The Taste for Debt, Capital as a Social Relation & Post-industrial Society
As the title suggests, there are a few things I’d like to touch upon in this discussion. If only to open a can of worms in a way that it does not spill and soil the floor, yet bearing in mind that this can does need to be opened. I have used a metaphor, admittedly, obliquely, to raise a question which I believe is central for Marxist theoreticians: Does language have a use value?
To begin with, it may help us to recognize that experiences we have no concept for can often be experienced as trauma. By this I mean that were a trauma to be Real in the Lacanian sense, which here - I also use adjectivally, there would be an aspect in the experience which would be resistant to any process of symbolization (1). This may be only inasmuch as we do not have a handle on what may be causing a particular symptom. However, with some investigation we can come to an understanding of what ails us, even if the initial diagnosis is imprecise. However limited this headway is, it provides us with a way of explaining to someone else what we may be going through, and this is valuable, vitally so. In other words, language allows us to represent our experiences, even to ourselves. So regarding an answer to the question: does language have a use value? I would say yes, language indeed has a use value, yet unlike just about every other commodity, it is one which can only be recognized in its transmission, or dare I say, exchange.
I begin with such a preface because I was recently reading a short chapter ‘Capital as a Social Relation’ (2) from the political economist, Professor Anwar Shaik, who teaches at The New School For Social Research. When someone from a background in literature from an Indian university, like myself, encounters critiques of capitalism it is often under the rubrics of objectification, instrumentalization, and reduction. Important facets which do speak of a certain loss encountered in our engagement with our workspaces, reflective of certain inhumanisations which affects us – just as we become unconscious or rather immune to their effects. Yet, the advantage of this which professor Shaik’s chapter puts forth is the simple fact of allowing us to approach this ‘can of worms’ generically, hence capital as a social relation. And let us make no mistake, as much as a worker may complain about the conditions of their labor, the fact that they do labor is the aspect of their existence which allows us to recognize them as such. Which leaves the question, what do they labor for?
Here, Shaik provides us with a certain trajectory which, to not sound too instrumentalist, may be described as an assembly line of our apprehensions. Let me draw it for you.
Object —> Tool —> Capitalist Instrument
In a sentence: we see above how in a limited phenomenology, our apprehension of a common article is scoped or can be seen only from the perspective of capital, if we are to accept our present social organization which requires the division of labor to be guided by and geared towards its acquisition.
We are presented in Marx’s Kapital with the example of a loom which is encountered, perhaps used by a family or a community to make cloth. Such an instrument would first serve primarily for the production and direct consumption of the cloth, to be cut and stitched into clothes. Yet, were the same loom to be encountered in a capitalist factory, what would matter most vis-a-vis the cloth is not its quality or durability, but what it may command as a price in the market.
Our object, the loom has transformed from a tool utilized to make an article and has acquired a second order utility which comes to subsume its very purpose - ie. as an instrument designed to make a commodity.
Inasmuch as we desire to use an article in our possession not for our own direct consumption, but to trade, and perhaps to purchase another article; we have in our hands not a simple thing, like a knife or soap – but a commodity which we are willing to part with for the right price. What so-called schools of cultural Marxism have been trying to point out is that in today’s world, associations, relationships, alliances, belongings, affiliations, indeed networks acquire this trait. If you think about it, a contract for a job is precisely such a statement. It binds a worker to an employer under certain relations of exchange.
From such a point of view, let us say that of the capitalist, articles such as the loom, the capacity to labor, yarn, money etc. appear to be different facets of the owner’s capital. As such, capital no longer appears to be a thing but a set of relations.
Relations, whatever else they may be, are also how we perceive ourselves vis-a-vis something else, or what that may be for us. A language for instance may be alien or native, an activity habitual or strange. Our familiarity with something often determines how we perceive it, and a practiced hand or gaze can transform what we see in a task. However there are some relations which remain exploitative, if not openly hazardous.
Without access to money for example, our relation to our means of subsistence i.e., our very capacity to reproduce our labor becomes a matter in which we may be at the mercy of simple exchanges, within a household, no longer mediated by a market and hence removed from society. It is this condition of abject dependence, a relation which is easily exploitable – that has been named colonialism. Admittedly such a concept has more readily been used to express relations characterizing the economic plunder of resources that empires may have exercised vis-a-vis colonies. The relations in question however can easily be mapped onto the domain of the household itself, a space which is also characterized by certain divisions of labor, normative prescriptions, and acceptable and unacceptable uses of language.
