Total Subsumption: New sites of production, new sites of struggle Total subsumption and the labour theory of value

The common cause to be found between the university and the ghetto is that they have now both become sites of production and exploitation. To understand this reality we must examine and revise Marx's theory of production, following Antonio Negri's theory of real subumption, a process which, he claims, leads to the domination of the law of value over the entirety of social life. In Capital Marx establishes capital's need to dominate human productive capacities through the exploitation, the extraction of surplus-value as unpaid time: Let us now look at the residue of the products of labour. There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like objectivity; they are merely congealed quantities of homogenous human labour, i.e. Of human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure. ... A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because abstract human labour is objectified or materialized in it. How, then, is the magnitude of of this value to be measured? By means of the quantity of the 'value-forming substance', the labour, contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration, and the labour-time is itself measured on the particular scale of hours, days etc. (Marx 1990: 128-129). In The Constitution of Time, Negri notes the following aporias or analytic blockages to this labour theory of value: (1) the definition of qualified or complex labour, (2) of productive as opposed to unproductive labour, (3) of productive labour-power, and (4) of the productive function of intellectual or scientific labour (2004: 24). The problem is partly evident from the differential payment of different kinds of labour. If labour is homogenous, why aren't wages and salaries? It is tempting here to enter into Marx's explanation of the value of labour-power, and the value of its reproduction. The solution would be to say, in somewhat elitist fashion, that reproducing the intellectual labour-power requires a much higher standard of living (as measured by its consumption of commodities, not the least being education) than the manual labour-power.1 However, Negri proposes a much more radical solution: the idea of total subsumption. Sumbsumption first appears in Marx's theory in an appendix to Capital: Volume 1 (1990: pages?). Marx distinguishes two levels of subsumption. Formal Subsumption occurs with the takeover by capital of a mode of labour developed before the emergence of capitalist relations (1990: 1021). Marx is here referring to the centralisation of cottage industries in the hands of urban entrepreneurs. Nothing is alterred in the labour-process itself (spinning still happens on the spinningwheel, small agricultural plots are still farmed by peasants on a small scale), but it is drawn into the rational calculations of capital accumulation. However, competition, the search for relative surplusvalue,2 eventually must lead to real subsumption, in which the logic of capital forces the development
1 It is precisely this argument that leads institutions to determine the bare minimum chemical requirements for human subsistence. Marx enters into this kind of arithmetic when describing The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation, namely to determine and then to transgress these measures as unnatural limits. When he does it (1990: 810, 835-836), we can forgive his coldness for its subversive intent. When the WHO does so, we dismiss their pious outcries in light of the purpose of their research: to prevent hunger from turning into righteous anger. 2 Relative to the socially average rate of exploitation; it is not enough for a capitalist to exploit their workforce, to extort as much surplus-labour as possible from the workers' lives. A capitalist must do it more efficiently than all other competitors in the market-place. As well as demonstrating why the plantation economies of South America were objectively backward, and thus prey for American imperialism after the civil war and abolition, it is the entire rational motor of capitalism. Negri is correct in identifying with the development of the concept of relative surplus-value in the Grundrisse a major leap forward in the power of Marx's analysis.

