On Creatively Destructing

Abstract

Capitalism—as Marx has shown and Schumpeter has reminded us—has always promoted creative destruction practices. What in fact helps capitalism survive is the constant renewal of its products, modes of production, and needs through its own self-destructiveness. Capitalist destruction is a clearing out, a maneuver, a revaluation, and the presupposition for creation, all at once. It is a unification, the embracing of multiple and seemingly incompatible activities whose common component mainly consists in positivity: in their ability to reverse, to beautify destruction and its products. Capitalism's destructiveness gains its “literal meaning” in real space—interestingly involving biological metaphors into its analysis. It then presents itself as regeneration, as a natural, organic condition, and—in its purest manifestation—as life itself. At the antipode of capitalist creative destructions stands yet again a destructive practice, negatively charged and described by an allegoric, historic, frightening name:“vandalism.”

Key Words:

• Capitalism
• Creative Destruction
• Karl Marx
• Self-Destruction
• Vandalism

Notes

1. The discourse that invests this kind of recommendation is also worth some attention. As Le Corbusier (1929, 128, 232) formulated it, “Therefore the existing centres must come down. To save itself, every great city must rebuild its centre.” And likewise, “We must build on a clear site!”

2. See Schumpeter (1994, xiv).

3. “Adaptation is the heart and soul of evolution,” Niles Eldredge (1995, 33) remarked.

4. The exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries has been explicitly presented in Naomi Klein's (2007) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

5. It is not by chance that Schumpeter (1994, 82–3) uses a biological term in his description of capitalism: “The opening-up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.”

6. The perception of the organic as a self-developing system is at least as old as its Kantian definition, that of “an organised unity, not an aggregate” which may “grow from within, but not by external addition” (Kant 1998, 860–1).

7. Ironically, even the term “heterotopia” belongs also to medical and biological terminology. In medicine it refers to the presence of a particular tissue type at a nonphysiological site, an ectopia, the displacement of an organ or other parts; in biology it refers to an altered location of trait expression. See West-Eberhard (2003).

8. This English translation is by Jay Miskowiec and is available online: http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf.