The Limits of the Law: Work in the Light of Capitalist Reproduction

ABSTRACT

1. INTRODUCTION

For most of the population, working conditions have been deteriorating to such an extent and with such intensity that the limits of workers, physical or emotional, are increasingly outstretched.¹ As such, the question of alternatives to how work, the relation of production, is organised in capitalism gains increasing relevance. While scholars have examined this question in different ways and from varying perspectives, they have rarely approached it from the perspective of capitalist reproduction. This article aims to bridge that gap by exploring the question of alternatives to capitalist work, focusing on the conditions of reproduction of the relation of production. The main argument is that the social totality is co-constituted by different levels—the economic, the juridico-political and the ideological—which are in a relationship of multi-directional mutual causations collectively ensuring the reproduction of the capitalist system. The study of reproduction shows how the capitalist totality shapes not only the organisation of production but also the social relations and structures that underpin it. In light of the constraints imposed by the rules of capitalistic reproduction then, a reflection on alternatives to capitalist work requires that work is reconceptualised, to the extent possible, beyond current structures, including its current shape and regulation by the juridico-political level.

This reading of totality is heavily influenced by the strand of structural Marxism and its two main advocates, Nicos Poulantzas and Louis Althusser. According to this tradition, which emphasises the overdetermination of each level by the others, changes in the legal level, however radical, may not produce effects as drastic on the economic sphere as a full reconceptualisation of work would require. Therefore, imagining alternatives to work from the point of view of reproduction necessitates not only that work is understood within the context of the capitalist social totality but also that the task of its redefinition reaches beyond mere legal change. This becomes possible once class struggle is introduced into the analysis as a force capable of breaking the cycle of capitalist reproduction.

The argument proceeds as follows. The paper starts with presenting the structuralist social totality in which the ideological, juridico-political and economic levels constitute each other through their mutual relation and articulation (sections 2 and 3). In this arrangement, chronological priorities and topological proximities are insignificant, as all levels reside in one another, being presupposed by one another. As such, the law has no more constitutive power than any other level. This broad description of the social totality is further qualified by the following sections.

The section on the economic level (3.A) explains the interconnected structuralist concepts of determination in the last instance and the relative autonomy of all the levels: the economic structure may ultimately determine all others but, in the meantime, each structure maintains its own logic which affects and shapes the other structures. The idea of relative autonomy allows to argue that a transformative change in the working relationship cannot rest on a demand for solely legal, solely political or solely economic change. This invitation for a holistic restructuring of the total is further justified in the following section, which expands on the limits of legal transformation (3.B). It is here explained that legal right is already present in the relation of production which must be understood as always already conditioned by legal concessions. The section centres on the concept of interpellation, namely the idea that individuals are constituted by ideology recognising themselves as subjects within social structures that confer upon them specific identities. Seen in this light, rights, laws and norms assign particular roles to individuals from which they are not expected to deviate. Given the rigidity of identities assumed by the concept of interpellation, the question becomes unavoidable whether the structuralist totality leaves any room for the reimagination of work.

This question is taken up in the last two sections (4 and 5). Section 4 introduces class struggle as the force that interrupts what seems like a perpetual cycle of capitalist reproduction which denies workers any agency. The class struggle, it is here argued, rebuts the criticism of hyperstructuralism and denial of agency with which structuralists have been charged: the different levels are not closed and fixed spaces, but rather come into existence through their mutual encounters, and are always conditioned and determined by class struggle. Finally, the article prefigures some basic elements and methodological limits to the discussion of alternatives to work (Section 5). First, it is submitted that, rather than utopian, a discussion of a post-capitalist alternative to work is immanent to the extent that it is articulated from the point of view of the class struggle—a force inherent in the capitalist relation of production in so far as it is produced by the conflict between labour and capital characterising that relation. Second, it is argued that a number of methodological limits should demarcate the proposals to alternatives to work. For example, the limits imposed by the co-constitution of all levels means that a holistic reimagination of work would require one to think beyond mere legal transformation.

The last section concludes, suggesting that the struggle for a collective redefinition of work may already be underway.

2. A BACKGROUND TO THE PUZZLE OF CO-CONSTITUTION

Summarising some basic principles of Marxist theory, Engels writes in 1890:

the factor which is in the last instance decisive in history is the production and reproduction of actual life. (...) If now someone has distorted the meaning in such a way that the economic factor is the only decisive one, this man has changed the above proposition into an abstract, absurd phrase which says nothing. The economic situation is the base, but the different parts of the structure- the political forms of the class struggle and its results, the constitutions established by the victorious class after the battle is won, forms of law and even the reflections of all these real struggles in the brains of the participants, political theories, juridical, philosophical, religious opinions, and their further development into dogmatic systems-all this exercises also its influence on the development of the historical struggles and in cases determines their form. It is under the mutual influence of all these factors, (...) that the economical movement is ultimately carried out.²

Three claims, both explicit and implied, in the above statement seem relevant to the constitutive question. The first claim is that contrary to the economic determinism with which Marxism has been charged,³ the sphere of production does not unequivocally and one-sidedly determine the rest of social and political phenomena around us. The second claim is that law, for example, constitutions, and ideology equally determine historical development in a relationship of mutual influence with the economic element. The third claim is that the above cycle of determinations is mediated by class struggle, whose results determine it and whose results it simultaneously determines.

