Three provisional theses on Marx’s concept of value

“Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use-value may be a thing that interests men. It’s no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange-values.”

–Marx, Capital, Volume I

Value is not transcendental. It is born only when it discovers itself in and through the historical accident of exchange. But the birth of value, which follows its discovery of itself, amounts to it being instituted as that which is a presupposition of exchange so that exchange is its realisation as value. Consequently, exchange ceases to be an accident of history to be transformed into an expression of its systemic principle, which is value. This is precisely the dialectic of history of logic and logic of history that Marx demonstrates while mapping the unfolding of value from its elementary or accidental form to its general form and money-form through the intermediate moment of its total or expanded form.

However, it is precisely the failure to closely attend to this rigorous dialectic of history of logic and logic of history that has often led scholars – mostly post-Marxists, but also a good number of Marxists of various kinds – to erroneously claim (and affirm) that for Marx value begins with exchange. Such an error renders value trans-historical and/or has disastrously reformist political consequences.

Essence, of course, becomes accessible only when it appears. But that does not mean appearance precedes essence or that the latter is an effect of the former. All those who insist that value – or the dialectic qua the principle of mediation – begins with exchange are falling precisely into such an error: it’s only in exchange that value is accessed so exchange precedes value. As a result, they mistake Marx’s demonstration of the historical precedence of exchange over value as the former’s logical priority over the latter.

Qualitative equalisation of (qualitative) difference — valorisation — is not the effect of exchange. Rather, it’s an integral dimension of the mode of organising of production (in its hidden abode) that must be logically prior to exchange in order for it to be realised in exchange. Had that not been the case, there is no way “mental”, “ideal’ or “imaginary” money-form as the measure of value would precede, and be distinct from, the tangible money-commodity as standard of price that really changes hands as definite quantities of metal money in the actuality of exchange. Marx in demonstrating this draws our attention to the logical priority of measure of value (and thus value) over standard of price (and price qua exchange-value). In other words, Marx is emphasising, implicitly or otherwise, how value precedes exchange-value with the latter realising the former.

Besides, if in Marx’s conception value did begin with exchange why would he then need to dwell at length (in Capital, Volume I) on Aristotle’s historical incapacity to come up with a conception of value when the latter is faced with the historical fact of exchange?

Therefore, the assertion that value begins with exchange is a complete and correct statement of things only if one is thinking of value merely in terms of its accidental creation. However, if one is dealing with value in terms of it being the logic of organising production — which is the mode of mobilising labour through quantification of respectively different socially necessary labour times for various qualitatively different concrete labours through a process of reducing them to human labour in the abstract — then this statement is incomplete and perhaps even wrong. In such circumstances, one will do well, instead, to state the following: exchange realises value-relationality (or the dialectic) precisely because the latter presupposes the former. So, instead of saying dialectic begins with exchange one should say the dialectic (value qua value-relationality) appears (or is realised) in exchange (exchange-value qua exchange-relation) precisely because the former is presupposed by the latter as its principle.

To not grasp the dialectic qua the law of mediation, and exchange in those precise terms is likely to lead one into the serious error of conflating and confounding the function of price (and its standard) with that of value (and its measure). Both being distinct functions of the one and the same money-form or money-commodity. That would compel one to erroneously insist, one way or another, that the market is the be all and end all of capital.

Marx’s exposition on value in Capital reveals two things at once. One, value is not transcendental. Two, value in being instituted, however, conceives of itself as being transcendental. This thinking of value by itself, which renders it transcendental (value qua value), is precisely the systemic operation of capital. Marx’s articulation of critique of value is intimately bound up with demonstrating what commodities say about themselves – or what value thinks of itself. In fact, what is important for the Marx of Capital is, first and foremost, the demonstration of what value says about itself. (See the citation with which this post begins.) Hence, Marx demonstrates how value is, in its own thinking, transcendental. He needs to do this because his critique of value is a deconstruction of precisely the transcendentality of value – or value as transcendental.

Marx’s critique of value begins by showing how value is, in its instituting, the abstraction of use-value, which is the irreplaceable, uncountable one (the singular). In other words, value, in thinking itself as being transcendental, is negation of this singularity of use-value. When Marx tells us that exchange-value – which is expression of value – has not an atom of use-value, even as use-value is the “material depository” of value/exchange-value, he is underscoring precisely that. He is drawing our attention to how value conceives of itself, or operationalises itself, as transcendental through a process of abstraction of use-value that is, therefore, the latter’s negation or disavowal.

Therefore, in terms of value conceiving of itself as transcendental – something that Marx demonstrates in the process of developing its critique — use-value is an absence or lack in value/exchange-value. But to the extent, that this negation, which renders that which is negated a lack, is made possible precisely by that which goes lacking the lack in question is constitutive of that which renders it a lack. In other words, Marx demonstrates how use-value is, in terms of value conceiving of itself as transcendental, a constitutive lack.

Value conceives itself as being transcendental (value qua value) that is expressed as and in the empirical (of exchange). This means value as such – that is, as the final instant of determination in its loneliness – conceals itself as the character of its (empirical) expressions. This also means that value as this concealed character of its expressions in and as the empirical (of things) is also a concealment of the process of abstraction of the concrete (“historical character” of “meanings” as Marx says in Capital) by which it comes to be the (hidden) essence — the transcendental — of its (empirical) expressions, and the concrete as such (use-value as the singularity it is). In such circumstances, when value as the concealed character of its (empirical) expressions is revealed in its hiddenness, its (empirical) expressions come across as the mystifications or fetishisms/fetishes they are.

Therefore, value as this hidden character of its expressions in and as the empirical — which is value conceived by itself as being transcendental – in being revealed thus is not itself a fetish, a mystification or an ideology. It is, instead, the character of fetishism, mystification and/or ideology. Following Adorno’s explication of the dialectic in Negative Dialectics, we could characterise value as the truth of the untrue. Hence, value qua value, which is value conceived by itself as being transcendental, is not in itself an ideology but is the character, or truth, of ideology.

Besides, value in being revealed as this hidden character of its (empirical) expressions — which are themselves, concomitantly, demonstrated to be fetishes or ideologies — is also a revelation of both the process of abstraction of the concrete and its concomitant repression as that process of abstraction.

This clearly implies that revelation of value as the hidden character of its (empirical) expressions – i.e. its revelation as the character or truth of fetishism or ideology – is also a positing of the concrete qua the reversal of the process of abstraction of the concrete. Which means value in its revelation as the character of fetishism or ideology – or the truth of the untrue – must be grasped and envisaged as the division of this truth of the untrue into itself and truth as such.

III

It is this Alain Badiou points towards in Theory of the Subject, when he writes: “There are two dialectical matrices in Hegel. This is what turns the famous story of the shell and the kernel into such a dubious enigma. It is the kernel itself that is cracked, as is those peaches that are furthermore so irritating to eat whose hard internal object quickly cracks between one’s teeth into two pivoting halves.”

So, it is not simply about extracting the rational kernel of value (dialectic) from its mystical shell – which is ideology qua exchange-value as the (empirical) expression of the rational. Rather, this extraction of the rational kernel from the mystical shell is also the former’s division between itself as the rationality of the irrational and rationality as such. More precisely, it is the transformation of the rational kernel in its extraction. Althusser is quite clear on that score while explaining in an anti-Hegelian register “how”, in Marx, “can an extraction be an inversion?”. He writes in ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’: “…the mystical shell is nothing but the mystified form of the dialectic itself: that is, not a relatively external element of the dialectic (e.g. the ‘system’) but an internal element, consubstantial with the Hegelian dialectic. It is not enough, therefore, to disengage it from its first wrapping (the system) to free it. It must also be freed from a second, almost inseparable skin, which is itself Hegelian in principle (Grundlage). We must admit that this extraction cannot be painless; in appearance an unpeeling, it is really a demystification, an operation which transforms what it extracts.”

But what would this demystification – this extraction as transformation of that which is extracted – amount to? On this count Badiou’s Hegelianism against itself in his Theory of the Subject is brilliantly lucid. At any rate, it is more rigorous than what Althusser’s anti-Hegelianism is in ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’. Badiou writes:

“In the peach there is still a kernel of the kernel, the bitter almond-shaped nut of its reproduction as a tree. But out of Hegel’s division, we will draw no secondary unity, not even one stamped with bitterness.” He then goes on to contend: “…at the heart of the Hegelian dialectic we must disentangle two processes, two concepts of movement, and not just one proper view of becoming that would have been corrupted by a subjective system of knowing. Thus:

“a) A dialectical matrix covered by the term of alienation; the idea of a simple term which unfolds itself in its becoming-other, in order to come back to itself as an achieved concept.

“b) A dialectical matrix whose operator is scission, and whose theme is that there is no unity that is not split. There is not the least bit of return into itself, nor any connection between the final and the inaugural….”

Therefore, unless value in its revelation as the hidden character of its (empirical) appearances – that is, in its revelation as the character of ideology or the truth of the untrue – is also the manoeuvre that divides it between itself and truth as such, which is the concrete as the process of abstraction of the concrete in reverse, it would amount to what “unfree mysticism” – Marx’s characterisation of the Stoics in his doctoral thesis on Epicurus and Democritus.

But what of the Marx of Capital – the one who is supposedly an incorrigible and an incurable Hegelian? In the section on fetishism of commodities, he provides us with his own version of Hegelianism against Hegel — one that indicates in its own way how the revelation of the truth of the untrue must also be a division between itself and truth as such. He writes: “The determination of the magnitude of value by labour-time is therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities. Its discovery, while removing all appearance of mere accidentality, from the determination of the magnitude of the values of products, yet in no way alters the mode in which that determination takes place.”

A QUICK NOTE ON THE POST-PHENOMENOLOGY OF MARX AND HOW TOTALITY IS A PHANTOM THAT IS REAL

Hegel’s phenomenological story — i.e. phenomena as constitutive moments of the unfolding of the dialectic of essence and appearance — is theoretically central in Marx. Yet, Marxism is post-phenomenological. But what is post-phenomenology? It is nothing but praxis — practice that in its actuality is, at once, itself and its own dialectically-inflected critique. This is “practical materialism”, which Marx radically distinguishes from Feurbach’s “contemplative materialism”. The latter in being a partial materialist critique of Hegel’s dialectical spiritualism is rendered, in the final analysis, subjective-idealism and thus a necessary complement of Hegelian spiritualism. Hence, in its theoretical or cognitive moment (Marxist) post-phenomenology is phenomenology as both the symptom of praxis in its interruption, and a placeholder of the praxis to come.

In that context, one can clearly see how Walter Benjamin’s “dialectical image” (dialectic as an image of its own standstillness), or, for that matter, Brecht’s “gestus”, are nothing but discursively articulated conceptions of the post-phenomenology of praxis in its theoretical or cognitive moment. Something that radically re-defines the cogitative order itself to render thought the image and/or concrete index of its own determinate excess and suspension. This reveals how such conceptions are radically and modally distinct from such essentially phenomenological conceptions of Heideggerian discourse as historicality and the ontico-ontological nature of Being — their seeming resemblance notwithstanding.

Many new-fangled theorists and fashionable ‘radical’ philosophers in their post-Marxist zeal to either reject, or, more dangerously, appropriate Marx, tirelessly insist that totality is a phantom. But if one adheres rigorously to what one has sought to demonstrate above — i.e. the post-phenomenological character of Marxism, which amounts to extenuation of phenomenology precisely through its radicalisation — one will have to admit that even as totality is a phantom it is a real phantom (a “real abstraction” a la Marx). Alfred Sohn-Rethel in his critique of Althusser insists that Marx’s conception of commodity abstraction is, contrary to the French philosopher’s explication of the same, not merely metaphorical but literal. That is to say, the commodity-form is not merely a symptom of its own impossibility — a mark of its own inexistence as it were. Rather, the value-expressing commodity-form — one ought to say following Sohn-Rethel’s critique of Althusser — is a symptom of its own impossibility precisely because it exists as a commodity-fetish in a literal sense. Marx’s explication of commodity-abstraction, particularly in Capital, Volume I, points unambiguously in that direction.

Marx demonstrates how commodity abstraction — and therefore the value-bearing commodity-form — is a living contradiction. He reveals with great clarity how commodity abstraction — or valorisation — is about difference being qualitatively equalised precisely in its being difference. He, therefore, also shows that there is no qualitative equalisation — valorisation — without qualitative difference because the question of exchange, and thus qualitative equalisation, arises only when there is qualitative difference. That is to say, a commodity-form is qualitative difference bearing its own negation, which is qualitative equalisation. That is how commodity-form/value-form, in being itself as a unit of qualitative equalisation, is a symptom of its own negativity; and is, therefore, a living contradiction.

There is no doubt that Althusser’s rearticulation of Marx’s concept of commodity abstraction in Lacano-Freudian terms of “symptomatic reading” is, from a strategic-interventionist standpoint, a crucial theoretical breakthrough. But it is likely to pave the way — as it unfortunately often has — for a post-Marxist, poststructuralist appropriation of Marx. That, not surprisingly, has rendered Althusser’s conception of relative autonomy of contradictions into an absolute autonomy of difference — a good example of this is Deleuze’s affirmative conception of “difference-without-opposition”.

