2.2.1. The Historical Character of the Distinction between Work and Labour
Engels makes a distinction between work and labour. He stresses that ‘the labour which creates use-value and counts qualitatively, is Work, as distinguished from Labour; that which creates value and counts quantitatively, is Labour as distinguished from Work.’2 In this sense, work is not simply an instrumental activity, even under capitalism; it produces use-values and thereby is simultaneously the production of our natural environment and of ourselves. Work is thus a universal category; people in all societies, no matter the specific organisation of productive activity, work. Labour, as defined mainly in the Marxist tradition, is instrumental activity;
labour is activity not with the aim of producing use-values but with the aim of producing value.
Labour is activity that workers undertake in return for the wage and is activity undertaken so that surplus-value can be exploited. As such, I argue that it is important to make the distinction;
if we are to look at labour under capitalism and imagine that this form of interaction with the objective world is eternal and immutable then it would be no surprise if we were to agree with the mercantilists that there is no intrinsic satisfaction to be had from work. From the perspective of the worker, work under capitalism is most oftentimes a painful drudge and it might be argued that a “progressive” approach to a form of social organisation that forces billions of people to do certain things and to do them in a certain way and threatens them with starvation and eviction if they do not comply would be to abolish work as quickly as possible.
On the other hand, if we were to look at work and imagine that this form of interaction with the objective world is an eternal and immutable condition we would occlude entirely the politics and the political economy of the capitalist mode of production. That is, if we were to conflate work with labour. Of course, this conflation and the notion of work as simply a means to the acquisition of money were refuted as early as Adam Smith. Marx takes the critique of the mercantilist view of work as simply a painful yet utilitarian cross which must be borne to where Smith never could. He does so by linking the phenomenon of subjective feelings
1 Antonio Negri. ‘Domination and Sabotage’ in Sylvere Lotringer and Christian Marazzi (eds). Autonomia: Post-Political Politics. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1980). 62-71.
2 Friedrich Engels (Editor’s Note) in Marx Capital vol. I 54fn. Emphasis in original.
regarding the drudgery of work to history and to the organisation of work. As Spencer puts it, both the Mercantilists and the Classical Political Economists ‘were guilty of seeing only the negative aspects of work, and were unable to relate such aspects to the capitalist system.’1 Marx refutes the claims of mercantilism and of Smith by considering them in their historical context. In sketching out Marx’s conception of work, it is important to remember that this is an exposition of the dialectical development of humanity’s ‘place’ within the world, as discussed at length in the previous chapter. This is not a static, synchronic evaluation of the properties of the “human” but is a dynamic, diachronic examination of the relation between humanity and nature. “Human nature” is therefore, for Marx, a development in itself, and one that pertains within the production of the natural world of which humanity is a part. As Marx argues, the character of the activity by which humanity appropriates nature is simultaneously a process of the production of nature and a process of the production of humanity. Marx states that ‘all history is nothing but a transformation of human nature.’2 Work, in the process of shaping the world, shapes the people who do it. It is in this context that work is the practice by which humanity realises its creative potential. In capitalism, work is seen as a drudge, as painful, as a purely instrumental means by which to obtain the necessaries of life because work is organised under capitalism. As discussed in chapter one, the wage, exchange relations and the system of private property alienate the worker from the object of their labour, from their activity, and from the rest of humanity by virtue of the power relations that result from the organisation of work. In doing so, the capitalist organisation work alienates us from the possibility to interact with the objective world in a way that is coordinate to what Marx calls our ‘species powers’.
This alienation and the primacy of value over use-value in labour makes work under capitalism a painful and instrumental graft.
2.2.2. Work and Labour under Capitalism
Why is the organisation of work under capitalism as labour important and why is work so important to life that its significance goes beyond its mere biological reproduction? Work is essential; work creates life, reproduces it, and affirms it. As Marx states, work is, ‘in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces...in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a
1 Spencer The Political Economy of Work 47
2 Marx cf. Ollman Alienation 79
form adapted to his own wants.’1 Work is not a biological need. Before the discovery of fire there were peoples who did not work, but who simply ‘seize[d] upon the materials of nature ready made.’2 The need for use-values produced by work is a need that has developed as humanity has worked. As Sean Sayers states, ‘subject and object change and develop in relation to each other.’3 It is in this sense of the co-development of humanity and the material world that Marx argues that ‘human action with a view to the production of use-values...is the everlasting Nature-imposed condition of human existence.’4 Existence in the absence of this quality of action would be something very different, and humanity would be something very different, than it is today. Thus work creates life, i.e., the form of life. As people work to produce use-values coordinate to needs so they are altered through the act of production. Thus work does not only provide the means of subsistence but is the principle mechanism by which we engage with our environment. It is in this double-sense that I say that work creates life.
