The fetish of global competition

Introduction

After the prolonged triumph of free-market dogma, reinforced by the end of the Cold War, the awareness that markets require regulation has gained considerable currency, especially since the start of the post-2007 crisis. In this context, the field of comparative capitalisms (CC) studies provides an interesting analytical framework that illuminates the role of non-market relations in the economy. Taking the embeddedness of the market seriously, this approach highlights the differences between institutional arrangements in different countries and the complex interaction between the economy and non-market institutions, which neoclassical economics tends to ignore. However, studies drawing on this framework and more conceptual approaches interested in establishing increasingly sophisticated typologies fail to provide insights into more general features of capitalism (cf. Coates 2000: 142; Bruff 2011). They do not provide a comprehensive understanding of either the underlying social foundation of capitalism or the power structures that characterise capitalism independently of its institutional configurations (see also the papers by Bieling and Gallas in this special issue).

Furthermore, CC studies tend to focus exclusively on national institutional arrangements, leaving them unable to identify regulatory changes that cut across national spaces, as a number of scholars have pointed out (Brenner et al. 2010). As a consequence, CC studies tend to underestimate the global convergence trend. I agree with this criticism, but also insist on the importance of diversity as a key characteristic of globalisation. What is needed is a theoretical framework that makes it possible to understand the simultaneity of convergence and diversity as a core characteristic of capitalist markets organised through the principle of competition. I suggest a turning back to the notion of fetishism as developed by Karl Marx’s labour theory of value and Evgeny Pashukanis’s general theory of law. Critical scholars, especially those in the tradition of regulation theory, have thrown out the baby with the bathwater when abandoning this part of Marxist theory. ¹ Only some modifications are required in order to avoid the pitfalls of this account of capitalism, as I will highlight. The last section of the paper outlines a number of questions that such a perspective poses, paving the way for a new research programme.

What global competitiveness?

CC scholarship has provided major insights into the diversity of market regulations, and different sub-currents within the broader field of research have become firmly established (see Amable & Petit 2001; Howell 2003). What unifies them is their refusal to privilege one set of regulations over the others. This constitutes a break with the modernist account of progress that understands differences as different development stages, all of which are seen in relation to one final goal. By contrast, CC researchers stress that in each country these institutions are differently developed and interrelated. Accordingly, they warn against the notion of a single best way to organise the economy. The key factor that determines growth and profitability is rather the quality of institutions and policies (Soskice 1999: 110; Höpner 2005).

However, there is less consensus among CC scholars on the particular institutions or mechanisms that are likely to increase aggregate performance and the role of coherence in this context (see Ernst 2002: 2; on coherence, see Kenworthy 2006). For example, as is well known, the varieties of capitalism (VoC) account often draws conclusions that differ from those informed by a broader CC approach (cf. Drahokoupil & Myant 2013). However, the majority of CC studies emphasise the importance of comparative advantages and provide suggestions of how to optimally exploit ‘the benefits from complementarity’ (Aoki 2001: 8, see also Porter 1990). Notably Hall and Soskice (2001: 36–44) underline the role of relative comparative institutional advantages when they argue that global competitiveness, especially that of high-income countries, depends on finding the right niche in the global economy. Specialisation makes it possible to exploit the strength of a country’s set of institutions in the context of an increasingly complex global division of labour. In this context, they notably assign organised labour an important role in increasing the competiveness of coordinated market economies by advancing incremental innovation (2001: 39).

The VoC notion of relative comparative advantages draws heavily on David Ricardo’s political economy. Ricardo (1951 [1821]), further developing Adam Smith’s free trade agenda, proposed that even countries with no absolute advantage due to high production costs benefit from global free trade as long as they focus on their comparative advantage. By emphasising the institutional dimension that underpins competitiveness, CC studies also integrate important insights by Friedrich List (1909 [1841]: 206), who criticised a Smithian labour theory of value for reducing productivity to the ‘bodily labour as the cause of wealth’ (1909: 113). However, only the sub-current of CC studies which draws on economic sociology develops a notion of productive power that comes close to the plethora of elements that List considered as sources of productivity, ranging from Christian religion and monogamy to the invention of printing, of money, weights and measures, of the calendar, and of watches (1909). As such, despite the aforementioned differences, CC accounts share a strong free-trade orientation.

