Trans-Scripts 3 (2013)

The Proletariat*
Nathan Brown**

A political slogan always takes place, articulated in a context, at the crux of theory and praxis. A slogan, especially when it takes the form of a chant, conjoins the thinking of a situation to action within it. A slogan or chant manifests the inscription of political thought within the political action of bodies. Likewise, it manifests the inscription of acting bodies within the thinking they articulate. As everyone knows who participates in political action, this is what lends the practice of chanting during a march, a picket, or an occupation the peculiar quality of being at once discomfiting and exhilarating: the surrender of ones thinking body, situated at the crux of theory and praxis, to the declarative speaking of formulations that are not necessarily or essentially ones own. Participation in the collective articulation of political situations opens individuals to both the joy and the anxiety of being spoken through, ventriloquized by the collective. Indeed, often one finds oneself repeating formulations with which one does not agree at all; and this is part of the requisite humiliation of political action, the frequent necessity of allowing our participation in what happens to overcome our proud attachment to the consistency of what we think we are. Sowhat are we, when we occupy this curious interstice between the tenuous and temporary consistency of the collective (a common cry, for instance) and the inconsistency of what we think we are? Its with this question in mind that I want to reflect on one particular chant that was taken up in a particular context during the political sequence called Occupy Oakland. The context was the Anti-Capitalist March on the day of the General Strike, Nov. 2, 2011. The chant was We, Are, The Proletariat.
__________________________ * This text was presented as the keynote lecture at the 15 March 2013 graduate student conference in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, titled, The Laboring Body. ** Nathan Brown is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and the Program in Critical Theory at the University of California, Davis. His works include The Technics of Prehension: On the Photography of Nicolas Baier (forthcoming), Origin and Extinction, Mourning and Melancholia: On Terrance Malick's The Tree of Life and Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2012), Rational Kernel, Real Movement: Alain Badiou and Thorie Communiste in the Age of Riots (2012), Red Years: Althussers Lesson, Rancire's Error, and the Real Movement of History (2011), and Absent Blue Wax (Rationalist Empiricism) (2010). 61

Nathan Brown

What would such a slogan have meant in the context of its articulation? Most immediately, we can say that it functions as a displacement of another slogan: We Are the 99%. Both of these slogans configure the political terrain as that of class struggle, but the class analysis implied by each is quite different. The opposition of the 99% to the 1% thinks class in terms of income levels, pointing to the inequality and injustice of income distribution. The category of the proletariat, on the other hand, is premised upon a structural analysis of property and the wage relation. But it isnt necessary to view We Are the Proletariat as a polemical slogan, in the context of that march, rejecting the liberalism of We Are the 99% as ideological or incorrect. Rather, it simply points to something like the condition of possibility for the opposition between 99% and 1%: namely, to the exploitation of the wage relation as the structural and historical cause of economic inequality under capitalism. But of course, to determine the constitution of the proletariat through reference to the wage relation is immediately to provoke objections which will indeed prove essential: objections that bear upon the conditions of possibility for the wage relation itself. In The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx is categorical: the proletariat is the class of modern wage-labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live. 1 But in Capital, as Aaron Benanav and Endnotes point out in an essential article on surplus populations, Marx is more inclined to define the proletariat as what they call a class in transition. 2 Proletarian, Marx writes in a footnote to Chapter 25, must be understood to mean, economically speaking, nothing other than wage-labourer, the man who produces and valorises capital, and is thrown onto the street as soon as he becomes superfluous to the need for valorisation. 3 Here, the proletariat is best considered that class which, by working, tends to produce its exclusion from work. What Marx calls the general law of capitalist accumulation 4 is that the working population...produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent which is always increasing. 5

Karl Marx, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Samuel Moore (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 33.
1 2

Aaron Benanav and Endotes, Misery and Debt: On The Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital in Endnotes 2 (April 2010): 20-51. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 764. Ibid., 798. Ibid., 783. 62

