In a brief but illuminating passage from the first volume of Capital vol. 1, Marx lays the groundwork for a critical method that accounts for the movements of history, including the historical present. Marx here introduces the premise that the commodity-form undergoes a metamorphosis once its circulation becomes entirely mediated by money, a sea-change in the historical development of capitalism.1 Monumental though this shift may be, however, Marx insists that the universalization of money does not abolish or change the central contradictions internal to the commodity-form itself. Rather, he writes, it “provides the form within which they have room to move. This is, in general, the way in which real contradictions are resolved.”2 As he does often throughout Capital, Marx here highlights the commodity and its internal contradictions as the “elemental form” through which any analysis of capital must proceed.3 However, his turn in the second sentence to the “general” signals that from this passage’s central metaphor we can draw out some larger principles of historical method. To this end Marx prompts us, on the one hand, to consider the movement of history, its inherent transience, and the manner in which contradiction and negation set history in motion. On the other hand, Marx asserts the pertinacity of form, insisting that our attention not solely be drawn to movement, but also that we hold focus on the room in which historical movement takes place, the deep structural determinations of any age. The relation between movement and room conditions the historical events of any epoch (minimally, since the rise of capitalism). However, in periods of historical transition, or in contexts where local antagonisms clash visibly with the systemic dynamics of a world market, such a relation can be drawn into heightened critical relief.

This essay takes up the 1974 UN Declaration for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) as just such an opportunity: a chance to reconsider the 1970s as a decade of transition in which the sharpening developmental aspirations of G77 nations in the global south come into conflict with structural transformations in the accumulation of capital. The NEIO, which emerged out of the Raul Prebish and Hans Singer period with UNCTAD, garnered support from the most prominent G77 political leaders of its day. Julius Nyerere believed that with its aggressive program of wealth redistribution and promises of socialism between G77 states, the NIEO could function as a “Trade Union of the Poor,” affording Third World states the ability to collectively negotiate economic terms and conditions for development, and to strike when negotiation proved inadequate.4 Speaking of the “dialectic of domination and plundering on the one hand, and the dialectic of emancipation and recovery on the other,” Algerian president Houari Boumediene, one of the NIEO’s chief proponents, warned of an “uncontrollable conflagration” if the north refused to allow the Third World to control and profit from its natural resources.5 More recently Vijay Prashad has dubbed the NIEO “the highest point in the Third World Project.”6 It is easy, then, to understand the allure of recuperative efforts that return to the NIEO project in search of radical embers — starved of oxygen by the neoliberal turn, the debt crisis, and the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s — that might be rekindled today.7

Contra this claim, however, I will advance two arguments that correspond to the two main sections of the essay below. First, I argue that despite its important currents of ambition and innovation, the NIEO is best understood as the final expression — one is tempted to say last gasp — of “the Bandung era.”8 Such a periodization — roughly 1955 to 1974 — enables us to consider the dynamic relationship between the state and capital in an era characterized both by decolonization and expanding capital accumulation. Secondly, I argue that the developmentalist demands of the Bandung era run aground on the contemporaneous systemic crisis of capital. For the NIEO articulates its aspiration to build what amounts to an international welfare state for decolonizing nations at precisely the moment that capital tips into an extended, and perhaps terminal, crisis of accumulation. To make this case I will draw upon the persuasive analysis offered by theorists within the critical-theoretical school known largely in German-speaking Marxist circles as Wertkritik (often translated as “value-critique” or “value-form-critique”, and typically associated with the journals Exit! And Krisis). This essay, more specifically, will consider the work of Robert Kurz, and Ernst Lohoff. 9 In alignment with the Wertkritik theorists, I read the 1970s as the decade in which the contradictions immanent to capital’s value-form — particularly a rising organic composition that displaces more value-productive labor than it can absorb — become visible and ultimately disabling for Third World aspiration.10 From this vantage I contend that the interventions of NIEO ultimately express the contradictions of a transitional moment, forcefully demanding a place for the Third World in a political-economic order, even as the structural preconditions of that order have inexorably begun to unravel.

In elaborating these primary arguments, I endeavor to work within the historical method I glean from Marx’s account of the commodity-form’s historical development: a relational account of both movement, and the room to move. At times I foreground local differences and antagonisms in an effort to untangle the contradictory forces at work in the two decades between the Bandung conference and the NIEO Declaration. In these moments I try to identify the real internal fissures that cleave apart what appears to be a unified Third-Worldist bloc and a set of sovereign, self-determining nation-states. At other points I assert that the framework in which such differences must be situated is the unified world market, the structural determinations of which condition the choices and actions of its participants even as the latter forcefully assert their independence. From here the argument pivots to analyze the contradictions of the value-form as such, the room in which the historical actors of the Bandung era moved. I turn to both Marx and the Wertkritik thinkers Kurz and Lohoff to consider an objective crisis of capital accumulation — the systemic inability to valorize value — a process that begins concurrently with the NIEO Declaration, and has lasting implications for our historical present.

Bookend to Bandung

My first claim is that the NIEO is the extension, indeed the culmination of a twenty-year political project outlined at the 1955 Asian-African Conference at Bandung.11 Comparing the 1974 NIEO Declaration passed by the UN General Assembly with the 1955 “Final Communiqué” from the Bandung Conference (the culminating resolution of agreed-upon principles and policy proposals from the twenty-nine participating nations), one finds significant continuities both in specific policy proposals, and in underlying principles.12

The span of time that separates the two documents witnessed the formal decolonization of dozens of new nation-states (celebrated in the prelude to the NIEO Declaration as the “greatest and most significant achievement during the last decades”), and both documents share as a foundational principle the condemnation of colonialism in its many forms and the assertion of the right to self-determination, state sovereignty, and national independence as the sine qua non of international development.13 Decrying “colonialism in all of its manifestations” as an “evil which should be speedily brought to an end,” the Bandung Communiqué affirmed the “rights of peoples and nations to self-determination.”14 The NIEO Declaration likewise claimed as a founding principle the “sovereign equality of States, self-determination of all peoples, inadmissibility of the acquisition of territories by force, territorial integrity and non-interference in the internal affairs of other States.”15 It denounced “neocolonialism in all its forms,” and took the further step, more defiant than the Bandung agreement, to assert the “full and permanent sovereignty of every State over its natural resources and all economic activities,” including the “right to nationalization or transfer of ownership to its nationals.”16 From this principle of state sovereignty issued a host of policy-oriented proposals that constitute the shared platform of both Bandung and NIEO. These include a range of developmentalist protections and stimuli around trade, the international monetary system, price controls, technology transfer, raw material export, manufacture and industrialization, oil production and the role of producers’ associations, among others.

There is, then, considerable overlap between the documents of Bandung and NIEO, both in the remedies proposed and, more importantly, in the shared premise that decolonizing and recently decolonized nations have an inalienable right to the full set of capacities that inhere to state sovereignty and self-determination. However, despite the forcefulness with which self-determination is asserted as an unassailable truth, the ideal of “independence” — whether as a political or economic actor — remained maddeningly elusive for those nations who had recently or who soon hoped to declare formal independence from their colonial rulers. The slogans of “independence” and “liberation,” among the most powerful social ideals of the twentieth century, are gradually emptied of substance during the Bandung era, even as the Third World champions of national self-determination rallied huge popular movements under those banners. The imbalanced international system of states, and the myriad difficulties in establishing politically coherent regionalist or Third-Wordlist blocs served to perpetuate and extend the enormous power differential between stronger and weaker states. More important, as the NIEO’s allusion to neocolonialism implies, the uneven geographical development between global north and south meant that patterns of capital accumulation and international class relations continued to structure the economic prospects of newly independent states, much as had been the case under direct political rule. Independence remained a politically potent ideal, but the Bandung era puts paid to any straightforward conception of self-determination.17

Indeed, reconsidering the Bandung era allows us to see some of the contradictions at work that were surely visible to its participants, but that appear resolved in the unified political front asserted in official proclamations. This avowed unity forged, its participants declared, by the shared historical legacy of colonialism, enabled Bandung states to speak collectively of “common interest and concern.”18 The conference has largely occupied this ideal in historical memory, becoming almost synonymous with the emergence of the Third World or the Non-Aligned Movement as a coherent social and political bloc. However, even a cursory review of the historical record reveals that this coherence is illusory from the start. Broad schisms were already apparent in 1955. A mere eight years after partition, the subcontinental rift between India and Pakistan remained acute. Stark geopolitical divisions within the conference arose between those nations whose leaders advocated for non-alignment (India and Ceylon most notably) and those who had joined the South East Asian Defense Treaty Organization (SEATO) (Pakistan, Turkey, the Philippines, Thailand and Japan). The contentious presence of China’s Zhou-En-Lai stoked cold-war concerns such as those voiced in a Manila newspaper, which fulminated that the Bandung meeting would “furnish a convenient point of departure for the propaganda of the puppet Peiping Communist Regime.”19 Indeed the wavering SEATO nations agree to attend the conference only after receiving explicit sanction from Washington, which encouraged them to counter communist arguments and advance concrete proposals in line with a US economic development model.

These divisions between and among Bandung nations only became more acute in the years following the conference. The two-decade period between Bandung and NIEO witnessed an extraordinary (and, in the mid-1970s, still ongoing) wave of decolonization giving rise to a heterogeneous array of new nation-state formations across the Third World.20 However, military conflicts between India and China in 1962, India and Pakistan (1956, 1965, 1971), Pakistan and East Pakistan/Bangladesh (1972), among others, further undermined any pretense of South Asian unity in the years immediately following Bandung’s declaration of Asian-African solidarity. Likewise, despite the fervent hopes of pan-Africanists, the decade and a half of African decolonization following Bandung produced no unified continent-wide or federalist (let alone Afro-diasporic) political bloc. Vietnam’s history occupies an important symbolic status in this era: site of both the iconic anticolonial victory of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and the rather darker “liberation” of Saigon in 1975 after two decades of continuous warfare and untold human suffering. These decades proved particularly damaging for the Third World Left. Consider the consequences of Soviet guidance urging communist parties and working class struggles throughout the Third World to form political alliances with nationalist bourgeois regimes, which led ultimately to the containment and eradication of socialist parties in Nasserite Egypt, Nehruvian India, and perhaps most disastrously to the massacre of between a half-million and a million PKI members following the 1965 coup in Indonesia.21 While both Bandung and NIEO undoubtedly afford historical examples of a Third-Worldist collective articulating matters of shared and common interest, the unity expressed remained aspirational rather than real, and in fact papered over glaring internal divisions.

