The Reproduction of Labor Subjectivity under the Logic of Capital — A Contemporary Dimension of Western Marxist Critical Theory of Capital

The question of the subject is a key issue in the study of Marxist philosophy, and its development has been profoundly influenced by the currents of Western Marxism. Through a Hegelian interpretation of Marx’s philosophy, Lukács placed the question of class consciousness, i.e., the revolutionary subject, at the center of Marx’s philosophy, and set the alienation or reification of the subject as the theme of Marx’s critical theory. This profoundly influenced the thought of Western leftists such as the Frankfurt School, and indirectly contributed to the formation of the “inversion of subject and object” paradigm in the study of Marxist philosophy in China. According to this paradigm, the core of Marx’s critique of capital lies in capital’s usurpation of the worker’s subjectivity, the alienation or objectification of the worker by capital, while the liberation of the worker lies in the restoration and reconstruction of the worker’s subjectivity.

主体问题是马克思主义哲学研究中的一个关键问题，其发展深受西方马克思主义思潮的影响。卢卡奇通过对马克思哲学的黑格尔式解读，将阶级意识即革命主体问题置于马克思哲学的中心，将主体的异化或物化设定为马克思批判理论的主题，从而深刻影响了法兰克福学派等西方左翼的思想，也间接促成了我国马克思主义哲学研究中“主客颠倒”范式的形成。依照这一范式，马克思资本批判的核心就在于资本对劳动者主体性的篡夺、资本对劳动者的异化或客体化，而劳动者的解放就在于劳动者主体性的恢复和重建。

However, new changes in contemporary capitalism pose a severe challenge to the above line of thought: the enhancement of labor subjectivity has not promoted the liberation of workers, but has instead worsened their situation. On the one hand, trends such as the flexibilization of the labor process, the cognitive content of labor, and the elasticity of the labor market have highly highlighted the subjectivity of workers; on the other hand, phenomena such as stagnant real wages, the decline of trade union power, the extension of working hours, and the intensification of labor indicate that the working class is subjected to stronger domination than before. This has led Western Marxists to realize that there may be a profound hidden complicity between the development of labor subjectivity and the rule of capital. To this end, since the 1960s, Western Marxists have constructed a theory of the reproduction of labor subjectivity under the logic of capital, attempting to grasp the internal connection between the subjectivity of workers and the power of capital. Examining the above evolution of Western Marxism helps to reflect on the existing models of Marxist philosophical research in China and to better grasp the specific realities of contemporary capitalism.

但是，当代资本主义的新变化却对上述思想提出了严峻挑战：劳动者主体性的增强不仅没有促进劳动者的解放，反而造成了劳动者处境的恶化。一方面，劳动过程灵活化、劳动内容认知化、劳动力市场弹性化等趋势的发展，高度凸显了劳动者的主体性；另一方面，实际工资停滞、工会力量衰落、劳动时间延长、劳动强度上升等现象，则表明劳工阶级所受的支配比从前更强了。这使西方马克思主义者开始意识到，劳动者主体性的发展同资本的统治之间有可能存在着一种深刻的隐性共谋。为此，20世纪60年代以来，西方马克思主义者构造了一种资本逻辑下的劳动主体再生产理论，试图把握劳动者的主体性同资本权力之间的内在关联。考察西方马克思主义的上述演变，有助于反思中国马克思主义哲学研究的既有模式，更好地把握当代资本主义的特殊现实。

I. “Weberian Marxism” and the Theory of the Subject

一、“韦伯式马克思主义” 与主体理论

The study of the subject question in Western Marxism can be traced back to the founder of this current, Lukács. Combining a Hegelian interpretation of Marx’s philosophy with Weber’s theory of rationalization, Lukács constructed a revolutionary theory based on class consciousness and a critical theory based on the category of reification, thereby profoundly influencing leftist intellectual currents such as the Frankfurt School in Germany and Neo-Hegelianism in France. Merleau-Ponty summarized this line of thought as “Weberian Marxism,” accurately grasping its crux. This intellectual lineage laid down the main model for Western Marxist thinking on the subject question, but it also faces severe challenges in the new changes of contemporary capitalism.

