This line comes from a section in which they lay down the premise for a materialist conception of history. The basic premise for their method is that concepts a…

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The ultimate object of political economy has been to increase the absolute mass of accumulated wealth in society, leaving it to moralists and politicians to divide the yearly produce and the permanent accumulation in whatever proportions their mysterious wisdom might think fit; satisfied with the achievement of increasing the wealth (the productive powers of the labor) of the society, and confident that comfort and happiness must, somehow or other, or somewhere or other, be the necessary consequence of increased and increasing wealth. The rich and powerful, with eye intent on the direction of this wealth, when produced to their own use, were altogether soothed and pleased with the speculations developing the easiest means of multiplying all the objects that could minister to their delights; and they fancied themselves, from their adventitious command over the means of enjoyment, the dispensers of food, clothing, and habitation to the productive classes. “Enough must be left with the laborers,” say the rich, “to make them work.” All beyond this was so much lost to themselves; nay, worse, tended to make the working classes discontented, insolent.^[1]

—William Thompson

This is Part 2 in a series drawing conceptual connections between the anti-capitalist economic thought of William Thompson’s 1824 An Inquiry into the Distribution of Wealth and that of Karl Marx’s 1867 Capital. See here the first post for background on the series.

From a surface level, social production appears to operate with the consistency of a solar system. However, just as the physical laws guiding the actual motions of stars, planets, and moons cannot be gathered by simply viewing their apparent motions in the sky, so too the motivations guiding individuals in capitalist production cannot be understood by simply observing them at a surface level. Both Thompson and Marx use this kind of analogy to critique capitalists and pro-capitalist political economists, but they do so in quite different ways.

Focusing on the conditions compelling the working class in its exertions, Thompson uses this kind of celestial analogy to criticize the “mechanistic” views of political economists and the way these views help enable the abuse and misuse working people’s productive interests and motivations. He challenges “the habit which almost all of us have acquired of surveying the immense machinery of production constantly in motion” as though it has “some internal sufficient cause for its eternal continuance, like the eternal revolutions of the planets.”^[2] Thompson argues that industrious motivations and enjoyment in productivity are undermined and hindered by the forced extraction of surplus-value from workers and the coercive conditions under which they are compelled to accept such an unequal exchange for their labor; by the “forced deductions, over and above those which are necessary and voluntary, or which nature imposes.”^[3]

Marx takes up this type of celestial analogy, critically turning its lens onto the capitalists in analyzing their motivations. He explains that “the external movement of individual capitals,” and the motives of the individual capitalist, “which drive him forward,” can only be analyzed scientifically “if we grasp the inner nature of capital, just as the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies are intelligible only to someone acquainted with their real motions, which are not perceptible to the senses.”^[4] Marx understands the motives of capitalists as primarily driven by “the immanent laws of capitalist production;” by “the coercive laws of competition” in the economic system of which the capitalist is a part.

In another passage of Capital, Marx references this analogy in analyzing the cyclical nature of the expansion and contraction of social production in modern industry and the way it results from the immanent laws of capitalist production and competition. He explains how “a necessary condition for modern industry” is “the production of a relative surplus population,” a population of “disposable human material” in excess of its requirements for production, and how this results in endless cycles of both expansion, “by fits and starts,” and contraction of the scale of production.

The expansion by fits and starts of the scale of production is the precondition for its equally sudden contraction; the latter again evokes the former, but the former is impossible without disposable human material, without an increase in the number of workers, which must occur independently of the absolute growth of the population. This increase is by the simple process that constantly ‘sets free’ a part of the working class; by methods which lessen the number of workers employed in proportion to the increased production. Modern industry’s whole form of motion therefore depends on the constant transformation of a part of the working population into unemployed or semi-employed ‘hands’.

The process and methods Marx gestures to here which drive up unemployment and “lessen the number of workers employed in proportion to the increased production” are those of ever-increasing automation which comes eternally and chaotically in an unplanned manner via the competition between individual capitalists aiming to reduce the cost of production and undermine the prices of their competitors, as well as to reduce wages of the remaining workforce. This process eventually leads once again to a necessary expansion of the scale of production which requires a ready pool of employable “hands.” He criticizes the superficiality of economists who view “contraction of credit as the cause of the periodic alterations in the industrial cycle, whereas it is a mere symptom of them.”

Just as the heavenly bodies always repeat a certain movement, once they have been flung into it, so also does social production, once it has been flung into the movement of alternate expansion and contractions. Effects become causes in their turn, and the various vicissitudes of the whole process, which always reproduces its own conditions, take on the form of periodicity.^[5]

In this example, the analogy of celestial bodies in motion is used to explain how the repetitive motions of social production, mystifying in their appearance, operate according to a certain set of basic rules pertaining to the nature of capital.

Both Thompson and Marx use this kind of celestial analogy to critique capitalists and pro-capitalist political economists. However, whereas as Thompson uses it to criticize the way viewing social production in such a “mechanistic” way enables the abuse of working people’s productive powers, Marx explains that social production appears in this mechanical way because individual capitalists operate according to “the immanent laws of capitalist production,” laws which are not perceptible to the senses. Driven by “the coercive laws of competition” and according to “the inner nature of capital,” capitalists indeed treat workers as disposable material, as another kind of machinery, rather than productive humans compelled by their interests in the commodities that they collectively produce.

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Today, pro-capitalist economists and talking heads continue to view social production from a surface level, while the needs of working people are neglected and undermined. Just as Thompson observed that the rich and powerful “fancied themselves, from their adventitious command over the means of enjoyment, the dispensers of food, clothing, and habitation to the productive classes,” so too, capitalists and business owners are viewed as “job creators,” while the health of the economy is judged on the basis of the fluctuations of the stock market and the Gross Domestic Product, rather than on the actual conditions of production and the wellbeing of average people. And as Marx observed, expansions and contractions of credit continue to be confused for a cause rather than a symptom of the endless industrial cycles of expansion and contraction of the scale of social production.

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Notes

^[1]. William Thompson (1824) An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness: Applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth (reproduction by Forgotten Books: London), 36-7.

^[2]. Ibid, 33-4.

^[3]. Ibid, 44.

^[4]. Marx, Capital: Vol. One (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 433.

^[5]. Ibid, 758-9.

Notably, an Irish historian, Fintan Lane, is currently working on a new biography on Thompson, which I pre-ordered last year, but it’s unclear when that will be finished and distributed.

I’m working on a few projects about Thompson and his influences, and as I work on them, here I’m going to post a series of brief essays highlighting specific connections between Thompson and Marx. I intend for these to be short essays homing in on one element and then another, but this first post will provide some background to introduce the series and explain why I think it’s well worth studying this influence, before taking a look at the Marxian concept of primitive accumulation and the role of force in the origins of capitalism.

Why study Thompson when we have Marx?

Not only are such connections interesting and enlightening for anyone trying to understand Marx and his method but the more we understand the various sources that Marx benefitted from and relied upon, the more we are sure to humanize rather than idolize him.

In studies of Marx’s influences, there are countless works connecting Marx to the German philosopher Hegel, or to French Socialist thought, or to the political economists who Thompson himself critiqued; and yet, very little has been done to understand Marx’s influence from that first anti-capitalist critique of British political economy, the very project Marx himself embarked upon. Hence, the subtitle of Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy.

Following the lead of Thompson, Marx pushed the paradigm of classical political economy to its limits, developing a revolutionary social theory and formulating precise economic laws of the dynamics determining the general course of development in capitalist society. This was not through any sort of transcendence but rather through engagement with countless other groundbreaking thinkers, innovatively synthesizing insights and knowledge from multiple disciplines and fields of thought and freshly analyzing all kinds of contemporary reports and data on everything from factory inspections to crop failures. Thompson is a crucial part of that project.

As James Connolly wrote in his piece on Thompson, “Marx found the true line of economic thought already indicated,” comparing Thompson’s relation to Marx as akin to the relations between pre-Darwinians and Darwin:

we should say that the relative position of this Irish genius and of Marx are best comparable to the historical relations of the pre-Darwinian evolutionists to Darwin; as Darwin systematised all the theories of his predecessors and gave a lifetime to the accumulation of the facts required to establish his and their position, so Marx found the true line of economic thought already indicated, and brought his genius and encyclopaedic knowledge and research to place it upon an unshakable foundation.[1]

It’s perhaps especially important for the English-speaking world to know about Thompson. Of course, English is the most dominant world language via two centuries of British and American capitalist imperialism and hegemony, and Marx being influenced by Thompson means that the critique came from “within the house,” so to speak, even from among members of the property owning, “idling class” as Thompson described his own class position, and that such critique has been alive since at least the Industrial Revolution.

The name Marx and the term Marxism have been so demonized and made taboo. In the U.S. in particular, decades of Cold War ideology and propaganda have succeeded in making terms like socialism and communism appear in the minds of so many as something imported, from continental Europe or from the Eastern world, but not something Anglican or American, allowing individualism to appear as a timeless virtue and private property and market competition as liberation rather than the source of inequality and the conditions for exploitation.

I think it is important for Thompson to be known in the Anglophone world, lest socialism can be made to appear as merely an outside ideological influence rather than internal response to exploitation and poverty, a project of social science born and raised in the belly of the beast. As Connolly writes, emphasizing how Thompson’s influence on Marx poses a problem for Irish nationalists who painted socialism as “A German idea:”

It is […] curiously significant of the conquest of the Irish mind by English traditions, that Irish Nationalists should often be found fighting fiercely against Socialism as “a German idea”, although every social conception which we find in the flower in Marx, we can also find in the bud in Thompson, twenty-three years before the publication of the Communist Manifesto, forty-three years before the issue of Das Kapital.[2]

On the other hand, Marx was not politicized by Thompson but rather was already disturbed by society under the rule of private property, writing scathing journalistic articles in his mid-20s about landowners in Prussia punishing peasants for gathering fallen branches to use as firewood. Hence, he had interest in thought like Thompson’s.

Following Thompson into the hidden abode of production

Two decades before Marx travelled to England, where the heart of the Industrial Revolution was taking place, intent on critiquing the pro-capitalist political economists, Thompson did just that. Thompson corresponded with the English Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham and the English political economist David Ricardo by mail. In a letter to Ricardo, Bentham referred to Thompson as “our Hibernarian friend,” meaning our Irish friend, and wrote rather cryptically about the political stakes of Thompson’s radical project given how he felt about the political climate of the time:

You have, I make no doubt, sympathized with him in his exaltation. You will have seen, in as strong a light as I do, the need there is, that for an indefinite length of time, connections so obnoxious should remain unknown; for all the good he can expect to do may depend on it.[3]

Bentham had invited Thompson to his home in England to stay with him in 1819, which Thompson did not take him up on until a few years later, when, in May 1822, Bentham learned via Ricardo that Thompson was coming that summer to England to develop a study of the distribution of wealth.

While staying with Bentham, Thompson was introduced to all kinds of intellectual acquaintances, and he did a lot of important writing for his project.[4] Thus, the “obnoxious” connections, to use Bentham’s term, that Thompson was drawing would not “remain unknown.” Indeed, Thompson saw it necessary to repel, as he wrote, “the confused and erroneous notions prevailing almost everywhere, in print and conversation.”[5]

In the “Preliminary Remarks” at the beginning of his Inquiry into the Distribution of Wealth, Thompson explains what spurred his project:

In one of the literary societies established in the city of Cork [Ireland] for the diffusion of knowledge, a gentleman celebrated for his skill in the controversies of political economy, thought proper to descant on the blessings of the inequality of wealth, as now established; on the dependence, and consequent gratitude which the poor should feel to the rich, on the too great freedom and too great equality of wealth in the United States of America.

Thompson explains that he argued against this pro-inequality “gentleman” and thereafter set out to write an essay on the subject which soon became a book.[6]

Thompson was one of the first thinkers, and likely the very first in the English language, to use the term social science, the central problem of which was according to him the distribution of wealth, and the central goal of which should be the improvement of human happiness. Like Marx, he was an interdisciplinary thinker, and he explicitly advocated for interdisciplinary work in order to advance social science.

Thompson exposed the limits of both “mechanistic” political economy and “moralizing” Utilitarian philosophy and social reform, comparing the two and showing how each lacked the basic insights of the other. While political economy had been focused on maximizing the accumulation of capital without concern for human wellbeing, Utilitarianism was concerned with maximizing happiness for the greatest number of people possible but lacked the basic material insights that an inquiry into the distribution of wealth would yield. Like Marx, Thompson saw truth in political economists’ who theorized that labor was the source of value and of wealth, and while he agreed with the Utilitarian principle of the greatest good for the greatest number, he knew this Enlightenment value needed to confront the reality of an asymmetrical distribution of wealth in society.

How comes it that a nation abounding more than any other in the rude materials of wealth, in machinery, dwellings and food, in intelligent and industrious producers, with all the apparent means of happiness, with all the outward semblances of happiness exhibited by a small and rich portion of the community; should still pine in privation? How comes it that the fruits of the labor of the industrious, after years of incessant and successful exertion, are mysteriously and without imputation of fault to them, without any convulsion of nature, swept away? It is not for want of physical knowledge; it is not for want of abundant materials of wealth to make all comfortable, it is not for want of the capacity or inclination to abundant reproduction. To what then is this strange anomaly in human affairs to be attributed? this misery in the midst of all the means of happiness?[7]

Marx likely first learned of Thompson from Engels, who supposedly had sent Marx copies or extracts of all the socialist texts available in Manchester, but subsequent to his own first visit to England in 1845, which included meeting members of the Chartist movement, Marx cited Thompson’s Inquiry in his 1847 The Poverty of Philosophy. As late as Marx’s posthumous second volume of Capital, published in 1885, Thompson is quoted at length and mentioned by Engels in the Preface.

Marx’s reading of William Thompson, Part 1: Force and primitive accumulation

Where better to start this series than on the concept of the pre-conditions of capitalism, what Marx called primitive accumulation?

In setting up the final part of Capital Vol. I, Marx explains that capitalism has as a precondition some prior accumulation of wealth: “an accumulation which is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its point of departure.”[8] So, the question is where did that prior accumulation come from? Before presenting his own take on the matter, Marx parodies the kind of story presented by the political economists that are the subject of his critique. It’s worth quoting at length:

Long, long ago there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and above all frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. The legend of theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. Never mind! Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort finally had nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority who, despite all their labour, have up to now nothing to sell but themselves, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly, although they have long ceased to work. Such insipid childishness is every day preached to us in the defence of property. […] as soon as the question of property is at stake, it becomes a sacred duty to proclaim the standpoint of the nursery tale as the one thing fit for all age-groups and all stages of development. In actual history it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part. In the tender annals of political economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial.[9]

Thompson has a remarkably similar conception of the role of force in the distribution of property. Emphasizing the fact that, up until his project, the particular element of distribution was the least analyzed aspect of any study of the distribution of wealth, Thompson too emphasizes the historical role of force. One passage in the Preliminary Remarks of his Inquiry reads strikingly similar to the famous passage above from Capital. Thompson writes:

Force, fraud, chance, prescription, are almost everywhere the main arbiters of distribution, and have almost frightened reason from daring to contemplate the mischiefs they have caused. Injustice in this most momentous matter has everywhere prevailed; but the perennial source has not been unfolded. Hence, discontent, misery, vice, universal degradation—degradation not always absolute, but compared with the state of happiness attendant on the natural laws of distribution, if left freely to operate, in the present state of improved and everyday extending knowledge. In every nation, and in almost every age, of the world, the blessings of equal comforts to all, and the enormous evils of great inequality of wealth, have been dimly seen and recognized; and vain and ignorant efforts have been made to establish a just distribution. Force is the instrument of ignorance to accomplish every thing, even justice itself.[10]

In another passage, Thompson describes the conditions that a thousand industrious workers would be up against in trying to form a co-operative “colony” when beginning with no tools, materials, land, or subsistence:

Against them, all the materials to work upon are appropriated by the previous labor, force, or fraud, of some of their compatriots, not a piece of stone containing any iron or any useful metal, not a branch of a tree, not a skin of any animal, no rude material can be turned to any use for food, clothes, or covering, or any purpose subservient to convenience, that is not already obedient to an owner.[11]

Throughout his Inquiry, Thompson frequently uses the term force in describing the coercive circumstances of unequal wealth in which capitalists are able to extract surplus labor from producers. However, in this passage, it is clear he is making a much broader claim about the distribution of wealth and the history of “mischiefs” which have apparently been too frightening for many of those considering the distribution of wealth to contemplate.