This preference for a free-trade agenda is, perhaps unsurprisingly, accompanied by the lack of a thorough analysis of power relations. Matthew Watson (2003: 14) rightly argues that the very idea of international advantage, be it a competitive or a comparative one, disguises the fact that not everybody within the same national economy will benefit equally from the wealth produced. Some CC scholars have endeavoured to overcome this shortcoming (cf. Jackson & Deeg 2006: 8). Bruno Amable (2003: 7–11), for instance, suggests relating institutional choices not only to ‘political-economic equilibrium’ but also to the preferences of the ‘dominant social bloc’. However, Amable tends to affiliate dominance and power with the political sphere, while the market and its equilibrium are portrayed as power-neutral. In contrast, I outline below how a historical materialist account of capitalism makes it possible to understand the relationship between power and competition in capitalist societies.

A historical materialist account of competition

A historical materialist (HM) perspective provides a very different account of capitalism than that studied in CC. First, it enables us to unbundle key CC concepts such as firms, production regimes, industrial relations and ownership. It deconstructs the unities used by CC scholars in more general terms by pointing out some major characteristics held in common by all capitalist societies, and which the CC perspective simply ignores (see also Jessop, Hardy, Weiss and Gough in this special issue). At the core of a HM account of capitalism is a double dependency. Due to a separation from owning the means of production, workers depend on finding work in order to ensure their livelihood (Harvey 2010: 98). At the same time, capitalists depend on the labouring power of the workers to produce the goods they sell on the market. This double dependency is a source of major tensions and conflicts, for the discrepancy in ownership clearly privileges the owners of production and facilitates the extraction of surplus value. However, the level of surplus value extracted depends on the state of the class struggle in the given society.

Second, a HM account is also better equipped to explain changes and crisis than the static account of capitalism in CC studies, which understands changes as the result of an exogenous shock. By contrast, a HM perspective understands capitalism as always crisis-prone, haunted regularly by over–production – which in turn reduces the capitalists’ capacity to realise the value of their commodities. Third, a HM account provides a different understanding of internationalisation and thus helps to overcome another shortcoming of CC studies, identified by Neil Brenner and others (2010: 188) as the difficulty of deciphering ‘processes of market-disciplinary regulatory change that crosscut (and interconnect) national regulatory systems’.

This regulatory change is at the heart of the ‘new constitutionalism’ literature. Notably Stephen Gill (2003: 168) has highlighted the role of the ‘transnational fraction of the capitalist classes of the world’ in establishing global competition regulation. He points out how the ‘disciplinary neoliberalism’ institutionalised by the World Trade Organisation and other free trade agreements aggravates international competition in the interests of this class fraction and to the detriment of the old constitutionalism that was part of a Fordist social compromise (for the EU, see Buch-Hansen & Wigger 2011). This approach stands in stark contrast to CC studies, and dismantles the Holy Grail offered by a liberal account of capitalism, according to which competition benefits everyone in society. However, it focuses predominantly on elites lobbying for the establishment of European or international competition regulations, and does not provide the full picture of the enabling conditions of this change. The fact that the new regulations are in the interest of these class fractions does not necessarily imply that they are able to impose them on society. Consequently, these studies tend to understand global competition regulations as a device in the hand of a powerful elite. As I will show, they fail to develop an understanding of competition as a social relation and, in consequence, overestimate the convergence trend.

Below I develop an analytical framework that highlights the social foundations of global competition and the complex relationship between convergence and differentiation. This framework suggests integrating Marx’s labour theory of value and Pashukanis’s general theory of law into a critical account of globalisation, which makes it possible to account for the ‘constitutive outside’ (Jessop 2008: 11) of competition and therefore the dependency of capital on a broader societal environment. This perspective raises a number of new research questions and also has implications for social struggles.