西方马克思主义关于主体问题的研究，可以追溯到这一思潮的开创者卢卡奇。卢卡奇将马克思哲学的黑格尔式阐释同韦伯的合理化理论结合起来，建构了一种基于阶级意识的革命理论和一种基于物化范畴的批判理论，从而深刻影响了德国的法兰克福学派、法国的新黑格尔主义等左翼思想流派。梅洛-庞蒂将上述思路概括为“韦伯式马克思主义”,准确地把握到了其要害。这一思想脉络奠定了西方马克思主义思考主体问题的主要模式，但也在当代资本主义的新变化中面临着严峻挑战。

Lukács believed that in advanced capitalist society, the commodity form is a unified form that constructs all social relations, and this form reaches its extreme in the commodification of labor power, i.e., the reification or objectification of the human being itself. On this basis, he grafted Marx’s theory of the commodity form onto Weber’s theory of rationalization, pointing out that the main characteristics of the reified form lie in rationality, precision, and calculability, thereby establishing a connection between the commodity form and the rationalized labor process. Thus, the worker is understood as an object subjected to precise calculation in the rationalization process; capital’s power of domination over the worker is manifested as the power of the commodity form to reify or objectify the worker. In opposition, the liberation of the worker lies in escaping this objectified situation and restoring their own subjectivity, i.e., forming a class consciousness as the “subject-object” of history as a whole. From the perspective of historical materialism, this theory corresponds to the Taylorist capitalism of the 20th century. In the mid-20th century, with the widespread implementation of Taylorist scientific management and the Fordist mode of production, trends such as the alienation of workers’ knowledge and skills onto machines, the inversion of subject and object between labor and capital, the objectification of workers, and the bureaucratization of capitalist industry became particularly prominent. This situation was aptly expressed in Lukács’s theory of reification.

卢卡奇认为，在发达资本主义社会中，商品形式是建构一切社会关系的一种统一形式，这一形式在劳动力的商品化即人本身的物化或客体化中达到了极致。在此基础上，他又将马克思的商品形式理论同韦伯的合理化理论嫁接起来，指出物化形式的主要特征就在于合理性、精确性和可计算性，从而在商品形式与合理化劳动过程之间建立了联系。由此，劳动者被理解为在合理化过程中受到精密计算的客体；资本对劳动者的统治权力就体现为商品形式对劳动者进行物化或客体化的力量。与之相对，劳动者的解放就在于摆脱此种客体化境遇，恢复自身的主体性，即形成作为历史整体之“主体—客体”的阶级意识。从历史唯物主义的观点来看，这一理论是同20世纪的泰勒制资本主义相适应的。20世纪中期，随着泰勒制科学管理和福特制生产方式的广泛推行，劳动者的知识和技能逐渐被异化到机器上，这使得劳动与资本之间的主客颠倒、劳动者的客体化、资本主义产业的科层化等趋势格外凸显。这种状况在卢卡奇的物化理论中得到了贴切表达。

The interpretive paradigm initiated by Lukács gradually became the dominant problematic of early Western Marxism. Among the first generation of Frankfurt School scholars, Lukács’s theory was transformed into a critique of the totally administered society and instrumental reason, and attained a purely philosophical form in Adorno’s negative dialectics, which critiques identity through non-identity. “The name of dialectics says no more than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy. It is not the position of the Hegelian absolute idealism that it distorts into being: it is not the essence in the Heraclitean sense. It indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived.” [1]1 Theodor W. Adorno, *Negative Dialectics*, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 5. In Marcuse’s works, this line of thought developed into an opposition between civilization and Eros, between the “one-dimensional man” and repressed unconscious desires, exerting a tremendous influence on the revolutionary movements in the West during the 1960s and 1970s. According to this line of thought, the critique of identity by non-identity is consistent with the resistance of subjectivity to objectivity: to resist the uniform, rigid bureaucratic system, it is necessary to liberate repressed desires full of individual differences. Influenced by this line of thought, the study of Marxist philosophy in China often understands the essence of the logic of capital as the unifying and abstracting function of the value form, and the consequence of the universal unfolding of the logic of capital as the rule of abstraction and the impoverishment of the world of meaning; correspondingly, the sign of human subjectivity’s liberation from the rule of capital is also understood as the full development of human creative capacity and the re-enrichment of the human world of meaning.

