>> In Deleuze and Guattari's terms the difference between these
>> different modes of subjection is the difference between "machinic
>> enslavement," into which the human being is incorporated in the
>> productive process as another element of fixed capital under the
>> direction of a "higher unity," and "social subjection," in which
>> the worker is no longer a component of the machinery, but a user,
>> whose control is interiorized. In an unpublished chapter of
>> Capital Marx illustrates this difference boldly and crudely,
>> distinguishing between the subjectivity of the slave and the free
>> worker:
>>
>> "In contrast to the slave, this labor becomes more productive
>> because more intensive, since the slave onl works under the spur
>> of external fear but not for his existence which is guaranteed
>> even though it does not belong to him. The free worker, however,
>> is impelled by his wants. The consciousness (or better: the idea)
>> of free self-determination, of liberty, makes a much better worker
>> of the one than of the other, as does the related feeling (sense)
>> of responsibility; since he like any seller of wares is
>> responsible for the goods he delivers and for the quality which he
>> must provide, he must strive to ensure that he is not driven from
>> the field by other sellers of the same type as himself."
>>
>> The same conditions that make the abstract subjective potential of
>> labour unruly--its libertion form any determinate sphere of need
>> and from any presupposed political relation--are also the
>> conditions of subjection. There is a fundamental undecidability at
>> the intersection of the production of subjectivity and capital.
The passage from Marx illustrates Marx's treatment of the capitalist labour process as a process that develops the capabilities of the individuals subjected to it and, in this and other ways, constitutes them as the subjects able to create the penultimate social form from which all barriers to the full actualization of "freedom" have been eliminated. "All these differences in the relation make the activity of the free worker more intensive, more continuous, more agile, and more dexterous than that of the slave, quite apart from the fact that they fit the worker himself to undertake historical actions of an entirely different nature."
"The slave belongs to a particular master; it is true that the worker must sell himself to capital, but not to a particular capitalist, and thus he has a choice, within a particular sphere, as to who he sells himself to, and can change masters. All these differences in the relation make the activity of the free worker more intensive, more continuous, more agile, and more dexterous than that of the slave, quite apart from the fact that they fit the worker himself to undertake historical actions of an entirely different nature. The slave receives the means of subsistence necessary for his maintenance in a natural form, which is as fixed in kind as in extent — in use values. The free worker receives them in the form of money, of exchange value, of the abstract social form of wealth. However much the wage is now in fact nothing but the silver or gold or copper or paper form of the necessary means of subsistence, into which it must constantly be resolved — money functioning here as the merely transitory form of exchange value, as mere means of circulation — abstract wealth, exchange value, and not a specific traditionally and locally limited use value, still remains for the worker the purpose and result of his labour. It is the worker himself who turns the money into whatever use values he wants, buys the commodities he wants with it, and as an owner of money, as a buyer of commodities, he stands in exactly the same relation to the sellers of commodities as any other buyer. The conditions of his existence — and also the limited extent of the value of the money he has acquired — naturally compel him to spend it on a rather restricted range of means of subsistence. Nevertheless, some degree of variation is possible here, such as e.g. newspapers, which form part of the necessary means of subsistence of the English urban worker. He can save something, form a hoard. He can also waste his wages on spirits, etc. But in acting this way he acts as a free agent, he must pay his own way; he is himself responsible for the way in which he spends his wages. He learns to master himself, in contrast to the slave, who needs a master. To be sure, this only applies when one considers the transformation of a serf or slave into a free wage labourer. The capitalist relation appears here as a step up the social scale. It is the opposite when an independent peasant or craftsman is transformed into a wage labourer. What a difference there is between the proud yeomanry of England, of whom Shakespeare speaks,[73] and the English agricultural day labourers! Since the purpose of labour is for the wage labourer wages alone, money, a definite quantity of exchange value, in which any specific characteristics of use value have been extinguished, he is completely indifferent to the content of his labour, and therefore to the specific character of his activity. In the guild or caste system, on the other hand, this activity was regarded as the exercise of a vocation, whereas with the slave, as with the beast of burden, it is only a particular kind of activity, of exertion of his labour capacity, imposed on him and handed down from the past. Hence in so far as the division of labour has not made his labour capacity entirely one-sided, the free worker is in principle receptive to, and ready for, any variation in his labour capacity and his working activity which promises better wages (as is indeed demonstrated in the case of the surplus population of the countryside, which constantly transfers to the towns). If the developed worker is more or