The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present.

By Jason Read. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. 214p. $57.50 cloth, $18.95 paper.

Is Marxist philosophy dead or is there something of significance and importance in Marx's social and economic theory for the present world, particularly his analysis and explanation of capitalism? The general consensus, both in the theoretical realm of scholarship and the practical world of politics, seems to be negative. We now appear to live in a “post-Marxist” world where Marx's conceptions no longer apply; or perhaps, despite the significant impact and following he had for almost a century, Marx never really did provide an accurate explanation of the domains of material production and sociopolitical and cultural life, and their connection. Perhaps capitalism is not a fundamentally exploitative, alienating, and self-contradictory system necessitated to implode but rather, as Francis Fukuyama has suggested, it brings us progressively and somewhat happily to the “end of history.”

Jason Read's book goes against this grain in providing a positive reconsideration of the relevance of Marx to the present. He suggests that what might be seen as the triumph of capitalism, its increasing expansion and hegemony over human life, is a result of a “profound mutation,” the nature of which has escaped the purview of traditional Marxist critique. The problem lies in good part in the conception of a “mode of production,” wherein Marx conceptualized the forces and relations of production, the division of labor, and the economic structure generally—also referred to as the “economic base.” Upon this productive and economic system rests the so-called superstructure, which includes law, politics, culture, ideology, and forms of consciousness found in art, religion, and philosophy. In the traditional Marxist analysis of the “base/superstructure” model, the real motor of change and development lies in the base, whereas phenomena at the level of the superstructure are largely surface effect, with some interactive influence upon the base but, as Friedrich Engels put it, with the base being in the end determinant. Read's interpretation of Marx, and that of the various other commentators he refers to, challenges this view as overly simplistic and incapable of explaining capitalism today or its origination historically.

Read's view is that capital cannot be separated from the superstructure because production involves not only material production, in the sense of material goods manufactured in a factory, but also what he calls the “production of subjectivity,” that is, of beliefs, desires, and culture generally. Today especially, capitalist production is “micro-political” in inserting itself into daily life and subjectivity (the term “subjectivity” presumably referring to what the term “superstructure” designates). A new critique of capital is thus called for, one that in giving attention to the micro-political dimension overcomes the division between economic and philosophical analysis, a critique that recognizes the limitations of Marx's own analysis but also draws upon places in his texts that link culture and economy. Marx does not treat systematically the materialistic production of ideas and subjectivity, but both in Capital, Volume 1 (1867), and, particularly, in the notebooks entitled Grundrisse (written in 1857–58 but not published until 1939) Read argues, “against the grain,” that there are explications that point in the direction of a theory of the production of subjectivity.

According to Read, this issue has been taken up by various poststructuralist philosophers, such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, as well as the structuralists Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, and the “autonomist” Marxists Antonio Negri and Mario Tronti. In appealing to such divergent thinkers and schools of thought, Read is not being simply eclectic. He does a good job of showing how these thinkers converge in drawing out of Marx a conception of “immanence” that allows for a more complex, dynamic, and holistic understanding of capitalism, while at the same time requiring recognition of a greater degree of ambiguity and uncertainty than traditional Marxists would have about its direction and fate. Althusser's conception of “immanent causality,” the idea that in the mode of production causes do not exist outside of their effects, is particularly important, as well as his strategy of a “symptomatic reading” of capitalism, which recognizes not only “multiple logics” and tensions in Marx's works but also that capitalism in the present cannot be understood in terms of rigid hierarchies. However, whereas Althusser emphasizes the way that subjectivity is materially produced by capital, it is the poststructuralists like Foucault and Balibar and the autonomist Marxists Negri and Tronti who emphasize the independent role of subjectivity and how, for example, power, violence, and desire contribute to an expanded sense of production and of the “effectivity of subjectivity.” Thus, subjectivity is not only materially produced but is itself productive of capital and wealth, resulting in somewhat of a “contradictory identity” of subjection and subjectification.

Read's interpretive strategy for reading Marx in light of the present, and for reading the present in light of intersections discovered in the works of various Marxist and post-Marxist thinkers, leads to some interesting, albeit mixed, conclusions regarding the relevance of Marx for the present and the explanation of capitalism. Despite the author's response to the charge of turning Marx into a sort of post-Marxist with the claim that he has given “an almost obsessive attentiveness to the actual writings and arguments of Marx” (p. 8), these writings are admittedly not univocal on the matters at issue. Furthermore, it would seem that if Marx's categories and their connections are in significant ways historically situated, and if capitalism has become in the present so mutated that it requires significant reworking of explanatory concepts, not only of production but of labor, capital, consumption, and so on, then one wonders if we have not departed significantly from Marx's central paradigm in a way that historically and theoretically is post-Marxist. Marx not only tended to privilege the “production of objects” and things and marginalize nonproductive activities, but he also resisted giving recognition to the role of the rising service- and knowledge-based industry that has now become central. Perhaps it is appropriate to say that the seeds of the contemporary post-Marxist interpretation of capitalism are dormant in Marx's writings but require a significant historical development for the theoretical realization, involving a “transformation of the ontology of production underlying Marx's thought” (p. 159), a very significant shift indeed.

Also, if the perspective of the production of subjectivity indicates that the future is not subject to inexorable laws but, rather, that the logic of antagonism is open to contingency and a multitudinous play of forms of subjectivity, then not only is any expectation of capitalism's necessary demise undermined but it becomes unclear whether capitalism as such can really be understood systematically, since necessitation in its structure and formation seems to give way to possibility, novelty, and uncertainty. What appears to remain constant and significant for Marx and post-Marxist analysis is how capitalism produces a mystification of relationships. The crucial question is whether the unmasking of mystification through theoretical critique can spur “living labor” into rejecting and overcoming it, as opposed to conspiringly submitting.

These reservations are only by way of entering into conversation with the author's text. Overall, Read does a good job of accomplishing the task he sets for himself, the exploring of intersections in the Marxist and post-Marxist explications of capitalist society and the formation of an interpretive strategy for a retrospective reading of Marx. My only complaint about The Micro-Politics of Capital is that it tends occasionally to fall into postmodernist jargon, perhaps under the influence of the contemporary writings with which it is in dialogue. Those of us not steeped in the language game of this literature are better served by more consistently straightforward prose.