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Two What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Philosophy of Karl Marx The Politics and Ontology of Living Labor In effect when Marx concerns himself with the essence of capitalism, he begins by invoking the establishment of a single global and nonqualified subjectivity, which capitalizes all the processes of subjectification. And this unique subject (“the unique subjective essence of wealth”) expresses itself in “whatever” object. According to Marx capitalism liberates the subjectivity of all of the traditional codes which limit it, only to fall back on [rabattre sur] it in the production of value. —Maurizio Lazzarato and Antonio Negri, “Annex 2” A B S T R A C T L A B O R For Karl Marx the two constitutive components of the capitalist mode of production are labor, or the capacity for labor freed from the means of its employment, and wealth, freed from the objective means of its investment. The capitalist mode of production is formed in the encounter between a free flow of labor and a flow of undifferentiated wealth. The encounter of these two flows, in the form of wage labor, are sufficient to constitute what Marx calls “formal subsumption,” the initial stage of capitalism. In the previous chapter we examined the particular historical argument entailed in ascertaining the capitalist mode of production from the point of view of the “encounter”; an argument that entailed a recognition of the role of the encounter in history—history as the history of the encounter of various ensembles (subjective , technical, and political) and their effects on each other. Marx’s assertion of the 61 foundational role of labor and wealth in the formation of the capitalist mode of production must also be placed in relation to the discourse of political economy not only in terms of the moral, anthropological, or ideological elements underlying its philosophy of history, as in so-called primitive accumulation, but also in terms of the dominant question of its problematic. This dominant question is the connection between labor and wealth (or as it is called later, “value”) as it is elaborated and developed by the physiocrats Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Many have argued that Marx’s formulations involving labor power, living and dead labor, and capitalist valorization are merely a continuation of “the labor theory of value” begun with Smith and Ricardo. I will argue, however, that Marx’s thought of the conjunction of labor and wealth at the formation of the capitalist mode of production cannot be understood simply as a response to a question already posed but is itself the formulation of another question that develops into a problem unique to Marx. This other problem, or rather, series of problems, can be indicated by the specific antagonistic nature of the conjunction of labor and wealth: Labor and wealth come together in time and space in a particular relation, between laborer and capitalist, and thus the problem for Marx is articulating the particular antagonistic logic produced in and through this relation with its overlapping structures and strategies of exploitation, domination, and transformation. Marx begins with the problem inherited from bourgeois political economy—the relation between labor and wealth—and translates this into another problematic that is strictly unthinkable from the perspective of political economy: the conflictual and historical logic of the relationship between capitalist demands and the working class resistance.1 At the heart of this problematic is the production and constitution of subjectivity . In the previous chapter we saw that in the precapitalist modes of production the intersection between subjectivity and the mode of production was framed by reproduction, by what Marx saw as the intrinsically conservative nature of the precapitalist forms. The precapitalist forms repeat and conserve their conditions and presuppositions, which are technical, political, and subjective. This repetition exposes the precapitalist forms to a particular type of vulnerabilty: They are threatened by changes in the production of subjectivity and in the production of material life. In contrast to this, the capitalist mode of production has at its formation and foundation a collective subject that is “free” from the constraints and guarantees of a particular form of life. Thus the problem of subjectivity enters into the capitalist mode of production in a fundamentally different way: It is not a matter of the reproduction of a fixed subject but instead the extraction of wealth from a multitude of subjects that are constituted as basically interchangeable. This fundamental difference, which will be explored in this chapter, does not change a basic...

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