Mark Jones The ecology of capitalist intersubjectivity
Immanent Limits to growth? If you take Marx's view that '[c]apital develops
adequately' on the basis of 'unlimited competition and industrial production,'
[Marx (1973) p.559] and that its purpose is not the production of goods but of
profit -- not use-values, but value -- then there can be no external limits to
capitalist accumulation. [Marx (1976) p.725: 'the employment of surplus-value as
capital, or its reconversion into capital, is called the accumulation of capital.']
Capital is vampiric: but vampires don't have any natural life span, do they? 'Money
attempted to posit itself as imperishable value,' Marx said, in the hallucinatory
language of the Grundrisse:
'as eternal value, by relating negatively towards circulation, i.e. towards the
exchange with real wealth, with transitory commodities, which ... dissolve in
fleeting pleasures. Capital ... alternates between its eternal form in money and
its passing form in commodities; permanence is posited as the only thing it can be
... But capital obtains this ability only by constantly sucking in living labour as
its soul, vampire-like...'[Marx (1973) p.646] Marx is at pains to develop the idea
that the limits to capitalism can only be internal. It is central to the closure of
his system that this should be so. At the same time, he gives no theoretical
guarantees that in practice capitalism ever will bump up against its limits. Those
who think he did, and that subsequent history therefore disproved him, are wrong.
For Marxism, as with neo-classical economics, there are tendencies ... and
counter-tendencies. Which wins out, history will decide. Marx said 'the integument
must burst asunder' and his work is infused with that thought, but far from taking
it for granted, he endeavours to find out why it may NOT happen, i.e., what are the
preconditions for equilibrium.
His attempt to define equilibrium states led Marx to devise models of capitalism --
in fact he was the first macroeconomist, the first to utilise multi-sector
modelling. Almost single-handed, Marx made equilibrium the main subject of study
among a generation of political economists.
Marx concluded that over time two related things will happen: despite frequent
crises, capital will go on accumulating until it confronts us with an alternative
world of mysterious and potent technologies, embodied in a gigantic accumulation of
technical and industrial processes, machinery and networks.
Confronting this social-other is the inflated reserve army of labour. This
confrontation is the presence of history in Marx, for it is obvious that this
strange bifurcatory world cannot last, although it was never clear to Marx or his
successors what would come after; Lenin and the Bolsheviks never rose above
capitalism's own programme of urbanisation and factories. Equilibrium is real, but
it conceals an inexorable historical progression. 'The greater the social wealth
[Marx said], the functioning of capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and
therefore also the greater the absolute mass of the proletariat and the
productivity of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army... The more
extensive, finally, the pauperized sections of the working class and the industrial
reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law
of capitalist accumulation.' [Marx (1973) p.798]
And still more clearly: 'Accumulation of capital is therefore multiplication of the
proletariat'[Marx (1976) p.764]. The result a century later is a world where less
than 200 million employees of transnational corporations and big capital produce
three-quarters of the profit which valorizes the world's social capital, while four
billion workers and landless peasants form a largely-immiserated mass of humankind
with an average income of less than $5,000 per annum, one billion on less than a
dollar a day.
Endless population growth pose its own problems. Eco-catastrophe seems likely
before capital is destroyed by its internal contradictions. Ecological damage and
Malthusian limits are on Marx's agenda. But these are not the limit-point he means
when he says 'the integument must burst asunder'. Internal contradictions --
falling rate of profit, rising organic composition of capital, creation of a
reserve army of labour --form the limits to growth.
Marx did anticipate environmental destruction as an external limit. Examples of
ancient world collapses due to salinisation, desertification, deforestation were
there. The impact of capitalist agriculture on English soil fertility was also
clear. If the use of clove and legumes in the Agrarian Revolution of the 18th C had
fixed nitrogen in depleted soils, ensuring adequate harvests for the burgeoning
cities of the Industrial Revolution, by the mid 19th C these gains had been lost
and English agriculture begin to import guano in competition with European powers.