An analogous dynamic is evident within the institutional form of the state itself. That is, the apparent unity of nation-state actors at Bandung in fact masks the internal class antagonisms within those states. The critique of class antagonism within the bourgeois state goes back to Lenin, of course.22 Developing Lenin’s foundational insights, Alex Callinicos and Fred Block offer the concept of a “state manager” to discuss the contradictions of executive state leadership. Their notion, I think, usefully clarifies the distinct but structurally intertwined interests of those political figures who manage the state and those capitalists whose primary motive is private capital accumulation, most particularly as a way of thinking about the twentieth-century experience of relatively isolated Left or Left-leaning states operating within a capitalist world market. Callinicos posits that the interests and actions of state managers and capitalists typically, though not invariably, align. This alliance stems not from the conspiratorial plotting of the capitalist class to control state policy through direct coercion or cooptation (though surely there are many instances where such collusion does take place); rather, capitalists gain de facto political sway because of their disproportionately large role in the state economy, meaning that state managers are inclined to adopt policies that favor capitalists out of a desire to reproduce the social order as a whole. State managers can, of course, emerge from the capitalist class and more or less directly represent that class’ interests (setting aside for now the internal divisions within the capitalist class itself). Likewise popular pressure from workers or from those who are dispossessed or discriminated against can at times reorient policies of state managers towards the interests of working class majorities against elites. By and large, however, without exerting direct political control and simply through the independent pursuit of private accumulation, the capitalist class tends to impersonally sway the policies of state managers in their favor simply by dint of their perceived indispensability to the collective well-being of the society as a whole. 24

This framework, I believe, helps clarify the contradictory positions of Nehru, Sukarno, Chou En-Lai, Nasser, and the other leaders of newly independent states, who in their Bandung speeches make repeated reference to the revolutionary yearnings of the 1.4 billion people — nearly two thirds of the world’s population, they stress again and again — who live in Asia and Africa. Those figures, on the one hand, are marshaled to assert a political leverage in relations with the First World, a collective authority that Sukarno memorably, if enigmatically, terms “the Moral Violence of Nations.”25 On the other hand, the unrest hinted at by those population figures poses perhaps an even greater problem for the new leaders themselves, scrambling to make good on the promise of independence movements and address the surging popular demand for jobs, food, education, health care — in short, the new needs and wants created by capitalist “modernity.” Even those state managers who represent Left political movements and whose individual histories of revolutionary struggle would suggest opposition towards the interests of capital become snared in the dilemma of the state manager sketched above: the structural interdependence between the state and capital means that even revolutionary independence leaders find themselves dependent on capital to address the economic demands of newly liberated peoples. Irrespective of the individual political leanings of Bandung state-managers, newly independent nation-states, one after the next, sought access to money capital, industrial capital, and commodity capital and its promise of development, hoping to remedy decades of enforced dependency.26

From one perspective, then, the contradictory forces at play in the Bandung construct an apparent unity that masks internal antagonisms: a unified Third World bloc better conceived as competing national interests; the unified state better understood as competing class interests. As Marx’s historical method insists, however, we must situate these very real antinomies within a larger unity. From the perspective of social totality, the heterogeneous constellation of states and classes all remain subject to the determinations of a unified capitalist world market, in particular capital’s immanent requirement to ensure the valorization of value. Understood thusly, national liberation becomes possible politically in part because it removes fetters to capital accumulation. National liberation, then, contains the same double sense that Marx ascribes to all forms of freedom under capital: the freedom to act as legal/political subjects (here sovereign states as well as individuals) is predicated upon freeing populations from their means of subsistence. Post-war decolonization subsumes vast new populations into a world market as commodity-subjects and monetary-subjects, even if not always as waged proletarians, thickening the capital relation throughout an ever wider sphere.

Of particular importance here is the changing dynamic of value-productive wage labor that marks the Bandung era. John Smith’s valuable study Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century, cites helpful data on this point. In 1950, approximately seventy million industrial workers, about thirty-four percent of the world’s total, lived in “less developed regions”; by 1974, the year of the NIEO resolution, that figure had more than doubled to approximately 180 million industrial workers. The NIEO is launched at the same moment that the global south becomes for the first time home to the majority of the world’s industrial workers. If waged manufacturing work is included in these calculations (in addition to industry) the amount of value-productive in the south becomes even greater still. This trend has only accelerated in the intervening years. Indeed one of the defining features of the period immediately following the Bandung era is that the overwhelming majority of the world’s proletariat comes to be located outside the historic cradle of industrial capitalism; Smith estimates that by 2010, 79 percent of the industrial workers, and 83 percent of manufacturing workers lived in the global south.27 I will consider some implications of these quite staggering shifts in more detail below.

The broader point is that the “room to move” within the dialectic I have been sketching above presupposes the Bandung era’s ultimate transience — presupposes that the era will be superseded by another at the moment when its internal structures pose a sufficient impediment to the accumulation of capital. When viewed from the hindsight of the present moment, we see that the Bandung era ripened, “as in a hothouse,” the contradictions of value production and realization in a then-still-expanding world market.28 It witnessed the integration of vast new territories and populations into the capital relation, on the one hand creating new branches of capital with new access to raw materials and markets, and on the other hand freeing a latent surplus population of proletarians for value-productive wage work and subsuming them as commodity-subjects. 29 In the process it created an enormous (and still growing) “reserve army” of surplus labor located most notably in surging urban populations in the south, populations often unable to hold regular employment as wage laborers and whose presence serves (among other things) to depress the wages of those who can find employment.30 In many cases, the process creating this “reserve army” takes a form quite similar to the sorts of original accumulation that Marx describes in Part Eight of Capital, where largely agrarian populations are freed from their land and means of subsistence and forced into wage work (for those “lucky” enough to find it), while once-privately-held land and resources are consolidated by large capitals. But (especially in the post-1970s period) it also takes the form of displaced wage laborers — civil servants, those who had worked in state-subsidized industries, those whose plants are moved to more profitable greenfield sites, those who are displaced by automation or increasing technical requirements — workers who are likewise forced out of their employment to join the ranks of the reserve army. Paradoxically, this rapid, vast process of labor subsumption (vast both in terms of geography and population) took place under the stewardship of state managers from the Bandung nations, many of whom were considered stalwarts of the anti-colonial Left. Ultimately, then, I contend that the NIEO marks the close of the Bandung era not because of any policy choices pursued or not pursued by the state managers of the decolonizing world, but rather because by the time the NIEO Declaration is passed in 1974, capitalism has entered into a phase of crisis (from which it has not yet exited) that structurally precludes the redistributionist aspirations imagined throughout the twenty-year Bandung era. It is to the implications of this crisis of valorization that I now turn.

Development without Accumulation

There is now something approaching broad agreement within contemporary Marxist scholarship (!) that following a two-decade post-war boom (1945-1965), capitalism entered an extended phase of stagnation and crisis beginning sometime during the late 1960s or early 1970s.31 Since this time much of the world has seen real wages remaining flat or declining, profit rates dipping, unemployment rising, inequality rates within nations surging (including within China, which is often the notable exception to the above trends), and consumption levels maintained through finance and credit bubbles, which in turn introduce new instabilities into the system.32 Against this backdrop, the four-plus decades since 1970 have witnessed the near universal rollback or outright demise of the Keynesian or social-democratic welfare state policies in the capitalist First World, state-planned economies in the Second World, and developmental state projects in the Third World.

Rather than surveying the rich debates within Marxism regarding this post-1970 era — debates that now have a substantial body of secondary literature — I will focus my attention several critical-theorists within the Wertkritik school whose work offers distinctive theses about what they consider an epoch defined by crisis. Although this work has only recently been translated into English, the Wertkritik theorists (including Robert Kurz, Ernst Lohoff, Norbert Trenkle, Roswitha Scholz, Claus Peter Ortlieb, and Karl-Heinz Lewed) have since the mid-1980s developed a coherent and provocative critique of fundamental contradictions within the value-form under capital. My thinking about this corpus of work and its implications for reconsidering the NIEO remains preliminary, if for no other reason than the translated dossier of writings published as a special issue of Mediations and in book form as Marxism and the Critique of Value represents only a small fraction of the Wertkritik corpus. Nevertheless, these thinkers have challenged and deepened my own thinking about the post-1970s era in particular and Marxism more broadly, so I turn now to a pair of provocative essays by Kurz and Lohoff in order to develop an argument about the crisis of accumulation that becomes evident at the moment that the NIEO redistributionist program is launched.33

Kurz’s and Lohoff’s analysis of the post-1970 crisis is simultaneously more and less orthodox in its reading of Marx than the accounts offered by other Marxists who analyze this period. It departs from Marx — or at least it appears to — in its uncompromising dismissal of proletarian class standpoint and struggle (on this, more below). However, it remains exceedingly faithful to Marx, particularly the Marx of Grundrisse and Capital, in developing its central arguments, which arise directly from Marx’s concepts of value, relative surplus value, commodity fetishism, and the tendency towards a rising organic composition of capital. Kurz, in a foundational essay from 1986, emphasizes the central contradiction within capital’s chase of relative surplus value: productive efficiencies gained by increasing levels of science and technology that are perfectly rational, indeed compulsory, for any individual capital inexorably undermine accumulation at the scale of total social capital by eliminating the sole source and substance of value creation under capital — labor-power.

