What can a sepia-toned postcard of Lüderitz Bay (pictured), formerly a German South West Africa naval base, teach us about the dynamics of global capitalism? The answer is a great deal, according to the central argument of Heide Gerstenberger’s Market and Violence: The Functioning of Capitalism in History. For Gerstenberger, Karl Marx and Marxist theoreticians have fallen into a key misunderstanding regarding the role of violence in capitalism, an oversight they share with liberal figures like Adam Smith: namely, the optimistic interpretation of capitalist accumulation as a historically progressive social development that would ultimately eliminate direct, explicit forms of violence. The link between colonial violence and exploitation in German South West Africa is thus mobilised by Gerstenberger as one of several prime examples of the pervasiveness of overt violence in the “concrete historical developments” of capitalism. However, how plausible is this sepia-toned understanding of violence, as it were, in the face of increasingly digitalised forms of social life? With all the rich historical detail it provides, Gerstenberger’s book seems to shine more as a retrospective account of earlier forms of violence than as a prospective analysis of the sharply colourful and AI-mediated violence of contemporary market transactions.
Gerstenberger’s vocabulary of violence
A brief study of Marx’s mature works does not substantiate Gerstenberger’s claim about his supposed optimism, teleological reasoning and belief in an essentialist notion of humanity. For, in Capital, Volume 1, Marx is vehement about the problematic character of the “silent compulsion of economic relations” which, once fully developed, “breaks down all resistance”. In other words, while this silent compulsion may not exert the force of direct, personal relations of domination, it is nevertheless a problematic force, albeit one of a different kind—the covert violence that workers experience in their dependence on the “natural laws of production”. In Grundrisse, Marx writes: “when the aim of labour is […] money, wealth in its general form, then, firstly, the individual’s industriousness knows no bounds”. Given its impersonal features, the economic compulsion that affects workers to sell their labour power cannot be attributed to the violent acts of capitalists, but to their systemic and violent dependence on capital. So, once again, in Marx’s mature writings, the tacit functioning of market relations is not an indicator of human progress but a key object of concern. Gerstenberger’s particular interpretation of Marx as an “optimistic philosopher of history” unfortunately permeates much of her extensive vocabulary of violence, a lexicon that, seen up close, also bears the imprint of philosophical reflection.
Market and Violence rests on “the proposition that there is no developmental trend inherent to capitalism which is conductive to impersonal relations in economic dealings [given that] what capitalism means in tangible terms has always been and continues to be decided politically” (p. xi). The starting point of Gerstenberger’s vocabulary is, therefore, politics, the political, or any instance of political imposition of social measures or institutional arrangements that may be devoid of the abstract form of the capitalist economic relation. “Tangible” politics here becomes a proxy for the concrete violence that, as negation of impersonal capitalist production, defies Marxian optimism. For example, regarding the National Socialist labour regime of Nazi Germany, Gerstenberger states that:
[t]he subordination of labour relations to state authority meant that safe-guarding discipline at the workplace was no longer a private economic task, but also a political one. Its solution was pursued in two ways: through the political integration of the workforce, and thus of a majority of the population, using propaganda and concessions on the one hand, and the coercive power of the state on the other (p. 382).
According to Gerstenberger, the irruption of the political in an emphatic sense, that is, through the unfolding of state power and ideological dispositifs, means nothing less than the “destruction” of “domesticated capitalism”—her label for developed capitalism—in early 1930s Germany. In this context, mature capitalist forms of socialisation, such as the legalisation of trade unions and strikes, simply collapse due to the return of explicit state violence, succumbing both in their actuality as social practices and conceptually as private forms of domination (p. 329). But is this assertion of the defeat of capitalist rationality perhaps too hasty, an assertion that too quickly grants political action attributes that it does not historically possess?
Presented in their essence, as what they “truly are”, without an explanation of the specific social form they take at explicit stages of capitalist development, Gerstenberger’s concepts of the political, state power and ideology are fundamentally ontological; in their independence from context, they are ahistorical. From such a standpoint, the revolutionary struggle against the Ancien Régime represented by the French Revolution could only be grasped as another case of political activity that took place outside the overdetermination of capital. Specifically, as Gerstenberger puts it, “it is now generally recognised that while the revolution was favourable for capitalist conditions, it was neither determined by them nor promoted them directly” (p. 57, emphasis added). It follows, then, that labour relations in France became private relations between legally free and equal contractual partners as a result of the French Revolution (again, in an emphatic sense), not because they were a precondition for capitalist production (p. 58). Gerstenberger’s ontological vocabulary of violence includes this hypostatised notion of revolution and several other derivations of the concept of politics, also encompassing the language of slavery and colonialism, among other social processes. Given the absence of a hierarchy among the categories that constitute such vocabulary, however, only one absolute corrective to Marx’s “optimism” can be identified in it: the supposed facticity of historical research.
