Towards a Minor Theatre

"When we read the Grundrisse," Antonio Negri suggests, "one feeling dominates: that here we are truly 'beyond Marx'" (1979, 14). This paradoxical perception is an apposite indication of the theoretical trajectory I am attempting to follow, in order to re-establish the Marxist form of the relation structure/struggle as a valid one, and to elaborate the possible contemporary forms, and potential efficacy, of working-class oppositional social practice. Although many of Laclau and Mouffe's criticisms of elements of Marxist theory are valid, I believe that their focus is both too narrow and too wide: too narrow, inasmuch as the justly criticised elements are often details of subsequent elaborations of Marx's work performed by other theoreticians within the Marxist tradition; too wide, when, on the basis of the former, Laclau and Mouffe claim to have grasped essential aspects of "Marxism" as a whole, and proceed to apply their deductions with little discrimination. As a result, I find their claim to have negated the validity of "Marxism" problematic. As Negri asks, "But beyond which Marx?" Certainly, I do not claim to be able to correct Laclau and Mouffe's oversights by virtue of a reading of Marx untrammelled by the prejudices of interpretation. In following Negri's work and that of other theorists within "autonomist Marxism," I remain within the Marxist "tradition," and pursue one particular version of "Marx." Indeed, the partiality of my interpretation is augmented by its attempt to connect the autonomist reading with Deleuze and Guattari's theory of capitalism. I believe, however, that the autonomists' treatment of Marx is sufficiently original as to be useful for an identification of aspects of the structure/struggle relation and the forms of political subjectivity that escape the reach of Laclau and Mouffe's model, and to prove efficacious for the task I have set myself. While the fact that it proceeds via an attention to Marx himself is, undoubtedly, to be praised in terms of theoretical rigour, nonetheless, it is to the extent that this attention may be useful for our attempts towards contemporary political projects that the re-reading is significant. As Negri's paradox indicates, therefore:

We have nothing to do with orthodoxy. And we would be delighted to be able to ignore Marx himself. A break has been made, there is no denying it. The theory of value is worn to shreds, as far as our struggles are concerned. Now the discovery of the Grundrisse restores Marx to us. Because of its power, not because of our fidelity. We no longer can take the pleasure or have the duty to argue with orthodoxy; our languages separate us, they are contradictory. (1979, 17)

Through my reading of Marx, I will attempt to demonstrate that the relation structure/struggle is, against Laclau and Mouffe's formulation, an internal one, such that their model of the hegemonic form of politics is invalid.1 It is the externality which they posit between the social agents' insertion under the capitalist relations of production and the "working class," of course, that will be the main focus of my critique. This will necessitate a critique of Laclau and Mouffe's theorisation of the nature of working-class unity and subjectivity.

As we have seen, Laclau and Mouffe understand a social agent's identity and practice to exist in a differential, relational formation--a discourse. The regularities within such a formation are "the relative and precarious forms of fixation" of the elements articulated within its discursive chain (98). The revolutionary potential of a particular oppositional identity or antagonistic practice is assessed on the basis of its articulation, within a counter-hegemonic discursive formation, with other identities or practices; its ability to form relations with other "elements"; to arrest the flow of differences by becoming fixed around basic articulatory principles. A social agent is constituted within the field of overdetermination, and oppositional social practice is understood through a discursive form modelled on "the democratic discourse," which constructs a politicised identity:

[T]he form of the antagonism as such is identical in all cases. That is to say, it always consists in the construction of a social identity--of an overdetermined subject position--on the basis of the equivalence between a set of elements or values which expel or externalize those others to which they are opposed. Once again, we find ourselves confronting the division of social space. (164-5)

The crucial methodological shift which Laclau and Mouffe effect arises from their discursive mode of theorising the constitution and development of the social: it is that the "constitution" of social agents becomes equated with their "identity," which is understood to operate according to a discursive logic--the "logic of the signifier." Social agents are understood to be constituted by the sum of subject positions within which they are located. While this is no doubt an element of the constitution of social agents, it grasps the subjective side of their constitution only. Indeed, its conception of "subjectivity" is reductive insofar as the latter is understood as an overdetermined sum of identities--giving priority to the sign(s) of identity at the expense of the pre-personal and supra-personal collective flows which constitute--and exceed--them. It can define political identity only in negative terms--as lack, constant failure, etc.2 It suggests that the "working class" is not an objective and constitutive element of the capitalist social order; rather, it is formed through an articulation between a social agent's objective position (under the relations of production) and a "socialist" discourse which gives that agent an oppositional identity. Accordingly, the unity of the subject confronting capital is "not the expression of a common underlying essence but the result of political construction and struggle"--it is an hegemonically constructed subject (65).

In order to demonstrate the invalidity of this proposition, I will interrogate Laclau and Mouffe's conception of "constitution," by way of a distinction drawn between the social agents' "identity" and their "activity," or "practice."3 In effect, I will be challenging Laclau and Mouffe's understanding of "working class" merely as an identity. I will demonstrate that (1) the social agents' activity, as organised by capital, produces and reproduces their objective existence (it constitutes them), and that in doing so, it produces them as parts of an antagonistic social subjectivity--what I will call their "class composition"--that is opposed to capital; and that (2) this oppositional "unity" operates as an "external principle" of the construction of the identity "working class" (the social agents' "subjectivity," in Laclau and Mouffe's sense). Furthermore, I will show that (3) the oppositional potential of the "working class" is not predicated on its struggles necessarily adopting that "identity." By virtue of the specific nature of the semiotic processes of capitalism's ordering of production, the struggles of the working class do not necessarily operate according to the mechanisms of "identity politics."4 Before proceeding, however, it is important to distinguish this understanding from orthodox Marxism's base/superstructure model, where the objectivity of the social agents (their positions within the relations of production) determined their subjectivity (class consciousness). As I will show in what follows, while the class composition has an objective existence in the bodily existence of the social agents as living labour capacities, it also has a subjective existence in their activity--the subjectivity of living labour itself. As the "bearers" of economic categories which have become "true in practice," the social agents operating under capital exist as parts of a unified, antagonistic subject: living labour (though the precise nature of its "unification" will have to be investigated). Whether or not the agents adopt those economic categories as an "identity" is, as we shall see, another matter.

Antagonistic Subjectivities and the Valorisation of Capital

In his analysis of capitalism, Marx suggests that in order for capital to exist, it must be able to maintain its processual character. All the processes through which it passes must be completed, in order to maintain the self-preservation of value (and to increase its magnitude). To the extent that capital successfully maintains the continuity of its constituent processes, a "circuit of capital" is created which, extrapolating from the M-C-M' form of the exchange process, may be diagrammed as follows:

|&endash;LP |&endash;LP'

M---C . . . . . . . . P . . . . C'---M' . . . M'---C' . . . . . . . . P'. . . . C''---M'' (and so on)5

|&endash;MP |&endash;MP'

This circuit constitutes the production-reproduction-expansion of value; it describes the valorisation of capital. Marx insists that the continuity of the circuit is not assured: it is a process "which can fail" (1857-8, 316).6

It is clear that within the circuit, value "is constantly changing from one form into the other, without becoming lost in this movement" (1867, 255). Transposing the terms of the processes into Laclau and Mouffe's terminology, it is clear that the valorisation process produces a unified "subject" on the basis of the overdetermination of the different elements within the circuit (the valorisation process fixes the elements--M, C, LP, MP, P, C', M', etc.--as processual moments of its "discourse"),7 insofar as, in and through the different forms of existence of value, value's self-identity is maintained:

[I]t thus becomes transformed into an automatic subject. If we pin down the specific forms of appearance assumed in turn by self-valorizing value in the course of its life, we reach the following elucidation: capital is money, capital is commodities. In truth, however, value is here the subject of a process in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it changes its own magnitude, throws off surplus-value from itself considered as original value, and thus valorizes itself independently. For the movement in the course of which it adds surplus-value is its own movement, its valorization is therefore self-valorization. By virtue of being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or at least lays golden eggs. As the dominant subject of this process, in which it alternately assumes and loses the form of money and the form of commodities, but preserves and expands itself through all these changes, value requires above all an independent form by means of which its identity with itself may be asserted. Only in the shape of money does it possess this form. Money therefore forms the starting-point and the conclusion of every valorization process. (1867, 255; my emphases)

Understood in this way, we may say that capital acts as a social power of overdetermination throughout its circuit of valorisation. Within that circuit, one of its "forms of fixation" is the relation established through the workers' exchange with capital (between LP and MS, mediated by M).8 By virtue of the separation that this relation presupposes between the workers and the means of their existence (which establishes the conditions of capitalist production), the workers are forced to work in order to reproduce themselves.9 The separation that capital presupposes also takes the form of a separation between the workers and their activity, such that the unification of the two--the extraction of labour from labour capacity--is forced; "The unity is brought about by force" (1857-8, 150). The form of fixation here involves the relation between LP and MP within the labour process,10 and the separation produces alienation:

Indeed, living labour itself appears as alien vis-à-vis living labour capacity, whose labour it is, whose life's expression it is, for it has been surrendered to capital in exchange for objectified labour, for the product of labour itself. Labour capacity relates to its labour as to an alien, and if capital were willing to pay it without making it labour it would enter the bargain with pleasure. Thus labour capacity's own labour is as alien to it--and it really is, as regards its direction etc.--as are material and instrument. Which is why the product then appears to it as a combination of alien material, alien instrument and alien labour--as alien property, and why, after production, it has become poorer by the life forces expended, but otherwise begins the drudgery anew, existing as a mere subjective labour capacity separated from the conditions of its life. (1857-8, 462-3)11

Since the appropriation of alien labour is a condition of capital's existence, capital cannot exist without the constant application of force.12 Now, a question inevitably presents itself at this point: Doesn't this application of force imply a struggle? Doesn't the forced quality of its work process imply that something is antagonistic to capital, which, in order to exist, capital must constantly overpower? Clearly, although the discourse of capitalist organisation may be able to establish identities that are not antagonistic to it ("worker" and "capitalist" as positive differentials), this does not abolish the forced quality of the workers' labour. However natural or inevitable the workers may regard their subjection to be, does the application of force not imply that their labour--their activity--is antagonistic?

It is the distinction within Laclau and Mouffe's theory between relations of subordination and relations of oppression that I am challenging here. This distinction is parallel to that of positivity/negativity. The discourse of capitalist valorisation allegedly produces the workers and the capitalists (understood as identities) within a relation of subordination where each term is a positive differential (and any resistance to the application of force doesn't count as "political" within this relation). This supposedly establishes the structural "order" of the capitalist organisation of production, in which negativity can only be introduced from an external position (which would establish the relation of subordination as one of oppression). Insofar as the categories "wage labourer" and "capitalist" are conceived as differential positivities, it is clear that they are operational concepts--they are functional to the smooth running of the processes of capitalist valorisation.13 What this model of theorising the structure/struggle relation is unable to apprehend, however, is that the structural order of capitalist production is constituted by an antagonistic struggle between two, opposed subjectivities; which is to say that the relation between the structure and struggles is an internal one. As Negri has suggested, a theory "remains insufficient as long as this structure, this totality is not internally split":

It remains insufficient . . . as long as we do not succeed in grasping not the structural (capitalist) subjectivity but the subjectivities which dialectically constitute the structure (the two classes in struggle). (Negri 1979, 44)

In order to support this assertion, however, it is necessary to explore Laclau and Mouffe's elaboration of the defining qualities of negativity/antagonism/struggles in relation to the social relations that constitute the discursive structure of capitalist production.

