Capitalism and Outer Space: Replies to an Interlocutor

How did you decide to write about this topic?

In our paper “One giant leap for capitalistkind: Private enterprise in outer space,” we were interested in trying to understand what the sudden explosion of interest and investments in outer space meant, structurally and theoretically, with regard to contemporary capitalism. One significant event for us was the much-publicized launch of SpaceX’s first Falcon Heavy rocket in February 2018. It represented a combination of new technological advances in rocket design and space technology, the ascendancy of the private enterprise model of space exploration, and a neoliberal ideology in response to the question of humans as space-traveling beings.

Our working hypothesis has been that outer space represents the next logical step for capital’s expansion. We can think of capital as a machine that wants to blanket the world. There is no end to what capital would like to profit from, no limit to which realms of life it wants to insinuate itself into. Capital is by its very nature voracious. It has a limitless appetite. The problem, of course, is that Earth is finite and fixed. Logically, then, capital must try to push beyond Earth’s frontiers into a limitless domain, namely the universe as such, which mirrors capital’s own boundless ambitions. Capital is like a virus, and outer space represents an infinite selection of fresh hosts awaiting infection.

Why do you think NewSpace companies are allowed to portray themselves as libertarian and independent when they rely on the government?

It fits with our contemporary zeitgeist. The ultimate neoliberal fantasy is the idea that there exists such a thing as a domain free from entanglements with the state called the market. But the idea of a self-sustaining, sovereign market is largely a phantasmagorical construct. Investigate further and even the most Ayn Rand-like of corporations or capitalists are likely to be deeply embedded in the state: They invariably owe their very existence, in some way or other, to the fiscal expenditures, technologies, or infrastructure of the state.

The Norwegian hotel billionaire Petter Stordalen brings out this point nicely in one of his books when he writes appreciatively of the Norwegian welfare state and the idea of social democracy (or democratic socialism, as Bernie Sanders would call it): Without free public schools, childcare facilities, healthcare, roads, lighting, and so on, his hotel workers wouldn’t be able to come into work every day and help sustain his business empire. In other words, even a so-called “self-made” billionaire recognizes how deeply indebted he is to the state. 

The state organizes our hearts and minds, the very fabric of our reality, whether we like it or not, through such things as infrastructure, R&D investments, regulatory agencies, legislation, and the institutions and policies of the welfare state. In a sense, there is no beyond to the state.

Unfortunately, this fact has been largely obscured today by the very political forces that have successfully turned the state into an instrument of corporations against the public at large. The market is a mystical construct. But this misrecognition, as Bourdieu might say, of the state’s real and significant role has been hugely successful in insinuating itself into people’s hearts and minds.

NewSpace corporations exploit the widespread belief in the myth of the market. They exploit the cultural cachet that the (supposedly) ruggedly individualistic, self-sustaining, lift-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps entrepreneur enjoys today. The myth of a self-reliant market actors, independent from the state, is itself a profitable idea. There’s money to be made off the idea of a lean, mean market actor that stands in opposition to supposedly sluggish, lagging, traditionalist, overly bureaucratized state actors: Never mind that most of the rockets currently being used were built using Cold War dollars and roubles, and that NASA’s 1967 Saturn V launch vehicle is more powerful than anything the NewSpace gang have come up with! 

The media, political establishment, and many consumers are so often in awe of a figure like Elon Musk, but few people realize that his business remains intricately interwoven with the state. As Musk’s own biographer shows (but doesn’t properly emphasize - you have to know it’s important to really notice it), at one point Musk’s SpaceX was one week away from bankruptcy until NASA bailed them out. Taxpayer dollars often sustain these mythically self-made entrepreneurs. The state is NewSpace’s biggest customer. Take a look at SpaceX’s launch schedule and you’ll see that a significant proportion of their customers are government-linked or themselves derive significant revenues from government, with significant contributions from NASA and the U.S. Air Force. United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, recently received a $1.2 billion defense contract  from the U.S. Air Force to launch spy satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office. Follow the money and the know-how and you’ll almost invariably come up against a government source.

But culturally speaking, it’s more palatable to talk about “disruption” or “innovation” or “lean startups” - all part of the vapid lexicon of what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron called the “California ideology,” now exported by Silicon Valley around the world in a few brief decades with astonishing success. Even Stanford, Silicon Valley’s premier university, derives 80 percent of its external research funding from the U.S. federal government.

One reason why space capitalism needs the state is that risk of failure is relatively high, and when things go wrong in space, they tend to go wrong in a catastrophic, expensive way. There is some evidence to suggest that insurance companies are shying away from space enterprise these days. SpaceNews.com recently ran a story about how insurance rates are increasing after a series of expensive failures, including a $415 million claim after the United Arab Emirates’ Falcon Eye-1 imaging satellite experienced a launch failure and a $183 million claim after an imaging satellite experienced an orbital failure back in January 2019. Insurance is the precondition of successful capital investment: Finance is not a supplement to manufacturing but a necessary part of productive capitalism. The history of capitalism suggests a very intimate bond between Wall Street and Main Street. But space breaks the mould, precisely because the risks involved in, say, launching costly payloads packed with expensive tech into space are so great. The role of the U.S. Air Force and NASA is largely that of the state shouldering many of these risks. Until spaceflight has matured beyond a relatively high failure rate, it will remain the domain of the state.