From the point of view of a lawyer, the significance of Engels’ short description of mutual determinations rests mainly in the central place that ‘forms of law’ and ‘constitutions’ assume in the quote. The centrality is here meant quite literally, in the sense that Engels’ references to the law occupy the middle space of the chosen statement. However, this spatial situation could also be seen as bearing a specific meaning: the law is overdetermined by the economy (right above it), just as it determines not only the economy but also ideology (right below it) which, in an everlasting cycle, determines back both the economy and the law. In other words, the spatial centrality of law in Engels’ quote may signify that the law is no more central than any other level in the cycle of determinations. Indeed, how else are we to understand laws if not as products of a historically specific and always economically overdetermined struggle within a given society? In turn, how can we not acknowledge the interference of laws with the dynamics of that struggle through their intervention (minimal or otherwise) in the economy, politics, ideology and so on? To sum up, the law does not constitute the economy. Yet, neither does the economy constitute the law, tout court.

How, then, are we to understand the genealogy of phenomena or ‘effective determinations’ referred to in the passage above?⁴ How are we, in other words, to understand the capitalist world in general and the capitalist working relation in particular? These two questions are not necessarily interchangeable quests. Among the different strands of Marxism, structural Marxists would counter that understanding the world does not necessarily entail understanding the genealogy of phenomena. In the following section, I explain what structural Marxism means by this statement and how it can cast an explicative light on Engels’ quote and the place of law in the social totality.

3. SOCIAL TOTALITY: CO-CONSTITUTION AND OVERDETERMINATION

For structuralists, the social totality is the aggregate of different levels—the economic, the juridico-political and the ideological—that overdetermine and qualitatively transform one another. The structuralists represent a strand of Marxism that has been accused of a variety of flaws—from hyperstructuralism,⁵ to political determinism,⁶ to obscure language.⁷ Despite the deficiencies that unavoidably permeate any human-made effort to explain the world, structural Marxism provides compelling answers to the constitutive question. This is not because it exhaustively and once and for all resolves the genealogy puzzle but for precisely the opposite reason; namely, because it argues that the question of origin is of no consequence in the effort to understand the capitalist totality. Before discussing what is significant for structuralists, I introduce in some more detail two questions that one of their main representatives, Nicos Poulantzas, rejects as insignificant.

The first question is what Poulantzas refers to as the question of chronological priority, which can be formulated as follows: Is social totality an amalgam of autonomous levels (economy, state, ideology, etc.) which precede that social totality and which then, at a later stage, combine to produce it?⁸ To this question, Poulantzas responds in the negative. As such, the question of chronological priority recedes to the background of Poulantzas’ analysis, and, instead, he reserves a central place for the question of logical presupposition.⁹ For Poulantzas, ranking the various levels according to their chronological order obfuscates the genuinely significant aspect of the discussion, which is that none of the levels can be conceived autonomously without all other levels being already presupposed in them. In fact, the question of chronological priority does not merely obfuscate the aspect of logical presupposition. Rather, it altogether cancels it out. If it is agreed that any of the levels, whether the economic, the juridical or the political, came first then to logically presuppose all levels in all others becomes an impossibility.

The second question which Poulantzas sets aside is the question of topology.¹⁰ For example, are the economic and the juridico-political levels autonomous and merely situated in the vicinity of one another in a given social formation? Put simply, is the economy a self-sustaining self-contained level that can reproduce itself without the presence of the state and its laws? To add the chronological dimension, would an affirmative answer to the latter question also mean that the self-reproducing economic level simply has a ‘rebound action’ on the state?¹¹ Once again, Poulantzas responds negatively. Just as the state or the law cannot be conceived prior to the economy, so too the economy cannot be conceived autonomously from, or as a level simply adjacent to, the juridico-political and ideological levels.

Poulantzas considers the questions of chronological priority and topological autonomy irrelevant because they cannot adequately account for the functioning of the capitalist mode of production—a term that Poulantzas sometimes uses interchangeably with social totality. In the capitalist mode of production, the relation of production (or economic relation) and its perpetuation is not sustainable without the intervention of all other levels. It is not possible, for example, to imagine conditions of social consensus around the idea of dependent working relationships in the absence of laws regulating the employment contract, a state enforcing these laws, and a dominant ideology championing the idea that said contract was freely entered into on the part of the worker. Few, of course, would deny the necessity of at least some degree of intervention of the legal or ideological element for the reproduction of the economic relation. The decisive question, however, is not whether intervention occurs but how. It may have already become clear that, for Poulantzas, the intervention of the elements of the superstructure into the economy is not external. Perhaps intervention is a misnomer insofar as the word implies an already existent economic base which other levels will later mediate and, as such, it would be more accurate to speak of mutual constitution. Ideological, political and economic determinations constitute each other in their totality through their mutual relation and articulation. In fact, they are from the very beginning implied within one another.¹²

A. ECONOMY IN THE LAST INSTANCE

The economic level, which manifests itself in the relation of production, enjoys priority within this scheme of mutual constitution. Its priority is not chronological but instead signifies a conceptual minimum without which the capitalist social totality cannot be perceived. By the same token, the dominance of the economic level does not mean that the elements of the superstructure—the juridico-political and ideological—are merely expressive of the economic element.¹³ Instead, as remarked above, these levels are logically presupposed in the economic level. All levels in this complex totality are, in turn, defined by their mutual overdetermination, with the economic element determining the total in the last instance.

