Guido Starosta, Marx's Capital, Method and Revolutionary Subjectivity, Brill, 2015; hbk £112.76, pbk (Haymarket Books, 2017). £24.99.
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This is a sustained intervention in Marxist theory, addressed to the issue of revolutionary subjectivity, but with far wider resonance. If your main interest is in contemporary Marxist theoretical debate, it is essential reading: it introduces the largely untranslated theoretical work of Juan Iñigo Carrera; it builds upon and critiques a vast array of current approaches; and it makes a coherent and elegant argument for revolutionary subjectivity as a necessary result of the unfolding of the concrete determinations of capital in its process of self-valorisation, following the eventual withering away of manual labour. Its key point of reference is the discussion in the Grundrisse (Penguin, 1973: 700) on ‘general scientific labour, technological application of natural sciences, on one side, and … the general productive force arising from social combination [Gliederung] in total production on the other side’.
For someone like me, who is familiar with only a fraction of the vast literature with which Starosta engages, and who seeks to research contemporary global political economy from a Marxist perspective, it has broader value. For inescapable reasons spelled out by Starosta himself, his take on the future emergence of revolutionary subjectivity, impeccable on its own terms, is necessarily abstract. But his approach – because it is based rigorously on the concrete determinations of the valorisation of capital – provides in the meantime a powerful means of investigating contemporary issues, and Starosta himself returns powerfully to this point in his closing pages.
Put at its simplest, Starosta’s argument is that the constitution of the working class as a ‘self-abolishing’ revolutionary subject must come about within and through the historical dynamic of capitalist development, not outside it. Emancipatory subjectivity – a disposition on the part of the proletariat to take charge of their own lives as freely associating individuals – is ‘immanent in the very unfolding of the reified forms of social mediation of capitalist society’ (3). His goal, therefore, is to track its emergence through a materialist analysis that stays true to Marx’s critique of political economy. To do so, he offers a new reading of Marx (one, as noted, grounded in the work of Iñigo Carrera), which in part involves the ‘completion’ of Marx’s own incomplete analysis. So he first sets out Marx’s dialectical method, then produces an account of the emergence of revolutionary subjectivity in accordance with it. Overall, the argument is long, detailed, complex and very heavily footnoted. But in outline it is simple and admirably clear.
First, Marx did not simply ‘turn Hegel on his head’. His adoption of the critique of political economy as a method entailed a rejection not an inversion of philosophy, Hegel included. It proposed instead the ‘reproduction of the concrete by means of thought’, a method that required a break with abstract logic in favour of tracing the specific process of the valorisation of capital, and the manner in which its ‘immanent’ character, necessarily inherent in the process, would give rise in the end to the emergence of revolutionary subjectivity on the part of the working class. An abstract dialectic, however materialist, is not enough – the specific, concrete laws of motion of capital have to be discovered, and reproduced in thought. This is what Marx sets out to do.
Second, Capital (Volume 1) offers a deliberately one-sided account, which needs to be brought together with elements sketched out in the earlier notebooks known as the Grundrisse. When this is done, it becomes clear that the overthrow of the capitalist class through class struggle does not in itself necessarily bring about the emancipation of the working class. Rather, this is only achieved when the science-driven division of labour assigns intellectual labour to humans, and manual labour to things (that is, machines), thereby enabling the transformation of the still alienated subjectivity of the proletariat and making them genuinely revolutionary subjects able to produce their own life as freely associating individuals. But the latter development is only touched on, and incompletely at that, in the Grundrisse.
So ‘whatever transformative powers the political action of workers might have – both capital-reproducing and capital-transcending political action – must be an immanent determination begotten by the alienated movement of capital as subject and not external to it. … As Marx shows in Capital and the Grundrisse, through the constant revolution in the material conditions of social labour, capital progressively transforms the subjectivity of the workers according to a determinate tendency: they eventually become universal labourers, that is, organs of a collective subject capable of consciously ruling their life process by virtue of their power scientifically to organise the production process of any system of machinery and, therefore, any form of social co-operation. This mutation of their productive subjectivity is the necessary prelude to the constitution of the labourers as truly social individuals through their self-abolition as wage workers and the construction of the free association of individuals’ (9, emphasis mine).
The development of a materialist science, then, required the ‘overcoming of philosophy’. In the first three substantive chapters, Starosta argues that the account of alienated labour in the 1844 Manuscripts lacked the ‘positive exposition about the forms of capital’s development that produce in the workers not only the will to social transformation but also the material powers to achieve it’ (44); that Marx ‘overcame’ philosophy by focusing rigorously and without preconceptions (for example, without assuming or invoking any ‘essence’ of humanity) on ‘concretely existing human transformative practice’ (63-75), and its alienated form as an aspect of the self-valorisation of capital; and that it was his critique of Proudhon that ‘attempted for the first time positively to unfold the reproduction in thought of the real movement of capitalist economic forms’, made his critique of Hegel explicit, and committed him to attempt through his scientific endeavour a ‘positive investigation of the social determinations – and hence necessity – of the different forms of the political action of the workers aiming at the radical transformation of the capitalist mode of production’ (77).
Starosta’s approach aligns with Marx’s warning from the preface to the 1872 French edition of Capital (to which he alludes on p. 301) that ‘There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits’. The ‘reproduction of the concrete by means of thought’ means tracing the real movement of things, in their specific modes of existence and development, rather than settling for ‘recourse to the logical necessity of the abstract form of movement’ (84). Starosta therefore rejects a materialist dialectical logic in favour of a materialist dialectical method, in which one traces the emergence of successive concrete forms. Such a method ‘analytically separates the different forms by discovering as immanent in a particular concrete form the realised potentiality of another real form, which is abstract with respect to the first one, but concrete with respect to another form of which it is the realised potentiality’ (93). Immanent potential becomes real and concrete through specific and successive transformations that must be traced directly in real human practice, starting out from ‘present-day economic facts’ (14). I recommend a close reading of the summary of these opening arguments (which for reasons of space and (in)competence I have dealt with in bare outline only) in the section ‘The Limits to Marx’s Early Attempt at a Dialectical Revolutionary Critique of Political Economy’, pp. 109-116. This builds on the earlier suggestion (82) that ‘Marx’s Capital, as a critique of political economy, is not, pace Engels, an application of dialectical logic to political economy, but the ideal reproduction [that is, reproduction in thought] of the real determinations of capital as the alienated social subject of bourgeois society, starting with its simplest mode of existence, i.e. the commodity’.
With this background in place, Starosta turns directly in the second part of the book to the topic of revolutionary subjectivity in Marx’s mature critique of political economy (that is, primarily in Capital, Volume 1). What follows is an extended critical reading of the opening chapters of Capital (especially the first), then of chapters 10 (The Working Day) and 15 (Machinery and Large-Scale Industry) in particular. Here Starosta expands on the distinction between analysis and synthesis in Marx’s dialectical method (129-40), and continues his critique of contending perspectives, in the process of exploring the determinations of the value form of the product of labour (the commodity form), commodity fetishism, subjectivity, the specifically capitalist determinations of the class struggle, and then, in Chapter 8, ‘real subsumption and the genesis of the revolutionary subject’. Only from p. 254 onwards does he take up the issue of large-scale industry and workers’ productive subjectivity, and even then only to tell us that the argument there is incomplete. So patience is required! Looking across these five chapters as a whole, and leaving aside the important critical commentary carried on in the main text and numerous extended footnotes, I focus on two main issues: the substantive account of the determinations of capital/class struggle and their shaping of human subjectivity, and the implications for the analysis of contemporary society.
