DH

One of the virtues of looking at capital as a totality and thinking of all aspects of capital circulation is that you identify different arenas of struggle. For example, the environmental question. Marx talks about the metabolic relation to nature. Therefore, struggles over the relation to nature become politically significant. Right now, a lot of people who are concerned about the environmental issue will say, “we can deal with this without confronting capital accumulation.”

I object to that. At a certain point we’re going to have to deal with capital accumulation, which is about 3 percent growth forever, as a clear environmental issue. There’s not going to be a solution to the environmental issue without confronting capital accumulation.

There are other aspects, too. Capital has long been about the production of new wants, needs, and desires. It’s been about the production of consumerism. I’ve just come back from China, and I noticed in just the three or four years I’ve been going to China the immense increase in consumerism. This is what the World Bank and the IMF were advising the Chinese to do twenty years ago, saying, “you’re saving too much and not consuming enough.” So now the Chinese have obliged by starting a real consumer society, but that means that people’s wants, needs, and desires are being transformed. Twenty years ago in China, what you wanted, needed, and desired was a bicycle, and now you need an automobile.

There are various ways in which that is done. The “mad men” of advertising have their role to play, but even more important is the invention of whole new lifestyles. For instance, one of the ways in which capital got out of its dilemma in 1945 in the United States was through suburbanization, which is the creation of a whole new lifestyle. In fact, what we find is that lifestyle creation is not a choice.

We all have cell phones. This is the creation of a lifestyle, and that lifestyle is not something I can individually choose to be in or out of — I have to have a cell phone, even though I don’t know how the damn thing works.

It’s not as if, back in time, somebody was desiring, wanting, or needing a cell phone. It came into being for a particular reason, and capital found a way of organizing a lifestyle around it. Now we’re locked into that lifestyle, and that’s it. Refer back to the suburbanization process. What do you need in the suburbs? You need a lawnmower. If you were smart in 1945, you would’ve gotten into the production of lawnmowers because everybody had to have lawnmower to cut their grass.

Now, there are revolts against certain things that are happening. People are beginning to say, “look, we want to do something different.” I find little communities all around the place in urban areas, and in rural areas, too, where people are trying to set up a different lifestyle. The ones that interest me most are those which use new technologies, like cell phones and the internet, to create an alternative lifestyle with different forms of social relations than those characteristic of corporations, with hierarchical structures of power, that we encounter in our daily lives.

To struggle over a lifestyle is rather different than struggling over wages or conditions of labor in a factory. There is, however, from the standpoint of the totality, a relationship between these different struggles. I’m interested in getting people to see how struggles over the environment, over the production of new wants, needs, and desires, and consumerism are related to the forms of production. Put all of these things together and you get a picture of the totality of what a capitalist society is about, and the different kinds of dissatisfactions and alienations that exist in different components of the circulation of capital, which Marx identifies.