Capitalism, Citizenship and the Arts of Thinking by Kathryn Dean;

Author:Kathryn Dean; [Dean, Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781135230456
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2022-01-29T00:00:00+00:00

5 Alienation and the capitalist divisions of labour

DOI: 10.4324/9780203871706-5

Introduction

The discussion of Descartes’s analysis in Chapter 4 was intended to provide a close-up account of that aspect of analytical thinking that qualified it as capital’s socially necessary mode of thinking. Its decompositional and ‘purifying’ character rendered thinkable the violent abstraction and mechanising logic that informed the organisation of the emergent capitalist workshop and, subsequently, the subsumption of craftworkers to machines. Its abstract conception of materiality as ‘matter’ rendered plausible the reduction of human activity to abstract labour. It is to this topic that I now turn. As discussed in the last section of Chapter 4, during the nineteenth century, as physics became energised, a new theorised physiology, supported in its abstracting activities by visual aids such as line-drawing and photography, began to turn its attention to organisms as repositories of energy, or, as matter in motion. In the process, the bodies in question were abstracted from their everyday contexts, as the wax had been abstracted from the honeycomb, and shorn of all particularities of time, place and everyday experience, so that their activities could be studied as context-free, broken-into-instants movements susceptible to mathematising treatment. In this way, the messy materialities which Plato had deemed resistant to the beautiful precision of mathematics were to be cleaned up and reshaped for instant responsiveness to the new mechanised imperatives of an increasingly insatiable capitalism. Human activity was to become precisely calibrated behaviour of the kind needed for insertion into a wholly reliable impersonal system of production of commodities. Thus were the myriad species-specific activities of humans reconceived of as abstract labour: thus did humans become conceptualised as bare stuff having the abstract potential for abstract change. In short, thus did humans become understood in terms used by Descartes in relation to the piece of wax.

I shall begin this chapter with a brief discussion of pre-capitalist divisions of labour, intended to convey the democratic character of their general intellect, a Marxian concept brought into contemporary historical–materialist discourse through the work of Italian autonomist thinkers and used here to refer to the nature and distribution of thinking skills and knowledgeability needed for the reproduction of a given mode of life. Informed by the concept of general intellect, the bulk of this chapter is taken up with a discussion of the capitalist regimes of activity in terms of the movement from formal to real and (perhaps) to neo-formal subsumptions of ‘labour’ to capital understood in terms of the transition from social to detailed to mechanised and, today, to an informatised division of labour. As noted before, I take labour to be, not a transhistorical abstraction, as claimed by Marx, but a historico-culturally specific conception of human activity having the character of an ‘empty signifier’ (labour as mere expenditure of energy) such that it is made available for recruitment to the law of value in whatever form is deemed necessary at whatever moment.

It is worth recalling that I am reading Marx’s critique of capitalism as a critique carried

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