This problem cannot be obviated unless Althusser’s revolutionary anti-humanist theoretical breakthrough — which he accomplished through the Lacano-Freudian symptomatic reading of Marx’s conception of commodity abstraction — is supplemented with Sohn-Rethel’s Hegelian-Marxist critique of the same. This would serve to underscore the fact that Althusser’s entirely valid anti-humanist critique of Hegelian historicism (and Left-Hegelian humanism) is essentially radicalisation of Hegel by thinking Hegel in the extreme — an operation that amounts to brushing Hegel against his own grain.

Clearly, Althusser’s anti-Hegelianism, in radical contrast to the anti-Hegelianism of his post-Marxist epigones and poststructuralist compatriots, is not a premature jettisoning of Hegel but his rigorous extenuation. This is an aspect of Althusser’s thinking that is quite evidently there in such essays of his as ‘Marxism is Not A Historicism’ (in Reading Capital) and ‘Lenin as Philosopher’ (in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays). And supplementing his symptomatic reading of the commodity-form with Sohn-Rethel’s critique of the same is likely to foreground that aspect of Althusser’s discourse and thinking. In fact, the Spinozist moment in Althusser, and more significantly in Pierre Macherey, emerges arguably as an integral dimension of this manoeuvre to radicalise Hegel in order to have Hegelian historical reason exceed and surpass itself. This, for example, comes out most clearly in Macherey’s Hegel or Spinoza, wherein Spinoza is made to function deconstructively within the symmetrical Hegelian dialectic of recognition (historicism + humanism) to radicalise and transfigure it into an asymmetrical, materialist dialectic of anti-humanist action.

Some rough-and-ready critical observations on the ‘redoing’ of the subalternist approach by Derridean-Marxists

In a recent polemic directed at one of the doyens (Partha Chatterjee) of the Subaltern Studies project, I had contended that subalternist politics does no more than end up reproducing capital as a structure of constitutive duality of subalternity and elitism through its continuous expansion and intensification. This, I had further insisted, was because the proponents of subalternism presuppose that radicalism lies in envisaging politics in terms of affirmation of sheer subalternity. A move that, I had argued, continuously reproduces the structure of measure and valorisation, together with its constitutive limit or crisis. I had also sought to demonstrate in passing that this contention of mine stemmed from the fact that subalternity is the determinate limit or crisis of the structure of measure and/or valorisation in its suturing on to that very structure.

Among the many criticisms levelled at this polemic, I am choosing to respond, at some length, to one in particular here. I am doing this because I think by responding to this particular criticism I will be able to make certain clarifications, albeit only provisionally, with regard to how the structure (or, more precisely, the architectonics) of capital is to be grasped from the Marxian vantage-point of critique of political economy. More importantly, this response of mine will, I hope, go some way in revealing the rather insidious defence of subalternism and its pernicious politics the criticism in question mounts.

The aforementioned criticism of my position begins by arguing that “Subalternity cannot be preassumed to be a node around a capital centric suture…”. It then goes on to contend, against my argument, that “The evacuation of politics and ignoring of political economy can only be presumed if one *begins* with the assumption that economy is coterminous with capitalism, and capitalism is defined around markets and uber-structure of a globe as per the Young Hegelians rather than through production relations as per Marx”. Now, I entirely concur with my critic’s implied insistence that capitalism is not coterminous with economy. However, my reasons for doing so are diametrically and fundamentally opposed to hers. When my critic suggests that capitalism is not coterminous with economy, she clearly implies the economy is much bigger than capitalism. The latter being restricted, as far as she is concerned, to the markets of the globe. My concurrence with her assertion, on the other hand, is based on making sense of economy as merely markets, and thus grasping capital as political economy, which is much more than what global markets per se signify.

Clearly, my critic, in suggesting the economy is greater than capital, is, in all likelihood, equating capital with the global markets. For all practical purposes, she is the one who, in effect, shares with the Left-Hegelians the presupposition that capitalism is exhausted by markets. The only thing that putatively distinguishes her from the Left-Hegelians is her conception of the economy, which is the dynamic of intercourse of capital-as-markets with a vast sphere that, in her estimation, lies outside capital. This is clearly on account of her avowed affinity with a so-called Marxian theoretical approach that claims to have rethought capitalist development in those terms. Insofar as forging a political strategy is concerned, this approach has, in the name of anti-capitalism, yielded all sorts of compromising, complicitous and cooptative manoeuvres. In fact, it can be demonstrated without too much difficulty that this so-called anti-capitalist strategy suggested by my critic and others of her ilk is no more than a Left-Hegelian politics of social-democratic reformism by ‘antihumanist’ theoretical means. But more on that later. For now, let us not get ahead of ourselves.

To conflate capital with its sphere of exchange, where it is only expressed, would surely amount to a Left-Hegelian move, which, thanks to its basis in an anthropologised dialectic, renders the structure of capital fully congruent with the markets of the globe, even as it renders those global markets an uber-structure. The strategy of ‘transformative’ politics that emanates from such Left-Hegelian dialectical anthropology is, needless to say, one of continuous democratisation of exchange relations, or juridical relations. It is by no means not geared towards suspension of the iron-cage of social relations of production, which are merely represented by those juridical or exchange relations. In more specific political terms, such a strategy is tantamount to the thwarting of the radical potential of concrete struggles and, as a result, reduces them to being competitive and reformist manoeuvrings.

Insofar as capital is the actuality of value-relations, the sphere of exchange-relations (read markets) is merely the moment of expression of value and does not, therefore, exhaust capital. The condition of possibility of exchange-relations that are the phenomenal sphere of its expression is — as Marx rigorously demonstrates in the famous first chapter of Capital, Volume I — value-relation. And this is founded entirely politically in the abode of production and is hidden precisely by its phenomenality, or appearance, of free exchange. It’s in this precise sense that capital is, from a Marxian standpoint, political economy.

The question then is, when one grasps and conceptually designates capital as a structure, is it always the case that one is necessarily thinking of capital as being coterminous with market? In other words, is conflation of capital (read value-relations) with its expressivist sphere of exchange relations — which would thereby render global markets into a transcendental structure — the only way in which one can possibly think and conceptually designate capital as a structure? Or, is it possible to explicate and conceptualise capital as a structure – more precisely, a dialecticalised structure and thus an architectonic – from the Marxian standpoint of value-relations (social relations of production)? In fact, it’s precisely from such a Marxian standpoint, which understands and defines capital in terms of value-relations (or social relations of production), rather than merely in terms of the ‘uber-structure’ of global markets, that one can arguably come up with a more rigorous and politically productive conception of capital as a structure. My critical explication of subalternity as a capital-centric suture presupposes capital as a structure in precisely those terms of value-relation or social relations of production.

My critic has, however, shown she is incapable of comprehending that. Her theoretical standpoint, which allows her to hastily misread the conceptual presuppositions of my polemic against subalternism in order to then arrogantly dismiss my critical explication of subalternity as misplaced Left-Hegelianism, is precisely the cause of her paradigmatic blindness on that score. Her theoretical standpoint, as she has herself clearly indicated, derives from the “far better redoing of the subalternist approach” in the work of Stephen Cullenberg, Anjan Chakrabarti and Anup Dhar. She probably forgets to mention the work of two other front-ranking figures of this ‘redoing’ fraternity: Ajit Chaudhury and the late Kalyan Sanyal.

DERRIDEAN-MARXISTS AND THE ‘OUTSIDE’ OF CAPITAL

Since my critic has not spelt out how this fraternity of, what I choose to call, Derridean-Marxists ‘redoes’ the subalternist approach from a supposedly Marxian political-economic standpoint, let me do the honours. Of course, it’s not possible to go into the details of the work done by each of its various celebrated scholar-heroes here. I will, therefore, have to restrict myself to briefly stating its central thesis. This synoptic restatement of its central thesis here will, I guess, have to suffice for now. It will, hopefully, be adequate for the purposes of articulating a pertinent critique of its conceptual presupposition, and the strategic political orientation that consequently flows from it. This central thesis is arguably shared by all the proponents of this ‘school’ of Derridean-Marxism, notwithstanding the difference in nuances and stresses in their respective theoretical articulations.

The theoretical approach of these Derridean-Marxists is derived from Derrida’s “hauntological” reading of Marx, and the so-called anti-essentialist reading of Marx by Stephen Resnick and Rick Wolff. Their central thesis, which is underpinned and thoroughly informed by this theoretical approach of theirs, is the following: there is a vast outside of capital that the latter commands in order to reproduce itself without, however, subsuming this outside into its value-relational horizon of exploitation (or, extraction of surplus value). Another famous Derridean, with close ties to the Subaltern Studies project, would likely affirm this as a conception of ‘outside in the capital machine’. And this is what my critic also probably has in mind when she speaks of the “far better redoing of the subalternist approach” by some of those Derridean-Marxists. Without doubt this is, indeed, a redoing of the subalternist approach; one that rescues its restorative politics, which is based entirely on affirmation of sheer subalternity, by garbing it up better in the radical idiom of Marxism.

In fact, it is not at all surprising that my critic should assume that the only way in which one can think of capital as a structure, and subalternity as a capital-centric suture, is by presupposing that capital is coterminous with its phenomenalised and expressivist sphere of exchange-relations. Considering that her likely theoretical point of departure is this thesis of capital reproducing itself by commanding a vast outside without, however, subsuming it into its value-relational horizon, she could hardly think otherwise.

At this point, it must, however, be admitted that the work produced by these Derridean-Marxists is exceedingly rich in inquiry-based studies that have laid bare a whole host of socio-economic transactions, and the digits of power relations that underpin those transaction as their constitutive dynamic, especially in the geographical specificity of the Indian subcontinent. That is doubtless an important contribution on their part to the Marxian political-economic project. However, the theoretical framework within which those studies are situated robs them of much their revolutionary-transformative productivity. The only way those studies can be reclaimed for revolutionary-strategic purposes are by freeing them from the Derridean-Marxist conceptual framework in which they are embedded. That can only be accomplished through a process of sustained critique of that conceptual framework.

CAPITAL AS A VALUE-RELATIONAL STRUCTURE IN MARX

This Derridean-Marxist thesis, I wish to contend right away, is erroneous. Its error is arguably the result of not fully coming to terms with the lessons in critique of political economy that the Marx of Capital, particularly its first volume, has to offer. If one were to grasp value and its equation — following the Marx of Capital — in terms of congelation of human labour in the abstract, and the objective abstract labour time concomitant with it, then the abstraction of concrete labour and its own singular concrete time into a qualitatively equalisable objective measure comes across wholly as a question of politics. This is politics as class struggle, which is revealed by the objective dynamic of social relations of production. The politics of class struggle is constitutive of primitive accumulation — which is fundamentally the abstraction of concrete labour and its respectively singular concrete time in accordance with the objectively equalising measure of labour time through its extra-economic regimentation – and the resistance against it of that concrete labour and its respective use-value, which are a qualitative difference. This struggle is, therefore, over the degree of regimentation of concrete labour. For, the socially necessary labour time determined for a concrete labour that creates its respective use-value – something that through such determination is rendered equalisable as human labour in the abstract whose congealed yield would now be commodity as value – is a direct function of the degree of extra-economic regimentation of that concrete labour and its repository or potential. The latter being the vendible commodity of labour-power.

So, here we have in the ‘mind’ of capital – if one is allowed to talk in those terms for the sake of analysis – the resumption of qualitative difference (concrete labour/use-value), which is the limit of the horizon of qualitatively equalisable and thus quantifiable value-relation, precisely in and as its subsumption into that horizon of qualitative equalisation and measure. In other words, in the blind ‘mind’ of capital, it is the resumption of its limit in and as its subsumption into it. Here then we have a situation, wherein the limit of capital in its determinateness is, in the blind ‘mind’ of capital, not its limit but a barrier to be overcome. In this articulation of the limit of capital as a barrier by capital itself, the former gets sutured on to the latter to become its constitutive crisis or constitutive limit. In this context, subalternity, following Gramsci’s Marxian explication of the same, is precisely a historically concrete position of determinate limit of the horizon of value-relations thinking itself, not in its own terms, but in terms of its articulation and animation by that horizon. My contention that subalternity is a capital-centric suture is meant, contrary to what my critic presumes, in this precise sense of it being the constitutive limit/crisis of the horizon or structure of value relations or social relations of production.

Let us now approach the problem of value-relation as a structure from a slightly different angle. Let us begin by asking, how can there be an equation if there is no difference? More simply, the question of exchange arises only when there are qualitative differences (use-values). To paraphrase Marx, 20 yards of linen exchanged for 20 yards of linen will be no exchange at all. It will be a tautological absurdity. But an equation, thanks to its tendency to qualitatively equalise qualitative differences (singularities) tends to endanger precisely its own existence as that equation by tending to erase difference tends to preclude its own condition of possibility. The equation can, therefore, exist only when it’s a qualitative equalisation that nevertheless has to allow qualitative difference in order to be that qualitative equalisation. This paradox is the very heart of the algebraic logic of equation. And capital, or the law of value-relation, as the historical operation of this paradoxical logic of equation — or, qualitative equalisation of qualitative difference (singularity) — is, as Marx correctly states (particularly, in Grundrisse), a “moving contradiction”. This is precisely the reason why value as qualitative equalisation, in being represented by the quantitatively differentiated determination of exchange-value, instrumentalises the qualitatively different use-value component, or sheer bodily form, of a commodity to be embodied and thus realised as value. That capital for Marx is, indeed, a “moving contradiction” becomes amply evident when he unambiguously demonstrates right at the beginning of Capital that even as value in its representation by exchange-value has not an atom of use-value, use-value is the necessary material depository of value/exchange-value. Clearly, what Marx reveals to be the “two-fold nature” of commodity as the basic unit of capital is actually the germ of capital as a “moving contradiction”.