The concept of determination in the last instance by the economy proposed in Engels’ introductory quote and expanded on by Louis Althusser, has not received unanimous endorsement. For many, including Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, the concept essentially returns structuralists to a unidirectional logic of chronological priorities.¹⁴ However, there is nothing temporal in the idea of the last instance. The one-sided causality upon which Laclau and Mouffe base their accusation is, in fact, an interaction.¹⁵ It is that interaction to which Althusser points when he argues that ‘[from] the first time to the last, the lonely hour of the last instance never comes’ because ‘in History, these instances, the superstructures, etc.—are never seen to step respectfully aside when their work is done’.¹⁶ The political, juridical and ideological levels do not intervene in the economy to later become overdetermined by it and to finally cease to produce results. Instead, there is a continuous flow of causal effects and overdeterminations, and it is for this reason that ‘the last instance never comes’. As a causal force, then, the economic level does not have chronologically prior or autonomous existence to the rest of the social totality but instead makes itself visible through its results on the rest of the levels of the superstructure.

Lack of autonomous existence by no means amounts to inseparability or collapse of one level into the other. Unlike in pre-capitalist modes of production, in capitalism the economic and the juridico-political levels retain a relative separability or, in the language of structuralists, a ‘relative autonomy’.¹⁷ At a basic level, relative autonomy means that in the capitalist mode of production, the state’s repressive apparatus does not need to directly intervene in the production process to expropriate the work product from the workforce.¹⁸ At a deeper level, the concept of relativity does not signify a quantification of autonomy but, rather, introduces a qualitative element. It suggests that while in the capitalist production process, the juridico-political power of the state is never overt, its presence is nevertheless an integral element. As Poulantzas puts it, ‘[the] separation is nothing other than the capitalist form of the presence of the political in the constitution and reproduction of the relations of production’.¹⁹ The state and the law, in other words, must be assumed as already present in the process of production, including in the commodification of labour power, the freely concluded labour contract, the non-violent process of extraction of surplus value, etc. This is what it means that the capitalist separation of the economic from the political is only relative.

It is within this understanding of the totality as structures with relative autonomy vis-a-vis one another that the determination in the last instance by the economy is to be conceived. It is in this sense that the dominance of the economic structure constitutes a conceptual minimum without which the scheme of structures of the social totality would disintegrate into chaos. In the final analysis, determination in the last instance by the economy is an axiom which, in the words of one of Louis Althusser’s analyst,

[...] appears as something of a realist manifesto: a declaration of faith that, on the other side of the aporias inherent in human language and even human reason, the real world exists and that we have valid knowledge of it. For Althusser, determination in the last instance provides, for historical science, that minimal level of theoretical coherence without which the very production of knowledge is inconceivable.²⁰

Having explained the position of the economic level as the dominant structure which in the last instance overdetermines the others, but which also implies all other levels within it, it is now time to turn to the relevance of this understanding for the place of law—the juridical level—within the social totality of relatively autonomous structures. The concept of overdetermination helped Althusser frame the idea of social transformation in a way different to philosophers before Marx, notably Hegel.²¹ In his effort to explain how the Marxist dialectic is different to the Hegelian one, Althusser compared Hegel’s self-transformative contradiction to what he mapped out as the Marxist contradiction with overdetermination.²² Here, the social totality is defined by multiple coinciding contradictions which together determine reality. Simultaneously, however, they also determine the possibility of change. The practical relevance of this should be clear: the overdetermination of contradictions means that despite the dominance of the economic structure,

a revolution in the [economy] does not ipso facto modify the existing superstructures and particularly the ideologies at one blow (as it would if the economic was the sole determinant factor), for they have sufficient of their own consistency to survive beyond their immediate life context, even to recreate, to ‘secrete’ substitute conditions of existence temporarily.²³

It can be inferred that a revolution in the law would not in itself modify either the economy or any other level. This is an important and sobering finding concerning the power that we tend to assign to legal transformation, and it compels anyone devoted to the idea of a more humane relation of production to think beyond mere legal change. As a matter of fact, the preceding discussions of social totality, overdetermination and relative autonomy make it impossible to conceive a different model of relations of production in the absence of a transformation at all levels. This observation pushes the limits of imagination towards what may seem like a utopian demand for a holistic restructuring of the total. Before we explore whether and how such a holistic restructuring can occur, let us explore in more detail where the law stands in the structuralists’ social totality.