Why do you think they’re able to get away with talking about how their work is for the good of humanity when that’s not actually their main aim?

Many NewSpace companies and their owners probably do think that they are working for the good of humanity. And to be fair, they are contributing new technologies that do advance our space-traveling capabilities. SpaceX’s ability to land launch vehicles on autonomous drone barges makes for an impressive media spectacle. The problem is, of course, that these space companies are forced to develop commercial strategies with all sorts of other aims - generating profit for their owners being the most structurally significant.

Capitalists in general, not just the ones working to exploit outer space, like to frame their activities in prosocial terms. Now, it has to be said that capitalism can generate incidental benefits to humankind. No critical social movement could deny this. But the question is if this is capitalism’s primary effect--which it probably isn’t--or at least a more commonly occurring side-effect than capitalism’s tendency to produce negative consequences for workers, the environment, cultural values, and so on. This question is perhaps the preeminent problem in our current political situation.

Adam Smith famously said that “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” On Smith’s view, social benefits are coincidental to the pursuit of rational egoism. Problems begin to arise, of course, when this self-interested productive activity ends up wrecking the atmosphere, harming or underpaying workers, and poisoning their “dinner,” so to speak.

There are untold riches—scientific, material and, why not, spiritual—awaiting our discovery in outer space. The tragedy of allowing capitalism to appropriate outer space is that these entrepreneurs will co-opt the limitless possibilities on offer: Rather than become a site of the free play of the human imagination, outer space will be reduced to a kind of cheap Starbucks sentimentalism; rather than allow the resources available on asteroids, the Moon, and Mars to benefit all of mankind, they will benefit a narrow slice of share owners. 

Why do you think commercial space politics tend to have this libertarian bent?

The captains of NewSpace industry like to portray themselves as if they’re libertarians. This mindset is shared with most Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. To explain why these entrepreneurs so often portray themselves as these libertarian, Ayn Rand-esque heroic figures would require explaining how the culture of American capitalism, and perhaps more specifically Californian capitalism, came about in the first place. All of it is part of a general degradation of the idea of competent governments in the post-Reagan, post-Thatcher world - that the state could ever be a force for good, and an efficient provider of equitable services. As one report on Capitalism in Space typically observes, “The private companies know best how to build their own products to maximize performance while lowering cost.”

The problem with this mentality is that it is a tremendous fiction. The revenues are largely sourced from government sources, primarily NASA and the military, in the case of the United States. The technology is largely developed and the relevant manpower is largely trained in universities like Berkeley and Stanford, which derive a huge proportion of their research funding from the government.

The libertarian vision of outer space is consistent with the dominant neoliberal ideology of our times: If you believe healthcare, higher education, and incarceration should be taken care of by private enterprise, then why would you all of a sudden believe that the government should build spaceships and launch satellites into Near-Earth Orbit? The zeitgeist of our times is libertarian. The paradox, of course, is that even under Thatcher, the British state did not become a “slim state” at all, but in fact grew. There is no way to get to outer space without the state.

If you could change the way the space enterprise works, how would it look?

Our advice would be to respect the intent of the Outer Space Treaty from 1967. The Outer Space Treaty says that all resources harvested and exploited in outer space should benefit all of humankind. If we do  manage to reach the potential resources found in outer space, they should benefit all of humanity. Profits should be shared equitably between all signatory nations. As we write in our paper, Donald Trump’s administration has essentially stated that this treaty is null and void. According to Scott Pace, the Executive Director of the National Space Council, outer space is precisely not “the ‘common heritage of mankind’, not ‘res communis’, nor is it a public good.” Well, that’s it for the Outer Space Treaty, then, which proposed a kind of Cold War-era proto-communism in space, with all profits to be shared equitably between all people back on Earth. Trump’s people hate this mindset of course, because they think profit-making is the only motivator of human action, a very neoliberal notion that makes a mockery of altruism and selfless curiosity that guide and drive a thousand acts of interpersonal kindness and scientific inquiry each and every day.

The notion that the Outer Space Treaty should still apply seems quite common-sensical to us. As Norwegian scholars, coming from a Nordic, social-democratic context, we’ve witnessed first-hand the many benefits of a strong welfare state, with high levels of taxation on “ground rent” resources like hydroelectric dams and oil or natural gas fields. Profits from space enterprise should benefit all of humankind.

Nation-states are under pressure from international corporations with their own agendas. The most advanced of these corporations are developing Internet technologies with tremendous ramifications, giving rise to a type of economic system that some call “platform capitalism” (Nick Srnicek) or “surveillance capitalism” (Shoshana Zuboff). The new space enterprises could be seen to be doing something similar. It is no coincidence that these NewSpace enterprises are deeply connected to Internet companies (PayPal in Musk’s case, Amazon in the case of Jeff Bezos), and that offering communication services was both the birth of the commercial space sector - the first satellite companies - and the future, as the commercial competition over satellite-based Internet services increase. Who will control SpaceX’s planned planetary-level Internet satellite system, Starlink? With potentially thousands of satellites in orbit, won’t this single corporation have a powerful chokehold on Earth’s Internet traffic? As the Internet’s infrastructure becomes increasingly space-bound, regulation must be put into place to ensure that corporations do not run amok with this power.

