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Paolo Virno’s “About Exodus” (trans. Alessia Ricciardi, Grey Room, n.21, 2005):

Among the different ways in which Marx described the crisis of capital accumulation (overproduction, the law of diminishing returns, etc.), there is one that goes largely unrecognized: the workers’ desertion of the factory.

Marx speaks of a feverish and systematic disobedience of the laws of the labor market, as regards the initial phase of North American capitalism, at the moment when his analysis of the modern modes of production encounters the epic of the West. The caravans of the colonies heading for the Great Plains and the exasperated individualism of the frontiersman surface in his texts as a signal of difficulty for Monsieur le Capital. The “frontier” is included with lively determination in the critique of political economy. It is not only a question of marginal glosses about the anomalies of developments in extra-European regions. There is, rather, on the part of Marx, the search for new interpretive categories to put to the test with respect to the basic tendencies implicit in the relations of capital. In this sense, more than to Marx’s articles about the American Civil War or to his correspondence with German socialist émigrés to the United States after 1848, it is useful to pay attention to a theoretical locus par excellence: to a chapter in Capital. More precisely, to the last chapter of the first book, where there arises the question of colonies, albeit really almost exclusively in terms of the social function of the North American frontier.

The question Marx puts to himself is simple: How did it happen that the mode of capitalist production encountered so many difficulties in a country as old as capitalism, born with it, and on which the viscous inheritance of the traditional modes of production did not weigh? In the United States, the conditions for capitalist development were present in all their purity, and yet something was not working. It was not enough that money, the workforce, and technologies flowed in abundance from the old continent; it was not enough that the “things” of capital would gather in a land without nostalgia.

The “things” have remained just so; for a long time they have not transubstantiated themselves in social relations. The cause of this paradoxical impasse resides, according to Marx, in the habit the immigrants assumed of abandoning the factory after a brief period, going West, penetrating the frontier.

The frontier, which is to say the presence of a boundless territory to colonize and populate, represents a point of departure. When the famous “richness of occasions/chances” gets cited as the root and emblem of a new civilization, what is usually forgotten is to place due emphasis on a decisive occasion that marks a difference with regard to the history of industrial Europe, that is, on the fact of an escape en masse from labor under a boss.

Already a father of the homeland, Benjamin Franklin, in offering counsel to those who might wish to come to the United States, writes:

Labor [in America is] generally too dear there, and hands difficult to be kept together, every one desiring to be a master, and the cheapness of lands inclining many to leave trades for agriculture. . . . Great establishments of manufacture require great numbers of poor to do the work for small wages; those poor are to be found in Europe, but will not be found in America till the lands are all taken up and cultivated, and the excess of people, who cannot get land, want employment.1

And Wakefield, the official expert on the problems of colonies that Marx elects as a polemical target, candidly admits in his England and America, “Where land is very cheap and all men are free, where one who so pleases can easily obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labour very dear, as respects the labourer’s share of the produce, but the difficulty is to obtain combined labour at any price.”2

The availability of free lands makes of wage labor a net with large meshes, a provisionary status, an episode limited in time, no longer perpetual identity, irrevocable destiny, life-prison. The difference is profound and concerns us today. The dynamic of the frontier, or the American enigma, represents a powerful anticipation of contemporary collective behavior. With any possibility of a spatial resolution exhausted, in the society of mature capitalism there nonetheless returns the cult of mobility, the aspiration to escape a definite condition, the calling to desert the regime of the factory.

In contrast to what happened in Europe, at the dawn of American industrialism there existed no peasants reduced to misery but adult workers who transformed themselves into free farmers. The problem of dependent labor assumes here an unusual configuration, which also has many current traits as well. In fact, autonomous activity is not a thin and suffocating residue but takes root beyond wage earners’ submission (or at least to one side of it). It represents the future: what follows and opposes the factory. Moreover, instead of being marked by idiocy and powerlessness, the relation to nature takes the form of an intelligent experience, precisely because it comes after the experience of the factory.

