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Abstract Models, Concrete Frictions

On Mau's Mute Compulsion

July 23, 2024

Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital
by Søren Mau
Verso
2023

The disconcerting sense that perhaps nobody is pulling the strings, but that we can feel the tightening knots all across our bodies and in every decision we make, is an existential experience that makes people gravitate towards the Marxist project. Søren Mau’s Mute Compulsion gives a name to that troubling silence that keeps our jaws clenched as we move through the halls of our extortionate universities, clasping to find an apartment that won’t cost us half of our monthly salary, go to work every day even though we despise it, and stay on the dentist’s waiting list for months on end to desperately find a cure for our grinding molars.

The book’s nominative concept is taken from the primitive accumulation section of volume one of Capital, specifically the chapter titled, “Bloody Legislation against the Expropriated since the End of the Fifteenth Century, The Forcing Down of Wages by Act of Parliament.” In this chapter Marx guides us through a brutal tour of how the ruling classes in England enacted successive legislations that dragged peasants from their common lands and threw them into the world of capitalist production vogelfrei (free as a bird) bestowed with a viciously ironic double freedom. Those who could not successfully undergo the metamorphosis from peasant to worker were transformed into an assortment of newly emergent, socially abjected categories—“paupers,” “vagrants,” and “vagabonds.” If they could not put themselves to purposeful labor, Marx tells us, they were subject to horrific violence—whipped, chained, indentured and branded. It’s only later, after this bloody dawn of capitalist midwifery, that a new form of power emerges distinct from its violent birth pangs. Marx describes this power thus,

the mute compulsion of economic relations seals the domination of the capitalist over the worker. Extra-economic violence is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases. In the ordinary run of things, the worker can be left to the ‘natural laws of production,’ i.e., it is possible to rely on his dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them.1As Mau notes, the English translation of this section is “silent compulsion.” Karl Marx, Capital, A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes, (London: Penguin Books 1976), 899; Søren Mau, Mute Compulsion, A Marxist Theory of The Economic Power of Capital, (London: Verso 2023), 3.

It is here we find what Mau wants to argue is the specific form of power characteristic of the capitalist epoch—mute compulsion—or what Mau will call “economic power.”2Townsend quoted in Mau, Mute Compulsion,132. We find similar iterations of the quote in both Capital and the Grundrisse.

Marx borrows this idea from Reverend Joseph Townsend, an economist and physician who in the Grundrisse he will describe as the “father of population theory” (not Thomas Malthus, who Marx describes as a shameless plagiarist in comparison). According to Townsend, “Hunger will tame the fiercest animals, it will teach decency and civility, obedience and subjection, to the most perverse. In general it is only hunger which can spur and goad them [the poor] onto labour; yet our laws have said they shall never hunger. The laws, it must be confessed, have likewise said, they shall be compelled to work. But then legal constraint is attended with much trouble, violence and noise: whereas hunger is not only peaceable, silent, unremitting pressure, but, as the most natural motive to industry and labour, it calls forth the most powerful exertions; and, when satisfied by the free bounty of another, lays lasting and sure foundations for goodwill and gratitude.”

While people are compelled to work, they do so through the silent, unremitting pressuring of hunger, as capital needles its way in between humanity and its means of subsistence. Mau tells us that Marx was captivated by this insight, and that one can find this formulation from Townsend written out again and again throughout his notebooks. Karl Marx Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus, (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 845; Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 800.
While it has been customary in Marxist literature to note the disappearance of violence or personal domination from everyday life, the space left behind by violence has often been filled with concepts like “ideology” or “hegemony.” Mau’s ingenuity lies in introducing a third term—economic power—that is irreducible to the violence/ideology couplet. It is not simply ideological or hegemonic consent that interpellates people into accepting or naturalizing class exploitation, but mute compulsion operating through the very pores of our social relations. With erudition, clarity and confidence Mau methodically shows us the schematics of this historically novel form of power that ensnares us all into its net. Nobody is pulling the strings. The capitalist system does not need an overwhelming system of violence or apparatuses of ideological manipulation to get people to bend to its diktat because it imposes its social logic into the very fabric of our being.

This essay, something between a review and a critical engagement, is split into three parts. The first part will explore the ingenious ontological framework Mau neatly models, explaining how the book provides an ontological argument for rethinking how capitalism intervenes at the metabolic basis in which social life is reproduced under capitalism. These arguments, in their breadth, scale and ambition, offer a genuinely new and interesting way of thinking about metabolic domination that cuts across the distinction between human and nature effortlessly, providing an ontology that can hold together the materiality of the body with the often all-too-abstract nature of capital’s spectral ontology. The second part discusses how Mau reconfigures social class. What’s distinctive about this section, I argue, is how it reconfigures a concept of class that enlivens the often turgid, overly exegetical and sometimes politically quietist value form debates the book interjects in.3The term “value form theory” is somewhat controversial in exactly what it refers to. Varyingly it has been used to describe Neue Marx Lektüre associated with Hans Georg-Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt, the arguments one finds amongst the Krisis group including Roswitha Scholz, Norbert Trenkle and Robert Kurz, or those Marxist exegetical analyses, associated with Chris Arthur, that intend to reproduce Marx’s “systematic dialectics.” Loosely, what all these formations have in common is centreing the question of value at the heart of Marxist analysis. In this stress on value, questions inevitably arise concerning the formal and abstract ontological moments in Marx’s writing. In the English speaking world the essay, “Communisation and Value Form Theory”, has remained a cornerstone for an introduction to these debates. Endnotes, “Communisation and Value Form Theory”, in Endnotes 2 (London: 2010). Many of these ideas are also discussed in an accessible format in a series of videos Sean O’Brien has recorded for the 87 Press. Sean O’Brien, “Marx after Growth: An Introduction to Marx’s Critique,” YouTube video, posted by “the 87 Press,” May 31, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqdvpernUyM&t=11s. See also, Marxism and The Critique of Value, eds. Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson and Nicholas Brown (Chicago Alberta: MCM’ Publishing 2014). Nonetheless, whilst the carefully constructed frameworks in the first half of the book are unfolded with often beautiful lucidity, the stress on conceptual clarity begins to work to clip the wings of political imagination. As Marxist readers, we know every text contours and shapes a political imagination. Each text contains analytical frameworks that provide political closures and openings, whether or not these moments are expressly named at the exoteric level of discourse.4Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious, (London and New York: Routledge Classics 2002). Whilst the book rejects a simple dialectic between theory and praxis, analysis and politics, abstract and concrete, I suggest the text doesn’t proffer any method for mediating between these sets of terms, often leading to implicit antinomies with consequences for thinking politics. The final part of this essay focuses on three particular moments where these antinomies are felt at their most symptomatic—the concept of transcendental debt, the critique of Werner Bonefeld and class struggle, and the chapter on so-called “difference.” In each instance I argue conceptual clarity becomes a burden, delineating strict limits on what Marxist theory can and cannot say. I conclude with a brief discussion of how we can rethink the relationship between the abstract and concrete, and how arguments found in the first half of the text—metabolic domination, the amputated proletarian body, social reproduction—could be used to think about forms of feminized and racialized labor, and where class domination is felt in a world characterized by spasm after spasm of crisis and capitalist decay.

