When you read Marx’s unpublished Chapter VI having already studied Book 1 of Capital, you are struck by the theoretical power and the clarity of expression of some of the concepts that Marx was constructing more or less at the same time in Book 1, not in different terms but with another tonality. In what follows I would like to explore this theoretical power; I would additionally like to show that the relevance of the unpublished Chapter VI lies in the fact that some of those concepts become a source of significant later developments in Marxist political criticism and allow us to select a few theoretical dispositifs, or rather orient them towards a better understanding of capitalism today.* Indeed, Marx here often surpasses his own capacity for illustrating the perverse mechanisms of capitalist exploitation and, while he watches the tendency developing, he seems to locate himself (in theoretical terms) in the ‘to come’ [a-venire] of class struggle against capital.
The chapters in which this ‘critical foresight’ is built are basically the ones that deal with the definition of absolute and relative surplus value (along with considerations regarding the development of technologies and machinery) and that therefore elaborate on the categories of ‘formal’ and ‘real’ subsumption’; the ones in which Marx constructs the concepts of ‘productive labour’ and ‘unproductive labour’ and stresses the position and function of science within capital’s process of value creation; and, finally, the ones that touch on the concept and measurement of the productivity of capital and perhaps grasp, by digging into the social extension and density of capitalist exploitation, the image of a revolutionary subject that illuminates the contemporary horizon. My intention in what follows is not so much to deepen the analysis of these passages from the unpublished Chapter VI as to show how they help to extend the power of Marx’s critique down to our time, into the era of postindustrial capitalism.
Here I am not interested in going over the definition of absolute and relative surplus value. Marx discusses this topic at length (pp. 3–58I : 454–73G : 966–1025E), then goes on to introduce the concepts of formal and real submission (or subsumption) of labour to capital (pp. 58–68I : 473–8G : 1025–34E). The definitions of the various forms of surplus value match those developed in Book I of Capital. Nor is it so important here (for the purpose of my research) to reiterate the criteria that distinguish formal submission from real submission. However, ‘[t]he real subsumption of labour under capital is developed in all the forms evolved by relative, as opposed to absolute surplus-value’ (Marx, Unpublished Chapter VI, p. 69I : 478G : 1035E). Rather what we need to stress is that, for Marx, ‘[w]ith the real subsumption of labour under capital a complete (and constantly repeated) revolution takes place in the mode of production, in the productivity of the workers and in the relations between workers and capitalists’ (ibid.). A strong temporality thus underpins the process – the time of a continuous revolution in which the ‘organic composition’ of capital changes in line with the movement of its components, machines and workers, science and use values. This temporal intensification is accompanied by a global extension of the capitalist mode of production:
With the real subsumption of labour under capital, all the changes in the labour process already discussed now become reality. The social forces of production of labour are now developed, and with large-scale production comes the direct application of science and technology. On the one hand, capitalist production now establishes itself as a mode of production sui generis [of its own kind] and brings into being a new mode of material production. On the other hand, the latter itself forms the basis for the development of capitalist relations whose adequate form, therefore, presupposes a definite stage in the evolution of the productive forces of labour. (Marx, Unpublished Chapter VI, p. 69I : 478G : 1035E)
Under these conditions, subjected to this dynamic, capital strips itself of any ‘individuality’; it becomes social capital. But even more important is the fact that the ‘productive forces’ immediately become ‘social’. Mechanisation and technology (‘determined’, ‘situated’, which renews itself precisely in real subsumption), far from being only ‘neutral’ products of ‘science’, are on the contrary ‘forces of production’ that, by invading reality, incorporate into their ambit not only workers but also populations. Mechanisation takes possession of life. Let us look at what machines are. Outside of realised capitalism, Hegel teaches us, the instrument of labour is a means, a medium to act on nature. Between man and nature is placed the tool, the machine. But under capitalism a shift is created in the relationship: the labour of the worker becomes a mediation between the machine (the tool) and nature. The pervasiveness of technology in the world of work becomes total. The instrument is no longer a use value for the worker; the worker becomes use value for capital, for ‘its’ (capital’s) machine (fixed capital).
