Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 19

Summary of Chapter 19: Productive and Unproductive Labor

Braverman reiterates that being in the working class is determined by a social relation, not the specific form of work that is done:

The various forms of labor which produce commodities for the capitalist are all to be counted as productive labor. The worker who builds an office building and the worker who cleans it every night alike produce value and surplus value. Because they are productive for the capitalist, the capitalist allows them to work and produce; insofar as such workers alone are productive, society lives at their expense. (284)

There remains the question of what constitutes “unproductive” labor. B notes that the distinction between “productive and unproductive” originates with the classical economists, whom Marx was critiquing:

In order to understand the terminology it is necessary to grasp first of all that the discussion of productive and unproductive labor, as it was conducted by Marx, implied no judgment about the nature of the work processes under discussion or their usefulness to humans in particular or society at large, but was concerned specifically and entirely with the role of labor in the capitalist mode of production. Thus the discussion is in reality an analysis of the relations of production and, ultimately, of the class structure of society, rather than of the utility of particular varieties of labor. (284-5)

… Marx defined productive labor under capitalism as labor which produces commodity value, and hence surplus value, for capital. (285)

Self-employed proprietors, such as independent farmers, artisans, professionals and so on, are unproductive for capital, or even outside the productive/unproductive distinction and in fact “outside the capitalist mode of production.” Servants are also outside the distinction, since their labor is not exchanged against profit but against revenue (e.g. the capitalist pays for the gardener at his home out of his own pocket). [But does this change if the maintenance of the home for future sale is seen as an investment? Not to mention the other forms of “capital” which having a home with a garden and a gardener produces, outside of a strictly Marxist framework—by which I mean to refer not so much to Bourdieu’s original forms of “capital,” but attempts to integrate these with Marxian concepts, e.g. Zhu (2020) on the “cultural fix.” (Which also being a variation on Harvey’s “spatial fix,” is linked to the expansion of capitalist relations which Braverman is talking about).]

B points out that the productive/unproductive distinction is important because as more kinds of work are brought into direct exchange for capital, this shows the expansion of capitalism, and capitalist relations, through society. He gives the example of an individual tailor employed by a customer for one suit alone, vs. a capitalist employing a roomful of tailors for suits, plus profit. “Capital is thus not just money exchanged for labor; it is money exchanged for labor with the purpose of appropriating that value which it creates over and above what is paid, the surplus value” (286).

In each case where money is exchanged for labor with this purpose it creates a social relation, and as this relation is generalized throughout the productive processes it creates social classes. Therefore, the transformation of unproductive labor into labor which is, for the capitalist’s purpose of extracting surplus value, productive, is the very process of the creation of capitalist society.

... the capitalist mode of production has subordinated to itself all forms of work, and all labor processes now pass through the sieve of capital, leaving behind their tribute of surplus.

The unproductive labor which capitalism increasingly pays for is involved, not in the production of value, but in the work of the appropriation of surplus value, and in the “realization problem” of ensuring that products get sold, so they can be turned back into capital.

These two functions, the realization and the appropriation by capital of surplus value, engage, as we have seen, enormous masses of labor, and this labor, while necessary to the capitalist mode of production, is in itself unproductive, since it does not enlarge the value or surplus value available to society or to the capitalist class by one iota. (287)

[This is furthermore important, because in a different organization of society, these would be unnecessary, or not as important; there would be no need, or less need, for these kinds of “unproductive” labor in a socialist economy.]

B gives an example of the same kind of work being in one case productive, in another unproductive:

The receivables clerk who keeps track of outstanding accounts, the insurance clerk who records payments, the bank clerk who receives deposits—­all of these forms of commercial and financial labor add nothing to the value of the commodities represented by the figures or papers which they handle. Yet this lack of effect is not due to the determinate form of their labors—the fact that they are clerical in nature. Clerical labor of similar and sometimes identical kinds is used in production, storage, transportation, and other such processes, all of which do contribute productively to commodity value, according to the division of productive labor into mental and manual sides. It is due rather to their occupation with tasks which contribute only to the realization of value in the market, or to the struggle of competing capitals over value, and its transfer and redistribution according to individual claims, speculations, and the “services” of capital in the form of credit, etc.

Summarizing his argument so far:

Labor may thus be unproductive simply because it takes place outside the capitalist mode of production, or because, while taking place within it, it is used by the capitalist, in his drive for accumulation, for unproductive rather than productive functions. And it is now clear that while unproductive labor has declined outside the grasp of capital, it has increased within its ambit. … the greater the mass of capital, the greater the mass of unproductive activities which serve only the diversion of this surplus and its distribution among various capitals.

Modern bourgeois economics has failed to grasp this change, because it can’t account for it, only being able to see things from the point of view of the bourgeoisie. Thus, for bourgeois economists, “the measuring of the productivity of labor has come to be applied to labor of all sorts, even labor which has no productivity. It refers, in bourgeois parlance, to the economy with which labor can perform any task to which it is set by capital, even those tasks which add nothing whatever to the wealth of the nation” (288).

And the very idea of the “wealth of nations” has faded, to be supplanted by the concept of “prosperity,” a notion which has nothing to do with the efficacy of labor in producing useful goods and services, but refers rather to the velocity of flow within the circuits of capital and commodities in the marketplace.

[Here, couched in Adam-Smith-ian terms, is another implicit critique of the capitalist international economic system vis-a-vis a possible socialist system.]

Unproductive workers employed in early capitalism had a certain high status as enablers of the capitalists’ wealth, but the new system means they have lost this status. Just as productive workers lost their individual input and now create value only as a mass (for example, the individuals on an assembly line only contribute partially, and production is actually brought about by all of them together), unproductive laborers have also lost their individuality and are now also a mass, “which shares in the subjugation and oppression that characterizes the lives of the productive workers” (289).

And this remains true despite the fact that, technically speaking, all those who do not themselves produce commodity values must perforce consume a portion of the commodity values produced by others. In the modern corporation, and for the mass of labor which it employs, this distinction has lost its social force as a line of division between proletarians and middle class: that line can no longer be drawn as roughly corresponding to the division between productive and unproductive workers, but must be inscribed elsewhere in the social structure. (290)

B clarifies how his own argument is rooted in Marx’s sketches of the issue. Contra Ian Gough, B insists that Marx never described commercial workers as a “commercial proletariat,” but as “wage-workers,” this distinction being important because, although they do have the same employment status as industrial workers, they are not productive of surplus value, like a true proletariat:

The unproductive labor hired by the capitalist to help in the realization or appropriation of surplus value is in Marx’s mind like productive labor in all respects save one: it does not produce value and surplus value, and hence grows not as a cause but rather as a result of the expansion of surplus value. (292)

However, Braverman also notes that Marx did not peer far into the future of capitalism, since he was more intent on ending capitalism, soon:

... it is necessary to keep in mind that Marx was not only a scientist but also a revolutionary; that so far as he was concerned the capitalist mode of production had already operated for a sufficiently long period of time; and that he anticipated not its prolonged continuation but its imminent destruction, a conviction which is part of the armament of all working revolutionaries.

And, as a revolutionary sharing this conviction, B concludes by noting that unproductive laborers now share much in common with the true proletariat, hinting at (though not stating here) their potential role as co-revolutionaries:

That which in Marx was a subordinate and inconsequential part of the analysis has thus for us become a major consequence of the capitalist mode of production. The few commercial wage-workers who puzzled Marx as a conscientious scientist have become the vast and complicated structure of occupations characteristic of unproductive labor in modern capitalism. But in so becoming they have lost many of the last characteristics which separated them from production workers. When they were few they were unlike productive labor, and having become many they are like productive labor. Although productive and unproductive labor are technically distinct, although productive labor has tended to decrease in proportion as its productivity has grown, while nonproductive labor has increased only as a result of the increase in surpluses thrown off by productive labor—despite these distinctions, the two masses of labor are not otherwise in striking contrast and need not be counterposed to each other. They form a continuous mass of employment which, at present and unlike the situation in Marx’s day, has everything in common.

Zhu, Annah Lake (2020) “China’s Rosewood Boom: A Cultural Fix to Capital Overaccumulation.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110(1):277-296.