In addition, the environmental impact of this new commercial space race has not been sufficiently addressed.

All in all, international cooperations and regulations need to be upheld and developed further with regard to NewSpace enterprises.

Can you explain more, for a layperson, what you mean when you say that space is an outlet for surplus capital?

Karl Marx had the idea that one of the distinctive problems with capitalism is not so much scarcity and lack but excess and overabundance: too many workers (which he called the “industrial reserve army” or “surplus populations,”, i.e. people without a positive function in the marketplace), too many commodities (causing all kinds of adverse ecological effects today with overproduction of too much stuff), and too much capital - investable assets with nowhere to go. If investors can’t find a “meaningful”—meaning profitable—outlet to invest their capital in, then what will they do with this capital? If they leave it in a bank vault or a zero-interest bank account, then inflation will simply eat away at it, year after year, and investors will miss out possible profit-generating opportunities: what economists call an opportunity cost. So capitalism is fundamentally about trying to find ever more and ever newer profitable venues for a capital that is always liable to become stagnant - dead capital. As Marx notes in the first volume of Capital, capital that doesn’t move, circulate, or accumulate, ceases to be capital at all and becomes more like treasure - in the sense of a pirate’s buried treasure, stagnant and inert, and in fact constantly depreciating.

The geographer David Harvey draws on Karl Marx’s idea of surplus capital to suggest that this fundamental tendency in capitalism explains why capitalism pushed out from beyond the narrow radius of Manchester’s cotton mills in the first half of the nineteenth century to become a global, planetary-level economic system. Capital is always seeking restlessly the next great investment opportunity, and that means seeking out new places: new mines in Congo, new sweatshops in Vietnam, and so on. Capital is about appropriating more space. Places that lived under traditional, non-capitalist economic systems tend to be colonized and gobbled up, as it were, by capital. David Harvey calls this a spatial fix: Faced with the problem of mounting surplus capital, capitalists seek out new spaces to invest their capital and thereby keep the wheels of the economy going.

Outer space, then, is just one more, final space in a long line of spaces that have served as fixes to capital’s need for expansion. But because outer space is potentially limitless, it is also the ultimate spatial fix. Capitalism has expanded from Manchester to Western Europe, to cover essentially all continents on Earth, with a few notable exceptions and pockets of more traditionalist economies here and there. Now that Earth has been more or less emptied out of capital-free spaces, outer space remains as one great, final virgin territory, so to speak. 

Outer space is terra incognita: we do not know what is out there. But it is also terra nullius: land without ownership. Finally, it is terra pericolosa, dangerous land, a site of extreme risk. All of this combines to make it a very difficult and yet enticing place for capitalists to invest in.

Similarly, can you define “charismatic accumulation?

As a capitalist, you cannot simply be an impersonal machine that allocates capital. To be a truly successful capitalist requires an additional human supplement: a personality, a certain charisma, to use the German sociologist’s Max Weber’s key concept. This has always been a part of the capitalist game, from Henry Ford through Steve Jobs and onward. But there’s something about outer space that seems to concentrate the capitalist mind along these lines. Since the days of the Babylonian astronomers and ancient Egyptian sky-worshipping polytheism, outer space has been a crucial site for the free play of the human imagination. Adept entrepreneurs know full well that playing up to this all-too-human longing for the transcendent can be a very useful strategy in building buzz for their brand. While the novelty has worn off a little by now, for the first couple of years every SpaceX launch was something like a quasi-religious spectacle, watched by hundreds of thousands of people, online and in real-time. Launch events were—and still are to a certain degree—capable of producing a real sense of wonder: what the French sociologist Emile Durkheim called “collective effervescence,” a kind of bubbling-up of human fellow-feeling. Space seems to offer the possibility that this terrestrial life is not all there is. This is a huge selling point in the overcrowded marketplace of ideas.

At the same time, launching these expensive, complex products into space is a highly technical feat of human engineering. It allows people like Elon Musk to sell themselves to the public as purveyors of nerd capitalism: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg initiated and exploited the trend of geeky entrepreneurs, combining business savvy and dorm-room or basement-dwelling studiousness. The form of charismatic accumulation specific to high-tech industries like outer space seems to spin off this basic Silicon Valley personality type, combined with a heavy dose of engineering derring-do. While Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic space enterprise emphasizes the “risk-all” madness of launching into space, Musk plays up to the more traditional love of Silicon Valley geeky obsessiveness. Whatever form it takes, the basic point is that the high-tech capitalism of our age seems to love a strong personality: It’s good for business, because it attracts investors, customers, and the media.

As the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk says, we live in an age of general excitability. If you’re not excited, you’re not alive to all the possibilities of the world, and are therefore in some sense dead to the world: “Excitability is now the foremost duty of all citizens,” Sloterdijk writes. Excitability is a kind of currency in an all-too drab, workaday world, beset with worries about crippling student debt, mortgage payments or rent, low wages, and unstable jobs. Charismatic space capitalists promise to break the monotony of this terrestrial life and feed the desire for excitement and the duty of excitability.

Do you think space capitalism is actually viable in the long-term? Is the market really there?

