请将“Does this mean that class distinctions can be reduced to a general statement about the schizoid character of humanity? No, because there are clearly differences in the way in which the class antagonism traverses us, differences in the degree to which it is possible for us to repress that antagonism. For those who benefit materially from the process of classification (accumulation), it is relatively easy to repress anything which points against or beyond classification, to live within the bounds of fetishism. It is those whose lives are overturned by accumulation (the indigenous of Chiapas, university teachers, coal miners, nearly everybody) in whom the element of against-ness will be much more present. It is those who are most brutally de-subjectified, whether through the stultification of endless repetition in meaningless jobs, or through the poverty that excludes anything but the fight for survival, in whom the tension of against-ness will be most tightly coiled. It remains true, however, that nobody exists purely against or against-and-beyond: we all participate in the separation of subject and object, the classification of humans.4

It is only in so far as we are/are not the working class that revolution as the self-emancipation of the working class becomes conceivable. The working class cannot emancipate itself in so far as it is working class. It is only in so far as we are not working class that the question of emancipation can even be posed. And yet, it is only as far as we are the working class (subjects torn from their objects) that the need for emancipation arises. We return to the contradictory result already established: we, the critical subject, are and are not the working class.

The conclusion reached is a non-sense only for identitarian thought, only if we think of ‘is’ and ‘is not’ as being mutually exclusive. The contradiction between ‘is’ and ‘is not’ is not a logical contradiction, but a real one. It points to the fact that we really are/are not reified; we really are/are not identified; we really are/are not class-ified; we really are/are not de-subjectified; in short, we really are/are not. It is only if we understand our subjectivity as a divided subjectivity, and our self as a divided self, that we can make sense of our scream, of our criticism.

The concept of fetishism, as we have seen, is incompatible with a belief in the innocent subject. Power-over reaches into us, turning us against ourselves. The working class does not stand outside capital: on the contrary it is capital that defines it (us) as working class. Labour stands opposed to capital, but it is an internal opposition. It is only as far as labour is something more than labour, the worker more than a seller of labour power, that the issue of revolution can even be posed. The concept of fetishism implies inevitably that we are self-divided, that we are divided against ourselves. The working/anti-working class/anti-class is self-divided: oppressed yet existing not only in but also against-and-beyond that oppression, not only against-and-beyond but also in that oppression. The struggle between fetishism and anti-fetishism exists within all of us, collectively and individually. There can be no question, therefore, of a non-fetishised vanguard leading the fetishised masses. By virtue of the fact of living in an antagonistic society, we are all both fetishised and in struggle against that fetishism.

We are self-divided, self-alienated, schizoid. We-who-scream are also we-who-acquiesce. We who struggle for the reunification of subject and object are also we who produce their separation. Rather than looking to the hero with true class consciousness, a concept of revolution must start from the confusions and contradictions that tear us all apart.

This is quite consistent with Marx’s approach. His understanding of capitalism was based not on the antagonism between two groups of people but on the antagonism in the way in which human social practice is organised.5 Existence in capitalist society is a conflictual existence, an antagonistic existence. Although this antagonism appears as a vast multiplicity of conflicts, we have argued (and it was argued by Marx) that the key to understanding this antagonism and its development is the fact that present society is built upon an antagonism in the way that the distinctive character of humanity, namely doing, is organised. In capitalist society, doing is turned against itself, alienated from itself; we lose control over our creative activity. This negation of human creativity takes place through the subjection of human activity to the market. This subjection to the market, in turn, takes place fully when the capacity to work creatively (labour power) becomes a commodity to be sold on the market to those with the capital to buy it. The antagonism between human creativity and its negation thus becomes focused in the antagonism between those who must sell their creativity and those who appropriate that creativity and exploit it (and, in so doing, transform that creativity into labour). In shorthand, the antagonism between creativity and its negation can be referred to as the conflict between labour and capital, but this conflict (as Marx makes clear) is not a conflict between two external forces, but an internal conflict between doing (human creativity) and alienated doing.

