What in the hell …

I don’t know. I suspect it’s a theoretical attempt to derive an allegedly new politics from an allegedly new stage, without having to critically engage with the wreckage and mistakes of prior organizational thought w/in Marxism. I may be wrong, I’m in an uncharitable mood.

In any case, the stuff below is something I’m working on re: Marx etc. Feedback is more than welcome.

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What follows is motivated by a reading of contemporary marxian political theory which deploys the terms biopolitics and biopower. These terms are used to expand what should be considered part of the conceptual and political field that falls under the Marxian term value production. Value production involves a site of political contestation (the location of value production in much of Marxism is considered to be the waged workplace) and a potential political subject (the working class). I am deeply sympathetic to the attempt to expand who should be considered part of the working class, and what times and spaces should be considered part of the working class, but I am not satisfied by the way this is accomplished using the terms biopolitics and biopower.

The stakes in this argument can be seen by turning to a passage from the Grundrisse, where Marx writes that within “the society that rests on exchange value, there arise relations of circulation as well as of production which as so many mines to explode it.” If this were not the case, “if we did not find concealed in society as it is the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations of exchange prerequisite for a classless society, then all attempts to explode it would be quixotic.” (Grundrisse, 159)

A number of political and theoretical disagreements within the Marxist tradition can be characterized as disagreements over which sites in society should be prioritized for seizure and communist or socialist redeployment. That is, they are disagreements over which relations are explosive or potentially so, which are essentially inert, and how relations judged to be explosive rank in a hierarchy of relative volatility and relative potential explosive force. These debates also contain, at least in their subtext (and sometimes directly on their surface), a corresponding disagreement over who is quixotic and who is not, and how those judged quixotic relate to each other in a rank order of being quixotic.

The turn toward biopower/biopolitics entails a view that capitalism extends beyond the factory such that social relations outside the factory walls – relations (and labors) of reproduction, consumption, and non-industrial production – become explosive.1 From this perspective, there is no longer a privileged site of potential explosiveness and of actual political practice aimed at the ignition of not-yet utilized explosive force. I am deeply sympathetic with this position, but I am unsatisfied with the historical narrative it entails. The claim that there is ‘no longer’ a privileged site implies a corresponding claim that there once was such a site. This implied narrative entails that only now do sites outside the area demarcated by prior Marxist conceptions become sites of value production and thereby become explosive. In other words, the argument implies that older Marxist political strategies, readings of Marx, and readings of social reality were correct and adequate in their time. This means that the social relations regarded by earlier Marxists as not one of Marx’s mines were not explosive at the time of those earlier Marxist formulations.

The basic presupposition of my view is that the sites of exchange between buyers and sellers of labor power, and the sites of capitalist use of labor power that has been purchased, are explosive. 2 The gist of this paper, then, touches upon questions regarding what should be considered a site of exchange between buyers and seller of labor power or a site of labor power being put to work in order to produce value. In the current Marxian use of the terms biopower and biopolitics, contemporary capitalism encompasses designated, recognized, waged spaces and times of production as well as spaces and times whose involvement in value production is unwaged, unrecognized and obfuscated. I intend to argue that this is the case for the capital relation as such.

My argument leaves questions of strategy and organization – how to go about lighting fuses – largely unaddressed. Indeed, for all my remarks about explosiveness, I will not actually spend time in this paper on the social explosions found within the history of struggles, nor will I address questions of how fuses are or should be lit, that is, how ‘explosive potential’ becomes or should be made to become actual explosion. My hope is that my view is useful for showing that the range of places wherein fuses exist that may be lit is a wider range than is sometimes believed, such that strategy and organization can begin in many more locations than much of the Marxist tradition has been willing to recognize.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri make a great deal of use of the terms biopower and biopolitics, terms which for them are connected to “a situation in which what is at stake in power is the production and reproduction of life itself.” (Empire, 24) In their discussion of these terms, the two quote Michel Foucault, who writes: “For capitalist society biopolitics is what is most important, the biological, the somatic, the corporeal.” 3 There is a tension present here, in that for Hardt and Negri this situation is a recent one, which they locate in a transition into a new stage – variably denominated postfordism, postmodernity, and real subsumption – in which capitalism becomes biopolitical. Hardt and Negri’s conclusions about the greater potentials existent in the present compared to the past are founded upon this claim. This would mean that the above-mentioned expansion of value production effected only applies to some relatively recent period of time. In passage Hardt and Negri quote, however, Foucault speaks not of postfordism or of any other specific era of capitalism but of capitalism as such.

