#living labor

[radicaldomesticities]

Lunch Break

[radicaldomesticities]

Living labor

[culturite]

Fred Moten - "Collective Head" (April 2014 @ NYU)

I had the opportunity to attend Fred's talk while I was in New York City this past year. He is a profound, beautiful thinker and incredible writer whose work inspires me in countless and ever-expanding ways. So happy to have found this.

[lazz]

i'm being loose with "we" and "them" and i feel like it's important to be loose, so that them can become we and we can become them

fred moten at the living labor keynote, "collective head"

[lazz]

the girls panel at living labor, the q&a convo about whether wasting time/leisure/crime (as represented on tumblr, in the bling ring, and spring breakers) constitutes an emerging form of resistance, or perhaps a cul-de-sac in feminism that resists making value judgments about life in contemporary capitalism

[feelingpolitical]

Capital, Marx’s abstract category, says to the laborer: ‘I want you to be reduced to sheer living labor— muscular energy plus consciousness—for the eight hours for which I have bought your capacity to labor. I want to effect a separation between your personality (that is, the personal and collective histories you embody) and your will (which is a characteristic of sheer consciousness). My machinery and the system of discipline are there to ensure that this happens. When you work with the machinery that represents objectified labor, I want you to be living labor, a bundle of muscles and nerves and consciousness, but devoid of any memory except the memory of the skills the work needs.

Chakrabarty, “Two Histories of Capital,” in Provincializing Europe, p. 67

[feelingpolitical]

The critical point is that the labor that is abstracted in the capitalist’s search for a common measure of human activity is living. Marx would ground resistance to capital in this apparently mysterious factor called “life.” The connections between the language of classical political economy and the traditions of European thought one could call “vitalist” are an underexplored area of research, particularly in the case of Marx. Marx’s language and his biological metaphors often reveal a deep influence of nineteenth-century vitalism. […] These vital forces are the ground of constant resistance to capital. They are the abstract living labor—a sum of muscles, nerves, and consciousness/will—which, according to Marx, capital posits as its contradictory starting point. In this vitalist understanding, life, in all its biological/conscious capacity for willful activity (the “many-sided play of muscles”), is the excess that capital, for all its disciplinary procedures, always needs but can never quite control or domesticate.”

Chakrabarty, “Two Histories of Capital,” in Provincializing Europe, p. 60

[feelingpolitical]

Now, if we initially examine the relation such as it has become, value having become capital, and living labour confronting it as mere use value, so that living labour appears as a mere means to realize objectified, dead labour, to penetrate it with an animating soul while losing its own soul to it --and having produced, as the end-product, alien wealth on one side and [, on the other,] the penury which is living labour capacity's sole possession -- then the matter is simply this, that the process itself, in and by itself, posits the real objective conditions of living labour (namely, material in which to realize itself, instrument with which to realize itself, and necessaries with which to stoke the flame of living labour capacity, to protect it from being extinguished, to supply its vital processes with the necessary fuels) and posits them as alien, independent existences -- or as the mode of existence of an alien person, as self-sufficient values for-themselves, and hence as values which form wealth alien to an isolated and subjective labour capacity, wealth of and for the capitalist. The objective conditions of living labour appear as separated, independent [verselbständigte] 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. How it does this, we have seen. 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 labour capacity. What is reproduced and produced anew [neuproduziert] 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-à-vis living labour capacity -- 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 -- it is merely a value of a particular use value alongside the conditions of its own realization [Verwertung] as values of another use value."

Marx, Grundrisse, Notebook IV: mid-December 1857-22 January 1958; The Chapter on Capital (continued), p. 461-2