Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital

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Cass Sunstein — “Obama’s superego” — together with his University of Chicago colleague Richard Thaler, coined the phrase “choice architecture” to intervene in this domain of indirect power as a space of deliberate government. However, as Mau rightly argues, the choice architecture of capitalist society — despite the dreams of “libertarian paternalists” like Sunstein and Thaler — is mostly produced inadvertently. Capital is not a cabal of capitalists or government officials. Nor is it a supra-individual Hegelian subject acting of its own accord. Rather, it is “an emergent property of social relations,” a “fixation” of our own social activity. We make it — but we seem incapable of unmaking it. This is the power of capital — the ability of this emergent choice architecture to reproduce itself, even in the face of organized efforts to derail or transform it. Mediation So what can Marx tell us about the logic of capitalism that mainstream conceptions of power miss? This is discussed in the next chapter, specifically the role of state violence and bourgeois ideology.

Hunger will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjection, to the most perverse. In general it is only hunger which can spur and goad them [the poor] onto labour; yet our laws have said they shall never hunger. The laws, it must be confessed, have likewise said, they shall be compelled to work. But then legal constraint is attended with much trouble, violence and noise: whereas hunger is not only peaceable, silent, unremitting pressure, but, as the most natural motive to industry and labour, it calls forth the most powerful exertions; and, when satisfied by the free bounty of another, lays lasting and sure foundations for goodwill and gratitude” We are joined by Joanne McNeil to discuss her new novel Wrong Way, which skillfully blends a beautiful literary style — focused on characterization, inner life, human relations — with a sci-fi story set in an alternative present / very near future. Joanne’s novel takes the practices of Potemkin AI and pushes them to a logical extreme, revealing their true absurdity by centering the everyday life of an human worker whose job is to secretly imbue the technological future with autonomy. We talk about the need to tell stories about ordinary people and their social relations with the technical systems and corporations that structure their reality, rather than always focus on the hero’s journey of gifted kids with oversized egos and privileged agency. The idea behind it – that under certain circumstances it is not persons but economic conditions that exert compulsion on formally free workers… This ‘mute compulsion’ was of central importance in the contrast between personal relations of domination such as slavery or serfdom in pre-capitalist modes of production, and the impersonal domination of legally free wage labourers by which Marx characterises the capitalist mode of production. That alone should be reason enough to look at it in more detail. The only astonishing thing was that no one had done so before.” Even amid the current outpouring of scholarship on Marx, leftist philosopher Søren Mau’s Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital stands as a significant contribution. First published in German and Danish in 2021 and published in English by Verso earlier this year, the book meticulously develops a theory of what Mau calls “economic power,” a form of capitalist domination that is not strictly bound to notions of class and, unlike the forces of violence or ideology, that acts upon subjects indirectly. Mute Compulsion is available in English, Danish and German, and forthcoming in Spanish, French and Arabic in 2024.

In Part II, beginning with chapter six, the fundamental social relations that allow for the emergence and maintenance of the mute compulsion are explained. Following Robert Brenner, Mau conceptualizes the relations into two groups: vertical (interclass) and horizontal (intraclass). The first refers to the relation between the exploiting, capitalist class and the exploited, proletarian class. His study employs Marx’s mature writings and revisits well-known formulations as presented by theories of the value-form. One important remark is the differentiation of workers and proletarians (the former being a subset of the latter). Two important definitions are presented: ‘“Class” thus denotes the relation of a group of people to the conditions of social reproduction’ (129), and ‘[t]he proletarian subject is, in Marx’s words, a “naked life” or a “mere subject” cut off from its objective conditions.’ (130). The main take-away is that the vertical relation in the capitalist mode of production offers the glue for unifying separated beings with conditions of their own reproduction, the necessary mediations that humans need to survive. The capital relation then becomes necessary and impersonal, a transcendental power that valorizes value. The real subsumption of agriculture includes: technologies, divisions of labor, and the global expansion of agriculture.

