Why Marx? Because a dialogue with Marx is essential for anyone developing the concept of class struggle at the centre and/or in the subaltern conditions of the capitalist empire and proposing a communist perspective today. The lessons from, and the discussion with, Marx are decisive for three reasons.
The first is political. Marxist materialism makes it possible to demystify all progressivist and consensual notions of capitalist development and to affirm, on the contrary, its antagonistic character. Capital is an antagonist social relationship; subversive politics locates itself ‘within’ this relationship, and immerses into it in equal measure the proletarian, the militant and the philosopher. The Kampfplatz [place of struggle] is ‘within and against’ capital.
The second reason why we cannot abandon Marx has to do with critique. Marx locates critique within historical ontology, which is constructed by, and always traversed by, the class struggle. Critique is thus the ‘viewpoint’ of the oppressed class in movement and enables you to follow the logic of the capitalist cycle, to understand its crisis, and by the same token to describe the ‘technical composition’ of the oppressed class and, eventually, to organise its ‘political composition’ in a perspective of revolution. The autonomy of the ‘class point of view’ is central to the critique.
The third reason for staying with Marx is that his theoretical elaboration made it possible, in the course of the twentieth century, to follow the deepening of the crisis of mature capitalism in its dual form (liberal and socialist), and at the same time to organise the liberation movements against colonial power and imperialism.
Today Marx’s theory has to come to terms with a radically different world of work and markets, of division of labour and geography of power – in short, with a new configuration of the classes in struggle. We need to establish whether, in addressing the new figures of exploitation, Marx’s theory can help with grasping their points of crisis, and then with liberating an appropriate imagination of the ‘common’. After the defeat of Soviet socialism we need a new theory of ‘common value’.
Within the limits of this chapter it is not possible to develop a comprehensive discussion on each of these points. Rather I shall limit myself to providing – on each point – an example drawn from Marx’s Capital.
By examining Sections IV, V and VI of Book 1 of Capital (chs 10–20), where Marx defines relative surplus value and analyses the process of formation of the system of the ‘large-scale factory’, we can arrive at an understanding of the constitution of a political point of view in Marx, and at the same time at his definition of a class politics.
Now, since the transition from the extraction of absolute surplus value to that of relative surplus value radically changes the relations of magnitude between the two parts of the working day (necessary labour time and surplus labour time), this transition has to be followed by a revolutionising of the conditions of production, both in the forms of value creation and in the forms of the labour process. There is a shortening of the labour time socially necessary for the production of a commodity, so that a smaller amount of work has the potential to produce a greater quantity of use value. At this point we have a radical modification of capitalism: the assumption of a machinic aspect that, as relative surplus value develops, comes to invest and transform the whole of society. These are the terms in which Marx studies the transition from manufacturing to the large-scale factory and the ensuing subsumption of labour cooperation to the exclusive command of capital. This transition creates the conditions for a huge increase in surplus value and for the subjection of a multitude of workers to the discipline of capital, as well as a progressive extension of the employers’ despotism from the factory to the whole of society. Thus the implementation of the processes of extraction of relative surplus value is not just about the division of the worker’s working day between the necessary labour part and the surplus labour part: it also revolutionises from top to bottom both the technical processes of labour and the social groupings. While on the one hand the body of workers active in the factory becomes a form of existence of capital itself, on the other hand the division of labour in the factory has to be reflected in a matching social division of labour – which means that, also outside the factory, social life is gradually subsumed to capital, first in a ‘formal’ manner, and then in ‘real’ terms. Nature itself is completely subjugated to the capitalist mode of production, agriculture to large-scale industry, and so forth.
