Niu Ziniu: The Reproduction of Labor Subjectivity Under the Logic of Capital—A Contemporary Dimension of Western Marxist Theory of Capital Critique
The problem of the subject is a pivotal issue in Marxist philosophical research, and its development has been deeply influenced by the currents of Western Marxism. Through a Hegelian interpretation of Marx’s philosophy, Lukács placed the question of class consciousness—that is, the problem of the revolutionary subject—at the center of Marxist philosophy. By framing the alienation or reification [1] of the subject as the central theme of Marx’s critical theory, he profoundly influenced the thought of the Frankfurt School and other Western leftist traditions. This also indirectly contributed to the formation of the "subject-object inversion" paradigm within Marxist philosophical research in China. According to this paradigm, the core of Marx’s critique of capital lies in capital’s usurpation of the laborer’s subjectivity and its alienation or objectification of the laborer; consequently, the liberation of the laborer lies in the recovery and reconstruction of their subjectivity.
However, new changes in contemporary capitalism pose a severe challenge to the aforementioned ideas: the enhancement of the laborer’s subjectivity has not only failed to promote liberation but has instead led to a deterioration of their condition. On the one hand, trends such as the flexibilization of the labor process, the cognitivization of labor content, and the elasticization of the labor market have highly highlighted the subjectivity of the laborer. On the other hand, phenomena such as the stagnation of real wages, the decline of trade union power, the extension of working hours, and the rise in labor intensity indicate that the working class is subject to even stronger domination than before. This has led Western Marxists to realize that there may exist a profound "hidden complicity" between the development of the laborer’s subjectivity and the rule of capital. To this end, since the 1960s, Western Marxists have constructed a theory of the reproduction of labor subjectivity under the logic of capital, attempting to grasp the internal connection between the laborer’s subjectivity and the power of capital. Examining this evolution in Western Marxism helps us reflect on the existing models of Chinese Marxist philosophical research and better grasp the particular realities of contemporary capitalism.
I. "Weberian Marxism" and Subject Theory
Research on the problem of the subject in Western Marxism can be traced back to the movement's founder, Lukács. By combining a Hegelian interpretation of Marx’s philosophy with Weber’s theory of rationalization, Lukács constructed a theory of revolution based on class consciousness and a critical theory based on the category of reification, thereby profoundly influencing German Frankfurt School thinkers, French Neo-Hegelianism, and other leftist intellectual schools. Merleau-Ponty summarized this approach as "Weberian Marxism," accurately capturing its essence. This intellectual lineage established the primary mode through which Western Marxism considers the problem of the subject, yet it faces severe challenges in light of the new changes in contemporary capitalism.
Lukács believed that in advanced capitalist society, the commodity form is a unified form that constructs all social relations, reaching its extreme in the commodification of labor power—that is, the reification or objectification of the human being itself. Building on this, he grafted Marx’s theory of the commodity form onto Weber’s theory of rationalization, pointing out that the primary characteristics of the reified form are rationality, precision, and predictability (calculability), thereby establishing a link between the commodity form and the rationalized labor process. Accordingly, the laborer is understood as an object subjected to precise calculation within a rationalized process; capital's power over the laborer is manifested as the power of the commodity form to reify or objectify them. In contrast, the liberation of the laborer lies in escaping this objectified condition and recovering their own subjectivity—that is, forming a class consciousness as the "subject-object" of the historical totality. From the perspective of historical materialism, this theory was suited to the Taylorist capitalism of the 20th century. In the mid-20th century, with the widespread implementation of Taylorist scientific management and Fordist modes of production, the knowledge and skills of laborers were gradually alienated into machines. This made the inversion of subject and object between labor and capital, the objectification of the laborer, and the bureaucratization of capitalist industry particularly prominent trends. This situation found suitable expression in Lukács’s theory of reification.
