I was pleased to see a very well-written letter recently published by Cosmonaut critiquing my previous remarks on degrowth. I do believe it displayed a perfect understanding of my position; however, the position it takes, against “mute compulsion”, for a multi-criterial standard of economic activity, and against the existing bourgeois economic categories, is what is perhaps less well understood, if only because the left at large has trumpeted these positions without fully thinking through their implications.

First, I would like to make a defense of the necessity of operationalizing bourgeois categories to understand socialism. Not only is this how Marx began, famously, but we are stubbornly stuck in a world, a material world, where everything is named in bourgeois terms. The means of production, labor, the means of consumption, these things, all of which would exist in a new form under socialism, can only be referred to today, investigated today, with the categories developed by bourgeois political economy, with exceptions of more direct measurement vanishingly rare. It is therefore necessary when imagining the possibility of socialism to translate this vision into bourgeois terms in order to speak of how this vision relates to material reality. We are, after all, living in bourgeois society, and it is only through this act of translation that transforms the language of the future, which does not yet exist, into the language of the present that we may actually begin to articulate anything.

The bourgeois economists who invented GDP and GDI (Gross Domestic Income) in the 1920s and 30s were no slouches; no comprehensive sets of economic statistics existed at the time, and no one knew even what the nominal income of a country was, much less its real income. The wage bill, the level of investment, the total hours worked; no data series for these existed for any serious length of time. When we read Capital, we’re confronted with a series of statistics painfully stitched together from a hundred different sources and which provide only a handful of datapoints each. What Marx would have given to have the wealth of information that we have today is impossible to say, perhaps one of his arms or legs. We as Marxists owe a great debt to the bourgeois economists who created these categories and data. Kalecki, the Marxist economist par excellence, achieved perhaps the greatest intellectual achievement in economics for his time in establishing his profit equations, which were nothing more nor less than translating the language of Marx’s reproduction scheme into that of GDI and GDP. Without this Rosetta Stone, we would remain terribly lost within the extremes of pure bourgeois ideology and utopian speculation.

To do this translation is not, however, to “treat any revolution in production as a matter of quantity rather than quality.” Marx’s intervention in Capital was not merely to outline how socialism was an immanent outcome of capitalism’s development. It must be read politically, strategically, as an attack on the bourgeoisie. If you pay close attention, it is not the logic of capital that destroys itself; it is the logic of capital that destroys the capitalist class, which merely gives the opportunity to the proletariat and the socialists to destroy the logic of capital. It is the Marxist political strategy that, when the logic of capital acts against the interests of capitalists, always takes the side of the logic of capital. The reason why is simple, in capitalist politics it is specifically the bourgeoisie, and in modern times the petty bourgeoisie as well, who are the chief foundations of the political order. The historical merger of the socialists with the working class has its goal in political victory, and its chief antagonists, just as its chief protagonists, are political actors, concrete individual subjects.

This is why it should not be the case that “our attitude about capitalist standards of productivity should be apathy, if not loathing”. The development of the productive forces decreasing capitalist consumption via falling profit rates means a smaller capitalist class, as the author is well aware. The reason this doesn’t matter is allegedly because taking the side of the logic of capital against the capitalist class is “to do Capital’s own bidding.” It’s here that it is worth examining this question of “Capital’s own bidding” and “mute compulsion”, the latter of which has become something of a boogeyman for the left and which was the title of the much acclaimed book by academic Marxist Søren Mau. In his book, Mau doesn't take up the practical question of what the implications of the power of mute compulsion being applied to the capitalist class are, even if he is the first to say they do indeed feel it. To do so would make some quite awkward pronouncements.