STRUCTURE IN ITS TWO-SIDEDNESS AND THE PROBLEM OF STRATEGY

For this reason, capital offers itself to be read as both itself (a totalising value-relational structure), and as a symptom of its own immanent crisis and thus impossibility. That is because every moment of subsumption of qualitative difference or use-value and the concrete labour unique to it is also the moment of resumption of that qualitative difference or singularity, and thus the determinate moment of displacement and excess of subsumption. In such circumstances, it can hardly be the case that there is an outside of capital that capital commands without subsuming it in its value-relational structure. In fact, what this reveals is that capital is a structure of subsumption/totalisation that resumes itself as that structure precisely by (re-)commencing its own limit and thus excess. In other words, there is no outside in the capital machine. It is, instead, all about being inside capital precisely by virtue of being against it. The so-called absolute outside of capital in being commanded by the latter is already always subsumed within it.

Therefore, an effective strategy against capitalist class power (the value-relational structure of subsumptive exploitation) is not, as my critic and her Derridean-Marxist friends would have us believe, the resistance of the outside or the other of capital to its coercive, oppressive command. For, this type of resistance can only be thought and envisaged, as it indeed is by the Derridean-Marxists, in terms of the sequentially continuous affirmation of ontologised difference. An effective strategy against the horizon of capitalist class power would, instead, be the affirmative deployment of the qualitative difference (or singularity) — which is the determinate limit of capital that capital always needs to resume only in order to subsume it – in a manner that it in its actuality tends towards suspending or totally negating the subsumptive value-relational structure that is capital.

This particular anti-capitalist strategy is a constructionist manoeuvre to affirm itself in its subtraction from the subsumptive-exploitative structure of value-relations by tending towards destroying or totally negating that structure in the process of constructing and affirming itself as that subtraction. The strategy posited by our Derridean-Marxists is affirmation of singular-universality as the (successively sequential) infinity of ontologised difference vis-à-vis capital as the horizon of the law of value. On the other hand, the anti-capitalist strategy that emerges from a rigorous fidelity to the lessons of critique of political economy offered by Marx in Capital, is arguably universal-singularity as the construction of a subtractive ontology by way of simultaneity of infinite difference and infinite deployment of infinite difference. This conception of universal-singularity as the construction of subtractive ontology by way of simultaneity of infinite difference and infinite deployment of infinite difference has been rigorously conceptualised and explicated by Alain Badiou.

Hence, an effective practical critique (affirmative critique) of capital cannot be envisaged by articulating it as the resistance of an absolute outside of capital to capital’s non-subsumptive command of it. Such resistance of the outside of capital — which is premised on the thesis that capital reproduces itself by commanding this absolute outside without subsuming it — is all about envisaging struggles against capital as withdrawal, or lines of escape, from it. Therefore, struggles animated by this strategy of resistance of the outside, or the other, of capital to its non-subsumptive command would evidently do nothing to suspend capital as a subsumptive horizon of value-relations. All that such struggles of resistance would do is puncture the horizon of capital causing it now to reproduce itself as its own open and permanent crisis. Clearly, the so-called anti-capitalist strategy of infinition of ontologised difference (or finitudes) is, in objective terms, really a politico-ideological articulation of neoliberalism. An effective practical critique can, instead, materialise only when capital is grasped in terms of its own internal critique or crisis – the determinate moment of resumption of the limit of capital – so that such moments of crisis internal to capital are sustained against their susbsumption through an anticipatory construction of those moments into a constellation. This constellational construction would be the uninterrupted process of what Badiou would call the mutual partaking of generic singularities, which, as a consequence, would articulate destructive antagonism towards the subsumptive-valorising structure of capital. This would, therefore, be the construction of the ontology of subtraction from within the subsumptive structure of value-relations, and in destructive antagonism to it. Hence, this subtractive ontology, in and as the adventure of its own construction, would be the Badiouian “singular-multiple” or “universal -singularity”. Marx and Engels’ conception of communism as “the real movement” – or, Marx’s conception of revolution as “revolution in permanence” – is precisely this.

In this context, the anti-capitalist strategy that derives from the conception of “in and against capital” of Mario Tronti, early Antonio Negri and certain other Italian workerist and post-workerist militants and intellectuals is clearly more rigorous, by far, than the Derridean and Derridean-Marxist strategy of ‘outside in the capital machine’.

At this point, we also ought to demonstrate how this wokerist/post-workerist strategic conception of in and against capital is fundamentally distinct from politics as the affirmation of sheer subalternity. Subalternist politics, unlike the workerist/post-workerist politics of in and against capital, is not able to countenance the fact that the limit of the horizon of measure, valorisation and/or representation is in its determinate resumption already always subsumed within that horizon or structure. In fact, proponents of subalternist politics do not realise that what they designate as subalternity, in order to envisage emancipatory politics in terms of its sheer affirmation, is this moment of resumption of the determinate limit/excess of the horizon of measure and valorisation as already always the moment of its subsumption. For this reason, the strategy of subalternist politics as the affirmation of sheer subalternity — not at all unlike the political strategy envisaged by our Derridean-Marxists in their ‘redoing’ of the suablternist approach — is envisaged in terms of infinition of ontologised difference.

LEFT-HEGELIANISM BY ANTIHUMANIST MEANS

It would perhaps not be out of place here to suggest that this Derridean-Marxist strategy of an absolute outside of capital haunting capital through its resistance against the latter’s non-subsumptive command amounts to mere dissemination. Now, dissemination, in spite of its radical antihumanist theoretical presuppositions, produces political effects that are, objectively speaking, hardly any different from the liberal-reformist and social-democratic effects produced by the Left-Hegelians, thanks to the latter’s humanist theoretical presuppositions. Repetition with a difference – or differance – does not, as we have observed earlier, suspend the objective horizon of value-relations. As a result, it amounts to no more than the puncturing of that horizon. Hence, it would not be entirely incorrect to insist that the political subjectivity articulated by this hauntological strategy of resistance is the Moses Hess-Proudhon-type of ethical-socialist subjectivity, which now stands refounded in tandem with the specificity of our late capitalist conjuncture: a conjuncture of barbarism that is characterised by capital existing as its own permanent and open crisis even as revolutionary-proletarian politics is in retreat. In other words, this is a neoliberal political subjectivity of radical communitarianism, which, in the objectivity of the neoliberal conjuncture, merely amounts to some kind of competitive reformism and identity politics. In this sense, it is a close kin of the pernicious political project of subalternism.

What must also be emphatically asserted here is that both subalternists and their Derridean-Marxist retrofitters are completely in the wrong when they insist that the so-called pre-political is actually political in its own right because it is absolutely autonomous, and thus a radical alterity, vis-à-vis the dominant political. Of course, the so-called pre-political is not actually pre-political. It is, without any dispute, political through and through. On that not a quarter ought to be yielded to the dominant historicist and stagiest tendency within both theoretical and political Marxisms. That said, one ought to also recognise that the so-called pre-political is actually political not because it is absolutely autonomous, and thus a radical alterity, vis-à-vis the dominant political. Rather, it’s as much political as the dominant political precisely because its relationship with the latter is constitutive of a structure that generates the political both in its dominant and subordinate instantiations. If capital is the structure of value-relations as the qualitative equalisation of qualitative difference, and is thus represented by quantitatively differentiated determinations of exchange-values, it is, in its world-becoming as that structure, manifest as combined and uneven development. In such circumstances, the political is neither the dominant nor the subordinate in any moment of this combination of unevenness. Rather, the political is the dynamic of the relation between the two, which is constitutive of their combinatory or structure. In this sense, the dominant political and that which, as a result, is produced and designated as ‘pre-political in that qualitatively equalised and thus quantitatively differentiated relationship are both equally political.

Now, let us focus on the workerist/post-workerist conception of being in and against capital in order to figure out how it is radically distinct from the modality of subalternist politics. The proponents of this strategic conception while envisaging the determinate resumption of qualitative difference (use-value/concrete labour) – which would be the determinate instantiation of excess of the structure of measure and valorisation — anticipate its subsumption. As a result, their strategy — premised on this conception of determinate resumption of excess as already always its subsumption — seeks to concretely prefigure the exceeding of the limit that the resumption of the excess in being determinately envisaged is anticipated to come up against. Clearly, this is a strategy of constructing subtraction – Badiou’s “subtractive ontology” to be precise – vis-à-vis the subsumptive horizon or structure of value-relations, which starts getting destroyed as a consequence of such subtractive construction, and in tandem with it.

This subtractionist strategy – which is as much integral to Badiou’s post-Maoist Maoism as arguably that of certain tendencies of workerism and post-workerism – is based on grasping capital through a process of dialectical reversal: capital, which is the subsumption of its determinate limit, is grasped as, and rendered, the limit of the determinate moment of its excess. Althusserian overdetermination, which is an explication of capital from the side of proletarian politics and in its strategic terms, affords precisely such a dialectically-reversed reading and conception of capital.

SUBTRACTION AND MARX’S ‘HEGELIANISM’

The ground for this was, however, cleared by Marx himself who anticipated this subtractionist strategy and its theoretical presupposition of being in and against capital. It was precisely because Marx grasped capital as a moving contradiction that he was able to rearticulate Hegel’s dialectic against its totalising mystifying grain, which “seemed to transfigure and to glorify the existing state of things”, as a “rational” dialectic that was “a scandal and an abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable break-up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence…”. This shows, among other things, that when one thinks capital as a structure – as one certainly should – one thinks of it as much as an abstracted totality as the discursive demonstration of its determinate excess. After all, the story of capital as a structure, if it’s seen in its longue duree, has so far been a story of its unraveling. However, this two-sided thinking of the dialectic – and the structure of capital – is bound to be lost on Derridean-Marxists because they do not fully grasp Marx’s demonstration of capital as a “moving contradiction”, wherein the inside of capital is that inside precisely in opposing capital by tending to exceed it as a subsumptive-exploitative structure of value-relations (or social relations of production). As a result, they do not see how the structure can be thought, and envisaged, as both a totalising closure, and precisely for that reason, as a discursively articulated exceeding and unraveling of the same.

It is this that compels them to make sense of oppression and social domination in terms of capital as a historically concrete horizon of social relations of production commanding its absolute outside in order to reproduce itself without, however, subsuming this outside into those relations of production. And it is precisely for this reason that someone like my critic cannot imagine that one can think of capital as a structure without either necessarily rendering the structure a transhistorical closure, or grasping it merely in terms of global markets.

When structure is grasped, or conceived, from the side of capital, we have structure as a totalised closure. This is structure as an abstraction. But when the same structure is thought, and/or envisaged, from the side of its immanent critique, then what we have is structure as the discursively demonstrated or articulated limit of the excess of structure as an abstraction. The fact that capital as a structure reproduces itself through expansion and recomposition shows it is not a stabilised totality. Precisely for this reason the structure of capital ought to be thought, not in terms of transcendental infinite totality, but as infinite totalisation. And this is the schizz of capital as a total structure. Therefore, to grasp, and envisage, capital as a structure is not necessarily to grasp it in terms of a transcendental or uber totality but to grasp it as totalisation (as opposed to totality), which must always begin as that totalisation precisely because in thus beginning it is constantly unravelled as the totality it tends to be. Clearly, the emphasis, when one grasps capital as a structure from the side of its immanent critique, is on the counter-tendency of resumption of its unraveling, or opening up, rather than its tendency of subsumption and closure.

In this context, Althusser and Macherey’s conception of structure (or the dialectic) as the limit-form of its own displacement, because it’s an effect and thus a symptom of its own “decalage” (void), demonstrates that their articulation of capital as a “structured totality” – contra capital as an “expressivist totality” – is from the side of its immanent critique. A similar but more advanced rearticulation of the structural dialectic (of infinite totalisation) from the side of its immanent critique that renders it a “historical dialectic” (of “infinite thought” in action) is to be found in Badiou’s “metaontological” (re)articulation of the structural dialectic as the Real in its limit: the Real being the happening of the impossibility of conceptualisation and/or structuring, and thus its excess. Even a Hegelian-Marxist such as Moishe Postone in coming up with his conception of capital as structure clearly does so from the side of its immanent critique. He explicates his conception of capital as a “blind subjectivity” of totalisation in terms of this totalisation being an effect of precisely the determinate overcoming of social mediation (or totality). Postone arrives at this conception of totality/totalisation, thanks to his radical deployment of the Hegelian dialectic by pushing it to its extreme, and thus against its own idealist grain.