This is clearly not a new phenomenon, Victorian England provides us with clear examples of the rearrangements, or rather the emergence of new relations in the household, which reshaped what sociality was to be among the bourgeoisie and aristocracy. The instituting of a governess, for example, who looks after and educates the children, a butler who looks after the house and manages supplies are key figures who indicate that the lords and ladies of the manor felt the need for another person or people in the house to take on delimitable responsibilities, often personal ones, such as cooking and looking after kids.
Literature is replete with examples and novels from the Victorian era, such as Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte for instance would provide anyone curious enough, with the sense of cloistered privacy so treasured in a young girl’s diary, or the secrets exchanged among them in a closet.
Simultaneously, a growing distance is observed between man and wife – who often sleep in separate rooms, and have relations which are mediated by hired intermediaries.
The middle and upper classes in India are really not very different from such historical features, inasmuch as the employment of domestic labor mediates working relations in the household. I think colonialism, too, is experienced all the more viscerally when a person is able to draw a wage from an activity related to food and cooking, and a dependent may have no direct control over either. The space of the household in such circumstances can be further distancing when a butler is around to handle chores, and with the professionalization of such intimate tasks we experience our living space as an area which offers itself up for economic gain to agents apart from ourselves, even if it may free us from some drudgery.
Such a presence also marks an intimate front where two cultural horizons meet, and while this may not be map-able in the kind of questions presently pursued, such an encounter may be an aspect which an ethnographer for instance could choose to take up.
These fissions which are experienced within the household itself is what mark what I would describe as an intimate sphere of our alienation, yet since resources are directly involved in relations unmediated by money or exchange at least for one party - colonialism, or if you prefer, neo-colonialism may best characterize the form of subjection in question. In fact, it may be telling that this term has also been used to describe a style of architecture, popular in the new world - consisting of houses with porches, with little pillars holding up a canopy, and so on.
In looking beyond this sphere we find that despite over a century of struggle, capitalism still remains our specific historical form of bringing together the means of production i.e., land, labor, money, machinery, markets, etc.
What is the gaze which observes this spectacle? Inasmuch as it is viewed as a factory of production, we would tend to gloss over the specific forms taken by struggles against this social organization, which is always over the terms and conditions of labor. Here, I can’t but think of bad behavior and acting out as resistances to a social order which would rather cast itself in a benevolent light, yet – perhaps not unlike a platform owner on social media; makes use of profiles which appear on site, even if we were to be referring to something as seemingly benign as grazing on their tastes and preferences; perhaps to trade as information with advertisers or other ‘competitors’.
Inasmuch as the capacity to labor is retained by a worker, which here includes the capacity to sell their labor, the common ownership of at least this factor of production by individuals and groups bespeaks of an inherent equality among people under capitalism. In this regard it does seem to advance a common cause ahead of social formations such as slavery, which as we are informed were intimately associated with colonial rule, which may be reinvented surreptitiously in the garb of neo-colonialism, in the household, and beyond…
Charting domestic and relatable analogies here, which link households with other close at hand forms of sociality such as social media sites, may allow us to chart such a domain and the kind of associations it enables, yet this may be a task for a later effort. The resources and artifacts required to put a household together are often functions of trade relations between markets. Often in distinct countries, and anyone who would like to trace how they have come to acquire anything, even something as mundane as dishwashing liquid, will see that the chemical factory would be hiring hands under contracts, as would the transportation company, all of them taking a cut for themselves from the labor put in. And this is not to mention the initial extraction of the minerals themselves, which are often forced coups when not simply appropriated by a state and sold or leased to a private company.
In returning to the idea of equality we were referring to earlier however, its appeal rests on the equal ownership of our capacity to labor, and to sell this power, an idea which was very much a darling of the tradition of classical political economy which saw in its conception, a means of forming alliances, and wresting power away from a traditional landed aristocracy. Were this to remain the horizon of the liberal ideology however, it tellingly reveals a shallowness to its struggles, as it presents no reference to the work it does, nor does it present a means of joining it. In other words it forecloses any reference to class. Why is this so? For if the basis of our freedom consists simply in our capacity to sell our labor power, the horizon of this ambition would be to become a wage slave i.e., a person who is granted money, in return for determined activities. This in itself, may not be a bad place, yet it is one which does not see the relations that the activities in question have to other activities which it does not share but yet depends on for the conduct of life as inhabited. This, to my mind - thinking the relations of production, which we depend on, is the only means we have to form a sociality which, in principle, is universalist and emancipatory. It should be noted here that it is to Anwar Shaik’s credit that he is able to present the work of classical political economy while not being blind to its own blindness, it is this which makes him an observant Marxist critic.
