Niu Ziniu: The Reproduction of Labor Subjectivity Under the Logic of Capital
The problem of the subject is a key issue in Marxist philosophical research, the development of which has been profoundly influenced by the intellectual currents of Western Marxism. Through a Hegelian interpretation of Marx’s philosophy, György Lukács placed the question of class consciousness—that is, the problem of the revolutionary subject—at the center of Marx’s philosophy. By setting the alienation or reification of the subject as the theme of Marx's critical theory, he profoundly influenced the thought of the Frankfurt School and other sectors of the Western Left. This also indirectly contributed to the formation of the "subject-object inversion" paradigm in Chinese Marxist philosophical research [1]. According to this paradigm, the core of Marx’s critique of capital lies in capital's usurpation of the laborer’s subjectivity and the alienation or objectification of the laborer by capital; the liberation of the laborer, therefore, lies in the recovery and reconstruction of the laborer’s subjectivity.
However, new changes in contemporary capitalism have posed a severe challenge to the aforementioned ideas: the enhancement of the laborer’s subjectivity has not only failed to promote their 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 elasticity of the labor market have highly highlighted the subjectivity of the laborer. On the other hand, phenomena such as stagnant real wages, the decline of union power, the extension of labor time, and the increase in labor intensity indicate that the domination suffered by the working class is stronger than before. This has led Western Marxists to realize that there may exist a profound, implicit 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 the Theory of the Subject
The study of 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 Max 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. This profoundly influenced leftist intellectual schools such as the Frankfurt School in Germany and Neo-Hegelianism in France. Maurice Merleau-Ponty summarized this line of thought as "Weberian Marxism" [2], accurately grasping its crux. This intellectual lineage established the primary model for Western Marxism’s thinking on the problem of the subject, yet it faces severe challenges amidst the new changes of contemporary capitalism.
Lukács argued that in developed capitalist society, the commodity form is a unified form that constructs all social relations, reaching its apex in the commodification of labor power—that is, the reification or objectification of the human being itself. On this basis, he grafted Marx’s theory of the commodity form onto Weber’s theory of rationalization, pointing out that the main characteristics of the reified form are rationality, precision, and calculability, thereby establishing a link between the commodity form and the rationalized labor process. Consequently, the laborer is understood as an object subject 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 the laborer. In contrast, the liberation of the laborer lies in escaping this objectified condition and restoring their own subjectivity, i.e., forming a class consciousness as the "subject-object" of the historical totality. From the perspective of historical materialism, this theory was adapted to the Taylorist capitalism of the 20th century. During the mid-20th century, with the widespread implementation of Taylorist scientific management and the Fordist mode 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. This situation found apt expression in Lukács’s theory of reification.
This interpretive paradigm initiated by Lukács eventually 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, attaining a pure philosophical form in Adorno’s negative dialectics, which used non-identity to critique identity. "The name of dialectics says nothing other 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 is not what Hegel's absolute idealism was forced to transfigure it into: it is not of the essence in a Heraclitean sense. It indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived" [3]. In the works of Marcuse, this line of thought further developed into an opposition between civilization and Eros, and between "one-dimensional man" and repressed unconscious desires, exerting tremendous 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 a uniform and rigid bureaucratic system, one must liberate repressed desires full of individualized differences. Influenced by this approach, Chinese Marxist philosophical research often understands the essence of the logic of capital as the identifying and abstracting effect of the value form, interpreting the consequence of the universal expansion of the logic of capital as abstract domination and the impoverishment of the world of meaning. Correspondingly, the sign of human subjectivity being liberated 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, according to the view presented earlier, the critical approach initiated by Lukács was directed at a specific form of capitalism—namely, the industrial capitalism that peaked in mid-20th-century Fordism—and cannot represent the general laws of the logic of capital. Specifically, only in Fordist capitalism, due to the needs of mass-producing standardized products, does the organizational form of capitalism manifest as a developed bureaucracy, and do various social systems show signs of high fixation and rigidity, making the labor process a uniform, one-dimensional process. Yet these features are neither necessary corollaries of the essential laws of capital's logic nor common features 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 into the general form of capitalism.
