In the midst of planetary economic trouble of as yet incalculable duration, where millions are thrown out of jobs and homes as trillions in asset values depreciate, where the ability of investment banks to offer competitive remuneration to their hardworking staff hinges on the ability of the government to send single mothers and the disabled in pursuit of nonexistent jobs by cutting what few benefits they can still get, where conditions of survival become more equivocal by the day as the “crisis” opens up opportunities to Western governments to budget-crunch in ways that were once only available in Eastern Europe and the “developing world” – given all this, the mainstream media and public opinion alike voice surprise that there has not been more “unrest.” Sure, there have been strikes, occupations, and the routine “bossnappings” in France, everyone is reading Capital and the leftist broadsheets exhibit the odd materialist leaning in the opinion pages, playing catch up with a financial press that has been querying neoclassical economic orthodoxy since the autumn 2008 crash. Yet, given the politicization of social reproduction announced by the bank bailouts, where the contradiction between the “we’re all in this together” rhetoric of crisis and the welfare-state cushion that saved the financial entities which had done much to precipitate it, could not have been more plain; rather more vocal expressions of discontent might have been expected among a far broader contingent that has been unwillingly “alienated” from housing, employment and the access to social status that debt-financed consumption had been promising over the last few decades. Especially when the present period is thought in conjunction with the Great Depression, the dramatic differences in social stability – once factors like the much lower rate of unemployment and the stabilization measures taken by governments this time are discounted – are hard to ignore. Altogether, the collective and subjective response to the present downturn exhibits an ironclad normality which is more insidious than it is reassuring. The political climate shifts ever further rightwards, and the de-legitimation of capitalism is yesterday’s news item already, a discursive commodity that found neither a buyer (making it socially unnecessary) nor purchaser (on social reality).

A couple of explanations could be adduced for the relative quiescence of whole populations thrown into the shit, none of which seem particularly esoteric but nonetheless have not cropped up much in the crisis-analysis generated in the Marxist and left economist redoubts. While many prognoses emanating from those quarters have a touch of the sanguine catastrophism that says “things will have to get much worse before the social movements arise which will make them better,” and that may turn out to be the case; a crucial element missing in the analysis that sees the current meltdown as a cyclical repeat of the Wall Street crash of 1929 is an inquiry into the composition of subjectivity that grounds the class relation today. This is subjectivity for which, to put it concisely, the antagonism that engenders social movements is no longer an option. Owing to decades of falling or stagnant wages, the concentration of wealth, the contraction or privatisation of the “social wage” (welfare state services), global competition, the financialization of production, and the transformation of work, labour has been de-valued and re-valorised as debt. It has been de-valued ideologically as much as economically; work has fallen below the horizon of visibility as a social fact, emptied of political significance by the long pincer movement of right-wing individualism and left-wing culturalism (although neither orientation has a basic political allegiance; the attribution is more a matter of convenience). Objectively, work can no longer provide a tenable collective or personal identity, because the ascendancy of debt as the basis of social reproduction now means that workers each individually identify their interests with capital, come to think of themselves as units of capital.

If the crisis was caused by the unwise speculation of the banks, not only did consumer debt from housing, education and credit cards provide it with a distorting popular mirror, implicating everyone, but the arena of socialised capital – workplace benefits, welfare state provision – had also been thoroughly permeated by financial mechanisms, as pension funds were tied to stock markets and local authorities invested in hedge funds to forestall budgetary cutbacks, not to mention the infiltration of welfare state agencies by commodity logic that sought to introduce “artificial markets” for reasons of pure dogma rather than dogmatic efficiency.

What all this seems to indicate is that there is no plausible ground for antagonism once the capital:labour divide has been effaced by the structural identification with capital. This also resonates with Foucault’s idea of the shift from the older liberal subjectivity of exchange to the neoliberal subjectivity of competition; the one presupposes equality and recognition, the other inequality and “merit.” Hence it is not just that the working classes, waged and unwaged, have undergone degrees of expropriation in the past few decades that came as a surprise to contemporaries of the post-war welfare-state compact – at least in Western Europe and the US – it has also been an expropriation of antagonism at a time when the contradictions between interests have never been fiercer, and the stock of legitimacy held by capitalist social relations has never been as low as it stands now.

