“Los mejores escritores de Colombia son los jueces y los secretarios de juzgado, y no hay mejor novela que un sumario” (123), afirma el misántropo narrador de La virgen de los sicarios (1999) de Fernando Vallejo. Sin que necesariamente se trate de un sumario, ni, tal vez, tampoco de una novela tradicional, el libro recupera en soliloquio las peripecias que un gramático misántropo en edad madura vive al lado de sus jóvenes amantes sicarios en una ciudad de Medellín envuelta en los resabios de la muerte de Pablo Escobar. La muerte del capo pareciera ser el evento que presupone al relato de la narración, pues Fernando, el narrador, conoce a Alexis, su primer amante, luego del “exterminio de su banda” (64). Así, desposeído de sus “medios tradicionales de subsistencia,” Alexis trabaja ahora en “La casa de las mariposas,” una casa de citas. El relato, por otra parte, comienza con el regreso a casa del narrador y los recuerdos que los lugares de su infancia le provocan (“Había en las afueras de Medellín un pueblo silencioso y apacible que se llamaba Sabaneta” [5]). A la vez que la muerte del capo tiene una relación directa con la vida del narrador, ya que “los acontecimientos nacionales están ligados a los personales” (64), el estado general y desordenado que luego de la muerte de Escobar impera en Medellín parece análogo a la forma del texto.
Del recuerdo personal, al momento “presente,” y luego hacia digresiones que terminan criticando al estado general de la vida en Medellín, a la iglesia, al gobierno o explicando palabras a sus “lectores,” el narrador arma un sumario desordenado. La virgen de los sicarios inicia como novela y termina como otra cosa: una despedida y un pastiche hecho con los versos de una canción. El mismo narrador admite que la trama de su vida, y de su relato, “es la de un libro absurdo en el que lo que debería ir primero va luego” (16). El orden de la narración es difícil de seguir. Hay, así, una tensión entre el afán del narrador por explicar a sus lectores algunos detalles de su narración y el hecho de contar su propio relato. Mientras que los lectores son identificados como extranjeros, o desentendidos de lo que sucede en Medellín (“le voy a explicar a usted porque es turista extranjero” [39]; “Ahí están todavía esperándome, a mí con mis dudosos lectores” [45]; “y lo digo por mis lectores japoneses y servo-croatas” [113]) y la narración misma parece desentenderse de sí (“Nada hay que entender. Si todo tiene explicación, todo tiene justificación y así acabamos alcahuetiando el delito” [105]). Con todo esto, pareciera que el narrador no se interesara mucho por el acto mismo de leer. Es decir, parece que La virgen de los sicarios busca escribirse como un sumario para “no-lectores.”
Leer no hace a nadie mejor persona. Al mismo tiempo, la lectura es una herramienta más que lo mismo libera y oprime, un ejercicio, un hábito. El narrador enfatiza, por su parte, los beneficios de que Alexis no lea:
Pero esta criatura en eso era tan drástico como el gran presidente Reagan, que en su larga vida un solo libro no leyó. Esta pureza incontaminada de letra impresa, además, era de lo que más me gustaba de mi niño. ¡Para libros los que yo he leído!, y mírenme, véanme. ¿Pero sabía acaso firmar el niño? Claro que sí sabía. Tenía la letra más excitante y arrevesada que he conocido: alucinante que es como en última instancia escriben los ángeles que son demonios. Aquí guardo una foto suya dedicada a mí por el reverso. Me dice simplemente así: ‘Tuyo, para toda la vida,’ y basta. ¿Para qué quería más? Mi vida entera se agota en eso” (46).
Al menos desde la perspectiva del narrador, el narco elude la lectura. Para el narco todo es escritura, parquedad y pragmatismo que no puede darse tiempo para comprender, o leer. No obstante, como sucede Contrabando ante la incapacidad de diferenciar quién es quién, el narco también es el inicio de la lectura. Si la lectura es siempre una acción ambivalente y cargada de errores y malentendidos, ¿por qué habría que expulsar de la narración al acto de leer y comprender? ¿O será, tal vez, que La virgen de los sicarios busca no-lectores? Si la figura del lector, al menos desde una perspectiva tradicional, es un mero agente que reproduce gustos heredados en la medida que participa de productos culturales hechos por quienes validan su propio estatus de lector, entonces, el lector es siempre un agente cargado de un aura de “autoridad,” pues al lector hay que complacerle. Sin embargo, también hay otras formas de extrañar al lector, de sacarlo de quicio, como desearle “que le vaya bien, que le pise un carro o que le estripe un tren” (transcripción modificada 127).
Contrabando (1991/2008), de Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda, bien pudiera ser catalogado bajo lo que Nicolas Bourriaud llama textos de postproducción. Esto es, textos que no necesariamente buscan “superar” las técnicas ya usadas por sus predecesores, sino hacer uso de “todo aquello que se ha apilado en el almacén de la historia para hacer realidad y presente” (Postproduction 17). La observación de Bourriaud parte del supuesto de que hoy en día los artistas programan (o modulan) más que componer materiales de arte. Con esto, aunque Bourriaud no lo vea así, la posición de aquellos que alguna vez tuvieron el “dominio” de las formas artísticas cambia. En el campo literario, el escritor deja por completo atrás la figura del “hombre de letras” y ahora no es más, tal vez, que un copista, un agente responsable de lo que su escritura modula, pero desempoderado ante la oportunidad de transferirle a su escritura un rol trascedente y de primer orden en el entramado social e histórico de la vida diaria. Justo esta posición es la que el narrador de Contrabando dibuja para sí y su entorno.