Once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages. (Marx 1973, p. 692)
And again:
In the machine, and even more in machinery as an automatic system, the use value, i.e. the material quality of the means of labour, is transformed into an existence adequate to fixed capital and to capital as such; and the form in which it was adopted into the production process of capital, the direct means of labour. (Ibid., p. 692)
But, if this is the case, when this development is completed, two social totalities come to overlap: the (constant) capital, which has covered the whole of social reality, and the (variable) capital, which is the source of valorisation of this social reality. These pages are thus a powerful introduction to a ‘biopolitical’ description of the real subsumption of labour to capital. To explain the premise: there is no longer use value, there is no longer even nature – all social relations (obviously those of production, but also those of reproduction and circulation) are transposed onto the terrain of exploitation – in short, life is subsumed to capital.
In giving the above narrative of capitalist development from formal subsumption to real subsumption, in addition to some of my older writings – for example my texts collected in I Libri del rogo (Negri, 2005 [2006]) and in Marx oltre Marx (Negri, 1991 [1979]) – I have borne in mind Claudio Napoleoni’s (1972) fundamental commentary on the unpublished Chapter VI; and I have done so because, up to this point, Napoleoni’s comments on Marx’s pages are in my view entirely correct. From what has been developed thus far, Napoleoni draws a first and definitive conclusion, which is that in Marx the subjugation of social labour to capital includes also the machinery, the instrument of labour, both as a machine and as the bodies of workers; from this he deduces, logically, that a machine not used in a capitalist way should be different from one that is used in a capitalist way and obviously that the bodies of the workers, which compose themselves in a certain way in a certain form of capitalist development, should compose themselves in a different way in a situation that is beyond capitalism; and this conclusion seems correct too. However, this conclusion will be true only as long as one reads Marx’s deductions regarding real subsumption in a linear way. When they are taken ‘dialectically’ (in other words, subjected to the historical determinations of the class struggle), it will no longer be possible to consider the ‘reification’ of value in machinery or the ‘alienation’ of the worker as closed worlds (this reversal constitutes the essential breakthrough of the ‘workerist’ reading of Capital). Capital is, rather, always a relationship of power, and machinery itself (subsumed to social capital) is itself a relationship. This relationship cannot be defined deterministically. It is struggle and conflict, it is a historical assemblage – and hence open-ended – of victories and defeats: this is where politics lives; and the changes, the effects of the struggle, the (workers’ bodies’) being ‘within or beyond’ the structures of exploitation, and the measures of this ‘within or beyond’ are variables, dynamics, ontologically defined with the passing of time. Machines run wherever there is struggle, as Marx himself said, and so do values, too: machines return to being a working class ‘use value’ in the struggle – a use value that the subsumption of labour under capital (the socialisation of labour, the scientific characteristics of its organisation) extends to the social struggle against capital. Here is defined conclusively the antagonistic relationship that constitutes the reality of capital – by removing all determinism, and also all idealistic or apocalyptic deviations, from the capitalist process that leads to real subsumption and to the ‘reification’ of social relations. The subsumption of society to capital tendentially represents, rather, a biopolitical terrain for emancipatory struggles.
NB. When I say tendentially I am not assuming a deterministic horizon; I move in the conflictual context of class struggles. On this terrain, after having registered the ‘tendency’ ex post, we have to verify the opening up of dispositifs ex ante. Therefore here biopolitical fabric (and/or potential [potenza]) and machines of biopower mean ontological openings of biopolitical dispositifs, desires, programmes, institutional machines – or else ontological accumulation of tendencies and structures of power over life. This is the field of class struggle in our present era – in other words in conditions of real subsumption of society to capital, which is now complete. Michel Foucault (in his late writings) and Judith Revel have worked especially on these issues.
This brings us to another important point that Marx writes about in the unpublished Chapter VI: the definition of productive and unproductive labour (pp. 73–92I : 480–90G : 1038–49E). Here again we shall read these pages in order to advance our understanding of our present time. Now, on the question of what is ‘productive labour’, Marx replies as follows: it is the labour that produces surplus value – in other words it is activity that valorises capital.
