5
A Structural Connection Among Race, Gender, Class
Marx’s Political Economy Without the Subject
Teresa Brennan
Most radical papers today begin and end with one or two paragraphs lamenting the fact that the author has been unable to take account of race or gender or class, and that the author recognizes how important it is that such work be done. Well, this author recognizes it too, but wants to claim that a value theory without the subject/object distinction will enable us to make connections between race, gender, and class that go beyond goodwill, or the desire for these various forms of exploitation to have something in common.
What is a value theory without the subject/object distinction? It is an interpretation of Marx’s labor theory of value that begins by criticizing Marx’s assumption that in all modes of production, across all historical periods, production is organized by the opposition between a subject (the laborer) and an object (technology and the means of production). In the first part of this chapter, I will briefly sketch this argument, before turning to its implications for race, gender, and class in Part 2.
The Labor Theory of Value Without the Subject/Object Distinction
What Marx did, and the other nineteenth-century political economists did not do, was to stress the “twofold” nature of a commodity (Marx 1954, 54). A commodity, as Marx defined it, is always produced for exchange, and has exchange value. But it also and always has use value; there can be no use value without nature, or natural substance. Even Marx, despite his much touted admiration for industrialization, stressed that nature is the source of all use value.
Moreover, because of Marx’s emphasis on the twofold nature of a commodity, the labor theory of value can become a theory with considerable explanatory force in relation to the exploitation of the environment. It becomes this in that, without the subject/object distinction, the theory reveals that the essential contradiction in production is between the reproduction time of natural energy and the time or speed of exchange for profit. Marx himself saw this basic contradiction in terms of labor power and technology, where labor power alone adds value, but where value will necessarily be diminished as more is spent on technology. Technology adds no value in itself, but more has to be spent on it in order for capital to produce in the fastest time possible, and thus compete. Understanding of this contradiction has been limited due to the centrality of the subject/object distinction in Marx’s thought. Because of that centrality, he singled out labor for special treatment. I will briefly sketch his analysis before discussing how it can be reworked without the subject/object distinction, as Marx understood it.
I mentioned that nature and technology alike are seen by Marx as “the object.” Together they constitute the means of production, which Marx defines as the “objective factors,” while he defines the “subjective factor” as labor power (Marx 1954, 179). For Marx himself, surplus value, or profit, is made possible because of the difference between what the subjective and objective factors add in production. The subjective factor, or the subject, labor power, adds value while the objective factor, or the object, nature and technology, does not. This is because the subject, labor power, is variable in its capacity for adding value, while the object is constant. Marx formalizes the difference between them by terming the subjective factor “variable capital” and the objective factors “constant capital.” Variable capital is variable because it adds more than it costs in the production process. It does this because it adds more, within a given time in production, than the time it takes to reproduce labor power overall. Marx dwells at length on labor power’s ability to add more than it costs. But it comes down to this: labor power is living energy. Labor power, as Marx said quite precisely, is energy transferred to “a human organism by means of nourishing matter” (Marx 1954, 207 n1). Its livingness distinguishes it from constant capital (nature and technology), which is ostensibly dead. Its value accordingly is precisely constant. Being ostensibly “dead,” nature and technology can give no more than they cost.
Despite all this, the profit maker will spend more on constant than on variable capital. This is so for the following reason. In order to compete, to get more products onto the market in the shortest possible time, greater amounts have to be spent on constant capital and less on variable capital. More will have to be spent on constant capital as improved technologies make for faster production: in other words, to stay in the race, profit makers have to produce and distribute commodities in the fastest possible time. Thus they have to spend more on constant capital, on technologies and the natural resources that feed them. At the same time, they spend less on variable capital, because the more sophisticated the technology (as a rule, and there are, of course, exceptions) the less labor intensive the industry. In short, while technological expenditure enables profit makers to compete more effectively in the short term, it leads, according to Marx, to a “tendency of the rate of profit to fall” in the long term (Marx 1967). In assuming that there is such a tendency, Marx assumed that profit depends on the difference a living subject makes to a dead object.
