Catastrophe, Crisis, Time
Revisiting the archives
Lately I’ve been doing a read-through of Don DeLillo’s ‘late’ works—books like Point Omega and Zero K, the latter of which I finished yesterday in the midst of a bad hangover. What strikes me about these books, besides their rather quiet, meditative nature (and their surprisingly short lengths and clipped style), is the particular approach that DeLillo takes to many of his favorite themes—namely, history and temporality.
Maybe there will be a longer post this topic when I finish the readings at some point at an undetermined future date, but a few brief comments: in his ‘classic’ period, the era of books like Libra and Mao II, DeLillo emphasizes the position of the individual within the vortices of history as a grand force, unfolding across time. Lee Harvey Oswald, trapped in the double-bind of byzantine intelligence plots and the vicissitudes of fate itself, wants to meld himself into the turbulence of historical progressesion, and the ubiquitous crowds of Mao II signal processes of depersonalization and massification, the abstraction of the subject at the level of historical development itself. Oswald’s impulse writ large.
In the latter books, history as a force is eclipsed by posthistorie, and time itself seems to have come to a halt. It’s by no accident that both Point Omega and Zero K have desert settings: the desert is infused with the “stillness of the plateau”, and the great geological catastrophes, the closest we can come to directly experience the sheer depths of deep time, are frozen in place, solid icons of an unreachable past and an impossible future. At the same time, dreams of an accelerative future, and the myth of the Singularity itself, rumble on the peripheries of the texts: Point Omega’s title alludes to the concept of Teilhard de Chardin, and in Zero K, wealthy individuals near death are cryogenically frozen, swept up in a technologically-fueled metempsychosis, believing they will one day be reborn in a new world where they will speak and perceive the world in a language of pure mathematics.
DeLillo mutes these impulses, pushes them down beneath the quietude and slow-motion decay of a civilization turned immobile. Against the negentropic fever dreams of technological utopians, he asserts the primacy of entropy, not only as a cosmological constant, but as an expression of the human will towards its own extinction. In Point Omega, this imagery is stark: the ultimate human drive is to return to a state of non-organic existence, to become little more than rocks.
The relationship between these two time signatures, accelerative, technologically-enhanced time and unmoored, motorless time, led me to return to some very old blog posts I wrote—November of 2019! Almost five years ago, a horrifying thought—that dealt with these same temporal modes through a Marxist lenses. They meander around, hanging out in debates over the historicization of so-called ‘postmodernity’ (a term I really dislike) and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (which is a pretty big waste of time), but I like these posts a lot, and they were rough notes for a big project that never quite came to fruition. So I figured, why not re-post them here, for anyone who might be interested.
Old Post I: Spatialization of Time/Temporalization of Space
Last night I came across this interview with Moishe Postone via Ross Wolfe’s Charnel House blog. I’m a bit surprised that I hadn’t seen it before—it’s definitely an example of Postone at his best, and (like many of his other interviews and shorter articles) brings into relief the positive political dimensions that are often missed if one sticks to Time, Labor, and Social Domination alone.
One of the more difficult conceptualizations at the heart of Time, Labor, and Social Domination is that Postone posits not simply one temporality unique to the capitalist mode of production, but two that unfold in a dialectical relationship. On the one side, there is ‘abstract time’, which operates like the new sense of time ushered in by Kant: it is “uniform, continuous, homogenous, ’empty’ time'” that serves as an “independent variable” with respect to events. On the other side, ‘concrete time’, the time of events, processes, cycles and movements—historical time as “dependent variable”.
In this interview, Postone’s interlocutors—Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda—pose the question of how this particular dialectic can be applied in a way that allows us to understand the dynamics of capital in the present moment:
You indicated that with the development of technology an hour of work can become intensified, denser, condensed and such that there is specific relation between to historically determined forms of time, so there seems to be a quantitative intensification that may ultimately even lead to a qualitative leap into the converse direction, such that at one point this is precisely where there might even arise a possibility for overcoming and liberating the worker from work, when technology reaches a point where the worker is no longer needed? Would you agree with this trivializing reconstruction? If so or even if not so, how does your analysis of time in and under capitalism relate to analyses of contemporary capitalism that seek to demonstrate how capitalism subtracts one or maybe even more than one dimension of time, such that there is a peculiar absence not only of future (as the no-future attitude asserts), but rather of a proper present (and therefore even of a proper past)?
to which Postone offers this rich and stimulating response:
The time(s) of capital are of a complex dynamic, that entails at one and the same time ongoing and accelerating transformations, which are not only technological but of all spheres of life on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the reconstitution of the fundamental basis of capital itself. That process of reconstitution of the basis of capitalism within the framework of Marx’s critique is the reconstitution of labour, not only as the source of the value form of wealth but, relatedly, of labour as the necessary socially mediating activity which gives rise to an entire structure of abstract domination. I suggested that people tend to view only one dimension of this complex dialectic: either they notice that the more things change the more they remain the same, everything is just this constant featureless desert of the present, or they become very excited about everything solid melting into air, about how everything is acceleration. The actual trajectory of capital’s development within the framework of the theory, as I understand it – and this is particularly powerful – should not be understood with reference to the one nor the other but as both at the same time. This means that it is not a linear development. There are growing shearing pressures, as one would say in physics, that are internal to the system. Both the form of production and the sense of historically constituted possibilities have to be understood with reference to what I call the shearing pressures of capitalist developments. Does this make sense?
One of the things that is interesting to me here is the way that Postone’s description of these two sides intentionally nods to distinct theoretical currents, by extension revealing the way in which what is offered as a theoretical reading is in fact the incomplete crystallization of some objective tendency. The static, frozen eternity of the present—this is the situation measured with equal parts dread and delight by Baudrillard, where capital’s furious compulsions to deterritorialization gives way to the motionlessness of the hyperreal. The other side, meanwhile, is the purview of the various accelerationisms (and indeed, Hamza and Ruda raise the question of accelerationism directly): not the cool desert of simulation and simulacra, but the liquid-hot torrents of development driving History itself to undergo escalating compression.
In a way, these two vantage points can be broadened beyond these distinct theoretical currents to the conceptual epochs that capitalism has often been divided into. Baudrillard’s hyperreal is, of course, ultimately a diagnosis of postmodernism, and effectively pushes Jameson’s conclusions—postmodernism as a cultural timelessness triggered by the advent of a global and financialized ‘late capitalism’—to an apocalyptic extreme, where terms like ‘post-‘ and ‘late’ can hardly even apply. Accelerationism, meanwhile, is all about modernity: each of its own internal currents, regardless of the contention they may regard one another with, seeks out identification with the processes of modernization, or more properly, seeks to reclaim the combustive energy of modernity in the face of the postmodern condition.
By denying the superiority of one of these positions against the other, and by tying them to a multi-faceted temporal dynamic oscillating in the heart of capitalism itself, Postone thus denies the logic that slates ‘modernity’ and ‘postmodernity’ into a linear and successive framework. What was previously a rigid periodization is thus folded and twisted back on itself, producing the odd architecture of a contradiction-riven model of history, characterized by ruptures as much as by continuity.
The first two posts on the present blog were about Marx’s usage of geometrical growth—what today we would more commonly refer to as exponential growth—to define certain aspects of capitalist development. Foreshadowing a lot of technophilic theorists and utopians of today, Marx suggested that the development of the productive forces would tend towards geometric growth, and along with it, the deepening of the world market and the descent of the rate of profit. Presenting as such paints the picture of the capitalism as a globalizing, technologically-oriented accelerative force. But that’s only half the story: the rate of profit is as much an indicator of rising as it is impending stagnation and crisis. Everything is pregnant with its opposite, and ‘progress’ is denied any sort of smooth curve and intrinsic superiority: capitalist development comes into conflict without itself, and immense power translates effortlessly into extreme frailty.
This is the progressive side of capitalism being constantly checked by its regressive side, a situation which is reflected in Marx’s discussion of the limits of capitalism. Capitalism appears, as Deleuze and Guattari would masterfully describe in the most sublime—and overlooked—passages of Anti-Oedipus, to have no external limits, with each that it encounters becoming a threshold through which it simply expands itself. At the same time, however, it has an internal, absolute limit, which is capital itself. This seemingly esoteric formulation becomes clearer when one factors in value, as the magnitudes of socially-necessary labor time expended in commodity production, as the ultimate source of profit in the form of surplus value. What this means is that while capitalism might go stratospheric, “dispatch itself straight to the moon” or to Mars or wherever, it can never break with itself. The exploitation of human labor remains inscribed into the core of the system.