This is so because “[c]apitalist ‘planning’ presupposes the planning of living labour” in every capitalist workplace.4 Silvia Federici’s excellent book Caliban and the Witch makes a similar point, but Federici demonstrates how the planning process of capitalism must seek to manage not only life in designated and remunerated places and times of labor, but also other processes – often not recognized as labor but still bound up with value production – necessary for the existence of the capitalist mode of production. The force of Federici’s argument derives less from her engagement with Marxian categories and concepts, though they are cogent, than her rigorously documented historical research detailing how the originary processes of capitalism – “so-called primitive accumulation” – entailed a war on women, a biopolitical operation required for the creation of the commodity labor power.

In this paper I will attempt a reading of Marx which will argue that the above named expansion of value production effected by the terms biopolitics and biopower demonstrates something about the concept and material existence of capitalism itself, something true for the entirety of the epoch of capitalist production, from its beginnings to the present. In other words, the situation that Hardt and Negri identify is not unique to the present, but is the situation of capitalist social relations from their inception. Capitalist production as such is biopolitical in the sense in which Hardt and Negri use the term.5 Or, as Paolo Virno has put it, “When there is a commodity that is called labor-power it is already implicitly government over life (…) because labor power is a paradoxical commodity, it is simply the potential to produce. As soon as this potential is transformed into a commodity, then, it is necessary to govern the living body that maintains this potential, that contains this potential.” 6

Part what I wish to address by this account is that Hardt and Negri’s remarks about the unique political possibilities of the present – the possibilities of an absolute democracy instantiated in a collective subject called multitude – do not withstand scrutiny as uniquely possible in the present. The point I wish to make can be seen in the following quote from Marx: “there are determinations which are common to all stages of production and are fixed by reasoning as general; the so-called general conditions of all production, however, are nothing but these abstract moments, which do not define any of the actual historical stages of production.”7 The condition of being biopolitical is a determination common to all stages of capitalist production. As such, it does not tell us anything specific about any one moment, nor about what political/organizational conclusions should be drawn, nor does it justify the claim to a new political possibility unique to the present.8

Marx characterizes the capital relation by the repetition of a series of circuits. One of such circuit is C-M-C, simple circulation. In this series, one commodity, the first ‘C’, is sold for money, ‘M’, which in turn is use to purchase a second commodity, the second ‘C’. This final commodity is consumed and ostensibly drops out of circulation permanently. Marx uses this series in his laying out of a logical and historical progression of production. It is important to note, however, that simple circulation does not disappear, but rather is preserved, taken up as a key moment in capitalist production.

The fundamental exchange in capitalism is not that between buyers and sellers of commodities [Find reference, it’s like the society of pure plunder – an impossibility – if everyone lived by the exchange of a commodity they made for one made by someone else then there would be no accumulation. Where would the excess wealth come from if all exchanged goods were swapped for goods of equal worth?]. Rather, capitalism is an exchange between the owners of two special types of commodities: the owner of the commodity MS (means of subsistence) and the commodity LP (labor power). All the rest of the commodities in capitalist production are produced by the purchase/sale and use of the commodity labor power. At the same time, all other commodities, by their being commodities, participate in the imposition of the status of being a commodity on labor power.

What is labor power? Labor power is potentially any human capacity as such. This capacity rests in the body of the worker, so that the sale of the commodity labor power is the sale of a portion of the lifetime of the worker. Determinate labor power - that is, the skills and traits demanded on the labor market - varies tremendously in its material instantiation, conditioned by a large number of variable factors.