3 4 5

Nathan Brown So this is one limit through which we need to think the category of the proletariat: the transformation of the working class into a class which is not working. And we need to conceive of this transitional character of the class as internal to its class constitution, by conceiving of the class historically. Importantly, this is a limit we encounter under conditions of real subsumption that obtain relatively late in the history of capitalism, through technological and managerial innovations that tendentially render living labor relatively superfluous. Much earlier, however, in the very process of its initial constitution, the category of the proletariat is already riven by internal contradictions. Marx describes the process of primitive accumulation as that of divorcing the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his own labour...of divorcing the producer from the means of production, a process through which immediate producers are turned into wage laborers. 6 The gradual formation of the capital-relation through expropriation is punctuated by moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labour market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians. 7 Here we can think through the limits of Marxs definition by turning to counterhistories of primitive accumulation offered by Silvia Federicis Caliban and the Witch: Women the Body and Primitive Accumulation, as well as by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. The essential formal point that I want to draw from Federicis study is that, as she puts it,
primitive accumulation...was not simply an accumulation and concentration of exploitable workers and capital. It was also an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as race and age, became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat. 8

While Marxs analysis of primitive accumulation focuses upon the production of landless wage laborers through expropriation, Federici focuses upon the conditions of possibility for the production and reproduction of labor power itself, and thus upon the subjugation of womens labor and womens reproductive function that was essential to the formation and maintenance of the so-called working class. Of course, this subjugation involved the exclusion of women from waged work, and
6 7 8

Ibid., 874-875. Ibid., 876.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), 63-64. 63

Nathan Brown thus the construction of a new patriarchal order based upon the mediation of access to the wage through men. In particular, Federici shows that the construction of this new patriarchy was heavily predicated upon the witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries: the brutal disciplining of womens bodies and forms of collective life that was necessary to enforce a new sexual division of labor and confine women to reproductive work. 9 Thus, Federici treats gender as a specification of class relations, arguing that the term women signifies not just a hidden history that needs to be made visible; but a particular form of exploitation and, therefore, a unique perspective from which to reconsider the history of capitalist relations. 10 The point I want to hold onto here is that the process of primitive accumulation produces different forms of exploitation, in a technical sense: not only exploitation through the direct extraction of surplus value from wage labor, but also the dependency of wage labor in general upon the unwaged exploitation of reproductive labor in the home, as well as the unwaged exploitation of slave labor. Any consideration of the laboring body thus has to account for Federicis central claim: that if capitalism has been able to reproduce itself it is only because of the web of inequalities that it has built into the body of the world proletariat. 11 What this means is that the proletariat is constitutively divided, in the first instance: the very process of its constitution is also the process of its division, and the creation of the contradiction between capital and labor is also the creation of internal contradictions and inequalities within the proletariat itself, corresponding to different forms of exploitation structuring the relation of different laboring bodies to capitalist accumulation. 12 Similarly, in The Many Headed Hydra Linebaugh and Rediker argue that the emphasis in modern labor history on the white, male, skilled, waged, nationalist, propertied artisan/citizen or industrial worker has hidden the history of the Atlantic proletariat of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. 13 This proletariat, they argue, was anonymous, nameless, female and male, of all ages,
9

Ibid., 12. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 17.

10 11 12

Primitive accumulation, then, was not simply an accumulation and concentration of exploitable workers and capital. it was also an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as race and age, became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat (Ibid., 64). Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 332. 64

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Nathan Brown mobile, transatlantic, motley and multiethnic, planetary in its origins, motions, and consciousness. It was often unwaged, forced to perform the unpaid labors of capitalism, and indeed, the unpaid labors of the process of primitive accumulation itself. This last point is crucial: the proletarian class is not only constituted as a result of expropriation; rather, the labor of expropriation is already performed by unwaged or precarious workers upon whom capitalism will continue to rely, who are intrinsic to the constitution of the proletariat. Referring to those who were known as hewers of wood and drawers of water, Linebaugh and Redicker argue that:
Hewers and drawers performed the fundamental labors of expropriation that have usually been taken for granted by historians. Expropriation itself, for example, is treated as a given: the field is there before the plowing starts; the city is there before the laborer begins the working day. Likewise for long-distance trade: the port is there before the ship sets sail from it; the plantation is there before the slave cultivates its land. The commodities of commerce seem to transport themselves. Finally, reproduction is assumed to be the transhistorical function of the family. The result is that the hewers of wood and drawers of water have been invisible, anonymous, and forgotten, even though they transformed the face of the Earth by building the infrastructure of civilization. 14

