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Nathan Brown need to think the category of the class into a class which is not working. And we need to conceive of this transitional character of the class as internal to its we encounter under conditions of real subsumption that obtain relatively late in the al and managerial innovations that tendentially render living labor relatively superfluous. ss of its initial constitution, the category of the proletariat is already riven by internal contradictions. Marx describes the of divorcing “the worker from the 6 expropriation is punctuated by “moments when great masses of men are suddenly stence, and hurled onto the labour market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians.” 7 Here we can think through the limits of Marx’s definition by turning to counter-Caliban and the Witch: The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of primitive accumulation...was not simply d concentration of exploitable workers and capital. It was also an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as ‘race’ and age, became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat. 8 While Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation focuses upon the production of landless wage laborers through expropriation, Federici focuses upon the conditions , and thus upon the subjugation of women’s labor and women’s reproductive function that was ce of the so-called “working class.” Of course, this subjugation involved the exclusion of women from waged work, and 6 Ibid., 874-875. 7 Ibid., 876. 8 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), 63-64. 63 Nathan Brown mobile, transatlantic, motley and multiethnic, planetary in its origins, motions, and consciousness. It was often unwaged, forced to perform the unpaid labors of of the process of primitive accumulation itself. This last point is crucial: the proletarian class is not only constituted as a of expropriation; rather, the labor of expropriation is already performed by unwaged to the constitution of the proletariat. Referri Hewers and drawers performed the fundamental labors of expropriation that have usually been taken for granted by historians. Expropriation itself, for example, is treated as a given: the field is before the plowing starts; the city is before the laborer begins the working day. Likewise for long-distance trade: the port is before the ship sets sail from it; the plantation is before the slave cultivates its land. The commodities of commerce seem to transport themselves. Finally, reproduction is assumed to be the transhistorical function of the family. The result is that the hewers of wood and drawers of water have been invisible, anonymous, and forgotten, even though they transformed the face of the Earth by building the infrastructure of ‘civilization.’ 14 We can only grasp the significance of this history if we understand the proletariat as a class in transition rather than as a class with a stable historical identity. Once again, the proletariat never stable or cohesive as a class: it is always already divided in and tution. Through the analysis of primitive The Many Headed Hydra or and through historical and theoretical work on the tendential production of surplus populations by Mike Davis or Aaron Benanav, we can thus recognize that “the class of the proletariat with a very limited, been done to this effect that this point another: why is “the proletariat” still the right term for grappling with these conceptual and structural consequences? It is important to note, in this respect, that Fecontinue to rely upon this term, even as To recapitulate, the historical and stru 1) the proletariat is not a stable historical entity or class identity, but rather a class in transition 14 Ibid., 42. 65 Nathan Brown different forms of exploitation, no way of getting a conceptual grip on their differential logics or histories. Indeed, the problem with the opposition between the it has no historytories like those of Federici or Linebaugh rough the differential constitution of the and the violent subjugation of women’s The Communist Horizon, Jodi Dean makes the curious suggestion that the term “proletariat” be replaced by the term “the people as the rest of us”—the to what was called the 99%. 16 that an emphasis on the people as the rest of us can do the work formerly done by 17 According to Dean, “We are the 99% names an appropriation, a ve desire for equality and justice, for a change in the conditions through which the 1% seizes the bulk of what is common for themselves, leaving the 99% with the remainder.” 18 and justice: this is precisely the discourse and the form of thought that Marx attacks The Critique of the Gotha Program, which Fanon associates with the Western, humanist values espoused by colonized intellectuals. In their introduction to the first (2012), the editorial collective writes: Our materialism dispenses with concepts of rights, equality, justice, agency, representation, or any that otherwise affirm the same set of relations and political forms that inaugurate and ensure our oppression. Rather we turn our attention toward the various registers and forms of violence that characterize patriarchy, a structure and set of mechanisms that produces relations of domination and subordination, but within which identity categories are unstable. 19 This statement recognizes that concepts of rights, equality, justice are not only idealist complicit in the forms of oppression they appaof a term like “the people as the rest of us”—supposedly the victi 16 Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (London: Verso, 2012), 70: “In this chapter, I present the idea of the people as the rest of us as a modulation of the idea of the proletariat as the subject of communism.” 17 Ibid., 74. 18 Ibid., 201. 19 LIES: A Journal of Materialist Feminism 1 (2012): 10-11. See also Jackie Wang’s important article in LIES, “Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety” (145-172). 67 Nathan Brown We can think through some consequences of this matter of fact, at a formal Class Struggle”—and we can also supplement proletariat as an internally differentiated class in transition. Mattick is concerned capitalist development, assuming different forms according to the changing fortunes of the capitalist system. And indeed, Maanti-capitalist, except in a purely ideological sense.” 