Gržini?? and Tatli? with Mbembe: Parallel Colonial Regime
In their book Necropolitics, Racialization, and Global Capitalism Marina Gržini?? and Šefik Tatli? discuss in great detail the connection between neoliberal rationality and biopolitics, but they specifically underline that this is a framework made to fit the so-called First World. They theorize that the First World and biopolitics condition each other so that population control can be properly organized. The claim they espouse is that:
[b]iopolitics has been reserved for First World’s governmentality … Biopolitics is reserved only for the fictitious battle of forms-of-life, although death is all around it. … The biopolitical in the First Capitalist World includes life as a political concern but only through its exclusion from the political sphere. (Gržini? and Tatli? 2014, 23, 27)
The authors then propose two formulae corresponding to biopolitics and necropolitics: Foucault’s biopolitics can be formalized “as make live and let die,” while Gržini?’s necropolitics[i] can be summarized as “let live and make die.” They make abundantly clear and suggest on many occasions that the necropolitical formula is not necessarily in opposition to the biopolitical one, and that there is a complementarity in place, yet it has the aspect of asymmetric spatial distribution: necropolitics is a continuation of (bio)politics with other means or, to be precise, the means of teleological death and a cosmology of violence. What is more, necropolitics often proceeds differently in the second world (Central and Eastern Europe [CEE]) and the third world (Africa). Yet it does correspond to and has a better counterpart in Mbembe’s notion of “private indirect government” as the privatization of violence (Mbembe 2001, 66-102).
One could easily object that the privatization of violence is most lucidly observed in Western penitentiary systems (US) and its racializing framework (a classical example can be found in Vacquant 2009), but this would be a tendentious reading: when liberal democracies pretend to punish-to-prevent, they still maintain a biopolitical mode of governance, notwithstanding the attending necro-masquerade and the vapidly cynical racial blindness. As Gržini? and Tatli? claim, biopolitics capitalizes on and governs the conscience in the First Capitalist World (Gržini? and Tatli? 2014, 37). Liberal-capitalist democracies may fake the regulation of conscience, but it would be a methodological blunder to disrespect the theater of governmental hope they continuously enact, even when their political apotheosis results in the proliferation of necropolicies. Such view is abetted by the thesis that “when biopolitics was first elaborated in the 1970s, it was [made] for the capitalist First World and its apparatuses, where the ‘Other’ did not exist – but there was a parallel colonial regime in Eastern Europe” (ibid, 86).
This is a very crucial claim. It deserves attention and some critique. It is this “parallel colonial regime” and its fate post-1989 that I scrutinize here: my simple suggestion would be to call this Other, along with its population control, the transitory figure that underwent a move from “reserve labor army” to “reserve death army.” More precisely, the parallel Other of western biopolitics had its mirror image in the late Stakhanovite Soviet model of economic development, with the crucial difference that it tried to maintain a workforce in contradistinction to Engels and Marx’s identification of the “reserve army of labor.” Scientific Marxism had to avoid at all costs the contradictory implementation of necessary unemployment so central for bourgeois economies. Nonetheless, Stakhanovism should be singled out as the parallel Other of the then existing liberal-democratic biopolitics. Gržini? and Tatli?’s label of “parallel colonial regime” is better explained as the theory of (socialist) state capitalism by the Johnson-Forest Tendency (see James 1986). (Their Althusser is, surprisingly, much more sophisticated than their Marx: the theory of necropolitics certainly does not warrant more theoretical anti-humanism.) If a parallel colony has been unfolding, this has happened after the end of the Cold War. To explain East-European state socialism through postcolonial theory is to evade the parallel Other’s coloniality, proliferating precisely on the turf of Marxist humanism.
Thus, there are two points of concern: 1) the parallel state-socialist biopolitics should be read as state-capitalist biopolitics (this is its “othering”); 2) the reserve labor army in socialist state capitalism did not, nominally, exist: post-1989, it should be read as reserve death army. Socialist state capitalism had successfully covered its own peoples as Other. Gržini?’s effort to demonstrate the workings of necropolitics in CEE after the Cold War can be sustained by the supplementary effort to think of necropolitical population control as transitional waste management, correlative to CEE’s unrestrained shock doctrine mode of governance. Such effort entails the resuscitation of Marx’s notion of “reserve labor army” and meeting Gržini?’s theory of necropolitics as applied to CEE’s variegated transitions. This will add political mobility to the explanation of the exploitation of death itself in the rampant lumpenproletarization spreading across the region after 1989.
