The Temptation of St. Anthony (ca. 1650) by Joos van Craesbeeck
“History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its ‘ruses’ turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force. This is indeed the ultimate sense in which History as ground and untranscendable horizon needs no particular theoretical justification: we may be sure that its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them.” - Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, “On Interpretation”
“It must be kept in mind that the new forces of production and relations of production do not develop out of nothing, nor drop from the sky, nor from the womb of the self-positing Idea; but from within and in antithesis to the existing development of production and the inherited, traditional relations of property. While in the completed bourgeois system every economic relation presupposes every other in its bourgeois economic form, and everything posited is thus also a presupposition, this is the case with every organic system. This organic system itself, as a totality, has its presuppositions, and its development to its totality consists precisely in subordinating all elements of society to itself, or in creating out of it the organs which it still lacks. This is historically how it becomes a totality. The process of becoming this totality forms a moment of its process, of its development.” - Karl Marx, Grundrisse
I am interested here in establishing the beginning of a research program that can offer a review and synthesis of many readings I have undertaken in the last several months. This pursuit involves historical and historiographic work on the origins of the capitalist mode of production and the emergence of the modern, or capitalist, state form. For this specific point of departure, I found striking a remark made by Gilles Deleuze on the importance of Marx’s concept of the organic composition of capital. In a lecture on the content of the the State Apparatus as it is presented in his work with Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze says of the organic composition of capital’s expressed relation between constant and variable capital that an important element of his and Guattari’s conception of the State form as an apparatus of capture is revealed. Where Marx gives us an account of the relation between the organic composition of capital and the general law of capital accumulation, there is, given by the dynamic movement of surplus-value’s relational constitution as an expanding scope of the capital-relation, an ever-expanding population surplus to the relative needs of capital. Here Deleuze says: “What is the formula of social subjection? It is precisely: the greater the predominance of variable capital in relation to constant capital, the more social subjection. This is a law, that is to say, a law is added to Marxism that is purely Marxist, it seems to me.”1 On the other side of this conceptual determination by way of effect, there is the condition of a greater predominance of constant capital, to which Deleuze labels the adverse and simultaneous cultivation of “machinic enslavement.”
On first glance, it would be a simple affair to critique Deleuze on the ground that variable capital is here conflated with a reserve army of labor, the surplus population that is produced by capital accumulation as a function of class decomposition internal to the preservation of capitalist reproduction. Yet, on the other hand, it is more interesting to explore this element of the State form’s definition by the social subjection conditioned by the management of a surplus population, one that can be observed both in the present and historically. What Deleuze does apprehend here is the broad possibility of variation in the relations that determine the organic composition of capital that Marx himself draws attention to in Capital, yet where it is taken further is the occasion for closer inspection. This aspect of a continuity in State function prompts Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of the State through an attempt to bridge historical specificity by way of distilling the form to its most transhistorical articulations, and in that sense arrive at the movement of capture. But there remains here to also further explore this relation between capital’s organic composition and capitalism as an organic totality, one in which historiographic interpretation of social forms such as the State can possess a more dynamic quality, in which the location of a continuity of functions does not eclipse the complex movement of sublation that characterizes the longue duree of capitalism’s emergence as the product and presupposition of its constitutive mode of class struggle.
The problems that sublation poses to historiographic interpretation are bound up with a navigation of these concerns, those of the limits that are imposed on freedom by necessity, the immanent and historically-conditioned articulation of necessity within the demonstrable contingency of unstable categories, and the emergence of a formal coherence that renders this instability intelligible, while also posing a conflict to its textual mediation of event and content. Marx’s dialectic grasps this actuality of sublation, positioning method as a categorial apprehension of movement, the study of a sociality of form that marks the starting-point of political economy inverted into a critique that develops a historico-logical synthesis of form-determination and the subsumption of content as a moment of the becoming of social transformation. The organic quality of the system is the self-positing presuppositions of which it consists, the unity-in-contradiction and difference-in-unity that is given in the relation of forms to each other, and the totality that consists of the perpetual movement of this relationality. Organic cannot be equated to a natural state, however, as we see here that even in the dialectical development between forces and relations of production, between a material-technical basis and the social relations of people and their social practices of reproduction which interact in and through this foundation, forming it through themselves, we observe the formation of a social organism. Organic sociality does not predicate itself upon a natural progression of movement, but here an implicitly partisan telos internal to the process it forms, subordination as the act of conditioning the formation of organs that its body still lacks, subsumption as a formal transformation that routes the directionality of content in a specific formal determination.
