Rethinking Marxism

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Subjectivity, Class, and Marx's “Forms of the

Commune”

Jack Amariglio

To cite this article: Jack Amariglio (2010) Subjectivity, Class, and Marx's “Forms of the
Commune”, Rethinking Marxism, 22:3, 329-344, DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2010.490357

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RETHINKING MARXISM VOLUME 22 NUMBER 3 (JULY 2010)

Subjectivity, Class, and Marx’s

‘‘Forms of the Commune’’

Jack Amariglio

Forms of subjectivity are implied by the concepts of ‘‘direct producer’’ and

‘‘appropriator of surplus labor’’ in Marxian class theory. The section of Marx’s
Grundrisse that discusses ‘‘forms that precede capitalist production’’ elaborates a
typology of ‘‘forms of the commune.’’ Original, Asiatic, and Germanic forms of the
commune share a fundamental communal class process. These forms of the commune
differ in how variations of the ‘‘primitive’’ commune (based upon kinship/clan rules)
or of the ‘‘individual’’ (who performs and appropriates surplus labor only as a kin/
clan/commune member) appear as direct producers and/or appropriators. Communal
appropriation occurs even when the appropriators, such as Germanic heads of
households or Asiatic ‘‘despots,’’ extract surplus as ‘‘representations’’ of the ‘‘unity’’
of the clan/commune. This article argues that in Marx’s later writings, all manner of
concepts of individuality and collectivity/communality are produced by Marx to
determine and differentiate class processes.

Key Words: Class, Subjectivity, Commune, Grundrisse, Individuals

How do conceptions of subjectivity help fill the space of a central Marxian concept,
that of class, as it is specified in Marxian traditions of class discourse? This question
guides my journey through that part of Marx’s notebooks, the Grundrisse, that treats
what he called ‘‘forms of the commune.’’ Bringing this question together with Marx’s
discussion, I seek to show that Marx was flexible, in a disciplined and focused way, in
describing how various forms of human subjectivity could transform the meaning and
possibilities for an array of distinct class processes and the positions that they make
possible. In this paper, I deal with several familiar concepts of subjectivity that can
occupy and overdetermine the discursive space of class within the type of Marxian
class analysis first put forth by Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff in their
pathbreaking Knowledge and Class (1987).1 I stick mainly to the categories of class
and fundamental class process produced within the Marxism affiliated with Resnick
and Wolff, and what I offer below is intended as a friendly addendum to this kind of
class theory. My viewpoint of how subjectivity concepts are crucial to diverse readings

1. For my appraisal of Resnick and Wolff’s immense contribution to Marxian theory, see my
foreword to their New Departures in Marxian Theory (2006). For a similar judgment, see Norton
(2001, 23).

ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/10/030329-16

– 2010 Association for Economic and Social Analysis
DOI: 10.1080/08935696.2010.490357
330 AMARIGLIO

of class discourse draws directly on Marx’s writings about the discursivity of class and
his use of various forms of subjectivity*/in particular, the individual and the
collective/communal*/that have a long-standing prominence in Western social
thought.2
Marxian concepts of class and the (fundamental) class process have as one of their
discursive conditions of existence concepts of the ‘‘direct producer’’ and the
‘‘appropriator of surplus labor.’’ These are, in my view, designations for (eco-
nomic/class) subject positions. What subjectivities are implied in the Grundrisse?
In this text, Marx avers that forms of social life that may appear quintessentially,
irreparably divided and individuated are, instead, communal. Within some forms of
the commune, the direct producer and first appropriator may appear to be an
individual (as head of household, for example), but Marx treats this apparent
individual appropriation as carried out by the commune and rarely, if ever,
‘‘individually.’’ In my gloss on Marx’s presentation, I consider two poles in modern
notions of subjectivity: individuality and communality (or collectivity). I look at how
the concept of class is made ready for action by concepts of the individual or of the
commune/collective as direct producer and/or appropriator.3 But there are innumer-
able concrete ways of conceiving of individuals and collectives as subjects for class.
In the history of ideas, Marx is prolific in producing alternative concepts of
individuality and collectivity and using them as raw material in working up concepts
of class or their close relations (e.g., notions of property ownership), and perhaps he
does this best in the section of the Grundrisse that pertains to ‘‘forms of the
commune.’’
My reading of Marx’s ‘‘forms of the commune’’ highlights certain ideas. First, Marx
is describing ‘‘original,’’ Germanic, Asiatic, and ancient forms of the commune, and
not distinct modes of production or different class processes. Second, these
alternative forms of the commune can each be the subject that fills conceptual
spaces of the direct producer and the appropriator of surplus labor. This gives rise to
my position that what Marxists have termed ‘‘primitive communism’’ comes in a
variety of forms, all of which, though, contain a communal class process as the

