Nathan Brown the Proletariat

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Trans-Scripts3 (2013)

The Proletariat*

Nathan Brown**

A political slogan always takes place, articulated in a context, at the crux of theoryand praxis. A slogan, especially when it takes the form of a chant, conjoins thethinking of a situation to action within it. A slogan or chant manifests the inscriptionof political thought within the political action of bodies. Likewise, it manifests theinscription of acting bodies within the thinking they articulate. As everyone knowswho participates in political action, this is what lends the practice of chanting duringa march, a picket, or an occupation the peculiar quality of being at once discomfiting

and exhilarating: the surrenderof ones thinking body, situated at the crux of theoryand praxis, to the declarative speaking of formulations that are not necessarily oressentially ones own. Participation in the collective articulation of political situationsopens individuals to both the joy and the anxiety of being spoken through,ventriloquized by the collective. Indeed, often one finds oneself repeatingformulations with which one does not agree at all; and this is part of the requisitehumiliation of political action, the frequent necessity of allowing our participation inwhat happensto overcome our proud attachment to the consistency of what we thinkwe are. Sowhat are we, when we occupy this curious interstice between the tenuousand temporary consistency of the collective (a common cry, for instance) and the

inconsistency of what we think we are?

__________________________

* This text was presented as the keynote lecture at the 15 March 2013 graduate studentconference in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, titled, TheLaboring Body.

** Nathan Brown is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and the Programin Critical Theory at the University of California, Davis. His works include The Technics ofPrehension: On the Photography of Nicolas Baier (forthcoming), Origin and Extinction,Mourning and Melancholia: On Terrance Malick's The Tree of Life and Lars von Trier'sMelancholia (2012), Rational Kernel, Real Movement: Alain Badiou and ThorieCommuniste in the Age of Riots (2012), Red Years: Althussers Lesson, Rancire's Error,and the Real Movement of History (2011), and Absent Blue Wax (RationalistEmpiricism) (2010).

Its with this question in mind that I want to reflect on one particular chant thatwas taken up in a particular context during the political sequence called OccupyOakland. The context was the Anti-Capitalist March on the day of the GeneralStrike, Nov. 2, 2011. The chant was We, Are, The Proletariat.

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Nathan Brown

What would such a slogan have meant in the context of its articulation? Mostimmediately, we can say that it functions as a displacement of another slogan: WeAre the 99%. Both of these slogans configure the political terrain as that of classstruggle, but the class analysis implied by each is quite different. The opposition of

the 99% to the 1% thinks class in terms of income levels, pointing to the inequalityand injustice of income distribution. The category of the proletariat, on the otherhand, is premised upon a structural analysis of property and the wage relation. But itisnt necessary to view We Are the Proletariat as a polemicalslogan, in the contextof that march, rejecting the liberalism of We Are the 99% as ideological orincorrect. Rather, it simply points to something like the condition of possibility for theopposition between 99% and 1%: namely, to the exploitation of the wage relation asthe structural and historical cause of economic inequality under capitalism.

But of course, to determine the constitution of the proletariat through referenceto the wage relation is immediately to provoke objections which will indeed proveessential: objections that bear upon the conditions of possibility for the wage relationitself. In The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx is categorical: the proletariat is theclass of modern wage-labourers who, having no means of production of their own,are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live.1 But in Capital, as AaronBenanav andEndnotespoint out in an essential article on surplus populations, Marx ismore inclined to define the proletariat as what they call a class in transition.2Proletarian, Marx writes in a footnote to Chapter 25, must be understood tomean, economically speaking, nothing other than wage-labourer, the man whoproduces and valorises capital, and is thrown onto the street as soon as he becomessuperfluous to the need for valorisation.3 Here, the proletariat is best consideredthat class which, by working, tends to produce its exclusion from work. What Marxcalls the general law of capitalist accumulation4 is that the workingpopulation...produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it isitself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent which is alwaysincreasing.5

1 Karl Marx, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Samuel Moore (London: Pluto Press,2008), 33.

2 Aaron Benanav and Endotes, Misery and Debt: On The Logic and History of SurplusPopulations and Surplus Capital inEndnotes2 (April 2010): 20-51.

3 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 764.