Luego de que Antonio Aguilar, “el último charro cantor,” le encomiende a un ficticio Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda la escritura de un guion cinematográfico, el escritor emprende un viaje del Distrito Federal, hoy Ciudad de México, hasta Santa Rosa, Chihuahua, su pueblo natal, para inspirarse y poder así escribir la historia que el ídolo de la canción popular le solicita. “Usted es de un pueblo serrano del norte y debe saber cómo siente la gente del campo, cómo quiere de verdad y cómo es capaz de morir por un amor. Quiero una película como aquellas que hacía el Indio Fernández” (pos. 38.1), le dice Antonio Aguilar a Rascón Banda. La tarea de escribir el guion, desde esta perspectiva, es vista como la transcripción del sentir “popular” en la producción cinematográfica del México de finales de los años noventa. Contrabando puede ser visto, así, como un texto que cuenta las peripecias que derivan de la encomienda de Antonio Aguilar. El texto se dejaría ver una suerte de bitácora sobre un proyecto de escritura. No obstante, las páginas de Contrabando son más y menos que una bitácora. Si el proyecto original consiste en escribir el proceso mismo de la escritura, el texto traiciona esta motivación. De hecho, por su propia forma el texto elude una clasificación tajante dentro de algún género literario. Las páginas de Contrabando son más una pila de artificios, una acumulación que ratifica y resume todo lo que la producción escrita en buena parte del siglo XX en México ha hecho para dar cabida a los espacios que comúnmente representan al país, y también a la literatura misma. En otras palabras, las representaciones de la época de oro del cine mexicano, como las que popularizara Emilio el Indio Fernández, han llegado a su punto de extenuación. O esto, al menos, es lo que sugiere el narrador cuando desde su llegada al aeropuerto de Chihuahua se encuentra con una atmósfera intervenida por una presencia ominosa. El narcotráfico, o contrabando, se deja ver en cualquier tipo de situación, pero siempre con el mismo resultado: muertes, terror, miedo y sentimientos encontrados entre la imposibilidad de hacer justicia y la indignación de no poder hacer nada al respecto.
El problema del narcotráfico retratado en Contrabando no es, necesariamente, que la violencia inunde hasta las realidades más “pacíficas.” Antes bien, la violencia subyace en el nivel local y fluye entre lo que entonces, en 1991, el año en que Contrabando recibió el premio de novela Juan Rulfo, era un país y un mundo que se desentendía de estos conflictos. El mundo no sabe de estos conflictos, o más bien, vive como si no supiera. Faltaría conocer esta realidad, como sugiere Damiana Caraveo, una de las tantas sobrevivientes que el narrador se encuentra en su viaje, “para que el mundo lo sepa” (15.9). Por otra parte, no es que no haya visibilidad de estos conflictos, sino que las versiones son muchas, variadas y corruptas. Sobre la masacre de Yepachi, la masacre a la que Damiana Caraveo sobrevivió, la prensa escribe “Enfrentamiento entre narcos y la Policía Federal. Masacre en el Rancho de Yepachi […] Judiciales federales contra Judiciales del Estado: ganaron los federales” (pos. 32.6). Las versiones oficiales polarizan y a la vez nublan la distinción entre aquello que es difícil de separar. Es decir, mientras que la nota sobre la masacre de Yepachi anuncia primero un enfrentamiento entre los enemigos del estado (los narcos) y las fuerzas del estado (la policía federal), luego anuncia que el conflicto sucede dentro del mismo estado (entre policías federal y estatal). Con esto, el contrabando y su violencia evidencian la imposibilidad de distinguir, diferenciar y separar. Más aún, ya sea en la masacre de Yepachi, o en otros de los enfrentamientos narrados, los conflictos demarcan el desgaste y extenuación del sentido de la guerra. No se trata de una guerra civil, ni tampoco de una guerra partisana, pues no se puede diferenciar entre amigos ni enemigos, siempre es ambiguo quién está fuera o dentro del nomos, del estado. No extraña entonces que muchas veces en el texto se enfatice la imposibilidad de distinguir entre narco y policía, o que “judiciales y narcos no distinguen” (pos. 71.0) entre los que asesinan. En últimas, en Santa Rosa “no se distinguen ni el bien ni el mal” (pos. 41.6), “no se sabe quién es quién” (pos. 353), y todo lo que alguna vez fue sagrado es profano, y aquellos hábitos que parecían tan sólidos se vuelven espuma.
El hecho de que no se pueda distinguir entre narco y federal está directamente relacionado a la forma misma del texto. Si el narco termina donde inicia el estado, y el estado inicia donde termina el narco, ambos están en una banda de Moebious. No sorprende así que el último sintagma de una sección del texto sea siempre el título del siguiente apartado. Este recurso es llevado hasta las últimas consecuencias cuando al final de la novela se comprueba que la última palabra del libro es también la que le da título a la obra. A su vez, la imposibilidad de distinción evoca directamente aquello que hace el contrabando: integrar lo que no está autorizado (legal) dentro del orden común de las cosas, en el mercado y la producción social. Una mercancía de contrabando es igual a una mercancía legal, su mínima diferencia está en la sanción dada por las autoridades (el estado). Contrabandear es introducir un ciclo de producción ajeno al propio sin recibir una sanción oficial, es volver cotidiano lo que no lo es. El contrabando informa de la presencia de lo propio y de lo interno al introducir lo mismo desde lo ajeno y lo externo. Esto es, por el contrabando uno se entera de aquello que está afuera, pero que, paradójicamente, también sucede adentro.
