Notes on Communism and Transition

Marxism is often associated with a stagist, linear model of history. This essay draws from the traditions of Marxist internationalism to challenge that misconception. It emphasizes the multiple and overlapping temporalities within Marxist thought. Recognizing the coexistence of differing economic forms broadens our capacity to recognize political tendencies in the present and resources for building communism.

What does the concept of “transition” presuppose? Does transition make sense only if you know exactly where you have been and where you will end up? Does it rest, in other words, on an unstated premise of linear temporality? Or, if past and present intermingle, if the past remains and the future is uncertain, are we stuck in a sort of endless now, caught in the cliché where the more things change, the more they remain the same such that we fail to identify transformations occurring right before our eyes? Whether in theory or practice, many of us resort to an imprecise “always,” ontologizing when we could be historicizing, falling prey to various pessimisms because things are clearly getting worse. Assuming not only that transition rests on linear temporality but also that it presupposes progress, we see no progress and so push transition aside, forfeiting the opportunity to understand why things are changing and how we might intervene to push them in one direction rather than another.

Marxists have long grappled with the question of transition. Broadly speaking, in Marxist theory “transition” points to the problem of fundamental systemic change, of how we get from present oppression to future emancipation. How is social, political, and economic transformation possible? How does one kind of society and mode of production become another one? The question tends to be posed as the alternative of reform or revolution, the issue of stages of historical development and periods of revolutionary struggle, the determining dynamic of technological innovation, or even the classic political theory dilemma of how people who have grown up in chains might build a free society. Some of the most enduring Marxist debates over transition take up how capitalism arises out of feudalism and how communism might arise out of capitalism.¹ The parallel between the two transitions rests on an unstated premise: we know where we are going; the question that matters is how we get there.

Often overlooked by both Marxists and their critics are approaches to time and history that conflict with developmentalist assumptions about history's linear progression from slavery, feudalism, and capitalism to socialism and communism. While also part of Marxist theory and practice, these more complex temporalities are less inspirational than promises of victory in the epochal struggles of world history that the working masses are destined to win. They are also harder to stereotype, resistant to the quick anticommunist dismissals of orthodoxy that pass for critique. The complex temporalities interwoven throughout Marxist theory allow for overlap and incompleteness, processes associated with earlier modes of production coinciding with those of later modes.² Reversals and retrogressions subvert presumptions of a straightforward march to a certain future. Development is uneven, inextricable from de-development. Features associated with one period or category slide into those of the period left behind or entered into, deconstructing the very idea of transition. Perhaps we never really get anywhere at all.

Examples of Marxist theory's complex temporalities bring out the unevenness and heterogeneity that linear stagism obscures. These challenges to a reductive reading of Marxism provide important context for reconsidering Étienne Balibar's and Antonio Negri's discussions of communist transition and how they might speak to the present. In a scoundrel time of political stasis in the face of intensified global inequality on a rapidly overheating planet, the assumption that building communism—much less socialism—is the next task on the historical agenda seems like a holdover from a dated and defeated ideology. I show how reframing Balibar's and Negri's contributions from the seventies in light of the temporal unevenness always part of Marxist thought signals specific challenges in the present, illuminating not certainties but alternatives, tendencies the unfolding of which is inextricable from political struggle. We must eschew the futility that blinds us to change, not out of false hope but to better recognize what and why to fight.

The Old Endures

Let's consider some of the complex temporalities significant in Marxist analysis.

Already in the preface to the first edition of Capital, Karl Marx (1977: 91) contrasts the development of capitalist production in Europe with that in England: “Alongside the modern evils, we are oppressed by a whole series of inherited evils, arising from the passive survival of archaic and outmoded modes of production, with their accompanying train of anachronistic social and political relations.” Capitalist production coexists with prior modes of production, as well as with non-bourgeois and noncapitalist ideologies and practices such as feudal political and legal forms. Considering the United States, Marx underscores how slavery, ostensibly a past economic form, was indispensable to the capitalistic production of cotton for the world market, compounding “civilized” with “barbaric” horror (and thereby undercutting the conceits of the so-called civilized) (345). Marx's political writing expresses a similar sense of the weight of the “traditions of dead generations.” In “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” he famously says that “men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past” (Marx 1994: 188). Elements from the past persist in the present; existing in the present, they are features of the present impacting human action. The present doesn't erase the past. It preserves it.