Gerstenberger’s method (or lack thereof)
In Market and Violence there are traces of an attempt to differentiate two forms of violence in capitalism, one more visible than the other. There is, firstly, exploitation, which Gerstenberger understands as “a fundamental characteristic of capitalism”; and then there is “unbounded exploitation”, which she links to violence per se and defines as “a practice that transgresses norms which have been officially instituted in capitalist societies” (p. 4). The latter form of exploitation would then be more manifest than the former. While Gerstenberger does not delve into the violent nature of capitalist exploitation—which would require theorising a systemic form of violence—she nevertheless acknowledges, for example, that legal wage labour relations are ultimately power relations or social dynamics of subjection (p. 426). It becomes clear, therefore, that Gerstenberger does defend a particular theorisation of violence, even if not in a systematic manner. What is not so clear, on the other hand, is the presence of a method in her work, in the sense of a logically coherent investigative procedure delimited by the very structure of its object of study. On the contrary, what Market and Violence offers is a rapid dismissal of the immediacy and preponderance of Market violence, which then gives way to a detailed empirical research on unbounded Violence.
Such a configuration of theory without (or little) method is, in fact, reminiscent of Slavoj Žižek’s writing on violence. As Žižek points out, an exploration of violence in capitalist society cannot stop at the level of “directly visible ‘subjective’ violence, violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent”. If it does so, it risks missing the analysis of “objective violence”, the form of violence that “is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent”. For Žižek, then, objective or social-symbolic violence is a more subtle form of coercion, a violence located in the “background” of social reality from where it silently mediates subjective, noticeable violence. Despite the added conceptual nuance, however, Žižek, like Gerstenberger, is not prospective enough in his diagnosis of the evolution of violence in capitalism. Indeed, Žižek shows interest in the contemporary process of “disintegration of the protective symbolic walls that kept others at a proper distance”, but he does not dwell on that disintegration. What are the contours of the current transformation of social-symbolic violence, the metamorphosis of objective violence or capitalist exploitation, which of course does not announce its dissolution but rather its further development? The question is both theoretical and methodological, since it expresses a concern for the immediate reality of its subject matter, not only for its gaps, contradictions and therefore criticism.
In Topology of Violence, Byung-Chul Han maintains that what is at the heart of the current mutation of the form of violence is its positivisation, i.e., the fact that today capitalist exploitation increasingly dispenses with the negativity of external compulsion. “Once a certain level of production has been reached”, he says, “self-exploitation is much more efficient and productive than external exploitation because it is accompanied by a sense of freedom”. Thus, in Han’s view, which echoes Marx’s words in the Grundrisse regarding money and individual industriousness, the “late modern achievement-subject” is actually “subjugated by no one. It is no longer a subject in whom subjugation […] is still inherent”. This positive violence thrives within an “achievement society”, an environment that avoids the negativity of prohibitions and commands to present itself as a society of freedom. Han’s perspective on violence may look counterintuitive compared to the reflections of Gerstenberger and Žižek on the topic. Gerstenberger’s insistence on “unbounded exploitation”, for example, makes sense in the context of her analysis of the case of Fazlur, a 30-year-old ship wrecker in Chittagong, Bangladesh. “When a ship arrives, Fazlur is the first to board with an oxygen burner, cuts the first hole and then throws down a rope ladder for the others. The very first time, he was scared to death”, she describes (p. 427). Far removed from the specific working conditions of one of the world’s largest shipbreaking yards, however, what are the chances that a gig worker would feel “scared to death” due to a clearly identifiable threat in their workplace? Do Uber Eats or HungryPanda pose any threat to their “riders”? And if so, what is the nature of this menace?
Against the analogue, sepia-toned approaches of Gerstenberger and Žižek, provocative arguments like Han’s provide powerful theoretical and methodological answers to the problem of violence in capitalism. The sophisticated violence of digital platforms, which particularly escapes Gerstenberger’s attention, may certainly coexist with remnants of older forms of violence—the violence of politics, power and ideology in their classic definitions. But the repertoire of historical “facts” about these outbreaks of open antagonism should now be followed by a more prospective study of their historically specific demise.
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