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 7

 

Summary of Chapter 7: The Age of Happiness

Chapter 7 begins a new subsection of part 1, titled, “The impossibility of Communication: Power as Universal Mediation,” under which heading V states:

In the realm of Power, mediation is the false necessity wherein people learn to lose themselves rationally. Mediation’s power to alienate is now being reinforced, and also brought into question, by the dictatorship of consumption (seven), by the predominance of exchange over gift (eight), by cybernetisation (nine), and by the reign of the quantitative (ten). (65)

This chapter, then, will be about the “dictatorship of consumption. Vaneigem’s summary:

The contemporary welfare state belatedly provides the guarantees of survival which were demanded by the disinherited members of the production-based society of former days (1). Affluent survival entails the pauper­isation of life (2). Purchasing power is a licence to purchase power, to become an object in the order of things. The tendency is for both oppressor and oppressed to fall, albeit at different speeds, under one and the same dictatorship: the dictatorship of consumer goods (3). (65)

V begins the chapter with condemnations of both the welfare state and consumerism, noting with great sarcasm the obfuscation of the working class, who can now be imagined to be “rich” because they have various objects, and how consumption is meant to stand in for or replace the goals of revolution. Nevertheless, the younger generation are not taken in, and V celebrates various examples of uprising/insurrection.

The dictatorship of consumer goods has finally destroyed the barriers of blood, lineage and race; this would be good cause for celebration were it not that consumption, with its logic of things, forbids all qualitative differences and recognises only differences of quantity between values and between people. (69)

Vaneigem notes that consumer goods are losing their use value, with their value for consumption being all that matters. Noting Stalin’s revealing phrase that humans are “the most precious kind of capital,” V asserts that even this is no longer true: humans are only good for moving consumption along, gaining our entire identity from what we buy. “Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete” (70). V observes with some irony that

a historical period based on such an anti-human truth can only be a period of transition, an intermediate stage between the life that was lived, if obscurely, by the feudal masters and the life that will be constructed rationally and passionately by masters without slaves. Only thirty years are left if we want to end the transitional period of slaves without masters before it has lasted two centuries. (70-1)

The great Bourgeois revolutions of the west have turned out to be no better than counter-revolutions, producing a society, not of “masters without slaves,” but of “slaves without masters.” At the same time, as the Stalin quote revealed, state “socialism” is also not truly revolutionary, but just another variation on the capitalist/consumerist order. [and has not China since demonstrated this even more clearly?]

The old proletarian sold his labour power in order to subsist; what little leisure time he had was passed pleasantly enough in conversation, arguments, drinking, making love, wandering, celebrating and rioting. The new proletarian sells his labour power in order to consume. When he’s not flogging himself to death to get promoted in the labour hierarchy, he’s being persuaded to buy himself objects to distinguish himself in the social hierarchy. The ideology of consumption becomes the consumption of ideology.... On the one hand, homo consumator buys a bottle of whiskey and gets as a free gift the lie that accompanies it. On the other hand, communist man buys ideology and gets a bottle of vodka for free. Paradoxically, Soviet and capitalist regimes are taking a common path, the first thanks to an economy of production, the second thanks to an economy of consumption. (72-3)

In the Soviet Union, the “surplus value of power” is the support of the bureaucrat. “He earns it not on the basis of money-capital, but on the basis of a primitive accumulation of confidence-capital obtained through the docile absorption of ideological matter.” (73)

In capitalist countries, the material profit reaped by the employer from both production and consumption remains distinct from the ideological profit which the employer is not alone in deriving from the organisation of consumption. This is all that prevents us from reducing the difference between a manager and worker to the difference between a new Rolls Royce every year and a VW lovingly maintained for five.

But State planning reduces everyone to no more than agents for consumption. Although many of V’s Cold War observations can sound a bit dated, the following presciently evokes the fantasies of some current Silicon Valley technocrats:

The culmination of the process would be a cybernetic society composed of specialists ranked hierarchically according to their aptitude for consuming, and making others consume, the doses of power necessary for the functioning of a gigantic social computer of which they themselves would be at once program and print-out. (73-4)

He ends by expressing hope that the disaffected proletarian youth of the first world, and the peasantry of the third world, will have none of this, and will join forces in revolt, putting an end to the bourgeois half-revolution:

The revolt against the welfare state will set the minimum demands for world revolution. You can choose to forget this, but you forget it at your peril. As Saint-Just said, those who make a revolution by halves are only digging their own graves. (74)

 

On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Part III, Chapter 2

 

Summary of Part III, Chapter 2: Relations Between Technical Thought And Other Species Of Thought

This chapter is divided into two parts, “Technical thought and aesthetic thought,” and “Technical thought, theoretical thought, practical thought.” The first lays out a quite interesting theory of beauty, and the second sets the stage for the final chapter, on philosophical thought. The whole can be seen to be following through the relations established in the previous chapter, for which a diagram can be found in the previous summary.

in order for works of art to be possible, they must be made possible by a fundamental tendency in the human being, and by the ability to experience the aesthetic impression in certain real and vital circumstances. The artwork that is part of a civilization uses aesthetic feeling and satisfies, sometimes artificially and in an illusory manner, man’s tendency to seek a complement with respect to a totality, when he exerts a certain type of thought. (192)

S seems to be forging a path between a certain universalist or inherent “fundamental tendency in the human being” with a historical situatedness, in terms of a particular culture at a particular stage in the historical transition he has outlined, from magical to post-magical thought. Thus, in the post-magical world divided between science and religion, the role of aesthetic thought and the work of art is to recreate the sense of totality that had been lost with the end of unified magical thinking. However, S stresses again that this is not simply a survival or atavism of the older magical era, but something new and distinct; and also, as indicated in the above quote, that the sense of totality achieved may only be superficial and “illusory.”

He makes an interesting use of the term “metábasis eis állo” which is an abbreviation of the phrase “metábasis eis állo génos” from Aristotle, meaning a change from one genus (e.g., subject, line of reasoning, or discipline) to another. For Aristotle, and subsequent thinkers through Husserl, such metabasis has typically been considered a bad thing. Simondon, however, drops off the genos and transforms it into something more like “change into an other,” a positive thing in Simondon’s thought, and linked to his concept of transduction.

The aesthetic character of an act or a thing is its function of totality, its existence, both objective and subjective, as an outstanding point. Any act, any thing, any moment has in itself the ability to become an outstanding point of a new reticulation of the universe. Every culture selects the acts and situations that are apt to become outstanding points; but culture is not what creates the aptitude of a situation to become an outstanding point; it only forms a barrage against certain types of situations, leaving narrow straights for aesthetic expression with respect to the spontaneity of the aesthetic impression; culture intervenes as limit rather than as creator. (193)

The single reticulation of the magical world has been replaced with two separate reticulations of technics and religion in the modern world, but these cannot recreate the original unity, which can only be approached with aesthetics.

To this day, it does not appear possible for the two reticulations, that of technics within the geographical world and that of religions in the human world, to analogically encounter each other in a real, symbolic relation. And yet only in this way could the aesthetic impression state the rediscovery of the magical totality, by indicating that the forces of thought have once again found one another. Aesthetic feeling, common to both religious thought and technical thought, is the only bridge that could allow for the linking of these two halves of thought that result from the abandonment of magical thought. (194)

Aesthetic reality is “a new mediation between man and the world, an intermediate world between man and the world.”

Works of art recreate the power of key-points by their integratedness with their surroundings, a quality which distinguishes them from technical instruments, which retain their technical essence no matter where they are: “a statue is not placed just anywhere, a tree is not planted just anywhere” (195). It is not the imitation of nature [as presumed by some philosophers] but this integration with nature and the surrounding world, which defines the aesthetic object.

S develops his interesting theory of beauty in contrasting between technical and aesthetic objects:

technical objects are not inherently beautiful in themselves, unless one is seeking a type of presentation that answers directly to aesthetic concerns; in this case, there is a true distance between the technical object and the aesthetic object; it is as if there were in fact two objects, the aesthetic object enveloping and masking the technical object... (196)

His example is a modern water tower disguised to match an adjacent ancient ruin—a contemporary example of the same sort would be a cell tower masked to look like a tree. However, such an obvious example is not necessary for his argument. Way back in chapter one, S had distinguished between intrinsic, technical constraints shaping development, and extrinsic constraints coming from such silly and superfluous realms as marketing. Thus, for S, any technical object really is two objects, the pure, essential technical object corresponding to the intrinsic technical traits, and the second object a sort of aesthetic coating of all that is non-essential, but used for instance in marketing, corresponding for example to the “psychic and social inferences” which pollute the automobile as technical object (cf. chapter 1). Upon reading S’s claim that “technical objects are not inherently beautiful in themselves,” I thought of two drills I have near my desk; one, an old metal-green drill I inherited from my grandfather, very solid and elegantly curved in a way they don’t make them anymore; and the other, a garish plastic-rubber yellow and black thing I unfortunately had to replace it with. Both are, of course, both technical and aesthetic objects, equivalent insofar as they function as drills, but very different aesthetically—neither, perhaps, intended to be beautiful, per se, but rather to evoke various impressions of functionality, masculinity, and modernity. The older drill, however, has taken on a sort of beauty through its age and its association with an older aesthetic now flavored with nostalgia. Thus, while these drills as technical objects are completely interchangeable, and thus dissociated from context, as an aesthetic object, the older drill is beautiful through its integration into a certain sense of history and family belonging.

