With the crisis of the Fordist paradigm, that is the crisis of the real subsumption based on material production, a transition starts to the present day, where we see a shift from the production of money by means of commodities (M-C-M′) to the production of money by means of knowledge and relational activities (C[k]): (M-C[k]-M′), with structural effects on the mode of production and on the valorisation process (bio-cognitive capitalism).
We are entering a new phase of subsumption of labor to capital, where at the same time formal subsumption and real subsumption tend to merge and feed off one each other.
Today we can still talk of formal subsumption of labor to capital when labour activity refers to the ability and to relational learning processes that the individual worker holds on the basis of his experience of life. These are skills that are partially completed in a period prior to time of their use for the production of exchange value. The learning and the relationship, initially, arise as use values, such as tools and manual skills of the artisans of the first pre-Tayloristic stage of capitalist, are then “salarized,”obtorto collo, 1 and formally subsumed in the production of exchange value.
Mass education and the development of a diffuse intellectuality make the educational system a central site for the crisis of the Fordist wage relation. The key role attributed to the theme of the development of a “socialised and free” sector of education in the conflicts concerning the control of “intellectual powers of production” is, therefore, an essential element of Marx’s elaboration of the notion of the general intellect. The establishment of a diffuse intellectuality is configured as the necessary historical condition, even if, in the Grundrisse, this reference is implicit and, in some cases, concealed by a dialectical approach to the evolution of the division of labour that privileges the analysis of structural changes instead of the institutions and the subjects which could have originated these transformations.2
Unlike Marx, the general intellect is not fixed in machinery, it is not just “growth of fixed capital” but today is more and more dependent on living labour, i.e. the variable capital.3As well argued by Marazzi, the bio-cognitive capitalism tends to be seen as an anthropogenetic model of production and accumulation:
The metamorphosis toward the capitalist anthropogenetic model or, if you prefer, the “biopolitical turning point” of the economy, has a precise amount reflected in the evolution of employment of the labor force. Over the past decade the secular decline of the manufacturing sector compared to the service sector accelerates. This is not only a decrease in the number of industrial activity for increases in population (a phenomenon that has been going on since the beginning of the 1990s), it is a decline in absolute terms, since 1996, which in United States, England and Japan is equivalent to a reduction of one-fifth of jobs and, in Europe, at an average net loss of 5%. […] The difficulties, which we encounter in analyzing these trends in the labour market, indirectly confirm that the emerging model is an anthropogenetic paradigm, a model in which growth factors are in fact directly attributable to human activity, to his communication, relational, creative and innovative skills.
(Marazzi 2005:112)
The valorisation process works by exploiting the capabilities of learning, relationship, and social (re)production of human beings. It is in effect a kind of primitive accumulation, which is able to put to labour and to value those activities that in the Fordist-Taylorist paradigm were considered unproductive. The formal subsumption in biocapitalism, therefore, has the effect of broadening the basis of accumulation, including training, care, breeding, consumption, social, cultural, artistic, and leisure activities. The idea of the human productive act changes, the distinction between directly productive labour, the artistic and cultural work (opus), leisure activities (otium and play) fail and tend to converge into labour, a directly and indirectly productive (of surplus value) activity (Fumagalli 2015).
At the same time, in bio-cognitive capitalism, the real subsumption is modified with respect to Taylorism, but we believe that it still operates. Carlo Vercellone was right when he wrote, “From the moment in which knowledge and its diffusion is affirmed as the principal productive force, the relation of domination of dead labour over living labour enters into crisis” (2007: 26) and, quoting Marx, “Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself” (Marx 1973: 704). But, in our opinion, the changing relation between dead and living labour leads to a redefinition of the two concepts, as well as for the concepts of abstract and concrete labour.
As already suggested, the formal subsumption, implicit in bio-cognitive capitalism, has to do with the redefinition of the relationship between productive and unproductive labour, by making productive what in the Fordist paradigm was unproductive.
Now the real subsumption has to do with dead to living labour ratio, as consequence of the transition from repetitive mechanical technologies to linguistic relational ones. Static technologies, at the basis of the growth of productivity and of intensity in labour performance (large-scale economies) switch to dynamic technologies able to exploit learning and network economies by simultaneously combining manual tasks and brain-relational activities. The result has been the increase of new, more flexible forms of labour, in which design and manufacturing stages (CAD-CAM [computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing) are no longer perfectly separable but more and more interdependent and complementary. Even the separation between manufacturing and service production becomes more difficult to grasp. They become inseparable within the production filière. As far as material production is concerned, the introduction of new computerized systems of production, such as CAD-CAM and CAE necessitate a professional skill and knowledge that make the relationship between humans and machines increasingly inseparable, to the point that now it is the living labour to dominate the dead labour of the machine, but inside new form of labour organization and of social governance. On the production side of services (financialisation, R&D, communication, brand, marketing), we are witnessing a predominance of the downstream valorisation of material production.
