The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital

by Massimo De Angelis

'The Beginning of History brings creativity to the center of anti-capitalist thought and through it provides new meanings to the concepts of anarchism, socialism and communism.' Silvia Federici, author of 'Caliban and the Witch' 'The Beginning of History is a kind of intellectual revolution in itself, both rigorous and exciting.' David Graeber, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Yale University '[This is] a breakthrough book in anti-capitalist theory.' George Caffentzis, Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Southern Maine Francis Fukuyama may declare the "end of history", and neoliberal capital embraces this belief. However, the diverse struggles for commons and dignity around the planet reveal a different that of the beginning of history. The clash between these two perspectives is the subject matter of this book. This book analyzes the frontline of this struggle. On one side, a social force called capital pursues endless growth and monetary value. On the other side, other social forces strive to rearrange the web of life on their own terms. This book engages with alternative modes of co-production recently posed by the alter-globalisation movement, and it examines what these movements are up against. This passionate account explores groundbreaking new critical political economic theory and its role in bringing about radical social change. This book is a must for all political activists and students of political theory.

Genres: Politics, Economics

320 pages, Paperback

First published December 20, 2006

About the author

Massimo De Angelis is Professor of Political Economy and Social Change at the Department of Social Sciences and Social Work, Cass School of Education and Communities., University of East London. He does research in participatory social and economic change, commons and social movements.

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is awesome. De Angelis comes out of the same grand tradition as famous Italian autonomists like Negri, Lazzarato, Virno, etc, but where the latter all seem to have sunk into a common obsession with the notion of "real subsumption", that there is nothing and noplace outside of capitalism, De Angelis argues exactly the opposite. In fact, he insists that it would be better not even to talk about "capitalism" as a total system (as opposed to as an ideology - as an ideology it obviously does exist), but rather, to talk about capital, and capitalists, and capitalist value practices (using money to make more money), but that these capitalist value practices are never the only game in town. There are always other ones. True, the capitalist ones are dominant at the moment, but there is a continual struggle going on, where on the one hand, the market sets everyone against each other, sets the livelihood of people in Africa against those in Germany, of one city, town, enterprise, community, occupation against another, so that even every invention or discovery that was originally intended to eliminate scarcity and improve people's lives ultimately gets diverted to the purpose of creating new forms of scarcity and keeping people in desperate competition against each other. In reaction, those motivated by other values (solidarity, community, ecology, beauty, security, tradition...) are constantly creating new forms of commons, of shared and collectively managed resources, and political forces aligned with capitalism are always attempting to break them up and appropriate them with new enclosures. Thus, what Marx called "primitive accumulation" has never ended. At the same time, the capitalists are always trying to create "commons" of their own, what they like to call "externalities", fobbing off the costs of production onto other people, communities, or nature. Much of the political struggle of the last twenty or thirty years, De Angelis explains, can be understood precisely as battles over the creation and enclosure of different sorts of commons, and behind it all, lie battles over the nature of value itself.

This book is a brilliant antidote for the stylish despair that has overtaken so much of the autonomous Left in recent years - that has sent figures like Yann Moulier and even, to some degree, Hardt and Negri to the point of throwing themselves as the feet of their former enemies once their prophecies of the rising of the Multitude did nt seem to be becoming immediately true. While sometimes technical, it is always engaging, passionate, and often, inspiring.

[Federico Arcuri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Assignment from my "introduction to commons" class:

Two fundamental concepts are pivotal for understanding the radical political economy/ecology approach of De Angelis: enclosure and commoning. Please define them and describe how they relate.

Massimo De Angelis writes this book, first of all, to help advance the struggle against capitalism. He say that in order to do this, we need to properly understand what capitalism is and what can be good to overcome it, against the sad background of a neoliberal “end of history”. His main argument is that the beginning of history is all around us, already, as different activist and social movements reproduce value-practices (modes of living, actions, practices that reflect specific ways of relating to each other, specific social relations) that are contrary to the social relation of capital. He defines capital as a “life-colonising force” predicated on continuous accumulation by enclosure, with its essential element being its nature as a social relation, a social relation of separation. In contrast, “life-enhancing forces” such as the new commons, Zapatista ecc. Are based on value-practices of social cooperation that have the potential of problematizing how we co-produce our lives and the system and thus fight capitalism. We fight capitalism through the commons, not for the commons.
This definition of capital is based on a nuanced understanding of the Homeostatic process through which capitalism thrives: capitalism evolves through homeostasis, the “automatic process of self-regulation of living organisms to maintain a dynamic balance”, with self-balancing (negative) and self-reinforcing (positive) feedback loops, thus having a civil war (stasis) , a crisis in built in its DNA. This is not natural, but comes out of a social construction with two moments: a generative moment (enclosures) and a preservative one (disciplinary integration). Enclosure and Accumulation, what is defined by Marx as Primitive (ex-novo) Accumulation and continuous accumulation.
A definition of enclosure could then be:
the moment of primitive, new, accumulation, with the ex-novo production of separation, that happens when….

- Capital encounters limits as a frontier (biophysical limit)
- Capital encounters limits as new political formations (counter-enclosures, commons)

… then it responds via strategies such as … “increase people’s dependence on capitalist markets for the reproduction of their livelihoods”

… then it continues via “ordinary run of things” (Marx) - accumulation


A definition of commons could be…
The (reactive) formation of value-practices that resist capital’s enclosuring imposition of its own value-practices by the creation of solidarity, communing subjectivities. Or, as
Sergio Ruiz Fina says, commons are "forms of social organization based on practices of direct democracy, a horizontal distribution of power, and collective decision-making. They involve rights and obligations for the people involved, and effect the ways that they relate to each other and their environment.

What does it mean to say that capitalism uses social conflict as its riving motor? Capital acknowledges the instability of the system: Governmentality is a way of “acknowledging the problem and issues at the basis of the crisis as ‘social stability’, but at the same time co-opts them within the mechanism of accumulation and its value practices”

[Yong Feng · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book dense with ideas but I felt lost in some chapters as I'm not familiar with Marxist and post-Marxist thought, particularly Hardt and Negri's Empire which he cites a lot, though I will at those to my future reading list. The title challenges the neoliberal narrative of an end to history, and suggests an alternative that is based on the struggle for the commons which can open up ways of being and relating outside of the market and its measures of value.

De Angelis reveals the fundamentally antagonistic nature of capital where the creation of scarcity through enclosure leads to conditions where people have no choice but to take actions that harm others. A comparison of neoliberalism with the Jeremy Bentham's concept of the panopticon, where both systems enact control through anonymity and separation provides a novel analogy. He argues that understanding the structure of capital is important for overcoming it, and shows how the struggle against capital is intrinsic to the generation of the commons and communities, and thus should be the central goal of communism.

[Redpoet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad. I have some major theoretical issues with him (and in his critiques of tony Negri, I side with Negri), still some nice contributions. Some strange use of vocabulary...some ridiculous figures which were unnecessary, but confusing to follow. Some very selective citations from Marx. He seems also to think he has discovered several things that were previously "discovered" by other autonomous Marxists. Still, worth a read.