Labor’s Relation to Capital: Notes on Christopher Arthur

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.