i on thomas paine reviews: origins of crisis in ussr - Common Sense

Page 48 Common Sense - Issue 15
each of these presupposition is supposed to render its contrasting term coherent. The two
presuppositions are: the presupposed freedom of the social subject and the presupposed
logic of the capitalist system. No answer can be provided as to the constitution of both
labour's self-activity and capital's cajoling power. The only answer possible is the
denunciation of capital as subordinating labour's autonomy and a study of the changing
composition of labour's revolutionary subjectivity which is seen as being in oppsition to
a presupposed logic of capital.
In sum, the internal relation between capital and labour is transformed into a relation of
mere opposition. thus reducing the internal relation between form and substance to a
simple juxtaposition of opposition. Thereby, labour is taken as a one-sided abstraction. At
the same time, the essentialisation of the subject goes hand-in-hand with the fetishisation
of capital as a 'bewitching power'. Contrary to seeing the relation between capital and
labour as a social relation qua contradiction in and through the forms constituted by this
relation itself, the insistence on labour as merely 'against' capital dismisses dialectics as a
concept that moves within, and is a moment of, its object As was reported above, the
understanding of labour as existing againrt capital involves a conceptualisation of capital
as a machine-like entity. Capital becomes a logic, defined by certain laws whose
irrationality provides oppositional space for insurrection. The relationship between
structure and struggle is merely wnceived of as a relation of cause and effect i.e. the
disruptive and revolutionary power of the working class causes disruption and crisis to
which, in turn, capital responds by reimposing its domination over labour (see Negri,
1979). Such a view undercuts the internal relation between structure and struggle and
replaces it by a sociological investigation into insurrectionary forms of being which
exploit the inconsistencies of the capitalist system. The notion of the presence of labour
in and against capital effectively says that labour does not exist outside capital. The class
struggle exists only in and against the forms in and through which the constitutive power
of labour exists gua contradiction. Of course in a sense the class struggle exists in the
form of revolutionary separation, but it so exists only as one extreme pole of the
dialectical continuum of transcendence and intenation. the develment of which is omn
to the class struggle itself. Autonomist approaches disentangle the internal relation
between transcendence and integration by construing social practice solely in terms of
transcendence.
On the other hand, approaches which stress that labour exists merely 'in' capital dismiss
the antagonistic character of capitalism, neglecting the contradictory relation between
transcendence and integration. Instead, capital is conceived of as a one-sided abstraction at
the same time as social practice is sacrificed on the altar of scientism. These approaches
are structuralist-functionalist because what for them really counts are the inescapable lines
of tendency and direction established by capital's projects. Labour no longer exists in
opposition to capital but is, rather, a part of capital's own project. Structuralist approaches
contend that the reproduction of capital is not simply given by the logic of capital.
Capitalist reproduction goes forward through class struggle. Structurally predetermined
views of social development entail a conception of the subject as merely (but at least) the
bearer - Trap - of social categories. The subject who bears categories must, at the same
time, be the subject who transforms them. But on a structuralist approach, he or she can
transform them only by reproducing them. In structuralism, human practice is conceived
in terms of 'human agency', that is, as an executor of demands and requirements emanating
from extra-human structures. The contradictory logic of capital requires human agency' as
some-thing which reproduces capital.