The determinations of capital/class struggle and the shaping of human subjectivity
Marx unfolds, in a two-stage process of analysis and synthesis, the real determinations specific to the commodity as a social form, or the things that determine its development and make it what it is – its production by private and independent alienated labour, its dual character as use value and exchange value, the latter as its necessary form of appearance, and its basis in the quantity of socially necessary labour it contains. The commodity is established as a social form that presents itself to commodity producers as ‘a social power external to their own individuality’ (144), and hence determinant of their alienated consciousness. In short, Marx does not begin with ‘individuals producing in society’, as he promised at the start of the Grundrisse (p. 83), but leads up through analysis of the commodity as the ‘cell-form of bourgeois society’ to the necessity of the alienated consciousness of the commodity producer in that society (152-63). This fundamental characteristic is central to the issue of the potential emergence of revolutionary subjectivity, as individuals under capitalism are bound to ‘organise their alienated practical action in order to reproduce the materiality of their lives’ on the basis of these immediate appearances, ‘thereby becoming determined as personifications of the autonomised self-movement of those objectified forms of social mediation [commodities, and by extension, capital]’ (159). This is the basis of Starosta’s insistence that there is no route to emancipatory consciousness outside the unfolding of the immanent determinations of capital.
Chapter Six then explores the subjectivity that corresponds to the commodity form as the ‘objective form of existence of the alienated consciousness’, identifying it as resting on ‘the apparently self-determining freedom of the commodity producer’ (164). Here he develops Iñigo Carrera’s argument, beyond what is found directly in Marx, that ‘the other side of the coin by which the human individual sees her/his social powers as the objective attribute of the product of social labour is her/his self-conception as the bearer of an abstractly free subjectivity’ (166). As this is neither true consciousness nor true freedom, the point that follows (most clearly expressed in a footnote), is that:
‘the determinate negation of this apparent freedom consists in a form of consciousness which is free not for being ‘self-determined’, but by virtue of being conscious of its own immanent social determinations; which in this mode of production, given the latter’s real inverted existence in an objectified form, can only mean being self-conscious of its own alienated nature and of the productive potentialities historically developed in such an alienated form. In other words, it also involves a transformation of the form of human freedom into the fully conscious knowledge of the social determinations of individual labour and, as a consequence, the recognition of the necessity to regulate it as a directly collective power’ (ft. 8, p.169).
It takes Starosta a while to reach this point, but it brings us to the heart of the book, and to a very simple question: how can commodity producers become fully conscious of the alienated nature and the need to transform it, through the unfolding of the inner determinations of capital itself? The section ‘Why Does Method Make a Difference? The Implications of Marx’s Investigation of the Commodity Form for the Determinations of Revolutionary Subjectivity’ (172-9), in which Starosta situates himself in relation to rival approaches, reviews the foundations of his approach. As summarised later, ‘whatever power we might have to radically transform the world must be a concrete form of the commodity itself … the social powers of our transformative action are effectively borne by the product of labour and we cannot but personify them’ (189-90).
The next step, then, is to ‘advance towards more concrete determinations of the real in order to account for the necessity of the practical abolition of alienated social life,’ by ‘turning to the specifically capitalist determinations of the class struggle’. For Starosta, ‘the class struggle is the necessary concrete form in which the accumulation of capital realises its determinations’, or more concretely, ‘the most general direct social relation between collective personifications of commodities through which the indirect relations of capitalist production assert themselves’ (196). This in turn leads to what Starosta describes as ‘the fundamental discovery of Marx’s critique of political economy’:
‘This real relation … is the necessary expression of the development of the historically specific alienation inherent in the commodity form into its more concrete social form of capital. In other words, that real relation expresses the fact that, as an expression of an alienated social existence, the total social capital becomes determined as the concrete subject of the movement of modern society (196-7).
Starosta is uncompromising in insisting that capital must be seen as the ‘materialised social relation that takes possession of the species-powers of humanity’ (199-206). The production of human life ‘has ceased to be the content of the movement of social reproduction and has become the unconscious outcome of the production of surplus value, that is, of the only (alienated) content presiding over the movement of modern society’, and this ‘autonomised regulation of social life … becomes the constantly renewed premise and result of the social metabolic process itself’ (201), and a mode of life on the part of individuals, so that ‘there can be absolutely no aspect of human existence that does not become determined as an instance of this metabolic interaction inverted as an attribute of capital’: ‘The upshot of the constitution of capital as alienated subject is that all the determinations of the human life process will really prove to be material bearers of the former’s self-expansion’ (202), as ‘as a matter of fact, the gradual unfolding of this progressive subsumption of the materiality of the human life process under the movement of capital is what the rest of the three volumes of Capital are all about’ (203).
This is an excellent way of looking at Capital, and it is underpinned by a sequence of theses on the formal subsumption of labour to capital: ‘the historically specific determination of the class struggle in the capitalist mode of production consists in being the necessary concrete form of the buying/selling of the commodity labour power at its value’ (207); in concrete terms, this initially revolves around the issue of the length of the working day (209); when considered at the level of the individual antagonistic relationship between capitalist and worker, the valorisation of capital inevitably leads to a tendency for labour power to be sold systematically below its value. However appealing this might be to the voracious appetite for an extra surplus value of the individual capital, this immediate necessity goes against the mediated necessity of the reproduction of the valorisation of capital as such to prevent the productive attributes of labour power, the one and only direct source of surplus value and hence of self-expansion, from exhaustion’ (212); ‘in its simplest and most general form, the class struggle carries no content other than the establishment of the conditions for the preservation and reproduction of the productive attributes of workers as wage labourers’; and more generally, ‘this implies that the determinations implicated in the mere existence of labour power as commodity (or the merely formal subsumption of labour to capital) do not give the class struggle the transformative potentiality to go beyond the capitalist mode of production. In this simple determination, the political action of the working class is merely determined as a concrete form of the reproduction of capitalist social relations’ (214); although Marx does not explicitly say so here (ft. 71, p. 217), the concrete subject of the process of valorization is the total social capital; and when workers struggle without being aware of their determinations as attributes of the total social capital, ‘they unconsciously personify a necessity of the reproduction of their alienated general social relation’ (218). In short, not only does the class struggle embody no transformative potentiality other than being the form in which labour power is sold at its value, and therefore, a form of the reproduction of the alienation of human productive powers in the form of capital’, but as individual capitalists act contrarily, total social capital must be represented ‘by the struggle of wage workers as a class’ (220 and ft. 77, emphasis mine). This is a striking and compelling observation.
