Capitalism Makes Everyone Bend

“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”

“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”

“Mau details how economic power shapes the terrain of social reproduction, influencing subjects by determining material conditions”

“subjects of economic domination are not directly restrained or blinkered by false consciousness, as they are often understood in the context of post-Marxism. Rather, they are subjugated by the oblique logics of capital”

“Forced to conform to capital’s demands, people are dominated insofar as, per Mau, “the worker wants to live.””

“I’d first like to ask about the origins of Mute Compulsion. As you note in the book, the title comes from a passage in Volume I of Marx’s Capital: “the mute compulsion of economic relations seals the domination of the capitalist over the worker.” How did your reading of Marx, and of this passage specifically, lead to the theorization of”

“I got the idea for the book not from that passage in particular but from reading works by scholars from the German “New Marx-Reading” or Neue Marx-Lektüre (NML) tradition, especially Michael Heinrich, as well as from reading political Marxists, especially Ellen Meiksins Wood”

“Marx only uses the expression “mute compulsion” in that specific passage, and in other places he talks, for example, of “invisible threads,” which I also briefly considered as a title for the book.”

“the power of capital cannot be reduced to class domination, since it also includes mechanisms of domination that everyone is subjected to, although in very different ways”

“There has been a tendency to think about power as something that has two fundamental forms, namely violence and ideology”

“In my book, I argue that economic power is a form of power that can neither be reduced to violence nor ideology. In contrast to violence and ideology, economic power doesn’t directly address the subjugated part in a relationship of domination. Instead, it addresses the environment of the subject, which means that it functions by shaping the material and social environment in a way that forces people to act in a certain way”

“This is distinct from violence, which addresses the subject directly as a body, as well as from ideology, which addresses the subject by shaping the way in which it thinks or perceives itself and its surroundings”

“Your book also addresses the concept of value in Marx. You argue that, for Marx, the labor theory of value is not a matter of reading the true price of labor but, instead, about illuminating the very essence of valuation as an expression of domination”

“Here I follow what can broadly be termed value-form theory, an approach that interprets Marx’s theory of value not as a theory that attempts to explain prices but a theory about the social form of labor in capitalism or, in other words, a theory about how social labor is organized”

“One of the unique things about capitalism is that production is organized by private and independent producers who exchange their products on the market. This is what the theory of value explains and tries to analyze, and with regards to power, the crucial thing is that such a system generates certain standards that everyone must live up to in order to survive”

“It does so by means of abstract and impersonal market pressures”

“So the theory of value is basically a theory of how the market is not an apolitical transmitter of information but a mechanism of domination that generates impersonal commands”

“Value is a concept that highlights the horizontal relationships between units of production rather than the vertical class relations, even though the latter are presupposed by the former”

“The theory of value is a theory of how social labor is organized by means of real abstractions such as money, which subjects everyone in capitalist society to the demands of capital”

“As a Marxist, I obviously don’t think that writing books is what is going to initiate the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism — especially not writing a book as abstract and theoretical as Mute Compulsion. On the other hand, it would be meaningless to write a book about capitalism if I didn’t believe that it could, at least potentially, be useful for combating the world of capital”

“I think we should be careful not to derive political tactics and strategies from the kind of abstract theory that I develop in Mute Compulsion, so in my view, the political utility of the book lies rather in the fact that it offers a conceptual framework that can hopefully be put to use in strategically relevant analyses of concrete situations”

“But although it is by no means necessary to understand the capitalist system in order to destroy it, I think that a certain understanding of the enemy can be useful when fighting that enemy”

“If there are any strategic perspectives to draw from my analysis of the economic power of capital, it would probably be to underline the importance of building new, communist forms of collective reproduction at the same time as we’re dismantling capitalism”