Karen Barad’s definition of materiality, in Meeting the Universe Halfway, is useful here: “In an agential realist account, matter does not refer to a fixed substance; rather, matter is a substance of intra-active becoming—not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency. Matter is a stabilizing and destabilizing process of iterative interactivity.” K. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 151.
Strictly speaking, social surplus is only that which is distributed, represented, reproduced, and produced. The surplus is never not all of these.
Readers familiar with the tradition will notice that I have substituted “representation” for circulation and “reproduction” for consumption. This is a substantive realignment, as aspects of what was circulation now belong to production and representation, and elements of consumption are similarly reassigned. This allows for more accurate and specific descriptions of the political economy, in the sense that, for example, when writers have criticized “consumer society” they have frequently done so in terms not of consumption per se, but actually in terms of representation (often advertising) or of reproduction (around issues of health and safety). Likewise, circulation in the sense of exchange is so fundamental that it can’t really be productively isolated, while circulation in the sense of fixed capital investment is really a form of production.
S. Walby, “Woman and Nation,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology, vol. 33, no. 1–2 (1992). E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009): “To understand the role played by (nationalism as a system of) education, we must, to borrow a phrase from Marx, consider not merely the mode of production of modern society, but above all its mode of reproduction” (29). This is because “the monopoly of legitimate education is now more important than the monopoly of legitimate violence” (34). However, production still predominates: “These conditions do not define the human situation as such, but merely its industrial variant” (55).
Typically I refer to the non-commodity stock exchanged by workers as “labor-power.” If I neglect to do so in the early going, it is because, strictly speaking, money perhaps ought to be predicated in a similar way. Whether this would be best done in terms of “value-power,” “presence-power,” or, after André Orléan, “debt-power” or “credit-power,” however, is beyond the current text to determine.
De Brunhoff shifts between the terms “non-commodity” in Marx on Money, trans. Maurice J. Goldbloom (London: Verso, 1973), 71, and “peculiar” or “particular” commodity in State, Capital and Economic Policy (London: Pluto Press, 1978), 4. Both are crucial works that make possible much of what follows. Karl Polyani, in The Great Transformation, uses the term “fictitious commodity.” For the role of class struggle in determining the degree to which labor power is commodified, see Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979).
This price of land becomes particularly important when it is recruited to offset decreases in consumption resulting from stagnant wages, further disaggregating labor into those who own and those who rent, a strategy pursued in Britain and the US especially. See Christian Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism, trans. Kristina Lebedeva (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011).
A concrete example: the invention of birth control created the conditions of possibility for the predominance of the mode of reproduction over the mode of production. Thus the dominant class identity shifted, in certain contexts, from being constituted by reference to the relations of production to being constituted by references to the relations of reproduction. Shulamith Firestone was one of the first to think reproduction along these lines. Also Engels, whose passage to this effect in The Origins of the Private Property and the State Judith Butler identifies as a socialist-feminist favorite. See J. Butler, “Merely Cultural?” in Adding Insult to Injury: Nancy Fraser Addresses her Critics (London: Verso, 2008). As Barad readily asserts, few have done more than Butler to develop the concept of materiality.
If all hitherto recorded history really is the history of class struggles, then these struggles must precede and occasion any division of the classes into whatever number. The privilege that would grant the twoness of the class struggle in advance, so to speak, is archaic and unfounded. The greatest critic of this error is Étienne Balibar, particularly in his essays on the mode of production, from Reading Capital (London: Verso, 2012); “On the Vacillation of Ideology…,” in Masses, Classes, and Ideas (London: Routledge, 1994); and on nationalism and racism, in Race, Nation, Class (London: Verso, 1991), where he describes the effect of this productivist metaphysics: “It can be said in the strong sense of the word there is in Capital not two, three, or four classes, but only one, the proletarian working class, whose existence is at one and the same time the condition of the valorization of capital, the result of its accumulation, and the obstacle which the automatic nature of its movement constantly encounters” (160)
See, for example, Chester Dunning and Norman S. Smith, “Moving Beyond Absolutism: Was Early Modern Russia a ‘Fiscal-Military’ State?” Russian History, vol. 33, no. 1 (2006); and Jan Glete, War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States (London: Routledge, 2001). Perry Anderson’s Lineages of the Absolute State (London: Verso, 1974) remains one of the best historical treatments of this or any other topic, albeit one still committed to ultimately explaining absolutism and feudalism in terms of production. In the interests of brevity I have left off specifying what sort of technology, in particular, makes distribution as generic as production was for writers like Anderson. In short, it is military technology. The concrete stakes of my intervention here are, ultimately, to make technologies like the machine gun, the atom bomb, the long bow, and (in another theater) birth control as significant, for historical materialism, as the technologies of the cotton gin, the robot, or (in another theater) double-entry bookkeeping.
It’s important to remember, with respect to labor-power, that the growth of trade unions was as frequently organized by employers or the state for the purposes of labor discipline. De Brunhoff, The State, Capital and Economic Policy, Chapter 2. Also Jonas Pontusson and Peter Swenson, “Labor Markets, Production Strategies and Wage Bargaining Institutions: The Swedish Employer Offensive in Comparative Perspective,” Comparative Political Studies, vol. 29, no. 2, (1996): 223–50. Correspondingly, it is also important to remember that it was not the regime of Ronald Reagan that brought down the USSR, but the struggle for independent unions originating in Poland.