B. THE LEGAL LEVEL IN THE SOCIAL TOTALITY

A closer look into the juridical level is necessary because it permits the articulation of a position regarding the relevance of the law to economic or political struggles over relations of production. A preliminary observation should be that, for structuralism, the law is not simply ‘derived’ from the economic structure, nor can it be conceived as a mere instrument put in the interests of bourgeois rule.²⁴ In line with what has been argued so far, the juridical element is present from the outset overdetermining the other levels of the capitalist totality. As Poulantzas puts it, law is always present from the beginning in the social order: it ‘does not arrive post festum to put order into a pre-existing state of nature. For as the codification of both prohibitions and positive injunctions, law is a constitutive element of the politico-social field’.²⁵ In this sense, the law does have a constitutive role which, however, is heavily conditioned by the causal interaction between itself and the other levels.

There is another point in Poulantzas’ quote that merits attention, that is, the element of positivity. Positivity, on the one hand, means that the role of the juridical element in capitalism is not and cannot be restricted to outlawing whatever is not in the interest of capital. On the other hand, to explain how the law organises the reproduction of domination, it is not sufficient to say that legal equality in the sphere of exchange contributes to domination by the capitalist over the worker in the sphere of production. For Poulantzas, the law is more than the equivalent to repression plus ideology.²⁶ Indeed, the state’s role goes further than laying down the negative rules of exchange, circulation, and production: while it is necessary for the state’s repressive apparatus to be ever-present, even despite its apparent absence, this is not sufficient to secure conditions of social peace.²⁷By the same token, ideology in the sense of internalised repression, although necessary, is equally insufficient. What capitalist law entails in addition to the twin notions of repression plus ideology is the positive force of material concessions to the masses. This, for Poulantzas, is part of what guarantees smooth reproduction of the economic relation while, for him, it is also the only sense in which it can be said that the capitalist state adheres to the rule of law.²⁸

This may seem like an unremarkable finding. Others have pointed to the inability of the law, for example, of constitutions, to succeed without exerting a positive unifying force over society.²⁹ Marx also famously commented on the way in which demands for the shortening of the working day were assimilated by the law to create conditions of social peace and guarantee the smooth and peaceful continuation of the production process.³⁰ Engels put this in a nutshell:

[The] Ten Hours Bill was enacted, and a number of other secondary reforms introduced—much against the spirit of Free Trade and unbridled competition, but quite as much in favour of the giant-capitalist in competition with his less favoured brother. [The] larger the concern [of workers] the greater the loss and inconvenience caused by every conflict between master and men; and thus a new spirit came over the masters, especially the large ones to avoid unnecessary squabbles, to acquiesce in the existence and power of Trades’ Unions (....) And for very good reason. The fact is that all these concessions to justice and philanthropy were nothing else but means to accelerate the concentration of capital in the hands of the few.³¹

In the above passage, Engels speaks of capital’s interest in sanctioning rights for the benefit of capitalist rule. However, as Althusser notes, Engels, while partly correct, fails to situate capitalist action in the broader context of the state’s role in the social and material reproduction of the production relation.³² Indeed, Engels’ quote adopts an almost instrumentalist approach to material concessions as a means to achieve an end. Poulantzas has shown why this instrumentalisation may be problematic. As remarked above, Poulantzas’ focus on the positive dimensions of the law occurs from the point of view of the reproduction of power and production relations and does not view concessions as a capitalist ruse. The state maintains a primary role in the organisation of a stable equilibrium between dominant and dominated classes, and the law is an essential ingredient in the state’s organisation of conditions of social consensus. The formal and abstract equality of the law individualises subjects and confers upon them individual legal rights and legal claims only to reunite them in the imagery of the classless nation.³³ The organisation of consensus in this way shows, first, that the state and the law are already present in the capitalist economic relation, which can never be fully conceived in their absence. Second, Poulantzas’ positivity of the juridical element also shows why the state rarely has recourse to violence, even though the monopoly of violence always lurks, underwriting the entire system of the law.

The above tendencies manifest themselves unevenly depending on historical context and, of course, on the terms and balance of relative powers within a given social formation. For example, in relation to today’s organisation of labour relations in the UK, legal scholars maintain that the presence of authoritarian elements is increasing in the state’s legal approach to (mainly) the collective aspect of the relation of production. Two examples suffice. First, Alan Bogg’s condemnation of the Trade Union Act 2016 as expressive of the anti-liberal ideology of the Conservative party—an ideology reflected in the increasing coercion and violent pacification of workers’ dissent in favour of social order.³⁴ Second, Ewing and Hendy’s description of the more recent Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023 as reflective of a ‘Tory ambition (...) to convert trade unionists into agents of an authoritarian state to subvert not only lawful strikes called under tight conditions, but also freedom of association, one of the essential building blocks of a democratic society’.³⁵ The picture painted is grim, and rightfully so. There is continuity between the two acts, representing a historic defeat of workers, but as the three authors claim, there is more to it because it appears as if, over the past few years, the balance between positive concessions and repression is tilting towards the latter in the UK. It is mainly on the basis of coercion that the state looks to guarantee the conditions of reproduction of the capitalist relation. Therefore, it is imperative to be alert to the legal expressions that capitalist organisation assumes in its offensive against labour, as there is no doubt a growth in directly coercive and authoritarian elements. At the same time, we must not lose sight of the ways in which legal right is already present in the relation of production. In other words, we must read the relation of production as always already conditioned by legal concessions. Practically this means that the recognition of legal rights may be as conducive to pacification of workers’ dissent as coercion itself. As Negri argues, in a text that largely resonates with Poulantzas, the capitalist state puts together workers’ rights precisely to mediate, reconcile and tame the ceaseless conflictual movement of relations of production.³⁶ The capitalist class, thus, becomes receptive to concessions as part of its political strategy against workers.³⁷ In turn, capitalist repression of class antagonism becomes integrated into the production process as an ideology that celebrates commonality of interests and a ‘natural right of equality’.³⁸