Both Thompson and Marx recognize an avoidance on the part of political economists to acknowledge the historical role played by force in the accumulation of wealth, the division of classes, and the impoverishment of the majority of society.

As Marx notes, such use of force in the accumulation of property is “a notorious fact.” Yet, when political economists contemplate the distribution of wealth in society, it seems they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that fact, and as Marx describes, revert to a moralizing story the equivalent of a nursery tale. Both Thompson and Marx reject any moralizing answer to the problem of poverty and immiseration in society.

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In that section of Capital on primitive accumulation, Marx presents a series of chapters which describe the transition from feudalism to capitalism as it took place in England, beginning with the dissolution of feudal relations via the expropriation of peasants from the land in the late 15^th and early 16^th century: “The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole process.” Whereas, as peasants, these agricultural producers had the right to use the common land, “which gave pasture to their cattle, and furnished them with timber, fire-wood, turf, etc.,” now they were, in great masses, “suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labour-market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians.”[12]

This sudden disruption to the livelihoods of these great masses came with what Marx calls the “bloody legislation” against vagabondage throughout Western Europe in the late 15^th century and throughout the 16^th century: “The fathers of the present working class were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers.” Begging and “idling” was punished by bodily mutilation such as slicing or clipping of the ear or branding a letter on the forehead, chest, or back, or even by enslavement.[13] This period also included the “forcing down of wages by act of parliament.”

From the basis of this transition came the emergence of the relatively independent productive elements which come to form the capitalist economy: “genesis of the capitalist farmer;” “creation of a home market for industrial capital;” and the “genesis of the industrial capitalist.”[14] Thus, Marx states: “capital comes [into the world] dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”[15]

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[1]. James Connolly (1910), Labour in Irish History, HardPress Publishing, 79-80. Text also available here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1910/lih/chap10.htm

[2]. Ibid, 81.

[3]. Richard Pankhurst (1954) William Thompson (1775—1833): Pioneer Socialist (Pluto Press: London), 11.

[4]. Ibid, 11-12.

[5]. William Thompson (1824) An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness: Applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth (reproduction by Forgotten Books: London), xviii.

[6]. Ibid.

[7]. Ibid, xv-xvi.

[8]. Karl Marx, Capital: Vol. One (1990 [1867]). trans. by Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books), 873.

[9] Ibid, 873-4.

[10]. Thompson, Xii.

[11]. Ibid, 38-9.

[12]. Marx, 876-78.

[13]. Ibid, 896-907.

[14]. Ibid, 908-931.

[15]. Ibid, 926.

as long as a class of mere capitalists exists, society must remain in a diseased state.

—William Thompson (1824)

While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.”

—Karl Marx (1867)

There is not one of these aspects—not the least operation, the least industrial or financial mechanism—that does not reveal the insanity of th…

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[Painting by April Burke]

Since the advent of neoliberalism in the US in the 1980s and with the acceleration of offshoring and factory closures and the rise of automation in the 1990s and 2000s, economic dislocation of precarious working communities and individuals has increased rapidly. Whole regions of the US that have historically housed industrial production have been hollowed out, leaving ghost towns, unemployment, and despair where once there were thriving communities.

These communities suffer a range of ill effects from the economic precarity introduced and amplified during these decades, including higher rates of early death. In fact, in recent years, a new category of death has been coined–deaths of despair.^[1] These are deaths that are due to suicide, drug and alcohol-related overdose, and alcohol-related liver disease. Those who suffer deaths of despair are disproportionately middle age, without a college education, and classified racially as white non-hispanic.^[2]

It’s one thing to say that economic dislocation leads to precarity and bad outcomes. It’s another thing entirely to say that dislocation plays a causal role in deaths of despair. The difficulty comes from the fact that economic dislocation lies upstream from a host of other ill effects, all of which increase the probability of disease, injury, or death. Thus, making causal claims about the relationship between the increased precarity caused by capitalism and deaths of despair difficult.

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Dislocation and opioid overdose

Luckily, but also tragically, the US over the past couple of decades has provided a horrific natural experiment in deaths of despair. Specifically, the last few decades has seen the US battling an opioid overdose epidemic. In the period between 1999 and 2024, there have been almost one million opioid related deaths.^[3] Using this grisly tableau as a database, a number of recent studies have probed the relationship between dislocation that results from economic events and opioid overdose.

One measurable economic event is the decrease in industrial manufacturing that followed the market reforms and increased trade liberalization of the 1990s and 2000s. Employment in manufacturing has cratered in the last two decades. Wages have also decreased as jobs and production has been offshored. One of the areas to have been hardest hit is the midwest, particularly the so-called “rust belt.” A recent study by Kiang et al. (2019) showed that this area of the country also experienced the highest change in the rate of overdose deaths from 1999-2016.^[4]

While these data are suggestive, they are correlational in nature. Another recent study by Dean and Kimmel (2019) measured overdose deaths in counties that had lost manufacturing jobs as a result of free trade agreements vs. those that hadn’t for the period between 1999 and 2015.^[5] Overall they found that counties with more trade related job losses had higher overdose rates. Specifically, 1000 trade-related job losses produced a 2.7% increase in overdose deaths (this increases to 11.3% if fentanyl is in the local heroin supply). Importantly, these results cannot be accounted for by differences in population, per capita income, overall unemployment rates, opioid prescription patterns, population density, racial demographics, mass layoffs unrelated to trade liberalization, or individual characteristics of different states, as all of these variables were controlled for.

Another recent study by Venkataramani et al. (2020) assessed the difference between overdose deaths in counties that had or had not experienced the closure of an automotive assembly plant.^[6] Counties were matched on a number of characteristics. Interestingly, the authors analyzed data from five years before the plants closed (or an equivalent timeframe in control counties) to seven years afterwards. They found no difference in mortality rates for the pre-closure period. The difference in mortality increased significantly in counties with the closure of a plant. Most interestingly, the increase in overdose mortality was greatest for non-hispanic white men aged 18-34, followed by non-hispanic white men aged 35-65.

A similar result was found by Pierce and Schott (2020) when they studied mortality rates that occurred following the passage of a bill in 2000 that granted permanent normal trade relations with China, locking in lower tariffs on imported goods and exposing various regions to increased import competition.^[7] They found an increase in overdose deaths and deaths of despair that was largely driven by an increase in mortality of white working aged people. They concluded that the increase in overdose is due to economic disruption of the labor market produced by rapid changes in trade policy.

The results of these studies indicate that the dislocation that results from economic disruption caused by neoliberal market reforms leads directly to an increase in overdose deaths which are not attributable to factors unrelated to economic disruption.

Dislocation and the profit motive

While it is evident that a rise in deaths of despair in the US is caused by the neoliberal flight of manufacturing, it is not yet clear why this dislocation was a part of the neoliberal period in this first place. Why was manufacturing relocated when it was employable at home? Not only did entire communities depend on those jobs but also capitalist economies depend upon both an expanding workforce and a consumer base that can afford the products. How do we have the absurd situation in which people who are willing and able to work go unemployed while usable factories stand at a halt?

The primary motive of capitalists and capitalist society is the rate of profit—what Karl Marx described as the driving force of capitalist production. A capitalist is unlikely to replace workers with machines or foreign workers unless doing so increases the rate of profit. Critically, the economic crisis of the 1970s, which led to the neoliberal response, came amid a crisis of profitability that began in the mid-1960s, as shown in studies by Roberts (2016) and Basu et al. (2021).[8] This means that factories and workforces and the global arrangement of production that drove the post-war economic boom had reached a point of diminishing profitability.

Chronicling the neoliberal era as beginning with the crisis of profitability in the mid-60s and culminating around the peak of the dot.com revolution in the mid-90s, Roberts (2016) argues this boom-bust cycle occurred according to Marx’s theory of profitability,[9] a theory which explains how, over time, increased automation results in decreased profit rates, once a labor-replacing technical revolution becomes standardized in an economy and no longer gives the early adopters an advantage to undercut prices of competitors. Capital investment in foreign trade is one of several means which Marx identified as ways in which capitalists temporarily counteract falling profit rates.[10]

In the neoliberal case of offshoring, profit rates are boosted by taking capital produced here and employing it somewhere where workers have less legal protection and less union organization and therefore higher exploitability in the form of lower wages and less safety regulation protocols. Driving up unemployment domestically, offshoring also increases worker exploitability in the domestic economy.

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From dislocation to solidarity

Given the working class’s dependency on wage work, a factory closure can affect the stability of the economy of entire communities for generations, and the neoliberal flight of manufacturing spanned entire regions. Short of a viable alternative or social safety net, a sudden burst in unemployment is more than enough to shift lives out of balance, leading to despair on a wide scale. Add to this the infusion of prescription opioids into these hurting communities (in some areas, the number of prescriptions was more than the number of adults) by unscrupulous pharmaceutical corporations and you have a perfect recipe for deaths of despair.

These are patterns of a system of production prioritizing short-term profit over all else. The rise in deaths of despair as a result of dislocation in the American industrial wastelands stands as a warning for the kinds of outcomes that can result from widespread economic dislocation. The solution going forward is not to avoid change and innovation but to adequately distribute the wealth produced. The ultimate solution is a society that grows and develops organically based on the needs of the producers rather than the needs of profit.

The immediate antidote to the dislocation of modern capitalism is solidarity. This is not just an abstract idea. In fact, studies of factors that are protective against overdose mortality have shown that community solidarity, or social capital, an index of strength of community relationships and trust, reciprocal cooperation and civic engagement, and a feeling of belonging is not only protective in and of itself, but also mediates the relation between economic factors and mortality.^[11] Similar results have been demonstrated recently regarding the relation between social capital and COVID-19 mortality.^[12] Such solidarity not only provides protections against the social effects of economic dislocation in the short term, but is a critical aspect of forging a class movement capable of replacing capitalism with a system that allows all to flourish.

[1]. Rehder K, Lusk J, Chen JI. Deaths of Despair: Conceptual and Clinical Implications. Cogn Behav Pract. 2021 Feb;28(1):40-52. doi: 10.1016/j.cbpra.2019.10.002.

[2]. Anne Case and Angus Deaton (2020). Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Princeton. NJ.

[3]. https://www.cdc.gov/overdose-prevention/about/understanding-the-opioid-overdose-epidemic.html

[4]. Kiang MV, Basu S, Chen J, Alexander MJ. Assessment of Changes in the Geographical Distribution of Opioid-Related Mortality Across the United States by Opioid Type, 1999-2016. JAMA Netw Open. 2019;2(2):e190040. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.0040

[5]. Dean A, Kimmel S. Free trade and opioid overdose death in the United States. SSM Popul Health. 2019 May 23;8:100409. doi:10.1016/j.ssmph.2019.100409.

[6]. Venkataramani AS, Bair EF, O’Brien RL, Tsai AC. Association Between Automotive Assembly Plant Closures and Opioid Overdose Mortality in the United States: A Difference-in-Differences Analysis. JAMA Intern Med. 2020;180(2):254–262. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.5686

[7]. Pierce, Justin R., and Peter K. Schott. 2020. “Trade Liberalization and Mortality: Evidence from US Counties.” American Economic Review: Insights 2 (1): 47–64. DOI: 10.1257/aeri.20180396

[8]. Roberts, M. (2016). The long depression: How it happened, why it happened, and what happens next. Haymarket Books, p. 60. Basu et al. (2021). “World Profit Rates, 1960–2019,” Working Paper. doi.org/10.7275/43yv-c721; Roberts, M. (2022) “A world rate of profit: important new evidence,” https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2022/01/22/a-world-rate-of-profit-important-new-evidence/

[9]. Roberts (2016), 60.

[10]. Marx, K. (1991). Capital: Vol. 3, trans. by David Fernbach. Penguin, 344-46; 364-5.

[11]. Zoorob, MJ., Salemi, JL. Bowling alone, dying together: The role of social capital in mitigating the drug overdose epidemic in the United States, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 2017., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2016.12.011.

[12]. Fraser T, Aldrich DP, Page-Tan C. Bowling alone or distancing together? The role of social capital in excess death rates from COVID19. Soc Sci Med. 2021 doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114241.

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The last time I wrote something on the topic of “Western Marxism” I was arguing against an essay claiming that it died as a result of debate in the 1990s between John Rawls and analytical Marxist philosophers, notably G.A. Cohen., and because great minds had supposedly realized that Marx’s theory didn’t make sense.

Recently, I’ve been following some discussions and debates on Substack about a new book about Western Marxism: Who Paid the Pied Pipers of Western Marxism? by . Rockhill is primarily focused on relations there were between U.S. government agencies like the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—which was the direct predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—and then the early CIA and a group known as the “Frankfurt School” of critical theory, especially Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. These were German intellectuals who fled to the US to escape Nazi Germany, and who are generally known for their studies of fascism, cultural production, and attempts to bridge Marxism and psychoanalysis.

Notably, critical theory and Western Marxism are traditions Rockhill himself identifies with, as he is trained in this area and employs some of the theory in thinking about the conditions surrounding the intellectual or cultural production of the figures he critiques in the book.

Rockhill has a broader critique of Western Marxism and critical theory, including “the French school,” referring to a generation of French thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who often had complex if not critical stances on Marxism. According to Rockhill, Western Marxism represents versions of Marxism that are not anti-imperialist, or in the case of the French school, even “waged an intellectual war against Marxism.”

Erroneously, Rockhill names Deleuze as among those who supposedly waged intellectual war against Marxism.[i] In my recent essay titled “On the backs of the Arabs,” I unpacked a passage in Deleuze describing how Marxian analysis explains what underlies the colonization of both the Americas and Palestine.[ii] Not only is Deleuze anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist but he emphasizes the need for Marxian analysis of capitalism for explaining colonialism and imperialism; and inversely, colonialism and imperialism are central issues in Deleuze’s analysis of capitalism.

I’m not alone in my general take on Deleuze’s relation to Marx. I’ve contributed to the literature on the topic in my article “Spinoza, Marx and Anti-Oedipus: A Labour Theory of Repression,” but scholars who have written on this relation tend to find Marx to some extent intrinsic to the thought of Deleuze, considering his theories and concepts from ontology and history to production and the state. In this essay, I’ll focus on what’s most relevant to countering Rockhill ‘s claim about Deleuze: context. I’ll demonstrate the context of arguments Deleuze makes, not of Marx, but of certain interpretations of Marx, and I’ll touch on the basis for his own interpretation.

