notes on capital
chapter 15: machinery and large-scale industry
sections 1-5

(492): quoting john stuart mill on the dubious utility of technological innovation for "any human being," marx seems to approve of a thoroughgoing skepticism. this, it has to be stressed, is in direct contrast to left, center, right interpretations of marxist developmentalism which ally a misguided appraisal of marx's technological determinism to an alleged 'linear' view of history. against these understandings, both this introduction and the rest of the chapter make clear marx's dialectical ambiguity with respect to the introduction of technology: at once a source of unprecedented revolutions in productivity, but also simultaneously the means for the brutalization of the handicrafts, the exploitative employment of women and children in their place, etc. aside from asserting the generally contradictory nature of "progress," then, the specific morphology of capitalist deployment of technological innovation is critical: the profit-seeking that underlies prodigious advances in technology renders them useless from the point of view of human development. this disjuncture between technological development and human development, one thus understands, is left to be implicitly resolved in socialist society, where collective ownership of the means of technological discovery would orient advances in science towards the liberation of humanity. democratic control, in other words, is critical.

(499): the centrality of the story of the steam-engine to the modern geography of rural-urban relations is critical, both in the historical sense that it explains specifically a momentous revolution in human life, and in the theoretical sense that it affirms a historical materialism that identifies the importance of shifting structures of production in shaping the contours of social life. though, in a basic sense, cities remain parasitic on the agricultural economy (in the sense that their metabolic reproduction is rooted in rural areas), the urban economy, now, for the first time, stands to become a concentrated area of real productive activity. in this sense, cities in industrial england in the 19th century are clearly entirely different from urban formations in earlier centuries.

(508): marx here makes a critical point about the changing basis for the "organization of the social labor process." in pre-machine manufacture, he argues, the organization of labor "is purely subjective." as i understand it, this means that it depends not on the nature of the implements being used, but takes the form of progressive innovations, on the part of the merchants/small capitalists in charge, in the form of organizing the process of production. with the advent of the machine era, however (and particularly, it would seem, with the point at which machines begin making machines (504)), the progressively more alienating organization of the labor process becomes an objective necessity, grounded in the technical requirements of production by machinery. in other words, as man, in general, cedes his sovereignty to machines, in general, specific man, in the form of the labor, loses all possibilities of control over his specific workplace. the machine takes the reigns. (see also page 547.) this attempt to understand the morphology of the factory in terms of prevailing technologies is crucial: perhaps raymond williams et. al. would insist that this not become reified as one of many "moments" (such as the ill-considered argument that 'mental' and 'material' labor become irrevocably split at one point in history)--in other words, that this dynamic, the relation of the division of labor to extant technology, needs to be constantly assessed and re-assessed. yet it does seem indisputable, this notion that the machine era inaugurates something totally unprecedented, in requiring a particular form of bondage in the factory. (i suppose, though, that it's only the williams argument that would make room for emancipation, even if it's hard to anticipate.)

(524-525): much of das kapital is littered with examples of the fallacies of liberal narratives of the industrial revolution (i.e., the ways in which they (a) less sophisticatedly, discount the suffering of the subalterns in favor of extolling the gains; (b) more sophisticatedly, recognize the suffering of the subalterns, but subjugate it, as benjamin insisted, in a narrative of future progress. in other words, the past becomes irrelevant because we live in the future). against all this, marx recovers the timelessness of domination. it is with the persistence of this morphology in mind that one ought to engage capitalist anthropology, the struggles of the working-day, etc. not as moments when capitalism had yet to be civilized, but as examples of the emphatically present requirements of capital accumulation. moments that form as inextricable a part of our present experience as anything that happens today, precisely because they explain, both historically and theoretically, today.

(530): remember--the distinction between the individual pursuit of relative surplus-value, and the way in which it is acquired by capitalism in toto. namely, the distinction between the honeymoon period (which is all the neo-classicals see), which results from the successful implementation of a new technology by one capitalist, and the general cheapening of consumer goods, which benefits all capitalists by cheapening the price of labor-power (and thereby reducing the the amount of necessary labor in a day).

(531): the classic immanent contradiction, which leads to the formulation of the declining organic composition of capital.