Laclau and Mouffe draw a distinction between a relation that is contradictory and one that is antagonistic (1985, 122-127). Through a critique of the work of Lucio Colletti, they suggest that, whereas contradiction involves an objective relation between conceptual objects, antagonism involves something different:

[I]n the case of antagonism, . . . the presence of the "Other" prevents me from being totally myself. The relation arises not from full totalities, but from the impossibility of their constitution. The presence of the Other is not . . . subsumable as a positive differential moment in a causal chain, for in that case the relation would be given by what each force is and there would be no negation of this being. . . . Insofar as there is antagonism, I cannot be a full presence for myself. But nor is the force that antagonizes me such a presence: its objective being is a symbol of my non-being and, in this way, it is overflowed by a plurality of meanings which prevent its being fixed as full positivity. . . . [A]ntagonism constitutes the limits of every objectivity, which is revealed as partial and precarious objectification. . . . Strictly speaking, antagonisms are not internal but external to society; or rather, they constitute the limits of society, the latter's impossibility of fully constituting itself. (125)

Even if we were to demonstrate that capitalism is contradictory because it forcibly unites capital with its negation--wage labour--this would not, Laclau and Mouffe claim, demonstrate that the relation is antagonistic; "We all participate in a number of mutually contradictory belief systems, and yet no antagonism emerges from these contradictions. Contradiction does not, therefore, necessarily imply an antagonistic relation" (124).

Clearly, the relation between the wage labourers and capital is an objective relation: the workers exist within the relation as objectified labour capacities and capital as objectified alien labour. The relation between (productive, value-creating) labour and capital (objectified value; wealth) within the labour process, however, is not an objective relation. What I am suggesting is that the workers' activity, within the labour process, confronts capital antagonistically. The labour process is the objectification (as product-use value-content and commodity-exchange value-form) of a subjective presence (living labour):

Now, in so far as capital, money existing in all particular forms of objectified labour, enters into the process with not-objectified, but rather living labour, labour existing as a process and as action, it is initially this qualitative difference of the substance in which it exists from the form in which it now also exists as labour. It is the process of this differentiation and of its suspension, in which capital itself becomes a process. Labour is the yeast thrown onto it, which starts it fermenting. On the one side, the objectivity in which it exists has to be worked on, i.e. consumed by labour; on the other side, the mere subjectivity of labour as a mere form has to be suspended, and labour has to be objectified in the material of capital. . . . [L]abour is not only consumed, but also at the same time fixed, converted from the form of activity into the form of the object; materialized; as a modification of the object, it modifies its own form and changes from activity into being. (Marx 1857-8, 298; 300)

Following Laclau and Mouffe's own definition, therefore, the workers' activity exists in an antagonistic form within its capitalist organisation, since that activity--living labour--is fixed, objectified, within the labour process. It is the subjectivity of living labour which confronts capital in that process. By virtue of the alienating quality of the relation, Marx suggests that:

[O]bjectified labour is, in this process, at the same time posited as the worker's non-objectivity, as the objectivity of a subjectivity antithetical to the worker, as property of a will alien to him . . . . Production based on exchange value . . . [is] the relating of labour to its objective conditions--and hence to the objectivity created by itself--as alien property: alienation of labour. (1857-8, 512; 514-515)

The value produced (capital), therefore, is a symbol of the non-being of living labour:

The product of labour appears as alien property, as a mode of existence confronting living labour as independent, as value in its being for itself; the product of labour, objectified labour, has been endowed by living labour with a soul of its own, and establishes itself opposite living labour as an alien power: both these situations are themselves the product of labour. Living labour therefore now appears from its own standpoint as acting within the production process in such a way that, as it realizes itself in the objective conditions, it simultaneously repulses this realization from itself as an alien reality, and hence posits itself as insubstantial, as mere penurious labour capacity in the face of this reality alienated from it, belonging not to it but to others; that is posits its own reality not as a being for it, but merely as a being for others, and hence also as mere other-being, or being of another opposite itself. This realization process is at the same time the de-realization process of labour. It posits itself objectively, but it posits this, its objectivity, as its own not-being or as the being of its not-being--of capital. It returns back to itself as the mere possibility of value-creation or realization [Verwertung]; because the whole of real wealth, the world of real value and likewise the real conditions of its own realization [Verwirklichung] are posited opposite it as independent existences. As a consequence of the production process, the possibilities resting in living labour's own womb exist outside it as realities--but as realities alien to it, which form wealth in opposition to it. . . . [T]his objectified labour--these external conditions of his being, and the independent externality (to him) of these objective conditions--now appear as posited by himself, as his own product, as his own self-objectification as well as the objectification of himself as a power independent of himself, which moreover rules over him, rules over him through his own actions. (454; 453)14

Capital cannot constitute labour as a positive differential within its discursive structure, therefore, because the relation by which labour is articulated into that structure is an alienating relation. By virtue of that alienating quality, the relation is antagonistic, because the objective being of capital is a symbol of the non-being of living labour. This means that the capital relation is never a relation of subordination--it is always oppressive.

It is because the relation between the workers (objective labour capacities) and their work (living labour as the negated being of living labour capacity) is an alienating relation, it is because they are forced to work beyond the point of necessary labour into surplus labour,15 it is because the workers' activity produces capitalist valorisation beyond their own self-valorisation, it is because capital is objectified, alien labour, that the form of the relation between labour and capital is an antagonistic form. Living labour is unable to constitute itself as a "full presence" for itself. The objective being of capital within the labour process (the means and material of labour, or fixed and circulating capital) can be considered as an overdetermined symbol of the non-being of the subjective presence of living labour. It is clear that the concept of "labour" cannot be an operational concept, since, within the labour process, it exists in a negative relation to capital. Insofar as the capitalist organisation of production produces this form of labour, the "order" of capitalist production is permeated with negativity--a negativity that is internal to that order. The workers' practice--the subjectivity of living labour--confronts capital--value as a subject--antagonistically, and the capitalist structure is constituted by the struggle waged between the two. If, at the highest stage of capitalist development, the money-form represents the community of socialised production (Marx 1857-8, 223), then the impossibility of it fully constituting itself is given by the antagonism of living labour. Its "limits" are constituted by the permanent presence of the subjectivity of living labour at the heart of its system--a subjectivity that only the application of force can objectify.

The key to this reading is that capital cannot be conceived merely as a "thing"; capital is not merely value, or money, as a "subject," but is a relation and a process. As a relation, capital is the "dominant subject" over another subjectivity--living labour. As a process, it is the simultaneous production of value's valorisation (surplus labour) and the working class's self-valorisation (necessary labour).16 In what way, therefore, does the identification of the antagonistic nature of the relation between living labour and capital force a reformulation of the constitution of the social agents (in their objective and subjective sides)? What is the relation between the antagonistic subjectivity of living labour and the unity of the "working class"? How may we account for the dispersal/fragmentation of the individuals who work under capitalism (the complex diversity of "identities") and the "unity" that seems to be implied by the concept of the "subjectivity" of living labour? Are the social agents who belong to the working class constituted as parts of a discursive unity? In order to arrive at a suitable definition of the working class as a subject which opposes capital, it is necessary to examine the precise nature of the semiotic processes of capitalism. By utilising Deleuze and Guattari's theorisations, I will demonstrate that the analysis of discursive processes comprehends only one aspect of capitalism's "semiosis." As I will show, the articulation of signifiers--their fixing as moments of a meaningful discursive chain--is predicated, under capitalism, on another process that unfixes those signifiers. Indeed, the specificity of capitalism's semiosis will demand that we distinguish between two different types of "fixing": the first, which I shall describe as an encoding, is based on the particular qualities of the articulated "elements," and corresponds to Laclau and Mouffe's discursive model; and the second, which I shall describe as an axiomatizing, is indifferent to the qualities of the elements brought into relation with one another, and operates by virtue of a semiotic mechanism that is based on abstract quantities. As we will see, it is the particular role that abstractions have under capitalism which will allow us to resolve the problematic dispersed individuals/identities and the "unified" subjectivity of living labour. By bringing together a theorisation of the role of abstractions and of capitalist semiosis, we will have a conceptual apparatus sufficient to apprehend the constitution and oppositional efficacy of the "working class."

The Practical Truth of Abstractions

Money, Marx suggests, "is general wealth in the form of a concise compendium, as opposed to its diffusion and fragmentation in the world of commodities" (1857-8, 218). It "satisfies every need, in so far as it can be exchanged for the desired object of every need, regardless of any particularity." Money possesses this property "directly in relation to all commodities, hence in relation to the whole world of wealth, to wealth as such." In it, therefore, "The concept of wealth, so to speak, is realized, individualized in a particular object":

Thus, in the first role, money is wealth itself; in the other, it is the general material representative of wealth. This totality exists in money itself as the comprehensive representation of commodities. Thus, wealth (exchange value as totality as well as abstraction) exists, individualized as such, to the exclusion of all other commodities, as a singular, tangible object, in gold and silver. Money is therefore the god among commodities. (221)

Money is thus the realisation of the abstraction "wealth as such," wealth in general. As an abstraction, "wealth as such" has become "true in practice"--it is not just a mental abstraction, but one which really exists (105). This generality, in money, obtains a concrete, objective existence that is indifferent to the particularity of any given commodity. This indifference means that:

[Money] does not at all presuppose an individual relation to its owner; possession of it is not the development of any particular essential aspect of his individuality; but rather possession of what lacks individuality, since this social [relation] exists at the same time as a sensuous, external object which can be mechanically seized, and lost in the same manner. Its relation to the individual thus appears as a purely accidental one. (222)

Money is therefore the objective form of qualitatively unlimited wealth--it is not tied to a particular gratification, nor to a particular social agent. Its only limit is a quantitative one. As we have seen, money is the independent form by means of which self-valorising value (capital) asserts "its identity with itself" (1867, 255). As an automatic (reproducing and expanding) subject, capital "is the constant movement to create more of the same. The quantitative boundary of the surplus value appears to it as a mere natural barrier, as a necessity which it constantly tries to violate and beyond which it constantly seeks to go" (1857-8, 334-5). Thus, capital is the realisation of the abstraction "wealth in general," transformed into an automatically self-increasing subject; "Capital posits the production of wealth itself and hence the universal development of the productive forces, the constant overthrow of its prevailing presuppositions, as the presupposition of its reproduction" (541). This subject, insofar as it is qualitatively unlimited and indifferent to particularity, exists as an abstract totality that has an objective existence; it is objective wealth acting as a "subject."

