Productive labour, in its meaning for capitalist production, is wage-labour which, exchanged against the variable part of capital (the part of the capital that is spent on wages), reproduces not only this part of the capital (or the value of its own labour-power), but in addition produces surplus-value for the capitalist. It is only thereby that commodity or money is transformed into capital, is produced as capital. Only that wage-labour is productive which produces capital. (This is the same as saying that it reproduces on an enlarged
scale the sum of value expended on it, or that it gives in return more labour than it receives in the form of wages. Consequently, only that labour-power is productive which produces a value greater than its own.)
(www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/
ch04.htm)
Capital, in order to reproduce, must reproduce at an expanded rate because it only produces to the extent that it produces a surplus.
Conversely, the way the worker produces is not the same as how he reproduces, or consumes in order to reproduce his labour-power, because the disjunctive surface of capital excludes the greater part of his product. Here we have the fundamental Marxist proposition regarding surplus-value, prior to its breakdown into profit, interest, rent, costs of circulation and so on. Under capitalism, products are not produced for their immediate use-value, they are kept in a reserve in order to be sold at a later date. For this reason, Marx saw clearly that the sphere of exchange, of values, is constituted as a function of a superabundance on the side of products, which itself presupposes the appropriation of labour above and beyond that required for the production of immediate use-values (Marx 1973: 456–9). Although Marx insists that surplus-value is unique to the capitalist mode of production, he does suggest that a form of accumulation in the capitalist manner is a naturally occurring and universal phenomenon:
No production [is] possible without an instrument of production, even if this instrument is only the hand. No production without stored-up, past labour, even if it is only the facility gathered together and concentrated in the hand of the savage by repeated practice. Capital is, among other things, also an instrument of production, also objectified, past labour. Therefore capital is a general, eternal relation of nature. (Marx 1973: 86)
What Deleuze and Guattari call ‘surplus value of code’ is the means by which primitive economies regulate society through direct inscriptions (‘scarifications’) on the body which block any movement towards decoding. The emergence of capital, on the contrary, marks the transition to a society regulated by a surplus-value of flux, the latter being a ‘conjunction’ of two kinds of decoded flows: a flow of workers without any ties and a form of general equivalent capable of buying and selling anything at all, including labour-power (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 290). The regulative principle of capitalist society, then, corresponds not to coding but to this interior limit between the mutually exclusive decoded/ing flows. This limit is regulative precisely because it both attracts and repels the organs of capital.
Capital is constantly deterritorialising, finding new, exotic markets and innovative practices of decoding at its periphery, but as part of the same movement it must reterritorialise, rediscovering within its centre zones of archaism and lack which check this expansion. Without subjects ready and willing to occupy, to live, this interior limit, capitalism itself would not be possible since it would be unable to legitimate its periods of crisis. Capitalism, then, must constitute a subjectivity based on hostility towards codes, but it must also produce subjects unwilling to follow decoding all the way beyond the social relations which condition the production of the decoded flows themselves. The psychoanalytic subject discovers ‘desire in the abstract’, a free floating desire (libido) which, however, is only free to the extent that it is tied to a social order that denies it satisfaction (prohibition of incest). Capitalist society constitutes the limit between production in general (desire) and production for the sake of capital (work) as its own interior, uncrossable limit (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 333). The libidinal objects of the parental fantasy are ‘discovered’ only to the extent that they are rediscovered outside the family as symbolic substitutes (the cop, the priest, the nation).
Deleuze and Guattari characterise the disciplinary power of capital entirely within the terms of this ‘double movement’, or axiomatic, the conjunction/disjunction of the two mutually exclusive flows:
In Das Capital Marx analyzes the true reason for the double movement:
on the one hand, capitalism can proceed only by continually developing the subjective essence of abstract wealth or production for the sake of production, that is, ‘production as an end in itself, the absolute development of the social productivity of labor’; but on the other hand and at the same time, it can do so only in the framework of its own limited purpose, as a determinate mode of production, ‘production of capital,’ ‘the self-expansion of existing capital.’ Under the first aspect capitalism is continually surpassing its own limits, always deterritorializing further, ‘displaying a cosmopolitan, universal energy which overthrows every restriction and bond’; but under the second, strictly complementary, aspect, capitalism is continually confronting limits and barriers that are interior and immanent to itself, and that, precisely because they are immanent, let themselves be overcome only provided they are reproduced on a wider scale (always more reterritorialization – local, world-wide, planetary). (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 281)
The necessarily expanded reproduction of capital cannot be separated from a form of subjectivity which seeks to surpass its immanent limits (the unconscious) only by displacing them, redrawing them at a further remove – hence the psychoanalytic drama of Oedipus, in which the
subject overcomes the familial figures only by rediscovering them in the social and political domains.
