Against Post-Marxism

Against Post-Marxism:Marx and the Struggles within the Labour Process
Terence Smith Professor Richard DeGeorge Philosophy 580 August 1996


The proclaimed dawn of "postmodernity" has been concomitant with a general state of crisis and pessimism within Left political theory. In response to this crisis, post-Marxism has proposed itself as a means toward the reinvigoration of an emancipatory politics within postmodernism. I am dubious, however, of the way in which this "post" constructs the "Marxism" that it purports to succeed. I would like to focus on the elaboration of the project of "radical democracy," as advocated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985), particularly with regard to the way in which this project constructs the labour process and the implications that follow from that construction for our understanding of the position of "labour" within a contemporary revolutionary praxis. Laclau characterises the postmodern sensibility as a response to the erosion of the ontological status of the central categories of the discourses of modernity (Laclau 1988). Consequently, Laclau and Mouffe's critique of Marxism targets what they understand as its ontological privileging of the working class as the agent of historical transformation. Such privileging, they claim, is an unacceptable form of "essentialism" given the plurality of subjects opposed to the dominant order in contemporary society. Although not explicitly specified in these terms, the diminishing role of "productive labour" which is often identified with the development of a postmodern capitalism, where productive labour is understood as the activity of the industrial proletariat which valorizes capital, may be cited as a determining influence on Laclau and Mouffe's onslaught against working-class "essentialism." If productive labour is no longer of central importance to society, then society's producers may no longer be accorded a privileged position, either in its emancipation or subsequent operation. "[W]hat is at stake," they suggest, "is true participation by all subjects in decisions about what is to be produced, and the forms in which the product is to be distributed" (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 178, my emphasis). In place of the logic of "determinism" which, they claim, has characterised Marxist praxis up until now, Laclau and Mouffe propose an alternative political logic derived from Gramsci's reformulations of the concept of "hegemony." Gramsci's concept, while still guilty of Marxist essentialism, nonetheless attempted to grasp the nascent forms of social complexity which we experience so acutely under postmodernism. Hegemony described the formation of a "collective will" of the oppressed through an "ideological articulation of dispersed and fragmented historical forces"; where "ideology" refers to "an organic and relational whole, embodied in institutions and apparatuses, which welds together a historical bloc around a number of basic articulatory principles" (67). For Laclau and Mouffe, then, the concept of hegemony introduced into the history of Marxist theory a space supplemental to the "simple antagonism among classes" (60), in which a more complex theorisation of political action was developed. It is within this space that a "genealogy of post-Marxism" may be traced (1988, 337); a project which reaches fruition when "the logic of hegemony" is allowed to "unfold all of its deconstructive effects on the theoretical terrain of classical Marxism" (1985, 85).
Laclau and Mouffe's critique focuses specifically on the question of the constitution of the economic space, judging the question of its relation to social processes external to it to be one which may not be given a generally applicable answer. The original theorizations of hegemony attempted to account for a breach between the imperatives of a projected necessity arising from the economic sphere and the contingent political articulation that attempted to fulfil those tasks. Within these schemes, hegemonic articulation, as the linking of disparate social agents, was considered to be a logic whose operations were confined to the political realm. Meanwhile, those agents' fundamental constitution "beneath" that articulation was judged to be determined by the economic realm, and was therefore ruled by the operations of the "logic of capital." In opposition to this, then, Laclau and Mouffe "attempt to demonstrate that the space of the economy is itself structured as a political space, and that in it, as in any other `level' of society, those practices we characterised as hegemonic are fully operative" (76-77).
As their attention to the constitution of social agents suggests, Laclau and Mouffe privilege subjectivity and the processes of identity-formation as a rubric through which to understand the political logics governing contemporary society. Their attempt to dismantle Marxist "essentialism" consequently involves delineating the ways in which these processes are present within the economic sphere. This conceptual extension negates the distinction within the Marxist tradition between determinism and voluntarism; predicated as it was on the bifurcation of the economic and political spaces and their corresponding logics?either the objective determinism of the economy or the subjective voluntarism of the political. In extending the political logic of hegemonic articulation and its subjective processes to the economic sphere, the opposition is deconstructed. It is displaced to an opposition internal to competing articulations. Since the onslaught of their critique has its origins in the promotion of a political logic, it is not surprising to find that its object is a particularly objectivist and determinist version of Marxist theory. I find this somewhat of a straw opponent, and given that its defeat prompts the entry into post-Marxism, the particularities of their attack deserve further interrogation. I believe that there are other ways of reading Marx, particularly if we look to Grundrisse in preference to Capital. I will attempt to demonstrate while the objectivist readings of Marx are deserving of critique, this process by no means necessarily leads us into a "post-Marxism."
