasants, but also shopkeepers. This is a tradition that continues down to the present. When Hu Jintao told Bush, a few years ago, ‘Don’t worry about China trying to challenge us dominance; we have too many preoccupations at home’, he was pointing to one of the chief characteristics of Chinese history: how to counter the combination of internal rebellions by the subordinate classes, and external invasions by so-called barbarians—from the Steppes, up to the nineteenth century, and then, since the Opium Wars, from the sea. These have always been the overwhelming concerns of Chinese governments, and they set narrow limits on China’s role in international relations.
(...) Well, not of less relevance, because in fact it is the most serious crisis that historical capitalism has experienced; certainly, it was a decisive turning point. But it also educated the powers-that-be in terms of what they should do so as not to repeat that experience. There are a variety of recognized and less recognized instruments for preventing that type of breakdown from happening again. Even now, though the collapse in the stock exchange is being compared to the 1930s, I think—I may be wrong—that both the monetary authorities and the governments of the states that actually matter in this are going to do all they can to avoid the collapse in the financial markets having similar social effects to the 1930s. They just cannot afford it, politically. And so they will muddle through, do anything they have to. Even Bush—and before him Reagan—for all their free-market ideology, relied on an extreme kind of Keynesian deficit spending. Their ideology is one thing, what they actually do is another, because they are responding to political situations which they cannot allow to deteriorate too much. The financial aspects may be similar to the 1930s, but there is a greater awareness and tighter constraints on the political authorities not to let these processes affect the so-called real economy to the same extent that they did in the 1930s. I’m not saying that the Great Depression is less relevant, but I’m not convinced that it is going to be repeated in the near future. The situation of the world economy is radically different. In the 1930s it was highly segmented, and that may have been a factor in producing the conditions for those breakdowns. Now it’s far more integrated.
(...) Yes. I think that over the last thirty years there has been a change in the nature of the crisis. Up to the early 1980s, the crisis was typically one of falling rate of profits due to intensifying competition among capitalist agencies, and due to circumstances in which labour was much better equipped to protect itself than in the previous depressions—both in the late-nineteenth century and in the 1930s. So that was the situation through the 1970s. The Reagan–Thatcher monetary counter-revolution was actually aimed at undermining this power, this capacity of the working classes to protect themselves—it was not the only objective, but it was one of the main objectives. I think that you quote some adviser of Thatcher, saying that what they did was [to create an industrial reserve army]; what Marx says they should do! That changed the nature of the crisis. In the 1980s and 1990s and now, in the 2000s, we are indeed facing an underlying overproduction crisis, with all its typical characteristics. Incomes have been redistributed in favour of groups and classes that have high liquidity and speculative dispositions; so incomes don’t go back into circulation in the form of effective demand, but they go into speculation, creating bubbles that burst regularly. So, yes, the crisis has been transformed from one of falling rate of profit, due to intensified competition among capitals, to one of overproduction due to a systemic shortage of effective demand, created by the tendencies of capitalist development.
(...) ...What the declining power does is very important, because they have the ability to create chaos. The whole ‘Project for a New American Century’ was a refusal to accept decline. That has been a catastrophe. There has been the military debacle in Iraq and the related financial strain on the us position in the world economy, transforming the United States from a creditor nation into the biggest debtor nation in world history. As a defeat, Iraq is worse than Vietnam, because in Indo-China there was a long tradition of guerrilla warfare: they had a leader of the calibre of Ho Chi Minh; they had already defeated the French. The tragedy for the Americans in Iraq is that, even in the best possible circumstances, they have a hard time winning the war, and now they are just trying to get out with some face-saving device. Their resistance to accommodation has led, first, to an acceleration of their decline, and second, to a lot of suffering and chaos. Iraq is a disaster. The size of the displaced population there is far bigger than in Darfur.
(...) One of the major problems on the left, but also on the right, is to think that there is only one kind of capitalism that reproduces itself historically; whereas capitalism has transformed itself substantively—particularly on a global basis—in unexpected ways. For several centuries capitalism relied on slavery, and seemed so embedded in slavery from all points of view that it could not survive without it; whereas slavery was abolished, and capitalism not only survived but prospered more than ever, now developing on the basis of colonialism and imperialism. At this point it seemed that colonialism and imperialism were essential to capitalism’s operation—but again, after the Second World War, capitalism managed to discard them, and to survive and prosper. World-historically, capitalism has been continually transforming itself, and this is one of its main characteristics; it would be very short-sighted to try to pin down what capitalism is without looking at these crucial transformations. What remains constant through all these adaptations, and defines the essence of capitalism, is best captured by Marx’s formula of capital M–C–M', to which I refer repeatedly in identifying the alternation of material and financial expansions. Looking at present-day China, one can say, maybe it’s capitalism, maybe not—I think it’s still an open question. But assuming that it is capitalism, it’s not the same as that of previous periods; it’s thoroughly transformed. The issue is to identify its specificities, how it differs from previous capitalisms, whether we call it capitalism or something else.
(...) Well, I would have no objections to it being called socialism, except that, unfortunately, socialism has been too much identified with state control of the economy. I never thought that was a good idea. I come from a country where the state is despised and in many ways distrusted. The identification of socialism with the state creates big problems. So, if this world-system was going to be called socialist, it would need to be redefined in terms of a mutual respect between humans and a collective respect for nature. But this may have to be organized through state-regulated market exchanges, so as to empower labour and disempower capital in Smithian fashion, rather than through state ownership and control of the means of production. The problem with the term socialism is that it’s been abused in many different ways, and therefore also discredited. If you ask me what would be a better term, I’ve no idea—I think we should look for one. You are very good at finding new expressions, so you should come up with some suggestions.