(542): 1780s, beginnings of unrest; 1833, 12 hr day; 1847, 10 hr day. needless to say, the presentation of these pieces of legislation as amenable to bourgeois aspirations is a revision, in a sense, of the polanyi picture of a capitalism being tamed (if i remember that right). in other words, these are not quite the fetters on bourgeois rapacity that orthodox explanations of them might attest. while of course it's true that these were welcome gains for workers, it is important not to forget that they were co-opted, in one way another, to fit the enormously plastic tactics of capitalism. to give marx's example, the shift to the 10-hr day, he argues, led to an "intensification" of the working day, which concentrated more labor-time in it than had previously been expended in 12 hours.

(548): a specific use of sisyphus to explain the laborer in machine-production. marx and engels as apologists for liberal modernity? please!

(548): here a reflection on the separation of intellectual labor from manual labor (i.e., the former becomes the duty of capital, and latter the bitter fate of labor). in other words, we see, with machines, the consolidation of alienation. yet, as williams would suggest, perhaps we need to remember that more is going on here? yet is that truly the case? i find it hard to see ways in which mental labor is not being detached from the lives of laborers everywhere. we, of course, need ranciere's reminders here, always. but this should not obscure, i don't think, the emphatically true suggestions that alienation intensifies with the ascent of the machine over handicraft/manufacture.

(549): a reminder, again, of foucault's debt to marx. aside from the talk about disciplining an entire population to accept the dictates and routines of industrial production and urban life (teaching workers to consume, for example), here marx writes of the implementation of specific intra-factory codes. the formation of an autocratically-administered army at the site of production, in the name of discipline and diligence (and, of course, as marx makes explicit at the top of 550, in defiance of the representative 'democratic' tradition laid claim to at the time).

(557-559): marx formulates briefly an argument about how the implementation of machinery creates (and re-creates, as time progresses), an reserve army of labor. specifically, he writes of english hand-loom weavers, and--critically to the caricatures of marx as colonial apologist--of the weavers in india who were devastated by english innovation. these examples, and this general history, is his explanation for luddite rejoinders to machinery. yet, of course, it's not that these open up revolutionary possibilities; in that sense, they are, however regrettably, only birth-pangs of the new order.

Others might question Cockburn’s pessimism: from his base in Qom, Muqtada retains influence over a strong nationalist current in Iraq, and in August 2008, it was Sadrists who led protests against the ‘Status of Forces’ agreement between the us and the Maliki government, which was obliged to reject the treaty amid a wave of anti-Occupation sentiment. Muqtada continues to weave between the traditions of Iraqi nationalism and Shia communalism—ministering to his Shia working-class base while making sporadic appeals to Iraqi society as a whole. Whether he can help to forge a coherent political force that will reject any further accommodations with the occupiers remains to be seen. But Cockburn has given us a valuable portrait of an individual who is pivotal to the country’s future political arrangements—and more importantly, of the social forces that will sustain him as long as he continues to speak for them.