The interpretive paradigm initiated by Lukács gradually became the dominant problematic for early Western Marxism. Among the first generation of Frankfurt School scholars, Lukács’s theory was transformed into a critique of the "totally administered society" and instrumental reason, eventually achieving a purely philosophical form in Adorno’s negative dialectics, which uses non-identity to critique identity. "The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come into contradiction with the traditional norm of adequacy. Contradiction... indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived." In Marcuse’s work, this logic developed into an opposition between civilization and Eros, and between the "one-dimensional man" and repressed unconscious desires, exerting a massive influence on the revolutionary movements in the West during the 1960s and 70s. According to this logic, the critique of identity by non-identity is consistent with the resistance of subjectivity against objectivity: to resist the uniform and rigid bureaucratic system, one must liberate repressed desires filled with individual differences. Influenced by this line of thought, Marxist philosophical research in China often understands the essence of the logic of capital as the identifying and abstracting effect of the value form, while understanding the consequence of the universal expansion of capital logic as abstract domination and the impoverishment of the "world of meaning." Conversely, the sign of human subjectivity’s liberation from the rule of capital is understood as the full exercise of human creative capacity and the re-enrichment of the human world of meaning.
However, as previously argued, the critical approach initiated by Lukács targeted a specific form of capitalism—industrial capitalism, which reached its peak in mid-20th-century Fordism—and cannot represent the general laws of the logic of capital. Specifically, only in Fordist capitalism, out of the need for the mass production of standardized products, does the organizational form of capitalism manifest as a highly developed bureaucracy; only then do various social systems show signs of high fixation and rigidity, and the labor process becomes a uniform, one-dimensional process. Yet, these features are not necessary corollaries of the essential laws of capital logic, nor are they common characteristics of other stages of capitalism. Early Western Marxism directly linked this specific form to the general value form, and even to the entire history of Western rationality, thereby exaggerating it as the general form of capitalism.
More importantly, as some scholars have pointed out, when Lukács inferred the rationalized labor process from the commodity form, the medium he employed was Weber’s rationalization theory rather than Marx’s theory of capital valorization. This approach bypassed Marx’s essential definition of the logic of capital, creating a "short circuit" between the commodity form and the labor process. In Capital, the discussion of the rationalization of the labor process belongs to the historical analysis of the transition from manufacture to large-scale industry, which in turn belongs to the theory of relative surplus value. That is to say, the rationalized labor process is not built directly upon the commodity form; the two must be mediated by the theory of capital valorization and the theory of relative surplus value. According to the exposition in Capital, the prerequisite for the establishment of the commodity's value form is the universal movement of capital valorization, which in turn requires the exploitation of surplus value created by labor. In advanced capitalist societies, the increase in surplus value mainly relies on the production of relative surplus value: through the rationalization of the labor process, the productivity of necessities increases and their unit value decreases, leading to a drop in the reproduction costs of labor skills. This results in a decrease in the value of labor-power and an increase in the proportion of surplus value within total value. Clearly, in Marx’s view, the rationalization of the labor process is a requirement for the production of relative surplus value—the requirement of the "specific rationality" of the movement of capital valorization—rather than a requirement of general modern rationality. Early Western Marxism, however, precisely ignored this point, simply grafting the rationalization of the capitalist labor process onto modern instrumental reason.
Because early Western Marxism bypassed Marx’s essential definitions of the logic of capital—namely, the movement of capital valorization and the production of surplus value—its critique of capitalism could only strike at the empirical phenomena of a specific era, failing to hit the essential connection between these phenomena and the logic of capital. This critique failed to see that both the identifying power of the value form and the appearance of identity in the rationalized labor process are grounded in the movement of capital valorization. However, the principle of capital valorization is precisely not identity, but a kind of non-identity: capital does not remain at the same magnitude of value but constantly pursues "more" than the present, constantly differentiating itself from itself, thereby constantly creating something new and different that did not previously exist. Only driven by this endless desire to constantly exceed itself can the appearance of identity in the value form expand over all things, and can the rationalization of the labor process be pushed to the point of counting every penny. In this sense, the malady of capitalist society is precisely not identity, but non-identity itself: it is not an abstract scarcity, but a deformed excess; not that what should exist does not exist, but that what should not exist exists in too great a quantity.
The aforementioned failure of "Weberian Marxism" directly led to its deviation on the problem of the subject. It associated identity with the suppression of subjectivity by the rationalized labor process and associated non-identity with the liberation of plural subjectivities. While this critical path certainly had significance for resisting social solidification and rigidity during the era of industrial capitalism, it focused only on the empirical phenomena of that specific period, and thus actually formed a complicity with the essential laws of capital logic. In fact, subject liberation based on non-identity precisely satisfies the requirements of capital valorization, because capital valorization is originally realized through a subject full of non-identity—the subject of surplus labor. Only when the subject can provide labor exceeding their own needs—that is, providing not only necessary labor but also surplus labor—is the production of surplus value possible. In this sense, non-identity and subjectivity are indeed consistent; but this consistency does not lie in their containing hope for liberation from the rule of capital, but in the fact that they are both internal moments of capital's power itself.
Evidently, the theoretical strategy of "Weberian Marxism" cannot succeed. It understands the general characteristics of capitalism as identification and reification and critiques them based on non-identity and subjectivity, failing to see that non-identity and subjectivity are precisely the requirements of the essential laws of capital logic, while identity and reification are merely the appearances of these essential laws during a specific period. Therefore, this theoretical strategy contained a double risk from the start: on the one hand, its critique of the specific form of capitalism was severed from the essential laws of capital logic, potentially affecting social organizations that are not capitalist but exhibit similar characteristics, thereby "accidentally hitting friendly forces"; on the other hand, its liberation scheme was conceived only for a specific stage of capitalism. Such a scheme not only fails to resist capitalism in general but may instead comply with the requirements of capitalism’s own transition to its next stage, satisfying capitalism's need for "self-adjustment" in the face of its periodic contradictions.
From the perspective of actual historical development, the objective effect brought about by "Weberian Marxism" was indeed thus. First, its critique of capitalism targeted rationalization and bureaucracy rather than capital valorization itself. This critique similarly affected trade unions and welfare states that employed bureaucratic structures, as well as socialist countries in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, eventually falling primarily upon these "friendly forces" within the leftist camp. Second, its liberation strategy was to recover the laborer’s subjectivity and the differences imprisoned by the identifying value form. However, in the 1960s and 70s, as capitalism gradually shifted toward neoliberalism, this release of subjectivity and difference was precisely what capitalism needed most. It broke the solidarity of unions and worker organizations, dismantled the industrial assembly lines that bound large numbers of workers together, and restructured the labor process into dispersed and flexible forms, thereby weakening the resistance of the working class. It also cultivated differentiated consumer demand and shaped a labor ethic that encouraged individual self-actualization, intensifying divisions within the working class and creating labor and consumer subjects suitable for neoliberalism.
"Weberian Marxism" had a deep influence on the Western social revolutionary movements after 1968, determining their conservative essence beneath a radical exterior. As Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello pointed out in The New Spirit of Capitalism:
The defining characteristic of this period was the rise of various "new social movements" (the feminist movement, gay rights movement, ecological and anti-nuclear movements, etc.), the gradual dominance of anti-communist and pro-autonomy factions within the Left, and a harsh critique of communism that persisted throughout the 1980s. The analytical category of totalitarianism [5] was applied to communism without encountering the resistance seen in the 1950s or 60s. In France, since social critique was inextricably linked to the communist movement, the latter’s discrediting meant that critique temporarily but overtly abandoned the economic realm. Under the assault of "artistic critique," [6] the corporation was reduced to a repressive institution akin to the state, the military, the school, or the family; the struggle against bureaucracy and for labor autonomy replaced concerns regarding economic equality and the security of the most dispossessed.
It is evident, therefore, that the critique of capitalism in early Western Marxism was effectively a critique of the superficial commonalities between capitalism and socialism—at times even devolving into a critique of socialism itself. Rather than dealing a blow to capitalism, it was absorbed and utilized by it. This failure of "Weberian Marxism" illustrates a crucial point: to theorize the problem of the subject within the horizon of Marxist philosophy, one must distinguish the specific manifestations of a particular period of capitalism from the essential laws of the logic of capital, examining the transformation of the subject within the phased evolution of capitalism. One must consider not only the subject’s resistance to capital but also its inherent complicity with capital. These two points found vivid expression in Western Marxism after the 1960s.
II. The Positivity of Power: Western Marxism’s Critique of Labor Subjectivity under the Logic of Capital
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Western world stood on the eve of the neoliberal transformation—a reality that profoundly influenced the development of Western Marxism. The neoliberal mode of reconstructing the power of capital was not through strengthening regulation, but through deregulation; not through prohibition and coercion, but through permission and encouragement; not through reinforcing social homogeneity, but through the ubiquitous creation of flexibility and difference; not through turning people into "things" like machine parts, but through encouraging people to "realize themselves" and "become themselves." In other words, in the neoliberal era, the operation of capital’s power transcended the traditional negative appearance and exhibited unprecedented positive characteristics. This power was not limited to the repression and negation of subjectivity; on the contrary, it sought to create, stimulate, manifest, and even indulge subjectivity. This led Leftist thinkers to realize that a profound relationship of complicity existed between the enhancement of the laborer’s subjectivity and the deepening of capital’s power. Critical theory could not cling to the old notions of "Weberian Marxism" that understood capital’s power solely as the negation of the laborer’s subjectivity; otherwise, it would likely allow new technologies of power to bypass critical scrutiny under the guise of "freedom" and "liberation." In light of this, since the 1960s, Western Marxists have directly confronted the problem of the "reproduction of labor subjectivity" under the logic of capital. This problem threads through theories of ideology, power, and biopolitics, manifesting a clear trend toward a positive understanding of power. Its concern is not how the power of capital negates and represses the subjectivity of the laborer, but rather how this power produces a specific labor subjectivity.
This line of thought can be traced back to Alexandre Kojève. In his seminars on Hegel, Kojève argued that Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit was a form of philosophical anthropology, discussing the process by which self-consciousness is formed through mutual recognition—a process in which the subject is generated by "desiring the desire of the other." This interpretation implicitly aligns with Marx’s understanding of commodity society: in commodity exchange, "each person can only achieve their end by serving as a means for another," so commodity society possesses the general structure of "desiring the desire of the other." [7] Therefore, the role of the "desire of the other" in the dissolution and reconstruction of subjectivity has powerful explanatory force for the generation of the subject under the logic of capital.
Mediated by Lacan, this theoretical theme was linked to Marx’s theory of capital in the work of Althusser. Althusser distinguished between two different senses of subjectivity: one is the subject of revolutionary political action, which appears as a blank space delimited by the contrast of plural forces waiting to be occupied; alongside this, there exists an "ideological subject" dominated by and embedded in the operation of capital, which retains the status of a subject despite its subordinate position. In fact, the specificity of the capitalist mode of rule lies precisely in the fact that ruling people as subjects—and through their subjectivity—is far more effective than ruling them as objects: "As soon as man understands that morality requires a subject of self-consciousness, i.e., a subject responsible to himself for his own actions, then man can make himself accept the obligation to obey norms—which is much more 'economical' than imposing norms on man through violence." [8]
The reproduction of this specific subjectivity is a necessary link in the process of capitalist reproduction. Althusser argued that capitalist reproduction could be broken down into the reproduction of the conditions of production and the reproduction of the relations of production, and the reproduction of the conditions of production necessarily includes the reproduction of labor power—that is, the reproduction of the labor subject. On this issue, Marx only explained the reproduction of the laborer’s physical life through wage theory, but failed to explain how the worker’s specific subjectivity, namely their docile disposition, is reproduced. Therefore, it is necessary to forge a specialized theory of the reproduction of the labor subject as a necessary supplement to Marx’s theory of capital. In Althusser’s view, the reproduction of the labor subject is accomplished by a state apparatus: the ideological subject is the product of the "interpellation" of the ideological state apparatus; without such a mechanism, the laborer could not become a subject in the true sense.
Althusser’s theory of ideological state apparatuses marks a profound transformation in the theory of ideology and the philosophy of the subject, a transformation necessary for understanding the mechanisms of capitalism’s operation. Modern philosophy understood the subject primarily as a subject of consciousness, and Marx’s critique of ideology was first and foremost a critique of this idealist philosophy; thus, ideology was often understood as false consciousness. However, Althusser did not understand ideology in the sense of a philosophy of consciousness, but pointed out that "ideology has a material existence." Ideology is a "'representation' of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence," through which the subject understands their own real situation and acts accordingly. Although this relationship is imaginary, because the subject lives in reality and performs real actions precisely through this relationship, it possesses a "material" real existence. In other words, the imaginary relationship between the subject and reality participates in the constitution of reality itself.
