Peter Frase

A persistent debate in Marxist circles revolves around the concept of the "mode of production". Marx's own work, of course, was given over to discovering and theorizing the capitalist mode of production: a form of society in which the selling of wage labor and the accumulation of capital are the central organizing principles. But Marx's writing sometimes suggests that one can develop an entire theory of history around the notion that the countours of a society--its ideas, its institutions, its politics, and so on--can be derived from an understanding of that society's particular mode of production:

This conception of history depends on our ability to expound the real process of production, starting out from the material production of life itself, and to comprehend the form of intercourse connected with this and created by this mode of production (i.e. civil society in its various stages), as the basis of all history. (The German Ideology)

This is sometimes referred to as the model in which an economic "base" determines the cultural "superstructure". Thus there can be not only a capitalist mode of production, but others--primitive communist, feudal, socialist, and perhaps, one day, communist modes of production. This in turn leads to the "stagist" conception of history, in which one mode of production necessarily follows another, in a teleological progression from primitive tribalism to communism.

But even if you don't accept stagism, the very notion of noncapitalist modes of production brings with it a number of difficulties. When you start to look at the diversity of noncapitalist societies, it becomes less and less evident that a particular way of organizing production predicts a particular way of organizing social life. A great diversity of forms seems possible. What's more, the very idea of separating the economy from the cultural superstructure is analytically difficult when you're not considering capitalism, the one type of society which is premised on making that very separation: people in a hunter-gatherer society don't necessarily conceive of a separate entity called "the economy"; production is just a part of life in general, regulated by cultural codes and rules.

All of this quickly becomes apparent when one consults the record of Marxist attempts to understand noncapitalist societies. Marx's own speculations along these lines haven't held up all that well. Engels' work on primitive societies was later refuted by anthropologists. Karl Wittfogel's notorious conception of an "Asiatic Mode of Production" would have to be mentioned here, of course. Anthropologists like Maurice Godelier and Eric Wolf came to grief over the matter of mode of production, and when some in the Althusserian tradition tried their hand, they fared no better. In the extreme case of Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst, the manifest shortcomings of a theory of history based on the mode of production led to the repudiation of Marxism, and to the production of one of the most reviled and ridiculed [PDF] books of the whole 1970s period of left theorizing.

What to do, then? It seems to me that the correct solution to this problem is the one proposed by the anthropologist Talal Asad, in a review of a book by the aforementioned Eric Wolf. The review rehearses a familiar Marxist distinction between different ways of extracting a surplus from a dominated population: through force (as is the case in feudalism, for example) or through voluntary exchange (as is characteristic of capitalism). After discussing some of the limitations of this view, and of Wolf's project in general, Asad says the following:

This, I suggest, expresses very well where the trouble lies. We can surely accept that noncapitalist social relations in production, as in other areas of life, are more personal, and that reciprocal obligations across wide bodies and networks of kin are more common, than they are in capitalist societies. But there is no key to the secret of noncapitalist societies. It is only when we assume that such societies are determined by some single principle, or integrated into a determinate totality, that we look for the key that will explain them. But there is no good reason to assume that such is the case, and indeed the thrust of Wolf's entire narrative throws doubt on that assumption. Only in capitalist societies, based as they are on production for profit, on the drive for unceasing growth, on the penetration of money-values into various spheres of life, and on the continuous transformation of productive forces, is there something approaching 'a key' to its understanding. This is not to say that capitalist societies are integrated totalities, autonomous and homogeneous, without contradictions and without heterogeneous cultural spaces, because that they clearly are not. It is merely to argue that, if the concept of mode of production has any explanatory use, it is in relation to capitalism, and not in relation to 'kin-ordered' societies.