We can only grasp the significance of this history if we understand the proletariat as a class in transition rather than as a class with a stable historical identity. Once again, the proletariat never is stable or cohesive as a class: it is always already divided in and through the continual process of its constitution. Through the analysis of primitive accumulation offered in books like The Many Headed Hydra or Caliban and the Witch, and through historical and theoretical work on the tendential production of surplus populations by Mike Davis or Aaron Benanav, we can thus recognize that the class of modern wage laborers is a definition of the proletariat with a very limited, superficial, and historically circumscribed purview. Indeed, perhaps enough work has been done to this effect that this point should seem obvious, or even banal. But the question is, what are the conceptual, structural consequences of this recognition for theory and praxis? And that question implies another: why is the proletariat still the right term for grappling with these conceptual and structural consequences? It is important to note, in this respect, that Federici, Linebaugh and Rediker, and Benanav continue to rely upon this term, even as they challenge its canonical definition. To recapitulate, the historical and structural claim Im emphasizing here is twofold: 1) the proletariat is not a stable historical entity or class identity, but rather a class in transition
14

Ibid., 42. 65

Nathan Brown 2) the proletariat, as a class in transition, is internally differentiated and indeed constitutively divided by different forms of exploitation Apropos of these points, consider the tension in the sequence of occupations during 2011-2012 between the terms Occupy and Decolonize, tensions that have also been important within the struggle at the UC. Again, the opposition of the 99% to the 1% proposes an implicit class analysis (though not a very rigorous one) as the ground of solidarity and antagonism upon which the occupations can be constructed, and which they share. But we know that the term occupation also applies to the occupation Afghanistan, the occupation of Iraq, the occupation of Palestine, the UN occupation of Haiti, and to the whole history of colonial occupation. This history thus involves a different ground of solidarity and opposition that also makes a claim upon the struggle branded Occupy, especially because we know that what is being occupied is already occupied groundthe occupations are actually counter-occupations which, at their best, challenge capitalist property relations established through primitive accumulation (and sustained through ongoing rounds of primitive accumulation). Insofar as they recognize their crucial relation to the history of primitive accumulation, the occupations must also recognize their relation to the history of colonialism and anti-colonial struggle. That is, they must recognize their relation to what Franz Fanon calls the colonial situation, and to the process of decolonization. For Fanon, the colonial situation is characterized by an absolute division between colonized and colonized: a world divided in two, a Manichean world in which challenging the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of viewpoints. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the impassioned claim by the colonized that their world is fundamentally different. 15 Decolonization unifies the colonized against the colonizer through violent strugglean effort to completely displace, remove, and erase the colonizer, thereby constituting a new situation. The competing claims of the terms occupy and decolonize thus index the different logic of a political movement considered in terms of class struggle or decolonization. And these different logics immediately highlight differences and divisions within, and constitutive of, the so-called 99%. This was immediately clear in the fall of 2011, just as it was immediately clear in the struggle at the UC in the fall of 2009. Predictably, there were competing calls for unity or the articulation of difference, and the latter rightly emphasized the different forms of exploitation latent in the apparent unity of the class named by the 99%. The problem with the quantitative logic of that term is that it offered no means of grappling with those
15

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004), 66

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Nathan Brown different forms of exploitation, no way of getting a conceptual grip on their differential logics or histories. Indeed, the problem with the opposition between the 99% and the 1% is that it has no history. The term the proletariat, on the other hand, has a history which is essentially linked to the process of primitive accumulation, and this is precisely why it can give rise to counter-histories like those of Federici or Linebaugh and Rediker, counter-histories that work through the differential constitution of the proletariat through colonialism, slavery, and the violent subjugation of womens bodies as unwaged reproductive labor. In her book The Communist Horizon, Jodi Dean makes the curious suggestion that the term proletariat be replaced by the term the people as the rest of usthe rest of us referring, here, to what was called the 99%. 16 My wager, she writes, is that an emphasis on the people as the rest of us can do the work formerly done by proletariat. 17 According to Dean, We are the 99% names an appropriation, a wrong. In doing so, it also voices a collective desire for equality and justice, for a change in the conditions through which the 1% seizes the bulk of what is common for themselves, leaving the 99% with the remainder. 18 A wrong, a desire for equality and justice: this is precisely the discourse and the form of thought that Marx attacks in The Critique of the Gotha Program, which Fanon associates with the Western, humanist values espoused by colonized intellectuals. In their introduction to the first issue of LIES: A Journal of Materialist Feminism (2012), the editorial collective writes:
Our materialism dispenses with concepts of rights, equality, justice, agency, representation, or any that otherwise affirm the same set of relations and political forms that inaugurate and ensure our oppression. Rather we turn our attention toward the various registers and forms of violence that characterize patriarchy, a structure and set of mechanisms that produces relations of domination and subordination, but within which identity categories are unstable. 19

