Prologue: who and what we have lost

The Marxist Literary Group is not an organization accustomed to the adulation of its leading members, much less to personality-cults. At the same time, at least over the twenty-five years or so of my involvement with it, it has built up a definite esprit de corps,something anyone who has ever attended an annual MLG Institute on Society and Culture over at least the last fifteen years or so has surely experienced. But it is, as I reckon it, precisely the kind of group spirit apt to grow out of a form of collectivity wary of leaders who become inaccessible to rank and file members or of elevating them into the objects of deferential obeisances.

To explain this would probably require delving into details from the organization’s past about which I’m neither quite old enough nor sufficiently knowledgeable to be very informative. Indeed, it’s unfortunate that the MLG lacks, so far, any genuinely comprehensive account of its history as an organization1; and the time frame within which that lack might be redeemed is fast disappearing. After fifty or more years of its effectively continuous existence as an organization, those individuals who were present at and responsible for the MLG’s founding are, in most cases, now in their seventies and eighties, while others are, by now, probably and sadly past consulting.

Nor, as the traumatic and bitterly grievous occasion for this issue of Mediationsmakes all too clear, can any of us predict very safely where or how we will find ourselves on the occasion of, say, future gatherings at ICS — on the still further assumption that the current species of failed state that is the contemporary US can ensure the minimally adequate standards of public health required for even modest, relatively downscale events such as ICS to take place.

Anecdotal accounts of the MLG’s beginnings in the late 1960s and early 1970s and of its further evolution during the 1980s nevertheless make it fairly clear that any egalitarian ethos the MLG may now be able to claim for itself has had to be built up over time. The MLG’s openness to and encouragement of graduate student participation on all levels, for instance, and its rejection of academic or other traditional intellectual hierarchies and star-worshipping practices were evidently not always such well-established norms.

Indeed, though it may seem ironic, it is in fact probably no accident that the MLG originated and continues, formally, to function as one of numerous subset organizations within the Modern Language Association (MLA). I say ‘ironic’ because, for almost as long as I can remember, the MLG has tended to find its identity in, among other things, an antipathy for the hierarchical and ultra-competitive culture of the MLA, an organization in which, at the same time, many if not most of the MLG’s younger members, at least, are obliged to participate as well. Anyone who has ever known what it was like to take refuge from the insidious atmosphere of an annual MLA convention at a traditional MLG/Minnesota Review cash bar knows all about this — even if such gatherings often were and perhaps still are, as a rule, always also the coolest place to be. At MLA, of course, you could never feel entirely free of the urgent pressure to look over your shoulder for someplace else that was better for your career. But once ensconced inside the MLG tent, at least, the capitalist ideologies responsible for legitimating academic labor markets and increasingly massive academic under-and unemployment were explicitly non grata, and it at least became easier to imagine a world in which, say, getting a living by teaching literature — not the worst pretext for studying and teaching Marxism — was not only something open to anyone but in fact didn’t need any apology at all.

And, even better than that, and as if providing that idea with sensuous, individual human form, at an MLG cash bar you might also glimpse across the room, much to your delight and relief, the tall figure of Kevin Floyd and hear, above the murmur of the many animated conversations underway, the sounds of his faintly Texan drawl and of his explosive laugh.

In Kevin, our late and bitterly mourned comrade, had not the Marxist Literary Group found, after all, a near perfect embodiment of this esprit de corps--found, as one might put it, its genius? I do not use this latter word, as ought to be clear by now, in its more vulgar sense as, to cite an online dictionary, a “person endowed with extraordinary mental superiority” — although this is not to deny that Kevin’s was an extraordinary intellect. Some will likely recall here Walter Benjamin’s encomia against the Romantic cults of ‘creativity’ and ‘genius’ in “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility,” cults that, as Benjamin observed in his most celebrated essay, the ‘proletarianizing’ impetus of art’s technological reproducibility was poised to sweep away but which fascism, with its ‘aestheticizing of politics,’ was intent on preserving and re-deploying2. These are ideas with which Kevin was surely in sympathy.

I do not, however, use the term ’genius’ here in its Romantic but rather in its now more antique sense (plural: “genii”) as the “attendant spirit of a person or place”—or, as the case may be here, the spirit of an organization or group of people. At any rate, for me at least, the sheer irresistibility of Kevin’s personality andthe way in which it gave spontaneous, individual expression to the social atmosphere of summer Institutes and the MLG itself, readily invites this idea.

I perhaps needn’t mention names here, but this is not for a moment to forget how fortunate the MLG has been, before Kevin’s all too brief tenure, in finding other exceptional presiding officers3 among its ranks. Nor have we been strangers to the tragic, early loss of other, much admired, beloved and now likewise grievously mourned MLG members and Institute regulars: I am thinking here of the former MLG president and renowned Marxist literary scholar and critical theorist, Michael Sprinker (1950-1999), and of Michael’s comrade-in-arms, the critic, novelist and MLG regular Fred Pfeil (1949-2005). Both, like Kevin, died at tragically young ages, claimed by the same illness that took Kevin from us--capitalism’s every day, default-setting plague of cancer. And, although the organization has had it occasional bouts of acrimony, at least during my quarter century of more or less regular Institute attendance, the MLG’s practice of consensus-based self-governance speaks to its exceptionally good institutional karma over the years—and probably helps to explain its no less exceptional institutional longevity: founded--depending on the chronologist--in 1969 or 1970, 2020 did indeed mark MLG’s fiftieth year (and counting)of continuous, active organizational existence. Members of the MLG are rarely strangers to radical political practice and, as Marxists, are certainly no strangers to polemics, so might not this durable, amicable and hale esprit be a side benefit of the “literary” component of the MLG, the fact that its work is mainly intellectual, not to say theoretical or even, in a more ancillary fashion, academic? Not likely. Rather, in the end, this beneficent organizational culture — one that Kevin embodied so remarkably well — surely has as much if not more to do with the “M” in ‘MLG,’ i.e., with the emancipatory, egalitarian, radically utopian and anti-capitalist ethos of Marxism itself — the Marxism of both Old and New Lefts as it lives on and lives in the MLG and as it is epitomized and emblazoned in the life and work of Kevin Floyd.

The Reification of Desire, before and after

The profound shock, grief and sense of loss that overwhelmed the MLG when — sometime after many of us saw him for the last time in June, 2018 at an Institute at Albany University in New York — we learned that Kevin was gravely ill, followed by the anticipated but no less dreaded news of his death on November 7, 2019 are, as I write this in early 2021, still vivid and intense. And they seem likely to stay that way for a long time to come — one measure of how strong a bond had grown up between Kevin and many of us in the MLG over the many years during which his regular presence at Institutes and at all levels of the organization had made it hard to imagine it at all without him.

But losing Kevin is no less a general loss for the progressive development of Marxism per se as a social, cultural and aesthetic theory-and, not least, clearly, as a theory of gender and sexuality. The Reification of Desire4, Kevin’s major work and one that rapidly elevated him to a singular and commanding stature at the convergence of Marxism and Queer Theory, was already a decade old in 2019. Reading its pages again now instantly re-confirms how and why it was to become an almost immediate classic of Marxist critical theory.

