‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please;’ K Marx 1
Varoufakis makes a serious misreading of ‘capitalism’ and its sources. These errors are important to understanding the future. The first misreading is to assume ‘capitalism’ as currently conceived existed in the past and therefore has changed today towards techno-feudalism. A second error is not to see that the concept of ‘capitalism’ as an ‘epoch delimited idea’ whose true shadow is only revealed at a later time. As Hegel stated ‘The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering’. 2
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In one sense, it can be said that these are one and the same error. To return to Marx, he continued:
‘The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language:’
In seeking to introduce ‘revolutionary new ideas’ and confront the new age Varoufakis is weighed down with the traditions and concepts of dead generations. These former Marxists of earlier generations ossified the concept of ‘capitalism’ till it became some unquestionable brick before one’s feet.
Here, one can refer again to Hegel that the key ideas of an age can only be seen clearly when the age of their potency is passing. Philosophical analysis at its acutest is like a anatomical dissection of a specimen. We require the specimen not to keep moving and developing, and preferably to be dead. Taking the Hegel text further with a different translation: ‘’When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old, and with grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated, it can only be known; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the falling dusk’.3
We will examine the weaknesses in Varoufakis’ approach from a historical and analytic point of view shortly, but first we must address the formal failure of his logic. Let us take as an example his comments on Trump’s trade wars4. He takes the results of the Brettons Woods agreements as the desired intentions of the most important players. Later Richard Nixon is granted total agency. This form of historical analysis takes formal logic to the extreme which is a symptom of contemporary economics. Politicians and society in a post-Enlightenment world are ruled by logic and self-interest. We can read backwards from the effects to the intentions given rationality. But this involves abandoning dialectics. It involves allowing human players to make history as they please. The implicit concept of rationality that people seek their own self-interest and can act on it because otherwise they would not be rational would be scorned by Hegel. Hegel decried formal logic as entirely empty, stating that you only get out at the end what you surreptitiously put in at the beginning, hidden in an earlier premise. Under dialectics, the outcome can be entirely different from anything any of the players wanted, however powerful.
Over and over again, Varoufakis grants total agency to US global ‘capitalism’. Within Marx’s historical writing, no such assumptions are allowed to explain outcomes. In ‘Class Struggles in France, 1848-1850’, Marx describes how misunderstandings, hubris, misconceptions, and chance drive actual events. Clear intentions are expressed, and actions are planned only for something else to transpire. Hegel takes his dialectic from Plato’s reproduction of Socratic dialogues. However, Hegel misreads Socrates as merely presenting a logical argument. For example, Socrates challenges Thrasymachus, who argues that Justice is the interest of the stronger by reminding him that the stronger regularly misidentifies his true interest. It is possible to reduce this argument to formal logic and this is the usual approach of contemporary Western philosophy departments. One can see the influence of Kant here.
However, Socrates’ argument is also practical. In fact, powerful rulers often make decisions that are not in their true interest. If we take justice, Dike, as more profound than ‘lawful’, we tend towards the Chinese concept of ‘will of heaven’, since the right thing to do is ‘the will of heaven’. For Hegel, ‘reason’ is not the mere calculation that it became post -Comte, and could never be represented by an optimised computation and is closer to a mystical/religious concept. Justice, the will of heaven, and reason are all more or less synonyms. Socrates’ position is not merely against any formal argument that the will of the stronger is the best ( or adapted to today’s mythology – the will of the richer) but that, as a practical matter, ‘the will of the stronger/richer’ often brings about bad results. This is why the discussion moves immediately to address what should be done to arrange a state where the best decisions are made since the wishes of the stronger or richer may in the end prove disastrous for themselves as well as the rest of society.
