Impetus
Introduction to “Alienable Activity: Post-Labor and Its Synthesis with Anti-Work Theory”
Inspiration for this essay came to me spontaneously after I had listened to some audio clips of ICT essays critiquing Communization and Gilles Dauvé, a prominent but controversial Communization theorist. There was a lot of valid criticism, in particular of Dauvé and his opportunistic and brazen writing style, but there were also parts that made me question the mental faculties of whoever wrote the essays. Regardless, I came upon a split with the left-communist writers on the concept of Labor.
In one of the essays, the writer remarks on how Dauvé recollected:
“In 1846, Marx argued that ‘the communist revolution is directed against the preceding mode of activity’ and ‘does away with labour’ (German Ideology, Part I, D).”
This similarly follows the dialectic of some Communization theorists of the thesis-antithesis relationship of Capital and Labor, meaning that the synthesis would involve the abolition of Labor and not the liberation of Labor, which Marx also reflects on in the same passage. Dauvé then traverses a strange tangent about how Marx wanted to preserve one aspect of Capital while also having a poor analysis of the relationship between use-value and exchange-value in order to opportunistically support the dialectic common among his area of Communization theory.
While I agree with the idea of this dialectic, I feel like it is difficult for other communists (and those that claim to be) to understand what radicals like myself mean by abolishing Labor. In the relationship of capitalism, Labor has created the conditions for Capital and thusly creates Capital itself, if but indirectly. Labor is the prime source of Value outside of land and nature (raw materials). Adam Smith himself postulates that product is what arises from the mixing of a man’s labor with the land, to paraphrase. Dead Labor, after all, is what constitutes the enigma of Capital itself. All Capital, prior developed materials, and machinery carries with it the corpses of prior Labor inputs. Labor thus creates its antithesis, and the dialectic was shifted as civilization and capitalism expanded and grew strong enough to revolve the image of the dialectic and take on the image of taking retroactive charge of the dialectic.* However Labor itself is not always leading towards Capital. Marx notes that there was often Labor in pre-capitalist economies that would produce non-exchange products, such as clothing in a serf family’s home, simply for its use-value, whereas capital requires exchange-value. Marx argues later in his life that in order for Labor to be liberated it must remove its alienation from oneself (work — wage-labor) to the point that Labor becomes “life’s prime want” as he says in Critique of the Gotha Program.
Labor must be liberated. No one who knows what this means argues against this. Even the abolition of Labor itself requires a liberated labor, similar to how the revolution that eliminates the proletarian class requires the liberation of the proletariat, even in an accelerated conditions. However, Labor’s liberation is not the end of liberation. Activity itself must be liberated from the constraints of Labor. Just as the Post-Left requires the distinction from the left (its origin), and the Post-Marxists from the Marxists, and the Post-Civilization Anarchists from Civilization, Post-Labor requires that Labor be distinguished in a proper and functional way from both Work and Activity. I can only imagine the reactions other communists (and socialists of any ilk) would have to this concept. Let’s continue to a closer look at the relationship of Labor and Activity.
First we must have a concept of what Labor really means, when we say we wish to abolish labor, or wish to live beyond Labor, or post-Labor. For this we distinguish Labor as being alienable activity, not activity alienated in and of itself, as Work is to Labor.Well, then, what constitutes an alienable activity? It is that which has the potential to alienate from oneself what one does. This means production alienated from its consumption. The tandem of these relations, their dialectic, is in the contents of Labor. Whether form of consumption is delayed, the rights to which sold, or exchanged through barter, the relationship determines the alienability of the Labor, not whether the Labor is alienated or not. That is what Work determines.
Labor is therefore anything that can be taken advantage of, and Work is what is taken advantage of. One of the functions of alienation, or taking advantage, would be exchange, or indirect consumption. Let’s use blacksmithing as an example. Say someone wants to create a sword for an armory. Let’s not assume who owns the armory, because this is occurring in a vacuum. If it helps you can either consider it the blacksmith’s individual armory or a community armory. The blacksmith gets to work on the blade, and creates whatever quality the blade. It doesn’t really matter how long he took or how good the blade is. He realizes he needs a handle. He offers something in exchange for the handle from the leatherworker, and thus takes advantage of the leatherworker’s Labor. How well the leatherworker was compensated also doesn’t matter, the Labor was alienated. Consider also if the blacksmith decides to give or exchange his sword to someone who desires it, he has also been alienated from himself, from his production, from his actions, his activity. The point here is not to point out the issues with exchange but to point to the air of potentiality within the creation of products. A product is not a commodity until it is commodified through exchange. Even still the creation of a product is an alienable activity, or Labor, because it can be exchanged, can be commodified, can be taken advantage of. As previously stated, it still doesn’t matter that one was compensated nor how much.
Of course, this being said, what can be done to alleviate our condition from Labor? The first step is to alleviate our condition from Work. The next step is to alleviate our condition from our semiotics of Capital and Ideology.
Much akin to how Théorie Communiste say in Much Ado About Nothing, the liberation of labor becomes its realization and self-perpetuation in the form of counter-revolution. What this means is that work (and consequently Labor) become the focus and impetus of the counter-revolution, as the organs of the proletariat, which were designed to protect the proletariat within Capital, become that which perpetuates Labor. From this we can understand that in order to overcome Labor, the proletariat (or the Imaginary Party, the other revolutionary subject I entertain) must become opposed to Organized Labor, the last Vestige of Work’s ideology. When Work presents itself as the counter-revolution, the revolution becomes one against Work itself, and against Labor’s realization and affirmation. When the liberation of Labor from Work is complete, what arises is the need to move beyond Labor. The counter-revolution is now the social, the semiotics of our activity being alienated, of difficulty as labor. Alienating the difficult and harmful parts of life is still alienating life, especially when we give it a name. If we wish to end alienation our goal is not to get rid of all hardships, but to be able to act on them in completeness with our actions. Not to have hardship be a part of life to regret, but a hardship that makes life empty of regret. When we fail to alienate our hardship, we control and autonomously “own” all of our actions. We aren’t distinct from our actions of “labor”, but not in our atomized forms under Capitalism, but under a manifestation of our desires and our organic coalescence. All of our activity belongs to autonomy. All our autonomy is collective. All our collectives are unalienable. Until the end of Labor and Work, we will continue to act towards our own liberation, and the liberation of the world, proletariat, Imaginary Party, the people, humans, animals, and the biosphere from Capitalism.
* Some people consider this Late(-Stage) Capitalism, Decadent Capitalism, Post-Modernism, Simulation and Simulacra, Empire, or Semiotic Capital. Whichever method or name you prefer, the point remains that the image is that of Capital assuming the dominant role of the dialectic, whether that is or is not the case.