Marx and Friedrich Engels also recognize that economic forms ostensibly rendered obsolete can reappear. In a set of letters from December 1882, Engels writes to Marx that he is glad that they “proceed in agreement” regarding the reappearance of serfdom in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries after it had virtually disappeared in Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Engels criticizes the historian George Ludwig von Maurer (whose work he had been studying) for presuming “steady progress to better things” since the Middle Ages.³ Although it's common to present Marxism as a theory of history's march from slavery, through feudalism, to capitalism, socialism, and onward to communism, Marx and Engels resist reduction to a linear, progressive theory of historical change. Especially in their later writing, capital does not overthrow feudalism, bursting loose from its fetters and establishing itself once and for all. Transition is extended, complex, reversible, and uncertain.

Vladimir Lenin, too, resists reduction to linear history. His political moves in this regard are well known: his insistence that the Bolsheviks prepare for—and lead—a socialist revolution in a country where capitalism had barely developed; his introduction of capitalism (the New Economic Policy) as a necessary tactical retreat from the project of building socialism following the economic devastation of civil war. The very premise of Lenin's theory of the state in the transition to communism is the endurance of bourgeois forms during the socialist phase: “Remnants of the old, surviving in the new, confront us in life at every step, both in nature and in society” (Lenin 1917).

Lenin's analysis of the emergence of capitalism in Russia likewise evinces an understanding of transition as open, complex, and honeycombed with contradictory tendencies and forms. He details the differentiation among the Russian peasantry: upper, middle, and poor peasants; various forms of ownership, labor extraction, and payment (including wage labor); the persistence of the coercive practices associated with serfdom after its official abolition in 1861. Lenin pays particular attention to the transition to capitalist agriculture from the “corveé” (barshchina) form of agricultural labor. The corveé system relied on peasants providing lords with labor-services: peasants held land and tools but depended on access to land that remained in the lords’ possession, land such as watering places, woods, and meadows. In principle, peasants agreed to work for the landlords in exchange for rights of access; in practice, they were often directly coerced. The capitalist agricultural system relied on waged workers. Whether hired seasonally or as day laborers, these peasant workers didn't use their own tools, and they had to work for hire (sell their labor power) because they had no land (lacked means of subsistence). Important to Lenin is less the distinction between the corvée and capitalist forms of agricultural labor than their coexistence during the transition to capitalism. The combination of dissimilar systems, he tells us, “leads in practice to a whole number of most profound and complicated conflicts and contradictions” (Lenin 1899). Lenin continues: “Life creates forms that unite in themselves with remarkable gradualness systems of economy whose basic features constitute opposites. It becomes impossible to say where ‘labor-service’ ends and where ‘capitalism’ begins.”

Rosa Luxemburg (2003: 346) argues that capital accumulation depends on “non-capitalist social strata and forms of social organization.” Marx had already emphasized the “primitive accumulation” at capital's origins, drawing out the violence of colonialism as well as domestic processes whereby producers were separated from the means of production. Luxemburg highlights capital's ongoing dependence on an outside that it expropriates through violent means, employing “force as a permanent weapon” (351). While Luxemburg attends to slavery and serfdom, her prime example is European colonial expansion, carried out “by a relentless battle of capital against the social and economic ties of the natives, who are also forcibly robbed of their means of production and labor power” (350). She looks closely at French colonialism in Algeria; British colonialism in India, China, and South Africa; and the forced removal and killing off of Indigenous people in the westward expansion of the United States. In all the lesson is the same: the capitalist economy develops in and depends on a noncapitalist outside that it violently subdues—and this very process of subjugation intensifies capital's imperialist, lawless violence by rendering ever scarcer the outside on which capital depends.⁴

Focusing on colonialism in Africa, Walter Rodney deepens Luxemburg's argument. Capital doesn't simply depend on a noncapitalist or precapitalist outside that could potentially enter the world trading system and eventually catch up. Capital, particularly in its imperialist phase, actively underdevelops huge parts of the world. What looks like forward movement, development, from one angle is exploitation, oppression, and underdevelopment from another. Countries aren't simply at different stages along a path heading in one direction. Africa's integration into the capitalist world economy is precisely what renders it exploited and dependent. Rodney (2018: 12) is writing in the early 1970s, a time when “the capitalist epoch is not quite over.” He observes that “those who live at a particular point in time often fail to see that their way of life is in the process of transformation and elimination” (12). Rodney thinks that the capitalist system is “rapidly expiring” in the wake of fifty years of socialist success. Yet he warns that “modes of production cannot simply be viewed as a question of successive stages” (12). Not only has socialism not replaced capitalism, but capitalist exploitation of underdeveloped countries is expanding and intensifying their underdevelopment. Multiple political and economic forms coexist, but hardly peacefully.