2. For readers who know my past work, it may come as a shock that the forms of subjectivity I
introduce here are excessively narrow, conventional to mainstream discourses of subjectivity,
prestructuralist, and pre-postmodern. Perhaps most surprising may be the complete exclusion of
the Althusserian-inspired ‘‘decentered subject’’ about which I have written at length in earlier
articles and books (e.g., Ruccio and Amariglio 2003). I am intrigued by Marx’s assertion in part 1
of Theories of Surplus Value (1969, 408/9) that subjective decentering, or the splitting of the
self into two or more contending parts, is a main feature of a modern, commodity-producing,
capitalist society in which the unity of subjects is primarily accidental and separation is the living
norm for capitalism’s subjects.
3. I see my essay as a companion piece to the fine article by Serap Kayatekin and S. Charusheela
on feudal subjectivities. Kayatekin and Charusheela state that a chief goal of their article is to
‘‘ask how subjectivity is partly an effect of the class process and similarly how class is one of the
effects reproduced and rearticulated by subjectivity’’ (2004, 380). They regard their analysis as
largely incorporating ‘‘culture and subjectivity into the definition of feudal class processes’’
(382). I share with Kayatekin and Charusheela the desire to rework basic conceptions of
particular class processes by starting with types of subjectivity not usually introduced into class
positions of direct producer and/or appropriator.
 COMMONS AND COMMUNES 331

dominant, fundamental class process. Third, each commune contains distinct forms
of individual subjectivity in production that do not (for Marx) suggest that
some noncommunal fundamental class process is predominantly taking place.
The existence of some kinds of ‘‘individuality’’ does not imply the absence of the
‘‘collective’’ subject as the direct producer and appropriator.
For example, while in the Germanic form of the commune, independent households
may be the direct producers, and the patriarch may appear as the ‘‘appropriator,’’
Marx contends that these households and their legendary collective ‘‘assembly’’ are
constituted as communal bodies. Insofar as the performance and appropriation of
surplus labor occur within and by these communal bodies, even this most independent
form of production*/what others call ‘‘peasant household production’’*/is rendered
by Marx as communal production and appropriation. In this example, as with the
Asiatic form, the commune is the direct producer and appropriator of surplus labor.

Forms of the Commune

In his only sustained theoretical treatment of early socioeconomic life, Marx produces
an analysis of continuity and rupture based on the premise of an ‘‘original commune.’’
While others read this section of the Grundrisse as demonstrating various paths of
transition out of ‘‘primitive communism’’ and, therefore, specifying precapitalist
modes of production as an advance over this original commune, I believe there is
little to indicate that Marx’s main preoccupation here was the formation of class and
state from classless and stateless communism. Instead, class and state, or at least
class processes and centralized/concentrated political organization, are always/
already parts of the different forms that the commune may take during its longue
durée in precapitalist history.
Marx names different forms of the commune: ‘‘original,’’ Asiatic, ancient,
Germanic, and Slavonic, though this last category is not given any specificity. While
the context of his discussion is, as Marx explains, the historically logical process
whereby the ‘‘free laborer,’’ on one hand, and ‘‘capital,’’ on the other, come to face
each other, but are also dialectically connected, as relatively separate ‘‘objective’’
entities, the narrative of changing life in communes highlights the historical
peculiarity of the most recent phase, capitalism, in which productive laborers are
propertyless, ‘‘free,’’ and hence identified as isolated individuals rather than clan,
family, or community members. Necessary and surplus labor are not analyzed in each
variation of the commune (one exception occurs in his comments on surplus labor
time in ancient Rome [Marx 1973, 476]). Instead, Marx elaborates forms of property
and, less so, forms of the labor process that were extant in communal life. Marx
asserts that it is only through many transformations and finally the breakdown of
communal bonds that the alienation of the individual worker from his or her
conditions of production occurs, predicated upon the separation of this individual
from clan/commune ties.
Marx’s presentation of forms of the commune is undertaken to show that there
were diverse paths along which ‘‘individuals’’ treated the ‘‘natural conditions of
labor’’ as their private property. Conversely, Marx claims that these diverse forms of
332 AMARIGLIO

proprietorship correspond to variations in the basic nature of the commune. What is

striking, given the attention Marx pays elsewhere in the Grundrisse to occasions in
which necessary and surplus labor exist and assume a variety of forms*/they may
even disappear! (see Marx 1976, 525/33, 604/10, 705/6)*/is that he does not trace
within the ‘‘logical’’ movement from one variant of the commune to another
any change in the prevailing mode of performing/appropriating surplus labor. No
supersession of what can be understood as a ‘‘communal’’ form of performing and
appropriating surplus labor occurs within Marx’s story though all the following
transform during the commune’s historical development: forms of property;
different subjectivities; forms of the labor process; political relations among
commune members; unique geographical and climatic conditions; a variety of social
sites, such as family, clan, tribe, or community; and different degrees of the social
division of labor. These can all be seen as so many different conditions of existence
of the fundamental communal class process. But while these changes happen, at no
point do they amount to transcendence of communism. The overdetermination of
the fundamental communal class process by these manifold nonclass processes and
their transformations never amount to class-based transition, though they imply
immense changes and differentiations that matter deeply in the lives of commune
members.
Marx recounts the many ‘‘nice’’ and not-so-nice ways that communism can come
into this world. Communism is not distorted, for example, when there is despotism
(as his analysis of the Asiatic form of the commune shows), but, rather, it is
fallacious to assume that the communal class process must line up with other
processes of inclusion and empowerment of commune members. Marx deromanti-
cizes communist class processes at least insofar as they imply, necessarily, any other
kind of social and political life. Marx’s dedication to a widely defined communism
that might eventually heal the wounds by applying communal salve to each bleeding
pore in the body of capitalism required additional commitments and struggles. In his
description of forms of the commune, there are some that are more ‘‘democratic’’
(Germanic) than others (Asiatic), but they are communism, in economic class terms,
nonetheless.
In the section on forms of the commune, Marx discusses the commune primarily in
terms of social relations of kinship/clan. The ability of laborers to maintain themselves
within early communism as independent, interrelated proprietors/possessors de-
pended on their inscription within kin/clan networks and on the reproduction of the
clan. Alternative forms of the commune produce differences in how laborers appear as
either co-possessors or independent proprietors. In the ‘‘original’’ commune, laborers
‘‘relate naively’’ to the natural conditions of labor, here predominantly land, ‘‘as the
property of the community’’ so that ‘‘each individual conducts himself only as a link, as
a member of this community as proprietor or possessor’’ (1973, 472). The original
commune is based on ‘‘the family, and the family extended as a clan or through
intermarriage between families, or combinations of clans’’ (472). Thus, the clan
community ‘‘appears not as the result of, but as a presupposition for the communal
appropriation (temporary) and utilization of land’’ (472). Since in the ‘‘original’’
commune, the unity of the clan community is the result of ‘‘the communality of blood,
 COMMONS AND COMMUNES 333