The fetishisation of commodity

At the core of Marx’s study is the transformation of the products of labour through market exchange, which turns the product into a commodity that is exchangeable with any other commodities and the labour of private commodity producers into social labour. Isaac Rubin, privileging a sociological reading of Marx, suggests understanding this process as a key mode of socialisation in capitalist societies (Rubin 1972 [1928]: 127–30). This mode is characteristic of a society in which the means of production are privately owned and the products are redistributed through market exchange. Competition and equalisation is key in this context, for the transformation of the products into commodities puts them on an equal footing so that they become exchangeable with any other product. In consequence, individual labour expended upon the product becomes abstract labour with an impersonal character. This process of dissociation abstracts from the commodities’ use value, their individual conditions of production, and the individual labour expended on them (Marx 1887: 85). Marx calls this transformation the ‘mystical character’ (Marx 2007 [1867]: 46) or the fetishism of the commodity: the product is exchanged, and the social relations between the producers gain ‘the fantastic form of a relation between things’ (2007: 47), disguising the fact that they are all products of living labour. Hence, it is through fetishisation that products of individual producers become exchangeable in a market organised through competition. The fetishism of commodities is not a simple fiction but a social process of dissociation that makes it possible to displace something from its original context into another setting. Through the exchange the social division of labour is realised, while at the same time the community with its individual commodity producers becomes invisible. The fetishisation thus stands for the simultaneity of presence and absence of the relationships among people.

Marx outlines how money takes the function of a generalised equivalent in which all commodities can represent their (exchange) value and thus their relation to each other within a common framework. The dissociation masking the condition of production of the commodities makes it possible to describe the value of commodities as if it were merely the result of the market and thus of a specific supply-and-demand ratio. Only appearing to be independent of their context of production after the transformation, the commodities are nevertheless interconnected through this very context. It is this interconnectedness which establishes value. Marx (2008 [1935]: 31) argues that ‘the value of one commodity is to the value of another commodity as the quantity of labour fixed in the one is to the quantity of labour fixed in the other’. The quantity of labour should not be understood as the quantity of labour expended upon an individual product. It is rather the result of equalisation processes which establish that social labour is the quantity of labour socially necessary for the production of a commodity in a ‘given state of society, under certain social average conditions of production, with a given social average intensity, and average skill of the labour employed’ (2008: 33).

Along these lines, Rubin (1972 [1928]: 127) identifies different dimensions of equalisation. First, the equalisation process sets products of a given kind and quality, but produced in different labour and technical conditions, on an equal footing. A second equalisation process is related to the qualifications of labour that differ with regard to their levels, i.e. the type and the length of training. Rubin insists in his analysis that these equalisations are realised through the everyday acts of market exchange, and they are therefore described as more or less unconscious processes (1972: 125, 148). I will return to this point later.

The endless circuit of capital

In capitalist societies, commodities enter into an endless circuit of exchange. This exchange is no longer restricted to the satisfaction of wants through selling in order to buy, meaning that use value is its end and aim. Simple circulation ends with consumption, Marx argues. By contrast, capitalism is characterised by an endless circuit in which money is used to produce commodities with the sole aim of making money:

Value therefore now becomes value in process, money in process, and, as such, capital. It comes out of circulation, enters into it again, preserves and multiplies itself within its circuit, comes back out of it with expanded bulk, and begins the same round ever afresh. (Marx 1887: 106)

The circuit of capital therefore has no limits and has become an end in itself. This process reinforces the transformation of a product into a commodity where only its exchange value counts, abstracting from its use value. C(commodity)-M(oney)-C(commoditiy) thus becomes M-C-M or, more precisely, M-C-M’(surplus). Money seems to create money. Accordingly, Michel Aglietta (2000 [1979]) describes money as being at the beginning and the end of the valorisation process. The continuing expansion of value underpins the constantly renewed movement of capital, its incessant search for profit-making. Capital can therefore be understood as a ‘social relation of appropriation’ (2000: 46). Changes in the technological process, the labour process and the development of the productive power of labour play a major role in this constant search for surplus value. The empirical CC studies often provide interesting insights into these processes and their interrelatedness. However, as outlined in my paper with Ian Bruff in this special issue, they shy away from a deep engagement with the underlying dynamic of these processes and its crisis-prone nature. The dynamic risks coming to a halt when capital does not see opportunities for profit-making. David Harvey (1982: 192) speaks in this context of a crisis of over-accumulation, i.e. ‘a surplus of capital relative to opportunities to employ that capital’. The recent reluctance of capital to invest, which triggered a liquidity crisis followed by an economic crisis, can be taken as an indicator that this risk has not lost its relevance today. To escape this situation, in the constant search for more surplus value, capital aims at shifting boundaries (Grenzen) that set limits to further exploitation. In this sense, ‘capital is the endless and limitless drive to go beyond its limiting barrier. Every boundary [Grenze] is and has to be a barrier [Schranke] for it’ (Marx 1973 [1857]: 334; see also Lebowitz 2003). There is ultimately no spatial and social fix that can resist this incessant move towards further extension of capital’s scope, as Rubin (1972 [1928]: 144) argues:

When exchange is restricted within national boundaries, abstract labour does not yet exist in its most developed form. The abstract character of labour achieves its completion when international trade connects and unifies all countries, and when the product of national labour loses its specific concrete properties because it is delivered to the world market and equalized with the products of labour of the most varied national industries.