What is this blindness which I am referring to however? Well, unlike any form of serfdom, and even in explicit opposition to it, a laborer is free to sell their labor under capitalism. Classical political economy recognises this, born as it was on the tide of the bourgeois democratic revolution. Labour is a component, like capital – yet capital, unlike labor, is something that not everyone may have. In such circumstances, labor remains utilizable by anyone, as the question of exploitation slips out of sight. What is spoken of is a cooperation between labor and capital, with each contributing its corresponding component and receiving a commensurate reward. This wraps up quite nicely, a sanctification of capitalism.
The question which is left here is: what does labor do for capital? Or in existential terms: what may a laborer do for a wage? The agreement upon which such a relation of exchange rests on may be a job contract or some other form of agreement between parties concerned. What interests me however here is an understanding of the position of the capitalist and the worker in the circumstances of the mode of production prevalent today.
An early-Leninist conception of the working class no longer seems coherent inasmuch as this mass does not seem to have a class consciousness which looks beyond its immediate affiliations. Socially, this may be reflected in the weakness of trade union movements. The capitalist, is now increasingly no more the traditional factory owner who can today be increasingly subjected to promissory payments, in the future, and supplies entailing other retailers and banks. This is largely representative of the outsourcing of productive functions necessary for the making of most machinery for example. With the rise of entrepreneurs, the treating of education as a commodity under neoliberalism and the fact that most if not all would be required to pass through some of these qualifications, and to utilize them in working relations, the capitalist today is reinvented in the role of a platform owner or supervisor, and as this is hardly any different from a redundant managerial class of yesteryears – can still bear resemblances which orthodox Marxism sought to identify among a technocracy which serves supervisory and increasingly limited productive functions.
It is to be observed however, that the relation between the capitalist and worker is less analogous to the simple formality of the job contract today than it ever was. The form of this article has been gravely undermined by the removal of the kind of security it once commanded. With companies increasingly in a position to fire employees with impunity.
In this emerging terrain, the capitalist and the worker are perhaps better conceived as moments in a social process which we encounter in their relationality. Perhaps even as determinate encounters which someone like Althusser sought to mark. And representations of these are replete. I think of photography here for example, and its recent rise and circulation to be the ultimate nominalist art, with regard to narrative. A composition of objects may make a picture, as might a portrait – yet, what such an essentially spatial configuration invisible-izes is how precisely did the objects get there, and as such are mute representations which may be interpreted at face value, perhaps, even as symbols, but only in relation to their background in the image. Here, however, I do observe a self-expository aspect which some profiles bring to bear, when an activity such as a hike or a dish is embarked upon or prepared for, such gestures seem to bring facets of narrative back into the picture.
What may these relations come to mean in the purview of the household however, which in its sociality can exist only in relation to other houses and their externalities? Here I mean to refer to the domain they depend on – industry, or the totality of productive relations that constitute society.
The home may once have been a kind of shelter from the world. Indeed, this is what I imagine the first caves to have been. Yet, our domestic requirements hinge upon supply chains and markets which are built upon the organization of exploitation and a structural violence and exclusion, chiefly operative in terms of how surplus value is distributed. An analysis of this aspect is literally impossible without bringing class to bear as an analytic lens and thinking of the relation of one to another, let us say between authors and publishers for example; and here I would highlight the need for sound criticism. In the absence of any sincere effort to do this or mark its outlines what we notice is the proliferation of obfuscatory registers, or if you prefer – ideologies.
Can, for example, the exploitative dimension of capital be redeemed via a religious interpretation like a promissory transfer of the capital itself? Whether it be land, vital resources, money, or perhaps just information, withheld and used strategically? This was the narrative which sold the middle class from the 1970’s all the way to the first decade of the 21st century, and perhaps for a generation presented a horizon they may aspire to. The dream of upward mobility. Many still dream this to this day.
Yet, for those of us who do not look to such a narrative with hope would there be another hermeneutic via which to explore the contradictions we face here? In post-industrial society for instance, i.e. in circumstances where manufacturing is not the sector which drives national profits, and where advancements in agricultural technologies reduce the requirements of hands on the field – both these traditional spheres of production, which we still depend on, become more profitable for the owners of the enterprises, who benefit from increased productivity.
The activities which actually enable such advances to take place however are often innovations; technological, chemical, organizational, and economic. In other words, activities which can only properly be described as consisting of the field that we now know to be post-industrial society, with roots in traditional research universities, research and development departments, and perhaps in some forms of auditing firms. This is perhaps best thought of as a milieu rather than a historical moment in the transition of the economy. A kind of organizational temporality as it were. Yet, also a milieu which is depended on by industry and by the educational sector very strongly. The success story that the middle class cherishes education as a path to upward mobility does seem to rest very much on such apprehensions…irrespective of the realities which are found upon closer investigation.
