Jared Houston revisits debates regarding the normative standing of Marx’s critique of capitalism, advancing the thesis that Marx’s offers a metanormative critique of capital accumulation. Capital offends not against this-or-that particular, positive, and precise account of Marxian morality, but against any and all normative systems that stand in the way of boundless accumulation.

Old debates in political philosophy query the precise normative content of Marx’s critique of capitalism.¹ Did Marx condemn capitalism as unjust? If so, what principles of justice are invoked? What is Marx’s view on human rights in relation to capitalism? The same for self-determination, freedom, etc? If normative handles such as justice and rights are not preferred, then what are the Marxian normative alternatives: alienation, exploitation? Are these normatively distinct from the more familiar concepts in liberalism and if so, precisely how? Such are the barrage of questions volleyed at Marxism by political philosophy. Defenders of Marx have stepped forward to mine Marx’s writings for answers.

Revisiting these debates as partisans of Marxism, suspicions set in that its terms have been decided by liberal methodological biases that obscure the deepest and most interesting elements of Marxist thought by demanding that Marxism be more like liberalism. Marxism must, according to the direction of questioning above, pick a normative line and develop it into a “precise and distinctive” normative critique of capitalism – one that focuses on a singular normative value or principle that can be contrasted, compared, and argued in relation to established (liberal) principles or values such as justice or liberty. To be a respectable subject of political philosophical inquiry, Marxism must meet liberal theory’s dress code. The catalog satisfying this dress code has grown to include “precise and distinctive” accounts of alienation, exploitation, freedom as self-determination, equality, solidarity, dignity, ability-needs principle, etc. It appears that Marxists are to eagerly await the approving response of contemporary political philosophy in these articulations. As if winning entry or approval into its prestigious debate halls is a significant strategic way-point on the path to proletarian self-emancipation.

Herein, the question of the normative content of Marxism’s critique of capitalism is re-approached in opposition to these terms. This is the first step to re-orientating debates on normative questions in Marxism away from those treating it as a passive subject of academic inquiry; toward those living the struggle to abolish capitalism. Political philosophers are not owed responses to questions that accord with their implicit methodological biases. Workers becoming proletarian, however, owe each other a grounding of our claim that capitalism is destroying our lives and ruining our planet; that it cannot be reformed but must be abolished.

Marxism’s critique of capitalism has been academically obscured because it is of a deeper normative nature than that demanded by and accustomed to liberal theory as an interrogator. Marxism’s critique of capitalism is not normative, but metanormative.² Grounded in the textual core of Marx’s account of the “laws of motion” of capital, it concerns the metanormative implications of the historically emergent institutional dynamics of capitalism, namely the accumulation dynamic – capital’s drive to consume evermore material, labor, energy, and information. Marxists have long stated that capitalism’s accumulation dynamic is voracious; it strikes it with an insatiable hunger to expand its social metabolism and in doing so constantly transgresses boundaries, limits, and thresholds of the kind implicated in any normative system. Assuming modest metanormative properties explained as “threshold-integrity” and “articulation-control”, no amount of positive philosophical precision safeties a normative system from this historically intensifying onslaught. Because liberal theory’s implicit methodological biases draw it away from the study of emergent institutional dynamics and engagement in metanormative critique in relation to them, it has posed the wrong questions to Marxism and obscured the deepest insights of its critique of capitalism. The depth and revolutionary relevance of Marxism’s metanormative critique of capitalism are argued against the shallowness of liberal demands for positivity and precision in the academic articulation of Marxism’s normative content.

In section one, methodological preliminaries clearing the academically obscured terrain are stated, and an institutional-historical account of the accumulation dynamic is advanced. In section two, evidence is organized to argue that capitalism’s accumulation dynamic is metanormatively voracious and thus incompatible not with this-or-that particular and precisely stated normative commitment, but with any such commitments. In section three, some objections to the argument of section two are explored, as are its implications for Marxism as the living struggle to abolish capitalism.

Marx, Marxism, and the Accumulation Dynamic

Debates on the normative content of Marx’s critique of capitalism are often limited in their analysis of the explicit textual content of Marx’s writings. In one sense this is inescapable, but in another, it shows the impact of bourgeois methodology on this issue. The reduction of the evidential basis of Marxism to textual analysis of Marx’s writings ignores the insistence in those writings and in Marx’s practical labors (in the First International) that the whole of the proletarian must exercise their ability to grasp and wield the dialectical materialist method in their revolutionary struggle for self-emancipation from capital. The argument presented here moves beyond a narrow focus on Marx’s texts, to write in the spirit of Marxism, i.e. the inter-generational worker’s struggle in theory and practice, that uses Marx’s writings as central referents to organize its historically unfolding mission of revolutionary self-emancipation from capital. Writing in the spirit of Marxism moves beyond the bourgeois obsession with “what Marx thought” that abstracts Marx “the genius” from his practically avowed revolutionary proletarian partisanship and insistence that the proletariat must become, by their own intellectual and organizational labors, “a class for themselves.” Marxism is thus not the academic curiosity of Marx as dead genius and communism as dead politic. Nor is it the tacit reinforcement of the bourgeois ideology of the intellectual dependence and deference of workers to revolutionary geniuses for practical leadership and theoretical instruction. Marxism is the living struggle of workers to abolish capitalism and build socialism; of proletarian self-emancipation. Marxism is thus above all the confidence of revolutionary workers to criticize Marx in order to advance Marxism. That is the truest sign of the class becoming one for itself. The partisan “tone” that writing in the spirit of Marxism produces is distasteful to analytic philosophy, priding itself as it does in purportedly dispassionate and non-partisan analysis. Intellectually un-credentialed workers speaking confidently and militantly about revolution against capital is too “political” for political philosophy. No apologies for this tone will be found here.

Accumulation: an institutional-historical account

Capitalism’s accumulation dynamic plays a central role in the argument to come. It is thus important to solidify an account of this historically emergent institutional dynamic as a central feature of capitalism and Marxism’s metanormative critique thereof. In doing so, the prior shift away from Marxian textual analysis, to writing in the spirit of Marxism, proves necessary. While Marx offered important insights toward an initial account of accumulation, its full articulation awaited key contributions from Marxist theorists continuing dialectical materialist analysis of the historical development of capitalism. In what follows, elements of the accumulation dynamic will be assembled into a larger interacting whole by first analyzing smaller scales of its activity – individual competition between firms, the finance sector, and the multi-sector economy. This initial thread is then re-weaved at larger scales – state policy, imperialism, colonialism, ideology – closer to the historical reality: mutual interaction between the many sites and scales of the accumulation dynamic.

In Capital 1, Marx takes up analysis of the accumulation dynamic in chapters 23-25. Exclusive control over the means of production allows profits from the exploited labor of workers to be appropriated by capitalists, who consume some portion of them (on e.g. yachts and caviar), and reinvest the rest in expanding/enlarging production, the basis for accumulation. Such investments allow for the exploitation of more labor and the utilization of more constant capital (machines and materials) toward greater profits. This however is only a definition of what is meant by accumulation as an economic concept. A full account of the accumulation dynamic must explain why and how³ accumulation is a central feature of the actual historical practice of the full assemblage of capitalist institutions and ideologies. In chapters 23-25, Marx makes three starting contributions to an account of the mechanisms driving accumulation: competition, credit, and the labor reserve.

