Capital's Necessary Surplus Populations

We seem to live in a new machine age, a world in which automation, artificial intelligence, algorithms, and the “robotization” of the economy are causing machines to gradually displace human laborers. Where will those millions of menial workers go after our economies have been thoroughly digitized, more completely embedded in what Benjamin Bratton (2015) terms “the Stack,” that is, a planetary-wide matrix of computing power? But just as we begin to think about this terrifying prospect, Marx is already there, waiting for us, as Foucault once said of Hegel, ready to puncture the notion of total capitalist mechanization. Marx is ready to stop us in our tracks, when he writes in Capital concerning the limits to how machines replace human labor. In some particularly advanced industrialized countries, Marx writes, machines are adopted on a sufficiently large scale that they end up “creat[ing] such a superfluity of labour” that wages end up depreciating by the traditional laws of supply and demand. But when machines replace human hands and minds, wages are lowered to such an extent that it no longer becomes profitable for capitalists to replace human labor with machines; it would be more inexpensive to pay for wage-labor than to invest in automation (Marx 1976: 516). Thus, by their very actions—introducing machinery that cheapens labor below the price of those very machines—capitalists tend to generate social circumstances that undermine those selfsame actions: Machines undermine the adoption of machines by way of a social mechanism – the wage. In fact, this might be the central methodological thrust of Marx’s Capital: All things turn into their own opposite.

In Marx’s account, the consequences of this relationship between machine power and human labor are viscerally jarring. Even where machines could reasonably be used to replace raw labor-power, including in unpleasant menial work, the abundance and resultant cheapness of labor prevents the adoption of even relatively simple technology. “Before the Iabour of women and children under 10 years old was forbidden in mines,” Marx (1976: 516) writes, “the capitalists considered the employment of naked women and girls, often in company with men, so far sanctioned by their moral code…that it was only after the passing of the [Factory] Act that they had recourse to machinery.” Marx remarks scathingly that machines for breaking stones had been invented in the United States but had not been employed in England “because the ‘wretch’ who does this work gets paid for such a small portion of his labour that machinery would increase the cost of production to the capitalist” (Marx 1976: 517). In some places, instead of horses, women are employed “hauling barges,” because the capitalist can accurately calculate the costs of employing horses and machines, while the cost of keeping “the women of the surplus population is beneath all calculation” (Marx 1976: 517). In other words, cheap and docile human laborers are preferred to machines, at least in so far as they remain docile and (consequently) cheaper than machines.

The fact that these conditions no longer typically obtain in the Western world does not mean that capitalism has somehow transcended this mechanism. Rather, it suggests the enormously important role of spatial dislocation and what later Marxists termed “uneven development.” The naked, hysterical “wretches” of the Global North no longer toil in physically grueling, gruesome circumstances—they are more likely to be warehoused in a psychiatric ward or jailhouse, or work in a call center at the bottom of the “service” sector—but that is largely because capitalism has transported these forms of production elsewhere. The Norwegian writer Kjartan Fløgstad has pointed out that the industrial working class is still very much with us, contra those who have proclaimed a postindustrial age; only they are not here, they are there, out of sight of Western eyes—but one wonders if this does not “misunderestimate” the real presence of working bodies even in the capitalist core. Is not the deadening monotony of an Amazon warehouse worker, such as the English journalist James Bloodworth has studied, proof that we are still caught up in a world of proletarian labor, even in the seemingly sanitized North? Behind every smart algorithm stands a sweating, laboring body. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

This incisive analysis of the relationship between machines, wages, and human labor is typical of Marx’s method in Capital. It combines structural insights with a clear moral argument. Marx’s prophetic rage and his anger at deplorable working conditions are fueled by a moral vision about the nature of (in)justice. It is part of the general insanity of capitalism, Marx suggests, that it would prefer to work human beings to indignity, exhaustion, near-death, or even to the very end of life’s tether, rather than employ the ingenious fruits of the human mind—various labor-saving technologies—because of structural conditions that obtain under the capitalist process of production. To make this argument, of course, requires that Marx mobilizes a series of implicit moral axioms, such as the valuation of human life for its own sake and the ethical obligation to uphold human dignity. Far from being the cold, calculating menace that his detractors have sometimes made him out to be, Marx is a deeply ethical writer.