The paradigm of desertion, which first becomes apparent in the proximity of the “frontier,” opens up unforeseen theoretical perspectives. Neither the concept of a “civil society” elaborated by Hegel nor the functioning of the market delineated by Ricardo helps us to understand the “strategy of flight,” which is to say an experience of civilization based on the continuous subtraction of established roles, on the inclination to trick the deck of cards while the game is under way. The “frontier” becomes a critical tool for Hegel as well as Ricardo because it positions the crisis of capitalist development in a context of abundance, while the Hegelian “system of needs” and the Ricardan law of diminishing returns are explanatory only in relation to a dominant scarcity.

A certain degree of abundance ridicules the pretended naturalness of the law of supply and demand and reduces the labor market to a scientific utopia. The relations of force between the classes are now also defined by escape, which is to say by the existence of lines of flight. Marx writes:

The absolute population here increases much more quickly than in the mother-country, because many labourers enter this world as ready-made adults, and yet the labour market is always understocked. The law of the supply and demand of labour falls to pieces. On the one hand, the old world constantly throws in capital, thirsting after exploitation and “abstinence”; on the other, the regular reproduction of the wage-labourer as wage-labourer comes into collision with impediments the most impertinent and in part invincible. What becomes of the production of wage-labourers, supernumerary in proportion to the accumulation of capital? . . . This constant transformation of the wage-labourers into independent producers . . . reacts in its turn very perversely on the conditions of the labour-market. Not only does the exploitation of the wagelabourer remain indecently low. The wage-labourer loses into the bargain, along with the relation of dependence, also the sentiment of dependence on the abstemious capitalist.3

In this light, one can experience prophetically the effects of the inexistence, or even worse of the ineffectiveness, of the reserve wage-army as an instrument for the compression of the worker’s wage. The same situation will repeat itself on a large scale with the welfare state. Income no longer exclusively depends on the donation of wage-labor; in fact, this donation is accepted or denied in strict relation to an eventual income otherwise obtained (it does not matter whether through the receipt of state assistance or the performance of autonomous activities). Marx turns to the “frontier” to justify the high salaries, the scandal, and the cross of American capitalism at its debut. But we have already said that it is not merely a question of historiography. Nomadism, individual freedom, desertion, and the feeling of abundance nourish the contemporary social conflict.

The culture of desertion, however, is extraneous to the democratic and socialist tradition. The latter has internalized and repositioned the European idea of the “border” in opposition to the American one of the “frontier.” The border is a line at which one stops; the frontier is an indefinite area in which to proceed. The border is stable and fixed, the frontier mobile and uncertain. One is obstacle; the other is chance. Democratic, socialist politics is based on fixed identities and safe delimitations. Its task is to grasp the “autonomy of the social” by making thorough and transparent the mechanism of representation that connects work to the state. The individual is represented in the work, the work in the state — a sequence without fissures, based as it is on the standing character of the individual’s life.

One thus understands why democratic political thought sank on confronting youth movements and the new trends of dependent labor. To put it in the terms of a beautiful book by Albert O. Hirshman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, the Left has not seen that the exit-option (abandoning a disadvantageous situation as soon as possible) was becoming prevalent over the voice-option (protesting actively against that situation).4 Instead, it has morally denigrated the category of “exit” behaviors. Disobedience and flight are not in any case a negative gesture that exempts one from action and responsibility. To the contrary, to desert means to modify the conditions within which the conflict is played instead of submitting to them. And the positive construction of a favorable scenario demands more initiative than the clash with pre-fixed conditions. An affirmative “doing” qualifies defection, impressing a sensual and operative taste on the present. The conflict is engaged starting from what we have constituted through fleeing in order to defend social relations and new forms of life out of which we are already making experience. To the ancient idea of fleeing in order to better attack is added the certainty that the fight will be all the more effective if one has something else to lose besides one’s own chains.