In the Marxian Workshops: Producing Subjects 9781786603609, 1786603608

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In the Marxian Workshops

New Politics of Autonomy Series Editors: Saul Newman and Martina Tazzioli In recent years, we have witnessed an unprecedented emergence of new forms of radical politics – from Tahrir Square, Gezi Park and the global Occupy movement, to Wikileaks and hacktivism. What is striking about such movements is their rejection of leadership structures and the absence of political demands and agendas. Instead, their originality lies in the autonomous forms of political life they engender. The New Politics of Autonomy book series is an attempt to make sense of this new terrain of anti-political politics, and to develop an alternative conceptual and theoretical arsenal for thinking the politics of autonomy. The series investigates political, economic and ethical questions raised by this new paradigm of autonomy. It brings together authors and researchers who are engaged, in various ways, with understanding contemporary radical political movements and who approach the theme of autonomy from different perspectives: political theory, philosophy, ethics, literature and art, psychoanalytic theory, political economy, and political history.

Series Titles Spaces of Governmentality, by Martina Tazzioli The Composition of Movements to Come, by Stevphen Shukaitis Foucault and the Making of Subjects, edited by Laura Cremonesi, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini and Martina Tazzioli Italian Critical Thought: Genealogies and Categories, edited by Dario Gentili, Elettra Stimilli and Glenda Garelli In the Marxian Workshops: Producing Subjects, by Sandro Mezzadra Anarchisms, Postanarchisms and Ethics, by Benjamin Franks

In the Marxian Workshops Producing Subjects

Sandro Mezzadra Translated by Yari Lanci

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2018, Sandro Mezzadra Mezzadra, S. (2014) Nei cantieri marxiani: il soggetto e la sua produzione. Roma: manifestolibri. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-7866-0358-6 PB 978-1-7866-0359-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN: 978-1-78660-358-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-78660-359-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-1-78660-360-9 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Abbreviations to Marx’s Works 

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Introduction to the English Edition

ix

Prefacexvii 1 Marx Beyond Marxism

1

2 Production of Subjectivity

9

3 A Twofold Beginning

17

4 The Subject of History, the Subject in History

27

5 Living Labour

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6 Hobbesian Spectres

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7 Labour Power

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8 Class (Struggle)

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9 ‘The Political Form at Last Discovered’

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10 Marx in Algiers

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Conclusion95 Appendix: The Topicality of Prehistory: A New Reading of Marx’s Analysis of ‘So-called Primitive Accumulation’

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Bibliography121 Index133 About the Author143 v

Abbreviations to Marx’s Works

18B C, I C, II C, III CCHPR CCPE CF CGP CHDS CSF CWF

The Eighteenth Brumaire, in Cowling, M. and Martin, J. (eds.). Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire. (Post)modern Interpretations. London: Pluto, 2002, pp. 19–109. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Translated by B. Fowkes. London: Penguin Books, 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 2. Translated by D. Fernbach. London: Penguin Books, 1992. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3. Translated by D. Fernbach. London: Penguin Books, 1991. Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in Early Writings. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992, pp. 243–57. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in MECW, 29, pp. 257–420. ‘Concerning Feuerbach’, in Early Writings. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992, pp. 421–23. ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, in The First International and After. Political Writings, vol. 3. Edited by D. Fernbach. London; New York: Verso, 2010, pp. 339–59. Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State, in Early Writings. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992, pp. 57–198. ‘The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850’, in Surveys from Exile. Political Writings, vol. 2. Edited by D. Fernbach. London; New York: Verso, 2010, pp. 35–142. ‘Civil War in France’, in The First International and After. Political Writings, vol. 3. Edited by D. Fernbach. London; New York: Verso, 2010, pp. 187–236. vii

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EPM G GI HF JQ MCP

Abbreviations to Marx’s Works

Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in Early Writings. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992, pp. 279–400. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by M. Nicolaus. London: Penguin Books, 1993. The German Ideology, in MECW, 5, pp. 19–539. The Holy Family, in MECW, 4, pp. 5–211. ‘On the Jewish Question’, in Early Writings. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992, pp. 211–41. Marx, K. and Engels, F. The Communist Manifesto. Translated by Samuel Moore. London: Penguin Books, 2002.

MECW,   1–50:  Marx, K. and Engels, F. Collected Works. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975–2005. PP The Poverty of Philosophy. Answer to the Philosophy of Poverty by M. Proudhon, in MECW, 6, pp. 105–212. RIPP ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’ (Unpublished Chapter VI), in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Translated by B. Fowkes. London: Penguin Books, 1990, pp. 948–1065. VPP ‘Value, Price, and Profit’, in MECW, 20, pp. 101–49.

Introduction to the English Edition

I am particularly happy to write this introduction to the English edition of my book on Marx, which came out in Italian in 2014. It is a short book, which weaves a pretty dense conceptual fabric interlacing a close reading of Marx’s texts and the contemporary debates surrounding the question of the ‘production of subjectivity’. I am grateful to Yari Lanci for the passion and commitment he devoted to the translation of the book. New questions and problems have arisen in discussion with him over the last months, demonstrating that translating a text can be something different and more challenging than simply transposing words and sentences from one language into another. I have to thank Yari for reminding me in a very concrete and effective way of that point, which is often made in studies on the politics of translation, simply through the way in which he performed the ‘task of the translator’. Working on such diverse topics as migration, borders, postcolonial criticism, globalization, the ‘extractive’ nature of contemporary capitalism, the transformations of labour as well as of such important political concepts as citizenship and sovereignty, I have entered multiple dialogues and collaborations in the last decade. I like sharing the practice of writing. I even appreciate – both scholarly and politically – the shadow of anonymity that hangs over cowritten texts. But the name of Marx, an ‘accursed but still clandestine immigrant as he was all his life’ (Derrida 2006: 219), haunts any intellectual and political collaboration I am part of, any of the writings that matter (at least to me) in my attempt to make sense of this distracted world – and to contribute to its radical transformation. Just to give a couple of examples: Brett Neilson and I could not have written Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor without harking back to Marx’s notions of labour power, abstract labour and world market. My work on extraction, again with Brett ix

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Neilson and Verónica Gago, would not have been possible without the new reading of Marx’s analysis of the ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ that I foreshadowed in an essay of 2007 (reprinted here as an appendix) and that we further developed in engaging discussions in India and Latin America. Again, we could not have been able to grasp the extractive nature of finance without picking up on some aspects of Marx’s analysis of ‘interest bearing capital’ in volume 3 of Capital, developed in front of a completely different financial world. And to close a list that could easily go on: my contribution to the collective, ongoing and transnational discussion on the ‘autonomy of migration’ would be unconceivable without a critical reflection upon the question of the mobility of labour, and more generally upon the conditions of the ‘encounter’ between labour power and capital in Marx’s critique of political economy. Do you remember Salvador Dali’s 1931 painting, ‘Six Apparitions of Lenin on a Piano’? Maybe it is just a joke, but I like to think of the repeated apparition of the name of Marx in my own and in my collaborative work according to that image. And, to make sense of that repeated apparition, I decided not to attempt to explain what it means for me reading Marx today, but to give an instance of a close reading of his text combined with – or maybe better – driven by contemporary concerns. There is hardly a philosophical and political notion whose status has changed so dramatically since Marx’s death as the concept of subject. I am convinced that behind these mutations there is a material history of struggles, insurgencies and tears that any attempt to read Marx today has to theoretically take into account. Taking the ‘production of subjectivity’, with a consciously anachronistic move, as the guiding thread for proposing a reading of Marx is an attempt to open up a space in which it becomes possible to stage a kind of posthumous dialogue between Marx and struggles that, like those around sex and race, far exceed the boundaries of his political imagination and in many ways challenge the limits of his critique of capitalism. I will come back to this point towards the end of this introduction. For the moment, it is important for me to say that reading Marx today does not only mean to take stock of the dramatic transformations of capitalism, according to a ‘revolutionary’ logic that Marx himself had so effectively grasped. It also implies, taking into due consideration, the fact that these transformations have been driven by extraordinary labour and social struggles, which have invented new languages of liberation and established new parameters of critique. This is a crucial point, which often gets lost in contemporary critical discussions and that my intellectual and political training in Italian workerism (and in particular my ongoing conversation with Toni Negri) allows me to emphasize. The kind of ‘suspension’, or ‘bracketing’ (to use a phenomenological category), of the history and problematic of Marxism that I propose in the

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book is meant to enable a reading of Marx’s texts up to the challenges that shape our present. ‘Production of subjectivity’ is a phrase that necessarily points to the work of Michel Foucault and to his deep influence on the language of contemporary critical theory (an influence not necessarily coincident with a serious engagement with his work). As the reader will see while going through the chapters that follow, I do think that attempts to stage a (renewed) dialogue between Marx and Foucault around specific constellations of problems (following, for instance, the lead of Pierre Macherey and Sandro Chignola) can be highly productive. There is definitely a ‘Foucauldian moment’ in Marx, in his analysis of the fabrication of the worker’s body and in his ‘biopolitical’ reflections upon ‘relative surplus population’ as, among others, Étienne Balibar (2015: 93–94) maintains (and there is definitely a ‘Marxian moment’ in Foucault, as, for instance, the recent publication of his lectures at the Collège de France in 1972–1973, The Punitive Society [2015], allows us once again to grasp). But I follow Balibar, who has been another crucial interlocutor for my work in the last years, when he cautions us from any simple and idyllic ‘reconciliation’ between Marx and Foucault. While precisely the question of subjectivity can serve as a terrain of creative encounter between the works of these two thinkers, one has always to remain aware that, at the end of the day, any encounter between them is also necessarily a clash – between different paths of thought and, to follow again Balibar, different ‘anthropologies’. After the ups and downs of ‘Freudo-Marxism’, no ‘Foucaulto-Marxism’ is in sight. Our attempt to read Marx today can definitely mobilize concepts and questions from contemporary critical theory, but it cannot nurture any search for easy syntheses. It must proceed without guarantees, to paraphrase the title of a memorable intervention by Stuart Hall (1986), and it necessarily occupies a position that remains transversal, at the same time internal and external with respect to the critical debates of our present. Books on Marx have multiplied in recent years, at least since the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and in view of the second centenary of his birth in 2018, to mention two quite different circumstances. This is not the place to discuss the main trends in this growing literature on Marx, which evolves alongside the steady advancement of the new critical edition of his and Engels’s works. To limit myself to just two examples from the Anglophone world, I have very much enjoyed reading William Clare Roberts’s Marx’s Inferno (2017), a sophisticated and historically grounded attempt to read Capital as a work of political theory. Although following different lines and deploying a different reading, this is something that I also try to do in my book. From another point of view, Harry Harootunian’s Marx after Marx (2015) enables a recovery of the concept of ‘formal subsumption of labour under capital’ for the present

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that – although not unproblematic (see Osborne 2016) – nicely fits some of my reflections upon the historical time of capital and upon the multiplication and heterogenization of labour (as well as of capital’s modalities of capture and exploitation of living labour). It would be easy to go on with examples of books on Marx that I find interesting and challenging, to build a map of interpretations within which to locate my own reading. Such a map should be immediately widened, to include the ongoing scholarly interest for strands of Marxism that I find inspiring for a number of reasons – workerism first of all (see, for instance, the work of Viewpoint Magazine), but also the Althusserian reading of Marx and its multiple later mutations and deviations (see, for instance, Nesbitt 2017), as well as uses of Marx outside the ‘West’ that we have at last learned to read beyond the canon of ‘Third-worldism’ (see, for instance, Walker 2016 and Rozichner 2015). Readers of In the Marxian Workshops will find several hints that enable the drawing of such maps both in the text and in the epigraphs that open each chapter. Let me add here a critical word with respect to current debates surrounding the work of Marx. It should be clear from the very focus of my book (the production of subjectivity) that the interpretation of Marx it pursues is quite far from the so-called Neue-Marx-Lektüre (‘New reading of Marx’), which has also become quite influential in the Anglophone world in recent years. This is not to deny the relevance of the textual analysis provided in the 1960s and 1970s by such scholars as Alfred Schmidt, Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt from within a critical dialogue with Adorno and the developments of the Frankfurt school, and more recently by Michael Heinrich. The problem is that in the particular reading they perform of the critique of political economy the emphasis on the ‘value form’ swallows up the very space of antagonism, which is for Marx the space of class struggle and of a politics of liberation (for a critical discussion of the Neue-Marx-Lektüre, see Reitter 2015). Simply put: class struggle and a politics of liberation are for me the two main questions that we have to continue to think about in the wake of, with and beyond Marx – in front of the transformations of capitalism and of a history and present of struggles that are obscured rather than illuminated by an approach that posits and emphasizes, as the specific object of the Marxian critique, ‘the essential determinants of capitalism, those elements which must remain the same regardless of all historical variations so that we may speak of “capitalism” as such’ (Heinrich 2012: 31). I have to say something more about the way in which my reading of Marx is connected with a specific analysis of contemporary capitalism – which also means with an attempt to critically map the conditions of class struggle and of a politics of liberation in the present. I was mentioning earlier my collaborative work on extraction and the attempt to forge an expanded notion of

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extraction as a way to grasp the peculiarity of capitalism today (see Gago and Mezzadra 2018; Mezzadra and Neilson 2015; 2017). We are not the only ones who follow this analytical and critical thread (see, for instance, Sassen 2014; Hardt and Negri 2017). But what do we mean by extraction? Our engagement with Latin American debates surrounding the notion of ‘neo-extractivism’ has lead us to grasp the relevance of actual extractive activities (from mining to fracking to extensive cultivations as in the cases of soy and oil palm trees) in many parts of the world as well as of the connected processes of dispossession that often reproduce colonial blueprints and are contested by powerful struggles (within which indigenous people are often at the forefront). At the same time, we have to start asking ourselves whether it is possible to say that an extractive dimension is characteristic of the operations of contemporary capital also in other strategic domains of economic activity. Looking at finance and logistics, at the spread of ‘data mining’ and at the emergence of so-called platform capitalism, we have indeed mapped a set of processes and operations in which capital draws its valorization from intruding into an ‘outside’, extracting value from huge deposits of social activity and from multifarious forms of social cooperation. These processes and operations play a crucial role in the contemporary composition of what we can call with Marx Gesamtkapital, ‘total’ or ‘aggregate capital’; more precisely, they tend to take a position of command upon that composition. This accounts for the hypothesis regarding the extractive nature of contemporary capitalism, although this does not imply that contemporary capitalism as a whole is to be considered as extractive. What is particularly important for us is to analyse the articulation of the extractive operations I have briefly mentioned with other operations, which can be driven by a significantly different logic (an industrial logic, for instance). Emphasizing the extractive nature of contemporary capitalism leads me to further develop the notion of a global multiplication of labour that Neilson and I forged in Border as Method. The structural heterogeneity of living labour appears to be further intensified once one takes into account the huge variety of forms of labour, activity, and life that the operations of capital in domains like finance, logistics and extraction target as ‘source’ of valorization. Social cooperation emerges against this background as the main productive force, although there is a need to emphasize that this social cooperation is far from being homogeneous and smooth. It is rather fractured and characterized by a structural gap with respect to the ways in which the localized and specific subjective experience of living labour relates to the common power of cooperation. ‘Labour power’, a crucially important concept for the critique of political economy, appears split into the two dimensions identified by Marx, which means its rooting in the common human potency and its being always embodied in the singular ‘living personality’ of a proletarian

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(see chapter 7). Under such conditions one of the most relevant theoretical tasks becomes for us to rethink the notion of exploitation (see Mezzadra and Neilson 2018). Our analysis of the extractive dimension of contemporary capitalism definitely leads us to engage with David Harvey’s notion of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ and to underscore the continuities with the scene of primitive accumulation, where extraction in literal sense played a prominent role. But Harvey’s reference to a kind of conceptual opposition between ‘accumulation by dispossession’ and ‘accumulation by exploitation’ is predicated upon a very traditional understanding of the latter and may obscure the persistent relevance of exploitation. A notion of exploitation that includes dispossession as one of its constitutive moments may allow to theoretically and politically come to terms with a situation in which the valorization of capital continues to be dependent on the exploitation of labour, activity and life of a multitude of subjects, but this exploitation takes forms significantly different from those famously analysed by Marx in Capital. The explosion of ‘free’ wage labour, which Marx considered as a kind of standard for the regulation of the relations between capital and labour under capitalism, is particularly relevant in this regard. On the one hand, this is because the generalization of ‘free’ wage labour was considered by Marx as the condition for a process of steady homogenization and equalization of labour and of the composition of the working class – as it is particularly apparent in his analysis of the transition from manufacture to large-scale industry in chapters 14 and 15 in the first volume of Capital. On the other hand, the emphasis on the role of the contract in the ‘sale and purchase of labour power’ (chapter 6) leads Marx to forge a ‘dialectical’ understanding of the relation between capital and labour – further developed in his analysis of the struggle for ‘a normal working day’ (chapter 10) and doomed to serve as a basis for both a revolutionary project (which aimed at breaking the dialectics of capital and labour) and reformism (which aimed at ‘normalising’ exploitation through a political management of that very dialectics). Independently of the critique that Marx’s theory of ‘free’ wage labour has attracted over recent decades (see Mezzadra 2011a), it is clear that nowadays we are confronted with a composition of living labour characterized by a panoply of subjective figures, juridical and nonjuridical regulations, ‘skills’, knowledges and ‘cultures’. Heterogeneity and multiplicity are key features of this composition across diverse geographical scales, while at the same time taking seriously the hypothesis of the extractive nature of contemporary capitalism leads to displacing the idea of a ‘dialectics’ between capital and labour and to stressing the ubiquity of the spectres of violence and compulsion – in the multifarious forms they may take (well beyond ‘the silent compulsion of economic relations’, which for Marx played such an important role in the framing of the relation between capital and labour).

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A ‘motley crowd of workers of all callings, ages and sexes, who throng around us more urgently than did the souls of the slain around Ulysses’ (C, I: 364): this powerful image forged by Marx in order to conjure up the kind of human raw material equalized and flattened by capital in the age of large-scale industry is a good snapshot, to be further developed and substantiated, of the composition of contemporary living labour. The exploitation of this labour by capital, however, is not necessarily predicated upon its equalization. The opposite is the case today: insofar as capitalism takes on a pronounced extractive nature we are confronted with an intensification of exploitation that goes hand in hand with its extension – to the point that, to mention just a couple of instances, the poorest of the poor are exploited through the financialization of their life, the boundaries between production and reproduction are blurred by the penetration of finance onto households, mobility and migration connect and recombine geographical scales of exploitation and resistance, digital platforms continuously work the boundary between work, activity and life. In front of this profound heterogeneity, a whole set of differences (from race to sex, from nation to caste and ethnicity) enables a differential management of labour power not simply at the point of production but also wherever its production and reproduction is at stake. While Marx’s theory of labour power and exploitation continues to be a crucial source of inspiration today, the work in keeping with Marx’s spirit requires one to go beyond the letter of his texts. What becomes particularly relevant in this regard, as I maintain in chapter 8 of this book, is to politicize the analysis of the proletarian body, which means to carefully investigate the ways in which the construction of that body as a racialized or sexualized body facilitates forms of domination and exploitation that acquire a differential character. It is working along these lines that Marx can be rediscovered and reappropriated by antiracist and feminist movements, as it is happening in many parts of the world – and that common grounds for new and even unexpected political alliances and coalitions can be established. ‘Difference’, simply put, is not only an element of division and fragmentation of living labour. The proletarian body is also a field of struggle and subjectivation, and the contemporary composition of living labour bears the traces of a long history of struggles that have politicized difference. My emphasis on heterogeneity and multiplicity is an attempt to grasp the workings of these two sides of difference across the lines of conflict that shape capitalism today. Such an emphasis necessarily raises a set of questions regarding the possibility to rethink and to politically reactivate another concept lying at the centre of Marx’s thinking and politics: the concept of class (see Mezzadra and Neumann 2017). The balance and the gaps between the subjective and objective aspect of class haunted Marx since his early years, although in Marxism

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there is a clear tendency to posit class as a kind of already constituted and objectively existent social formation. ‘The formation of the proletariat into a class,’ on the contrary, is the immediate aim of the communists, according to the Manifesto (MCP: 234). The process of that ‘formation’ is for us the immediate problem, we could gloss. There is a need to repeat that for Marx a process of steady homogenization and equalization of labour provided the ground for ‘the formation of the proletariat into a class’. Is it possible to think of class formation while emphasising the deep heterogeneity of contemporary living labour? I think that, besides being possible, it is also necessary. The concept of class invites us to locate the principle of radical division that allows us to define the field of exploited and dominated subjects within which an anticapitalist politics must necessarily be rooted. This field is becoming wider and wider, comprising the huge majority of the population of the world, as we learn, for instance, from so many reports and investigations on the surge of inequalities in the distribution of wealth in the present. A class politics has to work within this field prompting processes of militant enquiry of the composition of living labour, mapping the multitude of experiences of exploitation and struggle that shape that composition, and weaving alliances, coalitions and complicities capable to articulate heterogeneous processes of subjectivation without suppressing their specific, partial and even ‘minoritarian’ character. This is something quite different from what Marx and Engels had in mind when they wrote of ‘the formation of the proletariat into a class’. Nevertheless, it is a project that we cannot think of and pursue without Marx – without going back to his texts and reading them under the pressure of our present.

Preface

As far as I’m concerned, Marx doesn’t exist. I mean, the sort of entity constructed around a proper name, signifying at once a certain individual, the totality of his writings, and an immense historical process deriving from him. . . . It’s always possible to make Marx into an author, localisable in terms of a unique discursive physiognomy, subject to analysis in terms of originality or internal coherence. After all, people are perfectly entitled to ‘academize’ Marx. But that means misconceiving the kind of break he effected. —Michel Foucault, ‘Questions on Geography’ (1976)1 My work has developed as Nietzsche would have wished, for he did not love authors who strained after the intentional, deliberate production of a book, but rather those whose thoughts formed a book spontaneously and without premeditation. Many projects for books occur to me as I lie awake, but I know beforehand that I shall carry out only those to which I am summoned by an imperious force. —José Carlos Mariátegui, Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality (1928)2

In this short book, Marx is read beyond Marxism. There is no claim to show why ‘he was right’ and no attempt is pursued to confine him to his time, possibly in order to include his work in a canon of ‘classics’. Marx is rather confronted with the present, in keeping with a lesson I learned once and for all from an Italian classic text published in the 1960s (see Tronti 1971). To do so, however, it is necessary to keep a safe distance from the temptation of an all-too-immediate transposition of his thought in our present, which has become fashionable as of late (particularly after the beginning of xvii

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the global economic crisis in 2007–2008). Also, as a principle of method, one should be wary of any continuity and any tradition, even the most noble ones. A way to gain a renewed access to Marx’s texts for a critical understanding of the present is by ‘suspending’ the style of reading and problematics constructed and sedimented by the long history of Marxism. The following pages constitute an exercise in the reading of Marx through the prism of a fundamental theme in contemporary critical debates: the production of subjectivity. Evidently, this formula is not to be found in Marx’s texts. Such an anachronism, which I am consciously carrying out, is rather aimed at generating a sort of temporal short-circuit so as to shed new light on Marx’s problematic and better define ours. Besides, Marx’s originality corresponds to his quality of being ‘untimely’, to recall the original French title of a compelling book by Daniel Bensaïd (2009). In other words, his originality derives from a commitment to his time that is absolute only inasmuch as it places itself in the crack that shatters this time’s unity, opening it up to the tension generated by the critique and the materiality of class struggle. This inaugural gesture in Marx’s theoretical and political journey is that which I venture to release and ‘reactivate’ in this book. Around the theme of the production of subjectivity, I will organize the reading of some key moments in his oeuvre, arranged in chronological order. Mine is nonetheless a partial reading, meaning that it is supported by specific interpretative choices and by a selection of texts that may seem arbitrary to some, both of which cannot always be irreproachably justified by the will to write a short book (the same could be said of the use I make of the immense critical literature on Marx, which is strictly limited to the requirements for the development of my argument). The ‘impetuosity’ ascribed to the young Marx in a satire that circulated among the Young Hegelians in Berlin, the force with which he attempted to ‘to seize the celestial vault and lower it to earth’ (see Mezzadra and Ricciardi 2002: 11), is to be recognized as the underlying character of his thought and life. This remark is not solely concerning Marx’s revolutionary activism, as the refusal to feel at ease in the ‘present state of things’ is at the origins of an exceptional drive for innovation also characterizing his relation with the sciences of his time. Through a reference to Michel Serres, Bensaïd defined Marx’s critique in the terms of a ‘science of borders’ (2009: 222). Since I have extensively worked on the theme of borders in the last few years, I could not find this definition more fitting. In effect, Marx’s work always moved through and hovered over the borders of numerous ‘disciplines’, chiefly philosophy and political economy, but also others spanning from history to natural sciences, from the theory of law to anthropology. From within these disciplines, Marx constantly exposed their limits and put into practice what could be defined, by way of another anachronism, as a border

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epistemology: the only adequate epistemology he could deploy to tackle his fundamental political problem, that is, the problem of liberation. Again, Marx seems so untimely that he truly appears ‘for our times’ as regards politics, critique and theory.3 The dual distancing movement I mentioned above (from Marxism and the present, strictly speaking) is thus a preliminary move, which aims at highlighting a specific contemporaneity of Marx’s writings. On the basis of what I have hitherto argued, it goes without saying that this book is not an introduction to the work of Marx (among many other things it does not claim to be). On the contrary, a few parts of this book may seem difficult to read for those not familiar with his texts and, more generally, reading it perhaps requires more time than it might appear just by checking the number of its pages. Moreover, the exercise in the reading of Marx proposed here certainly carries no claim of being the only legitimate approach to his work, today. There is still, for instance, a considerable amount of philological work to be done on the texts, as is shown by the new critical edition of the works of Marx and Engels, the so-called MEGA2. Taking into account the most recent developments of this edition, the following chapters interrogate Marx starting from the need to think politically about the present, to identify the specific character of the relations of exploitation and domination that constitute contemporary capitalism and to understand the radicality of the struggles which, time and again, materialize and requalify the problem of liberation. The point of intersection between these two axes, ultimately, is where Marx invites us to think about the production of subjectivity. Two Marxian concepts take on particular importance in my analysis and somehow define its spatial and temporal coordinates: ‘abstract labour’ and ‘world market’. Here, too, it is fairly easy to spot the contemporary concerns guiding me, which are related to the transformations of labour and its composition, on the one hand, and to the processes of accumulation and valorization of capital on the other. From the latter point of view, in particular, Marx’s concept of ‘world market’ can aptly be assumed as the guiding thread of an investigation of the gigantic transformations that are affecting the world order, to the point of calling into question the ‘Western’ hegemony within the global capitalist system. Radically different from the ‘world of Marx’, our world is still in need of Marx’s work in order to be critically thought of. This book is born from the reelaboration of a syllabus prepared for the module ‘Frontiers of Citizenship’, a course I taught at the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Bologna in 2012–2013. I want to thank all the students who enthusiastically accepted the challenge of a course entirely focused on Marx. The continuous dialogue with them played a crucial role in clarifying some of the interpretative theses I present in the following chapters. On a

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previous occasion, invited by Carlo Galli to give a talk on 24 November 2011 at the Istituto Gramsci in Bologna (as part of the series ‘Letture Marxiane’), I had the chance to dwell on Marx’s concept of abstract labour. Later, I discussed the general arguments of this book in a seminar held at the University of Padua on 20 June 2013, to which I was invited by Giuseppe Duso as part of the series ‘Pensare la società’, in addition to an intensive course held at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín (Buenos Aires) between October and November of the same year, invited by Verónica Gago and Mario Greco as part of the series ‘¿Qué hacer con Marx?’. In these cases, I want to thank those who invited me and those who participated. Since like Spinoza, I too fear loneliness and am constantly searching for conditions of common work, this book should include a fairly long list of acknowledgements (without ascribing any responsibility of what is written here to the names in the list). A significant part of what I write here on Marx derives from the work I have done for many years with Brett Neilson, particularly as regards the use we made of Marx’s writings in our Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (2013). Sandro Chignola, Maurizio Ricciardi, and Adelino Zanini read and discussed different versions of my book, and they helped me clarify my theses even when they did not agree with them. In Buenos Aires, the ongoing discussions with Maura Brighenti, Verónica Gago, Mario Santucho, Sebastian Scolnik, and Diego Sztulwark have been, once again, fundamental. Being part of the project EuroNomade (www.euronomade.info) provided me with a series of motivations without which I would have been less likely to carry out this work. For their comments on the overall text or individual chapters, I would also like to thank Giso Amendola, Marco Bascetta, Luca Basso, Fulvio Cammarano, Paolo Capuzzo, Niccolò Cuppini, Miguel Mellino, Toni Negri, Matteo Pasquinelli, Maurilio Pirone, Federico Tomasello, and Benedetto Vecchi. Lastly, this book is dedicated to Giovanna. NOTES 1. Foucault 1980: 76. 2. Mariátegui 1971: xxxv. 3. cf. Negri 2011.

Chapter 1

Marx Beyond Marxism

What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetimes of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred, and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their deaths attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to speak, and to hallow their names. —Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, State and Revolution (1917)1

You would be quite mistaken in fancying that I am ‘fond’ of books, Marx wrote to his daughter Laura in 1868. Rather, he continued, ‘I am a machine condemned to devour them and, then, throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history’ (MECW, 43: 9–10). The reading of Marx recently presented in Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval’s ponderous book (2012) unfolds from this image. Marx is outlining here a singular metabolism: books, authors and theories grinded by a reading-machine which tosses them, ‘in a changed form’, on the ground of history to make it more fertile. In other words, this metabolism entails a continuum of variations and repetitions of themes inherited from history, which produce by themselves those innovations that must bounce back to history. Evidently, it is important not to overstate the significance of Marx’s private ‘confession’ to his daughter in the year of her marriage with Paul Lafargue, and yet it offers a clue worth following in order to reread his work, today. Since Engels’s preface to the second volume of Capital [1885], Marxism has constructed a very different image of Marx, the image of an absolute innovator who ‘provided the key to the understanding 1

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of the whole of capitalist production – for the person who knew how to use it, that is’ (C, II: 98). Marx’s thought started being considered as a solid system built on the basis of a series of ‘discoveries’ (of class struggle, of labour power, of surplus value, of laws) and of a set of radical ‘breaks’ with everything that preceded him, including his three fundamental sources: German philosophy, political economy and French socialism. In 1913, Lenin remarked that Marx’s doctrine ‘is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression’ (1963: 63). It is this Marx, Marxism’s Marx, that we must leave behind. We have often repeated the sentence which Marx, according to Engels, had pronounced towards the end of the 1870s: ‘Ce qu’il il y a de certain c’est que muoi, je ne suis pas Marxiste’ [If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist] (MECW 46: 356). However, these days it is not a matter of posing once again a version of Marx as a ‘critic of Marxism’. In the terms deployed in his harsh anti-Soviet polemics by Maximilien Rubel (an important scholar of Marx’s work and implacable critic of Marxism), one could say that ‘Marxism’ is no longer, if not only marginally, an ‘instrument of power’ (Rubel 1981: 8). That which presents itself as ‘Marxism’, in the universities as well as in the action of political forces, which in many parts of the world keep invoking it, is a heterogeneous set of theoretical elaborations and political languages rarely capable of becoming hegemonic from an ‘ideological’ point of view (a further issue concerning Rubel). Today’s ‘Marxists’, those who take care to present themselves as such, often reproduce the tones already encountered in the passage from Lenin quoted above, yet what were once weapons to change the world, in major struggles and significant historical movements, today appear as mere caricatures. Indeed, the most interesting and creative readings and uses of Marx – interesting and creative from the perspective of what was Marx’s matter of concern, namely, the critique of the ‘present state of things’ (GI: 49) – are frequently to be found outside ‘Marxism’. Personally, I doubt aiming at refounding Marxism would have any sense nowadays, if with this term one means a system of thought capable of providing an overall explanation of the world starting from Marx’s concepts and lexicon. I also doubt that it is possible to advance a ‘communist idea’, as in Alan Badiou’s formulation (2010), if not by going back to Marx’s texts and appropriating them creatively. The reading of Marx beyond Marxism, which I propose in this short book, finds its origin in this twofold doubt. It is worth reminding the reader that ‘Marxism’ was originally the ‘stigma’, the polemical definition, the invective used by Bakunin and other anarchists against Marx’s followers during the disputes within the First International (see Haupt 1982: 272ff). At a later time, in keeping with processes well

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known to sociologists, this stigma became an ‘emblem’ particularly after Karl Kautsky founded the Neue Zeit (the ‘Marxist’ journal of the German Social Democracy) in 1883. What we call Marxism was a tremendous thought-edifice, historically constructed on the basis of Engels’s work on the manuscripts for the second and third volumes of Capital, consolidated in the polemics around ‘revisionism’ at the end of that century (with the birth of different ‘Marxisms’), and then settled after the October Revolution and the division of the workers’ movement. Marxism, ‘both a method of interpreting and of changing [the world]’ (Hobsbawm 1982: vii–viii), it was experienced in struggles, dreams and insurrections of the masses, actions of political movements, parties and regimes. Thus, it was not only a thought-edifice, but also a material force contributing to the construction of the world we inhabit. Marxism was a triangulation between the three concomitant poles of philosophy, science and politics, with sides of variable lengths depending on the varied ‘currents’ and historical contingencies, so as to result in infinite variations for the geometrical figure of the triangle (Therborn 2008: 116ff). As Göran Therborn remarked, however, currently ‘the classical Marxist triangle has been broken and is most unlikely to be restored’ (180). Its depletion was not only sanctioned by the end of existing socialism, which Rita di Leo (2012) has recently defined ‘the profane experiment’, but also, by the end of the workers’ movement, understood as a historical form and a political force. From the second half of the last century, different social movements and political struggles constituted themselves beyond Marxism. In philosophy, ‘science’ or politics, as well as in anticolonial uprisings, on the barricades in May 1968 in France and in FIAT’s Mirafiori factory in Italy, in women’s demands and ‘minorities’ taking the floor, this series of movements and struggles pass through it problematically at first, then contribute to its explosion. At the end of the 1950s, Sartre argued that Marxism is the insuperable horizon of our time.2 This is no longer the case. It thus becomes necessary to reread Marx outside Marxism, to immerge him in the materiality of a course of history proceeding beyond it, to position him in conversation with theoretical developments, which Marxism failed to contain in itself, to interrogate Marx’s texts through the lens of existing problematics and struggles. We just mentioned that from the second half of the twentieth century a series of theoretical developments and social movements accelerated the crisis of Marxism – and one should also add that the theme of a ‘crisis’ has been part of the development of Marxism since its ‘revision’ at the end of the nineteenth century. This occurs particularly when it comes to the way Marxism has constructed and interpreted the subjectivity of ‘labour’. In his analysis of the Solidarność experience in Poland and proletarian struggles in apartheid South Africa, Giovanni Arrighi lucidly showed how Marxism had adopted – at least in its hegemonic forms – an idea already present in Marx,

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namely, that to capital’s tendency to exploit labour power ‘as an undifferentiated mass with no individuality other than a differential capability to augment the value of capital’, corresponded a ‘predisposition of labour to relinquish natural and historical differences as means of affirming, individually and collectively, a distinctive social identity’ (Arrighi 1990: 63). The global development of capitalism and of workers and proletarian struggles in the twentieth century, Arrighi continued, did not confirm this idea in any way. Such historical development exposed the incapacity of Marxism to offer incisive theoretical instruments to counter the diffusion of patriarchy, racism and nationalism within the workers’ movement, both in its communist and socialist components. Assuming the production of subjectivity as the guiding thread of the analysis of some of Marx’s texts involves, I think, keeping these issues in mind. More generally, Marxism could be considered a ‘system of thought’, in the sense ascribed to this formula by Michel Foucault in his inaugural lecture at Collège the France in 1970. Indeed, even in Marxism, ‘the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed by a certain number of procedures’ (Foucault 1982a: 52). The point is not of being reminded of Foucault’s earlier statement that ‘Marxism exists in nineteenth century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else’ (2003: 285). This affirmation actually reveals its paradoxically internal (though liminal) position within the ‘discursive field’ of Marxism, as it could be argued that, in the 1960s, Foucault relegated Marx to the flotsam and jetsam of the nineteenth century pressed by the need of distancing himself from such a discursive field, from its procedures and the logics organizing it. Rather, Foucault helps us grasp the definition of this discursive field. Studying in particular the three ‘foundational’ moments mentioned earlier, I think it would be possible to cartographically map Marxism’s rules of enunciation (a certain way of using quotations from Marx) and problematic (the relationship between base and superstructure, just to limit ourselves to one issue). These quite steadily governed the production and reproduction of Marxism as a ‘system of thought’, combining the functions Foucault defined in terms of ‘remanence’, ‘additivity’ and ‘recurrence’ (2002a: 139ff). Even within a system of thought so understood, ‘“Anyone . . . speaks”, but what he says is not said from anywhere’ (122). On the contrary, what is said is necessarily involved with the procedures that constitute and delimit the discursive field of ‘Marxism’. It is easy at this point to anticipate some objections: did not extraordinary ‘heresies’ stem from Marxism? Should we perhaps confuse ‘MarxismLeninism’ with black Marxism and Italian workerism, Stalin with Trotsky, ‘Western Marxism’ with ‘Oriental despotism’? Let’s be serious. The end of Marxism, in contrast, allows us to reopen the Marxist archive and appreciate

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afresh the polyphony and the abundance of alternatives. It also provides the chance to reread a whole series of classics besides those that a long history has indeed labeled as ‘heretics’. In other words, formulations and problematics could be rediscovered even at the kernel of Marxist’s ‘orthodoxy’. Yet it is of essence to assert a methodological principle: the productive rediscovery of the Marxist archive rests upon the condition of suspension and deactivation of the rules of enunciation and of procedures regulating its formation. In view of providing a first and modest contribution to this (necessarily collective) endeavour, I will have a series of ‘Marxist’ quotations reverberate at the beginning of every chapter of this book, in the form of epigraphs and without comment. Let us then start with the epigraph opening this chapter, and let us exceptionally and very briefly comment on it. Just before the October Insurrection, referring to the transformation of Marx into a ‘harmless icon’, Lenin posited a problem we can relate to in times when Marx appears on the covers of The Economist as the visionary prophet of globalization (and ultimately as an apologist of capitalism). Even Marxism, however, the very Marxism-Leninism developing after State and Revolution, transformed Marx into an ‘icon’ – often, although not always, ‘harmless’, but still an ‘icon’. Did this not happen to Lenin as well? It would be enough to reread the opening lines of the (all too easily prophetic) poem written by Mayakovsky just after Lenin’s death in 1924: ‘the very idea – I abhor it, / that such a halo, poetry-bred / should hide Lenin’s real, huge, human forehead. / I’m anxious lest rituals, mausoleums, and processions, / the honeyed incense of homage and publicity / should obscure Lenin’s essential / simplicity’ (Mayakovsky 1986: 176). But let us focus on Marx. Marxism, patristic literature, constituted itself through the commentary on his texts, and whose specific image was built primarily by forging a corpus of work which emphasized its systemic and scientific characters. In this regard, Engels’s work on the second and third volumes of Capital is exemplary. Let me state quite clearly that this is not to depict the umpteenth contraposition between Marx and Engels, between the brilliance of the former and the pedantry of the latter. Engels’s work is extraordinary, combining fraternal dedication, philological precision and ‘party’ militant spirit. But he imposed unity and sistematicity to something that, after the publication of the first volume of Capital [1867], moved towards complex and often contradictory ramifications without ever being capable of settling in a synthesis. The publication of the new critical edition of Marx’s manuscripts (MEGA2) allows us to appreciate the extent to which his thought was fragmentary yet rich, and offers new entry points to something that could be named, quite precisely, the Marxian workshops. It is important to stress markedly that I am not claiming the author of Capital was a thinker who loved to write textual fragments or aphorisms.

