At first glance, the only thing that Pierre Macherey and Paolo Virno have in common is that they are, in my opinion, underrated as philosophers. They are both the less well known member of a school, or orientation that is primarily identified with other figures more often discussed; Macherey is often seen as one of the names associated with Althusser, but not referenced as much as Balibar or even Rancière and Virno with autonomia or post-operaism, but less translated than Negri and less famous than Tronti. Macherey is barely translated into English, but thanks to Seagull books, most of Virno's work is available. The other, more interesting thing that they have in common, is that they have both turned to the concept of labor power as a philosophical concept.
To put it simply, maybe too simply, labor power is the term Marx coins to stress that what the worker sells to the capitalist is a capacity, a capacity to work. It is up to the capitalist to actualize this capacity, to turn a potential to work, a capability, into actual work. In the passage fromin the slide above, and in "The Productive Subject" Macherey compares this to a kind of everyday metaphysics in which the passage from capacity to actuality is less a speculative matter than a practical one. As Macherey writes
"From this point of view, we could say that when the capitalist occupies himself with his workers’ labor-power, which he has acquired the right to employ in exchange for a wage, treating it as a “productive power” whose productivity he intends to increase in order to produce relative surplus value – he practices metaphysics not in a theoretical but in a practical way. He practices this peculiar sort of metaphysics not during his leisure time, as a distraction or mental exercise, as he would a crossword puzzle, but throughout the entire working day dedicated to production. By opening up his company to notions such as “power,” “capacity” and “causation,” he thereby makes them a reality, realizing these fictions, these products of the mind, which he then employs with daunting efficacy. In this way, with payrolls and charts of organizational tasks at hand, he shows, better than a philosopher’s abstract proofs, that the work of metaphysics could not be more material, provided that one knows how to put it to good use in introducing it into the factory. One could, incidentally, derive from this a new and caustic definition of metaphysics: in this rather specific context, it boils down to a mechanism for profit-making, which is no small matter. This means that, amongst other inventions that have changed the course of history, capitalism has found the means, the procedure, the “trick” enabling it to put abstract concepts into practice – the hallmark of its “genius.”
Macherey's remarks here could be seen as the basis for a new consideration of metaphysics, a sort of metaphysics of real abstractions, for lack of a better word, in which it is practice, day to day life, and not speculation that is the terrain for such concepts as potentiality and actuality. One could imagine here a "Metaphysics of Capital," a title that I am sure someone has used before. However, such an assertion overlooks an important part of Marx's criticism, the history of this very category and condition. As Macherey writes,
"Before becoming a so-called natural given of economics, the existence of labor power rests on the relationship of domination, a constraint whose actual nature the legal form of the contract eludes by exploiting the confusion that is key to its operation. In fact, if the worker were not forced, not only would he not offer his labor power for hire to the capitalist, but he would not possess this very force, which is a fiction completely fabricated by the regime of wage labor, a potential reality assumed to exist separately from the conditions of its realization..."