This location of wealth "objectively, as an external thing, in money" (103), however, was superseded though the "Mercantile System" in economic theory. The latter "took a great step forward by locating the source of wealth not in the object but in a subjective activity" (103-4); even if it also limited that activity "within narrow boundaries." It was not until Adam Smith's theory that this limitation itself was dissolved:

It was an immense step forward for Adam Smith to throw out every limiting specification of wealth-creating activity--not only manufacturing, or commercial or agricultural labour, but one as well as the others, labour in general. With the abstract universality of wealth-creating activity we now have the universality of the object defined as wealth. (104; my emphasis)

The abstraction "wealth in general" only exists, therefore, by virtue of a parallel abstraction of wealth-creating activity--"labour in general." The objective being of money is created by the subjective activity of labour. Just as money-as-capital is qualitatively unlimited and indifferent to particularity, so too is the labour that creates it:

[S]ince capital as such is indifferent to every particularity of its substance, and exists not only as the totality of the same but also as the abstraction from all its particularities, the labour which confronts it likewise subjectively has the same totality and abstraction in itself. . . . [It appears] in the totality and abstraction of labour as such, in which it confronts capital. (296)

Furthermore, just as money is the realisation of the abstraction "wealth as such"--it is an abstraction that has become true in practice, that has become real--labour, under capitalism, exists as the realisation of the abstraction "wealth-creating activity as such." The totality and abstraction of labour have become true in practice:

As a rule, the most general abstractions arise in the midst of the richest possible concrete development, where one thing appears as common to many, to all. Then it ceases to be thinkable in a particular form alone. . . . [T]his abstraction of labour as such is not merely the mental product of a concrete totality of labours. Indifference towards specific labours corresponds to a form of society in which individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and where the specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence of indifference. Not only the category, labour, but labour in reality has here become the means of creating wealth in general, and has ceased to be organically linked with particular individuals in any specific form. Such a state of affairs is at its most developed in the most modern form of existence of bourgeois society . . . . Here, then, for the first time, the point of departure of modern economics, namely the abstraction of the category "labour," "labour as such," labour pure and simple, becomes true in practice. The simplest abstraction . . . achieves practical truth as an abstraction only as a category of the most modern society. (104-5; my emphases)

The proliferation of types of labour characteristic of the capitalist development of production,17 while increasing the diversity of types of labouring activity, nonetheless provides the concrete conditions--the richest possible development--for the abstract category of labour to acquire practical truth. It is because "one thing" appears as common to all of these activities--they are wealth-creating--that their diversity nonetheless has an essence: the abstract, subjective essence of social production--living labour as the subjective source of wealth. Furthermore, as Marx shows, this abstract, subjective essence is not an a-historical constant of all forms of society. Rather, it is the result of processes peculiar to capitalism that render the abstraction true in practice. Through its development under capitalism, labour is involved in a process of becoming-abstract: "The worker's activity [is] reduced to a mere abstraction of activity" (693). Although this process only reaches fulfilment with the development of machinery under large-scale industry, it is already underway from the moment that labour assumes the form of wage labour, since "wage labour appears as the dissolution, the annihilation of relations in which labour was fixed on all sides, in its income, its content, its location, its scope etc." (891). The ability of living labour capacity to be realised within whatever branch of production capital momentarily requires means that the same indifference to particularity which capital possesses is necessarily required of living labour capacity as well; it is because capital is indifferent to the particular qualities of the labour processes which it employs, that the living labour capacities also become indifferent to the particular qualities of their work--they are "required to be capable of the same flexibility or versatility" as capital (1867, 1013).18 The abstract, conceptual relation between capital and labour, therefore, becomes real only with the development of a form of society in which each abstract pole of the relation--"wealth as such" and "wealth-creating activity as such"--becomes true in practice:

This economic relation . . . develops more purely and adequately in proportion as labour loses all the characteristics of art; as particular skill becomes something more and more abstract and irrelevant, and as it becomes more and more a purely abstract activity, a purely mechanical activity, hence indifferent to its particular form; a merely formal activity, or, what is the same, a merely material activity, activity pure and simple, regardless of its form. Here it can be seen once again that the particular specificity of the relation of production, of the category--here, capital and labour--becomes real only with the development of a particular material mode of production and of a particular stage in the development of the industrial productive forces. (1857-8, 297)19

The Semiotics of Capitalist Valorisation

If we were to speak of the labour processes in terms of "signifiers," it is the peculiar nature of capitalism's "semiosis," insofar as it is indifferent to the particular qualities of those processes, that creates the abstract, subjective essence of social production. As we have seen, however, in developing their theory of the social through an anti-essentialist model, Laclau and Mouffe effectively deny the existence of this "subjectivity." They insist that the labour processes constitute a diversity, not a diversification--they are "floating signifiers" that have no connection prior to their articulation under capital's ordering of production. The reason that they are unable to apprehend the creation of this subject, however, lies precisely in the nature of their methodological approach to social production. Their model focuses on processes that "fix" signifiers within certain relations; floating "elements" become "moments" of a discursive chain. Were there to be an "underlying principle" of the diversity, it would exist--would be constituted--by virtue of a connection between the elements that fixed them within a closed discursive formation; but since the elements are capable of being articulated, they conclude that "There is no single underlying principle fixing--and hence constituting--the whole field of differences" (1985, 111).

As we have seen, capital's proliferation of types of labour occurs within a tendency towards a becoming-abstract of those labour processes; the rich, concrete development of many types simultaneously realises the abstraction "labour in general": they all have something in common--they are wealth-creating activities--and are developed within a form of society that is indifferent towards their specificity ("individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another"; "labour in reality . . . has ceased to be organically linked with particular individuals"). The constitution of this "subject"--"labour in general"--however, does not proceed via a "fixing" of signifiers.20 It is only able to exist as an abstraction that is true in practice by virtue of the development of its unlimitedness--that it is not fixed to a particular branch of production, or particular social agent. On the contrary, as we have seen, "wage labour appears as the dissolution, the annihilation of relations in which labour was fixed on all sides, in its income, its content, its location, its scope etc. . . . [T]he historic character of wage labour is non-fixity" (1857-8, 891; my emphasis). It is the movement of "unfixing," of dissolution, fluidification, and becoming-limitless, that Laclau and Mouffe's theory is unable to apprehend.

It is because labour "loses all the characteristics of art" (297), it is because "labour in reality" has "ceased to be organically linked with particular individuals" (104), it is because, under the form of wage labour, it "appears as the dissolution, the annihilation of relations in which labour was fixed on all sides" (891), that Laclau and Mouffe's model of the social--operating according to the "logic of the signifier"--is invalid. It is the specific nature of capitalism's "semiosis," in distinction from that of earlier social formations, that is at issue here; insofar as it operates on the basis of abstractions, and implies a particular manner of reproducing/constituting social agents. Capital's value production is not simply the "fixing" of meaning. Rather, the fixing fixates within a process of the "unfixing" of meaning; the destruction of meaning. As Marx and Engels characterise the specificity of the capitalist mode of production:

Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (1848, 478)

While Laclau and Mouffe correctly identify the moment of "fixing" as the result of struggles, they understand the "meaninglessness" on which it acts through rather vague themes like "social complexity." They are unable to grasp the tendency that the dynamic of fixing-unfixing moves within. They focus on the construction of a meaningful social order without grasping the way in which capitalism itself is responsible for the undoing--the constant revolutionising--of that order. The problem lies in their use of "discourse" as a means to understand the social.

As we have seen, a discourse "is constituted as an attempt to dominate the field of discursivity, to arrest the flow of differences, to construct a centre. . . . [A] discourse incapable of generating any fixity of meaning is the discourse of the psychotic" (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 112; my emphasis). It is precisely in this sense that Deleuze and Guattari's project analyses contemporary society in terms of "capitalism and schizophrenia." Their theory grasps capitalist semiosis as a process constituted by two, opposed poles: a psychotic pole that sweeps away fixed relations and sets social flows free, and a discursive pole that attempts to arrest those flows, to control and confine their movement within limits appropriate to its valorisation. Within Deleuze and Guattari's genealogy of the semiotics of social formations, the qualitative encodings of pre-capitalist social formations give way to the generalised "deterritorialization" of capitalism. This movement of deterritorialization, generated by the permanent revolution of capitalism's production for the sake of production, produces the "meaninglessness" of its semiosis by destroying the codings and over-codings of the flows of social production effected by earlier social formations:

For what do private property, wealth, commodities, and classes signify? The breakdown of codes. The appearance, the surging forth of now decoded flows that pour over the socius, crossing it from one end to the other. . . . Any method will do for ensuring this universal decoding: the privatization brought to bear on property, goods, and the means of production, but also on the organs of "private man" himself; the abstraction of monetary quantities, but also the abstraction of the quantity of labor. (1972, 218; 244-5)

Within Deleuze and Guattari's scheme, Laclau and Mouffe focus on the processes of "despotic overcoding" only.21 The production of a deterritorializing movement, however, determines capital's semiosis as a process proceeding via an axiomatic (as opposed to a coding):

Capitalism is in fact born of the encounter of two sorts of flows: the decoded flows of production in the form of money-capital, and the decoded flows of labor in the form of the "free worker." Hence, unlike previous social machines, the capitalist machine is incapable of providing a code that will apply to the whole of the social field. By substituting money for the very notion of a code, it has created an axiomatic of abstract quantities that keeps moving further and further in the direction of the deterritorialization of the socius. (33)22

It is capitalism's "axiomatic" that has the two, opposed poles of unfixing and fixing (which Deleuze and Guattari describe as movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization), and the operation of this axiomatic defines the specificity of capitalist semiosis. The distinction between an encoding and an axiomatizing is crucial for an understanding of the way in which capitalism operates, and the manner in which social agents are constituted by it. Whereas an encoding articulates signifiers together to produce meaning, an axiomatizing produces "a direct relation between decoded flows" (Deleuze and Guattari 1972, 249)--as such, it is meaningless:

[I]n point of fact it is impossible to code such operations: in the first place, a code determines the respective qualities of the flows passing through the socius (for example, the three circuits of consumer goods, prestige goods, and women and children); the characteristic object of codes is therefore to establish necessarily indirect relations among these qualified and therefore incommensurable codes. Such relations indeed imply a quantitative siphoning off of portions of the different sorts of flows, but these quantities do not enter into equivalences that would presuppose an unlimited "something"; they simply form composites that are themselves qualitative, essentially mobile and limited . . . . [M]oney as a general equivalent represents an abstract quantity that is indifferent to the qualified nature of the flows. (247; 248)

By founding itself on an operation that axiomatizes decoded flows (the replacement of money for the notion of a code), capitalist semiosis would appear to be able to proceed without creating meaning. However, in order to ensure that the flows set free by capital's deterritorializing movement remain confined within the bounds of its own self-valorisation (i.e., within its axiomatic), capitalist semiosis is forced to reintroduce meaning at a certain point--it requires a whole apparatus to regulate the decoded and axiomatized flows; a function principally effected by the modern capitalist state:23

For capitalism constantly counteracts, constantly inhibits this inherent tendency while at the same time allowing it free rein; it continually seeks to avoid reaching its limit while simultaneously tending toward that limit. Capitalism institutes or restores all sorts of residual and artificial, imaginary, or symbolic territorialities, thereby attempting, as best it can, to recode, to rechannel persons who have been defined in terms of abstract quantities. Everything returns or recurs: States, nations, families. That is what makes the ideology of capitalism "a motley painting of everything that has ever been believed." The real is not impossible; it is simply more and more artificial. Marx termed the twofold movement of the tendency to a falling rate of profit, and an increase in the absolute quantity of surplus value, the law of the counteracted tendency. As a corollary of this law, there is the twofold movement of decoding or deterritorializing flows on the one hand, and their violent and artificial reterritorialization on the other. The more the capitalist machine deterritorializes, decoding and axiomatizing flows in order to extract surplus value from them, the more its ancillary apparatuses, such as government bureaucracies and the forces of law and order, do their utmost to reterritorialize, absorbing in the process a larger and larger share of surplus value. (34-5; my emphases)

This process of the reintroduction of meaning, which Deleuze and Guattari term "reterritorialization," constitutes the other pole of the axiomatic of capitalist semiosis, and is the process that Laclau and Mouffe's theory apprehends. The capital relation, though, is not solely the attribution of meaning within a discursive chain--not an encoding--but a direct axiomatizing of decoded flows.24 Capital as a process involves more than just "fixing" elements, or the creation of a meaningful discursive chain of formerly-floating signifiers (ideology).

