It was during the Second World War that the insight of Friedrich Pollock, elaborated during the Weimar era, came to be a reality – namely that the capitalist market cannot be considered in a simplistic and rhetorical manner as freedom (if not indeed anarchy) of circulation and as realisation of the value of commodities but, on the contrary, fundamentally as a unity of control over society as a whole, as ‘planning’. This socialist concept, abhorred by capitalist economic thinkers, made a splendid re-entry into the categories of economic science. The concept of ‘social capital’ (and therefore of a capital unified in its social extension, within and above the market, and understood as a mechanism for guaranteeing the functioning of the market itself), as a kind of shorthand for an effective capitalist management of society, became increasingly widespread.
Particularly important in this regard was the debate that was taking place in the western communist left, about the nature of the Soviet Union. During the 1940s dissident workerist tendencies within Trotskyism developed the concept of ‘state capitalism’ as a way of defining the Soviet regime, taking the Thermidor of the Russian Revolution not as a contingent passage in the transition to communism but as a specific and progressive function of the reorganization of mature capitalism. In the Italian debate of the 1950s, a period of capitalist modernisation in the course of postwar reconstruction, the concept of ‘social capital’ was developed, notably by Raniero Panzieri – the Italian translator of the second volume of Marx’s Capital and the founder of the journal Quaderni Rossi. It was on the basis of his analysis of the circulation processes of capital that Panzieri was able to develop the concept of ‘social capital’, demystifying notions of the ‘free market’ and also drawing in, in addition to the aforementioned Trotskyite dissident traditions, elements of European liberal thought – which, with Keynes, had made social capital and monetary planning the centre of democratic planning in Fordist development. But it was the Frankfurt School in particular (following in Pollock’s footsteps) that took the concept of capitalist development as a whole and gradually formed the theory of the ‘subsumption of society to capital’ – from a structural point of view (the whole of society being included within capitalist domination), from a spatial point of view (from imperialism to the world system), and (with finer intuition) as an ongoing process of mutual translation between technologies and anthropological transformations. It was on this complex terrain, in relation to this social and dynamic ontology, that the thematic of emancipation and its consequent practices were advanced.
Conversely, and outside of that strong materialist methodology, in the western Marxism of the period between the two wars and immediately after the second, and among the heirs of the Frankfurt School (forgetful as they were of that other very rich anthropology that had been anticipated) the space of emancipation was rather built on (or, better still, reduced to) a moral (ethical) horizon and the space of liberation was written off as utopian. An idealist perspective imposed itself. The consequences of the theory of ‘social capital’ were addressed in a dialectics that did not relive the experience of exploitation. If, we were told, capital seemed more and more to embody the inhuman and Aufklärung [Enlightenment] translated into its opposite, then within this impoverished reading there arose a tradition that considered emancipation or liberation as an ‘outside’. Here we are in the realm of metaphysics, where communism is by now presented as the product of a thinking that in absolute terms realises the universal, or as the inoperative reflection of a being removed from history. Badiou and Agamben have today taken on board those old frustrations, thus removing desire from life, without realising that those illusions consign the struggles for emancipation to impotence and defeat, to a destiny of obedience and pain.
But let us return here instead to the workerist thinkers [operaisti]. In Marx the concept of capital is always given – against all idealist positions that seek to present it as a unitary figure – as a ‘social relationship’. Capital, capitalism, the dimensions of social command and so forth cannot be taken as a fixed given: the capitalist subsumption of society is the subsumption of a contradiction, an antagonistic relationship that continues to exist. But there is more: any epistemology of capitalist development can only have as its starting point an antagonistic position that is internal to development itself. The analysis is always ‘within’, and by the fact of being ‘within’ it will also be ‘against’. And, while social command always implies an other over which it is to be exercised, this relationship is ‘intransitive’, it shuns any solution of the dialectics, any going beyond of the antagonist movement; it imposes a movement of resistance that is not only ethical but also epistemological. A number of consequences arise from this, which I merely note here and to which I shall return later. The first consequence – at a ‘macrolevel’ – allows us to read the development (and crisis) of capitalism as an antagonistic process with a dynamic marked by continuous, albeit varying, conflictual intensities. There is always someone who wins and someone who loses within this open-ended and unresolved process. The second consequence, at the ‘microlevel’, is revealed by the continuous changes in the social composition of the subject, in both technical and political terms: the varying densities of the capitalist relationship drive the contradictions to figures that are increasingly singularised and irreducible. The third consequence is that, from the relationship between intensity and density that marks the antagonism, there emerge new qualities of the subjects who participate in development. When, as happens in post-Fordist society, the social relationship that constitutes capital occupies the whole of society and determines its productivity, when productivity becomes cognitive, immaterial, affective, cooperative and so on, in short, a ‘production of subjectivity’, then the exchange becomes ontological and we witness a deepening of the antagonism that invests the subjects – especially the figures of living labour, who increasingly recognise themselves as being capable of appropriating portions of fixed capital and able to develop productive efficacy autonomously, on a basis of cooperation.
