Anti-hero of labor

Despite having plenty of Carnegies, capital has never had a Stakhanov.  And it never will, for it cannot.


There are heroes of Labor and there are those who heroically put up with laboring.  But capital has no hero of labor, for there is no subject of labor.  [See: "Labour capacity has appropriated for itself only the subjective conditions of necessary labour -- the means of subsistence for actively producing labour capacity, i.e. for its reproduction as mere labour capacity separated from the conditions of its realization -- and it has posited these conditions themselves as things, values, which confront it in an alien, commanding personification."  Not only does "labour capacity" (read: those who labor) only appropriate for itself (a rather key qualification in the subject-side of things) "subjective conditions", it then posits those conditions, materially and perspectivally, as a set of hostile objects and conditions.]  It just wraps gaudier sheets and sharper fences around its stupid, busy vacancy.  Nations, comportments, types, allegiances, parties, teams.  Class is at once the dodging of this (the declaration of a common identity that needs to "develop" itself) and the threat of mass deixis, a material pointing toward this incoherence, via the act of collective seizure of what surrounds, protects, and produces it.  And that process, of seizing and pointing, is not a gathering of common subjects.


If capital slept, it would toss and turn over this, but it does not sleep and it does not worry.  Neither do we.  All the more hollow a core to crack into view, when historical projects come to the end of their lines, when programs go to shit, when battles go nowhere.  It is not our job to provide capital with the keystone essence that it could not provide.


For like capital, communism begins from and turns on a negative anthropology.  The difference is that we see no point in denying this.  Better to learn to make of the given something than to rummage around for what once may have been.


When those who set out across land come to an ocean, after miles of textured land, thickets, groves, and plateaus, they often build right there, on the edge of that huge shifting void, barred from the land but with the promise of crossing and an idea of arrivals from places that couldn't yet be found or mapped.  A notion that declares a massive nothing yet which, in matter and fact, is always busy, generative, dangerous, never pristine or unused.  Not an outside but the premise of transfer.  Because, at the end of it, even continents are islands.


So too do we, sprained and dusty, making our home next to this terrible emptiness whose wind we've sensed for a long while, that only now is coming into to view.