 

Reconfiguring the Conditions of Social Reproduction: Weaving Power across the Amputated Proletarians

One of the most innovative theoretical interventions in Mute Compulsion is the way it reconfigures a number of structural precepts that set the stage for capitalism’s subsonic domination. In order to do this, Mau has to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of romantic humanism and Marxian anti-humanism. He does so by honing in on how the concept of “metabolism” functions in Marx’s mature writing. In Capital, Marx says, labor is,

first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.5Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 286.

One could well imagine sections such as this being castigated as humanist vestiges or, perhaps worse, substantialism. Yet, for Mau, what this does is give us a way of thinking about how humans are caught up in the web of life. Momentarily, the text almost takes a “new materialist” or eco-Marxist turn when Mau describes humans as, “a moment of a material totality, an organism indissolubly inscribed in a flow of matter, just like plants, bacteria, fungi, or other animals.”6Mau, Mute Compulsion, 91. Yet, rather than becoming fascinated with particle nominalism, or lose himself in sublime awe in the infinite metaphoricity of the quantum, Mau uses this moment to anchor a definition of the human. In what might be considered a Marxological faux pas, Mau revises a section from The German Ideology to help elucidate how Marx grounds human existence in metabolism. Here, Marx suggests, “the first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the corporal organisation [körperliche Organisation] of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.”7Marx and Engels quoted in Mau, Mute Compulsion, 93. Corporeal organization becomes a central prism through which Mau establishes a minimal social ontology and develops an account of how capital has seemly managed to extend its tentacles into every sinew of our lives. Humans are irreducibly embodied. In order to sustain our existence, we need continual metabolic interaction with the natural world. In short, we need to eat. Rather than continuously search for food every day anew, humans are unique in our ability to produce rather than simply consume our subsistence.8Mau, Mute Compulsion, 94. This production of subsistence implies another ontological dimension of the human: tools. In order to produce, humans need to mediate their relationship with nature via the use of various tools. In this way tools become incorporated into what it means to be human. The body is no longer a fixed ontological unit, but it continuously incorporates tools into its conditions of existence.9Mau, Mute Compulsion, 97–98. This stress on tool usage as a fundamental dimension of our corporeal organization allows humans to circumvent romantic narratives of Man and His Fall from Nature. The human body has always been porous—always a mediation of technics and nature—there is no transhistorical human essence inside us. This theory is capacious enough to subsume other claims to human essence. Agricultural, transhumance, or protein-heavy diets—all these require some kind of social mediation with nature. One could posit language, art or intelligence as the differentia specifica of the human species, but this would forgo the basic tenets of historical materialism.

Søren Mau’s Mute Compulsion gives a name to that troubling silence that keeps our jaws clenched as we move through the halls of our extortionate universities, clasping to find an apartment that won’t cost us half of our monthly salary, go to work every day even though we despise it, and stay on the dentist’s waiting list for months on end to desperately find a cure for our grinding molars.

Herein lies our uniqueness, but also our inherent fragility. This is also where Mau locates capital’s metabolic domination, its power to intervene into all aspects of the life process. The dependence of embodied humanity on nature is the Achilles’s heel of the human species. It is here where the logic of capitalism seeps into the fabric of social life. All the violence that accompanies primitive accumulation and the enclosures sets the stage for humanity to be disabused from our means of subsistence. The tools that form some kind of ontological carapace over our weakness, that we rely on to produce our subsistence, to make our food, to keep us protected from the harsh realities of seasons, all these tools are now concentrated in the hands of the capitalist class. Our means of subsistence are no longer ours and we are entirely dependent on the market to reproduce our very being. This process of separation between humanity and nature lays the foundation for Mau to propose a more expansive conceptualization of the proletariat:

I prefer to speak of “proletarians” and “the proletariat” rather than “workers” and “the working class.” Indeed, what defines the proletarian condition is not work but the radical split between life and its conditions.10Mau, Mute Compulsion, 130.

