What in the hell …

This is a review I wrote of Jason Read’s book. The review comes off too harsh (still that kind of marxist I guess, unfortunately). It’s a great book. Just not perfect. I got a lot out of writing the review, though that’s not a promise to any readers. I’ve written to Jason about doing an interview and he’s agreed. If anyone has questions to suggest - or just wants to discuss - Read’s work I’d be happy to hear.

Jason Read, The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present, SUNY Press, New York 2003

Jason Read places a wide range of material often thought divergent into one contiguous (though variegated) terrain. The Micro-Politics of Capital engages ’structural’ Marxists including Althusser, Balibar, and Ranciere; ‘autonomist’ Marxists like Negri, Tronti, and Virno; and ‘post-structuralists’ like Foucault and Deleuze. Read produces both an erudite comparative study and reading of Marx and resources for a living materialist and communist thought. It is only to be expected, of course, that tensions traverse this project, in a fashion similar to “the tension between different logics in Marx’s writing” which the book foregrounds [Read, 16]. This review first provides an overview of the book then turns to one of the book’s tension, that over the temporal register to which the book applies.

In the first chapter Read focuses on two moments of Marx’s writings, the section in Capital on primitive accumulation and the Grundrisse notebooks “Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations.” In these sections, Read unearths the question of subjectivity as an important - though sometimes concealed - moment of both Marx’s thought and of capitalist production. Subjectivity appears as a negative moment, when Marx critiques capital’s apologists by uncovering capital’s’original sin’, the bloody expropriation of the commons deployed to produce the ‘free proletariat’ which became the laboring subject required by the capital relation. Read finds a positive moment in the Grundrisse selections, which emphasize the active role subjectivity plays, as much artisan of social relation as artifact. Read thus underscores Althusser’s point that the reproduction of the social relations of production is the presupposition needed for production to continue.

Marx once noted that production requires a prior distribution of productive relations [Grundrisse, 96], and it is this distribution which Read identifies as simultaneously the production and product of subjectivity. The actively productive and yet historically produced character of subjectivity problematizes the distinction between subject and object, as well as attempts to point to one or the other as sole source of causal determination. This means”[e]very effect is equally and at the same time a cause”, that is, “[e]lements of the capitalist mode of production that would appear to be its effects […] must equally be thought of as causes and elements of its functioning” [Read, 32]. Althusser called this immanent causality, part of the problematization of the concept ‘mode of production,’ which must be rethought as “a production of subjectivity and social relations rather than simply things” [Read, 110]. Mode of production is not simply an economistic ‘objective’ matter, because subjectivity has an objectivity and enters into economy.

Subjectivity, of course, does not exist in itself, but rather always exists as modalities of subjectivity. In chapter two, Read develops this point, and attempts to sketch aspects of the specific changes in the mode of subjectivity bound up with the transition to capitalism. Read defines capital as embodying an antagonistic logic, which means that struggles and conflicts between the subjects of the capital relation – and, on the part of the working class, struggles against subjectification in the role demanded by capital – are the constitutive process of the capitalist mode of production as it changes over time. Understanding the history and the present of the mode of production is a question of understanding changing and mutable relations of power, subordination, and refusal.

In the final chapter of the book Read turns from pre-history to the most recent period of capitalism, known to some authors as Post-Fordism. It is in this chapter that tension around temporality, present throughout the book, fully manifests. Read uncritically accepts a historical periodization drawn from Negri, based on the distinction of formal and real subsumption. Formal subsumption is the imposition of capitalist command over prior forms of production, whereas real subsumption is the direct intervention into the forms of the labor process by capital. In Negri’s work, real subsumption is a historical epoch. For Negri, it is under the era of real subsumption that capitalism becomes biopolitical and subjectivity is set to labor. For Read, however, every mode of production and every moment in the history of capitalist production is bound up with the antagonistic production of subjectivity, so it is not clear on what grounds Read accepts the historical narrative of formal/real subsumption.

Taken to its logical conclusion, Read’s problematizing conception of mode of production renders a number of received distinctions and categories – those between production and reproduction, society, politics and economy, subject and object, to name a few – highly fluid and unstable. The task for thought is to trace the changing relations named by and the modalities of subjectivity bound up with which these distinctions and categories, as well as the struggles constitutive of their historical change. If these distinctions and categories cease to be useful then new analytical tools must be sought. Read states as much, and provides much in the way of resources for this process. It is a pity, then, that Read does not similarly subject the categories of formal and real subsumption to interrogation and render them fluid as he does to other categories. The tension between these perspectives is the temporal tension in Read’s book, which has to do with what temporal or historical – or perhaps, metahistorical – register the book applies to. This can be phrased essentially as a question – when is Jason Read’s book true? – which different moments of the work answer in different ways.

The Micro-Politics of Capital is peppered with phrases that operate in two distinct relations to time. The first is an eternal time, a meta-historical time. For example: “social relations are prior to, and determinate of, the technological relations.” [Read, 52] This phrase refers to social relations as such, and thus, if true then it is true any mode of production whatsoever and at the very least is true of the capitalist mode of production for the entirety of its history. This implies a critique of positions, like parts of Marxism, which see technology as politically neutral or as objectively determining history. Read’s arguments – producing a conceptual fluidity in our understandings of production, reproduction, society, economy, and so forth – operates at this same temporal register.

There is a second temporal register in Read’s book, as when Read state that ours is “an age in which capital has extended beyond the walls of the factory to encompass all of social space.” [Read, 14] This statement occupies or produces a time of the present as transition, an event horizon between a determinate past and a rapidly approaching future. The time in this type of statement – which occurs throughout the writing of Negri, from whom these aspects of Read’s work are largely drawn – has a paradoxical effect.

Read states “it is no longer possible to separate capital, as the producer of goods and commodities, from what used to be called the superstructure,” an apparent claim about the present [Read, 2]. The heart of the matter, however, is the “it is no longer possible”, which marks an absolute disjunction between past and present, and implies a specific story about the past. To say “it is no longer possible” to distinguish economic base and cultural superstructure means that it once was possible to correctly make such a distinction. And yet, a large portion of Read’s argument implies that the conceptual division of base-superstructure – or politics-economics, production-reproduction, etc – was never correct.

The point has a political valence: to say “capital has extended” beyond the factory means that capital’s command and resistance against capital occurs not only in designated workplaces but throughout the social field, such that the industrial working class is not the privileged political or historical agent which much of Marxism takes it to be. But, “has extended” implies that this is only now the case, such that the factoryism of traditional Marxism was, until recently correct. Much of Read’s argument implies that the exclusive focus on the industrial proletariat was both a theoretical and political error. That is, there is an implied critique to be made here of the thought and strategies pursued put forward by Marxists and working class movements for much of history (and still advocated by many today).

By temporally localizing his own theoretical innovations to an only now present moment Read limits his own ideas’ critical force and utility for Marxian historiography. Worse yet, by defining the present in contradistinction to a falsified past – a definition of the past which is all the more strange in that it is undercut by a substantial part of the rest of his argument – Read risks producing the mere image of an understanding of the present. This image consists in speaking of general historical conditions of production as if they were specific only to the present, and so threatens to impede discussions of concrete problems of power and organization faced by movements today. To paraphrase Deleuze, the political issue is not what is new or old, but rather to always search for new weapons. Read blunts the very theoretical weapons he offers by entangling them in a periodizing temporality, they must be deployed with a different – and currently absent – communist conception of time in order to achieve full efficacy.