Tracing surplus in the history of anthropological thought

p. 362, Marxist Approaches in Anthropology, Annual Review of Anthropology 1975.

"Most of Marx's analysis of relations of production dealt with class societies. He showed that the dynamics of class 'were rooted in the appropriation of surplus-labor-as either living or embodied labor-by a class of non-producers:

The essential difference between the various economic forms of society, between, for instance, a society based on slave-labour, and one based on wage-labour, lies only in the mode in which this surplus-labour is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer (39, p. 217).

Following the work of Balibar (4), a number of Marxist anthropologists, such as Terray (56)and Rey (49), picked up on this citation from Marx and applied it to their analysis of precapitalist societies. They argued that Engels' tendency to define class in terms of a property relation-ownership of the means of production-
is a distortion of the essential determination of class, i.e. the exploitation of the producer by the nonproducer. Rey specifically tried to show that in the "lineage mode of production" in Africa surplus-labor is extracted by elders from dependent junior men.

Rey's emphasis on the category of surplus-labor has been analytically fruitful for anthropologists since it centers attention on the dialectical determination of surplus in a Marxist framework. Whereas cultural materialists and the classical political economists insist that surplus is defined uniquely by technological parameters (productivity and the minimum subsistence requirements necessary for the biological reproduction of labor), Marx, in his analysis of capitalism, argued that the subsistence bundle of workers is socially, not biologically, determined. Both its composition and its size vary with the use-values that workers demand, and can therefore express the outcome of workers' struggle for a larger share of their own surplus product."

Revolution

"Any society whatsoevver has all of its rules at once - juridical, religious, political, economic; laws governing love and labor, kinship and marriage, servitude and freedom, life and death. But the conquest of nature, without which it would no longer be a society, is achieved progressively, from one source of energy to another, from one object to another. This is why law weighs with all its might, even before its object is known, and without ever its object becoming exactly known. It is this disequilibrium that makes revolutions possible. It is not at all the case that revolutions are determined by technical progress. Rather, they are made possible by this gap between the two series, which solicits realignments of the economic and political totality in relation to the parts of the technical progress. There are therefore two errors which in truth are one and the same: the error of reformism or technocracy, which aspires to promote or impose partial arrangements of social relations according to the rhythm of technical achievements; and the error of totalitarianism, which aspires to constitute a totalization of the signifiable and the known, according to the rhythm of the social totality existing at a given moment. The technocrat is the natural friend of the dictator - computers and dictatorship; but the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribes there his dream of permanent revolution. This dream, therefore, is itself action, reality, and an effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about."

Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p.59

Deleuze and Proletariat: path to Ranciere

" ... it is as though each affirmation referred to its negative, or has 'sense' only by virtue of its negation, while at the same time a generalised negation takes the place of the problem. Thus begins the long history of the distortion of the dialectic, which culminates in Hegel and consists in substituting the labour of the negative for the play of difference and the differential. ... Furthermore, if the truth be told, none of this would amount to much were it not for the moral presuppositions and practical implications of such a distortion. We have seen all that this valorisation of the negative signified, including the conservative spirit of such an enterprise, the platitude of the affirmations supposed to be engendered thereby, and the manner in which we are led away from the most important task, that of determining problems and realising in them our power of creation and decision. This is why conflicts, oppositions and contradictions seemed to us to be surface effects and conscious epiphenomena, while the unconscious lived on problems and differences. History progresses not by negation and the negation of negation, but by deciding problems and affirming differences. It is no less bloody and cruel as a result. Only the shadows of history live by negation: the good enter into it with all the power of a posited differential or a difference affirmed; they repel shadows into the shadows and deny only as the consequence of a primary positivity and affirmation. For them, as Nietzche says, affirmation is primary; it affirms difference, while the negative is only a consequence or a reflection in which affirmation is doubled. That is why real revolutions have the atmosphere of fetes. Contradiction is not the weapon of the proletariat but, rather, the manner in which the bourgeoisie defends and preserves itself, the shadow behind which it maintains its claim to decide what the problems are."

Difference and Repetition, p.267-8

Ranciere, in the Misadventures of Critical Thought makes a very similar point with regard to 19th century elites and their use of critical thought. The premise of critical theory to reveal what's hidden beneath mystifications is what Ranciere criticizes there. He argues that this pattern of thought which acts like an authority, revealing the reality of problems was acquired by the elites for social engineering, leading to the assimilation of labour movements into social democratic regimes. On top of that the quote above would reject any interpretaion of Deleuze as "a non-political philosopher before he met Guattari".

