Beyond the Utilitarian Principle
A prehistory of socialism
Cassandra Guan
The tractor engine died without any warning, leaving the powerful motor vehicle stranded on the unplowed hillside. Its driver, a jaunty young worker from the big city, leapt off his perch to see what could be done. As he toiled in the dirt, ruining a suit of good linen, the distant crowd of peasants—assembled to welcome the new industrial miracle—watched the disheveled mechanic with disbelief. They were told the tractor would revolutionize agriculture and strengthen the ties between town and country. Yet there it stood, disabled and pitiful, a leaden question mark sunken into a barren landscape. One by one, members of the village brass band lowered their instruments in confusion. Would the pride of Soviet industry live up to its heroic promise? With the gaze of the rural community upon him, the industrial worker made a furious effort to reignite the lifeless engine. And yet, despite acrobatics worthy of Buster Keaton, it soon became apparent that the comrade from town could not restart the locomotive alone.
The day was saved by the farm worker Marfa Lapkina—leader of the dairy cooperative October Way and nemesis of reactionary elements in her village commune. Seizing a flag that the grease-soaked mechanic was about to lay his hands on, Marfa appears to offer him her assistance. Grinning roguishly up at her well-padded figure, the prostrate worker beckoned to the peasant woman for a personal loan. With a blush and a smile, our obliging heroine pulled up her work apron . . . What comes next is possibly the weirdest strip tease in film history: The unhorsed knight of Soviet industry tore apart, one after another, the innumerable petticoats of a stalwart shepherdess. The bizarre expropriation of her underwear visibly gratified Marfa, just as it presumably titillated the film’s rural audience. Cutting to a close-up of her enraptured expression, the film recalls an earlier climax: the ecstatic demonstration of an industrial cream separator that bespattered Marfa’s rustic countenance with obscene seminal traces. The paralyzed tractor, it turns out, requires a “rural tribute” to reignite its productive function. As if aroused by the spectacle of sturdy peasant legs, the dead engine roared back to life.
The confusion of production with procreation in the climactic scenes of The General Line (1929) is not a coincidence. The directors Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Alexandrov carefully embedded the contemporary political economy in a libidinal economy, lubricating the rusty gears of state industry, as it were, with an excess of private enjoyment. Through the ruse of montage, they contrived to align the farm worker’s unconscious pursuit of erotic gratification with the industrial policies of the revolutionary state, which needed to extract value from the peasant economy but had no adequate means of remuneration. The structural conflict of interest between Soviet agriculture and industry was consequently remediated in The General Line as a pornographic fantasy of worker–peasant cooperation.
“The introduction of sex into Soviet economic planning effectively created an alternative currency with which the insolvent state could compensate the rural producer for her material sacrifice in the rebuilding of the country’s industrial base.”
We have here a backdoor solution to a real-life dilemma: The introduction of sex into Soviet economic planning effectively created an alternative currency with which the insolvent state could compensate the rural producer for her material sacrifice in the rebuilding of the country’s industrial base. Through an analysis of this cinematic fantasy, I hope to shed some light on the psychopathology of capital accumulation, as well as to dispel a pedestrian view of Soviet cinema as “simply propaganda.” As we will see, the Bolsheviks regarded cinema from Lenin onward as “the most important of all the arts,” because they believed the reconstruction of Soviet industries depended on the successful conversion of biological needs into economic drives. The ribald comedy of agrarian collectivization, far from trivializing the harsh realities of Soviet industrialization, offers an incisive commentary on the expropriation of the peasantry in the structural crisis theorized by Bolshevik economists as “primitive socialist accumulation.”
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Marx used the term “primitive accumulation” (ursprüngliche Akkumulation)— also translated into English as “primary” accumulation—to refer to the emergence of capitalism as a historical mode of production. From its first articulation, the premise of an “originary” accumulation in the constitution of modern capitalism struck Marx as paradoxical. The accumulation of capital, Marx writes in Das Kapital, presupposes surplus value, while surplus value, by its very definition, presupposes a capitalist mode of production.
