Conclusion

It is of course fitting for a long book to have a short conclusion. The book commenced with a definition of what capital in its most fundamental incarnation is and an elaboration upon how an upside down reified society, marked by economic relations among things, manages to reproduce the economic life of a human society as a by-product of its chrematistic of value augmentation. This definition and explanation of the peculiar modalities of operation of capital acts as a touchstone for all determinations about the existence, transmutation or perduring of capitalism in history. The subsequent analysis of the transmutations of capital across its stages of development captured the limits to the transformability of capital and also demonstrated that at no point in history was the suzerainty of capital and its innate push to marketize human material intercourse ever a fait accompli. Nor is the history of capitalist development prefigured by the inner logic of capital. Both the use value space confronting value augmentation and the institutional edifices which supported capital were all historically contingent. And for capital to manage accumulation in a world historic stage of capitalism required the surmounting by capital of the contingently given use value recalcitrance to value augmentation accompanied by sweeping political and socioeconomic change; such reverberating from the very organization of capitalist business and structure of accumulation (in both national and international dimensions) through to the state and other elements of the superstructure. Historical analysis of capitalism also displays that the periods of transition between the capitalist stages of liberalism and imperialism and imperialism and consumerism were punctuated by depression, devastation of war and extensive human suffering. Our survey of trends originating in the waning years of the capitalist stage of consumerism and accelerating in the twenty-first century point to an ever grimmer future of perpetual war, ecological destruction, social decay, unprecedented global poverty, and the list goes on. Mass publics, including the industrial proletariat and other working people that made the greatest sacrifices in the tumultuous periods of transition between capitalist stages were animated by the promise of a better world. Though the precise wording of these promises changed they were all rooted in a basic trope, that of the “freedom” from extra-economic compulsion and interpersonal relations of domination and subordination offered by capitalism as an historical

society. While it was the case that Soviet experiments provided extensive social welfare benefits to their populaces, exceeding those found in even some of the wealthier capitalist economies, the model never attracted large followings in advanced OECD states in the post-WWII period because of its regression to precapitalist extra-economic forms of compulsion; these over which capitalism represented an historical advance. In the late feudal era, as the acid of markets was in process of dissolving the social and economic relations of that mode of production, the ideology of the Divine Right of Kings that naturalized the feudal order was propounded in an ever more strident fashion. Today, humanity finds itself at a similar juncture: With the chant of neoliberal ideology becoming increasingly shrill, and Nobel Prizes showered on its leading figures, the signature works of which not only extol the benefits of “markets” (to be read as capitalism) but seek to naturalize capitalism, “the market” was already an elaborate façade behind which governments and the powerful “private” economic organizations that colluded with them were organizing economic life according to a non-market, extra-capitalist system of power. At bottom here, and at the root of the world economic tendencies dubbed globalization, has been the US predicament of maintaining global hegemony which required it to become a global economy, dependent upon the world for the goods its population consumes, the money its government spends and the investments its “private” institutions make. While the predicament faced by the US was symptomatic of the demise of the capitalist stage of consumerism, the final stage of capitalism, the forces unleashed under the ideological banner of neoliberalism accelerated the world historic transition away from capitalism underway in the US and other states invaded by neoliberal pathologies. With untold depravities facing humanity, mass publics, including the shrinking industrial proletariat and other working people whether in formal or informal and vulnerable forms of employment, along with a swelling surplus humanity swarming into global slums, are being told that there is no alternative to world economic austerity which, like the natural force of a tsunami, has crashed on their shores beyond human control. The sorts of promises that went along with the 1930s Depression punctuating the intervening years between the demise of imperialism and rise of the stage of consumerism now abound from political leaders; that, as in the previous tumult, there exist seeds for a renewal of socalled capitalist freedom where material compulsions are, paradigmatically at least, solely commodity economic, abstract and impersonal. Again, while there was never any certainty that capital would reemerge from the ashes of WWII, it did, and the capitalist stage of consumerism, in which value augmentation proceeded with management by capital and an extensive superstructure matrix of a use value cluster of consumer durables, was the result. But the trajectory of globalization as we have seen has progressively unraveled what specifically capitalist substance marked the stage of consumerism. This unraveling under the auspices of neoliberal doctrines, as we have noted, is most evident in its impact upon the commodification of labor power. Remember, the fundamental metabolic interchange between human beings and nature, the labor and production

process (without which, human society would be impossible), is predicated in capitalist society upon labor power as a commodity. Without that there exists no central principle by which capital is able to meet the test of material economic reproducibility demanded of any historical society. Marxist studies often lost sight of a key maxim of Marx’s writings, that capitalism is a historically delimited order. Capitalism comes into being at a given level of development of human material wants and productive technique and, whether or not the march of value is cut short by class struggle and revolution, capitalism, like other modes of economy, is destined to pass from history as its ability to manage human material reproductive affairs is exhausted. Our analysis has demonstrated that capitalism, as a production centered society with its society-wide systems of self-regulating markets and their matrix of superstructure support attuned to managing production of standardized mass produced use values, has reached that point of historical exhaustion as there simply does not exist another use value cluster on the horizon amenable to capitalist modes of production, and that could spark a further golden age of accumulation. The array of neoliberal economic pathologies we have cited, all of which spawned under the aegis of what is in common parlance referred to as globalization, from the global disarticulation of production and Wal-Mart-ization or third-world-ization of work through to the bloating ocean of idle M′ funds and the financialization driven retreat of capital to the interstices of the world, have produced a monstrous misallocation of global social resources. The torched “national” economic skeletons that the post-WWII economic rebuilding was confronted with offered a better platform for a future than the scorched earth bequeathed by globalization. This was especially the case for the Third World. In fact, the term “global economy” if applied to the current neoliberalism engendered morass, where the intended use of the term economy is that of its substantive meaning of material reproductive modalities able to support human life, is an oxymoron. Therefore, under conditions of the current world economic trajectory, there is no longer any basis for making promises for a livable human future. We have referred to the potential future progressive, redistributive, ecosustainable, material economically reproducible society (marked by selfmotivation as its paradigmatic form of material compulsion) as socialism. But the name is not important here. What is important for us to recognize is the sort of dislocation and collective effort that building the new progressive society will involve pales in comparison with what is in store for humanity if we remain inactive on the transformatory front.