notes on capital
chapters 26-33: primitive accumulation

(873-874): worth flagging this page, as it outlines the contrast between Marxist and liberal positions on force/conflict within capitalist production.

(874-875): "so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production."

(875): Marx making explicit the normative consequences of the transition toward the "double freedom" of the proletariat: at once free from serfdom and the "fetters of the guilds" ["and it is this aspect of the movement which alone exists for our bourgeois historians"], and at the same time "robbed of all of their own means of production." Quite clearly, here, we are speaking of the dialectics and contradictions of historical progress.

(876): The last sentence contains all that is regrettable about Marx's "universalizing" of the British experience--by making Britain the "classic form" of expropriation of rural areas, he, quite unwittingly and against his more explicit instructions, inspired failed attempts to read quite different histories through this classic, universal lens.

(877): Feudalism finished by the fourteenth century--the vast majority of the population as "small peasants."

(878): FN #3, fascinating. reflections on Japan and liberal attitudes toward the Middle Ages, possibly hinting at a contempt for Whiggish interpretations of history's march that ought to dampen the spirits of crude Marxist modernizers.

(879): here Marx, in the manner of this entire book, leaves the question of the state-society interface open to history, without compromising the thrust of his class analysis.

(880): implicit in this is an appraisal of legislation's utility in the face of history's march. and, to be honest, marx is not very generous, especially if we're speaking of big sweeps. what this implies for agency, i think, is less clear, since these are cosmetic laws authored and implemented largely by kings at the behest of tradition. (see also 885). at the same time, it is important to stress that the identity between legislation and ruling class interests is not trivially true, in that--as one sees with the reports on proletariat health after the corn laws--a class can be economically ascendant but politically (and temporarily) relatively impotent. yet of course these are exceptions that can be assimilated into the rule.

(884): the theft of state assets at "ridiculous" prices--where have we heard that before?

(886): "the identity between the wealth of the nation and the poverty of the people" -- a not-so-indirect rejoinder to liberal triumphalism.

(887-888): "'Upon the whole, the circumstances of the lower ranks of men are altered in almost every respect for the worse.'" it should be clear, then, that we are not speaking of the Marx of the modernizers' imagination. or, at least, he does not share their totalizing fixation with the future, even if they would agree on policy forward. there is room, in other words, for a recognition of place.