卢卡奇所开启的这一阐释范式，后来逐渐成为早期西方马克思主义的主导性问题意识。在法兰克福学派第一代学者那里，卢卡奇的理论被转化为对全面管制的社会和工具理性的批判，并在阿多诺以非同一性批判同一性的否定辩证法中获得了纯粹哲学的形式。“辩证法这个名称所说的无非是，对象不可能完全进入概念而不留有剩余，它们同传统的充分性原则相矛盾。矛盾并不是黑格尔的绝对观念论把它歪曲成的那个样子：它不是赫拉克利特意义上的本质。它所指的是同一性的非真理性，指向这样一个事实，即概念不能穷尽它所设想的事物。”在马尔库塞的著作中，这种思路又发展成文明与爱欲、“单向度的人”与被压抑的无意识欲望之间的对立，在20世纪60、70年代西方的革命运动中产生了巨大的影响。按照这种思路，非同一性对同一性的批判与主体性对客体性的反抗是一致的：要反抗整齐划一、僵化的科层体制，就需要解放被压抑的、充满个体化差异的欲望。我国的马克思主义哲学研究受到这一思路的影响，也常常将资本逻辑的本质理解为价值形式的同一化、抽象化作用，将资本逻辑普遍展开的后果理解为抽象的统治和意义世界的贫乏化；与之相对，人的主体性从资本统治下获得解放的标志，也被理解为人的创造能力的充分发挥，以及人的意义世界的重新丰富。

However, according to the view presented earlier, the critical line of thought initiated by Lukács targets a specific form of capitalism, namely, industrial capitalism that reached its peak in mid-20th century Fordism; it cannot represent the general law of the logic of capital. Specifically, only under Fordist capitalism, due to the need for large-scale production of standardized products, does the organizational form of capitalism manifest as a developed bureaucracy, do various social institutions show signs of high rigidity and ossification, and does the labor process become a uniform, one-dimensional process. However, these characteristics are not necessary inferences from the essential laws of the logic of capital, nor are they common features of other stages of capitalism. Early Western Marxism directly linked this specific form to the general value form, and even to the entire history of Western rationality, thereby exaggerating it into the general form of capitalism.

但是，按照前文的观点，卢卡奇开启的这一批判思路所针对的乃是资本主义的一种特殊形态，即在20世纪中叶的福特制中臻于顶峰的工业资本主义，它并不能代表资本逻辑的一般规律。具体来说，只有在福特制资本主义中，出于标准化产品大规模生产的需要，资本主义的组织形式才会表现为发达的科层制，各种社会体制才会表现出高度固定和僵化的迹象，劳动过程才会成为一个整齐划一的单向度过程。不过，这些特征并不是资本逻辑本质规律的必然推论，也不是资本主义其他阶段的共性特征。早期西方马克思主义把这种特殊形态同一般的价值形式直接联系起来，甚至同整个西方理性的历史联系起来，这样就将其夸大成资本主义的一般形态。

