Xia Ying and Huang Jing’ou: The Exception Without Exception in the Logic of Capital and Labor That Is Non-Labor

Contemporary Western leftist thinkers, though diverse in their modes of expression, share a common theoretical commitment to direct intervention in social reality. Since the 20th century, Western capitalist societies have generally experienced a golden age of economic development. The expansion and extension of capital has not only failed to exacerbate its internal contradictions, but has instead tended to weaken the acute antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in its immediate manifestations. The consequences of this trend are twofold:

On one hand, the research perspectives of Western leftist thinkers have become increasingly specialized. Some have turned toward quasi-metaphysical studies of pure philosophy and mathematics [such as Alain Badiou]; others toward the critique of popular culture within a psychoanalytic horizon [such as Slavoj Žižek]; some toward the reconstruction of contemporary aesthetic theory [such as Jacques Rancière]; and others back to classical traditions to construct theoretical forms of contemporary biopolitics [such as Giorgio Agamben]. On the other hand, Western leftist thinkers have highlighted the radical dimension of their thought through an "event-oriented" ^[1] methodology. This methodology implies a fractured view of history; that is, these thinkers no longer persist in critiquing contemporary capitalism by presupposing an inherent rational order of history. Instead, they focus more on the logical ruptures within any existing order—namely, the eruption of various abnormal social events—and directly transform critique into a form of "liberation." By analyzing these historical fissures, they seek to discover all possibilities for escaping contemporary capitalist society. This search for a radical path has rendered them leftist intellectuals who possess only a radical posture. In essence, their critical method has diverged from the path of capitalist critique held by Marx.

This divergence manifests as follows: while Marx sought to explore capital’s own internal contradictions within the logic of capital to realize a possible social emancipation, contemporary radical leftist trends attempt to construct an "external" critique of capitalist society through the critique of "exceptional" and "abnormal" events within event-oriented ruptures. Among them, only Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s concept of "Empire" attempted to recover a possible immanent critique within the horizon of the globalization of capital, yet their theory ultimately exhibited a certain intellectual naivety in its conception of autonomous labor. The fundamental reason they fell into this intellectual naivety lies in their collective disregard for the method and path of the critique of political economy inherent in Marx's thought. Against the backdrop of the global COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, this intellectual naivety became even more direct and obvious.

I. The Anti-Intellectualism of Agamben’s "State of Exception" Theory and Its Roots

Since the global COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, Western leftist thinkers were the first to track and analyze this "event." Žižek collected his commentaries since the outbreak into a book, publishing Pandemic: Covid-19 Shakes the World at the earliest opportunity. As Italy was the first in Europe to enter a state of emergency, the Italian version of the book hit the shelves almost simultaneously. In it, Žižek constructs a radical post-human perspective. Facing the epidemic’s spread in Europe, Žižek pointed out: "We should resist the temptation to search for a deeper meaning in the current pandemic, such as: though the pandemic is cruel, it is merely a punishment for humanity's cruel treatment of other species on Earth. If we search for hidden messages behind the pandemic in this way, it shows we are still in the pre-modern era... The most difficult fact to accept is that the ongoing pandemic reflects a pure natural contingency, with no hidden deeper meaning behind it. In this broader order of things, we are simply one species without any particularity." ^[2]

This de-subjectified perspective allowed Žižek to maintain a certain distance from the many remarks made during the pandemic by leftist thinkers represented by Agamben. "All of the Alt-Right and the Fake Left refuse to accept the full reality of the pandemic; they both dilute it into a practice of social-constructionist reductionism—in other words, denying the pandemic from the perspective of social meaning." ^[3] This critique, in a sense, touches upon the crux of contemporary Western leftist thinkers' analysis of the pandemic. Indeed, in the critiques of figures like Agamben and Byung-Chul Han, the pandemic—as an event-oriented "state of exception"—became a typical way to construct or reinforce social power. For Agamben, the threat of the virus to the survival of concrete human beings was far less alarming than the problem of the reconstruction of social power brought about by this state of exception. So much so that at the very start of the Italian outbreak, Agamben used the image of the "anointers" ^[4] to illustrate the sense in which the pandemic was constructed by the system of social power rather than being a fact of real existence, calling the current pandemic a "state of exception brought about by an unprovoked emergency." Even after this view was criticized, Agamben seemingly did not abandon his position. In his March 11 article "On Contagion," he continued to paint a "terrifying" post-pandemic scene for a Europe still fighting the virus: "The 'neighbor' no longer exists... Closing all universities and schools at once, conducting only online teaching; stopping discussions and gatherings on political and cultural themes, communicating only through digital channels; machines replacing all contact between humans—all contagion" ^[5], thereby critiquing the various efforts made by governments to combat the epidemic. Byung-Chul Han, a Korean-German leftist thinker with the same critical path, likewise highlighted the universalization of big data accompanying the pandemic and the social power that might extend from it, viewing epidemic prevention measures as a form of "over-responsiveness." This, in a sense, became a footnote to Agamben’s theory of the state of exception.