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The Althusserian current of historical materialism

“Western Marxism” is a loose category for interpretations of Marx emergent contemporary with, separate from, and often critical of the official Marxism of “actually existing socialism,” especially, of course, that of the USSR. Other 20^th century thinkers who are typically associated with Western Marxism include Hungarian György Lukács, Italian Antonio Gramsci, German Walter Benjamin (who is also associated with the Frankfurt School but died while attempting to flee Nazi capture), and French Louis Athusser. This makes for a strange set of bedfellows. For example, Western Marxism, as a whole, but especially the Frankfurt School, is typically characterized by an engagement with philosophical humanism, idealism, and the thought of the philosopher Hegel. However, the The Althusserian current of historical materialism is characterized by its arguments against Hegelianism, humanism, and idealism.

Althusser influenced a generation of French intellectuals, particularly with the 1965 publication of a book of essays titled Reading Capital, written by him and four of his graduate students, following a seminar they did together studying the text. They saw Capital as Marx’s most advanced, scientific work, wherein, they theorized, Marx made an epistemological break from the thought of Hegel. Thus, they were critical not only of Hegelianism but of Hegelian interpretations of Capital, the kind represented especially by the likes of Adorno of the Frankfurt School. The Althusserians also brought to contemporary Marxist discourse a range of themes, including structure, reproduction, and unconscious, creating combinations which, as French philosopher and social theorist Jacques Bidet explains, “establish[ed] new, fertile philosophical links between Marxism and the social sciences.”[iii]

The Hegelian, “dialectical” interpretation relies heavily on Marx’s Grundrisse (translated as “Foundations”), which was a first draft of Capital, an outline that wasn’t published until 1939-41. As Bidet explains, in Grundrisse, “Marx develops his programme of a ‘critique of political economy’ by constant recourse to the categories of Hegel’s logic.” However, as Marx developed successive drafts toward the publication of the first edition of Capital, and furthermore in three successive editions of the text, the Hegelian philosophical system was increasingly marginalized. Hence, the Hegelian tradition of interpreting Capital operates by reference to the Grundrisse and to the first edition of Capital.[iv]

The reading which restores the level of Hegelianism found in the Grundrisse, however, or even the first edition of Capital for that matter, doesn’t recognize the final copy as the more advanced version according to Marx (and, as Bidet explains, leads to “utterly divergent, mutually exclusive interpretations – something that tends to render the project as such problematic”), nor does it consider whether or to what extent Marx had good reasons for marginalizing that philosophy.[v]

Contrary to the Hegelian tradition which, as Bidet explains, often carries with it a “logico-historical, teleological bias” which “mars the exposition of Capital,”[vi] Althusser’s student Étienne Balibar, for example, describes the transition to the capitalist mode of production from the feudalist mode as a rupture in the correspondence between the relations of production and productive forces, setting free the elements that would form the encounter between labor and capital, the relation between which forms the social composition of the capitalist economy.[vii] This is a history of contingency rather than teleology; a history in which moving beyond capitalism requires intervention.

Deleuze, as early as his 1968 Difference and Repetition, aligned his reading of Marx with some of the general takeaways associated with Althusser and Balibar.[viii] Like Balibar, Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their 1972 Anti-Oedipus emphasize the element of contingency in thinking about history through a Marxian lens. They explain that “universal history is the history of contingencies, and not the history of necessity. Ruptures and limits, and not continuity,” and that “it is correct to retrospectively understand all history in the light of capitalism, provided that the rules formulated by Marx are followed exactly.”[ix]

They also criticize Marxist economists who would, according to them, often trivialize factors like banking, finance, and credit circulation when considering the mode of production and the theory of money[x]—aspects of Marx’s theory that come in the subsequent volumes of Capital and which happen to be key to Marx’s analysis of the limits of capitalist production and their displacement; that is, aspects that characterize capitalism’s limits and ruptures.

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Capitalism’s general modus operandi

In a 1991 essay on Deleuze, the late Marxian literary theorist Fredric Jameson wrote that:

that vast Marx chapter of L’Anti-Oedipe […] nonetheless and despite its energy and coherence may be taken as a set of notes on Marxism rather than some new philosophy of the latter, or some ideologically innovative reading.[xi]

Deleuze was, according to a letter from Guattari while the two wrote Anti-Oedipus, “sweating over capitalism.” “I have the feeling of always wandering around alone, kind of alone, irresponsibly, while you’re sweating over capitalism,” Guattari wrote, “How could I possibly help you?”[xii] Deleuze’s “sweating over capitalism” was no doubt his sweating over the texts of Marx and other contemporary Marxian thinkers as for Deleuze and Guattari having a Marxian analysis of capitalism is essential to a political philosophy: “I believe that Félix Guattari and myself have remained Marxists,” said Deleuze late in life about himself and his longtime collaborator, “[t]his is because we do not believe in a political philosophy that would not be centered on the analysis of capitalism and its developments.”[xiii] Of all the references and influences in Anti-Oedipus, and there are many, Marx is doubtless the basic and most consistent framework.

Applying the general logic of capital accumulation as defined by Marx to the contemporary situation certainly takes some work. As Christoph Henning explains in Philosophy After Marx:

Marx provided a highly abstract model of capitalism’s general modus operandi. When proceeding methodologically from the abstract to the concrete, description of contemporary circumstances requires the progressive introduction of increasingly substantial specific conditions, namely, those under which a given process plays out in each particular instance. […]

Marx’s approach was simple: the long-term interplay of forces can only be interpreted once their general logic has been understood. Because this approach involves such a high level of abstraction, the future cannot be predicted precisely. It is a matter, rather, of measuring the range of possibilities staked out by the laws in question.[xiv]

So, when on the topic of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Deleuze highlights the explanatory power of Marxian analysis of the “two complementary movements of capitalism,” what sort of underlying economic law is he seeing at work? In Anti-Oedipus, he and Guattari explain that the double movement of capitalism is what Marx termed “the law of the counteracted tendency:” that is, the tendency and counteracting tendency for the rate of profit to fall.[xv] I covered this in more detail in my essay “On the backs of the Arabs,” but in short, as the productive forces of capitalism advance toward increased automation, via competition in the market, the ratio of capital invested in machines vs. workers increases, causing reduction in the rate of profit. As Marxist economist Michael Roberts explains, “the rate of profit (R) = the surplus value (S) divided by constant capital (C) and variable capital (V),” wherein,

The value of means of production is called constant capital (C), because the means of production cannot add any new value without workers using it. The value of labor power employed is called the variable capital (V), because the labor employed can produce more value than it consumes in goods and services that workers need to live.

While new, more productive tech gives an initial competitive edge to individual capitalists, that edge only lasts until the new tech becomes standard in the economy and contributes to the general tendency of a falling rate of profit, causing thus not only displacement of workers but economic slumps. However, the increased mass of surplus-value that comes with technologically increased productivity enables investment of capital in the extension of the market, which temporarily displaces the limit to profit, beginning the boom-bust cycle all over again.

These dynamics involve the development of an international division of labor, a world market, and the globalization of capitalism. Although this analysis of the falling rate of profit comes in the third volume of Capital, the dynamics and tendencies are already present in the first volume, in Marx’s analysis of the development of machinery and largescale industry. There, he explains that with the mass of surplus-value created by machinery and the diminution of workers required for production there arises “an extension of work” which constitutes the creation of world market relations with new demands for labour in transport and construction of infrastructure, such as canals, docks and bridges. With the creation of the world market by largescale industry, “a greater mass of foreign raw materials, ingredients and half-finished articles are used as means of production in the home industries.”[xvi] As Marx explains in the third volume of Capital, the technical revolutions serve to temporarily delay the falling rate of profit and, through stagnation, “prepares the ground for a later expansion of production – within the capitalist limit;” that, “with expanded conditions of production, a wider market and increased productivity, the same cycle of errors is pursued once more.[xvii]

To be clear, the rule is not simply innovation, but the rate of profit. Citing American Marxist economists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Deleuze and Guattari explain that capitalists are not simply interested in implementing new technology, and they won’t make an investment unless it increases profit:

it has often been remarked that the Industrial Revolution combined an elevated rate of technical progress with the maintenance of a great quantity of “obsolescent” equipment, along with a great suspicion concerning machines and science. An innovation is adopted only from the perspective of the rate of profit its investment will offer by the lowering of production costs; without this prospect, the capitalist will keep the existing equipment, and stand ready to make a parallel investment in equipment in another area.[xviii]

Deleuze and Guattari also build on the world-systems analysis of Egyptian-French Marxist economist Samir Amin in his 1970 Accumulation on a Global Scale, explaining that banks function to finance the movement of capital from “the center” to “the periphery,” and “the increasing exploitation of the peripheral proletariat in relation to that of the center” amounts to “ensur[ing] a rise in the rate of surplus value.”[xix] Notably, the factor of the falling tendency of profit is central to the discussion:

As Samir Amin has shown, the process of deterritorialization here goes from the center to the periphery, that is, from the developed countries to the undereveloped countries, which do not constitute a separate world, but rather an essential component of the world-wide capitalist machine. It must be added, however, that the center itself has its organized enclaves of underdevelopment, its reservations and its ghettos as interior peripheries. […] And if it is true that the tendency to a falling rate of profit or to its equalization asserts itself at least partially at the center, carrying the economy toward the most progressive and the most automated sectors, a veritable “development of underdevelopment” on the periphery ensures a rise in the rate of surplus value, in the form of an increasing exploitation of the peripheral proletariat in relation to that of the center.[xx]

In subsequent works, Deleuze further applies Marxian analysis to describe developments in the world market. In A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Deleuze and Guattari describe the emergence among the international division of labor of a bureaucratic role in the private sector, and they define this development within Marx’s category of variable capital (rather than, for example, something akin to the common idea today of a “professional managerial class”). They write:

as long as the working class defines itself by an acquired status, or even by a theoretically conquered State, it appears only as ‘capital,’ a part of capital (variable capital), and does not leave the plan(e) of capital. At best, the plane becomes bureaucratic.[xxi]

In a 1990 article, Deleuze writes about the latest “mutation” of capital with the movement of factories to the “Third World” and the emergence of “the business” in the place of the old factories. While “factories give way to businesses,” the factories are “often transferred to remote parts of the Third World, even in the case of complex operations like textile plants, steelworks, and oil refineries.” Deleuze writes that the business on the other end often only “buys finished products or assembles them from parts.”[xxii]

Of course, this extension of the market such that factories have been moved to the “Third World” is characteristic of what we now call the neoliberal era of capitalism, as the neoliberal “free market” policies of the last half century are what enabled that movement, that displacement—following a crisis of profitability in the 1960s and economic crisis in the 70s[xxiii]—leaving factory towns at the center to obsolescence and decay, transforming the “Steel Belt” in the US into the “Rust Belt.” Thus, although these cycles allow capital to survive, they leave misery, even death, in their wake.

What “war against Marxism”?

Although he criticizes certain interpretations of Marx, nowhere does Deleuze “wage a war” against Marxism, as Rockhill claims. Instead, he emphasizes the need to follow the laws formulated by Marx when contemplating history through analysis of capitalism and homes in on the Marxian laws relevant for explaining developments in contemporary capitalism, including colonization.

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Notes

[i]. See ~57:00 - 1:03:00 in the following interview.

Gabriel Rockhill

Red Scare with Gabriel Rockhill

This interview was live streamed on the Red Scare Substack on 12/18/25: https://nickestes.substack.com…

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8 months ago · 42 likes · 3 comments · Gabriel Rockhill

[ii]. Gilles Deleuze, “The Grandeur of Yasser Arafat.”

[iii]. Jacques Bidet (2009) “New Interpretations of Capital,” in Jacques Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis (eds), Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism (Chicago: Haymarket Books), 378.

[iv]. Ibid, 372.

[v]. Ibid, 375-6.

[vi]. Bidet, 383.

[vii]. Étienne Balibar, (2015 [1970]) ‘On the Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism’, in Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Rancière, Reading Capital (London: Verso), 448–9.

[viii]. Gilles Deleuze (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press. 186.

[ix]. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York: Penguin, 2009), 140.

[x]. Ibid, 230.

[xi]. “Marxism and dualism in Deleuze” (1997) Fredric Jameson, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 96.3.

[xii]. Félix Guattari (2006) The Anti-Oedipus Papers, ed. Stéphane Naduad, trans. Kélina Gotman, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 137.

[xiii]. Deleuze, Gilles (1995) Negotiations, 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Colombia University Press, 171.

[xiv]. Christoph Henning (2015) Philosophy After Marx: 100 Years of Misreadings and the Normative Turn in Political Philosophy, (Chicago: Haymarket Books), 27.

[xv]. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 34, 259.

[xvi]. Marx, Capital: Vol. One (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 572–3.

[xvii]. Marx, Capital: Vol. Three, 364.

[xviii]. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 233.

[xix]. Ibid, 230-1.

[xx]. Ibid, 231.

[xxi]. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2009) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 472 [parentheses original].

[xxii]. Gilles Deleuze (1995) ‘Postscript on Control Societies’, in Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press, 181.

[xxiii]. Michael Roberts (2016) The Long Depression: How it Happened, Why it Happened, and What Happens Next (Chicago: Haymarket Books), 60. See also Michael Roberts’ blog, “A world rate of profit: important new evidence,” https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2022/01/22/a-world-rate-of-profit-important-new-evidence/

In 2025, I published 20 essays here, paired with an amazing lineup of original artworks by .

Below are my favorites from the year, which I see as falling between two general categories:

1) Marx and contemporary capitalism.

2) Critical approaches to political economy and psychoanalysis.

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[Painting in progress by ]

Every once in a while, I'll have an interesting exchange in the comments of one of my articles. Recently a commenter pitched a thought experiment as a way to refute my claim that capital requires, as I wrote, “a vast labor market of people who have no means to work for themselves (i.e., no sufficient access to land or means of …

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[Monotype by ]

There are monsters in our midst. Genocidal states; environmentally destructive corporations; war-profiteering; for-profit health care and health insurance companies with algorithm’s choosing which …

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[Mixed media sketch by ]

Today, there’s more wealth in the US than there’s ever been in one nation, yet most of us struggle to get by. There’s a lot of poverty and decay in the city and in the country. Prices are high, wages are low, and the job market is terrible amid mass layoffs in both the public and private sector, including as a result in some cases of employers like Mark Zuckerberg replacing workers with AI.

As I’ve covered in my last couple of essays, the impact of neoliberal era capitalism shows itself at its exterior limits in the cases of the mass displacement and migration we see at the US Southern Border as well as in the genocidal colonialism we see in Palestine. But for many within the US, these are far off and abstract—borders, foreign nations, international politics; out of their control, not their business, many suppose. So, what does it look like in the home country? Besides the violent mass deportations attempting to rip American communities apart, how are things at the heart of the empire in the wake of the neoliberal economic restructuring, involving increased austerity as well as unemployment as capital was moved abroad? Was there a “trickle down,” a “rising tide that lifts all boats”?

In the previous essay, I covered how the working class’s capacity for consumption is kept at a minimum, oscillating between a relatively narrow range, and that this narrow capacity for consumption presents a real barrier to capital growth. Hence, capital will be sent abroad if it can be employed abroad at a higher profit, because capitalism is not based on the needs of the producers.

On the other hand, the concentration and accumulation of capital—which is accelerated in times of crisis—ultimately threatens the basic, small-business level of competition that drives capitalist production and development. In recent decades we’ve seen the working class’s capacity for consumption reduced as capital was sent abroad to exploit foreign workers where labor was less organized and regulated, while concentration and accumulation of wealth has only been exacerbated.

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Within the US, the results of the neoliberal era present themselves in the poverty and decay that are evident everywhere. Dilapidated former factory towns; cities with masses of unhoused people beside masses of empty homes; decades of wage stagnation, declining standards of living, people living paycheck-to-paycheck and working multiple part-time and/ or gig-economy jobs with little or no benefits; and people eventually opting for a Bernie Sanders or a Donald Trump over establishment candidates like Hillary Clinton.

