Long Way From Home

Recently a comrade made a more explicit connection between my post on Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Marx’s concept of time. I wanted to post a few notes about it here as a follow up.

He pointed to an important essay by Loren Goldner on the concept of social reproduction where he talks about Marx’s concept of time, drawing the threads together from the Grundrisse, Capital Vol 3, the “Theses on Feuerbach”, among others.

Goldner writes:

“In the Theses, as indicated above, Marx refers (Thesis 1) to the “active side developed by idealism,” over and against all previous materialisms “which do not understand activity as objective.” What connects Descartes to Hegel, via Spinoza and Leibniz, is the idea of “actual infinity.” (I retain this term not in any mathematical sense but as it comes down to us from philosophy, above all in Hegel.) Bourgeois ideology conceives of infinity as endless repetition toward a goal which is never reached, as presented in Zeno’s paradoxes. Bourgeois ideology could not free itself from this “asymptotic” ever-closer approximation of a “bad infinity” (the term is also from Hegel), which expressed in a different way an atomistic reductionist vision of the universe as consisting of ever-smaller points and instants….”

“…Actual infinity, by contrast, sees infinity not as an ever-receding “goal” at the end of a process of infinitely small steps, but as EXISTING IMMANENTLY IN THE PRESENT. What connected Descartes to Hegel and Marx was the idea that the banal recognition of any specific “fact” presupposed immanently and simultaneously a self-consciousness RE-cognizing of that “fact.” Just as there is in Marx no commodity in itself but ultimately the whole circuit of M-C-M’ valorization presupposed in the existence of any specific commodity, there is in the development from Descartes to Hegel the growing recognition that the “actual infinite” present in cognition is the presupposition of any sense-certainty perception whatsoever. Hegel culminated this process in philosophy (that is in ideology) by immanently unfolding the activity of “world spirit” from banal sense-certainty data; Marx relocated it in the concept of “sensuous transformative praxis,” the “germ of a new world outlook” best presented in the (incomplete) 4 volumes of Capital, wherein he immanently unfolds the world history of capitalism, and demonstrates capitalism’s transitory nature, from the banal individual commodity. Creativity IS the “actual infinite” in man”
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In Chapter 9 of Capital Vol. 1, “The Rate of Surplus Value,” Marx says that the rate of surplus value should not be confused with the rate of profit.

The rate of surplus value is s/v. The greater the ratio between the two the larger the surplus value. The increase in surplus value and the lesser the variable capital, the greater the exploitation. Because value is the form of labor in capitalist society, the relationship between necessary labor and surplus labor takes the form of s/v. And this s/v is the value form of the living labor, which is surplus labor/necessary labor.

Some relation of necessary to surplus labor has characterized all societies. However, in capitalist society labor takes the form of s/v. V is living labor existing as “labor-time”. The relation s/v is the necessary time to reproduce labor power and surplus time that accrues to the capitalist because he controls the means of production.

The relation s/v is therefore not simply an “expression for the degree of exploitation of labour-power by capital, or of the worker by the capitalist” (326). The relation s/v expresses the separation of labor from the means of labor. Therefore this relation expresses “the same thing in different ways; in the one case in the form of objectified labour, in the other in the form of living, fluid labour” (326). What s/v indicates is living labor existing as objectified labor.

Marx says that the rate of surplus value is not the rate of profit. Profit is s/C; that is, the surplus in relation to the capital advanced, or s/(c+v). In comparison, the rate of surplus value is the relation of the surplus created by labor to the value that returns to it in the form of wages, or s/v.

Yet the rate of surplus appears to the capitalist as the rate of profit. As Marx says, s/v takes the form of s/C. From the standpoint of s/C labor, in the form of (v), is just another object in the production process. The capitalist makes no conceptual distinction between (c) and (v), and both simply exist as (C), his commodity or capital that must be advanced.
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I’ve continued to slowly work on Fanon when I have time.

It is difficult to understand Fanon’s concept of race without grasping his methodology. The terms through which he thinks about race are drawn from a number of sources. Fundamental to Fanon’s approach, and most important for the purposes of this essay, is his engagement with Hegel. While a student in post-war France, Fanon encountered the Hegelian inflected existential phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre. It was during this time that France experienced a Hegelian revival while Fanon was a young man recently discharged from the military and pursuing a degree in psychiatry. Influential in the return to Hegel was Alexandre Kojève’s lectures, later published in English as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1947). These lectures interpreted Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit through a Heideggerian and Marxist lens. Kojève lectures had an important impact on Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’s development of existentialism in post-war France. It was from Sartre and Merleau-Ponty that Fanon gathered and adapted many of the basic phenomenological concepts with which he theorized race.