“The whole movement, therefore, seems to turn around in a neverending circle, which we can only get out of by assuming a primitive accumulation (the “previous accumulation” of Adam Smith) which precedes capitalist accumulation; an accumulation which is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its point of departure.”
In the aftermath of the world’s first successful proletarian revolution, the paradox of primitive accumulation became an all-too-concrete dilemma. From the commanding heights of the political economy, as the saying goes, the comrades of Lenin had ample opportunity to verify Marx’s observation that a dynamic cycle of capitalist accumulation presupposes the availability of considerable masses of capital and labor-power in the hands of commodity producers. The absence of this creative surplus in the period of post-war reconstruction (c. 1922– 1926) ignited a momentous controversy among Party economists over the imperative of so-called “primitive socialist accumulation” (Zakon sotsialisticheskogo nakopleniia).
Today, the concept of primitive accumulation is widely invoked by historians of extraction, slavery, colonialism, and gender.[1] It is worth noting, however, the reframing of the concept of primitive accumulation in left-leaning academic circles. Contemporary accounts of capitalism tend to emphasize the necropolitics of capital for - mation (such as the conquest and enslavement of indigenous populations, the extraction of natural resources, and violence against women and minorities) at the expense of interrogating how a dynamic cycle of economic accumulation comes into being. Primitive accumulation in present academic parlance is largely synonymous with what David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession”—or with the destructive processes that paved the way to the creation of the capitalist system. The upshot is that contemporary leftists—in rewriting the theory of the structural origin of capital as a historical narrative of dispossession—have effectively reverted to Marx’s early critique of capitalism as alienation. As Massimo De Angelis states in “Marx and Primitive Accumulation,” the quintessential aspiration of the twenty-first century anti-capitalist movement is “the direct access [my emphasis] of the means of existence, production and communication.” The emphasis on unmediated access in this attestation belies the utopian socialist fantasy that social reproduction can occur without alienation. Despite the nominal reference to Das Kapital, the contemporary theorists of primitive accumulation have by and large adopted the political horizon of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon rather than the mature Marx by equating capital with property and property with theft.
The Bolsheviks, by contrast, could not afford to ignore the productive role of capital in the construction of a socialist economy. Their quixotic endeavor to accumulate capital ex nihilo in the liberal era of Bolshevik governance created the condition for a radical experiment in aesthetic mediation. As we will see, the October revolutionaries discovered—in practical as well as epistemological senses—the origin of capital accumulation in the domain of what Hannah Zeavin has called everyday media. For without a capitalist imperative to stimulate growth, the Soviet commitment to industrialization ensured that the first task of social reconstruction was not the rationalization of the labor process but the installation of a new principle of pleasure in the political economy of work.
With this radical aim in view, leading figures in the Bolshevik Party became fervent cinephiles, while avant-garde filmmakers in response to the state industrialization project developed new aesthetic strategies to approximate the way surplus value mediates the forces of production. The heady fusion of new media aesthetics, avant-garde experimentation with form, and state economics in the Soviet story of primitive accumulation exposes a blind spot in contemporary critiques of capitalist enclosures: the call to resist or even reverse accumulation by dispossession does not explain how unmediated access to the means of existence, production, and communication would be achievable in the digital economies of the twenty-first century. Does offering every child a laptop, for example, constitute an instance of direct access or a more insidious form of psychic enclosure? Far from valorizing immediacy, the Soviet planners aspired to the hypermediation of everyday life to preserve the revolutionary experiment from the forces of economic entropy.
“The call to resist or even reverse accumulation by dispossession does not explain how unmediated access to the means of existence, production, and communication would be achievable in the digital economies of the twenty-first century.”
Minted by the left Bolshevik Vladimir Smirnov, the colorful slogan “primitive socialist accumulation” was initially a call for the wartime requisition of private property by the state economy. Nikolai Bukharin raised it to the status of a theoretical concept in The Politics and Economics of the Transition Period (1920). After 1921, the earlier usage gave way to a new set of connotations as the challenges of economic reconstruction came to the fore of Soviet politics. At this time a political realignment took place within the Communist Party: Bukharin, hitherto a Left Bolshevik, swung sharply rightwards and tied his political fortunes to the New Economic Policy (NEP). Those critical of the NEP rallied around Leon Trotsky, who made the slogan “primitive socialist accumulation” into a central refrain of the Left Bolsheviks’ call for rapid industrialization.