Before moving on in the discussion, allow me to stress here the importance of Foucault’s thought in driving research in this direction. It was instrumental both in redefining capitalist development as the development of an ‘intransitive’ relationship between biopower and subjective resistances and in introducing the analysis of the anthropological transformations that follow on this intransitivity of the relationship. Resistance (folding back on itself, producing autonomous subjectivities) increasingly configured itself as a production of singularities, and the ontological instances of singularisation, which Deleuze had so clearly defined, found concreteness in Foucault’s theory of the dispositif. The dispositif is the productive tension that is exerted on the subject; it is the tendency towards the development of the production of subjectivity within cooperative processes, and to their collective metamorphosis. The Foucauldian dispositif is a machinic conatus and a productive cupiditas that push forward the autonomy of the subjects in the resistance to capital – thus both within and against the capitalist relation. When we speak of the Marxism of Foucault we are referring to this machine of immanence that finds – no longer in the industrial structures of the class struggle but in the social texture of capitalist domination – the capacity [potenza] for resistance, for breaking, for alternatives. It is a new world becoming reality; biopolitical creativity in opposition to biopower.
Bearing in mind the conclusions arrived at in section 1, let us now move on to explore the theme of the ‘limits of capitalism’.
In Book 3 of Capital Marx says that capital itself is the limit of capitalism. He arrives at this statement through a demonstration of the tendential fall of the rate of profit in the development of the organic composition of capital. If capitalist value creation (and thus profit) occurs through the use of ‘living labour’ (and through the exploitation or the extortion of its creativity), the more the mechanisation of work advances (and thus valorisation shifts and is flattened onto the constant elements of capital), the less the value of capital will increase, because the usage (exploitation) of labour power will be reduced.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this law was often understood as being catastrophic for capitalist development. However, that was not how it worked out. The limit did not express itself in relation to, and in proportion to, the enlargement of the technological accumulation of the capitalist system; and the transformation of the subjectivities put to work widened rather than narrowed the field of accumulation, exploitation and command. This does not mean that the limit disappeared – it is still there, and capitalists are always dramatically aware of its imminence – but the limit has shifted and relocated itself in the light of the new subjectifications that have been produced. The result is that – as I have already pointed out in assessing the contribution of the Frankfurt School – the antagonistic character of capitalist development can be neither recognised nor revealed on the objective terrain: it can only be interpreted when one looks at those new subjectivities that development has produced – or, if you will, at the materiality of the new anthropological figures, which are singular and subjectively relevant – in short, at the anthropological transformations introduced by capitalist development itself, at the changes taking place in labour power, and at the new dialectic between immaterial labour power and the reappropriation of fixed capital.
By this I mean that, if the capitalist catastrophe arising from the falling rate of profit has not occurred, this is not because of capital’s capacity to avoid it through successive waves of technological innovation, geographical expansion and updating and transformation of the instruments of command (the high profile of financial command by comparison with industrial policies is the latest manifestation of this). Rather, the catastrophe was reconfigured and postponed via the transfer of the capacity to produce and accumulate from bosses to workers; from the potentiality of constant capital to the diffusion of the processes of proletarian reappropriation of fixed capital. The limit of capitalism is here revealed by the extension of its domination, by the fact that it has subsumed the entire planet, but also by the fact that in this way, in the course of this process, it has been forced to surrender to the producers (who are increasingly singularised and grow ever stronger in their autonomous cooperation) the capacity to exist and produce outside of the homologating obsession of (capitalist) command and to build, chaotically but in alternative ways, their ontological independence.