As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, "The social axiomatic of modern societies is caught between two poles, and is constantly oscillating from one pole to the other" (260; my emphasis). The two poles of capitalism's axiomatic are defined by the two, simultaneous movements of deterritorialization and reterritorialization that it produces. They are defined as: (1) a movement of unfixing, proceeding towards unlimitedness by "continually developing the subjective essence of abstract wealth or production for the sake of production, that is, 'production as an end in itself, the absolute development of the social productivity of labor'"; (2) another, simultaneous movement that fixes, limiting and confining the other movement within the bounds of capital's valorisation, alienating the subjective essence within the private form of property, and proceeding "in the framework of its own limited purpose, as a determinate mode of production, 'production of capital,' 'the self-expansion of existing capital'" (259).25

Laclau and Mouffe's theory confronts the diversity of labour processes as capital confronts it--as an "abstract chaos" (Marx 1857-8, 268). Capital confronts the elements as a qualitative diversity of labour which it must reduce to the quantitative diversification of value. While Laclau and Mouffe's theory grasps this, it fails to appreciate the way in which the whole process simultaneously produces an "unfixing," or the generation of that chaos; and that these unfixed, labouring activities, through the deterritorialization of their particular qualities, are caught up in a becoming-abstract that makes the abstract category of labour--as the abstract, subjective essence of social production--true in practice. Just as the objectivity of money-capital is constituted by flows of deterritorialized wealth, the subjectivity of living labour is constituted by flows of deterritorialized wealth-creating activity. It is because Laclau and Mouffe understand "constitution" to proceed via a process of "fixing" that they are unable to grasp living labour--the dissolution of limitedness, the deterritorializing power of capitalism26--as the abstract subjective essence of social production. According to the reading I have developed, however, we may say that a collective, subjective force antagonistic to capital is produced by capital, and only a semiotics able to comprehend the movements of unfixing-fixing, unlimiting-limiting--in short, the two poles of capitalism's social axiomatic: deterritorialization-reterritorialization--is capable of grasping the creation of that subject and its articulation within capitalist valorisation.

The Constitution of Social Agents

As we have seen, Marx's critique of capitalist society identifies practice--understood under the form of labour--as a revolutionary force. My own critique of Laclau and Mouffe's theory has proceeded via a distinction drawn between social agents' identity and their practice--the first understood in discursive terms (codes/territories); the second through a production model (deterritorialization/the axiomatic). So far, I have not specified the manner in which capitalism produces and reproduces--in short, constitutes--the social agents; I have referred only to their practice, without specifying how this practice, as the antagonistic subjectivity of living labour, relates to the subject positions of capitalism's "discursive structure" (although, in identifying the two poles of the axiomatic of capitalist semiosis, our understanding of that structure has been radically altered: it has been subjectified. It is constituted by the antagonistic struggle between capital as a subject and the subjectivity of living labour). What we are working towards is a resolution of the problematic: "dispersal of identities" and the "unity" of the subjectivity of living labour (the working class). Within Marx's work, however, the category of labour appears to subsume both of the terms practice and identity; and it is from this apparent subsumption that Laclau and Mouffe's theory attempts to derive its validity. It is necessary, therefore, to investigate their interrelations further.

Under capitalism, labour does not exist only in the form of activity--it is also present in the form of rest:

As against capital, labour is the mere abstract form, the mere possibility of value-positing activity, which exists only as a capacity, as a resource in the bodiliness of the worker. But when it is made into a real activity through contact with capital--it cannot do this by itself, since it is without object--then it becomes a really value-positing, productive activity. (1857-8, 298)

Labour is therefore posited as "not-capital" in two ways (295-6): (1) as not-objectified labour conceived negatively; the immediate bodily existence of the worker as objective use value; the not-objective in objective form; "Labour as absolute poverty: poverty not as shortage, but as total exclusion of objective wealth"; (2) as not-objectified labour conceived positively ("or as a negativity in relation to itself"); the activity of the worker as the subjective existence of living labour; the living source of value and the general possibility of wealth. The relation between the two--the body and the activity of the worker--is a contradictory unity:

[T]he in-every-way mutually contradictory statements that labour is absolute poverty as object, on one side, and is, on the other side, the general possibility of wealth as subject and as activity, are reciprocally determined and follow from the essence of labour, such as it is presupposed by capital as its contradiction and as its contradictory being, such as it, in turn, presupposes capital. (296)

As we have seen, the "subject" which opposes capital is living labour. In locating that subject in the form of rest--as the bodily existence of the worker--we are presented with a relation between the social agents who work under capitalism and their (antagonistic) collective practice. The workers are posited as the abstract, objective form of the subjectivity of living labour. From this assertion, Laclau and Mouffe believe that Marx is claiming to apprehend those social agents' political "identity." It is the specific nature of capitalism's semiotic processes, however, insofar as the capital relation is produced by an axiomatic which is based on abstract quantities, that leads me to conclude that Marx's theory makes no such claims.

Marx suggests, in his preface to Capital, that "individuals are dealt with here only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, the bearers [Träger] of particular class-relations and interests" (1867, 92). Since the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity given in the passage quoted above refers to the different forms in which labour is posited under capitalism, it is clear that the subjectivity of the social agents is not given within the capital relation. The "subjectivity" refers to the subjectivity of collective, co-operative, social labour, not the that of the social agents. When Marx considers individuals as the "bearers" or "carriers" of economic categories, I believe he is referring to the relations under which their objectivity is produced and reproduced. I believe he is referring to their objective constitution within a form of society in which those economic categories have become true in practice.27

This distinction is possible because capital does not need to code the social agents required for its existence; capital is based on the appropriation of living labour, not the social agents who perform that labour: "it does not appropriate the worker, but his labour--not directly, but mediated through exchange" (1857-8, 498); that is, capitalism effects "a decoding of the worker in favor of the work itself" (Deleuze and Guattari 1972, 225), which is to say that one of the flows set free by capitalism's processes of deterritorialization consists of the particular qualities of the working population (though, as we will see in the next chapter, and as we have already anticipated, the movement of reterritorialization effected by its discursive pole attempts "to recode, to rechannel persons who have been defined in terms of abstract quantities" [34]). As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, because capital is produced by virtue of a conjunction of decoded and deterritorialized flows, and operates, therefore, on the basis of an axiomatic of abstract quantities:

It is these quantities that are marked, no longer the persons themselves: your capital or your labor capacity, the rest is not important, we'll always find a place for you within the expanded limits of the system, even if an axiom has to be created just for you. . . . [I]nscription no longer bears directly, or at least in theory has no need of bearing directly, on men. (251)

Since labour, as an abstraction that has become true in practice, is not "organically linked with particular individuals in any specific form," capital, in order to exist, has only to reproduce the workers as living labour capacities "in the totality and abstraction of labour as such" (Marx 1857-8, 104; 296). The production and reproduction of workers under capitalism is a process that is concerned with maintaining and expanding individual social agents' capacity for work--nothing more:

Now, as regards the worker's consumption, this reproduces one thing--namely himself, as living labour capacity. Because this, his reproduction, is itself a condition for capital, therefore the worker's consumption also appears as the reproduction not of capital directly, but of the relations under which alone it is capital. Living labour capacity belongs just as much among capital's conditions of existence as do raw material and instrument. Thus it reproduces itself doubly, in its own form, [and] in the worker's consumption, but only to the extent that it reproduces him as living labour capacity. Capital therefore calls this consumption productive consumption--productive not in so far as it reproduces the individual, but rather individuals as labour capacities. (Marx 1857-8, 676)

The capital relation therefore establishes the reproduction of the worker as the reproduction of an abstract, subjective power (necessary labour--use value--abstract potentiality of living labour capacity):

[T]he worker himself constantly produces objective wealth, in the form of capital, an alien power that dominates and exploits him; and the capitalist just as constantly produces labour-power, in the form of a subjective source of wealth which is abstract, exists merely in the physical body of the worker, and is separated from its own means of objectification and realization; in short, the capitalist produces the worker as wage-labourer. (Marx 1867, 716)

Because the relation produces the worker as "a subjective source of wealth which is abstract"--because the relation is indifferent to the particularity of the worker's reproduction--it is clear that the particular qualities of the workers who enter and are reproduced by the relation can vary infinitely. This is because, in distinction from the encodings of pre-capitalist social formations, the capital relation is formed through an axiomatic of abstract quantities, which means that it restricts the reproduction of the workers quantitatively, not qualitatively:

In general terms, the exchange value of his commodity cannot be determined by the manner in which its buyer uses it, but only by the amount of objectified labour contained in it; hence, here, by the amount of labour required to reproduce the worker himself. For the use value which he offers exists only as an ability, a capacity [Vermögen] of his bodily existence; has no existence apart from that. . . . Since he exchanges his use value for the general form of wealth, he becomes co-participant in general wealth up to the limit of his equivalent--a quantitative limit which, of course, turns into a qualitative one, as in every exchange. But he is neither bound to particular objects, nor to a particular manner of satisfaction. The sphere of his consumption is not qualitatively restricted, only quantitatively. This distinguishes him from the slave, serf etc. . . . What he obtains from the exchange is therefore not exchange value, not wealth, but a means of subsistence, objects for the preservation of his life, the satisfaction of his needs in general, physical, social etc. (1857-8, 282-4)

The particularity of any given worker, therefore, is not determined by the relation within which they are reproduced. They are reproduced abstractly, as a realised abstraction. This is what I believe Marx means when he describes social agents as the "bearers" of economic categories, or as their "personification." It indicates, irrespective of their particular subjective identities, the functions which those agents' practice fulfils within the total process of capitalist production:

Already the fact that it is labour.i.labour; which confronts capital.i.capital; as subject.i.subject;, i.e. the worker.i.worker; only in his character as labour, and not he himself, etc. should open the eyes. This alone, disregarding capital, already contains a relation, a relation of the worker to his activity.i.activity;, which is by no means the "natural" one, but which itself already contains a specific economic.i.economic; character. (310)

The relation of the worker to his activity, of course, is a relation of alienation. While necessary labour reproduces the workers' objective existence as living labour capacities, the relation within which that activity exists determines the objective value produced as the property of a will alien to them:

Labour capacity has appropriated for itself only the subjective conditions of necessary labour--the means of subsistence for actively producing labour capacity, i.e. for its reproduction as mere labour capacity separated from the conditions of its realization--and it has posited these conditions themselves as things, values, which confront it in an alien, commanding personification. (452-3)