The social antagonism is thus not in the first place a conflict between two groups of people: it is a conflict between creative social practice and its negation, or, in other words, between humanity and its negation, between the transcending of limits (creation) and the imposition of limits (definition). The conflict does not take place after subordination has been established, after the fetishised forms of social relations have been constituted: rather it is a conflict about the subordination of social practice, about the fetishisation of social relations. All social practice is an unceasing antagonism between the subjection of practice to the fetishised, perverted, defining forms of capitalism and the attempt to live against-and-beyond those forms.

Class struggle is a conflict that permeates the whole of human existence. We all exist within that conflict, just as the conflict exists within all of us. It is a polar antagonism which we cannot escape. We do not ‘belong’ to one class or another: rather, the class antagonism exists in us, tearing us apart. The antagonism (the class divide) traverses all of us. Nevertheless, it clearly does so in very different ways. Some, the very small minority, participate directly in and/or benefit directly from the appropriation and exploitation of the work of others. Others, the vast majority of us, are, directly or indirectly, the objects of that appropriation and exploitation. The polar nature of the antagonism is thus reflected in a polarisation of the two classes,6 but the antagonism is prior to, not subsequent to, the classes: classes are constituted through the antagonism.


IV

What of the workers in the factories, the industrial proletariat? Are they not central to the concept of class struggle? Is work not central to the whole understanding of the antagonism of capitalist society?

The central site for the separation of doing and done is production. The production of the commodity is the production of the separation of subject and object. Capitalist production is the production by the workers of surplus value, a surplus which, although produced by the workers, is appropriated by the capitalist. By producing a surplus as surplus value, the workers are producing their own separation from the object produced. They are, in other words, producing classes, producing their own class-ification as wage labour: ‘Does an operative in a cotton-factory produce nothing but cotton goods? No, he produces capital. He produces values that give fresh command over his labour, and that, by means of such command, create fresh values’ (Marx 1965, p. 578).

In production, then, the worker in producing an object produces at the same time her own alienation from that object and thereby produces herself as wage labourer, as de-subjectified subject. Capitalist production involves the ever renewed separation of subject and object. It also involves the ever renewed bringing together of subject and object but as alienated subject and object. The relation between subject and object is an unhinged relation, with value as its (un)hinge. The category of value faces both ways. On the one hand, the fact that value is the product of abstract labour points to capital’s absolute dependence upon labour and its abstraction. On the other hand, value conceptualises the separation of the commodity from labour, the fact that it acquires an autonomous existence quite independent of the producer. Value, then, is the process of subordinating the strength of the worker to the domination of her autonomised product.

But the separation of the worker from the means of production is just part (although a central part) of a more general separation of subject and object, a more general distancing of people from the possibility of determining their own activity. The notion of the separation of the worker from the means of production directs our minds to a particular type of creative activity, but in fact this very distinction between production and doing in general is part of the fragmentation of doing that results from the separation of doing and done. The fact that the de-subjectification of the subject appears simply as the separation of the workers from the means of production is already an expression of the fetishisation of social relations. The separation of the worker from the means of production (in the classic sense) is part of, generates and is supported by, a more general process of de-subjectifying the subject, a more general abstracting of labour. Hence value production, surplus value production (exploitation) cannot be the starting-point of the analysis of class struggle, simply because exploitation implies a logically prior struggle to convert creativity into labour, to define certain activities as value producing.

Exploitation is not just the exploitation of labour but the simultaneous transformation of doing into labour, the simultaneous de-subjectification of the subject, the dehumanisation of humanity. This does not mean that creativity, the subject, humanity exist in some pure sphere waiting to be metamorphosed into their capitalist forms. The capitalist form (labour) is the mode of existence of doing/creativity/subjectivity/humanity, but that mode of existence is contradictory. To say that doing exists as labour means that it exists also as anti-labour. To say that humanity exists as subordination means that it exists also as insubordination. The production of class is the suppression(-and-reproduction) of insubordination. Exploitation is the suppression(-and-reproduction) of insubordinate creativity. The suppression of creativity does not just take place in the process of production, as usually understood, but in the whole separating of doing and done that constitutes capitalist society.

Thus: labour produces class, but labour presupposes a prior classification. Similarly, production is the sphere of the constitution of class, but the existence of a sphere of production, that is the separation of production from human doing in general, also presupposes a prior classification.”翻译为中文