"There is no key to the secret of noncapitalist societies." This is a deep point, because it implies that the whole project of generalizing Marxist concepts to noncapitalist situations is misbegotten. Asad's argument amounts, in fact, to what I would consider the key procedure which Marxism uses to assimilate non-Marxist arguments: the historical circumscription of categories. In the same way that Marx argues that, say, "value" is a category specific to the capitalist economy, Asad argues that "mode of production" is meaningful only in relation to capitalist societies. If we carry his argument just a bit further, we can turn it into a historical contextualization of Marxism itself, which is now taken to be a theory of capitalism rather than of history tout court. It follows that the passing of capitalism would make Marxism obsolete: the residents of a communist future would have no more need for Marxism than we have for medieval scholastic philosophy.

The question of thought's historical grounding also relates back to a philosophical debate about Marx's relationship to Hegel, and in particular to Hegel's concept of "totality". On this latter point, the best treatment is given by Moishe Postone, who performs the historical circumscription gambit on Hegel, showing that the totality can only be the capitalist one (and that communism therefore is not a totality), and that Hegel's Geist is in fact capital itself. Though he does not stage the critique in these terms, it seems that Asad holds, as does Postone, that the category of totality must itself be historicized, so that we come to see it as something specific to capitalism. Thus are all the attempts at a "Marxist" theory of noncapitalist societies swept away--Asiatic mode of production, Hindess and Hirst, Gibson-Graham, and all the rest. They are mis-specified, irrelevant, "not even wrong" as Wolfgang Pauli once cruelly dismissed the work of a yo
ung physicist.

This line of argument has, perhaps, a somewhat tendentious claim on the handle "Marxism". It certainly entails rejecting, e.g., the Marx of The German Ideology whom I quoted above. One can call it whatever one likes, of course, but I would still defend the term "Marxism" on the grounds that one can distill a consistent and powerful theoretical system from Marx's thought without relying on a general "theory of history" based on modes of production.

All of this comes down to an extended riff on a maxim of Fredric Jameson: "always historicize!" One might object that this slogan is, itself, a transhistorical generalization--that the imperative cannot be applied to itself. I suppose that the historicizing imperative itself could be regarded as the one and only transhistorical postulate of Marxism. More paradoxically, however, I might suggest that "always historicize" is itself historically contingent, and that it may well be valid for people in noncapitalist societies to think in terms of transhistorical categories.

In any event, I do believe that contra, say, G.A. Cohen, we can rid ourselves once and for all of the conception of Marx's "theory of history". This conclusion is, to my mind, profoundly liberating, and not merely because it frees us from a long series of insular debates and intractable false problems. Limiting the historical reach of the mode of production's totalizing and determing force means, above all, that we can accept Marx's thought without acquiescing to any kind of economic determinism. This allows us once again to envision the post-capitalist future as a realm of freedom, and not just another iron cage.

And we now have the definitive riposte to all those post-modernists who would damn Marxism for its sins of essentialism, determinism, and teleology, and who would counsel us to abandon our master narratives and transcendental signifieds. To this we can now respond that what they perceive as an error in thought is in fact the defect of that reality which must be overturned; it is not a philosophical, but a political question, in other words. To put it another way: the demand to give up master narratives is the demand to give up a condition which imposes a master narrative.

Michael Moore's “SiCKO” is, in certain respects, a perfect political movie. One film isn't going give us single-payer universal health care in this country, but this one might just move us a little closer to it. In its portrayal of a perverse health care system that places profits before patients, “SiCKO” manages to do the two things that any effective piece of agitprop must.

The first, of course, is to inspire outrage. And there is plenty of outrage to be had. The guy who had to decide which finger he could afford to get reattached; the old folks living in their daughter's storage room because they sold the house to pay medical bills; the woman whose daughter died because the hospital refused to treat her. At various points in the movie, I was teary-eyed with rage.

But it's not enough to just upset people. This is a common mistake made by leftists—middle class white ones especially. They think that people will rise up if they find out how much they are being screwed. But it turns out that many people are perfectly aware that they are being screwed; they just don't think there's anything they can do about it. So after you get people riled up, it's vitally important that you show them how things could be different.