By virtue of the alienating quality of that relation, the subjectivity of living labour, in objectifying itself, produces its objectivity as that of a subjectivity to which it is opposed. The private form of property (capital's axiomatic) posits living labour's objectivity "as the objectivity of a subjectivity antithetical to the worker, as property of a will alien to him" (512).28 The capitalist axiomatic produces two, abstract and opposed, subjectivities, which confront one another antagonistically. Capital is personified as the collective capitalist, and living labour capacity becomes the working class:

What we are concerned with here is the division of the constituents of the process of production itself, constituents that really belong together. This division leads to the progressive separation of these elements and their personification vis-à-vis each other . . . . Real wealth (from the standpoint of exchange-value), money (from the standpoint of use-value), i.e. the means of subsistence and the means of production, make their appearance as persons in opposition to the possibility of wealth, i.e. labour-power, which appears as a different person. . . . The functions fulfilled by the capitalist are no more than the functions of capital--viz. the valorization of value by absorbing living labour--executed consciously and willingly. The capitalist functions only as personified capital, capital as a person, just as the worker is no more than labour personified. (1867, 1015; 989)

Does it make sense to speak in terms of "subject positions"--of precariously fixed moments in a discursive chain--here? Do the abstract "personifications" of capitalism describe "subject positions"? If by "subject position" we mean that the social agent occupying that position exists within the relation as a living labour capacity, then we lose the sense of the productive organisation of capitalism as a discursive dispersal of identities. If, on the contrary, by "subject position" we mean to indicate precisely that dispersal/fragmentation--the division of labour that, as it were, produces a dispersal of signifiers (job titles) attached to particular kinds of work; the employment of workers by different capitalists; the segmentation of the labour market "according to the capacity of different groups of workers to resist their authority" achieved through the capitalists' use of racism and sexism, the exploitation of regional or foreign labour reserves, and the division between "a well-paid and protected sector, and a peripheral sector of unskilled or semi-skilled workers for whom no security exists" (Laclau and Mouffe 1985, 82); in short, the qualified, particular differences produced by all the economic and political mechanisms which fragment the unity that classical Marxism posited for the "working class," and which Laclau and Mouffe are at such great pains to emphasise--then it is clear that the relation formed by capital's articulation does not establish "subject positions."29 Capital's reproduction of the workers reproduces them as an abstract, subjective power that is indifferent to its particular qualities; it produces them as a deterritorialized flow, and since the exchange value of that flow is not determined by its use value, it retains its substantial autonomy--it is constituted by a multiplicity of differences. The reason that the "personifications" of capital's relation cannot be considered as subject positions within a discursive structure, is to be located in the specificity of capitalist semiosis--the reproduction of each pole of the relation is produced via an axiomatic:

[T]he axiomatic deals directly with purely functional elements and relations whose nature is not specified, and which are immediately realized in highly varied domains simultaneously; codes, on the other hand, are relative to those domains and express specific relations between qualified elements that cannot be subsumed by a higher formal unity (overcoding) except by transcendence and in an indirect fashion. (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 454; my emphases)

It is the particular specificity of the operation of capitalism's semiosis that means that when we speak of the "working class" as a collective "subject," this in no way implies a homogeneity of the social agents that constitute it. The working class is a deterritorialized subjectivity which exists in a non-discursive form. The "personification" of living labour as the working class refers only to the functions effected by the social agents' activity as determined by capital's axiomatic--not their identity. As Negri suggests:

The other subject, the working class subject, must emerge, since capitalist subsumption does not efface its identity but just dominates its activity . . . . In the successive process of the subsumptions, capital modifies the class composition, driving it to ever higher degrees of unity under and within its domination. . . . The organic composition of capital does not enclose the political composition of the working class, but it indicates it as its external antagonist. (Negri 1979, 123; 125)

There are two problems, therefore, with Laclau and Mouffe's discursive model as a means to understand capitalism. Firstly, to consider capitalist production as a discursive structure does not allow us to grasp the permanent revolution, or processes of deterritorialization, with which it constantly disrupts any stabilised order that it may produce. Secondly, capital's indifference to particularity means that, in order to function, it does not require its social agents to be coded in any particular way. It demands only that the social agents' practice is functional to its valorisation, irrespective of whatever meaning may arise as a result. Earlier, I suggested that capitalism's process of valorisation, insofar as it produced value as the symbol of social wealth, overdetermined the "elements" of social production. From this, it could be argued that, by ensuring that the social agents' practice is functional to that valorisation, capitalism's productive organisation constitutes a discursive structure. To do so, however, would be to understand the functionality of the social agent's practice to arise from the latter's articulation into a discursive chain. It would be to understand value as a product of the encoding of social labour. As we have seen, however, the functionality of social labour--the production/reproduction/expansion of value--is a result of an axiomatizing, not a discursive encoding. While the social agents' activity may be qualitatively diverse, capital is indifferent to that diversity. Capital operates via an axiomatic that enables it to be "realized in highly varied domains simultaneously." To describe the functionality of the social agents' practice in discursive terms as constitutive of "subject positions" (or "moments" existing as positive differentials within capitalism's structural order), therefore, would be to miss the fact that, within capital's axiomatic, the qualities of the elements and relations are not specified beyond their common "essence"; the latter of which consists either of the abstraction "objective wealth" or of "wealth-creating activity"; both of which, as a result of the degree of intensive and extensive development of capitalism, have become true in practice; or, as Marx puts it, "individuals are now ruled by abstractions" (1857-8, 164). Therefore, in both cases, it is the specific operation of capitalism's semiosis--a system based on an axiomatizing that utilises abstractions and apprehends processes of deterritorialization--that escapes the purview of Laclau and Mouffe's discursive model, and renders the latter unsuitable for an analysis of the "working class."

We have seen that, through their practice, the social agents who labour under capitalism produce and reproduce their objective existence by means of an axiomatic that does not determine their particular qualities--their practice constitutes them as parts of "a subjective source of wealth which is abstract." They are constituted as parts of the subjectivity of living labour without being "partially fixed" as moments of a particular discursive identity. Furthermore, since the "direct relation between decoded flows" that the axiomatic produces--as the conjunction of decoded flows; the forced unity of labour and capital; the objectification of living labour as value, which is simultaneously the subjectification of living labour capacity, or the extraction of productive, social activity from the collective body of workers--is an alienating relation, the process of axiomatizing is an antagonistic process. Thus, there is an oppositional subjectivity, prior to its organisation as a form of "political" struggle (understood under the model of "identity politics"), existing as an abstract potential in the body of the worker; or rather, to anticipate an accusation of "blubbering" humanism (Negri 1979, 154), as a potential in the collective body of the work force--which is to say that the abstraction "subjectivity of living labour" is only true in practice within the conditions productive of socialised labour (or its real subsumption under capital).

Insofar as their collective body is constituted as the objective form of the subjectivity of living labour, the social agents who labour under capitalism exist as parts of what I will call the class composition of living labour. As we have seen, by virtue of the particular role that abstractions play within capitalist semiosis, this statement in no way implies any qualitative homogeneity of those social agents--they are not "united" under a single working-class "identity." Earlier, I suggested that were we to attempt to comprehend the antagonism of the subjectivity of living labour, or working-class struggles, within the parameters of Laclau and Mouffe's model of hegemonic politics, then the "class composition" would serve as the "external principle" of working-class "identity." Such a situation would arise where the "personification" of living labour acted as a representative symbol for the unity of the class; the economic category of abstract social labour would overdetermine the qualitative elements of the flows constituting the subjectivity of living labour. Clearly, within such an ideological formation, the personification of living labour (as the "articulatory principle" of the unity) would function in such a way as to place those qualitative "elements" within relations of abstract equivalence with one another--in which case, it would seem to function in the same way that capitalist valorisation operates (as Negri suggests, we would have replaced the totalisation of money-value with "the emptiness of a use value totality which is immediately indifferent" [1979, 173]). Such a conception of class struggle appears to assert the homology of the organisational processes of the two, opposed subjectivities of capitalism. Following Marx's analysis of the capital relation, and Negri's subsequent elaboration,30 however, I am led to insist that such an assertion cannot be made with validity, since working-class self-valorisation is specifically different:

In the relation of capital and labour, exchange value and use value are brought into relation; the one side (capital) initially stands opposite the other side as exchange value, and the other (labour), stands opposite capital, as use value. . . . [U]se value as such does not stand in a connection with exchange value, but becomes a specific exchange value only because the common element of use values--labour time--is applied to it as an external yardstick. Their unity still immediately splits, and their difference still immediately coincides. . . . The extremes which stand opposite one another are specifically different. (Marx 1857-8, 267-8; 269; 266)

It is the concept of class composition that will enable the development of a different conception of the nature of working-class political struggle; one which avoids the problem of the apparent homology of the two subjects by basing itself on the specific difference of the processes of the reproduction of the working class: use value--necessary labour--abstract subjectivity--potential of wealth--self-valorisation. It is a conception that is based on the qualitative diversity that constitutes the antagonistic subjectivity of living labour; to quote Negri:

Thus the antagonism is not presented as a logically rigid determination but as an ontologically variable, dynamic and constitutive dimension. The new is not something unitary, but something manifold. The paradigm is not solitary, but polyvalent. The productive nucleus of the antagonism consists in multiplicity. . . . [This] constitutes the specific form of existence of the socialized worker. (1989, 87)

It is also a conception that, as a specification of the form of contemporary oppositional organisation, will partly provide the conditions of possibility for the model of "postmodern" political theatre to be developed in the next chapter.

Class Composition and Self-Valorisation

The specific difference which exists between living labour and capital is a result of the relation of alienation established by capital's axiomatic that reproduces each subjectivity as separate entities--the "division of the constituents of the process of production" that leads to "their personification vis-à-vis each other" (Marx 1867, 1015). It is this specific difference--the separation produced through an alienating, antagonistic relation--that, as Negri insists, "becomes the quality which defines labor" (1979, 70). The defining quality of living labour under capitalism is the antagonism that it presents to capital. It is "the only use value, therefore, which can form the opposite pole to capital" (Marx 1857-8, 272). In understanding contemporary society as a capitalist society (and I shall approach the question of the relation between society and capital in the next chapter), the form of the relation structure/struggle is necessarily posited as an internal one formed through the antagonistic confrontation of the two, opposed and distinct, subjectivities. The antagonism, internal to capitalism, of the subjectivity of living labour is the defining quality of the working-class composition. If history develops by way of the dynamics of the structure/struggle relation, therefore, it is the internal, antagonistic interactions between the class composition of living labour and the organic composition of capital that drives the development of capitalist society:

Marx characterizes the working class as a solid subjectivity, which is at once collective use value and necessary labor, as an historical and social essence to which is owed on the one hand "the replacement for wear and tear so that it can maintain itself as a class"; on the other hand, the working class is a social essence characterized by its particular status: its use value is creative; it is the unique and exclusive source of wealth. We are in consequence exactly at the heart of a first definition of the dynamic of the working class, where its essence as creator of value is engaged in a continual struggle which has as a result on the one hand the development of capital and on the other the intensification of the class composition, the enlargement of its needs and of its pleasures, the elevation of the value of labor necessary for its reproduction. And since capital finds itself constrained to repress and to devalue this productive force of the working class, and to delimit its impulsion into the intensification of its own composition (N.B.: the path of the intensification of the organic composition of capital passes by way of this repression), here then the struggle, the fundamental antagonism which is transformed into expanded proletarian struggle, constitutes at last a key to historical progress. . . . [T]he antagonism alone determines the movement. (Negri 1979, 73)

Since the relation "capitalist structure/anti-capitalist struggle" is an internal one, the concept of "class composition" necessarily refers to the same phenomenon as that apprehended by Marx's concept of the "organic composition of capital": the organisation of the elements of the social process of production. The concept, which was developed within autonomist Marxism, is a critical inversion of Marx's more familiar one (an inversion which, in the next chapter, will be central to my argument for the critical potential of certain forms of cultural production). Just as Marx's concept allows us to grasp the dispersal of capital's constituent elements without denying the existence of a "subject" (self-multiplying value as the "dominant subject" of the process) which traverses that dispersal, so its inversion allows us to grasp the dispersal of the power of the subjectivity of living labour. As Harry Cleaver suggests, "whereas the emphasis in Marx's concept is on the aggregate domination of variable by constant capital, the concept of 'class composition' involves a disaggregated picture of the structure of class power existing within the division of labour associated with a particular organisation of constant and variable capital" (1992, 113).

