The backlash was intense. Not only the strike in Memphis but also King’s planned march on Washington with the Poor People’s Campaign was in jeopardy. Nevertheless, King returned to Memphis on April 3 to plan another protest march and to attend the meeting in the Mason Temple at which he gave his last speech. The day after—in the early evening of April 4, 1968—he was shot to death outside his motel room. He was thirty-nine years old.
IV
There is no way to assess all the consequences of King’s death, or to estimate what he could have accomplished. What can be said is that the murder of King belongs to a number of murders of socialist organizers in the 1960s, along with other forms of violent repression that gradually weakened the struggle for freedom. The sanitation workers in Memphis did win their strike, and their labor conditions were improved, but the larger project to which the strike belonged for King (the Poor People’s Campaign) was defeated shortly after his death. The march on Washington took place in May and June 1968, without King but carrying forth his memory, with thousands of poor people setting up a camp called “Resurrection City” in the capital. There were resilient demonstrations and articulated demands, but in June the Washington police tore down Resurrection City, attacking the poor with teargas and batons.
I relate these events because it should never be forgotten that the historical defeats of socialist movements are not merely a matter of having an insufficient analysis or an insufficient strategy. The defeats are also deeply linked to the asymmetry of capitalist power relations and the all too real violence exercised to suppress attempts to organize for the sake of a different vision of society.
As the political-economical framework of the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s gradually shifted toward neoliberal capitalism, the very idea of “freedom” predominantly became part of a right-wing discourse, where the freedom of the market to operate for the sake of profit explicitly took precedence over the freedom of we the people to recognize ourselves—to recognize our commitments—in the institutions we maintain. As I have argued, however, it is not enough to criticize neoliberal forms of capitalism in order to reclaim the idea of freedom for an emancipatory agenda and pursue a commitment to democratic socialism. Rather, we must grasp how the very conception of value under capitalism—how value is produced and measured in a capitalist society—is inimical to the actualization of our freedom, the care for our material conditions, and our lifetime.
We can thus return to the issue with which I began this book and which is arguably the most pressing global issue of our time: climate change. Our ecological crisis is a stark reminder that our lives depend not only on the fragile self-maintenance of our material bodies but also on the fragile material self-maintenance of the global ecosystem to which we belong. Moreover, the insight that our way of life is destroying the ecosystem on which we depend has reanimated questions regarding the viability of “capitalism” even in mainstream political debates. Yet the systematic understanding of capitalism that is needed to grasp the fundamental issues involved is strikingly absent and calls for the revaluation of value that I have articulated.
A telling example is Naomi Klein’s influential book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Klein rightly emphasizes that the problem of climate change cannot primarily be addressed on an individual level but must be understood in terms of the economic system under which we live. Drawing on a wide body of research, Klein shows that our economic priorities—the generation of profit and the “growth” of capital—are the main reasons we are not able to implement the measures that are needed to prevent an ecological disaster. When it comes to organizing for the sake of profit, governments are able to cooperate globally and effectively (as in the creation of the World Trade Organization), but when it comes to organizing for the sake of the ecosystem on which our survival depends there is no such cooperation or efficiency, since it is not profitable. Likewise, when it comes to averting economic crises in the “growth” of capital, we are made to endure sacrifices of our collective social good in the name of “austerity.” In contrast, when it comes to averting ecological crises there are no major government initiatives to restrict our consumption of commodities, since doing so would have a negative impact on the rate of profit. We continue to exploit ever more of our natural resources for the sake of profit, even when it is clear that doing so is destroying our own environmental conditions. Moreover, as Klein reminds us, we know all too well how our current economic system “will deal with the reality of serial climate-related disasters: with profiteering, and escalating barbarism to segregate the losers from the winners.”92
The large-scale questions raised by the problem of climate change should therefore be understood as “a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message—spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions—telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet.”93 Rising to the challenges posed by climate change will require “reinventing the very idea of the collective, the communal, the commons, the civil, and the civic,”94 which is why we must engage politically with the question of what “we collectively value more than economic growth and corporate profits.”95 As Klein repeatedly emphasizes, “we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate.”96
Despite her calls for a fundamental economic transformation, however, Klein never interrogates the production of wealth under capitalism and the measure of value that informs it. Her subtitle identifies capitalism as the root of the problem, but there is no definition of capitalism in Klein’s book. When she defines what she means, it turns out that she is not talking about capitalism as an economic system but merely about what she calls “deregulated capitalism” (i.e., neoliberalism), the evils of which she blames on “an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.”97 To be sure, the corporate stranglehold over our political economy is pernicious and in need of urgent critique, but to treat it as the cause of the structural contradictions of capitalism is to deprive ourselves of the ability to understand the economic system of which we are a part. That we prioritize profit is not reducible to the manipulations of a corporate elite, since the priority of profit is built into how we measure our social wealth from the beginning. For the same reason, that we collectively value the “growth” of capital as the final purpose of our economy is not reducible to the reigning ideology of neoliberal capitalism. Rather, the purpose of our economy is beyond democratic deliberation under any form of capitalism, since the defining purpose of capital accumulation is built into how we produce our social wealth in the first place. Moreover, as I have shown in depth, the capitalist measure of value is inimical to the production of real social wealth, since it valorizes socially necessary labor time rather than socially available free time, requires unemployment as a structural feature, and has an inherent tendency toward destructive crises.