But this genealogy of relative surplus value and this expansion of big industry, both of which appear invincible, actually have a very bizarre historical origin. The fact is that capital, in order to produce, has to incorporate human material and it has attempted to do this in history (which always repeats itself) since its origins, enormously expanding labour time and extending the appropriation of additional labour power – the labour of women and children, for example, in the first phase of industrial accumulation in Europe. In such circumstances the very survival of the working class as a ‘breed’ was put at risk, so ferocious was the degree of exploitation. Marx speaks of a holocaust of the proletariat. Resistance is born. The very transition from manufacturing to large-scale industry – as Marx explains – is brought about by working-class rebellion. This is in fact what happened. At that point the state had to intervene, using the force of law, to oblige the capitalists to shorten the length of the working day. We might also add: to force them to understand that the life of workers is not just brute raw material but is vital activity, historically consolidated and qualified – and, on this basis, resistant.
When the resistance of labour power appears, the whole picture (as described thus far in these sections of Capital) changes. We have not only the historical event of the passage from the extraction of absolute surplus value to relative surplus value, there is not only the birth of the big factory, of the factory system, and of the mode of production of large-scale industry; what also becomes apparent, with the spread of this new figure of capital, is its internal structure as an antagonistic social relationship. Once one looks at it not solely from the viewpoint of the power of the capitalist but also from the point of view of the workers, of their resistance, of their potentiality [potenza], it becomes apparent that the categories that define capital are twofold. We can put this more succinctly: rather than as an ‘objective organism’ or as an irresistible despot, capital here shows itself as one partner in a game that has two players – and because, as Marx tells us, what the workers partially lose is concentrated in capital, and against them, it is as an enemy of the workers. On the one side is the exploiter, on the other the exploited.
Let us return to the ‘dual nature’ of the categories, not presuming to offer a complete picture but giving a few basic examples. We have seen from the definition of surplus value that surplus labour exists in opposition to necessary labour. But these definitions, these abstractions need to be related back to the materiality of the capital relation in order to be able immediately to measure its antagonism: when labour power reaches that point of the working day where it considers that it has worked enough to get the wages necessary for its own reproduction, it refuses to work further and has to be forced to do so. If this is the case, it follows that in the process of production the relationship between the labour process and the process of value creation, between the organisation of work and the organisation of exploitation, is always conflictual. Consequently, simultaneously with becoming more productive, labour power also has to be socially weakened, exposed to the overabundance and competition of other labour power, and, through this, subjected to a greater oppression. However, at this point labour power has reached higher forms of consciousness in the face of capitalist repression and, through its higher levels of productivity, has brought about a greater capacity for resistance. So – in Marx’s narrative – labour is now in a position to impose reductions in the duration of the working day and increases in the overall wage bill. Relative surplus value is an outcome of the struggles.
Furthermore, the advent of a production based on the extraction of relative surplus value requires an intensification of cooperation by workers, since it is through the cooperation of labour power that labour productivity is increased. And if this cooperation always goes hand in hand with the capitalist division of labour, by virtue of this fact it poses itself as an element of contradiction in relation to capital. The antagonistic relationship that constitutes capital is, in this case, deepened in social terms. The capital relation, which always requires a combination of cooperation and subordination, is able neither to conceal the opposition nor to block its expression – so that the resistance to value creation in the labour process is further accentuated by the political consciousness that cooperation produces.
Furthermore, it is especially in the relationship with machines that labour power shows its potential power [potenza], because when the machine, in its relative independence, transmits value to the product, what it transmits still remains dead labour, while only the activity of the workers, of living labour, enables machines to be productive.
