Subjectivity, Class, and Marx's “Forms of the Commune”

Abstract

Forms of subjectivity are implied by the concepts of “direct producer” and “appropriator of surplus labor” in Marxian class theory. The section of Marx's Grundrisse that discusses “forms that precede capitalist production” elaborates a typology of “forms of the commune.” Original, Asiatic, and Germanic forms of the commune share a fundamental communal class process. These forms of the commune differ in how variations of the “primitive” commune (based upon kinship/clan rules) or of the “individual” (who performs and appropriates surplus labor only as a kin/clan/commune member) appear as direct producers and/or appropriators. Communal appropriation occurs even when the appropriators, such as Germanic heads of households or Asiatic “despots,” extract surplus as “representations” of the “unity” of the clan/commune. This article argues that in Marx's later writings, all manner of concepts of individuality and collectivity/communality are produced by Marx to determine and differentiate class processes.

Keywords:

• Class
• Subjectivity
• Commune
• Grundrisse
• Individuals

Acknowledgements

This paper has its origins in my 1984 doctoral dissertation and, as a separate work, has undergone numerous shifts in focus. One version was presented at the “Workshop on Class” held 20–2 June 1996 at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I wish to thank Julie Graham, Richard Wolff, Kathy Gibson, Steve Resnick, Carole Biewener, Harriet Fraad, David Ruccio, Steve Cullenberg, Rebecca Forest, Jenny Cameron, Yahya Mete Madra, Kenan Erçel, Ceren Özselçuk, Anna Curcio, and Christina Hatgis for their helpful comments. I am grateful to Ceren and Yahya for strongly encouraging me to contribute to this collection.

Notes

¹For my appraisal of Resnick and Wolff's immense contribution to Marxian theory, see my foreword to their New Departures in Marxian Theory (2006). For a similar judgment, see Norton (2001, 23).

²For readers who know my past work, it may come as a shock that the forms of subjectivity I introduce here are excessively narrow, conventional to mainstream discourses of subjectivity, prestructuralist, and pre-postmodern. Perhaps most surprising may be the complete exclusion of the Althusserian-inspired “decentered subject” about which I have written at length in earlier articles and books (e.g., Ruccio and Amariglio 2003). I am intrigued by Marx's assertion in part 1 of Theories of Surplus Value (1969, 408–9) that subjective decentering, or the splitting of the self into two or more contending parts, is a main feature of a modern, commodity-producing, capitalist society in which the unity of subjects is primarily accidental and separation is the living norm for capitalism's subjects.

³I see my essay as a companion piece to the fine article by Serap Kayatekin and S. Charusheela on feudal subjectivities. Kayatekin and Charusheela state that a chief goal of their article is to “ask how subjectivity is partly an effect of the class process and similarly how class is one of the effects reproduced and rearticulated by subjectivity” (2004, 380). They regard their analysis as largely incorporating “culture and subjectivity into the definition of feudal class processes” (382). I share with Kayatekin and Charusheela the desire to rework basic conceptions of particular class processes by starting with types of subjectivity not usually introduced into class positions of direct producer and/or appropriator.

⁴I have left out the crucial issue of the subsumed class and nonclass payments that occur within the family and in which direct producers and other family members not engaged in direct production or nonlaborers receive shares of the already appropriated surplus from male heads of households.

⁵Yahya Madra and Ceren Özselçuk (2010) read Marx's discussion on the forms of the commune similarly. They state: “perhaps surprisingly, Marx suggests the possibility of a communal form where the social surplus is appropriated by a despot in the name of the commune and for the commune: the despot would have the right to appropriate the surplus because he or she would be socially designated as ‘a particular entity’ that realizes the higher and ‘comprehensive unity’ of ‘the many real particular communities’… Marx also discusses the peasant forms of the commune where the male head of the household is the communally designated appropriator of the surplus produced in the household. In considering these forms of ‘property’ as communal forms … Marx differentiates between the actual physical act of appropriation and its social signification.”

⁶In his foreword to the Grundrisse, Martin Nicolaus reduces Marx's discussion of the forms of individuality to just two. He says: “the Grundrisse speaks of two very broadly and generally defined types of human individuality. The first is the ‘private individual,’ meaning the individual as private proprietor, both as owner of the means of production and as ‘owner’ of the commodity, labor-power; the individual within the exchange-value relation. The abolition of the relations of private property is the abolition of the conditions which produce and reproduce this kind of individual. The place of this type is taken by the social individual, the individual of classless society, a personality type that is not less, but rather more, developed as an individual because of its direct social nature. As opposed to the empty impoverished, restricted individuality of capitalist society, the new human being displays an all-sided, full rich development of needs and capacities, and is universal in character and development” (1973, 51).

⁷This quote was rewritten by Marx for volume 1 of Capital: “For an example of labour in common, i.e., directly associated labour, we do not need to go back to the spontaneously developed form which we find at the threshold of the history of all civilized peoples. We have one nearer to hand in the patriarchal rural industry of a peasant family … The different kinds of labour … such as tilling the fields, tending the cattle, spinning, weaving and making clothes—are already in their natural form social functions; for they are functions of the family … The distribution of labour within the family and the labour-time expended by the individual members of the family, are regulated by differences of sex and age as well as seasonal variations in the natural conditions of labour” (1976, 171).

⁸David Ruccio sees in Nancy as well as in Corlett (1989) a rethinking of the concept of community along nonessentialist lines. Since many traditional concepts of community in the Marxian literature posit community as an immanent or organic totality, the postmodern turn in deconstructing and decentering all forms of subjectivity has resulted in new conceptions of community that, as Ruccio tells us, are “conceived in multiplicity and difference in an open social reality” (1992, 19). Ruccio adds that these new concepts of decentered community can be productive of a new stratagem of seeing “collective subjectivity” in the midst of societies based on commodity exchange as well as ones in which communism is said to exist.

⁹On the politics of distribution involved in shareholder rights struggles, see Gibson-Graham (2006). George DeMartino tells me that some institutionalist economists view production and consumption as essentially communal activities in all societies, despite the claims of some that their private labor or right of ownership makes it only fair for them to receive the rewards of “their” work.

¹⁰For an in-depth discussion of Locke's notion of property rights, see Tully (1980). A productive line of inquiry is one in which the question of class process might determine conceptions of property and subjectivities that inform these conceptions. One could pursue Tully's suggestion that, for Locke, property is a right that is derived from “the right or property that all men have to things necessary for subsistence,” which, in turn, is “a consequence of the right which all men have to their preservation” (3). It would be interesting to explore the connection between the ability to reproduce one's subsistence and the performance and appropriation of surplus labor. It might be shown that Lockean notions of property presuppose a class process.

¹¹See Jennings (1975) and Cronon (1983) for how European conceptions of property, based largely on interpretations (or distortions) of natural law philosophy and Lockean defenses of proprietorship, promoted conquest of Native Americans.