This race to overcome soil depletion has characterised capitalist agriculture and
is still its central drama. Why did Marx not incorporate these externalities into
his totalising social logic of capitalist accumulation? His work was incomplete,
the planned studies of the formation of classes, of the state, and of imperialism,
left as sketches and notes; the studies in natural science and mathematics still
more preliminary. Marx's views on Darwin and the German agronomist Liebig ('more
important than all the economists') leave no doubt that he would have continued
this work if he'd had time. But Marx left us all that is needed to continue.
Capitalist accumulation reproduces its contradictions in more intense forms.
Therefore the progress of capitalist science and technology, reflected in increased
factor productivity, would never be sufficient to jerk the system free of its
limits. No matter how much agronomy increased soil fertility, the gains would
inevitably be absorbed by accumulation itself. Gains are short-term and illusory
and only bring closer the day of reckoning, when accumulated environmental deficits
result in insurmountable, final crisis. Marx was thus a deep ecologist, sure that
the logic of accumulation is bound to lead to planetary disaster unless capitalism
is displaced by communism.
The counter-arguments to Marxian doomsaying depend upon continuing uncertainty
about the long-term outcome of capitalist accumulation.
The uncertainties operate at all levels. If population stabilises and the
demographic transition does happen, for example, then Marx's predictions about
increasing reserve armies of labour will be falsified. In this case, sustainable
capitalism seems possible after all. If the world's population peaks and
stabilises, as many demographers predict [IIASA, The Future Population of the
World (1996)] -- and at the same time capitalism converts to renewable
energy-systems, as the World Bank now says it can [Fuel for Thought: A New
Environmental Strategy for the Energy Sector, World Bank, draft, June 1998] then
what's to stop capitalism continuing in a stable state? That's one prognosis:
capitalism will survive the upheavals of the next decades and in a century or so
the world will have uniform high standards of life. People will enjoy near-
immortality amid wired-up techno-splendour. Enthusiasts from as Wired! argue that
nothing short of runaway warming or general nuclear war can prevent this utopia.
Of course the fate of the planet has possibly already been decided by anthropogenic
changes to the ocean conveyor. But short of that, capitalism can survive almost
anything: Massive human die-offs, the collapse of entire regions (Russia,
Africa) -- all this is either new business opportunities, or can be ignored as evil
but unavoidable friction-costs.
Markets can be restructured to favour green-capitalism. Pollution- permits will
drain the carbon from the energy system. Even if Marx was right and capitalism must
Grow or Die, growth will be virtualised and GNP dematerialised as services grow,
informatics substitute for matter and energy per unit of output falls. Is this
another way Marx's predictions might be falsified? Even Herman Daly believes in the
sustainable market-based economy.
Crisis gives capital the chance to retire obsolete plant and restructure with
'greener' systems. It no longer greatly fears popular resistance, which can be
recuperated. Systemic shocks, if severe enough, produce not revolt but passivity,
withdrawal and helplessness, as in Russia. The extent of the collapse has
paralysed collective responses and reduced the population to socially-excluded
spectators at the bacchanalia of the criminal oligarchy. Hopelessness, despair and
impotent passivity is expected; the West counts on it, and that is clear from many
public pronouncements. The strategy of permitting the Russian people to sink or
swim was deliberate. Preoccupied with the problems of immediate survival, and
lacking any faith in popular institutions, Russians could not resist what was done
to them, endure in silence hunger and mass death.
In the socially-inclusive and politically-integrated core countries, the
destruction of obsoleted proletariats, squeezing of welfare budgets and widening of
income and wealth differentials has continued for two decades without serious
resistance. Meanwhile efforts have been made in the ideo-cultural sphere to
construct new personality-templates and to adjust mass- psychology accordingly.
Capitalism has long ago abandoned universalist ideas of development and rising
standards for all.
No-one objects.
Under the guise of abandoning the neurosis, guilt and parsimony of the patriarchal
personality, which was a principal social invention of 19th century capitalism, and
stimulated by the mass conscription of women into the labour-force, there has been
a resolute attempt to deconstruct the family as a residual instance of solidarity
against capital, and to pull away the psychic supports of a personality-template
organised around a psychic centre of sacrifice, heterosexual gender identity,
sexual control and repression of the feminine. In its place we are witnessing the
creation of a new personality-type adequate to global capital which has
subordinated the family as well as the nation, commoditising their functions and
liquidating the arsenal of atavistic symbols of community, mystery, sacrifice and
other- directed struggle, seen as no longer required to legitimise bourgeois
hegemony and objectively now only the rags of archaic value-system, absorbed by the
deceitful misogynies of the New Right and no more than a menace to Neo-liberalism.
