Made in Manchester

In this, Marx was fortunate to find a huge archive of investigative materials assembled by the British state-appointed factory inspectors, public health officials and parliamentary inquiries on everything from child labor to banking practices. He fulsomely acknowledged the importance of these materials for his own interpretations and complained at the “wretched state” of information from elsewhere:

We should be appalled at or own circumstances if, as in England, our government and parliaments periodically appointed commissions of inquiry into economic conditions; if these commissions were armed with the same plenary powers to get at the truth; if it were possible to find for this purpose as competent, as free of partisanship and respect of persons, as are England’s factory inspectors, her medical reporters on public health, her commissioners of inquiry into the exploitation of women and children, into conditions of housing and nourishment, and so on.

The English factory inspectors and health officials like Leonard Horner, Mr Scriven, and Dr Greenshaw (to name a few) were key figures. Imagine how bereft and unsatisfying the first volume of Capital would be without the accounts provided by these state officials.

Marx also collected a vast trove of contemporary press reports, pamphlets, and relevant books on all aspects of political economy (such as those of Andrew Ure and Charles Babbage on machine technology). Finally, his friend and patron Friedrich Engels not only inspired him through his early and remarkable work The Condition of the English Working Class in 1844 but also supplied continuous commentary on labor and life in Manchester, as recorded through Engels’s firsthand experience helping to manage his family firm in the city.

To top it all, Engels also got to see Manchester through the eyes of his Irish working-class companion and lover, Mary Burns. It was through her that Engels was introduced to the fetid squalor of the living quarters of the proletarian Irish immigrants of the city. The historical materialist foundation that Marx always craved in his theoretical work came from the likes of Horner, Burns, and Engels. It is this that gives such a powerful aura of accuracy and authenticity to Marx’s writings. And it is this that then partly explains how and why Marx’s theorizations from that time echo down to us so convincingly, even though we are living in such different times. Yet this also gives substance to the view that Marx’s theoretical formulations may be tainted by the particularities of the Manchester case or more broadly by Anglocentric or Eurocentric perspectives.

Capital Goes Global

But capital as an economic system was itself Eurocentric in origin and continued to be so throughout his lifetime. It began in its industrial form in Britain and spread worldwide but, as it did so, it had to adapt to different conditions and take on different forms. From time to time, it had to confront proto-capitalistic social formations and hybrid forms elsewhere. Marx also had to deal with regions of arrested development, regional economies where seemingly insurmountable barriers to full-fledged capitalist development prevailed (for example, the American South until very recently or the backward region of the Italian South that Antonio Gramsci confronted).

Marx universalizes the qualities and character of the capitalist mode of production by way of the particularities of mid-nineteenth century Britain in general and Manchester industrialism in particular. How to theorize its nature was the challenge that, before Marx, troubled both Adam Smith and David Ricardo. How to distill a few universal concepts and relations from the myriad and voluminous record of social practices of, for example, market exchange and capitalist production everywhere and how to ensure that whatever conceptual apparatus is derived is “adequate to” (as Marx would put it) valid interpretations of the “laws of motion” of capital in general. To this day, it is an open question whether the laws of motion of capital that Marx laid out apply with equal force in China, Bangladesh, the European Union, and the United States.

Marx’s attempt to find an answer to that sort of question – a question that confronts all attempts to theorize capital – has first to deal with an intense hostility to all things Marxist, particularly in the Anglo-American tradition. As Walter Rodney wittily observes: within that tradition, “one knows that [Marxism] is absurd without reading it and one doesn’t have to read it because one knows it is absurd.”

Even if Marx’s presentations may have been accurate and relevant for the place and time of their origin, their validity for Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong as well as for movements as diverse as Amílcar Cabral’s revolutionary movement in Guinea-Bissau or Thomas Sankara’s revolutionary government in Burkina Faso or Rodney’s revolutionary work in Guyana needs demonstration. Rodney has, perhaps, the most succinct answer. What matters is not so much Marx’s substantive findings, which are always tainted by the circumstances of their place and time, but his method of investigation and enquiry that led him to those substantive findings.

