A Few Remarks

I was musing a little over the Rubin book today, although it's been a couple of weeks since I picked it up. The book begins with a distinction between productive forces and production relations (PF and PR in my notes below). PF expresses the technological state of production at any given point in history, whereas PR bespeaks the way society is structured around production. Bosses and employees, owners and slaves, lords and serfs, the existence of classes in whatever form, all pertain to PR, although the permutations in PR are often precipitated by technological changes or shifts or increases in the PF.

In commodity-capitalism, the interface between PF and PR takes place in such a way as to obscure the distinction between the two. The double movement of reification-personification represents a continuous series of incursions across the border and an ambiguation of the two spheres that is not simply illusory but articulates (and simultaneously muddles)the actual structure of commodity fetishism. So demystifying the commodity amounts to, not a dispelling of a subjective illusion, but showing how the actual structure of commodity-capitalism is a real mystification, an undermining of the distinction between people and things or between PR and PF. Thus, an analysis of commodity fetishism has to start with the PF/PR distinction in order to show that this very distinction is what gets mystified by the way commodity-capitalism is structured. So demystification isn't simply a matter of recognizing social relations behind the relations between things, but of showing how social relations and thing-relations--PR and PF--enter into a certain combination and then determining why this combination is monstrous and alienating for human producers. The question of communism is one of locating the human in order to effect a reversal in priority between the human and the economic, to show that, as Marx points out in chapter (5?), value is the subject of the valorization process, and the human subject becomes a sort of side-effect. This brings us to John Schultz's question--if Marx leaves behind "humanism" in his later writing and only gives an account of the human as already taken up into the circuit of valorization, how do we locate a human subject of communism? How do we think a revolutionary subject or a communist subject?

One possible answer to the question of the "revolutionary subject" (and perhaps, by extension, the "communist subject") is that capitalism dialectically constitutes the proletariat as the subject of capitalism's destruction (cf. the "Manifesto"). This is of course a problematic answer. For one thing, if we accept "decadence theory," has capitalism in fact outrun the period of possible revolution? In other words, if capitalism no longer serves to educate, unite, and constitute the proletariat as a class-for-itself, could "decadence" potentially signify the end of the communist possibility?

This is where I want to look at Heidegger--if human beings can take up a relation to their existence as potentiality, this means that we may have a propensity, however small or unlikely, to resist our absorption into preconstituted or congealed circuits of actualization. In this sense, the "essence" of human beings is not to have an "essence"--in other words, to not be fully actualized at any given point or in any mode, whether phenomenally or noumenally. Of course, Heidegger recognizes that this also means we also always teeter on the brink of losing our essence--of becoming fully absorbed in a mode of revealing, to use his language for a moment.

I will stop here, as this is getting a little long.