The annual launch market is still relatively small in the wider scheme of global capitalism. One estimate suggests that companies like ULA, SpaceX, Arianespace and others generated $8 billion in revenues in 2018 - a paltry figure when we recall that the global home decor market, to take one somewhat pedestrian example, was valued at a whopping $660 billion last year. Space capitalists are still small fry. When analyzing novel social phenomena, it’s always worthwhile bearing the current scale of such phenomena in mind to avoid aggrandizing them groundlessly.

Peter Diamandis, the chairman of the X Prize Foundation, has said that “there are twenty-trillion-dollar checks up there, waiting to be cashed.” He was talking about the promises of near-Earth asteroid mining. At present, all of this is quite far-fetched. (His own X Prize Foundation had to cancel the 2007-2008 Google Lunar X Prize, which challenged private teams to land on the moon and transmit HD video back to Earth, because there were no viable projects.) There is a huge amount of hot air in the private space enterprise - this is the downside of our culture of excitability: People get terribly excited about the slightest sign of novelty.

When speaking of viability, one aspect that gets underplayed are the significant ecological effects of launching into space. For instance, SpaceX is developing the idea of Earth-to-Earth space flight, which might entail moving passengers from any point on Earth to any other point within, say, half an hour. What would be the ecological consequences of burning tremendous amounts of rocket fuel to escape Earth’s gravity well, just so that a London-based billionaire could get to Sydney in 30 minutes? There is something perverse about the idea that all the rest of us are being enjoined to cut back on flying, even as Musk and his cronies tinker away to make life easy for the hyper-rich.

Of course, this would be just one more step in a general tendency under capitalism that the geographer David Harvey calls time-space compression: The speed at which capital circulates increases and along with it life also accelerates. Both space and time are compressed by new technologies. One unfortunate consequence of Earth-to-Earth space flight, if it is ever realized, would be its damaging effects on our already CO2-saturated atmosphere. But perhaps more worrying, according to some rocket engineers, is the trail of soot and alumina left in the wake of rockets that could accumulate in the stratosphere and deplete our fragile ozone layer. The United Nations’ 2018 Quadrennial Global Ozone Assessment is the first annual UN report to take this threat seriously. Ironically, as Musk dreams of shuttling humans off Earth to Mars as a species-preserving measure, he could be co-responsible for accelerating the very destruction of Earth that he purportedly fears.

In a radically decarbonized future, heavy caps on emissions might be enough to shutter the space industry - or at least seriously rein it in. This might not be a bad thing, because as a report from the non-profit Aerospace Corporation recently noted, emissions from rockets “inherently impact the stratosphere in a way that no other industrial activity does.” Reaching space on a grand scale might entail tearing open and ripping apart our own atmosphere in the process. This is why we may need to rethink our future in space—perhaps even holding off from launching too many rockets into space—precisely in order to preserve life here on Earth.

The Science of Prayer

Do intercessory prayers work? Medical science has taken an interest in the power of prayer. One approach is to assign patients randomly to a control group that is to remain in an “unprayed” state; another randomly assigned group of patients then receives intercessory prayers over a set period of time by persons who sign on to pray for them. Unsurprisingly, most studies using this randomized controlled trial (RCT) method show no healing effects of prayer—I say “unsurprisingly” because this result cannot come as news to those with a modicum of knowledge of Christian thought and theology.

First, we cannot ever be sure that the supposed control group remains, as it were, unprayed for. Who knows whether someone isn’t praying for them in secret? Friends and family members may continue to pray for them, regardless of scientific protocols. The prayer group may not be able to control their prayers in the surgically precise manner laid down by the experimenters. In addition, there may also be an element of unknowing or unwitting prayer: Behind such studies lies the rather naïve, sterile assumption that prayer is a kind of “Dear God” epistle that we set down to write in our innermost mind, when in fact prayer can be near-automatic and more integrated with our lives: When I am saddened by the news that my friend has fallen ill, this emotional response is itself a kind of prayer; my emotional state is a call for help. The heartbreak we feel upon sensing the plight of our neighbor is in a certain sense a kind of prayer, a plea that things might be set right. These studies fail to acknowledge the corporeal and quotidian nature of prayer: Life lived right is one long prayer.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, there is a strange hubris at the core of scientific prayer studies. “The arrogance that would make God an object and impose our laboratory conditions upon him is incapable of finding him,” Pope Benedict argues in Jesus of Nazareth. For who are we to play empiricist tricks with God? Einstein once quipped that “God doesn’t play dice,” to which Niels Bohr provided the perfect reply: “Who are you to tell God what to do with his dice?” There is room for a similar response to these studies. If God is omniscient, capable of knowing all things, he would certainly be able to see through schemes and stratagems like randomly-controlled trials, whose aim, it would seem, is to pin down his real existence and test his efficacy. But how could we mere mortals issue commands to God? When the Devil tempts Jesus to prove God’s saving powers, his reply is simply, “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” The Christian view is that we must put our trust in the Lord, but we cannot therefore throw ourselves off the top of a building and expect his saving grace to swoop in and keep us from hitting the ground, because that would be akin to issuing an order to God—exploiting his omnibenevolence, and therefore disrupting the rightly-ordered relationship between creator and creature.

