Contenu du sommaire : L'exploitation aujourd'hui

The aim of the article is to spell out the dimensions in Marx's conception of exploitation that are still relevant. In order to make sense of the complexity and richness of his analysis of exploitation, the article proceeds by way of four steps. First, it traces Marx's conception back to a Saint-Simonian matrix and to ways in which this was rearticulated in Manifesto. Secondly, it analyses the various dimensions of the theory of exploitation outlined in Capital. Thirdly, it addresses a series of objections that have been formulated against Marx's conception of exploitation. Fourthly, it discusses the relevance of this conception for the critique of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. The article thus points out that one of the main features of this phase of capitalism is what can be termed a return of absolute surplus value.

Subcontracing can be analysed as a contemporary form of extraction of surplus labour, which activates the principle of economic dependency within the framework of the relations between companies. It thus contributes to the bypassing of labour law and to the transfer of a whole spectrum of risks from employers to workers. Examining the case of the forestry sector in South Africa and the construction sector in Australia, coupled with an inter-sectorial analysis in the case of France, the article shows that the recourse to sub-contracting has spread widely over the last three decades, contributing to a profound redefinition of the global organization of production relations in capitalist economies.

Within advanced contemporary societies, notably in the United States which has been a pioneer in this regard, the main channel for the extraction of surplus labour is now the payment of high wages to managers, in both the private and the public sectors. Correlatively, the rise in income inequality has primarily stemmed from the growth in wage inequalities. These tendencies are a manifestation of the gradual emergence of social relations typical of a new mode of production, namely managerialism, whose ruling class is the class of managers. The notion of « managerial capitalism » encapsulates the hybrid character of current production relations. The basic principles of Marx's theory of history are thus preserved, albeit at the cost of a major « revision ». These transformations explain why and how prophesies in the Manifesto regarding the vanishing of class societies did not materialize: capitalism metamorphoses into a new avatar of class society.

The article presents a panorama of the main recent uses of the notion of « digital labour ». The term, which emerged in the 1990s, has come to be used as the category through which to qualify both the voluntary contributions of the public to commercial or information websites and the work carried out by the drones of the net economy who, in the shadows, ensure the day-to-day functioning of the virtual universe. Insofar as the tasks characteristic of such work appear to be both badly paid and poorly regulated, they are frequently described today as constituting a form of modern exploitation. In addition to its intrinsic interest, the denunciation of such forms of labour, which is no doubt substantially legitimate, offers a good opportunity to take up again the concept of exploitation, in order to foreground both its pertinence and its inevitable plasticity.

For almost a century, employment contracts have been the preferred contractual model for the organisation of relations with workers, to ensure productive activity. Digital platforms disrupt the traditional representations of the legal framework of labour relations, insofar as their business model is built on the circumvention of labour law through the recourse to the figure of the self-employed worker. Collaborative platforms deny the existence of a relation of subordination. They therefore refute the exercise of any power over workers, claiming to be merely intermediaries between two independent users: the person demanding a service and the person offering to carry it out. However far from putting an end to labour exploitation, platforms in fact generate a massive phenomenon of self-exploitation, with the result that it is only the actual forms of labour exploitation that have changed.

The aim of the article is to revise the notion of exploitation, within the framework of a larger research project on contemporary capitalism which foregrounds the relevance of an « extractive » logic in shaping the operations of capital in such strategic fields as logistics and finance. Taking as its common thread the analysis of contemporary social struggles, the authors examine the gaps, tensions and frictions between social cooperation and the actual embodied and grounded experience of living labour, here foregrounded as the privileged standpoint from which to rethink exploitation. Questions relative to exploitation, in its relations to dispossession, power and to domination, are addressed by way of the Marxist analysis of the notions of exploitation and cooperation. The article ends with a more political argument, focused on the possibility and limits of a (« reformist ») project for the « normalization » of exploitation and the question of a class politics today.

