Hegemony and the Politics of Labour: Towards a Discourse Theory of Value in Contemporary Capitalism [1 ed.] 9781003440567

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Hegemony and the Politics of Labour

Hegemony and the Politics of Labour takes up a question that goes to the heart of the debate about politics, capitalism, and discourse: how can labour relations and value production be understood as discursive processes? When they launched their poststructuralist discourse theory almost 40 years ago, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe positioned the contingency of discourse and politics in sharp contrast to the deterministic tendencies of the Marxist critique of capitalism. Moving beyond Marxism as an essentialist ‘other’, discourse theory has since remained notoriously silent on questions related to the core workings of capitalism. This book is the first to bring the central categories of discourse theory into conversation with Marx’s critique of political economy. Reintegrating both traditions, it argues that the social relations of labour in capitalism emerge as a hegemonic formation. Its contribution is to extend the reach of discourse theory to the capitalist economy, exploring how a post-​Marxist account of labour, value, and class connects to the contingent politics of populism. Hegemony and the Politics of Labour is an original and important contribution to the fields of discourse theory and critique of political economy. Simon Tunderman is a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP). He holds a PhD in political theory from the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS). Previously he worked as a lecturer in European Politics and Society at the University of Groningen.

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Hegemony and the Politics of Labour Towards a Discourse Theory of Value in Contemporary Capitalism Simon Tunderman

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Simon Tunderman The right of Simon Tunderman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​57690-​9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​032-​57691-​6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​44056-​7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003440567 Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

vii 1

1 Post-​Marxism and the Materiality of Labour

17

2 Labour and Political Society: On the Contingency of Capitalism

53

3 Money and the Limits of Labour

89

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4

Marxists and the Accusation of Idealism  19 The Discourse of Materiality  23 The Portrait of Marx as an Idealist  31 How Not to Interpret the Theory of Value  38

2.1 The Specificity of Labour in Capitalism  55 2.2 Abstract Labour and the Question of Freedom  63 2.3 Abstract Labour and the Political Constitution of Society  70 2.4 Utility and Universality  78

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5

Structure, Sign, and Labour  91 Empty Signifiers and Universality  95 Value and Difference  100 Money and Empty Signifiers  106 The Possibility of Antagonism  111

4 Domination and the Antagonisms of Value

4.1 The Political Relevance of Value  127 4.2 The Superfluity of Labour  134 4.3  Social Domination and the Contradiction of Capitalism  141

125

vi  Contents 4.4 Contradiction or Antagonism?  150 4.5 Class and the Antagonism of Value  156

5 Subjectivity and the Logics of Value

5.1 T  he Constitution and Sedimentation of Abstract Labour  166 5.2 The Split Subject of Labour  172 5.3 The Logics of Value  182 5.4 A Symbolic Logic of Capital  191

165

Conclusion: Labour, Class, and the Political

202

Index

210

Acknowledgements

This book is based on my PhD dissertation. I would like to start out by thanking the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS) for granting me a scholarship, and for creating such a well-​ organised and friendly environment. Also, I am grateful to Natalja Mortensen at Routledge for her kind help and advice in turning my thesis into the book it has now become. It is safe to say that I could not have written this book without the support and supervision of Martin Nonhoff. I am indebted to Martin for showing me the ropes of political theory, his guidance in navigating the academic world, and his ever insightful comments on my work. The value of his taking the time for supportive and helpfully critical discussions of the individual chapters of this project can hardly be overstated. Also, Martin’s effort to complement critical academic work with an open and friendly social space for exchange among people at various stages of their careers is a prime example of how to make academia a better environment for everyone. For these things I would like to thank Martin very much. I have had two second supervisors at the University of Bremen, both of whom have played a crucial role in the development of this book. My gratitude goes to Frank Nullmeier for his almost intuitive understanding of what I was trying to do in my work, and the critical capacity to think it through and embed it in the essential debates. His advice on turning the original thesis into a book publication has proved crucial. I thank Sebastian Botzem for the important directions he gave me with regard to navigating the field of contemporary critical political economy, as well as for his recommendation always to keep connecting abstract theory to actual empirical reality. My research stay at the University of Essex, kindly funded by BIGSSS and Erasmus+​, provided me with valuable new input and ideas. The extensive discussions I had with Jason Glynos about the possible connections between discourse theory and the study of capitalism have been crucial

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viii  Acknowledgements for developing my argument. David Howarth’s fascinating teaching on Essex School theory as well as his comments on an early chapter helped to get a much clearer grasp of the exact relation between the ‘post-​’ and the ‘Marxist’. I would also like to thank Jason and David, along with the staff at the University of Essex, for their help in organising my research stay there. Sometimes brief encounters can be incredibly productive. On various occasions Yannis Stavrakakis has given me valuable feedback on my work, and also important practical advice regarding publication strategies. Joscha Wullweber convinced me that the connection between the critique of political economy and Laclauian theory was worth exploring in more detail. And I am very glad to have skipped a conference panel to discuss the connections between Postone and Wertkritik with Norbert Trenkle. Many people have contributed to this book in bigger or smaller ways. In particular, I would like to thank Frieder Vogelmann, Gundula Ludwig, Seongcheol Kim, Karsten Schubert, Sebastian Möller, Stefan Wallaschek, Janosik Herder, Jimena Vazquez, Kostis Roussos, Malte Jauch, Arndt Wonka, Jan Overwijk, Ivan Bakalov, Yiorgos Moraitis, Leslie Gauditz, Anna Wolkenhauer, Christian Leonhardt, Benjamin Heidrich, Eva Johais, and Pepijn Corduwener. Their comments and ideas, whether in the colloquium or at the coffee machine, have been important for developing the arguments of this book. Special thanks to my friends and colleagues in Bremen, who made the mensa a treat even when the dish of the day was deep-​fried cauliflower. For their support, collegiality, and friendship during my time at the University of Groningen I am grateful to Stefan Couperus, Léonie de Jonge, Lisa Gaufman, Hugh McDonnell, Tilman Lanz, Christoph Humrich, Agha Bayramov, and Mustafa Sezal. I would not have been able to complete this project without the continuous love and support of my family. For this I am grateful to my father Leo, my sister Julia, and –​in loving memory –​my mother Mariska. I also count myself lucky with such wonderful aunts and uncles as Els and Olaf, Frans and Jetty, and Marcel and Corrien. I want to dedicate this book to Kristin, my love, and Vera, our little love.

Introduction

Labour and discourse seem to be at opposite ends of the spectrum of critical political theory. While a focus on labour moves political analysis into the domain of material necessity, a discursive perspective emphasises the contingency of political practices. Do underlying economic developments regulate the shape of politics, or do people’s contentious political acts construct the social world? The choice for understanding politics, then, seems to be between the necessity of labour or the contingency of discourse. This, at least, is what is at stake in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s post-​ Marxist intervention in Marxist debates. Unconvinced by the Marxist tendency to search for the core of politics in economic structures, they positioned their seminal Hegemony and Socialist Strategy as a theory of discourse that could grasp the complex emergence of new political movements (Laclau and Mouffe 2014 [1985]). Over the years, their book has proven to be as influential as it was controversial when it was first published (Kouvelakis 2020). While it also attracted criticism, especially from Marxist circles, discourse theory has since established itself as an important current in critical political thought. Still sceptical of attempts to find underlying relations of necessity or determination, contemporary discourse theory offers a rich analytical framework for studying the political struggles over the direction and outlook of society. Laclau and Mouffe’s theoretical intervention has become influential in a number of different fields of research, ranging from hegemonic discourse analysis (Nonhoff 2019) through ideology critique (Glynos 2008) and media studies (Farkas and Schou 2020) to the contemporary populism debate (Stavrakakis 2017; Kim 2021). But it has always remained notoriously silent on a crucial domain of the social, as it never managed to adequately grasp the workings of the capitalist economy within its framework. This blind spot for the capitalist economy has been a consistent point of criticism addressed to discourse theory from different parts of the debate (Diskin and Sandler 1993; Dahlberg 2014). In the early discussion

DOI: 10.4324/9781003440567-1

2  Introduction Marxists found fault with Laclau and Mouffe’s intervention for its alleged idealism, as a consequence of which it would not be able to understand the materiality of economic processes that structure the social world (Geras 1987). And while this was a somewhat hostile reproach from a different academic tradition, nowadays discourse theorists themselves also advocate for delving deeper into the material dynamics of the economy (De Cleen et al. 2021). Discourse theory’s aspirations to the status of a ‘political ontology’ (Marchart 2018) of society remain incomplete as long as the economy remains outside of its grasp. This book revolves around the tension between discourse theory and the critique of capitalism, and explores how the material structures of labour can become part of the hegemonic constitution of society. In a sense, this question goes to the heart of discourse theory’s contested emergence as a paradigm of critical political theory. Laclau and Mouffe positioned their work in response to Marxist debates on political struggle. They saw a ‘proliferation of social struggles’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2014, 1) emerging around ecological, feminist, or sexual rights subjects. In their view, Marxist attempts to explain the differential character of these social movements by reference to a supposed core in anti-​capitalist class struggle did not do justice to the status of politics as a self-​determined logic. Laclau and Mouffe disagreed with what they considered a tendency to reduce politics to the economy. The intervention of discourse theory therefore sits right at the centre of the question about the relationship between the political and the social. As Laclau remarked on this matter: Any advance in the understanding of present-​ day social struggles depends on inverting the relations of priority which the last century and a half’s social thought had established between the social and the political. This tendency had been characterized, in general terms, by what we may term the systematic absorption of the political by the social. The political became either a superstructure, or a regional sector of the social, dominated and explained according to the objective laws of the latter. Nowadays, we have started to move in the opposite direction: towards a growing understanding of the eminently political character of any social identity. (Laclau 1990, 160) The social, which in Marxist discussions is the stuff of labour, exploitation, and class struggle, had ‘absorbed’ the political, according to Laclau. Discourse theory sought to reverse this and put forth that social identities, relations, and the social order itself are not given by the supposed laws of capitalist development, but rather constituted through political struggle. Extending this line of thought leads to the insight that the

Introduction  3 capitalist economy and the social relations of labour, too, are constituted through political struggle. But how exactly this works has so far remained unclarified from a discourse theory perspective. This draws up a distinction between the Marxist domain of the capitalist economy –​deterministic, class-​reductionistic, based on labour –​and the contingency of political discourse theory, with limited engagement between the two sides. Discourse theory has a much wider grasp than the name would seem to suggest at first sight. Rather than restricting itself to analysing discourse in the narrow linguistic sense, it aims to trace the contested emergence of political movements and social formations. Discourse theory, in this way, starts from the contingency of the social world. There are no fixed identities, relations, or historical mechanisms that determine what society looks like or how politics develops. This is a position of radical anti-​ essentialism. Since there are no essences or fixed determinations, any identity emerges through contingent political struggle. It is through connecting elements, building alliances, and contesting adversaries that politics shapes the social world. For Laclau, then, the political is the contingent and power-​laden domain where social relations are constituted through struggle (Laclau 1990, 35). Hegemony is the central concept in this regard. Hegemonic practices are political acts that try to change or establish a social order for which there is no stable ground. So while there is no such thing as an objective, predetermined society, there will always be attempts at organising society in particular ways (Laclau 1983). This is a process of contestation between different views on social order. Discourse theory, then, revolves around contingent political struggles aimed at constituting hegemonic orders. In that sense, hegemony is ‘a theory of the decision taken in undecidable terrain’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2014, xi). From this it follows that there is a substantial distance between Laclau and Mouffe’s thought and the Marxist theory they directed their critique at. Over the years the body of Marxist thought has inspired a wide variety of specific offshoots with particular inflections, but according to Laclau and Mouffe economic essentialism remains a problem throughout. They locate the origin of this problem in Marx himself. In the introduction to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx writes that politics and the state are grounded in the material relations of political economy. Political change and eventually revolution become a function of the mounting tension between the forces and relations of production (Marx 1974, 8–​9). According to this line of thought, what happens in the political realm is determined by the economy. Laclau and Mouffe criticise this position as a form of economic essentialism. While they acknowledge the contributions of later thinkers, they point out the recurrence of this essentialism. Louis Althusser’s structural Marxism, for example, still holds on to the idea of ‘determination in the last instance by the

4  Introduction economy’ (Althusser 1965, 111). Something similar applies to Gramsci, who originally introduced the concept of hegemony into Marxist theory to account for the process of alliance-​building between classes that cemented social orders (Gramsci 1971, 12). While Laclau and Mouffe applaud the widening of the political terrain that comes along with Gramsci’s intervention, they also criticise his insistence on the centrality of the working class as a form of essentialism (Laclau and Mouffe 2014, 59). Even in these further developments of Marxist theory, then, politics remains in a relation of determination relative to the foundational force of the economy. The critique of Marxist economic essentialism also features in wider debates of political theory. One example of this criticism can be found in the work of Hannah Arendt. For Arendt, the political grasps the collective actions that constitute a community through deliberation and acting together in diversity. Insofar as constitution of a free society is central for Arendt, the political is identical with freedom (Arendt 1993, 52). It is clear that this understanding of the political as acting in freedom to create new beginnings towards the common good stands in the starkest possible contrast to totalitarian forms of government, which repress any possibility to act politically in the name of a supposedly natural law that governs all of society. As such, it is interesting to consider what Arendt says about Marx’s work in The Origins of Totalitarianism: Marx’s class struggle, on the other hand, as the driving force of history is only the outward expression of the development of productive forces which in turn have their origin in the “labour-​power” of men. Labour, according to Marx, is not a historical but a natural-​biological force —​released through man’s “metabolism with nature” by which he conserves his individual life and reproduces the species. (Arendt 2017, 609) Although Arendt stops short of attributing totalitarian tendencies to Marx himself, she clearly indicates a certain totalitarian resonance in the central category of labour, as this would lay at the basis of a driving force of history that presses human beings into the fold of a ‘natural law’. Indeed, Marx’s supposed positing of labour as anchoring point that determines the course of history seems fundamentally at odds with Arendt’s take on the freedom of acting politically towards the common good. In this way Arendt draws a strong distinction between the political on the one hand, and Marx’s work on the critique of capitalism on the other. This distinction between the contingent domain of the political and the supposed economic foundationalism of Marxism is also visible in another context. For Jacques Rancière, the political becomes visible when ‘those who have no part’ emerge to interrupt a social order of domination

Introduction  5 (Rancière 1999, 11). Insofar as there is a contingent foundation for the community at all, then, politics consists precisely in questioning and undermining it. Politics manifests itself as a claim to genuine equality by a part of the community that, despite its formally equal status, was reduced to a subservient role. This figure of a constitutional fissure in the political also appears in Claude Lefort’s work. Lefort famously argued that from the democratic revolution onwards, the place of power remains symbolically empty, spurring continuous democratic contestation over its temporary occupation, which would then also constitute democratic society as such in the absence of a transcendental foundation (Lefort 1988). Although Lefort and Rancière, given their focus on struggle and contestation, put forward a rather different interpretation of the political than Arendt, to some extent they share her skepsis regarding the potential of Marxism to grasp the political. Rancière says that Marxism ‘turned the political into the expression, or mask, of social relationships’ (Rancière 1999, vii). Similarly, Lefort distances himself from Marxist theory that reduces politics to a ‘superstructure whose base is to be found at the supposedly real level of relations of production’ (Lefort 1988, 10). The political is juxtaposed to Marxist economism. Also in wider political theory debates, then, does Marxist thought feature as a staple of essentialism and determinism, contrasted to the contingency of politics. Discourse theory brings this juxtaposition to a boiling point insofar as it explicitly argues against reducing politics to economics, while retaining crucial insights from the Marxist tradition. Indeed, Laclau and Mouffe are very explicitly post-​Marxist about their theoretical efforts. Mouffe argues that after ‘the demise of Marxism’ the political consists in taking seriously the fundamental role of antagonism and channelling it in democratic ways (Mouffe 1993, 2). Laclau, for his part, retains quite a bit of the Marxist tradition he previously worked within, but reinterprets it on poststructuralist footing. For him, the political is about the contested constitution of political identities, groups, and social formations through hegemonic struggles. His political theory remains true to the Marxist aim of emancipation from oppression but broadens the scope beyond the classical focus on classes. In fact, Laclau says that it is precisely this somewhat stubborn focus on class that underscores Marxism’s increasing inability to cope with the reality of contemporary politics. Denying that he has rejected Marxism altogether, he says that it is in fact ‘Marxism that has broken up and I believe I’m holding on to its best fragments’ (Laclau 1990, 201). The fragments of antagonism and hegemony are central in this regard, because Laclau rethinks them in anti-​essentialist ways to grasp contemporary politics. Laclau therefore retains a close connection to Marx’s work and in fact stresses the importance of incorporating it into poststructuralist thinking about the political:

6  Introduction What is required, therefore, is taking one step back and inscribing Marxist theory within a horizon of broader interrogations which —​ without necessarily denying the former in its totality —​relativises and historicises its categories and, above all, enables us also to think about a set of historical possibilities different from those which are thinkable within Marxism. (Laclau 1990, 161–​62) This book takes Laclau’s appeal to reinscribe Marxist theory in broader interrogations as its starting point. Because in moving away from Marxist determinism, discourse theory has blocked its view on the capitalist economy. The task, then, is to reintegrate the Marxian critique of political economy into the poststructuralist framework of Laclau’s discourse theory. Previous explorations of discourse theory’s relation to the economy tend to see Laclau’s theoretical apparatus as an add-​on that speaks to economy-​ related issues, but not to the critique of capitalism itself. This can take on three different forms. First, discourse theory can be used to explore the ideological dimension of economic processes (Ryner 2006; Daly 1991; Mylonas 2014). While this can lead to valuable insights about the appeal and power of economic ideologies, it maintains the distinction between the material and the discursive. Second, Laclau’s discursive approach can be used to consider the political consequences of financial crisis or the breakdown of capital accumulation (Rey-​Araújo 2021; Best 2014). This is an important way to connect the politics of discontent to economic crisis, but it raises the question how contingent politics relates to class dynamics arising from economic processes with a determining logic of their own. This question is all the more problematic as long as Laclau’s objections to Marxism regarding labour essentialism remain standing. Third, the discourse-​theoretical logics of difference and equivalence can be mapped onto the emergence of financial value chains (Wullweber 2019; Devenney 2020). Money in financialised capitalism is reimagined as an empty signifier here, which gives discourse theory some grasp on economic value processes. Crucially, however, because this discursive approach to money limits itself to finance, largely to avoid the risk of essentialism associated with Marx’s account of labour value, this approach cannot say much about labour or the actual social relations of commodity production. This also means that the account of money as empty signifier remains hanging in the air, insofar as it is not grounded in a critical analysis of the material relations of contemporary capitalism. While all three strands of the debate make important contributions, they show that it is necessary to finally deliver a discourse-​theoretical account of labour relations, value, commodity production, and class.

Introduction  7 These considerations, then, amount to the central question how the Marxian critique of political economy can be reintegrated into Laclau’s theory of hegemony. Given the current state of the debate, in which the discursive contingency of politics is juxtaposed to the deterministic tendencies of Marxism, it is necessary to begin the argument at the most foundational level, with labour and value. After all, it is labour that supposedly assumes the function of human essence in Marxist theory, while value allegedly subjects society to the laws of economic structures, which would in turn constitute the ‘essence’ of historical development (Laclau and Mouffe 1987, 91). If the critique of political economy is to be made congruent with discourse theory’s view on the social world as radically contingent, then these crucial categories should be reimagined in a post-​Marxist way. How, then, can labour be considered not as an essence, but rather as a form of contingent hegemony? And how can the value of commodities be seen not as a deterministic law, but as a social logic revolving around everyday practices (Glynos and Howarth 2007)? Once these questions are answered, it becomes possible to expand on this newly won post-​Marxist take on capitalism and consider how class dynamics come into play, and how the tensions that come along with capitalist commodity production work out on the level of working people’s subjectivity. In this way, the goal comes into view of constructing a post-​Marxist critique of political economy, revolving around a discourse theory of value in contemporary capitalism. In the wider debate, there have been other theoretical projects that could be termed ‘post-​Marxist’ and respond to similar issues as Laclau and Mouffe’s. One such project is Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff’s Knowledge and Class. Resnick and Wolff start from the observation that essentialist Marxist theorising leads to a kind of thinking in which complex social and historical phenomena are explained by referring to a supposed ‘simplicity’ at the core (Resnick and Wolff 1987, 3). To overcome such simplicities, they develop an epistemology relying on the concept of overdetermination, which specifies that multiple processes and factors mutually affect each other. Class, from this perspective, is not an essence but an entry point to investigate the overdetermined social totality (Resnick and Wolff 1987, 51). While this is an important theoretical development, Resnick and Wolff’s work has also been criticised for reducing political economy to epistemology (Miklitsch 1995, 176). This reduction may come along with problems of its own, but for the purposes of this book it also means that Resnick and Wolff’s theory plays out in a different register than Laclau and Mouffe’s. After all, Laclau and Mouffe think about the transition from Marxism to post-​Marxism in ontological terms (Laclau and Mouffe 2014, x). From this perspective, an epistemological discussion with class as its overdetermined starting point overlooks the crucial

8  Introduction ontological question as to how labour and value are constituted politically, as part of a hegemonic process. A second important theoretical project to mention in the post-​Marxist context starts with J.K. Gibson-​Graham’s The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It). They take issue with the tendency, also in the Marxist debate, to consider capitalism as a unitary hegemonic system that supposedly exhausts the reality of the economy. In order to introduce nuance into this picture and do justice to other economic practices, they aim to ‘discover or create a world of economic difference’ (Gibson-​Graham 1996, 3). Gibson-​Graham draw on a variety of sources, including Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. For example, they mobilise the Laclauian concept of dislocation in order to think about economic practices that cannot be subsumed under the hegemonic understanding of capitalism (Gibson-​Graham 1996, xi). As such, their work represents an important step in thinking economic difference and emancipation beyond capitalism. At the same time, a critical view on the book could lead to the insight that the concept of capitalism itself ‘seems to lack any clear determinacy in the work of Gibson–​Graham’ (Albritton 1999, 172). As such, this criticism lends additional urgency to the task to develop an account of capitalism compatible with Laclau and Mouffe’s poststructuralist theoretical framework. This is important in its own right, but a comprehensive post-​Marxist view on the hegemonic social relations of capitalist labour, shedding light on its persistence, can also be of value for the study of post-​capitalist politics. Third, postcolonial theory approaches the relation between discourse theory and capitalism from yet another angle. Kalyan Sanyal argues that there is a general silence in post-​Marxist theory on matters related to the global South. The radical democratic project does not take sufficient note of the global power relations and inequalities that structure the possibilities for struggle, especially when it comes to the movement of capital and consequent class politics. In Sanyal’s view, this means that post-​Marxist theory and radical democracy could even be seen to be conditional on an unequal relation with the global South, when capital movement compensates for the gains of radical democratic struggles in the global North by seeking cheaper investment opportunities in the South (Sanyal 1996). As such, from a postcolonial perspective, Laclau and Mouffe’s radical democratic project may offer valuable theoretical insights, but also runs up against its limitations when it comes to conceiving of the inequalities of global capitalism. Their ideas about the hegemonic construction of political identities point towards the ‘multiple issues surrounding class, gender, race, case, religion, and so on’ that are relevant to the global context (Chakrabarti and Cullenberg 2003, 39). But discourse theory’s silence on capitalism may nonetheless cause it to overlook important structural economic

Introduction  9 inequalities. In this way, the postcolonial critique also underscores the importance of developing a concept of capitalist labour, value, and class in post-​Marxist terms. Formulating this goal raises the additional question how such a post-​ Marxist critique of political economy can be theorised. Since it is crucial to go to the core of the matter, a theoretical dialogue between discourse theory and Marx’s critique of capitalism is a good starting point. However, the relation between Marx and Laclau poses an obstacle at the same time, given the critique of essentialism and determinism, which the latter directed at the former. Reading Marx purely from a discourse-​theoretical perspective, in other words, will come along with a particular interpretation. As will become clear later, Laclau’s interpretation of Marx tends to lock away the critique of political economy in an essentialist register. Still, the debate about the crisis of Marxism related to essentialism and determinism cannot be ignored. For this reason it is necessary to adopt a different critical reading of Marx. Now, it could be said that faced with the problems of essentialism and determinism in Marxist thought, there are largely two different possible responses. The first would be to go beyond Marx and combine his work with other sources, such as psychoanalysis and linguistics, to develop a new critical political theory. This is what Laclau and Mouffe have done. The second possibility goes into the opposite direction and amounts to a return to Marx (Starosta 2004). This return to Marx’s core project of the critique of political economy can be found in Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination (Postone 1993). This second option offers a pathway for a useful method to theorise a post-​Marxist critique of political economy. Postone, just like Laclau, also grappled with the problems of labour essentialism, historical determinism, and class reductionism in Marxist theory. But while Laclau took a poststructuralist turn with his focus on the political, new social movements, and populism, Postone went back to Marx’s core texts in order to reinterpret them and critically reconstruct his critique. A crucial focal point of Postone’s efforts lays with abstract labour. Abstract labour, in the first part of Capital, is introduced as one side of capitalist labour. Concrete labour is the other. While concrete labour, according to Marx, always has a specific character –​for example spinning, or tool making, or nowadays food delivery –​abstract labour is homogenous. In other words, while all forms of labour are different considered as concrete labour, they are all homogenous and equivalent as abstract labour. Crucially, it is precisely this homogenous character of abstract labour that makes it possible for qualitatively different commodities to be exchanged in the first place (Marx 1976, 127). Insofar as exchange presupposes a commonality for equating different things, capitalist commodities can be traded on the basis of their homogenous abstract

10  Introduction labour side, abstracting from their concrete side. The problem here is that this seems to feed right into the charge of Marxist labour essentialism. Postone, however, argues that abstract labour is not a transhistorical essence, but rather a historically specific social framework of labour relations. For him, abstract labour is a ‘social mediation’ (Postone 1993, 150). This indicates the peculiar nature of labour in capitalist society. It is not just a goal-​oriented activity to produce useful things, but also a way for people to relate to each other. Precisely insofar as capitalist modernity presupposes the dissolution of the fixed relations of domination that made up feudalism, labour becomes a way for people to find their place in society. People relate to each other on the basis of their labour, through commodity production and exchange, and it is through this same process that they assume their social position. This is the reason, then, that the social relations of capitalism should be understood in a wider sense than just the worker-​capitalist class struggle. The social framework of labour also ties individuals together in a social fabric of working people, who are ‘free’ to find a job, which then provides their entry point into capitalist society. According to Postone, then, abstract labour grasps the homogenous character of labour that arises from its role as social mediation in capitalist society. Because it is historically specific to capitalism, abstract labour on this reading avoids essentialism and transhistorical reasoning. But Postone’s discussion of abstract labour also raises an additional crucial question. How does the social framework of abstract labour emerge if it is not a transhistorical essence? Postone himself admitted that he left open the question how the social structures of labour ‘are constituted by people and can be operative, although they are unaware of its existence’ (Postone 1993, 395). Similarly, he was criticised because his heavy focus on the structural side risks reducing human practice to the overarching economic forms of capitalist society (Bonefeld 2004, 104). As such, it turns out that while Postone’s work can help to bring Marx’s critique of capitalism on the same plane of analysis as Laclau’s discourse theory –​that of social relations –​it comes with challenges of its own. If the emergence of the social framework of abstract labour is not accounted for, the suspicion of an essentialist positing cannot be left behind. But Laclau’s poststructuralist take on hegemony can trace the contingent emergence and political maintenance of social relations. As such, the specific task is to see how abstract labour emerges as a form of political hegemony. To answer this question, the book sets up a theoretical dialogue between Laclau’s discourse theory on the one hand, and Marx’s critique of political economy as read by Postone on the other. By going back and forth between the two perspectives, discussing their theoretical assumptions, contributions, and weaknesses, the book works towards a full post-​Marxist account of the hegemonic relations of labour and value that make up capitalist society.

Introduction  11 The book’s main contribution is to overcome the discourse-​theoretical silence on the core workings of the capitalist economy. In so doing, it also speaks to important contemporary discussions about political economy, for example about precarity and unremunerated household work. But the relevance of this book goes beyond economic considerations in a narrow sense. Indeed, the fact that it works out a post-​Marxist account of capitalist labour raises the question what this means for the question of class and politics. How do the class workings of the capitalist economy relate to politics, and specifically populist discontent? Laclau’s highly influential work on populism –​a mode of politics that articulates different demands together in common opposition against a power bloc –​seems at odds with the Marxist take on class. The problem is that the ‘Marxist notion of “class” cannot be incorporated into an enumerative chain of identities, simply because it is supposed to be the articulating core around which all identity is constituted’ (Laclau 2000, 297). But thinking about abstract labour and value in terms of hegemony offers the possibility to reconsider the relation between class and populism. As will become clear towards the end of the book, populist attempts to construct a new people can be seen as taking place on a terrain uprooted by capitalist class dynamics, from which economic demands emerge that remain unsatisfied. There is a crucial if contingent connection between class and populism. Whether and to what extent economic class demands are incorporated into populist chains of equivalence remains very much a question of contingent political strategy. The book will develop its argument over the course of five main chapters. Chapter 1 will first explore the reasons why Laclau’s theory of hegemony and Marx’s critique of political economy have until now remained far apart. In other words, why has it proved so difficult for discourse theory to grasp the capitalist economy, especially since it understands itself as a comprehensive political ontology? Marxists have typically answered this question with criticism of discourse theory’s supposed ‘idealism’, understood as a limited focus on matters of language and ideology, which would make it incapable of grasping the materiality of economic processes. This criticism, however, is unfounded. Laclau and Mouffe argued convincingly that their work should be understood as a theory to grasp the materiality of social relations. This once more begs the question, however, why the materiality of the economy largely remains out grasp. The chapter will argue that the obstacle towards integrating the two schools of thought lies in labour and value. More specifically, Laclau and Mouffe’s deconstruction of Marxist theory presupposes an essentialist understanding of the Marxist take on labour and the labour theory of value. Since labour and value constitute the core of Marx’s critique of capitalist society, this interpretation places his work on essentialist footing, rendering it incompatible

12  Introduction with discourse theory’s poststructuralist ontology. In this way it becomes clear that Laclau’s essentialist interpretation of Marx’s value theory constitutes a main obstacle towards grasping labour and capitalist social relations in discursive terms. Labour, then, is the problem but at the same time the solution. Picking up on this thought, Chapter 2 explores a different interpretation of abstract labour. It moves beyond thinking in terms of essences and rather brings the discussion of abstract labour onto the same plane of analysis as Laclau’s, namely that of the constitution of social relations. Drawing on Postone’s work, it will become clear that abstract labour, as the commonality that makes it possible to exchange commodities as equivalents, is not a transhistorical notion of labour as such. Rather, it is only in capitalist society that abstract labour emerges as a social framework. This social framework, which binds people together on the basis of their labour, emerges at the same time as the pre-​modern social hierarchy of feudalism starts to disintegrate. Developing the points of conversion between this reading of abstract labour and a poststructuralist ontology, the chapter draws on the work of Claude Lefort to show that abstract labour may be understood as an instance of the political institution of society. In this way, it will become clear that abstract labour is no longer an obstacle between discourse theory and Marx’s work, but rather the entry point for a common discussion. Crucially, since the social relations of abstract labour emerge as an instance of political constitution, they have to continuously be renewed. As the example of the so-​called gig economy shows, in which precariously employed taxi drivers and food deliverers expand the social relations of labour to new domains, this comes along with new forms of inequality and potentials for political contestation about the way society should be organised. Chapter 3 will pick up the question that follows logically from the previous one. If abstract labour is a social framework that constitutes society in a contingent way, then how does this process of constitution take place? The chapter argues that abstract labour is constituted as a Laclauian hegemonic formation. It is here that the similarities between Laclau and Marx with regard to their formalistic inquiry into the constitution of social relations become most visible. Laclau’s discursive logics of difference and equivalence, which shape social relations and identities in the absence of a foundation, already feature in Marx’s value theory. This close correspondence between the two theories makes it possible to read Laclau’s theory of hegemony not so much as a radical break with Marx’s value theory, but rather as its further development. Following on from this, it will become clear that the constitution of abstract labour relations is a matter of the logics of equivalence and difference. The equivalence of abstract labour relations finds expression in the empty signifier of money. This in itself is

Introduction  13 already important insofar as it makes the contingency of capitalist labour relations visible. But the point is that in a crucial regard, Laclau’s theory of hegemony goes beyond Marx’s value theory. For Laclau, equivalence only emerges on the basis of antagonistic exclusion. This means that the social relations of abstract labour can only emerge through the antagonistic exclusion of an outside. The chapter will identify this moment of antagonism by going to the discussion on primitive accumulation and ‘feminised’ work practices. This underscores that capitalist labour is not a self-​enclosed system but rather a contingently grounded hegemony that excludes but also preys upon its outside. While the argumentation so far grounds labour relations on contingent antagonism, the actual workings of these labour relations only become clear with a closer look at value production. Chapter 4 will consider the question of domination and class in the context of value theory. While Laclau was critical of a classical Marxist labour theory of value that identified domination in terms of the struggles between capitalist and worker, it will become clear that a non-​essentialist ‘value theory of labour’ sheds light on crucial aspects of contemporary capitalism. Hegemony itself is always caught up with questions of power, and in the context of the hegemony of abstract labour this plays out as the abstract domination of people by time. Becoming part of the social relations of abstract labour means that people have to produce value. And producing value is oriented towards profitability, which in turn depends on questions of surplus value production, productivity, and efficiency. By drawing on the work of Postone and Foucault, the chapter shows how standards of productivity and efficiency subject working people to ever more disciplinary pressure. At the same time, the increasing importance of technology and automation pushes labour out of production processes. While this makes labour increasingly superfluous for material wealth production, labour still remains crucial as a social framework. In the face of this increasing superfluity, then, the hegemony of labour is upheld by the expansion into more precarious employment domains. There is also an important long-​term historical dimension to this. The question about the connection between capitalist society and what comes after is not one of automatic dialectical transition. In fact, it is precisely the contingent struggles to maintain the precarious relations of labour that antagonistically exclude the possibility of a post-​work society and reinstate capitalist hegemony. This latter point indicates the importance of contingent practices, even in a context dominated by abstract structures of capitalism. As Laclau argued, hegemony only persists as long as its social relations are reconstituted and remain sedimented. This is why Chapter 5 explores the structure-​agency dynamic through which people’s practices uphold the hegemony of abstract labour. In this way, the theory of hegemony

14  Introduction connects the abstract level of constructed universalities to the concrete level of people’s labour experiences. The chapter uncovers a crucial class dynamic here. Class, understood in a post-​Marxist way, revolves around the tension between the antagonistic logics of surplus value production on the one hand, and social use on the other. While the former is oriented towards increasing productivity to increase the production of surplus value as abstract wealth, the latter captures people’s work practices that focus on social and material needs. In order to approach this matter, it is first necessary to develop an account of subjectivity congruent with a poststructuralist ontology. To do so, the chapter delves further into the psychoanalytic (Lacanian) influences of Laclau’s work. This makes it possible to see how working subjects are engaged in different antagonistic logics that together uphold the hegemony of value. It will also become clear that the subjects who are engaged in labour practices in order to keep up their way of social being, and thereby uphold abstract labour, are also always subject to the domination of time and the logic of capital. This shows the paradoxical character of the hegemony of labour, since it dominates people but still remains dependent on their agency for its own reconstitution. This also raises the question about the connection between labour, class, and populism, which will be discussed in the Conclusion. References Albritton, Robert. 1999. Dialectics and Deconstruction in Political Economy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. https://​doi.org/​10.1057/​978023​0214​484 Althusser, Louis. 1965. For Marx. London/​New York: Verso. Arendt, Hannah. 1993. Was ist Politik. Munich/Berlin/Zurich: Piper. —​—​—​. 2017. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Penguin Random House. Best, Beverley. 2014. “Speculating Without Hedging.” Critical Discourse Studies 11 (3): 272–​87. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​17405​904.2014.915​861. Bonefeld, Werner. 2004. “On Postone’s Courageous but Unsuccessful Attempt to Banish the Class Antagonism from the Critique of Political Economy.” Historical Materialism 12 (3): 103–​24. Chakrabarti, Anjan, and Stephen Cullenberg. 2003. Transition and Development in India. New York: Routledge. Dahlberg, Lincoln. 2014. “Capitalism As a Discursive System?” Critical Discourse Studies 11 (3): 257–​71. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​17405​904.2014.915​384. Daly, Glyn. 1991. “The Discursive Construction of Economic Space: Logics of Organization and Disorganization.” Economy and Society 20 (1): 79–​ 102. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​030851​4910​0000​003 De Cleen, Benjamin, Jana Goyvaerts, Nico Carpentier, Jason Glynos, and Yannis Stavrakakis. 2021. “Moving Discourse Theory Forward.” Journal of Language and Politics 20 (1): 22–​46. https://​doi.org/​10.1075/​jlp.20076.dec

Introduction  15 Devenney, Mark. 2020. Towards an Improper Politics. Towards an Improper Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​ 978147​4454​056 Diskin, Jonathan, and Blair Sandler. 1993. “Essentialism and the Economy in the Post-​Marxist Imaginary: Reopening the Sutures.” Rethinking Marxism 6 (October): 28–​48. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​089356​9930​8658​064 Farkas, Johan, and Schou. 2020. Post-​Truth, Fake News and Democracy. Mapping the Politics of Falsehood. New York/​Oxford: Routledge. Geras, Norman. 1987. “Post-​Marxism?” New Left Review 163 (May–​June): 40–​82. Gibson-​Graham, J.K. 1996. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It). A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Glynos, Jason. 2008. “Ideological Fantasy at Work.” Journal of Political Ideologies 13 (3): 275–​96. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​135693​1080​2376​961 Glynos, Jason, and David Howarth. 2007. Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory. New York: Routledge. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers. https://​ doi.org/​10.1080/​102866​3090​2971​603 Kim, Seongcheol. 2021. Discourse, Hegemony, and Populism in the Visegrád Four. Discourse, Hegemony, and Populism in the Visegrád Four. Routledge. https://​doi.org/​10.4324/​978100​3186​007 Kouvelakis, Stathis. 2020. “Beyond Marxism? The ‘Crisis of Marxism’ and the Post-​Marxist Moment.” In Routledge Handbook of Marxism and Post-​ Marxism, edited by Alex Callinicos, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Lucia Pradella, 337–​50. New York/​Oxford: Routledge. Laclau, Ernesto. 1983. “The Impossibility of Society.” CTheory 7 (1–​2): 21–​24. —​—​—​. 1990. New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. London: Verso. —​ —​ —​ . 2000. “Constructing Universality.” In Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, edited by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, 281–​307. London/​New York: Verso. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1987. “Post-​Marxism without Apologies.” New Left Review, no. 166: 79–​106. —​—​—​. 2014. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Second ed. London/​New York: Verso. Lefort, Claude. 1988. “The Question of Democracy.” In Democracy and Political Theory, 9–​20. Cambridge: Polity Press. Marchart, Oliver. 2018. Thinking Antagonism. Political Ontology after Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Marx, Karl. 1974. Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Erstes Heft. Berlin: Dietz. —​—​—​. 1976. Capital. A Critique of Political Economy: Volume I. London: Penguin. Miklitsch, Robert. 1995. “The Rhetoric of Post-​ Marxism: Discourse and Institutionality in Laclau and Mouffe, Resnick and Wolff.” Social Text, no. 45: 167–​96. Mouffe, Chantal. 1993. The Return of the Political. London/​New York: Verso. https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​20046​845

16  Introduction Mylonas, Yiannis. 2014. “Crisis, Austerity and Opposition in Mainstream Media Discourses of Greece.” Critical Discourse Studies 11 (3): 305–​21. https://​doi. org/​10.1080/​17405​904.2014.915​862 Nonhoff, Martin. 2019. “Hegemony Analysis: Theory, Methodology and Research Practice.” In Discourse, Culture and Organization. Inquiries into Relational Structures of Power, edited by Tomas Marttila, 63–​ 104. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://​doi.org/​10.1007/​978-​3-​319-​94123-​3 Postone, Moishe. 1993. Time, Labor, and Social Domination. A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rancière, Jacques. 1999. Disagreement. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Resnick, Stephen A., and Richard D. Wolff. 1987. Knowledge and Class: A Marxian Critique of Political Economy. Chicago/​London: University of Chicago Press. https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​2072​014 Rey-​Araújo, Pedro M. 2021. Capitalism, Institutions, and Social Orders: The Case of Contemporary Spain. Oxford/​New York: Routledge. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​ 048661​3422​1114​202 Ryner, J. Magnus. 2006. “International Political Economy: Beyond the Poststructuralist/​Historical Materialist Dichotomy.” In International Political Economy and Poststructural Politics, edited by Marieke de Goede, 139–​56. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sanyal, Kalyan K. 1996. “Postmarxism and the Third World: A Critical Response to the Radical Democratic Agenda.” Rethinking Marxism 9 (1): 126–​33. https://​ doi.org/​10.1080/​089356​9960​8685​481 Starosta, Guido. 2004. “Editorial Introduction: Rethinking Marx’ s Mature Social Theory.” Historical Materialism 12 (3): 43–​52. Stavrakakis, Yannis. 2017. “Populism and Hegemony.” In Oxford Handbook of Populism, edited by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy, 535–​53. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wullweber, Joscha. 2019. “Money, State, Hegemony: A Political Ontology of Money.” New Political Science 41 (2): 313–​28. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​07393​ 148.2019.1596​686

1 Post-​Marxism and the Materiality of Labour

Taking seriously the self-​understanding of discourse theory as ‘political ontology’ (Laclau 2014, 1), it should be possible to understand the capitalist economy as one part of the contingent constitution of society. Laclau himself has urged to do just that. In New Reflections, he underlines the importance of reinterpreting the central categories of Marxist theory from new theoretical perspectives (Laclau 1990, 162). However, this integrative dialogue between Marxism and discourse theory has not yet taken place. This is all the more remarkable because neglecting the domain of the economy leaves open important questions about contemporary politics, for example about the connection between the emergence of populist movements and current capitalist developments (Kaplan 2012). So the question that emerges here is quite simple: why have discourse theory and the critique of political economy not been able to find common theoretical ground? One possible answer to this question would be to say that the two theoretical traditions are simply incompatible. Interestingly enough, each side of the debate accuses the other of idealism. Marxists have rejected the discourse theory framework because it allegedly reduces social reality to language and is therefore pertinently unable to grasp the material character of social relations. For their part, Laclau and Mouffe argue that it is, in fact, Marx’s idealism that turns the critique of political economy into a form of essentialism. Laclau says as much when he criticises Žižek for trying to combine ‘two incompatible ontologies: one linked to psychoanalysis and the Freudian discovery of the unconscious, the other to the Hegelian/​Marxian philosophy of history’ (Laclau 2005, 235). Insofar as Laclau developed his own theoretical framework on the basis of a psychoanalytic ontology (the subject of lack, the impossibility of society, etc.), it would seem impossible to take on board the other, Marxian, ontology. But this would be too hasty a conclusion. Both sides accuse the other of idealism but both sides are mistaken. This is already quite well known for the supposed idealism of discourse theory, since Laclau and Mouffe had a

DOI: 10.4324/9781003440567-2

18  Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour heated debate with Norman Geras in the 1980s in which they explained that their work is based on the materiality of contingent social relations. But on the other side, the accusations Laclau and Mouffe directed at Marx seem to have held their ground up until now. However, the main argument developed in this chapter is that their claim regarding Marx’s alleged idealism is unjustified. Bracketing the larger part of Marx’s work, they refer mainly to those passages that sound overly idealistic, making the proof on which they build their case rather shaky. Moreover, their critique only focuses on Marx’s theory of history and leaves out the theory of value. The theory of value constitutes the foundation of Marx’s work and therefore also lies at the heart of his theory of history, so the fact that Laclau and Mouffe neglect it casts further doubt on their critique of Marx. But most importantly, even though they do not speak about it, Laclau and Mouffe do presuppose a particularly idealist interpretation of the theory of value. This implicit understanding of value as a form of idealism and essentialism constitutes the core of the incompatibility between discourse theory and the critique of political economy. However, this incompatibility is not hewn in stone because it is constructed artificially. It is based on a misinterpretation of the theory of value. That means, importantly, that it can be overcome. The chapter is structured as follows. The next two sections will review the debate that developed after Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (HSS) was first published. Marxists criticised the book for its alleged idealism (Section 1.1) but Laclau and Mouffe showed this critique to be unfounded (Section 1.2). The point here is not to regurgitate the old accusations and insults made in this debate, but rather to show that if it is indeed the case that discourse theory continues the tradition of materialist philosophy, this would only add additional salience to the question why it has not been able to come to terms with the capitalist economy. There would have to be different reasons for this apparent incompatibility. Therefore, Section 1.3 will focus more closely on Laclau’s explicit critique of Marx and the Marxist tradition. It will become clear that Laclau’s accusation of idealism depends on a somewhat selective reading that focuses only on Marx’s theory of history and excludes his theory of value. Section 1.4 will argue that the accusation of idealism, even though it does not explore Marx’s value theory, still implicitly builds on it. That is, it presupposes a particularly idealist interpretation of the theory of value that has become problematic. As the final Section 1.5 will argue, the implication of all this is that a different interpretation of Marx’s value theory will not only steer clear of determinism but also opens up an opportunity to reintegrate the critique of capitalism into the discourse theory framework. As such, the point of this chapter is to pave the way for the ones coming after it, which will develop a poststructuralist theory of value.

Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour  19 1.1  Marxists and the Accusation of Idealism In a debate at the University of Essex in 2007, Laclau said that the notion of discourse that lends the name to the theoretical framework he and Mouffe developed could, hypothetically, be replaced by the notion of practice (Laclau and Bhaskar 2007, 9). As far as nomenclature goes, this substitution would have spared him and others a lot of confusion. The notion of discourse, with all its linguistic connotations, does not intuitively cover the whole analytical depth of the discourse-​theoretical framework, especially since it claims to grasp the constitution of society in terms of a political ontology. Judging from the name only, a ‘discourse theory’ seems preoccupied with questions about language and ideas rather than the contingent constitution of society as such. This, at least, is what many Marxists seem to have thought when HSS first appeared in 1985. They were lining up to reprimand Laclau and Mouffe for forsaking the sacred grounds of historical materialism and moving towards such a frivolous thing as studying discourse. Right from the start, then, the main points of contention between Marxism and discourse theory were whether or not the latter falls prey to idealism, and whether or not it can grasp the materiality of social life. In fact, today some authors still accuse discourse theory of collapsing the materiality of the social whole into a set of semiotic practices (Sum and Jessop 2013, 179). This section will revisit the terms of the original debate to make clear on what grounds Marxists thought they could accuse Laclau and Mouffe of idealist thinking. Ellen Meiksins Wood’s 1986 book The Retreat from Class offers an extensive and rather scornful critique of Laclau and Mouffe’s work. This critique is embedded in a wider discussion of various attempts to move away from what some considered the typically Marxist pitfalls of the primacy of the working class and economic reductionism. Meiksins Wood is very sceptical about these new ‘revisionist’ theoretical developments, particularly about their purported adherence to the Marxist tradition. She sooner considers them as fundamental departures from Marxism and ‘indeed a rejection of its essential premises’ (Meiksins Wood 1986, 3). What these ‘revisionist’ authors depart from, of course, is the idea that material production is the central dimension of social life. What emerges in its stead is the idea that ideology and politics are autonomous phenomena, which for Meiksins Wood constitutes a drift toward the establishment of language or ‘discourse’ as the dominant principle of social life, and the convergence of certain ‘post-​ Marxist’ trends with post-​structuralism, the ultimate dissociation of ideology and consciousness from any social and historical base. (Meiksins Wood 1986, 5)

20  Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour What Meiksins Wood saw in the newly emerging tradition of post-​Marxism, then, was a substitution of the material base for discourse as the constitutive dimension of society. She interprets this to mean that ‘social and political forces are constituted by discourse itself, with little foundations in social relations’ (Meiksins Wood 1986, 5). Although her critique of post-​Marxism is at times very accurate, here she misinterprets it: from a poststructuralist perspective, the social and political forces constituted by discourse are social relations. So the question about whether the one is founded in the other is a moot point. Indeed, for Laclau and Mouffe, the question about whether discourse determines materiality or the other way around would be an ‘ontic’ one. That is, it is not the most fundamental question, seeing as the central move of HSS was to think the transition from Marxism to post-​Marxism in terms of an ontological change (Laclau and Mouffe 2014, x). Rather than asking which particular ontic subdomain is the most important one in determining social relations, Laclau and Mouffe are more interested in asking the question what the ontological possibilities are for social relations to emerge at all in the absence of a determinate foundation of society. However, as described earlier, the notion of discourse does not intuitively convey the ontological depth of this approach. Thus, it easily leads to the unfortunate confusion that we are dealing here with a form of linguistic reductionism. This, at least, is how Meiksins Wood seems to interpret HSS. Her main claim is that Laclau and Mouffe’s theoretical framework ultimately comes down to ‘the dissolution of social reality into discourse’ in which there are ‘no historical conditions’ but only ‘arbitrary juxtapositions, conjunctures, and contingencies’ (Meiksins Wood 1986, 61–​62). Interpreted in this way, it is no wonder that such a theoretical framework fails to grasp the materiality of capitalism, let alone the material interests of the working class. But as will become clear later in this chapter, this apparent failure to grasp the materiality of social life is to an important extent based on a misinterpretation of Laclau and Mouffe’s work. The vehemence of the Marxist battle cry against the widening sphere of influence of poststructuralist theories suggests that there is more at stake here than just the question whether or not a particular book offers a well-​ argued account of the predicament of the working class. Indeed, the tone of the debate is quite hostile, even by Marxist standards. The obvious displeasure towards Laclau and Mouffe’s theoretical project may perhaps be partly explained by the latter’s ‘egregious misunderstanding of Marxism’ (Meiksins Wood 1986, 54). In fact, despite the confusion about the true portent of discourse theory described earlier, Meiksins Wood mercilessly shows how Laclau and Mouffe launch their post-​Marxism by caricaturing Marx’s critique of political economy so that they can safely shove it aside.

Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour  21 Section 1.3 will investigate this in more detail. Another reason for the intensity with which Marxists rallied around the red flag could have been, at least from a retrospective point of view, that the 1980s signalled the slow demise of Marxism as a dominant current of critical thought and its gradual replacement by postmodern and post-​Marxist traditions (Sim 2000, 1). In a way, then, the debate between Marxists and the authors of HSS was the crystallisation of a historical clash between a new theoretical paradigm and an old one trying to hold off its demise. This could explain the urgency and intensity of not only the writings of Meiksins Wood, but also those of Norman Geras. And it was Geras’s full frontal attack which in the end provoked the most notorious debate between the Marxist and post-​Marxist perspectives. Geras, just like Meiksins Wood, is quite displeased with the fact that Laclau and Mouffe seem to have left the perimeters of Marxist theory. Setting the tone of his elaborate review of HSS, he wonders if this theoretical shift may have something to do with the ‘pressures upon them of age and professional status’ (Geras 1987, 41), thereby at once disqualifying the book as a fanciful trifle. Indeed, throughout the text Geras does not try very hard to hide his contempt for the discourse theory approach. To some extent, this may be understandable because of the unfavourable way Laclau and Mouffe portray the Marxist tradition, within which Geras worked himself. So he does in fact have a point where he criticises this tendency on which HSS seems to build: In a nutshell, Marxism is defined by Laclau and Mouffe in the most uncompromisingly necessitarian or determinist, most rigidly economistic, and —​if one must —​most simplifyingly ‘essentialist’ terms; and then dismissed for being determinist, economist, ‘essentialist’. (Geras 1987, 48) There is indeed something to be said for the claim that Laclau and Mouffe treat Marxism rather unfairly. Geras spends a major part of his article showing the inconsistency of Laclau and Mouffe’s repudiation of Marxism. The other main part is dedicated to a critique of discourse theory itself. And here, just like Meiksins Wood, he falls prey to the same kind of confusion about the allegedly idealist character of Laclau and Mouffe’s thought. As is well known, one of the main arguments of HSS is that discourse theory does not distinguish between discursive and non-​discursive practices. Any social object is always constituted within discourse (Laclau and Mouffe 2014, 94). Unsurprisingly, Geras strongly objects to this claim. He states that ‘a pre-​ discursive reality and an extra-​ theoretical objectivity form the irreplaceable basis for all rational enquiry’ (Geras 1987, 67). So he opposes the argument of the discursive constitution of

22  Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour society, because without the idea of objective reality ‘one simply slides into a bottomless, relativist gloom, in which opposed discourses or paradigms are left with no common reference point, uselessly trading blows’ (Geras 1987, 67). Without a foundation in the materiality of the economy, then, the result would be a chaotic swirling around of ideas and ideologies. This is also the point at which Geras launches the accusation of idealism. Far from accepting Laclau and Mouffe’s claim that they have moved beyond the distinction between the discursive and non-​ discursive, he actually characterises their work as a typical case of idealism, in which ‘all the world is discourse’ (Geras 1987, 67). And from the general thrust of his argument it is clear that Geras understands discourse in the same way as Meiksins Wood. That is, discourse is interpreted as an ideational or linguistic phenomenon and not as a formal–​ontological logic able to grasp the constitution of society in its different domains. The confusion about the notion of discourse described at the beginning of the section is thus also at play here. The objections raised by Geras are so fundamental that it can be no surprise that he rejects the theoretical framework of HSS in its entirety. Instead, he insists on the more traditional Marxist framework, in which there is a reciprocal (but not equal) relation between the distinct domains of the materiality of the economy on the one hand, and ideology and political practice on the other. Importantly, in such a framework, ‘material structures and determinants shape and limit what political practice can “construct” ’ (Geras 1987, 71). In a way, this means that the discussion so far has not been very productive. On the basis of a misconception of the real analytical potential of discourse theory, Geras refuses to take seriously any of Laclau and Mouffe’s arguments or concepts. The result is that Geras, and others with him, retreats safely behind the traditional barricades of the materialism/​idealism distinction. And by extension, this widened the divide between Marxism and post-​Marxism, strengthening the pre-​conception that the latter is unfit to investigate the materiality of the economy. Indeed, more recent arguments also put forward the idea that discourse theory can be a helpful analytical tool for political economy, but only as part of a wider framework that distinguishes between the discursive and the extra-​discursive (Ryner 2006, 145). This means that the confusion about the meaning of the notion of discourse has still not been cleared up. And more importantly, that the critical potential of discourse theory to investigate the contingent constitution of economic relations in a hegemonic formation has not been realised either. To conclude this section, it is clear that the appearance of HSS raised a lot of dust in Marxist circles. The main problem, as has become clear by reviewing the critiques of Meiksins Wood and Geras, was that Marxists

Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour  23 would not follow Laclau and Mouffe in going beyond the familiar domain of Marxist theory and its distinction between the material and the ideational. In fact, the main accusation Laclau and Mouffe faced is that they had forsaken the material and turned towards the domain of ideas and language only. Here Laclau and Mouffe seemed to have made a definitive break with the Marxist tradition they, too, once used to belong to. This caused somewhat of a rupture, also among authors who had previously been sympathetic to Laclau’s earlier work. Stuart Hall, for instance, distanced himself from HSS because of its ‘dissolution of everything into discourse’ (Hall 1985). This, then, is where the Marxist and post-​Marxist traditions seem to have parted ways. Ever since, the dialogue between the two traditions remains rather limited, partly because the idea that discourse theory focuses on language and ideas only still persists. However, this is a misrepresentation of Laclau and Mouffe’s work, and one that stands in the way of tapping into the potential of discourse theory to investigate the contingent constitution of economic relations as part of a hegemonic capitalist formation. That is why the next section will show that it can, despite all the criticism to the contrary, grasp the materiality of the social world. 1.2  The Discourse of Materiality There is a lot at stake in the discussion about discourse theory, idealism, and materiality. If the claims put forward by Meiksins Wood and Geras were indeed accurate and Laclau and Mouffe would be were guilty of dissolving all of reality into ‘discourse’, i.e. language, their newly launched theoretical project would have little analytical value. It would basically exclude the whole domain of materiality from its analytical scope. In turn, this would lead to two options: either the excluded materiality would have some determining influence over language and you end up with the base-​superstructure model, only this time without being able to understand what happens in the base; or materiality has no social effectivity at all, which would entail the risk of radical relativism, if not ontological psychosis. In the latter case, Eagleton would have been right in joking that in discourse theory ‘it is wholly coincidental that all capitalists are not also revolutionary socialists’ (Eagleton 1991, 215). Everything depends, then, on the interpretation of the concept of ‘discourse’. And in the second instance on the understanding of idealism and materiality. In their 1987 article Post-​Marxism without Apologies, Laclau and Mouffe explained their interpretation of these concepts and also showed that the accusation of idealism was not accurate. In fact, they went even further and defended the paradoxical claim that their work continues the tradition of materialist thinking that Marx had initiated. It is important to consider their

24  Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour argument in detail because it will have implications for the potential of discourse theory to understand the capitalist economy. Laclau and Mouffe start out by drawing attention to a philosophical distinction that is perhaps a bit unusual in Marxist theory and sooner derives from phenomenology. It is, however, fundamental to the discussion. The point is that Geras ‘is making an elementary confusion between the being (esse) of an object, which is historical and changing, and the entity (ens) which is not’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1987, 84–​85). They go on to specify that the existence of an object does not say anything about its being. Rather, any object’s being only emerges within a social system of meaning, which Laclau and Mouffe call discourse. They clarify this further with an example: Wood will be raw material or part of a manufactured product, or an object for contemplation in a forest, or an obstacle that prevents us from advancing; the mountain will be protection from enemy attack, or a place for a touring trip, or the source for the extraction of minerals, etc. The mountain would not be any of these things if I were not here; but this does not mean that the mountain does not exist. It is because it exists that it can be all these things; but none of them follows necessarily from its mere existence. (Laclau and Mouffe 1987, 85) This passage clarifies why the distinction between entity and being is central to Laclau and Mouffe’s thinking. That is, they are only interested in the latter dimension of being, since the fact that an object exists says nothing about the role and meaning it assumes within human societies. The object’s being, i.e. its meaning and social effectivity, only takes shape within the larger social structures of society. And it is the latter dimension of social being that Laclau and Mouffe are trying to capture with the notion of discourse. Unfortunately, this distinction between existence and being is lost on Geras. In his reply to Laclau and Mouffe’s article, he glosses over their response quoted above and repeats the point he had made in his previous article, i.e. that language should be distinguished from objectivity. For him, language is of secondary importance, the point is to grasp objectivity as such. By way of example, he says that if the word ‘stones’ were not there, the stones themselves, along with their properties that distinguish them from other things would still be there. Geras then takes this to prove that part of what some philosophers call the being of objects seems to be right in there from the beginning with their existence. And if not, you

Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour  25 cannot speak intelligibly about what exists outside thought at all: about inherent properties, what was the case in the prehistory of humankind. (Geras 1988, 55) Notice that Geras still argues in terms of whether or not something exists outside thought or not. This misses the point, and here the two sides of the debate are starting to talk past each other. Geras holds on to the view that material objectivity exists as such and language/​thought is just a means to represent it. Laclau and Mouffe, on the other hand, maintain that the objectivity of social being is constituted through social practice, and they try to grasp this process of constitution by drawing on, among other things, linguistic theory. Geras does not see that this is a different ontological approach in its own right. It has nothing to do with whether something exists outside thought or not. It is clear, then, that the clash between the two systems of thought seems difficult to resolve, especially because they operate within different traditions. It is difficult to establish a dialogue based on common conceptual ground. Perhaps it seems that this could be the end of the matter, but there is more to be said here. Upon closer inspection, it turns out that Geras’s theory does not fit its own research object. In the passage quoted above, Geras speaks of objects in terms of their ‘inherent properties’ that must have been there in the ‘prehistory of mankind’, or what ‘seems to be right in there from the beginning with their existence’. Now, what happens if you try to apply Geras’s objectivist approach to one of the fundamental Marxian categories, value? It turns out that Geras’s approach does not lend itself at all to grasp this concept. For one thing, value as the dominant form of wealth in capitalism is decidedly nonmaterial (Harvey 2010, 33). Does that mean, à la Geras, that it is just ‘thought’? Evidently, this would not do justice to the status of value as a fundamental form of social relations in capitalist society. For another, value is a historically specific category of production that characterises capitalist society only (Postone 1993, 29). How does this sit with Geras’s claim that objects, from the prehistory of mankind onwards, have inherent properties? Clearly, his theory would turn value into an unchanging, transhistorical category. This would undermine the historical specificity of the Marxian critique of political economy in general, which, as later chapters will show, empties it of much of its critical potential. So it seems that Geras is losing terrain on two fronts in this debate. He overlooks the analytical depth of discourse theory as a political ontology, and also puts forward an alternative theory that would ossify such a fundamental Marxian concept as value. In the meantime, Laclau and Mouffe continue to unfold their theory of the constitution of society. It has already become clear that they understand the constitution of society in terms of

26  Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour being rather than existence. Now the question is of course how to interpret this notion of being. Laclau and Mouffe propose to understand it as social context much like Wittgenstein’s language games. Wittgenstein famously blurred the distinction between the material and the linguistic in his theory of language games. Everyone knows the example of the two builders engaged in a practice in which one builder would call out for a particular building material, and the other builder would go and fetch it. The point for Wittgenstein was that the language game (or the social context) of the building project consists of the linguistic and material practices of the people engaged in it. These practices, in turn, consist in following the rules of the game, which only apply within the social context of the game itself (Wittgenstein 2006, 345). This means that the social being of the material and immaterial elements emerges only within the social context of the language game. In other words, there is no point in asking about the elements outside of the language game because their being (as a building material, as a request for more mortar, and as a builder) only makes sense in the context of the language game itself. Laclau and Mouffe take from Wittgenstein the concept of language game as that which constitutes the social being of objects but they rename it ‘discourse’. They do so to further inquire into the ontological logics that constitute the language games (or discourses) and the elements within it. Once more, they reject Geras’s (and much of the Marxist tradition’s) quest for grasping the true objectivity of existence and are interested only in the contextual being of social elements. Considered in terms of contextual being, the distinction between linguistic and material objects has no validity, because both only assume their social being within a particular social-​discursive context. For any object, then, the question is how its being is constituted. This also means that the category of ‘truth’ as understood by Geras loses its footing. Because, as Laclau and Mouffe write, it ‘would be absurd, of course, to ask oneself today if “being a projectile” is part of the true being of the stone (…); the answer, obviously, would be: it depends on the way we use stones’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1987, 85). Along the same lines, it would be just as absurd to ask if ‘being a proletarian’ is part of the true being of the average person in the street. Clearly, the question is, in what social context a stone becomes a projectile, and in what social context a person becomes a proletarian. These are the kind of questions discourse theory seeks to answer. And this underlines once more why Laclau and Mouffe understand their work as a political ontology that investigates the constitution of the social world, rather than a linguistic theory of ideology. Having established that discourse theory is interested in the social practices that constitute social-​discursive systems, the present discussion is –​finally –​starting to close in on the most important question of this

Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour  27 section, namely Laclau and Mouffe’s claim that theirs is a materialist philosophy. That is, they do not only reject the label of idealism that Geras had stuck on their theory but also claim the exact opposite. Understanding this crucial move depends, first of all, on establishing clearly what they mean by the concept of idealism. Now, for Laclau and Mouffe, idealism stands for those philosophical traditions that assume a direct correspondence between object and concept, and posit that everything that is real is rational. Of course, they attribute this kind of thinking not only to Hegel, but also to Plato and Aristotle. It is worth quoting their understanding of idealism in full here: Idealism, in its sense of opposition to materialism and not to realism, is the affirmation not that there do not exist objects external to the mind, but rather that the innermost nature of these objects is identical to that of mind —​that is to say, that it is ultimately thought. (Not thought of individual minds, of course; not even of a transcendent God, but objective thought.) (Laclau and Mouffe 1987, 87; emphasis in original) To put this differently, they are saying that idealist philosophy posits a direct correspondence between an object and its concept. In other words yet again, idealism would argue that the ‘true being’ of an object is located in its corresponding concept, which means that the reality of the object is projected into the domain of thought and the mind (Balibar 2007, 15). For these reasons, an idealist would, perhaps, agree with Geras that an object’s existence already includes its inherent properties, because these are necessarily part of its concept. The limited space of this book does not allow for a full and detailed discussion of all the different philosophies and theories Laclau and Mouffe group under the header of idealism. But in order to better understand discourse theory in relation to idealism, it is helpful to consider another perspective on the latter. Adorno, in his lectures on dialectics, locates the core of dialectical thinking in the method that always overcomes the difference between reality and concept and, as such, reintegrates identity with non-​identity (Adorno 2010, 15). The concept of non-​identity here refers to the situation when objects in reality do not correspond to their concept at the level of thought. Put differently, the concept does not (anymore) capture the full reality of the object. In such cases, the contradiction that arises between object and concept gives rise to a dialectical movement, which integrates the contradiction into the concept of the object. As such, dialectics turns non-​identity or difference into identity. Crucially, because this process of overcoming difference is located at the conceptual level, Adorno speaks of the primacy of thought over being and reality (Adorno

28  Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour 2010, 123). It is for this reason, then, that he calls (Hegelian) dialectics an idealist philosophy. In this way, Adorno confirms the reading of idealism presented by Laclau and Mouffe.1 Of course, this brief excursus cannot do justice to Hegel, nor any other idealist philosopher, but it does serve to make clear the difference between idealist and materialist traditions of thinking. If idealism, as briefly outlined above, leads to the view that reality is rational and knowable as such, materialist thinking rather stresses that reality is not reducible to the concept and is never fully exhausted by knowledge. According to Laclau and Mouffe, a materialist philosophy does not accept the idealist claim that the being of objects is located in their concepts, or in thought. Rather, any attempt to grasp the reality of an object in thought, that is, to project the concrete into a universal form, always leaves out an unknowable ‘residue’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1987, 87). This residue, which Laclau and Mouffe call ‘matter’, clearly makes it impossible for the concept to ever fully capture the reality of the object. What follows from this, crucially, is that in the materialist conception, there are no fully self-​enclosed concepts and objects. There is always that material residue that prevents the full identity of the object and concept. In other words, whereas idealist philosophy would make it possible to identify the ‘true being’ or ‘essence’ of an object, materialist thought would rather insist that no identity is ever self-​enclosed and always precarious (Laclau and Mouffe 2014, 82). Precarious in the sense that social objects have no stable identity, no fixed being. It is here that, for Laclau and Mouffe, the potential of a materialist political theory starts to become visible. The move away from an idealism that thinks in terms of fixed identities and self-​enclosed social totalities starts by adopting the materialist trope of the instability or incompleteness of the identity of all objects. Now, if it is not possible to identify the true identity of objects by referring to their concepts located in objective thought, of course the question arises where the precarious identities of objects could be found. The materialist answer to this question is: in their social being. Here the connection with Marxian thought also starts to become clear. As Balibar notes, Marx’s materialism with its professed aim to overcome societal alienation was directed against an idealism for which ‘the world is the object of a contemplation which seeks to perceive its coherence and its “meaning” and thereby, willy-​nilly, to impose an order on it’ (Balibar 2007, 24). Against such idealist attempts to represent the truth of the world in different systems of thought, Marx argued that the essential dimension of the social world is located in the social practices of actual people. So, for example in the Theses on Feuerbach, he writes that ‘the human essence is no abstraction in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations’ (Marx 1977, 157). Clearly, Marx is not interested in trying to define a true

Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour  29 human essence as an abstract concept, as idealists are prone to do. Instead, he locates the human ‘essence’ in the material practices and social relations according to which people relate to each other. By extension, this means that identities only emerge within these practices and relations, or, in social being. This focus on social being, then, constitutes the countermovement to the idealist reduction of reality to the concept. To come back to Laclau and Mouffe, after having dismissed both the accusation that they are idealists as well as the tradition of idealist philosophy as such, they go on to explore the potential of materialist philosophy. The question is, still, what a materialist approach to understanding identity would look like if it refuses to accept the possibility that any concept can fully exhaust the reality of objects in the world. This question can be answered by tying the three strands of the argument of this section together. First, rejecting the idealist trope of the direct correspondence between reality and concept means that there are no fixed identities. In other words, the material residue that precludes full identities causes any identity to always remain unstable (Laclau and Mouffe 1987, 82). Second, it follows from Marx’s rejection of idealist contemplation that actual social relations between people constitute the fundamental dimension of the social world. This implies that unstable social identities are established along with these foundational social relations. And third, Wittgenstein pointed out that social meaning emerges through performing the rules of a language game within a particular social context. This makes clear that understanding the social relations that constitute identities presupposes understanding the social rules that govern a social context. For Laclau and Mouffe, then, the task is to combine these three dimensions –​unstable identities, social relations, rules of a social context –​to continue the debate on materialist philosophy. Of course, the three dimensions of unstable identities, social relations, and rules of a social context directly feed into Laclau and Mouffe’s notion of discourse. And on the note of discourse, this section is finally drawing towards its conclusive point. From the start, the purpose of this section has been to follow Laclau and Mouffe’s line of argumentation in their repudiation of idealism and consequent presentation of discourse theory as a form of materialism. According to the two authors, the move from idealism to materialism must be founded on a systematic weakening of form, which consists in showing the historical, contingent and constructed character of the being of objects; and in showing that this depends on the reinsertion of that being in the ensemble of relational conditions which constitute the life of a society as a whole. (Laclau and Mouffe 1987, 91; emphasis in original)

30  Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour Now, it is clear that this is exactly what their discourse theory aims to do. Under the header of the discursive constitution of society, Laclau and Mouffe’s political ontology captures the contingent practices and relations that establish the unstable identities of objects according to the discursive logics of equivalence and difference. Crucially, this approach qualifies as materialist because of the essentially differential character of identities that only emerge within social practice (Laclau and Mouffe 1987, 92). Insofar as this makes any identity contingent and unstable, the materialist approach of discourse theory goes directly against the grain of idealist thinking, which posits that a concept grasped in thought can be fully identical with the object. There is one more thing that is important to underscore in this discussion. And this is that Laclau and Mouffe credit none other than Marx himself with constituting the initial break with idealism, since he ‘showed that the meaning of any human reality is derived from a world of social relations much vaster than had previously been perceived’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1987, 91). They go on to call Marx’s materialism a form of ‘radical relationalism’, because he argued that such crucial notions as the state and ideology are not self-​enclosed entities with a fixed identity, but rather emerge from a differential relation to the material conditions of society (Laclau and Mouffe 1987, 90). This means that the discussion results in two important insights. First, as has already been explained, Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory can be called materialist insofar as it is opposed to idealist reductionism. But second and more importantly to the overall aim of this book, Laclau and Mouffe draw a (cautious) relation of equivalence between their own work and Marx’s materialism insofar as the latter started the move towards a differential theory of identity. This would seem to underpin the claim Laclau made later that he has not ‘rejected Marxism’ but is rather ‘holding on to its best fragments’ (Laclau 1990, 201). Now, if one of these best fragments is Marx’s materialism, then surely it should be possible to apply its further elaboration by Laclau and Mouffe to the Marxian critique of political economy, and grasp capitalist materiality from a discourse-​theoretical perspective. The answer to this question should be yes; but at the same time, no, it has not turned out to be possible yet. So far, the reasons for this incompatibility between discourse theory and the critique of the political economy remain unclear. As this section has shown, it cannot be because of the alleged failure of discourse theory to grasp the material. Indeed, far from being idealists who reduce the social world to thought, Laclau and Mouffe present their discourse theory as a form of materialist philosophy that asks how contingent identities emerge in concrete social relations and practices. The political ontology of discourse theory captures the contingent being of any object as the outcome of material social relations. There is no reason,

Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour  31 at least at this fundamental-​ontological level of analysis, why this would be any different for objects articulated within the social context of the capitalist economy. Therefore, judging from the way it has been presented here, discourse theory should be able to grasp the contingent being of the material social relations that lie at the basis of capitalist value production. And since Laclau and Mouffe claim to have further elaborated Marx’s incipient materialism, they should be able to deliver a more comprehensively materialist account of the social relations of value production than Marx himself could. But this has not happened, and discourse theory and the critique of political economy remain incompatible despite the fact that they both belong to the tradition of materialist philosophy. The next section will explain therefore that the incompatibility between discourse theory and the critique of political economy should be sought elsewhere. That is, not in an apparent failure of discourse theory itself but rather in the way it has portrayed Marx’s work. 1.3  The Portrait of Marx as an Idealist The previous section ended with Laclau and Mouffe commending Marx for having initiated the move away from idealist thinking and towards a materialist conception of relational social being. However, in the same text, they go on to criticise him because ‘this radical relationalism of Marx is immediately translated into idealistic terms’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1987, 91). Laclau and Mouffe thus accuse Marx of remaining within the idealist tradition that is so opposed to their own discourse-​theoretical materialist approach: [W]‌hen we are told that the anatomy of civil society is political economy, this can only mean that there is a specific logic —​the logic of the development of the productive forces —​which constitutes the essence of historical development. In other words, historical development can be rationally grasped and is therefore form. It is not surprising that the ‘Preface’ to the Critique of Political Economy depicts the outcome of the historical process exclusively in terms of the contradiction between productive forces and relations of production; nor is it surprising that class struggle is entirely absent from this account. All this is perfectly compatible with the basic premises of Hegelianism and metaphysical thought. (Laclau and Mouffe 1987, 91; emphasis in original) Now, it would seem undeniable that Marx, insofar as he predicts a necessary logical development of history based on the development of the productive forces, engages in idealist thinking along the lines specified in the

32  Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour previous section. But the question here is whether it is legitimate to reject Marx’s critique of political economy on the basis of a sentence from the preface to one book. Although Laclau and Mouffe launched their own discourse theory in contradistinction to Marxian political economy, they did not discuss the latter at length. Instead, they rely on the passage from the Critique of Political Economy, in which Marx does indeed, it has to be said, write that history is propelled forward by the contradiction between the forces and relations of production (Marx 1974, 15). But even if this argument is ‘perfectly compatible with the basic premises of Hegelianism and metaphysical thought’, then that does not mean that all of Marx’s work is. As will become clear later, Marx’s value theory in particular offers great potential for continuing the development of materialism. But Laclau and Mouffe hardly engage with this part of Marx’s work. In HSS, they do not quote Marx’s work directly. Instead, they rely on a critique of Althusser as a proxy to dismiss the Marxian critique of political economy in general. Laclau, where he does directly engage with Marx, more often than not does so on the basis of the Preface with its stagist depiction of history. For instance, in the well-​known debate with Žižek about populism, he en passant criticises Marx because ‘there is no purely internal history of capitalism, as the one described by the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy’ (Laclau 2006b, 659). Indeed, experience has shown that there is no such internal history of capitalism. But this does not mean that Marx’s critique of political economy should be rejected out of hand. Throughout his work, Laclau has identified two different strands in Marx’s thinking. The objectivist and idealist Marx is different from the Marx of class struggle and contingency (Laclau 2006a, 102). Laclau was more interested in continuing the line of thinking of the latter Marx. But in the course of this project, which in itself is perfectly legitimate, Laclau may have exaggerated the idealist tendencies of the other Marx. In doing so, he often returned to the same passage from Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, while overlooking other parts of his work that could offer alternative perspectives. For example, in Emancipation(s), he quotes the same passage again and then proceeds to find fault with Marx’s ‘fully rationalistic and secular eschatology’ (Laclau 1996, 11). And as a second example, in his critical review of Hardt and Negri’s book Empire Laclau equates the latter’s immanentism with Marx’s philosophy of history, which posits that society has to ‘pass through the whole hell of class division to develop the productive forces of humanity, and it is only at the end of the process, in a fully developed communism, that the rationality of all this suffering becomes visible’ (Laclau 2001, 4). So here again, Laclau portrays Marx as an idealist (and immanentist at that) who believes in the rational development of history.2 Indeed, other scholars working within the same tradition

Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour  33 as Laclau seem to have accepted the claim that Marx’s work is plagued by his view that ‘the objective laws of history can be known with the certainty of natural science’ (Glynos 2001, 196). However, it is important to remain sceptical towards this portrayal of Marx as an idealist. It may seem justified by the passage from the Critique of Political Economy, but Marx has written other works that go into a different direction, as will become clear later. Marx’s radical relationalism goes much further than Laclau and Mouffe wrote in their 1987 exchange with Geras. It extends all the way to the theory of value. To be fair, at times Laclau did, in fact, give more credit to Marx. In New Reflections, he once more brings up the Preface of the Critique, where Marx writes about the contradiction between the forces and relations of production that constitutes the driving force of history. But this time, he contrasts it with a very different claim from the Communist Manifesto, which states that history is essentially the history of the class struggle (Laclau 1990, 6). How, Laclau asks, is it possible to reconcile these two very different conceptions of historical change that emerge within the work of one author? Whereas the Critique presents history in a rather Hegelian fashion as the logical sequence of different periods that develop on the basis of an intelligible historical mechanism (i.e. the contradiction between forces and relations), the Manifesto accords prominence to class struggle and thereby installs a form of contingency at the heart of historical change. So here, within the context of Marx’s work, an idealist account of history is opposed to a more materialist one that focuses on social relations. This is an important part in Laclau’s argumentation, because it will decide whether the idealist/​determinist account from the Critique or the materialist/​ contingent account from the Manifesto turns out to be more convincing. Unsurprisingly, Laclau argues that the idealist account does not hold much water. It is interesting to follow his argumentation here, because he makes his point on the basis of a further development of the materialist account. The first step of his argument is to say that the only way to reconcile the two conflicting accounts of history would be to show that the class struggle is an inherent and necessary moment of the relations of production. This would mean, in other words, that the relations of production would have to be ‘intrinsically antagonistic’ (Laclau 1990, 9). But this is impossible, as Laclau argues based on the concrete example of the relation between capitalist and labourer: Could it be argued that the relationship is intrinsically antagonistic because it is based on unequal exchange and because the capitalist extracts surplus from the worker? The answer to this point is ‘No’ because it is only if the worker resists such an extraction that

34  Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour the relationship becomes antagonistic; and there is nothing in the category of ‘seller of labour power’ to suggest such resistance is a logical conclusion. (Laclau 1990, 9; emphasis in original) Laclau thus argues that the relations of production are not antagonistic as long as it does not come to an actual conflict between the different parties. The question is, then, how such conflicts emerge that actually create antagonistic tensions. And here, Laclau says that this is an entirely contingent question, as many different kinds of antagonism may or may not arise between social agents. It already starts to become clear how the idealistic rigour of the contradiction between forces and relations of production is coming loose. To drive the point home, Laclau specifies the exact conditions under which an antagonistic conflict between capitalist and worker may come into being. If wages keep falling, it may not be possible anymore for the worker to buy the same consumer goods they are used to. The demand for higher wages then leads to an antagonistic conflict with the capitalist. However, this conflict ‘is not internal to capitalist relations of production (in which the worker counts merely as a seller of labour power), but takes place between the relations of production and the worker’s identity outside of them’ (Laclau 1990, 9). The crucial point is, then, that the antagonistic conflict only emerges on the basis of a constitutive outside. And exactly because this constitutive outside is external to the antagonistic relationship, it prevents the latter from assuming the status of self-​enclosed entity. Now, obviously, if the antagonistic relationship is not even closed in itself, then there is no point in trying to argue that the class struggle could be an inherent part of the relations of production. In turn, this means that it is not possible to reconcile the idealist and materialist accounts of historical change presented by Marx. The point of all this, then, is to once more show that Marx’s account of history is destabilised by a materialist remnant, i.e. the constitutive outside of the antagonistic class struggle. And for Laclau, conversely, this collapse of the idealist Marx provides an additional impetus to further develop the materialist theory of antagonistic struggle and social change. However, as convincing as Laclau’s critique may be in terms of the irreconcilable differences between idealism and materialism, it also opens up an important additional question. This question is, in fact, quite simple: how to understand the identity of the worker within the context of Laclau’s discussion? First, it is important to stress here once more that for Laclau, there is no objectivity external or previous to the contingent articulation of an antagonistic social relation. The irony is that Laclau seems to forget about this central argument of his in the present discussion. When

Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour  35 he argues that antagonism is not inherent to the relations of production or to the identity of the worker vis-​à-​vis the capitalist, he presupposes the existence of the latter two categories (the relations of production and the identity of the worker) without being able to account for their ontological emergence. Just like any other identity, the identity of a ‘worker’ only has a social being within the articulated objectivity of a social antagonism. Now, if the identity of the worker apparently precedes any antagonistic relationship with the capitalist, then how does it emerge? The identity of the worker clearly cannot be traced back to an unclarified assumption of the ‘worker’ as such, because this would reduce the being of the worker to the conceptual level of thought. Because Laclau rejects such idealism, he would have to account for the material relations in which the contingent identity of the worker emerges.3 But these material relations clearly go beyond the capitalist-​worker connection, since the antagonistic relation between the two poles is not a necessary one, and therefore cannot account for the social being of the worker. Laclau does not answer these questions, but does use the category ‘worker’ in his critique of Marx. Left undiscussed in this way, there is a clear risk of reifying the categories of ‘worker’ and ‘relations of production’ in Laclau’s text. Perhaps Laclau would answer to this point of critique that he is not interested in the question how the social identity ‘worker’ emerges. But within the context of this chapter, which discusses the incompatibility between discourse theory and the critique of political economy, there is a larger problem at play here. Once again, it turns out that the discourse-​ theoretical discussion of Marx’s critique of political economy is incomplete. It had already become clear how Laclau tends to overemphasise the idealist tendencies in Marx’s account of history by repeatedly returning to one passage from the Critique of Political Economy. But now it also appears that Laclau’s repudiation of Marx’s theory of history builds on two fundamental Marxian categories (worker, relations of production), the social being of which he leaves unclarified. This means that Laclau’s critique cannot stand alone but rather points beyond itself, towards other fundamental questions related to the critique of political economy. Put differently, Laclau has been campaigning against Marx on the level of the theory of historical change, but this is not the most fundamental level. The theory of history is not the essence of Marx’s work. Rather, underneath Marx’s thoughts on history lies the true core of his work, namely his theory of value (Althusser and Balibar 1968, 97). If you want to understand the social being of the category worker or the relations of production, you have to look at Marx’s theory of value. In the same vein, Marx’s views on historical change only become clear if you consider them together with his value theory. Without taking into account the theory of value, any critique of Marx remains incomplete.

36  Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour Since Laclau is in the business of criticising Marx, the question now emerges in how far he has seriously engaged with the theory of value. But he has made only a couple of explicit references to it. In the article Ideology and Post-​Marxism, Laclau criticises Marx’s ‘objectivist vision’ (i.e. again the point about the Preface) and says that ‘the labour theory of value, on which it was grounded, was shown to be plagued by all kinds of theoretical inconsistencies’ (Laclau 2006a, 104). Unfortunately, he does not pursue the argument further, nor does he explain what these inconsistencies are, or how they relate to Marx’s theory of social change. In a different article, he sheds a bit more light on this question when he says that ‘little remains of the labour theory of value the way it was presented by Marx. It is enough to mention the names of Eugen von Böhm-​Bawerk, Ladislaus Bortkiewicz, Joan Robinson, or Piero Sraffa’ (Laclau 2006b, 659). But is it really enough just to mention these names? Even if you remain at this superficial level, it becomes clear that Böhm-​Bawerk, for instance, was a positivist economist who did not understand the first thing about Marx’s dialectics (Kay 2015). This should already cast some doubt on his ability to ‘falsify’ the theory of value. So perhaps it would have been helpful if Laclau had at least indicated the general argument that these critics level at Marx. If only because this would also have revealed more about the way he himself understands the theory of value. It is important to briefly consider the general gist of the critique of the value theory hinted at here. The inconsistencies in Marx’s value theory these authors pointed out had to do with the quantitative discrepancies between values and prices. The assumption is that if the value theory cannot account for prices, it is no longer valid. So a large part of their critique revolved around the so-​called transformation problem, namely the fact that values do not correspond directly to prices (e.g. Böhm-​Bawerk, 1949, 98; Robinson, 1942). However, these authors fail to see that the point of Marx’s value theory never was to precisely calculate prices in terms of labour time. This was perhaps the goal of his predecessors, Smith and Ricardo, but Marx himself was interested in an entirely different question. In fact, he has explicitly said so in a passage that is, admittedly, not from the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy but from Capital, Volume 1. Here Marx writes: Political economy has indeed analysed value and its magnitude, however incompletely, and has uncovered the content concealed within these forms. But it has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value, and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product. (Marx 1976, 174)

Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour  37 In other words, Marx was not caught up in the ‘properly fetishistic fascination’ with tracing back prices to labour content (Žižek 1989, 3). Rather, he was interested in analysing the social relations that establish labour value as a social system. Crucially, this means that authors such as Böhm-​ Bawerk and Robinson criticise Marx for not delivering something he never promised to do. By extension, insofar as Laclau relies on these authors, his critique of the value theory also falls flat. He, too, seems to mistake Marx’s project for an elaboration of Smith and Ricardo’s, and does not realise that Marx did not write a labour theory of value but rather a value theory of labour (Elson 2015). The importance of this distinction cannot be overstated. A first difference between the two lies in the fact that Marx’s value theory of labour does not claim to be able to explain prices in exact quantitative terms. But the second and arguably more important difference consists in the way the two different interpretations of the value theory build on a particular understanding of social relations. This is where the question about value connects back to the previous discussion about the theory of history. As mentioned above, Marx’s theory of history is not the core of his work but rather builds on the theory of value, which, in turn, revolves around a set of social relations. Now, the crucial point is therefore that depending on how you interpret the theory of value, you end up with a particular view on the social relations constituting it, which in turn determines how you understand the theory of historical change. In other words, if you interpret the value theory in idealist terms, you will find an idealist take on social relations, and will also understand historical change in an idealist, determinist way. The next section will return to this important point. In sum, this section has shed new light on the incompatibility between discourse theory and the critique of political economy. If there are roughly two ways to interpret Marx’s work (i.e. in materialist or idealist terms), Laclau has picked up on the materialist tendencies and developed them further into a discourse theory that grasps the differential constitution of the social world. At the same time, however, Laclau has left behind those parts of Marx’s critique of political economy that seemed to display the strongest idealist undertones. It is almost as if Laclau thought that Marx’s critique of capitalism could not be saved anymore. Perhaps, then, it would be possible to imagine Laclau and Mouffe’s post-​Marxist intervention as a bifurcation, where they further developed Marx’s incipient materialism into a theory of contingent social struggle on the one hand, while the critique of capitalism centred around the theory of value often served as an example of old-​fashioned idealism and determinism. As such, the main reason for the incompatibility between discourse theory and the critique of capitalism is the depiction of Marx’s work on the capitalist economy as an unsalvageable idealist project. However, the crucial point is that this

38  Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour incompatibility is not definitive and does not pose an insurmountable obstacle. It is rather an artificial incompatibility, constructed by too selective a discussion of Marx’s work. As will become clear in the next chapters, it is possible to overcome it and interpret Marx’s critique of political economy in discourse-​theoretical terms. The starting point for such an undertaking should not be the theory of history but rather the core of Marx’s work. That is, the attempt at reintegration should start at the theory of value. 1.4  How Not to Interpret the Theory of Value So far, this chapter has argued that the incompatibility between discourse theory and the critique of political economy is largely due to Laclau’s interpretation of Marx’s work on the capitalist economy as properly idealist. It is for later chapters to demonstrate that Marx’s materialism, in fact, reaches much further and that his work can be made congruent with a discursive political ontology. Before this argument can be developed, however, it is first necessary to define exactly where, for Laclau, this alleged idealism of Marx comes from. And although this idealism manifests itself –​ according to Laclau –​in Marx’s theory of history, its source must lie in the theory of value. This is because, as none other than Böhm-​Bawerk also knew, the ‘pillars of the system of Marx are his conception of value and his law of value’ (Böhm-​Bawerk 1949, 9). A genuine theoretical dialogue between Marx and Laclau should therefore be located at the level of the theory of value and not at the theory of history. But as mentioned, Laclau has not really engaged directly with Marx’s value theory. Nonetheless, his accusation of idealism in the context of the discussion on history implies a certain understanding of the theory of value. Because if history is about change and movement, then the value theory is at the core of what changes and moves. This section will show that Laclau’s interpretation of Marx presupposes an idealist interpretation of the theory of value. Crucially, the true origin of the artificial incompatibility between discourse theory and the critique of political economy lies in this interpretation of the value theory. The previous section has already given a first answer to the question posed by the title of the present section, i.e. how the theory of value should not be interpreted. It should not be interpreted as a theory of price. Price and value are two different things in Marx’s theory and operate at completely different levels of analysis (Trenkle 2014, 1). This means, and this cannot be stressed enough, that any problems that may arise at the level of price (e.g. quantitative deviation) bear no relation to the validity of Marx’s account of value as a social phenomenon. In fact, Marx said that ‘a quantitative incongruity between price and magnitude of value, i.e. the possibility that the price may diverge from the magnitude of value, is inherent

Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour  39 in the price-​form itself’ (Marx 1976, 196). If he himself allows for a non-​ correspondence between value and price, then obviously the point of the value theory is not to give an exact explanation of the prices of commodities. Nor is it Marx’s goal to offer a theory of market equilibrium, as this would be the extension to a macro-​level of the micro-​level question about price formation (Postone 1993, 45). Insofar, then, as Marx’s primary interest was not focused on typically economic questions about prices and market equilibrium, he distances himself from those thinkers such as Ricardo and Smith who were, perhaps, first and foremost economists. Marx was not a political economist. Indeed, this is also witnessed by the fact that the title of one of his books (and the subtitle of Capital) is a critique of political economy. This crucial notion of critique sets Marx apart from political economists. If Marx’s defined his work as critique, and his value theory was at the heart of this critique, then what was he critiquing? The answer is not the most obvious one. Exploitation makes up an important part of Marx’s critique, but the critical potential of his value theory is not exhausted by the fact that it delivers proof of capitalist labour exploitation. As Diane Elson says, the problem with reducing the theory of value to a critique of exploitation is that it ‘has no satisfactory answer to the claim that exploitation in capitalism can perfectly well be understood in terms of the appropriation of surplus product, with no need to bring in value at all’ (Elson 2015, 116; emphasis in original). In economic theory, there are different approaches to exploitation –​there is even a neoclassical one –​and most of them make do without the concept of value (Schweickart 1997). Furthermore, exploitation is not specific to capitalism. As Marx writes: Capital did not invent surplus labour. Wherever a part of society possesses the monopoly of the means of production, the worker, free or unfree, must add to the labour-​time necessary for his own maintenance an extra quantity of labour-​time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owner of the means of production, whether this proprietor be an Athenian [aristocrat], an Etruscan theocrat, a civis romanus, a Norman baron, an American slave-​owner, a Wallachian boyar, a modern landlord or a capitalist. (Marx 1976, 344) In other words, the exploitative practice of surplus labour existed in other societies throughout history, albeit in a different form. If exploitation as such is not what defines capitalism, then this means that Marx deploys his value theory to cast a wider net. As will become clear in later chapters, Marx uses the theory of value to understand the historical specificity of social relations in capitalist society.

40  Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour However, value theory has nonetheless often been understood as a theory of exploitation. Moishe Postone has argued that a large part of Marxist writings on political economy has revolved around denouncing capitalist exploitation and the main institutions underlying it, such as private property, the market, and of course class. Understood in this way, Marx’s value theory would essentially be a theory of distribution (Postone 1993, 8). That is, according to Postone this theory puts the focus on the mechanisms that lead to a skewed distribution of the social wealth produced. In a nutshell, the argument is that the labour of the working class produces all wealth, which is then appropriated by the capitalist class. The fact that this process of exploitation takes place according to the ‘objective’ principles of the market and within the ‘lawful’ framework of the modern state does not detract anything from the moral condemnation that it incurs, but rather serves to lend additional urgency to the critical attempts to uncover what odorous practices are taking place underneath the shiny veneer of bourgeois society. For this kind of ‘traditional’ Marxist critique, then, the value theory serves to show the exploitative mechanism according to which wealth is distributed in capitalist society. Postone characterises this mode of thinking as the critique of capitalism form the standpoint of labour (Postone 1993, 5).4 It seems that Laclau interpreted Marx’s work along the same lines, that is, as a critique of exploitation. ‘What are Capital and Grundrisse’, Laclau asks in 2006, ‘but a sustained attempt to root exploitation in an objective process whose necessary counterpart is working-​class struggle?’ (Laclau 2006b, 660). In this interpretation of Marx’s critique, then, proletarian labour is seen as the source of all wealth, but because of the exploitative nature of capitalist society this wealth is distributed in such an unequal way that huge socio-​economic inequality and wide class disparities are its consequences. Indeed, this interpretation of Marx’s value theory runs into all kinds of problems. It reduces the social reality of capitalism to a series of antagonistic struggles over the distribution of wealth. Paradoxically, the consequence of this focus on the distribution of wealth is that a significant part of Marxist theory treats the production process as a pre-​given set of tasks, and takes the position of labour as the creator of all wealth as a given (Elson 2015, 124). This means that it cannot grasp the specificity of the capitalist labour process in detail. Nor is it able to appreciate the fact that labour in capitalism is qualitatively different from labour in other forms of society. In fact, as will become clear in later chapters, the central role of labour in capitalism goes beyond the production process and is fundamental for the constitution of society as such. This dimension is obscured in the traditional interpretation of value as a system of allocating resources and wealth (Kurz 2014, 18). And as indicated above, the transformation problem complicates attempts to trace back prices to labour

Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour  41 time expenditure. But here, the most important point is that this interpretation also has important consequences for the discussion about the incompatibility between discourse theory and the critique of political economy. This has to do with the fact that this particular interpretation is based on an idealist understanding of what is arguably the most crucial concept in this context, namely abstract labour. If the theory of value is the pillar on which Marx’s theory of history rests, then the concept of abstract labour is the foundation for the pillar. The role of abstract labour in the discussion of the commodity in Capital is well known. In the first chapter, Marx writes that the duality of the commodity consists in, on the one hand, a use value that serves to satisfy a particular need or demand, and an exchange value that makes it possible to sell or buy the commodity on the other. As use values, commodities are all qualitatively different because they all serve a different concrete purpose. But considered from the perspective of exchange value, all commodities stand in a relation of equivalence. Now the question Marx poses is what constitutes the equivalence on the basis of which all commodities acquire their exchange value and, more importantly, on the basis of which they all become commensurable in the first place. Of course, Marx’s answer is that all commodities are equal insofar as they share the characteristic of being products of abstract labour (Marx 1976, 127). That is, abstracted from its concrete usefulness, a commodity represents a particular quantity of undifferentiated human labour in general. The commonality of abstract human labour makes it possible to compare commodities in terms of labour time expenditure, whereas considered as use values they are qualitatively different and thus incommensurable. This means that abstract labour is crucial for the critique of political economy, because without it, there would be no value and no exchange at all. If abstract labour is indeed the ‘secret of the expression of value’ (Marx 1976, 152), then it is clear that the way in which this secret is interpreted has far-​reaching consequences for the understanding of Marx’s work in general. An idealist interpretation of abstract labour leads to a different rendition of the Marxian critique of political economy than a materialist one. Crucially, this also means that a discussion of abstract labour can make clear the connection between the theory of value and the debate on historical change that was discussed in the previous section. As Dipesh Chakrabarty writes: The idea of ‘history’, as all students of Marx would know, was central to Marx’s philosophical critique of capitalism. Abstract labour gave Marx a way of explaining how the capitalist mode of production managed to extract, out of peoples and histories that were all different, a homogenous and common unit for measuring human activity. Abstract labour

42  Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour may thus be read as an account of how the logic of capital sublates into itself the differences of history. (Chakrabarty 2000, 655) For Chakrabarty, then, there is a direct connection between abstract labour and the development of history. Now, as the previous section has shown, Laclau attributes to Marx and idealist understanding of history. At the same time, Laclau has hardly anything to say about the theory of value, let alone abstract labour. But following Chakrabarty’s logic, it is now possible to argue that if abstract labour provides an account of history, an idealist interpretation of history must be based on an idealist interpretation of abstract labour. And, connecting this to the overall aim of this chapter, an idealist conception of abstract labour is not compatible with a materialist or discursive ontology. Indeed, the core of the incompatibility between discourse theory and the critique of political economy lies in the idealist interpretation of abstract labour, which is indirectly but necessarily implied in the poststructuralist critique of Marx’s theory of history. What does an idealist understanding of abstract labour look like? It is actually very easy to (mis)interpret it in this way, simply by taking Marx’s words from the first chapter of Capital a bit too literally. Here he speaks of abstract labour as ‘human labour in the abstract’ (128); as ‘equal human labour, the expenditure of identical human labour-​power’ (129); as the ‘productive expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands etc.’ (134); as the ‘labour-​power possessed in his bodily organism by every ordinary man’ (135); as ‘labour power, in the physiological sense’ (137); in short, as a ‘common substance’ (151). Of course, these remarks can easily lead to the view that abstract labour refers to the transhistorical, timeless essence of human labour.5 For instance, Paul Sweezy seems to have done so in The Theory of Capitalist Development, where he writes that abstract labour ‘is what is common to all productive human activity’ (Sweezy 1942, 30). In a similar vein, Karl Kautsky describes the duality of commodity-​producing labour as follows: On the one hand, labour appears to us as the productive expenditure of human labour-​power in general; on the other hand, as a specific human activity for the attainment of a given object. The first aspect of labour forms the common element in the productive activities carried on by men. The second side varies with the nature of the activity. (Kautsky 2002, 24) So Kautsky, too, interprets abstract labour as the timeless generality of human productive activity. Finally, a more contemporary example of this interpretation comes from Kicillof and Starosta, who understand abstract

Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour  43 labour as a ‘purely material form, bearing no social or historical specificity’ (Kicillof and Starosta 2007, 34). In sum, understood in this way, Marx’s central concept of abstract labour turns into a transhistorical understanding of labour as such.6 Such transhistorical accounts of abstract labour betray an idealist style of thinking insofar as they abstract from the empirical reality of work activities to identify their essence in the innate human capacity for work. It is easy to see how this idealist understanding of abstract labour constitutes an obstacle for integrating Marx’s work with poststructuralist theory. Most notably, Castoriadis has criticised Marx for constructing his value theory around the ‘metaphysical substance’ of abstract labour, the existence of which he merely posits but cannot really explain, nor point out in social reality (Castoriadis 1984, 264). Extending Castoriadis’s critique along the lines of the idealism/​materialism distinction discussed in Section 1.3, you could say that abstract labour only exists in thought and is therefore an idealist concept. Moreover, such reductions of abstract labour to a common transhistorical human capacity for labouring, in general, more or less automatically feed into all kinds of idealist imaginations about the human essence. Indeed, such an interpretation of abstract labour may give rise to the misunderstanding as if Marx wanted to say that mankind, for him, is homo faber (Glynos and Howarth 2007, 109). Of course, in this way, any possibility for rapprochement between discourse theory and the critique of political economy would be farther away than ever. In fact, at the basis of the incompatibility between the two traditions lies this misunderstanding of Marx as an idealist who identifies the essence of people in their capacity for labour. Fortunately, it is also possible to interpret abstract labour in a different way and avoid idealist or essentialist claims. Garnett has convincingly argued that you can understand Marx either in a modernist way (i.e. the idealist interpretation discussed above) or in a postmodern way, i.e. as someone who criticises the idealist positing of abstract labour as the human essence on which to build social theory (Garnett 1995). Indeed, there is ample evidence that the former interpretation is a misunderstanding of the value theory, caused by taking some of the arguments of Capital too literally. A further reading immediately demonstrates that Marx was really interested in ‘deconstructing’ the kind of essentialist assumptions about the substance of value. In a crucial passage from the first chapter of Capital he writes: Men do not therefore bring the products of their labour into relation with each other as values because they see these objects merely as the material integuments of homogeneous human labour. The reverse is true: by equating their different products to each other in exchange

44  Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour as values, they equate their different kinds of labour as human labour. They do this without being aware of it. (Marx 1976, 166–​67) The message could not be clearer: for Marx, there is no such thing as ‘homogeneous human labour’ as such. Rather, this category only emerges through the practices of actual people. That means, crucially, that abstract labour is the product of social relations and thereby very much in line with a materialist ontology. The central question that comes to the fore here, then, is how social labour is organised in capitalist society so that abstract labour emerges (Elson 2015, 129). In other words, the crucial task is to pursue a critique of labour in capitalism. This claim is not as obvious as it may sound. In his major work Time, Labor and Social Domination, Postone has made the important distinction between the critique of labour in capitalism, and the critique of capitalism from the standpoint of labour. He also describes how, although Marx’s aim was to develop the critique of labour in capitalist society, a large part of the Marxist debate has often pursued the critique of capitalism from the standpoint of labour. Now, the problem is that the latter kind of critique departs from a transhistorical or idealist notion of human labour as described above. On this account, labour, as the general human capacity to work that establishes the ‘metabolism’ between people and nature, is at the core of social life (Postone 1993, 8). In this classical Marxist interpretation, labour is the source of all social wealth and constitutes the dynamic of society. This centrality of labour, which is really specific to capitalism (and needs to be explained as such), is thus wrongly attributed to all forms of society, indeed to human existence as such. Crucially, this idealist interpretation of labour also leads to a peculiar understanding of Marx’s work: Within this general framework, then, Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism is primarily a critique of exploitation from the standpoint of labour: it demystifies capitalist society, first, by revealing labour to be the true source of social wealth, and second, by demonstrating that that society rests upon a system of exploitation. (Postone 1993, 8) The critique of capitalism, from the standpoint of transhistorical labour, thus consists of analysing how the specific social system of capitalism imposes itself upon a transhistorical entity, namely abstract labour. But precisely for this reason, i.e. that it takes for granted abstract labour, it is not so much a critique of labour and production, but rather of how the spoils of transhistorical labour production are distributed in capitalism.

Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour  45 This point stumbles across the first connection to Laclau’s implicit understanding of the theory of value. As became clear towards the end of Section 1.3, he cites the critiques launched at Marx’s value theory by Böhm-​Bawerk, Robinson and others, who demonstrated that there is a quantitative incongruence between values and prices. Now, against the backdrop of Postone’s remarks about the critique of capitalism from the standpoint of labour, it is clear that these authors interpreted Marx’s work as if he wanted to show that all social wealth was really produced by labour. Crucially, because they could show that sometimes prices (i.e. wealth) do not correspond to values, they could disprove what they thought the value theory was meant to prove. The crucial point for the question about the incompatibility between discourse theory and Marx’s work is that Laclau, insofar as he sides with this positivist critique of the theory of value, implicitly understands the latter as a critique from the standpoint of labour as well. In turn, this may explain why it has proven so difficult to find common ground between Laclau and Marx. Because, if according to Laclau’s implicit understanding of the theory of value, Marx’s social theory rests on an idealist, transhistorical concept of abstract labour, it will be very hard to integrate this with a poststructuralist ontology.7 Indeed, there is a wider tendency in poststructuralist theory that stresses the importance of Marx’s work, but on a more critical note also underscores his ‘essentialism’ (Gibson-​Graham 1996, 239; Howarth 2013, 64). But as the argumentation so far has shown, this essentialism is due to the misinterpretation of Marx’s work as a critique of capitalism from the standpoint of transhistorical labour. This point also leads to the second implicit connection between Laclau’s understanding of Marx and the theory of value. As quoted above, Chakrabarty said that abstract labour lies at the heart of Marx’s theory of history, as it allows him to explain how the material dynamics of value production feed into structural historical developments. This means that the interpretation of abstract labour assumes a crucial importance, because an idealist understanding of abstract labour will give rise to an idealist understanding of history. Now, Laclau criticised Marx for exactly this reason, i.e. for his alleged idealist approach to history, which posits a logical development that may be rationally grasped and is therefore reducible to thought. Also, it has just become clear that Laclau sides with the orthodox interpretation of Marx’s value theory as a critique of capitalism from the standpoint of labour, which is based on a transhistorical understanding of abstract labour. In other words, Laclau imputes a double idealism to Marx: first with regard to abstract labour and second with regard to history.8 But how exactly are the two moments related? The answer to this question goes beyond the obvious one that in such an idealist scenario, labour is the metaphysical essence that drives history

46  Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour forward through its successive stages. It also relates to the understanding of capitalism as a mode of distribution rather than production. This was already discussed above but it is important to return to this point, because it will have consequences for the further development of the argument in later chapters. The crucial point is that a transhistorical notion of abstract labour also leads to a trans-​historical notion of wealth. If human labour is the same in all kinds of society, and labour is the source of all wealth, as the idealist interpretation of the value theory would have it, then the wealth produced by labour must also be the same throughout history. As Postone argues, a transhistorical understanding of abstract labour ‘implies the existence of a transhistorical form of wealth that is distributed differently in different societies’ (Postone 1993, 25). This means that there would be no qualitative difference between the kind of wealth produced by serfs in the middle ages and the kind of wealth produced by conveyor belt workers in the 1920s. Rather, the difference would be, on the one hand, a matter of quantity, as the latter kind of work is of course much more productive and produces more wealth. On the other hand, there would be a difference in the way wealth is distributed, since both work processes take place under different forms of relations of production. But this is also the crux of the matter: the specificity of capitalism is reduced to the particular form of the relations of production, because labour, wealth, and production itself are understood as transhistorical, technical phenomena (Postone 1993, 9). In other words, the Marxist approach that is based on a transhistorical notion of abstract labour takes the categories of labour and wealth production for granted and focuses on how capitalist relations of production distribute this wealth. Now, the story about the historical dynamic of the distribution of wealth in capitalism is of course very familiar. The relations of production –​in the form of the market, private property, and of course class –​will secure the compounded exploitation of labour, leading to such an unequal distribution of wealth that, in the end, the proletariat would have nothing to lose but its chains. At this stage, the relations of production would also become an obstacle to the further development of the productive forces, causing the proletariat to come into its own as the historical agent that will bring about the transition to the next form of society. As has become clear in this chapter, Laclau is very critical of this historical narrative, because it presupposes that ‘history is unified by the necessary development of the productive forces; and that a particular system of relations of production becomes a break on any further development of the productive forces’ (Laclau 1990, 8, emphasis in original). In other words, Laclau objects to the idealist theory of history because it is based on the idea that the productive forces develop along a necessary, predetermined path. That is, he criticises

Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour  47 the idealism inherent in this interpretation of the productive forces, which in the end, boils down to an idealist understanding of abstract labour. But this is exactly the point. The idealist understanding of abstract labour and the productive forces is the consequence of a misinterpretation of Marx’s value theory, which Laclau also subscribes too. That means, crucially, that Laclau’s critique of Marx is circular. To drive this point home, it is instructive to spell out the different steps of Laclau’s circular critique of Marx. First, Laclau criticises Marx for his idealist theory of history, but says hardly anything about the core of his work, namely the theory of value. Second, however, from the sparse comments Laclau did make on the topic of value, it is possible to distil how he must have interpreted it. Because he criticises the quantitative incongruity of the theory of value, it seems that Laclau understood Marx’s critique as what Postone would have called a critique of capitalism from the standpoint of labour. Such a critique departs from a transhistorical, idealist notion of abstract labour and aims to show that all wealth is created by the working class, and that the working class is at the same time exploited by capital. Third, as Postone has shown, this critique of capitalism from the standpoint of transhistorical labour reduces the reality of capitalism to a system of the unequal distribution of wealth, and takes actual labour production as a given. Crucially, in this reading, the productive forces then unfold their determinate power until they clash with the capitalist relations of production, unifying the proletariat in its necessary role of revolutionary agent. (Of course, Laclau is right to criticise this latter point.) Fourth, he uses this critique to dismiss Marx’s critique of political economy in general. But here argument here is that this dismissal is not valid, because it is based on an idealist misinterpretation of abstract labour and the theory of value, a misinterpretation that Laclau seems to have latched onto. And that is also why Laclau’s critique of Marx appears to be circular. In conclusion, this section has finally reached the core of the incompatibility between Marx and Laclau. It turns out that this is an artificial incompatibility, because it is based on Laclau’s overly idealistic reading of Marx. At the heart of this misinterpretation lies an implicit understanding of abstract labour as the transhistorical essence of human labour. The mistake is that this leads to the view that Marx’s value theory was essentially a theory of price and the distribution of social wealth in capitalism. Understood in this way, transhistorical abstract labour is the catalyst that drives the development of the forces of production, which clashes sooner or later with the relations of production and the immiserated proletariat. In this way, the idealist development of history is determined by the metaphysical substance of abstract labour. It is clear that this narrative is wholly incompatible with Laclau’s discursive-​materialist, poststructuralist

48  Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour ontology. After all, it identifies abstract labour as the foundation for society and history, whereas Laclau’s postfoundational approach rejects the assumption of any stable foundation for the social world (Marchart 2010, 16). There is, of course, a different way to understand Marx’s value theory that is much more compatible with a postfoundational ontology. In fact, as the next chapter will show, the critique of value is nothing if not materialist. But Laclau has unfortunately interpreted Marx’s work in an idealist way. By extension, Laclau’s depiction of Marx’s thinking as an idealist system has artificially constructed the incompatibility between discourse theory and the critique of political economy. There is an implicit political dimension to this largely theoretical exploration of the disagreement between Marxism and post-​Marxism. Laclau and Mouffe’s move towards post-​Marxism and new social movements was also received critically because it supposedly amounted to abandoning the working class. They have rejected this charge, if only because a central element of their critique of the contemporary left is precisely that it lets go of the ‘anti-​capitalist element which had always been present in social democracy’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2014, xvi). As such, a concern for the working class would remain central to post-​Marxist politics. And indeed, in a recent interview, Mouffe says that it is crucial to consider the position of the working class in conjunction with other demands when it comes to constructing left-​wing populist politics (Le Dem 2017). While this highlights discourse-​theory’s continued anti-​capitalist intentions, it is not at all clear how these can be made congruent with its wider outlook on society. After all, it was Laclau himself who cautioned against simply incorporating the working class into a wider popular chain of identities, because ‘it is supposed to be the articulating core around which all identity is constituted’ (Laclau 2000, 297). In other words, because class and labour remain associated with Marxist essentialism in the discourse theory framework, they cannot be integrated into a consistent political strategy along with other dimensions, such as feminism or populism. The precondition for being able to do so would be to show that labour and class are non-​essentialist, contingently constructed political categories. Drawing on the political-​ontological apparatus developed by the wider Essex School, the next chapters will do so. Notes 1 In a similar vein, Ollman seems to confirm the idea that Marx’s dialectic is a form of idealism. According to Ollman, the dialectical method starts from the ‘real concrete’ (the world as it presents itself to us) and proceeds through ‘abstraction’ (the intellectual activity of breaking this

Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour  49 whole down the mental units with which we think about it) to the ‘thought concrete’ (the reconstituted and now understood whole present in the mind). (Ollman 1990, 27) Since the dialectical movement leads to a situation where the ‘whole’ is understood in the mind, it would seem to confirm Laclau and Mouffe’s reading of idealism. But whether or not this is a sufficient reason to reject Marxian dialectics as a rigid form of essentialism, as Laclau and Mouffe seem to do, is a different question. 2 On a not completely unrelated note, Spivak writes: ‘The reduction of Marx to a benevolent but dated figure most often serves the interest of launching a new theory of interpretation’ (Spivak 1993, 74). 3 One possible way out would be to say that before somebody becomes a ‘worker’ caught up in an antagonistic struggle with a capitalist, they are simply a ‘seller of labour power’. But this immediately raises the same question, i.e. how does one become a seller of labour power, and how does this social identity fit into a larger ensemble of contingently articulated social relations? 4 For a different critique of ‘traditional Marxism’ and its tendency to interpret Marx’s theory of value as a continuation of Ricardo’s (see Saad-​Filho 1997). 5 It may be partly due to Marx’s writing in Capital that such interpretations of abstract labour proliferate. As Postone says, relative to the Grundrisse, ‘Capital is more difficult to decipher and is readily subject to misunderstandings inasmuch as it is very tightly structured as an immanent critique –​one undertaken from a standpoint immanent to its object of investigation. For this reason, its categories can be misunderstood as affirmative rather than critical’ (Postone 2008, 121) 6 For an overview of the recent debate on the concept of abstract labour (see Bonefeld 2010). 7 In an isolated comment Laclau wrote about abstract labour, he does argue against understanding abstract labour transhistorically, because it only emerged in capitalist society. However, in a rather elusive move, he then goes on to say that ‘there is no reason why its range of operation should be restricted to those societies which made possible the initial emergence of the categories’ (Laclau 2004, 322). Laclau insists that these comments do not amount to anachronism. But even when interpreted most favourably, they remain isolated, and do not detract from the otherwise idealist depiction Laclau gives of the Marxian critique of political economy, as described in this section. 8 In 1940, Walter Benjamin also criticised the connection between an essentialist understanding of labour and an idealist concept of history. But he attributed it to Marxists and social democrats, not to Marx himself. Benjamin’s critique is especially interesting because it goes beyond identifying idealist tendencies in the Marxist discourse and actually spells out its political consequences, which could be far-​reaching. According to Benjamin, then, the problem is that the ‘vulgar-​Marxist conception of the nature of labour (…) recognises only the

50  Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour progress in the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society; it already displays the technocratic features later encountered in Fascism’ (Benjamin 1999, 251).

