Undead Labour: Un/Spinning the Time of Real Abstraction

published in The Economy is Spinning, ed. Kris Dittel, OMP 132, Eindhoven, Feb. 2017. Sami Khatib Undead Labour Un/Spinning the Time of Real Abstraction Ka-meh said: If the silk worm span just to eke out a living as a worm, it would be a real wage worker. Bertolt Brecht1 I. Marx said the commodity has a dual nature: use-value and exchange-value. Whereas the use-value seems unproblematic, bound to a concrete useful thing, the latter expresses an abstract social category, that is: value. As bearer of exchange-value, a thing exceeds its “thingly” character – it possesses a certain quality that turns it into the materialization of a social substance (value). This transubstantiation of ordinary matter into the spectral materiality of value is addressed in the famous opening lines from Marx’s chapter on commodity fetishism in Capital, Vol. I: A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a use-value, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it satisfies human needs; or that it first takes on these properties as the product of human labour. […] The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a sensuous supra-sensuous thing. (C I, 163)2 The peculiar “sensuous supra-sensuous” materiality that transforms a thing into a commodity, the bearer of sensuous use- and supra-sensuous exchange Brecht, Bertolt: Bertolt Brecht’s Me-ti. Book of Interventions in the Flow of Things, ed. Antony Tatlow, trans. Antony Tatlow, London: Bloomsbury, 2016, p. 109. 2 Marx, Karl: Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, Vol. 1, London: Penguin, 1976, 1990, p. 163, henceforth abbreviated C I, page; trans. modified, cf. Marx, Karl: Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Erster Band, Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW), Vol. 23, Berlin: Dietz, 1962, p. 85. I have discussed this Marx quote at length in “Sensuous Supra-Sensuous. The Aesthetics of Real Abstraction,” in Aesthetic Marx, ed. Samir Gandesha and Johan F. Hartle, London: Bloomsbury, 2017. 1 1 value, is to be found in a social substance. In Capital, Marx defines this substance as “abstract” or “abstract human labour” in opposition to “concrete labour” (C I, 137). Here, we enter the terrain of the spectral materiality of “real abstraction,” a term introduced by Alfred Sohn-Rethel that refers to the abstraction performed by the reality of abstract human labour.3 In his reading of Marx’s Capital, Sohn-Rethel contends that commodity abstraction is objective, real and not subjective or thought-induced. Value as a denaturalized social relation comes into being by virtue of a real process of exchange – an actually performed equation of things as commodities, which acquires at the same time the form of thought, that is, abstraction. “Wherever commodity exchange takes place, it does so in effective ‘abstraction’ from use. This is an abstraction not in mind but in fact.”4 It is in this sense that SohnRethel’s term “real abstraction” takes Marx’s Capital to its epistemological conclusion. Marx had already discovered a fundamental link between the form of commodity abstraction and the form of thought articulated by the categories of bourgeois science: these “are forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective, for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of social production, i.e. commodity production” (C I, 169). Commodity abstraction, however, is not limited to the form of thought but also structures the aesthetic forms of intuition, which Kant defined as time and space. As Sohn-Rethel put it: Time and space rendered abstract under the impact of commodity exchange are marked by homogeneity, continuity and emptiness of all natural and material content, visible or invisible (e.g. air). […] Time and space assume thereby that character of absolute historical timelessness and universality which must mark the exchange abstraction as a whole and each of its features.5 Cf. Sohn-Rethel, Alfred: Intellectual and Manual Labour. A Critique of Epistemology, London: Macmillan, 1978, pp. 19ff. 4 Sohn-Rethel: Intellectual and Manual Labour, p. 25. 5 Sohn-Rethel: Intellectual and Manual Labour, p. 48-49. 3 2 Commodity abstraction does not only have a history but produces the very form of abstract spatio-temporal continuity that, in the first place, allows for the notion of history and historical sequentiality. Put differently, the category of the commodity form introduces a spatio-temporal form necessary to historicize its own historical genesis. This is why the “origin” of capitalism cannot be told in a linear way; the linear time-line of historicization is to be produced in the “first” place. The status of this “first” is both logical and temporal. Real abstraction as the operator of the commodity form exceeds any phenomenological account of capitalism; it concerns the “original” production of forms that appear ahistorical and transcendental in order to provide the framework for historical “events.” This is not to say that “before” the rise of capitalism and the commodity form there was no history proper; rather, the form of historicity specific to capitalism necessitates a specific form of time and space. II. The constitutive gap in the suture of the logic of capital and the historicity of capitalism is repeated on the categorical level of the commodity form. In Capital, Marx defined the