Postone again:
The fact that there is a limit to capital does not mean that capital collapses. Rather the limit is an asymptotic curve, you get closer and closer to an absolute limit but you never reach it.
One of the dynamics that has fascinated me over the past year (though I’ve unfortunately blogged about very little, relegating most conversation to twitter) is the double relationship between time and space that can be found in Marx’s analysis of capitalism: the spatialization of time and the temporalization of space. I’d like to suggest that this double character is precisely what gives rise to the two visions of temporality alluded to by Postone AND is intricately bound to capitalism’s external limitlessness and internal limit.
The ‘temporalization of space’ makes its appearance in the tenth chapter of the Grundrisse, where Marx takes up the relationship between the means of transport and communication and the sphere of circulation—that is, the market nexus of exchange relations. It is precisely here that we find the most clear of example of capitalism’s capacity for liquidating limits to itself:
The more production comes to rest on exchange value, hence on exchange, the more important do the physical conditions of exchange – the means of communication and transport – become for the costs of circulation. Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus the creation of the physical conditions of exchange – of the means of communication and transport – the annihilation of space by time – becomes an extraordinary necessity for it. Only in so far as the direct product can be realized in distant markets in mass quantities in proportion to reductions in the transport costs, and only in so far as at the same time the means of communication and transport themselves can yield spheres of realization for labour, driven by capital; only in so far as commercial traffic takes place in massive volume – in which more than necessary labour is replaced – only to that extent is the production of cheap means of communication and transport a condition for production based on capital, and promoted by it for that reason. All labour required in order to throw the finished product into circulation – it is in economic circulation only when it is present on the market – is from capital’s viewpoint a barrier to be overcome – as is all labour required as a condition for the production process (thus e.g. expenses for the security of exchange etc.).
The operative phrase here—”the annihilation of space by time”—is the root of theories, advanced by folks like David Harvey, around “space-time compression” (something that, while close to acceleration, is only a reduced conception of it). Space-time compression indexes a world getting smaller, as spatial distance between points beings increasingly irrelevant in the circuits of production of exchange. This is accompanied by a generalized speeding-up of history itself, as events multiply, refract, and evaporate before one even has a chance to get a handle on them…
In Capital Volume 2, Marx revisits these elements via his discussion of turnover time, which is the circuit of capital—the reciprocal unfolding of production and exchange in pursuit of profit—understood as a recurrent and periodic system. Under the whip of competition, the capitalist seeks to shorten its turnover, and to achieve this end calls upon a whole ensemble of means. To accelerate the production process, “cooperation, division of labour, application of machinery”; and to accelerate circulation, “improved shipbuilding”, the construction of great railways, etc. This implies, in turn, a greater amount of capital advanced by each capitalist: “The time of turnover is lessened in that case by an increase of the advanced capital. More means of production and more labour-power must be united under the command of the capitalist”. This raises the specter of the organic composition of capital, the ratio of constant and variable capital, and with it, the question of the rate of profit. As mechanization of production (i.e. rising constant capital) becomes a tool for the shortening of turnover time, it becomes clear that the “annihilation of space by time”—the temporalization of space—is plugged directly into the rate of profit’s tendency towards or away from geometrical growth.
As Marx writes in the fourth chapter of Volume 3:
It has already been shown in detail in Book II how the quantity of produced surplus-value is augmented by reductions in the period of turnover, or of one of its two sections, in the time of production and the time of circulation. But since the rate of profit only expresses the relation of the produced quantity of surplus-value to the total capital employed in its production, it is evident that any such reduction increases the rate of profit… The chief means of reducing the time of production is higher labour productivity, which is commonly called industrial progress. If this does not involve a simultaneous considerable increase in the outlay of total capital resulting from the installation of expensive machinery, etc., and thus a reduction of the rate of profit, which is calculated on the total capital, this rate must rise… The chief means of reducing the time of circulation is improved communications. The last fifty years have brought about a revolution in this field, comparable only with the industrial revolution of the latter half of the 18th century… The period of turnover of the total world commerce has been reduced… and the efficacy of the capital involved in it has been more than doubled or trebled. It goes without saying that this has not been without effect on the rate of profit.
What of the ‘spatialization of time’? This, too, is first alluded to in the Grundrisse, in the course of a discussion of surplus labor (labor undertaken that is beyond what is necessary for the worker to survive) and surplus value:
…labour as such is and remains the presupposition, and surplus labour exists only in relation with the necessary, hence only in so far as the latter exists. Capital must therefore constantly posit necessary labour in order to posit surplus labour; it has to multiply it (namely the simultaneous working days) in order to multiply the surplus; but at the same time it must suspend them as necessary, in order to posit them as surplus labour. As regards the single working day, the process is of course simple: (1) to lengthen it up to the limits of natural possibility; (2) to shorten the necessary part of it more and more (i.e. to increase the productive forces without limit). But the working day, regarded spatially – time itself regarded as space – is many working days alongside one another. The more working days capital can enter into exchange with at once, during which it exchanges objectified for living labour, the greater its realization at once. It can leap over the natural limit formed by one individual’s living, working day, at a given stage in the development of the forces of production (and it does not in itself change anything that this stage is changing) only by positing another working day alongside the first at the same time – by the spatial addition of more simultaneous working days.
What this concerns, in the first instance, is the organization of the working day under the law of value, which then manifests in two internal forms: the prolonging of the working day (something that Marx would later discuss under the rubric of ‘absolute surplus value’), or the intensification of labor via mechanization (later to be understood via ‘relative surplus value’). Working from these two positions, one could even draw out models for periodizing capitalist development; it was after the great victories to shorten the working day, for example, that intensifying labor through mechanical means took priority over indefinite extension of labor time. But just as the hard boundary between modernity and postmodernity collapses under the double character of capitalist temporality, so too does the distinction between absolute and relative surplus value, which constantly glide into one another in a dialectical fashion.
In order for the law of value to structuralize social relations, a profound alteration in the experienced nature of time takes place. Time rich in qualities is emptied out, opened up, and made into something quantifiable. Value is both producer and product of a colossal leveling process that flattens the bourgeoisie and proletariat alike, making them little more than interchangeable cogs in a fearsome machinery. “Time is everything, man is nothing”, wrote Marx in The Poverty of Philosophy. “[H]e is, at the most, time’s carcase. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything; hour for hour, day for day… [this] is purely and simply a fact of modern industry”.
Lukacs, no doubt having Marx’s suggestion to understand the organization of the working day through a spatial lenses, drives home the implications of this leveling:
Thus time sheds its qualitative, variable, free flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable ‘things’ (the reified, mechanically objectified ‘performance’ of the worker, wholly seperated from his total human personality): in short, it becomes space.
Because we’re dealing here with value and surplus-value themselves, we’re in the zone of capitalism’s internal limit. This is exactly why the spatialization of time and the temporalization point in these two directions, and why we can understand Postone’s two registers of time in relationship to these two tendencies. In the case of the temporalization of space, we find capitalism as its most revolutionary and accelerative, transforming the productive forces, their effects rippling across an ever-more connected globe: there is here an absolute sense of futurity, marked by the dissolution of past forms. Creative destruction, in the clearest sense of the phrase. But in the case of the spatialization of time, we find the utterly unchanging, frozen world devoid of qualities. Because it poses the barrier that capitalism can never transgress, it denies the possibility of a future, which it rebounds into the permanence of the present. The higher the former climbs, the more the latter asserts itself: the end of capitalism becoming a forever-receding spot on the horizon.
It’s not enough, however, to make these tendencies into an oppositional polarity. They each penetrate one another on each level, even call one another into being: what is it but the increasingly spatial character of the working day that helps drive the temporalization of space, that is, the very destruction of space itself? And likewise, what does this destruction do but install the law of value everywhere, reconstitute the same flattened labor relations in every place, with all of the same mechanical, spatialized orders of lived time?