And this is the essence of S’s theory of beauty when applied to technical objects, that it is an effect of their integration into the world in the manner of an aesthetic object (another example he gives is that of a sail that is beautiful when filled by the wind). “But it is not only the technical object that is beautiful: it is the singular point of the world that the technical object concretizes” (197) “The technical object is beautiful when it has encountered a ground that suits it, whose own figure it can be, in other words when it completes and expresses the world.”

However, to return to the ugly, new yellow-and-black drill, this is also designed to evoke connotations and thus bind it into a meaningful cultural context. Thus the aspect of integration which S uses to explain the experience of beauty, no doubt actually informs not just beauty but a wide range of aesthetic reactions to objects, including ugliness, boredom, inanity, who knows what else—basically whatever reaction to an aesthetic object is possible.

S goes on to argue that although technical objects, by definition, are not beautiful in and of themselves (for reasons given above), they can come to be understood as beautiful in their technicity through education, e.g., in the mind of a student of science who comes to sense the beauty of their operation (his example is a radio relay). And this again is because this is an understanding of their operation as integrated into a universe: “The telephone call center is beautiful not because of its characteristics as an object, but because it is a key-point in collective and individual life” (198). As he states it later on, “it is never the object strictly speaking that is beautiful: it is the encounter — which takes place about the object — between a real aspect of the world and a human gesture” (202).

One can thus say that the aesthetic object is not strictly speaking an object, but rather the extension of the natural or human world that remains integrated within the reality that bears it … (199)

In addition to differing from technical thought in the above ways, aesthetic thought also differs from religious thought in that “it can neither be universalized nor subjectivized.” It does not take on the meaning that religion does:

the work of art remains artificial and localized, produced at a certain moment; it is not anterior and superior to the world and to man. The set [ensemble] of all works of art perpetuates the magical universe and maintains its structure: it marks the neutral point between technics and religion.

As this neutral point between technics and religion, aesthetics is thus not just a holdover from the time of magic, but a working part of this post-magical reality. “A norm of beauty exists within these two opposite modes of thinking [i.e., technics and religion], a norm that makes them tend toward one another by applying them to the same universe.”

Aesthetic reality is thus a surplus to given reality, but according to lines that already exist in given reality; it is what reintroduces the figural functions and the functions of ground into given reality which, in the moment of the magical universe’s dissociation, had become technics and religion. (200)

While technical thought is made up of schemas, of figural elements without ground reality, and religious thought is made up of ground qualities and forces without figural structures, aesthetic thought combines figural structures and ground qualities.

In discussing how aesthetic works relate to each other, he goes into an interesting discussion of analogy, then discusses the relation between perception and participation. The translators provide a lengthy footnote (202n5) discussing his Simondon’s term “appeal aspect” (Caractère d’appel) in terms of the Gestalt concept of valence. S surveys changes through the ancient Tragic, the Romantic, and the Classical periods of art. He intends an important distinction between superficial art which fails to achieve anything lasting or meaningful, and the more important art which does:

premature aestheticizing tends toward a static satisfaction, toward a false completion prior to a complete specification; true technicity and true religion should not tend toward aestheticism, which maintains a rather facile magical unity through compensation, and thereby preserves magic and religion at a rather poorly developed level. The real development of thought requires the different attitudes of thought to be capable of detaching from each other and to even become antagonistic, for they cannot be simultaneously thought and developed by a single subject; they require, in fact, that a subject realize them and assume them in a profound, essential way, turning one of them into the principle of the subject’s existence and life. (208)

This presence of multiple attitudes existing at once in the work of art [cf. Bakhtin] requires that such art be social and collective, part of a tradition; “a second function of aesthetic judgment thus becomes that of preparing for the communication between social groups representing the specialization of different types of thought.” After all, “the subject is a collective being.” He refers to the “aesthetic quest,” bringing to mind his language in earlier chapters, that magic is not about superstition but about the will to explore and to supersede the given; thus, this aesthetic thinking also motivates scientific and technical progress and invention.

Aesthetic intention in itself is already the exigency of totality, the quest for a whole reality. Without aesthetic intention, there would be an indefinite quest for the same realities within ever more narrow specializations; this is why aesthetic intention appears like a perpetual deviation on the basis of the central directions of a quest; in reality this deviation is a quest for the real continuity beneath the arbitrary fragmentation of domains. (210)

One could even ask oneself whether art, to the extent that it observes, is not also what somehow sums up [résume] and renders an ensemble of realities transposable to another temporal unit, to another moment in history. Art, in the celebration and final investiture that it brings about, transforms the fulfilled and localized reality hic et nunc into a reality that will be able to traverse time and space: it renders human fulfillment non-finite; it is commonly said that art eternalizes different realities; art, in fact, does not eternalize but renders transductive, giving a localized and fulfilled reality the power to pass to other places and other moments. (210-11)

The second part of the chapter focuses on relations between theoretical and practical thought as further splits within the technical-religious divide, setting the stage for philosophical thought’s “role of convergence” in a future, “post-aesthetic” order (211). In the current order, it is the breakdown of existing models in practice that generates the need for innovation, or in Simondon’s way of putting it, regarding technics:

But the failure of the technical gesture phase shifts the technical act into two opposing realities: one figural, made of schemas of action, habits, and structured gestures learned by man as a means, and the other a ground reality, the qualities, dimensions, and powers of the world to which the technical gesture applies itself. This ground reality that undergirds the technical gesture is the dynamism of things, that through which they are productive, and that which gives them their fecundity, efficacy, and useable energy. (213)

This proceeds through inductive thought:

inductive thought comes from the failure of direct, parceled, localized technical action; this failure provokes the disjunction of the figural reality and the ground reality that was associated with it; inductive thought organizes the ground realities. (215)

As an example he gives a problem which emerged in hydraulics, whereby the water in a pump could not rise above a certain height, which fact was inexplicable according to existing models.

It is in order to recover the broken compatibility that technical thought splits into praxis and theory: theoretical thought which arises from technics is the thought at the heart of which it is possible to think the totality of the conditions of operation in a way that is once again homogeneous and coherent; through hydrostatics the system of conditions of the rising of water within the body of the pump can once again be homogeneous... (216)

Like technical thought, religious thought also splits when encountering limits, in this case to its imposition of totality. In contrast to the inductive approach of theoretical technicity, theoretical thought in religious thought is deductive, presuming a totality, a given, and then reasoning to particulars:

For contemplative deductive knowledge, the effort of knowledge is only that of becoming aware of an already existing order, not that of an effective ordering; knowledge does not change being, and always remains partially insufficient for grasping being, which is prior to it and at the heart of which knowledge deploys itself like a reflection. (218)

S makes the interesting claim that “the use of number within the sciences appears to be of religious origin rather than of technical origin; indeed, number is basically structure that allows deduction and allows the grasping of a particular reality in its reference to the whole [l’ensemble], so as to integrate itself within it...” He contrasts Plato’s and Aristotle’s views on number, with Plato’s side correlating with the religious and also the dominant scientific use today. Religious ethical thinking also proceeds from totality to particulars, for instance Kant’s categorical imperative:

the categorical religious imperative is categorical prior to being rational; it is everything at once, because the totality of being pre-exists all particular action and infinitely surpasses it, just as reality envelops the particular being who is the subject of moral action. (219)

A “complete” knowledge and a “complete” ethics would unite the opposed inductive/[pragmatic] and deductive/totalizing approaches of technics and religion, and their instantiations in theory and practice (220). This synthesis is a path to grasping reality: “the real is the synthesis of the virtual and the necessary [i.e., between the theoretical/desired/possible, and the limits set to this by nature, existing knowledge, etc.], or rather the foundation of their compatibility; between inductive pluralism and deductive pluralism, it is the stability of the figure-ground relation taken as a complete reality.”

In order for the divergence within the coming-into-being of thought to be fully compensated, the distance between the theoretical order and the practical order would have to be overcome by a type of thinking that has a definitive capacity of synthesis, and is able to present itself as a functional analog of magic, and then of aesthetic activity; in other words, the work that aesthetic thought accomplishes at the level of the primitive opposition between technics and religion would have to be carried out anew at the level of the relation between theoretical and practical thought. This work is what philosophical reflection must fulfill [accomplir]. (221)

Philosophical thought has to return to an originary grasping of the coming-into-being at the end of which it (philosophical thought) intervenes as a force of convergence.

