That is helpful. I don’t think we disagree here. I don’t think ownership’s the best way to think this stuff either, that’s part of the direction I want to press the argument.

I was thinking of positing a distinction between ‘ownership’ and ‘possession’, not hard and fast but to distinguish the juridical level from the sort of everyday/material “I have it in my pocket” kind of level.

I would qualify the lack of access to use values, though, just as I’d qualify the lack of ownership - neither is absolute. With use values, there’s not full access or sufficient access, especially to particularly important use values, but there’s still nonmonetary access to some use values in some sense in most cases.

Can you say more on the life/death and law stuff, that seems like it might be similar to the kind of contiguity I’m interested in here.

take care,
Nate

If this is an accurate representation of your concerns, then I think I misunderstood you. I was asking about whether the proletarian could really be said to “own” his/her labor power. Need compels the proletarian to sell his/her labor power. Ironically, need compels the proletarian to sell his/her labor power precisely in order to preserve his/her labor power. Without the use-values which serve to maintain the labor power of the proletarian, the proletarian loses that property. Not, of course, in a legal sense, but in an absolute, or existential sense. S/he dies. Similarly, if the proletarian attempts to acquire the use-values s/he needs by means other than selling his/her labor power, through theft, or revolt, s/he is punished by the state, and deprived of his/her labor power in a different way. S/he is prevented from selling his/her labor power, or is compelled to expend their labor power without being paid wages, in the form of prison labor, for example. I do think that both the bio-political and juridical considerations qualify the extent to which the proletarian “owns” his/her labor power, and indicates that there are struggles over life and death and with the law that have similar effects as the struggle between proletarians and capitalists.

I hope this is helpful. I really like Mike’s accounting analogy.

Good to hear from you. How did your writing weekend end up back when? I see there’s a lot of new stuff at your blog, I’ll have to get over there soon.

I don’t mean to say the working class ceases to be (prior to the revolution). All I mean is that the description/definition “class that owns only labor power” is technically not the case. The class owns stuff in addition to labor power on a routine basis. I certainly agree that the sum of wages and outlay is important (I think the accounting metaphor’s quite helpful actually, thanks), but I don’t see why the time after expenditure of wages and after consumption of purchased goods should be the defining time for the proletariat. I’m not saying the other times - owning of wages prior to spending them or owning use values purchased prior to consuming them - should be the defining one’s either. Rather, I think that ownership may prove to not be a particularly useful category for defining the proletariat. The important bit, I think, is that people don’t get access to a large portion of needed and wanted use values unless they spend money, and they don’t get much money to spend without working. That’s a key source of the requirement to work - the blocking other avenues of access to a large portion of use values, and the blocking is backed up by force - the force, the force of the state. That’s the other piece of the agenda that’s loosely formed in my head here, in addition to the syndicalist point that Colin noticed, the role of the state - I think that might provide a point of entry or resonance for talking about how anarchists can read/use Marx productively.

take care,
Nate

Not sure I’m following everything you have to say in this post. I like the part about the working class being dynamic rather than static (”oscillating” as you put it). At the same time, I don’t find it terribly helpful to conceptualize a proletariat that ceases to be and then comes back into existence again. Taken in a long view, accepting your shift from “sole” to “primary,” and allowing for the obvious limited exceptions, even the oscillation you’re describing doesn’t really change the parameters of class composition.

Let me put it a different way: in my secret other life I am an accountant. One of the things that accountants do is prepare financial statements (in my case for non-profits, but theoretically they can be done for individuals as well). The two most important financial statements are the balance sheet, which reflects financial status at a single moment in time, and the income statement, which summarizes revenue and expense over the course of a period of time. For the hypothetical proletarian who earns just enough to survive, the income statement would include wages earned as income, and money spent on food, shelter, clothes, etc, as expense, with a net income hovering around zero. Say the income statement covers a calendar year 2006. The balance sheet totals assets (in this case, accumulated wages that have been saved, if any) and liabilities (debts like rent due and so forth), with the net being either positive - more assets than liabilities - or negative - the reverse. In the case of the hypothetical proletarian, the balance sheet for December 31, 2005 and December 31, 2006, are likely to be fairly similar, assuming that both wages and expenses have remained stable. In each case, assets are likely to match liabilities just about to the penny, meaning that net assets are also hovering around zero.