For Klein, all these features of the capitalist mode of production are out of view, since she assumes that the decisive issue is the distribution rather than the production of wealth. As she approvingly quotes Frantz Fanon: “What matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth.”98 Klein—like Fanon—thereby falls short of an analysis and critique of capitalism. To criticize the given distribution of capital wealth—and advocate for its redistribution—is not a critique of capitalism.
The shortcoming here is not particular to Klein but characteristic—as we saw in chapter 6—of much of contemporary left-wing thinking. It does not make sense to argue that the problem is capitalism and at the same time argue that the solution is the redistribution of capital wealth. Yet this argument is routinely made on the Left today. The form of the argument is a contradiction in terms: it asserts that the problem is capitalism and that the solu
tion is capitalism. The contradictory form of the argument is covered over by a sleight of hand, whereby capitalism is tacitly defined as neoliberalism and redistribution is tacitly defined as an alternative to capitalism. These conflations are persistently made but never justified. Inequality, exploitation, and commodification are regularly denounced, but their relation to the capitalist mode of production is not taken into account and the critical injunction is reduced to calls for redistribution. Redistributive reforms can certainly be a helpful means for political change under capitalism. But even in order to understand the substantial challenges that our redistributive reforms will encounter—and to conceive our political strategies in relation to those challenges—we need to grasp the contradictions that are inherent in the capitalist production of wealth. Moreover, if we are committed to overcoming the economic injustice of capitalism, then redistribution cannot be our end. Inequality, exploitation, and commodification cannot even in principle be overcome through the redistribution of capital wealth, since the wealth itself is produced by unequal relations of production, exploitation, and commodification.
What we are missing, then, are not indictments of capitalism, but a rigorous definition and analysis of capitalism, as well as the principles for an economic form of life beyond capitalism (the principles of democratic socialism). This is what I have provided.
Hence, let me rehearse what I demonstrated in systematic detail in chapter 5: there is only one fundamental definition of capitalism. Capitalism is a historical form of life in which wage labor is the foundation of social wealth. We live in a global capitalist world because all of us depend for our survival on the social wealth generated by wage labor. In order to generate wealth through the social form of the wage relation, we must exploit labor time and consume commodities that are made for profit. The production of all our goods and services is mediated by the social form of wage labor, since even how much free time we have to produce goods or services for nonprofit depends on the wage we receive or the capital we have. Moreover, the production of the capital wealth that is distributed in the form of wages requires that there is a “growth” of value in the economy, which is possible only if we continue to exploit and commodify our lives for the sake of profit. Under capitalism our collective spiritual cause—that for the sake of which we labor—is profit. This is why a falling rate of profit shows up as a form of “crisis” for us and why we have to take measures to generate new possibilities of profiteering. That our spiritual cause under capitalism is profit is not reducible to an ideological worldview, a conscious belief, or a psychological disposition. Profit is our spiritual cause not because of what we have to think but because of what we have to do under capitalism. We cannot maintain ourselves—cannot reproduce our lives—without the surplus value that is transformed into profit and accumulated in the form of capital that is distributed as wealth. The more we exploit and commodify our lives as well as our environment, the more wealth we have to distribute; the less we exploit and commodify our lives as well as our environment, the less wealth we have to distribute.
Let me emphasize here that capitalism is a historical form of life and that profit is a spiritual cause of what we do, rather than a natural cause. The point is that capitalism does not reflect an original state of nature and does not finally determine who we can be. As living beings, we seek self-satisfaction—and there is nothing degrading about being alive, nothing sinful about seeking self-satisfaction—but since we are spiritually living beings it is not naturally given what counts as self-satisfaction for us.
