The Dialectical Unity of Capital and Non-Capital: The Role of Overpopulation in Popular Rebellion Today

Throughout its history, Capital has established a decisive form of discrimination that has effectively strengthened its power against Labor: discrimination between an endogenous labor force (integrated, with certain guarantees and rights in the capitalist nexus) and an exogenous labor force (yet to be incorporated or incorporated as ‘heterochthonous’, without such guarantees and rights). We refer to the historical incorporation of the exogenous population from the non-capitalist to the capitalist nexus (with the consequent replaceability of the endogenous labor force) as absolute mobility. The more possibilities Capital has of accessing a population in the non-capitalist nexus and of being able to incorporate it through absolute mobility into the capitalist nexus, the greater its unilaterality or class domination. In contrast, when these possibilities run dry, Capital is more inclined towards reformism or negotiation. However, this absolute mobility has historically been combined with relative mobility of the labor force, which includes various processes of which labor force migration is a fundamental component. This paper holds that both types of mobility are at the core of class struggles. Keywords—Absolute mobility, capital-labor antagonism, relative mobility, substitutability. I. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK HILE the process of widespread, incessant reproduction of capital is what gives meaning to the capitalist mode of production, this dynamic entails other coincidental processes, all of which have a common starting point in the monopolization of the means of production-means of subsistence; these are: Turning the maximum possible period of time in each day of collective labor into surplus work time converted into accumulated surplus value. which leads to: Exploitative control over the maximum possible proportion of living labor (namely, people). which in turn results in: Maximum possible appropriation and control of their time. Maximum possible control over their mobility. Wim Dierckxsens was at the Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones (DEI) in Costa Rica. He is now Coordinator of the International Crisis Observatory. (Address: Apartado 227, CP6150, Santa Ana, Costa Rica; phone: (506) 22030431; e-mail: mariwim@racsa.co.cr). Andrés Piqueras is with the Philosophy and Sociology department at Universidad Jaume I, Castellón (Spain) (phone: (0034) 964 729667; fax: (0034) 964 729260; e-mail: piqueraa@fis.uji.es). A constant, relentless battle between Labor and Capital has been fought over these processes throughout history. In this chapter, however, we will focus exclusively on the last of these in an attempt to contribute to Marxist research in this field. Since the very beginnings of merchant capital, the following concerns have been constant: 1. How to obtain a labor force at minimum cost for main production activities. 2. How to retain or ‘anchor’ a labor force that had gradually been freed from the bonds of vassalage, slavery or serfdom. 1. With European colonial expansion across the rest of the globe, and the shaping of the international pan-European system [1] that would become a global system in the 20th century, a market –first international and then global– of raw materials and values in use, generally turned into goods, gradually spread and became consolidated; capital resources and assets would later be added. From the outset, these were accompanied by the development of an international ––and later world–– labor force market. The role of intraand inter-continental acquisition of living labor, initially to guarantee the original accumulation of capital and colonial production (slavery and other kinds of forced labor in local populations, mobility of enslaved Africans, mobility of coolie serfdom in the Asian population), and then to ensure specific capitalist exploitation (proletarian wage-dependent automobility), first gained importance in the colonies and then in the system’s peripheries. Only with the industrial revolution did the metropoles, or centers of the system, become directly involved in this international labor force market, with the export of millions of proletarians to the peripheries. A century later, in the middle of the 20th century, these metropoles began to import labor on a mass scale from the peripheries. Historically, the cheapest way of introducing living labor into the capitalist mode of production was to have access to and continuously incorporate into capitalist production, a labor force from outside itself, in other words neither produced nor 1 The movement of living labour to strategic economic sectors (mining of precious minerals, cotton plantations for the textile industry and food production for European salaried workers; railway and transport infrastructures, mining and industrial production in the metropoles, etc.), was essential to the development of the system’s central formations, which controlled these dynamics and the mobility and use of living labour, in the above-mentioned ways that, far from occurring linearly, overlapped in time and were used in combination at the system’s discretion The Dialectical Unity of Capital and Non-Capital: The Role of Overpopulation in Popular Rebellion Today Wim Dierckxsens, Andrés Piqueras W World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology International Journal of Economics and Management Engineering