Competition, credit, and labor reserve

The capitalist sells commodities on the market in competition with other capitalists. They seek not merely profits, but profits above those of their competitors. Large relative profits are sought to fund expanded production (accumulation) through e.g. new machinery lowering per unit production costs. Sought because, upon expanding production through accumulation, the firm can either sell more goods or sell them at a lower cost than competitors, capturing greater market share, and further expanding profits. The most profitable firms can repeat this cycle to effectively eliminate competitors by pricing them out of the market⁴ and/or purchasing their firm directly. Knowing this brutal truth and fearing to be consumed by their competition, the capitalist does not choose to accumulate out of incentive, greed, or abstinence. They are forced to as an existential necessity by the institutional coercion of the competitive market: ‘competition makes the immanent laws of capitalist production to be felt by each individual capitalist, as external coercive laws.’⁵

Profits are not the only source of money to fund accumulation. Banks commodify money itself to offer loans to capitalists. Loans can finance accumulation in place of profits without the need for the capitalist to await the sale of their commodities to dedicate a portion of their profits to expand production. Debt-funded accumulation, therefore, becomes as much a necessity as high profits to maintain competitive advantage, and even higher profits are sought to offset debt payments as new costs of production. Meanwhile, banks face the same competitive pressures as any other firm to the effect of raising the tempo and intensity of competition within and across all sectors of the economy. Loans, bonds, and stock investments across all sectors combine into “diversified” portfolios that must yield above-average profits in competition with other banks.

…with capitalist production an altogether new force comes into play – the credit system, which in its first stages furtively creeps in as the humble assistant of accumulation, drawing into the hands of individual or associated capitalists, by invisible threads, the money resources which lie scattered, over the surface of society, in larger or smaller amounts; but it soon becomes a new and terrible weapon in the battle of competition and is finally transformed into an enormous social mechanism for the centralisation of capitals.⁶

Banks further intensify and reinforce the accumulation dynamic by extending the gaze of capital far into the future with long-term debt. This upgrades the competitive focus from relative profits in a short-range of production cycles to relative profit rates over the long-term, staking capital’s claim over resources and labor into the far-off future to feed accumulation.

All of this institutional momentum toward the expansion of production through accumulation would at first glance seem to demand not only more constant capital (machines, raw materials, and fuel) but more labor. But since constant capital can more reliably be exploited (machines do not go on strike), and since exclusive rights to innovations in production techniques hold the promise of exceptional profit rates, there is a tendency for the capitalist to disproportionately direct investments toward constant capital. Marx referred to this as the tendency for the “organic composition of capital” – the ratio of constant capital to labor – to increase. The immediate result of much accumulation is thus not an increased demand for labor-power, but a decreased one: a portion of workers previously employed in a phased-out production process are now unemployed because new advanced machinery acquired by accumulation requires fewer workers per unit production:

…the rapidity of the change in the organic composition of capital, and in its technical form increases, and an increasing number of spheres of production becomes involved in this change, now simultaneously, now alternately. The labouring population therefore produces, along with the accumulation of capital produced by it, the means by which it itself is made relatively superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus population; and it does this to an always increasing extent.⁷

The surplus laboring population – what Marx called the “industrial reserve army” – is not left to waste as a woe-some side-effect of accumulation. Rather, it is re-metabolized and ‘becomes the lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production.’⁸ For whilst established industry increases its organic composition of capital, new industries must abruptly expand to meet spiking demand for the materials and fuels comprising constant capital. For this abrupt expansion (or shift in labor-power to and from different ‘spheres’ of the expanding economy), ‘there must be the possibility of throwing great masses of men [sic] suddenly on the decisive points without injury to the scale of production in other spheres.’⁹ Thus, the industrial reserve army must stand ready for service. There are therefore, broadly, two “poles” of accumulation within the capitalist economy, one more reliant on the precarious employment of the industrial reserve army for the exploitation of human labor, another more reliant on the exploitation of nature (raw materials, fuels, etc.) driven by the tendency for capital to raise its organic composition; each reliant on each other. Crises, part of the cycle of modern capitalism, express a necessarily uneven pace of development between the two that is regenerative of their mutual reliance. Crises re-create the industrial reserve army in an unemployed exploitable form, lower input costs, and increase access to raw material and fuels. Periods with falling rates of profit, investment, and employment, are therefore necessary and (have so far)¹⁰ been reproductive in the maintenance of the accumulation dynamic over the long-term.

State, colonialism, imperialism, and ideology

So far our assembly of the mechanisms out of which the accumulation dynamic emerges is located within the domestic capitalist economy in the common sense understanding (firms, market, credit, wage-labor). Marx’s closing chapters on so-called primitive accumulation in Capital 1 prompt us to double back and weave over this initial thread the critical insight that capitalism has always been integrated into the state and its colonial and imperial operations.

All of the foregoing categories – firm, market, credit, labor – are not simply economic abstractions but material realities given shape by the laws and “regulatory policy” of the state. Thus Marx’s constant movement between critical political economy (e.g. surplus labor vs. necessary labor) and history in, for example, the discussion on the historical battles in England over the length of the working day.¹¹ Chapters 27-28 detail a key intervention of the state in the development of capital’s accumulation dynamic through the “enclosure of the commons” in England. From the 15th to the 18th century, land held in common and accessible to the peasantry as means of subsistence was progressively appropriated into private property to double effect. First, as new means of production for the agricultural capitalist, accumulated here not through superior performance in the competitive market, but through superior violence against the peasantry, and then superior political influence over legislation (via bourgeois parties) that would legitimate and accelerate this violence. Second, as means to proletarianize the peasantry – to detach this holdout from their non-market mediated access to the commons as means of subsistence – a last refuge from their having to resort to wage-labor to survive.¹² Commons enclosed, they are now enlisted into the industrial reserve army, ready to be thrown upon an expanding “sphere of production.” Accumulation is thus not simply an emergent tendency of the idyllic assemblage of competitive market institutions and wage-labor, limited in either origin or operation to well-bounded “civil society.” As a historical-institutional dynamic, accumulation originates and operates beyond and across these boundaries, in this case, to condition for service the legislative activities and priorities of the emerging capitalist state. While Marx could not write as much as intended about this state, Marxism has produced, through the Marxist theory of the state, crucial studies of how state institutions co-developed with capitalism and how the modern state is an integral element of the stability of the accumulation dynamic.¹³

Along with the state’s power to legalize accumulative expropriation domestically, its role in the expansion of public debt and the international credit system is noted by Marx in chapter 31. While our story above told of private banks serving individual capitalist firms, Marx argues that modern banking was historically refined through service to the state on a national scale.¹⁴ Specifically, its need of financing colonial acquisitions and imperialist wars delivering raw materials, fuel, and command over labor-power, the “primitive” accumulation of capital:

The colonial system with its maritime trade and commercial wars served as a forcing-house for [public debt]. Thus it first took root in Holland. National debts, i.e., the alienation of the state – whether despotic, constitutional or republican – marked with its stamp the capitalistic era. … Hence, as a necessary consequence, the modern doctrine that a nation becomes the richer the more deeply it is in debt. Public credit becomes the credo of capital … one of the most powerful levers of primitive accumulation.¹⁵

It was this national banking system and its funding of the capitalist state’s imperialist and colonial operations¹⁶ that revolutionized smaller-scale private banking and the intensification of cross-sectoral competition noted above. Both are integral to the accumulation dynamic, as is the ‘international credit system’¹⁷ by which national banks lend not only to their home state but also to foreign states within their imperial bloc or (semi-)peripheral states.