Althusser’s theory of ideology helps specify the mechanism of the reproduction of the labor subject under the logic of capital in a positive manner. Traditional ideology theory, based on the critique of the philosophy of consciousness, tended to regard the reproduction of the labor subject as a secondary issue belonging to the category of social consciousness, understanding it as a negative mechanism through which bourgeois ideology "deceived" or "bought off" the laborer. However, Althusser’s concept of ideology "has a material existence"; it cannot be reduced to the "deceptive" effect of false consciousness but is more fundamentally anchored in the structures of social relations that constrain the laborer’s real actions. It can control the laborer’s actions through positive means such as production, guidance, and even incentive. Ideology in this sense does not obscure capitalist relations of production; rather, it is a link within those relations of production themselves, ensuring their smooth operation by interpellating individuals into specific subjects. This substantial concept of ideology provides a possibility for establishing a link between the theory of the subject and the critique of political economy.
Evidently, Althusser’s concept of ideology possesses a strong sense of reality and differs significantly from traditional ideology theory. Foucault further radicalized this line of thought, discarding the ambiguous concept of ideology and developing the theory of the subject into a theory of power or biopolitics. In texts such as Truth and Juridical Forms, Foucault proposed that despite Marx’s critical stance toward national economy (classical economics), there existed a commonality between Marx and the national economists: namely, the uncritical treatment of labor as an innate human essence and a natural source of wealth. However, the fact that man becomes a labor subject—and specifically a labor power that produces value—is a historical phenomenon of modern bourgeois society and a constitutive product of social power. We should not simply accept this fact, but should ask what kind of power mechanism constructs man into such a subject. Clearly, the subject here is not the subject of revolutionary action, but a subject that submits to a specific social power and is capable of docile, continuous labor. The reason why this seemingly fully objectified worker is still understood as a subject is that wage labor requires the worker’s volitional qualities of agency. Negative factors such as hunger, poverty, and coercion are insufficient to force landless peasants to become wage workers; on the contrary, wage labor requires positive elements such as the worker’s will to work, industrious disposition, and sense of professional responsibility, all of which must be constructed within the worker from scratch. In Foucault’s view, the dual meaning of the word "subject" in Western languages already implies this ambiguous situation: the word means both "subject, agent" and "subjected to, submissive to," which implies that "becoming a subject" has always been the result of being "subjected to power," while power itself cannot exist independently of the subject.
Driven by the aforementioned problematic, Foucault meticulously examined the formation of the labor subject in early capitalist society. He studied various mechanisms of subject production in mid-19th century British cities, such as the penal system, legal-moral discourse, and medical and criminological discourses, elucidating how they constructed the urban poor into subjects capable of continuous labor. Foucault specifically pointed out that the objects of these mechanisms were active elements like "the worker’s body, desires, and needs," and their ultimate result was the internalization of capital’s demands for labor as the laborer’s own moral requirements: they "required a strict, high-intensity, continuous labor—in short, the moral character of the worker." This indicates once again that the mechanism for reproducing the labor subject is absolutely essential to capitalism, as it must transform capital’s desire for valorization into the laborer’s spontaneous desire and ethical responsibility.
Later, in texts such as The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault discussed the problem of subject reproduction under neoliberalism. In neoliberal society, the worker must be constructed not only as a labor subject but also as an investment subject or "entrepreneur of the self": "Economic man here is absolutely not one of the parties in an exchange. Economic man is an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself." [9] In this case, the subjectivity of the laborer undergoes a significant "capitalization": the laborer understands and arranges themselves according to the rules of capital’s action, viewing their own activities as investments in human capital. The laborer is not just a subject engaged in repetitive labor driven by capital, but a self-driven subject of self-renewal and self-shaping, much like capital itself. Of course, this does not mean the laborer possesses capital or has gained freedom by escaping the rule of capital; it only means that the requirements of capital’s reproduction have been embedded within the laborer’s subjectivity, such that the laborer spontaneously cooperates with the reproduction of capital and treats it as their own will.
In summary, within European Leftist thought since the 1960s, there has been a clear theoretical thread concerning the production of the subject under capitalism. Starting from ideology theory, this thread broke away from the philosophy of consciousness presupposed by traditional ideology theory, turning instead to explore the objective mechanisms that constrain the real actions of laborers in capitalist society. Along this line, the understanding of power in Western Leftist thought has continually transitioned from negativity to positivity in order to elucidate how the subject's own agency becomes a link in the power of capital. Foucault was very clearly aware of the necessity of this "positive" turn for understanding capitalist society: "We must try to rid ourselves of a juridical and negative representation of power, and cease to conceive of power in terms of law, taboos, freedom, and sovereignty... it is more complex and more positive than a mere 'prohibitory' effect."
