Marx's Capital and Kafka's The Metamorphosis

One remembers clearly the protagonist in Kafka's story The Metamorphosis in the
very first scene: he wakes up to find himself turned into a gigantic bug, somet
hing sub-human, a change that happened while he slept, unaware.
Marx's basic assertion about the metamorphoses commodities experience in circul
ation (some raw material is exchanged for some value realized in price; the sell
er of the raw material buys more machines - for breaking up rocks, chemicals for
cleaning the harvested ore, etc. - and hires more labor, with the money from th
e sale. The buyer of the raw material - say, iron - processes the ore using a b
last furnace and other auxiliary instruments of production - using more hired wo
rkers. With what he has left over, he buys himself a new leather jacket. In t
his way, the exchange has related the things exchanged as equivalents, or one as
the bodily form of manifestation of the value of the other. Their equality? W
ell, that is the equivalent of their common property: abstract human labor. Mi
ners, ironworkers, and coat makers do not necessarily agree to these exchanges.
Each is acting independently in the series of exchanges and branches of product
ion which result in the social product, the embodiment of a definite quantity of
average human labor power. But all of the muscular, cerebral, and spiritual en
ergy that was expended vanishes in the product. Not an iota of it is presented
to the consumer, who sees some utility, nor to the producer, who sees only a val
ue, a potential Ideal value to be transformed into hard cash. The inversion of
places which the actors in this process, and those of their wares, is obvious.
But Kafka's character woke up to this change. He became conscious of himself a
s a living human being, and self-conscious in his effort to regain that identity
, only once he realized he was not human anymore.
This subjectivity in the laws of commodity production were glimpses by Marx in
his rigorous empirical analysis of the treatment of labor-power itself as a comm
odity, and its wage the monetary expression of those commodities it needs for it
s life to be replenished, so that it may be used up again another day.
Really, Marx's labor theory of value, and surplus labor time, is a theory of ti
me itself. Since Aristotle and Aquinas, the relationship of time to epistemolog
ical processes and our subjective experience of determined social relationships
has been a subject of inquiry. By dividing the workday into the time necessary
for the worker to replenish his or her existence, and the rest into the surplus,
it is possible to take from behind his back some of his own product, and the po
wer to appropriate it according to a plan determined beforehand in cooperation w
ith other workers, from the shop floor level to the international level of the g
lobal economy.
What Marx only glimpsed - the reproduction of labor-power - is today something
that capitalist processes have unleashed. The real subsumption of labor-power (
in contrast to the formal subsumption in which the 'productive consumption' of l
abor is used up during a definite period and in a definite place), has led to a
qualitative change in Marx's own philosophical and economic categories of self-c
riticism. Today, immersive media, interactive social media, techno-culture, an
d powerful digital consumer technologies meant to 'empower' the consumer, actual
ly become mediums in which they are controlled even when they are not at work.
The factory has become a social factory, open and de-centered, not an enclosed g
eometric space. Ontologically, both the 'disciplinary regime' of traditional ca
pitalist imperialism and the teleos of the 'good life' - represented in forms of
media apparatuses as the existential power of individual choice - existed coext
ensively, alongside each other, each a semi-finished commodity used up in the pr
oduction of the other. Value becomes self-valorizing, as the consumer choices a