In short, capitalist despotism, both in the factory and in society, cannot rid itself of the use value of working-class labour, of labour power, and all the more so as the social productive power of labour progresses. The capitalist relation is therefore always subject to this contradiction, which can explode at any moment and which, on an everyday basis, banally but efficaciously, presents itself as the problem of wages. When the process of purchasing labour power on the capitalist market is enacted, it immediately becomes apparent that what happens there is an exchange of unequal magnitudes, an exchange that is conflictual. And whereas thus far we have stayed with a reading of chapters 10–20 of Book 1 of Capital, permit me now to recall how, in chapter 8 of Section III of the same book, Marx, by bringing the Factory Act into his theoretical analysis, makes it clear that, as regards the dimensions of the working day, in the factory there is always an antinomy, that of right set against right. He concludes: between equal rights, force decides. Put more strongly, in the precise terms of the critique of political economy, the situation is as follows:
in the division between surplus-value and wages, which division essentially determines the rate of profit […] there are functions of two independent variables, which limit one another, and it is their qualitative difference that is the source of the quantitative division of the produced value. (Marx, 1972, p. 364 = Capital, Book 3, Section V, ch. 22)
It was by viewing the wage as an ‘independent variable’ in the capitalist relation that I learned to do politics. And many others with me. This discovery of the antagonism, in other words of a contradiction that is not resolvable but could be acted on from the point of view of global labour power, and by the working class – this represented the essential dispositif from which political research, or rather ‘co-research’ [con-ricerca] together with the exploited, could develop; it could also extend in various ways – moving outwards from the organisation of the struggles in the factory to social struggles, from wage objectives to struggles over welfare, from the contestation of the restrictions of freedom imposed on the working-class struggles to revolution in the conditions of freedom of life… There were no objective laws to be met – rather it was a matter of developing that (material and political) independent variable that the production of the revolutionary struggle determined: constituent projects to be actualised, always within that liberation of and from work that, alone, constitutes society and history.
The quotation from Book 3 given above brings us to a discussion of the critical function that Marx’s teaching produces: there we found a clear statement of the antagonism between capital and labour power as ‘independent variables’ that limit each other on the basis of their ‘qualitative differences’. At this point we have a striking Marxian statement that is worth quoting: ‘the real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself’ (Marx, 1972, p. 250 = Capital, Book 3, Section III, ch. 15). If this statement is true, the entire critical dispositif of Marxism has to be read in its light.
By way of example we could look at the whole of Section III in Book 3 of Capital (chapters 13–15), which is devoted to a discussion of the ‘law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’. I don’t want to revisit the controversy that has dogged this formulation over the years; my point is rather to take from Marx’s formulation, with its demystification of capital (for capital is the real barrier to development), the practical critique of capitalist development (which is both constructed and put into crisis by working-class resistance; so this is a critique that moves ‘within and against’ capital), and thus the autonomy of the working-class viewpoint.
What does the law say? It states that the average social rate of profit tends to decline in relation to the growing concentration of capital, in other words as a result of the relative increase of the totality of capital by comparison with the increase of variable capital, of living labour. ‘Capital as the barrier’ to its own development is thus not a pathological or occasional fact. Furthermore, having stated the law, Marx does not draw catastrophist consequences from it. Indeed, from an initial point of view, the law describes a huge advance in capitalist organisation:
its most important consequence is that the law presupposes an ever-increasing concentration of capital and therefore a growing decapitalisation of the small capitalists. This is, in general, the result of all the laws of capitalist production. Stripped of the antagonistic character that capitalist production imprints on it, what does this fact, this progress of centralisation mean? It simply means that production loses its private character and becomes a social process – not formally, since production is social in every exchange because of the absolute dependence of the producers on each other and because of the necessity of representing their work as abstract social labour (money), but in real terms. Since the means of production are used as social means and thus not through ownership by individuals but through their relationship of production, so too labour is carried out on the social scale. (Marx, 1972, p. 226 = Capital, Book 3, Section III, ch. 13)
Moreover, the purely tendential character of the law is accompanied by a series of efficacious countertendencies.
What, then, from a critical point of view, is the relevance of putting together the law of development and the law of the falling rate of profit? It is this: by so doing, one identifies, within development, the antagonist functioning of the fundamental relationship. The essential form of development will therefore be one of a clash between the existence of the working class within capital and the contradictory capitalist necessity both to associate itself to this presence and to repress it. Putting the law of development together with the law of the falling rate of profit means bringing this antagonism to the fore. The process of concentration reveals its fundamental importance, showing how capitalist reorganisation around the extraction of relative surplus value is nothing but a means of governing antagonistic poles: working-class resistance and the capitalist need to contain and constrain it for the sake of its own growth. From this objective antagonism to the one expressed in class struggle the journey can be long. However, it is qualitatively homogeneous. Marx’s projection of the contradiction, in the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit, shows itself not as the final index of a necessary crisis but rather as a first approach to defining a contradiction that affects not only the objective moment but also the mainstay of development: the relationship between capital and labour. As for Marx’s immediate examples of the realisation of the law and of the effects of the deepening of the contradiction, namely his prediction that the reserve army of the unemployed will increase and the masses will become utterly impoverished – these examples have to be read against the experience of his time, in other words the experience of a working class that was still mainly confined in a movement of spontaneous resistance and was struggling to turn itself into a possible political power [potenza politica]. But, again, this prediction was neither deterministic nor catastrophist: ‘an abstract law of population exists only for plants and animals, and even then only in the absence of any historical intervention by man’ (Marx, 1977 [1863–7], p. 784).