For Socrates, discerning true justice, is similar to a Chinese sage discerning the will of heaven and is a matter of great practical importance. Hegel’s quietism is not in keeping with the Socratic dialectic or the will of heaven. But then Hegel, unlike the Chinese sages or Socrates was a creature of the state, a paid employee. This was a role scorned by Chinese sages and Socrates. For Hegel, philosophy had no role in upsetting the State as it was in existence. While this inflamed Marx,5 this concept of philosophy does not accord with either Socratic dialectic or the view of Chinese sages.
Let us now turn to the emergence of the world of ‘capitalism’. We start with plantations. Europe sought to imitate the slave plantations of the Ottomon world. In the Canary Islands they began experiments in racialised plantations. After much experimentation, a system was developed which was transplanted to the Caribbean. This system was found to be genocidal in its consequences in the Canary Islands and the original population of Canary Islands became largely extinct in a fairly short time. When the system was introduced in the Caribbean, the Caribs largely died out. This could not have been a surprise. This also led to a demand for a large source of labour. The wealth that was extracted from the plunder of the New World was used to fund the invasion of Africa6. Original European invasions of the New World was sparsely funded and only the rape and plunder of that continent made the invasion of Africa possibly. It was not any superiority in arms but the financial impact of constant war where the African states did not have a hinterland of exploitation to draw upon. In Angola the European invaders funded continuous wars using local proxies to do much of the fighting. There were over 5 Ashanti wars in an 80 year period with the British using West Indian troops as their ‘proxies’. Once these territories were pacified various forms of exploitation was carried out. Slave trading was later replaced by resource extraction.
An accumulation of wealth at the centre, together with the emergence of huge potential markets, created the possibility of large-scale production. In India the British closed down local textile production to create a large market for British production. This is not the triumph of capitalist production that is usually told.
What we have at this time was a period where following the ideas of Hume, Kant and Hegel a story is told that European triumph was foretold. Social narrative was known to be crucial long before modern world of media. Academia played an enormously important role supporting state enterprise. In previous generations, the clergy would have played this role exclusively.
A story that internal development of material production led to external expansion was fabricated. This story has history backwards. As later scholars pointed out, the West’s expansion generally involved the underdevelopment of the pacified territories. This idea that capitalism emerged first and then expanded was clearly a constructed myth.
We need then to go back to the formation of plantations. As the Canary Islands experiment showed, the plantation system was intrinsically genocidal. This created a problem of social motivation. Both the Portuguese and Spanish had an issue of social motivation. Recent research has shown that the source of labour for the invasions of Latin America was among the poorest of Spain. This is not surprising when we realise the likely result of joining a Spanish invasion was death, either from war or disease. While the state was able to plunder in great measure, the individual ‘volunteers’ had a short life expectancy. These volunteers were the detritus of their society and once the opportunity arose, rape and plunder would be expected. The widespread suggestion that this was the result of the interaction of Western culture with other cultures must be seen as both absurd and an insult to Western culture. These people were the detritus of Western society.
In Virginia, US, and other areas the issue of the social creation of plantation society arose. There are many books on the creation of ‘white people’ and this must be seen as a proposed solution to the question of how to create a plantation society. This was a period when there was an active slave trade of white people to North Africa7. In fact, many of the Virginian planters had been captured and enslaved in North Africa themselves and subsequently ransomed. There can have been no idea in their minds that ‘slavery’ was in any way associated with skin colour. Nevertheless, the creation of a ‘white society’, a population that existed in opposition to a slave population, was critical. To be accepted as ‘white’ meant a status below which one would not fall. For the Irish and East Europeans the status of ‘white’ had to be negotiated. Acceptance of Jews as fully ‘white’ was a 20th century phenomenon8.
It is this identity and consciousness that will be essential if these populations can be set to work and fight with their lives for the institutions of slavery from which they may have had little material benefit. Psychic rewards may become essential to mould a population and make it willing to give its life. Britain created ‘public schools’ to produce a population willing to ‘run the empire’, which in reality meant being willing to live in places where death from disease was a high risk and to fight wars against populations in return for very little material reward. Thus, the Queen and the Empire became essential psychic rewards. Thus, the underlying needs for creating loyal populations became critically important, and literalness became inconvenient. Later, Japanese persons became ‘honorary’ whites because anything else was economically and politically inconvenient.
