Contents of spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/papers/caff.aufheben
A Reply to Aufheben magazine's review of Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War,
1973-1992
by
George Caffentzis
Aufheben, v.a. irr. lift (up), pick up; keep, preserve;
(laws) repeal, abolish; (agreements) rescind, annul;
(philosophy) overcoming, preservation.
These remarks are personal responses to a review of a book entitled
Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973-1992 which appeared in an
English-language journal entitled Aufheben in 1994. I am responding to the
Aufheben review because I am one of the editors of Midnight Oil and
because the review was lengthy and very critical. Its thesis is: "It is
not merely that Midnight Oil is inconsistent, as is only to be expected
from a collective project developing over 20 years, rather it is that we
find its underlying theory incoherent." I will argue that the "underlying
theory" is not incoherent and that the arguments the Aufheben reviewer uses
to prove Midnight Oil's theory incoherent are not sound because the views
attributed to the Midnight Notes collective are simply not its views. In
other words, the Aufheben reviewer has read Midnight Oil wrong-headedly.
Who is to blame for this misreading, if that is what it is, the
authors or the readers or both? Here let me take on a bit of mea culpa for
the Midnight Notes editorial collective. The text of Midnight Oil is a
strange and complex animal. The first part deals directly with the Gulf War
and with aspects of the petroleum extraction and refining industry
internationally during the 1980s. Its purpose was to describe and explain
why the war (with or without quotation marks) happened as it did. Parts two
and three include articles from Zerowork I (1975) and issues of Midnight
Notes from 1979 to 1990 whose purpose is to trace the development both of
that period's class relations in general and of the theory of the Midnight
Notes collective uses to explain the Gulf War. But development implies
contradiction and some later articles (especially "The Work/Energy Crisis
and the Apocalypse" ) were clearly in a polemic with earlier ones
(especially "Notes on the International Crisis"). All this happens without
much stage direction for the reader. The only place where there is some
reflection on the whole project is in the Introduction and there the accent
is on the continuity and coherence of the book's articles, although the
difference between Zerowork and Midnight Notes collectives is noted.
Thus the reader who notices a contradiction between articles in
Midnight Oil has some work to do for him/herself. The reader has to ask
and answer the questions: "Is the contradiction a sign of theoretical
incoherence or of theoretical development? Is it a sign of a plain
confusion or of an aufheben (i.e., a repealing and a preserving)?" Is this
too much to ask of a reader? Not necessarily, if the reader is a member of
a collective that calls itself "Aufheben" (even ironically). I will show
that at a number of points the Aufheben reader-reviewer did not ask
him/herself these questions and simply assumed the worst, for reasons that
are not clear to me.
The clearest example of this failure has to do with the notion of
value. In the Aufheben review's section on "Value and the Apocalypse," the
reviewers note that there is a rather obvious contradiction between "Notes
on the International Crisis" and "The Work/Energy Crisis and the
Apocalypse." The second article clearly rejects the first article's view
that capitalism had entered into a period of "laborless production
liberating capital from labor as a value-producing activity." The reviewer
did not note that the first article appeared in Zerowork I in 1975 and the
second in Midnight Notes #3 in 1980. In fact, he/she assumes a continuity
of views even when there is an explicit rejection of such continuity in the
later article, which the reviewer notes! But she/he continues to claim that
the "underlying theory" of Midnight Notes abandons the "law of value" when
in Midnight Notes article after article, from beginning (p. xiv: "Despite
all its high-tech machines, space shuttles, laser beam weapons and genetic
engineering, capital still depends upon human work") to end (p. 326: "How
can we understand anything about this world without using the axioms of
Marx's theory of work, money and profit?") the application of this law
forms the basis of explanation.
Our interest, however, has not been in swearing allegiance to "the
Law" but to show how capital is even more constrained by it at the end of
the twentieth century than it was in the nineteenth. The most important
consequence of this constraint is that any increase in the capitalization
of highly mechanized industries (such as the nuclear power industry and the
petroleum extraction and refining industry) must be accompanied by an
increase in unmechanized, "wretch" and "housework" labor. That is why
computerization and robotization must be accompanied by a major increase in
sweatshops and slavery, i.e., the expansion of areas of absolute surplus
value and unwaged labor. This theme has been repeated so often in Midnight
Notes writing that it is hard to believe that any reader can mistake it,
even if he/she disagreed with it, as the Aufheben reviewers certainly do.