It is with regard to the commodity labor power that simple circulation continues to occur, in the form of C(LP)-M(W)-C(MS). That is, C(Labor Power)-M(Wages)-C(Means of Subsistence). There is a continual tension b/w capitalists and proletariat over, whether the final exchange, M(W)-C(MS), will be productive for capital, unproductive, or antithetical to capital. Prior the abolition of the capital relation, this exchange is always potentially productive for capital, in that it reproduces the body that brings the commodity labor power to market as well as producing future bodies which will eventually enter into the market as sellers of labor power.

We might represent the series that capital requires and desires in the following two ways:

a) C(LP)-M(W)-C(MS) … C(LP)-M(W)-C(MS)

b) C(LP)-M(W)-C(MS) … C(LP’)-M(W)-C(MS)

In both, the commodity labor power is sold for a wage, which is used to purchase means of subsistence. In series a) means of subsistence are used to renew the labor power, that is, to distract, restore, and repair the body after its ostensible workday is over, in order to return the body to the labor market the next day in roughly the same quality, as bearer of a labor power for sale that is roughly equal in productive capacity to that of the previous day. Series b) represents two phenomena. In both, means of subsistence from the previous day9 are used to produce new labor power (LP’) for future sale to capital, in two senses. Wages can be spent to produce new levels of capacity and skill in current labor power: new skills via education, new ability to maintain physical activity via exercise and healthy food. Wages can also be spent to produce new bodies (having children) and to assure that they have the qualities desired by the market for labor power (raising and educating children).

In all cases, we see what Marx noted: if the laborer consumes disposable time for her own self this robs the capitalist.10 If means of subsistence are not purchased, or if they are not used in some manner that returns roughly the same or greater quality and quantity of labor power to the market, capitalism has a problem.11 In other words, the capitalist has a direct interest in making time off the clock functional to value production. The worker who is too hungover to function or to function at the average rate of production costs the employer, thus providing an incentive to police the behaviors of the employee off the clock. The boundary line demarcating precisely how a body in different places and times stands in relation to value production, which is to say, the relationship of life to capital, is political and determined by a historically variable balance of small and large scale class conflicts. It is not reducible to an obvious and fixed delineation of clearly unproductive and clearly productive [cite, v2 of Capital, wages as productive consumption.]

Marx quotes Postlethwayt, writing that the reason for the increased productivity of the English working class is derived from how the English working class spend their leisure time. This is a clear case of the ostensible nonproductive time of leisure functioning for the capitalist. [Postlethwayt quote in v1 of Capital, cite.]

Returning to our series of simple circulation, there are two initial questions unfold from the exchange that follows after the sale of labor power, that is, from the use of the wage to purchase means of subsistence [M(W)-C(MS)]. These questions, which are continually repeated conflictual processes, are:

1. Whether or not the wage purchases something that does actually reproduce the body that brings the body as bearer of the commodity labor power to market the next day.

2. Whether or not the wage purchases something that is used to produce – and produce in sufficient quantities and of sufficient qualities – future bodies which will enter the market as bearers of the specific commodity labor power demanded by the production processes prevailing at the time.

Both of these questions directly effect capitalist production, and render attempts to manage life in the interest of capitalists. [Cite Marx on the adulteration of bread in v1 of capital, cite also Beynon, Working For Ford on Ford’s concern over the morals of ‘his’ workers, ie, his attempts to police – in the classic sense of the term, including social engineering – the life of the working class, both waged and unwaged, in their ostensibly unproductive and certainly unwaged time.] Both of the above questions can be seen at work today in a host of regulations – laws and also employer policies regarding drug use, parenting, health and welfare – as well as in prior moments of capitalist production – the regulation of sexual and reproductive practices, discourses on the morality of alcohol and drug use.