It should be noted that the reduction in industrial employment, however, does not correspond to an actual decrease of the share of manufacturing on total GDP, which in the United States and in all the developed countries, remains, since 1980, more or less unchanged.
In bio-cognitive capitalism, real subsumption and formal subsumption are two sides of the same coin and feed off one another. Together they create a new form of subsumption, which we can define life subsumption. We prefer this term to that of subsumption of general intellect, as proposed by Carlo Vercellone (2007), since we do not refer only to the sphere of knowledge and education but even to the sphere of human relations, broadly speaking. This new form of the modern capitalist accumulation highlights some aspects that are at the root of the crisis of industrial capitalism. This leads to the analysis of new sources of valorisation (and increasing returns) in bio-cognitive capitalism. They derive from the crisis of the model of social and technical labour division (generated by the first industrial revolution and taken to the extreme by Taylorism) and they are powered by “the role and the diffusion of knowledge which obeys a co-operative social rationality which escapes the restrictive conception of human capital” (Vercellone 2007: 31).
It follows that the certified and direct labour time cannot be considered the only productive time, with the effect that a problems of the unit of measure of value arises. The traditional theory of labour value needs to be revised towards a new theory of value, in which the concept of labour is increasingly characterized by “knowledge” and is permeated with human life and life time. We can call this step as the transition to a theory of life value, 4 where the fixed capital is the human being “in whose brain resides the knowledge accumulated by the company” (Marx 1973: 725).
When life becomes labour force, working time is not measured in standard units of measurement (hours, days). The working day has no limits, if not the natural ones. We are in the presence of formal subsumption and extraction of absolute surplus value. When life becomes labor force because brain becomes machine, or “fixed capital and variable capital at the same time,” the intensification of labour performance reaches its maximum: we are in the presence of real subsumption and extraction of relative surplus value.
This combination of the two forms of subsumption—precisely life subsumption—needs a new system of social regulation and governance policy, and it mainly manifests itself in four ways.
In bio-cognitive capitalism, the subsumption of labor by capital becomes a vital subsumption, going further and making the concepts of formal and real subsumption, singularly considered, non-exhaustive. Now it is a matter of analyzing in more detail how this life subsumption takes shape and becomes concrete.
Precisely because we speak of life subsumption and life is not univocally standardizable in terms of abstraction (as it is possible for the concept of abstract labor), we must necessarily consider the different ways in which life subsumption operates. They are mainly four: (1) dispossession, (2) extraction, (3) financial subsumption, and (4) imprinting. The first two actually refer to the idea of formal subsumption, albeit in a divergent way.
Their analysis is preliminary to define a life-value theory.
The accumulation by dispossession was treated and initially actualized by David Harvey in the well-known essay “The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession” (2004) to then be resumed and expanded in other writings. This term refers immediately to the concept of original accumulation and therefore to the idea of formal subsumption, although articulated in a different way from what Marx had described in the first stage of capitalism. In fact, the concept of dispossession does not immediately refer to the productive factor of labor (as for Marx) but rather to the processes of urban gentrification (and not only) that have accompanied the process of globalization. It has to do not so much with the Smithian division of labor but rather with its spatial dimension.
Harvey argues that capital is a flow that produces plus-value, a surplus, a flow that, as Marx had already noted, is based on the constant metamorphosis of money–commodity–production–commodity–money (monetary production economy), whose crucial moment is that of production, that is the exploitation of the labor force.
In this flow there are incomes—there is bourgeois consumption, but also that of workers—and the blockage of this constant flow, which for capitalism must be continuous, is precisely the crisis. It is in these moments of blocking that contradictions occur (crisis of realization). One of these contradictions, analyzed by Marx in the Grundrisse and in Books I and II of Capital, is that between production and realization of value. Marxist tradition has always been effective in analyzing the contradictions of value production, less in analyzing those of realization.
One of the effects of economic globalization has been precisely that of extending the base of production as a source of accumulation but also extending the networks of the process of realization. In this process, the fundamental point is that value is produced in one place and realized in another, now produced in China but realized elsewhere. To account for the complex geography of this relationship, Harvey sets the example of Walmart in the United States. If we begin to look at the practices of appropriation of value, we see that extra-economic methods (violence, exercise of power, etc.) come into play that Marx analyzed in the first book of Capital talking about the original accumulation (Chapter 24). The Marxian analysis of the original accumulation is that of the birth of the salaried labor force, but today the analysis should focus more on the way in which capitalism regains value in the flow circulation.