This statement recognizes that concepts of rights, equality, justice are not only idealist but also complicit in the forms of oppression they apparently oppose. The ahistoricism of a term like the people as the rest of ussupposedly the victims of a wrong who supposedly desire equality and justiceloses not only the material history of a
16

Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (London: Verso, 2012), 70: In this chapter, I present the idea of the people as the rest of us as a modulation of the idea of the proletariat as the subject of communism. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 201.

17 18 19

LIES: A Journal of Materialist Feminism 1 (2012): 10-11. See also Jackie Wangs important article in LIES, Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety (145-172). 67

Nathan Brown category like the proletariat, but also the materialist counter-histories the term has generated through efforts to make it rigorously consistent with the very history in which it is entangled. Thus, rather than historicizing such a category and the problems its usage entails, Dean can only bemoan and wish away any emphasis upon the inherently differential and discrepant composition of struggles:
By denying the fundamental opposition to Wall Street that divides the movement from the politics that preceded it, the embrace of multiplicity proceeds as if we were just the same assortment of individuals with opinions and views as before, rather than a collectivity so threatening as to incite overwhelming and violent police response. As a consequence, participants are encouraged to emphasize their individual positions rather than cultivate a general, collective one. The result is that they continuously confront one anothers particularities as differences that must be expressed rather than, say, disciplined, repressed, redirected, sacrificed, or ignored as not relevant to this struggle. 20

Deans thinking here is not only grossly reductive (theoretically and practically), it is also factually incorrect. Early in the fall of 2011, pieces like the W.&.T.C.H. communique from Baltimore, or Joel Olsons essay on Whiteness and the 99% criticized both the reformist logic of identity politics and the foot-stomping liberal insistence upon false unity, as well as the sort of individualism Dean mentions. 21 In carrying out this critique, such writing thought dialectically about the composition of struggles and about the decompositions they contain, which are always taking place and have a history that cannot and should not be repressed, redirected, sacrificed or ignored. The slogan decolonize insists not only upon conceptualizing occupation as counter-occupation of already occupied land, but also upon installing the antagonism of the colonial situation within the counter-occupation itself: it insists upon the constitutive fact of dividedness that literally makes up the so-called 99%, and beneath that superficial label, the proletariat. The proletariat is a class in contradiction not only externally but internally, and to do political work is to work within and upon the element of those contradictions. If Dean were practically engaged in radical politics to the point of inextricable implication, it wouldnt be long before she learned this the hard way, as every radical must in one way or another. It is a matter of practical fact that this can only be a matter of debate in theory.

20 21

Dean, The Communist Horizon, 220.

On The Recent #Occupations: A Communique from W.&.T.C.H. (October 2011), https://sites.google.com/site/bmorewomentrans/communique (accessed 4/7/13). Joel Olson, Whiteness and the 99% (October 2011). http://www.bringtheruckus.org/ ?q=node%2F146. (accessed 4/7/13). 68

Nathan Brown We can think through some consequences of this matter of fact, at a formal level, through an important 1976 essay by Paul Mattick, New Politics and the Old Class Struggleand we can also supplement Matticks analysis by considering the proletariat as an internally differentiated class in transition. Mattick is concerned with a simple point: that radical political struggles are linked to the vicissitudes of capitalist development, assuming different forms according to the changing fortunes of the capitalist system. And indeed, Mattick points out that because all labor organizations form part of the general social structure they cannot be consistently anti-capitalist, except in a purely ideological sense. 22 Mattick analyzes the dialectical relation of spontaneity and organization that constitutes the dilemma of radicalism:
In order to accomplish anything of social significance, actions must be organized. Effective organizations, however, tend towards capitalist channels. It seems that in order to do something now, one can only do the wrong things, and in order to avoid false steps one should undertake none at all. 23