The great debate, which pitted the so-called “super-industrializers” led by Trotsky against the so-called “harmonists” allied with Bukharin, turned on the leftist thesis that the success of the Soviet revolutionary experiment hinged on a rapid rate of growth propelled by the expansion of the stateowned industries. Such a program of industrialization requires significant capital outlay. As Eric Hobsbawm wryly observed, a revolutionary state committed to the overthrow of world capitalism is bound to be starved of capital resources. In a 1924 paper delivered to the Communist Academy in Moscow, Evgeni A. Preobrazhensky, the chief economist of the Trotskyite faction, gave the impending crisis of accumulation its definitive analysis. “The Fundamental Law of Socialist Accumulation” became the seminal chapter of his magisterial treatise The New Economics (Novaia ekonomika).
The author of The New Economics predicted that the Soviet economy in the transition to socialism will have to pass through, perforce, a stage of capital formation structurally equivalent to the process of primitive accumulation described by Marx in the final chapters of Capital, but within a dramatically condensed timeframe and without replicating the violent expropriation of European colonies. The economic foundations of capitalism cannot survive the perturbations of proletarian revolution, Preobrazhensky warned. Consequently, “if socialism has its prehistory, that prehistory can commence only after the conquest of power by the proletariat.” For this reason, The New Economics posited primitive socialist accumulation as “a fundamental law which constitutes the mainspring of the whole Soviet state economic system.”
The suggestion that socialism on its path to communism must recapitulate the development of capitalism, a process Marx memorably described as “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt,” scandalized the Party faithful. In the foreword to the second edition of The New Economics, Preobrazhensky reflected bitterly that the rapid dissemination of his thesis was equaled only by the hostility of its reception. Yet even his enemies cannot seriously contest the diagnosis of an accumulation crisis inherent to the Soviet economic system. Adopted at the 10th Party Congress, the NEP itself was an attempt to remediate the basic economic contradictions created by the proletarian revolution. Instead of challenging the leftist economic thesis, controversy erupted over the source of the surplus fund for industrialization and the form of the institutional changes necessary to set into motion a dynamic cycle of economic development. The harmonists in government attacked the theory of primitive socialist accumulation as detrimental to the worker– peasant alliance and denounced its author as the would-be exploiter of “internal colonies.” The undaunted super-industrializers formed a vocal opposition in their calls for the rapid transformation of the countryside.
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The enthusiasm of the super-industrializers was dampened by the reality of peasant resistance. The redistribution of large landed estates after 1917 inadvertently weakened the revolutionary government, as peasant households reverted to small-scale production and the output of agriculture declined. The democratization of land ownership disincentivized off-farm sales even as the Soviet government desperately needed agricultural surplus for export to pay for the cost of industrial reconstruction. To make matters worse, the inflationary pressures created by the shortage of industrial goods and wartime disruptions encouraged peasants to hoard their grain. Meanwhile, a staggering percentage of the country’s former industrial proletariat—over 80% by some estimates—had become reabsorbed into the peasantry. The conjuncture of these extraordinary circumstances ensured that the rural populations of the Soviet Union circa 1922 were significantly less “alienated” than they had been before the October Revolution.
It was in the context of this paradoxical dilemma—the dearth of economic alienation in the post-war economy as a result of peasants gaining direct control over the means of subsistence—that the controversy over primitive socialist accumulation erupted with seismic force. At the doctrinal level, the contention between the Left and Right Bolsheviks revolved around the necessity of alienating peasant modes of production in the formation of industrial capital. In The New Economics, Preobrazhensky emphatically denied the possibility of equivalent exchange between different economic systems. He thought that modes of production, like living organisms, cannot exist alongside one another on the basis of equilibrium. One must inevitably exploit and dispossess another. Such a metabolic conception of economic history can only mean one of two things for the prospect of socialist accumulation: either the state industries must develop at the expense of peasant agriculture through “the non-equivalent exchange of values” or succumb to economic competition.