The characteristic organic totality of capitalism as a social system is not a mere abstract presentation, but also an indication of the immediate perceptual barrier to the apprehension of its totality, a moment in which the reified formal existence in which it appears is reliant upon manifold layers of mediation, where form takes the appearance of any number of structural assemblages.Yet the structure is not pre-given, even if it appears as presupposition. Even as a structure operates as a mediating fixture given intelligibility within the full ensemble of social relations, it is a moment in a process of recomposition. But the direction of this process, the crystallization of forms as determinate moments, not merely as historical-temporal coordinates, but as temporally-reproduced categories involved in the mediation of social practice and the material reproduction of the social totality, is what can only be understood through the investigation of teleological determination. The direction of capital accumulation, the perpetual drive of surplus-value as a movement of expansion, presents a contradictory movement, where the appearance of social objectivity is in conflict with the subjectivity-in-contest of the capital-relation as a class antagonism. Class struggle is the internally-constitutive dynamic of a telos in which the historical actuality of a sociality reproduced in and through the capitalist mode of production predominates. Understanding the development of this tension from the analysis of social form itself, we can turn to Isaak Rubin’s reading of Marx and the relation of form to function:
“The new sociological method which Marx introduced into political economy applies a consistent distinction between productive forces and production relations, between the material process of production and its social form, between the process of labor and the process of value formation. Political economy deals with human working activity, not from the standpoint of its technical methods and instruments of labor, but from the standpoint of its social form. It deals with production relations which are established among people in the process of production. But since in the commodity-capitalist society people are connected by production relations through the transfer of things, the production relations among people acquire a material character. This ‘materialization’ takes place because the thing through which people enter definite relations with each other plays a particular social role, connecting people - the role of ‘intermediary’ or ‘bearer’ of the given production relation. In addition to existing materially or technically as a concrete consumer good or means of production, the thing seems to acquire a social or functional existence, i.e., a particular social character through which the given production relation is expressed, and which gives things a particular social form. Thus the basic notions or categories of political economy express the basic social-economic forms which characterize various types of production relations among people and which are held together by the things through which these relations among people are established.”2
The fetishization of capitalist social relations emerges not as deception but as the manner in which these social relations of production are realized through things, where material objects take on a subjective purpose determining the actions of its bearers, where the positive content of labor as purposeful activity exists as a subsumed function of capital’s instrumentalization of its commodified form, labor-power. There is a correspondence of thing or object and function, which imparts a determinate social character through the abstract form that subsumes content, and is animated by the conflictual relation of content that ensues from this in historical actuality. Commodity and money do not immediately equate to capital, but they are historical presuppositions through which capital finds the basis of its articulation in and through their functions, their formal antinomies in practice, mediations of a relation of dispossession and exploitation of labor as labor-power.3 Marx’s theory of value then is a theory of a mediating category of these relations of production and of a relation of separation and exploitation of reciprocally-conditioning and mutually-antagonistic agents of production. The unfolding of Capital, according to Rubin, “examines a series of increasingly complex ‘economic forms’ of things or ‘definitions of forms’ (Formbestimmtheiten) which correspond to a series of increasingly complex production relations among people.”4
Thus in Marx we are constructing the organic totality of capital from its categorial determination in specific social forms, and a movement of their conjunction that is socially-determinate and not materially given. Yet their material presupposition and technical basis forms an inextricable unity with social production, as the objective conditions of existence and determinate limit of any social life, but which the flexibility of sociality and of capital’s structure of formal mediation continually seeks to overcome. This is not, however, merely given by the materiality of nature rendered as a reified object apart from human social life, but the synthesis of social and material that is in the human species’ relation to itself. A further illumination of this limit comes from the dynamic trajectory of the organic determinants of capital’s social totality itself. Thus, we may turn to Marx’s concept of the organic composition of capital and its internal constitution by social and material components, and its relation to accumulation:
