Spontaneous Generation and Capitalist Capture

I recently finished and defended my thesis for my MA in Philosophy. I wrote about surplus value in economics, Marx, and Deleuze. Here’s the introduction:

In his critique of political economy from the Grundrisse to Capital, Karl Marx presupposes abstraction and quantification. The process by which activity and its product are alienated from the human worker, which as independent existences are then measured and valued numerically, is in fact a pervasive phenomenon in the capitalist political economy. Equally widespread is excess, which economics, the political economy’s official science, records as profit. Marx thinks the phenomenon differently as surplus value resulting from the processes of alienation and valorization. Surplus value, in turn, is connected by Marx to the further but no less marked phenomenon of recurrent crises, recognized by economics as a structural feature of the capitalist system.

There is, in a sense, a consensus between Marx’s thought and mainstream economics, originating as this latter does from the political economy of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo, which is precisely the target of Marx’s critique. In both strands of thinking about the economy, there is the recognition, taken almost for granted, that there is excess: there is more in the end than was there in the beginning. It is assumed, in other words, that the product has more value than what was put in its production. The disagreement lies rather on how this excess originates (where it comes from). This is a question worth raising not only because it clarifies the nature of the excess and its production (which then may have significant consequences over its distribution), but, more importantly, because this excess itself is that upon which the social formation is founded and rests (and as such sheds light on its rules and relations).

This thesis sets against each other the economic and Marxist claims on excess. As its official science, economics takes the capitalist economy as a given (as the ‘natural’ state of the economy, as it were) and explains excess as savings on costs resulting from the strategic planning of capitalist agents, whose point of view, in studying economic phenomena, modern economics takes. Marx, in a historicist move, argues that capitalism is but one political economy among many, where the facts assumed by the likes of Ricardo, such as the savings supposedly reaped by capitalist planning, are, far from given, attributable to a particular systemic formation (a political event) of social relations and materials into an economy. This systemic social formation that comes to be called capitalism, Marx argues, involves at its core the exploitation of labor, in which capitalists expropriate the surplus value that laborers produce, appropriate it as their profits, which is then accumulated as additional capital.

Initially these ideological claims seem irreconcilable and mutually exclusive. While this thesis takes the view that something similar to what Marx refers to as exploitation in fact takes place in the capitalist social formation, a fundamental mechanism covered over by the naturalizing mystifications of political economy and revealed only through a historicist stance like that of Marx, I argue that the roles implied by that power mechanism are not mutually exclusive and, as such, the acts of ‘exploitation’ are not rigidly designatable to either only capital or labor, as Marx claims. I argue that a further standpoint beyond historicism is called for to account for the contribution, in addition to that of labor (whose point of view, directly opposed to economics’, Marx takes), of capital to the system, not to mention those by other elements, including non-human ones.

The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (sometimes with Félix Guattari), combined with insights from complexity and organization theory, provides this necessary standpoint. Refusing to take the capitalist ‘socius’ as natural, taking it, like Marx, as historical, Deleuze nonetheless provides some metaphysical grounding through the abstract process that he describes underlies all political economies, namely the assemblage of different elements into a unified, consistent, and productive whole that is the social formation. Thereby exploitation is revealed as a concrete actualization of the virtual process that Deleuze calls capture, an actualization specific to the historical socius that is capitalism.

More importantly, exploitation or capitalist capture is revealed to presuppose a spontaneous generation of excess. As such, exploitation does not exhaust all the productive capacities of the system and is but one potential source of further values among others. As Deleuze is quick to point out, however, all the (economic) potentials presupposed to be spontaneously generated are inseparable from the (political) process of capture that subordinates values to the dominant element in the system (e.g. to capital). Marx thus has some warrant to assert that exploitation is fundamental not only to the workings of the capitalist system but, more importantly, to the production of excess.

My inquiry into the nature of excess in capitalism is thus both historical and metaphysical. A historical standpoint towards the social formation is assumed to avoid taking the structural arrangements that lead to certain economic phenomena (such as savings), often reified by economics, as natural. At the same time, certain abstract processes, such as the formation of the assemblage (that generates excess), are recognized for their virtual reality in all social formations, although they appear in historically different forms (e.g. as surplus value or profit in capitalism) in which the potentials actualized are different.