Both theoretically and politically, this subject/object distinction is the wrong place to begin. In fact, and obviously enough now, it is not only labor or human subjects that live and add energy; it is also nature, although it was easy enough to forget this, to objectify nature, when it was abundantly there to be taken for granted, as it was at Marx’s time of writing. But if nature or certain natural forces are shown to have an energetic property in common with labor power, and I will try to show this, Marx’s “essential contradiction,” between time and technology, has more explanatory power. Nature is the source of all value, and ultimately of all energy, but the inherent dynamic of capital is to diminish this value and this energy in favor of time and technology. Not only this, but from a standpoint in which time and speed become central, a structural connection among gender, race, and class becomes evident.
For Marx himself, energy can only be added by “living labor” (Marx 1973, 362); all other constituents of production are supposedly lifeless. As far as the behavior of capital is concerned, their livingness is irrelevant. But this does not mean that it is irrelevant to the inner workings of production, or to a value theory that is not based on the subject/object distinction. It is important to remember that Marx, in discovering what he thought was the source of capitalist profit, also showed how capital loses consciousness of that source (Marx 1954, 76 ff.); as an oblique result, more is spent on constant capital, less on the variable capital that adds value. This source was so obscured that part of it remained hidden even from Marx.
As labor power is precisely energy, even “tension,” (Marx 1954, 583), meaning an energetic force, it has everything in common with other natural forces, capable of realizing energy as humans can. These sources are also produced and replenished by the transfer of “nourishing matter.” Labor power even has a potential affinity with natural substances that are inanimate as well as animate, insofar as these can be made into sources of energy.
Once labor power is treated as a source of energy, one form of all natural sources of energy, and once the opposition between subjective and objective factors is replaced by one between living nature and the commodified dead, then value theory’s logic can be extended. We can keep the logic that led Marx to break capital down into two components: constant and variable capital. We can even say that variable capital is the source of surplus value, while constant capital is not. We can deduce, too, that the greater the outlay on constant as opposed to variable capital in production, the less the surplus value extracted. We can even deduce, with Marx, that the imperative to produce more in the shortest possible time will lead to a greater outlay on constant capital.
The difference from Marx lies in this: I assume that all natural sources of energy entering production should be treated as variable capital and sources of surplus value. I assume, too, that to an extent, these sources, including labor power, can stand in for or be replaced by one another. If another natural substance can supply what labor supplies, that natural substance also counts as variable capital. Moreover, because substances can stand in for one another as variable capital, there is no real check on the speed with which variable capital can be used up. The only check is whether a particular form of variable capital, a particular natural substance can be replaced. If it cannot, its reproduction has to be guaranteed, that is to say, taken into account, by capital.
Does this mean that any natural force or source of energy will do the same profit-making job that labor power does? Only under certain circumstances, and with many qualifications. How extensively one energy source will be replaced by another depends on what I will term the law of substitution. It is necessary to explain this law before the speeding up of production time, and its disjointedness with natural time, can become apparent.
According to the law of substitution, capital will, all other things being equal, take the cheapest form of energy adequate to sustaining production of a particular commodity at the prevailing level of competition. Many of these energy forms will be refined; they will be—from one to many times—removed from their natural state. But this does not mean that they cease to be valuable. They only cease to be this when their capacity for adding energy is exhausted. Up to this point, their value may be increased as other forms of energy (including labor power) are mixed into them, although this mixing can also diminish energy sources overall, especially when their reproduction time is discounted. We will see that the reproduction time of other natural substances aside from labor power will be discounted whenever possible; labor power is the only source of energy whose reproduction time capital has to pay for—as a rule.