But let us also examine this concept of mute compulsion and translate it into practical, even if bourgeois, terms to see how it is expressed in reality. Mute compulsion is the power of market forces over people; it can be felt acutely whenever rising government spending raises bond interest rates or rising gas prices force people to drive less, or even in the basic economic fact of capitalism, that people must work for a wage, as money is the only thing that gives them access to the basic subsistence goods. The problem with Mau’s simple power analysis of these dynamics is that it can obscure the real question of resource distribution. When the American liberal left, taking inspiration from MMT academics, raised the banner of deficit spending as the basis of its political program and decried the disciplining force of international markets, what is conveniently left out is that the extremely high dual deficits (government and trade) mean that Americans are borrowing money in order to command the labor of the rest of the world. The risk of capital flight is first and foremost the risk of interdependency faced by the American economy, which has been acutely exposed by the various supply chain crises of the past 6 years. That same interdependency is why Americans have no choice but to suffer higher energy costs, even if a socialist government were to introduce rationing; indeed, socialists would probably introduce not so mute compulsion in this regard. And lastly, for the individual compelled by market forces to work in wage labor, this is due to their mutual interdependency with the rest of society for every single consumption good, as any good Marxist can tell you, it was only once the peasants were enclosed and kicked off their land, which previously provided them with subsistence, that they sought out wage labor. This should make it obvious now that the choice we are faced with regarding mute compulsion is not discipline by market versus no discipline, it’s discipline by our dependency on others versus self-discipline and self-reliance.

What makes the capitalist class unique as a ruling class is that they too are enmeshed in this web of interdependence, from the Mesopotamian patriarchs, Roman senatorial class, to the feudal lords, the ruling class in times of old has directly commanded vast armies of labor over the swatches of land they owned in order to meet their own needs. They were dependent on the lower-class labor, to be sure, but the reproduction of their class position rested merely on reproducing this internal authority and economy. They largely did not know mute compulsion. Only the capitalist class must also buy their food and finery on the market, and therefore, only the capitalist class sees their existential fate in their ability to sell things to others. For partisans of capitalism, such as the Austrian economists, this is the great progressive force of capitalists as a class, as it means that they must provision general human needs to reproduce themselves, no matter the obvious parasitism, corruption, violent repression, and human baseness it involves. But this interdependency can also be weaponized against the capitalists. Other than the obvious issue of strikes and labor organizing, the falling rate of profit via the development of the productive forces is one other such method of weaponization.

Now we come to the issue of the post-capitalist economy and how this relates to bourgeois categories. In general, I am opposed to so-called “tests of communism” which simply compare the value form at its most abstract to any proposal or situation and reject any resemblance. Certainly, some people have pointed to “multi-criterial” economic planning as the major point of contrast here. Perhaps such standards will exist in the future, although I frankly tend to doubt it due to the complexity they add to basic economic activities, and they certainly are not necessary for democratic control of the economy. The same effect can be achieved with a single unit of account via certain quotas, budget restrictions on natural resources, and regulations regarding permissible production techniques. The bigger issue, however, is the question of growth and “real GDP.” The main critique of the letter, as was mentioned earlier, was this use of bourgeois categories, which allegedly undermines the project of actually breaking from capitalism. Unfortunately, this is an idealist critique in my opinion. What will be necessary to break from capitalism is a grand productive output, of guns and tanks and bombs and watts and joules and corn and flour and beans and transistors and wires and wood and rare earths and steel and cotton and polyester and blinding heat and frigid cold. Who can deny, with the events of the past few years, or the past few months, that political power really does grow out of a supply chain, whether the threat to use it or the threat to destroy it?

Perhaps this does not translate perfectly into predictions about real growth rates, as these are affected by many things, but this question about the development of the productive forces cannot be neglected. Besides destroying the capitalist class, it is absolutely necessary in order for socialism to truly be the meta-stable social form. While policies which promote self reliance may be necessary, it will be nearly impossible for a polity to totally lack some level of interdependence, and in such a situation, where relationships are always necessarily relative rather than absolute regardless of whether there is a market or not, developing the productive forces is the only way to ensure a given polity doesn’t cease to be interdependent and becomes merely dependent. And the development of the productive forces, all else being equal, will mean an increase in real growth. As American defense contractors like to apocryphally quote Stalin, “quantity has a quality all its own.” A certain quantity of output is necessary to fight and to win, to satisfy people's wants and ambitions, and to transform energy infrastructure. The stakes of the 21st century are winner takes all, and to win is an exercise not in identifying the correct vocabulary, but in identifying material necessity.