archive : s0metim3s

The problematic of mobility and enclosure - which cannot but become an exploration of the concrete history of the connections between ‘free labour’ and servitude - has been a prominent one in writings on borders and migration.

What emerges here, at least on the terrain on marxist philosophy, is a critique of the schematics of formal > real subsumption, slavery > free labour, primitive accumulation > capitalism proper, and so on - which is to say, of the linear, progressive model of capitalist development. This critique takes as it point of departure and perspective the very border between these concepts, acknowledging them not as temporal (even if temporalised) but as geopolitical distinctions. Some of this is discussed here (pdf), in light of Silvia Federici’s book, Caliban and the Witch.

Of particular relevance, also to be added to the list of readings on migration, Nate’s gift for Marx’s birthday celebrations, a translation of a portion of Sandro Mezzadra’s Diritto di Fuga: Migrazioni, Cittadinanza, Globalizzacione, taking as its point of departure the work by Yann Moulier-Boutang.

Together with the idea that free waged labor represents the sine qua non based upon which one can speak of fully developed capitalism, the research of Yann Moulier Boutang ends up placing into question the presumption, based in reality more in some marxist currents than in the pages of Marx himself, following which capitalist development has a linear trajectory from the extraction of absolute surplus value to relative surplus value - that is to say, from “formal subsumption” to “real subsumption of labor to capital.” The persistence of unfree forms of labor throughout the entire arc of the history of capitalism defines in other terms a terrain in which formal subsumption and real subsumption, with the distinct forms of surplus value extraction that pertain to them, necessarily coexist simultaneously. But at the same time, the insistence upon the elements of co-action and bridling of the free movement of labor that structurally concerns capitalism in regard to its “permanent authoritarian temptation” does not make capitalism “a cold system, the latest western variant of hydraulic despotism, (…) but rather a movement without end and without pause.” Anonymous individual and collective defection, with which women and men try to subtract themselves from the despotic regime of dependent labor, in the multiple forms which that assumes, is in fact the essential element of the capitalist social relation, the key for understanding the dynamic of the “regimes of accumulation” in which this provisory equilibrium is encountered each time.

More here.

In recent times, it seems to me particularly important to attend to the very workings of the contract, as both social and wage contract and the intersections between them, inasmuch as the latter increasingly becomes the condition and paradigm of the former.

The immediate reason for this, I suppose, would be the precarisation of otherwise or historically regular forms of work. And yet, granting that the experience of precarious forms of labour was always indeed ‘regular’ insofar as without it there would be no compulsion to wage labour, it becomes a question of the work (and social) contract as such.

And so, Matthew Hyland’s “Proud Scum - The Spectre of the Ingrate”, dealing with the connections between work contracts and identity:

Supplementary contracts-you-can’t-refuse for the wilfully uncontracting and dis-integrated have become a popular institutional tool in Britain, used in welfare crackdowns, school discipline, mental health, public housing and the widening margins of ‘criminal justice’. The device’s relative normalisation is perhaps not surprising given the longer-term spread of conditions once clearly identified with the ‘foreign’ side of the border around the national/wage contract.

[…] The integration imperative can be said to traverse a polarity with the multicultural utopia of full, ‘economically active’ assimilation into the national first person plural at one extreme and at the other the abstraction of the socially pathogenic foreigner, who is unassimilable to the state and therefore subject to its unlimited force.

The full article here.