Part VII
SYMPOSIUM
THE SECOND CONTRADICTION OF CAPITALISM
The thesis of the "second contradiction of capital-
ism" was first advanced in James O'Connor's "Capitalism, Na-
ture, Socialism: A Theoretical Introduction," CNS, 1, 1988.
Contributions to the debate on the "second contradiction" by
John Bellamy Foster, Samir Amin, Victor Toledo, Kamal Nayan
Kabra, Michael Lebowitz, Martin O'Connor, Enrique Leff,
Sunil Ray, Andriana Vlachou, Albert Recio, Enzo Mingione,
Martin Spence, Joan Martinez Alier, Carla Ravaioli, Valen-
tino Parlato, and Giovanna Ricoveri have appeared in past
issues of CNS. Reprints of the original article and symposi-
um contributions are available in CNS/CPE Occassional Paper
5, The Second Contradiction of Capitalism: Debates, and may
be ordered from CNS, P.O. Box 8467, Santa Cruz, CA 95061;
408-459-4541 -- phone; 408- 459-3518 -- fax;
cns@cats.ucsc.edu -- email.
The Material/Communal Conditions of Life* By Martin O'Connor
1. The "Conditions of Production" and the Communal Condi-
tions of Life
Capitalist accumulation and the "market economy" are
fundamentally parasitical regimes. They depend for their vi-
ability on the exploitation not only of labor power in in-
dustrial production and of the physical habitat through raw
material appropriation and waste disposal, but also on ex-
ploitation of non-capitalist social domains and publically-
provided infrastructures. These non-commodity domains -- the
domains of intertwined human, communal, and natural activi-
ties of repair, renewal, regeneration, and reproduction --
may be thought of as furnishing the necessary material and
social conditions for commodity production, market exchange,
and capital accumulation. But capital, whether off-shore or
with particular territorial affiliations, tends to destroy
and degrade these domains. Capital provokes, through its own
parasitism, a crisis in the reproduction of these conditions
of production. For capitalistic enterprise, this is a "sup-
ply crisis," reflected in increasing costs or difficulties
of access to the needed sources and sites, as the cumulative
result of predation and industrial fall-out. Easily accessi-
ble minerals and energy sources are used up; economic in-
frastructures become inadequate through decay or insuffi-
cient investment; human habitats and ecosystems are
poisoned, disrupted and despoiled; and the communal struc-
tures of "social welfare," health care, and education, and
repair and regeneration of workers and consumers fail to
cope with the burdens placed upon them.
These conditions of capitalistic production, upon
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which the commodity economy depends, are also the communal
conditions of life. They are, correspondingly, the primary
grounds on which new social alliances, and new forms of
worker solidarity, must be forged. For this to happen, pol-
itical and organizational attention must broaden out beyond
the narrow focus on industrial labor's share of the indus-
trial economic product, to the question of sustaining
healthy material and communal conditions of life. This re-
valorization of the material/communal conditions of life
may, in these terms, be understood as the basis for a polit-
ical and social movement of resistance to the cynical and
predatory logic of operation of increasingly de- territori-
alized capital.
2. The (Trans-national) Firm and the Nation-State.
To understand the nature and significance of this
revalorization, it is useful to reflect on the institutional
fabric of industrialization. The acceptance, in the period
since World War I, of "the firm" and the "nation-state" as
the two unquestioned "natural units" for analysis of econom-
ic activity and policy, represents an ideological victory
more than anything else. These two units have become the sa-
cred cows of orthodox economic theory, and more significant-
ly, they have underpinned the "Keynesian compromise" of the
post-World War II period by which the state mediated at a
national level the contest between capital and labor, and
key policies for wages, social welfare, and worker condi-
tions are negotiated on a tripartite national basis. But now
that this "compromise" is breaking down (due to, among other
things, the movement "off-shore" of capital, and the exten-
sion of the "market ethos" deeper into all spheres of life),
it becomes important to comprehend better the occulted foun-
dations for this compromise and its fragility.