Hopefully this scenario makes some sense to you. The balance sheet is the key item here, and the fact that net assets remain at or very close to zero means that the proletarian has remained a proletarian for another year. From an accountant’s perspective (which I will obviously grant is not normally the most useful perspective in the world, although in this case I find it helpful), any ephemeral surplus wages retained by the proletarian are just that – ephemeral, and not a good basis to say that s/he is however temporarily not a proletarian.

Just something to think about. Hope all is well with you.

Solidarity,
Mike

Thanks for these. On the first, that’s precisely part of the agenda. Negri actually says something about this somewhere in his stuff from the 70s, about the goal being to raise socially necessary labor time - ie, increase expenditure for variable capital (wages) and thereby reduce surplus value. One could probably do a Hegelian thing here about quantity and quality - quantitative change in SNLT/surplus can result in qualitative changes such as forcing restructuring, causing crisis, etc - if one were so inclined.

On the rest, you’ve anticipated where I want to go with this, which is only half formed at best. In the long term, I’m interested in reading Agamben and Schmitt in tandem with Marx as part of a criticism of Marx(ism) for its ‘people-like’ moments - tendency to think in a way like sovereignty and in quasi juridical categories.

In regard to that - the proletarian’s ownership of their body is not _legally_ qualified by the fact that their body dies if not maintained (that is, at any moment prior to death - the moment of death does change ownership status, but the condition dying does not, at least not in all cases). In the same register proletarian ownership of wages isn’t qualified by whether or not those wages are desired for subsistence rather than accumulation/savings.

That’s not to say that the point you’re pressing is unimportant, quite the opposite. “Ownership” as a legal category only goes so far - not very far at all - as your pressing on the link or the gap between legal ownership and material (corporeal?) conditions indicates. It also isn’t the best for thinking of dynamism.

Re: need, absolutely. Need is crucial - the ’silent compulsion of the market’. It’s also a really interesting category in Marx, as it’s not simply bodily/biological needs but any need (or desire) whatsoever, considered historically, which allows room for agency.

One of the next steps I want to take with this is to expand on the parenthetical qualification in the second paragraph of my post, the difference between “sole” means and “primary” means. Needs are created historically and in at least some cases they’re created alongside the means to satisfy those needs (such as a need for electronic communication or a need for a means to produce electronic music, or longstanding needs like frienship). I’d call this, rather sloppily, part of ‘commons’ or ‘commoning’, a mode of meeting needs outside the wage relation (that needs to be specified better, “nonwage” isn’t enough but it’s a thumbnail sketch for now). These are created and recreated in lots of places at lots of times. When they reach a certain level of being widespread and become detected, a competing commodified mode of access is introduced, alongside of or followed by measures that reduce access to meeting these needs in noncommodity forms. That is, attempts to narrow nonmonetary avenues access to use value - enclosures - are part of the capitalist side/tendency of capital logic/relations. Here’s the link I want to make with the above post and discussion - the proletarian is not actually someone who always owns only their own body, but rather sometimes - regularly, as a matter of routine - owns wages and use values purchased with wages. Also, analogously, the proletarian is not someone who always only gets access to use values via money earned as wages. These are two registers in which capitalization is not total, to use a clumsy phrase. It also allows a place for or point of contiguity with the Deleuzian sort of “look how productive we are!” (in non-surplus-value kinds of ways) as well as Negri’s ’self-valorization’.

These may be small points, I’m not sure.

