Abstract
The introduction situates the study within the context of contemporary debates about the nature of work and examines the place of the French critique of work in these discussions. Drawing upon the new ‘critique of value’ school of critical theory—represented, among others, by Robert Kurz and Moishe Postone—the chapter criticises traditional conceptions of labour as a natural, rational and transhistorical abstraction. It explores two fundamentally different approaches to the critique of work, that of ‘phenomenological’ versus ‘categorical’ critique, found in the work of Karl Marx. The Introduction argues that an understanding of these two different modes of critique provides a powerful new basis for the critical analysis of the historical critiques of work examined in this study.
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- 1.
See, for a historical example, Michael Seidman, Workers Against Work: Labor in Paris and Barcelona During the Popular Fronts (Berkley: University of California Press, 1991), and, for a sociological study of more recent trends, Stephen Bouquin, ed. Résistances au travail (Paris: Syllepse, 2008).
- 2.
A particularly egregious example of the latter occurred in 2007 when the reigning French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde surprised the National Assembly by accusing Paul Lafargue of being a reactionary. Lagarde claimed that Lafargue represented an aristocratic disdain for work that he had inherited from the Ancien Regime. The implication being that any attack on the length of the working day was in some way an attack on liberty itself. Suffice it to say that the absolutist monarchies of the past would certainly not have advocated anything like Lafargue’s call for a three-hour working day. National Assembly, 13th Legislature, Extraordinary Session, First Sitting, Summary, 10 July 2007. www.assembleenationale.fr
- 3.
Karl Marx, trans. Ben Fowkes, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 133.
- 4.
Anselm Jappe, trans. Alastair Hemmens, The Writing on the Wall: On the Decomposition of Capitalism and Its Critics (London: Zero Books, 2017), p. 15.
- 5.
Moishe Postone, ‘Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the German Reaction to “Holocaust”’, in Germans and Jews since the Holocaust, edited by Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986).
- 6.
‘Arbeit macht frei’, literally ‘Work makes free.’ The phrase was taken from the title of an 1871 novel by the nationalist writer Lorenz Diefenbach (1806–1883) in which a gambler and fraudster is reformed into a productive German citizen through hard work. The phrase can be interpreted in a number of ways: first, a lie to the entrants of the camps that they would be freed if they were to work hard; secondly, a mantra that expresses the belief that the internationalisation of labour discipline would reform them of their ‘degeneracy’; and thirdly, that the German people would be ‘freed’ by working its purported enemies to death.
The Situationists would later reproduce a picture of these words above the gates of Auschwitz in the same issue of their journal as a reproduction of Guy Debord’s, diametrically opposed, ‘never work’ graffito. See Chap. 5.
- 7.
Robert Kurz’s manner of referring to real-existing socialism. See Robert Kurz, Der Kollaps der Modernisierung: Vom Zusammenbruch des Kasernensozialismus zur Krise der Weltökonomie (Frankfurt: Eichborn, 1991).
- 8.
Cited in Anselm Jappe, Les Aventures de la marchandise: Pour une critique de la valeur (Paris: La Découverte, 2017), p. 114.
- 9.
See, for example, Peter Fleming, The Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself (London: Pluto Press, 2015); David Frayne, The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work (London: Zed Books, 2015); Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London: Verso, 2015); and Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
- 10.
Indeed, many observers have, in typical pro-work fashion, discussed the advantages of the French social model precisely on the basis that the working population is, despite common misconceptions, statistically far more productive than the British. See Ferdinando Giugliano and Sarah O’Connor, ‘Boasts Debunked as France Gets Last Laugh over UK on Productivity’, Financial Times, 19 March 2015, https://www.ft.com/content/c413ca76-ce3c-11e4-86fc-00144feab7de
- 11.
See Robert Kurz, Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus. Ein Abgesang auf die Marktwirtschaft (Eichborn Verlag, 1999), pp. 354–359.
- 12.
David Graeber, ‘On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs’, Strike! Magazine, 17 August 2013, http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
- 13.