And that's where SiCKO really shines. Health care was really a brilliant choice of subject. Not just because, as many reviewers have pointed out, insurance companies make an excellent villain. The genius of it is that when it comes to our awful health care system, things not only can be better, they are better in every other rich country in the world. The strongest part of the movie was the parts talking about the Canadian, British, and French systems, which guarantee free health care to everyone. It really is that simple—just rip off the French!

Maybe that's why Moore's message is finding such a receptive audience. Even Oprah waxed social democratic after seeing it. Boing Boing (via TPM Café) reports that even in Texas, the movie can inspire spontaneous organizing. Meanwhile, the movie has apparently scared the crap out of the health insurance industry. And on right-wing TV, they’re reduced to arguing that universal healthcare causes terrorism. Unfortunately, SiCKO has not yet inspired any of the leading Democratic candidates to come out in favor of true single-payer universal coverage instead of some partial compromise position (Dennis Kucinich does support single payer Medicare-for-all, however).

It's also worth noting that this movie is about a lot more than health care. Some of the more perceptive critics have noticed that Moore is just using health care as an entry point to a much broader social democratic vision. He wants to promote a vision of the country in which people look out for each other—and the government looks out for them—rather than our current ethos of ultra-individualism. That's why Matt Yglesias—who is no socialist—suggests that the reaction to the movie is a sign of the “anti-capitalist folk instincts” of many Americans. “The crux of the matter”, he argues, “is that ordinary people think that if there's a sick person, and you're in a position to help the sick person, that you ought to help the sick person. This is what us socialists might call the principle of solidarity.

Is this right? Do Americans have “anti-capitalist folk instincts”? And if so, how do we tap into them and direct them toward political action?

We live at a time when advances in technology make possible an easing of the burden of work by a reduction in working hours, and a tremendous expansion of human freedom. A moribund capitalism prevents us from realizing this potential, by turning productivity into profit instead of free time, and by trapping the creative potential of human knowledge in the form of private monopolies enforced by the state. Two pieces of data illustrate this point.

The first is this graph, which comes from a report of the President's Council of Economic Advisors (PDF):

Forget what you heard about outsourcing. The manufacturing sector in the U.S. produces eleven times as much as it did in the 1940's, but employs a far lower percentage of the population than it once did. All that increased productivity could be turned into reduced hours for all; instead it is turned into profits for a few, unemployment and uncertainty for many.

The second datum comes from a remarkable study that was reported today. An analyst at a private firm looked at American companies in order to determine where their value came from:

Cardoza said his research showed that tangible assets, like plants, equipment and inventory, represented four-fifths of the market value of U.S. companies 30 years ago. The other fifth came from intangible assets like brand name, reputation and other factors. Now, he said, the ratio has flipped, and intangibles, which he valued by subtracting tangible assets from a company's total market value, make up four-fifths of the pie, with the largest slice made up of patents, copyrighted material and other forms of intellectual property.

In other words, state-granted monopolies over knowledge, rather than the production of commodities, are now the basis of American capitalism. The money that accrues to the holders of these monopolies is what, in the economic tradition, is known as a rent. Unproductive extraction of rent was something that was associated with the landowning nobility during the transition to capitalism, and bourgeois thinkers raged against it. Now the capitalist class is the unproductive, rentier class. But who will overthrow them?

To get a sense of the case against patent and copyright law--from both a left and right perspective--see this fascinating blog, where I first spotted the link to this article.

Critics of neoliberalism, from right and left, have often remarked on the nonsensical quality of Gross Domestic Product as a measure of societal wealth. Since GDP measures everything which is paid for on the market, it cannot distinguish between positive and negative forms of economic activity. A cure for cancer becomes equivalent to cleaning up an oil spill, so long as both cost money. On the other hand, helping your neighbor carry her groceries up the stairs has no economic value, while the production of cigarettes and the treatment of lung cancer become major sources of "wealth".

This critique is really two critiques, however, one of which has some radical implications. Merely pointing out that GDP valorizes things like environmental destruction and weaponry as forms of wealth leads to a tame (if salutary) reformism: such "public bads" should be taken off the books, or counted negatively against those good things which are produced for sale in the market. All this amounts only to a better accounting method, a better way of showing how much, and how efficiently, is being produced by the capitalist economy.