Thus, Mattick argues, radicals faced with the impasse of organizational integration tend to either put their faith in spontaneous uprisings of the masses or accept the reformist character of political organizations that are able to sustain themselves within capitalist social relations. We can call this the problem of organization, which is a general, structural feature of anti-capitalist struggle. We can also extend the problem of organization to our analysis of the internally differentiated character of the proletariat as a class in transition. In order to be effective, class action must be cohesive. But insofar as the cohesion of the class takes precedence over and represses the differences, divisions, and antagonisms constitutive of its formation it will tend to align itself with capitalist social relations that do the same: that constitute the proletariat, as a working class, at the same time as this constitution relies upon and represses the reproductive, unwaged, and informal labor that produces and reproduces the class in the first place. This is why the repression of such differences will inevitably have explosive consequences within struggles: this repression is the historical and material ground of class itself, and therefore of the very thing against which one struggles. What is at issue here is precisely the old structural problem and imperative of the self-abolition of the proletariat. We are in a position to formulate the structural condition of this problem and imperative clearly and concisely: the proletariat is what
Paul Mattick, New Politics and the Old Class Struggle (1976), http://www.marxists.org/ archive/mattick-paul/1976/new-capitalism.htm (accessed 4/7/13). See also Spontaneity and Organization (1949), http://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1976/new capitalism.htm. (accessed 4/7/13).
22 23

Ibid. 69

Nathan Brown it is not. The proletariat is not the working class which it produces, reproduces, and simultaneously renders superfluous. But the formation and constitutive decomposition of the working class which the proletariat includes does indeed condition the way in which the proletariat is what it is not: that is, it conditions the contradictory and transitional character of an historically articulated locus of differential forms of exploitation. We are nothing, we must become everything: this is the classic slogan of the class that Badiou or Rancire conceptualize as the part of no part. But this slogan is in fact misleading. To think revolution as the self-abolition of the proletariat is to recognize that the problem is not how the proletariat can become everything, but rather how the proletariat can become nothing, precisely by working upon the way in which it is what it is not. It is because they place this problem at the crux of their theoretical production that I find the work of the group Thorie Communiste (TC) essential to thinking through the problem of organization and its relation to an understanding of revolution as the self-abolition of the proletariat. For most of the past 200 years, the dominant form in which revolutionary class struggle has presented itself is the workers movement, operating through such mediations as the union, the party, the council, the self-organized workplace, and conceptualizing revolution in terms of a seizure of state power and the organization of a transition to communism through the dictatorship of the proletariat. TC refers to this period of struggles as programmatismforegrounding the organization of struggles according to a working class program and the self-affirmation of working class power, whether reformist or revolutionary. Simply put, the problem TC try to confront is: what happens to proletarian struggle after the relative waning of working class power, the waning of the workers movement as a dominant form of struggle, in the 1970s and 1980s? A postfordist restructuring of the economy takes place during these decades: the process of deindustrialization, neoliberal austerity measures and structural adjustment programs, the expansion of financial speculation and credit markets which unfix consumer spending from wages. This counter-revolutionary restructuring tends to displace and decompose working class power, such that being a worker, as a form of identity, is no longer an affirmative ground of collective struggle, but rather a situation from which one is excluded or a negative determination by which one is constrained. 24 The rise of the prison-industrial complex in the US, for example, brutally expresses the contemporary necessity for capital of both excluding proletarians from the working class while nevertheless reproducing exploiting their labor under constrained conditions.

See Thorie Communiste, The Present Moment, http://libcom.org/library/presentmoment-theorie-communiste. (accessed 4/7/13)