René Zavaleta Mercado (2018: 188) shows how Spanish colonialism created a “deeply ingrained seigneurial-servile culture” in Bolivia.⁵ He considers the ostensible paradox of a “formally capitalist sector” in an environment that was not capitalist (113). The silver mines of Potosí that made European capital possible didn't make that region capitalist. They produced for a world market, but not capitalistically. The mines’ owners weren't capitalists in any strong sense. Their mentality was feudal, seigneurial, a mentality that became permanently inscribed in the Bolivian oligarchy. Instead of reinvesting the surplus in the mines, the owners purchased massive amounts of land and built extravagant palaces. Labor relations weren't capitalist either. The vast majority of workers were Indigenous people directly conscripted into forced labor (the infamous mita) and paid not in wages but in goods produced on the owners’ lands. Zavaleta writes, “It is reasonable to maintain that, from the very moment the Spaniards set foot on these lands, the most consistent precapitalist element is the theft of labor power” (116). The second most consistent is the theft of land. By the beginning of the twentieth century, over 60 percent of the land in Bolivia was held by less than 10 percent of the people—a dramatic change from the middle of the nineteenth century when 90 percent of the land was still owned by peasants. The legally enacted expropriation of Indigenous land led to something like a second serfdom (in contrast to the expropriation of the English enclosure movement associated with the emergence of capitalism) (128). Formerly free workers were now servile workers bound to the land.

Zavaleta notes the fundamental difference between European feudalism and Bolivia's seigneurial system: the Bolivian system was “constructed in the encounter with the Indian” (136). He explains (employing G. W. F. Hegel): “Where there is no Indian, there is no lord” (136). Racial difference functioned as a crucial element of subjugation: society is founded on inequality, with endless graduated hierarchies ensuring “that there is always someone lower in rank” (138). The seigneurial aspects of the system also manifest in the fact that “there is no lord without land” (139). Land conferred a title imagined to bestow a nobility akin to that of Spanish lords to those who were not Spanish lords but who fetishized and fantasized their position. Land was symbolic and reproductive, feudal rather than capitalist. Holding the land had a mystical quality never fully adequate to the task of mitigating the racial uncertainty of the landowning class.

Even cursory familiarity with the broad Marxist revolutionary tradition belies linearity and stagism. Different political and economic forms coexist, operating to reinforce and undermine their settings and each other in ways marked more by the persistence of violence than anything else. The cost of the rejection of progressive history thus appears to be quite high, paid for in hope and possibility.

Theorizing Contemporaneity

Historians Jairus Banaji and Harry Harootunian give theoretical expression to the overlap of economic forms typically associated with different temporalities. Albeit with different emphases (agrarian capitalism and the provincialism of Western Marxism, respectively), each draws out the multiple, differentiated, and combined trajectories of capitalist development. Their analyses highlight concepts useful for navigating complex temporalities.

Banaji emphasizes the distinction between relations of production and forms of exploitation (2011, esp. chap. 2). He employs this distinction—which he finds in the Marxist tradition—in a critique of the Marxist tradition, from “vulgar Marxism” in the twenties and thirties, through mid-century debates over the transition from feudalism to capitalism, to the 1970s debate between Ernesto Laclau and André Gunder Frank over underdevelopment in Latin America. Most significant for my discussion is Banaji's emphasis on laws of motion. Banaji argues that modes of production cannot be defined in terms of specific labor processes. The same labor processes can be found in different modes of production. Commodity production appears in feudalism; factory owners sometimes use serf-labor; slave plantations generate surplus value for capitalists. An enormous array of labor forms sustains feudal enterprise, not just serfs but also part-time workers, free tenants, day laborers, and legally enslaved domestic workers (92). Capitalism likewise relies on coerced, unwaged, and unfree labor. Rather than being characterized by their mechanisms of surplus labor extraction, modes of production are differentiated by their underlying dynamics, their specific laws of motion. Whereas capitalist production is driven by the imperative of accumulation (with its accompanying compulsions to compete and improve), the driver of feudal production is the consumption needs of lords. So even as free labor and commodity production appear under feudalism, and, indeed, Banaji argues that feudalism “crystalized” as “commodity feudalism,” what matters are the laws of motion behind the coercive shape that feudalism takes: generate the cash needed to fund the lords’ consumption.

