Subsumption Of Labour Research Articles

The political technology of the ‘Camp’ in historical capitalism

So much of what we experience in neoliberal capitalism resembles the operation of the camp. How then can we understand the camp as a political technology of labour control recurrent in historical capitalism, and why would we want to? Driven by the perennial imperatives to govern (Foucault) and to accumulate (Marx), the camp as a modulation of social control allows us to explore the role of ‘meta-disciplinary’ technique in the ‘real subsumption of labour’. The aims here are (1) to question the sanguine expectations of a liberal pastorate that is inextricable from the needs of capital; (2) to articulate the ‘techniques of domination’ experienced in the idiom of neoliberal capitalism; and (3) to find inspiration for corresponding counter-conducts and ‘techniques of the self’. This article offers a kind of historical archaeology of ‘meta-disciplinary’ technique by resuscitating Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a surprisingly rich source of insight into the operations of the camp modulation and the counter-conducts it engenders. The analysis to follow works in the space between Marxian and Foucauldian political thought opened up by the new materialisms, and draws upon the recent works of Lordon, Lazzarato, Negri, inter alia, that are currently enriching critical theory.

Anthropomorphic Capital and Commonwealth Value

In this essay, we intend to analyze the process of accumulation of contemporary capitalism, in which the regime of valorization derive from the notion of “common” a “results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledges, languages, information affect, and so forth” (Hardt and Negri, 2009) and from its expropriation. When we deal with the concept of “common,” the reference is made to a heterogeneous category. In this text we refer to two modalities of expression of the “common:” the digital common (section network value) and the common of social reproduction (section social reproduction value or the economy of the interiority and anthropomorphic capital). Regarding the first case study, the concept of “network value” is investigated and defined as a product of individual life in a relational context increasingly controlled and subsumed by the social media and big data industry. Regarding the second, we discuss how the activity of social reproduction of individuals is today central in the process of accumulation of the economy. “Social reproduction” is a useful concept to investigate what we call the “anthropomorphic capital,” that is the capacity by the contemporary labor organizations to capture and make productive the essence of today's life and its complexity. In short, it transpires better and better how all activities are productive, i.e., accumulation generators. We observe the apparent paradox of a generalization of surplus value in the era of the decline of waged employment and with it a tension of capital contemporary to the general mortification of living labor. In fact, we note how capital claims to transform the human being into capital itself, explicitly assuming the whole of human existence as a field from which accumulation can be generated (human being, enterprise or human capital). This is what, at this point, we call anthropomorphic capital or the economy of interiority. In the last section, we report some results of an empirical research “Commonfare-Pie News,” able to underline how life is more and more subsumed to the logic of capitalistic valorization, to the point that today we can speak not only of the subsumption of labor to capital but of a real life subsumption.

Rediscovering the cash nexus, again: Subsumption and the labour–capital relation in platform work

This article proposes a re-theorisation of the main social relations of platform work, based on two concepts drawn from Marx: subsumption of labour and the cash nexus. Platform work research to date is heavily empirical in character, with little theoretical development. As a result, the social relations of platform work are treated descriptively, using ad hoc or common-sense categories, or platforms’ own terminology. This under-theorisation leads to over-estimation of platform work’s novelty, decentring of capital in accounts of its development, incipient technological determinism and problematic generalisation from emergent trends. In place of the commonly assumed ‘triangle’ of platform work relations, this article argues that platform work is best understood in terms of an emerging labour–capital relation, which establishes a cash nexus between platform and worker as a result of a process of subsumption. This re-theorisation, in turn, helps to understand the rapid emergence of platform worker organisation and resistance, and the similarity of its demands with worker resistance in other, more established areas of paid work under capitalist relations of production.

The Crisis-Ridden Capitalist Mode of Production as Driving Force for Restructurations and Transformations in and of the Media Industry: Explanatory Theoretical Elements of a Critique of the Political Economy of the Media

The goal of this article is to explain long term restructurations and transformations of the media industry. In order to do so, the article uses theory elements of a critique of the political economy of the media. The paper is a contribution to the development of theoretical approaches that provide a theoretical analysis of the media in capitalism based on Karl Marx’s concepts. The capitalist mode of production is the primary driving force of media corporations‘ strategic action and of the media economy’s structural transformations. Factors that are of particular relevance in such structural transformations include profit orientation, capital accumulation, capitalist crises, state policies, behaviour of producers and consumers, private property, class relations, the antagonism between productive forces and relations of production, the antagonism of variable and constant capitalism, the antagonism of use-value and exchange-value, and competition.
 Competition, capital’s need to survive, and capitalism’s immanent crisis potentials force corporations try to create innovations such as new digital technologies. Informatisation, which includes the use of the computer as universal machine and the Internet, is the provisionally latest stage in the development of the productive forces that has affected media technologies and the media industry. The capital-driven structural digital transformation of the media industry has resulted in the convergence of production, distribution and consumption, the creation of a variety of non-tangible digital products, digital rationalisation and automation, and the universal real subsumption of labour under capital. These developments have also created the potential potentials for overcoming the capitalist character of the media economy and advancing decommodification based on the emergence of a universal digital media system.

