(a) So I'm thinking a lot about chapters 5, 6, and 7 from Capital, especially their various characterizations of labor in terms of power, capacity, potentiality, etc. I'm not sure I know what this means. (I think I asked a version of this when we read the Grundrisse.)
Chapter 6 frames the entire question of labor in terms of "capacity" (what's the German?). Like Sarah said in her post, the change of money into capital occurs only in the consumption of labor-power. The "special commodity" on the market for the creation of capital, and therefore also for the creation of surplus-value, is "the capacity for labor" (p. 270). Marx goes on to describe this in terms of "the aggregate of those mental and physical capabillities 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" [p. 270 again]."
But what do we mean when we talk about "labor-power" in terms of capacity? I don't think it gets clearer when Marx calls it "the aggregate of ... capabilities." Then the question becomes: what do we mean by capabilities? (Is labor-capacity plural?) There is clearly something "potential" in labor-capacity, right? It is "actualized" by the capitalist precisely in its objectification in a use-value. In fact, Marx says on p. 274: "labor-power becomes a reality only by being expressed; it is activated only through labor." This shows up more strongly at the beginning of chapter 7: "By working, the latter (the worker) becomes in actuality what previously he only was potentially, namely labour-power in action, a worker... and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature. He devolopes the potentialities slumbering within his own nature, and subjects the play of its forces to his own sovereign power" (p. 283).
So in some sense, labor-capacity is a potentiality, or an aggregate of potentialities, that are activated in capitalism. But there is no "pure" labor-capacity floating "out there" or "in us" independent of capitalism. This is a "historical condition," like Sarah said. More than this, for the worker even to appear as labor-power to be consumed, capitalism must have developed or in the process of developing. It must already be a "possession" of his (p. 271), and therefore already be "alienated" from him. The only kind of labor-capacity we're talking about here, then, is "alienated" labor-capacity-- labor-capacity already under the domination of capital, already captured by it.
So we've got capacity, or an aggregate of capacities; potentiality or potentialities. In Grunrisse, actually, he formulates this in terms of dynamis. Why this change? Why not talk about labor-power in the more technical sense of dynamis in Capital?
Well, one of the reasons for this change from Grunrisse to Capital seems to be something Negri talks about in Marx beyond Marx. Whatever Marx means by "potentiality" or even dynamis here, it's at least a little different from the ordinary and the philosophical notions of it. It's captured and dominated by what actualizes it; Negri formulates this in terms of antagonism. So what does it mean to think about labor-capacity (labor-capacities) in terms of its antagonism to what actualizes it? What kind of actualization could that even be? And what does it mean to have revolutionary capacity/capacities/potentialities/dynamis?
Finally--here I'm really not trying to force us into an ATR discussion--what does labor-capacity look like freed from this domination? Or (maybe this is better) what is labor-capacity's "real" or other potential? Marx says something really, really fascinating on p. 284 of Ch. 7: "The less he (the worker) is attracted by the nature of the work and the way in which it has to be accomplished, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as the free play of his own physical and mental powers, the closer his attention is force to be." Seems like such close attention is absolutely necessary in Capitalism, where work is alienated. But this category of "enjoyment" here is great: the destruction of capitalism is probably somehow tied up with "enjoyment". But what does it mean for labor-capacity to have the capacity for enjoyment? And if labor is always already subject to the domination of capital, how can we even imagine what enjoyment would look like? And doesn't this mean there's something revolutionary about "enjoyment" (if we can even get there)?
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A couple comments--it's hard to keep your whole post in mind, and you seem to have answered many of your own questions, so let me know if I go off track here--labor-power (or "-capacity") is the key to valorization because if there were something actual exchanged, the capitalist could never extract surplus-value. So capacity is an input that yields a greater output than is necessary to maintain it. I think labor-capacity is plural in content but formally singular, as the capacity for abstract labor. The various capacities of the skilled laborer are mathematically-logically reducible to basic (potential) units of abstract labor, and what's more are increasingly actually so reduced as know-how is technologically congealed (cf. the "Fragment on Machines" from the Grundrisse). I think that labor-capacity is basic human potential when seen through the lens of valorization or under the rubric of capitalism--much as value can only appear as exchange-value, human potential can only appear as labor-power, so we can understand it in terms of a Rubin-style form/content distinction, and for similar reasons--just as value is not simply exchange-value, because it does not arise in the sphere of circulation but is only realized there, human potential (which Marx does not talk about in this way, I'm extrapolating) has to in some way be there as a content in order to be molded by the valorization process and can't appear any other way, but presumably could under different historical conditions (unlike value?) and "enjoyment" may be the key to that.
