A fraternal solidarity prevails between Marx and the cold, cruel theorists who favor capitalism. For Marx, this is the only enduring solidarity: to the other socialist theorists he was usually more spiteful and intolerant. And so he happily agrees with Adam Smith in the distinction between productive and unproductive labor: and he defends David Ricardo against all his “sentimental opponents”:
“Ricardo, rightly for his time, regards the capitalist mode of production as the most advantageous for production in general, as the most advantageous for the creation of wealth. He wants production for the sake of production and this with good reason. To assert, as the sentimental opponents of Ricardo’s did, that production as such is not the object, is to forget that production for its own sake means nothing but the development of human productive forces, in other words the development of the richness of human nature as an end in itself.”
But the purpose of the society proposed by Marx as going beyond capital is precisely the “development of the richness of human nature,” its transition to that “omnilaterality” of “total man” that had not yet been achieved. Capital, based on the destruction of limits, was therefore still too timid in breaking them down: beyond capital was the prospect that production for production’s sake would reach its most radical, most intense, most effective form. Marx therefore seeks to shift the clearest and most ruthless concept of capitalistic production (the one put forward by Ricardo) into a context in which capital is engulfed, because it has itself become an obstacle to production.
“Beyond a certain point, the development of the powers of production becomes a barrier for capital; hence the capital relation a barrier for the development of the productive powers of labor.”
The theory of the progressive decrease in the rate of profit is aimed primarily at establishing a point of no return, where development finally obstructs itself. Capital, which had been the very spearhead of development, becomes a “barrier,” just as the economic relations dissolved by capital had previously been. But, if capital was the subject of that process of development that has now turned against it, who will be the subject of the development that destroys capital? Marx, at this point, floats the image of development as a plan, as a sequence preestablished by men who have reappropriated their resources and themselves. But the prime characteristic of progress is the impossibility of a preestablished plan, a continual, blind flailing in the dark, where the result is a constant surprise, since there is no knowledge superior to the workings of development itself. The other great force of modern society, control, emerges here behind the words of Marx, behind the pitiful images of men who take their destiny in hand, behind chromolithographs of the happy throng of workers who become also artists and even fishermen and perhaps also policemen. Yet control and development are the beasts that grapple with each other in a slow combat that may be fatal for both.
Ricardo and Marx were rival theologians, but “honestly,” “scientifically” devoted to the same God. What indulgent tenderness Marx displays in observing Ricardo’s excesses, because after all they were excesses in the right direction … “Ricardo, e.g., who believes that the bourgeois economy deals only with exchange value, and is concerned with use-value only exoterically…” Oh, what a noble error!
“Thus Ricardo’s ruthlessness was not only scientifically honest but also a scientific necessity from his point of view. But because of this it is also quite immaterial to him whether the advance of the productive forces slays landed property or workers. If this progress devalues the capital of the industrial bourgeoisie it is equally welcome to him. If the development of the productive power of labor halves the value of the capital fixe, what does it matter, says Ricardo. The productivity of human labor has doubled, thus here is scientific honesty. Ricardo’s conception is, on the whole, in the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie, only because, and in so far as their interests coincide with that of production or the productive development of human labor. Where the bourgeoisie comes into conflict with this, he is just as ruthless to it as he is at other times toward the proletariat and the aristocracy.”
Ricardo and Marx therefore each put themselves, respectively, on the side of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, but only as long as those two classes guarantee maximum productive development. And, in the same way that Marx imagined Ricardo standing ruthlessly against the bourgeoisie, so too we can imagine Marx standing ruthlessly against the proletariat. For the objective—alas—is never anything less than man, indeed the human species, a good intention that Darwin’s dreary catechism already corroborated. Marx shook his head in irritation: “They reveal a failure to understand the fact that, although at first the development of the capacities of the human species takes place at the cost of the majority of human individuals and even classes, in the end it breaks through this contradiction and coincides with the development of the individual; the higher development of individuality is thus only achieved by a historical process during which individuals are sacrificed…” Nietzsche, however, understood it. Every so often, in his last years, he threw himself, like a visionary bookkeeper, into plans and calculations regarding those classes, human types, nations, generations that had to be sacrificed, that ought meekly to submit to one immense experiment.