What’s intriguing about this definition is how it sidesteps the interminable debates about who the working class is. Are they the all-important “value producing” sector of the population? What is the relationship between surplus populations, the proletariat and the so-called lumpenproletariat? For Mau, this does not matter, almost everybody in capitalist societies have been disabused of their means of subsistence.11Mau, Mute Compulsion, 84–85. Peter Stallybrass argues that throughout the nineteenth-century the term proletarian has associations that have been used in the Marxist tradition to define the lumpenproletariat. Stallybrass argues that it is within the context of their debates with Stirner and Bakunin that Marx and Engels begin to clarify their, at the time, peculiar definition of “proletarian.” Stallybrass highlights the preface to the second edition to The Eighteenth Brumaire, where Marx says, “People forgot Sismondi’s significant saying: The Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat.”This inversion here is emphatically not the same definition of the proletariat as we see in Mau’s work. Yet the Brumaire sits in a funny position in contemporary Marxological debates, being written just after the purported epistemological break. What makes it relevant for the conversation at hand is the way the lumpenproletariat are configured as the scum of society. Nonetheless, the concept almost disappears entirely from Capital, being replaced with far more analytical precision with the various forms of surplus-populations, of which the lumpenproletariat only become a small section. Peter Stallybrass, “Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat,” in “The Margins of Identity in Nineteenth-Century England,” special issue, Representations, No. 31 (1990): 69–95. In another brutal turn of phrase he calls our tragic fate to live in a “form of community based on the amputated proletarian body.12Mau, Mute Compulsion,138. Here we observe Mau bore a tunnel under the foundations of value-form theory’s otherwise beautifully constructed crystalline formal structures, locating the historical specificity of capitalism at an embodied level. Capitalism may well be a historically specific mode of production, but it is this historical cleavage between humanity and nature that becomes its definitive condition of possibility.13Mau, Mute Compulsion, 71–72.

 

Power, Class, and Domination: The Vertical/Horizontal Axis

The fact that parts of the human body can be concentrated as property in the hands of other members of the species has the consequence that power can weave itself into the very fabric of the human metabolism. Instead of attaching itself externally to the metabolism and violently pumping out surplus labour like a leech, the dominant part in a power relation can inject itself into the heart of social reproduction.14Mau, Mute Compulsion, 115.

Early on in the book Mau takes us through a guided tour of traditional ways of thinking about power. In each instance, through Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, Nicos Poulantzas, Bob Jessop and others, Mau shows how power has implicitly been thought of as something that exists over and above social life in the form of the state, ideology, and a coherent political elite. What all these theorists of power are unable to do is locate how power works in spite of any individuals making conscious decisions or how capitalist power could be thought of as “transcending” class, tying up everybody, bourgeois or proletarian, into the web of its social logic.15Mau, Mute Compulsion, 27–31. In order to clarify what Mau means by power, it will be helpful to situate his theorizations against what the text presents as the most advanced theorist of impersonal power: Michel Foucault. What impresses Mau about Foucault is how the latter’s thought surpassed his Marxist contemporaries, sidelining the ideology/violence couplet in order think a microphysics of power wherein “certain actions may structure the field of other possible actions.”16Foucault quoted in Mau, Mute Compulsion, 34. For Foucault power is dispersed, subatomic, impersonal, relational and productive. It’s not an imposition on the social body, but the very network of relations that allows sociality to cohere. Rather than the usual Marxist dismissal of Foucault, Mau praises him for not conceiving of “the economy” as a separate ontological category and for the demand that we “cut off the head of the king.”17Foucault quoted in Mau, Mute Compulsion, 9. Nonetheless, according to Mau, Foucault cannot tie the thematic threads of his nominalistic studies together because he does not have a theory of what is historically specific about modern power. Accordingly, he fails on two counts: First, Foucault has no conception of property relations. Unlike the other dimensions of power, property relations are not processual—they concentrate power into the hands of the bourgeoisie; Second, there is no account of the driving motor of power relations—that is, the valorization of value.18Mau, Mute Compulsion, 36–37. Without a sense of why power moves in the directions in does, Foucault misrecognizes how totality constitutes itself, imperceptibly, behind the backs of producers. Nonetheless, while Mau is highly critical of Foucault, one gets the sense that this Foucauldian notion of power comes close to what Mau thinks mute compulsion is. Indeed, almost imperceptibly, Foucault quotes remain littered throughout the text.

Having dispensed with Foucault, Mau can construct his alternative model for conceiving of a form of power dispersed throughout the social field that is distinctly capitalist in nature. Before doing this, Mau will have to first criticize the alternative Marxist frameworks for thinking power associated with value form theory. In Moishe Postone, Theodor Adorno, Werner Bonefeld, Michael Heinrich and Ingo Elbe, Mau shows, again and again, a propensity to emphasize abstract and impersonal forms of domination over and above class relations.19Mau, Mute Compulsion, 195–208. To circumvent this overly abstract conception of power, Mau turns to Robert Brenner’s distinction between vertical and horizontal axes of economic power. Vertical power maintains a kinship with the sort of power we associate with value-form theory, that is, an impersonal, transcendental form shaping the social field. Value, to reproduce its own systematic inertia, surges through the pores of society qualitatively reshaping social relations so as to repeat its perpetuum mobile. But it is with the horizontal axes of power that Mau introduces an extra dimension of complexity into the debates within value-form theory. The keyword here is—competition. Although no clear definition of competition is ever provided in Marx, its effects are felt throughout his apparatus. Firstly, we get a sense of intra-bourgeois competition in Capital where different aggregates of “intensity” and “skill” in the labor process act as competition between capitals, pressurizing the threshold of socially necessary labor time.20Mau, Mute Compulsion, 213. This is the sort of common-sense notion of competition most of us are aware of: price cutting, expanding production, technological innovation, labor process restructuring,and so on. What is perhaps more controversial is the positing of an intraclass competition between workers, “competition is a differentiating force which secures the subjection of individuals to capital by mean of a kind of divide et empera strategy.”21Mau, Mute Compulsion, 218. It is so-called “free” competition that holds our hands behind our backs, forcing us to compete with one and other, acting as the vessel of mute compulsion. This is an argument that takes place at the level of social totality. The distribution of surplus-value is not between worker and capitalist in the individual workplace, but takes place at an aggregate level across the social field.22Mau, Mute Compulsion, 219–20. While as workers we climb over each other to compete for job vacancies and lower wages, the specifically class character of this form of domination is in the forced unity competition obliges the capitalist to engage in. Here Mau quotes Marx, who describes capitalists as “hostile brothers, [who] divide among themselves the loot of other people’s labour.”23Marx quoted in Mau, Mute Compulsion, 219. While workers scramble for minimal protection from the worst excesses of violence and hunger that lie outside the circuits of the valorization process, we become easy victims of capital’s relations of exploitation. In this movement the compulsive mutilation of the proletarian body is transfigured through the mute compulsion of the self-valorization of value.