This is something driven home for me in an especially personal way, having once carried on a lengthy correspondence with Kevin about his Ph.D. dissertation, a work then still in-progress but eventually to evolve into The Reification of Desire. This was in the early to mid-1990s when I was teaching at Northeastern University in Boston and Kevin was still a graduate student at the University of Iowa. The principal occasion for our exchange of emails were questions he had raised concerning the work that, as much if not more than any other, still informs and foregrounds The Reification of Desire, Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (hereafter, HCC) and especially its centerpiece, fons et origo of the Western Marxism to which it subsequently gave rise, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” HCC’s central concept of reification, a still controversial extension and extrapolation of Marx’s theory of commodity-fetishism, was one with which Kevin, although by then I think convinced of its potential centrality to the project of mediating Queer Theory and Marxism, was simultaneously struggling to come to terms in those days, given the hostility of some currents of Queer Theory for its dialectically paired concept of totality. He had read and had been influenced by Jameson’s still widely cited essay on HCC, “History and Class Consciousness as an Unfinished Project,5” But more about this in a moment.

Kevin and I had met not long before, thanks to our shared involvement in MLG and the summer Institutes of those years, and not the least of my reasons for setting aside the second half of June each year for regular pilgrimages to ICS was the prospect of long and sometimes raucous conversations with Kevin during breaks between panels, often — as I will always vividly remember — gathered with the other smokers (Kevin had yet to quit) on pavements outside the series of ICS conference halls at places like the University of Illinois in Chicago, Georgetown, George Mason, Portland State in Oregon, the University of California, Davis, Ohio State, Concordia University in Montreal and St. John’s in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. I can’t say for certain whether Kevin was there at all of those places and times, but my memories of them is inseparable from memories of him.

I wish now that I had kept copies of those emails, but re-reading The Reification of Desire all these years later does at least restore for me the gist of what they must have contained as I recognize throughout its pages evidence of Kevin’s occasional demurrals and, sometimes, his carefully constructed refutations of what was then my often passionate and enthusiastic advocacy of “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” and my own attempts to persuade Kevin of its correctness. Re-reading The Reification of Desire now also becomes an ironic register of how my own thinking has moved on as I encounter there a critique of reification après Lukács that somewhat uncomfortably reflects back at me what I now, a generation later, recognize as the limitations and dead ends in the version of it I had been espousing to Kevin.

Although generally sympathetic to any attempt at reviving HCC and re-inserting it into the left theoretical debates then unfolding, especially during the poststructuralist-inflected identity politics shaping ‘cultural studies’ in its then incipient North American variant, what I most remember arguing over with Kevin after first meeting him were, again, the reasons for my dissatisfaction with Jameson’s attempted rehabilitation of HCC in the above mentioned essay, which had first appeared in 1988. What I objected to was, as I saw it, Jameson’s watering down of Lukács’ class-based standpoint theory in order to accommodate the non- or supra-class standpoints of what were then being referred to as ‘new social movements.’ This was in no way out of any reluctance on my part towards acknowledging the emancipatory content of struggles against sexism, racism or homophobia and heteronormativity. And my criticisms of this particular foray of Jameson’s into HCC and the Marxism of Lukács generally were foregrounded by the grateful acknowledgment of the fact that it had been Jameson, especially in Marxism and Form (1974) who had probably done more than anyone else to re-introduce Lukács and HCC to North American and Anglophone readers generally.

My disappointment and skepticism regarding what was, ironically, Jameson’s 1988 defense of HCC rested on the fundamentally theoretical question of whether, in fact, “An Unfinished Project” hadn’t tended to water down if not to falsify the epistemological content and the dialectical methodology of Lukács’ argument in the book. In agreement with HCC, and, so I thought, with Marx, I understood class, especially the class struggle pitting labor against capital, as the site of a contradiction that was in turn a deep-structural dimension of bourgeois society, whereas more loosely and ‘culturally’ based social movements lacked this essential structure and therefore could not be held to constitute anti-systemic ‘standpoints’ in the same sense6. Regardless, in the end, of whether and how far one credited Lukács’ theory of the ‘imputed’ revolutionary class consciousness of the proletariat, in extending his concept of standpoint to the consciousness of non-class-based movements Jameson was — as I still think — coming dangerously close to incurring a basic category-mistake. By obfuscating this essential, structural difference — with the aid of convenient but, for me, basically spurious references to Adorno’s concept of ‘truth-content’ (‘Wahrheitsgehalt’) — Jameson in “Unfinished Project” would be draining HCC of its ‘truth-content,’ namely, its grounding in dialectical method and in the categories of Marx’s critique of political economy. Any ‘aspiration to totality’ to which a culturally based social movement might lay claim could not therefore aspire to overcome the reified consciousness generated by the material basis of a capitalist, commodity-producing and exchanging social formation. By neglecting this crucial distinction, I thought, Marxists who took Jameson’s well-intentioned but, in the end, diffuse and liberalizing reading of HCC as a basis for affirming the potentially anti-reifying consciousness of certain ‘new social movements’ regardless of their structural relation to class — or, for that matter, to the social mediations of commodity- or value-form — were, at the very least, misreading HCC, and, at worst, providing ‘revolutionary’ alibis for cultural forms of dissidence perfectly at home in bourgeois society.

But this was in the early to mid-1990s, before I had first read and given serious consideration to Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor and Social Domination(1993) and its critique of a labor-centered ‘traditional’ Marxism — that of Lukács and HCC notably included. Nor had I yet, thanks to Roberto Schwarz and a 1995 sojourn at the University of São Paulo, had my thinking transformed by a first encounter with the value-critical work of Robert Kurz (then newly translated into Portuguese) and, as my German abilities caught up, by the work of other ‘Wertkritik’ theorists, including the Nuremberg value-critical journal Krisis7 and its 1999 Manifest gegen die Arbeit (Manifesto Against Labor). Ultimately swayed by the focus, shared by both Postone and Wertkritik, on a critique of the value-abstraction per se and on a correspondingly revised and fully historicized situating of class and the class contradiction on a less deeply structural, more derivative and narrowly ‘sociological’ theoretical plane within Marxism, my distrust of Jameson’s well-intentioned but, to be blunt, overly ecumenical and diplomatic reading of Lukács in “An Unfinished Project” has not changed. But, meanwhile, my own reading of HCCdefinitely has.

And so it is that when reading The Reification of Desire now I find myself far more open to Kevin’s skeptical and critical reading of HCC. If reification — in its origins a theoretical term conceived so as to extend the critique of commodity fetishism beyond the “objective forms of bourgeois society” to its corresponding “subjective forms” — is understood to encompass too broad a range of more generally ‘objectifying’ forms and practices, then every ostensible fragment or fraction within bourgeois society potentially risks being considered an alienated and alienating fetish in itself. My increased openness to criticism of HCC, to this extent differing from that evinced in The Reification of Desire, does not arise out of any necessary or competing commitment to Queer or to any other ostensibly non-Marxist theory, however, but rather, in line with Postone and value critique, out of a critical rejection of Lukács’ evident conception of the social totality as a totality of labor8. Reification, accordingly, becomes equivalent to a division or fragmentation of labor as itself the fundamental, still to be liberated substance of the social. Postone’s reading of Marx does, in fact, make an appearance in later chapters of The Reification of Desire — and Postone, along with value-critique are to enter more fully into his thinking in later works [see below] — but, on balance, Kevin’s more Foucauldian-influenced critique of Lukács, with which I differ, still dominates The Reification of Desire.