Laclau and Mouffe identify three conditions for, and respective theses of, the validity of asserting the fundamental constitution of social agents by the economy: (1) the condition that the economy's laws of motion are of an endogenous nature, coupled with the thesis of the neutrality of the forces of production; (2) that the social agents form a unity at the economic level, coupled with the thesis of the growing homogenisation and impoverishment of the working class; (3) that the relations of production dictate "historical interests" to those agents positioned within them with the thesis of the working class' interest in socialism (76/77). The negation of each of these conditions and theses forces us to "face the consequences" and enter the terrain of post-Marxism?or so they claim (85-88).
For the purposes of this essay, I will attempt to develop a critique of the first of these negations only. While the other two are no less important for their critique of Marxist essentialism, and equally provide ample opportunities for a demonstration of its invalidity, this would necessitate an extensive elaboration both of their own philosophical foundations, and the elements within Marx's works which may be mobilised as an alternative. Unfortunately, that is a far larger project than the parameters of this one can contain. I believe, however, that many of the arguments I will develop here represent a significant move towards establishing a conceptual terrain adequate to the larger investigation.
To the task at hand, then. I believe there is a confusion in Laclau and Mouffe's reasoning about their negation of the first couplet (endogenous economy?neutral productive forces). On the one hand, they insist on the centrality of struggle for the development of the productive forces and the functioning of the economy. On the other, however, they fail to analyse adequately the possible class nature of those struggles. If their reasoning is supposed to reveal the necessity of a move beyond Marxism, a demonstration of the struggles' non-class character would be imperative. However, all they succeed in demonstrating, I will argue, is the inadequacy of both the objectivist version of Marxism which they critique, and their own proposed alternative to it.
The confusion arises, I believe, from an ill-conceived relationship?which they found their critique upon?between: (1) a general law of development of the productive forces; and (2) the laws of development specific to the capitalist mode of production. They suggest that, for Marxism, the combination of the two produces "a primal economic contradiction" whose "social and political expression" is the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and proletariat (77). What is presented as the Marxist analysis of the development of the productive forces, however, is in fact a significantly flattened out and simplified version?a simplification which provides the ground for their demonstration of the necessity of a "post-Marxist" analysis. To be more precise, they reduce Marxism's historicised account of the working through of the tendency of the productive forces' development to the moment which forms its culmination: "the capitalist relations of production constitute an insurmountable obstacle to the advance of these productive forces" (77). This reduction allows them to describe struggles over the "general" development of the forces of production as struggles external to their capitalist development (and the class antagonism that permeates it). The struggles are thus able to be described as governed by a political logic which is not necessarily that of the class struggle. This externality, however, is only possible due to their poor conception of the relation between the two laws of development mentioned above. While, indeed, the "primal economic contradiction" which Marxism identifies arises from the development of the forces of production, it is not an external contradiction between the productive forces and capitalism, but an internal one between capitalist forces of production and capitalist relations of production. The antagonism which this contradiction produces at the culmination of the productive forces' development is therefore not between a general law and the laws of capital externally combined with it, but is an antagonism internal to capitalism derived from its forced combination of wage labour and capital. Hence, in any analysis of capitalist society, the relation between (1) a general law of development of the productive forces and (2) the laws of development of capitalism, correctly described, is not external, but internal to the concept of capital itself?what Marx calls "the living contradiction" (1857-8, 421). Laclau and Mouffe's failure to elaborate this inner connection has serious repercussions throughout their argument.
Laclau and Mouffe assert that Marxism assumes that the general law of development involves no struggle?that its development is a neutral process?while the laws of capital form the exclusive area of concern. Their critique focuses on the labour process as the site where this assumption is invalidated. Rather than attempting to analyse the connection between the two laws of development as manifested within the labour process, however, and thus the class nature of the struggles, Laclau and Mouffe play one off against the other. This is supposed to demonstrate the inadequacy of the Marxist conception of the labour process. While Laclau and Mouffe may be correct in pointing out that "the study of the labour process was for long depreciated within the Marxist tradition" (78), this cannot be said of Marx's own work itself. On the contrary, I will argue that although Marx's analysis of the labour process does not immediately appear to offer an apposite retort to Laclau and Mouffe's critique, this appearance is merely a result of the trajectory of approach?namely, the confused relation identified above. Once corrected, however, I believe it is possible to demonstrate that Marx elaborates extensively the inner connection which their analysis lacks, and that as a result, his analysis of the labour process remains a valid one.