The new ludic, androgynous personality, playful, self-regarding, narcissistic
perhaps, is meant to be incapable of solidarity or commitment; post-modern feminism
has made of the great feminist issues a study in misanthropic self-glorification
and gender-hatred. Conceiving of emancipation as freedom from biology (universally
misunderstood as 'sociobiology' by writers like Judith Butler, Teresa de Lauretis,
Kaja Silverman, whose followers amplify their own profound ignorance of real
science), they wilfully reject any notion of genetic determination of the
personality or gender-identity.
Only a dramatic social crisis, removing many social support- systems and throwing
individuals back on their own resources, is likely to revive collective forms of
activity which in any case are likely to seem contradictory, anachronistic and
ineffective, even ludicrously so. The introjection of capitalist-spectacle has
overwhelmed forms of mass resistance even in semi-colonial peripheries where people
have far less to gain from collusion; nevertheless the symbolic power of capital
and its self- aggrandising brand name-imagery and its pervasive suasion of
self-provision, even in circumstances where no form of self-help makes any sense,
has swept all before it.
The counter-revolution in Russia has emboldened capital to persevere in its
deconstruction of residues of older forms of proletarian or class-based
subjectivity. At the same time, the leading imperialist countries retain strong and
socially-inclusive states. In France, Australia and Germany the centre-right has
begun to collapse under the insidious pressure of long-term deflation and chronic
high unemployment; in these countries, as also in Britain, Italy and the USA, it
will be left to centre-left populist governments of the Blair type to bear the
brunt of the impending slump, an economic tsunami which will sweep across the world
market and strengthen right-populist movements, backed by finance capital.
Thus, strong states may survive and become more repressive in the short term;
elsewhere, in parts of Asia, the former Soviet Union, Africa and Latin America,
states will weaken and sometimes collapse. The reconsolidation of world imperialism
in one or two super centres requires a radical redistribution of the power and
reach of states. At the same time, Manuel Castell's visions of an inverted, global
gulag of enclaves and networks of wealth, disregarding borders and cutting across
the historic and spatial limits of every ethnos, will also appear to be a
determining instance of global, post-national capitalism. Overarching eco-crises,
combining energy and water shortages with flooding of densely populated coastal
regions and with massive new effects of anthropogenic climate change, will further
darken this picture of unprecedented extremes of squalor and ostentatious wealth,
and further deepen the polarisation of humankind, its prirutal degradation and
humiliation, its propensity for war and for tribalism, social nihilism, the mass
destruction of culture. This is the world of exterminism, the tnanatocracy of late
imperialism.
The rediscovery of the ecological imperative at the heart of Marxism enables us to
reconsider its emancipatory agenda. Instead of urbanisation and development, future
revolution will inaugurate a historical cycle of defending and repairing ecological
networks and of reconfiguring our absorption of the landscape and our construction
of locales, based on reordered architectures of space and time and radically
different uses of energy inputs. The task of reversing entropy will prove
extraordinarily complex and challenging and entails reversing four millennia of
urbanisation. Taking the energy and materials flows out of the 'urban gulag',
reconverting exurbia into truly ruralised space-time and energy flows (dismantling
the suburbs, or allowing ecosystems to encroach on them and reabsorb them) --
these will be the forms of reappropriation of wealth, the forms of redistribution
of power and privilege, and the way in which 'the countryside surrounds the city'.
