Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital by Søren Mau ****
Reading dates: 02 December 2024 – 15 March 2025
We read Mute Compulsion for our politics reading group. The texts are not always easy and I have had a few rounds of not finishing the book, which is not great for the formation of my political thought. Of late, I have made a renewed commitment to the set readings, no matter how hard.
Mute Compulsion required not that I read, but that I study the text. Yet, it gave back in a plentiful way. Once I got back my Marxist vocabulary, I felt all the emotions: awe (at Marx’s project and Mau’s fewer of synthesis and clarity), recognition, utter despair (at how far the tentacles of capital go), frustration (at how difficult it will be to get out of it), joy (at seeing a clearer picture of how the world is organised). I wanted to photocopy the expert and beautifully written summary of the conclusion and hand it out in the street. It made me even more communist.
We had a good discussion but the main criticism was around how the idea of surplus is outdated and how only Marxists engage with it as a category, but not other forms of political economy. Yet, I still see the picture painted by Marx and Mau as crystal clear of what is going on around me and it will take some convincing to provide other explanations that fit so well. I am open to them.
NOTES
From the Introduction
in this world, profit is more important than life.
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forms of social domination reproduce themselves through inscription in the environment of those who are subjected to it.
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how capital manages to hold on to its status as the social logic everyone has to obey in order to live.
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in capitalist societies, the products of labour generally take on the form of commodities.
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production, where only a marginal share of the products of labour is produced for exchange
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dialectical derivations is what Marx calls ‘the method of rising from the abstract to concrete’
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the simplest definition of capitalism: a society in which social reproduction is governed by the logic of capital to a significant degree. This is a rather vague definition
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it valorises value by exploiting labour – which is why we call it capitalism.
From chapter 1. Conceptualising Power and Capital
basic thrust of Marx’s critique of capitalism: it deprives people of control over their lives
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he often describes capital as ‘domination of objectified labour over living labour’
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Capital is a concept which refers to the social form of wealth, not its content, analogously to the discipline of philosophical logic, which (at least in its non-Hegelian sense) is concerned with forms of thought rather than their content.
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From the sixteenth century onwards, however, a fundamental transformation took place: the logic of capital began to weave itself into the very fabric of social life, eventually reaching the point where people had become dependent upon it for their survival.
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For Hegel, subjectivity is self-relatingnegativity, or ‘the “I”’s pure reflection into itself’, which is tantamount to the ability ‘to abstract from everything … to extinguish all particularity, all determinacy’.72 The subject posits itself by externalising itself, only in order to sublate this difference
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capital is fundamentally a movement,or ‘value-in-process’.
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Capital is value in motion, and value is a social relation which gains an autonomous form in money, thereby making it possible for value to circulate in the form of capital.
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Conceptualisation of capital as an emergent property of social relations thus allows us to avoid the hyperbolic and ultimately unconvincing depiction of capital as a living subject endowed with consciousness, will, and intentionality, while still holding on to the crucial insight that it does indeed exert causal power in its own right
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The power of capital can thus be defined as capital’s capacity to impose its logic on social life;
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Another definition which would fit here is the one provided by Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall: ‘Power is the production, in and through social relations, of effects on actors that shape their capacity to control their fate.’
From chapter 2. Power and Marxism
the organisation of social reproduction on the basis of the valorisation of value presupposes an institution formally separated from the immediate processes of social production endowed with the capacity to enforce rules upon everyone by means of coercive force
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The state is, in Marx’s words, ‘the political engine for forcibly perpetuating the social enslavement of the producers of wealth by its appropriators, of the economic rule of capital over labour’.
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The Marxists of the Second International era used the term ‘ideology’ in the broad sense of ‘any kind of socially determined thought’
From chapter 3. The Social Ontology of Economic Power
The essence of the human being is labour, which Marx understands as the self-creation of the human being through objectification.
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Communism thus comes to represent the reappropriation of the human essence: the ‘social revolution’, writes Marx, ‘represents man’s protest against a dehumanised life’
From chapter 4. The Human Corporeal Organisation
‘A human body cannot,’ as Malm puts it, ‘regulate her Stoffwechsel in solitude, any more than she could speak in a private tongue: she must do it as a communal being. Her relation to the rest of nature is therefore mediated through her relations to other human beings’.