Banaji draws out the repercussions of this emphasis on laws of motion for understanding colonialism. Arguing that the colonization of Latin America “was a feudal colonization, a response to the crisis of feudal profitability which all the landowning classes of Europe were facing down to the latter part of the sixteenth century,” he rejects the dominant assumption in the Laclau-Frank debate, namely, that colonization was driven by the imperative of capital accumulation (93, 65). They both take for granted the laws of motion that an earlier generation of Marxists knew had to be discovered underneath empirical appearances. Converting capitalism's “points of arrival into points of departure,” they fail to recognize how similar forms had radically different laws of motion (65).⁶ In Latin America and parts of South Asia, feudal estates produced commodities for national and international markets (as we've already seen in Zavaleta). In the West Indies, most of Africa, and much of Asia, capitalist firms relied on “archaic (‘precapitalist’) modes of labor-organization and generally stagnant levels of technique” (62). While Marx recognized these “intermediate, hybrid forms,” Banaji points out that they've persisted longer than the large-scale production typically associated with capitalism (63). A one-sided emphasis on forms of exploitation, coupled with the erasure of feudal laws of motion under the assumption of specifically capitalist motivation, blocks their differences from view, misrepresenting and misunderstanding each.

Harootunian emphasizes formal subsumption. As Harootunian (2015: 13) explains, Marx's concept of formal subsumption refers “to the encounter of capitalism and received practices at hand.” Labor practices “belonging to a prior mode of production” are resituated “alongside and within newer capitalist demands to create value.” Temporal unevenness thus occupies the heart of Marx's theory of capital accumulation. Neither a remnant nor an outside, precapitalist or noncapitalist relations of exploitation are directly incorporated in capitalist production in the operation of formal subsumption (see also Read 2003). The old is preserved as a precondition of the new. Whereas many commentators view real subsumption as the point when capitalism is fully established, since this is when capital transforms labor processes to generate surplus value, Harootunian (2015) argues that for Marx formal subsumption is the key to capitalist development. Capital always appropriates what it finds on hand, “subjugating older practices and institutions” to its logic (29). Western Marxism, however, has fixated on real subsumption: the commodification of everything, domination of the value form, and triumph of capital. The resulting “image of achieved capitalist society in the West” presumes a flattening uniformity, not only obscuring historical difference but also disavowing capital's reliance on the unevenness it produces (5).

Harootunian endeavors to deprovincialize Marx by showing how thinkers beyond the industrial capitalist core use and develop Marxist categories to theorize unevenness. To this end, he reads José Carlos Mariátegui's layered account of the unresolved land question in Peru. Mariátegui emphasizes not just the colonial implantation of feudalism but also its reliance on extermination, slavery, and extraction as well as its mutation into a persistent semifeudalism. Envisioning strata of economic forms one on top of the other, he sees in Indigenous communities enduring traces of an Incan communism and cooperative tradition. Harootunian writes:

Formal subsumption's retaining of the past renders transition an open question, a process never fully complete. The past isn't left behind but perpetually part of a permanent transition.

Taking up debates over the development of capitalism in China and Japan, Harootunian considers opposing interpretations of feudalism: Wang Yanan's charge that enduring feudalism provided a barrier to capitalist development in China and Uno Kōzō’s argument that feudal residues benefitted Japan's capitalism (163). While critical of Wang's reliance on a stagist Marxism that smooths over a more astute treatment of unevenness, Harootunian commends Wang's insight into the alignment of feudal structure and imperialism as a clear statement of the logic of formal subsumption. The very elements of the traditional economy that foreign capital was restructuring, in other words, that were being used in capitalist production, also operated as constraints on capitalist development. An uneven history bound together primitive and capitalist accumulation, freezing them in place (174). Uno's analysis of development in Japan also focuses on the interplay of feudal and capitalist elements, from the ways that specific forms interact with and change each other, to the persistence of feudal sentiments even after the demise of feudal social relations (an argument akin to Zavaleta's). Far from a feature specific to Japan, the persistence of elements from the past in the present is a general feature of capitalism everywhere, the basic dynamic of formal subsumption in which capital takes what it finds.