This is to invert the strategic preoccupations of Bolshevik Marxism. It is to
repudiate the Marxism-Leninism which John Gray, author of 'False Dawn', defines
this way: "Classical Marxism, its Soviet embodiment, and western neo-liberalism,
also share a cavalier attitude to ecological and environmental limits. They are
radical technological optimists - arguing that whatever the short-run damage to the
environment, it will be more than compensated for by the advancement which rapid
industrialisation and the displacement of older types of economic life allow. So
both of these philosophies embody a radically modernist attitude to humankind's
relations with the earth, to cultural forms and types of economic life standing in
the way of its increasing mastery." [New Times, Number 146, 9 May 1998]
In fact blind faith in progress is already confined to crackpots like Julian Simon
and Rush Limbaugh. Instead of the golden uplands of communist plenty we faced a
future of resource-depletion, ecosphere collapse and a potential inability to
sustain the exurban infrastructures of the post-modern city. Socialism is not even
a question of redistribution; there may be nothing to distribute. As was shown in
Russia, when urban systems begin unravelling they do so with terrifying speed and
leave little behind. Cities are parasitic as they always have been. They depend
upon enormous fluxes of energy and material inputs. They give back only entropic
waste: that, and improved technology. If the technology starts to lag behind the
accumulated disorder which increasing complexity brings, then cities swiftly
become unsustainable. But there is no longer a viable countryside to retreat to.
The exurban post-modern society has been involuted, decanted itself into the
country and made of wilderness a besieged enclave within itself. We are tied to the
fate of the city as we have never been, the more so now that more than half the
world's bloated human population live in cities, as Marx predicted. Yet the city is
no longer viable. It has to be replaced. That's the scale of the challenge, the
problem and the drama of the era of transition.
Capitalist production is simultaneously the production of 'surplus' population;
capitalist enrichment of the few is always and everywhere also the pauperisation of
the majority. Marx called the production of surplus population, 'the absolute
general law of capitalist accumulation'.(Cap I p798, Penguin ed.). This 'absolute
general law' of population is central to understanding the conjuncture: 'The
production of a relative surplus population, or the setting free of workers,
therefore proceeds more rapidly than the technical transformation of the process of
production that accompanies the advance of accumulation ... in proportion as the
productivity of labour increases, capital increases its supply of labour more
quickly than its demand for workers'. (p789) 'The constant movement towards the
towns presupposes, in the countryside itself, a constant latent surplus population,
the extent of which only becomes evident at those exceptional times when its
distribution channels are wide open... The third category of the relative surplus
population is the stagnant population...' (p796). It is impossible to analyse tidal
movements of people which are at the heart of so-called immigration crises, without
understanding the general law of population in the first place. That is why Marx
spent so much time analysing the matter. Immigration into the US is the direct
result of the previous creation of a surplus population, principally by driving
peasants off the land in the process of extending capitalist agriculture. There is
a one-to-one connection between the aggressive extension of monopolised agriculture
in the oppressed peripheral countries, and the creation of the megacities in the
South which are the sumps of stagnant surplus population, and the ultimate source
of contemporary tidal immigration into the US, Europe etc.
The argument from social justice begins with the proposition that as of now, we
have enough food production capacity to feed people all over the world comfortably.
All that is needed is more equitable distribution, meaning among other things less
meat in Western diets.
This is the classic Green argument: if we eat more wholesome beans and vegetarian
foods, there is enough food for everybody. But it is utopian. The call for social
justice involves not just redistribution, but a structural change in the mode of
food production itself. What will this change entail, and how can it be
implemented? Once you start to examine the problem in detail, you discover that the
level of food production we have today, which is historically very high, depends
upon the inputs which the total capitalist system provides: everything from
chemical inputs, pharmaceutical, pesticides, stock breeding, biotech -- to
distribution methods, the vertical organisation of agriculture, the existence of a
large scale, powerful agronomy research sector, the existence of sufficient energy
inputs etc. Third World food depends on the 'Green Revolution' in agriculture which
is itself just an aspect of modern capitalism.
This 'Green Revolution' which produces an abundance of food also produces new
'surplus' populations, i.e., former peasants made landless and driven into the
cities. But if people object on spurious grounds even to the terminology 'surplus
population' the we are unable even to define the problem, which is that the
productivity of modern capitalist agriculture creates excess population as a
by-product.
This surplus population is a hostage to imperialism and it guarantees that modern
capitalist agriculture, far from becoming sustainable or green/organic, will be
still more intensified, capitalised, and imbued with the technologies of gene-
modification, germplasm patenting, chemical saturation of soils etc.: because there
will be no other way to feed the hostage populations of the megacities which their
very process creates. Pools of hunger, scarcity, malnutrition, epidemic disease
etc. are produced by capitalism alongside and together with the enclaves of
prosperity.