Clearly, emancipation is, and must be, an antidialectic. But the antidialectic of emancipation, if the same is to be thought rigorously and not in the fancy-free non-dialectical manner of so-called difference-thinking, can be actualised only through dialectical thinking as its own action. As both Postone and Badiou have shown from their respectively distinct radical-Hegelian and Althusserian points of departure, this antidialectic of emancipation cannot be ontologised, and can only be an immanently constructed constellation. This fundamentally distinguishes Badiou’s metaontological affirmation of the antidialectic of emancipation, for instance, from the ontologising and thus non-dialectical affirmation of the antidialectic in phenomenology of difference and Heideggerian-Levinasian deconstruction.

WHAT THE HELL IS UNPRODUCTIVE LABOUR?

We have so far articulated our critique of the Derridean-Marxist position in terms of the bare abstractions of the dialectic and the structure. We would do well now to critically examine their central thesis — capital commanding an absolute outside without subsuming it — in more concrete political-economic terms.

Let us begin with Marx’s conceptions of productive and unproductive labour in his Theories of Surplus Value, Part I. While critically engaging with Adam Smith’s conceptions of the same, Marx writes: “Only labour which produces capital is productive labour. Commodities or money become capital, however, through being exchanged directly for labour-power, and exchanged only in order to be replaced by more labour than they themselves contain. For the use-value of labour-power to the capitalist as a capitalist does not consist in its actual use-value, in the usefulness of this particular concrete labour – that it is spinning labour, weaving labour, and so on. He is as little concerned with this as with the use-value of the product of this labour as such, since for the capitalist the product is a commodity (even before its first metamorphosis), not an article of consumption. What interests him in the commodity is that it has more exchange-value than he paid for it; and therefore the use-value of the labour is, for him, that he gets back a greater quantity of labour-time than he has paid out in the form of wages.”

Marx then goes on to further explicate his conceptions of productive and unproductive labour through his continued critical assimilation of Smith: “…this distinction between productive and unproductive labour has nothing to do either with the particular specialty of the labour or with the particular use-value in which this special labour is incorporated. In the one case, the labour is exchanged with capital, in the other with revenue. In the one case the labour is transformed into capital, and creates a profit for the capitalist; in the other case it is an expenditure, one of the articles in which revenue is consumed.”

The domain of the absolute outside of capital, which capital commands in order to reproduce itself without at the same time subsuming that outside into its value-relational structure, is, for our Derridean-Marxists, possibly constituted by a range of practices of unproductive labour as defined by Marx in the passage above. There are, undeniably, a whole range of labouring activities (including heavily gendered care work in the domain of social reproduction), which yield products that are acquired not to be competitively exchanged for profit through transfer of value, but for immediate consumption. As a result, the domain of ‘production’ constitutive of such labouring activities involves no extraction of (surplus) value – or (surplus) labour time. Rather, what is involved, as far as such unproductive labour is concerned, is extraction of surplus use-values for immediate consumption. The forms through which such extraction of surplus labour (surplus use-values) — as opposed to extraction of surplus labour time (surplus value) – is operationalised are, more often than not, extra-economic or semi-extra-economic. That is perhaps why such forms can, at times, come across as ‘pre-capitalist’ (feudalism, slavery, bonded labour and so on in their various permutations and combinations) at the level of their discursive appearances. If one were to confine oneself strictly and purely at this level, one would be correct to observe that capital as a value-equational structure of social relations of production institutes socio-economic transactions with an outside of unproductive labour by way of extra-economic or semi-extra-economic command. Such unproductive labouring activities can be easily construed as the outside of capital because the products they yield are not value-embodying commodities in the strict sense, and such labouring activities are, for that reason, not integrated into the value-equational horizon of production relations.

However, from the vantage-point of Marx’s critique of political economy, such an analysis would be patently unrigorous and incomplete. To claim that such labour-practices constitute the unproductive outside of capital because the products they yield are not value-embodying commodities because they are merely use-values meant for immediate consumption, is to analyse the situation merely in terms of its immediate empirical appearance. To analyse such a situation more rigorously and accurately, one must attempt to grasp and reveal the concretely precise functionality that this immediate appearance of unproductive labour – labour producing use-values for immediate consumption – has with regard to the value-relational horizon of capital and its productive labour. And here the following excerpt from Theories of Surplus Value, Part I, becomes crucial: “The whole world of “commodities” can be divided into two great parts. First, labour-power, second, commodities as distinct from labour-power itself. As to the purchase of such services as those which train labour-power, maintain or modify it, etc., in a word, give it a specialised form or even only maintain it – thus for example the schoolmaster’s service, in so far as it is ‘industrially necessary’ or useful; the doctor’s service, in so far as he maintains health and so conserves the source of all values, labour-power itself – these are services which yield in return ‘a vendible commodity…’, namely labour-power itself, into whose costs of production or reproduction these services enter.”

Seen in this context, labour-practices that are unproductive in their immediate appearance, emerge as productive in the final analysis, in terms of their rearticulation and refunctionalisation by the causality of the structure within which they get situated precisely by virtue of producing only use-values for immediate consumption. The use-values such labour produces for immediate consumption effectuate, in being thus consumed, the production of the “vendible commodity” of labour-power, which, according to Marx, is “the source of all values”. Such unproductive labour, which produces use-values for immediate consumption, would, according to Marx, be “services” that enter into the “costs of production and reproduction” of the vendible commodity of labour-power. So, in the ultimate analysis, such labour is productive. Autonomist Italian Marxist-Feminists – particularly, Leopoldina Fortunati in her pathbreaking book, The Arcane of Reproduction – have developed this important insight of Marx to an advanced level of theorisation with regard to the familial domain of unwaged care work. Of course, one will not be able to grasp the full import of such work if one seeks to understand value merely in terms of calculation of its magnitude.

Value is, first and foremost, about politically instituting an equalising measure or rationality. Only then is it a calculable magnitude in accordance with this politically founded measure or rationality. Marx demonstrates that with great acuity in Capital. By seeking to explicate unwaged and thus apparently unproductive labour in the familial domain of reproductive or care work in terms of its integration into the capitalist value-chain of productive labour, Italian Marxist-Feminists such as Fortunati have revealed the constitutive crisis that value essentially is, at the level of its very appearance. They have shown how the unwaged, custom-based extra-economic familial domain of care work demonstrates value in and as the irrational (political) founding of itself as a rationality (economy). Therefore, in their theorisation, value is not merely a rationality or measure, but is, rather, a measure or rationality in and as its own constitutive crisis of the irrational and the unmeasured. In terms of bare logical abstraction, what they are suggesting, and with profound accuracy at that, is the following: the unmeasured is not only the constitutive limit of measure that makes the latter possible, but, precisely on that account, measure is the limit-form of the immeasurable. That primitive accumulation is not merely a one-time historical occurrence, but is constitutive of every moment of so-called normal, economic accumulation is rigorously substantiated by the work of these Italian Marxist-Feminists.

Our Derridean-Marxists with their conception of capital commanding its absolute outside without subsuming it cannot, unfortunately, understand that. They are unable to grasp and explicate capital as a structure, which for them can only and necessarily be an exitless totality that precludes all attempts to think a viable and effective strategy of emancipation. It is this that has arguably led them to think of capital in terms of it commanding an absolute outside to itself, and which this outside resists. This, they believe, is the only possible way through which one can develop an effective anti-capitalist strategy. It is precisely for this reason they think, like my critic here, that anybody who grasps capital as a structure is necessarily a Left-Hegelian thinking in terms of an transcendental structure created by global markets. And this, in turn, is, as we have seen earlier, due to their inability to grasp Marx’s explication of the value-relational structure of capital as a moving contradiction. This prevents them from understanding capital as the horizon of value-equational relations of production in terms of internal dialectics. As a result, they are incapable of seeing how the dialectic as a structure is not merely the totalising subsumption but is, precisely for that reason, the limit-form of its own antagonistic asymmetry. In other words, they do not realise that the inside of capital, a value-relational structure, is not merely this inside. That the inside of capital is that inside precisely as the limit or interruption of its determinately asymmetrical antagonism is something that completely eludes them. Their failure, or unwillingness, to countenance capital as a structure in its two-sidedness also obstructs a proper understanding of political economy in its concrete operation. They are unable to grasp how unproductive labour, whose apparent function is the creation of use-values for immediate consumption, is already always subsumed within capital’s value-relational structure of productive labour precisely by virtue of being such a producer of use-values for immediate consumption.

What the thesis of capital’s non-subsumptive command of an absolute outside also fails to account for is how labour-practices, which are apparently unproductive, fulfil yet another productive structural-functionality over and above the one demonstrated above. People, who apparently do unproductive labour in order to only reproduce themselves, constitute the “relative surplus- population” or the “industrial reserve army” (Marx, in Capital, Volume I). This reserve army of labour works to regiment the productively employed labour-power and increases the latter’s productivity, thereby leading to a concomitant increase in the extraction of surplus value and capital accumulation. In the ultimate analysis, this renders the apparently unproductive labour of the unemployed and underemployed reproducing itself, systemically productive.

The labour that is unproductive in an immediate sense must be grasped in terms of how its unproductive functionality is productively articulated by the structured totality of social labour within which it is constitutively situated. That is precisely what Marx does while explicating his concept of the “industrial reserve army”. He writes: “If the means of production, as they increase in extent and effective power, become to a less extent means of employment of labourers, this state of things is again modified by the fact that in proportion as the productiveness of labour increases, capital increases its supply of labour more quickly than its demand for labourers. The over-work of the employed part of the working-class swells the ranks of the reserve, whilst conversely the greater pressure that the latter by its competition exerts on the former, forces these to submit to over-work and to subjugation under the dictates of capital. The condemnation of one part of the working-class to enforced idleness by the over-work of the other part, and the converse, becomes a means of enriching the individual capitalists, and accelerates at the same time the production of the industrial reserve army on a scale corresponding with the advance of social accumulation.”

This Marxian conception of industrial reserve army has become even more significant in this neoliberal (or, late-capitalist) conjuncture. That is so because this conjunctural moment is characterised by accelerating rates of same-skilling across the various segmental and sectoral divides of the working class, and an equally rapid diminution in the quantity of productively employed living labour due to a significant diminution of socially necessary labour time. All of this, thanks to an unprecedented and overall increase in the organic composition of capital. This, in turn, has brought into being the footloose and precarious “mass-worker”. Its ranks ceaselessly burgeoning with an ever-increasing rapidity. The mass-worker is clearly as much a part of the apparently unproductive reserve army of labour as he/she is productively employed in the production of value. The Derridean-Marxist thesis that there is a vast outside of capital that capital as a value-relational horizon non-subsumptively commands in order to reproduce itself is even more difficult to sustain in the face of the rise of the mass-worker, and its characteristically indeterminate and precarious positionality.

In fact, the crisis that capital has progressively been running into due to the increasing and accelerating diminution of living labour in the production of value has compelled it to turn towards the affective realm of ‘non-work’ socialisation in order to render its various moments sites for direct extraction of value. The rise of social media is a prime exemplar of that. This is “affective capital” – or “biocapitalism” – demonstrated and explicated with quite a bit of clarity by the Italian post-workerists, among others. This is life itself in its living as production of value, and thus productive work. This has led Negri, together with many other post-workerists and autonomist-Marxists, to come up with the conception of social factory. In this light, our Derridean-Marxists need to be asked, once again, where is this absolute outside of capital that capital commands without subsuming it? Where is it, indeed?

OF TRANSITION AND POSITIONALITY

At this point, it would perhaps be appropriate to underscore the importance of rethinking the problem of transition. Such rethinking is indispensable if one wishes to rigorously come to terms with the strategic conception of positionality. My critic, thanks to her affinity for the Derridean-Marxist theoretical approach, deploys this conception in the most slipshod fashion while criticising my polemic against Partha Chatterjee and his subalternist approach to politics. I had argued, while dwelling on Chatterjee’s rather troubling position on India’s occupations of Kashmir and its so-called north-eastern states, that “…this so-called criticism of colonial occupations by subalternists such as Chatterjee is not the determinate critique of political economy it ought to be in order to realise and fulfil its radical potential. And anti-colonialism and/or anti-occupation, in the discourse and thinking of such intellectuals, stands completely evacuated of all politics of class struggle to become no more than an idiom of competitive ethno-nationalisms and ‘militant’ reformism. Precisely through such a politico-theoretical move is the anti-colonial and/or anti-occupation politics of, say, Kashmir ostensibly affirmed only to be rendered a little nationalism or sub-nationalism that then serves to legitimise and reinforce India’s federalist-unionist big nationalism, which is the ideology that serves its imperial project of politically managing the South Asian moment of the globalising late-capitalist conjuncture. This particular modality of deployment of the language and ideas of anti-colonialism is nothing but their revisionist rearticulation, which is precisely what postcolonialism is.” I had also gone on to assert that “…this is not simply hypocrisy on Chatterjee’s part. It is something far more pernicious. It is neurosis that inheres in the very structure of his thinking and discourse.”.

