Proletarianization as repetition compulsion
Some notes on Part VIII, Karatani, and Negri
Small land holders are the most precious part of the state.
-Thomas Jefferson (1785)
If “the very word ‘proletariat’ almost never appears in Capital,” as Balibar writes (1994: 124), the process of proletarianization arrives quite infamously during Volume I’s denouement, a historical account of “so-called primitive accumulation.” As is well known, Marx observes in these last chapters how industrial capitalism not only historically presupposes the concentration of capital necessary to invest in factories, machinery, and so on but also the ‘free’ availability of a class of wage-laborers. As is equally well known, the ‘freedom’ of the latter is double: they are ‘free’ to sell their labor-power in the market and subsequently ‘freed’ from the means of production, which is to say dispossessed of them. The freedom of contract is also the freedom to starve.
Marx’s account of the class of peasantry that is supposed to precede proletarianization is complex. For one—and in contrast to many of the ‘stagist’ interpretations of his thought—he explicitly notes that the dispossessed were not simply ‘serfs’ in personal bondage to feudal lords (“In England, serfdom had disappeared in practice by the last part of the fourteenth century”). He refers instead to the “immense majority of the population” as “free peasant proprietors,” whose “absolute ownership” of the land was merely cloaked by “feudal trappings.” Marx also notes that rural wage-laborers were already present, prior to the emergence of industrial capitalism proper, who independently maintained some form of subsistence farming while working the estates “in their leisure time.” Finally, he notes how peasants enjoyed the “right to exploit the common land, which gave pasture to their cattle, and furnished them with timber, fire-wood, turf, etc.” (1976: 877). Hence, the class-to-be-proletarianized maintained very complex personal and impersonal relations to estate, private, and common property.
What strikes me about Marx’s comments on the ‘origin’ of industrial capitalism in England is thus not just that it presupposes dispossession but that, moreover, private claims to land had already been made by English smallholders. Indeed, one of the most remarkable points raised by this final section of Volume I is that private property appears not as wholly determined by the relations of production in a simple base-superstructure reading. Rather, capitalist private property is shown to be produced via complex violations of, transformations within, pre-capitalist property regimes, which only once established became constitutive elements of the capitalist relations of production. In other words, private property is not merely a legal abstraction drawn from and then imposed upon the latter but in some sense built into the base itself (Kennedy, 1985: 993).
To stress, none of this suggests a transhistorical or metaphysical understanding of property. But what is worth reckoning with, in Marx’s account, is how and why the institutionalization of private property depends on the violation of its pre-capitalist forms.
The Origin of Private Property
Parenti (2014) has argued that the state’s production of stable territorial regimes through the institution of private property is essential to the accumulation of capital. However, this function of the specifically capitalist (bourgeois) state, qua the ‘neutral’ guarantor of private property, arrives quite late in the historical industrialization of England. As Marx makes very clear in Part VIII (and as Parenti himself notes [2014: 838-839]), for instance, it is not “the capitalist state” that facilitated the proletarianization of the English smallholders. The latter’s dispossession resulted from relations of both institutional and interpersonal violence going on for centuries prior. Although proletarianization receives its fetishized form in the bourgeois regime of private property, as a historical process it emerged out of the distinctly non-capitalist relations characteristic of “so-called primitive accumulation.”
In Marx’s account: long before the 19th century, the yeomanry had become subject to the whims of landed proprietors, who “carried out, by legal means, an act of usurpation which was effected everywhere on the Continent without any legal formality” (1976: 883). This included the dispossession of peasants from the land in the late 15th century following the rise of the Flemish wool industry; the expropriation of Church lands during Reformation; the gradual legal restructuring of feudal tenure; and, most dramatically, the massive enclosures of the commons which occurred during the 18th century. This last episode, Marx stresses, took place still without any legal “formality”: large capitalist landholders assumed the historical role and responsibility of the feudal lords as a matter of “customary decree”.
The “Parliamentary form of robbery” thus occurs only after much capricious violence—the latter waged by an alliance slowly taking shape since the 16th century between the aristocracy, the emerging bourgeoisie, and the “new bankocracy”—against the peasantry had already taken place. If, by the 19th century, the capitalist class came to obfuscate the process of proletarianization behind the form of the state, as the “identity between the wealth of the nation and the poverty of the people” (ibid: 886), in the period prior this alliance was, in practice, the living law (ibid.: 885).
The “whole series of thefts, outrages and popular misery,” as Marx rebukes, were rationalized post-hoc to be inevitable for the sake of advancing industry to the alleged benefit of all British people. Marx quotes the agriculturalist John Arbuthnot on this point: “If, by converting the little farmers into a body of men who must work for others, more labour is produced, it is an advantage which the nation should wish for” (qtd. in ibid.: 888). Once memorialized in the “capitalist state,” the arbitrary acts of violence against the peasant smallholders could become the retroactive measure of bourgeois right.
Proletarianization as Repetition Compulsion
At this point, I want to make a more provisional argument: these critical ‘extra-economic’ insights at the end of Capital—both the origin of private property in the violation of pre-capitalist property relations and the origins of primitive accumulation in politically enacted mass dispossession—are key to understanding proletarianization as a “repetition compulsion” of capitalist development.
