labor and human particularity

8/4/2019 Labor and Human Particularity

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Labor and human particularity:Tracing a dialectical trajectory

with special reference to the concept of skill

Matan Kaminer

Final seminar paper presented to Dr. Anat Matar

for the course "Derrida and the Political"

Department of Philosophy

Tel Aviv University

4 Sept. 2011


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Introduction

Marx's labor theory of value is not ordinarily thought of as a theory of human

particularity (i.e., as a piece of philosophical anthropology). If at all, it is Marx's

earlier, "humanist" work that is read in this fashion. This paper, however, proposes to

read the labor theory of value, as put forward in Capital, as a theory of that which sets

human beings apart from other beings.

I do this through the application of two related Hegelian procedures.1 First, I draw out

the tautological relationship in which Marx's work entangles the concepts of labor,

value, humanity and exchange. Second, I set the theory of capitalism developed by

Marx to work on the concepts of human labor showing how the very tendencies

Marx points to as endemic to capitalism transform and erode it to a point where it is

not clear whether it can still play the role it did at the outset of capitalism. Finally, I

try to speculate on the future trajectory of the concept and fail, and attempt to

excuse my failure.

Throughout the course of the discussion special attention is paid to the change in the

concept of skill and related concepts. I use Harry Braverman's work on the

transformation of labor under capitalism and a modification of Bourdieu's concept of

habitus to show that the vicissitudes of workers' humanity and subjectivity under

capitalism can largely be understood as struggles over the process of de-skilling.

In the forest of tautologies

Value, asserts Marx, is only created by human labor:

1

As a consequence of Hegel's own principles, it is almost useless to cite particular passages when

making use of his insights. My primary source, however, is thePreface to the Phenomenology of Spirit.


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In short, [gift exchange] represents an intermingling. Souls are mixed with things;

things with souls. Lives are mingled together, and this is how, among persons and

things so intermingled, each emerges from their own sphere and mixes together. This

is precisely what contract and exchange are.5

The society of the Andaman Islands (to which Mauss is referring specifically) then

shares a characteristic with capitalist society: both grant a value to exchanged objects

which is independent of their use-value, and in both cases this value depends on the

objects being given by a person. All of the terms in this sentence "value", "objects",

"use-value", "person" change their meaning in the shift from Andaman gift

exchange to modern capitalism, yet the relation between them is maintained.

Sub specie "generalized commodity exchange",6 as Werner Hamacher points out

following Marx, exchange becomes tautological in another sense. It produces a new

language, "commodity language" a very dull one in which only one kind of sentence

can be said.

The cloth [Marx's example of the commodity which speaks "commodity-language"]

speaks and thinks exclusively in the exchange with other commodities, with its

own kind, with regard to them and to the possibility of finding in them its echo or its

reflex. Commodity-exchange-language is restricted to a grammatical-syntactic

minimum in which only propositions of equality can be formed. Such propositions

regularly purport that a particular quantum of one thing is equal to a particular

quantum of another thing Hence the statements of commodity-language are not

propositions of existence but arithmetical propositions of relation7

5 Mauss, The Gift, 256.

6 Marx's term for a theoretical model in which all commodities are exchanged on the market;

capitalism is generalized commodity exchange in which labor power is also commodified.

7

Hamacher, Lingua Amissa: The Messianism of Commodity-Language and Derridas Specters of

Marx, 170.


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Having established that there is, generally speaking, a relation between exchange,

value and the human, we are now ready to leave the forest of tautologies for the

wasteland of capitalism, in which they are shackled to a fourth term, labor.

Labor at the birth of capitalism

Historically, in fact, at the start of its formation, we see capital take under its control

(subsume under itself) not only the labour process in general but the specific actual

labour processes as it finds them available in the existing technology, and in the form

in which they have developed on the basis of non-capitalist relations of production. It

finds in existence the actual production process the particular mode of production

and at the beginning it only subsumes itformally, without making any changes in

its specific technological character. Only in the course of its development does capital

not only formally subsume the labour process but transform it, give the very mode of

production a new shape and thus first create the mode of production peculiar to it.But

whatever its changed shape may be, as a labour process in general, i.e. as a labour

process viewed in abstraction from its historical determinateness, it always contains

the general moments of the labour process as such.8

The distinction between the formal and the real subsumption of labor, originating

here, is a commonplace in Marxist theory. But it is not as commonly pointed out that

Marx's conception of the specificity of human labor quoted above (the image of the

architect as prototypical worker) is in fact only accurate for the stage of formal

subsumption. The transformation of labor under real subsumption, as we shall see,

brings about a change, not only in specific labor processes, but also in abstract and

general characteristics of "the labor process as such".