4 Ibid., 798.

5 Ibid., 783.62


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Nathan BrownSo this is one limit through which we need to think the category of the

proletariat: the transformation of the working class into a class which is not working.And we need to conceive of this transitionalcharacter of the class as internal to itsclass constitution, by conceiving of the class historically. Importantly, this is a limitwe encounter under conditions of real subsumption that obtain relatively late in the

history of capitalism, through technological and managerial innovations thattendentially render living labor relatively superfluous.

Much earlier, however, in the very process of its initial constitution, the categoryof the proletariat is already riven by internal contradictions. Marx describes theprocess of primitive accumulation as that of divorcing the worker from theownership of the conditions of his own labour...of divorcing the producer from themeans of production, a process through which immediate producers are turnedinto wage laborers.6 The gradual formation of the capital-relation throughexpropriation is punctuated by moments when great masses of men are suddenlyand forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labour marketas free, unprotected and rightless proletarians.7

Here we can think through the limits of Marxs definition by turning to counter-histories of primitive accumulation offered by Silvia Federicis Caliban and the Witch:Women the Body and Primitive Accumulation, as well as by Peter Linebaugh and MarcusRediker in The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History ofthe Revolutionary Atlantic. The essential formal point that I want to draw fromFedericis study is that, as she puts it,

primitive accumulation...was not simply an accumulation and concentration ofexploitable workers and capital. It was also an accumulation of differences and divisionswithin the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as race andage, became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat.8

While Marxs analysis of primitive accumulation focuses upon the production oflandless wage laborers through expropriation, Federici focuses upon the conditionsof possibility for the production and reproduction of labor power itself, and thusupon the subjugation of womens labor and womens reproductive function that wasessential to the formation and maintenance of the so-called working class. Ofcourse, this subjugation involved the exclusion of women from waged work, and

6 Ibid., 874-875.

7 Ibid., 876.

8 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation(New York:Autonomedia, 2004), 63-64.

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Nathan Brownthus the construction of a new patriarchal order based upon the mediation of accessto the wage through men. In particular, Federici shows that the construction of thisnew patriarchy was heavily predicated upon the witch-hunts of the 16th and 17thcenturies: the brutal disciplining of womens bodies and forms of collective life thatwas necessary to enforce a new sexual division of labor and confine women to

reproductive work.9 Thus, Federici treats gender as a specification of class relations,arguing that the term women signifies not just a hidden history that needs to bemade visible; but a particular form of exploitation and, therefore, a uniqueperspective from which to reconsider the history of capitalist relations.10

The point I want to hold onto here is that the process of primitive accumulationproduces different forms of exploitation, in a technical sense: not only exploitationthrough the direct extraction of surplus value from wage labor, but also thedependency of wage labor in generalupon the unwaged exploitation of reproductivelabor in the home, as well as the unwaged exploitation of slave labor. Anyconsideration of the laboring body thus has to account for Federicis central claim:that if capitalism has been able to reproduce itself it is only because of the web ofinequalities that it has built into the body of the world proletariat. 11 What thismeans is that the proletariat is constitutively divided, in the first instance: the veryprocess of its constitution is also the process of its division, and the creation of thecontradiction between capital and labor is also the creation of internal contradictionsand inequalities within the proletariat itself, corresponding to different forms ofexploitation structuring the relation of different laboring bodies to capitalistaccumulation.12

Similarly, in The Many Headed Hydra Linebaugh and Rediker argue that theemphasis in modern labor history on the white, male, skilled, waged, nationalist,propertied artisan/citizen or industrial worker has hidden the history of the Atlanticproletariat of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. 13 Thisproletariat, they argue, was anonymous, nameless, female and male, of all ages,

9Ibid., 12.

10 Ibid., 13.

11 Ibid., 17.

12 Primitive accumulation, then, was not simply an accumulation and concentration ofexploitable workers and capital. it was also an accumulation of differences and divisions within theworking class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as race and age, becameconstitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat (Ibid., 64).

13 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, andthe Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic(Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 332.