The response my critic came up with is the following: “The critique of Chatterjee here sort of exculpates (him) by presuming the issue has something to do with the in-built limit of their analysis. I actually think that this is not so — which makes it worse. This is not a lapse because the analysis cannot go there. It is a lapse because we (I include my self here, as I don’t think I have worked this out for my own self) retain a nationalist presupposition coming from our positionality. Sort of like how whiteness works (so not inherent TO analyses of race that they cannot handle the transitions between racial formations from slavery to capitalism, but a blockage from the whiteness side of it…).”

A more disingenuous articulation would be difficult to come by. She attempts — with the surreptitious dexterity of a seasoned professional academic — to turn the tables on my polemic by suggesting that I provide Chatterjee with an exit route just because I seek to critically locate his pernicious position on Indian occupations in the limit internal to his structure of thinking and discourse. Well then, let me return the favour by laying bare in even more unqualified terms the political complicity of her theoretical approach in India’s occupation of Kashmir; among other things.

Even as she insinuates that my polemic against Chatterjee’s position on Kashmir and the so-called Indian Northeast is actually an apologia on his behalf, she goes on to suggest that Chatterjee’s problem is entirely an ethical problem of not being able to grapple with the “nationalist presupposition” of his positionality at the level of his self. By making this problem of positionality purely into a question of ethics, or practice of the self, my critic seems to be clearly suggesting that the politics of emancipation can be no more than a politics of reform – one that will compel people occupying dominant and oppressor positionalities to ethically grapple with the presuppositions of those positionalities to change the state of affairs by simply changing themselves. In making this utterly status-quoist political move – dressed up in the idiom of radical theory – not only does she naturalise the conception of positionality, but consequently ends up reinforcing the hegemony of the structure as the constitutive duality of dominance and subordination.

We would do well, at this point, to remind my critic, and her ethically-inclined Derridean-Marxist friends, what Marx says in the ‘Preface to the First German Edition’ of Capital, Volume I: “I paint the capitalist and the landlord in no sense couleur de rose. But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of our society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.”

My critic’s complicit and compromised position is arguably on account of how she understands the Marxist problem of transition. If one were to rethink the problem of transition in the light of how capital as a value-relational structure refunctionalises unproductive labour as productive, one would probably realise that the transition from various pre-capitalist modes of production to a capitalist one does not always necessarily involve alteration in the discursive appearances of the socio-economic forms that instantiated those pre-capitalist modes of production in their own respective times.

More often than not, such forms are carried into capitalism in their ‘pre-capitalist’ discursive appearances through a process of their rearticulation, reanimation, and/or refunctionalisation by the capitalist mode of production, or the value-relational structure that is capital. We already saw that when we were earlier dealing with how extra-economic or semi-extra-economic extraction of surplus use-values gets rearticulated into a productive relation. In such circumstances, apparently pre-capitalist social relations of race, caste, community, gender and so on are preserved at the level of their respective discursive appearances only and precisely through a process of their productive refunctionalisation in and by the value-relational structure of capital. Hence, race, caste, community and gender relations in their ‘pre-capitalist’ appearance operate as integral constituents of the value-relational structure of capital. They are now, therefore, fully capitalist in their structural-functionality.

In such a situation, the oppressed positionalities of, say, Blackness, Dalitness, Femaleness, Muslimness, or, for that matter, Kashmiriness can emancipate themselves from the oppression embodied in the oppressor positionalities of, say, Whiteness, Brahminism, Maleness, Hinduness, or, for that matter, Indiannness, only by seeking to unravel the value-relational structure of capital within which such oppressive relations are situated through their productive refunctionalisation by that structure.

INDIA’S NEOLIBERAL OCCUPATIONS

In the case of Kashmir, for instance, the Indian occupation retains the discursive appearance of classical colonialism. But the way it serves capital in its late, neoliberal conjuncture is significantly distinct from how classical colonialism served capital in its early conjuncture of so-called embedded liberalism. It might not be entirely misplaced to argue that the main function of Indian occupation of Kashmir now, thanks to the de-development it has wrought on the occupied territory, is that of rendering and maintaining the population of this territory as a reserve or pool of migrant labour with regard to certain economic sectors, and segments (mostly cognitarians) of the productive labour market in the Indian mainland. This is even truer of the Indian occupation of its so-called Northeast. The degree and extent of this phenomenon can, however, be revealed only through militant inquiries by politically committed activists and radical intellectuals within the Kashmiri movement against Indian occupation

This contention of mine should not, however, be taken to mean that certain other territories such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, which have historically been an integral part of the Indian national project in its formation, have not been de-developed to function as labour reserves for the industrial economic centres of the country. What it simply means is that Kashmir and the so-called Indian Northeast have been functionalised as labour reserves through the historical process of occupation that is specific to them. Bihar and UP too have been similarly functionalised, but through different historical processes specific to their respective socio-economic and political geography. Besides, the economic sectors and labour segments the Kashmiri reserve serves, for instance, is not fully congruent with the economic sectors and segments served by the Bihari or Uttar Pradeshi reserves. There is also likely be a whole range of differences, both at the subjective-experiential plane and at the level of objective quantification, among the members of those diverse labour reserves in their operations in the social factory on the Indian mainland. What cannot, however, be disputed is the historical form of colonial occupation — which has been specific to the dynamic of relations between India and Kashmir, or India and its so-called Northeast — continues to perpetuate itself; and in doing so functionalises those regions as pools of migrant labour for different economic sectors, and segments of its productive labour market, on the Indian mainland.

Also, the occupation, by being a live demonstration of India’s imperialist hegemony vis-à-vis its south Asian neighbourhood, tends to bolster, both politically and ideologically, the nationalist consensus in the mainland thus preventing the accentuation of class contradictions there. Of course, such occupations, not unlike classical colonialism, continue to extract and appropriate resources and raw materials native to the occupied territories. But this arguably is no longer its primary structural-functionality. Rather, it is a discursive appearance that has been retained from its specific historical past and which is now an epiphenomenon that wreaks and sustains de-development in the occupied territories to functionalise them as migrant labour pools with regard to the mainland. All of this together, however, amounts to no more than a considered hypothesis. One that will, once again, have to be substantiated through militant investigations by activists and radical intellectuals in the anti-occupation struggles being waged in those areas.

The short point of all this hypothesising is that every struggle against its respectively specific form of oppression has to envisage its strategy in a manner that each of them in the determinateness of militating against its concrete form of oppression begins articulating the destruction of the value-relational structure of capital. Anything less would be reformist and restorative identity politics, which would rob those struggles of their radical potential, and render them competitive and reformist. This would make those struggles into reproducers and recomposers of precisely the same oppressive structure of the constitutive duality of domination and subordination they have been militating against. The reproduction of that structure, by way of its recomposition through such struggles, will amount to those struggles throwing up new layers of systemically-coopted elite intermediaries and subjugated subalterns of their own.

BETWEEN ETHICS AND PRIVILEGE-CALLING, AND THE ETHICO-POLITICAL OF REVOLUTIONARY MILITANCY

In this context, my critic’s theoretical move to delink the question of positionality from the problem of transition leads her to a thoroughly ethicalised conception of politics, whose preponderant strategic register is that of privilege-calling. The problem with this strategic register, if we carefully attend to the political language it generates, is that its emphasis is more on calling people out on their privileged positionalities than on strategising the unraveling of the value-relational structure of capital that is the condition of possibility of this constitutive duality of privileged and underprivileged positionalities.

This is, therefore, a strategy of “ressentiment” (Nietzsche). Underpinned by “slave-morality” (Nietzsche), it’s a strategy tailor-made to serve neoliberal capital. If on one hand, it is about struggle as a politics of competitive bargaining and cooption; its obverse, on the other hand, is that people occupying dominant/oppressor positionalities do no more than ethically grapple with those positionalities in their instantiations at the level of merely their selfhood. Collective politics, in this context, becomes a big laugh: it’s about the ‘collectivity’ of various selves ethically grappling with their oppressor positionalities to overcome them. This clearly implies that the structural condition of possibility of such mutually constitutive positionalities of the oppressor and the oppressed is left intact. Worse, the idiom of solidarity becomes, as far as the oppressor/dominant positionality is concerned, a register of philanthropic empathy and sympathy for the ‘less-fortunate’ occupiers of the oppressed/subordinate positionality. As a result, the idiom of solidarity becomes a systemic ideology, enabling not merely the reproduction of the structural condition of possibility of oppression as such, but perpetuating and deepening the same forms of oppression too.

This is, however, not to suggest that a political strategy orientated towards unraveling the value-relational structure of capital will have nothing to do with questioning privileged positionalities. To thinks that is preposterous, to say the least. Any strategising that seeks to unravel the value-relational structure of capital will have to envision how movements against specific forms of oppression can concretely articulate themselves as the simultaneity of “struggle in unity, unity in struggle”. This strategic conception and credo of Mao Zedong clearly shows that privilege-calling is integral to revolutionary-political movementality, and thus does not need to exist as an independent strategic register and/or political idiom. After all, what else can it mean when people are called on to struggle in the process of coming together in unity? Mao’s credo of “struggle in unity, unity in struggle” is all about envisaging strategy as the constellational construction of subtractive ontology in Badiou’s sense of the term. And it is not as if this is devoid of ethicality. In its revolutionary-proletarian conception, politics is the singularity of the ethico-political. This means it is no longer simply about ethics as the grappling with one’s positionality in its instantiation at the level of one’s self. Politics as the singularity of the ethico-political implies, instead, that ethics is integral and internal to concrete political struggles against concrete forms of oppression or social domination. This is manifest in the future-anterior orientation of those struggles that they seek to actualise from the determinateness of their respective concrete locations in striving to unravel the value-relational structure of capital while struggling against the specific forms of oppression they are faced with. According to Badiou, there cannot be a Marxist ethics, but there is an “ethics of Marxism”. And this ethics of Marxism is the revolutionary-proletarian subjectivity as the simultaneity of “unity in struggle, struggle in unity” in its actualisation amid and through concrete struggles against concrete forms of oppression.

Some random thoughts on the rationalism/irrationalism divide

If we historicise religion in terms of its pagan provenance we can clearly see religion as unreflexive atheism. That reading is precisely what is at stake in Gramsci’s critical entanglement with the consciousness and culture of what he termed the subaltern. Something that comes across rather clearly in his critique of Bukharin’s manual of Marxist sociology.

On the other hand, the conception of the rational in Hegel’s system of philosophy of history is deeply theological — theology here to be read as the mystification of religion through a hypostasis of its material basis. Albeit, the historical thinking of metaphysics and idealism that is prominently at work in Hegel while he is building his system of philosophy (of history) provides us with the resources needed to reconceptualise rationalism as materialism, against the Hegelian-systemic grain of theology as it were.

One way, my preferred way, of reading materialism off Hegel is provided by Althusserian Pierre Macherey’s deconstructive reading of Hegel’s criticism of Spinoza. He also demonstrates a similar approach when in his affirmative reading of Adorno’s mobilisation of Hegel’s conception of negativity in ‘Negative Dialectics’, Macherey rigorously explicates such Adornesque mobilisation of Hegelian negativity as Spinozist conatus, which is an extensional, and thus non-productive, positivity.

In that context, religion needs to be approached not as a closed system of mystification but, like every other thing in modernity (especially, its theologised commodity of secularism), as a terrain problematisable in terms of it already always being internally divided between the materiality that is its emerging or political (re-)emerging, and its mystified, theologised presence. It’s perhaps time now to revive once again the (Marxian) project of reconceptualising reason/rationalism in terms of materialism as constant movement of internal division between idea and matter, and thus as critique, polemicality and politics, rather than get caught in the (Weberian) historicist and positivist binary of rational contra irrational.

Some critical observations on the Kantianism of Levi-Strauss’s dialectic and how a ‘formalised in-humanism’ could be extracted from it

“The savage mind totalizes. It claims indeed to go very much further in this direction than Sartre allows dialectical reason, for, on the one hand, the latter lets pure seriality escape (and we have just seen how classificatory systems succeed in incorporating it) and, on the other, it excludes schematization, in which these same systems reach their consummation. In my view, it is in this intransigent refusal on the part of the savage mind to allow anything human (or even living) to remain alien to it, that the real principle of dialectical reason is to be found. But my idea of the latter is very different from Sartre.
“In reading Critique it is difficult to avoid feeling that Sartre vacillates between two conceptions of dialectical reason. Sometimes he opposes dialectical and analytical reason as truth and error, if not as God and the devil, while at other times these two kinds of reason are apparently complementary, different routes to the same truths. The first conception not only discredits scientific knowledge and finally even leads to suggesting the impossibility of a science of biology, it also involves a curious paradox; for the work entitled Critique de la raison dialectique is the result of the author’s exercise of his own analytical reason: he defines, distinguishes, classifies and opposes. This philosophical treatise is no different from the works it examines and with which it engages in discussions, if only to condemn them. It is difficult to see how analytical reason could be applied to dialectical reason and claim to establish it, if the two are defined by mutually exclusive characteristics. The second conception is open to a different objection: if dialectical and analytical reason ultimately arrive at the same results, and if their respective truths merge into a single truth, then, one may ask in what way they are opposed and, in particular, on what grounds the former should be pronounced superior to the latter. Sartre’s endeavour seems contradictory in the one sense and superfluous in the other.
“How is the paradox to be explained, and avoided? Sartre attributes a reality sui generis to dialectical reason in both the hypotheses between which he hesitates. It exists independently of analytical reason, as its antagonist or alternatively its complement. Although in both cases Marx is the point of departure of our thought, it seems to me that the Marxist orientation leads to a different view, namely, that the opposition between the two sorts of reason (analytical and dialectical) is relative, not absolute. It corresponds to a tension within human thought which may persist indefinitely de facto, but which has no basis de jure. In my view dialectical reason is always constitutive: it is the bridge, forever extended and improved, which analytical reason throws out over an abyss; it is unable to see the further shore but it knows that it is there, even should it be constantly receding. The term dialectical reason thus covers the perpetual efforts analytical reason must make to reform itself if it aspires to account for language, society, and thought; and the distinction between the two forms of reason in my view rests only on the temporary gap separating analytical reason from the understanding of life. Sartre calls analytical reason reason in repose; I call the same reason dialectical when it is roused to action, tensed by its efforts to transcend itself.”
–Claude Levi-Strauss, ‘History and Dialectic’ (The Savage Mind)

That dialectical thinking is fundamentally and precisely all about vacillation — envisaging dialectical reason and analytical reason as complementary, and then oppose them to one another as truth and error – is something that is completely lost on Levi-Strauss when he criticises Sartre for his (left-Hegelian) articulation of dialectical thinking by way of such vacillation.

