What in the hell …

Pasted below is part two of my b-day celebration offering for Marx’s hundredsomethingth. It’s a translation of a chunk of a book by Sandro Mezzadra, to complement the stuff by Virno that I put up earlier. The book was originally called Diritto di fuga: Migrazioni, cittadinanza, globalizzacione. I have it in Spanish and translated it from there. I’ll eventually be circulating the translation to friends who I think have it in Italian to ask for suggested revisions. Any changes made will be put up here. Anyone w/ a copy of the book in any language please feel free to suggest revisions. This first part of this is from pages 87-91 in the Spanish. The second part is from p138-140. Mezzadra is a one-time editor of DeriveApprodi who is hella interesting. There’s another piece by him at generation-online. Brett and Mezzadra did a piece together in Borderlands. Mezzadra also co-wrote the preface to the Italian edition of the Colectivo Situaciones book 19 y 20, and had an essay appear not too long ago in Ephemera.

Mezzadra cites Yann Moulier Boutang extensively here. YMB is an editor of Multitudes, author of a biography on Althusser, and a participant in the recent Cambridge UK conference on immaterial labor. The book Mezzadra draws on is coming out soon-ish in Spanish, then I can read it.

1.

Flight and the bridle

A recent investigation summarized in a large volume by Yann Moulier Boutang*x allows us to consider the tension that is created between the poles of flight and despotism as a structural element that recurs throughout the history of the capitalist mode of production. It should be underlined that this research, as is often the case with works that change how we look at the past, is driven by a political concern arising from the end of the millenium: while capital and commodity mobility seem to overcome all obstacles in globalization, new and old barriers are placed in from of labor mobility. While in many of the ’souths’ of the world, old and new forms of slavery persist, men and women fleeing war, poverty, social and political tyranny encounter fortified borders. In the heart of the centers of capitalist accumulation, where “domestic” labor is reorganized in the name of flexibility and precarity, the luckiest of these migrants are submitted to a regime that bridles their mobility: precarious residence permits, frequent violations of the work contract, frequently to falling into “clandestiny,” into invisibility, into the condition of being “non persons”. How can these apparent contradictions be explained? How to understand the paradox of a capitalism that, distinguished in a Marxian sense by “constant movement”, “incessant commotion of social conditions” and “all blocked relations” reproduce in their global activity the entire repertoire of forms of co-action and unfreedom that one would want to see relegated to its prehistory?
To answer these questions Yann Moulier Boutang proposes a long detour, which ends up returning to and placing in contention some fundamental concepts upon which the social, historical, and economic sciences have constructed an image still in use today by capitalism: beginning with the concept - central to the marxian critique of political economy - of formally free waged labor. A “new continent”, a “land to conquer systematically, like a paradigm in the sense of the research program of I. Lakatos,” was progressively delineated in the course of this historical voyage: the flight of dependent labor, free or unfree, imposed little by little upon the eyes of the author like a first mover, the statute of waged labor codified and guaranteed in the modern codes of labor, capitalist competition and accumulation in general becomes incomprehensible - this is the thesis at the bottom of Yann Moulier Boutang’s research - if deprived of the crucial relevance of the control of mobility, of the difficult search for guarantees and equilibria against the unilateral rupture of the employment relation on the part of the dependents.
From this perspective “free waged labor” ceases to be the norm progressively imposed by capitalism, able to unfold its superior economic and juridical rationality whatever the other historical firm of the labor relation, to become a specific conjugation of the broader concept, this the essence of the capitalist mode of production, dependent relation, which admits of free, semi-free, and unfree forms. The very formation of a “free labor market” in Western Europe - which the author analyzed starting from the promulgation of the English workers in 1349 (Yann Moulier Boutang, 1998, p277) - present in the form of the constant intervention of public powers, which play a decisive and internal role in the government of the economic mechanism, into the mobility of labor. In the face of the persistence of behaviors of flight and defection on the part of the dependents, the legislation over the poor - this is something the author insists upon in a particularly convincing way - can not be considered with Polyani (1944) as reaction to the “excesses” of the market (375): with its corollary of new total institutions, similar representation constitutes more the condition for the consolidation and expansion of the market, to the degree in which it has contributed to channeling and discipline the mobility of labor. Once again, this fundamental problem explains the permanent authoritarian temptation that accompanies, as an incessant underside, the development of the labor market throughout the English revolution, the “liberal age” and the welfare capitalism of the 20th century.
The thesis of Yann Moulier Boutang is reinforced when applied seriously to the reading of Immanuel Wallerstein and considering capitalism, from the beginning of its history, as a world-economy. For a view distinct from the the traditional Eurocentric one of the social and economic sciences, which can seem anomalous, or to the original sin of youth relegated to the phase of “so-called primitive accumulation,” it demonstrates fully the constitutive function realized, properly as a “distinct form” from the norm of free waged labor, in the historical and structural and constitution of the capitalist mode of production. As the author demonstrates in a series of extremely rigorous specific studies, the installation of “second servitude” in central and meridian Europe, slavery in the Atlantic economy and the distinct forms of deportation that served as the origin of the system of forced labor in the colonies, are systems that bridle the free movement of labor and which constitute the “dark side” of the process by the means of which was constituted the “economy of free waged labor” central to the capitalist system. Analyzing modes of abandoning the slavery regimens in the United States, Brazil, and South Africa, he shows how the “transition” was accompanied by the institution of new internal and external borders to the mobility of labor, exemplified by international migrations of low level contract labor (the Chines “coolies” in California) and by the system of peonage. The wage relation as well, on the other hand, brought papers into its juridical matrix, in the judgement of Yann Moulier Boutang, the stigmas of placing bridles on labor, representing an unstable equilibrium between the tendency of workers to subtract themselves from capitalist command (concretely: breaking the labor contract the instant any better opportunity presented itself) and the vital necessity for capital to assure a supply of dependent labor.
Together with the idea that free waged labor represents the sine qua non based upon which one can speak of fully developed capitalism, the research of Yann Moulier Boutang ends up placing into question the presumption, based in reality more in some marxist currents than in the pages of Marx himself, following which capitalist development has a linear trajectory from the extraction of absolute surplus value to relative surplus value - that is to say, from “formal subsumption” to “real subsumption of labor to capital.” The persistence of unfree forms of labor throughout the entire arc of the history of capitalism defines in other terms a terrain in which formal subsumption and real subsumption, with the distinct forms of surplus value extraction that pertain to them, necessarily coexist simultaneously. But at the same time, the insistence upon the elements of co-action and bridling of the free movement of labor that structurally concerns capitalism in regard to its “permanent authoritarian temptation” does not make capitalism “a cold system, the latest western variant of hydraulic despotism, (…) but rather a movement without end and without pause.” Anonymous individual and collective defection, with which women and men try to subtract themselves from the despotic regime of dependent labor, in the multiple forms which that assumes, is in fact the essential element of the capitalist social relation, the key for understanding the dynamic of the “regimes of accumulation” in which this provisory equilibrium is encountered each time.
Migrations, from this point of view loses any character of being marginal in history and in the concrete functioning of the capitalist mode of production, and instead looms as the paradigm for the complex disputes that play around the control of labor mobility: incarnation par excellence of the behaviors of subtraction and flight that subjectively traverse capitalist production, the migrant is also the figure predestined to bear upon her or his skin the hardest effects of the bridling of freedom. And, it is frequently the “nation” which serves as the rhetorical figure within which the threads arise that, very concretely, serve the function of “bridles.”

