On naturalisation and wage struggles (towards a critique)

This is a little ramble I posted on facebook last night. Maybe it is complete bollocks, but also maybe it will help us to consider struggles over the wage and wage-form differently from how they have been considered in a lot of autonomist/left-communist thought. I’m genuinely interested in what other people think of this line of argument, so please do respond. 

Ok, so I just read Jason Read’s piece on the division of labour here (people should read it, because it’s asking good questions.) And I had a question about the dialectic. I’m also going to tag Maya here because I think she’s worked on similar arguments – and if I remember rightly (through the thick smokey fog of the last three months since I read it) similar arguments come up in the Endnotes piece. [Having had a quick look back at that piece this morning, the critique there on this question is more subtle.] I should say at the outset that this isn’t an attack but more just a question, and one which I want to have a conversation about in terms of good old practical activity as much out of academic interest – and perhaps we might find big differences in the contexts of our activity that transform position on this question.

Anyhow, the question I had was about this idea of “naturalisation”. As Jason says, labour is devalued by being “naturalised” (I think at the end of your piece you say its “devalorised”, which I think is wrong – that is, it is consumed and circulates but is devalued only from the standpoint of the wage. But I could be wrong here.) Where naturalisation here exists as an ideological proposition its purpose is to allow for either a lowering of the wage, or for the wage to not be paid at all. From this point of view it becomes the work of critique to denaturalise, to show that those forms that appear as natural are in truth historical (or social). From such a critique a wage can be demanded because what is at stake is a social relation between labouring subjects rather than a relation between humans and nature (while one might pay for, say, a cow, one doesn’t pay it a wage.) So this type of argument is specific – I think historically, but do correct me because I’m ignorant as fuck – to those Marxisms that are concerned mostly with an analysis of the wage form as a revolutionary critique. So far so good. This looks a bit like the sorts of discussions one can find of “second nature” in lots of early twentieth century texts. I guess the big archetype is Lukacs’ Theory of the Novel, where he demands a “metaphysical act of reawakening” against this false naturalisation. But for that early Lukacs that reawakening is possible because there is a first nature to be awakened into. When Lukacs becomes a Bolshevik this changes quickly, although there are remnants of the argument in History and Class Consciousness – although it wasn’t until the 1960s that he would repudiate that claim as “romantic anti-capitalism” clearly the dialectic changes by the time of History and Class Consciousness away from one whose reconciliation involves a metaphysical reawakening of nature as such. I get side-tracked into Lukacs because I think there’s something useful there: in the rejection of his big thesis on reawakening of nature the radical moment in the dialectic instead becomes this moment of understanding the truth of the historical reality of the proletariat. That is, in the process of a critique of second nature one doesn’t in the revolutionary moment recognise first nature but instead historically determined class antagonism, and the history of oppression as history as such. One recognises the reality of a class antagonism. What struck me is that there was something of that second Lukacs about this argument about naturalisation.

But there’s a problem with this Lukacs, and a critique which maybe is helpful, or maybe not. The problem is that this type of critique is absolutely incapable of talking about nature, and is incapable of offering a critique adequate to the domination of nature (both internal and external nature). Perhaps the Adornian overtones of this argument are probably too clear – actually I think the argument is best made by Alfred Schmidt in his book on Marx and Nature. The way that this argument pans out is that one is left with this critique of naturalisation only with an ideologiekritik, and not with something either more forceful or revolutionary. But worse than that, this type of ideologiekritik is itself ideological. It falls into the same trap as that which Marx identifies at the very opening of the Critique of the Gotha Programme. I’ll quote:

“First part of the paragraph: "Labor is the source of all wealth and all culture.”

Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. the above phrase is to be found in all children’s primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.“

It strikes me now that the position that Marx critiques here is exceedingly hard to avoid if one takes as central the wage and the wage form. I wonder if there is any writing from this perspective that tries do deal with this type of argument. Maybe worth putting the short form of this argument that Marx makes too in his 1856 speech to the people’s paper: "At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy”.

Right, where was I other than half-baked ramblings? Ah yes, two slightly more far-out points related to this that may make answering this question either massively massively harder or much much easier.

1) Part of the question here must be to do with the historical situation of political activity. Again, please correct my ignorances. In the 1970s when the Housework argument was kicking off there was also a super-strong reaction against essentialism amongst all stripes of feminists. If anything the argument against essentialism has become even stronger post-Butler. And along with that reaction against essentialism is a strong taboo on talking about distinctions, divisions, differences in and of nature. The arguments against talking about those distinctions from the left are strong in a couple of ways. Firstly asserting a natural difference between men and women (or between people with different coloured skin) is seen as the territory of the oppressors, and as the standard justification for oppression. Therefore one needs to show somehow that those distinctions are in truth social rather than natural in order to disable the naturalist claims of racism, sexism and so forth. The second argument against this thinking is that to talk about distinction in nature is to behave as though one might have immediate access to nature whereas in truth this must be socially mediated. The problem is that social mediation is not the same as social production. And similarly, the first of these criticisms seems willing to sacrifice talking about nature at all. There is a dialectical difficulty here: the abstract negation of nature for the sake of social critique doesn’t offer a grand civilised path to the elimination of materially particular suffering (which must contain an element of nature.)

2) One of the ways of thinking about nature has been this dark mass, unified and destructive, the violence from which some hero once arose ex nihilo. But is there not a danger of projection here, that the bourgeois hero projects his own unity – the principium individuationis turned fortress – back on to nature. Isn’t this the very essence of the domination of nature – and against the law of humans, would it not be to do nature justice to treat it in its own distinctions, differences, and divisions. I’m not completely against thinking destructive nature, of pure agony and the darkness of death – that’s certainly not easy to get rid of once you have human subjects. And sure, one must critique the division of labour, but – and maybe this is a philosophical question about communism here – ought communism not just to be thought of as an integration of those divisions, but also of the freedom beyond them to divide yet again?

I’m guessing neither of you will have time nor care to answer this. Sorry for the rambling. Maybe someone will come along and read it and tell me I’m wrong or to shut up or something equally apposite.