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

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?

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?

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.

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.