[..] Life under the master-desire is exploited life. But in what sense exactly is it exploited? Probably not in the way Marxian theory imagines it. For exploitation in the Marxist sense of the term only makes sense in conjunction with a substantialist labour theory of value, according to which exploitation is the name of the capitalist appropriation of surplus-value, measured by the difference between the total product and the value-equivalent assigned to the reproduction of labour-power – what is paid out in wages. The definition of the value of the labour-power that must be reproduced is however among the most uncertain, and is in fact circular: instead of the objectively and independently calculated value of the labour-power that must be reproduced determining wages, the wages themselves indicate the actual value reserved for the reproduction of labour-power. The chief problem however is that in order to follow the Marxian definition of exploitation, one must accept a substantialist theory of value whose substance is the duration of abstract labour.

[...] in the Marxian definition exploitation is precisely the capture of surplus-value by capital, which consists in depriving the employees of a part of the value they have produced. It is not however the dispossession from that part of value in itself that turns it into exploitation, but its private appropriation by the capitalist. Were the surplus-value handed over, not to the capitalist but to the enterprise under total internal democratic control of the employees, or more accurately to the employees collectively, who would still think of calling it ‘exploitation’? Yet formally the employees would still be personally deprived of the surplus-value as the difference between the total value and the value of the reproduction of their labour-power. The ‘objective’ calculus of the labour theory of value, which supposedly entails a finding of exploitation, would be maintained, without however leading to that conclusion. Therefore, if exploitation there is, it falls under a political theory of capture more than under an economic theory of value. [...]

For this is indeed the task of capitalist epithumogenesis, to pull the legs of the employees, in all the senses of that expression. First, to get them to move, which means, returning to the basic significations of auto-mobility, to make them move themselves, and in the most mundanely physical sense: by getting them to put one foot before the other, as revealed by the striking spectacle of the daily migration towards factories and business districts, those large concentrations of capitalist passionate exploitation on which waves of conatus-vectors converge, aligned up to their correlation within the physical space of an underground train carriage, a great current of co-linearised powers of acting heading for the master-desire. [...]

[...] Does not capitalism, in conceding that abolishing the hierarchy and giving free rein to initiative and collaboration are the real requisites of productive creativity, embark on the road to the free association of workers, impelled by its inherent tendency? If indeed the artist is a possible and desirable avatar of the worker, and from capital’s own point of view, then the very idea of employment as a relation of hierarchical subordination is fundamentally called in question.

The constitution of enterprising capitalist communities have had, so far, all the structures of the employment relation and the monetary economy with a division of labour in its favour. The question of how individuals enter into it is resolved rather simply: primarily under the effect of material necessity – not because they spontaneously want to join. [...] Assisted by all the structures of capitalist enlistment that affirm its right to capture, the master-desire views enlistment into its cause as self-evident and fails to even notice anymore its inability to pursue the enterprise, which exceeds its means of power, without the contributions of other powers that it variously obtains. For how many capitalist enterprises would remain if people were freed from material necessity? [...]

[...] If the communist idea is essentially about equality, the question then is how to understand the nature of an equality that accompanies a substantial, recognised inequality among contributors, and does not deny the asymmetry of those situations where the force of an initial proposition objectively gives the other contributions an auxiliary character. One formulation of what we might call the communist equation could therefore be as follows: what form of equality can be realised under the legacy of the division of labour – and notably under the most onerous of its legacies, to wit, the primary separation between ‘conception’ and ‘execution’?

But the sequence of causes and effects is in principle fully compatible with change. Stars die that once shone; the earth that was calm suddenly opens up; hills that used to be part of the landscape collapse in an earthquake – and are no longer there. None of this, which can only be called ‘change’, is an exception to the laws of determinism, or requires the disruptive intervention of a freedom (but perhaps the defenders of novelty intend to appeal to the will of God). The same is true in the historical and social world, whose phenomena of both reproduction and transformation are likewise produced, namely, determined to occur by some or other causal sequence, even though, unlike dying stars and sliding hills, these sequences are the product of human action. For these actions are no less caused. And these causal sequences have no other motors than the conative energies and passions that steer them. Collective human life reproduces itself, or begins to change, solely as a consequence of the interplay of people’s inter-affections, or, to say this in the simplest way possible, out of the effect they have on one another, but always through the mediation of institutions and social relations.

[...] For Spinoza there is no power that is not immediately and fully actual. In other terms, there is no reserve in the Spinozist ontology. There is no unfulfilled or uneffectuated power that stands back, available for activation. Even when it can do very little, the conatus is always exhausting what it can do. [...]

[...] the social landscape of capitalism has profoundly mutated. From the moment when, despite being ‘capital’s men’, top executives became employees, the original Marxian theory was in trouble. And this trouble kept on growing with what could be called the rise of management: the growing number of employees who partially crossed over symbolically to the ‘side of capital’.

What could it mean to ‘symbolically cross over to the side of capital’, when materially one does not in fact belong to the side of capital, other than that the affective composition of the individuals in question shifted largely to the joyful end of the scale, and they found themselves enthusiastically bringing their power of acting to the enterprise, that is, ultimately, aligning it with the desire of capital? Marxism’s trouble is aggravated by the fact that this crossing is not an all-or-nothing affair, but a matter of degrees that can be laid out in a continuum, going from the lowest – the sullen employee who does the least, and reluctantly – to the highest – those who, albeit instrumentally, devote the totality of their working life, at times their whole life, to the success of the enterprise. The landscape of class is therefore the double of the passionate landscape of employment, and fully reflects the history of its affective enrichments. It has lost the simplicities of its beginnings, and is blurred by the employment relation’s gradient of commitment, which in the final analysis is an affective gradient, a gradient of the employee’s joy (or sadness) at living the life of an employee. This is where Spinoza meets Marx – and changes him, for the transformation can be described synthetically by borrowing from the lexicons of both: to ‘symbolically cross over to the side of capital’ is to have a joyful ‘real subsumption’.

[...] despite being individually experienced, there is nothing subjective about affects. They are objectively caused and they produce the movements of the conatus just as objectively. [...]

[...]

[...] Common affects do not fall from the sky; one must still ask what prior common affection produced them. In the present case it is rather on the side of capital that one must look, not so much capital as an antagonistic class – of which a solid core remains thoroughly identifiable, although its contours and periphery have become fuzzier – but capital as social relation, and ultimately as the very form of social life.