commodity as the material shell of abstract social relations, that is, “value.” Value is formed by “abstract labour,” which is itself defined by another relation – a relation of time. Value, however, cannot be measured by chronometric time, as Marx reminds us: “the time spent in production counts only in so far as it is socially necessary for the production of a use-value” (C I, 303). The measure of abstract labour-time, value, is not absolute and external but internal and relational – every expenditure of abstract labour-time temporalizes its own temporal measurement vis-à-vis other expenditures of abstract labour-time. This self-temporalizing measurement has consequences for the production process: First, the labour-power must be functioning under normal conditions. If a self-acting mule is the socially predominant instrument of labour for spinning, it would be impermissible to supply the spinner with a spinning-wheel. The cotton too must not be such rubbish as to tear at every other moment, but must be of suitable quality. 3 Otherwise the spinner would spend more time than socially necessary in producing his pound of yarn, and in this case the excess of time would create neither value nor money. But whether the objective factors of labour are normal or not does not depend on the worker, but rather on the capitalist. A further condition is that the labourpower itself must be of normal effectiveness. In the trade in which it is being employed, it must possess the average skill, dexterity and speed prevalent in that trade, and our capitalist took good care to buy labour-power of such normal quality. lt must be expended with the average amount of exertion and the usual degree of intensity; and the capitalist is as careful to see that this is done, as he is to ensure that his workmen are not idle for a single moment. He has bought the use of the labourpower for a definite period, and he insists on his rights. (C I, 303) In order to be regarded as value, the expenditure of labour-power must be average in terms of quality, intensity, efficiency and effectiveness. As in Marx’s example, the spinning-wheel is spinning value only insofar as “socially necessary labour-time” (C I, 129) is invested in the process of spinning. But how can the labour of spinning be said to be value-producing if we do not know the exact amount of socially necessary labour-time in the first place? Could we think of a spinning-wheel that operates in abstract labour-time, immediately spinning value? Commodity abstraction is a dialectical process, combining two antithetical temporalities: the time of commodity circulation and the time of the production process. This temporal dialectics is not static but pertains to the speculative time of capital, the self-movement of abstract labour-time. Here, dialectics thus indicates that equi-valence and equi-temporality are not simply different, belonging to different socio-temporal orders; rather, it also implies the unstable identity of identity and non-identity, which means, in our case, that value and time are both the same and absolutely different. In terms of the self-valorization of value (capital), the dialectical identity of identity and nonidentity translates to the equi-valence of equi-valence and equi-temporality. Two radically heterogeneous equations are combined, fused and torn apart. The temporal dialectics of the value form can be approached from two 4 perspectives, representing two equations. From the perspective of the production process, the concept of socially necessary labour-time is already an abstraction from the multitude and specificity of concrete labour-time. When different labour-times are equated, the particular qualities of each labour process are abstracted. In this way, when exchanged as equal values, the products of the production process can circulate in “real time” without representing the concrete labour-times that were equated in the production process. Thereby, the time of commodity circulation is never “in tune” with the time of the production process. Hence “socially necessary labour time […] constituting value is not just a ‘technical’ average, because the sociality of private labours, and so the same magnitude to be measured, is eventually fixed in market exchange. Thus, [socially necessary labour time] is known only ex-post.”6 This intervention “ex post” curves the linear time of the production process and introduces a dimension of logical time, that is, the anticipation of the time of the market (commodity circulation) and the retroactive determination of the value of the time of the production process. The temporal split between concrete labour-time (time of the production process) and its abstract average (time of the circulation sphere) is further complicated on the categorical level: although abstract labour (value) cannot be rendered in terms of quanta of concrete labour, measured by the linear time of the production process (weeks, days, and hours), the value form is a necessary condition for the production of the chronometric standard that allows “in the first place” for quantifiable time-units of concrete labour. Put differently, the category of abstract labour already implies a social mode of “time-as-measure” which is not merely a concept applied to a given mode of production but the very production of this standard qua abstract labour-time unit. This is what Sohn-Rethel was hinting at when he wrote: “Time and space rendered abstract under the impact of commodity exchange are marked by homogeneity, continuity and emptiness of all natural and material content, 6 Bellofiore, Riccardo: 'A Ghost Turning into a Vampire', in Riccardo Bellofiore and Roberto Fineschi (ed.), Re-reading Marx. New Perspectives after the Critical Edition, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 185. 