Cultural Materialism and Fixed Labor Power

Interview with STEPHEN SHAPIRO - by EMANUELE LEONARDI

You are currently working - from a Marxian perspective - on notions such as fixed labour power and cultural materialism. Could you please explain what are the key features of such concepts? how they constitutively relate with the education system and the increasingly crucial role played by knowledge in the context of contemporary processes of production?

Cultural materialism is the study of the relationship between social experience, as historically shaped by the organization of production, and cultural expression, be it textual, visual, sonic, or behavioral. Closely associated with Raymond Williams (1921-88), cultural materialism broadly seeks to surpass the unhelpful rigidities of base-superstructure or cultural reflection theory, which even Engels disparaged.

The current moment has seen the renewed debate over tactics between those left family members, anarchists and marxists. Within these discussions, there has also been the return to reading Marx. David Harvey has encouraged us to go beyond the necessary study of Capital volume 1 to include the equally necessary study of Capital’s published volumes 2 and 3. There we discover that Marx has left unsaid a category that ought to be present: fixed labor-power. Marx indicates the difference between fix and fluid (circulating) means of production and mentions fluid labor-power. But for such a dialectical thinker, he unusually does not mention fixed labor-power.

The category of fixed labor-power covers everything that is often called social reproduction. Fixed labor-power includes both the consumption fund, all the materials that labor needs, but which capitalists do not provide, to ensure their human survival (food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, and educational training), and everything that sculpts class subjectivity, such as the social infrastructures responsible for the composition and decomposition of class solidarity and subordination.

Harvey has written incisively on the “spatial fix” involving the fixed means of production. We now need to do likewise with the “cultural fix” of fixed labor-power. One way to imagine this concept is by comparison with the fixed capital of the built spatial environment. We might say that the expectations of class position and subjectivity are a socially constructed, built cultural environment. How can we theorize the transformation of a former cultural fix in a time of developmental crisis? One possibility would be to reconsider the difference between ownership and rent. Marx’s long section on rent in volume 3 needs to be read as not solely referring to agricultural production, but to include all those realms where we do not own the grounds, as it were. The idea of “renting” the built social-cultural environment might be a useful way of conceptualizing a range of topics, from how we inhabit, but do not control, semiotic codes to the manifold subjectivities that institutions, including educational ones, deliver through moments of exchange. 

Fixed labour power seems to directly refer to the working classes' production of subjectivity. More specifically, could you explain how it is related to the transformation of contemporary capitalism and the crisis of university?

The idea of fixed labor-power sees culture as crucial to class constellations and relationally intertwined with all the other components within the circulation of capital. Education belongs within this circuit in at least two main ways. Firstly, Marx makes clear that training is as much a socially necessary labor requirement as food, housing, and health. But as with these, capitalists prefer to externalize the cost of education, and they typically do so by requiring either the public State or the private individual to bear the cost of education. In the current regime of accumulation, neoliberal capital has a larger goal of weakening the public State and seeks to mainly gain the educational inputs from individuals. From the 1970s onward, capital has weakened the position of the US-EU working-class, the groups that have looked to the public State to provide education and training. Now capitalists feel “global” and they have moved to expropriate the generationally accrued wealth of the US-EU middle-classes. In short, the middle-classes are beginning to realize that their status has not been owned, it is not fixed, but is being made fluid as the rental price of inclusion within this class strata is increasing and its expected profitability is vanishing. The current generation is being made to go into debt as they pay more for education that no longer protects against precariousness and delivers less life stability.

The loss of a bourgeois cultural fix is perhaps what has motivated fascination with certain topics like immaterial labor and emotional capital. Yet the point is not just that emotional instruments have become more important within service sector economies, but that the discussion of so-called immaterial labor is itself evidence of the ongoing experience and recognition from within about the ongoing decomposition of the Western middle-class, the strata that has always defined its civil/bourgeois society with reference to their emotional and social characteristics.

From a general World-Ecology perspective, social issue always present environmental dimensions, and vice versa. How do you think the crisis of universities (e.g. the student loan bubble, or the missed encounter between academic degrees and upward social mobility) affects the way human and extra-human natures interact at a global scale? Conversely, how do you see ecological crises impacting on our experience as cognitive workers?

By implementing the idea of fixed labor-power, we perceive that class and value relations are shaped by a stereogenic torus of fixed means of production, fixed labor-power, fluid means of production, and fluid labor-power. If capital works through a particular ecological regime, then this social form is inextricably bound within a cultural regime as well. The two cannot be usefully separated for long within any analysis of one or the other. If we are desperately increasing the depletion of the ecological environment due to increasing costs of resource extraction, this is linked to the depletion of a certain socio-cultural environment as a result of increasing costs of gaining training and educational credentials. The entire problem of ecological degradation has to be considered as contoured within the two-fold torus described above that likewise degrades older cultural fixes of class status. Capitalism uses similar ecological and educational tactics. The conditions that make it acceptable to cut down rainforests are the same ones that justify the exploitation of peoples, here and abroad.

Universities are currently traversed by a plurality of struggles whose aim is the re-appropriation of the means by which knowledge is created, transmitted, and valorized. In a sense, Occupy Wall St. directly interrogates the current institutional setting of educational institutions. What are your impressions about the social movements that have individuated in the demise of universities their privileged struggle terrain? 

Occupy Wall Street (2011) was a dandelion movement. It should not ultimately be judged on its momentary successes or failure, but how its seeds of discontent will float to root elsewhere, often in unpredictable places and in unpredictable ways. My own feeling is that we building up to a something like a May 1968 moment. This event will share some of that earlier one’s failures, especially the renewed critique of education as a terrain of class struggle. Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy have it right in their recent The Crisis of Neoliberalism (Harvard UP, 2011). They argue that the middle classes may be beginning to realign their affiliation away from allegiance to haute capitalists and towards the working class. Such a turn occurred during the 1930s and 40s. Occupy’s fusion of middle-class university students, raw with frustration at the betrayal of the class aspirations, and laboring class unions perfectly illustrates the moment’s ongoing realignment of class relations. Those within the university need to realize that their fate is not always to become the accomplices to dirty deeds done by those in clean business suits. Instead, it might be to form what Michael Denning calls a cultural front that works with the working-class. An older keyword for this was “commitment.” This might seem too musty today. Let us momentarily call it realignment and see where we can go from here.

 Mark Fisher has often been quoted for his argument about “capitalist realism.” He says that, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” Perhaps. But we might also say that “end times” cultural productions are not the absence of cultural work, but the transistor through which the middle classes imagine historical phase-change and the shifting composition of social alignments. For too long we have trained ourselves to speak a syntax of cultural pessimism. Now is the time to risk optimism. As Adlai Stevenson said in 1954, “Eggheads of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your yolks.”

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Stephen Shapiro is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the Universuty of Warwick (UK). He is also an activist in the British anti-austerity movements. His research focuses on cultural materialism, Marxist theory, and critical literary studies. Amingst his recent publications: How to Read Marx's Capital, (London: Pluto, 2008); The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System, (University Park: Penn State Press, 2008); The Wire: Race, Class, and Genre (edited with Liam Kennedy. Ann Arbor: Michigan UP, 2012.