After much delay, I’ve read Christopher Arthur’s The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital. I have a lot of good things to say about the book, and I consider it, along with Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination, to be among the best supplementary readings to Marx’s Capital and Grundrisse. For pedagogical purposes, it might even have some advantages over Postone’s work. Appreciative gestures aside, I’ll briefly point out what I see as a fundamental flaw in the logical development of Arthur’s New Dialectic. It concerns his interpretation of abstract labor.
Arthur considers the question of why living labor and not, say, machine-power, contains the secret to valorization. “Why is ‘labouring’ different from ‘machining’?” (53). Arthur, correctly to my mind, challenges the “obvious” answer to the question, namely, that labor posits its own ends, by pointing out that labor’s ends are co-opted by capital, according to whose logic the ends (use values) become merely means to value as end in itself. In this respect, the extent to which labor-power differs from machine-power becomes unclear. In his attempt to answer this question, Arthur goes on to describe the peculiar nature of labor-power qua commodity: it’s not a commodity at all in the sense that wages are not tied, in the last instance, to its value. In other words, labor-power, unlike the commodity, does not instantiate value, i.e. socially necessary labor-time. Since the “value” of labor-power is not determined by it’s conditions of production, but instead by “class struggle in the context of the historically given level of ‘subsistence’” (53), Arthur concludes that labor is “a use value which is itself inherently at odds with its social determination as a moment of capital” (Ibid.). Here is where we must begin some important hair-splitting.
Arthur goes on to claim that “capital can constitute itself only in a contradictory way, through employing an agent that resists its use for alien purposes” (Ibid.). However true this may be for laborers themselves, it’s unclear that labor really confronts capital as its alien “other.” Slaves, for instance, resist their “use for alien purposes,” often in a more forceful and direct way than wage laborers do, when the latter resist at all. It is well known that societies based on slave labor are not capitalist, not value-producing societies, so coercion itself (described by Arthur as a “bending of the will” somehow different than the breaking of the will), however prevalent in the objective relations between labor and capital, cannot be at the heart of value production. This is a subtle point, because coercion does exist. Perhaps it’s better to simply state that the compulsion exerted by capital doesn’t consist exclusively in the labor–capital relation. Rather, it’s an objective, social compulsion that affects the laboring and capitalist classes alike. Even as he concurs with Marx’s claim that the subject of production is capital itself, Arthur balks, as do most Marxists, at the full implications of this claim.
As I’ve tried to show, in his effort to distinguish living labor from machine power, Arthur falls back onto the idea that he began to dispute: that labor’s essence lies in a teleological positing of will. Arthur must assert capital’s ability to usurp the agency of workers, but can’t bring himself to make the claim that this agency is rendered entirely null. The point that must be made, and held fast to, is that in the valorization process subjective intentions are irrelevant; “they do this without being aware of it” (Marx). In his zeal to endow labor with agency, Arthur is forced to assert a kind of “residual ‘subjectivity’” or “definite recalcitrance to being ‘exploited’.” The problem with asserting this vestigial subjectivity is that labor is always already subjectivity subsumed. Only by not working does the worker avoid her agency being co-opted by capital. In describing this recalcitrance that he must insist upon in order to continue asserting that the proletariat is capital’s gravedigger, Arthur claims that labor productivity is always contestable and therefore incalculable in advance. This seems to contradict Marx: the rate of exploitation is precisely calculable. Indeed, the capitalist depends upon his ability to calculate it. While it is true that workers can contest the rate of exploitation through stoppage, strikes, etc., in reality these instances of class struggle represent the emergence of “natural laws of the modern mode of production” (Marx). That is, there is a certain dynamic equilibrium between the rate of exploitation and the cost of the worker’s reconstitution as such, viz. as labor-power. More importantly, none of labor’s intransigence alters the basic reality of commodity-producing society: that people are compelled to sell their multifarious productive activities, rendered commensurable and quantifiable by an abstraction called labor-time, in order to obtain vital necessities. All historical attempts to overcome this reality via the “dictatorship of the proletariat” have failed. Objections to this categorical denial of workers’ ability to shake off the chains of capital will no doubt point to Marx’s own labor activism. But what may have still seemed (or even been) possible in the 19th century is arguably no longer possible today, given capital’s own historical development. To deny this development is to ignore the visible mutations of commodity-producing society and to also deny the possible for capital to generate its own internal historical dynamic.
