Capital’s fundamental antagonism

May 7, 2008

One of the questions we keep tripping up on when we talk about antagonism is whether there is a real antagonism that is masked by false antagonisms. Of course this makes us nervous given the left’s history of subsuming other struggles so that class struggle (narrowly defined) is primary and women’s issues, for example, are classed as secondary. This is related to treating class as a fixed identity and produces the countervailing tendency to treat class as just one identity amongst others, such as gender, race all of which are equivalent.

Against this we don’t want to think in terms of real or false but we do want to assert that there is a central antagonism to capital, but one that gets (re)composed in different ways. Capital forms from an original encounter between deterritorialised labour and deterritorialised capital, this is the foundational antagonism of the capital relation. It’s the fundamental axiom that all the other axioms of capital are built upon. In times of crisis we can see this original axiom reasserting itself; capital returns to its liquid form and labour gets ripped from the means by which it thought it had protected itself, laws, pensions, house prices, etc. Labour is also freed from the beliefs tied to this security.

We can see the outlines of this now with the effects of the credit crisis provoking a reaction at the polls – the revolt of the suburbs – leading to Brown immediately ripping up the green axioms and measures that seemed so certain and solid just months ago. This is why the climate change movement needs to take account of capitalist crisis, as I tried arguing last year at the climate camp meeting. Moreover it’s why the climate change movement has to come to terms with capital’s axioms, dynamics and central antagonism. And why movements have to be based on freedom, on an increase in capacities and through that orientated to how capital cramps our lives by imposing endless work.

Endless work causes climate change – no shit Sherlock.

But isn’t that arguing that green issues, or Queer issues,or feminism should be subsumed by class politics? No, I don’t think so. We aren’t saying they are mystificatory antagonisms. All these antagonisms are real. The point is that they are composed and recomposed through the dynamics of capital, as well as, of course, our struggles, which exceed those dynamics.

We’re not arguing that the post-war agreement between capital and some sections of the organized industrial working class is the central antagonism of capital.

The foundational antagonism is between liquid money and vogelfrei workers, the post-war settlement was just a particular composition of it, just as the present composition is. The route to unveiling the central antagonism isn’t through some frozen class fundamentalism, which is retrieving some 1950s version of the antagonism and holding that up as the essence of capital.

When we look at the antagonisms that emerged with the autonomous struggles of the 1960s and ’70s – young/old, gay/straight, male/female – can we say that these are the displacement and recomposition of capital’s antagonism? Don’t they pre-exist capital?

We might approach that question by asking weren’t there young people before capital? The answer to that one is NO, not in the sense of that category as it emerged from the 1950s and ’60s. Gay, youth, women are all socio-political categories, they have all been fundamentally recomposed by capital. That doesn’t mean they are reducible to capital or that they are just an effect of capital – humanity exceeds capital but it folds what exceeds it into its BwO.

The important thing is to take into account capital’s effects on these antagonisms and then try to escape them. Lazzarato argues that the route is not through class, which he sees as structurally pre-defined and therefore incapable of escaping capital, but through the minor/major distinction and then the minoritarian line of flight that leads beyond capital’s BwO.

5 Comments

brian May 8, 2008 at 12:57 pm

I especially like the point that in times of crisis this axiom re-asserts itself. Where I work, we like to pretend it’s a very touchy-feely progressive sort of company. And most of the time it is, in a kind of hideous fucked-up kind of way. But we’ve just been handed a round of effective pay cuts: my boss is battening down the hatches in preparation for the coming storm. And no prizes for guessing who’s gonna feel the pinch more than most. But when he’s up against it, my boss has a stock phrase he returns to over and over again (sorry, he’s a very low rent David Brent): “There’s no bars on the windows, no locks on the door…” And he’s right. I am vogelfrei. If I don’t like it, I can choose to leave. I can choose to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner“… as long as I don’t mind starving, having my house repossessed etc etc. The mistake he makes is to think that he’s somehow above being similarly liquidated. Capital’s liquid form is unforgiving and ultra-mobile (it tends towards complete deterritorialisation) and there’s no loyalty bonus for being an arsehole…
david May 9, 2008 at 11:37 am

