3. The dialectic of capital as despotism and bourgeois freedom

In the previous section we acknowledged the importance of the Autonomist argument that human activity in society can be subsumed by capital, and that this subsumption entails antagonism. We appreciated that this understanding is a moment of truth in the understanding of capitalism. Yet we have also seen that this does not necessarily imply that attending a vocational course, hoovering, making love, sleeping, smiling at a parent, etc. are productive labor for capital and create value.[92] In this section we will see that there are in fact differences between these activities and those done within a wage-work relation, and that a view of bourgeois society as simply a social factory misses out a dialectic understanding of capital. Indeed, when the conception of society as a ‘social factory’ was used as a polemical device, it had some poignancy; but its overliteral use as a theoretical model for capitalism is too drastic and reductive.

There are in fact important differences between waged work and reproduction ‘work’, in the way the ‘command’ is given to us and how it relates to class antagonism. In the workplace, we are subjected to explicitly imposed orders, and we obey them consciously. Also, what we do is never ‘for ourselves’, but it is done for the sake of our employer’s business. The subsumption of our activity and of our aims, as well as the subsumption of the result of our activity and aim, is a real subsumption.

Outside the workplace we are ‘free’ to choose what to do, and how to do it. And we do what we do ‘for ourselves’. However, this freedom hides an indirect command of capital: in a world where ‘what I as a man cannot do, i.e. what all my individual powers cannot do, I can do with the help of money’ every need becomes necessarily subordinated to the need to play along with the market and its laws.[93] Even leisure is conditioned by what we can afford, both in terms of money, and time, since time is money. If we are in a position to spend time and resources in leisure and/or education, we may tend to spend more time in leisure and/or courses that are useful to improve or maintain our capacity to earn a wage. The mind exhaustion implied by alienated labor is likely to dictate the mindless and alienated quality of leisure — after a day’s work our brain cannot sustain more than a boring and non-involving night in front of the TV, for example. All this, is really ‘enjoyed’ ‘for ourselves’, and we do it with our free will, but it implies our subjection to the law of value.

This command is indirect in the case of the family: it is for the sake of an economic income that both husband and wife act of their own free will. Of his free will, the husband will sign a contract with an employer and will submit himself to the despotism of production for most of his active day. In the same way, of her free will, the wife will try her best to manage their home so that the husband will be able to go and earn the money they need to live.[94]

The internalization implied by commodity fetishism means that activity or work outside the sphere of production is a special ‘work’ in a special ‘factory’, where the ‘worker’ is the ‘foreman’ of himself.[95] In this special factory the command of capital is the opposite of the despotism, organization and discipline of any other factory: it is a command based on freedom. This situation implies contradictions. Paradoxically enough, the command which I impose on myself is indispensable for my submission to the explicit despotism of capital in the workplace — how would the capitalist keep me in the workplace, if I did not see my job as in my own interest? My unfreedom, my forced labor, my painful experience of being despotically commanded within production is then one side of the same coin of my bourgeois freedom outside production. A theory that sees the working class only as a chain gang forced to work under a despotic command misses that other face of capital, our domination that is one with the naturalization of the economy, of the necessity to exchange as an obvious and inevitable condition of life — the ‘arcane’ behind the fact that we reproduce capital with our ‘free’ actions and ‘free’ choices.[96]

To summarize: even if the Autonomists argue correctly that capital subsumes all society within or outside production, this does not mean that all activities are the same, and that society is a mega factory. This view is not useful, since it does not explain the differences. It is really more useful to consider the two dialectical aspects of capital, as despotism-of-production/freedom-of-exchange, and consider them in their interrelation.[97]

In the next section we show how this undialectic approach to capital can lead to politically dangerous consequences and consider Leopoldina Fortunati’s case.