Mute Compulsion A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital

352 Pages·2023·2.424 MB·English

by  Søren Mau

Mute Compulsion
MMuuttee CCoommppuullssiioonn 2288--1100--2222..iinndddd 11 2288//1100//22002222 1155::1144::3344
Søren Mau is a communist philosopher and postdoctoral researcher based in
Copenhagen, Denmark. He is an Editor of the journal Historical Materialism and
a member of the board of the Danish Society for Marxist Studies.
MMuuttee CCoommppuullssiioonn 2288--1100--2222..iinndddd 22 2288//1100//22002222 1155::1144::3344
Mute Compulsion
A Marxist Theory of the
Economic Power of Capital
Søren Mau

Foreword by Michael Heinrich
London • New York
MMuuttee CCoommppuullssiioonn 2288--1100--2222..iinndddd 33 2288//1100//22002222 1155::1144::3344
First published in English by Verso 2023
First published as Stummer Zwang: Eine marxistische Analyse der
ökonomischen Macht im Kapitalismus by Dietz Berlin 2021
© Søren Mau 2021, 2023
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217
versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-346-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-349-6 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-350-2 (US EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mau, Søren Mads, author.
Title: Mute compulsion : a Marxist theory of the economic power of capital
/ Søren Mau ; foreword by Michael Heinrich.
Other titles: Stummer Zwang. English
Description: London ; Brooklyn, NY : Verso, 2023. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022038208 (print) | LCCN 2022038209 (ebook) | ISBN
9781839763465 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781839763502 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Marxian economics. | Capitalism. | Marx, Karl, 1818-1883.
Kapital.
Classification: LCC HB97.5 .M35813 2023 (print) | LCC HB97.5 (ebook) |
DDC 335.4/12—dc23/eng/20220923
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022038208
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022038209
Typeset in Minion Pro by MJ&N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
MMuuttee CCoommppuullssiioonn 2288--1100--2222..iinndddd 44 2288//1100//22002222 1155::1144::3344
Contents
A Note on Translations and References vii
Foreword by Michael Heinrich ix
Introduction 1
PART I: CONDITIONS
1. Conceptualising Power and Capital 23
2. Power and Marxism 48
3. The Social Ontology of Economic Power 70
4. The Human Corporeal Organisation 89
5. Metabolic Domination 104
PART II: RELATIONS
6. Transcendental Class Domination 123
7. Capital and Difference 152
8. The Universal Power of Value 174
9. Value, Class, and Competition 200
PART III: DYNAMICS
10. The Despotism of Subsumption 225
11. The Capitalist Reconfiguration of Nature 253
12. Logistical Power 273
13. Surplus Populations and Crisis 296
Conclusion 319
Acknowledgements 326
Appendix: Cited Volumes of Marx and Engels’s Collected Works 328
Index 330
MMuuttee CCoommppuullssiioonn 2288--1100--2222..iinndddd 55 2288//1100//22002222 1155::1144::3344
MMuuttee CCoommppuullssiioonn 2288--1100--2222..iinndddd 66 2288//1100//22002222 1155::1144::3344
A Note on Translations and References
Whenever possible, I have used official English translations of Marx’s
writings. When deemed necessary, I have modified these and added
a footnote in case of substantial modification. All translations from
German texts which are not available in English are mine.
References to Marx and Engels’s Collected Works (MECW) look like
this: (32: 421), which means volume 32, page 421. References to the Marx-
Engels- Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2) look like this: (II.3.4: 1453); this refers to
section (Abteilung) 2, volume 3.4, page 1453. Other references to Marx’s
writings follow this system of abbreviations:
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben C1
Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978).
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 2, trans. Ben C2
Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978).
Marx’s Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865, ed. Fred Mosely M
(Chicago: Haymarket, 2017).
Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy G
(Rought Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1993).
‘The Commodity’ (chap. 1 of Capital, vol. 1, 1st ed.), in Value: V
Studies by Karl Marx, ed. Albert Dragstedt (London: New
Park Publications, 1976).
MMuuttee CCoommppuullssiioonn 2288--1100--2222..iinndddd 77 2288//1100//22002222 1155::1144::3344
viii Mute Compulsion
‘The Value-Form’ (appendix of Capital, vol. 1, 1st ed.), trans. A
Mike Roth and Wal Suchting, Capital and Class 4 (Spring
1978): 130–50.
‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’, appendix of R
C1.
The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, ed. Lawrence Krader E
(Assen: Van Gorcum & Comp., 1974).