The results of neoliberalism also look like the emergence of a class of billionaires in an era when the working-class majority actually lost wealth, and while the economy grew more slowly than the prior post-war “Golden Age” period of economic development.[i] Now owning less than nothing—more debt than assets—the bottom 50% of society saw a $900 billion decrease in net worth between 1989 and 2018, while the net worth of the top 1% increased by $21 trillion during that time. On the other hand, amid conditions of social decay, we see several new billionaires emerging every week; in 2024, there were on average in the world four new billionaires per week. This increasing flow of new billionaires is not despite but because of this fundamental impoverishment of the majority of society relative to the wealth it has produced and is producing. Among the richest countries in the world, the US has for many years represented some of the highest, often the very highest, rates of impoverished workers per capita.

Today’s richest capitalists rode the wave of the neoliberal global economic restructuring and the dot-com revolution of the late 1990s. By considerably reducing production costs, the technological advance of the dot-com revolution contributed to restoring profits for a few years in the mid-1990s.

In Marxian economist Michael Robert’s model of the global rate of profit since 1950, the neoliberal period culminated in the climax of the dot-com revolution, around 1997. From that point in time, this technical revolution had evidently completed throughout the economy to a level sufficient to cause a downturn in profit rates, as Marx’s theory predicts. That point in history marks the end of the neoliberal era, beginning the period we’ve lived in since, what Roberts calls the long depression.

This period of long depression was inaugurated with the crash of the dot-com financial bubble in 2001 and then the crash of the subprime mortgage financial bubble in 2008, as falling rates of profit are grounds for wild financial speculations, credit maneuvers, and swindling of all kinds. Hence, this is also a period of Vulture Capitalism, as economic and political journalist describes it in her 2024 book of that title, detailing the various means by which capitalists have been supplementing and padding their accumulation of wealth under these conditions, including cronyism, corporate crimes, backdoor bailouts, and disaster capitalism, frequently involving monopolistic practices as well as state intervention rather than “free market” capitalism to achieve their aims, and done at the expense of average citizens.[ii]

Squandering our potential, gambling our future

What do the rich need all that wealth for when so much of society continues in precarity, when so many problems in society could be solved by redistributing it? They need it for at the least maintaining their class position by laying claim to the future distribution of wealth. As the early 19^th Century Irish economist and philosopher William Thompson, and Karl Marx following Thompson, understood, a hoard of extra money capital exists simply as a demand on the future productive powers of society, a means for appropriating the future wealth produced by society (Marx, Capital, Vol. 2, 397). That’s why so many rich people are today investing in AI: not because they are simply excited about technological progress but because they want exclusive access to the future productive powers of society; exclusive, disproportionate access to the distribution of wealth that is yet to be created.

Although their wealth has skyrocketed by their own monopolistic rise within the market and all the spoils of neoliberalism, they’ve since largely remained unable to inaugurate a new technical revolution capable of significantly recovering former profit rates in the economy. They’ve obviously chosen AI as that next tool, that next advancement in the productive forces, but so far, AI has failed to significantly increase productivity or profits sufficient to support the growth needs of capital. Hence, all the hype around AI and the pressure to use it everywhere you look, as its overvaluation becomes increasingly evident.

The lack as of yet of a technical revolution sufficient to restore profit rates also explains why these uber-rich leaders of industry and the ruling class more broadly have increased their brazenness and confidence in openly throwing their weight around in recent years to once again reassert the dominance of capital over labor despite the already impoverished state and relatively narrow capacity for consumption of the working class, amid this obscene state of inequality.

Creative destruction and accelerationism

It was announced this week that the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics will go to three theorists of creative destruction, which is a theory of how innovation brings economic growth and prosperity—and these three theorists each see AI as that next prosperity-bringing innovation. Notably, this is a theory that is heavily based in Marx’s analysis of technical revolutions under capitalism. However, these theorists arrive at very different political conclusions, in accordance with the interests of the ruling class to salvage capitalism via automation. Whereas Marx makes clear that crisis is an inseparable part of capitalism’s development, and that technical revolutions under capitalism do not amount to prosperity for the working class, quite the contrary, the mid-20^th Century theorist who originated this Marxist-inspired thesis believed crisis in capitalism was only induced by external factors. This is what a capitalist’s reading of Marx looks like.

Creative destruction is a theory which happens to align with a neoliberal agenda. According to The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the prize, the work of these economists “shows that we must be aware of, and counteract, threats to continued growth.” In a 2007 essay, the Marxian theorist and geographer David Harvey actually described “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction,” though not in the positive light that these Nobel Prize winners see it.[iii] Marx himself was not against an expanding society, so long as it was steady and organic, primarily based on the needs of the producers, and decided democratically. So too, even the 19^th Century Luddite movement was not simply against tech; rather, it was a movement in opposition to the replacement of workers with automation; in other words, it was an objection to capitalism and the way technical revolutions are handled under capitalism.

Several of the richest capitalists today, including not only Thiel but also especially Elon Musk and Marc Andreesen, have been known in recent years to adhere quite passionately to the political theory of accelerationism. That too is heavily based on Marx’s theory, particular the same ideas about technical revolutions that inspired the idea of creative destruction. Though, I’m not sure that the billionaires realize the Marxian background to their ideas, since they get them filtered through right-wing edgelords like Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin. The accelerationist tech-bro billionaires are both literally and figuratively banking on AI as their savior, but theirs is a much grander, much more sci-fi version of ideology than what you get from the creative destruction economists.

The Cosmopole or the despot

In related news this week, the Big Tech billionaire Peter Thiel—the ever-sweaty, nervous guy who is well-known for not only starting PayPal but owning the military intelligence, mass-surveillance company Palantir—has recently delivered a series of private lectures on why he thinks people who oppose unregulated technological development are the “legionnaires of the antichrist.”

While Musk is comfortable performing a Nazi salute at a political rally, Thiel is apparently obsessed with Nazi Carl Schmitt’s interpretation of the Anti-Christ, and he made the case that the “legionnaires to the Anti-Christ” are people like Greta Thunberg, the woman who from a young age led a global climate action movement, who recently led two international actions to break Isreal’s blockade on humanitarian aid into Gaza, stating that she’s “not scared of Israel” but rather that she is “scared of a world that has seemingly lost all sense of humanity.” On the other hand, Thiel has struggled in interviews to give a straight answer on whether climate change is real or whether humans should continue to exist. Which of these two, Thunberg vs. Thiel, more closely resembles your own sense of morality?

Thiel’s idea of people being simply anti-tech is a caricature, a coping mechanism for his own authoritarian bent. There are far more people who oppose the way in which certain tech is used and developed than there are people who just oppose tech outright. There are ways we can be united in supporting a more stable version of tech development. For example, in his 2025 book The Physics of Capitalism, introduces what he calls the Cosmopole, a new superstructure for managing the global commons. The Cosmopole is a model by which decisions—especially those concerning things like technological advancements in energy conversion—could be made collectively, by an international democratically operated body. Kolasi writes:

Certain critics and right-wing demagogues will scream, “one world government” at this plan, but they would be wrong, because this plan does not call for a single executive branch to rule over the entire world. In other words, there would be absolutely no risk of a demagogue or dictator emerging to run the whole planet, because there would simply be no executive position at the global level. […] There is no judiciary necessary to check the authority of the Cosmopole as its membership will be replaced through sortition and modular rotation over time. The dynamism of the Cosmopole is inherently a check on its power, as no Cosmopole can be easily corrupted by outside forces and future Cosmopolists can always overturn the poor decisions of their predecessors.[iv]

These ecologically important efforts must be unified on a global scale because, as Kolasi writes, “[t]he world is an integrated community where decisions over here can have a huge impact on what happens of there.”[v] This kind of global cooperation guided by the collective interests of humanity is, however, impossible so long as the world is dominated by super rich capitalists competing over wealth, power, and territory.

In addition to hoarding the vast majority of society’s wealth, the tech-bro billionaires are despotic, anti-democratic, and antisocial. They engage in monopolistic practices, and they act against the will of the people as well as democracy altogether, including undermining unionization efforts, buying up the mainstream presses and media platforms, and attacking government agencies that regulate and investigate their companies. They’ve got compounds and bunkers in Hawaii and New Zealand to hide from civilization in case the pitchforks should ever come. Meanwhile they’re fantasizing about colonizing Mars and plotting to build libertarian utopia’s here on earth where billionaires like them could be absolutely free in their domination of society, where they can do away with democracy and governments altogether—championing Yarvin as their favorite philosopher, a friend of theirs who believes in having a tech “CEO-king.” Thiel wrote years ago that he “no longer believe[s] that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Our future depends on the potential of humanity, not AI

Today, the biggest threat to capital might be the billionaire class itself. The over concentration of capital threatens to snuff out competition on the market from below. Thiel fears “one world communism,” but he and his accelerationist friends tend to believe in a kind of sci-fi idea of an AI “singularity,” where machines inevitably come to dominate humans like in “The Matrix” or “The Terminator.” In whatever circumstances that might even be possible, it obviously wouldn’t be capitalism anymore, let alone desirable. Perhaps for them the end game is to compete over who gets to become the immortal AI-Monster of Frankenstein, ruler of the galaxy.

Maybe they think they’ll get there through a violent fascist regime. The idea of achieving full automation through fascism—of achieving much of anything, really, through fascism, other than suppression, prohibition, and destruction—is one of the dumbest, most misguided ideas imaginable. It might work in science fiction, but in reality, fascism suppresses innovation and creativity, people don’t tolerate total suppression, and violent regimes don’t last long. As the philosopher Spinoza wrote in 1665,

Human nature does not allow itself to be absolutely compelled, and as the tragedian Seneca says, no one has maintained a violent regime for long […] there is nothing that people find less tolerable than to be ruled by their equals and serve them; and nothing is more difficult than to deprive people of liberty once it has been granted.[vi]

Our atomization as individuals in this capitalist system is merely a precondition for our potential to unify and build from the ground up the egalitarian, sustainable world we want and need. Given the state of the climate and the state of the economy, there has never been a better or more important time to get organized: unionize, fraternize, meet in person, collaborate, share.

Peter Thiel plans to be cryogenically frozen upon death, so let’s ensure that, if he’s so lucky as to be brought back to life in a distant future, he wakes up in the world he and the billionaires fear most, operated by the Cosmopole and full of peace, empathy, and humanity.

Notes

[i]. Erdogan Bakir and Al Campbell (2010), “Neoliberalism, the Rate of Profit and the Rate of Accumulation,” Science & Society, Vol. 74, No. 3, 323–342.

[ii]. Grace Blakely (2024) Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom (New York: Simon & Schuster).

[iii]. David Harvey (2007), “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 610, p 22-44.

[iv]. Erald Kolasi (2025), The Physics of Capitalism: How a New Political Ecology Can Change the World (New York: Monthly Review Press), 349-50.

[v]. Ibid, 341.

[vi]. Benedict de Spinoza (2019 [1665]), Theologico-political Treatise, (Cambridge University Press), 73.

[Painting by ]

The genocide Israel is conducting of the Palestinian people has become undeniable. Even Hillary Clinton, a diehard defender of Isreal, called for the end of Isreal’s aid blockade: “thousands of children in Gaza are at risk of starvation while trucks full of food sit waiting across the border.” As mass starvation in Gaza has set in, a recent report found that 83% of those killed in Gaza since Oct. 7^th have been citizens. This week, Israel’s current “war on Gaza” was declared as meeting the legal definition of genocide by the International Association of Genocide Scholars—a genocide paid for with American taxes, operated with American-made weapons, and backed by the U.S.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu has reportedly been talking about a full military occupation of and even annexing parts of Gaza, as the Israeli military is deploying 60,000 reservists and extending the service of 20,000 active-duty soldiers as part of a plan to take control of Gaza City, and Israel just confirmed 22 new settlements in the West Bank, the largest increase in several decades. A few weeks into his second term, Trump described Gaza as a “big real estate site” and claimed that the U.S. was committed to owning it. Just a year prior, his son-in-law and former adviser Jared Kushner stated that Gaza’s “waterfront property could be very valuable.”

Do these sound like the righteous actions of states championing democracy, protecting Western culture and liberal values from foreign invasion and terrorist attack?

Genocide of the Palestinians is one means among others to take over more Palestinian territory, an expansion toward a “Greater Isreal.” This genocidal land grab is well within the patterns of capitalism since its origins. Not only was the state of Israel, like the U.S., born in violent, imperialist-backed expulsion of indigenous peoples from the land[2] but such clearing of land is a precondition and ongoing process of capitalist development. And like the indigenous peoples of America, the Palestinians have been there resisting encroachment from the start. Capital must expand, and in the process, it will violate any moral, national, or legal bounds it needs to.

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The limits to capital

Rather than allowing a stable, organic development of society based on the needs of the producers, production under capitalist society is wholly oriented to capital, which makes for a turbulent and destructive pattern of development.[3]

In my recent essay on neoliberalism and migration, I explained how the “free trade” policies of the last half century were implemented in a response to an economic crisis in the 1970s. Scholar of U.S. History and Chicano Studies Justin Akers Chacón, in his 2021 book The Border Crossed Us, summarizes the neoliberal era in such terms, writing, “[a]s conventional methods of capital mobility and accumulation have receded, stagnated, or been impeded, the rich capitalist states have turned inward and outward to aggressively restore the primacy of capital accumulation and replenish declining rates of profitability.”^[4] Economist Michael Roberts, in his 2016 The Long Depression, explains how the crisis of the 1970s came in the wake of a decline in profitability in the mid-1960s, and he argues that it occurred according to Marx's theory.^[5]

The philosopher Gilles Deleuze emphasized the explanatory power of Marx’s theory in analyzing Israel’s colonization of Palestine. To be clear, Deleuze’s reputation is not as being a Marxist theorist but rather as being a highly original thinker in his own right, one of the most original and prolific thinkers of the 20th Century, writing about everything from painting and film to life and philosophy itself, drawing on a broad range of thinkers, artists, and scientists from throughout the modern period—which included Marx when it came to political analysis. In their cult classic, two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and his collaborator, psychoanalyst Félix Guattari emphasized the importance of Marx’s theory of profitability and crisis for contextualizing the rise of fascism.[6] Seeing Marx’s theory as also applicable in regard to the contemporary issue of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and Israel’s ongoing expansions, Deleuze wrote in a 1984 essay that,

Marxist analysis reveals the two complementary movements of capitalism: constantly to impose limits, within which it develops and exploits its own system; and always to push these limits farther back, to exceed them in order to begin its own foundation once again on a larger and more intense scale. Pushing back limits was the act of American capitalism, the American Dream, taken up by Israel and the dream of Greater Israel on Arab territory, on the backs of the Arabs.[7]

Marx indeed writes that, “[c]apitalist production constantly strives to overcome [its] imminent barriers, but it overcomes them only by means that set up the barriers afresh and on a more powerful scale.”[8] Deleuze understands Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people as one of several means toward the main goal of clearing the Palestinian territory, in order to enable continued growth of Israeli capital. Anticipating the kinds of egregious, cynical statements of the likes of Trump or Jared Kushner salivating over the real estate value of Gaza—while it’s being pulverized and its citizens are being brutally killed in mass—Deleuze critiques the manifest destiny logic common between the US and Israel from the context of capitalism and the way in which it must always expand as a way to overcome its limits.

