Circulation of Capital
Description
Nick Dyer-Whiteford:
"What the young Marx discusses as “universal intercourse” is in his later works, such as Grundrisse and Capital, developed in more abstract terms through the concept of “circulation”. This is a term that has a double meaning, in a way that is both confusing and felicitous (Kjøsen 2019).
The first of these meanings — call it “circulation 1” — designates a specific moment or segment of the process by which capital incessantly transforms from money to commodities to more money, and more commodities. It is, Marx says, only in the process of production, where human labour transforms raw materials into commodities, that “surplus value” is created. However, for this surplus value to be realized as profit, commodities must exit production and go to market, where they can be exchanged for money. “Circulation 1” refers to this phase in the overall circuit of capital. As surplus value is only generated in production, circulation1 cannot add to the value of a commodity. But it can increase the speed and efficiency with which commodities are exchanged for money, realizing their value. Increasing the velocity of circulation decreases the time in which a given quantity of capital “turns over” from commodities to money and back again, thereby increasing its profitability. In this sense, then, circulation1 defines a crucial, but delimited part of the cycle of capital, one which gives rise to its own vast, historically evolving apparatus of transportation, warehousing, logistics, shops, marketing, advertising, financing and all the communicative flows these entail (see Kjøsen 2019).
There is, however, a second meaning of “circulation” in some passages of Marx’s work. In this usage, the term “circulation 2” refers to movement through the entire circuit of capital. It encompasses all the transformations of value through money, the purchase of labour and machinery for production, the making and marketing of commodities, back to more money. “Circulation 2” therefore includes and subsumes production and circulation1 — from which, in recent Marxist scholarship, monetary operations of credit, debt and speculation are sometimes split off as a distinct third category of “financialization”. “Circulation 2” thus comprises all of capital’s continuous motion between production, circulation1 and financialization."
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Discussion
Acceleration as the Rotational Velocity of Capital’s Globalized Circulation
Nick Dyer-Whiteford:
"It points to a historical process by which capital as a whole becomes increasingly circulatory. Production, marketing and financialization become increasingly tightly integrated; ever larger ratios of waged labour are devoted to logistical, marketing and financial (i.e. “circulation1”) rather than production activities; the “annihilation of space by time” (Marx 1973, 539), the mission of the circulation1, is intensified by production operations at the scale of the world market and the whole ensemble is increasingly governed by the logics of velocity.
The oscillating semantics of circulation this point to the accelerationist tendencies of capital. Acceleration, in both its left and right variants, is often thought as a rocket-like ascension of technological powers, blasting towards some fatal or utopian destination. That ascending, dynamic is, however, propelled by, and in turn propels, the rotational velocity of capital’s globalized circulation. The technological medium, both product and cause, of this circulatory intensification is provided through the successive revolutionizing of industrial processes by capital, of which the latest is the so-called third or fourth industrial revolution of mobile communication, high speed 5G networks, artificial intelligences, and advanced automation (see Manzerolle and Kjøsen 2012 and 2014; Kjøsen 2016). This is the process for which Big Tech (and, increasingly, its Chinese capitalist competitors) are capitalism’s vanguard, and circulation is the concept that we will use as to connect the ascendancy of platform capitalism with the rise of populist electoral parties, a global pandemic, and worldwide riot. The thread of circulation links platforms, populisms, pandemics and riots."
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Tiziana Terranova on Foucauldian and Deleuzian Circulation
Nick Dyer-Whiteford:
" The concept of Foucault’s (1993) most widely applied to the study of networked accumulation is that of “panoptic” monitoring, and, particularly as it is modulated by Giles Deleuze’s (1995) cybernetic revision in his “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, remains crucial to all understandings of “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff 2019). However, as Tiziana Terranova has argued in a series of important studies (2004; 2009; 2015), panopticism is enriched and surpassed in Foucault’s later works on the topic of “biopower”. “Biopower” of course designates the “technologies of power” developed by sovereign states in the era of emergent capitalism to enable rule at the level of entire of populations (Foucault 2009; 2010). And as Terranova (2015) makes clear, the central aim of such population-level modern governance is to secure the conditions of “circulation”, the movement of bodies, merchandise, information, increasingly necessary to a new political economy of accumulation.
This “biopolitical” account of circulation is similar to Marx’s discussion of “universal intercourse”, and Terranova mentions its consonance with Marx’s later writings on capital’s increasing subsumption of social processes. Yet her portrayal of Foucault’s theory of circulation emphasizes elements missing in Marx’s account. It highlights the role of “governmentality”—largely, the activities of the state, however much Foucault eschews that term--alongside and supporting the operations of capital in the fostering and securing of circulation. Foucault’s concept of biopower is, however, more ample than Marx’s focus on labour-power. His treatment of circulation is correspondingly both larger and smaller than Marx’s. On the one hand, he highlights the importance of circulation issues to population-level controls (such as those of pandemic regulation); on the other, through attention to processes of subjectification, Foucault insists on the micro-political affective and attentional dimensions of circulatory control and expansion.
Terranova develops this concept of circulation via Foucault’s discussion of the passage from liberalism to neoliberalism, with the latter dissolving the former’s formal demarcations between the spheres of civil society and capitalist economic calculation. Crucially, for our purposes, Terranova brings her interpretation of Foucault’s work directly into the digital era, and the domain of Big Tech, with a detailed analysis of Facebook’s social graph and its metricisation of relations and affect (“likes”) as an instance of how networks become central to securing the conditions of circulation, and compellingly situates within neoliberal project of capitalizing all aspects of human relation. If there is a weakness in her essays, it is perhaps only that they do not clearly enough negotiate the transition from the governmental exercise of biopower to the privatized exercise by capital demonstrated in by Zuckerberg’s empire. This calls for is a more detailed anatomization of the collaborative and contradictory relations at play in the relations between platform capitalism and the capitalist state in the development of networked biopower-- of the sort on display in the virtual appearance of Zuckerberg before the anti-trust congressional hearing.
The integration of Marxian and Foucauldian analysis of network circulation posited by Terranova also opens towards a correction of the Eurocentrism of both thinks, by inviting comparison with the inversion of Foucauldian biopolitics in Achille Mbembe’s (2001; 2019a; 2019b) work on “necropolitics”. Mbembe’s account of "contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death", a subjugation that includes not just the power to kill, but to allow to die, for example by starvation or disease or sustained social oppression or exposure to ecological disaster. It is applied specifically to the postcolonial situation of racialized populations. Mbembe’s work can be read as a scathing corrective to Marx’s Eurocentric analysis of “universal intercourse” and the way it grossly overlooks the experience of populations, for whom the “intolerability” of capitalist verkher did not gradually become apparent but was rather immediately inflicted as slavery, conquest and genocide. The relevance of “necropolitical” analysis to digital circulation is explicit in his recent discussion of “digital computation” as a “deglobalizing” weapon of “boderization”. In this process, ubiquitous computation is part of “the process by which world powers permanently transform certain spaces into places that are impassable to certain classes of people”, a social division that operates both externally, on international frontiers excluding migrants and internally in the divisions of subtly and not-so-subtly racially segregated regions, cities, prisons and internment camps (2019b).
Our “circulationary” approach to the sequence of platforms, populisms, pandemics and riots therefore lies through a synthesis of Marxian concepts of labour-power, Foucauldian biopower and Mbembe’s necropolitics. "