By dispossession, Harvey does not refer only to the processes of traditional colonization and to the processes of original accumulation through land-grabbing 5 or similar forms, but also to the typical sectors of contemporary valorisation of bio-cognitive capitalism: the gentrification of space and finance, or real estate and financial speculation activities.
Accumulation by dispossession is a structural character of capitalism, not specific to our age. However, as happens also to other concepts, such as that of financialization, that of accumulation by dispossession is more important at certain times and less in others. In the last thirty-five years he has played an absolutely central role in the development of capitalism. The reason why I am a little reluctant to associate accumulation by dispossession with colonialism is that it is no longer limited solely to colonial territories, but intervenes in the very heart of the West […]. There is a question we must ask ourselves about who and how extraction works. For example, copper in Zambia is a very coveted target for the mining practices of the two major corporations that are disputing it, one Chinese and one Indian. Much of Latin America has been transformed into a large soybean cultivation, naturally oriented towards China. It is not happening that China does today what England has done to India: it would be wrong to think so. Some of the most hateful labor exploitation practices today can be traced back to Korean and Taiwanese corporations. There is a continuous shift in the geography of the extraction so we must always ask ourselves who is extracting what.
(Harvey 2014)
In this statement by David Harvey we can see how the accumulation for dispossession is represented as a form of accumulation of extractive capitalism but generates confusion between extractivism and extraction. In this regard, following Harvey, it seems to us that the term extractivism seems more congenial, unlike the concept of extraction. In fact, the concept of extraction must be read in a broader perspective than Harvey does. This is in fact the reading matrix of a component of neo-operaist thought, which starts from the assumption of cognitive capitalism as a new phase that would have modified in a structural way the process of valorization of Taylor-Fordist derivation (Vercellone 2013;Mezzadra 2009). The reading given by Carlo Vercellone and Antonio Negri (2008), in particular, but also by Sandro Mezzadra, means by extraction (differently from extractivism) the ability on the part of capital to externally capture the self-valorisation capacity of social cooperation and thus transform it into a source accumulation.6
It is essential to analyze the ways in which financial capital touches the ground, both from the spatial point of view and from the point of view of the changes that occur in the relations between capital and labor. It seems to me […] that an extensive extraction concept can be used in this regard to define the way in which financial capital relates to the different forms of social cooperation (and competition). The difference compared to industrial capital is particularly important here: while the worker, once through the factory gates, is inside a cooperation system organized by the owner, the black woman alone (to use a stereotypical figure) who contracts a subprime mortgage must pay the debt monthly by entering a series of relations of cooperation, dependence and exploitation that are essentially indifferent to financial capital, which is limited to “extract” a share of value produced from within those relationships.
(Mezzadra 2014)
In this framework, social cooperation is understood as a potential autonomous capacity for the production of use value (therefore an expression of concrete work), or the municipality (in the singular), the result of the transformation of the indistinct value produced in society by the same concrete work in immediately social value.
In this perspective, extraction also contains the logic of dispossession: the practice of direct expropriation is therefore one of the possible components of extractivism. Extractivism thus becomes one of the modalities of the extraction process.7
In this context, the whole problem of the measurement and the dichotomy extractivism/extraction emerges. And we advance the hypothesis, very intriguing, that it is the financial measure that transforms the concrete work of social cooperation (Hardt and Negri 2017: 159–177), and the general intellect into abstract labor and that “The metropolis is today for the multitude what the factory was for the working class” (Negri 2014).
And together with the theme of identifying a unit of measure capable of defining the value of the common there is also the question of defining a political composition of the work appropriate to the one that is outlined (with the terms multitude and extraction) being the new technical composition of work in bio-cognitive capitalism.
These are questions that still require answers and which also open new questions. What is the role of the production unit, that is the firm?
[S]tarting from the supposed externality between the common and multitude, on the one hand, and financialized accumulation on the other, the moment of the enterprise disappears, or rather, the enterprise is essentially the corruption of the cooperation already given, it is not seen as a moment still central to the accumulation, even if reconfigured, which still today organizes the extraction of value from the inside.
(Sciortino 2016: 119)8
Here the difference between extraction and extractivism comes out again. In this regard, to mark the differences, the concept of extraction has an ancient root but its term is very recent. As we have already stressed, its root lies in extractivism. Its use is in fact linked to the political history of the last decade in South America and especially to the post-crisis period 2007, in the aftermath of the financial crisis (Gago and Mezzadra 2015).
