Marx Against Moloch

You shall not give any of your children to devote them by fire to Moloch, and so profane the name of your God. Leviticus 18:21

Capitalism is a demonic economic logic bent on consuming everything, including human beings. The only way to overthrow its tyranny is to build heaven on Earth.

Human Capital: From Dark Metaphor to Grim Reality

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! – Allen Ginsberg, Howl  

The fact that the real nature of capital has been completely and utterly mystified is evidenced by the currency of the phrase “human capital.”  In the same way that legal titles to income or land become “capital” in the imagination of the landlord or the financial speculator, the liberal press and intellectual class imagine that the development of individual human beings can be classified as such, so that we are perpetually encouraged to see ourselves as little entrepreneurs investing in ourselves as we pay exorbitant costs for a university education and take out loans which only enrich the bankers. Today, however, this logic is being taken to a new extreme. A piece in the New Yorker about a delightful bit of innovation in financial technologies provides a glimpse into the idyllic future capitalism has in store for us: Soon, you will be able to sell yourself!

Two brothers, Daniil and David Liberman, are working to make it possible for individuals to sell futures in themselves: sellers have their future earnings estimated algorithmically, and on this basis are assigned some total value. They can then sell some percentage of shares in themselves to a buyer, who is entitled to a given percentage of their future earnings as a result. This is fictitious capital par excellence—the sale of a legal title to future income based on pure speculation, with no intervening illusion that this constitutes a real investment in production of any sort. In this arrangement, the “human capital” is not a set of skills or social connections which can be monetized, but the human being proper.

As typical Silicon Valley freaks, the Liberman brothers are of course not content with their scheme to get rich off buying other people’s future; they also want to be celebrated as heroes for it. They pitch themselves as technological revolutionaries waging battle against inequality—but not class inequality, naturally—but temporal  .  According to the Liberman brothers, they have devised a way to share the wealth your future self will make with your, presumably poor, current self. The fact that wealthy and connected people like them will make money off your back in the long run is purely coincidental, of course .

Fictitious Capital: The Economic Logic of Human Sacrifice

The complete objectification, inversion and derangement of capital as interest-bearing capital—in which, however, the inner nature of capitalist production, derangement, merely appears in its most palpable form—is capital which yields ‘compound interest’. It appears as a Moloch demanding the whole world as a sacrifice belonging to it of right. Marx, Capital Volume 3

The Liberman brothers may be demented psychos, but their project is not only the result of a sick human mind. It is the result of centuries of development of financial capital.

In Capital, Volume 3, Marx describes the contradictory role that the expansion of credit plays in the development of capitalism. Credit allows capitalist production to go on smoothly by advancing industrial capitalists money needed to cover costs while the value they own is tied up in the production process. In this way, it accelerates the turnover time of capital, i.e., the time it takes between when money capital is invested and when money returns to the capitalist in order to begin the process anew. In performing this function, however, credit necessarily begins to exert its own destabilizing influence on the system.

Through its own expansion, the credit system transforms all money (originally a store of value and a means of exchange) into money capital, a form of value employed in seeking more value, a self-expanding social process. This interest-bearing capital comes to make up an ever-growing share of the total economy. On the one hand, the development of industrial capitalism proper increasingly concentrates wealth in a few hands, and these wealthy capitalists are then incentivized to store their wealth in the form of interest-bearing capital, a safer and easier investment than continuing on in the productive sphere. At the same time, the banking system concentrates all savings, including the meager deposits of the workers, into a singular mass which is then at their disposal to wield as money capital or in pure speculation.

Together with the declining rate of profit described elsewhere in Marx’s analysis, these tendencies lead to the creation of fictitious capital. Unlike industrial capital, which generates value through the exploitation of labor in the production process, fictitious capital merely makes a legal claim to value generated elsewhere in the economy. It is not really capital at all in its objective economic function, but it does function as capital from the subjective standpoint of its owner—that is, it generates revenue for them. In this sense, it is fictitious.

Under the heading of fictitious capital fall any loans which are spent as revenues rather than invested, especially those which then create debts which can be bought and sold. Examples include government bonds which entitle the owner to a portion of future state revenues, or personal loans which generate claims on future wages, like the mortgage debts which exploded the economic crisis of 2008.

This generates a profound contradiction: even as more and more money capital is made available for investment, and ever-growing percentage of this capital is fictitiously “invested” in the form of a legal claim on future production; in effect, a wager that production will in fact expand, and an ever-declining portion is actually invested in production proper. In periods of crisis, when commodities are unable to be sold and money (as means of payment, rather than as money capital) is at a premium, the crisis is exacerbated by the claims made on money by the financial capitalists.

The making-concrete of “human capital” proposed by the Liberman brothers is the logical endpoint of this process, the Xenith of the development of the credit system. Now that all of our money, our knowledge, and our relationships have become capitalized, the only thing left is to capitalize ourselves.

From the Realm of Necessity to the Realm of Freedom

The thing that you [the capitalist] represent face to face with me [the worker] has no heart in its breast. That which seems to throb there is my own heart-beating. – Marx, Capital Volume One 

Marx observes that: “The realm of freedom actually begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases.” Capitalism, by simultaneously spurring innovation through competition and ruthlessly dispossessing the non-capitalist small producers, expands the total social surplus beyond the wildest imaginings of pre-capitalist societies, and creates an unprecedented material basis for freedom from the demands of productive labor. But its success is its own undoing. By devoting production to the pursuit of private gain, capitalism chains all of us the abstract laws of market competition and accumulation without regard for human well-being .

Capitalism replaces a subjection to nature with a subjection to a set of reified social relations which appear to us as natural. Through its inherent self-expanding tendencies, it penetrates and absorbs all areas of social life. Even as real productivity expands, the rate of surplus extraction declines as production becomes increasingly reliant on capital rather than labor from which all value ultimately emanates. Capital is forced to seek out new avenues for its own accumulation. It follows us home from the workplace to squeeze us with debt, its own spectral twin , until at last there is nothing left but to consume humanity itself.

The only route to true freedom from this all-consuming beast is to seize what is divine within us: our capacity for creative collaboration and to take production into our own hands through democratic planning and create a society which is really human. As Marx concludes:

Freedom in this field can only consist in socialized [humanity], the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis.

Zack Frailey Escobar is a communist dock worker and sociology student living in San Diego. You can find more of his work at redhorizon.home.blog.