Old Post II: Decadence & (Po)Mo
On the tl, Moct chimes in on my post about capitalist space-times:
https://twitter.com/Moctezuma_III/status/1193667057864368128
It’s an interesting point that says something about the distinct social and cultural patterning that typifies capitalist development. I would absolutely agree with Moct here in that the frozen desert of temporal spatialization is the defining characteristic of our current epoch. We can see clearly that the postmodern, which persists despite the cliched nature of the term, corresponds quite directly with the movement of capitalism in a retrograde, if not outright stagnant, form. ‘New Economy’ mania from the center (which has evolved into discourses around ‘creative capitalism’, ‘knowledge economies’, ‘smart development’, etc over time) and the celebration of post-Fordist flexible production from certain sectors of the left have lent to capitalism a certain ideological legitimacy that papers over this decline—though it can scarcely obscure the sort of (non-)functional cynicism that has replaced ardent belief in the progressivist dimensions of this system.
This raises an important question about we how hold both—temporalization of space, spatialization of time—as both being constant (via mapping them to inseparable capitalist process, per Marx) while also suggesting that one is capable of producting particular and distinct socio-cultural formations capable of being (loosely) periodized.
As an aside, uwunil pointed me to Susan Buck-Morss’ Dialectics of Seeing for some other reflections on modernism and postmodern—understood here in a primarily aesthetic register, though one plugged into wider economic relations—as being constants. It looks like an interesting book, and I’m looking forward to diving into it more thoroughly, but for the time being here’s the passage in question:
The Passagen-Werk [Benjamin’s Arcades Project] suggests that it makes no sense to divide the era of capitalism into formalist “modernism” and historically eclectic “postmodernism”, as these tendencies have been there from the start of industrial culture. The paradoxical dynamics of novelty and repetition simply repeat themselves anew.
Modernism and postmodernism are not chronological eras, but political positions in the century-long struggle between art and technology. If modernism expresses utopian longing by anticipating the reconciliation of social function and aesthetic form, postmodernism acknowledges their nonidentity and keeps fantasy alive. Each position thus represents a partial truth; each will recur “anew”, so long as the contradictions of commodity society are not overcome.
What I’d like to add to this is the hypothesis, tentative at this stage, that the ‘postmodern condition’ asserts itself when the ‘modern’ goes into recline. This seems difficult to parse, given that these map to fixed dynamics in capitalism—I’ve suggested, for instance, that the spatialization of time that underpins the postmodern experience is linked the blind quantification advanced the forces of value and surplus value in the core of the capitalist system, with the temporalization of space indicative of modernity being related to the rapid development of productive forces, evolution of communication and transport technologies, and the deepening of the world market’s penetration. The reconciliation here is that as the latter declines—and the indices of world trade volumes, productivity measures, the rate of profit, etc. have indeed declined—the more the cold, steely mechanisms of the law of value are laid bare.
The period that most closely approximates what we are currently describing as postmodernity are the years towards the end of the 1800s typified by many artists and intellectuals as being under the sway of decadence. While the 1890s was itself the main locus of this line, it is important that this ultimately emerges in the context of the what has been described the “Long Depression”, which kicked off around 1873 and ended—depending on who you’re talking to—in 1879 or 1896. The National Bureau of Economic Research, for instance, reads the depression as having run from October 1873 to March 1879, an analysis closely matched by Fred Moseley in his entry in David Glasner and Thomas Cooley’s encyclopedic Business Cycles and Depression. In the UK, however, the closely-related agricultural depression persisted well into the 1890s, and across Europe as rates of growth post-1879 remained well below their pre-1873 levels. In both Russia and the United States, whatever recovery might have taken place at the end of the 1870s paved the way for additional recessions, with agricultural and manufacturing sectors taking the hardest hits. France faced deep economic hardships in the 1880s and 1890s, compounded by the country’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian war and the subsequent reparation payments it was forced to pay.
However one reads it—as a singular, lengthy depression, or repeating clusters of depression and recessions—it is undeniable that these decades were characterized by extreme economic turbulence not isolated to one or two countries, and instead swept the whole of the capitalist world. The fallout was predictable: mass transitions from laissez-faire market orders to protectionist regimes, ballooning monopolies and cartels, and the re-institution of colonialism (in other words, the putting into place of the dominoes that would fall with the outbreak of the First World War).
That such a series of events would be crystallized into a veritable cultural obsession with irreversible decline and decay is unsurprising, and as Anson Rabinbach shows in his magisterial work The Human Motor, much of this contextualization centered around the intrusion of the discovery of entropy into previously-held beliefs in the eternal efficacy of progress. It was in the 1860s when von Helmholtz formalized the discovery into a series of apocalyptic predictions, writing that all things tended towards the eventual heat death of the universe. Against the prophets of progress saw human development as a great train rocketing into the future, this was a vision of a gradual breakdown into stillness: “[t]he universe from that time forward would be condemned to an eternal state of rest”.
Rabinbach points out that while von Helmholtz would quickly “retreat from the more apocalyptic conclusions of entropy”, such ideas had already taken hold. Herbert Spencer, for instance, would suggest that all civilizations would ultimately tend to decay (though his brand of historical dissolution inverted entropy’s tendency towards homogenization by posing a law of increasing heterogeneity). Nietzsche, meanwhile, would pose the question “[w]here does our modern world belong—to exhaustion or ascent?” So many responded, loudly and with detached despair, that it belonged to exhaustion. As a proliferation of scientific studies into exhaustion and fatigue took place (leading, interestingly, to all sorts of proto-Taylorist techniques for better managing labor in a manner perfectly equitable the large-scale industrial monopolies that were beginning to hold sway), European culture found itself under the shadow of the fin-de-siecle. Rabinbach quotes Saul Friedlander as saying that this period found a replacement for the myth of progress in a “wholly new vision: that of the total end of man”. Similarly, David Weir, in Decadence and the Making of Modernism, seizes upon the notion of ‘decline at the peak’ to capture this particular sort of vertigo and quotes Vyacheslav Ivanov’s description of “the feeling, at once oppressive and exalting, of being the last in a series”. Such language cannot help but invoke the moment in H.G. Wells’ 1895 book The Time Machine, when the nameless protagonist arrives at a point, distant in the future, where human existence has vanished and the universe itself is slowing down to its final end state:
While I was musing upon these things, my attention was attracted by a pretty little structure, like a well under a cupola. I thought in a transitory way of the oddness of wells still existing, and then resumed the thread of my speculations. There were no large buildings towards the top of the hill, and as my walking powers were evidently miraculous, I was presently left alone for the first time. With a strange sense of freedom and adventure I pushed on up to the crest.
There I found a seat of some yellow metal that I did not recognize, corroded in places with a kind of pinkish rust and half smothered in soft moss, the arm-rests cast and filed into the resemblance of griffins’ heads. I sat down on it, and I surveyed the broad view of our old world under the sunset of that long day. It was as sweet and fair a view as I have ever seen. The sun had already gone below the horizon and the west was flaming gold, touched with some horizontal bars of purple and crimson. Below was the valley of the Thames, in which the river lay like a band of burnished steel. I have already spoken of the great palaces dotted about among the variegated greenery, some in ruins and some still occupied. Here and there rose a white or silvery figure in the waste garden of the earth, here and there came the sharp vertical line of some cupola or obelisk. There were no hedges, no signs of proprietary rights, no evidences of agriculture; the whole earth had become a garden…
It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane. The ruddy sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind. For the first time I began to realize an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence enough.
Other identified the origins of decadence in precisely the ferocious pulsations of modernization that it was so contrary to. Max Nordau’s simply-titled Degeneration is the principle work of this tendency, shot through with deep paranoia of the effects of urbanization, the development of rapid transport, communication systems, electrification, and feverish cultural production—in other words, many things that we might consider to be not only characteristic of the temporalization of space, but were in fact productive of this very dynamism. Fatigue, for Nordau, is the natural result of modernist speed, and fatigue converts “healthy men” into ‘hysterics’. “All… conditions of life have, in this period, experienced a revolution unexampled in the history of the world”, and for this reason “the whole of civilized humanity has been exposed for half a century” to the conditions optimal for breeding hysteria. Nordau’s vision of society is a hellish landscape dominated by irrationalism, mysticism, and bizarre physical maladies; page after page document the rise of ‘degenerates’, populations undergoing premature loss of hair, teeth, and eyesight, so on and so forth. “Railway spine” and “railway brain” are of particular interest to him, these being the degraded physiological and mental states allegedly induced by the shocks of traveling of great speeds.