For more information on the volumes cited of MECW, see the appendix.
Different references within the same note are separated by a semicolon:
‘G: 234, 536; 33: 324; IV.1: 43, 56; M: 788’ thus means Grundrisse, pages
234 and 536; MECW, volume 33, page 324; MEGA2, section 4, volume 1,
pages 43 and 56; and Marx’s Economic Manuscript of 1864–1865, page 788.
MMuuttee CCoommppuullssiioonn 2288--1100--2222..iinndddd 88 2288//1100//22002222 1155::1144::3344
Foreword
by Michael Heinrich
I first met Søren Mau in November 2017, at the annual conference in
London of the journal Historical Materialism. When we talked after his
paper presentation, he asked me if I knew of any literature that dealt
more specifically with the Marxian concept of the ‘mute compulsion of
economic relations’. I couldn’t think of a single title. Søren then told me
that he wanted to write a dissertation on this concept. At first I was a bit
perplexed. I had often myself quoted the ‘mute compulsion’ that Marx
talks about in the chapter on ‘so- called primitive accumulation’, and had
also used it in many discussions. The idea behind it – that under certain
circumstances it is not persons but economic conditions that exert com-
pulsion on formally free workers – seemed almost self-e xplanatory to me.
It took only two or three sentences to make clear what was meant. Until
now, it had never occurred to me that this concept might need a separate
analysis. My surprise was similar to that in a game of chess when, in an
opening that has been analysed in most variations up to the fifteenth
or twentieth move, one is confronted with an innovation on the fourth.
Either such a move is terribly stupid or it is insanely good. As I realised
fairly quickly, Søren’s idea was not stupid at all. This ‘mute compulsion’ was
of central importance in the contrast between personal relations of domi-
nation such as slavery or serfdom in pre-c apitalist modes of production,
MMuuttee CCoommppuullssiioonn 2288--1100--2222..iinndddd 99 2288//1100//22002222 1155::1144::3344
x Mute Compulsion
and the impersonal domination of legally free wage labourers by which
Marx characterises the capitalist mode of production. That alone should
be reason enough to look at it in more detail. The only astonishing thing
was that no one had done so before.
My second big surprise came about a year and a half later. I had stayed
in touch with Søren, we had discussed different issues now and then, and
I had agreed to participate in the defence of his thesis at the University
of Southern Denmark. In the spring of 2019, I got to see his entire dis-
sertation, written in English, for the first time. Far from being a narrow,
philological discussion of the term ‘mute compulsion’, Søren’s analysis
was much broader. He presented mute compulsion as a key component
of the specifically economic ‘power of capital’, a power based on altering
the material conditions of social reproduction. For his examination of the
question, already much discussed, of how capitalist relations repeatedly
reproduce themselves despite all crises and contradictions, Søren had
named a third type of power relations alongside those based on violence
and those based on ideology. While the first two have a direct effect
on people, this third type asserts itself indirectly by reshaping people’s
economic and social environment.
Søren’s work is now available in revised form as a book. It is dedicated
to a detailed investigation of this specific ‘power of capital’. The various
elements of a theory of this power are reconstructed from Marx’s critique
of political economy in his manuscripts written after 1857. The results of
this reconstruction do not refer to a concrete capitalist society; they are
located on the level of representation of the ‘ideal cross-s ection’ of the cap-
italist mode of production, namely the level of abstraction on which Marx
locates his own analysis, at the end of the manuscript for the third book
of Capital. On this level, everything is analysed that necessarily belongs
to the capitalist mode of production, regardless of its respective historical
manifestation – and here this ‘mute compulsion’ is inherent in every case.
However, Søren’s investigation is not only about contributing to the
elucidation of Marx’s critique of political economy or completing it. This
already becomes clear in the second part of his three- part work. Starting
from Marx’s conception of proletarians who can dispose of their life but
are cut off from the necessary conditions of this life, Søren shows how
biopolitical questions raised by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben
are inherent in Marxian analysis from the beginning, even if they are not
called that. Also in the second part, the ‘power of capital’ based on ‘mute
MMuuttee CCoommppuullssiioonn 2288--1100--2222..iinndddd 1100 2288//1100//22002222 1155::1144::3344