The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

104 The passage from modernity to postmodernityradical, total, and violent rupture with the past - another of thebasic elements of modernist sensibility - is omni-present in Marx'saccount of the origins of capitalism.But Marx takes matters much further. The conversion of labourinto wage labour means 'the separation of labour from its product,of subjective labour power from the objective conditions of labour'(Capital, 1: 3). This is a very different kind of market exchange.Capitalists when they purchase labour power necessarily treat it ininstrumental terms. The labourer is viewed as a 'hand' rather than asa whole person (to use Dickens's satirical comment in Hard Times),and the labour contributed is a 'factor' (notice the reification) ofproduction. The purchase of labour power with money gives thecapitalist certain rights to dispose of the labour of others withoutnecessary regard for what the others might think, need, or feeL Theomni-presence of this class relation of domination, offset only to thedegree that the labourers actively struggle to assert their rights andexpress their feelings, suggests one of the founding principles uponwhich the very idea of 'otherness' is produced and reproduced on acontinuing basis in capitalist society. The world of the working classbecomes the domain of that 'other,' which is necessarily renderedopaque and potentially unknowable by virtue of the fetishism ofmarket exchange. And I should also add parenthetically that if thereare already those in society (women, blacks, colonized peoples, minoritiesof all kinds) who can readily be conceptualized as the other,then the conflation of class exploitation with gender, race, colonialism,ethnicity, etc. can proceed apace with all manner of invidious results.Capitalism did not invent 'the other' but it certainly made use of andpromoted it in highly structured ways.Capitalists can deploy their rights strategically to impose all kindsof conditions upon the labourer. The latter is typically alienatedfrom the product, from command over the process of producing it,as well as from the capacity to realize the value of the fruit of his orher efforts - the capitalist appropriates that as profit. The capitalisthas the power (though by no means arbitrary or total) to mobilizethe powers of co-operation, division of labour, and machinery aspowers of capital over labour. The result is an organized detaildivision of labour within the factory, which reduces the labourer to afragment of a person. 'The absurd fable of Menenius Agrippa, whichmakes man a mere fragment of his own body, becomes realized'(Capital, 1: 340). We here encounter the principle of the division oflabour at work in a quite different guise. Whereas the division oflabour in society 'brings into contact independent commodity producers,who acknowledge no other authority but that of competition,M oderniz ation 105of the coercion exerted by the pressure of their mutual interests,' the'division of labour within the workshop implies the undisputed authorityof the capitalist over men, that are but parts of a mechanismthat belongs to him.' Anarchy in the social division of labour isreplaced by the despotism - enforced through hierarchies of authorityand close supervision of tasks - of the workshop and the factory.This enforced fragmentation, which is both social and technicalwithin a single labour process, is further emphasized by the loss ofcontrol over the instruments of production. This turns the labourereffectively into an 'appendage' of the machine. Intelligence (knowledge,science, technique) is objectified in the machine, thus separatingmanual from mental labour and diminishing the application of intelligenceon the part of the direct producers. In all of these respects,the individual labourer is 'made poor' in individual productive powers'in order to make the collective labourer, and through him capitalrich in social productive power' (Capital, 1: 341). This process doesnot stop with the direct producers, with the peasants pulled off theland, the women and children forced to give of their labour in thefactories and mines. The bourgeoisie 'has pitilessly torn asunder themotley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and hasleft remaining no other nexus between man and man than callous"cash payment." ... [It] has stripped of its halo every occupationhitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has convertedthe physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man ofscience, into its paid wage labourers' (The communist manifesto, 45).How is it, then, that the 'bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantlyrevolutionizing the instruments of production, and therebythe relations of production?' The answer Marx provides in Capital isboth thorough and convincing. The 'coercive laws' of market competitionforce all capitalists to seek out technological and organizationalchanges that will enhance their own profitability vis-a-visthe social average, thus entraining all capitalists in leap-froggingprocesses of innovation that reach their limit only under conditionsof massive labour surpluses. The need to keep the labourer undercontrol in the workplace, and to undercut the bargaining power ofthe labourer in the market (particularly under conditions of relativelabour scarcity and active class resistance), also stimulates capitaliststo innovate. Capitalism is necessarily technologically dynamic, notbecause of the mythologized capacities of the innovative entrepreneur(as Schum peter was later to argue) but because of the coercivelaws of competition and the conditions of class struggle endemic tocapitalism.The effect of continuous innovation, however, is to devalue, if not