The problem with Sartre’s articulation of dialectical thinking is not this vacillation between analytical reason as the concrete instantiation of dialectical reason as the determinate overcoming of analytical reason, and dialectical reason as the abstraction of such overcoming. In fact, the explication of dialectical reason as such an interplay of the concrete and the abstract, makes such vacillation its lifeblood. The problem, instead, is that this vacillation is orientated in Sartre’s thinking in terms of pure seriality. But even on this count the stress of Levi-Strauss’s criticism of Sartre falls not so much on his conception of pure seriality as on the escape that this pure seriality is meant to be, in my view an unrigorous, articulation of. That, needless to say, leads Levi-Strauss to a conception of dialectical reason, wherein it is not the pure seriality of escape from analytics. Rather, for Levi-Strauss, dialectical reason is destined, in its infinite perpetuation, to yield analytics. He construes the infinition of dialectical reason as the infinite proliferation of infinite analytics or analytical reasons. Thence his conception of the savage mind as one that totalises.

Therefore, the paragraphs excerpted above — which are, in a sense, the crux of Levi-Strauss’s theoretical and philosophical approach – unambiguously demonstrate that his conception of savage mind is not only an anthropologised and ethnicised conception, but is, in the same movement, a kind of Kantian elevation of the same to the status of a metaphysical tribune of pure reason, which is a governmentalising constitutivity of multiple practical reasons by way of adjudicating among them and thus interpellating them into being integral parts (placeholders) of that constitutive governmentality.

It is, therefore, hardly surprising that the dialectical reason Levi-Strauss affirms through his conception of savage mind is — notwithstanding his insistence that its provenance is in Marx – basically Kantian. And this, not surprisingly, compels the French anthropologist to conceptualise or formalise the dialectic as a structure, a deep structure to be precise. Or, how else can one explain Levi-Strauss’s conception of dialectical reason here as an expressivist totality of infinite analytical reasons (or, infinite analytics of finitude)? And this Levi-Straussian conception of structural dialectic is arguably nothing but a reformulation of Kant’s “transcendental dialectic” (in his Critique of Pure Reason), albeit in the discursive locality of ethnology and modern anthropology.

Kant’s “transcendental dialectic” is a formalised dialectic, wherein the dialectic is grasped in its abstraction and thus conceptually rendered a transcendental or a priori structure and form that is expressed in and by an infinite multiplicity of concrete practices and their respectively specific practical reasons. Here we can clearly see how Kant’s transcendental conception of the dialectic – not unlike Levi-Strauss’s structural dialectic — renders it a govermentalising, adjudicatory metaphysical tribune of pure reason vis-à-vis an infinite multiplicity of practical reasons that are, therefore, mutually relativised analytics precisely on account of being mutually articulated.

That is so because Kant does not grasp practical reason (or analytic) as the effect of the noumenon (thing-in-itself) as the determinate excess of the horizon of relationality. Rather, for Kant, the noumenon becomes the basis for envisaging a new order of relationality among multiple practical reasons because in his eyes there is an ontological similitude among all of them precisely because those multiple practical reasons in their difference determinately express the noumenon (thing-in-itself) as the excess of the horizon of relationality. Therefore, it’s not for nothing that speculative materialist Quentin Meillasoux sees Kant as a figure of Ptolemiac counter-revolution, not Copernican revolution, in western philosophy. The noumenon is precisely that which cannot be inscribed within the horizon of relationality – or the symbolic order — that it nevertheless founds in the process of effectuating itself as the determinate presentation of void of the horizon of relationality, or the symbolic order. Kant’s philosophical move is counter-revolutionary in that he thinks the noumenon only, however, to conceptually articulate it by privileging its effect over itself as its own instantiation.

The fundamental philosophical kinship between Kant’s “transcendental dialectic” and Levi-Strauss’s structural dialectic shows, among other things, why the latter’s attempt to articulate a critique of ethnology, as a discourse complicit in the colonial enterprise, by way of developing the discipline of structural anthropology ends up as a heroic failure. Thanks to his Kantian conception of the dialectic as an ahistorical, and thus metaphysical, structure, the ethics of Levi-Strauss’s anthropological critique of colonialism is unable to develop a political register for articulating itself. In fact, his Kantian conception of the dialectic as an ahistorical deep structure does not allow his ethicality of critique to move beyond its moral registration. And that, not surprisingly, once again restores the colonial civiliser, albeit this time around as the benevolent anthropologist-tribune, who is now there to enforce the moral law of mutual respect between the savage and the civilized (or the raw and the cooked) by way of instituting the structuralist epistemological project of relativism in order to conscientise the latter.

In this context, it must be said that Levi-Strauss’s conception of the dialectic as an a priori deep structure, not unlike Kant’s “transcendental dialectic” with which it has a fundamental philosophical affinity, amounts to what Hegel called “bad infinity”. The “bad infinity” of Levi-Strauss’s structural dialectic derives, not unlike Kant’s “transcendental dialectic”, from it being transcendental in its infinite totality. That does not, however, imply that we take recourse to Hegelian, or for that matter Sartre’s left-Hegelian, “good infinity” as the way to critique and break with this Kantian/Levi-Straussian bad infinity. For, this Hegelian – or left-Hegelian – “good infinity” is nothing but transcendental bad infinity by other means. By introducing history as the unfolding of the geist – or an expressivist, quasi-materialist human ontology in case of the left-Hegelians – all such good infinity amounts to is transformation of infinite totality of transcendental bad infinity into infinite totalisatiion.

What we need to do, instead, in order to rigorously critique and break with the transcendental bad infinity of Kant, and the Kantian Levi-Strauss, is to think the Hegelian good infinity in its extreme. This Hegelian conception of good infinity, a la the quasi-historical dialectic of Hegel, admittedly enables the envisioning of the historical dialectic by providing what is, in essence, still an ahistorical dialectic with the appearance of epochal motion. And while that can, and often is, dangerously deceptive because the repetition of the ahistorical structural dialectic now has the appearance of historical motion and epochal change, it also opens the way, as it did for Marx, to think it in its longee-duree, and thus in its extreme, so that its appearance of the structure-exceeding historical motion becomes its own immanent thinking, rendering that historical motion and the attendant epochal change real, and not merely apparent. This thinking-in-the-extreme, it must be stated here, is not something that has to be forcibly interpolated into this quasi-historical dialectic. Rather, the very fact that the transcendental or formal dialectic now has a historical appearance, renders Hegel’s quasi-historical dialectic — his so-called good infinity — something that virtually calls out to be thought in the extreme, and thus against its own grain. After all, the shift that is effected, from infinite totality of transcendental bad infinity of the Kantian dialectic to infinite totalisation (repeat totalisation) of the so-called good infinity of the Hegelian dialectic, shows that totality is no longer an accomplished a priori fact but is a project that one has to perpetually seek to accomplish through a perpetual process of totalisation. Clearly, the a priori, and thus teleology, of infinite totality continues to persist but now as a schizz, a crisis: it opens itself up precisely in closing itself.

To get a sense of what thinking Hegel’s good infinity — or his quasi-historical dialectic — in the extreme amounts to, we might do well to attend to the following excerpt from Fredric Jameson’s The Hegel Variations:
“…the form of of the syllogism can also be useful if we focus attention, not on its results or conclusions, but rather on that ‘middle term’ shared by both subject and predicate–a kind of Hoelderlinian primordial unity, from which…both terms emerge and to which they strain to return at the end of the logical process. Even these examples, however, suggest yet a further lesson, namely the need to stress an open-ended Hegel rather than the conventionally closed system which is projected by so many idle worries about Absolute Spirit, about totality, or about Hegel’s allegedly teleological philosophy of history.
“Indeed, the doctrine of the middle term suggests a very different Hegel who may serve as a corrective to the traditional ones: this is the Maoist Hegel proposed by Alain Badiou, in which the metaphysical spirit is expansive rather than centripetal or cyclical. Here the central dialectical movement is identified as One dividing into Two, and it is clearly quite distinct from those figures that emphasize (for example) the return of consciousness into itself….”

Clearly, this move of brushing Hegelian (and left-Hegelian) “good infinity” against its grain, also, at once, does the same to the transcendental bad infinity of Kant and Levi-Strauss. Such against-the-grain reading of transcendental bad infinity – which is concomitant with the thinking-in-extreme of the so-called good infinity of Hegel – will amount to an affirmation, not of some new good infinity against bad, but an immanentist bad infinity in radical antagonism to both the transcendental bad infinity of Kant and such Kantians as Levi-Strauss, and the good infinity of Hegel.

This immanentist bad infinity, which is immanentist in an active practical-materialist sense, is the infinity of remainder and/or excess. More rigorously and precisely, it’s the infinity of determinate production of void vis-à-vis the horizon of relationality or symbolic order in its concrete mediations. This is, therefore, not escape as Sartrean pure seriality but is, instead, a leap that seeks to suspend precisely such seriality that is merely the obverse of the bounded seriality of Kant’s transcendental dialectic (or Levi-Strauss’s structural dialectic), or, for that matter, the seeming open-endedness of the Hegelian geist in its historical unfolding. This immanentist bad infinity is a conception of nowness or finitude in its uninterrupted infinition. This immanentist bad infinity, or finite-infinity — the transfinite in Badiou’s Cantorian set-theoretic terms – is “infinite thought” in radical and thus unpunctuated antagonism, not only to the infinite totality of transcendental bad infinity of Kant (and Levi-Strauss) and so-called good infinity of Hegel; it’s also in radical antagonism to the phenomenological and/or deconstructive conceptions of practice of infinite finitudes. In the latter, the suspension of infinite totality/infinite totalisation is thought as the difference of the “a-whileness” (Heidegger) of finitude as an interiorised and thus phenomenologically-reduced experience.

In radical contrast to that, the immanentist bad infinity — which late Althusser variously conceptualised, by way of a protracted detour through Greek atomism, Lucretius, Machiavelli, Spinoza and even Heidegger, as “transcendental contingency”, “necessity of contingency” and so on – is the remainder or excess (as the determinate production or presentation of void) as the institution of its own duration and historicity.

This immanentist bad infinity — which stands affirmed in breaking with transcendental bad infinity of Kant by brushing it against its grain in the process of thinking the Hegelian good infinity in the extreme – is also a reading-against-the grain of Kant’s formalised “transcendental dialectic”. So, this immanentist bad infinity, as an against-the-grain reading of Kant’s formalised dialectic (and thus of Levi-Strauss’s Kantian structural dialectic too), is an envisioning and articulation of the dialectic as the limit-form of the ontological excess of both the dialectic itself as an abstracted structure, and the individualised hypostasis of concrete practical reasons that in being hypostatised thus mediate into being the dialectic as that abstracted structure.

This conception of the dialectic as limit-form of ontological excess, as opposed to the formalisation and abstraction of the dialectic into a transcendental structure as in Kant (and Levi-Strauss), is what Badiou terms “formalised in-humanism” in his The Century. Badiou’s “formalised in-humanism” is, unlike in traditional epistemology, not an identity between the form or concept, and its object of “in-humanism”. Rather, as the term demonstrates through its fraught lexical and semantic appearance, it’s meant to articulate the form or concept of precisely the impossibility of formalisation or conceptualisation. And, for Badiou, this impossibility in being an active occurring – a “taking-place” – is the Real in its human-exceeding in-humanity. In other words, Badiou’s “formalised in-humanism” – which is our immanentist bad infinity in and against the transcendental good infinity of Kant’s formalised dialectic – is an allegorical conceptual figure of constellated construction of transindividualised ontological excess. This would be nothing save the truth of the absent-cause – the a priori of no a priori as it were – in its forcing.

