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A Tale of Two Conferences:
Globalization, the Crisis of Neoliberalism
and Question of the Commons

Bibliography

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For economists, especially neoliberal theorists, who are committed to an ontology of individualistic, utility-maximizing agents, workers' coordination in production and capitalists' cooperation in corporate firms are troublesome epiphenomena. They must be deduced as the product of the decisions of individual rational agents according to the neoliberal paradigm. However problematic these deductions are, they are necessary because capitalism depends so flagrantly on the communal capacities of capitalists and workers for its reproduction. In this appendix we will review a few of these capacities briefly on the level of capitalists and on then broader level of the capitalist system as a whole. For, in a way, capitalism calls upon a class-specific communalism with very specific rules of self-regulation.

We should not be surprised to discover that capitalism must have communal aspects. After all, capitalism had integrated certain aspects of communism, conceived as a centrally planned economy with a dominance of state property, as Lenin and others pointed out in the early 20th century. The most important one is planning. Often capitalism is identified by its critics with the anarchy of the market and the lack of social-economic planning, but it has increasingly become clear that planning on the level of the firm, the branch of industry and indeed the national and planetary level is an essential feature of capitalism. On the level of the firm, without these capacities to plan (on all levels) the concept and practice of world wide, just-in-time production, for example, would be impossible. On the level of a branch of production, Lenin pointed to the development of cartels and "trusts" (a semantic fossil of the fact that capitalists need to have a certain level of confidence in each others' behavior in order to operate an oligopoly) that can plan production and pricing throughout the branch national and internationally. On a world-scale, the missionaries of neoliberalism, the World Bank and the IMF--for all their talk about the virtues of the "free" market--claim to have planning models of whole economies, to set targets for certain national and even world-wide economic indices, and so on.

a. The Corporation as a Capitalist Common. The "fire and blood" attack on peasant and early working class communalism that Marx writes about in Capital I was paralleled by the development of new forms of capitalist self-organization, which later became the Corporation. The semantics of this development is revealing. For example, proto-corporations were often called "unions," "companies," most specifically "joint stock companies," "gilds," and even "societies," i.e., their cooperative communal aspect was prominent. Indeed, the corporation became for the capitalists the primary way to communalize their capitals and share in the increased productive and exploitative capacity made possible by jointly accessing more capital than one's own and sharing the risk of investment. Ideally, the corporation is a common presumably regulated by the stock owners in the same way a common field is regulated by the commoners who have access to it. Indeed, a major criticism of corporations that has developed in the 20th century is that the capitalist commoners are losing their control of the corporation and letting the management (with interests often far removed from those of the owner commoners) make the basic decisions.

The historical relation between the associational forms of the common (used by agricultural workers) and the corporation (used by the capitalist class) was largely an inverted one in Britain between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. The stronger and more widespread the corporation, the weaker and more vulnerable the commons, for the most part. This held true except, of course, for the crisis of the capitalist "common" in 1719-20 with the South Sea Bubble and the passage of the Bubble Act which declared joint stock companies to be (according to the Bubble Act's preamble) illegal and "the common grievance, prejudice and inconvenience of His Majesty's subjects." But this form of commons was so powerful that the Bubble Act and the "inconvenience" it caused barely put a dent in the growth of joint stock companies so that by the early twentieth century the corporation became and remained since then the dominant form of business association.

b. "The Freemasonry of Capitalism." The final aspect of the general "commonism" of capitalism we will comment on is less obvious than the communal aspects of capitalists' cooperation, for it depends upon a general aspect of the capitalist system that is not empirically observable. The surplus value that is created by the whole working class within all capitalist firms, branches of industry and the circuit of social capital during a specified period is a common-pool resource for the capitalist class as a whole. This resource is in the long run distributed to firms and branches of industry in the form of profit on the basis of the capital invested in them and not on the basis of their actual production of surplus value. Thus a sweatshop in Brooklyn which exploits its large immigrant worker staff at a rate of surplus value of 100% might only get a profit of 10% on the basis of a small investment, while a nuclear power plant in Indian Point that actually exploits its much smaller technical staff at a rate of 5% actually gets a profit of 10% as well on an investment hundreds of times that of the Brooklyn sweatshop.

The existence of this "surplus value common-pool resource" and the rules that govern withdrawals from it is only dimly understood by both capitalists and workers. For both realize that there is something going on "behind their backs" with respect to exploitation, though they can not quite express it. On the one side, workers know that often they are extremely exploited, but mysteriously their immediate boss is not the recipient of the surplus value they create; on the other, some capitalists know that other members of their class are recipients of surplus value generated by their workers. They deeply resent it, but for the most part they are reconciled to it. Thus the Brooklyn sweatshop owner, who is often on the edge of bankruptcy and must drive his/her workers to the limit when there is an order, has a sense that through some quasi-transcendental processes ranging from the determination of the price of electricity on a New York State-wide level to the selling of the Indian Point bonds some of the efforts of "his/her" workers reappear as the profits of the electricity company.

This capitalist "surplus value commons" does serve an important function for the system as a whole, for if commodities essential to the production of all other commodities (e.g., electricity, petroleum and computer operating systems) could not be produced at or near the average rate of profit, then their absence from the market would halt the production of all other commodities. This clearly could not happen if capitalism is to remain a self-reproductive system. Thus for all the rivalry and resentment within the capitalist class concerning the regulation of the capitalist common-and there have been plenty of curses uttered in the process against those, from John D. Rockefeller's days to Bill Gates', who have demanded their due from the surplus value common -the inevitable class consciousness, what Marx called "the Freemasonry of capital," triumphed. In other words, capitalists are not only concerned about their own returns, but have a wider systemic interest which recognizes that what appears to be an unjust "monopoly" profit, is actually justified by the rules of appropriation.

Marx's discovery of a "surplus value commons" is termed the "transformation problem" by critics, of course, to trivialize the issue into one emphasizing the consistency of mathematical constraints. But the key question is whether capitalist class consciousness is a "material" matter or not? If the bond between capitalists was merely a matter of self-interested beliefs, then it is not clear why capitalism can support such a grave inequality within its own ranks, especially in a crisis which will lead to the annihilation of many small capitals (and only some big ones). But if the commonism of capital rules, it appears just that the flow of value will not proportionally reward the originators of value, but will only reward proportionally capital itself. This rule is just, since the survival of the system of capitalist accumulation is the ultimate value and not the preservation of equal exchange.

Putting together these essential elements of capitalism (the corporation and the surplus value commons), it is clear that the commons is not logically antagonistic to capitalism. On the contrary, certain kinds of commons are necessary conditions for the existence of capitalism. Indeed, without the capacity of capitalists to call upon the mutual aid and class solidarity of other capitalists and to use the communal character of workers to their advantage (cooperation), capitalism would not have been able survive the shock of class struggle over the centuries. Indeed, if capitalism was not a common-pool resource system organized on some levels as common property, then it would never have been able to have become a self-reproducing system, even in the short run.

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