As we have seen, by virtue of the common essence of the social agents' practice--the abstract subjectivity of living labour--the "disaggregation" within the class composition is not a discursive "dispersal"; it indicates the fragmentation of living labour under capital's command. The usefulness of the concept of class composition, however, lies in the particular theoretical framework within which it was developed--which suggests that a class "recomposition," in overcoming the fragmentation, does not involve establishing an homogenous "unity." This is because, unlike capital, whose form of value's self-identity is maintained through the qualitative homogeneity of money (exchange value), living labour exists as use value--as a qualitative multiplicity. By virtue of the separation that is produced, the capital relation does not annul their specific difference:

This antagonism finds its origin in the relation of scission between use value and exchange value--a relation of scission in which the two tendencies are liberated from the forced unity to which they had been constrained: on the one hand, exchange value is autonomised in money and in capital, and on the other, use value is autonomised as the working class. . . . We must see in these two spaces the formation of opposed subjectivities, opposed wills and intellects, opposed processes of valorisation: in short, an antagonistic dynamic. (Negri 1979, 72; 93)

A "recomposition" of the working class does not operate in the same way as capital--it involves "the invention of a system, not of unification, but of multivalent engagement of all social forces which are not only in the process of articulating new subjective forces, but also of breaking the blocks of capitalist power" (Guattari and Negri 1985, 123; my emphases). The autonomy of the working class--the separation of use value from exchange value--means that its constitutive processes are specifically different from those of capital's valorisation; there can be no homology between the two. While capital's valorisation involves a quantitative expansion, the working-class's self-valorisation is an increase in the qualitative diversity of the satisfaction of its needs; "widening the sphere of [its] pleasures" (Marx 1857-8, 287). The recomposition of the working class is necessarily based on the variety produced through its processes of reproduction; through its processes of self-valorisation; in short, it is based on the qualitative multiplicity of the social agents reproduced within it:

In this intensity which characterizes separation we find maximum liberty. The social individual is multilaterality. The highest intensity of difference is the highest approach to communism. . . . Working-class power is the negation of the power of capital. It is the negation of the centralized and homogeneous power of the bourgeoisie, of the political classes of capital. It is the dissolution of all homogeneity. . . . Subjectivity not only liberates itself, it liberates a totality of possibilities. . . . The communist revolution, the emergence in all its power of the social individual, creates this wealth of alternatives, of propositions, of functions. Of liberty. (Negri 1979, 149-50)

Not only does the concept of class composition provide a theoretical framework able to account for the diversity of the processes of resistance to capitalist domination, however, but it also, through its articulation with the concept of self-valorisation, provides a means of theorising the way in which those processes are able to move beyond that domination--the processes of self-valorisation may be said to constitute what Marx calls "foreshadowings of the future" (1857-8, 461):

Because the term [class composition] has been developed in a way that conceptualizes working class self-valorization not as unified but as diverse, it provides a theoretical articulation of the tradition within "autonomist Marxism" of recognizing the autonomy not merely of the working class but of various sectors of it. To both recognize and accept diversity of self-valorization, rooted like all other activity in the diversity of the peoples capital seeks to dominate, implies a whole politics--one which rejects traditional socialist notions of post-capitalist unity and redefines the "transition" from capitalism to communism in terms of the elaboration from the present into the future of existing forms of self-valorization. (Cleaver 1993, 40)

It is in the variety of dynamics which arise from the flows of the subjectivity of living labour that the specific potential of working-class struggle resides. The working class produces "a process of valorisation which is autonomous from capitalist valorisation--a self-defining, self-determining process which goes beyond the mere resistance to capitalist valorisation to a positive project of self-constitution" (Cleaver 1992, 129).31 The self-determining subjects of the working class exist as a multiplicity of what Laclau and Mouffe would term "identities." By virtue of the specific difference between the capitalist and working-class processes of valorisation, the latter's recomposition does not involve establishing a working-class "identity" under which its social agents may unite. Its power consists of its ability to push the processes of the deterritorialization of the social flows beyond the axiomatic's capacity to conjugate them such that they are functional to its valorisation. As Deleuze and Guattari insist:

[Capitalism] does not effect the "conjugation" of the deterritorialized and decoded flows without those flows forging farther ahead; without their escaping both the axiomatic that conjugates them and the models that reterritorialize them; without their tending to enter into "connections" that delineate a new Land; without their constituting a war machine whose aim is . . . revolutionary movement (the connection of flows, the composition of nondenumerable aggregates, the becoming-minoritarian of everybody/everything). . . . Every struggle . . . constructs revolutionary connections in opposition to the conjugations of the axiomatic. (1980, 472; 473)

That is to say, the potential of the struggles of the working class resides in its ability to develop the multiplicity of its self-valorisation:

Each singular component of the movement develops systems of value which should be considered in themselves, without requiring either "translation" or "interpretation." These systems are permitted to evolve in their appropriate directions and to exist at times in contradictory relationships with each other. They don't participate any the less in the same project of constructing a new type of social reality. . . . Each molecular movement, each autonomy, each minoritarian movement will coalesce with an aspect of the real in order to exalt its particular liberatory dimensions. It will thus break with the schema of exploitation that capital imposes as the dominant reality. It is this new consciousness of the modern proletariat--deterritorialized and fluctuating--which will permit envisaging the rupture of capitalist segmentation and the reformulation not of "commands," not of programs, but of "diagrammatic propositions" of communism and of liberation. (Guattari and Negri 1985, 94; 81-2; my emphases)

I began this investigation by suggesting that Laclau and Mouffe's critique of Marxism did not correctly assess the claims made by Marx's theorisation of subjectivity and classes. Through a close reading of the concepts that Marx mobilises in order to apprehend the elements and processes of capitalism, I have shown that the rubric of "identity" is neither a necessary part of Marx's theoretical system (such that a critique made in those terms does not affect Marxism's validity), nor, by virtue of the historical specify of capitalism's semiosis, is it adequate as a foundational category of an analysis of contemporary society (such that Laclau and Mouffe's model of the hegemonic form of politics is ultimately invalid). It has to be admitted, however, that the kind of political project that I have been outlining--based on the multiplicity of self-valorisation--is one not normally associated with "Marxism"; indeed, it appears much closer to the project of radical democracy elaborated by Laclau and Mouffe, which I have spent so much time attempting to critique. It is to the distinction that I made in the introduction between the Marxist tradition and Marx's work itself (which, I suggested, problematised Laclau and Mouffe's negation of "Marxism"), that I find myself appealing. As Marx once said, though in a different context, "The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living" (1852, 595). It is precisely because Laclau and Mouffe's project is similar to the one elaborated here that, I believe, their differences are all the more important. If both are irreconcilable with the Marxist "tradition," then so much the worse for the latter.

Notes

Chapter Two

1 As we have seen, the claims of validity for this form presupposed a particular configuration of social conditions: uneven and combined development. In the next chapter, I will show how this presupposition itself has its validity progressively abolished by the development of the relation between society and capitalist production. See my section "The Real Subsumption of Society" in chapter three.

2 In this regard, see Deleuze and Guattari's critique of Lacan in Anti-Oedipus (1972) and Fernández's "Félix Guattari: Towards a Queer Chaosmosis" (1993).

3 To describe my theoretical position in the most general terms, my critique of Laclau and Mouffe attempts to follow and extend the distinction of methodological procedure that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri draw from their use of the concept of "labour": "The concept of labor refers primarily to a problematic of value. In our usage, in fact, the concepts of labor and value mutually imply one another: by labor we understand a value&emdash;creating practice. In this sense labor functions as a social analytic that interprets the production of value across an entire social spectrum, equally in economic and cultural terms. This conception of labor should be distinguished first of all from the many contemporary attempts to employ "performance" or "performativity" as a paradigm for social analysis and social practice: although performance highlights the social importance of signifying or discursive practices, we use labor instead to focus on value&emdash;creating practices. Focusing thus on the processes of valorization seems to us the clearest lens through which to see the production not simply of knowledges and identities, but of society and the subjectivities that animate it&emdash;&emdash;to see, in effect, the production of production itself" (Hardt and Negri 1994, 7&emdash;8). As a tangential remark, the reference to the production of production itself not only refers to Marx's introduction in the Grundrisse, but also vividly recalls the opening chapters of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti&emdash;Oedipus: "Hence everything is production: production of productions, of actions and of passions; productions of recording processes, of distributions and of co-ordinates that serve as points of reference; productions of consumptions, of sensual pleasures, of anxieties, and of pain. Everything is production, since the recording processes are immediately consumed, immediately consummated, and these consumptions directly reproduced. This is the first meaning of process as we use the term: incorporating recording and consumption within production itself, thus making them the productions of one and the same process" (1972, 4).

4 What I will suggest is that Laclau and Mouffe's model, which is essentially one based on the organisational forms developed by the NSMs, is not able to apprehend the specificity of "working&emdash;class" struggles. As we shall see, the working class is constituted by the subjectivity of living labour, which only exists in a "discursive" form when it is contained by the "axiomatic" of capital's conjunction (the worker as "personified" labour). The revolutionary potential of living labour, however, resides in its deterritorializing ability to escape that axiomatic&emdash;&emdash;an ability I shall explore under the rubric of self&emdash;valorisation. In asserting this difference, of course, I appear to be presupposing that Laclau and Mouffe's theory adequately grasps the character of the NSMs' struggles. While I do not necessarily support that presupposition, the parameters of this investigation prevent me from exploring this issue further at this point. The issue, of course, is to what extent the model of political self&emdash;valorisation that I will develop in this chapter (see my section "Class Composition and Self&emdash;Valorisation" below), problematises the model of "identity politics" as a suitable framework for the analysis of political subjectivities associated with the NSMs. I am suggesting, therefore, that not only is Laclau and Mouffe's model unsuitable for an analysis/critique of the relations of domination exercised in the labour process, but, to the extent that, under real subsumption, value is extracted from all pores of society, it is also inadequate for those political subjectivities that appear to be far removed from value&emdash;production.