More importantly, as some scholars have pointed out, when Lukács deduced the rationalized labor process from the commodity form, the mediation he employed was Weber’s theory of rationalization [4], rather than Marx’s theory of capital valorization. This line of thought bypasses Marx’s essential definition of the logic of capital, creating a "short circuit" between the commodity form and the labor process [5]. In Capital, the discussion on 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 directly built 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 developed capitalist societies, the increase in surplus value primarily 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. It is evident that, for Marx, the rationalization of the labor process is a requirement for the production of relative surplus value—the "particular rationality" of the movement of capital valorization—rather than a requirement of modern rationality in general. However, early Western Marxism precisely overlooked this point, simply grafting the rationalization of the capitalist labor process onto modern instrumental reason.
Because early Western Marxism bypassed Marx’s essential definition of the logic of capital—namely, the movement of capital valorization and the production of surplus value—its critique of capitalism could only hit upon the empirical phenomena of a specific era, failing to hit upon 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 identifying appearance of the rationalized labor process are grounded in the movement of capital valorization. However, the principle of capital valorization is precisely not identity, but a certain non-identity: it does not remain at the same magnitude of value but constantly pursues "more" than what currently exists, 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 does the appearance of identity in the value form expand over all things, and is the rationalization of the labor process 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; it is not that what should exist does not exist, but that what should not exist exists too much.
The aforementioned misstep of "Weberian Marxism" directly led to its biased stance on the problem of the subject. It associated identity with the suppression of subjectivity by the rationalized labor process, and 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 ended up forming a complicity with the essential laws of capital's logic. In reality, liberation of the subject based on non-identity precisely satisfies the requirements of capital valorization, because capital valorization is fundamentally 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, 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 their being internal links within the power of capital itself.
Evidently, the theoretical strategy of "Weberian Marxism" could not possibly succeed. It understood the general characteristics of capitalism as identification and reification, basing its critique and resistance on non-identity and subjectivity, while failing to see that non-identity and subjectivity are precisely the requirements of the essential laws of capital's logic, while identity and reification were merely the appearances of these essential laws during a specific period. Therefore, this theoretical strategy contained a double risk from the outset: on the one hand, its critique of the particular form of capitalism severed the link with the essential laws of capital's logic, and thus had the potential to spill over into social organizations that do not belong to capitalism but exhibit similar characteristics, thereby causing "friendly fire." 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 even comply with capitalism’s own requirements for transitioning to the next stage, satisfying its need for "self-adjustment" in the face of periodic contradictions.
From the perspective of actual historical development, the objective effect of "Weberian Marxism" was indeed thus. First, its critique of capitalism was directed at rationalization and bureaucracy rather than capital valorization itself; this critique similarly spilled over into trade unions and welfare states that adopted bureaucratic forms, as well as socialist countries in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, eventually falling primarily upon these "allies" within the same leftist camp. Second, its liberation strategy was to restore the laborer’s subjectivity and the difference imprisoned by the identifying value form. However, during the 1960s and 70s as capitalism gradually shifted toward neoliberalism, the release of this subjectivity and difference was precisely what capitalism itself needed most. It undermined the solidarity of unions and worker organizations, dismantled the industrial assembly lines that brought 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, exacerbating divisions within the working class and creating labor and consumer subjects suitable for neoliberalism.
"Weberian Marxism" had a deep influence on the social revolutionary movements in the West 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 characteristics of this period were actually the rise of various "new social movements" (feminist movements, gay rights movements, ecological and anti-nuclear movements, etc.), the gradual dominance among the Left of anti-communist and pro-autonomy factions, and a harsh critique of communism that permeated the entire 1980s. Analytical categories of totalitarianism were applied to the analysis of communism without encountering the resistance seen in the 1950s or 60s. In France, since social critique was closely linked with the communist movement, the latter’s discrediting meant that critique temporarily but overtly abandoned the economic sphere. Under the assault of "artistic critique," the corporation was reduced to a repressive apparatus identical to the state, the military, the school, and the family; the struggle against bureaucracy and for labor autonomy replaced concerns for economic equality and the security of the most dispossessed. [6]
From this, it can be seen that the early Western Marxist critique of capitalism was actually a critique of the superficial commonalities between capitalism and socialism, sometimes even turning 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" highlights that to think through the problem of the subject within the horizon of Marxist philosophy, one must distinguish the specific manifestations of capitalism in a particular period from the essential laws of the logic of capital, and examine the transformation of the subject within the stage-by-stage evolution of capitalism. One must consider not only the subject’s resistance to capital but also the subject’s internal complicity with capital. These two points found vivid expression in Western Marxism after the 1960s.
