I ran across this article, “Toward a Breakdown of the Capitalist Subject?” via a post at Jodi’s. I think the piece is inadequate and evidences a widespread and mistaken understanding of capitalism which overemphasizes the sphere of circulation; this is common in conversations that conflate (anti-)capitalism with (anti-)neoliberalism.
“Perhaps the economic catastrophe is dissipating the most glaring illusions about the self-regulating market”
- what illusions, held by whom, and held in what manner? I’m thinking here of some of the registers I see when I read v1 of Marx’s Capital - illusions held by economic actors, the actual practices of economic actors, and the ostensible or publicly stated views of political economists. I mention the last thinking of Michael Perelman’s book the Invention of Capitalism, which argues that while classical political economists *sounded* like they thought markets were self sufficient - self constituting, and self regulating - and articulated arguments to this effect, the documentary evidence of these economists’ private and policy documents shows that they in fact were aware that the self-sufficiency of markets was an ideological fiction.
The article’s authors hold that “capitalism” includes or is in part “a way of inciting subjects to behave according to the company model and the general norm of competition.” Capitalism “everywhere establish[es] competitive situations between subjects, by inciting them to become the winners of a universal competition, by imposing controls and surveillance and, above all, by pushing subjects to self-control by making performance the ruler of each person’s life,” and thus this system has the impact of constructing a new subject, a “neo-subject,” as some psychoanalysts call it.”
This is overstated and one-sided. This ’subjectivity’ is rooted almost entirely in the market for commodities other than labor power, with only passing reference to labor markets (competition for jobs) and some workplaces (competition among workers after their labor power has been purchased - ie, on the job between workers). What this leaves out is that capitalism has always included cooperation as well, in at least two senses - the cooperation under the direct management of capitalists (or their agents) on the job, as described by Marx in the chapters on cooperation and the workplace, and the cooperation, referenced in passing and in only partial form by Marx required to continue to reproduce labor power - reproducing existing labor power on a daily/annual basis and producing new labor power on a generational basis.
This cooperation offers at least some basis for some organization against capitalism, such that we might hesitate to reduce it to ‘capitalist subjectivity.’ On the other hand, this cooperation is subordinated to the command of capitalists in/via various mediations. What’s more, capitalism is impossible without this cooperation. In any case, to understand “capitalist subjectivity” as simply market subjectivity, as the subjectivities involved in the sphere of circulation, is misleading on two counts. One, it presents the subjectivities required in and propagated by capitalism in only a partial fashion. Two, it doesn’t help us understand the importance of cooperation to capitalism. More specifically on this point, it doesn’t help us understand the important point that there is a mode of cooperation-as-capitalism. Without that perspective, it is hard to understand either the past or the present, and the implied political claims and demands in the piece risk being merely social democratic, calling only for a better capitalism (a sort demand which we have to make but if instantiated is likely only to really result in a better capitalism for some, at the expense of others).
Perhaps more succinctly:
The piece is right but only partially and thus misleadingly. Yes, the consumer of commodities is a capitalist subject. Likewise workers who compete with each other on the job, workers who compete for jobs, students who compete with each other at school, and similar figures. But none of this is *the* capitalist subject. Also (at least equally) important to capitalism are workers who cooperate to do their jobs and who cooperate to make and raise children and cooperate to teach and learn needed job skills and knowledges, and people who help maintain some of the areas of state-and-capitalist management of cooperation. To count only the first set as ‘the capitalist subject’ is to misunderstand capitalism and likely to pose an inadequate response to capitalism.
Comment by Nate — September 30, 2009 @ 7:22 pm
Hey Nate - On this:
Yes.