5 This diagram is taken from Bell and Cleaver's essay (1982, 213). The variables are as follows:

MP: means of production which the capitalists monopolise as a class and sell to each other

LP: labour power, or the capacity to work, which capital forces workers to sell to it in order to acquire M and MS

P: production, or the activity into which the capacity to work is converted

C: commodities (other than labour power), which are produced by workers who work, and then sold to them by the capitalist as MS, or to other capitalists as MP

M: money, the universal equivalent of all commodities, which is often exchanged for labour power, and then exchanged by workers for MS

MS: means of subsistence (not listed in capital's circuit); commodities necessary to the production and reproduction of LP (food, clothing, housing, and so on), bought by the working class in exchange for LP.

6 "The three processes [wage exchange; production process; commodity exchange] of which capital forms the unity are external; they are separate in space and time. As such, the transition from one into the other, i.e. their unity as regards the individual capitalists, is accidental. Despite their inner unity, they exist independently alongside one another, each as the presupposition of the other. Regarded broadly and as a whole, this inner unity must necessarily maintain itself to the extent that the whole of production rests on capital, and it must therefore realize all the necessary moments of its self&emdash;formation, and must contain the determinants necessary to make these moments real" (Marx 1857&emdash;8, 408); "The constant continuity of the process, the unobstructed and fluid transition of value from one form into the other, or from one phase of the process to the next, appears as a fundamental condition of production based on capital to a much greater degree than for all earlier forms of production. On another side, while the necessity of this continuity is given, its phases are separate in time and space, and appear as particular, mutually indifferent processes. It thus appears as a matter of chance for production based on capital whether or not its essential condition, the continuity of the different processes which constitute its process as a whole, is actually brought about. . . . [T]heir inner necessity becomes manifest in the crisis, which puts a forcible end to their seeming indifference towards each other" (Marx, 1857&emdash;8, 535; 443&emdash;4).

7 As we shall see later, Laclau and Mouffe's model is not able to grasp the precise nature of this "fixing," insofar as it operates according to an axiomatizing (abstraction, deterritorialization, meaninglessness), not an encoding (reterritorialization, meaning). I shall return to this below.

8 The workers' exchange with capital consists of two exchanges: LP&emdash;&emdash;M in the wage exchange and M&emdash;&emdash;MS in commodity exchange. The circuit of workers' self&emdash;valorisation is therefore C&emdash;M&emdash;C, as opposed to capital's M&emdash;C&emdash;M'. Again, as we shall see, the workers' self&emdash;valorisation is a process "fixed" via an axiomatic, not an encoding (see previous note).

9 "[I]f the worker needs only half a working day in order to live a whole day, then, in order to keep alive as a worker, he [sic] needs to work only half a day. The second half of the labour day is forced labour; surplus&emdash;labour. What appears as surplus value on capital's side appears identically on the worker's side as surplus labour in excess of his requirements as worker, hence in excess of his immediate requirements for keeping himself alive" (Marx 1857&emdash;8, 324&emdash;5).

10 "The objective conditions of living labour appear as separated, independent values opposite living labour capacity as subjective being, which therefore appears to them only as a value of another kind (not as value, but different from them, as use value). Once this separation is given, the production process can only produce it anew, reproduce it, and reproduce it on an expanded scale" (Marx 1857&emdash;8, 461&emdash;2).

11 It is the historical form of labour that establishes the particular relation worker&emdash;labour. Marx's insistence on the possibility of "free, associated labour" posits an historical form of labour constituted by an articulation between the two poles of the relation that is not forced; which presupposes the abolition of the separation within the conditions of production. A question might be raised at this moment: To what extent does the externality between LP and MP, as presupposed by Laclau and Mouffe's theory (since they are theorised as "signifiers" that are articulated together within a discourse), rely on their historically specific separation under the form of capitalist production? If the separation is not given in the conditions of production (i.e., under communism), is the relation still an "articulation"? Marx insists that: "It is not the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their appropriation of nature, which requires explanation or is the result of a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labour and capital" (1857&emdash;8, 489). Marx's work may be said, therefore, to rely on an "essentialism"&emdash;&emdash;not of "identity," but of activity, of practice. In conceiving the connection between the social agent and their activity under the form of discourse, is Laclau and Mouffe's theory even capable of theorising alienation? Doesn't alienation, as a concept, necessarily imply an "essence" (i.e., labour as activity)? It is important, in this respect, to avoid the error which suggests that alienation is a concept used by Marx only in his early "humanist" work; the Grundrisse uses it often, and these notebooks form the kernel of the three volumes of Capital. Negri, in his Marx Beyond Marx (1979), often returns to this issue, and insists that a theorisation of alienation does not necessarily imply humanism. Under capitalism, it is the historical form of labour as wage labour that establishes the relation between the workers and their work as one of alienation; of "external forced labour" (Marx 1857&emdash;8, 611). Clearly, if the structural discourse of capitalism establishes identities within it (subject positions) as positive differentials, the subjects within those positions are not alienated (since, as we shall see, alienation implies, by Laclau and Mouffe's own definition, antagonism; yet they insist that relations of subordination cannot be antagonistic, and therefore cannot be alienating.

12 As we shall see (implicitly throughout the development of my argument, and explicitly in the final section of chapter three), we may draw a distinction between the type of "force" referred to here, and the force of the ontology of living labour: one operating through an axiomatic and reterritorializations, and the other operating through deterritorializations. Antonio Negri, drawing on the work of Spinoza, indicates the difference through the use of, on the one hand, "Power" (potestas, potere, pouvoir, Macht), and on the other, "power" (potentia, potenza, puissance, Vermögen): "This distinction marks the poles of the social dialectic: on the one hand potentia which is constitutive social activity, and on the other potestas which is the totalizing and fixed dimension of social making" (1989, 49).

13 On "operational," see Herbert Marcuse, One&emdash;Dimensional Man (1964): "Operationalism, in theory and practice, becomes the theory and practice of containment" (30).

14 "The objective conditions of living labour capacity are presupposed as having an existence independent of it, as the objectivity of a subject distinct from living labour capacity and standing independently over against it; the reproduction and realization [Verwertung], i.e. the expansion of these objective conditions, is therefore at the same time their own reproduction and new production as the wealth of an alien subject indifferently and independently standing over against living labour capacity. What is reproduced and produced anew is not only the presence of these objective conditions of living labour, but also their presence as independent values, i.e. values belonging to an alien subject, confronting this living labour capacity. The objective conditions of labour attain a subjective existence vis&emdash;à&emdash;vis living labour capacity&emdash;&emdash;capital turns into capitalist; on the other side, the merely subjective presence of the labour capacity confronted by its own conditions gives it a merely indifferent, objective form as against them&emdash;&emdash;it is merely a value of a particular use value alongside the conditions of its own realization [Verwertung] as values of another use value. Instead of their being realised in the production process as the conditions of its realization [Verwirklichung], what happens is quite the opposite: it comes out of the process as mere condition for their realization [Verwertung] and preservation as values for&emdash;themselves opposite living labour capacity" (Marx 1857&emdash;8, 462).

15 "Labour capacity has appropriated for itself only the subjective conditions of necessary labour&emdash;&emdash;the means of subsistence for actively producing labour capacity, i.e. for its reproduction as mere labour capacity separated from the conditions of its realization&emdash;&emdash;and it has posited these conditions themselves as things, values, which confront it in an alien, commanding personification" (Marx 1857&emdash;8, 452&emdash;3).

16 "[T]he worker constantly creates a double fund for the capitalist, or in the form of capital. One part of this fund constantly fulfils the conditions of his own existence and the other part fulfils the conditions for the existence of capital" (Marx 1857&emdash;8, 504). These two processes describe the difference between "large&emdash;scale circulation" (capital) and "small&emdash;scale circulation" (wages). See Marx, Grundrisse (1857&emdash;8) 673&emdash;678, and Negri, Marx Beyond Marx (1979) 127&emdash;150. The first process takes the form M&emdash;C&emdash;M', the second C&emdash;M&emdash;C; the first capital's valorisation, the second labour's self&emdash;valorisation. Within the terms of Deleuze and Guattari's theory of capitalism, the difference between self&emdash;valorisation and valorisation is expressed thus: "In the one case, money represents a potential break&emdash;deduction in a flow of consumption; in the other case, it represents a break&emdash;detachment and a rearticulation of economic chains directed toward the adaptation of flows of production to the disjunctions of capital" (1972, 228&emdash;9).

17 "The value of the old industry is preserved by the creation of the fund for a new one in which the relation of capital and labour posits itself in a new form. Hence exploration of all of nature in order to discover new, useful qualities in things; universal exchange of the products of all alien climates and lands; new (artificial) preparation of natural objects, by which they are given new use values. The exploration of the earth in all directions, to discover new things of use as well as new useful qualities of the old; such as new qualities of them as raw materials etc.; the development, hence, of the natural sciences to their highest point; likewise the discovery, creation, satisfaction of new needs arising from society itself; the cultivation of all the qualities of the social human being, production of the same in a form as rich as possible in needs, because rich in qualities and relations&emdash;&emdash;production of this being as the most total and universal possible social product, for, in order to take gratification in a many&emdash;sided way, he must be capable of many pleasures, hence cultured to a high degree&emdash;&emdash;is likewise a condition of production founded on capital. This creation of new branches of production, i.e. of qualitatively new surplus time, is not merely the division of labour, but is rather the creation, separate from a given production, of labour with a new use value; the development of a constantly expanding and more comprehensive system of different kinds of labour, different kinds of production, to which a constantly expanding and constantly enriched system of needs corresponds. . . . [T]here appears nothing higher in itself, nothing legitimate for itself, outside this circle of social production and exchange. Thus capital creates the bourgeois society, and the universal appropriation of nature as well as of the social bond itself by the members of society. Hence the great civilizing influence of capital" (Marx 1857&emdash;8, 409).

18 "[A]lthough labour&emdash;power assumes a distinctive form in every particular sphere of production, as a capacity for spinning, cobbling, metal&emdash;working, etc., so that every sphere of production requires a capacity for labour that is developed in a particular direction, a distinctive capacity for labour, it remains true that the flexibility of capital, its indifference to the particular forms of the labour process it acquires, is extended by capital to the worker. He is required to be capable of the same flexibility or versatility in the way he applies his labour&emdash;power. . . . [T]he worker looks upon the particular content of his labour with equal indifference. His work belongs to capital, it is only the use&emdash;value of the commodity that he has sold, and he has only sold it to acquire money and, with the money, the means of subsistence. A change in his mode of labour interests him only because every specific mode of labour requires a different development of his labour&emdash;power. . . . The more highly capitalist production is developed in a country, the greater the demand will be for versatility in labour&emdash;power, the more indifferent the worker will be towards the specific content of his work and the more fluid will be the movements of capital from one sphere of production to the next" (Marx 1867, 1013; 1014).

19 The reference to a particular material mode of production in which the relation has become real here refers to the establishment of a specifically capitalist mode of production, or what I have referred to both as the real subsumption of society under capital and the becoming total of bourgeois society.