“The composition of capital is to be understood in a twofold sense. As value, it is determined by the proportion in which it is divided into constant capital, or the value of the means of production, and variable capital, or the value of labour-power, the sum total of wages. As material, as it functions in the process of production, all capital is divided into means of production and living labour-power. This latter composition is determined by the relation between the mass of the means of production employed on the one hand, and the mass of labour necessary for their employment on the other. I call the former the value-composition, the latter the technical composition of capital. There is a close correlation between the two. To express this, I call the value composition of capital, in so far as it is determined by its technical composition and mirrors the changes in the latter, the organic composition of capital. Wherever I refer to the composition of capital, without further qualification, its organic composition is always understood.”5
The concept of the organic composition of capital, as evidenced here, involves a complex series of formal determinants in its own constitution. Let us start by stating that we must read this first as the illustration of a particular dynamic, and not as a static condition, as it is the process of becoming which forms the moments of the development of capital, and that in this instance gives definition to a distinct composition. First, we have the value composition of capital, expressing the value relations of components of production in relation to each other. This is the relation expressed by the proportional ratio of constant capital and variable capital in monetary form to each other, thus as components of production expressed through and constitutive of exchange value. Second, there is the technical composition of capital, a material expression of the mass of means of production and mass of labor entering as components of the production process. The capitalist production process, as a fusion of the labor process with the valorization process, necessarily sees these two dimensions as distinct modes of existence, but as interdependent expressions of a unity in which they are also oppositional and potentially contradictory. Their close correlation is here given by Marx in a specific relation of determination to value and technical composition which become the organic composition of capital: it is in so far as the value composition is determined by and reflects the movement in the technical composition.
In the concept we observe an interpenetrating dialectical determination of the social and material, of elements of production and exchange relations. Where constant capital and variable capital are often equated with their material mode of appearance, the capitalist mode of production brings the appearance of means of production and living labor as material elements of its process as commodities and mediated by the objectivity of value. The material reproduction of human social life is in this manner a fusion of material subsistence and definite social form, a constant subversion and synthesis between need as a category of fulfillment in a tension between the social and individual that is also given in the dynamic of social production conditioning private appropriation.
Therefore, if we are to put the matter simply, there is, in the constitution of capital as an organic totality, the organic composition of capitalist production is organic to the extent that value expression is an adequate mediator of materiality and sociality. There is a dialectic implicit then in the disjunction that effects and is affected by the conditionality of value’s existence in process, a social form that is only instantiated insofar as the conditions of its existence can be maintained. The organic composition of capital begins the chapter on “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation,” and is therefore an aspect of the social constitution of capital as social totality that is a necessary relation to ensure the continuity of the accumulation process. This necessity is less an imperative, pre-conceived and yet to be realized, than the sociality organic to the condition of capital. Beyond the calculation of the organic composition of capital, in its determination by quantifiable metrics of value and technical composition, we can understand its conceptual determination as a social dynamic in the actuality of capital accumulation in Marx’s terms:
“As simple reproduction constantly reproduces the capital-relation itself, i.e.: the presence of capitalists on the one side, and wage-labourers on the other side, so reproduction on an expanded scale, i.e. accumulation, reproduces the capital-relation on an expanded scale, with more capitalists, or bigger capitalists, at one pole, and more wage labourers at the other pole. The reproduction of labour power which must incessantly be re-incorporated into capital as its means of valorization, which cannot get free of capital, and whose enslavement to capital is only concealed by the variety of individual capitalists to whom it sells itself, forms, in fact, a factor in the reproduction of capital itself. Accumulation of capital is therefore multiplication of the proletariat.”6
This dynamic is then the imperative of capital accumulation, a synthesis of means and ends as it produces its own conditions of existence, the production of the commodity labor-power is the persistent social substantialization of value in the formation of not only a proletariat, but the conditions which make its sale of this commodity vital to subsistence. The wage relation is the appearance in which the money form integrates the reproduction of labor-power into the reproduction of capital. This reconstitutes surplus-value not just through the realization in the purchase of the commodity, but through the reconstitution of the relation: “The production of surplus-value, or the making of profits, is the absolute law of this mode of production. Labour-power can be sold only to the extent that it preserves and maintains the means of production as capital, reproduces its own value as capital, and provides a source of additional capital in the shape of unpaid labour.”7 The purchase of labor-power and the mediation of the wage relation incorporates this unpaid labor as the self-negating production of surplus as a social category that is formally independent in determination from any material object, but must be enacted through the performance of the laborer’s activity as a flexible component of production. Thus, when Marx says “The law of capitalist production which really lies at the basis of the supposed 'natural law of population' can be reduced simply to this: the relation between capital, accumulation and the rate of wages is nothing other than the relation between the unpaid labour which has been transformed into capital and the additional paid labour necessary to set in motion this additional capital. It is therefore in no way a relation between two magnitudes which are mutually independent, i.e. between the magnitude of the capital and the numbers of the working population; it is rather, at bottom, only the relation between the unpaid and the paid labour of the same working population”,8 it is the apprehension of an element of labor-power that is structurally incapable of remuneration as this constitutive absence is the condition of possibility of surplus-value, of capital’s expansion.
Where Marx transforms the labor theory of value could then be interpreted as the development of a value theory of self-negating labor, in which the development of labor’s productivity, in its self-alienating objectification of the labor process that automation successively develops in technological advancement and the maximization of output in a diminishing ratio of variable capital that results in the structural determination of a population surplus to the immediate needs of capital, in turn creating a perpetual pressure on the limits of wages by rearticulating the competitive dynamics of industrial competition into workers’ subsistence relations on a social scale as well. Thus we can see that the social totality of capital as an organic system is also the generative dynamic of this condition, the continuity of its advancement.
In this, we also apprehend an aspect of Marx’s theory of “rising” organic composition and its relation to this dynamic of accumulation, and that is an illuminated limit that capital must constantly overcome, a self-imposed barrier that in turn fuels its conditions of possibility by way of generating its class relation and class antagonism. Yet true to any organic life, the life-activity of value is only brought in definition with the actuality of its demise. If, as Werner Bonefeld states, “the social antagonism of capital and labour is a relation of classes, and, as a relation of classes, a relation in and against domination and exploitation, or, in other words, a relation in and against the inversion of the determining power of labour into a property of capital's power to impose the value form over the conditions of life”,9 then the conditions of life would also appear to act as a synthesized social-material barrier that acts back on the imposition. This brings us to the totality-in-contradiction of capitalist social relations in the material reproduction process, that of its constitution by means of an antagonistic relation between classes, and the importance of the State form in the historical genesis and reproduction of this antagonism. For Bonefeld, “the state is not a state in capitalist society, but rather a moment of the class antagonism of capital and labour”10 in which the antagonism is articulated in a specific mode of operation by which abstract individuals operating on an uneven terrain of formally equal rights corresponds to abstract labor as the condition of possibility of value as human labor substantialized into an appropriable condition by capital, existing in and through this antithesis to living labor.
