nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

So we mustn’t take such minimal politics of the body or the minor politicsof care and reproduction as sufficient, even if they are necessary. This is oneof the ways nano- and micro-politics are folded in with macropolitics. Whatwe learn from the current conjuncture of crisis and rebellion is that a revolutionarypolitics starting from our bodies consists in more than the affirmationof the sensitivity and intelligence of the body, and of dimensions of embodiedcollectivity and transindividuality (e.g. in affect), and more than our comingtogether to care for one another. However valuable, desirable and necessarythis may be, we must practice them in ways that go beyond self-organisedself-help. If we don’t they merely help us reproduce ourselves so we can survive‘in society’, i.e. continue to reproduce or be ready to reproduce the ‘socialbody’ of capital (as workers or ‘job seekers’) once it again finds those of us ithasn’t deported useful. This is why we affirm our politics of care, body and reproductionas aspects of a general ‘political warfare’ on the conditions whichmake us sick, precarious and individualised. 18...conditions of individualisationThe question of conditions is a way to go beyond asking: ‘how does powerwork upon our bodies’, to ask: why do we let power work on us in these ways?Why do we let ourselves be individualised by work and debt, why do we submitourselves to medical pathologisation? Here the answers come short andquick. We labour because we must, we take up debt because we must, we paytherapists and buy self-help books because we find it hard to help ourselves.Marx is still very much our contemporary when he proposes that this set ofcompulsions is based on a common condition, shared, but lived differently, aproletarian condition. It is the condition of being doubly ‘free’, free of property,and free to sell one’s labour power – which unlike slavery proper impliesthat one is responsible for one’s own reproduction (a slave owner has to feedhis slaves as he feeds his animals and repairs his machinery). In the GrundrisseMarx writes:It is already contained in the concept of the free labourer, that he is apauper: a virtual pauper ... If the capitalist has no use for his surpluslabour, then the worker may not perform his [sic] necessary labour. 19Necessary labour, of course, refers the labour necessary to for a wage thatwill reproduce the worker. Marx speaks of this condition of freedom as inherently‘precarious’. 20 If we add to this the virtual poverty of those living undercapitalism that do not fit within the terms ‘he’ and ‘the worker’, we get a sense205