Can subjectivity survive Marxism? It depends on what is meant by “subjectivity” and “Marxism.” In a certain, important sense, we are all subjects who have survived Marxism, insofar as even the question seems outdated, its tombstone marked by the fall of the Soviet Union. But even if the geopolitical power of Stalinism has been reduced to rubble, capitalism survives, as do its antagonisms and contradictions. The problem of subjectivity is really that — a problem — because of the nature of capital’s domination over humanity; knowing exactly how and why we are subjected to its autocracy has only become more urgent since the collapse of the Soviet bureaucracies.
So let us turn to Marx, not necessarily to understand who it interpellates,[1] but to see how it wishes to free us from the tyranny of objects. We will claim that Marx’s critique of subjectivity in his later works, linked to his earlier concepts of alienation, provide us with the tools to understand subjectivity as a mechanism of domination — but an empty one, often bereft of subjects themselves.
First of all, let me inscribe an “I” into the writing of this essay, because talking about subjectivity and its existence is like losing one’s glasses. Just as we need our glasses to find them, we need subjectivity in order to discuss it as a problem. So I want to clarify and make explicit that I am a Marxist, in particular a member of the International Workers’ League, Fourth International (IWL-FI). This gesture is not to turn this assignment into a pamphlet, but to indicate that I am speaking to and from Marxism. I fear that our organizing and our politics run the risk of falling into a dogmatic faith in the capitalist subject as we have interpellated them[2] into action. I believe that our only hope is to abandon the subject and to reconstitute another kind of political animal in its place.
We must begin by investigating the “initial” Marxist subject, the basis of our critique. A passage from Grundrissewill suffice to illustrate my point and to give us enough ammunition to elaborate on it:
Separation of property from labor appears as the necessary law of this exchange between capital and labor. Labor posited as not-capitalas such is: 1) not-objectified labor [nicht-vergegenständlichte Arbeit], conceived negatively (itself still objective, the not-objective itself in objective form)… This living labor, existing as an abstraction from these moments of its actual reality (also, not-value); this complete denudation, purely subjective existence of labor, stripped of all objectivity. Labor as absolute poverty: poverty not as shortage, but as total exclusion of objective wealth.[3]
As we see, the subject is the laborer, forced to sell his labor-power in exchange for wages. The dissymmetry between the sale and the purchase is what allows for the extraction of surplus-value, since labor-power, uniquely among commodities, has the characteristic of being able to create more commodities. As a result, labor-power is not only able to reproduce the amount of capital poured into it, it is able to expand this capital. The object, then, of our subject would be their labor-power objectified, crystallized into the commodities it creates and measured by the surplus time it takes to create them over-and-above the socially necessary time it would take to simply reproduce them.
Already, we have a curious circumstance by which the subject is so defined because of their capacity to have objects squeezed out of them. This capacity is determined by an “objective” force, the same that determines “objective wealth” relative to the worker’s absolute lack of it: social relations. Subjectively, then, labor appears always as a lack, because it is exactly what is stolen from the worker; their own subjectivity seems to be out of their hands. Moreover, Marx describes in this passage a circuit to be completed by the commodity so as to “fulfill” its own definition and “realize” the worker’s subjective lack. That is, labor-power must be mined and objectified for it to retroactively make sense as a potentially exploitable commodity, and only then can the worker’s subjectivity (lack of money as a social force, lack of power) have any meaning whatsoever. Only when the chain M-C-M’ is completed does the worker’s negative subjectivity become expressed as exploitation. We have before us a very neat, superficially dialectical ecosystem. (“Superficially” is perhaps harsh, it is meant to refer to the false movement implied by the uneven power at play in social relations. What we have described is, again, a circle, not a spiral. Are dialectics — i.e., a spiral movement[4] — necessary? I believe so, because things are not as they seem: things lie. They surpass themselves, and what makes a subject a subject can never be fixed in place.)
This is the next development, the odd transformation that pulls us out of this theoretical circle of subject-creates-object-that-determines-subject:
Machinery is put to a wrong use, with the object of transforming the workman, from his very childhood, into a part of a detail-machine… In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labor proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow. In manufacture[,] the workmen are parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage [lebendige Anhängsel].[5]
The worker themself — itself — is objectified. How does this occur, and what does it mean? Marx presents us with a paradox: the more the laborer gives of their labor-power — and, therefore, the more they are a subject of capital —, the more they become its object. This is a paradox unique to capitalism, just like subjectivity as a problem.[6] As is, of course, the exploitation of labor-power for surplus-value as a hegemonic, generalized mode of production.
