Trans-Scripts 3 (2013) The Proletariat* Nathan Brown** A political slogan always takes place, articulated in a context, at the crux of theory and praxis. A slogan, especially when it takes the form of a chant, conjoins the thinking of a situation to action within it. A slogan or chant manifests the inscription of political thought within the political action of bodies. Likewise, it manifests the inscription of acting bodies within the thinking they articulate. As everyone knows who participates in political action, this is what lends the practice of chanting during a march, a picket, or an occupation the peculiar quality of being at once discomfiting and exhilarating: the surrender of one’s thinking body, situated at the crux of theory and praxis, to the declarative speaking of formulations that are not necessarily or essentially one’s own. Participation in the collective articulation of political situations opens individuals to both the joy and the anxiety of being spoken through, ventriloquized by the collective. Indeed, often one finds oneself repeating formulations with which one does not agree at all; and this is part of the requisite humiliation of political action, the frequent necessity of allowing our participation in what happens to overcome our proud attachment to the consistency of what we think we are. So—what are we, when we occupy this curious interstice between the tenuous and temporary consistency of the collective (a common cry, for instance) and the inconsistency of what we think we are? It’s with this question in mind that I want to reflect on one particular chant that was taken up in a particular context during the political sequence called Occupy Oakland. The context was the Anti-Capitalist March on the day of the General Strike, Nov. 2, 2011. The chant was “We, Are, The Proletariat.” __________________________ * This text was presented as the keynote lecture at the 15 March 2013 graduate student conference in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, titled, The Laboring Body. ** Nathan Brown is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and the Program in Critical Theory at the University of California, Davis. His works include “The Technics of Prehension: On the Photography of Nicolas Baier” (forthcoming), “Origin and Extinction, Mourning and Melancholia: On Terrance Malick's The Tree of Life and Lars von Trier's Melancholia” (2012), “Rational Kernel, Real Movement: Alain Badiou and Théorie Communiste in the Age of Riots” (2012), “Red Years: Althusser’s Lesson, Rancière's Error, and the Real Movement of History” (2011), and “Absent Blue Wax (Rationalist Empiricism)” (2010). 61 Nathan Brown What would such a slogan have meant in the context of its articulation? Most immediately, we can say that it functions as a displacement of another slogan: “We Are the 99%.” Both of these slogans configure the political terrain as that of class struggle, but the class analysis implied by each is quite different. The opposition of the 99% to the 1% thinks class in terms of income levels, pointing to the inequality and injustice of income distribution. The category of the proletariat, on the other hand, is premised upon a structural analysis of property and the wage relation. But it isn’t necessary to view “We Are the Proletariat” as a polemical slogan, in the context of that march, rejecting the liberalism of “We Are the 99%” as ideological or incorrect. Rather, it simply points to something like the condition of possibility for the opposition between 99% and 1%: namely, to the exploitation of the wage relation as the structural and historical cause of economic inequality under capitalism. But of course, to determine the constitution of the proletariat through reference to the wage relation is immediately to provoke objections which will indeed prove essential: objections that bear upon the conditions of possibility for the wage relation itself. In The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx is categorical: “the proletariat is the class of modern wage-labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live.”1 But in Capital, as Aaron Benanav and Endnotes point out in an essential article on surplus populations, Marx is more inclined to define the proletariat as what they call “a class in transition.”2 “Proletarian,” Marx writes in a footnote to Chapter 25, “must be understood to mean, economically speaking, nothing other than ‘wage-labourer,’ the man who produces and valorises ‘capital,’ and is thrown onto the street as soon as he becomes superfluous to the need for valorisation.”3 Here, the proletariat is best considered that class which, by working, tends to produce its exclusion from work. What Marx calls “the general law of capitalist accumulation”4 is that “the working population...produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent which is always increasing.”5 1 Karl Marx, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Samuel Moore (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 33. 2 Aaron Benanav and Endotes, “Misery and Debt: On The Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital” in Endnotes 2 (April 2010): 20-51. 3 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 764. 4 Ibid., 798. 5 Ibid., 783. 62 Nathan Brown So this is one limit through which we need to think the category of the proletariat: the transformation of the working class into a class which is not working. And we need to conceive of this transitional character of the class as internal to its class constitution, by conceiving of the class historically. Importantly, this is a limit we encounter under conditions of real subsumption that obtain relatively late in the history of capitalism, through technological and managerial innovations that tendentially render living labor relatively superfluous. Much earlier, however, in the very process of its initial constitution, the category of the proletariat is already riven by internal contradictions. Marx describes the process of primitive accumulation as that of divorcing “the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his own labour...of divorcing the producer from the means of production,” a process through which “immediate producers are turned into wage laborers.”6 The gradual formation of the capital-relation through expropriation is punctuated by “moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labour market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians.”7 Here we can think through the limits of Marx’s definition by turning to counter- histories of primitive accumulation offered by Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women the Body and Primitive Accumulation, as well as by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. The essential formal point that I want to draw from Federici’s study is that, as she puts it, primitive accumulation...was not simply an accumulation and concentration of exploitable workers and capital. It was also an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as ‘race’ and age, became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat.8 While Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation focuses upon the production of landless wage laborers through expropriation, Federici focuses upon the conditions of possibility for the production and reproduction of labor power itself, and thus upon the subjugation of women’s labor and women’s reproductive function that was essential to the formation and maintenance of the so-called “working class.” Of course, this subjugation involved the exclusion of women from waged work, and 6 Ibid., 874-875. 7 Ibid., 876. 8 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), 63-64. 63 Nathan Brown thus the construction of a new patriarchal order based upon the mediation of access to the wage through men. In particular, Federici shows that the construction of this new patriarchy was heavily predicated upon the witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries: the brutal disciplining of women’s bodies and forms of collective life that was necessary to enforce a new sexual division of labor and confine women to reproductive work.9 Thus, Federici treats gender as a specification of class relations, arguing that the term “women” “signifies not just a hidden history that needs to be made visible; but a particular form of exploitation and, therefore, a unique perspective from which to reconsider the history of capitalist relations.”10 The point I want to hold onto here is that the process of primitive accumulation produces different forms of exploitation, in a technical sense: not only exploitation through the direct extraction of surplus value from wage labor, but also the dependency of wage labor in general upon the unwaged exploitation of reproductive labor in the home, as well as the unwaged exploitation of slave labor. Any consideration of the laboring body thus has to account for Federici’s central claim: that “if capitalism has been able to reproduce itself it is only because of the web of inequalities that it has built into the body of the world proletariat.”11 What this means is that the proletariat is constitutively divided, in the first instance: