A critical yet comradely comment on David Harvey’s “Collective Response” piece

David Harvey’s posted a thoughtful piece in Jacobin on the Covid-19 crisis.

There’s a critical point I’d like to raise here. The point may seem tangential but, I hope to show, it requires due emphasis. In fact, the need for such emphasis relates to how, as in Harvey’s prefatory remarks, some of us enjoy a privileged position in the social division of labor at the expense of other workers now forced to put their lives more directly on the line.

To conclude that modern technology offers ample opportunities for individual liberation, Harvey cites Marx (Grundrisse) approvingly:

“The transformation of the production process from the simple labor process into a scientific process, which subjugates the forces of nature and compels them to work in the service of human needs, appears as a quality of fixed capital in contrast to living labor . . . thus all powers of labor are transposed into powers of capital.” Etc.

This has to be pondered properly. What Marx is doing here is arguing one side of the question. This is something he often does in his Hegelian flights — negative reason, you know. The Grundrisse, as it is well known, is made of notes to self, not yet polished for publication. In the latter case (as in Capital, vol. 1), Marx makes an effort to preempt potential misunderstanding by clearly stating the scaffolding of assumptions on which he supports a particular reflection.

Pitting Marx against Marx, one should note that not “all powers” — not all the productive powers of labor are here transposed into fixed capital. Some of these powers, one may even say the chief cognitive aspects of cooperative labor power are indeed apparently absorbed by fixed capital, turned into the power that passive ownership holds over living human activity. True.

But —there’s a but here — a fuller materialist account of the cooperative productive powers of labor as they exist in a capitalist society must highlight that these cognitive aspects, now crystallized in fixed capital, prove to be nothing without the activity of de-skilled “manual” labor power still embodied in the humanity of the worker. As Marx reminds us in Capital (vol. 1, ch. 8, p. 308, Penguin 1990 reprint), productive useful labor “raises the means of production from the dead merely by entering into contact with them, infuses them with life …” etc.

This is something that we must stress today — precisely today! Because the Covid-19 crisis is making it abundantly clear that even the most prosaic and seemingly simple tasks of the collective labor power of society, those performed by nurses and paramedics, ambulance drivers, courier workers, public transport employees, infrastructure repair people, farm workers, meat packers, supermarket staffers, etc. are indispensable, absolutely vital for fixed and all capital to subsist and operate as an exploitative vehicle.

As somebody noted on Twitter, it is no accident that a big portion of capital’s value as reflected in stock market prices evaporated suddenly at the eruption of the crisis — a crisis in which no material inventories, natural resources, machinery, or physical structures vanished, but only as a result of the inability of many workers to continue to cooperate productively at a close range: a sober reminder that, in spite of modern telecommunications, the reproduction of human life on the planet (for now largely subordinated to capital) continues to rely to a significant extent on immediate physical interaction and contact.

But most importantly, the ultimate necessity of “manual” labor as the true basis on which “skilled” labor (which, as Harvey notes, takes now autonomous forms in science, academic activity, etc.) stands is suggestive of the revolutionary path to follow, namely — as the circumstances of their political development may permit it — the refusal of workers to cooperate or enable any activity that doesn’t place their lives and needs front and center, refusal that should then be followed by positive activity aimed at constructing a better social order.

Again, fixed capital, as Marx himself points out in many other places in Grundrisse and Capital, only holds the productive power of labor in a fetishistic or illusory form — illusory form that a crisis like the current one exposes as such. Scientific knowledge only seems to reside in buildings, libraries, machines, robots, servers, etc. — away from the pulsing brains and limbs of actual people. It takes a crisis to dissipate the mirage of its autonomous standing.

The crisis makes it transparently clear now: Without the regular, monotonous, seemingly simple so-called “manual” labor exposed out there to maintain, operate, manipulate, and nourish the objects that empower our lives, these objects end up idle, subject to rapid decay and break down. That the stock of human knowledge resides in the totality of society’s labor power, now divided and only integrated for the benefit of the owners, should make us take note that we hold the ultimate ability to deploy it for our own, truly free individual development.

While Harvey emphasizes the potential built into modern technology for people to attain freedom. In the relative tranquility enabled by our personal isolation, one may feel that the moment only calls for a collective reflection on the possibility of a better social order. This is certainly an aspect or side of our struggle: possibility. But dwelling on this side may feed the illusion of technocratic fixes to our social ills. In Marx’s approach — the mediation between productive potential and a socialist society. is the revolutionary class struggle.