Capital's Dice-Box Shaking: The Contingent Commodifications of Labor Power

Abstract

This essay suggests how the problem of contingency necessarily appears as a mode of capitalist domination within the process of commodifying labor power. Tracing this problem in Marx's Capital and Grundrisse, as well as in the work of Uno Kōzō, I demonstrate how an unavoidably contingent and undecidable moment within the process of commodifying labor power is itself exploited for the purpose of producing surplus value and profit. At the center of this discussion is the way that surplus populations, state apparatuses, and ideology are related fundamentally to the contingencies immanent to the process of commodifying labor power.