“Waged and unwaged” is perhaps the crucial category here. The steady degradation of employment conditions means that labour cannot serve as an impetus for mobilization; fractalized and degraded working conditions make organising a joke in many cases, even if employees cared enough about their jobs to get together to improve their working conditions. The political culture of work has vanished, and it is not coming back. For this reason, all mobilization around the workplace is therefore immediately a matter of “social rights” and extends outside it, since work for its own sake cannot be sustained as an object around which political desires can circulate. Production and reproduction, the old Marxian categories that have produced so many category errors as costly political mistakes, seem to be immanent to the same terrain – the terrain that witnesses the evacuation of support for forms of life other than financial accumulation. Yet the enclosure of public goods in the pursuit of ever-attenuating profits, deteriorating infrastructure, speculation on value that will never exist, and the re-channelling of resources from production into management and security hints that production and reproduction are not only not self-evident worlds that can come together or drift apart, but that the breakdown of divisions between the terms is as much the breakdown of the two terms themselves, a breakdown observed by the term “non-reproduction.” Here it is not the ubiquity of value production, as designated by the Italian Autonomists, that creates the social factory, but the ubiquity of de-valorisation that ensures that the social field confronts capital as a whole. A whole wreck.

Producing surplus value for capital has never been more generalized, thus diffuse; because diffuse, naturalized and invisible. Nor has it ever been less tied to regular employment; it is not just the precarity of formal employment, but the monetization of the “social wage,” and the expansion of unpaid labour from bureaucracy in academia to online social networking (especially when the latter is an escape valve from “the job”). Nonetheless, the links between political subjectivity and the mode of selling labour-power have been definitively severed – resistance to capital has never been so abstract, and abstracted, from the conditions of reproduction, partially because the conditions of reproduction for many have never been at once so ruthless and so abstract. The specialized sphere of “activism” in Western countries is an unambiguous symptom of the development of this abstraction; “work is immutable, and workers are too busy for politics, so we have to turn our attention elsewhere.” Resistance has never been more internal, and more inadequate, to the material conditions that support its realization (as value) – this is notable in the currency of critique in contemporary art, for instance, even and especially when it addresses itself to the evils of exploitation or the aporias of emancipation. Selling labour-power to live has never been more conflated with life itself – this indeed conjures away any disparity between capital and labour, when they become indiscernible as variables in the compulsions of life as it is.

In other words, how do the particular features of financialized capitalism transform the possibilities for antagonism, the antagonism basic to anything that would emerge as a counter-force to the indolent lethality of domesticated crisis? Or can the antagonism really be displaced to “life” vs. “capital,” as if capital did not set the parameters for life? Can the pervasiveness of indebted life, capitalist life, be politicized, as waged work was once politicized? In what sense can we speak about an emergence of a political disposition specific to debt? Perhaps it could be illuminating to complicate this “politicization” of the wage historically in order to imagine what a communist politics that acts on the entire terrain of exploitation and doesn’t allow itself to be divided by the nature of the wage contract might look like, a communist politics that starts from the rigid but thoroughly occulted nature of class relations today.

Debt acts as a displacement of the centrality of the wage both in reproduction and to the reproduction of the social relation of capital. Earlier, social movements such as feminism (in its Marxist and socialist veins) and the benefit claimants’ unions questioned the centrality of the wage and the workplace for capitalist exploitation, as did the neighbourhood programmes of revolutionary nationalist groups in the 1960s and 70s U.S. like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords. These interrogations are ongoing: while the radical demands of Wages for Housework have been tendentially answered by the resurgence of domestic service which marks the triumph of both equality feminism and super-exploitation of migrant women with a commodification of domestic labour that echoes pre-modern times, current groups such as the Edinburgh Claimants Union and the London Coalition Against Poverty re-take the terrain of the social wage as a political arena in a time of escalating job losses and benefit cutbacks. If the realization that the “personal is political” emerged as a way to turn individual experience into systemic critique and a collective articulation that carried over the many divergent strands of the feminist movement from the days of consciousness-raising into the present, the “personal is political” can also name struggles transpiring in the field of reproduction and over the State “commons” – from unregulated domestic and service labour, to health care workers resisting privatisation, to recipients (and administrators) of benefits that organize together to resist or at least minimize the clawbacks of opportunist politicians and vicious or addled bureaucracy. The modality of the “personal” which is critical here is the failure to function as an efficient capitalist subject, which is embraced and turned back around on the structures that rely on such failures to stoke fear, create conformity and extract profit. But concurrently, the “personal” is also the support structures provided by social services, whether state-run, private or off-the-books, the work that is never thought of as work except by the people doing it. Likewise, the people who use social services are primary targets for state biopolitical agendas which are unleashed with impunity on people who are not “in work” and who can be controlled “personally” through their children, their immigration status or healthcare needs.