This lapse into traditional, labor-centric Marxism, with its need to affirm proletarian subjectivity, is quite curious, given that Arthur himself gives a lucid exposition of capital qua Hegelian absolute, or Universal Subject. This seems related to Arthur’s vision of capital as a systemic dialectic. Arthur describes a systemic dialectic as purely logical, as opposed to a historical dialectic in which causality takes pride of place. In other words, Arthur views capital as a synchronic totality.
The system comprises a set of categories expressing the forms and relations embedded within the totality, its ‘moments’. Since all ‘moments’ of the whole exist synchronically all movement must pertain to their reciprocal support and development. While this motion implies that moments become effective successively, the movement winds back into itself to form a circuit of reproduction of these moments by each other. (64)
As a purely systemic dialectic, capital is self-contained and self-perpetuating. Insofar as contradictions appear, they are eventually resolved as opposing ‘moments’ of the total movement. Capital is understood here as a kind of perpetual-motion machine, whose stoppage would require outside intervention; to overthrow it requires an alien (not immanent) agent to overthrow it. Hence the insistence that labor is alien to capital, when in reality labor is posited by capital as its other, in which case labor’s otherness isn’t the same as the sort of alienness that would allow its messianic appearance as deus ex machina. Even to the extent that Marx himself viewed proletarian labor as the gravedigger of capital, he saw it as having been generated by capital itself, not as an outside force. Arthur wants labor to exist both inside and outside capital, as both a moment of the systemic totality and external other.
Arthur’s systemic dialectic presents us with the spiral form of value in motion, grounded in a historically indeterminate, ungrounded labor. The hypnotic movement of his purely systematic dialectic rotates in place on the axis of eternal labor, creating the impression that if only labor would refuse to be incorporated into value production that all would be well. But this is not a matter of refusal; labor cannot be decoupled from value. As Arthur himself states, capital (value in motion) is the subject of this dialectical movement. “In capitalist commodity production there is an inversion of subject and object in that the real subject of the process is capital” (47). Capital posits labor as its presupposition and negative ground. The “negation of the negation” cannot arise from any subjective negation on the part of workers as workers, since they have been posited as such by capital. Rather, the negation of the negation must entail the abolition of labor.
Labor relates to capital as a moment of the totality, not as its extrinsic other. The really outré idea (Postone’s) is that labor itself has historical specificity. This implies several things. First, as Postone explains, the overthrow of capital will not entail labor’s realization but rather its abolition. Second, if labor is specific to capital, then it cannot be transhistoricized as the “metabolic interaction between man and nature” (Marx) or understood as the primary motor of History. As Marx scholar N. Pepperell points out in a recent blog post, the historical emergence of capital has less to do with the intrinsic laws of the commodity form than with a monstrous convergence of factors immanent to European feudalism. This “Devil’s dialectic,” which is no dialectic at all in either the historical or systemic sense, set capital in motion. Likewise, one must look to factors immanent to capitalism (e.g. capital’s drive towards greater efficiency and productivity, which leads to the increasing obsolescence of it’s own labor-substance) to grasp both the possibility for transcending commodity-producing society and for glimpsing the outlines of what might follow.
Given the current economic crisis (which may be terminal) and the very real possibility of social breakdown, it is dangerous to continue to treat the problem of overcoming capital as if it were simply a matter of will. If building a better society is understood primarily as a voluntarist enterprise, it seems just as likely that society will slowly devolve into a Hobbesian realm inhabited by Nietzschean survivalists as that anything better will emerge. Anselm Jappe considers this very thing in an essay in Revue Lignes. Readers of French should take a look.