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Nathan Brownmobile, transatlantic, motley and multiethnic, planetary in its origins, motions, andconsciousness. It was often unwaged, forced to perform the unpaid labors ofcapitalism, and indeed, the unpaid labors of the process of primitive accumulationitself. This last point is crucial: the proletarian class is not only constituted as a resultof expropriation; rather, the labor of expropriation is already performed by unwaged

or precarious workers upon whom capitalism will continue to rely, who are intrinsictothe constitution of the proletariat. Referring to those who were known as hewers ofwood and drawers of water, Linebaugh and Redicker argue that:

Hewers and drawers performed the fundamental labors of expropriation that haveusually been taken for granted by historians. Expropriation itself, for example, istreated as a given: the field is therebefore the plowing starts; the city is therebeforethe laborer begins the working day. Likewise for long-distance trade: the port is therebefore the ship sets sail from it; the plantation is therebefore the slave cultivates itsland. The commodities of commerce seem to transport themselves. Finally,

reproduction is assumed to be the transhistorical function of the family. The resultis that the hewers of wood and drawers of water have been invisible, anonymous,and forgotten, even though they transformed the face of the Earth by building theinfrastructure of civilization.14

We can only grasp the significance of this history if we understand the proletariat asa class in transition rather than as a class with a stable historical identity. Once again,the proletariat never isstable or cohesive as a class: it is always already divided in andthrough the continual process of its constitution. Through the analysis of primitiveaccumulation offered in books like The Many Headed Hydraor Caliban and the Witch,

and through historical and theoretical work on the tendential production of surpluspopulations by Mike Davis or Aaron Benanav, we can thus recognize that the classof modern wage laborers is a definition of the proletariat with a very limited,superficial, and historically circumscribed purview. Indeed, perhaps enough work hasbeen done to this effect that this point should seem obvious, or even banal. But thequestion is, what are the conceptual, structural consequences of this recognition fortheory and praxis? And that question implies another: why is the proletariat stillthe right term for grappling with these conceptual and structural consequences? It isimportant to note, in this respect, that Federici, Linebaugh and Rediker, and Benanavcontinue to rely upon this term, even as they challenge its canonical definition.

To recapitulate, the historical and structural claim Im emphasizing here is two-fold:

1) the proletariat is not a stable historical entity or class identity, but rather a classin transition

14 Ibid., 42.

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Nathan Brown2) the proletariat, as a class in transition, is internally differentiated and indeed

constitutively divided by differentformsof exploitation

Apropos of these points, consider the tension in the sequence of occupations during2011-2012 between the terms Occupy and Decolonize, tensions that have also

been important within the struggle at the UC. Again, the opposition of the 99% tothe 1% proposes an implicit class analysis (though not a very rigorous one) as theground of solidarity and antagonism upon which the occupations can be constructed,and which they share. But we know that the term occupation also applies to theoccupation Afghanistan, the occupation of Iraq, the occupation of Palestine, the UNoccupation of Haiti, and to the whole history of colonial occupation. This historythus involves a different ground of solidarity and opposition that also makes a claimupon the struggle branded Occupy, especially because we know that what is beingoccupied is already occupied groundthe occupations are actually counter-occupationswhich, at their best, challenge capitalist property relations established throughprimitive accumulation (and sustained through ongoing rounds of primitiveaccumulation). Insofar as they recognize their crucial relation to the history ofprimitive accumulation, the occupations must also recognize their relation to thehistory of colonialism and anti-colonial struggle. That is, they must recognize theirrelation to what Franz Fanon calls the colonial situation, and to the process ofdecolonization.

For Fanon, the colonial situation is characterized by an absolutedivision betweencolonized and colonized: a world divided in two, a Manichean world in whichchallenging the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of viewpoints. It is nota discourse on the universal, but the impassioned claim by the colonized that theirworld is fundamentally different.15 Decolonization unifies the colonized against thecolonizer through violent strugglean effort to completely displace, remove, anderase the colonizer, thereby constituting a new situation.

The competing claims of the terms occupy and decolonize thus index thedifferent logic of a political movement considered in terms of class struggle ordecolonization. And these different logics immediately highlight differences anddivisions within, and constitutive of, the so-called 99%. This was immediately clear in

the fall of 2011, just as it was immediately clear in the struggle at the UC in the fall of2009. Predictably, there were competing calls for unity or the articulation ofdifference, and the latter rightly emphasized the different formsof exploitation latentin the apparent unity of the class named by the 99%. The problem with thequantitative logic of that term is that it offered no means of grappling with those

15 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004),6.