The ensuing chapter on philosophical thought will also be about culture: “this intermediate mode can be called culture; philosophy would thus be constructive and regulative of culture, translating the sense [sens] of religions and of technics into cultural content." (222)

A Thousand Plateaus, Chapter 13

Summary of Chapter 13: 7000 BC: Apparatus of Capture

In this chapter they continue the series of propositions (but not of axioms?) from the previous chapter. The date refers to the flourishing of Çatalhöyük. The cover image is of a method for trapping partridges in a net using bait and an artificial cow, which the trapper manipulates “afin d’amuser les Perdrix” before capturing them in the net (Chomel 1767: 881-3). Kishik (2009) gives an interesting discussion of the source, though he refers to a different image of the same net without the cow and partridges.

Proposition X: The State and its poles.

D&G begin the chapter reiterating the Mitra-Varuna distinction from Dumézil, the two poles of the state being those of the “Binder-god,” or conqueror, and the “jurist-god,” or legislator. These can both conduct war according to their own principles, but this is only the captured war machine; the war machine is always represented by a third god or force [cf. Vaneigem’s “third force.”]. There is a “tempting three-part hypothesis” (426), whereby the war machine becomes a mediator between the two poles, in a 1 (binder god), 2 (war machine), 3 (jurist god) relationship. However, this does not in fact explain the origin of the State, as the first term of the conquering binder god remains presumed as somehow originary (and this remains eternal as the third jurist-god or republic aspect remains in “resonance” with the first (427)). Thus war can not be called on as an explanation for the existence of the state (because it presupposes the existence of the state), similarly to how “private property presupposes public property,” and “money presupposes taxation.” [They are here arguing against Engels’ theory of the State from his Origin of the Family; yet while the second and third points can be taken as well established (cf. Proudhon, Graeber), the first still seems a bit circuitous imho. Nevertheless they will make the case in the following proposition.]

Proposition XI: Which comes first?

On one level, the answer to this question is the aforementioned imperial pole of the state; yet at the same time they are framing the discussion to avoid a first-this, then-that series which could imply a social evolutionism. Smith (2019) gives a good overview of D&G’s sources and interlocutors in this section: they are arguing specifically against the evolutionism of Childe and Engels, as well as (behind them) Morgan and Spencer; key authors they draw on for support are Jane Jacobs, Fernand Braudel, and of course Clastres.

They begin with a discussion of the Urstaat, or originary State, which Smith argues “does not refer to a supposed first state, but rather functions as an Idea (in the Deleuzian sense) that is present, throughout the social field, as a virtuality or problem” (Smith 2019: 150). At the same time, they want to avoid the error made by Clastres, of imputing mechanisms in pre-State societies which counter the emergence of hierarchy to an “overmysterious presentiment of what they warded off and did not yet exist” (429). Thus, the Urstaat has to be in some sense always-already present, more literally in the sense of “tendencies that ‘seek’ the State” through incipient hierarchy (430; and I feel Clastres had made this argument as well); but also in terms of this “immemorial” “Idea of a completely captured and coded flow” (Smith, ibid., quoting from A-O); “it was already acting before it appeared, as the actual limit these primitive societies warded off, or as the point toward which they converged but could not reach without self-destructing” (431). Toscano notes that D&G “revive the Hegelian intuition that the state has always been there – not as an idea or a concept, but as a threshold endowed with a kind of virtual efficacy, even when the state as a complex of institutions and as a system of control is not yet actual” (Toscano 2010: 44).

Everything is not of the State precisely because there have been States always and everywhere. Not only does writing presuppose the State, but so do speech and language. (430; emphasis original)

This argument links back, one presumes, to their early discussion of language founded on the order-word (as opposed to “communication”); here they talk about translation as opposed to “communication:”

Speech communities and languages, independently of writing, do not define closed groups of people who understand one another but primarily determine relations between groups who do not understand one another: if there is language, it is fundamentally between those who do not speak the same tongue. Language is made for that, for translation, not for communication.

They elaborate an important distinction between the roles of cities and states in the ancient world. Towns are always in a network of other towns, the individual town is a “circuit-point” in this network. This means the urban network has “egalitarian pretensions, regardless of the form it takes: tyrannical, democratic, oligarchic, aristocratic” (432) (in much the same way as the State remains at heart hierarchical, although taking differing, even democratic and “socialist” forms, which D&G assert are “not façades” (436)).

Expanding on Clastres’ thesis, then both cities and states become thresholds or potentials which primitive societies ward off, and which thus to some degree preëxist in these societies without overcoming them:

Primitive societies do not lack formations of power; they even have many of them. But what prevents the potential central points from crystallizing, from taking on consistency, are precisely those mechanisms that keep the formations of power both from resonating together in a higher point and from becoming polarized at a common point: the circles are not concentric, and the two segments require a third segment through which to communicate. This is the sense in which primitive societies have crossed neither the town-threshold nor the State-threshold. (433)

Neither city nor State preceded the other, as both are in “reciprocal presupposition” (434). Both are forms of, or form through, deterritoralization of the previous “primitive” societies. It would be an error to see them, as imagined in a certain 20^th century free-market mythology, as opposed poles of statist order on the one side and free-market capitalism on the other: “the towns did not invent capitalism,” which depends on the State in particular.

They come to a central argument, which is they they will define social formations in terms of machinic processes rather than by the modes of production favored by Marxists and social scientists in general (435). (Modes of production, they argue, are merely dependent on these machinic processes).

Social Formation	Machinic Process
primitive societies	prevention-anticipation
State societies	apparatus of capture
urban societies	instruments of polarization
nomadic societies	war machines
ecumenical organizations	“the encompassment of heterogeneous social formations”

Proposition XII: Capture

In this section they continue what is essentially their own critique of political economy, updating Marx with some insights from later economists and twentieth century anthropology. They begin with Jevons’ marginalist theory of value, applied to traditional society’s prevention-anticipation of the State. This leads them to a distinction between limit and threshold, such that “the limit designates the penultimate marking a necessary rebeginning, and the threshold the ultimate marking an inevitable change” (438). “Exchange is only an appearance” (439) in the economic relations between pre-state groups; it is really about evaluation in relation to desire: “The issue is one of desirability as an assemblage component: every group desires according to the value of the last receivable object beyond which it would be obliged to change assemblage.” And “it is the evaluation of the last as limit that constitutes an anticipation and simultaneously wards off the last as threshold or ultimate (a new assemblage)."

The threshold comes “after” the limit, “after” the last receivable objects... (440)

The Archaic State, having passed the threshold, engages in stockpiling; the argument regarding stock is derived from V. Gordon Childe, though Smith (2018) traces it back further to Marx in Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, relating to primitive accumulation. The State absorbs the previously existing traditional societies which had coded the land, by overcoding them:

In solely descriptive terms, we therefore distinguish between serial, itinerant, or territorial assemblages (which operate by codes) and sedentary, global, or Land assemblages (which operate by overcoding).

The land as the object of agriculture in fact implies a deterritorialization, because instead of people being distributed in an itinerant territory, pieces of land are distributed among people according to a common quantitative criterion (the fertility of plots of equal surface area). (441)

They return to the previous chapter’s distinction between work and free action, with Massumi occasionally translates travail as “work,” and other times as “labor.” Smith (2018), (who consistently uses “labour”), notes that the distinction is derived from the work of Martial Gueroult.

In this section they lay out their “trinity formula,” an adaptation of Marx’s trinity of capital-profit, land rent, and labor-wages; their trinity is land, work, and money, with “money” replacing and subsuming(?) Marx’s “capital,” by bringing the state and its taxation into the concept.

They distinguish between four “regimes of violence”: struggle, war, crime, and policing. In particular the distinction between war (even when captured by the state) and legal violence (aka policing) underscores their difference from the “war is the health of the state” argument which would equate the two: “State overcoding is precisely this structural violence that defines the law, ‘police’ violence and not the violence of war” (448).

Proposition XII: The State and its forms.

The question now becomes: Once the State has appeared, formed in a single stroke, how will it evolve? What are its factors of evolution or mutation, and what is the relation between evolved States and the archaic imperial State?

