‘ISM’ VERSIS THE THING ITSELF –
And The Re-invention of Faecesism
Marx
wrote and spoke of ‘capital’ and of ‘capitalist’ but I do not believe that he
used the term ‘capitalism’. I can’t say – definitively – why not, but I can see
a good reason for the omission. ‘Capitalism’ suggests a specific ideology, a
structure of ideas, a form of governance. Marx’s omission points in another
direction: capital is not an idea but a process, and a progress, of a man-made
but mindless manifestation that permeates a social body and in fact flourishes
best politically by means of not being
named, as such. We can speak, for example, of ‘evolution’ but not
‘evolutionism’. The latter suggests that evolution is an idea espoused by
certain interested parties (certainly considered so by creationists), not an
inexorable and universal process beyond ideas as such. We could extend this:
‘biology’ is not ‘biologyism’; ‘physics’ is not ‘physicsism’. The impossibility
of these non-usages tells us that these are ideas, even perhaps political
ideas, rather than the sciences of their subject-matters.
‘Capitalism’ as a form of governance
is a joke. If all countries are absorbed into the same economic agglomeration,
why is this not reflected in international unity and peace? The United Nations
was created with something like this in mind. Whither the UN today? But if
capital is competitively anarchical what else might we expect except the
feeding of economic anarchy into political and military anarchy?
There have been many apologists for
what they call ‘capitalism’ (as an ideal) who in effect tell us that capital is
not reducible to a grubby and wasteful means of manipulated enrichment through
exploitation of labour power. Their use
of ‘capitalism’ (however misplaced it may be in our cynical age) is defensive
by way of persuading people that ‘capitalism’ is a system of ideas for the promotion of general human benefit and
freedom. It happens, however, that probably nearly all perceptive antagonists of capital speak of
‘capitalism’ also. Implying that ‘capital’ is essentially a political system
that can either be modified (social democrats) or brought down by single
political acts (voluntarist revolutionaries). But this is wholly inadequate as
a way of forging a strategy and plan of action to abolish real capital, i.e. actual expropriation from its owners – worldwide.
Capital is the creation of surplus
value out of the exploitative relation with wage-labour. To this end the means
of production must be monopolised by capital: meaningful production (on any
scale outside the domestic) cannot exist otherwise. Capital cannot brook
rivals. Otherwise it might be found wanting for its production is not carried
out for use but for profit.
To call any country – the USA for
example – a country of ‘capitalism’ says little that distinguishes that country
from any other. In the light of the above description, all countries in the world are of ‘capitalism’, so the term is
meaningless in the real politico-economic world. China presents us with our
pre-eminent present model of a capital overseen – though by no means wholly
controlled – by the state. North Korea and Cuba are built upon the same
wage-labour exploitation that exists everywhere else, except that in these
cases the surplus value is vested in the state, rather than in private individuals
and shareholders. They are as much under top-down management as any country of
private corporations combined with governmental coercion or the threat of it,
plus corporate media ideology. All systems are of course run by committees, if
committee members are selected by differing means. But behind them all is a
cabal of billionaires here and a politburo (or politburos) there. Making
distinctions between the ‘capitalism’ of one country and the ‘non-capitalism’
of another is both meaningless and illiterate in terms of political economy.
Though not to those capitalists seeking to penetrate and expropriate the
capitals of so-called ‘non-capitalist’ states and economies, or to those
seeking to retain their state powers against the probing private buccaneers. In
other words, by talking about the ‘capitalism’ of one country as opposed to the
‘non-capitalism’ of another we are playing the same game as the gamesters
instead of fighting for world socialism
On the other hand ‘socialism’ is not
only valid but the only means we have of naming
something that is a body of ideas,
and – in the present world –nothing else, though of course it is also a term to
connote the entirely necessary and vital activism of socialists.
My belief is that Marx would have
wanted us to drop the ‘ism’ from capital for us to grasp what it really is, for
otherwise its continued grip (however much the world of capital is in a
constant state of crisis plus war and near-war) is not loosened and removed by
action to effectively destroy it. And in the process of transformation we will
also gradually drop the ‘ism’ from ‘socialism’ as it emerges as simply
‘social’, the matrix for a wholly and democratically co-operative society. One
day ‘social’ and ‘sociality’ will have overcome ‘socialism’ as a mere idea
among many ‘isms’, as the social assumes its own, objectively popular totality.
Interestingly, ‘fascism’ has become a
widespread term of abuse which even bona
fide fascists tend to avoid even as they identify with their idea of it. It
was, of course, openly and proudly flourished in the 1920s and 1930s
(Mussolini, British Union of Fascists, etc.) but came to grief as we know with
death camps and W0rld War II and its outcome. Today in the UK we have instead
English Defence League and Democratic Football Lads’ Alliance – and many more.
All euphemisms. Earlier Hitler’s Nazi Party was actually called not ‘fascism’
but the National Socialist German Workers’ Party – NSDAP – although, cynically
enough, it was neither a socialist nor a workers’ party; nor, indeed, was it
‘national’ or ‘German’, since its ultimate goal was to exercise power well
beyond the boundaries of one nation-state and to control the destinies of
millions of non-Germans. This euphemising is now widespread in fascist and
fascist-leaning political parties across Europe and beyond. ‘Fascism’ indeed is
an almost incoherent term, at least to us today, derived not from ‘faeces’ – if
only - but from ‘fasces’: a bundle of rods binding an axe blade and used in
ancient Rome to lead processions of magistrates, as symbols of their power. Of
obvious symbolic power to Mussolini but not, really, to anybody else – witness
for example the rapid decline of Mosley’s BUF.
But no euphemism could compete in
longevity with the ‘Conservative Party’: the party of fracking, rampant
property speculation, breakdown of all public services, hedge-funders and so
on. Under the Conservative Party anything that is deemed necessary (to many of
us) to be ‘conserved’ is fair game. The only thing that Tories (old Irish term
for ‘robbers’) ‘conserve’ is a misplaced nostalgia, a nostalgia more deeply
entrenched with the disappearance of what might meaningfully be conserved. John Stuart Mill in the 19th
century gave it a more fitting title: the Stupid Party. Some nostalgic
Conservatives take pride even in that, in the name of British ‘muddling
through’. Boris Johnson is a champion muddler. But in reality no ‘muddling
through’ is involved in perpetuating the supremacy of capital. Overall, capital
itself ‘muddles through’ but not its deadly serious and calculating operators,
for whom continuous exponential gain (or ‘growth’) is the only alternative to
its eventual extirpation. Liberalism and (elsewhere) official Communism are
left to square this in the political field with the majority of the governed –
against the latters’ real interests. And not doing a terrific job of it these
days.