That is, compelled by the coercive laws of competition, individual capitals constantly seek new scientific and technological means by which to increase the rate of exploitation through gains in productive efficiency over the social average. These technological advances tend to displace labor as production becomes increasing efficient, shifting the organic composition of capital towards more constant, and less variable capital. As the ratio of constant to variable capital rises, less value is objectified in each individual commodity, which forces individual capitals to grow in scale, producing a greater mass of commodities in order to increase the mass of value (understood by the capitalist as increases in profit). The greater productivity of increasingly mechanized production at larger scales reduces the price of commodities and by extension the value of labor-power as a commodity to be purchased on the market (understood by capitalists as the cost of wages). Such expansion likewise requires more raw materials as well as expanded consumption in order to realize the value (ideally) objectified within the growing mass of commodities. An increased rate of exploitation coupled with an increased mass of commodities produced as capital becomes more concentrated and centralized generates for the individual capitalist a temporary increase in profitability. Indeed, any individual capital must constantly innovate technologically lest it be swallowed by its competitors. From the perspective of capital as a totality, however, the tendency to displace living labor from production removes the basis for new value creation, undermining the foundation of accumulation. That which is both rational and necessary from the perspective of the individual capital reveals itself to be suicidal from the perspective of capital as a whole.

This tendency towards a rising organic composition of capital can be accommodated so long as new branches of capital are created in which those workers who are displaced from existing branches can find employment, or so long as new populations of commodity-subjects can be subsumed into the capital relation. Indeed, this expansionary requirement is the basis for classical Marxist theories of imperialism (e.g., Luxemburg, Lenin, Bukharin).34 However — and this warrants emphasis — in the example of the NIEO and the Bandung era, the complete subsumption of the planet is achieved, paradoxically, through decolonization rather than (or in addition to) imperialism. The post-war incorporation of the decolonizing nations into the world market facilitated the rapid subsumption of new wage-workers (freed from their land and means of subsistence and increasingly migrating to cities as free, would-be wage-laborers). Further, it establishes new markets (including the creation of new needs and wants among a widening group of monetary-subjects annexed into the commodity relation), new branches of capital, new opportunities for financial investments where money capital could be lent to facilitate productive capital, and an emerging “national bourgeoisie” that worked both in concert and in competition with existing capitals — in short, the expansion, acceleration, and intensification of many tendencies of capitalist imperialism, under the transformed historical circumstances of the 1950s and 1960s.

Kurz, however, asserts that at a certain pivotal moment the absolute limit for such systemic expansion is reached and capital as a whole begins to expel more value-productive laborers than it can absorb. This saturation point, according to Kurz, was reached in the late 1960s or 1970s. The revolutions in micro-electronics and the scientific management of labor provide the final acceleration that pushes the system beyond its tipping point to realize the tendency, always latent in capital’s relentless search for relative surplus value, that value creation itself will slowly recede, marking the end of systemic accumulation. Kurz writes

from now on, it is inexorable that more labour is eliminated than can be absorbed. All technological innovations that are to be expected will also tend only in the direction of the further elimination of living labour, all new branches of production will from the outset come to life with less and less direct human productive labour.35

Here the distinction between Kurz and, for instance, Robert Brenner becomes clear. Brenner’s argument reads the post-1970 period as an expression of two contradictory tendencies within capitalism identified by Marx: the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and the tendency towards overproduction or under-consumption. Both tendencies, of course, are related to the value-form crisis that Kurz explicates. Kurz, however, would posit a distinction between phenomenal appearance and deep structure. That is, the tendencies of a falling rate of profit or overproduction find expression in the realm of circulation and in the language of price and profit. They can be visible to bourgeois economists and Marxist theorists alike (though in decidedly different ways) through empirical economic data on profitability and productivity. Such crises have erupted periodically throughout the history of capitalism and have been resolved or deferred through a variety of measures, including the expansion to new markets, the creation of new demand, the opening of new branches of capital to absorb displaced labor, the “moral depreciation” of assets, temporal deferral through financial investment, among many others.36 By contrast, the value-form crisis that Kurz theorizes finds merely its representation in empirical economic data on profitability and the like.37 The force of his critique, following Marx, is to read crisis in relation to a social abstraction — the aggregate mass of value produced by the total social capital — from which, in turn, issue the determining forms and relations of capital.

For Kurz, following Marx, value is objective under the social relations of capital, but never identical either to the commodities in which value is objectified or to the price through which value is ideally realized. Value only ever finds a representation in the price-form, hence price may mirror value exactly or diverge considerably from its original referent. Indeed this capacity for elasticity is among the key functions of money for Marx.38 Kurz would consider Brenner’s data on profitability symptomatic of the underlying crisis rather than the source of the crisis itself. Moreover, Kurz contends that the value-form crisis is final and irreversible; it can be deferred (most notably through acrobatic financial and credit instruments that have helped capital stave off a terminal crisis since 1970) but, unlike crises of profitability or overproduction, this value-form crisis cannot be resolved or reversed by capital. Once real accumulation as such has ceased, the objective and subjective correctives to capitalist crisis no longer apply. Kurz writes

There has already existed since the beginning of the seventies… a foreseeable trend according to which the world-market’s room for maneuver begins inexorably to shrink, a new (and, I assert on the basis of the above derivation: final) stage of the “struggle over the markets” has come to pass, which can be negotiated neither by economic nor by political and military means.39

This foundational claim of terminal crisis, shared broadly by the theorists associated with the Wertkritik tendency, refocuses our attention on the objective “room to move” within capital’s value-form. Accepting Kurz’s premises holds a number of implications for a historical reading of the NIEO project and the post-1970 period, several of which I will provisionally spell out below. Before returning to the NIEO, however, I want to consider a second line of argument about the state, gestured to by Kurz in the passage above but most clearly articulated by Lohoff, that complicates and extends what I have argued above regarding the contradictory role of state managers in the Bandung era and NIEO project.

Lohoff contends that the political form of the modern state arises not in the wake of capital’s ascendance, but rather as the necessary precondition for society’s full subsumption into the capital relation. The following passage warrants quoting in full:

In order to be able to act as commodity-subjects people must find already in place certain general infrastructural preconditions without which their mode of existence is impossible. There can be no individual movement from one place to another without usable roads for these individuals’ private vehicles. No labor-power can enter the labor market without first passing through educational institutions and being fitted to the universal cultural standards that are deemed necessary. In order that the very preconditions for existence as a commodity-subject should become universally accessible to all potential commodity-subjects, these preconditions may not themselves assume commodity form. The further the development of productivity moves forward the more profoundly and differentially scaled and the more extensive this system of non-commodity infrastructural outlays becomes — and so much so that its maintenance is a concern only the state as abstract universality is in any position to take upon itself. The asocial character of commodity-society imposes on the latter, as still another of its essential aspects, the formation of a second, derivative form of wealth. Were it not for the emergence of a wide-ranging sector of state-organized wealth-production, the victorious onslaught of the primary, commodity form of wealth could never have taken place.40

The argument here, in brief, is that the full development of a commodity-society requires for its very existence an established physical and social infrastructure, which by definition cannot take the form of commodities that confront free purchasers in the marketplace itself. Only the state can assume such a role at the scale necessary to produce and reproduce both commodity-subjects and the dense networks of commodity production and circulation needed to establish the social division of labor under capital. The social wealth of the state, which must be meted out to a population with some attention to broad and equitable inclusion, if not universality — in contrast to the market logic of competition and profit — makes possible the “victorious onslaught” of the commodity form of wealth, defined by its “asocial sociality” (ungesellschaftliche Vergesellschaftung), the apt phrase Lohoff uses to express the contradictions of fetishized social relations under the commodity form.41

What implications do these arguments from Kurz and Lohoff hold for a reading of the NIEO project and its legacies? First, the claim I make above about the structural impossibility of the NIEO agenda holds true, I think, whether or not one finds the broader claims of Kurz and Lohoff persuasive. That is, from within any of the Marxist perspectives cited above the period following 1970 will be understood as an era of intense and sustained economic crisis and contraction, radically curtailing both the political will and the economic means to implement a redistributionist agenda along the lines expected and demanded by the newly independent nations of the Bandung era. This crisis (singular) is, in fact, partially visible to the drafters of the 1974 NIEO resolution as a series of crises (plural): oil shocks, rising inflation with rising unemployment (so-called “stagflation”), rising US current account deficits and the fragility of the US dollar, the collapse of the Bretton Woods currency regime, as well as (from the inverse perspective) the sharp spike in nationalizing expropriations, labor struggles and wildcat strikes, and other forms of organized social opposition.42 The resolution itself makes explicit reference to this context of systemic instability: “since 1970 the world economy has experienced a series of grave crises which have had severe repercussions, especially on the developing countries because of their generally greater vulnerability to external economic impulses.”43 Although specific crises were visible, the NIEO drafters appeared to share a Keynesian faith that the demand generated by a planetary welfare state and the developmentalist aspirations of bringing huge new markets and labor reserves into the orbit of capital had the capacity to reverse what they hoped was a short-lived stagnation. With the benefit of hindsight, however, we can say rather definitively that the post-1970 crisis of capital essentially foreclosed the political possibility of such a redistributionist, demand-oriented, international welfare state solution.

The example of Japan affords us one window into why a south-centric, demand-oriented, Keynesian solution proved unable to generate systemic growth. A participating nation at Bandung, Japan can nominally stand in unison with the other decolonizing Asian-African nations in 1955 (rather disingenuously it must be said, given its own imperial history).44 However by 1974, Japan was full-fledged economic power and a primary competitor to the US. Marxist economic historians have read Japan’s ascent with somewhat different emphases. Brenner, for instance, situates Japan’s emergence as a dominant economic power within capitalism’s tendency towards a falling rate of profitability and the inevitable coercive, intra-class and inter-state competition that can allow a later-developing bloc such as Japan to exploit new regions or seize technological advantages and hence undermine an existing hegemon such as the US.45 Presumably the NIEO drafters hoped to see analogous cases throughout the Third World in which late development afforded Bandung nations with competitive advantages on the world market. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, by contrast, believe that Japan’s ascent was facilitated by a form of US economic hegemony unique in its efforts to foster system-wide economic growth rather than pursue narrow national self-interest.46

Kurz the Wertkritik theorists shed a different light on the case of Japan. Their arguments about the end of system-wide accumulation provide a framework for reading both uneven geographical development between core and periphery, as well as those localized pockets of growth that have occurred post-1970. These pockets include not only the profitability generated by Japanese capital in the years immediately leading up to 1970, but also, for example, the emergence of subsequent high-growth nations or regions such as the “Asian Tigers,” the “BRIC” nations (China most particularly), and indeed even those developmentalist states within the Third World whose economies were able to prosper for a period through dirigiste policies during the immediate post-independence period.47 Kurz and Lohoff posit systemic subtraction through individual addition. For instance, Japan’s economic growth between 1950-1970 was achieved through increases in productivity within key sectors (relying heavily on the automation of production and the scientific management of labor processes, perhaps most famously with flexible, on-demand production). After a point, however, this growth does not supplement existing global production in, for example, the automobile industry. It comes at the expense of existing auto-makers in the UK, US, and elsewhere, leading to job losses and the push to reduce labor costs and increase automation from the former industrial leaders. But those gains in Japan also precipitate a further rise in the organic composition of capital as a whole. Capital’s drive to realize additional relative surplus displaces value-productive laborers in both the established and emerging countries.48

Critics will quite reasonably point out that there has been vast proletarianization throughout the global south during this period, most notably in China. This is certainly true, as attested by Smith’s figures quoted above. New value-creating living labor has undoubtedly been subsumed into capital (in both real and formal terms), and new markets for increased production have been created in the process. However, several trends temper any straightforward assertion that such value-creation evidences a resurgence of systemic accumulation.