The two laws which Laclau and Mouffe identify may be said to describe two corresponding perspectives from which the labour process may be analysed: (1) the compulsion to work (the general law, or what Marx refers to as production in general?that is, the production of labour); and (2) the valorization process (the laws of capital, or the production of value in excess of the equivalent?that is, the production of surplus labour and its realization as profit). It should be noted that while we can delineate these two aspects in theory, as far as the labourers who work within the capitalist mode of production are concerned, the distinction is an abstraction from what is experienced as a single process?all of their labour "is alien . . . and coerced" (Marx 1857-8, 470). This is to say that the inner connection between the two describes the reality which the labourers of capitalism?wage labourers?experience in practice.
Laclau and Mouffe attempt to prove that the organisation of the labour process is not based solely on the need to extract and realize surplus value (the second perspective). [Furthermore, social relations] They suggest that Marxism, in order to support its assumption that the general law of development involves no struggle, "had to resort to a fiction: it conceived of labour-power as a commodity" (78). This conception is inadequate since "[l]abour-power differs from the other necessary elements of production in that the capitalist must do more than simply purchase it; he must also make it produce labour" (78). Their analysis from the first perspective therefore, reveals a political mechanism for asserting control over the labour process. Further, as a political (not economic) mechanism, it is understood to operate independently of the imperatives of capital's valorization. In treating labour capacity as a commodity, Marxism, they claim, is blinded to the struggle involved over the exercise of this control.
As has already been suggested, however, I believe that the reductive way in which Laclau and Mouffe conceive the development of the productive forces, and the externality which this produces between the general and capitalist laws that drive it, cause their analysis to be blind to the inner connection that exists between the struggles over the labour process and the struggles involved in capital's valorization. As Marx suggests,
The contradiction between production and realization?of which capital, by its concept, is the unity?has to be grasped more intrinsically than merely as the indifferent, seemingly reciprocally independent appearance of the individual moments of the process, or rather of the totality of the processes (1857-8, 415).
While Marx does indeed insist that labour capacity is organized through the commodity form, he goes to great pains to highlight the "peculiar" nature of this commodity (1867, 344). In order to analyse its peculiarity, however, he begins not with production but circulation?specifically small-scale circulation, or the act of exchange between capital and labour. This act consists of the exchange of objectified labour in the form of money for "disposition over alien labour" (1857-8, 282); that is, the exchange of a wage for the prerogative of the exercise of control over the labour process. The peculiar nature of this commodity results in a part of capital (circulating capital within small-scale circulation, or wages) being specified as use value. A contradiction therefore emerges, as "exchange value and use value are brought into relation; the one side (capital) initially stands opposite the other side as exchange value, and the other (labour), stands opposite capital, as use value" (267-8). Within this relation, the particular use value constitutes a part of capital's form in contradiction to capital's nature as exchange value. There is clearly a class struggle taking place here; that "between collective capital, i.e. the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e. the working class"?wherein, between the "antinomy, of right against right" which arises from the surface appearance of the equality of the two, "force decides" (1867, 344). What is more, Marx predicts that, with the further development of capitalism, the masking of the struggles involved will be dissolved:
[I]n the struggle between the two classes?which necessarily arises with the development of the working class?the measurement of the distance between them, which, precisely, is expressed by wages itself as a proportion, becomes decisively important. The semblance of exchange vanishes in the course of the mode of production founded on capital (674; also 458).
This suggests that, within this act of circulation, the formal appearance of fair exchange, or the wage, gives way to the class struggle.
In order to identify the struggles with which Laclau and Mouffe attempt to negate the validity of a Marxist analysis, however, it is necessary to analyse the ways in which the organization of labour capacity through the commodity form affects not the realm of circulation, but production. In the words of Marx, we must "leave this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in full view of everyone, and follow [the owner of money and the owner of labour-power] into the hidden abode of production" (1867, 279). That is, like Laclau and Mouffe, we must focus on the labour process. Our trajectory of enquiry, however, will be a little different.