Why is the problem of the ‘limits of capitalism’ re-emerging today? It seems at first sight that the problem arises simply in the political sphere, in other words that it is born out of the crisis of the relationship between capitalist development and democracy, that is, from the crisis of the democratic state, of the state of law, of the representative and parliamentary state. Are capitalism and democracy really incompatible, when understood from a constitutional point of view? They are and they are not; what is certain is that, in the current conditions, capital is not compatible with an egalitarian and progressive democracy. The crisis of social democracy should probably be read in this light.
However, these considerations are insufficient to define the difficulties currently observable in the relationship between capitalism and democracy. It is beyond doubt that constitutional democracy has difficulties when confronted with instances of equality that arise from a productive world that is increasingly cooperative, and that the economic order of private property is also in difficulty when it comes up against those instances of the ‘common’ that are becoming increasingly present in the current state of production. What we have is a cognitive labour power that is not consumed in usage, is implemented in cooperation, and is not usable except in its cooperative and dynamic composition, therefore in its ‘excedence’ in the face of all measurement and in its autonomy from all extrinsic command. This is the ‘common’ character of the present-day force of production power – linguistic, affective, cognitive, immaterial and cooperative. The economic order of possessive individualism and private property no longer has ontological consistency. On this point modern constitutionalism and the world of life come into conflict in an irreducible manner. We conclude, therefore, that this relationship is in crisis for at least two reasons, which go far beyond the crisis of the state of law [stato di diritto]: one is that money has overtaken [ha sopravanzato] labour; the other is that technology has overtaken life.
At the end of this article we shall see how these two contradictions find their cause in the tendential breaking of the capital relationship itself: the oneness – of power, of money, of capital – has split into two and cannot be put together again. But before considering this basic element, let us open up the discussion on the problematics we have sketched thus far.
That money has overtaken labour is clear when you analyse the structure of financial capital: it has introduced ways of controlling labour power, which, as well as extending themselves socially, place the capital relationship outside of any material measure. Profit becomes very radically separated from labour; the law of labour value has been completely dissolved. Globalisation intervenes in this tendency, extending it across the space of the whole world and making it even more uncontrollable.
It is the possession of money – the financial convention – that now becomes the regulatory norm of social and productive activities and therefore gives access to a ‘property-owning reality’ whose efficacy is based solely on the most arbitrary monetary function. Property becomes paper-based, money-based or share-based, and mobile or based on real estate; its nature is conventional and juridical. André Orléan and Christian Marazzi – two writers whom I consider required reading in the present context – have correctly emphasised this transformation. The financial convention has to be viewed as a command that is independent of any ontological determination: this convention fixes and consolidates a ‘sign of ownership’ (in terms of ‘private property’) and holds even when it presents itself as an ‘excedence’ – not simply in relation to older and static determinations of labour value but also in relation to that continuous ‘anticipation’ and ‘increase’ that accompany it in exercising the financial capture of socially produced value and in operating at a global level. It should therefore be clear that, in this new configuration of the rules of property, the material basis of the law of value continues to exist. And yet we are not dealing here with individual labour – in reading the law of value – that becomes abstract, but with labour that is immediately social, common, and as such directly exploited by capital. The rule of finance is able to set itself as hegemonic because in the new mode of production the common has emerged as an eminent potentiality, as a substance of the relations of production, and is increasingly invading all social space as a norm of value creation. Finance capital follows on this growth of the common, seeks to translate it directly into profit, pushes securities and real estate rent, and anticipates them as financial rents. Another economist, Harribey, stated it well, in his discussion with Orléan: value no longer presents itself in substantive terms, it does not even show itself as a simple accounting phantasmagoria; it is rather the sign of a productive common, mystified but effective, which develops more and more intensively and extensively. Money has therefore overtaken labour and now looks at it like at a distant shore where it will not be necessary to land – in the illusion that this abstraction can last and that monetary speculation and the corruption of values can carry on forever.
