Das Kapital Reflections #2: The Middle Distance

What if it’s not all or nothing?

I make light of the exasperating task it is to read all 200 pages of Marx’s chapter on machinery.  That many pages and they didn’t even have typewriters!  My mind regularly snapped back to “Bruh I can read this shit on a palm sized computer more powerful than any technology available to you - WHAT exactly can you tell me about machines?”  But the overall gist is valuable and important:  Technological innovations have implications for life under capitalism that are important to track and consider closely. 

Part of the Das Kapital project is charting how capitalism immiserates common people through a revolution in material - and consequently, social - relations.  The technological question is part of this.  And as genius as this work is we can say: Marx and Engels weren’t fortune tellers. They forecasted some things and not others.  

Capitalism as a revolutionary, totalizing force that brutalizes the vast majority?  Yes.

Would there one day be technological achievements within capitalism able to solve (to some extent) its brutal, exploitive tendencies?  Don’t think they saw this coming.  Probably not appropriate for investigating given what the times called for.

A  weakness in most casual leftism is an unwillingness to grapple with that question - what I call ‘the middle distance’ - even now.  They appear to have inherited the general thrust of Marx (or more likely Marx influenced scholarship) that capitalism must be abolished completely for the new to be born. For many this is the only way liberation becomes possible. This is its origin point.

Okay.  The resulting question is of course ‘how do we get there?’ And I think we see some of the strategic and tactical decisions in play - the recalcitrant feet drag of anti-voting, retreat from electoralism, and a lot of rhetoric promoting the commune, dual power, or left pastoral imagery.  It remains to be seen if this is truly a viable project.  That’s being generous.

What I don’t see a lot of is people engaging with the middle distance.  What technologies do we have in play right now - both at a consumer level and that of the owning class - that could intervene in widespread mental/emotional/psychological/material misery?  What can we learn from just-in-time supply chains, worldwide delivery systems, and delivery mechanisms that would allow us to claim the middle distance in a way that speaks to the possibility of there being something BETTER than what we have now —— even though it may not be “socialism” or “communism”? 

THAT shit…is really mainstream.