As I tried to point out today, the fact that the same technical words such
as 'subsumption' are found in Marx and Hardt-Negri should not be
interpreted that they are operating on the same basis theoretically. After
all, for Michael Hardt, Spinoza is a "communist." For Marx, subsumption was
very much related to the question we discussed during the Wood-Brenner
thread, namely how old forms of exploitation become 'subsumed' under the
capitalist mode of production. Marx is not only very clear about what he
means, but ties everything to the actual historical process:
>From Chapter 16 of V. 1 of Capital, "Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value"
The prolongation of the working-day beyond the point at which the labourer
would have produced just an equivalent for the value of his labour-power,
and the appropriation of that surplus-labour by capital, this is production
of absolute surplus-value. It forms the general groundwork of the
capitalist system, and the starting-point for the production of relative
surplus-value. The latter pre-supposes that the working-day is already
divided into two parts, necessary labour, and surplus-labour. In order to
prolong the surplus-labour, the necessary labour is shortened by methods
whereby the equivalent for the wages is produced in less time. The
production of absolute surplus-value turns exclusively upon the length of
the working-day; the production of relative surplus-value, revolutionises
out and out the technical processes of labour, and the composition of
society. It therefore pre-supposes a specific mode, the capitalist mode of
production, a mode which, along with its methods, means, and conditions,
arises and develops itself spontaneously on the foundation afforded by the
formal subjection of labour to capital. In the course of this development,
the formal subjection is replaced by the real subjection [subsumption] of
labour to capital.
It will suffice merely to refer to certain intermediate forms, in which
surplus-labour is not extorted by direct compulsion from the producer, nor
the producer himself yet formally subjected to capital. In such forms
capital has not yet acquired the direct control of the labour-process. By
the side of independent producers who carry on their handicrafts and
agriculture in the traditional old-fashioned way, there stands the usurer
or the merchant, with his usurer's capital or merchant's capital, feeding
on them like a parasite. The predominance, in a society, of this form of
exploitation excludes the capitalist mode of production; to which mode,
however, this form may serve as a transition, as it did towards the close
of the Middle Ages. Finally, as is shown by modern "domestic industry,"
some intermediate forms are here and there reproduced in the background of
Modern Industry, though their physiognomy is totally changed.
=======
In contrast, Hardt and Negri just sling the term around without trying to
root it in the material world. This passage from "Empire" is just
word-salad that makes about as much sense as Dutch Schultz's last words or
a speech by Professor Irwin Corey:
"The Empire that is emerging today, however, is not really a throwback to
the ancient Polybian model, even in its negative, 'bad' form. The
contemporary arrangement is better understood in postmodern terms, that is,
as an evolution beyond the modern, liberal model of a mixed constitution.
The framework of juridical formalization, the constitutional mechanism of
guarantees, and the schema of equilibrium are all transformed along two
primary axes in the passage from the modern to the postmodern terrain.
"The first axis of transformation involves the nature of the mixture in the
constitution--a passage from the ancient and modern model of a 'mixtum' of
separate bodies or functions to a process of the hybridization of
government functions in the current situation. The process of the real
subsumption, of subsuming labor under capital and absorbing global society
within Empire, force the figures of power to destroy the spatial measure
and distance that had defined their relationships, merging the figures in
hybrid forms."
Louis Proyect
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