At this point (three-quarters of the way through the book), the historical mission of the proletariat appears to be to enforce the logic of total social capital over the predatory ambitions of individual capitalists, leaving us further than ever from the emergence of revolutionary subjectivity. Only in the final substantive chapter, ‘Real Subsumption and the Genesis of the Revolutionary Subject’, are the conditions for its emergence specified: ‘it is precisely in the development of the ever-changing concrete forms of the real subsumption that the answer to the question about revolutionary subjectivity is to be found’. When Marx turns to this theme, he shows ‘precisely what the capital does to the materiality of human productive subjectivity as it takes possession of, and transforms, the labour process’ (233). Starosta argues that in its effort to transform the labour process, increase productivity, and extract relative surplus value, capital needs must transform the subjectivity of the wage labourer. This requires ‘the advance of the productive co-operation of the labourers through simple co-operation, the division of labour of manufacture and the automatic system of machinery of large-scale industry’ (237). Simple cooperation makes individual workers ‘members of a collective productive organism, a collective labourer’, giving their work a social character, so ‘capital is the social form that transforms the productive powers of free but isolated individual labour into powers of directly and consciously organised social labour’ (239), emphasis original). In this situation, ‘all the productive powers that spring from the social combination of the workers are transformed into attributes of capital’ (245).
With the formal subsumption of labour to capital, the breaking down of the production process into discrete ‘detail operations’ condemns individual workers to a single form of activity that makes them ‘an appendage of the workshop’. But a counter-tendency arises with the application of science to the production process, as large-scale industry ‘makes science a potentiality for production which is distinct from labour and presses it into the service of capital,’ and with the advent of the system of machinery ‘the technical reason for the lifelong attachment of the worker to a partial function is swept away’ (249, 252, citing Capital, 482, 491). The ‘rule of thumb’ is replaced by ‘the conscious application of natural science’ (255, citing Capital, 508), and labour, albeit still under the control of capital, becomes both directly social and informed by science (256). So here Starosta turns to three crucially important sections of Capital, Chapter 15, §3 (517-43) on ‘The Most Immediate Effects of Machine Production on the Worker’, §4 on the factory (544-53), and §9, supposedly on ‘The Health and Education Clauses of the Factory Acts, The General Extension of Factory Legislation in England’ (610-35), but in fact the section of Capital most relevant to current relations between labour and capital, and hence of the greatest importance today. On the one hand, the potential for exploitation is intensified. But on the other, even while capitalists may keep workers at the same task, it becomes possible in principle for any worker to operate any machine, so the capitalist mode of production tends ‘to universalize the productive attributes of wage labourers’ (261). Compulsory elementary education has within it the potential to create ‘fully developed human beings’, while ‘inasmuch as the technical basis of large-scale industry is essentially revolutionary, it entails the permanent transformation of the material conditions of social labour and, therefore, of the forms of exertion of the productive subjectivity of individual workers and of their articulation as a directly collective productive body. This continuous technical change thereby requires individuals who can work in the ever-renewed material forms of the production of relative surplus value. Hence, ‘large-scale industry, by its very nature, necessitates variation of labour, fluidity of functions, and mobility of the worker in all directions’ (Capital, 617, cited 265). Despite the limitations arising from the ‘private fragmentation of social labour’, ‘it is in the fully expanded universal character of human productive subjectivity that the material basis for the new society rests’ (265-6, emphasis original). And here Starosta cites a crucial passage: ‘This possibility of varying labour must become a general law of social production, and the existing relations must be adapted to permit its realization in practice … the partially developed individual, who is merely the bearer of one specialized social function, must be replaced by the totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions are different modes of activity taken up in turn’ (Capital, 618, my amended translation).
However, while the general necessities of the reproduction of the total social capital demand that workers bear a universal productive subjectivity, and at the same time the possession of such a subjectivity becomes ‘a matter of survival for the members of the working class’, the emergence of the ‘concrete determinations behind [the] inevitability of the proletarian conquest of political power’ on this material basis are not identified here or anywhere else in Capital (266-8). Instead, Marx cuts a few corners, leaping to the resounding endpoint (p. 929) in which: ‘The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated’. When the reader looks for the underlying determinations, ‘they are not there’ (269). The following passage summarizes the gulf to be bridged, and at the same time captures something of the current state of proletarian productive subjectivity, so I quote it in full:
‘Although the productive subjectivity of the worker of large-scale industry as presented in Capital tends to become universal, this universality is the product not of the scientific expansion of her/his capacity consciously to regulate the production process, but of the increasing (eventually absolute) deprivation of all knowledge of the social and material determinations of the labour process of which she/he is part. As we have seen above, for the workers engaged in the direct process of production, the separation of intellectual and manual labour reaches its plenitude. This kind of labourer can certainly work in any automated labour process which capital puts before her/him, but not as the ‘dominant subject’ with ‘the mechanical automaton as the object’. Rather, for those workers ‘the automaton itself is the subject, and the workers are merely conscious organs, coordinated with the unconscious organs of the automaton, and together with the latter, subordinated to the central moving force’. The scientific productive powers needed to regulate the forces of nature, and which are presupposed to their objectified existence in a system of machinery, are not an attribute that capital puts into the hands (or, rather, in the heads) of direct labourers. In brief, in the figure of this wage labourer bearing what, following Iñigo Carrera, I term an absolutely degraded productive subjectivity, scientific consciousness and universality do not go together, but are in opposition to one another. In other words, it is not this degraded productive subjectivity that, simply as such, carries in its immediacy the historical revolutionary powers that Marx himself considered necessary to make capital ‘blow sky high’. Moreover, neither has Marx’s exposition demonstrated that the very movement of the present-day alienated general social relation – capital accumulation – leads to the social necessity to transform, in the political form of a revolution, the productive subjectivity of those labourers in the direction of their reappropriation of the powers of scientific knowledge developed in this alienated form’ (270).
From this point, then, Starosta seeks to answer the question that imposes itself: ‘How are those workers whose productive subjectivity has been emptied of almost all content to organise the allocation of the total labour power of society in the form of a self-conscious collective potency (the latter being what the abolition of capital is all about)?’ (272). Here he argues that while initially the general application of science as a productive force confronts workers as an ‘alien power already objectified in the machine’, it creates a situation in which the direct process of production ‘becomes just an aspect of a broader labour process which now entails two additional moments: the development of the power consciously to regulate in an objective and universal fashion the movement of natural forces – namely, science – and the application of that capacity in the practical organisation of the automatic system of machinery and whatever remains of direct labour – the technological application of science, including the consciousness of the unity of productive co-operation’. While Capital treats these issues in a one-sided manner, the Grundrisse alternates between doing likewise and putting at the forefront ‘the underlying material unity of the total activity of living labour, where the development of science and its technological applications act as essential constitutive moments’ (275). Building on this, Starosta offers a further concrete determination, and identifies in embryo the necessary source of revolutionary subjectivity:
‘although not explicitly addressed by Marx, the benefit of historical hindsight makes it very easy for us to recognise how the total social capital deals with its constant need for the development of the productive powers of science, namely, by engendering a special partial organ of the collective labourer whose function is to advance in the conscious control of the movement of natural forces and its objectification in the form of ever more complex automatic systems of machinery. Whilst the system of machinery entails the progressive deskilling of those workers performing what remains of direct labour – to the point of emptying their labour of any content other than the mechanistic repetition of extremely simple tasks – it also entails the tendential expansion of the productive subjectivity of the members of the intellectual organ of the collective labourer. Capital requires from these workers ever more complex forms of labour. As much as those discussed in Capital, these are also “immediate effects of machine production on the worker”’ (276).