A brief outline is given of capital as a historically specific social relation, the valorisation of value, and can thus ‘only be grasped as a movement, and not as a static thing.’ Building on a critical reconstruction of Karl Marx’s unfinished critique of political economy and a wide range of contemporary Marxist theory, philosopher Søren Mau sets out to explain how the logic of capital tightens its stranglehold on the life of society by constantly remoulding the material conditions of social reproduction. This impersonal form of domination has been criticized by thinkers such as William Clare Roberts for being too vague about the source of domination. It’s important to keep in mind “the domination of value is a domination of people by people mediated by relationships between people and things.” This is the ‘alien power’ Marx often refers to and is different from his earlier conception of alienation discussed above. The essence of the human being has been replaced by social relations. The political horizon is no longer reappropriation and realization of an alienated essence but abolition of autonomised social relations. Real subsumption varies in different branches of production. Agriculture remained quite resistant until the 1940s, after which it accelerated rapidly. This began 60 years after Marx’s death. Despite this, “the agricultural chemist Justus von Liebig’s critique of the robbery of soil fertility in modern agriculture had a profound influence on Marx, and, as Kohei Saito’s recent study of Marx’s notebooks has documented, Marx continued to work on the ecological aspects of his critique of political economy in the period following the publication of the first volume of Capital in 1867.”

Thank you to Counseling Communism and Edwad Academy for reading and discussing many of the texts mentioned. These groups are ongoing, reach out if you'd like to join. Politicizing the Value-Form: Some notes on Mute Compulsion. Following that, Mau discusses metabolic domination and value. “In a ridicule of economists in Capital, Marx writes that ‘so far no chemist has ever discovered exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond’. What does he mean by that? That the value form is a ‘purely social’ property which has nothing to do with ‘natural qualities’ of a commodity, such as its chemical composition.” Mau develops a theory of what he dubs “economic power,” a form of power that has traditionally been overlooked by Marxist scholars, who have mostly focused on the role of violence and/or ideology. As Mau defines it, economic power differs from these because it does not act directly upon the subject; instead, he claims, it shapes subjects’ environment to force them to act in certain ways. As much as Mau considers violence and ideology to be important forms of power, he shows that theorizing economic power is indispensable to any serious understanding of how capitalism perpetuates itself through the process of social reproduction.

Regarding his notion of biopolitics, I think he highlights some important aspects of how the state began to relate to the population in the modern era, which can be fruitfully combined with Marx’s analysis of the rise of capitalism. Despite what many assumed after the fall of the Berlin wall, Marx’s work has not fallen out of fashion. In fact, since the latest capitalist crisis began in 2008, Marx’s work has seen a resurgence that shows no sign of abatement. Among the efforts to reintegrate Marxist thinking into today, Søren Mau’s book Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital (Verso, 2023) stands as a landmark contribution. The author is a communist philosopher and postdoctoral researcher based in Copenhagen, Denmark. It's just a separation. A fake card in a fake bank machine. There's no consideration for my heart. And my heart will bleed.. Blaming everyone in the hospitals. Blaming everyone at the bottom of the English Channel. Blaming everyone who doesn't look like a fried animal... In real subsumption, new processes are implemented to meet the pressures of competition and/or prevent worker control (such as reducing monopolisable skills) that fundamentally change the labor process.So basically Marx is abstracting from many things on a theoretical level throughout Capital to examine various aspects of capitalism at its ideal average. Does the capitalist mode of production need concrete labor outside of the point of production of surplus value? Yes. Does the capitalist mode of production necessarily require women to do the concrete labor that is needed for survival? No. Do actually existing capitalist societies exploit pre-existing domination and oppression for its benefit? Yes. Capitalism: a society in which social reproduction is governed by the logic of capital to a significant degree.”

In grain production, roller milled flour has reduced turnover time in flour production but has decreased bran content, resulting in lower fiber content and B vitamin deficiencies requiring the creation of vitamin enriched white flour. In the 1960s, high-yielding wheat lowered production costs while also decreasing iron and zinc content by as much as 30%. In the next chapter, there is a deeper dive into the material needs of humans, the importance of social relations with nature and other human beings is established though Mau is careful to argue against any original unity of humans and nature. Money has existed for thousands of years but "from the sixteenth century onwards a fundamental transformation took place: the logic of capital began to weave itself into the very fabric of social life, eventually reaching the point where people had become dependent upon it for their survival. Capital became ‘the all-dominating economic power’, or, put differently: society became capitalist."

The expropriation of the means of production from all individuals

The ‘silent, unremitting pressure’ is not an immediate relationship between two social agents and, following Foucault, power is "exercised only over free subjects." Hence, “The power of capital does not just prevent the worker from following their will (although it often does that); it also facilitates a certain way in which they can actually follow that will. Mute compulsion only works because the worker wants to live.”