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An explanation of this kind would have to account for such evolutionary processes as the origins and effects of bipedality, which freed the hands for carrying and toolmaking; the ways in which increased effectivity of hunting and gathering created new and complex forms of social interaction as well as freeing up time for social activities not immediately related to the provision of food; how fire made it possible to externalise digestion, enormously increase energy efficiency, and develop larger brains; and how larger brains, in turn, combined with a narrow birth canal as a result of bipedality led to the peculiar phenomenon of prematurely born human animals.
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the notion of corporeal organisation reveals the corporeal roots of transindividuality
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The double mediation at the heart of the human metabolism – the mediation of tools and the mediation of social relations – explains why it can take infinite different forms.
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Human corporeal organisation opens up an immense space of possibility founded on a necessity
From chapter 5. Metabolic Domination
Dialectics is, rather, a process in which a concrete totality reveals itself to contain its own negation as one of its moments.
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Only because the corporeal organisation of the human being opens up an immense space of possibility is something like a succession of modes of production – that is, history – possible. The translation of this possibility into actuality – the processes that decide on the specific social relations under which people live – is what we call politics.
The Meaning
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The fact that parts of the human body can be concentrated as property in the hands of other members of the species has the consequence that power can weave itself into the very fabric of the human metabolism.
From chapter 6. Transcendental Class Domination
The fountains of your life are sealed by the hand of capital, that quaffs its golden goblet to the lees and gives the dregs to
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Why are you locked out of life when you are locked out of the factory? … What gives the capitalist this tremendous power?
–Ernest Jones
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it must be possible to purchase labour power as a commodity in order for M–C–Mʹ to be the dominant form of circulation.
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The commodification of labour power is the condition of possibility of what Marx calls the capital relation, which is the relationship between the proletarian who sells her labour power and the capitalist who buys it
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Violence was necessary, in his view, because peasants had to be deprived of the possibility to reproduce themselves outside of the market – something they did not give up voluntarily. In other words: market dependence had to be created, since peasants generally did what they could to avoid relying too much on the market.
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once capitalism has been established, it systematically prevents individuals from opting out of it.
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‘Class’ thus denotes the relation of a group of people to the conditions of social reproduction.
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the ruling class rules because it is the class ‘whose conditions are the conditions of the whole society
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struggles across the entire social field can be a part of the same political project: wrenching the conditions of life from the grip of capital
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what defines the proletarian condition is not work but the radical split between life and its conditions.
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Capitalism is the institutionalisation of insecurity;
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humans are transformed into workers, however, is a fundamental condition of the capitalist mode of production: the radical separation between life and its conditions which allows capital to insert itself as the mediator between them. The proletarian is a ‘mere possibility’ or a ‘bare living labour capacity’, and by isolating capacities from the conditions of their realisation, capital becomes the logic which governs the translation of possibility into actuality
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The valorisation of value injects itself into the human metabolism, making the reproduction of capital the condition of the reproduction of life.
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Mute compulsion only works because the worker wants to live. Only because of this can capital succeed in demanding surplus labour in exchange for the means of life.
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The worker is not merely a nothing, but in a sense, they are less than nothing: not only are they excluded from the conditions of their existence (they are absolutely poor); they also owe their future to capital
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surplus labour is a kind of interest the worker has to pay in order to live:
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At its root, capital is thus a debt relation,
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As a promise to pay, debt involves a certain configuration of temporality. Any debt relation is an attempt to ‘neutralize time’, that is, to reduce ‘the future and its possibilities to current power relations’.49 A debt relation is thus a power relation in which the future is subjected to the present.
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The power of capital is, in other words, based upon a temporal displacement in which the past appropriates the future in order to subjugate and neutralise the present
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The transformation of people into absolutely poor and transcendentally indebted workers binds them to capital as such, not to a particular capitalist.
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The individual is not a residue of the dissolution of pre-capitalist social bonds; it is a socially constituted form of subjectivity
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For Kant, the transcendent realm is what lies beyond the field of possible experiences,
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The transcendental, on the other hand, concerns the conditions of possibility of the field of possible experiences. Space and time, for example, are transcendental forms of intuition, which means that they are conditions of possibility of what can appear to us in experience. In other words, whereas the transcendent lies beyond the field of immanence, the transcendental is what is logically prior to this field.
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In Foucault’s analysis, biopower is one of the two forms of power characteristic of modernity, alongside discipline.74 Both are opposed to sovereign power, the essence of which is ‘the right to decide life and death’.
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Since the aim of capitalist production is the accumulation of wealth in its monetary form rather than the fulfilment of human needs, capitalist production frequently leads to the undermining of the life of the workers on whose lives it ultimately depends.