Trabalho e educação: categorias fundantes do processo de desenvolvimento humano e da pedagogia-histórico crítica

O presente artigo apresenta uma breve reflexão sobre a historicidade das categorias trabalho e educação, destacando as condições objetivas e subjetivas produzidas nas sociedades capitalistas. Destaca os modos de subsunção do trabalho e da educação pelo capital, na política educacional brasileira, o que requer, a compreensão dialética das possibilidades e dos limites materializados, destacando a intervenção do Estado capitalista e do mercado nas políticas impostas às escolas públicas de educação básica. Após explicitar os fundamentos da Pedagogia Histórico-Crítica e da Psicologia Histórico-Cultural, faz ênfase na retomada dessa reflexão sobre trabalho e educação, para recolocar o debate sobre a relação teoria e prática e, portanto, escola e sociedade na perspectiva de superação do capitalismo.

Power, labour power and productive force in Foucault’s reading of Capital

This article uses Foucault’s lecture courses to illuminate his reading of Marx’s Capital in Discipline and Punish. Foucault finds in Marx’s account of cooperation a precedent for his own approach to power. In turn, Foucault helps us rethink the concepts of productive force and labour power in Marx. Foucault is shown to be particularly interested in one of Marx’s major themes in Capital, parts III–IV: the subsumption of labour under capital. In Discipline and Punish and The Punitive Society, Foucault offers a genealogy of the forms of labour power ( Arbeitskraft) and productive force ( Produktivkraft). One of his central problems is to understand how labour power is converted in productive force and how, prior to that, productive subjects who can properly bear and dispose of their labour power are formed. Foucault’s reading of Capital resonates with those currents of Marx interpretation today that seek to repoliticize the concept of productive force and to offer a materialist account of subject formation.

Towards a “Unified Field Theory” of Uneven Development: Human Productive Subjectivity, Capital and the International

This article puts labour, and its historically changing forms of existence, at the centre of the theorisation of uneven international development. It advocates a consciously dialectical approach that goes beyond significant limitations in historical-geographical materialism, and in the work of Neil Smith in particular. It argues, first, that geopolitical modes of explanation cannot be asserted on descriptive grounds, or in logical abstraction from the determinate content of social reproduction. It then argues that the critique of uneven development must focus on the material process Marx termed the “real subsumption of labour to capital” so as to analyse the transformation of the productive subjectivity of the international working class in contemporary capitalism. This transformation has today resulted in the contemporary form of a “new” international division of labour, the worldwide dynamics of which are mediated by a variety of specific national and regional forms of the capital accumulation process.

¿De asalariados rurales a...? Acceso a la tierra en el norte uruguayo

Desde 2006 el proyecto sucro-alcoholero en Bella Unión, Uruguay, dinamizó diversas experiencias de acceso a tierra por parte de asalariados rurales organizados. Este artículo analiza el caso de los trabajadores de la Unión de Trabajadores Azucareros de Artigas en la Colonia Sendic con foco en los cambios en la subsunción del trabajo en el capital. Los resultados muestran que los colonos conforman una clase híbrida que oficia de intermediaria entre la fuerza de trabajo y el capital, resultado de la imposibilidad de recrear al productor mercantil dada la forma en qué se valoriza capital en el complejo sucro-alcoholero.

The Methodological Rationale of Thomas Sekine

The unique conceptual status of Thomas Sekine’s approach to Marx’s Capital and capitalism, heavily indebted to Kōzō Uno’s work, will be analyzed by setting against its own theoretical counterparts, orthodox dialectical materialism. It will also be shown that Sekine’s critique of dialectical materialism differs from other neo-Hegelian perspectives or Althusser’s anti-Hegelian structuralism. These comparisons unearth Sekine’s concealed epistemological preoccupations: totality, subsumption of labor, self-commodification, historical indeterminacy and the logico-historical error. Last, Sekine also considered neoclassical economics as another form of unfounded orthodoxy both in conceptual and empirical terms, which he emphasizes in his analysis of the current phenomenon of financialization.