The metaphysics of capital presupposes its history. This is why, in Macherey's recent writing on labor power, he returns to the question of symptomatic reading. History, the history of those who only have their labor power to sell, and politics, the power relations that make it so some only have their labor power to sell are the two constitutive occlusions of capital, of political economy. In a sense Macherey's argument would seem to be that political economy cannot see power. Labor power moves then from a metaphysics to a kind of epistemology, to be the answer as to why capitalism, or its apologists, cannot see its history, and cannot see the inequality underlying the exchange between worker and capitalist. What is effaced is power in two fundamentally different senses, which is why it cannot be a metaphysics, the power of domination which reduces individuals to sellers of their labor power, and the productive powers of labor that produce wealth. Impotence and potential coexist in the same relation--the fundamental relation of having to sell one's labor power in order to survive. As Macherey stresses in La Chose Philosophique this coexistence exceeds the philosophical opposition of essence and appearance:
"Marx's true discovery is therefore that capitalism takes advantage of an ambivalence of the kind on which the concept of "force" is predicated on; to create value, this system of production based on the establishment of wage labor uses the equivocal status given to a "force," "labor power," capable of existing both potentially, or as a potentially, and an actuality, and from which it has found the means to extract maximum of profit in the two forms, the extraction of absolute surplus value (by extension of the working day) and relative surplus value (by increasing the productivity of labor power). This ultimately lies the secret of wage labor: its exploitation is based on the sleight of hand performed, at the time the employment contract is entered into, between what is purchased, namely the right to employ labor power in the form of a maximum amount of work actually performed, and what is actually paid to the worker, the cost of reproducing his labor power treated as a commodity in its own right. So, when Marx refers in passing to the relationship between essence and appearance, he is speaking without realizing it – for in fact he does not speak of it, while speaking of it, without however speaking of it,...--of the relationship between potentiality and action, the key to the material exploitation of labor power by the capitalist: the latter pretends to buy "labor" and to remunerate it at its value – this is what Ricardo maintains – while in reality he rents the right to use in a certain place and for a certain time, under the guise of making it pass from potentiality to action, "labor power", by playing on the double value with which the notion of "force" is credited...This tour de force, a true exercise in sleight of hand, consisted of drawing effects that could not be more real, and what is more, countable in hard cash, from an ambiguity put in place on the level of philosophical ideas which initially constitutes his playing field: the capitalist, past master in the art of passing off shadows as lanterns, is an experienced philosopher, a "speculator", and a most devious one!"
The task is not to recognize the metaphysics at work in capital, but to recognize that the process of exploitation exceeds our established metaphysical categories, which is why essence and appearance fail to do it justice.
Paolo Virno's return to labor power is boldly stated at the opening of the essay with the bold title "Historical Materialism" that is part III of Déjà vu and the End of History. As Virno writes,
"The concept of labour-power, though it recurs in every turn of phrase throughout economic and sociological analysis, has itself hardly been thought about at all. Professional philosophers shrug their shoulders at the thought of doing so, and at most busy themselves with themes which are its corollary (biopolitics for example). And yet this concept, which is apparently self-evident and even superficial, is very much tangled up with study of historical time.
The capitalist production relation is based on the difference between labour-power and effective labour. Labour-power is pure potential, very much different from the corresponding acts."
Virno's approach to labor power is framed through his revival of a kind of negative philosophical anthropology, specifically the works of such thinkers as Arnold Gehlen, who understand humanity through the fundamental condition of a default of instinctual determination. As I wrote in The Politics of Transindividuality,
"Virno, drawing from Arnold Gehlen, argues for this indetermination being the defining characteristic of humanity. As Gehlen writes, ‘In terms of morphology, man is, in contrast to all other higher mammals, primarily characterized by deficiencies, which, in an exact, biological sense, qualify as lack of adaptation, lack of specialization, primitive states, and failure to develop, and which are essentially negative features.’ Human beings lack specialization, the instincts and aptitudes that define the animal kingdom, and in their place have a drawn out, perhaps even lifelong practice of learning and forming habits. This lack of determination, the openness to the world, can also be understood as the preindividual basis for individuation. Mankind’s nature, the capacities for language and habits, does not constitute a basis for an individual or collective identity, only the potential for different individuations. The deficiency of instinctual determination is the potential for new habits and languages, for individuation of collectives and groups.