It could, however, be argued that Kevin’s wariness of HCC when it comes, for instance, to the latter’s attribution of the sexual objectification of bodies to the reifying mentality of a Kantian form of bourgeois morality — an attribution charged by The Reification of Desire with being, itself, too resonant of Kantian and bourgeois morality9— clearly does register something else that is, ironically, common to both HCC and Kant’s moral philosophy. But what if that, rather than a (for me, still dubious) heteronormative bias built into Lukács’ idea of reification, is some version of the Protestant work ethic, including the belief, however inadvertent and unacknowledged among ‘traditional’ Marxists like the one I probably still was in the early to mid-1990s, that sees sex, for example, as entirely positive but also as a potential diversion from or even drain on productive labor? Such a work ethic was surely commonplace across the ‘Arbeiterbewegungs-marxismus’ (‘workers’ movement Marxism’) of the Second and Third Internationals, if only somewhat less explicit in the Lukács who did, it is true, adamantly reject Freudian psychoanalysis as still another instance of bourgeois irrationalism. Whatever its theoretical or political source, Kevin’s distrust of a work-ethical, labor-fixated Marxism was far more developed and advanced than my own during the first half of the 1990s when I was playing the professor and more seasoned intellectual to Kevin’s student Marxist.

I understand this only too clearly now, making me realize how, without knowing it then, I’d have been better off at times apprenticing as Kevin’s student--something I freely acknowledge myself to be now to have been many times in the past. And not the least of the many things I continue to learn from re-reading The Reification of Desire is just how much my once sometimes hesitant tutoring of its author twenty-five years ago and whatever it was he may have learned from me had also concealed this double edge, this ironic peripeteia. The mix of sadness, anger, regret, disbelief but equally of love and admiration that Kevin’s loss evokes in those of us who knew him is something I experience in particular while imagining the conversations, whether spoken or written, that I might still have been carrying on with the author of The Reification of Desire--words imagined but also still present, immanently, so to speak — and in that way very much alive—on almost every one of its pages.

But however that may be, there can be no doubt at all about the book’s brilliance or about its remarkable breadth and erudition, especially considering the youth of its author. Like the works of Kevin’s true master-teacher in the writing of The Reification of Desire— without question, I think, Fredric Jameson — the book is surely destined to educate, as Jameson’s books did mine, future generations of students in their own ‘roads to Marx.’10

Kevin Floyd as Marxist theoretician: some intellectual-historical contexts

It bears repeating, yet again, that the tragically premature death of Kevin Floyd delivers a grievous blow to progress in mediating the most advanced critical theories of gender and sexuality with simultaneous advances in Marxism’s emancipatory critique of capitalism. But Kevin’s loss is equally a loss for Marxism as critical theory tout court. The answer to the question of what Kevin might have gone on to contribute in either regard is, in the last analysis of course, probably an imponderable — although one that I will return to, if necessarily speculatively, below. What is clearly the task for those of us who knew, admired and loved him — and one of the best and surest ways to commemorate him — is surely, rather, to study and learn from the extant work itself and to introduce it to our students and to others still new to it.

To my regret, I didn’t keep up with Kevin’s work after The Reification of Desire as carefully as I might have. Others who were to get to know him better, probably, than I did as the years passed and who in some cases were in the process of collaborating with him on joint projects will be in the best position to inform the rest of us about his most recent work and to keep that work in active circulation.

But shortly after news of Kevin’s serious illness began to circulate among his friends and fellow MLG’ers, acquaintances among the latter introduced me to one of these more contemporary works. This is an essay entitled “Automatic Subjects: Gendered Labour and Abstract Life.” Published in Historical Materialism in 2016,11 “Automatic Subjects” reflects Kevin’s continuing concern for the politics of gender, specifically the impact of so-called biotechnology on human and social reproduction and how that has been studied, analyzed and critiqued by a group of radical feminist — and to some extent Marxist-feminist — social scientists, centering in particular on Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby’s 2014 Study, Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy12. Here, however, in something of a departure from The Reification of Desire and the latter’s practice of mediating between the sometimes apparently conflicting theoretical claims of Marxism and Queer theory, the standpoint of analysis and critique has, unequivocally, become that of Marxism per se--albeit according to an understanding of the latter that has clearly evolved from what it had been in Kevin’s best-known earlier work. To be more specific, the Jamesonian Marxism that orients Kevin’s thinking in much of The Reification of Desire, without necessarily being repudiated, has given way to a Marxism in which, for example, the value-critical influence of the journal Endnotes and of German Wertkritik theorists, particularly that of Roswitha Scholz and ‘value-dissociation theory’13 is in much greater evidence. But this is also a Marxism in which Kevin, dropping the earlier practice — still resonating with Jamesonian ‘metacommentary’ — of making Marxism into a kind of broker negotiating between a set of pre-existing theoretical partis pris, draws more directly on Marx himself, especially the Marx of Capital and the Grundrisse. And here the reasoning adheres far more closely than previously to the methodological principles of immanent critique.

But some broader historical and intellectual contextualization will help to understand more precisely how “Automatic Subjects” reflects an overall critical trajectory in Kevin’s work and in his contributions to Marxist theory. For, along with all that was and is so extraordinary about him and his individual contributions to Marxism, Kevin Floyd’s life and work were and are also representative, on a more global level, of a historic revitalization and growth of Marxist critical theory historically more or less congruent, not coincidentally, with the MLG’s half-century of existence — and, enclosed within that time frame, congruent also with Kevin’s own tragically foreshortened life span.

Absent the kind of empirical or systematic study needed to fully confirm it, the following must remain largely speculative. But after almost fifty years of intellectual labor devoted on one level or another to the study and development of Marxism, perhaps I can lay out some reasonably accurate impressions in this regard. This has been a period, after all, in which, to cite one of the more obviously exemplary cases, the expressly Marxist literary and critical theory authored over five decades by Fredric Jameson made his writings, for a considerable time, into the most cited and likely the most widely influential body of literary and cultural theory and criticism for an English-speaking academic public and probably well beyond--a status that has scarcely begun to lapse. This was also a time during which Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory— a now classical work of critical exposition whose legendary clarity, polemical verve and historical contextualization were and are surely inseparable from its explicitly Marxist standpoint — could rapidly become what is still probably the most widely read primer of its kind14. At the same time, both along with and likely also as a gradual side-effect of its rise to prominence (if not quite preeminence) in the literary academy, Marxism gained at least a relative legitimacy in most of the rest of the Humanities and in those disciplines in the Social Sciences less beholden to corporate and state bureaucratic superintending. And perhaps most dramatic of all has been the steady accumulation of what has by now become, to say the least, an imposing archive of works either about Marx and Marxism or written from an explicitly Marxist standpoint — or both. This archive is almost certainly many, many times larger and more diversified today than it would have been fifty not to say just twenty years ago.15 The interventions of the New Left and the movements of the 1960s were crucial to this outcome of course. But even so, viewed from the historical vantage point of, let us say, hypothetically, 1952 — the year I happen to have been born — and of what was then a collective critical intelligence subject to outright suppression if not already cowed into self-censorship by the main mort of Cold War anti-communism, this is something that, those seventy some years ago, would have been impossible even to imagine, much less predict.