But we must again ask what specifically this objectification looks like, and if it is purely defined by exploitation. A quotation from The Communist Manifesto would certainly suggest otherwise: “Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine [bloßes Zubehör der Maschine], and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him.”[7] “Living appendage,” or “lebendige Anhängsel,” is not exactly the same as a “Zubehör”; Anhängsel is more specifically an “appendage,” whereas Zubehör is better rendered as “equipment.”[8] In the first instance, Marx sets up the antinomy between “lifeless” or “dead” [toter] machinery vs. living labor, whereas in the second, the ironic twist hangs on one’s machine-like utility, our servility to the means of production as if they had a life of their own. Tools were meant to be used, but instead, we find ourselves being treated like equipment. In other words, the first instance is a description of the exploitation of surplus value from living labor, but the second is a statement on alienation: on being rendered an object because of one’s relationship to production being presented back to the oneself as something beyond the scope of one’s own subjectivity. To be a living appendage and to be a piece of equipment are, on the one hand, thus two sides of the same coin, since production is assumed to be capitalist. On the other hand, alienation describes an experience that living labor does not, and it is worth exploring as a potential statement on subjectivity and capital.
To that end, I suggest a brief close reading of a passage from the Manuscripts of 1844; although much of the Manuscripts deals with alienation, this particular section reveals the subjective-objective dimension of the concept:
The worker becomes all the poorer in the wealth he produces… This fact expresses merely that the object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation… All these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself. [Was das Produkt seiner Arbeit ist, ist er nicht. Je größer also dieses Produkt, je weniger ist er selbst.] The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.[9]
The very beginning of this citation brings us back to where we started — exploitation as an expression of class struggle. The workers produce together, socially, but the value they create is recuperated individually, privately, by their boss. As a result, the more value they churn out, the less they themselves can lay claim to, relative to the total. Furthermore, we see a kind of negative subjectivity from the point of view of the laborers, springing from the completed M-C-M’ circuit. What is new for us, however, is the introduction of “alienation” as a way to conceive not only of objectification in and of itself, but of one’s continued “bondage” to the stolen value, precisely because it is stolen.
This cherished lost object is chased after like the promise of paradise. And indeed, the more of the workers’ “inner world” that is sapped, the more capital can engorge itself, as God does on the emptied-out soul. This metaphor inaccurately describes kenosis; normally, one empties one’s self out in order to be able to receive God, but it is not a question of one-to-one metaphysical bartering. Marx’s description of religion is thus in fact a description of the Other under capitalism, exploitation objectified into an alien Master to whom we are bound, both as an appendage and as a slave. There arises then the idea of desire. What is our desire for God? What do we expect from Him? What is the nature of this bondage? If we can accept that to serve God is to choose bondage,[10] then the image of God introduces a theological but also psychological aspect to alienation: though our “inner world” might be in the hands of a cruel God, our libido continuously expends itself to justify Him. Thus, the “bondage” of which Marx speaks is both practical — we rely on labor contracts to survive — and internal. We may retrospectively pinpoint libido as just such a drive capable of lusting after an always-already lost object.
If existence as a “living appendage” is an expression of class struggle, its metaphorical representation but also its direct effect, then alienation is a representation of this representation, a further extension of exploitation outside of the realm of the factory and inside the mind of the worker. In other words, we already had the subject of exploitation, a further step, a S’ to S.[11]
I hope I still have the reader’s goodwill. Should that be the case, then I will explain what precisely I mean by (such a potentially empty term as) “S’.” We have already established that Marx’s subjects (S) are negatively defined, and that this very negativity keeps them bound to their object. Indeed, though they create these objects, they slowly become objects themselves, dominated by these objects’ autocratic rule. The subject’s negativity can thus be said to be productive, since it literally produces objects. But is this objectivity not merely the “positive” to the subject’s “negative”? Is it not shifting words around in a loop? How can we think about the subjectivity of a negatively-defined object? We push onwards, by having this objectified subjectivity lay claim to more. It does not merely circle the objet a forever and ever, it actually metastasizes. The emptiness of the subject is never filled, only weaponized to expand further. Hence, when I say “S’,” I mean a mechanism of domination that grows organically from the exploited subject’s development into alienation.[12] We are no longer speaking of subjects as such, but of subjectivity as a process that encircles and produces objects.