Lorraine de Foucher, ‘Absurdes et vides de sens: ces jobs d’enfer’, Le Monde, 22 April 2016.
- 14.
See, for example, Dominique Méda, Le Travail: une valeur en voie de disparition? (Paris: Flammarion, 2010).
- 15.
Thomas Piketty, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Capital in the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
- 16.
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, trans. Gregory Elliott, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2007).
- 17.
The notion of an ‘esoteric’ and ‘exoteric’ Marx is put forward in Robert Kurz, trans. Hélène Steinberg and Lucien Steinberg, ‘Les Déstinées du marxisme’, in Lire Marx: Les textes les plus importants de Karl Marx pour le XXIe siècle, choisis et commentés par Robert Kurz (Paris. La Balustrade, 2013), pp. 13–41.
- 18.
See Robert Kurz, trans. Robin Halpin, The Substance of Capital (London: Chronos, 2016), pp. 8–13.
- 19.
Herbert Applebaum, The Concept of Work: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. ix–x.
- 20.
Jean Dubois, Henri Mitterand, and Albert Dauzat, eds. Dictionnaire étymologique et historique du français (Paris: Larousse, 1995), p. 778.
- 21.
René Descartes, trans. Ian Maclean, A Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 51.
- 22.
This apocryphal tale is, unfortunately, almost certainly untrue. The Dutch physician Jacobus Bontius (1592–1631), in his Historiae naturalis et medicae Indiae orientalis libri sex (1658), notes that the people of Java claimed that orangutans could talk ‘but they did not want to because they did not want to be forced to work’, cited in Chris Herzfeld, trans. Kevin Frey, The Great Apes: A Short History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 14. Descartes, who had no doubt read the book, then mentions this observation in a private letter, seemingly as a joke, where he complains that, since he has made it known to the world that he is a writer of books, he is never left alone in peace. ‘If I had only been as wise as they say the savages persuaded themselves that the monkeys were, I never would have become known as a maker of books: Since it is said that they imagined that the monkeys could indeed speak, if they wanted to, but that they chose not to so lest they be forced to work. And since I had not the same prudence to abstain from writing, I now have neither as much leisure nor as much peace as I would have had if I had kept quiet.’ Letter to Pierre Chanut, 1 November 1646, cited in Amir Aczel, Descartes’s Secret Notebook: A True Tale of Mathematics, Mysticism and the Quest to Understand the Universe (New York: Broadway Books, 2005), p. 182. While the apocryphal tale might not be true, it nevertheless says something about how the author has been interpreted over the years.
- 23.
Chris Rojek, Decentring Leisure: Rethinking Leisure Theory (London: Sage, 1999), p. 189.
- 24.
In this vein Jappe cites an anecdote told by an eighteenth-century French moralist that recalls a time just before the Revolution when France had already gone through the Enlightenment cultural valorisation of labour, while Spain clearly had not:
A Frenchman was given permission to visit the study of the King of Spain. Coming before his chair and desk, he said: ‘So this is where the great king works.’ ‘What’s that! Work,’ said the guide, ‘what insolence! The great king, work! You just came here to insult His Majesty!’ A quarrel erupted in which the Frenchman had to take great pains to make the Spaniard understand that he had meant no offence to the majesty of his master.
Sébastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort, Maximes et pensées, caractères et anecdotes (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1968), p. 242. (N.B. All translations are my own unless otherwise stated.)
The king, of course, was a ‘man of leisure’ and any suggestion that he ‘worked’ was an insult not only to his person but to his subjects also. Such examples of uneven historical development give some clue as to how different the pre-modern understanding of the word ‘labour’ is from our own.
- 25.