What these studies also neglect is that what we hold to be good does not always coincide with the good that God wills. We may fervently desire good health and long life. But the Christian life means resigning oneself to the idea that one does not always get what one wants. The Cross, that “terrible cross,” as Robert Barron puts it, teaches that through suffering, the good may also be brought about, hard as that may be to stomach.

Furthermore, there is an axiomatic assumption at the core of such studies that is deeply inimical to the Christian worldview, namely the idea that God is somehow absent from the “scientific” treatment of medical ills. Medical science is the work of human beings, these studies suggest, while prayer is a kind of afterthought, a distinct appeal to God. But whatever this is, it is not the Biblical view of the world. Hegel’s notion of Spirit marching through history, racking up all manner of scientific and technological breakthroughs along the way—from the discovery of hygiene to penicillin and modern cancer treatments—could be read in an overtly Christian-theological manner, showing that God is already working to help us by way of (supposedly secular) scientific interventions. A competent surgeon who removes a cancerous tumor or a lab researcher on the cusp of discovering a new drug are both examples of a divine power working through them to bring about the good on Earth. “Now we have this treasure in clay jars, so that this extraordinary power may be from God and not from us,” Paul tells us (2 Cor. 4:7). Secular scientists can be instruments of God, whether they like it or not, like “clay jars” freighting the divine life into the world.

Christianity is not anti-empirical or anti-science. The Gospel of John emphasizes that Christ has a deep respect for the innate human desire for empirical knowledge and sensate proof: Our reason makes us creatures enamored with ratiocination. This is why the resurrected Christ allows Thomas to view and touch his wounds: “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side” (John 20: 27). If God made us in his own image, this means that he equipped us with a certain basic empiricist orientation to the world around us—and he respects this human predilection. But it is more pleasing to him that we trust in him: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29).

Finally, prayers do not stack up like quantitatively additive interventions. More prayer does not necessarily make for better prayer. (And more medical treatment is not always better than less treatment: Combining prescription drugs can do more harm than good.) To think that two prayers are twice as powerful as one prayer, or that two hundred praying persons are two hundred times more powerful than one person’s prayers, runs counter to the notion that prayers are only ever supplications to the One who wields authority (ἐξουσία). To think in these former terms is to move away from religion and into the realm of magic: If two of my prayers are automatically better than one of them, then I have become a sorcerer, capable of controlling God himself. As noted above, this approach is antithetical to Christian thought.

We have, however, been given good reason to believe that the divine standing of the one who prays plays some role in the efficacy of prayer: “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much” (James 5:16). But scientific trials cannot as a matter of principle take such differences into account—how could they? We mere creatures cannot guess the true will of the creator. It is only for him to decide whether a person is righteous or not—or whether a prayer will be heard.

The proper course of action in the Christian life is to believe without seeing. This is what is called faith—real faith. As the Incredulity of Thomas in the Gospel of John shows, only authentic faith is truly pleasing to God, even though he sometimes meets us midway, given our all-too-human longing for empirical evidence. But randomized controlled trials will never give rise to real belief. God is unlikely to allow us to pin him down quite so easily. The one who prays without second-guessing the Almighty, prays best.

Capital's Necessary Surplus Populations

We seem to live in a new machine age, a world in which automation, artificial intelligence, algorithms, and the “robotization” of the economy are causing machines to gradually displace human laborers. Where will those millions of menial workers go after our economies have been thoroughly digitized, more completely embedded in what Benjamin Bratton (2015) terms “the Stack,” that is, a planetary-wide matrix of computing power? But just as we begin to think about this terrifying prospect, Marx is already there, waiting for us, as Foucault once said of Hegel, ready to puncture the notion of total capitalist mechanization. Marx is ready to stop us in our tracks, when he writes in Capital concerning the limits to how machines replace human labor. In some particularly advanced industrialized countries, Marx writes, machines are adopted on a sufficiently large scale that they end up “creat[ing] such a superfluity of labour” that wages end up depreciating by the traditional laws of supply and demand. But when machines replace human hands and minds, wages are lowered to such an extent that it no longer becomes profitable for capitalists to replace human labor with machines; it would be more inexpensive to pay for wage-labor than to invest in automation (Marx 1976: 516). Thus, by their very actions—introducing machinery that cheapens labor below the price of those very machines—capitalists tend to generate social circumstances that undermine those selfsame actions: Machines undermine the adoption of machines by way of a social mechanism – the wage. In fact, this might be the central methodological thrust of Marx’s Capital: All things turn into their own opposite.

In Marx’s account, the consequences of this relationship between machine power and human labor are viscerally jarring. Even where machines could reasonably be used to replace raw labor-power, including in unpleasant menial work, the abundance and resultant cheapness of labor prevents the adoption of even relatively simple technology. “Before the Iabour of women and children under 10 years old was forbidden in mines,” Marx (1976: 516) writes, “the capitalists considered the employment of naked women and girls, often in company with men, so far sanctioned by their moral code…that it was only after the passing of the [Factory] Act that they had recourse to machinery.” Marx remarks scathingly that machines for breaking stones had been invented in the United States but had not been employed in England “because the ‘wretch’ who does this work gets paid for such a small portion of his labour that machinery would increase the cost of production to the capitalist” (Marx 1976: 517). In some places, instead of horses, women are employed “hauling barges,” because the capitalist can accurately calculate the costs of employing horses and machines, while the cost of keeping “the women of the surplus population is beneath all calculation” (Marx 1976: 517). In other words, cheap and docile human laborers are preferred to machines, at least in so far as they remain docile and (consequently) cheaper than machines.