We must then investigate subjectivity not as an ontology of the “I,” but as a kind of mechanism. I employ the metaphor of “mechanism” because it relates what is most essential to Marxist thought — namely, that we are not dealing with ironclad “laws” of Kantian legality, but rather of laws of motion, much more similar to Spinoza’s proto-materialist geometry. That is, just as he refused to define capability beyond what occurs, “laws of motion” describe what is systematically possible.[13] It allows us to say what a machine does and might do, not what it will necessarily do. Furthermore, it implies a repetitiveness that is useful for us, because capital by definition reproduces. It is interested in growth, in its own spawning. As a result, we cannot simply take capitalism as a kind of soccer game where we root for our favorite teams and allies of those teams, nor can we mistake the appearance of a mass of riches for value itself. Since value is an analytic quality that reflects social relations and the time that exceeds whatever is socially necessary for the culling of surplus value, we must not lose sight of the forest for the trees. Hence the idea of a “mechanism.” That said, as a metaphor, it is an objectified, alien representation of social relations. It is only a small part of the story. However, we can use it to glimpse the whole, i.e., the nature of subjectivity within capitalist social relations. This “within” is key: it does, in a sense, speak of the Weltlichkeit of the formerly alone [bloss] subject, but in no way can it connect this subject with “being thrown” or fallenness. We must now elucidate what precisely it does mean.
We have until now ignored two very important details of the passage quoted above that will shed some light on this mechanism. Firstly: “Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself [Was das Produkt seiner Arbeit ist, ist er nicht. Je größer also dieses Produkt, je weniger ist er selbst.].” Secondly: “hostile and alien.” The first speaks to the confusion between production and being — what the worker is (ist) —, and so between subjectivity, objectivity, and existence. The second refers to the dialectical collision of exploitation and alienation, that the world of objects rules the worker as a sublimated class struggle but it does so in a hostile manner. In other words, we are being led gradually towards a revolutionary outburst, not of proletarians against objects, but of proletarians against the bourgeoisie.
To ask what the worker is means understanding what makes them a worker. To resort to das Dasein would be to evade precisely this point. As a result, the description of subjectivity that I have put forth can be said to subsume ontology not as a question (what is the worker?) but as an answer (the worker is). Because the worker “is” not: the “is” can only refer to a subjectivity, which is in any case an empty shell, or else we must claim that the “is” refers to something “deeper” and more “primordial,” i.e., Dasein. Were we to accept Dasein as a solution, we would be abandoning what makes the worker a worker in favor of what allows the worker “to be,” in the abstract. We would be narcotizing exploitation and alienation in favor of the worker’s abstract “existence.” But their relationship to existence is mediated, even formed by exploitation and alienation. These are what allow someone to view their existence as distinct from their existing! However, this does mean that we have no “solution” to our slow strangulation by capital — none, except for the explosion of “hostility.”
That objects and then labor[14] should appear not only as foreign to the subject but hostile suggests a step towards breaking one’s bondage to the missing object. The hostility of what we create proves that we are not, as in Frankenstein, foiled by our own creations, but are exploited by an enemy class. This enmity defines class struggle, it defines classes and it defines exploitation and alienation. It is the heart of why the worker is a worker. Because they are alienated, because they are exploited. It is also instructive in that it is labor objectified that is hostile — though the bourgeoisie profits off of exploitation, it itself has no choice but to. Overthrowing the bourgeoisie is then only a modicum of the effort required to establish socialism. We need to destroy that which underlies our very own subjectivity, the systemic exploitation of surplus value.
That said, capitalism does not purely rely on surplus-value. Other forms of labor are required to keep the machines running, most notably slavery and reproductive labor. But what is more perfectly alienated than slavery? Who is more alienated from their offspring than the slave who gives birth against their will? In the case of slavery, the slave is quite literally treated as an instrument — Marxist analysis[15] takes us up to this point. In other words, the slave is actually the utmost alienated object. The alienation only makes sense as alienation however in the context of a capitalist or semi-capitalist market. That is, in the context of subjectivity.
So we begin to see that alienation can help us understand much more broadly the system that relies on exploitation. Because not only value-producing workers are alienated. By virtue of their exploitation, insofar as most commodities are produced by wage-laborers, we are all alienated. Alienation, then, and its empty mechanism of subjectivity — that is, theft — allow us to greatly expand the narrow insistence on factory workers espoused by certain strands of Marxism. It is not that we should abandon factory workers, quite the opposite! We need to build alliances across sectors of the working class, not all of whom are, traditionally speaking, living labor, and we also need the support of at least a sizable portion of the petite bourgeoisie. And, even, a tiny sliver of the bourgeoisie. As such, we must mobilize our analytical tools to break with rote, circular repetition and genuinely make strides towards freeing ourselves from capital.
[1] I use “interpellate” here literally, not in the Althusserian sense.
[2] I refer to the worker with my own they/them pronouns, perhaps out of personal bias.
[3] Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, London: Penguin Books, 1973, 1993, pp. 295-296. The emphasis is Marx’s own. I have rendered British spelling American wherever it appears, to have the quotations conform stylistically to the rest of the essay.
