If one is to superficially gaze over both arguments, it would seem that Negri and Hardt and Žižek are batting for the same team. They both start from Marx, claim that the real battle today is still against Capital and fight against the post-political realm of ordering and administration. Essentially for all the writers, Capital ruins people’s lives. However, a more detailed analysis points to a radical difference between them. Past the two competing sets of theoretical jargon they use, at the heart is a differing diagnosis of the nature and limitations of Capital. To put it simply, for Negri and Hardt, the contradictions that are immanent to capitalism produce its destruction. For Žižek the opposite applies; the contradictions immanent to capitalism create the very basis for its existence.

In this essay my aim is to show how both of the two competing theories of Capitalist subsumption of production in the end make for the two very different theories of the limits of Capital. Thus I aim to contrast Negri and Hardt’s disavowed determinism with Žižek’s Leninism. I will do this by first explaining how Negri, Hardt and Žižek look at Capital’s subsumption of productive labour. Essentially both theories emerge from an understanding of Marx. However, in the next section I will explain how the two theories diverge fundamentally on the question of immanent contradiction. By contrasting Negri and Hardt with Žižek, I wish to show how not only they have been wrong when considering the immanent contradictions in capital, but how their failure inversely feeds back into Capitalist subsumption and reproduction. Thus I aim to show how Žižek demands a return of agency to re-politicise the mass of working people across the world in order for us to break out of the loop of Capitalist subsumption.

To begin this essay, it is important to see what this theory of subsumption is and how it constructs how the different thinkers have approached the limit of Capital. As a root for each of the thinkers, Marx contended that value is borne through human activity.[1] By getting the worker to produce more than he can himself consume, the Capitalist can extract a ‘surplus-value’[2]. The labourer no longer produces for himself, but for Capital. Thus he or she no longer simply produces the quantity for him or herself, but enough for the expansion of Capital[3]. Essentially the Capitalist mystification of production, that strange movement of money that begets more money, is in fact based upon a system where the worker’s productive abilities are appropriated for the progression of Capital. Thus the primacy here is on labour. The Capitalist, in order to accumulate greater Capital, requires this labour-time. Thus we have Capital as a vampiric figure in a parasitic relationship to labour; the process of changing money into Capital, that is the addition of value into circulation of money, necessitates the involvement of a surplus-value. What is most important to this analysis though, is the Capitalist’s necessity to innovate. As the Capitalist drives for greater and greater accumulation of Capital, he requires his workers to become more and more productive[4]. As well as deepening, the Capitalist also widens his areas of interest. Value is increasingly sought from areas that traditionally were on the outside. Through the greater scope of Capitalist accumulation, new areas and territories can be subsumed within the Capitalist territory. As Deleuze and Guattari point out in Anti-Oedipus, Capital deterritorialises and reterritorialises[5]. This form of ‘imperialism’ occurs in many different realms, either geographically with the movement of imperialism (the expansion of control of commodities across the globe) or in terms new productive spaces opened up by the creativity of the worker. To put this into Deleuzian terminology, it is the worker that opens up the spaces and deterritorialises, but it is the capitalist who “axiomises the decoded flows and reterritorialises the deterritorialised flow”[6]. The point of this ‘reterritorialisation’ is to place this area of productivity within a field of exploitation as a means for the Capitalist to extract wealth. Commodification here is the important term. The capitalist aims to turn whatever he or she can into a commodity, in order to extract this wealth from the object of production. With Negri and Hardt as well as Žižek, the boundaries of this reterritorialisation are in theory infinite[7]. This means then that Capital can territorialise material objects and, fundamentally for Negri and Hardt’s analysis, immaterial objects.

The movement into immateriality is important in two ways. Obviously it shows that Capital moves into new territories, constantly re-ordering and structuring the productive forces in order to extract surplus-value. What else this immaterial nature of labour shows is how labour has fundamentally shifted in the new ‘information economies’[8]. As the worker is no longer fixed to a stable object, but inversely is purely variable then it goes without saying that symptomatically the productive time of the worker no longer constitutes time in the factory, but also time outside the factory[9]. Work now permeates all of life, one can be productive not only at the desk, but in the bath, in the car to work and even sleeping (one has only to be reminded of the Chemist, Friedrich August Kekule, who thought of the hexagonal structure of Benzene in his sleep[10]). All of this creative time thus fundamentally can be subsumed into capitalist production.