Aristotle, in The Politics, underlines the importance of ‘economics’ for other aspects of life, such as the running of the city (politics), but the key difference is that it is a question of establishing the nature of the right social roles, relations between people (as in a household), rather than relationships between people and things or the most efficient and utilitarian expenditure of their own ‘undifferentiated energy’. Equally, what we might think of as the ‘stuff’ of economic life, such as merchandise and coin is by no means the focus of his work. Rather, it is a question of socially managing land and people, in which objects that are traded and bartered are only one part rather than the essential focus of social life. See Moishe Postone, ‘Thinking the global crisis’, South Atlantic Quarterly, Spring 2012, pp. 247–248: ‘In the first volume of Capital , Marx notes that, for Aristotle, shoes and houses are incommensurable. Hence he could not locate the grounds for their mutual exchangeability. Those grounds, for Marx, are historically specific and social. What renders them commensurable is value, a historically specific form of wealth that has nothing to do with their properties, whether material or immaterial, but is the crystallized expression of a historically specific form of social mediation that, in Marx’s analysis, is constituted by a historically specific form of labor.’
- 26.
Marx , although he contributes in many respects to the cultural valorisation of work, actually criticises Ricardo for his ahistorical conception of the labour abstraction. See Anselm Jappe, Les Aventures, p. 137.
- 27.
Karl Marx, trans. Martin Nicolaus, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 85.
- 28.
Ibid., p. 103, 105.
- 29.
Ibid., p. 103.
- 30.
Marx , Capital , vol. 1, p. 284.
- 31.
Ibid., p. 133.
- 32.
Kurz, Substance, pp. 28–29.
- 33.
See Postone, ‘National Socialism’, op. cit.
- 34.
Marx, Capital , vol. 1, p. 133.
- 35.
In the same passage, Marx even reinforces the gendered character of labour and the labouring subject with reference to the eighteenth-century economist William Petty: ‘Labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother.’ Ibid., p. 134.
- 36.
Ibid., p. 283.
- 37.
Marx , it should be remembered, was a great admirer of Darwin and, at times, expressed the wish that his work should take on a similar scientific status.
- 38.
What is being presented here is explicitly an examination of the pro-work, or ‘exoteric’, side of Marx; something that should become clearer below where we see that Marx also presents a very different, negative, theoretical conception of the labour form. For a detailed exploration of these ambiguities in the work of Marx himself, however, see Jappe, Aventures, ‘Le travail est une catégorie capitaliste’, pp. 120–131.
- 39.
Karl Marx, trans. David Fernbach, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 958–959.
- 40.
Ibid., p. 959.
- 41.
Ibid., p. 958.
- 42.
See, for example, the anthropological research of Marshal Sahlins on hunter-gatherer communities, Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (New York: de Gruyter, 1972), and, his critique of homo economicus, The Western Illusion of Human Nature (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2008). For a historical analysis of how modern economies differ from more recent pre-modern modes of life, made on the basis of a non-Marxian framework, see Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation [1944] (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).
- 43.
For a brief introduction to Kurz and Wertkritik, see Anselm Jappe, trans. Alastair Hemmens and John McHale, ‘Kurz, A Journey into Capitalism’s Heart of Darkness’, Historical Materialism 22, no. 3–4 (2014), pp. 395–407; and trans. Alastair Hemmens and Engel Di Mauro, ‘Towards a History of the Critique of Value’, Capitalism Nature Socialism 25, no. 2 (3 April 2014), pp. 25–37.
- 44.
Moishe Postone, Time, Labour, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
- 45.
See Jappe, Aventures, op. cit. This book serves as an excellent detailed introduction to the critique of value, in particular its anti-work aspects, for sceptical readers more familiar with traditional Marxist modes of analysis.
- 46.
See Jappe, ‘Kurz’, op. cit.
- 47.
See Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson and Nicholas Brown, eds. Marxism and the Critique of Value (Chicago: MCMʹ Publishing, 2014). The volume brings together English translations of a number of texts that are foundational to key aspects of Wertkritik.
- 48.
The Left Young Hegelian Heinrich Heine distinguished between the ‘esoteric’ and ‘exoteric’ readings of Hegel in his On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (1834). Marx himself would go on to apply a similar schema to Adam Smith in Theories of Surplus Value (1863) (both in chapter 10 and chapter 20). See Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value (Moscow: Progress Publishers), vol. 2 (1968), pp. 166, 169 and vol. 3 (1971), p. 69.
