Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital

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Basically, I think the members of the JFT had many useful insights that still stand, but relied too heavily on the 1844 manuscripts. Although it is important to note that Dunayevskaya always believed that Capital was Marx’s most important work. I agree with Mau here that the “the 1844 Manuscripts seemed to offer a convenient Marxist escape route from orthodox Marxism.” Instead, Mau turns to analyzing the horizontal relations mentioned earlier: how value is realized by direct producers (workers) through the market to meet their needs and competition between different capitalists (and workers for higher wages etc). These horizontal relations create forms of power which can’t be reduced to vertical class domination. Marx’s analysis of value is not intended to explain quantitative prices but the qualitative organization of social reproduction in capitalist society that underlies them.

But there are many aspects of his general concept of power that fit quite well with what Marx is doing in his critique of political economy. I think it’s certainly possible and fruitful to combine Foucault and Marx, even though it’s not an important project for me. Mau believes the British physician and economist Joseph Townsend may have been the inspiration for Marx’s passage on mute compulsion: Whereas real subsumption is a progressing linear tendency of capitalism, the end of the book looks at capital’s cycles of creating surplus populations crises of overproduction? Marx defines 3 types of surplus population that make up the industrial reserve army: floating – temporarily under or unemployed workers; latent – proletarians only drawn into wage labor when capital needs them; stagnant – lowest strata of proletarians with ‘extremely irregular employment’ that do not have access to means of subsistence outside of the wage relation. Marx believes that as productivity continues, there will be a growing surplus population, though it is not clear why employment from accumulation could not outweigh rises in productivity. Here I follow what can broadly be termed value-form theory, an approach that interprets Marx’s theory of value not as a theory that attempts to explain prices but a theory about the social form of labor in capitalism or, in other words, a theory about how social labor is organized.Unfortunately, the canon of Marxist theory does not do much better than Poli Sci 101 in this regard. The dichotomies of violence and ideology, of coercion and consent, of dominance and hegemony, of RSAs and ISAs litter the traditions of Marxist theory. They all reproduce the fundamental intuition of social contract theory, of modern economics, and of Weberian sociology “that power comes it two fundamental and irreducible forms,” the power to act forcibly on the body and the power to alter thoughts and act on ideas. According to Mau, capitalism is “the first mode of production in history to fully exploit the ontological precarity of the human metabolism.” Capitalism takes hold and persists only by means of two social cleavages. First, the creation and reproduction of the proletariat is synonymous with ensuring that the vast majority of the human population is reduced to, in Marx’s terms, “naked life,” separated from any direct access to the means of social reproduction. All access to these means of life is contingent on laboring for capital. Mau calls this the vertical dimension of capital’s economic power, the impersonal or transcendental class domination that is distinctive of this form of society. Years ago I turned to Marx to explain the domination we face under capitalism, but was put off by the orthodox theory of historical materialism and the Eurocentric focus. I wondered what lessons could be taken from Marx from a less orthodox, U.S. context. This led me to C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, also known as the dissident “Johnson-Forest Tendency” (JFT) of the 1940s that would completely break with Trotskyism in the U.S. in 1950. Grace Lee Boggs was a central member and she was the first to translate The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 into English in 1947 (not in 1956 as Mau claims).

In addition to Mau’s concerns, the impacts of real subsumption of agriculture on human nutrition and health needs to be explored. Probably the most helpful definition of dialectics is given: “a process in which a concrete totality reveals itself to contain its own negation as one of its moments.” Hence, the relation between nature and the social dialectical: human material organization emerges out of nature and opens up new possibilities. Value becomes the mechanism through which economic activity is organised because the units of production are separated from each other while still remaining dependent upon each other.” In animal production, pasture raised eggs, milk and beef are much higher in omega-3 fatty acids than factory farmed varieties. These omega-3 fats are essential to humans as they are not available in the active form in plant foods. Inadequate intake of omega-3 fats may lead to higher risk of heart disease and depression in adults, and they are needed for proper brain development for children. Increased intake of processed foods is increasing unhealthy omega-6 fats at an alarming rate, while omega-3 intake is decreasing due to factory farming. Western diets can have an omega-6 to omega-3 ratio as high as 30:1, while traditional Japanese diets may be closer to 4:1! This may contribute to inflammatory diseases including heart disease. Capitalism kills.

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So that was my idea with the book: to take this argument about power in capitalism that I had from others and expand on it. And then I just found that particular passage in Capital very useful for summarizing this entire analysis. Marx only uses the expression “mute compulsion” in that specific passage, and in other places he talks, for example, of “ invisible threads,” which I also briefly considered as a title for the book. In grain production, roller milled flour has reduced turnover time in flour production but has decreased bran content, resulting in lower fiber content and B vitamin deficiencies requiring the creation of vitamin enriched white flour. In the 1960s, high-yielding wheat lowered production costs while also decreasing iron and zinc content by as much as 30%.