But the critique of GDP points to a deeper question: why should things be produced for money at all, regardless of whether they are good or bad? That is, do we really gain as a society when things which could be performed voluntarily and for free become paid jobs?

The standard response to this question is that, while it would certainly be nice if all production could be undertaken voluntarily rather than under the discipline of wage labor, such an anarchist utopia is totally impractical. And for many goods, this is a real and difficult problem. The same things that make production efficient--the division of labor, repetitive and tedious jobs--are the same things that make people not want to do them unless they get paid. To address this problem, we need some way of negotiating the trade-off between having more things and having more (and higher quality) free time. Of course, under the present fetishization of constant economic growth, it is impossible even to articulate such a trade-off, except in the language of consumer or worker "choice".

But let us set this set of problems aside for a moment. The tension described above is true primarily for physical goods, things like cars and shoes. But what is distinctive about the capitalism that has developed over the past few decades is the increasing preponderance, in the money economy, of commodities that are not physical objects, but intellectual property of one kind or another. Let us take a single example, from the computer software industry.

Microsoft is preparing to release the new version of Microsoft Windows, called "Vista". In the run-up to launch, the company is making every effort to persuade customers of the value of this new product. One of the most important targets of persuasian has been the European Union, which has been increasingly unhappy with Microsoft's monopoly business practices. To the end of persuading the EU to welcome Vista with open arms, Microsoft recently released this white paper. Its purpose is to outline the positive economic benefits which Microsoft Vista will supposedly bring to Europe. These, are, according to Microsoft:

• Within its first year of shipment, IDC expects Windows Vista to be installed onmmore than 100 million computers worldwide. More than 30 million computers inmthe region studied are expected to be running Windows Vista.
• In the six countries studied, Windows Vista-related employment will reach moremthan 20% of IT employment2 in its first year of shipment.
• While much of this employment will shift from Windows XP-related employment,mover 50% of the growth in IT employment will be driven by Windows Vista.
• For every euro of Microsoft revenue from Windows Vista in 2007 in the sixcountries studied, the ecosystem beyond Microsoft will reap almost 14 euro in revenues. In 2007 this ecosystem should sell over ?32 billion ($40 billion) in products and services revolving around Windows Vista.
• Within the six-country region, in 2007 over 150,000 IT companies that produce, sell, or distribute products or services running on Windows Vista will employ over 400,000 people; another 650,000 will be employed at IT using firms.

Billions of dollars in economic growth due to Vista! What wonderful news! But wait--what does this mean? One critic quickly saw through the gambit on offer:

The white paper may predict sales by the "Microsoft ecosystem" of over $40 billion in six of Europe's biggest economies, but what this figure hides is the fact that income for Microsoft and its chums is a cost for the rest of Europe. In other words, IDC's white paper is effectively touting an expense of over $40 billion as a reason why the European Commission should welcome Vista with open arms.As the paper itself mentions, half of this cost is down to the hardware. Some of these purchases would have taken place anyway; the rest represent upgrades from older hardware that cannot meet Vista's requirements. But if Vista did not exist (or, for example, if the European Commission were to block its sale for whatever reason), the old systems would not suddenly stop working: they would tick along for a few more years, gradually being replaced. The only justification for this hefty expenditure is to be able to run Vista: no Vista, no need to rustle up many extra billions on hardware upgrades outside the usual replacement cycles.

It's the same on the software side. The case for Vista itself is hardly strong. As the product's ship date has slipped, so more of its new features have been ripped out. Now it is not entirely clear what the benefit of upgrading is (apart from the evergreen "better security", of course). And without the need for hardware and software upgrades, the associated consultancy and service costs disappear too: most of Vista's $40 billion "benefit" is not only a cost, but an unnecessary one at that.