The fact that these conditions no longer typically obtain in the Western world does not mean that capitalism has somehow transcended this mechanism. Rather, it suggests the enormously important role of spatial dislocation and what later Marxists termed “uneven development.” The naked, hysterical “wretches” of the Global North no longer toil in physically grueling, gruesome circumstances—they are more likely to be warehoused in a psychiatric ward or jailhouse, or work in a call center at the bottom of the “service” sector—but that is largely because capitalism has transported these forms of production elsewhere. The Norwegian writer Kjartan Fløgstad has pointed out that the industrial working class is still very much with us, contra those who have proclaimed a postindustrial age; only they are not here, they are there, out of sight of Western eyes—but one wonders if this does not “misunderestimate” the real presence of working bodies even in the capitalist core. Is not the deadening monotony of an Amazon warehouse worker, such as the English journalist James Bloodworth has studied, proof that we are still caught up in a world of proletarian labor, even in the seemingly sanitized North? Behind every smart algorithm stands a sweating, laboring body. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

This incisive analysis of the relationship between machines, wages, and human labor is typical of Marx’s method in Capital. It combines structural insights with a clear moral argument. Marx’s prophetic rage and his anger at deplorable working conditions are fueled by a moral vision about the nature of (in)justice. It is part of the general insanity of capitalism, Marx suggests, that it would prefer to work human beings to indignity, exhaustion, near-death, or even to the very end of life’s tether, rather than employ the ingenious fruits of the human mind—various labor-saving technologies—because of structural conditions that obtain under the capitalist process of production. To make this argument, of course, requires that Marx mobilizes a series of implicit moral axioms, such as the valuation of human life for its own sake and the ethical obligation to uphold human dignity. Far from being the cold, calculating menace that his detractors have sometimes made him out to be, Marx is a deeply ethical writer.

Nowhere is this more clearly on display, arguably, than in the sections of Capital that deal directly with what Marx terms surplus populations: 

[I]t is capitalist accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces indeed in direct relation with its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant working population, i.e. a population which is superfluous to capital's average requirements for its own valorization, and is therefore a surplus population. (Marx 1976: 782) 

Surplus populations are those groups in society that are not necessary to capital as it seeks to multiply itself. The figure of the surplus population hovers over nearly all of Capital, but it is in the latter stages of the first volume, in chapter twenty-five, that Marx fleshes out the term more comprehensively. But as some Marxist observers have noted, the notion of surplus populations in some ways lies much deeper in the conceptual underpinnings of Capital. Indeed, as Benanav and Clegg (2014) point out, surplus populations penetrate to the very core of Marx’s understanding of what it means to be a proletarian, this most crucial figure in Marxist political theory.

Typically, the figure of the proletarian has been understood as a person who must sell their wage-labor in order to survive: an individual who can find ways of earning a living other than through wage-labor is no longer, sensu stricto, a proletarian, so the story goes. This is the hard lesson learned by the unfortunate English capitalist described by Marx in the closing chapters of Capital, Mr. Peel, who who travels to the Swan River district of Australia with his capital (with “means of subsistence and production to the amount of £50,000” [Marx 1976: 932-933]) as well as three thousand workers (“working class men, women, and children”), only to discover upon arrival that most of his workers are able to survive off the abundance of the land they found readily on hand. Simply put, Mr. Peel’s workers discover that they no longer need him, thereby exploding their membership in the very category of the proletarian: “Unhappy Mr Peel, who provided for everything except the export of English relations of production to Swan River!” writes Marx (1976: 933). Why labor in exchange for wages to sustain life if life can be sustained through independent work on bountiful land? The men, women, and children of Marx’s story were proletarians by dint of sheer necessity; now that the conditions of necessity no longer obtain, they cease to be proletarians. But notice how this also causes Mr. Peel to cease to be a capitalist: without wage-laboring proletarians, no capitalist. The force of existential insecurity as the condition sine qua non for membership in the category of the proletarian also sustains the capitalist; once this existential insecurity is removed, the whole house of cards that is “English relations of production,” as Marx terms nineteenth-century Mancunian industrial capitalism, comes tumbling down.

To be a proletarian would seem to mean being beholden to the needs of the capitalist. A proletarian is one who is unfree, fettered to the imperative of selling labor-power in exchange for the only means of subsistence available, namely wages.But a close reading of Marx’s definition reveals that this understanding of the term is not entirely accurate. Interestingly, already at the level of definition, the proletarian figure is in some sense “always already” superfluous to the needs of capital. This is what makes Capital such an astonishing work: It’s dialectic all the way down, so to speak. Peel back the onion layers of the dense writing, and where one might expect to find a beating, pulsating heart, instead one finds contradiction, and yet more contradiction. There is no core; there is only a kind of undecided quantum state of negation heaped upon negation. Thus Marx (1976: 764n1) writes: 

‘Proletarian’ must be understood to mean, economically speaking, nothing other than ‘wage-labourer’, the man who produces and valorizes ‘capital’, and is thrown onto the street as soon as he becomes superfluous to the need for valorization possessed by ‘Monsieur Capital’, as Pecquer calls this person.