2. from “Marx in Calcutta”

In Dipesh Chakrabarty’s recent work, Provincializing Europe, the “spirit of anticolonial gratitude” that sustains the project of “provincializing Europe” makes reference to a widely used reflection over what we can define as the material constitution of western universalism, in addition to the discovery of the impossibility for critical thought of locate itself linearly outside of this. It is a very complex text, rich in conceptual stratification and not at all to position itself upon the terrain of far reaching philosophical reflection, as demonstrated by the frequent references to Heidegger and Derrida. (…) For Chakrabarty, in this respect, comparison with Marx is central (…)

Chakrabarty carries out a rigorous analysis of the marxist category of “abstract labor”. He begins with a critique of the “historicist” temptation implicit in the distinction between “formal subsumption” and “real subsumption of labor in capital” which, while extremely productive in the analytic arena, poses a univocal reading of the history of capitalism it poses, in other words, authorizing the idea according to which “real” capitalism means “final” subsumption, that is to say, the pregressive annulling of the operative marks of “historical difference” within a world disenchanted and uniform precisely because of the domination of capital and its logics. Chakrabarty’s objection is fundamental and seems to produce particular effects resonant with the discourse that we have already seen in the development of Yann Moulier Boutang earlier: this type of image of capitalism ends contradicting the insistence of Marx himself upon the constitutive role that worker resistance and subordination play in the very concept of capital, in addition to obscuring the despotic character of capitalist domination. Here the category of abstract labor enters in: far from assuming it as something “objectively” given (and thus as the model upon which to construct the political theory of resistance to capital, imagining a worker movement constructed as the mirror image of “abstract labor”), it must be instisted that it represents for Marx, as can be deduced in his analysis of factory discipline, “the hermeneutic grid with which capital asks us to read the world.” As such, attention should be shifted to the tension that is necessarily installed between the abstraction that capital operates in its search for a “common measure for human activity” and the fact that this labor, without the subjection of which it is not possible to produce surplus value, presents itself necessarily as living labor.

It’s this section that made me go to the library to get the Chakrabarty book I mentioned in another post, it’s the same book that Mezzadra’s talking about. Chakrabarty also comments (p49) that the idea of uneven development and the formal vs real subsumption theses both still retain “the idea of empty and homogenous historical time, for it is over such time that the gap could ever close between the two kinds of subsumption.” I’d add that this empty time is the terrain within which such a transition could take place or be identified.

Chakrabarty also says the following which I like quite a bit:

The task of producing “minority” histories has, under the pressure precisely of a deepening demand for democracy, become a double task. I may put it thus: “good” minority history is about expanding the scope of social justice and representative democracy, but the talk about the “limits of history,” on the other hand, is about struggling, or even groping, for nonstatist forms of democracy that we cannot not yet either understand or envisage completely. This is so because in the mode of being attentive to the “minority” of subaltern pasts, we stay with heterogeneities without seeking to reduce them to any overarching principle that speaks for an already given whole. (107.)

The last line makes a nice link, as does Angela’s recent post with regard to contracts, between homogenous empty time and the unities of the people and class in itself that I’ve been trying to think through lately using (and in) Schmitt and Marx.