In a contemporary world market with a single division of labor, any car (or a shirt, cell phone, etc.) whether produced in the US, Korea, Mexico, China or elsewhere, must contain roughly the same value. That is, the different capitals producing cars both compete against one another and collectively contribute to establish the average socially necessary labor time that constitutes a car’s value. This global competition explains one of the forces that both drives production to the south, and drives productive capital within the south to increasingly mechanize in the search for relative surplus value gains within a single world market. Lower wages in the south (the geographically differentiated value of labor-power or what Smith refers to as “labor arbitrage”) do not increase the value of the commodities produced there; they only increase the ratio of surplus to necessary value (and hence capital’s hunt for low wage workers functions as a form of relative surplus value). Cheaper labor as such is not always in the capitalist’s interest. A smaller number of workers under conditions of high technical productivity may produce more value (and be more profitable) than a larger number of low-wage workers under less productive conditions. Moving production to lower-wage countries, therefore, only occurs when the cost of labor-power understood in relation to levels of productivity tip into a profitable balance for capitalists. Further, the move to lower-wage countries only provides capitalists with a temporary boost in relative surplus, akin to productivity gains achieved through mechanization. Any temporary gains in the proportion of surplus gradually disappear over time as other capitals follow suit in relocating facilities to regions with low-wage workers. Once competitive advantages have been equalized, capital searches anew for relative surplus gains, most typically through intensified productivity via mechanization, which in turn displaces more labor.

But what of those industries in the global south that continue to resist mechanization? Those industries where the low value of labor-power makes it advantageous to maintain organic compositions with high variable and low constant capital, either because there are few competitors working at higher levels of productivity or because something about the concrete nature of the work makes it difficult to automate and mechanize (e.g., with certain kinds of garment work, assembly processes, and agricultural tasks)? Though Kurz and Lohoff do not address this question directly in the essays at hand, their broader framework of value-form critique suggests at least two theoretical responses that posit countervailing tendencies. First, commodities produced under such conditions tend to be low-value goods, and goods produced largely or exclusively under conditions of relatively low productivity (i.e., low-wage, low productivity labor in one region is not competing against high-wage, high-productivity labor elsewhere). Even if such industries are absorbing displaced or latent populations of surplus labor — drawing new wage-workers into value-productive activity under conditions of lower organic composition, and hence producing individual commodities that objectify more value than they would if produced under more mechanized conditions — the total value of all such commodities remains relatively low.49 At the level of any individual branch of industry it appears, and in fact may be, that large numbers of workers are being absorbed into value-productive activity, off-setting the displacement of productive labor in the north. However, when considered from the perspective of the total social capital and the total mass of value being produced, even a large number of workers producing low-value goods cannot produce a sufficient quantity of value to reverse the systemic tendency towards diminishing accumulation. This, ultimately, is why the US can in Panitch and Gindin’s schema, remain committed to enhancing system-wide growth by focusing almost exclusively on Europe, Japan and China, while benignly disregarding “the rest of the world.” 50

Second, what appears as low-wage, non-mechanized production becomes integrated to ever-greater degrees into intensive, carefully managed circuits of capital during the post-1970 period. When considered in sum, these circuits reveal themselves to be of a higher organic composition than might initially appear to be the case. Consider such prototypical examples as the low-waged, repetitive, life-threatening work performed by the world’s poorest laborers, the majority of whom are women: mining Coltan for iPhones, stitching Nike shoes, assembling Samsung TVs, harvesting coffee beans sold to Nestle, and similar forms of toil. All of these concrete activities continue to require the strong backs, sharp minds, and skilled experience of living labor, and hence resist the uniform tendency towards automation and mechanization. Some of this production — garment work is the classic example — relies on “hybrid,” “flexible,” or “distributed” sites of production, such as home-work, piece-work, subcontracting, sweatshops and small-scale manufacturing. Although such work may appear similar (and in fact is similar as concrete labor) to pre- or early-capitalist manufacturing networks, value-form critique prompts us to consider the subcontracted piece-work of today as qualitatively distinct from the piece-work of earlier centuries. Today this distributed labor is integrated into a sophisticated system of production and circulation with tightly coordinated and managed labor practices, linked directly to centralized capital (located largely, though by no means exclusively in the north). These networks increasingly depend upon the saturation of science, and technologically-enabled forms of management in order to raise the rate of exploitation throughout the circuit. Robotics, automation, and micro-electronics may provide the most celebrated examples of productivity gains through scientific application; however the system-wide application of science to enhance productivity takes many other forms as well. In the cases above the management of supply chains, transport, warehousing, logistics, and a host of efficiencies of scale are made possible by the introduction of science and technology largely within the sphere of exchange.

Furthermore, even the “hybrid” or “distributed” forms of production that characterize certain branches of contemporary capital still contribute to the ever-increasing incorporation of all populations into commodity-society. The poorest and most marginalized of workers are increasingly constituted (by now, almost universally constituted) as monetary-subjects and commodity-subjects, even if they themselves have regular access to neither money nor commodities, let alone value-productive waged employment. 51 We must likewise reckon with the horrific truth that the floor of socially necessary subsistence has greater elasticity than we would like to imagine, and the requirements of basic subsistence continue to be pushed ever-downward — the ultimate race to the bottom (a partial response to Smith’s claim that systemic super-exploitation is the source of contemporary profit). Neither the process of pauperization, nor the surplus humanity it produces, are external to capital. Rather they are precise expressions of its defining character: asocial sociality. This is all to say that even the vast proletarianization of workers in the south under conditions of low organic composition is not in itself sufficient to invalidate the Kurz’s claim that the post-1970 era marks the end of accumulation and valorization at the level of the total social capital. It is not the sheer mass of wage-workers that matters; it is their relation to the systemic requirements of, and capacity for, valorization and accumulation.

In analytically developing Marx’s dialectic between the systemic displacement of labor and the absorption of new labor under increasingly technologically intensive conditions, the value-form theorists prompt us to consider the sphere of circulation and exchange as well as that of production. This means, for instance, that labor-intensive manufacturing in China (or Mexico, Bangladesh, Vietnam, etc.,) may appear to offer sites of capital accumulation that counterbalance losses in the global north. In order for that apparent value to be realized in circulation, however, the purchasers of value-bearing commodities must offer equivalent value in exchange, typically in the universal equivalent money-form, mediated by national currencies. Value-laden commodities produced in China, for example, should be purchased by consumers in the US who exchange an equal value in money (dollars) or commodities in return. Kurz, Lohoff, and other Wertkritik theorists question whether this exchange has become increasingly imbalanced, indeed whether it is sustainable only via the elasticities of the money form, and most particularly through forms of fictitious capital, which rest on the ever-receding promise of future value production. As real accumulation slackens, the “purchasing power” of US (productive and unproductive) consumption is based less and less on reserves of objective value, and increasingly on the unstable foundation of credit and finance. If Kurz is correct in his claims about the end of accumulation, Marxists will need to continue to develop more sophisticated analyses of the elaborate architecture of fictitious capital that has been able to keep the system afloat during forty-plus years of decline.52

One noteworthy part of that history which relates to the NIEO is the emergence of Euro-dollars as the US current account deficit rose in the 1970s, along with the flood of petro-dollars from oil producing states. This systemic excess liquidity in dollar currency led to notably expanded development lending from northern banks in the 1970s. It is a dark irony, in the context of the NIEO, that much of the borrowing undertaken by Third World states occurs because of cash shortages stemming from OPEC’s sharp increases in oil prices. In other words, the very model of Third World resource-based monopoly cartels upon which the NIEO based many of its claims of global leverage was itself partly responsible for the flurry of southern borrowing that levied such devastating effects on those states. Third World debt skyrocketed between 1968 and 1980, growing by a factor of twelve times over that period from $4.75 billion to $580 billion. The Volker Shock’s strategy to halt US inflation by raising interest rates from 6 or 7 percent to 20 percent sparked the subsequent debt crisis of the 1980s, beginning with Mexico and spreading to states across Latin America and Africa. In the bailout agreements that followed, Citibank, Chase Manhattan, Bank of America and other northern banks were held largely harmless for their risky lending. By contrast, the World Bank and IMF structural adjustment policies, negotiated bilaterally to prevent the potential leverage of collective default from a Bandung bloc, used debt as a mechanism to pry open modestly-protected dirigiste economies, exposing them to the savageries of neoliberalism. Among the financial instruments devised to ensure repayment was the creation of “debt for equity” swaps that allowed investors to take ownership of companies or resources as a form of repayment for debts owed. Repayment quickly gave way to gross usury. The Third World states entered the crisis owing $580 billion in 1980. By 2002 they had made $4.6 trillion in payments, roughly eight times what they originally owed. Given the compounding of interest, however, they still found themselves $2.4 trillion in the red — four times the debt they owed in 1980. Well worth far more careful study, this history of debt and finance in the aftermath of the NIEO illustrates both the structural relations that make necessary fictitious capital, as well as the manner in which debt can be used to centralize capital by transferring wealth, in this case with devastating effects on Third World states.54

Finally, Lohoff’s analysis in particular offers us a way to conceive of the state’s relation to capital that significantly extends the Callinicos/Block conception of the state manager outlined above. While the latter provides an explanation for the tendency of states to align themselves with the interests of capital, Lohoff demonstrates how capital itself relies upon the presence of a parallel, derivative form of non-commodified social wealth, provisioned through the state. The universal subsumption of populations into capital as commodity-subjects requires the universally accessible physical and social infrastructure of the state. This schema provides a structural analysis of the relation between capital and the state onto which the theory of state managers can be nicely grafted. On the one hand, the tendency for state managers to work in the interests of capital is understandably strong as outlined above. On the other hand, many of the newly independent nation states had little or no meaningful state infrastructure or non-commodified social wealth to make accessible to their populations. State managers in the decolonizing world (again, both those who saw state policy as a lever for capital accumulation, and those who saw state policy as a buffer against capitalist exploitation) faced the contradiction of trying to build state capacity and non-commodified social wealth during a period of value-contraction.