The reviewer also argues (a bit incoherently) that Midnight Notes
collective uses the law of value incorrectly, since the petroleum industry
is not a high organic composition industry and that the proper analysis of
oil price is through seeing it as a product of rent. This is not the place
to deal with the matter organic composition at length but a glance at page
237 of Midnight Oil will show that the derivation of the three sectors of
industry organized by the ratio of invested capital to wages was
empirically based. Anyway, if the collective was empirically wrong, then
the Aufheben reviewer should show us some numbers. As for the rent analysis
of the oil price, it is not that Midnight Notes did not consider it, but it
was rejected as a minor aspect of the story. The idea that a few oil
sheiks' and autocrats' "property rights" determined such a vital
commodity's price was hard to believe in the context of the increasing
marginalization of rental income with the development of capital in the
twentieth century. This is especially the case with former colonial nations
which are being recolonized in new ways at this very moment. As I wrote in
"Rambo on the Barbary Shore": "For the U.S. state considers itself the
custodian for world capital of the planet's energy resources, whether these
residues of geologic evolution happen to be immediately below U.S.
territory or not....'Libyan terrorism' is simply the belief that the
petroleum resources locked in the Libyans' soil is theirs. Such presumption
is intolerable, according to the present capitalist order."(p. 292, 294)
One might agree or disagree with these expressions, but they hardly
constitute neglect of the question of rent.
Disagreement is one thing, but the inability to read what one is
disagreeing with is another. Therefore, it is not surprising that some
other elements of "incoherence" in Midnight Oil the Aufheben reviewer
claims to see are also cases of her/his disagreement with the Midnight
Notes position presented as Midnight Notes' own confusion (N.B.: don't
mingle aufhebens, please). Let me take them in order: (1) the importance of
energy commodities in the present period of capitalist accumulation, (2)
the way in which capitalists plan, strategize and conspire, (3) Midnight
Notes' predictions concerning the Gulf War made in October of 1990, (4) the
role of class struggle as the major variable in historical analysis.
Is it true, as the Aufheben reviewer contends, that "Midnight Notes
contends, that the history of post-war capitalism is the history of oil
price changes?"[my italics] No, it is not, as a reading of the full title
of the book--Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973-1992--and even a
superficial reading of chapter headings and random paragraphs throughout
the book would indicate. "Work," "energy" and "war" are clearly as
important as "oil" in the book's conceptual economy, while its dramatis
personae include not only roughnecks and Exxon executives. Autoworkers,
coal miners, nuclear power technicians, housewives and communal farmers are
as central to Midnight Oil's history of post-war capitalism as are people
formally connected with the oil industry.
Why then does the Aufheben reviewer mistakenly claim that Midnight
Notes collective "attempt[s] to reduce the history of capitalism to the
history of oil price fluctuations"? My most charitable explanation is as
follows. Knowledge of the role of energy commodities and their prices,
especially petroleum, play in class relations is crucial for the
understanding of the post-war history of capitalism. This is not an insight
especially given to Midnight Notes, it is contemporary common sense. This
knowledge is especially important in explaining the Gulf War of 1990-91
which was fought, literally, on, over and within oil wells, pipelines,
terminals and refineries. Since Midnight Oil is a book aiming to explain
the main characteristics of the Gulf War through the application of class
analysis, oil qua commodity and its price had to be central topic of the
book.
Further, the Midnight Notes collective has argued more generally
that with the demise of a Keynesian strategy--which focused class struggle
in the mass assembly line factories making "consumer durables"--the center
of gravity of class relations shifted to basic commodities that are
essential to both capitalist production and the reproduction of the working
class. Energy commodities, especially petroleum, are the most basic of the
basic commodities. Consequently, changes in the prices of such commodities
penetrate all nodes of the commodity field and are obviously crucial for
understanding the history of post-1973 capitalism.