More importantly, as some scholars have pointed out, when Lukács inferred from the commodity form to the rationalized labor process, the intermediary he employed was Weber’s theory of rationalization, not Marx’s theory of capital valorization. This line of thinking bypassed Marx’s essential determination of the logic of capital, creating a “short circuit” between the commodity form and the labor process. In *Capital*, the discussion of the rationalization of the labor process is subordinate to the historical analysis from the handicraft workshop to large-scale machine industry, and this analysis is in turn subordinate to the theory of relative surplus value. That is to say, the rationalized labor process is not directly built upon the commodity form; between the two, the mediation of the theory of capital valorization and the theory of relative surplus value is necessary. According to the exposition in *Capital*, the premise for the validity of the value form of commodities is the universal movement of capital valorization, and capital valorization in turn requires the exploitation of surplus value created by labor. In advanced capitalist societies, the increase in surplus value mainly relies on the production of relative surplus value: through the rationalization of the labor process, the productivity of necessities of life rises, their unit value falls, and the reproduction cost of labor skills also falls accordingly, which leads to a decline in the value of labor power and an increase in the proportion of surplus value in total value. It can be seen that, in Marx’s view, the rationalization of the labor process is a requirement for producing relative surplus value, that is, a requirement of the “specific rationality” of the movement of capital valorization, not a requirement of general modern rationality. However, early Western Marxism precisely overlooked this point, simply grafting the rationalization of the capitalist labor process onto modern instrumental rationality.

更重要的是，如有学者指出的，卢卡奇从商品形式推论到合理化劳动过程时，采用的中介是韦伯的合理化理论,而不是马克思的资本增殖理论。这种思路绕开了马克思对资本逻辑的本质规定，在商品形式与劳动过程之间造成了“短路”。在《资本论》中，有关劳动过程合理化的论述隶属于从手工工场到大机器工业的历史分析，而这种分析又隶属于相对剩余价值理论。也就是说，合理化劳动过程并不是直接建立在商品形式之上，这两者之间必须经过资本增殖理论和相对剩余价值理论的中介。按照《资本论》的阐述，商品的价值形式得以成立的前提是普遍的资本增殖运动，而资本增殖又需要剥削劳动创造的剩余价值。在发达资本主义社会中，剩余价值的增加主要依靠相对剩余价值的生产：经由劳动过程的合理化，生活必需品的生产率提高、单位价值下降，劳动技能的再生产费用也随之下降，这导致了劳动力价值的下降，以及剩余价值在总价值中所占比重的提高。可见，在马克思看来，劳动过程的合理化是生产相对剩余价值的要求，也就是资本增殖运动的“特殊理性”的要求，而不是一般的现代理性的要求。但是，早期西方马克思主义恰好忽视了这一点，将资本主义劳动过程的合理化同现代工具理性简单地嫁接起来。

Because early Western Marxism bypassed Marx’s essential determination of the logic of capital, namely the movement of capital valorization and the production of surplus value, its critique of capitalism could only hit the empirical phenomena of a specific era, but not the essential connection between these phenomena and the logic of capital. This critique failed to see that whether it is the homogenizing force of the value form or the homogenizing appearance of the rationalized labor process, their foundation lies in the movement of capital valorization. However, the principle of capital valorization is precisely not identity, but a certain non-identity: it does not stop at the same quantity of value, but constantly pursues “more” than the present, constantly differing from itself, thereby constantly creating things that did not originally exist, things that are novel and alien. Only under the drive of this endless desire that constantly exceeds itself can the homogenizing appearance of the value form spread over all things, and the rationalization of the labor process be pushed to the point of haggling over every penny. In this sense, the crux of capitalist society is precisely not identity, but non-identity itself: it is not abstract poverty, but deformed surplus; not that what should exist does not exist, but that what should not exist exists too much.

由于早期西方马克思主义绕开了马克思关于资本逻辑的本质规定，即资本增殖运动和剩余价值生产，所以它对于资本主义的批判只能命中特定时代的经验现象，而不能命中这种现象同资本逻辑的本质关联。这种批判没有看到，无论是价值形式的同一化力量，还是合理化劳动过程的同一化表象，其基础都在于资本增殖运动。但是，资本增殖的原则恰恰不是同一性，而是某种非同一性：它不会停留于同一个价值量，而是不断地追求比现在“更多”,不断地与自身相差异，从而不断创造出原本不存在的、新异的东西。只有在这种不断超出自身的、无止境的欲望的驱使下，价值形式的同一化表象才会在一切事物之上扩展开来，劳动过程的合理化才会被推进到锱铢必较的程度。在这种意义上，资本主义社会的症结恰恰不是同一性，而是非同一性本身：它不是抽象的贫乏，而是畸形的过剩；不是应该存在的东西不存在，而是不应该存在的东西存在得太多了。

