Sometimes you start reading a book and can tell right away if it is going to be good or not. The author, foreshadowing the topics to be discussed, references existing debates or problematics to give the reader a taste of what is to come. Maybe they will stake out a couple positions to give an indication of where their opinions lie. If they are doing their job right, they will introduce some novel concepts right off the bat in order to flesh them out over the course of the book. As a reader it difficult to not watch this stage-setting that authors do and begin to form opinions right off the bat. Generally I can tell pretty quickly if I will enjoy a non-fiction book, usually by the time I am well into whatever chapter comes first after the introduction.
El Capital: Razón Histórica, Sujeto Revolucionario Y Conciencia (English: Capital: Historical Reason, Revolutionary Subject and Consciousness) is one of the few times my intuition let me down. This book, written by Argentine thinker Juan Iñigo Carrera, was recommended to me by more than one person as Iñigo Carrera’s analysis focuses on several topics that overlap with my interests. These include the composition of the proletariat and its subjectivity thereof, the role of industrial labor in anticapitalist politics, the character of global capitalist development, the role of science in productive affairs, and the function of the state. Initially I was quite excited to sink my teeth into this. Iñigo Carrera comes from a different Marxist milieu than the ultraleft anglophone one I generally tread in and as such offered a potentially useful new perspective. The unfortunate reality is that this book was a severe let-down. In fact, I was so disappointed with it that I only finished the first four chapters out of ten. I do not discount the idea that something useful could be found in the remaining majority of the book, but I find it just about impossible to think any of it could dig this book out of the hole Iñigo Carrera dug for himself.
One thing to note: to my knowledge this book is published only in Spanish and there is no comprehensive English translation1. Any quotes that appear here are my own translation. Non hispanophone readers are welcome to message me if they are interested in viewing the detailed notes I took in English.
Dealing in Abstracts
The first chapter wastes no time before beginning to lay out important analytical categories. Here Iñigo Carrera introduces a crucial but overall underexplained concept: that of productive subjectivity. Keeping in line with some of Marx’s best strengths, Iñigo Carrera deploys a refreshingly materialist approach to his exposition of capitalism’s inner workings. The character of capitalist society’s social forms, like that of any other productive system, are not simply conditioned by society’s productive activity, but fundamentally driven and structured by them. The strength of this book is the way capitalist history is abstracted into categories that retain great explanatory power despite his general eschewing of any sort of low-level concrete analysis. This omission does not always have to be problematic, sometimes a text can remain purely in the realm of high abstractions and remain useful. Unfortunately the abstractions El Capital deploys to discuss subjectivity completely fall apart under closer scrutiny.
The process of industrial production is the star of the show for building out Iñigo Carrera’s analysis of subjectivity. This is for good reason: the commodity production process itself is the center of gravity that all economic activity orbits around. The creation of new value (extracted as surplus from labor performed to create commodities) is what pays for not only the expansion of industry itself, but also all the administration, circulation, and reproduction necessary for capitalist society to function. It is the double freedom of the worker (the legal “freedom” to seek employment of the worker’s choosing and the “freedom” from owning the means of production themselves), combined with industrial production’s immanent tendency towards a perpetual sophistication of the means of production, that serves as the basis of this formulation of productive subjectivity. The individual worker must seek out employment in order to afford to sustain themselves and any dependents, and is thus forced to engage with the scientific character of industrial production on its own terms. Inherent within the commodity production process is a tendency towards rationalization through the division of labor and automation. In line with Marx and later Marxists who have written on the topic, Iñigo Carrera does well in chapter 2 of laying out the character of this tendency in the productive sphere and the way it stratifies labor along lines of who has their work simplified, who enacts and administers this simplification, and how this is reflected in pay differentials. The exact definition of what exactly “productive subjectivity” actually is or consists of is never made explicit, however it clearly has an implicit link to how much or little control the worker has over the character of their work and how much their work is responsible for structuring the work of others with a lower productive subjectivity. This is fine enough if only examining the labor rationalization process itself, however this concept is deployed much further than these conceptual boundaries.