At the onset of the colonial era, on the eve of capital’s birth (c. 1500), existential competitive pressures raged across the European imperial-colonial state-system. The common fear was the loss of sovereignty by foreign domination following a military defeat. Each state needed to field a large technologically-advanced military, and exploit and expand its colonies to fuel, feed, and fund it.¹⁸ Over the coming centuries, individualized capitalist market competition thus developed in the context of military competition within the imperial-colonial state-system. These competitive pressures drove the appropriation of land in the Americas and Oceania, and the enslavement of African labor. While the story above tells of capitalists funding accumulation through profit from the sale of commodities, or loans from banks, the real history of capital is that both of these sources were materially preceded and predicated on millions of acres of stolen land and millions of hours of enslaved labor. At the onset of colonialism, the accumulation dynamic was not in full swing. If not for the material impulses made possible through colonialism – the violent mass appropriation of land and labor – early capitalism would not have gained the momentum to sustain its “self-expansion.”

In contemporary capitalist imperialism, the two “poles” of accumulation mentioned earlier can be more precisely stated within the global division of labor between the imperial capitalist core and the exploited (semi-)periphery, the evolved form of the imperial-colonial state system. Extractive industries exploit reserves of raw materials and fuels from the periphery to the core and semi-periphery under the watch of (neo)colonial client states that enforce command over industrial reserve armies. These materials feed both the outsourced manufacturing and heavy industry base in the semi-periphery and the high-tech “information” economies of the core, which sell back industrial and consumer products to the periphery who pay for them, in part, with huge debts imposed by the international credit system.¹⁹

One last thread remains to be woven: across and among these sites and scales, the accumulation dynamic’s institutional elements are simultaneously supported and amplified by its ideological ones. Capital seeks not the negativity of brute coercion to the accumulation dynamic, but positive and affirming integration of the subject within it.²⁰ The ever-hustling entrepreneur commits themselves to long nights of study in the competitive rationality of the market and how to successfully manage a firm. The university cultivates and celebrates this commitment and manages the material habitats it unfolds in. The hardy wage-laborer is loyal, obedient, and industrious, to the praise of their pastor and parents. The experienced bureaucrat understands the state’s reliance on taxes from capitalist firms for its sustenance and confidently teaches subordinates the necessity of supporting a growing economy. The honor-bound soldier fights – not for imperialism – but for the class-neutral state and its “progressive” mission in the world. The colonized are tempted to reconcile themselves to the reality of (settler-)capitalism through invitations to be active participants in the “sustainable” exploitation of their stolen land and resources. Proliferated access to joint-stock ownership in publicly traded firms, and the investment of union’s pension funds therein, bolsters the petty-bourgeois ideology of a “middle-class” wherein all can derive income “passively”, expanding popular support and demand for accumulation. All are thus expected to learn growth as a condition of personal financial stability and mobility, as well as a positive societal imperative. Should growth present problems, the solution must be to grow out of these problems: global poverty is solved by market liberalization and growth; constant economic crises are solved by economic stimulus to foster growth; ecological collapse is solved with the growth of a new “green” capitalism. Capitalist ideology fulfills the recurring need to make sense of a strange and changing world; to create a coherent organized conceptual and affective whole that answers queries and quells anxieties. It achieves this by utilizing the material power of sense-making enacted through its expanding dominance of the mode of production, home of the accumulation dynamic, with ideology as servant, stimulant, and expression of its voracity. Capitalist ideology does not heavy-handedly impose banal conformity onto passive subjects. It subtly curates for the individual through socialization and habituation a restricted diversity of conceptual-affective frameworks for sense-making more or less compatible with the accumulation dynamic. The choice among them is yours to make, and thus affirming of your identity, even an “anti-capitalist” one. Alternatives that have been proven historically to be threatening to accumulation are socially degraded in salience and sanctioned in practice: communism is naive, dogmatic, impractical, laughable, and evil. Thus, by its voracity, the dynamic guards itself against the apprehension of its nature, and conscious interventions to halt its consumption of every gram of matter, every calorie of energy, and every byte of data.

This institutional-historical account of the accumulation dynamic is incomplete in the sense that there are elements and interconnections that could further be identified, or elaborated upon. The intent, however, is not to provide a comprehensive and conclusive statement of this dynamic but to solidify its account in service to the forthcoming argument.²¹ For this the above suffices.

Accumulation has been presented as a historically emergent institutional dynamic of capitalism, understood as an assemblage of relatively abstract institutional forms (firms, markets, credit, wage-labor) with more complicated moving historical-material realities (state, colonialism, imperialism). Is the accumulation dynamic then an emergent property of the interaction of the historical observance of the aggregate rule sets of capitalism’s institutions? Not quite. To say that the accumulation dynamic is a rule set that capitalism realizes is to grant it too much. The accumulation dynamic is less so the observance of a stable rule set by capital, than the reckless transgression of the many normative boundaries impeding accumulation, external but also internal to capital, under that dynamic’s fundamentally contradictory relationship to a normatively bounded reality it cannot completely consume.

Marxism’s Critique of the Metanormative Voracity of the Accumulation Dynamic

But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its werewolf hunger for surplus labor, capital oversteps not only the moral but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working day.²²

What are the metanormative implications of the accumulation dynamic? How does capital’s drive to integrate evermore material, labor, energy, and information into its social metabolism impact the various normative systems that cohabitate the earth, and that capital will therefore inevitably come into contact with over the course of its boundless expansion on a bounded planet? Marxism’s answer is that the accumulation dynamic drives capital to transgress any and all norms that present themselves as limits, boundaries, or thresholds impeding accumulation.

Nature becomes [under capital] for the first time simply an object for mankind, purely a matter of utility; it ceases to be recognized as a power in its own right; and the theoretical knowledge of its independent laws appears only as a stratagem designed to subdue it to human requirements, whether as the object of consumption or as the means of production. Pursuing this tendency, capital has pushed beyond national boundaries and prejudices, beyond the deification of nature and the inherited, self-sufficient satisfaction of existing needs confined within the well-defined bounds, and the reproduction of the traditional way of life. It is destructive of all of this, and permanently revolutionary, tearing down all obstacles that impede the development of productive forces, the expansion of needs, the diversity of production and the exploitation and exchange of natural and intellectual forces.²³

Some read this passage as praise of capital’s progressive social impacts, its overcoming of our “primitive” past. It is here interpreted as Marx warning that capital threatens not some particular norm, but any and all that stand in the path of accumulation.