8 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 198.


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But first let us reflect a moment on the "labour process in general in the form in

which [it has] developed on the basis of non-capitalist relations of production" as it

enters capitalism, and on the concept of the human which it entails. Let us now read

the beginning of the paragraph from Capitalon human labour, the end of which was

quoted above:

Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and

in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material reactions

between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces,

setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in

order to appropriate Natures productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus

acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own

nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to

his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that

remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of

things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity,

from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-

suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human.9

The strict separation, or opposition, between man and nature and man and animal

which Marx presupposes here is, as he is well aware, not universal. It is historical

more specifically, European and early modern.10 This early modern European worker

uses "arms and legs, head and hands" that is, he integrates mental and physical

activities in his labor. Equally importantly, his labor is considered as "acting on the

external world" by producing objects from materials taken from nature. At this stage,

9 Ibid.

10

"Early modern", for my purposes, refers to the period between the Renaissance and the French and

Industrial Revolution, that is roughly 1450 1800.


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activities which do not directly engage in such production of objects, such as prayer

or child-raising, are emphatically excluded from the definition of labor.

Such a conception of labor requires two separations in order to be plausible. First, it

assumes a level of technological development in which humans are "liberated" from

"animal-like" activities (such as collecting berries) on the one hand, and in which

machines are not involved in the planning of production on the other. Second, it

demands a society in which the production of certain physical objects whether

already commodified or about to turn into commodities is both widespread and

strictly differentiated (by gender and class roles) from other activities. Both of these

conditions held true in early modern Europe, as they do not in all societies, including

our own.

Another aspect of labor in early modern Europe which is very important for our

purposes is its culturalgroundedness. Even objects which had always been produced

as commodities (mostly luxuries) were produced in certain ways which were learned

informally,11 as part of the socialization of their producers. The special cultural

characteristics, irreducible to utility, of all objects produced by pre-capitalist societies,

have been much studied and remarked upon under the heading of "material culture".

Production of material objects in pre-industrial societies, including early modern

Europe, rested heavily upon the habitus inculcated in the producers by processes

which in themselves were not intentional "training" for labor. Of course, much the

same could be said about exchange itself, which in pre-capitalist societies was never

founded upon the "cold cash nexus". It was only under capitalism that the spheres of

exchange and production gained their relative autonomy, not only from each other but

from the cultural lifeworld in general.

11

In fact, in medieval Europe at least, formal education was specifically and intentionally impractical,

precisely in order to differentiate it from the craft learning of the plebs.


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The transformation of the labor process

There is no room or need in this paper to trace the actual historical development of the

labor process under capitalism; what interests us is rather the transformations in this

process which arise necessarily, as theoretical corollaries of the capitalist tendency to

accumulation of surplus value.12 These arise as part of what Marx terms the tendency

of the organic composition of capital to grow, or, equivalently, of the productivity of

labor to rise. Instead of quoting extensively from Marx's rather convoluted

presentation of the subject, I shall attempt to paraphrase it more simply and in a way

more suited for my purposes.

The argument rests on the reasoning that there is only one consistent way to compete

in a capitalist marketplace: by lowering one's costs and capitalizing on the difference

between these and the prevailing price of the commodity.13The capitalist's interest is

therefore to invest less value in the same amount of commodity than was done

previously. Of course, there is by definition no way to do this without bringing down

the value of the commodity itself, but the pioneering capitalist can enjoy above-

normal profits until her competitors catch up. Once they do, the commodity will be

sold at its new and lower value. However, something will have changed in the

meantime. Each unit of commodity will represent less value than it did previously.

Since all value is imparted to commodities by labor, there is no way to lower their

12 Of course, this is not to deny the importance of the dialectic between actual, empirical history and the

discovery (usually retrospective) of laws and tendencies only to ignore it for narrow academic

purposes.

13

This in turn can be done either by lowering prices and capturing market share, or by making a higher

profit per unit sold than the competition.


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value without lowering the amount of labor invested in the production of each one.

This can be done either by cheapening labor power or by increasing its productivity.

Each of these goals in turn can be achieved in two different ways.

Cheapening labor power can be achieved by cheapening the production of the

commodities needed for its reproduction food, housing, clothing, etc. known as

the "means of subsistence" (by any one of these same methods). Alternatively (or at

the same time), it can be done by replacing forms of labor which cost more to

reproduce with forms which cost less a process known (though not by Marx) as de-

skilling.