(888): again, the non-identity between the "nation" and the "people" -- the bourgeois becomes the torch bearer for the "nation", a move which allows him to speak in the name of the people he dispossesses.

(889): dating enclosures: late 1400s to late 1700s

(892): hinting at the perpetual nature of primitive accumulation, much like harvey's position

(893): an interesting side-note to Marx on nature: here, in this portrayal of expropriation, the small farmer simply forms another part of the natural backdrop. he is dead to the bourgeois' history, precisely he--like all else that is "natural," precedes it. an alternative, very literal embedding of the "social" in the "natural."

(896): important passage, for two reasons: (a) prefigures the problems of the third world, in that the peasantry is being thrown onto a market that cannot properly absorb it (b) prefigures Foucault, in that the peasantry has to be disciplined into accepting an entirely new routine and set of values (cf. the listed punishments for vagabondage)--has to be "modernized." Lumpen activity is theorized in this context, and has to be done so in the contemporary Third World, as well (gangsterism, terrorism, etc.)

(899): "Even at the beginning of the reign of Louis XVI, the Ordinance of 13 July 1977 provided that every man in good health from 16 to 60 years of age, if without means of subsistence and not practising a trade, should be sent to the galleys."

(899-900): here Marx clearly seems to overstate his case, making normal a state of affairs that is highly idealized. against this passage, it is important to re-assert Harvey's reminder that primitive accumulation and the State are always important tools for the ruling class--in that sense, Marx's account is far too kind; the notion that this violence is transitional and particular to a specific epoch needs refutation.

(902): the first minimum wage, where before there were only maximum wages being proposed.

(903): the sordid history of bourgeois positions on trade unions, including the French Revolution's banning of them in 1791! liberty means, as it always has for the bourgeois, the liberty of a particular class. the timelessness of the worker's oppression, then, is here made clear.

(910): Marx's suggestion here, that observers are too ready to see the large-scale capitalist without also appreciating his dependence on a plethora of networks of smaller-scale production, resembles Arrighi's critique of the Euro-centrism of theories of the Big Corporation. We do have to ask what this means for theories of centralization/concentration--and it is not sufficient to say that it "opens them up to history", even if that is true and important.

(910-911): a further important point--expropriation is not simply important to the reconfiguration of structures of production, but it also is critical to reconfiguring consumption. it is only once the workers are divested from the right to produce their own means of subsistence that they become dependent on a market. (to this one can append Marx's Foucaultian moments--they have to be "taught" how to consume).

(915): "the author should have reminded himself that revolutions are not made with laws."

(916): Marx on violence, implicitly: "Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power."

(916-917): Marx on the colonies, hardly an apologist for empire.

(918): Marx here makes a critical chronological intervention, in stressing that colonialism (as commercial supremacy) is coeval with manufacture, and that it helps mature industry. In other words, colonialism was critical for industrial predominance. By the late 19th century, this has changed--one can only sustain commercial supremacy if industrial forces are already sufficiently matured. This is important in better understanding the changing nature of colonialism, itself.

(920): Arrighi's narrative is here being prefigured, as Marx recounts the shifting centers of the international credit system. But, I think, there is a clear need to make it more systematic than what is presented here, as Arrighi does.

(920): Capital as "the capitalized blood of children"--unforgiving, and absolutely correct.

(921-922): These passages are key to any comprehensive Marxist theory of the state. Especially if we are going to argue that primitive accumulation is a continuous feature of life in modern capitalism, then the State--as provider of "original" capital--has a continuous, protective role to play (in other words, the bailouts can be represented as a kind of primitive accumulation).

(923): Marx's re-telling of the historical crimes of capitalism makes for important reading. Why do liberals never have to "own up" to these crimes when endorsing this system of production, the way that commies in the case of their own beliefs? There is something to be said here about Walter Benjamin and the stealthy cloaking of past crimes in the narrative of present progress.