By contrast, the harmonists fervently upheld the unity of the Soviet economic system and defended the possibility of peaceful cooperation among the different sectors. After the publication of “The Law of Primitive Socialist Accumulation,” Bukharin railed against Preobrazhensky, his erstwhile literary partner on The ABC of Communism, for talking only about the struggle of the different classes of producers and ignoring their coop - eration. Anxious to safe-guard the worker–peasant alliance, he advanced a gradualist program of economic development, famously summed up as “riding into socialism on a peasant nag,” whereas the super-industrializers conceived of political economy as a field of permanent struggle and ruthless competition.
From these doctrinal positions, the two ideological camps worked out different scenarios of growth. These practical scenarios, clashing over the point of departure for socialist accumulation and the tempo of industrial development, can be grouped into two categories. The first category consists of compulsory forms of economic alienation. These can be further subdivided into the liquidation of one mode of production by another and the nonequivalent exchange of value between different modes of production. In the first scenario, the assets of private enterprise are nationalized. In the second scenario, only the profit portion of private earnings is taxed by the state to subsidize the development of industries. The second category is comprised of various scenarios in which state capital formation occurs on a voluntary basis. There was much talk of voluntary collectivization and the taking on of public debt through national banking among the Right Bolsheviks. The Left Bolsheviks dreamed of foreign loans and the use of industrial machinery to revolutionize agriculture.
In fact, none of the hypothetical scenarios worked out for the cashstrapped proletarian state. The taxation of agriculture (whatever it was called) presupposed large-scale production and industrial methods of farming, which in turn presupposed capital investment and collectivization. These conditions did not exist. Schemes for state banking were equally mercurial because Soviet peasants did not have enough confidence in their government to exchange their surplus produce for its paper money. Nor did foreign lenders come to the Bolsheviks’ rescue. Indeed, the prospect of financing the dictatorship of the proletariat was so anathema to capitalists of all nationalities that Preobrazhensky had to finally admit, “[capital] does not desire to flow on a large scale into an economic system of a type alien to itself.” Even the granting of concessions rights, which Lenin attempted, failed to attract any investors.
It was in response to this desperate state of affairs that Trotsky postulated the necessity of “proletarian selfexploitation,” as his biographer Isaac Deutscher recounts. The structural constraints on primitive socialist accumulation, Trotsky reasoned, can only be overcome by a collective act of self-alienation. At the Fifth Komsomol Congress in October 1922, the leader of the Left Opposition drew an incendiary parallel between the embryonic capitalist, who ruthlessly exploited himself, and the sacrifice required of workers in the formation of state capital. “The bourgeois as a class [passed] through the stage of primitive accumulation which is distinguished by its extreme barbarity of exploitation and self-exploitation.” Now, the proletariat must create the economic foundation of socialism through similar means. “Socialism can only be arrived at by way of the greatest sacrifices and straining of energy, blood and nerves of the working class.”
Without mincing words, Trotsky presented the alienation of labor as the ultimate basis of surplus value creation. Preobrazhensky had advocated for tax and trade policies that would transfer wealth from peasant agriculture to the nationalized industries. His enemies questioned the ability of the state to increase off-farm sales without offering commensurate value in exchange and demanded to know how peasant agriculture would generate enough surplus to meet the needs of industrial expansion. In response to their criticism, Trotsky rearticulated Preobrazhensky’s call for the nonequivalent exchange of values between different classes of producers into an appeal for the nonequivalent exchange of values between the producer and herself. Upstaging the defenders of peasant interest, he announced that the burden of primitive socialist accumulation would not fall on the shoulders of the peasantry alone but that all would have to submit to a period of voluntary self-exploitation.
In effect, the law of primitive socialist accumulation dictates that workers and peasants must alike deny their natural wish to consume more as their productivity increased, while embracing new processes of labor that would disrupt long-established forms of life. How to capture private profit, the main focus of Preobrazhensky’s economic analyses, appears as a secondary issue beside the primary dilemma of constraining mass consumption while increasing the productivity of labor. But how is such a radical change of morals to be accomplished? The country’s twenty-five million peasant households have already gained direct access to the means of subsistence. Insured against the fears of privation, they have no obvious incentive to engage in surplus production. What could the Bolsheviks do to persuade the self-sufficient peasantry to sacrifice their immediate self-interests for the purpose of socialist accumulation?
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Sometime between the Komsomol speech and a key address on industrialization at the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923, Trotsky conceived the idea of writing a popular brochure, intended for the use of party activists, to communicate the cultural problems of the transition period in a language comprehensible to the ordinary person. With this objective in view, he asked the Secretary of the Moscow Committee to convene a meeting of experienced party agitators for the purpose of exchanging ideas about the challenges of Communist education. Afterwards, Trotsky published a series of articles in the Pravda about the reconstruction of morals and habits during the transition period. The serialized essays were subsequently anthologized under the title Problems of Everyday Life.
While tackling a broad spectrum of everyday issues, Problems of Everyday Life put the mediating force of culture at the front and center of Soviet industrial policy. Culture, in the sense of a historically constituted milieu that conditions the habits and morals of the masses, was to become the site of a new state intervention. In an essay called “Not by Politics Alone,” Trotsky asks, “And what is our problem now? What have we to learn in the first place? What should we strive for?” The blunt answer: “We must learn to work efficiently: accurately, punctually, economically.” Learning how to work differently means “the working class must undergo a long process of self-education, and so must the peasantry . . .”
With this end in view, Trotsky issued a fervent endorsement of cinema as an instrument of aesthetic education. “Vodka, the Church, and the Cinema” first appeared in the Pravda on June 12, 1923. The author of this surreal manifesto wagers that cinema would erode the influence of religion and alcohol in the lives of the mass. This marvelous innovation, having “cut into human life with a successful rapidity never experienced in the past,” will henceforth liberate people from the need to cross the church and tavern door. The Party, Trotsky urges, should hasten “to make up for the separation of the church from the state by the fusion of the socialist state and the cinema.”
Anticipating the avant-garde approximation of religious iconography in films such as The General Line and Enthusiasm, Trotsky’s striking appraisal of cinema as the new state church signals a turning point in the theory and methods of socialist education. He told the congregation of party activists at the Fifth Komsomol Congress that education has become a predicament. The task of Communist educators is “far more complex and far more difficult” because the masses must learn to act against their rational self-interest in the period of primitive socialist accumulation. Didactic tools such as the newspaper are no longer adequate to the task of preparing workers to endure the tremendous sacrifices socialist reconstruction demanded.
Instead, the Bolshevik Party must make a concerted effort to promote the “healthy pleasures” of the Soviet worker because “we seek a point of support in this vital human material for the application of our party and revolutionary state lever.”
The Orthodox Church offers a compelling, if not adequate, model for proletarian recreation. Refuting Bukharin’s declaration on the same occasion that “[w]e must destroy everything which goes beyond the bound of rational cognition,” Trotsky charges that rational criticism of religion as false consciousness misses the real basis of its popular appeal. The masses are not moved by anti-religious propaganda because their relationship with the Orthodox Church is not intellectual but habitual. The brilliantly illuminated church, packed with people in festive attire, alive with sight and scent and sounds, offers the people “a range of social-aesthetic attractions” absent from their workaday lives. People are not bound to the Orthodox faith by its theological doctrines, Trotsky observes, but rather by its aesthetic pleasures.
The notion that people are motivated in their actions by the pursuit of pleasure is, of course, the first principle of Utilitarianism. The founder of the English utilitarian tradition, Jeremy Bentham, had stipulated that all human endeavor can be reduced to the rational pursuit of pleasure and quantified in mathematical terms. A radical measure, by contrast, sets the economy of pleasure that Trotsky seeks to promote through the fusion of state and cinema apart from the utilitarian prescription voiced by Marx: “from each according to his ability; to each according to his need.” In the new moral economy, the drive for surplus accumulation—realized through the alienation of labor—made the pursuit of pleasure non-identical with itself. That is, the means and ends of human activity no longer coincide. With the new ethos of work that seeks satisfaction in the accumulation of value rather than its use, it is no longer possible to add up the pleasure dividends of one’s actions as figures in a column and then legislate on the basis of this calculation. Instead, we see a fundamental conflict playing out in the domain of everyday life between the satisfaction of needs and the mobilization of drives.