- 49.
The French Structuralist, Louis Althusser, in a preface to a 1969 edition of Capital volume one (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1969), infamously advised first-time readers to skip completely the first chapter, which, ironically, contains the foundation of Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism, and he spends much of his introduction criticising Hegelian-influenced readings of Marx.
- 50.
Postone , Time, p. 5.
- 51.
Ibid., pp. 3–4, 6.
- 52.
Ibid., p. 5.
- 53.
Ibid.
- 54.
Ibid. Postone, it is true, largely glosses over the more positivistic conception of labour found in Marx, examined above. Moreover, he preserves the notion of labour as a rational abstraction, in the form of ‘necessary labour’, but, as Kurz argues, this still does not detract greatly from the extent of his original insights. See Kurz, Substance, ‘Critique of Moishe Postone’s Concept of Labour’, pp. 60–69.
- 55.
Postone , Time, p. 5. As Jappe argues, the ‘economic determinism’ of traditional Marxism, or the ‘objective’ base versus ‘subjective’ cultural superstructure model of historical materialism, is not entirely wrong to the extent that it reflects the real subordination of human life to the ‘economic’ in capitalism, but it is certainly not characteristic of any other form of society: ‘It follows that “economism”, as the subordination of all human activity to the economy, is not a theoretical error: it is actually quite real in capitalist society, but only in this society. It is not an immutable fact of human existence, much less something that must be defended. On the contrary, this subordination constitutes an aspect of capitalist society that can and must be changed. At the same time, it should be stressed that this centrality of the “economy”, and of the “material” aspect in general, in modernity (at the expense, for example, of “gratitude”) can only be explained by the autonomisation of abstract labour.’ Jappe, Writing on the Wall, pp. 89–90.
Equally, even in capitalism, the cultural superstructures or forms of subjectivity structured by labour can sometimes trump its ‘objective’ economic base or strictly economic individual interests. A person might, for example, choose, for moral reasons, to do, what they perceive as, ‘honest’ blue-collar work, working with one’s hands, when a better paid, but supposedly morally inferior, ‘white’ collar job, working with ‘other people’s money’ in a bank, for example, is on offer. This can also work the other way around, for example, when middle-class parents discourage their children from pursuing a skilled blue-collar career, rather than a white-collar one, even when, as is often the case today in the West, they are better paid and more secure, due to cultural prejudice against manual labour, which, for historical reasons, is seen as a step down the social ladder.
- 56.
For a detailed exposition of this argument, see Ernst Lohoff and Norbert Trenkle, trans. Paul Braun et al., La Grande dévalorisation: Pourquoi la spéculation et la dette de l’état ne sont pas les causes de la crise (Fécamp: Post-éditions, 2014).
- 57.
Strictly speaking the contributors to the journal Exit! now refer to their theory as Wertabspaltungskritik, the ‘critique of value-dissociation’, to reflect this development. See Roswitha Scholz, Das Geschlecht des Kapitalismus: Feministische Theorien und die post-moderne Metamorphose des Kapitals (Bad Honnef: Horlemann Verlag, 2011) and ‘Patriarchy and Commodity Society: Gender without the Body’, in Marxism and the Critique of Value, op. cit., pp. 123–142.
- 58.
See Norbert Trenkle, ‘Terror of Labour’, in Krisis: Contributions to the Critique of Commodity Society (London: Chronos, 2002), pp. 3–8.
- 59.
Modern philosophy, with the rise of capitalism, began to put forward the concept that material reality might constitute a single abstract substance. See Kurz, Substance, ‘The philosophical concept of substance and the real metaphysics of capitalism’, pp. 12–21.
- 60.