of the actual methods of production (the creation of large-scale manufactures and, eventually, machinebased industry). What we must note here is that exchange-value may remain formally seperate from use-value, but in fact its logic rebounds upon use-value. According to Marx, use-values must be the presupposition of production: there is no way to profitably produce an article which no one has any need of. But real subsumption means that exchange-value changes the very form of these use-values: we have machine-woven cloth where before we had hand-woven cloth, and so forth. What Negri proposes in The Constitution of Time is that this process of subsumption represents a tendency of capitalism which culminates in the total subsumption of social reality. In total subsumption, we are left with nothing external to production. The Marxist dialectic of antagonism between the proletariat and capital is founded on this externality: the material reality of needs and desires which are neither reducible to nor satisfied by the rational calculation of the market. When the dialectic is resolved (and we know that under real subsumption that indeed occurs), tautology reigns. Real subsumption means the complete realization of the law of value. At first glance indifference rules in real subsumption. Labour is quality, time is quantity; in real subsumption quality falls away, so all labour is reduced to mere quantity, to time. Before us we have only quantities of time. Use-value, which in Capital was still given as separation from, and irreducible to, value tout court, is here absorbed by capital. The aporia consists in the fact that since time has become entirely hegemonic over the process, in so far as it is its only measure, it also reveals itself as its only substance (Negri 2004: 27). In subsumption, every moment is recognised by capital as a moment for exploitation. The signs of this shift are clear: facebook makes our socialisation productive (ostensibly for ourselves, in truth for marketing researchers); we are encouraged to find ways to economise on leisure time (lose weight while you watch t.v.!); personal health choices are emphasised, and thus lose their private character, so that smokers and the obese are now somehow unpatriotic. As well as the distinction between exchange-value and use-value, various Marxist categories founded on the existence of an external realm to production collapse. Consumption becomes directly productive consumption, so firms must invest as much or more in advertising than in actual production. More significant to our current argument, production and reproduction become indistinguishable. Whether we are simply resting to be fresh for work in the morning, or enduring unemployment on an ever-declining social wage, we do so directly to satisfy the law of value. Of course, as Negri warns us, when we go beyond Marx we suspect he has already been there: The capitalist process of production, therefore, seen as a total, connected process, i.e. a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself; on the one hand the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer (Marx 1990: 724). When there is no longer a life seperate from production in which to found our struggles, we may feel those struggles are meaningless. Negri's purpose in The Constitution of Time is to argue that, on the contrary, the seeming overcoming of the antagonism of struggles past is in actuality only its displacement into a new realm in which every second contains the possibility of an explosion. Subsumed production and politics A use-value and a time of life which are external to production provide a point of origin for capitalism, but they also provide its justification. When exchange-value can no longer find its basis in use-value, the command to create exchange-values no longer appears as the imperative towards

productive activity in any meaningful sense: it is command pure and simple. The insurrectionists are clear on this point: Today work is tied less to the economic necessity of producing goods than to the political necessity of producing producers and consumers, and of preserving by any means necessary the order of work (The Coming Insurrection). Now, our antagonism emerges directly within the productive process itself. As iek would put it, the proletariat is the excremental remainder of production: disavowed and hidden, yet piling up as implacably, promising consequences just as dire for the system, as nuclear waste or carbon dioxide. It comes with the realisation that our production is totally alien to us. We mean alien with the full weight of Marx's early work: it rises up as something independent of us, with power over us. It demands that we produce so that we may better produce so that we may better produce... what? Above all let us remember the result at which we have arrived, that is to say this law of value which is emptied, which is reduced to being only an empty form of capitalist command. Empty and efficient. Efficient and irrational. Irrational and cruel (Negri 1993: 148). The struggle emerges precisely when we realise that we are capable of opposing something (for a moment, we would say anything!) to this emptiness. We oppose our productive desire to our alienated productive capacity. And so this realisation must not come to pass: The further real subsumption advances, the more obligation, law, juridical organization, etc. must cannot not but be constitutional, global, structural and so the more the idea of time is removed (and only poorly compensated for by that of space). ... The State operates under the necessity of removing the collective dimension and the productive autonomy of time, of temporal being, because their emergence means antagonism (2004: 85). Capital appears today in the guise of regulatory mechanisms which are there to assure us, whatever discontent we might express, that this world is the only one we are capable of creating together. New Sites of Struggle As I expressed earlier, the process of subsumption implies the imposition of exchange-value logic on use-value itself. In the university, this has taken on a particular set of institutional reforms, a historical process towards subsumption that I will describe below as moving through three phases: the university as an