Capital, Volume 1
Appendix:
Results of the Immediate Process of Production
Apparently
we should have read this after next week's reading. In the introduction we are given an outline that has
"primitive accumulation" before it.
But really order isn't so important, and in fact logically it has to do
with what we have just been reading.
Divide
into three sections (look at outline on p. 948):
1.
Commodities as the Product of Capital (pp. 949-975)
2.
Capitalist Production as the Production of Surplus-value (pp. 975-1019)
3.
Formal and Real Subsumption (pp. 1019-1060)
The
first two sections are really review of what we have already read, but now from
a different point of view. The third
part is really something new and I'll spend more time on that.
Commodities
as the Product of Capital
1.
Only when labor-power is a commodity does the commodity appear as the universal
form of wealth. (read pp. 950-51)
· "In
capitalist production the tendency for all products to be commodities and all
labour to be wage-labour, becomes absolute" (1041).
2.
This section effectively takes us back to Part I of volume 1 and looks again at
the commodity, but now the commodity is not the premise of capitalist
production, its point of departure, but the result of production, its point of
arrival. (Commodities are
"depositories" of capital (pp. 967, 975); is depository an
alternative version of Träger?)
A. From
this perspective use-value looks different.
Read p. 953 -- use-value appears inessential. Better formulation on p. 951: “use-value is universally mediated
by exchange-value.” In the beginning of
Chapter 1 use-value was the natural starting point, now it’s a result of
production and comes after exchange-value.
Capitalist agriculture is an example – produce commodities for sale not
for own consumption.
B. Second
important result of taking perspective of the results of the process is that we
now view the total product and see the value of an individual commodity as
aliquot portion of the value of the total.
This allows Marx to pose the transition to Vol. 2 and the problem of
realization.
p.
971: working class cannot buy all the products produced.
p.
967: constantly expanding market.
Capitalist
Production as Production of Surplus-Value
Here
we are returning primarily to Chapter 7 "The Labour Process and the
Valorization Process" and the fundamental question is What is capital?
First
basic precondition for capital is that the worker is separated from the means
of production (raw materials + instruments of production). Separated meaning that the worker does not
own them nor has free access to them, as the peasant has access to the
land. Thus separated the means of
production appear as capital confronting the worker (antagonistically).
· Read p. 983
top -- There are two points here: first that the means of production confront
the worker; second that the means of production appear as capital even outside
the production process and hence outside of this particular historical
formation.
First
the confrontation: the opposition between the worker and the means of
production fill the place of the confrontation between worker and capital. The opposition gives rise to a reversal of
subjectivity or agency: inversion of subject/object. Instead of the worker making use of the land or tools, capital
makes use of labor. Or put more
poignantly, from the perspective of the labor process, the worker makes use of
the means of production, but from the perspective of the valorization process
the means of production make use of labor, or better they absorb labor.
· Read p. 988,
long, sucking leeches
· Read p. 1008,
sucking living labor
· p. 1007,
process of absorption.
The
metaphor of absorbing and sucking is the flip side of use. It is the way the thing, means of
production, objectified labor uses living labor -- it sucks it. Inversion of subject/object.
This
is effectively the new view of fetishism and reification we get in this part of
the text. Fetishism and reification in
Chapter 1 had to do primarily with commodity exchange: commodities relate to
each other in a "social" way through exchange and humans relate only
via commodities. In this part, however,
we have a fetishism and reification based in the production process.
· Read p. 990,
inversion of subject into object
· Read p. 1003
bot and 1004 top, alienation and absorption
Fluens
– fluid metaphors to emphasize the relational character. Read 1005: capital is not a thing.
Formal
and Real Subsumption
What
I find most useful in this distinction and this tendency (from the formal to
the real) is its implicit periodization of capitalist production: the phase of
the formal subsumption, the phase of the real.
I have argued that postmodernity should be understood as the phase of
the real subsumption.
Let's
just review what they are.
Last
week in Chapter 16 (p. 645). Formal
subsumption of labor under capital involves laboring forms that were developed
outside of capital. They suffice for
absolute surplus value. Relative
surplus value requires the real subsumption, that is the rule of laboring forms
developed within capital itself. The
real subsumption is the specifically capitalist mode of production. Read subsumption not really as Aufheben but
merely as incorporation.
Formal
subsumption: incorporation of what is foreign, pre-existing
labor processes. In other words,
"production processes of varying social provenance have been transformed
into capitalist production" (1020).