But our immediate concern is with qualifying “natural sources and forces.” Some substances are more ready forms of energy and add more energy than others. In everyday thinking, the extent of the energy they have or add is precisely what makes them valuable. And this cuts both ways. If labor power can stand in for another energy source more cheaply and more effectively, it will be the source chosen. Nonetheless, the points remain that: (i) at the level of substance, the material energetic level, the common denominator is energy, not labor power; and (ii) all energy sources, including labor power, vary in what they cost compared to what they add. At the same time, the critical distinction Marx drew between labor and labor power is amplified massively in the case of other natural sources and forces. Marx’s critical point was that labor added more in production than the reproduction cost of the commodity labor power, although capital did not cheat: it paid for labor power at its value. Other natural forces and sources also add more than their reproduction costs, but capital (and for that matter state socialism) does cheat in relation to other natural forces; it does not pay for them at their value. The law of substitution can offset trends toward the immiseration of the working class, to the extent that other energy sources can stand in effectively for labor. I say “to the extent” because while the immiseration of the working class did not occur in the capitalist heartlands in the manner Marx predicted, it has occurred in the global context.
There have been arguments among Marxists as to whether the nonoccurrence (yet) of the immiseration of the working class in the capitalist heartlands can be explained by imperialism. There is a general consensus (cf. Renner 1978) that the rise of the new and vast middle class in the advanced West requires more explanation than that provided by the labor theory of value as it stands. However, by this reworking of value theory, the relative benefits of the working and middle classes could be explained by the exploitation of nature.
The effects of the law of substitution here are similar to those wrought by imperialism, and to the creation of a labor aristocracy (Hobsbawm 1964). When Lenin, following Marx and Engels, argued that a labor aristocracy, a richer segment of the working class, could be created through the exploitation of other sections of that class, nationally and internationally, they were drawing attention to how the rate of surplus value extraction of one portion of the labor market could be less in one place if it were higher elsewhere. We can now see how a similar “benefit” to portions of the labor market can be effected through increasing the rate of surplus value extraction of other natural entities and things. If coal or wood or oil provide energy that labor power would otherwise provide, if they add value in the same way, and if they can be exploited more ruthlessly, then labor power can “benefit.” Labor power can be better off when wood, coal, and so forth receive less than they need to reproduce, in that cheaper substitutes increase GNP. As a rule, the reproduction time of natural substances is not factored into capital’s costs; as I said, frequently this reproduction time is not paid for at all, let alone paid for at its value. However, this means, as we shall see, that all aspects of the production process, including the reproduction of labor power, have to be speeded up. And labor power, whose reproduction time has to be taken into account, unlike that of many other natural forces, cannot on the face of it be speeded up. It is exactly here that we will locate the structural intersection of race, class, and gender.
The question of the reproduction of natural sources returns us to time. Capital does not pay for the reproduction time of natural substances in order to make a profit. It is at this point that a value theory without the subject/object distinction reveals that capital’s basic contradiction is between the time of natural reproduction and technology. By this theory, for a particular capital to stay in the race, it has to speed up the materialization of energy, the value added by natural substances in production, and so speed up the rate of surplus value extraction. While this speeding-up diminishes overall use value in the long term, it is compelling in the short term. It leads to speedier profit via speedier production. But this speedier production is out of joint with the time of natural production.
Consider here Marx’s concept of “socially necessary labor time.” This is based on the average amount of time required to produce a given object at a given level of technology. Now the average amount of time a tomato plant takes to produce a tomato can in fact be calculated with some precision. The real point is that the plant’s technology appears or appeared to be fixed. One of the main historical limitations affecting the author of Capital was the assumption that the reproductive time of natural substances cannot be speeded up; that is, the tomato plant’s inner workings cannot be regulated or controlled. It is historically plain that this is not so, and that capital has indeed found social ways of speeding up various forms of natural reproduction.
The speeding up of the natural products takes place by regulating their conditions of production. This cannot be done with human labor power (yet), which is why labor power becomes the odd element in this reworking of value theory. But as capitalism cuts back the supply of natural substances, it not only diminishes the energy, or “nourishing matter” labor power relies upon, it also diminishes the conditions for other natural sources of energy to regenerate as well. Natural reproduction time is seriously out of joint. How this is played out in total terms should be reflected in the crisis of capital, in its “long waves” and “laws of motion.” In sum, what Marx saw clearly and before all was the inherent contradiction in capital as a mode of production. He saw it in terms of labor and technology, or variable and constant capital, as he defined it, where the former, to keep pace, had to expand at the expense of the energy input of labor. The contradiction is recapitulated in this account, although its terms of reference have changed. Or rather, its terms of reference have been stripped of their phenomenal forms, so that the contradiction emerges as what it is: essentially one between the substantial energy of nature—the source of value—and the artificial speed of production.