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Nathan Browndifferent forms of exploitation, no way of getting a conceptual grip on theirdifferential logics or histories. Indeed, the problem with the opposition between the99% and the 1% is that it has no history. The term the proletariat, on the other hand,has a history which is essentiallylinked to the process of primitive accumulation, and this isprecisely why it can give rise to counter-histories like those of Federici or Linebaugh

and Rediker, counter-histories that work through the differential constitution of theproletariat through colonialism, slavery, and the violent subjugation of womensbodies as unwaged reproductive labor.

In her bookThe Communist Horizon, Jodi Dean makes the curious suggestion thatthe term proletariat be replaced by the term the people as the rest of ustherest of us referring, here, to what was called the 99%. 16 My wager, she writes, isthat an emphasis on the people as the rest of us can do the work formerly done byproletariat.17 According to Dean, We are the 99% names an appropriation, awrong. In doing so, it also voices a collective desire for equality and justice, for achange in the conditions through which the 1% seizes the bulk of what is commonfor themselves, leaving the 99% with the remainder.18 A wrong, a desire for equalityand justice: this is precisely the discourse and the form of thought that Marx attacksin The Critique of the Gotha Program, which Fanon associates with the Western,humanist values espoused by colonized intellectuals. In their introduction to the firstissue ofLIES: A Journal of Materialist Feminism(2012), the editorial collective writes:

Our materialism dispenses with concepts of rights, equality, justice, agency,representation, or any that otherwise affirm the same set of relations and politicalforms that inaugurate and ensure our oppression. Rather we turn our attention

toward the various registers and forms of violence that characterize patriarchy,a structure and set of mechanisms that produces relations of domination andsubordination, but within which identity categories are unstable.19

This statement recognizes that concepts of rights, equality, justice are not onlyidealistbut also complicitin the forms of oppression they apparently oppose. The ahistoricismof a term like the people as the rest of ussupposedly the victims of a wrong whosupposedly desire equality and justiceloses not only the material history of a

16 Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon(London: Verso, 2012), 70: In this chapter, I present theidea of the people as the rest of us as a modulation of the idea of the proletariat as thesubject of communism.

17 Ibid., 74.

18 Ibid., 201.

19LIES: A Journal of Materialist Feminism1 (2012): 10-11. See also Jackie Wangs importantarticle in LIES, Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety (145-172).

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Nathan Browncategory like the proletariat, but also the materialist counter-histories the term hasgenerated through efforts to make it rigorously consistent with the very history inwhich it is entangled. Thus, rather than historicizing such a category and theproblems its usage entails, Dean can only bemoan and wish away any emphasis uponthe inherently differential and discrepant composition of struggles:

By denying the fundamental opposition to Wall Street that divides the movementfrom the politics that preceded it, the embrace of multiplicity proceeds as if we werejust the same assortment of individuals with opinions and views as before, ratherthan a collectivity so threatening as to incite overwhelming and violent policeresponse. As a consequence, participants are encouraged to emphasize theirindividual positions rather than cultivate a general, collective one. The result is thatthey continuously confront one anothers particularities as differences that must beexpressed rather than, say, disciplined, repressed, redirected, sacrificed, or ignored asnot relevant to this struggle.20

Deans thinking here is not only grossly reductive (theoretically and practically), itis also factually incorrect. Early in the fall of 2011, pieces like the W.&.T.C.H.communique from Baltimore, or Joel Olsons essay on Whiteness and the 99%criticized both the reformist logic of identity politics and the foot-stomping liberalinsistence upon false unity, as well as the sort of individualism Dean mentions. 21 Incarrying out this critique, such writing thought dialecticallyabout the composition ofstruggles and about the decompositions they contain, which are always taking placeand have a history that cannot and should not be repressed, redirected, sacrificed orignored. The slogan decolonize insists not only upon conceptualizing occupation

as counter-occupationof already occupied land, but also upon installing the antagonismof the colonial situation within the counter-occupation itself: it insists upon theconstitutive fact of dividedness that literallymakes up the so-called 99%, and beneaththat superficial label, the proletariat. The proletariat is a class in contradiction notonly externally but internally, and to do political work is to work within and upon theelement of those contradictions. If Dean were practically engaged in radical politicsto the point of inextricable implication, it wouldnt be long before she learned thisthe hard way, as every radical must in one way or another. It is a matter of practicalfact that this can only be a matter of debate in theory.