Smith succinctly summarizes the issue, and how it relates to the above “trinity:”

the archaic state cannot overcode and capture without at the same time freeing up a large quantity of decoded flows that escape from it. It cannot create large-scale public works without a flow of independent labour escaping from its hierarchised bureaucracy of functionaries, notably in the mines and in metallurgy. It cannot create coinage without flows of money escaping, and nourishing or giving birth to other powers (notably in commerce and banking). It cannot create a system of public property without a flow of private appropriation growing up beside it, and then starting to slip through its fingers. Finally, it is with the rise of private property that classes appear, since the dominant classes are no longer part of the state apparatus, but become distinct determinations that make use of a now-transformed apparatus. (Smith 2018: 236)

"[T]he state is at once capture and the impossibility of complete capture, since the state can only overcode by decoding (abstraction)” (ad loc.) The archaic state overcodes, but this releases “decoded flows” which escape from it. D&G clarify that by “decoding” they do not mean “deciphering,” but de-coding, [“un-coding” could have been the more felicitous term]: “the state of a flow that is no longer contained in (compris dans) it own code, that escapes it own code” (448-9). The varieties of state have to do with how this relationship to both overcoding and decoding is organized.

The Greek city-states exist at the periphery of the Egyptian, then later the Persian world-economy and feed off of/benefit from the wealth it has generated. Flows are overcoded in the Orient, then decoded in Europe. “Surplus value is no longer surplus value of code (overcoding) but becomes surplus value of flow” (451). Split into public vs. private sphere [in state space], slavery changes from communal workers to private property. “[T]he State apparatus is faced with a new task, which consists less in overcoding already coded flows than in organizing conjunctions of decoded flows as such.”

Thus the regime of signs has changed: in all of these respects, the operation of the imperial "signifier" has been superseded by processes of subjectification; machinic enslavement tends to be replaced by a regime of social subjection.

The point is to draw out the relationship between capitalism and the state, how they are dependent on each other, while also articulating their differences in relation to territory, coding, etc. They clarify the difference between axiomatic and coding/codes:

axiomatic deals directly with purely functional elements and relations whose nature is not specified, and which are immediately realized in highly varied domains simultaneously; codes, on the other hand, are relative to those domains and express specific relations between qualified elements that cannot be subsumed by a higher formal unity (overcoding) except by transcendence and in an indirect fashion. (454)

Toscano expands on this:

Originating in the discourse of science and mathematical set theory in particular, axiomatic denotes a method that need not provide definitions of the terms it works with, but rather orders a given domain with the adjunction or subtraction of particular norms or commands (axioms). Axioms thus operate on elements and relations whose nature need not be specified. They are indifferent to the properties or qualities of their domain of application and treat their objects as purely functional, rather than as qualitatively differentiated by any intrinsic features. Axioms are in turn accompanied by theorems, or models of realisation, which apply them to certain empirical or material situations. (Toscano 2010: 21-2)

[Thus axiomatic refers to the non-specifying, discretizing and [extensive rather than intensive “disembedding” aspect of capitalism]. Per D&G the imminent axiomatic is effectuated in models of realization [thus the axiomatic of the Urstaat is realized in specific forms of the state? Though they state later that the archaic state is characterized by a transcendent formal unity, distinct from capitalism’s immanent axiomatic. It is more that the archaic State plays a role of primitive accumulation and creating uncontrolled decoded flows, clearing the way for the axiomatic of capitalism to emerge; one it does it becomes a “megamachine,” a world system within which existing states are models of realization of said axiomatic]. The relation of state and capital in terms of De/Re/Te:

It is thus proper to State deterritorialization to moderate the superior deterritorialization of capital and to provide the latter with compensatory reterritorializations. (455)

So States are not at all transcendent paradigms of an overcoding but immanent models of realization for an axiomatic of decoded flows.

They assert that models of realization are “supposed to be isomorphic” with the axiomatics they effectuate; but how can this be so when so many differing models of the State effectuate the axiomatic? They discuss this with three points:

1. There is really just one (capitalist) world market, even the [so-called] socialist states are part of it, like it or not;

2. The real capitalist market tolerates polymorphy for two reasons: a) [articulation] of capitalism with non-capitalist modes of production, b) the bureaucratic socialist states are able to “conjugate with capitalism;” “there is only one world market, the capitalist one.”

3. The axiomatic encompasses the diversity of existing state forms, and while they are not all equivalent or interchangeable, they are interconnected, for instance the western democracies install and support dictatorships in the third world.

It is in the form of the nation-state, with all its possible variations, that the State becomes the model of realization for the capitalist axiomatic. (456)

A key difference in operation of the archaic state and modern states is the distinction between machinic enslavement and social subjection. Machinic enslavement means the individual becoming part of a vaster machine composing other people, animals, materials, and so on: a “constituent piece” (457) [this is presumably distinct from the mere fact of being part of an assemblage; likely having to do with the organization of the machine towards the Face of the Despot in the signifying regime of the Archaic State].

But there is subjection when the higher unity constitutes the human being as a subject linked to a now exterior object, which can be an animal, a tool, or even a machine. The human being is no longer a component of the machine but a worker, a user. He or she is subjected to the machine and no longer enslaved by the machine.

This second form is also exploitative, it just treats the individual as a subject and not a mere object, along the way to extracting labor value. It seems that capitalism then introduces an even stronger version of social subjection which recreates some aspects of ancient enslavement, but this is in relation to technical machines:

One is not enslaved by the technical machine but rather subjected to it. It would appear, then, that the modern State, through technological development, has substituted an increasingly powerful social subjection for machinic enslavement.

But the naked or “free” worker of capitalism takes subjection to its most radical expression, since the processes of subjectification no longer even enter into partial conjunctions that interrupt the flow. In effect, capital acts as the point of subjectification that constitutes all human beings as subjects; but some, the “capitalists,” are subjects of enunciation that form the private subjectivity of capital, while the others, the “proletarians,” are subjects of the statement, subjected to the technical machines in which constant capital is effectuated. The wage regime can therefore take the subjection of human beings to an unprecedented point, and exhibit a singular cruelty, yet still be justified in its humanist cry: No, human beings are not machines, we don't treat them like machines, we certainly don't confuse variable capital and constant capital …

[I was recently reading about the controversial Hart and Risley (1995) study of how parents of three groups (professional class, working class, and “welfare”) speak to their children, and how well the children go on to perform in school. Long story short, the higher the class the better the children are treated, and thus they go on to do better in school. Besides all sorts of methodological issues, the study clearly is of the “culture of poverty” sort of argument, ignoring all sorts of socioeconomic context to blame children’s adult social status on how they were raised by their parents. Nevertheless, in terms of D&G’s terminology, we can also see it as an illustration of how class identity is replicated. The professional class parents treated their students as subjects of enunciation, asking them questions, and expecting them to grasp a wider variety of words and concepts, which is precisely how the parents themselves are treated in their work and by capitalism, i.e., as subjects of enunciation. In turn, the working and “welfare” class parents, according to the study, asked fewer questions and issued more commands, treating the children like subjects of the statement, precisely as they in turn are treated in this economic system.]

Capitalism’s new machinic enslavement “in no way represents a return to the imperial machine since we are now in the immanence of an axiomatic, and not under the transcendence of a formal Unity” (458).

But it is the reinvention of a machine of which human beings are constituent parts, instead of subjected workers or users. If motorized machines constituted the second age of the technical machine, cybernetic and informational machines form a third age that reconstructs a generalized regime of subjection: recurrent and reversible “humans-machines systems” replace the old nonrecurrent and nonreversible relations of subjection between the two elements; the relation between human and machine is based on internal, mutual communication, and no longer on usage or action.

Automation reduces human workers to parts in the machine, and supplants variable capital (labor) with a larger proportion of constant capital (machinery).

But with automation comes a progressive increase in the proportion of constant capital; we then see a new kind of enslavement: at the same time the work regime changes, surplus value becomes machinic, and the framework expands to all of society. It could also be said that a small amount of subjectification took us away from machinic enslavement, but a large amount brings us back to it.

The technical machine thus involves both enslavement and subjection, not as opposing forces but “two simultaneous parts that constantly reinforce and nourish each other.” They provide the example of television:

For example, one is subjected to TV insofar as one uses and consumes it, in the very particular situation of a subject of the statement that more or less mistakes itself for a subject of enunciation (“you, dear television viewers, who make TV what it is . . .”); the technical machine is the medium between two subjects. But one is enslaved by TV as a human machine insofar as the television viewers are no longer consumers or users, nor even subjects who supposedly “make” it, but intrinsic component pieces, “input” and “output,” feedback or recurrences that are no longer connected to the machine in such a way as to produce or use it. In machinic enslavement, there is nothing but transformations and exchanges of information, some of which are mechanical, others human.