However, Foucault's understanding of the capitalist production of the subject also possesses certain deficiencies. Although Foucault realized that a concept of productive [10] power was necessary, his so-called "disciplinary power" still carries a certain negativity, as it operates through punishment, discipline, isolation, and confinement. This power can only produce obedient and docile workers; it struggles to produce industrious subjects possessed of an internal proactivity. According to Marx's definition, capital is "an uncontained and limitless desire to transcend its own limits," a form of self-affirmation that is constantly repeated and reinforced. Correspondingly, the power capital uses to produce the laboring subject should also be thoroughly productive—that is, possessing the form of "desire-production." This production of the subject as the production of desire was first elucidated in the works of Gilles Deleuze.
III. Deleuze’s Theory of the Desiring Subject and Its Contemporary Development
In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze equates general capitalist production with the production of desire: "Desire is the order of production; all production is at once desire-production and social production." In this way, Deleuze bypasses the production of material goods such as commodities, money, and means of production, directly defining the object of capitalist production as a certain subjective element (i.e., desire). As the American Deleuze scholar Jason Read argues, "Deleuze and Guattari's particular position is to reject all those mediations and hierarchies that connect and yet separate the economy and subjectivity." This stipulation strikes at Marx’s essential insight into capitalism: that capitalism is fundamentally the production of subjects and the relations between subjects. "Society itself, i.e., man himself in his social relations, always appears as the ultimate result of the process of social production. Everything that has a fixed form, such as the product etc., appears in this movement only as an element, a vanishing element." Today, this essence of capitalism manifests directly in daily experience: the activities of human reproduction—such as consumption, learning, entertainment, and social interaction—have become indistinguishable from the sphere of production. The "products" of capitalism increasingly manifest as human relations and as the human person itself; every sphere of social life has been transformed into a site for the valorization of capital, forming a "desiring machine" where "everything is production."
In order to define capitalist production as the production of desire, Deleuze first transformed the concept of desire itself, overturning the negative understanding of desire. Contemporary French philosophy, often standing on the foundation of Kojève and Lacan, understands desire in a negative way: desire is a "constitutive lack" caused by the primordial loss of "object a," and the subjectivity based upon this is a hollow impossibility. However, this negative concept of desire applies at most to human consumptive desire; it does not apply to capital’s desire for valorization. The valorization of capital does not occur because of some lack; on the contrary, it is a process of using value to produce value, a spiral process that takes itself as its own end. It does not lack any external object (such as a specific use-value), but rather sets out from itself to affirm itself to a greater degree. Therefore, in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze focuses his critique on Lacan’s negative concept of desire, thereby defining desire-production as productive. "Desire lacks nothing; it does not lack its object."
This productive definition of capital’s desire also entails new concepts of value and labor, thereby redefining the structure of the laboring subject. First, surplus value, as that which capital desires, cannot be defined as an external object that capital lacks—that is, it cannot be defined as an increment or a difference in the magnitude of value: "[Surplus value] should not be defined as the difference between labor power and the value created by labor power, but should be defined through the incommensurability... between two flows (capital and labor) that are immanent to each other." That is to say, between surplus labor and necessary labor there is not only a quantitative difference but also a qualitative difference. A productive definition of surplus value requires defining the relationship between capital and labor as a qualitative relationship, which shapes a type of labor with new qualitative determinations—namely, surplus labor—through specific power mechanisms. This qualitative determination of surplus labor hits upon Marx’s understanding of surplus labor in the Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858 (Grundrisse): "Necessary labor time is labor for mere use-value, for subsistence. The surplus working day is labor for exchange value, for wealth." Here, Marx does not define necessary labor and surplus labor as two different quantities of labor, but as two different types of labor with different ends: surplus labor does not merely exceed necessary labor in quantity; it is inclined in its internal structure to constantly exceed itself.