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The systemic and scientific traits – which belong to one of the three sides of the Marxist triangle as in Therborn’s formulation – are part of Marx’s work since his formative years. However, what is worth emphasizing and critically interrogating is the constant collision between these traits and the materiality of history, of politics as well as the development of his very analysis and theoretical investigation. If I were to take the liberty of evoking, somehow ironically, the title of one of Martin Heidegger’s books, I would argue that the Marxian workshops permit a great deal of roaming ‘off the beaten track’. Whereas the MEGA2 contributed to update the image of Marx and established new grounds from which his works could be studied, it did so not so much by the addition of unpublished materials but by showing the enormous disproportion between what Marx wrote and what he actually published – a disparity very difficult to find in another ‘classic’. This has in effect offered some basis for the arguments of those, such as Dardot and Laval, who value the usefulness of the metaphor of the ‘machine’ with which we opened this chapter. Reading Marx beyond Marxism, in the sense just outlined, gives us the chance to appreciate once more the fragmentary character of Marx’s oeuvre and, as we said, to explore its workshops on the basis of the recent struggles’ achievements and theoretical developments. This is not what happened within Marxism, whose development has been periodically characterized by the release of previously unpublished works which, in turn, generated fiery polemics about whether notebooks and fragments of theory could be considered as stand-alone texts. This happened with the Economic and Philosophic Manuscript of 1844 and The German Ideology, it did – although in dissimilar modalities and conditions – with the Grundrisse, as Marcello Musto shows in a recent edited volume (2011). Here also it is of necessity to suspend and deactivate the rules of enunciation and problematic regulating the reading of Marx during that very twentieth century Arrighi (1990) defines as being also a ‘Marxist century’. Let us thus cross the threshold of the Marxian workshops. Let us reread Marx’s texts, keeping in mind that they are not only ingrained in the history of theories, but also in the history of both struggles and clashes on the streets, of the violence of domination and exploitation, of the arduous material construction of freedom and equality undertaken by the exploited. This is a history experienced under the uncertain (yet never doused) light of what Marx called ‘the dream of a thing’ [Traum von einer Sache] (MECW, 3: 144) in a renowned letter to Ruge written in September 1843, and that it would come to assume the name of communism. Adding a second epigraph to this incipit, it is worth reporting what Ernst Bloch wrote about Thomas Münzer in 1921 after the fatal defeat of the revolution in Germany: ‘We always want to be with us. Thus here too do we by no means look back. Instead, alive, we mix ourselves. And the others too come back transformed, the dead return, their

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action wants to once again become with us’. In other words, Marx too is for us ‘above all history in the fertile sense. He and what is his and all that is past, which is worth to be written down, is here to oblige us, to inspire us, to support what is continuously meant for us in the broadest way possible’ (Bloch 1921: 13). Affirming the necessity of a return to Marx beyond Marxism, as it should be clear by now, is a rhetorical gesture aimed at rediscovering and reactivating in our present the radicality, the subversive and revolutionary dimensions of his thought and of his communist desire – that is, of ‘what is continuously meant for us’. NOTES 1. Lenin 2014: 41. 2. See Sartre 1963: 7.

Chapter 2

Production of Subjectivity

Man is to be conceived as an historical bloc of purely individual and subjective elements and of mass and objective or material elements with which the individual is in an active relationship. To transform the external world, the general system of relations, is to potentiate oneself and to develop oneself. . . . For this reason one can say that man is essentially ‘political’ since it is through the activity of transforming and consciously directing other men that man realises his ‘humanity’, his ‘human nature’. —Antonio Gramsci, ‘Problems of Philosophy and History’ (1932–1935)1

‘We always want to be with us’, as Bloch wrote in 1921. Therefore, our journey into the Marxian workshops is going to be oriented by the themes we think about and discuss in our present. As previously mentioned, the formula ‘production of subjectivity’ describes the line of enquiry I wish to pursue. In the last thirty years, reflections on ‘the subject’ have revolved around this formula, in philosophy as well as in psychoanalysis, feminist, cultural and postcolonial studies – the list could also be enriched by mentioning further fields or provinces of knowledge. The series of debates on ‘postmodernism’ was not the only factor contributing to this theoretical vicissitude at the turn of the 1980s, when it seemed that – as seen in Italy – it was necessary to go ‘beyond the subject’, possibly to weaken thought, soothe passions and comfortably settle in the new conjuncture.2 These discussions were also carrying the forceful effects of a season of struggles strongly undermining the figures of political subjectivity that had been constructed over the course of modernity, from citizenship to class – just to mention two particularly important examples. However, the 9

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formula ‘production of subjectivity’ also needs to come to terms with the array of theoretical developments which, amid the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, between Marx and Freud, Nietzsche and Heidegger, generated and perpetuated the crisis of the subject’s image generally sustaining the advancement of European philosophy from Descartes to Kant. That is, it must come to terms with the crisis of the ‘ego cogito as transcendental subjectivity’, as Edmund Husserl framed it in his Cartesian Meditations (1960: 18–22). This is something worth keeping in mind, even when (as for the present writer) one has developed a substantial uneasiness about some contemporary writings where the syntagm ‘Cartesian subject’ is tiredly repeated and reduced to empty slogan. The formula Nietzsche employed to encapsulate the freedom of the will in Beyond Good and Evil [1886] – ‘I am free, “it” must obey’ (2002, §19: 19) – illustrates the short-circuit that had been emerging between two poles of the concept of the subject itself. Indeed, the modern formation of this concept had unravelled in an unstable equilibrium inscribed in its Latin etymology, which combined the neuter subjectum – from the Greek hypokeimenon (‘underlying’, ‘that-which-lies-before’) and progressively bearing the functions of ‘command’, both in ontology and grammar – and the masculine subjectus, considered synonym with subditus in the Middle Ages and thus linked to a long history of subjection and obligation to obedience.3 In relation to its political and juridical aspects, the subject’s twofold origin triggered countless tensions and contradictions during modernity, in the way it unifies the supposedly antithetical polarities of sovereignty over the world and absolute subjugation. Looking retrospectively, these contradictions plainly appear as constitutive of the ‘individual’ as well as of the diverse figures of ‘collectivity’, from people to nation – again, limiting ourselves to just two examples. The analysis and commentary of Marx’s texts in the following pages will find numerous traces of these tensions. Then again, even though in ways manifestly different to those found in Nietzsche, the unity of the will had appeared as being split, for example, in Rousseau’s Social Contract [1762], not only between what he distinguished as the ‘three essentially different wills’ in the ‘person of an officer of government’ – the ‘will pertaining to the individual’, the ‘will common to the members of the government’ and the ‘will of the people or the sovereign will’ (1999: 97) – but also, and more significantly, in the opposition of the ‘general will’ and the ‘will of everyone’, where the latter was intended as the simple ‘sum total of individual wants’ (66). It is also well-known that ‘if anyone refuses to obey the general will he will be compelled to do so by the whole body’. ‘Which means nothing else than he will be forced to be free’, Rousseau continues (58). Over the course of modernity, the political (and to reiterate, juridical) concepts of will and subject developed within historically determined ­

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structures – ‘material’ structures, as it goes almost without saying in a book on Marx – in a complex network of relations with the developments of sciences and culture. In regard to philosophy, references to Descartes have become canonical for any enquiry on the subject and assumed the characters of a slogan as we said, since Martin Heidegger’s essay ‘The Age of the World Picture’ [1938]. In this text, the German philosopher establishes the foundations for his later critique of technology, particularly in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ [1954], by copiously deploying the formula ‘for the first time’ – ‘It is in the metaphysics of Descartes that, for the first time, the being is defined as the objectness of representation, and truth as the certainty of representation’ – and with the tones of fate still fascinating more than a few contemporary philosophers – ‘The whole of modern metaphysics, Nietzsche included, maintains itself within the interpretation of the being and of truth opened up by Descartes’ (Heidegger 2002: 66).4 The moment in which ‘man becomes the primary and genuine subiectum’ – ‘that being upon which every being, in its way of being and its truth, is founded’, thus in line with the meaning of hypokeimenon – is for Heidegger necessarily complemented by the conquest of the world in a ‘picture’ according to the productive representation (or ‘representing production’) that enframed ‘beings in their entirety’ and steered them towards calculability and technical manipulation (66–67 and 84). Heidegger swiftly gets rid of the very idea that ‘humanity frees itself from previous bonds’, and thus legibly indicates the direction in which his critique is moving politically. Also, Heidegger’s reading of Descartes in his 1938 essay seems to be severely impaired by a close analysis of Descartes’s texts, and this led Étienne Balibar to talk of an actual ‘myth of the “Cartesian subject”’ (2017: 19–23). Furthermore, Heidegger’s inclination to ‘compress’ the whole of modernity in a single author, a single concept and a single ‘moment’ erases in one fell swoop the powerful alternatives and violent battles that characterize the modern era, even within philosophical discourse.5 Nevertheless, Heidegger’s contribution, later developed in his ‘Letter on Humanism’ [1946], constitutes an important chapter in the crisis affecting the category of the subject from the second half of the nineteenth century. In particular it became a factor in the formation of an ‘antihumanist’ constellation in which, although based on very different premises, one could position the work of Louis Althusser (2005) in regard to his interpretation of Marx. Even Foucault’s proclamation of the death of man, destined to be ‘erased like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ (2003: 422), cannot be understood but within these prolonged vicissitudes and the development of such ‘antihumanist’ constellation. Meanwhile, the echo of anticolonial struggles and insurrections of black communities in US ghettos began to resonate loudly. They were indicating the extent to which European humanism itself was involved in the history of colonialism and racism.6

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Hence, it is worth posing the question: once man is dead, has the subject withered away? Not necessarily. Death often accompanies birth, many births. One could even say that once man is dead, the figure of ‘woman’ is born. Important battles and violent ruptures frame this figure by snatching it from a male signifier which had claimed to be, not metaphorically, the ‘master signifier’. Correlatively, even the figure of ‘woman’ would soon be traversed by a series of tensions that drew near to determine its death – without succeeding, perhaps since women always had a substantially different relation to life compared to men – but did nonetheless damage the unity of its profile. The history of African American and postcolonial feminism outlined in Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s collection of essays (2003) specifically highlights this aspect: ‘black woman’, ‘Third World woman’ and ‘subaltern woman’ are all symptoms of the proliferation of differences and partialities eluding the inclusion within the bounds of a single signifier (usually criticized as ‘white middle-class woman’). That is, they are ultimately signs of the proliferation of figures of subjectivity at the intersection between devices of subjection and practices of subjectivation. This is the general meaning one can succinctly assign to the formula of ‘production of subjectivity’.7 The use of the concept of subjectivation proposed here – a concept central to contemporary critical debates by theorists such as Étienne Balibar and Jacques Rancière – constitutes one of the two poles (alongside ‘subjection’) around which the production of subjectivity is determined.8 Yet what matters is precisely the tension between these two poles, their reciprocal implication in uneven historical, political, social and cultural constellations. To put it more succinctly, the subject becomes unthinkable outside this field of tensions and it is itself produced in this battlefield. The equilibrium between subjectum and subjectus appears as being definitely broken, it can be restored only by unstable and temporary figures always exposed to the possibility of rupture, in respect to both subjection and subjectivation. A genealogical reconstruction of the formula ‘production of subjectivity’ need evidently come to terms with ‘structuralism’ and ‘poststructuralism’, two of the most important yet elusive schools of thought in the twentieth century, and whose defining traits are blurred and fluid. They are elusive and malleable for fairly simple reasons: since the end of the 1960s the most important authors associated to ‘structuralism’ – from Althusser to LéviStrauss, from Lacan to Foucault – grappled with distancing themselves from it; ‘poststructuralism’ on the other hand stemmed from the study, particularly in the United States, of a series of thinkers who would have been quite surprised in seeing their names tied to one school of thought (also known as ‘French theory’, cf. Cusset 2008). Nonetheless, in order to enrich our understanding of the ‘production of subjectivity’, it is worth emphasizing such elusive and mobile traits and uncertain dividing lines.

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One should start with enquiring the meaning of ‘post’ in poststructuralism. What does it come after? Only after ‘structuralism’? In the 1973 essay ‘How Do We Recognise Structuralism?’, Gilles Deleuze hints at the answer already in the first lines when he contends that these questions ‘are of keen interest, provided they are timely and have some bearing on work actually in progress. This is 1967’ (2004: 170). Deleuze’s italics are indicative of the periodizing character of 1968, the edge on which structuralism cannot but proceed towards its ‘post’, though without avoiding the exertion of ‘a productivity which is that of our era’ (192). This edge, around which the problems concerning the ‘structural mutations’ or the ‘transition from one structure to another’ were posed anew, is also where the questions regarding ‘praxis’ and the subject reemerge vigorously. As he put it, ‘Structuralism is not at all a form of thought that suppresses the subject, but one that breaks it up and distributes it systematically, that contests the identity of the subject, that dissipates it and makes it shift from place to place, an always nomad subject, made of individuations, but impersonal ones, or of singularities, but pre-individual ones’ (190). For the purposes of our discussion and in the sense sketched earlier, Deleuze is outlining the horizon and problematic of ‘poststructuralism’, which is to say, the analysis of the forms of subjection and processes of subjectivation, of the production of subjectivity after the end of the subject as hypokeimenon and the ‘death of man’. Even Deleuze’s work on the categories of ‘desubjectivation’ and ‘asubjective’ – especially in the books cowritten with Félix Guattari – would come to be placed within this field. After 1968, the works of many authors somewhat associated with structuralism in the previous decade essentially gravitate around the theme of the subject and its production.9 For instance, this seems to be the case of Althusser, particularly in relation to his work on the ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’, where the individual ‘becomes a subject’ after the interpellation inherent to the ‘commonplace’ police hailing, ‘Hey, you there!’ (1971: 174). This is not the place to outline the several (reasonably justified) criticisms to Althusser’s reformulation of the theory of ideology via the category of interpellation.10 This issue is only hinted at in the following pages, possibly to be dealt with more systematically in future works. Yet it deserves a mention for it depicts the intensity of an analysis showing the overall ‘materiality’ of ideology in the very moment it places the production of subjectivity on the terrain of the ‘imaginary’ – an imaginary certainly read through a Lacanian lens but within a multiplicity of (both direct and indirect) influences from Spinoza and Marx. Michel Foucault has more overtly tackled the issues under investigation here. Ultimately, he has provided the majority of the lexicon employed in current debates (subjection, subjectivation, dispositif  /device, etc.). I will not go further in exploring the path which led Foucault to place the subject and

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its production at the centre of his research.11 Nonetheless, what Foucault argued about power seems to be valid in this case as well, namely, that it was possible to rethink the subject only ‘after 1968, that is to say, on the basis of daily struggles at grass-roots level, among those whose fight was located in the fine meshes of the web of power’ (2002b: 117). In an interview with Duccio Trombadori in 1978, Foucault refers to what he calls the ‘limit-experience that tears the subject from itself’ (1991b: 31–32) and it seems that, in his view, 1968 embodied one of these experiences. Indeed, such ‘tearing’ cleared the space for some remarkable future research around the theme of the subject, and Foucault would carry it out very differently in comparison to the most influential philosophies in his formative years, which attributed a very central position to ‘consciousness’. In Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor, Brett Neilson and I highlighted the importance of the underlying confrontation Foucault establishes with Marx on these matters.12 In particular, we were drawing the attention to ‘The Mesh of Power’, a talk Foucault gave in Bahia on 1 November 1976 in which Marx is openly discussed (Foucault 2012). We hypothesized – and found confirmation for our hypothesis in a recent and crucial essay by Pierre Macherey (2015) – that Foucault was following the traces offered by the individual and social aspects embedded in Marx’s concept of labour power.13 On the one hand, Foucault links an ‘anatomo-politics’ of the technologies of power meticulously analysed in Discipline and Punish [1975] to the former aspect; on the other hand, he hints at further research on the technologies of power related to the latter, which he indicates here with the term ‘bio-politics’ – this is one of the first times the term appears in Foucault’s work (Foucault 2012).14 Foucault’s emphasis on the heterogeneous character of forms and technologies of power is aimed at a radical displacement in the analysis of power so that it could be entirely set out more on the ‘economic’ level than on a terrain traditionally defined as political. Even so, it is an economy that according to Foucault – and to Marx, though differently – ‘is primarily concerned with the “management” of life, bodies and their “powers” . . . even before having as its focus the value of traded goods within an economy of things’ (Macherey 2015). We just mentioned the aspects of individualization and socialization in Marx’s concept of labour power: these are the two fundamental traits to keep in mind when thinking about the production of subjectivity, historically and theoretically. Already in 1987, Antonio Negri positioned very accurately this problem in a Marxian context in one of his lesser-known books (Fabbriche del Soggetto). In his reformulation of different classical themes and concepts, Negri argued that ‘the society of real subsumption can be also characterized as the attempt to the direct production of subjectivity’. The category of ‘real subsumption’ had already been the focus of Negri’s reading of the Grundrisse (1991a). In Fabbriche del Soggetto, he links real subsumption precisely to

Production of Subjectivity

15

the production of subjectivity and, as it became clear with the transformation of capitalism triggered by the crisis at the beginning of the 1970s, to the disruption of the nexus between ‘structural and superstructural determinations affecting subjectivity’. As Negri adds, ‘It corresponds to a new primitive accumulation and, as in the original one, this phase of real subsumption assembles at once the conditions of social reproduction and its actors, bearers, and subjects’ (1987: 76ff). These are some of the essential concepts and problems that will be tackled in the next pages. Also, it should not be overlooked that the formula ‘production of subjectivity’, applied with reference to Marx, always entails a twofold meaning, as presented in the tension between subjection and subjectivation we mentioned earlier. The significance of the genitive case in its formula cannot but be split in two. In other words, the production of subjectivity in the capitalist mode of production designates both ‘the constitution of subjectivity, of a particular subjective comportment, and in turn the productive power of subjectivity, its capacity to produce wealth’ (Read 2003: 153). As Ranabir Samaddar recently maintained (2010: xxviii), Marx explored the problem of ‘liberation of subjectivity, in other words the theme of revolutionary subjectivity’ from the standpoint of the subject’s intrinsic duplicity. The following chapters will depict the ways in which Marx analysed what could be called devices of subjection – those pertaining to the figure of the state and those to the figure of capital – while he aimed at the incessant reformulation of the problem of liberation. The expression ‘factories of the subject’ acquires a literal sense in volume 1 of Capital, across the striking chapters in which Marx deals with cooperation, the working day and large-scale industry and investigates the tremendous tensions characterizing the ‘fabrication’ of a disciplined productive subject and the labour force’s resistance. As we will see, the problem of the production of subjectivity had generally been Marx’s focus since his formative years. Already in the years preceding 1848, both his attempt at founding a materialism radically renewed compared to its past versions and his critique of modern politics can be read through this problematic. NOTES 1. Gramsci 2005: 360. 2. cf. Vattimo 1981. 3. See Balibar 2017. 4. The reference to Heidegger’s critique of technology becomes relevant not only from the standpoint of the history of philosophy. In current debates, philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito summoned the key term of that critique – Gestell, translated as ‘Enframing’ – in order to present new readings of

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Foucault’s concept of ‘dispositif’ and of the genealogy of neoliberalism. For a convincing critique of this perspective, see Dardot and Laval 2013a: 307ff. 5. cf. Negri 1999. 6. Notwithstanding his ‘extreme’ attempt to radicalize and forge humanism as ‘total’, it is worth recalling Frantz Fanon’s words: ‘[We must] leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe’ (1990: 251). 7. See also Mezzadra and Chignola 2012. 8. According to Balibar, ‘The antithesis between subjection and subjectivation runs insistently through Foucault’s work but characterizes all French philosophy from the second half of the twentieth century, since one of the guiding threads of this philosophy is what we could call the problematic of “modes of subjection”’ (2017: 304n9). Whereas Balibar assigns the character of ‘emancipation’ to the notion of ‘subjectivation’, in current debates it is also possible to find uses of the term that place it in proximity with ‘subjection’. 9. On this, although from a different standpoint, see also Tarizzo 2003. 10. Especially in the English-speaking world, critical analyses of advertisement, cinema, and literature have widely utilized the Althusserian category of ‘interpellation’. However, after the first period of its reception, the relevant literature highlighted the limits in Althusser’s category, which are to be found in its abstractness and most importantly in the unidirectionality assigned to the functioning of ideological devices. For a review of this concept, which places it within the discussions occurring at the time when Althusser formulated it, see Montag 2013. 11. In relation to this, the main reference is Foucault 1982b. 12. cf. Mezzadra and Neilson 2013: ch. 6; see also Legrand 2004, Leonelli 2010, Nigro 2011. 13. Particularly in chapter 7, it will be clear to what extent the concept of labour power is related on the one hand to ‘corporeity’, the ‘living personality’ of the individual worker, while on the other it refers to that which humanity has in common, the social and cooperative dimensions on which exploitation functions. 14. The lectures delivered by Foucault at Collège de France at the beginning of 1973 are of particular importance for the study of these themes. The lectures The Punitive Society portray one of the most intense moments of Foucault’s confrontation with Marx and Marxism (with E. P. Thompson in terms of historiography, and with Althusser as regards to philosophy and politics). Here the concept of labour power is unequivocally central. The issues involved in the fabrication of labour power and its necessary transformation into ‘productive force’ – something that capitalism never encounters ‘as immediate and concrete form of human existence’ (Foucault 2015: 232n♰) – form Foucault’s guiding thread for the analysis of the emergence of ‘disciplinary power’ (see Foucault 2015: 196, 237ff). At the same time, the 1973 lectures highlight the radically conflictual character of these processes emerging under the pressure of the multiplicity of proletarians’ behaviours of resistance and refusal. Foucault analyses them by means of an original reading of the category of ‘popular illegalisms’ (see ibid.: 139ff and 186ff).

Chapter 3

A Twofold Beginning

The peculiarity, however, that greatly complicates any correct understanding of the problem of ‘Marxism and philosophy’ is this: it appears as if in the very act of surpassing the limits of a bourgeois position – an act indispensable to grasp the essentially new philosophical content of Marxism – Marxism itself is at once superseded and annihilated as a philosophical object. —Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy (1923)1

Although only (and necessarily) in its general outline, we have just sketched the contemporary theoretical field in which the problem of the ‘production of subjectivity’ is posed. Now, it is necessary to say something about the way in which the same problem appeared, under a different name, to the young Marx. As regards political and philosophical concepts, the confrontation with Hegel is here unavoidable, simply because it was Marx himself who considered it as such in what could be called a twofold beginning: in theory and history, the connection between politics and philosophy is for Marx immediately inextricable. Even more so after Hegel. In 1842, Arnold Ruge gives blunt expression to the historical intersection between politics and history when he writes, ‘Our times are political, and our politics intend the freedom of this world’ (in Stepelevich 1983: 211). Here as well, in order to identify a theoretical field and sketch its problematic, let us just briefly provide some remarks on Hegel. The German philosopher logically carries out the development of modern contractualism precisely when he articulates its definitive and rigorous critique during his years in Jena (1801–1807).2 In the previous chapter we referred to a ‘retrospective glance’ that examines the history of modern political concepts and grasps the tensions and contradictions (if not actual aporias) constitutive of 17

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the figure of subjectivity. In a way, that of Hegel is already a retrospective glance even though, far from ‘solving’ these tensions and contradictions, he ends up reformulating and ultimately intensifying them. If we were to sum up the point I have more interest in exploring, one could say that Hegel decisively poses as the fundamental theme of his reflection the problem of the nonindividual conditions of individuality. This issue had been lurking in modern political thought since Hobbes, in that in his work, the figure of the individual appears to be carved from conditions – those determined by the existence of the ‘Leviathan’ – that the individuals themselves should have supposedly created by means of the ‘pact’ (or ‘covenant’). Hegel’s problematization has the consequence of affecting the set of concepts and institutions where politics had been thought of and articulated in modernity. ‘First, there appears the empty abstraction of the concept of the universal freedom of all, separate from the freedom of individuals’, Hegel writes, with an overt reference to Rousseau, in 1802; ‘and next, on the other side, this very freedom of the individual, comparably isolated’ (1975: 88–89). It is necessary to go beyond this abstract opposition between each ‘individual’ and ‘all’ in order to find the mediations and articulations exposing ‘each’ as much as ‘all’ to a dynamic which connects them, transforms them and continually produces them. What is relevant for our purposes is the way in which Hegel poses (or reopens) this problem, more than his solutions – during these years he begins to find these solutions in a new concept of ‘constitution’ [Verfassung], in the dialectic of ‘recognition’ [Anerkennung] and under the lens of ‘ethicity’ [Sittlichkeit]. The opposition between the individual and sovereign power, that is, between ‘each’ and ‘all’ and around which the entire natural law theory developed, appears as being uncoupled. In fact, the individual and collective dimensions – singular and common, to use some of Hegel’s recurring terms, which do not always bear the corresponding meaning of ‘particular’ and ‘universal’ – seem to be relatively unstable figurations, produced by a movement that is aware of its ‘moments’ and its dialectic articulation, also holds its own autonomous consistency as a productive movement, philosophically and politically. Étienne Balibar has recently shown the unfolding of this Hegelian problematic in the Phenomenology of the Spirit [1807]. Balibar mainly works on two formulas: ‘A Me who is a We, and a We who is a Me’ [Ich, das Wir, und Wir, das Ich ist] and ‘the activity of all and each’ [das Tun aller und jeder]. Once again, the notions of ‘individuality’ and ‘collectivity’ are joint in a nexus which prevents them to be thought as opposed terms and rather seems to indicate the place of subjectivity in a problematic ‘being in common’.3 Besides, the very concept of the universal for Balibar seems to lean towards the ‘common’: through the prism of Allgemeinheit (indeed of ‘universality’) one can see that which is all(en) gemein, common to all (Balibar 2017: 157).

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Let us consider the passage in Hegel in which the second formula mentioned above appears (and we should read it while keeping in mind Marx’s ‘dream of a thing’): ‘Rather the nature of the Thing itself is such that its being is the action of the single individual and of all individuals and whose action is immediately for others, or is a Thing itself and is such only as the action of all and each: the essence which is the essence of all beings, viz. the spiritual essence’ (Hegel 1977: 251–52).4 Die Sache selbst, the thing itself, stands here as the ‘common cause’ or ‘common concern’, as Balibar notes with the aid of the authority of Hegel’s French translators and prominent interpreters (JeanPierre Lefebvre, Jean Hyppolite). In this respect, what emerges more clearly is Hegel’s displacement of the Aristotelian problematic regarding the constitution of what is ‘proper to man’: ‘in order for individual activity to communicate with the universal, the ergon idion, the work proper to man that is also “particular work”, must also become a koinon ergon, a “common cause actualizing itself in a work”’ (Balibar 2017: 158). It is in the space opened by this displacement – a displacement already implicit in the well-known statement in the preface of the Phenomenology according to which ‘everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject’ (Hegel 1977: 10) – that Marx’s twofold beginning can be placed, in philosophy and politics, in the unity that consolidates them and comes into view with the greatest transparency around the problematic of the subject. By removing ‘one of philosophy’s most ancient taboos’ – namely, the distinction between praxis (‘free’ action) and poiêsis (‘necessary’ action for the satisfaction of material needs) – Marx’s materialism deeply innovates the image of human activity (Balibar 2007: 40–41). On the basis of such ‘ontological’ innovation, Marx gains a new perspective on politics and immediately hinges it on the analysis of man’s productive power, the conflicts affecting it and the limits constricting it materially (and separating it from the ‘Thing itself’, the ‘common cause’ or the ‘common concern’). From this perspective, it is worth reading an extract from what we know as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844: [I]n the first place labour, life activity, productive life itself appears to man only as a means for the satisfaction of a need, the need to preserve physical existence. But productive life is species-life. It is life-producing life [das Leben erzeugende Leben]. The whole character of a species, its species-character, resides in the nature of its life activity, and free conscious activity constitutes the speciescharacter of man. Life itself appears only as a means of life. (EPM: 328)

Thus, production produces man (336). Production of life, production of man – ‘The practical creation of an objective world’ (328) – this is how Marx’s problematic can be succinctly outlined. With the emphasis placed on

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the moment of production, on a ‘creation’ stripped of any transcendent character, one could hear echoes from Epicurus and Lucretius and see the trace of the materialism from the Renaissance. Yet the difference with what appeared to Marx as materialism in the wake of Hegel’s death could not be more definite. First thesis on Feuerbach [1845]: ‘The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity [sinnlich menschliche Tätigkeit], practice, not subjectively [nicht subjetiv]’ (CF: 421). Stated clearly: there cannot be a new materialism, for Marx, if not by going beyond the opposition between subject and object, and the mediation of their relationship through an ‘intuition’ – that is, by profoundly reshaping the image of the subject itself, by recognizing that it is at once productive and produced. Hegel must certainly be ‘inverted’ since, as we read again in the first thesis on Feuerbach, ‘the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such’ (ibid.). The intensity of the young Marx’s reflections on ‘estrangement’ and ‘alienation’ – bearing in mind that these are Hegelian categories5 – ultimately points at a radical interruption in the ‘communication’ between the individual activity and the ‘universal’: the inversion of the ‘dream of a thing’ [Sache] into the nightmare of what later would come to be termed ‘reification’ [Verdinglichung]. What is at stake in Marx’s search for a non-‘mutilated’ materialism – to deploy Macherey’s expression (2008: 40) – and his use of the category of ‘praxis’ in its anti-idealist function, is the reinstitution of the relation between ‘subject’ and ‘object’. For Marx, this entails the fixing of a precise distinction between ‘objectification’ (the transmutation of the subjective practice in an object) and ‘alienation’ (the crystallization of this object in a dimension hostile and alien to the subject).6 Yet the ‘new materialism’ announced by Marx in the theses on Feuerbach will not make a step back with respect to Hegel. Rather, it will gain its point of honour in holding at its centre – as the key for an overall reconstruction of ontology – the practical activity of single individuals, the ‘sensuous human activity’ displacing the alternatives which divided postHegelian German philosophy, the alternatives between ‘real’ and ‘rational’ as well as between ‘substance’ and ‘consciousness’.7 We mentioned ontology, the doctrine of being. In these years, being appears to Marx as a ‘mass being’ [massenhaftes Sein], which man is immersed in (HF: 53). Ontology of immanence, ontology of the social being, ontology of the relations through which human beings always construct their own history and produce their ‘nature’: ‘the existence of man for other men, his human relation to other men, the social behaviour of man to man’ (43). The claim in the sixth thesis on Feuerbach is well known, where the human is configured as being the place of a genuine ‘permanent revolution’ (Balibar

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2007: 33) and of a ‘multiplicity indefinitely open and undergoing constant recomposition’ (Macherey 2008: 150): ‘the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations’ [in seiner Wirklichkeit ist es das ensemble der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse] (CF: 423). Less commented on is another extract written in the same years, in which the critique of abstraction bears further aspects. We are dealing here, in The Holy Family [1845], with the critique of what is called with stinging irony the ‘Critical Criticism’ of Bruno Bauer ‘and company’. Critical Criticism, Marx and Engels write, ‘sits enthroned in the solitude of abstraction, that even when it seems to be occupied with some object it does not come out of its objectless solitude into a truly social  relation to a real object, because its object is only the object of its imagination, only an imaginary object’ (HF: 158). Here, the critique of abstraction is the critique of ‘solitude’, the critique of a subject affirming his or her sovereignty (‘sits enthroned’) only insofar as he or she stands above the world of things and the world of man, only to find him or herself handling an imaginary object. The image of individuals inhabiting bourgeois society as ‘atoms’, condemned to move in an ‘empty’ world unconnected to one another (cf.: 120ff) thus appears to Marx as a mere apology of this solitude. On the contrary, to recall a striking image in The German Ideology [1845–1846], they are ‘empirically universal individuals’ (GI: 49), individuals who indeed ‘have become abstract individuals, who are, however, by this very fact put into a position to enter into relation with one another as individuals’ (87). The greatest degree of isolation corresponds here to the greatest degree of sociality.8 This is the nexus to keep under scrutiny in order to study the processes that led, once again, to interrupt the communication between the individual and the array of (evidently not individual, but ‘universal’) conditions that, ‘empirically’, determine its existence and produce its subjectivity. Therefore, against Critical Criticism and in order to shed light on the production of abstractions which materially dominate human beings, the enquiry should be centred on the ‘essential activity of the human subject who is real and therefore lives and suffers in present-day society, sharing in its pains and pleasures’ (HF: 160). Almost unawares, we just shifted from the first philosophical beginning to the second, the political. The state and private property are indeed the devices, as we would call them today, which ‘turn human beings into abstractions’ inasmuch as they are themselves ‘products of abstract man’ (193). It is clear how the thread chosen here to explore the Marxian workshops, the production of subjectivity, reveals the specularity of state and private property in Marx since his early works – as crystallizations in a dimension of separation of the common conditions that determine the existence of each individual. As Marx unequivocally states: ‘The political constitution at its highest point