And, second, technology has overtaken life. In saying this we highlight two elements: the first is the dissolution of the functional homogeneity that industrial activity created between technological development and the development of labour power. By contrast, today, within the structures of production (and no longer only industrial ones), the subjectification of labour power takes place in a manner that is less and less resolvable within productive command. In short, one is no longer seeing simply the theft of surplus labour by constant capital – one is also seeing the parallel appropriation of fixed capital by labour power. Technological command is no longer able to maintain a steady relationship with the autonomous cooperative socialisation of labour. Here we have a first paradox. It relates to production, and it consists in the fact that financial capitalism represents the most abstract and detached form of command at the very moment when it concretely invests the whole of life. The ‘reification’ of life and the ‘alienation’ of the subjects are produced by a productive command that has come to be – in the new mode of production, organised by financial capital – entirely transcendent, over a labour power that is cognitive. However, this labour power, when it is obliged to produce surplus value, precisely because it is cognitive, immaterial, creative and not immediately consumable, reveals itself as being independently productive.
This paradox appears fully when you consider that, given that production is essentially based on ‘social cooperation’ (in computer science, in care and welfare, in the service sector etc.), the valorisation of capital no longer clashes only with the massification of ‘variable capital’ but also with the resistance and autonomy of a multitude that has reappropriated to itself a ‘part’ of fixed capital (thus presenting itself, if you like, as a ‘machinic subject’) and of a continuous ‘relative’ capacity of organising the social networks of labour.
This paradox and this contradiction create a very violent opposition between ‘constant capital’ (in its financial form) and ‘variable capital’ (in the hybridised form it assumes, having incorporated ‘fixed capital’) – and thus tendentially implement the verticalisation of command and the breakdown of the representative structures of the state of law.
A second contradiction arises when we note that, as a result of these processes of appropriation – by workers – of fractions of fixed capital, capitalist command on the one hand extends and exploits the lives of workers, of society in its full extension, and thus defines itself as ‘biocapital’, and on the other encounters increasingly insurmountable difficulties in dealing with ‘the bodies of the workers’.
Here the clash, the contradiction and the antagonism become fixed when capital (in the postindustrial phase, the era in which cognitive capital becomes hegemonic) must put directly into production human bodies, turning them into singular machines, no longer simply subsuming them as labour commodity. Thus (in the new processes of production) bodies become ever more effectively specialised and acquire autonomy, so that, through the resistance and the struggles of machinic labour power, there develops ever more expressly the demand for a ‘production of the human by the human’, in other words for the living machine that is ‘the human’.
In fact, at the moment in which the workers reappropriate a part of the ‘fixed capital’ and present themselves, in variable and often chaotic manner, as cooperating actors in the processes of valorisation, as ‘precarious’ but ‘independent’ ‘subjects’ of the valorisation of capital, a complete reversal occurs in the function of labour vis-à-vis capital: the worker is no longer just the tool that capital uses in order to conquer nature – or, in ordinary terms, in order to produce goods; rather the worker, having incorporated the instrument, having metamorphosed from an anthropological point of view, reconquers ‘use value’ and acts machinically, in an otherness and an autonomy from capital that seek to become complete. Between this objective trend and the practical mechanisms of constituting this machinic worker we locate that ‘class struggle’ that we may from now on call ‘biopolitics’.
These paradoxes remain unresolved in the action of capital. Consequently, the stronger the resistance becomes, the harsher becomes the state’s attempt at a restoration of power. Any resistance is therefore condemned as an illegal practice of counterpower, and every manifestation of revolt is defined as destruction and ransacking. A further paradox – but this one is pure mystification – is that, in exercising the maximum violence, capital and its state need to appear as an inevitable and neutral figure: the maximum violence is exercised by instruments or organs that are ‘technical’. ‘There is no alternative,’ proclaimed Mrs Thatcher. So here you are given to understand that, in the name of this inescapable command (which is rational in capitalist logic), technology overtakes life in forms that are extreme but nonetheless typical and generalisable. The case of the ‘nuclear state’ is characteristic here: in this model technology stands as a forceful guarantee of sovereignty, as a permanent blackmail of public power against any force or movement (especially in domestic policy) that wishes to or is able to impose itself on the ‘legitimate sovereign’. These are probably the phenomena that polarise the capital relation and bring about the crisis of democracy even as a simple form of social democratic control over development.
The ‘nuclear state’ is a state that seeks to impose the sovereign ‘exception’ in physical terms, and to mould the statist notion of the ‘autonomy of the political’ within an insurmountable technological trope, as a guarantee of the predominance of capitalism and of the impossibility of going beyond it. Here modern sovereignty becomes definitively ‘biopower’. Is this not a renewal, through the ‘terrible power’ of the ‘nuclear state’, through its technological functioning, of that tradition of sovereign power that, in history, characterised the tradition of absolutism?
