Labour Metaphysics (some scattered and incoherent remarks)

We could treat the history of capital as unimportant because in 1845 (or 1867) and in 2007 it is identical in itself, and conclude that what was said of communism at its beginning is fixed in stone. But those who believe that the history of capital is without importance in the sense that, from the beginning, it is as it is in itself, have not yet managed to become Hegelian. Parmenides suffices. They leave the development alongside being as something which doesn’t form part of it, something accidental. Contrary to the Marx of 1843-46, if we can and must speak of revolution today as the abolition of work (and all the rest) we do it on the basis of the internal contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, of exploitation, of the situation of the proletariat, without any reference to the “person” of the proletariat, to a “human essence”, to “man as community”. We are in contradiction with capital on the basis of what we are, that is to say of what capital is, and not from what we could be, a potential which would somehow already exist as suffering. It is the breakdown of programmatism which, at the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies, momentarily resurrected the very conditions of its emergence as if they could also be those of its overcoming. We momentarily all became Feuerbachians again, …some of us remained so. They have thus made of an ideology born of the failure of ’68, the eternal formula of the communist revolution.
Théorie Communiste, 'Much Ado About Nothing', trans. Endnotes

C Wright Mills famously remarked about the 'labour metaphysic' of the American New Left that made the proletariat 'the historic agency'. While this speaks to what we might call a strategic difference in terms of agential forms, it also speaks to the issue of the metaphysics of labour itself in Marx - or whether there actually is any such metaphysics. For example, Enrique Dussel treats 'living labour' as the 'creative source' of surplus-value, but rather than argue this is an immanent dynamic of the capital-relation instead he argues that living labour is in exteriority to the value totality of capitalism. [1] Dussel therefore affirms the positivity of living labour as the affirmation of otherness - an 'eternal' otherness. Hence his Shellingian critique, by drawing out Schelling's positive philosophy as the alternative to the 'negative' Hegel, appropriate for capital qua subject.
Chris Arthur follows Dussel to this point but dissents firstly on the appropriateness of the use of Schelling, although he concededs it could offer a useful analogy, and on the issue of labour as 'creative'. For Arthur labour is the source of value, but not creative of value. To be the source of value is to be that out of which capital creates value, while capital harnesses and exploits living labour to create value from this source. Capital is the 'creative' principle, but it does not create itself out of nothing. In this case labour is negated by capital, forming a 'contradictory unity' (here is where exteriority seems to lose its traction and a thinking of immanence take over, as Nicole outlines, or in a different form Theorie Communiste).

For Arthur labour is (still) the 'standpoint of critique', if the reality of this stand-point is 'historically open-ended'. In contrast, despite the backsliding identified by Nicole Pepperell, Postone insists that labour is the object of critique. In the form of their historicisation of capital Theorie Communiste would argue that these standpoints of exteriority (correlated with Schelling or with vitalism) are symptomatic of formal subsumption rather than real subsumption. That is, still conceptualising capital on its past modelling of labour as exteriority. While I think this is correct, and can only recommend Nicole's summary comment in the post below, the constant point of anxiety such models provoke is the seeming collapse of agency.

Whereas Wright Mills' point was that the horizon of the New Left was too constrained by a 'Victorian Marxism', the difficulty here seems to be the lack of forms that make-up the critique of labour / the rupture of the capital relation from within. Hence in the Historical Materialism symposium on Postone the recurrent charge that he completely evacuates agency. The difficulty here is between splitting a contradiction in unity and a contradiction that appears to only line-up on the side of capital; in the second case any standpoint of critique appears to be threatened because its immanence is always vulnerable to subsumption. This is excerbated in a time which seems to lack 'points' (to use Badiou's term).

This issue is further complicated by Virno's argument that within the current formation of real subsumption 'human nature' itself becomes visible as the site of subsumption. In this case we have not so much a vitalism, but the posing by capital (and the struggles within/against it) the question of the human in terms of the capacities that make us open to subsumption. In Virno's sense it is our very anthropological openness and dis-adaptation (our anti-nature we might say) that makes us all too suited to the 'nature' of capital as axiomatic machine of flexibility, mobility, and de-territorialisation. Again I see Nina's project as not simply 'becoming Feuerbachian' as a result of historical irony, but the attempt to think through the posing of the 'generic' human, and especially 'equality', within the anthroplogical determinations of capitalism.
It would also be on this unstable and deeply ambiguous line that projects of neuro-philosophy and eliminativism could be focused. On the one hand, styled as critiques of the self they appear as anti-humanist wedges against (why not?) bourgeois ideology, on the other hand, the flexbilisation of capital doesn't appear to have any necessary need for human subject as such, merely any form/content for accumulation. In a sense labour here as source of value within capital again comes into question; broadly whether the re-programming of our sensorium be oriented to value-extraction or in rupture with the law of value.
Here I'm sceptical of how far the second path can be taken without active struggle (itself something of a paradox in a paradigm which would regard 'will' and 'activity' as folk-psychological illusions). In a sense, as I understand it, SBA embraces this by placing the contradiction in capital; capital is a 'sorcerer's apprentice' that dissolves its own bases for accumulation. In contrast, it appears, Planomenology wants to follow the first path of critique, and it will be interesting to see how this deals with the problem of capital qua axiomatic and the seeming disappearance of agency as mere folk-relic of our psychology.

Notes

[1] The material on Dussel and Arthur is from Chris Arthur's review in HM 11.2 (2003).