Søren Mau - Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital

Mute Compulsion

Sren Mau is a communist philosopher and postdoctoral researcher based in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is an Editor of the journal Historical Materialism and a member of the board of the Danish Society for Marxist Studies.

Mute Compulsion

A Marxist Theory of the
Economic Power of Capital

Sren Mau

Foreword by Michael Heinrich

First published in English by Verso 2023
First published as Stummer Zwang: Eine marxistische Analyse der
konomischen Macht im Kapitalismus by Dietz Berlin 2021
Sren Mau 2021, 2023

This eBook was expropriated and is now CopyLeft in early 2023

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

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ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-346-5

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-349-6 (UK EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-83976-350-2 (US EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mau, Sren Mads, author.

Title: Mute compulsion : a Marxist theory of the economic power of capital / Sren Mau ; foreword by Michael Heinrich.

Other titles: Stummer Zwang. English

Description: London ; Brooklyn, NY : Verso, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022038208 (print) | LCCN 2022038209 (ebook) | ISBN 9781839763465 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781839763502 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Marxian economics. | Capitalism. | Marx, Karl, 1818-1883. Kapital.

Classification: LCC HB97.5 .M35813 2023 (print) | LCC HB97.5 (ebook) | DDC 335.4/12dc23/eng/20220923

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022038208

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022038209

Typeset in Minion Pro by MJ&N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

Contents

Whenever possible, I have used official English translations of Marxs writings. When deemed necessary, I have modified these and added a footnote in case of substantial modification. All translations from German texts which are not available in English are mine.

References to Marx and Engelss Collected Works (MECW) look like this: (32: 421), which means volume 32, page 421. References to the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2) look like this: (II.3.4: 1453); this refers to section (Abteilung) 2, volume 3.4, page 1453. Other references to Marxs writings follow this system of abbreviations:

For more information on the volumes cited of MECW, see the appendix. Different references within the same note are separated by a semicolon: G: 234, 536; 33: 324; IV.1: 43, 56; M: 788 thus means Grundrisse, pages 234 and 536; MECW, volume 33, page 324; MEGA2, section 4, volume 1, pages 43 and 56; and Marxs Economic Manuscript of 18641865, page 788.

by Michael Heinrich

I first met Sren Mau in November 2017, at the annual conference in London of the journal Historical Materialism. When we talked after his paper presentation, he asked me if I knew of any literature that dealt more specifically with the Marxian concept of the mute compulsion of economic relations. I couldnt think of a single title. Sren then told me that he wanted to write a dissertation on this concept. At first I was a bit perplexed. I had often myself quoted the mute compulsion that Marx talks about in the chapter on so-called primitive accumulation, and had also used it in many discussions. The idea behind it that under certain circumstances it is not persons but economic conditions that exert compulsion on formally free workers seemed almost self-explanatory to me. It took only two or three sentences to make clear what was meant. Until now, it had never occurred to me that this concept might need a separate analysis. My surprise was similar to that in a game of chess when, in an opening that has been analysed in most variations up to the fifteenth or twentieth move, one is confronted with an innovation on the fourth. Either such a move is terribly stupid or it is insanely good. As I realised fairly quickly, Srens idea was not stupid at all. This mute compulsion was of central importance in the contrast between personal relations of domination such as slavery or serfdom in pre-capitalist modes of production, and the impersonal domination of legally free wage labourers by which Marx characterises the capitalist mode of production. That alone should be reason enough to look at it in more detail. The only astonishing thing was that no one had done so before.

My second big surprise came about a year and a half later. I had stayed in touch with Sren, we had discussed different issues now and then, and I had agreed to participate in the defence of his thesis at the University of Southern Denmark. In the spring of 2019, I got to see his entire dissertation, written in English, for the first time. Far from being a narrow, philological discussion of the term mute compulsion, Srens analysis was much broader. He presented mute compulsion as a key component of the specifically economic power of capital, a power based on altering the material conditions of social reproduction. For his examination of the question, already much discussed, of how capitalist relations repeatedly reproduce themselves despite all crises and contradictions, Sren had named a third type of power relations alongside those based on violence and those based on ideology. While the first two have a direct effect on people, this third type asserts itself indirectly by reshaping peoples economic and social environment.

Srens work is now available in revised form as a book. It is dedicated to a detailed investigation of this specific power of capital. The various elements of a theory of this power are reconstructed from Marxs critique of political economy in his manuscripts written after 1857. The results of this reconstruction do not refer to a concrete capitalist society; they are located on the level of representation of the ideal cross-section of the capitalist mode of production, namely the level of abstraction on which Marx locates his own analysis, at the end of the manuscript for the third book of