The act of production, or more precisely, the labour process, involves the actual setting to work by capital of the obtained labour capacity and the actual exercise of control: "the capitalist takes good care that the work is done in a proper manner" (1867, 291). Marx describes this process as capital's "productive consumption" of labour, whereby the use value acquired becomes, as a result of the compulsion to produce alien labour, "the worker's specific, productive activity" (267). The utilization of the use value, therefore, causes its transformation from a potentiality to a reality; from labour capacity to alien, productive labour:
As against capital, labour is the mere abstract form, the mere possibility of value-positing activity, which exists only as a capacity, as a resource in the bodiliness of the worker. But when it is made into a real activity through contact with capital?it cannot do this by itself, since it is without object?then it becomes a really value-positing, productive activity" (298).
It is, however, the nature both of this "compulsion," and this "contact with capital," and the relation between the two, which is at issue.
To focus on the process of "contact with capital," then, the struggles which Laclau and Mouffe privilege involve this transformation from a capacity to an activity?they are opposed to the capitalist's "necessity to extract labour from the labour-power purchased" (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 78). It is not immediately apparent, however, that Marx's scheme acknowledges this transformation as a potential site of antagonism. Indeed, when Marx identifies the two forms in which labour is opposed to capital, i.e., is "posited as not-capital," he seems to imply that the first oppositional form (not-objectified labour as object, or the worker's immediate bodily existence, conceived as absolute poverty) relates to the act of exchange, while the second oppositional form (not-objectified labour as subject, or the worker's activity, conceived as the general possibility of wealth) relates to the act of production (295-7). Hence, the transformation from the first form to the second?from objective capacity to subjective activity?does not seem to be an issue, and the antagonisms which occupy Marx's attention while analysing the labour process appear to be limited to those between capital and "the mere subjectivity of labour" (298). To conceive of the matter in this way, however, is to ignore the dialectical nature of the process. The worker's activity, as activity, is in itself the transformation both of the capacity into the form of activity and at the same time the activity into the form of the product. The transformation of labour capacity into labour and labour's production of the product are one and the same process. The form of opposition of labour to capital within the labour process?the subjectivity of labour?is therefore identical to the opposition to the transformation of labour capacity into alien, productive labour. It is precisely this opposition, and the struggle which it involves, to which Laclau and Mouffe are referring. Marx's analysis, in identifying this opposition, now appears with the fullness of antagonism readily apparent.
Laclau and Mouffe project an assumption on to Marx to the effect that "it is necessary that all the elements intervening in the productive process be submitted to [the general law of development of the productive forces'] determinations" (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 78). The "fiction" of labour capacity-as-commodity is the form in which Marxism makes this assumption, it is claimed. Further, as an element of the "economist viewpoint," this fiction reinforces an understanding of the development of the productive forces as a neutral process (ibid.). The identification of the antagonistic elements within Marx's analysis, however, directly contradicts this construction. The issue, then, lies elsewhere. I believe that Laclau and Mouffe's critique attempts to grasp a real moment within the labour process, namely the exercise of control, regardless of whatever critical constructions they mobilise to comprehend that moment. While their analysis rightly criticises a Marxism that stresses only the objective side of the production of capital, Marx himself identifies a subjective moment?the subjectivity of labour?and, further, identifies that subjectivity as antagonistic. It is Marx's analysis, then, that enables a true critique of an objectivist Marxism; which is to say that his analysis penetrates to the heart of the matter?the opposition between labour and capital as the determining relation of the real moment?and offers a solution. In light of that analysis, Laclau and Mouffe's comments on the antagonisms within the labour process can be construed only as criticisms of a theory which denies the existence of those struggles, not as a coherent critique. I believe that the inadequacy of their attempted critique may be traced to the confusion identified earlier over the relation between a "general law of development" and the specific laws of capital. It is this confusion which results in the projection onto Marx of an assumed submission of all elements within the labour process to a "general law of development." Even if it were true that Marx assumes that the labour process is a neutral one (which would reduce his critique to an "objectivist" Marxism which only locates struggle within the superstructural forms "in which men become conscious of this conflict" (Marx 1859, 21)--and I shall demonstrate shortly that this is not the case, since the category of "form" in Marx is not confined to the superstructure), this assumption would still not be identical to the one that Laclau and Mouffe project. The object of enquiry is different in each case: with Marx, the labour process under capitalism, with Laclau and Mouffe, the labour process in general. I believe that Laclau and Mouffe's claim effects a displacement of the assumption from its true source. It is not Marx, but, taken as a "subject," capital (in its ideological form as economic theory), which "makes" the assumption. Within the bourgeois form of economic theory, capital's development of the productive forces is naturalised as their general development; the capitalist form of production is assumed to be production in general. As capital cannot exist unless the submission to its labour process and the development thereof is effected, the assumption of an automatic, struggle-fee submission is identical to a presupposition of capitalism as representing production in general liberated from the antagonism embodied in wage labour. Whether or not capital (within the economic process, as opposed to within its ideology) assumes this submission to be without antagonism remains to be seen.