less incapable of this variation, he still regards it as always open to the next generation, and the emerging generation of workers can always be distributed among, and is constantly at the disposal of, new branches of labour or particularly prosperous branches of labour. In North America, where the development of wage labour has least of all been affected by reminiscences of the old guild system, etc., this variability, this complete indifference to the specific content of labour, this ability to transfer from one branch to another, is shown particularly strongly. Hence the contrast between this variability and the uniform, traditional character of slave labour, which does not vary according to the requirements of production, but rather the reverse, requiring that production should itself be adapted to the mode of labour introduced originally and handed down by tradition, is emphasised by all United States writers as the grand characteristic of the free wage labour of the North as against the slave labour of the South. (See Cairnes.) The constant creation of new kinds of labour, this continuous variation — which results in a multiplicity of use values and therefore is also a real development of exchange value — this continuing division of labour in the whole of the society — first becomes possible with the capitalist mode of production. It begins with the free handicraft guild system, where it does not meet with a barrier in the ossification of each particular branch of the craft itself.]" http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/economic/ch02a.htm
The fully "free self-determination" which is the end point of the historical process of human development is "a complete and no longer restricted self-activity" creating and appropriating beauty and truth within relations of mutual recognition in a "true realm of freedom." As in Hegel, this requires "an incalculable medial discipline of the intellectual and moral powers."
Marx explicitly identifies the labour process of an ideal community with "discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming".
"Real economy -- saving -- consists of the saving of labour time (minimum (and minimization) of production costs); but this saving identical with development of the productive force. Hence in no way abstinence from consumption, but rather the development of power, of capabilities of production, and hence both of the capabilities as well as the means of consumption. The capability to consume is a condition of consumption, hence its primary means, and this capability is the development of an individual potential, a force of production. The saving of labour time [is] equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power. From the standpoint of the direct production process it can be regarded as the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being man himself. It goes without saying, by the way, that direct labour time itself cannot remain in the abstract antithesis to free time in which it appears from the perspective of bourgeois economy. Labour cannot become play, as Fourier would like, [5] although it remains his great contribution to have expressed the suspension not of distribution, but of the mode of production itself, in a higher form, as the ultimate object. Free time -- which is both idle time and time for higher activity -- has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject. This process is then both discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming; and, at the same time, practice [Ausübung], experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society. For both, in so far as labour requires practical use of the hands and free bodily movement, as in agriculture, at the same time exercise." http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.htm
He also claims the ultimately negative form of "discipline" that characterizes the capitalist labour process has positive developmental consequences:
"the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations [Geschlechter], has developed general industriousness as the general property of the new species [Geschlecht]". http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch06.htm
As I just pointed out, the ideas about being and human being embodied in this conception of human history are explicitly rejected by Foucault. Quoting Nietzsche, he rejects the idea of human subjectivity as potentially fully "free self-determination" and the claims about the end of history associated with it. Humanity attemptin to end this way would be humanity ending "on the sands", i.e. building sand castles that must inevitably be washed away by the true human essence, violent instinctive self-destructiveness.
"its [the "will to knowledge's] development is not tied to the constitution and affirmation of a free subject; rather, it creates a progressive enslavement to its instinctive violence."
Nietzsche's "wish" is for "humanity to end in fire and light." an end he elaborates as "the idea of humanity sacrificing itself." It's this end that the "desire for truth" is to serve for only it "could direct and sustain such a sacrifice."
"We should now replace the two great problems of nineteenth-century philosophy, passed on by Fichte and Hegel (the reciprocal basis of truth and liberty and the possibility of absolute knowledge), with the theme that 'to perish through absolute knowledge may well form a part of the basis of being.'"
"It may be that there remains one prodigious idea which might be made to prevail over every other aspiration, which might overcome the most victorious: the idea of humanity sacrificing itself. It seems indisputable that if this new constellation appeared on the horizon, only the desire for truth, with its enormous prerogatives, could direct and sustain such a sacrifice. For to knowledge, no sacrifice is too great."
Ted