In their turn to the World Bank and international development funding, the state managers of the Bandung nations sought to secure capacities that would enable southern states to equitably provision non-commodified social wealth to their mobilized and expectant populations. However, to knock at the door of the World Bank with applications for development aid earmarked for industrialization was to enter partnership with capital and the international financial and credit systems. This contradiction is not absolute, and the strategic choice of southern nations to seek development funds is certainly understandable, even defensible. As Lohoff argues, the social wealth of the state is the precondition for capital accumulation; the latter requires the former. A collaboration between capital and the state makes is part of what John Maynard Keynes, Harry White and the other architects of Bretton Woods had in mind in 1944 when they charged the fledgling World Bank “to promote private foreign investment by means of guarantees or participations in loans and other investments made by private investors; and when private capital is not available on reasonable terms, to supplement private investment by providing… finance for productive purposes....”55 The notion that a portion of capital’s total surplus value, mediated through a supranational financial institution such as the World Bank, might be distributed to create state capacity that would in turn create the conditions for expanded capital accumulation is not impossible as such. Indeed it appears analogous in some regards to the way Marx characterizes an equalization of the rate of profit across both productive industries and non-productive yet essential industries including merchants and finance capital.56 Such systemic revenue sharing among the capitalist class, however, and the expansion of capital accumulation upon which it was projected, had become impossible by 1974 if Kurz’s periodization is correct. Development funding coupled with dirigiste regimes in the Bandung states was indeed able to create both social wealth and capital infrastructure in the south for a brief period during the Bandung era; yet it was unable to systemically produce conditions for sufficiently expanded valorization and accumulation.

Paradoxically, development funding’s most successful method of generating profit (though not valorizing value) may have come through the creation of debt — a redistribution of existing wealth, or at best a form of “accumulation without valorization,” to adopt Trenkle’s provocative, if not entirely satisfying, formulation.57 The creation of perpetual indebtedness and the deepening entanglement of the south into the networks of financial capital points to another contradiction. The crisis of accumulation’s manifestation as debt crisis proved the lever for the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and 1990s and precipitated what is surely among the most rapid and thoroughgoing dismantling of state social wealth ever witnessed. Felt most acutely in the south, this cannibalization of public goods — now frequently termed neoliberalism — spread to the north as well. Lohoff allows us to reconceive neoliberalism as the suicidal expression of capital’s need for accumulation, necessitating that capital consume the very forms of social wealth as provisioned by the state on which it depends.

Class-Struggle, Value-Struggle, and the Fluid History of the Present

As I hope my analysis has demonstrated, Kurz, Lohoff, and the other Wertkritik theorists, far more rigorously than most, expose the objective determinations of commodity-subjects and value-relations under capital, most notably in the period of crisis following 1970. They offer an exacting critique of the asocial sociality of lives lived amidst the brutalizing structures of capital’s value-form. The rigorous dialectical method that characterizes their work, however, appears to run aground upon the historical finality of “terminal crisis.” In their disavowal of a working class or proletarian standpoint of immanent critique for the overcoming of capital’s value-form, their dialectic seems to come to an abrupt, ahistorical, and hence decidedly undialectical conclusion. Space does not permit a full analysis of this problem here. Indeed, an adequate treatment would require, minimally, an essay or a book of its own. As will become clear in my remarks below, I have found no fully satisfactory response to what I nevertheless see as a glaring hole in value-form critical theory, a body of thought that I find enormously penetrating in nearly every other way. A few words on this matter, however, are necessary in order to situate Wertkritik in relation to the political conjunctures both of the NIEO and of today.

The disavowal of class standpoint can be found throughout the essays in the Mediations dossier on Wertkritik, but the case is made most explicitly in Norbert Trenkle’s 2006 essay, “Struggle Without Classes.” Trenkle polemicizes against what he calls, following Moishe Postone, “traditional Marxism,” wherein the class struggle between labor and capital is elevated to the primary contradiction of capitalism. While such may once have been the case (though, perhaps, even this is in doubt), Trenkle contends that Post-Fordist changes in the nature of work, the saturation of science and technology throughout the production process, and the universality of the commodity- and value-forms have inexorably undermined the necessary preconditions for a proletarian collective identity and consciousness. Either the moment of its collective consciousness has passed without that class having fulfilled its potential to negate and supplant capitalist social relations, or the very category of proletarian class consciousness has been revealed by history as a metaphysical ideal. Either way, he unequivocally asserts that the proletariat is today incapable of assuming the role of a “generalized social mega-subject” assigned it by “traditional Marxism.”58 To support his claim Trenkle cites a range of atomizing forces that have contributed to displace, stratify, and splinter the proletariat and proletarian class consciousness: the rising organic composition of capital which perpetually makes labor surplus; the distribution of managerial functions that are assumed increasingly by segments of self-disciplining workers; the transience of jobs (workers changing jobs voluntarily or jobs that are moved to find cheaper labor elsewhere); the steep social differentials that exist between workers including differentials exacerbated by geographical distance, employment type, and social hierarchy; and the increasing pauperization and neglect of populations that have been permanently displaced by capital from wage-labor.59 If the proletariat is to be defined as value-productive laborers, Trenkle maintains, that pool represents an ever-shrinking and geographically fragmented subsection of humanity. If the proletariat is defined as all people who need to work in order to live — whether actually working or not60 — then it “becomes a non-concept, for it no longer has the power to discriminate at all. It is then just another word for the general mode of existence in capitalist society.”61 Either a shrinking minority whose capacity for systemic disruption is waning, or a baggy, metaphysical universal, the contemporary proletariat in Trenkle’s account is unable to assume that role of singular historical subject/object, gravedigger to the capitalist mode of production.

What then might take the proletariat’s place? What would “emancipatory struggle without classes” look like?62 Here, unfortunately, Trenkle is not very precise and his answers not terribly satisfying. He concludes his essay with some affirmative gestures towards a non-hierarchical, anti-identitarian, coalitional politics (holding up the Left-standard examples of the Zapatistas or the piqueteros as hopeful if contradictory experiments). He writes

This [coalitional politics] will only succeed if different struggles and conflicts can be linked together across all borders without false proclamations of unity or hierarchies. This linking, however, cannot be derived from presupposed objective or subjective determinations (class standpoint or class struggle). It can only emerge from the conscious cooperation of such social movements that aspire to the abolition of domination in all its facets, and not only as an abstract, distant goal, but also within their own structures and relationships.63

Unequivocally rejecting the objective/subjective determinations of class standpoint and urging instead the abolition of totality or of “domination in all its facets,” Trenkle here appears to offer little more than a politics of affiliations that assails, without clear distinction, both the structures of the capital relation and its myriad, often contradictory effects or symptoms.64 As Neil Larsen puts it in his sympathetic but conceptually exacting critique of the political limits of value-form theory, “[t]aken no further than this, do not Trenkle and Postone remain adrift in the political equivalent of an emancipatory ‘night in which all cats are grey,’ unable to distinguish, except by voluntarist political identifications, between, say, Al Qaeda and the piqueteros?”65 The force of Trenkle’s polemic against the presumed certainty of a unified subject/object consciousness characteristic of “traditional Marxism” leaves him with little room from which to assert a genuinely historical mediating subject. Larsen astutely contends that value-form theory has yet to adequately identify a standpoint of immanent critique from which to sustain its dialectical insistence that all historical epochs contain within them the forces that will supersede the existing order: “The mere abstract assertion of the plural, ‘non-totalizing form’ of the social content (or contents) implied in such an immanent critical standpoint… falls short of an answer here if one keeps to the standards of the Marxian thinking upheld by Postone or Trenkle themselves.”66

Where does that leave us? Larsen’s own answer is suggestive, if preliminary. Larsen contends that if the defining feature of the value-form is the “pure abstraction of asocial sociality,” then perhaps it “must ultimately be society itself, the very possibility of the social in the face of the catastrophe of capitalism, that takes up the role of historical ‘subject/object.’” As Larsen readily admits, the “still intractable problem of how such a radically social Subject — one more radically and concretely totalized than its class variant — breaks free of reified into dialectical consciousness remains.”67 A fundamental — perhaps the fundamental — task facing contemporary Marxist thinkers, then, is to both theorize and organize the concrete forms through which the struggle over the social as such might emerge as a response to the catastrophic barbarism of capitalist social relations in order to usher in a radically different mode of sociality.