No se trata de que Contrabando tense las relaciones entre realidad y ficción, sino que la novela deja ver como la mayoría de los textos semióticos (contradicciones) que articularon buena parte de la modernidad han llegado a develarse como simples pliegues sobre una misma superficie. Ahora bien, ya sea por la imposibilidad de catalogar la obra dentro de un género, o la imposibilidad de distinguir entre narco y federal en la narración, el texto da cuenta de un mecanismo narrativo que apila y concentra una breve historia del cambio radical que el contrabando trae para finales de siglo XX. Esto es, Contrabando es un resumen desordenado de diversas formas de producción, ya sean económicas (se menciona la industria minera, el campo, el acaparamiento de tierras, la ganadería) o intelectuales (a la par que se escribe Contrabando se escribe una obra de teatro y un guion cinematográfico, también abundan las notas periodísticas, las canciones y hasta grabaciones transcritas en el texto). “Esto es como un barril sin fondo, como una mina que se traga el dinero” (pos. 68), le dice su padre al narrador para entender el secuestro del presidente municipal de Santa Rosa. Como una mina también es el propio proceso de escritura del guion cinematográfico, pues el narrador está convencido de que “los muertos del aeropuerto y la masacre de Yepachi no pueden ser una película de canciones, pero de Santa Rosa surgirá la historia” (pos. 40.4). Así, el viaje a Santa Rosa es un viaje extractivo. El guion, incluso, se escribe a sabiendas de que “los personajes tendrán el mismo final que tuvieron en Santa Rosa, para no cambiar la realidad, que sobrepasa en acción dramática a cualquier ficción” (pos. 301). El narrador, entonces, escribe a partir de que copia la “realidad.” Copiar es, así, una forma de extraer.
Que el narco reavive a la vez que destruye viejas formas de producción, viejas tradiciones, sugiere que los cambios sociales presentes en Contrabando se pueden leer como un proceso más de acumulación primitiva (u originaria). Igualmente, a la par que unos son desposeídos y otros comienzan a acumular riqueza, la producción queda supeditada a extracción y no reproducción. Ya sea porque Santa Rosa antes fuera centro minero y ahora sea “el centro del narcotráfico serrano” (pos. 193.9), la producción por extracción parece ser la única forma de articulación social. La extracción es una forma sui generis de producción, como afirma Karl Marx, “porque ningún proceso de reproducción sucede, o al menos ninguno que esté cabalmente bajo nuestro control o sepamos a ciencia cierta cómo funciona” (Grundrisse 726). Si la reproducción es la forma de producción que permite la duplicación de un ciclo de trabajo, entonces, dada la imposibilidad de representar al estado como un agente que domina la violencia, y por extensión, el trabajo, en Contrabando no hay reproducción sino mera extracción, un proceso que produce, pero cuyos mecanismos se nos escapan. Como a ciencia cierta no sabemos aún qué hace provechoso a las minas, ya sea porque al extraer todo un yacimiento se implica, muchas veces, la destrucción total del ecosistema, o porque simplemente, a veces, las minas se secan, de la misma manera, Contrabando se escribe, se produce, a partir de un mecanismo que no sabemos cómo funciona a ciencia cierta, se escribe desde lo que nos escapa, lo que nos presupone, pero también nos excede.
La propuesta literaria de Contrabando consiste en proponer un texto para después. Es decir, la obra de Rascón Banda apuesta por pensar una diferencia luego de un proceso de extenuantes repeticiones que esquilman formas de expresión tradicionales en el ámbito literario. La forma novela, por ejemplo, parece insuficiente para encasillar al texto, pues aunque hay elementos propios del género, como el dialogismo, la polifonía y el uso de cronotopos, también el texto excede las funciones canónicas de la novela, pues los personajes no se desarrollan y sus apariciones son dispersas y contingentes. Consecuentemente, Contrabando invita a pensar una forma otra de escribir, de hacer literatura, e incluso una invitación hacia la posibilidad de una política otra, una infrapolítica, tal vez. Al menos respecto a la literatura, la propuesta de Rascón Banda consistiría en ubicar lo literario en el contrabando que se escapa a la tarea de escribir, al deber escribir, como se evidencia al final del texto. Luego de que el narrador prometa “quemar todo lo que [escribió] en Santa Rosa” (pos. 356), que el guion cinematográfico sea rechazado porque éste es una traición al pueblo y una ofensa a “estos amigos, que van a ver [a Antonio Aguilar] a los palenques o […] espectáculos en ferias y rodeos” (pos. 356), y que la obra de teatro del narrador, Guerrero Negro, parezca tener un futuro prometedor en los círculos literarios del Distrito Federal, el narrador se dibuja a sí mismo escribiendo, exhibe como su proceso de escritura queda a solas frente a su deber y su deseo.
Para olvidarme de Santa Rosa y darle la vuelta a estas páginas de contrabando y traición, sólo me falta pasar a máquina la letra de los corridos que estoy oyendo, porque para el montaje de Guerrero Negro se necesitan, me dijo el director, cuando menos veintiún corridos de contrabando (pos. 358).
Por contrabando y traición, entonces, Contrabando es escrito. Esto es, hay una correspondencia entre los 23 apartados del texto de Rascón Banda y las 21 transcripciones de corridos que el narrador necesita para el montaje de su obra. Los otros dos apartados que no corresponden con las transcripciones son, respectivamente, la obra de teatro Guerrero Negro, y el guion cinematográfico, pues ambos también forman parte del texto. Contrabando, como entramado textual, exhibe su propia producción basada en un acto perpetuo de copia (extracción). Con todo esto, el texto mismo que leemos sería un apartado número 24, un numeral a manera de plusvalor, aunque quizá esta palabra sea deficiente para describirlo. El valor extra que Contrabando aporta está por encima y por debajo de la producción textual, como un número siempre en exponencial n, o un fantasma que a veces regresa, a veces se va, pero siempre persiste para un después.