Finally, there is the question of prices. Midnight Notes is not
alone in arguing that all prices of commodities are determined by
socio-political struggle. It is the starting point of the critique of
political economy both logically and historically. After all, prices of
commodities, especially prices of their production, reflect (1) the
existence of exploitable labor (hence the continually renewed, violent
expropriation of workers from the means of subsistence), (2) the struggle
over the value of workers' labor power (indeed, often the establishment of
the existence of such value in the first place) in the production of the
commodity, (3) the struggle over the surplus value extracted during the
production of the commodity (involving battles over length and intensity of
the work day), (4) the transferring in or out of the total surplus value
generated by the capitalist system as a whole in order the determine the
price of production (which involves the global accumulated struggles of
capital and proletariat in all aspects of production).
Though these geological strata of class struggle can be found in
the prices of all commodities, they are especially evident in commodities
on the top and bottom of the production tree--i.e., in branches where there
is a very high or a very low machinery/direct labor ratio. This is so
because the global social character of capital is made most evident in
these branches. Energy commodities, especially those produced in the
nuclear or petroleum cycle, are on the higher branches, and so their prices
reflect the indices of struggle throughout the system.
Taking these aspects of oil prices as essential to Midnight Oil's
analysis, it would certainly be wrong to say that Midnight Notes reduces
the history of capitalism to oil price fluctuations, as the Aufheben
reviewer charges. The most accurate claim one can make is that Midnight
Notes interprets major changes in oil prices in the 1973-1992 as indices
and complex reflections of class struggles throughout the world capitalist
system. This too is not such a wild view. The problem is to provide such an
interpretation. Midnight Oil sketches a narrative that attempts to explain
basic inflections in the oil price from the early 1970s to the early 1990s.
The particular narrative might be crude and full of gaps. It certainly does
not claim to be necessarily true. Other, perhaps better, narratives are
possible and I look forward to studying them. But one thing that Midnight
Notes approach does is to show how the most dispossessed and apparently
wretched people of the planet have changed capitalism and are putting its
hegemony in question on the most basic level. The narrative satisfies a
minimum condition, from my perspective, for any correct understanding of
oil price changes or any other important feature of the history of
capitalism.
The Aufheben reviewer certainly finds fault with particulars of the
Midnight Oil narrative, but more importantly s/he sees a deeper logical
flaw in it: the conflation of "capitalism with the actions of individual
capitalists" for "Midnight Oil is fatally undermined by Midnight Notes's
tendency to ascribe outcomes to the conscious strategy of a unified
capital." In a word, the Midnight Notes collective commits a fallacy of
composition--by arguing that since individual capitalists have strategies,
then capital as a whole has a strategy--which leads it to hold a simplistic
and vacuous "conspiracy theory."
Here again I argue that the reviewer misread the work. First, since
the Aufheben reviewer recognizes the Midnight Notes collective's efforts to
read working class action as a determining element in the analysis of any
recent historical event or tendency, then surely Midnight Oil cannot be
ascribing outcomes to the conscious strategy of a unified capital, any more
than an outcome can be ascribed to a conscious unified proletarian
strategy. Since there are at least two parties' actions involved in any
historical event, according to class analysis, then the outcome can not be
ascribed to any particular strategy. So in a war, the victory of side A
cannot be ascribed to A's actions and strategy alone, the actions of side B
and its strategy for victory must be included in any account of the victory
itself. Since almost every important feature of capitalism is rife with
struggles, then any outcome cannot be ascribed to a single strategy. The
Midnight Notes collective certainly does not believe in the myth of an
absolute, omnipotent totality called capital determining values, prices and
profits around the planet. That God was never born, it need hardly be
killed by Midnight Notes or Aufheben!