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52  Post-Marxism and the Materiality of Labour Postone, Moishe. 1993. Time, Labor, and Social Domination. A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —​—​—​. 2008. “Rethinking Capital in Light of the Grundrisse.” In Karl Marx’s Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy 150 Years Later, edited by Marcello Musto, 120–​46. Abingdon/​New York: Routledge. Robinson, Joan. 1942. An Essay on Marxian Economics. London: Macmillan. Ryner, J. Magnus. 2006. “International Political Economy: Beyond the Poststructuralist/​Historical Materialist Dichotomy.” In International Political Economy and Poststructural Politics, edited by Marieke de Goede, 139–​56. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Saad-​Filho, Alfredo. 1997. “Concrete and Abstract Labour in Marx’s Theory of Value.” Review of Political Economy 9 (4): 457–​77. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​ 095382​5970​0000​042 Schweickart, D. 1997. “A Democratic Theory of Economic Exploitation Dialectically Developed.” In Exploitation, edited by Robert Ware and Kai Nielsen, 49–​68. Atlantic Heights: Humanities. Sim, Stuart. 2000. Post-​Marxism: An Intellectual History. New York: Routledge. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1993. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Colonial Discourse and Post-​Colonial Theory. A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 66–​111. Harlow: Longman. https://​doi.org/​10.1590/​S0102-​ 445019​9900​0200​012 Sum, Ngai-​Ling, and Bob Jessop. 2013. Towards a Cultural Political Economy. Putting Culture in Its Place in Political Economy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Sweezy, Paul. 1942. The Theory of Capitalist Development. London: Dennis Dobson. Trenkle, Norbert. 2014. “Value and Crisis: Basic Questions.” In Marxism and the Critique of Value, edited by Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson, and Nicholas Brown, 1–​16. Chicago/​Alberta: M-​C-​M’. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2006. “Philosophische Untersuchungen.” In Werkausgabe Band 1, 225–​580. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London/​New York: Verso.

2 Labour and Political Society On the Contingency of Capitalism

Value and labour are central to capitalist society, but in a fundamentally contingent and precarious way. Precisely because the essentialist and transhistorical interpretation of Marx’s value theory must be rejected, it becomes clear that this central piece of his critique is very much caught up with politics. Indeed, capitalist society is constituted politically through the continuous appearance and disappearance of lines of work. The contemporary example of the gig economy, in which precariously employed food deliverers, taxi drivers, and other platform workers symbolise the expansion of labour into uncharted territory, underscores the process by which labour acquires a new contingent political foundation. Understanding this process requires an in-​depth discussion of Marx’s value theory that focuses specifically on abstract labour. Abstract labour, as the common element that facilitates exchange through commensurability, has often been interpreted in a metaphysical or transhistorical sense. But such a transhistorical understanding of abstract labour is incompatible with the poststructuralist insistence on the contingent constitution of society. Indeed, a transhistorical notion of abstract labour depoliticises capitalism insofar as it would seem to derive from an unavoidable essence rather than a specific historical constellation. For this reason, the possibility of uncovering the fundamentally political character of capitalism depends first and foremost on reinterpreting abstract labour in non-​idealist terms, that is, as a discursive formation. A discursive approach avoids any transhistorical idealist arguments and interprets abstract labour in terms of the historically specific social relations that constitute it. It also draws attention to the peculiar role that labour plays in capitalist society. In fact, it is this historically specific status of abstract labour that, for Marx, sets capitalism apart from other forms of society. In developing this discursive interpretation of abstract labour, the chapter will draw on Moishe Postone’s main work Time, Labor, and Social Domination.1 The previous chapter already indicated the importance

DOI: 10.4324/9781003440567-3

54  Labour and Political Society of this book, which lays out an essential critique of Marxist political economy with its idealist tendencies. Surprisingly, Postone’s critique has a similar thrust as Laclau’s. Both authors try to move critical social theory away from the heavy focus on class struggle that weighed down classical versions of Marxism. For the purpose of this chapter, the most important point is that Postone offers an account of abstract labour as a specific form of social mediation. Rejecting the understanding of abstract labour as a transhistorical metaphysical substance, Postone shows that the concept rather grasps the specific form of social interdependence that comes along with capitalist labour relations. His account of abstract labour as social mediation, then, shows how labour mediates relations between people insofar as individuals in capitalism relate to each other on the basis of their labour. It is this specific social function that makes labour abstract in capitalism, and thereby constitutes the commensurability of all commodities. Put differently, in Postone’s reading abstract labour amounts to what Laclau would call a constructed universality (Laclau 2000). The universal, common element that makes it possible to compare and exchange commodities is constituted by the material social relations between people in capitalist society. However, this notion of universality also points towards a problem in Postone’s work. In a nutshell, this problem is that he cannot account for the political emergence of the constructed universality of abstract labour. Postone thus offers a materialist account of value, but does not really solve ‘the secret of value’. The step from a materialist to a discursive account of abstract labour therefore consists in being able to account for the contested political emergence of abstract labour social relations. Engaging closely with the work of Postone, this chapter will present a contingent interpretation of abstract labour as a framework of social relations. It will unfold the argument in four steps. First, adopting a broader perspective, Section 2.1 starts off by asking what exactly the difference is between capitalism and other forms of society. It will become clear that, according to Marx, this difference is to an important extent located in the social mediation of abstract labour. The next section (Section 2.2) explains what Postone means when he characterises abstract labour as social mediation. Section 2.3 then seeks a connection to the previous chapter, which discussed the incompatibility between discourse theory and the critique of political economy. It will become clear that, once abstract labour is understood as a materialist framework of social relations, this incompatibility disappears. As will be demonstrated by drawing a comparison with Claude Lefort’s work, Marx’s value theory actually displays remarkable similarities with the poststructuralist debate on the contingent institution of democratic society. This is especially the case with regard to the social construction of the universality of the value mediation, which

Labour and Political Society  55 establishes equivalential links between people and thereby a form of social coherence. However, as Section 2.4 will show, it remains unclear how this social universality of value emerges, if it is not based on a transhistorical essence, as idealist philosophy would have it. This confusion is due to the lack of a conception of agency in Postone’s theory, which privileges the structural dimensions of capitalist society. This underscores that the unclarified emergence of abstract labour necessitates a further extension of the materialist interpretation of value that moves beyond Postone’s work and into discursive terrain. As Chapter 3 will show, Laclau’s discursive theory of hegemony can meet the requirements of this task. 2.1  The Specificity of Labour in Capitalism If Marx has fallen out of fashion among poststructuralist political theory, then this may be due to misunderstandings about how he understood capitalism as a form of society, and how Capital was meant to grasp the nature of that society. The previous chapter had already made some headway towards trying to dispel these misunderstandings. It has done so, if you will, in a negative way. That is, it has become clear how Marx’s critique of political economy should not be understood, namely as a theory of market prices. If its analytical scope is reduced to explaining prices, the theory of value would essentially be reduced to an effort to show that all wealth is always and everywhere produced by labour, that labour is the positive content hidden underneath the price tags in the supermarket, and that, indeed, labour is the positive content hidden underneath the necessary movement of history. It is this kind of Marxist theory that poststructuralist authors objects to, and for good reason. However, it is not the only kind of Marxist theory out there, and it is arguably not even the kind of theory Marx himself meant to develop. The Marxist price theory approach is based on a transhistorical notion of labour as the essence of human history. But Marx was trying to pin down the particularity of capitalist society, in which labour assumes a special role. This section will explain how Marx tried to grasp the historical specificity of capitalism with his central concepts of value and abstract labour. These concepts, far from being applicable transhistorically, in fact capture the specific social function of labour as a social mediation, which only emerges with the onset of capitalism. Marx himself was explicit enough about the fact that his work only applies to the historical time frame of capitalist society. In the first chapter of Capital, Marx cautiously praised political economists (i.e. Ricardo) for having discovered that labour is the content of value, only to criticise them heavily in the next sentence for failing to ask the arguably more fundamental question. Marx reproaches political economy for not having asked

56  Labour and Political Society why labour in capitalism assumes the form of a commodity (Marx 1976, 174). According to Marx, failing to ask this question incurs the risk of reifying the commodity form as a natural form of human existence. And this, in turn, would impede any attempt to grasp the historical specificity of capitalist society. As Marx writes: The value-​form of the product of labour is the most abstract, but also the most universal form of the bourgeois mode of production; by that fact it stamps the bourgeois mode of production as a particular kind of social production of a historical and transitory character. If then we make the mistake of treating it as the eternal natural form of social production, we necessarily overlook the specificity of the value-​form, and consequently of the commodity-​ form together with its further developments, the money form, the capital-​form, etc. (Marx 1976, 174fn.) Here Marx explicitly warns against making the mistake of taking value and the commodity as self-​evident transhistorical categories of human society. He rather underscores the ‘historical and transitory character’ of the capitalist mode of production, and stresses that the latter is ‘stamped’ by the value form of the product of labour. In other words, the question why labour in capitalism assumes the form of a commodity is important because it is directly connected to the historical and transitory character of capitalist society as such. This means that the first step towards unfolding a properly discursive version of the critique of political economy lies in a closer inspection of the commodity form. Now, the two sides of the commodity are concrete and abstract labour. In order to build up the argument as clearly and logically as possible, the concrete labour aspect of commodities will be considered first. In fact, this is a rather straightforward matter. Concrete labour stands for the actual labour processes and labour acts that people perform when they go to work and produce useful things. Since the range and variety of useful things is potentially endless, there is also an endless variety of concrete labour acts. As such, concrete labour comes as close as it gets to a transhistorical conception of labour.2 Marx readily concedes that throughout history, people have always had the capacity (and necessity) to work, because labour as the creator of use-​values, as useful labour, is a condition of existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal human necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself. (Marx 1976, 133)

Labour and Political Society  57 People have to interact with nature in some way to survive. So it may be the case that, from the point of view of the working person, there are similarities between working on the medieval construction site of the local lord’s castle, and working on the modern construction site of a high-​rise office building with lots of glass in the façade to suggest transparency and moral clarity. But this useful character of labour, and the similarity it may display throughout history, does not say anything about the social specificity of labour in capitalism, nor about capitalist society as such. All this is to say that the concrete, useful side of labour in capitalism is not the most interesting one for the present discussion. To reiterate Marx’s question, it is more interesting to ask why useful labour appears in the commodity form together with the abstract aspect of labour. Marx avoids adopting the useful, concrete, or apparently transhistorical side of labour as the starting point for his analysis. Rather, the historical specificity of social labour constitutes the main focus of Marx’s value theory, and the point is to understand how it works as a social process in different forms of society (Elson 2015, 123). The historical specificity of social labour in capitalism, then, lies in the combination of the concrete and abstract dimensions, i.e. in its appearance in a commodity with a use value and exchange value. It turned out to be relatively easy to pin down the concrete side of labour, but the abstract side is harder to grasp. If the concrete forms of labour that produce use values are all qualitatively different, considered as abstract labour values, all commodities are qualitatively equivalent. But the question is, of course, on what basis this equivalence emerges. The concrete, physiological, or useful side of labour cannot constitute this equivalence. Isaak Illich Rubin pointed this out in an oft-​quoted passage from his essays on Marx’s theory of value: One of two things is possible: if abstract labour is an expenditure of human energy in physiological form, then value also has a reified-​ material character. Or value is a social phenomenon, and then abstract labour must also be understood as a social phenomenon connected with a determined social form of production. It is not possible to reconcile a physiological concept of abstract labour with the historical character of the value which it creates. (Rubin 1973, 135) Accordingly, abstract labour must be non-​physiological, and can only emerge as a social phenomenon. Indeed, Marx famously said that ‘not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as values’ and that this objectivity is rather constituted on the basis of a ‘purely social substance’, namely abstract labour (Marx 1976, 138). So the equivalence

58  Labour and Political Society of commodities as values lies in the social substance of abstract labour. But so far, it is not at all clear what Marx means by this term ‘social substance’. Bracketing the potential problems that may arise from the metaphysical-​ sounding notion of ‘substance’, it is now important to consider what the term ‘social’ means in the context of the value theory. This will make clear that Marx’s understanding of ‘social’ quickly dispels all fears that we could be dealing with a metaphysical kind of substance here. In fact, for Marx the idea of ‘social’ is a rather intuitive matter: ‘as soon as men start to work for each other in any way, their labour also assumes a social form’ (Marx 1976, 164). Since people need things that individuals cannot produce by themselves in isolation from all others, they will start to work together one way or another. As such, a social form of labour emerges that goes beyond the useful character of the actual concrete activity of working. To come back to the example of the two building sites used above, the point is to go beyond the superficial similarities that may appear between the medieval and modern construction workers who were perhaps both building a wall, and rather ask how and why each of them ended up there, and how they and other workers are embedded in a wider framework of social relations. Needless to say, these social labour relations will look completely different in both cases. This means that, in order to understand what Marx means by the ‘social substance’ of abstract labour, it is crucial to understand how people work together in capitalist society. The easiest way to illustrate this is by drawing a comparison with feudal societies. Then it will turn out that, in contradistinction to feudal societies in which labour is determined by social relations, and controlled by people, labour in capitalism is free of such direct social control. In fact, in capitalism labour unfolds its own logic of social determination. A rather stylised comparison between feudalism and capitalism would locate the main difference between the two in the fact that capitalist society allows much more (double) freedom and independence to individuals than feudal society did. In fact, the medieval social structure, which binds people in a fixed hierarchy of social domination, posed an obstacle to the development of capitalist society (Stoetzler 2004, 263). This feudal hierarchy was much like a pyramidal structure with the crown on top, a stratified collection of lords and vassals in the middle, and a mass of farmers, serfs, and day labourers at the bottom.3 Although some of these feudal relations may survive in ceremonial form up to today, the capitalist states of Western Europe have done away with the direct relations of domination and oppression between, for instance, the lord and the serf (Postone 1993, 38). The crucial point here is that the fixity of feudal social relations also resulted in a particular organisation of social labour. As Marx writes, in medieval Europe

Labour and Political Society  59 we find everyone dependent —​serfs and lords, vassals and suzerains, laymen and clerics. Personal dependence characterises the social relations of material production as much as it does the other spheres of social life based on that production. But precisely because relations of personal dependence form the given social foundation, there is no need for labour and its products to assume a fantastic form different from their reality. They take the shape, in the transactions of society, of services in kind and payments in kind. The natural form of labour, its particularity —​and not, as in a society based on commodity production, its universality —​is here its immediate social form. (Marx 1976, 170) In other words, the fixed structure of feudal relations of domination establishes a hierarchical dependence among the members of society, and social labour relations take place within this hierarchical structure. If this still sounds vague, it basically means that feudal lords command the serfs to build them a new castle, and they have the right to do so by the grace of God and the crown. Moishe Postone has elaborated on this point because it is central to his interpretation of abstract labour as a social mediation. He underscores that in feudal societies, ‘labouring activities are social by virtue of the matrix of overt social relations in which they are embedded. That matrix is the constituting principle of such societies; various labours gain their social character through these social relations’ (Postone 1993, 150). The social relations of feudalism, grounded as they are in the ultimate authority of God, appear as the fixed and natural order of society. Each person –​and it has to be stressed here that this argument still takes place on a rather crude and stylised level –​has their fixed position within this social order. On the basis of the social status of their position in the feudal hierarchy, each person also has a differing degree of autonomy (in the case of the higher social strata) or obligations (in the case of the lower social strata). Now, the important point is that the labour people perform in this society, and especially the social labour processes that transcend the individual, take place within the structure and meaning of these social relations. Put differently, social labour is shaped by the social framework in which it takes place. The social relations of feudalism are the bedrock that determines social labour processes, which means that ‘each form of labour is socially imbued and appears as a particular determination of social existence’ (Postone 1993, 172). In sum, the fixed social relations between serfs, lords, crown, and God establish the social framework of feudal society, and social labour processes are part of these relations. In such pre-​capitalist societies, the product of labour does not take the form of a commodity. People produce the things they need to survive,

60  Labour and Political Society such as food, clothing, housing, for themselves. Additionally, they have to perform the work duties accorded to them by their position in the feudal system, for instance, by giving a portion of the harvest to the lord or paying tithes to the church. As such, it is even possible to say that they are being exploited, insofar as they have to cede part of their produced goods to somebody else. But importantly, they do not produce commodities with a use value and exchange value. Rather, they produce the directly useful things they need to satisfy their needs. Marx illustrates this with an example from a rural area in which he finds a peasant family which produces corn, cattle, yarn, linen and clothing for its own use. These things confront the family as so many products of its collective labour, but they do not confront each other as commodities. The different kinds of labour which create these products —​such as tilling the fields, tending the cattle, spinning, weaving and making clothes —​are already in their natural form social functions; for they are functions of the family, which, just as much as a society based on commodity production, possesses its own spontaneously developed division of labour. (Marx 1976, 171) What Marx is saying here, then, is that the labour performed by the feudal family was determined by the family itself. The family decides what they need and what they will produce next; they also decide on who works on which task, and for how long. At the end of this process, the family consumes the products they have produced. In turn, the rural family is embedded in the larger social framework of feudal relations described earlier, which may impose additional social labour obligations on the family. All in all, then, this example illustrates that in feudal society, social relations determine and impart meaning to labour. This is not the case in capitalism. In fact, it is the exact opposite. Postone’s central argument is that in capitalism, labour mediates itself, and replaces the direct and overt social relations of feudalism as the constitutive social framework (Postone 1993, 150). But what does it mean to say that labour mediates itself in capitalism? This revolves around the quite straightforward question of how people work to be able to satisfy their daily needs. As has just become clear, social work in feudal society was embedded in the direct social relations of the family, and ultimately in the relations of domination that extended from local vassals all the way to the monarch. But in capitalist society, people do not produce what they consume. Rather, they produce commodities to be able to exchange them for other commodities. According to Postone, this means that in capitalist society,

Labour and Political Society  61 an individual does not acquire goods produced by others through the medium of overt relations. Instead, labour itself —​either directly or expressed in its products —​replaces those relations by serving as an ‘objective’ means by which the products of others are acquired. Labour itself constitutes a social mediation in lieu of overt social relations. (Postone 1993, 150, emphasis in original) This passage illustrates that social labour, and thereby the form of social interdependence, are radically different between the two kinds of society. In contradistinction to previous times in which your position in society determined your labour as well as your possibilities to acquire other goods, now your labour becomes the means through which you can exchange commodities produced by others. Labour is thus no longer defined by a social hierarchy, but rather unfolds a social dynamic of its own through the medium of exchange. This mediation takes place through exchanging commodities of equal value. As is well known, Marx says that the value (not the price) of a commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time that is used to produce it (Marx 1976, 145). A quick example of simple commodity exchange will illustrate this. Suppose that at a given point in time, it takes one social labour hour to produce a chair, and it takes two social labour hours to produce a smartphone app. Since twice as much abstract labour is used to produce a smartphone app than a chair, the value of one app is twice as high as of one chair. The value of one app equals two chairs, or one chair equals half an app. In their capacity of equal values, the two commodities may be exchanged for one another. So if the carpenter produces two chairs in their workshop, they will have generated enough value to be able to buy the app produced by a millennial in the hippest part of town. The point of this example, then, is to show that labour itself mediates the production and exchange of commodities in a society of free commodity-​producing individuals. Absent any direct social determination of production and exchange, it is the value of commodities, measured in abstract labour time, which regulates the social interdependence of people in capitalism. This form of social interdependence in which people produce commodities to be able to buy other commodities is based on labour relations. As such, people encounter each other as sellers of equal exchange values. To an important extent, then, value therefore also mediates the relations between people in general. At this point, it is necessary to come back to the crucial concept of abstract labour. The present discussion of the different forms of social interdependence in feudal and capitalist societies has already implicitly indicated what this concept stands for. Absent any direct social relations of domination that determine labour and social production, in capitalist society it is in

62  Labour and Political Society fact, labour itself that functions as a means to acquire products produced elsewhere by other people. This is why, crucially, Postone says that Marx uses the notion of abstract labour to grasp this special function of labour as a socially mediating activity in capitalist society (Postone 1993, 150). This also makes sense with regard to the question raised above, namely why labour in capitalism takes on the form of a commodity with a concrete and abstract side. The concrete, use value aspect of the commodity replaces the useful good (for instance, a chair) that in feudal times people would have produced for themselves as a necessity of life. But now, in capitalism, precisely because people do not produce chairs for themselves anymore, they have to acquire them as commodities produced through someone else’s concrete labour. And in fact, everybody is dependent on the products of everybody else’s labour. This is where the social function of abstract labour emerges: it makes it possible to equate qualitatively different use values as homogeneous quantities of abstract labour, and in this way enables the specifically capitalist form of interdependence based on labour. The equivalence of commodities that emerges on the basis of abstract labour is thus grounded in the purely social function of labour in capitalism. This discussion of the social function of abstract labour, then, should suffice to dismiss any doubts about the fact that Marx deploys the concept only in the context of capitalist society. In fact, abstract labour, as the social mechanism through which people acquire the products produced by one another, sets capitalist society apart from other societal forms. Also, it is clear now that the specificity of this social function does not derive from the apparent homogeneity of physiological labour as such. It is rather the reverse. As the previous chapter argued, when Marx speaks of human labour in the abstract, he does not refer to the apparently homogeneous character of all work activities throughout history. Instead, Marx says that people construct such a homogeneity of labour through their own practices, since ‘by equating their different products to each other in exchange values, they equate their different kinds of labour as human labour (Marx 1976, 166). And this process of equating different kinds of labour only takes place in a modern capitalist society in which labour has been freed of the direct determination of the feudal social hierarchy. It turns out, then, that the crucial concept of abstract labour, which has often provoked accusations of idealism, essentialism, and determinism, is in fact historically specific and socially constructed. That is, abstract labour interpreted as a social function is perfectly compatible with a poststructuralist ontology of contingent social relations. However, this is not the full story yet. If the analysis left off here, it could lead to the mistaken view that abstract labour is simply a social mechanism for the distribution of labour among the different production

Labour and Political Society  63 tasks that need to be performed. If labour in feudalism was distributed on the basis of the direct relations of domination, then it would appear that in capitalism labour itself assumes a social function that determines how different parts of the work force are distributed among a given set of tasks.4 But, this reading would again miss the point of Marx’s critical theory of capitalism. It would reduce the theory of value to a theory of labour distribution at best, and market equilibrium at worst. Such a reading would overlook the most important part of Marx’s value theory. As indicated above, the point is not just that in capitalism, labour itself determines the social organisation of labour, which had previously taken place within the framework of feudal social relations. Crucially, Marx’s argument is that the abstract labour mediation replaces those feudal social relations. This means that the analytical depth of the concept of abstract labour goes beyond the question how labour is organised in capitalism, and actually reaches down to the more fundamental question about the political constitution of social relations in capitalism. Indeed, Postone has argued that abstract labour relations constitute capitalist society as such. The next section will discuss this argument in more detail, and it will become clear that understood in this way, abstract labour gives an account of how ‘the people’ of capitalist society comes into being. 2.2  Abstract Labour and the Question of Freedom It is quite a long way from saying that labour is no longer determined by feudal oppression to elevating labour to a constitutive social framework of modern society as such. Yet this is a radical consequence that follows from the reading of Marx’s critique adopted here, and it will make it possible to make the connection to the poststructuralist debate on the political constitution of society. The first step towards grasping the peculiarity of the social mediation of abstract labour consists in revisiting the question of freedom in capitalism. Marx would agree with the proponents of capitalism that it is a social system which, in contrast to feudalism, does allow the individual much more freedom. But he is quick to add wryly that the freedom people enjoy in modern capitalist society is a double freedom, in the sense that they are free to dispose of their own labour power, but also ‘free’ of all that is necessary to deploy their labour power themselves and produce the goods and things they need (Marx 1976, 272). Of course, this is Marx’s familiar point that in capitalism, people sell their labour power in order to be able to buy whatever they need to survive. At the same time, then, when feudal social ties come loose, and people can potentially use their labour power as they see fit, they are also confronted with the necessity to sell their labour power. And this still applies today. Bakers, investment bankers, academics, prime ministers, Uber drivers, senior policy

64  Labour and Political Society officers, barbers, CEOs, fashion experts: they all sell their labour power. You are free to sell your labour power, but at the same time, selling your labour power is a social necessity in order to be able to acquire the goods you need or want to live your life.5 The previous section already discussed how this constitutes a form of social interdependence that is specific to capitalist society. People sell their labour power to be able to buy the commodities others have produced. It is now necessary to take a closer look at this form of social interdependence based on commodity exchange. Importantly, these commodities appear in what Marx famously called a fetishised form. A commodity appears as a straightforward thing with particular characteristics, a use value, and a price. In other words, the commodity appears as an unproblematic, naturalised thing. However, Marx showed that underneath this naturalised appearance lies the social structure that enables the emergence of commodities in the first place. As he writes in Capital: The equality of human labour takes on a physical form in the equal objectivity of the products of labour as values; the measure of expenditure of human labour-​power by its duration takes on the form of the magnitude of the products of labour; and finally the relationships between the producers, within which the social characteristics of labour are manifested, take on the form of a social relation between the products of labour. (Marx 1976, 164) Two things are important to stress here. First, the fetishised character of commodities obscures the fact that commodities are in fact a product of human labour relations. Second, and more importantly, it is in fact through the fetishised appearance of objectified human labour as naturalised commodities that those social relations between individual producers emerge at all. In other words, against the backdrop of the disintegration of pre-​ capitalist social relations, a society of seemingly isolated, free individuals appears, which enter into social labour relations through commodity fetishism. By extension, the relation between these individuals takes place through the mediation of the objectified products of their labour, i.e. commodities. Thus, it seems that commodity fetishism and the abstract labour mediation are closely intertwined. Indeed, Postone says that if abstract labour is the foundational social framework of capitalist society, it only ever appears in the objectifications of labour, i.e. commodities. The reason for this is that labour in capitalism, as this chapter has argued, has been freed of any direct social determinations, as was the case in feudalism. This

Labour and Political Society  65 means that it is, per definition, impossible to grasp the function of labour in capitalism as a social mediation in its own right. It only appears through its fetishised objectifications. As Postone writes: Labour’s unique social function in capitalism cannot appear directly as an attribute of labour, for labour, in and of itself, is not a socially mediating activity; only an overt social relation can appear as such. The historically specific function of labour can only appear objectified, as value in its various forms (commodity, money, capital). (Postone 1993, 168) Commodities, and more specifically, the relations of commodities to other commodities as equivalent exchange values, are thus the surface form in which the social relations of abstract labour become manifest. It is through the objectified domain of fetishised commodities that the social mediation between free labour can take place. But this mediation is not directly visible. Indeed, the point about fetishism is that the relation between commodities (e.g. their relative value expressed in market prices) conceals the ‘definite social relation between men’ that underlies it (Marx 1976, 165). In turn, this definite social relation of abstract labour, for the very reason that it is not an overt social relation, can only emerge through fetishised commodities. When people buy a commodity, or when they sell one, or indeed, when they sell their own labour power as a commodity, they treat these commodities as if they are unproblematic objects with particular characteristics, although, in actual fact, they are the manifestation of human labour relations. Moreover, the fetishised domain of the commodity, with its objective appearance of economic laws and market prices, subjects people to particular forms of domination. Social relations that appear in a thing-​ like world also assume the shape of relations between things that entail thing-​like forms of constraint, such as an endless drive for profit-​making (De Angelis 1996, 10). Chapter 5 will come back to this question of domination. For now, the important point is that the commodity fetish at the same time enables and obscures the abstract labour relations between people. However, this process of obscuring should not be taken too literally, because as Anselm Jappe has argued, fetishism is by no means a simple mystification or veil, as is often thought. It can only be grasped properly in its anthropological dimension, which is reflected in the origin of the term: the projection of collective powers upon fetishes that man has himself created, but on which he thinks he depends. In a wholly objective and psychological sense, the commodity

66  Labour and Political Society is the totem around which the inhabitants of modern society have organised their lives. (Jappe 2017, 90–​91) Through the commodity fetish, then, the equivalence between people as producers of exchange value can emerge as a relation between free individuals who exchange commodities in the marketplace. The relationship between buyers and sellers in the marketplace is really a relationship of abstract labour, but precisely for the reason that in capitalism, the labour of free individuals is not determined by direct social relations, it can only assume the form of a relation between things, i.e. fetishised commodities. Crucially, therefore, fetishism is not an epistemological confusion. As Jappe says, commodity fetishism is rather a social process around which people have organised their lives in capitalist society. Thus, it is rather a typical example of Žižek’s I-​know-​very-​well-​but-​still: people may be aware that there is nothing natural about the money price of a commodity, but in their social activity as sellers and buyers of commodities they behave as if commodities had these natural properties (Žižek 1989, 28). In this way, the social relations of abstract labour become manifest in the relation between the things people produce.6 Marx’s exposition of the commodity fetish is complex and dense, but at the end of the day it refers to a rather straightforward question. One way to illustrate this would be to refer to Aristotle’s dictum from the Nicomachean Ethics that ‘there would be no community without exchange’ (Aristotle 1999, 76). The question that commodity fetishism answers, then, is how a community takes shape in which people are not bound together through fixed feudal relations that determine labour and exchange. If this community rather consists of free individuals –​ and as such is perhaps not even a community yet, since there are no relations between the individuals so far –​they can combine their individual autonomy with social labour and exchange through fetishised commodity production. It is through fetishised commodity production that the abstract labour relations between individuals can take shape, and a community emerges. However, this is a peculiar kind of community, since it is characterised by ‘the alienation of members of society, as their own sociability is only bestowed on them by commodities, dead things, thus entirely emptying sociability in its social form of representation of its concrete, sensual content’ (Scholz 2014, 126). For example, to the extent that a baker and a barber are mutually dependent on one another’s labour, they have entered into a social relationship with each other. But this social relationship emerges on the basis of the products of their labour and the two people therefore encounter each other first and foremost as free market actors who sell fetishised commodities.

Labour and Political Society  67 This simple example contains the core of what Postone means when he talks about abstract labour as a social mediation. While in previous times they would have been a lord or a petty farmer embedded in a fixed hierarchy with traditions and customs as to the organisation of labour, now the baker and barber are free individuals who meet each other as producers of commodities in their capacities of baker and barber, respectively. That is, the positions in society of both baker and barber are determined by the fact that they produce commodities. They are embedded in the abstract labour mediation as baker and barber, and also relate to each other on the basis of their respective positions. To be sure, their job and position in the labour mediation does not exhaust their identity, as they may also be part of a number of other social structures that establish relations between people on the basis of, for instance, gender or ethnicity (Albritton 2004, 80). But the main point is that the specificity of capitalism lies in the fact that labour, too, establishes a social structure within which people relate to each other, and within which they assume their position within society. Put differently, abstract labour constitutes a social matrix (Postone 1993, 151). The baker and barber find their place in this social matrix on the basis of their labour. And so do the academics, prime ministers, Uber drivers, investment bankers, policy officers, CEOs, and fashion experts. They all relate to each other on the basis of their labour, and abstract labour, conversely, constitutes the social framework that establishes relations between people on the basis of their labour. This abstract labour mediation is hard to grasp because it does not show itself as directly as the overt social relations of pre-​capitalist societies. In fact, it never shows itself directly at all, but only appears in the fetishised surface manifestations of money and the prices of commodities. But of course, underneath the fetishised relations between commodities lie the social relations between the people who have produced them (Marx 1976, 168). In the Grundrisse, Marx gives a particularly accurate description of these social relations, which underscores the point about social mediation this section has so far tried to develop: The reciprocal and all-​sided dependence of individuals who are indifferent to one another forms their social connection. This social bond is expressed in exchange value, by means of which alone each individual’s own activity or his product becomes an activity and a product for him; he must produce a general product —​exchange value, or, the latter isolated for itself and individualised, money. On the other side, the power which each individual exercises over the activity of others or over social wealth exists in him as the owner of exchange values, of money. The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket. (Marx 1973, 156–​57, emphasis in original)

68  Labour and Political Society In other words, the interaction between people takes place through the products of their labour, and these assume the form of exchange value or money. If this gives people a certain degree of influence over others, it also sets confines on them insofar as they are compelled to produce exchange values in order to access the ‘bond with society’. This social bond, then, is founded on labour relations but manifests itself in money. At this point, it is slowly starting to become clear why Postone argues that abstract labour replaces the direct relations of social domination that characterised feudal society. In capitalism, people find their place in society insofar as they produce exchange value that is equated into the general social mediation of abstract labour. Also, they use the objectification of their labour –​money –​as a means to relate to other people. It is in this way that abstract labour constitutes a social whole consisting of the labour practices of individual people (Postone 1993, 42). And it is precisely because capitalist society presupposes the dissolution of the previous feudal social relations of direct domination, which means that people have become ‘doubly free’, that this abstract labour mediation assumes such an important role as a central social matrix. Labour connects people to each other, and through labour, a society of free individuals emerges who work together through fetishised commodities and money. Now, there is certainly a dimension of necessity to the abstract labour mediation, since people have to sell their labour power to survive, and therefore have to become producers of value one way or another.7 But the importance of abstract labour relations goes beyond the question about acquiring the necessities of life, and comprises social, cultural, and ethical dimensions of modern capitalist society as well. This is illustrated by the fact that normative claims as to a ‘right to work’ emerge, which also refer to securing the claim to social freedom of the labour market, as well as the possibilities for mutual recognition that await the producer of value (Honneth 2014, 227). The importance of labour is thus clear, both as a means of subsistence and as a socio-​symbolic framework for modern society as such. It is important to stress once again that despite the foundational role of labour relations in capitalist society, the account of abstract labour mediation as presented by Postone steers clear of the determinist tendencies that other Marxist theories may have displayed. This is because he locates the labour mediation not in a transhistorical notion of labour but rather, as argued here, in the capitalist form of social interdependence. This makes it possible for Postone to claim that ‘labour grounds its own social character in capitalism by virtue of its historically specific function as a socially mediating activity. In that sense, labour in capitalism becomes its own social ground’ (Postone 1993, 151, emphasis in original). Now, if labour becomes its own social ground, the question immediately arises how this happens, i.e. how labour becomes its own social ground, and

Labour and Political Society  69 how the abstract labour mediation constitutes itself. This is a fundamentally political question about the contingent emergence of a particular form of society revolving around labour relations. Section 2.5 will take up this question. For now, it is important to point out an important aspect of the abstract labour mediation that has been implicit to the present discussion, but the full extent of which has not yet emerged. The point is that if labour in capitalism does, in fact, become its own social ground, then this also means that the labour mediation and production of value essentially get beyond human control. This has to do with the fetishised character of commodities. The commodity fetish does not just obscure the social relations of value production, but also assumes an autonomous dynamic of its own. And this dynamic exerts a dominating influence over the people embedded in the abstract labour mediation that is oriented towards the production of value. People produce value for exchange. In exchange, the value of commodities is determined by the expenditure of abstract labour time. But the crucial point is that the respective producers have no influence over the value of the commodities they produce. The value of commodity A is determined by the average time socially necessary to produce it, relative to the average time used for the production of commodity B, and all the other commodities available for exchange. This means that with every change of productivity the relative value of commodities changes as well. And productivity changes are the order of the day, since the whole point of capitalist production is to capture as much surplus value as possible to generate the largest possible profit. The aim of capitalist production is ‘the unceasing movement of profit-​making’ (Marx 1976, 254). Now obviously, if a general hike in productivity leads to a decrease in the value of a commodity, this will have consequences for those people embedded in the abstract labour mediation as the producers of that commodity. After all, higher productivity means that less labour is needed for the production of commodities. The crucial point here is that this process takes place at the level of fetishised commodity production, and individual producers can hardly influence it. Consequently, people in capitalism find their place in society through their labour, but labour itself is dominated by the domain of the commodity fetish. Hence Marx’s remark that ‘[j]‌ust as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand’ (Marx 1976, 772). Freedom in modern society, then, coincides with the commodity logic of capitalism that follows a trajectory of its own. It is important to underscore that the social relations of abstract labour and value reach beyond commodity exchange and establish a comprehensive social framework. This is a contentious point in the debate on value theory. Michael Heinrich, for example, argues that ‘abstract labour is a

70  Labour and Political Society relation of social validation existing only in exchange’ (Heinrich 2012, 53). However, as Norbert Trenkle argues, the equation of different kinds of concrete labour as abstract labour expenditure already takes place before commodities enter the sphere of market circulation. The risk of reducing abstract labour to the sphere of exchange and circulation is that it would turn the sphere of production into ‘a presocial space in which private producers create their products, still untouched in any way by any determinate social form’ (Trenkle 2014, 8). Since the whole point of a capitalist economy is to produce value, the production process itself is already organised to that end, and the abstraction of labour already takes place here. That is, concrete labour is already rendered equivalent as abstract labour before exchange, in production. Similarly, it goes without saying that people do not only enter into social relations with each other once they equate their labour products with each other in market exchange. Rather, insofar as they produce value, they are already part of the abstract labour mediation, previous to market exchange. So in sum, market exchange is crucial to commodity production, but the full reach of Marx’s critique of modern society only unfolds with the understanding of abstract labour as a comprehensive social framework that structures relations throughout modern society. 2.3  Abstract Labour and the Political Constitution of Society This section argues that Postone’s reading of Marx’s critical theory, which revolves around the abstract labour mediation, can be seen as one instance of the typically poststructuralist project to theorise ‘the political’. In the context of poststructuralist political theory, the political is shorthand for the dynamic attempts to establish social structures in the absence of any stable foundations that may ground these structures (Marchart 2010; Flügel-​Martinsen 2017). Poststructuralist theorists reject all attempts to fix society in an origin, for instance in the ultimate authority of God, of class, or mankind itself. Because there is no last instance that founds society, there can only ever be different contingent attempts to construct social relations. And because there is a plurality of such attempts, and none of them are pre-​ordained to succeed in constituting themselves, poststructuralist theory approaches the contingent constitution of society as a matter of political contestation (Marchart 2010, 16). Now, a Marxist theory of the kind that explains social reality on the assumption of the centrality of class and distributional conflicts is clearly incompatible with the debate on the political. As the previous chapter has shown, it is founded on a transhistorical notion of abstract labour. But Postone’s rendition of abstract labour rejects any such foundation and rather highlights that the centrality of labour emerges on the basis of its specific function as a

Labour and Political Society  71 social framework in capitalist society. This would suggest that the abstract labour mediation establishes itself as a contingent social structure that does not build on a metaphysical foundation but rather emerges through political construction. Since the Marxian focus on labour has often lead to accusations of essentialism and determinism, it may seem counterintuitive to try to think abstract labour as an instance of the political. But in fact, the discussion of this chapter so far connects directly to a key text from the poststructuralist tradition. Claude Lefort’s essay The Question of Democracy asks the question what distinguishes modern democratic society from other forms of social life. He frames his discussion around a comparison between feudal and democratic society. In doing so, he thus follows an analytical strategy similar to the one set up by Marx, as described in the previous two sections. Moreover, Lefort also comes to similar conclusions. Stating that the distinguishing features of modern democracy will only come to the fore in a comparison with the preceding monarchical system, he starts by drawing up a schematic sketch of the latter. The monarchy, then, is a form of society that finds its origin in a ‘theological-​political matrix’ which is embodied in the prince (Lefort 1988, 16). Lefort argues that this prince is a twofold being. On the one hand, the prince is beyond the law, since he owes his position at the top of the social hierarchy to the grace of God, whose will he represents. On the other hand, the prince embodies the worldly law of society and is also subject to it. In this semi-​transcendental capacity, the prince thus serves as a kind of mediator between people and God. He establishes the law and coherence of the social order on the basis of God’s authority and, in this way, does not leave room for any doubt as to the legitimacy of this social order. The crucial point for Lefort is that the prince, with one foot in society and another in heaven, provided a stable foundation for the pre-​modern social order. Because of this transcendental basis, feudal society also took on a specific form, insofar as ‘the kingdom itself was represented as a body, as a substantial unity, in such a way that the hierarchy of its members, the distinction between ranks and orders appeared to rest upon an unconditional basis’ (Lefort 1988, 17). There is a close correspondence here between Lefort’s characterisation of monarchical society and Marx’s analysis of social labour in feudalism. As Section 2.2 showed, Marx analysed how social labour in a feudal society takes place within the framework of what Lefort here calls ‘the ranks and orders’ that establish the hierarchy between different groups of people. Postone, following Marx, described the same process as the overt relations that determine both social labour and the social relations of the people performing it (Postone 1993, 150). So both Lefort and Marx underscore the fixed character of pre-​modern society, which bound people together in a social hierarchy grounded in

72  Labour and Political Society the authority of the crown. Now, as has become clear, Marx locates the change towards capitalist modernity in the dissolution of these traditional social ties, and the emergence of the social framework of abstract labour relations. And the abstract labour mediation is purely social, i.e. not grounded in a transcendental pole. Against the backdrop of Lefort’s analysis, these parts of Marx’s work now start to appear in a new light. This is where the concept of abstract labour can engage in a theoretical exchange with the poststructuralist debate on the political constitution of society. The entire discussion hinges on the qualitative change that ushered in the new form of society that is called capitalist democracy. Marx’s view on this question is clear by now, and Lefort’s account does not stray too far away from it. Lefort famously argued that in a democracy, the place of power that was once occupied by the semi-​transcendental prince is left empty. The authority of God is no longer accepted as a legitimate basis for political power and social order, which means that it is not possible anymore for one person (such as the prince used to do) to claim the place of power for themselves (Lefort 1988, 17). The crucial point is therefore that, at the same time as it empties the place of power, the democratic revolution also dissolves the secure foundations on which feudal society had been built. A democratic order does not point to metaphysical authorities to ground its social relations, but rather constructs its social relations in the absence of any external foundation. This means that the consequences of the empty place of power go beyond the form of political organisation, and rather reach so far as to establish a new form of society that does not rest on a transcendental foundation. For Lefort, then, democratic society is characterised by the dissolution of traditional authority and the concomitant social order. At the same time, he observes the emergence of processes of political negotiation about distinct social domains as diverse as law, justice, knowledge, and indeed the economy (Lefort 1988, 18). In other words, a situation of relative freedom opens up, in which new social relations emerge contingently to constitute society. The argument that has started to unfold here and will be further elaborated throughout this book is that abstract labour constitutes one instance of these contingent social relations that make up the political constitution of society. The relevance of this theoretical argument is underscored by a passage from Lefort, in which he discusses how social structures take shape in modern society: Democratic society is instituted as a society without a body, as a society which undermines the representation of an organic totality. I am not suggesting that it has therefore no unity or no definite identity; on the contrary, the disappearance of natural determination, which was once linked to the person of the prince or to the existence of a nobility, leads

Labour and Political Society  73 to the emergence of a purely social society in which the people, the nation and the state take on the status of universal entities, and in which any individual or group can be accorded the same status. But neither the state, the people nor the nation represent substantial entities. Their representation is itself, in its dependence upon a political discourse and upon a sociological and historical elaboration, always bound up with ideological debate. (Lefort 1988, 18) This passage neatly summarises the point this section has been unfolding so far. As Lefort says, if modern society is ‘a society without a body’, then this means that contingent attempts at constructing social totalities will replace the ‘natural determination’ of social relations that prevailed previously. And if ‘the people’ becomes a ‘universal entity’, then only insofar as it avoids any ‘substantialist’ claims and is subject to political and ideological debate. As Lefort wrote in a different text, ‘[d]‌emocracy inaugurates the experience of an ungraspable, uncontrollable society in which the people will be said to be sovereign, of course, but whose identity will be constantly open to question, whose identity will remain latent’ (Lefort 1986, 303–​4). That is, the people as a form of universality is constructed politically. Now, the important point here is that Marx’s analysis, as described in the previous section, indicates that one of the forms of universality that emerge in modern society is that of the value-​producing people, in which a social framework emerges insofar as people relate to each other as producers of exchange value. It is now possible to say, with Lefort, that the task is to analyse how this social framework of abstract labour relations emerges as a politically constructed universality. Central to this undertaking is Lefort’s distinction between the political and politics. If politics stands for the well-​known practices of parliamentary debates and governmental decisions, the political is harder to define. For Lefort, the question about the political goes towards trying to account for the fact that a more or less autonomous domain of politics could emerge in the first place. That is, the point is not to ‘objectify’ politics as a natural feature of human life, as perhaps mainstream political science tends to do, but rather to ask how this domain of politics could establish itself (Marchart 2010, 127). Of course, Lefort’s response to this question is already clear from the foregoing discussion. With the dissolution of the semi-​transcendental foundation of human existence, modern democratic society establishes itself through the constitution of different social domains that had previously been part of the fixed monarchical order. It is only with the democratic revolution, then, that the autonomous domain of politics emerges (Lefort 1988, 11). But the crucial point is that the appearance of the domain of politics refers to the foundational

74  Labour and Political Society dimension of the political constitution of society, which makes it possible for this domain to arise in the first place. As Lefort says: The fact that something like politics should have been circumscribed within social life at a given time has in itself a political meaning, and a meaning which is not particular, but general. This even raises the question of the constitution of the social space, of the form of society, of the essence of what was once termed the ‘city’. The political is thus revealed, not in what we call political activity, but in the double movement whereby the mode of institution of society appears and is obscured. It appears in the sense that the process whereby society is ordered and unified across its divisions becomes visible. It is obscured in the sense that the locus of politics (…) becomes defined as particular, while the principle which generates the overall configuration is concealed. (Lefort 1988, 11; emphasis in original) So in Lefort’s reading, the political is the ontological possibility for society to constitute itself in the concrete domain of politics (and other domains such as knowledge, the economy, etc.). The political constitution of society thus happens through these concrete domains, and insofar as these domains always emerge on the ontological basis of the political and its absent foundation, this political constitution is obscured behind the objectifications of politics, knowledge, and the economy. So in the absence of any stable foundation, the political constitution of society takes place through the establishment of multiple contingent social domains, which assume the concrete form of politics as such, knowledge as such, or the economy as such. In this way, these concrete domains obscure the ontological condition of the political as their own absent foundation. The main pitfall of mainstream political science, according to Lefort, is therefore that it forgets about the ontological domain of the political. It takes the concrete appearance of social facts as a natural given. Also, it tends to objectify social structures and, more importantly for the present discussion, forgets that the category of class does not exist until it has ‘been given a form’ (Lefort 1988, 11). So it seems that here Lefort closes the door to Marxist theory, insofar as the latter reifies the category of class rather than asking how it comes into being. Indeed, this unquestioned assumption of the fundamental category of class is one of the main dividing lines on the basis of which the poststructuralist debate on the political parts ways with Marxist theory (Marchart 2010, 17). On first sight, this does not seem to bode well for the argument of this book, which aims to bring together the two traditions. However, this kind of critique should sound rather familiar by now. It is cut from the same cloth as

Labour and Political Society  75 Postone’s, when he criticises traditional Marxism for taking the categories of value and abstract labour as transhistorical properties of human life. Both Postone and Lefort, then, argue against the reifying tendencies of traditional Marxism, and both underline the importance of rather treating the categories of labour, value, and class as historical categories. Crucially, this is where Postone’s critique of labour in capitalism and Lefort’s theory of the political meet each other. Somewhat surprisingly, then, it seems that although they come from very different theoretical perspectives, Postone and Lefort would be able to agree on quite a few things. When Lefort says that in democratic modernity, the place of power is empty, Postone would agree because capitalist society has no transhistorical foundation in a transcendental pole. Lefort would stress that this does not mean that there is no society anymore at all, but rather that social structures emerge contingently through political construction. This would also make sense from Postone’s point of view, because one of these social structures –​if not the most fundamental one –​ is the abstract labour mediation, a social structure in which people relate to each other on the basis of their labour. Now, at first sight, because of its metaphysical connotations in classical Marxism, Lefort could be sceptical about this notion of abstract labour. But Postone draws attention to the fact that the whole point of Marx’s work is to grasp the historical specificity of capitalist society. In that sense, the poststructuralist fears of Marxist essentialism would largely be based on misunderstandings that can be cleared up by theoretical rapprochement between the two intellectual traditions. So when Postone elaborates that abstract labour is a form of social mediation in capitalist society, then the important point for Lefort would be not to reify this, but instead ask how it emerges in the absence of a stable foundation. In this way, Postone’s Marxism and Lefort’s poststructuralism mutually reinforce each other.8 However, there is still a theoretical stumbling block that could spoil the interpretation of abstract labour as an instance of the political. The problem lies in the notion of commodity fetishism, which is important for Postone but absent from Lefort’s work. It is true that both authors may agree with each other insofar as they point out that social relations are the result of political constitution and have no metaphysical foundation. But the difference is that Postone’s Marxian theory, as has become clear in Section 2.2, posits that these social relations do not manifest themselves directly but only appear in the fetishised forms of the commodity and money. The abstract labour mediation is thus directly connected to commodity fetishism. Lefort’s theory, on the other hand, has no need for the concept of fetishism. Here the problem is not just that an important concept is part of one theory and absent from the other. The issue is rather that the inclusion of this concept has an impact on the understanding of

76  Labour and Political Society social relations. For Marx and Postone, the commodity fetish obscures the positive network of social relations that underlies it. But no such thing happens in Lefort’s work, nor arguably in poststructuralism in general. Here social relations –​for instance, in the form of politics –​rather tend to obscure their own absent foundation, i.e. the political. In one case, then, positive social relations are concealed, whereas in the other social relations conceal the lack around which society is structured (cf. Žižek 1989, 50). Thus it seems that the positive social relations that are obscured behind commodity fetishism constitute a stumbling block for the political, which departs from the absence of any form of positive social relations. Perhaps, then, the issue of commodity fetishism casts a shadow large enough to once more draw up a divide between the critique of political economy and poststructuralist theories of the political such as Lefort’s. If Marx’s commodity fetishism is based on positive social relations, then this seems to suggest that there is a foundation for social reality after all. This does not sit well with the particular contingent dynamic of the political. After all, for Lefort the political is not a separate domain distinct from the domain of politics (or knowledge, the economy, etc.). Rather, politics and the political are always intertwined. The political only shows itself in the act of withdrawing, insofar as any attempt at founding concrete social structures grasps at an absent foundation, a lack, which nonetheless enables such attempts at constitution in the first place (Marchart 2010, 129). The point is, then, that it would seem that the positive social relations of abstract labour are not absent at all, but merely concealed behind the commodity fetish. Crucially, this suspicion seems to be confirmed by Postone’s argument to the effect that within capitalism, the social relations of abstract labour constitute the ‘essence’ of society (Postone 1993, 166). To be sure, Postone stresses that this ‘essence’ is historically specific to capitalism, but this argument still suggests that these social relations are simply there, providing the basis for capitalist society. As such, it would seem that Postone and Lefort cannot truly agree after all. And this disagreement would reach further than just these two authors, torpedoing the attempt to bring together the critique of political economy and the discussion on the political constitution of society. But luckily, this disagreement does not pose an insurmountable obstacle. Rather, it opens up the important additional question about the constitution of abstract labour relations themselves. So far, it has become clear that abstract labour is a social framework, and that it does not find its basis in a transhistorical concept of labour. However, Postone also says that social mediation of abstract labour provides the positive social relations that become manifest in fetishised commodity dynamics. If left unclarified, this argument could lead to the unquestioned assumption of these abstract labour relations as the ‘essence’ of capitalist society. This would then be

Labour and Political Society  77 the point where Postone and Lefort part ways. Therefore, the crucial task is to reject the straightforward assumption of the abstract labour mediation, and rather ask the quintessentially poststructuralist question: how does this social framework emerge at all? In other words, the point would be to show that Postone’s theory does not just posit the abstract labour mediation as a social framework in the absence of a positive foundation, but rather connects the two moments theoretically in an argument that explains how the social mediation of abstract labour is constructed politically. The next section will look at Postone’s answer to this question, which is not fully convincing. This is also the point, then, where the poststructuralist theory of the political can show its value to Postone’s critique of political economy. Because, as later chapters will show, a combination of poststructuralism and Marxian value theory would be very well able to account for the political construction of abstract labour. As such, this theoretical collaboration would continue Marx’s project of materialist social theory and radicalise it further in discursive terms. This theoretical elaboration becomes all the more urgent considered against the backdrop of the political dimensions attached to understanding abstract labour relations in Lefort’s terms. After all, if he is right to point out that society is constituted around the empty place of power, then society does not exist by necessity but only through its contingent social practices and relations. In the case of capitalist labour, this becomes very clear when it comes to the fragility of labour relations, which are subject to the threat of redundancy in situations of economic crisis, and even in good times their security is by no means guaranteed. Indeed, a capitalist economy premised on incessant growth only thrives as long as it expands. This expansion can take different forms, but one of the most visible manifestations of this process is the emergence of the so-​called gig economy. The gig economy is characterised by the rise of new forms of short term, very often precarious employment through digital platforms, typically in delivery and driving services (Roy-​Mukherjee and Harrison 2020). These new gig economy jobs are particularly important for the present discussion, because they are a perfect example of the contingent reconstitution of the social relations of abstract labour. Crucially, gig employment underscores the contingent character of capitalist labour relations, insofar as the creation of such new jobs expands the social relations of labour where other kinds of employment disappear. The creation of gig jobs cannot be traced back to an automatic law, but should rather be understood as a reconstitution of the border of the social framework of labour relations. Moreover, the reconstitution of abstract labour relations through precarious gig employment also raises attention to the question of exploitation and class politics in contemporary capitalism.