Hay un cierto enigma que circula entorno a Diario de un narcotraficante de Ángelo Nacaveva y los detalles de su publicación. Al hecho de que el nombre de autor sea un pseudónimo, se agrega el carácter fundacional de la obra, como una de las notas que acompaña la edición de Kindle dice, el libro “es un hito en la escritura del tema, ya que fue el primero que lo abordó y aún hoy sigue habiendo pocas discrepancias al respecto” (pos. 2). Esto es, antes de Nacaveva, eso que hoy se conoce como narconovela, o narcoliteratura, no existía. Como texto fundacional, entonces, la novela cargaría con un concentrado de temas y motivos que aparecen en otros relatos de este género. No obstante, quizá la novela de Nacaveva sea sólo fundacional del género de la narcoliteratura en la medida en que los textos predecesores son completamente distintos a esta novela en la forma en que las “emociones fuertes” son narradas. A pesar de que la advertencia de autor anuncie “emociones fuertes,” esta novela traiciona su propia promesa.
Contada a manera de diario que va desde un día de abril en la década de los cincuenta, hasta septiembre del año venidero, la novela recupera las experiencias de Ángelo Nacaveva, un periodista que vive atosigado por el tedio y la rutina en Culiacán, Sinaloa. Un día, el narrador se dice a sí mismo, “no es posible que pase me vida entre el trabajo y las cuatro paredes de mi casa […] Necesito algo más fuerte” (pos. 54). Esa fuerza la encontrará al pedirle a su amigo Arturo que lo incluya en su nueva empresa, meterse de “gomero,” traficante de heroína. “Quisiera dedicarme a otra cosa, algo que en realidad se pueda hacer dinero, fácil y rápido” (198), le dice Ángelo a Arturo, pero la promesa de aventura y dinero rápido se desvanece. Nacaveva pronto se da cuenta de que la vida de gomero es como cualquier otra, hay que someterse “a una disciplina completa [se] debe ser obediente y todo” (pos. 259). Pronto incluso, el proyecto del diario se tambalea, pues “de los días anteriores, nada se ha reportado en este diario porque todo es rutinario” (pos. 31396). Por más que Nacaveva no lo quiera quiera, el tedio siempre lo alcanza, y aún así, sigue escribiendo.
¿Por qué Nacaveva se empeña en escribir su diario y convertirlo en novela? El diario es leído por diversos personajes en el relato. Para la mayoría de éstos el diario es genial y muchas veces las páginas escritas actúan a favor del narrador. No obstante, a cambio de escribirlo todo, es decir, a cambio de dar una versión global sobre el tráfico de drogas y “todos” sus matices, Nacaveva arriesga su vida, pues para escribir, primero hay que vivir, o eso sugiere el narrador. “Tú por hacer un libro eres capaz de todo” (pos. 5644), le dice Arturo a Nacaveva antes de que éste último emprenda una serie de malas decisiones que lo llevarán a caer preso del FBI, en California, para luego ser extraditado a México y volver en condición deplorable a Culiacán. Nacaveva termina, entonces, con pocas ganancias y algunas heridas, no obstante, conserva su vida y su diario. “¿Qué mayor riqueza quiero?,” (pos. 7481) se pregunta el narrador en las últimas páginas del relato. Diario de un narcotraficante sugiere, así, que la obsesión y manía que mueven a los adictos, y al tráfico de drogas, es análoga a la manía y la obsesión que impulsa al escritor a escribir, a vivir. Por otra parte, vida y escritura no necesariamente están encadenadas entre sí, pues Nacaveva mismo reconoce que a su diario se le escapan cosas, “cuántas cosas se me escapan. Es lo único que me puede de mi aventura” (pos. 7495). Esas experiencias no escritas, sin duda, son las que mejor resguardan la vida del narrador al tiempo que también dejan incompleto su relato. Como el enigma que circula a la novela, el relato guarda así otro misterio.
Notebook 6, as the entirety of the Grundrisse, seeks to describe what moves capital. The challenge of describing this movement is that capital has no subject, capital is better understood without subjects. Or at least this is what the first pages of Notebook 6 suggest. Early in the Notebook, Marx comments on different approaches to what machines do in the capitalist cycle. For instance, Marx quotes a fragment from the work of Thomas De Quincey. For the latter, “a machine as soon as its secret is known, will not sell for the labour produced, but for the labour producing… it will no longer be viewed as a cause equal to certain effects, but as an effect certainly reproducible by a known cause at a known cost” (559). While Marx does not refute this observation, it is ratter suggested that a machine, per se, can be a worker too. That is, since the price of the commodity is equal to the quantity of living labour, then, a machine is not only a non-human device, but the assemblage between worker and tool, and the other way around.
Machines are everywhere in capitalist production. One can argue that precisely the machine presupposes capitalism. No wonder why most of the landscapes of urban centers in Europe and elsewhere display machines at their center. Whatever is common is transformed by the machine, thus “in order to take over these works [what is common to the workers], capital does not create but rather takes over the accumulation and concentration of workers” (586 emphasis added). A machine, then, takes over what workers accumulate. Capitalist accumulation, from this perspective, is to take control, to establish domination on the things that workers accumulate. The machine does not accumulate, it takes over that accumulation. The concept of accumulation and concentration are, then, for Marx, are both “contained in the concept of capital —the concentration of many living labour capacities for one purpose” (590). Concentration, then, only exists for capital as living labour that accumulates for one single purpose. From this accumulation, as a presupposition to capitalist accumulation, does not have a single purpose, and is not something that necessarily is work oriented.