In this respect Capital appears as dead, inert simply reacting to the drives and movements of the productive energies of the workers, or as Negri and Hardt put it ‘the Multitude’[11]. For Žižek when he quotes Marx saying “[with Capital] all that is solid melts into air; all that is holy is profaned”[12] he shows how Capital functions in a system that has no solid consistency. In his analysis of Negri and Hardt’s Empire, he identifies capital with the electron. The electron has the mass of its still weight and its weight in movement. However paradoxically, the electron has no mass when stationary; its only mass exists in its movement. This is precisely the ontology of Capital, and especially for the late, ‘turbo-capitalism’ at work within the Empire[13]. Within this theory then Capital’s ethereal, spectral quality of zero-density thus gives it the power not only to exploit and constrain the productive abilities of the workers, but also have no positive structure causing intransigence in face of new productivity.

The imperialism of Capitalism here is vitally important. Through its elasticity Capital can accommodate a myriad of different practices of production and resistances[14], not only rendering them powerless, but fundamentally putting them on the inside of production. Global Capitalism thus has no definite outside, no part of the world where value cannot be extracted and commodities can be made[15]. Not only can Capital tolerate this creativity of different production, but fundamentally is needs it in order for new wealth. These two fold imperatives, of incessant technological innovation and movement to the outside allows the Capitalist to earn more than he or she pays his or her workers. The capitalist paradigm of exploitation is not simply paying the workers less than they deserve, that is paying them less than their ‘labour-power’ costs, but in creating a ‘use-value’ greater than the product of the commodity, and then appropriating the value^[16]. Functioning in a closed system thus can never function for Capitalism; it constantly requires that outside in which the ‘use-value’ can function. As Marx tells us, “the metamorphosis, this conversion of money into capital, takes place both inside the sphere of circulation and outside it”[17]. This concept here is of course vitally important. In the constant circulation and movement of Capital, without an outside forming a new territory in which to enter, the entire system cannot reproduce itself. Within a closed system, the worker as a producer and the worker as a consumer cannot function as an equilibrium. The worker must produce more than he can consume, and as the Capitalist works to accumulate Capital rather than simply commodities, he or she cannot simply consume that surplus either. Negri and Hardt here quote Marx when he claims “A precondition of production based on capital is therefore the production of a constantly widening sphere of circulation, whether the sphere itself is directly expanded or whether more points within are created as points of production”[18]. Capital thus requires this outside, new areas in which to move Capital in, in order to regenerate the same process of accumulating value. This outside thus, as shown by immaterial labour, is not simply moving production to a new geographical area, but also within a new area of production. Capital now territorialises new fields of production, be they communicative, ideational or the production of thought.

As we can see, the ‘zero-weight’ of Capital allows it to feed of an infinite level of human productive ability. With no positive mass, Capitalism functions not as a productive entity, but as a way of structuring the productive capacities of the worker. This is where the immense power of Capitalism comes from, the ability to control the very means of production that the worker channels his or her productive ability into. Negri and Hardt assert that today, our passage to Empire creates a point where the entire social terrain has been touched and subsumed by Capitalist exploitation, now every part of production, even cultural, now falls under the capitalist paradigm eluded to above[19].

At this point, I wish to progress this essay onto how Negri and Hardt view the limitation of Capitalist subsumption. I aim to briefly analyse how Negri and Hardt’s non-dialectical view of the relationship between Capital and labour, or to use their terminology, Empire and the Multitude.

The first point here to be aware of is that generally, Negri and Hardt follow much the same view of Marx’s theory of subsumption. However, combining it with Foucault theory of Bio-politics and Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, we have a new sense of this theory of subsumption. Essentially, the entire plain of existence is one of pure immanence. Nothing exists outside of this field, which contains Capital/Empire and Labour/the multitude. What is interesting here though that the multitude is responsible for Empire. All productive ability occurs from the multitude, including the production of repressive apparatus constituted upon it by the forces of Empire, “the Multitude called Empire into being.”[20] Bio-politics here denotes the reterritorialisation of productive bodies within a capitalist system of subjectivity. Negri and Hardt here claim that “[Capital] thus produce[s] not only commodities but also subjectivities. They produce agentic subjectivities within the biopolitical context: they produce needs, social relations, bodies, and minds – which is to say, they produce producers”[21].