When Antonio Negri and Carlo Vercellone affirm that today the surplus value originates from the exploitation of the “immaterial” labour (Negri) and the expropriation of the general intellect (Vercellone) and which tends to become fixed in financial income (“the becoming rent of the profit,” according to the happy expression of Carlo Vercellone), they refer to the return of formal subsumption.9
The term extractivism was rarely used and, if it was, it was referred to the countries of the southern hemisphere regarding their rapid industrialization process and the new international division of labor that was developing. It was most often linked to the theme of original accumulation (Sacchetto and Tomba 2008; Perelman 2001; Mezzadra 2008; Van der Linden 2010).
We know that the global economic crisis of 2007 has accentuated predatory policies, already existing, from the imposition of monocultures, to the exploitation of natural resources, to land-grabbing. Such policies of extraction, or more properly, of dispossession, have changed the structure of geographical boundaries, as evidenced by the studies of Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Nielsen (Mezzadra and Nielsen 2013).
In this context, the relationship between financial capital and extractivism seems to be lacking and the political management of the territory and of the urban space, within a dialectic relationship with the constituent power (especially with reference to the progressive governments of South America) assumes a new centrality (Negri 2012). And it is in this context that extractivism turns into extraction.
In conclusion, extractivism and its extraction declension defines the internal exploitation of human social cooperation: instead, dispossession refers more to the external exploitation of natural resources and social and organizational networks (logistics) which today is the basis of accumulation.
In this sense, the studies by Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby (Cooper and Waldby 2014) show how the bioeconomy developed from the biological capabilities inherent in the bodies themselves, and particularly in the bodies of women. In fact, the productive sectors driven by the life sciences are today the most flourishing ones of capitalism. Reproductive and regenerative medicine have opened new global markets, whose source of surplus value coincides directly with the generative potential of women’s bodies, but not only. If today bio-cognitive capitalism makes the appropriation of life a new frontier of colonization behind the thrust of new technologies, how does this vital expropriation manifest itself?
Are the concepts of extraction and dispossession adequate to grasp the processes of exploitation that unfold directly on the biological bodies of individuals and not only on the environment in which they live? (Rossi 2012).
Trying to answer these questions obliges us to go beyond the simple formal subsumption, albeit within an extension of the primitive accumulation base of capital. The link “formal subsumption–original accumulation” is no longer able today to grasp the complexity of contemporary exploitation.
The start of the financial crisis and the outbreak of the crisis of the so-called “sovereign debt” clearly highlighted the role of the financial markets and of the debt instrument as an integral part of the process of subsumption of labor to capital. In this context, the link between the financial and real sphere becomes indissoluble (Fumagalli and Mezzadra 2011). It follows that the financial markets enter directly into the biopolitical sphere of individuals (Lucarelli 2010). Riccardo Bellofiore grasps this aspect speaking of “real subsumption of labor to finance”: “it deals with the subaltern integration of the working class households, as well as of the middle class, into the financial markets, and of their slipping into a growing bank debt” (Bellofiore 2012a: 191). And more:
The two pillars at the basis of the reaction of capital to the workers’ struggles and to the crisis of the seventies have been the labor fragmentation and financialization. Both had new characters. Labor fragmentation, in fact, has been significantly the other side of a new “centralization without concentration.” Financialization, in turn, was embodied in an authentic “real subsumption of labor to finance and debt”: an inclusion of households and consumers—hence of the world of labor—within the financial universe. The real subsumption of labor to finance led to the deepening of centralization without concentration, and more generally a further crackdown of the exploitation of labor.
(Bellofiore 2011: 49)
The very moment when, in the aftermath of the Taylorist–Fordist–Keynesian paradigm crisis, the “new” capitalism manifests itself,10 it is based on the nexus between finance and precariousness, within a new productive organization for supply chains, which Bellofiore calls “centralization without concentration” (2012: 16). Finance “has real effects on the management of production” (Bellofiore 2012: 17) and not only on investments or output. This is why Bellofiore talks about financial subsumption as an “aid that is no longer just formal, it is now also real” (2012: 18).
This form of real subsumption is therefore not new compared to that of the past, acted in the Fordist period where the real subsumption reaches its apogee: it presents itself with different forms and modalities, mediated by the necessity of income causing increasing indebtedness: “it pushes the workers, close into the poincer ‘rent/indebtedness’ to work harder and harder. Extraction of absolute and relative surplus labor is inextricably interwoven, while the center-periphery dichotomy is generalized to every area and nation” (Bellofiore 2012b: 18).