The critique of the pandemic by Agamben and others, using the "state of exception" as an entry point, caused leftist thinkers to fall into a trap of anti-intellectualism: denying the facts of the pandemic and its spread itself, and instead believing that the pandemic was merely a fantasy constructed by the media and the government (e.g., Agamben); ignoring the biological characteristics of viral transmission and instead worrying about the social disintegration caused by the disappearance of the neighbor, while viewing all epidemic prevention measures as excessive panic (e.g., Agamben, Byung-Chul Han, Rancière); even ignoring the socio-economic losses caused by pandemic isolation, and instead viewing the empty, quarantined streets as a direct victory for anti-consumerism and a miracle of the arrival of communism (e.g., Žižek). These views directly manifest a rejection of and alienation from science and common sense in contemporary real life. This anti-intellectualism made Western leftist schools of thought during the pandemic a focus of public criticism; the proactive theoretical posture they had always flaunted instead appeared as an impractical form of grandstanding.

However, from a purely academic perspective, the analytical path Agamben provided in the face of the pandemic was actually nothing more than a practical drill of his own thought and theory. In recent years, Agamben’s entire philosophy has revolved around the problem of biopolitics born under a state of exception. Although Michel Foucault raised the issue of biopolitics in his later years during his lecture series at the Collège de France, he merely regarded it as a form of state governmentality that only became universalized in modern society. Agamben, however, expanded it into a method of constructing law and social power that has always existed throughout the entire history of human social development: the abnormal state of exception. In Agamben’s view, this abnormal state of exception has always been a potential opportunity for constructing power: from religious sacrifices to the "justitium" ^[6] in ancient Roman law, to protracted wars—all are both "states of exception" and opportunities for the formation of legal or political power. Agamben, having provided a systematic explanation for this source of power, would naturally be wary of contemporary attempts to construct a normalized, total manipulation in the name of a "state of exception." Agamben is committed to the most thorough critique of any power and its internal manipulations, which causes his own thought to reveal a tendency toward anti-intellectualism.

The anti-intellectualist trend in Agamben’s theoretical critique not only reveals that the event-oriented analytical methods of contemporary leftist thought are impractical, but also demonstrates—through its thoroughgoing advancement—the theoretical limits of contemporary Western leftist thought as a form of radicalized research in political philosophy. It is precisely this radicalist trend in political philosophy, along with the trend toward conservativism in Anglo-American political philosophy, that fully delineates the overall face of contemporary Western political philosophy.

First, political philosophy aimed at the pursuit of universal and good social governmentality carries a conservative trend. For instance, Leo Strauss traced the themes of political philosophy back to relevant discussions in Plato’s Laws and proposed: "The guiding theme of political philosophy is the regime, not the laws." And the so-called regime "is the order, the form, which gives society its character. Thus, the regime is a specific way of life." Political philosophy built upon this foundation naturally regards "the common good" as the goal of the statesman. Although it seemingly contains an absolute value, it appears capable of merging with political science as a form of knowledge—that is, a most rational form of state governmentality—ultimately realizing the expression of a universal and common good through a rational order.