 

Specters of Politics?

Mute Compulsion is not afraid to name the names and is usually well-rounded in its criticism of specific authors and broader research projects. It displays an incredible breadth in its knowledge of the literature, ensuring it will likely ruffle feathers in many Marxist fiefdoms.24Most certainly the Althusser heads will have something to say about how Mau formulates ideology. I should imagine, too, his argument concerning the status of fetishism as a form of ideology will upset others. Yet some of the specific skirmishes seem, at the very least, odd choices. Despite Mau’s insistence that he is engaged in an analysis of pure concepts and not proposing a specific political strategy, these choices condition and frame a political horizon that has theoretical ramifications. For this reader, there are three particular examples that stand out: the critique of Werner Bonefeld’s concept of class; the concept of transcendental debt; and the chapter on so-called “difference.”

Mau’s criticisms of the likes of Adorno and Postone for underestimating the class character of domination are correct, but Mau’s own thinking becomes caught in the same trap as Postone

To begin with Werner Bonefeld, in a section that claims to be “bringing class back in,” Mau argues that Bonefeld has a “peculiar” conception of class that merely “pays lip service” to the category. Mau provides us with a list of concepts that Bonefeld uses in his “repetitive rhetoric” to describe capitalism: perverted, madness, reification, monstrosity, absurdity, irrationality, mystification. Yet, despite Bonefeld’s lurid language, Mau believes that all Bonefeld furnishes us with is an analysis that presents capitalism “as a perverted system where the absurd movements of economic things dominate everyone.”25Mau, Mute Compulsion, 206. However, in the haste too swipe away Bonefeld, the book misses exactly what is unique in Bonefeld’s configurations of class within the value-theoretic field, that is—class antagonism.26Werner Bonefeld, Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). The perversion at stake in Bonefeld’s work isn’t simply an optical concern with topsy-turvy appearances; what is perverted is the human praxis that forms of appearance occlude. Mute Compulsion clearly has a sense that there is such a thing as class struggle and that workers do sometimes resist. Nevertheless, something is lost when we replace class antagonism with inter- or intraclass competition. It is as if we have ceded too much ground to the Foucauldian wolves scratching at the door: workers have been entirely individuated into neoliberal subjects, tied into the sticky webs of compulsion, made to realize game theory’s most stark utopian fantasies.

Mau’s criticisms of the likes of Adorno and Postone for underestimating the class character of domination are correct, but Mau’s own thinking becomes caught in the same trap as Postone. For Postone, the gravitational force of the valorization process form determines labor, prioritizing the abstract dimension of the labor process over and above the concrete, synchronizing all spheres of social life to the abstract temporality of capital’s reproduction. Postone variously calls this “impersonal domination,” “abstract domination,” and even “impersonal compulsion.”27Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993). While mute compulsion may work at a more granular or even “micro” level than that of impersonal domination, a concomitant conceptualization of struggle or antagonism is never proposed. In short, there is no way of theorizing praxis between these poles of mute compulsion (or impersonal domination) and the collective subjects that make history. We are left with a proletariat in Mau’s own conceptualization of class domination, as is the case in Postone, as an object that is acted upon in a unidirectional fashion. For Bonefeld, on the other hand, class antagonism is not simply an interesting historical factoid or strategic configuration: it has analytical consequences because it affects our dialectical climbing between the abstract and concrete. As Mau told us earlier in the book, “capital can never free itself from the subjective praxis that undergirds it.”28Mau, Mute Compulsion, 44. Yet Bonefeld seems far more aware of this undergirding in his insistence that class struggle is a historically specific, yet necessary determination in the dialectical unfolding of capitalist totality. What this means for Bonefeld is that, “class antagonism is the constitutive premise of the economic categories.”29Bonefeld, Critical Theory, 9. Later in this same text Bonefeld will define class as having a double meaning, “it entails the notion of class unity as the manifestation of the class antagonism between the classes, and it entails class disunity as a competitive relationship between the sellers of labour power.” Bonefeld, Critical Theory, 107. This definition includes Mau’s stress on competitive disunity at the same time as keeping open the possibility of class unity in the context of perpetual antagonism. This isn’t merely a pedantic point and I’m not trying to save the integrity of Werner Bonefeld here. Much like a lot of the Marxological archive the book pulls from, antagonism as a historical determination that actively shapes the total ensemble of social relations is curiously absent from Mute Compulsion’s frame of reference. For Bonefeld, on the other hand,

there is only one world, a world of class antagonism between the political economy of labour and the political economy of capital. This is the site of class antagonism and class struggle. In order to understand these things, one has to be within them. In short, ‘already the simple forms of exchange-value and of money latently contain the opposition between labour and capital.’30Werner Bonefeld, “On Postone’s Courageous but Unsuccessful Attempt to Banish the Class Antagonism from the Critique of Political Economy,” Historical Materialism 12, no. 3 (2004): 121.

