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What does it mean to be a left wing economist today? |
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Page 10 of 38
Thus the same schematic description of a capitalist economy that Marx used in an attempt to show that capitalism is unstable and must some day come to an end can be used to argue that capitalism will always stabilize itself and will never come to an end.
Rosa Luxemburg contributed to the Marxist tradition her own ideas concerning what capitalism does to defend itself from its own instability. She also had her own theory about why capitalism must come to an end. For Luxemburg, writing in 1913, there is no possible way to sell the products of capitalist mass production industry within the confines of the narrow market made up by the capitalist owners and the workers employed by them. The workers can only spend their wages, which by definition have a value lower than the value of the commodities they produce. They cannot possibly buy all their own products. The owners cannot buy all the remaining unsold consumer products because, for reasons Luxemburg argues in detail, they must keep plowing back some of their incomes into new investments. The new investments only make capitalism more unstable than it already was, because they result in even more productive powers producing even more consumer goods that it is even harder to sell. According to Luxemburg, the only possible way for capitalism to exist is by continually expanding its markets by seeking buyers in those parts of the earth that are not yet capitalist. Capitalism can only exist in a world where there are still non-capitalist markets to conquer. She supplements her logical analysis of capitalism’s requirements with an account of its history, which shows that as a matter of fact capitalism has been imperialist, colonialist, militarist, and racist. Her theory does not require that capitalism always be all of these things, but it does predict that a capitalist society is likely to be one or more of them at any given point in time. Without selling its products to non-capitalist peoples in some way or another it cannot continue. Luxemburg gives many historical details concerning how European powers forced the Chinese, the Africans, the Hindus, the Egyptians and other peoples to participate in the kinds of commercial relationships that European capitalism required. She also gives an account of the internal transformation of the United States during the 19th century from a mainly natural economy of self-reliant farmers to a nation of employees dependent on capital for employment. But when the capitalist system has taken over all the earth and all its peoples, then there will be no natural economies left. The system will have to end because it can only exist by modernizing natural economies. At some point in time there will be none left to modernize. Fredric Jameson in the 1990s added another twist. Even when capitalism has brought every square inch of the planet into its marketplace, it still has yet another frontier to conquer. The new frontier is the unconscious mind. Jameson interprets contemporary culture as the commodification of the unconscious mind. Capitalism creates markets where none previously existed by turning every deep need of the human psyche into a need to buy something. Hardt and Negri in their recent book Empire, give Luxemburg’s ideas yet another twist. It is not enough to make the entire world a market. It is also necessary to make all the world’s peoples into a proletariat, so that they can be exploited both as consumers and as wage laborers.
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