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is therefore the constitution of private property’ (CHDS: 166). As described in The German Ideology, the process through which the ‘productive forces’ eventually ‘appear as a world for themselves, quite independent of and divorced from the individuals, alongside the individuals’, has ultimately one of its causes in the way these forces are ‘no longer the forces of the individuals but of private property, and hence of the individuals only insofar as they are owners of private property’ (GI: 86). As we will see later on, the individual as owner of private property constitutes the other side of the figures of citizenship produced by the ‘perfectioning’ of the modern state, where the latter stands as ‘the form . . . in which the whole civil society of an epoch is epitomised’ (90), the guarantor of the relations of domination organizing civil society around private property – especially through the central role of ‘civil law’ (91). Furthermore, at the intersection between Marx’s two beginnings, one necessarily finds religion as the chief terrain of the exercise of critique in post-Hegelian philosophy. It would be interesting to show how also in this case Marx adopts a very original perspective, following a trace actually left by Spinoza.9 In this way – compared to the passages quoted earlier from The Holy Family – a different aspect would emerge, a wholly material significance hinged upon the processes of the historical production of subjectivity and imagination.10 For instance, Marx does not simply dismiss religion in keeping with the typical views of a cold rationalism, even though he certainly considers religion to be the product of human imagination. In addition, religion is undoubtedly the ‘opium of the people’ as we read in the introduction of the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right [1844] (this metaphor should be considered historically as well, since the First Opium War ended with the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842). However, if ‘religious suffering’ is for Marx ‘the expression of real suffering’, it is also ‘a protest against real suffering’. As the text continues, ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world’ (CCHPR: 244). In other words, a powerful desire for liberation and redemption for long had been invested – for long the ‘dream of a thing’ had been dreamed of – in the fantastic world of religion, a desire which is then necessary to materialize in earthly reality by turning the ‘criticism of heaven . . . into the criticism of earth’. And anyway, ‘Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower’ (244–45). Nevertheless, there is a further point to emphasize. In these formative years, the ‘criticism of earth’, Marx says it explicitly, is primarily the ‘criticism of law’ and ‘criticism of politics’ (245), while at the same time it is immediately defined as the critique of the ways in which law and politics

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constitute subjectivity. Once again in polemic with Bruno Bauer, in ‘On the Jewish Question’ [1843], Marx develops this critique in such a radical way as to determine a displacement deeply affecting the logics and categories of modern politics. The focus of his analysis is once again the figure of subjectivity corresponding to the modern state, a subjectivity cut through by the radical split [Spaltung] between the public and private sides of its existence, between life ‘in the political community’ [im politischen Gemeinwesen] and ‘in civil society’ (JQ: 220). Marx discernibly identifies what others would have called the ‘theologico-political’ structure of the modern state form: ‘Religion is . . . the devious acknowledgement of man, through an intermediary. The state is the intermediary between man and man’s freedom’ (218–19). The more ‘the intermediary’ perfects itself and ‘the perfected political state’ [der vollendete politische Staat] expresses ‘the species-life [Gattungsleben] of man’ by representing it, the deeper the split between the latter and the ‘material life’ of man becomes (220). In contrast to Bauer’s Critical Criticism, Marx cannot halt his critique in the field of ‘pure politics’. Indeed, the analysis of the ‘emancipation of the Jews’ rather becomes the occasion for an overall critique of ‘political emancipation’, as well as of concepts such as democracy and citizenship. This movement of critique should be valued for its specificity, for Marx regards politics mainly in its reality effects. These are in turn described primarily in relation to the production of a specific figure of subjectivity, in the historical moment in which the state ensured its monopoly on politics as such. It is not from within such ‘politics’ that one can overcome the split mentioned earlier. The horizon is thus marked, since what Marx terms ‘human emancipation’ in ‘On the Jewish Question’ (216) points at the gap and disjuncture produced with respect to modern politics. The development of Marx’s thought in the following years will severely question the adjective ‘human’, due to both the growing distance separating Marx from the kind of ‘humanism’ one can detect in many pages from his early works, and for the significance that another historical power – alongside the state and characterized by specific modalities for the production of subjectivity – will increasingly acquire in his work: capital. In the capital relation, truly, ‘man as such plays a very mean part’ (C, I: 135). Still the riddle of liberation will remain at the centre of Marx’s thought and action, and it is important to stress its specific difference from ‘emancipation’, even beyond Marx’s texts. Meanwhile, politics is being faded out. But is this not what also happened with philosophy? During these years, was Marx not constantly clashing with the limit of philosophy? Did he not start a new materialism (in his intentions at least), the fading out of philosophy itself? ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’ (CF: 423), as the very renowned eleventh thesis on Feuerbach declares. These are among the words most commented upon

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in the history of philosophy after Marx, enough to lead Gramsci to argue that, in sharp contrast with Croce’s interpretation of Marx’s theses, ‘philosophy can only be negated by philosophizing’ (Gramsci 1975: 1271). We should not overlook the difficulties and genuine aporias marking Marx’s philosophical and political programs. The asserted correspondence between the ‘negation of philosophy’ and its ‘realization’ mediated by the historical action of the proletariat (CCHPR: 249 and 257) shows, on the one hand, the difficulty of the endeavour Marx envisioned in his formative years and, on the other hand, it highlights the extent of its problematicity. At the beginning of Negative Dialectics [1966] and plainly referring to the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, Adorno somewhat ironically argued, ‘Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed’ (2004: 3). In the works of the ‘young’ Marx, there appears a very powerful (if not violent) tension characterizing the ongoing possibility of thinking a kind of philosophy separated from the ‘mass being’ which man, as we read in The Holy Family, is immersed in. As Gramsci put it: ‘The character of the philosophy of praxis is especially that of being a mass conception’ (1975: 1271). Without reading this passage in Gramsci further – as this would necessarily lead us to deal with his theory of the ‘organic’ intellectual – one could try to superimpose the figure of ‘mass being’ onto the figure of ‘mass conception’, so as to derive an idea of fading out of philosophy as a separate discourse.11 The critique of political economy is that through which Marx will attempt at putting this fading out into practice. In conclusion to this chapter I wish to signal that this twofold movement of fading out, grasped as a whole, seems to support the hypothesis that the relationship between philosophy and politics in Marx can be characterized in contrast to the terms used by Jacques Rancière and grouped under the formula of ‘metapolitics’ (1999: 82ff). Exposing the ‘untruth’ of politics and discovering the social as ‘truth of the political’ do not appear as being decisive in Marx, not even in ‘On the Jewish Question’. Once the ‘reality effects’ of modern politics are seriously taken into consideration, and after having measured these effects on the specific terrain of the production of subjectivity, the social cannot be thought of as being radically other than politics, in other words, as its ‘truth’. This could only be an optical illusion, and its traces can certainly also be seen in some of Marx’s pages. Rather, the social and the political seem to be intertwined in a relation of constitutive specularity displaying the impossible ‘purity’ of both. If anything, and if we were to play with formulas while simultaneously maintaining a safe distance from the accounts of contemporary politics, that of Marx is in its central tenet an ‘antipolitics’, in the specific sense of a politics which incorporates in itself the element exceeding it and constantly displaying the limits of politics as such. An antipolitics sustained by an ‘antiphilosophy’.

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NOTES 1. Korsch 2008: 47. 2. cf. Duso 1987. 3. See Balibar 2017, in particular ch.7. 4. Translation slightly altered, see Balibar 2017: 158. 5. Although their discussion would fall beyond the scope of the argument here, it is worth reporting that these two concepts, expressed in German with the terms Entäußerung and Entfremdung, are certainly closely related but do not exactly coincide. On this, see Basso 2015: 118. 6. Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason [1960] highlights this distinction, pointing out that alienation turns against human beings the more general process of objectification, understood as the more general process of exteriorization of human activity onto the world. 7. cf. Dardot and Laval 2012: ch.2. 8. cf. Basso 2012. 9. cf. Marx 1976. 10. For the reference to Spinoza, see Negri 1991b: 86–98. 11. cf. also Macherey 2008: 236ff.

Chapter 4

The Subject of History, the Subject in History

And many of us drowned just off the beaches. The long night passed, the sky began to clear. If they but knew, we said, they’d come and seek us. That they did know, we still were unaware. —Bertolt Brecht, War Primer (1955)1

Marx’s ‘new materialism’ is first and foremost a historical materialism. And history presented itself to Marx and Engels initially as the reign of liberty. As we read in The Holy Family, ‘History does nothing. . . . It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; “history” is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims’ (HF: 93). This inebriation from liberty will not last long. In Marx’s work, the shadow of ‘necessity’ will progressively spread over history: the objective configurations of social relations, which assign different subjects to determinate positions, will significantly restrict the margins of action of these subjects and, as we saw earlier in relation to the sixth thesis on Feuerbach, threaten to halt the ‘permanent revolution’ that had been identified as the essential trait of the human through its own reference to ‘social relations’. As Marx argues in a short (yet well-known and influential) text, the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ‘In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production’ (CCPE: 263). In this setting, the intensity of what I earlier referred to as Marx’s ‘communist desire’ will certainly not disappear. However, in many of his pages, 27

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let alone those by some Marxists, the unavoidability of the revolution will acquire an ‘objective’ character, the movement of the ‘base’ itself – entrusted with the ‘ripening’ of the conditions for the overcoming of capital – will appear as the subject of history. Again, in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the sequence of the modes of production (‘Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois’) is presented by Marx as the succession of ‘epochs marking progress in the economic development of society’. And he adds: ‘No social formation is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society’ (ibid.). Indeed, the Manifesto of the Communist Party [1848] had announced in its first lines that ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’ (MCP: 219). For Marx, the base, mode of production and social formation are not closed totalities but rather marked by contradictions, conflicts and lines of antagonism. Yet what is the part played by class struggle in this ripening of the conditions for the appearance of ‘new and superior relations of production’? How does subjectivity intervene within and against such a process? And which subjectivity are we referring to, the ‘class’, or perhaps a vanguard, a ‘party’? Independently of their theoretical and political developments after Marx’s death, all these questions radically interrogate his thought, which is characterized by ongoing unsteadiness and internal tensions in relation to the problem these very questions pose.2 In a page from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [1852], the terms of this problem are put forward at once very precisely and with their own theoretical difficulties: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please in circumstances they choose for themselves; rather they make it in present circumstances, given and inherited’ (18B: 19). Should we infer here a sort of Marxian ‘pessimism’ following the developments of the 1848 revolution, stained with the blood of the June insurgents in Paris? It would not seem so, if we consider that one could spot similar formulations already in The German Ideology.3 In this text, Marx had started from a reflection on ‘estrangement’ – namely, the ‘fixation of social activity’ in a ‘social power’ which, far from appearing to individuals as ‘their own united power’, confronts them ‘as an alien force existing outside them’ (GI: 47–48). Instead, it would be more apt to see the well-known statement quoted above as the development (or the indication of the terms) of an internal problem in Marx’s new materialism, that is, the problem of the relation, constitutive of the ‘practical activity of single individuals’, which the latter entertains both with ‘the determined conditions from which it occurs and with those produced by it: every activity is conditioned and produces new conditions by transforming those initially “encountered” on its path, as

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“posited” outside and independently from itself’ (Dardot and Laval 2012: 139). To evoke the terms deployed in the previous chapter, I would add that this is a problematic constellation bearing the risk of ‘interrupting’ the relation between the two poles of materialism (subjective and objective) which the first thesis on Feuerbach referred to. Let us linger on the formulation in The Eighteenth Brumaire. It could be said that Marx sketches in a few lines a theme destined to mark, particularly in Germany, the ‘bourgeois’ culture in the following decades between historicism (Dilthey), ‘classical sociology’ (Simmel and Weber) and philosophical hermeneutics (Gadamer). We are dealing here with developments in which ‘tragic’ tones will be predominant, for example, in the description of Weber’s ‘iron cage’ increasingly tightening its grip around the liberty of the subject in history. From this standpoint, the late Simmel (of the ‘tragedy of culture’ period) is a prime example, and one should not forget how his works will influence Marxism through Lukács’s mediation.4 Marx’s page seems to be more balanced, even though the image following the lines of the extract quoted earlier is not the most reassuring: ‘Tradition from all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living’ (18B: 19). Nevertheless, it is still ‘men’ who ‘make their own history’, although not ‘just as they please’. It would be tempting to refer to a sort of Marxian equilibrium. And yet I think nothing would be more mistaken: a simple opposition between objective ‘circumstances’ and ‘men’ is not at issue, but rather a further laceration that affects the subject. Commenting on a different passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire, Gayatri Spivak argued that ‘Marx is obliged to construct models of a divided and dislocated subject whose parts are not continuous or coherent with each other’ (1999: 258). The point is that the subject is at once produced by ‘circumstances’ which present themselves as being external to it, as ‘objective’, and produces these same circumstances, both in the sense that they do not have anything natural (since they had been in turn produced by human beings who made their own history) and in the sense that the subject, knowing these circumstances are constructed, can transform or destroy them. This division, as highlighted by Spivak, predominantly affects the subject itself more than it does separate subject and object. Instead of tracing the passages in Marx where the ‘objectivism’ that dominates the critique of political economy gives way to the ‘logic of class struggle’,5 it is necessary to push the analysis further precisely on the terrain of the production of subjectivity.6 Here the ‘equilibrium’ from a Marxian perspective cannot but appear in the form of domination, as the capacity of the ‘relations of production’ to contain in themselves the ‘productive forces’ by disciplining them. At a closer look, the extract from The Eighteenth Brumaire anticipates on the terrain of history the tension and antagonism between these crucial categories of the critique of political economy. The historia

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rerum gestarum, one could say as a remark to the ‘nightmare’ weighing on the ‘brain of the living’, threatens to crush the res gestae in its own script, compressing and erasing the spaces of innovation.7 What Marx reformulates in The Eighteenth Brumaire is essentially a Machiavellian problematic, and it is intriguing to think that this problematic, through numerous conceptual metamorphoses, marked the very method of the critique of political economy. Fortuna (the ‘circumstances’) and virtù (the capacity of human beings to ‘make their own history’) come to indicate the two poles on which the constitution of a subject is materially determined – a subject whose internal division arranges subjectum and subjectus on opposite sides. In the following years, Marx will retain this analytical scheme and its central problem – from time to time threatening to be transformed into a riddle and indeed give way to ‘objectivism’ – will be the theoretical (and necessarily political) foundation of what we could term as the moment of subjective excess. In other words, a type of freedom materialistically renewed in history and open to a politics of transformation. Nonetheless, in history, ‘real, living men’ – and we would add ‘real, living women’, as it was not customary to specify it in Marx’s time – live and suffer, they struggle and come to terms with ‘circumstances’ in which they act. Marx himself, as a ‘real man’, passionately shared in the ‘pains’ and ‘pleasures’ of the portion of history he happened to live, to recall the extract from The Holy Family we commented on in the previous chapter (HF: 160). In this sense, 1848 was for Marx (as for the whole of Europe) a pivotal landmark. The Manifesto of the Communist Party was published at the beginning of that year, and with it, Marx and Engels aimed at meeting ‘this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism’ and to present the communists’ project ‘openly, in the face of the whole world’ (MCP: 218). From this political pamphlet, one among the most extraordinary and influential ever written, it is necessary to highlight a single point here: the power of theoretical anticipation in taking the floor becomes immediately political. The 1840s had been characterized by important debates on the ‘social question’, indeed haunted by the ‘spectre’ of communism.8 The revolt of Canuts (Lyonnaise silk workers) in 1831 foreshadowed the irruption on the European scene of a new and menacing subject9 which Louis Auguste Blanqui, speaking at the trial against the Société des Amis du Peuple in the coming year, would come to name with an ancient term: proletarian.10 Yet at the beginning of 1848 certainly not many had thought that ‘two great hostile camps’, the ‘two great classes directly facing each other, Bourgeoisie and Proletariat’ (MCP: 220), would have engaged in armed conflict during the course of that same year. It did not seem there were the ‘objective circumstances’, to recall the topic mentioned earlier, and indeed in February, in Paris, bourgeoisie and proletariat had fought shoulder to shoulder against the

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July Monarchy and for the Republic. Then it was June, ‘the gigantic insurrection in which the first great battle was fought between the two great classes which divide modern society’ (CSF: 58). From antithetical political positions to that of Marx, Alexis de Tocqueville in his Recollections [1851] recognized the break determined by this insurrection with respect to the modern history of revolutions: The insurgents fought without a war-cry, without leaders, without flags, and yet with a marvellous harmony and an amount of military experience that astonished the oldest officers. What distinguished it also, among all the events of this kind which have succeeded one another in France for sixty years, is that it did not aim at changing the form of government, but at altering the order of society. It was not, strictly speaking, a political struggle, in the sense which until then we had given to the word, but a combat of class against class, a sort of Servile War. (Tocqueville 1896: 187)

Marx had already anticipated this break. The ‘locomotives of history’: this is how Marx defines revolutions in The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850, a series of ‘historical’ articles written in the immediacy of the events (CSF: 117). There are moments in history when time vertiginously speeds up. Yet where to? Towards the direction ‘objectively’ established by ‘reason’, by ‘progress’ or by the ‘laws of movement’ of the economic structure? Starting from this question, it would be worth reading Marx’s writings on 1848. In this regard, it seems that one could refer to the concentration in time of a series of vectors of development, of their decomposition, and of a progressive explosion of the unity of history as such. Certainly, Marx’s pages often reassure us about the outcome of such a complex movement. When we read that ‘the revolution is thorough-going’, that ‘it does its work methodically’, one can see the assured payback for the June defeat, when ‘the whole of Europe will jump up and cry: Well grubbed up, old mole!’ (18B: 98). Should we maybe be surprised by this ‘reassurance’, in a text by a defeated yet surely not regretful revolutionary? Evidently not. For Marx, the revolution was not in any way reducible to an ‘event’ – a topic which he engaged with in harsh dispute with Blanquists and anarchists in the following years – and it was, if anything, a matter of illuminating the specific temporality of its process. According to the Marx of The Eighteenth Brumaire, this temporality is uneven, by no means linear, though it is unquestionably open to the sudden acceleration transmitted by a series of ‘events’. As he maintains, ‘proletarian revolutions . . . engage in perpetual self-criticism, always stopping in their own tracks; they return to what is apparently complete in order to begin it anew’ (18B: 22).

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However, what I wish to highlight here (in relation to its theoretical aspect) is what I earlier described as the movement of decomposition and the progressive explosion of different vectors of developments reconstructed by Marx in his writings on 1848, as well as the numerous and heterogeneous historical times that characterize them. On the one hand, at least two longterm histories, making their way through the ‘bottleneck’ of the 1848 revolution, experience an acceleration which seemingly did not affect the course they had undertaken: the history of the modern state form – ‘All upheavals perfected this machinery instead of destroying it’ (18B: 99) – and that of capital – ‘The financial aristocracy was not only not overthrown by the February revolution but in fact actually strengthened by it’ (CSF: 129). On the other hand, there is at least a third history which ran in parallel with these, cut across them, and affected them while gaining progressive autonomy: it is what we could call the political history of the subaltern – a term Marx did not use and which I am provisionally adopting, following Spivak more than Gramsci, to emphasize the problematicity of the ‘naming’ of its subjects.11 It is a history characterized by a specific regime of accumulation of experiences, invention of institutions, languages, relationships, by their own ­temporalities and original devices for the production of subjectivity. As Marx writes, ‘The February revolution was the beautiful revolution, the revolution of universal sympathy, because the conflicts which erupted in the revolution against the monarchy slumbered harmoniously side by side, as yet undeveloped’ (CSF: 60). Here the problem of the ‘circumstances’, of the ripening of the ‘objective’ conditions of the revolution is posed again. In this case, the point is that the ripening time accelerates vertiginously, as the June revolution erupts after only four months, ‘the ugly revolution, the repulsive revolution, because realities have taken the place of words, because the republic has uncovered the head of the monster itself by striking aside the protective, concealing crown’ (ibid.). In the gap between February and June one can thus glance at the features of another history, in which the same ‘repetition’ of the themes inherited from the past – far from gaining the ‘farcical’ traits which distinguish the character of Louis Napoleon (18B: 19) – feeds on proletarian imagination and becomes politically productive.12 Marx’s analysis displays useful indications of method for a (genealogical) reconstruction of the strength with which the struggles and the movements of the subalterns make (their own) history. On this, we should refer to Marx’s analysis of the ‘clubs’, which he regarded as ‘constituent assemblies of the proletariat’ (CSF: 84). Also, we should refer to his emphasis on the ability of the proletarian autonomous initiative to dictate the pace of the development of bourgeois institutional forms, firstly by developing ‘parliamentary power so that it could be overthrown’, then by ‘developing the executive power . . . in order to concentrate all its powers of

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destruction against it’ (18B: 98). Yet it is worth remembering that this history is haunted by the massacre of the June insurgents. Moreover, once we recognize its autonomy, it is necessary not to analytically isolate what I called the political history of the subaltern from the broader constellation in which it positions itself. However, I would argue that Marx’s hint is fairly valuable, either for historiographical works – to ‘the invention of another way of writing history’ made necessary by the crucial yet unacknowledged break Marx enacted from the philosophy of history (cf. Bensaïd 2009: 19) – and for theoreticopolitical analyses. Although only in fragments, we can discern the trace of his reflection not only on ‘another history’ but also on ‘another politics’, whose features allow to be half-seen in the shadow of the history constructed by the modern state. Besides, Marx had already tried to hold this trace in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, when he alluded to the moment of structural excess of the proletarian struggle concerning its immediate goals (thus anticipating a theme which, once again, through numerous metamorphoses, will assume the form of the relation between reform and revolution). ‘When communist workmen gather together’, he noted, ‘their immediate aim is instruction, propaganda, etc. But at the same time they acquire a new need – the need for society – and what appears as a means has become an end’. And he added, ‘This practical development can be most strikingly observed in the gatherings of French socialist workers. Smoking, eating and drinking, etc., are no longer means of creating links between people’ (EPM: 365). To reiterate: it is a note, but one that could be very valuable. NOTES 1. Brecht 1998: n58. 2. The analysis of such unsteadiness and tensions is at the centre of the interpretation by Dardot and Laval (2012), which starts by evoking a work by Cornelius Castoriadis. However, Karl Korsch had already written in 1938 that ‘the “objective” description of the historical process as a development of the productive forces and the “subjective” description of history as a class struggle are two independent forms of Marxian thought, equally original and not derived one from the other’ (Korsch 2016: 167–68). 3. cf., for example, GI: 48ff. 4. I am referring, in particular, to Simmel’s ‘extensive’ interpretation of the Marxian commodity fetishism in an important essay from 1911, ‘The Concept and Tragedy of Culture’: ‘The “fetishistic character” which Marx attributed to economic objects in the epoch of commodity production is only a particularly modified instance of this general fate of the contents of our culture. These contents are subject to the paradox and increasingly so as “culture” develops that they are indeed created by human

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subjects and are meant for human subjects, but follow an immanent developmental logic in the intermediate form of objectivity which they take on at either side of these instances and thereby become alienated from both their origin and their purpose’ (Simmel 1997: 70). 5. By a way of simplification, this is the hypothesis supported by Dardot and Laval in a book I have already mentioned more than a few times, Marx, prénom: Karl (2012). 6. According to Dardot and Laval, ‘all of Marx’s texts’ strive to ‘articulate two very different perspectives’, one corresponding to the ‘logic of capital as an accomplished system’ and the ‘strategic perspective of conflict, thus of struggle between classes’ (2012: 11). Since the importance of Dardot and Laval’s work goes beyond Marx, prénom: Karl, it is worth noting that the emphasis on this ‘division’ in Marx’s work corresponds, in relation to the critique of neoliberalism and contemporary capitalism, to their emphasis on ‘counter-conducts’ and on the necessity ‘to promote in the present alternative forms of subjectivation to the model of personal enterprise’ (Dardot and Laval 2013a: 316ff), which runs the risk of appearing essentially voluntarist. 7. These two Latin formulas are usually employed to show the ambiguity of the concept of history, at once pointing to the real history and its narration, ‘historiography’ (cf., in general, Koselleck 2004). My use of them here is influenced by Hardt and Negri 2000: 46–48. 8. See, for example, Pankoke 1970. 9. cf. Tomasello 2013. 10. See Blanqui 2018: 8–19. ‘Proletarian’, Blanqui answered when questioned regarding his ‘profession’. To the objection of the president of the Court (‘that is not a profession’), Blanqui in turn responded: ‘What do you mean it is not a profession? It is the profession of thirty million French people who live of their own labour and who are deprived of all political rights’ (Blanqui 1995: 23ff). 11. I am referring here to the renewed use of Gramsci’s theme of subalternity in postcolonial studies, starting from those defined in India as ‘subaltern studies’ (cf. Guha and Spivak 1988). Within the debate of this recovery, Gayatri Spivak has often stressed the need of adopting the concept subalternity to indicate the limits of different conceptualizations of the subject. As she argued in an interview: ‘The imprisoned Antonio Gramsci used the word [subaltern] to stand in for “proletarian”, to escape the prison censors. But the word soon cleared a space, as words will, and took on the task of analysing what “proletarian”, produced by capital logic, could not cover’ (Spivak 2000: 324). 12. cf. Carver 2002: 121–23.

Chapter 5

Living Labour

If the concept of alienated labor includes the relation of man to the object . . . then the concept of labor as such must also cover a human activity (and not an economic condition). If the alienation of labor signifies the total loss of realization and the estrangement of the human essence, then labor itself must be grasped as the real expression and realization of the human essence. But that means once again that it is used as a philosophical category. Despite the above development of the subject we would be loath to use the often misused term ‘ontology’ in connection with Marx’s theory, if Marx himself had not expressly used it here. —Herbert Marcuse, ‘New Sources on the Foundation of Historical Materialism’ (1932)1

Since the revolutions of 1848, only a few years passed before Marx referred to them as being ‘but poor incidents – small fractures and fissures in the dry crust of European society’. ‘However’, he added, ‘they denounced the abyss. Beneath the apparently solid surface, they betrayed oceans of liquid matter, only needing expansion to rend into fragments continents of hard rock’ (MECW, 14: 655). When he wrote these lines in 1856, Marx had already been living in exile in London for a number of years. Previously, in The Class Struggles in France, he seemed to believe that the next revolution would have found its own ‘organizational beginning’ in England, since this country ‘dominates the world market’ (CSF: 112). In the meantime, Marx immerged himself in the ‘oceans of liquid matter’ of the critique of political economy, taking a research path that would come to find a temporary conclusion only with the publication of the first volume of Capital [1867]. After 1848, Marx argued that ‘A new revolution is only a consequence of a new 35

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crisis. The one, however, is as sure to come as the other’ (CSF: 131). During these years, while living in conditions of severe poverty and tormented by health problems and difficulties of various kinds, Marx inspected the horizon in search of signs of the crisis that must have occurred. When the recession of 1856–1858 began, Marx witnessed and analysed it with extraordinary insight. Specifically, in a series of articles for the New York Daily Tribune, Marx brought into focus the outline of a genuine ‘revolution from above’ set off by capital within the crisis, which showed the overall inadequacy of any conspiratorial and minoritarian fantasy – this overt polemical reference was aimed at Mazzini – and forced the radical requalification of the problem of revolutionary organization and action (cf. Bologna 2009). The hypothesis of the ‘inevitable’ link between crises and revolution was not confirmed, but in experiencing the crisis – as if he ‘trained’ with the wait for the revolution – Marx accelerated his work of critique of political economy and, between 1857 and 1858, attempted to establish its ‘foundations’ [Grundrisse]. This resulted in a series of manuscripts destined to lie among Marx’s many provisional drafts, until their publication in 1939 (though the actual acknowledgement of this ‘work’ began only with its reprint in 1953). Under the influence of the crisis triggered by the collapse of the speculative upside in the stock exchange (particularly of the Paris Bourse), Marx did not begin the Grundrisse with an analysis of the commodity – as he would later in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [1859] and the first volume of Capital – but with a section on money. A twofold necessity led Marx to focus on the relation between money as a particular commodity (exchanged on specific markets) and money as capital (that is, as the basis for valorization and accumulation). On the one hand, he wanted to provide an explanation for the monetary and financial determinations of the crisis and, on the other hand, he kept carrying out the critique of Proudhonian socialism. In the Grundrisse, Marx explicitly refuses to counterpose the financial sphere (organized around a purely speculative logic) to the productive sphere (organized instead on the basis of social needs) – indeed, he centres his critique of Proudhon and his imitators on the refusal of this opposition (see Bologna 2009). More generally, by starting from the analysis of money instead of the commodity, Marx’s first attempt to lay the foundations of the critique of political economy immediately places it on a terrain defined by the process of progressive socialization of capital (Negri 1991a: 24), more than by the exchange of equivalents the analysis of the commodity refers to. In other words, here capital immediately appears to Marx as Kapital im Allgemeinen, ‘capital in general’.2 As Marx contends: Capital in general, as distinct from the particular capitals, does indeed appear only as an abstraction; not an arbitrary abstraction, but an abstraction which

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grasps the specific characteristics which distinguish capital from all other forms of wealth – or modes in which (social) production develops. (G: 449)

In the next chapter we will return to the problems arising from ‘capital in general’ and similar concepts, such as ‘total capital’. For the moment, it is worth noting that by rooting his analysis at this level of abstraction, Marx introduces a significant dynamism in the Grundrisse’s analysis, which adopts the ‘world market’ as its own spatial horizon and the tendency as its own privileged temporal vector. Marx’s own ‘method’ – whose sole ‘elucidation’ is to be found in the renowned 1857 ‘Introduction’ [Einleitung] to the Grundrisse – is deeply marked by this dynamism. Built around ‘determined abstractions’ (which also include the concept of ‘capital in general’), Marx’s method aims at criticizing classical political economy starting from the recognition of its scientificity, that is, by positing that classical political economy constructed categories as abstract as to be ‘true in practice’ (G: 105).3 Far from advancing a return to the ‘concrete’, Marx’s critique is fully placed on the terrain defined by the constitutive function of abstraction, of an abstraction which, if we follow Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1978), can well be defined as ‘real’ – in the sense that in the capitalist society this abstraction appears as materially embodied in money and commodities, where money and commodities are to be understood as the criteria for the structuring of social relations (‘social synthesis’, as Sohn-Rethel would put it), more than simple economic categories. From within such a terrain, Marx is working to extract – to make rise against – the excess of ‘living labour’ regarding the capitalist command and exploitation that classical political economy, in his view, literally cannot describe, since they define the horizon in which its discourse has developed.4 As we read in the so-called ‘Unpublished Chapter VI’ of the first volume of Capital – another very important manuscript written around 1865 – ‘bourgeois economists [are] imprisoned within capitalist ways of thought. Such thinkers do indeed realize how production takes place within capitalist relations. But they do not understand how these relations are themselves produced’ (RIPP: 1065). In the Grundrisse manuscripts it is possible to find some of the most suggestive formulations for anyone interested in reading Marx under the lens of the ‘production of subjectivity’. For instance, as we read in the section also known as ‘Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations’, ‘The production of capitalists and wage labourers is thus a chief product of capital’s realization process’ (G: 512). But note (to anticipate a problem we will tackle later on when discussing some of the aspects of Marx’s analysis of the ‘so-called primitive accumulation’): capital’s valorization process produces the subjective figures of the capitalist and the wage labourer, but at the same time it does not logically occur without these two figures, which thus appear at the same

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time as its precondition. Interestingly, in his critique of political economy, Marx reformulates – by literally displacing them, moving them on another level – some of the classical problems of modern political theory. We already encountered these problems earlier when referring to the circularity which, since Hobbes, characterizes the relation between individuals and society. The production of subjectivity (and the reproduction of its figures) in any case seems to be placed at the centre of the analysis of capital’s valorization process, essentially in keeping with the relevance assumed by that issue since Marx’s first formulation of ‘critique’ as concerns law and politics. Even the set of issues that Marx dealt with in his youth (under the rubric of ‘estrangement’ and ‘alienation’), reappears in the Grundrisse within the analysis of the process of ‘objectification’ of labour in order to indicate its specific distortion in the society of capital.5 Labour, which at this point occupies the field of the ‘practical activity of single individuals’, is transmuted in products (indeed in objects) appropriated and accumulated by those who did not work on them, and generates a power hostile and alien to those who did. Capital emerges out of this process, and for Marx it is literally unthinkable outside an antagonistic relationship whose definition immediately puts at stake the meaning itself of the terms ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’. Moreover, the break established by Marx’s critique regarding the order of the discourse of political economy, in addition to numerous complex continuities, centres specifically on the difference existing ‘between profit and surplus-value, respectively intended as an economic “measure” and as a social “relationship”’ (Zanini 2008: 139). Let us ponder over the meaning of objectivity and subjectivity, since the definition of new materialism already gravitated around these terms. As Marx writes: ‘When objectified labour is, in this process, at the same time posited as the worker’s non-objectivity, as the objectivity of a subjectivity antithetical to the worker, as property of a will alien to him, then capital is necessarily at the same time the capitalist’. Also, he adds that ‘It is posited within the concept of capital that the objective conditions of labour – and these are its own product – take on a personality [Persönlichkeit] towards it, or, what is the same, that they are posited as the property of a personality alien to the worker’ (G: 512). Later, in the last pages of volume 1 of Capital, Marx will write that ‘capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things’ (C, I: 932; see also RIPP: 1005; C, III: 953; MECW, 32: 427). Reading this definition through the prism of the extract from the Grundrisse just quoted allows us to set two important points. First, as we have seen earlier, the subjective figures among which this kind of social relation, capital, is determined are not ‘given’. Rather, they must instead be produced and constantly reproduced by capital’s valorization process, while mutating their profile in parallel with the ‘things’ that mediate their relation.

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Secondly, this same mediation through things occurs essentially in a different way at the two ‘subjective’ extremities of the relation: the ‘personality’ of the capitalist is defined as a sort of support – Träger, ‘bearer’, is in Marx’s work a central term precisely in relation to the production of subjectivity – of the ‘objective conditions of labour’ produced by workers and snatched from their control. A unitary figure of subjectivity does not seem to find any space within a field which is, instead, marked by a radical asymmetry – this being the ultimate meaning of Marx distancing himself from ‘humanism’. The concept of labour as such – whose 1844 definition as ‘life-producing life’ is worth recalling – undergoes a series of fundamental transformations and dislocations within Marx’s laboratory of the critique of political economy. This concept is dismantled, or better, divides itself in a plurality of conceptual pairs, which are themselves affected by antagonism: living labour and dead labour, present labour and past labour, abstract labour and concrete labour, labour power and labour, productive and unproductive labour – only to mention the most relevant, which nevertheless refer to different theoretical registers and analytical levels. However, what Marx retains from his striking early definition is that labour indicates a mass subjectivity which, through the production of objects, sets in motion the process in which capital emerges by appropriating these very objects (in different ways). Hence, capital appears on the scene as a sort of objectivity of a higher degree, confronts workers, and converts the appropriated and accumulated ‘objects’ in something fundamentally different, in ‘objective conditions of labour’ as such (G: 503). As we have seen, the capitalist appears as the personification of these objective conditions, their lifeless frozen mask – to employ terms whose importance will become clearer in the following chapter. Notwithstanding, here we are facing only a formal outline of the origins and functioning of the capitalist social relations. These relations, with their historical proliferation and becoming the dominant ‘mode of production’, keep depending on the production and reproduction of their figures of subjectivity. On the one hand, the development of capitalism is unconceivable without the action of these subjects – chiefly with respect to labour, which in Marx’s view assumes an actual ‘ontological’ priority over capital: labour’s practices of subjectivation, its movements and the struggles related to it play a key role in driving (and conditioning) capitalist development, as the Italian workerism had effectively understood since Tronti’s Operai e capitale [Workers and Capital, 1966]. On the other hand, however, capitalist development ‘acts retroactively’, so to speak, both on the subjective figures of labour and of capital; it modifies their composition and reproduces their relation on a larger scale. ‘The movement of capital is limitless’ (C, I: 253); it is ‘an endless process’ (G: 270). Capitalist accumulation knows no limits, neither social nor geographical – we have learned to what extent Marx was right on this point

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(although capital’s relation with its ‘limit’ is a crucial theme and will be necessary to revisit later on). Despite what is nowadays still being claimed repeatedly, capitalism is not the functional logic of one of the ‘systems’ in which the national (or global) society articulates itself, namely, of the ‘economic’ system. As a social relation, capital instead has the tendency to structure the whole of society in keeping with its own ‘rationality’ – capital’s endless valorization and accumulation. Indeed, by reproducing itself on enlarged scales, the capitalist mode of production produces not only ‘commodities’ and ‘surplus value’ but rather, as Marx puts it in the first volume of Capital, ‘it also produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself; on the one hand the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer’ (C, I: 724) – the production and reproduction of a relation, that is, of the figures in which subjectivity appears as being split into. What we draw from Marx’s texts is an indication of method, and it allows us to displace the discussion of the relation between base and superstructure that characterizes the history of Marxism, once we assume its constitutive significance for the critique of political economy. This indication rather suggests to analyse the decomposition and recomposition in manifold ensembles of economic, political, juridical, cultural factors (see Mezzadra 2011b) from the standpoint of the production of subjectivity. In this sense, the category of ‘mode of production’ itself seems to indicate, through a complex interplay of subordination and determination, the principle of articulation for the set of those relations which, in the capitalist social formation, must be structured in specific forms in order to ensure the incremental continuity of the valorization of capital.6 Of course, as we read at the beginning of the so-called 1857 introduction to the Grundrisse, ‘The object before us, to begin with, material production’ (G: 83). Yet Marx does not backtrack on the disjuncture determined earlier by his new materialism with respect to the definition of matter. Rather, in relation to material production and by deeply innovating its concept, he displaces the set of philosophical heritage we have read through the lens of the production of subjectivity. A principle of indetermination is thus acting in the field of material production (again, ‘life-producing life’), and essentially exposes it to a series of dimensions which, only apparently (in the eyes of ‘vulgar’ materialism), appears as ‘immaterial’. This principle of indetermination, which in the capitalist mode of production affects in particular the ‘economic’ sphere and structurally forces its ‘boundaries’ – in the specific sense that there are no absolute limits to the social dimensions on which the capital relation unfolds – represents the fundamental problem of historical materialism, more than the relations between base and superstructure. Nevertheless, it is still valid to argue that, by the time of these writings, in Marx ‘there is no category which can be defined outside the possibility of scission’ (Negri 1991a: 45). ‘Life’ is here entirely posited in terms of labour,

Living Labour

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and it could even be argued that in many pages of the Grundrisse labour appears as the sole subject, facing a capital which acquires a subjective character only in a game of smoke and mirrors – Marx talks about ‘transubstantiation’ (G: 308) – as the inverted image of subjectivity, death and past: The only thing distinct from objectified labour is non-objectified labour, labour which is still objectifying itself, labour as subjectivity. Or, objectified labour, i.e. labour which is present in space [räumlich vorhanden], can also be opposed, as past labour, to labour which is present in time [zeitlich vorhanden]. If it is to be present in time, alive, then it can be present only as the living subject, in which it exists as capacity [Fähigkeit], as possibility [Möglichkeit]; hence as worker (G: 272).