The approach I take, then, reverses that of traditional political economy (which has evolved into modern economics). Rather than taking the capitalist political economy and its historical phenomena as natural, what I recognize is the metaphysical (and thus universal and ‘eternal’) status of the virtual assemblage that generates excess. Taking the assemblage as the abstract structure or framework (‘abstract machine’ or ‘Idea’ in Deleuze’s terms) that underlies all concrete and historically specific political economies, I draw from Deleuze’s philosophy to show that capitalism is an assemblage that generates excess. The metaphysical conclusions derived from this insight, the processes that will be shown are the true givens of any study of the political economy, will then inform the second look at phenomena at work in the capitalist political economy, especially the savings and profit (and sometimes loss) that economics takes as given, even ‘natural’ (or as resulting from the system that economics takes is the ‘natural’ configuration of the economy).

In order to make the move back from metaphysical abstraction to historical specificity, concepts other than those provided by Deleuze in discussing the abstract assemblage are needed to connect its metaphysical mechanisms to their historical actualizations. Those provided by modern economics are of limited value because, even though specific to the capitalist social formation, they tend towards reification of the system. Marx, on the other hand, provides a general notion of value that does not necessarily contradict the concepts of economics.

In Marx’s thought, values result from the alienation/abstraction and quantification/valorization that, as established above, is a pervasive phenomenon in capitalism (itself admitted by economics). These processes manifest the way in which different human actors (more generally, different individual elements) are related in the workings of a political economy. As such, values (the expressions of the processes) are the valorized manifestations of relations in capitalism, which, Marx shows, are really but the relations of classes (themselves manifestations of the two forces mentioned above, labor and capital). The concept of value thus provides the necessary connect between the metaphysical, abstract assemblage (philosophized by Deleuze) and the historical and concrete social formation (critiqued by Marx).

I begin the thesis in the first chapter with a consideration of values and classes. Drawing from David Harvey’s reading of Marx’s ‘economics’ (supplemented in certain instances by Antonio Negri),  I argue that values and classes are mirror images of each other (what is abstract in one is concrete in the other) that describe the workings of the social formation in general and of capitalism in particular. This sets up the more specific inquiry of the succeeding chapters that discuss the opposed claims on capitalistic excess, with an eye towards evaluating which claims are more valid and which parts can be reconciled.

In chapter 2, I provide the account of excess given by economics (specifically geographical economics). Economics refers to capitalistic excess as profit, which it explains as savings on costs. I argue that this is an ideological claim due in large part to the fact that, as Marx points out, economics takes the discursive position of capitalism’s official science (and is thereby its legitimation). In chapter 3, (again with the help of Harvey and Negri) I lay out Marx’s account of surplus value as the result of the exploitation of labor. I argue that Marx’s account is ideological as well (taking the point of view, this time, of labor), although, because of its historicist stance, is not quite politically complicit (this time, with the class of laborers) in the same way as economics. Because Deleuze provides the metaphysics for some parts of both claims, he is interwoven in the first two accounts to point out the elaborations he makes on them.

It is not until chapter 4, however, that a metaphysical account of the whole is constructed using Deleuzian philosophy, in which Marx’s historicist account is generalized to reconsider some of economics’ claims and, more importantly, to take into account other components in the assemblage not considered by both. I show how Marx’s account of exploitation historical to capitalism fits in Deleuze’s model of capture in the assemblage (which thereby testifies to the former’s presence) and, more importantly, I ‘enlarge upon’ Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation by drawing from Deleuze’s discussion of the stock, which gives insight as to how excess is ‘spontaneously generated’ in social assemblages. I conclude by raising the question of how the accounts given by Deleuze and Marx can be reconciled. More precisely, I ask how primitive accumulation and accumulation in general, or stockpiling and exploitative capture, are connected. The end is thus not so much an end as a signpost for further research. [End]

The full text can be accessed from the LSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Collection. Come fall 2009, I will also be moving on to the PhD program in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. I would like to thank my dear advisors: Greg Stone, who gave me the opportunity to do graduate work, introduced me to theory, and insists on Marx (making him persist); John Protevi, who introduced me to Deleuze and demands a rigorous and complex thinker; and especially Greg Schufreider, the chair of the committee, who with patience, openness, and generosity guided me all the way, going so far as to let me present parts of this thesis in his course in nineteenth-century philosophy. I miss his Heidegger and his enthusiasm for California I share. Carl Freedman, Alexandre Leupin, and François Raffoul also deserve mention, not to mention Louisiana State University. I am very lucky to have had the opportunity to work with these excellent scholars. I take responsibility for underdeveloped theses and all misrepresentations.