So when the dimensions and quality of the class relationship come to be substantially altered by the events of the revolutionary struggles, the power of Marx’s framework explodes in all the richness of its critical foundation. The rate of profit can fall independently of the competition between capital and labour; however, as Marx concludes in his comments on Ricardo, this is the only competition that can make it fall. Because when, in response to the struggle of the working class, capital is forced to move to very high levels of concentration and – in them – to the limit of a general equalisation of organic composition, then the proportion between the rates of profit will be the same as that between the masses of surplus value. Every other term will be removed.
But the story does not end there. The centralisation of constant capital, of capitalist power and, on the other hand, the socialisation of variable capital, of living labour, have increasingly become a reality beyond the outer temporal limits of Marx’s thinking. The basic critical issue proved to be the understanding of the new figures of ‘organic composition’ of capital – that is, of the new relationship established between constant capital and variable capital, between dead labour and living labour, through their reciprocal transformation. In this situation of capitalist crisis and working-class resistance, what was the new antagonistic articulation of capitalist development? Developing the method of Marxian critique, it seems to me that the fundamental element that differentiates the current form of capitalist development from earlier forms is the fact that social cooperation in production (which in other times was produced directly by capital) has achieved a degree of autonomy. Let me try to explain.
In the history of the capitalist mode of production it has always been capital that has imposed the form of cooperation. The latter had to be functional in relation to the form of exploitation. Only on this basis did labour become productive. Even in the period of primitive accumulation, when capital incorporates the pre-existing forms of organisation of labour and subjects them to valorisation just as they are, it is capital that imposes the form of cooperation, and this cooperation implies the elimination of the relationships previously established. But today the situation has changed completely. Capital has become a financial power, engaged in the capture of surplus value that is ‘socially’ produced. Around this highly centralised process there develop antagonist moments of self-valorisation that are radically independent and that economic and political power attempt to hold together and to subject to capitalist despotism. The extremely high composition of capital is completely projected onto the social in order to control it. First automation and then computerisation have taken things beyond the processes of mechanisation and have imposed immaterial figures of control. Whereas on the one hand automation still partakes somewhat of the old political economy of value creation through machines, with digitalisation this threshold is crossed and the commodity becomes increasingly transparent. On the other hand, there begin to emerge sectors that are increasingly sensitive to the autonomy of social cooperation, to the self-valorisation of proletarian subjects, and to the growing presence of individual and collective microphysics. Therefore, in order to express itself, the productive activation of labour power will have no need of being put into connection with the means of production through being bought and sold by the capitalist. Or rather this is not the only case in which it will become productive. All this leads us to consider as a hypothesis (at an advanced degree of verification) that the antagonism between the social cooperation of the proletariat and the (economic and political) command of capital, while still taking place within processes of production, has now come to exist outside of them, in the real movement of the social. Social cooperation not only anticipates the economic and political movements of capital but also pre-exists them and asserts itself as autonomous.