Over-population confronts the world with multiform crises whose scale and intensity
make alternatives to capitalism almost unthinkable. Socialism's law of population
must begin with the fact that the population cannot exceed Earth's carrying
capacity, and all economic processes including food production must be
sustainable. The population already exceeds carrying capacity, yet it may rise to
10 bn. within forty years. This huge surplus population will be hostage to
capitalist agronomy, science and technology, to monopolised agribusiness with its
complete dependence on unsustainable technologies, on chemical and pharmaceutical
inputs, biotechnology and gene-manipulation, to the monopolistic food producing
centres which will be concentrated in the temperate zones of the rich North. The
tempo of change, too swift to plan or vary; and the structural imbalances which
will only deepen over time, make this fate seem all the more inescapable. But this
only means that capitalism's crises will become still more explosive and dangerous.
How new is post-postmodernism?
It is argued of the 'new' pomo elite "that there has been a transformation of the
political class in the period following the End of the Cold War. The argument runs
like this: not that there has been a transformation of capitalism, in toto, but
that the changes are profound, and that it is wrong to minimise them. Of course the
social class of capitalists, as a spontaneously self-reproducing class is not so
turmoil-ridden as the political elite that serves them. But all the same the
changes even in the way that business is done seem marked ... thus it is pointed
out just how useless the signposts of 'left' or 'right' are in the new political
landscape. Did the right win the cold war? Then how come they were all bounced out
of office? Is Bill Clinton/Tony Blair right-wing or left wing - your answer to that
question will tell us more about where you stand in the political spectrum than
about them. There is in any event always a generational turnover in the elite. Just
as the elites of the eighties grew up in the forties (Bush being the last president
to serve in the Second WW, Thatcher the last prime minister to have lived through
it), today's rulers cut their teeth in the sixties and even seventies, smoking pot
at Oxford, or playing in a pop band there.
But while that generational turnover is just a fact of life, what givs it special
pertinence is the exhaustion of the old political and cultural framework that was
put together in the Cold War..." [the foregoing is culled from an elist exchange of
views] But how real is this change in the formation and mindset of elites, and how
much is just spectacle, just for show? It was Prime Minister Harold Wilson who gave
the Beatles the MBE in the 'Swinging Sixties'. Homosexual and abortion rights
arrived in 1967 in the UK. John Profumo, a Tory War Minister, employed Christine
Keeler and allegedly smoked dope before that; and let's face it, homosexuality,
sexual freedom, polygamy and monogamy, recreational drugs, and any other hallmark
you can apply to pomo swingers like Bill and (maybe) Tony, have been the
preogatives of the ruling class in Britain and elsewhere since before Byron,
Swinburne, the Restorationists, John Donne, Chaucer-- hell, you can go back to
Richard The Lionheart, whose crusaders bought hashish off the Arabs...
It is much more useful to examine the construction of mass sexual psychology, to
find clues to the historical fluxes between alternately more permissive and more
austere moral climates. And a key question this century anyway is control of
fertility.
Fertility and mortality rates are obviously important determinants of female
participation in the labour force. A majority of American women did outwork in the
C19; ditto Chinese and English women for a millenium before that; the Chinese used
herbal oral contraceptives, with some degree of efficacy in the C17; Chinese and
Persian WOMEN controlled much of the silk trade and often owned the workshops
(their Mongol conquerors accorded women still more equality; they rode alongside
their men). But 19th C England was the first society to escape Malthusian
balance -- and to put women en masse into factories.
Falling mortality rates produced a population explosion, which however began to
abate early this century. The reasons why bear examination. What led to the
declining fertility rates which complement declining mortality and morbidity rates?