Marxist feminist activists and theorists such as Mariarosa and Giovanna Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici and Leopoldina Fortunati in the 1970s were responsible for pointing out the necessity of unpaid labour to the system of production dependent on waged labour. This argument can be seen as addressing surplus value production (the dependence of profit on unpaid labour) from the viewpoint of divisions within the working class which are turned to the advantage of capital, harming workers’ resistance or self-activity. The wage divides workers from one another and produces a form of discipline and identification between the interests of labour and capital (though it should be noted, given the preceding argument, that the wage preserves a dialectical mismatch between those interests, while debt coercively closes the gap where that mismatch can become a site of struggle). In this sense, debt now, as the “discovery” of unpaid labour did then, signals the erosion of prospects for collective working-class activity based in the workplace – not only because so much, if not most, capitalist work happens outside the official workplace, as the Italian autonomist feminists pointed out, but because debt-fuelled accumulation produces identities tied to consumption, not production – this could be seen as one of the key subjective political consequences of the post-1970s restructuring of the labour-capital relation – even as surplus-value extraction has intensified drastically over this time. More concretely, this would on one level be about how an effective class re-composition in the “crisis” would have to co-ordinate struggles between the employed and the unemployed, since they are targeted and divided in similar ways by capitalist austerity – as well as great numbers from the former category moving into the latter – and it would also be about how the wage can become a contested category, and the role this contestation has played in past struggles and what would have to happen for it to play this role in the present conjunction. This discussion would also link into what it might mean to consider debt in terms of the wage, both in terms of the erosion of class antagonism, and its reconstitution on different grounds. But also, importantly, how debt has been used instead of the wage for access to goods, services, as well as the self-development (entrepreneurial and education life projects) implied in the figure of “human capital” which has become objectively unavoidable as a form of life.

Some points to be elaborated here might include: - How the concept of unwaged labour producing commodity labour-power throws into crisis the distinction between productive and unproductive labour, and thus production and reproduction (Dalla Costa, Federici, Fortunati, et al); whether or how this re-framing has any relevance to the present. It likewise unsettles the analysis that sees “commodification” of services like housework as the penetration of the value-form into hitherto uncolonised areas by seeing the “family wage” as having always already implicated the household in the circuit of value production, and that “free exchange” was, and is, not free. - By emphasising the integral relation of unwaged domestic labour to the wage system, it expands the terrain of working-class politics to include all of those exploited by capital, whether in the home or on the job, or indeed at the Job Centre. - Finally, it displaces or widens the focus of class struggle beyond the formal workplace, and starts to see class phenomena in all kinds of “social movements” that contain an element of resistance to being “labour-power,” waged or unwaged, including the direct action claiming of resources (claimants’ unions, squatting, and also other emancipation struggles premised on a “marginalised” identification by the social order).

Here it is indispensable to stress that the concept of the “free worker” as originally enunciated by Marx as the one who has nothing to sell but their labour power is long overdue for revision, and the urgency of this task is inarguable at a moment where neither labour power nor sale are operating as usual, and this “usual” has also sustained considerable distortion for many years without becoming an object for political discussion. Marcel van der Linden, for example, writes that “It seems more reasonable to admit that in reality labour commodification takes many different forms, of which the free wage-earner only selling his or her own labour power is only one example.”1 Thus, it is not only the gendered division of labour which has historically played out as the difference between paid and unpaid work; it is also the elision of the many other forms of irregular, unpaid, self-exploiting, and bonded labour in working-class politics that has ensued their survival and proliferation into the present, and which positions them as central to the current phase of capitalist non-reproduction, and even such equivocal ties to the wage relation must be considered alongside the refusal of or inability to gain waged work which welfare benefits represent. All these phenomena exhibit the tenuousness of the formal labour contract as an apparatus of control and exploitation by capital and state, but also the tenuousness of such contracts for both defensive struggles and re-compositions on the terrain held, for now, by crisis management.

*This text is a revised discussion document for a workshop organised for the Summer Camp in the UK, July 2009. A fuller consideration of all these questions and some others is planned for one of the next issues of Reartikulacija.

Marina Vishmidt is a London-based writer who works on questions related to art, labour, and value.

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