Since the immediate purpose and the authentic product of capitalist production is surplus-value, labour is only productive and an exponent of labour-power is only a productive worker if it or he creates surplus-value directly, i.e. the only productive labour is that which is directly consumed in the course of production for the valorisation of capital. (Marx, Unpublished Chapter VI, p. 73I : 480G : 1038E)
This view is heavily and polemically reiterated in those same pages:
It is only bourgeois obtuseness that encourages the view that capitalist production is production in its absolute form, the unique form of production as prescribed by nature. And only the bourgeoisie can confuse the questions: what is productive labour? and what is a productive worker from the standpoint of capitalism? with the question: what is productive labour as such? And they alone could rest content with the tautological answer that all labour is productive if it produces, if it results in a product or some other use-value or in anything at all. […] The only productive worker is one whose labour = the productive consumption of labour-power – of the bearer of that labour – on the part of capital or the capitalist. (Marx, Unpublished Chapter VI, p. 74I : 480G : 1039E)
These definitions seem to be in contradiction with my premise (developed in section 1 above) that productive labour and social labour are coextensive, both being subsumed to capital: this, in my view, is the essence of the tendentially biopolitical dimension of exploitation. I say ‘seem to be’ because I do not think that I am in contradiction with Marx on this terrain. Indeed it is obvious that I stand by the viewpoint of the critique of value: in principle, I do not consider any labour that produces ‘utility’ to be ‘productive’ – as do for instance Say, Bastiat and other economists, who understand ‘utility’ as any kind of service provided; in that case, paradoxically, every social activity should be considered as productive. But that is not true! However, around this question we must also immediately signal a shift in the verification of the theory of labour value. When the capitalist wants value, he wants it in the form of surplus value – to the point that, as we shall see later, there is indeed no theory of value that is not (as deduced from the definition) a theory of surplus value (in other words, deduced from resistance, or rather from the working-class struggle against surplus value). We can refer to Marx, to his draft Theories of Surplus Value, for clarification on this issue. But, to pick up the thread of my argument, how do we react to the fact that, with the real subsumption of work and society under capital, the labour process becomes, in its entirety, a process of valorisation? When Marx says that ‘capital is productive’ because it has invaded society and subjected it to the processes of production of surplus value, can the term ‘productive labour’ any longer have meaning, except insofar as all social activity is productive (which contradicts the previous reading of the concept of productive labour)? There is evidently a problem here.
Let us remove a misunderstanding straightaway. Occasionally in his writings Marx wonders whether labours such as those of priests, civil servants, soldiers, judges, lawyers and so on are ‘productive’. He concludes that, rather than productive, they are ‘in essence destructive’, because these people – who
know how to appropriate to themselves a very great part of the ‘material’ wealth partly through the sale of their ‘immaterial’ commodities and partly by forcibly imposing the latter on other people – found it not at all pleasant to be relegated economically to the same class as clowns and menial servants and to appear merely as people partaking in the consumption, parasites on the actual producers (or rather agents of production). This was a peculiar profanation precisely of those functions which had hitherto been surrounded with a halo and had enjoyed superstitious veneration. Political economy in its classical period, like the bourgeoisie itself in its parvenu period, adopted a severely critical attitude to the machinery of the State, etc. At a later stage it realised and – as was shown too in practice – learnt from experience that the necessity for the inherited social combination of all these classes, which in part were totally unproductive, arose from its own organisation. (Marx, 1975, p. 30)
There is no need to point out the historical acumen of these observations, which, while confirming the criteria of the ‘long term’, ridicule the ‘eternal laws of tradition’ vaunted by Tocqueville, the ‘sycophant’ of bourgeois power! The fact remains that today some of those infamous functions are turning out to be productive – albeit ‘immaterial’ and ‘cognitive’ – and are no longer exchanged for annuity, but for waged income. We continue to detest these ‘ideological state apparatuses’ and to consider them ‘parasitic’ – however, this is not the main point. Here what is new is the fact that real subsumption has gone far deeper than Marx himself could have imagined and that therefore we, too, must move forward in our analysis – maintaining our distaste for those bureaucrats and servants of ideologies and of the state who, even when they are rendered productive, nevertheless remain the dregs of society.