Nordau, at his fever-pitch:
Hysteria and degeneration have always existed; but they formerly showed themselves sporadically, and how no importance in the life of the community. It was only the vast fatigue which was experienced by the generation on which the multitude of discoveries and innovations burst abruptly, imposing on upon it organic exigencies greatly surpassing its strengths, which created favourable conditions under which these maladies could gain ground enormously, and become a danger to civilization…
We stand now in the midst of a severe mental epidemic; of a sort of black death of degeneration and hysteria, and it is natural that we should ask anxiously on all sides ‘What is to come next?’
Nordau was, at the end of the day, a liberal, albeit a disaffected one who saw the promises of liberalism deferred by the world it had celebrated. He stands at a different end of the pole of his great contemporary Nietzsche, who he regarded as a madman characteristic of this doom-laden time. Nietzsche offered his own vision of a world in decline, which nonetheless swam in the same waters of the ‘entropic paradigm’ as Nordau and the others:
Disintegration characterizes this time, and thus uncertainty: nothing stands firmly on its feet or on a hard faith in itself; one lives for tomorrow as the day after tomorrow is dubious. Everything on our way is slippery and dangerous, and the ice that still supports us has become thin: all of us feel the warm, uncanny breath of the thawing wind; where we still walk, soon no one will be able to walk.
Yet, in contrast to so many others, Nietzsche marked a point in which the decline was not absolute. Civilization wasn’t fated to decadence, and an escape from the glide to complete breakdown and stasis was capable of being converted in an intensive regeneration. On form of this can be found in his prophecy of the impending ‘transvaluation of values’ that was to occur on the far end of degeneration. From weakness (the primary symptom of decadence) to strength, from man to the superman: these were the pathways of the transformation. But it such a historical mutation isn’t only to be found here in Nietzsche’s writings: the ‘realization’ of the eternal recurrence poses its own cataclysmic challenge to the entropic paradigm, which suggested a unilateral and unwavering voyage into cosmic descent.
[Brief note: it’s interesting that in the midst of this period of decadence that we find a proliferation of new articulation of temporality. It was in The Gay Science, published in 1882, that contained the first references to it, while eight years later in 1890, Henri Poincaré unveiled his famed recurrence theorem. While not dealing with the nature of time itself, as Nietzsche’s model did, it concerned things happening on immense time-scales, and the surface-level resemblance (not to mention their historical coincidence) between the eternal recurrence and recurrence theorem was not lost on all; in 1896, the mathematician Ernst Zermelo, for example, wrote in his notebook the name of an essay that would never see the light of day: “The Eternal Recurrence According to Nietzsche and Poincaré: A Theorem of Dynamics”.
Likewise, this was also the era in which Henri Bergson was unveiling his own idiosyncratic theories of time and memory—theories that, perhaps importantly (though unfairly), were soon thereafter regarded as being indicative of the flight into mysticism that characterized this era. And following in his footsteps was the psychologist Pierre Janet, himself quickly displaced by the rise of the Freudians, who built a model of the unconscious mind that profoundly temporal in nature. Looking back on this moment in his Deleuze and the Unconscious, Christian Kerslake notes that “[i]f this tradition evokes any associations for the English speaking world today, it is with a peculiar lost Victorian and Edwardian world, a world in which journals of psychology and physiology were filled with cases and analyses of mediums, somnambulism, hypnosis and spiritualistic phenomenon”…]
Nietzsche’s untimely attack on decadence was profound in France, at the time smoldering in the malaise of its post-war defeat and the wider economic crisis of the Long Depression. It was in this place and time that the most pronounced articulation of the fin-de-siecle mentality were taking hold: Decadents like Joris-Karl Huysmans and Charles Baudelaire depicted a darkly luminous world, lush and damp, that had rejected wholesome the myth of progress, while the closely-related Symbolists eagerly embraced the slow end of things. To quote C.F. Forth,
Positing the absurdity of political action and the inevitable suffering of human existence, the Symbolists rejected external reality in favor of a new kind of idealism, which in its variety of forms included solipsism, occultism, mysticism, and a fascination with the morbid. Paramount to this movement was the artists’ resolve to flee reality through a variety of means, such as hallucinatory drugs, dreams, or other altered states of mind. Finally, the decadent Symbolists refused to participate in political and social life, arguing instead for the detached position of “l’art pour l’art.”
Forth argues that this movement met its own demise in 1892, with two events: the launch of the avant-garde journal La Banquet, and the release of the French translation of Nietzsche’s Der Fall Wagner—a fierce denunciation of the composer, who was a living legend for the Decadents and the Symbolists. Nietzsche was also promoted in the pages of La Banquet, having been founded by Daniel Halevy and others as a “reaction against symbolism” with the goal of “renew[ing] the pure and rich French tradition”. Nietzsche, read as a “philosopher of confidence, health and joy” who had “spent his staunch life struggling against nihilism and pessimism”.
Thus the political Nietzsche came to fruition, the one who provided ammunition to a motley and contentious range of actors, including right-wing nationalists, socialists and anarchists. It is in this particular context—or more properly, the context of these events in the wider socio-economic situation—that we can understand the writings of Georges Sorel (himself a close associate of Helevy of La Banquet), who filtered the Nietzschean influence through a heterodox Marxism. Rejecting the deterministic Marxists who spoke of the Zusammenbruch—the inevitable catastrophic breakdown of the capitalist mode of production—Sorel described the proletarian revolution in terms of a “moral catastrophe”, a “transvaluation of all values”. This catastrophe would tear civilization away from stagnant decadence, which was in turn denied its scientific status per its equation with laws of entropy. Decadence, for Sorel, becomes exactly what I’ve staked out here: the social and cultural effect of a capitalism that has become retrograde.
Perhaps the most important take-away here is this: Sorel’s vision of overcoming decadence does not follow along the path of empowering the capitalist classes, or investing the population with unbridled enthusiasm for the state’s conflict with an enemy, or from some pre-determined ebb and flow of naturalistic processes. It is instead the product of the class war itself, the repayment of “black ingratitude” to the ‘civilized’ bourgeoisie and the parliamentary socialists.
***
In The Postmodern Condition, Fredric Jameson describes decadence not in terms of a particular time, but an intangible feeling or shadow that exists as the underside of the modernist mind. “Why should proud modern—or modernist—people, at best merely apprehensive about their insufficient modernity, harbor this secret fantasy of languid, neurasthetic difference?” The answer is that it is both specific period and permanent shadow, because of the fundamental co-existence of the registers that decadence and its opposition index. And indeed, Jameson finds in decadence a ‘foreshadowing’ of the postmodernism, though clearly at this point this sort of language is insufficient to capture the real dynamic at play. Similarly, the very terms in which he addresses decadence fall short of the particularities of that moment:
“Decadence” is… in some way the very premonition of the postmodern itself, but under conditions that make it impossible to predict that aftermath with any sociological or cultural accuracy, thereby diverting the vague sense of a future into more fantastic forms, all borrowed from the misfits and eccentrics, the perverts and the Others, or aliens, of the present (modern) system. In history, finally, or rather in the historical unconscious, “decadence” comes before us as the ineradicable otherness of the past and of other modes of production — an otherness posited by capitalism as such, but which it now, as it were, tries on, as with old costumes, since these ancient decadents (who have no concept of decadence themselves) are the others of an other, the difference of a difference: they look at their own surroundings with our eyes, seeing nothing but what is morbidly exotic, but complicitous and finally infected by that, so that the roles slowly reverse and it is we moderns who become “decadent” against the backdrop of the more natural realities of the precapitalist landscape.
He goes on to add that the fin-de-siecle atmosphere of decadence was ultimately an apocalyptic fantasy, and that postmodernism lacks this dynamic. One might immediately protest such a charge—after all, hasn’t the apocalypse not inserted itself into every pore of the social machine? How different things are today! The spectacle of apocalypse has inserted itself in every pore of the social machine. Discussions of the current long-range economic crisis sometimes take up dressings of zusammenbruchstheorie, but these are socially marginal compared to the great source of doomed-out visions: climate change. But we must ask, as Jameson did, if “such anxieties and the narratives in which they are invested really ‘intend’ the future… or somehow convoluted and return to feed on our own moment of time. Shades of Baudrillard appear at specifically at this point, with his understanding of hyperreality—the ecstatic, science fiction version of the present—as being a Möbius loop that infinitely turns things back upon themselves. But there’s a much more down to earth conclusion as well: people may belief in the apocalypse, but not at the level where habit-changing practice induces real belief (and thus real practice).