With each reinforcing the other, the assumption of a submission to the determinations of a "general law of development" and the assertion of the neutrality of that development, may be made with validity only when, crucially, the particular historic form of development is specified as one in which "the free, unobstructed, progressive and universal development of the forces of production is itself the presupposition of society and hence of its reproduction" (1857-8, 540). Once our object of analysis is specified as the capitalist mode of production, however, it is precisely the capitalist relations of production that, at first, constitute the "forms of development of the productive forces." Later, however, they "turn into their fetters" (1859, 21). Thus, it is the degree of development within this specified historic form which determines whether or not the productive forces present themselves as antagonistic. Therefore, the assumption and the assertion mentioned above may be made only while considering labour as labour in general, "not as wage labour, not in its specific character as form in antithesis to capital" (1857-8, 330). To do this in isolation from a consideration of the formal relation, however, as we have seen, is to commit precisely the error that bourgeois economists make. That Laclau and Mouffe feel able to identify Marx with exactly this error perhaps may be due to the fact that Marx considered his exposition within Capital to be "not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that spring from the natural laws of capitalist production. [Rather, it] is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies winning their way through and working themselves out with iron necessity" (1867, 90-1). Within the Grundrisse, however, these antagonisms have a more central place in the inquiry. Once identified through an elaboration of the formal relations of the development, it is impossible to conceive of these antagonisms as constituting a struggle that does not have a class character. Thus, the grounds for the validity of Laclau and Mouffe's move into a "post-Marxism" are removed, and we return, instead, to Marx.
I will assert that capital does presuppose the production process in general?i.e., that labour capacity successfully becomes real labour?but only in its ideological forms does it assume a general development of the forces of that production; that is to say, a development that does not proceed by way of antagonism. It is necessary to follow in detail Marx's account of labour process to make this clear. Marx discusses the labour process not in general, but specifically with regard to its absorption into capital (1857-8, 297-320). At the close of this section, he concludes:
We have already seen so far that capital presupposes: (1) the production process in general, such as is common to all social conditions, that is, without historic character, human if you like; (2) circulation which is already a specific historic product in each of its moments, and even more so in its totality; (3) capital as a specific unity of the two (320).
At first sight, this would seem to be Laclau and Mouffe's preferred site of intervention?capital is the unity of a general law with a specifically capitalist one. Although Marx's elaboration here is a consideration of the general process, it is nonetheless framed by the specific context of that general process' internal operation within the capitalist production process. What is more, our attention should be drawn to the "seen so far" with which this quotation opens, since, crucially, its conclusions are specifically linked to the context of the discussion which precedes it. In light of this context, Laclau and Mouffe's intervention is thrown off-balance.
Here, then, we are looking at the labour process in general through its capitalist formation. It remains to be seen if, in an analysis of contemporary society, it may be looked at in any other way. (For the moment, though, we may note that if it may, which would imply the existence of labour processes that are not shaped by capital's formation, then Laclau and Mouffe's project may have some validity, since any struggles which these processes might contain would not be determined by the opposition wage labour-capital, i.e., would not be part of the class struggle.) The guiding thread for the development of Marx's analysis in this section is "the process of [capital's] becoming." What is more, "[t]his dialectical process of its becoming is only the ideal expression of the real movement through which capital comes into being. The later relations are to be regarded as developments coming out of this germ" (310). The process is analysed from two aspects: its material and formal sides. To follow Marx, firstly, then, its material character:
Capital becomes the process of production through the incorporation of labour into capital; initially however, it becomes the material process of production; the process of production in general, so that the process of the production of capital is not distinct from the material process of production as such. Its formal character is completely extinguished (304).
