Niu Ziniu: The Reproduction of Labor Subjectivity under the Logic of Capital: Lukacs, Kojève, Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, Negri, Boutang

February 2024  

Source: Marxism and Reality, Issue 6, 2023

Author: Lecturer at the School of Philosophy, Nankai University

Summary

The subject problem is a key issue in Western Marxism. The “Weberian Marxism” pioneered by Lukacs emphasized the negation and alienation of the subjectivity of workers in the process of rationalized labor, and Lukacs emphasized the suppression of the worker’s personality by the identity of the value form.

This idea was absorbed and utilized by neoliberalism around the 1970s , but it cannot explain some new phenomena in contemporary capitalism. In view of this, thinkers such as Althusser, Foucault, and Deleuze raised the issue of “subject reproduction” under the logic of capital, and began to pay attention to the inherent collusion ( secret cooperation) between labor subjectivity and capital, as well as these thinkers studied the power mechanism used by capital to produce specific subjectivity.

Their understanding of capital power clearly shows a trend from “negation” to “affirmation”. However, contemporary Western Marxism has failed to fully implement the affirmative understanding of capital power, so that it has fallen into excessive optimism on the issue of workers’ liberation.

The subject problem is a key issue in the study of Marxist philosophy, and its development is deeply influenced by Western Marxist thought. Through a Hegelian interpretation of Marxist philosophy, Lukacs placed class consciousness, that is, the problem of the revolutionary subject, at the center of Marxist philosophy, and set the alienation or reification of the subject as the theme of Marx’s critical theory, which profoundly influenced the thinking of the Western left such as the Frankfurt School, thus Lukacs indirectly contributed to the formation of the “subject-object reversal” paradigm in the study of Marxist philosophy in China. According to this paradigm, the core of Marx’s critique of capital lies in the usurpation of the subjectivity of workers by capital, the alienation or objectification of workers by capital, and the liberation of workers lies in the restoration and reconstruction of their class subjectivity.

However, the new changes in contemporary capitalism have posed a severe challenge to the above ideas: the strengthening of the subjectivity of workers has not only failed to promote the liberation of workers, but has caused the deterioration of their situation.

On the one hand, the development of trends such as the flexibility of the labor process, the cognition of labor content, and the elasticity of the labor market has highly highlighted the subjectivity of workers; on the other hand, phenomena such as the stagnation of real wages, the decline of trade union power, the extension of working hours, and the increase in labor intensity indicate that the working class is more dominated than before. This has made Western Marxists begin to realize that there may be a profound implicit conspiracy between the development of workers’ subjectivity and the rule of capital.

To this end, since the 1960s , Western Marxists have constructed a theory of labor subject reproduction under the logic of capital, trying to grasp the inherent connection between workers’ subjectivity and capital power. Examining the above situation of Western Marxism is helpful to reflect on the existing model of Chinese Marxist philosophy research and better grasp the special reality of contemporary capitalism.

1. “Weberian Marxism” and the subject theory

Western Marxism’s research on the subject problem can be traced back to Lukacs, the founder of this trend of thought. Lukacs combined the Hegelian interpretation of Marx’s philosophy with Weber’s rationalization theory to construct a revolutionary theory based on class consciousness and a critical theory based on the category of reification, which profoundly influenced the Frankfurt School in Germany, the French neo-Hegelianism and other left-wing schools of thought. Merleau – Ponty summarized the above ideas as “Weberian Marxism”, accurately grasping its key points. This line of thought laid the foundation for the main model of Western Marxism’s thinking on the subject problem, but it also faces severe challenges in the new changes of contemporary capitalism.

Lukacs argued that in developed capitalist society, the commodity form is a unified form for constructing all social relations. This form reaches its peak in the commodification of labor, that is, the reification or objectification of human beings themselves. On this basis, Lukacs grafted Marx’s commodity form theory with Weber’s rationalization theory, pointing out that the main characteristics of the reified form are rationality, precision and calculability, thus establishing a connection between the commodity form and the rationalized labor process.

As a result, workers are understood as objects that are precisely calculated in the rationalization process; the ruling power of capital over workers is reflected in the power of the commodity form to reify or objectify workers. In contrast, the liberation of workers lies in getting rid of this objectified (reified) situation and restoring their own subjectivity, that is, forming a class consciousness of “subject-object” as a historical whole. From the perspective of historical materialism, this theory is compatible with Taylorist capitalism in the 20th century. In the mid- 20th century, with the widespread implementation of Taylorism, scientific management method and Fordism, the knowledge and skills of workers were gradually alienated to machines, which made the subject-object reversal between labor and capital, the objectification of workers, and the bureaucratization of capitalist industry particularly was prominent. This situation was correctly expressed in Lukacs’ theory of reification.