What class antagonism does is inject an irreducible moment of friction in the free circulation of abstractions.31Given what has been said here, it should be of no surprise that Bonefeld’s latest book, also on compulsion, gives far more space to the concepts of class antagonism, freedom, struggle, corporeality and communism that run parallel to real abstraction, value extraction, exploitation and misery. Werner Bonefeld, A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion: Wealth, Suffering, Negation (London: Routledge, 2023). It is antagonism that is a third moment between value and competition missing in Mau’s model of power (or perhaps what we could now reconceptualize what we mean by power relations, reintroducing the relationality of power between bourgeoisie and proletariat into the frame).

Next, the section on what Mau calls “transcendental debt.” Whilst this section offers an interesting set of theoretical maneuvers, it mystifies what the turn to debt in the past decade has been trying to understand. Mau argues that the proletarian is always in some sense less than nothing because their dependency on market-mediated subsistence means they always owe their future to the incessant turnover of capital. From this perspective, we can view surplus-value as a kind of interest procured on an unpayable historical debt. Mau approvingly quotes Marx from The Critique of The Gotha Programme arguing that the wage worker is granted the right to life, “only insofar as he works for a certain time gratis for the capitalist.”32Karl Marx, Critique of The Gotha Program (Oakland: PM Press, 2023), 64–65 quoted in Mau, Mute Compulsion, 135.. In the PM Press edition translated by Kevin B. Anderson and Karel Ludenhoff the latin term gratis is rendered without pay. Reading this line in context, Marx appears to be criticizing this perspective, which he attributes to Lassalle. This, however, is a minor quibble and not one that I find drastically important for either supporting or undermining Mau’s argument. We should leave the strict scriptural interpretation to the experts. It is from this position that Mau finally argues, “capital is thus a debt relation, and debt is therefore not merely “a new technique of power” belonging to the financialized capitalism of the neoliberal era. It might be true that ‘the indebted man’ is ‘the subjective figure of modern-day capitalism’…but it is crucial to acknowledge that the transcendentally indebted subject has been a part of capitalism from the very beginning.”33Mau, Mute Compulsion, 135. Whilst newfangled anthropological concepts like “indebted man” may be unconvincing and perhaps rightly disregarded, transcendental debt casts the net so wide that all the fish swim straight through.34Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of Indebted Man, An Essay on The Neoliberal Condition, trans. Joshua David Jordan (London: Semiotext(e), 2012). Suggesting we are in some sense always already in debt might work at an extremely high level of abstraction, but it doesn’t really help us understand the differences (or perhaps similarities!) between the ideal-type of the formally free laborer and indentured Indian labor in the Caribbean in the nineteenth century, or the subprime mortgage defaulter, or the differences between free white workers and black workers after formal emancipation and the introduction of the sharecropping system, or the structures of debt imposed on newly independent nation-states during the neo-colonial period, or a whole generation of proletarians disciplined by student loans, or even how indenture has been reintroduced amongst migrant workers in parts of southern Europe or the Middle East. In all these instances we can clearly observe how debt has been used as a tool of mute compulsion, crushing proletarians into pliable economic objects, but in each instance different forms of debt produce crucial analytical and political differences that cannot be understood with a transcendental theory of debt.

The last example of Mau’s oddly chosen skirmishes occurs in what is perhaps the most unsophisticated and, ironically, the most political chapter of the book, “Capital and Difference.” The chapter sprints straight off the block with a high display of both erudition and the ability to tackle large bodies of research. It beats a path through the tradition of Marxist Feminism, name checking Maria Mies, Lisa Vogel, Nancy Frazer, Cinzia Arruzza, and Silvia Federici in quick succession. We are momentarily lulled into a false sense of security when Mau promises, “the Marxist-feminist perspective on the capitalist system is absolutely crucial for a theory of the economic power of capital.”35Mau, Mute Compulsion, 154. Mau begins by affirming that there will always be some necessary outside, or what Roswitha Scholz calls a moment of value disassociation.36Roswitha Scholz, “Patriarchy and Commodity Society: Gender Without the Body,” in, Marxism and the Critique of Value, eds. Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson, Nicholas Brown (Chicago: M-C-M’ Publishing,,2014) 123–42. At this juncture, however, difficult quandaries begin to emerge. Rather than attempt to figure out how and why the economic power of capital disassociates aspects of social life, the text takes aim at Federici’s insistence that “cooking, smiling, fucking” have now been mediated by circuits of valorization.37Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero, Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 19–20. Mau argues, “the concept of the daily reproduction of labor power threatens to explode in meaninglessness or simply merge with the concept of life,” before providing several science fictionesque thought-experiments imagining the industrialization of surrogacy and mass-produced childcare systems to criticize the category.38Mau, Mute Compulsion, 155–56. Given the stated aim of the book and its core concepts—economic power, subsistence and social reproduction—this maneuver seems, at the very least, strange. In his haste to disprove Marxist Feminism, the most interesting and thought-provoking insights of the field are denigrated or simply ignored. Why would one turn to writing bad speculative fiction to disprove critical categories? A more enlightening inquiry may have looked at how Maya Gonzalez and Jeanne Neton theorize the two interlinked circuits of the directly market-mediated (DMM) and indirectly market-mediated (IMM) spheres of social reproduction to show exactly where economic power intervenes in feminized social life.39Endnotes, “The Logic of Gender,” Endnotes 3 (London, 2013). Cooking, smiling and fucking are all heavily implicated—swelling childcare costs, buying prams, artificial milk formula, schooling, the exponential growth in private psychiatric care, the explosion of the hospitality industry, Uber Eats, sex work, billions of porn clicks every day, OnlyFans, and so on—all of these examples are not footnotes to the main argument but exactly where capital mediates and controls the means of social reproduction.

There’s no coffee in your cappuccino; you’ve been sold a cup of warm milk.