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The essence of sovereignty is thus the ability to institute the exception through which the subjects of the law are stripped naked and exposed to sovereign violence.
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The modern state can only relate to its subjects as a population whose biological life has to be administered, controlled, and regulated because capitalist relations of production have already isolated the naked life of the proletarian subject in order for the accumulation of abstract wealth to take place.
From chapter 7. Capital and Difference
‘The categories “women” and “men” are nothing other than the distinction between the spheres of activity.’
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we should avoid the ahistorical radical feminist concept of patriarchy
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Any given situation consists of an infinity of facts, and any description – or even just any meaningful experience – of any phenomenon involves abstraction, that is, the omission of irrelevant aspects of the phenomenon in question.
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in order to form concepts and build theories, it is necessary to define an object of analysis by abstracting from irrelevant aspects of the empirical totality in which this object exists.
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One of the ways in which this power of abstraction is usefully employed is to engage in counterfactual considerations and abstract from actual connections between various phenomena in order to examine how they might otherwise be related
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antagonisms among proletarians tends to neutralise opposition to the power of capital
From chapter 8. The Universal Power of Value
The concept of value is meant to capture a specific form of socialisation of labour, that is, a historically specific way of coordinating production.
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the domination of value is a domination of people by people mediated by relationships between people and things.
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What these authors claim is that fetishism refers not to the ideological naturalisation of a social practice but rather to that practice itself; or, with regards to commodity fetishism more specifically, not the ideological representation of value as a natural property of products of labour, but the actual practice of relating to each other through the exchange of products of labour.
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Value thus appears as a natural quality possessed by products of labour regardless of their social context – and this is what fetishism is.
From chapter 9. Value, Class, and Competition
Value presupposes class, but class does not presuppose value.
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Class domination is, in other words, a necessary yet insufficient condition of value.
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Against such a ‘building block’ approach, as David Harvey calls it, we should insist on what Endnotes refer to as the ‘bi-directionality of systematic dialectics’.41 What this means is that there is always a retroactive constitution of meaning at play in the development of categories; we thus have to continually reinterpret earlier categories in the light of subsequent conceptual developments.
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competition is a deeply Platonic mechanism: it treats every particular capital as the immediate incarnation of capital as such,
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what the individual capital meets when it confronts a competitor is nothing but its own essence disguised as another individual capital.
From chapter 10. The Despotism of Subsumption
one of the sources of the power of capital is the very exercise of this power.
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The peculiar thing about labour power as a commodity, however, is that, unlike most other commodities, it cannot be separated from its seller. When its buyer wants to realise its use value (i.e., consume it), it thus involves domination and the confiscation of a part of the seller’s life.
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Capitalist production is thus a unity of the ‘anarchy’ of the sphere of circulation and the ‘despotism’ of the sphere of production
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this complete de-individualisation of labour, confinement in barrack-like factories [Einkasernirung], military
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discipline, subjugation to the machinery, regulation by the stroke of the clock, surveillance by overseers, complete destruction of any development in mental or physical activity, who vociferate against infringements of individual freedom and the free movement of labour at the slightest sign of state intervention
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Real subsumption is the process whereby one of these aspects (the valorisation process) meshes with or intervenes in the other (the material character of the labour process); in other words, it is the becoming-substance of form.41 Marx also refers to this as the ‘specifically capitalist mode of production’
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as Marx notes, ‘the social function of hierarchical work organization is not technical efficiency, but accumulation’.
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the most fundamental dynamic of the material restructuring of social reproduction set in motion by capital: separate in order to reconnect, fracture in order to reassemble, atomise in order to integrate
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the capitalist production process is not only the production of commodities endowed with surplus value – it is at the same time the production of power.
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One of the peculiar things about labour power is that although it is a commodity, ‘it is not produced capitalistically’, as Lise Vogel puts it. Whatever the precise reasons for this, it is remarkable that capitalism is – or at least has been so far – perfectly compatible with relinquishing direct control over a process which is an absolutely indispensable condition of its existence.
From chapter 11. The Capitalist Reconfiguration of Nature
the only thing that prevents a truly nightmarish rollout of terminator technology is resistance.
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it is always important to bear in mind what is commonly referred to as Engel’s law, after the statistician Ernst Engel: namely the fact that people tend to spend a smaller part of their income on food as their income rises – in other words, that there is a low income elasticity of demand for agricultural products.