(924): "Liverpool grew fat on the basis of the slave trade"

(926): "...capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt"

(928): Though my own obsession with the normative implications of Marx's dialectics is important, it is also moot. Because Marx is, of course, not suggesting that we stop (or try to stop) history at any given stage of its advance. It is not a case of deliberating on the principles we find superior, and working to embody them in a world of our making. Rather, history advances quite in spite of our best efforts. We can observe dialectics, amidst all this (and the implications of that attentiveness for the bourgeois historians are important), but we cannot intervene.

(929): Why the proletariat? "...with this there also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united, and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production." Might a close-reading of this passage be in order, especially concentrating on those three words, "trained, united, organized."

(929): This is important (and was argued on preceding pages, as well): when Capital mobilizes to argue that it defends the cause of private property, it falls to us to remind the ideologues that this is one kind of private property--or, rather, the private property of one class, in particular. what's more, in the process of primitive accumulation, this system has little problem in obliterating the private property of millions of small producers and peasants. (see also 931)

(932): speaking of the colonial imperative to transform structures of production in the colony, Marx invokes the schematics of uneven development: "In the interest of the so-called wealth of the nation, he seeks for artificial means to ensure the poverty of the people."

(932): absolutely foundational to this entire process is this point that Capital is not simply a wad of cash ready to be deployed, but a wad of cash ready to be deployed in a particular social relation: "property in money, means of subsistence, machines and other means of production does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if the essential complement to these things is missing the wage-laborer, the other man, who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will... capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things.

(938-939): excellent passages against which to develop a history of emigration--again, as always, this speaks of a Marx for whom theory is open to history, even if the framework's contours are established, as well.