Here, the mutual constitution of the economic, the juridico-political and the ideological present themselves, on the surface, as a never-ending cycle from which there is no breaking, as concessions co-opt worker demands without ending exploitation. In the next two sections, I will attempt to tone down such an absolutist reading of the mutual constitution of structures. Before that, I conclude this section with a brief visit to Althusser’s concept of interpellation—a concept that seemingly makes the defeatist effects of the indestructibility of the cycle of mutual constitution felt even more.

Having discussed material concessions, let us return to the twin set of repression plus ideology and examine it in the light of Althusser’s concept of interpellation. The latter is based on the structuralist premise that the consciousness of individuals is determined by their social environment rather than vice versa.³⁹ Interpellation is the process through which ideology constitutes individuals as subjects and constructs reality through the mediation of language.⁴⁰ In the interpellated reality, subjects are assigned particular roles that they recognise as theirs and from which they are not expected to deviate:⁴¹

a worker who goes to his workplace has already travelled a long road through the social conditions—individual or collective—that induce him to come, voluntarily or involuntarily, and offer his services in exchange for the purchase of his labour-power. (...) And although the material means of reproducing labour-power is wages, they do not suffice, as is well known. From his school years on, the worker has been ‘formed’ to conform to certain social norms that regulate behaviour: punctuality, efficiency, obedience, responsibility, family love and recognition of all forms of authority.⁴²

This, for the structuralists, is, in part, how hegemony is reproduced. The state rarely needs to overtly use its repressive apparatus because the obedience that would otherwise have to be imposed is already insinuated into its subjects. From the point of view of workers, the question becomes unavoidable: If we are all assigned a role by pre-existing structures in a social totality from which there is no visible escape, is there any point in imagining a better future for work? If so, what role would the law play in it? I will take up these questions in the remaining sections. First, I will discuss the criticism of what has been termed ‘hyperstructuralism’⁴³—the idea of an unbreakable cycle of capitalist reproduction. Next, I will introduce the concept of class struggle as a modifier of the structuralist pattern of reproduction. This will lead me, in the last section, to discuss the possibility of a better future—a future with less and better work.

4. A DEFENCE AGAINST HYPERSTRUCTURALISM: THE CLASS STRUGGLE

Taken as described so far, the system of mutual constitution between levels not only generates its own perpetual reproduction but also renders futile any effort to re-imagine the terms of the relation of production. Among many critics of the logic of mutual constitution, French philosopher Guy Debord has criticised it as ‘antihistorical thought ( … ) [that] believes in the eternal presence of a system that was never created and that will never come to an end’.⁴⁴ The systematisation of structuralist thought, Debord’s argument continues, promotes the ‘illusion that all social practice is unconsciously determined by pre-existing structures’.⁴⁵ The critique, which attacks structuralists as hired academic functionaries of ‘limited intellectual capacity’, resonates with a more general polemic according to which structuralists see humans as defenceless against capitalist structures that always reproduce themselves regardless of human intervention.⁴⁶ It equally reflects a more general criticism according to which, in structuralist thought, everything constitutes everything else with an equal force and, thus, any explanatory power this theory may have is lost in a chaotic maze of mutual constitution.⁴⁷

Both the criticism of defencelessness and that of lack of explanatory power misconceive aspects of structuralist thought. Starting with the latter criticism, it has already been explained how determination in the last instance by the economy partly rebuts the hyperstructutralist accusation of everything unqualifiedly constituting everything else. Let us focus instead on the first charge. At first sight, interpellation and mutual constitution seem to rule out the possibility of structural transformation, thus leaving individuals defenceless. However, the criticism fails in its evaluation of structuralism insofar as it overlooks that structural transformation is, in fact, a central aspect of structural Marxist thought. The element that renders such transformation possible is the class struggle.