It is the inability of much of the Marxist left to see the role of social identity as an essential part of human life, which meant that the expectation that workers of Europe would self-identify as such was bound to be disappointed. But what was worse was that the European left also identified in large part as ‘white’ as if that identity was merely ‘factual’.
Marx had followed Kant and Hegel in seeing European history as an ‘internal history’ and the emergence of ‘capitalism’ as an internal development of European history. This entrenched the idea of ‘whiteness’ in European Marxism goes a long way to explain the inability of many Marxists to cope with the Haitian revolution9. Their Marxism had denied agency to African populations. For much of both the left and right in Europe, non-whites had no ‘agency’ while history evolved to produce ‘capitalism’ as a pure development of European history. It also explains the inability of Western Marxists to question the concept of the internal development of ‘capitalism’. Many of the so-called new technologies were not unique to the development of industrial production in England. Steam engines had been invented millennia earlier10, and much of the essential technologies were stolen by England from other countries such as Italy, in exactly the same way that the US stole manufacturing technology from England11.
However, if ‘race’ was intertwined with the birth of the entity they called ‘capitalism’, then this entity was a very different entity from what had previously been described. It also meant that once a world where racial subordination by ‘whites’ was challenged arose, then that concept of ‘capitalism’ would be undermined. It would also explain why ‘capitalism’ as conceived in the West could never be globalised for it always required racial subordination over another population as the social population that it was based upon demanded that psychic reward as part of their remuneration. It also meant it could not be easily replicated in the societies of the South as they had no generic racial subordination to replicate. This also shows where Japan ran into difficulty as it sought to imitate the US with its own form of racial subordination on the rest of Asia.
Western Marxists would seek to treat ‘racial subordination ‘ as an epiphenomenon that would be transcended during the economic transition to Socialism. This would have been more convincing if they had not themselves drunk the Kool-Aid of racial subordination.
If the birth of the system called ‘capitalism’ was on top of a system of plantation production and racially based plantation societies, then this idea of an abstract ‘capitalism’ is an ‘epoch delimited’ idea, and that epoch has passed. Varoufakis’ new mode of ‘capitalism’ inherits the idea that ‘capitalism’ is a pure non-racial construction. It should be acknowledged that the concept of ‘capitalism’ is not a system but a nineteenth-century intellectual construct, and it should be viewed as such. Understanding the likely trend of the future requires an understanding of how changes in worldwide racial subordination will play their great role. Old-fashioned Marxism has a poor explanatory grasp of the West’s fight against Russia ( a capitalist society) and China (Socialist with Chinese characteristics), and has no grasp of the concept of ‘white world supremacy’ as real phenomenon. Lack of engagement with the work of George Jackson is also indicated12 despite his deep influence on such as Foucault.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm
GWF Hegel Preface to ‘The Philosoph of Right’ trs SW Dyde
Hegel’s Preface to ‘The Philosophy of Right’ trs Alan White, Focus
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/J3aqg6yaOTo?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
Varoufakis Youtube
Marx wrote: ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’ 11th Thesis on Fuerbach , https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/index.htm
World changing ideas – 1 : History (https://African-century.org)
S Webb ‘The Forgotten Slave Trade: The White European Slaves of Islam’
Karen Brodkin, ‘How Jews Became White Folks’ 1998
Wolf D Hund ‘Racism in white sociology: From Adam Smith to Max Weber’ . Hund inter alia discusses the use of ‘race’ bind poor whites to the dominant society despite their extreme poverty.
Heron of Alexandria is often described as Greek because he wrote in Greek. This also reveals a racial prejudice.
Ben-Atar, D ‘Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of America Industrial Power’ 2004, Yale
George Jackson ‘Blood in my eye’.