In the first volume of Capital, Marx uses the rhetorical ploy of staging what he calls the “voice” of the worker in order to bring out the character of his category “labor.” This voice shows how abstracted the category “worker” or “labor” is from the social and the psychic processes that we common-sensically associate with “the everyday.” Firstly, it reduces age, childhood, health, strength and so on to biological or physiological statements, separate from the diverse and historically specific experiences of aging, of being a child, of being healthy, and so on. “Apart from the natural deterioration through age etc.,” Marx’s category “worker” says to the capitalist in a voice that is introspective as well, “I must be able to work tomorrow with the same normal amount of strength, health, and freshness as today.” This abstraction means that “sentiments” are no part of this imaginary dialogue between the abstracted laborer and the capitalist who is himself also a figure of abstraction. The voice of the worker says: “I . . . demand a working day of normal length . . . without any appeal to your heart, for in money matters sentiment is out of place. You may be a model citizen, perhaps a member of the R.S.P.C.A., and you may be in the odour of sanctity as well; but the thing you represent as you come face to face with me has no heart in its breast.”30 In this figure of a rational collective entity, the worker, Marx grounds the question of working-class unity, either potential or realized. The question of working class unity is not a matter of emotional or psychic solidarity of empirical workers, as numerous humanist-Marxist labor historians, from E. P. Thompson on, have often imagined it to be. The “worker” is an abstract and collective subject by its very constitution.31 It is within that collective and abstract subject that, as Gayatri Spivak has reminded us, the dialectic of class-in-itself and class-for-itself plays out.32 The “collective worker,” says Marx, “formed out of the combination of a number of individual specialized workers, is the item of machinery specifically characteristic of the manufacturing period.”33

ABSTRACT LABOR AS CRITIQUE


The universal category “abstract labor” has a twofold function in Marx: it is both a description and a critique of capital. Whereas capital makes abstractions real in everyday life, Marx uses these very same abstractions to give us a sense of the everyday world that capitalist production creates— witness, for example, Marx’s use of such reductively biological categories as “women,” “children,” “adult males,” “childhood,” “family functions,” or the “expenditure of domestic labour.”38 The idea of abstract labor reproduces the central feature of the hermeneutic of capital— how capital reads human activity.

Yet “abstract labor” is also a critique of the same hermeneutic because it—the labor of abstracting—defines for Marx a certain kind of unfreedom. He calls it “despotism.” This despotism is structural to capital; it is not simply historical. Thus Marx writes that “capital is constantly compelled to wrestle with the insubordination of the workers,” and he says that discipline, “ highly detailed specifications, which regulate, with military uniformity, the times, the limits, the pauses of work by the stroke of the clock, . . . developed out of circumstances as natural laws of the modern mode of production. Their formulation, official recognition and proclamation by the state were the result of a long class struggle.”39 Here Marx is not speaking merely of a particular historical stage, the transition from handicrafts to manufactures in England, when “the full development of its own peculiar tendencies comes up against obstacles from many directions . . . the habits and the resistance of the male workers.”40 He is also writing about “resistance to capital” as something internal to capital itself. As Marx writes elsewhere, the self-reproduction of capital “moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited.” Just because, he adds, capital gets ideally beyond every limit posed to it by “national barriers and prejudices,” “it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it.”41

From where does such resistance arise? Many labor historians think of resistance to factory work as the result of either a clash between the requirements of industrial discipline and preindustrial habits of workers in the early phase of industrialization or a heightened level of worker consciousness in a later phase. In other words, they see it as the result of a particular historical stage of capitalist production. Marx, in contrast, locates this resistance in the very logic of capital. That is to say, he locates it in the structural “being” of capital rather than in its historical “becoming.” Central to this argument is what Marx sees as the “despotism of capital,” which has nothing to do with either the historical stage of capitalism or the empirical worker’s consciousness. It would not matter for Marx’s argument whether the capitalist country in question were a developed one or not. Resistance is the Other of the despotism inherent in capital’s logic. It is also a part of Marx’s point about why, if capitalism were ever to realize itself fully, it would embody the conditions for its own dissolution.

