A conversation with a friend prompted some partial thoughts on matters of capitalism, communism, and left politics so I thought I’d type them out. As usual, I don’t fully know what I think until I write it out, and, as is often, those thoughts had some background to them, so I thought I’d type out that background. The first part of this, “Circuits,” lays out that background. To an important extent that’s a lot of what the second part, “Aerial View and Life on the Ground,” does as well. The third section, “Living the Wrong Life,” gets more into the thought I was trying to have, about trying to foster and spread solidaristic response to life in capitalism, as part of attempting to deepen the (specifically emancipatory) oppositional character of workers’ activities and struggles - the idea here being that life subordinated to capital is terrible, but not all equally so, and some responses to that life are just of that life while others involve kernels of a different way of life or glimpses of a liberated future humanity. Some of this may be a little in the weeds outside the conversation my friend and I were having, I’m unsure. As ever, pennies in a wishing well.

Circuits

Capitalism is a society subordinated to the making of money into more money, via capital as a social process. Marx abbreviates this process in a way that can look wonky but in my view is succinct and clarifying. I’ll get to it that in a second. Basically, here’s what he abbreviates: each capitalist enterprise goes to market with money, buys stuff and people’s capacities for a while, and orders the people to set the capacities to work on the stuff. The result is an object or activity that the capitalist sells for more money than the capitalist spent. Some of that sum of money is invested in buying more stuff and more people’s capacities next time around.

Okay, now one more time, with some of Marx’s abbreviation added in. The capitalist or their representative goes to market with money, which Marx abbreviates as M. They exchange the money. Marx indicates exchange with a dash. They specifically exchange the money for two kinds of things: first, stuff that can be used to make things, that is, means of production. Marx abbreviates this as C(mp), ‘C’ because it’s a commodity - something bought and sold - and ‘mp’ meaning “means of production.” Second, people’s capacities, our ability to work. Marx calls that ability ‘labor power’. ‘Power’ here means ‘potential to do something.’ Like I have the power to make myself lunch or to sing songs or to doodle on paper, etc. So, Marx abbreviates this second kind of thing as C(lp), again ‘C’ meaning commodity and ‘lp’ meaning “labor power.” The capitalist or their representative returns from the market with the two kinds of stuff, and makes the people - the commodified labor power, C(lp) work with some of the means of production, C(mp), on some of the other means of production. That takes time and it’s what we often called ‘production’ or ‘producing.’ Marx abbreviates the passage of time with an ellipse, and abbreviates production with the letter P. So, “...P...”. The result of production is an object or activity that the capitalist sells. That object or activity is different than what the capitalist initially bought. To make this less abstract, a capitalist buys bread, tomatoes, mustard and mayo, knives, and paper bags. That’s all C(mp). And they buy the time and ability of some people, C(lp), who they put to work turning those ingredients into sandwiches in bags for sale. They don’t just buy the stuff then resell it. They buy the stuff and pay people who they make transform the stuff into something different than what they originally bought. Marx abbreviates that new transformed stuff as C’. This is pronounced “see prime.” The apostrophe is meant to indicate that the stuff is different from the original stuff bought, that is, it indicates that C and C’ are different commodities. Then the capitalist or their representative sells the result. They sell C’. Marx abbreviates that “C’-M’,” with the dash meaning an exchange as I said, and with M’ pronounced “emm prime.” The apostrophe in M’ means the amount of money is different than the initial amount of money spent.

The full abbreviation, then, is M-C(mp+lp)...P...C’-M’. It can be shortened to M...M’, meaning the capitalist goes to the market with money, that is, as a buyer, and later after time has passed (time spent doing some specific kinds of activity) the capitalist ends up with more money. Marx calls this sequence of events, M...M’ or M-C(mp+lp)...P...C’-M’ by the term “a circuit.” Capital is that circuit on an ongoing basis. The repetition of that circuit is the life of any individual capital or capitalist enterprise.

Generally speaking, the things that fall under commodified means of production, C(mp) are produced by some capitalist enterprise. That’s why they’re commodities, things for sale. Another way to put this is that the goods and services that one capitalist buys as means of production, C(mp) are simultaneously C’ for another capitalist. This means that implied within the circuit M-C(mp+lp)...P...C’-M’ is the reality that every individual capitalist depends on other capitalists. I used a tomato sandwich making business as an example before. That business buys stuff like bread, tomatoes, knives, and so on, and it sells tomato sandwiches. If all the bread sellers go out of business, the tomato sandwich making business is in trouble. Likewise, if all the sandwich making businesses go out of business, the bread sellers are in trouble. They need each other and, to a limited degree, benefit from each other.

The circuit M-C(mp+lp)...P...C’-M’ abbreviates the movement of capital over time, as I said. I’ve tried to draw out how this implicitly shows that each individual capitalist depends on other capitalists, because all the inputs that take the form of a commodity produced by another capitalist. Each capitalist regularly exchanges money for means of production, which means they act as a buyer in the exchange M-C(mp). This is simultaneously also the process of another capitalist exchanging a set of commodities for money, which means they act as a seller in the exchange C-M. Generally speaking for them the C they are selling is the result of a production process, C’. For one capitalist, the final step after production is C’-M’, where they sell the transformed goods or services C’ for an amount of money, M’, greater than their initial expenditure, M. This is simultaneously the initial step before production, M-C(mp) for another capitalist. This is all to say, the actual existence of the circuit abbreviated by all those letters, dashes, and so on, is always many such circuits happening in real time all the time, and generally in different steps in the process. As I said, this is all a description of how capitalists depend on each other, and a lot can go wrong in that, as I implied with my slightly silly example of the sandwich makers and the bread sellers. When things go wrong in that for capitalists, they tend to try to pass the consequences onto the rest of us, and it’s the rest of us I want to turn to now.

Labor power is bought as a commodity, C(lp) but it’s not generally produced as a commodity. (This is the case when we’re talking about waged labor. Things are different and kind of complicated with enslaved labor and capitalism. I have a lot to say about this and because there is a great deal to say I won’t get into it here as I want to make a different point for now.) In selling our labor power, we’re not acting as capitalists. We don’t generally sell our capacity to work, the commodity C(lp), for a profit on an expanding basis. We generally get roughly enough that we have to keep selling it: that is, our jobs don’t generally pay us enough money that we end up able to stop having a job. Our jobs generally pay us some amount small enough that we continue to have to have a job.

This is a little wonky, but as people with jobs, that is, as sellers of labor power, we do not conduct the circuit M-C(mp+lp)...P...C’-M’. Capitalists conduct that circuit. We play a role in it - we’re forced to in order to get money so we can afford to live - and the circuit couldn’t operate without our participation, but our relationship to that circuit is very different from the capitalists’ relation to that circuit.

Marx calls that circuit “the circuit of capitalist production.” What we do is something different, which Marx calls “simple circulation.” Simple circulation is Marx’s name for a different set of activities, which he abbreviates as C-M-C or really C(lp)-M-C(ms). We sell our labor power a commodity, C(lp) to get wages, M, which we spend on the stuff we need and want to have the kind of life we can afford at our current pay rate. Marx calls that stuff “means of subsistence”, abbreviated here as “ms.” A lot of means of subsistence is only available, in high enough quality and high enough quantity, as a commodity for sale. C(ms) abbreviates that means of subsistence exist specifically as commodities. It’s the commodified character of means of subsistence that makes us sell our labor power in the first place. That sounds wonky but it’s something we all understand at a gut level: we have a job because we have to have money in this society, because without money we can’t get enough of what we want and need, and at reasonable quality.