Within this material process of production, then, as described earlier, labour, in the form of labour capacity, is "consumed by being employed, set in motion" and "at the same time fixed, converted from the form of activity into the form of the object" (300). Capital, from entering the labour process as both objectified labour and living labour, to exiting it as objectified labour embodied within the product, may be described as "initially this qualitative difference of the substance in which it exists from the form in which it now also exists as labour. It is the process of this differentiation and of its suspension, in which capital itself becomes a process" (298). To define this capital-as-process within the terms already discussed, therefore, capital's differentiation takes place during the exchange between capital and labour (where "small-scale" circulating capital is specified as use value?as its contradiction; as wage labour), while the suspension of this differentiation happens within the labour process (where the labour capacity is consumed and the product emerges). Regarded in this way, however, solely from its material side in isolation from its formal character, there appears to be little conflict arising from this process. "All three moments of the process, the material, the instrument, and labour, coincide in the neutral result?the product" (300, first emphasis mine). None of the elements of opposition between labour and capital identified earlier appear to be present, as the material relation between capital-as-process' constituent parts does not contain capital's "own relation" to each of them:
It therefore appears on one side as a merely passive object, in which all formal character is extinguished; it appears on the other side only as a simple production process into which capital as such, as distinct from its substance, does not enter. . . . To the extent to which we have examined the process so far, capital in its being-for-itself, i.e. the capitalist, does not enter at all. . . . Thus the process of the production of capital does not appear as the process of the production of capital, but as the process of production in general (302-3, last emphasis mine).
Thus, capital presupposes the production process in general, abstracted from its historic character; "human, if you like." It is here that the "general" enters as a category in Marx's analysis. This, too, appears to be the site of Laclau and Mouffe's intervention?the transformation of labour-as-capacity into labour-as-activity?hence, the compulsion to work, or to produce alien labour. Thus it appears that Marx's analysis seems to conceive of this transformation as a neutral, automatic process. Within Laclau and Mouffe's construction of Marxism, this is so not because capital successfully achieves total control, but rather because, at this moment, no control is necessary. Indeed, it would seem that capital, in its being-for-itself, or the capitalist, does not need to bother to enter the process. Why, then, do the workers work? The absence of the capitalist here suits Laclau and Mouffe's intervention, which in its essence is precisely this question. Marx's analysis, it is to be remembered, is a development of the relation between the compulsion to work and labour's contact with capital. Thus, it seems, the compulsion to work has been secured through the purchase of the labour capacity. The separation of labour from property, from the conditions of its production and reproduction, is the form of control exercised by capital over the labourer?the "silent compulsion of economic relations." Marx suggests that:
Direct extra-economic force is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases. In the ordinary run of things, the worker can be left to the "natural laws of production," i.e. it is possible to rely on his dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them " (1867, 899).
As the enclosure of the "natural laws of production" within quotation marks might suggest to us, however, this does not constitute the capitalist's exercise of control tout court.
Before developing this assertion, however, it is necessary to pause for a moment on the confluence within the above account of the category "general" in Laclau and Mouffe's and Marx's usage; which, crucially as it turns out, are qualitatively distinct. Earlier, I identified the confusion within Laclau and Mouffe's argument as a reduction of Marxism's historicised account of the development of the productive forces to the moment that forms its culmination: the contradiction of the forces with the relations. Now it is clear, however, that what is actually happening in Laclau and Mouffe's critique is a displacement, not reduction, of the "historical" quality of this process. The movement of history is displaced onto a category that, for Marx, is a-historical?production in general, without historic character, "human, if you like." The result of this displacement is the construction of what can only be contradictory within Marx's conceptual scheme: the "general development of the forces of production." This construction substantiates Laclau and Mouffe's complaint about Marx's view of the telos of history:
According to this view, if history has a sense and a rational substratum, it is due to the general law of development of the productive forces. Hence, the economy may be understood as a mechanism of society acting upon objective phenomena independently of human action (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 77-8).
Thus, not only is this the presentation of an extremely objectivist version of Marxism, but the construction of its conceptual foundations is contradictory and false. This results in the subjectivity of the development being displaced to a position external to its movement. While there may be general laws of production, the development of those laws, as development, implies diachrony, that is, history. Yet, the general laws of production for Marx imply the absence of exactly this element?the general laws exist only as an abstraction from the movement of history. The real historical development, rather, proceeds by way of an internal relation between the development of the subjectivity of labour and its objective development as capital. In short, "[t]he history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle" (Marx and Engels 1848, 473). To conceive of a general law of development unfolding under present conditions, therefore, would be tantamount to insisting that "there has been history, but there is no longer any" (Marx 1846-7, 115). The only general "law" and telos of development, from an historical materialist methodology, is that of the practical struggle of agents within the forces and relations of production?the only law is the law of class struggle.