The class struggle, seen as the motor force of history, conditions the pattern of mutual constitution opening unlimited possibilities, and on that account the feasibility of change is part of the essence of structural Marxism.⁴⁸ By assuming the class struggle outside of the equation, Debord’s criticism of eternal reproduction of a closed system has failed to grasp the structuralist systematisation that it so vehemently protests again.⁴⁹ An integral part of his misunderstanding is his misconception of structures as closed pre-existing entities. This misunderstanding, on which much of Debord’s criticism is premised is in direct conflict with structuralist thought. In the rest of this section, I will attempt to show that rather than pre-existing, structures are in a constant process of becoming. Rather than constituting closed levels, they come into existence through their mutual encounters and reflect historically and spatially contingent conditions. In other words, structures are always conditioned by class struggle even as they condition social practice. On the one hand, social practice may be determined, in the last instance, by the economic condition.⁵⁰ On the other hand, however, the class struggle retains primacy in determining everything that constitutes the social totality. As two Althusserian philosophers put it, every social formation is foundationally split into classes with conflicting interests.⁵¹ The clash between these classes spreads through every level that constitutes the total and

without an exception, determines through ‘non-ordinary’ causal relations (namely ‘non-linear’ or ‘non-expressive’, to use Althusser’s own terminology) everything that makes up society: the ways and forms of operation of a given social formation, in other words its history. Among other things, the class struggle also determines everything that could be classified as an ‘idea’.⁵²

The potentially transformative effect of the class struggle on structures is unmistakably manifest in Althusser’s writings especially as a qualifier of the determinism that defines the concepts of pre-existing structures and interpellation. The reproduction of hegemony is not preordained. Revolutionary tendencies have always existed, but we cannot explain their emergence without grasping the class struggle as a force that determines ideas, and therefore structures and history.⁵³ According to this reading, the different levels of the capitalist totality are the outcomes of class struggle historically—in fact, the latter is inscribed in the very constitution of capitalism.

To avoid slipping into idealism, the class struggle must be framed as rooted primarily in the field of economic exploitation which is none other than the relation of production.⁵⁴ The clash between forces of production and capital, therefore, has a material foundation in the conditions of domination characteristic of the working relationship. In other words, the capitalist relation of production must be seen as the product of the historic defeat of workers by capital. That defeat is reflected in the juridico-political sphere, and mirrored in the idea that in capitalism work equals liberty—an idea to which I come back later. Commenting on the inscription of the class struggle in the relation of production, Negri argues that the elements of collective aggregation by workers have transformed into institutions so deeply co-opted in the capitalist relation of production as to have become ontological in it.⁵⁵ However, the conflict between labour and capital, rife as it is with contradictions, is unpredictable.⁵⁶ The inherent openness of structures allows them to be susceptible to change, even transformative change, precipitated by that conflict. This paints a picture more complex than Guy Debord’s approach to structures as fixed and predetermined entities and refutes the charge that structuralism denies human agency.⁵⁷

Poulantzas is equally uncompromising with regard to the constitutive power of class struggle. This brings structuralist thought in contrast to non-structuralist strands of Marxism for which the class struggle is circumscribed by capitalist conditions and particularly the commodity form.⁵⁸ It is in non-structuralist approaches then that the transformative potential of class struggle is subdued: the class struggle is overpowered, so many non-structuralist arguments go, by a system that subjects both workers and capitalists to the common insurmountable logic of commodity exchange.⁵⁹ For Poulantzas, however, everything—including commodity exchange and the commodity form—exists as a result of class struggle historically. This means that there are no economic forms, or, more generally, economic relations, that exist prior, beyond, and outside of the class struggle. This insight is therefore ontological: if social classes come into existence through their conflict in the production process, then the production process cannot be conceived without already insinuating the class struggle inside it.⁶⁰The fact that the specific configuration of the social totality makes it difficult for the class struggle to reach an outcome favourable to working masses does not mean that transformation is ruled out. It merely reflects that, as Marx put it, men make history but not as they please: ‘they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’.⁶¹

Such circumstances reach beyond the relation of production, to the juridico-political level, namely law and the state. For Poulantzas, state power itself condenses the balance of forces as it has resulted from the class struggle in a given state.⁶² It is for this reason that different states protect capitalist interests in different ways and with varying degrees. In line with what was argued at the beginning of this discussion, one needs to be careful not to conflate this insight with an exploration of origins. The significance of the relationship between structures (economic, juridico-political, ideological) and the class struggle is—to use a metaphor by Althusser—that the class struggle enters into the state machine as a force which the state engine transforms into laws, norms, and rights.⁶³ However, and this is the important point, class struggle never enters ‘as pure Force, for the very good reason that the world from which it issues is itself already subject to the power of the state, hence the power of right, laws and norms’.⁶⁴

To recapitulate, the class struggle determines structures just as it is conditioned by them. Right, laws and norms, crucial as they are for the subject’s understanding of itself and of its role, play a special part in this conditioning. Simultaneously, rights, laws and norms are the main products that the force of the class struggle transforms into because the state always has an interest in producing this transformation.⁶⁵ We need to pause here and consider the consequences of this for worker struggles—it appears to altogether negate the relevance of labour rights to working people, or worse, it appears to present labour rights as always conducive to the perpetuation of capitalist power. This needs to be qualified. To the extent that rights won in the field of the class struggle suspend or even nullify parts of the capitalist strategy, then the class struggle produces rupture even when transformed into rights. An example would be industrial action in so far as it can result in the delay of capitalist assault on other rights or, taken as an activity per se, in so far as it represents a moment of refusal to submit to the capitalist rules of production. But we should settle for more. The fact remains that ‘right substantially and directly inheres within’ the capitalist relation of production.⁶⁶ Is it possible to detach work from a system economic, legal, political, and ideological, and re-imagine it in its entirety? Τhis is an overambitious task that any theoretical discussion can only open and not conclude. Some preliminary thoughts will be introduced in the remnant of the article.