language, customs,’’ the commune comes to represent itself, subjectively, as a unity

in which proprietary rights reside.
In this form of the commune, surplus labor performed predominantly on communal
land is appropriated by the entire clan. Marx does not privilege the idea that the
direct producer of surplus is an individuated, laboring subjective entity over a
subjectivity in which, or through which, the commune/clan is the unity to which the
term direct producer can be applied. The notion of a direct producer, or worker, is
seen as a historical product. As he says, ‘‘the positing of the individual as a worker,
in this nakedness, is itself a product of history’’ (472).
When Marx turns to the ‘‘Germanic’’ form of the commune, then we encounter
laborers as independent proprietors, something approaching the ‘‘Crusoeism’’ of the
‘‘free association of men’’ that Marx imagines in the first chapter of Capital (1976,
171). Yet, in the Grundrisse, these laborers/proprietors are first and foremost
members of a clan/commune, and it is only by virtue of that membership that they
attain such independence and their claim to ‘‘ownership’’ of their conditions of
production and reproduction. Marx distinguishes the independence and proprietor-
ship*/the putative freedom*/of laborers when the commune is mostly a thing of the
past from the circumstance in which physical, geographical, and ideological
separation, mostly by family, occasions the appearance and reproduction of the
community itself.
The segmentation of the clan into distinct family units does not imply collapse of
the commune, nor does it imply different, noncommunal forms of appropriation of
surplus labor. To the contrary, it is the kinship principle, in Marx’s discussion, that
permits separation in the first place, and it is that principle in practice that
guarantees an agent’s ability to ‘‘individually’’ appropriate, and never for ‘‘himself’’
(Marx considers the historic Germanic commune from the standpoint of patriarchy, in
which the ‘‘head of the household’’ is the reigning male figure) but on behalf of his
family. This last point helps us understand why Marx insists on characterizing
Germanic sociality as a form of the commune and not as a noncommunal ‘‘mode of
production.’’ For Marx, the male head of household within the Germanic form is one
representation of the commune/clan, and it is solely as the representation of the
clan’s unity*/realized in the allegedly ‘‘democratic’’ assembly of male patri-
archs*/that the householder and his family are entitled to appropriation of their
own surplus.
There is unfortunate ambiguity in Marx’s discussion of individuality within the
Germanic form of the commune, as he toggles between family and male head of
household as the prevailing subject of production/appropriation. This has given rise
to the misattribution of surplus appropriation to a particular type of individual
producer (a male peasant, say) instead of the family unit, deeply embedded in
communality. I don’t think the Grundrisse, though, supports the notion of individual
male heads of families appropriating ‘‘on their own.’’ Instead, Marx implies that
heads of households do not achieve ‘‘self-exploitation’’ of their ‘‘own’’ surplus, nor
do they additionally exploit, according to a different class process, other family
members. While the history of patriarchy involves all manner of violence against
subjugated family members, in Marx’s description of the Germanic commune,
334 AMARIGLIO

appropriation is a family affair, and family is a molecule of the self-representation

and existence of the commune.4
At a different pole, Marx discusses the ‘‘Asiatic’’ form of the commune, based upon
his reading of ‘‘despotic’’ empires that he believed reigned at different points of
especially Chinese and Indian history. (I leave aside here the literature on so-called
oriental despotism and the Asiatic mode of production, though Marx’s writings in the
Grundrisse and elsewhere are very much at the center of disputes and have been
lambasted for their ‘‘orientalism.’’)
Marx places the Asiatic form of the commune closer to the ‘‘original’’ commune
than the Germanic. What distinguishes the Asiatic commune from ‘‘original’’
communism is that, in the Asiatic commune, the cohesion of the commune is
represented by a ‘‘comprehensive unity’’ that often takes the form of a despot who,
Marx claims, is seen by the members of the commune*/organized in village
communities*/either as the ‘‘father of the many communities’’ (473) or as an
intermediary for an ‘‘imagined clan-being, the god’’ (473). In terms of proprietorship,
Marx says this ‘‘higher unity’’ represented in and by the person/body of the despot
‘‘appears as the higher proprietor or as the sole proprietor, the real communities
hence only as hereditary possessors’’ (472/3). Yet, Marx unequivocally states that it is
the clan and the existence of communal property that is represented by the despot.
The ‘‘real’’ or ‘‘objective’’ commune, as opposed to its ‘‘imaginary’’ representa-
tion in the person/body of the despot, is the village community, which Marx
characterizes as self-sustaining because of its ‘‘combination of manufactures and
agriculture’’ (473). The village community ‘‘contains all the conditions of reproduc-
tion and surplus production within itself’’ (473) with the important exception of the
capacity to represent the unity of the commune to itself. On this basis, a portion of
surplus labor ‘‘belongs to the higher community,’’ the despot, and takes the form of
tribute and/or ‘‘common labor for the exaltation of the unity’’ (473).
Marx’s discussion implies that appropriation by the Asiatic state/despot is under-
taken by the commune itself. The Asiatic state appropriates surplus labor along with
the village communities because it is the highest representation of Asiatic clan unity.
Note the particular novelty and also difficulty Marx introduces. While scornful of
despotism, Marx does not produce an analysis of the Asiatic commune based upon the
notion of ‘‘false consciousness,’’ in which case it is fairly easy to argue that the cynical
appropriation by despots in the name of the ‘‘higher community’’ and the unity that
they supposedly represent is nothing but a sham, disguising exploitation that is far
removed from communal appropriation. Yet Marx, the grand demystifier, does not take
that tack; the Grundrisse is eye-opening for Marx’s insistence on taking seriously the
notion that there is no meaningful difference between the ‘‘real’’ and the ‘‘imaginary’’
when it comes to the actions of the clan/commune on its own behalf.5 Though he writes

