The Double Consciousness of Capital

In the Grundrisse, Marx provides two seemingly antagonistic visions of the role and significance of capital in the history of humanity. In the first, he builds a laudatory account and up-beat assessment of how, through its penchant for creative destruction and technological revolutions, capital can bring us to the cusp of a new form of society, a civilization in which the human species can flourish as never before. To be sure, this does not mean there is no serious work to be done in engineering the transition to socialism. Marx immediately focuses on the struggle to dissolve the contradiction between productive forces and social relations, but there seems to be nothing seriously problematic about the legacy of capital in pursuing the transformation to socialism. I will refer to this mode of thinking about capital and the path to socialism it presages, as Model 1. Later on, in the midst of his attempt to reconstruct the various pre-capitalist modes of production, Marx offers some very different reflections on how the history of humanity has unfolded with the rise of capital. Here that legacy is seen as deeply problematic, to the point where it constitutes a primary and perhaps insuperable barrier to founding a rosy socialist future. He emphasizes the centrality of alienation, of hollowing out, of loss of meaning, of the sacrifice of all human potentiality to Molloch, the god of money power, and the descent into vulgarity of capitalist developmentalism. I will refer to this theorization of capital and the tasks it sets for any socialist transition as Model 2. The easiest way to interpret and in a sense ‘reconcile’ these two statements is to suggest that the first is Marx’s representation of the bourgeois utopian vision as to what they were achieving and what they were destined to achieve, while the second is a dramatic rendition of Marx’s dystopian vision of what the bourgeoisie was actually accomplishing. There is nothing in the context of either statement, however, to support this interpretation. Marx seems to have internalized both visions as parallel tracks within his own mode of thought. The Grundrisse documents in part his struggle to free himself from the dominant bourgeois interpretations (particularly from Hegel and Ricardo) that he had earlier absorbed. A radicalized bourgeoisie (which was Marx’s burden) has, it is worth remarking, played a major role in both shaping and leading revolutionary movements, and in the process it has frequently been dogged by what I choose to call a ‘double consciousness’ derived from these divergent accounts of capital’s nature. By exploring this double consciousness, we stand to learn something important about the ambivalences that characterize thinking about the socialist project today