Gulli approaches but avoids Marx's new dialectic of labor

Bruno Gulli's Labor of Fire: The Ontology of Labor between Economy and Culture (Temple UP, 2005) ascribes to Marx, specifically the 1844 Manuscripts and the Grundrisse (Marx's draft notebooks for Capital), "a radical ontology of labor," in order to show "at least at the level of theory that other and better worlds are indeed possible" (p. 6). Gulli's "ontological labor" means labor before it is specified in any determined form. This "immediate being" (p. 87) of labor, as living creative human activity that is one with life, is the negative of any actual labor which is always mediated by social relations like slavery or capitalism. This is an important work because this approach reflects the influence of the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger--an influence that is widespread in contemporary theory among both Marxists and anti-Marxists (poststructuralists). This essay will show why that is a problem.

Gulli calls for "the return of labor to itself" (p. 9) as undetermined, "creative power," which he rightly asserts can never be reduced to productive labor under capitalism. There living labor becomes productive labor only insofar as it becomes "objectified labor," meaning labor is only "the substance of capital" but not a live subject. This substance is value in things, which, as capital, becomes dead labor or machines, dominating living labor, and confronts the worker as an "alien power" (p. 84-86).

From this perspective Gulli takes sharp issue with those like Moishe Postone who claim Marx had no trans-historical concept of labor outside of capitalism. This led Postone to see the potential for liberation, not in the laboring subject's return-to-self, but in "dead labor" or capital. In a like manner, says Gulli, postmodernists like Jean Baudrillard deny there is any universal concept of labor apart from capitalism. In place of overcoming capitalism through the negative power of labor returning to itself, there is the theorist's radical critique.

Does Gulli measure up to Marx's negative power of labor returning to itself, which Gulli says has a "Hegelian origin" (p. 9)?

GULLI'S VS. MARX'S DIALECTIC

Claiming a confirmation of his ontological perspective in Marx's 1844 "critique of Hegel's dialectic," Gulli writes: "one of the most important moments of this critique has to do with Hegel's concept of negation (negation of the negation), which Hegel presents as the absolute positive, but which Marx calls a 'false positivism,' to which he counterposes Feuerbach's concept of the positive in itself" (p. 27).

On the contrary, in rooting his dialectic in labor, that is, the whole, corporeal human being, Marx distinguished it both from Feuerbach and from the false positivism of Hegel's disembodied dialectic even as Marx singled out Hegel's "negation of the negation. . .as the true and only positive, and from the point of view of negative relation inherent in it as the only true act and spontaneous activity of all being. . ."[1] (my emph., RK). For Marx, our full humanity hinges on this "dialectic of negativity as moving and creating principle." He calls it Hegel's "outstanding achievement" which "conceives the self-creation of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation . . . grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man--true, because real man--as the outcome of his own labour" (CW, 3:332-3).

The only true positive is a process of double negation. Firstly, both human natural capacities and nature, taken as givens, are negated through externalizing or objectifying of those capacities in nature, transforming both nature and expanding human capacities. Secondly, this external reality is negated through a negative self-relation that recognizes human social and material reality as the result of its own labor and as the ongoing expansion of human capacities.

In place of this realized and recognized movement of labor, Gulli foresees a "movement whereby becoming nears being" (p. 148) where, again "being" is indeterminate labor in its "immediacy" (p. 88). Gulli says labor and art have to merge as one, but this is merely approached, never attained. In contrast, Marx's Grundrisse directly poses creative labor that doesn't reproduce itself in "any determined form" as post-capitalist labor of the future when there is the "absolute working out of. . .creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself. . .in the absolute movement of becoming" (MN, p. 488).

GULLI VS. MARX'S CAPITAL

In Marx's dialectic of becoming, a new freedom emerges not so much from but through the negation of specific determinations that alienate the ongoing self-expansion of innate human capacities. In contrast, Gulli poses purely ontological, indeterminate free creative power as the negation of capitalist productivism. Gulli claims Capital is "problematic," accusing Marx of equating "living labor with productive labor" (p. 84) because Marx says "productive labour" is itself "socially determined" (BF, 1043).

Capital, in contrast to Marx's draft in the Grundrisse, traces capitalism's socially determined concept of productive labor in specific workers' struggles. The laborer embodies the contradiction between abstract, value-producing labor and concrete living labor. In Capital Marx's theory is neither ontological nor a debate with other theoreticians, but is united with practice in a new way. Thus, Marx's concepts of how ever more surplus value is extracted from workers--relatively through the introduction of machinery or absolutely through a longer working day--are inseparable from engagement with living laborers, and the theory inherent in their struggles against the domination of the machine or for a normal working day in a "protracted and more or less concealed civil war" (BF, 412) in production. The movement to a universal concept of labor is through the kind of labor that is specific to the capitalist epoch as distinct from merely counterposing labor as a form of indeterminate and universal condition of existence.