Marxism “starts from a perspective of man’s relationship to the material world . . . and when it arose historically, consciously dissociated itself from and pitted itself against all other modes of perception which started with ideas, with concepts and with words.” Marxism “rooted itself in the material conditions, and the social relations in society.” This, says Rodney, is the starting point: “a methodology that begins an analysis of any society, of any situation, by seeking the relations that arise in production between men.” There are a whole variety of things that flow from that: “Man’s consciousness is formed in the intervention in nature, nature itself is humanized through its interaction with man’s labor, and man’s labor produces a constant stream of technology, that in turn creates other social relations.” This is the spirit of Marx’s historical materialism and the Communist Manifesto at work.

To the degree that we all now have our being within a material world dominated by capital and the geopolitics of capital’s imperialism, so the method of inquiry must be directed toward understanding “the motor within that system” in order to expose and overthrow “the types of exploitation which are to be found within the capitalist mode of production.” The resultant theory is thereby revolutionary. As Cabral put it: there may be revolutions that have had a revolutionary theory that failed, but “nobody has yet successfully practiced revolution without a revolutionary theory.” While the material conditions of production and social relations in Guinea-Bissau may have been the starting point, the culmination, in Cabral’s view, entails mobilizing the power of revolutionary theory everywhere.

In his single-minded concentration on Manchester industrialism, Marx presumes that the merchants, the bankers, and the landed interest took up the subservient role of serving the needs of an all-powerful industrial capital. In the first two volumes of Capital, Marx largely ignores these other factions of capital. In the first volume, for example, he explicitly presumes that all commodities trade at their value (the market functions perfectly), that “capital passes through its process of circulation in the normal way,” and that the fragmentation of surplus value into rent, interest, and profit on merchant capital in no way affects accumulation. In the Grundrisse, Marx boldly asserts that “the laws of capital are completely realized only within unlimited competition and industrial production.” This rules out any problems that might derive from state-imposed restrictions on competition, monopolization, or the excessive centralization of capital.

There is nothing wrong with abstracting in this way, but major modifications to the theory might be needed in the event of restrictions on competition and shifts in the balance of power between the different factions of capital. It is very unlikely, for example, that the laws of motion of industrial capital are the same as the laws of motion of merchant, banking, or landed capital. In recent times, for example, industrial capital has increasingly been disciplined by the monopsony power of merchant capitalists like Walmart, Ikea, and the major clothing and electronics companies (like Apple). Whole sectors of the economy (such as contract farming) exist in which the direct producers dance to the tune of the merchants or other intermediaries. Likewise, the power of banking and finance, of debt and credit, and of land and property capital has, at certain times and in certain places, been decisive in shaping capital accumulation and its crises. The revisions such transformations mandate in Marx’s theory of capital will be examined later.

Marx’s focus on Manchester industrialism entailed confronting the particularities of the labor processes in the cotton mills and the nature of the labor market it defined. The power loom weavers were essentially machine minders. The transfer of skills from the laborer into the machine (a transfer that Marx makes much of in Capital and the Grundrisse) entailed a de-skilling of much of the labor force. Unskilled Irish labor and women could easily substitute for what had traditionally been semi-skilled male artisans who worked handlooms, although through the “putting out” system in which merchants provided the raw materials and gathered back the finished product.

The depressing effect on wages and living conditions through the employment of Irish laborers posed a problem for Marx. Initially scathing in his criticism of the Irish for their role in redefining the value of labor power downward, he later came to recognize that the answer lay in raising the Irish labor force up as a necessary first step in the organization of class struggle. For the millowners, division within the working class (based on gender, ethnicity, national identity, and religion) was more than welcome. It helped them rule unopposed by pitting one faction of labor against another. Capital presumed the domination of labor by capital. Capital’s power would be consolidated to the degree that it could mobilize other structures of domination (such as race and gender) in support of its domination over labor.

It could be argued that Marx’s focus on the particularities of Manchester’s industrial capitalism biased his vision and that his preoccupation with the doctrines of the free market, competition, and free trade promoted by the industrialists of the so-called Manchester School of Richard Cobden and John Bright somewhat warped his vision. But the factory inspectors, the public health officials, and the parliamentary reports did not confine their observations to Manchester. They went all over the country. And Marx was well aware of the distinctive influence of the Manchester industrial faction in the realm of ideology and politics as well as in their enormous (for that time) centralization of economic wealth and power.

