The Grammar of Capital

Posted on December 22nd, 2006 filed in History, Local, Politics

Work continues this week around the clock tower at the site of the old Aberdare Boys’ School.

According to Colin Rees, the clock tower dates back to 1901, it was built five years after the school was built.

The efforts to preserve parts of the school site by former pupils was laudable, but it seemed almost inevitable that they would fail as it would be going against the grain of how things work. Nothing is sacred or too special in a capitalist society. Marx puts it eloquently in Communist Manifesto thus :

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier times. All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their train of venerable ideas and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become obsolete before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face with sober senses the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men

The clock tower, the clock itself and the various buildings have little or no value as part of Aberdare’s architectural heritage, in a capitalist system. Why ? Because the ‘here and now’, the ‘today’ is most important in capitalism. People forget that capitalism is a revolutionary system where standing still is not an option.

American writer Marshall Berman characterises the way people and things are swept aside in his book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (The Experience Of Modernity) (Verso, London, 1991)

“In this [modern bourgeois] world, stability can only mean entropy, slow death, while our sense of progress and growth is our only way of knowing for sure that we are alive. To say that our society is falling apart is only to say that it is alive and well… Modern men and women must learn to yearn for change: not merely to be open to changes in their personal and social lives, but positively to demand them, actively to seek them and carry them through. They must learn not to long nostalgically for the “fixed, fast-frozen relationships” of the real or fantasized past, but to delight in mobility, to thrive on renewal, to look forward to future developments in their conditions of life and their relations with their fellow men. - Berman pp. 95-96”

In the capitalist system, the destruction of local architectural sites of interest represents expansion, development, growth, progress even. Likewise (to use another recent example) in the capitalist system, destroying a variety of wildlife habitats, simplifying (or polluting) the environment, and imposing massive social costs on society by erecting a few wind turbines is growth, an investment and (in the Alice in Wonderland world of Cardiff Bay) environmental progress.

Capitalism has a grammar or a set of rules that make it work. Economist and historian Doug Dowd refers to the “needs” of capitalism :

The three prime needs of capitalism are (1) the need for expansion, (2) the need for exploitation, and (3) the need for rule by what amounts to an oligarchy.

The story of destruction at the old Aberdare Boys’ School reflects the needs of bourgeois capitalism. There are many more untold stories of destruction. Everyone has a story to tell. “Nothing lasts forever” the capitalist might quip. And the respondent aware of the grammar of capitalism should reply “yes of course, you too”.