One must not, of course, pass over here the ironic connection — if not implicit quid pro quo— between this robust intellectual growth and the simultaneous decline, at least relatively speaking, of Marxism as a viable and effective political movement in many if not all parts of the world — and especially in the metropolitan West since at least the late 1960s and early 1970s, if not earlier. (Any analogy to the formerly ‘socialist’ East in this respect remains a more complicated one than can be sorted out in these remarks.) This has been accompanied, notoriously, by the migration if not always the outright retreat of Marxists into the sanctuaries sometimes provided by universities, libraries and research institutes. Of course, few if any such sanctuaries existed or in many cases exist now throughout most of the former Second World or a Third World under outright or de facto US imperial domination. Across Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa — for readers of Mediations this murderous history will be too familiar to require rehearsing — Marxists in their thousands if not millions have rarely found refuge in universities and have more often been jailed or killed outright by the armies and death squads of US imperialism or of its proxies, in places like (to name only a few) Indonesia, Vietnam and Central America.

Cold War anti-communism and the reactionary collaborationism of the preponderant sectors of organized labor, especially in the Western metropolis, had in any case already driven the Old Left into the margins of society long before the supposedly tripartite world gave way to the binary, North-South world of globalized neoliberalism. And, three decades after Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalist decree of an ‘end of history’ there is scant indication that this most drastic of the official prohibitions directed at Marxism has as yet been much mitigated, much less reversed. Anti-communism’s past onslaughts have, often enough, succeeded in suppressing any Marxist political much less intellectual presence to speak of in what remains of civil societies henceforth given over to religious fundamentalisms, irrational cults and the cynical quiescence demanded of daily survival. Mourning those who have, at whatever level or for whatever purpose, embraced Marxist ideas and perished as a result has rarely been an unfamiliar part of life in those majority sectors of the world where our relative privileges are largely unknown.

The rapid disappearance of the erstwhile ‘Second World’ of ‘actually existing’ socialism after 1989 must of course be acknowledged here too, but as many others have observed, the final demise of the Old, Third International Left was widely sensed by the New Left as an anti-climax and did surprisingly little--outside the former ‘Second World’ itself, at least initially — to deter or dampen the intellectual, critical-theoretical energies increasingly generated by the works of Marx and of Marxism more generally. And, after all, Marxists have long had the counterweight of the chronic, steadily worsening crisis of post-Fordist capitalism itself to thank for the intellectual resilience of the works of Karl Marx and their growing appeal for contemporary readers. As the late Robert Kurz, referring to this resurgent interest in Capital and the Marxian opus as a whole even while, after 1989, capitalist ideologues were declaring their author truly and finally dead, “Totgesagte leben länger” — ‘those pronounced dead live longer.’

But there is, I think, a still additional irony to Marxism’s late 20th and early 21st century intellectual and literary ‘flight forward,’ more literally intrinsic and, if the phrase can be allowed, ‘theory-immanent’ in this case to Marxism itself in its current intellectual and academic manifestations. Here again I rely mainly on personal experience and thus may be guilty of distortion or exaggeration, but, given that caveat, I will hazard the observation that even as Marxism in one form or another has grown in explicit influence in the Humanities--which no one much bothers to police--and the less-well policed Social Sciences there seems to have developed a lag or gap, so to speak, between Marxism as the expression of an ineradicable critical opposition to capitalism’s accelerating morbidities and catastrophes (no small thing in itself) and the systematic comprehension and practical subsumption of Marxism as method, more precisely as the method, epitomized in Capital, of Marx’s critique of political economy16. To characterize this gap in terms first introduced in the middle of the last century by Roman Rosdolsky17, while an “exoteric,” i.e., more immediately historically delimited, nineteenth century Marxism attempts, not always successfully, to adapt itself to the secular transformations of twentieth and twenty-first century capitalism, the crucial question persists as to whether, in doing so, the “exoteric” proves consistent with Marxism on the “esoteric” level, Rosdolsky’s term for Marx’s immanent critique of capitalism in Capital and the Grundrisse.If, for Marxism —to echo here Lukács’s influential formulation in “What is Orthodox Marxism?” — “orthodoxy refers exclusively to method,”18 then one may wonder whether this has ever been truer than it is today, as, on the one hand, the chronic and continuously compounded crisis of capitalism just as continuously foregrounds and reinforces the terms of an ‘exoteric’ Marxism, but, on the other, a lag between ‘exoteric’ and ‘esoteric’ nevertheless persists, possibly growing even more aggravated along with existing conditions themselves.19 In any event, a conjuncture seems to persist in which the immanent question of what constitutes a methodologically ‘orthodox’ Marxism consistently and repeatedly poses itself.

Albeit still speculatively, one might refine the hypothesis of such a methodological ‘lag’ still further in observing how, especially post-2008, left intellectual radicals, rather than claiming in once familiar ‘postmodern’ or ‘post-marxist’ fashion to have completely reinvented or even surpassed a purportedly outdated ‘orthodox’ Marxism, evince instead a, so to speak, ‘post-orthodox’ preference for a revisionism restricted to the more local, sub-doctrinal level of Marxism’s individual categories.

Consider for example how common it at one point became during the last couple of decades, especially when ‘globalization’ had begun to replace ‘postmodernity’ as the momentary Zeitgeist of choice, to allege that Marx’s otherwise valid critique of capitalism tended to neglect ‘spatial’ categories20. This and similar cautiously ‘friendly’ criticisms not so long ago became almost too numerous to mention but were more recently given(to my mind, unfortunate) traction and credence by Jameson’s showcasing, in his 2009 Valences of the Dialectic of a rather hastily argued “spatial dialectic.”21 Suddenly we were being encouraged to revise our thinking as if it were the case that Marx’s unquestionably Hegelian dialectic, with its self-evidently necessary privileging of history and temporality, might be corrected or improved by, somehow or other, patching in spatial categories — categories that were never, upon more careful consideration, absent from Marx’s thinking in the first place. Never mind the initial, naive separation itself, mechanical and blatantly anti-dialectical, of the spatial from the temporal, quite as if, for Marx, history were not already assumed to be taking place somewhere.