Let us remember that, for Marx, “the real submission of labor to capital operates in all the forms able to relative surplus value, not absolute surplus value” (1976: 69). It is essential, however, to underline that for Marx “real submission is accompanied by a complete revolution that continues and is constantly repeated in the same mode of production, in the productivity of labor and in the relationship between capitalists and workers” (Marx 1976: 69).
The extraction of relative plus-labor involves direct control of the organization of work and labor performance. This control is certainly inherent to the process of precariousness, even if the “real submission of labor to capital” takes different forms from those described by Marx, more indirect than direct. Is it also inherent to the process of financialization, as Bellofiore claims? We doubt it. From this point of view, financial valorization appears more like a form of formal subsumption, as claimed by the extraction theorists.
Real and formal subsumption tend therefore to mix, but, according to Bellofiore, without however giving life to ways of exploitation that deviate from those already experienced in the past. From this point of view, the fight against exploitation takes the form of the wage battle and the reduction of working time certified as productive of surplus labor. In fact, in the transition from Fordist capitalism to money-manager capitalism, there is no significant change in the accumulation process, while, as regards valorization, it is increasingly induced by both individual (micro-) and macro-level indebtedness (double indebtedness, for example the United States: the domestic one—public debt—and the external one—trade balance deficit) managed by financial markets on a global scale.
Quite different is the analysis conducted by Federico Chicchi, Emanuele Leonardi, and Stefano Lucarelli who, in a recent publication (Chicchi et al. 2016) present a theory of exploitation that goes beyond the concept of subsumption of Marxian memory. The starting point, according to the authors, is the dissolution of the wage ratio. “It is in fact the explosion of wage dynamics as the driving force of value creation that leads us to question ourselves about the ways of contemporary exploitation and the logics that inform them by problematizing and forcing the heuristic potential of the Marxian categories of analysis” (Chicchi et al. 2016: 16).
Furthermore, capitalism presents itself as an “axiomatic” system. Recalling Deleuze and Guattari (2005), in fact, it is argued that the axiomatics of capital is defined by a set of “common characters” that define basic principles. As Sandro Mezzadra rightly recalls, the axiomatic capitalism of Deleuze and Guattari “surely corresponds to an‘isomorphism’, but not to a ‘homogeneity’. On the contrary, axiomatic not only tolerates but constantly promotes the generation of social, temporal and spatial ‘heterogeneity’” (Mezzadra 2014). This is why capitalism is an organism in constant transformation, able to continuously shift its operating limits, assuming the crisis as an opportunity.
Faced with the crisis of the wage society, based on the increase in the centrality of wages as a measure of exploitation, there are two elements of novelty that must be grasped:
Just starting from the inadequacy of the concept of subsumption in the dual form of formal and real, Chicchi, Leonardi and Lucarelli do not investigate the possible existence of a new form of subsumption but tend to exclude it a priori. The authors do, in fact, a reading of Marx that indissolubly links the concept of subsumption to the salary relationship. It is well known that in the unpublished Chapter 6 of Capital, Marx clearly states that:
Material wealth is transformed into capital only because the worker, to be able to live, sells his work capacity; only through the wage labor relationship, the things that are the objective conditions of work, that is, the means of production, and the things that are the objective conditions of the maintenance of the worker, that is, the means of subsistence, become capital.
(Marx 1976: 36)
Hence, “Wage labor, or wage worker, is therefore a necessary social form for capitalist production” (Marx 1976: 36). In these as in other statements, Marx does not refer to the existence of a direct relationship between the process of labor subsumption and the wage relationship. He claims that wage labor is a necessary social form of capitalist command, not the social form. The capitalist mode of production that Marx analyzes in the nineteenth century sees the wage ratio as the main and constituent process of the subsumption of labor to capital, in its dual form, formal and real. But nothing prevents us from thinking that, in its “axiomatic” developments, capitalism can prefigure others.
It is necessary to consider, as well as Chicchi et al. in part allude, that the wage ratio implies the existence of a clear and clean separation between human activity and machine. And it is this separation that is reunited in the process of material production (aspect on which Marx, in the above quotations—not by chance—particularly dwells) thanks to the salary ratio. But if this separation is no longer necessary to define the exploitation of labor, then the salary ratio may also fail, without however the process of subsumption (and exploitation) fails. A confirmation is given by the dissemination of free and unpaid labor in recent years.