The Marxian theory of money, then, is of particular interest to Deleuze and Guattari because it relates specifically to the production of ‘axiomatised subjects’ (Thoburn 2003: 97). The two decoded flows, the flow of workers and the flow of money capable of buying their labour-power are characterised as a differential (a difference between two differences). Money as a result appears in two forms, a flow of wages which goes into the pockets of the workers (what Marx called variable capital), and a flow of profits which the capitalist takes and reinvests in the means of production in order to extract more surplus-value from his workers (what Marx called constant capital). In establishing a common measure money effects the cancellation of the intensive difference, which qualifies the two flows:
Let us return to the dualism of money, to the two boards, the two inscriptions, the one going into the account of the wage earner, the other into the balance sheet of the enterprise. Measuring the two orders of magnitude in terms of the same analytical unit is a pure fiction, a cosmic swindle, as if one were to measure intergalactic or intra-atomic distances in meters and centimeters.
There is no common measure between the value of the enterprises and that of the labor capacity of wage earners. (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 250) Capital is not defined by a homogeneous flow, but by two mutually exclusive flows which act as checks on one another: a flow of payment and a flow of financing, a flow of tangible assets and a flow of credit, a market flow and a flow of technological innovation (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 407). For this reason, Marx’s theory of money is conceived on the one hand as a measure, or store, of value, and on the other as a medium of exchange, facilitating the circulation of capital (Harvey 1982: 251). The great ‘cosmic swindle’ which the social authority of capital performs is to conflate these two aspects of money, to displace the limit which separates them, and to mystify this in commodity-fetishism and exchange (Marx 1970: 87–9).
Deleuze and Guattari are insistent on a Marxian theory of money which gives adequate importance not only to the general equivalent but ‘to banking practice, to financial operations, and to the specific circulation of credit money’ since it is in the opposition of the two kinds of money (payment and finance) that difference is cancelled and surplus-value realised (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 250). This explains why they are hostile to Freud’s account which emphasises the role of the general equivalent in psychic life. According to Freud, the libidinal structure
which accounts for the significance of money is primarily anal-erotic rather than phallic. Hence, the famous equation ‘money= shit’ which Deleuze and Guattari so vehemently deride (Deleuze and Guattari 2004:
31). The phallus, being the standard or the unit of measure (gold), refers to excrement as the medium of exchange value, the general equivalent (credit-money). As Jean-Joseph Goux writes:
Supplementary (superfluous) elements are what govern the circulation of substitutes. The surplus is excluded to act as measure of the replacements. In general, whatever the register, the universal exchange value is linked to excess.
In the election of gold as in that of the phallus, the surplus is charged with measuring the deficit in transactions involving value – whether in a positive form (as surplus of wealth in gold or surplus of vitality in the phallus) or in a negative, archaic form (as excrement, matter that is excluded and expelled).
(Goux 1990: 31, my emphasis)
Surplus brings into being a lack or exclusion (something withheld in a reserve) which functions as a principle of calculation (or cancellation)14 and allows a separate flow to be set up as the medium of exchange. A
‘detatched complete object’ is excluded or excepted, only to return as the totality which the parts lack; the parts lack what is in excess of them.
The function of the State is to establish an infinite debt capable of appropriating and absorbing everything and this, precisely, is what establishes money as the general equivalent (Deleuze and Guattari 2004:
214–15). The despotic or Asiatic formation does not eradicate the primitive codes and their finite debts; it overcodes them by relating them all to a single, transcendent ‘higher unity’, rather than each other. The despotic mode of production brings into being two flows, a flow of credit (debt) and a flow of payment (tribute), crucial to the development of capital. In this sense, capitalism does not replace feudalism. Rather, feudalism becomes capitalism by being monarchised, democratised, etc., over a long historical period (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 242).
Capitalism lacks a ‘body’ of its own on which it could inscribe its codes precisely because it is hostile to coding and this is why it finds an archaic body on which to reterritorialise. Capitalism does not replace feudalism, but rather maintains elements of feudal authority, exercised no longer from a point of transcendence but immanently, through capital itself.
The limit between attraction and repulsion is the regulatory principle of all desire. This limit is universal, not only to all societies but to nature. In phenomena of co-evolution, such as the orchid and the wasp, two elements double and are thus in excess of one another, but also attract one another as what each lacks. In primitive society, similarly, the
limits which regulate behaviours such as incest are coded and thus the limit remains purely virtual (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 270). Capitalist society is distinct from every other because its limits are constantly being brought into reality as something lived, and, indeed, this occupation of the social limit is precisely how capitalist society can dispense with codes.
The limit which constitutes capital is experienced in different realms as the limit between payment and credit, production and capital, variable and constant capital, but also as that between desire and work. Money, in so far as it functions as a means of social regulation, concretises this limit, makes it a lived reality. The zones of lack and archaism which capital hollows out in the midst of abundance and innovation serve as graphic examples of this.