Banaji's and Harootunian's insights into the dynamics of complex temporalities demonstrate ways of approaching transition without falling into stagism and determinism. That forms associated with one period exist in another doesn't mean they function in the same way or follow the same laws of motion. Capital embraces, absorbs, and capitalizes on feudal processes and relations. Formal subsumption is the bringing of old forms under a new logic. Feudal processes and relations may be fetters on or agents of capitalist development. Transition isn't a clean break. The persistence of past elements complicates clear descriptions of the present and holds the future in suspense.

Transition to Transition

In the posthumously published Philosophy of the Encounter, Louis Althusser (2006: 201) asks:

Althusser doesn't pursue this line. Rather than considering a dialectic of decay and reinforcement or of classes functioning on behalf of seemingly opposed modes of production, Althusser is interested in opening up the aleatory, in viewing transition as a matter of chance encounters that may or may not take hold.

Althusser's skepticism regarding the thesis of feudalism's mythical decay is well founded. Yet his conceptualization of modes of production as structures that impose their unity on a series of elements obscures the complex combinations and interactions of modes of production. It's as if he introduces the question of complex temporalities, of continuities and reinforcements that undermine and support, only to push it aside. As chance overrides decay, the opportunity to consider the overlaps of forms and logics is closed off in favor of a clear delineation of structures: feudalism with its structure of dependence and capitalism with its structure of exploitation (203). At a minimum one might want to ask about forms of dependence on exploitation and the exploitation of dependence. Different modes of production can coexist, contributing to the reproduction of processes and relations that they transform.

Already in his contributions to Reading Capital, Balibar (2009: 343) theorizes transition in terms of the “co-existence of several modes of production.” Analyzing Marx's discussion of primitive accumulation in Capital, volume 1, Balibar attributes this coexistence to political intervention, the use of state power, and “force as an economic agent” (343). One mode of production doesn't gradually and peacefully evolve into another, as if the laws of motion of the new mode were latent within the old. Nor is the emergence of the new simply chance. The political intervenes. Balibar quotes Marx: “The bourgeoisie, at its rise, cannot do without the constant intervention of the State” (342). What does it mean that the state continues to intervene? Why would the state intervene if capitalism has its own laws of motion? One possibility is the coexistence of modes of production, of a capitalism that is not complete in itself but reliant on an exterior that it both presupposes and creates. We might think here of a law that protects the few as it brutalizes the many, a state in the service of wealth and the social relations that concentrate it in as few hands as possible. Another possibility is of laws of motion that come into contradiction with themselves: competition leading not to improvement but destruction, not to investment but to hoarding. These possibilities are not mutually exclusive.

My focus thus far has been on transitions linking and unlinking feudalism and capitalism, on capital's beginnings. But what about its end? What might the complex temporalities of transitions to capitalism tell us about transitions out of it? Turning to writings from Balibar and Negri, I consider the question with respect to the state and to formal subsumption. While the laissez-faire mystifications of bourgeois economics attempt to obscure the role of the state in capitalism, its role in the transition to communism is straightforward: the dictatorship of the proletariat. Formal subsumption is rather more challenging: does communism presuppose real subsumption, or might formal subsumption suggest other paths?

Transitional State or State of Transition?

There's a paradox at the core of Marxist thought: communism builds from capitalism, is made possible by capitalism, and is its negation, a radical break from all that exists. Lenin (1917) finds the resolution of the paradox in the dictatorship of proletariat. The emancipation of the proletariat involves more than winning political power. It entails the proletariat's active exercise of power with the goal of building communism. Bourgeois resistance must be suppressed. Classes must dissolve. The people have to develop new habits and capacities. The movement from capitalism to communism is a transition. Dictatorship of the proletariat names that transition. It is the form of a state that aims at its own dissolution.

Balibar takes up Lenin's discussion of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the context of debates in the French Communist Party (PCF) in the 1970s. Like other communist parties in Western Europe, the PCF abandoned the dictatorship of the proletariat in favor of the so-called democratic road to socialism. Against this “Eurocommunist” position, Balibar (1977) argues that there isn't a transition to socialism. Socialism is not a transitional mode of production between capitalism and communism. Socialism is a transitional period; there are classes and class conflict, multiple contradictory interests, the persistence of bourgeois law. The dictatorship of the proletariat isn't an alternative to socialism; it is socialism (124).