Capital’s power is autocratic, writes Marx. Resistance is rooted in a process through which capital appropriates the will of the worker. Marx writes: “In the factory code, the capitalist formulates his autocratic power over his workers like a private legislator, and purely as an emanation of his own will.”42 This will, embodied in capitalist discipline, Marx describes as “purely despotic,” and he uses the analogy of the army to describe the coercion at its heart: “An industrial army of workers under the command of capital requires, like a real army, officers (managers) and N.C.O.s (foremen, overseers), who command during labour process in the name of capital. The work of supervision becomes their exclusive function.”43

Why call capitalist discipline “despotic” if all it does is to act as though labor could be abstracted and homogenized? Marx’s writings on this point underscore the importance of the concept of “abstract labor”—a version of the Enlightenment figure of the abstract human—as an instrument of critique. He thought of abstract labor as a compound category, spectrally objective and yet made up of human physiology and human consciousness, both abstracted from any empirical history. The consciousness in question was pure will. Marx writes: “Factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost; at the same time, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and intellectual activity. Even the lightening of labour becomes a torture.”44

Why would freedom have to do with something as reductively physiological as “the nervous system . . . the many-sided play of muscles”? Because, Marx explains, the labor that capital presupposes “as its contradiction and its contradictory being,” and which in turn “presupposes capital,” is a special kind of labor, “labour not as an object, but as activity, . . . as the living source of value.”45 “As against capital, labour is the merely abstract form, the mere possibility of value-positing activity, which exists only as a capacity, as a resource in the bodiliness of the worker.”46 Science aids in this abstraction of living labor by capital: “In machinery, the appropriation of living labour by capital achieves a direct reality. . . . It is, firstly, the analysis and application of mechanical and chemical laws, arising directly out of science, which enables the machine to perform the same labour as that previously performed by the worker. However, the development of machinery along this path occurs only after . . . all the sciences have been pressed into the service of capital.”47

The critical point is that the labor that is abstracted in the capitalist’s search for a common measure of human activity is living. Marx would ground resistance to capital in this apparently mysterious factor called “life.” The connections between the language of classical political economy and the traditions of European thought one could call “vitalist” are an underexplored area of research, particularly in the case of Marx. Marx’s language and his biological metaphors often reveal a deep influence of nineteenth-century vitalism: “Labour is the yeast thrown into it , which starts it fermenting.” And labor power as “commodity exists in his vitality. . . . In order to maintain this from one day to the next . . . he has to consume a certain quantity of food, to replace his used-up blood etc. . . . Capital has paid him the amount of objectified labour contained in his vital forces.”48 These vital forces are the ground of constant resistance to capital. They are the abstract living labor—a sum of muscles, nerves, and consciousness/will—which, according to Marx, capital posits as its contradictory starting point. In this vitalist understanding, life, in all its biological/conscious capacity for willful activity (the “many-sided play of muscles”), is the excess that capital, for all its disciplinary procedures, always needs but can never quite control or domesticate.

One is reminded here of Hegel’s discussion, in his Logic, of the Aristotelian category “life.” Hegel accepted Aristotle’s argument that “life” was expressive of a totality or unity in a living individual. “The single members of the body,” Hegel writes, “are what they are only by and in relation to their unity. A hand e.g. when hewn off from the body is, as Aristotle has observed, a hand in name only, not in fact.”49 It is only with death that this unity is dismembered and the body falls prey to the objective forces of nature. With death, as Charles Taylor puts it in explaining this section of Hegel’s Logic, “mechanism and chemism” break out of the “subordination” in which they are held “as long as life continues.”50 Life, to use Hegel’s expression, “is a standing fight” against the possibility of the dismemberment with which death threatens the unity of the living body.51 Life, in Marx’s analysis of capital, is similarly a “standing fight” against the process of abstraction that is constitutive of the category “labor.” It is as if the process of abstraction and ongoing appropriation of the worker’s body in the capitalist mode of production perpetually threatens to effect a dismemberment of the unity of the “living body.”