Throughout the world, "the firm" has been -- and
remains -- in reality an ill-defined entity, embedded in a
complicated rural and town social and economic fabric. Much
of the basis for economic and communal livelihood lies out-
side the "workplace" as defined by commodity production and
wage relations, even outside the money economy. Complex la-
bors of maintenance and renewal of domestic and communal
life -- involving families, friendships, local food produc-
tion, support of the sick and those temporarily or per-
manently out of (paid) work, as well as worker cooperation
on-the-job -- are the mainstay of everyday economic life,
without which much industrial enterprise would cease to
function. In European societies, for example, this dependen-
cy (parasitic or symbiotic as the case may be) of
industrial/commodity production activity on communal condi-
tions is manifest in the tightly regionalized character of
much production enterprise, even that destined for export
markets. In the so-called developing countries of the South,
the communal basis for enterprise is manifest in the hugely
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important "informal economy," which defies economists' usual
notions of firm structure and "rationality" as people commu-
nally improvise to find ways to keep each other alive.1
The privileged status of the "nation-state" is
equally problematical, for related reasons. In ideological
terns, the nation-state has had its unquestioned highpoint
in the formation of the United Nations Organization, and in
the decolonization-and-development process after World War
II. Economic policy sovereignty, national accounts, a rising
per capita GNP, and, more problematically, aspirations to-
wards liberal democracy were all, somewhat tautologically,
taken as the hallmarks of a "developing" state. Now, howev-
er, this status is being undermined in several ways. Fac-
tional and tribal struggles make clear the flimsy basis of
many national demarcations to the extent that, in many re-
gions of the so-called Third World and in parts of the form-
er Soviet bloc, a political apparatus based on the unit of
the nation-state has neither social legitimacy nor practical
effectiveness. In Europe, there are the questions of in-
tegrated policy, single markets, and monetary union (be-
trayed in the name change from European Community to Europe-
an Union). Finally, the monstrous growth since the 1970s of
financial intermediaries and trans-national corporations
(TNCs), with highly mobile capital linked electronically
into circuits outside of the control or surveillance of any
nation, constitutes a veritable de-territorialization of
capitalist economic activity.
This growth in trans-national commercial activity
coincides with the period of increasing and now-sustained
high levels of
unemployment within industrialized countries of the
"developed" North. It also coincides with the growth of debt
and poverty in much of the "developing" South. Increasingly,
it is evident that capital has no loyalty to any particular
people or place, only to the imperatives of its own repro-
duction.2 New technologies, particularly electronic communi-
cations and micro-chip technologies, threaten to revolution-
ize workplace arrangements, to displace many workers, and
also to revolutionize patterns and perceptions of leisure,
recreation and sociability. At the same time, the alarm has
been sounded about "ecological limits to growth," and also
the geo-political implications of the entrenched (and widen-
ing) disparities between Rich and Poor. This is the context
in which the debate must take place about the shaping of new
worker and communal solidarities.
It is evident that the trans-nationalization of cap-
ital (the move "off- shore") radically undermines the capa-
city of the state to manage a Keynesian-style worker-capital
compromise, even if there were the political will to do so.
It is also evident that "new technologies" -- especially
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micro-chip-based mechanisms of automation and communication
-- are eroding "traditional" industrial workforces to pro-
gressive oblivion. On the other hand, it has sometimes been
suggested that workplace "flexibility" may be liberating,
through the possibilities they open up for variable or re-
duced working hours, of "working at home," etc., which in
turn may permit new worker solidarities that connect back to
the communal basis of life. This is a rather forlorn hope.
The so-called "flexibility" of new computer-based technolo-
gies, together with the move towards "enterprise bargain-
ing," brings several fundamental risks. The most obvious of
these isJthe breaking up of traditional worker (union) soli-
darities. Workers are made to compete individualistically
for scarce jobs, and are blackmailed by the menaces of the
reserve army of labor (both the local pools of unemployed
and the international reserve offering lower costs through
enterprise relocation). What is presented as emancipation of
the worker through technology, is really a two-fold reitera-
tion of enslavement to the capitalist machine. First,
through the instantaneity of "flexible" response, workers
are made servants task-by-task to the technical apparatus
which, in turn, responds to the tyranny of market forces.
Second, the worker as cog is drawn deeper into dependency on
the accumulation process, internalizing the solipsistic men-
tality of wage- worker/consumer sanctified by the economics
textbooks.
3. Revalorizing Community: A "Post-Industrial Compromise"?
The search for a new the basis for social solidarity
-- for some sort of "social pact" or partnership between en-
terprise (capital) and the communities in which they are in-
serted -- requires critical attention to the ways in which
capitalistic enterprise both exploits, and is dependent on,
its communal (cultural and territorial) base, as well as to
the manner of its insertion in the world market economy.
If it is accepted that capitalist accumulation and
the "market economy" are fundamentally parasitical regimes,
then the modus operandi of trans-national (off-shore) capi-
tal represents the most sophisticated, and the most cynical,
development to date of this parasitical accumulation pro-
cess. The reach of transnational capital may, indeed, be
likened to the shadow of a vampire's cloak -- sweeping over
a landscape in search of a victim's blood.3 However, the
predatory character of capital is also its weakness, the
weakness of dependency. The capitalistic enterprise evident-
ly requires adequately skilled work forces for commodity
production, and relies on exploitation of the local physical
habitat as a site for production activity, raw material ap-
propriation (including air and water), and waste disposal.
It depends also on human, communal, and natural activities
of repair and reproduction which, in one way or another,
willingly or unwillingly, furnish the needed labor supply
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along with what we might call the social and ecological
"conditions of consumption." These complex labors of repair
and sustenance are, in fact, the primary labors of every
real society. While they are almost wholly ignored in the
representations of orthodox economics, being consigned to
the black box of the "household" (as consumer or unit of hu-
man capital), the dependency of capital on these non-
commodity domains is nonetheless real, and can become a bar-
gaining chip in the hands of organized labor and communi-
ties.
Effective capital accumulation depends, in the first
instance, on achieving the subordination of these "house-
hold" domains -- that is, their mobilization as wage labor,
and (in the Fordist/Keynesian era) as commodity consumers.
But, it may pointed out, capitalism itself will self-
destruct if it does not adequately provide for the vitality
of these domains. Under competitive conditions in the at-
tempt to extract profits, the subordination of households,
communities, and habitats risks becoming outright depreda-
tion. In myopic efforts to keep down costs, capitalist en-
terprises tend to focus only on the immediate and short-term
determinants of the "supply" of needed inputs, and thus to
provoke, through their own parasitism, a double crisis: the
degradation or non- reproduction of needed "conditions of
production" (as reflected in increasing supply costs or dif-
ficulties of access to the needed materials, sources, and
sites); and the impairment or non-reproduction of the needed
"conditions of consumption" (such as viable living condi-
tions and incomes so that people as consumers can buy the
products). Whereas in the past capitalism has been able to
expand through continual new colonizations on the "extensive
margin" -- opening up of new terrains of natural resources,
forests, fishing grounds, sources of labor power, and mark-
ets for produced commodities -- now that the global reach of
capital is complete, moving on to new "virgin" terrains is
not available as a solution to supply crises. Only a deepen-
ing of "intensive" colonization is possible.4
At the same time, these conditions of capitalistic
production and consumption upon which the commodity economy
depends are also the communal conditions of life.
Material/communal conditions, as much as wages and workplace
conditions per se, thus become the privileged terrains of
political contest, the point of political and economic lev-
erage in the struggle against capitalist exploitation. What
this means, first and foremost, is that capital must be
challenged to "respect" the communal basis of people's
livelihoods, and to recognize its own dependence on the
health of people and communities and habitats for their own
operations.
This implies a subsumption of the traditional con-
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test between labor and capitalist classes over the appropri-
ation of the "surplus" of commodity production. New social
alliances, and new forms of worker solidarity, must be
forged along lines that are "communal" as much as industri-
al, extending not just over workplace solidarities on such
matters as occupational health and safety, working condi-
tions, hours of employment and wage levels, but also to the
maintenance and enhancement of collective livelihood -- in-
cluding such matters as toxic waste control, respect of ha-
bitat as a cultural as well as ecological milieu, recogni-
tion of importance of town and village solidarities, friend-
ship, assistance, etc.5
The nature of this struggle for the valorization of
communal production and consumption conditions is necessari-
ly ambiguous. In principle, what might be sought are stra-
tegic "partnerships" between communities and capital, where
each "respects" the other's needs. Ideally, enterprises must
be made to understand that they have a debt to the districts
and communities that sustain them, and that the "honoring"
of this debt involves commitments and respect far beyond the
mere payment of workers' wages. But if capitalism is in-
herently predatory in character (and I think that it is),
then at best this challenge to capital is a kind of holding
action whose ultimate effectiveness is far from clear.