Contraception is the usual answer, but it is wrong. It was not available. That's
the difference with today. By the 1890s controlling fertility had become a vital
question, and a dramatic and often traumatic question, of great importance to
individuals as well as whole classes. It was directly related to rising or
declining social opportunity, and the chance of self-betterment.A powerful
explanation of 'Victorian' repressive sexuality is that it was the product of
perceived new opportunities, in the absence of effective contraception. There were
strong incentives for working and lower middle class people to internalise
Victorian values. I'll say more on that in a moment. The changes which brought
'permissiveness' in the Sixties were based on the Pill not on any mysterious
transformation in elite consciousness. It went with the upsurge of postwar literacy
and the advent of near-universal accessibility to further and higher education,
which did give some of the socially-subaltern cohorts more opportunity to progress
into political and buisness elites; that and the disintegration of Fordism and
decompositon of mass blue collar production cycles/working classes. Social
co-optation of the lower classes was a significant underlying reason for
'permissiveness', but paradoxically the same desire to cross class boundaries was
at work in the moral auterity of the late 19th C. The introjection of Victorian Sam
Smiles values into the English w/c, previously renowned for its Hogarthian
shiftless, feckless, morally-dissolute, licentious, drunken and brawling nature,
was not merely the enforced substitution of Methodism for booze, but was also an
adaptive response to perceived greater social possibilities resulting from
restraint. Where a century before, more children was a key to security in later
life, by the end of the last century the opposite was clearly true. But the
mechanisms of birth control were poor or absent, thus placing a premium on
abstinence as the most reliable way to keep family size down.
A pathbreaking study of the whys and wherefores of fertility change in Britain is
Simon Szreter's "Fertility, class and gender in Britain 1860-1940" (Cambridge U.P.
1996). Szreter shows that rubber and chemicals do not explain much of the early
falls in the birthrate. You have to look elsewhere, at conditioned and internalised
forms of psychosexual repression and control. These mechanisms also underpinned not
only the cult of property-acquisition and consumerism which defines the repressive
desublimation of western libido, but also and just as conveniently, which powered
its machismatic inversion: the assumption of the 'White Man's Burden', so essential
to victorian imperialism. Thus trends originating in the Reformation reached their
climacteric in the half century before WW2, and thus did Victorian capitalism
construct sexuality; unbundling that construct has been the work of the entire
postwar period. "The English census of 1911 is often called the 'fertility census',
because the census-forms contained special additional questions. Households had to
report on how many children had so far been born into unions. Over the next decade
or so Dr T.H.C. Stevenson, superintendent of statistics at the General Register
Office, worked on the answers to these special questions, seeking to analyse the
figures according to a particular categorisation of English social classes. This
class scheme was to prove momentous beyond anything Stevenson could have foreseen:
for him at the time its relation to fertility was simply a very pleasing
confirmation of what he had already believed about the nation's sex-life.
Stevenson's scheme was nothing less than the five-tier, one-dimensional,
occupation-based division of classes which remains, in essence, orthodox and
official in the present day, eighty years later. Stevenson's version went as
follows: I Professional, II Intermediate, III Skilled Manual, IV Intermediate, V
Unskilled Manual. There have been lots of complaints from historians over the years
about the inadequacy of this list, but with slight revisions it remains ascendant.
Stevenson's emphasis on occupation and skills had at first been a response to the
agenda set by eugenicists, whose hereditarian theories were being increasingly
resisted, according to Szreter, by a 'confident, revitalized and more comprehensive
environmentalist analysis' in institutions of social policy such as the GRO. The
eugenicists said that low skills and high fertility were linked, leading to 'race
suicide'.
Given his environmentalist views, Stevenson may have been dismayed when he saw that
the linkage predicted by the eugenicists in fact held. But he also saw an
alternative line of argument, which accepted the linkage but overtrumped the
hereditarian explanation with an impeccably environmentalist one. Birth-control was
the key. It was 'diffusing' slowly from the educated and prosperous in a gradient
through the less educated and poorer ranks." (from a review of Szreter by Michael
Mason).
Now, the question is, was Stevenson right, as generations of policy-makers,
historians and sociologists have all assumed? Was it birth control techniques which
were being diffused -- or something else? Mason summarises Szreter's argument like
this: "Szreter is confident that Stevenson was wrong, even on his own showing.
The argument involved here is somewhat elaborate. Stevenson, and demographers ever
since, have held that true birth-control - in the sense of full sexual relations
between partners performed with the deliberate adjunct of devices and substances
believed to prevent conception - will most clearly show up in the statistics in the
'stopping' rather than 'spacing' of births. Large numbers of couples will be
detectable as at first producing children at something like the biologically
maximum rate - and then producing no more. Stevenson claimed that stopping
behaviour was discernible as 'diffusing' in the English social classes across time.
