Ricardo’s Ruthlessness

A fraternal solidarity prevails between Marx and the cold, cruel theorists who favor capitalism. For Marx, this is the only enduring solidarity: to the other socialist theorists he was usually more spiteful and intolerant. And so he happily agrees with Adam Smith in the distinction between productive and unproductive labor: and he defends David Ricardo against all his “sentimental opponents”:

“Ricardo, rightly for his time, regards the capitalist mode of production as the most advantageous for production in general, as the most advantageous for the creation of wealth.⁴⁸⁹ He wants production for the sake of production and this with good reason. To assert, as the sentimental opponents of Ricardo’s did, that production as such is not the object, is to forget that production for its own sake means nothing but the development of human productive forces, in other words the development of the richness of human nature as an end in itself.”

But the purpose of the society proposed by Marx as going beyond capital is precisely the “development of the richness of human nature,” its transition to that “omnilaterality” of “total man” that had not yet been achieved. Capital, based on the destruction of limits, was therefore still too timid in breaking them down: beyond capital was the prospect that production for production’s sake would reach its most radical, most intense, most effective form. Marx therefore seeks to shift the clearest and most ruthless concept of capitalistic production (the one put forward by Ricardo) into a context in which capital is engulfed, because it has itself become an obstacle to production.

“Beyond a certain point, the development of the powers of production becomes a barrier for capital; hence the capital relation a barrier for the development of the productive powers of labor.”⁴⁹⁰

The theory of the progressive decrease in the rate of profit is aimed primarily at establishing a point of no return, where development finally obstructs itself. Capital, which had been the very spearhead of development, becomes a “barrier,” just as the economic relations dissolved by capital had previously been. But, if capital was the subject of that process of development that has now turned against it, who will be the subject of the development that destroys capital? Marx, at this point, floats the image of development as a plan, as a sequence preestablished by men who have reappropriated their resources and themselves. But the prime characteristic of progress is the impossibility of a preestablished plan, a continual, blind flailing in the dark, where the result is a constant surprise, since there is no knowledge superior to the workings of development itself. The other great force of modern society, control, emerges here behind the words of Marx, behind the pitiful images of men who take their destiny in hand, behind chromolithographs of the happy throng of workers who become also artists and even fishermen and perhaps also policemen. Yet control and development are the beasts that grapple with each other in a slow combat that may be fatal for both.