The results were, in a sense, predictable: “One fine morning, in the year 1836, Nassau W. Senior . . . a man famed for his economic science and his beautiful style, was summoned from Oxford to Manchester, to learn in the latter place the political economy he taught in the former.” What Senior learned was that the capitalist’s profit was totally encompassed by the last hour of work in a twelve-hour day and that any shortening of that day to, say, ten hours would spell ruination for the capitalist system because the hours of profit making would disappear.

This “so-called ‘analysis’” prompted a fierce rebuttal, as much directed to parliament as to Senior, by none other than Horner, who worked with the factory inspectors from 1833 to 1857 and “whose services to the English working class will never be forgotten,” as Marx noted. And, of course, the Ten Hours Act was finally passed. The shortening of the length of the working day was, Marx opined, one small but critical step toward a socialist future. It opened a pathway to the realm of freedom — understood as free time — for the working classes.

For the Manchester industrialists of that time, a different kind of freedom — “His Holiness Free Trade,” as Marx called it — was the only kind of freedom that mattered. The economics of free trade were lauded to the skies by the Manchester School and incorporated into state policies across the country and with respect to the industries that at that time dominated in world capitalism. Free trade, it turns out, is always the mantra of the leading capitalist industries and powers. The elaboration and instantiation of the doctrine in the form of the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements of the late 1990s at the behest of the major global corporations and the United States as the hegemonic power of the moment is the obvious case in point.

In June 1849, Marx moved to London, where he stayed for the rest of his life. While not a participant in British politics, he followed British political life closely by way of press reports and parliamentary debates. For a while, he earned some much-needed income as London correspondent of the New-York Daily Tribune. During the 1850s, he tried to make sense of British imperial politics for New York readers covering, among other things, the barbarity of the repression of the Indian Sepoy Rebellion of 1857–8, the equal barbarity of the second Chinese opium war of 1858, and the dissolution of the East India Company in favor of

British direct imperial rule over India. These were, incidentally, the years when Marx was intensely engaged in writing the Grundrisse. The connection back to Manchester free-trade politics was obvious.

As he noted in 1853:

The ruling classes of Great Britain have had, till now, but an accidental, transitory and exceptional interest in the progress of India. The aristocracy wanted to conquer it, the moneyocracy to plunder it and the millocracy to undersell it. But now the tables are turned. The millocracy have discovered that the transformation of India into a reproductive country has become of vital importance to them.

The Indian market had, for some time, been a major outlet for the huge increase in output of the Lancashire cotton industry. Imperial power had assured the destruction of a long-standing indigenous handloom cotton industry in favor of becoming “inundated with English twists and cotton stuffs.” “The necessity for opening new markets or extending the old ones” was as pressing in India as it was in China and failure to do either signaled “an approaching industrial crisis” due to “diminished demand for the produce of Manchester and Glasgow.”

The millowners’ answer was to rationalize the space-economy of India by building railroads. Prior to this, the Indians could not use machinery “to work up their cotton, which is sent by ox-carts, sometimes over eight hundred miles over wet lands, to be shipped to the Ganges, thence round the Cape of Good Hope to England, to be fabricated and then returned to the natives at whatever percent above ninety such an operation costs.” The millocracy wanted, needed, and eventually got a railroad system that gave access to cheap raw materials and spatially integrated markets across the Indian subcontinent. Marx records the astonishing increase in British trade in cotton goods to India from £2.5 million to £6.1 million between 1856 and 1859.

It is important to recognize how global this system already was. The Manchester system rested on the slave labor of the cotton plantations in the United States and the markets for the commodities produced were to be found primarily in India, where caste distinctions prevailed. The whole system was managed by British imperial administration in which the Colonial Office in London was prepared to deploy violence and outright repression of whole populations to keep much of the world open for trade.

While the British bourgeoisie in general, and the millocracy in particular, were motivated by the vilest of interests, and promoted their endeavors with the most blatant hypocrisies, the building of the railroads would, Marx hopefully supposed, ultimately mean the building of an industrial system in India which would “dissolve the hereditary divisions of labour, upon which rest the Indian castes, those decisive impediments to Indian progress and Indian power.” The account of globalization in the Communist Manifesto has a contemporaneous ring:

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old- established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe.