Let us readdress the problem: Marx does not leave us unarmed. We note how, after having restricted the concept of ‘productive labour’ so much, he then goes on to expand it. Since
with the development of the real subsumption of labour under capital or the specifically capitalist mode of production, the real lever of the overall labour process is increasingly not the individual worker. Instead, labour-power socially combined and the various competing labour-powers which together form the entire production machine participate in very different ways in the immediate process of making commodities, or, more accurately in this context, creating the product. Some work better with their hands, others with their heads, one as a manager, engineer, technologist, etc., the other as overseer, the third as manual labourer or even drudge. And an ever increasing number of types of labour are included in the immediate concept of productive labour, and those who perform it are classed as productive workers, workers directly exploited by capital and subordinated to its process of production and expansion. If we consider the aggregate worker, i.e. if we take all the members comprising the workshop together, then we see that their combined activity results materially in an aggregate product which is at the same time a quantity of goods. And here it is quite immaterial whether the job of a particular worker, who is merely a limb of this aggregate worker, is at a greater or smaller distance from the actual manual labour. But then: the activity of this aggregate labour-power is its immediate productive consumption by capital, i.e. it is the self-valorization process of capital, and hence, as we shall demonstrate, the immediate production of surplus-value, the immediate conversion of this latter into capital. (Marx, Unpublished Chapter VI, p. 74I : 480G : 1039–40E)
Furthermore, with the development of the capitalist mode of production,
the objective conditions of labour take on a different form owing to the scale on which, and the economy with which, they are employed (quite apart from the form of the machinery itself). As they develop they become increasingly concentrated; they represent social wealth and, to put the matter in a nutshell, their scope and their effect is that of the conditions of production of labour socially combined. (Ibid, p. 88I : 489G : 1052E)
Finally:
Science, which is in fact the general intellectual product of the social process, also appears to be the direct offshoot of capital (since its application to the material process of production takes place in isolation from the knowledge and abilities of the individual worker). And since society is marked by the exploitation of labour by capital, its development appears to be the productive force of capital as opposed to labour. It therefore appears to be the development of capital, and all the more so since, for the great majority, it is a process with which the drawing-off of labour-power keeps pace. (Ibid, p. 89I : 489G : 1053E)
And we could continue to flood our text with quotations from Marx.
But we are interested in a particular problem: What does it mean that the social labour process has, in real subsumption, transformed itself into the social process of valorisation, and vice versa? What does it mean that the social forces of production have been absorbed by capital and have become a ‘force of production’ of capital? It means two things. The first is this. When we consider the productive nature of labour, we are moving increasingly in the same biopolitical dimension to which the analysis of the process of real subsumption had brought us. These ‘forces’ that work productively in the labour process, within the ‘socially combined’ reality of the production machine – or rather of ‘the collective factory’ – are not ‘individual’ but ‘social’ forces.
But, in addition to this point (which we already began to see in section 1 above), this collective factory, which is both the precondition and the result of the productivity of workers in their conglomerations, is (and this is my second point) traversed and reorganised by science; and science too is incorporated in capital, but this indicates an ever more ‘abstract’ development of the potentialities of labour. About ten years before, in the Grundrisse, which was written between 1857 and 1858, Marx had even more acutely (and in almost idealistic terms) interpreted this scientific passage in the development of capital, placing general intellect as a final index of the process of real subsumption of society under capital and elucidating its potentiality as the revolutionary heir of the proletariat. (It was thus an Aufhebung [sublation] that was based on the assertion of the absorption of life into capital and therefore on the negation–inversion of that subordination – Aufhebung therefore as a solution to the crisis of the process of machinic socialisation and its transformation into a hegemony of cognitive capital – in this way the labour process and the valorisation process are conjugated together, in an innovative way.) To summarise our argument: in reading the unpublished Chapter VI, the second consideration that can help us advance a powerful Marxian ‘insightful analysis’ of the present is thus this grafting of science and cognitive labour onto the roof of the capitalist edifice built through the real subsumption of society. Today we would say: moving from the ‘setting to work’ of the whole of society through the exploitation of labour cooperation and of cognitive valorization to the creation of a new revolutionary subject.