The above-mentioned failure of “Weberian Marxism” directly led to its deviation in stance on the subject question. It correlates identity with the suppression of subjectivity by the rationalized labor process, and non-identity with the liberation of multiple subjectivities. While this critical path certainly had the significance of resisting social rigidity and ossification in the era of industrial capitalism, it only focused on the empirical phenomena of this particular period, and thus actually formed a complicity with the essential laws of the logic of capital. In reality, the liberation of the subject based on non-identity precisely satisfies the requirements of capital valorization, because capital valorization is originally realized through a subject rich in non-identity, namely the subject of surplus labor. Only when the subject can expend labor beyond its own needs, that is, not only necessary labor but also surplus labor, is the production of surplus value possible. In this sense, non-identity and subjectivity are indeed consistent; but this consistency does not lie in the hope they contain for liberation from the rule of capital, but in the fact that they are both internal moments of the power of capital itself.

“韦伯式马克思主义”的上述错失直接导致了它在主体问题上的立场偏差。它将同一性关联于合理化劳动过程对主体性的压抑，将非同一性关联于多元主体性的解放，这种批判路径在工业资本主义时代固然有抵抗社会固化僵化的意义，但它仅仅着眼于这一特殊时期的经验现象，所以反而同资本逻辑的本质规律形成了共谋。实际上，基于非同一性的主体解放恰恰满足了资本增殖的要求，因为资本增殖原本就是通过一种富有非同一性的主体即剩余劳动的主体而实现的。只有当主体能够付出超出自身需要的劳动，即不仅能付出必要劳动，还能付出剩余劳动时，剩余价值的生产才是可能的。在这种意义上，非同一性与主体性确实是一致的；但这种一致性并不在于它们蕴含着从资本统治下获得解放的希望，而在于它们都是资本权力本身的内在环节。

It can be seen that the theoretical strategy of “Weberian Marxism” cannot succeed. It understands the general characteristics of capitalism as homogenization and reification, and critiques and resists them based on non-identity and subjectivity, yet fails to see that non-identity and subjectivity are precisely requirements of the essential laws of the logic of capital, while homogenization and reification are only the appearances of these essential laws in a particular period. Therefore, this theoretical strategy contains a double risk from the outset: on the one hand, its critique of the specific form of capitalism is severed from the essential laws of the logic of capital, and thus may also affect those social organizations that do not belong to capitalism but exhibit similar characteristics, thereby “mistakenly injuring friendly forces”; on the other hand, its emancipatory program is conceived only for a specific stage of capitalism. This program not only fails to resist capitalism in general, but may instead conform to the requirements of capitalism’s own transition to the next stage, satisfying capitalism’s need for “self-adjustment” in the face of its periodic contradictions.

可见，“韦伯式马克思主义”的理论策略是不可能成功的。它将资本主义的一般特征理解为同一化和物化，基于非同一性和主体性对其进行批判和抵抗，却没有看到非同一性和主体性恰恰是资本逻辑本质规律的要求，而同一性和物化只是这一本质规律在特殊时期的表象。因此，这种理论策略从一开始就包含着双重风险：一方面，它对于资本主义特殊形态的批判同资本逻辑的本质规律断绝了联系，因而有可能波及那些不属于资本主义但表现出相似特征的社会组织，从而“误伤友军”;另一方面，它的解放方案只是针对资本主义的特殊阶段所构想出来的，这种方案不仅无法抵抗一般的资本主义，反而有可能顺应资本主义自身向下一阶段转型的要求，满足资本主义面对其阶段性矛盾而“自我调整”的需要。