The pro-capitalist economists that predated Marx were concerned about such barriers immanent to capitalist production, as evident in what they observed as a tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Capitalist production is governed by the drive for accumulation and expansion, determined by constant revolutions in productive technology, the devaluation of existing capital that accompanies this, and the competitive struggle and need to improve and expand production in order to avoid going under.[9] The problem with the technical revolutions, aside from the fact that they put people out of work, is that in the long run they drive profit rates down. Profits are mostly determined by surplus-value, which is the amount of labor provided by the worker in excess of the value exchanged in the form of a wage.

When machines become more durable and more productive and thus the amount of human labor required on average for the production of a given commodity is reduced, the product becomes cheaper. Thus, as the total value of machines, tools, and raw materials increasingly outweighs by proportion the total value of human labor power employed, the rate of profit tends to fall throughout the economy. The unplanned replacement of workers with technology by individual competing capitalists provides a short-term competitive solution for those early adopters of the technology, but once the more productive technology becomes the standard throughout the industry, the average cost of production of the commodity is lowered and the general rate of surplus-value is decreased.[10] But by increasing unemployment and cheapening the costs of the means of production—and thus helping relatively reduce the ratio between the value of machines vs. workers—the technical revolutions serve to temporarily delay the falling rate of profit and, through stagnation, Marx writes, “prepares the ground for a later expansion of production – within the capitalist limit.”

And so we go round the circle once again. One part of the capital that was devalued by the cessation of its function now regains its old value. And apart from that, with expanded conditions of production, a wider market and increased productivity, the same cycle of errors is pursued once more.[11]

By constantly devaluing and rendering obsolete much of capital’s productive forces while also driving up the surplus of unemployed workers, this tendency is a barrier to capital’s drive for an ever-expanding field of productive forces. Capital may recover for an additional growth cycle, but, as Roberts explains, “only after the bankruptcy of many companies, a huge rise in unemployment, and even the physical destruction of things and people in their millions.”[12]

With a falling rate in profit, we see further concentration of capital as small businesses go bankrupt while big businesses continue to grow and industry leaders have credit available. We also see all kinds of new capitalist adventures in speculation (think NFTs, cryptocurrency) and swindling (think MLMs, internet scams, Trump University, etc.), as well as surpluses of unused capital alongside surpluses of unemployed people: “unoccupied capital on the one hand, and an unemployed working population on the other.”[13] Because satisfying human needs is not the goal, “[i]f capital is sent abroad,” as Marx writes, “this is not because it absolutely could not be employed at home. It is rather because it can be employed abroad at a higher profit.”[14] Gregg Shotwell describes such phenomena in his 2011 Autoworkers Under the Gun: A Shop-Floor View of the End of the American Dream, “We bought American and the Corps bought whatever they wanted in Mexico, Europe, Asia, and Latin America with profits earned by American workers. Foreign workers didn't steal our jobs.”[15]

Thus, there is an additional barrier to capital in the form of the restrictions it depends on among the working population. In order for the exploitations of labor to be realized as profit, its products must be sold. Capital requires an ever-present labor market: people ready to sell their capacity to work in order to survive because they don’t have the means to work for themselves in the form of freely accessing land or industry. Hence, this requires processes of separation from the land, a dispossession from means of production. Capital also requires that wages not be too relatively high because, at a certain level, an increase in wages would lead to stagnation and crisis.[16] The majority of society’s capacity for consumption is kept at a minimum, oscillating between a relatively narrow range, and is determined by the class struggle over distribution—workers organizing to fight for better wages, for example, and bosses doing all they can to bust or weaken unions. Therefore, there is a limit to how much the working class can consume under these conditions, that is, how much capital can be realized, how much can be successfully produced, given production’s dependency on distribution and consumption. And when profits fall and then wages fall and unemployment increases because work is replaced by new forms of automation, society’s capacity for consumption falls, even as the overall productive capacity increases via the increased automation. Marx writes that,

The market, therefore, must be continually extended, so that its relationships and the conditions governing them assume ever more the form of a natural law independent of the producers and become ever more uncontrollable. The internal contradiction seeks resolution by extending the external field of production. But the more productivity develops, the more it comes into conflict with the narrow basis on which the relations of consumption rest.[17]

Because the purpose of capital is not to satisfy human need but rather to maximize profits, the capitalist drive for accumulation, what orients the entire society, remains in constant tension with the restricted capacity for consumption among the majority of society, restrictions which are both a precondition and a product of the capitalist system.[18] When significantly more wealth is produced than can be realized under the conditions determining society’s power of consumption, with significant amounts of unused capital alongside unemployment: “it is impossible to accomplish this process without ever-recurrent explosions.”[19]

Ultimately, “[t]he true barrier to capitalist production is capital itself” because, on the one hand, capital demands unrestricted growth, and on the other, it requires barriers to flow within, barriers which depend upon dispossession and exploitation of society’s working masses. The various factors causing and temporarily delaying the overall fall in the rate of profit, which include automation, banking, credit, finance, and foreign trade, can proceed simultaneously or in succession.[20] The tension is momentarily resolved by crisis and displaced by expansion of the market, a resetting of the same limits at a new scale. However, the driving force of capitalist production is the rate of profit, and the general purpose and tendency of capitalist production is accumulation and concentration of capital, which causes the rate of profit to fall; a certain level of concentration would extinguish “the animating fire of production.”[21]

Although Marx’s predecessors of Political Economy, particularly David Ricardo, horrified as they were by the tendency for declining profit, managed to glimpse this barrier in analyzing capitalist production—something that virtually all new schools of economics after Marx painstakingly avoid—they didn’t understand the deeper cause of their concern, the deeper meaning of this tendency: that capitalism is historically contingent and finite: “its relativity, the fact that it is not an absolute but only a historical mode of production, corresponding to a specific and limited epoch in the development of the material conditions of production.”[22]

Palestine at the limits of capital

In the light of Marx’s analysis of capital and the ways it’s always pushing back its limits, the limits it depends upon, Deleuze and Guattari conceive of capital as a kind of social machine, formed and functioning by a process of de-territorialization. This concept essentially refers to the whole package: capital’s expropriations of lands, its exploitative extractions of surplus labor, its immanent barriers, its proclivity to break down, its displacements of workers by automation, its ongoing colonial and market expansions, and its historical contingency. In analyzing the ascendancy of fascism and the ultimately genocidal pursuits of the Nazis, Deleuze and Guattari consider the historical circumstances of the crisis of the Great Depression and the context of capital seeking various ways to displace its limits and restore profit rates:

exploitation grows constantly harsher, lack is arranged in the most scientific of ways, final solutions of the “Jewish problem” variety are prepared down to the last detail, and the Third World is organized as an integral part of capitalism.[23]

There’s a psychoanalytic component as well, but the destructive and ultimately suicidal tendency of fascism is understood by Deleuze and Guattari as emerging in the broader context of capital confronting its limits, that is, the context of increasing exploitation of workers and increased control over the minimum level of consumption (“lack is arranged in the most scientific of ways”), while capital is sent abroad in a further expansion of the world market, at a more intense scale (“the Third World is organized as an integral part”).

Writing several years later on Israel’s occupation of Palestine, Deleuze explains that Europe’s lack of reparations for the suffering of the Jews in the wake of the Holocaust enabled the Zionists to have Europe’s infinite debt to the Jews be paid by another innocent people, the Palestinians.[24]

Deleuze is no doubt referencing the 1947 United Nations resolution to partition British-controlled Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. This was done under a sense of urgency in the wake of the Holocaust and was rejected by the Arab leaders in Palestine, leading to a civil war and the Nakba (1947-49), or “catastrophe,” the violent and deadly expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from the newly formed state of Israel in the Palestinian territory. After initiating in 1967 a “Six-Day War” in the Middle East, Israel occupied the Palestinian West Bank, where it has since been building settlements against international law, and seized occupation of the Gaza strip, with increased restrictions on movement since the 1990s, turning it into an open-air prison.

Deleuze explains that Europe enabled the Zionists to transform the suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust into an absolute evil, in a religious and mystical vision rather than an historical one:[25]

It doesn't stop the evil; on the contrary, it spreads the evil, makes it fall once again on other innocents, demands reparation that makes these others suffer part of what the Jews suffered (expulsion, restriction to ghettos, disappearance as a people). With "colder" means than genocide, one ends up with the same result.[26]

Similarly, in another essay, he writes:

The Zionists have built the state of Israel with the recent past of their suffering and upon the unforgettable European horror – but also upon the suffering of this other people and with this other people's stones.[27]

Today, the function of genocide as part of Israel’s plans to takeover all of Palestine has never been clearer.

Deleuze also accurately predicted that Isreal would become a laboratory for state repression internationally—as the Spanish Civil War served in the lead up to WWII—to develop tactics that would be outsourced around the world.[28] It’s quite well known, for example, that U.S. cops are trained by Israeli cops, using tactics developed in the occupation of Palestine.

International response to genocide

By the mid-80s, Isreal started implementing neoliberal policy in response to economic crisis. And as Israeli economist Arie Krampf explains in a 2018 paper, Israel’s occupation of Gaza makes Israel vulnerable to the economic consequences of a negative international public opinion,[29] given its internal neoliberal-driven inequality and its dependence on imports and exports in this highly interdependent world market that capitalism, and most recently neoliberal-era capitalism, has produced, with its interconnected supply chains.

This is a vulnerability demonstrated by global movements of workers and consumers organizing to Boycott, Sanction, and Divest from Israel in opposition to the occupation. This summer, dock workers from across Europe—including France, Greece, Belgium, Spain, Sweden, and Italy—have intervened to stop Israel-bound shipments of military equipment and raw materials for Israeli military industries. There is currently a 50-ship humanitarian aid flotilla in route to Gaza via the Mediterranean Sea. And the dockworkers in Genoa—one of Italy’s two largest commercial ports—have promised to strike and to organize a Europe-wide blockade on shipments if the Israeli military attempts to threaten or seize the aid ships, as they did when the smaller Greta Thunberg-led flotilla approached Gaza in late July. As one representative said, “If we lose contact with our boats for even 20 minutes, with our comrades, we will block all of Europe.” This kind of internationalism and anti-imperialism carries the potential to not only end the genocide but to win a world without imperialism, colonialism, and genocide.

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On that note, I’ll leave you with a couple of powerful and inspiring comments I received on my recent essay on the Irish socialist William Thompson (where it on Medium), which featured the amazing painting shown again as the banner of this essay, illustrating the solidarity between Irish and Palestinian liberationists.

Notes

[1]. Gilles Deleuze (1998 [1984]) “The Grandeur of Yasser Arafat” (trans. by Timothy S. Murphy) in Discourse, Vol. 20, No. 3, 30-33.

[2]. The US-Israeli relation goes back to the around the beginning of the Cold War. The state of Israel was formed with a violent expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians between 1947-49 (the Nakba, or “catastrophe”) after decades of sponsorship of the Zionist project by the imperialist economic and military backing from Britain and France in the aftermath of the First World War and the fall of the Ottoman Empire. In the decolonization era of post-WWII, Israel became a “watchdog” for the US in the Middle East, especially during the Cold War when controlling the region and ensuring access to Middle East oil was a top priority for the US. Israel also would at times serve as a conduit for the US, dealing arms to various suppressive reactionary and right-wing governments around the world when it would be disadvantageous for the U.S to do so directly. Shireen Akram-Boshar, “How Israel Became the Watchdog State: US Imperialism and the Middle East,” in Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, ed. by Sumaya Awad & Brian Bean (Chicago: Haymarket Books), 40-1; 47.

[3]. Karl Marx (1991) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: Vol. 3, trans. by David Fernbach (London: Penguin), 358.

[4]. Justin Akers Chacón (2021) The Border Crossed Us: The Case for Opening the US-Mexico Border (Chicago: Haymarket Books), 5-6. Given their expansionist nature, it should be no surprise that the “free trade” policies which we have come to know as neoliberalism, from NAFTA and beyond, “gestated in the womb of colonialism,” such as in Puerto Rico. Ibid, 30.

[5]. Michael Roberts (2016) The Long Depression: How it Happened, Why it Happened, and What Happens Next (Chicago: Haymarket Books), 60. See also Michael Roberts’ blog, “A world rate of profit: important new evidence,” https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2022/01/22/a-world-rate-of-profit-important-new-evidence/

[6]. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York: Penguin, 2009), 373.

[7]. Deleuze, “The Grandeur of Yasser Arafat.”

[8]. Marx (1991) Capital: Vol. 3, trans. by David Fernbach (London: Penguin), 358.

[9]. Ibid, 353.

[10]. Ibid, 373-4. For a nice summary, see also Hadas Their (2020) A People’s Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics, (Chicago: Haymarket Books), 177.

[11]. Marx, 364.

[12]. Roberts, 6.

[13]. Ibid, 359.

[14]. Ibid, 364-5.

[15]. Gregg Shotwell (2011) Autoworkers Under the Gun: A Shop-Floor View of the End of the American Dream (Chicago: Haymarket Books), 225.

[16]. Marx, 364.

[17]. Ibid, 352-3.

[18]. Ibid, 365.

[19]. Ibid, 367.

[20]. Ibid, 357.

[21]. Ibid, 368.

[22]. Marx, 364-5.

[23]. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 358.

[24]. Deleuze, (1988) “Where They Can See It,” trans. from Arabic by Mustapha Kamal) in al-Karmel 29: 27-2.

[25]. Gilles Deleuze (1998 [1984]) “The Grandeur of Yasser Arafat.”

[26]. Ibid.

[27]. Deleuze, (1988) “Where They Can See It.”

[28]. Gilles Deleuze (2007 [1978]) “Spoilers of Peace” in Two Regimes of Madness (Semiotext: New York) 161-3.

[29]. Arie Krampf (2018) “Israel’s Neoliberal Turn and its National Security Paradigm,” Polish Political Science Yearbook, 2 (47).

[Drawing by ]

There’s a long history of knowledge and skills being taken from a group of people for cynical purposes and ultimately being used against the people from whom it’s taken. For example, rice cultivation involved a special kind of knowledge which certain cultures of West Africa, particularly the women, held and which was especially sought after by slave traders, knowledge which rice plantation owners depended on and which then became a target of brutal exploitation.[1] The practice of inoculation was first introduced in North America by an African slave, a practice which was later experimented on slaves as well as used on slaves in order to maximize profits. George Washington had the Continental Army soldiers inoculated to protect them from smallpox, a move which was likely decisive in the victory of the American Revolution—a move which, again, depended upon the knowledge of African slaves.[2] A medicine (quinine) useful for treating malaria invented by indigenous peoples in Peru using the bark of a tree (cinchona) native to the region was highly sought after by European colonizers—who weren’t satisfied with receiving the medicine via export and instead sought all sorts of ways to smuggle the seeds of the tree out of the country, eventually succeeding via an illegal bribe.[3] The scientific knowledge and methods of craftspeople which was essential to the origins of the Scientific Revolution would later be incorporated into a factory system in the Industrial Revolution, in an economy which eventually made craftspeople become dependent wage workers in factories.[4] Today, the critical knowledge of experts in humanities is being sought by AI companies, and I assure you, the results won’t be for the benefit of these experts—not so long as these AI systems remain in private hands, and not so long as we live in a society that enables the expulsion of workers into unemployment via the introduction of new automated technology.

Virtually nobody enters the fields of humanities with the number one priority of making money. Folks primarily motivated by money will be found in business school. Rather, we enter the humanities because we’re passionate, curious, and creative—motivations and skillsets that are generally shunned and devalued in capitalist society. Sure, some of us have fantasized about fame or fortune for writing the next Great Novel or just had the foresight to dream of a life free from the drudgery of working in a cubicle, but we all know there are far better routes than poetry to attaining riches if that’s one’s motivation. Despite social and familial pressures, despite the societal pressures in an economy that prioritizes exchange value above all else, salability over usefulness or spiritual or intellectual enrichment, students of the humanities persevere by staying close to their creative passions and intellectual curiosities. And yet, despite being told that they’ve made the wrong choice, that they’ll never get a job, that “there’s no money in [x],” despite enduring life in a society thoroughly hostile to their critical thinking skills, today, AI companies are seeking experts in the humanities (among other fields) for those critical thinking skills. That’s right, the technology that’s being hyped as the pinnacle technology of the future, what venture capitalists are investing grotesque amounts of money into, appears to depend on attaining a certain set of skills that we’ve so long been taught aren’t valuable.