Thus, not only asymmetry but, as we already said, a constitutive excess of labour in the capital relation.7 This relation, however, restricts it with what we could call – by amending a formula deployed in the third chapter of this book – the non-subjective conditions of the subjectivity of labour, as materially represented by capital. Labour is surely a subject but not in the sense of Hegel’s ‘self-moving’ Spirit directed towards its realization. Instead, and not devoid of irony, Marx shapes his analysis of the circulation of money as capital – of the ‘valorization of value’ where ‘value [becomes] the subject of a process’ (C, I: 254ff) – on the renowned pages of the Phenomenology. Accordingly, it is not by chance that a theorist such as Moishe Postone, who maintains that the analysis of the form of value constitutes the essential kernel of Marx’s theory, designates capital as the ‘Subject’ predominating in the critique of political economy.8 Still, it seems to me that by proceeding along these lines one would lose sight of the intensity with which Marx empties out the image of a subjectivity built on Hegel’s reference to the Spirit, rediscovers the internal power of the movement that produces it and, ultimately, captures the materially antagonistic determination of a subject resisting any resolution at the level of ‘forms’ – be they qualified and determined according to a ‘phenomenology of the spirit’ or a philosophy of history. Living labour (‘labour as subjectivity’) is the name of this subject and, at the same time, it is the fundamental basis of the ‘openness’ of capital understood as a relation, the principle of its impossible totalization and its intrinsic instability. Nonetheless, it goes without saying that in addition to a relation, the term ‘capital’ also designates one of the two sides of this very relation. Furthermore, although born in a game of smoke and mirrors, the subjectivity of capital can exercise an immense social power, adopt specific strategies and perform as a political actor, both in its ‘fractions’ and in what Marx defines as ‘total capital’. This social power vigorously establishes itself in a series of ‘laws’ and objective compulsions arising from

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the becoming global system of the capitalist mode of production, which Marx analyses, in particular, in the manuscripts for the second and third volumes of Capital. Fighting hand-to-hand with ‘past’, ‘dead’ labour, that is to say, with machines, ‘labour as subjectivity’ (‘living labour’) itself is subjected to the material power of scission and separation. In the period of ‘large-scale industry’, specifically, the collective working body has its brain removed: ‘The separation of the intellectual faculties of the production process from manual labour, and the transformation of those faculties into powers exercised by capital over labour, is . . . finally completed by large-scale industry erected on the foundation of machinery’ (C, I: 548–49). Evidently, even this expropriation is not without friction, for the working brain rebuilds through subversive cooperation and in the struggles against the capitalist organization of factory work. Within capitalist development the subjective figure of labour exploited by capital, pressed by these struggles, will undergo significant transformations, which are far from being merely limited to ‘manual labour’. ‘Expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles and sense organs’ (164): the set of activities corresponding to Marx’s brief list will be (and is) involved in this process. The relation between ‘living labour’ and the ‘objective conditions of labour’ (between the subject and the nonsubjective conditions of subjectivity) will be different in each individual case; the very general intellect Marx talks about in a well-known passage from the Grundrisse (G: 706) will become a field for subjectivation and antagonism. Yet in the capitalist mode of production the ‘separation’ is destined to be endlessly reproduced, in forms that we also need to investigate in our present. Besides, it would be worth following the indication provided by Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000: ch.2) and read the concept of living labour also through the prism of another Marxian category – as crucial as it is complex – that is, of abstract labour. Of this concept, Marx in the first place proposes an apology: the labour confronting capital is ‘abstract labour’ since it is ‘labour pure and simple . . . absolutely indifferent to its particular specificity [Bestimmtheit], but capable of all specificities’. Whereas in capital ‘general wealth . . . exists objectively, as reality’, this labour is itself general wealth ‘as the general possibility of the same, which proves itself as such in action’ (G: 296). Abstract labour appears here as a pure social power, and its indifference to any specificity (which is to say, to the ‘concrete’ contents of labour) posits the conditions for the antagonistic subjectivation of labour as such. Nonetheless, in accord to modalities which need to be analysed further in the following chapter, abstract labour is also that through which the capitalist measure is exercised, the way in which capital represents labour as its ‘variable’ part, first through wages and then in the social dimensions in which capital exercises its productivity. ‘A use-value, or useful article’, as Marx writes in

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the chapter on the commodity in the first volume of Capital, ‘has value only because abstract human labour is objectified [vergegenständlicht] or materialized in it’ (C, I: 129). According to this essential meaning of the concept, abstract labour is the general productivity of labour as it appears through the norm of the valorization of capital. It is the disciplinary criterion living at the core of living labour – the internalization of the vampire, to recall another image Marx utilizes to define capital (cf. Neocleous 2005: ch.2). Or to put it more prosaically, the trace of the commodity-form of labour power. NOTES 1. Marcuse 2005: 93. 2. cf. Rosdolsky1977: 41ff. 3. Marx deals with the relation between categories characterized by a higher or lower degree of abstraction in terms leading him to reject any symmetry between logical and historical order (cf. Musto 2010: 112): ‘Thus’, as we read in the 1857 ‘Introduction’ to the Grundrisse, ‘although the simpler category may have existed historically before the more concrete, it can achieve its full (intensive and extensive) development precisely in a combined form of society, while the more concrete category was more fully developed in a less developed form of society’ (G: 103). 4. cf. Zanini 2008: ch.2. 5. cf. Carver 2008. 6. cf. Hall 2003: 136. 7. See also Jameson 2011: 64. 8. Postone 2005: 76, but more generally 1996.

Chapter 6

Hobbesian Spectres

For the contradiction has two aspects: on the one hand, there is the increasing undermining of the forms of reification – one might describe it as the cracking of the crust because of the inner emptiness – their growing inability to do justice to the phenomena, even as isolated phenomena, even as the objects of reflection and calculation. On the other hand, we find the quantitative increase of the forms of reification, their empty extension to cover the whole surface of manifest phenomena. And the fact that these two aspects together are in conflict provides the key signature to the decline of bourgeois society. —György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (1923)1

The concept of ‘abstract labour’ plays a key role in Marx’s theory of value. Marx considers his critical examination of ‘the dual [indeed abstract and concrete] character of the labour embodied in commodities’ as the crux ‘to an understanding of political economy’ (C, I: 132). One of the canonical definitions of the dual character of labour in a society based on the production of commodities can be found in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, and it is worth reading it in its entirety: Whereas labour positing exchange value manifests itself in the equality of commodities as universal equivalents, labour as useful productive activity manifests itself in the infinite variety of use values. Whereas labour positing exchange value is abstract universal and uniform  labour, labour positing use value is concrete and distinctive labour, comprising infinitely varying kinds of labour as regards its form and the material to which it is applied. (CCPE: 277)

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Abstract labour is thus linked to exchange value, whereas concrete labour refers to use value. The former is the root for a specific form of equality, built on the generalization of the principle of equivalence and the commensurability of the values of commodities. Yet how is the abstract character of labour to be defined? What does abstraction act upon? In other words, what is the status of the concept of abstract labour? On this, Marx’s text is not univocal. In a series of influential essays written in the 1920s, Isaak Rubin had already signalled that Marx oscillates between a physiological understanding of abstract labour – in the passages where abstract labour is defined by abstracting it from any concrete qualification of the productive activity, where it is reduced to mere expenditure of ‘functions of the human organism’ (C, I: 164) – and its social determination, which appeared to Rubin as the only correct one. As he maintains, ‘The concept of abstract labor expresses the characteristics of the social organization of labor in a commodity-capitalist society’ (Rubin 1990: 141; see also Heinrich 1994). Though Rubin refers to a bygone era of capitalism (a society with ‘simple’ commodity economy and competition), his indication is certainly valuable. However, I would argue that it is worth emphasizing both the plurality of meanings of the concept of abstract labour and the relations this entertains with other Marxian concepts, undoubtedly related to it but not to be considered as its synonyms, in particular, the concepts of ‘labour in general’, ‘social labour’ and ‘labour power’. In the semantic field delimited by these concepts, the reference to a physiological determination of abstract labour is made clear in a sense fairly compatible with its social determination: as we will see in the next chapter, the commodification of humanity’s abstract ‘power’ (the transfiguration of what Marx, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, defined as ‘species-being’, the Gattungswesen of humans) is indeed that which provides the key signature of the capitalist mode of production. A set of ‘sociological’ aspects of abstract labour emerges whenever this is placed in connection with labour in general and social labour, on the one hand in regard to the forms of the organization of labour and cooperation, and on the other hand as concerns the formation of the mesh of norms – in the term’s dual meaning, prescriptive and descriptive, statistical – around which capitalist society is organized.2 This point can be clearly grasped in another passage from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in which Marx affirms that ‘This abstraction, human labour in general, exists  in the form of average labour which, in a given society, the average person can perform. . . . It is simple labour which any average individual can be trained to do and which in one way or another he has to perform’ (CCPE: 272–73; cf. also C, I: 135). Nevertheless, it is also necessary to stress the specificity of abstract labour on the basis of its constitutive link with exchange value. Even though Marx

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insists that abstract labour ‘creates’ exchange value – as we have seen in the first extract from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy quoted earlier – something else must be noted. In the analysis of the commodity-form, which the extract refers to, a complex game of representation of labour and value causes abstract labour to be characterized as the form of labour, as the (temporal) measure of the expenditure of labour power which, in the process of production, is truly at the heart of the creation of value. This appears to be a crucial distinction, allowing on the one hand to retain the reference to the other aspects of the concept of abstract labour already mentioned, while on the other it warns against the risk of ‘confining’ labour in the value-form, against posing labour as a ‘self-grounding social mediation’ (Postone 1996: 151). Rather, this distinction highlights an antagonistic determination that affects labour itself: we are dealing with an issue becoming increasingly relevant the more labour, as it happens nowadays, extends on new social, cooperative and ‘anthropological’ dimensions, as this results in the disappearance of its separation from activity and life. Under these circumstances, the reproduction of what we just defined as the form of labour becomes autonomous from labour as such, while revealing its central role in the production of subjectivity related to capital on a more generally social terrain. Keeping in mind this problem, let us follow Marx’s analysis of the commodity. It is known that the distinction between use value and exchange value of commodities, although not invented by Marx, vertiginously develops in the first pages of Capital and peaks in the conceptual acrobatics of the section titled ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret’ (added to a considerable extent to Capital’s second edition in 1873). Grotesque ideas evolving out of a table’s wooden brain, transformed into a ‘thing which transcends sensuousness’, warn us about the ‘mystical character’ of the commodity (C, I: 163–64). Once the attention is fixed on its form, the commodity presents itself as ‘a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’ (163), a ‘social hieroglyphic’ (167). These are among Marx’s most renowned pages and are ‘very strange’ themselves. The commodity is a fetish in so far as it transfigures productive cooperation in ‘material [dinglich] relations between persons and social relations between things’ (166), while setting productive cooperation in opposition to the individual subjects in a separate form as a power dominating and ‘enchanting’ them.3 The theologicopolitical problem we encountered in ‘On the Jewish Question’ here reappears and disseminates spectres in the world of things and their social life – commodities are, indeed, ‘social things’ (165). Marx himself notes that ‘to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion’ (ibid.). In another context – in the chapter in the third volume of Capital dedicated to the ‘trinity formula’, which is to say, to the relation between profit, ground

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rent and wages – he puts forward the image of a ‘religion of everyday life’ (C, III: 969; cf. Basso 2015: ch.1). One of the conceptual tools to read these pages from the standpoint of the production of subjectivity can be found in the (largely theologico-political) semantics of representation, and we need to consider its whole spectrum of meaning. ‘A common element [ein Gemeinsames]’ constitutes the substratum of the world of commodities, which is characterized by a ‘phantom-like objectivity’ (C, I: 127–28). Commodities represent this ‘common element’, the ‘substance’ of their values, and instead have generally (exchange) value only inasmuch as ‘abstract human labour is objectified [vergegenständlicht] or materialized in it’ (129). Discussing labour as represented in commodities, Marx uses the verb darstellen (which bears a strong figurative and ‘expositive’ connotation) instead of using vertreten or repräsentieren, the two verbs usually utilized to denote the political dimension of representation. However, what is firmly present in Marx’s analysis is the central problem sitting at the core of representation since Hobbes – the sovereign production of a political unity and a ‘people’, of an order standing above the individuals who compose it and become citizens only by recognizing it.4 Rather, one could argue that it is possible (and more importantly, productive) to reconstruct Hobbes’s presence in Marx’s reflection precisely around the theme of representation, more than in the genealogy of the concept of labour power – ‘The Value . . . of a man is . . . his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his Power’ (Hobbes 1985: 151) – and the remarks about the bellum omnium contra omnes to define the reality of competition or evolutionism. Represented in commodities, the ‘common element’ constituting the substance of their values portrays the gap and disjuncture between the individual and collective dimensions that mark sovereignty and people, as shaped by modern political theory (on the traces of Hobbes’s Leviathan [1651]). Marx writes that ‘The total labour-power of society, which is manifested in the values of the world of commodities, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour-power, although composed of innumerable individual units of labour-power’ (C, I: 129). The citizenship in the world of commodities can be acquired by participating in a game of exchange in which, constantly, what human beings have in common appears to each in the form of an alien objectivity, ‘thingyfied’. The political estrangement Marx critically enquired in ‘On the Jewish Question’ appears here on a different position with respect to the classical terrain of the state, sovereignty and citizenship, and it seeps into the tiniest relations of exchange underlying the fabric of the society of commodities.5 What we defined as the form of labour dominates human beings; it demands to control their behaviours, command their needs and colonize their desires. For the purposes of our analysis, the fetishism of commodities obtains its full

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significance: its mystical character, as Marx puts it, lies in the fact that the commodity-form reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers. (C, I: 164–65)

By now, the parallelism with Hobbes’s theory of representation should be evident, since it was characterized by the profound separation between the sovereign representation of the political unity of the people and the inarticulate multiplicity of the individuals forming the ‘multitude’ of the state of nature.6 It is necessary to emphasize that the fetish character of the commodity essentially consists in a specific production of subjectivity, which is to say, in the separation of the individuals as producers from the ‘sum total of labour’ – and thus in the suspension of its productivity, of its social and ‘common’ characters, in a dimension withdrawn from the availability of each individual. Moreover, the network of relations unravelling in the society of commodities is structured around the norm and the institution of property, which embodies its organizational principle and criterion of ‘closure’. Accordingly, while introducing an additional level of analysis, Marx writes that ‘Commodities cannot themselves go to market and perform exchanges in their own right’. The enquiry thus can proceed only by focusing on their ‘guardians’, that is, on the ‘possessors of commodities’. The possessors of commodities face each other as persons, recognize each other as owners of private property through the juridical relation of the contract (C, I: 178). Here, Marx deploys the term ‘person’ in a technical-juridical sense, and the best Marxist critique of law is based precisely on such an indissoluble mutual implication of commodityform and juridical form to show the extent to which the person becomes, in modern bourgeois law, ‘the personification of the abstract, impersonal, legal subject, the pure product of social relations’ (Pashukanis 2002: 113). Let us keep following Marx’s text: ‘the persons exist for one another merely as representatives . . . of commodities. The theatrical masks who appear on the economic stage [die ökonomischen Charaktermasken] are merely personifications of economic relations; it is as the bearers [Träger] of these economic relations that they come into contact with each other’ (C, I: 178–79, quote slightly altered and emphasis added). I stressed the theatrical connotation of the term Charaktermaske – whose importance in Capital should not be overlooked (cf. Haug 1995) – and italicized ‘representatives’ so as to emphasize that the echoes from Hobbes

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become perceptible also in these passages.7 For instance, in chapter 16 of Leviathan, Hobbes had evoked the original theatrical meaning of the term ‘person’, central to his entire theory of representation and sovereignty, and more specifically had associated it with the mask covering the face of a stage actor. What is more, the contract played an essential role in the organization of social relations among ‘private’ individuals in his work as well – in contrast to the ‘pact’ (or ‘covenant’) that generates the Leviathan.8 For Hobbes, these relations arise as relations between individual proprietors with the emergence of the state, and sovereignty – affected by and structured on a specific logic of representation – embodies a sort of ‘a priori’ of these same relations in the sense that, strictly speaking, the subjects among which these relations are determined cannot come into being without it. In the Marxian perspective, this a priori splits in two. The sovereignty of money emerges alongside the sovereignty of the state, in a persistently unstable equilibrium which is necessary to investigate historically and theoretically.9 The problem of representation is at stake once again: if abstract human labour is represented in commodities as the measure and substance of their value, then in order for the commodity to be exchanged, this value must be commensurate with a ‘universal equivalent’ that is as abstract as this value itself, and which is thus capable of representing it. Étienne Balibar, in particular, shows the extent to which Marx reformulated the logic of modern contractualism – in his description of the origins of money as the universal equivalent – but at the same time how, in the unfolding of Marx’s analysis, the ‘objective’ forces exerting pressure on the masks of persons increasingly replace the action of individuals as owners of commodities (Balibar 2017: 199). These individuals, as Marx writes, ‘can only bring their commodities into relation as values, and therefore as commodities, by bringing them into an opposing relation with some other commodity, which serves as the universal equivalent’ (C, I: 180). The emergence of the convention of the universal equivalent is a crucial step in the generalization of the relations of exchange, a way to evade situations in which a particular commodity could be exchanged only with another particular commodity needed by the owner of the first – obviously provided that, in turn, the owner of the latter commodity is in need of the first. Yet theoretically, as we have just seen, ‘some other commodity’ can perform the function of universal equivalent. Marx’s analysis determines here an extremely significant development, ascribing to commodities the ‘social action’ from which money arises, as if the structural determinations comprised in the commodity-form prevailed on their guardians: Only the action of society can turn a particular commodity into the universal equivalent. The social action of all other commodities, therefore, sets apart the particular commodity in which they all represent their values. The natural form

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of this commodity thereby becomes the socially recognized equivalent form. Through the agency of the social process it becomes the specific social function of the commodity which has been set apart to be the universal equivalent. It thus becomes – money. (C, I: 180–81)

As form of value, money does not limit itself in mediating the process of exchange – in relation to this, Marx refers to ‘money as money’. Money also allows valorization and accumulation to occur, and allows the transformation of value into ‘value in process’: money itself thus becomes ‘money in process and, as such, capital’ (C, I: 256). The analysis of the ‘general formula for capital’ (M-C-M'), in which the sum of money originally advanced for the purchase of a commodity comes back to the capitalist’s pocket with an increment, a surplus value (251), leads Marx to demystify the appearance of a ‘self-valorization’ of capital (255). The network of exchanges, under the pressure exerted by the structural determinations contained in the commodity-form, must be torn in order that the labour of a different subject may emerge, a subject which is irreducible to the person’s mask. Capital is a social relation in so far as the increment of value, surplus value, originates not in the sphere of circulation but rather in the sphere of production, where living labour operates. Additionally, in Marx’s analysis capital partitions itself along with labour. The reference here is to the division of the concept of capital as such, more than the capitals operating in different economic ‘sectors’ (merchant capital, industrial capital, interest bearing capital) or different ‘stages’ of the cyclical process of capital (money capital, productive capital, commodity capital). In the valorization process, capital divides itself in a constant and variable part corresponding to the parts of capital laid out in the elements which, from the point of view of the labour process, ‘can be distinguished respectively as the objective and subjective factors, as means of production and labour-power’ (317). Therefore, the ‘subjective factors’ (labour power) are represented in capital as its variable part, in the sense that only labour power is capable of generating value and thus determine an increase in the capital-value. The socio-relational nature of capital is here at once manifest and mystified, ‘labour as subjectivity’ is again solidified and harnessed in a quantifiable objectivity which actually is the reality of dominion and exploitation – of the form of labour, to evoke the terms employed earlier. The categories of constant and variable capital play a crucial part in Marx, and they should not be confused with the categories of ‘fixed’ and ‘circulating’ capital related to the sphere of circulation and analysed in the second volume of Capital. Their relation – put differently, the relation between the shares of capital invested in constant and variable capital – defines the ‘value composition’ of capital. This corresponds, ‘as material, as it functions in

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the process of production’, to the ‘technical composition’ of capital, which is instead ‘determined by the relation between the mass of the means of production employed on the one hand, and the mass of labour necessary for their employment on the other’. In order to give expression to the strong link between these two dimensions, Marx introduces the concept of ‘organic composition of capital’ (C, I: 762). These are very useful tools to analyse the transformations characterizing the development of capitalism, once we highlight their ductility and flexibility, and once we also liberate them from some of the rigidity distinguishing the analysis of ‘the general law of capitalist accumulation’ in volume 1, chapter 25 of Capital.10 What is worth stressing here, once again, is that the organic composition of capital is not merely an ‘economic’ category. Rather, this category contains and neutralizes a set of political relations of domination which restrain living labour in a net with very small mesh, disciplining its excess to make it productive (of surplus value). Moreover, this occurs both on the side of variable capital, in which labour power appears as a commodity whose value is calculated according to the measure of abstract labour, and on the side of constant capital, invested in those objective conditions of the labour process which, as we saw in the previous chapter, face living labour as an alien and hostile power.11 The problem of the subjectivity of the capitalist comes again to the forefront, the problem of the ‘person’ dominating and exploiting, and in particular of the relation between, on the one hand, the individual capitalist and, on the other, the set of the laws of movement of capital and the objective compulsions which follow the progressive extension and socialization of the capitalist mode of production. Such is the problem of the construction of a collective subjectivity of capitalists, of what Marx calls ‘total capital’. This is another crucial concept and, for the moment, we should mark its difference with the concept of ‘bourgeoisie’. It might be argued that the bourgeoisie, as it appears quite clearly when we consider its relationship with the category of ‘middle class’, plays an important social role of mediation in the construction of the ‘hegemonic’ arrangements that ensure the continuity of capital’s valorization process. The ‘boundaries’ of the bourgeoisie are thus structurally uncertain from a sociological standpoint. They expand, unravel and shrink in keeping with the more or less inclusive nature of the norms – social and cultural, besides juridical and political – in which its hegemony is expressed. By contrast, ‘total capital’ is the concept through which Marx poses the problem of capital’s general interest, one not identifiable with the interest of any of its fractions, and which can ultimately be defined on the same level of abstraction where ‘capital in general’ operates, as we saw in the previous chapter. ‘Total capital’ is at once narrower than the concept of bourgeoisie, in terms of the ‘interests’ included in it, and broader, since its scope is defined by the

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whole of society. Commercial companies, industrial cartels, employers’ associations, investment banks and global financial corporations have historically played and keep playing key roles concerning the ‘representation’ of the total capital, affecting and conditioning different states and international organizations. However, for its own nature, the total capital can never coincide with its representation functioning in determined settings: both the expansive dynamic of capital and the permanent threat of crises originate from this instability, which in particular widens the gap between each individual capital and the total capital. These issues have been addressed within the debates about imperialism and finance capital (consider, for instance, Rudolf Hilferding’s theory of a ‘general cartel’),12 and those about the Marxist theory of the state (since Engels’s well-known definition of the state as ‘the ideal personification of the total national capital’ [der ideelle Gesamtkapitalist, MECW, 25: 266] in Anti-Dühring [1878]). What needs to be considered is, on the one hand, the necessity of a representation of the total capital – even in our contemporary settings, in which the representation primarily operating on a national scale comes to be unsettled by the processes of globalization – and, on the other hand, its intrinsic instability. As Marx maintains, ‘each particular capital should be viewed simply as a fragment of the total capital and each capitalist in fact as a shareholder in the whole social enterprise, partaking in the overall profit in proportion to the size of his share of capital’ (C, III: 312). The issue is that things rarely work as described in this extract from the third volume of Capital, which seems to fix in an ‘ideal’ model the reality of ‘total capital’ – and this does not mean that it becomes less relevant with respect to the material effects it unfolds. As movement, capital cannot be considered as ‘a static thing’. The movements of capital certainly appear as ‘actions of the individual capitalist’, Marx writes in volume 2, but the movement of value tends to become autonomous from individual capitals, to pose itself as an ‘abstraction in action’ that, with the enlarging of capital’s scale of reproduction, crystallizes as social norm independent of the individual capitalist. The more acute and frequent these revolutions in value become, the more the movement of the independent value, acting with the force of an elemental natural process, prevails over the foresight and calculation of the individual capitalist, the more the course of normal production is subject to abnormal speculation, and the greater becomes the danger to the existence of the individual capitals. (C, II: 185)

Besides, in the terms of the joint-stock model, Marx points out that the total capital ‘has in common with many other joint-stock companies that everyone knows what they put into it, but not what they will get out of it’ (509).

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NOTES 1. Lukács 1971: 288. 2. cf. Macherey 2015 and Chatterjee 2012: 185–87. 3. cf. Bensaïd 2009: 229ff. 4. As Hobbes writes in chapter 16 of Leviathan: ‘A Multitude of men, are made One Person, when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented; so that it be done with the consent of every one of that Multitude in particular. For it is the Unity of the Representer, not the Unity of the Represented, that maketh the Person One. And it is the Representer that beareth the Person, and but one Person: And Unity, cannot otherwise be understood in Multitude’ (Hobbes 1985: 220). It is in this chapter from his most important work that Hobbes, starting from an original interpretation of the term ‘person’ (and in particular on the basis of the distinction between ‘actor’ and ‘author’ of the words and actions of an ‘artificial’ person), formulates a radically new theory of representation. 5. cf. again Rubin 1990: ch.7. 6. The notion of reflection (the key term of the extract quoted above) points to the relevance of the “image’ in Hobbes’s theory, as was aptly signalled by Carlo Galli (1988: ch.2) within the intense philosophico-political debates on this theme occurred in Italy in the 1980s. 7. On this, cf. also Basso 2015: 40ff. 8. Whereas the contract entails the simultaneous ‘transferring of Right to the Thing’ and ‘transferring, or tradition, that is, delivery to the Thing it selfe’, the pact (or covenant) is characterized by the fact that ‘one of the Contractors, may deliver the Thing contracted for on his part, and leave the other to perform his part at some determinate time after, and in the mean time be trusted’. Though this definition of pact could also be applied to contractual relations between individuals (the Marxian contract of the sale and purchase of labour power can be framed in this particular category), Hobbes’s fundamental aim was to highlight the specificity of the pact founding the Commonwealth. In this case, in fact, every individual commits to relinquish his or her right to govern him or herself without having the certainty that other individuals will respect this commitment in the same way. Such is the specific case of a pact in which ‘both parts may contract now, to performe hereafter: in which cases, he that is to performe in time to come, being trusted, his performance is called Keeping of Promise, or Faith; and the fayling of performance (if it be voluntary) Violation of Faith’ (Hobbes 1985: 193). 9. After having stressed the importance of Hobbesian themes in Marx, it is important to signal that, in relation to money (and its ‘sovereignty’), the comparison with Locke is clearly fundamental. In chapter 5 (‘Of Property’) of the Second Treatise of Government [1690], Locke highlighted the function of individuals ‘tacitly agreeing in the use of money’ – that is, ‘by putting value on gold and silver’ – in originating a process for the multiplication and extension of property, chiefly through enclosure of land: ‘Where there is not some thing, both lasting and scarce, and so valuable to be hoarded up, there men will not be apt to enlarge their possessions of land, were it never so rich, never so free for them to take’ (Locke 1980: 29). It should be noted

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that here, as in other essential points of Locke’s theory, a strategic role is played by a version of America imagined as a space without law, property and money, as terra nullius. 10. In particular, I am referring to the thesis according to which ‘a relative diminution of the variable part of capital occurs in the course of the further progress of accumulation and of the concentration accompanying it’ (C, I: 772ff), in addition to the production of a ‘relative surplus population’ – what Marx names ‘industrial reserve army’ (781ff) – as well as to the affirmation that ‘in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse’ (799). Though Marx identifies significant tendencies which characterize the capitalist mode of production, his analysis in this chapter at times appears to overlook their dynamicity. It goes without saying that a thorough discussion of this point would require the investigation of the meanings assumed by terms such as ‘law’, ‘necessity’, and ‘tendency’ in Marx’s work. Useful guidance on these essential topics, which cannot be discussed further here, can be found in part 3 of Bensaïd 2009. 11. cf., for instance, Napoleoni 1972: 65. 12. In his important book Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development [1910], the Austrian Marxist economist Rudolf Hilferding thoroughly investigated the formation process of trusts and cartels constituting one of the distinctive traits of capital at the beginning of the twentieth century. He formulated the hypothesis of the progressive constitution of a ‘general cartel’ placed on the boundary between capitalism and socialism: within the conditions determined by the existence of such a cartel, for instance, ‘The whole of capitalist production would then be consciously regulated by a single body which would determine the volume of production in all branches of industry’ (Hilferding 1981: 234).

Chapter 7

Labour Power

Labour as abstract labour, and therefore as labour power, can be found already in Hegel. Labour power – and not only labour – as commodity, can be found already in Ricardo. The commodity labour power as working class: this is the discovery of Marx. The dual character of labour is only the preliminary. It does not constitute the discovery, but only the means of reaching it. We do not pass from labour to working class, whereas we can do this if we start with labour power. —Mario Tronti, Operai e capitale (1966)1

To resume the analysis of the conceptual devices Marx primed in the laboratory of the critique of political economy, we now need to dwell on a concept evoked a few times already in the previous two chapters, namely, the concept of ‘labour power’ [Arbeitskraft]. This concept figures only marginally in the Grundrisse where, if anything, one can find what Marx will present as its synonym in later years, ‘labour capacity’ [Arbeitsvermgögen], despite the fact that the use of ‘labour capacity’ in the Grundrisse does not perfectly correspond to the use of the category of labour power in the first volume of Capital. Here, this category occupies, for all intents and purposes, a strategic position: Marx’s entire theory of exploitation – but, more generally, also the image of the worker as revolutionary subject – is based on this category (as well as on the distinction between labour power and labour). Labour power is certainly the concept of a force, a power, yet a power defined in the terms of a ‘potential’ – the syntagm could also be translated as ‘faculty of labour’, by analogy with Kant’s Urteilskraft, the ‘faculty of judgement’. As Paolo Virno put it, ‘Labour-power is pure potential, very much different from the corresponding acts’ (2015: 159). The following is Marx’s definition: ‘We mean by labour-power, or labour-capacity, the aggregate of those mental and physical 57

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capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being, capabilities which he sets in motion whenever he produces a use-value of any kind’ (C, I: 270). And he adds, with an explicit reference to the Aristotelian distinction between potency and action, ‘The use of labour-power is labour itself. . . . By working, [the ‘bearer’ of labour power] becomes in actuality what previously he only was potentially, namely labour-power in action, a worker’ (283). We should return to the remarks about the proximity and simultaneous difference between the concept of labour power and abstract labour. As we saw earlier, both concepts express something ‘human’, in general, but whereas labour power embodies the basis of the production of surplus value, abstract labour – as the measure of the expenditure of labour power – mediates and merges the labour and valorization processes. We also saw that once ‘the quantity of labour objectified in [a product]’ has been calculated (293), abstract labour places itself in its commodity-form and inhabits it as the phantom of its objectivity. However, the point is that labour power is itself a commodity in the capitalist mode of production, in the sense that this mode of production is based on the existence of a class of individuals who are compelled to turn the set of their ‘mental and physical capabilities’ into a commodity in order to reproduce the material bases of their own lives. As any other commodity, labour power displays a dual character, but its absolute peculiarity lies in the fact that this dual character is deeply rooted in life, in the body of each individual and in the social fabric they are part of. The value of labour power, as the value of any other commodity, cannot but be determined by the labour socially necessary to produce the set of commodities workers consume to reproduce the material conditions of their existence. According to Marx, wages pay for this value, but this value has necessarily already been produced both in the moment when workers sign the contract and when they show up at the gates of the factory: labour embodied in labour power is thus ‘past labour’, measured in keeping with the criterion of abstract labour. Besides, what characterizes labour power is its structural excess with respect to its own value, the fact of being a producer of value as its use by the capitalist activates a ‘living labour’ fundamentally different from the ‘past’ labour which, ‘embodied in the labour-power’ in a latent form, determines its exchange value. And Marx adds that ‘this difference was what the capitalist had in mind when he was purchasing the labour-power’ (300). Considered in its relation with labour power, abstract labour therefore can be seen as a field of antagonism and conflict, primarily over ‘value’ and time control – of labour time but also of the dividing line between working time and nonworking time, the latter loomed over by the (also temporal) measure of abstract labour (cf. Bensaïd 2009: 77–81).2 On the one hand, with regard to the exchange value of labour power, its measure clashes with the fact that

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‘the number and extent of his so-called necessary requirements, as also the manner in which they are satisfied, are themselves products of history’ (C, I: 275): the workers’ struggle over wages attempts to widen the needs that determine the value of labour power, always socially qualified. On the other hand, the difference between the past labour embodied in labour power as the measure of its value, and the living labour producing new value constitutes, for Marx, the cornerstone of the entire capitalist mode of production. ‘Necessary labour’ – which is to say, the labour time during which the worker produces the value corresponding to the value of his or her labour power – is always accompanied by a time of ‘surplus labour’. During ‘surplus labourtime’, workers produce a mass of additional value, a surplus value, which the capitalist appropriates without compensating them with any ‘equivalent’, therefore, exploiting the workers’ living labour. The commodification of this kind of human essence – an ‘essence’ abstractly reduced to a set of aptitudes and faculties and thus historically produced, beyond any naturalism – immediately poses the problem of the process of disciplining required to render such ‘human essence’ productive (from the standpoint of capital). At the same time, it also relates to the antagonistic character of this process which is inherently affected, disrupted and interrupted by the workers’ resistance. The Dantesque pages where Marx invites his reader to forsake the world of exchange and circulation, ‘this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in full view of everyone’, to descend into ‘the hidden abode of production’ and, lastly, discover ‘not only how capital produces, but how capital is itself produced’ (C, I: 279–80), are as well-known as they are extraordinary. I shall not comment on them further. Instead, let us briefly remain on the ‘surface’, where the ‘owner of money may find labour-power on the market as a commodity’ (270, emphasis added). The verb Marx uses here is vorfinden, and indicates a sort of ‘coming upon’ or ‘encountering’ something that comes before or is already there. And indeed, Marx writes that in order for the encounter to occur between the two dramatis personae (280), ‘various conditions must first be fulfilled’ (270). In other words, the two subjective figures whose ‘encounter’ is examined here must be produced. As a specific social relation, capital arises only when ‘the owner of the means of production and subsistence finds the free worker available, on the market, as the seller of his own labour-power. And this one historical precondition comprises a world’s history [eine Weltgeschichte]. Capital, therefore, announces from the outset a new epoch in the process of social production’ (274). This epoch, for Marx, began with the colossal violence characterizing the ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ in which, for instance, the conditions of the encounter between the owner of money and the owner of labour power are produced (that is, in which these same two subjective figures are produced). In England, the enclosure of common land in the countryside created