Second, what of the fallacy of composition retort: "Capitalism does
not have a strategy, although individual capitalists pursue different
strategies"? We should remind the Aufheben reviewer that not every
inference from parts to whole are illegitimate. For example, though "Each
atom in this piece of chalk is indivisible. Therefore, the chalk is
indivisible." is a fallacious argument, "Every atom in this piece of chalk
has mass. Therefore, the piece of chalk has mass." is not. What of capitals
and strategies? Let our reviewer attend: there may be a genuine aufheben
lurking here. For individual capitals and capitalists are not merely
mutually repulsive entities, they form a system and a class. Can this
system and class, though not conscious, have a strategy? Marx, Nietzsche,
Weber, Freud, Foucault and many others have taught us that strategies need
not have self-conscious, Cartesian subjects owning them. Certainly
individual capitalists have collective interests (prime among them "the
intensity of exploitation of the sum total of labor by the sum total of
capital") and they embody these "freemason"-like interests in ever more
elaborate organizational forms, beginning with mercantile combinations
within a city (as noted by Smith) and ending in the most refined
international coordinating bodies like the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO
(prefigured in the writing of Saint-Simon). But even in the absence of any
formal organizational form, one can ascribe a strategy (tacitly, as Locke
would say) to capitalists operating collectively. Is this logically
improper, fallacious or incoherent? Not necessarily. Is it useful? Perhaps,
if it helps in describing, explaining, predicting and retrodicting our
history.
The matter of prediction and retrodiction brings us, finally, to
the Midnight Notes pamphlet, When Crusaders and Assassins Unite, Let the
People Beware, quickly written in September and October 1990, as an
intervention in the anti-war debate in the U.S. which tended to be
hysterical and/or apocalyptic at times. The pamphlet tried to soberly
describe, explain and predict the outcome of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait
and the U.S./U.N. response months before the shooting started and stopped.
The Aufheben reviewer begins and ends the review with this pamphlet and
gives the impression that it was a total failure and a proof of the
"incoherence" of Midnight Oil's "underlying theory." But this assessment is
off the mark. Indeed, the following facts--the actual outcome of the war
(which led to a status quo ante as far as the governments of Iraq and
Kuwait are concerned), the elaborate backroom monetary dealings between the
Hussein regime and the Bush administration preceding the invasion, the
permanent stationing of the U.S. military in the Gulf, the ability of the
Iraqi military to remain intact and destroy the southern "Shiite" and
northern "Kurdish" rebellions, the U.S. government's application of
"marginal [instead of absolute] military force," and the refusal of the
U.S. to fight "a large-scale, conventional shooting war"--were correctly
predicted or retrodicted by the pamphlet. Of course, the pamphlet was
sketchy and ad hoc, but it was the starting point of the Midnight Notes
collective's year-long study of the background of the war which eventually
led to the writing of Part I of Midnight Oil.
Surely, it shouldn't be surprising that this study would have led
to a deepening of our analysis of the Gulf War, especially in allowing us
to see its connection to the Debt Crisis and the New Enclosures. Nor should
the construction of a more complex analysis of the game played by the major
capitalist players among each other, separately, and of the struggle they
fought against the oil-producing proletariat, collectively, be surprising
either. Somehow the Aufheben reviewer wants to blame the Midnight Notes
collective for studying the issues more thoroughly and putting forth more
complex hypotheses on the basis of this study. I really do not understand
their game in this regard.
Let me end this reply, by responding to Aufheben's broadest
criticism of the book with a brief observation. The reviewers claim that
the Midnight Notes collective "overemphasize[s] class struggle" and does
not understand the importance of capitalist competition on the world
market. If Midnight Notes would just tone down that struggle bass and
amplify the competition melody, then perhaps they would play more
agreeably, the Aufheben critic suggests. But this suggestion implies a
parallelism between class struggle and capitalist competition, i.e.,
competition is intra-class antagonism while class struggle is inter-class
antagonism. Are competition and class struggle just parts of a larger
Hobbesian field of human antagonism? No. Competition operates by the rules
of the capitalist game, within a given mathematical framework of risk and
probability, and it helps determine the average rate of profit inside the
system. Class struggle questions the very rules of the game (and so
operates on a meta-level immediately), its mathematics is one of chance and
possibility, and it results in the total surplus value that competition
presupposes.
Midnight Notes is interested in action that violates the rules of
capital, that opens up new possibilities and that reduces the total surplus
value; that is the music the collective tries to hear and to play. Do we
hear it, all of it, do we play it right? That is our problem. Does
competition exist and is it important? Of course. But you don't need to
open your window 'round about midnight to hear that stuff.
Portland, Maine
December 1, 1994
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