You’re right on with this stuff about class and politics. The antagonism between industrial working class in the North, Negri’s “mass worker” is no more the be-all-and-end-all of class politics than any other struggle. (And, as you say, much of it is predicated on an understanding of class as a fixed identity. What sort of antagonism was beer and sandwiches at no. 10?) No struggle is subsumed by class politics. Better to say that class politics is an emergent concept: class politics can emerge from all the variety of struggles, but it doesn’t do so automatically. That’s why we intervene, because we want to try and nudge it in that direction.

I think we have to be a little more careful when we talk about the origins of capital or what it is. Capital is both that encounter you mention and the separation of labour from its conditions of life that makes possible the (re)encounter: capital simultaneously deterritorialises and reterritorialises. And when capital encounters labour it is frequently territorialised, as are the workers: it is a factory or office, in a paricular location, containing specific machines or tools, thus requiring workers with particular skills and, to use modern language, subjectivities. But again you’re right that in times of crisis, capital attempts to escape these fixities, returning to its liquid form — which also helps us shed the beliefs tied to the fixed forms. “All that is solid melts into air” could describe the “private equity” deals that shift capitalist value from “productive” activities into financial capital in the form of US Treasury bills and their like… which then turn out to be practically worthless.

But this is why we have to be careful about saying that capital has any fundamental or foundational form. Money, for example, existed for centuries before capitalism became the dominant mode of production, just as there have been always been young humans, men and women, and so on.
keir May 12, 2008 at 10:48 am

Yeh I think you might be right Dave with your urgings of caution. It is difficult to move between concepts like axiomatics and antagonisms, they don’t quite match up, although they are definitly overlapping. I can’t quite think through the central antagonism dillema here.

I do think there is something there though around the original axiom of capital. Deterritorialised labour is exactly it’s separation from it’s conditions of life but this separation is pre-accomplished as far a capital is concerned. It’s part of its presuppositions. Although of course, as Massimo would remind us primitive accumulation is a continuous process. And (the other) David Harvey argues that primitive accumulation, which he calls accumulation by disposession, is the main contemporary form of accumulation. Still from within capitalism the violence of that process is seen as lying outside capitalism, as natural processes or as the product of other modes of accumulation. African’s are either savages, locked into corrupt tribal patterns or still under the sway of state socialism.

Despite that I think you are right that I’ve over fucussed on primitive accumulation when there are other means by which capital encounters what is in excess of it and incorporates it. That can be as fixed capital, Eg. capital embodied in, or clinging to, machines with the move from absolute to relative surplus value.

But I do think that the form of the original encounter has an effect so that Capital’s deterritorialising logic is primary over its territorialising logic and that this gets shown in times of crisis when additional axioms tend to get stripped away. Although they can then be new ones added latter to deal with that crisis, eg. Keynesianism
brian May 12, 2008 at 12:34 pm

Lads, lads, lads… Do we really need to get caught up in a “my axiomatic’s prior to yours” cock-fight? Isn’t the more important point that capital’s deterritorialising logic always occurs in a definite time and space? I think it can be useful to think of that logic as “primary”, because it’s the one capital tends towards in times of crisis. But can’t we do that without the ontological claims?
Right, shake hands and go back to your classroom.
david May 14, 2008 at 8:28 am

Yeah, I think we’re chasing our own tails here a little. Thought it was me focusing on primitive accumulation (i.e. capital as separation) to counter Keir’s axiomatic of capital as the encounter. But now he’s ‘fessing up to it. Actually I think I agree that capital’s deterritorialising logic is primary (whatever ‘primary’ means), but as Big Brian the Arbitrator says, this must occur in a definite time and space. And this deterritorialising logic is summed up in the title of a nice Holloway piece, ‘Capital moves‘.