Increasing productivity can be achieved, firstly, by the simplification of complex

labor processes into aggregates of simpler, more mechanical ones. Since complex

labor processes are those which require training and/or experience, this goal is also

subsumed under de-skilling. Alternatively, it can be achieved by replacing human

labor with machine activity. When machines can be designed and built to perform a

specific activity more cheaply than humans, this mechanization is favorable to

capitalist accumulation and will be adopted. Moreover, in separating intellectual from

physical factors in production, simplification can aid in mechanization: from the

moment that a physically powerful human is no longer necessary to do a job, it is

usually more effective to replace him with a physically powerful machine.

All these processes have a single effect as far as Marx is concerned (in Capital at

least): they serve to increase the proportion of value invested by capital in machinery

(constant capital) relative to that invested in wages for workers (variable capital). This

ratio is called the organic composition of capital, and the rise in the organic

composition of capital, as already pointed out above, means that less value is invested

in each commodity. If the demand for commodities does not grow at least as fast as


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the organic composition of capital, not all commodities can be sold at their value and

the result is a crisis.

The point of the argument therefore brings us back to exchange. "Demand" is nothing

other than human customers who have the money and the inclination to buy the

commodities offered by the capitalist.14 The capitalist's contradictory interest vis--vis

these people he wants to employ as few of them as possible but to sell to as many of

them as possible is where I began. This contradiction leads eventually to the

transformation of the relation between human labor and value, which we will examine

below. But first, let us explore the effects of the four methods mentioned above on

work itself.

The first of these, cheapening the means of subsistence, is nothing but the particular

pressure to apply all methods on the specific branches of capitalist production which

produce means of subsistence. Insofar as this simply points to variations in the

pressure on different sectors of capitalist production, it is not significant for our

purposes. We are left with mechanization and de-skilling, which we take to mean both

the simplification of labor processes and the replacement of expensive workers with

cheap ones.

De-skilling and mechanization

As we have seen, labor power "as capitalism finds it" is far from the general capacity

to perform any task demanded of the worker. Rather, it is an ability to fashion quite

specific kinds of objects, which is acquired together with the habitus attuned to (non-

14 When the capitalist's clients are other capitalists (as happens when she produces means of

production), this only serves to push the problem back onto the buying capitalist, who must sell her

product to consumers.


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market. This is emphatically not true of skill in pre-capitalist European society,

where even skill that is formally recognized (in the crafts) was imparted not through

discrete, commodified training but through the total institution of the apprenticeship.

Of course, this is the way skill wouldappear if all labor processes were invented by

and for capital. The objectified character that formal instruction necessarily carries

enables not only its commodification but its division into component parts and their

assignment to workers on a "need to know" basis: in other words, it can be more

easily subjected to de-skilling.

The computer revolution makes the formalization of skill into an even more profitable

proposition. As formalized knowledge becomes programmable, mechanization can

take over labor processes which formerly required skilled labor. As opposed to

previous forms of the machine, computers can be programmed to perform not only

one kind of activity but many kinds. The trajectory of computerization is to

mechanize precisely those capabilities considered particularly human by Marx:

adaptability to new functions and planning ahead.

Another blind spot produced by Marx's reification of skill is the occlusion of the

category's relative character. The distinction between skilled and unskilled labor is

made to appear absolute, as if the unskilled worker is an "unmodified human

organism", which can only perform some defined set of primitive functions. 17 In fact

"unskilled" labor is only relatively unskilled for the particular society under

discussion. In contemporary Israel, for example, literacy is not considered a skill at all

but a basic requirement for entry into the (unskilled) labor force. Having understood

this, we can understand capitalist societies' investment in generalized basic education

as a choice to cheapen the means of reproduction of labor power through the de-

17

Of course this is not Marx's actual view, as could be attested by numerous citations. Nevertheless it is

the view assumed by his comments on this subject.


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skilling and extension of instruction, insofar as literacy becomes a general

requirement for workers.18

A relative view of skill also enables us to counter the bourgeois view that, if the

amount of knowledge (however measured) is growing faster than the population, the

average level of skill is rising rather than falling. In fact something like Marx's law of

"relative impoverishment" of the proletariat also holds as concerning knowledge and

skill. While the vast majority of workers "need to know" less and less, a minority

must gain in knowledge: first, in order to operate the sophisticated machines which

replace workers; second (after this operation is automatized), to design them; and

finally, after this design is also computerized, to direct it. With each step, this group

grows smaller in relation to the working population and closer in its function to

management. Thus it can be gradually "bribed" into identifying with capital, for

example through high wages and stock options.19 What is more, a greater and greater

amount of social knowledge is no longer possessed by any human whatsoever but is

rather stored in computer banks. All this has important ramifications for the concept

of the human under capitalism.20

18 This is not to say that public education in a capitalist society cannot also have other functions; but

these do not concern us here.