For empirical evidence and discussion of the historical specificity of ‘labour’, see, for example, Jacques Le Goff, ‘Pour une étude du travail dans les idéologies et les mentalités du Moyen Age’, in Lavorare nel medio evo: rappresentazioni ed esempi dall’Italia dei secc. X-XVI (Todi: Presso L’Academia Tudertina, 1983); Robert Fossier, Le Travail au Moyen Âge (Paris: Pluriel, 2012); Daniel Becquemont and Pierre Bonte, Mythologies Du Travail. Le Travail Nommé (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004), pp. 8–9; Michel Freyssenet, ‘The Emergence, Centrality and End of Work’, Current Sociology, 1999, vol. 47, n. 2, pp. 5–30 (a longer French version of this text can be found at freyssenet.com); Marie-Noëlle Chamoux, ‘Société avec et sans concept de travail: remarques anthropologiques’, Sociologie du travail, vol. 36, Sept. 1994, pp. 57–71.
- 61.
On the historical development of abstract time over concrete time, see Postone, Time, Labour and Social Domination, pp. 200–216.
- 62.
Kurz, Substance, p. 55.
- 63.
See Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (London: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 17–18; also Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books, 1991), pp. 43–53. Notwithstanding, it is also obviously the case that, particularly in certain monastic communities, toil for its own sake was often seen as a means of expiating the sinful nature of the human condition. The existence of such a self-abasing ideology in the Middle Ages was certainly a factor in the future development of the modern work ethic.
- 64.
Kurz, Substance, p. 27.
- 65.
Some medieval historians have suggested that the originally negative connotations of ‘labour’ were the result of classism or an ‘aristocratic disdain’. However, it is just as important to say that medieval people, in particular the peasants themselves, quite rationally saw tasks that were, empirically speaking, difficult or painful as something to be either suffered or avoided. Indeed, to the extent that ‘labour’, in its original sense, was a curse for original sin, the whole of pre-modern Christianity could be thought of precisely as a form of consolation for and absolution from such activity.
- 66.
This is a problem that, as we saw in the case of Applebaum above, is deeply frustrating to thinkers who want an intellectually satisfying, generally positivistic, definition of labour as a transhistorical abstraction but who, at the same time, can find no rational basis for it. A more postmodern vein of thinking might simply recognise how seemingly arbitrary what is and is not considered work in society and, as a result, conclude that it is simply a matter of one’s point of view, which simply dodges the question under the guise of promoting the voices of the oppressed. (E.g. see Keith Grint and Darren Nixon, The Sociology of Work [Oxford: Polity Press, 2015], p. 2.) A more moralising definition might say that these activities are unpleasant or forced and, therefore, a form of ‘work’, a common one for critics of work; but, while this may hold true for some, it is hardly the case that all of the activities that fall under the rubric of work as a generalised social activity are, at an empirical level, experienced universally as pain and personal domination, even if this is, objectively, often the case. It would also not explain why there is a strong tendency, even within physics, to project work onto activity in general. Equally, attempts, such as those of Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition (1958), to draw philosophical distinctions between ‘work’ and ‘labour’ bare no relationship to how these words are actually used nor how the form of abstract labour itself mediates social reality, and are, therefore, equally empty.
- 67.
See Jappe, Aventures, pp. 53–54.
- 68.
For a further discussion of this concretely abstract side of labour, or ‘concrete labour’, see Kurz, Substance, ‘What is really abstract about abstract labour’, pp. 84–111.
- 69.
‘Modern humans come upon the space of business as a finished shape whose disembedded character they feel, but can no longer name.’ Ibid., p. 90.
- 70.
‘If abstract labour is the abstraction of an abstraction, concrete labour only represents the paradox of the concrete aspect of an abstraction – namely of the form-abstraction “labour”. It is only “concrete” in the very narrow and restricted sense that the different commodities require materially different production processes: a car is made differently from, say, an aspirin tablet or a pencil sharpener. But even the behaviour of these processes of production is in no way indifferent, technically or organizationally, to the presupposed goal of valorization. […] the capitalist process of production is configured in this respect: it is organized solely according to the maxim of producing the greatest possible number of products in the shortest possible time. This is then called the economic efficiency of a business. The concrete, material side of labour is thus nothing other than the tangible form in which abstract labour’s diktat of time confronts the workers and forces them under its rhythm.’ Norbert Trenkle, ‘Value and Crisis: Basic Questions’, in Marxism and the Critique of Value, op. cit., pp. 9–10.