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Under the direction of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, ‘a similar package of reforms was’, as Weis explains, ‘stamped upon every debtor nation, generally including: trade and investment liberalization; export promotion; currency devaluation; fiscal austerity; price and wage deregulation; the privatization of state services and enterprises; and the assurance of private property rights’.73 SAPs accelerated tendencies that were already well underway, partly as a result of the green revolution.
From chapter 12. Logistical Power
Capital is always on the run – not only from disobedient workers, disobedient governments, and disobedient nature, but also from itself. That is to say, it is constantly in flight from its tendency to overproduction, which acts as a powerful impetus towards the expansion of markets.
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Capital is a movement in which value alternately takes on the form of money and commodities.
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One of the peculiarities of capitalism, however, is that it reduces spatiality to ‘a merely temporal moment’.13 Space is reduced to time in the sense that distance matters for capital only because it takes time to cross it,
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Capitalism is founded upon the insertion of the logic of valorisation into the gap between life and its conditions,
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capital’s ability to restructure the material conditions of social reproduction. In other words: they are a part of the economic power of capital. All of them are simultaneously a result of this power and one of its sources, that is, they display the same circular structure as the mechanisms of domination
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One of the important tasks of the analysis of the real subsumption of labour and nature is to reveal the poverty of productive force determinism.
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historical junctures where certain technologies were abandoned, not because they were less productive, but because they were incompatible with capitalist relations of production.82 In these cases, capitalist relations of production hindered the development of the productive forces; technologies were left behind despite being cheaper, more productive, or more effective, or all of these things at the same time.83
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the logic of capital, no matter how omnipotent it may seem, is only one social force among many
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Initially, capital was a social form imposed on pre-capitalist content. As soon as its grip on the conditions of social life was established, however, this form revealed itself to possess a strong propensity to materialise itself, to transcend its own formality and incarnate itself in a mesh of limbs, energies, bodies, plants, oceans, knowledges, animals, and machines – a process which continues to constantly reshape the world to this day. This is what the concept of real subsumption captures. It is far from frictionless, and among the most important of the many obstacles capital encounters are labour and nature, both of which possess an ineradicable autonomy with which capital has struggled for centuries.
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By accelerating the process of real subsumption on the level of the global totality of production, capital moved closer to creating a world in which profitability is the condition of life.
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Marx is able to conclude that as a ‘process of reproduction’, capitalist production ‘produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself’ –
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What circulates in millions of shipping containers or grows in eroding soils pumped with synthetic fertiliser and Monsanto seeds is thus not only commodities but also capitalist relations of production. Capitalist production is the production of capitalism. This insight demonstrates that the economic power of capital is in its essence dynamic:
From chapter 13. Surplus Populations and Crisis
the ‘mechanism of the capitalist production process removes the very obstacles it temporarily creates’.
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The ‘true barrier to capitalist production is’, as Marx puts it, ‘capital itself’.35
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In the capitalist mode of production, the production of useful things is subordinated not only to the production of value, but to the valorisation of value, and the mute compulsion of competition forces individual capitals to produce without regard for the limits of the market, like a stuck gas pedal in a car heading towards a cliff.
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a crisis is not only the point at which accumulation is interrupted; it is also a mechanism by means of which capital re-establishes the conditions of another round of accumulation.
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What the theory of crisis demonstrates is not the inevitable collapse of capitalism but rather, in the words of Clarke, ‘the permanent instability of social existence under capitalism
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a crisis is ‘a necessary violent means for the cure of the plethora of capital’, a mechanism by means of which capital avoids breakdown.
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When a crisis hits, it becomes clear just how much a society in which social reproduction is governed by the valorisation of value is a society which has lost control.
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A crisis is a temporary solution to the inherent and ineradicable contradictions of accumulation; it is capital’s attempt to flee its own shadow.
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the immanent tendency of crises is to set in motion powerful dynamics which, if left unchecked, tend to restore and expand the power of capital
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A crisis of capital is always also a crisis of proletarian reproduction, and therefore also a situation in which the incompatibility between the convulsions of accumulation and the need for a secure and stable life achieves its most glaring expression.
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The forces of capital know very well that a crisis is a splendid opportunity to strengthen capital’s grip on social life. We communists should also take heed of that.
From the Conclusion
My hope is thus that, combined with other relevant theories and a sensitivity towards the specificity of the conjuncture, the systematic scrutiny of the concept of mute compulsion offered in this book will be able to make a contribution – however slight – to the dismantling of the destructive, oppressive, and nightmarish system known as the capitalist mode of production and thereby to the creation of the conditions of possibility of a free life – also known as communism.
