Wednesday, October 2, 2019

Postcapitalism, Basic Income and the End of Work: A Critique and Alternative by Frederick Harry Pitts and Ana C. Dinerstein

A lot of this essay is a pretty convincing poke at the anti-work milieu, whether Left or Right, Accelerationist or (post-)Autonomist.  It is very much worth reading, especially as they point out how often these theories are predicated on a very masculine and middle-class flight from reproductive labor and "bullshit jobs" (Graeber), that is, work that doesn't suit their personal (intellectual/non-manual) creativity.

That is something very important to point out and a problem I have with people for whom the abolition of labor is the abolition of "the metabolic interchange between humanity and nature".  They are quite right to point out that the problem is not generic, transhistorical labor, but the social form of labor.  As I have tried to point out in earlier posts, it is the social form of labor as abstract domination that is at issue. 

The section outlining the way in which a Universal Basic Income (UBI) conforms both to a strong statism and nationalism seems very clear.  The way in which a UBI is managed through a citizen's right opens the way to deny the UBI to non-citizens, to the disenfranchised (in the United States, for example, would this also include persons who have lost the right to vote through felony offenses?)  They make a very strong presentation on how the authoritarian Modi government in India has looked to possibly use a UBI as a way to further mobilize national-chauvinism against minority groups.

A Problem?
There is a section near the beginning of the essay that I have problems with, and maybe it is just a matter of precision on their part, or maybe it is not.

"We suggest that the postcapitalist prospectus fails on three fronts. The first is that the post-work literature is productivist insofar as it sees ‘work’ as the central relation of capitalist society and not as the antagonistic relations of property, ownership and subsistence that logically and historically precede a society in which most people are compelled to sell their labour to live, nor the specific kind of results assumed by the products of that labour in the market."

What the part I have italicized seems to suggest is that Marx's critique is not a critique of relations of production, of abstract labor as determinate social form, but of relations of distribution (property, ownership).  Moishe Postone makes a very succinct critique of exactly this view and it remains his most enduring contribution to revitalizing Marx's work.  The problem with this view, in its most succinct sense, is that it is a criticism of property and ownership that leaves labor as determinate social form, as form of domination, untouched.  The logic is then that one needs to change who owns, to change the property relations, but it doesn't take issue with production as such.

I believe that Dinerstein and Pitts do actually want to call the social form of labor into question, but you cannot do so from the perspective of the relations of distribution.  It is labor, as the contradictory unity of concrete and abstract labor, itself which must be abolished because value as the social form of wealth is itself a category of production, not of exchange or circulation, that is, not a social form produced after production that leaves production beyond critique.

This dilemma probably arises from the adoption of the position now put forward by Michael Heinrich and Christopher J. Arthur that the value-form is produced through exchange.  This so-called monetary theory of value does exactly what Marx does not: it situates value as social form of wealth in exchange, rather than in production.

This essay also dovetails with a point made by Jehu, repeatedly, regarding the crisis of capital being one of the increasing superfluity of living labor leading to technologically-driven permanent unemployment due to the increasing organic composition of capital, as opposed to the increasing organic composition of capital increasing the difficulty of expanded valorization of value and hence of a crisis of overaccumulation.  The former, which Jehu ascribes to Endnotes (fairly or not), he says is a Keynesian position (fairly), whereas the latter is Marx's position. 

Dinerstein and Pitts point to a similar issue when they say that "But this is a very narrow understanding of capitalism that sees it synonymous with labour itself and not, as we have stated above, with value, commodities and a certain historically-specific set of antagonistic social relationsbased not around labour but labour-power. With the waning of work, we are told, technological unemployment renders the wage insufficient to secure workers' subsistence. Their labour-power- the pure potential to labour- must be reproduced through other means." [Italics mine - CW]

Here again we see this attempt to drag domination and exploitation out of the relation of capital and labor in the production process.  The fixation on labor-power comes at the expense of the problem of abstract labor.

This gets a little weird at the point at which they seem to claim that UBI would destroy the class struggle by putting an end to the struggle over property and ownership:

"This is an extreme example that usefully serves to highlight how, liquidating class struggles for a nationally-constituted citizenry, abstract utopias reliant on the UBI might also treat the class struggle as a closed case whilst largely retaining the current rule of property ownership, including, crucially, that of the means of production, for which no postcapitalist or  post-work vista gives a convincing vision for redress. The basic income, as a key principle of  the proposed post-work society, breaks here with some vital preconditions of worker organisation. In his analysis of the Keynesian state, Holloway argues that the latter constituted a specific ‘mode of domination’ (Holloway 1996, p. 8) for the Keynesian state contained the power of labour via the ‘monetization’ of class conflict: ‘In the face 13 of rigidity and revolt, money was the great lubricant. Wage-bargaining became the focus of both managerial change and worker discontent’ (Holloway 1996, p. 23). The crisis of Keynesianism was, in this sense, ‘a crisis of a form of containment of labour’ (Holloway, 1996, p. 27). The basic income could become, then, another form of domination of the power of labour, only that this time, rather than relying on class conflict, aims at obliterating it." [Italics mine - CW]

The key here is the idea that capital is a "form of domination of the power of labour".  If, however, domination is all the way down to the point of production, then it seems unlikely that a UBI scheme will obliterate class conflict.  The struggle after all is not merely over wages, but over the very imposition of labor as the necessary condition of life for the vast majority of human beings, of the conditions under which that domination takes place, of the logic for which production takes place, and so on.  In other words, the struggle against capital is the struggle against more than the distribution of the means of production, but over the very way in which those means of production are themselves an expression of domination.

