Ron Kelch misrepresents important aspects of my book's basic themes in his essay on my work printed in the Oct.-Nov. 2008 N&L. First, Labor of Fire was not conceived as a study of Marx's dialectics but as an ontological critique of productive labor. An adequate understanding of the book hinges on whether one sees or does not see the necessity of such a critique, of the disambiguation of the category of productive labor (and consequently of unproductive labor). In any case, the ontological critique does not deny the dialectics, and there are points in the book in which I make this explicit. Instead, the critique highlights the difference between living labor and productive labor by saying that the latter is an instance, historically determined, of the former. Yet living labor exceeds, and ontologically grounds, productive labor. This is the only way in which a mode of production can be grasped in its historicality, that is, on the basis of a wider, transhistorical ground, which belongs to the dialectics of nature. That labor as it is in itself, in its immediate being, is not productive is not a new idea, but it is what Marx (whom I simply don't "accuse" of anything) says in both the Grundrisse and Theories of Surplus Value. I call this labor neither-productive-nor-unproductive to emphasize the structure of neutrality that it has in relation to any given mode of production. This does not mean that labor is a mere negative. Labor which is not productive is certainly not nothing at all, for labor, even when considered in its indeterminateness, is doing, making--a relation of nature. It is this that constitutes the ontological ground for the unfolding of dialectics and history. It is not history that determines labor, but the other way around, labor determines history. Without labor as an ontological category, that is, constitutive of the human world, there would be no history. And again, labor is not historical; labor makes history.

The second point relates to Kelch's conclusions, which are mainly based on Marx's passage on the realms of necessity and freedom in Volume 3 of Capital. Kelch says: "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" (emphasis added). There are two things I need to notice here. One is that "productive" in "productive power of labor" is different from "productive" in "productive labor" as a category of capital. This is the very notion I wanted to disambiguate. Productive here is either used equivocally or in its original sense of a general bringing forth, or making. The second is that Kelch makes the usual mistake of overlooking the original free disposition of labor. This is the same as overlooking the truth that slaves were originally free and only because of this original freedom could be enslaved. Their freedom is also a return. Labor's liberation from value production is a regained freedom, a return. Kelch continues: "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" (emphasis added). From what I have just said, but also from Labor of Fire, it should be clear that the return is not to a previous historical period, which would obviously be blocked in the way Kelch describes. Rather, it is a return to the itself of labor, that is, to its original disposition as the power constitutive of the human world, as well as to its freedom. Yet, as Marx says in the passage of Volume 3 of Capital I alluded to above, this freedom will always be grounded in necessity; for this return is not the end of history.

--Bruno Gulli

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Ron Kelch responds

Bruno Gulli rightly says that his "ontological critique does not deny dialectics." However, Marx's new dialectic of labor always remains external to Gulli's conception of a pure being of labor. "Becoming" only "nears being." Indeed, "labor makes history" and not the other way around. Why then even though Labor of Fire calls labor a "process" does it deny the way Marx specifies that process as "negation of the negation"? Marx calls it "the only true act and spontaneous activity of all being" and "the real history of humanity as a given subject."

This, I hold, is Marx's "original free disposition of labor" which Gulli says I "overlook." Freedom is not just labor's power to negate the existing material and social world. Negation of the negation is labor's return to self, a negative self-relation, in which labor recognizes the material and social externalization of human capacities as the process of its own becoming. This process is always socially determined, always mediated, says Marx, by the "power of abstraction" that shapes human relations. That's why Marx's concept of labor as a universal, which is not fixed in any determined form, includes determination within it, that is, presupposes movement through its social determinations.

Gulli's ontological critique largely ignores Capital, where this dialectic, in which labor determines history, is most concrete for the capitalist epoch. Nothing could be timelier in today's economic crisis than a call for a clear comprehension of Marx's labor theory of value with abstract, alienated labor as its value-producing substance. Instead, Gulli introduces ambiguity into Marx's "'productive labor' as a category of capital" when he clouds the clear distinction Marx makes between how productive labor is socially determined under capitalism and productive labor per se: the distinction between socially necessary labor time and actual time, between the alien, blind necessity of socially necessary labor time "in" things, commodities and capital, and actual material necessity.

Living labor that is "neither-productive-nor-unproductive" becomes concrete only when material limits appear as what they really are through freely associated labor's negation of productive labor under capitalism. Only then does the "development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom," emerge with transparent material necessity as its basis. Labor, infused with the negative and immanent drive to transcend its externalization, would finally end what Marx called "pre-history."

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