In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requir- ing for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impos- sible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The stirring up of revolutionary sentiments by these processes might, Marx hypothesized, create opportunities for socialist revolution, though this would depend on how the now ruling classes “shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat.” The relations between Manchester industrialism, imperialism, and class struggle were evident, though partly masked by doctrines of free trade that, in Marx’s time, were supported by Manchester School economics and the works of the Ricardian socialist John Stuart Mill.

The Manchester materialist anchor in Marx’s thought produced a critical theory of the role of imperialism, although as experienced and understood from the center rather than from the periphery. But this imperialism was not only about the colonization of markets. It also rested on access to raw materials from the rest of the world and, in the case of raw cotton, Marx was acutely aware that, before the US Civil War, Manchester industrialism rested on the slave economies of the southern states in the United States.

The intersection of the slave mode of production with a booming capitalist mode of production produced unfathomable brutality at the same time as “labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.” The location of Manchester in the emergent global economy of nineteenth-century capitalism, intermediating, between slave labor in the cotton fields of the southern United States and the teeming populations of South Asia as the main market, was of remarkable interest. It pioneered the global production-consumption networks that dominate global capital today.

From Manchester to Birmingham

If, however, forty years after Senior had been summoned to Manchester he had been summoned to Birmingham, he would have encountered a rather different industrial structure in a different global situation with a different mode of labor exploitation (resting on rapidly rising labor productivity) producing for very different markets. Much of the production was relatively small scale (compared to the gargantuan cotton mills) and often highly skilled, even with some degree of primitive mechanization. The Matthew Bolton and James Watt steam engine was manufactured in Smethwick, for example, a suburb of Birmingham. The whole West Midlands region was dominated by a machine tools and metal-working sector that was very different from the cotton mills of Lancashire.

Above all, Birmingham was the center of gun-making and specialized in the production of military equipment, munitions, and artillery. The market for such products is very much tied to state expenditures and state contracts. But the status of the defense industries, and the role of what is conventionally referred to in the US as the military-industrial complex, is something far beyond what Marx could have envisioned.

In the midst of the “Reagan Recession” of 1982, for example, when unemployment topped 10 percent after Paul Volcker, then chair of the Federal Reserve, raised interest rates to 14 percent to confront an inflation rate of around 17 percent, Reagan ruthlessly cut back on all forms of social expenditure, reduced the top tax rate from around 70 percent to 35 percent, and confronted and broke PATCO, the air traffic controllers’ union.

He then launched a massive increase in defense funding to challenge the Soviet Union to a gargantuan arms race, which in the long run the Soviets disastrously lost. While the rest of the United States swooned in economic depression, the defense industries, scattered in a great arc from Virginia, through the Carolinas, across Texas to Los Angeles and up to Boeing in Seattle, boomed in an astonishing wave of what some called “military Keynesianism” since it was all deficit financed, leading Republicans like Dick Cheney later to opportunistically say in the George W. Bush years that “Reagan taught us that deficits do not matter.”

Precision engineering and making guns and steam engines require very different types of labor from minding a cotton loom. Almost a century later, the West Midlands was the industrial region in which the automobile industry took root, anchored in cities like Coventry, Aston, and even Oxford, with Birmingham as its commercial center, while totally avoiding Manchester and the cotton towns of Lancashire. In the United States, the Massachusetts industrial model of the textile towns like Lowell was likewise radically different from that of steel towns like Pittsburgh or, in later times, Detroit and the auto industry.

Marx might have ended up telling a rather different theoretical story in Capital had he focused on Birmingham industrialism — one where technological change had early on become, as he himself had predicted, a business in itself. Here was a form of industrial organization that drew heavily on agglomeration economies of the sort that Marx had recognized and commented on in Capital.

In the case of Birmingham, its industrialism depended on the emergence of a labor force with distinctive machine-tool skills and modest but livable wage levels in a cultural environment where the working class was primarily divided on the basis of mental versus manual capacities. A workman who had skills in metal forging in the making of steam engines was valuable, and employers had to prevent such workers being lured away by rival firms in Belgium, France, and indeed all over the continent. Conversely, Birmingham manufacturers were happy to employ skilled workers no matter what their background (Polish, Prussian, and so on). Diversity of ethnic or religious background did not matter (as it plainly did in Manchester) as long as the skills were there.