However, if we are to accept this aspect of the State form as moment of an antagonism that is processual, we may also ground ourselves in the counter that its historicization would pose, and this question of what it means for the capitalist state to not be a state, but a moment of the class antagonism. In the same volume, Heidi Gerstenberger revisits the historical determination of the bourgeois state form’s development, stating that:
“As long as domination and religion are not conceived of as social practices which in precapitalist societies could organise (and not only influence) material production, the analysis of the historical constitution of the separate existence of the sphere of economics is doomed to failure before its start, because 'the economic' is assumed to have been separate all along. The very term 'extra-economic coercion' which, following Marx, is used to describe the feudal mode of exploitation, is an expression of this a-historical conception which has been inherent in so much of historical materialism. Since these conceptions have been found wanting when applied to the analysis of concrete historical processes, the path has been opened for the recognition that the last remnants of any general historical 'law'; must be smashed: the assumption that in all societies in which class relations can be found class struggle constitutes the decisive dynamic element. Wherever class relations form an element of the social forms of reproduction, there exists a history of class struggles. Yet that does not mean that the history of these societies can be adequately explained in terms of class struggle.”11
This resonates with an earlier statement made by Bonefeld, that “social form has no existence separate from concrete historical development.”12 In this way, we have a challenge set before us for historiographies of the origins of the capitalist social system, and the manner in which Marx addresses its origins in the prefigurative generation of an accumulation process that creates the conditions of reproducing capitalist social relations, not as one fell swoop, but as a process of the organic totality’s subordination of traditional forms to its design and aim, the preservation through transformation of the late feudal epoch’s sublation into bourgeois revolution and the modern state, in which a preceding form of state served as the basis for the organization of this advancement and the transformation of pre-capitalist social antagonism into the purity of class struggle as it would be experienced in the capital-relation. Imperatives emerge from the objective conditions as they are given historically, but they are made from definite coordinates of struggle and the erosion of conditions of existence that every reproduction entails. To understand the historical actuality of the State form and its relation to capitalist development, the insight as to its existence as a moment in the class antagonism of capital and labor can also carry with it this synthesis of structure and struggle in process that takes the historical specificity of its particular forms as the expression of a consolidated political organization of a dominant class, the State not as mere instrumentality but as living instrument.
Gerstenberger’s call for a historicization that accounts for interpretations of social practice that organize material production in pre-capitalist forms is then one that we can read as an immanent potentiality, if not overt concern, in the construction of Deleuze and Guattari’s “apparatus of capture,” where the two poles of political sovereignty are constituted by a prior mutilation, the consequence of war that is the presupposition of the State apparatus and the organization of work, of social production in a social form of living separation.13 In reflecting on the indeterminacy of the war machine, however, to account for this complete determination of the State and its formation, we encounter another dimension in which a dynamic reading of Marx’s organic composition arises:
“In the first place, the war machine explains nothing; for it is either exterior to the State, and directed against it; or else it already belongs to the State, encased and appropriated, and presupposes it. If the war machine has a part in the evolution of the State, it is therefore necessarily in conjunction with other internal factors. And this is the second point: if there is an evolution of the State, the second pole, the evolved pole, must be in resonance with the first, it must continually recharge it in some way, and the State must have only one milieu of interiority; in other words, it must have a unity of composition, in spite of all the differences in organization and the development among States. It is even necessary for each State to have both poles, as the essential moments of its existence, even though the organization of the two varies. Third, if we call this interior essence or this unity of the State ‘capture,’ we must say that the words ‘magic capture’ describe the situation well because it always appears as preaccomplished and self-presupposing; but how is this capture to be explained then, if it leads back to no distinct assignable cause? That is why theses on the origin of the State are always tautological. At times, exogenous factors, tied to war and the war machine, are invoked; at times endogenous factors, thought to engender private property, money, etc.; and at times specific factors, thought to determine the formation of ‘public functions.’ All three of these theses are found in Engels, in relation to a conception of the diversity of the roads to Domination. But they beg the question. War produces the State only if at least one of the two parts is a preexistent State; and the organization of war is a State factor only if that organization is a part of the State. Either the State has no war machine (and has policemen and jailers before having soldiers), or else it has one, but in the form of a military institution or public function. Similarly, private property presupposes State public property, it slips through its net; and money presupposes taxation. It is even more difficult to see how public functions could have existed before the State they imply. We are always brought back to the idea of a State that comes into the world fully formed and rises up in a single stroke, the unconditioned Urstaat.”14
As we also encounter the problematics of presuppositions without end, the leading in and back at all times to a State presupposed that exists as a structural predetermination, we also see the stress of the authors on its necessary interiority of a unity of composition, an organic system that is generative of itself and contains a logical coherence that is a key to its resiliency. The final invocation of the Urstaat problematic is indeed a historical concern, but one that we can begin to approach through this apprehension of social form as existence in tandem necessarily with and in its concrete modes of existence. Perhaps too it is the case that we may read back historically the problem of this coherence of the State form and its presupposition as a project of potential de-reification, the distilled antagonism of its modern iterations a crystallization that is only discernible at specific historical conjunctures, one whose routinization is particular to our era while also being the apperception of its historical transience.
