RG's poster
Each week we will meet to discuss a part of Mau's book. The previous reading does not have to be very deep, the hour and a half of the session are for this work. Each work Mau's chapter's will be framed around an specific theme and also put in converstation with other authors, but always the economic power of capital will be our starting point of discussion.
Here is the link for the Praxis website where you can find the information and the dates and location: Praxis Website . In this website I share a personal overview of group and each session.
Aside from link to texts, you will find the reasons for each other-text, and a small preview of the theme of each session. Organizing and running a reading group is a challenge. I hope to be able to successfully carry out the task for myself and the people involved. (For now the language is English)
The idea is for each session to be thematized, following Mau's book and a accompanying text of a relatively similar size, allowing us to dive into or confront the book. The idea of an additional text adds a different flavor each week, the door being open to any proposal from any participant.
| Session | Chapters | Side text | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|
| 27/3 | Introduction: "the introduction" | ------------ | Even though we evidenced the need to go further in the book to be able to use it properly, the session was very fruitful to begin understanding the book's objectives, crimes, and misdemeanors, and to set the pace and the opening of the next sessions. For example, we commented on the very difficulty Mau faces in attempting to refer to his analysis as "tripartite" when in truth, "economic power", as a "form of power", would only appear when the other two main forms of power, violence and ideology, are "absent". There were more comments related to the form of the subject in our society, the concept of reproduction, the possibility of an "essence" of capitalism or of "human nature" beyond history, or on the very term "compulsion". Nevertheless, like Mau himself, our session was also introductory. Beijinhos! |
| 3/4 | Part 1. Chapter 1 + 2: "A theoretical production of a capitalist exercise of power" | La verite et les formes juridiques (mainly conferences 4 and 5) | An analysis of forms of power, them being violence, ideology, and an emergent form linked of european capitalist mode of production. This new form comes from previous Marxist failed attempts to understand capital's domination as obligatory maintainance of specific social relations in favour of capital's interests and without direct intervention of individuals, drawing then the relation between the formal economy and the life-making activities. The sessions will be add some spice with Foucault's text where he develops a form of power that is link the emergence to the capitalist mode of production and its surplus profit. Days later, I find myself thinking of a possible "paralelism" in their development between the morality control groups in England and the reality tv shows and public diaries of social media... |
| 10/4 | Chapters 3 + 4 + 5: "(Marxist) Ontology of society, nature, and the body" | "The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Innapropiate/d Others" | During the sessoin we discussed Mau's insights about human nature and the validity, not only of his defition, but also how he uses to separates human essence (and its society) from the rest of nature. We crtized his retaining humanism, his reading of Althusser, and how he is obstinated to only position himself inside a Marxian tradition not wanting to enter into conversation with "outside" thinkers, although implicitly denosting some of then. Overall this chapter gave as the second half of the "conditions" part of his book: after offering his understanding of "power", in these three chapters he "demonstrates" the essence of humans (extra-somatic organs composing a not wholly sealed "body") and their society (emerging dialectically from nature). Power then, for him, is embedded with the social logics in the gaps between the nuclear body (the activity of life) and its conditions (the extra-somatic organs it needs for its needs). Although we had no time to introduce Hararway's texts, in her text we find carried out her "demands" for a creative and anti-dominant practice of feminists theory for the body politic and natural-social sciences, as posed in the first chapters of her "Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature". |
| 24/04 | Chapters 6: Isolation, "universal" debt, and the structural division of classes by capital | ------------ | We had a short conversation to clarify the notions of vertical and horizontal relations. The center of our conversation was the notion of class, how it is logically related to capitalism and what it entails. Mau's main argument is that before exploitiation capital needs isolation. Thus, the power of capital is "positive" since it produces new individuals, mainly, the proletarians of propertyless, which later will be the (wage) workers, and economic power does that by addressing the enviroment of the worker or materials conditions of reproduction of life. We also had some shy comments about the difficulties of the concept of enviroment. But Mau, and we pointed this out, stresses that even in this situation there is a community and not mere individuals living their lifes, and this community is the one created by money: this means that although capital separates people, it maintains them united in this "split" society. Apart from the notion of the proletariat (those who have nothing, maybe only except their prole... (next session we will talk about reproduction)), we also spent most of our time discussing the notion of debt, as it plays an important role in creating the proletariat and abstracting them not only from their conditions of life (owning capital the aliviation of "hunger" (as indexical need...) it previously created) but also creating a different experience of time and therefore of living. |
| 02/05 | Chapters 7: Capitalism and Difference | Tithi Bhattacharya -How Not to Skip Class- Social Reproduction of Labor and the Global Working Class | Althoug we commented in diagonal Bhattacharya's text, it allowed us to see the truly interest answer given by Mau to understand the proletariat as a class in capital's logic. In this session we closed Mau's sections about horizontal relations, that is, of isolation and explotation. More specifically, in chapter seven the focus was on those social relaitons or hirerchies that are not dependant on an abstract logical level on the ideal average of capitalism. Mau focused on sexism (patriarchy or the exploitation of what can be called "reproductive labor" and racism). After analyzing the entanglement of different oprresion and the reprudctive or outside work for the labor-power/value in capitalism, Mau prefers to tackles the situation via a dual system, that is, understanding that those "social" oppresion are not "capital's fault", although that must not undermine the necessity to fight against them. In our conversation we questioned this intuition, arguing that capitalism could not historically nor actually function without social oppression in order to freely steal value or "distract" working class and compelled them to fight for their right to be exploited better than others. But also, we pointed out how even in we can explain most of the social subsystems under capital's brutal logic (like sumbsuming the emotional daily reproduction of life, all the interpersonal relations and even our idea of how to develop our existence), there are some key points of those systems that capital cannot and will not control. Capitalism is in its "nature" parasitical. In this session we also put into question the methodological path of Mau and the possibility of his choice of the "most relevant facts from where to abstract" do not carry some eurocentric biases and paint a blurry picture of the questions and answers to be asked about capitalism. |