Spectral Histories

"A messianic promise, even if it was not fulfilled, at least in the form in which it was uttered, even if it rushed headlong toward an ontological content, will have imprinted an inaugural and unique mark in history. And whether we like it or not, whatever consciousness we have of it, we cannot not be its heirs. There is no inheritance without a call to responsibility."

Jacques Derrida, quoted in Zhivka Valiavicharska, Socialist Modes of Governance and the "Withering Away of the State", Theory&Event Volume 13, Issue 2, 2010

The article is another one of a series of attempts to re-Present the Left-wing past as a political possibility of today. A close reading of State&Revolution is all the more interesting given that we attempted a similar reading this smester with Ozselcuk.

Valiavicharska does not use psychoanalysis, but her point is similar to that of Yahya-Ozselcuk's discussion of the forms of the commune, especially when Valiavicharska refers to retrospective studies on Soviet experience and the practice of property law. The close reading of State and Revolution gives us a sense of Lenin flirting with what Madra&Ozselcuk call feminine jouissance following Lacan, countering arguments on the domination of beuracratic specialists as the anthropological truth of Soviet experience in all its aspects.

The article is an attempt to re-Present Soviet past and rescue the "pure memory" of communism from its representational chains.

Weapon

"weapons are nothing but the essence of the combatants themselves",

Hegel, quoted in Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, p.247

Lowy on Lukacs, Dialectics and Revolution

http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1119

The philosophical work that best gave expression to the dialectics of revolution after October 1917 was probably György Lukacs’ History and Class consciousness (1923). By dissolving the reified moments in the contradictory process of the historical totality, and by emphasizing the unity between the subjective and the objective in the revolutionary praxis, Lukacs was able to dialectically supersede (Aufhebung) the traditional oppositions between “ought” and «being”, values and reality, ethics and politics, final goal and immediate circumstances, human will and material conditions. Since this opus magnum of Marxist dialectics in the XXth century is well known, I would like to add a few comments on another piece by Lukacs, only recently discovered, Chvostismus und Dialektik .

For many years scholars and readers wondered why Lukacs never answered to the intense fire of criticism directed against History and Class Consciousness (HCC) soon after its publication, particularly from Communist quarters. The recent discovery of Chvostismus und Dialektik - probably written around 1925 - in the former archives of the Lenin Institute shows that this “missing link” existed : Lukacs did reply, in a most explicit and vigorous way, to these attacks, and defended the main ideas of his hegelo-marxist masterpiece from 1923. One may consider this answer as the last revolutionary/marxist writing of the Hungarian philosopher, just before a major turn in his theoretical and political orientation - the philosophical “reconciliation with reality” proposed by his essay on Moses Hess from 1926 [21].

Chvostismus und Dialektik - English translation : Tailism and Dialectics - may be considered as a powerful exercise in revolutionary dialectics, against the crypto-positivist brand of “Marxism” that was soon to become the official ideology of the Soviet bureaucracy. The key element in this polemical battle is Lukacs’ emphasis on the decisive revolutionary importance of the subjective moment in the subject/object historical dialectics.

If one had to summarize the value and the significance of Tailism and dialectics, I would argue that it is a powerful hegelian/marxist apology of revolutionary subjectivity. This motive runs like a red thread throughout the whole piece, particularly in its first part, but even, to some extent, in the second one too. Let us try to bring into evidence the main moments of this argument. One could begin with the mysterious term Chvostismus of the book’s title - Lukacs never bothered to explain it, supposing that its - German ? Russian ? - readers were familiar with it. The word was used by Lenin in his polemics - for instance in What is to be done ? - against those “economistic Marxists” who “tail-end” the spontaneous labour movement. Lukacs, however, uses it in a much broader historiosophical sense : Chvostismus means passively following - “tailing” - the “objective” course of events, while ignoring the subjective/revolutionary moments of the historical process.

Lukacs denounces the attempt by Rudas and Deborin to transform Marxism into a “science” in the positivist, bourgeois sense. Deborin - an ex-Menshevik - tries, in a regressive move, to bring back historical materialism “into the fold of Comte or Herbert Spencer” (auf Comte oder Herbert Spencer zurückrevidiert), a sort of bourgeois sociology studying transhistorical laws that exclude all human activity. And Rudas places himself as a “scientific” observer of the objective, law-bound course of history, whereby he can “anticipate” revolutionary developments. Both regard as worthy of scientific investigation only what is free of any participation on the part of the historical subject, and both reject, in the name of this “Marxist” (in fact, positivist) science any attempt to accord “an active and positive role to a subjective moment in history”. [22] The war against subjectivism, argues Lukacs, is the banner under which opportunism justifies its rejection of revolutionary dialectics : it was used by Bernstein against Marx and by Kautsky against Lenin. In the name of anti-subjectivism, Rudas develops a fatalist conception of history, which includes only “the objective conditions”, but leaves no room for the decision of the historical agents. In an article in Inprekor against Trotsky - criticised by Lukacs in T&D - Rudas claims that the defeat of the Hungarian revolution of 1919 was due only to “objective conditions” and not to any mistakes of the Communist leadership; he mentions both Trotsky and Lukacs as examples of a one-sided conception of politics which overemphasizes the importance of proletarian class consciousness [23]. While rejecting the accusation of “subjective idealism”, Lukacs does not retract from his voluntarist viewpoint : in the decisive moments of the struggle “everything depends on class consciousness , on the conscious will of the proletariat” - the subjective component. Of course, there is a dialectical interaction between subject and object in the historical process, but in the crucial moment (Augenblick) of crisis, it gives the direction of the events, in the form of revolutionary consciousness and praxis. By his fatalist attitude, Rudas ignores praxis and develops a theory of passive “tail-ending”, considering that history is a process that “takes place independently of human consciousness”.