Recognition of this conflict transformed the parameters of education. As Evgeny Dobrenko points out, “moral” stimuli to labor were assumed to be fundamental in Soviet political culture. But the meaning of moral stimuli underwent a radical transformation in the exigency of capital accumulation. While Bukharin and Preobrazhensky argued in the The ABC of Communism that labor discipline must be based on the worker’s self-consciousness of responsibility toward the whole working class, Trotsky endorses cinema as an instrument of aesthetic education precisely because it bypassed literacy requirements and mobilized the libidinal drives. Seeking to emulate rather than abolish the opiates of the masses, he underscores cinema’s capacity to reconstitute the tightly woven complex of habits and norms that encases the individual in an inhospitable social milieu. Instead of preaching sobriety and asceticism, Trotsky effectively proposed to replace the old consolations of peasant life with a new and powerful form of addiction: the proletarianized worker must be taught to enjoy her self-exploitation.
Underlying the hedonist vision of socialist education is a principle of psychic adaptation expounded by the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi in his book Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality (1924). In this work, Ferenczi argues that the forces of education can never induce the individual to renounce infantile forms of gratification. What appears at first glance to be the emergence at puberty of an adult genital sexuality is really a clever recombination, or “amphimixis,” of infantile eroticisms. The disciple of Freud speculates that the organization of excitements leading up to genital ejaculation is actually a montage of the urethral and anal eroticisms characteristic of infantile sexuality, and that it is, moreover, “one particular instance out of the many in which such fusion of erotisms takes place.” He concludes that “no living organism can be induced to make any change in its activity” without the remediation of libidinal gratifications. As a public defender of psychoanalysis from the attack of the Pavlovian behaviorists, Trotsky frequently invoked the psychoanalytic model of subjectivity in his polemics on Soviet cultural policy. Like Ferenczi, he did not believe Communist education can make people renounce their customary pleasures (church and tavern) and pursue an unpleasurable activity (work), unless the new culture of work successfully remediates older forms of hedonistic gratification.
“As a public defender of psychoanalysis from the attack of the Pavlovian behaviorists, Trotsky frequently invoked the psychoanalytic model of subjectivity in his polemics on Soviet cultural policy.”
Contrary to anti-Communist stereotypes, what the law of primitive socialist accumulation mandated was not the ascetic renunciation of pleasure but its active administration. In The General Line, Trotsky’s prophetic vision of a socialist alternative to church art found its most artistically compelling realization.[2] Its bucolic heroine personifies the new spirit of state capitalism in the peasant economy. Like the embryonic capitalist invoked by Trotsky as a model for Soviet workers to imitate on the path to socialism, Marfa continuously subjects herself and her rural community to privation, urging the deferral of immediate gratification for the sake of future accumulation. And yet, this selfdenying proletarian saint, who literally fought off her intemperate neighbors to preserve the cooperative’s investment fund from dispersal, does not have to wait for another lifetime to receive her rewards. The pornographic fantasy of being stripped naked by an insatiable machine illustrates the irrational perquisite of selfsacrificial labor. Her face aflame from the transindividual ecstasy of surplus value creation, the beatific peasant woman would unknowingly render a “yeoman service” to the state capitalist formation. Her miraculous intercession in the crisis of primitive accumulation suggests that the mortified industries can be reanimated with the economic forces unleashed by the alienation of labor.