Again, the confusion and resultant falsity of Laclau and Mouffe's scheme resolves itself into the question of the category of "form" in Marx's conceptual framework. The opposition, correctly stated, is not that between the general and the specific, but rather between the general as abstraction and its concrete forms of existence; which, under capitalism, are contradictory forms. The actual labour process under the historically located capitalist mode of production, therefore, is only able to appear as the general process to the extent that the second aspect under which Marx analyses the process?its formal side?is overlooked. As we have seen, this aspect is crucial to a proper understanding of capital as the foundation of bourgeois society. The importance of an analysis of the formal character is specifically stressed by Marx in the opening of volume one of Capital, where he asserts that it constitutes the distinction between the methods of bourgeois political economy, and his own critique of the same: the former "has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form" (1867, 174). From the side of capital's formal specificity, then, "this process is a process of self-realization" (1857-8, 311). Therefore, under capitalism, "the labour process is merely a means for the self-valorization of capital" (1867, 1039, my emphasis). It is this process of valorization (translated as "realization" in the Grundrisse) which distinguishes the mode of production founded on capital as a distinct, historically determinate and transitory kind of social production (in which labour takes the form of wage labour and the product of labour takes the form of the commodity); distinct both from the earlier modes of production which in its conceptual and real process of becoming it presupposes, and has superseded, and from the mode of production which develops within and in antithesis to that becoming, and forms the boundary that represents, in turn, its own supercession.
As Marx is keen to stress, therefore, "even within the production process itself this extinguishing of the formal character is merely a semblance" (304). This semblance is removed when the "invisible threads" which draw the formal relation through the production process are identified. Within its capitalist formation, the general production process?as an abstraction which "takes place within the process itself" (303)--"appears as the self-propelling content of capital" (305). When considering the labour process under capital as a whole, this content cannot be conceived in isolation from the form which it assumes. Indeed, "the connection [of the form] with the content . . . with capital, is not . . . irrelevant" (258). It is this connection that constitutes the "invisible threads." Here, then, we return to the issue of the compulsion to work and its relation to labour's connection to capital. We have already observed how, considered from its material side, the labour process appeared to be the automatic implementation, by a now passive capital, of the successful outcome of a struggle with labour within the act of exchange; that is, we have identified the control exercised by capital over labour in the form of the silent compulsion of economic relations?the separation of labour from property. However, within the act of exchange, although the worker is posited as worker, the capitalist is present "only as money" (294). Within the act of production from its material side, the capitalist is not present at all. Within the formal relation, though, where the process is to be regarded as a valorization process, "Value enters as a subject" (311). As it does so, therefore, so too does the form of opposition that labour presents to it emerge?labour-as-subjectivity as the form of the class antagonism. Hence, it is only within the act of production considered in its formal relation that the antagonism between capital and labour is realised. This, however, implies a form of control immanent to that act. That this control exists, and is acknowledged by Marx, is suggested by his assertion that "[i]f the capitalist were to content himself with merely the capacity of disposing, without actually making the worker work . . . then the exchange has taken place in full" (282, my emphasis). The exchange, then, only posits the capitalist's control over the labour process?it does not secure it.
The existence of capital depends upon the continuity of its three constituent processes?the exchange between capital and labour, the production process, and the process of commodity exchange?and, therefore, depends upon its overcoming of all confrontations within them. However, the three processes are external to one another:
[T]hey are separate in space and time. As such, the transition from one into the other, i.e. their unity as regards the individual capitalists, is accidental. Despite their inner unity, they exist independently alongside one another, each as the presupposition of the other. Regarded broadly and as a whole, this inner unity must necessarily maintain itself to the extent that the whole of production rests on capital" (403).