Contemporary capitalism can then be represented as a social axiomatic that constantly shifts beyond its operating limits; therefore it has an “elastic delimitation” able to include different and non-traditional areas, “the shoreline,” “the threshold,” “the escape lines.” Its great adaptive capacity, which oscillates between “de-territorialization of flows and contemporary continuous re-territorialization,” exploits the “crises” to reinvent itself. The axiomatic machine is also the product of an algorithm, a process of machine automation that does not necessarily need a salary ratio.
As Cristina Morini writes:
This means that the subsumption logic of the exploitation of the industrial phase, is no longer, does not explain enough, what is a theme in a continuous sway between freedom and dependence, a pressure-impressing mechanism that puts you in shape: a little you’re there, a little undergo the intimidation, the fear of an ambush and whose exclusion is no longer social but individual.
(Morini 2016)
Here it derives “the paradigm shift imposes by de-salarization on the analysis of exploitation” (Chicchi et al. 2016: 30), represented by the concept of imprinting. Always referring to Cristina Morini:
The word imprinting refers to the studies of Konrad Lorenz on animal learning systems but also the impression on a photographic film, to focus the biopolitical device that marks the subject with a latent image or the limit beyond which everything is granted: everything is aimed at the selection of potentially functional trajectories (from the point of view of capitalist valorization). In the Marxian subsumption “the subordinate/salaried labor relationship is central and indeed necessary.” In the imprinting process “labor and valorization process do not coincide on the level of wages but they find different conditions of realization.” Here is the point, the architrave of the discourse: to derive surplus value from subjectivity without necessarily passing through wage convention. The passage from the real subsumption to the logic of imprinting takes place “through the progressive loss of the cogency of the wage ratio,” in the amplification of the subjective condition and of the adhesion; “Diffusion of a more humiliated and less salaried working condition,” not to mention the situations in which “the expropriation of surplus-value takes place completely outside the wage relationship and the employment contract”: data profiling on the web, clinical work, forms of voluntary and civic participation, financial conventions, exploitation of the common goods of nature.
(Morini 2016)
The concept of imprinting as the new frontier of capitalist exploitation highlights a new component of contemporary bio-cognitive capitalism, the one that refers to the prefix bios-. Increasingly, the component of subjectivity and continuous self-subjectivation defines the ambiguous and problematic ridge of forms of liberation and subsumption at the same time. At the moment when this condition becomes central, upstream for the development of that social cooperation or general intellect from which the process of accumulation of capital draws and downstream for its expropriation and capture, not only the category of wage labor but also that of capital must be rethought and redefined.
If, in fact, the category of wage labor falls (understood as a mere condition of dependent work), what happens to the capital category? Mario Tronti, in Operai and Capitale, breaks with traditional Marxism, based on the old and traditional Hegelian dialectic.
I wrote somewhere that there is no class without the class struggle, because the class is not a pure sociological aggregation: the classes are potentially political. This had already been identified by Marx. The classes need each other, they never stand in themselves. They become classes, Marx said, when they become for themselves. When they become class for the class that stands against itself. And so we must elevate, Marx argued, to class consciousness. Lenin said that they must be organized. And in this struggle between the classes, the Hegelian dialectic of recognition is triggered, and the consequent reciprocal relationship, in the sense that a class, finding itself in front of its class adversary, recognizes also itself, acquires awareness of itself. This was the dialectic, which we did not call in this way, because we were critical of it; but it is the old Hegelian dialectic of the servant-lord, in which each one needs the other, and one does not know who the servant and the lord is because as one hand—depending on the balance of power—one becomes a servant and the other lord.
(Tronti 2007)
For the workerist approach, it is the unilateral point of view that allows us to have the general point of view: it is that of worker subjectivity. If the worker can exist without capital, capital cannot work without the worker. In other words, constant capital cannot exist without variable capital.
We ask ourselves: does variable capital always take the form of paid work? If so, even constant capital would have no reason to exist, nor the Marxian notion of organic composition of capital and the concept of subsumption would no longer make sense.
In the monumental analysis that analyzes the passage from slavery to the wage relationship (Moulier Boutang 1998), Yann Moulier Boutang critically discusses the idea that leads “to consider the affirmation of capitalism and that of the wage system” (Maltese 2013: 27) as consubstantial. The wage form is not the prototype of the subsumed labor because of its high compatibility. According to Moulier Boutang, it is more relevant, in the constitution of capitalism, the exodus (exit) from dependent labor. This fact “would determine the dynamics of capitalist competition to the extent that the prism of defection would illuminate the tortuous path of the legal construction of labor control” (Moulier Butang 1998: 23–24).