| 08/05 | Chapters 8 + 9: The plane of universal value and competition | ------------ | In these two chapter Mau tries to answer the question: "how does the bare transformation from individual to worker take place" arguing that it is partly the result of mechanisms and processes such as the competitive pressures of the market. In this session we will focus on horizontal relations, that are basicly defining within the theory of value as the subjugation of everyone by value. This dominations takes place in the market, where indepedent units of production encounter each other as buyers and sellers of fetishied commodities (sorry for the redundancy). At the market, this horizontal relations of domination are essentially exectued by competition. That is the summary, in individual sentences, of our the chapters we commented. Now, in our session we basically added two things, plus the overall commentary of the text. Firstly, we tried to understand Mau's analysis of the horizontal relations in their relative independence and how exchange value is the abstraction through which our society expresses and organizes the production and circulaiton of resources (and how it introduces as a new resource or commodity labour power). We agreed that the most important moment in these chapters happens when Mau ellucidates the mutual and simultaneous mediation between competition and value, on one axis, and isolation and class explotation, on the other, and their limited autonomy and reciprocal involvement in capital's compulsion. Secondly, we commented that it was possible that his understand of fetishim fell a bit short to the explanatory power of this process regarding human's labour power and its transformation not exchange value but wage. Although Mau hints the depth of this concept when he talks about a "real inversion" and a "ideological inversion", it did not seem very explicit. Moreover, when Mau continues talking about fetishim and comments on Postone's theory, we felt that Mau underestimates his proposal. In that line we commented how in the urban era we can understand a "omnipresent" market, emerged after the stablishment of the law of value and process of fetishization, where addictive pleasure is what circulates and produces capital, created an addictive "compulsory" circuit. |
| 22/5 | Chapter 10: "The real subsumption of labour" | ------------ | After the conditions of capital's logic, now we face how it really comes to be, how this empty form concretizes itself, and that happens though the subsumption of the world, or at least of that which capital needs in order to produce surplus value (which is at least labour power). Mau starts this chapter going back to the idea that when buyer and seller meet in the market there is already inequality there, and then in the workplace this inequality is managed. Mau's idea is then that the economic power of capital, although is impersonal and indirect, has to be embodied somehow, and that is subsumption, the materialisation of captial as social form, organising labour, technologies and relations of production in order to secure at every moment the valorisation of value, the production of surplus value. One of the most interesting ideas is that Mau says that the two main and constant cause of subsumption are the competition of productivity (which is then not the aim of capitalism) and the resistance of workers, that we can be sure will take place at some point. Mau then continues to talk about how machines has been used to divide, discipline and threat workers and the bodies (through corporeal calibration). With the possibility of dismissal and being trade, the main use of machine is to impose an abstract time into the labour process and the life of the workers. This imposing is reinforced with fossil fuels, that Mau also talks about in the next chapters. One of the places where Mau fins subsumption taking place is also the control and polarisation of skills and knowledge around the whole mass of workers: capital aims to deskill workers in order to make them easier to replace, to trade, and in order to do so has to constantly abstract any knowledge that appears in the workplace from any day experience or erradicate any necessary skill or practice for people that appear in the market as difficult to move around because of its tradition (Mau talks about emotional skills). In a nutshell, around this chapter Mau both reinforces his idea that capital separates and isolates in order to reconnect but mediatiating this new community. He also emphasizes the idea the subsumption has to happened because capital has to subsume labour into labout power so the only way to acctualise itself is thorugh value, through the production of surplus value. |
| 29/5 | Chapter 11 + 12: "The real subsumption of the technological and spatial conditions of labour: agriculture and logisitics" | ------------ | Last session we commented these chapter where Mau basically shows how capital's logic has been able to subsumed in the last century the agricultural production, or at least isolate and controlled its inputs and outputs, and logistcs. With these examples we were able to deepen into the idea, as also showned by Saenz de Sicilia, that subsumption is a crucial process via which capital produces its own conditions, that is, is the movement throught which the moments of production and reproduction are united. I also commented that we can find some other exmaples of subsumption in David Graeber's ideas of bullshit jobs or in Clara E. Mattei's analysis of austerity. Converning the chapters we commented, we talked the attention Mau's pays to technology, as in suicide seeds or containers. Mau also recognizes that the reappropriation of technology, and not only its sabotage, can be crucial to identify the strenghs and weakness moments of capital's subsumption. I would like to list now some interests ideas that I found in these chapters. The distinction between agricultural production and farming and the recognized relative autonomy or resistance of nature (and therfore the body that works too) from capital's rhythm. The subsumption of natura as the spatial conditions of labour means also the possibility to trade and communicate units of production all around the globe. This helps explains four phenomena: the complete transformation of the landscape, the arrival of just-in-time production (going over the idea that capitalism overproduces and just fills inventory and stocks), the rellocation of factories and therefore to control of the flows of workers around borders (which Mau will deal with in the next chapter). Another interesting idea in these chapters is that if the ligistics revolution has really sumsubed the global geography, then "any attempt to seize the means of production would require an immediately global seizure". Beautiful, maybe. Also, by now, Mau's understanding of capital's logic (and of Marx's account on it) and it's dynamic, mainly that of sumsubtion, of a form exercising in content and the internal evolution of this process, is fairly very well grounded. |
| 5/6 | Chapter 13 + Conclusion: | ------------ |
and thanks co-organizer Mariana and Praxis!