Bourgeois consciousness receives a similar analytical treatment. Similar to the divide between low and high productive subjectivity, Iñigo Carrera identifies a disparity between the consciousness between those of individual capitalists and those that operate the state. This rift propagates along the tension that exists between the needs of private capital to maximize returns versus the reproduction of capitalist society as a whole. The state embodies the apex consciousness. By a combination of taxation and nationalization the state wields “social capital” (as opposed to private capital) to fund the reproduction of the conditions that enables private capital to operate at all. This includes infrastructure development, education, healthcare, financial policy, foreign policy, and anything else that enables the reproduction of an economy and body of laborers amenable to the generation of profit by private capital. He constructs a compelling explanation for the nature of the capitalist nation state and its explicitly bourgeois character. This framework is infinitely more useful than that of many leftists, both historical and contemporary, who consider the state a neutral arbiter of society.
All good so far, but things get dicey as soon as he begins to deploy these abstract notions of productive and bourgeois consciousness towards the question of proletarian revolution. Capitalism, per Iñigo Carrera, has a “historical purpose” of developing a technologically sophisticated global productive apparatus that can be managed by an equally global state in a rational and scientific fashion. It is the task of the proletariat, led by the workers with the highest productive subjectivity, to seize the bourgeois state and forcibly convert all private capital into social capital. The form of capital itself is still fundamentally capitalist, but by virtue of being placed under direct control of the (proletarian-in-name) state, it is fulfilling its “historical purpose.” Just as bourgeois states create organizational bodies to coordinate the affairs of multiple states at once (he uses the European Union as his main example), the revolutionary proletarian states must combine social capital across nation states until it is global in reach.
Per Iñigo Carrera, the problem with bourgeois consciousness, even that of the nation state managing social capital, is that it does not go far enough to bring global society under the umbrella of scientific rationality. It is the segment of the working class that has a high productive subjectivity that is equipped with the proper mentality to realize this terminus. This technical understanding of production, coupled with the training to scientifically manage its labor, is the supposed intellectual basis for the administration of global industrial production as a whole. The glaring omission is why the broader proletarian class beyond just those with elite technical training would have any sort of motivation to participate in such a revolutionary movement. I struggle to think of an aspect of consciousness that has more relevance to Marxism than this, however Iñigo Carrera not only fails to answer the question, he barely even acknowledges that the question exists in the first place. It is simply a given that the proletarian class would and should carry out a revolution along these lines for these ends. The rationalization process that elite technical workers carry out on the broader industrial labor pool is itself the very mechanism by which industrial labor is deskilled and stripped of negotiation power, and by which capital in richer countries exploits laborers in poorer countries. I do not need to assert this myself as a counterargument, Iñigo Carrera himself does an excellent job detailing the brutality of the rationalization process and its international character throughout the first two chapters. So the question remains, why the fuck would the proletariat buck the status quo if it means an intensification of that which they, ostensibly, seek to upend?
The asymmetric power relation between workers of low and high productive subjectivity is very uncritically examined. I would accuse him of failing to realize that the rationalization imperative (deployed by high productive subjectivity workers) is a fundamentally bourgeois dynamic, except Iñigo Carrera seems to desire a maximization of capital’s control over society to the utmost degree and sees no contradiction between the overcoming of capitalism and supercharging its most fundamental operating logic. The fact that it is “social capital” rather than “private capital” seems to imbue it with some magical property of not actually behaving like capital in his eyes. Anticapitalism to him is not the destruction of capitalism at a fundamental level, but instead a sort of bizarre inverted right-libertarianism where the state directly manages all capital throughout the entirety of global society. Charitably, I might say that his schema for a totalized capitalist mega-state contains the possibility of something like large expenditures towards universal healthcare or environmental protection or other vaguely humanitarian programs modern nation states cannot seem to universally pursue, however in the 4 chapters I was able to stomach before giving up he never actually articulates any actual reason for anybody to want to carry out a proletarian revolution other than vague pontification about “historical development” and “necessary forms”. The antagonism between rationalizer and rationalized is only ever brought up to be handwaved away or strangely embraced as necessary. He concludes chapter 3 with the following: “this centralization [of all capital as social capital under the global state], as a reproduction of the capitalist mode of production in the course of realizing its historical reason for existence, will not avoid the atrocities and barbarism of capital. On the contrary, it will be manifested in its full brutality. This is the necessary concrete form that its own sublation must take.”
