One of the most common critiques
that I hear of Marx within several specific academic frameworks is that Marx
somehow imagines a ‘homogenous proletariat.’ Marx’s simplified vision of the
world is almost inevitably contrasted with a more sophisticated vision of the
world that is either being proposed by the speaker or is taken up by a thinker
that the speaker wants to see either supplant Marx or transcend his limited
vision. To be clear, this interpretation is not invented whole cloth by this
audience. One can only turn to particular threads of Marxist iconography,
particularly within the tradition of socialist realism and particular trends of
‘anti-identitarian’ Marxism to find this homogeneity either in the singular
image of the heroic male worker who is intended to stand in for the proletariat
as a whole or the antagonism toward difference found within certain strands of
thought. However, this interpretation of Marx doesn’t particular hold up well
when you turn to the first volume of Capital. I’m going to turn to that work to
first try to understand how that interpretation arises from that work, and then
look at how that interpretation falls apart when we consider the work as a
whole. Rather than producing homogeneity, Marx argues the infinite chain of
equivalence at the heart of capitalist accumulation is dependent on an intense
process of discipline that not only constructs forms of difference but is
deeply committed individualization of the worker and the citizen.
The homogeneity reading probably can
be best understood by looking at the first chapter of Capital. Marx
begins his investigation into political economy by examining the “” the
commodity. This chapter attempts to answer the question, what is behind the endless
chain of equivalences that form market relations. Why can we think about
objects as different and discrete as linen, coffee, and gold in relation to
each other? To do so, Marx distinguishes between use and exchange value. The
use of an object is singular and cannot determine the forms of equivalence that
drive the commodity form. The fact that I can use the bible that Marx discusses
as a form of edification, an object for display to establish an identify for an
audience, or as a doorstop doesn’t really explain its cost. Use value is
central to that system. If an item doesn’t have a use, it won’t be purchased,
and therefore will by necessity fall out of the circulatory process of the
system. However, to understand why something is worth something, we have to
look at its exchange value, the point that Marx spends most of the chapter on. Marx
then diligently works through dozens of permutations of equations in order to
get to the notion that value at the heart of this system is what he calls
‘socially necessary labor.’ The value is dependent on average time it takes to
produce something within a given social setting. Marx emphasizes that this is
by no means a stable system and his work in Capital and The Poverty of
Philosophy goes into the ways that forms of competition, class struggle, and
technological development cause this to change. He then goes on to explore how
the exploitation of this labor is necessary for the production of surplus
value.
However, one can see where one could
get to a notion of homogeneity through a good faith reading of this section of
the book. In order for labor to act as an equivalent, there has to be some
sense of the sameness of that labor. But Marx has already provided some pretty important
caveats that should warn against this reading. He has already indicated he is
thinking of labor only within the context of simple average labor, which by its
nature, excludes more complex and skilled forms of labor. Even more
significantly, he argues,
If we then
disregard the use-value of commodities, only one property remains, that of
being products of being products of labour. But even the product of labor has
already been transformed in our hands. If we make abstraction from its
use-value, we abstract also from the material constituents and forms which make
it a use-value. It is no longer a table, a house, a piece of yarn or any other
useful thing. All its sensuous characteristics are extinguished. Nor is it any
longer the product of the joiner, the mason, or the spinner, or any other
particular kind of productive labour. With the disappearance of the useful character of the products of labour, the
useful character of the kinds of labour embodied in them also disappears; this
in turn entails the disappearance of the different concrete forms of labour.
They can no longer be distinguished, but are all together reduced to the same
kind of labour, human labour in the abstract.
Let us now look at the residue of
the products of labour. There is nothing left of them in each case but the same
phantom-like objectivity; they are merely congealed quantities of homogenous human
labour, i.e. of human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its
expenditure. All these things now tell us is that human labour-power has been
expended to produce them, human labour is accumulated in them. As crystals of
this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values—commodity
values” (Marx 128).
The homogeneity of labor power is only
possible through an intense process of abstraction. It operates in the averages
of multiple competing spaces of production, rather than within the material
practices of the laboring process. It disciplines and animates the process of
production and as we will see later has a deep impact how we conceive ourselves
in relationship to each other, but it gives no sense of how something is
produced. Moreover, there is a critical edge to the description of this
process, indicating a sense of violence that is implicit in this process and
its erasure of particularity, one that isn’t simply limited to a sense that
roughly equivalent workers are being roughly equivalently exploited. But the
full implications of that critique are only available later in the book. After
all, we’re still operating within the terrain of the market, the realm of
equivalences that is dependent on equals interacting and competing as sellers
and buyers.
