Class and Classification

julio 30, 2011 Article and Chapters / English

John Holloway¹

Preguntando caminamos. Asking we walk.

This paper explores a simple question: if fetishism is understood as a process of fetishisation, what are the implications for the concept of class?

1. The distinction between fetishism and fetishisation is crucial for a discussion of Marxist theory. It is the difference between seeing the world in terms of domination and seeing it in terms of struggle.

Marx’s discussion of fetishism/ fetishisation is at the centre of his whole theory. It is at once a criticism of what is wrong with capitalism, a critique of bourgeois thought and a theory of how capitalism reproduces itself. There is, however, an ambiguity in his presentation of the issue. When he says that to the producers “the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things” (Capital I, 73), it appears that he is describing the social relations of capitalist societyas they really are. It appears, in other words, that he is describing the fetishism of social relations as an established fact, as something that is.

This understanding of fetishism has had important consequences for the Marxist tradition, although the issue of fetishism is usually not explicitly addressed. If social relations are taken to be effectively fetishised or reified, then a distinction is immediately established between a ‘they’ and a ‘we’. ‘They’, the producers, the workers relate to each other through things; ‘we’, the theorists, the critics, perhaps the Party, are able to penetrate the fetishised appearances and understand these reified relations as the historically specific form or mode of existence of relations between people. If it is taken that social relations really are fetishised in this sense (if fetishism is seen as an established fact), then Marxist theory and practice become elitist: we, the enlightened, think and act on behalf of the unenlightened. The idea of revolution as the self-emancipation of the workers then becomes nonsensical, as Lenin quite logically pointed out.

The understanding of fetishism as accomplished fact leaves us with an enormous theoretical problem that is rarely addressed: who are we? Who are we (Marx, Lenin, the Party, theorists) that criticise? Who are we that we can go beyond the fetishism of social relations?

The same point can be made in a number of other ways. If fetishism is an established fact, then domination and struggle are separated. The way things are is the system of capitalist domination: the question of how we struggle to break that domination is then a distinct question. Marxist theory, in this perspective, is the attempt to understand capitalist domination (hence ‘Marxist economics’, ‘Marxist sociology’ and so on).

Or again: if fetishism is an established fact, then the constitution and existence of social forms are separated. It is assumed that the fetishised forms of capitalism were constituted at the dawn of capitalism and that they now exist (and will continue to exist until capitalism is destroyed). Genetic criticism is then confused with historical criticism: the origin of social forms is understood as their historical emergence (as in much of the state derivation debate). Marxist categories are then understood as closed categories, categories that describe the historically established functioning of a mode of domination.

Against all this, it can be argued that fetishism should be understood not as an established fact but as an active process of fetishisation. Social relations really are and are not fetishised. Social relations are contradictory: their production and reproduction is an antagonistic process in which the fetishisation of social relations is always opposed by anti-fetishising tendencies. The reproduction of capitalism is a constant process of fetishising social relations in the face of attempts to establish social relations on a non-fetishised or anti-fetishistic basis. Capitalist domination is the struggle to fetishise, so domination and struggle cannot be separated. In our theory-practice, we cannot stand outside this clash between ‘really are’ and ‘really are not’, between fetishisation and anti-fetishisation: we inevitably take part in it, and on both sides. As theorists/ Marxists, we occupy no privileged position above the throng, but simply have a peculiar way of articulating our participation in the conflict in which all participate. No distinction can be made then between historical constitution and present existence of social forms: the present existence of social forms is their ever-renewed constitution. Marxist categories are essentially open in that they understand the forms in which social relations as being contradictory, open, always at issue. Finally and fundamentally, the only way in which revolution as self-emancipation can even be addressed is by understanding fetishism as fetishisation.

2. All that I take as a starting point. The question to be addressed here is what implications this understanding of fetishisation as a process has for our understanding of class.

Most discussions of class are based on the assumption that the fetishised forms are pre-constituted. The relation between capital and labour (or between capitalist and working class) is taken to be one of subordination. On this basis, understanding class struggle involves, firstly, defining the working class and, secondly, studying whether and how they struggle.

In this approach, the working class, however defined, is defined on the basis of its subordination to capital: it is because it is subordinated to capital (as wage workers, or as producers of surplus value) that it is defined as working class. Indeed it is only because the working class is assumed to be pre-subordinated that the question of definition can even be posed. Definition merely adds the locks to a world that is assumed to be closed. Once defined, the working class is then identified as a particular group of people, who can then be made the object of study. For socialists, ‘working class’ is then treated as a positive concept and working class identity as something to be prized. There is, of course, the problem of what to do with those people who do not fall within the definitions of working class or capitalist class, but this is dealt with by a supplementary definitional discussion on how to define these other people, whether as new petty bourgeoisie, salariat, middle class or whatever. This process of definition or classification is the basis of endless discussions about class and non-class movements, class and ‘other forms’ of struggle, ‘alliances’ between the working class and other groups, and so on.