They have been transformed by subjecting them to the wage relation and
capitalist discipline: the ex-slave becomes a wage-laborer and the ex-peasant
becomes a wage- laborer. "capital
subsumes the labour process as it finds it, that is to say, it takes over an existing
labour process, developed by different and more archaic modes of
production" (1021). What is
different? They do the exact same
activities for work only now they receive a wage for it. So, in juridical terms the difference is
that now the worker owns its labor-power (as opposed to the slave) and it is
forced to sell its labor-power (as opposed to the peasant). In other words, although the actual laboring
process remains the same as it is formally subsumed labor must be separated
from the means of production. In
slavery the slave is part of the means of production, bought and owned like the
land and the machinery. In peasant
production the peasant has free access to the means of production (the
land). When formally subsumed they must
be separated such that the worker owns its own labor power and the capitalist
owns the means of production. "The
more completely these conditions of labour are mobilized against him as alien
property, the more effectively the formal relationship between capital and
wage-labour is established" (1026).
Also for reproduction, the worker is no longer given its subsistence nor
does it have access to provide for it itself (like slave or peasant), but it
must buy its subsistence with the wage; ie., the worker becomes a
consumer. All of that is what I mean by
a juridical difference: the activities of the worker might be exactly the same
but they are done under different title, different ownership. This is a formal not a real difference.
·Formal
subsumption is the first stage of the expansion of capitalist production to new
areas, imperialism. In the Manifesto
M&E write that capital takes what is foreign and makes it proper. Really in the formal subsumption it
incorporates something foreign within itself and mediates the conflict. It is important that in the formal
subsumption labor remains foreign to capital even if it is incorporated. It came from outside and it retains its
foreign essence -- only the formal conditions of its existence have
changed. This is both true in the same
geographical region (for example, subsuming agricultural production under
capital in England) or in the different region (subsuming cotton production in
India or Egypt). In all cases it
implies a contradiction and antagonism between capital and labor. The dialectic here might be conceived in the
play between inside and outside, or really the command over the play between
inside and outside. This is Rosa
Luxemburg's definition of imperialism (Accumulation of Capital): it is
capital's need for expansion, which is precisely its need continually to
internalize its outside, to subsume the production of new regions under
capitalist relations and rule.
·I would also
like to claim this dialectic between inside and outside is characteristic of
modernity. It is not uncommon to
identify modernity with capitalism, but I would want to identify it
specifically with the phase of the formal subsumption. (My preference would be to look at this
dialectic between self and other, proper and foreign, inside and outside), but
it may be more useful to look at it with Marx in terms of the secularizing and
rationalizing vocation of modernity.
The formal subsumption of labor "dissolves the relationship between
the owners of the conditions of labour and the workers into a relationship of
sale and purchase, a purely financial relationship. In consequence the process of exploitation is stripped of every
patriarchal, political or even religious cloak" (1027). The dissolution of the pre-modern power
relations is characterized as the disappearance of a series of barriers (1031). What remains is a purely economic
relationship (an impersonal relationship) between free owners of
commodities. The process of formal
subsumption is modernization or the phase of the formal subsumption is
modernity.
Real
subsumption: the laboring processes themselves are
altered. This is why under the formal
subsumption only absolute surplus value could increase s-v (because the
processes were unchanged); now the change in laboring processes is the key to
relative surplus-value. Marx calls this
real subsumption the "specifically capitalist form of production," as
if the formal subsumption were just a transitional phase. The labor that produces under the real
subsumption did not exist previously somewhere else it was invented by capital
(or within capitalism), in the factory for instance. Labor in the real subsumption is thus (in some sense) not foreign
but proper. Three points I want to
emphasize: independence, social character, role of technology and science.
1.
"capitalist production now establishes itself as a mode of production sui
generis" (1035).
2.
Progression from individual labor to social labor to social capital as what
appears to be the producer, the subject.
Read p. 1035: social not individual labor.
"Direct
labor as such ceases to be the basis of production, since . . . the product
ceases to be the product of isolated direct labor, and the combination of
social activity appears, rather as the producer" (Grundrisse, p. 709).
3.
Read p. 1024.
·So, here is the movement: "In very brief summary ... automaton" (Social Text 38-39). This is where I want to speak of the real subsumption as the postmodern condition: the apparent autonomy of capital, it is no longer apparently relying on labor for the production of wealth; the end of the dialectic between self and other, inside and outside, and so forth.
·Mystification
that science and technology appear as the source of wealth, and that capital
appears as the source of science and technology. Read p. 1053: "They appear ... individual worker."
Temporally
I would also say the phase of the real subsumption corresponds with
postmodernity. In Marx's time the hint
of the real subsumption existed only in the factory and thus only occupied a
miniscule fraction of the production of a few European countries. The phase of the real subsumption arrives
when factory relations spread to all sectors of social production (I would call
this the factory society). It also
means a certain realization of imperialism.
In other words, global capitalist domination no longer involves the
internalization or formal subsumption of non-capitalist regions (as it did in
imperialism); now capitalism has effectively spread to all sectors of global
production. So that the realization of
the world market or globalization might be taken as simply names for the phase
of the real subsumption.
Services
and Unproductive Labor
"In
general, we may say that service is merely an expression for the particular
use-value of labour where the latter is useful not as an article, but as an
activity" (1047).
·microscopic
significance (1044).
Biopower:
“capital itself regulates the production of labor-power.”