4. A Materialist Politics of Solidarity?
In mounting this challenge, worker movements and lo-
cal and regional governments considered as territorial ad-
ministrations, along with new social movements such as green
and women's groups, are all important in bringing about the
reorientation to the communal conditions of life: emphasis
on habitat, regional culture, etc. as the common-ground fur-
nishing the platform supporting commercial enterprises.
Moreover, at least in principle, local and state governments
would have key roles in helping to define the "social
responsibilities" to the region, of enterprises active in
the region, and also of workers employed in a region. Final-
ly, while the logic of the capitalist process -- especially
with the move "off-shore" -- is to negate specificities of
place, person and sociality (except insofar as these can
provisionally be played upon for commercial advantage), many
real businesspeople have divided loyalties, retaining at-
tachments to people and place. It is possible to play on
this ambivalence in demanding that entrepreneurs show "good"
(responsible) attitudes towards their hosts.
Of course, such propositions of partnership may seem
naive, and somewhat utopian! At the very least, working
against their achievement is the inclination of TNCs to
search out new cost-shifting opportunities elsewhere (e.g.,
lower wages, lesser social responsibilities, weaker or non-
enforced environmental quality requirements). Thus, dif-
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ferent districts and nations may be (and are) played off
against each other, with capital threatening to "withdraw"
and relocate elsewhere unless attractive conditions (meaning
attractive to capital, but exploitative of workers, communi-
ties, and nature) are furnished. This brings us up against
the contradiction -- inherent and perhaps fatal -- between
the predatory logic of capitalism and the complex logics of
reciprocation needed for a healthy economy. Any compromise
will thus be unstable, a kind of duel or tug-of-war. At the
very least, then, for this sort of political "partnership"
strategy to be effective, there are two crucial require-
ments.
First, it is clear that people themselves, both as
workers and as citizens of their districts, must collective-
ly and individually give paramount significance to maintain-
ing the "communal conditions of life" -- habitat, local in-
frastructures, community, culture, solidarities of place (as
well as workplace). This implies a major effort of mobiliza-
tion against the repressive socialization as workers and
needy consumers under the guise of "flexible workshops," en-
terprise bargaining, and the rhetoric of productivity gains.
The political/social bases for effective resistance and
mobilization are, aJpriori, far from clear.
Second, and linked to the question of effective pol-
itical strategies of revalorisation of the community, people
must guard against the "divide and rule" tactics habitually
employed by capital. In some respects, the success of one
district, nation, region, or community in negotiating a
"partnership" with capital to respect local ecological or
social conditions of production, may be at the expense of
other communities. One manifestation of politicking that may
be compromised in this way is myopic NIMBY politics in rela-
tion to the siting of industrial complexes, motorways and
other infrastructures of modern life, and waste disposal
sites and facilities.
To counter these dangers, it is necessary to ap-
proach "local" issues with an acute awareness of the work-
ings of "the market system" on a global scale. In fact, far
from being a bastion of individual "liberty," the generali-
zation of "the market" as the social norm of contract and
"exchange" actually generates radical insecurity and aliena-
tion for most people. This is not only worker insecurity,
such as fear of losing a job, or cynical degradation of
working conditions. It extends also to the diffuse insecuri-
ty felt by people as citizens of the communities and dis-
tricts within which capitalistic enterprises are located,
about the social and environmental "irresponsibility" of
capital. They fear -- quite justifiably, most especially in
the case of "off-shore" capital -- that environmental quali-
ty and local cultural heritage will be sacrificed (or made
into issues to be manipulated cynically) by enterprises
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whose "loyalty" extends only as far as their own strategic
advantage in the global accumulation rat-race.