There is, then, a twofold movement of the productive subjectivity of the collective labourer that is required by the system of machinery – degradation in relation to direct manual labour, and expansion in relation to indirect intellectual labour. Starosta argues that as the ‘very nature of human labour’ changes, it becomes increasingly ‘an activity aimed at the conscious control of the movement of natural forces in order to make them automatically act upon the object of labour and, in this way, effect its change of form’ (277); and he returns to the Grundrisse (700) to round off the argument:
‘To the degree that labour time – the mere quantity of labour – is posited by capital as the sole determinant element, to that degree does direct labour and its quantity disappear as the determinant principle of production – of the creation of use values – and is reduced both quantitatively, to a smaller proportion, and qualitatively, as an, of course, indispensable but subordinate moment, compared to general scientific labour, technological application of natural sciences, on one side, and to the general productive force arising from social combination [Gliederung] in total production on the other side – a combination which appears as a natural fruit of social labour (although it is a historic product). Capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production’ (cited 277, Starosta’s emphasis).
This passage, coupling general scientific labour and the general productive force arising from social combination, is the prime reference point for Starosta’s argument: ‘the determinate form of the material transformation of the labour process – dictated by the most immediate necessity of capital to expand its magnitude – becomes the fully conscious organisation of human productive co-operation. Which, in turn, means that the social form of the life process of humanity must be revolutionised as well: it is a change of the materiality of the production process which, albeit required by the valorisation of capital, can no longer proceed on the basis of that alienated general social form’ (290); and ‘the revolutionary powers are not ‘self-developed’ by the workers, but are an alienated attribute that capital puts into their own hands through the transformations of their productive subjectivity produced by the alienated socialisation of private labour. This is the reason why revolutionary consciousness is itself a concrete form of the alienation of human powers as capital’s powers. The abolition of capital is not an abstractly free, self-determining … political action, but one that the workers are compelled to undertake as personifications of the alienated laws of movement of capital itself’ (291). Crucially, this entails a conscious grasp of alienated general social relation, as workers see through the ‘apparently natural self-determining freedom of the commodity owner, and discover the material productive powers developed through capital’s mode of existence’:
‘In this way, workers shall recognise the social necessity of the historical task that, as fully conscious yet alienated individuals, they have to personify through their self-abolishing political action, namely, the revolutionary supersession of capital through the production of the communist organisation of social life’ (292).
And as Starosta points out, the whole process is encapsulated in a remarkable passage from the Grundrisse (325),looking forward to a time: ‘when the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations [Geschlechter], has developed general industriousness as the general property of the new species [Geschlecht] – and, finally, when the development of the productive powers of labour, which capital incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth, and of the sole conditions in which this mania can be realized, have flourished to the stage where the possession and preservation of general wealth require a lesser labour time of society as a whole, and where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction, its reproduction in a constantly greater abundance; hence where labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased’ (300).
Views may legitimately differ on how far Starosta has advanced the revolutionary project, as he insists that ‘the form of political subjectivity that undertakes the revolutionary expropriation of the bourgeoisie by conquering state power is not… revolutionary subjectivity “proper”’ (309, emphasis original), and that only with the absolute centralization of the entire social capital as the property of a world state can workers ‘eventually become aware of their world-historic, truly emancipatory task’ (313).
By definition, ‘concretely existing human transformative practice’ cannot be specified in advance, and in so far as any specific instance is a ‘unity of many determinations’, the path towards it can only be traced in abstract terms. An immediate consequence is that the precise trajectory by which the ‘conquest of political supremacy’ by the working class, its self-abolition as a proletariat and the inauguration of a global society based on the free association of individuals might come about cannot be known in advance – all that can be said is that it ‘cannot skip over the necessary mediation of the actual historical realisation of the absolute centralisation of capital in the political form of the global dictatorship of the proletariat’ (ft. 51, p. 311). Starosta recognises this, of course. He rightly rejects ‘recipes for the cookshops of the future’ (ft. 58, p. 313), and declines to speculate on what form the final transition might take. The odds, dear reader, are that it will not happen in your lifetime.
Implications for the analysis of contemporary society
In the meantime, what should we do? Returning to the here and now, Starosta concludes that the contemporary reader of Marx’s works should commit to the ‘development of the objective knowledge of the social determinations of contemporary social forms of existence of capital and, fundamentally, of our political action among its concrete forms’ (314). This is absolutely right, and the central chapters of the book, with their focus on the application of science to the production process and the emergence of the collective worker, along with the two-fold movement of subjectivity reflected in ‘degradation in relation to direct manual labour, and expansion in relation to indirect intellectual labour’, offer a fundamental resource that has never been more relevant than today (cf. ft. 83, p. 262). As Starosta sums it up in conclusion:
‘As a necessary moment of the class struggle, a most urgent task arises for that partial organ of the collective labourer that is nowadays responsible for the production of the critical scientific knowledge of capitalist social forms (i.e. communist intellectual labourers). What is required is dialectical research on contemporary concrete forms in which the alienated development of the productive subjectivity of the workers towards its fully developed universality realises itself through its own negation, that is, by fragmenting the different partial organs of the collective labourer and by keeping the productive attributes of the labourers (even when they are expanded as in the case of intellectual labourers) miserably bound to being those required by the material forms of
the production of relative surplus value’ (315).
This could hardly be better said. However, in one respect, Starosta does not develop his argument as he might, and that is in relation to what is sometimes considered separately as ‘reproduction’ – in this case, specifically the reproduction of humanity itself through procreation. As we have seen, Starosta insists that capital ‘takes possession of the species-powers of humanity’, and that there can be no aspect of human existence that escapes determination as an attribute of capital. But he takes no account of the manner in which capital is taking possession of and transforming the process of production of human life itself, or its implications for the production and therefore the character of proletarians in the future. The application of science to this process, and its actual and potential capture by capital, which have advanced enormously in recent years, were non-existent in Marx’s day. By neglecting the topic, Starosta can only go half-way towards identifying the contemporary determinations of capital, and their implications for revolutionary subjectivity. His focus is on the transformation of the labour process, lacking a parallel consideration of the transformation of the proletariat itself, and the potential for the real subsumption to capital of the process of production of human life itself. The possibility not only looms ever closer in current scientific advances, but also fits precisely into the brilliant insight in the Grundrisse cited above that a time will come, ‘where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction’, that ‘labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased’. This must apply to the labour of producing human beings, from conception through gestation to birth. Already, it is impossible to speak of the production of human beings by science and machines as utopian or dystopian science fiction. But if we maintain the assumption that the process of their production would, like everything else, take place under the sway of total social capital as the concrete subject of the movement of modern society, with whatever further scientific advances the future holds, up to the point at which capital is centralized under a world state, it is rash to make any assumptions about the social forms of their existence, and, crucially, the character and limits of their consciousness.
