Labor, Humanism, and the Play of Mediation: A Rejoinder

Abstract

This rejoinder focuses on two issues discussed in Samuel Mercer’s review of Ana C. Dinerstein and Frederick Harry Pitts’s book A World beyond Work? Labour, Money and the Capitalist State between Crisis and Utopia. The first concerns the authors’ alleged defense of concrete labor against abstract labor; the second concerns the accusation of humanism. First, the rejoinder clarifies the authors’ understanding of concrete and abstract labor as dialectically intertwined, and also the implications of this for class struggle in and against the “play of mediation” between the two. Second, the rejoinder pleads guilty to the charge of humanism in how the authors approach work and alienation. The authors argue that the related criticism is based in the idea of an “epistemological break” in Marx’s work, but they situate their work in a countervailing reading of Marx that sees a humanist core and continuity characterizing both Marx’s “early” conceptualization of alienation and estrangement and his later conceptualization of real abstraction in the critique of political economy.

Key Words:

• Abstract Labor
• Concrete Labor
• Humanism
• Karl Marx
• Postwork

We are grateful to Samuel Mercer for his sophisticated review of A World beyond Work? (Dinerstein and Pitts 2021), and specifically for its engagement with the theoretical fundamentals of the book. We share with Mercer’s scholarship a critique of the current wave of postwork thinking and its relationship with claims about so-called postcapitalism, albeit with different reasons and to different ends. We thank the editors for giving us the opportunity to expand on some of the interesting issues Mercer raises. Our rejoinder particularly focuses on two such issues raised in the review.

The first concerns our alleged defense of concrete labor against abstract labor. For us, it is important to understand that concrete and abstract are inseparable because abstract labor is the form of existence of labor specific to capitalist society. This is why we argue that the end of concrete labor desired by some will not lead to the postcapitalist society they describe. Capitalist society is not defined solely by its dependence on putting people to work in concrete labor itself. Rather, its specificity relates to the maintenance of underpinning conditions of dispossession and commodification and to the mediation of human productive activity in social, legal, and economic forms that regulate and reproduce the existence of concrete labor as waged labor—and thus, in turn, as abstract labor. As Mercer (2022) notes, we stress the need to foreground these social relations and social forms in our critique of the postwork prospectus. In his critique, Mercer suggests that we betray these theoretical underpinnings with our political recommendations, defending concrete labor as a separate pole of human “doing” against its mediation as abstract labor in a manner reminiscent of a Marxist humanism. Mercer suggests that we are unduly swayed by the young Marx’s discussion of alienation, eliding the insights of Marx’s later critique of political economy: “While Dinerstein and Pitts insist that work cannot be separated from the social relations and social forms in which it is valorized, their political recommendations apparently rest on a humanist interpretation of concrete labor that does exactly this, that exists primarily in cooperation between human beings as ‘products of human thought and practice,’ autonomous of capitalist social relations” (280).

To respond, we are not defending “concrete labor” against “abstract labor” in the way Mercer describes. Rather, we insist on their inseparability. Just as workers cannot emancipate themselves from alienation through the refusal or “end” of work alone, they similarly cannot emancipate themselves from alienation through detachment from the market or from money alone. Our example of the Argentinean piquetero movement of unemployed workers demonstrates that struggle is waged within these processes of mediation and abstraction, in navigating the contradictions presented in the forms that labor’s dual character assumes in capitalist society. The struggles of this movement of workers show precisely that life without work may free workers from the “doing” of concrete labor but not from the modes of existence it assumes in abstract social forms like value and money. These latter forms and the social relations they conceal represent a deeper form of subordination in capital, rooted in dispossession. Unemployment, as the lack of concrete labor, does not escape the movement of mediation specific to a society that appears in the form of its abstract twin. This has consequences for how struggles are conceived, with those of the unemployed not autonomous from other forms of class struggle in, against, and beyond capitalist social relations. These struggles are rather part and parcel.

The second and related point we wish to address regards humanism and the question of “life.” The author observes that we provide a humanistic definition of work, seeing it as “what makes us human and what makes us social” (Mercer 2022, 279). We happily plead guilty to the charge of humanism. Work, as the capacity of the “insurgent architect” to plan and imagine the future, is only human. But in capitalism this capacity exists, as Richard Gunn (1987) puts it, in the “mode of being denied.” This means it exists as concrete labor and is only recognized in its form of mediation as abstract labor. Our political recommendations do not rest on a retreat into work as concrete labor, for it cannot be rescued from abstract labor because it is already contaminated by it. Rather, the book projects a process of class struggle waged within the contradictions that characterize what Gunn calls the “play of mediation” between concrete and abstract. This “play” goes on every day as humans negotiate the estrangement and abstraction of their subjective activities in forms of social and economic objectivity that take on lives of their own. These forms mediate class struggle, with class struggle also being a struggle over the terms of such mediation—a struggle over not only labor but also the welfare state, the law, income distribution, and the economy. This struggle will not result in a definitive escape from intractable processes of objectification intrinsic to human existence. The play of mediation will go on, producing better and worse objectifications of human subjective activity in new and different social forms.

This understanding of alienation and real abstraction sheds light on a central point of difference underpinning our disagreements with Mercer. The review suggests that we remain stuck in an understanding of alienation and estrangement abandoned in Marx’s mature work, such as Capital. But we do not see such an Althusserian divide between the concepts deployed by the young and the old Marx, nor that one betters the other. Rather, we follow a long lineage of critical theory, including the Frankfurt School and Henri Lefebvre, in perceiving a continuity, grounded in the subject-object dialectic, between the concepts of alienation and estrangement in Marx’s early work and what later appears in the critique of political economy as fetish or real abstraction. Humanism, in this reading, was not cast off with the “epistemological break” Althusser dreamed up but rather remained a constant presence in Marx’s critique of political economy, as a critique of the forms of social and economic objectivity into which the subject disappears in capitalist society. If “humanism” is the attempt to understand the subject’s struggle in and against the inhumane reproduction of human life in and through forms of social domination, then—yes—we are humanists, like Marx himself.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Rethinking Marxism Reviews Editors and the Editorial Board for inviting us to write this rejoinder, with particular mention to Chizu Sato.