Nkunda is a former member of the Rwandan military. He had fought with Rwandan Patriotic forces when they replaced the so-called Hutu regime in 1994. He is also under an executive order from President Bush, who outlined that he should be called for or brought to justice for committing war crimes. And he’s heading up a group called the Congress—or the National Congress for the Defense of the People. So he and his group is made up of about 6,000 rebel forces, which is a key point, because these conflicts are often presented as Africans warring against each other, but what we have here is a small group—6,000 in a nation of nearly 60 million—that’s getting strong support by one of US’s staunchest allies in the region, Rwanda.
(...) Well, Congo is endowed with spectacular natural resources that are vital to the functioning of modern society. We can take, for example, cobalt, of which Congo has a third of the world’s reserve of cobalt. Cobalt—the Congressional Budget Office says cobalt is a strategic mineral for the US’s aerospace and military industries. For those of us who are concerned about environmentally friendly cars, such as the hybrid, cobalt is a central mineral for the functioning of the batteries in those cars. You have about 2.5 kilograms of cobalt in a Toyota Prius, for example. You have coltan, or columbite-tantalite. Congo has anywhere from 64 to 80 percent of the world’s reserve of this mineral, which is found in almost every cell phone. It’s found in the video games that our children play. It’s found in the airbags in our automobiles, and the air suspension brakes. It’s actually the wonder resource or wonder mineral of our time. You have tin, which is vital to the functioning of our computers and laptops. So there are a number of strategic minerals that are found in the Congo that are key to the functioning of modern society and modern industries.
(...) But I must say, Amy, the issue is not even so much the UN forces. What we see in the Congo is policies coming from the West that prioritize profit over the people. Kabila, himself, was installed in 2006, in elections that were held in the Congo, with the full backing of the Western powers, to the exclusion of the pro-democracy and grassroots forces inside the Congo. So you hear today experts in the media saying, “Well, Kabila should control the country, or he should do more with his own troops,” who have been also been accused of committing atrocities. But it’s not in the political DNA of the Kabila government to govern. The government actually reigns, but it does not govern. And when it was put in place by the Western nations, they knew very well what the outcome would be, because he was put in place in order to provide unfettered access for Congo’s vast mineral resources to Western corporations. And this has been documented by—in Foreign Policy magazine back in 2006 by Paule Bouvier and [Pierre] Englebert. They clearly stated that the US and Western nations were prioritizing stability over democracy. We argued at that time that the result—that the US or the Western nations would get neither stability nor democracy, because the policies were flawed in the first place.

However, according to Le Monde diplomatique, cobalt, uranium and other minerals that require more capital-intensive, large-scale mining operations, are now becoming more profitable than coltan — giving the West an incentive to impose some sort of order. This may explain why the bloodshed in the DRC has finally become a major news story in the West, accompanied by calls for a “humanitarian” intervention. However, what African-American revolutionary Malcolm X said in 1964 remains true today: “The basic cause of most of the trouble in the Congo right now is the intervention of outsiders — the fighting that is going on over the mineral wealth of the Congo and over the strategic position that the Congo represents on the African continent. “And in order to justify it, they are … trying to make it appear that the people are savages.”

Within this deadly context, George W. Bush proposed the Mérida Initiative, dubbed "Plan Mexico" due to its striking similarity to Plan Colombia. Plan Mexico is a US aid package that will provide equipment, training, and resources to the Mexican police, army, and government to support Calderón's doomed war on drugs and organized crime. While it was originally valued at $1.4 billion over a period of three years, Sen. Patrick Leahy and Sen. Barack Obama have both stated that Bush's proposal falls short and that much more money over many more years will be necessary to fulfill Plan Mexico's mandate.

What follow is a very brief outline (and totally unoriginal—see bibliography) presentation of the four main radical and Marxist theories of crisis: under-consumptionism, profit-squeeze, over-competition, and falling rate of profit as a result of increasing mechanization/capitalization of capital. After presenting each theory, I will attempt to evaluate them in terms of their political implications, logical structure, and factual/empirical validity.

To save Loe Sam, the army has destroyed it. The shops and homes of the 7,000 people who lived here are a heap of gray rubble, blown to bits by the army. Scraps of bedding and broken electric fans lie strewn in the dirt. As Pakistani Army helicopters and artillery fired at militants’ strongholds in the region, about 200,000 people fled to tent camps for the displaced in Pakistan, to relatives’ homes or across the border into Afghanistan.
(...) Arabs, Uzbeks, Tajiks and Afghans form the hard core of its opponents, enlisting young, unemployed local men who join the militants for money and the prestige of sitting armed with a rifle in a double-cabin pickup, the favored Taliban vehicle, General Khan said.
(...) “If the government doesn’t rebuild, we will be thieves, suicide bombers,” he said. “We will be forced to do these things.”
(...) The army says 1,500. But two officers, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were contradicting their superiors, said that the number appeared excessive. One army captain involved in the fighting said 300 seemed closer.
(...) In his wood-paneled office, Col. Nauman Saeed, the officer in charge of day-to-day operations at the headquarters in Khar, said he was mired in a classic guerrilla conflict. In September, he said, Taliban leaders in Bajaur had replenished their forces with 950 more men from Afghanistan. “You keep killing them,” Colonel Saeed said, “but you still have them around.”