NB. When we speak of ‘productive labour’ in real subsumption, we speak, in accordance with the development envisioned by Marx, of labour done by bodies of factory workers and labourers (manual workers) and workers of the mind cooperating socially, and we have to stress the transformation (‘monstrous’ and happy) that these bodies carry onto the new biopolitical terrain of class struggle. Naturally what is in play here is an antagonism between biopower and biopolitics; so out with all continuistic, determinist, eurodemoniac illusions! These bodies are ‘monstrous’ – but in fact what is ‘monstrous’ is the desire for the common in freedom and equality. (On this issue of ‘monstrous’ bodies, see the writings of Félix Guattari, Christian Marazzi and Matteo Pasquinelli.)
But if this is so, if the capitalist fabric – tendendentially biopolitical and cognitive in Marx’s thinking, and effectively so in actuality – if, in short, within the fabric of capitalism the labour process has become completely one with that of valorisation, where does that leave exploitation? Or rather, how do we now identify those who exploit and those who are exploited?
There is no doubt that in some ways Marx leaves this question unanswered in the unpublished Chapter VI. Objectified labour, through the historical process of real subsumption, extends so broadly and assumes such a strong autonomy that the insurgence of subjectivity, of living labour, becomes increasingly difficult to recognise. Dead labour becomes a social body, an increasingly huge organic container of (and capacity to contain) living labour. To read certain pages of the unpublished Chapter VI, it almost seems that, once the ‘social combination’ of the productive forces has been achieved, the capitalist world succeeds in blocking the historical development of the class struggle. But this condition is only ‘apparent’. (One should of course pay special attention to the specifically ‘dialectical’ value in Marx’s words. ‘Apparent’ does not mean shadowy, superficial or insubstantial; it qualifies the material concreteness, ontological albeit mystified, of global capitalist power in the exploitation of labour power, and at the same time its ability to hide the potentiality of this power and its effects.) This condition is therefore apparent. Why? Marx would probably not even think of asking the question – the whole dialectical premise of his method reduces the question to banality. Not for us. But why? Because the relationship of exploitation is intrinsic and intransitive – not external, not transitive vis-à-vis the labour relationship and the productivity of capital. To put it better: the alienation of the conditions of labour, in the real subsumption of the society of capital, continues and increases as capitalist development advances. In the Grundrisse Marx notes:
the fact that in the development of the productive powers of labour the objective conditions of labour, objectified labour, must grow relative to living labour […] this fact appears from the standpoint of capital not in such a way that one of the moments of social activity – objective labour – becomes the ever more powerful body of the other moment, of subjective living labour, but rather […] that the objective conditions of labour assume an ever more colossal independence, represented by its very extent. (Marx, 1973, p. 831)
So this colossal alienation produces a historical process through which (alienated, objectified) labour, increasingly ‘socialised’, finds its autonomy (now socialised precisely with regard to its primitive individualisation) in relation to capital. We are faced with an ‘inversion’ of the concept of the ‘social productive force’ of capital that manifests itself historically in the socialisation of living labour: a subjective ‘inversion’ that suppresses alienation, the reification of living labour (here is not the place to distinguish these concepts, merely to evoke them jointly in their descriptive and evocative capacities) in dead labour. And it attributes to living labour a potentiality of socialisation, now torn from dead labour. Through this inversion the activity of individuals is endowed with a character that is immediately social and productive.