78  Labour and Political Society The notion of class reminds of the crucial point in Lefort’s work that struggle and contention amount to a negative ground of the social. In the face of the empty place of power, different groups and visions vie to occupy it, signalling that internal division is very pronounced even if society as such signifies itself on the symbolic plain. It is at the end of the day, through such conflicts –​the status of which is ontological as constitutive of society –​that internal divisions struggle about the direction and meaning of society. This conflictual dynamic also becomes clear in the example of the gig economy, which in turn assumes a wider symbolic meaning as reflective of contemporary capitalism. It should first be noted, however, that Lefort’s notion of conflict is explicitly directed against what he considers the Marxist notion of class conflict as secondary or derivative of an underlying economic foundation. Instead, conflict is a primary ontological dimension in which society is instituted (Marchart 2007, 98). Now, the gig economy example illustrates this insofar as these newly emerging lines of employment indicate, on the one hand, a desire to partake in the society of labour relations. But on the other hand, the gig economy is also well known to cause debate and conflict about the conditions and shape these new social labour relations should take on. While the general direction seems to go towards insecurity, precarity, and inequality, there are also movements that push back against this and demand a more humane direction for drivers and deliverers (Wood and Lehdonvirta 2021). From a Lefortian perspective, these struggles are not derivative from an underlying ground; rather, they constitute a contingent ground of new labour forms by struggling over the specific forms they take. Conflictual dynamics in the gig economy, then, reconstitute the society of labour relations through struggles over the meaning and direction labour should take. 2.4  Utility and Universality In order to approach the question of the constitution of abstract labour, it is useful to revisit Marx’s discussion of the connection between utility and labour. Why does Marx argue that labour establishes the commonality between commodities, and not utility? Marx’s critique of Aristotle helps to clarify this. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle wrote that the exchange of different goods such as houses and shoes occurs on the basis of a ‘proportionate equality’ of these goods that posits how many shoes equals one house. However, the quantitative question of the proportionality of different goods presupposes a more fundamental one, since ‘proportionate equality will not be reached unless they [the goods] are equal in some way’ (Aristotle 1999, 75). The question is, then, what this equality consists in. Marx cites this passage approvingly, since of course, he is also trying to account for the exchange of qualitatively different use values. But here, Marx says, Aristotle

Labour and Political Society  79 ‘falters, and abandons the further analysis of the form of value’ (Marx 1976, 151). Aristotle says that true equality of different goods cannot exist, and that exchange takes place on the basis of the convention of money, which serves as the measure of the needs served by different goods (Aristotle 1999, 75). Marx does not agree, and argues against Aristotle that there is a common social substance in commodities, namely abstract human labour. But he also stresses that Aristotle could not have identified abstract labour as the basis of equality yet, since in his time there was no generalised commodity production (Marx 1976, 152). Hence the historically specific role of the abstract labour mediation in capitalist society. Perhaps Marx’s argumentation on these first pages of Capital is not particularly convincing. It seems that he merely posits that abstract labour is the common substance, without really offering an explanation. Indeed, if you only read these pages, there is something to be said for Böhm-​Bawerk’s scepticism towards Marx. Why, he asks, should labour be the common property of commodities, and not utility, or anything else, such as scarcity (Böhm-​Bawerk 1949, 75)? But these critical questions only make sense because Böhm-​Bawerk refuses to take into account the dialectical character of Marx’s argumentation, and instead argues from a positivist point of view. And in fact, from a positivist perspective, the question about the commonality of commodities is a completely different one. It becomes a formalistic exercise, devoid of any real-​world content, which tries to identify on a logical level which common properties commodities may have (Kay 2015, 52). Indeed, from this perspective, there is no way to distinguish the fact that commodities are products of labour from the fact that commodities have a use value. Therefore, according to Böhm-​Bawerk’s positivist logic, it may just as well have been the case that utility constitutes the commonality of commodities. However, as opposed to this, Marx’s dialectical method eschews such positivist formalistic reasoning and rather starts from the real social relations of human society, very much in line with materialist philosophy. This means that the commonality of commodities cannot be reduced to a mental abstraction of logical thinking. For Marx, then, the commonality or equivalence of commodities has to be grounded in the real social world where people go about their daily lives. The point is that Marx’s argument why abstract labour and not utility constitutes the commonality of commodities only becomes clear if you consider it in the wider context of the critique of political economy he outlined in the rest of Capital. Within this wider context, then, it becomes clear what the difference is between utility and labour, despite the fact that they are both ‘properties’ of commodities. From Marx’s materialist perspective, which departs from the level of real social relations, it does not make any sense to try to speak of utility in general. Utility, in general, only exists as a mental abstraction, or an idealist concept, if you will. The usefulness of

80  Labour and Political Society commodities lies in the fact that they serve a particular purpose, which means that utility is a particular, not a universal category. As Kay says: For Marx it is precisely the fact that use-​value can only exist in specific forms that provides the reason for exchange in its most basic form of one commodity for another: i.e. because use-​value is specific, commodities differ from each other as use-​values and this provides a reason for exchanging them. (Kay 2015, 53; emphasis in original) So utility is important for Marx, but only insofar as it explains that particular use value of a commodity, which in turn is the reason for exchange. The commonality of commodities, the universality on the basis of which they are exchanged, however, is located in their being expenditures of abstract labour. Therefore, in contradistinction to the chimerical category of ‘utility in general’, labour in general is a social category at work in the actual relations between people in capitalist society. Abstract labour is the general totality of real social labour relations. It has been discussed at length in this chapter as the specific social form of interdependence and societal mediation that characterises capitalism. The point here is that abstract labour is not a mental abstraction (such as ‘abstract utility’ would be), but an abstract social process that happens in society through the real practices of actual people. In other words, abstract labour is what Alfred Sohn-​Rethel famously called a real abstraction (Sohn-​Rethel 1978). The particular use value of commodities gives people a reason for exchange, but since exchange presupposes the equivalence of these commodities, a process of abstraction takes place in which people equate commodities with each other as expenditures of homogeneous human labour in the abstract. This process of abstraction is not just a thought experiment, as Sohn-​Rethel describes: In commodity exchange the action and the consciousness of people go separate ways. Only the action is abstract; the consciousness of the actors is not. The abstractness of their action is hidden to the people performing it. The actions of exchange are reduced to strict uniformity, eliminating the differences of people, commodities, locality and date. The uniformity finds expression in the monetary function of one of the commodities acting as the common denominator to all the others. (Sohn-​Rethel 1978, 30) Hence the term real abstraction. The abstraction from use values to the commonality of abstract labour (expressed in money) happens through the real actions of actual people. Whether they are consciously aware of it or not, it is through their concrete practices that the abstract labour mediation

Labour and Political Society  81 emerges as a fundamental social framework of capitalist society. The previous section had already partly discussed this, but now it becomes clear that understanding the constitution of abstract labour requires investigating the dynamic between the particular actions of people and the abstract social structure of labour. As Postone also says, the labour mediation that is constitutive of capitalist society is a case of ‘the mutually constituting relationship between social structure and everyday forms of practices and thought’ (Postone 1993, 42). With this structure-​agency dimension, the picture of the social relations of abstract labour has thus become a bit more complete. However, the one thing that is still unexplained is the actual structural-​ agency dynamic of abstraction that results in the equivalence of different use values. It is all very well to say that this is not just a mental process, and that it takes place through the real practices of social people, but this still does not answer the question how this equivalence emerges. The point is that at the ‘end’ of the process of abstraction the different use values, and the different concrete labour processes that produced them, are all equal as abstract labour. Abstract labour, in this sense, is a sort of universality, insofar as the concept of universality grasps that which is common to qualitatively different things (Butler 2000, 14). However, the crucial point is that abstract labour cannot be a transcendental, idealistic, or metaphysical kind of universality. Indeed, the whole point of Postone’s work is to push back against traditional Marxists who did, in fact, adhere to such a transhistorical notion of labour. But in this case, Marx’s crucial question about ‘the secret of the expression of value’ returns once more: as what are commodities equal? Now, if the universality, the common character of commodities and the capitalist labour process, cannot be derived from a transhistorical essence of labour as such, then it must necessarily be socially constructed. There cannot be a positive anchoring point outside social relations, but the universality of abstract labour must arise from the concrete social practices of commodity production itself. Only here, in the social dynamic between the agential and structural dimensions, can the equality of labour come into being. So the point is to grasp the constitution of the universality of abstract labour, and the concomitant equality among qualitatively different things, in the dynamic of concrete labour acts. Postone repeats at various stages of his argument that labour in capitalism is both concrete and abstract at the same time. But even though he stresses this twofold character of labour time and again, he never really explains how this may occur, or how the abstract equivalence of labour arises from the particular character of concrete labour acts. In Time, Labor, and Social Domination there is one crucial passage where he comes closest to an explanation: The labour of all commodity producers, taken together, is a collection of various concrete labours; each is the particular part of a whole.

82  Labour and Political Society Likewise, their products appear as an ‘immense collection of commodities’ in the form of use values. At the same time, all of their labours constitute social mediations; but because each individual labour functions in the same socially mediating way that all the others do, their abstract labours taken together do not constitute an immense collection of various abstract labours but a general social mediation —​in other words, socially total abstract labour. Their products thus constitute a socially total mediation —​value. (Postone 1993, 152) Now this is quite a curious passage. It seems to be working towards explaining how the abstract emerges from the concrete, but then it never really does. In fact, it does quite the opposite, and complicates things further by raising additional questions about the relationship between the particular and the universal. Postone says that the labour of all commodity producers constitutes a collection of various concrete labours, each of which is particular and different. But now, of course, the question is, how does this collection of particulars turn into a universal? How does non-​identity turn into identity? Here Postone makes a big leap and posits that ‘at the same time, all of their labours constitute social mediations’. Now, mediation already presupposes the equivalence of concrete labours. This equivalence, however, still has not been explained. Therefore, there is a large argumentative gap between observing the collection of particular concrete labours, and the assertion that these labours also constitute social mediations. In other words, Postone covers over this gap with a non-​sequitur of the kind that pops up more often in his work (Arthur 2004, 101). Moreover, his use of the plural form ‘social mediations’ is rather puzzling, for the simple reason that it is not quite clear what it means. It seems to suggest that each individual labour act is already a mediation by itself.9 And indeed, insofar as each commodity, considered as abstract labour, can be the expression of the value of other commodities, it would be possible to say that it constitutes a mediation. But this once more raises the question as to the process of abstraction that establishes the commonality between these labours in the first place. If Postone cannot explain how concrete labours become equivalent, then perhaps Marx’s secret of value has still not been fully solved. It has become clear that this construction of abstract labour equivalence has to do with a structure-​agency dynamic, where individual workers exchange commodities for their use value, but somehow abstract from their qualitative difference to enable the process of exchange. This point illustrates that this is not just a highly theoretical question about the constitution of equivalence. As the notion of agency suggests, it is also about the role

Labour and Political Society  83 actual human beings play in upholding the larger social structures of capitalist society. Postone is very clear when it comes to describing the structural side of the abstract labour mediation, but cannot explain the agential dynamic of concrete labour from which it must arise. Crucially, this means that Postone’s theory privileges the structural dimension over agency. Indeed, Werner Bonefeld has criticised Postone on exactly this point, because throughout Time, Labor, and Social Domination, ‘human social practice is conceived as derivative and thus a bearer of social and economic functions’ (Bonefeld 2004, 104). That is, Postone shows how capitalist social structures such as abstract labour bind people together in a relational framework that delimits a particular social space, but he does not ask how actual people constitute and keep up these social structures. The crucial dimension of human agency is thus obscured in his critique of political economy. This question of human agency also connects back to the previous section (Section 2.3), which set up a theoretical dialogue between Postone and Claude Lefort’s poststructuralist political theory of modern society. It turned out that the two theoretical traditions displayed close similarities, except for the fact that Postone’s critique of political economy features the concept of commodity fetishism, and Lefort’s does not. The idea of commodity fetishism is that the surface appearances of capital (i.e. money, prices, etc.) obscure the real, positive relations underlying them. This is problematic from a poststructuralist point of view, which sooner departs from the constitutive lack (the empty place of power) around which social relations are structured contingently. The point here is that, compared to the contingency of Lefort’s society of lack, Postone’s theory displays a risk to reify the positive social relations hidden underneath the commodity fetish. Now, such reification could be avoided by showing how the social structure of abstract labour, too, is constituted in a political process. In turn, this would require a theoretical grasp of the exact dynamic between structure and agency in the political constitution of abstract labour. However, as the present section has shown, Postone does not go into the structure-​ agency dynamic, but rather tends to obscure human agency to the point where people have become the bearers of social structure. Ironically, this means that Postone’s reinterpretation of Marx ends up, in a rather ‘traditional’ Marxist fashion, throwing the human individual under the overwhelming power of the structural dimensions of capitalism. This insertion of the question of agency is not to suggest that individual acts simply have the leeway to determine the direction capitalist social relations will take. But it does mean that understanding the development and persistence of capitalist labour requires looking into the political acts that constitute labour relations, rather than assuming that the economy is a self-​enclosed societal domain with an independent logic. Indeed, this is

84  Labour and Political Society where the importance Lefort’s conception of the political becomes clear. The political is sometimes understood as a domain distinct from others, especially the economic domain, for example by authors such as Weber or Habermas. But Lefort, by contrast, goes beyond the idea that society can be separated into different domains and rather argues that the political is everywhere, insofar as it shows itself as the contingent and groundless institution of social relations (Caillé 1995, 56). The political, then, also means to see how such acts of institution delineate the social framework of labour in capitalist society. The expansion of capitalist relations into the terrain of the gig economy is an example that underscores this point. It is only through the combined and contingent political acts of constitution that gig jobs become part of abstract labour. This implies that it is crucial to look at the activities of gig workers themselves, but also at the initiatives of ‘entrepreneurs’, and at the facilitating or intervening politics of relevant authorities, for example at whether or not they classify gig workers as employees with related labour rights (De Stefano 2016, 494). All of these dimensions highlight different social, governmental, or ideological aspects of the gig economy, and the Lefortian insight is that they together lead to the political institution of its social relations. There is no foundation for it, but it is through the political acts of people that these relations shape up. In sum, this chapter has shown that Marx’s discussion of abstract labour, through Postone’s reinterpretation, can speak to the poststructuralist question about the constitution of society. From the perspective of Lefort, Postone’s abstract labour universality, precisely for the reason that it does not have a metaphysical foundation, must be contingently constructed in social practice. A full account of the centrality of abstract labour therefore must be able to explain how it emerges through the actions of actual people. Within the overall structure of this book this argument, and specifically the inclusion of Lefort’s work, functions as a theoretical pivot between Marx and Laclau. As Laclau and Mouffe wrote about Lefort’s thoughts on the constitution of society: If we examine them in the light of our problematic, it is possible to link [Lefort’s] analyses to what we have characterised as the field of hegemonic practices. It is because there are no more assured foundations arising out of a transcendent order, because there is no longer a centre which binds together power, law and knowledge, that it becomes possible and necessary to unify certain political spaces through hegemonic articulations. (Laclau and Mouffe 2014, 171) By going through Lefort’s analysis of modern society, then, it becomes possible to connect Postone’s work on abstract labour to the theory of

Labour and Political Society  85 hegemony. As the next chapter will show, Laclau and Mouffe’s work on hegemony can go a long way towards answering the main question that emerged from this chapter, namely, how abstract labour is constructed as a political universality. Notes 1 Where necessary this will be complemented by work of various authors associated with the Wertkritik tradition. These authors (e.g. Robert Kurz, Roswitha Scholz, Norbert Trenkle, Anselm Jappe) have developed an interpretation of Marx’s critical theory that largely corresponds to Postone’s, but at times goes beyond it and can therefore offer additional insights (Jappe 2014). The work of Wertkritik authors is now starting to get more recognition in the English-​language debate (Rasmussen and Routhier 2019). 2 However, it is important to stress that the kind of concrete activities that produce useful things in other social forms than capitalism would not be called concrete labour. Concrete labour pertains only to capitalist society, if only because it is not a ‘natural’ activity anymore, but rather very much subsumed under, and changed by, the imperatives of capital accumulation (Renault 2014, 189). 3 This is of course a rather crude depiction of feudal society, a simplification that is only justified because it serves to illustrate a larger point. For a more detailed account of feudalism and its historical relation to the emergence of capitalism (see Meiksins Wood 2002). 4 Althusser, for one, seems to subscribe to this interpretation, i.e. that Marx’s theory of value ‘is intelligible, but only as a special case of a theory which Marx and Engels called the “law of value” or the law of distribution of the available labour power between the various branches of production’ (Althusser 2001, 58; emphasis in original). Diane Elson criticises Althusser for this view because it takes capitalist production as a ‘pre-​given structure which has ultimate causal significance’ (Elson 2015, 125). 5 Of course, there will be exceptions, since some people already have enough money and do not have to work anymore (e.g. old nobility or indeed capitalists). This does not change the fact, however, that the large majority of people in capitalist societies do sell their labour power. Even when they retire they live off of the savings they put aside from the remuneration they received for selling their labour power. The larger point here is that capitalism is unique relative to other societal forms in that the practice of selling labour power has become generalised as a means to acquire goods in a new form of social interdependence. This also applies to self-​employed people, who sell the objectified products of their labour power and in that sense are also embedded in the social relations of abstract labour. 6 This also connects to the question of populism. According to Johan Hartle, the phantom-​like objectivity that arises on the basis of commodity fetishism gives rise to a desire for authenticity beyond the reified domain of the capitalist economy. Populists such as Geert Wilders may then mobilise this desire and present themselves as the ‘really real’ politician. In that sense, Hartle says that

86  Labour and Political Society populism ‘appears to be the phantom of the objectivity (Gegenständlichkeit) of bourgeois politics, the false promise of emphatic subjectivity in an otherwise objectified political realm’ (Hartle 2010, 65). 7 The decommodifying effects of the welfare state as described by Esping-​ Andersen (1990) may offer relief from the material pressures that come along with this necessity for people to sell their labour power. But decommodification in this sense does not fundamentally challenge, on an ontological level, the social organisation of labour as a social framework unique to capitalism society. If benefits and social regulation allow people to work fewer hours, or increase their remuneration, they still sell their labour power and in that sense are embedded in the abstract labour framework. And those who are unemployed, and in that sense outside of the abstract labour social framework, often experience moral repercussions when they are accused of being ‘welfare cheats’, undeserving of the support of hard-​working others (Chunn and Gavigan 2004). In this sense, the welfare state may actually underscore the moral expectation that everybody, in fact, does sell their labour power in order to provide for themselves. 8 Lefort, in his early career, engaged closely with Marx’s work but later distanced himself from it. One of the reasons for this was that Lefort disagreed with the classical Marxist understanding of the proletariat as the universal class that embodies the development of history (Flynn 2018, 413). That is, Lefort’s objections to Marxian theory echo those put forward by Laclau (cf. Chapter 1). But they also presuppose precisely that interpretation of Marx which Postone sought to leave behind. As such, Lefort’s critique of Marx does not stand in the way of the attempt of this book to bring the two together. 9 Presumably Postone refers to a situation of simple or isolated exchange as Marx described it in ­chapter 1 of Capital (Marx 1976, 139ff.). Isolated instances of exchange of just two commodities take place, but there is no general equivalent yet, therefore no general equivalence between different labours, and no general social mediation.

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Labour and Political Society  87 Butler, Judith. 2000. “Restaging the Universal. Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism.” In Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, edited by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, 11–​43. London/​New York: Verso. Caillé, Alain. 1995. “Claude Lefort, the Social Sciences and Political Philosophy.” Thesis Eleven, no. 43: 48–​65. Chunn, Dorothy E., and Shelley A.M. Gavigan. 2004. “Welfare Law, Welfare Fraud, and the Moral Regulation of the ‘Never Deserving’ Poor.” Social and Legal Studies 13 (2): 219–​43. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​09646​6390​4042​552. De Angelis, Massimo. 1996. “Social Relations, Commodity Fetishism and Marx’s Critique of Political Economy.” Review of Radical Political Economics 28 (4): 1–​29. De Stefano, Valerio. 2016. “The Rise of the Just-​in-​Time Workforce: On-​Demand Work, Crowdwork, and Labor Protection in the Gig-​Economy. Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal,.” Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal 37 (3): 471–​504. Elson, Diane. 2015. “The Value Theory of Labour.” In Value. The Representation of Labour in Capitalism, edited by Diane Elson, 115–​80. London/​New York: Verso. Esping-​ Andersen, Gøsta. 1990. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Flügel-​Martinsen, Oliver. 2017. Befragungen des Politischen. Subjektkonstitution –​ Gesellschaftsordnung –​radikale Demokratie. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. https://​ doi.org/​10.1007/​978-​3-​658-​13734-​2. Flynn, Bernard. 2018. “Lefort as a Reader of Machiavelli and Marx.” Continental Philosophy Review 51 (3): 401–​20. https://​doi.org/​10.1007/​s11​007-​017-​9431-​7. Hartle, Johan Frederik. 2010. “Phantom-​like Objectivity.” Krisis, no. 2: 60–​65. Heinrich, Michael. 2012. An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press. Honneth, Axel. 2014. Freedom’s Right. The Social Foundations of Democratic Life. Cambridge: Polity. Jappe, Anselm. 2014. “Towards a History of the Critique of Value.” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 25 (2): 25–​ 37. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​10455​ 752.2014.906​820. —​—​—​. 2017. The Writing on the Wall. On the Decomposition of Capitalism and Its Critics. Winchester/​Washington: Zero Books. Kay, Geoffrey. 2015. “Why Labour Is the Starting Point of Capital.” In Value. The Representation of Labour in Capitalism, edited by Diane Elson, 46–​66. London/​ New York: Verso. Laclau, Ernesto. 2000. “Constructing Universality.” In Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, edited by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, 281–​307. London/​New York: Verso. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 2014. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Second ed. London/​New York: Verso. Lefort, Claude. 1986. The Political Forms of Modern Society. Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism. Edited by John B. Thompson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

88  Labour and Political Society —​—​—​. 1988. “The Question of Democracy.” In Democracy and Political Theory, 9–​20. Cambridge: Polity Press. Marchart, Oliver. 2007. Post-​Foundational Political Thought. Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​CBO97​8110​7415​324.004. —​—​—​. 2010. Die politische Differenz. Zum Denken des Politischen bei Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, Laclau und Agamben. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin. —​—​—​. 1976. Capital. A Critique of Political Economy: Volume I. London: Penguin. Meiksins Wood, Ellen. 2002. The Origin of Capitalism. A Longer View. London/​ New York: Verso. https://​doi.org/​10.1002/​047​0090​340.ch4. Postone, Moishe. 1993. Time, Labor, and Social Domination. A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt, and Dominique Routhier. 2019. “Critical Theory as Radical Crisis Theory: Kurz, Krisis, and Exit! On Value Theory, the Crisis, and the Breakdown of Capitalism.” Rethinking Marxism 31 (2): 173–​93. https://​doi. org/​10.1080/​08935​696.2019.1592​408. Renault, Emmanuel. 2014. “Work and Domination in Marx.” Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy & Social Theory 15 (2): 179–​93. https://​doi.org/​10.1179/​ 1440​9917​14Z.0000​0000​030. Roy-​Mukherjee, Shampa, and Michael Harrison. 2020. “The Shifting Boundaries of Capitalism and the Conflict of Surplus Value Appropriation within the Gig Economy.” In Conflict and Shifting Boundaries in the Gig Economy: An Interdisciplinary Analysis, edited by Rebecca Page-​Tickell and Elaine Yerby, 45–​62. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. https://​doi.org/​10.1108/​978-​1-​83867-​603-​ 220201​005. Rubin, Isaak Illich. 1973. Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value. Montréal/​ New York: Black Rose Books. Scholz, Roswitha. 2014. “Patriarchy and Commodity Society: Gender Without the Body.” In Marxism and the Critique of Value, edited by Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson, and Nicholas Brown, 123–​42. Chicago/​Alberta: M-​C-​M’. Sohn-​ Rethel, Alfred. 1978. Intellectual and Manual Labor. A Critique of Epistemology. New Jersey: Humanities Press. Stoetzler, Marcel. 2004. “Postone’s Marx: A Theorist of Modern Society, Its Social Movements and Its Imprisonment by Abstract Labour.” Historical Materialism 12 (3): 261–​83. Trenkle, Norbert. 2014. “Value and Crisis: Basic Questions.” In Marxism and the Critique of Value, edited by Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson, and Nicholas Brown, 1–​16. Chicago/​Alberta: M-​C-​M’. Wood, Alex J, and Vili Lehdonvirta. 2021. “Antagonism beyond Employment: How the ‘Subordinated Agency’ of Labour Platforms Generates Conflict in the Remote Gig Economy.” Socio-​Economic Review 19 (4): 1369–​96. https://​doi. org/​10.1093/​ser/​mwab​016. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London/​New York: Verso.

3 Money and the Limits of Labour

At first sight, Laclau and Postone seem to have little in common, except perhaps for the epithet ‘post-​Marxist’ that is sometimes attributed to them. But the previous chapters have constructed a theoretical argument that brings them together quite logically. This is clear from the main conclusion reached about abstract labour so far, and the questions left unanswered by Postone’s work. Abstract labour, as ‘the universal reduction of every specific energy to the one, identical, abstract form of labour, from the battlefield to the studio’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 172) is a constructed universality. But it remains unclear how this process of social construction works. If abstract labour is to deliver on the promise to be non-​essentialist, it has to be shown, in true discursive fashion, how it emerges from the concrete acts of actual people. From this perspective, the question about the construction of abstract labour equivalence is a question about the articulatory process that oscillates between the particular and the universal. And this question brings the discussion of abstract labour right into the domain of Ernesto Laclau’s theory of hegemony. The whole point of Laclau’s work has been to explain the social articulation of universalities, the radical construction of ‘the people’, and the contingent constitution of society (Stavrakakis 2017, 547). Laclau’s work, then, can help to answer the questions Postone left unanswered. With Laclau, it is possible to say that the social mediation of abstract labour emerges as a hegemonic formation. And it is only in this way, by approaching abstract labour as a hegemonic formation, that it is possible to really argue convincingly that abstract labour is a historically specific social framework. The reason for this, as will become clear, is that it is based on antagonistic exclusion and struggle. This chapter functions as a kind of pivot for the whole argumentative structure of the book. If previous chapters still accorded much weight to the differences between discourse theory and the critique of political economy, with the promise to eventually bring the two traditions together, then this chapter will actually start the process of theoretical integration.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003440567-4

90  Money and the Limits of Labour That means that the main argument will be that Postone’s rendition of abstract labour can be approached as a contingently articulated hegemonic formation. More concretely, Laclau’s logics of difference and equivalence mirror the formal structure of Marx’s value theory and its concrete-​abstract labour dynamic. Also, there is a close correspondence between Marx’s analysis of the money form on the one hand, and Laclau’s central concept of the empty signifier on the other. Both the money form and the empty signifier assume the crucial function of tying the differential elements of a social structure together. These theoretical similarities between the critique of political economy and discourse theory have been pointed out before. In fact, Laclau himself acknowledged the formal similarity between the empty signifier and the money form (Laclau 2005a, 93). But what is new about this chapter is that it thinks through the logical consequences of the correspondence between money and the empty signifier. First, in the sense that it connects the empty signifier back to the analysis of abstract labour relations. And second, by drawing attention to the fact that an empty signifier implies antagonistic exclusion, it argues that the abstract labour relations that are expressed in money can only emerge by passing through a moment of negativity. And in this sense, abstract labour is truly discursive and non-​essentialist. It means, crucially, that the hegemony of capitalist labour is predicated on the antagonistic exclusion of an outside. Money, as an empty signifier, signifies the border between the abstract labour framework and its excluded outside, which remains crucial to it as source of appropriation. This chapter emphasises the Marxian heritage of Laclau’s work and reads discourse theory as an extension of Marx’s value theory. The argument unfolds in three steps. Section 3.1 points out the theoretical similarities between Marx’s analysis of concrete and abstract labour and Laclau’s logics of difference and equivalence. The point of this is to show that the political process of constructing equivalence between concrete labours may be investigated through a poststructuralist lens (Section 3.2). That is, Laclau’s empty signifier can help explain the emergence of the abstract labour universality. However, Section 3.3 will show that this is by no means a done deal, since it seems that Marx’s value theory depends on a positive difference incompatible with Laclau’s insistence on the cancellation of all difference. In fact, Laclau and Mouffe themselves said that the equivalence in Marx’s value theory is of a different kind than that of the empty signifier. But their argument only applies to the limited forms of value, and not to the general equivalent. Section 3.4 will pursue this further and use Laclau’s theory to show that the general equivalent and the empty signifier are to an important extent coterminous. But this in itself is not the most important part. It is rather the implication of the correspondence between the empty signifier and the general equivalent that is of

Money and the Limits of Labour  91 the most interest here. As Section 3.5 will argue, this implication is that the abstract labour universality, which is expressed in the money empty signifier, constitutes itself through the antagonistic exclusion of other, directly useful kinds of labour. In conclusion, this means that abstract labour is a hegemonic formation dependent upon its contingent political reconstitution by excluding and appropriating what lies outside of the limits of money. 3.1  Structure, Sign, and Labour In poststructuralist strands of political theory, especially those that draw on the work of authors like Lacan, Derrida, and indeed Laclau, there is a certain tendency to try to understand social phenomena ‘like a language’. Various deconstructive efforts aim to show how ossified social phenomena are in fact socially constructed through a logic reminiscent of Saussure’s structural linguistics (de Saussure 2011). The most famous example of this is of course Lacan’s claim that the unconscious is structured like a language. Given the huge impact structural linguistics has had on social and political theory over the last decades, it is no surprise that this formula has been copied many times over in efforts to show that xyz, too, is structured like a language (Albritton 1999, 117). It is important to stress at the outset of this section, which brings together Marx’s value theory and Laclau’s discourse theory, that it does not aim to follow this tradition. Marx’s analysis of the commodity predates Saussure’s structural linguistics by some 40 years, and therefore rather anticipates it (Tomšič 2015, 6; McNally 2001, 54). Therefore, a Marxian analysis would, if anything, turn the question around and ask in how far Saussure’s work emerges from the real abstraction of concrete and abstract labour that Marx analysed in Capital.1 But this is not the goal of this section. Rather, it has the aim of demonstrating the theoretical similarities between the structure of value and the logic of discourse. This means, ultimately, that Marx’s analysis of the commodity economy can be reinterpreted, with Laclau, as a chain of equivalence. But interestingly enough, the chain of equivalence originates in Marx’s analysis of the commodity form. The previous chapter has already discussed that Marx analyses commodity exchange as the process in which people produce commodities that are useful to others, so that they can exchange them. In a nutshell, this means that commodities are different as concrete labour, and equivalent as abstract labour (Aumeeruddy and Tortajada 2015, 6). The very fact that each commodity has a particular purpose that makes it useful to somebody provides the reason for exchange, but exchange, in turn, happens through an abstraction from this qualitative difference onto the plane of equivalent abstract labour. The labour that produces commodities

92  Money and the Limits of Labour is therefore of a twofold nature (Marx 1976, 132). Considered from the perspective of exchange value, all commodities are products of homogeneous abstract labour. But considered from the perspective of use value, labour is a specific goal-​oriented activity that results in a qualitatively specific good that serves some human need. Just like there may be any number of different needs that are served by the use value of a commodity, so there may be infinite possibilities for different kinds of concrete labour. So tailoring is different from web-​designing, which in turn is rather different from writing a book, or taking care of the elderly. The point here is that the differential character of concrete labours is essential for commodity exchange, because it makes no sense to try and exchange two identical use values against each other. In other words, Marx’s analysis of the qualitative particularity of concrete labour is crucial to understanding the social division of labour in capitalism, in which individual producers work for each other through exchange. Commodities constitute a social structure of elements that retain their own particularity even if they also enter into a universal relation of equivalence with each other. At this point, the similarity with discourse theory comes to the fore. Of course, Laclau and Mouffe ask different questions than Marx, but they, too, are interested in the dynamic of particular differences and universal equivalence. They do not locate this question in the domain value, labour, or commodities. First and foremost, they try to come to terms with the philosophical possibility and social construction of meaning. And they extend their analysis of the construction of meaning to the social sphere in general, where they draw on the same theoretical resources to trace the ontological possibility and political construction of hegemonic social formations. Just like Marx’s critique of the commodity form allowed him to say something about the social relations of labour, so Laclau and Mouffe’s poststructuralist critique of the sign enabled them to investigate new social movements. Throughout this development, and in its different foci (meaning, social formations, and eventually populism), discourse theory ends up looking remarkably similar to the formal structure of Marx’s commodity economy. Here it is helpful to reconstruct the main steps of Laclau’s argument. The first step, and the starting point for discourse theory in general, is to acknowledge the contingency of any identity. Adopting one of the crucial insights of Saussure’s structural linguistics, Laclau stresses that meaning or identity only ever emerges from the differential relations between signifiers. However, he goes beyond Saussure and stresses that since there are endless possibilities to relate different signifiers to each other, it will never be possible to truly fix meaning (Laclau 1983, 22). So the play of differences establishes identity, but since this play is potentially endless, any identity that arises will always be contingent. As

Money and the Limits of Labour  93 such, contingency is the starting point from which the development of discourse theory departs. But contingency does not mean erratic chaos. Discourse theory, and poststructuralist theory in general, rather often has to endure the criticism that its insistence on social contingency inevitably leads to a relativism of the worst kind, where anything goes and nothing sticks. This kind of criticism is to be heard in positivist and Marxian circles alike. Indeed, Postone has criticised poststructuralism for its alleged tendency to argue that reality is indeterminate (Hamza and Ruda 2016, 506). But this criticism rests on a misunderstanding about the point of discourse theory. Laclau, Mouffe, and others are not interested in stressing the contingency or indeterminacy of meaning, identity, and indeed society in its own right. Instead, the aim of discourse theory is to explain how, in the absence of any transcendental fixation of meaning, social meaning, social structures, and social formations emerge nonetheless. Laclau and Mouffe account for this relative fixity by introducing the logic of equivalence, which is intertwined with the logic of difference. This logic of equivalence, then, establishes a commonality among different elements. As Laclau and Mouffe write in HSS, ‘the differences cancel one other out insofar as they are used to express something identical underlying them all. The problem is to determine the content of that “something identical” underlying them all’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2014, 113). That, indeed, is the problem, as the previous chapters on the mysterious commonality of abstract labour have demonstrated. At this point, it starts to become possible to imagine Marx’s commodity logic as a chain of equivalence. Considered as concrete labour, all commodities are different; considered as abstract labour, all commodities are equivalent and exchangeable. So an equivalential link connects differential elements to each other that would otherwise remain isolated. But what does this commonality, this something equivalent that binds differences to each other, consist of? How does a social system emerge out of an otherwise unconnected set of differential elements? This question is another crossroads where the difference between idealist philosophy and Laclau and Mouffe’s discursive materialism becomes apparent. In order to be able to better understand Laclau and Mouffe’s answer to this question, it is helpful to first consider a critique of the alternative, idealist answer that they reject. The most famous critique of the idealist account of systematicity is of course Derrida’s analysis of the transcendental signified. The remainder of this section will therefore first explore Derrida’s critique, which has also influenced Laclau and Mouffe’s thought. This will help to draw a stark contrast with the discourse-​theoretical account of the emergence of equivalence, which revolves around the empty signifier. The latter will be at the centre of attention in the next section (Section 3.2). Its importance

94  Money and the Limits of Labour will be all the more obvious once it has become clear how it emerges as an alternative to what Derrida called the transcendental signified. Derrida’s deconstruction is a philosophy that draws on a variety of sources. Although Marxian critics often reject his work as a kind of linguistic idealism that has lost touch with reality, or worse, that falls prey to the confusions of the commodity fetish (McNally 2001, 57), Derrida himself has been quite straightforward about the fact that Marx also belonged to those philosophers that influenced his thinking. Indeed, he even said that deconstruction should be understood as a radicalisation of the Marxian project of critique (Derrida 1994, 115). Nevertheless, the larger part of Derrida’s work does not focus on capitalism directly and instead focuses more on questions revolving around signification proper.2 In this regard, he has zoomed in on Saussure’s structural linguistics. A central argument of Saussure’s structuralism is that any meaning is always relational, and arises out of the relations between signifiers. Derrida sought to think through the radical consequences of this structuralist understanding of meaning. As he wrote in Of Grammatology, signifiers can only refer to other signifiers and it is in the interstices between them that their differentiality emerges. Derrida introduced the notion of différance for the understanding of language as a contingent system of differences. Différance means that it is a ‘trace’ of other signifiers that constitutes the differential identity of signifiers, since ‘without a trace retaining the other as other in the same, no difference would do its work an no meaning would appear’ (Derrida 1974, 62). Derrida’s radicalisation of structuralist linguistics consists in the fact that he criticises Saussure for holding on to the idea that in speech meaning is actually present to mind, whereas in fact the only way meaning could emerge is through the trace of signifiers in relation to other signifiers (Derrida 1974, 30). In other words, whereas Saussure’s philosophy still contained the idea of a certain fixity and presence of meaning, for Derrida meaning is only difference. This rather dense point may be illustrated by drawing on another of Derrida’s famous texts. In Structure, Sign, and Play, he writes that the tradition of Western philosophy has witnessed a shift in the understanding of the concept of structure. According to Derrida, structure, or rather ‘the structurality of the structure’, used to be understood as a collection of elements organised around a centre that establishes the rules according to which the elements relate to each other. In other words, this centre of the structure would limit the play of differences by establishing positive determinations to the centre, which is itself not subject to the play of differences. As such, the centre would establish relations of equivalence, insofar as it has always been thought that the centre, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which while governing the

Money and the Limits of Labour  95 structure, escapes structurality. This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the centre is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The centre is at the centre of the totality, and yet, since the centre does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its centre elsewhere. (Derrida 1978, 352) The centre, then, establishes a ‘structurality’ or rather systematicity among the elements of the structure by setting rules according to which they relate to each other, and according to which they may be equivalent to each other. This centre is therefore the stable anchoring point of the structure outside the structure itself. Since it is partly outside the structure, the centre qualifies as a ‘transcendental signified’, examples of which would be the philosophical notion of essence, God, or humanity (Derrida 1978, 353). And the shift in the understanding of structurality Derrida identified consists exactly in the disintegration of this transcendental signified. This shift had already implicitly announced itself in the preceding discussion about difference and signifiers. If all meaning is difference, then logically this also applies to the transcendental signified. Yet this means that the signifier that is supposed to signify the transcendental signified also only refers to other signifiers. It is exactly this insight, however, that had been suspended prior to Derrida’s shift by positing the foundation of the structure outside of the structure itself, for instance in God. But as soon as the differential structural logic is extended to the centre that is supposed to keep it all together, the transcendental signified as the unshakeable pillar of meaning collapses. This is the shift or rupture Derrida is talking about. Transcendental signifieds such as God or the human essence no longer suffice as the unquestioned foundation of meaning or society as such, because they are themselves subject to the interplay of difference. Now, Derrida’s list of transcendental signifieds may easily be complemented by the notion of abstract labour. For much of orthodox Marxism, it could be said that abstract labour assumed the function of a transcendental signified. But with Derrida’s critique of the transcendental signified, the question rather emerges how the ‘centre’ of abstract labour is constructed through the differential dynamic of concrete labour particulars. And with this turn, we have come full circle and returned to the question how the abstract labour universality is constituted through discursive practices. 3.2  Empty Signifiers and Universality The previous section has demonstrated that there is no shortage of theoretical similarities between Derrida, Marx, Lefort, and Laclau. Be that as it may, however, the main question of this chapter still remains to be

96  Money and the Limits of Labour answered. How, then, does the logic of equivalence work if equivalence does not derive from a positive determination and has to remain internal to signification? Laclau takes up this question in his essay Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics? Here he rephrases the question –​how to halt the play of differences? –​into a question about the constitution of the limits of a signifying system. For a meaningful totality of signification to emerge, there have to be limits that delimit the signifying space of the system. These limits, however, cannot be established through yet another difference, because then they would be internal to signification and would therefore not really be limits. For this reason, Laclau says that if what we are talking about are the limits of a signifying system, it is clear that those limits cannot be themselves signified, but have to show themselves as the interruption or breakdown of the process of signification. Thus, we are left with the paradoxical situation that what constitutes the condition of possibility of a signifying system —​its limits —​is also what constitutes its condition of impossibility —​a blockage of the continuous expansion of the process of signification. (Laclau 1996, 37; emphasis in original) Consequently, if a system is to be sensible it must have limits, but since these limits cannot be signified they can only be established as the collapse of signification. For Laclau, this means that the limits of the system signify nothing but its negativity. This negativity is never fully integrated in the system, nor domesticated by a dialectical movement, but rather persists as a threat against which the system can in fact articulate itself (Dreyer Hansen 2014, 286). So the limits are established by a signifier that is part of the signifying totality but does not signify another difference. Rather, this signifier, as a moment of negativity, is empty. In Laclau’s argumentation negativity and emptiness are closely related to equivalence and universality. The starting point is that the empty signifier has the function of limiting the play of difference and establishing equivalence. But according to Laclau, these limits cannot be directly signified as positive difference. That is why the equivalence of differential elements can only be ensured by the ‘pure cancellation of all difference’ (Laclau 1996, 38). The negativity of the empty signifier thus refers to this cancellation of all difference. And since difference constitutes meaning, the cancellation of difference signals the ‘breakdown of signification’. Equivalence is therefore a negative, a non-​difference among elements. In its function of representing the system as non-​difference, i.e. equivalence, the empty signifier remains empty. Yet the fact that the empty signifier is empty obviously does not mean that it is not important. Indeed, its function is to establish the limits and thereby the systematicity of the system as such. Crucially, the notion

Money and the Limits of Labour  97 of negativity already suggests how this is done: the meaning of the empty signifier is negative in the sense that it establishes the limits of the system as something that it is not. The limits thus emerge in a negative way vis-​à-​ vis an outside. In turn, this means that establishing the limits of a meaningful system requires a radical exclusion. The limits of the system are constituted by excluding that negative outside that the system is not. As such, the equivalence among the elements of the system is established by the fact that they are connected in their common exclusion of the negative outside. The empty signifier represents this common exclusion. In other words, the empty signifier unites a chain of differences insofar as they all exclude the same external pole. The emptiness of the signifier results logically from the fact that equivalence can only be signified as the cancellation of difference. This is a complex issue, but Laclau summarises it accurately in the following passage: Each signifier constitutes a sign by attaching itself to a particular signified, inscribing itself as a difference within the process. But if what we are trying to signify is not a difference but, on the contrary, a radical exclusion which is the ground and condition of all differences, in that case, no production of one more difference can do the trick. As, however, all the means of representation are differential in nature, it is only if the differential nature of the signifying units is subverted, only if the signifiers empty themselves of their attachment to particular signifieds and assume the role of representing the pure being of the system —​or, rather, the system as pure Being —​that such a signification is possible. (Laclau 1996, 39) Once more, then, it becomes clear that the logic of equivalence can only establish itself in a negative way, through the exclusion of an external pole from the system of signification. That is to say that the limits that constitute the system and enable meaningful signification through halting the play of difference emerge vis-​à-​vis an outside, which poses an antagonistic threat to the system. That is why the outside, the exclusion of which is constitutive of the system, represents the negativity of the system, the non-​ being of the system. So the excluded outside constitutes the system but at the same time poses an existential threat to it. The paradox is therefore that only through excluding the threat of its non-​being can the system signify its own being as a meaningful structure with equivalential links between different elements. In other words, the constitution of the system is always antagonistic. Emptying itself of its concrete content, one signifier will emerge from the chain to represent the common opposition to the antagonist, thereby uniting the chain as such and establishing its systematicity.

98  Money and the Limits of Labour At the end of the day, this theoretical discussion of negativity and exclusion also refers to a rather recognisable social phenomenon. Because Laclau and Mouffe extend the anti-​essentialism of Derridean deconstruction to the social domain and posit that social identities (e.g. of individual people, social movements, political formations) also lack a fixed anchoring point and are therefore constructed through difference (Townshend 2004, 270). Consequently, they adopt their theoretical framework with the logics of difference and equivalence to analyse the emergence of social formations as a process, in which a number of differential elements enter into equivalential relations with each other insofar as they find a common adversary. Discourse theorists thus draw on the same linguistic vocabulary to explain the emergence of social movements. For instance, Jason Glynos discusses this dynamic in the context of political contestation around the signifier ‘justice for all’ (Glynos 2001, 128). Insofar as this signifier has been emptied of its concrete content it could assume the role of empty signifier, around which other particular social demands could find their united expression. ‘Justice for all’ thus represents the common opposition against different threats to people’s social existence. And contemporary politics offers plenty of other examples. In the context of the economic crisis in Greece different social groups found their common adversary in the austerity regime that threatened their social existence. Syriza managed to channel these different demands into a singular front by mobilising them around an empty signifier (Katsambekis 2016). For all its theoretical complexity, then, the discourse theory framework finds a very concrete field of applicability in contemporary politics. The discussion of difference, equivalence, and empty signifiers also relates to the philosophical category of universality. If universality is that which unites particulars insofar as they all partake in the same universal property, then Laclau’s work points out that universals are constructed through discursive logics. The two examples mentioned above already suggested this. It was through the articulation of differential demands around the common opposition against austerity that the universality of the Greek people emerged. Put differently, the universality of the Greek people does not hover on a higher transcendental plane which imparts a Platonic idea of ‘Greekness’ in particular form to individual Greeks, but rather the opposite. The universality of the Greek people is constructed through a discursive negotiation of particular signifiers which enter into relations of equivalence vis-​à-​vis an excluded outside. Similarly, ‘justice for all’ is not a universal truth but rather an empty representation around which particular demands could be articulated. So in both cases, the particular elements that construct the universal are actually oriented towards overcoming a problem, or attaining something that is not yet there. As such, these examples reveal a fundamental feature of the discursively constructed

Money and the Limits of Labour  99 universal, namely that it is represented as a lack, as something that is not there and remains out of reach insofar as its attainment is blocked by the outside that constitutes it (Nonhoff 2006, 215). Similarly, the differential elements of a social formation enter into equivalential relations not because they share the same positive characteristic, but because they are all oriented around the same structural lack of the universal. Universality and lack thus go hand-​in-​hand in the construction of social formations. This discussion of the empty signifier completes the discourse-​theoretical approach to the social constitution of relations of difference and equivalence. It had already become clear how these two interrelated logics were anticipated by Marx’s analysis of commodities which are different as concrete, and equivalent as abstract labour. But now, an additional similarity comes to the fore, and this one is at least as important. From a formalistic point of view, Laclau’s empty signifier has the same function as the money form analysed by Marx. The money form represents the exchangeability and thereby the equivalence of commodities as abstract labour values. That is, one commodity emerges from the chain of commodities to enable their exchange and establish their common identity as products of abstract labour. According to Marx, then, the money form gives to the world of commodities a general social relative form of value, because, and in so far as, all commodities except one are thereby excluded from the equivalent form. A single commodity, [for example] the linen, therefore has the form of direct exchangeability with all other commodities, in other words it has a directly social form because, and in so far as, no other commodity is in this situation. (Marx 1976, 161) Just like, for Laclau, one signifier emerges from the chain of signifiers to represent the chain as such, so for Marx, one commodity emerges from the chain of commodities to assume the role of money, and express the value of commodities as equivalent products of abstract labour. In both cases, we are dealing with chains of differential elements that express their commonality through one particular element that approaches the form of universality. Because of this close theoretical similarity, the money form and the empty signifier are crucial for bringing bring Marx and Laclau together in a discursive critique of capitalist labour relations. Laclau’s discourse theory leads to the insight that universalities are socially constructed and emerge through a process of antagonistic political division, which draws a divide between the universality and that which threatens it. The crucial consequence that follows from this is that any universality, insofar as it has to signify itself as a negativity that unites different elements in their opposition to an excluded threat, emerges as

100  Money and the Limits of Labour an incomplete or lacking universality. Because its constitution and maintenance will always remain dependent on the excluded outside, no universality will ever be ‘full’, and instead emerge as the promise of fullness if the antagonistic pole is finally overcome. Consequently, any universality that manages to become hegemonic will emerge as a collective desire for the imaginary fullness represented by the empty signifier (Nonhoff 2006, 148). Now, translated to the critique of political economy this means that, insofar as abstract labour emerges as a hegemonic formation that finds its universal expression in an empty signifier, Laclau’s theory would ‘predict’ that this coincides with a collective desire for the imaginary fullness of the universality. Indeed, in this case, it seems safe to say that the social labour relations of capitalist society do display this never-​ending collective desire for the universality of money. There is never enough money (Marx 1976, 231). The most obvious manifestation of this is probably the relentless quest for more economic growth that dominates the politics of democratic states. The dynamic of a boundless desire for the promised fullness of the empty signifier does not stray too far from the power of attraction money exerts on the social and political relations of a society based on abstract labour and commodity production. 3.3  Value and Difference The similarity between the commodity logic as analysed by Marx and the discourse-​theoretical structure of difference and equivalence would seem to promise a straightforward transposition of Laclau’s discursive logics to Marx’s value theory. However, things are never as easy as they seem, especially in Marxian theory. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe refer to Marx’s value theory and observe that there, too, the question arises how relations of equivalence emerge (Laclau and Mouffe 2014, 114). But crucially, they seem to rule out exactly that kind of theoretical rapprochement suggested by the aforementioned similarity. They judge Marx’s equivalence of values to be fundamentally different than the negative equivalence of the empty signifier. The focus of Laclau and Mouffe’s critique is that, in their reading, the equivalence of value derives from a positive external reference point. As has become clear in the previous section, this would go against the grain of the logic of the empty signifier, which shows that equivalence can only consist in an excluded negativity. Laclau and Mouffe’s critique of Marx’s notion of commodity equivalence goes as follows: But the common external reference cannot be to something positive, for in that case the relation between the two poles could also be constructed in a direct and positive way, and this would make

Money and the Limits of Labour  101 impossible the complete cancellation of differences implied by a relation of total equivalence. This is the case, for example, in Marx’s analysis of the relation of equivalence. The non-​materiality of labour as substance of value is expressed through the equivalence among materially diverse commodities. However, the materiality of commodities and the non-​materiality of value are not equivalent to each other. It is because of this that the use-​value/​exchange-​value distinction can be conceived in terms of differential and, hence, positive positions. But if all the differential features of an object have become equivalent, it is impossible to express anything positive concerning that object; this can only imply that through the equivalence something is expressed which the object is not. (Laclau and Mouffe 2014, 114; emphasis in original) This rather challenging passage gives quite a bit of food for thought. It seems to once more draw up an insurmountable difference between Marx’s value theory and the poststructuralism of Laclau and Mouffe themselves, complicating any possible rapprochement between the two traditions. But what is it that they are actually saying? Laclau and Mouffe start off by arguing that the external reference that establishes equivalence cannot be constructed as a direct relation of difference, because such a relation would remain internal to a system of signification and consequently cannot signify its limits, nor its constitutive equivalence. Their claim is that Marx’s analysis of the equivalence of commodities falls prey to exactly this fallacy, since exchange value and use value are different from each other. For Laclau and Mouffe, this has to do with the fact that the substance of value –​labour –​is non-​material, whereas commodities as use values are material. Now, in order to start defusing Laclau and Mouffe’s critique, it is instructive to point out the tension between this claim and two other infamous arguments from HSS, namely that ‘our analysis rejects the distinction between discursive and non-​discursive practices’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2014, 93), and that ‘we will affirm the material character of every discursive structure’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2014, 94). According to the logic of their own theory, it should not be a valid strategy of critique to maintain the distinction between materiality and non-​materiality when it comes to analysing the constitution of difference and equivalence. But there is another problem that is more important. And that is that Laclau and Mouffe aim their critique at the level of use value and exchange value, whereas the fundamental level at which equivalence emerges is, as Chapter 2 argued, abstract labour. It may very well be that use value and exchange value are different (see below), but the fundamental cancellation of all difference takes place at the level of abstract labour. Laclau and Mouffe’s critique seems to take abstract labour for granted, which

102  Money and the Limits of Labour results in a distorted interpretation of Marx’s value theory. Moreover, the matter of positive difference between value and use value only applies to the first two forms of value Marx analyses in Capital, and not to the fully developed money form. This is the point where it becomes necessary to delve into the nitty gritty of the value form. As has become clear previously, the value of a commodity is determined by the volume of socially necessary labour time used for its production. But contrary to concrete labour that produces use values, this abstract kind of labour that is the substance of value is a non-​palpable, social phenomenon. This purely social character of value is crucial for the discussion of the relation between commodities, because it brings to the attention that at the end of the day, the commodity is a product of social labour relations. At the beginning of his analysis of the value form Marx stresses that it is important to remember that commodities possess an objective character as values only in so far as they are all expressions of an identical social substance, human labour, that their objective character as values is therefore purely social. From this it follows self-​evidently that it can only appear in the social relation between commodity and commodity. (Marx 1976, 139) This crucial point, which may perhaps not be as self-​evident as Marx claims it to be, harks back to the specific social character of labour in capitalist society that was the subject of Chapter 2. Because labour in capitalism is (doubly) free and not subject to direct relations of domination, its social character only takes shape through the exchangeability of the products of labour as fetishised commodities. Consequently, the social relations of abstract labour that lie at the heart of fetishised commodity exchange also only manifest themselves in their surface appearance of, for instance, market prices of commodities. So it is important to keep in mind that the discussion about commodity exchange does not stand alone but is inextricably connected to the social relations of capitalist society that are established by labour. But now, of course, the question is how exactly the relations between commodities develop. Marx builds up his argument step by step. That is, before he comes to the fully developed form of the value relation between all commodities in a commodity economy (through the money form), he first considers the simplest value relation between just two commodities. He calls this first form the isolated form of value. In this form, each of the two commodities plays a different role. If commodity A expresses its value in commodity B, then commodity A assumes the role of relative value, while commodity

Money and the Limits of Labour  103 B assumes the role of equivalent value. For example, if 50 beers have the same value as one bowling ball, the bowling ball is the equivalent form of the relative value of 50 beers. Through the relation between relative and equivalent values, it becomes clear that it takes the same amount of social labour time to produce 50 beers as it does one bowling ball. Now, it may seem a bit unnecessary to call one of the poles of the equation relative and the other equivalent value, but it is actually quite an important point. For it underscores the crucial fact that labour value cannot signify itself. That is, it makes no sense to say that the value of 50 beers is 50 beers, or that one bowling ball is worth just as much as one bowling ball. The value of any commodity is therefore always relative, because it requires the relation to another commodity in the equivalent form to manifest itself (Marx 1976, 140). So at this preliminary stage of the discussion of the value form, the relational character of the commodity form already comes to the fore. This relational character consists in the fact that value presupposes social relations between at least two labourers. But, of course, a full-​fledged capitalist economy harbours more than two labourers. Indeed, the promise of Marx’s critical theory, adopted by Postone, is to uncover the social relations of capitalist society in its entirety. Nevertheless, the simple value relation between two commodities already contains the core of the social structure of that society. Because this simple relation between two commodities gives rise to the crucial social mechanism around which capitalist society revolves, i.e. the social mechanism that equates different kinds of concrete labour (beer brewing, bowling ball making) as homogeneous abstract labour. This passage from Capital shows how Marx understands this process of equation: By equating, for example, the coat as a thing of value to the linen, we equate the labour embedded in the coat with the labour embedded in the linen. Now it is true that the tailoring which makes the coat is concrete labour of a different sort from the weaving which makes the linen. But the act of equating tailoring with weaving reduces the former in fact to what is really equal in the two kinds of labour, to the characteristic they have in common of being human labour. This is a roundabout way of saying that weaving, too, in so far as it weaves value, has nothing to distinguish it from tailoring, and, consequently, is abstract human labour. It is only the expression of equivalence between different sorts of commodities which brings to view the specific character of value-​creating labour, by actually reducing the different kinds of labour embedded in the different kinds of commodity to their common quality of being human labour in general. (Marx 1976, 142, emphasis added)

104  Money and the Limits of Labour The first thing to notice is the confusing use of words here, mainly in the italicised passage that makes it seem as if abstract labour is a common characteristic of all labour that predates any social process of abstraction in capitalism. Marx’s choice of words here arguably feeds into the essentialist misunderstanding of the theory of value. The second noteworthy thing about this passage is that Marx presents this social process of equating different kinds of labour as so obvious a matter that it does not need further elaboration. But the preceding sections of this chapter have demonstrated that the equation of different things in the absence of a positive metaphysical foundation is no easy feat. This means that the important social process of equating different kinds of labour as abstract labour is still not fully transparent. It is crucial to explore this in more detail because it has important political consequences. The central insight that emerges from the simple, isolated form of value between two commodities is that value emerges in the relation between a relative and equivalent value. Crucially, this implies that the value of the first is expressed in the use value of the second. The equivalence between the two commodities in the isolated form, then, depends on the positive difference between their respective exchange values and use value. As Marx continues his discussion on the value of linen and coats: Hence, in the value-​relation, in which the coat is the equivalent of the linen, the form of the coat counts as the form of value. The value of the commodity linen is therefore expressed by the physical body of the commodity coat, the value of one by the use-​value of the other. As a use-​value, the linen is something palpably different from the coat; as value, it is identical with the coat, and therefore looks like the coat. Thus the linen acquires a value-​form different from its natural form. Its existence as value is manifested in its equality with the coat, just as the sheep-​like nature of the Christian is shown in his resemblance to the Lamb of God. (Marx 1976, 143) For value to emerge in the isolated form, then, there has to be a relation between commodities that enables their equivalence as abstract labour expenditures, but this relation is constructed as a relation of difference between exchange value and use value. The reason for this is that anything else would be tautological: you cannot express the value of linen (say, five social labour hours) in the same value of a number of coats also worth five social labour hours. That would effectively be the same as saying five labour hours are worth five labour hours. So this is why the relation of equivalence between commodities in the isolated form has to be expressed in a relation between a value and a use value. Value and

Money and the Limits of Labour  105 use value, however, are different categories. In this isolated form of value, then, the equivalence of commodities is tied up with the difference of use value and value. This latter conclusion is important insofar as it seems to confirm Laclau and Mouffe’s claim that equivalence in Marx’s value form is of a different kind than the equivalence established by the construction of empty signifiers. The isolated form of value establishes equivalence between two commodities through the expression of abstract labour value in a use value produced by concrete labour (Marx 1976, 150). This equivalence is dependent on the difference between the value of commodity A and the use value of commodity B. Since the equivalence of abstract labour emerges through the difference between the value and use value of two commodities, it seems that equivalence in Marx’s value theory is indeed, as Laclau and Mouffe claim, a matter of positive difference. For there is no cancellation of all difference (as is the case with the empty signifier) as long as the difference between a use value and exchange value remains necessary to express the equivalence between commodities as abstract labour expenditures. The problem is that for Laclau and Mouffe, this would mean that the positive difference of use value and exchange value suggests that both poles are part of a larger social totality. By extension, this would mean that the equivalence that emerges through their differential relation is not the kind of total equivalence that emerges on the basis of a radical exclusion as suggested by the empty signifier. Rather, this equivalence seems part and parcel of a larger unifying totality. And in this way, we would end up in the kind of idealist totality that Laclau and Mouffe sought to leave behind. So this is a way to understand Laclau and Mouffe’s critique of Marx’s notion of equivalence between commodities. Their critique of the positive difference between use value and exchange value makes sense because, against the backdrop of the larger post-​ Marxist debate, it seems to prove that Marx has not left the perimeters of Hegelian idealism. This critique would be very much in line with the particular way Laclau and Mouffe understand Marx’s critique of political economy, as described in Chapter 1. However, it must be stressed here that this discussion of difference and equivalence still only pertains to the first out of four forms of value Marx presents in Capital. It is important to take account of Marx’s full discussion of the value form in its four variations. Now, the second form of value Marx analyses is in fact rather similar to the first, and would also be vulnerable to Laclau and Mouffe’s critique of positive difference. This total or expanded form of value exhibits the same logical structure as the isolated form, but ‘the value of a commodity, the linen for example, is now expressed in terms of innumerable other members of the world of commodities’ (Marx 1976, 155). So now the value of a commodity may be

106  Money and the Limits of Labour expressed in the use value dimension of any other commodity. Although this form expands the number of value relations greatly, it does not change the fact that the difference between value and use value remains fundamental to the commodity relation. However, this is not the full story. The expanded form of value is not the final point of Marx’s analysis. In fact, he argues that the kind of equivalence between commodities established by the expanded form is more limited than that which characterises a full-​fledged commodity economy. In this second (expanded) form, the value of a commodity may be expressed in any other commodity, but this results in an infinite series of unconnected value expressions of pairs of commodities. These pairs of commodities, however, are not related to each other, and therefore it is neither possible to speak of general exchangeability, nor of general equivalence. As Marx writes: Since the natural form of each particular kind of commodity is one particular equivalent form amongst innumerable other equivalent forms, the only equivalent forms which exist are limited ones, and each of them excludes all the others. Similarly, the specific, concrete, useful kind of labour contained in each particular commodity-​equivalent is only a particular kind of labour and therefore not an exhaustive form of appearance of human labour in general. (Marx 1976, 157) Marx is thus the first to emphasise that this expanded form of value does not yet establish full equivalence between all commodities, and that it does not yet give rise to the general homogeneity of abstract labour. Similarly, this also means that at this stage there cannot be such a thing as a general social mediation based on abstract labour that constitutes social relations in capitalist society. What we have in this scenario, instead, is an infinite number of possible equivalences and therefore an infinite number of social mediations between the owners of two commodities. Nor can it be ruled out that these instances of commodity exchange still rely on the positive difference between use value and exchange value, as Laclau and Mouffe object. At the same time, however, the discussion so far has not gone beyond the second form of value. To really get to the bottom of Marx’s understanding of commodity equivalence, therefore, it is necessary to consider his thoughts on money. 3.4  Money and Empty Signifiers It is only with the analysis of the general form of value and the money form that Marx starts to approach the complex reality of capitalist society.