II. The Positivity of Power: The Western Marxist Critique of Labor Subjectivity under the Logic of Capital
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Western world stood on the eve of 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 by reinforcing social identity but by creating flexibility and difference everywhere; not by turning people into "things" like machine parts, but by encouraging people to "realize themselves" and "become themselves." In other words, in the neoliberal era, the mode of operation of capital power transcended the traditional negative appearance and displayed unprecedented positive characteristics. This power was not limited to suppressing and negating subjectivity; on the contrary, it sought to create, stimulate, promote, and even indulge subjectivity. This led Leftist thinkers to realize that a profound relationship of complicity existed between the enhancement of labor subjectivity and the deepening of capital power. Critical theory could not cling to the old concepts of "Weberian Marxism" by understanding capital power merely as the negation of labor subjectivity; otherwise, new techniques of power might bypass the scrutiny of critical theory in the name of "freedom" and "liberation." In view of this, since the 1960s, Western Marxists have directly raised the question of the "reproduction of labor subjectivity" under the logic of capital. This problem runs through theories of ideology, power, and biopolitics, exhibiting a clearly visible trend toward a positive understanding of power. Its concern is not how capital power negates and represses the laborer’s subjectivity, but 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 philosophical anthropology, discussing the process by which self-consciousness is gradually formed through mutual recognition—a process in which the subject is generated by "desiring the desire of the other." This interpretation coincides with Marx’s understanding of commodity society: in commodity exchange, "each becomes a means for the other only in order to serve as an end for himself," [7] thus commodity society possesses the general structure of "desiring the desire of the other." Therefore, the role of the "desire of the other" in the dismantling and reconstruction of subjectivity has powerful explanatory force for the problem of subject-generation under the logic of capital.
Mediated by Lacan, this theoretical theme was linked to Marx’s theory of capital in the work of Louis Althusser. Althusser distinguished between two different senses of subjectivity: one is the subject of revolutionary political action, which appears as a blank space to be occupied, defined by the contrast of plural forces; [8] besides this, there exists an "ideological subject" dominated by and embedded in the operation of capital, which, despite being in a dominated position, still possesses the status of a subject. 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 for its own actions, then man can make himself accept the obligation of conforming to norms—this is much more 'economical' than imposing norms on people through violence." [9]
The reproduction of this specific subjectivity is a necessary link in the process of capitalist reproduction. Althusser argued that capitalist reproduction can be decomposed 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 the theory of wages, but did not explain how the specific subjectivity of the worker—namely, their submissive character—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 completed by a state apparatus: the ideological subject is the product of the "interpellation" of the Ideological State Apparatus; if not for this 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 operating mechanisms of capitalism. The subject understood by modern philosophy is first and foremost a subject of consciousness, and Marx’s critique of ideology was first and foremost a critique of this idealist philosophy; thus, ideology was also 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." [10] Ideology is a "‘representation’ of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence," [11] through which the subject understands their own actual 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 of the subject to reality participates in the constitution of reality itself.
Althusser’s theory of ideology helps specify the reproduction mechanism of the labor subject under the logic of capital in a positive way. Traditional theory of ideology, 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 by which bourgeois ideology "deceives" or "co-opts" laborers. [12] 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 grounded in those structures of social relations that constrain the real actions of laborers. It can govern the actions of laborers through positive means such as production, guidance, and even incentive. Ideology in this sense does not obscure capitalist relations of production but is a link within those relations themselves, ensuring their smooth operation by interpellating individuals into specific subjects. This reality-oriented concept of ideology provides a possibility for establishing a link between the theory of the subject and the critique of political economy.