4. I have left out the crucial issue of the subsumed class and nonclass payments that occur
within the family and in which direct producers and other family members not engaged in direct
production or nonlaborers receive shares of the already appropriated surplus from male heads of
households.
5. Yahya Madra and Ceren Özselçuk (2010) read Marx’s discussion on the forms of the commune
similarly. They state: ‘‘perhaps surprisingly, Marx suggests the possibility of a communal form
 COMMONS AND COMMUNES 335

about the ‘‘objective’’ existence of the commune in state or communal land, the
‘‘subjective’’ existence of the commune is not relegated to the realm of ideology, or at
least that version of ideology in which the imagined relation of agents to their ‘‘real’’
relations of production distorts those real relations. Marx’s discussion is exemplary
regarding the materiality of the ideological, and the ideological is portrayed as a ‘‘real’’
reflection of the imagined but objective community*/that of ‘‘blood’’ and kinship*/
which stands as its initial presupposition.
No distinction is drawn between the real, empirical direct producers and the
commune*/an imagined unity with a form of representation in a person/body that
may not ‘‘actually’’ perform necessary and surplus labor. In Marx’s discussion, the
appropriating body is the Asiatic commune, and, following his lead, we can call this
kind of class process ‘‘communal’’ since it is the commune via both the despot and the
villages that is appropriating surplus on the basis of clan rules. Tribute may be a way
of transferring surplus among communal sites/entities, but it is not, in itself,
noncommunist exploitation of peasants by the Asiatic state. It may, of course, be a
subsumed class payment, but it is in relation to a communal fundamental class
process.
Should the Asiatic commune dissolve and should that same person/clan retain its
place as the appropriator of surplus labor, then a new form of surplus extraction
would be born, and the claim of the despot to appropriate the surplus would move
toward more private appropriation. The change in representation*/from communal
to individual*/and the change in who or what is considered a direct producer or
appropriator makes a world of difference for class analysis, if the Grundrisse is
followed.

The Individual as the Subject of Class

In his discussion of forms of the commune, Marx makes constant reference to

‘‘individual,’’ ‘‘collective,’’ and ‘‘communal.’’ Marx depicts the variations in
individuality and collectivity that arise within the context of ‘‘primitive’’ commun-
ism, and this leads to changes in these terms’ meanings. Individual, collective, and
communal have been defined in so many different ways that it is dizzying to make
sense out of what is included or excluded from any particular rendition. This problem
is not remedied by reference to Marx since in his writings there are various,
contending conceptions of each of these terms.
Sticking to conceptions of individuality, a survey of Marx’s ‘‘late’’ writings finds the
isolated individual, private individual, real individual, social individual, and natural

where the social surplus is appropriated by a despot in the name of the commune and for the
commune: the despot would have the right to appropriate the surplus because he or she would
be socially designated as ‘a particular entity’ that realizes the higher and ‘comprehensive unity’
of ‘the many real particular communities’. . . Marx also discusses the peasant forms of the
commune where the male head of the household is the communally designated appropriator of
the surplus produced in the household. In considering these forms of ‘property’ as communal
forms . . . Marx differentiates between the actual physical act of appropriation and its social
signification.’’
336 AMARIGLIO

individual, among others.6 In different places, Marx intends some of these terms to
be polar opposites, indicating that some types of individuality denote independence
and separation while others do not. Marx often provides a historical analysis whose
aim is to show that individuality never arrives on the scene full-blown but is
constituted differently within alternative historical conjunctures.
Nor should we ignore the adjectives that precede the various kinds of individuality
that Marx posits in his writings. It is misleading, I think, to treat the adjectives as
mere descriptors that embellish an essential definition of the individual. Marx brings
out the opposition in some individuality terms, making it difficult to sustain the
argument that there is a transcendent, stable concept of individuality. Marx regards
some ideations as mystifications of the real conditions of individuals in concrete
societies, but other formulations he regards as signifying just those conditions.
In this vein, we can understand Marx’s presentation in the Grundrisse (1973, 83/4)
where he excoriates the ‘‘Robinsonades’’ that posit the ‘‘Natural Individual’’ as a
consequence of the state of nature rather than as socially, historically produced. The
farther back one goes in historical time, the more one sees the ‘‘producing
individual’’ as belonging to a social grouping. Positing ‘‘the individual’’ without
reference to different historical epochs runs the risk of naturalizing and eternalizing
the most recent form of individuality. What it would mean to have in the subject
position of direct producer the isolated individual that emerges, Marx says, as one
whose relative independence is secured by the reign of freedom and expropriation
that betokens the rise of ‘‘civil society,’’ is a different matter if one places in that role
a less isolated type of individuality.
As we have seen in Marx’s discussion of forms of the commune, some kinds of
individuality give rise to the idea that direct producers are independent and separate
or isolated from the collective, while others beckon toward a more ‘‘social’’ form of
individuality. Marx cautions against reading individual labor as identical in each
setting, since the individual direct producer where labor is isolated, divided and
socially separated, as in the case of the freed (hence, dispossessed) worker, is
different from the direct producer, which Marx also calls ‘‘individual,’’ that is
positioned by his or her place within a family or community.
To get another idea of the difficulty here, I quote from A Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy7 (my citation is taken from Jean-Luc Nancy [1991]).