Nowhere is this more clearly on display, arguably, than in the sections of Capital that deal directly with what Marx terms surplus populations: 

[I]t is capitalist accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces indeed in direct relation with its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant working population, i.e. a population which is superfluous to capital's average requirements for its own valorization, and is therefore a surplus population. (Marx 1976: 782) 

Surplus populations are those groups in society that are not necessary to capital as it seeks to multiply itself. The figure of the surplus population hovers over nearly all of Capital, but it is in the latter stages of the first volume, in chapter twenty-five, that Marx fleshes out the term more comprehensively. But as some Marxist observers have noted, the notion of surplus populations in some ways lies much deeper in the conceptual underpinnings of Capital. Indeed, as Benanav and Clegg (2014) point out, surplus populations penetrate to the very core of Marx’s understanding of what it means to be a proletarian, this most crucial figure in Marxist political theory.

Typically, the figure of the proletarian has been understood as a person who must sell their wage-labor in order to survive: an individual who can find ways of earning a living other than through wage-labor is no longer, sensu stricto, a proletarian, so the story goes. This is the hard lesson learned by the unfortunate English capitalist described by Marx in the closing chapters of Capital, Mr. Peel, who who travels to the Swan River district of Australia with his capital (with “means of subsistence and production to the amount of £50,000” [Marx 1976: 932-933]) as well as three thousand workers (“working class men, women, and children”), only to discover upon arrival that most of his workers are able to survive off the abundance of the land they found readily on hand. Simply put, Mr. Peel’s workers discover that they no longer need him, thereby exploding their membership in the very category of the proletarian: “Unhappy Mr Peel, who provided for everything except the export of English relations of production to Swan River!” writes Marx (1976: 933). Why labor in exchange for wages to sustain life if life can be sustained through independent work on bountiful land? The men, women, and children of Marx’s story were proletarians by dint of sheer necessity; now that the conditions of necessity no longer obtain, they cease to be proletarians. But notice how this also causes Mr. Peel to cease to be a capitalist: without wage-laboring proletarians, no capitalist. The force of existential insecurity as the condition sine qua non for membership in the category of the proletarian also sustains the capitalist; once this existential insecurity is removed, the whole house of cards that is “English relations of production,” as Marx terms nineteenth-century Mancunian industrial capitalism, comes tumbling down.

To be a proletarian would seem to mean being beholden to the needs of the capitalist. A proletarian is one who is unfree, fettered to the imperative of selling labor-power in exchange for the only means of subsistence available, namely wages.But a close reading of Marx’s definition reveals that this understanding of the term is not entirely accurate. Interestingly, already at the level of definition, the proletarian figure is in some sense “always already” superfluous to the needs of capital. This is what makes Capital such an astonishing work: It’s dialectic all the way down, so to speak. Peel back the onion layers of the dense writing, and where one might expect to find a beating, pulsating heart, instead one finds contradiction, and yet more contradiction. There is no core; there is only a kind of undecided quantum state of negation heaped upon negation. Thus Marx (1976: 764n1) writes: 

‘Proletarian’ must be understood to mean, economically speaking, nothing other than ‘wage-labourer’, the man who produces and valorizes ‘capital’, and is thrown onto the street as soon as he becomes superfluous to the need for valorization possessed by ‘Monsieur Capital’, as Pecquer calls this person.

Because superfluity of labor is built into the very rhythms of capitalist accumulation, it follows that the proletarian is not just someone who is potentially “thrown onto the street as soon as he becomes superfluous,” but someone who is actually subjected to this treatment. If we accept the premise that superfluity is an integral part of the mechanism of capital accumulation, the figure of the proletarian, on the one hand, and the mass of surplus populations, on the other, are really interchangeable terms. The proletarian is a surplus population only waiting to be actualized. “The working population therefore produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous,” writes Marx (1976: 783), “and it does this to an extent which is always increasing.” The proletarian who works diligently at their assembly line is not merely producing another commodity, and not just value, but also their very non-being—their nihilation. Strangely, this means that superfluity, which would seem to be an excess to a necessary kernel or core, is in fact brought back into the very core and integrated into it. This surely violates our common-sense notion of what an excess even constitutes: to be an excess is precisely to be outside an interiority. But here we are dealing with a very strange sort of excess, one that is integral to the whole: It is both beyond and within. The proletarian, then, is the schizoid subject par excellence, the one who produces all of value, and therefore carries the entire social pyramid upon their shoulders—for where would the whole world of glittering commodities be without the toil of the proletarian?—but simultaneously produces the condition of their own undoing. The proletarian makes commodities and unmakes their categorial belonging. The proletarian produces goods for exchange and use, but also produces their own non-being. This is what Marx means by the industrial reserve army. But it is a reserve that is itself integral to the army and so stands in a strangely paradoxical, tense relationship with the social whole. To understand surplus populations, it is crucial to recognize that as soon as we take up wage-labor, which means as soon as we begin to receive wages, we are also enlisting in the ranks of an industrial reserve army. We are all reservists in the wars of capital.