To
understand the laboring process that creates the condition for that market to
work, we need to begin by turning to Ch 13, Co-operation. Marx opens the
chapter by emphasizing the importance of social production. Marx notes,
“Capitalist production only really begins, as we have previously seen, when
each individual capital simultaneously employs a comparatively large number of
workers, and when, as a result, the labour-process is carried on on an
extensive scale, and yields relatively large quantities of products.” (Marx
439) The increase in the level of workers tends to average out the differences
in production within this condition even without the intervention of machinery,
but the introduction of machinery intensifies this process, shifting the
relationship of workers to their work. Marx notes, “When numerous workers work together side by side
in accordance with a plan, whether in the same process, or in different but
connected processes, this form of labor is called cooperation” (Marx 443) That
cooperation create the conditions in which the labor of many creates a level of
productivity that could not be matched by the same amount of workers in
isolation. The process of cooperation itself intensifies production and the
level of exploitation.
Marx
intensifies his analysis when he turns to the next chapter, “The Division of
Labor and Manufacture”. He argues that the process of cooperation within the
factory setting specifically produces a kind of collective worker that is
produced through the cooperative process of the factory. He notes,
The collective
worker, formed out of the combination of a number of specialized workers, is
the item of machinery specifically characteristic of the manufacturing period.
The various operations performed in turn by the producer of a commodity, which
coalesce during the labour process, make demands of various kinds on him. In
one operation he must exert more strength, in another more skill, in another
more attention; and the same individual does not possess these skills in an
equal degree. After the various
operations have been separated, made independent and isolated, the workers are
divided, classified and grouped according to their predominant qualities. If
their natural endowments are the foundation on which the division of labour is
built up, manufacture, once introduced, develops in them new powers that are by
nature only fitted for limited special functions. The collective worker now
possesses all the qualities necessary for production in an equal degree of
excellence, and expends them in the most economical way by exclusively
employing all his organs, individualized in particular workers or groups of
workers, in performing their special functions. The one-sidedness and even the
deficiencies of the specialized worker become perfections when he is part of
the collective worker. The habit of doing only one thing converts him into an
organ which operates with the certainty of a force of nature, while his
connection with the whole mechanism compels him to work with the regularity of
a machine.
Since the various
functions performed by the collective worker can be simple or complex, high or
low, the individual labour-powers, his organs, require different degrees of
training, and must therefore possess very different values. Manufacture
therefore develops a hierarchy of labour-powers, to which there corresponds a
scale of wages. The individual workers are appropriated and annexed for life by
a limited function; while the various operations of the hierarchy of labour
powers are parceled out among the workers according to both their natural and
their acquired capacities. Every process of production, however, requires
certain manipulations, which every man is capable of doing. These actions too
are now separated from their constant interplay with those aspects of activity
which are richer in content, and ossified into the exclusive functions of
particular individuals. (Marx 469)
As
we can see in this extensive passage. The figure that constitutes the figure of
equivalence is a sort of collective assemblage of workers and machinery,
disciplined into a matrix of procedures by a plan or set of plans. The overall
effect of this process is a disciplinary homogeneity, produced by each
individual worker’s connection to ‘the whole mechanism’ in order to produce ‘an
equal degree of excellence.’ However, the process that produces this almost
cyborgic subjectivity does not transform the individual parts into equivalents.
Instead, the parts of the machine are defined by specialization and
individualization. This process may start with some sense of ‘natural
endowments’ but the disciplinary apparatus quickly steps into ‘develop in them
new powers that are by nature only fitted for special limited functions.’ Rather
than creating homogeneity, capitalist discipline within Marx’s analysis
produces an intense form of individualization that is enforced by Marx’s use of
the metaphor of the specialized organ of the body. This specialization also
involves hierarchy, a division between ‘simple or complex, high or low’ forms
of labor, corresponding to a ‘scale of wages.’ At this point, it’s hard to
recognize the image of Marx that we discussed at the beginning of the essay.
