nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

esistances of individual bodies described above become forms of collectiveantagonism whereby state institutions, factories and corporations becomecontested terrains.The most important product of capital is, as is often stated by Marxists, thereproduction of the class relation between capital and the working class 34 ; thisis not just the reproduction of the relation between classes, but also of the separationbetween individuals, which makes possible and necessary their continuedparticipation in the reproduction of the class relation. The more capitalhas expropriated the means of (re)production and self-valorisation 35 the lessdo the workers have the means necessary for struggling for wages as well asself-organising, commoning and refusing work. Maurizio Lazzarato writes:Capitalism is not only a system that continually expands its limits, it isalso an apparatus that infinitely reproduces, independently of the levelof wealth achieved, conditions of exploitation and dominations, that is,conditions of “lack” 36This constantly reproduced lack (of necessities of life, advertised luxuryitems, and promised careers, but also of opportunities to learn and expressoneself, and the time to maintain and establish desirable social relationships)it is a means of discipline, control and the capture of desire in the face of thepossibility of antagonism....capital as an inorganic organismSo in what sense can we speak of capital as a body, without falling into conservativeor corporatist organicism and ideas of a ‘harmonious society’? Foucault’sconcept of totalisation points to a logic of social integration, whichnever abolishes the power struggles and the resistances of bodies. With Marxwe get a sense of how such a social body does not merely subsume and individualisewhat is different from it, but strives to determine the conditionsunder which the different can be reproduced: we are not reducible to labour-poweryet we rely on state or capital, work or benefits to reproduce thisdifference. We are not just empirical bodies who are external to one another,governed and individualised by state and capital. Rather, in being governedand individualised we are integrated as individuals in social bodies, i.e. ourindividuality is reproduced and more than individual by being functionallyintegrated in self-reproducing ‘organisms’ as its ‘organs’ and ‘members’. 37Following Hegel’s useful distinction between different branches of scienceaccording to the types of relations proper to their objects, it is not merely a211