TIME AND SUBSUMPTION Andres Saenz De Sicilia (May 2013) There are a number of obvious problems with this as a reading of subsumption as it appears in Marx:
Firstly, the forms of subsumption may be logically successive, but this tells us very little about the actual chronology of their appearance. Given that real subsumption is present even in the most rudimentary rationalisations of the labour process – for example, in the implementation of basic co-operation within the factory – the historical gap separating formal from real subsumption is in many cases negligible; the wage relation is established and the labour process is immediately re-organised. The distinction between the forms is intended to do different work – that is, to differentiate between the formal, social command of capital and its material determination of the labour process. Secondly, the real subsumption of labour is, as a process, generally limited to specific production processes or branches of industry. Different branches and forms of production will, in the same historical moment be at different levels of capitalist development, and furthermore in uneven interaction with each other (indeed, Marx says that as the process of subsumption matures in one branch of industry it can act as a condition for the incipience of subsumption in another). It is not, therefore, viable to totalise all production processes as being at the same conceptual stage of development. In addition, even the same industries are subject to geographical asymmetries in production, such that the latest production techniques might be employed in some parts of the globe whilst much less developed technologies still dominate in other regions. [Ie., as in my reference to Belgium using virtual slave labor in the Congo to supply rubber to tire manufacturers in Brussels.] In such cases the deciding factor is accumulation: if there is a potential to increase profits then capitals will introduce technical innovations, but if, for example, low wages and poor environmental and safety regulations keep the cost of production ‘competitive’ then there is little incentive to do so (the extractive industries are a good example of this). Thirdly, if it is implausible to posit a homogenous stage of development across all labour processes then the claim that all of ‘life’, or ‘the social’ has been really subsumed is even more dubious. The developments brought about by real subsumption do of course have impacts beyond the labour process and radically reshape the reproductive sphere, but these changes are not uniform and are always mediated through the production process itself. This is because it is only in production that capital directly determines labour’s activity as its own – and this determination is precisely what is designated by Marx’s account of subsumption. Capital’s domination of the total social process can therefore only be understood as indirect and disperse (although this is not to discount the importance of direct extra-economic state violence, ‘primitive accumulation’ and modern forms of slavery in maintaining the conditions for this impersonal exercise of power). Underlying this last error is a failure to recognise the irreducible non-identity that holds between living labour and the labour-power commodity; this difference fundamentally structures capitalist social relations, so that whatever depth of social commodification is achieved, analytically at least, the two sides of labour always remain distinct. Workers are not slaves, and their labour power is only ever sold for specific period of time (or task) outside of which they are no longer subject to the command of the capitalist, and thus not subsumed. Jettisoning the distinctions between living labour and labour-power, production and reproduction, use value and exchange-value as Negri does leaves us with a theoretical object that can no longer be called capitalist. Indeed, as he himself acknowledges, under this version of real subsumption the goal of social production is not valorization but the extension of ‘pure command’. full: https://reificationofpersonsandpersonificationofthings.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/time-and-subsumption-andres.pdf _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