This lack of specialization, of individuation, is the condition for all history, which is why Virno describes language, habits, and fashion as historico-natural: they are natural in that each depend on natural capacities and deficiencies, the biological capacity for language or the deficiencies of instinct that make habits possible, and are historical in that the specific nature of this language or that cultural habit can only be defined by their history. This is true of all history, every specific language, cultural habit, and fashion is a specific actualization of these potentials, a particular compensation for these deficiencies. What defines the present mode of production, however, is that it is not just an actualization of this potential, but the potential itself becoming productive. ‘Human nature returns to the centre of attention not because we are finally dealing with biology rather than history, but because the biological prerogatives of the human animal have required undeniable historical relevance in the contemporary productive process.’ Post-Fordist labour, the labour of the general intellect, does not simply exploit particular habits, particular languages, particular cultural dimensions, but the capacity for acquiring new habits and new languages. The generic capacities of the species, rather than their specific manifestations, are directly put to work."
This idea underlies the fundamental assertion in the Historical Materialism essay that "Meta-history irrupts into ordinary history in the none-too-sublime guise of labour power." Meta-history, humanity's combination of indetermination, lack of instinctual determination, and capacity to learn, becomes an actual element of history. For much of human history this capacity has been the backdrop of history, as humanity's capacity to learn habits and language is actualized in actual habits that make up culture and existing languages. However, in capitalism, one sells oneself as labor power, as a capacity to work, as potential and this potential is put to work as potential.
In previous works Virno has been very interested in the transformation of potentiality in capitalism. For Virno the kind of work of that defines what post-operaismo labelled with the unfortunate monicker "immaterial labor" and what we might call, more mundanely, the service economy, the work of communicating, relating, and selling to others, is one in which potential is no longer the backdrop of the skills put to work but becomes something that is directly put to work. Work is less about doing this or that particular thing, but of dealing with the contingency and indeterminacy that used to be reserved for politics. As Virno writes in Grammar of the Multitude,
"By general intellect Marx means science, knowledge in general, the know-how on which social productivity relies by now. The politicization of work (that is, the subsumption into the sphere of labor of what had hitherto belonged to political action) occurs precisely when thought becomes the primary source of the production of wealth. Thought ceases to be an invisible activity and becomes something exterior, “public,” as it breaks into the productive process. One could say: only then, only when it has linguistic intellect as its barycenter, can the activity of labor absorb into itself many of the characteristics which had previously belonged to the sphere of political action.
Up to this point we have discussed the juxtaposition between Labor and Politics. Now, however, the third facet of human experience comes into play, Intellect. It is the “score” which is always performed, over and again, by the workers-virtuosos. I believe that the hybridization between the different spheres (pure thought, political life and labor) begins precisely when the Intellect, as principal productive force, becomes public. Only then does labor assume a virtuosic (or communicative) semblance, and, thus, it colors itself with “political” hues."
Or, as he puts it, "the general intellect is the intellect in general." This assertion underlies his general point about meta-history. Meta-history, the conditions of all historical difference and change, is directly put to work in history. The abstract potential to do work is no longer the backdrop of the concrete work of society but is directly put to work. As Virno writes elsewhere this is why so many advertisements for jobs discuss things like professionalism and commitment; work is less about concrete skills and habits, than it is about the general tendency to adopt new skills and habits.
One could draw a straight line between Macherey's metaphysics and Virno's meta-history, both are about the relation between potentiality and actuality, capability and action, that is at the core of labor power as a concept. However, such a straight line is warped by their very different approaches to history. Virno's history is one of periodizations in which the transition from Fordism to Post-Fordism, from production to services, is a fundamental transformation of the relation between potential and actuality, a history of the becoming increasing abstract of abstract labor. Macherey's history is less one of periods, than conditions, it is one in which the historical conditions of activity, the historical conditions of selling labor power, are effaced in the increasing reification of capitalism as a social relation. History is whatever is occluded whenever wage labor is taken as just the way things are rather than the product, and reproduction, of particular power relations.
This is only one way to think about the points of convergence and divergence. The question that I wanted to examine, or at least pose, is what is at stake in seeing labor power as a philosophical concept. How this changes the concept, problematizing it in a way that is perhaps not always the case if it is taken as an economic or sociological concept, but also problematizing philosophy with the concept, by introducing the history and power relations that produce every concept, but concealed in it.
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