[Needless to say, the case for the new machinic enslavement with our current communication and entertainment technology is far stronger than it was with television in D&G’s day! In a footnote (570n57) they reference Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451in which television has moved from being a mere device in the room, to “forming the walls of the house” [and metaphorically, the boundaries of the imagination. Has not VR made this dystopian fantasy a [virtual] reality?]

Social subjection proportions itself to the model of realization, just as machinic enslavement expands to meet the dimensions of the axiomatic that is effectuated in the model. (459)

They now delineate three historical forms of the state:

1) archaic States or Empires, machinic enslavement and overcoding of already-coded flows (that is, conquest of traditional “pre-State” societies);

2) diverse States existing in relation to the archaic State empires, “which proceed instead by subjectification and subjection, and constitute qualified or topical conjunctions of decoded flows”;

3) modern nation-States, “which take decoding even further and are models of realization for an axiomatic or a general conjugation of flows” and rely on both social subjection and the new machinic enslavement.

Whereas for the second kind of state, the Empire or Urstaat was on the horizon, with the modern capitalist state system it has been brought back to the center of political economic reality. “Capitalism has reawakened the Urstaat, and given it new strength” (460).

Proposition XIV: Axiomatics and the presentday situation.

“Politics is by no means an apodeictic science” (461); it is experimental, fumbling, grasping, a posteriori. Naturally, this is praise from D&G’s point of view. Capitalism and the State are axiomatic and we want to get them out of our heads! Axiomatics is not the cutting edge of science, it is rather a capturing of flows:

The great axiomaticians are the men of State of science, who seal off the lines of flight that are so frequent in mathematics, who would impose a new nexum, if only a temporary one, and who lay down the official policies of science. They are the heirs of the theorematic conception of geometry.

To the axiomaticians, D&G contrast the intuitionist school of mathematics, more interested in problems than in theorems. The remainder of the chapter will be a “summary sketch” of seven “givens” which Adkins clarifies are “currently informing the creation of axioms in capitalism” (Adkins, 228)

1. Addition, subtraction.

Here they go into more detail on how axioms work in capitalism – there are competing tendencies within capitalism to add, and to subtract, the number of axioms in operation. [These seem to be related to the question of how capitalism survives crises? It does not seem to be clearly stated, but they have been making references to the composition of capital (variable vs. constant) throughout this chapter, and this is linked to the theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.] These also have to do with capitalism’s relationship with the state; social democracies increase the number of axioms, while totalitarian ones reduce them [Exhibit A, the reduction of axioms in Trump’s current retooling of state power to more efficiently suit the interests of the wealthiest]. They reiterate their distinction between totalitarianism and fascism and discuss it in this regard.

2. Saturation.

“Saturation” sounds like a reference to Simondon, but he is not mentioned, and the concept itself is only invoked in passing:

Can we express the distribution of the two opposite tendencies by saying that the saturation of the system marks the point of inversion? No, for the saturation is itself relative. (463)

They invoke Marx on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (this is proof that capitalism is an axiomatic), [and hence the relation of axiomatics to crisis], and link the subtraction of axioms to totalitarianism, and the addition of axioms to social democracy; however, these are two opposed but linked parts of the modern state/capitalist axiomatic [and linked to the two poles of the State?] They go on to denounce the “disenchanted” concept of recuperation and talk about worker’s struggles.

3. Models, isomorphy.

“In principle, all States are isomorphic; in other words, they are domains of realization of capital as a function of a sole external world market” (464). Nevertheless, there are actually three bipolarities organizing the variety of existing states:

1) the isomorphy of the social democratic and totalitarian states at the center of the [world system];

2) an East-West heteromorphy between the capitalist West and the bureaucratic socialist East; and

3) a North-South polymorphy, between center and periphery.

4. Power (puissance).

This section treats of the operation of war in the contemporary [i.e., late Twentieth Century] world system.

On the one hand, war clearly follows the same movement as capitalism: In the same way as the proportion of constant capital keeps growing, war becomes increasingly a “war of materiel” in which the human being no longer even represents a variable capital of subjection, but is instead a pure element of machinic enslavement. On the other hand, and this is the main point, the growing importance of constant capital in the axiomatic means that the depreciation of existing capital and the formation of new capital assume a rhythm and scale that necessarily take the route of a war machine now incarnated in the complexes: the complexes actively contribute to the redistributions of the world necessary for the exploitation of maritime and planetary resources. (466)

They derive five points from Virilio (separated here for clarity):

[1] that the war machine finds its new object in the absolute peace of terror or deterrence;

[2] that it performs a technoscientific “capitalization”;

[3] that this war machine is terrifying not as a function of a possible war that it promises us, as by blackmail, but, on the contrary, as a function of the real, very special kind of peace it promotes and has already installed;

[4] that this war machine no longer needs a qualified enemy but, in conformity with the requirements of an axiomatic, operates against the “unspecified enemy,” domestic or foreign (an individual, group, class, people, event, world);

[5] that there arose from this a new conception of security as materialized war, as organized insecurity or molecularized, distributed, programmed catastrophe.

 

5. The included middle.

This section discusses the intrication of center and periphery in the modern world-economy [hence the contrast with the “excluded middle”]. D&G identify unequal exchange as one of the most important axioms of capitalism, and briefly restate some of the language on overcoding and decoding which has run through this and the previous chapter:

The more the archaic empire overcoded the flows, the more it stimulated decoded flows that turned back against it and forced it to change. The more the decoded flows enter into a central axiomatic, the more they tend to escape to the periphery, to present problems that the axiomatic is incapable of resolving or controlling (even by adding special axioms for the periphery). (468)

The four principal flows that torment the representatives of the world economy, or of the axiomatic, are the flow of matter-energy, the flow of population, the flow of food, and the urban flow.

They discuss how the center becomes involved in the periphery and vice versa, giving the example of a Third World social democracy which establishes power through a “class rupture” [incorporating part of the working class as voting, represented subjects, and excluding others as an underclass who are left to fend for themselves in an informal economy]. “And the States of the center deal not only with the Third World, each of them has not only an external Third World, but there are internal Third Worlds that rise up within them and work them from the inside.” Here they draw on Negri and the operaists in a discussion that ties back to their previous invocations of the composition of capital.

These phenomena confirm the difference between the new machinic enslavement and classical subjection. For subjection remained centered on labor and involved a bipolar organization, property-labor, bourgeoisie-proletariat. In enslavement and the central dominance of constant capital, on the other hand, labor seems to have splintered in two directions: intensive surplus labor that no longer even takes the route of labor, and extensive labor that has become erratic and floating.

 

6. Minorities.

“Ours is becoming the age of minorities” (469). They reiterate that minorities, like majorities, are not constituted by number but “by the gap that separates them from this or that axiom constituting a redundant majority”. They invoke the concept of multiplicities from “One or Many Wolves”:

What distinguishes them is that in the case of a majority the relation internal to the number constitutes a set that may be finite or infinite, but is always denumerable, whereas the minority is defined as a nondenumerable set, however many elements it may have. What characterizes the nondenumerable is neither the set nor its elements; rather, it is the connection, the “and” produced between elements, between sets, and which belongs to neither, which eludes them and constitutes a line of flight. The axiomatic manipulates only denumerable sets, even infinite ones, whereas the minorities constitute “fuzzy,” nondenumerable, nonaxiomizable sets, in short, “masses,” multiplicities of escape and flux. (470)

It does not help or further the cause of minorities to simply be incorporated into majorities, or even to flip the system and constitute new majorities of their own. “What is proper to the minority is to assert a power of the nondenumerable …. Woman: we all have to become that, whether we are male or female. Non-white: we all have to become that, whether we are white, yellow, or black.”

The remark on the inability of the axiomatic to accommodate even modest demands by majorities, as a sign of “the gap between two types of propositions, propositions of flow and propositions of axioms” (471).

The power of the minorities is not measured by their capacity to enter and make themselves felt within the majority system, nor even to reverse the necessarily tautological criterion of the majority, but to bring to bear the force of the non-denumerable sets, however small they may be, against the denumerable sets, even if they are infinite, reversed, or changed, even they if imply new axioms or, beyond that, a new axiomatic. The issue is not at all anarchy versus organization, nor even centralism versus decentralization, but a calculus or conception of the problems of nondenumerable sets, against the axiomatic of denumerable sets. Such a calculus may have its own compositions, organizations, even centralizations; nevertheless, it proceeds not via the States or the axiomatic process but via a pure becoming of minorities.