An observation on why Spinoza’s conception of the ethical is materialist

“We see that this natural Divine law does not demand the performance of ceremonies—that is, actions in themselves indifferent, which are called good from the fact of their institution, or actions symbolizing something profitable for salvation, or (if one prefers this definition) actions of which the meaning surpasses human understanding. The natural light of reason does not demand anything which it is itself unable to supply, but only such as it can very clearly show to be good, or a means to our blessedness. Such things as are good, simply because they have been commanded or instituted, or as being symbols of something good, are mere shadows which cannot be reckoned among actions that are the offspring, as it were, or fruit of a sound mind and intellect.”
–Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise

A rather obvious reading of the above passage would be to see it as a version of the fantasy of pure reason. But then we could also follow in Macherey and Althusser’s ‘Spinozist’ footsteps and read this quite differently. Spinoza’s god is the singularity of being and reason — a la the Spinozist conatus. His conatus or being can, therefore, be construed as the uninterruptedly, as opposed to sequentially, continuous excess of symbols that are deposited in and as the determinate moments constitutive of precisely this infinitely excessive, and thus dispersive and non-teleological movement, and which as those symbolic deposits tend to acquire a life of their own by getting instituted as commands (or, as Spinoza would say, human laws). That Spinoza conceives of being as a willing-knowing singularity becomes evident if we follow, later in this text, his explication of god as the concomitance of willing of things that come to comprise the world and the knowledge of those things.

Read in this manner, this Spinozist ‘version of the fantasy of pure reason’ can be envisaged, as it indeed is by Althusserians, as a theoretical mode to ground the practice of ideology-critique, which as that practice is derived from Marx’s articulation of his dialectical method as the theory of critique of political economy. Following Marx, who adopted Hegel’s dialectic only to see it precisely as the inverted reflection of the antagonism to the dialectic itself, Althusserians, particularly Macherey, would read ideology — which Althusser quite correctly characterised as the movement of its own displacement — as the image, or symptom, of its own absence, void or impossibility. And this is an approach that can arguably be read off Spinoza, including from his unambiguous suggestion here that “symbols of something good, are mere shadows” of that good.

The reason why Spinoza is open to such a reading is possibly because his thinking of being a la conatus — which for him is also, at once, “the offspring, as it were, or fruit of a sound mind and intellect” — precludes the need for it to be the ground for some kind of a moral law. In Kant, on the other hand, we have the moral law kick in as retroactive rationalisation (read metaphysicalisation) — and thus prospective regimentation — of multiple instantiations of pure reason as practical reason.

Some random and provisional thoughts on Marxian conceptions of production

Production as in capitalist production is, pace Marx, always immaterial. That value, as the realisation of production, is, in Marx, objective and thus immaterial proves that. Materiality would then reside only in the singularity/singularisation of destructive creation, as opposed to and in subtraction from creative destruction that is condemned to be productive. Hence, production, following the Marx of Althusser, is an effect of its own displacement and excess, and thus a symptom of its own negation, or better, absencing. Not for nothing does Marx see the recomposition of social relations of production — or the change/increase in the organic composition of capital — in terms of the liberation of developed productive forces from social relations of production that can no longer contain them. Therefore, the so-called productive forces, when seen in the longee-duree of their action, reveal themselves for what they are — active forces of transformative destruction in their reactive rendition. It’s only by grasping productive forces in this fashion can one think practice in its anti-historicist immanence in and against capital, which is the realisation of the abstraction of historicist thought. In such circumstances, radical transformation — transformation as novelty as opposed to transformation as mere change — can neither be the Hegelian circle of movement that seeks to neurotically conceal the brokenness of its own circularity, nor, for that matter, can it be the circle of Nietzschean/poststructuralist repetition, which is merely the obverse of Hegelianism because it openly embraces the brokenness of the circle and makes the broken circle into a virtue. [The circularity of Hegel’s dialectic is broken, and thus neurotic, because his dialectic is about the negation of the concretely realised absolute as already always being the historically concrete realisation of the absolute. This is what Hegel’s conception of employed negativity — negativity that is always already productively employed — basically amounts to.] In such circumstances, radical transformation can only be the ceaseless indivisibility of Spinozist extension — the conception of conatus at work in Spinoza’s thinking — that amounts to the suspension of both the Hegelian circle and its poststructuralist (‘repetitive’) obverse.

However, some astute Hegelian Marxists (Adorno. Moishe Postone and Zizek particularly come to mind) — to give them their radical due — think the schizz in Hegelian thinking in its extreme by mobilising the brokenness of Hegelian circularity against precisely the Hegelian circle itself in order to emancipate the former from the latter. For instance, Adorno’s conception of the dialectic in terms of its negativity shows us the way forward on how to think negativity (of the dialectic) in and as its own presentation, and thus as affirmative excess of the dialectic. His conception of “negative dialectics” — and constellation — demonstrates how one can think the dialectic as a mode of presentation of its own negativity. As a result, it is aligned, as it were, with a way of thinking the dialectic that sees and demonstrates it as the mode of presentation of the determinate excess and voiding of precisely the dialectic itself as an abstraction. Such articulation, or thinking, of the dialectic in terms of its excessive and antagonistic asymmetry is what renders it materialist. That is arguably why Pierre Macherey, a faithfully committed Althusserian-Marxist, reads Adorno’s concept of “negative dialectics” affirmatively as an elaboration of the Spinozist conception of conatus — the ceaseless indivisibility of extension –, albeit one that is articulated in and through the discursive register of Hegelian-Marxism. Which is why, one is compelled to ask, how much of Hegel there really is in such ‘Hegelian’ thinking? Is this not a way that even as it indisputably passes through Hegel takes us to his antipodes? And is this way, in being more Hegelian than Hegel, not already something entirely different? After all, this Adornoesque move to mobilise the brokenness of Hegelian circularity against precisely the Hegelian circle itself in order to emancipate the former from the latter transforms the former into a quality that is radically distinct from that of brokenness-of-the-circle. This new quality is nothing but Spinoza’s conatus as the ceaseless indivisibility of extension — this is also how Marx thought “real history” as the infinity of beginnings in their ceaseless indivisibility. Hence, one feels prompted to ask, together with Macherey, “Hegel or Spinoza”? And answer with him; Spinoza of course; but the Spinoza who comes to us through Hegel and after him

Criticise with weapons even as you wield the weapon of criticism, but don’t mix the two up

That our wielding of the weapon of criticism does not exhaust and preclude the task of criticising with weapons is something Marx says in his A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Needless to say, old chap Karl is right on the mark. But through this formulation of his, Marx is also clearly drawing our attention to the fact that the weapon of criticism and criticism with weapons are two different levels of abstraction of the indivisible real movement of the universalisability of the singular. And in revealing that real movement in and through its two different levels of abstraction, Marx is asking us, his readers, to be attentive to the fact that the indivisibility of the movement – precisely that which renders such movement real — from one level of abstraction to the other does not mean those levels stand conflated. Clearly, one cannot have criticism with weapons at the level that is constitutive of the wielding of the weapon of criticism, even as the movement from the one to the other has to be uninterrupted for it to be real. The respective discursive specificities that operationalise through inscription the different activitities of criticism (which are singularities in and as those different activities) of respectively different discursivised rationalities must be attended to, and maintained in and as their difference, for them to retain their respective singularity. This, needless to say, is not a blow for local ideology formation and discursive rationalities. It’s precisely meant to be a critique of such local ideology formation, albeit obviously in the specificity of the local. The universality of such singularities is, therefore, clearly not about rendering them mutually conflatable, and thus replaceable, which would amount to their de-singularisation.

Such universal-singular is, instead, a movement constituted in and by the unlapsed indivisibility of different moments of criticism (as activity) of respectively different discursive rationalities. These different moments of activities of determinate criticism of different discursive rationalities (read ideologies) are nothing but different moments of performativity of differing away from different identities. This is precisely what many of our comrades — who have fallen into the easy but extremely damaging habit of getting drunk on Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feurbach without any sense of how one is supposed to drink this potion — miss when they seek to drag criticism with weapons on to the level of the weapon of criticism. The result: ad-hominem attack on producers of ‘rightwing’ philosophical, scientific and aesthetic works passing itself off as polemical criticism of their works. As a consequence, what the weapon of criticism amounts to, in such circumstances when it stands conflated with criticising with weapons, is throwing out the baby of such theoretical, scientific and aesthetic thinking and production with the bathwater of what the practitioners of such thinking and/or producers of such theoretical, scientific and aesthetic works would have their engagement in such practice yield. So, ad-hominem attacks on producers of such works on account of their politics as thinkers, scientists, artists is extended seamlessly to the politics of the process of theoretical and/or aesthetic production they are engaged in. Hence, the labeling, and rejectionist abuse of such theoretical and artistic work — without any attempt to dialectically separate such work as the instantiation of the process of its production that renders the work text from the work per se in its asserted completeness — has become de rigueur at the level of abstraction constitutive of the weapon of criticism.

Of course, there cannot be any dispute that the task constitutive of the level of abstraction of weapon of criticism is to inquire into how a particular theoretical, scientific, or aesthetic practice (and thus process of production) produces the ontic effects it does to dialectically brush the former against the latter in order to reclaim it in, as and for itself. That is what Althusser’s class struggle in philosophy – or Marx’s wielding of the weapon of criticism at the theoretical level of abstraction it is constitutive of – arguably amounts to. However, that, contrary to the widespread assumption among comrades, is not at all the same as judging such theoretical, scientific, and/or aesthetic practices (or processes of production) by the effects or the ontic violence they produce. In other words, while class struggle in philosophy – or Adorno’s theoretical moment of class struggle – is all about figuring out the particular articulation of theoretical, scientific, and/or aesthetic practice (or process of production) that produces a certain kind of effect or ontic violence, it’s certainly not about rejecting theoretical, scientific, and/or aesthetic works that when grasped as such effects are rendered thinkable as instantiators of those theoretical, scientific, and/or aesthetic practices (or processes of production) in the specificity of their concrete articulations.

In short, while a theorist/philosopher, scientist and/or artist must be criticised with weapons – i.e. shot – for politically practising and purveying the violent and oppressive ontic effects they produce a la their rightwing discourses; those discourses as instantiations of theoretical/philosophical, scientific, and/or aesthetic practices (or processes of production) cannot be labelled rightwing, counter-revolutionary, status-quoist philosophy, science and/or art, and thus junked into the waste-bin of history. Rather, they should, as mentioned above, be engaged in the internality or immanence of their practices, or processes of production. This, in order to grasp their incompleteness, and lapse of rigour, that leads them to produce the violent, reactionary, status-quoist ontic effects they do. For, without such engagement — and their rejection would amount precisely to a refusal to engage with them in their processual internality – theoretical, scientific, and/or aesthetic practice will always remain open to such lapse of rigour, and thus also to the politically pernicious consequences concomitant with such lapse. And being a card-carrying radical is absolutely no guarantee that one will not be the locus of such lapse of rigour in theoretical, scientific and/or aesthetic practices (or processes of production). History has, time and time again, demonstrated that.

Therefore, in order to be a committed militant of revolutionary transformation one must be committed to the actuality of the real movement in its indivisible unfolding from the level of abstraction of the weapon of criticism to the level of abstraction of criticism with weapons, precisely by maintaining their separation from one another as two distinct levels of abstraction. A committed militant would, therefore, be one who makes himself/herself constantly aware that while there are thinkers/philosophers, scientists, and/or artists, who are rightwing, reactionary and/or status-quoist, there is or can be no rightwing theory/philosophy (better philosophising), science, and/or art. For instance, Heidegger and Schmitt, and Pirandello and the Italian Futurists were, as philosopher-individuals and artist-individuals, part of rightwing political projects in their respective countries (Nazism in Germany, Fascism in Italy). But that does not, therefore, make their philosophising/thinking and writing rightwing as such. Rather, what we need to figure is how and why do they have their philosophising and aesthetic production construe themselves as things that seamlessly blends with the reactionary political projects they participate in as philosopher-individuals and artist-individuals. That, presumably, is how one ought to also approach the ‘relationship’ between anti-communist and/or anti-working-class politics of such Indian writers and poets as Nirmal Verma, Ajneya, Ashok Vajpeyi, Kunwar Narayan, Satinath Bhaduri and O.V. Vijayan and their literary production.

Not surprisingly, the absence of such awareness among most militant comrades has ended up making their practice an integral part of the pernicious political logic that they seek to destroy and which is supposedly affirmed only by their opponents, who claim that the theoretical and artistic works they produce exhaust the task of criticism in its entirety by having the level of abstraction of criticism with weapons – or the singularising moment respective to that level of abstraction — disappear into the level of abstraction of the weapon of criticism. [Of course, the militant task even here is to make sense of this lack of awareness in supposedly militant political practices in terms of its material basis.] This, then, amounts to a reinforcement of the constitutive duality of “party of philosophy” and “party of practice” that Marx had criticised in the Introduction to his ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ in order to break with it.

Pragmatism and theoreticism – notwithstanding the appearance of their unmitigated enmity with one another and, in fact, precisely on account of such ‘enmity’ – are essentially the same. They are a constitutive diremption; a disjunctive synthesis. Revolution, or communism, can, in such circumstances, be nothing else but a movement that is real. And a movement will be real only when it’s a movement of breaking with this constitutive duality – this disjunctive synthesis – of pragmatism and theoreticism. Hence, a movement is a real movement only when it constitutes itself through abolishing, resisting and precluding the suture of the level of abstraction of criticism with weapons (the level of practice, wherein practice is the instantiation of its own immanent thought) with the level of abstraction of weapon of criticism (the level of philosophy, wherein thought is its own practice of thinking). As the Swiss-German writer Robert Walser put so acutely: “Everything at its proper time. So, fighting and throwing stones at its, and good intentions at its. It’s important to know every side.”