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a large mass of mobile and poor population, which was then ‘whipped, branded and tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws [against vagabondage] into accepting the discipline necessary for the system of wage-labour’ (899). In the last chapter of this book, we will return to some of the issues posed by the analysis of primitive accumulation (and it should be borne in mind that Marx had already analysed some of its aspects in 1842, in a series of texts with reference to the Rhine Province’s laws on the thefts of wood).3 In the meantime, it is worth pointing to a problematic moment in Marx’s theoretical construction. The encounter between the owner of money and the owner of labour power is described in substantial continuity with the exchanges among private owners of commodities we have seen in the previous chapter. Put differently, even the encounter between the owner of money and owner of labour power is mediated by the juridical institution of the contract – this is why Marx insists that the owner of labour power appears as a free worker and not as a servant or slave. What is more, it is mediated by a contract of sale and purchase – ‘The Sale and Purchase of Labour-Power’ is in fact the title of the sixth chapter in the first volume of Capital from which the quotes regarding the encounter between owner of money and owner of labour power were taken.4 I have shown elsewhere the problems posed by this aspect of Marx’s theory, from historical and theoretical standpoints (Mezzadra 2011a). From a theoretical point of view, the ‘sale’ of labour power presupposes its ‘alienation’ (in a juridical sense) which, in the case of the commodity labour power, is impossible if not by transferring the worker’s ‘physical form’ and ‘living personality’ to the property of others – thus the worker would cease to be ‘free’.5 From a historical standpoint, also, once we consider modern capitalism on the world scale so markedly emphasized first by Marx himself, this is characterized by the continuous reproduction of forced forms of labour which cannot really be considered only as ‘anomalies’ in contrast to a presumed norm of ‘free’, wage labour. Here, I need to reaffirm that it is a matter of liberating the analysis of the encounter between the owner of money and the owner of labour power from the juridical imaginary, which univocally shapes Marx’s description through the institution of the contract. Incidentally, this also has the consequence that even the opposition between the ‘surface’ of exchanges and the underground abode of production should be critically reconsidered. A plurality of encounters and a plurality of devices of capture (literally, and metaphorically): is this not what we come upon in our present? Moreover, instead of a contract of sale and purchase, one should talk about a lease agreement. From a juridical perspective, this latter type of contract is more likely to contain a plurality of forms corresponding to heterogeneous employment relationships.6

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Now, it is important to add a few remarks with reference to the two figures of subjectivity, the owner of labour power and the owner of money, whose existence ‘comprises a world’s history’ – and we should also stress the significance of the term used by Marx, Weltgeschichte: the one at issue here is truly a world history, considering the relevance of conquest and colonialism to the origins of the capitalist mode of production. The fundamental term of comparison, in order to grasp the radicality of the disjuncture Marx establishes with respect to a whole tradition of thought, is here undoubtedly John Locke’s, whose theory of ‘self-ownership’ is to date one of the mainstays of liberalism,7 in particular, of the way liberalism constructs its subject. Marx initially accepts this terrain, as it already became evident from what we argued in relation to the sovereignty of money in the previous chapter. And it is certainly true that, in doing so, Marx allows some of the limits of the liberal conception of the subject to affect his thought.8 Yet, at the same time, Marx sets off a displacement so radical on the terrain of ‘self-ownership’ that its meaning is profoundly questioned. For Marx, money and labour power are not only economic categories. Rather, they are also (as it were) anthropological categories, which is to say that they refer to what modern European philosophy defined as the level of ‘human nature’. Specifically, these categories indicate the two essential modalities through which the individual can be constructed (produced) as the owner of him or herself. As a result of Marx’s analysis, the field of modern subjectivity appears even more irremediably split. Potency (labour power) is opposed by power (money). Labour power, as we have seen, is ‘potency’. And the fact that money is ‘power’ is affirmed by Marx with equal precision in a passage from the Grundrisse which is worth quoting in full: 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 individualized, 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 [Eigner] of exchange values, of money. The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket. (G: 156–57)

One could say that the series of themes we considered in the previous pages (starting from the relation between isolation and sociality) can very clearly be summarized by this passage. And one could spend more time on the category of ‘social power’ presented here by Marx.9 Moreover, the traces of the ‘classics’ of modern political philosophy recur in this passage as well,

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in particular concerning the more general, ‘anthropological’, definition of power advanced, once again, by Hobbes in chapter 10 of Leviathan, according to which ‘The Power of a man . . . is his present means, to obtain some future apparent Good’ (1985: 150). This dominion on time that money assigns to its owner, while ‘anticipating’ the conflicts in the field of temporality we indicated earlier, structures the encounter with the owner of labour power and covers the latter’s future with the shadow of the former’s power, which is about to be transformed, as we will see shortly, in command. More generally, this dominion on time constitutes a property relation with the ‘self’ – and thus a way of ‘inhabiting’ the world – which is radically different from the one characterizing the owners of labour power, who are constantly pushed back to their ‘mental and physical capabilities’ to construct and reproduce their subjectivity, their lives. Hence, another radical asymmetry. But from this perspective, what emerges even more precisely is what we defined earlier as the constitutive excess of labour in the capital relation. Labour is the only factor that produces new value, precisely because the subjectivity of the individual owner of labour power is rooted in what human beings have in common, in what Marx defines, as we saw, as ‘one homogeneous mass of human labour-power’ (C, I: 129). The individuality of the bearer of labour power seems to be immediately immersed in this ‘common’, and it is inherently open to the social dimensions on which both capitalist exploitation and class struggle unfold. The distinction Macherey formulates between ‘labour power’ [Arbeitskraft] and ‘labour capacity’ [Arbeitsvermögen], in addition to the use of the term Vermögenskraft, are not to be found in Marx’s texts. However, the French Marxist scholar precisely points at the difference Marx determines between his concept of labour power, with an emphasis on its potential nature, and Ricardo’s theory (which Marx is indebted to in other respects). Since what is being commodified is not a ‘force in action’ but one as ‘potentiality’ to be used for what it ‘is not yet’, labour power appears as ‘the bearer of potentialities that one can apply pressure to and control so as to intensify them’ (Macherey 2015). The ‘plasticity’ and ‘flexibility’ of labour power allow the intensification Macherey refers to, which immediately forces the boundaries of the subjectivity of the individual worker, a specific production of subjectivity transforming the individual bearer of labour power in a component of ‘social labour’.10 For instance, the labour exploited by capital is always combined labour. This originates a differential of power (productive power, ‘collective power’, of ‘a body of men working together’), which is multiplied by the heightened ‘efficiency of each individual worker’ stemming from ‘mere social contact’. As Marx puts it: ‘the sum total of the mechanical forces exerted by isolated workers differs from the social force that is developed when many hands co-operate in the same undivided operation’ (C, I: 443–45).

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Marx describes the social power of cooperation, in relation to the ‘largescale industry’ of his time, in terms in which it is not hard to distinguish, once again, ‘Hobbesian spectres’.11 As we read in the Grundrisse, for instance, workers relate to the ‘combination and cooperation with other workers as alien, as modes of capital’s effectiveness’ (G: 585). Of course, Marx explicitly states that ‘When the worker co-operates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species’ (C, I: 447). Nevertheless, he adds that Their unification into one single productive body, and the establishment of a connection between their individual functions, lies outside their competence. These things are not their own act, but the act of the capital that brings them together and maintains them in that situation. Hence, the interconnection between their various labours confronts them, in the realm of ideas, as a plan drawn up by the capitalist, and, in practice, as his authority, as the powerful will of a being outside them, who subjects their activity to his purpose. (449–50)12

Marx’s line of reasoning on the ‘despotism’ of capital begins here. So too does the analysis of a specific technology of disciplinary power, the command [Kommando] he defines by analogy with the organization of the army and which, with the intensification of cooperation, develops ‘into a real condition of production’ (448) while assuming for the workers the ‘objective’ character of an alien power. Within this process, capital ‘appears as itself their subject’ (G: 585), in the sense that it demands to represent and dominate the whole workers’ collective, by putting in opposition the estranged subjectivity of the latter to the individuality of each worker. These Marxian pages are extraordinarily important for the study of the organization of labour and the technologies of power entwined in it – one should also note that the model of the army, certainly predominant in his analysis, is coupled by Marx with the model of the orchestra (C, I: 448–49), to point to the range of technical variations on which capital’s command can adjust itself. In any case, it is of essence to highlight that capital’s ‘demand’ continually and necessarily clashes with the workers’ resistance, which Marx indicates as one of the driving forces of the whole process: As the number of the co-operating workers increases, so too does their resistance [Widerstand] to the domination of capital, and, necessarily, the pressure put on by capital to overcome this resistance. The control exercised by the capitalist is not only a special function arising from the nature of the social 1abour process, and peculiar to that process, but it is at the same time a function of the exploitation of a social labour process, and is consequently conditioned by the unavoidable antagonism between the exploiter and the raw material of his exploitation. (449)

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The cooperation commanded by capital is faced with an antagonistic cooperation, a cooperation in which each worker develops the ‘capabilities of his species’ in different figures of collective subjectivity, in a different interpretation of the ‘alien’ relation to the ‘combination and cooperation with other workers’ – to the point that it converts at times into a ‘strategy of refusal’, to recall the formula deployed by Mario Tronti in the most theoretically dense section in Operai e capitale, the long essay titled ‘Marx, forza lavoro, classe operaia’ [Marx, labour power, working class] (1971: 234ff). In history, the capital relation is profoundly altered by these struggles. Labour changes but so do its ‘objective conditions’, which capital appropriates and represents. Quantum mutatus ab illo! (C, I: 416),13 as Marx somewhat ironically writes in the conclusion of an extremely important chapter (the tenth, ‘The Working Day’) in the first volume of Capital, which we will return to. Cooperation can assume autonomous traits the more production goes beyond the factory walls and spreads over society as a whole, the means of labour themselves can be partially integrated in the social brain so that it would lose the ‘fixedness’ characterizing the system of machines analysed by Marx (C, II: 240). As Carlo Vercellone (2012) argued in relation to the contemporary situation, ‘profit’ can certainly ‘become rent’. In other words, capital can develop the power to ‘appropriate [aneignen]’ and ‘seize [abfangen]’ the ‘values created without its assistance’ (C, III: 778–79). However, the set of problems we have encountered – the ‘subjection’ of each individual worker to the ‘will of a being outside them’, the separated, estranged nature of the criterion regulating the production and reproduction of their collective unity – cannot but reproduce itself as long as capitalism will exist, ultimately splitting and lacerating the very subjectivity of the individual exploited subject. From this perspective, what we defined earlier as the form of labour plays a key role. Furthermore, particularly in the Grundrisse and in the so-called ‘Unpublished Chapter VI’ of the first volume of Capital, Marx describes the process of socialization of capital (and of the capital relation) in terms of a process of subsumption (or ‘submission’, as sometimes this term was rendered in Italian). This is not the place to return to the theme and meaning of ‘subsumption’.14 We should just remind the reader that the distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘real’ subsumption corresponds to the distinction between the two forms of surplus value identified by Marx: on the one hand, absolute surplus value is obtained ‘by extending the duration of labour-time’ in conditions of ‘formal subsumption’ (RIPP: 1019ff); on the other hand, relative surplus value is obtained by altering the ratio between necessary labour time and surplus labour, in other words, by reducing the former and attaining an (indeed relative) increase of the latter through the intervention of machines and the development of working cooperation (1035ff).15

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The socialization of capital can certainly be described in terms of the progression of real subsumption, but formal subsumption – as ‘the general form of every capitalist process of production’ (1019) – endlessly reproduces itself on an ever larger scale, in the same way as relative surplus value merges with absolute surplus value. In the past few years, we were witness to the empirical evidence of this issue, globally characterized both by a ‘complete (and constantly repeated) revolution [which] takes place in the mode of production, in the productivity of the workers and in the relations between workers and capitalists’ (1035), and by the lengthening of the social working day – this has inverted a secular tendency, materially constructed by means of violent class struggles, for its reduction. In any case, the category of real subsumption provides a particularly effective tool for a reading of the intensity of capitalist development (which in reference to ‘extension’ adopts the ‘world market’ as its horizon, as we have said and of which more later). For instance, the ‘production of relative surplus value’ immediately invests the sphere of consumption and needs, ‘requires the production of new consumption’ which is secured by the ‘quantitative expansion of existing consumption’ and, above all, by the ‘production of new needs and discovery and creation of new use values’ (G: 408). In a page from the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx had argued that with the ‘positive’ suppression of private property, ‘Man appropriates his integral essence in an integral way, as a total man’ and that it would be then followed by ‘the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes’ (EPM: 351–52). Therefore, if this is communism, the Grundrisse portrays the communism of capital, in other words, capital’s capacity to spread the circuits of its own valorization over the terrain of the production of the human: [T]he cultivation of all the qualities of the social human being, production of the same in a form as rich as possible in needs, because rich in qualities and relations – production of this being as the most total and universal possible social product . . . – is likewise a condition of production founded on capital. (G: 409)

Production of human beings, production of subjectivity: for Marx this is, once again, the terrain upon which the antagonisms marking the capitalist mode of production persist. NOTES 1. Tronti 1971: 130. 2. In a renowned essay on the transformations of the experience of time and the techniques of time control with the emergence of industry, the English historian E. P. Thompson wrote: ‘Those who are employed experience a distinction between their

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employer’s time and their “own” time. And the employer must use the time of his labour, and see it is not wasted: not the task but the value of time when reduced to money is dominant’ (Thompson 1967: 61). 3. On this, see Bensaïd 2007. 4. Besides, in the ‘Unpublished Chapter VI’ of volume 1 of Capital, it is Marx himself to write that once ‘the sale and purchase of labour-power’ is considered ‘as the constant result of the capitalist process of production’, this ‘dispels the illusion that we are concerned here merely with relations between commodity owners. This constant sale and purchase of labour-power, and the constant entrance of the commodity produced by the worker himself as buyer of his labour-power and as constant capital, appear merely as forms which mediate his subjugation by capital. Living labour is no more than the means of maintaining and increasing the objective labour and making it independent of him’ (RIPP: 1063). 5. As is well known, Marx specifies that ‘For this relation to continue, the proprietor of labour-power must always sell it for a limited period only, for if he were to sell it in a lump, once and for all, he would be selling himself, converting himself from a free man into a slave, from an owner of a commodity into a commodity’ (C, I: 271). Yet the purchase of a good ‘for a limited period only’ is quite a singular juridical variety among contracts, which would be valid even in cases in which the object of exchange in the employment contract is exactly a specific quantity of time. 6. cf. Kuczynski 2009. 7. As Locke writes in chapter 5 (‘Of Property’) of the Second Treatise of Government, ‘From all which it is evident, that though the things of nature are given in common, yet man, by being master of himself, and proprietor of his own person, and the actions or labour of it, had still in himself the great foundation of property’ (Locke 1980: 27). On the relevance of this affirmation, see Dardot and Laval 2013b: 88–94. 8. cf. Dardot and Laval 2012: 690. 9. On this, see Ricciardi 2010. 10. cf. Macherey 2015. 11. See also Merlo and Rametta 1999: 378ff and the important work of Rozichner 2015: 242–43. 12. It is worth reporting that the theme of cooperation – of the ‘social power, i.e., the multiplied productive force, which arises through the co-operation of different individuals as it is caused by the division of labour’ – had already been examined in The German Ideology in relation to the problematic of ‘estrangement’ (GI: 48). 13. ‘What a great change from that time’ (Virgil, Aeneid, bk 2, line 274). 14. On this, see Negri 2012. 15. For an amusing yet accurate description of the difference between the two forms of surplus value, one should listen to ‘Cuarteto de la plusvalía’ (2013) by the Argentinian composer Gabriel Belek, available online at http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=6I8mtnhWx6U (accessed 25 October 2017).

Chapter 8

Class (Struggle)

It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. —W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880 (1935)1

For Marx, these antagonisms are class antagonisms. Yet what is a ‘class’? The sources of Marx’s use of this concept – the works of the historians and bourgeois economists mentioned in one of his letters to Joseph Weydemeyer in 1852 (MECW, 39: 60ff) – have been amply studied.2 Ultimately, on the basis of what we claimed in reference to labour power and money in the previous chapter, it would seem straightforward to define ‘class’. If we were to assume the split of the field of subjectivity around these two poles, the individuals constructing their lives on the ownership of labour power would form the class pitted against the class of individuals for whom the ownership of money is decisive. However, this definition of the ‘two great classes directly facing each other’, to recall the definition from the Manifesto, has at most a ‘logical’ value. It says nothing on the production of a collective subject that is capable of action as such – and we saw earlier the extent of the complexity of, on the one hand, the relation between individual capitalists and the ‘total capital’ and, on the other hand, between individual workers and the collective and social power of ‘a body of men working together’. 67

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The two fields we have ‘logically’ singled out are internally stratified due to a multiplicity of conditions that intervene to mediate and differentiate the relation each individual entertains with money and labour power. Here, what is under scrutiny is not only the multiplication of classes tackled by sociological analysis – as in the debates on the ‘middle class’, already beginning in the early 1900s within and outside Marxism. Factors such as gender and race originally divide the field of class, and they do so by introducing crucial differentials of power and devices of hierarchization. What I mean by ‘originally’ is that these factors structure what has just been described as the relation individuals entertain with money and labour power. The contradictions so determined around gender and race thus cannot be defined as being secondary in relation to a class contradiction qualified as ‘fundamental’.3 The body should not be merely considered as a neutral tabernacle of labour power, since it is powerfully invested by these contradictions, shaped and constructed within a field of forces and resistances which we need to investigate in their specific cases. One could say that, by now, we should have already learned about this aspect from a century of struggles and theoretical developments on these themes. Whereas we can find in Marx reflections and certainly advanced claims on racial themes (especially with reference to Ireland and the United States),4 the sexual dimensions of labour power were left entirely beyond his conceptual horizon. This becomes a significant circumstance the more we consider that Marx explicitly referred to the essential role of ‘procreation’ to ensure the continuous supply of labour power on the market (C, I: 275), and he was quite clear in affirming that ‘Given the existence of the individual, the production of labour-power consists in his reproduction’ (274) – it thus consists in a series of tasks and activities historically constructed as belonging to women’s sphere of competence. Radical feminism’s critique of Marx developed therefrom and has generated a series of achievements and theoretical developments that are now indispensable, particularly in relation to the production of subjectivity.5 Therefore, far from finding a ‘simple’ solution, the definition of the concept of class remains an open problem, and indeed Marx’s overall reflection presents it as such. It is known that the last chapter of the third volume of Capital titled ‘Classes’ is hardly more than a draft (written, however, prior to the publication of volume 1). In this chapter, Marx limits himself to set up the problem and advances a hypothesis of solution as ‘simple’ as the one with which we opened this chapter, namely, the hypothesis that at the origin of classes – here listed as three for the insertion of the class of landowners – there would be, for instance, ‘the identity of revenues and revenue sources’ (C, III: 1026). Yet this hypothesis is discarded at once with the last written lines, before the manuscript breaks off:

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From this point of view, however, doctors and government officials would also form two classes, as they belong to two distinct social groups, the revenue of each group’s members flowing from its own source. The same would hold true for the infinite fragmentation of interests and positions into which the division of social labour splits not only workers but also capitalists and landowners – the latter, for instance, into vineyard-owners, field-owners, forest-owners, mineowners, fishery-owners, etc. (C, III: 1026)

What can we infer from this moment of genuine conceptual derangement, occurring when Marx faces the partitioning of the class object caused by ‘the infinite fragmentation of interests and positions’? At the very least an indication in negative terms: ‘class’, for Marx, is not reducible to a sociological concept as it constitutes itself in the excess and beyond a simple cartography of social stratification.6 Nonetheless, once the issue is posed in these terms, we have just qualified the ‘problem’ posed by ‘class’, but certainly we are not drawing near its ‘solution’. Moreover, the category of class is evidently also a ‘sociological idea’, while at one and the same time ‘a political concept, a historical conjuncture, an activist slogan’, as Fredric Jameson recently argued. However, he added, the point is that ‘a definition in terms of any one of these perspectives alone is bound to be unsatisfactory’ (2011: 7). Each of these uses (in addition to a few others) can be extensively registered in Marx’s texts, with the result that ‘class’ seems to define a conceptual constellation comprising aspects and stratifications of meaning that are difficult (and, ultimately, misleading) to fuse in unity. In general terms, it is nevertheless necessary to point out that the violent unsteadiness we identified in Marx as regards history reappears also in his most significant uses of the concept of class. This concept, too, appears divided between the action of human beings and the ‘circumstances’, between a subjective connotation (inseparable from ‘class struggle’) and an objective, structural, connotation. In this respect, an excerpt from The German Ideology is a prime example: The separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; in other respects they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors. On the other hand, the class in its turn assumes an independent existence as against the individuals, so that the latter find their conditions of life predetermined, and have their position in life and hence their personal development assigned to them by their class, thus becoming subsumed under it. (GI: 77)

In another text written in the same period, The Poverty of Philosophy [1847], Marx further develops the terms of this ‘division’ of the concept of class by writing that

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The domination of capital has created for this mass [of workers] a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle . . . this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle. (PP: 211)

Though Marx never returned to it at a later time, the distinction between ‘class in itself’ and ‘class for itself’ just sketched out here has been extraordinarily influential within Marxism, precisely because it seemed to give plastic expression to the oscillation between the subjective and objective dimensions we mentioned above.7 Moreover, it has also opened the conceptual space to elaborate on the concept of ‘class consciousness’. This concept, whose complete theoretical foundation is not to be found in Marx, has nonetheless played an essential role in the manifold attempts at filling in the ‘gap’ between these two dimensions. Intertwined with the debates on the ‘party question’ and ‘ideology’, the development of the controversies on ‘class consciousness’ constitutes a fundamental chapter in the history of Marxism and the political movements influenced by it. At present, it is difficult to advance a positive assessment of this concept – even though, evidently, the set of problems tackled by those debates continue to require our attention, starting from the image of a divided subject and the importance of what could be defined as the terrain of the ‘imaginary’. The objective to disperse the fog of the ideological representations imprisoning the individual members of the working class, which would make ‘transparent’ their relationship with the ‘truth’ of the social relations of production and set off the process for the formation of the ‘class for itself’, appears so heavily burdened by pedagogical intents and legacies from the Enlightenment that, for many reasons, it seems untenable to put them forward again. The action of the party, understood as the bearer of a revolutionary consciousness external to the working class, had been originally thought (by Lenin, primarily) in a dialectical relation enhancing the workers’ spontaneity, but all too often it crystallized in a further ‘alien relation’ to the individual workers – to recall the terms we found in the Grundrisse. Also, after Marx, the expression of spontaneity and class autonomy was continuously determined in forms which seemingly contradict the linear and progressive character of the maturation of a ‘consciousness’, in other words, it developed with successive ruptures and breaks. Therefore, at least as a heuristic hypothesis of one should set aside the concept of ‘class consciousness’ and, general, the philosophy of consciousness as the privileged terrain to develop the theme of the ‘production of subjectivity’ – in keeping with the current debates we referred to in the second chapter of this book. In order to continue working in the field opened by Marx’s concept of class, valuable suggestions

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could rather be provided by the research of those who, like E. P. Thompson and the ‘history from below’ movement, insisted on the necessity to analyse the complex processes for the making of the class, or by the extensive work undertaken within the Italian workerist tradition on the notion of ‘class composition’.8 These two schools of thought – in different forms and with their respective limits – provided an indispensable contribution to the dynamization of the concept of class, by expanding its outline without diminishing its political content. Rather, they requalified its political content as a problem of the open process for the constitution of the class subject. ‘The domination of capital’, as we read in The Poverty of Philosophy, ‘has created for this mass [of workers] a common situation’; it posed the bases for the constitution of the ‘class for itself’ as a political subject, by means of struggle. Independently of the Hegelian vocabulary deployed in this extract (which foreshadows a distinction between class ‘in itself’ and ‘for itself’), here we find the formulation of an idea which Marx will go back to in the following years, the idea according to which capital prepares the conditions for the emergence of the workers’ struggle. As affirmed very graphically in the Manifesto, ‘But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians’ (MCP: 226). Here Marx uses the two terms as synonyms, as different names for the same subject, but he will successively separate them. In Capital, ‘workers’ occupy centre stage whereas ‘proletarians’ are absent, as we will see in the next chapter. However, as we already mentioned in the first chapter, Marx will substantially retain the idea that the capitalist mode of production, for its own material modes of functioning, is characterized by a tendency to intensify productive cooperation and strip labour of any ‘difference’, causing it to become abstract and homogenous. Based on these premises, it becomes possible (if not necessary) to overturn the capital relation, or at least to profoundly destructure it by means of the action of a working class which is disciplined and unified by the command of capital itself. Many are the passages in Marx’s work that could be summoned in support of such a reading of the relation between capitalist development and the formation of the working class – at the same time, it should be noted that other passages, such as those on cooperation we discussed earlier, could be interpreted against any hypotheses of a simple and linear ‘overturning’ of the capital relation. In this case we are facing a hypothesis, which was certainly confirmed in specific historical moments – the momentous workers’ struggles occurred in the United States in the 1930s and those in Italy in the 1960s, just to mention two examples – but that (it must be admitted) does not work as a general theory, especially when the industrial phase of capitalism is posited only as one of capitalism’s historical phases and not as its essence or telos.

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Rather, one should here retrieve the origin of a second problem – alongside the other problem we hinted at through the reference to consciousness – inherent to the concept of class in Marx (and in Marxism, which can hardly be excluded in an enquiry on this topic). Posited as the concept of a homogeneity, the concept of class often fettered the space of subjectivation, cutting it out on the inverted image of the representation of the unity of labour operated by capital (and often ‘adopted’ by the party if not by the workers’ state). Even the political stretch of the passage from ‘labour power’ [Arbeitskraft] to ‘attack power’ [Angriffskraft] of the working class, advanced by Mario Tronti (1971: 209ff) and at the origins of Italian workerism, fundamentally does not dodge this problem, despite its formidable innovative features. More generally, this gave rise to the vast problems and conflicts we alluded to at the beginning of this chapter with reference to gender and race – yet here one should report the controversies related to the concept of ‘productive labour’ and the centrality of the struggles, within and outside the West, undertaken by subjects which are not ascribable to the traditional image of productive labour. Furthermore, by remaining within the ‘linear’ scheme we just presented, which is to say, by insisting on a sort of specularity between capitalist development and the formation of the working class, one can hardly avoid the problem Lenin tackled in 1902 under the rubrics of ‘economism’ and ‘trade unionism’, to return to our comments on Marxism. With these formulas, Lenin had in mind an essentially unionist politics which merely refers to ‘the relations between the workers in a given trade and their employers, and all they achieved was that the sellers of labour power learned to sell their “commodity” on better terms and to fight the purchasers over a purely commercial deal’ (1988: 122). During the workers’ offensive in the 1960s in Italy as well as in other Western countries, asserting the immediately political character of the struggle over wages had a shattering positive effect that should not be forgotten.9 Certain situations in which that assertion can be verified might certainly occur nowadays as well. Yet again, it would be wrong to deduce from them a ‘general theory’, as it would mean to underestimate the power of integration and recovery characterizing the capitalist mode of production. In recent years, hovering over the terrain of social precariat and the remarkable heterogeneity marking contemporary living labour, we rather continuously witnessed the reappearance of ‘trade unionism’, searching for associative forms which, to quote from a page by Marx on unions, could attempt at achieving ‘equality of a sort’ in the negotiations for the value of labour power and act as ‘insurance societies’ (C, I: 1071). This is not to ideologically condemn this search, yet it cannot be denied that it fed (and keeps feeding) the ‘corporative’ tendencies that campaign against a class politics of contemporary living labour. Besides, such politics evidently cannot but form

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within and against the capital relation, thus it cannot but permeate a series of determinations that present themselves as ‘economic’. As the next chapter will show more clearly, from a Marxian perspective even the differentiation between economic struggle and political struggle appears far from obvious. In chapter 10 of the first volume of Capital, Marx analyses the most significant reforms attained by the workers’ struggle in England during the nineteenth century: factory legislation and limitation of the working day. These are among the most intensely political pages in Marx’s oeuvre, where he shows how workers manage ‘to put their heads together and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier by which they can be prevented from selling themselves and their families into slavery and death by voluntary contract with capital’ (C, I: 416). Here, the workers manifestly affect the state through their struggle, inscribe on it one of their essential achievements, and bend it towards their needs. Is this an example of what Lenin would come to define ‘trade unionism’ or ‘reformism’? Marx does not believe so and in this chapter he rather focuses on the description of a crucial transformation of the working class, determined not by the action of capital but by the struggle – that other history we referred to in the fourth chapter of this book thus reappears here in the field of English large-scale industry. To specify: this is a transformation determined by a struggle developing on the fundamental ‘antinomy’ which constitutes the capital relation, and therefore affects it in its entirety on the terrain of time control (whose strategic importance we emphasized in the previous chapter). In the struggle for the working day, as Marx puts it, the owner of money and the owner of labour power face each other while bearing equal rights. Yet ‘between equal rights force decides. Hence, in the history of capitalist production, the establishment of a norm for the working day presents itself as a struggle over the limits of that day, a struggle between collective capital, i.e. the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e. the working class’ (344). In regard to the pages we just commented on, we should also add that Marx very pointedly shows how the pressure of the workers’ struggle encounters what can be defined as capital’s embryonic reformism. Limitation of the working day and factory legislation are, for instance, historical antecedents of the formation of the twentieth century social democratic state around which reformism, both of capital and of workers, will have been generally redefined (in the West). I would argue that this affirmation hardly invalidates Marx’s conviction according to which the stake in the struggle for the working day was something more than a social reform, though of great importance. Rather, one should return to Marx’s indication and resume the analysis of the capital relation searching for the places in which the contradiction characterizing it presents itself as an antinomy – and thus irreducible to what Lenin called ‘trade unionism’. In a recent essay on the theme of class in the twenty-first

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century, Göran Therborn argues that, nowadays, class should be considered primarily as a ‘compass of orientation . . . rather than a structural category to be filled with “consciousness”’. The class compass, he writes, should guide the action of social movements towards the exploited and oppressed ‘in all their variety’ (Therborn 2012: 26). And we should add, it needs to guide towards the individuation of those antinomies around which, to recall Rosa Luxemburg’s words, ‘the practical daily struggle for reforms’ opens the space where the ‘suppression of wage labor’ becomes actual (2004: 129). NOTES 1. Du Bois 1998: 700. 2. cf. Dardot and Laval 2012: 227ff and Tomasello 2013. 3. In this regard, it is worth reporting that the discussions within feminist, anticolonial and antiracist movements have radically questioned the categories of ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’. For instance, as Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth: ‘In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched [distendues] every time we have to do with the colonial problem’ (Fanon 1990: 31). 4. cf. Anderson 2010: ch.3 and 4. 5. For instance, see Weeks 2011. 6. cf. Aronowitz 2003. 7. There is a need to emphasize that while in The Poverty of Philosophy Marx actually uses the phrase ‘class for itself’ [Klasse für sich selbst] in order to distinguish class as a political subject from the ‘mass’ of workers considered as a class facing capital, he does not use the notion of ‘class in itself’ in this latter regard. In other words, this distinction which has been so influential in Marxism is not to be literally found in Marx. On this, see Vester 2008. 8. See Thompson 2013; and Borio, Pozzi and Roggero 2002. 9. In a book-interview from 1979, Toni Negri contended that, in the workerist experience in the 1960s, the struggle over wages was posited ‘immediately as a political demand in the two important dimensions always displayed by this struggle from the workers’ perspective, namely, on the one hand as a matter of organization and, on the other, as regards the struggle over relative wages. Which is to say, on the distribution of income, with a precise political intelligence at this level of generality’ (1979: 65ff). Besides, Rosa Luxemburg had already written in her Introduction to Political Economy (published posthumously in 1924): ‘The struggle against the fall in relative wages accordingly means also a struggle against the commodity character of laborpower, i.e. against capitalist production as a whole. The struggle against a decline in relative wages is thus no longer a struggle on the basis of the commodity economy, but rather a revolutionary, subversive initiative against the existence of this economy, it is the socialist movement of the proletariat’ (2014: 286).

Chapter 9

‘The Political Form at Last Discovered’

A democracy in a revolutionary situation, a democracy under the pressure of an armed revolutionary proletariat, a democracy which transforms itself in the revolutionary process from an instrument of class hegemony of the bourgeoisie into an instrument deployed by the proletariat in order to destroy and neutralise the bourgeoisie, to violently break its resistance, to seize its propriety, to destroy its social order: this is how the most ancient socialism conceived the idea of dictatorship of the proletariat. —Otto Bauer, Between Two World Wars? (1936)1

Marx’s critique of political economy, particularly when read from the standpoint of the production of subjectivity, determines a series of displacements of the political. In the previous chapters these displacements were analysed, for instance, in relation to the commodity-form, cooperation and the ‘command’ within the factory. Marx tears off crucial political categories from the privileged reference to the state – such as those related to the nature of power and the relation between the individual and collective dimensions of experience and action – strips them of any autonomy and purity, and effectively and productively ‘contaminates’ them by immersing them in the ‘profane’ world of economy and society. The concept of exploitation, as a whole and understood in its distinctness with respect to the level on which both the history of the modern state and the history of rights take place, indicates the radicality of these displacements. The Marxian reflection on the figures of subjectivity reorganizes itself in the gap between the formal juridical equality characterizing the sphere of circulation and the antithetical positions occupied by the owners of money and the owners of labour power in the ‘hidden abode of production’. 75

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Marx’s early critique of political emancipation, which we described, in particular, in relation to ‘On the Jewish Question’, is thoroughly developed in his critique of political economy. Now, we can summarize its essential terms – though bearing in mind that the theme of emancipation is not central on the pages of Capital, and the advancements of the critique are thus to be reconstructed by an indirect route. Democratic and socialist theories of emancipation fall short of coming to terms with the utterly material problem of the articulation between the effects of domination and production of subjectivity that pertain, on the one hand, to the action of the state and, on the other, to the action of capital. I am emphasizing this ‘articulation’ in order to point out that what is at stake here is not simply the opposition between a ‘material’ and a ‘formal’ dimension. From the standpoint of Marx’s critique, modern politics certainly constitutes itself in a structural heteronomy, in the sense that modern politics seems to originally entertain a relation of mutual implication with capital that opens it up towards economy and society. This is not a relation of identity or a mere functionality: in the capitalist mode of production, on the basis of the heteronomy we just mentioned, politics and the state can well attain margins of ‘relative’ autonomy (so to speak). However, what ties them to capital is an original relation, meaning that for Marx any modern political concept or institution is compelled to contend with it. Furthermore, the development of the critique of political economy requalifies what we defined earlier as the riddle of liberation. The antagonisms constitutive of the capitalist mode of production determine the scene in which this riddle becomes visible. Also, the search for and the construction of a subject for a politics of liberation are guided by these very antagonisms, which are hinged on specific devices for the production of subjectivity. If we were to argue that, in Marx, politics undergoes a moment of autonomy (in the strongest sense of the word) – bearing in mind that politics had been ‘faded out’ in his youth and later described in its constitutive heteronomy through the critique of political economy, as we saw – it is this politics we should refer to. As a political category, class struggle evidently determines a displacement of the centrality of the state.2 However, in order that this displacement may positively develop, the intensity of class struggle must reach a stage in which a break is determined precisely on the terrain of the production of subjectivity. This is the place of a politics defined in view of a problem posed by Marx and Engels in simple yet challenging terms: ‘The liberation [Befreiung] of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself’ (MECW, 24: 269).3 Here, subject and object of liberation coincide and set out, indeed, a riddle. Drawing a disrespectful parallel (which Marx certainly would not have accepted), one could even say that as Baron von Munchhausen pulls on his pigtail to lift himself out of the mud he

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is sinking into, so does the working class liberate itself by taking shape as a political subject on the basis of the very conditions that determine its subjection and exploitation. Besides, once politics is ‘contaminated’ with economy and society, the movements and struggles of this subject – the ‘working class’ – are to be found in a context in which trade unionism and economism are tendencies that appear to be objectively present (as we maintained in the previous chapter), and in which the question arises of articulating and distinguishing between economic struggle and political struggle. At the same time, however, once the world of economy is ‘politicized’, this distinction cannot take as its point of reference the existence of completely separated and autonomous ‘fields’. On the contrary, through the example of the struggle for the working day we have seen how a conflict on economic themes can be charged with strongly political aspects, in the sense that it eventually affects the capital relation itself and its juncture with the state form. Moreover, this struggle transforms the subjective figures of the capital relation – quantum mutatus ab illo, as we saw earlier, is the Virgilian motto at the end of Marx’s chapter on the working day. In other words, it becomes part of that other history we referred to in relation to 1848, as it is characterized by a specific production of subjectivity. By modifying the workers’ subjectivity – what the Italian workerism defined as the political class composition – a successful battle such as the one for the regulation of the working day contributes to materially transform the conditions of class struggle and shifts it on a terrain potentially more favourable to the exploited. At the same time, it forces capital to place itself on such a terrain, in the attempt to ‘recover’ from the emerging disruptions and transform the struggles themselves in fuel for its valorization.4 Capital is thus forced to modify its ‘organic composition’ – the relation between constant and variable capital which, as we saw in the sixth chapter of this book, is ‘the relation between the mass of the means of production employed on the one hand, and the mass of labour necessary for their employment on the other’ (C, I: 762). Put differently, capital is compelled to innovate the technical and organizational foundations of production, with consequences of paramount importance in the class’s ‘technical composition’ – to keep using the workerist vocabulary though without postulating any immediate ‘transitivity’, any automatism, in the relation between the technical and political dimensions of class composition. The subject of the politics of liberation changes throughout history to the rhythm of these processes. Also, it is of essence to highlight that these processes (as well as capitalist development as a whole), far from being reducible to a technical or merely ‘economic’ rationality, are traversed and marked by political moments (struggles) which indicate their times and condition their direction.

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Capital is not lacking in further references to these kinds of struggles. In relation to the ‘additional Factory Act of 7 June 1844’ in England, for instance, Marx writes that the ‘highly detailed specifications’ contained in the 1844 act, ‘which regulate, with military uniformity, the times, the limits and the pauses of work by the stroke of the clock, were by no means a product of the fantasy of Members of Parliament’. Rather, ‘Their formulation, official recognition and proclamation by the state were the result of a long class struggle’ (C, I: 394–95). Discussing the limitation of the working day in the ‘Inaugural Address of the Working Men’s International Association’ [1864], Marx postulates the existence of an antagonism between the political economy of the bourgeoisie and ‘the political economy of the working class’ (MECW, 20: 11). This is a suggestive formulation in so far as it seems to establish, once again taking up the traces of that other history we referred to in the fourth chapter, the idea of a social and economic autonomy of the working class, an autonomy built not only on important struggles but also on a multiplicity of conflicts, practices of resistance, cooperation and insubordination, daily behaviours of refusal and sabotage of capitalist command. In addition, in a text written the following year (‘Value, Price and Profit’) and again referring to the working day, Marx explains that its limitation would not have taken place ‘without the working men’s continuous pressure from without’ the state. And he adds: ‘This very necessity of general political action affords the proof that in its merely economic action capital is the stronger side’ (VPP: 146). We keep reading in ‘Value, Price, and Profit’ that the working class ‘ought . . . not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never-ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market’. The distinction between economic struggle and political struggle here seems to be sharply formulated: ‘Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wages system!’ (148–49). This is indeed a very clear distinction, but it can hardly be satisfactory from a theoretical point of view – and one must bear in mind that Marx prepared ‘Value, Price, and Profit’ as an informative exposition of his theories for the General Council of the International. Even apart from what we argued on the possibility for the struggle over wages to acquire political character, and going back to Rosa Luxemburg’s words quoted at the end of the previous chapter, one could ask: is it imaginable that workers could come to fight for ‘the suppression of wage labor’ without going through a series of struggles concerning their material conditions and which also necessarily acquire ‘economic’ character? Is it not within these struggles that such experiences develop, those forms of organization whereby the members of the working class begin to approach the enormous task of being the protagonists

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of their own liberation, according to the Marxian formulation? Marx himself warns that ‘By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement’ (148). Instead of considering the ‘economic’ struggle in itself as an expression of economism and trade unionism, one should rather adopt the intensity with which struggles affect and requalify the riddle of liberation as the criterion for measuring their politicity. Marx, after all, in postulating the inherently political character of class struggle, certainly referred not only to struggles that, as the one for the working day, required a ‘general political action’ or to an explicitly revolutionary initiative. As he wrote, for instance, to his daughter Laura and Paul Lafargue in 1870, ‘every class movement [Klassenbewegung] as a class movement, is necessarily and was always a political movement’ (MECW, 43: 491). In this letter, Marx’s statement indicates the essential question that was central to his clash with Bakunin and anarchism, which could thus be described as a confrontation on the very meaning of politics. Besides, to qualify ‘every class movement’ as political does not entail the introduction of a principle of nondiscrimination nor does it place movements and struggles of different quality and intensity on an equivalent plane. What is questioned is, rather, the definition of what we could define as a criterion of the political, to borrow from the lexicon of Carl Schmitt.5 Approached from the point of view of the ‘class movements’ and struggles, the concept of politics itself appears to be split in Marx’s critique of political economy. On the one hand, ‘every class movement’ is characterized by an inherent element of politicity inasmuch as it emerges and develops within a field patrolled by the devices for the production of subjectivity that pertain to the state and capital, challenging their effects of subjection. On the other hand, the political intensity of a struggle is determined by the power with which it affects the riddle of liberation, while playing a part in the redefinition of its terms and bringing out its urgency (through something that could be defined as a movement of ‘politicization’ or, as we would put it, of subjectivation). Transversally, with regard to these two poles of the concept of class politics that we seem to infer from Marx’s critique of political economy, the tendencies towards economism and trade unionism operate in addition to capital and the state’s power of integration and recovery. However, there also emerge dynamics of generalization and accumulation of power, of the kind that Marx analysed, in particular, with the case of the struggle for the working day, a classical (and today still methodologically relevant) example of a struggle over ‘economic’ issues which comes to gain a general political significance – in other words, it comes to modify the power relations between classes (and therefore, as we said, to build a more favourable setting to face the riddle of liberation).

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Moreover, class struggle also develops in theory, introducing in it a political dimension which Marx sought to balance for his whole life with the rigorous scientific criteria he followed. The critique of political economy, as we read in the postface to the second edition of the first volume of Capital [1873], expresses a partisan point of view. Yet the passage under examination is also interesting for another reason. According to Marx, the critique ‘can only represent the class whose historical task is the overthrow of the capitalist mode of production and the final abolition of all classes – the proletariat’ (C, I: 98). This reference to the proletariat is quite surprising, as in volume 1 of Capital, which today’s reader reads after the postface, ‘the very word “proletariat” almost never appears’ (Balibar 1994: 126). This is the important issue regarding the ‘name’ of the subject from whose point of view (or on whose behalf, we could say) the critique of political economy develops. As Jacques Rancière put it, ‘There is history precisely because no primeval legislator put words in harmony with things’ (1994: 35). Historically, political battles of paramount importance occur around the production and appropriation of names. In a recent study, for instance, Federico Tomasello (2013) has shown the intensity of the confrontations that affected terms such as ‘people’, ‘workers’, and ‘proletariat’ (in France, between the revolt of the Lyonnaise silk workers in 1831 and the Paris Commune), and has investigated the processes leading to the formation of the ‘collective singular’ working class as a condition of the possibility of the workers’ movement.6 Marx plays a major role in this affair. As we have already seen, the first volume of Capital clearly articulates the critique of political economy from the point of view of the industrial working class. Marx analyses both the conditions of its exploitation and its struggles through the prime reference to the English case, which he considered to be the most ‘advanced’ from the perspective of capitalist development and thus, in many respects, as paradigmatic.7 Here, a first reason appears to suggest that ‘working class’ and ‘proletariat’ should not be considered as synonyms. Slightly forcing the interpretation of Marx’s works, it would instead be more useful to regard the tension between these two terms as an essential critical moment to be deployed in the analysis of the production of subjectivity in capitalism – both in relation to the polarity of subjection (the heterogeneity of the forms taken by exploitation and domination) and the polarity of subjectivation (the practices and struggles expressing the tension towards liberation). However, a second reason directly linked to the reading of Marx’s texts consists in the fact that, from a political angle, the ‘name’ of the proletariat seems to refer to forms of collective action, to practices of revolutionary insurgency that are quite different from those discussed by Marx in volume 1 of Capital with regard to the English working class.

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Behind the reference to the proletariat in the postface to the second edition, one can hardly miss the return of the ‘ghosts’ of the victims of the Paris insurrection in June 1848,8 in other words, the victorious (though brief) experience of the 1871 Commune. Of course, Marx presents the Commune as a ‘working-class government’ (CWF: 212) in The Civil War in France, written as an address to the General Council of the International at the end of May of the same year. However, it is fairly easy to notice that the composition of the Parisian armed proletariat at the centre of the Commune was significantly different from the composition of the working class described in the pages of the first volume of Capital.9 In this sense, the reference to the proletariat in the 1873 postface could even appear as a sort of slip by Marx, as an expression of his awareness regarding the thoroughly political nature of the gesture of naming as ‘working class’ the subject of the Commune, in harsh polemics with Blanquists and Proudhonians. Moreover, reading The Civil War in France entails, once again, the encounter with the (essentially classical political) problems faced by the young Marx when introducing the concept of proletariat in his critical assessment of Hegel’s philosophy of right.10 The theoretical unfolding and rhetorical construction of this text gravitate around the figure of the state (and thus around its specific production of subjectivity, more so than around the production of subjectivity related to capital), and deeply innovates the way in which the state had been examined in a fundamental work such as the Manifesto – as Marx and Engels explicitly remark in the preface to the German edition of 1872 (MCP: 193–94). The Commune appears to Marx as ‘the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour’, as ‘a thoroughly expansive political form, while all previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive’ (CWF: 212). In contrast to the discussion undertaken in this chapter, one should not be misled by the use of the term ‘emancipation’. In this passage, what is relevant is the reference to an ‘expansive’ political form, namely, a political form capable of taking roots in the ‘labour’ movements and struggles, in addition to deeply affecting the material determinations of a social system (the capital relation) which, until then, had been maintained and defended by every existing state by means of its repressive functions. Central in the Marxist debate on the state in the twentieth century, mostly because of Lenin’s interpretation advanced in State and Revolution on the threshold of the October Insurrection, Marx’s analysis of the Commune returns to some of the themes that were at the heart of his writings about the years just before and after 1848 – although in a different context, since we are dealing with the address to an international political organization. For instance, as a general evaluation and in close proximity to the passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire analysed in the fourth chapter, Marx asserts

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that the struggle of the working class ‘will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men’ (CWF: 213). Yet the Commune, in his view, has in any case determined a gigantic leap forward in the political history of the proletariat. As he wrote to Ludwig Kugelmann in April of 1871, the Commune established  ’a new point of departure of world-historic importance’, destined to last  ‘even if it be crushed by the wolves, swine and vile curs of the old society’ (MECW, 44: 137, 132). The ‘storming heaven’ of the Communards materialized the ‘positive form’ of the ‘social republic’ which had expressed only ‘a vague aspiration’ in the eyes of the Paris proletariat at the beginning of the February Revolution in 1848 (CWF: 208–9). In Marx’s pages, the very figure of the republic splits, and it does so in the face of the historical irruption of ‘a thoroughly expansive political form’ disrupting the traditional forms of the state and government in which the ‘parliamentary’ and ‘bourgeois’ republic (analysed in The Eighteenth Brumaire) were placed. Moreover, in examining the Commune, Marx’s separation between a communist politics and the modern state is definitive. The working class, for instance, ‘cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes’ (206) – as we mentioned above, this is the passage quoted in the preface to the 1872 edition of the Manifesto. This separation is to be understood not only metaphorically, but also literally (and nobody understood it theoretically better than Lenin). This means that communist politics, in the terms hinted at by Marx in his analysis of the Commune, is defined as the mass action that seeks to separate the state’s ‘common’ functions – in the sense of that Gemeinswesen with which Engels, in a letter to August Bebel in 1875, proposed to substitute the term ‘state’ (MECW, 45: 64) – from its repressive apparatus, by seizing the former’s functions and destroying the latter. ‘Dictatorship of the proletariat’, a formula that Marx had previously utilized, for instance, in the already cited 1875 letter to Weydemeyer (MECW, 39: 64–65), originally indicates the political form of such a mass action. As Marx argues in 1875, in his critique to the ‘Gotha Programme’ launched by the German Social Democracy under Lassalle’s influence: ‘It is by no means the goal of workers who have discarded the narrow mentality of humble subjects to make the state “free”’ (CGP: 354). Nor is their goal to emancipate ‘labour’, since they have to emancipate themselves (348). We are faced once again with the riddle of liberation as the theme determining, in necessarily open and ‘expansive’ forms, the constitution of the working class and proletariat as a political subject. Or better yet, as we can now add, the constitution of the set of subjects placed in the field of tension between these two terms. After Marx’s time, often someone else (a party, a state) demanded to act instead of or on behalf of the proletariat and the working class, representing them. Communist

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politics, however, as a politics of self-liberation, cannot but critically address every representational device even when, in specific circumstances, it will need to acknowledge its necessity. NOTES 1. Bauer 1979: 134. 2. cf. Balibar 2013. 3. English translation from the MECW slightly altered. 4. cf. Jameson 2011: 58. 5. Without recalling in full his theory of the ‘political’, one should report here that according to Schmitt the friend-enemy distinction provides ‘a definition in the sense of a criterion and not as an exhaustive definition or one indicative of substantial content’ (2007: 26). For a recent reading of Marx’s concept of class struggle from this standpoint, see Balibar 2013. 6. I am deploying the concept of ‘collective singular’ in reference to the work of the German historian Reinhart Koselleck (2004), who highlighted how some of the most important modern political concepts stemmed from a movement of abstraction and reduction to the singular of realities that had previously been named in the plural (in keeping with the formation of the concept of ‘History’ starting from a multiplicity of ‘histories’, see 2004: 33ff). 7. In the preface to the first volume of Capital, Marx ‘yelled’ at his German readers: ‘De te fabula narratur!’ [The tale is told of you] (C, I: 90). Though anticipating an issue that will be tackled in the next chapter, here it is worth signalling that, in the following years, Marx started problematizing the linear conception of development that derived from considering the English case as paradigmatic. 8. cf. CWF: 202. 9. cf. Dardot and Laval 2012: ch.5. 10. I am referring here in particular to the introduction of the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (written in the winter of 1843–1844), where the proletariat – whose formation is certainly linked to the ‘emergent industrial movement’ – is presented as stemming from ‘society’s acute disintegration  and in particular from the dissolution of the middle class’, with a transparent (and consciously radical) critique of the Hegelian concept of ‘civil society’ and its dialectics (CCHPR: 256).

Chapter 10

Marx in Algiers

Capitalism arises and develops historically amidst a non-capitalist society. . . . This is the setting for the accumulation of capital. . . . Accumulation, with its spasmodic expansion, can no more wait for, and be content with, a natural internal disintegration of non-capitalist formations and their transition to commodity economy, than it can wait for, and be content with, the natural increase of the working population. Force is the only solution open to capital; the accumulation of capital, seen as an historical process, employs force as a permanent weapon, not only at its genesis, but further on down to the present day. —Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (1913)1

Marx never went to Detroit and Adam Smith never went to Beijing. Marx did, however, actually stay in Algiers for a couple of months at the beginning of 1882, near the end of his life, hoping to find (in vain) some comfort from the harsh winter in London following his doctor’s advice. As with the wellknown works by Mario Tronti (1971: 290–303) and Giovanni Arrighi (2007) just alluded to, the title of this last chapter should not be taken literally. Marx went to Algiers while harshly debilitated by poor health, also strained by the death of his wife, Jenny, in the previous year. The following pages will not reconstruct Marx’s stay in Algiers even though it admittedly presents more than a few elements of interest.2 Instead, his passage to the ‘South’ and the ‘East’ will be used here as a (consciously allusive) metaphor for the set of displacements emerging in his thought after the publication of the first volume of Capital in 1867. It is in this way that one could attempt to resolve the enigma of Marx’s interruption of the plan to conclude his critique of political economy (he partially 85

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resumed it only in 1877). ‘Illness’, as Engels informs us (C, II: 85), appears to have been among the major reasons for this interruption. This is undoubtedly the case and yet, considering how passionately Marx supported the Commune, along with his active involvement in the International’s internal disputes, it seems unlikely that he could not have found the energies to order systematically the bulk of manuscript writing that he had primed for the second and third volumes of Capital, even before the publication of volume 1. As such, solving this ‘enigma’ of Marx’s interruption to his work means formulating the hypothesis that it was a series of theoretical blockages faced by Marx that halted the order of ‘presentation’ [Darstellung] of his critique of political economy, and so forced him to resume his ‘enquiry’ [Forschung].3 In the last years of his life, Marx immersed himself in the study of the natural sciences of his time (from chemistry to geology), gathered materials for a ‘critical history of technology’ (arguably influenced by Darwin), and filled up several notebooks with his commentaries upon the works of different anthropologists and ethnologists.4 The latter is particularly important and indicates the need to take into account Marx’s increasing interest in different realities and areas of the world, distinct from those around which he had hitherto constructed his theories of capitalism (England) and proletarian revolution (France). As we have seen earlier (chapter 7), the concept of Weltgeschichte is particularly relevant to Marx’s work in this respect. In its standard English translation (‘universal history’), the term loses its reference to the ‘world’. This is not a mere terminological issue. The young Marx takes in earnest the spatial connotation of the syntagm Weltgeschichte – used in German philosophy from the eighteenth century – and consciously welds it to its temporal aspect. As we read, for instance, in The German Ideology: ‘it is certainly . . . an empirical fact that separate individuals have, with the broadening of their activity into world-historical activity [mit der Ausdehnung der Tätigkeit zur Weltgeschichtlichen], become more and more enslaved under a power alien to them . . . a power which has become more and more enormous and, in the last instance, turns out to be the world market [Weltmarkt]’ (GI: 51). Evidently, the spatial connotation is unambiguously concrete in Marx’s use of Weltgeschichte, and the spatial meaning goes as far as to point towards a historical time dominated by a power [Macht] that adopts the world as the field of its own action. The idea of proletarian internationalism stems from this intuition in Marx’s work, which constitutes, at the same time, a formidable anticipation. As Jacques Derrida argues, ‘No organized political movement in the history of humanity had ever yet presented itself as geo-political, thereby inaugurating the space that is now ours and that today is reaching its limits, the limits of the earth and the limits of the political’ (2006: 47). One can notice here a further and markedly original aspect of Marx’s thought that should also be emphasized from the standpoint of the production

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of subjectivity. His endeavour is fully aimed at sensing the action of forces whose constitution and efficacy is to be found within ‘global’ coordinates, in an epoch in which the process of the affirmation of national states and dissolution of ‘local’ affiliations in Europe was far from coming to an end. These forces determine the production and everyday experience of subjects who, for these reasons, he defines as ‘empirically universal individuals’ (GI: 49). With a certainty which cannot be found in any spokesperson of classical economics, Marx locates one of the distinctive characters of the modern capitalist mode of production in the intrinsic world dimension of its operations. Let us consider the following passage from one of Marx’s economic manuscripts, posthumously published by Karl Kautsky between 1905 and 1910, under the title Theories of Surplus Value: It is only foreign trade, the development of the market to a world market, which causes money to develop into world money and abstract labour into social labour. Abstract wealth, value, money, hence abstract labour, develop in the measure that concrete labour becomes a totality of different modes of labour embracing the world market. Capitalist production rests on the value or the development of the labour embodied in the product as social labour. But this is only [possible] on the basis of foreign trade and of the world market. This is at once the precondition and the result of capitalist production. (MECW, 32: 388)

According to a formulation that Marx often repeated, particularly in the Grundrisse, the world market is thus ‘the precondition and the result of capitalist production’. ‘The tendency [Tendenz] to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself. Every limit [Grenze] appears as a barrier [Schranke] to be overcome’ (G: 408). While capital cannot exist outside the horizon of the world market (which is indeed its ‘precondition’), this very horizon needs nonetheless to be constantly fabricated and imposed (in this sense, the world market is ‘the result of capitalist production’). The question regarding the specific production of space that characterizes capital has been for some time the focus of Marxist geographers, most notably those whose analyses are based on the problem of the ‘turnover of capital’ – that is, of its cycle, ‘when this is taken not as an isolated act but as a periodic process’ and whose duration ‘is given by the sum of its production time and its circulation time’ (C, II: 235) – so as to analyse the territorial hierarchization resulting from it.5 I wish here to draw attention to the ostensible circularity of Marx’s argument according to which the world market – again, like the subjective figures of the capitalist and the worker, as we saw in chapter 5 – is both the precondition and the result of capitalist production. Such circularity is broken by the identification of a historical moment, the ‘so-called primitive accumulation’

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analysed by Marx in part 8 of the first volume of Capital, in which both the world scale of the capitalist mode of production and its subjects were produced through ‘anomalous’ and exceptional procedures, in contrast to the description of commercial relationships advanced by classical economics. Among the ‘violent means’ of primitive accumulation (C, I: 883), Marx accords particular attention to colonialism and conquest because of their substantial role in the opening of the world market: ‘The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things that characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production’ (915). The world market owes its existence to the violence of this ‘opening’. However, it is important to stress that its space presents characteristics one can define as formal in that such space could be materially articulated and organized in substantially different ways, according to variable geometries of hegemony, domination and dependency. Where capital ‘constantly revolutionizes’ (G: 410), it also does so in relation to the production of those spaces in which its valorization and accumulation on a global scale can come into being. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the important debate about imperialism registered precisely this issue, which Marx himself had grasped when he distinguished the world market from ‘international’ intercourse.6 What I would argue is that, initially, Marx was rather dazzled by what I just termed above the ‘formal’ characteristics of the world market and, on this basis, he formulated a linear image of the tendency of capital in developing and imposing its own logic in a necessary way, and without any friction, according to an essentially unitary and homogenous model. Independently of their rhetorical efficacy (particularly in relation to the critique of utopian socialism), the celebratory tone that Marx adopts regarding the revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie in modern history in the Manifesto, together with the similar tone taken with regard to English colonialism in India in a dispatch written in 1853 (‘The British Rule in India’, in MECW, 12: 125–33), could also be seen as symptoms of an imbalance between spatial and temporal aspects of Marx’s understanding of Weltgeschichte. These pages, like others among Marx’s texts, undoubtedly suggest a certain idea of progress as historical necessity which would disentangle the concept of Weltgeschichte from the effect of concreteness potentially indicated by the spatial reference. In fact, the same argument could be made for the section in the Grundrisse dedicated to ‘Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations’, which is generally ruled by a retrospective reading aimed at bringing to the forefront the distinctive characters – and, ultimately, the ‘superiority’ – of the capitalist mode of production. In other words, Marx is working with a concept of

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‘community’, which is formulated, to a large extent, as the negative of the processes of ‘dissolution’ and ‘separation’ – chiefly of producers from the ‘objective conditions’ of their labour – constitutive of capitalist society, in ways that anticipate some of the most relevant developments of sociological theory in the following decades. However, the interest for the development of the ethnology and anthropology of his time shows the extent to which, in the last years of his life, Marx felt the need to problematize this reading. At the same time, the immense collection of readings and commentaries on societies other than Western European which Marx accumulated since the 1850s – mostly the result of his work as a journalist for the New York Daily Tribune, on India and China, slavery in the United States, Irish and Polish nationalisms – allowed him to fill out the concept of ‘world market’ with new material determinations.7 It would be best not to overestimate the amount of displacement and revision in Marx’s thought that derived from this bulk of study and research, specifically after the publication of the first volume of Capital. Letters, drafts of letters and notebooks are to be read with some caution, as at most they could support the formulation of hypotheses. What seems to be plausible, nonetheless, is that in his last years Marx shifted his perspective towards a multilinear approach to history and capitalist development. He did so by considering the possibility of a multiplicity of heterogeneous forms of the imposition and organization of capital’s social relations, adjusted to different geographical and historical scales (see Anderson 2010 and Dussel 1990: ch.7). Marx himself affirms this when he refers to his treatment of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’: ‘the “historical inevitability” [of the transition to capitalism] is expressly limited to the countries of Western Europe’, as he put it in a letter to Vera Zasulich in March 1881 (MECW, 24: 370). Furthermore, slightly more than three years earlier, Marx had warned the editorial board of a Russian magazine against transforming his ‘historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of general development, imposed by fate on all peoples’ (200). In theoretical terms, it is worth rereading the short passage from the ­Grundrisse cited above: ‘The tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself. Every limit [Grenze] appears as a barrier to be overcome’ (G: 408). There is an argument implied here which, if developed appropriately, would yield a productive intervention in the (often harshly polemical) debate gravitating around the evaluation of capital’s ‘universalism’ and its relation with ‘historical difference’ – especially as this debate has occurred in the past few years in ‘postcolonial studies’.8 Stated differently, it could be argued that while, on the one hand, the ‘tendency’ indicates the ‘universal’ moment concerning both the concept of capital and its action, on the other hand, the encounter with the ‘limit’ – defined at the

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same time from the point of view of its geographical extension and in relation to a set of historical, social and cultural conditions determining, among other things, the composition of ‘living labour’ – is also the basis for the profound heterogeneity of capitalism (as much with regard to its historical configurations as its contemporary one).9 The limit Marx is referring to in this passage is geographical, signalled by the use of the term Grenze (border). Nevertheless, it is also social, as is evident in the following lines of the passage, in which Marx adds that the tendency of capital is ‘to subjugate every moment of production itself to exchange and to suspend the production of direct use values not entering into exchange, i.e. precisely to posit production based on capital in place of earlier modes of production, which appear primitive [naturwüchsig] from its standpoint’ (ibid.). In this extract from the Grundrisse, capital confronts noncapitalist spaces, both in the limits of its geographical ‘extension’ and in the limits of its ‘intensive’ penetration into determined social formations (in the terms utilized in chapter 7). This is the problem of the transition to capitalism, central to Marx’s analysis of the ‘so-called primitive accumulation’. Marx was certainly convinced that in Western Europe such a process of transition was essentially over and that, if anything, it was itself repeating in the colonies. As he argues in the last chapter of volume 1 (‘The Modern Theory of Colonization’): ‘There the capitalist regime constantly comes up against the obstacle [Hindernis] presented by the producer, who, as owner of his own conditions of labour, employs that labour to enrich himself instead of the capitalist’ (C, I: 931). In order to enrich the interpretative model of the relation between capital’s ‘universal’ moment and ‘heterogeneity’ just outlined, it is essential, then, to qualify and articulate the reference to this ‘obstacle’ by including a set of historical conditions which go far beyond the existence of the figure of producer as ‘owner of his own conditions of labour’. Furthermore, it is important to restate my conviction that the problems and the ‘procedures’ Marx studied in relation to ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ must be understood as characterizing – while evidently taking into account that its forms transform over time – the entire historical development of the capitalist mode of production and, thus, cannot be only confined solely in its ‘prehistory’.10 The generation of what appears at once as ‘the precondition and the result of capitalist production’ – the world market, of course, but also and more importantly the subjects circulating within it – is continuously posed anew as a problem that interrupts the historical linearity of development. This is particularly the case in those moments of crisis when capital must extend its essential need for ‘constant revolution’ to the highest degree when faced with specific limits. In these moments, the problem of the limit reemerges, in other words, as the problem of the transformation of a series of social relations, productive

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processes, forms of political organization, of specific spatial arrangements into barriers to be overcome.11 Our contemporary situation plainly illustrates the way in which these barriers are not necessarily noncapitalist environments, but can be constructed as ‘external’ to capital (from within, so to speak) in order to open new frontiers to its valorization. For instance, one could simply look at the attack upon the welfare state in the West or the dismantling of productive cycles belonging to past epochs of industrialization in many parts of the world. It seems that this dynamic of ‘opening’, immediately guarded by specific mechanism of ‘closure’ – that is, of the confining and hierarchization of spaces, as well as the disciplining of subjects – is a structural trait of the capitalist mode of production, one of its indeed ‘universal’ moments to be critically understood in the particular circumstances in which it develops. However, ultimately, it is coupled with a specific production of subjectivity and specific conflicts that are not reducible to the two fundamental images around which Marx’s revolutionary imagination unfolds, the industrial working class and the rioting proletariat in the streets of Paris. The different forms of communal property and communitarian relations cannot but assume a central role in these processes and conflicts, as they ultimately did in the scene of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’, both as a ‘point of attack’ for capital – by means of a wide spectrum of devices of enclosure and dispossession – and as a basis for resistance. If we were to accept the hypothesis whereby in the last years of his life Marx developed an acute awareness of the global significance of these issues, his encounter with the works of different anthropologists and ethnologists – as recorded in the notebooks of 1880–1882 – becomes even more meaningful when compared to how Engels presents it in the preface to The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State [1884]. Put differently, Marx was not only looking for the historical origins of a series of criteria of social hierarchy, but had also been compiling an archive of diverse forms of the ‘common’ so that he could politically interpret some of the most important conflicts of his time as these were determined by the global expansion of capitalism. Famously, in his final years Marx gave particular attention to the Russian case, and reflected on the possibility that the obshchina, the rural commune, could represent the basis for a direct passage to communism (cf. Basso 2015: 85–99). In this instance, the texts available to us are relatively fragmented and the recent attempts to shape a ‘communitarian’ version of Marx – principally in the United States – are definitely not very convincing.12 I have no interest in extracting from the late Marx a complete theoretical revision nor a solution to the aporias of his thought. Rather, it is necessary to bring to the fore the movement of unceasing requalification of the terms of a problem – that of liberation – which had been constant in his work since his first writings. It is certainly in the intensity of the theoretical engagement with forms of common

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property and communal relations that we can glimpse Marx’s need to resume his enquiry, precisely on the topic of the production of subjectivity in capitalism in general and as materially conceptualized in its world dimension. Perhaps this was Marx’s concern while walking down the streets of Algiers at the beginning of 1882, gathering information about construction ­workers – who ‘although healthy people and local resident they go down with fever after the first three days’ of work and receive ‘a daily dose of quinine’ as part of their wages (MECW, 46: 220) – or sipping a coffee in a ‘Moorish’ tavern, fascinated by the spirit of ‘absolute equality’ he could perceive among its Arab regulars. However, in reporting his impressions to his daughter Laura on the 13th of April and to avoid any misunderstandings, Marx adds in his characteristic mixture of German and English: und dennoch gehen sie zum Teufel without a revolutionary movement, ‘Nevertheless, they will go to rack and ruin without a revolutionary movement’ (MECW, 46: 242). NOTES 1. Luxemburg 2003: 348ff. 2. cf. Vesper 1995 and Musto 2016: 105–14. 3. As Marx argues in the postface to the second edition of the first volume of Capital [1873]: ‘Of course the method of presentation [Darstellungsweise] must differ in form from that of enquiry [Forschungsweise]. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development and to track down their inner connection. Only after this work has been done can the real movement be appropriately presented. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is now reflected back in the ideas, then it may appear as if we have before us an a priori construction’ (C, I: 102). On the relation between Darstellung and Forschung, especially in relation to the Grundrisse, see Negri 1991a: 12–13. 4. ‘A critical history of technology’, Marx contends in a note in volume 1, ‘would show how little any of the inventions of the eighteenth century are the work of a single individual. As yet such a book does not exist. Darwin has directed attention to the history of natural technology, i.e. the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which serve as the instruments of production for sustaining their life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man in society; of organs that are the material basis of every particular organization of society, deserve equal attention?’ (C, I: 493n4). 5. cf. Harvey 1982. 6. cf. Ferrari Bravo 2018. 7. cf., in particular, Anderson 2010. 8. I am referring, in particular, to Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013). In his polemical book, Chibber accuses theorists of ‘subaltern studies’ – such as R. Guha, D. Chakrabarty and P. Chatterjee – of not having fully recognized the ‘universalising’ tendencies of capital and ascribes to them an

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acritical celebration of historical and cultural differences, which would allegedly result in a new and paradoxical ‘orientalism’. Even though Chibber grasps some of the aspects worthy of critical discussion within the project of ‘subaltern studies’ – and more generally in postcolonial theory – the overall tone of his argument leads him to fundamentally misunderstand not only that project, but also some of Marx’s concepts he deploys against it (‘abstract labour’, to begin with). This was aptly clarified by Partha Chatterjee in a debate with Chibber in New York, April 2013, available online at https://kafila.online/2013/05/07/partha-chatterjee-on-subaltern-studies-marxism-andvivek-chhibber/ (accessed: 25 December 2017). For a critical discussion of Chibber’s book, see Mezzadra 2014. 9. Although from a different perspective, see Patterson 2009: ch.5. 10. I advanced this argument elsewhere (see the appendix) and I share it with many other scholars. 11. It is worth noting that in the Grundrisse Marx makes use of the pair ‘limit’ [Grenze] / ‘barrier’ [Schranke] to define capital in general, even in different contexts, as can be seen in the following extract: ‘As representative of the general form of wealth – money – capital is the endless and limitless drive to go beyond its limiting barrier. Every boundary [Grenze] is and has to be a barrier [Schranke] for it. Else it would cease to be capital – money as self-reproductive. If ever it perceived a certain boundary not as a barrier, but became comfortable within it as a boundary, it would itself have declined from exchange value to use value, from the general form of wealth to a specific, substantial mode of the same’ (G: 334). 12. For an evaluation of this debate, see Curcio 2011.

