Theorising capitalist development, cooperation and working-class resistance on a global scale

Abstract

Lucia Pradella L'Attualita del 'Capitale': Accumulazione e Impoverimento nel Capitalismo Globale II Poligrafo: Padua, Italy, 2010; 406 pp: 9788871156866, 27 [pounds sterling] (pbk) Literature on capitalist development has tended to take the form of studies of underdevelopment in the global South, and studies of neoliberalism in the global North. Informed by her research conducted on the articles and writings of Marx and Engels on colonialism and pre-capitalist societies, published in Italian in this volume, ' The contemporary relevance of Capital: Accumulation and impoverishment in global capitalism (my translation), Lucia Pradella succeeds in providing a clear, systematic and elegant exposition of how to approach the global economy through a study of capitalist development rooted in Marxist fundamentals. In Chapter 1, Pradella reminds us that the contradictory dynamic of capitalism develops from the social antagonism between capital and labour: the class struggle. Through an analysis of the latter, the limits of capital as a social relation become apparent to observation. The struggle of the working class can therefore he treated as an irreducible part of the object of study of contemporary social, political and economic inquiry (p. 23). Following Marx, Pradella discusses the impoverishment of the labourer as a direct consequence of the sale of labour-power--rendering an irreducible part of human species-being an external, objective entity confronting all workers. According to Marx, 'as the number of the co-operating workers increases, so too does their resistance to the domination of capital, and, necessarily, the pressure put on by capital to overcome this resistance' (1990: 448-449). An immediate result of this is that the capitalists' planning, command and surveillance of production becomes a necessary condition of the production process. Therefore, the 'unavoidable antagonism' inherent to the capitalist production process further develops. However, when brought together as labour-power purchased by capital, workers become increasingly unable to enjoy the fruits of their cooperative labour. This socially productive power of labour thus 'develops as a free gift to capital', and workers 'enter relations with the capitalist, but not with each other' (Marx 1990: 450-451). Furthermore, 'this illusion is almost as important a source of counter-revolutionary energy as commodity fetishism ... since it seems to give capital the credit for organising production and reproduction' (Caffentzis 2010: 29). In Chapters 2 and 3, Pradella demonstrates a formidable grasp of Marx's method, and therefore of the particular textual and contextual purchase of the categories and concepts deployed in the whole of his works. Like Marx, she treats cooperation as the fundamental and permanent form of capitalist development--making advances in productivity appear to be external to workers' species-being (pp. 90-95). But by bringing the circuits, cycles and chains of global commodity production, consumption and exchange to the fore, Pradella equips the reader with an account that is rid of relational strictness, and thus better placed to analyse the emergent properties of capitalist development. (1) In other words, the author reinvigorates Marx's discussion of the relation between cooperation and working-class organisation and resistance through an in-depth exploration grounded in the concrete historical developments of the capitalist mode of production. Pradella therefore enables us to observe that on a grand scale, cooperation finds a concrete manifestation in the contradictory international expansion of the field of waged labour--whereby working-class autonomy is increasingly frustrated by workers' dependence on the money-form. As a result, a global analysis of the social conditions of the proletariat is possible, but requires more than just a focus on waged labour. With this in mind, through a careful process of abstraction Pradella acknowledges the differentiated and stratified conditions of the global working class--including peasants and independent producers--and renders the impoverishment of the proletariat as a structural consequence of capitalist accumulation and development (2) (p. …