nd their expression in technologies for capitalist market analysis of trends, id

eas, wishes, fantasies, dreams, etc., are both constituted and constitutive of t
he global market regime.
But how does a social machine - an assemblage of human, animal, and natural bod
ies - which runs itself - an immanence of an infinite substance articulated by S
pinoza, and later by Foucault - give any credit to human agency's capacity to di
srupt it? Especially if the human is a part of that machine?
Well, Spinoza denied that the machine always runs smoothly. He admitted the ex
istence of friction between its elements. But even these 'crises' in the machin
e become a mechanism of refining capitalist techniques of power. Each opens it
up to its own class-consciousness: the financial elite, the industrial magnates
, and the commercial rulers become more and more, as Marx once described class c
onsciousness, a class-for-itself and less a class-in-itself.
Even Marx's earlier writing show a tension between the struggle of the exploite
d vis-a-vis the exploiting class on the one hand, or whether each class struggle
s to reproduce its own existence, unleashing social upheavals independently of t
heir will in this prolonged drama.
Historian Robert Brenner did an exhaustive analysis of some Marxist interpretat
ions of the historical transition to capitalism from pre-capitalist forms of pro
duction, feudalism in particular. He attacked most virulently the 'commercializ
ation' model, which asserts the germ of capitalist ideas, market laws, and commo
dity production inhering in the hindering feudal bonds which they broke, to be t
oo circular to explain the transition. Some parts of his research have been dis
credited, but the general thesis is defensible, and has been elaborated upon by
other authors, including E.P. Thompson.
The latter points out that in different countries, in the late Middle Ages, rev
olutions by the 'bourgeoisie' achieved very different political, legal, and econ
omic contents. In England, the landed gentry achieved political influence in pa
rliament, and some social wealth accumulated in trade (maritime trade most of al
l). In France, its series of revolutions brought about a centralized, quasi-aut
horitarian monarchic political dress, which used the levers of state power to in
troduce capitalist reforms as a means of stabilizing the social order from the d
iscontent of the poorest strata of workers, who would be provoked into action by
a radical bourgeoisie.
Having said that, today it is clear that capitalist laws of production rule ove
r capitalists themselves. They do not decide how to fix their moribund social o
rder. Its own flexibility on the one hand, and disciplinary rigidity on the oth
er, preserve its existence beyond its necessity.
Some critics of this Marxism rejecting a strict determinism have pointed out th
at agricultural output in 18th century France and England were about the same.
True, but this elides the critical fact that the agricultural population in Fran
ce was double that of England, the latter being the country to develop industry
the fastest, and thereby accomplish the creation of 'relative surplus value' gen
erated by the intensification of machinery's role in production, or what Marx te
rmed 'constant capital' in his general formula for capital, 'c + v + s' for meas
uring the value of commodities. V is the quantity of labor-power expended in wa
ges, and S is the surplus accumulated during the surplus labor time.
Today, immaterial labor productive of immaterial commodities - images, affects,
communication, abstract symbols - increase the diversity and quantity of commod
ities in circulation, and their diversity and quantity of uses. What can be con
sumed for satisfaction can almost perpetually be absorbed into another immateria
l commodity, with the terminus of this series of exchanges Marx identified defer

red by increasingly intensive processes of production. More simply, this intens

ity of production in actualizing some virtual ontology, compared to the extensiv
eness of imperialism's realization of the possible, and neoliberal deregulation
of foreign markets, creates a hypercapitalist production, corresponding to a hyp
erimperialist market regime. The administration of discipline is partly left to
the subjects of this global imperial order, who are regulated by the market, ra
ther than by a traditional State imposing the market's social relations on subve
rsives.
But after all of this, revolutionary movements are not dismissed as an adventur
ist impossibility. New forms of subversion corresponding to these new mutations
of capitalist teleos open up new and creative methods of resistance. The Arab
Springs and the Occupy movements were embryonic flashes of such upheavals - spon
taneity, direct action, and the reclaiming of public space were all tools in the
arsenal of resisting power and disrupting its harmonious functioning. The rece
nt picketing of Zim, an Israeli cargo shipment cartel (and supplier of weapons,
artillery, shells, and missiles) by the International Union Longshoremen local 1
0, in cooperation with activist groups and Palestinian justice groups working cl
osely together to stage the unexpected picket, effectively preventing the ship f
rom docking on the port of Oakland's berth, cost the company several million by
some estimates. Reports show that some companies are questioning whether to do
business with Zim anymore. This incident can be read about in the recent issue
of Jacobin magazine, in an article by Kumars Salehi, 'Workers Against Israel'.
The historicity of Brenner and Thompson show that 'bourgeois' is not synonymous
with 'capitalist.' In different geographic and historical contexts, their deve
lopment as a social subject followed very different trajectories, which today pr
esent themselves as a system of coexisting logics, much as the the coexisting pr
operties of a commodity - a value and a use-value, a product of a particular for
m of labor and the embodies of universal, abstract labor. But the ruptures prod
uced by these tensions can mobilize militants, and an analysis of the post-imper
ialist paradigm of neoliberalism and its specific content is essential to formul
ating viable strategies and socialist alternatives.
We may not have wanted to become the bug in Kafka's fictional story, but we did
by our own unleashing of forces outside our control. And like the bug, the mil
itant must find creative ways of surviving, fissures to crawl in, and a disrupti
on in the circuity in the substratum of this regime to explode a new, radical co
nstellation of collective values, enunciative practices, and cursive logics pose
d against the hegemonic power which it must struggle to converge on in the wake
of a subjective Event.