Brilliant!

A point though (which has doubtless been dealt with elsewhere on this site – and I will try to read lots more): You say that wage labour, which was one of the preconditions for the emergence of capitalism, is also a category that specifies what needs to be abolished in order for capitalism to be overcome, but does it? Could there be no post-capitalist (in an age when the economy is no longer this ethically blind process of appropriation and accumulation) wage labour? I ask that as a teacher in a little private school who feels some affinity with the school in the Marx quote you use, but who doesn’t feel (and here I take it that appearances really count – that the feeling matters) that the wage-labour relation is what really hurts, what really matters. I am happy to sign a contract and work for a wage, but I am not happy supporting a system in which some independent notion of what counts as a good education is now virtually impossible.

If people are to be allowed to choose the work that they do, isn’t wage labour (in some form) necessary regardless of the ultimate ends of the economic system?

But I am sure if I keep scrolling down the posts I will find that this little chestnut has already been well roasted. (So apologies for being too hasty.)

Keep up the amazing work.

Hey 01010100 – Welcome to the site. We may be thinking of slightly different moments in Marx: Marx does explicitly discuss particular roles – and persons as “bearers” of roles, and as important to his analysis only as such bearers, and the economic “stage”, with its “dramatis personae” – quite often in Capital. When he talks this way, though, he’s speaking at a different level of generality than that of some particular kind of employment – the role of a plumber, or a CEO, for example – he’s talking instead about, e.g., the role of a capitalist. When he uses this kind of language, he will often then make distinctions between the subjective dispositions or practices of the individual who might occupy a role, and the role itself – and often say that, in the analysis he is presenting, he is only interested in the role, not the individual deviations from it.

The term transcendence as used above isn’t intended to implicate anything mystical – just to capture something about the distinctive qualitative character of how certain forms of sociality become available in a capitalist context. Where the context makes available – at the level of everyday practice – a certain kind of practical disjoint between individuals and socially-available roles and dispositions, this makes certain possibilities available within our particular social script: the point here isn’t to talk about some sort of abstract leap outside the context, but to talk about what sorts of materials the context itself makes available, from which we will then make whatever sort of history we make.

In terms of the specific example you mention above – X becomes a janitor, and Y a philosopher – one of the sorts of practical resources that we have managed to demonstrate to ourselves in collective practice – in a quite coercive way, but the practical demonstration can still be useful, for thinking about possibilities for future transformation – for thinking about what potentials could be appropriated into alternative forms of collective life – is that people can fill these sorts of tasks as “jobs” – as positions that can be moved into, and out of – generationally or personally. The potential severing of personal identity from the identity of a particular sort of work – the possibility for the person to “transcend” or not be completely identified with some particular sort of labour – is one of the practical resources Marx begins to find interesting very early, as an insight that, however coercively gained, can be repurposed to more emancipatory ends:

Where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing to-day and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

Hey Carl – I like this:

The similarity being that for both, the oppressive system is speculatively totalized and then reinserted as such into the practical analysis.

Which then forces the notion of what would be required, in order to effect some sort of transformative change, into a totalised direction itself… Not all critiques need to be immanent critiques, of course, so someone could be untroubled by the ahistoricity of an expansive category of patriarchy, if they thought the possibility for transformation didn’t need to rely on potentials generated immanently within patriarchy itself – but the totalising move is more of a problem…

Hi Joe – I think what you’ve written above captures the thrust of the passage I was quoting. Marx doesn’t spare too much pity for the folks coerced into such displays – a bit like his sarcastic discussions of the capitalist’s “abstinence” that are scattered all through Capital – but it’s a dimension of social practice that he analyses in places.

Hey Nick – A discussion of this would probably require some fairly careful definition of terms, to make sure we’re talking about the same things. I’ve suggested above that Marx’s concept of what now gets called the “real economy” is potentially quite expansive – so at least some, and possibly a great deal, of what’s contained within the category of finance capital, as you’re using the phrase above, could potentially slip outside the net of activities that just generate interest (which Marx would tend to regard as a sort of spreading around of surplus value constituted in other ways), and into the net of activities that generate “value” – this needs to be looked at somewhat concretely, I think, to see how it would, or wouldn’t, map onto various claims Marx makes.