Next Mau turns to the question of sex and gender. The same argumentative strategies are deployed. We are told that feminists have been incapable of either providing an abstract category of who is the main victim of patriarchy (“women,” “people who bear children,” “feminized people”) or the historicity of gender. As above, rather than provide an answer to this question that would be amenable to the aims of uncovering how economic power shapes social life, this section merely restates the erroneousness of Marxist-Feminism. From here one begins to get a clearer sense of what has been going on. It is not really a chapter about mute compulsion and “difference” at all, but a chapter about a methodological dispute concerning the political significance of theory. What all these Marxist Feminists do, according to Mau, is confuse different ”levels of abstraction.” They have confused historically specific social relations for necessary conceptual relations. What all these debates have been for Mau, is a foil to ask the real question; “should we not rather question the idea that political strategies can be immediately derived from abstract theory?”40Mau, Mute Compulsion,166. At first appearance, this seems like an eminently sensible question, commendable even. But appearances can be deceiving. Are there really any Marxist feminists who do this? Weigh up the abstract relations behind the curtain before revealing receipts for the future for the baying crowds? One wonders how such arguments could even occur in a chapter that began by acknowledging, “Marx’s failure to examine this kind of labour and its role in the capitalist economy is probably the most damaging blind spot in his critique of political economy.”41Mau, Mute Compulsion, 152. It appears that Mau has repeated the very same failure, only this time at a higher level of abstraction.

Whilst the section on gender and sex appears to move too quick, the sections on race and racism disappear at light-speed. First the “popular” [sic] view is castigated. Too many radical scholars apparently believe there is a necessary logical connection between race and capitalism.42Mau, Mute Compulsion, 166. Mau sets himself the task of unmooring this necessary connection that these popular scholars have fastened together. Yet the choice of popular scholars is odd. Peter Hudis is quickly disposed of with a counterfactual and a dubious “logical conclusion” argument.43Mau, Mute Compulsion, 168–69. This is essentially a riff on the oft-quoted Ellen Meiksins Wood’s infamous claim that, “capitalism is conceivable without racial divisions, but not, by definition, without class.”44Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Class, Race, and Capitalism” in Political Power and Social Theory 15 (2002): 276. Indeed, Adolph Reed’s (!!!) retort to Meiksins Wood is just as relevant to Mau, “many things are conceivable that do not exist and have never existed – unicorns, dragons, and the homo oeconomicus of neo-classical economists’ fantasies, for example.”45Adolph Reed quoted in Nikhil Pal Singh, “Black Marxism and the Antinomies of Racial Capitalism,”  in After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century, eds. Colleen Lye and Christopher Nealon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2022), 32–33. Methodologically this begins to look more like Rawlsianism than a historical epistemology one would associate with Marxist analysis and the critique of political economy. Next, Himani Bannerji is tackled. Bannerji seems to have been chosen for particular attention because she provides Mau with a useful analogical metaphor to devastate. Bannerji suggests, ““race” cannot be disarticulated from “class” any more than milk can be separated from coffee once they are mixed, or the body divorced from consciousness in a living person.”46Bannerji quoted in Mau, Mute Compulsion, 170. According to Mau, while this may be true at the level of concrete reality, at a higher level of abstraction we can analytically separate the two conceptually.47That the other half of this Bannerji quote homologically maps onto Joseph Fracchia’s contention that human beings are “thinking bodies”, an ontological category that Mau otherwise endorses earlier in the text, appears to have not been noticed. Mau, Mute Compulsion, 112. Nevertheless, there still remains a long tradition of thinking the imbrication of capital and race, in explicit dialogue with Marxist traditions, that goes back over a century that do not seem to fit Mau’s popular scholar characterization. While it would be unreasonable to suggest Mau should methodically engage with the whole oeuvre of W. E. B. Du Bois, Stuart Hall or C. L. R. James in a study such as this, there isn’t even any engagement with the most recently popular [sic] sophisticated Marxian (if not always “Marxist”) works of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Nikhil Pal Singh, Saidiya Hartman, or even Angela Davis, to name only a few.48Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003); Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self Making in Nineteenth Century America, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag, Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California, (London: University of California Press, 2007); Nikhil Pal Singh, Race and America’s Long War, (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017). Perhaps a proper engagement with this body of work would be too scandalous for a text such as this to confront. If one took seriously the insights of contemporary thinkers trying to disclose the fatal coupling of race and capitalism, one would have to concede that what characterizes power from the plantation to the ghetto, through the school system pipeline, and finally to the prison industrial complex and mass incarceration is unremitting violence. This is why emancipation is such an important moment in Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection. It is exactly at the inauguration of supposed formal freedom, that we observe new modes of racialization come into view in the shadow of the afterlife of slavery.49The metaphoricity of slavery does a lot of crucial unacknowledged work in Mute Compulsion. In fact, the whole text begins with a Rosa Luxemburg quote that explicitly divides the capitalist epoch as that which is not slavery. Yet slavery isn’t an important political economic concept for Mau. The function of slavery in the text is heuristic, an exemplar that via negativa structures what the essence of capitalism is supposed to be. Capitalism is not slavery. Yet despite the abundant references to slavery throughout the text, there is no attempt to understand what slavery is. It is, in the words of Tapji Garba and Sara-Maria Sorentino, “(nothing but) metaphor.” Tapji Garba and Sara-Maria Sorentino, “Slavery is a Metaphor: A Critical Commentary on Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang’s ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’,” Antipode, 52, no. 3 (2020). Had the text engaged, even superficially, with contemporary the so-called popular view of the entanglement of race and capitalism as it appears in the New History of Capitalism, the burgeoning literature on the concept of ‘racial capitalism’, or the last four decades of Black Studies research, perhaps such ahistorical and simplistic diremptions would have been more carefully avoided.  The compulsions Black and other racialized peoples have been subjected to throughout the capitalist epoch have been anything but mute.50For a similar engagement with Mute Compulsion’s undertheorizing of the mediations between racism, capitalism and the concrete, see Richard Hunsinger. “The Roaring Silence: A Critical Commentary on Søren Mau’s Mute Compulsion,A Single Hail from Below (blog). March 13, 2023.