At this point we discuss the distinction between decadence and postmodern not in terms of the thing itself that underscores each (which of course takes beyond the relative autonomy of the cultural sphere, to the gears churning beneath), but in the depth in which these experiences are registered. Decadence as a form, the content being the entropic paradigm that filled it—at this level, there is still a directionality. Entropy, as Jameson points out, acts as a grand narrative that provides an end, even if that end is a homogeneous steady-state or a landscape of rubble, like Philip K. Dick’s “transformation of the world into kipple, the layers of dust, the rotting of all that’s solid, a destruction of form itself that is worse than death”. Decadence in the historical sense thus wasn’t a total inversion of progress, but a re-articulation of its commitment to some form of telos.
The same, it seems, cannot really be said of postmodernism—which makes sense. The compounding of capitalism’s negative tendencies would be reflected, presumably, in the cultural reflection of these tendencies. And it is here, in this zone, that class struggle re-asserts itself.
Old Post III: Catastrophic Marxism in the Age of Decadence
A few weeks back I wrote a post on the uncanny similarities between postmodernism—as a kind of all-encompassing and generalized cultural condition that has persisted since (roughly) the early 1970s—and ‘decadence’, the elusive ensemble of expressions, traits and (sub)cultural norms that rolled across Europe in the so-called fin-de-siecle era. On the surface, what brings the two together is the sense, common to each, of being at the ‘end of things’, the “last in a series”—an apocalyptic affect and constellation of aesthetic commitments that doesn’t end in spectacular combustion, but a simple unceasing of movement and motion Then, this was understood through the thermodynamic principle of entropy, and while the actually ‘end of the world’ in a cosmological setting exists at the other side of vast time-scales, this cold tableau was registered as something imminent. Today, entropy doesn’t hold as much sway, and the time-order that it produces is blocked by the negation of any sort of motive historical time.
It would be proper to label postmodernism a phase of decadence as well—so long as it is understood to be a condition that is more virulent than its predecessor, the age of ‘classical decadence’.
The similarities don’t end at distinct cultural parallels. The fact is that both expressions form themselves across the spine of an increasingly fragile and stagnant capitalism. If we take that classic Marxist frame of reference, the rate of profit, as an indicator, we find that these elements smoothly lock together:
A crisis of history is always, inevitability, a crisis of politics, and particularly so for politics that takes the construction of the future for its task. Thus this situation—and the host of cultural expressions that it brought into play—radiated throughout the fractious currents of Marxism, then still only in its nascent stages of growth. When the French ‘aristocratic’ Decadents like the Goncourt brothers could look out at the slowly reclining European continent and write that they were living through a strange repetition of the “malady of the Roman Empire”, a veritable “anemia” that was “obviously an actual fact”, their words formed an odd symmetry with legions of socialists who, with the then-recently published final volumes of Marx’s Capital in hand, searched for the rationale of development’s turgid detour. These particular Marxists—the catastrophists—heralded the impending collapse of capitalism. Where they broke their decadent cousins was that they didn’t see in this situation the eclipsing of all historical possibility. Instead, it was the ruination of civilization that prompted the opening of the future itself: communism erected atop a world turning into rubble.
From catastrophe to renewal: the evolution of Marx’s crisis theory
Catastrophe isn’t a foreign concept to Marxist thought. It figures as a permanent motif in the writings of Benjamin and Adorno, who both presented it as the ur-condition for modernity, a transient indicator of the “shock” through which this new epoch has ruptured the “flow of time”. But the chronological nature of catastrophe offered by these Marxists was a bit different in that it spoke of catastrophe, one perceived as being new—even to capitalism—ongoing, and slowly building to a particular point, producing along the way an immense influx of pressure that served as the ground for political mobilization.
The traces of this tendency are to be found in Marx’s early writings. In the Communist Manifesto, for example, the immediacy of the proletariat revolution is sketched out against a capitalism that has a double feature. On the one hand, there is the dynamic capitalism extolled in the fevered recounting of what the bourgeois revolutions have birthed into this world, and on the other, the inevitable advance of capitalism on its bad side. A brief overview of capitalism’s tendency to cyclical crisis is briefly sketched:
Ever since the beginning of this (19th) century, the condition of industry has constantly fluctuated between periods of prosperity and periods of crisis; nearly every five to seven years, a fresh crisis has intervened, always with the greatest hardship for workers, and always accompanied by general revolutionary stirrings and the direct peril to the whole existing order of things.
Yet at the same time, the progressive side persists, and makes possible the basis for a world beyond capitalism; as Etienne Balibar said, quoting Leibniz, capitalist society is “heavy with futurity”. “It thus appears”, Marx wrote, “that the very qualities of big industry which, in our present-day society, produce misery and crises are those which, in a different form of society, will abolish this misery and these catastrophic depressions”. Here, the connection between the proletarian struggle and economic crisis is forged. The possibility of communism is latent, but its actualization emerges through the conditions brought on by the crisis.
As Alvin Gouldner has pointed out in his work The Two Marxisms, all of Marx’s earliest writings, from his doctoral dissertation (1839-1840) to the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844) and right up to the Communist Manifesto (1848) were penned under the shadow of Germany’s economic turmoil. At the same time, the Young Hegelian world in which Marx had for a while moved through was enraptured by securalized eschatology; Bruno and Edgar Bauer, for example, maintained ‘catastrophic’ theories of history, with the former writing to Marx in 1840 of an imminent and “frightful” “catastrophe… greater and more monstrous than that which accompanied Christianity’s enterance on the world scene”. Moses Hess, meanwhile, announced in 1842 that “England, where distress has reached a frightful proportion, is heading for a catastrophe sooner than has been expected. And no one can foretell the consequences will have not only for Great Britain but also for this continent”.
From the reflections of the Young Hegelians to the material conditions of Germany; there, worker’s wages had risen in the 1820s and 1830s, but would sharply drop in the 1840s, reaching a low point in 1847. Recession swept over the land, triggering a rise in prices (for agricultural commodities, some price increases reached 100%) while some 6% of those living in the urban centers were cast in homelessness. “After 1845”, writes Thomas Nipperdey in Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, “food riots were becoming frequent, for example in Berlin, where the ‘potato revolution’ took place on 21 April 1847, or in Upper Silesia, where 80,000 fell sick with typhus, of whom 16,000 died”.
The Communist Manifesto, standing at the end of this phase of Marx’s development (keep in mind that this a quite different analysis than that of Althusser’s allegations of an ‘epistemological break’), is the distillation of this social environment, where the fury of industrial development glided with ease into utter barbarism. It is the germ-seed of all of Marx’s subsequent thought, and the litany of Marxisms that followed—but it is with the catastrophists in particular that a distinct and idiosyncratic tracing of the work can be felt. This can only really be glimpsed, however, through its juxtaposition against the evolution of Marx’s critique of political economy and the material-economic circumstances that shaped them.
Gouldner’s work is, to my mind, one of the only I’ve seen to attempt this (and sadly his work in this area is far too brief). He notes that as Marx and Engels left Germany at the end of the 1840s and found their way to London, the floodwaters of economic turmoil receded and gave way to a period of relative prosperity and growth—and, along with it, what Marx and Engels described as a “decomposition” of the workers movement. Crisis would not rear its head again until the latter part of the 1850s, when the Panic of 1857 began in the United States and soon made its way across the Atlantic, to Great Britain. Marx at the time had been writing for the New York Tribune, and had in fact penned several articles in the months again of the crisis about an impending ‘industrial crash’—only for these comments to be dismissed by the financial presses. Two months after the Panic set in, Marx penned “The British Revulsion”, in which he sketched the movement of the 7-11 year business cycle—now commonly known as the Juglar cycle—and compared not only the prevailing economic climate, but the actions taken by the Bank of England, with the period in the run-up to 1847. For Marx, the Panic of 1847 had a nature that was much deeper that the ‘free traders’, the bankers, or the presses cared to admit:
What English writers consider an advantage of their present crisis, as compared with that of 1847—that there is no paramount channel of speculation, like the railways, for instance, absorbing their capital—is by no means a fact. The truth is the English have very largely participated in speculations abroad, both on the Continent of Europe and in America, while at home their surplus capital has been mainly invested in factories, so that, more than ever before, the present convulsion bears the character of an industrial crisis, and therefore strikes at the very roots of the national prosperity.