All sorts of problems spring from this definitional approach to class. Firstly, there is the question of ‘belonging’. Do we who work in the universities ‘belong’ to the working class? Did Marx and Lenin? Are the rebels of Chiapas part of the working class? Are feminists part of the working class? Are those active in the gay movement part of the working class? In each case, there is a concept of a pre-defined working class to which these people do or do not belong.

 

A second consequence of defining class is the definition of struggles that follows. From the classification of the people concerned there are derived certain conclusions about the struggles in which they are involved. Those who define the Zapatista rebels as being not part of the working class draw from that certain conclusions about the nature and limitations of the uprising. From the definition of the class position of the participants there follows a definition of their struggles: the definition of class defines the antagonism that the definer perceives or accepts as valid. This leads to a blinkering of the perception of social antagonism. In some cases, for example, the definition of the working class as the urban proletariat directly exploited in factories, combined with evidence of the decreasing proportion of the population who fall within this definition, has led people to the conclusion that class struggle is no longer relevant for understanding social change. In other cases, the definition of the working class and therefore of working class struggle in a certain way has led to an incapacity to relate to the development of new forms of struggle (the student movement, feminism, ecologism and so on).

Defining the working class constitutes them as a ‘they’. Even if we say that we are part of the working class, we do so by stepping back from ourselves and by classifying ourselves or the group to which we ‘belong’ (students, university lecturers and so on). On the basis of this definition, it is possible to pose the question of their class consciousness and to study it. What consciousness do they have of their class position and their class interests? Is this consciousness what it ought to be? Is it a true consciousness or a false or limited (trade union) consciousness? If, as is usually argued, it is a false or limited consciousness, then the conclusion is usually that the revolutionary transformation of society is impossible or that it must be led from outside, by a Party or by intellectuals.

If, on the other hand, we do not start from the assumption of the fetishised character of social relations, if we assume that fetishisation is a process and that existence is inseparable from constitution, then how does this change our vision of class?

Capitalism is the ever renewed generation of class, the ever renewed classification of people. Marx makes this point very clearly in his discussion of accumulation in Capital: ‘Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation: on the one side the capitalist, on the other, the wage labourer.’ (Capital I, 578). In other words, the existence of classes and their constitution cannot be separated: to say that classes exist is to say that they are in the process of being constituted.

The constitution of class can be seen as the separation of subject and object. Capitalism is the daily repeated violent separation of the object from the subject, the daily snatching of the object-creation-product from the subject-creator-producer, the daily seizure from the subject not only of her creation but of her act of creation, her creativity, her subjectivity, her humanity. The violence of this separation is not characterisitic just of the earliest period of capitalism: it is the core of capitalism. To put it in other words, ‘primitive accumulation’ is not just a feature of a bygone period, it is central to the existence of capitalism.

The violence with which the separation of subject and object, or the classification of humanity, is carried out suggests that ‘reproduction’ is a misleading word in so far as it conjures up an image of a smoothly repeated process, something that goes around and around, whereas the violence of capitalism suggests that the repetition of the production of capitalist social relations is always very much at issue.

3. The understanding of class as classification has implications for all aspects of the discussion of class.

(1) Class struggle is the struggle to classify and against being classified at the same time as it is, indistinguishably, the struggle between constituted classes.

More orthodox discussions of class struggle tend to assume that classes are pre-constituted, that the subordination of labour to capital is pre-established, and to start from there. In the approach suggested here the conflict does not take place after subordination has been established, after the fetishised forms of social relations have been constituted: rather it is a conflict about the subordination of social practice, about the fetishisation of social relations. The conflict is the conflict between subordination and insubordination, and it is this which allows us to speak of insubordination (or dignity, to borrow the zapatistas’ phrase) as a central feature of capitalism. Class struggle does not take place within the constituted forms of capitalist social relations: rather the constitution of those forms is itself class struggle. This leads to a much richer concept of class struggle in which the whole of social practice is at issue. All social practice is an unceasing antagonism between the subjection of practice to the fetishised, perverted, defining forms of capitalism and the attempt to live against-and-beyond those forms. There can thus be no question of the existence of non-class forms of struggle. Class struggle is the unceasing daily antagonism (whether it be perceived or not) between alienation and dis-alienation, between definition and anti-definition, between fetishisation and de-fetishisation.

We do not struggle as working class, we struggle against being working class, against being classified. It is the unity of the process of classification (the unity of capital accumulation) that gives unity to our struggles, not our unity as members of a common class. Thus, for example, it is the significance of the zapatista struggle against capitalist classification that gives it importance for class struggle, not the question of whether the indigenous indigenous inhabitants of the Lacandon Jungle are or are not members of (belong to) the working class. There is nothing positive about being members of the working class, about being ordered, commanded, separated from our product and our process of production. Struggle arises not from the fact that we are working class but from the fact that we-are-and-are-not working class, that we exist against-and-beyond being working class, that they try to order and command us but we do not want to be ordered and commanded, that they try to separate us from our product and our producing and our humanity and our selves and we do not want to be separated from all that.

