RUPTURING THE DIALECTIC The Struggle against Work, Money, and Financialization Harry Cleaver RUPTURING THE DIALECTIC The Struggle against Work, Money, and Financialization Rupturing the Dialectic: The Struggle against Work, Money, and Financialization © 2017 Harry Cleaver This edition © 2017 AK Press (Chico, Oakland, Edinburgh, Baltimore) ISBN: 978-1-84935-270-3 E-ISBN: 978-1-84935-271-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016954842 AK Press AK Press 370 Ryan Ave. #100 33 Tower St. Chico, CA 95973 Edinburgh EH6 7BN USA Scotland www.akpress.org www.akuk.com [email protected] [email protected] The above addresses would be delighted to provide you with the latest AK Press distribution catalog, which features books, pamphlets, zines, and stylish apparel published and/or distributed by AK Press. Alterna- tively, visit our websites for the complete catalog, latest news, and secure ordering. Cover design by Kate Khatib / Owl Grammar Press. Exit icon by Rediffusion from the Noun Project. Printed in the USA on acid-free, recycled paper. TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface 1 Introduction 15 PART I: On the Usefulness of Marx’s Labor Theory of Value 29 Why and How Economists Got Rid of the Labor Theory of Value 31 Why and How Some Marxists Abandoned the Labor Theory of Value 39 The Substance of Value: Abstract Labor or Work as Social Control 71 Can Value be Measured? 87 Exchange and Money as the Form of Value 107 PART II: Decoding Finance, Financial Crisis, and Financialization 143 Decoding Finance and Financial Crisis 145 Decoding Financialization 181 PART III: Potential Strategies and Tactics for Rupturing the Dialectics of Money 227 Reforms and Revolution 235 Our Use of Money 243 Restricting the Need for Money 255 Conclusion 265 Bibliography 291 Index 309 PREFACE My objective with this book is to share some thoughts. I wrote it, not to convince and convert those whose ideas differ, but to contri- bute to an ongoing conversation about the world we live in, what we don’t like about it and how we would like to change it. That said, the thoughts I share here are by no means comprehensive; they do not deal with everything we don’t like or with all possible means of change. Nor do they specify many details about the nature of the new worlds we are striving to create as we experiment with ways to transcend the present situation. Their focus, rather, is fairly narrow. They are preoccupied with what I consider fundamental elements of the existing system that confines and limits us, elements that must be eliminated if we are to achieve more comprehensive change that will craft worlds closer to our hearts’ desires. Frequently in this book I use the first-person plural pronouns “we” and “our”—despite recognizing them as problematic. Some- times they refer to all living beings, as in “our very existence is threatened by the way capitalist industry poisons land, air, and wa- ter”; sometimes they refer to all of us who struggle against the way capital ism organizes society, as in “we struggle against the subordi- nation of our lives to capitalist imposed work.” My use of these terms, however, should not be read as a reductionism that ignores the complex heterogeneity of either living beings or of those of us who struggle. As I hope will be clear in what follows, I am acutely aware of those complexities and make no pretense of speaking for specific groups of which I am clearly not a member. Yet I use these terms because I want to avoid the academic practice of analyzing conflict from outside and above, as if an objective observer, by being clear that what I have to say here is one expression of my political stance among those opposed to capitalism and striving to create al- ternatives. I also use these pronouns, where it seems reasonable to do so, to emphasize how capitalist ways of organizing the world im- pose common problems on us and how we have often found in the past, and can hopefully find in the future, complementary ways to struggle. I juxtapose complementarity in struggle to more tradition- al evocations of unity. For me, complementarity implies the critical embrace of differences (not just acceptance or tolerance), both in 2 Rupturing the Dialectic situation and in goals. It implies the eventual replacement of capi- talism, not with a singular new world (socialist or communist) but with new worlds in which we are free of all kinds of domination and can elaborate many different ways of being and living together, while minimizing antagonism and conflict. As I see it, we live in a capitalist world—that is to say, a world in which business, or the government operating as a business, con- trols the vast majority of resources and tools required to produce what we need to live and, through that control, has enough power to force most of us to work for it.1 They force some of us directly, by enslaving us in sweatshops, in brothels, in prisons, or on fishing boats. They force most of us, however, indirectly. By controlling the means of production, capitalists also control the products we produce for them—including most of what we need—and the only way we are allowed legal access to them is through purchase—with money that, for the most part, we can obtain only by working for them. To maintain this indirect coercion, business and government maintain extensive police, surveillance, judiciary, military, and paramilitary apparatuses to violently prevent us from taking what we need directly and to make sure that we keep working.2 Working for them involves doing what they tell us to do, using the resources and tools they give us, producing whatever they tell 1 For Marx, being forced to work for capitalists makes us members of the work- ing class “in-itself.” If we resist, however, particularly in collaboration with each oth- er, he considered that we become participants in the struggles of the working class “for-itself.” This was a distinction he made in his analysis of the French peasantry after the 1848 revolution. While they were all clearly being exploited, he argued, and therefore formed a class “in-itself” by having common characteristics, their failure to act in concert to defend their common interests meant that they could not be considered a class “for-itself.” See Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 11 (New York: International Publishers, 1978), 99–197. 2 In the wake of the central city uprisings of the mid-1960s in the United States, sociologists were forced to recognize that the rebellions were not just responses to systemic racism and injustice, but constituted “commodity riots” in which the ef- fective slogan in the streets was “Always loot before you burn!” That recognition was one reason for the rapid expansion of food stamps and welfare programs in the wake of the police and military suppression of the risings. Preface 3 us to produce, in the ways they specify. This top-down control is de- humanizing; it strips us of a vital aspect of our humanity by subordi- nating our will to theirs. This subordination alienates us from work that might—in other circumstances and depending on its nature— provide satisfying modes of self-realization, both individual and col- lective. It also alienates us from each other, as our employers force us to compete, and from the things and services that we produce—that are owned by those we work for, who use them to control us. Our employers also force us to work far more than is necessary to produce what we need. For individual businesses, our extra labor generates profits that are then invested to impose more work. Col- lectively we are forced to produce what capitalists need to continue to subordinate us: not only the tools and raw materials necessary to keep us working and to put more of us to work, but also everything required by their various other methods of control, from police and military equipment to prisons, schools, and mass media designed to divert and misinform. Imposing more work than we require to meet our needs constitutes exploitation. Unless we’re too young, too sick, or too old—and sometimes even when we are—either we work at waged or salaried jobs, more or less alienating and exploitative, or we work, unwaged and unsala- ried, in schools and at home producing and reproducing our, or our loved ones’, ability and willingness to look for jobs or return to them. When we are young, incarceration in schools reduces whole years of our lives to being disciplined and trained for some uncertain, future job. Even when we get jobs, far too many of those jobs are poorly paid and precarious—they don’t last long—and very soon we find ourselves, once more, anxious about whether we can find another one—because we need the income that comes with it. Will it pay enough? How long will it last? How bad will it be? A lucky few find steady, satisfying jobs doing something that we would do even if we weren’t paid; most do not. Satisfying jobs or bad jobs, we have to work long hours, most days of the week, most weeks of the year, and most years of our lives. To keep costs down and maximize their prof- its, our employers use machines to measure and regulate the speed and rhythm of our work, while often refusing to spend money on safety measures—from protective masks for those digging into the earth and building things above it, to ergonomic office furniture for those harnessed to desks and computers.