I have elsewhere discussed (Panayotov 2015) that Gržini? and Tatli?’s work significantly contributes to disentangle biopolitics from CEE and that they have rightfully proposed a decolonial turn in treating the region through necropolitics. I am concerned with what started as a suggested critique that I want to develop: namely, the overlooking of Marxist analysis in their book, and interweaving it with the application of necropolitics to CEE as a semi-peripheral entity. My worry was that dismissing Marxist studies and the lack of enthusiasm about a project traversing both Marxism and necropolitics misses an obvious development: that CEE was an early stage laboratory of necropolitical experiments that bore the brunt of shock doctrine governmentality. Given that necropolitics is a phenomenon studied largely through the optics of the critique of neoliberalism, one is stricken by the very few analogies (if ever) drawn to Marx (not to mention Marx and Engels’ specific critique of Malthus). Where Marx recognized the production of the reserve labor army, Mbembe, and subsequently Gržini?, though mentioning Marx in passing, recognized something that can easily be called reserve death population or reserve death army. For, if it is true that adjusting neoliberal democracy with necropolitics is the paradigmatic shift in early 21st century, discarding life as a political value, as a constituent of political reason, of neoliberal democracies, goes hand in hand with erasing the correlative exploitation – however brutal – of the worker’s labor capacities. If death becomes the political projectile of futurity, labor is no longer part of neoliberalism’s managerial cosmology.
For their part, the authors never manifestly state they will write a genealogical history of necropolitics and liberalism – they start off directly from austerity and privatization and, again, this is not only the austerity of the post-2008 EU, but the one of the post-1989 CEE. As they put this, “[w]e see liberalism today as integral part of capitalism and its structure of power that does not care much for constructing serious apologetic narratives.”[ii] Under this view, liberalism and capitalism collapse into a necropolitical One, and rightly so, as the unification is unapologetic, a lack of apology that was never exactly a scandal in the CEE region, but something the First Capitalist World of biopolitics had to make faces about. A more specific study of CEE’s liberalisms might reveal such apologetic narratives, given that in the aftermath of 1989 communism transformed into social democracy, and then social democracy was concealed under the label “liberalism” (and democracy thereof). A theorization of the liberal justification of necropolitics – perhaps something we can call a “just death tradition” per Acquinas – would add an insight into its glorification as the one and only terminal “exit” from communism, and would contribute to suspending the ongoing nostalgia for ethno-centric communism specifically that we experience today in the face of obliterating the political.
Marx and Engels with Mbembe: Reserve Labor Army
To adjust on my part what is already an adjustment of Mbembe’s necropolitics offered by Gržini? and Tatli?, I suggest to call the byproduct of necropolitics in CEE “reserve death army.” What the term captures is what Gržini? and Tatli?’s recognition of liberal capitalism’s unapologetic character explains away, namely, its exploitative modus operandi of the politico-instrumental value of death. Valuation of death is the same as its exploitation: the obsolescence of labor entails the perishability of populations.
My elaboration is, too, an offshoot of Mbembe’s notion of “indirect private government” which describes both the privatization of state sovereignty and the assimilation of the means of coercion, carried through neoliberal policies (see below). Yet I return to Marx to develop the term, which he himself borrowed from Engels. Marxist scholarship uses both “reserve labor force” and “reserve army of labor.” A distinction is drawn between “industrial reserve army” and “relative surplus population” to accommodate those unable to work in the latter group, while the abled unemployed can be described by both terms. I choose to use “army” as it carries the sense of militarization and henceforth dispensing with the worker. The dispensation with the “human” is merely implied, though under necro-rationality there is no need of discarding an invariant of humanism to render populations obsolete. At this point, I still think of the worker rather than the human: the worker is a figure indexing the correlation between exploitation and labor force.