It needs to be emphasized, therefore, that the no-
tion of solidarity being put forward here has nothing to do
with defensive and bigoted postures aiming to preserve or
enhance privileged access to certain benefits of the world-
capitalist economy by the cynical exclusion of others. Nor
does resistance to the predations of "off-shore" capital
equate to an abject protectionism. Rather, solidarity means
refusing a predatory logic, refusing insularity, and looking
for opportunities to build a wealth-in-common through mutu-
ally affirming labors and reciprocations at many levels. The
building of local, communal or regional solidarities in this
sense is not necessarily spontaneous, and their negotiation
will be fraught with difficulties. Broadly speaking, such a
politics means affirming economic and social labors as gen-
erating wealth-in-common, as in the idea of a "public good"
where production or consumption by one person unavoidably
"spills over" into benefits to others. This is the wealth-
in-common of the biophysical milieu as a habitat (place of
living) shared in common, and also the wealth-in-common of
mutual hospitality where each of us is (in the utopian vi-
sion) the other's pleasure. What this can come to mean in
practice, in any particular region, is something that has to
be worked out.6 ================ * Thanks are due to Giovan-
na Ricoveri and James O'Connor for comments.
1 Serge Latouche, In the Wake of the Affluent Society (En-
glish translation London: Zed Books, 1993), gives an excel-
lent discussion of the dynamism of the informal in the Third
World. On the communal basis of enterprise in European
economies, see, for example, Giovanna Ricoveri, Ornella
Cilona, and Fulvia Focker, "Travail et conditions sociales
dans les districts industriels Italiens," Travail et Socit
16, 1, 1991. Feminist analyses such as Selma James, The
Global Kitchen (London: Housewives in Dialogue Archive,
1985); Marilyn Waring, Counting for Nothing (Sydney: Allen
and Unwin, 1988); and Mary Mellor, Breaking the Boundaries
(London: Virago, 1992) amply document the support, repair,
and renewal roles of non-paid "domestic" and "community" la-
bors by women in particular. See also James O'Connor,
"Preservation First!" CNS/CPE Newsletter, 1994. 2 See,
among others, Serge Latouche, L'Occidentalisation du Monde
(Paris: La Dcouverte, 1989); Martin O'Connor "On the Misad-
ventures of Capitalist Nature," CNS 4(3), September, 1993.
3 In case of worry that this seems an unfairly nasty char-
acterization of entrepreneurial activity that, after all,
purports to allow "gains from trade" through opening up of
hitherto backward, tradition-bound, and untapped domains of
human and natural "capital" to their valorization in/through
the marketplace, the question may simply be posed: How much
do these multi- nationals really seek or wish to share of
their "profits" with those whose labor power, genetic patri-
mony, or land and sea resources are being thusly opened up?
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4 For a detailed diagnosis in these terms, see Martin
O'Connor, ed., Is Capitalism Sustainable? Political Economy
and the Politics of Sustainability (New York: Guilford Pub-
lications, 1994), in particular the essays by Frank Becken-
bach ("Social Costs in Modern Capitalism"), and James
O'Connor, "Is Sustainable Captalism Possible?" and my own
"On the Misadventures of Capitalist Nature," op. cit.
5 This return to the communal as the source and grounds for
resistance is a point of convergence in much recent left
critical literature. For example, see Victor Toledo, "Moder-
nity and Ecology: The New Planetary Crisis" (CNS, 4, 4, De-
cember, 1993); Ariel Salleh, "Nature, Woman, Labor, Capi-
tal," in Is Capitalism Sustainable?, op. cit.; Martin
O'Connor, "The Heat Death of the Universe," paper given at
the 2nd International Conference of the European Association
for Bioeconomic Studies, Palma de Malloraca, March 11-13,
1994; and James O'Connor, "A Red Green Politics in the
U.S.?" (CNS, 5, 1, March, 1994). An historical irony of so-
cial Left movements might here be pointed out. The recent
breaking of worker solidarities within the workplace itself,
is made possible by a prior (but still continuing) ideologi-
cal devaluation and shredding of the communal structures
upon which both workers and capitalistic enterprises depend.
Conversely, re-establishing workplace solidarities now, in
the age of trans-national capital, depends on revalorisation
of the communal/material base as a ground of political
resistance to cynical and footloose capital. 6 An earlier
version of this paper was given as a talk to the Confedera-
zione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL), Rome, in December
1993, under the title "Post-industrialism, Worker Solidari-
ty, and the Material/Communal Conditions of Production".