A comparable practice of theoretical and methodological cherry-picking — a kind of surgical or sub-organic approach to revisionism — takes aim at established categories themselves, especially at those of labor and value. Recall, for example, the autonomist-inspired hubbub over so-called ‘immaterial’ (as well as, in related contexts, ‘communicative’ and ‘affective’) labor, inaugurated by Maurizio Lazzarato but sent into overdrive by the publishing-event-disguised-as-book, timed to coincide with the new millennium, of Hardt and Negri’s Empire(2000). The ensuing boom in ‘biopolitical,’ Deleuzo-Marxist theoretical commerce that followed upon and accompanied the setting up of the Hardt/Negri franchise is likewise too outsized to receive--and too increasingly remote from actual secular developments to deserve — further attention here. But any lasting or substantive impact it might have had on twenty-first century Marxist theory can probably be measured, if in no other way, by its inability to distract more methodologically ‘orthodox’ and organic Marxists from focusing attention and analysis on the relative disappearance, as a factor of production in postFordist capitalism, of labor-power itself, here understood, following Marx’s concept of capital’s organic composition in its actual relative proportionality as variable to constant capital.22

In the case of value, category revisionism can become even more blatant. Here, as in the case of labor, the number and variety of proposed unorthodox revisions to value theory far exceed the limits of analysis in the present context. A notable irony here is that, as methodologically orthodox work on Marx’s critical theory of value has blossomed since the 1990s, especially in the wake of the influence of Postone’s Time, Labor and Social Domination and of work in the German tradition of the ‘Neue Marx Lektüre’ and ‘Wertkritik’, including both the contributions of Michael Heinrich as well as those critical of them23, there has been a countertendency in the opposite (if not equal) direction. Organized and powerfully backed right-wing attacks on Marx’s value-theory begin, of course, almost simultaneously with the first publication of Capital,from Böhm-Bawerk to the rise of marginal utility theory to the founding of the modern discipline of economics itself. Revisionist challenges to orthodox Marxist value theory from what is ostensibly the left can be traced back to the nineteenth century as well, but for the purposes of present-day debates these begin to gain more widespread adherence thanks, for example, to the impact of Habermas’s break with Marx in the 1960s and 1970s and to that of discourse-theoretical works such as Laclau and Mouffe’s 1985 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. For instances of category-revisionism focused more exclusively on value per se, one may recall, here, Gayatri Spivak’s 1985 poststructuralist-inspired “Scattered Speculations on the Notion of Value,”24 as much for its considerable influence as for its lack, finally, of any clearly discernible or concrete engagement with Marx. Or take the colorful rise of a ‘postmodern,’ Althusserian Marxism within the discipline of economics itself (at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, at any rate) as reflected in the, for a time, dramatic career of the journal Rethinking Marxism and, for a time, in the massive Marxist conferences it sponsored in Amherst in the 1990s.25

Those sympathetic to Marx and Marxism for whatever reason or to whatever degree have in fact always been confronted with a choice between two possibilities. One is to adopt Marx’s methodical, categorial critique of capital and capitalism as itself a vector simultaneously extrinsic, aimed at the most fundamental and urgent questions and challenges posed by contemporary history, and yet also intrinsic, pointing deeper into the method of that critique itself. The second, although initially it may not appear to diverge from the first, is the aforementioned ‘suborganic’ practice of seizing upon one or the other of Marx’s essential categories in relative isolation with the aim of revising or otherwise amending it and thereby ostensibly correcting the theory as a whole. This, rather than simply jettisoning the question of method altogether and propounding, say, a structuralist-Spinozist or deconstructionist or Deleuzian or a neo-positivist ‘analytical’ Marxism, seems to have become the more dominant trend in recent years, especially in the wake of the financial crash of 2008. This doubtless reveals something again about the ironic ability of overripe, crisis-afflicted capitalism itself to help Marxism outflank its would be obituarists as well as those intent on denying its legitimacy altogether. But it becomes easier, more rhetorically convenient and, in the final analysis, more credible in light of contemporary historical developments, to contest the adequacy and actuality of Marx and Marxism exclusively on the level of its individual theoretical categories. For all that this may bespeak an intellectual and ideological conjuncture in which anti- and post-marxisms are a harder sell, however, countering this kind of piece-meal approach to revisionism can present an especially complex and refractory challenge to Marxists who, even while arguing the need to take Marxism into previously less familiar territory, remain vigilant against departures or deviations from methodological orthodoxy.

“Automatic Subjects”

This then returns us to “Automatic Subjects,” as theoretically grounded and conceptually rigorous an antidote to ‘piece-meal,’ category-revisionism as one is likely to find anywhere in the Marxist literature of recent decades. Rather than attempt to summarize it here, readers, especially those who knew Kevin, are urged to confirm this for themselves by referring to the aforementioned link26. I will limit the focus of these remarks to the specific manner in which Kevin undertakes to critique the principal exhibit in “Automatic Subjects,” the aforementioned Clinical Labor,Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby’s proposal for a ‘biotechnologically’ revised conception of labor as theorized in Marx’s critique of political economy and in most consistently Marxist elaborations on the latter. Under the heading of “clinical labor,” Cooper and Waldby compile a variety of relatively novel technologically-enabled and related processes including gestational surrogacy, the work of experimental drug clinical-trial subjects, the harvesting and marketing of human tissues (e.g., oocytes, fetal tissue, umbilical-cord blood) for stem-cell industries, the sale and surgical removal of transplantable human organs such as kidneys and even the regeneration of such tissues themselves on the “suborganismic” level of ‘laboring’ stem-cells themselves. Often in common with studies by other contemporary anthropologists and scholars27 focusing on a “biomedical mode of production,” Clinical Labor, according to “Automatic Subjects,” proposes “that we need to rethink the very relation between life, labor and value — and that the way the latter two categories, in particular, operate in Marx’s work is inadequate to the critical scrutiny the biotechnological reproduction of life demands.”28

But are all such forms of ‘clinical labor’ in fact labor in any sense, much less, as Cooper and Waldby argue, value-producing labor? While recognizing Clinical Labor’s value and importance as both empirical study and as exposé of the biotechnological industry’s profit-seeking incursion into human reproduction, “Automatic Subjects” unequivocally disputes this more theoretically freighted claim. And, although not explicitly referring to it this way, it argues, in what amounts to a novel and highly original instance of ideology-critique — here both of Clinical Labor and of other, similarly ‘bio-Marxist’ anthropological literature — that categorizing ‘biotechnological’ inputs in this way incurs, in a classically ideological inversion, a conceptual “subsumption of capital by labor.” Indeed, according to “Automatic Subjects,” the category of labor, thus revised, usurps, however unwittingly, the role, assigned by Marx to capital, of “automatic subject.”29

What then could account for this ideological inversion? Exposing the quasi-archaeological presence of operaismo and the autonomist Marxism of Negri, Fortunati, Lazzarato, Fumagalli, et. al. in current ‘bio-Marxisms’ and the pressure the latter exerts towards inverting of the actual subsumption of labor by capital, “Automatic Subjects” speculates:

if...the autonomist projection of an expansive horizon of value-producing labor represents capital as value-producing labor, and if Cooper and Waldby recapitulate this representation, might we then interpret these representations as allegories of the real expansion of capital relative to labor?30

If Kevin’s thinking here breaks in no uncertain terms with the category revisionism of Cooper and Waldby and similarly reasoning ‘bio-Marxists’ it initially does so in ways broadly shared by contemporary Marxist critiques of political economy. But in passages such as the following from “Automatic Subjects,” he clearly shows himself to be among the latter’s most advanced cohorts:

Only by occluding the systemic stagnation of accumulation in the present — only by assuming that value has been reduced to pure political command or by insisting, contradictorily, that there is no longer any meaningful distinction between value and wealth – can contemporary autonomist Marxism sustain its religiously optimistic narrative of labor’s vitality in the present. Cooper and Waldby, meanwhile, taking their distance from a Marxian account of value production they view as stuck hopelessly in the era of welfare-state industrialization, also presuppose the persistence of relatively vigorous value-production characteristic of that era — contending, again, that ‘forms of in vitrolabor are increasingly central to the valorization process of the post-Fordist economy’, and thereby occluding biotechnological capital’s high organic composition. To confront this analytic subsumption of capital by labor with the real subsumption of labor by capital is also to remind ourselves that this tendency, defined as it is by relative surplus-value extraction, reveals labor to be no more saliently the source of surplus value than (ultimately, tendentially) a barrier to be expelled from valorization altogether. While subsumption tends to suggest the internalization of what was previously external, it is also the case that proletarianized surplus labor is at once inside and outside, at once subsumed and externalized, at once subject to the law of value and dissociated from the valorization process.31

But what is both most intriguing and novel about “Automatic Subjects” here is, again, its careful detection of an allegorical relation between the flagrantly ‘suborganic,’ category-revisionism of both autonomist and ‘bio-Marxists’ like Cooper and Waldby and their evident hesitation if not outright refusal to recognize the reality and significance of existing global capitalist crisis conditions, i.e., the intensification of the internal contradictions of capitalism to the point that, even without a viral pandemic, social reproduction itself is thrown into question for hundreds of millions of ‘monetary subjects without money.’ Allegory, conveying the idea of an objective reality subject to a figurative registration and a simultaneous literal disavowal or de-registration, nicely and more precisely characterizes a tendency in which Marxism is simultaneously acknowledged as legitimate and even authoritative and yet purged of its internal, theoretical-methodological consistency (its ‘orthodoxy’ in this sense) and of its capacity as such to grasp the whole of contemporary reality. Without being able to confirm this here in any systematic way I am nevertheless willing to surmise that it is the ‘allegorization’ of capitalist crisis in just the sense given it by Kevin that will also be detectable in other instances of category-revisionism, far from restricted to the bio-Marxisms under critical examination in “Automatic Subjects.”

There is little doubt that Kevin would have gone on to make still further original and extraordinary contributions to Marxism and critical theory, not only in relation to gender and sexuality but to the furthering and developing of Marxism as critical theory tout court. If The Reification of Desire were not already basis enough for drawing such a conclusion, “Automatic Subjects,” among his last written works, makes this exceptionally clear. The loss to Marxist thinking and to its future — our loss — is great and unmercifully real. We can only continue to study the work Kevin has left us, to emulate it — and him — and to look carefully at how it can continue to orient our current efforts now and into the future.

So thinking, I wish to close with one final occurrence of mine, again perhaps overly speculative, concerning the third and last of the predications listed in the complete title of ‘Automatic Subjects,” namely “abstract life.” Kevin devotes relatively less to this concept than he does to those of “automatic subjects” and “gendered labor,” but it is no less suggestive and crucial to his argument as a whole in this essay. See, for example, the following, fuller extension of a passage previously cited:

But if, as I have proposed, the autonomist projection of an expansive horizon of value-producing labor represents capital asvalue-producing labor, and if Cooper and Waldby recapitulate this representation, might we then interpret these representations as allegoriesof the real expansion of capital relative to labor? And does the autonomist abstraction of life, like the abstraction of life in Cooper and Waldby’s account of ‘regenerative labor’, in this respect capture something salient about the present, though here again in inverted form? To the extent that surplus populations appear today to become absolutely rather than relatively surplus, proletarianization signifies capital’sabstraction of life, its tendential reduction of living labor to living inertia, to life at once subsumed by capital and externalized from it. Just as fictitious capital presumes to free itself from the social-labor process, value-producing labor is similarly ‘freed’ from that process in its reduction by capital to a form of proletarianized, value-dissociated surplus vitality. What is life, Marx asks, if not activity?75 In an era of stagnant accumulation, the ‘labor’ in ‘living labor’ tends toward displacement: labor is disinterred from life, increasingly hollowed out, leaving behind what is, from the standpoint of capital, a vital remainder.32

Here “abstract life” refers, in its most narrow sense, to what remains of abstract labor once it becomes virtually ‘unexploitable’ for purposes of the accumulation of capital, hence to the fact that, from the standpoint of capital, all that remains of such living labor is the marginal fact that it is--for the moment--still alive. Concerning just how far the ruling order’s concern for such ‘abstract life’ extends, capitalism’s propensity for destroying it in wars has left little doubt since at least 1914 if not 1492. But beyond the abstraction of value from material wealth and of labor, itself already an abstraction, from society’s self-production and reproduction on the level of human ‘species being’ itself, capital seems to have demonstrated a morbid capacity to continue abstracting from what it thereby, via negationis, renders “concrete.” Even when its interests do not push the states and other coercive agents that it instrumentalizes into the organized violence of war, does not capitalism continue to abstract away from the concrete social life of humanity “by other means”? As long as it has not — so far — rendered human life abstract via its outright annihilation capital’s abstraction from what remains of life perhaps continues, as one might put it, by simply “letting die.” In situations of chronic, compounded crisis like our own-Gramsci’s much cited “interregnum” — this evidently leads to what the late Marxist and value-critical theorist Robert Kurz, extrapolating from Freud, once termed a “capitalist death-drive.”

Kevin did not live to witness the events of 2020 and early 2021 in which the combined crisis-within-a-crisis set in motion by the spread of the novel coronavirus and of the violent, pathological racism and irrationalism incited and embodied by the often openly neofascistic regime of US president Donald Trump were to lend considerable poignance to the notion of a death-driven ‘abstract life.’ But it strikes me that Kevin’s particular conception of ‘abstract life,’ even if in its immediate context it echoes the ‘bios’ of ‘biotechnology,’ turns out to have plenty of resonance left over for the contemporary history Kevin only just missed. The frequent combination of violent, gun-worshipping racism and anti-communism with the militant, nihilistic refusal to wear protective masks or to adopt other, innocuous measures to prevent contagion and mass mortality from COVID-19 bespeak a breathtaking level of abstracting contempt for life and, at the very least, an obsessive flirtation with death--the death of others as well as one’s own--that seems more than merely coincidental. When Kevin characterizes his conception of ‘abstract life’ with the phrase “vital remainder,” I find myself wondering whether the emphasis belongs less on “vital” than it does on “remainder,” as in “remains” — i.e., a living body that is nevertheless just short of becoming a corpse.

Over ten days in August, 2020, 460,000 motorcycle enthusiasts, predominantly white, male and, among them, many who were pro-Trump and violently defiant of public health policies meant to lessen the spread of COVID-19, congregated in Sturgis, South Dakota for a traditional annual bikers’ convention.33 This was perhaps the largest but only one of numerous (and continuing) public demonstrations of what I am inclined to classify as an almost explicit form of capitalist death drive. Indeed, Trumpism’s contemporary North American neofascists remind me of the notorious Spanish fascist slogan said to have been shouted in a crowd gathered at the outset of the Civil War in 1936 at University of Salamanca. Though some claim that reports of the event lack substantiation, the slogan has lived on. Intended as a rebuke to a moderate and cautionary address by university rector Miguel de Unamuno, it is popularly attributed to one of Franco’s acolytes, General José Millán Astray: “Viva la muerte!” “Long live death!”