For someone like me, who is familiar with only a fraction of the vast literature with which Starosta engages, and who seeks to research contemporary global political economy from a Marxist perspective, it has broader value. For inescapable reasons spelled out by Starosta himself, his take on the future emergence of revolutionary subjectivity, impeccable on its own terms, is necessarily abstract. But his approach – because it is based rigorously on the concrete determinations of the valorisation of capital – provides in the meantime a powerful means of investigating contemporary issues, and Starosta himself returns powerfully to this point in his closing pages.
Put at its simplest, Starosta’s argument is that the constitution of the working class as a ‘self-abolishing’ revolutionary subject must come about within and through the historical dynamic of capitalist development, not outside it. Emancipatory subjectivity – a disposition on the part of the proletariat to take charge of their own lives as freely associating individuals – is ‘immanent in the very unfolding of the reified forms of social mediation of capitalist society’ (3). His goal, therefore, is to track its emergence through a materialist analysis that stays true to Marx’s critique of political economy. To do so, he offers a new reading of Marx (one, as noted, grounded in the work of Iñigo Carrera), which in part involves the ‘completion’ of Marx’s own incomplete analysis. So he first sets out Marx’s dialectical method, then produces an account of the emergence of revolutionary subjectivity in accordance with it. Overall, the argument is long, detailed, complex and very heavily footnoted. But in outline it is simple and admirably clear.
First, Marx did not simply ‘turn Hegel on his head’. His adoption of the critique of political economy as a method entailed a rejection not an inversion of philosophy, Hegel included. It proposed instead the ‘reproduction of the concrete by means of thought’, a method that required a break with abstract logic in favour of tracing the specific process of the valorisation of capital, and the manner in which its ‘immanent’ character, necessarily inherent in the process, would give rise in the end to the emergence of revolutionary subjectivity on the part of the working class. An abstract dialectic, however materialist, is not enough – the specific, concrete laws of motion of capital have to be discovered, and reproduced in thought. This is what Marx sets out to do.
Second, Capital (Volume 1) offers a deliberately one-sided account, which needs to be brought together with elements sketched out in the earlier notebooks known as the Grundrisse. When this is done, it becomes clear that the overthrow of the capitalist class through class struggle does not in itself necessarily bring about the emancipation of the working class. Rather, this is only achieved when the science-driven division of labour assigns intellectual labour to humans, and manual labour to things (that is, machines), thereby enabling the transformation of the still alienated subjectivity of the proletariat and making them genuinely revolutionary subjects able to produce their own life as freely associating individuals. But the latter development is only touched on, and incompletely at that, in the Grundrisse.
So ‘whatever transformative powers the political action of workers might have – both capital-reproducing and capital-transcending political action – must be an immanent determination begotten by the alienated movement of capital as subject and not external to it. … As Marx shows in Capital and the Grundrisse, through the constant revolution in the material conditions of social labour, capital progressively transforms the subjectivity of the workers according to a determinate tendency: they eventually become universal labourers, that is, organs of a collective subject capable of consciously ruling their life process by virtue of their power scientifically to organise the production process of any system of machinery and, therefore, any form of social co-operation. This mutation of their productive subjectivity is the necessary prelude to the constitution of the labourers as truly social individuals through their self-abolition as wage workers and the construction of the free association of individuals’ (9, emphasis mine).
The development of a materialist science, then, required the ‘overcoming of philosophy’. In the first three substantive chapters, Starosta argues that the account of alienated labour in the 1844 Manuscripts lacked the ‘positive exposition about the forms of capital’s development that produce in the workers not only the will to social transformation but also the material powers to achieve it’ (44); that Marx ‘overcame’ philosophy by focusing rigorously and without preconceptions (for example, without assuming or invoking any ‘essence’ of humanity) on ‘concretely existing human transformative practice’ (63-75), and its alienated form as an aspect of the self-valorisation of capital; and that it was his critique of Proudhon that ‘attempted for the first time positively to unfold the reproduction in thought of the real movement of capitalist economic forms’, made his critique of Hegel explicit, and committed him to attempt through his scientific endeavour a ‘positive investigation of the social determinations – and hence necessity – of the different forms of the political action of the workers aiming at the radical transformation of the capitalist mode of production’ (77).
Starosta’s approach aligns with Marx’s warning from the preface to the 1872 French edition of Capital (to which he alludes on p. 301) that ‘There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits’. The ‘reproduction of the concrete by means of thought’ means tracing the real movement of things, in their specific modes of existence and development, rather than settling for ‘recourse to the logical necessity of the abstract form of movement’ (84). Starosta therefore rejects a materialist dialectical logic in favour of a materialist dialectical method, in which one traces the emergence of successive concrete forms. Such a method ‘analytically separates the different forms by discovering as immanent in a particular concrete form the realised potentiality of another real form, which is abstract with respect to the first one, but concrete with respect to another form of which it is the realised potentiality’ (93). Immanent potential becomes real and concrete through specific and successive transformations that must be traced directly in real human practice, starting out from ‘present-day economic facts’ (14). I recommend a close reading of the summary of these opening arguments (which for reasons of space and (in)competence I have dealt with in bare outline only) in the section ‘The Limits to Marx’s Early Attempt at a Dialectical Revolutionary Critique of Political Economy’, pp. 109-116. This builds on the earlier suggestion (82) that ‘Marx’s Capital, as a critique of political economy, is not, pace Engels, an application of dialectical logic to political economy, but the ideal reproduction [that is, reproduction in thought] of the real determinations of capital as the alienated social subject of bourgeois society, starting with its simplest mode of existence, i.e. the commodity’.
With this background in place, Starosta turns directly in the second part of the book to the topic of revolutionary subjectivity in Marx’s mature critique of political economy (that is, primarily in Capital, Volume 1). What follows is an extended critical reading of the opening chapters of Capital (especially the first), then of chapters 10 (The Working Day) and 15 (Machinery and Large-Scale Industry) in particular. Here Starosta expands on the distinction between analysis and synthesis in Marx’s dialectical method (129-40), and continues his critique of contending perspectives, in the process of exploring the determinations of the value form of the product of labour (the commodity form), commodity fetishism, subjectivity, the specifically capitalist determinations of the class struggle, and then, in Chapter 8, ‘real subsumption and the genesis of the revolutionary subject’. Only from p. 254 onwards does he take up the issue of large-scale industry and workers’ productive subjectivity, and even then only to tell us that the argument there is incomplete. So patience is required! Looking across these five chapters as a whole, and leaving aside the important critical commentary carried on in the main text and numerous extended footnotes, I focus on two main issues: the substantive account of the determinations of capital/class struggle and their shaping of human subjectivity, and the implications for the analysis of contemporary society.