Let me stress that, when I conclude in these terms our discussion of Marx’s pages on the law of the falling rate of profit, it is not my intention – despite the pessimism with which others have addressed this law – to read major consequences into it. Nor do I want, as validation of my argument, to rehearse the literary exercise (which I practised on other occasions) of citing from the Grundrisse references to ‘the social individual who appears as the great foundation stone of production and of wealth’ and to ‘this fixed capital that is man himself’ (Marx, Grundrisse: The Chapter on Capital, Notebook VII) – although it is depressing that all too often they are regarded as ‘delusional’ rather than highly utopian … Here my concern is merely to point out that (as the critique suggests to us) capitalist development has reached a level of extreme fragility, a disproportion of the components that constitute capital that will be difficult to restore to measure – and that, consequently, capital renews its search for a material foundation for a new period of exploitation. But
from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it, and, since every such barrier contradicts its character, its production moves through contradictions that are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited. And there is more. The universality towards which capital irresistibly strives encounters limitations in its own nature, which, at a certain stage of its development, will reveal it to be itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, and hence will drive towards its own suspension. (Marx, 1973, p. 410)
Why should we not use the Marxian critique as we seek a new point of support for the communist revolution?
The third reason for taking Marx as a reference point is that, through theory – which for us is also the development of the principles and examples that we draw from Capital – we can better build a bridge between the present and the future. Here again I offer an example, just as I did above – this time taken from Book 2 of Capital, where, through the analysis of the circulation of goods and of the socialisation of labour exploitation, we see hints of antagonistic upshoots in the construction of the ‘common’.
If we assume that social labour has been subsumed to capital not only ‘formally’ (that is, in the concatenation of structures that maintain themselves in their individual specificity) but also ‘really’ (that is, in cooperation with a multitude of singular structures, henceforth unable to reproduce themselves separately), in short, if we assume that society has been subsumed to capital ‘in real terms’ – which means completely, and in a manner that modifies not only its external shape but also the forms of production and reproduction of society itself – it follows that we cannot consider these transformations (as often happens) only in terms of the ‘fetishistic’ and ‘irrational’. (Admittedly, Marx himself sometimes takes the fetishistic point of view to extremes. For example:
Thus we get the fetish form of capital and the concept of fetish capital. In M–M´ we have the meaningless form of capital, the perversion and objectification on production relations in their highest degree […] As interest-bearing capital […], capital assumes its pure fetish form, M–M´ being the subject, the saleable thing […] It is the primary and general formula of capital reduced to a meaningless condensation. (Marx, 1972, p. 392 = Capital, Book 3, Section V, ch. 24)
But we would say that the character of ‘fetish’ is better constructed by Marx in Book 3 of Capital than in Book 1. We must therefore consider the subsumption of society to capital in real terms – that is, we must address the operation of the capital at the social level, and on that terrain we have to identify the forms of production of value, of extraction of surplus value, and thus the modes and articulations of labour power against capital.
This is why Marx returns to theories of the economic cycle – and in particular to the study of Quesnay’s Tableau économique – to highlight (as appears very obviously in the cyclical formulae) the social character of the process of capitalist production. In the formula of individual and collective social consumption, Marx notes that, when we find ourselves in real subsumption, ‘the transformation is not the result of a merely formal change of position pertaining to the circulation process, but of a real transformation experienced by the use form and value of the commodity constituents of the productive capital in the process of production’ (Marx, 1997, p. 100 = Capital, Volume 2, Section I, ch. 3).
Here Marx repeatedly makes this same point, stressing that the constitution of global social capital represents a real and actual ‘revolution of values’ and that the result of this movement has an effect on the constituent parts of the value of the social product – in terms of both exchange and use. ‘The movement of industrial capital is this abstraction in actu’ (Marx, 1981, p. 185 = Capital, Volume 2, Section I, ch. 4) – where by ‘abstraction’ is meant capital’s ability to recompose each revolution of value, every violent transformation, every attempt to become independent of a fraction of capital. This step is so essential in the analysis of capital (in other words in relating circulation and production to the matrix of value creation) that Marx says: once you get to this point, once you assume the complexity of capital, ‘that requires a different method of investigation’ (ibid.).