Although the huge street demonstrations against racist police killings during the summer of 2020 — reportedly the largest mass protests in US history — suggest that the battle in the offing is at least, even by more pessimistic calculations, evenly matched, the worst--and in another sense perhaps also the best--are surely still to come. Though Kevin will not be there to witness all this and might not, any more than the rest of us, have predicted it, there is every reason to think it would not have surprised him--nor dismayed or frightened him into confusion or silence. He showed us in one of his final writings how theory can be as scrupulously grounded in the ‘esoteric’ Marx as it is unswervingly cognizant of the intricate details of contemporary empirical reality and dedicated to denouncing their evils. As shown by his life, his brilliant organizing for MLG and works like The Reification of Desire and “Automatic Subjects,” though Kevin may be gone, we still need him — more, if possible, than ever.

1. For a good summary account of this history, however, see Sean Homer’s reconstruction on the MLG website at http://www.marxistliterary.org/a-brief-history-of-the-mlg
2. “Since the transformation of the superstructure proceeds far more slowly than that of the base, it has taken more than half a century for the change in the conditions of production to be manifested in all areas of culture. How this process has affected culture can only now be assessed, and these assessments must meet certain prognostic requirements. They do not, however, call for theses on the art of the proletariat after its seizure of power, and still less for any on the art of the classless society. They call for theses defining the tendencies of the development of art under the present conditions of production. The dialectic of these conditions of production is evident in the superstructure, no less than in the economy. Theses defining the developmental tendencies of art can therefore contribute to the political struggle in ways that it would be a mistake to underestimate. They neutralize a number of traditional concepts—such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery—which, used in an uncontrolled way (and controlling them is difficult today), allow factual material to be manipulated in the interests of fascism. In what follows, the concepts which are introduced into the theory of art differ from those now current in that they are completely useless for the purposes of fascism. On the other hand, they are useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art (Kunstpolitik).” Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility (Second Version)” Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935-1938,trans. Edmund Jephcott, eds. Howard Eiland & Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002) 102.
3. Having been force-fed a Cold War version of ‘patriotic’ American nationalism in primary and secondary schools in the United States of the 1950s and 1960s, I have a strong, instinctive aversion to using the word “president” when referring to people who are not war criminals.
4. Kevin Floyd, The Reification of Desire: Towards a Queer Marxism(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
5. First published in Rethinking Marxism 1.1 (Spring 1988): 49-72; later re-published as the sixth chapter in Frederic Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic(London: Verso, 2009) 201-222.
6. This, to be sure, did not apply to gender difference per se on the level of the ‘sexual division of labor’ since, however overlaid by culture, gender-based social relations, if not ‘movements,’ could not be accused of being, in the final analysis, exclusively cultural any more than could gender and sexual difference themselves. But the putatively epistemological dimension of any possible forms of ‘gender consciousness’ is clearly a question of immense theoretical complexity bearing not just on capitalism as a form of the social but on all social forms, pre- as well as possibly post-capitalist. Jameson in “Unfinished Project” had, as its readers will recall, cited the feminist gender-based standpoint theory of the 1980s (see, e.g., the writings of Nancy Hartsock, Sandra Harding and Alison Jagger) in order to make the case against reducing HCC’s anti-reifying and totality- ‘aspiring’ standpoint theory to its apparent theoretical dependence on class. And he had, even more cursorily, suggested that something similar could be argued on behalf of the standpoints of “the Black experience” and on that of the Jewish victims of anti-Semitism. (See Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic 215-219.) But the full, underlying theoretical questions raised by these claims were not broached in any substantive way in Jameson’s essay on HCC.
7. This was before the split within the Krisis editorial collective in the early 2000’s, leading to Kurz’s departure from it and the setting up, across town, of the ‘rival,’ anti- or post-Krisis journal Exit.
8. See Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1996) 73-83.
9. See Floyd, Reification of Desire 78-83.
10. ‘My Road to Marx’ was Lukacs’s title for a 1933 autobiographical sketch, mentioned by the author in his 1967 preface to HCC. See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971) ix.
11. Vol. 24, Issue 2, 61-86. In commemoration of Kevin, Historical Materialism has made this article freely available. See https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/kevin-floyd
12. Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby, Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy(Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
13. ‘Wertabspaltungs-Theorie’in the original German. Although most often associated with the feminist value-critique of Roswitha Scholz in the journal Exit and elsewhere, versions of this theory were initiated and are articulated by other Wertkritik theorists as well. See Roswitha Scholz, “Patriarchy and Commodity Society: Gender without the Body,” 123-142, but also Ernst Lohoff, “Off Limits, Out of Control: Commodity Society and Resistance in the Age of Deregulation and Denationalization,” 151-186, both in Marxism and the Critique of Value, trans. & eds., Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson and Nicholas Brown (Alberta & Chicago: MCM’ Press, 2014). See also Vol. 27, Issues 1-2, Fall/Spring 2013-2014 in this journal: https://mediationsjournal.org/toc/27_1
14. First published in 1983, Literary Theory was, by the time of its most recent, 2008 edition, in its fifteenth printing.
15. See, as one good indication of this, the steady stream of new titles reviewed on the online “Marx and Philosophy Review of Books”: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/
16. ‘Marx’s critique of political economy’ is an unfortunately cumbersome phrase, but there are nevertheless good reasons to be wary of replacing it, especially with its too often heard abbreviation as ‘Marxist political economy’ --a blatant contradiction in terms. “Political economy,’ an eighteenth-century coinage, has long since morphed into what today goes simply by the name of ‘economics,’ but to speak of the ‘Marxist critique of economics,’ even if technically precise, risks unfairly and perversely stigmatizing the already established and familiar field of ‘Marxist economics.’ There appears to be no easy or workable way out of this semantic cul-de-sac.
17. “Der esoterische und der exoterische Marx. Zur kritischen Würdigung der Marxschen Lohntheorie I–III”, in Arbeit und Wirtschaft 11 (1957), Nr. 11ff. pp. 348–351, 388–391, 20–24. Rosdolsky is best known for Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Marxschen Kapital (1968) [The Making of Marx’s Capital (1977)] -- perhaps the single best antidote to Althusser’s ‘structuralist’ (anti-dialectical) approach to ‘reading’ Capital.
18. History and Class Consciousness 1.
19. The example may be somewhat crude, but consider here the rush to blame the ‘greed’ of Wall Street bankers for the severe financial crisis of 2007-2008--as if bankers in earlier years had somehow been less ‘greedy’ or a newer, less ‘greedy’ Wall Street elite could avert such crises in the future. The relative ease with which a moralistic crusade against ‘greed’ could--and in some quarters likely did--converge with traditional currents of anti-Semitism has often been pointed out. The underlying truth of the matter is, of course, that the competitive dynamic of capitalism forced and forces capitalists of all kinds to maximize profits and that the increasing absence of outlets for the investment of ‘functional’ capital in productive enterprises in the ‘real’ economy left capitalists, ‘greedy’ and otherwise, little choice but to pour liquid assets into the ‘fictitious’ capital of, e.g., subprime mortgages. If the crash of 2008 helped give rise to the “Occupy” movement of 2010 and 2011, then perhaps the relative neglect of this kind of analysis—one that a methodologically ‘orthodox’ Marxism did not fail to propose—might help to explain the depressing evanescence of “Occupy” after seemingly better prospects for reform--entirely illusory of course— were conjured by the re-election of Obama in 2012.