What is apparent here is that the system of re-production of subjectivities – that is the production of the producers – is that this system is a thick one, not simply economic, but social, political and cultural. The effect of the constant deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of different plains of production is that increasingly every aspect of life becomes subsumed within this biopolitical codification of life. What is vital here to understand is that this process itself is de-centred and deterritorialised, that Empire does not feed off a centre, but is produced in a rhizomatic network of relations subsumed into the system of production. This relationship, to add yet more jargon, is decidedly autopoietic; that is, it creates “social fabrics that evacuate or render ineffective any contradiction”.[22] The reproduction of subjectivities thus is de-linked from any specific territorial formation of traditional, ‘nation-state’, power. It is this network, controlled by an immanently subsumed Capitalist order of reproduction. Freedom is this context is not the absolute freedom of the infinite productive power of the multitude, but the freedom-for-Capital, that is the axiomisation and regulation of every eruption of life and creativity. One has only to think of the way that the radically nihilistic, anti-capitalist movement of punk that emerged in the late 1970s questioning the structure of everyday life, only to be subsumed into the body of Capital[23]. The grand irony here seems to be that any attempt to leave the body of Capital, to find the outside simply opens up new and original spaces for deterritorialisation by Capital.

However, Empire is not a tragedy, but a comedy. This is the crux of the essay, that moving into this new way of thinking, proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, we can see how the axiomisation and reterritorialisation of production flows and processes sets off immanent contradictions based upon Empire’s need to both free the productive abilities of the multitude and at the same time constrain and repress that very impulse. What we have here is what Marx told us many generations ago; the limit of capital is capital itself.[24]

As I said earlier in the introduction, with Negri and Hardt’s Empire, there seems to be at work a kind of determinism, that it is the material objects, almost a transcendent logic at play outside of the conscious play of human subjectivities. However this is a very wrong way of thinking about Negri and Hardt. The idea of a limit to Capitalist subsumption occurs on a new ontological plane. This ontological analysis is fundamental to Negri and Hardt, as this is the true site of the struggle between Empire and the Multitude. It is this coming ontological drama/comedy where “Empire becomes its own critique and its process of construction becomes the process of its overturning”[25] that Negri and Hardt address their determinism. Of course, this determinism is not “the schema of an ideal teleology that justifies any passage in the name of a promised end… [it is] aiming to subvert the hegemonic languages and social structures and thereby reveal an alternative ontological basis that resides in the creative and productive practices of the multitude”[26]. This of course gives sense to the idea that the means for revolution are immanent to the body of the multitude. It seems simply that as Empire progresses, grows and subsumes the entire body of the multitude that these contradictions, the violence, exploitation and misery that Empire imparts onto the multitude go from being implicit to explicit. As Deleuze and Guattari asset, the schizoid movement of deterritorialisation that Capital seems to have hijacked, in order to attain greater productivity, that is to push that schizoid essence further, ends in the complete deterritorialisation of Capital itself[27].

This is central to the ‘new leftism’ that Negri and Hardt propose. They rigorously oppose fellow comrades on the left who oppose the movement of Globalisation/Empire. While Empire may be even more barbarous and evil than the national-state imperialism of pre-World War Two, at step backwards advocated by some on the left, to re-empower the nation state is fundamentally wrong[28]. The globalisation of Capital increases its proximity to its own limitations, as no longer can it subsume anything else, the real alternative to Empire occurs within it[29].

So if we are to step back a second and analyse Negri and Hardt’s argument, it seems pretty clear that Empire exists as a functionality of historical movement, that is to say the contradictions are systemic to the functioning of Empire. For a progressive reconfiguration of social, economic and political relations we do not want to look for a transcendent being (God, reason, etc), a regression back to previous formations of sovereignty (the nation-state) or even a traditional Marxist revolution (based upon previous theories territorialized Capital) but as something that occurs within the present creative possibilities of the multitude.

However, that other giant on the contemporary Left, Slavoj Žižek, offers a fundamental criticism of Negri and Hardt’s ontological analysis of global ‘turbo-Capitalism’. This criticism emerges from the idea of Capitalist subsumption. While Negri and Hardt do seem to view Capitalism’s infinite ability to subsume the productive abilities of Labour, they seem to preserve a ‘non-place’ where the Capitalist impulse no longer can reach; this of course being the multitude’s revolutionary site. For Žižek however, the point is thus: “how do we define, exactly, the moment… at which the capitalist relation of production become an obstacle to the further development of the productive forces? Strict analysis leads to only one possible answer: never.”[30]

Here there is a slight, but altogether vital, shift in our understanding of Capital. The best way to think about Žižek’s Capitalism is to place an emphasis on the idea of surplus, that in Capitalism is the surplus value, but also in Lacan as surplus-enjoyment. Within previous modes of production, “the relations of production are in accordance with the productive forces, then those forces develop and outgrow their ‘social clothes’… this becomes an obstacle to their further development, until social revolution again co-ordinates forces and relations.” Capitalism, though, is fundamentally different. Instead of reaching a limit that no long allows it to function within the ‘social clothes’ (read here the capitalism’s social bedfellow, liberal-democracy), the very discord that broke down previous relations of production is “contained in its very concept… it is this internal contradiction which compels capitalism to permanent extended reproduction.”[31]

