Angels of love in the unhappiness factory

Abstract

The connections between the social relations of capitalism and the creation of subjectivity have always been of interest to anti-capitalists and rebels. Two questions are interlaced here: How does capital achieve popular support and what is the possibility of a revolutionary subject? The second question attempted to pierce the reality of the first. Following Marx, the answer was found in the proletariat: that the expansion of the employment of labour-power would lead to a class encased in radical chains. This class would then yell, ‘I am nothing and I should be everything’. However, today it can be hard to find in the exploitation of labour-power the force that can end this exploitation, and subjectivity seems to be more a product of increasingly mystifying flows and mutations that tend towards the crassly conformist or the theologically suicidal. Yet, various post-workerist theorists argue that if we look at the contemporary labour-processes – which now escape the workplace proper – we find a key insight to the creation of subjectivity.