To work is something ambivalent. It both cancels potentials, but also perpetuates the chance to elude this capture. Since every person that “arrives to maturity […] may be viewed as a machine which it has cost 20 years of assiduous attention and the expenditure of considerable capital to construct” (615), then, one works not only to increase the income of the capitalist, but to preserve the social that nurtured us. A worker is a machine, or better, a body in a perpetuate becoming. As the worker is crisscrossed by this ambivalent becoming, so capital is too determined by a need to double all the time its process of production. Once in movement, capital, must present itself as consumable product, raw material and instrument of labour, it “posits itself ahead of itself in its various form” (675). Capital, then, is moved by a force that not only sucks its live out of labour and the worker’s accumulation, but by a machine that squeezes the present. This machine has a two sided mechanism, it must recover and control all that was previous to the present state of capitalist accumulation while also promising the endurance, improvement and grow of that which was controlled.
One of the main topics discussed in the Notebook 5 of the Grundrisse is the passage of transformation from the commune to the city. While the commune is, in a too simplified sense, a free gathering together, the city is a mandated and ruled gathering. While the commune “appears as a coming together, not as a being together, as a unification made up of independent subjects, landed proprietors, and not as a unity” (483), the city is the place of the sovereign, the walled community that hosts at its center the one who rules. While the distinction between state and stateless societies is important, Marx does not develop this in depth. For Marx land independence, or land appropriation and its usage, presupposes sovereignty and the figure of the sovereign. Something presupposes the nomos of the earth, so to speak. The commune escapes division, since “the land which cannot be divided if it is to serve as means of production in this specific form” (483).
To relate to the land without the necessity of a nomos, or a sovereign, Marx proposes that the individual proprietors refuse union. The fact that since the appropriation of the earth means the appropriation of the “natural conditions of labour […] as well as its workshop and repository of raw materials” (485), signals that the way we immediately relate to the earth presupposes a “relation of the earth […] always mediated through the occupation of the land and soil peacefully or violently, by the tribe, the commune in some more or less naturally arisen or already historically developed form” (485). This means that the first struggle of humankind is the strive for affirming live with and within a territory, a form of living that does not consider private property or private forms of working, but positive and affirmative gestures of existence and coexistence. While all this picture is idyllic, or utopian, the form of relationship that Marx is proposing to understand the organization of the commune signals a threshold where utopianism reaches its limit. Since no individual has any existence or life outside of the commune, because those who live in commune do not exist “for [themselves] except in the assembly of the commune members, their coming-together for common purposes” (486), then, the commune eludes the nomos, the state and its oppression, but it erases, in a way, individuality, difference. At the same time, the assembly of the commons, their coming-together, or movement towards each-other, announces the possibility of a commonality, of a commune, with individuals and groups, a pack a formation like the one of the nomads, for whom “what is in fact-appropriated and reproduced here is not the earth but the herd; but the earth is always used communally at each halting place” (491). The commune, then, is the project without plan that seeks social reproduction in an apotropaic way: eating what kills and haunts, while persisting and affirming existence.
The task in the times of Marx and today is to work and create the commons. The commons are the necessary presupposition of labour, of the land, for humankind to exist. At the same time, the commons are what humankind is yet to become, a plastic moment that is habitual. There is something magical about “appropriation,” of encountering oneself with an instrument, a tool, a body, something, that is so different and yet so keen with one strives for affirming oneself. While in the bourgeois world the worker sees the realization of their social existence by the way their skill is expressed by the production line, in the commune, skill has no name, but has still a presence. The skill is “what posits [the worker] as the owner of the instrument” (499), if we are all posited in front of our “instruments” as owners, then, “appropriation” has found a way to let something from its magic to flee capitalist territorialization. To be in front of big projects in a capitalist society reaffirms our oppression but also our chance for building the commons. Marx mentions that, when dealing with the construction of highways, for instance, capitalism faces a point of exhaustion, because building a highway escape what capitalism can do, it even exceeds what the state is able to do. Building for the multitude is always “a necessary use value for the commune, because the commune requires it at any price” (526). In a capitalist society surplus time and value to build a road exist, there are the materials, and costs, but without the “concentration” of the masses, the project dies. Concentration is defined by Marx as “always the addition of the part of labour capacity which each individual can employ on road building, apart from his particular work; but it is not only addition” (528 emphasis added). Concentration is an addition that is not only addition of labour. This addition is something that is heaping up in the way the workers present themselves in front of the project. Addition is a concentration of bodies, an assemblage, the surplus of the commons. While, of course, a road, or perhaps any project that requires the presence of the masses, is always what capitalism demands, and not what the commons need, the desire of the masses stays still always subaltern to whatever domination expects from them. Capitalism will always speculate with its constructions as a way of realizing value, while “living labour creates value” (543) in unexpected ways.
“Notebook 4” of the Grundrisse is, perhaps, the one that focus the most on the way capitalist production relies in “transforming labour,” or the ways into which labour is transformed. At the same time, this notebook is also about what some critics have identified as the backbone of capitalism, the general equivalent. Continuing with the way surplus value is produced, Marx states that one of the main ways to approach this is via “developing the nature of surplus value as the equivalent of the absolute or relative labour time mobilized by capital above and beyond necessary labour time” (385). With this, then, surplus value must always be placed in one side of an axis of equivalence. The other side of this axis is meant to be occupied by absolute or relative labour time. With this, then, surplus value appears to be as a mere addition of labour (absolute or relative). The problem with this, is that by force of equivalence, surplus value can only be equal to surplus labour. Since capitalist production presupposes a specific use of machinery by the bourgeoisie, and this use implies “the saving of necessary labour and the creating of surplus labour” (389), then, new capital will always be equal to the old capital plus a fraction of it [the old capital]. Capitalism only works when surplus meets surplus, and consequently, the division of labour is never a necessary attribute that labour comes naturally with: labour suffers an imposition for its division and its eventual conversion into surplus labour.