CAPITAL AND MARX'S DIALECTIC

In Capital, Marx's concept of the "fire of labour" that imparts "vital energy" to nature in creating use-values is a "nature-imposed condition of existence. . .common to all forms of society in which human beings live" (BF, 289-90). However, inextricable from this condition of human existence is another one, which is that this universal metabolism with nature is, as Gulli himself puts it, "always socially determined" (p. 83).

Gulli reiterates Antonio Negri's summary of the Grundrisse on method, as that which "seeks the real in the concrete" through a "determinate abstraction" (p. 80). What Gulli and Negri, who both prefer the Grundrisse to Capital, ignore is that Marx in Capital began anew with the "determinate abstraction" of capitalism he had by then found.

The "real" determinate abstraction of capitalism is the commodity-form through which the objects of human creation, commodities and capital, dominate their creators by presenting themselves objectively as values, or socially necessary labor time in things. Relations between commodity producers "appear as what they are," that is, "as material relations between persons and social relations between things" (BF, 166). This determinate abstraction, which inverts social and material reality, shapes all bourgeois thought. Though Gulli writes, "labor that returns to its immediacy. . . becomes the subject (i.e., the ground and agent) of a new determination of the concrete" (p. 88), for Marx, a "new determination of the concrete" can emerge only through freely associated labor, a new mediating form of directly social labor, where each one freely expends her distinct form of "labor-power in full self-awareness as one single social labor force" (BF, 171).

Gulli's ontological approach avoids the critical movement through the historically specific way productive labor is socially determined under capitalism. Gulli makes productive labor itself into that which distinguishes capitalism from creative living labor, which for him is "neither-productive-nor-unproductive" labor (p. 85). For Marx, recognizing how productive labor and value-producing labor are not equivalent is one of the distinguishing marks of a "new determination of the concrete" beyond value production, which falsely presents itself as much of a "self-evident and nature imposed necessity as productive labor itself" (BF, 175).

Material necessity is always an "inconvenient truth" when the social power of labor develops under the blind necessity of value production. This is palpable whether one speaks of the disregard today for the material necessity of human life in the global hunger that stalks much of the world's poor and the care of the planet as the very foundation of life, or the fact that in Marx's time capitalism used up three generations of workers in one before workers won a normal working day.

A NEW BEGINNING IN FREEDOM AND NECESSITY

A new dialectic of freedom and necessity emerges through freely associated labor's appropriation of the social power of labor, creating a clear differentiation between, and unity of, two aspects of necessity, social necessity and material necessity. The results of labor then reflect back, not a socially necessary labor time in things, but the human-created world and its material limits. In Vol. 3 of Capital, Marx distinguishes between post-capitalist freedom achieved in the realm of necessary material production and the "development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom." Marx adds that the true realm of freedom "can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working day is its basic prerequisite" (CW, 37: 807).

Rather than following the path to a non-capitalist future through Marx's historical development of a new dialectic of freedom and necessity, Gulli sees the return of labor to its ontological self as a new form of artistic-social labor that is an end in itself. The problem for Gulli is how to achieve this worthy goal. Gulli makes an important criticism of the mere slogan "Another world is possible" when that is not made "philosophically . . . immediately evident" through "determining the specificity of the new world to come" (p. 184). However, his ontological approach to the future avoids Marx's specifically determining that future in his journey from the Grundrisse to Capital. Raya Dunayevskaya made a unique contribution when she traced the significance of this journey in Marxism and Freedom (see especially chapter 5, "The Impact of the Civil War in the United States on the Structure of Capital").

Gulli's posing of the inter-merging of art and labor remains a leap. He himself recognizes the "problem" that "the work of art also appears as a commodity" (p. 183) and that ". . .an esthetic regime requires that everybody be socially and existentially able to explore and actualize his or her creative potential. And in order to do this, one has to have time for it" (p. 151). In the Grundrisse Marx had already addressed how a post-capitalist shortening of the working day realizes the true realm of freedom through a new kind of productive labor: "the saving of labour time [is] equal to an increase of free time, i.e., time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power" (MN, p. 711).

To get to a new society, we cannot skip over Marx's tracing the course of human development from value production to when the productive power of labor is a human attribute instead of an attribute of capital. In Capital that future begins from a new relationship between freedom and necessity out of negating the commodity-form's inversion of social and material reality, an inversion which blocks living labor's ability to return to itself in an ongoing realized and recognized transformation of nature and human nature.

NOTES:

1. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (International Publishers: New York), Vol. 3, p. 329. Further references to Marx will have "CW" with the volume number and page number in the text, except for the commonly used Ben Fowkes translation of Capital, (London: Penguin, 1976), which is referenced with "BF," and the Martin Nicolaus translation of the Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973), which is referenced with "MN."

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