The disconcerting sense that perhaps nobody is pulling the strings, but that we can feel the tightening knots all across our bodies and in every decision we make, is an existential experience that makes people gravitate towards the Marxist project. Søren Mau’s Mute Compulsion gives a name to that troubling silence that keeps our jaws clenched as we move through the halls of our extortionate universities, clasping to find an apartment that won’t cost us half of our monthly salary, go to work every day even though we despise it, and stay on the dentist’s waiting list for months on end to desperately find a cure for our grinding molars.
The book’s nominative concept is taken from the primitive accumulation section of volume one of Capital, specifically the chapter titled, “Bloody Legislation against the Expropriated since the End of the Fifteenth Century, The Forcing Down of Wages by Act of Parliament.” In this chapter Marx guides us through a brutal tour of how the ruling classes in England enacted successive legislations that dragged peasants from their common lands and threw them into the world of capitalist production vogelfrei (free as a bird) bestowed with a viciously ironic double freedom. Those who could not successfully undergo the metamorphosis from peasant to worker were transformed into an assortment of newly emergent, socially abjected categories—“paupers,” “vagrants,” and “vagabonds.” If they could not put themselves to purposeful labor, Marx tells us, they were subject to horrific violence—whipped, chained, indentured and branded. It’s only later, after this bloody dawn of capitalist midwifery, that a new form of power emerges distinct from its violent birth pangs. Marx describes this power thus,
the mute compulsion of economic relations seals the domination of the capitalist over the worker. Extra-economic violence is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases. In the ordinary run of things, the worker can be left to the ‘natural laws of production,’ i.e., it is possible to rely on his dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them.1As Mau notes, the English translation of this section is “silent compulsion.” Karl Marx, Capital, A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes, (London: Penguin Books 1976), 899; Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion, A Marxist Theory of The Economic Power of Capital, (London: Verso 2023), 3.
It is here we find what Mau wants to argue is the specific form of power characteristic of the capitalist epoch—mute compulsion—or what Mau will call “economic power.”2Townsend quoted in Mau, Mute Compulsion,132. We find similar iterations of the quote in both Capital and the Grundrisse.
Marx borrows this idea from Reverend Joseph Townsend, an economist and physician who in the Grundrisse he will describe as the “father of population theory” (not Thomas Malthus, who Marx describes as a shameless plagiarist in comparison). According to Townsend, “Hunger will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjection, to the most perverse. In general it is only hunger which can spur and goad them [the poor] onto labour; yet our laws have said they shall never hunger. The laws, it must be confessed, have likewise said, they shall be compelled to work. But then legal constraint is attended with much trouble, violence and noise: whereas hunger is not only peaceable, silent, unremitting pressure, but, as the most natural motive to industry and labour, it calls forth the most powerful exertions; and, when satisfied by the free bounty of another, lays lasting and sure foundations for goodwill and gratitude.”
While people are compelled to work, they do so through the silent, unremitting pressuring of hunger, as capital needles its way in between humanity and its means of subsistence. Mau tells us that Marx was captivated by this insight, and that one can find this formulation from Townsend written out again and again throughout his notebooks. Karl Marx Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus, (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 845; Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 800. While it has been customary in Marxist literature to note the disappearance of violence or personal domination from everyday life, the space left behind by violence has often been filled with concepts like “ideology” or “hegemony.” Mau’s ingenuity lies in introducing a third term—economic power—that is irreducible to the violence/ideology couplet. It is not simply ideological or hegemonic consent that interpellates people into accepting or naturalizing class exploitation, but mute compulsion operating through the very pores of our social relations. With erudition, clarity and confidence Mau methodically shows us the schematics of this historically novel form of power that ensnares us all into its net. Nobody is pulling the strings. The capitalist system does not need an overwhelming system of violence or apparatuses of ideological manipulation to get people to bend to its diktat because it imposes its social logic into the very fabric of our being.
