Misreads our alt, it’s inevitable, capital can’t afford to attack labor, scale ensures alt efficacy

Another argument which is often used in favour of permanent accommodation is the threat of extreme authoritarian measures that must be faced by a socialist revolutionary movement. This argument is backed up by emphasizing both the immense destructive power at capital's disposal and the undeniable historical fact that no ruling order ever cedes willingly its position of command over society, using if need be even the most violent form of repression to retain its rule. The weakness of this argument is twofold, despite the factual circumstances which would seem to support it.

First, it disregards that the antagonistic confrontation between capital and labour is not a political/military one in which one of the antagonists could be slaughtered on the battlefield or riveted to chains. Inasmuch as there can be chains in this confrontation, labour is wearing them already, in that the only type of chains compatible with the system must be 'flexible' enough to enable the class of labour to produce and be exploited. Nor can one imagine that the authoritarian might of capital is likely to be used only against a revolutionary socialist movement. The repressive anti-labour measures of the last two decades — not to mention many instances of past historical emergency characterized by the use of violence under the capital system —give a foretaste of worse things to come in the event of extreme confrontations. But this is not a matter of either/or, with some sort of apriori guarantee of a 'fair' and benevolent treatment in the event of labour's willing accommodation and submission. The matter hinges on the gravity of the crisis and on the circumstances under which the antagonistic confrontations unfold. Uncomfortable as this truth may sound to socialists, one of the heaviest chains which labour has to wear today is that it is tied to capital for its continued survival, for as long as it does not succeed in making a strategic break in the direction of a transition to a radically different social metabolic order. But that is even more true of capital, with the qualitative difference that capital cannot make any break towards the establishment of a different social order. For capital, truly, 'there is no alternative' — and there can never be — to its exploitative structural dependency on labour. If nothing else, this fact sets well marked limits to capital's ability to permanently subdue labour by violence, compelling it to use, instead, the earlier mentioned 'flexible chains' against the class of labour. It can use violence with success selectively, against limited groups of labour, but not against the socialist movement organized as a revolutionary mass movement. This is why the development of 'communist mass consciousness' (to use Marx's expression), in contrast to the vulnerability of narrow sectarian orientation, is so important.

The second point that must be made in this context is equally important. It concerns the innermost determinations of the capital system as a necessarily expansion-oriented and accumulation-driven social metabolic order. The point is that the exercise of power through the repressive machinery of violence is extremely wasteful in the system's own terms of reference; even if undoubtedly it can serve the purpose of redressing the power relations in capital's favour in a situation of emergency. What must weigh heavily in the balance is that it is impossible to secure the required expansion and capital-accumulation on a permanent basis through the perpetuation of economically wasteful emergency, apart from its anything but negligible political dangers. The idea of' Big Brother' successfully ruling over labour as a permanent condition is too fantastic even for a work of Orwellian fiction, let alone for the actuality of capital's mode of social metabolic reproduction. For the latter must perish if it is unable to secure its own reproduction through the appropriation of the fruits of ever more productive labour and the concomitant expanded realization of value, which in its turn is inconceivable without a dynamic process of 'productive consumption'. And neither ever-improving labour productivity, with the necessarily increasing socialization of the labour process as its precondition, nor the required — ever-expanding — scale of 'productive consumption' is compatible with the idea of a permanent state of emergency. Moreover, as Chomsky rightly argued many years ago, the surveillance system that must go with a successful enforcement of permanent authoritatian rule involves the absurdity (and, of course, the corresponding cost) of infinite regress in monitoring not only the population at large but also the monitoring personnel itself, as well as the monitors of the monitors,290 etc. We must add here that the idea of capital's permanent rule through the use of violence must also postulate the total unity of global capital against the national labour forces which happen to be effectively under the control of capital's particular units in the existing (but by no means unified) global order. This vacuous postulate of capital's global unity and uniformity arbitrarily brushes aside not only the law of uneven development. It also ignores the abundant historical evidence which shows that the exercise of force on a mass scale — through war — always needed masses of people to be able to impose violence on their counterparts, motivated as a rule for many centuries by national rivalries. Indeed, the national articulation of the global capital system, far from being a historical accident, had a great deal to do with capital's need to maintain control over the labour force with at least some degree of consensus. Otherwise the inter-capitalist rivalries, all the way to the most comprehensive international conflagrations, would be unmanageably risky from the point of view of total social capital, nullifying the inner logic of the system to fight out to the full the conflict of interests and make the strongest prevail in the Hobbesian helium omnium contra omnes. For in every situation of major inter-capitalist confrontation the capital system itself would be in danger of being overthrown by its labour antagonist, in the absence of a sufficiently high degree of consensus — present as a rule to a very high degree in national conflicts — between capital and labour belonging to the same side. (In fact some radical socialists tried to counter this consensus, unsuccessfully, with the programme inviting the workers at the outbreak of the First World War 'to turn their weapons against their national bourgeoisie'.) Thus, to sum up, all of the arguments in favour of capital's permanent rule through the imposition of violence on a mass scale suffer from having to define their conditions of realization in a self-contradictory way. Accordingly, as mentioned in Section 18.2.5, to project the rule of capital, in its direct antagonistic confrontation with labour, by way of a completely unstable, hence necessarily transient, state of emergency, as the permanent condition of its future normality, is a mind-boggling notion. To be sure, no one should doubt that the use of violence may postpone for a shorter or longer period of time the success of labour's positive emancipatory efforts; but it cannot prevent the exhaustion of capital's productive potentialities. On the contrary, if anything, it can only accelerate their exhaustion if violence is used on a mass scale, thereby radically undermining the objective conditions of capital's rule.