Engels’ discussion of the reserve army of labor draws a grim picture of survival:
… it is clear that English manufacture must have, at all times save the brief periods of highest prosperity, an unemployed reserve army of workers, in order to be able to produce the masses of goods required by the market in the liveliest months. This reserve army is larger or smaller, according as the state of the market occasions the employment of a larger or smaller proportion of its members. And if at the moment of highest activity of the market the agricultural districts and the branches least affected by the general prosperity temporarily supply to manufacture a number of workers, these are a mere minority, and these too belong to the reserve army, with the single difference that the prosperity of the moment was required to reveal their connection with it. When they enter upon the more active branches of work, their former employers draw in somewhat, in order to feel the loss less, work longer hours, employ women and younger workers, and when the wanderers discharged at the beginning of the crisis return, they find their places filled and themselves superfluous – at least in the majority of cases. This reserve army … is the “surplus population” of England … (Engels 2010, 384)
Engels narratively anticipates the laws of labor and demand Marx will sketch two years later on the basis of his analysis, though his intention seems to be representational: to describe the proletariat as constantly shaken by the vagaries of surplus value extraction as it is tied to starvation. The emphasis goes to obsolescence or “superfluity.” The rate of profit can progress if the worker can be continuously jettisoned outside the relations of exchange. For his part Marx briefly takes up the term in 1847 in a manuscript he later abandoned:
Big industry constantly requires a reserve army of unemployed workers for times of overproduction. The main purpose of the bourgeois in relation to the worker is, of course, to have the commodity labor as cheaply as possible, which is only possible when the supply of this commodity is as large as possible in relation to the demand for it, i.e., when the overpopulation is the greatest. Overpopulation is therefore in the interest of the bourgeoisie, and it gives the workers good advice which it knows to be impossible to carry out. Since capital only increases when it employs workers, the increase of capital involves an increase of the proletariat, and, as we have seen, according to the nature of the relation of capital and labor, the increase of the proletariat must proceed relatively even faster. (Marx 1976, 415)
These passages resurfaced in published form in 1924/5, but they had already set the tone of the much-discussed chapter 25 of Capital, Vol. 1, where in “Section 3: Progressive Production of a Relative Surplus Population or Industrial Reserve Army” Marx introduces the concept whose necropolitical continuity caught my attention:
… capitalistic accumulation itself… constantly produces, and produces in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant population of workers, i.e., a population of greater extent than suffices for the average needs of the self-expansion of capital, and therefore a surplus-population. … It is the absolute interest of every capitalist to press a given quantity of labor out of a smaller, rather than a greater number of laborers if the cost is about the same. … The more extended the scale of production, the stronger this motive. Its force increases with the accumulation of capital. (Marx 2010, 624, 629)
Constant capital outwits variable capital: the existence of the reserve labor army is the condition for the alienation of constant capital from the labor force. If the effect on the reserve labor army under societies of capitalist production is that the rate of unemployment will increase and the competition among workers will rise, and that part of the population will become obsolete to the process of capital composition, this effect at least dialectically recognizes the necessary existence of unemployed masses for capital to be progressively autonomized. For the disjunction set forth between constant and variable capital projects the ideal of capitalist autonomy and liberation from the labor force, though here starvation is not the same as depopulation.
Marx with Mbembe: From Reserve Labor Army to Reserve Death Army
When we speak of “reserve death army,” the resulting implication is that the surplus population is no longer a necessary piece in the puzzle of capital accumulation – that is to say, the sovereign does not need it in reserve alive, though the reservation slots of death could be an involuntary unintended consequence of capitalist autonomy – and that a level of machinic homeostasis in capital composition and accumulation has taken place, the effect being that fewer and fewer workers – indeed, now superfluous humans – can and should reproduce. The more capital composition is autonomized, the deader the reserve labor army. The question of the worker’s dormant productive force, the question of keeping her alive is abandoned with the absolute tendency to substitute labor force for death-ability. The concentration of capital and its uneven distribution in fewer hands brings about the historical necessity to subtract the worker herself from the equation where capital now could produce with fewer to no hands.