One takeaway point from this is that implied within the circuit of capitalist production, M-C(mp+lp)...P...C’-M’, is working class subordination: we have to sell our labor power, we have to enact the exchange C(lp)-M, or we’re in serious trouble. Furthermore, the overriding purpose behind doing and making stuff in this society a great deal of the time is for that doing and making to generate a profit, for it to create an amount of money, M’, greater than the initial amount spent by some capitalist. Whether the doing and making meets other needs, like our needs for food, shelter, medicine, happiness, and so on, is secondary to whether the doing and making creates profit. (A great deal of terrible things follow from all this. Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels used the term ‘social murder’ to talk about a lot of those terrible things, in his excellent book The Condition of the Working Class in England. I’ve written at some length about social murder if anyone wants to read my work on that, and I talked about it on Death Panel a while back. I think it’s a powerful concept and analysis but I won’t get into it further here.) This is all building up to some thoughts I’m working out, as I said, and I’m ready or nearly ready to articulate them, but I want to both recap quickly and expand a little first.

We live in a society subordinated to the performance of the circuit M-C(mp+lp)...P...C’-M’. Specifically, that circuit is performed collectively by the capitalist class: every individual capitalist enacts a version of this as part of them living out their location in society, and that is in part a matter of each individual capitalist being dependent on other capitalists. (They tend to resent that dependence and come up with various fantasies of escaping it without actually escaping it. Being a capitalist seems to generate outlooks on the world that make some degree of sense, in a sort of ‘I can see how a fucked up person would think that fucked thing in that fucked up situation...’ kind of way, and in another sense those outlooks are irrational, they’re fucked up. That capitalism generates outlooks that are fucked up and also understandable in the immediate situation is a pretty important fact about the system. It’s part of why we need Marxism, to help us get past the immediately available fucked-up-but-understandable outlooks the system tends to generate.)

At the same time, each capitalist living out that circuit is also subordinating some working class people, the sellers of labor power, C(lp). The capitalist class as a whole live out that circuit, in the form of many such circuits ongoing simultaneously, and in doing so they subordinate the working class as a whole, forcing us to play a role in facilitating the ongoing operation of those circuits. This means that the circuit abbreviates something that we are subjected to: we live our lives facing pressures arising from and limitations created by the ongoing operation of that circuit. Our own participation in the circuit takes the form of simple circulation, specifically C(lp)-M-C(ms).

Aerial View and Life on the Ground

This brings me to one of the thoughts I was trying to work out. All of this circuit stuff is a kind of abstract picture of ways our lives are limited in capitalist society. It’s not a picture of the rich, wide range of kinds of life, ways of doing and living - things we think and want and fight over and so on - that we all live out. What specific means of subsistence we want and need, and why, and what we do with them and how, and the kinds of relationships and priorities and needs bound up with it - I’ll call that the rich texture of our lives - that’s not described by Marx’s abbreviations. As I said, what Marx describes is a set of processes that press upon and constrain the rich texture of our lives, in lots of negative ways. That’s incredibly important, but it’s not the same as an account of that rich texture. This isn’t to criticize Marx, it’s to say Marx is a comrade we think with and there’s still thinking to be done - not least because there’s a lot of variation within the rich tapestries of our lives across time and place. To put it another way, we can think of these abbreviations from Marx as like a photo taken from an airplane at the highest point in the flight, or taken by a camera on the moon. We get a very big picture, which is clarifying in that it shows us where the smaller pictures of our actual lives are located, but the big picture is not a substitute for the smaller pictures, and there are important patterns in those smaller pictures.
Some broad aspect of those smaller pictures of our lives are in relation to our employers, for those of us with jobs, which are located in the process of production ...P... and in the exchange M-C(lp). That is, at work, we encounter various forms of orders given and expectations upon us and authority and so on, and in the terms and condition of our employment we get some amount of pay and benefits in exchange for our labor power. All of that shapes our lives - how much we get paid, whether we have health insurance, and so on, is very significant, and so is how we get treated day to day in our jobs. There is also a tissue of relationships with our fellow employees, lived out in the production process: the simple question ‘what is this job like?’ rarely has a simple answer. (Even if the answer is apparently simple like ‘it sucks, I hate it’ or more rarely ‘its ideal, I love it’ the reasons behind those answers are complicated and multifaceted.) All of these areas of life are areas where forms of politics are lived out - in the sense of ‘politics’ as conflict and struggle and power relations - though we are often discouraged from understanding them as political. (A major priority behind labor law has been discouraging a labor movement that understands the sale of labor power and the production process as political and instead focused on bargaining in a more narrowly economic sense. I’ve written about this some from a historical and theoretical perspective. Some people on the left see this as a feature of unions and labor movements as such. That’s an error and a pretty serious one as it takes as given the reversible results of a historical process of struggle by the capitalist class and state forces. My own view is that the development of revolutionary fighting organizations, above all unions centered on the waged workplace, is the best approach, as I talk about at tedious length here.)