Viewed from the actual development of history, the objective effect brought about by “Weberian Marxism” is indeed this. First, its critique of capitalism targets rationalization and bureaucracy, not capital valorization itself. This critique equally affects trade unions and welfare states that adopt bureaucracy, as well as the socialist countries of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and even falls mainly on these latter “friendly forces” belonging to the same left-wing camp. Second, its emancipatory strategy is to restore the subjectivity of workers, to restore the difference imprisoned by the homogenizing value form. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, when capitalism was gradually turning toward neoliberalism, this release of subjectivity and difference was precisely what capitalism itself most needed. It destroys the solidarity of trade unions and workers’ organizations, dismantles the industrial assembly lines that tightly bind large numbers of workers together, and restructures the labor process into dispersed and flexible forms, thereby weakening the resistance of the working class. It also cultivates differentiated consumer demands, shapes a labor ethic that encourages individual self-realization, intensifies divisions within the working class, and manufactures labor subjects and consumer subjects suitable for neoliberalism.

从历史的实际发展来看，“韦伯式马克思主义”带来的客观效果确实如此。首先，它的资本主义批判所针对的是合理化和科层制，而不是资本增殖本身，这种批判同样波及了采取科层制的工会和福利国家，波及了苏联和东欧的社会主义国家，甚至主要落到了后面这些同属左翼阵营的“友军”身上。其次，它的解放策略是恢复劳动者的主体性，恢复被同一性价值形式所禁锢的差异性，但是在资本主义逐渐转向新自由主义的20世纪60、70年代，这种主体性和差异性的释放恰恰就是资本主义本身最需要的东西。它破坏工会和工人组织的团结、瓦解将大量工人紧密结合在一起的工业流水线，将劳动过程重构为分散而灵活的形式，从而削弱工人阶级的抵抗力量。它还培养差异化的消费需求，塑造一种鼓励个体自我实现的劳动伦理，加剧工人阶级内部的分裂，为新自由主义制造合用的劳动主体和消费主体。

“Weberian Marxism” had a profound influence on the social revolutionary movements in the West after 1968, determining the conservative essence of these movements beneath their radical appearance. As Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello point out in *The New Spirit of Capitalism*:

“韦伯式马克思主义”对1968年以后西方的社会革命运动有着很深的影响，决定了这些运动在激进外表下的保守本质。如吕克·博尔坦斯基和夏娃·希亚佩洛罗在《资本主义的新精神》中指出的：

The characteristic of this period is actually the rise of various “new social movements” (feminist movement, gay movement, ecological and anti-nuclear movements, etc.), the gradual dominance of anti-communist, autonomist factions among the left, and a severe critique of communism running through the entire 1980s. The analytical categories of totalitarianism were applied to the analysis of communism, yet without encountering the resistance they faced in the 1950s or 1960s. In France, since social critique was closely linked to the communist movement, the latter’s loss of prestige meant that critique temporarily but openly abandoned the economic sphere. Under the attack of artistic critique, the corporation was reduced to a repressive institution like the state, the army, the school, and the family; the struggle against bureaucracy and for labor autonomy replaced concern for economic equality and the security of the most deprived.

这个时期的特点实际上是各种“新社会运动”(女性主义运动、同性恋运动、生态和反核运动等)的兴起，反共产主义的、主张自治的派别在左派中间逐渐取得了主导地位，以及对共产主义的严厉批判贯穿整个20世纪80年代。关于极权主义的分析范畴被用于分析共产主义，却没有受到20世纪50或60年代那样的抵抗。在法国，既然社会批判与共产主义运动是紧密联系在一起的，那么后者的名声扫地就意味着批判暂时但公然地放弃了经济领域。在艺术批判的攻击之下，公司被化约为一种同国家、军队、学校和家庭一样的压制性机构；反对官僚制、争取劳动自治的斗争，取代了对经济平等和最受剥夺的人的安全的关切。

It can thus be seen that the capitalist critique of early Western Marxism was actually a critique of the superficial commonalities between capitalism and socialism, and sometimes even turned into a critique of socialism; rather than dealing a blow to capitalism, it was absorbed and utilized by capitalism. This failure of “Weberian Marxism” prominently indicates that to think about the subject question from the perspective of Marxist philosophy, one must distinguish the specific manifestations of capitalism in a given period from the essential laws of the logic of capital, and examine the transformation of the subject within the stage-by-stage evolution of capitalism; one must consider not only the subject’s resistance to capital, but also the subject’s internal complicity with capital. These two points are vividly embodied in Western Marxism after the 1960s.