[4] This is indeed not Deleuze’s conception of dialectics as a “false movement,” as he describes in Différence et répétition and Nietzsche et la philosophie, but rather Lenin’s (he is the one who conceives of dialectics as a spiral) and, dare I say, Marx and Engels’. Admittedly, Marx and Engels split with Hegel in that they make possible a far more nuanced negative dialectics elaborated by Theodor Adorno: things exceed themselves because of their productive negativity, and furthermore they do not necessarily do so towards a telos. Adorno’s philosophy is this paper’s éminence grise, as will become clear if not explicit. I note that his polemic in Negative Dialectics, however, is really more aimed at Heidegger the anti-dialectician than it is towards Hegel or anyone else.
[5] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Edward Aveling and Samuel Moore, 1887, on line, URL: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf, pp. 285.
[6] That is, in the sense we mean it, even if it were not defined, as it is in this case, by the extraction of surplus-value. We mean a capacity to conceive of one’s self as an individual possessing inalienable rights, being a res cogitans and mapping it onto an image of the world, etc. Cf Theodor Adorno, “Epilégomènes dialectiques : Sujet et objet” in Modèles critiques, trans. Marc Jimenez and Eliane Kaufholw, Paris: Payot, 2003, pp. 301-318 ; Cf Martin Heidegger, “L’époque des ‘conceptions du monde’”, in Chemins qui mènent nulle part, trans. Wolfgang Brokmeier, Paris: Gallimard, 1962, 2021, pp. 99-146.
[7] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848, online, URL : https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007.
[8] Heidegger uses the term “Zeug” for “equipment,” which also means “thing” or “bauble,” but also, in a certain sense, “useless chatter.” While interesting, it sadly has nothing to do with Marx’s Zubehör.
[9] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, online, URL : https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Economic-Philosophic-Manuscripts-1844.pdf, 28-29.
[10] I am moving rather quickly, I am aware, and I am in any case an atheist. That said, this idea comes from Exodus, that we should be “abdei Elohim”, God’s slaves. As an aside, a medieval rabbinical precursor to Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation,” “midrash,” has it that God threatened the Israelites by holding Mount Sinai over their heads when they made the deal to enter into servitude; this destabilized the terms of the contract, making it one that was agreed to under duress. It had to be decided that the Jews had later on reaffirmed their commitment to God legitimately when threatened by extermination in Persia. Cf the Chabadniks’ explanation online, https://www.chabad.org/parshah/article_cdo/aid/2786/jewish/Underneath-the-Mountain.htm.
[11] I am not referring to Lacan’s S and ＄ because this would requires several more pages of analysis that do not really belong here. Though the homage is deliberate, I am really trying to mirror Marx’s M-C-M’.
[12] So although we witness a repetition in the leap from exploitation to alienation, it is repetition with an important difference: it expands, albeit forever chained to the mode of production. That said, if we are talking about the revolution in thought necessary for colonialism and then imperialism to flourish, we are met with an immediate historical challenge: colonialism precedes industrial capitalism. But this is not really such a difficulty, since we never claimed that this exploitation had to be hegemonic as a mode of production for it to expand. It in fact requires even more theft. In my mémoire de Master, I liken this process to Freud’s Urverdrängung and to the “phylogenetic heritage” of the castration fantasy. Thus, I hope to sidestep the need for a Wundersprung or an “original sin” moment of capitalism-colonialism and can talk instead about repeated acts.
[13] Such a view of possibility runs deep: “Etenim quid corpus possit, nemo hucusque determinavit… (No one knows what the body is capable of…)” Baruch Spinoza, Ethica, III, 2, S, online, URL: http://baptiste.meles.free.fr/spinozabase/ethica.html#302.
[14] Note that this order is backwards historically. But from the perspective of the worker’s coming into consciousness of class struggle, objects loom larger in the horizon than labor itself. Alienation is dealt with before exploitation, although exploitation theoretically precedes alienation. In all fairness, to exploit subjects, they already need to be alienated to some degree from the fruits of their labor, by definition. This paradox is only analytical, because we have chosen to separate alienation and exploitation as two separate processes to understand the subjective experience of each of them.
[15] As a kind of fixed capital. Karl Marx, Capital, vol II, trans. David Fernbach, London: Penguin, 1978, 1992, online, URL: http://digamo.free.fr/penguin2.pdf, 555.
ESSENTIAL WORKS CITED
Marx, Karl. Capital, vol. 1. Trans. Edward Aveling and Samuel Moore. 1887. On line. URL:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf.
—. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Online. URL :
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Economic-Philosophic-Manuscripts-1844.pdf.
—. Grundrisse. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin Books. 1973, 1993.
Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto. 1848. Online. URL :
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007.
Hyperspekulation 
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