I want to talk a bit more about the circuit of simple circulation, C(lp)-M-C(ms). That circuit abbreviates some additional ways in which the complex, rich tapestry of our lives interact with and are limited by the circuit of capitalist production, and the abbreviation only partially gets at what we do within that interaction and in the bounds of those limits. (Marx has a fair bit to say about this in various of his writings, to be fair.) Basically, we sell our labor power C(lp) to get money, M, which we spend to get stuff, represented in the exchange M-C(ms). The stuff we get is very important, but it’s not the whole story. A great deal of what we want and need we acquire in ways other than commodity exchanges: all of us were parented, many of us have been either the recipients or the givers of important favors, advice, support, and so on. On a regular basis those of us who live with other people (and/or who have neighbors and coworkers) do things for each other or have others do things for us or both, all of which is vital for how we keep going. These are all part of how people live out being dependent on each other.

I don’t mean to romanticize this. Not all of this doing for others and having others do for us is well-intentioned or liberatory. I’m an adult who lives in the world. I’m aware that people can take advantage of each other, oppress, bully, and so on. My point for now is just that there are important forms of interaction where our dependence on each other does not take the form of buying and selling. These forms of interaction are real. They are production in an important sense, in that we act on things and on each other in ways that transform those things, and transform us, and transform each other, though they are production in a different sense than what is abbreviated in Marx’s circuit as ...P... and sometimes within capitalist society they are not treated as production.

To come at this another way, let me circle back to the circuit of simple circulation, the specific form involved in waged work: C(lp)-M-C(ms). We sell labor power for money to get means of subsistence. What specific means of subsistence are available to us in the markets around us - the ‘menu’ we place our ‘order’ from - is not really under our control, because it’s made up of the things that capitalists are trying to sell for a profit: most of what we buy that is C(ms) for us is simultaneously C’ for some capitalist. So when we enact the exchange M-C(ms) we are often exchanging with a capitalist who is enacting the exchange C’-M’. The same activity of exchange for us is a different activity for them. As I said, we also get some means of subsistence in noncommodified forms, which is to say, we also get some stuff we want and need through means other than buying it from a capitalist.

Once we’ve bought means of subsistence, more happens. Very simply, we take whatever we’ve bought as C(ms) and then we do something with it: cook it and eat it, wash it and wear it, and so on. Often we are using stuff we or someone else bought and/or made previously: if I buy bread and tomatoes today, when I get home I chop them with a knife I already own, season them with a little salt from a big container I bought a few weeks ago, put that on a plate I was given as a gift years ago, and have a glass of water in a cup I bought last month. The chopping, seasoning, and serving, also involves some labor, though often unpaid. (There is a very rich body of scholarship by marxist feminists on the gender politics and systemic role of unpaid labor in households, and some wonderful scholarship by historians building on that work as well.) My point here is in part the very simple on that there labor and production processes here as well, but not ones that produce M’, a profit in the form of money. It’s work to spend time buying of subsistence then preparing them for use then using them to meet our needs, but it’s generally not work our bosses pay us for. Generally this kind of work is importantly organized and understood through categories of family, kinship, community, neighborhood, and so on. There are also important ways in which some similar unpaid labor processes occur in paid work: a lot of us give and get advice, mentorship, orders, and so on from coworkers on the job in ways that aren’t really paid for. Again this isn’t only a good thing: people can take advantage of each other in these settings.