6. In his foreword to the Grundrisse, Martin Nicolaus reduces Marx’s discussion of the forms of
individuality to just two. He says: ‘‘the Grundrisse speaks of two very broadly and generally
defined types of human individuality. The first is the ‘private individual,’ meaning the individual as
private proprietor, both as owner of the means of production and as ‘owner’ of the commodity,
labor-power; the individual within the exchange-value relation. The abolition of the relations of
private property is the abolition of the conditions which produce and reproduce this kind of
individual. The place of this type is taken by the social individual, the individual of classless
society, a personality type that is not less, but rather more, developed as an individual because of
its direct social nature. As opposed to the empty impoverished, restricted individuality of
capitalist society, the new human being displays an all-sided, full rich development of needs and
capacities, and is universal in character and development’’ (1973, 51).
7. This quote was rewritten by Marx for volume 1 of Capital: ‘‘For an example of labour
in common, i.e., directly associated labour, we do not need to go back to the spontaneously
 COMMONS AND COMMUNES 337

Under the patriarchal system of production, when spinner and weaver lived
under the same roof*/the women of the family spinning and the men
weaving, say for the requirements of the family*/yarn and linen were social
products, and spinning and weaving social labour within the framework of
the family. But their social character did not appear in the form of yarn
becoming a universal equivalent exchanged for linen as a universal
equivalent, i.e., of the two products exchanging for each other as equal
and equally valid expressions of the same universal labour-time. On the
contrary, the product of labour bore the specific social imprint of the family
relationship with its naturally evolved division of labour . . . It was the
distinct labour of the individual in its original form, the particular features
of his labour and not its universal aspect that formed the social ties. In this
case, the social character of labour is evidently not effected by the labour of
the individual assuming the abstract form of universal labour or his product
assuming the form of a universal equivalent. [It is clearly community] on
which this mode of production is based, [that] prevents the labour of an
individual from becoming private labour and his product the private product
of a separate individual; it [is community that] causes individual labour to
appear . . . as the direct function of a member of the social organization.
(Marx, quoted in Nancy 1991, 74)

Here, Nancy understands Marx to be remarking on ‘‘the social character of labors in

primitive communities,’’ and this is important because Nancy’s reading is unlike that
of many others who have regarded this and related comments by Marx, especially
similar formulations in the Grundrisse, as being about noncommunal ‘‘modes of
production.’’ Nancy’s identification of Marx’s discussion of the ‘‘rural patriarchal
system’’*/which accords best with either Marx’s description in the Grundrisse of the
Germanic and ancient forms of the commune or his discussion of peasant households
within ‘‘primitive communes’’*/illuminates that, for Marx (and Nancy), the division of
social labor into separated households and the division of labor within a household do
not contravene assigning these households to the category of the commune.
Nancy’s exegesis in this passage bears further commentary.8 For Nancy, community,
as Marx discusses it, ‘‘means here the socially exposed particularity, in opposition to

developed form which we find at the threshold of the history of all civilized peoples. We have
one nearer to hand in the patriarchal rural industry of a peasant family . . . The different kinds of
labour . . . such as tilling the fields, tending the cattle, spinning, weaving and making
clothes*/are already in their natural form social functions; for they are functions of the
family . . . The distribution of labour within the family and the labour-time expended by the
individual members of the family, are regulated by differences of sex and age as well as seasonal
variations in the natural conditions of labour’’ (1976, 171).
8. David Ruccio sees in Nancy as well as in Corlett (1989) a rethinking of the concept of
community along nonessentialist lines. Since many traditional concepts of community in the
Marxian literature posit community as an immanent or organic totality, the postmodern turn in
deconstructing and decentering all forms of subjectivity has resulted in new conceptions of
community that, as Ruccio tells us, are ‘‘conceived in multiplicity and difference in an open
social reality’’ (1992, 19). Ruccio adds that these new concepts of decentered community can be
productive of a new stratagem of seeing ‘‘collective subjectivity’’ in the midst of societies based
on commodity exchange as well as ones in which communism is said to exist.
338 AMARIGLIO

the socially imploded generality characteristic of capitalist community’’ (1991, 74).