Two forms of time are at issue: the generational time of natural reproduction; and speed, the artificial time of short-term profit. It is clear that generational time suffers because capital tends inevitably to speed up the production of all commodities, including naturally formed or agricultural ones. While there are countervailing tendencies in agriculture, and in the very existence of labor power, and in scarce or apparently irreplaceable sources, the speed imperative will override them wherever possible.
A Structural Connection Among Race, Gender, and Class
The disjunction of time and space, as analyzed in Part 1 of this chapter is one key to how the exploitation of race, gender, class, and nature are connected. One caveat before continuing: The connections among race, gender, class, and nature discussed here are made solely at the economic level. Specifically, the connection between race and the other forms of exploitation analyzed below is limited to neocolonial situations and the imperative to migrate in search of work. The people in these situations are usually racially or ethnically stigmatized, although which groups are stigmatized in this way varies cross-culturally and historically, a fact which shows that the intensity of racism is seriously affected by economic factors. At the same time, one cannot reduce racism to the economic level, if for no other reason than that yesterday’s economically inflected racism drags into the stereotypes of tomorrow. Nor can the analysis of gendered exploitation be reduced to the economic level. But the significance of making the economic connections remains: it provides grounds for resistance and critique of the forces in power that extend beyond a neoliberal sympathy.
The focus on the implications of this revised value theory for sexual and neocolonial exploitation is sharpened by attending to the state in the first instance. We need to talk about the state first because the state joins with capital in regulating time and space. The momentum of capital alone is insufficient to account for the power of agency, the “invisible hand,” in the centralizing process of modernity. Centralization is inextricably tied to the state, which provides the “general conditions of production.” The more the emphasis shifts to portability and acquisition, and the more by implication it shifts to expansion, the more the issues of territorial control and transportation, one of those vague “conditions of production” become salient.
To extend centralization, and territorial domination, in which more territories are answerable and/or geared to the same center, one needs means of transportation in the first instance, and for domination, means for war. Spatial control and spatial expansion are the conditions of the invisible hand extending its grasp; in a sense they also are the state.
The state is part of the infrastructure of distribution, the outer sphere of consumption and exchange, all of which are not peripheral but central in this revised value theory. Not only does the state lay the grounds for and regulate key variables in the speed of acquisition (through transportation, energy services, and other forms of extension), but together with capital it also regulates the law of substitution outlined in Part 1 of this chapter. For example, whether oil can substitute for labor power in the production of certain commodities will depend on means of transportation, treaties governing import, and so on.
While the costs of establishing centralized state control may not be of particular significance to use value overall in themselves, they are nonetheless paid for out of that use value, and consume it in the same way that capital does. This homology is, or was, striking in the recent stage of capital’s development—state-monopoly capitalism, so-called because the mutually supporting interests of both parties seemed so great as to beggar separate description. But however unwillingly it did so, the state provided the spatio-temporal conditions of production from the beginning.1
As we will see in a moment, however, while all states feed on time to some extent, they vary in the efficiency and extent to which they do so, and in the constraints that their various cultures and histories impose upon them. This variation is reflected in the uneven demise of state power, and of states, for that matter. The demise suggests that while the nation-state was one form in which the “conditions of production” were laid down, it may not be the only form that will sustain them.