Living the Wrong Life (For Worse or for Better)

Speaking very broadly and generally, we can identify three forms or direction that all of this activity tends to take: this activity can be done in a way that is in line with the dominant standards of the actually existing capitalist society we currently live in, it can be done in a way that is alternative to the dominant, and it can be done in a way that oppose the dominant standards. (I’m borrowing these terms from a chapter in Raymond Williams’s book Marxism and Literature, a book that I highly recommend though I’d also recommend jumping around and reading the parts that most interest you and skipping the parts that don’t interest you.) By in line with the dominant I mean things like trying to be a good worker in order to get a raise, working overtime or taking on a second job for extra pay, competing with fellow workers, but also engaging in officially encouraged forms of cooperation. Basically being a good worker-citizen, which tends to involve some degree of subordinating other people too. By alternative, I mean doing things we don’t have to do and/or that involve different values from the dominant, such as pulling a coworker aside and saying ‘hey, slow down, you could hurt yourself’ or asking if they’re okay, and so on. I think of this as low-key solidarity. It’s very valuable, and it’s not really a threat to the system. Often it serves as a shock absorber or lubricant that eases some of frictions involved in a live subordinated to capital. By oppositional, I mean activity that conflicts with the dominant, such as refusing commands, stopping work, and so on. It’s important to bear in mind that each of these kinds of activity changes over time, sometimes very rapidly, so we can’t always tell if some activity is in line with the dominant or is alternative or oppositional unless we know a lot about the context.

Generally speaking, outside of relatively uncommon moments, we’re going along living our individual and collective lives subordinated to capital. We do our best to get by however we can. That involves some small acts of insubordination and conflict; some small acts of solidarity, mutual aid, and shared support; and, unfortunately, some small acts of selfish and anti-social activity as people try to individually climb the ladder or cut a deal or just be left alone, leaving other working class people behind or worse, taking advantage of them or selling them out. Again, generally speaking, we on the left want to identify the solidaristic things that some people are already doing and try to share them with other people, to help reflect on them and what they tell us about the world we live in, to share our analysis of the system we’re subjected to, to help come up with new and better solidaristic things to do, and to try to make relatively alternative solidaristic activities become relatively oppositional. It’s also important to be aware that people exist moving along certain socially or culturally available tracks or in available headspaces, and these can change pretty rapidly. A while back I suggested that we were seeing some of those changes tied to attitudes to immigration enforcement, and I leaned on a discussion of what Don Hamerquist called ‘epistemological breaks’ meaning sudden breaks from/within availabe political common sense. (Marx nerds may know that Louis Althusser used the same term, Hamerquist’s meaning is different from that.) I continue to think this development is incredibly important both in terms of left strategy and moral urgency, as I tried to articulate a while back. It looks at the moment like there’s an analogous process going on more recently with opposition to data centers. I mention this just to underscore that the working class isn’t fixed or inert but mobile and dynamic in complex ways, so the activity of identifying, sharing, etc as I said, has to be responsive to changes in what we’re doing and where, how, with whom.

The scale matters here too: intense opposition that is very localized is one thing, intense opposition that is very widespread is another. As Lenin once said, politics begins when millions are in motion. In the long term, though obviously as fast as possible, we want solidaristic oppositional activities to become so widespread and powerful that they start to really disrupt the circuits of capitalist production in ways that open up space for other priorities than capitalist profits, and contest the power of capital to subordinate society to itself. At the scale of our own lives this happens relatively infrequently, which is why I referred a moment ago to ‘relatively uncommon moments.’ In larger perspective, meaning thinking globally and thinking about longer spans of time historically, these moments recur pretty frequently. Identifying and learning from such high point moments, and, crucially, how they developed over time from earlier low points, is another valuable activity for us on the left.