20. A comprehensive account of this—still ongoing—trend would greatly exceed the size-limits of this essay, but its origins can be traced in part to the multiple, confused and shallow enthusiasms set off by the re-discovery and popularizations of the work of Henri Lefebvre, whose 1974 Production de l’espace (The Production of Space) first appeared in English translation in 1991. The rise and popularization of the works of Marxist and otherwise radical geographers beginning in the 1990s—especially of the works of David Harvey— appears to have been another, related and doubtless mostly inadvertent source for the rising chorus of accusations that Marx and Marxists were somehow guilty of neglecting ‘space.’ But at the heart of this anti- or neo- ‘orthodox’ crusade on behalf of the spatial was surely the notoriety surrounding the ‘postmodern’ geography of Edward Soja, whose Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory was published by Verso in 1989.
21. See Valences, “Towards a Spatial Dialectic,” 66-70, in which Jameson appears to justify taking the ‘dialectic’ in this direction on the grounds that ‘postmodernity’—a belief in the actual historical objectivity of which requires about as high a leap of faith as does belief in the ‘spatial dialectic’ itself—has been characterized by a ‘distrust’ of modernity’s earlier privileging of the ‘temporal.’ The Zeitgeist had spoken! Ergo, it’s time to “glimpse some of the advantages to be gained—on philosophical, aesthetic and economic-political levels—for a substitution of a spatial dialectic for the old temporal ones.” One awaits with bated breath the revelation of the ‘spatial’ version of, say, ‘Aufhebung,’ or of negation or, indeed, of the very category of becoming—i.e., of the process of unfolding in time— itself. (70) The ‘spatial’ surely deserves better.
22. Much more would have to be said about the question of ‘immaterial’ labor in any comprehensive discussion. But a moment’s reflection should suffice here to show how much of its topicality, and the controversy surrounding it, rest, arguably, on the ‘substantialist’ fallacy that, first, conflates labor per se with abstract labor and, then, misidentifies abstract labor in Marx as other than a strictly social relation--a social relation concerning which questions as to its ‘materiality’ or ‘immateriality’ are themselves soon revealed to be ‘immaterial’ in another sense, if not simply the products of a category mistake. As shall be seen below, this fallacy is in full force in Cooper and Waldby’s Clinical Labor as well.
23. See Michael Heinrich, Die Wissenschaft vom Wert(2001). For value-critical critiques of Heinrich see, inter alia, the works of Norbert Trenkle and Peter Samol, collected on the website for the journal Krisis, https://www.krisis.org/
24. See The Spivak Reader, eds. Donna Landry & Gerald Maclean (New York, London: Routledge, 1996)107-140.
25. See, inter alia, works by Richard Wolff, Stephen Resnick, Stephen Cullenberg, Jack Amariglio, David Ruccio and J.K. Gibson-Graham
26. See note 11. An abstract preceding the full paper in Historical Materialismreads as follows: “Critical analysis of the biotechnological reproduction of biological life increasingly emphasises [sic; UK spelling here and throughout] the role of value-producing labor in biotechnologically reproductive processes, while also arguing that Marx’s use of the terms ‘labor’ and ‘value’ is inadequate to the critical scrutiny of these processes. Focusing especially on the reformulation of the value-labor relation in recent work in this area by Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby, this paper both critiques this reformulation and questions the explanatory efficacy of the category ‘labor’ in this context. Emphasising the contemporary global expansion of capital relative to value-producing labor – specifically, the expansion of fictitious capital and debt on the one hand, and of global surplus populations on the other – it argues that this reformulation misrepresents the mediated capacities of capital as the immediate capacities of labor. This reformulation, moreover, is indicative of broader tendencies in the contemporary theorisation of labor, tendencies exemplified by autonomist Marxism.”
27. E.g., Kaushik Sunder-Rajan’s Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (2006); Kalindi Vora’s Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor(2015), Eugene Thacker’s The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture (2005), Melinda Cooper’s Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era(2008), and Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell’s Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism(2005).
28. “Automatic Subjects” 65
29. To be precise, in Capital vol. I it is value, not capital per se, that Marx describes in this way: “On the other hand, in the circulation M-C-M both the money and the commodity function only as different modes of existence of value itself, the money as its general mode of existence, the commodity as its particular or, so to speak, disguised mode. It is constantly changing from one form into the other, without becoming lost in this movement; it thus becomes transformed into an automatic subject.” (See Marx, Capital Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976) 255.) But this does nothing to lessen the validity and critical purchase of the argument in “Automatic Subjects.”
30. “Automatic Subjects” 80. As I think is made clear by a careful reading of the essay as a whole, by “expansion of capital relative to labor” (emphasis here on “relative”)”Automatic Subjects” refers to the phenomenon—long since and consistently observed in Marxist analyses and critiques of capitalism— of the rising organic composition of capital, i.e., the decreasing proportion of labor-power (variable capital in Marx’s terminology) to constant capital (means of production exclusive of labor-power) as a result of increases in productivity brought about in turn by competition among individual capitalists and the resulting drive towards automation. This trend of course was long ago forecast by Marx himself in the celebrated “fragment on machines” in the Grundrisse, but, according to the analysis of both value-critical Marxists and others, with the onset of the digital--or as it is sometimes called, the third industrial-- revolution the approaching, asymptotic disappearance of labor-power from the capitalist production process has resulted in dramatic, qualitative transformations and social upheavals, among them the creation of a--in Marx’s phrase-- global ‘reserve army of the unemployed’ (a ‘precariat’ in more contemporary parlance) for most of whom unemployment has become permanent in a world ruled by the needs of capital.
31. “Automatic Subjects” 77.
32. “Automatic Subjects” 80-81.
33. See, for example, the Center for Disease Control’s “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report” on this event at: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6947e1.htm . Meanwhile, according to an October 17, 2020 Washington Post article, “How the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally may have spread coronavirus across the Upper Midwest”: “Within weeks of the gathering, the Dakotas, along with Wyoming, Minnesota and Montana, were leading the nation in new coronavirus infections per capita. The surge was especially pronounced in North and South Dakota, where cases and hospitalization rates continued their juggernaut rise into October. Experts say they will never be able to determine how many of those cases originated at the 10-day rally, given the failure of state and local health officials to identify and monitor attendees returning home, or to trace chains of transmission after people got sick. Some, however, believe the nearly 500,000-person gathering played a role in the outbreak now consuming the Upper Midwest. More than 330 coronavirus cases and one death were directly linked to the rally as of mid-September, according to a Washington Post survey of health departments in 23 states that provided information. But experts say that tally represents just the tip of the iceberg, since contact tracing often doesn’t capture the source of an infection, and asymptotic spread goes unnoticed.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/10/17/sturgis-rally-spread/