Labor of Fire: The Ontology of Labor between Economy and Culture

REMARK: The Productive Power of Capital

REMARK: THE PRODUCTIVE POWER OF CAPITAL The productive power of capital is the productive power of labor wrested from labor. This act, or metamorphosis, reaches a degree of completion in the passage from formal to real subsumption, that is, from the extraction of absolute surplus-value (by lengthening the working day) to the extraction of relative surplus-value (by revolutionizing the labor process itself). But that the productive power of labor becomes the productive power of capital also means that the original ontological power of labor, in which the word “productive ” really means “creative,” is subsumed under new categories devised by capital and political economy. The fact that these new categories also appropriate and use the original linguistic expressions, that is, “productive,” “production,” should not make us lose sight of the fact that these expressions no longer correspond to their original concepts. Thus, “productive” for capital does not mean what it meant for labor. In the former case, what is really produced is exchange-value and surplus-value; in the latter, it was use-values to be produced—although forms of exchange always existed, they did not entail the concept of exchange-value in the capitalist sense. The productive power of capital is nothing but labor; however, this is no longer a labor which, itself a use-value, can bring forth other use-values but, rather, one that must be exchanged for a wage and can be exchanged for a wage only insofar as it has the capability of increasing and valorizing capital. It is in this sense that labor becomes productive for and of capital. In this sense, it constitutes the productive power of capital. In preparation for the next chapter, in which the distinction between productive labor and living labor is discussed (where “productive” has acquired its economic, capitalist connotation), a chapter that will especially deal with sections of the Grundrisse, it may be important to make some preliminary observations as a way of clarifying the passage from ontology to the critique of political economy. What will appear is that there is some continuity between (1) Marx’s unveiling of the ontological ground of labor and (2) its entrance into a regime of estrangement and alienation, which we have described by focusing on the Manuscripts, and the later developments, particularly described in sections of the Grundrisse and in the unpublished section of the first volume of capital on the passage from formal to real subsumption . Even though it is not our intention to trace a philological continuity of any kind, nor to enter the discussion as to whether there is continuity or rupture in Marx’s work, it may be important to note that it is precisely the existential modality of alienation that reaches full political maturity in a regime of real subsumption and large-scale industry in which the worker is excluded from the newly founded productive power of capital and yet completely included in it. What is reflected at different stages of Marx’s work is, on the one hand, a change occurring within society and, on the other, a fuller comprehension of problems and concepts anticipated and later developed. The wresting of the productive power of labor by capital 50 CHAPTER ONE becomes increasingly easier and more difficult at the same time: “easier” because capital acts as if the agency proper to living labor were its own, and in this sense it tends to reduce the input of actually living labor in the production process or exclude it altogether from that process; “more difficult ” because capital is not living labor, living labor is not capital, and, although living labor confronts an increasingly enormous alien power, it is still its own original power to appear as capital, a power within which the only real agency ultimately resides. Anticipated in the Manuscripts are the themes of subsumption and machinery, and that means, the theme of the productive power of capital. In other words, in the Manuscripts the question is already that of the reduction of living labor to productive labor, although the terms are not used. Productive labor is the theme of the first section on the Wages of Labour. After describing the general position of weakness of the worker vis-à-vis the capitalist, Marx speaks of wages as means of reproduction only, that is, the production of new living labor to be transformed into labor-power and thus into productive power for capital: “production of men, as of every other commodity” (1975: 283). The tendency toward...