Because surplus labor is defined as a special quality rather than merely a divisible quantity, Deleuze contends that all labor time in capitalism already carries the character of surplus labor, and the general laboring subject is always already a subject of surplus labor. "Labor only appears when it is accompanied by the constitution of a surplus... labor (in the proper sense) only occurs when accompanied by what we call surplus labor." For this kind of labor, "there is no longer a need for a code to guarantee surplus labor, because surplus labor is already qualitatively and temporally mixed with labor itself within the same simple quantity." Clearly, the mechanism for generating surplus labor is not an extractive mechanism external to the subject, but a desiring structure internal to the subject. In Deleuze’s view, this structure is such that "the desire of the most destitute creature can, with all its force, without any economic recognition or misrecognition, invest itself into the whole of the capitalist social field." In other words, the desires of the proletarians themselves, without needing the mediation of any false consciousness, can spontaneously desire surplus labor, thereby satisfying the requirements of capital’s reproduction and serving as the energy for capital's valorization. Through this thesis, Deleuze penetrates a crucial level of capitalist subject production: the desire-mode of capital must be embedded within the subjectivity of the laborer; the laboring subject must be able to "desire the desire of capital."
Furthermore, based on the characteristics of the capitalist reproduction process, Deleuze deduces the construction mechanism of its laboring subjects. The operation of capitalism does not rely on externally imposed laws, but on an internal relational structure; it does not govern social members with predetermined rules, but allows numerous subjects to constitute a specific relationship themselves, thereby unfolding an internal, flexible regulation of themselves. In Deleuze’s terminology, the social rules of capitalism are not "codes" but "axioms." Therefore, the reproduction of subjects in capitalism does not need to rely on some discipline, belief, or ideology; it does not have to be mediated by the subject’s consciousness to directly construct the subject’s actions and desires, aligning them with the desire of capital. A prominent manifestation of this mechanism is the rule of money: money unifies various different desires into the desire for money itself and establishes a direct quantitative relationship between them, allowing the "axioms" of capitalism to run automatically through the relationship of equivalent exchange. Consequently, even if a subject lacks any identification with or faith in capitalism, they will still spontaneously act according to the relationship of equivalent exchange. More importantly, in the object of money, the desire of the proletarian is unified with the desire of capital: although the money possessed by the proletarian is only enough to satisfy survival needs and cannot be converted into capital, the homogeneity of money as an object obscures this fundamental difference between the proletarian's desire and capital's desire. The result is that the proletarian’s desire to improve their own situation is realized not through class revolution, but through earning money—yet this precisely reproduces capitalism itself.
Deleuze’s theory of desire-production is a significant advancement in the Western Marxist theory of the reproduction of the subject, as it relatively thoroughly achieves the turn from ideology theory to power theory, and from a negative concept of power to a productive one. Since the 21st century, global capitalism has broken through various previous limits, incorporating all social spheres into its own scope and turning subjects and intersubjective relations into instruments and products of production. This situation has made Deleuze’s theory of capital a timely "universal discourse" for contemporary leftist thought. In this context, Byung-Chul Han, based on Deleuze’s basic insights, has conducted a summary study of the condition of the contemporary laboring subject, bringing this line of thought from France to Germany under the name of "psychopolitics." Han believes that contemporary "achievement society" [11] differs from the "disciplinary society" of the past; its main characteristic is not the negativity of power, but an excess of positivity. The predicament of the contemporary laborer is not the frustration of struggling to become a subject, but the "self-exploitation" imposed upon oneself by an excess of subjectivity.
However, Han also points out the fatal error Deleuze committed at the final stage of his theory. Although Deleuze already understood capital as productive desire-production or "generalized decoding," he did not fully carry through the productive concept of power and did not completely purge the negative concept of power; he thus hastily attributed the mode of capital power’s operation to "reterritorialization" (再结域), i.e., capital’s limitation on the possibilities of desire. In doing so, Deleuze failed to see clearly that capital power is fundamentally the constantly expanding desire itself—the release and intensification of desire. Correspondingly, the liberation strategy proposed by Deleuze is to overcome capital’s "reterritorialization" and expand capital’s "generalized deterritorialization" as much as possible. This actually advocates for the full liberation of capital and the removal of restrictions on capital, hoping that the maximal development of capital would sublate itself. However, in the era of Western countries' transition to neoliberalism, this is precisely what capital itself wants most. Evidently, Deleuze’s theory of the subject still retains residues of the negative concept of power, and thus could not avoid the fate of "Weberian Marxism"—that is, forming a complicity with neoliberalism.