In Nancy’s view, the concept of community that Marx is opening up is that of an
‘‘articulation of singularities,’’ or, as he puts it, ‘‘‘sociality’ as a sharing, and not as a
fusion, as an exposure, or as an immanence’’ (75). Marx’s concept of community here,
in the ‘‘primitive commune’’ he is describing, ‘‘is formed by an articulation of
‘particularities,’ and not founded in any autonomous essence that would subsist by
itself and that would reabsorb or assume singular beings into itself’’ (75).
Nancy redefines, using Marx as his guide, concepts of community and individuality in
order to posit a form of subjectivity that is not captured by ‘‘essentialist’’ notions of
these concepts. Toward this end, he introduces the idea of the ‘‘singular being’’ as that
which Marx is describing as the inhabitants of primitive communes. These beings

are what they are to the extent that they are articulated upon one another,
to the extent that they are spread out and shared along lines of force, of
cleavage, of twisting, of chance, whose network makes up their being-in-
common. This condition means, moreover, that these singular beings are
ends for one another. It even goes so far . . . as to mean that together they
relate, in some respect or in some way, from the very heart of their
singularities and in the play of their articulation, to a totality that marks
their common end*/or the common end (community) of all the finalities that
they represent for one another, and against one another. (75)

We may pause again and ask the question: what would it mean to place in the
positions of direct producer and/or appropriator of surplus labor either the concept
of the ‘‘singular being’’ that Nancy derives from his reading of Marx or the concept of
the ‘‘articulated community’’ that he likewise produces? Nancy’s characterization of
these singular beings captures the separateness and uniqueness that are usually
reserved for the isolated or private individual of the most alienated, yet advanced
form of capitalism. It also posits this individual as similar to the concept of the
‘‘common being.’’ But Nancy judges Marx’s contribution as an alternative to both
these conceptions of subjectivity: ‘‘the singular being is neither the common being
nor the individual’’ (77).
Positing this form of subjectivity in the place of the direct producer could elicit the
idea that the ‘‘individual’’ is the subject that acts as the producer/performer of
surplus labor. But this is neither what Nancy implies, nor what Marx is saying since, for
Marx, the immediate ‘‘sociality’’ of the individual’s labor induces one instead to gaze
toward the commune (in the form of the family) rather than toward the private
individual for producing/appropriating/distributing agents.
Furthermore, Marx’s description in Capital of ‘‘an association of free men, working
with the means of production held in common and expending their many different
forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force’’ (1976,
171) explicates a collectivity forged by relatively independent individual activity.
Marx compares this association with Robinson Crusoe’s activity in that ‘‘all the
characteristics of Robinson’s labour are repeated here, but with the difference
that they are social instead of individual’’ (171). This comparison has led some, like
Jean-François Lyotard, to complain that Marx’s vision of advanced communism
(the communism after capitalism) is nothing more than a ‘‘collective Crusoe-ism’’
 COMMONS AND COMMUNES 339

(1993, 135). Lyotard questions this concept of community as reinscribing totalizing

concepts of subjectivity that structure ‘‘political economy.’’ But Marx’s free
association is one of various forms of collectivity that he intimates can serve as
the subject of a communal fundamental class process, despite the fact that, along
the lines of Lyotard’s complaints, one could see the situation as a sprawling
constellation of little, brightly lit Crusoes in which some different fundamental class
process (perhaps self-exploitation) could be theorized.
There is no obvious division between characterizing production by ‘‘individuals’’
versus by ‘‘collective’’ forms of subjectivity. Likewise, there is little possibility of
halting the proliferation of class positions that depend on this or that reading of
subjectivity as it overdetermines the concept of class. Indeed, from certain
perspectives within Marxism, every social formation could be characterized without
too much angst as having communism as its dominant class form. What this move
requires is to take utterly seriously notions of sociality and community that are
thought to circumscribe all individual activity.
This is no minor point: it may be politically important to some struggles for
community to imagine communities as originary direct producers and appropriators
even though some within those communities uphold their own ‘‘right’’ to private
appropriation based on their labor or private ownership of means of production. Such
movements as the new communitarianism or shareholders’ rights suggest not only
a new politics of distribution, but a reconsideration of whether it is ultimately the
community or some private entity that performs and/or appropriates surplus labor.9
Thus, even capitalism may be a variant of communism (this idea is grasped by Nancy
in his ironic mention of ‘‘communist capitalism’’*/of course, he also suggests the idea
of a ‘‘capitalist communism’’ [1991, 75]), if one were to argue that it is the form of
the commune that positions some of its members as titular owners of productive
property and others as dispossessed. While this is not my argument here*/I am
opposed to it*/I do not think that a reading of Marx completely prohibits this
formulation, just as I think perusing Marx yields a preponderance of material to attack
this view.
But it is not unfathomable how one could reduce some ‘‘social’’ forms of production
and exploitation to something like what is described by the term ‘‘self-exploitation.’’
And this would include communism as well. What this last idea requires is the disbelief
that there exists any form of subjectivity that fills the role of direct producer and/or
appropriator other than Marx’s isolated individual. It is not long past that there was
much interest in a school of Marxian political economy for which all forms of sociality
and collectivity are disaggregated to reveal, at bottom, the individual and his or her
preferences and activities. The search for ‘‘microfoundations’’ of Marxian class theory
and the ‘‘methodological individualism’’ that it implied can be extended, if one wishes,
to the notion of class process. This could engender a theory of class in which all class

9. On the politics of distribution involved in shareholder rights struggles, see Gibson-Graham

(2006). George DeMartino tells me that some institutionalist economists view production and
consumption as essentially communal activities in all societies, despite the claims of some that
their private labor or right of ownership makes it only fair for them to receive the rewards of
‘‘their’’ work.
340 AMARIGLIO

positions are matters of individual choice, in which case the exploitation of the direct
producer, whether by ‘‘self’’ or by others, is by self-election. This does not by itself
mean that the form of performing and appropriating surplus labor is always that of
‘‘self-exploitation,’’ but it does remain a possible interpretation depending on how one
theorizes choice-making labor.