In this last case, the nuclear state, the limit of capitalism is real and actual: it is the catastrophe of life itself. But this is an extreme case – not ontologically necessary albeit logically possible. This catastrophist dimension attracts reactionary spirits: Heidegger adopted this logic to extend the nuclear threat to the whole of life, generalising the effects of nuclear technology within the very concept of technology. In my opinion the potentiality of life and the joy of liberty can enable us to avoid such transcendental threats. To them we oppose ontological resistances, we pluck technology out of the hands of capital, and we embody it, not as a garb of slaves but as a bodily instrument of emancipation.
What, then, is the limit of capital? It is always to be found in that subjective place where the exploitation of labour is broken and the slavery of private ownership and of monetary overlordship is removed – in the place where we succeed in reappropriating not only technologies but also their command. And, since technologies are prostheses of the human, the problem is how to make technology a prosthesis of our resistance, of our revolt and our humanity. It is in the construction of the ‘common’ that we reappropriate technologies and become powerful; the historical process of capitalist development (at the very moment when it has raised capitalist power – in financial form – to an exaggerated and empty transcendence) has made possible an anthropological transformation that goes in the direction of a cooperative singularisation: not of a process of individualisation of possessive subjects but of a proliferation of cooperating singularities. Technological intensities, cooperative densities and singular qualities are the product of, and produce, new anthropological figures. The common is not a compacted organic entity but a cooperating ensemble of singularities. Here we recognise the subjective place in which the limit of capitalism is posed, because here is posed the intransitivity of that relationship that defined capital itself.
However, reviewing the process that we have described thus far from the point of view of those philosophers whom we have criticised for their idealistic and moral critiques of the capital relation, you might raise the following objection: How can there ever be a singularity, how can a limit ever be posed, if it is posed in a manner that is so impure, and in particular if it has soiled itself through the reappropriation of fixed capital? To this objection we reply clearly: there is no liberation, there is no subjectivity that is not completely charged with historicity and immersed in the violence of the capital relation. There is no place where humanity can ingenuously or desperately recompose itself or redeem itself. The ‘universal human’ who acted the idea of the common – after the overturning of ‘real socialism’ where shall we ever find him again? Or perhaps the bare human [l’uomo nudo]? But the bare human is only a maximum abjection produced by power, who has been stripped of all ontological dignity. The rebels, the resisters, the ethical human beings are always dirty, just like the Cynic philosopher (as Foucault reminds us), and take upon themselves the full load of historicity. Therefore what is the nature of that process of appropriation that arms subjectivity? It involves adopting, grasping, and using bodily, mental, linguistic and emotional prostheses – in other words, bringing back to one’s own singularity some capabilities that were previously recognised as belonging only to the machinery that one worked with, and then incorporating and embodying these machinic characteristics, turning them into primary attitudes and behaviours of the activity of labouring subjects. In the separation established between the two subjects of the capital relation (the boss and the worker) there is, on the part of the singularity, a reappropriation of fixed capital, an irreversible acquisition of machinic elements that are subtracted from the valorising capacity of capital.
Now, every reappropriation amounts to an ousting [destituzione] of capitalist command. This process of appropriation, especially when conducted by the immaterial workers – who today are majoritarian in the processes of value creation – is very strong, very efficacious in its development; it brings about crisis. But there would be no crisis if we thought that it arose spontaneously from the processes of reappropriation and ousting. That is not how things are. The crisis needs a conflictual clash, a political reality that actively moves for the destruction not simply of the relation of exploitation, but also of the condition of enforcement that sustains it. In fact, when one speaks of reappropriation by the antagonist subject, one is not speaking simply of the changes taking place in the quality of labour power (which derive from the absorption of portions of fixed capital); we are speaking basically of a reappropriation of the cooperation that was incentivised in the capitalist restructuring of production and was then expropriated – and this is the essential drama of this critical phase. When it speaks of recuperation and reappropriation of fixed capital, far from expressing itself in terms that are tainted with economism, the analysis enters rather onto that terrain of cooperation that is now regulated by capital in biopolitical terms. Ousting capital from this function means recovering for labour power an autonomous capacity of cooperation.