Re: <nettime> The barter origins of money

[Keith Hart <HART_KEITH@compuserve.com>]

This is a response principally to Brian Holmes's contibution to this
thread of 25th May, but it spills over into his various posts on the
Zagreb interview with Michael Hardt.

Brian began by disagreeing with my assertion that Capital endorsed a
hierarchical version of production and consumption that Marx had
demolished in Grundrisse. He said that Marx was keen to dismantle the
hierarchy imposed by capitalism and was fully aware of the restrictions it
imposed on human creativity. He went on to suggest two possible approaches
to an oppressive system -- exit (dropping out) and voice (political
opposition). The latter option always carries with it the danger of
reproducing what is opposed. He ended by suggesting that contemporary
conditions deny us the luxury of a choice between these approaches. This
was related to the thread principally with reference to the argument that
a vast invisible infrastructure supports transactions involving markets
and money; and that this can and does support a variety of other human
exchanges. In one of the Zagreb posts, he poses the question in a way that
might inform the invocation of 'multitude' as a concept sustaining
transnational politics:

>Is it possible to name all those non-contractual, non-market principles
on which a multiplicity of human exchanges in reality depend? Is it
possible to acquire a much clearer understanding of what kind of
solidarities the transnational networks are based on, how and why they
function, and how they interact with existing representational
institutions?<

I fully the support the impulse behind these interventions, which I read
as a desire for greater clarity and realism in building the associations
capable of deflecting transnational capitalism for its curreent path. It's
just that there are several arguments going on here and it might pay to
keep them separate. No-one disputes that Marx was animated by the desire
to move us beyond the iunhuman restrictions imposed on society by
capitalism. Equally, there were times when he was able to give vent to a
more wideranging human philosophy (as in the notebooks of Grundrisse) and
others when he chose to pitch his tent closer to the ruling orthodoxy of
political economy (as in Capital). Marx's own intentions are secondary to
the policies pursued by the movement carrying his name and these played
straight into what became a twentieth century orthodoxy to privilege work
in public places over what people do at home. This had an obvious
relationship to gender politics. In the post preceding Brian's
contribution, I suggested that the subordination of consumption (use
value) to production (exchange value) in Capital chapter 1 made it
anachronistic to invoke Marx as the author of a cultural theory of use
value, as Sahlins did.

The point of this scholasticism is to oppose the notion that the society
we live in and have lived in for two centuries is best understood in terms
of a totalizing social logic known as 'capitalism'. Indeed I would argue
that Marx's most original contribution to understanding modern history was
his depiction of capitalism as feudalism in drag. He did this by making
surplus value his central concept, thereby drawing an explicit analogy
between the extraction typical of wage capitalism and feudal serfdom.
Remember that at this time the capitalists usually enlisted the workers on
their side against the militiary landlord class. Only later did it become
apparent that the capitalists now joined with the latter to keep down the
workers (in the political revolutions inaugurating state capitalism). So
capitalism is not so distinct from the social formations it pretended to
displace and this leaves plenty of room on all sides of the political
spectrum for the institutions of agrarian civilization to flourish
(patriarchy, landed property, world religion etc). That is why the state,
presumed in the late 19th century to be out on its feet, was revived with
such deadly effect in the 20th century. And this is only to speak of those
parts of the planet in which capitalism is most developed. What about the
more than 2 bn human beings who still work in the fields with their hands?
Or the vast areas of the world where the machine revolution has hardly
penetrated at all? It would not be surprising if Marx, around 1860,
sometimes wrote as if capitalism were a transient blot on the human
landscape and at others as if it was already the dominant force in
society.

Brian evoked the non-contractual, non-market principles on which human
exchange depends. This is to rehearse the project of Karl Polanyi who
hoped to oppose the market with a form of state planning based on timeless
principles of householding, reciprocity and redistribution. The affinities
with Stalinism are obvious and Polanyi never recovered from being in the
USA during the Cold War. Marcel Mauss, on the other hand, considered the
market to be itself an expression of timeless qualities of human exchange
and, following his Uncle Emile, wanted to expose to view the
non-contractual institutions that made market contracts possible, as a way
of getting citizens to think more constructively about the conditions of
cooperation in societies that already depend on markets and money. That is
broadly speaking my agenda too.

The main problem with the empire/multitude pair developed by Hardt and
Negri is that it offers a totalizing simplification of the world we live
in. Brian is right to demand greater specificity concerning the forms of
transnational association that might be capable of resisting capitalism
effectively and beyond that of building better societies for us all. I
would argue that the long boom of the 80s and 90s supported a teleological
vision of 'globalization' in which the left participated as much as the
right (who orchestrated it). But now that we are living in the aftermath
of the bust and its apocalyptic political symbol, when the Bush regime
seems to have reverted to 'state capitalism in one country' and all kinds
of ugly politics are surfacing, it may not help the left to persist with
intellectual traditions based on an assumption that 'capitalism' is all we
need to know about our world. Vague notions of a self-mobilising
'multitude' are even less likely to help. If capitalism is the culmination
of the age of money and unequal property, its roots are 5,000 years ago
and it will take more a myopic presentism to dislodge them. To my mind,
the last 150 years have witnessed a regression from the liberal democracy
promised by the 17th and 18th century revolutions and that retrograde
movement is picking up speed as I write. Yes, we need to be more precise
about the means we hope to live by, but we also need to be able to
question the historical vision that has us largely emancipated from five
millennia of the old regime.


Keith




#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net