Competition is the mechanism that “executes the laws of capital,” as Marx puts it. That means that, on the one hand, we cannot explain the dynamics of capitalism only on the basis of competition but, on the other hand, it also means that we can’t explain the dynamics of capitalism without reference to the competitive pressures capitalists expose each other to. I think Marx could have expanded on abstract vs. concrete labor and brought in real world examples, as he did in ‘so-called primitive accumulation’, and Heinrich has informally mentioned that Marx could have expanded this footnote into an entire chapter, but he did not.

Real subsumption varies in different branches of production. Agriculture remained quite resistant until the 1940s, after which it accelerated rapidly. This began 60 years after Marx’s death. Despite this, “the agricultural chemist Justus von Liebig’s critique of the robbery of soil fertility in modern agriculture had a profound influence on Marx, and, as Kohei Saito’s recent study of Marx’s notebooks has documented, Marx continued to work on the ecological aspects of his critique of political economy in the period following the publication of the first volume of Capital in 1867.”

These narratives fell out of favor for good reasons — both political and theoretical — but their retreat has left many critics of capitalism with an impulse toward purely immanent critique. All of the developments traced by Marx in Capital, all of the categories in which the critique of political economy has been articulated — value, labor, the forces and relations of production, even production itself — have been reinterpreted as “only valid in relation to the capitalist mode of production.” The effort to understand capitalism on the basis of law-like explanatory factors that run through both capitalist and noncapitalist societies has been replaced by the effort to understand everything through capitalism, conceived as a unique and totalizing social form. This essential gap between human life and its conditions of reproduction is exploitable. The access of some people to the conditions of reproduction can be made conditional upon them using them in particular ways — to produce a surplus to be consumed by those who control access, for instance. Because “parts of the human body” — tools — “can be concentrated as property in the hands of other members of the species,” Mau writes, “power can weave itself into the very fabric of the human metabolism” with nature. Thus, a transhistorical fact about human existence explains how economic power is possible, though it does not explain why economic power takes a particular form in a particular mode of production. Building on a diverse body of Marxist thought, Mau details how economic power shapes the terrain of social reproduction, influencing subjects by determining material conditions. In this rendering, subjects of economic domination are not directly restrained or blinkered by false consciousness, as they are often understood in the context of post-Marxism. Rather, they are subjugated by the oblique logics of capital. Forced to conform to capital’s demands, people are dominated insofar as, per Mau, “the worker wants to live.”

The eschewal of transhistorical claims by capitalism’s critics has been a by-product of the collapse of orthodox historical materialism, and of the criticisms directed at theories of universal historical development in general. Those older paradigms saw capitalism as a necessary consequence of the preceding history of economic development, an inevitable stage in a much larger arc. The growing power of the forces of production, the dialectical development of the material powers of labor, the real freedom of human beings — these were the driving forces behind capitalism’s emergence, spread, and eventual downfall. However, Søren’s investigation is not only about contributing to the elucidation of Marx’s critique of political economy or completing it. This already becomes clear in the second part of his three-part work. Starting from Marx’s conception of proletarians who can dispose of their life but are cut off from the necessary conditions of this life, Søren shows how biopolitical questions raised by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben are inherent in Marxian analysis from the beginning, even if they are not called that. Also in the second part, the ‘power of capital’ based on ‘mute compulsion’ is examined with regard to the production of social differences on the basis of gender and racist attributions – which brings us directly to important current debates. The break is clear in The German Ideology as Mau writes, “Marx and Engels repeatedly distance themselves from the concepts of alienation and ‘the essence of man’, making fun of the ‘speculative-idealistic’ conception of revolution as ‘self- generation of the species’ – which was precisely how Marx understood revolution in the 1844 Manuscripts.” Years ago I turned to Marx to explain the domination we face under capitalism, but was put off by the orthodox theory of historical materialism and the Eurocentric focus. I wondered what lessons could be taken from Marx from a less orthodox, U.S. context. This led me to C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, also known as the dissident “Johnson-Forest Tendency” (JFT) of the 1940s that would completely break with Trotskyism in the U.S. in 1950. Grace Lee Boggs was a central member and she was the first to translate The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 into English in 1947 (not in 1956 as Mau claims). The real subsumption of agriculture includes: technologies, divisions of labor, and the global expansion of agriculture.That said, Mau and Chibber are dealing with a similar question: How can we make sense of the economic power that circulates and accumulates in — and animates — capitalism? Near the end of Capital, Marx claims that, “in the ordinary run of things,” capitalist societies reserve “extra-economic, immediate violence” for exceptional circumstances, relying instead on “the mute compulsion of economic relations” to enforce “the domination of the capitalist over the worker” (translation modified). Mau takes his title and his object of study from this passage. What, exactly, is the mute compulsion of economic relations? How does it enforce capitalist rule? In grain production, roller milled flour has reduced turnover time in flour production but has decreased bran content, resulting in lower fiber content and B vitamin deficiencies requiring the creation of vitamin enriched white flour. In the 1960s, high-yielding wheat lowered production costs while also decreasing iron and zinc content by as much as 30%.