This comes back to the problem that if the abolition of labor in the accelerationist sense has a merely technological determinist notion of what is wrong with capitalism, so too the fetishistic putting forward of labor as something to be liberated takes us backwards to the view of the identity of free labor and freedom, as opposed to freeing humanity from the imposition of labor on individuals as a precondition for the actual freedom of all.  Only when labor is no longer imposed, that is, when an individual's access to the means of life no longer depends on the performance of labor, will human beings be free.  Contra the accelerationists, that doesn't mean that human beings won't engage in the metabolic interchange with nature, but that that interchange will not govern the relations between human beings.

My problem with Dinerstein and Pitts, in the end, is not that they go too far, but do not go far enough.

The result is an especially trade-unionist view of matters that if the workers don't have income to fight over, they have no reason to fight the system:

"The basic income effectively abolishes any means by which workers can struggle for a better deal, liquidating class struggle and purporting to resolve its contradictions at the imaginary level of a nation state paying free money to a nationally-defined people. In so doing, the vista of an abolition of work afforded by the basic income serves up the fruits of struggle prematurely, without struggles having taken place. It temporarily defers the contradictions of class antagonism without resolution through the antagonism itself. This is ironic even on the terms of the postcapitalist argument itself, insofar as class struggle would be necessary to drive up wages to the extent that employers would be motivated to worth(sic - "replace"?) low-paid workers in bad jobs with machines in the first place. Yet none of the popular imaginaries of an automated future entertain this notion, outsourcing capitalist development to technology as a neutral force as opposed to one imbricated and resulting from wider social relations."

How is it that a UBI serves of the fruits of struggle prematurely?  Is there some bizarrely Christian self-flagellation requirement without which the working class is not entitled to the fruits of that suffering?

However, as is evidently the case, it doesn't resolve the antagonism itself.  And why not?  That is not actually addressed because to do so would involve taking up the point that the only problem with labor is not that it is monetized, but that it is the necessary form of activity that produces value, that is, that there is no value-form without human productive activity in the form of abstract labor.  The point being, that capital that would cease to employ living labor qua wage-labor would cease to produce value and collapse.

But we are not done yet.  About a page later we find out that "basic income...  purports to change the social relations under which we get paid for the better, but runs the risk of doing so for the worst precisely because the class struggle contained and concealed in the formal legal relationship between the buyer and seller of labour is elided."

Now the class struggle is contained and concealed in the exchange relation between buyer and seller.  This is really explicitly the end of the Marxian idea of a critique of the relations of production for one in which the real problem is the buyer-seller relation.  And yet Marx makes explicit that this is a relation of equality, one which he goes on to mock as the seller (the worker) is taken by the buyer (the capitalist) for a good tanning in the actual labor process itself.

In the end, UBI could only be deployed in a minimal manner.  Dinerstein and Pitts are more right than they seem to realize in pointing out that maintaining dependence on monetized relations, on the money-form, thus entails the maintenance of domination, but not because value is produced there, but because monetized relations assume a commodity that produces a surplus of wealth, not merely in material form, but in the social form of value.

3 comments:

  1. "This dilemma probably arises from the adoption of the position now put forward by Michael Heinrich and Christopher J. Arthur that the value-form is produced through exchange"

    This seems predicated upon a misunderstanding of Heinrich (I don't really know Arthur). "value-form" in German is "Wertform", which is a section of the first chapter of Vol. I of Capital that deals with the various forms of value (simple form of value, expanded form of value, general form of value, in German einfache Wertform, enfaltete Wertform, allgemeine Wertform). The confusion is that the same German word, Wertform, is translated into two different terms in the English version, "value-form" and "form of value", even though in German the single word refers to the same thing: the different "forms of value" or "value-forms" (hence the title of the subsection).

    For a commodity's value to be "present" or "show itself" (sich darstellen), it requires another commodity to function as the manifestation of value, starting from the simple form of value and then working up to the general equivalent and money-form.

    To talk of this being produced by "exchange" is to muddle the levels of abstraction in Capital; the process of exchange is not dealt with until Chapter 2.

    ReplyDelete
  2. P.S.

    FWIW, Heinrich's two-volume commentary on the first seven chapters of Capital (or first five chapters in the German edition), "Wie das Marxsche Kapital lesen?", is very good at elaborating these distinctions of levels of abstraction, on the basis of close textual reading (as well as useful appendices from related manuscripts, etc.)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Firstly, thank you for your reply.

    Secondly, I am familiar with Heinrich on this (I helped with the editing of the English translation of his An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital) and it seems to me that his presentation of the matter goes beyond the point you make and the muddle is not mine.

    Substantively, if the matter was simply that for Value to appear, it must appear as exchange-value, and that the most developed form of exchange-value is money, then we would be fine. Unlike classical political economy, money is the necessary form of appearance of value. Marx has a value theory of labor, and further, a value theory of money.

    However, Marx does not hold that labor only becomes abstract in exchange, but is already abstract within production. The exact opposite is the case for Heinrich (and in my opinion Pitts and Dinerstein.)

    On p. 55 of the Introduction...
    "Value-objectivity is not possessed by commodities as objectifications of conrete labor, but rather as objectifications of abstract labor. However, if as we just outlined, abstract labor is a relation of social validation existing only in exchange (where privately expended labor counts as value-constituting, abstract labor) then value also first exists in exchange."

    ReplyDelete