It was in this same time that Marx went to work on the Grundrisse. As a transitional text—Peter Thomas and and Geert Reuten call it a Kampfplatz, a battleground—there is a collision between old ideas and theories and the dynamic systematization that emerge only in the volumes of Capital. The flirtations with stadialism that could found in earlier works has already begun to give way plural temporalities that underpin late Marx, though this exists in uneasy tensions with the inheritance of a kind of mechanistic-teleological depiction of capitalism’s impending end. As Thomas and Reuten note, large swaths of the Grundrisse remained under the sway of catastrophism, though the nature of the catastrophe has shifted a bit. Reflecting a lineage running back to the French Revolution, the Marx of the Communist Manifesto had an understanding of imminent catastrophe as a political act. In the Grundrisse, the catastrophe is not so much political as it economic, and the figure of the proletariat largely recedes to the background. This doesn’t mean, of course, that Marx abandoned political commitments or the analysis of class society, but what it does mean is that the Grundrisse presents capitalism as tending towards its own self-abolition.
In these pages, Marx sketches a theory of the rate of profit and its fall that lacks the sophistification of the organic composition of capital, which would only emerge in Capital—though here already there is a clear movement towards it. The rate of profit declines when “the portion [of capital] exchanged for living labor” falls below that “existing in the form of raw material and means of production”. This disproportion is bound with two other tendencies: the “development of productive forces”, and as a consequence, a growth in relative surplus-value. Marx thus poses that a growing divergence between relative surplus-value and the rate of profit occurs, which at some point brings the system into conflict with itself. These contradictions”, he writes, “lead to explosions, cataclysms, crises, in which by momentaneous suspension of labour and annihilation of a great portion of capital the latter is violently reduced to the point where it can go on”. He continues:
These contradictions, of course, lead to explosions, crises, in which momentary suspension of all labour and annihilation of a great part of the capital violently lead it back to the point where it is enabled [to go on] fully employing its productive powers without committing suicide. Yet, these regularly recurring catastrophes lead to their repetition on a higher scale, and finally to its violent overthrow.
By October 1958, Marx would write to Engels of a “favourable turn of world trade at this moment”, with the qualification that “the enormous accumulation of money in the banks of London, Paris and New York show that things are very far from being all right”. In Europe, the recovery had begun, while in the US, stagnant conditions would remain up through the events of the Civil War. It was in this environment that the critique of political economy came into full bloom. In 1959, Marx published A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, and from 1861-62 worked on a series of notebooks that expanded on themes present in the Grundrisse, albeit with a more systematic schema in mind. In spring of 1862 work was carried out for what would become Theories of Surplus Value, and wrote later that year of producing in cohesive form the output of this work under the title of Capital. From 1864 to 1865 the notebooks that would later be edited by Engels into Capital Volume 3 were written, and work on Volume 2 was carried out in the late months of 1865. In 1866, at the urging of his publisher, Marx went to work on finalizing the drafts for Volume 1, which would be publishing the following year. Volume 2 and Volume 3 would not, however, be published in his lifetime, making their debuts in 1885 and 1894, respectively.
Crisis theory holds a prominent position in Theories of Surplus Value, where Marx can be found ruminating on questions of disproportionality, but it isn’t really until Volume 3 that the question of the rate of profit and its tendential fall is addressed in full. In these pages the basic theory advanced in the Grundrisse—the widening gap between capital advanced for living labor and for non-human inputs—is reformulated through the organic composition of capital, with a high emphasis on the way in which stagnant, crisis-ridden conditions emerge, almost paradoxically, on the basis of growing productivity. But there’s another key distinct: the latent catastrophism of the Grundrisse has vanished. In the earlier work, periodic cataclysmics gave way to periods of renewed growth and stability, but were understood as leading towards the great catastrophe at the end of capitalism. In the writings of the 1860s, however, the apocalyptic language shifts as the importance of the “countervailing factors” move to the fore. In the Economic Manuscript of 1861-63, Marx writes that the “whole of the Ricardian and Malthusian school is a cry of woe over the day of judgment this would inevitably bring about”, and juxtaposes this against the “mad adventures that capital enters upon in consequence of the lowering of [the] rate of profit”. “Crises”, he adds, are thus “acknowledged as a necessary violent mean for the cure of the plethora of capital, and the restoration of a sound rate of profit”.
In the third volume of Capital, this is rendered ever-more stark fashion:
Alongside the fall in the rate of profit mass of capitals grows, and hand in hand with this there occurs a depreciation of existing capitals which checks the fall and gives an accelerating motion to the accumulation of capital-values.
Alongside the development of productivity there develops a higher composition of capital, i.e., the relative decrease of the ratio of variable to constant capital.
These different influences may at one time operate predominantly side by side in space, and at another succeed each other in time. From time to time the conflict of antagonistic agencies finds vent in crises. The crises are always but momentary and forcible solutions of the existing contradictions. They are violent eruptions which for a time restore the disturbed equilibrium.
The contradiction, to put it in a very general way, consists in that the capitalist mode of production involves a tendency towards absolute development of the productive forces, regardless of the value and surplus-value it contains, and regardless of the social conditions under which capitalist production takes place; while, on the other hand, its aim is to preserve the value of the existing capital and promote its self-expansion to the highest limit (i.e., to promote an ever more rapid growth of this value). The specific feature about it is that it uses the existing value of capital as a means of increasing this value to the utmost. The methods by which it accomplishes this include the fall of the rate of profit, depreciation of existing capital, and development of the productive forces of labour at the expense of already created productive forces.
In this same chapter (chapter 15: ‘Exposition of the Internal Contradictions of the Law’), Marx argues that through this process, the capitalist “cycle would run its course anew. Part of the capital, depreciated by its functional stagnation, would recover its old value. For the rest, the same vicious circle would be described once more under expanded conditions of production, with an expanded market and increased productive forces” [my emphasis]. Thomas and Gueten have noted that when Marx uses this term, ‘vicious circle’, he renders the phrase not in German but French—a deliberate invocation of the words as alluding to an “endless circle” or “lasting recurrence, in which one thing leads to another and back again in a spiral of presupposition and confirmation”.
Marx’s theory of crises and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall have been, at this point, utterly transfigured: the negative side of capital, the bad side, is bound more fundamentally than its progressive side than ever before, and the lingering mechanistic traces have been wiped from the theory. Catastrophe is rendered immanent to the capitalist system itself, not as a signal of a final, apocalyptic convulsion at a point in the future but as the means through which developmental processes undergoa periodic renewal—the rhythmic heartbeat of development. The dialectical dance of the tendential fall and the countervailing factors, always present but manifested most sharply in the form of the crisis, renders those processes as taking place along an asymptotic curve. Such an analysis doesn’t discount the possibility of the rate of profit’s fall being in the position of the primary (as Engels argued in his edits to Capital Volume 3—whether or not this is flush with Marx’s own understanding is a topic of open debate), but what it does do is put hard limits on the way in the ‘breakdown of capitalism’ can be understood, if at all.
A convulsion in the international order
In 1873, the ‘Long Depression’, the “first truly international crisis”, ruptured the prolonged phases of capitalist growth. It began in May, when the Vienna stock market collapsed, and spread to US in September in an economic contraction known as “Black Thursday”. North America had been witness to significant boom, set off by the reconstruction that took hold in the wake of the Civil War fueled largely by railroad construction; when investments in Pacific North Railroad collapsed, a domino of bank failures swept across the nation. A crisis in Germany’s railroad system struck as well, destabilized in the situation unfolding Vienna. The country’s economic had been upheld in large part by speculative activities, fueled by the influx of capital via the war reparations paid by France in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, and these reparations came to an end right after the crisis begun to unfold. The situation was no better for France herself: the economic downturn hit a country reeling from the reparations, and left no real opportunity for the vigorous recovery that it needed.
Across the English channel, Great Britain—the global hegemon and head of the international capitalist order—plunged headlong into the crisis shortly thereafter, and it was intensified by the challenges to British trade by possible by the opening of the Suez Canal. These interlocking characteristics were what made the Panic of 1873 a crisis of international scope, and countries across the world faced declining prices and dwindling growth.
The duration of ‘the Long Depression’—or even the classification of these events as a depression—has been somewhat controversial for economic historians. From an external point of view, the whole period takes on a profoundly schizophrenic character. Internally to the crisis, for example, the usual 7-11 year Juglar cycles continued, with the expected oscillations of expansion and contraction taking place. There was also the continuation, despite stagnant conditions, of expanding industrial power, production output, and in some places, rising real incomes. For this reason, figures like the Austrian school economist Murray Rothbard have written off the Long Depression as a “myth”, a sort of hysteria formed in reaction to the onslaught of the Second Industrial Revolution and the consolidation of an international trade order.
