Colonising the Future

March 22nd, 2007

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Posted by ChrisG at 2:40 pm

Nicolai Hartmann once wrote that all ethics is concerned with the future – the realm of the ought-to-be. But, we could add, ethical reflection tends to forget the future for itself, the sense in which the future as the unfinished part of everything we desire, plan and work for is that which makes the significance of all this an issue for us – both constitutive lack and positive potential. When it does forget that this is the case, and fails to make us pause, the imperatives of practice step in and make the future, colonising that gap with habits, products, results, many of which we find only make it more difficult to understand the core of Hartmann’s statement.

Making the future is something that, for Marx, capitalism is extremely good at, and in fact, gets better at all the time – but in making it, it tends to negate it also. It closes off access to the potential contained within that gap by shortcircuiting the means by which we imaginatively strive to connect with futurity, reducing the significance of the options even as they increase in number. In this passage from part 3 of Theories of Surplus Value, Marx calls this capacity of capital ‘real anticipation’, that is, the kind of anticipation that an organism is capable of – estimating the potential of its environment so as to act, adapt ahead of time and foreclose on the possibility that it will be caught out. To anticipate in this way is not just to ‘think ahead’, it is to act first and cancel other futures.

Anticipation of the future – real anticipation – occurs in the production of wealth in relation to the worker and to the land. The future can indeed be anticipated and ruined in both cases by premature overexertion and exhaustion, and by disturbance of the balance between expenditure and income. In capitalist production this happens both to the worker and to the land. What is shortened here exists as power and the life span of this power is shortened as a result of accelerated expenditure (pp. 309-10).

To act from concern for surplus-value, for profit, above all leads one to anticipate by projecting scenarios, extrapolating from past trends, and trying to optimise the way practice operates here and now to produce teh best return, 1 year 5 years 10 years down the line. Part of this imperative is to bet how far things can be pushed before the push becomes a destabilising shove, and one needs to find a safe place to wait things out. As Paul Burkett notes, there is for Marx little difference between human labour and natural forces, when it comes to this capitalist imperative. Whether it’s extending the working day via shiftwork, seeking foreign child labour, or stripmining non-renewable resources, the push ahead into the future, the need for ‘real anticipation’, captures and negates futures on all sides, stealing lived time and with it the power to restore the ‘powers’ of the ‘resource’ in question. Burkett quotes this passage from Vol. 1 of Capital to illustrate how this leads to a tragedy of the commons:

What experience shows to the capitalist generally is a constant excess of population, i.e., an excess in relation to the momentary requirements of surplus-labour-absorbing capital, although this excess is made up of generations of human beings stunted, short-lived, swiftly replacing each other, plucked, so to say, before maturity [...] Capital that has such good reasons for denying the sufferings of the legions of workers that surround it, is in practice moved as much and as little by the sight of the coming degradation and final depopulation of the human race, as by the probable fall of the earth into the sun. In every stockjobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbor, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety. Après moi le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Hence Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society.