The determinations of capital/class struggle and the shaping of human subjectivity
Marx unfolds, in a two-stage process of analysis and synthesis, the real determinations specific to the commodity as a social form, or the things that determine its development and make it what it is – its production by private and independent alienated labour, its dual character as use value and exchange value, the latter as its necessary form of appearance, and its basis in the quantity of socially necessary labour it contains. The commodity is established as a social form that presents itself to commodity producers as ‘a social power external to their own individuality’ (144), and hence determinant of their alienated consciousness. In short, Marx does not begin with ‘individuals producing in society’, as he promised at the start of the Grundrisse (p. 83), but leads up through analysis of the commodity as the ‘cell-form of bourgeois society’ to the necessity of the alienated consciousness of the commodity producer in that society (152-63). This fundamental characteristic is central to the issue of the potential emergence of revolutionary subjectivity, as individuals under capitalism are bound to ‘organise their alienated practical action in order to reproduce the materiality of their lives’ on the basis of these immediate appearances, ‘thereby becoming determined as personifications of the autonomised self-movement of those objectified forms of social mediation [commodities, and by extension, capital]’ (159). This is the basis of Starosta’s insistence that there is no route to emancipatory consciousness outside the unfolding of the immanent determinations of capital.
Chapter Six then explores the subjectivity that corresponds to the commodity form as the ‘objective form of existence of the alienated consciousness’, identifying it as resting on ‘the apparently self-determining freedom of the commodity producer’ (164). Here he develops Iñigo Carrera’s argument, beyond what is found directly in Marx, that ‘the other side of the coin by which the human individual sees her/his social powers as the objective attribute of the product of social labour is her/his self-conception as the bearer of an abstractly free subjectivity’ (166). As this is neither true consciousness nor true freedom, the point that follows (most clearly expressed in a footnote), is that:
‘the determinate negation of this apparent freedom consists in a form of consciousness which is free not for being ‘self-determined’, but by virtue of being conscious of its own immanent social determinations; which in this mode of production, given the latter’s real inverted existence in an objectified form, can only mean being self-conscious of its own alienated nature and of the productive potentialities historically developed in such an alienated form. In other words, it also involves a transformation of the form of human freedom into the fully conscious knowledge of the social determinations of individual labour and, as a consequence, the recognition of the necessity to regulate it as a directly collective power’ (ft. 8, p.169).
It takes Starosta a while to reach this point, but it brings us to the heart of the book, and to a very simple question: how can commodity producers become fully conscious of the alienated nature and the need to transform it, through the unfolding of the inner determinations of capital itself? The section ‘Why Does Method Make a Difference? The Implications of Marx’s Investigation of the Commodity Form for the Determinations of Revolutionary Subjectivity’ (172-9), in which Starosta situates himself in relation to rival approaches, reviews the foundations of his approach. As summarised later, ‘whatever power we might have to radically transform the world must be a concrete form of the commodity itself … the social powers of our transformative action are effectively borne by the product of labour and we cannot but personify them’ (189-90).
The next step, then, is to ‘advance towards more concrete determinations of the real in order to account for the necessity of the practical abolition of alienated social life,’ by ‘turning to the specifically capitalist determinations of the class struggle’. For Starosta, ‘the class struggle is the necessary concrete form in which the accumulation of capital realises its determinations’, or more concretely, ‘the most general direct social relation between collective personifications of commodities through which the indirect relations of capitalist production assert themselves’ (196). This in turn leads to what Starosta describes as ‘the fundamental discovery of Marx’s critique of political economy’:
‘This real relation … is the necessary expression of the development of the historically specific alienation inherent in the commodity form into its more concrete social form of capital. In other words, that real relation expresses the fact that, as an expression of an alienated social existence, the total social capital becomes determined as the concrete subject of the movement of modern society (196-7).
Starosta is uncompromising in insisting that capital must be seen as the ‘materialised social relation that takes possession of the species-powers of humanity’ (199-206). The production of human life ‘has ceased to be the content of the movement of social reproduction and has become the unconscious outcome of the production of surplus value, that is, of the only (alienated) content presiding over the movement of modern society’, and this ‘autonomised regulation of social life … becomes the constantly renewed premise and result of the social metabolic process itself’ (201), and a mode of life on the part of individuals, so that ‘there can be absolutely no aspect of human existence that does not become determined as an instance of this metabolic interaction inverted as an attribute of capital’: ‘The upshot of the constitution of capital as alienated subject is that all the determinations of the human life process will really prove to be material bearers of the former’s self-expansion’ (202), as ‘as a matter of fact, the gradual unfolding of this progressive subsumption of the materiality of the human life process under the movement of capital is what the rest of the three volumes of Capital are all about’ (203).
This is an excellent way of looking at Capital, and it is underpinned by a sequence of theses on the formal subsumption of labour to capital: ‘the historically specific determination of the class struggle in the capitalist mode of production consists in being the necessary concrete form of the buying/selling of the commodity labour power at its value’ (207); in concrete terms, this initially revolves around the issue of the length of the working day (209); when considered at the level of the individual antagonistic relationship between capitalist and worker, the valorisation of capital inevitably leads to a tendency for labour power to be sold systematically below its value. However appealing this might be to the voracious appetite for an extra surplus value of the individual capital, this immediate necessity goes against the mediated necessity of the reproduction of the valorisation of capital as such to prevent the productive attributes of labour power, the one and only direct source of surplus value and hence of self-expansion, from exhaustion’ (212); ‘in its simplest and most general form, the class struggle carries no content other than the establishment of the conditions for the preservation and reproduction of the productive attributes of workers as wage labourers’; and more generally, ‘this implies that the determinations implicated in the mere existence of labour power as commodity (or the merely formal subsumption of labour to capital) do not give the class struggle the transformative potentiality to go beyond the capitalist mode of production. In this simple determination, the political action of the working class is merely determined as a concrete form of the reproduction of capitalist social relations’ (214); although Marx does not explicitly say so here (ft. 71, p. 217), the concrete subject of the process of valorization is the total social capital; and when workers struggle without being aware of their determinations as attributes of the total social capital, ‘they unconsciously personify a necessity of the reproduction of their alienated general social relation’ (218). In short, not only does the class struggle embody no transformative potentiality other than being the form in which labour power is sold at its value, and therefore, a form of the reproduction of the alienation of human productive powers in the form of capital’, but as individual capitalists act contrarily, total social capital must be represented ‘by the struggle of wage workers as a class’ (220 and ft. 77, emphasis mine). This is a striking and compelling observation.