What is Leninism, argues Lukacs, if not the permanent insistence on the “active and conscious rôle of the subjective moment” ? How could one imagine, “without this function of the subjective moment”, Lenin’s conception of insurrection as an art? Insurrection is precisely the Augenblick, the instant of the revolutionary process where “the subjective moment has a decisive predominance (ein entscheidendes Übergewicht)”.

In that instant, the fate of the revolution, and therefore of humanity “depends on the subjective moment”. This does not mean that revolutionaries should “wait” for the arrival of this Augenblick : there is no moment in the historical process where the possibility of an active rôle of the subjective moments is completely lacking [24]. In this context, Lukacs turns his critical weapons against one of the main expressions of this positivist, “sociological”, contemplative, fatalist - chvostistisch in his terminology - and objectivist conception of history : the ideology of progress. Rudas and Deborin believe that the historical process is an evolution mechanistically and fatally leading to the next stage. History is conceived, according to the dogmas of evolutionism, as permanent advance, endless progress : the temporally later stage is necessarily the higher one in every respect.

From a dialectical viewpoint, however, the historical process is “not an evolutionary nor an organic one”, but contradictory, jerkily unfolding in advances and retreats [25]. Unfortunately Lukacs does not develop this insights, that point towards a radical break with the ideology of inevitable progress common to Second and - after 1924 - Third International Marxism. Another important aspect related to this battle against the positivist degradation of Marxism is Lukacs critique, in the second part of the essay, against the views expressed by Rudas on technology and industry as an “objective” and neutral system of “exchange between humans and nature”. This would mean, objects Lukacs, that there is an essential identity between the capitalist and the socialist society !

In his viewpoint, revolution has to change not only the relations of production but also revolutionize to a large extent the concrete forms of technology and industry existing in capitalism, since they are intimately linked to the capitalist division of labour. In this issue too Lukacs was well ahead of his time, but the suggestion remains undeveloped in his essay [26].

from Lenin

"The narrow horizon of the bourgeious law which compels one to calculate with the heartlessness of a Shylock whether one has not worked half an hour more than anybody else..."

State and Revolution, Lenin

Althusser on Sport and Ideology

"Each of them (Ideological State Apparatuses) contributes towards this single result in the way proper to it. The political apparatus by subjecting individuals to the political State ideology, the 'indirect' or 'direct' 'democratic' ideology. The communications apparatus by cramming every 'citizen' with daily doses of nationalism, chauvenism, liberalism, moralism etc., by means of the press, the radio and television. The same goes for the cultural apparatus (the role of sport in chauvenism is of the first importance)."

pg.104, Louis Althusser, 'Lenin and Philosophy and other essays', 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.' 2001, Monthly Review Press, NY.

"many of these contrasting Virtues (modesty, resignation, submissiveness on the one hand, cynicism, contempt, arrogance, confidence, self-importance, even smooth talk and cunning on the other) are also thought in the Family, in the Church, in the army, in Good Books, in films and even in the football stadium."

Ibid. pg.105

Georg Lukacs, Reification [and the Way Out], Bok Çukuruna Saplanmış Burjuva Vasatlığı

Lukacs immideacy ile mediation arasındaki diyalektik ilişkiden bahsediyor. Gerçeklik her halinde mediated durumdadır, ancak bir burjuva düşüncesi olarak unmediated, immideate empirical existence olduğu kabul edilebilir. Ideoloji de sanırım bu noktada beliriyor. In immidiacy, proletariat suffer where the bourgeios even if subjected to same self-alienation can feel at home.

Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness Studies in Marxist Dialectics, "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," 1971 MIT Press, pg. 149

"...the proletariat shares with the bourgeois the reification of every aspect of its life. Marx observes; "The propert-owning class and the class of the proletariat represent the same human alienation. But the former feels at home in this self-alienation and feels itself confirmed by it; it recognises alienation as its own instrument and in it it possesses the semblance of a human existence. The latter feels itself destroyed by this alienation and sees in it its own impotence and the reality of an inhuman existence."

pg.163,

"The methodological function of the categories of mediation consists in the fact that with their aid those immanent meanings that necessarily inhere in the objects of bourgeois society but which are absent from the immidiate manifestation of those objects as well as from their mental reflection in bourgeois thought, now become objectively effective and can therefore enter the consciousness of the proletariat. That is to say, if the bourgeois is held fast in the mire of immidiacy from which the proletariat is able to extricate itself, that is neither purely accidental nor a purely theoretical scientific problem. The distance between these theoretical positions is an expression of the differences between the social existence of the two classes."

Aklıma MEHA direnişçileri ile yaptığımız söyleşide, konuşan kadın emekçilerden birinin, "işçi sınıfı" , "emekçi dayanışması" gibi kavramları kararlılıkla kullanması, ve kullanırken yüzünde oluşan güçlü ifade ve ses tonu geliyor. Birkaç ay öncesine kadar siyasi eylemleri terorizm, bildiri dağıtanları terorist olarak algıladığını da ekliyor. Kazanılmış bir mücadele sonrasında bu kararlılık şaşırtıcı değil mutlaka. Ancak dinlerken bu kavramlara bu kadar inançla bağlanmasında başka bir denklik-birlik olduğunu düşünmüştüm. Lukacs okuru özne-nesne örtüşmesi, praxis, proletariat ve mediation kavramları üzerine düşünmeye itiyor. Yukarıdaki alıntıda, somut durumlardan oluşturulmuş bütünlüklü bir kavramsallaştırmanın, yabancılaşmanın çamuruna saplanmış proleterya için bir çıkış yolu olacağından bahsediyor Lukacs. Burjuva ise bu çamur içinde kendini evinde hissediyor Marx'a göre.

MEHA işçisinin bu kavramları kullanırkenki yüz ifadesi ile akademik bir ortamda bu kavramlar konuşulurkenki yüz ifadelerini ister istemez karşılaştırmak durumunda kaldım. İşte bu fark Lukacs'tan yaptığım alıntının son cümlesinde saklı herhalde. Sınıfların varoluş biçimleri arasındaki indirgenemez fark. Evet entellektüelleri proleter-burjuva ikiliğinde anlamlandırmak mümkün değil ancak bu kavramların/kavramsallaştırmanın bir kurtuluş yolu olarak görüldüğü, coşkuyla telaffuz edildiği bir entellektüel ortam sanırım burjuva düşüncesinin çamuruna saplanıp kalmaya mahkum. MEHA direnişçisi ise bana geçici de olsa o çamurdan kendini kurtarmış gibi göründü. Tabi total bir hareket olmadığı sürece geçici olduğuna bir daha vurgu yapmak gerekir.

pg. 172,

"...while the process by which the worker is reified and becomes a commodity dehumanises him and cripples and atrophies his 'soul' - as long as he does not consciously rebel against it- it remains true that precisely his humanity and his soul are not changed into commodities. He is able therefore to objectify himself completely against his existence while the man reified in the bureaucracy, for instance, is turned into a commodity, mechanised and reified in the only faculties that might enable him to rebel against reification. Even his thoughts and feelings become reified."

Radical Philosophy 149, Art and Immaterial Labour

Radical Philosophy'nin 149. sayısında "Art and Immaterial Labour" diye bir dosya var. Eric Alliez'in giriş makalesi üzerine;

"Dosyanın adının İtalyan Marxist Lazzarato’nun kavramı olan “gayrimaddi emek” ile sanat olması, bugün güncel sanat alanında hala güçlü bir etkisi olan “kavramsal sanat” anlayışının sanatın material olandan kavramsallığa doğru bir geçiş yaptığı görüşü ile bağlantılı. Marx’ın önemli makalesi “Ücretli Emek ve Sermaye” de kavramsallaştırdığı üretken emeğin, II.Dünya Savaşı sonrası kapitalizm’de artık ücretlendirilmeyen aktivitelere uzandığı, kapitalizmin artı-değer üretimi adına içerdiği ilişkilerin fabrikadan veya işyerinden evlere, düşüncelere, iletişim biçimlerine, günlük aktivitelere uzandığına dair temel bir kavramsallaştırma Lazzarato’nun bahsettiği. Sadece material üretimin değil, bilgi-iletişim-yaratıcılık gibi alanların kapitalizm için ne kadar önemli olduğunu biliyoruz. Bu dosya soruyor; peki sanat bu ilişkide nerede duruyor?"