- 71.
It should be stressed again that ‘abstract labour’ and ‘concrete labour’ are not different types of labour. They are rather categories that allow us to talk about labour at different levels of social ontology. Indeed, ‘abstract labour’ is, Kurz argues, strictly speaking, a ‘logical pleonasm’—like ‘wet water’—because labour is already an abstraction and this abstract quality of labour is what defines its essence or form. At the same time, ‘concrete labour’ is a kind of oxymoron or paradoxical-real determination because the labour in question is, by definition, not concrete, but the category allows us to talk about the paradoxical fact that, in an inversion of all previous social logic, a real abstraction, ‘abstract labour’, grasps hold of, organises and mediates concrete reality at all levels. All forms of ‘concrete labour’ are therefore just as abstract, at an essential social level, even if empirically they appear otherwise. As such, concrete labour, along with use value, is not a category that can be projected onto the pre-modern world. See Kurz, Substance, pp. 27–28.
- 72.
Jappe, Aventures, pp. 70–75.
- 73.
‘It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that the inversion of the formula C-M-C to M-C-M’ contains within it the entire essence of capitalism. The transformation of abstract labour into money is the only goal of commodity production; all use-value production is only a means, a “necessary evil”, with a single goal: to have at the end of the operation a larger sum of money than at the start. The satisfaction of needs is no longer the goal of production, but only a secondary aspect. […] the concrete serves only to feed the materialised abstraction: money.’ Jappe, Aventures, p. 73.
- 74.
See Jappe, Aventures, pp. 83–85.
- 75.
Society has reached such a state of absurdity that these days ‘job creation’ has become a job in itself and even a foundation stone of left-wing politics.
- 76.
See Robert Kurz, trans. Alias Recluse, ‘The Apotheosis of Money: The Structural Limits of Capital Valorization, Casino Capitalism and the Global Financial Crisis’, 2012, https://libcom.org/library/apotheosis-money-structural-limits-capital-valorization-casino-capitalism-global-financi. See also Jappe, Aventures, pp. 204–205.
- 77.
See Trenkle, Dévalorisation, pp. 92–93.
- 78.
‘A threefold real, practical process of abstraction takes place paradoxically in the abstract space-time of the economy. Although it is they themselves that “labour”, the functional subjects must first abstract from themselves, extinguishing themselves in a certain way as human beings, to obey the imperatives of abstract labour. This does not follow from the material character in itself, for instance from (social) production for others rather than for one’s own needs, but from the fundamentally “alien” fact of the capitalist self-sufficient purpose, the valorisation of value. The point is not to produce useful objects, either for oneself or for others, but it is essentially to produce value and surplus value, that is to burn up a maximum of one’s own abstract human energy within the functional space of economic space-time, to turn oneself as a human being into a social combustion engine.’ Kurz, Substance, pp. 101–102.
- 79.
Traditional Marxism always understood this process as the ‘tendency of the rate of profit to fall’, which is a more phenomenological way of trying to understand this process, but precisely because it was not based on a categorical critique, it was not something that was thought to put capitalism itself into question.
- 80.
See Trenkle, Dévalorisation, op. cit.; Jappe, ‘Le capital fictif’, Aventures, pp. 157–166, and ‘The Writing on the Wall’, The Writing on the Wall, pp. 60–80.
The more the labour and value forms come to mediate social life the more dangerous these kinds of financial crises become. In a period when the agricultural way of life was still widespread alongside modern industry, people could simply return to the land. Today, at least for most people in the West, this is simply not an option.
- 81.
Anselm Jappe, ‘The “Dark Side” of Value and the Gift’, The Writing on the Wall, pp. 84–103. Here Jappe draws parallels between the Maussian concept of the ‘gift’ and Scholz’s theory of ‘dissociation’.