A critical component of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is the section called “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage,” which appears in the second chapter on the origin and developing “movement of self-consciousness” [1]. There are number of considerations here. First, for Hegel self-consciousness arises as a result of the coexistence of human beings and the world around them. The relation between the two is defined by the appropriation of the object of nature and the creation of new objects by human beings.

The concept of self-consciousness as a developing process that emerges from the relation between human beings and the world is an important one. As Herbert Marcuse writes, for Hegel “the subject of thinking is not the ‘abstract ego’ but the consciousness that knows that it is the ‘substance’ of the world.” When true self-consciousness is achieved, Marcuse continues, “thinking consists in knowing that the objective world is in reality a subjective world, that it is the objectification of the subject. The subject that really thinks comprehends the world as ‘his’ world” [2]. For Hegel, Marcuse concludes, this state of freedom is achieved when humanity “abandons the abstract freedom of thought and enters into the world in full consciousness that it is ‘his own’ world” [3]. Self-consciousness is no longer a negation of something that lies outside of oneself and, instead, becomes a positive actualization of the world as an extension of the self. Only then is there is a complete correspondence between the self and world. For Hegel the development of self-consciousness towards the unity of the world and self is the process of history itself.
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I’ve been absent for awhile due to work and organizing, but I continue to put together notes on Fanon when I can. Meanwhile, going over Capital Vol. 1 again, I’m still dwelling on the relationship between the wage and surplus value.

After establishing the concept of Capital as value valorizing itself in chapter 4 (the “general formula”), he goes on in chapter five, the “contradictions in the general formula,” to show the contradiction of capital.

What is the contradiction? In chapter 4 he describes valorization as limitless, endless. The standpoint of capital is M-M’ and the C is incidental to its self-expansion. In chapter 5, Marx returns the dialectic by saying that the production of C is the basis upon which not simply M exists (the money expression of value/capital), but capital itself. And where does the C come from but living labor. The valorization of value IS living labor expanding itself in alienated, abstract form, though it appears to capital and the capitalist (and to everyone else) that it is not.

I thought the following was a key quote from Chapter 5 (online version, but with Penguin page number):

“The commodity owner can, by his labour, create value, but not self-expanding value. He can increase the value of his commodity, by adding fresh labour, and therefore more value to the value in hand, by making, for instance, leather into boots. The same material has now more value, because it contains a greater quantity of labour. The boots have therefore more value than the leather, but the value of the leather remains what it was; it has not expanded itself, has not, during the making of the boots, annexed surplus-value. It is therefore impossible that outside the sphere of circulation, a producer of commodities can, without coming into contact with other commodity-owners, expand value, and consequently convert money or commodities into capital.

It is therefore impossible for capital to be produced by circulation, and it is equally impossible for it to originate apart from circulation. It must have its origin both in circulation and yet not in circulation” (268).
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For some reason I saw Elite Squad 2 awhile back when it was released in the US, but not Elite Squad. I finally watched Elite Squad last week. Elite Squad 2 holds records in Brazil for ticket sales and revenue. José Padilha, the director of the Elite Squad series, apparently will be completing a remake of RoboCop next year, a movie of familiar themes to Elite Squad: crime-ridden city, a corrupt system and good cops who must decide to go outside the law to save the city.

Elite Squad is one of the most disturbing movies I’ve seen in awhile. And its easy to see why. I looked up scenes of the movie on youtube and I came across a trailer. The trailer is so detached that the actual content of the movie is transformed into an ideological specter, disembodied from the real movie.

The trailer says that Elite Squad is about reluctant, but good cops who have no choice but to clean up their neighborhood through extra-legal means. It is likely that it is on those terms many viewers may think about the movie. However, the visceral experience of the movie will prove otherwise. Its dystopian portrait of capitalist modernization is highly concentrated in the trope of the prison, which is overtly thematized in references to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. The feeling of capitalist society as a barbaric prison is reproduced at the level of character in Captain Nascimento’s spiraling addiction as he tries to escape his role as a military police commander.