The finance sector tosses into motion quite a lot of wage labour – e.g., it’s not as though the sector is comprised of day traders… – and seems to have been subject, over the last many decades, to similar sorts of trends – pressures for productivity increases, tendencies to deskilling, deployment of new technologies, etc. – that are the sorts of trends Marx would analyse in any other area of production. These points capture a slightly different image of the finance sector than the one evoked when we talk about bubbles, etc. – but this is why I suggest that it’s important to define terms, and then to work out exactly what we’re saying has become dominant, when we want to talk about the dominance of the finance sector, and assess whether this has any bearing on whatever Marx is trying to say about wage labour and its importance within capitalism.

As a side point, I should perhaps mention, since I haven’t done much on this on the blog, that Marx writes quite a bit on credit (which he regards as integral to capitalist production). I should write more on that theme, but really need to slog through some material more driven by the thesis, than by the crisis, first… :-)

Take care all…

That’s Pepperell; not Marx. Marx discusses the division of labor issue at some length (along with the wage labor issue). While we may or may not agree, transcendence has little to do with it: the market creates certain demands for particular types of labor, and people meet them (or not).

The social script conditions people–X becomes a janitor, and Y a philosopher–but we don’t recall any mention of transcendence. At least in the German Ideology, Marx suggests they can’t escape or transcend that social-economic-script (Capital continues that). They are scripted to be wage laborers; then further scripted by market forces into whatever sort of laborers owners value. Really, many Postmodernists tend to idealize (in philosophical sense, if not political as well) Marxism, when it’s quite more deterministic than many realize.

At one point I happened to be fiddling with my Lukacs chapter at the same time I was reading a lot of feminism, and by mistake it suddenly occurred to me that since patriarchy is to feminism as capitalism is to marxism, Catherine MacKinnon is to patriarchy as Lukacs is to capitalism. The similarity being that for both, the oppressive system is speculatively totalized and then reinserted as such into the practical analysis.

Is patriarchy a historical enough notion to get dialectical, even contingent? If patriarchy, like class struggle, has always already existed in some form or another as the essence of social relations, how does analysis of it not become a procrustean bed?

Just a few fleeting comments.

First of all, thanks for mentioning my post about Wolff. I think that when you say, “In other words: regulation that secured the humanisation of working conditions under capitalism, also encouraged the process of the consolidation and expansion of capital on an ever-increasing scale,” you touch on one of the highlights of the first part of Wolff’s talk. He criticizes regulation along these lines, which leads him to position his “socialist” alternative as distinct from both the liberal and conservative responses to these sorts of economic problems. I think he gets this right, but doesn’t really offer a proletarian socialist response.

Secondly, I’m glad you bring up the distinction between the miser and the capitalist, in terms of their greed or asceticism. I have realized that pinning “greed” on the excess of Capitalism usually comes from a sense of miserly or as I put it “subjective greed.” This eschews the social role that the Capitalist and his profit-driven motives serve, and makes it difficult if not impossible to address “the problem of Capitalism” as systemic.

Just so it’s clear though, when you say “…even the luxury consumption of the capitalist can come to have its coercive side – in this case, a guilded compulsion to maintain socially average displays of luxury,” do you mean that as Capitalism advances/expands that the socially performative role of the Capitalist (and the petty-bourgeois in their shadow) is invested in just as much as the material means of production? The rise of “corporate Zen” or the 1950s & ’60s “keeping up with the Jones” are what I have in mind.

I think that’s fairly standard Marxism (I’ve taken a lot of the basics from David Harvey). But I have little clue as to whether the idea of finance capital’s central power is common or discredited already in the Marxist literature. So much to read, so little time! Regardless, it seems like an interesting proposal to test out at the moment.

But it also seems to me that one of the major hurdles for arguing that finance capital has become the determining force of capitalism as a whole, is – as you say – the centrality of wage labour. If the financial sector is unproductive in a Marxist sense, then ultimately, everything has to come back to productive labour. Speculative bubbles can arise, and finance can even temporarily take on a determining force, but they ultimately rely on a ‘real’ productive basis. What it seems like to me, though, is that the financial sector has become, to use the catch phrase, ‘too big to fail’. It needs to be kept functioning in all its speculative irrationalism – which means the crisis must be perpetually deferred. Finance has taken on a life of its own, and even now, with all the bailout and rescue measures, what is of the utmost importance to those in power is to save the financial sector. Anyways, just an idea I’m playing with at the moment… underdeveloped and only half thought out, but there might be a nugget of something interesting there!