The image of the future that this experience proposed was rather different from that suggested by the Manchester experience of the 1840s. When the International Workingmen’s Association was founded in London in 1864, with Marx prominent in its formation, these were the kinds of skilled and literate workers who were involved from France, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, and other countries. The watchmakers of the Jura Mountain regions along the French-Swiss border in the 1860s were legendary in their political sophistication (the split between Marxist and anarchist currents had not yet occurred).

These were the organizers who collected and sent money in support of strikes and other agitations occurring throughout Europe in the late 1860s, culminating in the Paris Commune of 1871, in which international participation was important and welcomed. On the other hand, these were the relatively affluent workers who constituted an :aristocracy of labour” that Lenin later worried would not only rally to support imperialist and colonial ventures but also be all too ready to compromise with the strategies of corporate capital.

By 1860 or so, the industrialist Joseph Chamberlain (popularly known as “Radical Joe”) was exploring civic reforms in the social provision of gas and potable water, popular education and housing for the improvement of the “respectable” and adequately skilled working classes. He eventually went some way to implementing his reformist vision as mayor of the City of Birmingham. “Gas and water socialism” was at that time seen as a feasible answer to a whole range of ills backed by widespread local labor discontent.

Chamberlain took steps to realize such a possibility. With a measure of working-class support, “Radical Joe” later became a leading advocate for colonial expansion (the South African Boer War was his most notable contribution), in part impelled by the Conservative Party’s rejection of his reformism. He recognized that, if internal reform and growth of demand in the home market were blocked by bourgeois class power, the only option to expand the market was to seek out a “spatial fix” in the form of colonial ventures and cultivation of foreign markets. The notorious partitioning of Africa by the colonial powers at the Berlin Conference of 1885 was the culmination of a phase of interstate geopolitical rivalries over access to the raw materials and incipient markets of the whole African continent.

The image of the future defined by the Manchester industrialism of the 1840s and 1850s thus plainly did not apply to Birmingham in the 1870s. If Engels’s father had had an industrial establishment in the jewelry, gun, and machine-tool trades in Birmingham rather than a textile factory in Manchester, Capital might have read rather differently, as we have noted. But, against this seeming bias, Marx had the factory inspectors’ reports and the writings of an increasingly militant working class that focused on capital in general rather than on cotton factories in particular.

Where Is Capital’s Future Being Made Now?

Any casual observer might be forgiven for thinking that the Manchester image certainly still does apply to the conditions of life and labor in the Rana Plaza textile and apparel factory, twenty miles outside of Dhaka in Bangladesh, which collapsed on April 24, 2013, killing 1,129 workers, mostly women, and wounding many more. Producing textiles and name-brand apparel for Western markets, the factories were under constant pressure to cut costs for the benefit of Western consumers. Wages were close to starvation levels and factory discipline fierce.

The same could be said of the Foxconn production complex in Shenzhen, China, which produces most of Apple’s products and employed some 250,000 (some said 400,000) workers as of 2011 in one vast factory complex. A spate of worker suicides in that year persuaded the company to festoon the cramped company-provided living quarters of the migrant workers with mile on mile of netting to capture anyone who jumped. It is all too easy to take descriptions of labor and life conditions in the euphemistically dubbed “emerging markets” and insert them into Marx’s chapter “The Working Day” in Capital without noticing much difference. To the people living under such conditions, a dollop of “gas and water socialism” along with some internal social reformism of the “Radical Joe” sort would seem like a gift from heaven.

Capital produces a great deal of uneven geographical development, the qualities of which are often reflected in the particular theories to which economists subscribe. Marx noted, for example, that the protectionist theories promoted in his time by the US economist Henry Charles Carey reflected the needs of US “infant” industries to defend themselves against the dominance of British industrialism. This was the same rationale that produced import substitution industrial policies widespread throughout Latin America in the 1960s under the theoretical aegis of the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA).

The French economist Frédéric Bastiat, who fiercely promoted free markets and the virtues of laissez-faire in the early nineteenth century, reflected, in contrast, the struggles of French industrialists to free themselves from the shackles of a costly and inconvenient patchwork of local and national state regulations, taxes, and interventions. This, too, was later echoed in Latin America after neoliberal refutation of the ECLA and the advance of free trade policies favored by Augusto Pinochet and the Argentinian generals from the mid-1970s on. Even in Marx’s time, the image of the future that the most advanced regions projected was perpetually changing and geographically quite diverse.