What is this other way of inquiry? It involves considering the categories of analysis no longer genetically, but as functions of antagonism, in the totality of society. It is only at this point that theory becomes a weapon in the class struggle. A similar approach had already been developed (as I mentioned above) in Book 1 of Capital. Now the method is deepened. It follows immediately from this that social capital should no longer be regarded as the result of a process of ‘competition’ that determines it. It is as if the laws that govern it were a consequence of the war that the small industrialists conduct against each other – no, really, the laws that guide global social capital are only those that are born from the antagonism, from the class struggle. The passage from formal subsumption to the real subsumption of society to the collective capitalist thus creates, as a first and fundamental consequence, a situation in which capitalist ‘despotism’ over the working class in the factory is extended to society as a whole, eliminating the ‘anarchy’ that initially seemed to be hegemonic in the play of the market. This anarchy produces faux frais [‘incidental operating costs’] of production, which – along with all the complementary phenomena and utilities (‘externalities’) in general – have to be turned into ‘positives’ or otherwise eliminated, in order to configure the fullness of the social potentiality [potenza] of capital.
It is on this new basis that Marx takes from Quesnay the schemata of reproduction – a numerical version of those in the Tableau Économique (Capital, Book 2, Section III, chs 20–1). These schemata serve to balance (in the capitalist system) a first sector that produces ‘means of production’ with a second sector that produces ‘consumer goods’. In order for the system to function smoothly, it is clear not only that total demand must equal total supply, but also that the demand for products for an entire section must equal the overall production of the same section. This is the case of ‘simple reproduction’, that is, of a state of affairs in which everything remains unchanging from year to year: if the constant capital consumed in both sections is equal to the production of the first section, and if the total income of workers and capitalists of the two sections (which must be entirely consumed for the conditions to remain unchanged) is equal to the production of the second section.
But when, in ‘expanded reproduction’ – where capitalists do not consume all their income but reinvest a part of it – all the proportions change, it seems harder to find that equilibrium. Indeed it is very difficult to secure, even if the capitalists continually try to restore it with new investment and new consumptions. In the history of the interpretations of Marxism, this step (expanded reproduction) has become a significant problem – because, from Rosa Luxemburg onwards, this Marxian formulation was not accepted as obvious. Indeed it seemed contradictory with the antagonism that, in Marx, was the heart of the categories of critique. So there were several attempts at historicising and giving new shape to these disproportions and imbalances. Luxemburg, in particular, showed how equilibrium would have been unachievable if, in the face of the consolidation of movements and struggles of social labour power, capital had not acquired for itself (in colonial exploitation) new sources of exploitation in order to rebalance the cycle.
Similarly, we note that, in expanded reproduction, there is a confrontation in new forms between two phenomena that we have already considered when we studied the law of the falling rate of profit – that is, on the one hand the growth in the size of the value of constant capital, and thus the massification of the organic composition of capital; and, on the other, the relative autonomy of the variable part from the constant part of capital, brought about by the increase in the productive capacity [potenza] of labour power. A fundamental consequence derives from this: expanded reproduction, the more capital massifies its composition, is increasingly afflicted by crisis. But this crisis takes place within a new figure of capital: now socialised, it has integrated production and circulation and has created a global dimension for its development. However, it has not succeeded in rebalancing the relations between the reproduction section of the means of production and the consumer goods section, between development and the overall wage; rather it has seen them going in opposite directions, where constant capital and variable capital are no longer able to find a stable state of coexistence. Here we see the final effect of the crisis of the classical theory of labour value: this does not mean that value is something that has its foundation outside of the exploitation of labour power, but that the dimensions, measurements and qualities of this labour power have radically changed and that, along with the form, in Marxist terms, the material also changes.
Why, at the start of this section, did we refer to the opening of a new theoretical space? Because in this crisis and in the deepening of the antagonisms, within the new concatenations of labour and against the capitalist exploitation of social cooperation, it might perhaps be possible to build a new theory of labour value as a common potentiality [potenza]. We know that nowadays we have a formidable increase in the use value of labour power, but on the other hand we also have the extreme violence of social capital, which tends to close it within exchange value, within the societal reorganisation of command for exploitation, in order to eliminate the resistance and autonomy of labour. But there is something of the ‘common’ that, within the social capitalisation of value creation, reacts strongly against being caged and attempts to express itself.