Even if the disappearance of wage labor as a medium- to long-term trend is assumed (since, in any case, the wage ratio is still strongly present today, even if to a lesser extent in the cognitive-relational labour segments, segments that increasingly mark a growing trend to the detriment of wage labor, especially in countries with older industrialization), does this mean that the notion of subsumption of labor to capital also disappears, that is to say its subordination and its being exploited?
We doubt it. Chicchi et al. define the notion of subsumption in a very limited way. As is known—and as mentioned by the authors themselves—the concept of subsumption arises in the logic of Aristotelian derivation as “assumption of the minor premise of the syllogism as coherent with the major one” (Battaglia 2002: 17.816); it is later used in the Critique of Judgment by Immanuel Kant (die Subsumtion) with the meaning of classification in a classification.
We have already mentioned the Marxian use of the term, with the distinction between formal and real subsumption. In the unpublished sixth chapter of Capital, Marx uses the notion outside the sphere of logic for which it was conceived, reformulating it in order to frame the social and non-logical terms of capital and labor. Marx refers above all to the historical context of the capitalist phase that he could observe, in which the diffusion of the wage ratio represented the constituent characteristic. But this does not mean that the wage relationship is the constitutive element of the process of subsumption, as also Moulier Boutang reminds us. It is more plausible that the wage ratio is one of the forms in which the subsumption of labor to capital manifests itself.
We agree with Massimo Bontempelli, when he writes:
The conceptual operation that I have long proposed for its possible interpretive fertility is to reformulate, to transpose it as an illuminating category in a broader context, the Marxian notion of subsumption, in the same way that Marx has reformulated the Kantian notion of subsumption to refer to the relationship between capital and labor. It is a matter of thinking of the distinction between formal subsumption and real subsumption no longer only of labor to capital, but of human life itself to capital.
(Bontempelli 2008)
From this point of view, imprinting can be understood as one of the forms that defines the current subsumption process. A life subsumption.
Our thesis is that in a context of bio-cognitive valorization, where finance defines the scope of the same valorization, the forms of subsumption and therefore the forms of exploitation multiply. The heterogeneity of these forms derives from the lack of the clear separation between the human element and the mechanical element. This hybridization highlights new modes of conflict and at the same time possible self-organization processes. Hierarchy and cooperation are constantly intermingled and “dividing” differences represent the primary step of accumulation.
Battaglia, S. (2002) Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, 21 vols., Turin: Utet.
Bellofiore, R. (2011) La Crisi capitalistica: La barbaria che avanza, Trieste: Asterios.
Bellofiore, R. (2012a) “L’ascesa e la crisi del money manager capitalism,” in A. Simoncini (ed.), Una rivoluzione dall’alto: A partire dalla crisi globale, Milan: Mimesis, pp. 185–204.
Bellofiore, R. (2012b) La Crisi globale:l’Europa, l’Euro, la Sinistra, Trieste: Asterios Editore.
Bontempelli, M. (2008) “Capitalismo, sussunzione, nuove forme della personalità,” available at www.ariannaeditrice.it/articolo.php?id_articolo=17114 (accessed March 25, 2019).
Chicchi, F., E. Leonardi, and S. Lucarelli (2016) Logiche dello sfruttamento, Verona: Ombre Corte.
Cooper, M., and C. Waldby (2014) Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari (2005) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Fumagalli, A. (2015) La Vie mise au travail: Nouvelle formes du capitalisme cognitive, Paris: Eterothopia.
Fumagalli, A. and S. Mezzadra (eds.) (2010) Crisis in the Global Economy: Financial Markets, Social Struggles, and New Political Scenarios, Los Angeles, Calif.: Semiotext(e).
Fumagalli, A., and C. Morini (2011) “Life Putto Work: Towards a Theory of Life-Value,” Ephemera, 10 (3–4): 234–252.
Gago, V., and S. Mezzadra (2015), “Para una crítica de las operaciones extractivas del capital. Patrón de acumulación y luchas sociales en el tiempo de la financiarización,”Nueva sociedad, 255: 38–52.
Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2017) Assembly, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2004) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, London: Penguin.
Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2009) Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press.
Harvey, D. (2004) “The New Imperialism: The Accumulation by Dispossession,” Socialist Register, m. 40.
Harvey, D. (2014) “Capitalism by Dispossession (or Accumulation by Expropriation),” at the Yearly Seminar organized by EuroNomade at Passignano, Italy, September 18, available at http://gabriellagiudici.it/david-harvey-a-passignano-perugia/ (accessed March 25, 2019).