This error of Deleuze’s has also profoundly influenced 21st-century Western leftist thought, leading it to be overly optimistic when facing the flexible and elastic characteristics of contemporary capitalism, believing they help enhance the liberatory potential of laborers. For example, autonomists such as Negri believe that contemporary productive activity is primarily "biopolitical production," i.e., "using subjects to produce subjects," which is a form of common production based on the free association of laborers. This implies that the mode of labor’s subordination to capital has regressed from "real subsumption" back to "formal subsumption"; capital can no longer directly control the labor process, and laborers have a better hope than before of escaping capital's dominance. "We claim that Empire is better than the social formations and modes of production that preceded it, just as Marx claimed that capitalism was better than what preceded it... Empire does away with the cruel regimes of modern power and increases the potential for liberation." Furthermore, the Cognitive Capitalism school, represented by scholars such as Yann Moulier-Boutang, believes that contemporary production is primarily "using knowledge to produce knowledge." The tools and products of this "cognitive labor" are knowledge itself and therefore cannot be expropriated by capital. Consequently, laboring subjects can possess a certain form of capital, becoming a "cognitariat" [12], leading to the weakening or even disappearance of capitalist exploitation.
While these theories offer insights into the characteristics of contemporary capitalism, they clearly repeat the error of "Weberian Marxism"—equating capital power with the negation of labor subjectivity and equating the liberation of laborers with the restoration of labor subjectivity—while ignoring that this view possessed a certain rationality only during the era of industrial capitalism. Therefore, contemporary leftist thought inevitably overlooks another possibility: the enhancement of contemporary laborers' subjectivity and the improvement of labor skills do not point toward the liberation of the laborer, but are contemporary forms of labor's subordination to capital. These labor skills must remain attached to the means of production possessed by capital to function; their content has already been constructed into a form conducive to expanding the valorization of capital and strengthening capital's power, thereby further reinforcing labor's dependence on capital. As Marx said, "He is now subordinate to capitalist production and subject to the rule of capital, not only because he lacks the means of labor, but because of his labor capacity itself, because of the nature and mode of his labor." In this case, rather than saying that laborers have accumulated capital and gained the potential to confront it, it is more accurate to say that capital has accumulated itself within the laborer, transferring the costs of fixed capital into the laborer's investment in their own human capital.
The aforementioned misjudgments in contemporary leftist thought prompt us to reimagine the possibility of labor liberation within a contemporary context. In the neoliberal era, "domination" is carried out under the guise of "liberation": trends such as the flexible mobility of laborers, the flexibilization and cognitivization of the labor process, and the deepening of "human capital" ideology have led to a profound entanglement between the enhancement of labor subjectivity and capital's domination over labor. This indicates that the labor subject constructed by capitalism itself can hardly serve directly as a political subject resisting capitalism; it is impossible to elucidate the trajectory of the laborers' struggle for liberation by relying on a general category of the subject. Instead, it is necessary to distinguish between the subject of wage labor and the subject of political action. On this point, it is exceptionally beneficial to reawaken the original problematic of the theory of the reproduction of the subject in Western Marxism. As previously mentioned, Althusser [13] distinguished from the very beginning between the subject of political action and the "ideological subject" under the rule of capital. His intention was to demonstrate an essential difference between the development of labor subjectivity within capitalism and the political organization required for revolutionary action. At a moment when economic contradictions have become highly intensified and other conditions for revolution are in place, the obstacle to revolution may lie precisely in the very subjects that the revolution seeks to rely upon, mobilize, and liberate: they are products of capitalism's mechanism for the reproduction of the subject, are internally adapted to the requirements of the reproduction of capital, and resist revolution through their own will. Therefore, it is necessary for political action against capital to differentiate and screen between the two aforementioned types of subjects, transforming the "labor subject" of capitalism into a "political subject" through specific political procedures. If this link is neglected, revolutionary action is destined to be a failure, a sham, or a regression. Reimagining the possibilities of political action and its subjects in the contemporary context necessitates frequent evocation of these insights; herein lies the significant contemporary relevance of examining Western Marxist theories on the reproduction of the subject.
(Author’s affiliation: School of Philosophy, Nankai University) Online Editor: Zhang Jian Source: Marxism & Reality (《马克思主义与现实》), Issue 6, 2023.