Second, political philosophy with struggle as its core essence carries a radicalist trend. The German jurist Carl Schmitt was a contemporary of Strauss, yet when facing the same social reality, he proposed a concept of the political completely different from Strauss's: "The meaning of all political concepts, ideas, and terms contains an adversarial character," and "The political produces the most intense and extreme antagonism, and the closer each concrete antagonism approaches the ultimate point—that is, the formation of friend-enemy camps—the stronger its political nature becomes." The discussion of the state of exception as the construction of supreme social power also occupies the core of Schmitt’s political philosophy and actually constitutes the theoretical starting point for using the state of exception as a discussion paradigm: "A philosophy of concrete life must not withdraw from the exception and the extreme case, but must be interested in it to the highest degree... for the rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything." Based on this enthusiasm for the state of exception, Schmitt paid particular attention to the political theories of Machiavelli and Hobbes. The princely characteristics constructed by Machiavelli during Italy’s state of disorder, as well as the state of nature envisioned by Hobbes, are in some sense political conceptions based on a "state of exception." In elucidating the internal connection between the "state of exception" and supreme power, Agamben consciously identified the internal connection between his thought and Schmitt's. It is just that the state of exception, which was affirmed in Schmitt’s context, becomes an object to be critiqued and scrutinized in Agamben’s: "By placing the state of exception in the context of dictatorship, Schmitt then distinguishes between 'commissarial dictatorship,' aimed at defending or restoring the existing constitutional order, and 'sovereign dictatorship,' as a figure of exception in which dictatorship reaches what might be called its critical mass or melting point. The terms 'dictatorship' and 'state of siege' can thus disappear in Political Theology, to be replaced by the state of exception, while, at least on the surface, the focus shifts from the definition of the exception to the definition of sovereignty." ^[7] From this, it can be seen that the latter radical political philosophy’s tracing of the sources of power and norms has brought about two possible consequences: on one hand, as with Schmitt, in the process of absolutizing the state of exception, the supreme power it constructs is sacralized, thereby transforming philosophy into a political theology;

On the other hand, figures like Agamben seek to dissolve the birth of any possible supreme social power by attempting to prevent the "state of exception" from descending once again. However, Agamben’s paradox lies in the fact that, while searching for a way out of this "controlled society," he still resorts to hope in a quasi-theological "coming community." Therefore, whether one affirms or negates the state of exception, it is impossible to fundamentally escape the tendency of leading politics toward theological postulations. Yet, radical political philosophy seems capable of realizing its own radicality only within such a theologized setting; after all, if one does not set an absolute political goal and pit it against social reality, actions aimed at subverting the existing order of contemporary capitalist society lack legitimacy. In this sense, the "event-based" analyses ^[8] carried out within contemporary Western Leftist thought, based on a ruptured view of history, are merely variants of various theoretical paths regarding the state of exception. They all possess an underlying tone of potential political theology, hoping to rely on a sudden, singular opportunity to complete a subversive revolution.

In this regard, the theological attribute of a political philosophy of subversion rather than construction ensures it inevitably contains a certain anti-intellectualist tendency. This is because the radical critique, in its demand for an absolute rationalization, reveals the very unreality of its own theory. In this sense, an anti-intellectualism bordering on faith is both the theoretical limit of radicalized political philosophy and its necessary prerequisite.

II. Powerized Capital Logic and the Formation of Pan-Labor Ideology

Faced with the global pandemic of 2020, the problem with the analytical path of the so-called "state of exception" lies not only in the theological undertones it exhibits but, more importantly, in the fact that this analysis fails to fundamentally hit the mark. While Agamben, Rancière, Han Byung-Chul, and others were wary of any form of social power reconstruction during the pandemic, they completely failed to touch upon the most fundamental anxiety and fear of Western capitalist countries in the face of the outbreak. As the pandemic spread, this anxiety and fear were increasingly manifested as worry over economic recession rather than the loss of human life.

In his article analyzing the pandemic, Han Byung-Chul argued: "Although the danger of COVID-19 should not be underestimated, the panic caused by this pandemic remains disproportionate. Even the Spanish Flu, which had a much higher lethality rate, did not have such a devastating impact on the economy. Why is this? Why does the world react so excessively to a virus?" ^[9] However, Han failed to provide a good answer to this question, merely attributing the cause to the development and universal application of Big Data and other changes in the framework of social reality. He failed to clearly identify that his so-called "disproportionate panic" stems from the devastating blow to the economy generated by the pandemic.