Is this Marxian reversal of the effects of social subsumption convincing in determining the recovery of the autonomy of living labour as socialised labour, in other words as the figure of a common potentiality of labour that has been exploited and oppressed up until this point? To me it does not seem so; to me it seems rather that the fact of not considering Hegel a ‘dead dog’ plays a bad joke on Marx: it superimposes an intuition onto a reasoning, or rather it imposes a bad reasoning, founded on the (outraged) claim of the dignity of labour, onto a good reasoning, at other times expressed (and with what force!): the foundational recognition of the antagonist potentiality that arises (immediately) from the experience of the social exploitation of labour against the cruel abstraction of surplus value. Here again, it seems (when we bear in mind the inversion of the relationship ‘alienation–socialisation’) that one is dealing with the passage from the inside (real subsumption, alienation in production) to an outside (a whole socialisation of living labour and the fullness of its autonomy). But this is not the case: capitalism is fought both within and against; it does not permit an ‘outside’, and this is because the adversary of living labour is not simply the abstract figure of exploitation reshaped in the continuity of the circuits of the labour process, but the concrete figure of the capitalist who sucks out surplus labour. ‘The growth of capital and the increase in the proletariat appear, therefore, as interconnected – if opposed – products of the same process’ (Marx, Unpublished Chapter VI, p. 97I : 493G : 1062E). At the point where Marx’s critique arrives, there is no question of the labour process including the process of valorisation; rather it is the process of valorisation that configures and disciplines the labour process, and labour value itself is grasped first of all from the experience of exploitation, under the shape of surplus value. Marx stresses the fundamental pre-eminence of surplus value in his works:
The best points in my book are: 1. (this is fundamental to all understanding of the facts) the two-fold character of labour according to whether it is expressed in use-value or exchange-value, which is brought out in the very First Chapter; 2. The treatment of surplus-value regardless of its particular forms as profit, interest, ground rent, etc. (Letter to Engels, 24 August 1867, in Marx and Engels, 1975, p. 407)
Only now can we conclude:
This destroys the last vestiges of the illusion so typical of the relationship when considered superficially, that in the circulation process, in the market-place, two equally matched commodity owners confront each other, and that they, like all other commodity owners, are distinguishable only by the material content of their goods, by the specific use-value of the goods they desire to sell each other. Or in other words, the original relation remains intact, but survives only as the illusory reflection of the capitalist relations underlying it. (Marx, Unpublished Chapter VI, p. 97I : 493G : 1062–3E)
Isaak Rubin comments:
The usual short formulation of this theory holds that the value of the commodity depends on the quantity of labour socially necessary for its production; or, in a general formulation, that labour is hidden behind, or contained in, value: value = ‘materialized’ labor. It is more accurate to express the theory of value inversely […] The labour theory of value is not based on an analysis of exchange transactions as such in their material form, but on the analysis of those social production relations expressed in the transactions. (Rubin, 1972, p. 62)
Thus it is only the against that explains the within. It is the antithetical existence of the capitalist conditions of exploitation in relation to living labour that allows us to identify who is the one doing the exploiting and who is the exploited.
We could add a further consideration. We saw in section 1, as regards the concept of ‘machinism’ developed in the unpublished Chapter VI, how the Hegelian dialectic of the instrument has been transformed here: the instrument is no longer a mediation between the worker and nature; rather it is the worker who is the instrument between the capitalist and wealth (abundance of goods, and profit). Now, second, let us note that the instrument, in socialising itself, becomes profoundly transformed, or rather once again assumes its autonomy and reappears in the foreground. ‘We see here how even economic categories appropriate to earlier epochs of production acquire a new and specific historical character under the impact of capitalist production’ (Marx, Unpublished Chapter VI, p. 104I : 442G : 950E). These observations by Marx are useful to us as we conclude this brief excursus into the ‘insightful’ character of his critique of the economic categories of capitalism, as expressed in the unpublished Chapter VI. This foresight is not based on deterministic illusions but rather is open as a dispositif to the antagonist forces that construct the process of emancipation historically, in the course of the class struggle. Thus, if in real subsumption productive labour becomes a productive force of capital and if, by thus fulfilling the process and determining its inversion, the collective workers, formed through the social combination of the factors of production, recognise their own nature, transformed as they are into a ‘common’ actor of production – in short, if all this happens, we can conclude that in the ‘biopolitical’ figure of subsumption and in the ‘cognitive’ determination of production a new leading role is accorded to the proletariat (as collective instrument of production), namely that of taking a ‘common potentiality’ [potenza] into account, and therefore a ‘common’ dispositif is identified, which is radically ordinated towards a hegemonic claim for liberation from the domination of capital. The very instrument of production has potentially become able to liberate itself from exploitation and from command and to recognise itself as hegemonic in producing the wealth of the common.