Blind Spots
The revolutionary kernel latent within high productive subjectivity workers is implied by Iñigo Carrera to sit at the point of conflict between the needs of private capital and a fully rational scientific management of society. The necessity for revolution is so that the state can be rationally managed in a way that is not beholden to the needs of private capital, but rather to society as a whole. This does not sound so bad if you do not think about what any of it concretely means and the forms it would take. This overt tension between science and private capital is most pronounced specifically among scientists that are far removed from the production process, such as academic researchers studying topics with a broad societal impact (climate change, public health, etc.). The emphasis on “productive” is important when discussing high productive subjectivity workers. The scientific approach used (chiefly by engineers) to perform industrial production, including the scientific management of other workers, does not have this tension with private capital that more “pure” research science may have. There is no smooth continuity between the apex productive subjectivity and the rational administration of globally socialized capital that does not simply reproduce the worst parts of capitalism. The productive expertise of engineers can be thought of being constituted by a more scientific-technical component and a more business-managerial component2. The engineers who embody the technical component are often not the same engineers who embody the managerial component (especially at larger companies), and there quite often exists conflict between the two. The management of productive affairs, while obviously dependent on the technical component of engineering expertise, is itself in the domain of the managerial component of engineering expertise. A vanguard of technical experts with the interest and qualification to manage global capitalist production (Iñigo Carrera is clear on this, “social capital” is still obviously capital) would have to largely pull from middle and upper engineering managers, labor supervisory management, petty bourgeois engineers, engineers who are aspiring capitalists, and general non-engineering business administration staff. This is the group of people who currently have the least incentive to mobilize a broad revolutionary proletarian movement against private capital. The reality is that a mobilization of this group to take over the state in the interest of “better management” much more closely resembles fascism than anything socialist. My disagreement with Iñigo Carrera is not over the centrality of technical and scientific expertise; these are critical to any attempt to fundamentally restructure production. My objection is over the fact that he does not actually advocate for the restructuring of production, just the restructuring of its management by preserving the value form of the commodity. This would empower the most counterrevolutionary anti-proletarian elements of the technical intelligentsia.
The fundamental absurdity of how Iñigo Carrera deploys the concept of productive subjectivity towards a “revolutionary” framework is far and away this book’s most egregious head-scratcher, however that does not stop him making other blunders as well. Astute readers of this book at some point might think to ask themselves about the non-industrial proletariat and how they fit into all of this. Marx, not to mention mainstream modern economics, both well demonstrate how the ratio of productive to unproductive (i.e. workers from whom surplus value is extracted in the productive process versus those whose labor is administrative or socially-reproductive) rises as an industrial economy “matures”. Iñigo Carrera would know, as his decently-lucid narrative about global capital’s history of regimenting production across national borders throughout chapter 2 would not make much sense without an understanding of this important dynamic. But yet, this portion of the proletariat is almost entirely ignored in his conceptual categories. At the beginning of chapter 2 where he writes about the way machinery mutilates the productive subjectivity of factory workers there is a shoehorned comment about such decreasing productive subjectivity also applying to unproductive workers too, but never elaborates at all as to how that looks or what effect it has. Given that unproductive laborers far outnumber productive laborers in many countries, this is a strange oversight.
He does, however, pay quite a bit of attention to the surplus population who feature quite prominently in his analysis. Chapter 2 features a particularly lucid examination of the way productive subjectivity is structured across the global division of labor and the way a latent surplus population is generated in developing economies. This latent surplus population, itself containing an extremely low productive subjectivity, serves as a reserve army of labor that can be hyper exploited by capital. Even in the detached and dispassionate tone Iñigo Carrera uses when writing about this surplus population the reader can tell that this category of people is among the most brutally abused by global capitalism. It is unfortunate that his schema for capitalism realizing its “historically necessary form” would need to intensify the very engine that produces and abuses this deeply abjected surplus population. But what of the large portion of the surplus population, particularly in rich countries, that is not totally abject but still unnecessary for capital to produce or reproduce itself? Picture rapidly downwardly-mobile college graduates facing brutal recession job markets, bureaucrats performing near-meaningless administration in zombie industries, or employees of government agencies or companies kept afloat purely by subsidy or massive taxpayer-funded contracts where very little is actually produced. As this portion of the workforce, not to mention unproductive labor in general, comes to describe an increasing portion of the workforce in mature economies where the bulk of the high productive subjectivity workers also live, it feels like an oversight to not discuss this to at least some degree. Productive workers are a minority in mature economies (it is called “deindustrialization” for a reason), and thus the body of workers with high productive subjectivity is even smaller. How is this high productive subjectivity supposed to generalize itself (or rather, how do those with high productive subjectivity assume programmatic command) over a workforce that is mostly unproductive or surplus to the production process at all? It is difficult to imagine this taking a form substantially different than the current labor hierarchy deployed by private capital. Iñigo Carrera’s entire schema relies on social forms that would simply reproduce themselves rather than abolish themselves.