Within the realm of contemporary Marxist scholarship, one place to look in this regard is the recent re-emergence of Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), with its readings of broad-based struggles over sexism, racism, and other forms of oppression as ultimately determined by the capital relation and its need for social reproduction both inside and outside the wage-relation.68 Especially if paired with value-form feminist critiques such as those by Roswitha Scholz or the Endnotes collective, (connections I have not yet seen but which surely will be forthcoming if they do not already exist) SRT would appear to offer valuable theoretical/political insights into the question of how the social as such might emerge as a subject/object position of immanent critique.69 In a different register, David Harvey’s category of “accumulation by dispossession,” alongside David McNally’s writings on building Left resistance in the wake of what he calls the “Global Slump” offer attempts to understand dispossessed, marginalized, surplus populations as a necessary consequence of the brutalities of the capital relation.70 In these accounts capital’s surplus populations are seen as the necessary obverse of a wage-laboring proletariat, collectively exploited and dispossessed by capital’s imperatives to accumulate, and hence unified in their structural relation to capital. I am enormously sympathetic to the political impulses of these projects and hope to see them advanced. It must be said, however, that both SRT’s appeals to “feminism for the 99%” or Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession” leave themselves open to Trenkle’s critique of the proletariat as a baggy, “non-concept,” so broadly inclusive that they risk becoming incapable of seeing, let alone bridging, the real divisions, rifts, and fragmentations that prevent such a radically majoritarian class formation from recognizing itself and acting as such.71 Whatever their limitations — and space considerations prevent me from giving these ideas the full consideration they surely deserve — such theoretical concepts can be conceived as attempts to affirm the various struggles against racism, sexism, dispossession — “domination in all its facets”? — as class struggles immanent to capital. Perhaps the most apt formulation has been proposed by Beverly Best, who has captured the underlying unity between apparently fragmented interests in her category of value struggles, struggles that emerge out of and in opposition to the asocial sociality of the value-form.72

“As a rule,” Marx tells us, “the most general abstractions arise only in the midst of the richest possible concrete development, where one thing appears common to many, to all.”73 If asocial sociality is the abstract universality of life within the capital-relation, then the rich concreteness of the apparently fragmented struggles of the present ought to be conceived as the “concentration of many determinations, and hence the unity of the diverse.”74 Value struggles take many concrete forms. Certainly there remains a vast pool of value-productive proletarians, the majority of whom now reside in the global south, the inheritors of Bandung’s Third World legacy. Likewise there are huge populations of unproductive wage laborers, whose individual experiences of exploitation remain almost indistinguishable from those laborers who create surplus value, but whose wages are shared from the total social surplus, to which they only contribute indirectly.75 Finally, I think it is correct to see the surplus population whose existence is defined by its experience of oppression, discrimination, migration, displacement, dispossession, value-dissociation, and pauperization, as the direct expression of the capital relation rather than external to it — subjects without wages whose lives are nonetheless structured by, and in turn help reproduce, the need to secure commodities and money. Xenophobia, racism, sexism, and a range of other modes of discrimination arise in complex, geographically- and historically-specific forms, but invariably remain structured by the value-form and the capital-relation. Best is surely right, then, to argue that the life and death struggles waged by these populations are, indeed, value struggles. But the question of whether a common opposition to capital’s value-form can be conceived of and acted upon in common remains, to my mind, the great aporia of Left thought. Concrete examples of struggle rich in their value-form determinations abound. However, we find precious few historical examples that allow us to envisage a future sociality beyond capital or a historical process in motion with the potential to move us toward that end. To shift into an even more fully Hegelian idiom, it is surely possible, theoretically, to conceive of an abstract value-struggling class “in itself,” but much more difficult to recognize in the present those conditions under which such an abstract totality might attain the consciousness that allows it to act “for itself.” Can there emerge a subject/object capable not only of recognizing itself as the expression of capital’s asocial sociality, but also of acting for itself to overcome the catastrophe of capital?

In wrestling with this dilemma I return to Marx’s rejoinder, with which I began this essay, that the antinomies of history do not resolve contradictions, but rather provide “the form within which they have room to move.” An important corollary to this can be found in the Postface to the Second edition of Capital Vol. 1, where Marx clarifies that any fully dialectical account of an existing historical formation, “simultaneously includes recognition of its negation, its inevitable destruction; because it regards every historically developed form as being in a fluid state, in motion.”76 The Wertkritik claims of Trenkle, Kurz, and Lohoff respond to and in turn reproduce a certain a hopelessness and cynicism about the empirical realities of fragmentation, alienation, reification, and human suffering that characterize the present and that appear to loom in even more terrifying ways over the foreseeable future. This, I submit, is a predictable symptom of asocial sociality itself, unsurprisingly intensified during periods of crisis. That said, however unsatisfying Trenkle’s gestures towards a non-hierarchical, non-totalizing “struggle without classes” may be, they nevertheless suggest that he has not entirely resigned himself to a catastrophism in which the inevitable negation of capitalism can only mean barbarism or extinction. The demands of the present require that we, too, hold to the recognition that our contemporary moment is historical. That is, the historical present remains “in a fluid state, in motion,” with “room to move,” a principle all the more salient and necessary in the face of crisis. If we should be wary of metaphysical appeals to proletarian class consciousness absent an empirical subject, even more so must we remain skeptical about eschatological metaphysics that appear to announce an end to history. Crisis as such cannot resolve underlying contradictions and we should resist the temptation to celebrate its strictly negative potential. Marx writes, “crises are never more than momentary, violent solutions for the existing contradictions, violent eruptions that reestablish the disturbed balance for the time being.”77 Best’s formulation of value-struggles reasserts the necessary commitment to a critical theory of determination relative to the value-form that in turn posits the necessity of historical actors to not merely negate capitalism, but also to move beyond it and establish a society able to provide for human needs and capabilities. In struggling to concretize the contents of how value struggles or a struggle over the social as such might manifest in the world, I take comfort in McNally’s stirring words on reform and revolution:

Every mass movement to change the world begins with struggles to reform society. No movement for radical change begins by demanding revolution as such. Instead, world-transforming struggles emerge when oppressed people take to the streets and shut down places of work to demand a living wage, civil rights, a shorter working day, housing for all, or an end to war. It is in the course of mobilizing — in the process of reclaiming the streets, creating roadblocks, occupying workplaces, deliberating in mass assemblies, creating new forms of democratic self-rule — that people gain a sense of their own power, expand their horizons, and begin to imagine that another world is truly possible.78

This, of course, is no answer in itself; it asserts only that the subject/object of history will emerge in its becoming. But it places critical emphasis on the process of affirmative struggle with an optimism of the will that consciousness of and for value-subjects must follow from our efforts to remake a sociality radically different from the asociality of the capital-relation.

Committed Struggle

In assessing the potential relevance of the NIEO for contemporary struggles, then, we can and should look back to the Bandung era for its legacy of committed struggle. Would that we could rekindle in our age those powerful utopian currents that moved so many during the era of liberation. But if we are to look to NIEO for a model of Third World radicalism, we must recognize that its political and economic programs were forged in response to the value-dynamics of the early years of the Bandung era. Politically, the program emerges from a period marked by the post-war expansion of a US-led world market accompanied by the slackening of direct political control of European states over their colonial territories. It asserted Third World alignments and international governance founded on the principles of national sovereignty and the right to self-determination, principles that the era’s protagonists considered unassailable. It envisioned global wealth redistribution, leveraged through expanded consumption demands, direct monopoly control over natural resources, threats of nationalization, embargo and/or South-South economic cooperation. From the historical vantage of 1974, this program was both utopian as a response to colonial rule and the ongoing unevenness of imperial domination, and eminently rational as a pragmatic response to the value-dynamics of the Bandung era.

Indeed contemporary Marxist thinkers such as Prabhat Patnaik, following Samir Amin, continue to argue that Third World states, in the absence of any sufficiently powerful international peasants’ or workers’ movements, should practice forms of strategic de-linking in order to resist imperialist coercion and claw back some of the gains made during the post-independence period of dirigisme.79 Such a model would be in line with the tenets of the NIEO program, and offers a politically rational program of reforms that, if achieved, might provide some protections to the most exploited segments of the contemporary workforce. Given that it would require substantial Left victories to reorient existing state policy, de-linking represents a comparatively radical program for Third world states mired in the post-1970s crisis that has, among other things, considerably diminished those states’ capacity to resist imperialist capital. The NIEO drafters, however, posited an even more ambitious horizon of activity. They envisioned the collective withdrawal of economic participation by a Third World bloc as a lever to radically remake structural relations within a capitalist world market. In asserting the ideal of a NIEO, its drafters attempted to lay claims to the radical legacies of internationalism and anti-capitalism (of a sort). And yet, they asserted such claims through the institutional mechanisms of international law and the United Nations Assembly rather than through the mobilization of class struggle or value struggle in relation to a radicalized Third World liberation movement. The NIEO, whether by choice or coercion, was ultimately left to fight only with the weapons of the weak. Likewise de-linking reforms will never simply be achieved through treaties or international agreements; as McNally reminds us, they, too, will need to be won through mass struggle, perhaps setting in motion more revolutionary demands.

The fact, therefore, that the NIEO was forced into a pragmatic, reformist posture, need not in itself be damning. Reform can transform into revolution under the right conditions. But in this case the reformist program was mismatched to the value dynamics of its moment. As I have tried to demonstrate above, the NIEO, forged in relation to national liberation struggle and two decades of capitalist expansion, was untenable by 1974 as capital entered its sustained crisis. By reexamining the historical record of Bandung and NIEO in light of the value-form critique of Kurz, Lohoff, and Trenkle we find that the Bandung-era-victories ultimately hastened the further development of capital and intensified the contradictions of valorization within the world market. The developmentalist project of Bandung and NIEO opened virtually the entire planet to capital’s reach. It subsumed huge segments of the world’s population into productive and unproductive wage labor (unevenly, of course). But it did so under conditions that, at the level of the total social capital, displaced more value-productive labor than it could absorb. Moreover, the Bandung era’s principal victories — the end of direct colonial rule with all its attendant brutalities, the establishment of independent, self-determining nation states, and the expanded social horizons for huge portions of the world’s population (all of which should be celebrated) — emerged concurrently with a systemic crisis of accumulation that forced capital to cannibalize social wealth in its state form. Ultimately this dynamic assumed its most devastating forms of austerity and structural adjustment within the Bandung states themselves, and further undermined the preconditions for expanded accumulation even as vast numbers of commodity-subjects were newly pulled into the capital relation, often under the banner of national liberation.