However, even if we were to be considering nothing more than its myth, I think of such an emergent post-industrial society and the milieu proper to it, perhaps not unlike how a nostalgia for the pastoral was once invoked in romantic literature, to provide a generation exposed to the rapid industrialization of our world, a glimpse of another kind of temporality; maybe deeper in its association with the seasons and our natural circadian rhythm. In this respect it seems therapeutic, yet the former looks to the future and is intimately connected to it, whereas the latter lovingly mourns the past. As such they do remain ideologies, though if I may use the blaspheme, functional ideologies which create the possibility of some kind of class narrative – a way in which a people can measure their own success or failure.
Now, where amidst all this is the household? Well, inasmuch as the household remains the site of the reproduction of our labor power, if not as with the ruling class, the site of the reproduction of capitalist relations of production itself – the household in post-industrial society forms something akin to a Victorian microcosm, yet one which is put to work.
For it is my wager today that the household, inasmuch as it once consisted of the domain which brought a family together and allowed parents to raise their young, can, in the world presently, only be thought through such a concept – either explicitly or drawing ideological motifs from post-industrial society. For the place of the reproduction of our labor, indeed for the capacity to reproduce it to be advanced, is precisely the domain and expertise which this milieu has been conducting research into since its early structural gestations. More contemporarily, the Swiss economist - Christian Marazzi’s work, particularly on the relation between capital and language, inspired by post-Fordist scholars is, I believe, a firm demarcation of much of these developments. (3)
How may we recognize the signs of this? The specific form of development, which we are witnessing an expansion in today are primarily in the service sector. This may have begun with BPO jobs, expanded into hospitality, and now - cultural capitalism is replete with them. Can we not see in the commodification of lifestyles, the global rise of yoga, the chains which have been established in the service of health and fitness, an overwhelming impetus in advanced economies to seek to monetize aspirations which seem to address desires which can no longer be concretely tied to either manufacturing or agriculture?
And is this not apparent today, in these dare I say – apocalyptic times, more than ever? When, for instance, we have a global epidemic such as coronavirus forcing traditional workspaces closed, society is forced to adapt and learn to work from home. This politicized the site of the home in new ways, foregrounding how it cannot lay easily as a domain or rest and relaxation but also requires or may call for an effort made on our part to make it habitable, even when we are serving interests beyond it. This is an effort I would deem something akin to the Marxian concept of necessary labor, though applied in the intimate front of the reproduction of familial or domestic relations. A labor necessary to keep this domain, the hidden abode of reproduction as it were, industrially competitive.
This may mean a manager learning how to work from home, saving his company office space, and the public from one more car clogging the artery of our roads. He may do this in the company of a wife who could be moonlighting as a secretary in the evening, while she looks after a child during the day. The child may have to learn to take online classes – a fascinating new format despite its many present limitations, for the possibilities it holds for the future of education. The examples are merely that, and the specific division of labor which may be operative in a household are manifold, yet I hope to indicate what new forms of consideration and cooperation may be required in the household if they are to provide the shelter and care necessary for us, as we simply cannot keep bemoaning the ‘capitalization’ of our intimate lives while turning a blind eye to its advantages, and yes – indeed liberations.
Now, having charted such a milieu what may be its exteriority so to speak? Well, conceptually I believe we stand on firm ground for such a thesis would be reinforced by the presence of elements which have remained outside the domain of industrialization per se, such as domestic labor – an issue which we began with. And, as such the concept of post-industrial society would not necessarily have to draw on a prehistory which can only be brought to light under the rubric of industrialization, however much such a force may have literally shaped the infrastructure for it. As such I believe this exposition to be a practice of immanent critique to a problem, if not a crisis experienced in close quarters, by precisely those who were least empowered in them, as such I hope that it may be disseminated.
Footnotes
(1) - Lacan, Jaques, The Seminar. Book II: The Ego In Freud’s Theory and the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-55, Translate by Slyvana Tomaselli, New York, Norton, Cambridge University Press, 1988
(2) - Shaik, Anway, “Capital as Social Relation”, in The New Palgrave: Marxian Economics, Eatwell, John (editor), Palgrave Macmillan, UK, 1990
(3) - Marrazi, Christian, Capital and Affects: The Politics of the Language Economy, Semiotext(e), 2011
Photo Credit to Alice Pasqual