20 The question of the possibility of a "subjectivity" existing in an "elemental" state&emdash;&emdash;that is, the possibility that the absence of relations between the elements may be conceived positively&emdash;&emdash;is determined, I believe, by the philosophical scheme utilised to comprehend those elements. While my knowledge of the debates involved is far from complete, I believe that the theories' relation to Spinoza is an important element of the divergences I an attempting to trace between Laclau and Mouffe, on the one hand, and Negri and Deleuze and Guattari, on the other. Both Negri and Deleuze have written books on Spinoza; the former "outlines an antagonistic dual tradition of political theory&emdash;&emdash;Hobbes/Rousseau/Hegel vs. Machiavelli/Spinoza/Marx" (Ryan 1991, 217); while Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the body without organs is a "Spinozist" one: "The body without organs is in fact produced as a whole, but a whole alongside the parts&emdash;&emdash;a whole that does not unify or totalize them . . . . The body without organs is the immanent substance, in the most Spinozist sense of the word; and the partial objects are like its ultimate attributes, which belong to it precisely insofar as they are really distinct and cannot on this account exclude or oppose one another" (1972, 326; 327). If capitalism is a deterritorializing socius, and the body without organs is that socius' exterior limit, then the communist socius is one that has become a body without organs. The elements that are supported by the body without organs are held together "only by the absence of a link (non&emdash;localizable connections) . . . . [T]his absence of a link&emdash;&emdash;and of a meaning&emdash;&emdash;is positive" (Deleuze and Guattari 1972, 309). As Negri and Hardt suggest: "The rejection of an ideal, necessary order of being does not require the acceptance of radical contingency; the refusal of an ontological vision that determines a conservative, closed society does not require a deontological vision. One need not make this leap to the opposite pole and reject ontology tout court in order to affirm the openness of ends in society. . . . Ontology is not a theory of foundation. It is a theory about our immersion in being and about being's continuous construction (1994, 287).

21 See Part Three of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti&emdash;Oedipus (1972): 139&emdash;271.

22 The deterritorialization of, on the one hand, the working subjects, and on the other, the objective conditions of production, is described by Marx in the Grundrisse (1857&emdash;8, 502&emdash;3).

23 "If it is true that the function of the modern State is the regulation of the decoded, deterritorialized flows, one of the principle aspects of this function consists in reterritorializing, so as to prevent the decoded flows from breaking loose at all edges of the social axiomatic" (Deleuze and Guattari 1972, 258).

24 As we shall see later, the difference between the encoding of the reterritorializing pole and the "axiomatizing" operations proper (which constitute a process of relative deterritorialization) demonstrates the inapplicability of Laclau and Mouffe's theory to the productive organisation of capitalism, insofar as their theory grasps its reterritorializing movements only. While I shall explore the distinction more fully below, it is important to note that there are two types of "fixing" implied here; which will correspond to the distinction between a coding and an axiomatizing. The distinction is important because capital does not just exist as a "fixation" of the power of living labour; it also exists in a fluid state (although this fluidity is constituted on the basis of "binding," or axiomatizing, living labour). Thus, like living labour, capital as a subject is a deterritorialized subject&emdash;&emdash;as the following quote from Marx indicates: "As the subject predominant over the different phases of this movement, as value sustaining and multiplying itself in it, as the subject of these metamorphoses proceeding in a circular course&emdash;&emdash;as a spiral, as an expanding curve&emdash;&emdash;capital is circulating capital. . . . But while capital thus, as the whole of circulation, is circulating capital, is the process of going from one phase into the other, it is at the same time, within each phase, posited in a specific aspect, restricted to a particular form, which is the negation of itself as the subject of the whole movement. Therefore, capital in each of its particular phases is the negation of itself as the subject of all the various metamorphoses. Not&emdash;circulating capital. Fixed capital, actually fixated capital, fixated in one of the different particular aspects, phases, through which it must move. As long as it persists in one of these phases&emdash;&emdash;[as long as] the phase itself does not appear as fluid transition&emdash;&emdash;and each of them has its duration, [then] it is not circulating, [but] fixated. As long as it remains in the production process it is not capable of circulating; and it is virtually devalued. As long as it remains in circulation, it is not capable of producing, not capable of positing surplus value, not capable of engaging in the process as capital. As long as it cannot be brought to market, it is fixated as product. As long as it has to remain on the market, it is fixated as commodity. As long as it cannot be exchanged for conditions of production, it is fixated as money. Finally, if the conditions of production remain in their form as conditions and do not enter into the production process, it is again fixated and devalued. As the subject moving through all phases, as the moving unity, the unity&emdash;in&emdash;process of circulation and production, capital is circulating capital; capital as restricted into any of these phases, as posited in its divisions, is fixated capital, tied-down capital. As circulating capital it fixates itself, and as fixated capital it circulates" (1857&emdash;8, 620&emdash;1).

25 The quotations within the quotation from Deleuze and Guattari are from Marx's Capital (1867). The passage from Deleuze and Guattari continues: "Under the first aspect capitalism is continually surpassing its own limits, always deterritorializing further, 'displaying a cosmopolitan, universal energy which overthrows every restriction and bond'; but under the second, strictly complementary, aspect, capitalism is continually confronting limits and barriers that are interior and immanent to itself, and that, precisely because they are immanent, let themselves be overcome only provided they are reproduced on a wider scale (always more reterritorialization&emdash;&emdash;local, world&emdash;wide, planetary)" (1972, 259).

26 The opposed movements of capital&emdash;&emdash;towards unlimitedness and limiting&emdash;&emdash;are described by Marx thus: "There appears here the universalizing tendency of capital, which distinguishes it from all previous stages of production. Although limited by its very nature, it strives towards the universal development of the forces of production, and thus becomes the presupposition of a new mode of production, which is founded not on the development of the forces of production for the purpose of reproducing or at most expanding a given condition, but where the free, unobstructed, progressive and universal development of the forces of production is itself the presupposition of society and hence of its reproduction; where advance beyond the point of departure is the only presupposition. This tendency, which capital possesses, but which at the same time, since capital is a limited form of production, contradicts it and hence drives towards dissolution&emdash;&emdash;distinguishes capital from all earlier modes of production, and at the same time contains this element, that capital is posited as a mere point of transition. . . . Capital posits the production of wealth itself and hence the universal development of the productive forces, the constant overthrow of its prevailing presuppositions, as the presupposition of its reproduction. Value excludes no use value; i.e. includes no particular kind of consumption etc., of intercourse etc. as absolute condition; and likewise every degree of the development of the social forces of production, of intercourse, of knowledge etc. appear to it only as a barrier which it strives to overpower. Its own presupposition&emdash;&emdash;value&emdash;&emdash;is posited as product, not as a loftier presupposition hovering over production. The barrier to capital is that this entire development proceeds in a contradictory way, and that the working&emdash;out of the productive forces, of general wealth etc., knowledge etc., appears in such a way that the working individual alienates himself; relates to the conditions brought out of him by his labour as those not of his own but of an alien wealth and of his own poverty. But this antithetical form is itself fleeting, and produces the real conditions of its own suspension. The result is: the tendentially and potentially general development of the forces of production&emdash;&emdash;of wealth as such&emdash;&emdash;as a basis; likewise, the universality of intercourse, hence the world market as a basis. The basis as the possibility of the universal development of the individual, and the real development of the individuals from this basis as a constant suspension of its barrier, which is recognised as a barrier, not taken for a sacred limit. Not an ideal or imagined universality of the individual, but the universality of his real and ideal relations. Hence also the grasping of his own history as a process, and the recognition of nature (equally present as practical power over nature) as his real body. The process of development itself posited and known as the presupposition of the same. For this, however, necessary above all that the full development of the forces of production has become the condition of production; and not that specific conditions of production are posited as a limit to the development of the productive forces. . . . Capital itself is the contradiction [, in] that, while it constantly tries to suspend necessary labour time (and this is at the same time the reduction of the worker to a minimum, i.e. his existence as mere living labour capacity), surplus labour time exists only in antithesis with necessary labour time, so that capital posits necessary labour time as a necessary condition of its reproduction and realization. At a certain point, a development of the forces of material production&emdash;&emdash;which is at the same time a development of the forces of the working class&emdash;&emdash;suspends capital itself" (1857&emdash;8, 540; 541&emdash;2; 543). The new mode of production to which capitalism strives towards thus corresponds to Deleuze and Guattari's conception of the destruction of the socius "in order to make it a body without organs and unleash the flows of desire on this body as a deterritorialized field" (1972. 33); that is, a social formation in which "the energy of the flows" no longer exist "in a bound state on the body of capital as a socius that is deterritorialized" (246); or, in Marx's words, a society in which humanity "is in the absolute movement of becoming" (1857&emdash;8, 488).

27 "[T]he worker himself is absolutely indifferent to the specificity of his labour; it has no interest for him as such, but only as much as it is in fact labour and, as such, a use value for capital. It is therefore his economic character that he is the carrier of labour as such&emdash;&emdash;i.e. of labour as use value for capital; he is a worker, in opposition to the capitalist" (Marx 1857&emdash;8, 297).

28 "The production of capitalists and wage labourers is thus a chief product of capital's realization process. Ordinary economics, which looks only at the things produced, forgets this completely. When objectified labour is, in this process, at the same time posited as the worker's non&emdash;objectivity, as the objectivity of a subjectivity antithetical to the worker, as property of a will alien to him, then capital is necessarily the capitalist, and the idea held by some socialists that we need capital but not the capitalists is altogether wrong. It is posited within the concept of capital that the objective conditions of labour&emdash;&emdash;and these are its own product&emdash;&emdash;take on a personality towards it, or, what is the same, that they are posited as the property of a personality alien to the worker. The concept of capital contains the capitalist" (Marx 1857&emdash;8, 512); "The objective conditions of living labour capacity are presupposed as having an existence independent of it, as the objectivity of a subject distinct from living labour capacity and standing independently over against it . . . . The objective conditions of labour attain a subjective existence vis&emdash;à&emdash;vis living labour capacity&emdash;&emdash;capital turns into capitalist" (462); "The independent, for&emdash;itself existence of value vis&emdash;à&emdash;vis living labour capacity&emdash;&emdash;hence its existence as capital&emdash;&emdash;the objective, self&emdash;sufficient indifference, the alien quality of the objective conditions of labour vis&emdash;à&emdash;vis living labour capacity, which goes so far that these conditions confront the person of the worker in the person of the capitalist&emdash;&emdash;as personification with its own will and interest&emdash;&emdash;this absolute divorce, separation of property, i.e. of the objective conditions of labour from living labour capacity&emdash;&emdash;that they confront him as alien property, as the reality of other judicial persons, as the absolute realm of their will&emdash;&emdash;and that labour therefore, on the other side, appears as alien labour opposed to the value personified in the capitalist, or the conditions of labour&emdash;&emdash;this absolute separation between property and labour, between living labour capacity and the conditions of its self&emdash;valorisation, between objectified and living labour, between value and value&emdash;creating activity&emdash;&emdash;hence also the alien quality of the content of labour for the worker himself&emdash;&emdash;this divorce . . . appears as a product of labour itself, as objectification of its own moments" (452).

29 Indeed, I am unsure whether the axiomatizing operation which establishes the capital relation may properly speaking be termed an "articulation," since, according to Laclau and Mouffe's specification, an articulation establishes "a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice" (1985, 105; my emphasis).

30 "The more fundamental the representation of value in the figure of money, the more fundamental is the refutation of value, the radicality of its inversion. Communism is not the realization of the interchangeability of value, the being in force of money as a real measure. Communism is the negation of all measure, the affirmation of the most exasperated plurality&emdash;&emdash;creativity" (Negri 1979, 33).

31 "The self&emdash;valorization of the proletarian subject, contrarily to capitalist valorization, takes the form of auto&emdash;determination in its development" (Negri 1979, 162).