On the refusal of work, I agree. The refusal of work in the sense of the refusal to sell labor power is not a universalizable program in the sense of being immediately implementable in all situations. In some cases it’s practicable based on a social wage (welfare state) or based on the wages of others (punks who live off family and friends) or based on non-wage forms of meeting needs. If practiced at a big enough scale against an employer or collective capital which is vulnerable it still might also work, but there’s a difference between long term refusal (never working) and short term witholding of labor power (work stoppages). I’ve read a bit about discussions on the latter in the early IWW, who tried to keep strikes short rather than long and drawn out.

take care,
Nate

I agree with all your answers. I actually really like the point you make about the antagonism between proletarians who push for higher wages and capitalists who push for lower wages, because it incorporates and valorizes unionism within a political framework. There are some (mostly silly, and overly-theoretical) strains of Marxism that oppose this move, which I think is ridiculous.

However, I was trying to push a slightly different point. I didn’t express very clearly. I was trying to say that proletarians’ “ownership” of their power depends on their ability to maintain it. They can’t maintain their labor power (their bodies, or simply “themselves”) without various “use-values,” things like food, shelter, etc. These things have to be paid for. So, in order to maintain themselves (in order to survive) proletarians are compelled to sell their labor power. So, they aren’t necessarily looking for something “extra” (amenities) in contracting with the capitalist , they’re looking for a way to maintain themselves (survive). The basic concern which drives proletarians to seek wages and work is not accumulation but self-preservation.

This argument adds a dimension to the “oscillation” between higher- and lower-wage interests. Proletarians can temporarily refuse to sell their labor power, and this might incline the capitalist to increase the wages s/he offers. But there’s a limit to this strategy. The capitalist knows that workers can only hold out for so long, because they need the wages to live. So, they wait until the proletarian can’t hold out anymore, and propose a worse contract on worse terms than the proletarians would intially have accepted.

So, to summarize, I think your account fails to account for “need,” and the relationship between “need” and wages and work. Proletarian “need” conditions/qualifies their “ownership” of their labor power.

Colin–

I think there’s two issues here.

First, wages are a precisely additional property owned by the proletarian for the duration of the proletarian’s possessing them prior to spending them. The proletarian owns the money paid in wages. This is true regardless of whether or not wages accumulate. This duration of owning money may be very short, and one might argue that in many cases it’s so short as to be trivial, which I’d probably agree with. That doesn’t change the point that the waged proletarian, strictly speaking, must sometimes own more than just their labor power. Furthermore, this ’sometimes’ is also not occasional but regular, routine, and built in to waged labor as a social relationship such that the proletarian’s ownership of something more than their own labor power (the money wage) is not a circumstantial oddity.

Second, wages may or may not accumulate, based on all kinds of different circumstances. The terms here may be problematic but I think the point is reasonable - there’s a sort of drive on the proletarian side toward accumulating wages (or rather, a drive toward a condition in which accumulation of wages is possible - ie, toward higher wages), and there’s a drive on the capitalist side toward lowering wages such that the accumulation of wages is more difficult/less likely.

Part of the point here is that the proletarian who literally own just their labor power is closer to being bare life, which, as your comment noted, means being closer to not reproducing/maintaining their body, ie, closer to death. With waged labor, this is not a static condition but an oscillating one - the proletarian without wages who cannot find a ‘buyer’ to supply a wage is worse off than the proletarian without a wage who has found a buyer or than the proletarian in possession of wages (even more so if this last is in the position to save some wages). The proletarian who only owns labor power for an extended period of time occurs only when that proletarian can’t get a wage. There are of course various equilibria and vectors that emerge, the oscillation isn’t simply individual or a on/off, there are gradations and so on - all of which is to say that in the aggregate things may look different depending on the frame of reference to which that aggregate is composed. But I think the point about the individual proletarian stands, and I like the point that the proletariat, as an aggregate of proletarians, is composed out of dynamic and oscillating elements. That’s not a revelation really, but this is one way to make the argument.

take care,
Nate