由此可见，早期西方马克思主义的资本主义批判实际上是对资本主义和社会主义的表面共性的批判，甚至有时会变成对社会主义的批判；与其说它对资本主义造成了打击，不如说它被资本主义吸收利用了。“韦伯式马克思主义”的这种失败突出地表明，要在马克思主义哲学的视野下思考主体问题，就要把资本主义某一时期的特殊表现同资本逻辑的本质规律区分开，在资本主义的阶段性演化中考察主体的转变；不仅要考虑主体对资本的反抗，还要考虑主体同资本的内在共谋。这两点在20世纪60年代以后的西方马克思主义中得到了鲜明的体现。

II. The Affirmative Character of Power: Western Marxism’s Critique of Labor Subjectivity under the Logic of Capital

二、权力的肯定性：西方马克思主义 对资本逻辑下劳动主体性的批判

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Western world stood on the eve of neoliberal transformation, and this concrete situation profoundly influenced the development of Western Marxism. The way neoliberalism reconstructed the power of capital was not by tightening control, but by relaxing it; not by prohibition and coercion, but by permission and encouragement; not by strengthening the uniformity of the whole society, but by creating flexibility and difference everywhere; not by turning people into “things” like machine parts, but by encouraging people to “realize themselves” and “become themselves.” In other words, in the era of neoliberalism, the mode of operation of capital power went beyond traditional negative representations and exhibited an unprecedented affirmative character; this power was not limited to repressing and negating subjectivity; on the other hand, it instead created, stimulated, promoted, and even indulged subjectivity. This led left-wing thinkers to realize that there existed a profound complicity between the enhancement of labor subjectivity and the deepening of capital power. Critical theory could not cling to the old notion of “Weberian Marxism,” understanding capital power as the negation of labor subjectivity by capital; otherwise, it would likely allow new power techniques to bypass the scrutiny of critical theory in the name of “freedom” and “liberation.” In view of this, since the 1960s, Western Marxists have positively raised the issue of the “reproduction of labor subjectivity” under the logic of capital. This issue runs through topics such as ideology theory, power theory, and biopolitics, exhibiting a clearly discernible trend toward an affirmative understanding of power. What it concerns is not how capital power negates and represses labor subjectivity, but how this power produces a specific labor subjectivity.

20世纪60年代末70年代初，西方世界处在新自由主义变革的前夜，这一现实处境深刻地影响了西方马克思主义的发展。新自由主义重建资本权力的方式不是加强管制，而是放宽管制；不是禁止和强迫，而是允许和鼓励；不是强化全社会的同一性，而是到处制造弹性和差异；不是将人变成机器零件一般的“物”,而是鼓励人们去“实现自己”“成为自己”。换言之，在新自由主义时代，资本权力的运作方式超出了传统的否定性表象，表现出了空前的肯定性特征；这种权力不限于压抑和否定主体性，在另一方面它反而要创造、激励、张扬乃至放纵主体性。这让左翼思想家们意识到，劳动者主体性的增强与资本权力的深化之间存在着一种深刻的共谋关系。批判理论不能固守“韦伯式马克思主义”的旧观念，将资本权力理解为资本对劳动者主体性的否定，否则就很可能让新的权力技术以“自由”和“解放”之名绕过批判理论的检视。有鉴于此，20世纪60年代以来，西方马克思主义者正面提出了资本逻辑下的“劳动主体再生产”问题。这一问题贯穿了意识形态理论、权力理论、生命政治理论等议题，表现出一种清晰可见的、对权力作肯定性理解的趋势。它所关心的不是资本权力如何否定和压抑劳动者的主体性，而是这种权力如何将特定的劳动主体性生产出来。

This thread of thought can be traced back earliest to Alexandre Kojève. In his seminar on Hegel, Kojève argued that Hegel’s *Phenomenology of Spirit* is a philosophical anthropology, which discusses the process of self-consciousness gradually forming through mutual recognition; this is also the process by which the subject is generated through “desiring the desire of the other.” This interpretation implicitly aligns with Marx’s understanding of commodity society: in commodity exchange, “each person serves the end of the other only as a means for his own end,” so commodity society possesses the general structure of “desiring the desire of the other.” Therefore, the effect of the “desire of the other” in dissolving and reconstructing subjectivity has strong explanatory power for the issue of subject generation under the logic of capital.