Conclusion

The constitution of a ‘world market’ is defined by Marx several times as the greatest historical task of capital. This thesis is ‘established’ already in the first pages of Capital: the analysis of the concept of abstract labour shows, in fact, that an infinite multiplicity of articulations is necessary to its historical-theoretical existence, a continual overcoming of the ‘limits set by use-value’. —Luciano Ferrari Bravo, ‘Old and New Questions in the Theory of Imperialism’ (1975)1

The journey through Marx’s texts presented in this short book admittedly did not aim at revealing the outline of a systematic and exhaustive theory of subjectivity and its production. It allowed us, however, to identify the continuity of a problematic throughout Marx’s thought, although he tackled it with different tools over time. We saw how since the early 1840s Marx qualified his idea of critique by firmly connecting it to the ways in which the state and law produce their own figures of subjectivity. In following years, this constitutive link between critique and production of subjectivity is maintained, and finds new formulations in the fields of politics, history and political economy. When it comes to Marx, the reference to the ‘production of subjectivity’ is not at all improbable: in his texts, the subject is never examined irrespective of its implication in the network of circumstances and relations which define its position, delimit its margins of freedom and action and organize its relation to the world. In addition, subjectivity in Marx indicates a field marked by the category of scission (split, or separation). The critique of political economy shatters the unitary image of the subject constructed by modern political thought around categories such as citizenship, personality and ‘self-ownership’. 95

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Labour power and money, as we saw, are for Marx absolutely peculiar economic categories precisely because they constitute the gravitational centre of irreconcilable and antagonistic subjective figures. Yet at the same time, even these figures – the ‘bearer’ of labour power and the ‘bearer’ of money – are traversed by manifold ruptures which, in particular, concern their relation to the collectivity (the class) they are part of. We have seen an example of this in our discussion of the owner of money and the concept of ‘total capital’. Nevertheless, what matters most here is the bearer of labour power. Once the bearers of labour power become workers, in cooperation they find themselves subjected not only to the ‘command’ and ‘despotism’ of the capitalist, but also to the collective power of ‘a body of men working together’, which appears as ‘a will alien to them’. What is more, the analysis of the concept of ‘abstract labour’ proposed here shows that a rupture also marks the subjectivity of the individual bearer of labour power, who internalizes the commodityform (in addition to what I defined as ‘the form of labour’). Far from featuring only in the early and ‘philosophical’ phase of Marx’s oeuvre, the theme of ‘estrangement’ thus reappears in a few strategical moments of the critique of political economy, and it constitutes one of the red threads around which Marx organizes his analysis of subjectivity. According to Marx, estrangement does not represent a permanent presence in the human condition but, rather, the outcome of a series of relations that need to be interrupted. Evidently, that of Marx is neither the thought of order, nor is it even the thought of freedom: it is, much more radically, the thought of liberation. We noted that Marx was aware of the difficulty of this end goal, which often presented itself to him as a riddle. However, he never ceased thinking of this problem, against the background of the struggles and revolutionary practices of his time. To reread Marx’s texts today means to keep thinking of the same problem of liberation, in radically transformed circumstances. The critique of political economy portrays an attempt to set up the solution to this problem, starting from the analysis of the material arrangements that sustain the capitalist mode of production. Capital, as we saw, is not a ‘thing’ but a ‘social relation between persons which is mediated through things’. Here, it is worth recognizing the dual meaning assumed by the term ‘relation’, of fundamental importance in Marx’s entire oeuvre. On the one hand, the very existence of this relation comprises a series of conditions of subjection which place specific subjects in a subordinate position. On the other hand, however, since it is not fixed as a ‘thing’, the capital relation is exposed to criticism, subversion and transformation. Furthermore, this relation is for Marx based on the valorization and exploitation of an ‘excess’ in the subjectivity of the bearers of labour power, with respect to the conditions of their subjection (epitomized also in the compulsion to commodify their own labour power). In other words, the

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valorization of capital takes place on the same terrain on which the contradictions and antagonisms that characterize the capitalist mode of production are formed and become visible – as a material basis for the interruption of its historical continuity. As we saw in the analysis of the concept of labour power, Marx very accurately defines this subjective excess as the gap between the productive power of living labour and the value of the ‘past labour’ crystallized in labour power as a commodity. From this standpoint, capitalism appears as a mode of production entirely based on the deployment and exploitation of a subjective disproportion. Here, one can find at once the origins of capital’s impressive dynamism and its radical instability, which pose historically novel problems in regard to social disciplining and control. In the Marxian perspective, this element of subjective disproportion – the difference in value between living labour and labour power, which ‘the capitalist had in mind when he was purchasing the labour-power’ – was destined to throw the overall equilibrium of the system in disarray. In this sense, Marx’s critique does not invoke a criterion external to the capital relation. Rather, it relies on the intrinsically antagonistic nature of the capital relation so as to establish the possibility (and necessity) of its overthrow. Despite the traces of determinism that occasionally can be found in Marx’s pages, there appears to be here an indication of method which is still relevant today, particularly inasmuch as it refuses to turn capital into a fetish and, ultimately, shows capital’s dependence on labour and on the activity and cooperation of the exploited. At the same time, however, this indication of method is not sufficient for us. Marx’s theory of exploitation and the value theory on which it was based, as is evident, were formulated in a situation characterized by the affirmation of industrial capitalism in the ‘central’ countries of the time (primarily in England). These theories referred to settings of factory and ‘large-scale industry’ in which, on the one hand, workers directly faced capitalist command while, on the other, they experienced on a daily basis the gap and disjuncture between their productive power and the capitalist measure represented by wages. This is not to say that such circumstances do no longer occur today, but they stand in a much more complex regime of accumulation where financial processes violently synchronize a multiplicity of forms of labour and forms of cooperation. These processes alter the nature of exploitation as such, intensifying it but also making it elusive, more difficult to locate and ‘name’. Therefore, the certainty with which Marx identified the ‘hidden abode of production’ as the fundamental site of exploitation and of the extraction of surplus value – distinguishing it from the ‘surface’ of circulation and exchanges – nowadays appears to be increasingly problematic. In such a situation, one wonders whether the image of subjective excess elaborated by Marx should not be requalified in a specular relation with the

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way in which capital constructs the subjectivity of the bearer of labour power. The analysis of the concept of abstract labour presented here – as well as the introduction of the concept of ‘form of labour’ – aimed at highlighting the internalization of an original estrangement as the essential moment of this specifically capitalist production of subjectivity. We are dealing with a markedly material moment that conditions the actions, imaginary and lives of the exploited subjects even beyond the determined employment relationship they are (or not) involved in. To adopt the production of subjectivity as the privileged field of political struggle involves taking charge of this problem. Thus, it involves recognizing the strategic significance potentially taken on by the movements for the refusal of what was defined as capitalist subjectivity, in the moment when they place their action in a wider critique of the material arrangements of the capitalist mode of production. Within these arrangements, the moment of estrangement (as defined here) seems to be increasingly decisive in commanding social cooperation. It is also decisive in governing the dividing line between work and life which, although undoubtedly relevant in individual biographical cases – where it keeps appearing as the critical threshold to access an income – often tends to become indistinct with regard to the social dimensions targeted with priority by the valorization of capital. Moreover, estrangement tends to be coupled in these dimensions with (and in a way doubled by) processes of dispossession which assume ‘common’ resources as their target – from the knowledge produced in and deposited on online networks to nature, from social welfare to urban spaces. Now, what seems to me a crucial objective to work towards is the construction of a concept of exploitation that is capable of integrating these two fundamental dimensions of estrangement and dispossession, from the standpoint of the specific production of subjectivity of contemporary capitalism. The same argument could be made for the image of worker-subject emerging from Marx’s critique of political economy. In this case, too, we noted that in many of Marx’s pages the collective figure of the working class appears to be so specularly constructed on the inverse side of the concentration of production and the capitalist organization of labour that it assumes their same homogenous characters. From the beginning of this work, I insisted on the necessity of criticizing in depth such an image of the worker-subject. In rereading Marx’s analysis of factory cooperation, I endeavoured to show that the homogeneity of ‘combined labour’ is produced by the violence of capitalist command, as the latter very concretely appears as a command on the ways whereby the individual worker ‘strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species’. In this case too, the key problem seems to be concerning a specific production of subjectivity, which cannot simply be inverted. More generally, the emphasis put in this work on the necessity of maintaining the difference between proletariat and working class – well beyond Marx’s

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own intentions – corresponds to the need of going beyond every image of the exploited subject (and thus the revolutionary subject) as a homogeneous subject. It is crucial in this sense, I think, to question Marx’s conviction that the capitalist mode of production is characterized by the progressive generalization of the standard represented by ‘free’ wage labour. More realistically, to assume the presence of a multiplicity of forms of regulation and exploitation of labour – both in the history of capitalism and above all in this global ­present – dictates that we think of labour starting from the reality of its constitutive heterogeneity. For instance, what was argued earlier in relation to race and gender – and more generally in relation to the theme of corporeity – shows that such heterogeneity is not merely a sociological feature but, rather, carries the mark of a series of struggles and movements of insubordination. Also, this requalifies politically the problem of class subjectivation which, in so far as we fully come to terms with the increasing interpenetration between ‘production’ and ‘reproduction’, cannot be thought of within the boundaries of labour conceived in the strict sense, in ‘economistic’ terms. In Marx’s oeuvre, the problem of the homogeneity of the class subject is linked to an extraordinarily intense reflection revolving around the theme of abstraction, and the chapters of this book sought to reconstruct some of its essential moments. Developed in a heated confrontation with Hegel, Marx’s early critique of law and the state already put forward the reality characters of abstraction as a fundamental theme. These characters were examined starting from their effects in the constitution of specific figures of subjectivity. Here, abstraction stands for the separation of the ‘species-life of man’, which is appropriated and represented by the state, from the daily experience of each individual in the sphere of ‘civil society’. It is also worth signalling that, as we saw, this same problem emerges again in Marx’s analysis of factory cooperation, although within a fairly different theoretical horizon. Besides, Marx never developed the critique of abstraction as an apology of the ‘concrete’. In the Grundrisse and Capital, rather, his critique insists on the reality effects of abstractions such as money and the commodity-form. It does so, first, by evaluating the intensification of the common power made possible by abstraction – we should remember that money expresses the ‘social bond’ among individuals, whereas the commodity represents ‘a common element’, the objectification of ‘abstract human labour’ – and, second, by taking a stand against abstraction’s dimensions of mystification and fetishism. This is to say, the radical negation of the alleged equality evoked by abstraction itself and the constitution, in the world of commodities, of a subjectivity that is enchanted by such mystification and fetishism. It is on the terrain materially constructed by the power of abstraction that, according to Marx, the problem arises of the reappropriation of the common and achievement of equality, thus the problem of communism.

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The concept of ‘abstract labour’, too, is to be read within this remarkably original critique of abstraction. As I tried to illustrate, this concept cannot be reduced to ‘concrete’ dynamics of abstraction pertaining to the labour process and the figures of labour and, therefore, cannot be simply inverted in antagonistic terms. As the capitalist measure of productivity, abstract labour comprises a norm and a form (the ‘form of labour’), which reproduces capitalist command, disseminates it in social relations, and imposes it as the criterion for the production of subjectivity. Moreover, far from necessarily entailing a process that homogenizes social labour, the dominion of abstract labour, so understood, not only tolerates but also facilitates the unceasing diversification of social labour and heightens its heterogeneity. It is in this sense that, taking into account its close correlation with the notion of abstract labour, this book investigated another category around which Marx’s reflection displays characters of great originality, namely, the category of ‘world market’. As early as The German Ideology, the global scale over which the circuits of capital’s valorization and accumulation necessarily spread is inspected by Marx with a particular attention to the resulting effects as regards subjectivity (what can be defined as the spatial coordinates of the production of subjectivity). In this respect, the image of ‘empirically universal individuals’ is particularly relevant. It could be argued that the subsequent trajectory taken by Marx’s analysis in the laboratory for the critique of political economy, the ‘becoming-world’ of the capitalist mode of production, is initially characterized by a thesis not dissimilar to the one prevailing in the first phase of the contemporary debates on globalization in the 1990s: in other words, the tendency to the constitution of the world market appeared to Marx as a tendency to the progressively global uniformity of the social relations of production, guided by the system’s ‘centre’. From this perspective, it is essential to point out that the detailed study of realities and areas of the world other than the West led Marx, in the last years of his life, to call into question this image of the tendency and to work towards a multilinear approach to history and capitalist development. We can observe, in conclusion, that as the world market was becoming more real and concrete in Marx’s eyes, the same gap I indicated above as being inherent to the concept of abstract labour, the one between abstraction and heterogeneity, casted itself globally. This had consequences that Marx could just begin to imagine from the perspective of the subjectivity of the exploited – and, thus, of a politics of liberation. In many respects, the work revolving around these consequences is one of the pressing problems of our present. NOTE 1. Ferrari Bravo 2018.

Appendix

The Topicality of Prehistory: A New Reading of Marx’s Analysis of ‘So-called Primitive Accumulation’

For why should he that is at libertie make himself bond? Sith then we are free borne, Let us all servile base subjection scorne. —Edmund Spenser, Complaints: Mother Hubbard’s Tale (1591) The first capitalists are like waiting birds of prey. They wait for their meeting with the worker, the one who drops through the cracks of the preceding system. It is even, in every sense, what one calls primitive accumulation. —Gilles Deleuze, ‘Capitalism and Desire’ (1973)1

PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION TODAY In the section on ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ in volume 1 of Capital, Karl Marx takes us back to the early days of modern England. The object of the text is, in his words, the ‘pre-history’ of the capitalist mode of production (C, I: 875). Is this issue of purely antiquarian and historical interest? Clearly not. Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation has recently been read and reinterpreted as a decisive contribution to the critique of the present in various contexts. In the autumn of 1990, the US journal Midnight Notes dedicated its tenth issue to a phenomenon that it named ‘New Enclosures’. In the midst of the ‘idyllic’ rhetoric (idyllic in the precise sense employed by Marx in his analysis of primitive accumulation) surrounding a new world order, the Midnight Notes comrades defended the centrality of enclosures and several other concepts and themes treated in this section of Capital for a 101

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critical interpretation of the dramatic transformations of the capitalist mode of production under way since the mid-1970s. In their words: Today, once again, the Enclosures are the common denominator of proletarian experience across the globe. In the biggest Diaspora of the century, on every continent millions are being uprooted from their land, their jobs, their homes through wars, famines, plagues, and the IMF ordered devaluations (the four knights of the modern apocalypse) and scattered to the corners of the globe. . . . The New Enclosures name the large-scale reorganization of the accumulation process which has been underway since the mid-1970s. The main objective of this process has been to uproot workers from the terrain on which their organizational power has been built, so that, like the African slaves transplanted to the Americas, they are forced to work and fight in a strange environment where the forms of resistance possible at home are no longer available. Thus, once again, as at the dawn of capitalism, the physiognomy of the world proletariat is that of the pauper, the vagabond, the criminal, the panhandler, the street peddler, the refugee sweatshop worker, the mercenary, the rioter. (Midnight Notes Collective 1990: 1–3)

Two issues in the analysis of the Midnight Notes Collective serve as a quasi-introduction to my own reflections on the topic of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’. First, the process of enclosure and expropriation they describe does not exclusively invest the ‘South’ of the world; it affects the global space of contemporary capitalism as it keeps redrawing its geographical coordinates defined as aspects of a single unified process: the New Enclosures, which must operate throughout the planet in differing, divisive guises while being totally interdependent. . . . Under the logic of capitalist accumulation in this period, for every factory in a free-trade zone in China privatized and sold to a New York commercial bank, for every acre enclosed by a World Bank development project in Africa or Asia as part of a ‘debt for equity’ swap, a corresponding enclosure must occur in the U.S. and Western Europe. (2)

The second point concerns the strategic relevance of the question of mobility, which must be seen against the backdrop of the great question of the production of labour power as a ‘commodity’, and of the political constitution of the labour market, which always entails violence. As the Midnight Notes Collective puts it, ‘the New Enclosures make mobile and migrant labour the dominant form of labour. We are now the most geographically mobile labour force since the advent of capitalism’ (4). Examples of the contemporary conditions of primitive accumulation are abundant, including enclosures of heterogeneous ‘commons’, from land to knowledge, from water to the abstract code of life (DNA). I want to offer here

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only one specific example. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005), on the conflicts determined by the effort of Japanese corporations to open the large Indonesian rain forests to the capitalist wood trade during the 1990s, discusses many of the processes that attack the ‘common’ rights to the land in the name of the right to private property Marx described, focusing especially on enclosures. Tsing’s analysis offers a further conceptual contribution: primitive accumulation establishes frontiers in the spaces it invests. These are simultaneously savage frontiers, insofar as their first rule is violence, and salvage frontiers, because capitalism – single capitalists – appear to be the sole agents capable of development in a state of emergency as a result of the destruction of ‘traditional’ social environments (2005: 27ff). QUESTIONS OF METHOD As the 1857 introduction to the Grundrisse contends, the methodological problem of the dialectics between the abstract and the concrete (see Ilyenkov 1982) is historically determined and fundamentally imposed by the nature of the capitalist mode of production. It is only under the conditions of this peculiar mode of production, Marx suggests, that ‘abstract’ concepts make ‘concrete’ history. This means that if one takes such a fundamental category of political economy as ‘labour as such’, it is surely true that it is inscribed into a set of complex relations with other categories. And it is both possible and necessary to reconstruct critically the logical order of these relations. Conversely, in the capitalist mode of production, ‘labour as such’ as well as other ‘real abstractions’ (to borrow a notion from Alfred Sohn-Rethel) become embodied in history as a powerful standard dictating complex social, legal, cultural and political transformations and, above all, affecting the production of subjectivity. The tension between these historical processes and the logical order of conceptual relations must be methodologically reflected in the critique of political economy. In the introduction, particularly in the third paragraph on ‘The Method of Political Economy’, Marx seeks to find a method capable of working out the character of the historically determined totality of political economy and critically revealing the conditions of emergence of the conceptual abstractions of economic discourse. This he does not simply by reducing them to ‘concrete’ historical processes, but by taking the social power of real abstractions in capitalist social relations (capital, value, money, etc.) as the regulatory principle of critical analysis. The section of Capital on primitive accumulation concentrates on the origin [Ursprung] of the capitalist mode of production and sets out to study the conditions under which a whole set of real abstractions

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become for the first time in history ‘embodied’ as real powers, to the extent of determining the a priori conditions of social experience itself. It is for this reason that the section on primitive accumulation is so important also from a methodological point of view: because it at the same time studies the origin of the intertwining between ‘abstract’ concepts and ‘concrete’ history, which means the origins of the main methodological problem of the critique of political economy. In his analysis of Marx’s discussion of the relationship between abstract and living labour, Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000: ch.2) demonstrates that the short circuit between the abstract and the concrete must repeat itself every day in order for the capitalist mode of production to continue to exist and reproduce itself. As Marx writes in his manuscripts on the theories of surplus value, ‘accumulation merely presents as a continuous process what in primitive accumulation appears as a distinct historical process, as the process of the emergence of capital and as a transition to one mode of production to another’ (MECW, 32: 406).2 Whatever happened for the first time at the origin of the history of capitalism must logically repeat itself every day: this apparent paradox prevents us from seeing the historical time of the capitalist mode of production as merely linear and progressive. In addition to the topicality of the origin, it also opens up a problem that Étienne Balibar formulated in his contribution to Reading Capital (1970: 199) and that a large number of postcolonial critics have taken up in the past fifteen or twenty years:3 what Balibar calls the disconnection between the diachrony and the dynamics (324) of the structure of temporality in capitalist society,4 particularly in the transition to capitalism under conditions of colonialism, which is also the great theoretical problem of ‘the insertion of different times one into another’ (317). Balibar’s notion of ‘a genealogy of elements of rupture in the capitalist mode of production’ (300) as the main stake in the section of Capital we are discussing helps to further this discussion on Marx’s method. Marx is indeed operating with a rich and complex notion of Ursprung (origin) in his analysis of what is somewhat erroneously translated as ‘primitive’ accumulation. Balibar’s reference to ‘genealogy’ suggests a quite intriguing parallel with Nietzsche. Like Nietzsche, Marx looks with nothing but contempt at a ‘history whose function is to compose the finally reduced diversity of time into a totality fully closed upon itself; a history that always encourages subjective recognitions and attributes a form of reconciliation to all the displacements of the past; a history whose perspective on all that precedes it implies the end of time, a completed development’ (Foucault 1998: 379). While we always have to keep in mind the specificity of Marx’s method, it can thus be appropriate to interpret Marx’s use of ‘origin’ in the texts on primitive accumulation as fulfilling the same role as ‘emergence’ [Entstehung] in Nietzsche’s writings, which, à la Foucault, allows us to present ‘the entry of forces; their eruption,

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the leap from the wings to centre stage, each in its youthful strength’ (377). These forces are the protagonists of the unfolding drama of the history of the capitalist mode of production, of the buying and selling of labour power, famously described by Marx with the theatre concept of Charaktermaske (see Haug 1995), already used in politically dense meaning by Hobbes in chapter 16 of his Leviathan (‘Of Persons, Authors, and Things Personated’).5 FOR A CRITIQUE OF CLASSICAL (AND ‘VULGAR’) ECONOMICS Three of the questions raised in the section on primitive accumulation of Marx’s Capital have now been addressed: the relationship between the logical and historical order of exposition in Marx’s method, the relationship between ‘normal’ and ‘primitive’ accumulation of capital and the peculiar temporality inherent to the capitalist mode of production. However, another preliminary observation is in order. For Marx, primitive accumulation is not a concept, it is rather a phrase borrowed from others. Starting with the title (‘So-called Primitive Accumulation’) the chapter proceeds with an ironic reference to original sin. This primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote about the past. Long, long ago there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent and above all frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. The legend of the theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. (C, I: 873)

Marx’s powerful irony signals his polemical intentions to radically critique classical political economy, especially Adam Smith’s analysis of ‘previous accumulation of stock’, and to reveal exploitation (its historical origin and conceptual status) as the hidden ‘secret’ of classical economics.6 Unlike classical economics, Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation does not revolve around ‘a previous concentration of a stock of commodities as capital in the possession of the buyer of labour’ (MECW, 32: 404), but focuses on the violent production (and ‘original’ accumulation) of the conditions of possibility of capitalist relations of production, of the ‘encounter’ between buyer and seller of labour power (C, I: 270). As Marx asserts in the section on ‘Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations’ in the Grundrisse, ‘the production of capitalists and wage labourers is thus a chief product

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of capital’s realization process. Ordinary economics, which looks only at the things produced, forgets this completely’ (G: 512). The accumulation of money (of ‘monetary wealth which, regarded in and for itself, is altogether unproductive, as it only springs up out of circulation and belongs exclusively to it’) says nothing about the ‘original formation’ of capital: the latter ‘occurs purely by virtue of the fact that existing value, the monetary wealth, through the historical process of dissolution of the old mode of production, can, on the one hand, purchase the objective conditions of labour, and on the other hand, obtain the living labour of the freed workers in exchange’ (137). No Smithian ‘idyll’ here; rather a process of what might be named ‘original expropriation’, as Marx does in his 1865 text on ‘Value, Price, and Profit’. This process reveals that so-called original accumulation means nothing but a series of historical processes, resulting in a decomposition of the original union existing between the labouring Man and his Instruments of Labour. . . . The separation between the Man of Labour and the Instruments of Labour once established, such a state of things will maintain itself and reproduce itself upon a constantly increasing scale, until a new and fundamental revolution in the mode of production should again overturn it, and restore the original union in a new historical form. (MECW, 20: 129)

The perspective of the section on ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ in Capital is consistent with Marx’s method, highlighting some of the main characters of the mode of capitalist production, which would otherwise be concealed by its ‘normal’ functioning. Appearing near the end of the first volume of Capital and just before the ‘Modern Theory of Colonization’, the analysis of so-called primitive accumulation requires us to read the analytical direction of the book backward, stopping and starting again especially in the analysis presented in chapter 25 on ‘the general law of capitalist accumulation’. To use Antonio Negri’s thirty-year-old formula, this section is an example of the ‘research’ [Forschung] that intervenes to renew the ‘exposition’ [Darstellung] so that ‘the previous mode of presentation must, itself, be subjected to research and must constitute in turn the material of a new presentation’ (Negri 1991a: 12ff), of a neue Darstellung. The concepts of ‘norm’ and ‘exception’ not only need to be applied to the relationship between the origin, history and present of the capitalist mode of production, but they work to critically deconstruct the very image of ‘normal’ capitalism – if necessary, ‘beyond Marx’. Undoubtedly, ‘norms’ of functioning of the capitalist mode of production do exist, but each includes a constellation of logical and historical ‘exceptions’ that are part of their conditions of possibility and operate as a reserve of options that can always be realized.

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Some of the most interesting recent theoretical propositions and researches, such as the work of Yann Moulier Boutang (1998) on the ‘deformed forms’ of submission of labour to capital and Chakrabarty’s proposal to ‘provincialize Europe’, follow from such applications. Marx’s work itself definitely contains reflections pointing in a similar direction. Note, for instance, the strategic relevance he ascribes to colonization in the opening up of the ‘world market’ and the wealth of his references to the issue of slavery. This would legitimate a reconstruction of the history of capitalism similar to that put forward by many of the protagonists of ‘Black Marxism’ (see Robinson 2000), which traces its origins to Africa, the West Indies and the Atlantic rather than to England. Or consider Marx’s later writings on Russia,7 where he explicitly deals with the ‘exceptionality’ of the case of England, on which a considerable part of the analysis of primitive accumulation rested, while strongly rejecting any attempt at deducing the model of a ‘philosophy of history’ from this analysis (MECW, 24: 200), averring, in a well-known letter to Vera Ivanova Zasulich, that ‘the historical inevitability’ of the movement described in the section on primitive accumulation ‘is expressly limited to Western European countries’ (MECW, 24: 370). If we look at capitalism and valorize its character as a ‘world system’ since its origins, rather than building ‘peripheral’ exceptions, these different modalities seem to have determined the structure of the capitalist mode of production, both as conditions of possibility and as a ‘reserve’ of options that can be realized. We will return to the notion of transition and some of the problems it raises later on in this chapter. But for now, let us stress that the term origin (transition) always refers back to that force, violence, that Marx famously defines as ‘the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one: it is itself an economic power [Potenz]’ (C, I: 916). The question of violence in history is indeed another fundamental issue raised by Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation. In the entry on ‘Gewalt’ for the Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus, Balibar presents challenging observations on this point: notably, he expands on the multiple meanings of the term (power, violence, force) and contends that the first book of Capital could also be read as a ‘treatise on the structural violence instituted by capitalism’ or on ‘the excess of violence inherent to the history of capitalism’ (2009: 273). The question of violence works at least at two different levels in the analysis of primitive accumulation. On the one hand, the crucial role of ‘the concentrated and organized violence of society,’ the power of the State, assumes the form of a machine in determining the transition to capitalism (e.g., the role of the colonial system, public credit or national debt, and the protectionist system Marx refers to). Mario Tronti insisted on this same issue in his writings of the 1970s (1977: 212). The complication of the relations among politics, law and economy that emerges from Tronti’s reading, starting from

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his discussion of Marx’s definition of the ‘extra-economic origin of property’ (G: 488), stems from his reconstruction of the history of political centralization of power that took place in England between the ‘two Cromwells’ (Thomas, King Henry VIII’s chief minister, and Oliver, the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England). Tronti both stressed the relevance of the modern state as the ‘political engine of transition’ to capitalism, and contended, as a kind of historical foundation of his thesis on the autonomy of the political, that the origin of the modern bourgeois state precedes the very process of the transition to capitalism (1977: 220). One does not need to agree with the thesis of the autonomy of the political (for a critique see Mezzadra 2011c) to acknowledge the relevance of the question thus raised. On the other hand, there is a need to emphasize that Marx also analyses the operations of violence from another angle, which is not limited to its ‘concentration’ in the state machine. Instead, he studies its effects as they spread at the social level where the crucial role of the state, legislation and the law is highlighted ‘from below’, first and foremost from the point of view of the production of the conditions of existence of labour power as a commodity, and the regulation of wages and the working day (C, I: 896). This is what Marx does in his pathbreaking analysis of the enclosures and the ‘bloody legislation’ against vagrancy that preceded the creation of the factory (and the birth of the industrial working class) in early modernity. A COMMODITY LIKE NO OTHER I repeat: this is a pathbreaking analysis. Nevertheless, one can say that Marx could have emphasized even more the conflictual nature of the social processes and conditions of development of primitive accumulation. Recent historical works allow us to do that. The crisis of feudal authority in the countryside, in particular, was not univocally produced by these processes; rather, these processes intervened in a context already characterized by revolts and peasant wars that were unmaking the feudal fabric from within (see Dockès 1980 on the long-term peasant insubordination; see also Blickle 2003). As Theodore W. Allen explains in The Invention of the White Race, a constant movement of insubordination that extended from Wat Tyler’s rebellion of 1381 in England to the peasant wars of the 1520s in Germany was more responsible than the bourgeoisie for overthrowing the feudal system (1997: 14ff). Allen rightly draws our attention to the role that popular protests against enclosures played in the abolishment of the 1547 English law that had introduced slavery as a punishment for vagrancy only three years earlier and that could have otherwise become the basis of the institution of slavery in England (20–22).

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Crucially important, as well, is paying attention to the issue of mobility. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s work (2000; see also Linebaugh 1993) shows how the subalterns resisted in multiple and heterogeneous ways their proletarization and how such efforts often translated into practices and concrete demands for mobility. For Marx, this is not news. He famously writes in the Grundrisse that the subjects expelled from the countryside were ‘thrown into the labour market . . . dependent on the sale of their labour capacity or on begging, vagabondage and robbery as their only source of income. It is a matter of historic record that they tried the latter first, but were driven off this road by gallows, stocks and whippings, onto the narrow path to the labour market’ (G: 507). Just as labour mobility is one of the central issues in Marx’s writings on primitive accumulation, it is worth reminding ourselves, also from the point of view of our present, that ‘there is no capitalism without migration’. The conflicts and struggles on the terrain of mobility, pertaining to the key problem of the production and reproduction of labour power as a commodity are far from being limited to the ‘pre-history’ of capitalism (see Mezzadra 2011d). ‘Subaltern’ movements are a fundamental element at stake in the process of determination of the production of labour power as commodity and point to the antagonistic nature of this process. This antagonism must be conceptually distinguished from the antagonism between capital and labour that presupposes the production of labour power as commodity; at the same time a rigid opposition between the two forms of antagonism and between the conflicts arising out of them must be avoided. This is the reason why I am quite wary of the distinction between accumulation by dispossession and accumulation by exploitation popularized by David Harvey (2003). It definitely grasps an important point, but it can be misleading when taken in a too rigid way. While there are obvious differences between the conflicts produced by the expropriation of land that make the opening of a special economic zone (SEZ) (for instance, in India) and the antagonism that shapes labour relations in the factories of that same special economic zone, it is more productive to draw attention to the situations where these ‘types’ of conflict overlap and reveal the original radical, logical and historical articulation of expropriation and exploitation. These situations occur precisely when the ‘labour market’ is put under intense pressure by processes that reveal the problematic nature of what the labour market takes for granted: that is, the persistence and ‘normality’ of the production of the labour power as commodity. The reemergence of the question of the production of the commodity labour power, always ridden with conflict, affects the conditions of the working class (Perelman 2000) as well as determines its composition. Thus we are confronted with processes of expropriation and dispossession that directly and immediately affect the making, unmaking and remaking of the working

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class, challenging its stability and homogeneity. In many respects this is the situation we find ourselves in today, and we must continuously map these processes from the point of view of their subjective dimensions. Clearly, we must recognize the elements of poverty, fragmentation and even conflict that the reemergence of the question of the production of labour power as a commodity introduces into the global and local class composition, but we also must read the new condition against the grain, emphasizing new emerging forms of solidarity and struggle. In Marx’s analysis of the political and juridical constitution of the ‘labour market,’ where he deconstructs the very category of labour market, the emphasis on violence and force plays a strategic role in the polemic against the classical economists who believed market relations to be both free from coercion and conceptually opposed to it. Marx claims that there is nothing ‘natural’ in the fact that a class of individuals is forced to sell its own labour power in order to reproduce its own existence. This point should be underscored in considering contemporary debates on wages and income, where orthodox Marxists too often prioritize wage (the struggles of dependent workers) over income (that appears to them not directly related to the conditions of labouring subjects). To properly frame this opposition, the complexity of the proposal and struggles for income that strategically insist on the very existence of the capitalist mode of production must be understood. The latter cannot conceptually subsist without an element of coercion to work (Marx traces the genealogy of this process in the chapter on primitive accumulation). Under the constant pressure of workers and proletarian struggles, the history of capitalism registers many instances of ‘mitigation’ – although never of annihilation – of this element of duress; Marx’s analysis of the working day in chapter 10 of Capital is an excellent example (see Balibar 2007: 101–3). ‘FREE’ LABOUR? We can now come back to Midnight Notes and discuss the work of one of its most prominent members. Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch interprets Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation as ‘allowing us to read the past as something that survives in the present’ (2004: 12). Federici asserts the importance of the different forms of criminalization that culminated in the witch hunt (163) and of the efforts of ‘subaltern’ women to control their reproductive function during the demographic crisis that followed the plague of the fourteenth century (40). This is another essential dimension of conflict in primitive accumulation, which Marx actually neglected: the process (needless to say, far from ‘idyllic’) of the capitalist rationalization of sexuality shapes the sexual division of labour and assigns to women the primary function of

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reproduction of the labour force. The condemnation of the maleficia, termination and contraception marks this process (144) to the extent that the feminine body is literally constructed as a reproductive machine: this, Federici writes, ‘and not the steam engine, and not even the clock, was the first machine developed by capitalism’ (146). Federici’s intervention is also important for another reason. Like many other contributions from the emerging field of ‘global labour history’,8 Caliban and the Witch argues both historically and conceptually against Marx’s identification of the capitalist mode of production with ‘free’ wage labour (C, I: 874). This issue is all the more significant if serious consideration is granted to the proposal of ‘provincializing Europe’ and to the global dimension of the development of the capitalist mode of production from its origins: in this framework, the transition to capitalism displays multiple forms of forced labour that ‘provincialize’ and dislocate the ‘norm’ of the wage relation. Yann Moulier Boutang proposes along similar lines to replace the notion of ‘wage labour’ with ‘dependent labour’ as a necessary condition for the development of the capitalist mode of production, and to understand the former as a variant of the latter that needs to be studied in its specific historical, social and juridical context. Preserving Marx’s emphasis that capital must be understood and criticized as a social relation rather than a ‘thing’ (C, I: 932), this reading also allows us to analyse more insightfully the different forms of transition and subjugation of labour to capital in the context of the global present. In order to make sense of both writers’ analysis, we can elaborate on the Marxian image of the encounter between the money holder and the proletarian who is deprived of everything but his or her labour power.9 While this encounter can take many shapes (not necessarily the contractual one giving rise to ‘free’ wage labour), the constant element is a radical difference of the two subjects of this encounter, whose relationship constitutes capital. The section on primitive accumulation studies the genealogy of this constant. Jason Read, influenced at the same time by Althusser and Italian workerism, is also concerned with the issue of primitive accumulation. Read insists on the production of subjectivity as the key to a critical analysis of the capitalist mode of production: ‘production of subjectivity in both senses of the genitive: the constitution of subjectivity, of a particular subjective comportment, and in turn the productive power of subjectivity, its capacity to produce wealth’ (2003: 153). He develops this argument in an analysis of the section on primitive accumulation in Capital, which he also uses to return to the (Althusserian) distinction between capitalist ‘economy’ and ‘mode of production’. ‘The production of subjectivity’, according to Read, ‘is necessary to the constitution of the capitalist mode of production. For a new mode of production such as capital to be instituted it is not sufficient for it to simply form a new

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economy, or write new laws, it must institute itself in the quotidian dimensions of existence – it must become habit’ (36). Marx’s polemics against the classical economists’ ‘idyllic’ representation of primitive accumulation is highlighted and identified as a chapter of a more general polemic against the ‘a-historical’ character of human nature, defended in the classics of political economy as analytically foundational. Read correctly underlines that this is not merely a question of philosophical (and political) anthropology, but also ‘the more practical problem of the place of human desires, motivations, and beliefs (or subjectivity) in history: their conditions, limitations, and effects’ (20). Desires, motivations and beliefs are presented as being radically separated in the capitalist mode of production, along a line that cuts across subjectivity and splits individuals into two ‘classes’: those of the money owners and the owners of labour power. The chapter on primitive accumulation traces the genealogy of this severance, which takes many forms throughout the history of capitalism and is destined to keep reproducing itself and make all discussion of ‘human nature’ that calls upon an abstract and disembodied universalism redundant, until today. IN TRANSITION This discussion of Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation leads to the last great question to address here: transition. This is a formidably relevant and complex issue that seems to have become rather topical. Saskia Sassen’s book on Territory, Authority, Rights (2006), for instance, is a study of the transition from ‘national’ to ‘global’ political and juridical assemblages that reconstructs the passage from the medieval to the modern order to get a comparative perspective on the present. It is useful to our argument to mention at least three great debates on the issue of transition: the one emerging between Franz Borkenau and Henryk Grossmann in the 1930s at the Frankfurt school (see Schiera 1978; Jay 1973: 16ff);10 the polemic between Paul Sweezy and Maurice Dobb that started in the 1950s in the US journal Science and Society (see Tronti 1977: 207–27); and finally the debate initiated with the 1976 publication of Robert Brenner’s article on ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe’ in the journal Past and Present, which returned to many of the issues developed by Dobb and Sweezy, but also included the work of many non-Marxist historians (for the main texts on this debate, see Aston and Philpin 1985). Bringing together these three crucial debates on transition with Marx’s writing on primitive accumulation in Capital helps us frame the debate in an original way. Take, for instance, the issues of transition, the bourgeoisie

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and the ‘bourgeois revolution’. A rereading of Marx’s writings on primitive accumulation shows that Negri’s (2007) interpretation of the debate between Borkenau and Grossman in the 1970s is fundamentally correct: his criticism of the rigid and deterministic Marxism of Grossmann allowed him to open up the space for investigating the crucial role played in the transition by cultural and above all political and legal elements while at the same time challenging the traditional (not only Marxist) understanding of such important historical categories as ‘bourgeois revolution’ and ‘bourgeois class’. ‘I do not think that we can talk about a “bourgeois revolution”’, Negri wrote in 1978. And he further added: ‘We should rather talk about a capitalist revolution (in primitive accumulation, manufacture, industry and then socialism). The category of “bourgeoisie as class” is extremely ambiguous’ (1978: 139). His point about the ambiguity of the notion of the bourgeoisie as a class is extremely important. On the one hand, it anticipates later developments in the historiography of the bourgeoisie where the complex political, juridical, ‘ideological’, cultural and scientific mediations necessary for it to constitute itself as a unitary subject are exposed,11 as is the ‘long-term’ development of the symbiotic relation between bourgeoisie and aristocracy that lasted at least until World War I, a relation that was also analysed by Marx in his texts on primitive accumulation (Mayer 2010). On the other hand, this point also frees the notion of class from a set of ‘sociological’ incrustations built on it over time and allows us to reclaim it in its original Marxian sense, which was entirely political (Mezzadra and Ricciardi 2002). A second problem arises, however: the relation between ‘formal’ and ‘real’ subsumption of labour under capital, an issue well known in the theoretical ‘tradition’ of workerism and postworkerism. From Marx’s point of view it is quite clear that primitive accumulation can only be dominated by a ‘formal subsumption [Unterordnung]’ of labour under capital and by the extraction of ‘absolute surplus value’ (achieved by means of a constant increase of the length of the working day): the capitalist ‘mode of production itself had as yet no specifically capitalist character’ (C, I: 900), and lived of the ‘formal subsumption’ (of the formal domination and exploitation) of modes of labour and forms of production that were not directly organized and revolutionized by capital. The theoretical tradition of workerism and postworkerism has long emphasized ‘real subsumption’ (and the extraction of ‘relative surplus value’) mainly for political reasons, but in so doing our debates have suffered from a residue of ‘historicism’ and ‘progressivism’, and we have often presented this method of reading tendency, one of the most precious contributions of Italian workerism, as being excessively linear. So far as the specific relation between formal and real subsumption is concerned, this became a commonsensical appreciation of how these two concepts were simply indicative of two

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different ‘epochs’ (when not ‘stages’) of the capitalist mode of production, destined to succeed one another in a linear way. Marx certainly also uses these concepts to describe transformations (‘transitions’) internal to the capitalist mode of production, and we can interpret in this way famous texts such as the chapter in the first book of Capital on machinery and large-scale industry, the ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’, and the ‘Fragment on Machines’ in the Grundrisse, where these categories are discussed at length and originally in this sense. But in the ‘Results’, we find that formal subsumption is also defined by Marx as the ‘the general form of every capitalist process of production’ (C, I: 1019). In proposing a synthesis of our argument, while also taking into account the problems of ‘historicism’ and ‘progressivism’, we must stress that the ‘pre-history of capital’, its ‘previous history’ [Vorgeschichte], is and is not the history of capital. In ‘Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations’, Marx makes this absolutely clear: ‘in this preliminary or first period of capital’, a set of fundamental conditions of the capitalist mode of production (‘a certain level of skill, instrument as means of labour etc.’) are ‘already available. . . . This historic process is not the product of capital, but the presupposition for it’ (G: 505). On the other hand, this peculiar temporal structure (where the time of capital is dependent on other historical times that are not its own) characterizes ‘formal subsumption’ as a whole because all its modes of labour and forms of production are not directly organized by capital, and thus they were ‘already’ there. Rosa Luxemburg clearly observed this when she asserted that in order to exist and develop, capital needs a milieu of noncapitalist forms of production (2003: 348ff). Yet if we accept that ‘formal subsumption’ is also ‘the general form of every capitalist process of production’, the temporal disconnection we are adducing inscribes itself at the very heart of the concept of capital and logically determines its structure. This disconnection thus defines the relationship between the history and ‘prehistory’ of capital. As previously stated, this relation is always open in capitalist development and its everyday functioning. We can also now see that progressivism and historicism are actually and materially inscribed in the temporal code of capital (and critics must take this into account), though only constituting one vector – literally and deeply utopian – that is always interrupted by the violent (catastrophic) reopening of the problem of the origin. This is the constant repetition of transition, which designates the historical moment of the origin of capitalism as well as some of the main characters of its daily operations and surfaces above all at times of great transformation of capitalism itself. From the perspective of long-term historical development and the world system, capitalism is structurally characterized by the coexistence of formal and real subsumption, of absolute and relative surplus value. Contemporary