Work creates life not simply by producing the use-values necessary for its reproduction in the biological sense but also by forming it in the existential sense. As the principle mechanism by which we engage with the world, it is through work that we affirm our ‘species-being’ and develop our ‘slumbering powers.’5 It is for this reason that Marx states that ‘productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life.’6
Labour is distinct from work. The aim of labour under capitalism is to produce value not use-value and, as such, it is organised in such a way so as to make it impossible for humans to realise their capacities for existing in the world in a consciously free way, i.e., to engage with the world and formatively shape it in such a way to use one’s powers to satisfy needs. What are the key features of labour, and which characteristics are most important when thinking of theses on the potential for work under capitalism to be a source of self-valorisation? Labour under capitalism is wage-labour; the possibility for this character of the organisation of work persists from two conditions: private property and the concomitant possibility for the worker to be separated from means of production, and what Gayatri Spivak calls the ‘irreducible structural super-adequation’ of the subject, i.e., the ability of the worker to produce greater values than he or she needs for their own reproduction as a producer of use-values.7 The structural character of this super-adequation emerges from the universal capacity of subjects to
1 Marx Capital vol. I 173
2 Harry Braverman. Labor and Monopoly Capitalism: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998). 31
3 Sean Sayers. ‘The Concept of Labor: Marx and his Critics’, Science & Society 71:4 (2007). 435..
4 Marx Capital vol. I 179
5 Marx 1844 75; Marx Capital vol. I 173
6 Marx 1844 76
7 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. ‘Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value’ in In Other Worlds. (New York: Routledge Classics, 2006). 216.
create surplus-value. These two conditions make the commodification of labour-power possible. Labour-power – those capacities of bodies which are exercised when creating use-values, as distinct from labour which is labour-power in use – is a commodity.1 It has both a use-value and an exchange-value. It is, however, the most peculiar of commodities in that its use-value is that ‘its use creates value.’2 Its exchange-value is of a lesser magnitude than the exchange-values of the use-values it is able to produce. It is possible therefore to exploit surplus-value from the exchange of the wage for labour-power and the putting of labour-power to use in the production of value. Therefore, under capitalism ‘man has no human needs and money is the only true need produced in capitalism.’3
It is these conditions of labour that follow from the possibility of the exploitation of surplus-value which make it impossible for labour, according to Marx, to be ‘free, conscious activity’
through which humanity can ‘realise [its] slumbering powers.’4 Workers are alienated from their labour activity, from its product, from humanity’s other subjects, and from what it is to be human. The separation of the worker from the means of production, along with the species character of work in which the worker designs the alteration of the object from the commencement of labour, i.e., before and throughout sensuous engagement with the object, creates the possibility for this alienation from the potentialities that can only be fulfilled through work. This alienation occurs through the control of the labour process, and the ownership of the object of labour, by something alien to the worker, i.e., someone else, the capitalist. Thus, labour is work in a society in which the worker has been separated from the means of production, the worker’s labour-power is exchanged for a wage, the labour process is designed and controlled by an ‘alien power’, i.e., the capitalist; the use-values that are produced by labour are the property of this alien power. Labour is what work becomes under capitalism: it is the production of use-value solely to the ends of the production of value, and in its identities as exchange-value and surplus-value.
Work is the process by which humanity realises its potential; labour is a process in which work is transformed such that this potential is stunted. It is an important part of Marx’s analysis of labour under capitalism that those characteristics that follow from the fact of capital’s control over the labour process preclude the possibility for labour under capitalism to offer potential for the development and realisation of human capacities. There are a group of theorists however, the post-operaismo, who are also gathered together under the broad epithet of
1 Marx Capital vol. I 164
2 Marx Capital vol. I 224
3 Ollman Alienation 92
4 Marx 1844 76; Marx Capital vol. I 173
Cognitive Capitalism theorists and generally influenced by the Italian Autonomist Marxist tradition, who argue that developments in the character of labour under capitalism indicate that there is an immanent tendency toward labour being the source of the sort of self-realisation that Marx describes. Labour in the contemporary conjunction of capitalism, they argue, is a means by which human potentialities can be realised and, further, contemporary forms of labour represent a mode of being from which an exodus from capitalist relations will follow. To approach this, I examine the contemporary conceptual landscape of labour by analysing a set of concepts that have been used to describe contemporary variations in wage-labour: the concepts of emotional labour, aesthetic labour and the linked concepts of immaterial labour, affective labour and biopolitical production.