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Nathan Brown The problem posed by the end of programmatism is: how can revolution proceed otherwise than as the self-affirmation of the working class? This is the problem of proletarian self-abolition, rather than self-affirmationand self-abolition is considered here as the immediate process of revolution rather than a transitional program carried out after a seizure of state power. The problem is thus: how is it possible for the proletariat, acting as a class in contradiction with capital, within the capitalist mode of production, to abolish itself as a class and thereby produce communism? Let me phrase this question otherwise: how is it possible for the proletariat to reproduce itself without reproducing itself as a class? That is: to reproduce itself without reproducing the conditions through which it both reproduces and is reproduced by capital? Understood as communization, the revolution is the very process in and through which the proletariat, a class in struggle, learns to reproduce itself as other-than-a-class: and this constitutes the condition of possibility for the continuation of the revolution. The problem of revolution is thus that of immanently breaking the double cycle of reproductionthe reproduction of both capital and labor that reproduces the class relation. It is this focus on reproductionboth the reproduction of the class relation and the reproduction of the revolutionary process that destroys the class relationthat enables us to think the proletariat as something other than the working class, both in its historical constitution and in the process of revolutionary struggle. 25 Again: the proletariat has to be what it is not. It has to organize itself as a class to struggle against its reproduction as a class, precisely by reproducing itself without reproducing the class relationand thus reproducing itself as other than the proletariat. It is this fundamental contradiction within class struggle that TC analyzes in terms of the relation between dynamic, limit, and rift or gap (or cart). Because acting as a class also involves acting as a class, the dynamic of struggle (class action) is also its own limit. 26 We see the contradiction of dynamic and limit in the perpetual relay between composition and decomposition to which struggles are prone. Insofar as they cohere, the cohesion of struggles always also highlights both the cohesion of the proletariat as a class, which is precisely what has to be undone, and the internal contradictions by which the proletariat is riven, and which divide its unity. The reciprocal implication of dynamic and limit thus opens a rift or gap or swerve (cart) in class struggle by exposing both internal contradictions inherent to the composition of the
25

On the relation of TCs work to materialist feminist work on the reproduction of the class relation, see Maya Gonzalez, Communizaiton and the Abolition of Gender in Communization and its Discontents, ed. Benjamin Noys (New York: Minor Compositions, 2011), 219-234; and P. Valentine, The Gender Distinction in Communization Theory, LIES: A Journal of Materialist Feminism 1 (2012): 191-208. See Thorie de lcart in Thorie Communiste 20 (September 2005): 7-196. 71

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Nathan Brown class and class composition itself as contradictory to class abolition. The opening of such a rift thus posits or indicates or imposes a further limit to be overcome. This is the sense of TCs important formulation: self-organization is the first act of revolution; it then becomes an obstacle which the revolution has to overcome. 27 Any movement will articulate itself, internally, and this will often involve different internal processes of self-organization that also disorganize, or disarticulate, the unity of organization as a class. This is just to say that movements are often, or always, subject to violent decompositions that are also dialectical recompositions of the movement. Moreover, struggles will also be repressed, and such repression both fuels the dynamic of the struggle and limits what it can do. Struggles undo themselves, internally, and they are undone, externally. But this process of fragmentation, decomposition, repression, and recomposition is the inescapable condition of the proletariat having to struggle within the manifold contradiction that it is. I do not mean to be blithe or metaphysical about the concrete problems of organizing struggles, the concrete imperatives of collectively constructing a force that is coherent enough to constitute a consequential threat. But while, in theory, we can play at party intellectual, earnestly insisting that we have to get organized and stay organized, in practice we have no choice but to grapple with contradictions inherent to the problem of organization that we actually encounter. TC writes:
We have to consider seriously the fact that we are engaged in a class struggle which is a large historical movement with its deep tendencies, is restructurings, its necessities, but we are engaged in it each day as it comes. It is in the incessant interaction between all these levels, between the specific and the general, that we make our way, that we have to weigh our actions and those of our adversaries. 28

The fact is that, each day as it comes, the adversarial ground of struggles shifts, and this is largely because of the differential forms of exploitation by which the proletariat is at once constituted and divided. This is perhaps more than ever the case today, when struggles take place within a crisis of the reproduction of both capital and labora situation in which the same structural dynamics that shrink profit margins, pop financial bubbles, and sow economic crises are the also those that generate mass unemployment, foreclosures, vast slums and prison populations, ecological crises, and itinerant immigrant labor on the margins of the wage relation
Thorie Communiste, Self-organisation is the first act of the revolution; it then becomes an obstacle which the revolution has to overcome, http://libcom.org/library/selforganisation-is-the-first-act-of-the-revolution-it-then-becomes-an-obstacle-which-therevolution-has-to-overcome. (accessed 4/7/13).
27

Thorie Communist, The Glass Floor, http://libcom.org/library/glass-floor-theoriecommuniste?quicktabs_1=1. (accessed 4/7/13).