In addition to the above two issues, there is also a question of how and whether labor power shows up in the market as a commodity in the first place. As Marx writes, “[o]nce labour-power has come into the market as the commodity of its owner and its sale takes the form of payment for labour, assumes the shape of wages, its purchase and sale is no more startling than the purchase and sale of any other commodity. The characteristic thing is not that the commodity labour-power is purchasable but that labour-power appears as a commodity.” (Vol 2 p28, Int Pub Ed)

This question of how and whether labor power appears as a commodity in the market unfolds into two issues.

1. How did labor power – a capacity to act that resides in the mind and the body – come to exist as a commodity in the first place? Bodies as such may be said to be bearers of a potentiality, a power to act and to labor, but they are certainly not a priori bearers of a commodity, of labor power in the form of commodity. That is, LP as such is not necessarily C(LP). LP as C(LP) comes about in conditions in which bodies can only continue to exist if they sell their labor power as a commodity. In other words, C(LP) arises when bodies only get access to what they need and want – means of subsistence, MS – if they sell LP. This requires the following conditions:

1. bodies can not produce sufficient or desired means of subsistence themselves in some form that does not involve the purchase and sale of labor power
2. sufficient or desired means of subsistence are primarily available by purchase, that is, MS exist primarily as C(MS).
3. Since one only gets access to a commodity if one has money, M, bodies must only have access to money in the form of the wage, M(W). That is, M is primarily available via the sale of C(LP)
4. The above can be summarized by saying that bodies are compelled to make

the exchange of labor power for wages, C(LP)-M(W), because without money, M(W) they have no access to means of subsistence, C(MS).

Labor power came to exist as a commodity in the same historical movement in which means of subsistence became a commodity. That is, bodies came to appear as bearers of the commodity labor power on the market as – and to the extent that – bodies received access to means of subsistence only in the form of a commodity, which compels bodies to seek a wage in order to attain the money needed for purchase. While commodified labor power and commodified means of subsistence may appear as discrete, they are in fact the products of the same historical process and are linked in their roles as mutually determining and as requisite conditions for value production. In the terms I have used in discussing the series of simple exchange, the crux of the matter is the process by which the preceding ‘C’ and surrounding parentheses came to be attached to LP and MS. This process is the process of enclosure. C(LP) and C(MS) are enclosed LP and enclosed MS. Marx addresses this in his writings on so-called primitive accumulation. In one sense, we can think of the enclosures in primitive accumulation as historically primitive, as an originary historical moment: the phylogenesis of the capitalist mode of production.

If the first question regarding how and whether labor power appears as a commodity in the marketplace is a phylogenetic question, the second is an ontogenetic question.

2. How does labor power continue to exist as a commodity? The production of bodies and means of subsistence in the form of a commodity is not a final and fixed state, an accomplished condition. Rather, it is a set of antagonistic processes and tendencies. The initial appearance of the human species on the planet, its phylogenesis, does not guarantee its continued existence, but rather its continued existence requires continual and unguaranteed acts of ontogenetic self-positing. It is exactly the same with the capitalist mode of production. In this sense, enclosure or primitive accumulation is ontogenetic, it is logically primitive, and needs to continually attempt to (re)produce itself.

Capitalism persists via the continual reproduction of the conditions enumerated above regarding the inaccessibility of means of subsistence through avenues other than by the sale of labor power as a commodity and the purchase of means of subsistence as a commodity. That is, capitalism exists via continually repeated enclosures. [CITE THE COMMONER DEBATE – BONEFELD AND DE ANGELIS IN PARTICULAR]

How does the preceding discussion relate to biopolitics? Quite simply, the processes of enclosure are biopolitical phenomena. Enclosure acts – and is contested – upon the terrain of life and the body, at whatever moment in time it occurs.12 Originary or phylogenetic enclosure installed a new regime of the socio-historical articulation of life (The outcomes of the processes of this installation were not pre-determined. As Marx notes, it took a great deal of time, before the compulsion to sell labor power was installed with the relative, though of course contested, stability which it has had since the genesis of capitalism [FIND QUOTE]). Continued or ontogenetic enclosure continues to intervene on the terrain of life, in attempt to continue the regime of articulation of life that is the capital relation. In the process, new arrangements of the capital relation may emerge, but these articulation of life retain a certain unity in that they are social relations in the form of the capital relation, and as such share a certain biopolitical consistency. Life’s access to means of subsistence via avenues other than by life’s functioning as the bearer of the commodity labor power face constant and ever changing attempts at threats and attacks.