With not much surprise, as in the same Grundrisse it is already mentioned, wealth “is disposable time and nothing more” (397), since the time that can be completely thrown away is already producing surplus in all its forms, value, capital, and labour. At times, it seems that all the exercise and display of mathematical formulas is but trying to depict several forms of disguises, or mystifications, that capitalism requires. We see then that when it is written that “capital, as the positing surplus labour, is equally and in the same moment the positing and the not-positing of necessary labour; it exists only in so far as necessary labour both exists and does not exist” (401), this ambivalent existence of capital, that of being positing and not-positing, or existent and non-existent, is precisely what could be called a disguise, or a mystification. The very fact that capital exists only in the act of being placed in a position of ambivalence tells more about the fact that capital is always acting, performing a role in disguise as it is in the process of becoming something else. Capitalism, then, is a territorialization of becoming.
In “Notebook 4” there is also a topic later developed by Rosa Luxemburg, that of the limits of capitalism. Marx notes that there is a point after the different processes of circulation, production, and consumption have held sway in which capitalism becomes a barrier for itself, and “hence will drive towards its own suspension” (410). This suspension means that capitalism takes a step back only to eventually push forward its drive, to go “beyond [habitual] production” (413). The logic for Marx, then, is not that capital will wait for processes of crisis to expand, as Luxemburg will expand, but that capital in its highest points of development is when it “more appears as barrier to [its own] production —hence also to consumption— besides the other contradictions which make it appear as border some barrier to production and intercourse” (416). The logic is that capitalism, as with its axis of equivalences that only accepts in both sides different, but equalized, forms of surpluses, follows a drive for self-realization that demands “excess [that] it posits surplus labour, then, as the condition of the necessary, and surplus value as the limit of objectified labour, of value as such” (421). The only rule in town is to always demand an equivalence of excess. While it is emphatically mentioned that surplus value presupposes surplus labour, it happens otherwise when Marx explores the notion of “living labour.”
The realization of living labour is stated to be a process that “at the same time [realizes and then adds] the de-realization process of labour. It posits itself objectively, but it posits this, its objectivity, as its own not-being or as the being, of its not-being-of capital” (454). Consequently, it is not surplus value what presupposes surplus labour, and neither the other way around. What presupposes the exchanges and equivalences, the disguises, is living labour. When placed in front of capitalist production, living labour is territorialized (realized) and at the same time deterritorialized (de-realized). The process of deterritorialization of living labour is, by the same token, the process of becoming and of flight off capitalist production. Capitalism relies in something that is alien to it, something that is outside of it, something that carries the possibility of ending the never-ending spiral of accumulation or of repeating it. Living labour is a force of repetition, what haunts the production of surplus value, “the condition and presupposition of the becoming, of the arising, of capital presupposes precisely that it is not yet in being but merely in becoming” (459). Once capitalism has territorialized that becoming then the worker is negated from its products. But perhaps before it was different.
As “Notebook 4” closes, Marx elaborates on different modes of production that did not require the disposition of the worker’s labour and its product to guarantee social existence. Perhaps this part is the one that most strongly influenced further explorations on what communism could be. At the same time, one might wonder if the exploration of these past commons (common land, labour, time, etc.) should not necessarily be the core of the search for the commons. That is, perhaps, the commons are already outside of the past, outside of history, repeating in many different ways, all the time always becoming.
There is something in capitalism that not only relies on the way it affects and habituates the masses. While Marx famously stated that religion was the opium of the masses, capitalism, could also be said, relies on a psychotropic force. When describing how capitalists are directly affected by the time a worker consecrates to production, Marx notices that “the struggle for the ten hours bill […] proves that the capitalist likes nothing better than for him to squander his dosages of vital force as much as possible, without interruption” (294). The squander of dosages speaks volumes of the addictive relationship that capitalists have with the labour of workers. With not a lot of imagination one can picture capitalists as characters from The Wolf of Wall Street: bodies addicted to everything that excites them. In the Notebook 3, It is not the only time that Marx uses images that allude to addiction, or sickness. Marx compares labour “as the living source of virus” (296). Dosages and viruses are not necessarily contradictory in themselves. They are, in fact, tied by the idea of toxicity and addiction that both terms evoke.
The body of the addict lives and breathes that which addiction dictates it. If the capitalists are like addicts and “labour is the yeast thrown into it, which starts fermenting” (298), the capitalists need the liveliness in order to satisfy their thirst, their craves. With this, then, the whole process of production is a process that relies on live above all. What does, then, capital do? That is, if normally we associate capitalism with death, dispossession and destruction, why is it that the mogul addicts that feed the machine need so much of live? And more importantly, how is it that even consumption “which terminates neither in a void, nor in the mere subjectification of the objective, but which is, rather, again posited as an object” (300-301) still has some of the live that capitalism transformed? Perhaps a point of departure for understanding this is the fact that “production for unproductive consumption is quite as productive as that for productive consumption; always assuming that it produces or reproduces capital” (306). If capital, as in Notebook 2, is considered as something intrinsic to the way the body extends its power and its plan on something, then, capital is something unavoidable, something that is produced and reproduced at any times. The question, not new at all, is why does capital imply capitalism as a system to be easier to observe?
