Marx and subjectivity

I found this review while browsing Nate’s always-interesting blog What in the hell… and asked him if we could repost here. (It’s been slightly revised for the khukuri posting.) The book, and review, deal with the question of understanding the relations of production within capitalism, and particularly the role of subjectivity (and its production) therein — a crucial question in thinking about and attempting to construct a revolutionary strategy for the present era.

The political issue is not what is new or old, but rather to always search for new weapons.

Micro-Politics of Capital: A Review

by Nate Hawthorne

Jason Read, The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (State University of New York Press, 2003)

Jason Read’s book admirably covers a wide range of thinkers in The Micro-Politics of Capital. He engages structural Marxists like including Althusser; former Althusserians like Balibar and Ranciere; autonomist Marxists like Negri, Tronti, and Virno; and post-structuralists like Foucault and Deleuze. Given the range of thinkers Read deals with, it is no surprise that there are tensions running through the book, in a fashion similar to what Read calls “the tension between different logics in Marx’s writing.” [Read, 16]. This review first provides an overview of the book then turns to one of the book’s central tensions, with regard to time and historical epochs.

Marx once noted that production requires a prior distribution of productive relations [Grundrisse, 96].  Read identifies this distribution as simultaneously the production and product of subjectivity.

The actively productive and yet historically produced character of subjectivity problematizes the distinction between subject and object, as well as attempts to point to one or the other as sole source of causal determination. This means”[e]very effect is equally and at the same time a cause”, that is, “[e]lements of the capitalist mode of production that would appear to be its effects […] must equally be thought of as causes and elements of its functioning” [Read, 32]. Althusser called this immanent causality, part of the problematization of the concept ‘mode of production,’ which must be rethought as “a production of subjectivity and social relations rather than simply things” [Read, 110]. Mode of production is not simply an economistic ‘objective’ matter, because subjectivity has an objectivity and enters into economy.

In the first chapter Read focuses on subjectivity in relation to two moments of Marx’s writings, the section in Capital, volume 1, on primitive accumulation and the Grundrisse notebooks “Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations.” Subjectivity appears as a negative moment when Marx critiques capital’s apologists by uncovering capital’s’original sin’, the bloody expropriation of the commons deployed to produce the ‘free proletariat’ which became the laboring subject required by the capital relation. Read finds a positive moment in the Grundrisse selections, which emphasize the active role subjectivity plays – not only a product but also producer of social relations. Read thus underscores Althusser’s point that the reproduction of the social relations of production is the presupposition needed for production to continue.

Subjectivity, of course, does not exist in itself, but rather always exists as modalities of subjectivity. In chapter two, Read attempts to sketch aspects of the specific changes in the mode of subjectivity bound up with the transition to capitalism. Read defines capital as embodying an antagonistic logic. Struggles and conflicts between the subjects of the capital relation – and, on the part of the working class, struggles against subjectification in the role demanded by capital – are the constitutive process of the capitalist mode of production as it changes over time. Understanding the history and the present of the mode of production is a question of understanding changing and mutable relations of power, subordination, and refusal.

In the final chapter, Read turns to the most recent period of capitalism, discussed by authors such as Antonio Negri under the term Post-Fordism. It is in this chapter that tension around temporality, present throughout the book, fully manifests. Read uncritically accepts a historical periodization drawn from Negri, based on the distinction of formal and real subsumption. Formal subsumption is the imposition of capitalist command over prior forms of production, while real subsumption is direct intervention into the forms of the labor process by capital. In Negri’s writings, real subsumption is a historical epoch. For Negri, it is under the era of real subsumption that capitalism becomes biopolitical and subjectivity is set to labor. For Read, however, every mode of production and every moment in the history of capitalist production is bound up with the antagonistic production of subjectivity. As such, it is not clear on what grounds Read accepts the Negrian historical narrative of formal/real subsumption.