Here, we can discover that the pandemic—this so-called "state of exception"—reveals to us, through an extreme non-daily state, a hidden micro-power already constructed within our daily state: the compulsion for valorization inherent in the logic of capital itself. It has no need to rely on any "state of exception" to complete its own generation and development; on the contrary, all externalized control powers adopted to contain the pandemic act as obstacles to the operation of this micro-power of capital. In this sense, the virus, as a biological entity that exists by relying on contagion (that is, its own mode of self-proliferation), is capital logic made manifest. The operational modes of the two are isomorphic. Therefore, controlling the pandemic simultaneously curbs the logic of capital. All active measures regarding pandemic prevention undoubtedly uphold the premise of placing human life in a supreme position. But in capitalist countries, under the power-manipulation of the nearly frenzied compulsion for capital valorization, the contradiction between the pandemic and economic recession is exceptionally sharp. Today, the sharpening of social contradictions within the United States is essentially caused by the inability to effectively coordinate the compulsion for valorization inherent in capital logic within a capitalist context and the prevention of the pandemic. Therefore, in the face of the current development of Western capitalism, the critique of the controlled society triggered by worries over the "state of exception" is not only "scratching the foot through the boot" ^[10], but is fundamentally "rowing north to reach the south" ^[11].

In other words, for contemporary Western capitalist society, social power has been fully internalized into daily life and was not born under any form of "state of exception." Hardt and Negri have already discussed this: "We must not confuse politics with theology. The dominant forms of sovereignty today—if we insist on calling them that—are entirely embedded within and maintained by legal systems and administrative apparatuses... a republican form that is the rule of law and also the rule of property. In other words, politics is not an autonomous sphere but is entirely submerged in economic and legal structures. There is nothing special or exceptional about this exercise of power. Its emphasis on 'naturalness'—in fact, its silent, daily operation—makes this power even harder to identify, analyze, or challenge. Our primary task is to bring the intimate relationship between sovereignty, law, and capital into the light of day." ^[12]

Here, Hardt and Negri accurately identify two key points. First, to avoid the theological tendency of Western Leftist thought, critique needs to be concentrated on the logic of capital centered on "property" (ownership). Capital logic has today become a new, invisible power system that exists without relying on the state apparatus. Second, they identify that in contemporary social reality, this form of power consistently runs through daily operations rather than relying on a "state of exception." Correspondingly, the blockage of capital power by any event-based "state of exception" will ultimately become an effective opportunity for the birth of new forms of capital. In its compulsion for valorization, capital logic always requires the constant birth of "new things" to activate the vitality of capital accumulation. Therefore, after the state of exception forms a blockage to capital, it will, in essence, always achieve a greater degree of expansion through reorganization and transformation. As of May 31, 2020, while still in the midst of the pandemic, the assets of American tech giants significantly increased, with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s assets rising by 48%. Therefore, for capital logic, which always needs to explore new modes of valorization, all states of exception are essentially nothing more than the "normality" required for the spread of capital logic.

Thus, the power architecture of capitalist society highlighted by the pandemic by no means relies on a "state of exception" like the pandemic itself. On this point, compared to other Western Leftist thinkers, Hardt and Negri more thoroughly uphold the critical method Marx held toward capitalist society—namely, discovering "powerized" capital within the daily order of capital's operation, and using this to explore the possibility of subverting capital. In this critique of possibilities, the analysis of power mechanisms from a purely political-philosophical perspective is merely one of many links in Marx's analysis of the internal operating mechanisms of capitalist society. In other words, regarding this critique internal to daily life, Marx’s critique of capital logic is not so much a critique in the sense of political philosophy as it is a critique in the sense of social philosophy. In the latter's research, the generation and operation of power at the political level will be based on the analysis and critique of the daily operation of the entire social economy.