This analytical framework thus highlights a strong drive towards an ever-expanding equalisation and thus convergence process that makes global competition possible. However, the framework requires some modification in order to avoid the risk of reification.

The risk of reification

Marx understands the process of equalisation as a tendency. Split into countless individual actions, the process is characterised by heterogeneity and even contradictions. The complexity of all these movements disappears only when we increase the level of abstraction, rendering visible a pattern ‘that goes on behind the backs of the producers, and, consequently, seems to be fixed by custom’ (Marx 2007 [1867]: 52). As already outlined, social labour is crystallised through this complex equalisation process, and becomes abstract labour (Marx 2008 [1935]: 33). A number of scholars interpret Marx’s labour theory of value as a continuation and completion of the classical labour theory of value, and emphasise the quantitative dimension of abstract labour expressed in the time needed to produce a product (for an overview, see Milios 2009). This focus on the quantitative dimension of labour (time) tends to ignore the framework within which the average is established.

However, the focus on quantification can also be related to an ambiguity in Marx’s analysis that we need to be aware of if we intend to make his framework fruitful for our own purposes. This ambiguity comes to the fore when Marx elaborates on the relation between complex and simple labour. The move towards simple labour is part of the equalisation process by which private labour becomes related to socially necessary labour, and where concrete labour is turned into abstract labour. It is in this context that complex labour becomes simple labour, socially determining the minimum of skill needed to produce a particular product. Marx (1887: 130) also refers to simple labour as unskilled labour, and a number of scholars have interpreted this as an indication that further equalisation makes qualifications redundant (Devine 1989). Such interpretations risk overlooking the fact that Marx introduces the term ‘unskilled’ as an attempt to simplify his theory: ‘We therefore save ourselves a superfluous operation, and simplify our analysis, by the assumption that the labour of the workman employed by the capitalist is unskilled average labour’ (Marx 1887: 135). What he actually has in mind is the equalisation process generating ‘the average labour of a given state of society’ (1887: 130). However, by calling it simple or unskilled labour, he shifts the attention from quality to quantity: ‘Here, we have nothing more to do with the quality, the nature and the specific character of the labour, but merely with its quantity. And this simply requires to be calculated’ (1887: 130; emphasis added).

In consequence, the ‘quantitative’ analysis no longer accounts for the context within which the fiction of equality is established, and risks reifying the dissociation. Such a disregard essentially privileges the viewpoint of capital and loses sight of the fetish character of the equalisation process masking the dependence of capital on the always very specific given state of society. Abstract labour in its most developed form (as Rubin puts it), i.e. that which has overcome all boundaries, will have lost the condition of its existence – the concreteness of its living labour and society. In other words, abstract labour in its most developed form cannot exist: abstraction is thus a movement but not a state of society, which is always concrete. However, fetishism, the ‘violence of abstraction’ as Derek Sayer (1987) calls it, aims to mask this dependence. Critical accounts thus need to ensure that they do not reify this dissociation but instead bring capital’s dependence on its living society to the fore, with a view to challenging this violence (see also Hardy, Gough and Bailey & Shibata in this special issue). Furthermore, they need to better understand the abstraction as a social process. A first step towards such a research programme is an analytical framework that sheds light on the extra-economic dimension of this process.

The role of the extra-economic

In his studies of law in capitalism, Evgeny Pashukanis’s (1978 [1929]) point of departure is Marx’s argument that the exchange of commodities requires consent between the guardians of the commodities, mutually recognising ‘in each the rights of private proprietors’ (Marx 1887: 59). Pashukanis further develops this idea of the juridical relation as a major enabler of market exchange in line with Marx’s labour theory of value. Just as exchange value renders invisible the plurality of use values and the condition of production and the type of qualification, law abstracts from the specific situation and turns it into a legal case, which masks existing ties of mutual dependence and exploitation (Pashukanis 1978 [1929]: 147). As legal subjects, individuals encounter one another under conditions of the necessary fiction of equality and independence. Law thus transforms people into something they are not – equals, regardless of whether they enter into a relation as exchangers of goods or as employers and employees. Law thus becomes a generalised equivalent, comparable to money in economic exchange. Pashukanis emphasises that this abstraction and equalisation process only becomes ‘real’ through judicial procedures and law courts (1978: 43). Hence this process requires a practice related to litigation.

