AL: You make a point in this book, and “Valence of the Dialectic” that, “The Marx of the Grundrisse, (perhaps more than of the more triumphalist passages of Capital) tirelessly insisted on the significance of the world market as the ultimate horizon on capitalism.” How did he express this and how do you see it actualized today?

FJ: It doesn’t take much room in that work, but the point is the universalization of commodification — everywhere wage labour begins to replace every other kind of labour, be it slave or feudal. It is only when you see the predominance of wage labour in an area, like Western Europe for example, that you realize what kind of machine capitalism is, what kind of process it is, how it is universal.

In a footnote in Grundrisse [the notebooks that preceded Volume One of Capital] Marx says it is not until we reach the confines of the world market that a world revolution, a socialist revolution, becomes foreseeable. By that he means that when gradually around the world all of these other forms of labour will have been replaced by wage labour and thus the profits they produce will have been replaced by capital (from surplus value).

What happens when capital reaches a contradiction or a crisis? There is a breakdown movement. In the book I write that capitalism is “a peculiar machine whose evolution is at one with its breakdown, its expansion at one with its malfunction, its growth with its collapse.” The breakdown of the system is given in the expansion of the system. You’ve used up your peasantry and made them into farmers, then they become unemployed, the system moves along trying to get cheaper and cheaper labour, finally it reaches a point where there isn’t any cheap labour any more, but at the same time there isn’t anyone to buy all these products.

I think we’re in a position now to see that much better than they were in the 20th century. Once you touch the boundaries of the world market then capitalism can’t really expand any further. Now we are not at that point. Yet, better than in Marx’s own time we can see the limits of the situation approaching. That is the moment when the system becomes intolerable and it becomes clear that the system either has to break down or be replaced with something else.

Of course people used to think that Marx was saying that socialism is inevitable, but as far back as the Communist Manifesto he writes about either a revolutionary reconstitution “or the common ruin of the contending classes” — so no, it is not inevitable, but it is where human action and political practice come into play.

AL: In the book you write, “Marx alone sought to combine a politics of revolt with the “poetry of the future” and applied himself to demonstrate that socialism was more modern than capitalism and more productive. To recover that futurism and that excitement is surely the fundamental task of any left ‘discursive struggle’ today.” Could you talk more about this, and how one might begin to conceive a futuristic socialism?

FJ: Marx himself was always quite excited about new discoveries — things like chemical fertilizers (which don’t seem so good today, but lead to a green revolution in their time), undersea cable, and other discoveries of the day. It is very clear that he thought of socialism as more advanced technologically and in every other way. Raymond Williams wrote about how people think that socialism is a nostalgic return to a simpler society. Williams challenged that saying socialism won’t be simpler, it will be much more complicated.

There is a tendency among the Left today — and I mean all varieties of the Left — of being reduced to protecting things. It is a kind of conservatism; saving all the things that capitalism destroys which range from nature to communities, cities, culture and so on. The Left is placed in a very self-defeating nostalgic position, just trying to slow down the movement of history. There is a line by Walter Benjamin that epitomizes that — though I don’t know how he thought of that himself — revolutions are “pulling the emergency chord,” stopping the onrush of the train. I don’t think Marx thought about it like that at all. It seems to me that Marx thought that productivity would increase by getting rid of capitalism. On the level of organization, technology and production, Marx did not want a return to handicraft labour, but to go on into all kinds of complex forms of automation and computerization [as it would emerge] and so.

The historical accident of something like socialism or communism taking place in a place what was essentially a third world country, Russia, an underdeveloped country, that’s made us think of socialism in a way that was not Marx’s way of imagining it. The socialist movement has to itself be inspired by this other type of vision.

— Capitalism, the infernal machine: An interview with Fredric Jameson on Rabble.ca by Aaron Leonard

(via vindicatrix)