Clearly, Althusser’s concept of ideology is highly realistic and differs greatly from traditional ideology theory. Michel Foucault further radicalized this line of thought, discarding the ambiguous concept of ideology [13] and developing the theory of the subject into a theory of power or biopolitics. Texts such as Truth and Juridical Forms propose that although Marx held a critical attitude toward national economy, there exists a commonality between Marx and the national economists: namely, the uncritical treatment of labor as the innate essence of man and the natural source of wealth. [14] However, the fact that man becomes a labor subject—especially 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 as such a subject. [15] Obviously, the subject here is also not the subject of revolutionary action, but a subject who submits to specific social power and is capable of continuous, submissive labor. The reason this seemingly fully objectified worker is still understood as a subject is that wage labor requires the worker’s active qualities of will. Negative factors such as hunger, poverty, and coercion are not sufficient 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 character, and sense of professional responsibility, all of which need to be constructed within the worker from scratch. In Foucault’s view, the double meaning of the word "subject" in Western languages already suggests this ambiguity: the word means both "subject, agent" and "subjected to, subordinated to," implying that "becoming a subject" has always been the result of "subjection to power," while power itself cannot exist independently of the subject.
Based on this problematic, Foucault meticulously examined the formation of the labor subject in early capitalist society. He studied various subject-production mechanisms 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 such as "the worker's body, desires, and needs," [16] and their ultimate achievement was the internalizing of capital’s requirements for labor as the laborer’s own moral requirements: they "required a strict, high-intensity, and continuous labor—in short, the moral character of the worker." [17] This again shows that the reproduction mechanism of the labor subject is absolutely necessary for capitalism; it needs to 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 a neoliberal society, the worker must be constructed not only as a labor subject but also as an investment subject or an "entrepreneur of the self": "The homo economicus is not at all a partner of exchange. Homo economicus is an entrepreneur, and an entrepreneur of himself." [18] In this case, the laborer's subjectivity undergoes a significant "capitalization": the laborer understands and arranges themselves according to capital’s rules of action, understanding their own activities as investment in human capital. The laborer is not only a subject engaged in repetitive labor driven by capital, but also a self-directed subject of self-renewal and self-shaping, much like capital itself. Of course, this does not mean the laborer owns capital or has attained freedom from capital’s rule; it only means that the requirements of capital reproduction have been embedded within the laborer’s subjectivity, such that the laborer spontaneously cooperates with the reproduction of capital and regards it as their own will.
In summary, in Continental Leftist thought since the 1960s, there has been a clear theoretical thread concerning the production of the subject under capitalism. This thread, starting from ideology theory, breaks free from the philosophy of consciousness presupposed by traditional ideology theory and turns instead toward exploring the objective mechanisms that constrain the real actions of laborers in capitalist society. Along this line, the Western Left’s understanding of power has continuously 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 cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms... It is more complex and more positive than the mere effect of 'prohibition'." [19]
However, Foucault's understanding of the production of the capitalist subject also possesses certain defects. Although Foucault realized that a concept of productive power was necessary, his so-called "disciplinary power" still retains a certain negativity, as it operates through punishment, discipline, segregation, and confinement. This kind of power can only produce compliant and docile workers; it struggles to produce industrious subjects possessed of internal proactivity. According to Marx’s definition, capital is "an unconditioned and limitless desire to transcend its own limits" [20], a kind of self-affirmation that is constantly repeated and intensified. Correspondingly, the power capital uses to produce the laboring subject should also be thoroughly affirmative—that is, it should take 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 capitalist production in general with desire-production: "Desire is the order of production; all production is at once desire-production and social production." [21] In this way, Deleuze bypasses the production of material products 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 puts it, "Deleuze and Guattari's particular position is to refuse all those mediations and hierarchies that connect and yet separate the economy and subjectivity." [22] This formulation strikes at Marx’s essential insight into capitalism: that capitalism is fundamentally the production of subjects and intersubjective relations: "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 a factor, a passing factor." [23] Today, this essence of capitalism is directly manifested in everyday experience: human reproductive activities—such as consumption, learning, entertainment, and communication—have become indistinguishable from the sphere of production. The "products" of capitalism increasingly manifest as human relations and human beings themselves; every field of social life has become a site for the valorization of capital, forming a "desire machine" where "everything is production."