 

7. Undecidable propositions.

Of course the axiomatic does marshall the war machine, which is also nondenumerable and all that, but this is limited by the way coöptation by the state has changed the objects of the war machine, as discussed in the previous chapter. They go into more about the particular politics of minorities, how integration does not really achieve anything, while the “final solution" extermination is impossible. “The minorities issue is instead that of smashing capitalism, of redefining socialism, of constituting a war machine capable of countering the world war machine by other means” (472). They reiterate that at the same time as capitalism organizes denumerable sets into stable forms, it also creates nondenumerable sets which escape beyond it: “It does not effect the ‘conjugation’ of the deterritorialized and decoded flows without those flows forging farther ahead; without their escaping both the axiomatic that conjugates them and the models that reterritorialize them.”

The result is that “undecidable propositions” proliferate:

Every struggle is a function of all of these undecidable propositions and constructs revolutionary connections in opposition to the conjugations of the axiomatic. (473)

Adkins, Brent (2015) Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh University Press.

Chomel, Noël (1767) Dictionaire Oeconomique. Paris, 3^rd edition, Vol II: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k205510n

Hart, Betty, and Todd R. Risley. (1995) Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Company.

Kishik, David (2009) “Apparatus of Capture.” Notes for the Coming Community. https://notesforthecomingcommunity.blogspot.com/2009/01/apparatus-of-capture.html

Smith, Daniel W. (2018) “7000 BC: Apparatus of Capture.” In Henry Somers-Hall, Jeffrey A. Bell, and James Williams, eds., A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.

Smith, Daniel W. (2019) “Against Social Evolution: Deleuze and Guattari's Social Topology.” In Michael James Bennett & Tano S. Posteraro, Deleuze and Evolutionary Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. pp. 141-158.

Toscano, Alberto (2010), “Axiomatic” and “Capture.” In Adrian Parr, ed. The Deleuze Dictionary: Revised Edition. Edinburgh University Press.

Labor and Monopoly Capital, Chapter 18

 

Summary of Chapter 18: The “Middle Layers” of Employment

Braverman turns now from the proletariat to the new “middle class,” which, however, differs from the old petty-bourgeois middle class of pre-monopoly capitalism, in that it lacks independence and access to the means of production (e.g. as oldtime artisans, farmers, etc. had), instead having some characteristics of a working class, in particular being dependent upon capital for employment:

This portion of employment embraces the engineering, technical, and scientific cadre, the lower ranks of supervision and management, the considerable numbers of specialized and “professional” employees occupied in marketing, financial and organizational administration, and the like, as well as, outside of capitalist industry proper, in hospitals, schools, government administration, and so forth. (279)

The stark contract between the old class structure and the modern one is that, before monopoly capital, a large portion of the working population were independent of capital per se, being neither owners nor employees of capitalist enterprises. Today, however, “almost all of the population has been transformed into employees of capital” (ibid., emphasis original).

However, for the middle class, it is about more than the mere structural fact that they are employees, for this technically holds true also of upper management:

These operating executives, by virtue of their high managerial positions, personal investment portfolios, independent power of decision, place in the hierarchy of the labor process, position in the community of capitalists at large, etc., etc., are the rulers of industry, act “professionally” for capital, and are themselves part of the class that personi­fies capital and employs labor. Their formal attribute of being part of the same payroll as the production workers, clerks, and porters of the corporation no more robs them of the powers of decision and command over the others in the enterprise than does the fact that the general, like the private, wears the military uniform, or the pope and cardinal pronounce the same liturgy as the parish priest. (280)

Thus, the shared “form of hired employment” in fact represents two distinct realities: on the one side that of the working class, selling their labor power, and on the other a mechanism by which the ruling class selects representatives from within itself to carry out leadership roles in the corporation.

Then, “between these two extremes there is a range of intermediate categories, sharing the characteristics of worker on the one side and manager on the other in varying degrees,” primarily in terms of relative authority and expertise, as well as “working independence.” These intermediate positions are those held by the new middle class in the corporation.

Their pay level is significant because beyond a certain point it, like the pay of the commanders of the corporation, clearly represents not just the exchange of their labor power for money—a commodity exchange—but a share in the surplus produced in the corporation, and thus is intended to attach them to the success or failure of the corporation and give them a “management stake,” even if a small one.

There is a vast hierarchy which blends into management at the top, and the workers at the bottom. This “new middle class” is distinct from the old middle class, again, because they are not outside the capital-labor relationship, but possess a status combining aspects of both sides, though increasingly of the latter, in that, like workers, they are subject to downward pressure on wages from an unemployed reserve army, and their workplaces are periodically subject to “rationalization” in the interests of capital (282). B notes that employment crises in the 20^th century exposed the myth that these middle class workers were independent “professionals:”

... rising rates of unemployment among “professionals” of various kinds once more brought home to them that they were not the free agents they thought they were, who deigned to “associate themselves” with one or another corporation, but truly part of a labor market, hired and fired like those beneath them.

In such occupations, the proletarian form begins to assert itself and to impress itself upon the consciousness of these employees. Feeling the insecu­rities of their role as sellers of labor power and the frustrations of a controlled and mechanically organized workplace, they begin, despite their remaining privileges, to know those symptoms of dissociation which are popularly called “alienation” and which the working class has lived with for so long that they have become part of its second nature.

Thus, the new “middle class” either is going or will go through the same shifts towards proletarianization as the clerical class discussed earlier in the book. Braverman draws from this the moral that class is not a static “thing” (as presumed by those who want to come up with inherent definitions for classes), but a relationship (283).

The Revolution of Everyday Life, Chapter 6

Summary of Chapter 6: Decompression and the third force

V’s summary:

Up till now, tyranny has merely changed hands. In their common respect for rulers, antagonistic powers have always fostered the seeds of their future coexistence. (When the leader of the game takes the power of a Leader, the revolution dies with the revolutionaries.) Unresolved antagonisms fester, hiding real contradictions. Decompression is the permanent control of both antagonists by the ruling class. The third force radicalises contradictions, and leads to their transcendence, in the name of individual freedom and against all forms of constraint. Power has no option but to smash or incorporate the third force without admitting its existence. (57)

V begins with a parable of people living in a windowless tower, with the poor responsible for providing light with oil lamps. A revolutionary movement calls for the socialization of light, and radicals call even for the demolition of the tower; a stray bullet cracks the walls, letting natural light pour in. Windows are constructed and the radicals who had advocated the destruction of the building quietly eliminated; however, dissatisfaction soon reappears, as people are now unhappy about living in a “greenhouse.”

V charges that “The consciousness ofour time oscillates between that of the walled-up man and that of the prisoner” (58). A man enclosed in darkness sees his condition clearly and is filled with desperate rage, battering his head against the walls to break them down by any means; a prisoner in a cell, on the other hand, is passive because of the barred window or door which keeps alive the hope of escape or reprieve. “The man who is walled up alive has nothing to lose; the prisoner still has hope. Hope is the leash of submission” (58).

Thus, power has learned how to keep hope alive among the downtrodden and exploited, in order to render them passive, or rather, in order to be able to channel their resistance into controllable forms. In particular, V is referring to the cold war opposition of Capitalist and Communist states, each standing as an alternative to the exploited subjects of the other, while at the same time both retain their faithfulness to the principle of hierarchy:

The hierarchical principle remains common to the fanatics of both sides: opposite the capitalism of Lloyd George and Krupp appears the anti-capitalism of Lenin and Trotsky. From the mirrors of the masters of the present, the masters of the future are already smiling back. (58-9)

The Russian Revolution, for example, had started as a real, anarchist, uprising and organization from below, but had been betrayed and coöpted by the Bolsheviks:

As soon as the leader of the game turns into a Leader, the principle of hierarchy is saved, and the Revolution sits down to preside over the execution of the revolutionaries. We must never forget that the revolution­ary project belongs to the masses alone; leaders help it - Leaders betray it. To begin with, the real struggle takes place between the leader of the game and the Leader. (59)\

While the cold war powers go through the motions of opposition as part of the global spectacle, the people of the modern nation-states are kept entertained and confused by a multitude of momentary mini-conflicts, propagated in the media:

There is no one who is not accosted at every moment of the day by posters, news flashes, stereotypes, and summoned to take sides over each of the prefabricated trifles that conscientiously stop up all the sources of everyday creativity. In the hands of Power, that glacial fetish, such particles of antagonism form a magnetic ring whose function it is to make everybody lose their bearings, to abstract individuals from themselves and scramble all lines of force. (61)

[And how better to describe the workings of social media today, than as the algorithmically moderated flow of “particles of antagonism?”]

“Decompression is simply the control of antagonisms by Power” (61). Decompression, like the window in the jail cell, allows the pressure of despair and rage to relax into a controllable energy, which can be fed back into maintaining the spectacular oppositions which stand in for the possibility of real revolution. He cites old arcane church disputes as an example: a stark choice of god vs the devil would have overthrown the church; instead smaller, more arcane conflicts are promulgated, that don’t threaten the overall structure.