What Self Exploits (Itself)?

To come at this question otherwise, if we conceive the direct producer as an individual

isolated and separated from all other producers, then perhaps self-exploitation is
indeed possible. While critics of this concept are drawn primarily to the term beyond
the hyphen (exploitation), I find more worthy of discussion, because problematic, the
image of ‘‘self’’ that this concept projects. In defense of the concept, I see no reason
why a ‘‘self,’’ understood even within prosaic, bourgeois narratives of the individual,
cannot do this thing to oneself. It is no more, nor less, absurd than descriptions of most
other self-actions or self-thoughts that present a divided or multiple self, capable of
occupying simultaneous positions of potential or actual contradiction, conflict, and
even violence. Such commonly voiced sentiments as ‘‘being of two minds’’ about a
certain course of action, or complaining that one part of a self’s body or mind is capable
of and is engaged in attacking another part, speak to the impression of a troublingly
divided self. I am willing to accept all such ‘‘self’’ concepts as having an ontological
referent that potentially avoids ridicule.
However, it is also true that Marx does describe exactly something like ‘‘self-
exploitation’’ in part 1 of the Theories of Surplus-Value. In a remarkable set of
paragraphs, Marx explains that it may happen in a ‘‘capitalist mode of production’’
that ‘‘the independent peasant or handicraftsman is cut up into two persons’’ (1969,
408). He proceeds: ‘‘As owner of the means of production, he is capitalist; as labourer
he is his own wage-labour. As capitalist he therefore pays himself his wages and draws
his profit on his capital; that is to say, he exploits himself as wage-labourer, and pays
himself in the surplus-value, the tribute that labour owes to capital’’ (408). In this
case, ‘‘the labourer is the possessor, the owner, of his means of production. They are
therefore not capital, any more than in relation to them he is a wage-labourer.
Nevertheless they are looked on as capital, and he himself is split in two, so that he,
as capitalist, employs himself as wage-labourer’’ (408).
Marx poses how this situation is ‘‘looked on’’ against a seemingly objective and
external observation of the status of the handicraftsperson’s means of production
being ‘‘capital,’’ used by capitalists to put to work and thence exploit productive
workers. And it is this ‘‘looking on’’ that leads Marx to the bold statement that the
craftsperson/peasant is indeed ‘‘split in two’’ and that an ‘‘actual’’ capitalist is
operating on this terrain, employing an ‘‘actual’’ worker, him- or herself. Anticipating
a chorus of outraged dissent regarding what an individual can and cannot do (‘‘Exploit
oneself? No, ma’am, that is too much!’’), Marx continues his defense of this idea by
claiming that ‘‘in fact this way of presenting it, however irrational it may be on first
view, is nevertheless so far correct, that in this case the producer in fact creates his own
surplus-value’’ and so is ‘‘able to appropriate for himself the whole product of his own
 COMMONS AND COMMUNES 341

labour’’ (408/9). In Marx’s interpretation, it is the ownership of the means of

production that is decisive in this craftsperson/peasant taking ‘‘possession of his own
surplus-labour and thus bear[s] to himself as wage-labourer the relation of being his
own capitalist’’ (409).
Marx is cognizant of his application to the situation at hand of the ‘‘internal’’
ideology of the capitalist era, in which means of production surface as capital and
confront labor as an ‘‘independent force.’’ This application turns out to be a major
contribution, or concession, if you like, to his analysis of the content and character of
class processes throughout human history. The thought categories that grow up with
‘‘the determinate social character of the means of production in capitalist
production’’ (408) have such pervasive force that they must be apprehended and
utilized as accurate descriptions and concrete starting points even when, as with the
supposed ‘‘real’’ inseparableness of means of production and labor within or in
relation to the peasant’s/craftsperson’s self, the historically true categories
of capital and labor-exploited (by capital) stand ‘‘in direct contradiction to it’’
(408). Here, Marx enlivens his discussion of exploitation with a category*/
self-exploitation*/that only enters the thought-concrete in those societies in which
‘‘separation’’ and not ‘‘unity’’ of selves ‘‘appears as the normal relation’’ (409). This
is a fine example of Marx utilizing the ‘‘normal’’ thought of an epoch to serve as an
object of radical critique, but it is also a beginning conception, in this case, of a form
of subjectivity*/the separated or separable self*/that, when injected at the outset,
can alter an otherwise well-defined notion of a class process: in this case, the
capitalist fundamental class process. If the direct producer in capitalism is a divided
self, if it is inscribed with this particular form of subjectivity, then a self-exploiting
capitalist/worker can come into full view.
With this formulation, Marx does not identify a unique form of exploitation and
class process under the name of ‘‘self-exploitation.’’ To the contrary, he stands by his
description as delineating one variant form of capitalist exploitation. While it may be
possible to produce such a distinct concept (and I take this to be the work, starting
from different directions and coming to somewhat different conclusions, done by
Satya Gabriel [1990] and Janet Hotch [2000]), these paragraphs would have to be
radically deconstructed to show that what they say is ‘‘different’’ from itself, in order
to derive from Marx’s example self-exploitation that is a variant of neither capitalism
nor, at another pole, communism. This impression of self-exploitation as a variant of
communism is founded on the view that if the craftsperson comprises the entire
personage populating a site of socially divided production, then it is only a matter of
number, but not much else, not even its particular assignment in a social division of
labor, that makes an individual self recognizable as something other than a commune
or collective, and self-exploitation or appropriation different from communism.