Toward the end of the chapter the reader can sense the weight of problematic pressurizing what had so confidently been set at the beginning. We observe rapid movement across conceptual terminologies that have elsewhere in the text been carefully operationalized, before finally admitting the study has no clear concept of gender or race and that those questions would be beyond the scope of the book. In a final attempt to save some kind of political sympathy, if not analytical comprehensibility, Mau concludes, “I therefore agree with Michael Lebowitz when he argues that ‘the tendency to divide workers by turning their differences into antagonism and hostility’ is ‘an essential aspect of the logic [sic] of capital.’”51Mau, Mute Compulsion, 171, emphasis added. The Michael Lebowitz line comes from “The Politics of Assumption, the Assumption of Politics,” Historical Materialism 14, no. 2 (2006): 39. Given this admission, and remembering that one of the main themes of the book is venturing to untangle exactly what the logic of capital is, one wonders how race and gender (or “difference”) could remain so undertheorized.52The undertheorization of the mediations between race and capital also become mystifying in earlier sections of the book. This is particularly the case in a lengthy critique of both Foucault and Agamben that concludes; Bare life is the result not of sovereign violence but of mute compulsion of economic relations: the separation of life and its conditions is the original biopolitical fracture and the root of modern biopolitics. This is not to suggest that we can immediately derive all of the concrete examples of modern biopolitics examined by Agamben (Nazi concentration camps, contemporary refugee camps, etc) from the capital relation.” Mau, Mute Compulsion, 150–51. This conclusion is unconvincing on two fronts: First, in its premature breadth, the crucial details are quickly glossed over. How analytically useful is it to universalize bare life in such a way? Is the prison guard really in the same position of biopolitical fracture as the inmate? At a certain level of abstraction, yes, but at such a high level that all the humans become minuscule ants crawling over the crust of the earth. Secondly, the unnamed invisible link here between the death camp, the refugee camp, or the biopolitical population is, of course, race. What is clear in Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended! lectures, where one can see Foucault first trying to configure the basic elements of a theory of biopolitics, is that the social body requires biopolitical intervention is a racial body. While most commentators on biopower have stressed its productive capacities as it functions to foster the life of a population, in these lectures. Foucault is much more concerned with how the idea of a coherent population emerges in the context of early state formation. This emergence, according to Foucault, is concurrent with racialized communalist notions of self and other. With a form of community that needs to be protected, power turns to the right to kill and it is here, Foucault argues, “that racism is inscribed as the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States.” Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures At The Collège de France, 1975–6, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 254, Likewise, the image of muselmann in Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz, is very obviously a signifier of racial denigration, and the racist nature of the concentration camp shouldn’t need to be explained here. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999). Even if Foucault and Agamben themselves were only tangentially preoccupied with race, it is in their investigative material for anyone who cares to look. For a clear exposition of how race functions in both Foucault and Agamben, see Alexander Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of The Human, (London: Duke University Press, 2014). Race is here, as in other places, something the theoretical architectonics of Mute Compulsion is, unfortunately, unable to decipher. In the last instance, this section doesn’t really provide us with any novel or interesting ways of thinking about the imbrication of capital and “difference.” Its utility is entirely negative in function. One can read it symptomatically as the clearest statement of the limits of certain forms of Marxist thinking. That Mau remains mute even to the most innovative theorizations of gender and race in a territory he is otherwise comfortable in—Endnotes, Chris Chen, Maya Gonzales and Jeanne Neton—speaks volumes of the sort of politico-theoretical work that the text does not wish to name. To return once again to the Bannerji metaphor, you’ve gone to the coffee shop and bought your drink. Your first sip is swirling with beautiful, silky, clean, smooth microfoam. But there is something amiss. There’s no coffee in your cappuccino; you’ve been sold a cup of warm milk.

Where the book is at its most engaging, audacious, and daring is where it strays furthest from a fidelity to Marxist hermeneutics.

What Is Left to Say About Mute Compulsion?

The final part of the book, “Dynamics,” comprises a set of case studies for mute compulsion in action—subsumption, the reconfiguration of capitalism’s relation to nature, logistics and finally surplus populations and crisis. These sections are well argued, providing good introductions to these debates in Marxist theory, while the specificity of Mute Compulsion’s contribution is sometimes lost. Nonetheless, one of the supreme merits of Mau’s intervention is the isolation and clarification of a form of power specific to the capitalist mode of production. In so doing it provides us with an ontological model amenable to theorizing how capitalism becomes, “the first mode of production in history to fully exploit the ontological precarity of the human metabolism.”53Mau. Mute Compulsion, 321. One can anticipate that a major criticism of the book will be that it doesn’t adequately distinguish economic power from ideology or violence. There is always a moment of violence (or at least the potential threat of violence) in getting people into work. If one isn’t interpellated adequately, one is a bad subject and liable to fall victim to the violence of the dole queue, homelessness, imprisonment or some form of psychiatric discipline. While I have sympathy with such a criticism, what Mute Compulsion nonetheless does is outline a form of power that doesn’t work directly on the body or operate within structures of subjectivation. One way around this quandary, or at least one way to reduce the tightness of the tension, is by putting the theory to work. Rather than attempting to isolate at the level of pure abstraction which form of power takes precedence in the last instance, wouldn’t it be more sensible to see how these different modes of power operate in the context of concrete analyses? Yet it is exactly here where the major difficulties emerge. The rhetoric of the text seems hostile to the work of mediating abstract categories in concrete analytical contexts. Like much of the contemporary unease with highly formalist Marxist analysis, the promise of clarity and specificity is set over and against the murky waters of the profaned concrete. While Mau seems sometimes at pains to remind the reader that of course gender oppression or racial domination are wrong, or that class struggle happens, there is no sense that thinking about class struggle, gender or race could ever touch the neatly organized levels of abstraction used to construct the ideal average.