References

Benanay, A. and Clegg, J. (2014) Misery and debt. In: Contemporary Marxist Theory: An Anthology. London: Bloomsbury.

Bratton, B. (2015) The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Marx, K. (1976) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Volume One). London: Penguin.

Afterlife Theodicy and the Problem of Evil

One of the most attractive theological solutions to the problem of evil is what has been termed afterlife theodicy, revolving around the extreme disjunction we may presume to exist between the scale and scope of suffering on Earth and the scale and scope of joy in Heaven. By ‘scale’ I mean the quantity of suffering and joy, respectively, and by ‘scope’ I mean the quality and duration of suffering and joy. The problem of evil withers away once we frame earthly evils, plentiful as they may appear, within their proper context of a potentially limitless, eternal bliss in Heaven. Thus, I do not mind the momentary pain of the dentist’s drill when I know that it will rid me of the toothache that has been plaguing me for weeks. More to it, I do not mind very much the toil of an eight-hour working day on Friday morning when I know that a two-day weekend is right around the corner.

Now multiply this disjunction between suffering and rewards up by an infinite degree; of course, we cannot fully perform this mental operation, perhaps not even adequately, given our limited capacity for imagining infinity, properly speaking, but we should by an act of concentrated imagination try to see before our mind’s eye what eternal joy would look like. Would I be willing to suffer a day’s worth of excruciating (ex cruce, ‘from the cross’) pain if I knew that a three-month summer vacation were waiting for me at the end of it? How about an hour’s pain and a six-month stretch of time to do with as I please – spending time with loved ones, reading, writing, traveling? Or just one minute of pain and a year’s vacation? A second of pain – and a decade of holidays? Multiply up the joy by an infinite degree, and divide the pain infinitely, too, and you will have arrived at the radical disconnection between earthly suffering and heavenly joy made available to us by God, according to the Christian worldview.

In this light, the problem of evil appears in its proper dimensions as something of a non-problem, practically speaking, a sort of optical illusion, a deceptive sleight of hand forced upon us by sensuous earthly reality and our corporeal state of being. We are embodied creatures—sentient, sensate, and suffering—and so perceive most readily the pain of our own bodies. As embodied creatures, we can only with great effort, and perhaps not even then, force ourselves to contemplate the possibility of eternal bliss (but we cannot really feel it). But if the disjunction between earth-bound suffering and heaven-sent joy is greater than that difference that obtains between a grain of sand and the vast expanse of the Sahara desert, we should, by an act of the intellect and will, force ourselves to ignore present pains and focus ourselves squarely on the possibility of our participation in Heaven’s joy. The so-called problem of evil only appears to us as a problem because we have not fully appreciated what possibilities lies in wait for us in the Kingdom of Heaven. 

Now, some thinkers do not accept this line of reasoning. The philosopher Stephen Maitzen calls this account the “Heaven Swamps Everything” theodicy (2009: 122), which is not a bad turn of phrase; but he thinks it fails to stand up to scrutiny because he believes it conflates justification and compensation. How can even a very large compensation for a relatively minor wrong meaningfully justify this wrong? It cannot, Maitzen thinks, and so the theodicy collapses. God’s allowing for evil on Earth is not justified by Heaven’s bliss; rather, the sufferings of Earth are compensated for by the joys of Heaven. But compensation implies an offense, and an offense an offender; thus, under the “Heaven Swamps Everything” theodicy, God appears to us as an offender willing to redress the injuries he has imposed on us. He is not justified, and so this account is not, sensu stricto, a theodicy in Leibniz’s terms (from Theos, “God,” and dike, “justice”). “Even if heaven swamps everything, it doesn’t thereby justify everything,” Maitzen (2009: 123) writes.

