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‘Degenerative’ Capitalism

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Science and the Decolonization of Social Theory

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Abstract

When modernity is considered in terms of the historical conditions for the reproduction of human life on the planet within actual social hierarchies, commodification looks like its tangible reality and the notion of capitalism appears ineluctable. In narrative terms, modernity and capitalism overlap, as their reciprocal interpellation is used to describe the space-time boundary of the world from the sixteenth century onwards. Global capitalism seems to be undergoing a radical transformation that questions existing theories based on various exegeses of those of Marx’s writings that are devoted to the rational understanding of the logic of capital. When observed from the familiar perspective elaborated in the West, the crisis that challenges existing theories of capitalism does not look much like the conjunctural method of re-establishing acceptable conditions of profitability; rather it appears to be an irreversible transition towards a new ‘stage’ of capitalism. This stage would be distinctive in two respects: first, it manifests to an unprecedented degree the most detrimental effects intrinsic to the logic of capital: violent social polarization of power, wealth and existential expectations between social groups. Second, capitalism is said to have become global in scale as it never has before, which is a way of expressing the irrelevance of the geographical dimension of exploitation in the definition of what is external to capitalism: capitalism seems no longer to have territorial boundaries, only social and spatial borders, constantly transformed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The attribute of ‘postcolonial’ would not express an ultimate stage of capitalism, rather the analytic effort to understand capitalism from postcolonial theoretical perspective that, as such, is not limited to the former colonies, but represents the global operations and configuration of capitalism.

  2. 2.

    In his classical formulation, Schumpeter generalizes from his analysis of the business cycle in the US steel industry, to describe creative destruction as the essence of capitalism. ‘The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as US Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in’ (Schumpeter 1994 [1942]: 83).

  3. 3.

    An interesting debate between Harvey and Kliman has been hosted by the web journal New Left Projec t (www.newleftproject.org/). See Kliman’s intervention (www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/harvey_versus_marx_on_capitalisms_crises_part_1_getting_marx_wrong), and Harvey’s (www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/capitals_naturea_response_to_andrew_kliman).

  4. 4.

    Chibber’s deliberate attack on postcolonial theory has raised a relevant debate. Among the reactions it has generated, I consider those of Spivak (2014) and Mezzadra (2014) particularly relevant for the ‘defense’ of postcolonialism.

  5. 5.

    References for a critical assessment of this genealogy of historicism include Hinde (2000), Iggers and Powell (1962), Gilbert (1990), and Rüsen (1985, 1990). An interesting critique of this approach has been provided by Peter Burke in his reconstruction of the intellectual path of the French school of Annales (see Burke 1990).

  6. 6.

    It will be clear to the reader that I consider both capitalism and modernity as notions capable of being constructed as two distinct axiomatics. As such, they are conceivable via two different sets of axioms. While for Mezzadra there is a relation of derivation between the two, I am more interested in the heuristic value of the notion of axiomatic than in its applicability to presumed historical realities.

  7. 7.

    On this point see the interesting articulation of this interpretative problem in the frame of ‘uneven and combined development’ by Smith (2006).

  8. 8.

    Marx confronts Hodgskin’s theories both in preliminary studies of the theories of values and in Capital.

  9. 9.

    See an excerpt in English from Swing and Rella (2006) at http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/OPE/archive/0604/0022.html, date accessed 26 July 2015.

  10. 10.

    For an overview of the vast debate about the different outcomes of the controversy regarding the so-called transformation problem, see Freeman and Carchedi (1996).

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  1. University of Naples l’Orientale, Naples, Italy

    Gennaro Ascione

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Ascione, G. (2016). ‘Degenerative’ Capitalism. In: Science and the Decolonization of Social Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51686-2_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51686-2_7

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