Theoria

Spurred in part by a passage from On the Natural History of Destruction posted at The Weblog and a recent re-reading of Arendt’s The Human Condition and Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, that latter of which inspired in part by recent discussions of Marx on the occasion of his birthday (Angela, Shaviro, Nate).

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Reading the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, one cannot but be startled by the frequent use of ‘religious’ or ‘theological’ language in his discussions of capital. This, of course, is quite surprising for, in what became the ‘Preface’ to the Manuscripts, Marx points out that “the critical theologian remains a theologian.” For Marx, the working class – and, before that, the merely expropriated former peasants – appear as sacred objects; objects to be sacrificed in the accumulation of capital, much in the way that the Catholic Church (especially its property) was sacrificed to capital during the Reformation.

Marx’s story begins with the observation, “For the worker, therefore, the separation of capital, ground rent and labour is fatal.” While capital as such ostensibly remains as the object of these texts, Marx’s argument develops through an continued and sustained investigation of, on the one hand, the transformation of the worker into homo sacer and, on the other hand, the transformation of the human into an animal.

Pursuing a rather smart strategy, Marx attempts to demonstrate that even in ‘the best of all possible worlds,’ the world remains a terrible place for the worker:

Let us next take a society in which wealth is increasing. This situation is the only one favourable to the worker. In this case, there is competition among capitalists and the demand for workers exceeds the supply. But, in the first place, the raising of wages leads to overwork among the workers. The more they want to earn the more they must sacrifice their time and perform slave labour in which their freedom is totally alienated in the service of avarice. In so ding they shorten their lives. This shortening of the lifespan is a favourable circumstance for the working class as a whole, since it makes necessary an ever renewed supply of workers. This class must always sacrifice a part of itself, in order not be ruined as a whole. [...] Thus, even in the state of society which is most favourable to the worker, the inevitable result for the worker is overwork and premature death [...] Rising wages awake in the worker the same desire for enrichment as in the capitalist, but he can only satisfy it by the sacrifice of his body and spirit.

On the one hand,

We arrive at the result that man (the worker) feels himself to be freely active only in his animal functions – eating, drinking and procreating, or at most also in his dwelling and personal adornment – while in his human functions he is reduced to animal. The animal becomes human and the human becomes animal.

And, on the other hand, “living as the sacrifice to life.”

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In later works, the sacrificial language disappears – at least on the surface – becoming a gift from worker to capitalist: “The social productive power of labour develops as a free gift to capital whenever the workers are placed under certain conditions, and it is capital which places them under these conditions” (Capital I, “Co-Operation”). The gift of worker to capital is a self-laceration: it is the same gift an animal gives to a trapper when it chews its own leg off; leaving the gift of the leg behind for the hunter and a multilated body for the worker.

Every sense organ is injured by the artificially high temperatures, by the dust-laden atmosphere, by the defeaning noise, not to mention the danger to life and limb among machines which are so closely crowded together, a danger which, with the regularity of the seasons, produces its list of those killed and wounded in the industrial battle. The economical use of the social means of production, matured and forced as in a hothouse by the factory system, is turned in the hands of capital into systematic robbery of what is necessary for the life of the worker while he is at work, i.e., space, light, air and protection against the dangerous or unhealthy concomitants of the production process, not to mention the theft of appliances for the comfort of the worker. Was Fourier wrong when he called factories ‘mitigated jails’? (Capital I, “Machinery and Large-Scale Production”)

The unfortunate self-sacrifices to capital find themselves flung into pauperism, the lowest strata of the industrial reserve army:

the demoralized, the ragged, and those unable to work, chiefly people who succumb to their incapacity for adaptation, an incapacity which results from the division of labour; people who have lived beyond the worker’s average life-span; and the victims of industry, whose number increases with the growth of dangerous machinery, of mines, chemical works, etc., the mutilated, the sickly, the windows, etc. Pauperism is the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army. (Capital I, “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation”)

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What Marx saw as the fate of working class, Arendt extends, via the development of science and technology, to the entirety of the earth:

In order not to underestimate the momentum this process has reached after centuries of almost unhindered development, it may be well to reflect on the so-called ‘economic miracle’ of postwar Germany, a miracle only if seen in an outdated frame of reference. The German example shows very clearly that under modern conditions the expropriation of people, the destruction of objects, and the devastation of cities will turn out to be a radical stimulant for a process, not of mere recovery, but of quicker and more efficient accumulation of wealth – if only the country is modern enough to respond in terms of the production process. In Germany, outright destruction took the place of the relentless process of depreciation of all worldly things, which is the hallmark of the waste economy in which we now live. The result is almost the same: a booming prosperity which, as postwar Germany illustrates, feeds not oon the abundance of material goods or on anything stable and given but on the process of production and consumption itself. Under modern conditions, not destruction but conservation spells ruin because the very durability of conserved objects is the greatest impediment to the turnover process, whose constant gain in speed is the only constancy left wherever it has taken hold. (The Human Condition, 252-3)

She continues a few pages later,

Foremost in our minds at this moment is of course the enormously increased human power of destruction, that we are able to destroy all organic life on earth and shall probably be able one day to destroy even the earth itself. However, no less awesome and no less difficult to come to terms with is the corresponding new creative power, that we can produce new elements never found in nature, that we are able not only to speculate about the relationships between mass and energy and their innermost identity but actually to transform mass into energy or to transform radiation into matter. At the same time, we have begun to populate the space surrounding the earth with man-made stars, creating as it were, in the form of sattelites, new heavenly bodies, and we hope that in a not very distant future we shall be able to perform what times before us regarded as the greatest, the deepest, and holiest secret of nature, to create or re-create the miracle of life. I use the word “create” deliberately, to indicate that we are actually doing what all ages before ours thought to be the exclusive prerogative of divine action. (The Human Condition, 268-9)

In a sense, then, the very matter of life and death has become the object of politics itself.

Cross-posted to Long Sunday.