Money and the Limits of Labour  107 Only here does it make sense to speak of the cancellation of all difference between commodities as abstract labour values. The general form of value, then, is the third form Marx investigates. Here the relative value of all commodities is expressed in one other commodity that assumes the form of universal equivalent. An example of this general form of value would be a case in which the relative value of x bowling balls, y beers, and z policy recommendations would all be equivalent to a certain quantity of linen. That is, the value of any commodity now finds expression in one single other commodity. It is only with the general form of value that general equivalence among commodities comes into being: The new form we have just obtained expresses the values of the world of commodities through one single kind of commodity set apart from the rest, through the linen for example, and thus represents the values of all commodities by means of their equality with linen. Through its equation with linen, the value of every commodity is now not only differentiated from its own use-​value, but from all use-​values, and is, by that very fact, expressed as that which is common to all commodities. By this form, commodities are, for the first time, really brought into relation with each other as values, or permitted to appear to each other as exchange values. (Marx 1976, 158) This is where the value analysis starts to approach the complex reality of a comprehensive commodity economy. Marx no longer speaks of isolated exchange, nor of situations in which one commodity may be exchanged for a number of other commodities. In both these cases, there was no generalised equivalence among commodities. But now, with the appearance of the general form of value, all commodities acquire the social commonality of value insofar as they are equated with another commodity, ‘set apart from the rest’, which expresses their value. This prepares the ground for the total cancellation of difference between commodities as abstract labour values. In the general form of value, the logical structure of equivalence between commodities has changed vis-​à-​vis the previous two forms. The connection between commodities no longer consists of a link between the value of one commodity and the use value of another. Laclau and Mouffe argued that such a link would preclude total equivalence, since the relation between commodities would remain conditional on the positive difference between use value and exchange value. In turn, this would be problematic because it would suggest that Marx’s labour theory of value is a self-​ enclosed idealist totality. But the crucial point is that this changes with the arrival of the general form of value. From now on, the commonality

108  Money and the Limits of Labour of commodities as abstract labour values is established by one single commodity that serves as the equivalent for all of them. That is, all commodities now express their relative value in one and the same commodity that serves as their general equivalent. This commodity that assumes the form of general equivalent itself also changes. Marx says that the general equivalent is excluded from the ranks of ordinary commodities to be able to express their commonality of abstract labour values: The general equivalent form of value imposes the character of universal equivalent on the linen, which is the commodity excluded, as equivalent, from the whole world of commodities. Its own natural form is the form assumed in common by the values of all commodities; it is therefore directly exchangeable with all other commodities. The physical form of the linen counts as the visible incarnation, the social chrysalis state, of all human labour. (Marx 1976, 159) It is only at this point that Marx starts to speak of full equivalence among commodities. And crucially, this equivalence is no longer dependent on the value/​use value connection between individual commodities, since the general equivalent absorbs all concrete differences between them. All that is left of commodities in the general value form is their total equivalence as abstract labour values, which is expressed in the general equivalent. The fact that the equivalence of abstract labour value is no longer conditional on the positive difference between value and use value of individual commodities, then, casts doubt on Laclau and Mouffe’s argument that Marx’s value theory would be constructed around positive difference. For the general equivalent annuls all positive difference between commodities as abstract labour values. This general equivalent is, of course, money. The logical structure of the money form (the fourth and final form of value in Marx’s analysis) is the same as the general form of value, with the exception that social custom has shown that it is typically gold that assumes the function of general equivalent (Marx 1976, 162). Now, within the context of the attempted theoretical integration of the critique of political economy and discourse theory, the most relevant question is of course to what extent the general equivalent and the empty signifier are really similar. It has already become clear that as far as structural functionality goes, both concepts display largely the same characteristics. Both the general equivalent and the empty signifier emerge as one element from a larger chain of elements (commodities, signifiers) in order to represent the chain as such. In fact, this mechanism goes beyond representation, because it is this emergence of one element that makes it possible for the differential elements to assume full equivalence to each other. In other words, the

Money and the Limits of Labour  109 emergence of money and the empty signifier constitutes the social structures of commodity chains and signification chains. Perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, it was none other than Laclau himself who pointed out the similarities between money and the empty signifier. Political representation and the equivalence among different political demands, Laclau says, are only possible if a particular demand, without entirely abandoning its own particularity, starts also functioning as a signifier representing the chain as a totality (in the same way as gold, without ceasing to be a particular commodity, transforms its own materiality into the universal representation of value. (Laclau 2005b, 39) Just as different signifiers of a signifying chain are totally equivalent in their mutual relation to the empty signifier, so the different commodities are totally equivalent in their relation to the general equivalent. And just like an empty signifier constitutes the equivalence of signifiers as an equivalence of, for instance, parts of a discourse on justice, so the general equivalent (or money, gold) constitutes the equivalence of commodities as a chain of abstract labour values. Of course, in both cases difference still plays a role, because the logic of difference still constructs differences between signifiers, and concrete labour still results in different use values.3 But the crucial point is that with the arrival of the general equivalent, the systematicity of the system, that is, the fact that there is a system at all consisting of multiple elements, no longer depends on the positive difference between individual elements. The reason for this is that one commodity (money) has emerged from the chain to constitute the commodity chain as such. Here it is important to note that Marx said, in the quotation above, that the general equivalent is excluded. This is, in fact, a crucial point since it also touches upon the question whether the general equivalent and the empty signifier can really be called similar. It boils down to the fact that the empty signifier can only establish equivalence among the elements of the system by emptying itself of its original content, so that it can represent the system as such. Does this process of emptying also take place in the case of the general equivalent? Now, it is true that Laclau admitted that empty signifiers are not completely empty. For this reason, he also spoke of tendentially empty signifiers rather than completely empty ones (Laclau 2000, 304). But even if this means that the empty signifier does not have to be completely empty, it still remains crucial that its differential identity disappears to such an extent that it is able to represent the equivalence of the social system as such. If it retains too much of its differential identity, it would not be possible for a universality to emerge since the whole discussion would backslide into a matter

110  Money and the Limits of Labour of positive difference after all. In how far does the same apply to Marx’s general equivalent? Now, Marx never says explicitly that the general equivalent is emptied of its content. But he does make comments that seem to amount to the same. The key here lies in the process of exclusion. Marx says that the general equivalent is excluded from the world of commodities ‘as equivalent’ (Marx 1976, 159). At the same time, he says that all other commodities are excluded from the equivalent form (Marx 1976, 161). So the general equivalent is the only commodity that still has an equivalent form, and also the only commodity that no longer has a relative form. Crucially, since the money commodity is excluded from the relative form and only serves as equivalent, it would seem that it no longer makes sense to speak of it as having value of its own. This is consistent with Marx’s argument that ‘money has no price. In order to form a part of this uniform relative form of value of the other commodities, it would have to be brought into relation with itself as its own equivalent’ (Marx 1976, 189). Along these lines, perhaps it would be possible to say that money is empty insofar as it has no relative value anymore and only serves as general equivalent. Still, this does not seem entirely convincing. Marx’s analysis indicates that money emerges as a commodity from a wider chain of commodities. As such, the theory of money as presented here understands money as commodity money, which raises the question as to the determination of the value of the money commodity, i.e. gold (Foley 1983, 18). In other words, even if it cannot be directly expressed, the fact that gold assumes the money form as commodity money suggests that gold, just like any other commodity, has value as expenditure of abstract labour time. In that sense, money would retain a trace of positive determination and fall short of the total cancellation of all difference implied by the empty signifier. Because grasping the non-​essentialist constitution of abstract labour equivalence is crucial for the discursive theory of capitalism, this is the point where Laclau’s theory of hegemony can go beyond Marx’s value theory. Indeed, as will become clear, Laclau’s empty signifier can be seen as a further development of Marx’s general equivalent. In a sense, Laclau’s work on equivalence radicalises the beginning Marx made in Capital when it comes to grasping the social constitution of universality. As a starting point for this further analysis, it is interesting to note that Laclau used the empty signifier and general equivalent interchangeably: All the preceding considerations show clearly why universality, for us, is the universality of an empty signifier: for the only possible universality is the one constructed through an equivalential chain. The more extended this chain is, the less its general equivalent will be attached to any particularistic meaning. (Laclau 2000, 304; emphasis added)

Money and the Limits of Labour  111 Laclau’s interchangeable use of the general equivalent and the empty signifier offers a way forward. If the problem is that between two roughly equivalent concepts, one is decidedly empty and non-​essentialist (i.e. the empty signifier), whereas it remains doubtful whether the other (the general equivalent) can lay claim to the same characteristics, it is possible to enhance the latter by approaching it from the perspective of the former. That is, even if Marx’s general equivalent possibly remains caught up in positive determinations, these could be dispelled by developing it further along the lines of the empty signifier. In such an account, the empty signifier would be a further development of the money form. And as such, the empty signifier could be turned back onto the subject matter from which its predecessor emerged, namely the constitution of abstract labour equivalence. The way forward here is indicated by Laclau’s crucial work on antagonism. In addition to the discussion earlier, the empty signifier goes beyond the general equivalent in one crucial regard. As the previous section (Section 3.3) has argued, the empty signifier can only establish equivalence, and can only become empty, through the breakdown of signification provoked by the negativity of an excluded antagonistic pole. Without antagonism, there would be no empty signifier and no equivalence. This constitutive role of antagonism is absent from Marx’s analysis of the general equivalent. Further developing Marx’s general equivalent, then, means trying to connect it to the dimension of antagonism. In fact, from a discourse-​theoretical point of view, the equivalence of abstract labour values cannot constitute itself without an antagonistic exclusion. And this for the reason that abstract labour is not an idealist essence but rather a historically specific form of social relations. Taking this point about the lack of a positive essence underlying the commodity chain of equivalence and extending it along the lines of Laclau’s analysis of the empty signifier, it follows that this chain cannot establish itself in a general money equivalent unless this general equivalent signifies a negative exclusion that unites the chain of abstract labour values as such. It is here, then, that Laclau’s discourse theory shows its potential as a further development of Marx’s value theory. And this is also where the fundamentally political side of the Marxian discussion of value becomes explicit. 3.5  The Possibility of Antagonism Laclau has shown that a hegemonic social formation must establish itself through antagonistic exclusion. There is no other option, since for him equivalence and systematicity among disparate elements can only emerge on the basis of negativity. Negativity and exclusion, symbolised in the empty signifier, establish social systems. Incidentally, this speaks directly to the goal of accounting for the political constitution of the abstract labour

112  Money and the Limits of Labour universality, a social framework of labour relations that cannot be traced back to a positive essence. Put two and two together, and it seems like a very sensible idea to analyse the constitution of abstract labour as a matter of antagonistic exclusion. The hypothesis of such an undertaking would be that the equivalence of abstract labour emerges through the common exclusion of something else that poses an antagonistic threat to the social relations of value production. Now, this may sound logical, but on second thought, what does it even mean to try and speak of antagonistic exclusion in the context of abstract labour and value? Surely such a question may easily lead to the wildest forms of speculation. Or conversely, it could get caught up in formalistic explorations of possible antagonisms, while losing sight of the material reality of commodity production. As against this, this section will argue that the only credible way to conceive of a constitutive antagonism in the context of abstract labour is by identifying directly useful labour as the excluded antagonistic pole. In fact, Marx described this process in historical terms as primitive accumulation. The current section will offer a first approach to the question of antagonism and abstract labour. As has become clear, antagonism draws the limits of a signifying system and thereby constitutes it as such, through excluding an outside that threatens it. Only such an antagonistic exclusion is capable of subverting the differential logic into its opposite, i.e. the logic of equivalence. The equivalence of the system arises from the common opposition of its elements vis-​ à-​ vis the excluded antagonist, which represents an existential threat to the system as such. Since this common opposition cannot be signified as difference, it emerges in a negative way through the empty signifier which stands for overcoming the existential threat of the antagonist. It is only in this way, according to Laclau, that the limits of a system of signification, or any social system, can be established: A neutral limit would be one which is essentially continuous with what is at its two sides, and the two sides are simply different from each other. As a signifying totality is, however, precisely a system of differences, this means that both are part of the same system and that the limits between the two cannot be the limits of the system. In the case of an exclusion we have, instead, authentic limits because the actualisation of what is beyond the limit of exclusion would involve the impossibility of what is this side of the limit. True limits are always antagonistic. (Laclau 1996, 37; emphasis added) The most important part of this passage is Laclau’s claim that ‘the actualisation of what is beyond the limit of exclusion would involve the impossibility of what is this side of the limit’. It means that the excluded

Money and the Limits of Labour  113 antagonistic pole would, if it were not excluded, make it impossible for the social system to exist. Conversely, it is precisely through this radical exclusion that the system can exist at all, since its limits, and thereby its ‘being’, are constructed in opposition against the antagonistic pole. This insight is crucial for the investigation of the antagonism of abstract labour value equivalence. It follows from this abstract conception of antagonism that the ‘being’ of the social system of abstract labour value is conditional on the exclusion of something that threatens its existence. Now, what would threaten the being of value-​producing labour? Obviously, non-​value-​producing labour, or rather, directly useful work. If enough people engaged in a different kind of work that is not oriented towards the valorisation of value, the whole edifice of commodity society would collapse, along with its distinction between value and use value, its dynamic of abstract and concrete labour, and its general equivalent of money. This statement, however, is so obvious that it seems to say nothing at all. You might as well say that the antagonism of value consists in the disintegration of state infrastructure, a long-​term lack of vital resources, or, indeed, an extra-​terrestrial invasion, since the actualisation of each of these would mean the impossibility of abstract labour relations and value production. And in fact, from the formalistic perspective of discourse theory it is hard to distinguish the credibility of these respective options, as long as they assume the functional form of the antagonist. However, it is rather well known that Laclau’s formalism makes it difficult to determine why one discursive formation rather than another becomes hegemonic, so the search for the identification of the antagonism should not be located at the level of discourse theory per se (Stavrakakis 2004, 263). That is why the claim that directly useful work is the antagonistic pole that constitutes abstract labour value finds its justification not in Laclau but in Marx. So with the formalistic structure of antagonism in mind, it is now important to return to Marx’s analysis of labour. The easiest way to explain what the strange concept of directly useful work could mean is to once more stress the peculiar character of its opposite, i.e. value-​ producing labour. Section 2.1 has demonstrated that according to Marx, labour in capitalism is not just a goal-​oriented activity to serve human needs, but also form of social mediation within which people interact with each other to acquire goods and services. In other words, the kind of labour that is specific to capitalism, namely the twofold labour with an abstract and concrete side that produces commodities, is not so much oriented towards producing useful things for direct consumption, as it is towards producing things that may be exchanged. As such, labour in capitalism is directed towards the production of value. People produce value so that they may exchange the

114  Money and the Limits of Labour products of their labour (or their labour power as such) for money, with which they can go on to buy the things they need produced by others. Crucially, this means that the two dimensions of labour are equally necessary for commodity production but not equally important. Insofar as the overarching goal of the capitalist production process is the production of value, the abstract labour aspect overrules the concrete labour aspect, which manifests itself in the fact that use values only function as the ‘material bearers’ of value (Marx 1976, 126). In other words, the peculiarity of labour in capitalism, in addition to the fact that it constitutes what Postone calls a social mediation, therefore consists in the fact that it is oriented towards the production of an abstract, immaterial form of wealth, namely value. The point about value production is not to make sure that everybody has the things they need to live a comfortable life, but rather to always increase the mass of value and accumulate capital. Marx famously analysed this with regard to the circulation of commodities (C) and money (M). The circulation process by which somebody acquires a use value looks like C-​ M-​C, which means that they sell a commodity for money, and with that money they buy another commodity. In this process, the money ends up being spent on the use value that people need for one reason or another (Marx 1976, 249). Things are completely different with the other mode of circulation Marx identifies in the circuit of capital accumulation. Since the whole point of a capitalist economy is to produce ever more value, circulation takes the form of M-​C-​M’. That is, money buys commodities in order to sell these for more money (Marx 1976, 251). The increase in money between the first and last clause of this mode of circulation presupposes a certain margin of surplus value production. This surplus value is produced by labour (the next chapter will discuss this in detail). The crucial point here is that while the actual people embedded in the production process may engage in the first kind of circulation (C-​M-​C) in order to meet their daily needs –​they sell their labour power as a commodity for money, so that they can buy other commodities –​the overriding principle of the capital relation M-​C-​M’ subjects that same labour process to the command to produce ever more surplus value. This means that within the context of commodity production, the labour process through which people meet their material needs is dominated by the abstract imperative to produce ever more surplus value. So the concrete and abstract labour aspects intermingle in a complex way here. Concrete labour, which produces use values, is subordinated to abstract labour, which produces value. Value production requires that people are willing to perform commodity-​ producing labour. And the reason why they are willing to do so is that for them, labour is a way to acquire money to buy other commodities. The paradox is therefore that

Money and the Limits of Labour  115 although the overarching goal of the capitalist economy is to produce more value (M-​C-​M’), the people who actually produce that value do so to gain access to the ‘by-​product’, i.e. the use-​values that function as the bearers of value (C-​M-​C). Now, insofar as the concrete labour that produces use values is subjected to the value imperative of abstract labour, people in capitalist society work in order to meet their needs but do so in the context of an essentially alienated system that has a dynamic of its own. Alienation here refers to the fact that the abstract labour mediation that is specific to capitalism emerges from people’s own actions, i.e. the fact that they work together through commodity production, but then turns back on them as a form of domination (Postone 1993, 162).4 For within this capitalist organisation of labour oriented towards the production of value rather than material utility, working people are subject to exploitation and the systemic pressures of the commodity economy at large. There is thus a class tension between the abstract and concrete aspects of labour in capitalism. The logic of abstract labour, oriented as it is to increasing surplus value production, deploys structural mechanisms to extract more surplus value and decrease the share of labour in production, and in this way exerts pressure on the concrete labour aspect. In other words, the main point is that labour in capitalism serves a systemic goal –​producing ever more value –​that may be at odds with the more straightforward aim of work to ensure people’s daily subsistence. This insight also points toward the possibility of antagonism that constitutes the social framework of value producing labour. It derives more or less logically from the twofold character of labour as analysed here. Value production presupposes that people perform labour to valorise value. From the perspective of workers, the necessity of value-​producing labour reconstitutes itself insofar as it is the socially sanctioned way to acquire use values. Also, it follows from the specific function of abstract labour as a social framework of capitalist society that value-​producing labour is one of the most important ways for people to gain access to, and be part of that society. It is mainly in these two ways, then, that abstract labour reconstitutes its own necessity, and ensures that people keep engaging in value production. Now, the crucial point is that if you turn this around, it becomes clear that any different form of social labour that allows for alternative ways to acquire ‘use values’ (strictly speaking, they would not be called use values since this concept is internal to the capitalist mode of production only) and become part of society would challenge the social stability of abstract labour. From the perspective of abstract labour, then, such alternative forms of labour which would allow people to meet their daily needs without having to go through the mediation of social labour therefore have to be excluded and repressed. It is here that the possibility of antagonism lies.

116  Money and the Limits of Labour It is important to take this argument out of the domain of empty formalism, and consider what it may mean in an actual historical context. And then it appears that the possibility of non-​value-​producing labour manifests itself in different versions, each of which would, in fact, pose a challenge to the social framework of abstract labour value. The most obvious of these is arguably presented by Marx himself in the famous chapter on primitive accumulation. What else is primitive accumulation, and the concomitant expropriation of the agricultural population, than a political strategy to prepare the ground for the social necessity of value? Expropriation of peasants had the effect of excluding a form of work which, although it had caused many people to live in poverty, offered direct access to useful goods. And by extension, this exclusion then constituted the opportunity for a new form of labour that offered access to use values through the mediation of value-​producing labour, insofar as a ‘mass of “free” and unattached proletarians was hurled onto the labour-​market’ (Marx 1976, 878). Now clearly, this proletariat that emerged through the process of primitive accumulation and appropriation would not have been embedded in the production of value had their previous forms of directly useful social work still been a viable option.5 For this reason, the expropriation of peasant communities counts as a form of antagonism, because this exclusion constituted the social necessity for people to sell their labour power and engage in capitalist value production. The crucial point is that the realisation of directly useful kinds of work (such as pre-​capitalist farming) would pose a threat to the social system of value production. If realised on a large enough scale, directly useful work would preclude the development of a social system of value production. Thus, it is through this exclusion that the social relations of abstract labour can emerge at all. Abstract labour and the production of value are therefore predicated on the antagonistic exclusion of directly useful kinds of work. To paraphrase Laclau, if value-​producing labour is on one side of the antagonistic limit, and directly useful work on the other, then the actualisation of directly useful labour would mean the impossibility of value-​producing labour. At the same time, for the very reason that the production of value is dependent on the antagonistic exclusion of directly useful work, abstract labour value can never constitute itself independently. In this regard it is crucial to note Werner Bonefeld’s argument that primitive accumulation is not just a historical event at the beginning of the capitalist era. As the separation between labour and the means of production, primitive accumulation excludes the possibility of directly useful work, and as such it is a constitutive dimension of the reproduction of capitalist relations at any point in time (Bonefeld 2002, 81). Also, this indicates the importance of the state as an active agent that provides the expropriating conditions of primitive accumulation upon which labour

Money and the Limits of Labour  117 exploitation is predicated (Roberts 2020, 544). In other words, the social relations of capitalism, insofar as they emerge as abstract labour relations, presuppose the antagonistic exclusion of directly useful labour in the form of primitive accumulation. The fact that this antagonistic exclusion of directly useful work remains a constitutive dimension of abstract labour value production already suggests that the antagonism we encounter here is rather intricate. Of course the usefulness of labour does not completely disappear in capitalism. As has become clear, labour in capitalism is not only abstract, but abstract and concrete at the same time. That is, the directly useful kind of work that is excluded from value production as a systemic goal in itself, and thereby constitutes the system of value as such, returns in modified form within the system of value production as concrete labour that produces use values (cf. De Angelis 1995, 118). But the fact that the antagonism of value is messier in practice than the logical form of antagonism would suggest in theory also becomes apparent on a more practical, day to day level. Because as Roswitha Scholz has argued, the social relations of abstract labour are dependent on a whole range of work activities that are not part of the production of value, but nonetheless remain essential to it. Abstract labour, then, is dependent on a dissociated sphere of ‘work activities’ typically performed by women. As Scholz says, value dissociation means that capitalism contains a core of female-​ determined reproductive activities and the affects, characteristics, and attitudes (emotionality, sensuality, and female or motherly caring) that are dissociated from value and abstract labour. Female relations of existence –​that is, female reproductive activities under capitalism —​are therefore of a different character from abstract labour, which is why they cannot straightforwardly be subsumed under the concept of labour. Such relations constitute a fact of capitalist societies that cannot be captured by Marx’s conceptual apparatus. This facet is a necessary aspect of value, yet it also exists outside of it and is (for this very reason) its precondition. (Scholz 2014, 128) In the case of value dissociation, then, it appears that the sphere of labour that produces value is dependent on another social sphere in which people perform important which does not, however, result in the production of value. Household work, care work, and affective activities are crucial to the maintenance of the system of value production, but are nonetheless excluded from it. As for the radical exclusion that constitutes value-​producing labour, this means that the value antagonism does not require that one side of

118  Money and the Limits of Labour the divide totally eclipses the other. Rather, it is a more complex antagonistic balancing act of mutual dependence between value-​ producing labour and other kinds of work that are more directly useful. The fact that household work is taken for granted both in capitalist production and in many Marxian critiques of the latter has long been a subject of debate in feminist theory, for example in Angela Davis’s work (Davis 1983). This neglect of household work is not just problematic because it ignores the daily activities of half of the population, but also because it is crucial to understanding how capitalist society works as a totality. That is, a totality of abstract labour relations oriented toward value production that remains dependent on excluded and unremunerated feminised work. Silvia Federici has analysed this aspect of primitive accumulation in detail. She points out that historically, primitive accumulation meant a simultaneous devaluation of women’s social status and of labour power (Federici 2014, 75). This also shows that primitive accumulation, the social position of women and the feminised work activities are closely related to the political constitution of capitalist abstract labour relations. Indeed, the exclusion of feminised work activities from the hegemonic relations of abstract labour is a major source of the feminist political struggle against the capitalist patriarchy. The discussion of household work also points out a different dimension of the constitutive antagonism of abstract labour relations. That is, there is a degree of arbitrariness as to which work activities are integrated into the social mediation of abstract labour value and which are not. As the example of care and household work shows, unpaid work may be commodified and included into the chain of value-​producing abstract labour relations (Ungerson 1997). Right at the heart of the antagonistic fault line between directly useful work and abstract labour, therefore, sits the question about commodification, and more specifically the potential struggles over which kind of work are commodified and which are not. Further commodification means a further extension of the reach of abstract labour relations.6 In this way, the antagonistic constitution of abstract labour also chimes with another classic topic of Marxian debate, namely capitalist imperialism. Rosa Luxemburg famously argued that capitalism presupposes the existence of non-​capitalist domains, which it needs as markets and then incorporates (Luxemburg 2003, 348). These other non-​capitalist economies are based on directly useful work, and capitalist imperialism is precisely that process of struggle in which value-​ producing labour in the end replaces directly useful work.7 At the same time, there looms a crisis potential here since it follows logically that not all the world can become commodified and oriented towards value production if there are no external markets anymore (Dörre 2009, 27). It seems once more, therefore, that the antagonistic conflict between value

Money and the Limits of Labour  119 and directly useful work is a matter of balancing out if a crisis is to be prevented. Indeed, understanding money as the contingent border that delineates the hegemony of abstract labour relations underscores the precarious and predatory character of capitalism as a social system relative to what lies outside of its framework. The history of imperialism and colonialism illustrates this clearly. As Cedric Robinson argues, the enslavement of black people should be understood as a ‘particular historical development for world capitalism that expropriated the labour of African workers as primitive accumulation’ (Robinson 2000, 200). The antagonistic border between capitalist value production and its antagonistically excluded outside becomes visible quite explicitly here, insofar as capitalist labour relations between American citizens could take place through the interaction of money, from which enslaved black people were excluded. At the same time, the work done by enslaved people, excluded from the capitalist practice of ‘freely’ selling labour power insofar as it was forced, unremunerated, and based on direct and violent relations of domination upheld by racist political structures, provided crucial input for commodity production. The history of enslavement is a crucial example of what Beckert et al. call ‘commodity frontiers’ as the limits of capitalist production from beyond which it expropriates and extracts work and resources (Beckert et al. 2021). Although enslavement and forced labour have formally been abolished, they do still occur (Lucassen 2021, 293). As such, this indicates the contingency and violent precarity of capitalist labour as it preys on its excluded outside. Furthermore, it underscores the intimate connection between capitalism and racism, also after the formal abolition of enslavement (Wills 2018). On the other side of the border of capitalist labour, signified by the seemingly neutral and objective appearance of money, there is thus a historical and contemporary reality of violence, force, and racism. All in all, this discussion of the relation between value-​producing labour and directly useful work sheds new light on the constitution of abstract labour relations. Directly useful work –​whether in the form of feudal farming, household work, or non-​capitalist work –​is that which is on the other side of the antagonistic divide of abstract labour. It is its very exclusion that makes labour in capitalism abstract value-​ producing labour. Antagonism, as Marchart argues, ‘cannot be absorbed into the image of two opposing camps as would be typical for conflicts of war or class struggle’ (Marchart 2018, 63). Instead, the point is to ask about antagonism as a ‘radical incommensurability’ that grounds the social. And in this regard, the crucial insight here is that the exclusion of directly useful work is the moment of negativity that constitutes the equivalence of abstract labour relations as something that it is not (Laclau and Mouffe 2014, 114). If

120  Money and the Limits of Labour abstract labour relations make up a central social framework of capitalist society, then only insofar as they are predicated on the radical exclusion of directly useful work. This means that the centrality of labour in capitalism does not derive from a positive essence of labour as such, but rather emerges through a moment of antagonism that grounds labour relations on the basis of an incommensurability, i.e. through excluding a different form of social work that would imply its impossibility. And this exclusion, and thereby the equivalence of the social chain of abstract labour, is expressed in the empty signifier of money. Throughout the analysis of this section, the focus has shifted compared to the previous one, which ended with the question in how far money, as potential empty signifier, could really be called empty. Rather than trying to determine the degree of emptiness of the money form, this section has chosen the perspective of antagonism to bring together discourse theory and the critique of political economy. Laclau argues that a hegemonic social formation constitutes itself through antagonistic exclusion. If the point is to see whether the abstract labour mediation can be understood as a truly contingent framework of social relations, or if it still remains caught up in idealist thinking, it must be shown that abstract labour, too, is constituted through antagonism. And this has become clear by pointing out the different forms of directly useful work that are excluded from the relations of abstract labour value. As Laclau argued, capitalism is not a self-​enclosed totality but rather has a constitutive outside (Laclau 1990, 23). Directly useful kinds of work are the constitutive outside of abstract labour relations. And the border between them, the very limit that ties together the different kinds of concrete labour as equivalent abstract labour values, is expressed in money as empty signifier. Money may originally have been a particularity. But Laclau’s logic of the empty signifier captures precisely that process whereby a particularity assumes the function of representing universality (Laclau 1996, 57). As such, money represents the universality of abstract labour. And more importantly, money establishes the limits between the hegemonic relations of abstract labour oriented towards capitalist value production on the one hand, and its excluded outside on the other. Now, it is certainly not a revolutionary thing to say that capitalist labour relations are hegemonic. Capitalism is an example of hegemony if there ever was one. But the point is that understanding abstract labour as a hegemonic formation in a Laclauian sense makes it possible to investigate the concrete social processes that maintain this hegemony. If there is a certain tendency in the critique of political economy to focus on the abstract, impersonal structures of capital that loom over the personal and day-​to-​day actions of actual people, then the theoretical apparatus of hegemony can help bridge the divide between the two poles. That is,

Money and the Limits of Labour  121 approaching the matter from the perspective of hegemony can help to pry open the black box of the abstract labour mediation that plays such a fundamental role in capitalist society. Because, if abstract labour is a hegemonic formation, its maintenance depends on its continued reconstitution through the acts of actual people. The hegemony of abstract labour persists only as long as people sustain it through performing value-​producing labour. Abstract labour is hegemonic but also ontologically contingent. Looking at abstract labour through the lens of hegemony allows for asking a whole range of questions regarding the how and why of its persistence. And this is no unnecessary luxury. Amid the perennial gloomy Marxist predictions as to the imminent collapse of capitalism, which then never happens, the hegemony framework makes it possible to ask how people continue to carry the abstract social structures of value and capital accumulation. Notes 1 Such an investigation would be in line with the central tenet of Marxian critical theory that analytical concepts, and indeed theory itself, should be reflexively grounded in an analysis of the particular society from which they emerge (Horkheimer 1988). In fact, from this perspective it is possible to criticise Laclau and Mouffe for failing to do so. According to Demirović, they rather posit the encompassing significance of discursive logics on the one hand, and a specific understanding of society on the other, without providing a reflexive account of how the one relates to the other (Demirović 2007, 65). 2 In Specters of Marx, Derrida acknowledges the importance of Marx’s project of critique and emancipation, but also criticises it as a rather old-​fashioned instance of the metaphysics of presence. However, as Postone pointed out in his review of Specters, Derrida interprets Marx in a ‘fundamentally orthodox’ way (Postone 1998, 384). According to Postone, then, Derrida’s critique is limited by this interpretation, which also implies that his abandonment of the critique of political economy may have been based on the wrong reasons and as such, up for reconsideration. 3 There is also a second-​order difference at play in Marx’s value theory that does not occur in Laclau’s theory of hegemony. Beyond the fact that different commodities are equivalent as abstract labour values, they are also different, as abstract labour values, relative to each other, namely in quantitative terms. Abstract labour values are different as quantities of socially necessary labour time, or value. From a Marxian perspective, this emerging dominance of quantitative difference in the face of qualitative equivalence is of course exactly the problem of capitalism (Lukács 1971, 98). Interesting as this may be, for the present study it points out that there is a second dimension of difference within the equivalence of abstract labour value, which is not mirrored in discourse theory. Nor is it immediately clear how discourse theory could account for such second-​order differences in terms of abstract labour time.

122  Money and the Limits of Labour 4 As such, this is a slightly different understanding of alienation than the way Marx discusses it in the 1844 Manuscripts (Marx 1977). This early work would perhaps lend itself to the interpretation that Marx understands people as people insofar as they work, which in turn could be interpreted as essentialist. Any such doubts about whether Marx had an essentialist conception of labour disappear in his later work, as also discussed above. For more on Marx’s sometimes ambiguous formulations regarding labour (see Düzenli 2016). 5 On a side note, E.P. Thompson says that this process of primitive accumulation does not automatically need to invoke the images of the ‘catastrophic orthodoxy’ to the effect that this was a only a period of misery, violence, and impoverishment, because it also saw improvements in the living conditions of industrial workers (Thompson 1966, 195). 6 Polanyi’s famous notion of the ‘double movement’ indicates that there are limits to how far commodification and abstract labour relations may reach, namely up to the point where they start to threaten the well-​being of people so seriously that they push back against market encroachment (Polanyi 2001, 138). 7 At the same time, however, it seems that Luxemburg’s analysis of imperialism is speaking to a slightly different topic, insofar as the confrontation between capitalism and its other is provoked by demand-​side issues. Weak internal demand forces an expansion of the capitalist border. This is a different focus than the one of the present book, which tries to identify the antagonism that constitutes capitalist value production in the first place.

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Money and the Limits of Labour  123 Derrida, Jacques. 1974. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. —​—​—​. 1978. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” In Writing and Difference, 351–​70. London/​New York: Routledge. —​—​—​. 1994. Specters of Marx. The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. New York: Routledge. https://​doi.org/​10.2979/​ RAL.2002.33.4.124 de Saussure, Ferdinand. 2011. Course in General Linguistics. New York: Columbia University Press. Dörre, Klaus. 2009. “The New Landnahme: Dynamics and Limits of Financial Market Capitalism.” In Sociology, Capitalism, Critique, edited by Klaus Dörre, Jan-​Peter Herrmann, and Loren Balhorn, 11–​66. London/​New York: Verso. Dreyer Hansen, Allan. 2014. “Laclau and Mouffe and the Ontology of Radical Negativity.” Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory 15 (3): 283–​95. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​16009​10X.2014.973​895 Düzenli, Faruk Eray. 2016. “Did Marx Fetishize Labor?” Rethinking Marxism 28 (2): 204–​19. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​08935​696.2016.1158​970 Federici, Silvia. 2014. Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia. Foley, Duncan K. 1983. “On Marx’s Theory of Money.” Social Concept 1 (1): 5–​19. Glynos, Jason. 2001. “The Grip of Ideology: A Lacanian Approach to the Theory of Ideology.” Journal of Political Ideologies 6 (2): 191–​214. Hamza, Agon, and Frank Ruda. 2016. “An Interview with Moishe Postone: That Capital Has Limits Does Not Mean That It Will Collapse.” Crisis & Critique 3 (3): 500–​517. Horkheimer, Max. 1988. “Traditionelle und kritische Theorie.” Max Horkheimer. Gesammelte Schriften. Band 4: Schriften 1936–​1941, 162–​225. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press. https://​doi.org/​ 10.15713/​ins.mmj.3 Katsambekis, Giorgos. 2016. “Radical Left Populism in Contemporary Greece: Syriza’s Trajectory from Minoritarian Opposition to Power.” Constellations 23 (3): 391–​403. https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​1467-​8675.12234. Laclau, Ernesto. 1983. “The Impossibility of Society.” CTheory 7 (1–​2): 21–​24. —​—​—​. 1990. New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. London: Verso. —​—​—​. 1996. Emancipation(S). London/​New York: Verso. —​ —​ —​ . 2000. “Constructing Universality.” In Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, edited by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, 281–​307. London/​New York: Verso. —​—​—​. 2005a. On Populist Reason. London: Verso. https://​doi.org/​10.1057/​palgr​ ave.cpt.9300​255 —​—​—​. 2005b. “Populism: What’s in a Name?” In Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, edited by Francisco Panizza, 32–​49. London/​New York: Verso. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 2014. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Second ed. London/​New York: Verso.

124  Money and the Limits of Labour Lucassen, Jan. 2021. The Story of Work. A New History of Mankind. New Haven/​ London: Yale University Press. Lukács, Georg. 1971. History and Class Consiousness. Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Luxemburg, Rosa. 2003. The Accumulation of Capital. London/​ New York: Routledge. https://​doi.org/​10.4324/​978020​3361​863 Marchart, Oliver. 2018. Thinking Antagonism. Political Ontology after Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital. A Critique of Political Economy: Volume I. London: Penguin. —​—​—​. 1977. “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.” In Karl Marx: Selected Writings, edited by David McLellan, 75–​112. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McNally, David. 2001. Bodies of Meaning. Studies on Language, Labor, and Liberation. Albany: State University of New York Press. Nonhoff, Martin. 2006. Politischer Diskurs und Hegemonie. Das Projekt ‚soziale Marktwirtschaft‘. Bielefeld: Transcript. Polanyi, Karl. 2001. The Great Transformation. The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press. Postone, Moishe. 1993. Time, Labor, and Social Domination. A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —​—​—​. 1998. “Review: Deconstruction as Social Critique: Derrida on Marx and the New World Order.” History and Theory 37 (3): 370–​87. Roberts, William Clare. 2020. “What Was Primitive Accumulation? Reconstructing the Origin of a Critical Concept.” European Journal of Political Theory 19 (4): 532–​52. https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​14748​8511​7735​961 Robinson, Cedric J. 2000. Black Marxism. The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill/​London: University of North Carolina Press. Scholz, Roswitha. 2014. “Patriarchy and Commodity Society: Gender Without the Body.” In Marxism and the Critique of Value, edited by Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson, and Nicholas Brown, 123–​42. Chicago/​Alberta: M-​C-​M’. Stavrakakis, Yannis. 2004. “Antinomies of Formalism: Laclau’s Theory of Populism and the Lessons from Religious Populism in Greece.” Journal of Political Ideologies 9 (3): 253–​67. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​1356​9310​4200​0263​519 —​—​—​. 2017. “Populism and Hegemony.” In Oxford Handbook of Populism, edited by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy, 535–​53. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thompson, Edward Palmer. 1966. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books. https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​j.1468-​0289.1965.tb01​761.x Tomšič, Samo. 2015. The Capitalist Unconscious. London/​New York: Verso. Townshend, Jules. 2004. “Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemonic Project: The Story So Far.” Political Studies 52: 269–​88. Ungerson, Clare. 1997. “Social Politics and the Commodification of Care.” Social Politics 4 (3): 362–​81. https://​doi.org/​10.1093/​sp/​4.3.362 Wills, Vanessa. 2018. “What Could It Mean to Say, ‘Capitalism Causes Sexism and Racism?’ ” Philosophical Topics 46 (2): 229–​46. https://​doi.org/​10.5840/​ phil​topi​cs20​1846​220

4 Domination and the Antagonisms of Value

As a hegemonic formation, the abstract labour mediation is dependent on the continued production of commodities. Commodity production, in the Marxian framework, is intimately tied up with questions of exploitation and class antagonism. And commodity production in the context of Marx’s value theory takes place in the infamous ‘hidden abode’, where working people are exploited and surplus value is appropriated. As such, this topic is closely connected with Marx’s value theory. However, as is well known, Marx identifies labour as the only source of value. How does this sit with the highly productive, knowledge-​and technology-​based economies of the 21st century? Against the backdrop of the development of productivity, it seems strange to insist on labour as the only source of value. Indeed, a long time ago Schumpeter already said that the Marxian value theory is ‘dead and buried’ (Schumpeter 1976, 25). This would be problematic for the purposes of the present study. Because the attempt to understand capitalist abstract labour relations as a contingent hegemonic formation would collapse if it turns out that it builds on an old-​fashioned, perhaps even essentialist, theory of value. That is why this chapter will focus on Marx’s value theory. The argument will be that, far from being obsolete, the theory of value can actually help to understand the emergence of highly productive forms of capitalism that seem to depend less and less on actual labour. This leads to a situation in which the ontological precarity of contemporary capitalism becomes more pronounced, intensifying different forms of class antagonism. This overarching discussion of the value theory contains a second line of argumentation that is equally important. It has to do with the question of discursive structure and agency, and the constitution of social relations. Just like the previous chapters mobilised Postone’s interpretation of Marx’s work to move beyond some of the deterministic tendencies of orthodox Marxism, so this chapter draws on Postone to show the relevance of the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003440567-5

126  Domination and the Antagonisms of Value value theory for current times. But just like in the previous chapters, it will become clear again that Postone’s theory overlooks the important dimension of human agency in upholding the abstract structures of capitalism. Part of the problem here lies, indeed, in the level of abstraction of Postone’s work. This high level of abstraction also showed in the conception of antagonism that was developed so far, i.e. between abstract labour and the excluded possibility of directly useful work. If the role and agency of actual people in upholding the hegemony of value are to be made visible, then it is crucial to descend from this high level of abstraction. The discussion of the theory of value will help to do so. It will become clear that value production is a process that also harbours an ‘internal’ antagonistic dimension. The circuit of value production is oriented toward producing surplus value, whereas the logic of use value of actual people involved in production is oriented toward meeting life’s daily needs. Working people embedded in the abstract labour framework consequently find themselves under the pressure of the domination of time. As such, the abstract ‘external’ antagonism between value and directly useful work returns on the concrete ‘internal’ level of people’s lived experience as workers. Class struggle assumes centre stage here. In sum, the central argument of this chapter is that the rather formalistic antagonism between value production and the production of material wealth is mirrored by an identical antagonistic split between the dynamics of surplus value and use value, respectively. The chapter will develop this argument in five steps. First, Section 4.1 will explain the difference, central to Postone’s interpretation of Marx, between value and material wealth. Building on this, Section 4.2 will show that this difference imparts a specific dynamic to the historical development of capitalist production: whereas the output of value production remains stable or increases only incrementally over time, material production actually makes large jumps as the general level of productivity is raised. It will become clear that the paradoxical consequence of this is that labour becomes increasingly superfluous for the production of material wealth as time progresses. Section 4.3 discusses what is arguably the most controversial part of Postone’s work. He locates the main form of social domination of capitalist society in the domination by time rather than the domination of workers by capitalists. For Postone, this also leads to what he calls the central contradiction of capitalism, namely the contradiction between value and the possibility of its abolition. However, Section 4.4 will argue in favour of understanding this contradiction as an antagonism instead. Section 4.5 will then explore how this antagonism manifests itself at the level of labour itself. It is here that people’s lived experience in capitalism becomes visible. And it has to do with class.

Domination and the Antagonisms of Value  127 4.1  The Political Relevance of Value The distinction between value and material wealth is central to Postone’s critique of political economy. It already features in the Grundrisse and Capital. But Postone’s argument is that the difference between value and material wealth has often been overlooked.1 The problem with conflating value and material wealth is that it leads to the assumption of a transhistorical category of wealth, similar to the transhistorical category of labour. As argued in previous chapters, the historical specificity of labour in capitalism consists in its double character as both abstract and concrete. The crucial point is that this twofold nature of labour in capitalism is mirrored in its output, in the sense that labour in capitalism produces both value and material wealth. More specifically, abstract labour produces value, whereas concrete labour produces material wealth. This distinction is so important because, as will become clear, the two forms of wealth follow a different historical pattern as capitalism develops. Overlooking this distinction precludes realising the full critical potential and historical accuracy of Marx’s work. Those theorists who do overlook it are in good company, because even Habermas once failed to maintain the distinction between value and material wealth, as both Postone (Postone 1993, 233) and authors associated with the German Wertkritik tradition were eager to remark (Ortlieb 2014, 88). The crucial point is that, if this distinction is ignored, the huge productive potential of machinery, automation, and digitalisation of contemporary knowledge-​economies seems to render Marx’s value theory obsolete. But it will become clear that if the distinction is upheld, Marx’s value theory is now more relevant than ever. It all starts with something that is rather familiar by now. Labour in capitalism produces commodities. Commodities have a use value and an exchange value. The use value is what creates the demand for a commodity, and is therefore the reason why someone would buy it. However, it is the exchange value side that enables this exchange, because it allows for comparing qualitatively different commodities as abstract labour values. The exchange value of commodities is determined by the socially necessary labour time required for its production. The more social labour consumed in the production process, the higher the value of the commodity. However, this does not mean that a lazy worker produces more value than a diligent one. Because, the social aspect of socially necessary labour time refers to the fact that the value of a commodity is a social norm, applicable throughout society, and dependent on the current state of economic development and productivity (Marx 1976a, 129, 295). So if a particular factory takes twice as long to produce bars of soap than its competitors, it will not make twice as much money but rather only half

128  Domination and the Antagonisms of Value the amount. Since the value of soap is determined by the social norm, the factory will have to sell at the same value as everybody else. And because of its low productivity, the slow factory will only have half as many bars of soap to sell as the competition, which will effectively lead to bankruptcy sooner or later. In other words, the main takeaway is that socially necessary labour time determines the value of a commodity through setting a social norm that may not easily be changed by a single producer. As previous chapters have argued, the point of the production process in capitalism is not primarily to meet people’s needs, but rather to produce value and accumulate capital. Value is realised through exchanging commodities. But of course, the goal of exchanging commodities as values is to realise profit. There is no point in exchanging the same amount of value for the same amount of value (Marx 1976a, 251). So there has to be a way to avoid a break-​even situation and generate a profit. Crucially, this profit does not arise in the process of circulation itself. The social norm of value makes sure that commodities are generally exchanged at their values (Marx 1976a, 269).2 How, then, is it possible to generate a profit if the process of free exchange means that commodities trade at their values, and values are exchanged for equal values? The answer is of course, that there is one commodity that can generate more value than it costs. And this commodity is labour power. It is possible to buy labour power at its value, that is, at the cost needed to replenish it, and still make a profit. These costs would be the wages of working people, which they need to buy food, rent houses, and acquire the other things they need to live their lives. In the context of the value production process, Marx calls this necessary labour. It must necessarily be performed to break even. As with all other commodities, the value of labour power is measured in socially necessary labour hours (and then expressed in money wages). Now of course, the possibility of profit generation lies in the fact that a worker works more hours per day than they cost in terms of wages. If the wages represent six social labour hours of necessary labour, but the workers work eight hours, there is a difference of two hours of surplus labour. This is Marx 101. The production of surplus value, also known as exploitation, is the inherent goal of the capitalist labour process that Marx captured with the formula M-​C-​M’. The goal of the capitalist production process is to make a profit, the profit derives (largely) from surplus value, and surplus value arises from the difference between the value of labour power and the actual value produced by that labour power. Also, competition among capitalists makes sure that there is an incentive to generate as much surplus value as possible. Marx identifies two ways to increase surplus value. The first is, quite simply, to extend the length of the working day. To come back to the same example used above, if necessary labour amounts to six social labour hours, and the duration of the working day

Domination and the Antagonisms of Value  129 is extended from eight to nine hours, then surplus labour increases from two to three hours (Marx 1976a, 340). It is obvious, however, that this option of increasing absolute surplus value is limited by the fact that any day contains at most twenty-​four hours. This is where the second option comes in, and this one is more interesting. For it is with the introduction of relative surplus value, according to Postone, that the historical dynamic of capitalist production starts to unfold (Postone 1993, 283). Relative surplus value leaves the total length of the working day intact, and rather increases surplus labour through reducing necessary labour. Reducing necessary labour effectively means bringing down the cost of labour power. In turn, this is done by reducing the cost of the commodities used to replenish labour power. A simple example may demonstrate the idea of relative surplus value. Suppose that the working day is eight hours, and necessary labour amounts to six hours, leaving two hours surplus labour. The six hours necessary labour represent the socially necessary labour time used for the production of the commodities the worker needs to survive and make it to another day in the office. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say that in this example, all the worker needs to survive is pizza. So the worker consumes six social labour hours’ worth of pizza every day. Now, if the price of pizza drops, then so will the value of labour power. This is because the value of labour power is determined by the value of the commodities –​pizza, in this case –​needed to replenish it. If a disruptive innovation in the pizza business speeds up the process of pizza baking to such an extent that it is now possible to produce twice as many pizzas in the same time as previously, the value of pizza will be reduced by 50%. And consequently, since workers now only need half as much money to buy pizza and replenish their labour power, the value of labour power also decreases by 50%. So hypothetically, wages would also drop by 50%, and necessary labour too. Now, if necessary labour is reduced by half, it represents only three social labour hours in the new scenario, leaving the rest of the working day, five hours, for the production of surplus value. This is, in a nutshell, how relative surplus value works. Surplus value is increased by raising productivity to decrease the value of labour power (Marx 1976a, 432). As will become clear in later sections of this chapter, this simple mechanism has far-​reaching consequences for the historical dynamic of capitalism. There is, perhaps, one thing that does not add up about the story of relative surplus value. Given the fact that capitalists and companies pursue their own interest only, why would the pizza company invest in new machinery to lower the price of labour power and allow other companies to increase their margin of relative surplus value? The pizza company is, obviously, not running a charity for other companies. This is why it is crucial to consider that Marx locates the phenomenon of relative surplus

130  Domination and the Antagonisms of Value value not so much on the individual level of single companies, but rather on the level of the totality of the economy (Marx 1976a, 433). It is only because capitalist economies display a general tendency to increase productivity that it is possible, over time, for the value of labour power to decrease and surplus labour to increase. This dynamic of relative surplus value is, therefore, a systemic phenomenon, in the sense that it applies not so much to individual enterprises as to the capitalist economy in its entirety. Over time, the overarching dynamic of profit seeking that drives capitalism at large manifests itself in continuous increases in relative surplus labour across the economy. However, this systemic level obviously consists of a collection of individual companies. Therefore, the question arises why they would want to increase productivity if they do not benefit from it? They certainly would not do it to increase the profitability of their competitors, much less to promote the well-​being of humanity. In other words, there must be a reason for individual companies to raise productivity, which indirectly leads to an increase in relative surplus level on the systemic level. Companies have to make a profit within the confines of the general social mediation of value, which, as argued above, determines the value of commodities through the mechanism of socially necessary labour time. So the individual company cannot make a profit by selling their commodities above their general social value. But what it can do, crucially, is to produce more commodities, and exchange these at the same value. The same example serves to illustrate this point. Suppose that the socially necessary labour time norm for pizzas is such that it takes one hour to produce ten pizzas. One pizza represents 1/​10th of a social labour hour. As we had seen above, the pizza company now installs a new piece of equipment that greatly increases its productivity, allowing it to produce twice as many pizzas per hour. However, this individual hike in productivity does not by itself change the general social norm of social labour time for pizzas.3 Crucially, this means that although for the individual company one pizza now represents only 1/​20th of a social labour hour, from the perspective of the economy at large a pizza is still valued at 1/​10th labour hour. The company can therefore produce and sell twenty pizzas at the same value as when they still used to produce ten pizzas, because the individual value of the pizza falls below its social value (Marx 1976b, 1024). So the company still sells their pizzas at (or slightly below) their social value, but they can sell twice as many as before, and therefore realise twice as much value. This, then, is the incentive individual companies have to increase productivity. The catch, however, is that this particular pizza company is not the only one smart enough to do this, but that all companies are always trying to outcompete each other to capture more value. The same profit motive and

Domination and the Antagonisms of Value  131 competitive pressure that compel the first pizza company to raise productivity also invites all others to do the same. As more and more other pizza companies start to install the new efficient equipment, so their productivity rises as well and they start to enjoy the same competitive advantage as the first company. Which is the same as saying, in other words, that as time passes the competitive advantage of the first company dissipates because its competitors have shored up their productivity as well. Now, the social norm that determines the value of the commodity (pizza) is based on the general level of productivity, so when the new level of productivity is generally adopted, the value norm drops to the new, lower level (Postone 1993, 191). So after a while the norm of socially necessary labour time for pizzas will, in fact, say that one pizza no longer represents 1/​10th but rather 1/​20th of a social labour hour, because pizza producers across the economy now generally produce twenty pizzas per hour. As a consequence, all companies have to start anew to try and find a competitive advantage over others. And of course this does not just apply to pizza companies but to all companies in all branches of a capitalist economy, since they are all trying to make a profit through increasing surplus value. The result of all this, in short, is that capitalist companies are playing a catch-​up game, always raising productivity to capture more value than their competitors, only to see their temporary advantage disappear a moment later. Postone calls this game of catch-​up the ‘treadmill’ effect of capitalism. Increased levels of productivity do not lead to lead to a corresponding increase in the production of value, but rather establish a new social norm for the socially necessary labour time of commodities, which producers have to stick to (Postone 1993, 347). Capitalist companies are caught up in the treadmill of value production, trying to capture more of it, but not making much progress. This treadmill effect is crucial for understanding the long-​term development of the society of value-​producing people, as the next section will show. For now, the important thing is to underscore the political relevance of value, relative to material wealth. The terminology is a bit confusing here, but both value and material wealth are different forms of social wealth. Different kinds of society may exhibit different forms of wealth. As Postone says, the question is which form of wealth is dominant in a particular society in a specific historical time frame (Postone 1993, 25). It has already become clear on multiple occasions that in capitalist modernity, value is the dominant form of social wealth. Indeed, as Chapter 3 argued, value is hegemonic. As capitalist companies try to capture more surplus value, they are elevating the immaterial form of wealth Marx called value to the dominant kind. As the Grundrisse has it, value measured in labour time is the foundation of ‘bourgeois society’ (Marx 1973, 704). Indeed, from a Laclauian perspective this means that value is hegemonic. However, although value is dominant in capitalism, it is

132  Domination and the Antagonisms of Value not the only form of wealth. It appears together with material wealth. Material wealth stands for, quite simply, the concrete material output of the production process, pizza for instance. Value, as the dominant form of wealth in capitalism, is immaterial, whereas material wealth is, well, material.4 The two different kinds of wealth follow different trajectories. With every increase in productivity, the output of material wealth rises substantially, whereas the output of value grows only marginally if at all (Postone 1993, 309). Value is measured in labour time, and a social labour day of eight hours will produce eight hours’ worth of value, regardless of the level of productivity. What changes with productivity, as became clear in the discussion of relative surplus value, is the quantity of material wealth produced in those eight hours. The example showed that after new high-​ tech stone ovens had been installed, pizza production jumped from ten per hour to twenty per hour. As long as the general social labour norm for pizzas remains at the old level, the pizza baker at the forefront of innovation enjoys a competitive advantage. Sooner or later, however, the competition will catch up and the social labour norm will shift towards the new level of productivity, i.e. that one social labour hour equals twenty pizzas. The result of all this is that at the end of this cycle, value production has only increased marginally, whereas the stone ovens now churn out twice as many pizzas per hour. In other words, a hike in productivity substantially increases the output of material wealth, but there is no corresponding growth in value production. What little advantage the most competitive firm had in terms of value production disappears at the end of the cycle, starting the whole process anew (Postone 1993, 289). With every cycle, then, the output of material wealth grows, whereas the level of value production remains by and large the same. As capitalism develops, this process repeats itself over and over again, burying people underneath an ever-​growing heap of pizzas. The problem with this is that pizzas, and material wealth as such, are not the form of wealth that matters in capitalism. What matters, rather, is value. After all, capitalist society is a society constituted by the social relations of abstract labour, and abstract labour is the source of value. Use value, or material wealth, only serves as the ‘bearer of exchange value’, a necessary means toward the aim of realising more value (Marx 1976a, 293). As has become clear, the dimension of material wealth, consisting of use values produced through concrete labour, does not contribute to the abstract labour dimension of value production. The whole point of this discussion, then, is to clear up the confusion as to the role of machines, technology, science, and other productivity-​increasing procedures in the capitalist production process. That is, technological innovation by itself does not produce new value, but it does produce

Domination and the Antagonisms of Value  133 more material wealth. Productivity hikes increase relative surplus value insofar as they allow for the production of more material wealth in the same time, but they do not as such increase total value produced. This is because, as Marx says, a working day of a given length always creates the same amount of value, no matter how the productivity of labour, and, with it, the mass of the product and the price of each single commodity produced may vary. If the value created by a working day of 12 hours is, say, 6 shillings, then, although the mass of the use values produced varies with the productivity of labour, the value represented by 6 shillings will simply be spread over a greater or a less number of commodities. (Marx 1976a, 656) In other words, total abstract labour value remains largely the same, but material wealth output changes along with productivity. This means, in turn, that abstract labour remains the only component of value, but labour is not the only thing that determines material wealth production. Indeed, technology, machines, and computerised systems become more and more important determinants of material wealth production as times progresses. This means that the hegemony of value and the social relations of abstract labour attached to it is upheld by, and increasingly dependent on, productivity-​enhancing technology and knowledge. Value is measured in abstract labour time, whereas material wealth is measured in the quantity and quality of actual things produced.5 As time progresses and productivity rises, value output remains the same or increases only incrementally, but the output of material wealth takes a flight and amasses as an immense collection of commodities. This growth of material wealth, then, is not so much the product of labour, but more and more of technology, machinery, knowledge, etc. This also explains why those critics –​including Laclau –​who maintain that Marx’s theory of value has become obsolete miss the point. Insofar as they do not distinguish between value and material wealth, they take the theory of value to claim that all wealth is always produced by labour. It is obvious that this is not the case in the contemporary knowledge economy with its dependence on high-​tech and knowledge-​intensive production inputs. But crucially, as argued above, Marx’s argument is that all value is produced by labour, but not all material wealth. In fact, the value theory with its distinction between value and material wealth, rather than having become obsolete, actually helps to understand what is currently going on in the knowledge economy. That is, at such high levels of productivity, material wealth production increases exponentially, while value production lags behind, resulting in the paradox that labour, while still feeding into value as hegemonic form

134  Domination and the Antagonisms of Value of wealth, is becoming less and less relevant for material wealth production as compared to constant capital. From the perspective of material wealth, then, the long-​term dynamic of capitalist production is such that it renders labour increasingly superfluous. The dynamic between material wealth and value also helps to underscore the political character of capitalist labour relations. Abstract labour relations are hegemonic but only insofar as they amount to the production of value as hegemonic form of wealth, which determines their social validity to the extent that they abide by the standards of socially necessary labour time. Such value norms, however, appear as a foundation, but this is a foundation that continuously changes and undermines itself, illustrating the ‘groundlessness’ of labour. In the face of this groundlessness, it is in fact through political intervention that the hegemony of labour, through ever-​increasing productivity, can be upheld. Indeed, the contingent foundation of labour relations reappears as the construction of a new social value norm around which labour gravitates, up to the point where competition, innovation, and rising productivity uncover the groundlessness of this contingent foundation, too. Crucially, the politics of commodification, innovation, and intervention amounts to the political reconstitution of labour relations. This takes the form, for example, of expanding the borders of labour value into new terrains such as the bioeconomy (Birch and Tyfield 2013). The political shows itself as the contingent constitution of labour relations in the commodification of nature. But it is also visible in the political intervention of authorities concerned about economic growth potential. The European Commission, for example, has explored the possibilities for foresters to become more innovative so as to contribute to profitable bio-​based markets (European Commission 2013). By producing more material wealth through appropriating nature in the bioeconomy, then, the margin of relative surplus value can be expanded once again and the hegemony of labour value upheld. 4.2  The Superfluity of Labour Rather than clinging to an old-​fashioned labour essentialism, the Marxian value theory developed here points towards the increasing superfluity of labour in contemporary capitalist society. Over time, labour will become less important for the production of material wealth, but at the same time remain fundamental as the measure of the hegemonic form of wealth in capitalism, i.e. value. Marx describes this in a famous passage from the Grundrisse: The exchange of living labour for objectified labour —​i.e. the positing of social labour in the form of the contradiction of capital and wage labour —​is the ultimate development of the value-​relation and of

Domination and the Antagonisms of Value  135 production resting on value. Its presupposition is —​and remains —​ the mass of direct labour time, the quantity of labour employed, as the determinant factor in the production of wealth. But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose ‘powerful effectiveness’ is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production. (Marx 1973, 704–​5; emphasis in original) In this condensed passage, Marx says that value, measured by the expenditure of labour time, is the determination of the hegemonic capitalist form of wealth, i.e. value. But then he goes on to say that as ‘large industry’, i.e. productivity, develops, the production of ‘real wealth’, i.e. the output of material use values, starts to depend less and less on the expenditure of labour time. In other words, the development of the production of material wealth starts to deviate from the production of value. This destabilises the political of abstract labour relations, adding an additional layer to the precarious hegemony of contemporary capitalism. The output dimension of the two different forms of wealth is crucial to the argument of this chapter, because it already shows that the position of labour in capitalist society is changing. Arguably even more important than the output dimension, however, are the changes that are going on simultaneously at the level of production itself. It is at the level of production that fundamental shifts take place in the social structure of contemporary capitalism. To develop this argument it is helpful to return to Marx’s in-​depth discussion of surplus value production. Surplus value is the ‘amount by which the value of the product exceeds the value of its constituent elements’ (Marx 1976a, 321). These constituent elements are the two components of capital, namely constant capital and variable capital. Constant capital stands for the means of production, that is, the ‘raw material, the auxiliary material and the instruments of labour, [which do] not undergo any quantitative alteration of value in the process of production’ (Marx 1976a, 317). As an ‘auxiliary means’, constant capital does not produce new value itself; it can only transfer part of the value that was used in its own production to the new commodities. Because of the wear and tear of the machines and instruments, constant capital also loses some of its value with every new commodity it helps to produce. As far as constant capital is concerned, then, the production process is a zero-​sum game in which value is lost by the means of production and transferred onto the new commodities (Marx 1976a, 312). Constant capital does not produce new value.