elite institution; the university as a contested ideological institution; and finally the university as a subsumed site of productivity. In laying out this framework, I sacrifice something of historical exactitude for theoretical clarity. My purpose is to discern here what it means to be a university student today, and to make an analogy with the slums and ghettos which have served as a model of insurrectionary activity there. The university's roots lie in the medieval monastery. The original universities were primarily schools for the training of clergy, with the sciences tolerated only so long as they respected church dogma. The persecution of Gallileo for his work in astronomy exemplify this limit. Nevertheless, even as Gallileo faced the inquisition, universities in Lutheran states allowed the community of scholars to preserve itself. It is only with Protestantism that the university could develop the notion of academic freedom, that scholars should be free to present whatever findings resulted from rigourous research. However, the advance of Protestantism and Liberalism did not change the university's basic function as a support for the elite. To use Althusser's terminology, the university functioned as a State Ideological Apparatus, creating, justifying, and validating a system of thought conducive to the maintainence of the social order. The pass-over of power from a Feudal, Catholic order to a mostly Protestant, more Liberal one was confirmed by the treaty of Westphalia at the end of the 30 years war. Religion, and so ideology, was at the discretion of the prince of a state. Even in the new Republics of the 18th and 19th centuries the university's promise of liberation was limited to class mobility, not to threatening the class system. Althusser's position on the ideological state apparatuses, that they are a complement to the armed repressive apparatuses, is certainly dire, but it is hardly pessimistic. Despite their essential

function in society, he claims they nevertheless remains contestable areas. He does this within a strict orthodox Marxist framework. Contestation of academia is the equivalent to the seizure of state power by the workers' party. The role of the radical academic is therefore to try and create a dictatorship of the proletariat within academia, turning its productive powers from the purposes of one class to another. This position typifies what I call the contested period of the university. At this time, education's role as a prop to the social order was brought into question. Education was identified as a use-value which granted social position; generalised access to that use-value would mean generalised access to social mobility. It is here that we see the focus of the civil rights movement: widening access to education, and forcing education's ideology to validate wider access (through the inclusion of women, people of colour, indigenous peoples, and migrants in the process of ideological formation). David Harvey has shown (and CITE) that it was during this time that the global rate of accumulation slowed to crisis levels. Following autonomist theory (such as Tronti's Labour and Capital) we can interpret the fall in productivity observed by Harvey as a general refusal on the part of labour to continue being exploited. The move to education was, in part, a move for some kind of just capitalism, a widening of the Keynesian social safety net and an easing of the conditions of labour. But it contained also a utopian desire in the rejection of exploitation itself. The ideal of the free development of one's labouring power is alluded to by Stanley Aronowitz: I work hard but it's mostly self-directed. I don't experience leisureas time out of work because the lines are blurred. What is included in this form of academic labor anyway? For example, I read a fair amount of detective and science fiction, but sometimes I write and teach what begins as entertainment. The same goes for reading philosophy and social and cultural theory. I really enjoy a lot of it and experience it as recreation but often integrate what I have learned into my teaching and writing repetoire (1998: 207). Even as we can see the emancipatory potential of a full professorship such as Aronowitz', we must also recognise its contradictions: in the breakdown between work and leisure, we see a perfect presentation of the formula for subsumption; furthermore, Aronowitz' experience of this condition as emancipatory is contingent on certain material and institutional arrangements which are fast becoming a fiction for most. Aronowitz acknowledges as much, that he has the last good job in America, as evidenced by the ongoing casualisation and overloading of academic workloads. That academia has ever been a good job is due only to the work of social movements to build into it a possibility of the emancipation of time and thought. Contrary to popular, even academic, belief there was no particular tradition of academic freedom in the American university until the twentieth century and then only for the most conventional and apolitical scholars. ... For example, until well into the 1960s the number of public Marxists, open gays, blacks and women with secure mainstream academic jobs could be counted on ten fingers. And contrary to myth, it wasn't all due to McCarthyism, although the handful of Marxists in American academia were drummed out by congressional investigations and administrative inquisitions. The liberal Lionel Trilling was a year-to-year lecturer at Columbia for a decade, not only because he had been a radical, but because he was a Jew (Aronowitz 1998: 209). So Althusser was quite in keeping with his times to see the contestation of academia as a vital and viable task for the times. The few professorships of womens', gay, or ethnic studies are testaments to those struggles. And in the austerity era it should come as no surprise that they come under attack. However, the transition to subsumption has relied far more on making the mass of academic labour precarious to undue the gains of the civil rights movement and other radical struggles of the time. If the distinction between work and play dissolves, it is only for the lucky few, like Aronowitz, that work becomes play. For the rest of us, play becomes work.

