By Gordon Hull
I have been circling around the relation between Marx and Foucault for a while, and thinking in particular about the ways that they can be viewed as productively engaged, particularly at the intersection of primitive accumulation and subjectification (e.g., here, here and here) This of course flies in the face of Foucault’s acerbic dismissals of Marxism, as when in the early parts of Society must be Defended, he dismisses it as “totalitarian,” or in the Trombadori interviews more generally. But there is a renaissance of interest in the topic, and there are a number of Foucault texts only now being studied in the English-speaking world that can be brought to bear on it. Most prominent perhaps is the recently translated “Mesh of Power” lecture, where Foucault specifically credits chapters 13-15 of Capital for moving toward a non-juridical understanding of power. As Foucault says, what Marx shows there is that “one power does not exist, but many powers” and that power is productive, not repressive:
“These specific regional powers [delineated by Marx – GH] have absolutely no ancient [primordial] function of prohibiting, preventing, saying ‘you must not.’ The original, essential and permanent function of these local and regional powers is, in reality, being producers of the efficiency and skill of the producers of a product. Marx, for example, has superb analyses of the problem of discipline in the army and workshops.”
What I want to do here is extend some of the credit to the “Fragment on Machines” section of the Grundrisse.
I will make no serious attempt to coordinate my remarks here with what autonomist Marxists (like Negri) have to say about this text, because they’ve said a lot. They are also responsible for the general interpretation in the background of what I will say, which is that as it leaves Fordist, factory production, capital has moved into the “social factory,” where not just work, but all of our time is determined by capitalist relations. This is the complete subsumption of society by capital. The point I want to make is that the Grundrisse fragment contains the basic elements of a critique of human capital theory, as articulated by Gary Becker. This is of particular interest here, because of Foucault’s own study of Becker in his 1978 Birth of Biopolitics lectures (where, one must admit, Foucault spends almost no time on human capital theory but instead focuses on Becker’s theory of punishment and families). The basic narrative of the Fragment is that as society becomes more wealthy, a larger and larger portion of its wealth shows up in the form of fixed capital, specifically machinery. This machinery increasingly comes to dominate production, and we need to recognize in it the accumulated products of science and knowledge. As a result of the accumulation of labor-power in machinery, in the form of science and knowledge, the actual amount of socially necessary labor time to produce objects of value drops rapidly. As Marx puts it, “all the sciences have been pressed into the service of capital … invention then becomes a business, and the application of science to direct production itself becomes a prospect which determines and solicits it” (1973 ed., p. 704)
As a further result, workers end up with a lot less time spent at work. They thus have a lot more “free time.” In her Marx book (centered on the Grundrisse), Amy Wendling notes that Marx has difficulty conceiving of the outside of capital except as “free time,” defined as time away from work. This can’t be the entirety of the story, though, as this is merely the abstract negation of time at work. Hence, “Marx’s emphasis on free abstract time must be subject, in turn, to critique.” Thus:
“When we extrapolate Marx’s visions of free time, therefore, we must not only envision the lengthening of the disposable hours the worker marks between short stints of productive labor. We must instead imagine a modern life freed from time, or at least modern life freed from time’s abstract and alienating domination” (198-9).
It seems to me that Marx is moving in that direction in the Fragment (although perhaps not in Capital), even if he’s not sure where to go with the idea. Consider the following passage, from near the end:
“Free time – which is both idle time and time for higher activity – has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject. This process is then both discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming; and, at the same time, practice, experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society” (712).
It seems to me that passage is attempting to deal with the sudden emergence of free time dialectically, on the one hand, and as what Foucault will call a process of subjection, on the other. This is somewhat clearer in an earlier passage, where Marx comments that capital “increases the surplus labor time of the mass by all the means of art and science” and thus is “instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time.” He then cautions that “its tendency always, on the one side, to create disposable time, on the other, [is – GH] to convert it into surplus labor” (708). The message of this passage is that whatever free time capital creates will immediately be subsumed into capitalist production. The conversion of free time into surplus labor is what the autonomists call the complete subsumption of society by capital, and is evidenced by Tiziana Terranova’s thesis that the Internet is a mechanism of surplus value extraction: we create webpages in our free time, and ISP’s collect the revenue. We also have vanishing amounts of time: as Wendling notes, capital generates the exhaustion of its workers such that time off work has to be spent as down-time, staring blankly at a TV or eating too many fried things. The move to an economy with a lot of “free time” does not seem to have ameliorated the situation, because we are now working all the time. This is of course class-specific (and gendered): the salaried are tethered to their email late at night; and the poor have to work multiple jobs to afford food. Time we don’t spend working we often spend waiting, which is nobody’s definition of free time, and which serves to dissipate an overproduction of free time.
Earlier in the text, Marx suggests that the “general reduction of the necessary labor of society to a minimum … corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them” (706). That sounds like a good thing, and compared to mining coal with one’s fingers for twelve hours a day, it is. But I don’t think it’s free time in the sense one would hope for. Later on the same page: “the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it” (706). That is a premonition of human capital theory, which says that we are to view all of our activities as investments in our future selves and our future earning capacities. All the noise about “innovation” and the need for more and more education, the degradation of bench science and focus on immediate “translation” or “applied” work, and all the other techniques of neoliberalism to turn people into specimens of homo economicus are basically the transformation of the social lives of individuals into a form that supplies the ever-increasing needs of capital for more fixed capital. Far from having more distance from capital, the emergence of “free time” means that we have less.
In Capital, Marx proposed that “some crippling of body and mind is inseparable even from the division of labor in society as a whole. However, since manufacture carries this social separation of branches of labor much further, and also, by its peculiar division, attacks the individual at the very roots of his life, it is the first system to provide the materials and the impetus for industrial pathology” (Penguin ed., 484). Franco “Bifo” Berardi spends significant time talking about the mental health problems generated by cognitive capital. Here we can simply return to exhaustion: as recent work documents, we know that sleep deprivation is potentially a cause of any number of physical ailments, from Alzheimer’s disease to various forms of cancer. But what do we call those who insist on getting a healthy amount of sleep each day? Lazy.
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