Forever young? Marx’s Critique of political economy after 200 years

This article suggests a reconstruction of Marx’s Critique of political economy as a macro-monetary theory of capitalist production. The first part of what follows will provide a sort of methodological introduction to Das Kapital. I am questioning the meaning of critique versus criticism, the distinction between fetish-character and fetishism, the role of dialectics, and the difference between reading, interpreting and reconstructing. I will focus especially on volume I. At the centre of the discussion are: the multiple meanings of abstract labour and socialization, the role of money as a commodity for the labour theory of value, the ‘method of comparison’ in grounding valorisation (the emergence of gross profits) as the constitution of capital from class struggle in production, the unity of absolute and relative surplus value extraction, the key notion of Technologie in the real subsumption of labour to capital, the law of the tendential fall in relative wage, Marx’s two notions of competition, and the macro-monetary class perspective in capitalist reproduction crucial to Capital, volume I. Some considerations are devoted to the transformation problem, the so-called “New Interpretation”, and crisis theory. JEL codes : B14, B24, B51 Keywords : Marx, value, money, crisis, macro-monetary theory of capitalist production

CAPITAL WITHOUT WAGE-LABOUR: MARX’S MODES OF SUBSUMPTION REVISITED

Abstract:This paper argues that capitalist social relations do not presuppose wage-labour. The paper defends a functional definition of the capitalist relations of production, in terms of what Marx calls the ’subsumption of labour by capital’. I argue that there are at least four modes of subsumption, one transitional to and one transitional from the capitalist mode of production. Unlike the capitalist mode of production, capitalist relations of production are compatible with the absence of a labour market, and even with the absence of workplace authority relations. The ambit of capitalist domination is therefore broader than typically thought.

Where Forest Carbon Meets Its Maker: Forestry-Based Offsetting as the Subsumption of Nature

ABSTRACTThe “subsumption of nature” framework focuses on productivity increases and extractive innovations in nature-based industries. In this article, we argue that it can also be employed beyond that context in order to capture the convoluted dynamics of market environmentalism. To substantiate our argument, we draw on recent fieldwork on “Trees for Global Benefits,” a forestry-based offsetting project in western Uganda. Like industrial tree plantations, this project relies on the subsumption of carbon sequestration to market imperatives in order to guarantee the quality of its carbon credits. The ecological and socioeconomic difficulties this process engenders give rise to unintended consequences and set in motion the disciplining of the carbon offset producers themselves. The application of the subsumption framework to nonindustrial sectors in this way calls attention to the interlinked socioecological dynamics involved in the subsumption of nature, and highlights potential synergies with previous work on the subsumption of labor.

Towards an Orthodox Marxian Reading of Subsumption(s) of Academic Labour under Capital

This paper deploys an orthodox Marxian reading of the concept of subsumption of labour under capital. It does so through a brief, critical overview of the components of the Marxian conceptual instrument of subsumption of labour under capital (formal, real, hybrid and ideal subsumption). Recapitulating Marx’s concept, it sheds some light on the consequences of such a reading as a way of understanding the current transformation of the global higher education sector into a capitalist production sector per se . The reconstruction is then considered here as an attempt to approximate the specifics of the subsumption of labour under capital within the higher education sector. Moreover, the paper aims at showing that a discussion of the university dominated by capital with reference to the functioning or constituting of markets does not provide real opportunities for the understanding and solution of such problems as precarization, exploitation or acceleration of academic work. Thus, it joins a wider stream of Marxist higher education research and could be seen as a conceptual contribution to a critique of the political economy of higher education.

Reestruturação produtiva, flexibilização e precarização do trabalho na indústria de Catalão (GO)

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1980-3532.2015n14p161O presente trabalho é parte integrante de um projeto que venho desenvolvendo sobre o processo de reestruturação e a descentralização produtiva, a precarização e a flexibilização do trabalho na indústria de Catalão. Nossa pesquisa tem como eixo central as empresas Mitsubishi, Anglo American e Vale. Contudo, vale ressaltar que, quaisquer que sejam os "modelos" tecno-organizacionais, impostos pelo capital, eles funcionam como formas de exploração de mais-valia relativa e absoluta (e como controle social do capital sobre o trabalho). O capital, não esqueçamos, é uma relação social coercitiva. Nesse sentido, é possível considerar o toyotismo como um dos momentos importantes do processo de subsunção real do trabalho ao capital, que atinge as grandes empresas, num cenário de competitividade global sob a regência de políticas neoliberais, pode ser caracterizado, ainda, como uma ofensiva do capital na produção. A crise do capital tende a tornar adequada, para as condições novas de acumulação capitalista mundial, o modelo japonês. Deste modo, as condições sócio-históricas, onde nasceu o toyotismo, um capitalismo de escassez, de mercado restrito, moldaram-no como um conjunto de princípios adequados para o período do capitalismo em crise.