5. IN SEARCH FOR ALTERNATIVES TO CAPITALIST WORK

Any discussion over work in capitalism needs to be premised on the nature of work as a social relation overdetermined by all levels of the social totality. The discussion must further be underwritten by the proposition that the working relation is one permeated by continuous struggle, understood as objectively competing interests rather than necessarily active confrontation.⁶⁷ Depending on the historical conjuncture and the intensity of contradictions in the sphere of production, that struggle may take a more or less intense form; it may erupt or remain dormant. In line with what has been argued above, the outcome of the class struggle historically also runs through the meaning of work. That ‘work has no intrinsic meaning’ may be right at a high level of abstraction, but in capitalism where wage labour is fundamentally connected to the question of survival, struggle over the meaning of work re-emerges as an almost existential question over the meaning of life itself.⁶⁸ From this perspective, no job in capitalism is a good job. The absurdity of earning one’s living, of making human existence contingent on productivity, has been picked up in the literature, while Marx himself equated work with forced labour when one lacks other means of survival.⁶⁹

In post-Fordism, the meaning of work is increasingly redefined to the advantage of capitalist interests. The literature is replete with descriptions of the elusively abusive forms that work has gradually been taking in the post-Fordist era, starting from managerial control through the division of labour,⁷⁰ constant reskilling,⁷¹ the deification of flexibility,⁷² ‘techniques of integration, human engineering, human relations, regulation of communications’⁷³ moving on to the embedment of the idea of work as a religious mission⁷⁴ and culminating in clear signs of pathologisation due to the internalised urge to overachieve.⁷⁵ This journey is, of course, not as linear as the above sentence suggests nor are all these characteristics necessarily exclusive to post-Fordism. What is important to insist on is that, taken together, these developments are to be contextualised as part of capital’s strategy of asserting its power in the workplace and society at large. This is an element overlooked by literature as it focuses on concepts of subjective identities or subjective preferences, and fails to place them within the wider context of multi-directional interactions between the economic, juridico-political and ideological levels in the capitalist mode of production.⁷⁶ The point is precisely that what may seem as an individual tendency to overachieve or auto-exploit is in fact a collective trait and represents a collective defeat in the struggle over the meaning and the nature of work. Simultaneously, given the magnitude of that defeat and the forcefulness with which capital is asserting itself in the field of work, we are compelled to think about work, as far as possible, beyond the limits that the different levels of the capitalist mode of production—the economic, the juridico-political and ideological—impose on our imagination.

It has been argued that instead of utopian visions advocated from a point external to the sphere of production, we are in need of ‘immanent criticism, in which normative demands no longer merely have the character of mere wishes, [and this can only be] if the idea of meaningful and secure work already constitutes a rational claim embedded in the structures of social reproduction themselves’.⁷⁷ It follows, the argument continues, that the struggle over work can only be successful if social struggles rationally appeal to already existing norms in the sphere of exchange.⁷⁸ Compelling as this argument sounds, there are two interconnected levels at which the structural systematisation is in conflict with this understanding of social struggles and demands. First, it was suggested earlier that no economic forms exist prior to the class struggle. This means not only that the class struggle, or rather its outcomes, are already incorporated in existing economic forms, but also that it is necessarily for the class struggle to redefine such forms. Any other solution would make social struggles vulnerable to the critique of hyperstructuralist lack of agency. Second, to the extent that rights, norms and laws exist within the capitalist mode of production, appeals to already existing norms seem like an inadequate response given the intensity of capitalist assault against workers in post-Fordism. As such, insisting on a radical rewriting of the nature, meaning and practice of work is not a utopian vision external to the sphere of production but, on the contrary, a prospect internal to it because it is adopted from the point of view of class struggle that capitalist production itself generates.

The quest for alternatives to the capitalist relation of production must be a holistic exercise that includes a struggle against both the ideology of wage labour as religious activity and the semi-pathological urge to auto-exploitation that interpellates individuals. Part of this process must be the realisation that interpellation is rooted in the state’s juridical treatment of labour as a neutral notion immune to exploitation and domination. It has been argued that the exclusion of subordination from the juridical concept of labour, as expressed for example in the constitutional right to work, is so strong ‘that it produces a general celebration of productive labour, which in its spread and growth throughout society, affirms the freedom of everyone’.⁷⁹ The role of class struggle in this configuration is, to recap, that, as a collective force, it permeates the existing state of affairs which it also continuously re-modifies in multi-directional, non-linear ways. This understanding of production sets three methodological limits to the quest for alternatives to capitalist work. These limits, which are in a strong dialectical relationship with one another, could be categorised as (i) substantive, (ii) legal and (iii) praxis-related. I will examine them in turn.

