Superfluous Labour Time & Virtual Unemployment

Further Notes on the Proletarian Minority

By L. Luria

(Note: this is largely a follow up to Proletarian Minority)

Superfluous labour time refers to work rendered increasingly unnecessary to the production of material wealth, all the while purported as the genuine substance and measure of wealth as such. Virtual unemployment refers to the same superfluity at a lower level of abstraction, at the level of quantity, being the increment of labour rendered redundant by a determinate rise in productivity, which in the case of an expanding industrial economy is reabsorbed productively, but which under present conditions is neither reabsorbed nor abolished, instead held in suspension. In such a ‘normal case’, the freed increment is absorbed by the realisation of the increased rate of surplus value in commodity production across both departments (disproportionately within department 1), the redundancy ‘re-employed’ in productive expansion. In such circumstances of large-scale domestic productive manufacturing the freed labour is realised by three channels: additions to constant capital, to variable capital, or to leisure, according to which most raises the aggregate level of surplus value necessary for engendering expanded reproduction. However, this same virtual unemployment dynamic repeated in present post-industrial conditions gives rise instead to a ‘deformed’ instance in the circuit, reversing the logic of expanded reproduction altogether, giving rise to a ‘fourth channel’ which augments none of the prior three, serving instead to expand the credit system through a form of credit-backed non-production, financed superfluous labour time serving to maintain labour at scale rather than permitting its mass conversion to free disposable time. The wage then paid for this labour is constituted by recycled revenues backed by credit rather than from presently realisable surplus, forming a knot around the capacity for productive expansion altogether (in so far as those recycled revenues service a lengthening chain of claims on future valorisation that pre-empts the very surplus which productive investment would otherwise command).

In the epoch of globalisation, material wealth produced by accumulated social knowledge and by the developed productive apparatus has so outrun the value that direct (domestic) labour time constitutes that the contribution of the individual to value approaches nullity, albeit (paradoxically) at the point where social productive capacity is at its height. In economies such as ours in Britain, the concentration of determination in a minority is then the formal appearance of this process, value-generating labour contracting while material wealth is increasingly produced at higher and higher levels. Determination must here be grasped at the level of realisation rather than production alone; “to become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange” (Capital, Vol. I Ch. 1). Production posits value but leaves it latent, with value realised only in circulation, when the commodity is transferred to its buyer. Accordingly, the minority is determinate not by producing the greatest ‘quantity of value’, instead it acquires determination by occupying non-substitutable points through which the realisation of the whole social mass of value must pass, therefore where that passage – being the transition of use-value into Value, an article into a commodity – can be arrested. Actual determination arises as a fact of the present composition of circulation and not, as so many persist in claiming, by a measure of the latent value the worker adds through their labour.

For Marx, only through the “universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the ‘propertyless’ mass,” makes “each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others,” and “has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones.” What people typically refer to as the ‘working-class’ in Britain has an indisputable stake in their broader society, socialist and trade-unionist politics announcing itself as the defence of hard-won gains or as the elaboration and further development of certain base-line social norms. Concretely, this refers to the share of social wealth afforded to labour, consistently renewed through political processes either on the picket line or at the ballot box, and from another vantage through signing on to benefits and through legal participation in the welfare system. The phenomenon of the universal ‘propertyless’ mass is, in a sense, persistent, but its universal character has been effectively bifurcated between a majority toiling in conditions of virtual unemployment and a minority of determinate individuals working at sites of leverage. What brings these two groups to the semblance of common cause is that they both sell their labourpower for a wage, however rather than the wage constituting a share of aggregate surplus value, of which the lion’s share would ‘normally’ be committed for expanded reproduction, the wage of the indeterminate majority now constitutes a transfer drawn against a chain of future claims on valorisation, not from a share of any surplus presently realised, rendering the withdrawal of such labour essentially indeterminate. A strike that interrupts no realisation of value is unable to impose the cost on which its leverage would depend and would therefore foreclose their capacity to act ‘world-historically’ in the manner Marx describes. Withdrawal at a circulation chokepoint, on the other hand, interrupts the realisation of a far greater amount of value than that which the strikers themselves add by their labouring, arresting the entire mass of value embodied in the commodities whose passage the chokepoint commands, the cost imposed being in no proportion to the number who withdraw their labour. Where circulation can be re-routed (substitutable passenger transport, the distributed and interchangeable point of final retail sale, and so on) the interruption holds less determination, whereas at a non-substitutable maritime or port chokepoint, held long enough to exhaust all possible buffers, the effect is so significant in its potential as to qualitatively raise such a strike to assume real political determination.

The precondition of ‘propertylessness’ as laid out by Marx has then been suspended (if not abolished), held in abeyance by the credit and redistributive apparatus which moulds the forms of work and the wage content of the toiling mass, enmeshes the wages of productive labour within the overall credit system so as to occult any tangible site of determination reducible to the wage (besides its role in reproducing the value-form). Marx’s ‘propertylessness’ persists then in spite of the baseline stake of the majority, their claim to social wealth through the state, in the form of a ‘scandalous’ tendency re-emerging whenever the credit and redistributive apparatus contracts. It would follow then that a reduction of the mass’ share of social wealth (crisis) would constitute the moment by which the majority is dis-incorporated from the administered credit system and the leverage of the determinate minority is therefore brought to the fullness of political viability. The superfluous labour time of the indeterminate mass is then the reservoir whose dispossession constitutes the event in which the minority’s leverage is capable of assuming directly political, conscious capacity, being the point at which the credit-redistributive apparatus fails to continue facilitating the wage of the toiling mass, their reconstitution as ‘citizens’. “The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically," Marx writes, “just as communism, its activity, can only have a 'world-historical' existence,” world-historical existence meaning “existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history.” Acting in the fullness of world-historical existence means recognition and effectuating a political existence, which for the working-class is realised according to the capacity to interrupt and thus overturn the present economic arrangement, inevitably and invariably referring to the singular unique historical capacity of the working-class, the withdrawal of labour. The capacity for the withdrawal of determinate labour at scale constitutes the ‘negative’ moment of world-historical existence, leverage, whereas the ‘positive’ moment, the appropriation of the developed productive forces, the conversion of superfluous labour time into free disposable time, entails the maximal horizon that this leverage might attain.

If we say with Marx that the premises of our movement are already in existence, it remains only to name said premises, being superfluity itself, that our society is one whose developed productive forces have rendered the direct expenditure of labour increasingly unnecessary to material wealth. Virtual unemployment, being the quantitative form this superfluity assumes, held in suspension by credit, erects the form by which ‘propertylessness’ is deferred at the level of appearance. The ‘real movement which abolishes the present state of things’ is the abolition of superfluous labour time, of which the intensified socialisation of capital is the objective undergirding premise. Of the two conceptions of communism, the objective tendency of capital to socialise production and the real movement of a political subject, both must occur simultaneously for communism to be realised in full, and the site by which this might occur today, the site of determination, is the chokepoint.