What in the hell … :: … is(n’t) the capitalist subject? :: September :: 2009

A really interesting response from Nate to the excerpt on capitalist subjects I posted a day or so ago. It's a mindful corrective against accounts of capitalism that fail to acknowledge its dependence on and generation of some forms of cooperation. I read this in keeping with the idea that capitalism has also relied on forms of free labor as well.

The article’s authors hold that “capitalism” includes or is in part “a way of inciting subjects to behave according to the company model and the general norm of competition.” Capitalism “everywhere establish[es] competitive situations between subjects, by inciting them to become the winners of a universal competition, by imposing controls and surveillance and, above all, by pushing subjects to self-control by making performance the ruler of each person’s life,” and thus this system has the impact of constructing a new subject, a “neo-subject,” as some psychoanalysts call it.”

This is overstated and one-sided. This ’subjectivity’ is rooted almost entirely in the market for commodities other than labor power, with only passing reference to labor markets (competition for jobs) and some workplaces (competition among workers after their labor power has been purchased - ie, on the job between workers). What this leaves out is that capitalism has always included cooperation as well, in at least two senses - the cooperation under the direct management of capitalists (or their agents) on the job, as described by Marx in the chapters on cooperation and the workplace, and the cooperation, referenced in passing and in only partial form by Marx required to continue to reproduce labor power - reproducing existing labor power on a daily/annual basis and producing new labor power on a generational basis.

This cooperation offers at least some basis for some organization against capitalism, such that we might hesitate to reduce it to ‘capitalist subjectivity.’ On the other hand, this cooperation is subordinated to the command of capitalists in/via various mediations. What’s more, capitalism is impossible without this cooperation. In any case, to understand “capitalist subjectivity” as simply market subjectivity, as the subjectivities involved in the sphere of circulation, is misleading on two counts. One, it presents the subjectivities required in and propagated by capitalism in only a partial fashion. Two, it doesn’t help us understand the importance of cooperation to capitalism. More specifically on this point, it doesn’t help us understand the important point that there is a mode of cooperation-as-capitalism. Without that perspective, it is hard to understand either the past or the present, and the implied political claims and demands in the piece risk being merely social democratic, calling only for a better capitalism (a sort demand which we have to make but if instantiated is likely only to really result in a better capitalism for some, at the expense of others).

via whatinthehell.blogsome.com

Comments

[Nate]

hi Jodi,
Thanks for the hat tip. I'd really like to hear your thoughts on the relationship between capitalism and free labor, that's an issue I'm very interested in.
cheers,
Nate

[Jan]

Hi Jodi and Nate,

I think the free labor comes in at two levels: at the level of creating the conditions for competition to play it's part. I am thinking of for example non-salary work like household work, raising children etc... (what feminists used to call reproductive work). This type of labor does not play a direct role in the extraction of surplus value but is nevertheless "functional" for capital because it creates and maintains the conditions for exploitation through labor to take place. At a second level is the notion of immaterial labor as developed by the Italian autonomists. Here non-salary work becomes directly productive for capital: when you make a video on youtube you labor (although it does not feel like that, since you are having "fun") your non-salaried labor becomes a source for value abstraction; when you are using google your search queries and clicking behavior generate data that can be capitalized by google etc... these are instances of free labor which play a more or less direct role in the process of value extraction by capital.

BTW I do agree with Nate's emphasis that cooperation is required in capitalism - I think that Marx uses the term intercourse for that the German Ideology. However, the jump you make from concluding that this creates a type of subjectivity that might later on be mobilized seems a bit too easy for me... You can perfectly cooperate with your colleagues and still be in a competitive position vis-a-vis each other (academia, anyone?)

[Michael K.]

After years of reading Zizek and having spent a year teaching an undergrad course in the rhetoric(s) of the market, I've become very skeptical about the usefulness of the term "capitalism" (not to mention "subject," but that's another story).

First, I think J.K. Gibson-Graham understates the case against using the term. Simply put, it "reifies" (as they used to say) a *description* of a political project as a historical agent in its own right. There are lots of people, many of them powerful, who espouse "capitalism," but there is no economic reality that corresponds to this name.

Second, it is both more accurate and more useful to distinguish collective decisions (explicit or surreptitious) to deploy competitive markets to produce and distribute material, social and political goods from similar decisions to use other means. Markets and competition have numerous limits, failures and untoward side-effects, but these are well-understood even by their advocates. This, in turn, means that we are not simply "subjects of" (capitalist) markets but stand in a complex reflexive relationship to them.

Third, all this has been integral to pro-market thought from at least Adam Smith on (indeed, probably since Hobbes). It was Smith, long before Marx, who insisted that a great deal of cooperation would be necessary to institute and maintain market competition, which he also regarded as a source of social bonds. Put another way, cooperation is not the repressed "unconscious" of competition; it has always been an explicit and central presupposition of it. Market competition has always been explicitly justified, both to elites and to the masses, as a structure of cooperation capable of "delivering the goods" more efficiently than political—that is, linguistically mediated—forms.

In sum, markets have always been advocated as solutions to intractable social antagonisms. It seems bizarre now to "unmask" the cooperation underpinning competition in markets. But it is also an error to identify the commonplace use of markets with the principle of social organization tout court. Even the "ultra-capitalist" United States uses all sorts of non-market mechanisms across all the spheres of social life. True, non-market production and consumption feeds into market forms (and vice versa), but this does not collapse the distinction between them. If it did, we could just as easily say that market forms are inhabited by non-market ones and in effect don't exist at all.