In his theory of the capitalist state, Nicos Poulantzas (2000 [1978]) further developed this approach to the extra-economic dimension of the equalisation process, and the reproduction of capital more generally, by embedding law in the wider context of the state. Influenced by Max Weber, Poulantzas emphasises the relative autonomy of the state and its state apparatuses. This allows him to introduce an important modification to Pashukanis’s framework, because he rejects an understanding of the state as a mere function of capital (2000: 51–2). The reasons for the modern, national-popular state are related as much to class struggles as to the requirements of capital, Poulantzas argues (see also Gallas in this special issue). In line with a feminist critique, we should not reduce the struggles to the capital-labour relation but also take other social struggles into account (Nowak 2011; see also Wöhl in this special issue). Furthermore, and as a result, Poulantzas’s analysis puts more emphasis on social cohesion: law as a ‘centralizing-bureaucratic-hierarchic framework’ is considered vital in realising ‘the unity of the individuals of the people-nation in the very movement by which it forges their individualization’ (Poulantzas 2000 [1978]: 88, 106). The given state of society is thus not simply the result of countless equalisation processes organised through market exchange. Rather, it is also overdetermined by a number of other, extra-economic processes with their own rationalities and dynamics.

This account not only draws our attention to the role of the state in establishing hegemony in capitalist societies; it also highlights its economic role. I suggest that this role of the state be related to the equalisation process which seeks to ensure the exchangeability of the commodities. Furthermore, we need to move beyond the focus on bureaucratic state structures that prevails in Poulantzas’s analysis, with a view to highlighting the economic role of civil society as well. The economic sociology literature has provided some interesting insights in this regard, especially if the texts of which it is comprised are read against their liberal grain. Most notably, they have drawn our attention to the role of weights and measures, calendars and watches, indices and categorisations, in a manner not unlike that of List. For example, Michel Callon (2002: 198) points out how specialists from different academic disciplines have developed a ‘battery of tests, test benches, approved measurement instruments, documents guaranteeing traceability’ which incessantly qualify and re-qualify the commodity. He also refers to this process as ‘economisation’ (Calıskan & Callon 2009: 370). In a similar vein, Wendy Espeland and Mitchell Stevens (2009) call for a sociology of quantification.

I therefore suggest, first, that we understand these processes of quantification and economisation as part of fetishisation. They produce generic equivalents that make goods and services comparable. These standards are a crucial part of the ‘economic imaginary’, to use a term that Bob Jessop and Stijn Oosterlynck (2008) have coined. Second, I propose extending Pashukanis’s notion of juridical recognition. This recognition is no longer limited to the mutual recognition of the guardians of commodities as equal; it also includes the recognition of the commodity itself as exchangeable. The dissociation of the commodity from its original context thus requires recognition. This recognition requirement comes particularly well to the fore with regard to trade in services. Due to their high degree of immateriality, providers and consumers need to establish even more clearly than in the case of goods an intersubjectively shared understanding of what can be exchanged. However, the difference is only a difference in degree, rather then being a fundamental one.

Such an account highlights the economic and extra-economic practices underpinning fetishisation, some of them conscious and others not. The development of standards of equivalence involves the state as much as civil society, hence the integral state in a Gramscian sense. Further developing Poulantzas’s idea of relative autonomy, we can assign these standards-setting processes a certain degree of relative autonomy. This brings a second type of dependence of capital to the fore. Capital not only depends on living labour to extract surplus value, but also requires a process of abstraction creating an economic imaginary. A crucial dimension of this imaginary are chains of equivalence which in turn make products and activities comparable, and hence exchangeable, despite their differences. Capital, its protagonists and market transactions can only partly create this imaginary. This sociological account of the enabling conditions of competition clearly challenges the elite-centred perspective of the ‘new constitutionalism’ studies by bringing the dependence of the elite on a broader social process to the fore. It thus raises a number of new research questions, with which I would like to conclude.