19 Phenomena such as the proliferation of computer programmers in areas of India contradict this

tendency only if hypostatized. If we keep in mind the small size of the population of programmers in

relation to the population of the country (which has only recently fully entered capitalist relations of

production) and the rapid de-skilling of programming work, there is no contradiction.

20

This, minus the impact of computerization, is the argument put forward by Braverman in his "Final

note on skill"; see Braverman,Labor and monopoly capital, 424447.


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classed and the human is conceived. Insofar as "human" continues to signify what it

did for Marx in the sphere of production, it becomes more and more the prerogative

of management and of marginal groups, such as academics. It is from their (our)

perspective as inheritors of a past viewpoint that today's work can be judged as

"dehumanized" or "degraded". If, on the other hand, the focus of the category of

"human" is no longer production but rather the sphere ofconsumption, those excluded

from capitalist relations can only be judged to be sub-human.

What, we are now ready to ask, defines the human worker today? In other words,

what kinds of work are the typical human work of late capitalism? 23 Obviously the

answer would be those kinds of work that cannot be (more cheaply) done by machine.

This was the answer already in Marx's age, the difference being that today we are no

longer certain that any kind of work cannot be mechanized. Therefore any attempt to

characterize human work at this particular moment must be contingent, an empirically

informed snapshot rather than a rigorously derived formula. Nevertheless, without

such a snapshot our analysis would remain overly abstract. The following list must

therefore be seen as such an ambiguous snapshot of the current stage in the

development of capitalism and capitalist technology.

First, then, human labor still reigns in the field of "emotion" or "care" work, in which

what the customer buys is the worker's capacity for human affective activity from

sex to babysitting to threatening others with violence.24 Second, human labor is

necessary for quality control or supervision jobs, in which the human is a debugger of

machine processes (though as quality control is automated the remaining work can be

23 By "late capitalism" I am referring here not only to a period but also to a mode of production: those

of the excluded class which does not participate in capitalist relations may do very different kinds of

work.

24 See Hochschild, The managed heart.


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transferred to management). Third, humans are employed in "content production"

jobs, in which the worker's role is to produce signs which other people will be

interested in consuming (entertainment, news etc.). Fourth, people are employed as

mediators between consumers and mostly mechanized production systems, as in

technical services. Fifth (or perhaps this is only a summary of the previous four

points), jobs involving tasks that computers cannot yet undertake well, such as

sensing objects against a background, are performed by humans.

The phrase "more cheaply" placed in parentheses above is also a determining factor.

As the means of subsistence are made cheaper, human labor power becomes cheaper

at a rate which sometimes exceeds that of the general rise in productivity. Thus, there

are many tasks which could be carried out by machine, but nevertheless are not

because human labor power is cheaper and more versatile.

The theoretical weakness of this excursus into speculative particularity may be

excused by the way that its "fleshing in" of a moment in the process clarifies that the

analysis in its entirety has everything to do with gender. As we have seen, the

image of the human laborer particular to nascent capitalism (adopted by Marx, and,

one should add, the labor movement) presented a union of physical power and mental

skill.25 Mechanization and de-skilling have "castrated" the worker by dispossessing

him of both properties, leaving us with a heavily feminized working class. Insofar as

labor continues to define the human, then, the human is also feminized; on the other

hand, the "bare human" functions increasingly left to the working class are those that

have always been assigned to women.26

25 This was the stereotype: from the beginning of industrialization actual workers were of course often

unskilled and physically weak, and often women and children.

26

See Ortner, Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?. for an argument, though I seriously

disagree with her explanation of the structural analogy between the barely human and the female and


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or the persistence of skill?

Heretofore we have discussed skill as a product, either of a total, pre-capitalist

habitus, or as the outcome of a formal, objectivized process of training. However, the

conception of skill under current conditions is not limited to the latter: it is commonly

recognized that skill is not only a matter of formal training but also of individual

aptitude which exists independently of training what we call "talent" and of an

embodied knowledge which is gained through repeated iterations of the practice under

consideration what is known as "experience".

Both talent and experience, of course, are important aspects of Bourdieu's concept of

the habitus, or more specifically of his conception of practice as a result of the

encounter between a habitus and a particular social situation.27 Insofar as a habitus is

the creation of social circumstances similar to the ones it finds itself in, it will "fit in"

felicitously in the situation. This attunement will be perceived as the result of "talent"

insofar as it is observed to be a result of capacities inculcated in early life (often

mistakenly thought to be inborn), and of "experience" insofar as it is seen as an

outcome of repeated encounters with similar situations over a long period, even

perhaps an entire lifetime.

Bourdieu is an un-reflexive humanist in that he outlines a theory of human practice

without invoking any explicit determination of human particularity. He does not shy

away from the implications of the concept of habitus for human freedom and

subjectivity; on the contrary, the concept appears to have been developed for this

purpose. Nevertheless, it appears to suffer from an ahistoricity similar to that

the cultural and the male.

27 Bourdieu, The logic of practice, 5265.


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Can the concept of habitus be rescued from this hypostatized, hypostatizing form? I

believe it can, if we introduce a Hegelian understanding of self-identity as self-

transformation. If the real subsumption of labor introduces an unfinishedprocess of

de-skilling, mechanization and transformation of the human worker, then working-

class habitus can be seen as a process of response to this transformation. As the class

itself changes becoming de-skilled, feminized, relegated to new and "degraded"

forms of work so will its habitus. It will be "the same" class with "the same" habitus

only in relation to the ways in which capitalism remains "the same", that is, only in a

dialectical sense.32

This is not just another way of saying that capital succeeds in fashioning labor after its

own desire. Since habitus is inculcated over time, and since early experiences are

more significant in its development than later ones, the habitus of a working class

subjected to the trajectory of capitalist development would always exhibit a sort of

structural lag, experienced on both sides as a resistance in the sense used in physics,

if not in the political sense. If there is a worker habitus, then de-skilling will be

resented for as long as it goes on, as an affront to (whatever is left of) workers'

humanity.

31 Of course, "working-class habitus" could be taken to refer to a working class as constituted in a

particular historical situation (say, France of the mid-twentieth century). It often appears that it is in

this sense that Bourdieu uses the term. However, this usage differs importantly from Marx's (and our)

conception of class. On the difference between historically constituted class and the Marxian analytic

use of the term, see Tamas, Telling the truth about class.

32 Whether workers always come of working-class provenance is not of central importance here; so

long as labor continues to hold a central place in our understanding of the human, its forms will

continue to inform the habitus of anyone born into capitalist society and therefore of most people who

are forced into the working class.


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For our purposes, the point is that insofar as capital requires human labor to produce

value and profit, it will constantly explore new fields of activity to replace those

which have been mechanized and de-skilled, thus producing lowered value. This in

turn subjects it to a dependency on new skills. These will not necessarily be new in the

sense that the knowledge embodied in them is newly produced. In many cases where

activities that were previously outside the purview of capitalist relations are subsumed

(such as care work), "new skills" will consist of existing abilities, only newly

objectified and commodified.

But it is not only in new fields of capitalist activity that skill will be retained. As we

have seen, the cheapening of labor power retards mechanization insofar as in certain

situations the low price of labor power causes it to be more economical than the

enlistment of machines. In these fields of "old" production as well as within capital's

new activities, new skills will constantly be cropping up.

This is because so long as a labor process is entrusted into human hands, it depends

on transmission through the worker habitus. Formalization and simplification of

learning do indeed make the worker feel like a "cog in the machine", but the point is

thatshe (a subject)feels this, as an actual cog does not. The mode of resistance to the

feeling (already present in the reflexivity of the feeling itself) is a "zooming out"

which sees the particular labor process entrusted to the worker as part of a larger

whole.

In a sense, this is labor taking the management's point of view and this formulation

expresses the temptation faced by management in face of the worker's "big head" (as

we say in Hebrew): it is at once a bonus for capital, a free gift offered by the worker

as a result of her need for self-recognition, her self-humanizing habitus, and a

35

This is not in itself denied by Mandel or others who stick to a "conservative" definition of

productivity.


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resurgence of skill and worker control over the labor process. To reach back to Mauss,

it is a gift, but a poisoned one.36 Workplace struggles over this kind of "self-re-

skilling", in which management may vacillate between contradictory positions, are

thus only a recapitulation on a "micro" scale of the contradiction inherent in capitalist

value production.37 Thus, capital's need to expand into ever new fields of human

activity, as well as workers' need to preserve their humanity through an unwarranted

(from capital's view) mastery over the labor process, are two alienated sides of the

same coin capital being, in the final account, nothing but objectified, "dead" labor.