Crucial here is the idea that standards of efficiency in denying time are set globally. It was a global economic pressure in the 1980s that made nations “curtail state spending and interventions. Whatever the differences in partisan outcomes, all governments have been pressed in the same direction.”2 But, while this economic direction may be a global trend, not all states are affected equally. While any form of state will embody the spatial dynamic to the extent that it has an apparatus of centralized control, some states embody it in a purer form than others. Indeed, some states are constrained by other imperatives that make them manifestly inefficient when it comes to speeding up the sacrifice of time. Specific genealogies and specific traditions intersect with the totalizing spatial process. The collapse of Eastern Europe can be explained by the conflict between a form of state, and the dynamic whereby space replaces time, and the related desire for instant gratification.
Critically, we have to bear in mind the different roles various states play in providing and regulating general conditions where space replaces time. Marx’s analysis of how some states aid accumulation and expansion better than others (Marx 1954, 751) is appropriate here as an exemplar of how the modem state can be evaluated, albeit by different criteria. Some states are far better suited than others to the law of speed, and where the state fails to adjust its form to this law, or attempts to countermand it, there will be gigantic temporal hiccups. The form of centralized state that naturally works in harmony with the process of acquisition, and thence distribution, is a state with minimal checks on the abolition of the linear time of reproduction in relation to labor power, and in relation to the environment.
This last point returns us to the reasons for blockages in the Eastern bloc. State communism, insofar as it did attempt some minimal redistribution of wealth to labor power (which means to its reproduction cost), imposed a temporal constraint on a system designed to eliminate it; for any system of centralized consumption must work to increasing speed in relation to space rather than time, and this is a concomitant not only of competitive acquisition but of centralization. If a state has to introduce some guaranteed measure of distributive justice, this inevitably leads to hiccups if not major obstructions: distributive justice, as we shall see in a moment, is a temporal constraint that can be offset where labor power is imported, but it remains a temporal constraint when it is honored. It sits ill where the elimination of time, and instant gratification, is the end-goal of the game. It sits ill in a centralized capitalist mode of production, the system where queues could signal the end of an era.
The question of distributive justice and temporal constraints will be plainer after we have discussed reproduction, which bears on women and neocolonialism. The key is the intersection of space and time. More narrowly, it is in how this intersection, itself established by speed, brings in the sphere of reproduction, especially of labor power. For while my argument displaces labor power from the absolute center of value theory in terms of production, it also shifts the emphasis to labor power’s reproduction, as it shifts it to that of nature overall. To a limited extent, this shift was foreshadowed in debates about women’s reproductive labor, which drew attention to the importance of this sphere’s indirect contribution to surplus value. But this debate foundered because it kept within the classical categories.3 The shift to reproduction in this argument is structural. Reproduction of nature overall becomes the hidden ground of value and exploitation; capital drastically enhances its profit because it does not pay for reproduction at its temporal value, unless it has no option under the law of substitution.
From the perspective outlined above, the reproduction of labor is the perpetually odd element out in production. Labor power is the odd element because the socially necessary labor time required to reproduce it is fixed in part by nature. It is fixed insofar as socially necessary labor time includes the reproduction of children and thus the next generation of labor power. While the time necessary for the reproduction of nature, even of animals, can be short-circuited, that of labor power cannot on the face of it be speeded up. Which means such reproduction is potentially out of step with capital’s consumption-for-production, in which all things have to move faster and faster.
Now, as the imperative to speed up other living entities and substances is so evident—in everything from soil poisoned with fertility drugs to wingless chickens and legless cows, animals tailormade to producing flesh at the expense of their own ability to reproduce—human labor power’s apparent exemption from the same speedy imperative becomes significant. But, always in the event that no other natural substance can provide what labor power provides (the law of substitution), the apparently impossible end of speeding up the generational reproduction of labor power can be accomplished in various ways. It can be accomplished by keeping the cost of that reproduction down in relation to the other elements entering production. However, if this means is ineffective in a given situation, where the labor required exceeds the short-term supply, then one is left with the apparently impossible alternative of speeding up the generational reproduction of labor power so that it keeps pace with the other elements entering into production.