I remain skeptical, therefore, about efforts to excavate Bandung and NIEO as models of radicalism that might be recovered by Left movements of our day. Nevertheless, even losses or failed initiatives provide necessary lessons and leave structural legacies. A great deal can be gained by a careful historical consideration of the Bandung era. At least three distinct legacies from that period continue to shape our own. First, in the aftermath of Bandung, it has become inconceivable to imagine a Left political agenda that is not thoroughly grounded in the critique of capital’s relation to imperialism, racism, and uneven geographical development. This critique did not originate in the Bandung era; but Bandung cements it as an incontrovertible element of any struggle for emancipation and equality. Second, the value struggles of the Bandung era create the conditions for the export of productive industry and manufacturing to the global south, and the subsequent proletarianization of vast numbers of workers. No serious assessment of contemporary capitalist production or its source of value — productive, waged workers — can fail to consider the International Division of Labor that arises in the wake of Bandung. Third, and finally, the Bandung era transformed relations between the dynamics of value accumulation and struggles over the state and over social wealth. On the one hand, the Bandung era witnessed the near-universalization of self-determination, with the number of independent, sovereign states roughly tripling during the era of liberation.80 On the other hand, the period oversees a qualitative shift in the relationship between the state and the provisioning of social wealth under conditions of value-crisis, setting in motion the radical dismantling of many southern states leveraged by debt, structural adjustment, and neoliberal austerity.

The NIEO, then, offers us no ready-made political program of South-South radicalism that might be retooled for our moment. The conjuncture from which it arose, and which it strove to overcome, has now been fully superseded by an epoch characterized by a crisis of accumulation that has metastasized into all manner of financial, political, ecological, and social crises. This value crisis has both hollowed out the promise of national liberation and foreclosed any possibility of a developmentalist, demand-oriented, international redistributionist program along the lines envisioned by the NIEO. That said, the value struggles of today take place within the permanently altered landscape of a world market forged in part by the value struggles of the Bandung era: its critique of imperialism, its near-universal subsumption of commodity-subjects, its aspirational calls for national liberation, and the destruction of social wealth in the state form that follow in its wake. If the political content of the era’s radicalism is irretrievably of the past, the sedimented legacies of Bandung nevertheless persist into our own time, adding structural features to the historical forms within which we must now find the room to move.

