Ted Stolze: Resources of Hope, Logics of Struggle

In his recent book The Micro-Politics of Capital (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003) Jason Read has undertaken an extremely ambitious project: to demonstrate that 'capitalism as a mode of production cannot be critically grasped except as a production of subjectivity' (p. 15). Although I am largely sympathetic to this project and believe that Read has provided a valuable theoretical basis for future research, I would like to introduce a bit more complexity into his analysis. It seems to me that Read has made a compelling case that the historical development of capitalism-from its so-called 'primitive accumulation' and early prevailing logic of 'formal subsumption' until its present stage of increasingly dominant 'real subsumption'-has always involved the deployment of human beliefs, values, and desires, in short, of the subjectivity of living labor. Drawing on the theoretical work of Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Antonio Negri, Read calls this dynamic and uneven process one of 'subjection/subjectification', which he distinguishes from mere coercion or domination. He insists that capitalist subjection is never finished but is constantly renewed. Indeed, subjection 'produces, or at least makes possible, its own resistances' (p. 144). However, it seems to me that a more fine-grained conceptual analysis than Read offers is needed in order to explain adequately the contradictions of capitalist subjection.

Here I would like to borrow Raymond Williams's distinction among dominant, residual, and emergent forms of culture in order to characterize, by extension, dominant, residual, and emergent forms of subjectivity (Marxism and Literature, pp. 121-27). Such a distinction, I would hasten to emphasize, does not imply an easily demarcated periodization either of cultures or of subjectivities. The point, as Williams does well, is to emphasize the complex entanglement of cultures and subjectivities in distinctive 'structures of feeling' (pp. 128-35). Yet for analytic purposes it is worth considering each cultural or subjective strand apart from the others. At any rate, Read, it seems to me, concentrates in his book on the dominant form of subjectivity at any given period of capitalist development; but he allows, as I have said, for challenges to that hegemony. However, I think that he is less successful at accounting for residual and emergent forms of subjectivity.

By 'residual' I mean, in Williams's words, that which 'has been effectively formed in the past, but . . . is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present' (p. 122). As a result, Williams continues, 'certain experiences, meanings, and values which cannot be expressed or substantially verified in terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practiced on the basis of the residue-cultural as well as social-of some previous social and cultural institution or formation' (p. 122).

A clear example of residual culture-and, I would add, of subjectivity-is religion. Religious beliefs and practices have certainly been incorporated into the dominant capitalist subjectivity from Protestant Christianity during an earlier period of prevailing formal subsumption to Buddhism during the contemporary period of prevailing real subsumption. And yet Christians and Buddhists have also generated profound challenges to capitalist subjection, whether by reclaiming the anti-imperial themes of the New Testament or the compassion for all sentient beings at the heart of the Buddha's discourses. No doubt one could equally distinguish features of Islamic culture and subjectivity that, as residual, have either been incorporated into or have opposed capitalist subjection. Indeed, as Richard Horsley has argued in Religion and Empire, religious beliefs and practices have historically been, and continue at present to be, caught up in a complex interplay of appropriation by and resistance to imperial power.

I turn now to consider 'emergent' culture and subjectivity, by which, again quoting Williams, 'new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship are continually being created' (p. 123). Read himself challenges 'the prevailing pessimism of the present' and cautions against 'an revolutionary nostalgia'; for him 'it is not so much that the old models are bankrupt but that there are new possibilities, new political structures and subjectivities underlying the present, waiting to produce the future' (p. 161). Of course, any new struggles and subjectivities risk cooptation and reintegration into the dominant culture and subjectivity. For example, such a process of cooptation and reintegration is presently at work in the United States-temporarily, one hopes-in the channeling of incredibly vibrant global justice and anti-war movements into the rather predictable and cautious electoralism of Democratic Party enthusiasts.

Let me conclude with the problem of subjectivity in the transition from one mode of production to another. As Williams insists, 'no mode of production and therefore no dominant order ever in reality includes or exhausts all human practice, human energy, and human intention' (p. 125). Read also addresses the implications for subjectivity of the epochal transformation from the feudal mode of production to the capitalist mode of production and the passage within capitalism itself from formal to real subsumption; but he inadequately explores a possible transition beyond the capitalist mode of production itself. Echoing The German Ideology, Read maintains that 'communism is . . . not some blueprint of the society to come, it is not a political program, it is nothing other than the insistence of living labor at the heart of capital' (p. 155).

But isn't communism for the Marxist tradition also a full-fledged alternative mode of production in which the means of production will have been socialized and brought under democratic control? And isn't something like socialism still necessary as an intermediate step along the way to that future society of 'freely associated producers'? What, finally, is the importance for the success of this equally epochal transformation of political organization and leadership, or what Ernest Mandel used to call 'the Marxist theory of the subjective factor'?