IX

If, finally, one “concentrates” on values—and thereby deflects concentration from the underlying class structure of values (the ways, for instance, the blackness of skin is de-valued so as to legitimize social subordination)—this in turn “makes labor endlessly variable.” In other words, and as I have been arguing, in order for the New World Order of Capitalism to persevere, it must officially, and on a transcontinental level, “adopt” a pluralist labor force and in doing so “adapt” itself “ethically” to the regime of “respect for differences.” “Difference,” in short, is the very flag of that multiculturally “endlessly variable” labor force. This is the “ethic of care” of Bush’s “kinder, gentler” regime.

At another of his moments of ideological “clarity,” MacCabe underscores the “communitarian” pluralism that legitimizes Spivak’s “other” perspective on Marx: “What is clear… is that while Marx has perfectly grasped the constitutive crisis of capitalism, he has not provided an account of any other mode of production; for if there is no fixed relation between value and labor it is impossible to understand the appropriation of surplus outside a full understanding of the organization of value within a particular community.” Rigmarole, again, is the alibi for “rigor” underlying MacCabe’s “morale”-building narrative.

Presumably, that “constitutive crisis of capitalism” that “Marx has perfectly grasped” is that “account of exploitation grounded in the theory of surplus value,” which, of course, Spivak’s “thoroughgoing argument” “fully retains.” But as I have been pointing up, this is not the key feature of Spivak’s “most audacious move.” This “audacity,” which is so attractive for MacCabe that he can hardly make any real sense of it at all (Is it a “theory” or a “question”? Has he even “understood it correctly”? The point is ideology doesn’t have to be “correct,” doesn’t have to “make sense,” because it is not a matter of mere “logic” but rather historic compulsion), is to be found in that old charge of the light (white) brigade against the crudenesses of “totality,” “theory,” “conceptuality,” “certainty,” “critique” and so on. Because Marx refused to be a “specialist” and a “mechanic,” a petty “expert” who would in turn register the whole world in expert’s terms, “he has not provided an account of any other mode of production.” If the relation between value and labor is not a “fixed” one (i.e., no “total” theory), according to MacCabe, this makes it “impossible to understand” the system of value “within a particular community” from some position “outside.” “Full understanding,” rather, must be sought “within a particular community.”

MacCabe by this point has become so enchanted with the contradictory totality of pluralism suggested here that he stops (only momentarily of course, in ad hoc localist fashion) capitalizing the first letters in “Third World.” In the final sentence of the third paragraph I have been examining here, he concludes: “This consequence [of the impossibility of understanding any particular value system because value and labor are not “continuist”] may be seen as endorsed by Spivak because, for her, normative [i.e., “continuist”] accounts of mode of production have impeded third world struggles.” What is the “consequence” here that MacCabe says is so “clear”? Again, it is the class struggle of the “crude” against the “complex,” the pluralist totality of the “particularly oppressed” (“experienced”) as opposed to the revolutionary social totality of human emancipation.

The basically ahistorical, rear guard ideology here is the assumption that, by replacing “normative” or “continuist” accounts of mode of production with some sort of “particularist,” “detailed,” or “discontinuist” account, one thereby dis-“impedes” “third world struggles” (note: not even “all” of the “Third World” struggles anymore, but particular ones, “third world” struggles). This is the neo-individualist politics of “liberation,” not that of collective emancipation. It is not the “norm” of a given mode of production that “impedes” struggles and sustains exploitation, for the “norm” is itself nothing other than the articulation of the existing regime of the extraction of surplus value. In other words, while exploitation may well be deployed “differently,” according to regionally different “organizations of value within particular communities,” in Bangladesh, Singapore, Cape Town, Tokyo, or Boone, North Carolina, U.S.A., all of these “differences” do not in any sense “impede” the general law of motion of capitalist profit.

The question is, so what if Marx “has not provided an account of any other mode of production”? In the moment of the Capitalist New World Order, this very line of “argument”—a centerpiece in the anti-totality chant—is completely senseless: THERE IS NO OTHER MODE OF PRODUCTION. THE OTHER MODE OF PRODUCTION HAS TO BE HISTORICALLY CONSTRUCTED THROUGH REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALIST PRAXIS. The “in” of In Other Worlds is “differently within” the New World Order as a world system ruled in the final instance by only one mode of production, the capitalist mode, the unconscious mode of production of which is precisely the “respect” for all the differently articulated sites.

The question is, why is “there no fixed relation between value and labor”? Not because of the mystical “ability of capital to consume the use value of labor power” but because the underlying mode of production of capitalism is founded upon the division of labor power from collective determination of its own social value and organization.

The question is, what does it even mean to say that “it is impossible to understand the appropriation of surplus outside a full understanding of the organization of value within a particular community”? Let us dispense with “uncertainty” and begin to take sides. It means, simply, and quite commonsensically, that “the community is the source of all values,” and that “the community” transcends the wider pressures of world history. It means, simply, “respect the details,” the experts, the doublespeak, the specialists, those “experienced” ones in the audience. The ideology of the “most audacious move” here is not only the swift adoption of the postcolonial critic by MacCabe, a respectable First World father figure, but most importantly the sheer obscenity of calling the dutiful daughter forward under the sign of Marx.