To fully argue this point, two metanormative properties are proposed. First, threshold-integrity. Normative systems make distinctions that allow practitioners to tell whether e.g. actions/virtues/consequences (or whatever) are right/wrong, good/bad.²⁴ Thresholds mark the difference between permissible and impermissible actions, for example. One could say they draw a line and put up a STOP sign²⁵ indicating it should not be crossed. Threshold-integrity is breached when the STOP sign is, in practice, crashed through so persistently that the norm is not only offended against in the abstract but has its practical power to reproduce itself over time damaged. Second, normative systems need to have a sufficient degree of articulation-control such that the internal (re)articulation and practice of the system is primarily determined by practitioners respecting the norm as such. It is fine for a threshold to be moved here or there if that is done consciously and collectively by those who are interested or implicated in marking it out as a matter of internal respect for the norm. Otherwise, the normative system is being re-articulated by outside forces that may not have the authority to do so nor respect for the norm as such – it is at risk of being undermined.²⁶ When realized, these features allow for a normative system to have internal stability and integrity, which are not only subjectively desirable from the standpoint of its co-authors but objectively necessary for the system to reproduce itself across history. The intention and hope is that these claims are modest. Argumentatively, there is no need for controversial metanormative claims. Though perhaps so modest that they escape the attention of metanormative theory as interesting subjects of debate, they suffice for the following, core premise: capitalism’s accumulation dynamic is metanormatively voracious. It will either breach threshold-integrity or undermine articulation-control of any normative system that impedes accumulation in practice. Because of accumulation’s boundless expansive nature, capital’s voracity threatens the internal stability and integrity of any normative system in its historical-material path.

The Blood Trail of Capital

Evidence supporting this core premise is now presented. Some of it has previously been marshalled to support this-or-that defence of Marxism’s normative content, or to problematize Marxism for being normatively eclectic, terse, and imprecise. Here, it is organized to demonstrate the depth of Marxism’s metanormative critique of capitalism. Guiding the proletariat along the blood trail of capital, Marxism aims not simply to invoke moral recoil at the sight of this-or-that blood stain, but for the proletariat to learn, through tracking the trail to the lair of the beast, the true depravity of its nature – to see that capitalism is metanormatively voracious. Capitalism is not just inhumane, it is inhuman.²⁷

Children

Marx makes repeated reference to capital’s ruthless exploitation of the labor of children. In or before doing so, Marx does not espouse some precise and positive theory of, e.g. children’s rights.²⁸ Indeed, that would distract from the real issue: evidence that the material realities of capitalism offend against any plausible moral theory regarding the lives of children. Capitalism works children to death, maims them²⁹, denies them play with each other and the right relationship with their parents by forcing them into the industrial reserve army and factory conditions wherein “Dante would have found the worst horrors of his Inferno surpassed.”³⁰ These acts transgress not this-or-that precise and positive theory, but the most basic thresholds that moral theories must include lest they be tossed out of consideration.

Why would capitalism (be allowed to) do this? How could it violate the most basic moral thresholds for a portion of the population that is widely seen as deserving of special moral concern? Rather than yield to the immediate temptation to blame this transgression on the inhumane vices of individual capitalists, Marx directs our attention to the inhuman voracity of capital, which to satisfy its own hunger has “claimed and obtained the enjoyment not only of making children of 8 drudge without intermission from 2 to 8.30 p.m., but also of making them hunger during that time.”³¹

Health

Implicit in the above critique and the quote opening this section (14) is the observation that in exploiting labor-power to produce surplus-value, capital transgresses not only moral boundaries but physiological ones. It abuses the physical and mental health of workers to the point of premature death. Here again, Marx’s critique is unsatisfied in condemning the inhumane vices of individual capitalists as independent moral agents. It redirects the reader’s attention to the real subject of (meta)normative concern, the inhuman voracity of capital’s accumulation dynamic:

To the out-cry as to the physical and mental degradation, the premature death, the torture of over-work, [capital] answers: Ought these to trouble us since they increase our profits? But looking at things as a whole, all this does not, indeed, depend on the good or ill will of the individual capitalist. Free competition brings out the inherent laws of capitalist production, in the shape of external coercive laws having power over every individual capitalist.³²

While early capitalism may have voraciously breached the threshold-integrity of physical health to the point of premature death, contemporary capitalism reveals a different row of teeth in capital’s maw, those that chew up a norm and spit it back out in a form that serves accumulation.³³ Health as a capitalist norm becomes not the health of the human being as such, but of the working population’s labor-power and the healthcare service sector’s quarterly profits. It is sufficient for workers to be “healthy enough” to be physically present for exploitation at the workplace. Drug companies stand ready to medically sedate our detest for, and alienation from, bullshit jobs.³⁴ The modern mental health crises of capitalism reveals not only the inadequacy of this conception but also capital’s voracious undermining of articulation-control over health-as-norm.

Slavery

Returning to the section on so-called primitive accumulation helps to perceive a critical contradiction between capitalism’s internal “rules” and its own voracity. There, the smug Eurocentric ideology of colonialism as a “civilizing force” is contrasted with the brutal reality of capitalism’s transgression of even its most cherished “progressive” commitments. It is captured succinctly in Marx’s observation that the 19th century’s cotton-textile supply chains reciprocal reliance on factory labor from England and raw material from American slave plantations³⁵ reveals that ‘[i]n fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.’³⁶ Bourgeois morality prides itself on doing away with slave and feudal relations of production in order to create the “free and equal citizen” of bourgeois democracy. Yet capital demanded race-based slavery where wage labor would not satiate its voracity. Its own normative commitments are transgressed, and its own boundaries shifted, yielding to the demands of accumulation. In thrall to capital’s hungers, bourgeois society itself lacks articulation-control over even its own allegedly “progressive” moral identity. This is what was meant earlier in stating one must not grant capitalism too much by claiming it abides by a consistent and stable rule-set. Capital follows not one rule, but pleases one passion: accumulation. There is no rule that capitalism will not break in pursuit of this passion, even those it sets for itself.

Colonialism

Marxists have indulged in the temptation to describe the impulse for colonialism as deriving from an accumulation dynamic which, fully and independently formed in Europe, reached out to feed its hunger for land and labor beyond national borders. As stated above, this temptation must be resisted and this narrative rejected. Colonialism was one of the material impulses that made it possible for the accumulation dynamic to achieve its historical momentum. Capitalism in Europe gained its “self-expansive” nature only upon the genocidal appropriation of non-European land and life. Thus, the metanormative voracity of capital is perhaps better evidenced in the ideological doctrines continuing to obscure and de-center the material import of (settler-)colonialism to the development of capitalism. Early but still common among these are the doctrines of “terra nullius” and “discovery” claiming that indigenous land was unoccupied. Later came bourgeois race sciences’ informing (settler-)colonial state policy to justify race-based slavery and the genocidal ‘manifest-destiny’ of the militant white-supremacist American republic. Settler-colonialism ideologically re-articulated the horror of genocide, race-based slavery, and land dispossession, to the settler-bourgeois nationalist state-building narrative of “civilizing” a peoples and declaring theirs “our home and native land.” This moral white-washing (i.e. re-articulation³⁷) of the immediate moral repugnance of the acts in question³⁸ was required by capital to maintain and develop its imperial-colonial holdings, and historically achieved through its metanormative voracity. Even the claim that the accumulation dynamic is a “self-expansive” process smuggles part of this ideological re-articulation into Marxism.³⁹ That “capital comes [into the world] dripping from heat to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”⁴⁰ is best read, in the context of Capital 1, as Marx calling out and contrasting the idyllic bourgeois ideology of capitalism developing out of the allegedly distinctive and self-sufficient resources of “European culture”, with the historical reality of the global blood-trail of slavery and colonialism as the material impulse for accumulation’s historical momentum.