If we look at the entire country from a distance, during the period between 1978 and 1992 there were two great sectors: a public sector that was still largely based on socialist production relations and a private sector in which family production relations prevailed. Looking a little closer, in urban areas, the public sector was dominant, with a thriving family economy at the margins, while in rural areas, the family economy was dominant, with a growing township and village enterprise sector, which harboured both socialist and small-scale capitalist production relations. This was, indeed, a non-capitalist market economy, although it was changing quickly.
(...) Since 1992, much more radical market reforms have changed everything. Deng Xiaoping’s highly publicized tour of foreign-funded enterprises in southeast China’s special economic zones in early 1992 is conventionally cited as the key moment that marked the shift to more radical economic restructuring. After that, the ccp strongly encouraged the growth of the private capitalist sector and by the end of the decade it had presided over the privatization of the great majority of publicly owned enterprises. Between 1991 and 2005, the proportion of the urban workforce employed in the public sector fell from about 82 per cent to about 27 per cent (see Figure 1, below).
(...) This massive conversion of public into private property transformed managers into property owners and other work-unit members into disenfranchised proletarians. Work units in which previously both managers and workers had enforceable claims suddenly became the exclusive possession of the managers. In Marx’s language, labour power was separated from the means of production, as both were converted into commodities, and the responsibilities for production and consumption were severed.
(...) In order to retain some capacity to steer state-owned enterprises in line with political concerns, the ccp has held onto the power to appoint key state-sector executives, and government officials continue to use public holding companies to pursue state objectives that are broader than quarterly profits. Nevertheless, the structure of these enterprises has been fundamentally changed so that they are required—and able—to make profitability their primary goal. To accomplish this, they shed their previous obligations to their employees. Lifetime employment guarantees were eliminated, and enterprises not only reduced the size of their workforces but also discharged veteran workers and replaced them with younger workers who were less costly and more pliant. [13] State-owned coal mines, for instance, now engage contractors who compete to mine coal—using migrant labour—for the lowest cost per ton, a system that helps make Chinese coal mines the most dangerous in the world. [14] Enterprises have also closed unprofitable subsidiaries and removed themselves from the business of providing housing, health care, pensions, childcare, recreation, education and other services for employees and their families. Although these enterprises remain partly state-owned, the features that made them socialist have been eliminated.
(...) In 1978, China’s Gini coefficient (the measure used to compare international income inequality in which 0 indicates absolute equality and 1 absolute inequality) was calculated to be 0.22. This was among the lowest rates in the world. Observers were particularly impressed by it given China’s size and geographic diversity. The prc had accomplished this, despite large income differences between urban and rural areas and between more and less developed regions, because within each locality differences were minimal. Less than three decades later, in 2006, the figure was 0.496, surpassing the United States and approaching the rates of the world’s most unequal countries, such as Brazil and South Africa. [21] Inequality between regions and between rural and urban areas have both increased substantially, but the most dramatic change has been the polarization of income within localities.
(...) The data in Figure 2 indicate that all urban residents, including those at the bottom, now enjoy substantially higher incomes. These figures, however, only record cash income and, therefore, mask the loss of goods and services that had been distributed by the state and work units rather than the market, including subsidized housing, utilities, foodstuffs, household necessities, health care and education. The inadequacy of using cash income to gauge well-being across the structural transformation from a socialist to a capitalist economy becomes clear if one compares the income of the best-off urban households in the mid-1980s with that of the poorest households today. The former group, made up of managerial and professional cadres, lived in well-appointed apartments and enjoyed substantial economic comfort and security, even though they only had an average annual cash income of less than 1400 yuan; the latter group, made up mainly of unemployed or informally employed workers, despite having an average cash income of over 3800 yuan, live in deteriorating apartments, have trouble making ends meet, and avoid visiting the doctor.
(...) The sudden expansion of capitalist production relations since 1992 is what has made income inequality skyrocket in China. Before then, because the great bulk of economic activity was organized around the family labour and work-unit systems, which had responsibility for the consumption of their members, the growth of inequality was structurally constrained. The recent reforms have removed those constraints.
(...) That the current configuration of power in China may appropriately be called a capitalist state is confirmed by the government’s strong support for the expansion of the capitalist sector. Capitalist encroachment on the family labour sector and the relentless displacement of small enterprises by larger ones is fundamentally market-driven, but it is also state policy. China’s political leaders do not want backward produce markets, they want modern supermarkets, and state officials are expected to identify and support ‘winners’ in the economic competition. This expectation extends from the Political Bureau, which grooms national champions, down to county and township cadres, who are inveterate boosters of successful local enterprises. Under these conditions, it is difficult to distinguish, whether conceptually or empirically, state development strategies from the pecuniary interests of government officials and large-scale entrepreneurs, who are linked by myriad family and other ties.
(...) Arrighi correctly stresses the importance of China’s peculiar system of rural land tenure, which has barred individuals from selling land, preventing wholesale expropriation of the peasants’ means of subsistence. These laws have protected the family labour system in agriculture from capitalist encroachment, but they have not been at all incompatible with the operation of capitalist production relations in the rest of the economy, and they have permitted significant capitalist inroads in the most profitable areas of the agrarian sector. Although many entrepreneurs have certainly felt stymied by these laws, and employers of migrant labour will welcome the further influx of itinerant workers that the sale of land-use rights will produce, the land-tenure system established in the 1980s has served the broader interests of capital. For it has not only averted the social instability associated with huge landless populations, but has also allowed rural subsistence production to subsidize the employers of migrant workers, and a reserve army of rural labour to fluctuate in accord with the changing requirements of capitalist production. In fact, while the ccp’s recent decision to promote the sale of land-use rights might now permit capitalism to flourish in the countryside, it may also help to destabilize the larger system.
(...) Arrighi is right to highlight characteristics that are part of the country’s socialist legacy: a population that enjoys relatively good education and health, and a peasantry that retains possession of the land. These, however, do not change the fact that the sector of the economy that is growing most rapidly and successfully competing in international markets operates according to capitalist principles. Indeed, the enterprises in this sector are able to compete successfully because they are capitalist. Chinese entrepreneurs and their foreign partners, with strong and effective state support, have created what is—for the moment at least—the world’s most efficient system of extracting surplus labour. The features that make this system competitive in the global marketplace are the same that are producing ever greater class polarization in China.