Production Relations in Agrarian Capitalist Development

Das (2012) proposes to apply Marx’s account of the subsumption of labor under capital, concerning levels of capitalist control of production, in addressing questions regarding the definition of capitalism and the nature and forms of economic development in agrarian economies, and to use the recent economic experience of Indian agriculture for empirical illustration. This comment raises several issues with regard to Das’s reading of Marx’s account and his application of that account in assessing Indian agricultural development.

Marx and Weber and the logic of historical explanation: The rise of machine capitalism

In Marx’s characterization of the first stage of manufacture, economic production is constituted by the formal subsumption of labor under capital and thus the retention of precapitalist processes of production. In consequence, increases in production occur with constant returns to scale, competitive constraints are incompletely developed (per unit costs are not reduced), cooperation is simple, and this economic structure is consistent with various traditional as well as with rationalizing values. The objective, coercive, competitive constraints found in machine capitalism (the “iron cage”) are absent, and if capital accumulation occurs within this first stage of manufacture, it must be motivated subjectively. While Weber provides an explanation of the nature of this subjective motivation, an explanation of the capacity of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism to motivate capital accumulation systematically presumes a characterization of the logic of economic production that is developed incompletely in Weber’s analysis. The Protestant ethic becomes the spirit of capitalism, and methodically motivates capital accumulation, only when it interpenetrates the first stage of manufacture. Thus, neither Marx nor Weber alone provides an adequate explanation for the emergence of machine capitalism. Marx slights the necessity for the autonomous, subjective motivation of capital accumulation within the first stage of manufacture, while Weber provides an inadequate analysis of the nature of manufacture, the structure of economic production that is rationalized subjectively by the spirit of capitalism. However, their arguments are complementary and, if integrated, provide the foundation for a satisfactory explanation of this developmental process. Through my characterization of their analyses of capital accumulation in the first stage of manufacture, I construct an argument about Marx and Weber’s understanding of the role of value-commitments in the analysis of economic/social structures and about the common logic of historical explanation found in their theories.

EL CAPITALISMO Y EL RECHAZO DE LOS LÍMITES: EL CASO EJEMPLAR DEL TAYLORISMO Y EL FORDISMO

This paper intends to deploy a reflection on some of the general features of taylorism and fordism, two work organization and surplus generating devices that have marked the history of capitalist modernity and have established a production pace unprecedented in the history of economic life. By relating such devices to the capital's immanent tendency to increase himself –to look for its own self-expansion–, the text is inspired by the thought rooted in Marx's and Foucault's works in order to inquire into the sense of those strategies of subsumption of labour under capital which try to generate subjects of obedience and productive bodies.

Wages against Artwork: The Social Practice of Decommodification

From Foucault's claim that we are now all entrepreneurs of ourselves to Antonio Negri's (and others') claim that we are now in a moment of the real subsumption of labor to capital, the status of labor has changed. What aesthetic approaches to the status of labor as commodity can we locate at the end of labor, and how does this problem intersect with commodity-art? I suggest that a logic and an aesthetic of decommodification is required in order to continue our conversation about how aesthetics and value are co-constituted in contemporary arts practices; I introduce the artist Caroline Woolard's practice as a site to investigate the problem of artistic labor and aesthetic value in an entrepreneurial age. This essay is divided into two sections. The first offers a possible deduction of decommodification from the theoretical convergence of aesthetics and commodification. I move through the work of Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Theodor Adorno, and contemporary commentators on commodity forms including Silvia Federici. The second considers Woolard's work as an example of how decommodification can help think through art, labor, and entrepreneurship in relationship to the emergent mode of social practice.

Formalna i realna subsumcja pracy pod kapitał. Formy przejściowe.

Polish translation of Karl Marx Formal and real subsumption of labor under capital. Transitional forms

Crisis of Law of Value and the Real Subsumption of Labor under Capital. Questions for Michael Hardt.

Crisis of Law of Value and the Real Subsumption of Labor under Capital. Questions for Michael Hardt.