As such, there is no biopolitical phase of capitalism, in the sense of biopolitics given above [repeat quote]. Capitalism is biopolitical qua capitalism. Rather than a dichotomy between biopolitical capitalism and nonbiopolitical capitalism, what is required instead is an apparatus for analyzing the relations of power – in the sense both of balance of forces and of specific apparatuses, processes, and strategies that take as their telos the (re)production of life in the form of the commodity labor power – as these relations vary historically and geographically. Also required is an analytical apparatus for understanding possibilities and moments of non- and anti-capitalist biopolitics (in the sense of Hardt and Negri’s use of the term). That is, there are articulations of life that exist within, against, and beyond variations of the form C(LP) which are also biopolitical.13

In other words, we require an understanding of the continuities and discontinuities within the history of class struggle and, above all, in the present. The contemporary turn to biopolitics has a potential power in expanding our understanding of what constitutes class struggle in history and in the present, but if we are to conceptualize class struggle in terms of biopolitics – at least in HN’s sense – then we must recognize that there is not a condition of biopolitical vs nonbiopolitical class struggle, but rather differently instantiated biopolitical (dis)orders within which antagonistic processes occur.

Following on – the question of whether something is value productive or not value productive is related to but distinct from the question of how value productive something is (rate of exploitation). C(LP) once purchased is subjected to an attempt by the capitalist to use this purchased commodity, and this use will produce surplus value at different rates as determined by a host of factors (the factor which is determinant in the last instance is class struggle). In other words, the question of whether or not activity is value productive is not identical to the question of the rate of exploitation (a question which Negri eliminates in his work, since he believe measuring value is impossible, a maneuver which pre-dates his biopolitical turn, and as a result renders there no sensible way to discuss phenomena like speed-ups etc – note to self, this is the next step in my Negri research, the question of value and measure).

There are then two follow on points:

1) biopolitics in HN’s sense expands the range of what is considered value productive, of what constitutes C(LP). This is a worthwhile project that should be continued (and it is a project that, it must be noted, HN are neither the only nor the first to undertake), though revised to extend backward in time, in a project of historical research.

2) accounts of capitalism as biopolitical must address not only the specific ways that different activities stand as C(LP), but the rates of exploitation and the mechanisms and struggles by which those rates are or could be determined. Additionally, the matter of how those rates are potentially subverted must be taken into account, both in their material specificity in terms of organization against particular arrangements of value production and in a general capacity for (re)organization, that is to say, life and it’s capacities are not reducible to the historical instantiations of life at any given moment or the sum total of hitherto existing moments. While those are moments of what is meant by life, the term is aporetic in the sense that it has other potentialities, or is another name for a type of potentiality.

Finally, the heart of the struggle within capitalism can be characterized as one over the uses of the body and of lifetime, whether or not LP will be C(LP) and whether or not – and how, and to what degree – C(LP) once sold will be used. In a sense, in line with Agamben’s sense of biopolitics as extending back at least to the Roman juridical and social order, we can say that all questions of politics are conflicts, at the level of theory and of other practices, regarding what the use values of bodies are and will be. [CITE Agamben, make a note again that in this sense at least, which is perhaps a very expanded sense of biopolitics, that Virno can not be right about the biopolitical deriving from the commodity labor power. If anything, the commodification of labor power is one moment – albeit a very important one, not least because it is the prevailing mode in which we live – of biopolitics.]