In an otherwise uncharacteristic moment of political urgency, Mau approvingly quotes Lenin’s insistence that “the very gist, the living soul, of Marxism” is the “concrete analysis of a concrete situation.”54Lenin quoted in Mau, Mute Compulsion, 324–25. In short, the reason why we do analysis is to understand the current world and shed light on the political horizon. But the political implications of the text remain stunted because the poles set up between “political strategy” and “levels of abstraction” overwork their heuristic function, morphing into unbridgeable antinomies. It is in the readerly experience of these antinomial moments that we can get a sense of where the problem lies in Mute Compulsion. It is in the conceptual slippage in the meanings of “concrete “ and “level of abstraction.” For Marx the concrete and abstract do not run parallel as they seem here, they interact dialectically. If we remember in the methodological introduction to the Grundrisse, Marx says,

if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception [Vorstellung] of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts [Begriff], from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations.55Marx, Grundrisse, 100.

We can observe here a movement, first away from bad concepts to simple determinations, then retracing our steps back to a richer set of conceptual relations. For Marx the abstract and concrete are not opposed, they condition our thought as we move between them. The concrete is not concrete because it is opposite to abstraction, but is instead, “the concentration of many determinations.” In comprehending this movement, Marx says,

conceptual thinking is the real human being, and for which the conceptual world as such is thus the only reality, the movement of the categories appears as the real act of production – which only, unfortunately, receives a jolt from the outside-whose product is the world; and-but this is again a tautology – this is correct in so far as the concrete totality is a totality of thoughts, concrete in thought, in fact a product of thinking and comprehending; but not in any way a product of the concept which thinks and generates itself outside or above observation and conception; a product, rather, of the working-up of observation and conception into concepts. The totality as it appears in the head, as a totality of thoughts, is a product of a thinking head….56Marx, Grundrisse, 101.

Not even conceptual thinking is apart from the concrete—the thinking head, your head, is in the world, it comprehends the world through abstraction, but only to reproduce the concrete totality in the head. Here, a subtle spatiality is introduced. For Mau the “levels of abstraction” are higher and lower, but they always seem to be in some sense above the concrete.57For more dynamic approaches to this recursive relaying movement see Stuart Hall or Jairus Banaji. Jairus Banaji, Theory as History, Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Stuart Hall, “Marx’s Notes on Method: A ‘Reading’ of the ‘1857 Introduction’,” Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2003): 113–49. For Marx abstraction is the working-up. The spatiality of this dialectic between abstract and concrete is important because it orients the mind while trying to grasp abstractions that exist in the subsonic sedimentations below the crusts that form specific concrete historical conjunctures. With Mute Compulsion’s insistence on “conceptual clarity” we are never really sure how proletarian praxis, the historical or the concrete are allowed entry into the VIP area where all the abstractions dine.58On how real abstraction smashes the bodies of workers it leaves strewn in it’s wake, it would be useful to read Mute Compulsion next to Nate Holdren’s work on the history of workplace injuries or Saidiya Hartman’s history of the violent disciplining of the black worker’s body in the metamorphosis from slavery to nominally free labor.  Nate Holdren, Injury Impoverished:Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2000); Hartman, Scenes of Subjection. Without any methodological space for mediating the abstract and the historical, there is no way of moving from the ideal average to concrete analysis of the concrete situation. From a text that claims right at the beginning that this is going to be a book about “capitalism” and not another Marxiological exegesis, too often equivocations lead to stern Marxiological conclusions rather than engagements with abstract social relations and their concrete expressions.

Where the book is at its most engaging, audacious, and daring—metabolic domination, the amputated proletarian body, naked life—is where it strays furthest from a fidelity to Marxist hermeneutics. It is here where Mau makes some of his most fascinating claims, that halfway through the book seems to have been left by the wayside. Other more interesting questions and case studies could have been used to elucidate more fundamental ways in which power seeps into human metabolism. As parts of IMM become DMM, social reproductive practices in-themselves become labor processes, in becoming labor processes they become relevant in a discussion of subsumption that ties together labor and social reproduction. Maybe cleaners, carers, babysitters, teachers, health-care workers, Uber Eats drivers, kitchen porters, trash disposal operatives, domestic workers, sex workers, waiters, in short, the people who do the cooking, smiling and fucking, are not considered important because their work is not at the avant-garde of new areas of extraction and highly productive valorization. Yet they all still contribute to total social capital, to structural reproduction, and they are all located at that intersection between social reproduction and capital’s economic power. All these forms of labor are subject to the domination of the value form. Furthermore, many of these forms of labor are feminized, and imbricated in new processes of racialization. Crucially, none of them control the conditions of the reproductive work they do. This is also the case with thinking crisis and the control of the means of reproduction. Crisis is indeed important, just look at how it has ravaged our lives compulsively since 2008. All sorts of cancerous lumps have grown on the amputated proletarian body: renting and implosion of the housing market, the exorbitant costs of childcare in places like the UK and the US, the further privatized healthcare, the destruction of schools and universities in the name of productivity and industrial requirements, crushing personal and public debts, extortionate food prices and starvation alongside mountains of wealth and waste. The ontological work in these first chapters allows us to think about all of these phenomena in new and exciting ways, but the book itself doesn’t seem interested in these spheres of labor, production and reproduction. I don’t know about other readers, but it is exactly in these moments that I feel the boot of mute compulsion pressing down on my neck.

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