At this point (three-quarters of the way through the book), the historical mission of the proletariat appears to be to enforce the logic of total social capital over the predatory ambitions of individual capitalists, leaving us further than ever from the emergence of revolutionary subjectivity. Only in the final substantive chapter, ‘Real Subsumption and the Genesis of the Revolutionary Subject’, are the conditions for its emergence specified: ‘it is precisely in the development of the ever-changing concrete forms of the real subsumption that the answer to the question about revolutionary subjectivity is to be found’. When Marx turns to this theme, he shows ‘precisely what the capital does to the materiality of human productive subjectivity as it takes possession of, and transforms, the labour process’ (233). Starosta argues that in its effort to transform the labour process, increase productivity, and extract relative surplus value, capital needs must transform the subjectivity of the wage labourer. This requires ‘the advance of the productive co-operation of the labourers through simple co-operation, the division of labour of manufacture and the automatic system of machinery of large-scale industry’ (237). Simple cooperation makes individual workers ‘members of a collective productive organism, a collective labourer’, giving their work a social character, so ‘capital is the social form that transforms the productive powers of free but isolated individual labour into powers of directly and consciously organised social labour’ (239), emphasis original). In this situation, ‘all the productive powers that spring from the social combination of the workers are transformed into attributes of capital’ (245).
With the formal subsumption of labour to capital, the breaking down of the production process into discrete ‘detail operations’ condemns individual workers to a single form of activity that makes them ‘an appendage of the workshop’. But a counter-tendency arises with the application of science to the production process, as large-scale industry ‘makes science a potentiality for production which is distinct from labour and presses it into the service of capital,’ and with the advent of the system of machinery ‘the technical reason for the lifelong attachment of the worker to a partial function is swept away’ (249, 252, citing Capital, 482, 491). The ‘rule of thumb’ is replaced by ‘the conscious application of natural science’ (255, citing Capital, 508), and labour, albeit still under the control of capital, becomes both directly social and informed by science (256). So here Starosta turns to three crucially important sections of Capital, Chapter 15, §3 (517-43) on ‘The Most Immediate Effects of Machine Production on the Worker’, §4 on the factory (544-53), and §9, supposedly on ‘The Health and Education Clauses of the Factory Acts, The General Extension of Factory Legislation in England’ (610-35), but in fact the section of Capital most relevant to current relations between labour and capital, and hence of the greatest importance today. On the one hand, the potential for exploitation is intensified. But on the other, even while capitalists may keep workers at the same task, it becomes possible in principle for any worker to operate any machine, so the capitalist mode of production tends ‘to universalize the productive attributes of wage labourers’ (261). Compulsory elementary education has within it the potential to create ‘fully developed human beings’, while ‘inasmuch as the technical basis of large-scale industry is essentially revolutionary, it entails the permanent transformation of the material conditions of social labour and, therefore, of the forms of exertion of the productive subjectivity of individual workers and of their articulation as a directly collective productive body. This continuous technical change thereby requires individuals who can work in the ever-renewed material forms of the production of relative surplus value. Hence, ‘large-scale industry, by its very nature, necessitates variation of labour, fluidity of functions, and mobility of the worker in all directions’ (Capital, 617, cited 265). Despite the limitations arising from the ‘private fragmentation of social labour’, ‘it is in the fully expanded universal character of human productive subjectivity that the material basis for the new society rests’ (265-6, emphasis original). And here Starosta cites a crucial passage: ‘This possibility of varying labour must become a general law of social production, and the existing relations must be adapted to permit its realization in practice … the partially developed individual, who is merely the bearer of one specialized social function, must be replaced by the totally developed individual, for whom the different social functions are different modes of activity taken up in turn’ (Capital, 618, my amended translation).
However, while the general necessities of the reproduction of the total social capital demand that workers bear a universal productive subjectivity, and at the same time the possession of such a subjectivity becomes ‘a matter of survival for the members of the working class’, the emergence of the ‘concrete determinations behind [the] inevitability of the proletarian conquest of political power’ on this material basis are not identified here or anywhere else in Capital (266-8). Instead, Marx cuts a few corners, leaping to the resounding endpoint (p. 929) in which: ‘The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated’. When the reader looks for the underlying determinations, ‘they are not there’ (269). The following passage summarizes the gulf to be bridged, and at the same time captures something of the current state of proletarian productive subjectivity, so I quote it in full:
‘Although the productive subjectivity of the worker of large-scale industry as presented in Capital tends to become universal, this universality is the product not of the scientific expansion of her/his capacity consciously to regulate the production process, but of the increasing (eventually absolute) deprivation of all knowledge of the social and material determinations of the labour process of which she/he is part. As we have seen above, for the workers engaged in the direct process of production, the separation of intellectual and manual labour reaches its plenitude. This kind of labourer can certainly work in any automated labour process which capital puts before her/him, but not as the ‘dominant subject’ with ‘the mechanical automaton as the object’. Rather, for those workers ‘the automaton itself is the subject, and the workers are merely conscious organs, coordinated with the unconscious organs of the automaton, and together with the latter, subordinated to the central moving force’. The scientific productive powers needed to regulate the forces of nature, and which are presupposed to their objectified existence in a system of machinery, are not an attribute that capital puts into the hands (or, rather, in the heads) of direct labourers. In brief, in the figure of this wage labourer bearing what, following Iñigo Carrera, I term an absolutely degraded productive subjectivity, scientific consciousness and universality do not go together, but are in opposition to one another. In other words, it is not this degraded productive subjectivity that, simply as such, carries in its immediacy the historical revolutionary powers that Marx himself considered necessary to make capital ‘blow sky high’. Moreover, neither has Marx’s exposition demonstrated that the very movement of the present-day alienated general social relation – capital accumulation – leads to the social necessity to transform, in the political form of a revolution, the productive subjectivity of those labourers in the direction of their reappropriation of the powers of scientific knowledge developed in this alienated form’ (270).
From this point, then, Starosta seeks to answer the question that imposes itself: ‘How are those workers whose productive subjectivity has been emptied of almost all content to organise the allocation of the total labour power of society in the form of a self-conscious collective potency (the latter being what the abolition of capital is all about)?’ (272). Here he argues that while initially the general application of science as a productive force confronts workers as an ‘alien power already objectified in the machine’, it creates a situation in which the direct process of production ‘becomes just an aspect of a broader labour process which now entails two additional moments: the development of the power consciously to regulate in an objective and universal fashion the movement of natural forces – namely, science – and the application of that capacity in the practical organisation of the automatic system of machinery and whatever remains of direct labour – the technological application of science, including the consciousness of the unity of productive co-operation’. While Capital treats these issues in a one-sided manner, the Grundrisse alternates between doing likewise and putting at the forefront ‘the underlying material unity of the total activity of living labour, where the development of science and its technological applications act as essential constitutive moments’ (275). Building on this, Starosta offers a further concrete determination, and identifies in embryo the necessary source of revolutionary subjectivity:
‘although not explicitly addressed by Marx, the benefit of historical hindsight makes it very easy for us to recognise how the total social capital deals with its constant need for the development of the productive powers of science, namely, by engendering a special partial organ of the collective labourer whose function is to advance in the conscious control of the movement of natural forces and its objectification in the form of ever more complex automatic systems of machinery. Whilst the system of machinery entails the progressive deskilling of those workers performing what remains of direct labour – to the point of emptying their labour of any content other than the mechanistic repetition of extremely simple tasks – it also entails the tendential expansion of the productive subjectivity of the members of the intellectual organ of the collective labourer. Capital requires from these workers ever more complex forms of labour. As much as those discussed in Capital, these are also “immediate effects of machine production on the worker”’ (276).