Lucarelli, S. (2010) “Financialization as Biopower,” in A. Fumagalli and S. Mezzadra (eds.), Crisis in the Global Economy: Financial Markets, Social Struggles, and New Political Scenarios, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), pp. 119–138.
Maltese, P. (2013) “Lavoro imbrigliato e lavoro flessibile. Appunti su una teoria politico-pedagogica dell’esodo,” in Bollettino della Fondazione Nazionale Vito-Fazio Allmayer, 1, p. 2. Available at www.academia.edu/3800145 (accessed March 25, 2019).
Marazzi, C. (2005) “Capitalismo digitale e modello antropogenetico del lavoro. L’ammortamento del corpo macchina,” in J. L. Laville, C. Marazzi, M. La Rosa, and F. Chicchi (eds.), Reinventare il lavoro, Rome: Sapere 2000, pp. 107–126.
Marazzi, C. (2010) Il comunismo del capitale, Verona: Ombre Corte.
Marazzi, C. (2011) The Violence of Financial Capitalism, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
Marx, C. (1973) Grundrisse, London:Penguin Books.
Marx, C. (1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, London:Penguin.
Mezzadra, S. (2009) “La ‘cosiddetta’ accumulazione originaria” in LUM (Libera Università Metropolitana) (a cura di)., Lessico Marxiano, Rome: Manifestolibri, pp. 17–40. Available at www.lumproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/lessico-marxiano.pdf (accessed March 25, 2019).
Mezzadra, S. (2014) “Le Geografie della crisi e dello sviluppo capitalistico: Appunti preliminari e ipotesi di ricerca”, available at www.euronomade.info/?p=465 (accessed March 25, 2019).
Mezzadra, S., and B. Nielsen (2013) Border as Method; or, The Multiplication of Labor, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Morini, C. (2016) “Le Pillole azzurre del capitale: recensione a Federico Chicchi, Emanuele Leonardi, Stefano Lucarelli, Logiche dello sfruttamento—Oltre la dissoluzione del rapporto salariale,” available at http://effimera.org/le-pillole-azzurre-del-capitale-cristina-morini (accessed March 25, 2019).
Moulier Boutang, Y. (1998) De l’esclavage au salariat: Economie historique du salariat bridé, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Negri, A. (2004) Il Comune della cooperazione sociale: intervista sulla metropoli (by Federico Tomasello), available at www.euronomade.info/?p=2185 (accessed March 25, 2019).
Negri, A. (2012) “Perché Toni Negri?” Interview by Veronica Gago and Diego Sztulwark, November 13, available at www.euronomade.info/?p=831 (accessed March 25, 2019).
Negri, A. and C. Vercellone (2008) “Le Rapport capital-travail dans le capitalisme cognitif,” Multitudes, 32(mars): 39–50.
Perelman, M. (2001) The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Randall Wray, L. (2009) “The Rise and Fall of Money Manager Capitalism: A Minskian Approach,” Cambridge Journal of Economics, 33: 807–828.
Randall Wray, L. (2011) “Minsky’s Money Manager Capitalism and the Global Financial Crisis,” Working Paper No. 661, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College.
Rossi, U. (2012) “On the Varying Ontologies of Capitalism: Embeddedness, Dispossession, Subsumption,” Progress in Human Geography, 37(3), 348–365.
Sacchetto, D. and M. Tomba (eds.) (2008) La lunga accumulazione originaria, Verona:Ombre Corte.
Sciortino, R. (2016) “Tutto un programma di ricerca,” in E. Armano and A. Murgia (eds.), Le Reti del lavoro gratuito: Spazi urbani e nuove soggettività, Verona: Ombre Corte.
Tronti, M. (2007) “Intervention,” in G. Roggero (ed.), Rileggere Operai e capitale Lo stile operaista alla prova del presente, Faculty of Political Science, University of Rome, “La Sapienza,” January 31, p.4. Available at www.academia.edu/5135508/Rileggere_Operai_e_capitale (accessed March 25, 2019).
Van der Linden, M. (2010) Workers of the World: Essays toward a Global Labor History, London:Brill.
Vercellone, C. (2007) “From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism,” Historical Materialism, 15.
Vercellone, C. (2013) “The Becoming Rent of Profit? The New Articulation of Wage, Rent and Profit,” Knowledge Cultures, 1(2): 194–207.
Virno, P. (1992) “Quelques notes à propos du general intellect,” Futur Antérieur, 10: 45–53.
Whalen, C. J. (2012) “Money Manager Capitalism,” in J. Toporowsky and J. Michell (eds.), Handbook of Critical Issues in Finance, London: Edward Elgar, pp. 254–262.