#endnotes 4

[ultroid2068]

"While it is difficult to identify a precise and determinate “logic” as to why some activities become really subsumed and others do not, the fact that certain activities require delicate work or direct human contact, and therefore must remain labour-intensive, is clearly key. There appears always to be a remainder of such activities, an assortment of differentiated tasks, mostly in services.11 Insofar as services remain services, they tend predominantly to be a source only of “absolute”, and not “relative” surplus value. This is simply another way of saying that there are limits to raising productivity. Consequently, economies that are “post-industrial” and concentrated around service work tend to be low-growth. In such conditions, it is imperative for capitalists to get as much out of their workers as possible, by increasing the duration or intensity of labour. To some extent, the prerequisite for the existence of many jobs becomes pressurised work conditions. If super-exploited sectors take up a growing share of the labour market, this also puts downward pressure on all wages, and increases insecurity, as workers lose bargaining power and bosses are emboldened to demand ever more flexibility. With this, the door is opened for a whole range of abuses to be unleashed upon the worker — sexual, emotional and psychological, as well as the stealing or retention of wages and chronic overworking. Certain positions, such as that of the low-wage service sector worker, thus appear as a kind of special category of surplus worker, akin to the informally self-employed in low-income countries (and in high income countries over the past decade or so). Low-wage service workers must become extreme self-exploiters, as well as being super-exploited, if they are to get work. Many of these jobs (deliveries, house-cleaning, supermarket baggers, and so on) can only exist because the wages of the people performing the service are a fraction of what those consuming the service are paid. Thus, the condition for finding a job in a growing service sector is often accepting a significantly lower than average wage." - Endnotes #4, An Identical Abject-Subject?

[ultroid2068]

"On the one hand, this relatively simple theory of the tendential production of surplus population can help greatly in explaining various key aspects of the present global situation. It gives us a basis for explaining deindustrialisation, the relative growth of services, the spread of forms of insecure and flexible labour, and the numerous abuses for which this opens the way. In turn, these tendencies intensify and exacerbate the difficulty of unifying the working class under the hegemony of the industrial worker, in the way traditional Marxism anticipated; it thus gives us a basis for explaining the crisis of the left and present strategic predicaments. It also seems to offer an explanation for declining growth rates over recent decades, as relative surplus value-producing labour has become a diminishing share of global labour. There are other things we could add to this list too, for instance: the difficulty of states balancing between welfare demands and those of markets; the formation of mega-slums; post-industrial forms of urbanism. Or, on the other side: “financialisation”, “neoliberalism”, and so on. Insofar as these combined tendencies sketch out the major dynamics and outlines of the present global situation, we take the theory of surplus populations to be an important reference point in framing the present. On the other hand, when a theory has clear explanatory power, it can be tempting to slide into a sort of conceptual overreach, where the theory is presumed to explain things which it really can’t explain, or to say things which it doesn’t. It may be the case that Marxists have particularly bad habits on this level: for example, “capital” or “subsumption” are concepts that are often reached for too hastily, called upon to do more explanatory work than they are actually able to. For a theory to have real explanatory power, one has to be able to identify its limits clearly and honestly — to say what it cannot, as well as what it can, explain. What seems to be a standard misinterpretation or over-extension of the theory of surplus population is characterised by a hypostatisation of “the surplus population” as a singular social subject, with the apparent implication that this may be viewed as the new revolutionary agent, or at least that it is the agent behind various forms of contemporary struggle. This involves a conceptual slippage between general tendency and particular sociological or empirical cases. While it would of course ultimately be false to separate the two, it is also important not to identify them too immediately or simplistically. Thus, the theory of surplus population does not involve some kind of neo-Bakuninite romanticisation of a surplus subject “more radical” or “more dangerous” than the organised working class; nor does it involve a reading of present struggles as those of some “surplus” subject." -Endnotes #4, An Identical Abject-Subject?

[ultroid2068]

“I have focused on suburbanisation in the United States for the same reasons Marx focused on Britain in Capital: this dramatic shift in the working up of space by capital is nowhere else so clear and complete, but the conditions which generate sprawl and suburbanisation are of course not limited to the US — they represent a general enough global tendency in this period to be taken as characterising the broader dynamics of the class relation as such. This does not mean, however, that we can simply read the American case off the operation of capital’s “logic”. The latter is itself highly shaped by the peculiarities of the UScontext, meaning that the story of suburbanisation must be unfolded with an attention to particular cases and the contingencies which shape them. The tendency towards de-concentration is constituted by, and in turn helps to constitute, the reorganisation of the phenomenal forms of the capital–labour relation — a reorganisation driven by the crisis of 1917–45, in which the working class as an estate met its historic defeat in a counter-revolution that arose in part from within the workers’ movement itself. Such a defeat is not only political, however. Defeat always entails the reorganisation of the labour process and the very conditions of accumulation. While the working class was decisively defeated by fascism on one side and Keynesianism on the other — through their mutual immersion in war and genocide — accumulation was renewed on a world scale. This occurred under conditions which reversed the three above-mentioned assumptions of capitalism’s radical critics: transforming labour and production processes to surpass the dominance of mechanical industry; relatively overcoming the working class’s material impoverishment in the wealthiest countries; introducing a greater degree of inclusion and representation of wage-labourers, as individuals, within the political and legal system. The latter was not merely a matter of votes, or of the integration of unions or workers’ parties into the state: with it came more general improvements in the guaranteed quality of life, through access to healthcare, funded retirement, paid vacation, free public education, and so on. This gradually ate away at the independent organisations and institutions of the class that had existed outside, and often against, the state and bourgeois property law, and in many cases effectively destroyed them. The recognition of these changes has been glacially slow among those claiming a “revolutionary” outlook — that is, one in which the overcoming of capitalism as the work of capital, itself entails the overcoming of capitalism by those compelled to wage labour. Where they have been recognised, and where the abolition of capital has not been given up altogether, this has often entailed the claim that the capital–labour relation no longer holds, that the working class no longer exists, and that the overcoming of capital will either come only from a class outside of the capital relation, or will be the work of capital’s own rational self-overcoming. Both cases share a common source of error: an association of the phenomenal, historically particular conditions of mechanical industry and material impoverishment with the categories of capital as such and the abstract nature of its forms of domination, and the conflation of a class relation with the condition of being an estate. To put it another way, both have acted as if capitalist society was a direct form of domination of one group by another, as in slavery or feudalism, when in fact it involves an indirect form of domination through abstract social forms. Of course, in its initial development capitalism arose amidst such direct, concrete forms of domination and they do not simply disappear of themselves, but only under a protracted development, which is itself determined by continual crises and the potential overthrow of capitalism.”

-Endnotes 4, Its Own Peculiar Decor