(2) We are/ are not working class. To say that class should be understood as classification means that class struggle (the struggle to classify us and our struggle against being classified) is something that runs through us, individually and collectively. Only if we were fully classified could we say without contradiction ‘we are working class’ (but then class struggle would be impossible).

We take part in class struggle on both sides. We classify ourselves in so far as we produce capital, in so far as we respect money, in so far as we participate, through our practice, our theory, our language (our definition of the working class, for example), in the separation of subject and object. We simultaneously struggle against our classification in so far as we are human. We exist against-in-and-beyond capital. Humanity is schizoid, volcanic: everyone is torn apart by the class antagonism.

Does this mean that class distinctions can be reduced to a general statement about the schizoid character of humanity? No, because there are clearly differences in the way in which the class antagonism traverses us, differences in the degree to which it is possible for us to repress that antagonism. For those who benefit materially from the process of classification (accumulation), it is relatively easy to repress anything which points against or beyond classification, to live within the bounds of fetishism. It is those whose lives are overturned by accumulation (the indigenous of Chiapas, university lecturers, coal miners, nearly everybody) in whom the element of against-ness will be much more present. It remains true, however, that nobody exists purely against or against-and-beyond: we all participate in the separation of subject and object, the classification of humans. Notions of class composition, decomposition and recomposition should be understood, therefore, not as the changing position of different groups but as the changing configuration of the antagonism that traverses all of us, the antagonism between fetishisation and anti-fetishisation, between classification and anti-classification.

3) Is work central to classification? Yes-and-no.

(Work is an ambiguous term. It can be understood either as labour (alienated work) or, more broadly, as purposive, creative activity. To avoid the ambiguity, we shall refer to labour and creativity rather than to ‘work’.)

Labour is the production of capital and the production of capital is the production of class, classification. The production of capital is at the same time the production of surplus value, exploitation. If there were no exploitation, there would be no production of class.

However, the statement ‘labour is the production of capital’ is tautologous and also misleading in so far as it assumes the pre-constitution of labour, the prior abstraction of human creativity. The argument so far suggests that we cannot understand capitalism simply in terms of the conflict between labour and capital for to do so is to start from pre-constituted categories, from an assumed existence-in-abstraction-from-constitution. Exploitation is not just the exploitation of labour but the simultaneous transformation of human creativity into labour, the simultaneous desubjectivication of the subject, the dehumanisation of humanity. This does not mean that creativity, the subject, humanity exist in some pure sphere waiting to be metamorphosed into their capitalist forms. The capitalist form (labour) is the mode of existence of creativity/ subjectivity/ humanity, but that mode of existence is contradictory. To say that creativity exists as labour means that it exists also as anti-labour. To say that humanity exists as subordination means that it exists also as insubordination. The production of class is the suppression(-and-reproduction) of insubordination. Exploitation is the suppression(-and-reproduction) of insubordinate creativity. The suppression of creativity does not just take place in the process of production, as usually understood, but in the whole separating of subject and object that constitutes capitalist society.

Thus: labour produces class, but labour pre-supposes a prior classification. Similarly, production is the sphere of the constitution of class, but the existence of a sphere of production, that is the separation of production from human creativity in general, also presupposes a prior classification.

The answer, then, to our question about the centrality of work is surely that it is not labour that is central but creativity, which exists in-against-and-beyond labour. To start from labour (as in ‘labour studies’ or ‘the labour debate’?) is to enclose oneself from the beginning within a fetishised world, such that any projection of an alternative world must appear as pure fancy, something brought in from outside.

4. Underlying this discussion of class is an attempt to understand the current development of capitalism. Capitalism is in overt crisis in most of the world and in a situation of fragility in the rest, a situation in which the open outbreak of crisis is deferred through the ever-increasing expansion of credit. The crisis of class domination, however, does not correspond in any obvious way to a surge in the strength of the working class. This is a central question for anti-capitalist theory: if the world is a world of class struggle, how is it that when one side (labour) is weakened, the other (capital) is nevertheless in crisis? Unless this question can be answered, structuralism is inevitable. Elsewhere, Werner Bonefeld and I have suggested that credit expansion brings about a temporal dislocation between the surge of anti-capitalist struggle and the manifestation of crisis (as in 1917-1929, 1968-1974/1999?). The discussion here suggests a second approach: the weakness of capital is the result not of the strength of labour (as constituted class, as movement), but of the strength of anti-classification, of non-identity.

Capital accumulation is voracious. It requires an ever more complete subordination of humanity, an ever more profound classification of existence. This is surely the significance of Marx’s discussion of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall: if exploitation and the dehumanisation which it implies is not intensified, there is crisis. Crisis then is the result not of the strength of the working class or of the labour movement, necessarily, but of the strength of the general resistance to capital’s drive for an ever more profound subordination of humanity (dignity, as the zapatistas say).

That in us which exists against-and-beyond capital is not our existence as working class but our struggling against being working class. We are the force of non-identity. That is what we need to explore and articulate.