136  Domination and the Antagonisms of Value The only part of capital that produces new value is variable capital. Variable capital stands for the part of capital that is used to purchase labour power. It is variable in the sense that it is ‘continually being transformed from a constant into a variable magnitude’ (Marx 1976a, 317). This has to do with surplus labour. As the previous section demonstrated, Marx defines surplus labour as the difference between total labour and necessary labour. The variability of variable capital consists in the fact that it varies along with the ratio of surplus labour at a given point in time. Taken together, constant and variable capital make up the so-​called organic composition of capital. The higher the rate of constant capital relative to variable capital, the higher the organic composition of capital. Investments in new machinery, technology, or knowledge will add to the constant part of capital and therefore cause the organic composition of capital to rise. Variable capital (labour) will then make up a relatively smaller part of total capital. The paradox is thus that a new investment will increase surplus value production because it raises the productivity of labour, while at the same time diminishing the share of variable capital relative to constant capital. As this process repeats itself with every hike in productivity, the organic composition of capital keeps rising too (Marx 1981, 318). To avoid confusion, this does not necessarily mean that the rate of profit must fall, as a famous Marxist prediction goes. The point is rather that the historical rise of the organic composition of capital causes the labour share in production to gradually diminish (Postone 2009, 98). Labour remains the source of value, but sees its share in production drop over time. There are two interrelated but different long-​term dynamics of capitalist production at play here. First it became clear that increasing productivity leads to big jumps in the output of material wealth (use values), and only incremental and temporary increases in value production. Second, the discussion of the organic composition of capital showed that over time, the share of constant capital keeps growing relative to variable capital. These two dynamics thus follow a similar trajectory, but they also grow apart in one important aspect, as Marx illustrates with an example: The value of the capital employed today in spinning is 7 8 constant and 1 8 variable, while at the beginning of the eighteenth century it was 1 2 constant and 1 2 variable. Yet, in contrast to this, the mass of raw material, instruments of labour, etc. that a certain quantity of spinning labour consumes productively today is many hundred times greater than at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The reason is simple: with the increasing productivity of labour, the mass of the means of production consumed by labour increases, but their value in comparison with their mass diminishes. Their value therefore rises absolutely, but not in proportion to the increase in their mass. The increase of the

Domination and the Antagonisms of Value  137 difference between constant and variable capital is therefore much less than that of the difference between the mass of the means of production into which the constant capital, and the mass of the labour-​power into which the variable capital, is converted. (Marx 1976a, 774) So both the difference between constant and variable capital, and the difference between material wealth and value grow as productivity develops. But the gap between material wealth and value production widens much faster than that between constant and variable capital. Taken together, the fact of the matter is that as the labour share in production shrinks relative to constant capital, the total output of material goods grows exponentially. This historical dynamic of capitalist production has a positive and a negative side. To start with the good news, the positive side becomes visible if you approach the matter from the perspective of material wealth. As has become clear, with each increase in productivity the output of use values grows. Put simply, a working day of the same duration now produces more stuff. Machines, technology, automation, scientific knowledge, and other productivity-​enhancing measures take over ever larger parts of the production of material wealth from direct human labour. These ‘socially general productive capacities’, as Postone calls them, are themselves the product of past labour and now greatly relieve people of the toil needed to produce material wealth (Postone 1993, 339). When it comes to the concrete labour side of production, then, it would seem that the metabolism between people and nature now has become less of a bothersome affair, at least on average. The highly developed productive forces of contemporary capitalism allow for the production of huge quantities of goods in fewer hours of labour time. Since the socially general productive capacities are now largely responsible for the production of material wealth, it would seem that labour is no longer as necessary as before. After all, at such high levels of productivity, labour ‘no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself’ (Marx 1973, 705). In sum, from the perspective of material wealth production, it seems that it would be possible to drastically reduce labour hours, while still producing enough material wealth. As a matter of fact, in 1930 Keynes famously predicted something along these lines, and said that in the future a fifteen hour workweek would suffice to live in affluence (Keynes 2014, 23). Needless to say, Keynes’s clairvoyance let him down on this occasion. This also leads to the negative aspect of the long-​term development of capitalist production announced above. The crucial point is namely that even if material wealth production goes through the roof, it still remains merely the

138  Domination and the Antagonisms of Value ‘bearer of value’. And value, measured by labour time, remains the dominant form of social wealth in capitalism (Postone 1993, 194). The whole point of capitalist production, regardless of the level of material wealth output, remains to increase surplus value production. And surplus value is produced by labour. So from the perspective of value, then, the highly developed productive forces do not detract anything from the fact that the goal of production is to capture surplus value, and that labour, for this reason, remains as essential as ever. What happens with every increase in productivity is therefore not so much the gradual diminishing of the necessity of labour (as the account of material wealth production suggested), but rather the reconstitution of the necessity to capture surplus value, only this time at higher levels of productivity (Postone 1993, 300). The importance of this argument, which is central to Postone’s work, can hardly be overstated. Because it means that, on the one hand, capitalist production effects huge changes with regard to productive potential, the consumption of raw materials needed for commodity production, the output of commodities, and concrete labour processes. But on the other hand, nothing really changes, since the whole system is still oriented towards value production. All in all, the capitalist production process gives rise to a dynamic that reduces the share of labour in production relative to machines and technology, while at the same time greatly increasing the production of goods. But value remains the fundamental form of social wealth in capitalism. This leads to the paradoxical situation where commodity production based on labour time gives rise to a dynamic that seems to undermine its own logic. As Marx writes in the Grundrisse: The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-​scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-​spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. (Marx 1973, 705, emphasis and bracketed text in original) In this passage it once more becomes clear why the distinction between value and material wealth is so important to Marx’s critical theory. Here he says that capitalist society, oriented as it is towards the production of value, develops in such a way that it renders value, measured by abstract labour time, a ‘miserable foundation’ for wealth production compared to the potential of that other form of wealth, i.e. material wealth. Material wealth production has taken such a flight that it would be a more adequate measure of wealth than value. The reason for this is, as Marx says, that

Domination and the Antagonisms of Value  139 labour ‘has ceased to be the great well-​spring of wealth’. As the organic composition of capital keeps rising, constant capital produces the large part of material wealth, and the variable part of capital becomes comparably smaller. However, the sentence in which Marx speaks of labour ceasing to be the source of material wealth does not end there, but continues to say that ‘labour time ceases and must cease to be’ the measure of wealth, i.e. value. This prediction has suffered the same fate as Keynes’s. Nowadays the global capitalist economy churns out immense collections of commodities every second, but the measure of wealth remains abstract labour value. Regardless of how many sandwiches, smartphones, dog leashes, insurance products, living room plants, cars, or bottles of wine are produced, the hegemonic measure of economic prosperity still is abstract labour value. And as is well known, this abstract form of wealth serves no other purpose than to expand itself. This necessitates ever higher levels of productivity, creating what Paul Krugman called ‘a dangerous obsession’ with competitiveness (Krugman 1994). The fixation on economic growth of politicians, and indeed, the population at large remains firmly in place. Value production remains hegemonic. But for Postone, there is another point that is more important. In his view, a different form of social wealth production has now become a hypothetical possibility. Because direct labour time is no longer as essential for the production of material wealth as it used to be, it would be possible, in theory, to abolish value production and shift towards a different mode of production where labour expenditure could be scaled down significantly and, crucially, would be oriented towards the production of useful things rather than abstract labour value (Postone 1993, 365). This hypothetical possibility to supersede value, however, remains a possibility only. Value remains the hegemonic form of wealth, even though value production becomes increasingly difficult and crisis-​prone. The long-​ term build-​ up of the ‘socially general productive capacities’ of capitalism makes labour ever less relevant for the production of material wealth. As such, this historical dynamic also makes value, and the abstract labour that constitutes it, somewhat of an anachronism. The fact that machinery now produces the bulk of material wealth does not so much render Marx’s value theory obsolete; rather, it renders abstract labour value as the measure of social wealth and the foundation of social production obsolete. And the right interpretation of Marx’s value theory, with its distinction between value and material wealth, makes visible this important historical dynamic and the increasing obsolescence of labour. However, as argued above, the paradox is that the anachronism of labour value does not automatically abolish value production. Rather, labour value remains the dominant form of wealth. This has crucial consequences

140  Domination and the Antagonisms of Value for the society of value-​producing people, as Postone wrote in an article from 2017: As a result, ultimately, of the ongoing reconstitution of capital’s fundamental forms, the possibility of the abolition of proletarian labour emerges historically in an inverted form, in the form of increases in superfluous labour, in the superfluity of an increasingly large portion of working populations, in the growth of the underemployed, the permanently unemployed and the precariat. The possibility of the abolition of proletarian labour and hence the emergence of the emancipatory possibility of a society in which surplus production no longer must be based on the labour of a subaltern class, is at the same time, the emergence of a disastrous development in which the growing superfluity of labour is expressed as the growing superfluity of people, with the fraught political possibilities this entails. (Postone 2017, 50; emphasis in original) One of the fraught political possibilities of the growing superfluity of people is, obviously, the emergence of unsavoury populist movements that blame minorities or ‘cultural Marxist elites’ for the predicament of their electorate. Or alternatively, when a social democratic party insists on its ideological principles, the changing position of labour could also lead to calls for reinforcing labour rights and the welfare state. Either way, it is clear that the productivity dynamic that raises the organic composition of capital could have serious destabilising tendencies in a society that is to an important extent based on labour relations. The paradox is, according to Marx, that machinery ‘in itself is a victory of man over the forces of nature but in the hands of capital it makes man the slave of those forces’ (Marx 1976a, 569). Technology, machinery, and even scientific knowledges that enhances production processes thus play an ambivalent role in a capitalist society. They point towards an important class dynamic that works to undermine the social stability of abstract labour relations. While at first appearing as tools that may simplify or unburden the work process, productivity-​ enhancing measures also unfold a dynamic that may either intensify pressures on workers in order to meet new efficiency standards, or it may even replace them altogether if automation has made them redundant. Abstract labour, as a social universality that constitutes social relations between people in capitalism, is undermined by the profit-​seeking dynamic of productivity that may dislocate part of its social fabric. And precisely because abstract labour is a hegemonic framework that only emerges through a contingent political dynamic of articulation and antagonism,

Domination and the Antagonisms of Value  141 this automation dynamic intensifies the potential for political struggle. A prominent historical example of this were the so-​called Luddites in early 19th century England, who responded against the threat of emergent large-​scale industry by destroying textile machines (Lucassen 2021, 302). And in a more contemporary setting, the gradual disappearance of jobs in traditional industry on account of automation can lead to demands for protection or reinstatement of particular branches, such as coal mining in the United States. When populists take up such demands, however, they are confronted with the harsh reality of standards of productivity and efficiency. Donald Trump’s promise to bring back coal mining jobs failed in the face of such market imperatives (Bomberg 2017, 959). This illustrates the paradoxical character of capitalist labour relations. While they are contingent and politically constituted, they are also embedded in socially powerful productivity norms, which set limits to the bandwidth of political possibilities. 4.3  Social Domination and the Contradiction of Capitalism The first thing that comes to mind when the issue of domination pops up in Marxian discussions is of course class domination and class antagonism. But in a controversial move, Postone sought to move Marx’s critique of political economy beyond the focus on class domination. The starting point for Postone’s account of abstract domination is, once again, socially necessary labour time. Much like a broken record, we keep coming back to the same point, going on in circles. But then so does the capitalist economy. Because the very point about socially necessary labour time is that its standard is continuously altered, stabilised, and altered again. Now, the thing about norms is that they exert a compelling force. That is, commodity producers have to meet the norm of socially necessary labour time if they want to make a profit. If they are less efficient, they will produce less value than their competitors and before long they will be out of business. It is here that the first contours of the specificity of abstract domination in capitalism start to take shape. In this regard, Postone underscores that As a category of the totality, socially necessary labour time expresses a quasi-​ objective social necessity with which the producers are confronted. It is the temporal dimension of the abstract domination that characterises the structures of alienated social relations in capitalism. The social totality constituted by labour as an objective general mediation has a temporal character, wherein time becomes necessity. (Postone 1993, 191; emphasis in original)

142  Domination and the Antagonisms of Value Time becomes necessity. This is a crucial insight against the backdrop of the notion that abstract labour constitutes the social relations of capitalist society, and that people find their place in that society on the basis of their labour. Because now it becomes clear that along with these social relations of abstract labour comes the pressure of socially necessary labour time. That is, insofar as you find your place in capitalist society on the basis of your labour, you will also be submitted to the necessity to abide by the norm of social labour time. The pressure or domination of time and the constitution of social relations thus go hand-​in-​hand in capitalism. Moreover, the norms of socially necessary labour time are constantly being renegotiated. As soon as a new innovation has raised the general level of productivity for a particular branch, the norm for socially necessary labour time will be elevated to the new standard. The example of the pizzeria showed that the pizza baker, after new technology had become generally adopted, had to bake twice as many pizzas in one social labour hour as before. Here the dominating aspect of abstract labour and the measure of socially necessary labour time makes itself felt for the first time. Capitalist companies are caught up in a race to always catch up with the current norm for socially necessary labour time. In fact, as the discussion on relative surplus value has shown, they would even try to be more efficient than that, so as to capture more surplus value. But they can never enjoy whatever advantage they have for very long, because the competition will soon catch up. At the end of this process, although value production has only increased marginally, the material output of commodities has grown, and the value of each individual commodity has decreased. This, then, also explains Marx’s argument that ‘[c]‌apital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth’ (Marx 1973, 706). In other words, the paradox is that in a system geared towards capturing as much surplus labour time as possible, a dynamic unfolds which continuously cuts down on labour time expenditure. And it is the abstract domination of time, embodied by socially necessary labour time, which drives this dynamic. Postone analyses this time dynamic as a dynamic between the abstract and the concrete, closely related to the distinction between abstract and concrete labour. It is clear by now that abstract labour time is the measure of value. Also, changes in productivity do not affect this abstract unit of time: a social labour day of eight hours always produces eight hours of social labour, regardless of the level of productivity (Marx 1976a, 137). What changes is the concrete determination of this social labour hour, i.e. how many commodities are produced in one social labour hour. Here the difference between value and material wealth is once more crucial. One labour hour always renders the same value, but this value is spread

Domination and the Antagonisms of Value  143 out over a larger number of material wealth commodities as productivity rises. The domination of time, in this context, means that any producer interested in realising the value of their abstract labour expenditure will have to meet the standard of material wealth output at that particular point in time. To come back to the pizza example, after the new machinery has been generally adopted, you will now have to produce twenty pizzas rather than ten if you want to realise the same abstract labour value. By itself, an abstract labour hour does not change. But crucially, its concrete determination in terms of how many use values it produces in the same time does change. So although the magnitude of value is not affected by productivity changes, its concrete determination –​in terms of the norm that sets the standard for material output per abstract time unit –​is always renegotiated (Postone 1993, 289). This, then, is Postone’s treadmill effect also discussed earlier. Value production remains largely constant over time, but with every increase in productivity the social labour norm changes the standard for what counts as a social labour hour in terms of material output. And then the whole thing starts anew. At the risk of oversimplifying things, this treadmill dynamic can be clarified by elaborating on the same example. Suppose you are a pizza baker. You want to meet the current standard of productivity to be able to realise the full social labour value of every hour you work. So if the standard is currently set at ten pizzas per social labour hour, you will produce ten. The result of this is that you will realise the value of one abstract labour hour. This abstract time unit of one social labour hour, although it is not affected by productivity itself, can be reinterpreted in concrete time units, insofar as it requires ten pizzas to produce it: in concrete time, one pizza represents six minutes of labour time. But now the general level of productivity changes. Pizza bakers across the country now have to produce twice as many pizzas as before to realise the same value. So one abstract labour hour is still the same, namely one hour. But because of the rise in productivity, on average each pizzeria now produces twenty pizzas, reducing the concrete time determination of one pizza to three minutes. As Stoetzler summarises this process: An increase in productivity makes the social labour hour more ‘dense’ in terms of the production of goods. This determination, ‘density’, is an aspect of concrete temporality. The development of productivity does not change the abstract temporal unit (an hour has always sixty minutes) but it moves it ‘forward in time’: one hour of labour time today is —​in the abstract —​one hour of labour time five years ago, but they are two different hours in terms of what is happening qualitatively. (Stoetzler 2004, 271)

144  Domination and the Antagonisms of Value In sum, abstract labour time, as the measure of value, remains constant, but is continuously redetermined in terms of the concrete time standard for the production of use values. And because this process of time renegotiation applies to the totality of the capitalist economy, it subjects value production in its entirety, along with its constitutive abstract labour relations, to the dominating force of its treadmill effect. According to Postone, then, domination in capitalism is located within the very constitution of social relations that make up capitalist society. First of all, as Chapter 2 argued, this is the case because people in capitalism find their place in society on the basis of their labour, and they are confronted with the necessity to sell their labour power. This necessity to sell your labour power already entails a form of compulsion. But most importantly, the social matrix that emerges out of the abstract labour relations of people in capitalism is subjected to the domination of time, as outlined above. That is to say that the people of capitalism are a value-​ producing people, but as such they are caught up in the treadmill dynamic of abstract and concrete time. In a nutshell, people engage in the abstract labour mediation insofar as they produce value, but the domination of time makes sure that they are compelled to produce ever more material wealth in ever shorter periods of time. The point is that for Postone, the abstract labour mediation and the domination of time go hand in hand. Within the abstract labour mediation, value producers have to conform to the dynamic of socially necessary labour time. And since the abstract labour mediation, according to Postone, constitutes capitalist society, society as such is subject to the domination of time. For working people, time is a necessity they cannot ignore. Nobody creates the norms of labour time on purpose, and yet, as the outcome of previous labour processes, these norms compel people to conform to them (Marx 1976a, 135). And as the dynamic of time moves forward, then so must the people embedded in the abstract labour mediation. So this is Postone’s understanding of social domination in capitalist society. It is the domination of people by the dynamic of time, a dynamic which arises out of the abstract labour relations that are oriented towards the production of value through capturing surplus labour time. At this point, it also finally becomes clear why Postone says that the domination of labour by capital, although clearly important, is not the most important form of domination in capitalist society. As Postone writes, the domination of time is not a function of direct social domination, as is the case, for example, with slave or serf labour; it is, rather, a function of ‘abstract’ and ‘objective’ social structures, and represents a form of abstract, impersonal domination. Ultimately, this form of domination is not grounded

Domination and the Antagonisms of Value  145 in any person, class or institution; its ultimate locus is the pervasive structuring social forms of capitalist society that are constituted by determinate forms of social practice. (Postone 1993, 159; emphasis in original) The domination of time is abstract and impersonal in the sense that it does not emerge from a particular social location. As such, it has a different focus than ‘classical’ class domination, which is the domination of one social class by another. The antagonism between labour and capital is of course very important for the development of capitalist society, but it takes place within the larger structures of value production and the domination by time. Indeed, capitalists are just as much dominated by time as workers, since they also have to abide by the norms of socially necessary labour time. Neither the individual capitalist, nor the state can direct the norms of time domination (Lohoff and Trenkle 2012, 42). These norms are rather the outcome of the general dynamic of capitalist competition among companies. So although it is individual companies who produce value and constitute the abstract labour mediation, this mediation, insofar as it is caught up in the abstract-​concrete time dynamic, dominates those same individuals. As such, value production sets in motion, and is determined by, a decentred logic of time that subjects people to its pressures. This abstract understanding of domination in contemporary capitalism is not without its drawbacks, however. William Clare Roberts is critical of it because in his view, Postone did not realise that ‘domination, in order to be something we care about, must be domination by other people, and that, therefore, the constitution of a social structure by people must be understood as a mediated relationship among people’ (W. C. Roberts 2017, 92). So on this view, while it is certainly the case that structural dynamics of capitalism such as the determination of socially necessary labour time set powerful imperatives on the social, at the end of the day people are dominated by other people. This is an important insight because it illustrates that what Postone calls the domination of time is not a fully abstract, almost automatic process, but rather connects to human actions and behaviour. Roberts, citing Marx, therefore says that domination should still be understood in terms of the social relationship between people, which immediately raises attention again to the question of class struggle (W. C. Roberts 2017, 92). The social relationship of exploitation is a class relationship between a worker and someone who buys their labour power. In fact, the question often goes beyond class, for example in the case of Amazon, which relies on the underpaid work of black and Latinx workers for hard labour in its warehouses and increasingly also on women of colour in e-​commerce (Reese 2021, 113). Especially given the poor working conditions at Amazon, this constructs a relationship

146  Domination and the Antagonisms of Value of gendered and racialised domination between gendered and racialised workers on the one hand, and (mostly white) executives on the other. On this view, Amazon’s hyperproductivity should be seen as part and parcel of the abstract structures of capitalist profitability, but in the end it is also an actual person working within these structures who exploits and dominates other people. Still, even Jeff Bezos cannot control the abstract imperatives of socially necessary labour time. What this example illustrates, then, is the intricate interconnection between abstract structural norms and imperatives following a logic of their own, and the struggles between people in structurally determined situations. What unites these different dynamics is a class antagonism that operates at different levels. In fact, the reconstitution of abstract labour relations as equivalent is very much caught up with the market dynamics of commodity exchange and hence the appropriation and distribution of surplus labour (B. Roberts 2011, 344). This means that the ‘classical’ elements of class struggle, for example over remuneration and over the length of the working day, are part and parcel of the more abstract question as to how the hegemony of labour is maintained by the continued expansion of labour and commodity production. Crucially, then, workers’ struggle against capitalists is a concrete question of class struggle that includes a dimension of domination between people. At the same time, this struggle against personal domination takes place within abstract capitalist structures that set the boundaries of manoeuvre for both sides, insofar as the norm of value indicates the general threshold of levels of profitability and rate of exploitation. Personal and abstract domination, therefore, coincide. In an interesting turn of events, Postone compares the abstract form of domination by time to Foucault’s conception of disciplinary power. He only mentions this analogy in a footnote, and then drops it without developing it any further (Postone 1993, 159fn.). This is unfortunate, because Foucault could offer a way out of the overwhelming abstractness of the critique of political economy, and make visible its actual human content. And since the concrete human dimension is crucial to understand the continued hegemony of the abstract labour mediation, it is instructive to explore it more. Although Postone suggests that Discipline and Punish is the work that comes close to elaborating the kind of impersonal power relations that Marx sought to capture as the domination by time, this passage from The History of Sexuality captures the correspondence between the two approaches quite accurately: Power relations are both intentional and nonsubjective. If in fact they are intelligible, this is not because they are the effect of another instance that ‘explains’ them, but rather because they are imbued, through and through, with calculation: there is no power that is exercised without

Domination and the Antagonisms of Value  147 a series of aims and objectives. But this does not mean that it results from the choice or decision of an individual subject; let us not look for the headquarters that presides over its rationality; (…) the logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is often the case that no one is there to have invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated them (…). (Foucault 1978, 94–​95) In parallel to the conception of power Foucault outlines here, it is possible to say that the domination of time is ‘both intentional and nonsubjective’. It is exercised with certain aims and objectives, namely to capture more surplus value, and as such is ‘imbued, through and through, with calculation’. But even though some particularly ‘innovative entrepreneurs’ know how to squeeze more surplus labour out of workers, the domination of time cannot be traced back to a supposed headquarters of the capitalist class. It is rather something that pervades the society of value as such. Even if the aims of value production are decipherable, this does not mean that these have been invented by particular people or a certain class. Nor, indeed, does it mean that anyone can control the domination of time. The analogies between Foucault and Postone’s reading of Marx continue. Postone argues that as productivity rises, material wealth production soars and the anachronism of value becomes more pronounced, the social necessity of value nonetheless reconstitutes itself by determining a new norm of socially necessary labour time. This effectively means that value production remains dominant, but now requires people to produce more in the same amount of time. In other words, as increased productivity ‘structurally reconstitutes the determinations of value, these productive powers serve to reinforce the abstract compulsions exerted on the producers; they heighten the degree and intensity of exertion required, as well as the fragmentation of labour’ (Postone 1993, 350). Now, Foucault would perhaps phrase this as a process in which increased productivity intensifies the disciplining force on the human bodies that produce value. One of the ways in which disciplinary power shows itself, after all, is in the aim to ‘strengthen the social forces —​to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply’ (Foucault 1979, 208). In other words, what Postone analyses on a societal level as the abstract domination of time manifests itself concretely as the mounting disciplinary power experienced ‘in the body [as] the constricting link between an increased aptitude and an increased domination’ (Foucault 1979, 138). All in all, this segue into Foucault’s work thus illustrates that abstract structures of value creation also feed into the concrete experience of the people of capitalist society.

148  Domination and the Antagonisms of Value Moreover, this dynamic of time domination attains extra force when it is considered in the context of the discussion of relative surplus value. In short, with higher productivity levels and higher relative surplus labour as compared to necessary labour, the possibilities to further decrease necessary labour through additional increases in productivity enhancement shrink proportionally. If the relation of necessary labour to surplus labour is already very high in favour of the latter, then further increases of surplus labour will be proportionally smaller than if the two parts had both been equal (Marx 1976a, 658). In other words, the higher productivity already is, the smaller further advances in productivity will be. Postone argues that this means that ‘the more closely the amount of surplus value yielded approaches the limit of the total value produced per unit of time, the more difficult it becomes to further decrease necessary labour time by means of increased productivity’ (Postone 1993, 310). So as the search for surplus labour goes on, and the social labour hour grows ever denser, not only does the norm of socially necessary labour time get more demanding in terms of output, and the domination by time correspondingly more intense, but it also becomes ever more difficult to further increase the relative surplus labour margin. But the whole point remains to capture surplus value. It seems, then, that the long-​term development of capitalist productivity runs into trouble the closer the relative surplus value share starts to approach the total value produced. At this point it is possible to draw together the different main strands of the argumentation of this chapter so far. All of it has to do with the social dynamic of capitalist society. It has become clear, firstly, that this is a society that is oriented towards the production of value, measured by labour time. The peculiarity here is that the incentive to capture more surplus value leads to large increases in the output of material wealth, or use values, but no corresponding increases in the dominant measure of prosperity, namely value. So from the perspective of material wealth production, labour becomes increasingly less relevant, since with the rising organic composition of capital, constant capital by far outweighs variable capital. From the perspective of value, however, nothing much changes. Insofar as every increase in productivity reconstitutes the necessity to meet the demands of the social labour hour for those who want to realise the maximum amount of value, value re-​establishes its own hegemony. What has changed is that the concrete determination of one abstract labour hour has increased. This, in turn, leads to a tightening of the screws of the domination by time, which implies an intensification of the disciplinary pressures on workers so as to meet the output demand of the new norm of the abstract labour hour. Perhaps it is no exaggeration to say that this is quite a paradoxical situation. Because while the necessity for labour seems to disappear given the huge increases in material wealth output, what

Domination and the Antagonisms of Value  149 actually happens is the opposite, namely the persistence of value production, only in intensified form. For Postone, this means that abolishing capitalist labour becomes a latent possibility, which is however not realised. In one way, this is a typical Marxist argument, and then in another it is not. On the one hand, Marxist theory often abounds in embittered predictions of the imminent collapse of capitalism. And indeed, the account laid out here does, to some extent, go in that direction. On the other hand, however, the crucial difference of this particular theory is that the demise of capitalist value production is not announced as an iron necessity, but rather identified as a historical possibility that remains latent. This, then, is also Postone’s interpretation of the central contradiction of capitalism. According to him, this central contradiction lays not so much in the infamous clash between the forces and relations of production, that is, between value production and the relations of distribution between capital and labour. Indeed, the classical idea of the immiseration of the proletariat, which would lead to a clash between class relations and capitalist production, has long been discredited, as Adorno already knew (Adorno 1997, 151). So for Postone, rather, the central contradiction of capitalism revolves around a contradiction within the sphere of production itself, whereby that sphere includes the immediate process of production and the structure of social relations constituted by labour in capitalism. With regard to the structure of social labour, then, the Marxian contradiction should be understood as a growing contradiction between the sort of labour people perform under capitalism and the sort of labour they could perform if value were abolished and the productive potential developed under capitalism were reflexively used to liberate people from the sway of the alienated structures constituted by their own labour. (Postone 1993, 35) So for Postone, the contradiction of capitalism lies in the tension between the hegemonic social organisation of abstract labour relations oriented toward value production, and the possibility to move towards a different society organised towards material wealth production. This is a crucial point against the backdrop of the interpretation of capitalist labour relations as a hegemonic formation. As a form of hegemony, abstract labour was always already contingent, but now it has also reached a stage in which it seems to become obsolete. Yet if its hegemony persists, the crucial question is how people reconstitute its social relations in the face of a crisis-​like dynamic of increasing anachronicity. Put simply, how do working people maintain the abstract structures of value and labour? This question about the continued reconstitution of abstract labour also

150  Domination and the Antagonisms of Value has to be approached on the level of subjectivity. It is in this context that the importance of the brief excursus on Foucault comes to the fore. Because if the Foucauldian dimension makes visible, for the first time, the actual human content of the abstract structures of capital, as well as the dynamic of domination and discipline that the people of value are subjected to, it also raises a crucial additional question. And this is the issue Judith Butler discusses in The Psychic Life of Power with regard to the relation between subjectivity, subjection, and attachment (Butler 1997, 7). If it is indeed the case, as Butler argues, that there is no subjectivity without passionate attachment to one’s own subjection, then this could also go towards explaining the persistence of the value mediation, including its heightening disciplinary power. Perhaps, to put it provocatively, value production remains hegemonic because people are affectively attached to their own continued exploitation in the abstract labour mediation. An argument that goes along these lines could help explain how actual human beings uphold the abstract structures of capitalist society. 4.4  Contradiction or Antagonism? Laclau’s critique did not just target Marxism’s alleged labour essentialism or class reductionism, but also its philosophy of history. While the first two points have been resolved in the discursive account of abstract labour hegemony, the third now surfaces as a new challenge. Postone, for his part, may also argue against the orthodox reading of the clash between forces and relations of production, but his analysis still leads up to a historical contradiction between capitalist value production and the possibility of a new social organisation of production. The problem here lies in the notion of contradiction. Within a discourse-​theoretical context, the notion of contradiction qualifies as Hegelian-​idealist, which means that the centrality of a contradiction would put a stick in the wheel of the attempt to understand abstract labour as a contingent, discursive hegemonic formation. From a discourse theory perspective, the presence of such a contradiction would imply its eventual sublation within a sutured idealist social space. However, the crucial point is precisely that the historical possibility of post-​capitalism remains latent. To put it differently, it remains repressed by capitalist value production, which thereby reinstates its own hegemony. This means, then, that the tension between value production and its possible abolition comes along with repression, exclusion, and struggle. For this reason it makes more sense to interpret it as an antagonism rather than a contradiction. Developing this point here does away with possible remnants of idealist thinking in the Marxian take on the historical development of capitalism, and underscores the discursive character of capitalism and abstract labour.

Domination and the Antagonisms of Value  151 The first step towards unfolding this argument is to specify the basic characteristics of this ominous alternative post-​capitalist form of production. This has to do, first of all, with the specific form of social wealth. It is clear from the way Postone phrases the central contradiction of capitalism –​i.e. between value and material wealth –​that the alternative form of production would be oriented towards the production of material wealth rather than abstract labour value. After all, the whole point is that value production has developed up to the possibility of its own abolition, because the productive capacities have grown so much that the use value output of production has soared. In short, the output of useful things (cars, orange juice, houses, smartphones, tomatoes, train engines, etc.) has reached such large proportions that, in theory, it produces enough to meet everyone’s material demands. If material output were the goal and measure of wealth production, the imperative to capture more surplus value would disappear, and along with it a substantial part of the labour time that is expended with the aim of producing value. Put simply, labour time could be reduced substantially, because machines and technology furnish enough material wealth (Postone 1993, 363). This would be a fundamental change indeed. Rather than having to invent ever more ‘bullshit jobs’ (Graeber 2018) to produce additional value, a system oriented towards producing material wealth could actually diminish total labour time. Consequently, such a system of production would not measure its prosperity in labour time. Along with labour time as the measure of social wealth, the domination of time that propels capitalist society forward would also disappear. Of course, this change in the fundamental form of wealth is not the only difference between capitalist and non-​capitalist society. The second difference has to do with the kind of labour performed in the respective forms of society. Since Postone identifies the specificity of capitalism in the form of labour Marx called abstract labour, it will come as no surprise that in post-​capitalist society there is no place for abstract labour. The logical consequence of the fact that abstract labour is a historically specific category is that it does not apply to a society that does not produce value (Marx 1976a, 174fn.). However, this does not mean that all forms of work would disappear. Instead, the disappearance of abstract value-​producing labour would free up the space for directly useful kinds of work. As Postone has it, the ‘logic of Marx’s presentation suggests that the abolition of value would allow what had been constituted as social labour’s alienated use value dimension to exist in another form’ (Postone 1993, 360). This is an important point that relates directly to foregoing parts of the argumentation. Discussing the specificity of labour in capitalism with its concrete-​ abstract duality, Section 2.1 argued that concrete labour, understood as a purposeful human activity, has to be performed in all forms of society in one way or another. The peculiarity of capitalism is, as Section 3.5 argued,

152  Domination and the Antagonisms of Value that this concrete side of labour with its orientation towards producing use values is subjected to the abstract labour dimension and the imperative to capture more surplus value. It is this ‘subordination’ of concrete labour to abstract labour that would also disappear in post-​capitalist society. As the production of material wealth depends ever less on the expenditure of abstract labour time, and ever more on automation, the hypothetical possibility to cut back on labour time coincides with the possibility to restructure the social organisation of work as such. It has already become clear that this would mean, firstly, doing away with the superfluous labour that is performed only to produce more surplus value. Then this would also mean that every increase in productivity would effectively lead to a further reduction in labour time, allowing more time for other activities, e.g. leisure (Postone 1993, 364). At the same time, the work that is still done will be oriented towards servicing actual human needs rather than towards capturing more surplus labour time. In other words, it would be possible to orient labour directly towards the production of useful things. Now, if labour does not produce value anymore, then this means that the mediating role of value also disappears. This is a crucial point for Postone, because it means that the abolition of capitalism consists in the self-​abolition of the proletariat (Postone 1993, 370). So in contrast to more classical Marxist positions, which announce the future of communism as the proletariat coming into its own, Postone actually argues that the proletariat would disappear. From his theoretical perspective this makes sense, since he understands proletarian value producing labour as a form of social domination. This, then, is the third difference between capitalism and what comes after. Post-​capitalist society would be constructed around a different social universality, one that does not coincide with the domination by time. According to Postone, in sum, post-​capitalist society is one in which work time is reduced substantially, work as such is oriented towards meeting human needs, and work does no longer constitute a social framework subject to time domination. The central contradiction of capitalism is that it gives rise to the historical possibility of establishing this new form of society, but at the same time impedes the realisation of this possibility by reasserting the necessity to produce value. Now, there is certainly something to be said for McNally’s critique on this point. He says that Postone’s argumentation here remains rather ambiguous, insofar as it depends on ‘a vague hope that “people” might come to see the irrationality of a system based on value production’ (McNally 2004, 206). But the point here is not so much whether or not the shift from capitalism to post-​capitalism will actually take place. Rather, the main interest lies in the contradiction between these two forms of society that is immanent in the current state of capitalism. And the question here is whether the

Domination and the Antagonisms of Value  153 relationship between these two poles is, in fact, a contradiction, or rather an antagonism. The difference between the two options would be that if the relation is a contradiction, it would remain within Postone’s dialectical framework, whereas if it qualifies as an antagonism, it would open up the way toward completing the understanding of abstract labour as Laclauian a hegemonic formation. The remainder of this section argues for the latter option, and shows that we are dealing with an antagonistic relation. At this rather abstract level of analysis, there are two important points with regard to the relation between the capitalist society of value production and its possible abolition into a different kind of society. The first is an argument as to why this relation is not a contradiction. Laclau and Mouffe have dedicated a substantial part of their work to specifying the distinction between dialectical contradiction and antagonism, and in doing so they have drawn on Colletti’s reflections on this topic. Colletti argued that a contradiction follows the logical structure ‘A not-​A’, whereby each term implies the other, insofar as they only have meaning within the unity they constitute together (Colletti 1975, 4). The classical example would be the contradiction between being and not being. You cannot sensibly think the one without thinking the other, and each acquires their meaning within their contradictory unity. However, it is not clear that the same logical structure applies to the conflictual relation between capitalist value production and the possibility of an alternative social system oriented towards producing material wealth. Material wealth production is not the direct opposite of value. It is rather a contingent form of social relations that would pose a threat to it. What is more, an additional feature of a dialectical contradiction is that the clash between the two contradictory elements would sublate into a third term (Nonhoff 2017, 84). This assumption of a sublation of capitalism onto a higher plane of human society is of course exactly the kind of historical determinism Laclau criticised tirelessly. But crucially, it also flies in the face of Postone’s own work. Because the important point for him is to argue that the historical possibility for another kind of society emerges, but it remains latent and is not realised. So in this sense too, it seems that the conflictual relation between capitalism and its possible abolition does not qualify as a dialectical contradiction. The second important point goes into the opposite direction, and argues why this conflictual relation is rather antagonistic. This connects back to the question of the limits of a social system constituted on the basis of antagonism. As Laclau said, antagonistic exclusion means that the actualisation of the other side of the antagonistic divide would mean ‘the impossibility of what is this side of the limit’ (Laclau 1996, 37). That is to say that the very condition of antagonistic limits is that they exclude the threat to the being of the social system as such, and thereby constitute the coherence among the latter’s differential elements. The crucial point in

154  Domination and the Antagonisms of Value this context is that an antagonistic relation revolves around a central negativity. Through excluding something that does not belong to it, society constitutes itself as such. This exclusionary moment of negativity counts as constitutive because it is not, as is the case with dialectical contradictions, a temporary moment that sublates into a positive dialectical unity (Nonhoff 2017, 84). Rather, this negativity that is excluded remains central as the foundational moment of what society is not, and what it is. The conflict Postone identified at the current stage of capitalism, then, takes the form of an antagonistic relation. Because what is excluded is the possibility of a different social organisation of work, and this moment of negativity is not sublated into a higher unity but rather remains constitutively necessary for value production as such. Crucially, through excluding the other possibility of organising social labour (the kind that would be oriented towards producing useful things directly rather than value), the value formation reconstitutes its own necessity. For in this way, value production remains the only option for people to acquire the use values they need in their daily lives. Moreover, Laclau’s theory of antagonism indicates another important dimension of abstract labour relations. A contradiction is a logical relation between two clauses that plays out in the realm of thought. By contrast, antagonism grasps the actual social-​material practices through which the contingent construction of the unreachable fullness of society takes place. Compared to the quiet contemplation of logical contradictions, then, antagonism is a matter of continuous articulatory struggle to attain the universal. It is precisely this continuous struggle of political articulation that maintains a hegemonic project and the promise of its fullness to come (Nonhoff 2006, 310). This notion that continued hegemony presupposes continued articulatory practices is very important in the context of abstract labour. Capital, as the limitless valorisation of abstract labour value constitutes exactly such an articulatory practice (Marx 1976a, 253). Just like capital would collapse if it were to stand still because it no longer reconstitutes the movement of value, so a hegemonic project would collapse if the absent fullness it promises no longer incites the continued articulation of its elements. At the same time, as Bonefeld writes, the ‘social reproduction of capital and labour, then, acquires its livelihood in and through the negation of communism’ (Bonefeld 2002, 88). Combining these insights, then, implies that capital, as value in motion, grasps the material process through which the social relations of abstract labour are reconstituted and maintain their hegemonic status, and as such exclude alternative forms of social labour (‘communism’). This is not to say that this is an easy, much less automatic process. The current political obsession with innovation-​enhancing policies that are supposed to help companies remain competitive and growth-​ oriented indicates that policy

Domination and the Antagonisms of Value  155 makers no longer assume that these processes can be left to the market. Apparently, public assistance if not interference is now a necessity for a supposedly healthy process of continued capital accumulation (Tyfield 2012; Hove et al. 2012). This underscores that the hegemony of abstract labour describes a real social practice of articulation rather than a logical contradiction. Therefore, it makes more sense to speak of antagonism than contradiction in this case. A contradiction would imply that each of the two terms represents the negation of its opposite. But material wealth production would not so much be the logical negation of value production but rather a threat to the latter’s existence. If material wealth were the negation of value, then it would contain within itself, in a negative way, that which makes up the essence of value. This would be a stretch. Material wealth is not, in its essence, non-​value. Nor is the essence of value that it is not material wealth. Instead, it makes much more sense to understand the relation between the two as an incidence of historical contingency, in which material wealth happens to pose a threat to the social system of value production. This is not inherent to either of the two terms, but rather emerges as a historical process. Material wealth production would threaten value production, and in that sense needs to be excluded. It is in that sense that the universality of abstract labour and value production reconstitutes itself through the antagonistic exclusion of material wealth production. The latter, insofar as it is excluded, persists as a moment of negativity in the former. As a consequence, the hegemony of abstract labour becomes visible as a never-​ending social practice. A social practice carried out by actual people, that has to be repeated if the hegemony is to be maintained, especially in the face of its increasing anachronism compared to its own productive potential. The antagonistic border that separates an increasingly anachronistic society of labour value relations from the shift towards post-​capitalism becomes apparent in the latent crisis of labour on account of increasing automation. But in this context it is important to consider that it is not necessarily as straightforward as automation as such replacing human labour. Rather, the point is also that against the backdrop of an ever-​higher organic composition of capital with concomitant levels of material output seemingly divorced from labour expenditure, productivity growth cannot reach the levels that would be required in order to stave off a comparatively low demand for labour (Benanav 2020, 9). This superfluity of labour becomes visible in the increasing precarity of a growing underemployed section of the working class. Such precarious employment for a large part takes place in the service sector in low-​skill jobs, absorbing significant numbers of superfluous labour (Smith 2020, 14). While from a Laclauian perspective this appears as a reconstitution of abstract labour relations,

156  Domination and the Antagonisms of Value maintaining the hegemonic framework, this hardly works to stop its tendency toward dislocation. The precarity of employment resonates with the larger development of rising inequality in contemporary capitalism, which sets working conditions based on ever-​rising efficiency expectations. In a way, then, this temporary patch makes explicit what had largely remained implicit so far, namely that there is a crucial class dynamic at play in the abstract labour hegemony, which pulls it apart in two different directions. 4.5  Class and the Antagonism of Value The argumentation of this chapter so far is rather complex and abstract, and even in poststructuralist theory that is not necessarily a good thing. Moreover, it has become clear that it is important to descend from the high level of abstract reasoning to the level of the lived experience of people themselves. The importance of doing so appeared twice. First in Postone’s own work, where he admitted that it is necessary to see how ordinary people, through their individual actions as persons in capitalist society, uphold the abstract structures of that society. And then it appeared a second time in the previous section. If abstract labour is a hegemonic formation, its social relations have to be reconstituted over and over again precisely for the reason that it is a contingent social practice. Therefore, this section will now work toward grasping the concrete level of people living in capitalist society. In this regard, Judith Butler has made a crucial remark about hegemonic formations. She says that hegemonic formations ‘are constituted through exclusions that return to haunt the polities predicated upon their absence’ (Butler 2000, 11). The argument of this section is that this also happens in the case of abstract labour. Abstract labour is constituted through the exclusion of directly useful work, but this exclusion then returns within capitalist labour relations as concrete labour, and the connected dimension of the everyday experience of working people. In fact, this return of the useful (concrete) dimension of labour clashes with the overarching dynamic of abstract labour value production. This return, then, constitutes a second-​order, internal antagonism between concrete labour and abstract labour value. And this has everything to do with the question of class. Postone has downplayed the importance of class domination throughout his book. But at the same time, there is a rather obvious class dimension to the historical possibility to shift towards a different organisation of labour. Indeed, Postone says that the historical abolition of capitalism can be realised only ‘if people appropriate what had been constituted historically as capital’ (Postone 1993, 375). But at the same time, appropriating the ‘socially general productive capacities’ would be an important part of abolishing value production. And this would lead to an antagonistic

Domination and the Antagonisms of Value  157 conflict between workers and those who own the means of production, i.e. the capitalist class. It would be hard to consider this contradiction –​ regardless of whether the possibility of a different society is realised or not –​without taking into account the matter of appropriating the means of production. In fact, Werner Bonefeld has argued that what is missing from TLSD is an explanation of how the initial moment of primitive accumulation, which separated labour from the means of production, is repeated throughout the history of capitalism. He maintains that the separation between labour and the means of production, which was a central aspect of primitive accumulation, remains central at later stages too, and is essentially an instance of class struggle (Bonefeld 2004, 109). So it may very well be that, as Postone claims, the capital-​labour relationship is located within the value mediation. But at the same time, this value mediation would never have emerged, nor would it have been maintained, without the continued separation of labour and the means of production. Understanding the hegemony of abstract labour value, therefore, implies understanding the continued separation of labour from its means. And this is a class question. So it appears that Postone may have dismissed the importance of class domination and class struggle too hastily. Indeed, beyond the question about the possible appropriation of the means of production, class is important in a second sense. Because within the social relations of capitalist value production, there are two interrelated but conflictual dimensions at play. The logic of surplus value has a different outlook than the logic of use value. Here Butler’s comment that the repressed returns to haunt the hegemonic formation becomes very salient. For the excluded dimension of useful work returns in the form of concrete labour, and as such, causes a tension with the logic of surplus value production. As argued above, the difference between a society oriented towards value production and a post-​capitalist society would mainly consists in three main points. In post-​ capitalist society, people would work less, they would work to produce useful things rather than value, and labour would no longer have the function of mediating social relations, and therefore no longer be subject to the domination of time. These dimensions of useful labour are excluded in the antagonistic constitution of abstract labour equivalence, but then return in the form of concrete labour to haunt those relations. Indeed, attempts to wrest back control from the abstract imperatives of capital accumulation, complaints that the use-​value dimension of work in capitalism is underappreciated, and protests to either decrease working hours or increase remuneration are as old as capitalism itself. For this is the stuff of class struggle in capitalist society. Postone’s argument in this regard is that class conflict over these issues does not really pose a challenge to capitalist society as such, since it is inherent to the value mediation (Postone

158  Domination and the Antagonisms of Value 1993, 317). And he may be right that this class conflict by itself does not drive the engine of historical change, and will not automatically usher in a post-​capitalist future. However, the crucial point is that it does, in fact, point out a crucial antagonistic dimension that runs through capitalist society. The important point here is that capital and the abstract structures of capitalist society never fully dominate the people in it. In fact, the ‘human dimension’ of needs and wishes and actual people who go to work is always there, pushing back against these abstract determinations (Holloway 2012, 517). A full understanding of capitalism must make this subdued dimension of concrete labour and the people performing it visible, if it is to avoid the typical Marxist pitfall of reducing people to abstract social structures. This is the second-​order antagonism between the two sides of labour in capitalism, abstract and concrete. Crucially, the discussion about the length of the working day, remuneration, and resistance against the abstract pressures of capital accumulation emerge from the concrete labour experience of the actual people who work under capitalist circumstances. This reveals that, in addition to the story of abstract labour aimed towards the valorisation of value, there is another story about labour in capitalism. And this is the story of concrete labour: the people who work to buy the things they need, to engage in what they consider meaningful activity, and to find their place in society. It is this concrete dimension of labour in capitalism that is inextricably intertwined with, but also clashes with the abstract labour mediation. In this context McNally speaks of the conflict between concrete and abstract labour as ‘a fundamental conflict between antagonistic structures of meaning’ (McNally 2004, 202). In other words, the capitalist labour process has two sides. The concrete side of the lived experience of working people clashes with the alienated side of abstract labour oriented towards value production. At the same time, both sides are intertwined in an antagonistic relation, in which they mutually constitute each other. In other words, the constitutive antagonism that establishes abstract labour value through the exclusion of directly useful labour on an abstract level thus returns within capitalism as a second-​order antagonism. The value chain of commodities, and with it the social relations of abstract labour, unfolds in antagonistic opposition to the lived experience of concrete labour and the people who work as part of their daily lives. To put this schematically, the relation between the two foundational dynamics of capitalist production, i.e. M-​C-​M’ and C-​M-​C, assumes an antagonistic form. The circuit of capital (M-​C-​M’) and the lived experience of workers (C-​M-​C) both depend on each other. Building on abstract labour, the circuit of capital remains dependent on labour power as the source of value. Therefore, even if its goal is to valorise value, it has to retain the

Domination and the Antagonisms of Value  159 useful, concrete aspect of labour as an essential aspect of the value chain. Conversely, the lived experience of workers that is oriented towards the useful aspects of work is dependent on value production insofar as the abstract labour formation remains hegemonic.6 For each dynamic, then, the other side remains a necessary condition that is not part of its own social purpose. To speak with Laclau, this means that the abstract labour mediation ‘does not succeed in constituting itself as an entirely objective order as a results of the presence, within itself, of antagonistic relations’ (Laclau 2014, 111). As such, it becomes clear that the constitutive antagonism of value is repeated within capitalist labour practices themselves. It is the antagonism between abstract and concrete labour, which each represent a different structure of meaning, but remain mutually dependent. Abstract labour value production is oriented toward surplus value and profit, whereas concrete labour processes revolve around people’s actual lives and their attempts to acquire the things they need. The two logics are connected and antagonistically opposed. Therefore, it seems we are dealing with multiple antagonisms when we are trying to understand the hegemony of abstract labour (Holloway 2010, 915). For the antagonism between useful labour and value-​producing labour manifests itself twice: once as the constitutive mechanism that establishes capitalist value production, and then once within these social relations of value production as the second-​tier antagonism between the circuit of capital and the lived experience of working people. With regard to the first, it has become clear that it is the antagonism between value-​producing labour and directly useful work that constitutes the social relations of capitalism in the first place. That is, through antagonistic exclusion of directly useful work, the social relations of value production constitute their own social necessity. People who sell their labour power and produce commodities reconstitute the hegemony of value, and also repress the antagonistic possibility of directly useful work. But this is also where the second manifestation of the antagonism comes in. Within the social relations of value production, the seller of labour power works towards a different social logic (i.e. C-​M-​ C) than that of value itself (M-​C-​M’). In case workers resist the power of capital, an antagonistic class conflict between labour and capital may arise (Laclau 2006, 268). But even if there is no direct resistance, there will still be an antagonism in the sense outlined here. Each logic prevents the other from constituting itself fully, and each remains present in the other as a necessary moment of negativity around which its own social objectivity is constructed. Because the seller of labour power reconstitutes the relations of value, and excludes the directly useful dimension of labour. All in all, then, the question about the antagonistic constitution of the value mediation is a complex matter, in which antagonistic relations mutually constitute each other, and different aspects of the social complexity of

160  Domination and the Antagonisms of Value value production feed into each other. As such, this argumentation also sheds light on the role of class in the understanding of abstract labour as a hegemonic formation. On the one hand, the reconstitution of value relations depends on private property and the separation of labour from the means of production. In this respect, class domination and the class struggle are central categories. And resistance on the part of labour against class domination would lead to a classical class antagonism. However, the social reality of capitalism points out the crucial importance of class antagonism in the abstract sense. For it is the peculiar character of labour in capitalism as such –​its function as a social framework as well as the form of social wealth (value) –​that elevates it to the status of an alienated structure of abstract social relations that stands over the individual and their work. As such, labour in the alienated form dominates labour in the concrete. Constituted on the basis of an antagonistic exclusion of other forms of social labour relations, the antagonism of labour runs through society in different ways, as shown above. It manifests itself on a day-​ to-​day level in the antagonistic tension between the systemic imperative to valorise value on the one hand, and the useful dimension of concrete labour that makes up the experience of individual people on the other. At the end of the day, then, the fundamental antagonistic class relationship that constitutes modern society pits the worker not so much against the capitalist, as against the alienated structure of abstract labour relations as such. Notes 1 Of course Postone was not the only one to insist on the important distinction between value and material wealth. For example, in his Companion to Marx’s Capital, David Harvey also explicitly mentions the ‘crucial distinction between wealth –​the total use-​values at one’s command –​and value –​the socially necessary labour time these use-​values represent’ (Harvey 2010, 29). 2 However, it is important to underscore that Marx also admits that under certain circumstances prices may deviate from values (Marx 1976a, 197). For example, imbalances between supply and demand may cause temporary deviations between market prices and values. But Marx assumes that these imbalances will be ironed out after a while. Indeed, in general he builds his value theory on the presupposition of market equilibrium (Marx 1962, 128). 3 In this context, it is interesting to note that Castoriadis criticises Marx’s use of the concept of socially necessary labour time on the grounds that it is an ‘empty abstraction’ with no practical effectivity in the real world (Castoriadis 1984, 267). 4 In this context, Hardt and Negri’s concept of immaterial labour, i.e. ‘labour that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication’ is rather confusing (Hardt and Negri 2000, 290). According

Domination and the Antagonisms of Value  161 to the logic developed here, Hardt and Negri’s immateriality also qualifies as material wealth. This is because, considered as use values, services, culture, knowledge, and communication are the products of concrete labour, and therefore forms of material wealth. 5 When it comes to measuring the quality of material wealth, there is an interesting parallel with the newly emerging discipline of valuation studies (Helgesson and Muniesa 2013). The debate here tries to move away from the idea that objects have an intrinsic value, and, following John Dewey’s (1939) important essay, investigates the social practices of appraising and attributing value to things. From a Marxian perspective, such valuation practices would of course only pertain to material wealth or use values, while the dominant logic of abstract labour value would remain operative in the foundational social relations of abstract labour. Nonetheless, it would be interesting to see how, if at all, the logic of value intersects with social practices of valuation of use values. 6 Here, as in many previous instances, it seems to make more sense to speak of the value mediation rather than abstract labour mediation, because the point is to grasp the social relations of value production as such, for which both abstract and concrete labour are essential. Postone’s use of the term abstract labour mediation loses sight of this concrete labour aspect in the social relations of value production. His not very precise use of the term abstract labour mediation, and sudden shifts between abstract labour and value, has been criticised by Christopher Arthur (2004, 98).

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Domination and the Antagonisms of Value  163 —​ —​ —​ . 2014. “Antagonism, Subjectivity and Politics.” In The Rhetorical Foundations of Society, edited by Ernesto Laclau, 101–​ 26. London/​ New York: Verso. Lohoff, Ernst, and Norbert Trenkle. 2012. Die große Entwertung. Warum Spekulation und Staatsverschuldung nicht die Ursache der Krise sind. Münster: Unrast. Lucassen, Jan. 2021. The Story of Work. A New History of Mankind. New Haven/​ London: Yale University Press. Marx, Karl. 1962. “Lohn, Preis und Profit.” In Marx Engels Werke Band 16, 101–​52. Berlin: Dietz. —​—​—​. 1973. Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin. —​—​—​. 1976a. Capital. A Critique of Political Economy: Volume I. London: Penguin. —​—​—​. 1976b. “Results of the Immediate Process of Production.” In Capital. A Critique of Political Economy: Volume 1, 943–​1084. London: Penguin. —​—​—​. 1981. Capital. A Critique of Political Economy: Volume III. London: Penguin. McNally, David. 2004. “The Dual Form of Labour in Capitalist Society and the Struggle over Meaning: Comments on Postone.” Historical Materialism 12 (3): 189–​208. https://​doi.org/​10.1163/​15692​0604​2601​819 Nonhoff, Martin. 2006. Politischer Diskurs und Hegemonie. Das Projekt “soziale Marktwirtschaft.” Bielefeld: Transcript. —​ —​ —​ . 2017. “Antagonismus und Antagonismen —​Hegemonietheoretische Aufklärung.” In Ordnungen des Politischen. Staat –​Souveränität –​Nation, edited by Oliver Marchart, 81–​ 102. Wiesbaden: Springer. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1007/​978-​3-​658-​17259-​6_​5 Ortlieb, Claus Peter. 2014. “A Contradiction between Matter and Form: On the Significance of the Production of Relative Surplus Value in the Dynamic of Terminal Crisis.” In Marxism and the Critique of Value, edited by Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson, and Nicholas Brown, 77–​122. Chicago/​ Alberta: M-​C-​M’. Postone, Moishe. 1993. Time, Labor, and Social Domination. A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —​—​—​. 2009. “Theorizing the Contemporary World.” In History and Heteronomy, edited by Moishe Postone, Viren Murthy, and Yasuo Kobayashi, 85–​107. Tokyo. —​—​—​. 2017. “The Current Crisis and the Anachronism of Value: A Marxian Reading.” Continental Thought & Theory –​A Journal of Intellectual Freedom 1 (4): 38–​54. Reese, Ellen. 2021. “Gender, Race, and Amazon Warehouse Labor in the United States.” In The Cost of Free Shipping. Amazon in the Global Economy, 102–​15. London: Pluto. https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​j.ctv​16zj​hcj.13 Roberts, Bruce. 2011. “Exploitation, Appropriation, and Subsumption.” Rethinking Marxism 23 (3): 341–​51. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​08935​696.2011.583​005 Roberts, William Clare. 2017. “Marx’s Inferno. The Political Theory of Capital.” Princeton/​Oxford: Princeton University Press.

164  Domination and the Antagonisms of Value Schumpeter, Joseph. 1976. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. London: George Allen & Unwin. Smith, Jason E. 2020. Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation. Waterside: Reaktion Books. Stoetzler, Marcel. 2004. “Postone’s Marx: A Theorist of Modern Society, Its Social Movements and Its Imprisonment by Abstract Labour.” Historical Materialism 12 (3): 261–​83. Tyfield, David. 2012. “A Cultural Political Economy of Research and Innovation in an Age of Crisis.” Minerva 50 (2): 149–​ 67. https://​doi.org/​10.1007/​s11​ 024-​012-​9201-​y

5 Subjectivity and the Logics of Value

A hegemonic framework such as abstract labour is upheld by articulatory practices performed by actual people. As such, the focus shifts to working people and their ideological practices in capitalist labour structures. Now, at least since the publication of Žižek’s Sublime Object of Ideology, it is no longer accurate to adhere to a conception of ideology that casts people as unknowing cogs in the overarching capitalist machine. The point would rather be that people know very well what is going on (i.e. that they are being exploited), but the ideological moment consists in the fact that they are ‘doing it anyway’ (Žižek 1989). Furthermore, the poststructuralist starting point of ontological contingency means that work practices cannot be explained with reference to a human or even class essence. In other words, there are no natural laws of causation that can account for the persistent hegemony of abstract labour. As such, the question emerges how articulatory practices –​which imply a degree of contingency and agency –​reconstitute the social relations of value production over time. This is a question that essentially asks how abstract labour works as an instance of the political constitution of society. Working through questions about articulation, subjectivity, and affect, this chapter will trace the persistent hegemony of abstract labour between the two antagonistic logics of use value and surplus value. It will show how a discursive account of capitalism avoids the determinist tendencies of orthodox Marxism and instead understands capitalist society as a dislocated framework that is contingent upon the reconstitution of its social relations. As such, the chapter will develop the discourse-​theoretical vocabulary with which to grasp the hegemony of abstract labour. It will do so in four different steps. First, Section 5.1 will introduce the notion of articulation in order to be able to trace the political constitution of abstract labour to the level of social practices. If the argumentation of this section remains largely on the level of formalistic reasoning, the next ones will delve into the crucial dimension of affect. Section 5.2 will explore the question of subjectivity in the context of capitalist value production by picking up the question how discourse theory can understand the worker as subject if DOI: 10.4324/9781003440567-6

166  Subjectivity and the Logics of Value it rules out the orthodox notion of the proletariat. The argument will be that this subject emerges as a Lacanian split subject, insofar as its social being is located at the fault line between the circuit of capital and the logic of use value. In true Lacanian fashion, affect and desire emerge from the constitutive lack of this split subject of value. On this basis, it is then possible to outline, in Section 5.3, the social, political, and fantasmatic logics of value. To do so, the chapter will draw on the logics approach developed by Glynos and Howarth (2007). Finally, Section 5.4 will first tie the different strands of this chapter together and lay down an account of a symbolic logic of capital, in which capital accumulation and labour relations together lend a particular historical dynamic to capitalist society. 5.1  The Constitution and Sedimentation of Abstract Labour This section probes deeper into the political dynamic through which the abstract labour hegemony is constituted. Crucial in such a discussion is how people’s agency and practices establish social structures. Hegemony, according to Laclau and Mouffe is ‘a theory of the decision taken in an undecidable terrain’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2014, xi). The undecidable terrain refers to the insight –​which emerged in different forms in the work of Marx, Postone, Lefort, and Derrida –​that in capitalist modernity, there is no stable metaphysical foundation of society. However, even in the absence of any preordained social order, a relatively stable social framework will emerge nonetheless. The question that hegemony seeks to answer, then, is how this particular social framework establishes itself as a ‘political decision’, that is, as a contingent organisation of society. To answer this question, it is necessary to account for the role of people’s articulatory practices in upholding a hegemonic formation. The hegemony of abstract persists only as long as its social relations are reconstituted by working people. To see how this works and grasp the process through which people re-​establish the social relations of abstract labour, this section will first zoom in on the crucial notion of articulation. But while articulation is important to account for the ‘originary’ constitution of the abstract labour hegemony, it seems less helpful to understand the re-​constitution or the persistence of this hegemony. To understand the latter, the notion of sedimentation is more accurate. And in this context, the importance of class also comes up again. The basic element that makes up the social structure of value is the commodity. But a commodity is not a straightforward, natural thing. Rather, a commodity is only a commodity because of its social embeddedness in the social relations of capitalist value production. As has become clear earlier, these social relations, in turn, emerge on the basis of the production of commodities, which have a use value and exchange value. When it

Subjectivity and the Logics of Value  167 comes to analysing the dynamic of the social structure of abstract labour and commodities as its individual components, it is therefore clear that this should be approached as a matter of mutual constitution. Both the social structure of abstract labour as well as its individual commodities thus emerge through a process of mutual constitution. Discourse theory has its own concept for this process of the mutual constitution of the individual and the structural: articulation. Surprisingly, considering its importance in the overall framework of discourse theory, articulation remains a somewhat undertheorised concept. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe state that they understand articulation as ‘any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2014, 91). Articulation thus gives rise to the relational identity of elements. Insofar as commodities are only commodities because of their relations to other commodities as exchange values, the possibility thus arises to investigate the process in which commodities are articulated as such. Articulation grasps the process in which a particular element assumes a position within a social structure, as a consequence of which the identities of the elements are changed. The point, then, is that articulation connects elements to each other in a way that gives rise to a particular meaning between them. This relation is not a necessary one, but is rather constituted with the very act of articulation itself, as Stuart Hall says: The two parts are connected to each other, but through a specific linkage, that can be broken. An articulation is thus the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made. (Hall in Grossberg 1986, 53)?1 It is clear what this means: the point is to investigate the connections between commodities that make them commodities in the first place. This connection or linkage is not necessary, but only possible under particular circumstances. These circumstances are, in this case, the abolition of the fixed hierarchical structure of feudal society and the emergence of individuals ‘free’ to sell their labour power. Indeed, it is with this fundamental change of circumstances, which disintegrated the fixity of feudal economic production as well as its social relations, that the social necessity arises to articulate relations between now free-​ floating elements. As Glynos and Howarth argue, it ‘is now the case that every social process of putting together elements is to some degree articulatory, and this is because they (and the agents of articulation) are not governed by any underlying

168  Subjectivity and the Logics of Value metaphysical principle or ground’ (Glynos and Howarth 2007, 179). So fetishised commodity relations between people are articulated as the specifically capitalist form of social relations. It is interesting to underscore what kind of social framework emerges with the articulation of commodity relations. It has already become clear that each commodity is different as a use value, but equivalent as exchange value. As such, commodities constitute a social structure of differences and equivalences. Use value and exchange value, in turn, refer to the twofold character of labour in capitalism. The labour people perform to produce commodities is different as concrete labour, and equivalent as abstract labour. What emerges here is thus a social structure of mutually dependent labour acts, each of which refers to the others through the logics of difference and equivalence in the constitution of its own identity within the structure. This social structure of capitalist labour relations anticipates Saussure’s structuralist account of language. In his Course in General Linguistics, Saussure wrote that language ‘is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others’ (de Saussure 2011, 114). Now, the crucial point here is that this also applies to the social relations of labour that lie at the basis of the fetishised domain of commodity relations. In capitalist society, social relations between people are articulated through the equivalence and difference of their labour. That is to say that the people that emerges in the absence of a stable foundation for society is a people that finds their universality in their being producers of abstract labour. From the perspective of concrete labour, they retain their difference as bakers, academics, or hedge fund managers. But the very ‘social matrix’, as Postone calls it, which establishes the universality on the basis of which people enter into relations with each other, arises through the articulation of abstract labour equivalence. By bringing on board this notion of articulation, then, it becomes possible to imagine the constitution of the hegemony of abstract labour as a social process in which actual people are involved. Since, in capitalism, the directly useful aspect of work is antagonistically excluded, people’s access to the things they need takes place through the mediation of abstract labour value production. Access to goods, then, presupposes that you have something to exchange. This, in turn, means that you produce a useful good for somebody else. And as became clear in previous chapters, this implies that the product of your labour is equivalent to all others as abstract labour. Only if it is articulated in this way, along the lines of difference and equivalence, does your labour become part of the abstract labour chain of equivalence. As Marx said, in order for the product of labour to be socially valid as a commodity, that labour process must be part of the social totality of labour (Marx 1962, 123). And crucially, your labour is not naturally part

Subjectivity and the Logics of Value  169 of that social totality, but only insofar as it is produced for exchange, and articulated as such. In other words, workers articulate their labour as part of the commodity chain of equivalence, much like Saussure understood articulation as the process in which an utterance becomes part of a signifying chain (de Saussure 2011, 10). At the same time as the products of labour are articulated as commodities, they constitute the abstract labour chain of equivalence. Also, they lay a claim to the social wealth of the abstract labour universality, represented in money. In this way, through the articulation of their labour as abstract labour values, people constitute the universality of abstract labour. However, although the notion of articulation helps to bring the constitution of difference and equivalence in Marx’s value theory down to the level of people’s actions, in another sense it does not seem to fit so well. After all, Laclau and Mouffe use the notion of articulation in the context of political strategies, which implies that there is a conscious idea that inspires articulatory practices. It does not seem fitting, to say the least, to presuppose a conscious strategy behind the everyday ‘articulation’ of people’s activities as value-​producing labour. Indeed, when it comes to the daily practice of people going to work perhaps it would be more accurate to substitute the notion of articulation for Judith Butler’s rendition of the concept of iteration (Butler 1997, 16). Iteration stresses the repetition of practices in a way that does not involve strategic considerations. Indeed, it allows for a much larger non-​conscious element in the determination of social practice, which seems accurate in the context of day-​to-​day actions such as going to work. Even so, the notion of articulation remains important with regard to the question of the constitution of abstract labour equivalence. In Laclauian fashion, it uncovers the political character of this universality. As such, it helps to ‘reactivate’ the forgotten political origins of this important social framework, whose practices have meanwhile become ‘sedimented’ (Laclau 1990, 160). That is, it points out that the sedimented practices of everyday capitalist labour processes emerge from an act of political constitution. However, as important as it is to uncover the political origins of the sedimented practices of value-​producing labour, this is not yet the full story. The hegemony of abstract labour only persists as long as its social relations are reconstituted. Therefore, it is necessary to look beyond the ‘originary’ moment of political constitution and investigate in more detail the process of sedimentation that maintains hegemony. In this context the notion of primitive accumulation once more becomes very important. When it comes to the ‘originary’ constitution of the abstract labour hegemonic formation, the relevance of primitive accumulation is rather clear. Primitive accumulation, as the separation of labour from its means, is the moment where abstract labour is constituted as what it is not –​directly

170  Subjectivity and the Logics of Value useful labour. The moment of ‘originary’ articulation of work activities as twofold, value-​producing labour into the abstract labour chain of equivalence is therefore closely tied up with primitive accumulation. But primitive accumulation is important not just at the beginning of the capitalist era. Precisely insofar as primitive accumulation stands for the separation of labour from its means, it remains crucial to the continued reconstitution –​and concomitant sedimentation –​of abstract labour relations. In other words, primitive accumulation is not a one-​time event, but rather accompanies capitalist value production at every moment (Bonefeld 2011, 384). This means that understanding the process through which sedimented abstract labour relations are reconstituted implies, at the same time, understanding the continued process of primitive accumulation, or the separation of labour from its means. So the question is really about the simultaneous occurrence of two different but interrelated phenomena: how are abstract labour relations reconstituted, while the moment of primitive accumulation is also re-​ enacted? Marx, in fact, already discussed this question in Capital, and it is worth quoting the passage where he does so in full: Since the process of production is also the process of the consumption of labour-​power by the capitalist, the worker’s product is not only constantly converted into commodities, but also into capital, i.e. into value that sucks up the worker’s value-​creating power, means of subsistence that actually purchase human beings, and means of production that employ the people who are doing the producing. (Marx 1976, 716) Workers enter the labour process insofar as they have sold their labour power. This means that right from the start, they are confronted by means of production they do not own or control, but which in fact enable their exploitation as the source of value. Furthermore, insofar as workers then produce value, they continue to produce the very same things that are the condition of their own exploitation, as Marx goes on to explain: Therefore the worker himself constantly produces objective wealth, in the form of capital, an alien power that dominates and exploits him; and the capitalist just as constantly produces labour-​power, in the form of a subjective source of wealth which is abstract, exists merely in the physical body of the worker, and is separated from its own means of objectification and realisation; in short, the capitalist produces the worker as a wage-​labourer. This incessant reproduction, this perpetuation of the worker, is the absolutely necessary condition for capitalist production. (Marx 1976, 716)

Subjectivity and the Logics of Value  171 At the same time as workers produces value, and valorise value, they also effectuate, through the circuit of capital set in motion by their own labour, their own separation from the means of production. Put differently, value production and primitive accumulation, as the separation of labour from its means, coincide. This is crucial, because it means that the key to understanding the reconstitution of abstract labour relations lies in value production itself. The result of value production is thus not just valorisation, or capital accumulation, but also a renewed moment of primitive accumulation, insofar as the worker is once again separated from the means of production. What the worker does get, of course, is a wage. The wage is a moment of the circuit of C-​M-​C: it is part of the process in which people work to be able to buy the commodities they need in their lives. Wages make it possible for workers to go to the shop and buy and consume things. Although this C-​M-​C process is distinct from the M-​C-​M’ circuit of capital, it is also closely related to it. Indeed, according to Marx it is here, in the domain of wages and individual consumption, that the continuation of abstract labour value production is secured: Individual consumption provides, on the one hand, the means for the workers’ maintenance and reproduction; on the other hand, by the constant annihilation of the means of subsistence, it provides for their continued re-​appearance on the labour-​market. (Marx 1976, 719) What emerges here, then, is an account of the reconstitution of labour relations based on class relations. The capitalist labour value production process guarantees the return of people as labourers insofar as they remain excluded from the means of production, but do get a wage. The wage itself, of course, is expressed in money, and money, as empty signifier, is the expression of value. Value, in turn, emerges on the basis of abstract labour expenditure. It would seem, then, that we have come full circle. Abstract labour relations reconstitute themselves insofar as they are expressed in money, which is at the same time the most important way for people to make sure they can acquire the things they need and want. All in all, the picture that emerges here is that of a social system of value production that to an important extent seems to reproduce itself. For Marx, the end of a cycle of value production is at the same time the moment where people are confronted with the same necessity to sell their labour power again. This would then guarantee the reconstitution of abstract labour relations, and the persistence of the abstract labour hegemony. However, this account cannot really provide a satisfactory answer to the question as to how ordinary people uphold the abstract

172  Subjectivity and the Logics of Value labour hegemony, because it now seems they are fully subordinated to it, and, moreover, even reproduced by it. This chimes with the wider Marxist argument that considers the worker and capitalist as personifications of the categories of wage-​labour and capital. In Bonefeld’s view, this means that the ‘class struggle is the objective necessity of the false society. It belongs to its concept’ (Bonefeld 2014, 109). But from a discourse-​theoretical perspective, this view introduces a degree of idealist necessity that would seem to cancel out the ontological contingency that previous chapters have sought to uncover while interpreting abstract labour as a contingently constructed universality. Now, it is certainly the case that universality also entails domination. As Laclau said, universality ‘is a power that, like all power, is exercised over something different from itself’ (Laclau 2006, 159). But still, power and domination are never all-​encompassing, if only because they emerge from the contingent social relations of people themselves. There is thus always a distance between power and people. In this case, that means that the abstract labour universality, and the specific domination by time it entails, do not fully subsume people, much less reproduce them automatically. Marx, indeed, seems to uphold the view that there is such a fully automatic, self-​enclosed reproduction of the conditions of value production: ‘Every pre-​condition of the social production process is at the same time its result, and every one of its results appears simultaneously as its pre-​condition’ (Marx 1971, 507). But this is where Laclau’s poststructuralism would take a different course. Given that there is this distance between working people and the dominating universality they uphold, it is important to ask the Butlerian question as to how people themselves are caught up in maintaining the structures of their own domination. 5.2  The Split Subject of Labour The task that emerges from the argumentation up to this point is to explore the role of actual people in maintaining the hegemony of value. This task already emerged previously out of Postone’s inability to grasp the dynamic of agency in upholding the abstract labour mediation. In a nutshell, the question is what accounts for the fact that people reconstitute the social relations of abstract labour, especially if these are at the same time relations of domination. This is a question that goes beyond the level of formalistic reasoning, and explores the ‘content’ of labour relations. Or, in other words, it is a question about the ‘why’ of the social relations of labour. And with this question about ‘why’, the analysis leaves the domain of formalistic thinking, and runs up to questions of affective investment. More specifically, it is about affective investment in the context of modes of being that sustain hegemonic articulations. As such, it becomes

Subjectivity and the Logics of Value  173 necessary to include questions of subjectivity. The question about subjectivity, however, is located right at the fault line between post-​Marxist theory and more orthodox Marxist accounts. In its most extreme form, the latter sometimes seemed to understand the subject as an effect of the larger structures of capital (Amariglio and Callari 1989, 32). Since such forms of economic determinism are incompatible with discourse theory, it is necessary to look out for a different understanding of the subject. As for the question which theoretical framework would be able to provide an account of subjectivity, psychoanalysis would be an obvious candidate (Barrett 1991, 118). This, however, is by no means straightforward. After all, Laclau has warned explicitly against trying to mobilise psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivity simply as an add-​on to the Marxian critique of political economy.2 The problem is that the two approaches are not compatible. Psychoanalysis builds on an ontology of lack, whereas the Marxian critique, in Laclau’s interpretation at least, represents an understanding of the social as a self-​enclosed positivity. Thus, according to Laclau, it is impossible to affirm —​though it has often been done —​that psychoanalysis adds a theory of subjectivity to the field of historical materialism, given that the latter has been constituted, by and large, as a negation of the validity and the pertinence of any theory of subjectivity (although certainly not the category of the ‘subject’). (Laclau 1990, 93; emphasis in original) The difference between subject and subjectivity that Laclau alludes to here probably refers to the postmodern and poststructuralist critiques of the enlightenment subject as self-​contained, rational, and fully identical with itself. An orthodox Marxist account of the proletariat determined by its capacity for work would also fall into this category. As opposed to this idea of the subject, the poststructuralist tradition, within which Laclau writes, tries to understand subjectivity as something constructed and contingent, i.e. the outcome of a process of subjectification. If orthodox Marxist accounts fall prey to economic determinism, the subject would become fully internal to the capitalist economy, and therefore also lose its relevance for critical analysis. In such a situation it would not make sense to try and bring any notion of subjectivity back into the framework, since it would again be fully consumed by the economy. The problem, then, is the determinism of orthodox Marxism. Any rapprochement between Marxian theory and psychoanalysis should therefore entail a theoretical dialogue that leaves the premises of determinism, and brings both perspectives onto the same ontological level of contingency and lack. In this vein, Laclau proposes to integrate psychoanalysis and Marxian theory

174  Subjectivity and the Logics of Value around the notions of unevenness and dislocation (Laclau 1990, 96). This links up to the psychoanalytic notion of the split subject. The question could also be phrased differently: how to understand the identity of the worker in abstract labour relations of if it is not the orthodox proletariat? Now, the argumentation of the book so far indicates that the antagonism that runs through capitalist labour constitutes a field of objectivity within which the identity of the worker emerges. Value-​ producing labour is antagonistic to directly useful work, and abstract labour is antagonistic to concrete labour. To be sure, this antagonism is not a logical necessity, for the very reason that it is conditional upon articulation. But insofar as it is articulated and reconstituted –​and in a society in which abstract labour is hegemonic, this antagonism is continuously reconstituted –​the antagonism between abstract and concrete labour is inherently antagonistic. The reason for this is simple. Somebody who works to earn money in capitalist society, in a way, ‘articulates’ their labour as an element into the abstract labour chain of equivalence. Soon enough, however, it appears that the concrete and abstract aspects of their labour are each oriented towards a different aim. To put it more concretely, somebody sells their labour power as a commodity in order to be able to acquire other commodities (C-​M-​C), but as soon as they do that, their labour also functions towards a wholly different goal, namely to produce surplus value and accumulate capital (M-​C-​M’). For each pole the other side remains a necessity, meaning that neither side can become a fully self-​enclosed entity. Together, in their antagonistic struggle, they constitute the social objectivity of value production. And it is within this social objectivity of value production that workers assume their identity. But what of the worker, then? What can be said about the subjectivity of those working in the social framework of abstract labour? As is well known, the discussion about the notion subjectivity is one of the main bones of contention between discourse theory and Marxism. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe took issue with the conception of the subject of capitalist society as essentially determined by the relations of production, conceived as the antagonism between capital and labour. On such a reading, the worker’s identity would be exhausted by their being part of the proletariat as universal class. Laclau and Mouffe criticise this conception of the subject as a form of reductionism, in which the worker is accorded a positive identity by the relations of production (Laclau and Mouffe 2014, 14). Of course, one of the main points of HSS is to move away from such a reductionist understanding of the subject. The problem is namely that such a reductionist move presupposes the existence of a self-​enclosed objectivity, whereas the whole point of discourse theory is to show that any objectivity emerges as a play of differential elements. As the previous section has shown, this also applies to the objectivity of

Subjectivity and the Logics of Value  175 labour and commodities, the social meaning of which emerges through their mutual differential relations. Moreover, this orthodox Marxist understanding of subjectivity makes the subject the passive bearer of larger social structures. That is to say that this understanding of the subject leaves no room for agency (Glynos and Howarth 2007, 128). But since the whole point of discussing subjectivity in the context of abstract labour relations is to make visible the dimension of agency, it seems safe to say that this approach is a dead end. Having ruled out this more orthodox Marxist conception of the subject, it is important to explore how to conceive of subjectivity in the context of the post-​Marxist interpretation of the theory of value developed so far. On this account, value is a social framework of differential elements, which constitute a universality –​abstract labour –​that has no positive essence. The subject emerges within this hegemonic universality. Now, for Laclau this is exactly the problem. On the one hand, the subject has to be constituted within the social framework of differential elements. On the other hand, the subject cannot simply be constituted by that framework, because that would be deterministic, and again presuppose the self-​enclosed objectivity of said framework (Laclau 1996, 92). The consequence of this paradox is that the subject must be a kind of ‘externality’ that is nonetheless internal to the system of signification. This means that the task arises to account for the possibility of an externality emerging within the structure. Laclau does so by drawing on the notion of undecidability. For Laclau, then, the possibility that an externality emerges within the structure can only happen if the structure is not fully reconciled with itself, if it is inhabited by an original lack, by a radical undecidability that needs to be constantly superseded by acts of decision. These acts are precisely what constitute the subject, who can only exist as a will transcending the structure. Because this will has no place of constitution external to the structure but is the result of the failure of the structure to constitute itself, it can be formed only through acts of identification. If I need to identify with something, it is because I do not have a full identity in the first place. These acts of identification can only be thought of as the result of the lack within the structure and have the permanent trace of that lack. (Laclau 1996, 92; emphasis in original) The possibility of the subject, according to Laclau, thus coincides with the undecidability of the structure. Because social objectivity lacks an essence and rather emerges contingently through antagonistic contestation, it is structurally dislocated in its social being, and therefore unable to provide a fixed identity to the subject. This means that the subject ‘is nothing but this

176  Subjectivity and the Logics of Value distance between the undecidable structure and the decision’ (Laclau 1990, 30). The subject is thus characterised by its failed attempt at acquiring a fixed identity within that dislocated structure. It is also possible to approach this question from the other side, that is, from the perspective of the subject itself. And it is here that the psychoanalytic inflection of Laclau’s theory of the subject –​which is already hinted at in the quote above by the notion of lack –​comes to the fore. Laclau’s account of the subject, insofar as it emerges as the act of identification within a dislocated social structure, is in fact a crisis or failure of representation (Hudson 2006, 300). The social means of representation that make up social objectivity (in this case, the social framework of abstract labour relations), for the very reason that they themselves are the contingent outcome of the logics of difference and equivalence, cannot serve to fully constitute the subject. Nonetheless, the subject remains dependent on these social structures of representation. This means that Laclau’s subject mirrors the Lacanian subject of lack.3 Lacan, in his famous text on the mirror stage in children’s development, argued that the process of identification is at the same time a process of alienation, insofar as the child is confronted with its own ‘organic inadequacy’ compared to the image of fullness displayed in the mirror (Lacan 2002b, 6). For Lacan, this is the moment where the ego emerges. The ego is an imaginary function, the unattainable image of wholeness perceived in the (proverbial) mirror. This means that the ego, precisely because it is an imaginary function, an unattainable image, is also always at a distance. Insofar as the ego is the moment of identification –​ ‘this is what I am’ –​it is therefore also a moment of alienation. So within this domain of the imaginary, identity at the same time means non-​identity. Something similar happens upon the child’s entry into the symbolic order, the domain of society and social meaning. For Lacan, the symbolic order is constituted by the play of signifiers, and by social structures of meaning that have emerged through this play. As such, the symbolic order predates the child. This is crucial, because in order to become a subject, the child has to submit to the symbolic authority of society and the play of signifiers that make up its dynamic. The child, in its attempt at identification within the symbolic order, has to accept the means that enable meaningful identification within the symbolic order, i.e. the play of signifiers. The subject only becomes a subject through signifiers. In this context Lacan speaks of the ‘pre-​eminence of the signifier over the subject’ (Lacan 1972, 70). This indicates that, at the same moment where the child becomes a subject, it also experiences symbolic alienation, because the symbolic means on which it draws to acquire its identity are not its own, but rather those of the symbolic order which stands over it. To make matters worse, the symbolic itself is an order of lack, precisely because it is constituted by the play of difference (Stavrakakis 1999, 39). Just like

Subjectivity and the Logics of Value  177 in the domain of the imaginary, in the symbolic the subject does not find the option of a full identity. As Stavrakakis says, the ‘subject meets lack and alienation where it seeks fullness and identity’ (Stavrakakis 1999, 36). Insofar as the subject is represented by a signifier like any other, it suffers from the same undecidability as the social order in general. Since the subject is constituted through the symbolic play of difference, which itself stands over the subject as symbolic authority, the subject only acquires its identity through an act of symbolic alienation. That is why the Lacanian subject is a subject of lack. This subject, insofar as its identity is dependent on the symbolic order which lacks an anchoring point itself, remains caught up in the play of signifiers, and will therefore never be able to say ‘this is who I really am’. The lack that is inscribed in the constitution of the subject as such gives rise to a desire to overcome the lack and finally achieve a state of fullness. It is important to underscore that the irreducible distance between the subject and the structure, along with the fact that the subject will never acquire a full identity within that structure, opens up the dimension of agency. If the structure cannot fully determine the subject, then the subject, insofar as its identity is conditional upon its attempts at identification, has agency when it comes to its decisions at identification (Glynos and Howarth 2007, 129). That is to say that even if the subject is, of course, always already situated within a symbolic order, the dislocated nature of that structure opens possibilities for different modes of identification.4 Whether or not the subject does so depends, among other things, on the particular structuration of desire, its possible modes of enjoyment, and the social, political, and fantasmatic logics at play. This, will be discussed further in Section 5.3. First, it is important to see in how far the psychoanalytic subject of lack fits into the theory of abstract labour as a hegemonic formation. The hegemonic formation of abstract labour, insofar as it emerges through the differential play of elements, qualifies as a particular rendition of the symbolic order of society. That means that the subjects of this symbolic order –​workers5 –​acquire their identity, and their place in society, according to the same alienating dynamic that constitutes the subject of lack. The subject position ‘worker’ is a difference within the symbolic order. So when people identify with it (through ‘articulating’ their labour into the abstract labour universality), they become the subject ‘worker’. But because this subject position of worker is part of the symbolic order, the subject is alienated at the same time as it becomes a subject. The worker as subject, because it is never really identical with itself as an alienated subject within the symbolic order of society, is therefore a Lacanian subject of lack. Now, this argument may perhaps sound sensible theoretically, but it is not yet fully convincing. And that is because it is a rather generic application of the Lacanian theory of subjectivity. The fact that this is a

178  Subjectivity and the Logics of Value generic application of Lacanian theory also shows the limitations of this argument: it is located at a formalistic level, and revolves only around the dynamic between signifiers. To put it simply, it would be possible to swap the subject position ‘worker’ for any other and the argument would have been the same. That is why it is important to look at what is specific about the articulation of the worker within the abstract labour framework outlined earlier. Here it is crucial to connect the subject position of the worker to the previous analysis of the antagonism of labour in capitalism. To repeat it once more, this antagonism consists in the tension between concrete labour oriented towards the production of use values (C-​M-​C) and abstract labour oriented towards the production of value (M-​C-​M’).6 It is interesting to consider what this means in the context of the discussion on subjectivity. In his study on the relation between Marx and Lacan, Samo Tomšič writes that Marx’s analysis in Capital implies a difference between the subject of use value and the subject of exchange value (Tomšič 2015, 35). He then pairs this with the critical observation of the homology between Marx’s account of the fetishised domain of commodity production that goes on ‘behind the backs’ of the actual producers, and the play of signifiers that constitutes the symbolic order. Insofar as the subject acquires its identity within this symbolic order of commodity production, this means that the subject is constituted in an alienated social system. Crucially, for Tomšič this is an indication of ‘the dependency of the subject on the signifier: the system of differences, commodity exchange, the way in which commodities communicate among themselves, shapes the subject independently from every reference to the consumer’ (Tomšič 2015, 36). What surfaces here, then, is a rift between the subject of value, and the producer of use values (whom Tomšič calls the ‘consumer’). The subject is dependent on the signifier imparted to it by the symbolic order of commodity exchange. Crucially, this subject is the subject of value, the commodity producer who is equivalent to others in their capacity as abstract labour value producer, and different as the producer of particular use values. However, this account of the symbolic identity of the subject (located within M-​C-​M’) leaves aside the other antagonistic dimension of concrete labour (C-​M-​C). What of this other side of labour, then? How does the dimension of the lived experience of the worker and the orientation towards need and use feature in this interpretation of the subject of value? In order to explain this, it is first necessary to go back to the entry of the subject into the symbolic order. As is well known, Lacan associates this process with the Oedipus complex, insofar as the child has to give up the mother as love object in order to be accepted into the symbolic order of society. This means that the process by which someone becomes a subject entails an act of sacrifice. This question of sacrifice is crucial to the present discussion.

Subjectivity and the Logics of Value  179 Before connecting it to labour, it is important to note Stavrakakis’s interpretation of the moment of sacrifice in the constitution of the subject: But what is it exactly that is sacrificed in the world of language? We said that it is the mother, the maternal Thing. On a more general level, it is also our access to an unmediated level of need relating to all animal life. It is to the constitutivity of the symbolic in human life that we owe the fact that need becomes demand and instinct becomes drive and then desire. What is happening in all these transformations is the loss of a primordial level of the real. What is lost is all unmediated access to this real. Now we can only try to encounter the real through symbolisation. We gain access to reality, which is mainly a symbolic construct, but the signified of the signifier ‘reality’, the real itself, is sacrificed for ever. (Stavrakakis 1999, 34; emphasis added) The fact that the symbolic order, insofar as it is synonymous with society as such, is constitutive of human life implies the impossibility of unmediated access to ‘reality’. Crucial in this regard is Stavrakakis’s argument that entry into the symbolic order also entails the preclusion of ‘our access to an unmediated level of need relating to all animal life’. The Lacanian subject is thus a subject that only has mediated access to the dimension of need. It is through this question of mediated need that the parallel between the Lacanian discussion and Marx’s analysis of labour starts to show itself. Concrete labour, insofar as it offers indirect access to the satisfaction of human needs mediated through abstract labour, mirrors Stavrakakis’s Lacanian argument that unmediated access to the primordial level of needs is not possible within the symbolic order. The starting point for this argument is the claim, underscored by Tomšič, that the social structure of commodity production is an instance of Lacan’s symbolic order. Now, for Lacanian psychoanalysis the central question is what happens when somebody enters into the symbolic order and becomes a subject. The reason to do so would be to acquire a full identity. But as has become clear, in this way the subject constitutes itself in an alienated way, and thereby becomes a subject of lack and desire. There is no unmediated access to that which sparked the subject’s attempts at identification in the first place. Translated to the discussion on labour, this same dynamic occurs when people work in capitalist value production processes, and reconstitute the social relations of labour. The reason why a worker would sell their labour power is to pursue their own interest, whether that be to acquire additional use values, to develop their skills, or to acquire a certain position in society. That is, the articulation of their labour into the hegemonic formation of abstract labour follows the logic C-​M-​C. You could also call this the dimension of the worker’s material and social needs. However, because

180  Subjectivity and the Logics of Value the worker’s concrete labour takes place within the antagonistic social framework of value production (M-​C-​M’), the possibility for workers to work towards their needs is always mediated by value. This means that in capitalist society there is no unmediated access to the ‘real’ of workers’ needs. Rather, the lived experience of workers’ needs and their interests, captured by the logic of concrete labour, is itself a dimension of alienation insofar as it is part of the symbolic order of value. It is important to stress here that this argument does not amount to a return to the kind of labour essentialism that is problematic from a poststructuralist point of view. So to avoid confusion, the argument here does not coincide with Marx’s account of labour alienation in his early Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in which he posits the conscious capacity for work as the human essence, which is then alienated by the social relations of capitalism (Marx 1977a, 82).7 According to this logic, the identity of humans as labouring beings would exist independently of social relations, but then becomes estranged in capitalist society. But the Lacanian argument developed here is quite the opposite. There is no human essence at all, and nobody has a fixed identity; any attempt at ‘becoming someone’ will only ever lead to failed attempts at identification. Even becoming a worker is not a straightforward matter. If somebody sells their labour power, and their labour becomes part of the symbolic order of commodity production, the pursual of their work interests is subjected to the dominating dimension of abstract labour and value production. This means that at the very moment when the worker becomes a worker, and ‘articulates’ their labour as commodity-​producing labour, their labour is no longer just their own (C-​M-​C), but also that of the symbolic order of value (M-​C-​M’). In fact, since the production of value is hegemonic, the only way for workers to become workers and pursue their interest is through the alienating mediation of abstract labour. So just like, in Lacanian theory, becoming a subject is a process of alienating identification, so the worker, in submitting to the alienating dimension of abstract labour that makes them into a worker in the first place, finds that their labour alienates them at the same time as it offers them a way into society. That is why the worker is a Lacanian split subject, a subject of lack. This interpretation of the worker as a Lacanian subject of lack also feeds back into the discussion of the antagonism of labour. And importantly, it also relates to the question of class antagonism in the hegemonic value formation. The argument of this section is that the antagonism of labour is already located at the level of subjectivity, which means that it precedes the manifestation of the class conflict between worker and capitalist. This, at least, is what happens if you take Žižek’s important addition to Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of antagonism to heart:

Subjectivity and the Logics of Value  181 However, to grasp the notion of antagonism in its most radical dimension, we should invert the relationship between the two terms: it is not the external enemy who is preventing me from achieving identity with myself, but every identity is already in itself blocked, marked by an impossibility, and the external enemy is simply the small piece, the rest of reality upon which we ‘project’ or ‘externalise’ this intrinsic, immanent impossibility. (Žižek 1990, 251–​52) The consequence of Žižek’s insight is that the category worker is constituted along an antagonistic axis that runs through the subject of capitalist labour itself. That is, the worker’s subjectivity is itself split and ‘marked by an impossibility’: the worker’s logic of concrete labour and need is always blocked by the logic of abstract labour value, which at the same time remains the precondition for the worker to be a worker at all. And the fact that the worker finds their split identity in a field of objectivity constructed around the labour antagonism also explains why the capital-​labour antagonism, as Laclau said, is a contingent occurrence, that only happens when the worker resists the capitalist. Even if there is no ontic antagonism vis-​à-​ vis the capitalist, the worker will still be there, since its subjectivity arises on the basis of the impossible tension between the logic of useful labour and the circuit of value. As such, it would be possible to argue, drawing on Žižek, that the antagonistic conflict with the capitalist is the externalised projection of the impossibility of the worker’s identity. In turn, this would chime well with Postone’s claim that the capital-​labour antagonism is not the defining social axis of capitalist society (cf. Chapter 3).8 At the end of this section it is interesting to draw attention to an obvious conclusion that follows from interpreting the worker as a subject of lack. Where there is lack, there is desire. Within the context of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the logical consequence of the fact that the worker is a subject of lack is that they will be caught in a spiral of desire to fill that lack. As it was written by the incomprehensible master himself: Desire is what manifests itself in the interval demand excavates just shy of itself, insofar as the subject, articulating the signifying chain, brings to light his lack of being [manque à être] with his call to receive the complement of this lack from the Other —​assuming that the Other, the locus of speech, is also the locus of this lack. (Lacan 2002a, 251, bracketed text in original) Desire is the link between the subject of lack and the symbolic order, which is itself constituted on the basis of lack, i.e. antagonistic exclusion. It is the subject’s desire that explains the articulation of the signifying chain. So

182  Subjectivity and the Logics of Value in this case, the worker’s desire, which arises from their split subjectivity within the symbolic order of value, gives rise to a dynamic of affective investment that ensures the reconstitution of abstract labour relations. Put differently, the split subject of labour is caught up in a cycle of affective investment in the symbolic order of value, because that is where its possibilities of enjoyment come from. To be sure, part of this process lies in the necessity to buy new commodities for daily use, although even here there is no such thing as a ‘pure need’ –​even buying food is caught up with symbolic investment (Stavrakakis 2006). But beyond that, this process of affective investment revolves around the reconstitution of the worker’s identity as a failed identity that spurs the desire for fullness. These attempts at reconstitution, then, make labour into a matter of affective investment, and also maintain the hegemonic formation of value production. 5.3  The Logics of Value As the incorporation of the worker as a Lacanian subject of lack shows, the interpretation of Marx’s value theory offered here is poststructuralist indeed. A major consequence of having crossed the border from Marxism to post-​Marxism is that it necessitates a rethinking of the notion of causation. From the perspective of discourse theory, the understanding of causation that features in some classical Marxist theory is too ‘deterministic’. Engels’s work on dialectical materialism comes to mind here, since he speaks of the dialectical laws of movement that drive both nature and history (Engels 1978, 11). Now, Marx’s work avoids such determinism. Nonetheless, his argument that the end of the work process is at the same time the starting point of the new one (since it reproduces the worker as worker) is too abstract to be able to grasp the articulatory practices that account for the continuity of the work processes. To avoid abstract stories of causation, discourse theorists adopt the notion of logics, which accounts for the contingent performance of social practices (Glynos and Howarth 2007). This is a crucial concept, because it makes it possible to understand the temporality of hegemonic formations. That is, how they stay the same, change, or (dis)appear over time.9 Without an understanding of the logic that drives it, the analysis of a hegemonic formation will only be able to provide a snapshot of a social or political situation at a given moment in time, and it would not be possible to grasp the dynamic of this formation between moment A and moment B. It is clearly important to be able to account for the continued existence, throughout time, of the hegemony of value. That is why this section will explore the logics of value. The concept of logics goes back to Laclau, and was developed further by Glynos and Howarth in their book Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory. Laclau, for his part, argued that ‘any

Subjectivity and the Logics of Value  183 hegemonic formation has its own internal logic, which is nothing more than the ensemble of language games which it is possible to play within it’ (Laclau 2000a, 283). Of course, language games should be understood in the Wittgensteinian sense here, as a social practice that comprises both the linguistic and material. The main point is that a hegemonic formation is not just a static ensemble of elements that constructs a meaningful discourse, but rather a way of going on in the world. In other words, if the articulation of a hegemonic formation on the basis of an antagonistic exclusion constitutes a particular social objectivity, then logics are those patterns of behaviour that make that hegemonic formation ‘tick’ (Glynos and Howarth 2008, 11). In a way, then, understanding the logics of a hegemonic formation means understanding the rules according to which it operates. These rules determine what belongs to the hegemonic formation and what is excluded from it, and also what life looks like ‘inside’ the hegemonic formation. As Glynos and Howarth write, ‘the logic of a practice comprises the rules or grammar of the practice, as well as the conditions which make the practice both possible and vulnerable’ (Glynos and Howarth 2007, 136; emphasis in original). In a very general sense, this means that the logics of a hegemonic formation grasp those practices that reconstitute the antagonistic frontier that established these logics in the first place. Glynos and Howarth distinguish three kinds of logics: social, political, and fantasmatic. In what follows, each of these will be discussed in the context of the preceding analysis of the hegemony of abstract labour. First, the concept of social logics aims to ‘capture the “patterning” of social practices, where such practices are understood in this regard as a function of the contextualised self-​ interpretations of key subjects’ (Glynos and Howarth 2007, 140). It is important to note that this ‘patterning of social practices’ is not imposed from the outside, but rather emerges within the social formation itself. Social logics are those practices that characterise the goings-​on of a particular social context. So it would be possible to speak of the social logics of value production. However, here, too the antagonistic character of labour shows itself. Drawing on the analysis of Section 4.5, it is important to distinguish the social logic of use value (C-​M-​C) from the social logic of surplus value and capital accumulation (M-​C-​M’). Whereas the latter logic works towards the valorisation of value through extracting surplus labour, the former designates the practice where people sell their labour power as a commodity in order to buy other commodities. While they diverge according to their respective antagonistic orientations, these two logics are also inextricably interwoven in the social context of labour in capitalism. As such, the twofold social logic of capitalist labour is a typical illustration of Laclau and Mouffe’s argument that social logics ‘will always be limited by other –​frequently contradictory –​logics’ (Laclau

184  Subjectivity and the Logics of Value and Mouffe 2014, 129). Between these two interrelated but possibly conflictual logics of labour in capitalism, the social logic of use value is of most interest here. Because it is here that the daily practices of value-​producing people become visible. The reason why these daily practices of working people are so important is, of course, because they will provide the entry point towards answering the question that follows from understanding abstract labour as a hegemonic formation: how is this social structure constituted through the articulatory practices of actual people? And in this regard, the quote from the Logics book above contained an important qualification, namely that social practices are a ‘function of the contextualised self-​interpretations of key subjects’. The point here is that there is a relation of reciprocity between social logics and the self-​understanding of the people engaged in them. This is the reason why the previous section explored the dimension of subjectivity in such detail. Because it means that, contrary to Postone’s work which understands people as the bearers of social structure, this poststructuralist approach accords people agency vis-​à-​vis social structures, insofar as these structures are dependent on the self-​understanding of people. There is thus a crucial distance between the subject as contingently subjectified in these structures, and the subject’s own agency and actions vis-​à-​vis these structures. To put it schematically: the hegemony of abstract labour is conditional upon its social relations being reconstituted; this takes the form of people continuing the social logic of articulating their concrete labour into the abstract labour framework; but whether they do so will depend on their subjective self-​understanding. It is only as long as people understand themselves as workers that they will continue to bear out the social structure of value production. This account of social logics thus already includes the possibility of change. Whether change occurs or things stay the same depends on the second kind of logic Glynos and Howarth identify. Political logics, then, ‘focus more on the diachronic aspects of a practice or regime, whether in terms of how they have emerged, or in terms of how they are being contested and/​or transformed’ (Glynos and Howarth 2007, 141). Now of course, within the tradition of discourse theory, the notion ‘political’ is closely connected to the central idea of the political institution of society. As Laclau put it, while ‘social logics consist in rule-​following, political logics are related to the institution of the social’ (Laclau 2005, 117). As such, the particular dynamic of political logics has already surfaced at various points, if only implicitly. Given that there is no fixed order of society, social objectivity has to be constructed politically. And drawing up an antagonistic frontier that constitutes a hegemonic formation is a matter of articulating relations of difference and equivalence. The crucial point here is that because such articulations of difference and equivalence

Subjectivity and the Logics of Value  185 are contingent, the construction of an antagonistic frontier is an essentially dynamic process which needs to be reiterated over and over again for the social formation to remain hegemonic (Glynos and Howarth 2007, 144). In short, then, political logics grasp the process of political struggle that determines what belongs to a social formation and what is excluded. And along with the political constitution of a hegemonic formation, there emerges a particular social logic of practices within that formation. Political logics are of particular relevance for the present study when it comes to the question of the antagonistic exclusion that constitutes the universality of abstract labour. As argued previously, the equivalence of commodity-​producing labour as abstract labour values consists in their common antagonistic exclusion of directly useful kinds of work. In a more down-​to-​earth vocabulary, this means that an antagonistic struggle determines which kinds of work are commodified, and which are not. Those kinds of labour that are commodified are included in the value mediation. As such, they will have a concrete and abstract side. Money, as empty signifier, expresses their equivalence as values, and at the same time designates the antagonistic frontier with other kinds of work. For example, household work remains largely uncommodified and is thereby excluded from the value chain of equivalence. In terms of the social relations of labour, this also means that those people who do household work remain outside the society of value. This is a topic that has of course been studied extensively in feminist work, for instance in Betty Friedan’s classic The Feminine Mystique, which explored the experience of American women in the 1950 who were expected to remain at home doing household work, and could not take part in the society of labour (Friedan 1963). Since then, however, many things have changed, as household work has become partly commodified and women have entered the labour market. This is a process that could be grasped as a political logic that has rearticulated the frontier of commodification between value-​producing labour and directly useful labour. Consequently, it also draws up a new frontier as to who takes part in the society of value. The decisive point is that political logics revolve around the constitution of an antagonistic divide, and thereby the institution of a particular social framework. Since there will always be a variety of antagonisms in society, a political logic may be pitted against another one when it comes to maintaining a hegemonic formation. In the example mentioned earlier, it is clear that the political logic that sought to fortify the social formation of value production by including women into its ranks could clash with the sexist logic of prejudice against women. Political logics thus capture those articulations that either seek to challenge a hegemonic formation (e.g. attempts to include women into the labour force), or fend off such attempts and reinforce the existing order (e.g. the logic of traditional

186  Subjectivity and the Logics of Value household sexism). In other words, political logics may be oriented towards change or stability. As such, they are particularly useful when it comes to tracing the struggles currently taking place in the global economy, insofar as these revolve around questions of commodification. Nancy Fraser identifies three main fault lines along which such struggles currently take place. She writes how, in the context of the economic downturn that started in 2008, a multidimensional crisis dynamic unfolds in which the commodification of the environment, money itself (as financialisation), and social reproduction is renegotiated (Fraser 2014, 542). By approaching these three dimensions from the perspective of political logics, it becomes possible to trace the struggles that are currently going on in the renegotiation of the hegemony of value. Indeed, it is through these struggles that the hegemony is upheld by the continued expansion, at ever higher levels of productivity, of abstract labour value production. Taken together, social and political logics grasp the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ of a particular social framework. That is, they shed light on how a hegemonic framework is instituted, and what kind of social practices are going on there. But this still leaves open the question of the ‘why’. This is where the third logic comes in. Fantasmatic logics go towards explaining why practices change or stay the same (Glynos and Howarth 2007, 145). As such, they are closely related to Laclau’s attempt to mobilise the psychoanalytic category of affect for discourse theory, with the aim of going beyond the strictly formalistic approach to signification that revolves around the construction of difference and equivalence. Any articulatory practice, according to Laclau, requires a ‘force’ that explains why it happens at all (Laclau 2005, 101). This force consists in affective investment. Here Laclau’s debt to Lacan manifests itself most clearly. As argued earlier, Lacan understands the subject as a subject of lack, with a fundamental desire to fill the lack and achieve a state of fullness, which, however, always remains out of reach. Even if true satisfaction of the desire for fullness is not possible, the subject will be able to gain some sort of enjoyment from partial objects that become the object of affective investment. These objects are the cause of desire especially insofar as they harbour the promise of fullness, which then never comes, thereby further fanning that desire (Fink 1997, 51). The point here is that the particular fantasmatic way desire is oriented towards the enjoyment gained from the affective investment of particular objects also ‘captures a subject’s mode of being, whether individual or collective’ (Glynos and Howarth 2007, 107). As such, the categories of enjoyment and desire are directly related to subjectivity. As the number of Lacanian concepts –​the split subject, desire, enjoyment, partial object, affective investment, etc. –​keeps rising, it is important not to lose the ground underneath our feet. However, before all this can

Subjectivity and the Logics of Value  187 be reconnected to the question of the logics of value, one more concept has to be introduced. And that is the concept of fantasy itself. The importance of desire and enjoyment is clear because they feed into subjectivity, which in turn feeds into the maintenance of social logics that depend on the subject’s self-​understanding. But how does the logic of fantasy feature in all this? Fantasy, in short, is ‘the way in which subjects structure or organise their desire’ (Homer 2005, 86). That is to say that through fantasy, a subject’s desire finds partial objects from which it gains enjoyment.10 Since desire itself emerges as a consequence of the dislocated nature of the symbolic order, in which the subject is always a lacking –​and therefore desiring –​subject, the point of fantasy is to offer a support that promises a foothold beyond the ubiquitous lack. Fantasy directs desire to objects that offer enjoyment insofar as they cover over the fundamental lack. To make explicit the Žižekian undertones in this discussion, this means that fantasy is an ideological construction that is fundamental to the proper functioning of contingent social relations, because it makes it possible to overlook ‘the illusion which is structuring our real, effective, relationship to reality’ (Žižek 1989, 30). Ideological fantasy, then, offers a foothold in a contingent social world. It provides a sense of directionality to subjects in a social order that is dependent on these same subjects for its reconstitution. It is thus within an ideological fantasy that a subject’s desire takes shape, along with a mode of social being oriented around that desire. In this way, fantasy accounts for the affective force of desire that spurs articulation. And through the connection to articulation, the relevance of fantasy, desire, and affect for social and political logics also comes to the fore. Because the question why particular social or political logics are articulated is closely tied up with the way fantasmatic logics structure the desire behind them. Glynos and Howarth underscore the importance of the concept as follows: In sum, whether in the context of social practices or political practices, fantasy operates so as to conceal or close off the radical contingency of social relations. It does this through a fantasmatic narrative or logic that promises a fullness-​to-​come once a named or implied obstacle is overcome —​the beatific dimension of fantasy —​or which foretells of disaster if the obstacle proves insurmountable, which might be termed the horrific dimension of fantasy. (Glynos and Howarth 2007, 147) If social and political logics grasp the formalistic possibility of social relations in the absence of a metaphysical foundation of society, then fantasmatic logics explain why subjects would articulate them at all.