Worth noting is also his analytical treatment of continental East Asia and Africa. The latter receives barely a passing mention in chapter 2. The only thing he finds fit to mention about the incredibly dynamic and economically diverse continent of Africa is that its hunter gatherer, nomadic pastoralist, and peasant populations have been converted into latent surplus population unfit for integration into global industrial production by virtue of a lack of exposure to centralized authority or large-scale production, both features that he ascribes as being necessary cultural prerequisites for integration into capitalism. By contrast, his characterization of East Asian culture as particularly well suited for integration into capitalism hinges on his characterization of pre-capitalist Asian labor as being generally centralized under rigid authority and necessarily cooperative due to the labor-intense nature of large scale agriculture. These are both absolutely absurd oversimplifications of these regions’ productive histories. I was hoping for better than borderline-racist caricatures.
Salvage
Iñigo Carrera’s lucid understanding of Marx’s abstract concepts and their utility in describing many of capitalism’s immanent tendencies stands in deep contrast to his total abdication of materialist rigor when discussing the central topic of revolutionary subjectivity. Frankly, most of what is good in this book, or at least the first couple chapters, can easily be found elsewhere. I understand that the remaining 6 chapters likely contain more clever ideas and intelligent arguments about the character of capitalism and scientific thought, however I just simply do not have the motivation to slog through it considering how astonishingly bad his formulation around subjectivity is.
Instead let us look at what is actually useful and novel from this book: a modern focus on the centrality of the industrial proletariat, and the interesting notion of productive subjectivity. Marx’s original focus on the industrial proletariat was not just because of commodity production’s centrality to capitalist society, but also because it is the ability to industrially produce massive quantities of wealth that makes communism possible3. This possibility can only be concretely realized by those with the expertise to enact this transformation: the industrial proletariat. As such, this notion of productive subjectivity carries the potential to be a useful concept, albeit one that requires more careful and nuanced usage than Iñigo Carrera deploys in this book.
The utility of the concept of productive subjectivity becomes apparent if we ditch Iñigo Carrera’s notion of the revolutionary socialization of capital. Instead, we can apply it to an understanding of revolution in which capital is disrupted and a new productive apparatus, without the abstract valorization of labor time, is built with the direct fulfillment of human need as its central logic. To fundamentally transform capitalism during a moment of revolutionary rupture requires a nascent communist productive apparatus operating on the same substrate that capitalism’s subsumption process operates on: the material level of productive activity itself. The establishment of a new productive logic, with its own mechanisms of immanent unfolding, subsumes capitalist productive infrastructure and social forms into its own orbit as the form of its own self-reproduction. In less-abstract terms, this means that the transition to communism is not something that is enacted by a “proletarian state” (there is no such thing) after the dust clears, but rather something that must begin immediately and constantly expand until capitalism has been totally extinguished. In order for this to happen, the very character of productive activity itself must undergo a transformation at a very low-level to directly meet the needs of human society rather than to produce commodities for sale. This transformation can happen fast or slow, but it must never stop transforming. Such a transformation will require a complete upending to the current geographical distribution of productive infrastructure, the reduction of expertise stratification (low vs high productive subjectivity) across every industry’s labor pool, and the general proliferation of productive capacity to enable true global cooperation on equal terms. This is to say, an understanding of the distribution of productive subjectivity at the time of revolution will have to be utilized to rehabilitate the productive subjectivity of the global human species. Plenty more can be said on this topic.
Footnotes
- An English translation exists of the first chapter on the CICP website here.
- These two components are deeply intertwined. The capitalist nature of any engineering department fundamentally conditions the technical component. Despite this, the technical component can be severed and reformulated among communist lines, whereas the business component absolutely cannot.
- See my essay Dead Labor is the Embryo of Communism.
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