The published data of 1911 do not permit Szreter to check this claim for couples
who through ageing or death had finished having families by this date (the larger
category), but he is able to perform the neat trick of checking it for the smaller
category of younger couples who were still producing children. We can work out if
this group, at least, was 'spacing' or 'stopping'.
The answer is that "They were spacing. They do not exhibit the hallmark of
birth-control required by Stevenson. There is an obvious way to rescue Stevenson at
this point, in his own despite. Why can't spacing be a token of artefactually
controlled conception, just as much as stopping? Szreter does not rest his case
only on a refutation of Stevenson, on his own terms. He agrees that spacing of
births could in principle be the result of birth-control. But he has drawn a
further and more profound observation from the publish ed tables of the 1911
census. This is that low fertility achieved by spacing correlates with late
marriage. Couples of child-bearing age who were conceiving rather infrequently were
also likely to have postponed getting married."
Mason adds: "This is probably the most important single result to emerge from
Szreter's research, and it paves the way for his own general theory of family
sexuality in the years around and after 1911, which occupies the final third of his
book. It was, according t o Szreter, a 'culture of abstinence', influential right
through to Philip Larkin's 1963 ('Sexual intercourse began'), which mainly drove
down the fertility of England and Wales. On this account, diffusionism is out of
the window. There was no wisdom about obtaining and using certain devices and
substances which needed to percolate down from the privileged to the less
privileged. Moreover, the thinking which impelled couples to resort to
birth-control via 'abstinence' was, according to Szreter, one which wouldn't yield
a simple correlation with social rank. Couples took steps to reduce numbers of
conceptions in response to the 'perceived relative cost' of childbearing." It is
the subsequent availability of cheap and effective female contraception which has
transformed matters by relieving the psychological burden placed on couples earlier
in the century.
The process of dissolution of the family is also not linear and straightforward, as
we now even from Laslett's 'World We Have Lost'. Small 'nuclear' families have been
normative in England since the 14th C. And to speak of the 'explosion of the
nuclear family' as Jim Heartfield does is to exaggerate a phenomenon which is not
yet universal and may never be altho it is true that in some parts of England and
Wales, more children are born out of wedlock than in wedlock, that is still a large
minority) and secondly to misstate the causes, which are material, and are bound up
with the restructuring of the working class which goes in tandem with the
retructuring of production itself.
Female labour is more congenial for many modern assembly line processes, while the
demand for heavy manual labour has almost completely disappeared. Changes in
sexuality, in the empowerment of women, in the female image and self-imaging, in
the growth of third-sexing and androgyny as powerful subliminal messages in mass
market advertising, Hollywood and culture generally, all have their origins in this
constellation of historically-mediated factors which together constitute sexuality
and its mass psychology. Undoubtedly the process has much further to go, and an
all-out asssault by capital upon human sexual reproduction is just now gathering
pace (the Times today reports the first successful cloning of mice, which
apparently much more than with Dolly the sheep is an indicator that human cloning
is close at hand). What Fred Halliday called a "Second Cold war - both abroad, and
at home in the return of 'Victorian Values' (ie sexism and heterosexism), imperial
war-mongering, and a re-emphasis upon tradition" seems to me the complete opposite
of what has actually happened, which is a further loosening of those traditional
ties. Culture remains an epiphenomenon of the capitalist mode of production, a
shadow that history casts on the wall. Cultural change is reflexive and the range of
its autonomy far more circumsribed than people understand or acknowledge.
It is the immanent laws of motion of capital which determine the limits of
bourgeois culture and their forms. Postmodernism's specification of the individual,
its transcendental subjectivity, paradoxically rooted in the rejection of the
subject (Baudrillard), or in the construction of the subject as mere emblem of
conflicting forces (Foucault), or in the reduction of the subject to a text without
significance, a sermon with no auditor (Derrida), is actually a prefiguring of the
relocation of the individual in a new ecology of space-time, one hopelessly beyond
capital's grasp; a Rousseauan prefiguring of an absent social space between subject
and World; an Aristotelian process of self-realisation, which capital prefigures
because it has no choice because this historical inversion is now inescapable and
necessary, and forms the coterminous realm of individual and World known as
Communism.
Mark Jones
July 1998
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