In fact, speeding up the reproduction of labor power is not impossible, and this is plain once we turn to the alternative means by which human labor power can be reproduced. In referring to “alternative means” of reproducing labor power, I am not invoking the panoply of science fiction and high-tech, of cyborgs and genetic engineering, although the proliferation of fantasies concerning the former and investment in the latter is not irrelevant. In part, it is perhaps a symptomatic recognition of an underlying quest to find a fast-moving replacement for humans, capable of two of their most distinctive functions: portability and the capacity to take direction. For that matter, all the carry-on over artificial intelligence has more obvious purpose and point, if capital seeks a tame direction-taker. And of course, such docile will-less things already exist, in the form of computers, which altogether lack the “imaginative capacity for design” in executing commands. But the computerized component in constant capital expenditure, and the ambition it encapsulates, is not the immediate question. The alternative means of reproducing labor power I have in mind at the moment is what I will term the lateral reproduction of labor power, meaning the migrations of workers.
What I want to propose here is that the lateral reproduction of labor power will increase when the linear reproduction falls behind the imperative to speed up in other ways, and/or when linear reproduction becomes too costly. At the same time, I want to propose that such increases work in tandem with an imperative to keep the cost of the generational reproduction of labor power down, in lieu of the ability to speed it up. These propositions could be tested readily enough, keeping the law of substitution in mind. And insofar as they encapsulate the law of substitution, it should follow that where the lateral reproduction of labor power is prohibited for some reason, the generational cost of reproducing labor power will be forced down.
Clearly, these processes involve international labor, flows as well as national labor supplies and national legislation affecting the cost of reproducing the next generation. All these are regulated by the state. And it should follow that a good welfare state will either be “inefficient” or have ready access to guest workers; a state without this access will “speed up” generational reproduction by keeping its cost down. The condition of an efficient and just welfare state is either that it is self-contained enough to keep to economies of scale, and/or that its natural resources make it rich provided they can be exploited fast enough (but substantially rich in the long run anyway). We can note here that the former Soviet Union was restricted when it came to importing labor power. The production of surplus value in a country that disregards a welfare state is enhanced anyway, of course, but enhanced either by speed or natural substance and energy: the United States is amazingly rich in natural substance, while Japan is leading the field of speed (which may bring the United States, rich through substance, into more economic conflict with Japan, rich through speed).
To return to reproduction as such, we are left with the question as to why people have children at all in these speedy times. In feudal and petty-bourgeois modes of production, the interests of social reproduction and the interests of parents coincide. In the capitalist mode of production (CMP), they do not coincide automatically, which means that the overall interests of social reproduction are not guaranteed; they are not in the necessary self-interest of either sex. The striking facts of the increase in single mothers and decline in fathered families may evince this conflict with self-interest for men (cf. Elliot 1991). But we are unable to explain women’s persistence in having children in terms of self-interest, especially as the middleman is progressively cut out. We can only explain this, and explain the behavior of men who want children by (at least in part) their resistance to the economic logic of self-interest, and their persisting sense of generational time. There are arguments that adduce that an economic self-interest factor is working for women who have children and receive a state benefit when other economic options are few or virtually nonexistent. But the sheer poverty of this condition makes such self-interest unlikely; it is more probable that the state’s forcing down of the costs of linear reproduction relies on and exploits women’s sense of generational time.
What is clear is that the interests of social reproduction overall are best served by keeping the costs of the linear and lateral reproduction of the labor force to a minimum. This means that two groups are likely to be impoverished: single women and/or women who are positioned low on the class hierarchy; and the vastly heterogeneous peoples from whom a lateral supply of labor power can be drawn. If there is a structural connection among gender, race, and the residual category of class, I suggest that this is it. In other words, the structural connection lies in their exploitation for social reproduction, for keeping the cost of labor power down.