But this way of framing things falls down in its failure to apprehend what eternal bliss really entails in all its vastness: its true enormity. Our measure of things remains narrow and earthly. To be terrestrial is to be pedestrian. But Heaven is anything but pedestrian. Notions of justification, of balancing the scales, are so entirely bound up in this terrestrial realm: Who can say whether we will not feel that everything was worth it, yes, was in fact justified, by a very great reward in the end? In fact, we may not need to engage in complex mental acrobatics to see this. A woman suffering through childbirth may feel that this pain is worthwhile in light of the joy of having a child. But it is surely strange to call this child a kind of “compensation” for the trauma of birth – this word has too cool and commercial a ring to it. Why, precisely, can we not say that the pain of childbirth is “justified” by the child, when just is that which we can live with? Justice is a settlement, a settling-in, a coming-to-peace: in short, a (Hegelian) reconciliation. To justify God is to reconcile oneself with the world as it has been revealed to us by Him. The mother accepts the trauma of childbirth in the retroactive light of the joy of having the child. Similarly, Heaven’s community of saints may be able to live with the knowledge of their past sufferings in light of eternal bliss, precisely because eternity’s weightiness is capable of tipping even the heaviest of scales: eternity is a machine that fuels reconciliation; it makes the limited suffering of earthly life appear like a pinprick prior to an endless feast. 

To those who think that this introduces an intolerable subjective dimension to notions of justice, one might respond by showing that one part of the problem of justice lies precisely in its ability to make itself acceptable to our minds. In the Anonymous Sayings of the Desert Fathers, we learn of one elder [γέρων], Abraham, who recognized the validity of the afterlife theodicy in his own monastic practice: 

“The brothers begged one of the elders to refrain from his excessive labour. He answered them: “I am telling you, children, Abraham is going to be sorry that he did not strive harder when he sees the great gifts of God.” 

[Τινὰ τῶν γερόντων παρεκάλουν οἱ δελφοὶ παύσασθαι τῶν μεγάλων πόνων. Ὁ δὲ πεκρίθη αὐτοῖς· Λέγω ὑμῖν, τέκνα, ὅτι Ἀβραὰμ ἔχει μετανοῆσαι ὁρῶν τὰς δωρεὰς τοῦ Θεοῦ τὰς μεγάλας, διότι μὴ πλέον ἠγωνίσατο. (Wortley 2013, N.197)]

The original word that has been translated as “strive harder” here is a conjugated form of the verb αγωνιζομαι (agōnizomai), meaning, inter alia, to “enter a contest” (NAS New Testament Greek Lexicon); it is related to the word agonize in English and ἀγών (agōn) in Greek, which means “contest” or “competition.” If we read the Desert Father in light of this etymological connection, can we not view this terrestrial life as an agonizing contest whose potentially limitless prize at the end finally redeems the race? This was the apostle Paul’s view. As he writes, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Tim 4:7). The original Greek is instructive here: “τὸν καλὸν ἀγῶνα ἠγώνισμαι,” or “The good competition has been competed in,” translated more literally. If Paul has competed well, he can expect the sportsman’s “crown of righteousness” (ὁ τῆς δικαιοσύνης στέφανος) (2 Tim 4:8), a reference to the laurel wreaths bestowed upon victorious Olympic contestants.

The theodical project risks placing us in an overly juridical frame, suggesting that the proper logic is that of the courtroom trial rather than the heroic contest. Life is not a legal trial but a kind of game that demands good sportsmanship. And the prize is not so much a (juridico-commercial) restitutionary compensation but a freely given prize or gift, which cancels all suffering by its very magnitude. This must remain obscure in so far as one apprehends these issues legalistically, without an appreciation of how this gift is given lovingly: God is not an insurance agent but a loving parent. And it is in this light that the Desert Father’s words bear repeating: “I am telling you children, Abraham is going to be sorry he did not strive harder when he sees the great gifts of God.” It is we who must justify ourselves in the face of these “great gifts,” not God who must justify himself in the light of earthly suffering. In this sense, a proper afterlife theodicy approaches a kind of anthropodicy: a justification of earthly life in the life that lies beyond this realm.

The problem of evil depends for its subjectively felt efficacy on a distortion of scale. We misapprehend present sufferings to the degree that we fail to measure them in view of a state of eternal bliss. In the light of this everlasting joy, earthly suffering shrivels up into near-nothingness or next-to-nothingness. It is the recalibration of our distorted apprehension of the scale and scope of suffering that brings God’s goodness back into its properly excessive, superabundant form.

References

Maitzen, S. (2009) Ordinary morality implies atheism. European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 2, 107-126. 

Wortley, J. (ed.) (2013) The Anonymous Sayings of the Desert Fathers: A Select Edition and Complete English Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The Non-Believers: First Reformed (2017)

Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (2017) appears to offer an enormously appealing return to Christian social teachings. In this secular age, surely a return to Christ, in combination with some manner of left-wing doctrine, is just the sort of thing we need for a true salvation: of our souls, of our wounded social order, even of Earth itself. But if this is the message of the movie, it is only in spite of itself, for First Reformed’s account of the very structure of belief is highly ambiguous.

