And yet, once again, it is nothing but Papa versus the autocephalous hydra
With China’s grudging suspension of its covid lockdown, and with its foot dragging but economically inevitable abandonment of the vulnerable sections of its populace, we are now able to make out a clear and measurable distinction between the speed efficiency of repressive and exploitative regimes of production. The exchange rate between capital’s two operating systems may be stated thus: approximately 2 years output within the emancipatory-exploitative umwelt are equivalent to 3 years output under the surplus reality of labouring sublimation. Biopower out-competes the Labour Republic in energy conservation at a rate of 2 to 3. At the level of cost, that is at the level of losses incurred by intrasystem friction and constraint, abstract emancipation is one third more efficient at sloughing off, one third more efficient at escaping from, the societal and the concrete. Thus, as a whirling within the whirling, it is that step closer to freeing itself from the hold of embodied labour over wealth production.
Whether the discrepancy between the two systems is merely a particular historical marker, a rule of thumb measure for a particular event, or whether it indicates a generalisable rule of production, taking in the succession of manufactured crises of recent decades, is open to conjecture. In other words, we are set the question: is the repressive apparatus permanently stuck at manufacturing only two products to the exploitative life-world’s manufacturing of three? Is there always a relative delay in the abstract temporal movement of repressive production (ten years behind over 30 years, 100 years behind over 300 years) when measured against the abstractly emancipatory movement of the community of capital?
We must assume that it is because, after all, this is our very definition of the function of capital in history, where capitalism is understood as the abstracting totality’s exponential real movement towards the emergent production of a self-emancipating, self-estranging, second nature, and its accompanying negation of all that is solid, the inherited and unproductive mediations and constraints of the past. Let us take that fantasy as real, then what are the consequences?
Firstly, in practice, the exploitative lifeworld suggests an alternative operating system to the cost-heavy, reality principle oriented, repressive sublimating engine that drives the wheezing labour republic. It proposes a world where the frictionless emancipation of manufactured immaterial communities escape the chronic drain of inherited, materially constituted, redundant and dependent, arrangements of real live people. Ideologically, the abstraction of social wealth is sufficiently rationalised wherever community representation is proposed as the goal of the production of wealth. Then, wherever formal representation is enshrined, actual, material interests may be denied.
It is not an accident that the west materially exited the covid interregnum and returned to full production via its export of the mobilising ideologies of Me-Too feminism and BLM, as these were the dominant content-generators of the productive network in 2020 - the lucrative vax-antivaxx spectacle only really got going in 2021. The law of social reproduction may be presented simply: abstract communities of representation will escape the complex contradictions and constraints of material communities as constituted around the deep and irreducible costs which express historical need (or, rights are cheaper than needs).
Or to put it another way, once the Chinese apparatus expands to incorporate equivalents to feminism and anti-racism, as it once incorporated anti-imperialism, as factors of production, it will immediately make up the delay in its efficiency (demonstrating its effective transformation from a regime of repressive sublimation to an environment of emancipatory exploitation). At the event of its incorporating abstract representation, it will find itself also arriving at the juncture where it is free to disinvest safely from, and thus abandon by forgetting, the materially constituted needs of its actual populace - which up to that very point dragged on its forces of abstraction, being historically expressive of the subjective pole of the bargain at the core of the system of repressive deferral organised under the rubric of the state’s constituted reality principle.
Secondly, and this is implied by the above, so it needs only to be boldly stated as a guide rule: where exploitation escapes repression, reproduction becomes the mode of production - that is to say, wherever repression is escaped, ‘you are the product’ becomes the whole of the law. Not only does the exploitative totality tend to escape the labour process via its more direct, approaching immanent, and thus post-efficient, metabolisation of, by fusing with, desiring-activity, it also tends to escape the entirety of the historical value system reliant on systematic abstraction of quantities of living labour. The exploitative umwelt proposes a mode of abstraction that itself escapes the fetter of the value form.
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