For capitalism, capital is something that must be preserved. Outside capitalism, if today we can possibly picture that, capital is something that sooner or later will stop working. That is, if capitalism acts as an addiction, capital is always a reactivation of withdrawal symptoms. As “the value of capital has preserved itself in the act of production, and [after it] now appears as a sum” (315), the addict too, after withdrawal sees the sum of further doses as the only target. Preservation at all costs is the slogan of capital in capitalism, like euphoria or dysphoria for the addict. Form this it is visible that for the sake of preserving oneself, the worker gives life to a system that extracts affect from it. Labour is moved, then, by a process of addition, while capitalism is moved by a process of addiction. Addition is that which labour do as living labour, as something that “adds a new amount of labour; however, it is not this quantitative addition which preserves the amount of already objectified labour, but rather its quality as living labour, the fact that it relates as labour to the use values in which the previous labour exists” (363). While labour adds, capitalism dosages that addition turning it into addiction. The distinction between these two, addition and addiction, is blurry, and perhaps today impossible to tell.
There is something special about money. The problem of money is that in itself it is something very abstract but also an object whose activity happens almost everywhere and in many different forms. Money is another commodity, but it is for certain that it is “the god among commodities” (221). The “Notebook 2”of the Grundrisse tries to explain money in capitalists societies. This explanation not only focuses in the many different ways that money is used, but also in the “particular” and specific way that makes money so special for capitalism. If money, as we read in the first pages of the notebook is so special, it is firstly because its possession “places [us] in exactly the same relationship towards wealth as the philosopher’s stone would towards science” (222). That is, money is responsible for placing the subject in the direction of what the subject thinks they want. Without surprise, then, money triggers greed “a particular form of drive” (222), that accelerates the speed travelled by the subject who approaches the object of their desires. To be against money, in capitalism, is to be against oneself, because only money can approach what we want and desire to us.
At the same time that money is the oil that secures the function of the capitalist machine of exchanges and exploitation, money is also a scurrilous thing. While money is key to the production and accumulation of wealth, money cannot fulfill these duties on its own. “One is the richer the more of it [money] one possesses, and the only important process, for the individual as well as the nation is, to pile it up” (230). Money could easily be accumulated, because to accumulate is to “step back or outside of circulation” (230). But this has its risks. To display abundance and extraordinary wealth hoarding, or expense, reduces the way money circulates, and therefore, it reduces the way money is valued. To accumulate money is not based on a random greed-guided increase, but in a regulated competition because accumulation is completely dependent on circulation. If money has a close relationship to capital, then, as capital itself, money must be in constant movement, the moments it is accumulated it happens as a “wholly secret relation with the individual” (230). Of course, only sanctioned by society is the wealth (secret or not) of the individual valorized.
Money is strictly tied to capital production because money, as a system, is the one that guarantees equality and freedom at the moment of exchange. The problem of the ideas of freedom and equality, that money promises, is that these two features soon turn out to be “inequality and unfreedom” (249). In other words, to be part of the system of capitalist exchange one must always be aware that as simple as an exchange might be, that simplicity is not a simplified relationship. In an exchange relationship an individual is not merely exchanging with another, but their exchange actually “expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand” (265). This is why the money inside of ones pocket is never the same money as the one that is in the banks, or speculated in the stock market. What the relationship of money and capital problematizes is the fact that certain activities are the same and exchangeable at the same time that they are different and alien to each-other. In this landscape, the world market appears as an always under construction edifice of an inside that faces its own reflection repetitively. The world market is “not only the internal market [of a country] in relation to all foreign markets existing outside it, but at the same time the internal market of all foreign markets as, in turn, components of the home market” (280). As it is difficult to determine the difference between money and capital in capitalism, so it is to determine the inside-outside relationship that the idea of world market suggests.
As monstruous as this could look, the shaping and reshaping of capitalist society requires not only money and commodities in exchange between free individuals. What is missing the picture depicted so far by Marx is the presence of those who produce, the workers, bodies without value but with an almost infinite capacity to dispose their own labour: free as birds subjects.
What follows are a series of posts on Karl Marx’s Grundrisse.
“Introduction” and “Notebook I”
Perhaps the main topic of the notebooks that today we can call Grundrisse, by Karl Marx, is production. In fact the “Introduction” to the rest of the notebooks focuses on production overall. The question that starts these notebooks is: is production possible without a social structure that presupposes the exchange within individuals? That is to say, if exchange, production, circulation and the other faces of economy relay on capital’s sway. Marx states that “whenever we speak of production, then, what is meant is always production at a definite stage of social development —production by social individuals” (85). This means that whatever we perceive as individual production, the latter relies on a social production that presupposes it. More importantly, production is not something a part, or a step, in the way political economy works. It is then, that Marx states that everything that is related to production “requires an instrument [but not necessarily a machine] […] the instrument could be the body itself” (85). Thus, all human activity, in a way, is but a form of production. Production is everywhere and it can hardly be stopped, at best production is reshaped, dominated, controlled and triggered towards something that is not necessarily production’s target.
In the “Introduction” to the Grundrisse there is an invitation to rethink production. Marx, after this invitation, proposes to start thinking production through money. If all possession presupposes an act of power, then, the question is to determine how that power was stablished. In a very simple term, from today’s perspective, one can think, why is it that money is so powerful? Why is it that we do things without acknowledging the dangers that might come afterwards? The problem of money, in fact, puts at stake what is really what value tells us when we buy, exchange, or produce things. What is at stake, then, in the first notebook of the Grundrisse is to determine how is it that value is produce and how is it that we all embrace it.