NB. The class struggle, conducted within the real subsumption of society to biopower, seems to have to take on a particular tonality. It is the ‘antithetical existence’ of the indebted body – mediatised, securitised and represented – that rises in indignation, rebelling, organising and struggling. It has to do this within this world, which has been reified by biopower, by ‘single thought’ [pensiero unico], always in new configurations of alienation (hence the inexorable urgency for cognitive and subversive ‘co-research’ to give a start to any project of emancipation); and it also has to do this against it. While we have clearly identified the ‘within’, the ‘against’ is the terrain of practice, now entrusted to constituent imagination and to militant practices. You can learn a lot in this regard from Frantz Fanon and in general from the first generations of activists and scholars of ‘postcolonialism’. However, the problem today is how to organise the multitude – that is, how to engage the biopolitical networks of the singularities (digital and intelligent, cooperating and productive, critical of political economy and comunardistic, participant and democratically expert, etc.) in the establishment of a ‘politics of the common’.
These last considerations allow us to return, avoiding the dangers of idealistic interpretations, to the section in the Grundrisse that deals with general intellect, which we have already mentioned, and to reread its location and development within Marx’s thinking. We said that in the Grundrisse, written seven or eight years before the unpublished Chapter VI, Marx had advanced theses that would only achieve their full and material consistency in Book 1 of Capital. Already in the Grundrisse the problem for Marx was how to find a basis for overturning the effects of ‘alienation’ and ‘reification’: not to abandon them (as was suggested by Althusser, for example, when he defined them as products of Marx’s humanistic adolescence), but to give them critical and materialist justification. These are concepts that, already before 1858, in Marx’s early writings, represented – in an idealist manner – a perverse reality, the effect of capitalist exploitation. He denounced its repressive power and at the same time presented the occasion it offered for the dialectical passage – for negation towards an ideal overcoming. Now the renewed critique of political economy makes it possible to express this step in material terms: a passage that is historical, not dialectical, not necessary but effectually given; a passage through the hell of primitive accumulation, of both formal and real subsumption.
But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose ‘powerful effectiveness’ is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, of the application of this science to production […] In this transformation it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. (Marx, 1973, pp. 704–5]
Utopia? Illusion? Maybe. In any event it is a forward shift in the whole ‘insightful critique’. Shall we emerge from this transformed? Shall we emerge revolutionised? In 1858 ‘general intellect’ is a powerful concept that allows us to grasp – within the intuition of real subsumption and of the aggregation or combination of social productive forces – the major determinations of the objective changes imposed by the capitalist revolution: the intellectual character of labour in the subsumption of society to capital. But here we still do not have a communist revolutionary subjectivity. For this to come about, it takes resistance, social recomposition, desire, struggles, and practical anticapitalist dispositifs. In any case this is a matter of establishing a relationship between the ‘technical composition’ and the ‘political composition’ of the proletariat. That said, it is only the first mature theoretical step in materialism (which occurs precisely in the decade from 1858 to 1867) that produces in virtual terms a revolutionary and communist subjectivity. For as long as this does not exist, the analysis remains hypothetical, locked in fragility in what is assumed, rhetoric in declarations and impotence in action. It is precisely in the unpublished Chapter VI that not only the theoretical transformation but also the revolutionary transformation begins to emerge. We are no longer only within the productive subsumption of society in capital; we are beginning to be beyond it. The transformation may be – and virtually is – revolutionary. After having been constructed ‘within’, the instrument, the subject, the common ontology of producing (a new reality of ‘productive labour’) come out ‘against’ capitalist command. Surplus value is no longer just a machine that produces an accumulation of capitalist power in the exploitation of society; it is also the opportunity through which the proletariat erects its revolt. Shortly afterwards, the Paris Commune would reveal to Marx a first historical determination of this becoming – but more especially its first subjectivation.
Today, having endured a horrible centuries-long exploitation (made of misery and fatigue, and then, as if that were not enough, of ideological mystifications and religious barbarisms), we are finally able to give a name both to social surplus value (namely finance capital) and to general intellect (namely cognitive proletariat). This latter – in Marx’s prescient imagination – is a potentiality that, in destroying alienation and reification in the name of the ‘common’, offers new possibilities for revolution.