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Nathan Brown effects that are always unequally distributed along lines of sex, gender, and race. The rifts along these lines have to be, and will be, foregrounded in struggles. Immersed both in large historical tendencies and in the concrete problems of each day as it comes, we should not delude ourselves by thinking that we can make the proletariat be what its supposed to be, a cohesive revolutionary class. The proletariat can only be revolutionary by being what it is not, and the proletariat is the name of this contradiction. *** In his heretical, carefully argued book on Marx, Michel Henry maintains the thesis that Marx is not a materialist, and that this is the real strength of his work. Just as Kants critique of pure reason displaces the opposition between rationalism and empiricism, Henry argues, Marxs critique of political economy displaces the opposition between idealism and materialism. Henrys claim is that Marxs project is properly understood as a transcendental investigation, essentially bound up with an analysis of conditions of possibility, the transcendental ground of exchange, of the economy, and indeed the reality of history. Kant and Marx are transcendental philosophers, but the difference between them is that in Marx, transcendental philosophy ceases to be a philosophy of transcendental consciousness in order to become a philosophy of reality. 29 While I do not agree with nor wish to transmit the overall results of Henrys analysis, I do want to retain this point in order to ask: what is the reality which the constitution of the proletariat as a class both occludes and reveals? What is the ground of the claim, to reverse my earlier formulation, that the proletariat is not what it isa class? This is another way of asking: what does the self-abolition of the proletariat entail? What will become of the contradiction that it is when that contradiction is undone and dispersed?These are questions concerning the laboring body, about the different forms of exploitation to which different bodies are subject under capital, and about the undoing and displacement of those forms. Henry argues that the original abstraction which constitutes the transcendental condition for the possibility of exchange is that by which the various labors of diverse individuals are reduced to one and the same labor. 30 This is indeed what Marx argues in the first chapter of Capital: average socially necessary labor time constitutes the measure of value, flattening the singular qualitative content of labor into generic quantitative form. Labor is subsumed by capital insofar as it is organized
29

Michel Henry, Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 192. Ibid. 200-201. 73

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Nathan Brown as capitalist production, such that the real labor of concrete individuals, producing use values, takes on the form of social labor, producing exchange value. On the side of capital, the result of production is surplus value, which reenters the process of production as capital; on the side of labor, the result is the depleted body which has to be replenished by rest and the consumption of commodities. Thus, the reproduction of labor through the wage (C-M-C) accompanies the reproduction of capital through valorization (M-C-M).

But as we know, things are not so neat. The subsumption of labor by capital and the reproduction of the class relation also requires various forms of unwaged labor, and thus it also requires that the various labors of diverse individuals are not reduced to one and the same labor. This is exactly what Federici makes clear when she argues that the term women signifies a particular form of exploitation under capital. The crucial argument that there are different forms of exploitation under capital in fact has transcendental significance. It means that the condition of possibility for the subsumption of labor under capital is that the various labors of diverse individuals both must and must not be reduced to one and the same labor. In fact, this very quantitative reduction, upon which value depends, is predicated upon forms of labor that are not quantified, and the subsumption and reproduction of which relies upon qualitative measures (the violent disciplining of bodies). I want to say that it is through a crisis in the reproduction of the class relation that this double transcendental condition becomes clear (just as it would have been
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Nathan Brown manifest during the initial process of primitive accumulation). It is when the reciprocal yet contradictory reproduction of capital and labor enters into crisis that the fault lines in the category of classthe category of the proletariatbecome clear. These fault lines also make clear the ideological status of conceptualizing the proletariat as constituted entirely by the wage relation and thus by the figure of the worker or wage laborer. To recognize that different forms of exploitation are internal to and constitutive of the proletariat is also to recognize that the self-abolition of the proletariat requires the abolition of these all these different forms, rather than only the one form of exploitation consolidated in the wage. In the Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx attacks the application of concepts like equality and justice to labor or distribution. Subjective activity, he points out, the real activity of concrete individuals, yields no common measureand this fact suffices to destroy any pretense of equality or justice relative to the performance of labor or the distribution of its products. 31 Between different concrete individuals, the subjective experience of labor is never qualitatively the same, precisely because no two concrete individuals have the same body. Different forms of exploitation constitute bodies as categorically different, precisely by treating them, within each category, as the same. The singularity of qualitatively differential activity underlying different forms of exploitation can thus only be released from the formal determinations of capital if the bodies carrying out these activities are considered not as identities, nor as an indifferently unified class, but rather in relation to the different forms of exploitation that constitute them as proletarians, and that constitute the proletariat as such. This is a formal condition of possibility for the production of communism.

31

See also Henry, Marx, 194-196. 75