Against these sorts of propositions, economic historians like Arthur Lewis have convincingly argued that the Long Depression was, in fact, a depression, albeit one whose character truly reveals themselves with one delves into the world of statistical data. Taking England as his testing bed, Lewis noted that profitability fell continually from 1873 to 1899, with a reciprocal collapse in trade volumes. Similarly, the British iterations of the Juglar cycles each witnessed a recession that was deeper than its predecessor, with industrial output taking longer to return to its previously ‘normal’ rate. In 1877, the nation’s construction sector collapsed, and failed to regain its strength until 1903.
Michael Roberts has shown similar data for German, France and the US. In the case of Germany, “industrial production growth was 33 percent slower between 1873 and 1890 than between 1850 and 1873”, while in France “it was 24 percent slower than before”. The US’s industrial production growth was similar to that of France, moving “25 percent slower than before”. He continues:
Evidence for a depression in the United States is most dramatically seen in railroad construction, where the financial panic of 1873 was located. In fact, the post–Civil War boom in rail construction had peaked in 1871, but the decline in production accelerated, going from 6,000 miles’ worth in 1872 to just over 4,000 miles’ worth in 1873, then plunging to barely over 2,000 miles’ worth in 1874 and dropping further to under 2,000 miles in 1875, the bottom. Railroad construction began to recover after 1875, but it did so fitfully and basically remained flat and low during the 1876–78 period, fluctuating around 3,000 miles of construction. Only in 1879 did construction surge again up to 5,000 miles, followed by the biggest surge of all as the 1880ss proved to be by far the leading decade of rail construction, followed by a nearly total collapse in the 1890s.
Roberts has further illustrated that the various theories put forth in explain this crisis—usually contingent factors ranging from impositions of gold standards to irrational exuberance in financial markets—are insufficient in grappling with its real character, which laid in the movement of the rate of profit itself. Taking the mature version of Marx’s theory as presented in Capital Volume 3, he draws out a dynamic that how, in Great Britain and the US, there was an inverse relationship between the organic composition of capital and the rate of profit. This can be glimpsed particularly well in regards to the economic tendencies swirling beneath American society:
One of the effects of the Long Depression was a widespread return to protectionist measures as a means to try and stabilize embattled domestic markets. In the US, tariff policies had been a mainstay of the Civil War and post-Civil War years, but an opposition, led by the Democratic Party, formed in the 1880s—only to be beaten back in the 1890s as the depression dragged on. In France, the Méline tariff of 1892 brought to a close the period of laissez-faire that had been ushered by the Cobden-Chevalier Treaty of 1860. By this point, France was already locked into a tariff war with Italy, which lasted across the decade from 1887 to 1897. In Germany tariffs had by this point a long-standing policy, with Otto von Bismarck having curtailed liberal attitudes with the tariff of 1879. Of the major countries, Great Britain was one of the few that didn’t resort to protectionist measures (though it was the subject of policy debate).
Another effect was the acceleration in the concentration of firms, a dynamic highlighted by Eric Hobsbawm in Age of Empire:
If protectionism was the worried producer’s instinctive political reaction to the Depression, it was not the most significant economic response of capitalism to its troubles. This was the combination of economic concentration and business rationalization, or in the American terminology, which now began to set global styles, ‘trusts’ and ‘scientific management’. Both were attempts to widen profit margins, compressed by competition and the fall of prices.
This tendency was also reflected by Lenin: “Free competition is the basic feature of capitalism, and of commodity production generally; monopoly is the exact opposite of free competition, but we have seen the latter being transformed into monopoly before our eyes, creating large-scale industry… cartels, syndicates and trusts”. What this transformation portended, in Lenin’s view, was “the transition from capitalism to a higher system”—an iteration of capitalist development that he labeled ‘imperialism’. Under imperialism, the “international trusts”, now the centers of economic and technical might, the “division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers [had] been completed”. On this point, Hobsbawm agreed: “[t]here was a third possible way out of business troubles: imperialism”.
While the the intricacies of their causal relations is too tangled to really dive into on this blog’s pages, it is these three points—protectionism, cartelization, the return of colonial expansion—along with the revival of nationalism, appearing on the scene at the late phases of decadence (which, as we’ve seen, is basically synonymous with the Long Depression) as a means of ‘spiritual renewal’, helped propel the world into the dark and violent vortex of the First World War.
The coming Kladderadatsch
Such was the world that earlier Marxism—and the latter two volumes of Capital—were thrust into, and unsurprisingly, the imprint of stagnation and crisis would be stamped on both the reception of the texts and the political lessons drawn from them. It is for this reason that I consider the catastrophist Marxists the cousin of those who at alternating probed, revolted against, and even celebrated decadence, not in the sense of an absolute determination, but as a reflexivity that constituted the experience of that crippled modern world. What is critical to consider is that when the Long Depression had erupted, world capitalism had seen nothing like it before: as an entirely new state of affairs, the feeling that civilization was entering into a foreign time and space was widespread. For Marxists, this registered as the already-realized twilight stage of capitalism itself, the coming-together of the great historical catastrophes of economics and politics.
The convulsions of the global economic system shine brightly in Engels’ efforts to edit and re-publish Marx’s works in the 1880s and 90s, though his observations were often grounded in the experience of Great Britain (after all, it was this country’s development that served as the model for Marx’s immanent critique of political economy). In the preface to the 1884 German edition of The Poverty of Philosophy, after elucidating the way that Marx “never based his communist demands upon” our “sense of morality”, describes the “inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of production which is daily taking place before our eyes to an ever growing degree”. Engels continues:
Since England’s monopoly of the world market is being increasingly shattered by the participation of France, Germany and, above all, of America in world trade, a new form of evening-out appears to come into operation. The period of general prosperity preceding the crisis still fails to appear. If it should remain absent altogether, then chronic stagnation must necessarily become the normal condition of modern industry, with only insignificant fluctuations.
In Engels’ analysis, the 7-11 year business cycle, our Juglar cycle, no longer applied in this alien world, and as an indicator of long-range stagnation they took on an increasingly warped and widened character. Subsequent analyses of Juglar cycles within the ebbs and flows of the Long Depression show this clearly isn’t true—and it seems to me that what Engels was seeing was in fact what we might now refer to as the “long cycles” (the ‘Kondratiev wave’ or the ‘techno-economic paradigm’ of the ne-Schumpeterians) of capitalist development, which operate at a level high above these smaller cyclical convulsions.
At any rate, this same idea was turned over again by Engels in his preface to the English edition of Capital Volume 1:
The time is rapidly approaching when a thorough examination of England’s economic position will impose itself as an irresistible national necessity. The working of the industrial system of this country, impossible without a constant and rapid extension of production, and therefore of markets, is coming to a dead stop. Free trade has exhausted its resources; even Manchester doubts this its quondam economic gospel. Foreign industry, rapidly developing, stares English production in the face everywhere, not only in protected, but also in neutral markets, and even on this side of the Channel. While productive power increases in geometric rate, the extension of markets proceeds at best in an arithmetic ratio. The decennial cycle of stagnation, prosperity, overproduction and crisis, ever recurrent from 1825 to 1887, seems indeed to have run its course; but only to land us in the slough of despond of a permanent and chronic depression. The sighed-for period of prosperity will not come; as often as we seem to perceive its heralding symptoms, they again vanish into air.
It becomes even more pronounced in a lengthy footnote inserted in the thirtieth chapter of Capital Volume 3:
As I have already stated elsewhere [English edition: Vol. I. —Ed.], a change has taken place here since the last major general crisis. The acute form of the periodic process with its former ten-year cycle, appears to have given way to a more chronic, long drawn out, alternation between a relatively short and slight business improvement and a relatively long, indecisive depression-taking place in the various industrial countries at different times. But perhaps it is only a matter of a prolongation of the duration of the cycle. In the early years of world commerce, 1845-47, it can be shown that these cycles lasted about five years; from 1847 to 1867 the cycle is clearly ten years; is it possible that we are now in the preparatory stage of a new world crash of unparalleled vehemence? Many things seem to point in this direction. Since the last general crisis of 1867 many profound changes have taken place. The colossal expansion of the means of transportation and communication — ocean liners, railways, electrical telegraphy, the Suez Canal — has made a real world-market a fact. The former monopoly of England in industry has been challenged by a number of competing industrial countries; infinitely greater and varied fields have been opened in all parts of the world for the investment of surplus European capital, so that it is far more widely distributed and local over-speculation may be more easily overcome. By means of all this, most of the old breeding-grounds of crises and opportunities for their development have been eliminated or strongly reduced. At the same time, competition in the domestic market recedes before the cartels and trusts, while in the foreign market it is restricted by protective tariffs, with which all major industrial countries, England excepted, surround themselves. But these protective tariffs are nothing but preparations for the ultimate general industrial war, which shall decide who has supremacy on the world-market. Thus every factor, which works against a repetition of the old crises, carries within itself the germ of a far more powerful future crisis.