Balibar emphasizes that the dictatorship of the proletariat is also “the reality of an historical tendency” (134). Communism develops out of the contradictions of capitalism: the socialization of production and the class struggle, through which the proletariat learns to organize itself and replace competition with solidarity. These two forms in which communism tendentially appears under capitalism oppose each other, only coming together with the proletariat's revolutionary seizure of power. Balibar writes: “History has shown that the conditions for such a revolution are only produced by capitalism when it has arrived at the stage of imperialism, and unevenly from country to country, though the movement is globally irreversible (which does not mean that it is irreversible in any particular case)” (135–36). Balibar's assumption of unidirectional movement has not been born out. From the fragmentation of production associated with neoliberal globalization to the defeats suffered by the working class and the communist movement, the fragility of socialist victories seems hard to deny. Nevertheless, his insight into the simultaneous and contradictory development of imperialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat is crucial. Balibar reminds us not only of the unevenness inextricable from imperialism but also of the fact that imperialism is a stage. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the political form through which the proletariat wages class struggle within this stage.

At the time Balibar was writing, much of the communist movement emphasized the opposition between socialism and imperialism. The assumption was that they were two utterly separate and completely opposed camps. Balibar rejects this thesis, arguing for their mutual imbrication. Neither form is pure; they interact with and influence each other. He explains:

The presumption of two separate worlds makes it theoretically impossible for socialism to imagine revolutions occurring within imperialism. It prevents analysis of conflicts within the socialist bloc and of the influence of capital on socialist countries. In contrast, imperialism understood temporally, as an epoch, places socialist development within this period or stage. Socialism influences and is influenced by imperialism, the time of its development.

Lenin (1916) defines imperialism as a stage of capitalism characterized by five basic features: monopolies, finance capital, export of capital rather than the export of commodities, international associations of monopoly capital, and the division of the world among the largest capitalist powers. Uneven development and colonial exploitation—combinations of different labor processes, different forms of exploitation, different modes of production—are thus quintessential elements of imperialism. Placing socialism within the imperialist epoch, Balibar (1977) implicitly acknowledges this intermeshing. Yet in his effort to refute the idea that socialism is a distinct mode of production, he gives a misleading presentation of capitalism (140–41). He presents capitalism as the absolute separation of the laborer from the means of production when formal subsumption allows for continued connection. He centers the buying and selling of labor power even as wage-labor is found in noncapitalist labor arrangements. He omits capitalism's laws of motion, which would help make sense of the combinations of different labor processes. He says that “all law, from the beginning of capitalism onwards, is bourgeois,” which neglects the continuation of feudal legal forms as well as the common law tradition (141). And, most significant, he presumes temporal progress and linearity, imposing historical direction on top of his assumption of stages.

The relation between labor and capital, Balibar writes, is the “last possible relation of exploitation in history: once having arrived there, you can neither return to former modes of exploitation—in which the laborer enjoys a certain form of possession of his means of production and a certain individual control over their use—nor go forward to a ‘new’ mode of exploitation” (140). What can ground such claims of finality and irreversibility? Particularly in the wake of the defeat of the workers’ movement at the end of the twentieth century and the rise of new forms of exploitation in communicative capitalism in the twenty-first, former Marxist certainties have lost the power to convince. Today, for example, Uber drivers enjoy “a certain form of possession” of their means of production and a “certain individual control over their use”—and this very enjoyment is the mechanism through which capital is able to escape the constraints put on it by victories in working-class struggle. Entire countries can win independence, overthrowing their colonial oppressors, only to find themselves bound to capitalist financial institutions, corporate investments, and international trade agreements they have no choice but to sign. The very fact that socialism denotes a form of struggle and transition occurring during the imperialist era, and that during that era socialism and imperialism affect and transform each other, means there are no guarantees.

Negri agrees with Balibar that socialism is a stage of capitalism. Where he disagrees is whether it can be understood as a transitional stage in the development of communism. Negri (1991: 165) claims that “communism is in no case a product of capitalist development, it is its radical inversion.” Rather than theorizing transition to communism, Negri replaces transition with communism. Communism is the actual movement that inverts and negates capital.