As long as capitalism persists, so will this obdurate self-re-skilling.

From the point of view of only formally subsumed labor-power the point of view of

Marx and Braverman all this may seem like meager consolation. In fact, it is not

meant as consolation at all. I have no quarrel with the designation of the ongoing

transformation of labor under capitalism as "degradation". I do not question that

whatever scraps of skill workers manage to conserve, whether formalized or

conceived as talent or experience, may be deemed pitiful in contrast with the masterly

crafts of yesteryear. But to judge current forms of worker subjectivity, however

"degraded", as deficiently subjective "one-dimensional", to quote one authority is

to take an un-reflexive and ahistorical view, or in other words, a reactionary one. That

workers' habitus leads them to take this view themselves is, of course, a part of the

problem.

To be effective, working-class politics has to articulate with the lived reality of

workers. The fact that the current wave of revolt against neo-liberalism engulfing the

36See Mauss, The Gift, 81.

37 Workers may often use their understanding of the larger labor process to manipulate management

and shirk work. This is no less an exercise of their subjectivity, but management's relation to it is in no

way contradictory; it is simply hostile.


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world has yet (in most places, certainly in Israel) to take the form of a revolt at work

is perhaps an indication of our lack of imagination with regard to the possibility of an

un-degraded life of labor. The next and final chapter will attempt to deal with this

possibility.

Futures

Marxism has always seen itself, as Derrida points out, as a ghost from the future. The

analysis carried out in this paper has shown that Marx and Braverman's conception of

human labor is in fact a ghost from the past already obsolescent in Marx's time,

elegiac as Braverman wrote, apparently irrelevant today. Our analysis of the working-

class habitus has shown it to also have this resistant, foot-dragging, "reactionary"

character. All this seems to indicate that the future belongs to capital, and that all

labor can do is delay its arrival.

It is here that we must return to where we began (and stopped off along the way a few

times): to exchange. As far as capitalism in generalis concerned, not in any one of its

forms along the way but in its greatest possible abstraction, the only difference

between the worker and any of its other factors of production (machines, animals etc.)

is her other nature as "buyer of commodities",38or in other words, her participation in

the world of exchange. She produces more and more, relative to what she needs to

consume, but there is no longer anyone else who can buy all of this. This is the

tendency to "overproduce" that brings about the crises of capitalism.

Yet the worker's existence as "buyer of commodities" is, once again, nothing but the

reduced form the only form capitalist commodity-language can accept of her

38

As Ernest Mandel puts it, "the one freedom which cannot normally be taken away from the workers

is the freedom to spend their wages as they wish". Mandel, Introduction, 32.


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subjectivity. At the same time this subjectivity, as we have seen, also takes a historical

form within the sphere of production, both as outright resistance as well as, more

interestingly, an ambivalent "big-headedness", a desire to master the production

process and to re-skill herself.

Put this way, there can be absolutely no justification for judging worker subjectivity

as "reactionary" i.e., for condemning it for "coming from" the past. It would perhaps

be more fair to label it "belated", as Rastko Monik calls the theory of ideology.39

Capitalism, as we have seen here, traces a trajectory of the alienation of the human

from itself and its reduction (at least insofar as the world of labor is concerned) to a

very bare sort of subjectivity. The resentment, resistance or obdurateness of the

worker habitus is, in a sense, a memory of this trajectory. What could be the future of

this memory? Can we justify ourselves in dreaming of a return to an unalienated form,

at once conserving the memory of past meanings of human labor and subjectivity as

well as going resolutely beyond them?

The future, as Hamacher writes following Derrida40 precisely apropos the question of

labor in Marxism, would be no future at all if it could be inferred from past and

present. Moreover, the spectral figure of another kind of labor can never be safely

relegated to either one or the other, the future or the past: "specters of the past can

only appear when conjured by the promise of another future."41 (Marxist) speculations

39 "The project of a theory of ideology inasmuch as it conceptually presupposes a 'naturalness' of

statuses and inasmuch as it is not historically possible until the statuses and their respective

'perspectives' break down is necessarily belated." Monik, After the Fall: Through the Fogs of the

18th Brumaire of the Eastern Springs, 113. Emphasis in the original.

40

Hamacher, Lingua Amissa, 197 ff.

41 Ibid., 197.


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labor and human particularity

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