“In the United States, after the defeat of militant trade unionism during the 1920s, and after the massive unemployment of the 1930s, the government favored the growth of the trade unions (in the face of violent opposition from a section of the employers), because trade unions were entrusted with a new role: that of managing workers’ demands, notably by negotiating wage contracts with employers representatives. The disaggregation of the working class (into the unionized and the non-unionized, into white and black workers, etc.), the regulation of the right to strike, the witch hunt of communists and progressive liberals … all made it possible to make inflation acceptable.” De Brunhoff, The State, Capital and Economic Policy, 132.
This is the political economic reality beneath Carl Schmitt’s perception that the content of the concept of the political is the friend/enemy distinction. Certainly it is, but this distinction rests on an economy of labor-power, which, in times of crisis, manifests a friend/enemy distinction. Fascism is the extreme form of this manifestation. We see here how the understanding of production as a theater of class struggle accounts for the division between a politics (a friend/enemy distinction) and an economics (the relative commodification of labor-power).
Echoing Poulantzas’s critique of Foucault, de Brunhoff makes the essential point: “The Italian operaismo (class autonomy) current has defined the fundamental antagonism of the present epoch as that between socialized labor and the state as collective capitalist … Its weakness, in my opinion, is its subjectivist view of class, implying that society functions in terms of relations of power which are not embodied in given objective social relationships. Consequently the Italian critique ‘from the left’ has a tendency to mirror the economism it seeks to overthrow … By bringing together politics and economics a suffocating general rationality ensues, which leaves no place for the history of struggle. The result has been a displacement of the problem from capital to commodity and from capital to power … economism is more frequently to be found nowadays in the way in which analyses of different social practices have become contaminated by references to economic norms. The ‘political economy’ of signs, of the body, the family, the state; the primordial importance attached to the logic of equivalence and the category of exchange, together with the notion of micro-economic techniques of power—all these theoretical developments pay homage, in one way or another, to the economic theory of the commodity, if not the rules of optimum management. The social devices which produce knowledge—or signs or traces—are seen in a uniform, and hence comparable way, in terms of their common and presupposed capacity for probabilistic calculation … The commodity form and the mechanisms of power hold the center of the stage, while capital is left in the wings … labor-power and money as particular types of commodities seem to me to constitute a rational point of departure for an analysis of the relationship between state and capital over a long period.” De Brunhoff, The State, Capital and Economic Policy, 3. My own effort is simply to describe this relationship as a primary example of the social-historical materiality of distribution.
Or at least not the kinds of capital we have considered so far. It will be the argument in a future piece that military and police capitals accumulate precisely by providing these non-commodities.
The use of the term “market” in this analysis is a bit confusing, insofar as it refers to the conditions of possibility for a given form of exchange rather than a specific location or theological deus-ex-machina of the “invisible hand/spontaneous order” variety, which have always just described the view of non-commodities from the perspective of capital. So for example, the payment of rent in kind by serfs under feudalism represents an exchange of labor-power, and thus a “market” even though this often happened without there being a separate “theater of commerce” in the sense we usually mean by “labor market.”
Reactionaries often tell the truth about one small part of the political economy and then lie about or ignore the rest: they are not wrong, in this respect, to argue that the crisis began with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two American public-private hybrids responsible for guaranteeing mortgages. They just fail to see these institutions themselves as part of a larger bargain underpinning American empire. Cheap mortgages are what the American taxpayer gets in exchange for funding American military capitals, which guarantee the status of the American dollar as the reserve currency, allowing the federal government to borrow at world-historically low rates. Fannie and Freddie just extend a small part of this privilege to the rank and file of American citizens. Hence the reactionaries are careful not to blame Freddie and Fannie themselves, but only the laws which prohibit them from discriminating against borrowers on the basis of race. If the racist reality of the nation were simply allowed to assert itself, the reactionaries suggest, then all would be well. They are right about the first part—the core structures of the nation certainly excrete racism—but wrong about the second, because no effort to purge illegitimate nationals has ever succeeded in stabilizing the exchange of non-commodities.
Legibility concerns have delayed me from discussing the functions of the non-commodity money in sufficient detail here. It is important to say, in the interim, that it is only the strange position of the US dollar as the international reserve currency that allowed the Fed to do what it did. Typically, liquidity, as the social institution of the materiality of value, prevents any one institution from behaving in this way, as the constitution of liquidity at the moment of hoarding is constitutively international and diffuse. For the articulation of a similar position, see André Orléan, The Empire of Value, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge: MA: MIT Press, 2014).
The fact that America was able to avoid austerity on these two fronts is owing in part, in must be said, to the partially private character of its distributive institutions in charge of land and money. Half the governing board of the Fed is appointed by private banks and half by elected presidents. Likewise, Fannie and Freddie are public-private hybrids; they have shareholders, but these are not so strong as to keep the Treasury from evaporating the nearly three hundred billion in profits returned on the mortgages bought at the height of the crisis.
Broken by corporate-backed gerrymandering, the US House of Representatives even went so far as to threaten the position of the dollar as the reserve currency by refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless more government workers were fired. This effort by the American ruling class to instrumentalize its control over the international currency to enrich themselves at the expense of their citizens already contained Trump’s campaign in embryo: insofar as it, too, sought to sharpen the contradictions inherent in America’s position as a national territory charged with managing international money.
Nor was this absurdity lost on the leaders of the institutions, who repeatedly pled that they had done all they could with the levels of monetary policy and that it was necessary for Congress to turn to fiscal solutions.
Inflation is the signal example, which makes a national currency the gauze absorbing the political economic wound.
Hence the need for an emergency “fiscal compact” rammed through by Merkel in 2011.