Negri makes this claim in the context of a close reading of the Grundrisse as a theory of revolutionary subjectivity. His argument depends on real subsumption. The development of machinery transforms labor processes for the benefit of capital. The productive knowledge and skills of workers are absorbed into machines, that is, fixed capital. At the same time, because capital necessarily exceeds use, and is utterly indifferent to any specific form of use value, machinery can't appear as the most adequate form of capital. That form is circulating capital, not fixed capital. Productive capital thus involves the labor process and circulation. Negri writes: “Real subsumption of labor can't but be (in the same moment) real subsumption of society” (142).

Capital's subsumption of society has repercussions for the theory of value. Wealth creation depends less on labor time and more on the application of science and technology to production. This creates contradictions: on the one hand, capital posits labor time as the measure and source of wealth; on the other, machinery reduces necessary labor time. With the widespread adoption of machinery, then, capital diminishes necessary labor time in order to increase surplus labor time, making surplus labor time a condition for necessary labor time. The very machinery that should make it possible for workers to have more free time ends up locking them into longer hours because of its capitalist form. In Factory of Strategy, Negri (2004: 250) summarizes the analysis:

Under conditions of real subsumption, the form of the law of value is capitalist command. Abolishing, negating, this power of command is communism.

Real subsumption's undoing of the theory of value makes socialism impossible. As a stage where each is compensated in accordance with their work, socialism presumes that there is some kind of rational quantitative measure capable of ensuring a fair distribution. Large-scale industry's collective worker eliminates the possibility of such a measurement. Distribution, or redistribution, can be determined only on the basis of political criteria (which demonstrates the pointlessness of re-rationalizing the capitalist law of value). Since capitalism has already undermined the function of the law of value, what is necessary is destroying “every form of command immediately” and liberating “class from labor” (257). The abolition of command, and along with it the machinery and technology making up capitalist command's material structure, thereby replaces transition with communism: the liberation of living labor. As Negri (1991: 153) rather enigmatically puts it, “It is not the transition that reveals itself (and eliminates itself) in the form of communism, but rather it is communism that takes the form of the transition.” Communism is the process through which working-class subjectivity emerges within and in violent antagonism to capital.

That Negri's argument is premised on real subsumption implies that formal subsumption isn't sufficiently capitalist for communist movement: it's the widespread adoption of machinery, the development of industry on a large scale, that leads to the breakdown of the law of value and its transformation into nothing but capitalist command. A “completed” (to use Harootunian's term) capitalism therefore appears to be necessary for communist movement. If this is the case, communism becomes a project of the West or the North, of fully industrialized countries, their de-developed peripheries not only left behind but also perpetually pushed behind and away from communist possibilities. The colonized or formerly colonized remain outside a communist future, communism being unavailable as a name for their liberation. Paradoxically, or perhaps ironically given Negri's justified distance from Euro-communism, communism appears as the self-consciousness strictly of the European working class rather than as the orientation and victory of worker and peasant struggles in Russia and China. If Luxemburg is correct regarding capital's dependence on an outside, or if Lenin is correct regarding imperialism as an epoch of the territorial division of the world into colonial possessions, then communism seems literally unreachable, not simply antagonistic to capital but so separate from it as to be unable to touch it. Working-class subjectivity emerges as an autonomous process of self-valorization, in and as separation from capital, without admixture, without imbrication, not unlike the two-world thesis Balibar correctly rejects.

The premise of real subsumption erases differentiation within capitalism. Remnants of the past that could be appropriate for communism (forms of communal belonging, say, or Indigenous practices of agroecological farming) disappear. Noncapitalist labor processes and their role in supporting as well as hindering the development of capitalism fall from view. Layers of history are flattened out into a smooth, uniform present. For all Negri's insistence on overthrowing “all kinds of necessity and determinism attributed to the process of transition,” he sneaks them back in through the door of real subsumption (154). Not only do we know where we are going, communism is already here.

But what if it's not? Negri's erasure of multiple temporalities and his assumption of direction (communism as what opposes and follows capitalism) preclude consideration of what happens if workers lose, capital triumphs, and the whole apparatus of exploitation and command continues churning along. Fortunately, his analysis suggests ways to understand the repercussions of working-class defeat (even as he takes the perspective of victory).