For those students who grew up in the 1990s, academia has become a kind of glittering dream, fueled more by the right wing's attacks on the latte-sipping intellectual elite more than the rapidly shifting reality of academic labour. It is the realisation that this dream has slipped through our fingers that leads many to conclusions such as these: We live as a dead civilization. We can no longer imagine the good life except as a series of spectacles presented for our bemusement: a shimmering menu of illusions. Both the full-filled life and our own imaginations have been systematically replaced by a set of images more lavish and inhumane than anything we ourselves would conceive, and equally beyond reach. No one believes in such outcomes any more. The truth of life after the university is mean and petty competition for resources with our friends and strangers: the hustle for a lower-management position that will last (with luck) for a couple years rifted with anxiety, fear, and increasing exploitation until the firm crumbles and we mutter about plan B. But this is the exact description of university life today; that mean and petty life has already arrived (Communique from an Absent Future in After the Fall 2009: 7-8). Play is work. All of the mechanisms which claim to shore up the intrinsic merits of education dissolve into the valorisation of intellectual labour: Only the logic of consumer satisfaction obtains here: was the course easy? Was the teacher hot? Could any stupid asshole get an A? What's the point of acquiring knowledge when it can be called up with a few keystrokes? Who needs memory when we have the internet? A training in thought? You can't be serious. A moral preparation? There are antidepressants for that (Communique from an Absent Future 2009: 9). This is life in the subsumed university. Being a student is a lousy job that promises only further lousy jobs at the conclusion of our study. The irrefutable demand to produce more, better, and faster in our labour undermines the very conditions of that labour: a creative mind and an inquisitive spirit. The trends that signify subsumption (casualisation, and the quantity disguised as qualityassurance) are global. In France we see perhaps the clearest beginnings of the insurrection of the university in the riots against the CPE laws, which aimed to cement the precarity of students and academics. But there, also, we see the insurrection of the ghetto in the riots of the banlieu in 2005. By the time the university insurrection of the university had reached California, traversing the Atlantic and North America, it had taken on this aspect of the riots of the banlieu: it refused to place demands on power. It revolted against the totality of this subsumed life, and expected nothing of the agents of subsumption. At this stage, a realisation has occurred which is obvious in the ghetto. 'We end up interpreting Marxs 11th thesis on Feuerbach: The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it' (Communique: 9). Contained in this realisation is the uncomfortable fact that knowledge, as pure abstraction, is not knowledge at all. Here, the university students have realised that what they work at is the production of their own alienation. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confonting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien (Marx: Estranged Labour). This formula is not defunct when the worker, now a student, produces a part of hirself. Rather, it is more terrifying: the Masters student who writes on Marx proves, beyond a doubt, that the reification of these methods is their distortion; that Marx wrote us weapons, and that to treat them as a commodity signifies our defeat. Similarly, the daily life of the inhabitant of the ghetto, focussing on survival and the impossible struggle against exclusion, can only compound their exclusion. Here we see the resonance between university and ghetto: both are productive centres for the alienation of their

inhabitants. And it is this recognition of the enemy within ones' own subjectivity that leads students to attack their own universities, and the poor to burn their own suburbs. In both The Grundrisse and Capital there is an ambiguous step: Marx does not explain the ideological process whereby the workers become conscious of their exploitation. He merely asserts that it is impossible to imagine any other outcome, when this exploitation is real and present for anyone to comprehend. What is required is a subjective leap which, while Marx made it himself (and reproduced it so that others may make it themselves), he did not theorise. In the next section of this paper I will use Badiou's theory of the Event to provide for the emergence of this entirely new element within the Marxist schema. Here, our understanding of the production of alienation is a crucial modification to Negri's theory that the proletariat (employed, under-employed, and unemployed) is producing command, because what it adds to his theory of antagonism against capital is an understanding that that antagonism must also be directed against one's own subjectivity.