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We can extrapolate some general lessons about the psychical dynamics of capital accumulation from this particular history. Cut off from the flows of capital, a state socialist economy of the early Soviet type had to look inward for the conditions of capitalist accumulation. As Trotsky bluntly observed, this meant self-exploitation of labor without the oversight of the capitalist. The upshot is that the refrain of rationalization in Soviet economic discourse concealed an obscene imperative that the proponents of primitive socialist accumulation brazenly exposed—to the offense of good political taste. For no amount of pragmatic husbandry and rational distribution of finite economic resources could have made superannuated and under-capitalized industries turn a profit. Contrary to the defensive fables of the harmonists, industrialization in one country presupposes the ruthless exploitation of the working masses. The form of their exploitation, however, differs substantially from the exploitation of labor in Victorian-era capitalism. Its character is intensive rather than extensive, featuring an intra-subjective rather than inter-subjective conflict. Whereas the extraction of surplus value in the classical form of industrial capitalism described by Marx takes place through the non-equivalent exchange of value between the capitalist and the worker mediated by the wage-form, surplus value in the Soviet system is instead created through the nonequivalent exchange of value between the worker and herself—a psychic rupture mediated by the industrial mediation of everyday life.
The outsized role played by cinema in the Soviet industrialization campaign teaches us that what tethers subjects to the capitalist mode of production are the material forms of their alienation— in other words, media in the broadest sense. The way primitive accumulation implicates subjectivity is more complex and incalculable than a simple scenario of dispossession. If primitive accumulation refers to the expropriation of one mode of production by another, then it’s worth bearing in mind that something positive always comes in to remediate the relation between producers and the means of production. This could be a new system of knowledge, a new social organization, or a new techno-scientific paradigm. I am tempted to say that for what’s taken away, capitalism gives too much back in return.
Instead of accumulation by dispossession, then, a better metaphor for primitive socialist accumulation might be the Freudian notion of Verwerfung that Lacan translates as foreclosure (forclusion) in his seminar on psychosis. A function of the Unconscious distinct from the mechanism of repression, the foreclosure of subjectivity by capital destroys the rational basis of self-interest from which the meaning of individual actions can be symbolized and consequently measured. Instead, an obsessional form of enjoyment emerges, organized around the negation of a lack, that fuels an evergrowing cycle of compulsive accumulation.
We see this essentially psychotic structure in the rapturous hallucinations of the self-exploiting proletariat. At the end of Martha’s hard-won battle to exchange the accumulated profit of the dairy cooperative for a breeding bull, she walks into a gigantic state dairy farm (a Constructivist set designed by Le Corbusier’s disciple, Andrei Burov) to receive the prized calf straight from the middle of a surrealist dream. This ambiguous transition alerts us to the emergence of a transcendental negativity in the finite order of needs. “Maybe you think it’s a dream?” Close-up of Martha’s face, mouth gaping, incredulous. “Absolutely not.” The workers’ hosanna rings out as the calf appears on screen. Cinema spreads the good news to the hopeless millions: the withdrawn god of capital has returned to the land of socialism through the portal of immaculate (i.e. self-alienating) labor!
The Soviet economic parable instructs that primitive socialist accumulation is a prehistory that can only unfold in the present. Sitting on the horns of their dilemma, the church fathers of socialism ultimately found the “accumulation which is not the result of the capitalist mode of production but its point of departure” in the jouissance of the masses. Cinema as a state institution accordingly became a scaler of the two economies, making a productive use of the human being’s capacity for self-alienation in the interest of industrial policy.
[1] Since the publication of Midnight Notes’s influential dossier, “The New Enclosures” (1990), the concept of primitive accumulation has become a key lens for those attempting to interpret the history of capitalism. Such seminal interventions as David Harvey’s The New Imperialism (2003), which popularized the notion of “accumulation by dispossession,” and Silvia Federici’s critique of feminized labor in Caliban and the Witch: Woman, The Body, and Primitive Accumulation (2004), have revitalized the theory of primitive accumulation from anti-colonial, anti-globalization, feminist, and anti-racist perspectives, while tethering identity-based politics to a global critique of capitalist accumulation. As Federici writes in the introduction to Caliban and the Witch, “every new revolutionary movement has returned to the ‘transition to capitalism,’ bringing to it the perspectives of new social subjects and uncovering new grounds of exploitation and resistance.”
[2.] In his memoirs, Eisenstein recalls reading Thalassa while editing The General Line. He also maintains that the new system of montage aesthetics aims to bring the viewer to a state of ecstasy. The theory of genitality is thus adapted into a cinema of productivity.