Real Subsumption of Labor Under Capital and Dispossession Practices. Questions to Michael Hardt.

Abstract

Re-reading Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's trilogy confirms a reader's conviction that she is dealing with one of the most ambitious philosophical attempts to re-define our contemporaneity 1 . The shape of the latter, as Negri writes, has changed to the extent that it could not be described again using the prefix post-(Negri 2011) and our perception of this fact is strengthened by the experience of several crucial turns and transformations. This list includes such changes as transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, from industrial to cognitive capitalism, from material to biopolitical production, from imperialism to Empire and, finally, from city to metropolis. Each of them undoubtedly puts pressure on different elements of the overall transformation, all of them remain at the same time in a close connection with the transition already announced by Marx -the movement from formal to real subsumption of labor under capital (Marx 2013). Although in the era of abrupt geographical expansion of neoliberalization this process seems to define lives of billions of people (making them ultimately identical with broadly understood production process) this transition is burdened with numerous paradoxes and unresolved contradictions (Read 2003) which questions the total