In order to define capitalist production as desire-production, Deleuze first transformed the concept of desire itslf, reversing the negative understanding of desire. Contemporary French philosophy, often building on Alexandre Kojève and Jacques Lacan, understands desire in a negative way: desire is a "constitutive lack" caused by the original loss of the "object petit a," and the subjectivity based on this is a void-like impossibility. However, this negative concept of desire applies at most to human consumer desire, not 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 of self-augmentation that takes itself as its end. It lacks no external object (such as a specific use-value), but rather starts from itself to affirm itself to a greater degree. Therefore, in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze focuses on critiquing Lacan's negative concept of desire, thereby defining desire-production as affirmative. "Desire lacks nothing; it does not lack its object." [24]
This affirmative definition of capital’s desire also implies new concepts of value and labor, thereby redefining the structure of the laboring subject. First, surplus value, as the thing desired by capital, cannot be defined as an external object lacked by capital—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 rather should be defined through the incommensurability... between two mutually immanent flows (i.e., capital and labor—Author’s note)." [25] That is to say, there is not only a quantitative difference but also a qualitative difference between surplus labor and necessary labor. The affirmative definition of surplus value requires defining the relationship between capital and labor as a qualitative relationship, which, through specific power mechanisms, shapes a labor endowed with new qualitative determinations: namely, surplus labor. This qualitative determination of surplus labor hits upon Marx’s understanding of surplus labor in the Grundrisse: "Necessary labor time is labor for simple use-value, for life. The surplus working day is labor for exchange value, for wealth." [26] 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 purposes: surplus labor does not merely exceed necessary labor quantitatively; rather, its internal structure tends toward constantly exceeding itself.
Since surplus labor is defined as a special quality rather than merely a divisible quantity, Deleuze argues that all labor time in capitalism already possesses the character of surplus labor, and the general laboring subject is already a subject of surplus labor. "Labor only appears when accompanied by a surplus construction... labor (in the proper sense) only occurs accompanied by what we call surplus labor." [27] 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 in a single simple quantity." [28] It can be seen that the mechanism for generating surplus labor is not some mechanism of dispossession external to the subject, but rather a desire-structure internal to the subject. In Deleuze’s view, this structure is such that "the desire of the most disadvantaged creature can, with all its strength and without any economic knowledge or misrecognition, be invested in the whole of the capitalist social field." [29] In other words, the proletarian’s own desire, without requiring the mediation of any false consciousness, can spontaneously desire surplus labor, thereby satisfying the requirements of capital reproduction and serving as the energy for capital valorization. Through this thesis, Deleuze penetrates a crucial layer of the production of the capitalist subject: 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, Deleuze deduces the construction mechanism of the laboring subject based on the characteristics of the capitalist reproduction process. The operation of capitalism does not rely on externally imposed laws, but on internal relational structures. It does not govern social members through predetermined rules, but lets various subjects constitute a specific relationship themselves, thereby unfolding internal and flexible regulation upon themselves. In Deleuzian terms, capitalist social rules are not "codes" but "axioms." Therefore, the reproduction of the capitalist subject does not need to rely on 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, making them coincide with the desire of capital. A prominent manifestation of this mechanism is the rule of money: money unifies various different desires into a desire for money itself and establishes direct quantitative relationships between them, allowing the "axioms" of capitalism to run automatically through relations of equivalent exchange. In this way, even if a subject has no identification with or belief in capitalism, they will still spontaneously act according to the relations 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 an important advancement of Western Marxist theories of subject reproduction, as it relatively thoroughly achieves the shift from ideology theory to power theory, and from a negative concept of power to an affirmative one. Since the 21st century, global capitalism has broken through various former restrictions, incorporating all social fields into its own scope and turning subjects and intersubjective relations into tools and products of production. This situation has made Deleuze’s theory of capital a timely "universal discourse" for contemporary left-wing 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, introducing this line of thought from France to Germany under the name of "psychopolitics." Han believes that contemporary "achievement society" (Leistungsgesellschaft) differs from the "disciplinary society" of the past; its main feature is not the negativity of power but an excess of positivity. The dilemma of contemporary laborers is not the frustration of struggling to become a subject, but the "self-exploitation" inflicted upon themselves by an excess of subjectivity. [30]
However, Han also points out a fatal error Deleuze made at the final moment of his theory. Although Deleuze understood capital as affirmative desire-production or "generalized decoding," [31] he did not fully carry through the affirmative concept of power and did not completely eliminate the negative concept of power. He thus hastily attributed the mode of operation of capital power to "re-territorialization" (re-territorialiser), i.e., capital's limitation of the possibilities of desire. In this way, Deleuze failed to see clearly that capital power is fundamentally the constantly expanding desire itself—the release and intensification of desire. [32] Correspondingly, the liberation strategy proposed by Deleuze is to overcome the "re-territorialization" of capital and expand the "generalized deterritorialization" of capital as much as possible. This is actually an advocacy for the full liberation of capital and the abolition of restrictions on capital, hoping that the maximalist development of capital will sublate itself. However, in the era of Western countries transitioning to neoliberalism, this is precisely what capital itself wants most. It can be seen that Deleuze’s theory of the subject still retains remnants of the negative concept of power, and thus failed to avoid the fate of "Weberian Marxism"—forming a complicity with neoliberalism.