Thus we return to the problem with immanence. In contrast to Negri and Hardt who claim that the conditions for a new socio-economic order are immanent to the present system, Žižek asserts a contradictory assertion. Like desire that functions on its own negation, which is the process to achieve its completion leaves a surplus, a surplus that functions to cause that very desire, Capital functions within its own negation. That is the possibility for Capitalism’s reproduction is immanent within the very logic of its own negation. The internal contradiction thus drives Capitalism forward and forward[32]. Capitalism functions in a wholly unstable fashion – at the heart is an imbalance, a lack that drives permanent reproduction, putrefying itself as it moves on. Just how enjoyment only emerges in its surplus, Capitalist production can only occur in its surplus. As soon as it stands still, Capitalism dies.[33]

All this of course in some ways does not seem to rock Negri and Hardt’s boat too much. In Žižek’s criticism of Empire, past the rudimentary dismissal of “Deleuzian jargon”[34], one can see how Žižek’s approach to Marxism creates a context that Negri and Hardt’s theory of the immanent contradictions within Capitalism inversely feeds back into the very functioning of it. While Negri and Hardt seem to acknowledge this fact in Empire[35], the reliance on the process appears problematic for Žižek. By process, I am referring to how Negri and Hardt posit the fact that the site for post/counter Empire exists on the site of Empire itself, as a product of the internal contradictions. As Empire moves into social production, the demarcation between the sphere of economics and politics are qualitatively blurred; economic production becomes political production. Finance Capital’s deterritorialisation and nomadism thus instead of being part of the forces needed to be destroyed, inversely for Negri and Hardt, become the germ of the new “absolute democracy of the multitude”[36].

For Žižek, this will not do. Essentially for Žižek, Empire has the structure of a chocolate laxative; the cure exists within the body that causes the constipation/exploitation.[37] What the problem with Chocolate laxative is is that the while the content changes, with the removal of antagonistic quality, the form remains the same. Essentially, calling it the ‘immanent productive capacities of the multitude’ seems in some ways to be claiming a transcendent being that will perform revolution for us. Žižek points out that Negri and Hardt are “too Marxist”.[38] Like Marx himself Negri and Hardt seem to be fascinated by Capital’s progressive deterritorialising spirit, and end up playing the old ‘objective history’ card. Like the accountant from the world bank who visits a third world country ravaged by poverty, destitution and civil antagonism but responds with a report claiming a rosy future because of low levels of inflation, Negri and Hardt place an unflinching belief in an objective movement of history, that late Turbo-Capitalism’s processes create the basis for a new post-Capital mode of socio-economic structure. The fundamental problem for Žižek here is that Marx was wrong. Instead of Marx’s belief in Capitalism’s productive forces as the seat for a new world, Žižek contends that it is Lenin that provides the basis for a post-Capitalist world.

So, what do we mean by a ‘return to Lenin’? A return to Lenin not in the literal sense, but “Lenin-in-becoming, the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown into a catastrophic new constellation in which old coordinates proved useless”[39]. Instead of then simply waiting for those immanent contradictions that will work and play creating the nomadic and deterritorialising impulses of the multitude to disentangle themselves of Capital, Žižek commands us to make that fundamental cut with the previous structures, the emergence of agency. The task of the modern leftist is not simply search for a revolution without the essential agency of the present, which is the revolution without revolution, the diet, fat-free revolution, but to enact the possibilities for change not through a continuation of the present conditions but to perform that radical cut with them. Like how Rosa Luxemburg criticised Eduard Bernstein’s revisionist interjection against early revolution before ‘objective conditions had ripened’, Žižek would contend that revolution, action against the status quo, “are necessarily ‘premature’: the only way for the working class to reach its maturity, to await the arrival of the ‘appropriate moment’ for the seizure of power, is to form itself, to educate itself for this act of seizure.” Almost paradoxically then, the only point when the ‘objective circumstances’ for revolution and change are achieved is through the actual event of a revolution[40]. Change thus does not evolve, in the constant putting itself off of the act, to divulge it into a meta-objective functioning of historical teleology, but inversely by performing the very act with a real human agency, this is what fundamentally causes the critical mass.