20 Dean, The Communist Horizon, 220.

21 On The Recent #Occupations: A Communique from W.&.T.C.H. (October 2011),https://sites.google.com/site/bmorewomentrans/communique (accessed 4/7/13). JoelOlson, Whiteness and the 99% (October 2011). http://www.bringtheruckus.org/?q=node%2F146. (accessed 4/7/13).

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https://sites.google.com/site/bmorewomentrans/communiquehttp://www.bringtheruckus.org/%20?q=node%2F146http://www.bringtheruckus.org/%20?q=node%2F146http://www.bringtheruckus.org/%20?q=node%2F146http://www.bringtheruckus.org/%20?q=node%2F146https://sites.google.com/site/bmorewomentrans/communique


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Nathan BrownWe can think through some consequences of this matter of fact, at a formal

level, through an important 1976 essay by Paul Mattick, New Politics and the OldClass Struggleand we can also supplement Matticks analysis by considering theproletariat as an internally differentiated class in transition. Mattick is concernedwith a simple point: that radical political struggles are linked to the vicissitudes of

capitalist development, assuming different forms according to the changing fortunesof the capitalist system. And indeed, Mattick points out that because all labororganizations form part of the general social structure they cannot be consistentlyanti-capitalist, except in a purely ideological sense.22 Mattick analyzes the dialecticalrelation of spontaneity and organization that constitutes the dilemma of radicalism:

In order to accomplish anything of social significance, actions must be organized.Effective organizations, however, tend towards capitalist channels. It seems thatin order to do something now, one can only do the wrong things, and in order toavoid false steps one should undertake none at all.23

Thus, Mattick argues, radicals faced with the impasse of organizational integrationtend to either put their faith in spontaneous uprisings of the masses or accept thereformist character of political organizations that are able to sustain themselveswithin capitalist social relations. We can call this the problem of organization,which is a general, structural feature of anti-capitalist struggle. We can also extendthe problem of organization to our analysis of the internally differentiated characterof the proletariat as a class in transition. In order to be effective, class action must becohesive. But insofar as the cohesion of the class takes precedence over andrepresses the differences, divisions, and antagonisms constitutive of its formation it

will tend to align itself with capitalist social relations that do the same: that constitutethe proletariat, as a working class, at the same time as this constitution relies uponand represses the reproductive, unwaged, and informal labor that produces andreproduces the class in the first place. This is why the repression of such differenceswill inevitably have explosive consequences within struggles: this repression is thehistorical and material ground of class itself, and therefore of the very thing againstwhich one struggles.

What is at issue here is precisely the old structural problem and imperative ofthe self-abolition of the proletariat. We are in a position to formulate the structuralcondition of this problem and imperative clearly and concisely: the proletariat iswhat

22 Paul Mattick, New Politics and the Old Class Struggle (1976), http://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1976/new-capitalism.htm (accessed 4/7/13). See also Spontaneityand Organization (1949), http://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1976/newcapitalism.htm. (accessed 4/7/13).

23 Ibid.

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http://www.marxists.org/%20archive/mattick-paul/1976/new-capitalism.htmhttp://www.marxists.org/%20archive/mattick-paul/1976/new-capitalism.htmhttp://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1976/new%20capitalism.htmhttp://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1976/new%20capitalism.htmhttp://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1976/new%20capitalism.htmhttp://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1976/new%20capitalism.htmhttp://www.marxists.org/%20archive/mattick-paul/1976/new-capitalism.htmhttp://www.marxists.org/%20archive/mattick-paul/1976/new-capitalism.htm


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Nathan Brownit is not. The proletariat is notthe working class which it produces, reproduces, andsimultaneously renders superfluous. But theformationand constitutive decompositionofthe working class which the proletariat includes does indeed condition theway inwhich the proletariat is what it is not: that is, it conditions the contradictory andtransitional character of an historically articulated locus of differential forms of

exploitation. We are nothing, we must become everything: this is the classic sloganof the class that Badiou or Rancire conceptualize as the part of no part. But thisslogan is in fact misleading. To think revolution as the self-abolition of theproletariat is to recognize that the problem is not how the proletariat can becomeeverything, but rather how the proletariat can become nothing, precisely by workingupon the way in which it iswhat it is not.