Imperialism and Fascism

Capital’s metanormative voracity is at once life-threatening for the many peoples and traditions standing in the path of accumulation, and life-giving of new and grotesque worldviews it positions in defense of accumulation. In the first instance, imperialism has decimated and maintained domination over non-Euro-American life and land the world over to fuel the imperial core’s accumulation of capital. In the second, fascism is kennelled by capital, and unleashed when necessary to protect against the rising threat of anti-capitalist revolution, as occurred in the inter-war period and as recurring today.⁴¹ Capital will on one hand, end the millennia-old life-world of non-Euro-American peoples by subjugating them to its global division of resources and labor, and then on the other incubate and ascend reactionary racists into state power to facilitate their anti-communist cleansing and mass-industrial campaigns of killing. While moral critiques condemning the inhumanity of imperialism and fascism correctly articulate their evils, Marxism’s metanormative critique of capital’s inhuman voracity points to a broader historical-material source of these transgressions: the accumulation dynamic. This is not a merely theoretical point; it grounds the practical necessity, long-insisted by Marxists, of defeating fascism and imperialism by attacking their material root of capitalism.

Religion, morality, and socialism

Capitalism has undermined the articulation-control of Christianity (and other religions), moral philosophy, and even thought-traditions critical of capitalism such as socialism.

Various forms of Protestantism, including Methodism and Puritanism, were shaped by the imperatives of capital for labor discipline, labor supply, and colonization.⁴² Before the faithful, it was capital that flocked to those sections of Protestantism most conducive to accumulation, funding their material expansion through church construction and promulgating their services at workplaces. In England, the pincer attack of capital was Methodism and Puritanism for the working-classes below, and Utilitarianism for the “radical” middle-classes and intelligentsia above.⁴³ In The German Ideology, Marx analyses the latter as capital’s undermining of the articulation-control of prominent moral systems, historically tracing the origins of utilitarianism in France, to its late development in England. It was Bentham and Mill, Marx argued, that achieved the full integration of the ‘economic content’ of bourgeois political economy and its drive for exploitation of labor, into the less precisely articulated French utilitarianism. The resulting, fully contrived “moral” theory was so “[p]rejudiced in favor of the conditions of the bourgeoisie, it could criticize only those relations which had been handed down from a past epoch and were an obstacle to the development of the bourgeoisie.”⁴⁴ In its most recent mutations such as ‘long-termism’, utilitarianism continues to evidence the historical bite marks of capital on the flesh of moral and political philosophy.⁴⁵

Marx insisted that history has proven that even socialism cannot protect itself from the voracity of capital. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Social-Democratic parties comprising the 2nd International once organized millions of workers who struck fear into the heart of capital through an open commitment to Marxism.⁴⁶ When the inter-imperialist competition between European powers reached the breaking point of WWI, the high-sounding anti-war phrases of these parties was betrayed to the treachery of their coaching the proletarian into sacrificing millions of worker’s lives for the colonial and imperial division of the world, setting the stage for the rise of fascism. The legacy of Social-Democracy has been the repudiation of its commitments to Marxism and socialism, and the clear historical evidence that its staunch reformism necessarily draws it into service of the capitalist state, the accumulation dynamic, and thus the undermining of its articulation-control. Social-Democratic parties purge themselves of any vestige of socialism to win bourgeois elections. Upon doing so, they use the bourgeois state to enact austerity on the workers, in the name of growth. That socialism’s blood stains the maw of capital was made clear through Lenin and Luxemburg’s theoretical critiques of Social-Democracy and through the practical labors of communists the world over who remember and combat its treachery.

Nature

The depth of capital’s voracity has become strikingly apparent in the age of climate breakdown. Marx’s ecological critique of capitalism, which has only recently received substantial attention, was in this sense ahead of its time.⁴⁷ Marx took up the concept of metabolism from the sciences of the day, applying it to the social metabolism of modes of production. Capital’s insatiable hunger continues to place metabolic demands on the earth that it cannot sustain.

Nature is norm-governed inasmuch as observers of its bio-physical processes (metabolisms) make assessments of the normal functioning of those processes and their integrity and articulation over time, along with normative judgments regarding their desirability. This is an interactive effort by humans to “read-off” the norms of a system that they live within but do not articulate themselves without reducing that system to a set of purely empirical statements regarding function, devoid of normative content. Thus respect or care for nature refers to the valuation of these bio-physical processes and appreciation of our place within them, including their threshold-integrity and articulation-control.

As Marx claims in The Grundrisse above (14), accumulation does not respect either. Threshold-integrity of the earth-life system is breached when various bio-physical ‘planetary boundaries’⁴⁸ are transgressed under the dominance of the capitalist mode of production. The earth-life system admittedly undergoes radical changes on geological time-scales, such as a shifting between glaciation and hothouse periods, along with extinction events induced by natural processes such as volcanism. But recent threshold breaching is paired with an undermining of articulation-control of the earth-life system. Anthropogenic drivers disproportionately influence an unprecedented pace of system changes.⁴⁹ Marxism’s metanormative critique traces the source of these transgressions against the earth-life system, not to any set of human vices, but the inhuman accumulation dynamic. Rising greenhouse gas emissions, destruction of carbon sinks, and pollution are coincident with the rapid pace of industrial development that has been driven by capitalist accumulation. A metabolic rift is widening between the densely bounded, intricately linked earth-life system, and the relatively (on geological time-scales) newborn capitalist mode of production’s insatiable hunger after constituents of that system (raw materials, fuels, animals, waste-sinks) and the exploitation of its bio-physical processes. The earth-life system’s articulation-control over these processes is being undermined by capital’s voracity.

Ideologically, the rapid synthesis of a non-threatening “green” neoliberal environmentalism, which insists there is no way out of the environmental crisis but to double down on the marketization and commodification of nature, is further proof of the metanormative voracity of capital. So too is the constant transgression of the most recent emissions limit set by capitalist states in their climate treaties. That capital will pursue and justify accumulation to the point of undermining the earth-life system as the material basis of its own existence while pronouncing warming limits like the 1.5C Paris agreements only to quietly transgress them, is perhaps the clearest and saddest evidence of the deeply irrational and contradictory nature of its voracity.

Capital’s Internal Metanormative Instability and Marxism’s Revolutionary Strategy

Though far from exhaustive, the foregoing suffices in evidencing the core premise (15). In organizing the above transgressions, Marxism’s metanormative critique of capitalism explains the seemingly eclectic diversity of normative condemnations of capitalism found in both Marx and Marxism. The core premise grounds Marxism’s metanormative critique of capitalism, superseding normative critiques and their misdirected heeding of the academic demand for a positive and precise Marxian morality, by arguing that capital’s voracious accumulation dynamic makes it a general threat to any and all normative systems. No amount of positive philosophical precision safeties morality, Marxian or otherwise, from capital’s voracity.

