[PEN-L:4831] Marx on Subsumption and Exploitation, Pt. 1

[GSKILLMAN@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

First question:

What is meant by the formal subsumption of labor under
capital? (The Fowkes/Fernbach translation uses the term "subsumption"
where the Moore and Aveling translation uses the term "subjection";
I'll use them interchangeably.)

Jim writes:

> "Formal subjection" refers to the separation of the direct
> producers from the means of production, so that they must seek jobs
> in the labor-power market from the capitalists....

This reading of the term cannot be found in CAPITAL.  The condition
Jim identifies here Marx refers to as workers being "free in the
double sense" (Vol. I, Ch. 6, p. 272 in the Penguin edition).

Marx uses the term "formal subsumption" in several places (Ch. 16
of Vol. I and the Resultate, pp. 1019-1023), always in the sense of
capitalists taking direct supervisory control of the labor process
without changing the nature of that process.

Thus Marx in the RESULTATE, p. 1019 in the Appendix to Vol I:

"The labour process is subsumed under capital...and the capitalist
intervenes in the process as its director, manager.  For him it also
represents the direct exploitation of the labour of others.  It is
this that I refer to as the *formal subsumption of labour under
capital*." [Emphasis in original]

Again, on p. 1021: "It is in contradistinction to this last that we
come to designate as the *formal subsumption of labour under capital*
what we have discussed earlier, viz. the takeover by capital of a
mode of labour developed before the emergence of capitalist
relations." [Emphasis in original; see also Vol I, p. 645 Penguin ed.]

In parallel fashion, Jim's definition of "real subsumption" departs
from Marx's--what Jim calls a "milder version" of real subsumption,
Marx explicitly calls formal subsumption.  Marx reserves the term
"real subsumption" for the setting in which capitalists transform the
conditions of production.

The above matters because Jim claims to be representing what Marx has
to say about the connection between subsumption and exploitation.
To take but one significant example, the passage Jim quotes from p.
1023 of the RESULTATE *explicitly contradicts* Jim's assertion that
formal subsumption is in some sense necessary for the expropriation
of surplus value via circuits of capital which preceded the era of
capitalist production.  This claim is the focus of my next post.

Gil Skillman