Marx Ch 12, 13, 14

My ongoing motivation continues to be a Spinozean side of Marx, to keep thinking about how the forms of life emerge from and reproduce capital relations of exploitation. It is also how social difference becomes a space in which simultaneously capital can hiper-valorize itself but also encounter a limit, in that difference is also a life that partially escapes. I am interested in finding, contributing and generating these forms of life right here and right now, although I do not assume that that is possible by disengaging from all relations of the capitalist state / market.

In the previous chapter Chapter 12, on the working day empirically demonstrated the mechanism by which labour and capital are in opposition, as labour aims to work only the fragment of time the necessary for the reproduction of life. The problem is of course to have that replacement ready a body of skilled + disciplined, either the trained offspring or another population altogether. He does mention the migration of workers and how rural areas provide healthy and strong populations to be consumed in their two meanings, as a product bu the capitalist and in their vitality by the production process.

Thus after demonstrating how the specific form of cooperation of capitalism is particular in that it organizes social forces creating this never before seen productivity he is going to focus on the form of generating surplus through either technological innovation or finetuning of the cooperation process, [what he develops in Ch 13].

Thus in Chapter 14, he discusses the form of valorization that emerges not out of the extraction of more labour but in making labour even more productive. In this “blind ambition” for valorization thus capitalism strives to make work more efficient and the process more productive. For the worker, it means that coming into a capitalist relation makes their labour more productive than if they would work on their own, [and yet this is also what alienates them the most]. For the capitalist, this reduces the amount of time they need to pay for the reproduction of the worker’s life and thus encreases surplus. This reduction thus makes labour-as-a-commodity, cheaper, it also makes it cheaper in that the commodities the worker needs to buy to reproduce their life become cheaper under capitalism. Thus Industrial food production, favours capitalism as a whole, even if unintentionally [the capitalist of food production only wants to produce more commodities].

 A good distinction is that cooperation in K is either as a sequence of productive events - ie textile industry - , or as an intensive process of division of tasks to then assemble the final product - a train- ]. While cooperation is present in history and in other social formations capital develops this as a new form, takes cooperation to a new level of productivity.   


 And he keeps insisting that capitalists embody capital and that workers embody their exploitation, through the mention to health reports and even the problematic reference to stature. Which I find compelling as a reminder of the types of subjects that capitalism produces as part of it process, that needs to produce and that define the available forms of life. In this chapter he explains too how capitalists become necessary political figures: as their work is to organize production inside the factory [which he pairs with despotism] and then through the involuntary equilibriums established through exchange [which he also calls anarchy], they become a leading class. I thus found a crucial point in our discussion the paradox of the day after the revolution overthrowing the bourgeoisie. Who will take this organizational and coordinating mode? One option appears to be a Leninist state, the dictatorship fo the proletariat, the other some type of anarchic market exchanges.

This lead us back to the discussion of Sivanandan, in his critique of identity politics of  Poulantzas/Hall and New Times. For him, the problem is the lack of recognition of antagonism as inherent and the emphasis on culture as a sphere where the representation of difference by the state can lead to inclusion. I agree with the critique, although I take away many points form Hall. Here we discussed what the relation between party and social movements and party and state can be. Party may not be able or even attempt to represent social movements. And yet, I feel the party needs to be transverse by what social movements bring to light as they are constitutive of the more “traditional” class struggle. Burgeise gender - race - sexuality is at the centre, and thus parties need some form of engagement, without capturing all the energies of social movements.  I feel that Poulantzas becomes instrumental to neoliberal multiculturalism in that we have a social democratic party in power of the state that divides and mediates discretionary some specific demands of social movements, enabling room for action, resources and air, and yet the structures remain in place, and the energies of those movements to create new lives may get exhausted and domesticated. In this point, and paraphrasing Diego Szultwark, I find that social democracy as generating forms of inclusion through subsidies and through “listening” to social movements through politics of representation that divide problems, comes close to neoliberal management which promotes inclusion through entrepreneurship and revamped forms of disciplined work following a “calling” and all the new age self-help, become your own boss of the new right [Weber, Foucault]. Without undermining the achievements this implies, there is a joy and limit in the environmental movement is turned in recycle program, feminist movements into pay equity, anti-racism into state quotas, and so on.


I found our conversation about the market initially a bit tangential and yet when you shared your point about the market as social organization and as an afterthought the question on different forms of value exchange in a market is particularly telling. We did not go in detail about this, but I find the film the take, where factories are taken by workers, to confront with two problems at least, one is the participation in the market and the question of surplus. The other is the work regimes and auto disciplinarian regimes of production.

I feel I would like to discuss questions of reproduction of life/production of new forms life, the question of collective care and also of entering vulnerability [not only as a problem or as a negative, but as cycles in life, where death, disease is not denied] in the realm of the political further in the next meetings. I would also like to touch in slave labour, which has been a talking point we did not get to.