1. This essay had its genesis in an engaging weeklong seminar to reconsider the legacies of the NIEO held from April 30-May 4, 2014 in Kandersteg, Switzerland graciously hosted by the editors of the journal Humanity and New York University’s Remarque Institute. The first body section of this essay draws heavily from my previously published article: “Bookend to Bandung: The New International Economic Order and the Antinomies of the Bandung Era,” Humanity 6.1 (2015) 33-46. I am grateful to the editors of Humanity for their willingness to allow a re-printing of this material. Thanks to Neil Larsen, who was also present at the Kandersteg seminar, and whose tutelage about Wertkritik and comments on an earlier draft were indispensable. I likewise thank my colleague Paul Stasi, whose predictably helpful feedback has sharpened my arguments and untangled many unwieldy sentences. Finally, I am grateful to the insightful challenges posed by Nicholas Brown and the Mediations editors.
2. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1976) 198.
3. Marx, Capital 125.
4. Julius K. Nyerere, “Unity for a New Order” (speech, Arusha, Tanzania, February 12, 1979) 7.
5. Mouari Boumediene, “The Problems of Third World Development,” Black Scholar 6.8 (1975) 2-10.
6. Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations (London: Verso, 2012) 3.
7. See, for example, Prashad, The Poorer Nations, and the special NIEO issue of Humanity, in particular, Nils Gilman’s contribution, “The NIEO: A Reintroduction,” Humanity 6.1 (2015) 1-16.
8. I’ve adopted the term “Bandung Era” from Neil Larsen, “Imperialism, Colonialism, Postcolonialism” in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, eds. Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2000) 32.
9. Marxist scholars in the Anglophone world who do not read German owe a collective debt of gratitude to Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson, and Nicholas Brown, who have edited and translated a dossier of Wertkritik essays published as special double edition of Mediations, “Dossier: Marxism and the Critique of Value,” Mediations 27.1-2 (2013-14). The dossier is also published in book form as Marxism and the Critique of Value (Chicago: M-C-M’ Publishing, 2014). Henceforth, when citing specific passages I will refer to the book publication, since that allows me to identify specific pages.
10. The organic composition of capital is referenced repeatedly throughout Capital, and forms the basis for Marx’s falling rate of profit arguments in volume 3. The concept is most concisely introduced in Capital 762.
11. Though Bandung is a convenient naming convention, the Afro-Asian conference itself has, of course, many intellectual lineages including the various pan-African Congresses held in London (1910), Paris (1919), London, Paris, and Brussels (1921), London, Paris, and Lisbon (1923), New York (1927), and Manchester (1945). See George Padmore, Colonial and Coloured Unity: A Program of Action: History of the Pan-African Congress (London: The Hammersmith Bookshop, 1947). Sukarno opens his speech at Bandung by noting how many of the Bandung attendees were also present at the 1927 “League Against Imperialism and Colonialism” in Brussels. George McTurnan Kahin, The Asian-African Conference, Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956) 40.
12. I have written about the Bandung conference elsewhere, though I approach the material with a different method and emphasis here. See Bret Benjamin, Invested Interests: Capital, Culture, and the World Bank Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) 117-134.
13. “Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order,” UN General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution 3201 (S-VI), 1 May 1974.
14. Kahin, The Asian-African Conference 80-81.
15. “NIEO Declaration”
16. “NIEO Declaration.” The term neocolonialism comes into broad usage only after the publication in 1965 of Kwame Nkrumah’s book by the same name. Nkrumah, the first President of an independent Ghana, was a celebrated attendee at Bandung. Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: Last Stage of Imperialism (London: International Publishers, 1966). Here, the NIEO echoes the UN’s Charter for Economic Rights and Duties of States, passed in 1974 as well. The Charter likewise declares the rights of states to nationalize foreign property, upending the existing regime of international property rights law of which the US according to Stephen J. Korbin, had been “the principal guarantor.” The early- to mid-1970s represented the high point of such nationalizations, most notably in manufacturing, and the mining and petroleum industries. The number of expropriation acts jumped from only 6 in 1960 to 68 in 1974 and 83 in 1975. These numbers fall precipitously by the end of the decade, and the 1980s see single digit or zero expropriations annually. See Stephen J. Korbin, “Expropriation as an Attempt to Control Foreign Firms in LCDs: Trends from 1960-1979,” International Studies Quarterly 28.3 (1984) 333-336 and Michael S. Minor, “The Demise of Expropriation as an Instrument of LDC Policy, 1980-1992,” Journal of International Business Studies 25.1 (1994) 180.
17. Julius Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania, gives voice to a related assessment of the contradictions within the NIEO: “What we have in common is that we are all, in relation to the developed world, dependent — not interdependent — nations. Each of our economies has developed as a by-product and a subsidiary of development in the industrialized north, and is externally oriented. We are not the prime movers of our own destiny. We are ashamed to admit it; but economically we are dependencies — semi-colonies at best — not sovereign states.” Nyerere, “Unity for a New Order” 5.
18. The Asian-African Conference 76.
19. Daily Mirror, 19 March, 1955, Manila, in Asian-African Conference: Views and News (The National Committee for the Commemoration of the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Asian-African Conference, 1985) 14.
20. Consider the historical synchronicity that witnessed, just weeks prior to the NIEO declaration, a coup in Portugal that was in no small part the result of the African national liberation struggles in the Portuguese colonies of Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau/Cape Verde, the latter of which was home to the seminal Marxist anti-colonial theorist Amilcar Cabral, who himself had been assassinated a few short months before.
21. This traces back to the Lenin-M.N. Roy “Theses on Colonialism and the National Question” from the 1920 Second Congress of the Third International. Although the rhetorical shift from “bourgeois-democratic” to “national revolutionary” tries to distinguish between more and less revolutionary forms of national liberation, the Congress admits that all such national movements essentially are of a bourgeois character. See “Minutes of the Second Congress of the International, Fourth Session,” 25 July, 1920 (Marxist Internet Archive). https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/2nd-congress/ch04.htm
22. V.I. Lenin, “The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution.” (Marxist Internet Archive) https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/. See especially Chapter 1, “Class Society and the State.”
23. Alex Callinicos, Imperialism and Global Political Economy (Cambridge: Polity, 2009) 84-93. Fred Block, “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule,” Revising State Theory: Essays in Politics and Postindustrialism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987) 51-68.
24. The Asian-African Conference 46.
25. Consider, for instance, the following recommendation from the Bandung Final Communiqué: “The early establishment of the Special United Nations Fund for Economic Development; the allocation by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development [the World Bank] of a greater part of its resources to Asian-African Countries; the early establishment of the International Finance Corporation [a member of the World Bank Group].” Kahin, The Asian-African Conference 77.
26. John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016) 100-104. Smith, in his salutary effort to develop a value theory of Imperialism, places great emphasis on super-exploitation as an explanation for wage differentials between north and south. My own reservations about the concept of “super-exploitation” in relation to the falling rate of profit are very similar to those expressed by Michael Roberts’ in his helpful review and discussion of Smith’s book. Roberts, “Imperialism and Super Exploitation” and “Thoughts on the Debate about Imperialism.”
27. Marx is fond of this metaphor when referring to the role of colonies in the development of capital. See among other places Capital 915, 918 and Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1973) 225.
28. Marx discusses “latent” populations and “reserve army” in Capital 796, 784. The entirety of Chapter 25, “The General Law of Accumulation” is essential for the argument developed in this paragraph and throughout the essay. As Marx writes, “Capital acts on both sides at once. If its accumulation on the one hand increases the demand for labor, it increases on the other the supply of workers by ‘setting them free,’ while at the same time the pressure of the unemployed compels those who are employed to furnish more labor, and therefore makes the supply of labor to a certain extent independent of the supply of workers. The movement of the law of supply and demand of labor on this basis completes the despotism of capital.” Capital 793.
29. On urbanization, see Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006). On the role of a reserve army to maintain imperialist coercion see John Smith, Imperialism In the Twenty-First Century and Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, A Theory of Imperialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), especially 47-60.
30. Among many others, see John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney, The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and the Upheaval from the USA to China, Monthly Review Press, 2012); Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence (London: Verso, 2006); Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, The Crisis of Neoliberalism (Cambrige: Harvard University Press, 2011); the Endnotes journal/book series; Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009); David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Andrew Kliman, The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession (London: Pluto Press, 2012); Larsen et. al., Marxism and the Critique of Value; David McNally, Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance (Oakland: PM Press, 2011); Leo Panitch and Sam Gindon, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of an American Empire (London: Verso, 2012); Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1993); Smith, Imperialism In the Twenty-First Century. McNally represents a variation on the theme in that he does not consider this period as a single, extended crisis, but rather asserts there was a return to profitability in the 1980s, followed by decline and what he predicts as a decade-long global slump in the wake of the Great Recession.
31. These trends are particularly true within the US, Europe, and Japan; China poses a complex exception. It has experienced considerable economic growth and witnessed enormous proletarianization during this period. However inequality rates have continued to surge in China despite this growth. See McNally, Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance; Bellamy Foster and McChesney, The Endless Crisis; and (on inequality) Cristopher Lakner and Branko Milanovic, “Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession,” The World Bank Economic Review Advance Access.
32. Robert Kurz, “The Crisis of Exchange Value: Science as Productivity, Productive Labor, and Capitalist Reproduction” in Marxism and the Critique of Value 17-76; Ernst Lohoff, “Off Limits, Out of Control: Commodity Society and Resistance in the Age of Deregulation and Denationalization” in Marxism and the Critique of Value 151-186.
33. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (London: Routledge, 2003). Nikolai Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1929). V.I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2010). I cite the LeftWord edition of Lenin to highlight the wonderful introduction by Prabhat Patnaik.
34. Kurz, “The Crisis of Exchange Value” 21.
35. Again, much of this forms the foundation of Marxist theories of Imperialism. On “moral depreciation,” see Capital 528 and Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 2, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1978) 250, 264.
36. On the distinction between profit and surplus value see Capital, Vol. 3 267-69.
37. See Chapter 3 of Capital Vol. 1 including the following passage: “The possibility, therefore, of a quantitative incongruity between price and the magnitude of value, i.e., the possibility that the price may diverge from the magnitude of value, is inherent in the price-form itself. This is not a defect, but, on the contrary, it makes this form the adequate one for a mode of production whose laws can only assert themselves as blindly operating averages between constant irregularities.” Capital 196. See also the Chapter on Money in Grundrisse 115-238.
38. “The Crisis of Exchange Value” 27.
39. Lohoff, “Off Limits, Out of Control” 5.
40. “Off Limits, Out of Control” 4.
41. See note 17.
42. NIEO Declaration.
43. Even by 1955 Japan’s remarkable period of economic growth had begun. The decade of 1950-60 sees enormous gains in manufacturing investment which yields output gains averaging 16.7 percent each year. That growth continues spectacularly, with corresponding increases in GNP, up to its high point in 1970, where Japan’s profitability far outpaces the US and Germany. Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence 80-93.
44. The Economics of Global Turbulence 80-93.
45. Panitch and Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism.
46. Utsa and Prahat Patnaik lean heavily on this period of dirigisme in their arguments in favor of strategic de-linking for Third World states who are attempting to reverse the coercive pressures of imperialist globalization, Patnaik and Patnaik, A Theory of Imperialism.
47. Joshua Clover and Aaron Benavav make similar claims about the BRICs nations, arguing that although industries in these nations may initially enter at a lower organic composition than competitors in the north, the overall tendency towards mechanization and intensified productivity continues across the world market, displacing more value-productive labor than can be absorbed by industrial capitals located either in the north or the BRICs countries. Clover and Benavav, “Can Dialectics Break BRICS?” South Atlantic Quarterly 113.4 (2014) 743-759.
48. Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik grant this notion, though argue that the use-values of southern goods have become indispensable in northern markets. David Harvey refutes the Patnaik’s argument about use-value in his commentary, included in A Theory of Imperialism.
49. Panitch and Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism 102.
50. The formulation “monetary-subjects without money,” or “commodity-subjects without commodities” recurs throughout Marxism and the Critique of Value. See “Off Limits, Out of Control” 161, and Claus Peter Ortleib, “A Contradiction between Matter and Form: on the Significance of the Production of Relative Surplus Value in the Dynamic of Terminal Crisis” 117. As I understand it, the phrase originates from Kurz’s Der Kollaps der Modernisierung: Vom Zusammenbruch des Kasernensozialismus zur Krise der Weltökonomie [The Collapse of Modernization: From the Breakdown of Barracks Socialism to the Crisis of the World Economy] (Frankfurt: Eichborn, 1991).
51. See, for instance, Norbert Trenkle, “Labor in the Era of Fictitious Capital,” trans. Joe Keady, Krisis 3 (2015). This line of argument is further developed in Die grosse, Entwertung (2012). An analytically distinct variation on these claims that the explosion of finance capital has its roots in managing a fundamental crisis of also appears in the monopoly capital school of Marxist thought associated with the Monthly Review. See Paul M. Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, Stagnation and the Financial Explosion (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987). For a recent reevaluation of fictitious capital and the value-form in relation to Marxist writings on finance, see Beverly Best, “Political Economy Through the Looking Glass: II Imagining Six Impossible Things about Finance before Breakfast” Historical Materialism 27. (2017) 76-100.
52. The statistics on Third World Debt are taken from Global Slump 98, 127. See also Elmar Altvater, et. al., The Poverty of Nations: A Guide to the Debt Crisis from Argentina to Zaire (London: Zed Books, 1991); Sue Bramford and Bernardo Kucinski, The Debt Squads: The US, the Banks, and Latin America (London: Zed Books, 1988); Susan George and Fabrizio Sabelli, Faith and Credit: The World Bank’s Secular Empire (Boulder:Westview Press, 1994); Eric Touissant, Your Money or Your Life: The Tyranny of Global Finance (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005). On the Euro-dollar market, see The Making of Global Capitalism 118-20 and Global Slump 90-92.
53. International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, “Articles of Agreement” Article 1.ii.
54. Marx, Capital vol. 3 273-301.
55. Trenkle, “Labor in the Era of Fictitious Capital.” While I am persuaded by much of this essay, the formulation “capital accumulation without capital valorization” seems to me questionable. Similarly overstated is the later claim that “capital has become completely self-referential; the commodity that has the magic quality of augmenting capital comes about within the sphere of capital itself.” Valorization, as I understand it, is what defines true accumulation as distinct from, for instance, the centralization of capital. It seems to me that Trenkle here conflates value and the appearance of value for hyperbolic effect. His term “induced value production,” which references “the imaginary material that underpins financial markets’ future expectations,” better captures the fictitious character of future value that is anticipated — and which circulates independently even in this anticipated form — but will ultimately never be produced.
56. Norbert Trenkle, “Struggle Without Classes” in Marxism and the Critique of Value 202.
57. Trenkle, “Struggle Without Classes” 204-206.
58. It is worth noting that this corresponds quite closely to a definition Marx provides for the proletariat in Capital, “‘Proletarian’ must be understood to mean, economically speaking, nothing other than ‘wage laborer,’ the man who produces and valorizes ‘capital,’ and is thrown onto the street as soon as he becomes superfluous to the need for valorization…” Capital 764n1. It is also a concept that recurs throughout Grundrisse. For example, “the creation of surplus labor on the one side corresponds to the creation of minus-labor, relative idleness (or not-productive labor at best), on the other. This goes without saying as regards capital itself; but holds then also for the classes with which it shares; hence of the paupers, flunkeys, lickspittles etc., living from the surplus product” Grundrisse 401n. Or, “It is already contained in the concept of the free labourer, that he is a pauper: virtual pauper… Only in the mode of production based on capital does pauperism appear as the result of labor itself, of the development of the productive forces of labor” (604)
59. “Struggle Without Classes” 208.
60. “Struggle Without Classes” 221.
61. “Struggle Without Classes” 220.
62. Trenkle’s arguments about totality follow from Postone. They suggest that totality comes to define capitalism because capital creates a “qualitatively homogeneous ‘substance,’” abstract human labor. Hence, in the words of Postone, “the historical negation of capitalism would not involve the realization, but the abolition, of the totality.” Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, qtd. in Trenkle, “Struggle Without Classes” 213.
63. Larsen, “Lukács Sans Proletariat” in Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence, eds. by Timothy Bewes and Timothy Hall (London: Bloomsbury, 2011) 92.
64. Larsen, “Lukács Sans Proletariat” 92.
65. “Lukács Sans Proletariat” 97, 96. Larsen, thinking alongside Lukács here, refuses to abandon totality, and instead appears to posit a totality immanent to capital that might, in turn, remake social relations based on premises beyond abstract human labor.
66. See, for instance, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, ed. Tithi Bhattacharaya, (London: Pluto Press, 2017).
67. Roswitha Scholz, “Patriarchy and Commodity Society: Gender Without the Body” in Marxism and the Critique of Value. “The Logic of Gender: On the Separation of Spheres and the Process of Abjection,” Endnotes Collective.
68. The New Imperialism137-182; Global Slump. McNally is associated with SRT as well, contributing a thoughtful critique of intersectionality to the collection cited in note 66.
69. Of particular concern from the perspective of value-form critique is the fact that Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession” seems to conflate “accumulation” with what Marx would term the “centralization” of capital. The former presupposes the ongoing valorization of surplus value — the absence of which, for value-form critique, defines contemporary capitalism — whereas the latter refers to the relative distribution of capital. Capital 777.
70. Best, in a reading of Joshua Clover’s Riot, Strike, Riot has offered some valuable preliminary theorizing of the continuity between nineteenth-century and contemporary forms of collective struggle, arguing that struggles over both sites of production and circulation constitute different modes of value struggle: “Value Crisis and Value Struggle” unpublished conference paper delivered at Historical Materialism’s “The Great Transformation,” Montreal, Canada, May 18. 2018, and in revised form at the Marxist Literary Group’s “Institute for Culture and Society,” Albany, NY June 20, 2018.
71. Grundrisse 104.
72. Grundrisse 101.
73. See, for example, Capital, vol. 3 172, 179, 298, 406-408.
74. Capital 103 (emphasis added).
75. Capital vol. 3 357.
76. Global Slump 175-76.
77. See Prabhat Patnaik, “‘De-Linking’ and Domestic Reaction,” People’s Democracy, https://peoplesdemocracy.in/2015/0830_pd/“de-linking”-and-domestic-reaction and A Theory of Imperialism 152-153.
78. For instance, consider the number of World Bank member states. Prior to Indian independence in 1947, there were 40 members. By the time of the NIEO Declaration in 1974 that number climbed to 123. Currently there are 189. www.worldbank.org/en/about/leadership/members.