The logic of capital's operation was originally merely an objective mode of economic architecture; how did it become a social power mechanism? Hardt and Negri's analysis of this question hits the mark. They not only proposed the general trend of the "rule of property" replacing the rule of law, but actually identified the root cause of this trend: "The concept of the individual is established not through 'being' but through 'having'; the individual points not toward a 'deep' metaphysical and transcendental unity, but toward a 'surface' entity that owns property or possessions." ^[13] This is a unique way of constructing capitalist ideology—it constructs for us an idea of "personality" related to property. Capitalist relations of production not only require the existence of this personality as a prerequisite for the establishment of those relations; more importantly, they directly shape this personality. The essence of this personality is not determined by its own physical life, behavioral patterns, or social relations; its entire essence is related only to certain property rights. Therefore, when the pandemic spread, what truly posed a threat to human survival and generated fear in Western capitalist countries was not physical life itself, but the potential loss of property one might suffer during the pandemic. For example, as the pandemic raged, American citizens gathered in front of government buildings to protest; their targets were not only the government’s ineffective pandemic prevention but also the hope of re-entering alienated labor production controlled by capital logic as soon as possible. Within the Western capitalist context, this struggle actually means that people today no longer fight for shorter working hours as they did in the early stages of modernity; on the contrary, they are fighting to restore a state of alienated labor as quickly as possible, because the maintenance and acquisition of property relies on human labor as a medium. Under the social conditions of capitalist private ownership, this labor must exist in the form of alienated labor—that is, human labor does not affirm but negates the self. Clearly, people in Western capitalist countries regard participating in labor production within capital logic as an indispensable right, which also implies regarding the self-production of capital logic as a necessary condition for modern people to maintain their own existence. From this, what might be called an "ideology of labor" is being established in capitalist society: it regards labor production (alienated) carried out within capital logic as the essential definition of the human being, and thereby regards the guarantee of one's own personality as a form of possession of property rights. Strictly speaking, Hardt and Negri's critique of late capitalist society is based on this labor ideology, except they hold the same position as the "National Economists" ^[14] criticized by Marx—accepting as fact that which they should have deduced.

III. Generalized Forms of Labor and the Loss of Autonomy within the Ideology of Labor

Hardt and Negri attempt to confine the direction of their critique to capital’s internal self-operation. Although this direction hits the mark of contemporary capitalist society, the method they eventually use to overcome capitalism is merely to resort to various shifts in labor forms supported by new technologies—namely, the shift from material labor to immaterial labor. In this, the production methods and necessary means of production for immaterial labor are virtual forms such as information, knowledge, and affect; therefore, it is not only unrestricted by scarce resources but also possesses direct commonality. This "commonality" becomes the effective way for Hardt and Negri to overcome capitalism: "Commonality becomes the core site of freedom and innovation—free communication, free use, free expression, and free interaction—opposed to private control, which is the control generated by private property rights and their legal structures and market forces. In this context, freedom can only be the freedom of commonality." ^[15] At the same time, because this "standpoint of commonality reveals how the process of economic valorization is increasingly embedded in the structure of social life," ^[16] labor forms carrying this commonality can break away from capital control within a daily life structure and obtain an autonomous way of organizing labor. "Capital does not determine the organization of cooperation, at least not as Marx said. Even in the strictest, most exploitative cases, such as call centers or the catering industry, cognitive and affective labor will generally escape the rule of the capitalist and cooperate autonomously." ^[17]

Thus, it is clear that for Negri and Hardt, the way to escape the control of capitalized power is through emerging forms of labor. They fundamentally overlook the fact that labor itself has become an internal requirement of the logical system of capitalist society. Therefore, regardless of how the form of labor changes or whether labor possesses autonomy, it merely provides effective assistance for the smooth unfolding of the logic of capital. In short, Negri and Hardt’s critique of capital remains confined within the ideology of labor. They inevitably treat the confirmation of personhood and property rights as a self-evident premise, confident that this confirmation will persist after the logic of capital is sublated. Consequently, the so-called escape of immaterial labor from capital is a proposition that embodies a kind of theoretical naivety.

In reality, this specific ideology of labor under capitalist conditions is the primary intellectual obstacle we must dismantle when critiquing capitalism. For contemporary Western Leftist thinkers, however, they either completely ignore this premise or remain trapped within it. To dismantle this ideology, what must first be done is to reveal its specific historical dimension—that is, to show that it is not a universal definition of human essence but has its own formation process, and for that very reason, it necessarily possesses the possibility of being transcended.

At its inception, the ideology of labor was constructed by thinkers as an obvious fact requiring no proof, relying on theological guarantees. For instance, John Locke, based on the premise of Christian natural equality, recognized on one hand that personhood is naturally inherent to man: "The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions." ^[18] On the other hand, he used labor as a medium to personify property rights: "Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his." ^[19] Locke believed that property rights are not naturally inherent to personhood; for a person to obtain property rights that belong exclusively to themselves, they must apply labor to natural objects bestowed by God—which originally belong to all humanity—and thereby remove a portion of them from their original state of nature. Labor thus became the necessary medium for interpreting personhood through property rights: "My labor, taking them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed my property in them." ^[20] But in Locke's era, the labor that could unify personhood and property rights still referred to agricultural production, predicated on the divine gift of communal land. Under these labor conditions, there was a direct unity between the laborer and property rights (or the laborer and the ownership of labor). However, once money intervened and capital began its primitive accumulation, the two inevitably separated.