When liberal theorists demand normative philosophical precision as a remedy to the alleged vagaries of Marxism’s critique of capitalism, they obscure its metanormative depth. Part of that depth is how the metanormative critique of capitalism is situated in the Marxian unification of theory and practice, in the theory of revolutionary strategy. The paragraph immediately following Marx’s comments on capital’s ‘tearing down all obstacles’ above (14), presents Marx hypothesis that capital’s voracity is also its critical weakness:

But because capital sets up any boundary as a limitation, and is thus ideally over and beyond it, it does not in any way follow that it has really surmounted it, and since any such limitation contradicts its vocation [i.e. accumulation], capitalist production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome, only to be, once again, constantly re-established. Still more so. The universality toward which it is perpetually driving finds limitations in its own nature, which at a certain stage of its development will make it appear as itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, leading to its own self-destruction.⁵⁰

Capital’s voracity is both insatiable and frustrated by its constant confrontation of normative boundaries that strike both its internal operations and external expansion with ongoing crises that, if tactically exploited by the proletariat and their allies in an intensifying class struggle⁵¹, could be its end. Marxism’s metanormative critique of capitalism thus connects directly to its revolutionary strategy, informing these three central claims thereof:

(1) capitalism is destroying our lives and ruining our planet

(2) it cannot be reformed but must be abolished, and

(3) this can only be accomplished by the revolutionary political actions of millions of poor and oppressed peoples the world over.

Capitalism’s path of destruction is driven by its metanormatively voracious accumulation dynamic. As it intensifies over time, the blood trail of capital becomes so widespread, egregious, and flagrant that even its ideological powers strain to hide it from view. It too becomes clearer that capitalism cannot be reformed because those same reforms must pass through state and civic institutions voraciously consumed and invigilated to serve accumulation.⁵² Finally, only a revolutionary anti-capitalist alliance of the working-masses the world over has the interest, position, reach, insight, and initiative to leverage capitalism’s crisis tendency to abolish it as a world-economic system – to end its metanormative assault on our lives and planet.

Understanding Marxism’s metanormative critique helps in understanding Marxism’s insistence on prioritizing the inter-generational struggle for the revolutionary abolition of capitalism over the precise statement of communist morality in the present. That no amount of moral criticism – however incisive – can in itself abolish capitalism, Marxism has been clear in its critique of utopian socialism.⁵³ The metanormative critique sharpens that critical line: normative theorizing cannot progress with internal stability and integrity until practical progress is made in repelling capital’s multi-frontal metanormative assault by historically de-accelerating and eventually halting the accumulation dynamic. Communist morality cannot be developed in any precise sense that accords with the demands for proletarian self-emancipation⁵⁴ until capital’s metanormative assault is at least weakened.⁵⁵ The dominance of the capitalist mode of production today means that the immediate work lies in uncovering capitalism’s voracious multi-frontal assault in our normative world and pushing it back to make another possible. This requires further analysis of the institutional and ideological elements of capital’s accumulation dynamic. However, this work cannot be purely negative nor cognitive nor introspective, but materially grounded in and effected by building institutions of proletarian self-emancipation. These are the vessels of alternative conceptual-affective life-worlds, truly threatening in their ability to consolidate anti-capitalist sense-making, stabilize it organizationally and practically, and thus eventually challenge the capitalist mode of production.⁵⁶

Objections

Comrades might be eager to point out a shorter route to a similar conclusion through base-super-structure theory. The mode of production of a given society, we would be reminded, determines all super-structural features thereof, including all “moral” features. As consequence, capitalism is metanormatively undermining. In response, this account of the base-super-structure relation is rejected for many reasons,⁵⁷ the most pertinent of which is another of its consequences: it follows from this view that there is no mode of production that is not metanormatively voracious, including communism. If the base so crudely determines the superstructure, there is no such thing as articulation-control over human norms of any kind. All such normative systems are determined by external (economic) forces rather than the internal conscious normative labors of practitioners. This allegedly orthodox Marxist doctrine does not support but preempts the force of Marxism’s metanormative critique of capitalism – what it achieves in brevity is bought by blunting the critical edge of the metanormative critique of capitalism, as communism will be equally metanormatively voracious.

Capitalism’s voracity must be overcome by communism, not to materially precipitate a “new soviet man” and exert evermore “control over nature”, but as an act of metanormative emancipation. Communism’s first promise is thus more modest and basic than Marxism’s moral defenders have claimed. It is not the transcendence of antagonistic conceptions of justice, nor the immediate realization of non-alienated labor. Rather, it must be the basic precondition for any of these: pushing back on capital’s metanormative assault by halting the accumulation dynamic, as to win back the possibility of the metanormative rehabilitation of our lives and planet.⁵⁸ Communism’s second promise, following from the first, is equally important and perhaps more challenging – to guard against the historical re-emergence (or unintentional replication) of the accumulation dynamic in the mode(s) of production displacing the capitalist one.⁵⁹ Practically, this impels communists to display, through proletarian institutions, a broad commitment to metanormative emancipation: the open exploration and development of not only new communist norms, but the rehabilitative re-articulation of normative systems that capitalism decimated through colonialism, imperialism, and the exploitation of nature. Only in this way can the proletariat be part of a politically and materially⁶⁰ stable revolutionary anti-capitalist alliance the world over, i.e. an alliance of different peoples dedicated to the abolition of capitalism, not all of whom wish to build a strictly socialist mode of production in its place.

Another objection might come from those continuing to accuse Marxism of reluctance to pronounce on normative or moral matters. They might point out that there are normative implications in the above argument. The problem, we would be reminded, is that they are terribly imprecise. The metanormative critique responds: but of course they are! They are imprecise because the claims comprising the critique are not normative but metanormative,⁶¹ the latter being necessarily more imprecise than the former. Imprecision accounted for, let us try to state – as clearly as one can – what the normative implications of this argument are.

Condemning capital’s breaching of threshold-integrity and undermining of articulation-control implies three “imprecise” normative commitments. First, respect is advanced for a basic set of moral boundaries of the kind that ground common normative critiques of capitalism – human rights, environmental integrity, anti-racism, anti-imperialism etc. Second, the proletariat as a “class for themselves” are centered as those who must re-assert articulation-control over any communist morality and the construction of institutions that materially advance it. Neither bourgeois professors, nor the Party’s commissars, nor any well-meaning hierarchy of “talent” can undertake this work in their place. As mentioned above however, this must furthermore be done so as to ensure that the voracity of capitalism is not (accidentally) replicated in the new mode of production. The proletariat seeks the defeat of capital not only to rehabilitate their normative world, but to end its metanormative assault on the world we share. In doing so, they must establish comradely relations not just among each other but between the various forces comprising a revolutionary anti-capitalist alliance committed to metanormative emancipation. Backgrounding the “imprecision” of the former commitments is a third and final: normative pluralism. The normative world is not monolithic, reducible to some single good. It is a materially and socially variegated one, with the multiple valuable parts of the broader whole having better or worse (metanormative) relations among them. Internal to the class struggle, this implies viewing disagreements as to the exact articulation of communist rights & justice, or the structure of proletarian democracy, not as grave failures of the “united” worker’s to arrive at the single correct view on a complex question, but the result of abiding proletarian pluralism that socialist democratic institutions are to mediate. Externally, communists must seek to be positive participants in rehabilitating the network of human and non-human metanormative relations. To make headway, allied revolutionary political action to materially de-accelerate the source of capital’s metanormative assault – the accumulation dynamic – is needed. Those still demanding greater precision or clarity in these matters should therefore observe the unfolding history of proletarian self-emancipation. Those becoming a “class for themselves” do not speak most precisely through words, but deeds.