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Humanity’s Last Exam?

Since the beginning of this year, I think I’ve been targeted by 4 or 5 sponsored ads on LinkedIn from companies aiming to recruit me to help train AI. First, they were aimed at people with expertise in writing, but the last two have been more specific: one for philosophy, one for humanities M.A.s or PhDs. Here’s one I received last week, inviting me to participate in the rather ominously titled, “Humanity’s Last Exam, a rigorous new way to test Al's intelligence and reasoning:”

Hi Kevin,

My name is [x], and your expertise in humanities is exactly what we need for our research at Outlier (a company owned & operated by Scale Al).

Our Mission: we're challenging Al with Humanity's Last Exam, a rigorous new way to test Al's intelligence and reasoning. To do so, we need experts with Master's or PhDs in Humanities to create high-level problems that AI struggles to solve—in topics like Psychology, Sociology, Literature, Fine Arts, Music, & History.

When you click on the link in the ad, you learn that their program is used to “accelerate AI development at leading enterprises,” including Microsoft, Eureka Labs, Cisco, and TIME. They hype you up a bit, make you feel smart, valued, important even: “Outsmart Artificial Intelligence with Your Human Brilliance,” they say. Like it’s a game, a chess match, and they need you to intellectually wrestle their relatively weak AI into submission. Don’t worry, nothing economic at stake here! Oh, it’s also exclusive and elite: “Join the top 1% of scholars in shaping the future of AI.” They must’ve mistaken us humanities people for those business school people who believe they’ll become part of the economic “1%.”

Well, at least for those highly prized skills, essential for advancing their technology, they must be offering top dollar, right? Full-time with benefits? An offer you couldn’t refuse even if you were already living relatively comfortably? They’re offering “up to $118 per submission (contributed problem & solution pair)” and “Unlimited submissions - high earning potential.” Ok, what does that come out to per hour? How many hours are people putting into a submission? Don’t worry about that! You also get the cool knowledge that you’re outsmarting AI! Well, for now, at least… That is, until they decide they no longer need you. Then what?

Here's a “problem and solution pair” for you

Despite my revulsion at the prospect, despite the cynical and dystopian nature of the pitch, the elephant in the room is that there’s a job market full of critical thinkers who are no doubt compelled to seriously consider such a prospect because of how little work there is already on the job market, not the least due to the reckless introduction of AI into various industries. And not the least due to the critical skills they have, many are likely aware of what’s going on here and may still be compelled to accept the offer.

I can sympathize on an individual level with someone accepting the deal due to having virtually no other options. However, they should know that they’re engaging in an historically significant process of appropriation. I think we should not aid the AI companies in subsuming our already limited lines of work. Rather, we should resist it. I’m not against the advance of technology, or of even AI in particular, but I am against the ways in which automation is used in capitalist production—ways that regularly undercut the livelihoods of large swaths of people, while providing them no safety net, no alternative. It’s on you to play musical chairs against all the others on the market.

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This is all a part of the long process of accumulation of capital, a process of appropriation which, in the modern capitalist era, extends all the way back to the enclosures of the commons in the U.K. And as is the case for the commons that were taken from the people, humanities experts won’t personally benefit from the commodification of their skills in AI technology—until they take it back. As an English folk poem, circa 1764, goes:

They hang the man and flog the woman

That steal the goose from off the Common,

But let the great villain loose

That steals the Common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone

When we take things we do not own.

But leaves the Lords and Ladies fine

Who take things that are yours and mine.

The law locks up the man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the Common,

And geese will still a Common lack

‘Til they go and steal it back.

Notes

[1]. Clifford D. Connor, A People’s History of Science (New York: Nation Books, 2005), 90-3.

[2]. Ibid, 102-5.

[3]. Ibid, 95-7.

[4]. Ibid, 349-50.

[Mixed media, work in progress by ]

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[Painting by ]

The Irish philosopher and economist William Thompson (1775-1833) is a little-known but important contributor to the early development of the socialist movement in Europe. A frugal vegetarian, feminist, and socialist, Thompson advocated for suffrage for adults of each sex, as a necessary step toward socialism, as well as free education for all, and he was an early proponent of the socialist co-operative movement.[1] A reader of early French socialist theorists, he was known to walk in his home country of Ireland with the tri-colored French flag on the end of his walking stick—a symbol of support for the ideals on which the French republic was formed. He was influenced by utilitarian philosophers, those who theorized how to achieve “the most good for the most people,” but he came to be critical, as Karl Marx would, of this school of thought. He collaborated with the feminist theorist Anna Doyle Wheeler, describing one of his published works as the “joint property” of he and Wheeler, who was herself also affiliated with French feminists and socialists and who made income via translating works of French philosophers. A local celebrity due to his “‘peculiar habits, strange creed, and extraordinary theories,’” Thomspon is known also for being an extraordinarily good employer and landlord.[2]

Like many of the early socialist theorists, Thompson was from among the property-owning class. However, he was unique among those contemporaries in that he identified himself critically as among the “Idling Classes.” Indeed, he had no problem self-critically recognizing that, by living off rent, he was living off “‘the produce of the labour of others,’” a critical insight about owners of capital which he would introduce to the socialist movement. As the prominent Irish socialist James Connolly explains, writing about Thompson in his 1910 Labour in Irish History, “All the theory of the class war is but a deduction from this principle,”[3] that is, the principle that employers and landowners live off the labor of others. Thompson went much further than this statement in elaborating on that principle.

Marx gained important insights from Thomspon’s work. Marx cites Thompson in one of his early texts, and later economists, including Thorstein Veblen, have emphasized a large, unacknowledged debt to Thompson in Marx’s Capital.[4] Particularly, Thompson is known for theorizing the extraction of profit from labor in terms of exploitation as well as for coining the term surplus-value, which are key aspects of Marx’s theory of capital.

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A critique of the capitalist class

Thompson appears to be the first socialist to aim criticism at the capitalist class. While the progenitor of classical economics, the Scottish economist Adam Smith, had acknowledged the opposing interests of employers and workers, the advantage employers have for organizing and wielding power over workers, and the resultant potential of employers to exploit workers, Thompson was the first to see profit as inherently exploitative and to bring these insights into the socialist movement. He was, Connolly writes, “an economist more thoroughly Socialist in the modern sense than any of his contemporaries.”[5]

The early socialist movement of which Thompson was a part was largely defined by theorists like the Welsh industrialist and social reformer Robert Owen, capitalist-class thinkers who aimed to develop socialist communes, as Owen himself famously attempted in Indiana. Connolly explains that these early socialists contemporary to Thomson largely did not level criticism of this social system’s beneficiaries, that is, the owners of productive property; rather “their complaint was against the results of the social system.” Their focus was not on “the relation of the labourer as producer to the proprietor as appropriator of the thing produced” but rather “an analysis of the effects of competition upon buyer and seller,” a more commercial rather than industrial analysis. As such, they believed they could appeal to the sympathies of the broader ruling classes, as Connolly writes,

Indeed they, in most cases, believed that the governing and possessing classes would themselves voluntarily renounce their privileges and property and initiate the new order once they were convinced of its advantages.[6]

Connolly explains that these early socialists thus had a “one sided view of social relations,” seeing it necessary for the governing class to be strengthened and not hindered by anything which would “weaken the social bond by accentuating class distinction, or impairing the feelings of reverence held by the labourer for his masters.” Here, as Connolly writes, they mistakenly ignored “historical development as a factor in hastening the attainment of their ideal.” Without an understanding of the historical development of the social relations of production, the followers of these socialist philosophers, who had formed socialist sects, “degenerated into reactionaries of the most pronounced type” upon the loss of their leader’s inspiring genius, becoming “opposed to every forward move of labour.”[7] Marx and Engels later described these early socialists as utopian since they lacked the historical and economic grasp of the class obstacles in the way of creating of a sustainable socialist society.

Unlike these utopian socialists, “with their constant appeals to the ‘humanity’ of the possessing classes,” as Connolly writes, Thompson stood apart in advocating the need for the working class to be the organizers of the new society and emphasized the lengths to which the capitalist class will seize the powers of law and government to maintain power. As Connolly writes:

While Owen and the Continental Socialists were beseeching the favour of kings, Parliaments and Congresses, this Irishman was arraigning the rich, pointing out that lust of power for ever followed riches, that “capitalists, while capitalists, would always be law-makers”, but that “as long as a class of mere capitalists exists, society must remain in a diseased state”.[8]

In other words, Thompson was likely the first revolutionary socialist, an “apostle of the social revolution,” as Connolly describes him, “the first to pierce the worse than [biblical] Egyptian darkness of capitalist barbarism, and to point out to the toilers the conditions of their enslavement, and the essential pre-requisites of their emancipation.”[9]

Thompson describes a strong propensity among those “brought up in indulgence” to desire power because they, by such an indulgent upbringing, abhor restraint and are “uneasy under opposition.” He explains how they go about acquiring power:

“First by the direct influence of their wealth, and the hopes and fears it engenders; then when these means are exhausted, or to make these means more effectual, they endeavour everywhere to seize on, to monopolise the powers of Government.”[10]

Here we see an analytical prioritization of economic relations over legal and political relations, as the key determinant is wealth and its leverage, the basic idea behind what would be later termed class war. Thompson goes on to explain how these wealth-wielding power-seekers are even willing to work with despotism as they seek to monopolize as much of the government as possible:

“they monopolise, either directly or indirectly, the command of the armed force, the offices of judges, priests and all those executive departments which give the most power, require the least trouble, and render the largest pecuniary returns. Where despotism exists, the class of the excessively rich make the best terms they can with the despot, to share his power whether as partners, equals or mere slaves.”[11]

In opposition to his contemporaries, Thompson rejected any possibility of the capitalist class ushering in socialist society. He recognized this class’s tendency to advocate for its own rights, to the point that it, “if they are weak they gladly crawl to the despot, and appear to glory in their slavishness to him for the sake of the delegated power of making slaves to themselves of the rest of the community.” Thus, he emphasized the need to overcome the legal and political barriers in the way of socialism. As Connolly writes: “He did not believe in the State as a basis of Socialist society, but he insisted upon the necessity of using political weapons to destroy all class privileges founded in law, and to clear the ground of all obstacles which the governing class might desire to put in the way of the growth of Socialist communities.”[12]

The fruits of their labour

While Adam Smith and subsequently the British David Ricardo were the first economists to theorize labour as the source of value, Thompson was the first to introduce the term surplus value in defining capital and to describe profit in terms of exploitation, contributions which are typically associated with Marx who rather comprehensively advanced the theory further toward that end, toward the conclusions of this paradigm of economics. Thus, as Connolly writes, Thompson “long ante-dat[ed] Karl Marx in his insistence upon the subjection of labour as the cause of all social misery, modern crime and political dependence, as well as in his searching analysis of the true definition of capital.”[13] In the work of Thompson that Marx cites (after Marx’s first trip to Manchester in the summer of 1845)—Thompsons’s 1824 An Inquiry into the principles of the distribution of Wealth most conducive to Human Happiness as applied to the newly-proposed System of the Voluntary Equality of Wealth [not the most catchy title, but clear nonetheless!]—Thompson writes:

“What, then, is the most accurate idea of capital? It is that portion of the product of labour which, whether of a permanent nature or not, is capable of being made the instrument of profit. Such seem to be the real circumstances which mark out one portion of the products of labour as capital. On such distinctions, however, have been founded the insecurity and oppression of the productive labourer – the real parent, under the guidance of knowledge, of all wealth – and the enormous usurpation, over the productive forces and their fellow-creatures, of those who, under the name of capitalists, or landlords, acquired the possession of those accumulated products – the yearly or permanent supply of the community. Hence the opposing claims of the capitalist and the labourer. The capitalist, getting into his hands, under the reign of insecurity and force, the consumption of many labourers for the coming year, the tools or machinery necessary to make their labour productive, and the dwellings in which they must live, turned them to the best account, and bought labour and its future products with them as cheaply as possible. The greater the profit of capital, or the more the capitalist made the labourer pay for the advance of his food, the use of the implements or machinery and the occupation of the dwelling, the less of course remained to the labourer for the acquisition of any object of desire.”[14]

This passage is profoundly rich in terminology and understanding that will be familiar, in a general sense, to anyone who has read the works of Marx: understanding capital as “one portion of the products of labour;” emphasizing the state of dependence—in terms of “insecurity and oppression”—in which capital keeps the worker; the “enormous usurpation” of the productive forces, the acquisition of “those accumulated products;” the coerced—that is, “under the reign of insecurity and force”—possession and assumption of labor; the inverse relation between profits and wages.

Thompson understands, as Marx later would, that a precondition for capitalism—or “the system of individual competition,” as Thompson called it—is that the workers are separated from the means of production.

“The productive labourers, stript of all capital, of tools, houses, and materials to make their labour productive, toil from want, from the necessity of existence, their remuneration being kept at the lowest compatible figure with the existence of industrious habits.”[15]

In short, Thompson understands that the workers “toil from want” because they are “stript” from the “materials to make their labour productive.”

Equipped with these economic insights and this materialist understanding of society, Thompson critiques moral appeals to those living in extreme poverty, understanding motives as determined by things and circumstances. He questions how the poor should respect the property rights of those who couldn’t care less about their suffering, the pain of those “tormented by the gnawings of absolute want,” seeing criminality as an understandable outcome of impoverished circumstances:

“How shall the wretchedly poor be virtuous? Who cares about them? What character have they to lose? What hold has public opinion on their action? […] How can they feel for others’ woes, for others’ passing light complaints, who are tormented by their own substantial miseries? The mere mention of the trivial inconveniences of others insults and excites the indignation, instead of calling forth their complacent sympathies. Cut off from the decencies, the comforts, the necessaries of life, want begets ferocity.”[16]

Thompson also develops a concept of the way in which, given such circumstances, the workers can develop an outlook independent of and in opposition to the employers, recognizing the employers as a product of force, recognizing their conduct and the laws by which they operate as a non-consensual appropriation of “the fruits of their labour:”

“If they turn they find many in the same situation with themselves, partaking of their feelings of isolation from kindly sympathies with the happy. They become a public to each other, a public of suffering, of discontent and ignorance; they form a public opinion of their own in contempt of the public opinion of the rich, whom, and their laws, they look upon as the result of force alone. From whom are the wretched to learn the principle while they never see the practice of morality? Of respect for the security of others? From their superiors? From the laws? The conduct of their superiors, the operation of those laws have been one practical lesson to them of force, of restraint, of taking away without their consent, without any equivalent, the fruits of their labour.”[17]

Thompson prioritizes circumstance as the primary determinant of motive over things like “morals or principles or commands,” arguing that “Motives arise from things, from surrounding circumstances:”

“Of what avail are morals or principles or commands, when opposed, when belied by example? These can never supply motives of virtuous conduct. Motives arise from things, from surrounding circumstances, not from the idleness of words and empty declamations. Words are only useful to convey and impress a knowledge of these things and circumstances. If these things do not exist, words are mere mockery.”[18]

Midway between the Utopianism of the early idealists and the historical materialism of Marx

Connolly rightly understands Thompson as an important step in the socialist movement toward the development of historical materialism:

midway between the Utopianism of the early idealists and the historical materialism of Marx. […] we should say that the relative position of this Irish genius and of Marx are best comparable to the historical relations of the pre-Darwinian evolutionists to Darwin; as Darwin systematised all the theories of his predecessors and gave a lifetime to the accumulation of the facts required to establish his and their position, so Marx found the true line of economic thought already indicated, and brought his genius and encyclopaedic knowledge and research to place it upon an unshakable foundation.[19]

Despite being such an original and influential thinker, one who was rightly recognized on the European continent, he was so unknown within the English-speaking world of subsequent generations that Connolly, writing less than a century after Thomspon’s death, noted how little-known Thompson was among the young Irish socialists of Connolly’s own day:

It is curiously significant how little Irishmen know of the intellectual achievements of their race […] It is also curiously significant of the conquest of the Irish mind by English traditions, that Irish Nationalists should often be found fighting fiercely against Socialism as “a German idea”, although every social conception which we find in the flower in Marx, we can also find in the bud in Thompson, twenty-three years before the publication of the Communist Manifesto, forty-three years before the issue of Das Kapital.[20]

Connolly does acknowledge, though, that given Thompson’s daring arraignment of the ruling classes as well as his demands for suffrage for all adults, it’s no wonder that his work “found no favour with the respectable classes of society,”[21] those “morally upright” citizens of the classes he arraigned.