The overcoming of this externality appears as a necessity only from capital's side. The essential observation from labour's side, then, is that, because of the separation, the act of production "[is a process] which can fail" (316, my emphasis). One possibility for this failure lies in the unsuccessful overcoming of its constituent confrontation with labour within the act of production. Even if wages have been paid, this is no guarantee that the capitalist will be able to extract the quantity of labour necessary for capital to act as capital?i.e., the extraction of an excess over the equivalent, or surplus value. To suggest, then, that the act of production is an automatic one, is to negate the possibility established by the separation of the processes that constitute capital of a struggle that may end favourably for labour, and to obscure the operation of the exercise of the control posited in the act of exchange. Hence, the continuity of the process of capital-as-unity signifies not a struggle-free becoming, but rather the successful defeat of its opponent within a series of separated processes, each of which is structured by antagonism (this is not the place to demonstrate the ways in which the third process?the circulation of commodities?is implicated in the class struggle. For the moment, I will merely assert that this is the case). Marx suggests that:
It is absolutely necessary that forcibly separated elements which essentially belong together manifest themselves by way of forcible eruption as the separation of things which belong together in essence. The unity is brought about by force (150).
Capital-as-unity, then, is only able to maintain its integrity through a series of relations of force. To this extent, capital itself is forced to assume a struggle with labour immanent to the production process, the outcome of which determines whether it is able to preserve itself as subject. Thus, the production process does not automatically contribute to that preservation, but does so only to the extent that capital successfully imposes its formal relation on labour. Within the production process, a specific quantity of labour, namely necessary labour, constitutes the worker's reproduction, i.e., "keep[s] the workers alive as workers" (359). This much is secured by the "silent compulsion." Thus, as Peter Bell and Harry Cleaver insist in their analysis of the possibilities of crisis within capital's total process, as far as the workers are concerned, "it is in their interest to work the minimum necessary to get paid" (Bell and Cleaver 1982, 220). Anything beyond that, however, constitutes a site of struggle, whose determining relation is that between necessary and surplus labour:
Against capital's techniques of control such as the wage hierarchy, despotic oversight, and piece wages, the working class pits absenteeism, sabotage, loafing on the job, strikes, and so on (Bell and Cleaver 1982, 231).
In order to provide a true critique of Laclau and Mouffe's negation of the "fiction" of the commodity form of labour capacity, it is necessary not only to penetrate to the heart of the matter (in this case, the link between, on the one hand, the abuse of the concept of "general," and on the other, the neglect of the concept of "form"), but, further, to elaborate a solution to the problem (that is, that the question "why do the workers work?" has received the reply "because they are forced to do so"). It is necessary, therefore, to reconstruct Marxism's historicised account of the development of the productive forces, particularly in relation to the issues surrounding the exercise of control over the labour process.
The relation of the worker to his own activity-as-subjectivity antagonistic to capital, Marx insists, is of "a specific economic character" (310). This relation, as we have seen, involves the issue of the exercise of control over the labour process. As an economic relation, therefore, the struggle which results from the attempted implementation of that control may not be construed as being governed by a "political" logic of hegemony, in Laclau and Mouffe's use of the term. Rather, it is governed by the specific form of development of the productive forces under which it is subsumed, and therefore, the class nature is an essential element of that struggle. Further, it is this formal relation that is responsible for the coerced nature of that subsumption. However, this form, in its development as an antagonistic form, necessarily drives toward its own dissolution:
Capital's ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness, and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared: because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one. This is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces. It ceases to exist as such only where the development of these productive forces themselves encounters its barrier in capital itself (325).
Thus, when we consider the historical tendency of the form under which the productive forces develop, and identify that development as proceeding through antagonism, it becomes possible to posit the suspension of the coerced nature of that form: labour appears "not as labour." It is this possibility which allows us to definitively dismiss Laclau and Mouffe's negation of the constitution of social agents by the economy. Without reference to the historical specificity of the form of the labour process, the contribution of the struggles involved therein to the class struggle, and the possibilities which lie internal to that form for the emancipation of labour, we are left with an analysis which, in positing the relation between the labour process and the subjectivity of the workers that participate therein as externally constructed by a political logic which does not correspond to the antagonism generated by the contradictory nature of the capitalist mode of production, thereby negates the specifically revolutionary potential of wage labour. Within such an analysis, therefore, the workers under postmodern capitalism are reduced from a class which embodies the potential supercession of our postmodernity, to one more group within its inventory of miserable oppressed suffering under the deadening relations of capitalism. What is needed, therefore, is not a post-Marxism of any description, but rather a re-reading of Marx that stresses the forms in which the class struggle may effectively advance in contemporary society. In light of such a demand, Laclau and Mouffe's project of radical democracy sounds too feeble a reply.
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