This paradigm of interpretation initiated by Lukacs later gradually became the dominant problem consciousness of early Western Marxism.

In the first generation of scholars of the Frankfurt School, Lukacs’s theory was transformed into a critique of the society of comprehensive control and instrumental rationality, and acquired a pure philosophical form in Adorno’s negative dialectics of criticizing identity with non-identity.

“The name of dialectics means nothing more than that objects cannot enter concepts completely without leaving a residue, which contradicts the traditional principle of sufficiency. Contradiction is not what Hegel’s absolute idealism distorts it into: it is not the essence in the sense of Heraclitus. It refers to the non-truth of identity and the fact that concepts cannot exhaust what they conceive.”

In Marcuse’s works, this idea developed into the opposition between civilization and love, “one-dimensional man” and repressed unconscious desire, which had a huge impact on the revolutionary movement in the West in the 1960s and 1970s .

According to this line of thought, the criticism of identity by non-identity is consistent with the resistance of subjectivity to objectivity: to resist the uniform and rigid bureaucratic system, it is necessary to liberate the suppressed desires full of individual differences. Influenced by this line of thought, the Marxist philosophy research in China often understands the essence of capital logic as the unification and abstraction of value forms, and the consequences of the universal development of capital logic as abstract rule and the impoverishment of the world of meaning; in contrast, the sign of the liberation of human subjectivity from the rule of capital is also understood as the full development of human creativity and the re-enrichment of human world of meaning.

However, according to the viewpoint in the above, the critical line of thought initiated by Lukacs is aimed at a special form of capitalism, namely, industrial capitalism that reached its peak in the Fordist system in the mid -20th century, which cannot represent the general laws of capital logic.

Specifically, only in Fordist capitalism, due to the need for large-scale production of standardized products, will the organizational form of capitalism manifest as a developed bureaucracy, various social systems will show signs of being highly fixed and rigid, and the labor process will become a uniform one-dimensional process. However, these characteristics are not the inevitable inference of the essential laws of capital logic, nor are they the common characteristics of other stages of capitalism. Early Western Marxism directly linked this special form with the general value form, and even with the entire history of Western rationality, thus exaggerating it into the general form of capitalism.

More importantly, as some scholars have pointed out, when Lukacs deduced from the commodity form to the rationalized labor process, Lukacs used Weber’s rationalization theory, not Marx’s capital increase theory, as the intermediary. This line of thought of Lukacs bypassed Marx’s essential definition of the logic of capital and created a “short circuit” between the commodity form and the labor process.

In Marx’s Capital, the discussion on the rationalization of the labor process belongs to the historical analysis from the manual workshop to the large-scale machine industry, which in turn belongs to the theory of relative surplus value.

In other words, for Marx the rationalized labor process is not directly based on the commodity form, and the two must be mediated by the theory of capital increase and the theory of relative surplus value. According to the exposition of Capital, the premise for the establishment of the value form of commodities is the universal movement of capital increase, and capital increase requires the exploitation of the surplus value created by labor. In developed capitalist society, the increase of surplus value mainly depends on the production of relative surplus value: through the rationalization of the labor process, the productivity of necessities of life increases, the unit value decreases, and the reproduction cost of labor skills also decreases, which leads to a decrease in the value of labor and an increase in the proportion of surplus value in the total value. It can be seen that in Marx’s view, the rationalization of the labor process is the requirement for producing relative surplus value, that is, the requirement of the “special rationality” of the capital growth movement, rather than the general requirement of modern rationality. However, early Western Marxism just ignored this point and simply grafted the rationalization of the capitalist labor process with modern instrumental rationality.

Because early Western Marxism bypassed Marx’s essential provisions on the logic of capital, namely, the movement of capital appreciation and the production of surplus value, its criticism of capitalism can only hit the empirical phenomena of a specific era, but cannot hit the essential connection between this phenomenon and the logic of capital.

This criticism by early Western Marxism fails to see that both the unifying power of the value form and the unifying appearance of the rationalized labor process are based on the movement of capital appreciation. However, the principle of capital appreciation is not identity, but a certain non-identity: it will not stay at the same value, but will constantly pursue “more” than the current value, constantly differ from itself, and thus constantly create something new and different that did not exist before. Only under the drive of this endless desire to constantly surpass itself, will the unifying appearance of the value form be expanded on all things, and the rationalization of the labor process will be pushed to the point of being penny-pinching. In this sense, the crux of capitalist society is not identity, but non-identity itself: it is not abstract poverty, but deformed excess; it is not that things that should exist do not exist, but that things that should not exist exist too much.