This error of Deleuze has also profoundly influenced 21st-century Western left-wing thought, making it overly optimistic in the face of the flexibilization and elasticity of contemporary capitalism, believing that these traits help enhance the liberating potential of laborers. For example, autonomists such as Antonio Negri believe that contemporary productive activity is primarily "biopolitical production," i.e., "producing subjects with subjects," which is a form of common production based on the free association of laborers. This means that the mode of labor's subordination to capital has regressed from "real subsumption" to "formal subsumption"; capital can no longer directly control the labor process, and laborers have more hope than before of escaping capital's dominance. "We claim that Empire is better than the social forms and modes of production that preceded it, just as Marx claimed that capitalism was better than what came before... Empire eliminates the cruel regimes of modern power and increases the potential for liberation." [33] For another example, the school of Cognitive Capitalism, represented by scholars such as Yann Moulier-Boutang, argues that contemporary production is primarily "producing knowledge with knowledge." The tools and products of this "cognitive labor" are knowledge itself, and therefore cannot be alienated by capital. [34] Thus, laboring subjects can possess a certain kind of capital, becoming a "netocratic class," which in turn leads to the reduction or even disappearance of capitalist exploitation.
Although these theories perceive 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 in the era of industrial capitalism. Consequently, contemporary left-wing thought inevitably overlooks another possibility: the enhancement of contemporary laborers' subjectivity and the improvement of labor skills do not point toward the liberation of laborers, but are rather the contemporary form of labor's subordination to capital. These labor skills must be attached to the means of production owned by capital to function; their content has already been constructed into a form conducive to expanding capital valorization and strengthening capital power, thus further reinforcing labor's dependence on capital. As Marx said, "He is now subordinate to capitalist production and subject to the command 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." [35] In this situation, rather than saying that laborers have accumulated capital and gained the potential to resist it, it is more accurate to say that capital has accumulated itself within the laborer, shifting the cost of fixed capital onto 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 the 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 [36] of the labor process, and the deepening ideology of human capital have caused the enhancement of labor subjectivity to become profoundly entangled with capital's domination over labor. This indicates that the labor subject constructed by capitalism itself can hardly serve directly as a political subject in resistance against capitalism. We cannot clarify the trajectory of the laborers' struggle for liberation by relying on general categories of subjectivity; rather, it is necessary to make a distinction between the subject of wage labor and the subject of political action. On this point, it is particularly beneficial to re-invoke the original problematic of the theory of the reproduction of the subject in Western Marxism. As previously mentioned, Althusser 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 that there is 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 within that part of the subject which the revolution intends to rely upon, mobilize, and liberate: they are the products of the mechanism of the reproduction of the subject under capitalism, they are inherently adapted to the requirements of the reproduction of capital, and they resist revolution with their own will. Therefore, political action against capital must distinguish and discriminate 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 ignored, then revolutionary action is bound to be a failure, a sham, or a regression. To reconceptualize the possibility of political action and its subject in the contemporary context, it is necessary to frequently invoke the aforementioned insights; this is also where the primary significance of examining the Western Marxist theory of the reproduction of the subject lies today.
(Author’s affiliation: School of Philosophy, Nankai University) Internet Editor: Zhang Jian Source: Marxism & Reality (《马克思主义与现实》), Issue 6, 2023.