Marx's critique of Locke targets precisely this self-evident unity between the laborer and ownership in the absence of theological guarantees. Unlike Locke, who attributed the laborer's property rights to a divine gift, Marx's discussion of property rights is premised on the private ownership of the means of production. In capitalist society, there is no natural unity between the laborer and their property rights as Locke supposed. In Volume 1 of Capital, when discussing the dual social character of the private labor of producers, Marx points out: "It is only when exchange has become sufficiently widespread and important that the labor products split into useful things and things of value—actually, this only happens when useful things are produced for exchange, so that the value-character of the things is already taken into account during their production. From that moment on, the private labor of the producer truly acquires a two-fold social character. On the one hand, it must satisfy a definite social want as a definite useful labor, and thus prove itself to be a part of the total labor, a part of the naturally developed system of the social division of labor. On the other hand, the private labor of the producer can satisfy the producer's own manifold wants only in so far as every particular kind of useful private labor can be exchanged for every other kind of useful private labor, and is therefore equal to it." ^[21] That is to say, abstract labor produces value, while concrete labor produces use-value. On the one hand, under conditions of private property, both the means of production and labor power belong to private individuals, so the individual has the right to decide their own production; at this point, such production belongs to private labor. On the other hand, due to the social division of labor, various producers must connect and depend on one another. Objectively, this production is simultaneously meant to satisfy the needs of others or society, and thus it possesses social attributes.

In the pre-capitalist era of Locke, all property obtained by the laborer through their own labor belonged to the laborer themselves—the laborer possessed the entirety of their property rights. However, when these conditions transform into capitalist relations of production, whether the laborer performs necessary labor or surplus value-producing labor, the property rights belong to the capitalist. Although the capitalist pays wages for the laborer's necessary labor, this is entirely different from the Lockean sense where the laborer directly owns the results of that labor through the act of working. In this labor process, the laborer "does not only replace the old value, but creates new value; the labor-time objectified in his product is greater than the labor-time objectified in the products required to maintain his existence as a worker." ^[22] The early Marx called this labor under private property "alienated labor," and designated the truly human activity that escapes this alienation as "free conscious activity." ^[23] The latter fundamentally achieves a departure from the form of "labor."

Therefore, the method of using labor as a medium to confirm personhood through property created by labor reveals its inherent ideological nature within Marx's critique of alienated labor. The wealth created by man in (alienated) labor actually only confirms the inherent personhood of the capitalist whose goal is profit. The appropriation of wealth (i.e., property rights) was originally not a way for humans to define themselves; it only became a universal expression of personhood under the conditions of private property. Labor thus becomes a unique capitalist ideology, dominating the basic definition of human essence and the proper way for humans to exist. In other words, within the ideology of labor, if a person cannot labor, it means they have lost the legitimacy of their own existence. In today's era of the universal expansion of the logic of capital, people caught up in the ideology of labor (not just capitalists) are becoming, or have already become, the living personified expressions of capital. Marx had a clear realization of this long ago: "Capital is the person who has completely lost himself, existing subjectively in the worker, just as labor is the person who has lost himself, existing objectively in capital. But the worker has the misfortune to be a living capital, and therefore a capital with needs, which loses its interest, and hence its existence, every moment that it is not working." ^[24] Under capitalized power, the entire value of man and his personhood lies only in becoming a living carrier for the self-expansion of capital.

Consequently, during the pandemic, people in capitalist society, obscured by the ideology of labor, no longer regard life itself as an absolute value. Instead, they transform the anxiety over capital’s self-expansion into an anxiety over their own survival. This deep alienation is the inherent alienation of the ideology of labor itself. Therefore, whether it is material labor or immaterial labor under capitalist conditions, slight changes in form cannot fundamentally overcome the expansion of the logic of capital. On the contrary, the change in labor forms only brings about a generalization of the labor process, which will lead to the widespread penetration of the ideology of labor into people's daily lives, thereby effectively driving the universalization of the logic of capital. For example, the "Internet celebrity economy" cultivates laborers who seem to autonomously choose their workplace and mode of work; in reality, they are merely generalizing the entire content of their lives into a form of labor production serving the self-expansion of capital. Negri and Hardt believe that immaterial labor, in the process of autonomous production, might also produce corresponding political subjects, such as the multitude, who realize political organization and projects of liberation through flexible immaterial labor. In reality, this conception is nearly a spectral illusion. In fact, forms of immaterial labor not only fail to produce revolutionary subjects, but they also transform all non-labor behaviors themselves into a form of labor serving capital. The famous American futurist Alvin Toffler, in his book The Third Wave, proposed the concept of the "Prosumer," which accurately summarizes the true state of the laborer controlled by generalized labor. This concept is a portmanteau of "consumer" and "producer," referring to the existential state where today's online consumers are simultaneously producers of data capital. Today, supported by internet technology, the "commonality" carried by these generalized non-labor forms essentially relies on "traffic"—the purest expression of capital—to bring about the self-expansion of capital. Therefore, all transformations in the forms of immaterial labor bring about the virtualization of capital, such as the formation of data capital, rather than a change in the logic of capital itself.