The scope of this footnote is immense: in a single paragraph, Engels roams across the world crisis, offering his theory of enlarging cycles, reflecting on the cartelization of the economy and the decline of trade and, in a moment that anticipates the coming age of new imperialism (if not the blood and fire of a world war just mere decades away), prophecizes an “ultimate general industrial war”. And to wrap it all up, the ghost of the breakdown, “far more powerful crisis” whose singularity is underscored.
Engels, in this period, was flirting with the idea of the Kladderadatsch, the crash or collapse that marks the apocalyptic end of the capitalist system. The greatest proponent of the Kladderadatsch wasn’t Marx (who, as we’ve seen, developed a crisis theory freed from the feverish anticipations of the future catastrophe), but the ‘shadow emperor’ of the German SPD, August Bebel, who Engels corresponded with extensively. Bebel’s veritable fixation on the Kladderadatsch had emerged right in the context of the Panic of 1873, the catalyzing moment of the Long Depression. As Germany turned towards tariffs in the late 1870s, Bebel seized on the opportunity to predict a complete collapse of capitalism within the next decade. Two years later he wrote to Engels of a “growing conviction” that “a partial or considerable upswing of business is out of the question, that the crisis is chronic and moves forward until some incident provides the impulse for the general Kladderadatsch“.
Bebel’s vision of the immediate future was one of “the almost complete stagnation of all businesses, starvation wages for the workers, mass bankruptcies in the class of entrepreneurs, artisans in complete despair”. This was practically a matter of faith: Bebel wrote to Engels in 1885 that “[e]very night I go to sleep with the thought that the last hour of bourgeois society strikes soon”. This was a thirst for collapse, the swapping of the common coolness in the face of recline for euphoria: the transformation of the negative catastrophe into the positive. So strong was Bebel’s fixation on the Kladderadatsch that the political dimension of the catastrophe sometimes fell away; during the SPD party congress at Erfurt in 1891, he had argued that “bourgeois society is working so vigorously towards its own destruction that we need only wait for the moment when we can pick up the power which has already dropped from its hands”. Engels wasn’t so sure. In his letters he expressed the fear that by the time the socialists were able to mobilize, it may be too late.
Other leading socialist figures—namely Kautsky and Bernstein—flirted with theories of breakdown early on, but each rejected the enthusiasm that Bebel exhibited. When the SPD’s Erfurt Program emerged from the 1891 party congress, Kautsky penned a commentary that was shot-through with the imagery of the end, rendered in the most mechanistic of forms:
We consider the breakdown (Zusammenbruch) of existing society as inevitable, since we know that economic development creates with a natural necessity conditions which force the exploited to strive against private property…
Capitalist society has failed; its dissolution is only a question of time; irresistible economic development leads with natural necessity to the bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production. The erection of a new form of society is no long merely desirable; it has to become something inevitable.
The only question is: shall the system of private ownership in the means of production be allowed to pull society down into the abyss; or shall society shake off that burden and then, free and strong, resume the path of progress which evolutionary law prescribes to it?
Because Capital Volume 3 had yet to be published, the mature version of crisis theory and the transformation of the rate of profit was not yet known at this stages. Alternative theories on what had prompted capitalism’s catastrophic turn abounded. The Lassallean iron law of wages was grafted onto Marx’s economic analysis, though Marx himself had emphatically rejected the assumptions that underpinned this argument. Others resurrected underconsumptionist arguments: crisis emerged because the prices of goods flung onto the market far outweighed the wages of the workers who produced them. Bebel and Kautsky both flirted with this theory, as did many Italian socialists. Still, in terms of the politics and orientation of the Second International, crisis theory remained marginal, relegated to playing second fiddle to the the more general idea of breakdown.
The great assault on the Kladderadatsch came from the pen of Bernstein. In October 1898, he drafted a letter for the SPD assembly in Stuttgart that took aim at heart of this form of crisis theory:
I set myself against the notion that we have to expect shortly a collapse of the bourgeois economy, and that social democracy should be induced by the prospect of such an imminent, great, social catastrophe to adapt its tactics to that assumption. That I maintain most emphatically.
The adherents of this theory of a catastrophe base it especially on the conclusions of the Communist Manifesto. This is a mistake in every respect.
[…]
[T]he more the political organisations of modern nations are democratised the more the needs and opportunities of great political catastrophes are diminished. He who holds firmly to the catastrophic theory of evolution must, with all his power, withstand and hinder the evolution described above, which, indeed, the logical defenders of that theory formerly did. But is the conquest of political power by the proletariat simply to be by a political catastrophe? Is it to be the appropriation and utilisation of the power of the State by the proletariat exclusively against the whole non-proletarian world?
This was the opening shots of the Revisionist debates. For Bernstein, the motion of capitalist development was simply not reflecting the arguments set forth by Marx. Taking aim at the mechanistic logic of the catastrophists more than anything actually found in the volumes of Capital, he wrote that “concentration in productive industry is not being accomplished even to day in all its departments with equal thoroughness and at an equal rate”. Likewise, Bernstein perceived a shift in the relationship between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, as the “privileges of the capitalist bourgeoisie” came to submit “step by step to democratic organisations”. It followed from this that the power of the proletariat was not weakening, but was in fact strengthening: reformist social democratic politics and pragmatism, not ‘social catastrophe’, could in fact produce a steady march towards a socialist future. Robbed of the justification provided by the breakdown, Bernstein’s socialism came to take on an exceedingly ethical character—one that, in a completion of a liberal turn, would be rooted in German neo-Kantianism.
Enthralled by collapse, the ‘Orthodox Marxists’ carried out a theoretical regression that snared them in the trap of fatalism, while in his rejection of this stance, Bernstein inched closer to Marx’s own by recognizing that decline was not terminal, and that after crisis itself capitalism contained the ability to progress forward once again. But Bernstein lost the dialectical character of Marx’s analysis of capitalism, which was not simply an methodological mechanism but a probing of the very unfolding of social organization and consciousness under the sway of an operative abstraction. When he responded to Rosa Luxemburg’s critique with his famous turn of phrase—”this goal, whatever it may be, is nothing to me; the movement is everything”—he took Marx’s description of communism as the “real movement that abolishes the present state of thing” and flattened it into a one dimensional plane.
The vicissitudes of history moved in other directions. Within just a handful of years, socialism would be born out in renewed form with the events of the Bolshevik Revolution. It’s an interesting twist: deep in the throes of decadence, the Goncourt brothers had looked towards a workers revolt as a possible source for civilizational revival. In Rome’s waning days, “exhausted from a physiological perspective, an invasion of barbarians arrived to give it a transfusion of young, Herculean blood. Who will save the world from the anemia of the nineteenth century? In a few hundred years, will society experience an invasion of workers?” Jules de Goncourt also provided a significantly shortened timeline for this event: “now that civilization contains no more savages, the workers will do the job of revitalizing civilization in about fifty years. It will be called the Social Revolution”.
In Reflections on Violence, Georges Sorel echoed the sentiment of the Goncourts, albeit in a darker fashion, when he wrote that “[t]wo accidents alone, it seems, would be able to stop this movement [of decadence]: a great foreign war, which might reinvigorate lost energies… or a great extension of proletarian violence, which would make the revolutionary reality evident to the bourgeoisie and would lead to their disgust with the humanitarian platitudes”. It appears as each of these came to fruition, the latter in the form of the Bolshevik Revolution and the latter in the form of the First World War: the twin pillars standing at the end of the recline.
Now, beached on the shores of a seemingly-exhausted capitalism and stagnant, timeless life, we might do as Nietzsche did and ask: ‘who are our barbarians of today’?