This then outlines the contours of what may be a theme of investigation, that of strains of historiographic readings and analysis of the origins of capitalism and/or capital in various forms, and the historical inter-relation between and of capital and state, where political sovereignty and economic metabolism as a synthesis of class-based domination and exploitation are formed as a difference-in-unity from the historical presuppositions of the capitalist mode of production. Within this there is a specific interest on the relation between the social totality of capitalism as an organic system, the social and material import of that assessment, and the role of the State form in the historical constitution of that organic system, from which it comes to form a unity, where social form crystallizes out of processual determinations of class struggle as social practice, and a generative destabilization of social categories in their implementation.
https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/seminars/thousand-plateaus-v-state-apparatus-and-war-machines-ii/lecture-02?keys=marxism
Isaak I. Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value (2008) p. 31
Marx, Capital Volume 1 (1976) p. 273 “The economic categories already discussed similarly bear a historical imprint. Definite historical conditions are involved in the existence of the product as a commodity. In order to become a commodity, the product must cease to be produced as the immediate means of subsistence of the producer himself. Had we gone further, and inquired under what circumstances all, or even the majority of products take the form of commodities, we should have found that this only happens on the basis of one particular mode of production, the capitalist one. Such an investigation, however, would have been foreign to the analysis of commodities. The production and circulation of commodities can still take place even though the great mass of the objects prod uced are intended for the immediate requirements of their producers, and are not turned into commodities, so that the process of social production is as yet by no means dominated in its length and breadth by exchange-value. The appearance of products as commodities requires a level of development of the division of labour within society such that the separation of use-value from exchange-value, a separation which first begins with barter, has already been completed. But such a degree of development is common to many economic formations of society, with the most diverse historical characteristics; If we go on to consider money, its existence implies that a definite stage in the development of commodity exchange has been reached. The various forms of money (money as the mere equivalent of commodities, money as means of circulation, money as means of payment, money as hoard, or money as world currency) indicate very different levels of the process of social production, according to the extent and relative preponderance of one function or the other. Yet we know by experience that a relatively feeble development of commodity circulation suffices for the creation of all these forms. It is otherwise with capital. The historical conditions of its existence are by no means given with the mere circulation of money and commodities. It arises only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence finds the free worker available, on the market, as the seller of his own labour-power. And this one historical pre-condition comprises a world's history. Capital, therefore, announces from the outset a new epoch in the process of social production.”
Rubin (2008) p. 37
Marx (1976) p. 762
Ibid, pp. 763-4
Ibid, p. 769
Ibid, p. 771
Werner Bonefeld, Open Marxism Vol. 1: Dialectics and History (1992) pp. 101-2 “Social Constitution and the Form of the Capitalist State”
Ibid, p. 113
Heidi Gerstenberger, Open Marxism Vol. 1: Dialectics and History (1992) p. 155 “The Bourgeois State Form Revisited”
Ibid, Bonefeld, p. 105
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1987) p. 425-6 “The State apparatus needs, at its summit as at its base, predisabled people, preexisting amputees, the still-born, the congenitally infirm, the one-eyed and one-armed [...] Thus, in every case, the war machine seems to intervene ‘between’ the two poles of the State apparatus, assuring and necessitating the passage from one to the other.”
Ibid, p. 427