5 visible or invisible (e.g., air).”7 III. It is not by accident that the abstract forms of time and space were first discovered at the dawn of bourgeois society, namely by Immanuel Kant in his “critical” turn of philosophy. According to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87), time and space are not anymore conceived as inherent ontological properties of reality but as transcendental forms of intuition bound to the subject of cognition and his or her aesthetic mode of relating to the world. Reading Kant with Marx, Sohn-Rethel makes an analogous argument for Kant’s transcendental logic and the categories of quality, quantity, relation, and modality. Without these subject-bound categories no empirical fact or event could be cognized and structured. History in the modern sense thus relies on Kant’s “pure,” that is, non-empirical or transcendental forms. SohnRethel’s point was that these forms, which structure logic and aesthetics, do not only belong to the subjective (epistemological) side of cognition but are produced and materially enacted by the commodity form and its “character masks,” that is, capitalists and labourers. Abstract thought and with it the concepts of abstract time and abstract space are part and parcel of a world governed by commodity abstraction. The commodity form of labour relies on time and space as abstract, mutually convertible forms. Without this precondition, concrete labour could never pertain to “abstract labour” – the substance of value, which is, in the last instance, abstract labour-time, a congealed and quantifiable fragment of “homogeneous, empty time,”8 belonging to a historically specific social totality. In other words, abstract labour and the “real abstract” nature of time and space are co-dependent. The violent linearization and homogenization of heterogeneous now-points of concrete labour as abstract labour produces and proceeds historical time. As a result, time becomes the dominant social relation in capitalism. Marx stated 7 8 Sohn-Rethel: Intellectual and Manual Labour, p. 48-49. Benjamin, Walter: 'On the Concept of History', in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (ed.), Selected Writings, Vol. 4, Cambridge, MA.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press., 2003, p. 395. 6 that it is only the “economy of time” to which “all economy ultimately reduces itself.”9 Capital as the self-valorization of value leads to the temporalization of abstract labour-time (value). This temporalization, however, never arrives at chronometric time. The temporalization of 24/7 capitalism transcends the standard of “weeks, days, and hours.” IV. In the chapter on the normal working day, Marx pointed out the asymmetric relationship of chronometric time and capital: “The prolongation of the working day beyond the limits of the natural day, into the night, only acts as a palliative. It only slightly quenches the vampire thirst for the living blood of labour. Capitalist production therefore drives, by its inherent nature, towards the appropriation of labour throughout the whole of the 24 hours in the day” (C I, 367). Whereas the 24 hours of the working day present an absolute limit for the production of the absolute surplus-value, the production of the relative surplus-value can rely on the temporal and spatial intensification of value per given time-unit. Capital’s “vampire thirst for the living blood of labour” transcends the boundaries of the normal working day and chronometric measurement. The undead temporality of surplus-value indicates the transition from the substance of value, that is abstract labour-time, to the subject of self-temporalization beyond the chronometric measurement of spatialized units of simple average labour. Swallowing and digesting living labour, the dead labour of value transforms itself into the undead labour of surplus-value, that is, capital. Ultimately, capital’s undead temporality pushes the limits of the working day beyond Kant’s transcendental concept of time and space as pure forms of intuition. Capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorize itself, to create surplus-value, to make its constant part, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labour. Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by 9 Marx, Karl: Grundrisse, London: Penguin, 1973; this revised trans. is retrieved from the online resource, “marxists.org”, URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch03.htm. 7 sucking living labour, and lives the more; the more labour it sucks. The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labourpower he has bought from him. (C I, 342) This passage contains Marx’s definition of capital’s undeadness. Increasing the density and magnitude of extracted labour-time beyond the chronometric boundaries of living labour, capital acquires a form neither dead nor alive but undead. Within the infinite cycles of capital valorization, dead labour never perishes; as undead labour, it survives its own death. The time of capital thus endlessly transforms living labour into dead labour, resurrected and revalorized as undead labour. Marx aptly grasped the accelerating dynamic of value as surplus-value, referring to it as an “übergreifendes”, literally the overgrasping, non-identical subject of a process, “in which it alternately assumes and loses the form of money and the form of commodities, but preserves and expands itself through all these changes” (C I, 255). Those who are subjected to the restless undead temporality of “over-grasping” time-sucking vampirism are those bearers of labour-power whose mortal temporality is also stretched beyond physical death. If capital-time acts like a vampire, the bearers of labour-power are forced to sell a commodity that turns them into zombies, undead creatures whose commodified agency returns to the surface of the market. As popular culture has it, the zombie is the undead figure who was denied his or her proper burial and is forced to compulsively return. In contemporary capitalism, however, the “Night of the Living Dead”10 is exposed to the glaring daylight of endless work – the spinning wheel of undead labour. If the 24/7 expenditure of living labour is inherently subjected to the vampirism of dead labour, the haunting time of capital knows no exemption. Capitalism becomes, as Walter Benjamin succinctly put it, a cult religion that proceeds in “permanent duration.”11 “Capitalism,” as his fragment reads, “is the celebration of the cult sans trêve et sans merci [without truce 10 11 This is also the title of the genre-defining film from 1968, D: George A. Romero. Benjamin, Walter: ‘Capitalism as Religion’, in Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock andMichael W. Jennings, Vol. 1, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 288. 8 and without mercy]. There are no ‘weekdays’. There is no day that is not a feast day, in the terrible sense that all its sacred pomp is unfolded before us; each day commands the utter fealty of each worshiper.”12 The undead temporality of permanent production does not only stretch chronometric time into eternity but disrupts the phenomenological concept of time as diachronic sequence. Capitalism’s ever-lasting Sunday is the perennial workday of surplus value and surplus labor. The time of capital, thus characterized, extends the end of history into the dead eternity of surplus time. In the time of capital, there is no “now” that might not be simultaneous with any other “now”; there is no “now” that would not be intent upon its return in another, none that would not itself stand under the law of returns and appear as the mere revenant of another “now.” This means, however, that the time of capital is the time of the dead “now” as its own second coming as revenue and surplus, as re-now and over-now.13 If, under the supremacy of capital-time, every valorized “now” returns as the revenant of another “now” without allowing any particular “now” to be outlived, consummated and properly buried, the temporal expenditure of labour-power is denied its natural death. Like a zombie, every “now” of concrete labour-time is forced to return as undead abstract labour-time, caught up in the “dead eternity of surplus time.” Such temporality annuls the historical signature of time as sequential and irreversible. Bound to eternal returns, every “now” of the time of capital thus loses its historical trajectory; every “now” can be co-present in the space of capital. Of course, the “now” at stake here is not the sensuous “now” of concrete labour-time, measured by chronometric time, but the sensuous supra-sensuous “now” of abstract labourtime, the zombie-like expenditure of undead labour. This undead temporality, however, conjoins two antagonistic positions and their incompatible modes of undeadness. As much as we have to avoid “the Benjamin: ‘Capitalism as Religion’, p. 288. Trans. changed, cf. Steiner, Uwe: ‘Die Grenzen des Kapitalismus’, in Kapitalismus als Religion, ed. Dirk Baecker, Berlin: Kadmos, 2003, p. 285 13 Hamacher, Werner, 'Guilt History. Benjamin's Sketch "Capitalism as Religion"; trans. Kirk Wetters, Diacritics, Fall-Winter 2002, p. 89. 12 9 confusion of zombies with vampires,”14 we need to distinguish between the vampire-like temporality of capital and the zombie-like temporality of labourpower. The valorization of living labour as dead labour (value) necessitates the self-valorization of value as undead labour. As we said before, the time of capital produces its own results as its very precondition. This logico-temporal loop cannot be measured from a neutral external standpoint. The loophole in the time of capital expresses and represses the negativity of class antagonism, that is, the exploitation of labour-power performed in the real abstraction of commodity exchange. Therefore, the slick surfaces of vampire capital never fully succeed in repressing the return of zombie labour-power. V. The haunting time of capital creates its own ahistorical trajectory towards the dead eternity of surplus value.15 Such undead temporality is not merely fictitious but also real – it has real consequences for the current formations of capitalized space. Whereas particular exchange values are still dependent on the spatial or spatializable use-value dimension of the commodity, capital time exceeds the realm of spatial representation. Contradicting the fantasies of science fiction and the findings of astronomy, in capitalism space is a limited resource. Nevertheless, space is the only resource that can, at least “temporarily,” materialize a certain “amount” of future undead labour-time in the present. If capital is always endangered by future crises, only the spatialization of temporal risks and bonds seems to offer an instant staging ground for valorization. Space, precisely because it is abstract, provides some sort of materiality for the really existing fantasy of capital as a self-moving, “automatic subject” (C I, 255) – “‘money which begets money’” (C I, 256). It comes as no surprise that capital seeks to transform concrete space – that is, place and locality – into abstract speculative space in order to supplement its supra-sensuous reality with a sensuous materiality. 