It is because they place this problem at the crux of their theoretical productionthat I find the work of the group Thorie Communiste (TC) essential to thinkingthrough the problem of organization and its relation to an understanding ofrevolution as the self-abolition of the proletariat. For most of the past 200 years, thedominant form in which revolutionary class struggle has presented itself is theworkers movement, operating through such mediations as the union, the party, thecouncil, the self-organized workplace, and conceptualizing revolution in terms of aseizure of state power and the organization of a transition to communism throughthe dictatorship of the proletariat. TC refers to this period of struggles asprogrammatismforegrounding the organization of struggles according to aworking class program and the self-affirmation of working class power, whetherreformist or revolutionary. Simply put, the problem TC try to confront is: whathappens to proletarian struggle after the relative waning of working class power, thewaning of the workers movement as a dominant form of struggle, in the 1970s and1980s? A postfordist restructuring of the economy takes place during these decades:the process of deindustrialization, neoliberal austerity measures and structuraladjustment programs, the expansion of financial speculation and credit marketswhich unfix consumer spending from wages. This counter-revolutionaryrestructuring tends to displace and decompose working class power, such that beinga worker, as a form of identity, is no longer an affirmative ground of collectivestruggle, but rather a situation from which one is excluded or a negativedetermination by which one is constrained.24 The rise of the prison-industrial

complex in the US, for example, brutally expresses the contemporary necessity forcapital of both excluding proletarians from the working class while neverthelessreproducing exploiting their labor under constrained conditions.

24 See Thorie Communiste, The Present Moment, http://libcom.org/library/present-moment-theorie-communiste. (accessed 4/7/13)

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Nathan BrownThe problem posed by the end of programmatism is: how can revolution

proceed otherwise than as the self-affirmation of the working class? This is theproblem of proletarian self-abolition, rather than self-affirmationand self-abolitionis considered here as the immediate process of revolution rather than a transitionalprogram carried out after a seizure of state power. The problem is thus: how is it

possible for the proletariat, acting as a class in contradiction with capital, within thecapitalist mode of production, to abolish itself as a class and thereby producecommunism? Let me phrase this question otherwise: how is it possible for theproletariat to reproduce itselfwithout reproducing itself as a class? That is: to reproduceitself without reproducing the conditions through which it both reproduces and isreproduced by capital? Understood as communization, the revolution is the veryprocess in and through which the proletariat, a class in struggle, learns to reproduceitself as other-than-a-class: and this constitutes the condition of possibility for thecontinuation of the revolution. The problem of revolution is thus that of immanentlybreaking the double cycle of reproductionthe reproduction of both capital andlabor that reproduces the class relation.

It is this focus on reproductionboth the reproduction of the class relation andthe reproduction of the revolutionary process that destroys the class relationthatenables us to think the proletariat as something other than the working class, both inits historical constitution and in the process of revolutionary struggle. 25 Again: theproletariat has to bewhat it is not. It has to organize itself as a class to struggle againstits reproduction as a class, precisely by reproducing itself without reproducing theclass relationand thus reproducing itself as other than the proletariat. It is thisfundamental contradiction within class struggle that TC analyzes in terms of therelation between dynamic, limit, and riftor gap (or cart). Because actingas a class alsoinvolves acting as a class, the dynamic of struggle (class action) is also its own limit.26We see the contradiction of dynamic and limit in the perpetual relay betweencomposition and decomposition to which struggles are prone. Insofar as they cohere,the cohesion of struggles always also highlights both the cohesion of the proletariatas a class, which is precisely what has to be undone, andthe internal contradictionsby which the proletariat is riven, and which divide its unity. The reciprocalimplication of dynamic and limit thus opens a rift or gap or swerve (cart) in classstruggle by exposing both internalcontradictions inherent to the composition of the

25 On the relation of TCs work to materialist feminist work on the reproduction of the classrelation, see Maya Gonzalez, Communizaiton and the Abolition of Gender inCommunization and its Discontents, ed. Benjamin Noys (New York: Minor Compositions, 2011),219-234; and P. Valentine, The Gender Distinction in Communization Theory, LIES: AJournal of Materialist Feminism1 (2012): 191-208.