Conclusion: Towards a new research programme

In this contribution, I have argued that a Marxist account of capitalism provides a promising alternative to CC studies. It is better equipped to understand the particularity of power relations in capitalist societies and of the enabling conditions of competition. At the core of this account is the double, though unequal, dependency between capital and labour. Transferred to the global level, we get an idea of the dependence of capital on the ‘geographical fixation of use-value’ (Smith, 2008 [1984]: 202). In the same vein, Doreen Massey (1995) outlines in her seminal study of the spatial division of labour how capital depends on concrete social contexts (see also Gough in this special issue). The empirical analyses of CC studies, read against their liberal grain, provide interesting insights into this concreteness and the way it translates into a plethora of different institutional arrangements. However, only a HM account makes it possible to understand these arrangements as a reflection of the dependence of capital on living labour, and the complexity of subsuming labour under capital. Marx’s labour theory of value points to how this dependency is made invisible in the context of global competition through the process of fetishisation, which dissociates the commodities from their context of production. This process is intrinsically related to a process of equalisation by which the commodities become exchangeable, independent of their use value and concrete context of production. This violence of abstraction is material and imaginary at the same time, and it is a crucial element of power in capitalist societies, in its establishing of the necessary condition of the realisation of value through market exchange.

A HM account also brings the underlying dynamic of capitalism to the fore. The endless circuit of capital is characterised by an incessant search for new opportunities to extract surplus value, so that capitalism has a clear drive towards expansion which turns boundaries into barriers to overcome. Nevertheless, as I have outlined, we should not overestimate the volatility of capital and the convergence trend through global competition. The analytical framework I have developed emphasises the complexity of the endeavour to establish chains of equivalence at the global level, which makes it possible to abstract from the concrete conditions of their production so that commodities become exchangeable. This process of dissociation not only requires the countless acts of market exchange but also complex extra-economic mechanisms of dissociation and equalisation. Drawing on Pashukanis’ formal theory of law, a number of critical scholars highlight the role of international law in this context (Miéville 2005; Cutler 2008). Elsewhere, I have criticised them for not taking the role of litigation sufficiently into account (Hartmann 2011a). However, dispute settlements are vital for realising the equalisation through law, according to Pashukanis. The equalisation process through international law should therefore be examined in the context of what legal scholars call the constitutionalisation of international law with strengthened dispute settlement processes (cf. Howse 2006). Cases in point are the World Trade Organization, with its dispute settlement systems, and the European Union, with its Court of Justice (see Hartmann 2011b). I have shown that in both institutional contexts the equalisation process through litigation is particularly difficult when it comes to trade in services (Hartmann 2013). We can relate this difficulty to the higher degree of immateriality of services that requires a stronger intersubjectively shared understanding of what is exchanged. Accordingly, we should not limit the recognition to the guardians of commodities, as Pashukanis did. It also includes the recognition of the commodity itself as exchangeable: the higher degree of immateriality of the commodity, the more complex the recognition.

In my studies, I have outlined that this recognition requires multiple extra-economic processes aiming to establish chains of equivalence. These processes go far beyond state-bureaucratic organised standard-setting. They are truly social, involving a broad range of academic and professional organisations as well as consumers’ organisations and international organisations. In a plethora of different platforms, these actors abstract from domestic generic equivalents such as quality measures, technical standards and licensing requirements. They turn them into specific ones with a view to integrating them into new generic equivalents, now established at global level. These global standards re-confine what counts as the average conditions of production, with a given social average intensity and average skill of the labour employed, which are needed to produce a particular product. In other words, they redefine what counts as the given state of society which sets the boundaries of the equalisation processes.

I have argued that these complex extra-economic dissociation and equalisation processes can be related to an emerging global civil society comprising inter alia scientific communities, consumer associations and professional associations which possess relative autonomy. Accordingly, a second dependence of capital comes to the fore: its dependence on a complex process of fetishisation that it can only partly organise itself, but that it needs in order to realise the value produced by living labour. Further research is needed in order to understand the enabling conditions of this process of dissociation and equalisation, for it will deepen our understanding of the multiple dependences of capital that we can consider to be the Achilles’ heel of capitalism. This weak point of capitalism, i.e. its dependency on living, concrete societies, is a good point of departure for social struggles which seek to stand up against the incessant search of capital for profit with a view to putting societies and their reproduction on a new footing.