The first methodological limit to redefining work, namely the substantive limit, suggests that no single individual can propose a comprehensive agenda of post-capitalist alternatives to work. At a minimum, work needs to be recast in terms of both quantity and quality and must be submitted to the control of productive agents.⁸⁰ Beyond that, however, any substantive redefinition of work must be a collective exercise and one that accepts the infiniteness of possibilities. The point of collective struggle is precisely that it can set off a process of re-invention that is inconceivable from any position exterior to that struggle. Simultaneously, openness to the element of surprise encapsulates the essence of politics but is also an assertion of faith in collective processes as opposed to messianic grandiose declarations by single individuals.⁸¹

The second limit to redefining work is legal. The dialectic relationship between legal rights and economic exploitation means that alternatives to capitalist work need, as far as possible, to be thought outside the realm of rights. To some extent, this is self-explanatory. In an older article, written at a time when statutory employment rights were proliferating in the UK, Bob Hepple argued that ‘individual legal rights (...) cannot be expected to transcend the present economic and social structure of poverty’ despite the law’s important contribution to (mainly) procedural justice in the workplace.⁸² Beyond that, however, the limits of law as a vehicle for reimaging work are imposed at a more fundamental level by the function of law in the social totality, which perpetuates the rules of exchange.⁸³ To re-imagine work beyond capitalism, then, we may need not only to avoid the fetishisation of law ‘as the ultimate object of emancipatory projects’ but also to embrace the possibility of a struggle beyond the law.⁸⁴ This means articulating the struggle over work as a non-legal battle, namely, expanding the horizon beyond rights defined negatively as legal limits to state or employer power towards demands shot through with the emancipatory positiveness of political aspirations. It also means, as Marx reminded us in relation to the transition to capitalism, that the creation of

new relations of production, when they are gradually forming at the heart of the dominant relations of production, hence under them and, consequently, in opposition to them, is the object of a protracted process that, for a long time, remains a de facto process, without being juridically recognized as lawful.⁸⁵

This brings us to the third limit to redefining work—the praxis-related limit. Perhaps, rather than a limit, this third element should better be understood as a strategic consideration that flows from the previous two points. Strategically speaking, it is difficult to say that the struggle over redefining work will be set off at the level of ideas to then become politically organised and finally assert itself at the economic level.⁸⁶ The lack of chronological priority between the different levels that Poulantzas insisted on cannot but be reflected at the level of practice. Practice and ideas, then, will have to intersect and mould each other in a dialectical way. For example, practices of refusal, such as wildcat strikes, may unconsciously radicalise participating workers at the level of ideas rather than vice versa. Radicalisation can take many forms, ranging from embracing ideologies of exit from mainstream production—what the Italian workerism movement called strategies of self-negation⁸⁷—to ‘de-activating’ the concept of work⁸⁸ or ‘disidentifying’ from it in practice,⁸⁹ re-opening it to new uses and dimensions.⁹⁰ As already remarked, this open-endedness is a defining feature of the class struggle, which can never have predetermined boundaries or outcomes. What is needed for the struggle to erupt is a density of conflicts of interests fierce enough for the clash to break out. Perhaps in today’s stage of capitalist production, such a process of condensation is already underway.

6. CONCLUSIONS

The class struggle is a process and a force that may be imperceptible and ambiguous as it entails the objective but often invisible clash of interests between workers and employers. As such, it may well be the case that a quiet process of reconceptualising work through a struggle that involves a collective exercise of theoretical and practical re-invention is already in progress. Surely, that struggle is yet to climax but the oppression of the working relationship is becoming more and more felt, especially considering increasingly more sophisticated technologically driven managerial control. At the same time, the authoritarian turn of the state is widely sensed, as its repressive machinery is preparing to respond to future collective endeavours and industrial action. As capital intensifies its attack, labour will have to react with a commensurate response.

This article argued that such response is possible despite the ultra-resilient reproductive power of structures in the capitalist social totality. The article explored the inevitability of capitalist reproduction as the different levels of the social totality—the economic, juridico-political and ideological—are in a perpetual cycle of mutual constitution. Despite the incorporation of each level in all others, the concept of relative autonomy showed that transformation at one level would not necessarily transform the rest. For this reason, it was suggested that a transformation of the working relation requires more than legal change. It requires a holistic reimagination of the total. While structural Marxists have time and again been accused of denying any possibility of such a holistic reimagination, these criticisms take no account of the vast transformative force of the class struggle, which can break the cycle of mutual constitution. It is on this force that the hopes are placed for a recreation of the increasingly domineering and exploitative working relation. This may for now be a struggle indistinct and subtle. However, to cite Althusser one last time, ‘[the] economic struggle always remains in the shadows: that is its destiny, for it is the most important class struggle’.⁹¹

Footnotes

Author notes