Mute Compulsion. A Theory of the Economic Power of Capital
(By Søren Mau)
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Despite a decade of crisis and social unrest, capitalism is in many ways stronger than ever before. Never before have such a large share of the global population and such large parts of life been so tightly woven into the social logic that Karl Marx identified as the ‘all-dominating economic power in bourgeois society’: capital. Capital is not a certain category of things, but rather a process in which things are used in a certain way, namely as a means of making money, i.e., purchasing and selling with the aim of accumulating wealth in its abstract, monetary form. In other words, capital is the valorisation of value.
This thesis is an attempt to contribute to the explanation of how capital maintains its position as the ruling principle of the organisation of the reproduction of society. Earlier attempts to answer this question has tended to rely on the (often implicit) assumption that power essentially comes in two fundamental forms: violence and ideology. From such a perspective, the power of capital is explained with reference to either the guaranteeing of property rights by means of (the threat of) state violence or the ideological legitimisation of capitalist relations of production or—in most cases—a combination of these two. The fundamental claim of this thesis is that this violence-ideology couplet overlooks a form of power that is crucial for the reproduction of capitalism, but cannot be reduced to neither violence nor ideology, namely what Marx refers to in Capital as ‘the mute compulsion of economic relations’, or what I will also refer to as economic power. In contrast to violence and ideology, economic power addresses the subjugated part in a relationship of domination indirectly through its social and material surroundings and conditions. Violence addresses the body by inflicting pain and injury, and ideology addresses the ways in which we understand ourselves and our surroundings. In contrast, economic power forces people to do certain things by reorganising the social and material conditions of their existence.
In pre-capitalist societies, exploitation of workers was anchored in personal relationships of dependence, upheld by (the threat of) direct, physical coercion. The unique thing about capitalism is that the exploited class is tied to the exploiting class through an abstract, anonymous and impersonal form of power. This thesis is an attempt to construct a systematic theory of this mute compulsion. The foundations for such a theory can be found scattered out all over Marx’s writings. Marx himself, however, never explicitly worked it out, and, as I demonstrate in this thesis, his successors and interpreters have not succeeded in formulating a satisfactory theory of the mute compulsion of capital either, though several Marxist studies from the last couple of decades have succeeded in uncovering many important aspects of its workings. The thesis therefore proceeds from a critical reading of Marx’s writings in order to excavate essential insights and combine them with other insights drawn from relevant scholarly literature, Marxist as well as nonMarxist.”
