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Althusser, on the encounter, aleatory materialism, class formation and (political-economic) laws.

In untold passages, Marx […] explains that the capitalist mode of production arose from the ‘encounter‘ between ‘the owners of money’ and the proletarian stripped of everything but his labour-power. ‘It so happens’ that this encounter took place, and ‘took hold’, which means that it did not come undone as soon as it came about, but lasted, and became an accomplished fact, the accomplished fact of this encounter, inducing stable relationships and a necessity the study of which yields ‘laws’, tendential laws, of course: the laws of the development of the capitalist mode of production (the law of value, the law of exchange, the law of cyclical crises, the law of the crisis and decay of the capitalist mode of production, the law of the passage—transition—to the socialist mode of production under the laws of the class struggle, and so on). What matters about this conception is less the elaboration of laws, hence of an essence, than the aleatory character of the taking-’hold’ of this encounter, which gives rise to an accomplished fact whose laws it is possible to state.

This can be put differently: the whole that results from the ‘taking-hold’ of the ‘encounter’ does not precede the ‘taking-hold’ of its elements, but follows it; for this reason, it might have not ‘taken hold’, and, a fortiori, ‘the encounter might have not taken place’. All of this is said—in veiled terms, to be sure, but it is said—in the formula that Marx uses in his frequent discussions of the ‘encounter’ [das Vorgefundene] between raw labour-power and the owners of money. We can go even further, and suppose that this encounter occurred several times in history before taking hold in the West, but, for lack of an element or a suitable arrangement of the elements, failed to ‘take’. Witness the thirteenth-century and fourteenth-century Italian states of the Po valley, where there were certainly men who owned money, technology, and energy (machines driven by the hydraulic power of the river) as well as manpower (unemployed artisans), but where the phenomenon nevertheless failed to ‘take hold’. What was lacking here was doubtless (perhaps—this is a hypothesis) that which Machiavelli was desperately seeking in the form of his appeal for a national state, namely, a domestic market capable of absorbing what might have been produced.

The slightest reflection on the presuppositions of this conception suffices to show that it is predicated on a very special type of relationship between the structure and the elements which this structure is supposed to unify. For what is a mode of production? We provided an answer to this question, following Marx: it is a particular ‘combination’ of elements. These elements are an accumulation of money (by the ‘owners of money’), an accumulation of the technical means of production (tools, machines, an experience of production on the part of the workers), an accumulation of the raw materials of production (nature) and an accumulation of producers (proletarians divested of all means of production). The elements do not exist in history so that a mode of production may exist, they exist in history in a ‘floating’ state prior to their ‘accumulation’ and ‘combination’, each being the product of its own history, and none be-ing the teleological product of the others or their history. When Marx and Engels say that the proletariat is ‘the product of big industry’, they utter a very great piece of nonsense, positioning themselves within the logic of the accomplished fact of the reproduction of the proletariat on an extended scale, not the aleatory logic of the ‘encounter’ which produces (rather than re-produces), as the proletariat, this mass of impoverished, expropriated human beings as one of the elements making up the mode of production. In the process, Marx and Engels shift from the first conception of the mode of production, an historico-aleatory conception, to a second, which is essentialistic and philosophical.

In other words, and aside from being a particularly pithy critique of Marxian teleology, the condition which is required for capitalism to ‘take hold’, for the encounter to acquire the law-like character, is the nation-state. Not simply for the formation of a domestic market in goods, as Althusser notes, but a domestic market in labour.