The question then looms as to where and what is that contemporary form of capitalism that projects the image of our own socialist future today? Is it the Rana Plaza textile plant, Shenzhen industrialism, the Amazon warehouse workers, the Google workers in San Francisco, the Microsoft workers in Seattle, or the huge labor forces at the world’s major airports? But it was not only an image of everyone else’s future that Marx’s descriptions conveyed but also the image of what might be a socialist or communist alternative utopian reflection (of the sort that the socialist utopians of the 1840s were fond of creating and which Marx and Engels had so firmly rejected in the Communist Manifesto). It was instead constituted through a historical materialist negation of all that was so dreadful on the ground at that time and in that place.

The immediate grounding, in Marx’s case, was heavily reliant on mass production and social reproduction in the industrial region of Manchester. The cruel conditions of the workers in factories, workshops, and down mines along with the equally pitiful conditions of social reproduction in the industrial urbanization that capital had created and that Engels had so pointedly described, called out for negation. The material circumstances and the socialist project to which they pointed spoke for themselves.

It follows that the socialism that must be constructed to negate what is currently alienating and threatening in today’s world must be both constantly shifting and geographically diverse. These questions call for the closest attention, because, in the history of anti-capitalist oppositional politics, there has been a tendency to fetishize a certain imaginary of a socialist future as an ideal, ahistorical construct.

In the same way that John Maynard Keynes feared that we were in perpetual danger of becoming slaves to the thought of some long-defunct economist, so the political threat of obeisance to the ideals and ideas of some long-defunct socialist or communist project also looms. The fixity of our mental conceptions acts as a drag on our ability to think, let alone freely act on the political projects now required to create a more just, more ecologically acceptable, and more emancipatory socialist world. To put it in such terms is not to invite yet another bout of utopian dreaming (though a little more of that would not hurt). It is to construct an accurate, properly theorized account of what capital is currently about, much as the factory inspectors provided back in Marx’s time, and, on that basis, to take feasible steps toward the creation of a freshly conceived socialist alternative adequate to our current situation.

What this might mean depends, however, on geographical conditions. The problems posed by capital in Latin America are quite different from those in Sweden, where the whole country went into mourning with the death of the founder of IKEA, Ingvar Kamprad, who was lionized as a national folk hero. Yet there is a distressing habit of theorizing socialism as a political project outside of any historical and geographical grounding, even if capital’s basic laws of motion are invariant and universal enough within capitalism to demand and command respect everywhere.

It is significant, therefore, that, when Lenin came to power in Russia in 1917, he pursued an industrial policy based on the principles put forward by Henry Ford as the best and fastest way to increase the productivity of labor and build an economy capable of resisting the counterrevolutionary forces seeking to undermine the fledgling communist revolution.

While Lenin’s strategy worked in building industrial capacity, it came at the cost of perpetuating capital’s social relations. When China entered the global economy after 1978 and, in particular, when it signed on to the WTO in 2001, it had no choice but to submit to the laws of motion of capital. It is the operation of those laws that connects the industrialism of Manchester in the 1840s to contemporary conditions in Shenzhen’s Foxconn factories and those of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh. It also explains why China is now modeling itself on Silicon Valley, a very different imaginary of a capitalist future, while attempting some version of gas and water socialism along with “common prosperity” zones through equal access to housing, health care, and education (the “three mountains” that China has to climb to quell rising discontent).

While Marx’s work is open to critique and dismissal as that of some “long-defunct (Eurocentric) economist,” we still live under the rule of capital. The admittedly incomplete theory of capital circulation and accumulation that Marx laid out is plainly still relevant. His theorizing transcended the particularities of Manchester, and his “concrete abstractions” are robust and flexible enough to encompass Manchester and Birmingham or Shenzhen and Silicon Valley, provided we allow for the particular conditions within which Marx was working.