How Class May Constitute Concepts of Subjectivity

Most subjectivity concepts depend upon a location in a social field and are bisected
by processes that include labor, cognition, power, and much else. The differentiation
that forms of subjectivity often connote is erected upon the distinction between
342 AMARIGLIO

individuality and collectivity as two related but distinct and often opposed
subjectivities. Among leading positions regarding individuality is the definition of
the individual as one who possesses free will, who is defined by dint of his or her labor
and is therefore entitled to take possession of things in the object world, and who has
the ability to act on his or her own behalf as a subject of representation (especially
in the realm of politics). Once we specify this particular subjectivity, we find that
production under conditions of ‘‘selfdom’’ is often crucial to positing the attributes of
freedom, entitlement, enfranchisement, and proprietorship that define Western-
style individuality. From Locke through Marx and Engels, much effort has gone into
establishing a relation to nature through labor and the appropriation process as a key
component of what it means to be ‘‘an individual.’’ Though the distinction between
necessary and surplus labor may not be specified as a major part of understanding
labor and production, in respect to Lockean notions of property and individual
subjectivity, the possibility of producing/appropriating a surplus may be decisive in
discriminating between those who merely reproduce their animal existence and those
who claim a right to the results of their labor because of their productivity.10
In this way, the right of European colonists to land in North America was advanced
by the affirmation that colonists had improved the land through agricultural activities
that led to the production of surpluses, whereas (some) Native Americans, by living
off the land in hunting and gathering bands and thereby neglecting to ‘‘improve’’ the
land, by which was meant, ‘‘didn’t add’’ or ‘‘give back’’ more to the land than was
extracted, were denied proprietary rights. The denial of this fundamental right to
hold property was linked to the idea that freedom and individuality could not thrive in
the context of such primitive collectivities.11 And that one distinguishing character-
istic of these collectivities*/what made them ‘‘primitive’’ in the first place*/was the
inability or lack of motivation for individuals to produce surpluses. Thus, in an
indirect way, the existence of class processes above and beyond those supposedly
found in primitive communes was critical to the opinion that forms of individual
subjectivity were preferable. The notion of the individual subject as relatively
independent (from family, clan, and community) had as its historical presupposition,
and this is hammered home by Marx, the development of class processes in which the
production and appropriation of surplus were organized on a basis generally opposed
to the commune.
The emergence of the concept of the subject may develop from a tension between
activity and passivity. In Discerning the Subject, Paul Smith distinguishes the concept

10. For an in-depth discussion of Locke’s notion of property rights, see Tully (1980). A productive
line of inquiry is one in which the question of class process might determine conceptions of
property and subjectivities that inform these conceptions. One could pursue Tully’s suggestion
that, for Locke, property is a right that is derived from ‘‘the right or property that all men have
to things necessary for subsistence,’’ which, in turn, is ‘‘a consequence of the right which all
men have to their preservation’’ (3). It would be interesting to explore the connection between
the ability to reproduce one’s subsistence and the performance and appropriation of surplus
labor. It might be shown that Lockean notions of property presuppose a class process.
11. See Jennings (1975) and Cronon (1983) for how European conceptions of property, based
largely on interpretations (or distortions) of natural law philosophy and Lockean defenses of
proprietorship, promoted conquest of Native Americans.
 COMMONS AND COMMUNES 343

of the individual, which has a much more active and unifying element in its definition,
from the subject, which, as in the idea of being ‘‘subjected,’’ connotes general
passivity and the tendency toward fragmentation. This differentiation aside, in
modern, Western notions of the subject, conscious activity, either in reaction to
forces outside the subject or as creation, is a critical part of its definition.
During the past three centuries, one part of the Western debate on what makes
humans unique and distinguishable from other animals is this possibility of conscious
activity, that is, of being a ‘‘subject.’’ The agency that this distinction represents
arises in the dialectic between consciousness and labor, in which one or both of these
elements are definitive of what is peculiarly human. And since ‘‘humanness’’ is mostly
understood as subjectivity (and sometimes individuality), what is at stake here is the
possibility for humans to act independently, which, in turn, suggests the possibility of
their freedom, at least from the forces of brute nature. Since the possibility exists in
productive activity for surplus labor to be performed and appropriated*/this may be
one of the elements at the core of modern notions of ‘‘productivity,’’ as humans
become increasingly conscious subjects through the ever rising production of
surpluses*/then we can say provisionally that the notion of a distinctly human
subject since the seventeenth century has depended on the capacity of humans
to consciously produce and appropriate surplus. The production and appropriation of
surplus are what may ultimately determine relative ‘‘independence,’’ so important
to this concept of subjectivity. While recent social theory emphasizes other
peculiarly human elements, such as desire, in describing subjectivity, surpluses and
their appropriation/consumption may be indispensable for determining notions of
subjectivity.

Acknowledgments
This paper has its origins in my 1984 doctoral dissertation and, as a separate work,
has undergone numerous shifts in focus. One version was presented at the
‘‘Workshop on Class’’ held 20/2 June 1996 at the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst. I wish to thank Julie Graham, Richard Wolff, Kathy Gibson, Steve Resnick,
Carole Biewener, Harriet Fraad, David Ruccio, Steve Cullenberg, Rebecca Forest,
Jenny Cameron, Yahya Mete Madra, Kenan Erçel, Ceren Özselçuk, Anna Curcio, and
Christina Hatgis for their helpful comments. I am grateful to Ceren and Yahya for
strongly encouraging me to contribute to this collection.

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