For Marx all value is to be examined through labour time. A coin, or money, is but accumulated labour. That is, that “what determines value is not the amount of labour time incorporated in products, but rather the amount of labour time necessary at a given moment” (135). It could be argued, then, that value is but an abstraction, something that happened in the past but still, somehow, haunt us until today. The problem is now to examine why is money so special, why is it that money can serve as a third party that exchanges what was produced in another time?, why can money perpetuate the dead, or past, labour?
When we buy things, we don’t really buy them. Perhaps this is obvious for anyone who reads this post, but what Marx proposed at the end of XIX century is that commodities (merchandises) are but values when they faced a process of exchange. “All commodifies are perishable money; money is the imperishable commodity” (149). What Marx means when he stated the latter is that perhaps what is at stake when buying and selling commodities in the bourgeois system is the reaffirmation of a third party. Everything that cannot be turned into money cannot be a commodity. A commodity, then, carries within a potential to become money and the other way around. Of course, this does not mean that money resolves all the processes that are part of production. That is to say, that money itself does not resolve the problems of circulation or distribution of merchandises.
What is really at stake with money is another thing, not only the way exchanges are made. If for Marx are value is but an abstraction, and that abstraction comes directly from a head (144), whose head is that? That is, who is abstracting value for everyone else? Marx stablishes that the comparison between merchandises consist in a process of comparison, and this process creates money. Then, this “comparison, which the head accomplishes in one stroke, can be achieved in reality only in a delimited sphere by needs, and only in successive steps” (144). Thus, there seems to be a “head” that presupposes all general exchange. That head, a head of an unknown person, gets whatever it wants in a single stroke, a dull, or hard, blow. The head that presupposes value hits hard. This characteristic, then, is pure affect. Consequently, whoever experiences this hard blow has but no other choice but to replicate the first blow of the aforementioned thinking head. Soon, all idea of the general equivalent seems to be but the habituation of that single stroke, or a process that happens “little by little” (144) in the formation of capitalist society.
Freedom of choice is not new for neoliberalism but, as Brian Massumi argues in The Power at the End of the Economy (2015), it is its main feature. It is its “magic touch guided by the principle of competition” (1). The idea of the Market, at least for modernity, is tied to the way freedom of choice has been developed as a mechanism connected to the way we rationalize our everyday lives. We choose our future, as much as we choose our present and past. What matters is that our decision stands as a solid bridge that brings together what we desire and what we want. The problem with all this, as Massumi argues, is that every rationalized decision is haunted by affect. The market, or markets, these days is (are) rational only in appearance. Today, markets “react more like mood rings than self-steering wheels, the affective factor becomes increasingly impossible to factor out” (2). This means that as late Michel Foucault argued the invisible hand of the market seems to be connecting the world in a “spontaneous synthesis,” therefore “the positive synthesis of market conditions occurs immanently to the economic field” (3). The end of the Economy, for Massumi, is when “what is most intensely individual is at the same time most wide-rangingly social” (4) and at the same time, when the invisible hand seems to be suffering from a “degenerative motor disease” (5). Power, at least in its state form, is less than a invisible hand these days, but also more than a phantasmatic prothesis. Power is working in the “infra-individual” and every infra-level of action strikes strongly at a macro level.
The panorama that Massumi describes for power after the end of economy, that is, once there is not outside of capitalism, is closer to the way the weather behaves. The individual, then, as part of the landscape is like a mountain, or any other geographical accident that both increases or reduces the strength of the weather. The power of the individual, however, is not dictated by its rational ability of choosing, it is determined by its “nonconsciousness” since this “becomes the key economic actor” (17). From that we have not only a disempowered individual but a radical change in the individual. Autonomy stops being a feature of the individual and “what is now autonomous is its decision” (19). We like doing things that are done by something through and with us. The personal vanishes and we are in an infra-desert of experience. This brave new world focus on “self-interest” which consist in making and keeping tight a “strict equation between life satisfaction and rational calculus of choice” (23). By no means this should comfort us. Our current state is merely a state that persist in self-satisfaction or its extended deferral at all levels: pleasure, pain, gain, success, sadness, depression, death, rush and so on. We have, as neoliberalist homo oeconomicus “a system in which [we] owe the positive nature of [our] calculation precisely to what eludes [our] calculation” (36). We can calculate all that par excellence eludes calculus; we can measure all that is unmeasurable. And, of course, the problem is that these operations would never end well.
Rationality created its traps and captured affect. One is free to choose its deferral of death. While all of this seems extremely pessimistic, for Massumi, it also means that different ways of struggle are liberated. Perhaps, in a same formula as the one evoked by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire (2000), The Power at the End of the Economy suggests that what is at stake is abandon decision and supplant its rational features by an affective sympathy. That is, before placing reason at the top of our priorities, affect should dismantle hierarchies and recreating old paradigms. If capitalism has persisted for so long it is, for Massumi, because it has focused, wrongly, the importance of things in their quantity and quantification and not in its qualities and its qualifications. Life always will create, via events, a surplus. “Capitalism is the process of converting qualitative surplus value of life into quantifiable surplus value” (77), what is at stake with this is that there must be a way to stop converting the surplus value of life, manifested in experience, into quantifiable things, into a calculus that blindly gives answers. While Massumi offers a possible solution in a tone closer to Empire (as mentioned before), it is not clear enough how affect, or ontopower, would simply infect all common heroes —the anonymous masses that for Massumi have all the potential and imagination to make a change in the world— it is for sure important keep in mind that there is a difference between the qualitative surplus value of life and the quantitative capitalist surplus value. The first one is always a remainder, an excess, an uncountable, the second one is merely a false calculation, a persuasive trap. At the same time, if there is no economy, once affect became immanent, how would we learn of to differentiate again between surplus values without choosing?
