Dear Carol,
So here goes, this is my first attempt at thinking about capital using a picture. I’m hoping this will help me think about what capital is doing and where it’s going, how it’s moving, in environments that I’m more familiar with, rather than sticking with the various disconnected images I have in mind when I read your work, of boxes stacked at the doors of factories (the commod as it exits the production process), Mr Moneybags poised over the pragmatic weavers and so on. And maybe this will help with whether this nineteenth-century text can be applied directly to thinking about the present or not.
So this picture was taken on 26th March 2011, just near the Ritz. Whatever form of capital inhabits police officers was moving around in force that day. I only noticed some time later that there is actually an officer in the driver’s seat of the Metropolitan Anarchy van. So the van as capital? What production process is it part of? Where is value in this scenario? The easiest place to start seems to be the van as a commodity that was bought from a capitalist-manufacturer. How did that exchange go? It won’t have been done like the individual act of exchange, Sohn-Rethel at the market checking out the apples (last seen at a checkpoint on the road to Homs, she has filed no reports since). I suppose it will have been bought as part of a consignment of vehicles, so the exchange process will have involved people working for distinct capitals emailing each other and preparing invoices and arranging insurance contracts and drivers – or maybe the vehicles would all get delivered together on one of those lorries? So that would involve a driver, being paid variable capital in exchange for selling their labour power to the capitalist-owner of the lorry.
Well, this is why I came up with this idea, because I was thinking about how difficult it is to begin describing what capital is doing in any given scenario because in order to say things in linear sentences you have to choose a starting point and you have to choose what to say second, and there are so many interactions spinning off from one another that you end up needing this abstracting process just to begin. To write anything.
So maybe I don’t need to spin off to too many removes from the picture. The van has been bought in the exchange, its value has been realised for the capitalist, and that value is now free to enter into another production process. Of course it’s actually entering into a bank, but let’s not go over there.
The van-commod is now in use in what must be another production process. Is it? It’s being used, so is it being consumed as a use value? I don’t think this is a final point of consumption by an end-user, I think this is in a process of capital. Maybe I shouldn’t have chosen police, because now I have to ask what sort of capital-shaped process this is, where surplus value is not being generated by this production process. The state has its capital in the police, as a whole. Or is it just money? But this is a much larger scale process. I don’t know if capital is here to produce surplus value – but that’s why it is anywhere. This to be returned to later. Thanks Carol.
So in the picture, as potential bearers or movers of capital, in some part of the process, we have: a van; a police officer; a graffito; a shopfront; a building. On a much larger scale we can identify the police as an arm of the state, protecting property from people, property needing protecting because it’s capital. The nation state arises from the mode of production and develops with and through it, so we have a police logic arising from the political configuration which is based on a dominant capitalist mode of producing, materially and immaterially, to meet our needs. But I need to be able to tie together the large scale with the mini-scale of the van popping out of the van factory.
But I was thinking that the van is functioning here as fixed capital, distributing its value to the commods (commod forms?) bit by bit and gradually throughout the production process. So if the van lasts ten years, then each year it imparts a tenth of its value into the commod forms it’s producing. The boxes in a neat pile at the factory door. But, goshdangit, to what commodities is the van distributing its value? What is produced by policing as a production process? Biopower? Disciplining the bearers of the labour-power, partly, contributing to producing immaterial products, ideas – governmentality? The state is partly produced and reproduced here, the notion of law, the notion of justice, a power settlement whereby we identify our roles (whether as enforcer or as victim or as the one on whose behalf the ‘security’ is being produced – the good citizen) and play them out. I can see why you wanted to begin with material commods Carol, this gets silly quite fast. With the commod-object there isn’t this need to identify what is produced, we can see it, it’s a van – apple – coat. There isn’t this need to identify a disjuncture between what we believe is being produced (security?) and what is actually being produced (power?). There is appearance with normal commods of course, and mystification of their origins in the production process, but the use value is somewhat relegated to whatever the consumer thinks it is, whether it’s meeting a need they have or a desire they have, whatever those needs and desires might be and however they came about. But it’s those desires that I want to get to. But you can’t get there all at once. This tangling of appearance and actual production gets complicated quite fast. To be developed.
Into Ruins 