26 See Thorie de lcart in Thorie Communiste20 (September 2005): 7-196.

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Nathan Brownclass and class composition itself as contradictory to class abolition. The opening ofsuch a rift thus posits or indicates or imposes a further limit to be overcome. This isthe sense of TCs important formulation: self-organization is the first act ofrevolution; it then becomes an obstacle which the revolution has to overcome.27Any movement will articulate itself, internally, and this will often involve different

internal processes of self-organization that also disorganize, or disarticulate, the unityof organization as a class. This is just to say that movements are often, or always,subject to violent decompositions that are also dialectical recompositions of themovement. Moreover, struggles will also be repressed, and such repression both fuelsthe dynamic of the struggle and limits what it can do. Struggles undo themselves,internally, and they are undone, externally. But this process of fragmentation,decomposition, repression, and recomposition is the inescapable condition of theproletariat having to struggle within the manifold contradiction that it is.

I do not mean to be blithe or metaphysical about the concrete problems oforganizing struggles, the concrete imperatives of collectively constructing a force thatis coherent enough to constitute a consequential threat. But while, in theory, we canplay at party intellectual, earnestly insisting that we have to get organized and stayorganized, in practice we have no choice but to grapple with contradictions inherentto the problem of organization that we actually encounter. TC writes:

We have to consider seriously the fact that we are engaged in a class strugglewhich is a large historical movement with its deep tendencies, is restructurings,its necessities, but we are engaged in it each day as it comes. It is in the incessantinteraction between all these levels, between the specific and the general, that we

make our way, that we have to weigh our actions and those of our adversaries.28

The fact is that, each day as it comes, the adversarial ground of struggles shifts, andthis is largely because of the differential forms of exploitation by which theproletariat is at once constituted and divided. This is perhaps more than ever the casetoday, when struggles take place within a crisis of the reproduction of both capitaland labora situation in which the same structural dynamics that shrink profitmargins, pop financial bubbles, and sow economic crises are the also those thatgenerate mass unemployment, foreclosures, vast slums and prison populations,ecological crises, and itinerant immigrant labor on the margins of the wage relation

27 Thorie Communiste, Self-organisation is the first act of the revolution; it then becomesan obstacle which the revolution has to overcome, http://libcom.org/library/self-organisation-is-the-first-act-of-the-revolution-it-then-becomes-an-obstacle-which-the-revolution-has-to-overcome. (accessed 4/7/13).

28 Thorie Communist, The Glass Floor, http://libcom.org/library/glass-floor-theorie-communiste?quicktabs_1=1. (accessed 4/7/13).

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http://libcom.org/library/self-organisation-is-the-first-act-of-the-revolution-it-then-becomes-an-obstacle-which-the-revolution-has-to-overcomehttp://libcom.org/library/self-organisation-is-the-first-act-of-the-revolution-it-then-becomes-an-obstacle-which-the-revolution-has-to-overcomehttp://libcom.org/library/self-organisation-is-the-first-act-of-the-revolution-it-then-becomes-an-obstacle-which-the-revolution-has-to-overcomehttp://libcom.org/library/glass-floor-theorie-communiste?quicktabs_1=1http://libcom.org/library/glass-floor-theorie-communiste?quicktabs_1=1http://libcom.org/library/glass-floor-theorie-communiste?quicktabs_1=1http://libcom.org/library/glass-floor-theorie-communiste?quicktabs_1=1http://libcom.org/library/self-organisation-is-the-first-act-of-the-revolution-it-then-becomes-an-obstacle-which-the-revolution-has-to-overcomehttp://libcom.org/library/self-organisation-is-the-first-act-of-the-revolution-it-then-becomes-an-obstacle-which-the-revolution-has-to-overcomehttp://libcom.org/library/self-organisation-is-the-first-act-of-the-revolution-it-then-becomes-an-obstacle-which-the-revolution-has-to-overcome


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Nathan Browneffects that are always unequally distributed along lines of sex, gender, and race. Therifts along these lines have to be, and will be, foregrounded in struggles. Immersedboth in large historical tendencies and in the concrete problems of each day as itcomes, we should not delude ourselves by thinking that we can make the proletariatbe what its supposed to be, a cohesive revolutionary class. The proletariat can only

be revolutionary by being what it is not, and the proletariat is the name of this contradiction.

