[OPE-L:7449] Formal subsumption and putting-out

[Gil Skillman <gskillman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[Was: curses!]

Mike writes:

> At 05:41 PM 7/22/2002 -0400, you wrote:
> > Hi, Mike, it's good to hear from you--How are things on Lasqueti?
>
> terrible, gil--- the screen on my laptop is disintegrating infinitely more
> rapidly than capitalism, and I will be unable to communicate after this
> note until I resolve the problem (likely involving leaving the island).

What a pain.  Don't worry, this can wait until you're up and running
again.  Meanwhile, though, I'd like to clarify where I'm coming from in
this particular discussion and add some food for thought in responding to
the following:

>    Suffice it to say that we disagree on the definition of formal
> subsumption; for you, it appears that real monitoring is a necessary
> condition whereas I would see the right to monitor as sufficient-- i.e.,
> a question of property rights. In support of my interpretation of formal
> subsumption, see the Grundrisse (vintage), p.510.


I should make clear at the start that my primary goal in this discussion is
not to criticize any argument of Marx's (unlike in the Chapter 5
discussion), but rather to ascertain what his actual position is.  Thus I
want to emphasize that it isn't "for me" that actual monitoring of workers
in the labor process is the distinguishing feature of formal subsumption,
but for Marx, who explicitly states, in the passages I cited in the
previous post, both this point and that the putting out system (i.e., the
framework corresponding to your scenario A) *does not* constitute a case of
formal subsumption.  But I remain open to any textual evidence that Marx
meant something else by the term than what was indicated in the passages
that I quoted from him.

Now, on the passage you cited.  First, as you'll see from my reply to John
Milios, I think the economic logic undergirding this passage is suspect at
best, and believe that Marx largely drops this "dependency" (i.e.,
monopsony) interpretation of increasing capitalist control of production in
his economic writings after the Grundrisse.

But second, and more to the point, as I understand it *no* passage in
Grundrisse, let alone this particular one, can possibly be taken to speak
to the issue of what *Marx* meant by "formal subsumption of labor under
capital," since Marx did not introduce this analytical distinction until
the Economic Manuscript of 1861-63, 3 years after he finished the
Grundrisse notebooks.  The notions of formal and real subsumption of labor
under capital are thus nowhere to be found in the Grundrisse.

As far as I know, Marx first introduces the notion of "formal subsumption"
early on in the EM 61-63 in the following passage:

"This *formal* subsumption of the labour process, the assumption of control
over it by capital, consists in the worker's subjection as worker to the
supervision and therefore to the command of capital or the
capitalist."  [Marx-Engels Collected Works, V. 30, p93]

This definition of formal subsumption is then consistently maintained in
other passages discussing the phenomenon in the Ec Mss 61-63 and the
Resultate, from which I quoted in my previous post.  So far, Marx never
contradicts his initial stipulation that formal subsumption involves direct
capitalist supervision over the production process.  To the contrary, he
associates this new form of worker subordination with the achievement of
*absolute* surplus value relative to the surplus value that exists under
preceding forms of the circuit of capital, associated with the greater
continuity and scale of labor performed under capitalist supervision.

As a corollary, Marx repeatedly asserts that the rural
handicraft/buyer-up/putter-out relation *did not* constitute an instance of
formal subsumption of labor under capital.  Besides the passage from the
Resultate that says just that, quoted in my previous post, also see these
passages from the EM 61-63:  [Marx-Engels CW, V. 30, p. 270; V. 34, pp. 96,
117-19, 144]

And finally, Marx maintains this distinction in Volume I of Capital:

"It will be sufficient if we merely refer to certain hybrid forms, in
which...the producer has not yet become formally subordinate to
capital.  In these forms, capital has not yet acquired a direct control
over the labour process.  Alongside the independent producers, who carry on
their handicrafts or their agriculture in the inherited, traditional way,
there steps the usurer or merchant with his usurer's or merchant's capital,
which feeds on them like a parasite."  [p. 645, Penguin]


Note I'm not suggesting that you don't have a more economically coherent
notion of "formal subsumption" than Marx.  Perhaps you do, and that would
be an interesting line to pursue.  But in any case, it does not appear to
be *Marx's* conception of the term.

Gil