However, Marx’s examination of the
disciplinary process doesn’t stop at the point of production, the factory.
Instead, he shifts into a discussion of the monitoring of populations that are
selectively brought into and are taken out of the productive process depending
on the economic cycle, the ‘Industrial Reserve Army of the Unemployed.’ This
shift notably moves the classificatory and disciplinary system as noted
previously to the outside of the factory, and it shifts the narrative from the
relationship between employer and employee to a state logic. The increase of
the use of machines creates a surplus population that no longer is needed in
the factories. These populations are then brought into the factories and are
ejected from them in response to the boom and bust cycle that defines the
process of capitalist accumulation. Marx notes that these surplus populations
are not as Malthus has it, a product of natural processes, but a distinct historical
product of capitalist accumulation.
For our purpose though, the importance
of this category is its continuation of the process of distinction and
individuation that begins in the factory itself. We see the state introducing
an intense set of disciplinary apparatuses to classify and divide the
population for purposes of surveillance and policing. The proletariat then is
not only defined by an intense formation of individuation and differentiation
at the level of the factory, but outside as well. We find a class formation
that is deeply fragmented through the disciplinary process of capitalist
accumulation, differentiated by skill, access to work, legal status, and other
factors. It’s easy to see how this analysis can incorporate the modes of racialization
that both define the history of the workplace along with the forms policing
that contribute to the construction of a racialized population. It’s notable
that Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s analysis of the prison in Gold Gulag: Prisons,
Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California operates through the
categories of surplus populations and the industrial army of the unemployed
introduced by the first volume of Capital.
At a historical level, Marx doesn’t
minimize the importance of imperialism and slavery in constructing the
capitalist world system. As Marx notes in Chapter 31: The Genesis of Industrial
Capitalism,
“The discovery
gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in minds
of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings if the conquest
and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the
commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of
the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief
moments of primitive accumulation Hard on their heels follows the commercial
war of the European nations, which has the globe as its battlefield. It begins with
the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes gigantic dimensions in
England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the shape of the Opium
Wars against China, etc…. Force is the midwife of every society which is pregnant
with a new one. It is itself an economic power. (Marx 915-916
Far from ignoring the forces of
colonialism, Marx identifies the colonial process as both the starting point of
capitalist accumulation, and as an ongoing process as the reference to the
Opium Wars indicates. The European system of industrialization is dialectically
intertangled with the process of colonialism and each is dependent on the
other. We can see Marx distinctively identifying the operation of capitalism as
a world system, one that is dependent on extraordinary levels of violence and
force to keep in motion. We might also see this as another moment of
heterogeneity in Marx’s analysis. If the factory is marked by individualization
and disciplining of the workforce, and the construction of surplus populations
requires state discipline and surveillance, the factory itself requires
colonial violence to make its production viable. Marx earlier in the book makes
the same observation about the relationship between factory production, notably
textiles and the plantation, the two systems mutually reinforcing each other’s
growth.
Just as significantly, he sees the transformations
after the civil war as central to understanding the possible transformation of
the system. Marx introduces this in the Preface to the First Edition to the
book. “Let us not deceive ourselves about this. Just as in the eighteenth
century the American War of Independence sounded the tocsin for the European
middle class, so in the nineteenth century the American Civil War did the same
for the European working class.” (Marx 91) Far from playing an incidental role
in the transformation in the world system, Marx saw the civil war as a marker
for a dramatic shift in social conflict. He continues this analysis at the end
of the preface, “At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Mr.
Wade, Vice-President of the United States, has declared in public meetings
that, after the abolition of slavery, a radical transformation in the existing
relations of capital and landed property is on the agenda. These are signs of
the times, not to be hidden by purple
mantles or black Cossacks. They do not signify that tomorrow a miracle will
occur. They do show that, within the ruling classes themselves, the foreboding
is emerging that the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable
of change, and constantly engaged in a process of change.” (Marx 93) Slavery in
effect played a lynchpin role in holding together the system and its abolition created
possibilities for transformation, albeit far from certain ones.
None of this erases the flawed political
analysis and practice of Marxist groups throughout the long history of their operation,
and nor should it, but it points to a rich set of possibilities that are
contained within Marx’s analysis and create the space to continue to use and
build on Marx’s materialist analysis. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with
this at this point, but I wanted work through some of this material.