A product which imposes heavy costs on users, including accelerated hardware obsolesence, without clear benefits? Who would want such a thing? The economic growth being cited by Microsoft is evidently the kind of phony "wealth creation" cited by critics of GDP in the first sense mentioned above. But we can also ask the second question. Suppose that Vista did have discernible benefits. Certainly operating systems, generally, are useful things, and have to be upgraded sometimes. Even if Vista was a better piece of software, we might still ask: why should such a thing be made by a private company and sold for a profit? Why couldn't people just make it for free in their spare time, and then give it away?

To which Microsoft might respond: without the possibility of profit, there would be no incentive to innovate, and hence no-one would write operating systems. As against the cases of shoes and cars, however, a clear counterexample exists that vitiates this argument. The existence of free and open-source software is an excellent example of a post-capitalist form of production, in which social wealth is produced outside the system of economic (monetary) value.

The fact that the things like software can
be produced for free in the "social economy" does not mean that everything can be produced this way, as some of the more exuberant proponents of the "immaterial labor" thesis would have you believe. Yet by criticizing the facile equivalency between economic activity and wealth, we can begin to move toward a real critique of capitalism. This critique, if it is to reinvigorate socialism as an idea, has to take as its starting point this observation of Marx's, from volume 3 of Capital, one of the few places where he prefigures the communist future:

The actual wealth of society, and the possibility of constantly expanding its reproduction process, therefore, do not depend upon the duration of surplus-labour, but upon its productivity and the more or less copious conditions of production under which it is performed. In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.

Now the distinction between "freedom" and "necessity" is not as clear-cut as Marx seems to imply here, and it is not coextensive with "immaterial" and "material" goods. Fine wines and Sony Playstations are material goods, but are they necessary ones? This is, ultimately, a political question, but it is not one that can be resolved in capitalism. Defining the boundary between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom is, I would argue, the specific content of socialism as a form of society and a political process (rather than a telos, a utopia, or an end of all politics). Framing things this way explodes the false opposition between state planning and market anarchy. The aim of socialism is not to pull all economic activity under the control of the state. Rather, it is to push out as much as possible from commodity production in the market to socialized labor in the "free" sector.* Conversely, only where necessary, that is, where other ways of organizing production are not feasible, would production be pulled in to collective control by the state, workers collectives, or some other communal form.

This formulation opens a new horizon of possibility for the socialist project, a new vision of what society could be like. It also clearly rules out certain longtime "left" preoccupations as being basically anti-socialist. The Keynesian idea that we need more jobs and higher wages for everyone comes to seem dilatory, in this view: what we need instead are shorter hours and a lower cost of living. As a corollary, we need things like socialized health care and child care, which reduce individual dependence on wage-labor. Neither of these are anti-capitalist programs in themselves; yet they point away from capitalism rather, as with Keynesianism, toward an intensification of its logic.

Left untheorized, here, is imperialism, or more generally, uneven development (and by implication, racism). If too much wage-labor is the constitutive problem of European and North American societies, this cannot be said of much of the rest of the world--or even of the pockets of deprivation within the rich societies. Thus, the socialist project must entail a massive, internationalist, redistributive project along with the anti-capitalist project delineated here, if it is not to degenerate into the construction of elite islands of privilege in a global sea of misery. (In this, Hardt and Negri are right: a guaranteed income and global citizenship are the sine qua non of the left project today. Unfortunately, their naive postmodernism and reflexive anti-statism made them unable to connect this realization with a coherent political strategy.) Likewise, ecology and the reality of physical limits on human societies demand serious attention, if we are to give real content to Marx's comment about "the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature". And last but not least, what is described here is intrinsically also a feminist project: without a critique of unpaid women's labor, reduction of paid labor just reduces itself to a patriarchal ideology of the "family wage". But consideration of these dilemmas will have to wait for another time.

[* The free sector, or the realm of freedom, would be free in a double sense: its products would be available to everyone for free, like open source software; at the same time, the laborers themselves would be "free" in the sense that they work according to their own schedules and according to their own desires, rather than at the direction of a boss. The realm of freedom is thus, pace Stallman, free as in free spech, and free as in free beer.]