At what point does the reserve labor army transitions to reserve death army? The event takes place when and where there is no need for exchange, as relations of exchange and capital’s autonomy contradict each other. Marx concludes that there is a correlation between the wealth of a society and the rate of unemployment (or the size of the reserve labor army). In theory, a wealthier society should be able to support larger unemployed populations: a corporatist utopia that Marx, in Vol. 3 of Capital, called the “communism of capital,” and which Negri elucidated as the corporatist welfare utopia of Keynes and his ideal zero-value of profit and interest (Negri 1994, 45-53). The reason why the reserve labor army transitions to a reserve death army is this: if money becomes the symbol of equivalence, if they are reduced to an “accounting unit” of commodities, if they cease to index a relation of exploitation and are swiped away by welfarist solutions, conceded by the communism of capital, then capital will be no different than a language game. (Though with finance we came to understand the brutality of money as language, a problem the Italian operaismo has explained to us in staggering detail and frightening lucidity.) But this does not fully explain how to renegotiate a new Malthusian solution on the question of overpopulation. Mbembe offers the answer of indirect private government: capitalist accumulation and concentration can dispense with parts of the population if it can privatize sovereignty and, more importantly, the means of coercion:
… they [the policies] have created the conditions for a privatization of this sovereignty. But the struggle to privatize state sovereignty largely overlaps the struggle to concentrate and then privatize the means of coercion, because control of the means of coercion makes it possible to secure an advantage in the other conflicts under way for the appropriation of resources and other utilities formerly concentrated in the state. … one characteristic of the historical sequence unfolding in Africa is the direct link that now exists between, on the one hand, deregulation and the primacy of the market and, on the other, the rise of violence and the creation of private military, paramilitary, or jurisdictional organizations. (Mbembe 2001, 78-9)
Privatized sovereignty and coercion solve the welfarist Keynesian riddle of social capital (neither communism nor capitalism). As the surplus population was the centerpiece of Marx’s law of demand and supply of labor, under Mbembe’s necropolitics and its semi-peripheral update by Gržini? and Tatli? the worker’s labor is substituted for the human’s death or death-ability: the very reproducibility and availability of a living population (its unemployment is no longer the variable) is in direct co-dependence with its death toll. With the reserve death army, a population’s perishability and livability is dictated by its principled, organic impossibility to become the labor force, itself governed by the radical alienation and autonomization of capital composition from the population’s labor capacities.
The reserve death army is a figure of the complete realization of the capitalist utopia: the ultimate freedom of capital from labor force. Yet this freedom need not culminate in a concrete utopian humanism of leisure and welfare, on the contrary: the flight of capital from the dialectical confines of the reserve labor army becomes the harbinger of death as productivity is no longer tied to a political notion of life and subjectivity, themselves reducible to a sovereign. For the reserve death army subjectivity is irreducible to the sovereign. The sovereign is death unmediated by the state and unrestrained by a notion of “capital accumulation” (there can be no capital accumulation without the helping hand of the state; the unrestrainment of capital, as showed in the work of Santiago López Petit, which Gržini? abundantly cites, is a one-way death-driven utopia). This privatization realizes the absolute ahistorical utopia of a dream-world capital freed of the limitations that the factum of human embodiment imposes. Here, reserve death army is a vulgarized way of saying the “posthuman.” Strictly speaking, when capital composition is increasingly able to do away with the exploitation of human life (not labor force), when starvation and pauperdom are not on the agenda, it ceases to exist as capital “composition,” as life is translated into discomposition. The reserve death army articulates the step from exploitation to extinction simply because variable capital could be rendered superfluous: it is not a reserve. There can be no composition of capital that excludes variable capital. In the exact same moment when capitalism no longer needs the living behind the abstraction of unemployed labor force, its flight from humanity is no longer science fiction but the concrete utopia of extinction-level event; but it’s exploitation of humanity can no longer function as the extraction of labor, which redefines the limits of what can be thought of as “capital.” It is at this moment that the extraction of labor is substituted for the extraction – or the demand – of death. This constitutes the necropolitical shift within capital (pseudo-)composition.
The concrete utopia of capital comes to fruition with the proliferation of the reserve death army, an army that can be coerced into death without having to ever be in relations of exploitation or exchange. A “worker” can now spend her entire life waiting to be employed and at the same time expecting to die without having to ever work (or hope for and expect any social security whatsoever). The higher the reserve death army’s death toll, the lower the expenses for its decimation. The stronger the autonomy of capital and the larger the wasteful population, the higher the level of killability and the lower the level of livability of those former workers now lying dormant as the undead of the unrestrainment of capital.
Now that the reserve death army is produced, it no longer represents the pauperdom of which Marx laboriously spoke, but the privatized sovereign that Mbembe so effortlessly captured. Because the representatives of pauperdom have lost their functionality as surplus population, they no longer have access to the romantic rebellious refuge of criminality: after the privatization of the means of coercion, the lumpenproletariat has lost its correctional charm for both the working class and the capitalists. The reserve death armies of the world are not expendable downplayed criminals: they are the impossible, debilitated delinquents of life.
[i] Though this work is written in collaboration with Tatli?, the first part of the book is authored by Gržini?, which is why henceforth I refer only to her where the book’s theory of necropolitics is evoked.
[ii] Personal communication with the authors, 19 January 2015.
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