Connolly contextualizes Thompson’s thought within an era of political reaction in Europe, “a period of political darkness, or unbridled despotism and reaction” during the first quarter of the 19^th Century. The French Revolution had struck fear into the hearts of the ruling classes, resulting in “an almost insane hatred of reform, coupled with a wolfish ferocity in hunting down even the mildest reformers.” Connolly also includes the context of increased unemployment following the Napoleonic wars, as soldiers, including many Irish, returned home and the industries dedicated to producing war materials were stalled. And amid this reactionary suppression as well as increased unemployment, workers in Ireland became highly organized, in secrecy due to its illegality—so well organized that capitalists complained about “‘the tyranny of the Irish unions.’”[22]

While Connolly doesn’t explicitly say this, it’s clear that Thompson’s insights were influenced by the labor movement in Ireland. Those highly organized workers surely knew where society’s wealth was coming from, by the class consciousness and sense of exploitation which drove the workers to organize in secrecy in the first place, despite it being illegal to do so. Such influence is evident by the fact that Thompson himself writes of the way in which the workers come to see the employers as a product of the non-consensual appropriation of the fruits of their labor. As historian of science Clifford D. Connor explains in A People’s History of Science, modern science rests on an historical bed of intellectual development by masses of ordinary, usually anonymous, often illiterate people engaged in productive and economic activities.[23] It’s important to understand that Marx’s theory is in many ways born out of such a people’s history, born out of labor history—out of the labor movement as well as the socialist movement.

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Notes

[1]. James Connolly (1910), Labour in Irish History, HardPress Publishing, 76-80. Text also available here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1910/lih/chap10.htm

[2]. Caroline Gomes (2019), “William Thompson, a Pioneer of European Socialism”. https://laviedesidees.fr/William-Thompson-a-Pioneer-of-European-Socialism

[3]. Connolly, 80.

[4]. A biographer of Thompson, the Austrian legal theorist and socialist Anton Menger, even went as far as accusing Marx of plagiarism—a charge which Engels, Marx’s long-time collaborator, still alive at the time, unlike Marx, addresses in a couple of texts, including his preface to the second edition of Capital Vol. 1, where Engels writes approvingly of Thompson’s work.

[5]. Connolly, 76.

[6]. Ibid, 75.

[7]. Ibid.

[8]. Ibid, 80-1.

[9]. Ibid, 82.

[10]. Ibid, 78-9.

[11]. Ibid, 79.

[12]. Ibid, 76, 79.

[13]. Ibid, 76.

[14]. Ibid. This text by Thompson is available as a PDF here: https://archive.org/details/inquiryintoprinc00thomuoft/page/n5/mode/2up

[15]. Ibid, 81.

[16]. Ibid, 81-2.

[17]. Ibid, 82.

[18]. Ibid, [italics original].

[19]. Ibid, 79-80.

[20]. Ibid, 81.

[21]. Ibid.

[22]. Ibid, 74-5.

[23]. Connor, A People’s History of Science (New York: Nation Books, 2005), 18.

[Art by ]

A project undertaken in the wake of the mass uprising of students and workers of May ’68 in France, Anti-Oedipus: Captialism and Schizophrenia [1972] is a work of collaboration between a philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, and a psychoanalyst and revolutionary socialist, Felix Guattari. Based in part in a careful reading of Marx’s Capital, Deleuze and Guattari develop a political and social form of psychoanalysis, including original theories about fascism, contemporary madness, and the revolutionary potentials of art and science.

For Deleuze and Guattari, from wherever and from whichever form among the exploited masses it will emerge, the revolutionary break from capitalism will ultimately be a product of desire. Rather than, for example, a sense of duty or merely on the basis of “a just ideological position;” the revolution is made out of desire or it is not a revolution at all. This doesn’t mean it’ll be purely spontaneous. To the contrary, the revolution will have “been prepared by a subterranean labor of causes, aims, and interests working together;”[2] the working class “can constitute itself only by a counterinvestment that creates its own interest in terms of new social aims, new organs and means, a new possible state of social syntheses.”[3] Hence, revolutionaries ought to work with artists and psychoanalysts, that the forging of class consciousness that is the task of a revolutionary socialist movement will require input and insights of art and analysis as well as science, for art and science have a revolutionary potential:

What is at stake is not merely art or literature. For either the artistic machine, the analytical machine, and the revolutionary machine will remain in extrinsic relationships that make them function in the deadening framework of the system of social and psychic repression, or they will become parts and cogs of one another in the flow that feeds one and the same desiring-machine, so many local fires patiently kindled for a generalized explosion.[4]

In many ways, Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas about the revolutionary potential of art align with ideas formulated in a 1938 manifesto co-authored[5] by French surrealist André Breton, Mexican painter Diego Rivera, and Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky—a manifesto which in its creation and in its principles represents the kind of intrinsic relationship Deleuze and Gauttari call for between revolutionaries, artists, and analysts.

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Towards a free revolutionary art

In late spring of 1938, progenitor of the Surrealist movement Breton traveled to Mexico to deliver a series of lectures. Upon arriving, he was greeted by Rivera who offered him and his wife a place to stay and an invitation from the Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky for a visit. Trotsky was there in exile from the Soviet Union and under the constant threat of assassination by Stalin’s secret police. This meeting was especially important to Breton, for whom Trotsky’s influence had played a substantial role throughout the various stages of the Surrealist movement. And in their meetings in Mexico, Trotsky would influence Breton once more – this time directly. Trotsky “greeted the news of Breton’s visit with high interest” and “immediately began planning for the Surrealist to spearhead an independent writers’ federation in France.”[6]

By their second of several meetings in Mexico, Trotsky suggested Breton draft a manifesto to inaugurate such a movement, a project which Breton found utterly daunting and which he ultimately only began to pursue under the pressure of Trotsky. By mid-July, Breton began to make progress on a draft of such a manifesto based on their shared ideas. After several drafts, Trotsky, with the help of a translator, wove his own contributions into the text, and on July 25, 1938 the final draft of “Towards a Free Revolutionary Art,” was complete and signed by Breton and Rivera (in place of Trotsky).[7]

Amidst the Great Depression, with another world war looming and authoritarian forces ascendent across Europe, the authors of the manifesto express a concern for the threat to the conditions for intellectual creativity and emphasize the potential of artists and writers to contribute to the overthrow of regimes which threaten them. They define “True art” as that which “insists on expressing the inner needs of man and of mankind in its time” and which therefore “is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society.”[8] They draw on the psychoanalytic concept of sublimation:

The communist revolution is not afraid of art. It realizes that the role of the artist in a decadent capitalist society is determined by the conflict between the individual and various social forms which are hostile to him. This fact alone, insofar as he is conscious of it, makes the artist the natural ally of the revolution. The process of sublimation, which here comes into play and which psychoanalysis has analysed, tries to restore the broken equilibrium between the integral “ego” and the outside elements it rejects. This restoration works to the advantage of the “ideal of self”, which marshals against the unbearable present reality all those powers of the interior world of the “self”, which are common to all men and which are constantly flowering and developing. The need for emancipation felt by the individual spirit has only to follow its natural course to be led to mingle its stream with this primeval necessity – the need for the emancipation of man.[9]

Drawing on insights from psychoanalysis on “the process of sublimation,” Breton, Rivera, and Trotsky explain how the artist allies themself with the revolution when realize the hostility toward them of the social forms which define their role as an artist under “a decadent capitalist society,” and when they challenge “the unbearable present reality” with “all those powers of the interior world of the ‘self’, which are common to all men and which are constantly flowering and developing.” Those “constantly flowering and developing” powers within the artist, those powers of the “the interior world of the ‘self’” are, of course, of the category of desire.

Trotsky himself had years earlier described the need for reconciling Marx’s theory with psychoanalysis among other modern scientific theories. In his 1925 Literature and Revolution, Trotsky suggests the value of reconciling psychoanalysis with Marxism:

what is one to say about the psychoanalytic theory of Freud? Can it be reconciled with materialism, as, for instance, Karl Radek thinks (and I also), or is it hostile to it? […] It would be fine if a scientist would come along who could grasp all these new generalizations [the theory of relativity, psychoanalysis, theories of atomic structure] methodologically and introduce them into the dialectic materialist conception of the world. He could thus, at the same time, test the new theories and develop the dialectic method deeper.[10]

Trotsky’s interest in reconciling the methods of Marxism with those of psychoanalysis lies in the possibility of expanding upon the former into the realm of the unconscious—expanding social analysis of the conditions of capitalism into the study of the psyche. He certainly wasn’t alone in this interest as many “syntheses” of Marx’s theory with psychoanalysis would be developed throughout the 20^th Century, including by Breton as well as Deleuze and Guattari.

Using the Freudian term life instinct—the libidinal drive for self-preservation, reproduction, and pleasure—Trotsky describes the future, post-revolution need to treat “man’s extreme anatomical and physiological disharmony [caused by exploitative conditions of capitalism], that is, the extreme disproportion in the growth and wearing out of organs and tissues,” which “give[s] the life instinct the form of a pinched, morbid, and hysterical fear of death.”[11]

Notably, these descriptions of a worn-down body and a “pinched” life instinct are similar to some of the descriptions Marx’s longtime collaborator Friedrich Engels wrote in his 1845 Conditions of the Working Class in England, as I’ve covered in a previous essay on Engels’ concept of social murder. The idea of the circumstantial determination upon the physiological and emotional well-being of the working class is present in both works. This kind of analytical framework is also present in Foucault’s 1954 book Mental Illness and Personality—another work I’ve covered in a recent essay—wherein he provides a critical history and analysis of madness, drawing a direct connection between the pathological form of schizophrenia and the conditions of work in capitalist production: “the world of the machine and the disappearance of affective relations between men.” For Foucault, we should not be surprised “the morbid world” of contemporary madness appears mechanistic and devoid of affective life because it is often one of the few options available in a world that segments affective social relations of production with machines in an exploitative mode.[12]

In the works of both Engels and Trotsky there is too the idea of a natural drive to struggle against those oppressive conditions and to create better ones for a healthier, more balanced life. This kind of struggle is present as well in the art manifesto of Breton, Rivera, and Trotsky.

While they assert that art must be free, Breton, Rivera, and Trotsky deny any intent to justify political indifference or any wish for a return to “a so-called ‘pure’ art,” where art has no influence on society’s fate other than to serve “the extremely impure ends of reaction.” To the contrary, art is to have an active and conscious role in the preparation of revolution[13]—the kind of preparation described by Deleuze and Guattari when they assert that the working class “can constitute itself only by a counterinvestment that creates its own interest in terms of new social aims, new organs and means, a new possible state of social syntheses.”[14] Hence, facing the same requirement decades earlier, Breton, Rivera, and Trotsky assert the need for the artist to actively engage in the struggle for freedom: “the artist cannot serve the struggle for freedom unless he subjectively assimilates its social content, unless he feels in his very nerves its meaning and drama and freely seeks to give his own inner world incarnation in his art.”[15]

Regardless of this condition for the revolutionary potential of intellectual creation, such potential cannot be realized on the basis of duty or orders from the revolutionary party, but rather must be completely without such authority. Acknowledging the possibility that the revolution may require, “for the better development of the forces of material production […] a socialist regime with centralized control,” they, on the other hand, also call for “an anarchist regime of individual liberty” in order “to develop intellectual creation:”

No authority, no dictation, not the least trace of orders from above! Only on a base of friendly cooperation, without constraint from outside, will it be possible for scholars and artists to carry out their tasks, which will be more far-reaching than ever before in history.[16]

The aim of this appeal is to find a common ground on which all revolutionary writers and artists may be reunited, the better to serve the revolution by their art and to defend the liberty of that art itself against the usurpers of the revolution. We believe that aesthetic, philosophical and political tendencies of the most varied sort can find here a common ground. Marxists can march here together with anarchists, provided both parties uncompromisingly reject the reactionary police patrol spirit represented by Joseph Stalin and his henchman [Spanish anarchist] García Oliver.[17]

Unfortunately, the federation called for in the manifesto was never realized as within two years of writing it, Paris was occupied by the Nazis and Trotsky was assassinated by an agent of Stalin. Breton, however, participated in May ’68 and his ideas and the ideas of the Surrealist movement were embraced by many of among the revolutionary student movement, whose political graffiti often displayed surrealist-inspired slogans and imagery.

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge that Lenin and the Russian Revolution had achieved the immense accomplishment of forging of “a class consciousness consonant with the objective being or interest of the class,” which “imposed on the capitalist countries a recognition of class bipolarity.” This was ultimately achieved via the stance of revolutionary defeatism during the Great War—Lenin’s position that the working class had more to gain by revolutionary struggle at home than by continuing to fight working class peoples of other nations in service of imperialists. However, not only did capitalism from without manage “its veritable mole work,” but “this great Leninist break did not prevent the resurrection of a State capitalism inside socialism itself,” resulting in the marginalization of any remaining “uncontrolled revolutionary elements;”[18] hence, the exile of people like Trotsky.

Echoing an idea of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci about how individuals can have “mixed” or “contradictory consciousness,” Deleuze and Guattari explain how several potentials can coexist within even a revolutionary organization. They write, that “[i]n reality, everything coexists […] in the same people the most varied kinds of investments can coexist at such and such a moment, the two kinds of groups can interpenetrate.” Even at the moment when some among Lenin’s party (the Bolsheviks) realized “the immediate possibility of a proletarian revolution that would not follow the anticipated causal order of the relations of forces”—that is, the contingent, unanticipated possibility of a proletarian revolution in a country, Russia, that was still largely agrarian-based, depending on whether it could spread internationally to more developed countries—others in that moment among the same party were more hesitant, not believing in that revolutionary possibility, while still there’s a third group “who ‘see’ the possibility of a new socius but maintain it in an order of molar causality [read, status quo] that already makes of the party a new form of sovereignty.” Given the third group, there’s the potential that the “subterranean labor of causes, aims, and interests” which the working class requires in order to constitute itself as a class also “runs the risk of closing and cementing the breach in the name of the new socius and its interests.”[19] It’s with these kinds of insights that Deleuze and Guattari see an important place in the movement for not only art and science but also a psychoanalytic project like their own.

