File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/marxism.Jul12-Aug17.94, message 145


Date: Wed, 27 Jul 1994 23:13:15 -0400 (EDT)
From: Alex Trotter <uburoi-AT-panix.com>
Subject: formal & real domination (more)



I went digging through my collection of Camatte's writings, published and 
unpublished (I was in correspondence with him, and have gathered English 
translations of his work for an anthology to be published by Autonomedia, 
probably sometime in 1995) and took another look at _Capital and 
Community_, which he wrote in the mid-1960s. In that piece, heavily 
laden with quotations from Marx, he discusses formal and real 
subsumption. Another aspect of the distinction between them worth 
mentioning is the association of absolute surplus-value (based on length 
of the working day) with formal subsumption and relative surplus-value 
(based on revolutionization of technology,etc.) with real subsumption. 
Also, under formal domination of capital, the human being (the worker) 
remains semi-independent in the face of capital, and variable capital 
outweighs fixed capital. It's under real domination that fixed capital 
becomes dominant, and that's what starts the tendential fall in the 
profit rate.
	Camatte, to answer Donna Jones's question, sees the period 
between the world wars as the transition between formal and real 
domination (although it certainly seems that capitalism was moving in 
that direction throughout the 19th century). He also sees real 
subsumption in an expanded sense, not unlike Negri's concept of the 
"social factory," that goes beyond the immediate process of production. 
In a note of 1972, Camatte explains:

"Thus it is no longer merely labor, a defined and particular moment of 
human activity, that is subsumed and incorporated into capital, but the 
whole life-process of man."

And I guess that goes for culture too.

--Alex Trotter
	


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