Of course, Elite Squad must retain the moral impulse of its heroes, but it does so as a half-dead gesture. This is where I thought Elite Squad works and maintains authenticity. The moral impulse is meant to open the way to the restoration of the unity of the city, however, in this case, its “proper” place in the genre recedes in the distance. The kind of ideological commentary in the American trailer for the movie becomes that much more glaring – an attempt to square the circle, so to speak. It is a sign of decadence, equivalent to the chatter of the political class far removed from the actual reality of capitalist society.
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In writing about Fanon’s concept of race I have found Marx’s phenomenology of capital and labor critically important. What Marx draws out in a reading of Fanon is the centrality in the latter of a dialectical approach in thinking about the process and expression of race. For Fanon race is above all a social relation that develops dialectically.

Because Marx, like Fanon after him, conceptualized their respective subjects through a grappling with Hegel there is a methodological affinity between Fanon and Marx that is beneficial for both.

Very few marxists in a practical sense have made central the phenomenology and psychology of labor in capitalism even though it is clear that Marx was keenly attuned to these dimensions. At the same time very few interpretations of Fanon have considered sympathetically the inner connections with Marx, specifically in regards to a certain shared methodology appropriated from Hegel.

Several “Hegelian” passages in the Grundrisse have been particularly helpful as I wade back into Fanon:

“The independent, for-itself existence [Fürsichsein] of value vis-à-vis living labour capacity — hence its existence as capital — the objective, self-sufficient indifference, the alien quality [Fremdheit] of the objective conditions of labour vis-a-vis living labour capacity, which goes so far that these conditions confront the person of the worker in the person of the capitalist — as personification with its own will and interest — this absolute divorce, separation of property, i.e. of the objective conditions of labour from living labour capacity — that they confront him as alien property, as the reality of other juridical persons, as the absolute realm of their will — and that labour therefore, on the other side, appears as alien labour opposed to the value personified in the capitalist, or the conditions of labour — this absolute separation between property and labour, between living labour capacity and the conditions of its realization, between objectified and living labour, between value and value-creating activity — hence also the alien quality of the content of labour for the worker himself — this divorce now likewise appears as a product of labour itself, as objectification of its own moment. For, in the new act of production itself — which merely confirmed the exchange between capital and living labour which preceded it — surplus labour, and hence the surplus product, the total product of labour in general (of surplus labour as well as necessary labour), has now been posited as capital, as independent and indifferent towards living labour capacity, or as exchange value which confronts its mere use value. Labour capacity has appropriated for itself only the subjective conditions of necessary labour — the means of subsistence for actively producing labour capacity, i.e. for its reproduction as mere labour capacity separated from the conditions of its realization — and it has posited these conditions themselves (452) as things, values, which confront it in an alien, commanding personification.
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After a long hiatus I have finished up the writing I started on WITBD. What follows is a bit rough around the edges, but I’d rather set it aside. The first part of these notes can be found here.

Another key contribution of WITBD is its conception of revolutionary organization as “plan.”

The stress Lenin placed on the active link between the logical and historical movement of the class was meant to combat the dominant deterministic and static conception of the workers’ movement in the Russian marxist milieu of the time. As Lih emphasizes in his book, this context puts in a more complicated light Lenin’s constant attack on “any kow-towing before the stikhiinost of the worker movement, any disparagement of the role of the ‘purposive element’” (708). For Lenin it was critical to fight against the view that “the desirable struggle is one that is possible and the possible struggle is the one that is going on at a given minute. This tendency is, in fact, unbounded opportunism that passively adapts itself to stikhiinost” (717).

In WITBD, Lenin argued that what was missing in Russian revolutionary circles was an organizational framework that could fuse with the advanced workers and thereby develop the “purposive element” in their activity and struggle. Regardless of the fact that Lenin tended to think of the “purposive element” in terms of the logical content of the class struggle abstracted from its concrete historical forms, the distinction he raises between the “purposive element’ and spontaneous highlighted the set of practices he thought integral to a Russian revolutionary organization. The debate in WITBD about these practices centered on Lenin’s understanding of the relationship between the mass movement and the circles of revolutionaries scattered throughout Russia.

