This seems hugely reductive. So all labour is, unilaterally, domination? There’s no room for contestation within the labour process, no potential to be found in it or the effort to fight inside it? Labour doesn’t create some of the conditions for a new mode of production? Contesting its current modality inside the process doesn’t create further conditions for the future in the form of workers’ agency and organisation?

Not only does this seem to simplify away the complexity of the capitalist mode of production, it seems to suggest labour is simply, metaphysically, ‘non-contradictory’. It’s just variable capital, and its opposite is external to it.

Capitalism is a hugely complicated formation of relations, concrete individuals, activities and material objects, a social macro-structure that coheres and is sustained on the basic skeleton of the network of means and activities that produce the conditions of life. Individuals’ relation to this network – direct access or otherwise, exclusionary power or otherwise, capacity to utilise and restructure it or not – is where one locates the conditions of the activity of valorisation/exploitation.

To treat that whole formation as the manifestation of a simple essence, a sort of ‘thought’ or syllogism (accumulate!) that functions as an operator on concrete reality, processing it, is to reinstate metaphysics. The capitalist ‘imperative’ is derivative of the structure, not vice versa. It isn’t pure, but exists in admixture with the potential for other kinds of activity that can ‘cancel’ or destroy it.

So are irony, reversals, subversion, tactics and strategy within the labour process really snatched moments of ‘non-labour’? Even when advancing a pay claim, or union recognition, or heaven forfend, labour self-mangagment?

Of course! So why bother going on strike against a pay-freeze when inflation is at 5%? It’s all subordination anyway. Because people’s primary problem isn’t their conditions of life, it’s capitalism’s essential, omnipresent ‘logic’. They can intuit this logic as a sort of affect, the affective experience of the inhumanity of the system, and in response we can counter-pose a counter-affect, the ecstatic feeling of freedom.

But isn’t this halting at the level of experience, without really considering the conditions of experience? What constitutes it? It suggests our handling of the experience can be in a subordinate way or a liberated way, and that opting for the latter will liquidate the system and generate a new mode of production just because. But why must our experience be this way, and why must we handle it in those two ways?

Doesn’t this return us to the thought that there is an underlying structure of conditions for activity, and it is necessary to be mindful of these in action. What is the basis for the availability of the choice of either subordinate or liberated activity as the range of potential options ?

Further, It’s all very well saying labour is subordination, but useful labour is also the material condition for all activities – playing, thinking etc – and the only available way in this mode of production to undertake useful labour to reproduce oneself is through capitalist production.

So, really anti-capitalist activity isn’t exterior to labour and politics, it’s done on the basis of capitalist production, so internal to the capitalist mode of production. It is precisely the class activity of the workers, the proletariat, in the workplace, industry and political field, which they are able to undertake because they subsist.

If that’s the case, then to reduce worker contestation about employment to:
”More jobs, please exploit us more and we shall work much harder and faster, we shall subordinate every aspect of our lives to capital, we shall forget all this childish nonsense about playing and loving and thinking.”

is terrible. Should all those trade unionists go home and not contest having the material conditions of their lives, their activity, reduced? When they voice their opposition to austerity are they really saying the words you put in their mouth? Or is your reductive conceptual scheme really blinding you to the value of fighting against being cast into the surplus population & industrial reserve army? Of securing a wage that means you can pay union dues that can support a strike fund, which can give you the power to hold out against a future employer’s offensive?

Your answer to the question of material subsistence:

‘Every day we try to reconcile our opposition to capital with the need to survive. Some of us do it in a relatively comfortable way, by finding employment (in the universities, for example) that allows us to create spaces in which we can fight against capital while receiving a salary at the same time. Others play for higher stakes, foregoing (by choice or necessity) any form of employment and devoting all their energies to activities that go against and beyond the logic of capital, surviving as best they can, by squatting or by occupying land and cultivating it, or by selling anti-capitalist books, by creating alternative structures of material support, or whatever. ‘

Is, frankly, comically inadequate. The choice is being a university professor who ‘fights against capital’ as a kind of hobby (congratulations Professor Holloway – you’ve theoretically ratified your life!) and a hilariously vague melange of figures, an anticapitalist-squatter-occupier-farmer-bookseller, creator of:

“alternative structures of material support, or whatever.”

Whatever indeed.