Interesting review, I’ll add this book to my list.
[...] review of Chris Arthur’s The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital: http://www.jonathandettman.com/2010/02/17/notes-on-christopher-arthur/ [...]
Great review! I totally agree with you, from Arthur’s elucidation of the dialectical method as useful for pedagogical purposes to your critique of his traditional Marxism from the standpoint of “labor.”
While the overall review is quite to the point, I think you are actually doing something Postone is wrongly accused of, which is conflating labor in its transhistorical sense with Labor as a category of capitalist society.
It is not a problem that labor should be “the metabolic interaction between Man and Nature”. Labor constitutes a central part of what Marx refers to as the Realm of Necessity, which cannot be abolished. However, in capitalist society labor is not merely this, but plays the role of the metabolic interaction between Man and Man, it is Labor (and should be treated no less categorially than Commodity, Value, etc.) Labor becomes the form of social mediation, becomes a social relation. The Realm of Necessity is hypostatized and the Realm of Freedom is collapsed into it, so that “arbeit macht frei”. The Realm of Freedom exists strictly in the mode of being denied, or rather as capital develops both intensively and extensively, this is more and more true.
This should be distinguished from earlier societies in which overt social relations of domination structured human societies. In those typically one might say that the Realm of Necessity was occupied by the variety of producers (some of whom produced a surplus, and others who produced merely a subsistence living) and the Realm of Freedom was almost completely distinct and occupied by the Masters (slave owners, lords, aristocrats, bureaucrats, warlords, etc.)
The abolition of Labor would not be the abolition of labor, but the subordination of the Realm of Necessity to the Realm of Freedom, the abolition of Labor as mediation, as social relation. Human relations would be defined not by labor-dominated time and space, but by freely disposed time and freely engaged space. Capital provided the material precondition for this insofar as the development of productive capability makes possible the supplanting of labor by machines as the central component of the Realm of Necessity and the restructuring of “necessary labor” to 1) that which is most engaging and expressive of the development of our human faculties (the kind of work associated with the natural sciences here comes to mind, both the theoretical and technical sides of that work), and 2) that remainder which is unavoidable, but can be broadly distributed so that it involves a tiny fragment of any individual’s time.
The contradiction is, in this sense, internal to capitalist society as it does revolve around Labor as the primary relation of domination, albeit one which is abstract (in the sense that capital, an abstraction, is that which dominates) and indirect (in the sense that the domination is that of capital, not of the capitalist class or any ruling class.) This contradiction is expressed 1) as Postone notes as the contradiction between material wealth and the social form of wealth, and 2) as the contradiction inherent in Labor between its decreasing necessity and its social form as domination, which I believe Postone underestimates because of how he treats class in the traditional sense of classes rather than as a class relation.
@Chris: I wonder to what extent the distinction between abstract (capitalist) labor–”big L” Labor in your formulation–and transhistorical labor–if indeed there is such a thing–is maintained even in Marx. In part it’s a linguistic puzzle–what to call the diverse forms of human interaction with the environment if not “labor”? I agree that the realm of freedom in capitalism is virtually nonexistent (whither the leisure class?), and, like you, I think recovering it involves wresting material production away from the blind dynamic of value creation. But it seems like a practical impossibility to abolish abstract labor without also abolishing necessary labor, which you see as a transhistorical category, because, rather than Freedom being collapsed into Necessity (your words), in capitalism concrete necessity is subsumed by, and subordinate to, abstract necessity. I don’t dispute your characterization of the opposite situation as subordination of Necessity to Freedom, but how do we arrive at that situation without the abolition of labor, abstract and concrete? Critical distinctions alone won’t stop capital’s self-reproduction. But I don’t think there’s that much distance between us; the point I’m making is that “the metabolic interaction between Man and Nature” must be abolished, or at least reduced to a minimum via the mediation of machine productivity. Otherwise, how do we interpret Marx’s dictum “The realm of freedom actually begins only where labor which is in fact determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases”?
One other note, it seems to me that the problem we face today is that capital really does seem to have taken on a truly automatic character. The difficulty is in imaging how one might pull the brakes on this monstrous train, never mind simply re-organizing it.
I suspect that conditions will have to come into being where the domination of humanity by labor is somehow experienced as domination, where the disjuncture between the social form of wealth and our material capacity to produce wealth (or what might be described as social relations of enforced scarcity conflict with an actual capacity for abundance) is experienced.
I tend to think that the only conditions that matter here are material, not ideological. If we wait until domination by labor is experienced as such, we will find we have reverted to the pre- (now post-) capitalist state of affairs you described in your first comment, in which domination is once again personal. By then it may be too late for the kind of outcome we desire.
Labor with a big “L” is not the same as abstract labor for me. Labor is just the unity of abstract and concrete labor and is similar to Value as unity of use-value and exchange-value.
On your note that “the point I’m making is that “the metabolic interaction between Man and Nature” must be abolished, or at least reduced to a minimum via the mediation of machine productivity”
I would suggest that there is a world of difference between the former and the latter, the difference between impossible and possible. I’m not harping on it to be picky, but because it entails a different conception. For me, it entails not only abolishing as much labor as possible, it also involves the radical transformation of the nature and kind of labor which remains, divided into what should become absolutely minimally time consuming and what should be enriched because it engages us. I consider engineering, medical practice, architecture, etc. to be labor, i.e. part of the realm of necessity (its primary end is the material reproduction of human beings and controlling the interaction between Man and Nature), but it is possible to engage in that kind of labor as a humanly enriching activity.
On the question of experience, I put it this way because to put it as a problem of ‘material conditions’ leaves the automatic subject of capital in control. As you express it (and it is a common enough response), what is really at issue is that if it is up to human beings and not an automatic mechanism, we’re screwed and so maybe material conditions will do what experience and reason seem unable to do.
In either case, we have to wait, and this I think is born out, as so far no kind of material conditions have resulted in the surpassing of capital, only in changes in its forms and administration.
Cheers,
Chris
p.s. are you going to the HM conference in NYC?
“On the question of experience, I put it this way because to put it as a problem of ‘material conditions’ leaves the automatic subject of capital in control.”
Not necessarily. We should distinguish between material wealth and the ability to produce it from capital as an “automaton subject,” even when the former appears as the result of the latter’s historical movement. My point is exactly the opposite of the one you attribute to me. My stance is that, even if an automatic mechanism is at work–and I think there is, following Wertkritik’s diagnosis of an “internal limit to capital”–we simply can’t wait until capital collapses of its own accord. We have to begin to develop a new political economy now, while the all-important material conditions for the alternative we’ve talked about are still socially general. Otherwise it’s unlikely capitalism will be replaced by anything better.
And, no, unfortunately the HM conference falls right between trips to another conference and a wedding, and I don’t have the means to make an additional, cross-country trip. Are you on the program?
Ah, I see your point now, thank you for clarifying. It does change my response slightly, however I am curious then how you think we might develop a new political economy in the absence of an experience of the inadequacy of capital?
Not that I disagree with your sentiment that, as I take it, the conditions are ripe or more precisely over-ripe, at increasing risk of putrefaction and finding ourselves past the point of no return.
I am presenting, on suburbanization and the increasing prevalence of what Gaspar Tamas calls post-fascism. This talk focuses on the changes in spatial forms of domination (pace Debord’s discussion in Society of the Spectacle and Engels’ prescient thoughts in On the Housing Question) and how they impoverish the experience of domination and even the objective conditions of that domination in ways that weaken the capacity for both critique and resistance.
I do believe that those structures are somewhat fragile, at least in the sense that they could only be maintained based on conditions which are eroding. The current housing and debt crises may indicate the limits of suburbanism.
Well, good luck with your travels and keep up the great work with the blog, really good stuff. If you find yourself out in Baltimore, feel free to drop me an e-mail and let me know.
Cheers,
Chris