Undoubtedly, contemporary Western Leftist thought maintains its critique of capitalism within the framework of new technological and economic developments, providing thinkers with a diversified perspective on the era. However, neither of these two inherent analytical paths—the "externalized" critique characterized by attention to the state of exception, and the "internalized" critique characterized by property rights and immaterial labor—has truly provided a realistically feasible path to escape capitalism. Every state of exception in capitalist society gives birth to new forms of capital, which become a possible path for the self-propagation of capital logic. Therefore, a truly possible critique of contemporary capitalism still requires us to move from the perspective and methods of Marx's critique of political economy. We must analyze the new internal contradictions emerging in new forms of capital and deconstruct the inherent ideology of labor within the understanding of these contradictions, in order to seek a path of liberation that can truly shake off the control of capitalized power.

In the article "Two Questions Regarding the Crisis," it is pointed out that political time is woven through the common practice of establishing agendas and timetables. Yet this is precisely what we lacked under the state of lockdown. There was no way to construct a temporality to prepare for the "after" (dopo) that everyone was talking about. Consequently, those analyses claiming to respond to the current situation and prepare for the future are, in fact, pre-constructed analyses—ranging from theories of the state of exception, critiques of the control society, and big-data totalitarianism, to the necessity of rethinking the relationship between the human and non-human from top to bottom. The state of lockdown revealed more clearly than ever this orderly division of roles: on the one hand, rulers reduced political time (tempo della politica) to a state of emergency and shortsightedly made this their profession; on the other hand, intellectuals situated any given situation within the centuries-long epochs of capital or the Anthropocene, knowing only one effective mode of intervention—the total "overthrow" of the epoch itself. ^[25]

5. See Slavoj Žižek, "Clear Racist Elements to the Hysteria over the New Coronavirus."
6. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p. 317.
7. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Xue Xiping, Northwest University Press, 2015 edition, p. 63.
8. Leo Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy?, trans. Li Shixiang, Huaxia Publishing House, 2014 edition, p. 25.
9. Ibid., p. 8.
10. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. Liu Zongkun et al., Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2018 edition, p. 39.
11. Ibid., p. 38.
12. Carl Schmitt, "Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty," in Liu Xiaofeng (ed.), The Collected Works of Schmitt (Vol. 1): The Concept of the Political, Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2003 edition, pp. 13-14.
13. Agamben, State of Exception, p. 9.
14. Ibid., p. 47.
15. Byung-Chul Han, "Why East Asia's Control of the Pandemic Is More Effective than Europe's?"
16. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, trans. Wang Xingkun, Renmin University of China Press, 2016 edition, pp. 3-4.
17. Ibid., p. 4.
18. See Collected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 3, People's Publishing House, 2002 edition, p. 267.
19. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, pp. 216-218.
20. Ibid., pp. 216-217.
21. Ibid., p. 104.
22. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government: An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government, trans. Ye Qifang and Qu Junong, Commercial Press, 1996 edition, p. 6.
23. Ibid., p. 19.
24. Ibid., p. 20.
25. Collected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 44, People's Publishing House, 2001 edition, pp. 90-91.
26. Collected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 33, People's Publishing House, 2004 edition, p. 137.
27. Collected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 3, p. 273.
28. See Collected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 3, p. 281.

(Affiliation: Department of Philosophy, School of Humanities, Tsinghua University) Online Editor: Zhang Jian Source: Foreign Theoretical Trends (Guowai Lilun Dongtai), Issue 4, 2020.