This is one of the things that I think a number of readings of Marx that are, in some sense, very close to mine, manage to miss: that Marx is bounding certain forms of expression in the early chapters - displaying this sort of subjectivity, only in order to pull the rug out a short while later, to look back on the same scenes from a different perspective that is also available within capitalist society, and to show how, from that other perspective, these things can be seen for the partial and limited conceptions that they are. I’ve recently been trying to make this case against a number of the new forms of Hegelian Marxism - which rightly pick up on the fact that Marx channels Hegel’s terminology and aspects of his method in various places, but which then end up overlooking how Marx basically binds Hegel to the sphere of circulation - Hegel becomes, in Capital, sort of tacitly labelled as a petty bourgeois philosopher - someone whose categories quite neatly express particular conceptions of self-regulation and systemic autonomy, project these into metaphysical space in the form of the Geist, and thus sort of edit out contradictory dimensions of the social context being “expressed”…
Sorry - I’m particularly exhausted today and so this probably all sounds beside the point you were making - I don’t think it is
- but until I get more sleep, I don’t think I can say more clearly why your comments resonated with me…
But just: yes:
Comment by N. Pepperell — September 30, 2009 @ 11:38 pm
tanks np, holding the baby, = one handed = brief. Great comment as usual. more later
note to self - and capitalist planning as well. see panzieri, dunayevskaya
Comment by Nate — October 1, 2009 @ 12:15 am
panzieri
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2008/07/20/do-panzieri-and-tronti-have-to-say/
dunayevskaya
http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2007/03/01/is-so-great-about-planning/
other capitalist subjectivities = planners and administrators, and the engineers who design and carry out time-motion studies
revisit the notes on panzieri re the points i want to make about negri, the stuff about cooperation in panzieri = the same mistake negri makes about what negri thinks is the era before real subsumption
Comment by Nate — October 1, 2009 @ 1:55 am
Hey Nate - Since the thesis ended up being about a third of what I had originally set out to write, I never got to this:
Which is only taken up from the later chapters of Capital - not to mention bureaucrats, state officials, and a whole host of others…
Good stuff…
Take care…
Comment by N. Pepperell — October 1, 2009 @ 5:00 am
bizarrely, or perhaps predictably, the actual article in le Monde makes no mention of “capitalist subjectivity” but instead purports to describe “la subjectivité néolibérale”, neoliberal subjectivity.
Comment by chabert — October 2, 2009 @ 5:09 am
hi Colonel,
Interesting. Is it just a translation issue then?
What’s your take on the piece?
cheers,
Nate
Comment by Nate — October 2, 2009 @ 7:59 am
“What’s your take on the piece?”
I think it’s vague and banal - they tick off the main characteristics of what’s been known for a couple centuries as individualism, notice that for the past 30 years there has been a lot of mass culture and workplace encouragement of this way of behaving and thinking, and find it unpleasant. But this denouncement of individualism is framed in the headline of the moment - the credit crisis, the occasion for this bland predictable editorial copy, is offered as a possible turning point or whatever, opportunity to temper the aggressive individualism of the zeitgeist with the traditional alternative, some (of what has traditionally been known as) socialism.
This is presumed an appropriate moment for this revision of the mass culture because a stratum of the striving upwardly mobile petty bourgeoisie who five years ago could expect to be rentiers by middle age - the consultants and professionals who “exploit themselves” - are disappointed in their expectations due to the collapse of asset bubbles. But I think the fact that what they actually write is “neoliberal subjectivity”, not “capitalist subjectivity” (truthout changes this evidently as part of the ruling class campaign in the US to confuse people about what socialism is and what alternatives exist to private ownership of the planet) giving this a date of origin (”three decades of neoliberal government”), suggests a conscious triviality or superficiality - they are identifying a fad or trend mainly manifesting in entertainment and intellectual product, in management styles etc.. It also suggests they are not actually indulging in psychologising – the “neoliberal subjectivity” is found in mass produced commodities and in media, not necessarily in any human beings. It’s a model or figure, not necessarily one that anyone has internalised. “l’étudiant invité à confondre les progrès de la connaissance avec la croissance individuelle d’un “capital humain” in the trans: “the student invited to confuse the progress of knowledge with the individual growth of “human capital””. Preumably plenty of students reject this invitation. That they avoid identifying who issues it also gives the piece this soft lifestyle journalism quality that I think warns the reader not to look for coherence or any kind of substantial content.
I don’t think they mean to suggest there has been no cooperation for the past few hundred years, but to make a much lighter and less serious and temporally, geographically and socially constrained set of observations pertaining mainly to the mass culture and vernacular of the imperial core and a stratum of professionals. They’re remarking on the general culture of individualism, that people say “our relationship works because we want the same things”, that people talk about themselves seemingly voluntarily and indeed enthusiastically in management jargon, as human capital, stakeholders, skill sets, using idioms like “above my pay grade” cheerfully, incorporating as soon as viable, generally treating the assumptions required by capitalists as natural. Their point seems to be that postmodern bourgeois ideology of individualism is successful in the imperial core. Then they add, pertaining to the top story of the week, that they see the headline catastrophe as threatening this or likely to give rise to competition or that it ought to, since this culture is repugnant and it offers rewards to individuals it can’t deliver. Naturally they exaggerate, but in just the way that is routine for their genre.
Comment by chabert — October 2, 2009 @ 10:42 am