ReplyDeleteIf we look at the capitalist valorization circuit as a grid through which energy or potential is directed, then the freeing of this energy from sclerotic capitalist circuits is one way to characterize the revolutionary project. In capitalism, human potential is alienated, i.e. dominated and directed by the autonomous economic circuits that follow the logic of valorization--the subject under capitalism is "value."
What I want to say is that communism is in a certain way the reversal of priority between "value" and the human, not in the sense of the mastery and schematization of labor-processes by a transcendental subject, but precisely in the sense that the human exists as potentiality and when s/he does so explicitly s/he opens up the possibility of re-writing circuits and producing on the basis of needs and enjoyment and not at the dictates of an autonomous market teleologically pegged to an endless valorization process.
I have a kind of epistemological question about what Marx means by "human." I really like the way you phrased your comment here: that communism is the reversal of priority between "value" and the human. It seems like Rubin is talking in these terms, too. But if like Rubin says in ch. 7 Marx moves from his "humanist" kind of phase early on to "the analysis of the actual reality of the capitalist economy," then it seems like the only kind of "humanity" Marx is talking about is the kind that's already taken up into the capitalist valorization circuit. So whatever happens in the "reversal" of the circuitry isn't any kind of return, but a totally different kind of humanity in the first place.
ReplyDeleteI guess this is my question as somebody kind of new to Marx: how can anyone call for the overthrow of humanity's domination by capital, if what we mean by "humanity" in the first place is created within capitalism? Does revolutionary writing like Das Kaptial require a vision of something different? Or does it just need to describe the way revolution is formulated within the system already?
Or: are we able to talk about the reversal of the circuitry between value and the human? Isn't that to come up with a completely different picture of the human--one "outside" capitalism? And if so, how have we gotten to that picture?
Those are good and difficult questions. This question is absolutely central to me right now. This is a problem I want to solve by bringing together Heidegger and Marx. Here's what I want to say: If the human is not an ideal essence but a site of decision about the ordering of potentialities, then the congealing of circuits closes off the decision and debars the human from its role as such a site. In other words, the human does not have a preexisting essence precisely because it is the site of the event. The domination of dead labor, or capitalist productive circuits, bans the event by subordinating the human. Perhaps I need to find a better language for all of this.
ReplyDeleteHere is a longer version of the same. I will try to use consistent language, I'm trying to develop a language for this that is neither strictly Heideggerian nor Marxian, and F. Dupont has been partially helpful for this.
ReplyDeleteThe human can be seen as a gap or a decision within what I want to call the pre-human. The pre-human is the matrix of potentialities. This has two senses,and the decision or differentiation between these two is the human.
First of all the pre-human is the existing landscape, the world as a set of congealed and preestablished possibilities, many of which are human artifacts in the sense in which Marx says that "men make their own history but not in conditions of their own making." F. Dupont gives the very basic example of a hallway down which two figures walk in opposite directions and meet one another--their meeting is conditioned by the physical parameters of the hallway, the set of activities the building is associated with (are they workers in a factory? Baseball players? In church?) There is a pregiven set of potentialities that condition current activity, or as we might say, the domination of dead labor over living activity.
The other sense of the pre-human is what me might call the dark matrix of novelty, or the site of the event. The event is the limit of the coherence of any process and hence the outbreak of novelty. Any world as congealed set of potentialities faces a limit to its own coherence, most commonly in the form of an ungroundable principle or incontestable first instance. Hence although the event is always seen ex post facto to be constituted out of the ordinary materials of the world, since it institutes a new regime of coherence it can only be understood to be so retrospectively, in terms it itself has instituted.
The human is located in all this as the site of a division in the pre-human, the site of the event which simultaneously means the cut between the two senses of the pre-human given above--instituting power and instituted power, saying and the said, das man and authenticity, doxa and episteme, being and becoming, these are all ways that the cut is made but it is still the same basic formula. Communism carries on the battle that was waged in an epistemic register but sets it into existence, which is the force of Marx's materialism. The congealed weight of dead labor debars the human from being the site of the decision or the event, the cut in the prehuman and the institution of novelty. Instead, the first sense of the pre-human (dead labor) subsumes the human as another mechanical part of a process rather than that force within nature that exists as potentiality and thus can disrupt the dominance of the actual, of dead circuits. This will, I hope, get much clearer with time, but it's what I've got right now.
Increasingly this is looking like the key issue for my dissertation. I don't think Marx really answers the question, leaving a tension in his followers between those who see the later stuff as complementary to the early humanism and those who see a "break." So I think something like Heidegger is needed.
ReplyDelete