In invoking this term, I draw primarily on Kojin Karatani’s reading of Sigmund Freud in History and Repetition. Repetition compulsions, Karatani writes, reveal structural “holes” that cannot otherwise be directly represented. Karatani gives the examples of money and sovereignty—holes of modern economic and political systems of representation, respectively. Even if they temporarily take on a phenomenal appearance, e.g. in a president or a dollar bill, they are entities which, for the system of representation to function, are irreducibly external referents. These holes, in other words, cannot be filled, because they constitute the reality presupposed by their modes of expression. In normal times, these holes go unnoticed, but in crises—the collapse of the stock market, or the scandalization of a president—their unrepresentability is experienced as such.
The relationship between primitive accumulation and political economy is structurally analogous to Karatani’s holes. It is, in other words, another kind of constitutive outside—perhaps representable historically but never as an internal relation of capital, insofar as the violence of dispossession underpinning primitive accumulation cannot be fully remembered in capitalism’s own categories of exchange and property. And, because it cannot remember this outside from within its own categories, the capitalist system compulsively reproduces the separation that conditions its own ‘primitive accumulation’. What gets repeated, in other words, is the structural separation of living labor from the social conditions through which it can organize itself.
But a further twist is revealed in the repetition compulsion of proletarianization: the very category of private property emerges through the transformation and violation of prior property relations, including a pre-capitalist version of itself (in the case of the free peasant proprietors). That is to say, private property does not just supplant pre-capitalist property relations. Claims to exclusive possession were already being made within those relations, the violent reorganization of which is what produced the capitalist form of property. Dispossession is not external to the property relation but internally constitutive of its capitalist form.
What, then, is really dispossessed in proletarianization? Not simply a pre-capitalist ‘way of life’, nor any ossified ‘means of its production’, but the dynamic capacity for living labor to organize social activity according to its own collectively constituted norms. Primitive accumulation-proletarianization is not an event but a structure, continuously reproduced in the separation mediated by capital between living labor and the social conditions of its organization. What is repeatedly dispossessed, in other words, is what is constitutively forgotten within political economy: the self-conscious organization of labor, qua life-activity (see also Dussel, 2001: 200-204). At one and the same time, proletarianization is dispossession of the social organization of production and its transformation into alienated forms of life-activity.
Note on the Crisis-State
Let me take up this theme from another vantage point. Consider Antonio Negri’s observation in the 1970s that when the law of value enters into crisis, the mediations through which capital usually organizes exploitation increasingly give way to more “direct” and “external” command of capital. In Negri’s account, asymmetry only seems to vanish after labor appears as socially homogenous, i.e. via its representation in the money-form (Negri, 2005: 3; Marx, 1973: 296).
But, as he writes, a crisis of not only economic but political legitimacy emerges when money’s function as measure of the relation between individual labor-power and social production breaks down. The “Planner-State”—the “organizer of all the conditions of social production”—morphs into the “Crisis-State”, the “command of enterprise” (ibid.: 24). The “mystifications of the contradiction” are “exhausted” (ibid: 17), and the working class “reveals itself immediately to be a political class,” with capital its absolutely external antagonist (ibid.: 92).
But what I am suggesting is that the very appearance of the “autonomy of the political” presupposes a repetition compulsion of proletarianization in the sense described above. That is to say, the “Crisis-State” does not mark the dialectical culmination of the proletarianization of labor, qua the “point of [its] maximum socialization” (2004: 240). If one can, in Negri’s time, assert the “autonomy of the political,” it is only because it arrives synchronously with another round of dispossession: here, a dispossession of the mass worker from the organizational forms through which class struggle had been previously articulated (namely, trade unionism)—and hence any announcement of the ‘autonomy of the political’ somewhat sardonically prefigures the alienated position of the ‘socialized worker’ in the ‘new’ economy.
Analogous to Marx’s observation that the extra-legal, extra-economic violence against the ‘free peasant proprietors’ was a critical moment in the transition away from pre-capitalist property relations and toward the formalized, capitalistic private property regime of the bourgeois state, Negri observes in the Crisis-State a renewed, politically mediated class antagonism, one which momentarily appeared “without formality” only to be once again be mystified, retrospectively, with the emergence of so-called neoliberalism.
REFERENCES
Balibar, Etienne. 1994. “In search of the proletariat: The notion of class politics in Marx.” In Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy before and after Marx. Trans. James Swenson. New York: Routledge, pp. 125-50.
Jefferson, Thomas. 1785. Letter to James Madison, 28 October 1785. “Founders Online.” National Archives. Accessed 12 Jan 2020. Web.
< https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-08-02-0534>
Kennedy, Duncan. 1985. “The role of law in economic thought: Essays on the fetishism of commodities.” American University Law Review 34: 939-1001.
Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin.
————. 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin.
Negri, Antonio. 2005. Books for Burning: Between Civil war and Democracy in 1970s Italy. London & New York: Verso.
Parenti, Christian. 2013. “The environment making state: Territory, nature, and value.” Antipode 47(4): 829-949.