This essay, something between a review and a critical engagement, is split into three parts. The first part will explore the ingenious ontological framework Mau neatly models, explaining how the book provides an ontological argument for rethinking how capitalism intervenes at the metabolic basis in which social life is reproduced under capitalism. These arguments, in their breadth, scale and ambition, offer a genuinely new and interesting way of thinking about metabolic domination that cuts across the distinction between human and nature effortlessly, providing an ontology that can hold together the materiality of the body with the often all-too-abstract nature of capital’s spectral ontology. The second part discusses how Mau reconfigures social class. What’s distinctive about this section, I argue, is how it reconfigures a concept of class that enlivens the often turgid, overly exegetical and sometimes politically quietist value form debates the book interjects in.3The term “value form theory” is somewhat controversial in exactly what it refers to. Varyingly it has been used to describe Neue Marx Lektüre associated with Hans Georg-Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt, the arguments one finds amongst the Krisis group including Roswitha Scholz, Norbert Trenkle and Robert Kurz, or those Marxist exegetical analyses, associated with Chris Arthur, that intend to reproduce Marx’s “systematic dialectics.” Loosely, what all these formations have in common is centreing the question of value at the heart of Marxist analysis. In this stress on value, questions inevitably arise concerning the formal and abstract ontological moments in Marx’s writing. In the English speaking world the essay, “Communisation and Value Form Theory”, has remained a cornerstone for an introduction to these debates. Endnotes, “Communisation and Value Form Theory”, in Endnotes 2 (London: 2010). Many of these ideas are also discussed in an accessible format in a series of videos Sean O’Brien has recorded for the 87 Press. Sean O’Brien, “Marx after Growth: An Introduction to Marx’s Critique,” YouTube video, posted by “the 87 Press,” May 31, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqdvpernUyM&t=11s. See also, Marxism and The Critique of Value, eds. Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson and Nicholas Brown (Chicago Alberta: MCM’ Publishing 2014). Nonetheless, whilst the carefully constructed frameworks in the first half of the book are unfolded with often beautiful lucidity, the stress on conceptual clarity begins to work to clip the wings of political imagination. As Marxist readers, we know every text contours and shapes a political imagination. Each text contains analytical frameworks that provide political closures and openings, whether or not these moments are expressly named at the exoteric level of discourse.4Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious, (London and New York: Routledge Classics 2002). Whilst the book rejects a simple dialectic between theory and praxis, analysis and politics, abstract and concrete, I suggest the text doesn’t proffer any method for mediating between these sets of terms, often leading to implicit antinomies with consequences for thinking politics. The final part of this essay focuses on three particular moments where these antinomies are felt at their most symptomatic—the concept of transcendental debt, the critique of Werner Bonefeld and class struggle, and the chapter on so-called “difference.” In each instance I argue conceptual clarity becomes a burden, delineating strict limits on what Marxist theory can and cannot say. I conclude with a brief discussion of how we can rethink the relationship between the abstract and concrete, and how arguments found in the first half of the text—metabolic domination, the amputated proletarian body, social reproduction—could be used to think about forms of feminized and racialized labor, and where class domination is felt in a world characterized by spasm after spasm of crisis and capitalist decay.
Reconfiguring the Conditions of Social Reproduction: Weaving Power across the Amputated Proletarians
One of the most innovative theoretical interventions in Mute Compulsion is the way it reconfigures a number of structural precepts that set the stage for capitalism’s subsonic domination. In order to do this, Mau has to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of romantic humanism and Marxian anti-humanism. He does so by honing in on how the concept of “metabolism” functions in Marx’s mature writing. In Capital, Marx says, labor is,
first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.5Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 286.
One could well imagine sections such as this being castigated as humanist vestiges or, perhaps worse, substantialism. Yet, for Mau, what this does is give us a way of thinking about how humans are caught up in the web of life. Momentarily, the text almost takes a “new materialist” or eco-Marxist turn when Mau describes humans as, “a moment of a material totality, an organism indissolubly inscribed in a flow of matter, just like plants, bacteria, fungi, or other animals.”6Mau, Mute Compulsion, 91. Yet, rather than becoming fascinated with particle nominalism, or lose himself in sublime awe in the infinite metaphoricity of the quantum, Mau uses this moment to anchor a definition of the human. In what might be considered a Marxological faux pas, Mau revises a section from The German Ideology to help elucidate how Marx grounds human existence in metabolism. Here, Marx suggests, “the first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the corporal organisation [körperliche Organisation] of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.”7Marx and Engels quoted in Mau, Mute Compulsion, 93. Corporeal organization becomes a central prism through which Mau establishes a minimal social ontology and develops an account of how capital has seemly managed to extend its tentacles into every sinew of our lives. Humans are irreducibly embodied. In order to sustain our existence, we need continual metabolic interaction with the natural world. In short, we need to eat. Rather than continuously search for food every day anew, humans are unique in our ability to produce rather than simply consume our subsistence.8Mau, Mute Compulsion, 94. This production of subsistence implies another ontological dimension of the human: tools. In order to produce, humans need to mediate their relationship with nature via the use of various tools. In this way tools become incorporated into what it means to be human. The body is no longer a fixed ontological unit, but it continuously incorporates tools into its conditions of existence.9Mau, Mute Compulsion, 97–98. This stress on tool usage as a fundamental dimension of our corporeal organization allows humans to circumvent romantic narratives of Man and His Fall from Nature. The human body has always been porous—always a mediation of technics and nature—there is no transhistorical human essence inside us. This theory is capacious enough to subsume other claims to human essence. Agricultural, transhumance, or protein-heavy diets—all these require some kind of social mediation with nature. One could posit language, art or intelligence as the differentia specifica of the human species, but this would forgo the basic tenets of historical materialism.