14 15 Sigurdson, Ola: ‘Slavoj Žižek, the Death Drive, and Zombies’, Modern Theology 29:3 July 2013: 369. I have published a longer version of passages from section V and VI, titled “No Future: The Space of Capital and the Time of Dying,” in Former West: Art and the Contemporary after 1989, ed. Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. 10 The obvious site of this sensuous supra-sensuous transformation is real estate speculation, which in turn leads to housing crises, gentrification, and the enforced displacement of entire groups of pauperized inhabitants of global cities and regions. These graphic effects, however, obfuscate the asymmetric nexus of speculative space and speculative capital. If capital is not merely a fiction but also the really existing abstraction of concrete labour-time, space too as speculative space is both abstract and real. Consequently, from the perspective of capital owners, it is consistent to treat real space as a speculative abstract resource. Since capital is always credit-based, space as speculative space seems a “safe” option through which to keep the temporal risks of growing debts and infinite indebtedness within an assessable spatial scope. In this way, speculative space becomes another expression of what Marx called the fetishism of capital, the seemingly automatic self-valorization of economic value. If credit-based capital is indifferent to particular places, it still relies on the guaranteed convertibility of speculative space into speculative time – it bets on the bad infinity of debt repayment. This conjuncture reveals the dialectics of spatialization: space is not merely an abstract term for place or locality but also a denaturalized, abstract term for time. If financial capitalism and its inherent digital technologies flatten time to spatial co-presence, separated only by minimal temporal delays and digital asynchronies, space itself becomes the marker of time – a singular time, identical only with itself, that is, identical with its place in a global continuum of capital-space. Of course, such a definition of time and space would be tautological. VI. In capitalism, however, the dialectic of time and space is uneven, asymmetric, and ultimately stretched into a dead eternity. In credit-based, and therefore debt-driven economies, space is not simply another extension of time beyond present, past, and future. Today’s profit has its future origin in the extraction 11 of a certain “amount” of abstract labour-time. The retroactive time of capital is speculative by definition. In this way, capital bets on a future to which it is irredeemably indebted. Given the incalculable “amount” of future abstract labour-time that is valorized in today’s capitalism, the time of the future is not anymore “our” future. Rather, the future of capital time already owns us and we owe to a future without history. The financialization of capitalism presents the last, most radical stage of this basic dynamic. There is no future redemption in the economy of debt, only the uncertain promise to remain “credible” – to believe in the “credo of capital” (C I, 919). Under these conditions, time is not a neutral measure of spatial difference like chronometric time, but a speculative resource that temporalizes itself through the exploitation of labour-power. The more undead labour is forced to spin the time of real abstraction, the less the time of capital will ever arrive at historical time. Capital’s totalizing ontology, woven out of a tautological self-identical time, leaves no indeterminate empty spots, no undefinable gaps of time which could become undefined openings to a non-capitalist future. Against the sensuous suprasensuous reality of undead returns and self-identical “now-time,” Benjamin insisted on a heterogeneous temporality of “now-time” – an anachronic constellation of past and present shot through with sparks of “messianic” time.16 Without these anachronic short-circuits and messianic gaps, historical time would lose its historical character. For Benjamin, history is thus incomplete in a radical sense – its texture is woven of struggles, catastrophes, and failures – and it can therefore never be self-temporalizing, self-sufficient or identical with itself. The inaccessible wheel of history does not spin the yarn of abstract labour, it only weaves holes into the cloth of capital time. The fragmentary work of holes sets free the whole of undead labour – it weaves a contingent, heterogeneous, discontinuous cloth. History is nothing other than this negative spin, unbound. 16 Benjamin: ‘On the Concept of History’, p. 395. 12