In the opening scenes of the film we are presented with two seemingly contradictory religious elements: on the one hand, money-grabbing evangelicals, content to allow their megachurches to be funded by dirty money from big business (the fossil fuel industry, in this case), and, on the other hand, a long-standing Christian concern with self-sacrifice in the service of a proper care for the elements of creation. First Reformed is about the disappointment of Christianity in our age: how churches are corrupted by the secular world in which they are uncomfortably ensconced. 

The main character, a priest played by Ethan Hawke, is a pained figure, passing through the after-effects of a hurtful breakup, whose body, we discover, is riddled with cancer. He works in what at first appears to be an intensely austere Protestant church: the monochromatic shots of the priest’s black habit, the whitewashed church walls, and the greyscale of the surrounding landscape, all rather heavy-handedly bring home the point that we are far removed the vibrant vitalism of Roman Catholicism. And the First Reformed Church is failing: turnout at services is dismal; the creaking old church organ finally breaks and the bathrooms are out of service and with no money to pay for a plumber. Soon, however, we learn, almost in the key of Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (i.e. through the hyper-realistic intrusion of a brand name), that First Reformed is owned by a megachurch corporation; we’re not so much in the ascetic realm of Martin Luther after all, but in the land of Mammon: this somewhat severe place of worship is in fact just the offshoot of a nearby corporate megachurch that likes to trot out the centuries-old church building of First Reformed on special occasions (when throwing glitzy gatherings of various corrupted business and “community” leaders), or to sell tourist trinkets to visiting suburban families with waning theological interest but with money to spend and a yearning for authenticity.

Though he’s not without winning traits, Ethan Hawke’s character is in many ways deeply flawed: he drinks to excess, his knowledge of religious doctrine seems middling at best, he confesses to no longer being capable of prayer (though, as he astutely notes, “the desire to pray is itself a type of prayer”), and we learn that he received this position after long military service in Iraq, more as a recognition of his heroic status as a military veteran—the US is a warrior society—than out of any recognition of his deep Christian learning. Already this is a rather depressing scene, then: here is a man who doesn’t have much of a flock to shepherd—the same handful of worshippers shows up each Sunday—and anyway isn’t very well-suited to tending it. To make matters worse, he’s dying from a tumor, whose existence he initially refuses to acknowledge, much less seek treatment for, preferring instead to douse himself in whiskey and late-night sessions hunched over a laptop researching the ecological calamities that have been brought to his attention by one of his long-suffering, suicidal parishioners, who is a kind of eco-terrorist Hollywood stock character - a Biblical Bernie Bro. It is a mark of our age that Hollywood, even the moderately “left” Hollywood that First Reformed would seem to spring from, has little inkling how to portray political activists such that they can appear to be anything but bomb-toting lunatics - fringe extremists who seem only too eager to resort to carnage rather than, say, non-violent direct action. But that is no obstacle for a movie-making left that seems to delight in broad-brush caricatures: the capitalists are all bad, all the way down, which is more perhaps more palatable a portrayal than the fact that their opponents seem to be fanatics all the way down, too. 

Paradoxically, what this movie gets right, then, is (inadvertently) its inability to portray anything like true belief: whether these be religious or political, belief as such is in this movie itself highly suspect. Those who believe are necessarily portrayed as dangerous, self-destructive types. In a way this is a deeply subversive message because it mirrors a social fact that holds true of our age: truly to hold onto any sort of coherent system of belief is already to have set oneself on a course against our age. There is something about secular capitalist modernity that seems to block off the possibility of overt belief, this movie suggests: what society seems to require of us instead is the tacit acceptance of unconscious dogmas that always seem to be capitalistic ones. Nothing could be easier in our world than to be a non-believing believer, that is, to passively accept the enormous ideological baggage of our age, which uniquely sells itself to us as the dogma of non-belief.

But now more than ever do we need some firm set of dogmas, and it is the great merit of this film that it suggests that we look into two central ideational currents: Christian social teachings and left-socialist ecology - or perhaps better yet, some combination of the two. It is this explosive combination of Christ and ecological socialism that First Reformed toys with, even if it ultimately makes for an unsatisfying filmic experience, and even if its expression in anything like concrete political action is finally left unresolved. But the ideas in this movie are good; its intentions are well-meaning: Christianity properly conceived equates to stewardship for the things of Creation within a framework of radical egalitarianism; we can at the very least discern this lesser strand of thought in the long Christian tradition. And perhaps, this movie suggests, this subterranean strand could be brought up to the surface of capitalist modernity.