The heterogeneous peoples who supply the migrating labor force are far more likely to be those who are racially and ethnically stigmatized. Balibar and Wallerstein sum up:
Racism operationally has taken the form of what might be called the “ethnicization” of the work force…. But while the pattern of ethnicization has been constant, the details have varied from place to place and time to time, according to what part of the human genetic and social pools were located in a particular time and place and what the hierarchical needs of the economy were at that time and place. This kind of system—racism constant in form and in venom … allows one to expand or contract the numbers available in any particular space-time zone for the lowest paid, least rewarding economic roles. (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991, 33–34)
There is more incentive to migrate where there is unemployment or bare subsistence employment in the home country, and/or where there is overpopulation relative to job supply. The international interests of reproduction by the nations of advanced capital would seem to be well-served by overpopulation in the neocolonialist countries, both in terms of a greater willingness on the part of the latter’s populations to migrate, and in terms of greater competition for jobs within those countries. Significantly, it is usually men who migrate or move in search of work, while women with children remain fixed in place. This repeats a pattern evident in capital’s seventeenth-century genesis, and in the nonmetropolitan countries where capital’s advent is relatively recent. As discussed, this pattern goes hand in hand with a major alteration in scale. It is not only the division between town and country that is affected here; it is also the household, as the site of production. Household production, or petty commodity production, as Marx and Engels termed it, accorded women a very different and generally better economic place. Their productive labor was not geographically divorced from their situation as mothers. The significance of household production for women has been relatively neglected in Marxist debates about whether petty commodity production is a precapitalist form or an ongoing form of capitalism. The idea that it may be a form opposed to it was proposed by Clarke (1919), but her remarkable thesis was not developed, although Shiva (1988) has argued a similar case.
But the immediate concern lies elsewhere. Apart from indicating that the production of migrating men and single mothers is endemic to and a condition of capitalization, this pattern also reinforces the notion that these two groups have a great deal in common. They have in common their exploitation for social reproduction, even though their short-term interests are opposed. Or to say the same thing differently, they stand opposed in that one group advances lateral reproduction, the other linear reproduction. The tragedy is that the source of this opposition is not recognized by many who suffer under it, just as their common cause with exploited nature is also overlooked.
Notes
The environmental implications of the argument in this chapter are developed in Brennan (1996).
1. The periodization of capital is contentious, when it comes to the third stage. Mandel (1975) ties the idea of state monopoly capitalism to Comintern strategy and prefers to see the present era as an accentuation of that of monopoly capital. Mandel insists that “The era of late capitalism is not a new epoch of capitalist development. It is merely a further development of the imperialist, monopoly-capitalist epoch. By implication, the characteristics of the imperialist epoch enumerated by Lenin thus remain fully valid for late capitalism” (1975, 10). See also Baran and Sweezy (1966) and Poulantzas (1975). In one respect, the periodization of the various “stages of capitalism” in Marxist theory is incomplete because it does not recognize that the establishment of the modem state is integral to the historical process whereby space takes the place of time. The existing periodization moves from competitive capitalism (first stage) to monopoly capitalism (second stage) to state monopoly capitalism, otherwise known as late capitalism (third stage). The third stage reveals the spatial imperative in all its munching glory: its speedy circulation and its ever expanding reach cut off the roots of reproductive time. But this imperative is greeted as if it were a novelty introduced by capital alone.
2. Even more strongly: “governments no longer possess the autonomy to pursue independent macroeconomic strategies effectively, even if they were to seek to do so” (Garrett and Lange 1991, 543). Moreover, it is argued that today state power should not be measured in terms of military force but economic capability (Rosecrance 1986; Nye 1989; Jervis 1991) and, at the same time, that government’s domain of economic efficacy is now shared with many international organizations (e.g., the IMF) (Cox 1987; Shaw 1991; Hall, Held and McGrew 1992).
3. See, for example, Dalla Costa (1973), Delphy (1977), Gardiner (1975), and Harrison (1973) for arguments to the effect that women’s household labor contributed to surplus value—as labor that was not paid for by capital but that nonetheless contributed to the worker’s capacity to realize surplus value. By contrast, Humphries (1977) and Brennan (1977) argued that the wife’s household labor contributed to the workers’ side in class struggle, because it was in capital’s interest not to pay for two people (plus children) with one wage and that capital would seek where possible to force both wife and husband into the labor market.