Notes
1. The expansion of the field of value production using the terms biopolitics and biopower in many ways repeats earlier arguments about the ‘social factory’ within the Italian Marxist tradition of operaismo. The best English language source on this tradition is Steve Wright’s Storming Heaven.The most prominent theorist in this constellation within the English-speaking world is of course Antonio Negri. Negri’s Empire and Multitude are the primary texts I have in mind here with regard to biopolitics etc. Another work that I am trying to respond to in this paper is Jason Read’s The Micropolitics of Capital, which deftly deploys this theoretical constellation but at the same time demonstrates some of the tensions within it.
2. One could of course contest this. Reasons of space do not permit me to make an argument here for why these social sites are inherently potentially explosive, nor to argue against a view that would see them as otherwise. My sole rejoinder here is that to my mind the burden of proof is on the exponents of a theory of inert social relations, to prove that their position has any utility for either explaining or engaging in activities of struggle and organization.
3. Quoted in Empire p27. This typifies a strange blind-spot within much of Hardt and Negri’s work. They frequently take their most interesting claims to refer to novelties about the present, when these claims are actually more coherent and interesting if taken as innovations true for the entire history of capitalist production.
4. Raniero Panzieri, “Marx Versus The Objectivists”. It should also be noted that Panzieri attacks the received Marxist antithesis between planning and capitalism, arguing instead that the labor process under capitalism requires planning. See “Surplus Value and Planning”.
5. Rabinow and Rose and Mark Kelly have objected to Hardt and Negri’s version of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics. These writers argue that Foucault’s versions of the concepts are quite different, being much more restricted in their application, and much more useful. Kelly goes so far as to claim that Hardt and Negri’s concepts of biopolitics and biopower are so broad as to be vacuous. The challenges are interesting and worth taking seriously, but I will not engage them here. For the purposes of this paper, the analyses of biopower/biopolitics are interesting for their expansion of the field of what is involved in value production. The central point of my paper is that is the less the case that the area of the social field involved in value production has recently expanded, as Hardt and Negri claim, and more that this field has always been broader than most Marxist have seen – including Hardt and Negri in their accounts of prior moments in the history of capitalist production.
6. It must be noted that for Virno, biopolitics derives from labor power. I do not see what is at stake in the question of causal priority, nor do I see how biopolitics in general could be derived from labor power. That is another argument, however. The important point here is that the commodity labor power is immediately biopolitical from its moment of inception. [Cite Virno, my translation]
7. Marx, “Introduction”, p26 of Volume 28 of the Collected Works.
8. I do not mean this as any type of claim about what Marx actually meant, though that type of marxology is sorely tempting, at least for me. Marxology is a labyrinth from which it is easy to never leave, wherein every claim is always subject to endless counter-readings and deployments of additional biblio- and bio-graphical minutiae from Marx’s works and life. Even should a final account of Marx’s own interpretation of his work be someday produced, one could still make the basic point that the author’s own reading need not be the only or the most important one to which a text is subject.
9. I say ‘day’ to indicate workday, but the quantity of time need not be fixed to that amount of time. It can be at whatever average regular rate the exchange C(LP)-M(W)-C(MS) takes place.
10. p 233 (Int. Pub. Ed)
11. This is one way to read the tremendously racist discourses and damaging policy decisions around the dismantling of the welfare state in the US. President Reagan’s mythical ‘welfare queen’ is a figure who was, essentially, producing life that was considered not productive, her own and those of her children who were considered excess and ultimately disposable populations.
12. To be clear, there are important differences between enclosures that occur at different times and places and in different fashions. There are tremendous differences that should be recognized, including differences of scale and brutality. My intent is not meant to elide any of these differences, but to point out that there also important commonalities in terms of functions for/processes in capitalism and anti-capitalist resistance.
13. I am fond of the metaphor of ‘commons’ a general term for forms of life that exist(ed) – either actually or potentially – some instantiation other that the of the capital relation. As the historian Peter Linebaugh has noted, however, it is probably best not to simply focus on the term ‘commons’ as a name for all unenclosed/uncommodified labor power and means of subsistence, but rather our attention is better placed upon processes of ‘commoning’ enacted in different ways and in different places throughout history. (Linebaugh, “Magna Charta and Practical Communism’, address given at the centenary of the IWW, June 2005.)