Crucially, what counts as self-satisfaction for us depends on the spiritual causes that determine what matters in our society and move us to act. If our spiritual cause is profit, then fulfilling the demands of the practical identities that serve the purpose of profit (e.g., being a ruthless capitalist) will count as satisfying, even if it requires that we ignore the consequences of our actions for others and for the environment. Moreover, if our collective spiritual cause is profit, all of us will tend to understand ourselves as individuals who have no intrinsic motivation to care for the common good, since we cannot see ourselves in the collective purpose of our society. Indeed, no one can see herself in the purpose of profit, since it treats our lives as means rather than as ends in themselves. This is why capitalism is an inherently alienating form of social life.
Since profit is our collective spiritual cause under capitalism, which determines how we materially reproduce our lives, we cannot overcome its power through mere individual will or a change of the official worldview of our society. Rather, we must practically transform how we sustain our lives all the way down to the production of the social goods that we need. The means of production must be collectively owned and employed for the sake of the democratically determined common good, rather than privately owned and employed for the sake of profit.
The principle of collective ownership specifies the material condition of possibility for the other two principles of democratic socialism: the measure of wealth in terms of socially available free time and the pursuit of labor from each according to her ability, to each according to her need. As long as the means of production are privately owned, we can generate wealth only by converting the surplus time of our lives into surplus value. The increase of free time in our society thanks to improved technologies of nonliving production is not worth anything in itself under capitalism, since value can be generated only through the exploitation of living labor time. We cannot affirm the general reduction of socially necessary labor time as intrinsically valuable, but must find new ways of exploiting the time of our lives and commodifying the products of our labor.
If we own the means of production collectively, by contrast, we can pursue technological development for the sake of producing social goods for all of us and increasing the socially available free time for each one of us. We can employ nonliving production capacities for the sake of our emancipation—giving ourselves time to lead our lives—rather than for the sake of exploiting our lifetime. We can thus acknowledge in practice that socially available free time is the positive measure of value that renders intelligible socially necessary labor time as the negative measure of value. We can generate wealth by decreasing the socially necessary labor time for all, converting the surplus time of our lives into socially available free time.
By the same token, we can give ourselves time to engage democratically with the question of what it means to be devoted to the common good: from each of us according to our ability, to each of us according to our need. The cultivation of socially available free time requires evolving democratic institutions of education, material organization of labor, political deliberation, artistic creation, physical recreation, and so on. By participating in these institutional forms of life, we can engage the questions of what should count as our abilities and what should count as our needs. We can discover our individual abilities through activities of teaching, learning, and leisure, as well as come to understand our collective needs by sharing the socially necessary forms of labor.
We are thus given time to explore what we are capable of and what we value. We can actively negotiate which activities we take to be necessary and which activities we take to be expressions of our freedom, which pursuits we identify with as ends in themselves and which social roles we are committed to as our practical identities. Neither the practical identities through which we pursue our abilities nor the social conditions that shape our needs are given once and for all. We participate in institutional life on the basis of our commitments and are therefore also part of the possible transformation of our institutions. The point of democratic socialism is not to impose a general consensus regarding what matters, but to sustain a form of life that makes it possible for us to own the question of what is worth doing with our lives—what we value individually as well as collectively—as an irreducible question of our lives.
For the same reason, democratic socialis
m does not presume that we will all magically cooperate without antagonisms and that we will be absolved from the fragility of social bonds. The question of how we should live together will always be at issue and run the risk of breaking apart what binds us together. The point is not to have a society that secures that we cooperate in mutual recognition of the freedom of one another. To secure mutual recognition is neither possible nor desirable, since such security would eliminate our freedom. The point is rather to have a society that enables our cooperation in mutual recognition of the freedom of one another. Nothing can secure the actual exercise of mutual recognition, but mutual recognition can be enabled or disabled depending on the principles to which we strive to hold ourselves, depending on the spiritual cause that moves our actions in social space and time. For our mutual recognition to be enabled rather than disabled, the purposive principles of our society must be possible to grasp in practice as being for the sake of both the common good and our individual ability to lead a life. To be emancipated rather than alienated we must be able to see ourselves—to recognize our own commitment to social freedom—in the purposive principles of our society. These principles must do justice to the inseparability of our material and spiritual life, to how economic questions of priority are at the heart of our exercise of freedom both individually and collectively. The principles of democratic socialism designate what those principles of a free society must be.
Under democratic socialism, then, we will be able to own the responsibility of being the source of the authority of our norms. We will acknowledge that the norms to which we hold ourselves are prescribed neither by God nor by Nature, but that we are answerable to one another for the commitments we espouse and the actions we undertake.
This Life Page 44