22 Mattick analyzes the dialectical constitutes the dilemma of radicalism: In order to accomplish anything of social significance, actions must be organized. Effective organizations, however, tend towards capitalist channels. It seems that in order to do something now, one can only do the wrong things, and in order to avoid false steps one should undertake none at all. 23 the impasse of organizational integration reformist character of political organizations that are able to sustain themselves within capitalist social relations. We can call this “the problem of organization,” which is a general, structural feature of anti-capitalist struggle. We can also extend the problem of organization to our analysis cohesive. But insofar as the cohesion of the class takes precedence over and represses the differences, divisions, and antagonisms constitutive of its formation it the proletariat, as a “working class,” at the same time as this constitution relies upon is is why the repression of such differences What is at issue here is precisely the old structural problem and imperative of are in a position to formulate the structural what 22 Paul Mattick, “New Politics and the Old Class Struggle” (1976), http://www.marxists.org/ archive/mattick-paul/1976/new-capitalism.htm (accessed 4/7/13). See also “Spontaneity and Organization” (1949), http://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1976/new capitalism.htm . (accessed 4/7/13). 23 Ibid. 69 Nathan Brown ogrammatism is: how can revolution proceed otherwise than as the self-affirmation of the working class? This is the er than self-affirmation—and self-abolition is considered here as the immediate process of revolution rather than a transitional program carried out after a seizure of state power. The problem is thus: how is it possible for the proletariat, acting as a clacapitalist mode of production, to abolisproletariat to reproduce itself without reproducing itself as a class? That is: to reproduce , the revolution is the very continuation of the revolutionimmanentlybreaking the double cycle of reproduction—the reproduction of both capital and —both the reproduction of the class relation and enables us to think the proletariat as something other than the working class, both in 25 proletariat has to what it its reproduction as a class, precisely by reproducing itself without reproducing the class relation—and thus reproducing itself as other than the proletariat. It is this fundamental contradiction within class struggle that TC analyzes in terms of the ). Because , the dynamic of struggle (class 26 We see the contradiction of dynamic and limit in the perpetual relay between composition and decomposition to which struggles are prone. Insofar as they cohere, the cohesion of struggles always also highlights both the cohesion of the proletariat as a class, which is precisely what has to be undone, the internal contradictions by which the proletariat is riven, and which divide its unity. The reciprocal struggle by exposing both contradictions inherent to the composition of the 25 On the relation of TC’s work to materialist feminist work on the reproduction of the class relation, see Maya Gonzalez, “Communizaiton and the Abolition of Gender” in Communization and its Discontents, ed. Benjamin Noys (New York: Minor Compositions, 2011), 219-234; and P. Valentine, “The Gender Distinction in Communization Theory,” Journal of Materialist Feminism 26 See “Théorie de l’Écart” in Théorie Communiste 20 (September 2005): 7-196. 71 Nathan Brown effects that are always unequally distributed along lines of sex, gender, and race. The rifts along these lines have to be, and will be, foregrounded in struggles. Immersed both in large historical tendencies and in the concrete problems of each day as it comes, we should not delude ourselves by thinking that we can make the proletariat be what it’s supposed to be, a cohesive re the proletariat is the name of this contradiction *** is the real strength of his work. Just as the opposition between rationalism and properly understood as a transcendental investigation, essentially bound up with an economy, and indeed the reality of history. Kant and Marx are transcendental philosophers, but the difference between them is that “in Marx, transcendental 29 transmit the overall results of Henry’s analysis, I do want to retain this point in order to ask: what is the which the iat as a class both occludes and reveals? What is the different forms of exploitation to which different bodies are subject under capital, and about the undoing and displacement of those forms. ction which constitutes the transcendental diverse individuals are reduced to one and the same labor.” 30 : average socially necessary labor time g the singular qualitative content of labor ed by capital insofar as it is organized 29 Michel Henry, Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 192. 30 Ibid. 200-201. 73 Nathan Brown as capitalist production, such that the realplus value, which reenters the process of production as capital; on the side of labor, the result is the depleted body which has to be replenished by rest and the consumption of commodities. Thus, the reproduction of labor through the wage (C-M-C) accompanies the reproduction of capital through valorization (M-C-M’). reduced to at Federici makes clear when she argues that the term “women” signifies a particularcrucial argument that there are different of exploitation under capital in fact has “transcendental” significance. It means that the condition of possibility for the subsumption of labor under capital is that the various labors of diverse individuals reduced to one and the same labor. In fact, this very quantitative reduction, upon which value depends, is predicated upon forms of labor qualitative measures (the violent disciplining of bodies). I want to say that it is through a crisisthat this double transcendental condition becomes clear (just as it would have been 74 Nathan Brown e application of concepts like quality and justice to labor or distribution. Subjective activity, he points out, the real reciprocal yet contradictory category of the proletariat—become clear. eological status of conceptualizing the different forms of exploitation are internal to and constitutive of the proletariat is also to recognize that the self-abolition of the proletariat requires the abolition of these all these different forms, rather than only the one form of exploitation consolidated in the wage. e no common measure—and this fact suffices to lative to the performance of labor or the 31 Between different concrete individuals, the subjective experience of labor is never qualitatively thindividuals have the same body. Different of exploitation constitute bodies as different, precisely by treating them, within each category, as the same considered not as identities, nor as an lation to the different forms of exploitation that constitute them as proletarians, and that constitute the proletariat as such. This 31 See also Henry, 75