Taken to its logical conclusion, Read’s critical analysis of the concept of mode of production renders a number of received distinctions and categories – those between production and reproduction, society, politics and economy, subject and object, to name a few – highly fluid and unstable. A central task for thought is to trace the relations named by and the modalities of subjectivity bound up with which these distinctions and categories as they exist in history, as well as the struggles constitutive of them. If these distinctions and categories cease to be useful then new analytical tools must be sought. Read states as much, and provides philosophical resources for this process. It is a pity, then, that Read does not similarly subject the categories of formal and real subsumption to interrogation and render them fluid as he does to other categories. The tension between these perspectives is the temporal tension in Read’s book. This tension can be phrased in simple question: when is Jason Read’s book true? Different moments of Read’s work imply different answers to this question.

The Micro-Politics of Capital is peppered with phrases that operate in two distinct relations to time. The first is an eternal time, a meta-historical time. For example: “social relations are prior to, and determinate of, the technological relations.” [Read, 52] This phrase refers to social relations as such, and thus, if true then it is true any mode of production whatsoever and at the very least is true of the capitalist mode of production for the entirety of its history. This implies a critique of positions, like parts of Marxism, which see technology as politically neutral or as objectively determining history. Read’s arguments – producing a conceptual fluidity in our understandings of production, reproduction, society, economy, and so forth – operates at this same temporal register. This temporal register is the same that Marx discusses in this passage from the Grundrisse:  “[A]ll epochs of production have certain common traits, common characteristics. Production in general is an abstraction, but a rational abstraction in so far as it really brings out and fixes the common element and thus saves us repetition. Still, this general category, this common element sifted out by comparison, is itself segmented many times over and splits into different determinations. Some determinations of [production] belong to all epochs [of human history], others only to a few. [Some] determinations will be shared by the most modern epoch and the most ancient.”

There is a second temporal register in Read’s book, as when Read state that ours is “an age in which capital has extended beyond the walls of the factory to encompass all of social space.” [Read, 14] This statement occupies or produces a time of the present as transition, an event horizon between a determinate past and a rapidly approaching future. The time in this type of statement – which occurs throughout the writing of Negri, from whom these aspects of Read’s work are largely drawn – has a paradoxical effect.

Read states “it is no longer possible to separate capital, as the producer of goods and commodities, from what used to be called the superstructure,” an apparent claim about the present [Read, 2]. The heart of the matter, however, is the “it is no longer possible.” That phrase marks a strong disjunction between past and present, and implies a narrative about the past in which it used to be possible to separate capital from the superstructure. To say “it is no longer possible” to distinguish economic base and cultural superstructure means that it once was possible to correctly make such a distinction. And yet, a large portion of Read’s argument implies that the conceptual division of base-superstructure – or politics-economics, production-reproduction, etc – was never correct.

Furthermore, to say “capital has extended” beyond the factory means that capital’s command and resistance against capital occurs not only in designated workplaces but throughout the social field, such that the industrial working class is not the privileged political or historical agent which some Marxists have taken it to be. Here too Read implies a historical narrative. To say “has extended” implies that this is only now the case, such that privileging of the industrial working class was correct until recently. Much of Read’s argument implies that the exclusive focus on the industrial proletariat was both a theoretical and political error. That is, there is an implied critique here of the thought and strategies pursued put forward by many Marxists and working class movements for much of history (and still advocated by some today). The historical narrative of overcoming – “capital has extended”, “it is no longer possible” – serves on the one hand to discourage critical engagement with key political issues within the tradition and with history, and on the other obscures this lack of engagement.

Read restricts his philosophical work to the present, a present with qualities which he suggests have only recently come into being. As such, Read limits his own ideas’ critical force and utility for Marxian historiography. Worse yet, by defining the present in distinction to a falsified past – a definition of the past which is all the more strange in that it is undercut by a substantial part of the rest of his argument – Read risks producing the mere image of an understanding of the present. This image consists in speaking of general historical conditions of production as if they were specific only to the present. To paraphrase Deleuze, the political issue is not what is new or old, but rather to always search for new weapons. Read unfortunately blunts the theoretical weapons he offers by entangling them in mistaken periodizations. If readers set aside Read’s historical claims, his work offers powerful tools for reading Marx and understanding reading contemporary capitalism.

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