“In all conflicts between opposing sides an irrepressible upsurge of indi­vidual desire takes place and often reaches a threatening intensity.” (62) This is the third force, a true opposition to the spectacle and the workings of power, which can only have reality outside of the controlled binary of decompression.

From the individual's point of view the third force is what the force of decompression is from the point of view of Power. A spontaneous feature of every struggle, it radicalises insurrections, denounces false problems, threatens Power in its very struc­ture.

Individualism, alcoholism, collectivism, activism ... the variety of ideologies shows that there are a hundred ways of being on the side of Power. There is only one way to be radical. The wall that must be knocked down is immense, but it has been cracked so many times that soon a single cry will be enough to bring it crashing to the ground. Let the formidable reality of the third force emerge at last from the mists of history, with all the individual passions that have fuelled the insurrections of the past! Soon we shall find that an energy is locked up in everyday life which can move mountains and abolish distances. (62)

The long revolution is this history of seemingly failed insurrections, revolutionary communes, momentary resistances, etc., which have each left cracks in the wall; each revolutionary individual or generation adds their own impetus to it, playing their part in “the great gamble whose stake is freedom” (63).

Swindell et al., Against Automated Education

 

Swindell, Andrew; Luke Greeley, Antony Farag, and Bailey Verdone (2024), “Against Artificial Education: Towards an Ethical Framework for Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Use in Education” Online Learning 28(2), 7-27.

Summary:

This interesting article argues for an ethical framework drawing on the work of Gunther Anders, Michel Foucault, Paolo Freire, Benjamin Bloom (actually, the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy), and Hannah Arendt. In the event, Anders, Foucault, and Freire are discussed briefly for broader ethical context, but the main focus of the article is the addition of an ethical dimension to Bloom’s Taxonomy using Arendt’s hierarchy of labor, work, and action.

They apply this to the actually existing use of AI by imagining this, frankly, quite likely scenario:

Let’s consider an example of how AI might be used with current GPT technology in a classroom. A journalist, under pressure to produce more consumable content for its struggling publication, uses a GPT to write a story about the benefits and costs of electrical vehicle production and use. A teacher, excited by the labor-saving allure of an AI teaching assistant product called Brisk, uses the software extension to read the news story about electric vehicles and design a 60-minute lesson plan for their students, complete with learning goals, discussion prompts, a presentation activity, and summary quiz about the reading. The students, given carte blanche to use their school-provided Chromebooks, “read” the story using an AI platform like Perplexity, which provides summary analysis and key takeaways for them to use in their discussion and respond to the quiz. Simultaneously, they use Microsoft’s AI image generator to create a slide deck for the class to graphically represent their group’s ideas. The teacher completes the assessment cycle by having their AI assistant grade the quizzes, provide feedback to the students, and input their scores into a learning management system. (Swindell et al., 2024: 17).

[Brisk is a classic example of the stark cynicism of our current use of GAI, allowing “instructors” (the term loses meaning in this context) to automatically generate “feedback” on student essays, which you (the instructor) are then encouraged to “personalize” and present to the students as “from you.”]

The authors’ critique of such a situation:

In this scenario, the AI engages in activities of labor and consumption, while all of the parties involved advance nothing of lasting significance, and if debate or critical reflection arise amongst students it is an incidental, rather than planned, outcome of the AI-prescribed lesson. Indeed, the Brisk teaching assistant might be well programmed to incorporate into the lesson features of the RBT such as understanding, evaluating, and creating activities; but unless a human being in this process is attuned to helping learners act in the world and make it a place, using Arendt’s (1963/2006) words, “fit for human habitation,” ... the most common educational experience might become, ironically, ones in which humans are unnecessary. (ibid., 18)

They go on to propose a “Framework for Ethical AI Use in Education,” in the form of a graphic inputting insights from each of the five philosophies they are drawing on. They apply this framework in two examples, which are, unfortunately, not particularly satisfying. They begin with a list of “guiding questions” for lesson design using AI:

1. In what ways are our historical, technological, social contexts shaping how we think and act; what activity or experience can shock learners into appreciating their contingency?

2. Will the technologies we are going to use advance humanizing ends? In what ways can the technology enhance or harm the co-creation of knowledge?

3. How can we design learning activities that have benefits beyond their own sake; how are the learning activities helping students to act in the world?

4. In what ways can AI reduce the burdens of teaching and learning labor while increasing the capacity to act in the world? (ibid., 22)

[The first two questions show the influence of Foucault and the rest; the last two are primarily informed by Arendt.]

Their first proposed exercise involves a research project in which students seek to learn about their local “political landscape.” AI is used to conduct research on who the local elected officials are, what the local issues are, and what are the important fora for discussion and debate. Students then form their own positions using this knowledge: the idea is that AI performs the “labor” (Arendt’s lowest category), leaving humans free to focus on “action” (Arendt’s highest category.

However, having done exercises like this in the past without AI, this just seems like so many attempts to rationalize an “ethical” or “harmless” use of AI – namely, AI is inserted as an extra element where it is not actually needed. Local political entities, candidates, electoral bodies, and so on, have websites with all this information – it is not hard to find. Using a generative AI search tool only introduces the likelihood of errors, along with the dangerous habit of taking AI as a reliable source of information. At best, AI could be asked what websites contain this information, and then the information looked up on those websites (with the added hope that the list is correct, of course). What is more difficult is not the “labor” of looking up information, but the process of reading through debates, articles, and so on to try and evaluate and formulate issues and positions, and it is this that students are likely to use AI for – against the recommendations of Swindell et al, since after all this involves higher-level Bloom’s and corresponds with “action,” which is supposed to be left to humans.

In their second example,

students are tasked with researching a topic of their choosing both to learn about it and apply this knowledge to their own context. To facilitate this endeavor, AI acts as an agent of Socratic dialogue and questioning for the student, helping students generate research idea topics that will be specifically catered towards student interests. AI will be equipped to ask students questions regarding their level of interests and commitment, suggest other topics of potential interest based on specific student response in addition to refine students’ thinking regarding logical sequencing of topic selection and eventually argument. This personalized approach allows them to analyze how these topics manifest in their own lives and communities, gaining valuable insights. (ibid., 24)

Again, why is AI required to engage in Socratic dialogue? First of all, isn’t this the instructor’s job? (And one of Brisk’s more cynical applications is just such an automated “feedback” generator). But more deeply, isn’t this an opportunity for students to engage in Socratic interaction and mutual critique with each other? After all, the authors have been citing Freire on conscientization and the need to allow students to develop control over their learning process. The instructor could easily model Socratic questioning in class, and give students example questions and topics to guide them in developing their own practice. Delegating this to AI is an opporyunity lost.

Thus, we have yet another attempt at reasoning out an ethical use for AI in the classroom, which fails to provide any good reason for actually using AI in the first place. Seeing as the primary use of AI today is 1) to avoid having to do any actual work or difficult thinking, and 2) to avoid interacting with people, it is hard to see how a “humanist” or ethical use can gain much traction, until this situation – and the underlying causes, pre-existing the development of generative AI – are addressed.

Another limitation of the model could be the reliance on Arendt’s hierarchy of labor-work-action, which has been reasonably criticized as reproducing an arbitrary, classist distinction (cf. also Sennett 1990). It is not true that we don’t learn or gain from anything classed in this model as “labor,” or that there can in fact be a clear line drawn between the actual, complex, productive activities which Arendt has delineated into these three a priori types. More to the point, it is not the type of work, but the social context, aka the relations of production, which render some kinds of work more meaningless or alienating than others. Likewise, it is not the mere fact of automation that is problematic, but how that automation is deployed, to what ends, and in whose ultimate interests. The authors make some nods to this political-economic context (via their discussion of Freire, Foucault, etc.) but the proposed ethical framework does not much reflect this.

Beyond this, the insistence on a “humanist” framing could be a limitation (Arendt in fact called herself an “anti-humanist”). The result is yet another call to keep “humans in the loop,” as masters, rather than servants, of the technology—as if it were the relations between humans and machines, rather than those between humans and other humans, that was ultimately at stake.

What difference might a post-humanist view have on the issue? ANT, for example, could have been brought in to consider the human subject as a historically and contextually created “figure” in a larger more-than-human assemblage, and the dissolution of this figure, with the supplanting of the disciplinary society with the control society, occurring, in Foucault’s words, like the erasure of “a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (Foucault 1970: 387).

Foucault, Michel (1970) The Order of Things. Vintage Books, New York.

Sennet, Richard (1990) The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.