Concluding Thoughts

In Capital Is Dead, McKenzie Wark (2019) poses a provocative question: what if we're not in capitalism anymore but something worse? Her wager is that stagist assumptions continue to fetter leftist thinking and action: because we're not in socialism or communism, we must still be in capitalism. So blinkered, leftist analyses remain unable to theorize the present. Building from Wark's provocation, we can consider how Negri's and Balibar's analyses might look different when shorn of their directionality. What do they tell us about a world where socialism has been defeated and capitalism is global?

Negri's analysis of the change from surplus value to capitalist command highlights the way the law of value becomes implausible within capitalism. Capital's own processes erode it, disconnecting wage labor from any materially productive economic basis. Wages and salaries are determined politically, linked to the maintenance of class structure. In the twenty-first century, the repercussions of this change appear in the gross inequalities in pay between executives and employees, between upper management and lower-tier workers. The limits to the heights and depths of compensation are political, dependent on power: Are the holders of wealth able to command tax cuts? Are those who sell their labor power to survive able to unionize? Do interest rates encourage debt, and how do these debts contribute to class formation (by allowing, say, purchasers of debt to increase their wealth while debtors themselves become virtual prisoners perpetually bound to endless repayment)?

Even more significant are the limits that investment in fixed capital comes up against. Widespread adoption of machinery intensifies competition and diminishes returns. As Robert Brenner (2006) and Aaron Benanav (2020: 24) argue, overcapacity in world markets for manufactured goods has driven global deindustrialization and stagnation. An effect has been the shedding of jobs in industry and the dramatic increase in jobs in services. In high-income countries, 70–80 percent of employment is in services; most workers in Iran, Nigeria, Turkey, the Philippines, Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa are also in services (56). Nonstandard and informal employment has expanded, especially in the global South, as workers cobble together different forms of labor service. From one angle, self-employment looks like self-exploitation; from another it appears as generalized servitude, dependence on the consumption habits of service seekers with disposable income. The fragmentation and disintegration of labor in the context of deindustrialization suggests that, contra Negri, capitalist development is clearly reversible and dependent on multiple forms of noncapitalist labor. Premising analyses of capital on real subsumption today misses the opportunity to see the struggles linked to fragmenting and declining capitalism as locations of its weakness, its inability to secure its own conditions.

Correlative to declining economic growth and the steady rise in services has been hoarding and rentierism. Capital accumulation occurs more from intellectual property, patents, and fees than from the production of goods, from rent rather than profit. Corporations don't invest their proceeds; they buy back stocks and increase executive compensation. In a word, they eat their profits in old seigneurial style. Capital's laws of motion seem to be turning into their opposites as the drive to accumulate incentivizes plunder and hoarding rather than investment and improvement.

Balibar (2009: 343) observes that periods of transition are “characterized by the coexistence of several modes of production.” Extracted from the assumption that we know what we are transitioning to, his insight suggests that our present may not be accurately described simply as capitalist. It may in fact be becoming something else, something where feudal dynamics emerge out of capitalist incentives (Dean 2020a, 2020b). Coexistence points to the ways that the same labor processes may follow different laws of motion: service labor may be reproductive but not productive, more likely remunerated out of consumption funds than consumed as part of production. In the same vein, when finance operates destructively, does it even make sense to think of it as capitalist? Leveraged buyouts enable financiers to take over companies, saddle them with debt, and sell off their components. Start-ups like WeWork and Uber rely on massive infusions of private equity to “disrupt” entire sectors. Complex debt instruments led to over seven trillion dollars of losses in the 2008 financial crisis. The “logic” here is feudal: pillage and plunder.

Finally, Balibar's emphasis on imperialism as a stage of capitalism reminds us of the constitutive unevenness of global capital. The world isn't smooth or flat. It comprises losers and winners, poor and rich, exploited and exploiter. Capital relies on this unevenness, on noncapitalist modes of production, labor processes, and forms of exploitation. Such reliance indicates points of weakness. Whether these weaknesses will support or undermine capital, whether they can be mobilized on behalf of emancipation or commandeered for something worse depends on political struggle.

When we combine unevenness with the multidirectionality of transition, with the fact that things can get worse, we realize the unavoidability of politics: without power we will lose. Our enemies will fight back. Counterrevolution is real. Acknowledging this should not engender hopelessness and defeatism. It should remind us that communists fight because we must: we have a world to win.

Notes

References