Why a Marx-Inspired Materialist Historiography cannot Afford to be Historicist and yet it often is

A historically determinist (or hitoricist) historiography takes root when the line shifts from construing the discursive inscription of the immanent forces of history-as-movement as their limit, to making sense of such inscription as teleology. It’s this historical determinism as Marxism — which is arguably the result of reading Marx as if he was Hegel than retroactively read Hegel as Marx (i.e. read Hegel against his grain) — that has been the stageist bane of Marxist political interventions in the so-called non-European societies such as ours. The result: Marxist political discourse in the tropics has become a discourse tailor-made for the legitimation of the ideology of liberalism that can ‘survive’ and ‘succeed’ only by instituting its own materiality, which in this late capitalist conjuncture can, paradoxically, be nothing save neoliberalism.

All politico-ideological pleas of formal equality — all leftist struggles to win various violated or un-enforced juridical rights amounts precisely to that — can today succeed only by reinforcing the exchange-principle, and its basis in value-relations as the qualitative equalisation of qualitative differences through their quantitative differentiation. This would mean the reinforcement of value-relations through reinforcement of exchange-relations in their increasing precarity. And since this increasing precarity of value-relations would, in being reinforced, still be animated by the realisation or expression of value as qualitative equalisation in and through quantitative differentiation, such reinforcement of value-relations in its increasing precarity can only amount to increasing oppressiveness. The neurotic simultaneity of oppression and resistance — which is manifest in our current society and polity as the hegemony of competitive identity politics and lobby politics (both in their secular and so-called pre/non-secular forms) — is evidence of that.

In such circumstances, if one reads the Marx of Capital, in terms of his Afterword to the Second German Edition of Volume I, one will clearly see how Marx reverse-shifts the line, as it were, from teleology to limit, in his reading of history. That, arguably, is what his materialist operation on the Hegelian dialectic — the extraction of the rational kernel (of the dialectic) from its mystical shell (of a prioiri orientation) in his famous, and by now much-abused, words — amounts to. This is precisely the moment of Marx’s complete liberation from historicism. It’s this that gives us the Late Marx, who speaks affirmatively, for instance, of the ‘pre-capitalist’ Russian mir as the germ of a possible Russian road of historical development that could bypass capitalism, which for historical determinists was/is a necessary and un-bypassable milestone.

What does this non-teleological historiographical approach of Late Marx — which comes out of his explication of the logic of historical development in its bare and abstract form in Capital — amount to? It means the incompleteness of capital at particular spatio-temporal locations, once capital has come into being anywhere or everywhere else, is already an integral part of capital. Thus, struggles even at those locations that have the discursive appearance of pre-capitalism must be against capital. Which is to say, those struggles have to seek to abolish all teleology, including their own that will be imposed on them as their respective limits by their respective determinate locations. In terms of a philosophy of history, it means one approach each and every moment of history as being internally divided or schizzed between two temporalities — that of contingency and necessity (or, difference-as-differing-away and difference-as-identity). More precisely, it means every moment of history is an internal division between the time of form in and as its contingent instantiation (event) and the time of form as the concrete mediation of its structuring or being-placed. Walter Benjamin adumbrates precisely this as the historical materialist approach to historiography in his ‘Theses on Philosophy of History’, particularly theses V, VI and VII.

One should, however, have no qualms in admitting that even Late Marx’s historical vision is haunted by a tension between historicism and non-teleological history. Considering that Marx envisaged his critique of historicism (the Hegelian dialectic) — as any seriously radical and profoundly engaged critic ought to – from within such historicism, his battle against historicism is always conducted under the ineluctable shadow of the latter.

Marx’s constant endeavour in Capital is to show how capital — which is nothing but historicism in concrete action — is, in its, objectivity, a moving contradiction and thus constitutively neurotic. That is because Capital shows how commodity, which is the basic unit of capital (capital in its cell-form), is an objective demonstration of itself as the mobilisation of its own immanent critique or negativity — what with commodity being qualitative difference that is use-value in its sheer bodily form embodying or phenomenalising its own negation, which is value as the substance of qualitative equalisation. We can, in other words, say that capital for Marx is qualitative differences or use-values and their respectively singular concrete labours in their limit. But precisely in not being recognised in their limit, use-values are rendered neurotic commodities, wherein use-values in their qualitatively different (or singular) bodily forms embody, in and as the equivalent pole of an exchange-relation or value-form, the substance of qualitative equalisation (value) that is their negation as singularities.

As a result, the conception of limit – which belongs to a rigorously materialist historiography – would, in Marx, often find itself encoded in the historicist language, and, at times, even conception, of destiny and inevitability. The most infamous example on that count is the little that Marx wrote on the Latin America of his times. Be that as it may, we ought to read such ‘Eurocentric’ articulations of Marx, pace Jose Arico, as the exception to the rule of materialist historiography that is definitively posed, if not also instituted, by the approach that Marx’s Capital articulates.

In such circumstances, it would not — and should not — at all be an anathema for a Marx-inspired materialist historiography to deal with questions of culture, consciousness and mentalite as a history of phenomenology of difference. But where it would differ from both the established historigraphes of culture, consciousness and mentalite on one hand; and the equally canonised historically determinist historigraphy of the so-called Marxist historians from South Asia on the other, is in its demonstration of how such differences (as subjective experiences) are both themselves and already always their own limit, and thus subsumption into regimes of necessity. It’s in this sense that a radical Marxist historiographer could – in fact, necessarily should — draw as much from the historiographies of culture, consciousness and mentalite as from the various strains of determinist ‘Marxist’ historiography. For, only in drawing from both these kinds of historiography – by thinking difference and its subsumption together, but in their separateness — will he/she be able to complete the incomplete materialism that orients both those historiographical approaches. This rigorously comprehensive materialist historiography — which is exemplified by the historiographical practices of such rarely found historians as C.L.R. James (in Black Jacobins), Timothy Mason and Arno J. Mayer — is a synthesis of both the aforementioned historiographical approaches. And in being such a synthesis the materialist historiography in question breaks with the historiographical horizon constitutive of this duality.

Between Left-Hegelian Anthropology and Marx’s Materialist Dialectic: Some Random Observations on C.L.R. James

The transfer of philosophical categories to political practice in an immediate kind of way is one of C.L.R. James’s key theoretical proposals in Notes on Dialectics. He clearly states as much in the third paragraph of page 17 of the book: “Let us transfer this [the categories] to the labor movement. (These transfers are rough but Hegel intended them to be made. That is precisely what logic is, an algebra, but an algebra in constant movement.) ‘Categories’ of the labor movement are, I repeat, union, reformist party, reformist international, revolutionary party, revolutionary international, etc.” This proposal and insistence to transfer philosophical categories to political practice in an immediate kind of way is, I would argue, typical of the Left-Hegelian modality of “contemplative materialism” that Marx criticised in Feurbach’s critique of Hegel. This immediate way of transferring philosophical categories into political practice renders the dialectic a methodological foundation — which is no more than the obverse of dialectic as a (metaphysical) system in Hegel. This, I must say once again, is not the break that the materialist dialectic amounts to. The materialist dialectic, if I allow myself another repetition, is dialectic as the determinate presentation of its asymmetry, which is to say, the dialectic as the determinate presentation of the excess of itself as an abstracted structure. In other words, thinking the dialectic in materialist terms is to think it as an image of the actuality of its own asymmetry. It is to think dialectic as an image of “dialectics at a standstill” (Benjamin). In that context, the modality of the dialectic as a methodological foundation means, among other things, that one does not grasp knowledge as the limit-form of practice (knowledge as praxis in its limit on account of its determinate condition) but rather grasps knowledge as the realisation of practice or praxis. In fact, in this instance, practice and praxis stand conflated. It must also be mentioned here that the algebraic modeling of movement – something that James, as an avowed follower of Hegel, proposes here – is yet another instance that shows how knowledge is, for him, supposed to be grasped as the realisation of practice and not as the latter’s limit-form.

It is for this reason that one critically terms this, following Marx of The German Ideology and Theses on Feurbach, “contemplative materialism”. The only difference between this modality of contemplative-materialist thinking and practice, and that of Hegelian dialectical idealism is that while in the latter practice is realisation of knowledge (the infinity of the geist grasped in and as its finite concrete realization), in the former knowledge is grasped and envisaged in terms of realisation of practice. In either case, knowledge is not seen as the interruption of praxis on account of its determinateness. What merely happens is that from the a priori idea or geist of the latter the locus of ontological expressivity shifts to the historically concrete human agency of practice and the thinking of practice by its historically particular human agency in the former. The result of this shift of the ontological locus of expressivity from a priori idea to a historically concrete practice in terms of how it’s thought by its historically concrete human agency is no more than the radicalisation of the successive continuity of movement that is capital. And what this radicalisation of the successively continuous movement basically amounts to in terms of politics is no more than continuous democratisation of value-relation being mistaken for the real movement in its uninterruptedness, which should actually amount to the suspension of the logic of value-relation itself, and not its continuous democratisation. That James tends to oscillate from one to the other — the real real movement and the mistaken real movement — is often evident in his directly programmatic political writings. We come across this oscillation of James in, for example, ‘Every Cook Can Govern’, particularly when tries to demonstrate how the form of direct democracy as practised in the Athens of classical antiquity is the almost fully-developed political form of revolutionary democracy that socialism is supposed to replicate.

Therefore, in this mode of thinking there is no attempt to grasp a determinate historical practice in terms of its own immanent thought by detaching it from the sense it acquires in the thought of the historically concrete human agency or agentic-subject that, from the perspective of such “practical-materialist” (Marx’s words) modality of thinking practice, would merely be the historical index and anthropological register of its determinate instantiation.as praxis (practice as its own immanent thought in action). Clearly, this particular modality of thinking practice — wherein a historically concrete practice is thought necessarily only in terms of the sense it is given by its historically concrete agentic-subject — has its basis in an expresivist-ontological conception. And it’s due to this particular modality of upholding the centrality of practice that such thinking is arguably termed “contemplative materialism”. That is precisely the reason why both Hegelianism and such Left-Hegelianism, which has as one of its foundational proposals the immediate transfer of philosophical categories to political practice, inhabit the the same Hegelian idealist paradigm as the obverse of one another. And that is precisely why the difference in the respective political practices they generate is the difference between liberal-conservatism and radical republicanism and/or social democracy. A difference, if I I am allowed to be telegraphic here, objectively amounts to little in this late capitalist or neoliberal conjuncture.

Of course, I’m not saying that this expressivist thinking of the dialectic as a trans-epochal method is all that there is to Notes on Dialectics. The work is choc-a-block with many many brilliant insights into what the ‘structure’ of dialectical thinking as a rigorous articulation of materialism amounts to. Here is one from Part II of the book: “In reading on ‘Quality’ in the ‘Doctrine of Being’, Lenin writes in very large writing:

“LEAP

“This obviously hit him hard. He wanted it stuck down in his head, to remember it, always. He makes a note on it as follows:

“At the basis of the concept of gradualness of emergence lies the idea that the emerging is already sensuously or really in existence, only on account of its smallness not yet perceptible and likewise with the concept of the gradualness of disappearance.”

Now this acute observation of James’s unambiguously indicates that humanity as fully realised sensuousness can be generic only in its construction, and not in the Left-Hegelian (mainly Feurbachian) humanist sense of being an a priori expressivist ontology and/or the dialectic as a transhistorical methodological ground. This observation of James shows that if one is faithful to Marx, especially the Marx of Capital and Grundrisse, one can never think of the dialectic as a method, much less as a system. Fredric Jameson too says as much in the opening essays of his book, ‘Valences of the Dialectic’. Instead, one has to think of the dialectic, as Marx clearly does in his ‘Afterword to the Second German Edition’ of Capital, Volume I, as the presentation of precisely the determinate excess of itself as an abstracted structure. Hence, the dialectic, when one is in strict fidelity to the Marx of Capital, is not symmetrical, something that both Hegel through the neurosis of his dialectical thinking, and his apparent Left-Hegelians and/or Marxist-Humanist overturners would insist. It is, rather, asymmetrical and thus materialist.

It’s because of such keen insights into the materialist nature of the dialectic in Marx (and Lenin) that I like this book by James, even as I wonder; why then does he continue, more often than not, to swing towards a kind of Marxist-Humanism. After all, it’s not for nothing that James chooses to concentrate on Hegel’s Logic, and not Phenomenology.

Yet, there is no denying his oscillation between that and a Left-Hegelian-type expressivist dialectical anthropology. Therefore, for all its brilliant and lucid insights into the structure and nature of the materialist dialectic, this work by James does not, for me, constitute a decisive break with the Left-Hegelian, expressivist articulation of dialectics,. The former, as far as I am concerned, is in James’s thinking tainted by the latter. It is, therefore, no accident that James described himself as a Marxist-Humanist.