- 82.
For a detailed discussion of value-dissociation and gender, see Roswitha Scholz, Das Geschlecht des Kapitalismus: Feministische Theorien und die post-moderne Metamorphose des Kapitals (Bad Honnef: Horlemann Verlag, 2011); ‘Patriarchy and Commodity Society’ (2009) in Marxism and the Critique of Value, op. cit., pp. 123–1400; and trans. Stéphane Besson, Simone de Beauvoir aujourd’hui (Paris: Le Bord de l’eau, 2014). See also, Johannes Vogele, ‘Remarques sur les notions de ‘valeur’ et de ‘dissociation valeur” in Richard Poulin and Patrick Vassort, eds. Sexe, capitalisme et critique de la valeur (Paris: M éditeur, 2012), pp. 89–102 and ‘Le côté obscur du Capital, ‘Masculinité’ et ‘féminité’ comme piliers de la modernité’ in ibid., pp. 103–120; Kurz, Substance, pp. 90–92, 96–97.
- 83.
Scholz, ‘Patriarchy’, pp. 127–128, and Vogele, ‘Le côté obscur’, p. 112.
- 84.
On the other hand, this does not prevent the domestic sphere from becoming a utilitarian, functionalist and ‘productivist’ one in a certain sense. The dissociated aspects of life constantly have to justify their existence and specific modes of organisation as taking place outside of the logic of production and often they do so in its terms (e.g. one can imagine a worker in a nuclear family stating to a spouse, ‘I work eight hours a day so you should do eight hours of housework’); but, although they can have empirical similarities, they still do not take the form of (abstract) labour.
- 85.
Vogele, ‘Le côté obscur’, p. 112.
- 86.
Although it is our focus here, we cannot think of ‘value-dissociation’ purely in terms of patriarchy. The dissociated traits of laziness and irrationality have often been projected onto the disabled and people of colour; they have likewise suffered discrimination and been excluded from full participation in public life. Even illness, in modernity, is essentially defined by whether a person is capable of working or not. In official French language, for example, injury or ill health is usually spoken in terms of a period of ‘incapacité de travail’ or inability to work.
- 87.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 255.
- 88.
See Jappe, Aventures, ‘Le sujet automate’, pp. 98–107.
- 89.
For a detailed exploration of these positions, see Anselm Jappe, La Société autophage: capitalisme, démesure et autodestruction (Paris: Découverte, 2017). Jappe, drawing on Freud and the work of Christopher Lasch, argues that the subject form is essentially narcissistic in character as it recognises no limits on itself. It therefore fixes the human psyche in an infantile stage of psychological development where the objective world is seen only as a projection of the self. The empirical ‘subjects’ are increasingly unable to form healthy reciprocal relationships with the exterior world, which instead becomes the playground for the realisation of the most primitive desires. At the same time, these subjects are increasingly caught between feelings of omnipotence and total impotence as capitalism collapses by reaching its own internal and external limits.
- 90.
Jappe , Aventures, ‘Critique du progrès, de l’économie et du sujet’, pp. 207–211.
- 91.
The nature of value and labour as a priori forms, though historically specific, obviously excludes voting in general elections, active citizenship or seizing the state as means of resolving the problem of capitalism. These forms of ‘participation’ only permit empirical subjects access to different management roles, or to cast an opinion on styles of management, within the system of valorisation, which itself could never be voted upon or abolished with a law.
- 92.
Robert Kurz, No Revolution Anywhere (London: Chronos, 2012), pp. 19–21.
- 93.
Ibid., pp. 21–22.
- 94.
Anselm Jappe, ‘We Gotta Get Out of this Place’, Brooklyn Rail, Sept. 2015. https://brooklynrail.org/2015/09/field-notes/anselm-jappe-with-alastair-hemmens
- 95.
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Hemmens, A. (2019). Marxian Theory and the Critique of Work. In: The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought. Studies in Revolution and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12586-8_1
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