Capitalism is deathless: it does not know death, or at least, death does not touch it. Yet we will all die. An illegal immigrant is beaten to death – but how does this alter the American Dream? Floods wreck Bangladesh – but how does affect the ideal of a world market? These ideals arise from the body of capital, facilitating its movement. The existence of institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation and the G8 summit only propagate these ideals. But unlike the codes which governed the pre-capitalist world, they do not mean anything. Capitalism has already destroyed all codes.
The Communist Manifesto:
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society…. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away , all newly formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air…
We know it well: changes in means of production means workers are perpetually de- and reskilled; capital moves in real time from one place to another; production and consumption are continually revolutionised in view of the desire for profit, for surplus value, upon which capitalism depends and makes us depend.
What is to be done? Rethink the revolution which allows the ongoing revolution upon which capitalism thrives. Engage the crisis upon which capitalism depends.
A fundamental instability of meaning is built into capitalism from the start. Values are stripped away by capitalism insofar as they are unbound from traditional structures; the danger, however, is that they are replaced by the values of the market: with the value of work, the value of money. Constant movement: labour power is unbound from a particular conjunction of resources and bound again by others. If there is always a turbulence, a revolutionisation that is constitutive of capitalism, it is one whose movement is regulated. What is it regulated by? That process through which various factors of production (money, skills, technologies, raw materials) are conjoined into order to extract a surplus, a profit. This is not a simple reification.
As measure of value, money comes to supplant all other values; as a means of access to goods and services, it remains even when all other values break down. You tell yourself you do not desire money for its own sake, but for the goods and services to which it proves access. But the financial market does not seek those goods and services, but only money, since it is the means of access to more money. Money is sought in the financial market as sheer investment potential; its value is measured not in terms of particular assets, but of rates of speculative return. Beyond any financier or investor, capitalism desires and desires its own increase. As indebted or enthralled labour, we are enmeshed in the impersonal operation of capital.
We are mortgaged, that is pledged to the death by capital. Our future is wagered because of what capital owes to itself. How do we resist? How do we retrieve another meaning of time, of money? It is never a question of returning to the security of older values. A derangement has already occurred; the circulation of capital escapes the coded, despotic system whose inhabitants obey a model signal. The task is to engage the revolution itself insofar as it implies a gap or an interval. But what can compete against money?
Capitalism is deathless. But says the philosopher to the rich and the powerful: even you will have to die. We are all mortgaged, that is pledged to the death by capital. Our future is wagered because of what capital owes to itself. Capitalism is like a cell whose DNA is damaged and which spreads cancerously from a particular tumour. A normal cell in an adult grows and divides only to replace a worn out or dying cell, or to repair an injury. With cancer, cells continue to grow and divide; cancerous cells are those which have forgotten how to die. Spreading to other parts of the body, they grow and replace normal tissue. Cancer, metastatising, is deathless, but there is the paradox that it will eventually kill the host body and thereby kill itself. Cancerous cells will die even as they do not know death. And capitalism will die with its host body when the ecological limit is reached.
Then how to awaken to ecological catastrophe? To the misery of those who merely try to subsist amidst the storm of finance capital? To the apocalypse that has already happened? Perhaps death opens its eyes in us. Perhaps there is an experience of suffering upstream of any other experience. What faculty permits this? What shaping category, what transcendental? Philosophers will suggest that they have a special relationship to death. It’s the oldest story: Plato tells it, but so does Heidegger. Live as close to death to possible, Socrates advocates. Relate yourself to your death, Heidegger says. But what of the catastrophe which has already happened?
Bataille:
Nothing in sacrifice is put off until later – it has the power to contest everything at the instant that it takes place, to summon everything, to render everything present. The crucial instant is that of death, yet as soon as the action begins, everything is challenged, everything is present.
It is a question of death, of establishing a relationship to death in life. But now death is not the inevitable that awaits each of us such that, by relating ourselves to it, we can lift ourselves from the hoi polloi and reclaim our possibilities and impossibilities for ourselves. There is not enough time. Instead, before I gather myself up – before, that is, I am gathered to myself such that it would even be possible to write of Da-sein, there-being – there is the experience of catastrophic loss, expenditure, sacrifice. The death of the other person is this sacrifice.
We live events according to a double relation. As that which can be borne and mastered, even if this is difficult, by relating it to a particular end; but then also as that which escapes end and employ. Then the latter is the interruption of the project and of the power which would enable me to relate myself to my death. The ability to comprehend, bear, master, but fundamentally, the ability to be able, depends upon the ‘I can’, upon the modality of possibility which enables the opening to the future. And when this ability fails us? When, in sacrifice, there is no temporality upon which the human being might be projected? When, that is, there is no one there, no time and no place to be-towards-death? When the death of the other awakens us?
Perhaps there is a way of experience this death. Of living it in turn. And perhaps this provides a way of rethinking the general equivalent upon which the value of money depends. There is another capital, an experience of a giving. No longer is the monetary sign substituted for the thing that is sacrificed. There is no general equivalent which can fix the value of money in relation to its referent. The desire to create surplus value is defeated for as long as the time of the project is sacrificed – for as long as there is nothing upon which the human being is projected.
Common presence: a system, a non-system of exchanges so marked by loss that nothing therein would hold together and that the inexchangable would no longer be caught and defined by the desire for profit. It is as though the currency we most trust, the general equivalent which mediates all value, transformed itself into the inexchangeable. ‘Fire is an exchange for all goods’ Heraclitus writes; it is the exchange which ruins exchange, which replaces the value of money with the sacrifice of money. There is a celestial currency which has value only insofar as it is catastrophic.
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