Lenin argued “the strength of the present-day movement is the awakening of the masses (and principally the industrial proletariat), while its weakness is the inadequate purposiveness and initiative of the revolutionaries and leader/guides” (700). In contrast to the largest upsurge in the mass movement since the mid 1890s, it was the marxist revolutionaries who “suffer precisely from a lack of sufficient initiative and energy” (718). As a result, “revolutionaries fell behind this upsurge both in their ‘theories’ and in their activity—they did not succeed in creating an uninterrupted and continuous organisation with gathering momentum that was capable of guiding the entire movement” (721). The mass upsurge, Lenin proposed, offered an opportunity, not to be missed, to clarify the relationship between the broader movement and revolutionaries:

There can be no disputing that the mass movement is indeed the most important phenomenon. But the question is: what do we mean when we say that this mass movement ‘determines tasks’? There are two possibilities: either in the sense of kow-towing before the stikhiinost of this movement, that is, reducing the role of Social Democracy down to a simple servicing of the worker movement as such [ ]; or in the sense that the mass movement puts before us new theoretical, political, organisational tasks, much more complicated than those found satisfactory in the period before the emergence of the mass movement. (715)

In order to catch up with the workers, to be more “purposive,” revolutionaries had to be more centralized, disciplined and professional. WITBD was aimed at what Lenin considered disorganized and “amateurish” practices that represented a historical limit on the activity of Russian marxists. These practices were inevitable in the mid-1890s when Russian marxists were beginning to conduct broader agitation, but at the turn of the century the historical development of both the broader movement and the revolutionary circles made possible and necessitated a new form of organization. Lenin had in mind things like redundant labor, such as printing many local papers, a stubborn localism that resulted in lack of communication, sharing of experience, little national development of cadres and political perspectives, and the constant arrest of trained organizers.
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Two broad approaches have been hegemonic in the last thirty years in response to this conceptual and practical problem: class reductionism or identity politics. There have been attempts to go beyond this limit, for example “intersectionality,” initially developed by the black queer, socialist feminists of Combahee River Collective and later extended and elaborated by bell hooks among many others.

While the conceptual and practical problem of race has, arguably, reached an historical impasse, the process of white supremacy has qualitatively changed. White supremacy has not only deepened, but reorganized itself. It is simultaneously recognizable in the numbers – employment, prison, health, housing statistics, voting and immigration laws, police and vigilante violence – but also a lived and observable reality in every city street and small town in the United States. The changes in white supremacy no doubt have something to do with the conceptual and practical limits in dealing with it by those on the black, brown and white left.

What I have encountered less in the concept and practical problem of race is an approach that treats it as a dialectical social relation. Searching for a place to start I began putting together some notes on Frantz Fanon. He is a very dialectical thinker on race and there are close connections in his methodology to Marx. Fanon conceives of race not simply as a social construct, but a dialectical social relation.

Frantz Fanon is one of the most important thinkers on race and any serious theory of race must grapple with his work. At the same time Fanon arguably was and remains one of the most misunderstood revolutionary figures. Part of the reason lies in the hybrid nature of his work, drawing from philosophy, psychoanalysis, anthropology and marxism. Another reason may be the conditions under which his writings were produced, often addressing the immediate theoretical issues of the day whether in France, Algeria or Africa and the Caribbean as a whole. Further, having died of leukemia at the young age of 36, Fanon was robbed of the opportunity to more fully develop and synthesize his diverse work.

Many different political currents and historical movements have drawn from Fanon, often emphasizing one particular aspect of his thought. Fanon was first and foremost known as a radical diplomatic spokesperson for the FLN, the leading party of the Algerian revolution. However, Fanon’s broader ideas, even as they appeared in El Moudjahid, the FLN paper, remained somewhat anonymous.

Within anti-colonial circles Fanon became known as a proponent of exporting the model of the Algerian Revolution to other colonial societies in Africa. Fanon also had some relationships with French intellectuals, most famously Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. However, Fanon’s work as a theorist was never widely known in his lifetime. It was not until Les Damnés del la terre was translated into English in 1965 as The Wretched of the Earth that Fanon reached a wider audience. While Third Worldist writers recovered and synthesized his work in the latter 1960s and 1970s, the nationalist revival in the United States adapted Fanon’s thought to an American context. Later, Fanon was the subject of intense appropriation and critique within American universities, particularly in the 1990s. The different moments in the reception and interpretation of his work meant that Fanon has been interpreted in widely different ways.

What I want to do is briefly examine Fanon’s understanding of race. In doing so I can by no means provide an exhaustive account of Fanon’s work. Important areas of his writing will be left untouched as will much of the historical context. Instead I want to explore the key categories and methodology Fanon uses in his analysis of race as a vital step in the necessary reconstruction of theory of race and white supremacy.

It seems best to approach the question through a close reading of two of Fanon’s key works. While I’ll need to selectively draw from other parts of his work, my notes will have to primarily function as an exposition of two critical chapters from his two most important works. Those chapters are “The Lived Experience of the Black Man” and from Black Skin, White Masks and “Concerning Violence” from The Wretched of the Earth.