Unlike Negri and Hardt’s view of the dynamic, networked economy, Žižek claims that modern political and economic life is stale and lifeless, controlled by a Denkverbot, a barrier to thought beyond the status-quo[41]. Against Negri and Hardt’s emphasis on the continuation of Empire’s deterritorialising flows across every social and geographical plain, Žižek implores us not to let this process just continue with the hope that it will either destroy itself materially (ecological disaster) or immaterially (the critical mass of the desires of the multitude). As we have seen the immanent contradictions within Capitalism are the very conditions for its functioning. Without an adequate political agency to this, Capital’s ability to subsume every material and immaterial challenge will contain and deflect any opposition. An example Žižek gives here is in the face of climate change raising global temperatures, entrepreneurs are buying up land around the frozen Canadian Hudson Bay ready for sea-side apartments[42].

What comes out of Žižek’s criticism is a different understanding of historical functions. Of course here, the impulse is a Leninist one, both to enact the future now and to “suspend the stale, existing (post) ideological coordinates, the debilitating Denkverbot in which we live; it simply means we are allowed to think again”[43]. The Seattle G7 riots proved the tactic problem of a movement without a clear emphasis or goal. The critical and revolutionary voice of the movements were effectively neutered by the convening press claiming that Marxists were “manipulating the crowd of ‘honest’ protestors”, and Bill Clinton claiming that the members of the summit should “listen to message of the demonstrators”[44]. The problem then is by containing the revolutionary potential of the multitude in a meta-historical ‘determinism’, the ability to politicise and energise a political movement could be diminished. It is not enough to claim ‘we have history on our sides’; a truly revolutionary movement requires the active politicisation of a group of people in order destroy the previous political regime. As stated above, the ‘zero-mass’ quality allows Capital to subsume every antagonistic movement against it, not simply in terms of a strategy for toleration, but as a means of its actual existence. It’s very ‘condition of impossibility’ is simultaneously its ‘condition of possibility’[45]. The problem then is that instead of immaterial labour’s ability expose the immanent contradictions of Capital through an alignment of economic and social production instead continues the path of subsumption into Capitalist subjectivity. The proper move here is not though a return to localism, but the active intervention, or in Lacanian, the act that makes palpable what is hidden. This is the precise site of Lenin; the actor who’s agency creates that cut, the ability to transcend subsumption through a proper political intervention. That is the precise need for any revolutionary movement that exists today, to ensure a political understanding that allows both the hidden structures of power that subsume and nullify other revolutionary activities to be revealed, and the appropriate means for the destruction of that order.

To conclude then, through looking at the problem of subsumption, this essay has shown how the differences in conceptual framework of Negri and Hardt, and Žižek create a radically different understanding of the relationship between Capital and Labour. The essay began by analysing the standard Marxian theory of subsumption, claiming that capital functions in a parasitic fashion, appropriating the creativity productive qualities of Labour through the acquisition of ‘surplus-value’. Essentially, as the productive capabilities of Labour are infinite, the Capitalist ability to subsume has to be a reactive force, changing itself and the productive abilities of the worker in an ‘autopoeitic’, co-constitutive way.

For Negri and Hardt, the ontological shift in to immaterial production blends economic and social linkages. As Capital now extracts wealth from material productivity to social productivity including communication, ideas and representations, the multitude generates its own site of work, making the necessity for Capital less and less. While Negri and Hardt generally reject ‘determinism’ and ‘teleology’, it is clear that by emphasising the immanent defeat of Capital by the multitude, the are eluding to an objective historical process almost out of the hands of human agency. Žižek by contrast rejects this notion, emphasising the role of particular subjective engagements into the socio-economic arena. By disavowing agency to an external historical process, Negri and Hardt are ignorant to the subjective interventions of real humans that make history flow in the manner it does. This is the reason for Žižek’s privileging of Lenin, but to “ignite the utopian spark [of the]… field of possibilities that he opened up.”[46]

 —

Written by: Paul McGee
Written at: Exeter University
Written for: Dr William Large
Date written: April 2008

Further Reading on E-International Relations

• Globalisation, Agency, Theory: A Critical Analysis of Marxism in Light of Brexit
• Outside of Critical Theory, What Has Marxism Contributed to Understanding IR?
• How, if at all, Does Hierarchy Exist Both in the Theory and Practice of IR?
• Shaping the Transnational Capitalist Class: TNCs and the Global Economy
• How Has the Evolution of Production Chains Affected Women and Children?
• Is Automation Liberating? The Flawed Optimism Of Postcapitalist Visions