His account of relative surplus value is rooted in the British experience with strong reference to the Manchester system and the cotton industry. In Marx’s time, the industrial form of capital and its distinctive laws of motion dominated only in Britain, Western Europe, and the Eastern seaboard of the United States, with some mercantile outliers sprinkled across the rest of the world. But in our times, thanks to the relentless push to create an ever deepening and expanding world market, the economy is subsumed almost everywhere under the laws of motion of capital that Marx uncovered.

Marx’s account of those laws and how they work is thus more relevant than ever (which is not to say that our account of them cannot be improved and extended or that problems of interpretation and application should not trouble us). The charge of Eurocentrism has to be set against the fact that capital itself may be Eurocentric, in the sense that it originated in identifiable and hegemonic form in the Italian city-states before mutating under the hegemony of the Low Countries (with Amsterdam as its center), moving to Britain (where Marx encountered it), and then in the last century to the United States.

These hegemonic shifts, in Giovanni Arrighi’s account, entailed a change of scale as well as a deepening of institutional arrangements ordered around rising capitalist state power. But in the same way that Marx, toward the end of his life, detected a rising challenge to British hegemony by the increasing centralization of capital in the United States after the end of the Civil War, we currently wonder to what extent a Sino-centric influence is beginning to emerge to challenge the current hegemony of the United States.

The scarcity of information about which Marx complained is no longer with us as a problem. There is no shortage of detailed information on the conditions of the world’s working classes, the conditions of their social reproduction, the failures of social provision, and the dire conditions close to slave labor in certain regions. There are abundant accounts of dire living and learning situations in many parts of the world and the crushing conditions of poverty in which people eke out some sort of livelihood out of almost nothing.

There are research monographs galore along with voluminous reports from the international organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), along with the vast trove of information collected by NGOs (for example, the OXFAM periodic reports), state authorities, and commercial organizations (mainly for marketing purposes but still of relevance).

We suffer from a plethora rather than a scarcity of information. Techniques of mass data mining and media manipulation have proliferated. But there is also a lot of misinformation (labeled these days as “fake news”). The surfeit of information is in some respects a problem rather than a blessing. There is so much of it that much of the public either cannot possibly get to much of it let alone understand it. Not a few so-called “experts” who are called on to enlighten us appear to be as confused as everyone else, even when they manage to put aside ideological predilections long implanted by centuries of misleading bourgeois scholarship on matters to do with something called class struggle and political economy.

How to analyze and interpret the information is open to controversy, and the media dresses it up as much for political gain as for clear understanding. This leaves us with serious problems. It was relatively easy for Marx to see the big picture, at least from the perspective of Manchester industrialism and the factory inspectors’ reports, and to envision the negations that would define a socialist project for that place and time. The challenge for us seems far more complicated and perhaps indeterminate.

The most obvious beginning point is the state of political struggle and protest in the world today, along with some sense of the dynamics, including the twists and turns from right to left and back again that bleed into and influence the present state of things. There seems to be an upsurge in labor struggles around the world — both official and union-led as well as spontaneous or merely reactive to some serious failure of public policy or excess of corporate greed. Many of these struggles, in India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and China, for example, echo the traditional struggles that arose against Manchester industrialism.

But the majority of the big mass movements in recent times have been centered on the failure of the dominant economic model to deliver the necessary qualities of daily life to satisfy even the minimal needs of the mass of the population. The alienation of nature and the ever-increasing levels of social inequality as measured primarily in financial and asset wealth as well as in income terms, engenders powerful currents of resentment through relative deprivation. The austerity that is often demanded might be acceptable if we were not aware of the enormous increments of wealth and power being sucked out of the economy by the oligarchs and autocrats who wield such immense influence over public policies.

While the Occupy movements against the “1 percent” failed to last, the bitter taste and alertness to increasing rather than decreasing inequalities lives on. This is the kind of situation that provides a historical materialist grounding for someone like Thomas Piketty to revive the tradition of Ricardian socialism, without appeal to the labor theory of value, and to advocate the principle of an all-encompassing global wealth tax.

So, how should we interpret this history and this situation in relation to any emergent socialist strategy? A socialist politics has to recognize the qualities, problems, and contestations that arise within the totality of the circulation of labor capacity as well as at the point at which it intersects with the accumulation of capital. When alienation dominates all the different moments in the circulation of labor capacity, deep troubles lie ahead. This is something that the “so-called analysis” of contemporary economics goes a long way to concealing rather than revealing.