188  Subjectivity and the Logics of Value Fantasy structures their desire in accordance with particular social and political logics, which means that the subject’s enjoyment and their mode of social being are affectively tied up in a particular social framework. Put very simply, it is the affective force brought forward by fantasy that explains why social and political logics are articulated. This means that people may be affectively invested in a particular social logic that promises fullness, in which case they will be less susceptible to a political logic that tries to change things. Or conversely, a particular fantasy may effectively mobilise people’s desire around a political logic, which causes them to work toward change. It does not take much imagination to connect the logics of fantasy to the workings of a society where abstract labour is hegemonic. Indeed, there is no shortage of ideological fantasies related to work. Overall, the importance of work as a source of identity and enjoyment seems undeniable. Two examples may serve to illustrate this point. First, in his classic study of the factory work process, Burawoy noted how workers would structure their work practices around games that earned them ‘prestige, sense of accomplishment, and pride’ (Burawoy 1979, 89). These games would increase output at the same time as they ‘eliminated much of the drudgery and boredom associated with industrial work’ (Burawoy 1979, 89). Interpreted as a logic of fantasy, then, these games would be tied up with the social logic of the shop floor insofar as they provided the workers with a source of enjoyment and sense of directionality. The second example of fantasmatic logics on the work floor is more contemporary. Contu and Wilmott detail how photocopier technicians defied management pressures to stick to the rule book and instead constructed a narrative in which the ‘photocopier machine becomes a fantasmatic object of fascination that provides the space of ambiguity and uncertainty through which the technicians live out the fantasy of heroism by battling to control its performance’ (Contu and Willmott 2006, 1776). Here, too, the logic of fantasy chimes with the social logics of a profit-​oriented business. The workers, who structured their identity around the fantasy of the heroic worker, turned out to do their work very well. This shows that fantasy and enjoyment can be very much part of the same practice as profitability and exploitation. These two examples show how labour can become a source of enjoyment, which binds people on an affective level because their very identity as a subject depends on it. As such, fantasies constructed around work help to explain people’s attachment to labour and work practices, even if these are oriented towards the different goal of profit and exploitation. This is as true for individual people as it is for society at large. One look at any political party’s election programme will underscore just how important jobs and employment are for the mobilisation of political support. Very often it seems as if the prospect of full employment alone would be enough

Subjectivity and the Logics of Value  189 to solve the bulk of society’s problems. On a general level, then, there is a logic of fantasy constructed around labour itself that keeps the political imagination largely locked within the confines of the hegemony of abstract labour value. This is also very clear in the context of populist politics and the debate on immigration in Europe. Right-​wing populists in particular often mobilise people’s fears that immigrants will come and ‘take their jobs’. There is, in fact, little evidence that this is indeed the case (Cattaneo, Fiorio, and Peri 2015). But this is not the point. Even if immigrants do not really take people’s jobs, the fear that they might do so works as a fantasmatic logic that helps to direct people’s attention to a form of populist politics that casts the people against ‘outsiders’. And it is not accidental that one of the main objects of such fantasies is work. It stands to show how important work is for people as a source of identity. Now, it may seem that this discussion of logics, fantasy, and enjoyment has drifted off far away from anything to do with value, or the critique of political economy in general. However, all this was necessary in order to be able to answer a question that comes up in Time, Labor, and Social Domination. As mentioned in Section 2.4, Postone, writing a seminal book on the abstract structures of capital, underscores the ‘need to show how people, acting on the basis of forms of appearance that disguise the underlying essential structures of capitalism, reconstitute these underlying structures’ (Postone 1993, 196). This question contains two interrelated clauses: first, the underlying structures of abstract labour and value production; and second, people’s acts that may disguise underlying structures. In other words, the point is to explain how the cycle of capital accumulation (M-​C-​M’) is reconstituted by people engaged in the dynamic of useful labour (C-​M-​C). And it is possible to do exactly that by drawing on the logics approach. In fact, the answer is already implicit in the preceding pages. If you understand the process of concrete labour and use value as a social logic, you could picture this as a very down-​to-​earth situation of people doing a job and going about their lives. As they are in the middle of this social logic of labour, they are also caught up in different versions of the fantasmatic logic of work, as the examples above showed. That is, people are invested into their work on an affective level, because a fantasmatic logic underpins the social logic of labour with a sense of directionality and a promise of fullness, that is, enjoyment. Leaving aside all the Lacanian baggage for a moment, you could also say that people are simply ‘hooked’ on their work, because it allows them to be who they are. People’s affective attachment to their own labour, and to the more general idea that labour is something that determines your identity and worth in society, also feeds into the political logic that upholds the antagonistic constitution of the value formation. It may inspire a demand for more jobs, or fuel resistance to the closure of a factory. If such demands are not met,

190  Subjectivity and the Logics of Value they may be taken up by populists and articulated into a wider popular chain of equivalence, underscoring the political importance of the social relations of labour (Laclau 2005). But if the demands are implemented, they would uphold or expand the commodity chain of equivalence, and thus fortify the hegemony of value. And this is of course the crux of the matter. Because here it becomes clear that people’s articulatory practices understood under the header of the useful side of labour –​the combination of the social logics of their work processes, the fantasmatic logics of their affective attachment to their labour, and the political logics of the maintenance of the possibility of work –​are what reconstitutes the underlying structures of abstract labour and value production. The reason for this is that these logics of the useful side of labour are embedded in the social framework of value production. The peculiarity of capitalist society is that useful work takes on the shape of value-​producing labour. Useful labour is thus subjected to the hegemonic framework of abstract labour and capital accumulation. In this regard Judith Butler made the crucial argument that subjectification is also a matter of passionate attachment by the subject to its own subjectification (Butler 1997, 7). If the social structure of abstract labour value subjects workers to its dynamic of accumulation, then the interplay of logics sketched out here demonstrates how working people find ways of passionate attachment to and within this structure. And because of their attachment to it, they uphold and reconstitute that structure. This, then, is how working people uphold the abstract structures of value production. Insofar as they go about the daily logics of their useful labour activities, they reconstitute their labour as value-​producing labour into the abstract labour mediation. Crucial here is their passionate attachment to what at the end of the day is their own way of life. Now, the typical Marxist question to ask here is if this is not an ideological mechanism, which masks the underlying essential structures of capital accumulation. Indeed, Postone also asked whether people are aware that they reconstitute the abstract structures of capital. But the argumentation put forward here suggests that the people living in a value-​producing society, as Žižek put it, ‘know very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as if they did not know’ (Žižek 1989, 30). So people know that the work they do to earn a living also benefits their boss who makes a profit. They know that corporations make money by selling products that were produced by people like themselves. And they also know that their work is embedded in, and very often at the mercy of, large economic flows and dynamics that may reach across the world. They know, in short, that there is an aspect to their work that is largely out of their grasp, and may work to their own disadvantage. But still, they are doing it. And the reason for this is that they are attached to their subjective mode of being –​their identity as

Subjectivity and the Logics of Value  191 subjects –​which is part and parcel of this symbolic order of value production. In this way, they keep selling their labour power, reconstituting their labour relations as part of value-​producing labour. This means that they continue to work according to the social logic of value production at the same time as they go about their concrete work. In short, they uphold the hegemony of value. In other words, people uphold the hegemony of abstract labour not because they are predestined to do so, nor simply because they don’t own any means of production, but rather because their very being as subjects in modern societies is caught up in it. However, at the same time as they are attached to the symbolic order of value within which they assume their identity, they are not fully subsumed by it. Very much in line with Laclau’s account of subjectivity, there is still a certain distance between the symbolic order of value and the subject as worker. The reason for this is that they are engaged in the social logic of concrete labour that is different and oriented towards another goal than the social logic of value production. Axel Honneth’s analysis of the immanent normativity of capitalist labour markets underscores this point. Normative claims to a ‘right to work’ go along with practices of mutual recognition and social freedom opened up by doing a job well and becoming a valued member of a work community (Honneth 2014, 227). The point is, however, that this sphere of identity through work and social freedom belongs to the logic of use value, and as such is undermined by the antagonistic of surplus value which determines the conditions for labour to be socially valid at all. The important point here is that capital and the abstract structures of capitalist society never fully dominate the people in it. In fact, the ‘human dimension’ of needs, wishes and social freedom is always there, pushing back against these abstract determinations (Holloway 2012, 517). It is the antagonistic tension between the two logics, and the agency of working people caught between them, that can account for the reconstitution of abstract labour relations. 5.4  A Symbolic Logic of Capital Working people’s agency may account for the reconstitution of social labour relations, but the question remains how this relates to the dominating force of capital. It is crucial not to lock the capital relation away in a social domain distinct from the articulation of labour, because this would once more lead to a situation where an outside factor (capital) determines the social. In the heated debate with Laclau about populism, Žižek did just that when he wrote that ‘reality is the social reality of actual people involved in interaction and in the productive processes, while the Real is the inexorable abstract spectral logic of capital that determines what goes

192  Subjectivity and the Logics of Value on in social reality’ (Žižek 2006, 566). Here Žižek argues that capital is the Lacanian real, which would therefore by definition be excluded from the social-​symbolic domain of labour relations. Laclau was not impressed by this argument: The reason why Žižek has to distort the notion of the Real in this way is clear: only if the logic of capital is self-​determined can it operate as an infrastructure determining what goes on in social ‘reality’. But the Real, in the Lacanian sense, does exactly the opposite: it sets a limit preventing any self-​determination by the Symbolic. All this cheap metaphorical use of the reality/​Real duality to refer to something that is no more than the old base/​superstructure distinction is entirely out of place: it is evident that the logic of capital is as symbolic as the social reality it is supposed to determine. (Laclau 2006, 658) For Laclau, the matter is clear. The Lacanian real is not a social domain itself, but rather only shows itself as the breakdown of the symbolic order of signification. Since the logic of capital clearly has a social effectiveness that goes beyond the breakdown of signification, it must be part of the symbolic order rather than the real. In turn, this means that capital itself is dislocated along with the symbolic order in its entirety. The moment of dislocation in the cycle of capital becomes clear in the antagonistic relation between value-​creating labour and concrete useful labour, which means that neither side can constitute itself as a fully closed and self-​determined logic. The useful aspect of labour, insofar as it feeds into people’s determination to engage in capitalist labour at all, prevents the full being of the hegemony of value, oriented towards capital accumulation. That is to say that capitalist society is not a simple money-​ making machine geared only towards profit, but contains at least one other logic, namely that of the lived experience of its working people. The latter, then, precludes the full closure of value-​production, and in that sense also constitutes it. But crucially, this dislocation of the logic of value also shows itself in what is supposedly its theoretical core, i.e. the capital relation. If the capital relation is captured by M-​C-​M’, then this in itself does not contain a logical reason why the final clause is M’ and not again M. In other words, the profit that results at the end of circulation and is characterised by the apostrophe of M’ (M-​prime) does not derive from the capital relation itself. Or, to put it differently again, the profit motive does not reside in the logical formula of the capital relation itself, but rather emerges from the dynamic of capitalist society as such. As Postone says,

Subjectivity and the Logics of Value  193 Marx neither tries to prove that investment for gain exists in capitalism, nor tries to ground the historical genesis of capitalist society in the logical unfolding of its categories. Rather, he presupposes the existence of capitalist society and investment for gain; his intention is to clarify critically, by means of his categories, the underlying nature and developmental course of that form of social life. (Postone 1993, 267) The crucial point is thus that the capital relation, despite the fact that it exerts a major dominating force on social life in capitalism, is not a self-​determined mechanism, but rather very much a part of the dislocated society of value. This means that it does not stand outside of society as an all-​determining last instance, but is rather an integral part of the symbolic logics of the society of value. Capital offers important insights when it comes to explaining why the cycle of capital generates profit (M’) rather than returning to the same initial position (M). First, Marx describes a general lust for gold that arises as a consequence of the difference between the qualitative limitlessness of money in general on the one hand, and the quantitative limitations to any sum of concrete money on the other. In this way, the ‘contradiction between the quantitative limitation and the qualitative lack of limitation of money keeps driving the hoarder back to his Sisyphean task: accumulation’ (Marx 1976, 231). The hoarder’s endless desire for money is of course all the more interesting against the backdrop of the analysis of money as empty signifier. Once again, money and the empty signifier correspond insofar as both generate a desire for the lacking fullness it represents, a desire which will never be quenched (Nonhoff 2006, 148). Moreover, no matter how large a sum of money is, as soon as it is withdrawn from the cycle of capital, it will be exactly that: a sum of money, which is per definition limited. As a limited sum of money, it would no longer be capital. The point of capital is rather to approach absolute wealth as closely as possible (Marx 1976, 252). And if you don’t, then your competitor will. It is thus the combination of the limitlessness of money along with the competitive pressures of capitalist society that makes for the incessant drive to accumulate more capital. Any interruption in the process of accumulation, as Harvey notes, implies the risk of loss or devaluation of capital (Harvey 2010, 41). The crucial point is that, much like the norm of socially necessary labour time, the compulsion to accumulate capital pervades capitalist society in its entirety, driving it forward while holding it in its sway. The circuit of capital, then, is not a self-​propelled natural automaton, but very much embedded in the larger logics of capitalist society. It arises from a combination of the desire for ever more money and the social

194  Subjectivity and the Logics of Value pressures of competition. As such, it qualifies as a social logic that emerges along with the political institution of the society of value, and is therefore part of the symbolic order of capitalist society. Crucially, this also means that capital accumulation is not a natural law that will go its own independent way, but rather a logic dependent on its reconstitution. So on the one hand, capital accumulation is not a law-​like necessity that determines society from an external position. But on the other hand, the continued existence of capitalist society is very much dependent on continued accumulation, without which it would collapse. On this note, Rahel Jaeggi and Nancy Fraser point out that at times it is in fact difficult to keep accumulation going, because individual capitalists may start to enjoy their lives so much that they ‘lose their initiative to accumulate’ (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018, 18). The main point here is that capital accumulation, embedded as it is in a wider ensemble of social logics, has to be repeated if capitalist society is to continue to exist. Connecting this to the question of the reconstitution of labour relations, this means that it is crucial to consider how working people engage in the logic of use value and need in conjunction with the antagonistic logic of capital accumulation. And then it will become clear that the articulation of labour and accumulation acquires a particular dominating force. When it comes to domination in the context of value production, Postone’s work on the domination by time is central. While it has already become clear that value production is contingent upon the reconstitution of abstract labour relations, it is now possible to add a further qualification that arises from the discussion on socially necessary labour time. Since socially necessary labour time sets a norm for the output that must be realised in a social labour hour, the articulation of labour as value-​ producing labour is conditional on meeting the current social labour norm. What is more, since continuous increases in productivity keep raising the standard of what counts as a social labour hour, labour articulations have to keep up with the pace set by the domination of time. On the one hand, then, value production depends on the articulation and reconstitution of labour as abstract labour. On the other hand, the articulation of labour as abstract labour –​which remains the social framework through which people acquire their daily needs as well as access society as such –​has to meet the norms of social labour time. That is to say that the articulation of labour is dominated by time, while the domination of time, as a function of value production, remains dependent on the continued reconstitution of labour as value-​producing abstract labour. This insight has a crucial consequence for a society revolving around hegemonic labour relations. Because it means that the people who keep selling their labour power so as to uphold their way of social being in the abstract labour framework are subject to a dominating force that emerges from their own labour.

Subjectivity and the Logics of Value  195 In other words, the people that emerges contingently out of the articulation of abstract labour relations is dominated by the alienated dynamic of ever-​rising demands of productivity. This latter logic of value production emerges from abstract labour relations, but cannot be controlled by the people embedded in these labour relations. In a way, then, the people of value are dominated by their own alienated labour. The irony of this form of domination is that, if people’s affective attachment to their identity as subject of value means that they want to uphold their way of life, this very reconstitution of labour relations will also be a harbinger of change. Since the norm of value keeps rising with every cycle of value production, the wish for things to stay the same sets off a dynamic that continuously changes things. The social consequences of this dynamic manifest themselves in different ways. First, as productivity keeps rising, so does the rate of exploitation, putting additional pressures on the concrete labour of people’s jobs (Holloway 2010, 918). Over time, the same job may therefore become more intense in terms of the workload, or more meagre in terms of pay. Second, a company, or indeed a whole branch of the economy, could fail to meet the ever-​rising demands of productivity, in which case its jobs would go lost. This would then mean that those now unemployed people have to find a new job if they want to remain part of the social framework of abstract labour. One possible result of this process is increasing precarity (Van der Linden 2018). And the same applies when considered from the perspective of the social framework itself: its continued hegemony depends on the articulation of labour, so new profitable kinds of work have to be included in the value framework. Third, combining the previous two consequences, the dynamic of accumulation and articulation means that the character of labour in capitalist production processes is changing over time. With a rising organic composition of capital, the production of useful goods (material wealth) becomes increasingly divorced from direct labour expenditure, arguably contributing to the proliferation of ‘bullshit jobs’ (Graeber 2018). In short, change is effected by the desire for stability. So the society of value and the people working within it go through potentially dislocatory tendencies just to stay the same.11 Moreover, these dynamics of change are compounded by an additional crucial aspect of capital accumulation. As capital keeps on accumulating, its volume obviously keeps growing. The point of accumulation is to reinvest capital, valorise it, and end up with more than you started with. Hence the belief that a ‘healthy’ capitalist economy grows at 3 per cent a year (Harvey 2010, 27). Connecting the dots, this means that as capital keeps accumulating, ever more capital will have to be reinvested at the beginning of each new cycle. This means that the value production process at a given point in time will be impacted by the history of capital accumulation up to that

196  Subjectivity and the Logics of Value point. This argument attains additional saliency against the backdrop of a famous passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. (Marx 1977b, 300) Of course, there are various ways to interpret this passage. But, connected to the analysis of this section, it gives a particular inflection to the reconstitution of the society of value. According to Postone, Marx’s comments here indicate that the present time is dominated by the accumulated time of the past (Postone 1998b, 386). The reconstitution of labour relations in the context of a society dominated by time is weighed down by the tradition of all the dead generations, in the sense that these generations have already produced a certain volume of capital that has to be revalorised in order to prevent a crisis. Furthermore, this valorisation has to take place under the compulsion of a specific norm of socially necessary labour time, handed down by the same dead generations after years of productivity increases. The ‘nightmare’ thus consists in the fact that the presence of old capital and the compulsion of the social labour time norm confine the frame of action for the reconstitution of the society of value. Ever more capital has to be revalorised under ever-​higher demands in terms of socially necessary labour time. And to make matters worse, this form of domination cannot simply be traced back to the supposed headquarters of the capitalist class, but rather emerges from the particular form of social labour relations of capitalist society as such. Labour, then, dominates itself. The conclusion of all this is that the society of labour, which reconstitutes its social relations around the production of abstract labour value, unfolds a particular dynamic that is otherwise absent from your average conception of the political constitution of society. This particular political constitution of the society of value harbours the paradoxical feature that it is not just a matter of whether or not its main dimensions are reconstituted, and thereby remains hegemonic. Rather, the peculiarity of the political moment of value is that, insofar as it is articulated to remain hegemonic and stable, it is also always on the move. The reconstitution of its foundational axis –​ abstract labour –​is itself conditional upon meeting the standard set by its own historical development. Propelled forward by the logic of capital accumulation, this standard keeps rising with every new cycle of abstract labour value production. The dominating force of this dynamic consists in

Subjectivity and the Logics of Value  197 the fact that the standards of social labour time must be met in order to maintain the hegemony of value. At the same time, the growing volume of capital keeps increasing the pressure of revalorisation in every new cycle of accumulation. The crucial point is that the lived experience of working people takes place within this dominating dynamic that emerges from their own labour. Their own social being is caught up in it, and dependent on it. In this way, the question emerges how the spiralling development of capital accumulation over time coincides with the lived experience of the people of value. The contemporary politics of dissatisfaction may be a sign of the heightened tensions developed between the two antagonistic logics. Notes 1 As instructive as this citation is, Hall’s take on articulation is also slightly confusing, because in the same article he uses the example of two parts of a lorry (cab and trailer) that can, but do not necessarily have to be, ‘articulated’ together (Grossberg 1986, 53). Clarke notes that the problem with this example is that cab and trailer have been specifically designed to be joined together, and that as a result, ‘this may underestimate the work that articulation requires’ (Clarke 2015, 285). Also, it would be a stretch to say that the identity of the ‘elements’ cab and trailer is changed as a consequence of their being articulated together. But such a change of identity of the articulated elements is precisely what Laclau and Mouffe understand as articulation. 2 A full overview of the rich and vast literature on psychoanalysis and capitalism is beyond the scope of this book. The argumentation here draws on this literature with a limited and clearly delineated aim, i.e. to work towards complementing the discourse-​theoretical account of hegemonic labour relations with a compatible concept of subjectivity. It develops this by taking as its starting point not so much the debate on capitalism and psychoanalysis in general, but rather the references made to the question about capitalism and the subject in the discourse-​theoretical context itself. 3 The reason why the analysis is now moving toward the Lacanian theory of the subject is not just that it is close to Laclau’s work on hegemony. It also follows a suggestion made by Albritton, who said that Marxian theory such as Postone’s would do well to take into account the Lacanian theory of subject construction (Albritton 2004, 86). 4 To take this one step further, an additional consequence of this view is that ‘the sharp opposition between structures and agents begins to dissolve’ (Howarth 2010, 314). 5 When the argumentation speaks of ‘worker’ here, this is of course not meant to exclude the possibilities of other identities or modes of identification: it is very well possible for the identity ‘worker’ to exist in addition to a number of others. Being a worker does not exhaust someone’s identity. But the point is to account for the possibility of this partial identity within the social framework of abstract labour.

198  Subjectivity and the Logics of Value 6 Note that this is the antagonism within the social framework of abstract labour relations, and not the more fundamental antagonism between abstract labour value and directly useful work that constitutes that order in the first place (cf. Section 4.5). 7 In this regard it is interesting to note Postone’s observation that Marx’s work has undergone an important shift throughout his career. In his early work Marx still tended to think about labour and production in general, transhistorical terms, but this shifted while he was writing the Grundrisse. By the end of that book, and especially in Capital which was written even later, Marx’s categories were meant to capture the historical specificity of capitalist society only (Postone 1998a). 8 To take this argument even further, one possible implication of this is the possibility of a capitalist society without capitalists. As Postone writes: ‘Both the proletariat and the capitalist class are bound to capital, but the former is more so: capital conceivably could exist without capitalists, but it could not exist without value-​creating labour’ (Postone 1993, 357, emphasis in original). 9 The poststructuralist insistence on contingency does not mean, contrary to popular belief, that anything goes, everything is always changing, and there is never any fixity. Rather, the point is that change is always possible given the contingency of any social structure, but ‘stability is nevertheless understandable to the point where it may even appear inevitable’ (Jacobs 2018, 17). 10 Although of course strictly speaking, desire does not exist as such for a particular object. Rather, these objects are the cause that arouses desire. 11 This value-​producing dynamic of continuous change just to stay the same could be seen, in a way, as displaying a similarity to the poststructuralist dynamic of iteration, where the repetition of something also involves difference. Just like the notions of iteration and repetition, then, value production involves a kind of ‘continuity operating through partial discontinuities’ (Laclau 2000b, 78).

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Conclusion Labour, Class, and the Political

Capitalism is a fundamentally political form of society. Not just in the sense that its dislocatory dynamics may have obvious political consequences, such as the occurrence of crisis, or rising inequality. On a more substantial level, the very constitution of capitalist social relations is political. The social relations of abstract labour manifest themselves in money and exchange but their reach expands further, as they provide an entry point for people to find their place in society. Labour, in this sense, can be an opportunity to acquire an identity, to pursue ambitions, or to establish relations of mutual recognition with others. Insofar as this is a kind of social interdependence between people that is historically specific to capitalism, it should be understood as an instance of the political constitution of society. That is to say that labour relations emerge as a hegemonic framework that only persist as long as people reconstitute its contingent foundation through political struggle. Antagonism is central here. The political constitution of abstract labour relations takes shape through contestation over what counts as remunerated value-​producing labour. This excludes other practices as unremunerated reproductive work, which still remains a crucial precondition for the survival of the larger framework of value production. Furthermore, struggles take place over the expansion of the antagonistic delineation of capitalist value into non-​capitalist domains, and over the tension that arises between the logics of social need and surplus value. These continuous struggles both subvert and reinstate the precarious hegemony of labour relations. As the preceding chapters have shown, mapping discourse theory’s analytical toolkit –​the logics of difference, equivalence, antagonism, and the empty signifier –​back onto Marx’s value theory disarms Laclau and Mouffe’s criticism of labour essentialism and class reductionism. Indeed, the ensuing post-​Marxist account of labour relations rather underscores the unstable character of contemporary capitalism. Money is the starting point to illustrate this. Labour relations are mediated by money –​as Marx

DOI: 10.4324/9781003440567-7

Conclusion  203 said, in capitalism you carry your bond with society in your pocket. From a post-​Marxist perspective, money assumes the function of an empty signifier. It expresses the equivalence of abstract labour, which enables the exchange of different commodities, and gives rise to social interdependence through labour relations. In this way, the empty signifier of money delineates the antagonistic divide between abstract labour relations that produce abstract wealth as value, and its excluded outside of work practices oriented towards the production of directly useful things. Moreover, money as the expression of labour relations refers back to abstract labour value and the norms of socially necessary labour time, which set the standards of productivity and profitability for production processes. While these value time norms exert a dominating force on people’s working lives, they, too, are contingent. Far from being fixed in stone, the abstract domination of time keeps changing the conditions for labour to be socially valid. And at every step the extension of abstract labour and value production into new domains is subject to contestation, inviting the possibility of political struggle. With this central focus on the contested hegemony of labour relations, the book reintegrates Marx’s critique of political economy and Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory. Labour relations are politically constituted, and should no longer be understood in essentialist but rather in discursive terms. Importantly, this also makes it possible to elaborate the connection between the economy and discourse theory’s wider studies of contemporary politics. In fact, the argumentation of this book can be extended to establish a connection between class in the capitalist economy on the one hand, and populist politics on the other. Laclau’s influential account of populist reason understands populism as the construction of a new popular subject out of the unsatisfied demands of different groups. These demands each have their own aims –​for example better social security, improved infrastructure, or more environmental protection. But to the extent that they remain unmet by the powers that be, they become equivalent to each other in a negative sense. This means that ‘the people’ emerges on the basis of this common opposition against the authorities that, for one reason or other, do not meet their demands (Laclau 2005). Now, it is quite intuitive that the social relations of labour can give rise to economic demands, which can eventually be connected to populism. Especially in times of increasing precarity it seems that the capitalist economy can potentially lead to unhappiness with the social, economic, and political status quo. However, the challenge is to think through this connection between labour and populism in terms congruent with Laclau’s ontology. After all, capitalist labour is a domain overdetermined by class relations, and class was long thought to be incompatible with Laclau’s contingent populist reason.

204  Conclusion But the discourse theory account of hegemonic labour relations offers the opportunity to consider class in terms compatible with post-​Marxist takes on the political. Class antagonism, as this book has shown, takes on a number of different forms. Indeed, it is the interaction between them that accounts for the continued reconstitution of the hegemony of labour. Antagonism considered in terms of primitive accumulation, first, takes the form of a radical tension, an exclusion that grounds the relations of labour as a disjointed social system. As Marx discussed in Capital, primitive accumulation dissolved the feudal relations of domination and separated people from the means to provide their own daily bread, effectively inviting them to experience the freedom of capitalist labour markets. It is only here that the equivalential relations of abstract labour emerge as a contingently constructed universality. As such, this class process of separating labour from its means has ontological significance as the antagonism that grounds the relations of abstract labour, by excluding feudal work relations and the option to work for direct social need and use. This first dimension of antagonism, which also remains crucial beyond the ‘originary’ phase of capitalism, is closely related to a second. Precisely because capitalist value production presupposes the exclusion of work practices oriented towards creating directly useful things rather than abstract wealth, people’s access to the goods they need in life is mediated through the dynamics of value production. And this uncovers an antagonistic dimension within capitalist labour relations. Working is a practice. In the case of capitalist labour, there are two different logics that point towards different coinciding practices. The overarching goal of a capitalist economy is to accumulate capital by producing surplus value. The drive to produce more value and accumulate more capital leads to a rat race in which producers keep raising productivity, so as to increase the output of material wealth per social labour hour. While this may allow companies to temporarily increase the share of relative surplus value they capture, sooner or later the competition will catch up with them, raising the general standard of productivity and social labour time to a new level. This logic of surplus value, then, is oriented towards capturing more value as abstract wealth. And in the process, it keeps improving machinery, increasing productivity, and intensifying the demands set to the working process and people engaged in it. This may also lead to labour being pushed out of production processes, or of industries becoming obsolete. Standing in direct antagonistic contrast to this, there is the logic of social and material use. People go to work in order to be able to buy the things they need in life. In addition to such material considerations, people can also find a social identity in work, and they can become a valued member of society by working together with others. This logic of use, then, indicates that labour for people is oriented towards

Conclusion  205 meeting social and material needs. The crucial point here is that the logics of use and surplus value presuppose each other but also go in different antagonistic directions. The logic of surplus value exerts a dominating force over people insofar as it sets the standards of profitability their labour has to meet. At the same time, the logic of use indicates people’s orientation towards material and social need, which pushes back against the power of value norms. In other words, while the structural power of value governs the overall social conditions of labour, it can never fully dominate working people. Their need-​oriented practices keep them at a certain distance from the structural power of value. Indeed, the antagonistic tension between them uncovers the class dimension that comes along with the social relations of abstract labour. The logic of use prevents the full realisation of the logic of surplus value, and vice versa. It is the tension between these two antagonistic logics which leads to struggles over the direction of labour processes. And it must be noted that this is a contingent class antagonism. First, because it is embedded in the hegemonic social relations of abstract labour which are grounded upon the antagonistic exclusion of directly useful work. And second, because while the two logics indicate a crucial dimension of antagonistic class tension, this does not mean that class struggle will necessarily take place. Indeed, whether that happens is very much a matter of politics. All the more so because the subject of labour, too, now emerges as a contingently constructed identity. The post-​Marxist subject of labour is not the Marxist proletariat, supposedly defined by an essence of labour. Rather, it is a split subject in the Lacanian sense. Someone becomes a labourer –​ aiming for the social and material goals mentioned earlier –​by becoming part of the social order of value production. Since the latter is governed by the logic of surplus value, this means that becoming a working subject is an alienating manoeuvre, insofar as it requires accepting the authority of value. In this way, the post-​Marxist subject of labour is not fully identical with itself. As a split subject, it is rather a matter of affective identification in a symbolic order that works according to an authoritative dynamic of its own. In sum, then, the hegemony of abstract labour relations is politically reconstituted through these overdetermined class antagonisms. The antagonistic exclusion of directly useful work practices constitutes the equivalence of abstract labour value; within these relations the tension between the logics of use and of surplus value drives the class antagonism that can lead to struggles over the orientation of labour relations; and at the level of subjectivity this antagonism returns as the split subject of labour affectively attached to its partially dominated identity in the social order of value production. This, then, amounts to a post-​Marxist account of class in contemporary capitalism. Insofar as this is a fully contingent approach

206  Conclusion to class, it is compatible with a poststructuralist ontology that asks how identities are constructed through political struggle. In turn, this opens up the question about the connection between class and populism again. All the more so because the dynamic of precarisation seems to underscore the potential for the emergence of economic forms of discontent. However, it is crucial to be precise about the mode of articulation between the class dynamics of labour, the emergence of unsatisfied demands, and populist reason. Even if labour is contingent, any possible assumption of a straightforward determining relationship towards populism should be avoided. Hence it is more fruitful to conceive of the connection between the contingent class dynamics of labour and populism in terms similar to Gramsci’s take on crisis. He wrote that it may be ruled out that immediate economic crises of themselves produce fundamental historical events; they can simply create a terrain more favourable to the dissemination of certain modes of thought, and certain ways of posing and resolving questions involving the entire subsequent development of national life. (Gramsci 1971, 184) From this perspective, it becomes clear that class, crisis, or precarity by themselves do not automatically lead to populism. But to the extent that they lead to the partial disintegration of the abstract labour social framework, they may provide a ‘terrain more favourable’ for the emergence of populist projects. This makes it possible to imagine a tacit but important connection between the class dynamics of labour and populism. As Laclau says, ‘populism proceeds by articulating fragmented and dislocated demands around a new core. So some degree of crisis in the old structure is a necessary precondition of populism’ (Laclau 2005, 177). The reconstitution of hegemonic labour relations may have dislocatory effects, for example by making some jobs redundant through technological innovation, or by heightening the disciplinary pressures on labour in the search for more surplus value. Class dynamics can also become visible when the logic of surplus value acquires such weight that it threatens to eclipse the dimension of social and material need. This is the case, for example, when the housing market attracts so much capital that housing prices rise to levels many people can no longer afford. Now, the important point is that the potentially dislocatory effects of these class dynamics can give rise to corresponding demands to overcome them. A group of people may demand better job protection, for instance, or the reduction of competitive pressures, or housing prices regulation. Such demands make up the stuff of what Laclau described as populist reason: the construction of a new popular subject

Conclusion  207 out of a number of different unmet demands. And the possibility that such demands remain unmet is there, precisely because governing bodies’ possibilities to mediate the workings of the capitalist economy are limited. The dynamic of surplus value is administered by the norms of socially necessary labour time, which determines the conditions of labour and commodity production behind the backs of workers, business owners, and, indeed, governing bodies. Demands for better socio-​economic conditions that arise from dislocatory class demands, therefore, may be difficult to meet even if the political will to engage them is there. This, then, is how the connection between class and populism can be understood. Class dynamics amount to a degree of crisis or disintegration of the social relations of abstract labour. Given the importance of this social framework, demands to turn the tide may be directed at governing bodies, whose options to effect change are limited by the same abstract logic of value and capital. It is crucial to underscore that the emergence of such class demands does not in any sense determine the outcome of populist politics, nor even that populism will emerge at all. Insofar as class dislocation gives rise to new demands, it provides a favourable crisis terrain for populists to strategically piece together demands into a popular front. But it is very much a question of contingent politics if, and in what form, this happens. Indeed, the process of articulating demands together into a populist chain of equivalence also changes their character, which makes it unlikely that there will be any such thing as a ‘pure’ class demand. The interesting question that emerges instead is how –​if at all –​the demands arising from class dynamics are incorporated into populist strategies. Depending on this articulatory process, the construction of the people of which class demands are part can take on different left-​or right-​wing orientations. This is an important political process. Because it means that a class dynamic threatening a part of the work force with redundancy can become articulated as part of a wider progressive equivalential chain that takes on inequality in a comprehensive intersectional approach. Or it can be coupled with xenophobic scapegoating elements and turned into a right-​wing exclusionary project. In other words, populist reason can now investigate how class demands become part of new constructions of ‘the people’. Insofar as class processes become part of populist politics, the strict delineation between the economic and political fields starts to dissolve. Indeed, the political constitution of abstract labour relations itself underscores that the crisis tendencies of labour and value do not impinge on politics from the outside in a separate economic domain, but are part and parcel of it. Bringing the capitalist economy into discourse theory’s grasp of the political constitution of society expands the horizon of possible questions that can be taken up. It becomes possible to ask how different

208  Conclusion forms of populism amount to hegemonic projects aiming to organise political economy in specific ways. The question here is how populist project aim to give shape to economic practices and institutions, and how they run up against the structural power of value and capital that steer the organisation of society in anonymous ways. In addition to this, the discourse theory of hegemonic labour relations also results in questions following from the argumentation, which fall outside of the scope of this book. A first question revolves around the border between the inside and outside of capitalist labour relations. As the hegemony of abstract labour requires continuous expansion, it is crucial to investigate the struggles over commodification that take place around the antagonistic divide between capitalist value production and its excluded outside of directly useful work practices. How, in other words, do previously uncommodified work practices get incorporated into the abstract labour relations of value production, and how is this process contested? Further research in this direction can also chart the relationship between capitalism and non-​capitalist economic processes. Second, this book focuses on labour relations as an instance of the political institution of society, but it also points to the importance of more concrete politics of the state. There is a rich Marxian tradition of state theorising which can be brought into dialogue with the politics of hegemonic labour. Classical Marxian notions such as the role of the state in providing the conditions of appropriation, or securing state sovereignty can be of central interest here. Furthermore, it is also worthwhile to investigate the more subtle ways in which the state upholds the hegemony of labour, for example by providing assistance and subsidies for innovation so as to maintain value production at ever higher levels of productivity. And third, from a postcolonial perspective it is important to ask how the hegemony of labour interacts with other social formations. How does the ‘freedom’ of abstract labour in capitalist society relate to unfree or unequal work practices in other parts of the world? An additional important question is how the dynamics of xenophobia and racism work to construct internal hierarchies in hegemonic value production, or even exclude people from it altogether. These questions can be investigated on a more concrete empirical level. And in turn, such studies would also shed further light on the general workings of the labour hegemony, as they examine the hands-​on political struggles over the layout of capitalist society. As such, postcolonial and feminist perspectives on social relations of domination further underscore that contemporary capitalism is not a self-​enclosed system but a form of hegemony that requires continuous maintenance. Indeed, there is an important emancipatory element here, since discourse theory’s radical democratic framework offers the promise to contest and rethink systems of hegemony and domination. As Laclau and

Conclusion  209 Mouffe wrote in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, ‘every project for radical democracy implies a socialist dimension’ (Laclau and Mouffe 2014, 178). This indicates that the political strategies of progressive social movements with feminist or postcolonial aims, but also genuinely left-​ wing populist projects that entertain an open and inclusive notion of the people, stand to benefit from a critical discussion on alternative ways to organise economic relations. The question is, however, what ‘socialism’ means anymore in the 21st century. Specifically, the argument of this book leads up to the question as to what role labour plays in emancipatory projects with a ‘socialist dimension’. The increasing precarisation that characterises contemporary capitalism casts doubt on the viability of progressive projects involving an affirmative promise of full control over labour or the conditions of employment. Rather than such an affirmative perspective on labour, a radical critique seems to hold more promise. Indeed, it is here that the combined perspective of Marxian critique of political economy and post-​Marxist discourse theory shows its full potential. A radical democratic project that departs from the standpoint of hegemonic abstract labour relations has the emancipatory potential to critique and move beyond the relations of domination and precarity in contemporary capitalism. In this emancipatory critique of labour, it turns out that Marx and Laclau can speak the same language after all. References Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers. https://​ doi.org/​10.1080/​102866​3090​2971​603 Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1057/​palgr​ave.cpt.9300​255 Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 2014. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Second ed. London/​New York: Verso.

Index

Note: Endnotes are indicated by the page number followed by “n” and the note number e.g., 49n8 refers to note 8 on page 49. abstract labour: commodity fetishism and 64–​66; concrete labour vs. 9–​10, 41–​42, 56–​57, 114–​15, 117; constituted through antagonistic exclusion 112, 113, 115–​20, 192; function as transcendental signified in orthodox Marxism 95; hegemony of, upheld by political intervention 134, 140, 154–​55, 208; idealist interpretations of 41–​43, 44, 45–​48, 49n8, 53; as real abstraction 80–​81; as specific form of social mediation 54, 62, 69–​70, 70–​71, 72, 80–​81 Adorno, Theodor W. 27–​28, 89, 149 alienation 66, 115, 122n4, 160, 178, 180, 195, 205 Althusser, Louis 3–​4, 32, 35, 85n4 Amazon 145–​46 antagonism: antagonism of labour located at level of subjectivity 180–​81; antagonistic frontier as dynamic process 185; class antagonism 203–​04; contingency of 34; as continuous articulatory struggle 154; contradiction vs. 150, 152–​54; crucial to empty signifier 111; fundamental role of 5; hegemonic social formation of capitalism established through antagonistic exclusion 111, 112–​13, 115–​20, 159, 185, 192, 203; of labour and capital 145, 205, 206; limits of signifying systems

drawn by 112, 153; antagonism of concrete and abstract labour within capitalism 158–​59 Arendt, Hannah 4, 5 Aristotle 27, 66, 78–​79 articulation: articulation of commodity relations 167–​68, 180, 182; iteration vs. 169, 198n11; as mutual constitution of the individual and the structural 167; relational identity of elements 167, 197n1; role in originary constitution of abstract labour hegemony 166, 169; spurred by affective force of desire 186–​87 Balibar, Étienne 27, 28, 35 Benjamin, Walter 49n8 bioeconomy 134 Böhm-​Bawerk, Eugen von 36, 37, 38, 45, 79 Butler, Judith 150, 156, 157, 169, 172, 190 capitalism: capitalist imperialism 118–​19; capital relation not a self-​ determined mechanism 192–​93; class tension between abstract and concrete labour 115, 158–​60; commodity frontiers 119; concrete labour unique to 85n2; commodity fetishism 64–​67, 69, 75–​76, 83, 102; contingent political constitution of 84; critique of labour in capitalism vs. critique of capitalism from

Index  211 standpoint of labour 44–​45; double freedom 63–​64, 68, 85n5, 86n7, 102, 204; exploitation and class politics 77; feudalism, contrasted with 58–​59; fragility of labour relations 77; as fundamentally political form of society 202; incessant growth, need for 77, 100, 114–​15, 139, 195; increasing superfluity of labour 134–​41, 148; non-​value-​producing labour within 115–​20, 205; ontological precarity of 125; political character of labour relations 134; predatory character 119; profit motive 69; self-​ reproduction of 169–​171; specificity of labour in 55–​63, 127, 151–​52; surplus labour not specific to 39; treadmill effect 131, 142–​44; value as hegemonic form of wealth 131, 134–​35, 138, 139–​40; welfare state and 86n7 Castoriadis, Cornelius 43, 160n3 Colletti, Lucio 153 communism 32, 152, 154 Davis, Angela 118 deconstruction 94, 98 Derrida, Jacques 91, 93–​95, 121n2, 166 Dewey, John 161n5 discourse theory: blind spot for capitalist economy 1–​2, 6, 8–​9, 11, 30, 31, 207–​08; causation 182; contradiction as Hegelian-​idealist 150; democratic framework 208–​09; ‘discourse’ as misleading term 19, 20; economic analysis, limited avenues of 6; linguistic reductionism, Marxist accusations of 17, 19–​23; logics 182; as materialist 29–​30; opposed to economic reductionism 5; political ontology, aspirations to 2, 17, 19, 30–​31; radical anti-​essentialism 3; relativism, accused of 93; social constituted through political struggle 2; social object always constituted within discourse 21; see also articulation dislocation 8, 174, 192, 207

domination: by class 145–​46, 156–​60; disciplinary power 146–​47, 148, 150; entailed by universality 172; gendered and racialised 145–​46, 208; labour dominated by itself 196–​97; psychic attachment to one’s own subjection 150, 190; of time, as socially necessary labour time 141–​48, 152, 194–​95, 203 empty signifier: as alternative to transcendental signified 93–​94; antagonistic exclusion implied by 90, 111; emergence of social movements and 98; limiting play of difference and establishing equivalence 96–​97; money form, correspondence with 90–​91, 99, 105, 108–​11, 120, 171, 185, 193, 203; negativity of 96–​97, 100, 111, 112; universality and 98–​99, 100 Engels, Friedrich 182 enslavement and forced labour 119 European Commission 134 exploitation: surplus labour not specific to capitalism 39; value theory as theory of exploitation 39–​41 Federici, Silvia 118 feminism 2, 48, 118, 185, 208–​09 Foucault, Michel 146–​47, 150 Fraser, Nancy 186, 194 Friedan, Betty 185 gig economy see precarity Gramsci, Antonio 4, 206 Habermas, Jürgen 84, 127 Hall, Stuart 23, 167, 197n1 Hardt, Michael 32, 160n4 Harvey, David 160n1 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 27, 28 Hegelianism 17, 28, 31, 32, 33, 105, 150 hegemony: capitalist hegemony through exclusion of non-​value-​ producing labour 115–​20; constituted upon exclusions that return to haunt the polity 156, 157; definition of 3,

212 Index 166; field of hegemonic practice 84; hegemonic social formation through antagonistic exclusion 111, 120; internal logic of hegemonic formations 182–​83; role of articulatory practices in upholding 165, 166; value as hegemonic form of wealth 131, 134–​35, 138, 139–​40 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (HSS): articulation, definition of 167; ‘discursive’ and ‘non-​ discursive’ distinction, rejection of 21, 101; logic of equivalence 93, 100; Marxian political economy not closely engaged 32; Marxist resistance to 19–​23; Marx’s value theory 100; post-​Marxist transition as ontological change 20 Honneth, Axel 191 Horkheimer, Max 89, 121n1 idealism, concept of 27–​29, 30 identity of the worker 34–​35 iteration 169 Kautsky, Karl 42 Keynes, John Maynard 137, 139 Krugman, Paul 139 labour: abstract vs. concrete 9–​10, 41, 103, 168, 191; concrete labour unique to capitalist society 85n2; contingent necessity to capitalism 53; critique of labour in capitalism vs. critique of capitalism from standpoint of labour 44–​45; feudal organisation of 58–​60; groundlessness of 134; as human essence in Marxism 7; ideological fantasies related to work 188–​90; immaterial labour 160n4; increasing superfluity of, in capitalism 134–​41, 148; labour time as sole measure of wealth vs. drive to reduce labour time 142; non-​value-​producing labour, as antagonistic to abstract labour value 113, 115–​20, 174, 178, 192, 208; socially necessary labour time 128, 129, 130–​31, 134, 136, 141, 160n3, 194, 196, 203, see also domination; as social mediation,

in capitalism 10, 60–​62, 113, 142, 144, 168, 202; utility and 78–​80; see also abstract labour Lacan, Jacques 91, 176–​82; see also psychoanalysis Laclau, Ernesto: capitalism not self-​enclosed totality 120; constructed universality 54; contingent constitution of society 89; contingency of identity 92–​93; ‘discourse’ and ‘practice’ as interchangeable terms 19; domination, entailed by universality 172; exaggeration of Marx’s idealism 32–​33, 35, 47; idealist misunderstanding of abstract labour 45, 46–​48, 49n7; identity of the worker 34–​35; logics 182–​83, 184; Marxist essentialism and determinism, critique of 9, 150; neglect of Marx’s value theory 18, 32, 36–​37, 38, 41, 47; political prioritized over social 2–​3; on populism 11, 48, 203, 206; poststructuralist reinterpretation of Marxism 5–​6, 9, 17; psychoanalysis and Marxism 173–​74, 186; radical construction of ‘the people’ 89; relations of production not intrinsically antagonistic 33–​34, 181; sedimentation 169; social articulation of universalities 89; social identities constructed through difference 98; undecidability 175–​76; universals, discursive construction of 98–​100, 110; value theory as theory of exploitation 40; Žižek, critique of 17, 192; see also antagonism; empty signifier; Laclau and Mouffe language games 26, 29, 183 Lefort, Claude: attitudes to Marx 86n8; contingent political negotiation of social order 72–​73, 74, 75, 77, 78 83, 166; political vs. politics 73–​74, 76, 84; social hierarchy of monarchy 71–​72; symbolically empty place of power in democracy 5, 72, 75, 77, 78, 83; theological-​political matrix of monarchy 71

Index  213 logic of equivalence 93, 96, 97, 112 logics: concept of 182–​83; fantasmatic logics 186–​88, 189; political logics 184–​86, 187–​88, 189–​90; social logics 183–​85, 187–​88, 189, 190, 191, 194 Luddites 141 Luxemburg, Rosa 118–​19, 122n7 Marx, Karl: 1844 Manuscripts 122n4; abstract vs. concrete labour 9–​10, 41–​42, 55–​58, 79, 91–​92, 103, 113–​14; alleged idealism of 18, 31–​32; commodity fetishism 64, 65, 66, 69, 76, 178; Communist Manifesto 33; Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 3, 32, 33, 35; Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 180; Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 196; feudal organisation of labour 58–​59, 60, 71–​72; Grundrisse 67, 127, 131, 134–​35, 138, 198n7; labour value as social 36–​37, 44, 67–​68, 113–​14; materialism vs. idealism 28–​29, 30, 31, 32–​33, 34; primitive accumulation 112, 116, 204; reproduction of worker as wage-​ labourer 170, 172; social substance of abstract labour 57–​58, 62, 79, 80; specificity of labour in capitalism 55–​63; Theses on Feuerbach 28; utility and labour 78–​80; value theory foundational to work of 18, 35, 37, 38–​39; see also value theory Marxism: classical focus on class 5, 54, 70, 125, 141, 146, 149; collapse of capitalism 121, 149; critique of labour in capitalism vs. critique of capitalism from standpoint of labour 44–​45; determinist tendencies 165, 182; economic essentialism, accused of 3–​5, 17, 19, 173; function of abstract labour as transcendental signified 95; immiseration of proletariat 149; labour as human essence 7; reification of category of class 74–​75; subject as effect of capital’s structures 173; transhistorical notion of labour

42–​46, 53, 55, 70, 81; value theory as theory of exploitation 40–​41 materialist thinking, concept of 28 Mouffe, Chantal: democratic channelling of antagonism 5; on populism 48; see also Hegemony and Socialist Strategy Negri, Antonio 32, 160n4 overdetermination 7 Plato 27 Polanyi, Karl 122n6 populism: class and 11, 48, 206–​07; contingency of direction of 207; crisis in social structure as condition of 206; demands for jobs 190; demands to resuscitate dead industries 141; left-​wing 209; miscellany of unsatisfied demands, popular subject constructed from 203, 206–​07 post-​capitalist form of production: as antagonistic vs. as contradiction to capitalism 150, 152–​55; class dimension to possibility of 156–​57; decreased labour time from increased productivity 152, 157; domination of time, abolition of 152, 157; as latent possibility 139, 140, 149, 150; prevented by reassertion of value hegemony 152, 153, 154 postcolonialism 8–​9, 208–​09 Postone, Moishe: abstraction vs. individual actions 126, 156, 189, 190; abstract labour 9–​10, 46, 53–​55, 62, 67, 70–​71, 75, 81–​83, 151; Capital, as subject to misunderstanding 49n5; capitalist society without capitalists 198n8; class domination downplayed by 156, 157–​58; commodity fetishism 64–​65, 75, 76, 83; critique of labour in capitalism vs. critique of capitalism from standpoint of labour 44, 45, 47; Derrida’s critique of Marx 121n2; domination of time 141, 142, 144–​45, 146, 194; feudal organisation of labour 59–​60; historically specific forms

214 Index of social wealth 131; Marx’s shift from transhistoricism 198n7; post-​ capitalist society 139, 140, 149, 151, 152–​53; relative surplus value 129; return to Marx’s core project 9, 75; self-​mediation of labour in capitalism 60–​62, 66, 68, 70–​71, 75, 76, 81, 114, 161n6; socially general productive capacities 137, 139, 156; social matrix 168; superfluity of people 140; treadmill effect of capitalism 131, 142–​44; value vs. material wealth 127, 160n1 poststructuralism: contingent constitution of society 10, 53, 54, 62, 70, 165, 198n9; contingent construction of subjectivity 173; discourse as social relations 20; idealist misunderstandings of Marx 42, 47–​48, 55, 75 ontology 12, 14, 45, 62, 165, 206; political, focus on 9, 10, 63, 70; reinterpreting Marxist theory 5–​6, 43, 75 precarity of employment 11, 53, 77, 78, 84, 119, 125, 140, 155–​56, 195, 203, 206, 209 primitive accumulation 112, 116–​17, 122n5, 157, 169–​70, 171, 204 psychoanalysis: desire as link between subject of lack and symbolic order 181–​82, 186, 198n10; fantasy 187; incompatibility with determinist Marxism 173; Lacanian real 191–​192; Lacanian subject of lack 176–​77, 186; mediated access to dimension of need 179; Oedipus complex 178–​79; see also subjectivity Rancière, Jacques 4–​5 real abstraction 80–​81 Ricardo, David 36, 37, 39, 49n4, 55 Rubin, Isaak Illich 57 Saussure, Ferdinand de 91, 92, 94, 168, 169 Schumpeter, Joseph 125 Smith, Adam 36, 37, 39 social inequality 12, 40, 78, 156, 202, 207

socialism 209 Sohn-​Rethel, Alfred 80 subjectivity: affective investment in symbolic order of value 181–​82, 188–​89, 190–​91, 205; agency 177, 184, 191; antagonism of labour located at level of subjectivity 180–​81; contingent construction of 173; as fault line between orthodox Marxism and post-​Marxism 173, 174–​75; Lacanian subject of lack 176–​78; subject vs. subjectivity 173; subject of use value vs. subject of exchange value 178; undecidability, subject constituted by 175–​76; worker as Lacanian subject of lack 179–​82, 205 technology and knowledge: as determinants of material wealth production 132–​35, 137, 152; superfluity of labour and superfluity of people 140–​41, 155 transcendental signified 93, 94, 95 Trump, Donald 141 valuation studies 161n5 value theory: alleged obsolescence of 125, 127, 133; circuit of capital accumulation (M-​C-​M’) 114–​15, 128, 158, 159, 170–​71, 174, 178, 180, 183, 189, 192–​94, 195–​97; circuit of C-​M-​C 114–​15, 158, 171, 174, 178, 179, 180, 183, 189; commodity as product of social labour relations 102, 166; constant and variable capital 135–​37, 139, 140, 195; exchange value 61, 62, 65, 66, 67–​68, 73, 92, 107; expanded form of value 105–​06; exploitation and 39–​40; as foundation of Marx’s work 18, 35, 37, 38–​39; general form of value 107–​11; hidden abode of commodity production 125; isolated form of value 102–​05; money form 90, 99, 106, 108–​11, 120, 171, 185, 193, 202–​03; needs of workers mediated by value 179–​80; as non-​material 25; post-​ Marxist reimagining of 7; price 36,

Index  215 38–​39, 45, 55, 160n2; relational character of commodity form 103; relative and equivalent value 103–​05, 121n3; relative surplus value 129–​30, 133, 134, 142, 148; surplus value 114, 115, 125, 126, 128–​31, 135–​36, 138, 148, 151, 152, 157, 204–​05; use value vs. exchange value 41, 57, 60, 92, 101, 104, 105, 106, 107, 127–​28, 168, 191, 204–​05; value as hegemonic form of wealth 131, 134–​35, 138, 139–​40; value vs. material wealth 127, 131–​35, 136–​37, 138–​39,

142–​43, 160n1, 161n5; see also abstract labour; labour Weber, Max 84 Wertkritik tradition 85n1, 127 Wilders, Geert 85n6 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 26, 29, 183 Žižek, Slavoj: antagonism 181; capital as Lacanian real 191–​92; exploitation 165; fantasy as ideological construction 187; on ideology 66, 190; Laclau’s critique of 17, 192; value and price 37