Great changes have come about in more recent capitalist developments. The first point to emphasise is that finance has now become a central element in the process of production. The traditional distinction between the management of money on the one hand and a ‘real’ production level on the other hand is no longer tenable, not only politically, but above all in practical terms, from a point of view internal to the processes of economics in general. Today capitalism maintains itself on rent. Big industry, rather than reinvesting profit, focuses on rent. And the circuit, the lifeblood of capital, is now called rent, and this rent plays a key role in the circulation of capital and in the maintenance of the capitalist system: I mean in the maintenance of social hierarchy and capital’s unity of command.
Money also becomes the only measure of social production. So now we have an ontological definition of money as form, lifeblood, internal circulation, in which is consolidated the value constructed socially in the whole economic system. And here is where you have the total subordination of society to capital. Labour power, and thus the activity of society, is subsumed to this money that is measure and at the same time control and command. The political class itself is completely inside the process, and the forms of politics dance on this rope.
If this is the situation, it becomes logical and essential that the rupture – every rupture – should take place within this framework. We must – and I say this provocatively, but not too much so – imagine what it means today to make a soviet, in other words to take the struggle, the strength, the multitude, the common into this new reality and into the new totalitarian organisations of money and finance. The multitude is not simply exploited: it is socially exploited, exactly as workers once were in the factory. Mutatis mutandis, what is proposed here, at the social level (and in money), is the validity of the struggle on wages. Capital is always a relationship (between those who command and those who work), and it is within this relationship that the subsumption of labour power to money is established. But, precisely if the capital relation holds firm, the break is determined right there.
These starting positions can be used in interpreting today’s crisis. The crisis is given as the need to maintain order by multiplying money (the subprime mortgages, and the whole scary mechanism that arose from them, served to pacify the workers, in order to pay for social reproduction from the point of view of a capital and a banking system that dominated this world). So we have to get our hands on this thing in order to destroy its capacity for command. There can be no equivocation on this point. Against any conception that tries to explain the crisis by referring to the split between finance and real production, let us hold on to the view that financialisation is not an unproductive and parasitic deviation of increasing amounts of surplus value and collective savings. It is not a deviation, in fact it is the form of accumulation of capital within the new processes of social and cognitive production of value. Financial crisis today should therefore be interpreted as a blockage of capital accumulation (by the proletariat) and as an implosive outcome consequent upon the failed accumulation of capital.
How does one extricate oneself from a crisis of this kind? Only through a social revolution. Today, in fact, a feasible New Deal can only consist of the creation of new rights of social ownership of common goods: a right that clearly opposes the right of private property. In other words, if up until now access to a ‘common good’ has taken the form of ‘private debt’, from now on it is legitimate to claim the same right in the form of ‘social rent’. Ensuring the recognition of these common rights is the only right way out of the crisis. One last joke on this subject: there will be some (Rancière, Žižek, and Badiou have already said as much) who see these ‘reforms’ as completely useless, indeed as damaging for workers – well, why not try them? Why don’t we suggest them to Wall Street?
Yet there is no worse illusion than that reappropriating the ‘common’ and putting it under democratic management is all it takes to build communism. In fact, in capitalist social accumulation there is a form to which there necessarily corresponds a homologous substance. So that capitalist common, that ‘communism of capital’, has to be destroyed. This destruction is the narrow gateway of any communist constituent process. A new theory of labour value should at any rate be rebuilt as of now, by excavating into the capitalist ‘common’ in order to critique its development and overturn its tendency – in the same way in which the Marxian labour theory of value served to show labour power as a potentiality [potenza] and to set the destruction of exploitation and profit as an objective of struggle, beyond surplus labour.
These four notes (and these three examples) are simply to say why Marx should still be a companion for those who have committed themselves to finding ways to organise resistance against capitalist exploitation, to build an ever growing autonomy of workers (in the cognitive cooperation of post-Fordist labour), and to enjoy, within and against capitalist socialisation, forms of common life. ‘Why Marx?’ What this question raises is the need for militant dialogue. These notes indicate avenues to be explored in the coming years.