Like the friend I was talking with in the conversation that sparked this, I’m partial to at least some parts of the material worked out by what’s sometimes called ‘the communization current,’ a milieu of far leftists thinking about what a communist society might look like and how it might break out. (Some of this work has turned in a direction I personally don’t care about - figuring out how to plan and coordinate at large scale and so on. That’s obviously important stuff but I’m content to say the workers councils of tomorrow are smarter than I am because they’ll have the benefit of more time, of richer experience of struggle, and of the fact that they involve the shared intelligence of many people while I’m just one person.) In my opinion the best contemporary representative of the communization current is Jasper Bernes’s book The Future of Revolution, which I’ve reviewed favorably - it’s great! read it! - while also stating some quibbles regarding his ambiguous and sometimes mistaken remarks about unions. Briefly, arguably too briefly, communization is the idea that revolution means moving as fast as possible to non-commodity forms of distribution and forms of production for need, production not centered on or conditioned by the imperatives of profit, and conducted as democratically as possible, and that it smashes rather than relies on the state. It seems to me that communization is a term with an implied scope or scale: it’s not really communization unless it’s truly massive in the numbers of people involved, which happens only in uncommon moments as I said.

To my mind, efforts short of that are more like laying the groundwork for or planting seeds of communization.
As I said, as we go along outside uncommon moments, we aim to identify, share, enhance, and further develop alternative and oppositional solidaristic practices and outlooks, trying to deepen them and make the alternative more oppositional, more long-lasting, and include more people. In my view, there is something of a craft or art to all of this, meaning that it’s somewhat open-ended, guided by principles but always requiring interpretation in the moment. I think a very good general set of guidelines was articulated by the UK group Solidarity in the mid-twentieth century in their document “As We See It,” specifically this section: "Meaningful action, for revolutionaries, is whatever increases the confidence, the autonomy, the initiative, the participation, the solidarity, the equalitarian tendencies and the self-activity of the masses and whatever assists in their demystification. Sterile and harmful action is whatever reinforces the passivity of the masses, their apathy, their cynicism, their differentiation through hierarchy, their alienation, their reliance on others to do things for them and the degree to which they can therefore be manipulated by others - even by those allegedly acting on their behalf.”

I’m going to stop in a moment but I want to just add that in some situations there may well be one best course of what Solidarity calls “meaningful action,” with that course of action actually available to leftists in that situation. Often, though, the best course of “meaningful action” won’t be available because the left and the working class lacks capacity, and so we’re really talking about a second best course of action, in the sense of not so much doing the very best thing but rather doing the best thing that’s feasible under the circumstances. We have to live with that, and we also have to work out what this really means in real time in the situation.

Furthermore, there will often be situations where there isn’t one single feasible course of action that is clearly the best, which means we will have to do some guesswork and some prioritization, which can be extraordinarily stressful for us as individuals and put intense strain on our relationships and organizations. The Solidarity statement lists several important values, including working class self-confidence, solidarity, egalitarianism, demystifying the world, and so on. It’s not at all clear that the same course of action will promote each of those values equally, which means we may have to pick and choose among that set of values sometimes. That can be genuinely excruciating, stressful, and a collective strain as I said. Organizations don’t always survive conflicts over these kinds of matters because of the intense pressure on interpersonal relationships that can arise. The difficulty increases as the stakes go up, and the stakes in people’s lives can be metaphorically and sometimes literally life and death. To an important extent, a dilemma over of which course of action tied to what value to prioritize is just something that has to get worked out in realtime in discussion and conflict in the situation, and there’s a limited amount to be usefully said about this stuff in general. At the same time, it’s important to bear in mind that there are intense pressures for us to measure success in terms of ‘delivering the goods’ in an economic sense and a related pressure to rely on representatives/experts/specialists, rather than cultivating lowercase-d democratic self-activity - and thus, self-confidence - by ordinary working class people. (Producing a labor movement that measures success this way and that centers on specialists has been another major priority of labor law tied to what I said before.) In general, the best orientation in these situations, all things being equal (and I stress that in the actual world in concrete situations it’s rare that all things are equal), we should orient toward what may sound like silly or romantic ineffable matters of what Anton Pannekoek like spirit, ethic, or “proletarian virtue.” Put another way, we should emphasize trying to foster the existence of new kinds of people who are more inclined to act in alternative and oppositional solidaristic ways and to find life in this society undignified. That is, as much as possible, meaningful action involves creating the kinds of people who are, at least for a moment, more properly creatures of the future liberated communist society that humanity is head toward than they are creatures of the trash-heap death machine society we’re currently stuck in.