I’m quite open to that critique of at least a certain Marx. The important part of Marx is the critique of political economy, the moments where he does philosophy of history and much of his philosophical anthropology are mad problematic and sometimes color the first in unfortunate ways. I also think there’s a lot that could be done with a nonfetishized (because non-naturalized) version of the concept of use value. Part of that, though, I think, means not conceiving of use value as distinct from exchange value but rather exchange value as one subset of possible use values, as I’ve argued elsewhere on here.

I’m not sure I understand the question about labor power and potentiality. What I’m trying to do with the potentiality stuff here is similar to what I’m trying to do with bare life - I want to talk about one instantiation thereof. I don’t want to say “bare life is only the proletariat” nor do I want to say “potentiality is only labor power” as neither makes sense - especially the latter. The potentiality stuff is intended as an argument on several fronts. First, potentiality to labor must also be impotentiality to labor (or, potentiality to not labor). Thus commodification does not exhaust conflict but rather initiates new sites of it - labor power purchased as a commodity must still be used by the capitalist - the worker must be set to work if surplus value is to be produced. This isn’t news, but I like making the point using Agamben. Second, and linked to this, the potential for (form-of-)life to be commodified labor power is also the impotential to be commodified. Primitive accumulation/enclosure is a permanent process while capitalism exists but (or, precisely because) it is never permanently completed (equating for now “commodification” with “enclosure”). Third is an analogous point re: bare life. The potential for life to be killed via the lethal operations where bare life is produced is also the impotential to be killed. All of which is to say, the outcomes are not foregone conclusions but rather are antagonistic and aleatory. This last argument is independent of the arguments about the proletariat and could perhaps stand to be worked out on its own, but the essential point of this argument is precisely that bare life is not, in an important sense. Put another way, bare life is a sort of top down concept, it’s from the king’s/cop’s eye view. View from some of the positions of those who are (taken as) bare life, bare life is not bare. The sovereign’s decision which produces lethal results is precisely an indifference to many determinations - treating as if bare - but it does not, even in the acts of killing, render life actually bare. You may disagree here, but I hope I’ve made the point clearer. I take your point that this may vitiate the concept of bare life, but I think if handled right this can serve as a gloss or nuance rather than a complete rejection of the concept.

cheers,
Nate

His argument on caesuras is not dissimilar to his arguments in Homo Sacer, but functionally he wants to argue that the biological lines with which the Jew is separated from the Aryan give way to the ones that separate Jew from Muslim in the camp, then those that give way to the separation between camp prisoner and Musselman, and it is at the level of the Musselman that such caesuras cease to have any meaning, since the Musselman is produced as the absence of those caesuras. I asked about the possibility of the proletariat as another one of the caesuras, because in Agamben at least, the alternative to bare life is what he calls the form of life, which is a way of thinking life that does not find it co-incident with itself, i.e. with vitality/survival. Form of life isn’t so clear to me as to what it is, even if I understand what it isn’t, though I read a rumor that his next book will be called Form of Life and will attempt to finish off this theme, but I don’t recall where I read that. Anyway, there’s some risk I think that the institution of caesuras makes possible their removal and the bareness of the biopolitical order, though I’m really just typing out loud here.

As for the biologization, yeah, I think Marx does naturalize labor as part of the human condition, which is why he fetishizes (I don’t know how else to describe it) the concept of use-value in vol 1 of Capital, and why he also pins the hopes and dreams of communists everywhere on the reclamation of their own labor-power. Obviously he’s been called to task for this - Baudrillard’s Mirror of Production is the one that comes to mind, though Bauman has a book that celebrates laziness somewhere, though its title escapes me at the moment) - but I was asking if the move you want to make - to think the proletariat as a mode of bare life (something Badiou-like about this formulation, where the proletariat belongs to the set of bare life…) is to necessarily clothe bare life and somewhat vitiate the concept. Possibly. Which is why I was curious about how much you want to tie the argument your making about potentiality to labor power… Does that make more sense?

On the second, the proletariat is defined by its capacity to labor (though in Roman law it was defined instead by its capacity for biological reproduction). I don’t think this is my biologizing, though. If there is such a move, it’s going on elsewhere are you point out. That’s the ‘police’ version of the concept, as a count. I think Marx isn’t always clear on this and himself sometimes sounds like he’s using that version of it. The political concept, though, is that which disrupts the count, which would work against the police version. It does still take the police version, the existing count, as a point of reference because that is what it’s declared against. I don’t think that has to mean it also retains a naturalizing move.

On the third, I don’t know what you mean. Can you give an example of a fully successful operation in the production of bare life? Do you mean to say that people do get brutalized and killed? If so, then yes of course.

Strictly speaking, though, those people still in an important sense are not bare life. They’re very particular - “clothed” - life, or rather, lives, who get brutalized and killed. That the sovereign treats them as bare life does not mean that that’s what they are. (The same holds for a more classically marxian idiom, exchanging “bare life” for “abstract labor” and “sovereign” for “capitalist”.) The point here is one of perspective. To analyze and criticize the political (or rather, police) thought and operations which treat people as bare life is important. But the being “bare” are not determinations of those whom these operations act upon, but determinations of how they are acted upon, what they are treated as. Those who are acted upon are infinite multiples (as is everything), which are only ‘bare’ from some perspective rather than from all perspectives, and are definitely not bare from those perspective which can be said to be their own perspectives.
happy holidays,
Nate

1. Why isn’t the proletariat in the sense used above yet another of the caesuras that enables the production of bare life (as Agamben talks out in Remnants)?

2. To anticipate the most obvious answer to the above, which is that this caesura is not biological, isn’t there a sense in which you are explicitly biologizing the proletariat here as a social body? Especially as one defined by its capacity to labor, which is a biological determination/capacity, and a naturalization of labor as the boundary condition of the proletariat (it’s not your naturalization, but you do repeat it…)

And 3. It does seem to me that if we take Agamben seriously, some operations in the production of bare life actually are fully successful. I’m not sure I understand how acknowledging this limits one’s agency in the face of it. Can you unpack this a bit?