***

In his heretical, carefully argued book on Marx, Michel Henry maintains the thesisthat Marx is not a materialist, and that this is the real strength of his work. Just asKants critique of pure reason displaces the opposition between rationalism andempiricism, Henry argues, Marxs critique of political economy displaces theopposition between idealism and materialism. Henrys claim is that Marxs project isproperly understood as a transcendental investigation, essentially bound up with ananalysis of conditions of possibility, the transcendental groundof exchange, of theeconomy, and indeed the reality of history. Kant and Marx are transcendentalphilosophers, but the difference between them is that in Marx, transcendentalphilosophy ceases to be a philosophy of transcendental consciousness in order tobecome a philosophy of reality.29

While I do not agree with nor wish to transmit the overall results of Henrysanalysis, I do want to retain this point in order to ask: what is the realitywhich theconstitution of the proletariat as a class both occludes and reveals? What is the groundof the claim, to reverse my earlier formulation, that the proletariat is notwhat it isaclass? This is another way of asking: what does the self-abolition of the proletariatentail? What will become of the contradiction that it is when that contradiction isundone and dispersed?These are questions concerning the laboring body, about thedifferent forms of exploitation to which different bodies are subject under capital,and about the undoing and displacement of those forms.

Henry argues that the original abstraction which constitutes the transcendentalcondition for the possibility of exchange is that by which the various labors ofdiverse individuals are reduced to one and the same labor.30 This is indeed what

Marx argues in the first chapter of Capital: average socially necessary labor timeconstitutes the measure of value, flattening the singular qualitative content of laborinto generic quantitative form. Labor is subsumed by capital insofar as it is organized

29 Michel Henry,Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 192.

30 Ibid. 200-201.

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Nathan Brownas capitalist production, such that the real labor of concrete individuals, producinguse values, takes on the form of social labor, producing exchange value. On the sideof capital, the result of production is surplus value, which reenters the process ofproduction as capital; on the side of labor, the result is the depleted body which hasto be replenished by rest and the consumption of commodities. Thus, the

reproduction of labor through the wage (C-M-C) accompanies the reproduction ofcapital through valorization (M-C-M).

Breproduction of the class relation also requires various forms of unwaged labor, andthus it also requires that the various labors of diverse individuals are notreduced toone and the same labor. This is exactly what Federici makes clear when she arguesthat the term women signifies a particular form of exploitation under capital. Thecrucial argument that there are differentformsof exploitation under capital in fact hastranscendental significance. It means that the condition of possibility for thesubsumption of labor under capital is that the various labors of diverse individuals

both must and must not be reduced to one and the same labor. In fact, this veryquantitative reduction, upon which value depends, is predicated upon forms of laborthat are notquantified, and the subsumption and reproduction of which relies uponqualitative measures (the violent disciplining of bodies).

ut as we know, things are not so neat. The subsumption of labor by capital and the

I want to say that it is through a crisis in the reproduction of the class relationthat this double transcendental condition becomes clear (just as it would have been

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Nathan Brownman

e application of concepts likequality and justice to labor or distribution. Subjective activity, he points out, the real

acti

s ofexploitation can thus only be released from the formal determinations of capital ifthe

ifest during the initial process of primitive accumulation). It is when thereciprocal yet contradictoryreproductionof capital and labor enters into crisis that thefault lines in the category of classthe category of the proletariatbecome clear.These fault lines also make clear the ideological status of conceptualizing theproletariat as constituted entirely by the wage relation and thus by the figure of the

worker or wage laborer. To recognize that different forms of exploitation are internalto and constitutive of the proletariat is also to recognize that the self-abolition of theproletariat requires the abolition of these all these different forms, rather than onlythe one form of exploitation consolidated in the wage.

In the Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx attacks the

vity of concrete individuals, yields no common measureand this fact suffices todestroy any pretense of equality or justice relative to the performance of labor or thedistribution of its products.31 Between different concrete individuals, the subjectiveexperience of labor is never qualitatively the same, precisely because no two concreteindividuals have the same body. Different formsof exploitation constitute bodies ascategoricallydifferent, precisely by treating them, within each category, as the same.

The singularity of qualitatively differential activity underlying different form

bodies carrying out these activities are considered not as identities, nor as anindifferently unified class, but rather in relation to the different forms of exploitationthat constitute them as proletarians, and that constitute the proletariat as such. Thisis a formal condition of possibility for the production of communism.

31 See also Henry,Marx, 194-196.

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Documents

Nathan Brown the Proletariat