There is, then, a twofold movement of the productive subjectivity of the collective labourer that is required by the system of machinery – degradation in relation to direct manual labour, and expansion in relation to indirect intellectual labour. Starosta argues that as the ‘very nature of human labour’ changes, it becomes increasingly ‘an activity aimed at the conscious control of the movement of natural forces in order to make them automatically act upon the object of labour and, in this way, effect its change of form’ (277); and he returns to the Grundrisse (700) to round off the argument:
‘To the degree that labour time – the mere quantity of labour – is posited by capital as the sole determinant element, to that degree does direct labour and its quantity disappear as the determinant principle of production – of the creation of use values – and is reduced both quantitatively, to a smaller proportion, and qualitatively, as an, of course, indispensable but subordinate moment, compared to general scientific labour, technological application of natural sciences, on one side, and to the general productive force arising from social combination [Gliederung] in total production on the other side – a combination which appears as a natural fruit of social labour (although it is a historic product). Capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production’ (cited 277, Starosta’s emphasis).
This passage, coupling general scientific labour and the general productive force arising from social combination, is the prime reference point for Starosta’s argument: ‘the determinate form of the material transformation of the labour process – dictated by the most immediate necessity of capital to expand its magnitude – becomes the fully conscious organisation of human productive co-operation. Which, in turn, means that the social form of the life process of humanity must be revolutionised as well: it is a change of the materiality of the production process which, albeit required by the valorisation of capital, can no longer proceed on the basis of that alienated general social form’ (290); and ‘the revolutionary powers are not ‘self-developed’ by the workers, but are an alienated attribute that capital puts into their own hands through the transformations of their productive subjectivity produced by the alienated socialisation of private labour. This is the reason why revolutionary consciousness is itself a concrete form of the alienation of human powers as capital’s powers. The abolition of capital is not an abstractly free, self-determining … political action, but one that the workers are compelled to undertake as personifications of the alienated laws of movement of capital itself’ (291). Crucially, this entails a conscious grasp of alienated general social relation, as workers see through the ‘apparently natural self-determining freedom of the commodity owner, and discover the material productive powers developed through capital’s mode of existence’:
‘In this way, workers shall recognise the social necessity of the historical task that, as fully conscious yet alienated individuals, they have to personify through their self-abolishing political action, namely, the revolutionary supersession of capital through the production of the communist organisation of social life’ (292).
And as Starosta points out, the whole process is encapsulated in a remarkable passage from the Grundrisse (325),looking forward to a time: ‘when the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations [Geschlechter], has developed general industriousness as the general property of the new species [Geschlecht] – and, finally, when the development of the productive powers of labour, which capital incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth, and of the sole conditions in which this mania can be realized, have flourished to the stage where the possession and preservation of general wealth require a lesser labour time of society as a whole, and where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction, its reproduction in a constantly greater abundance; hence where labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased’ (300).
Views may legitimately differ on how far Starosta has advanced the revolutionary project, as he insists that ‘the form of political subjectivity that undertakes the revolutionary expropriation of the bourgeoisie by conquering state power is not… revolutionary subjectivity “proper”’ (309, emphasis original), and that only with the absolute centralization of the entire social capital as the property of a world state can workers ‘eventually become aware of their world-historic, truly emancipatory task’ (313).
By definition, ‘concretely existing human transformative practice’ cannot be specified in advance, and in so far as any specific instance is a ‘unity of many determinations’, the path towards it can only be traced in abstract terms. An immediate consequence is that the precise trajectory by which the ‘conquest of political supremacy’ by the working class, its self-abolition as a proletariat and the inauguration of a global society based on the free association of individuals might come about cannot be known in advance – all that can be said is that it ‘cannot skip over the necessary mediation of the actual historical realisation of the absolute centralisation of capital in the political form of the global dictatorship of the proletariat’ (ft. 51, p. 311). Starosta recognises this, of course. He rightly rejects ‘recipes for the cookshops of the future’ (ft. 58, p. 313), and declines to speculate on what form the final transition might take. The odds, dear reader, are that it will not happen in your lifetime.
Implications for the analysis of contemporary society
In the meantime, what should we do? Returning to the here and now, Starosta concludes that the contemporary reader of Marx’s works should commit to the ‘development of the objective knowledge of the social determinations of contemporary social forms of existence of capital and, fundamentally, of our political action among its concrete forms’ (314). This is absolutely right, and the central chapters of the book, with their focus on the application of science to the production process and the emergence of the collective worker, along with the two-fold movement of subjectivity reflected in ‘degradation in relation to direct manual labour, and expansion in relation to indirect intellectual labour’, offer a fundamental resource that has never been more relevant than today (cf. ft. 83, p. 262). As Starosta sums it up in conclusion:
‘As a necessary moment of the class struggle, a most urgent task arises for that partial organ of the collective labourer that is nowadays responsible for the production of the critical scientific knowledge of capitalist social forms (i.e. communist intellectual labourers). What is required is dialectical research on contemporary concrete forms in which the alienated development of the productive subjectivity of the workers towards its fully developed universality realises itself through its own negation, that is, by fragmenting the different partial organs of the collective labourer and by keeping the productive attributes of the labourers (even when they are expanded as in the case of intellectual labourers) miserably bound to being those required by the material forms of
the production of relative surplus value’ (315).
This could hardly be better said. However, in one respect, Starosta does not develop his argument as he might, and that is in relation to what is sometimes considered separately as ‘reproduction’ – in this case, specifically the reproduction of humanity itself through procreation. As we have seen, Starosta insists that capital ‘takes possession of the species-powers of humanity’, and that there can be no aspect of human existence that escapes determination as an attribute of capital. But he takes no account of the manner in which capital is taking possession of and transforming the process of production of human life itself, or its implications for the production and therefore the character of proletarians in the future. The application of science to this process, and its actual and potential capture by capital, which have advanced enormously in recent years, were non-existent in Marx’s day. By neglecting the topic, Starosta can only go half-way towards identifying the contemporary determinations of capital, and their implications for revolutionary subjectivity. His focus is on the transformation of the labour process, lacking a parallel consideration of the transformation of the proletariat itself, and the potential for the real subsumption to capital of the process of production of human life itself. The possibility not only looms ever closer in current scientific advances, but also fits precisely into the brilliant insight in the Grundrisse cited above that a time will come, ‘where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction’, that ‘labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased’. This must apply to the labour of producing human beings, from conception through gestation to birth. Already, it is impossible to speak of the production of human beings by science and machines as utopian or dystopian science fiction. But if we maintain the assumption that the process of their production would, like everything else, take place under the sway of total social capital as the concrete subject of the movement of modern society, with whatever further scientific advances the future holds, up to the point at which capital is centralized under a world state, it is rash to make any assumptions about the social forms of their existence, and, crucially, the character and limits of their consciousness.