This unity of the body that “life” expresses, however, is something more than the physical unity of the limbs. “Life” implies a consciousness that is purely human in its abstract and innate capacity for willing. This embodied and peculiarly human “will”—reflected in “the many-sided play of muscles”—refuses to bend to the “technical subordination” under which capital constantly seeks to place the worker. Marx writes: “The presupposition of the master-servant relation is the appropriation of an alien will.” This will could not belong to animals, for animals could not be part of the politics of recognition that the Hegelian master-slave relation assumed. A dog might obey a man, but the man would never know for certain if the dog did not simply look on him as another, bigger, and more powerful “dog.” As Marx writes: “the animal may well provide a service but does not thereby make its owner a master.” The dialectic of mutual recognition on which the master-servant relationship turned could only take place between humans: “the master-servant relation likewise belongs in this formula of the appropriation of the instruments of production. . . . [I]t is reproduced—in mediated form—in capital, and thus . . . forms a ferment of its dissolution and is an emblem of its limitation.”52

Marx’s critique of capital begins at the same point where capital begins its own life process: the abstraction of labor. Yet this labor, although abstract, is always living labor to begin with. The “living” quality of the labor ensures that the capitalist has not bought a fixed quantum of labor but rather a variable “capacity for labor,” and being “living” is what makes this labor a source of resistance to capitalist abstraction. The tendency on the part of capital would therefore be to replace, as much as possible, living labor with objectified, dead labor. Capital is thus faced with its own contradiction: it needs abstract but living labor as the starting point in its cycle of self-reproduction, but it also wants to reduce to a minimum the quantum of living labor it needs. Capital will therefore tend to develop technology in order to reduce this need to a minimum. This is exactly what will create the conditions necessary for the emancipation of labor and for the eventual abolition of the category “labor” altogether. But that would also be the condition for the dissolution of capital: “apital . . . —quite unintentionally—reduces human labour, expenditure of energy, to a minimum. This will redound to the benefit of emancipated labour, and is the condition of its emancipation.”53

The subsequent part of Marx’s argument runs as follows. It is capital’s tendency to replace living labor by science and technology—that is, by man’s “understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body”—that will give rise to the development of the “social individual” whose greatest need will be that of the “free development of individualities.” For the “reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum” would correspond “to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them.” Capital would then reveal itself as the “moving contradiction” it is: it both presses “to reduce labour time to a minimum” and at the same time posits labor time “as the sole measure and source of wealth.” It would therefore work “towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production.”54

Thus would Marx complete the loop of his critique of capital, which looks to a future beyond capital by attending closely to the contradictions in capital’s own logic. He uses the vision of the abstract human embedded in the capitalist practice of “abstract labor” to generate a radical critique of capital itself. He recognizes that bourgeois societies in which the idea of “human equality” had acquired the “fixity of popular prejudice” allowed him to use the same idea to critique them. But historical difference would remain sublated and suspended in this particular form of the critique.

from Chapter 2, Provincializing Europe by Dipesh Chakrabarty

Edited by babyfinland (Jan. 6, 2012 05:21:31)

getfiscal posted:
Rosa Luxemburg is a useful person to bring up because she explicitly said that you don't "wait" for a majority, which is essentially impossible to build under capitalism she believed. She said you had to take power and then build a majority. That is, all her talk of workers' councils and such was not premised on the idea that they formed a true majority of all workers across Germany, but because these were organs of mass power that could seize power and then build a majority through socialist policies. That sort of theory is central to revolutionary socialism, I would suggest.

To some extent I think Marxism indicates and provides some justification for this revolutionarism by arguing that, by virtue of their production under capitalism, the sites of socialist democracy are intrinsic to capitalism. As capital requires the living labor of the worker to reproduce itself, and seeks to abstract labor power into an exchangeable form at these sites (i.e. the factory), through a self-obviating logic (i.e. requiring living real labor to reproduce itself while simultaneously attempting to extirpate that real labor and substitute in the abstract labor universal) it lends weight to the socialist revolutionary impetus without needing any outside reference.