The above-mentioned mistakes of “Weberian Marxism” directly lead to its deviation in the position on the subject.

It associates identity with the suppression of subjectivity by the rationalized labor process, and associates non-identity with the liberation of multiple subjectivities. This critical path is certainly meaningful in resisting the rigidification of society in the era of industrial capitalism, but it only focuses on the empirical phenomena of this special period, so it is in collusion (secret cooperation) with the essential laws of capital logic. In fact, the liberation of the subject based on non-identity just meets the requirements of capital growth, because capital growth is originally realized through a non-identical subject, that is, the subject of surplus labor. The production of surplus value is possible only when the subject can pay labor beyond its own needs, that is, not only necessary labor but also surplus labor. In this sense, non-identity and subjectivity are indeed consistent; but this consistency does not lie in the hope of liberation from the rule of capital, but in the fact that they are both internal links of capital power itself.

It can be seen that the theoretical strategy of “Weberian Marxism” is impossible to succeed.

It understands the general characteristics of capitalism as identity and reification, and criticizes and resists it based on non-identity and subjectivity, but fails to see that non-identity and subjectivity are precisely the requirements of the essential law of capital logic, and identity and reification are only the manifestations of this essential law in a special period. Therefore, this theoretical strategy contains double risks from the beginning: on the one hand, Weberian Marxism’s criticism of the special form of capitalism is disconnected from the essential law of capital logic, and it is likely to affect those social organizations that do not belong to capitalism but show similar characteristics, thus “accidentally hurting friendly forces”; on the other hand, Weberian Marxism’s liberation plan is only conceived for the special stage of capitalism. This plan is not only unable to resist general capitalism, but is likely to conform to the requirements of capitalism’s own transformation to the next stage and meet the need for capitalism to “self-adjust” in the face of its stage contradictions.

Judging from the actual development of history, the objective effect brought about by “Weberian Marxism” is indeed the case.

First, Weberian Marxism’s criticism of capitalism is aimed at rationalization and bureaucracy, not targets the capital growth itself.

This criticism also affects trade unions and welfare states that adopt bureaucracy, the socialist countries in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and even mainly falls on the latter “friendly forces” that belong to the left camp. Secondly, its liberation strategy is to restore the subjectivity of workers and the differences imprisoned by the same value form. However, in the 1960s and 1970s when capitalism gradually turned to neoliberalism , the release of this subjectivity and difference is exactly what capitalism itself needs most.

Neoliberal capitalism destroys the unity of trade unions and workers’ organizations, disintegrates the industrial assembly line that closely combines a large number of workers, and reconstructs the labor process into a decentralized and flexible form, thereby weakening the resistance of the working class. Neoliberal capitalism also cultivates differentiated consumer demand, shapes a labor ethic that encourages individual self-realization, exacerbates the division within the working class, and creates suitable labor and consumer subjects for neoliberalism.

“Weberian Marxism” has had a profound influence on the social revolutionary movements in the West since 1968 , determining the conservative nature of these movements under their radical appearance. As Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello pointed out in The New Spirit of Capitalism:

This period was in fact characterized by the rise of various “new social movements” (feminism, homosexuality, ecology and anti-nuclear movements, etc.), characterized by the gradual dominance of anti-communist, pro-autonomous tendencies on the left, and the severe criticism of communism throughout the 1980s . The analytical categories of totalitarianism were applied to the analysis of communism without the resistance they had met in the 1950s or 1960s . In France, since social criticism was closely linked to the communist movement, the discrediting of the communist movement meant that social criticism temporarily but openly abandoned the economic field. Under the attack of esthetic artistic criticism, the company was reduced to a repressive institution like the state, the army, the school and the family; the struggle against bureaucracy and for labor autonomy replaced the concern for economic equality and the security of the most deprived.

It can be seen from this that the early Western Marxist critique of capitalism was actually a critique of the superficial commonalities between capitalism and socialism, and sometimes even turned into a critique of socialism; rather than saying that it dealt a blow to capitalism, it is better to say that it was absorbed and utilized by capitalism. This failure of “Weberian Marxism” highlights that in order to think about the subject problem from the perspective of Marxist philosophy, it is necessary to distinguish the special manifestations of capitalism in a certain period from the essential laws of capital logic, and to examine the transformation of the subject in the staged evolution of capitalism; it is necessary to consider not only the subject’s resistance to capital, but also the subject’s inherent collusion (secret cooperation) with capital. These two points have been clearly reflected in Western Marxism since the 1960s.

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