Because superfluity of labor is built into the very rhythms of capitalist accumulation, it follows that the proletarian is not just someone who is potentially “thrown onto the street as soon as he becomes superfluous,” but someone who is actually subjected to this treatment. If we accept the premise that superfluity is an integral part of the mechanism of capital accumulation, the figure of the proletarian, on the one hand, and the mass of surplus populations, on the other, are really interchangeable terms. The proletarian is a surplus population only waiting to be actualized. “The working population therefore produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous,” writes Marx (1976: 783), “and it does this to an extent which is always increasing.” The proletarian who works diligently at their assembly line is not merely producing another commodity, and not just value, but also their very non-being—their nihilation. Strangely, this means that superfluity, which would seem to be an excess to a necessary kernel or core, is in fact brought back into the very core and integrated into it. This surely violates our common-sense notion of what an excess even constitutes: to be an excess is precisely to be outside an interiority. But here we are dealing with a very strange sort of excess, one that is integral to the whole: It is both beyond and within. The proletarian, then, is the schizoid subject par excellence, the one who produces all of value, and therefore carries the entire social pyramid upon their shoulders—for where would the whole world of glittering commodities be without the toil of the proletarian?—but simultaneously produces the condition of their own undoing. The proletarian makes commodities and unmakes their categorial belonging. The proletarian produces goods for exchange and use, but also produces their own non-being. This is what Marx means by the industrial reserve army. But it is a reserve that is itself integral to the army and so stands in a strangely paradoxical, tense relationship with the social whole. To understand surplus populations, it is crucial to recognize that as soon as we take up wage-labor, which means as soon as we begin to receive wages, we are also enlisting in the ranks of an industrial reserve army. We are all reservists in the wars of capital.

References

Benanay, A. and Clegg, J. (2014) Misery and debt. In: Contemporary Marxist Theory: An Anthology. London: Bloomsbury.

Bratton, B. (2015) The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Marx, K. (1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Volume One). London: Penguin.

Afterlife Theodicy and the Problem of Evil

One of the most attractive theological solutions to the problem of evil is what has been termed afterlife theodicy, revolving around the extreme disjunction we may presume to exist between the scale and scope of suffering on Earth and the scale and scope of joy in Heaven. By ‘scale’ I mean the quantity of suffering and joy, respectively, and by ‘scope’ I mean the quality and duration of suffering and joy. The problem of evil withers away once we frame earthly evils, plentiful as they may appear, within their proper context of a potentially limitless, eternal bliss in Heaven. Thus, I do not mind the momentary pain of the dentist’s drill when I know that it will rid me of the toothache that has been plaguing me for weeks. More to it, I do not mind very much the toil of an eight-hour working day on Friday morning when I know that a two-day weekend is right around the corner.

Now multiply this disjunction between suffering and rewards up by an infinite degree; of course, we cannot fully perform this mental operation, perhaps not even adequately, given our limited capacity for imagining infinity, properly speaking, but we should by an act of concentrated imagination try to see before our mind’s eye what eternal joy would look like. Would I be willing to suffer a day’s worth of excruciating (ex cruce, ‘from the cross’) pain if I knew that a three-month summer vacation were waiting for me at the end of it? How about an hour’s pain and a six-month stretch of time to do with as I please – spending time with loved ones, reading, writing, traveling? Or just one minute of pain and a year’s vacation? A second of pain – and a decade of holidays? Multiply up the joy by an infinite degree, and divide the pain infinitely, too, and you will have arrived at the radical disconnection between earthly suffering and heavenly joy made available to us by God, according to the Christian worldview.

In this light, the problem of evil appears in its proper dimensions as something of a non-problem, practically speaking, a sort of optical illusion, a deceptive sleight of hand forced upon us by sensuous earthly reality and our corporeal state of being. We are embodied creatures—sentient, sensate, and suffering—and so perceive most readily the pain of our own bodies. As embodied creatures, we can only with great effort, and perhaps not even then, force ourselves to contemplate the possibility of eternal bliss (but we cannot really feel it). But if the disjunction between earth-bound suffering and heaven-sent joy is greater than that difference that obtains between a grain of sand and the vast expanse of the Sahara desert, we should, by an act of the intellect and will, force ourselves to ignore present pains and focus ourselves squarely on the possibility of our participation in Heaven’s joy. The so-called problem of evil only appears to us as a problem because we have not fully appreciated what possibilities lies in wait for us in the Kingdom of Heaven. 

Now, some thinkers do not accept this line of reasoning. The philosopher Stephen Maitzen calls this account the “Heaven Swamps Everything” theodicy (2009: 122), which is not a bad turn of phrase; but he thinks it fails to stand up to scrutiny because he believes it conflates justification and compensation. How can even a very large compensation for a relatively minor wrong meaningfully justify this wrong? It cannot, Maitzen thinks, and so the theodicy collapses. God’s allowing for evil on Earth is not justified by Heaven’s bliss; rather, the sufferings of Earth are compensated for by the joys of Heaven. But compensation implies an offense, and an offense an offender; thus, under the “Heaven Swamps Everything” theodicy, God appears to us as an offender willing to redress the injuries he has imposed on us. He is not justified, and so this account is not, sensu stricto, a theodicy in Leibniz’s terms (from Theos, “God,” and dike, “justice”). “Even if heaven swamps everything, it doesn’t thereby justify everything,” Maitzen (2009: 123) writes.

But this way of framing things falls down in its failure to apprehend what eternal bliss really entails in all its vastness: its true enormity. Our measure of things remains narrow and earthly. To be terrestrial is to be pedestrian. But Heaven is anything but pedestrian. Notions of justification, of balancing the scales, are so entirely bound up in this terrestrial realm: Who can say whether we will not feel that everything was worth it, yes, was in fact justified, by a very great reward in the end? In fact, we may not need to engage in complex mental acrobatics to see this. A woman suffering through childbirth may feel that this pain is worthwhile in light of the joy of having a child. But it is surely strange to call this child a kind of “compensation” for the trauma of birth – this word has too cool and commercial a ring to it. Why, precisely, can we not say that the pain of childbirth is “justified” by the child, when just is that which we can live with? Justice is a settlement, a settling-in, a coming-to-peace: in short, a (Hegelian) reconciliation. To justify God is to reconcile oneself with the world as it has been revealed to us by Him. The mother accepts the trauma of childbirth in the retroactive light of the joy of having the child. Similarly, Heaven’s community of saints may be able to live with the knowledge of their past sufferings in light of eternal bliss, precisely because eternity’s weightiness is capable of tipping even the heaviest of scales: eternity is a machine that fuels reconciliation; it makes the limited suffering of earthly life appear like a pinprick prior to an endless feast. 

To those who think that this introduces an intolerable subjective dimension to notions of justice, one might respond by showing that one part of the problem of justice lies precisely in its ability to make itself acceptable to our minds. In the Anonymous Sayings of the Desert Fathers, we learn of one elder [γέρων], Abraham, who recognized the validity of the afterlife theodicy in his own monastic practice: 

“The brothers begged one of the elders to refrain from his excessive labour. He answered them: “I am telling you, children, Abraham is going to be sorry that he did not strive harder when he sees the great gifts of God.” 

[Τινὰ τῶν γερόντων παρεκάλουν οἱ δελφοὶ παύσασθαι τῶν μεγάλων πόνων. Ὁ δὲ πεκρίθη αὐτοῖς· Λέγω ὑμῖν, τέκνα, ὅτι Ἀβραὰμ ἔχει μετανοῆσαι ὁρῶν τὰς δωρεὰς τοῦ Θεοῦ τὰς μεγάλας, διότι μὴ πλέον ἠγωνίσατο. (Wortley 2013, N.197)]

The original word that has been translated as “strive harder” here is a conjugated form of the verb αγωνιζομαι (agōnizomai), meaning, inter alia, to “enter a contest” (NAS New Testament Greek Lexicon); it is related to the word agonize in English and ἀγών (agōn) in Greek, which means “contest” or “competition.” If we read the Desert Father in light of this etymological connection, can we not view this terrestrial life as an agonizing contest whose potentially limitless prize at the end finally redeems the race? This was the apostle Paul’s view. As he writes, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Tim 4:7). The original Greek is instructive here: “τὸν καλὸν ἀγῶνα ἠγώνισμαι,” or “The good competition has been competed in,” translated more literally. If Paul has competed well, he can expect the sportsman’s “crown of righteousness” (ὁ τῆς δικαιοσύνης στέφανος) (2 Tim 4:8), a reference to the laurel wreaths bestowed upon victorious Olympic contestants.

The theodical project risks placing us in an overly juridical frame, suggesting that the proper logic is that of the courtroom trial rather than the heroic contest. Life is not a legal trial but a kind of game that demands good sportsmanship. And the prize is not so much a (juridico-commercial) restitutionary compensation but a freely given prize or gift, which cancels all suffering by its very magnitude. This must remain obscure in so far as one apprehends these issues legalistically, without an appreciation of how this gift is given lovingly: God is not an insurance agent but a loving parent. And it is in this light that the Desert Father’s words bear repeating: “I am telling you children, Abraham is going to be sorry he did not strive harder when he sees the great gifts of God.” It is we who must justify ourselves in the face of these “great gifts,” not God who must justify himself in the light of earthly suffering. In this sense, a proper afterlife theodicy approaches a kind of anthropodicy: a justification of earthly life in the life that lies beyond this realm.

The problem of evil depends for its subjectively felt efficacy on a distortion of scale. We misapprehend present sufferings to the degree that we fail to measure them in view of a state of eternal bliss. In the light of this everlasting joy, earthly suffering shrivels up into near-nothingness or next-to-nothingness. It is the recalibration of our distorted apprehension of the scale and scope of suffering that brings God’s goodness back into its properly excessive, superabundant form.

References

Maitzen, S. (2009) Ordinary morality implies atheism. European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 2, 107-126. 

Wortley, J. (ed.) (2013) The Anonymous Sayings of the Desert Fathers: A Select Edition and Complete English Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.