The article proposes a philological, epistemological and critical analysis of the concept of surplus value, from the Grundrisse of 1858 to Capital, where the category is given its systematic development. It stresses the centrality taken on by the category as a result of its coupling with the notion of surplus labour, in the accomplishment of the structural reversal from the « standpoint of capital » to the « standpoint of labour ». The exploitation of labour thus becomes the source for the accumulation of capital, making it possible to comprehend how « contradiction » and « conflict » are built into the historical movement of capitalism and into its overcoming. The article ends by isolating a number of points of tension which, rather than the invalidation of the theory of surplus value, call for its critical reworking, by way of an analysis of exploitation that must integrate both the major contradiction between capital and labour and the specific contradictions within labour. Such a proviso cannot fail to have implications for the « Marxist » analysis of the articulations between the critical theory of capitalisation, the composition of classes and the movements or forms of political mobilisation.

Borrow from Freud a « representation of matter »: only on that condition, could materialism avoid becoming a « senile idealism ». That is the strange proposition which Bataille formulated in the article on « Materialism », written for the critical dictionary of the journal Documents. The proposition enables us to read through the texts he wrote between 1928 and 1934, discovering in them the elaboration not of a materialist doctrine but a questioning of the materialist attitude, which can be articulated in terms of a certain relation, implicit or explicit, to Freud's thinking. Bataille's position is an original one, insofar as he did not seek to produce a synthesis between psychoanalysis and Marxism, between the unconscious and history. His contention was rather that the critique of political economy and psychoanalysis, at a certain point, both speak of the same thing.

The article proposes a rereading of E.
P. Thompson's major work, The Making of the English Working Class (1963). It examines the internal theoretical coherence of the procedures he adopted. The intention is to carry out this examination at a level that is more foundational than the selective appropriations of the work that were to be carried out, in a manner which proved productive in both historiographical and critical terms. The article thus shows how Thompson's « working class », irreducible to any solely objective or subjective criteria of identification, can only be apprehended as the subject of class struggle and of the struggles for democracy on condition that one's analysis remains as close as possible to the complexity of the narrative deployed in Thompson's work : the formation of this working class is indeed an effect of more than a purely narrative logic. It is a function of the articulation of three traditions of social critique, none of which can be sacrificed to the other two. These three strands are respectively founded on the politics of the rights of man, religious utopia, and on popular economic traditions.

The article looks at the debate which, at the end of the 1970s, opposed Althusser to Poulantzas, hinging on the question whether the withering away of the State was to constitute the core element of a communist strategy and, if so, how such a strategy was to inflect a communist politics in the present. For Poulantzas, the state represents the strategic field of political practice. A communist politics must therefore invest it from the interior, in order to modify the power relations between classes. For Althusser, the State participates in the construction of the dominant form of class struggle. It thus consolidates the power of the ruling class. A communist politics must consequently devise another form of class struggle, one which, beyond the division between the different fields of struggle, transforms the initiative of the masses into an autonomous power, in such a way that they appropriate and transform the functions of the State.

The writings of Pierre Macherey fall into three categories, depending on whether they deal with the history of certain canonical philosophical texts, the history of philosophical institutions, or with what he now calls « literary philosophy ». Starting out from his 1966 book, For a Theory of Literary Production, the article aims to show first that these three fronts are interdependent, insofar as the goal pursued remains the same ongoing task: the critique of ideology, without however adopting the foundational support of « Theory », as Althusser had sought to do. The paper focuses primarily on the third of these strands in order to elucidate what it can mean to « to do philosophy with (and not on) literature ». The approach is by no means a univocal one, it involves several possibilities whose interwoven design enriches Macherey's enterprise.

Erik Olin Wright is, alongside Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, and Perry Anderson, one of the major figures of contemporary Anglo-American Marxism. In France, he remains however one of the least known. The publication of Utopies réelles, the translation of his work Envisioning Real Utopias (Éditions La Découverte, 2017), in a series edited by Christian Laval and Laurent Jeanpierre, is a turning point in this regard. In the interview, Wright reviews his intellectual trajectory since the 1960s. He traces the genealogy of « analytical Marxism », of which he remains to this day one of the main representatives. He also describes the idea of « real utopia », through which he outlines a new anticapitalism for the 21st century.