Conclusion

Having foregrounded the urgency of pushing back capitalism’s metanormative assault, suspicion of the invitation to “defend” Marxism in the philosophical debates on its normative content is renewed. Communists ignoring these demands to run errands for liberal theory have instead prioritized urgent and important shared labor: tracking the blood trail of capital, building materially threatening proletarian organizations radically open to all workers, and pushing back capital’s metanormative assault on our lives and planet. This shared labor has yielded critical insights. Pertinently, the capitalist academy’s “theory industry” is voraciously chewing up Marxism and spitting it back out as “anything but socialism”: as a non-accidentally non-threatening means of obscuring and undermining proletarian articulation-control over Marxism as the living struggle to abolish capitalism.⁶² The misdirected philosophical errand that the metanormative critique suggests much of the philosophical debate on Marxism and morality has been is further evidence of this.

Defenses attempting to detail the normative content of Marx’s critique of capitalism are in light of the metanormative critique, both right and wrong. They are right in that capitalism’s voracity offends against many normative systems and this blood trail must be tracked and wrong in that one shouldn’t be singularly concerned with its offense against this-or-that normative value or system, nor with precisely stating so at the behest of liberal academics. The metanormative critique can unite, strengthen, and deepen the normative critiques offered in defense of Marxism.⁶³ It has these additional virtues: it recentres Marx’s analysis of the “laws of motion of capital”, demands theoretical and practical engagement with systems of oppression symbiotic with capital, and re-engages with revolutionary strategy.

One of the striking features of many philosophical discussions on Marxism and morality is their distance from Marx’s critical historical-institutional analysis of capitalism. Focus shifts to extracting or assembling positive commitments from Marx’s relatively scarce comments on socialism, communism, or bourgeois morality, whereas Marx grew to focus theoretical attention on capitalism as a historical-institutional system. As we have seen, the latter features moral condemnations of capitalism, but philosophers then complain that it is eclectic and imprecise. It has already been explained how Marxism’s metanormative critique of capitalism accounts for both. More importantly, it re-connects discussion of normative issues in Marxism back to a specific and central historical-institutional dynamic of capitalism: accumulation. It has been argued that is the source of normative concerns for Marxism, and thus Marx guided us rightly in focusing analysis on capitalism as a historical-institutional system.

The metanormative critique further demands that communists sharpen theoretical understanding and practical actions against the systems of oppression symbiotic with capital. Through its voracity, capital has transformed colonialism, imperialism, racism, fascism, cis-hetero-patriarchy, (and many others) to better serve the accumulation dynamic; so too have the latter materially and ideologically enabled and transformed capital. To halt the accumulation dynamic, revolutionary forces must therefore understand not only capital’s internal ‘economic’ nature, but these symbiotic (and in some instances constitutive) relationships. Communists can here practice their commitment to metanormative emancipation in acknowledging that revolutionary anti-capitalist allies have theoretical and practical insights into these relationships gained from extensive front-line experience holding the anti-colonial, anti-imperial, or anti-racist (etc) flanks of the metanormative assault.

What is to be done? If one follows the implied conclusions of the philosophical debates, the answer is a detailed research programme (surely initiated and supervised by prestigious Marxist academics) to ruminate further on Marxism’s moral muddle. The metanormative critique answers differently. What is needed is allied revolutionary political action to halt the accumulation dynamic; to end the metanormative assault on our lives and planet. An immediate task toward this end is struggling against the capitalist academy for articulation-control over Marxism, through the building and strengthening of proletarian institutions that unify inquiry and action, radically open to all workers. In doing so the proletariat does not dogmatically blind themselves to debates in the capitalist academy. They read and assess them in the same spirit Marx critically read contemporaries; in the spirit of Marxism.