Of course, much of the context in which “Towards a free revolutionary art” was written is quite different from that of today. For example, despite what today’s biggest reactionaries would have you believe, “a socialist regime with centralized control” as well “an anarchist regime of individual liberty” are not quite on the table today, as the working class is very much unorganized relative to both 1938 and 1968. I think the general principles regarding freedom for intellectual creation still stand, however; and in many ways, the conditions for intellectual creation are once again under threat not only by the conditions of capitalism but also, increasingly so, by forces of reaction.

As fascistic and otherwise generally authoritarian ideologies and figures once again rise to power, freedom of speech of student protestors is being threatened by the Trump admin, while reactionaries on the local level are working to ban books. Climate science is continually under attack amid a climate crisis, and political figures have helped sow distrust around vaccines and virology in a period when pandemics are increasingly more likely to occur. It’s important to note that most of the distrust of modern science is the fault of ways in which science is used by corporations and imperialistic nation-states. To counter the trends of anti-intellectualism, the task remains for revolutionaries, artists, and scholars to build what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a counterinvestment by which the working class can constitute itself “in terms of new social aims, new organs and means, a new possible state of social syntheses.”

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Notes

[1]. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2009a [1977]) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, (London: Penguin), 344; 379.

[2]. Ibid, 378.

[3]. Ibid, 344.

[4]. Ibid, 137.

[5]. I’ll refer to each of the three as the co-authors for sake of clarity. However, the manifesto is signed by only Breton and Rivera, but it’s generally believed that Breton and Trotsky authored the piece. The full manifesto is available online here: https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/lit_crit/works/rivera/manifesto.htm

[6]. Mark Polizzotti (1995) Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux), 455-56; 458-9.

[7]. Ibid, 460-2.

[8]. André Breton, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky (2003) “Towards a Free Revolutionary Art,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing), 533-4.

[9]. Ibid, 534.

[10]. Leon Trotsky (2005 [1925]) Literature and Revolution, ed. by William Keach and trans. by Rose Strunsky (Chicago: Haymarket Books), 180-181.

[11]. Ibid.

[12]. Michel Foucault (2011 [1976]) Madness: The Invention of An Idea [previously published under the title Mental Illness and Personality], trans. Alan Sheridan, (New York: HarperCollins), 138-9.

[13]. Breton, Rivera, and Trotsky, 534-5.

[14]. Deleuze and Guattari, 344.

[15]. Breton, Rivera, and Trotsky, 535.

[16]. Ibid, 534.

[17]. Ibid, 535.

[18]. Deleuze and Guattari, 256.

[19]. Ibid, 377-8 [emphasis added].

[Drawing by ]

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Across the political spectrum, we can find an outlook of cynicism, a view of society as largely defined by hypocrisy, inauthenticity, and a shallow pursuit of material possessions…

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We didn’t always have such little independence in the workplace and control over the potentials of production. Despite the common reactionary view that intelligence is naturally distributed hierarchically throughout society, the Scientific Revolution was born in the workshops of artisans—not in the minds of elite scholars. The little amount of independence enjoyed by craftspeople in the early days of capitalism was essential for the Scientific Revolution, the benefits of which were nonetheless captured by and pressed into the service of capital, on a single course guided by the motive of profit.

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In his 2005 A People’s History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and “Low Mechanicks,” Clifford D. Connor explains how modern science rests on a bed of intellectual development by masses of ordinary, usually anonymous, often illiterate people in productive and economic activity, producing science broadly defined as knowledge of nature, empirically, through trial and error.[2]

Against traditional histories of science, Connor explains that science and technology were never totally separate; that there were countless sciences that emerged with no established place in the academy, such as chemistry, metallurgy, botany, zoology, and experimental physics; that the philosophy, standards, and methods which characterize the Scientific Revolution were derived in the workshops of artisans;[3] and that the gap between academic science and artisan science was overcome when the ideas of prolific artisan-authors were disseminated in mass with the advent of the printing press.[4]

Even Rupert Hall, an historian who maintained the view that the scholar rather than the craftsman was the primary agent of the Scientific Revolution—seeing the latter as a product of the mind—explained that, “‘[t]he technological progress of Europe during the Middle Ages was due to transmission’ that ‘occurred at the level of craftsmanship rather than scholarship.’”[5]

If a natural philosopher of that era paid more attention to the processes of artisans “and [as Hall explains] less to his own consciousness and limited academic horizon, he could learn much of what the world is like. As the Middle Ages verged on the Renaissance, an increasingly rich technological experience offered ample problems for enquiry, and besides, much knowledge of facts and techniques.”[6]

Indeed, the essential stimuli for the “mechanical philosophy” that is characteristic of the Scientific Revolution was provided by a range of new technological advances by craftspeople: “most ultimately of Chinese origin—'improved methods of harnessing both saddle-horse and draft-horse, the watermill, the windmill, the mechanical saw, glazed windows, spectacles, the wheeled plow, the true rudder, lock-gates, the grandfather-clock, and finally printing.’” Since the 14^th Century, clockmakers and watchmakers were to become “‘a fruitful source of ingenuity and workmanship,’” while ever-higher standards for accurate measurement were set by the development of the card and dial makers industry which emerged to meet needs for navigational instruments like compasses.[7] Finally, as regards to the origins of the methodologies associated with the Scientific Revolution, “Hall acknowledged that ‘the early exploitation of observation and experiment as methods of scientific inquiry drew heavily on straightforward workshop practice.’”[8]

In addition to these craftspeople-led advances in scientific philosophy, standards, and methods, the print industry in particular created a space uniquely suited for intellectual exchange:

it can be thought of as having created a new culture, that “brought together scholars, craftsmen, merchants, and humanists engaged in common pursuits. The proofrooms of early printshops, where proofreaders, authors, and proofreader-authors exchanged ideas and criticized each other’s works, became in sixteenth-century Europe far more important than the moribund universities as centers of creative intellectual activity—scientific and otherwise.[9]

In addition to acquiring artisan knowledge through printed publications, many of the major figures of science of these times—for example, Galileo, Leibniz, Gilbert—would venture into mines and workshops to learn from science of artisans.[10]

Although in many cases, scholars did acknowledge artisan-author sources, others published books without such acknowledgements. Andreas Vesalius’s 1543 De humani corporis fabrica, which Connor credits as an anatomical masterpiece, “often cited as one of the landmark events of the Scientific Revolution,” was found to be based on “the striking anatomical drawings of one or more anonymous draftsmen presumed to have been affiliated with the workshop of Titian,” artists who remained anonymous simply because “Vesalius did not bother to give them credit.”[11]

Many of what are today entire fields of science were advanced by artisans and tradespeople as practices that were secondary to their primary field of work. The Renaissance artists’ drive to achieve an accurate depiction of nature stimulated growth in several fields. These artists “emerged from the ranks of manual labourers,” often apprenticing under goldsmiths.[12] They made massive contributions to botany, “when artists began to execute finely detailed realistic drawings of plants based on their own careful observations.”[13] Through that “collective determination to depict nature realistically,” Renaissance artists also developed the mathematics of linear perspective.[14] Finally, “[i]t was really the painters […] and not the doctors,” who advanced the science of anatomy by performing dissections on human cadavers, “for purposes of exploration rather than demonstration.”[15] Meanwhile, from the second through sixteenth centuries, surgery was a field of medical knowledge best maintained by “lowly barbers,” who, by the sixteenth century, “had themselves gathered enough strength and sophistication to enable them to contribute some of the greatest surgeons of history.’”[16] And after many elite scientists tried and failed to make a useful enough microscope, a linen draper, Antony Van Leeuwenhoek, developed microscopy as a major scientific field after using magnifying lenses to examine threads of fabrics.[17]

A Royalist reaction

Movements aiming at the reform of knowledge emerged in these contexts, most notably the rivalry between “Baconian” sciences, those associated with Francis Bacon, and the “Paracelsian challenge,” a movement “which instigated revolutionary change in the chemical and medical sciences.”[18]

Whereas Bacon coveted craft knowledge as a raw material to be usurped by scholars, Paracelsus: ‘took the methods of the artisan to be the ideal mode of proceeding in the acquisition of all knowledge, for the artisan worked directly with the objects of nature. Paracelsus considered this unmediated labor in and experience of nature as elevating the artisan both spiritually and intellectually above the scholar.[19]

While “Paracelsus saw himself as a man of the people, crusading against an entrenched oligarchy of wealthy mammon-worshiping physicians who were defrauding the public,”[20] in the eyes of Bacon, the Paracelsian movement was a subversive, dangerous political subculture. Bacon’s own “proposed reform of science,” Connor explains “was essentially ‘a Royalist reaction’ against efforts to establish independent forms of science that were not subject to royal control.”[21] Bacon was witnessing an explosion in scientific knowledge, about which he was certainly excited, but “he was also deeply concerned—even alarmed—by the social implications that accompanied the discrediting of traditional learning: ‘A huge potential existed for social instability and political rebellion.’”[22]

The Paracelsians’ medical and social views were strongly conditioned by their hero’s lifelong association with mines and miners [which exposed him to the most advanced metallurgical knowledge of the day]. It was a two-way relationship: a great deal of Paracelsus’s knowledge of nature was gained from miners, and in return, he concerned himself with their ailments. One particular work, his [On the Minors’ Sickness and Other Minors’ Diseases] testifies to that concern on his part. It is of particular interest as the first example of what would later be called occupational medicine.[23]

The field of occupational medicine inaugurated by Paracelsus would become relevant for Marx in his analysis in Capital of the conditions of the division of labor under manufacture—which also happens to be the site at and the process by which the scientific potentials of production, once enjoyed by craftspeople, were separated from labor.

Subsumed into the factory system

Despite their knowledge and methods placing them “in the vanguard of the Scientific Revolution in its initial stages,” craftspeople did not emerge as “the masters or beneficiaries of the new science.” On the one hand, there emerged in the latter half of the 17th Century, “on the basis of the artisanal knowledge they had exploited,” a new scientific elite, “consisting of gentlemen who looked to Bacon, Boyle and Galileo as their ideal and inspiration.” On the other hand, industrial capitalists emerged whose factory systems subsumed the former trade secrets of craftspeople and who “applied the mechanical philosophy to the ‘rationalization’ of production processes, ushering in the Industrial Revolution and its mechanized factory system.” The lives of the Scientific Revolution’s vanguard of craftspeople worsened as the rise of the factory system would coerce them into becoming wageworkers:

There were individual exceptions, of course, but for the most part the artisans and tradesmen who revolutionized science found themselves worse off than before. As their trade secrets entered the public domain and their crafts were subsumed into the factory system, they lost their economic independence. Those fortunate enough to find employment in the new economy became wageworkers and were “deskilled” by interchangeable assembly line Jobs, while the others were left behind as human detritus.[24]

By having their trade secrets subsumed by the factories and being coerced to enter those mechanized factories, the craftspeople who inaugurated the Scientific Revolution—via the modest level of independence they had in their workshops—found themselves with less independence.

In Capital, Marx describes the same historical process of the transfer of scientific knowledge and potential from craftspeople who then faced those potentials in the factories they entered as “deskilled” wageworkers:

What is lost by the specialized workers is concentrated in the capital which confronts them [in manufacturing]. It is the result of division of labour in manufacture that the worker is brought face to face with the intellectual potentialities of the material process of production as the property of another and as a power which rules over him. The process of separation starts in simple cooperation, where the capitalist represents to the individual workers the unity and the will of the whole body of social labour. It is developed in manufacture, which mutilates the worker, turning him into a fragment of himself. It is completed in large-scale industry, which makes science a potentiality for production which is distinct from labour and presses it into the service of capital.[25]

For Marx, the manufacturing worker is modified through division of labour into an appendage of the system, operating with machinic regularity, such that the small degree of independence in “knowledge, judgement and will” exercised by independent peasants or handicraftsman or even by “the savage” in “art of war” become “faculties now required only for the workshop as a whole.”[26]

An act of robbery

Many craftspeople were understandably secretive about their trade knowledge. As Connor explains,

Their knowledge of natural processes had been gained by hard work and years of apprenticeship; it was the source of their income, the basis of their ability to make a living and support themselves and their families. When well-off gentlemen who could afford to be magnanimous exposed the lore of the craftsman to public view, it was, from the standpoint of artisans’ interests, an act of robbery.[27]

As easily understandable as their motive is, such craft secrecy is typically condemned as “backward” by historians who, on the other hand, praise the well-off gentlemen who publicized such secrets. At the time, Baconian gentlemen like Robert Boyle tried to justify such appropriations of knowledge “by arguing that it would be repaid eventually with interest” by “‘improvement of the trades;” however, Boyle wrongly assumed that such improvements to the trades would necessarily result in better working conditions for tradespeople. So too, the “so-called labor-saving machinery” of the 19^th Century “did not serve to ease the labor of the laborers but to reduce the labor costs of the of their employers.”

in the context of a nascent capitalist economy, the benefits of increased productivity went not to the producers, but to a privileged few whose access to capital allowed them to gain control of the production process. The artisans who forfeited their knowledge were, for the most part, eventually forced into dependency as wage workers. […] no matter how socially progressive it may have been in the long run, the immediate effect [of so-called labor-saving machinery] was that displaced workers lost their livelihoods while factory owners enriched themselves.[28]

This is a familiar story, isn’t it? Still today the benefits of increased productivity generally do not go to the producers but to the privileged few “whose access to capital allowed them to gain control of the production process.” This is a process which not only further enriches the few with access to capital but keeps the wageworkers in the state of dependency by which the whole labor-capital relation operates. And to this day, the threat of increased automation in production (A.I., robotics, etc.) threatens the livelihoods of vast portions of the working class with potential displacement.

A master-servant relationship

The relation between capital and science has always been one of dominance by capital—“a master-servant relationship,” as Connor writes, “with capital as the dominant partner.”[29] Thus, in the first quarter of the 21^st Century, with science remaining within this master-servant relationship with capital, scientific knowledge production has continued to be shaped by the profit motive rather than by consideration of human needs.

But how long will our society’s vast range of potential be limited to the direction of the profit motive? Who ought to decide whether increased automation results in increased profits at the expense of displaced workers, rather than a decrease of the workweek or the retirement age? Who ought to decide whether society’s scientific and technical resources are prioritized for curbing the effects of climate disaster vs., say, colonizing Mars? Who ought to decide whether we build “hyperloops” instead of high-speed rails, as billionaire Elon Musk did (for the worse), or when and how we restructure public education, as billionaire Bill Gates did (for the worse), and as Musk is attempting to do now? How long will our imaginations be held hostage by the false promises of billionaires?

Notes

[1]. Marx, Capital: Vol. One (1990 [1867]). trans. by Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books), 482.

[2]. Connor, A People’s History of Science (New York: Nation Books, 2005), 18.

[3]. Ibid, 279-80.

[4]. Ibid, 293-5.

[5]. Ibid, 279.

[6]. Ibid.

[7]. Ibid, 279-80.

[8]. Ibid, 280.

[9]. Ibid, 294.

[10]. Ibid, 285; 433-4; 287-9.

[11]. Ibid, 271-2.

[12]. Ibid, 262.

[13]. Ibid, 272.

[14]. Ibid, 267.

[15]. Ibid, 270-71.

[16]. Ibid, 150-1.

[17]. Ibid, 327.

[18]. Ibid, 301.

[19]. Ibid, 301-2.

[20]. Ibid, 303.

[21]. Ibid, 302-3; 362.

[22]. Ibid, 362.

[23]. Ibid, 305, 307.

[24]. Ibid, 349-50

[25]. Marx, Capital, 482.

[26]. Ibid.

[27] Connor, 21.

[28]. Ibid, 22.

[29]. Ibid, 423.