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capitalism takes this coexistence to its extreme consequences because, as Paolo Virno argues, one of its constitutive traits is the determination of a sort of ‘universal exposition’ of the kinds of labour and forms of production that marked its history. Needless to say, this posits the problem of the articulation of these diverse forms of labour and exploitation, which is one of the most important problems for the conceptual definition and empirical investigation of contemporary capitalism. The reemergence of formal subsumption and absolute surplus value (as well as the violence that is inherent in them) is more intensive where the question of the production of labour as a commodity arises – that is, where the latter can no longer be taken for granted as a presupposition ‘regulated’ by the ‘labour market’. And not by accident has the concept of ‘formal subsumption’ recently been introduced into the debates of (post)workerism again by people who are researching the devices of ‘capture’ and exploitation of ‘cognitive labour’ (see Vercellone 2007) and the issues of migrant labour and the forms of its domination (see Mezzadra 2011d). It would be wrong to think that the connection of these issues and the circulating link between precarious and migrant labour suggest that the conditions of a ‘recomposition’ of the different subjects of labour these concepts refer to is automatic and ‘spontaneous’. The reflections presented here on the coexistence of formal and real subsumption propose that these subjects are radically heterogeneous and that this is clearly both an enrichment and a political problem. The debate on the category of multitude cannot but start from here. However, it would be fair to point out that the coexistence of formal and real subsumption, so far analysed in terms of the structures of temporality, has important implications for a reflection on what we might call the spatial coordinates of contemporary capitalism. To put it briefly: while in other phases of capitalist development real and formal subsumption tended to be distributed in different spaces (following the distinction between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, ‘first’ and ‘third’ world, and the chain of spatial, technological, product and financial fixes [see the important book by Silver 2003]), today they exist in every area of capitalism. This does not make the differences between ‘spaces’ irrelevant at all, but as Hardt and Negri (2000) point out in Empire, their borders become increasingly blurred and porous (see Mezzadra and Neilson 2013). To deal with the third and last question of transition, we return to the issue of temporality. Previous discussions on the temporal disconnection that is inscribed in the very concept of capital have taken issue with the analysis of the relationship between ‘abstract’ and ‘living’ labour proposed by Chakrabarty as well as with some of Balibar’s intuitions. Admittedly, Chakrabarty’s argument is not without problems when considered as a whole (for a discussion, see Mezzadra 2011a); nevertheless, his contribution remains extremely important. He distinguishes between ‘two histories of capital’: one (history

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1) entirely dominated by the ‘homogeneous and empty’ time of ‘abstract labour’; the other (history 2) forced to register the constitutive heterogeneity of ‘living labour’. In an essay coauthored with Federico Rahola (2006), I have tried to relate Chakrabarty’s analysis to the conceptual history of modernity developed by Reinhart Koselleck (2004), in particular his relation between History as a ‘collective singular’ and the plurality of histories, as well as to the analysis of the structure of historical time proposed by Virno (2015) in his Déjà Vu and the End of History. In doing this, we wanted to point out that the tension between History and histories (‘resolved’ in the transition to modernity) opens up again and unfolds in the everyday functioning of global capital because the latter is forced to turn the constitutive heterogeneity of historical times it encounters into the strategic field of the redefinition of the valorization of capital. In this way, the tension between potential and act that, according to Virno, underlies the very possibility of historical experience comes to the surface. I will not return to this issue although I am aware that it needs further development. I simply mention two further points that emerge from Chakrabarty’s text. The first concerns the centrality of a confrontation with colonialism for our research on the ‘transition’ to capitalism and primitive accumulation. In the section on ‘primitive accumulation’ of Capital, colonialism is presented as a ‘looting’ enterprise; the specific social relations it produces outside Europe are not discussed (while the chapter on the modern theory of colonialism is mainly dedicated to settler colonialism). If one were to fully adopt the colonial standpoint on transition, one would have to redesign its ‘geography’ and question any linear relation between the centre and periphery of the capitalist world system since its ‘dawn’ (see Mezzadra 2008). Yet, as Partha Chatterjee (1983) pointed out in an intervention in the ‘Brenner debate’, it would highlight situations where the historical and cultural ‘heterogeneity’ of the violent initial conditions of development of capitalism in relation to ‘history 1’ was even greater than in Western Europe and where the ‘solutions’ imposed were themselves radically heterogeneous (a combination of devices of domination and exploitation of different nature and ‘origin’). The second point I would like to make is that for this reason, given the conditions of colonial domination, the link between transition and translation clearly comes to light (Chakrabarty 2000: 34, 102). In order for there to be a transition to capitalism, the historically and ‘culturally’ heterogeneous conditions that capital encounters and subsumes must be translated into the codes that govern the ‘history 1’ of capital, in particular the code of ‘abstract labour’ understood as the interpretive device of the outlook that capital demands the world to be observed through (82). But if what we have previously said about the peculiar ‘quality’ of historical time in global capitalism is plausible, we may legitimately go a step further: this nexus between transition

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and translation, so clearly evident at the origin of the capitalist mode of production, is one of the fundamental modes of operation of contemporary capitalism and can, for instance, be critically detected in the operation of global financial markets (Fumagalli and Mezzadra 2010). This observation allows us to gain a working perspective to analyse the central role of the issue of translation in recent debates of cultural studies and political theory. So defined, translation is shown to be entirely material and deprived of all ‘culturalist’ semblances, appears in its ambivalence: on the one hand, it is the primary field of the labour of construction of political practice and ‘alternative’ projects; on the other hand it is crucial to the constant recomposition and transformation of the devices of domination and exploitation. Far from belonging to a Habermasian community of ideal communication, translation entertains conspicuous relations with the ‘midwife of history’ – that is, violence and force (Mezzadra 2010). IN SEARCH OF THE COMMON: OF COMMUNISM Last but definitely not least, one remaining issue left to us by Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation is that of the commons: the common land and rights that have been enclosed since the beginning of the capitalist mode of production for the violent establishment of private property. Early on, Marx dealt with this issue in a series of articles on the ‘law against the theft of wood’, written in the autumn of 1842 for the Rhine Gazette.12 The young Marx maintains ‘that a customary right by its very nature can only be a right of this lowest, propertyless and elemental mass’ (MECW, 1: 230). As such, it involves ‘rights against the customs of positive law’ (232), which sanctions popular ‘habits’ in the name of private property and attacks one of the fundamental bases of the reproduction of the poor in the countryside. ‘It needs hardly be said that the wooden idols triumph and human beings are sacrificed!’ Marx writes (226), anticipating the tone of the section on primitive accumulation in Capital. In his later writings on Russia, there is ample room for the political conjecture that the struggles in defence of the traditional commons (in this case, the obshchina, the Russian rural community) could open up unexpected scenarios of direct transition to communism. This was, I repeat, a political conjecture in the sense that its fulfilment entirely depended, for Marx, on political action and revolutionary struggle. While he was spending some time in Algiers in the attempt to recover from illness in the spring of 1882, he was quite fascinated by common property and customs among Algerians. Describing them to his daughter Laura, he added, in his characteristic mix of German and English: ‘und dennoch gehen sie zum Teufel [nevertheless, they will go to rack and ruin] without a revolutionary movement’ (MECW, 46:

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242). As a whole, Marx’s contemptuous assessment of the apologetic reconstruction of the origin of capitalism offered by classical and vulgar political economy keeps a safe distance from the nostalgic tones of a Sismondi, for instance, whose ‘hypochondriacal philanthropy’ is merely concerned with the preservation of the past and fails to see the antagonism that characterizes the present (MECW, 11: 531). The contemporary debate on the commons is similarly marked by nostalgic tones suggesting that ‘common goods’ – rigorously in the plural – are exclusively something of a given and thus something to preserve. Federici’s Caliban and The Witch, which I have otherwise praised, is somehow symptomatic of this attitude: although Federici moves from the important emphasis on the autonomous behaviour and resistance against attempts to place sexuality under control of the women of the countryside between the Middle Ages and Early Modernity, she ends up delivering a rather ‘idyllic’ representation of European feudalism, which is quite difficult to sustain. The issue of the commons, used here to conclude our discussion of the section on primitive accumulation in the first volume of Capital, is crucial and complex (see Hardt and Negri 2009; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, ch.9). It clearly involves entirely practical considerations (water, public services and intellectual property rights), but it is also connected in philosophical and political terms to the very semantics of community, which is ridden by speculative simplification in the debates of the movements and the Left, not so different from that surrounding the topic of the commons, for instance. I am certainly not going to exhaust this debate here, but simply indicate that this field of research is necessarily collective. The point I would like to stress is that we need to leave behind the image of the commons as something that is exclusively given and existing, and work toward the possibility that the common is something to produce, something that is built by a collective subject that is capable, in the process of its own constitution, of destroying the basis of exploitation and reinventing the common conditions of a production structured on the synthesis of freedom and equality. What is communism, if not the ‘dream of a thing’ that we need to start dreaming again? NOTES A first draft of this text was presented as a paper at the squatted Atelier ESC (Rome) in February 2007 within the framework of a series of seminars on the ‘Marxian Lexicon’. It was then published in my book La condizione postcoloniale. Storia e politica nel presente globale (Verona: ombre corte, 2008). A revised version, translated by Arianna Bove, was published in English in Rethinking Marxism 23, no. 3 (2011): 302–21. This is the version reprinted here, with small changes and updates.

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1. In Guattari 2009: 44. 2. On the continuity between ‘primitive accumulation’ and the general form of ‘capitalist accumulation’, see Rosdolsky 1977: 268–81. 3. See the introduction to the new edition of Young 2004. 4. What Balibar means with the concepts of diachrony and dynamics must be understood within the framework of the general approach developed by Louis Althusser and his coauthors in Reading Capital. To put it simply, while diachrony refers to the transition from one mode of production to another, dynamics refers to the ‘tendency’ of the capitalist mode of production – to the internal development of its structure. 5. On the relations between Hobbes and Marx, see above, chapter 6. 6. On this issue and more generally on Marx’s critique of classical political economy and ‘vulgar’ economics, an important reference is Zanini 2008. On primitive accumulation in classical economics, see Perelman 2000. 7. In recent literature, see Burgio 2000: ch.4. An important reference on the issue remains, Shanin 1983. 8. See, for instance, van der Linden (2008) as well as the important collection edited by Roth and van der Linden (2015). 9. Louis Althusser suggestively (and enigmatically) wrote about this image in a text dated 1982 where he refers to Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation as the ‘authentic core’ of Capital (2006: 109). 10. The debate was opened by the publication of Borkenau 1934. 11. See Kocka and Mitchell (1987) and especially Schiera (1987). A particularly important book in the discussion of this topic within Italian workerism was Zapperi (1974). 12. The articles were rediscovered in the 1970s during the great season of ‘history from below’. See, for instance, Thompson 1990: 241n1.

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Index

abfangen. See seize abstract: concrete and, 103–4; living labour and, 104, 115 abstraction in action, 53 abstractions, 21, 99 abstract labour, 42–43, 65n2, 116; concept of, 45–46, 58, 96, 100; exchange value linked to, 46, 47, 50; labour power and, 58; specificity of, 46–47 abstract universal and uniform labor, 45 accumulation. See primitive accumulation The Accumulation of Capital (Luxemburg), 85 the activity of all and each (das Tun aller und jeder), 18 Adorno, T. W., 24 ‘The Age of the World Picture’ (Heidegger), 11 ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe’ (Brenner), 112 alienation, 20, 25n5, 60 Allen, Theodore W., 108 Allgemeinheit, 18, 36 Althusser, Louis, 13, 16n10 aneignen. See appropriate Anerkennung. See recognition

Angriffskraft. See attack power anthropology, Marx on, 86, 89, 91, 112 antihumanist constellation, 11 antinomy, 73–74 appropriate (aneignen), 64 Arbeitskraft. See labour power Arbeitsvermgögen. See labour capacity attack power (Angriffskraft), 72 Balibar, Étienne, 18, 19, 41, 50, 104, 107, 119n4 barrier (Schranke), 87 Bauer, Bruno, 21, 23, 24, 47, 48, 76 Bauer, Otto, 75 bearers (Träger), 15, 39, 49, 58, 62, 70, 96, 98 Befreiung. See liberation bellum omnium contra omnes, 48 Bestimmtheit. See specificity Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 10 bio-politics, 14 black Marxism, 4 Black Reconstruction in America (Du Bois), 67 black woman, 12 Blanqui, Louis Auguste, 30, 34n10 Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Mezzadra and Neilson), ix, xiii, xx, 14 133

134

Index

bourgeoisie, 29–30, 37, 52, 71, 78, 88, 108 bourgeois revolution, 113 Bravo, Luciano Ferrari, 95 Brecht, Bertolt, 27 Brenner, Robert, 112 Caliban and the Witch (Federici), 110, 111, 118 capacity (Fähigkeit), 41 capital, 55n12, 89, 96, 105; action of, 76, 78; collective, 73; constant and variable, 51–52; history of, 115–16; money as, 36, 38; movement of, 39–40, 53; organic composition of, 52, 77; socialization of, 64–65; total, 37, 41, 52–53, 67; valorization of, 40, 43, 51, 52, 97, 98, 107 ‘capital in general’ (Kapital im Allgemeinen), 36–37, 52 Capital (Marx), 76, 78, 99; first volume of, 35, 37, 38, 40, 43, 47, 52, 55n10, 57, 64, 80, 81, 83n7, 85, 88, 89, 114, 118; primitive accumulation in, 101, 103, 104, 105–6, 111–13, 116–17; second volume of, 3, 5, 51, 86; third volume of, 3, 5, 47–48, 53, 68, 86 capitalism, 103, 107, 116–17; development of, 4, 39, 42; expansion of, 91; migration and, 109; normal, 106; transformation of, 15 ‘Capitalism and Desire’ (Deleuze), 101 capitalist mode of production. See mode of production capitalists: individual, 67; subjectivity of, 52, 98 Cartesian Meditations (Husserl), 10 Cartesian subject, myth of, 10–11 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 42, 104, 107, 115–16 Charaktermaske, 49–50, 105 circumstances. See Fortuna Civil War in France, The (Marx), 81–82 class: gender and race with, 68, 72, 74n3, 99; hierarchization with, 68, 87, 91; Marx concept of, 67–72;

origin of, 68–69; proletariat, 30, 32– 33, 71, 80–81, 109–10; sociological idea of, 69; subjectivation of, 99. See also working class class consciousness, 70 ‘class for itself’ (Klasse für sich selbst), 70–71, 74 classical economics, Marx critique of, 105–8 The Class Struggles in France (Marx), 31–32, 35–36 collective capital, 73 collective labour, 73 colonialism, 11–12, 16n6, 88, 104, 116 coming upon. See vorfinden command (Kommando), 37, 62–63, 71, 75, 78, 96–98, 100 commodities, 46–50, 75, 105; of labour power, 58–60, 61, 102, 108–10; money as, 36, 51, 61 common element (ein Gemeinsames), 48, 99 common functions (Gemeinswesen), 82 commons, 117–18 Commune (1871), 81, 82, 86 communism, 6, 33, 65, 82–83, 99, 118 communism of capital, 65 communist politics, 82 communitarian version, of Marx, 91–92 community, Marx on, 88–89 Complaints (Spenser), 101 concrete labour, 46, 103–4 consciousness, 14, 20, 70, 74 constant and variable capital, 51–52 constitution (Verfassung): Hegel concept of recognition, ethicity, and, 18, 19; of private property, 22 constitutive excess of labour, 30, 33, 37, 41, 52, 58, 62, 96–7 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Marx), 22, 81, 83n10 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Marx), 27–28, 36, 45, 47

Index

cooperation, 63, 66n12, 71, 97; factory, 64, 75, 98, 99 criterion of political, 79Critical Criticism, 21, 23 criticism, of earth, law, and politics, 22 Darstellung. See presentation Déjà Vu and the End of History (Virno), 116 Deleuze, Gilles, 13, 101 Descartes, René, 10, 11 desubjectivation, 13 devices of subjection, 15 dictatorship, of proletariat, 82 Die Sache selbst, 19 differential of power, 62, 68 dinglich. See material Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 14 discursive field, of Marxism, 4 ‘the dream of a thing’ (Traum von einer Sache), 6, 19–20, 22, 118 Du Bois, W. E. B., 67 Economic and Philosophic Manuscript of 1844 (Marx), 6, 19–20, 33, 46, 65 economic power (Potenz), 107 economic struggle, 78–79 economism, 72–73, 78, 79 The Economist, 5 economy. See political economy The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx), 28–30, 31–33, 81–82 Eigner. See owner Einleitung. See Introduction emancipation, 23, 76, 81, 82 ‘emergence’ (Entstehung), 104 enclosures, primitive accumulation relating to, 101, 102, 103, 108 Engels, Friedrich, 1–2, 5, 76, 81, 82; The Holy Family by Marx and, 21, 22, 24, 27, 30; Manifesto of the Communist Party by Marx and, 28, 30, 67, 71, 88 enquiry (Forschung), 86, 92n3, 106 Entstehung. See emergence

135

ergon idion, 19 estrangement, 20, 25n5, 28, 96, 98 ethicity (Sittlichkeit), 18 ethnology, Marx on, 86, 89, 91 every class movement (Klassenbewegung), 79 exchange value, with abstract labour, 46, 47, 50 executive power, 32 exploitation, 37, 77, 100, 115; concept of, 63, 75, 98; domination and, 6, 51, 116, 117; Marx on, 57, 80, 96, 97, 105 Fabbriche del Soggetto (Negri), 14–15 Factory Act of 7 June 1844, 78 factory cooperation, 64, 75, 98, 99 faculty of judgement. See Urteilskraft Fähigkeit. See capacity Federici, Silvia, 110, 111, 118 feminism, 9, 12, 68 feudal system, 108 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 20, 23, 27, 29 figures of subjectivity, 12, 18, 61, 75, 95, 99 formal subsumption, 64, 65, 113, 114, 115 form of labour, 47–8, 51, 64, 96, 98, 100 Forschung. See enquiry Fortuna (circumstances), 30 Foucault, Michel, xi, xvii, 4, 11–14, 16n14, 104, free action. See praxis free labour, xiv, 60, 99, 110–12 free worker, 60 Friction (Tsing), 103 Gattungsleben. See species-life Gemeinswesen. See common functions ein Geminsames. See common element gender and race, with class, 68, 72, 74n3, 99 General Council of the International, 78, 81 general political action, 78, 79

136

Index

geo-political, 86 The German Ideology (Marx), 6, 21–22, 28, 69, 86, 100 German Social Democracy, 82 globalization, 53, 100 global labour history, 111 Gramsci, Antonio, 9, 24, 32, 34n11 Grenze. See limit Grundrisse, 14, 36, 42, 70, 90, 93n11, 114; introduction to, 37, 40, 103; labour relating to, 38, 41, 57, 61–62, 63, 64, 105–6; political economy relating to, 36–37, 88, 99; world market relating to, 37, 87, 89

Ich, das Wir, und Wir, das Ich ist. See ‘A Me who is a We, and a We who is a Me’ ‘the ideal personification of the total national capital’ (der ideelle Gesamtkapitalist), 53 ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ (Althusser), 13 imaginary, 13, 70 ‘Inaugural Address of the Working Men’s International Association’, 78 individuality, 10, 14, 18, 21

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 9, 17–20, 22, 81, 83n10 Heidegger, Martin, 10, 11, 15n4 heterogeneity, 14, 32, 60, 72, 89–90, 99–100, 116 heteronomy, 76 hierarchization, 68, 87, 91 Hindernis. See obstacle historiarerum gestarum, 29–30 historical materialism, 27, 33 historicism, 114 history, 104–5, 111, 114, 117; of capital, 115–16; of men, 28, 29, 30; politics and, 17, 32; products of, 59; subject and, 27–34. See also topicality, of prehistory History and Class Consciousness (Lukács), 45 Hobbes, Thomas, 18, 48, 50, 52, 54n8, 62, 105 Hobbesian spectres, 45–56, 54n6 The Holy Family (Marx and Engels), 21, 22, 24, 27, 30 homogeneity, 72 homogenous, 71 ‘How Do We Recognise Structuralism?’ (Deleuze), 13 humanism, 11, 23, 39, 59, 61, 65, 69 Husserl, Edmund, 10 hypokemeinon (underlying), 10, 11, 13

Kant, Immanuel, 10, 57 Kapital im Allgemeinen. See ‘capital in general’ Klasse für sich selbst. See ‘class for itself’ koinon ergon, 19 Kommando. See command Korsch, Karl, 17, 33n2 labour: collective, 73; concept of, 39–42; concrete, 46; dual character of, 45; form of, 47; free, 110–12; Grundisse relating to, 38, 41, 57, 61–62, 63, 64, 105–6; living, 35–44; mobility of, 109; money and, 68, 112; objects relating to, 39; production of, 110; productive, 72; social, 46; subjectivation of, 42; types of, 59, 62; valorization of, 58, 96. See also abstract labour

juridical relation of the contract, 49

labour capacity (Arbeitsvermgögen), 57–58, 109 labour market, 110, 115 labour power (Arbeitskraft), 39, 42, 46, 119n9; abstract labour and, 58; attack power from, 72; bearer of, 96, 98; commodities of, 58–60, 61, 102, 108–10; definition of, 57–58; exploitation of, 4; Marx on, 3–4, 14, 16n13, 48, 57–63, 66n5, 67; owner

Index

of, 59–60, 62, 66n4, 76, 96, 112; as potency, 61; sexual dimensions of, 68, 110–11; value of, 58–59; wages for, 58, 72, 74, 74n9, 78, 99, 108–10 das Leben erzeugende Leben. See lifeproducing life Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 1, 4–5, 72, 81 ‘Letter on Humanism’ (Heidegger), 11 Leviathan (Hobbes), 18, 48, 50, 52, 54n8, 62, 105 liberation (Befreiung), 91, 96; selfliberation, 83; of subjectivity, 2, 15, 23, 76–77; of working class, 76–77 life-producing life (das Leben erzeugende Leben), 19, 39–40 limit (Grenze), 87, 89–90, living labour, 35–44, 104, 115 locomotives of history, 31 Lukács, György, 45 Luxemburg, Rosa, 85 Macht. See power Manifest of the Communist Party (Marx and Engels), 28, 30, 67, 71, 88 Marcuse, Herbert, 35 Marx, Karl: alienation, estrangement, and, 20, 25n5; alienation, objectification, and, 20, 25n6; on class, 67–72; on classical economics, 105–8; communitarian version of, 91–92; on community, 88–89; critique of works of, 95–100; on exploitation, 57, 80, 96, 97, 105; on labour power, 3–4, 14, 16n13, 48, 57–63, 66n5, 67; on liberation of subjectivity, 2, 15, 23, 76–77; beyond Marxism, 1–8; materialism of, 19–20, 27, 28–29, 33, 40; oeuvre of, 6, 73, 96, 99; on political economy, 35–38, 43n3, 57, 75, 76, 78–80, 86, 88, 92n3, 96, 103–4; problematics of, 3–6, 13, 15, 19–20, 24, 30, 95; revolutions and, 3, 9, 20, 27, 28, 31–32, 35; twofold beginning theory of, 17, 19–24; on world market, 35, 37, 65, 86–89, 90, 100, 107

137

Marx, Karl, in Algiers, 117; on anthropology, 86, 89, 91, 112; on ethnology, 86, 89, 91; work relating to, 85–94, 92n4 Marx, Karl, works of: The Civil War in France, 81; The Class Struggles in France, 31, 35; Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 22, 81, 83n10; A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 27–28, 36, 45, 47; Economic and Philosophic Manuscript of 1844, 6, 19–20, 33, 46, 65; The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 28–30, 31, 81–82; The German Ideology, 6, 21–22, 28, 69, 86, 100; The Holy Family, 21, 22, 24, 27, 30; Manifesto of the Communist Party, 28, 30, 67, 71, 88; ‘On the Jewish Question,’ 23, 24, 47, 48, 76; The Poverty of Philosophy, 69–71, 70n7; ‘Value, Price, and Profit,’ 78, 106. See also Capital; Grundrisse Marxism, 5; capitalist production relating to, 2, 4, 40, 87–88, 90; Marx beyond, 1–8; rules of enunciation of, 4, 6; Simmel influence on, 29, 33n4; stigma of, 2–3; triangulation, of philosophy, science, politics relating to, 3, 6. See also specific topics Marxism and Philosophy (Korsch), 17 Marxism-Leninism, 4–5 mass being (massenhaftes Sein), 20, 24 material (dinglich), 47 materialism. See Marx, Karl, materialism of material production, 40 MEGA2, 5, 6 ‘The Mesh of Power’ (Foucault), 14 ‘The Method of Political Economy,’ 103 methods, questions of, 103–5 ‘A Me who is a We, and a We who is a Me’ (Ich, das Wir, und Wir, das Ich ist), 18 Midnight Notes, 101, 102, 110 migration, x, xv, 109 add

138

Index

mobility, 102, 109 mode of production, 28, 39; capitalist, 40, 42, 46, 52, 55, 58, 59, 61, 65, 71–72, 76, 80, 87–88, 90–91, 96– 100, 101–5, 106, 107, 110, 111–14, 117 modern contractualism, 17–18, 50 modernity, 9–10 modern state, 23, 108 Möglichkeit. See possibility money, 67; accumulation of, 106; bearer of, 96; as capital, 36, 38; as commodity, 36, 51, 61; labour and, 68, 112; owner of, 59, 60, 76, 96; sovereignty of, 50; value of, 51 movement: of capital, 39–40, 53; of decomposition, 32; of working class, 79, 80, 83n6 multiplicity, 21 necessary action. See poiêsis Negative Dialectics (Adorno), 24 Negri, Antonio, 14–15, 106, 113 Neilson, Brett, 14 Neue Zeit, 3 New Enclosures, 101–2 new materialism, 27, 28–29, 40 ‘New Sources on the Foundation of Historical Materialism’ (Marcuse), 35 New York Daily Tribune, 36 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 10, 104 nonindividual conditions of individuality, 18 non-subjective conditions of the subjectivity of labour, 41 objectification, 20, 25n6, 38 objectified (vergegenständlicht), 43, 48 objective conditions of labour, 38–39, 42, 52, 64, 89, 106, objective world, 19 objectivism, 29, 30 objectivity, 38, 39, 58 obligation to obedience, 10 obshchina (rural commune), 91, 117–18

obstacle (Hindernis), 90 oceans of liquid matter, 35 October Revolution, 3, 5, 81 ‘Old and New Questions in the Theory of Imperialism’ (Bravo), 95 ‘On the Jewish Question’ (Marx), 23, 24, 47, 48, 76 ontology, 20–21, 39 Operai e capitale (Tronti), 39, 57, 64 organic composition, of capital, 52, 77 origin (Ursprung), 68–69, 103, 104 original expropriation, 106 owner (Eigner): of labour power, 59–60, 62, 66n4, 76, 96, 112; of money, 59, 60, 76, 96, 112; of private property, 49; self-ownership, 61, 66n7, 95 partisan point of view, 80 personality (Persönlichkeit), 16, 38, 39 Phenomenology of the Spirit (Balibar), 18, 19, 41 philosophy: antiphilosophy, 24; German, 2; of Marx, 17, 19–21, 23–24; triangulation of science, politics, and, 3, 6 poiêsis (necessary action), 19 political, displacements of, 75, 76 political economy, 2, 24, 29–30; Grundisse relating to, 36–37, 88, 99; Marx’s critique of, x, xii–xiii, 24, 29–30, 35–38, 39–40, 43n3, 57, 75, 76, 78–80, 86, 88, 92n3, 96, 103–4 political form, 75–84 political history, of subaltern, 32 political struggle, 78 political subjectivity, 9–10 politics: of class, 79; contamination of, 77; Foucault on, 13–14; history and, 17, 32; of Marx, 17, 19, 21–24; triangulation, of philosophy, science, and, 3, 6 possibility (Möglichkeit), 41 postcolonialism feminism, 12 postcolonial studies, 9, 89, 92n8 postmodernism, 9 poststructuralism, 12–13

Index

Potenz. See economic power The Poverty of Philosophy (Marx), 69–71, 70n7 power (Macht), 62–63, 86; of classical economics, critique of, 107–8; Foucault on, 13–14; relations, 79; of theoretical anticipation, 30. See also labour power praxis (free action), 19 prehistory. See topicality, of prehistory presentation (Darstellung), 86, 92n3, 106 present in space (räumlich vorhanden), 41 present in time (zeitlich vorhanden), 41 previous history (Vorgeschichte), 114 primitive accumulation, 59–60, 87–90; in Capital, 101, 103, 104, 105–6, 111–13, 116–17; enclosures relating to, 101, 102, 103, 108; Midnight Notes relating to, 101, 102, 110; mobility relating to, 102; normal accumulation and, 105; pre-history of capitalist mode of production, 101–5, 114; prehistory relating to, 101–6, 108, 110–13, 116–17; in Western European countries, 107 problematics, of Marx, 3–6, 13, 15, 19–20, 24, 30, 95 ‘Problems of Philosophy and History’ (Gramsci), 9 production, 59, 77; of labour, 110; of life, 19–20; of subjectivity, 4, 9–16, 17, 21, 24, 29, 34n6, 62, 68, 70, 75, 79, 86–87, 91, 92, 95, 98, 103, 111. See also mode of production productive forces, 22, 29 productive labour, 72 progressivism, 113, 114 proletariat class, 30, 32–33, 71, 80–81, 82, 109–10 proletariat internationalism, 86 Quantum mutatus ab illo!, 64, 77 ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (Heidegger), 11

139

race, 68, 72, 74n3, 99 racism, colonialism and, 11–12, 16n6 Rancière, Jacques, 12, 24, 80 räumlich vorhanden. See present in space Read, Jason, 111–12 Reading Capital (Balibar), 104 real, rational and, 20, 37 real abstraction, 37, 103 real subsumption, 14–15, 64–65, 113–15, recession, of 1856-1858, 36 recognition (Anerkennung), 18 Recollections (Tocqueville), 31 reification (Verdinglichung), 20 relative surplus value, 64–65, 113–14 religion, 22, 47 repräsentieren, 48 representation, 48, 49–50, 53 reproduction, 68, 110 resistance (Widerstand), 63 revolutions, 6, 36, 82; of 1848, 28, 31– 32, 35; Marx and, 3, 9, 20, 27, 28, 31–32, 35; permanent, 20, 27 Rhine Gazette, 117, 119n12 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 10 Rubin, Isaak, on abstract labour, 46 rules of enunciation, 4, 6 rural commune. See obshchina Sassen, Saskia, 112 Schmitt, Carl, 79, 83n5 Schranke. See barrier science, 3, 6, 11 seize (abfangen), 64 self-liberation, 83 self-ownership, 61, 66n7, 95 self-valorization, 51 sensuous human activity (sinnlich menschliche Tätigkeit), 20 sexual dimensions, of labour power, 68, 110–11 Simmel, G., 29, 33n4 sinnlich menschliche Tätigkeit. See sensuous human activity Sittlichkeit. See ethicity

140

Index

slavery, 108–9 social action, 50–51 Social Contract (Rousseau), 10 socialization, 14, 64–65 social labour, 46, 62–63, 69, 87, 100, social production, 59 social relations, 39–40, 49, 51, 103, 111 Société des Amis du Peuple, 30 society, of commodities, 48–49 sovereignty, 54n9; of money, 50; over world, 10; of state, 50 species-being, 46 species-life (Gattungsleben), 23 specificity (Bestimmtheit), 42 Spenser, Edmund, 101 split (Spaltung), 23 State and Revolution (Lenin), 1, 5, 81 structuralism, 12–13 struggle, of working class, 29, 34n5, 67, 68, 71–74, 77–82 subalterns, 12, 32, 109, 110 subditus, 10 subject, 13, 19, 27–34, 41 subjection, 79; obligation to obedience and, 10; subjectivation and, 12, 15, 16n8, 39 subjectivation, 72; of class, 99; of labour, 42; polarity of, 80; subjection and, 12, 15, 16n8, 39 subjective, 69 subjectivity, 42; of capitalist, 52, 98; ego cogito as transcendental subjectivity, 10; figures of, 12, 18, 61, 75, 95, 99; liberation of, 2, 15, 23, 76–77; objectivity and, 38, 39; political, 9–10; production of, 4, 9–16, 17, 21, 24, 29, 34n6, 62, 68, 70, 75, 79, 86–87, 91, 92, 95, 98, 103, 111; of workers, 62–64, 77 subjectum: hypokemenon and, 10, 11, 13; subjectus and, 12, 30 subjugation, sovereignty over world and, 10 substance, consciousness and, 20

subsumption (Unterordnung), 14, 64– 65, 113–14, 115 surplus value, 51, 64–65, 66n15, 97, 104, 113 technical composition, 52, 77 tendency (Tendenz), 87, 88, 113 tensions, 18, 28, 29–30, 33n2 Territory, Authority, Rights (Sassen), 112 theologico-political structure, of modern state form, 23 theory of value, 45, 97 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 31 topicality, of prehistory: commodity like no other, 108–10; critique of classical economics, 105–8; free labour, 110–12; primitive accumulation today, 101–6, 108, 110–13, 116–17; questions of method, 103–5; in search of the common, 117–18; in transition, 112–17, 119n10 total capital, 37, 41, 52–53, 67 Träger. See bearers transition, 112–17, 119n10 transubstantiation, 41 Traum von einer Sache. See the dream of a thing Tronti, Mario, 39, 57, 64, 85, 107–8 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, 103 das Tun aller und jeder. See the activity of all and each underlying. See hypokemeinon unionism, 72–73, 79 universal freedom of all, 18 Unterordnung. See subsumption Ursprung. See origin Urteilskraft (faculty of judgement), 57 valorization, 36, 37–38, 41, 77, 88, 91; of capital, 40, 43, 51, 52, 97, 98, 107; of labour, 58, 96; selfvalorization, 51

Index

141

values, 67; with abstract labour, 46, 47, 50; of commodities, 46, 50; of labour power, 58–59; of money, 51; surplus, 51, 64–65, 66n15, 97, 104, 113; theory of, 45, 97 vectors of development, 31–32 Verdinglichung. See reification Verfassung. See constitution vergegenständlicht. See objectified Vermögenskraft, 62 vertreten, 48 violence, 10, 107–8, 117 Virno, Paolo, 115, 116 virtù, 30 vorfinden (coming upon), 59 Vorgeschichte. See previous history

War Primer (Brecht), 27 Weltgeschichte. See world history Weltmarkt. See world market Widerstand. See resistance women, 12 worker-subject, 98 working class: economic autonomy of, 78; liberation of, 76–77; movement of, 79, 80, 83n6; struggle of, 29, 34n5, 67, 68, 71–74, 77–82; subjectivity of, 62–64, 77 working-class government, 81 world history (Weltgeschichte), 59, 61, 86, 88 world market (Weltmarkt), 35, 37, 65, 86–89, 90, 100, 107

wages, for labour power, 58, 72, 74, 74n9, 78, 99, 108–10

zeitlich vorhanden. See present in time

About the Author

Sandro Mezzadra teaches political theory at the University of Bologna and is research fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. He has been visiting professor and research fellow in several places, including the New School for Social Research (New York), Humboldt University (Berlin) and UNSAM (Buenos Aires). In the last decade his work has particularly centered on the relations between globalization, migration and political processes, on contemporary capitalism, as well as on postcolonial theory and criticism. He is an active participant in the ‘post-workerist’ debates and one of the founders of the website Euronomade (www.euronomade.info). Among his books are Diritto di fuga. Migrazioni, cittadinanza, globalizzazione (‘The Right to Escape: Migration, Citizenship, Globalization’, 2006) and La condizione postcoloniale. Storia e politica nel presente globale (‘The Postcolonial Condition: History and Politics in the Global Present’, 2008). With Brett Neilson, he is coauthor of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (2013) and The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (forthcoming, 2019).

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