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See, for example, Allen E. Buchanan, “Marx, Morality, and History: An Assessment of Recent Analytical Work on Marx,” Ethics 98, no. 1 (1987): 104–36; Norman Geras, “The Controversy About Marx and Justice,” New Left Review 150, no. 3 (1985): 47–85; Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford University Press, 1987). Though dated, this literature continues to exert a gravitational pull over re-visitations of the debate, seen more recently in, Wei Xiaoping, “Understanding Marx’s Concept of Justice,” Science & Society 84, no. 4 (October 2020): 485–509.
Metanormative in the sense that it makes normative claims across or about a broad range of normative systems. Metanormative inquiry – as a philosophical field – differs from metaethics in that the latter is more so concerned with questions regarding the ontological and epistemological status of normative claims, and less so with the goal of normative ethics, namely action-guidance. Metanormative inquiry retains an interest in action-guidance without restricting itself to arguing from substantive “first-order” normative claims (e.g utilitarian). Attempts to develop action-guidance under normative uncertainty are one example of metanormative inquiry; see e.g. Nicholas Kluge Corrêa and Nythamar Fernandes de Oliveira, “Metanormativity: Solving Questions of Moral and Empirical Uncertainty,” Ethic@ – An International Journal for Moral Philosophy 19, no. 3 (December 16, 2020): 790–810; Christian J. Tarsney, “Vive La Différence? Structural Diversity as a Challenge for Metanormative Theories,” Ethics 131, no. 2 (January 2021): 151–82. Herein a metanormative critique is developed which focuses on identifying the theoretical commonalities of, and normative quality of practical relations between, actually existing normative systems. Specifically, Marxist metanormative critique interrogates the deleterious relationship between capitalism and normative systems that, because of its dominance and nature as a mode of production, capitalism will impact in ways soon to be elaborated.
Why being the motivation and mechanisms for accumulation, and how being the means of its pursuit. The focus will be on the former. For the latter, see for example section 4 of Chapter 24 of Capital 1.
Producing commodities at such low cost that they can fulfill almost all demand and be sold at a price below that of competitors.
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, vol. 1 (Moscow USSR: Progress Publishers, 1887), 417, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/.
Marx, 1:441.
Marx, 1:444.
Ibid.
Ibid.
One of Marxism’s crucial observations of the contradictions of capitalism is that its reliance on the regenerative effects of these intensifying crises might someday become so acute they cease reproducing the capitalist mode of production, and instead produce revolutions against it.
Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, chap. 10.
Marx, 1:512–13.
Ralph Miliband, “Marx And The State,” Socialist Register 2 (1965); Fred Block, “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule: Notes on the Marxist Theory of the State,” Socialist Revolution 33, no. (May-June) (1977); Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (Verso Books, 2014).
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 1:536.
Marx, 1:535.
What some historian’s call the “fiscal-military state.”
Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 1:536.
Gerald Horne, The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century (NYU Press, 2020), 30–33.
For a review of the continued relevance of Luxemburg’s leading analysis of this relationship, see Éric Toussaint, “Rosa Luxemburg and Debt as an Imperialist Instrument,” Socialist Project – The Bullet (blog), February 1, 2022, https://socialistproject.ca/2022/02/rosa-luxemburg-and-debt-imperialist-instrument/.
The following is informed by the compositional model of ideology: Jennifer Ponce de León and Gabriel Rockhill, “Towards a Compositional Model of Ideology: Materialism, Aesthetics, and Cultural Revolution,” Philosophy Today 64, no. 1 (2020): 95–116.
Secondarily, to invite expansion, refinement and correction of the above.
Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 1:179.
Karl Marx, “Grundrisse,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford University Press, 1857), 363–64, my emphasis.
These examples are moral norms for the purpose of relevancy to the debate at hand and familiarity. Something similar is plausible regarding non-moral norms.
This analogy might best serve deontological normative systems. The reader is trusted to imagine others better serving alternative normative ethical systems, such as consequentialism and virtue-theory.
As the reader will see in the section on ‘Nature’ (pg. ) this account aims to include both human and non-human normative systems. For the latter, the foregoing language regarding human agents and groups can be replaced with natural processes and systems.
Thus the occult imagery Marx invokes to metaphorically represent capital: werewolves, vampires, the conjurations of sorcerers. This imagery is both relatable to Marx’s intended audience and effective in conveying the philosophical insight that capitalism is ontologically distinctive and not reducible to the aggregation of individual human capitalists and their behavior. Capital is an inhuman entity, an institutional-historical social organism with its own metabolism and passions that enthrall and subordinate human activity and interests to itself.
Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, chap. 10,15.
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 326–28.
Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 1:170.
Marx, 1:189.
Marx, 1:181.
That is, through its dominance as a mode of production, undermines articulation-control over the norm.
James Davies, Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis (Atlantic Books, Limited, 2022).
Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2014).
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 1:538.
Here, not so much a direct intervention upon the normative content, but one upon the historical facts which background or condition normative claims.
Morally condemned by Catholic colonial authorities themselves in e.g. A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolomé de las Casas.
Gurminder K. Bhambra, “Colonial Global Economy: Towards a Theoretical Reorientation of Political Economy,” Review of International Political Economy 28, no. 2 (March 4, 2021): 308.
Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 1:538.
No subscription to the slogan “fascism is capitalism in decay” is required here. Fascism is surely its own political beast. Though its growth is always sponsored and facilitated by the right-wing of capital, that sponsorship does not make it loyal and obedient to its benefactors. History has shown that fascism will bite the neck of its would-be masters.
Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, chap. 11.
Thompson, 365.
Karl Marx, “The German Ideology,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford University Press, 1932), 188.
John Naughton, “Longtermism: How Good Intentions and the Rich Created a Dangerous Creed,” The Observer, December 4, 2022, sec. Technology, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/commentisfree/2022/dec/04/longtermism-rich-effective-altruism-tech-dangerous.
Marx was not only a critic of capitalism but also the socialists he saw as inadequate in either their theoretical understanding of capitalism (Proudhon, Lassalle), or the practical importance of the proletarian’s revolutionary agency (Blanqui). See also part Part III of the Communist Manifesto.
Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (NYU Press, 2017); John Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010).
J. Rockström et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461, no. 7263 (2009): 472–75.
In short, the problem is not just that nature is changing but that capital is changing nature in ways and at a pace, it has not been changed before.
Marx, “Grundrisse,” 364.
The determinist trap – suggested in the above quote’s “self-destruction” – of seeing capitalism’s downfall as inscribed into its own internal dynamic and delivered by that alone, must be avoided. Marxism posits not the economic prediction of capitalism’s inevitable downfall, but the dialectical interaction between capital’s contradictory voracity and the proletarian’s revolutionary agency. While Marx may have in this-or-that sentence carelessly suggested so, Marxism does not predict that capitalism will defeat itself, but that capital’s instabilities must be strategically leveraged by a rising proletariat to abolish it.
Reformism itself, and the moralistic non-violence that accompanies it, are ideological constructs of capital: Marcie Smith, “Change Agent: Gene Sharp’s Neoliberal Nonviolence (Part One),” Nonsite.Org (blog), May 10, 2019, https://nonsite.org/change-agent-gene-sharps-neoliberal-nonviolence-part-one/.
The same critique has been taken out of context to falsely claim that Marxism eschews moral matters entirely.
That is, where the proletarian have adequate articulation-control over the communist norms in question.
Where the adequate development of such a morality is taken to be found not in its exposition by a prestigious Marxist scholar, but in and through socialist institutions, historically co-authored in practice by millions of workers the world over. Any positive articulations of Marxist theories of justice – for example – must therefore include not just a statement and argument of what is being fought for, but how it will be shaped and won by the proletariat’s revolutionary self-activity, in and through a revolutionary proletarian democracy. Theories of socialist democracy, participatory economic planning, radical organizational structures, and coalition-building, thus seem to have priority over substantive theories of Marxian morality.
Ponce de León and Rockhill, “Towards a Compositional Model of Ideology,” 15–17.
First, it employs crude-material determinism rather than dialectical materialism. In the latter the relation between the base and superstructure is not one of unidirectional linear causality, but mutually interactive and transformative conditioning. Second, it says nothing about non-human normative systems and thus misses important elements of the metanormative critique. The capitalist mode of production does not, for example, determine the bio-physical processes of the earth-life system, though it does intervene upon and transgress against them.
In this sense, communism promises not the teleologically closed end-point of normative history, but its radically open rebirth.
The insistence by many contributors in the debate on Marx and morality that communism is conceptually committed to a high level of the “development of productive forces” as a pre-condition for the transcendence of scarcity induced antagonistic (i.e. bourgeois) demands of justice, is thus not only incorrect but raises the threat of the betrayal of this second promise. See Lukes, Marxism and Morality, 34; Buchanan, “Marx, Morality, and History,” 126–27.
That is, repairs the metabolic rift between capital and the earth such that the material reproduction of human and non-human life becomes sustainable in the long-term.
Metanormative claims are not made in an attempt to eschew normative analysis and redirect it to positivist or descriptive analysis. The commitments made herein, namely that thresholds should be respected, or that articulation should come from within a community practicing a norm, have substantive normative content.
Gabriel Rockhill, “Critical and Revolutionary Theory: For the Reinvention of Critique in the Age of Ideological Realignment,” in Domination and Emancipation, 2021, 117–61; Gabriel Rockhill, “The CIA & the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism,” The Philosophical Salon (blog), June 27, 2022, https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-the-frankfurt-schools-anti-communism/.
Rahel Jaeggi has outlined a prospectus for a critique of capitalism that similarly departs from those established in the literature cited in footnote 1: “What (If Anything) Is Wrong with Capitalism? Dysfunctionality, Exploitation and Alienation: Three Approaches to the Critique of Capitalism,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 54, no. S1 (2016): 65. Though not conceived as such, the reader can decide whether the metanormative critique is one of the “form-of-life” of capitalism, as Jaeggi calls it.