这一思想线索最早可以追溯到亚历山大·科耶夫。科耶夫在其黑格尔研讨班上主张，黑格尔的《精神现象学》是一种哲学人类学，它所论述的是自我意识通过相互承认而逐渐形成的过程，这也是主体通过“欲望着他者的欲望”而生成出来的过程。这种解释暗合了马克思对于商品社会的理解：在商品交换中，“每个人只有作为另一个人的手段才能达到自己的目的”,所以商品社会具有“欲望着他者的欲望”的一般结构。因此，“他者的欲望”对主体性的瓦解和重构作用，对于资本逻辑下的主体生成问题具有强大的解释力。

This theoretical theme, mediated by Lacan, came into contact with Marx’s theory of capital in Althusser. Althusser distinguished two different senses of subjectivity: one is the subject of revolutionary political action, which appears as a vacant position demarcated by the balance of multiple forces, awaiting occupation; beyond this, there also exists an “ideological subject” subjected to the rule of capital and embedded in the operation of capital. Although it is in a dominated position, it still possesses the status of a subject. In fact, the peculiarity of the capitalist mode of rule lies precisely in the fact that ruling people as subjects and through their subjectivity is more effective than ruling them as objects: “As long as people understand that morality requires a subject of self-consciousness, that is, a subject responsible for its own actions, then people can make themselves accept the obligation to obey norms — which is far more ‘economical’ than imposing norms on people through violence.” [3]3 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in *Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays*, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 181. The original text reads: “as long as the subject is constituted as a subject of morality, responsible for his own actions, he can be made to submit to the obligation to obey the norms — which is much more ‘economical’ than imposing them by force.”

这一理论主题经过拉康的中介，在阿尔都塞那里同马克思的资本理论发生了联系。阿尔都塞区分了两种不同意义上的主体性：一种是革命性政治行动的主体，它表现为多元力量对比所划定的一个有待被占据的空白位置;在此之外，还存在着一种受到资本统治的、嵌入资本运行的“意识形态主体”,它尽管处在被统治地位，但仍然具有主体的资格。实际上，资本主义统治方式的特殊性恰恰在于，将人作为主体并通过其主体性来施加统治，比将其作为客体来统治要更有效：“只要人明白了道德需要自我意识的主体，即自己对自己行为负责的主体，那么人就能使自己接受服从规范的义务——这比通过暴力给人强加规范要‘经济’得多。”

The reproduction of this specific subjectivity is a necessary link in the process of capitalist reproduction. Althusser believed that capitalist reproduction can be decomposed into the reproduction of the conditions of production and the reproduction of the relations of production, and the reproduction of the conditions of production necessarily includes the reproduction of labor power, that is, the reproduction of the labor subject. On this issue, Marx only explained the reproduction of the worker’s physical life through wage theory, but did not explain how the worker’s specific subjectivity, that is, his docile character, is reproduced. Therefore, it is necessary to forge a specialized theory of the reproduction of labor subjectivity as a necessary supplement to Marx’s theory of capital. In Althusser’s view, the reproduction of the labor subject is accomplished by a state apparatus: the ideological subject is the product of the “interpellation” of the ideological state apparatus; without this mechanism, the worker could not become a subject in the true sense.

这种特定主体性的再生产是资本主义再生产过程的一个必要环节。阿尔都塞认为，资本主义的再生产可以分解为生产条件的再生产和生产关系的再生产，而生产条件的再生产必然包含劳动力的再生产，即劳动主体的再生产。在这一问题上，马克思只通过工资理论说明了劳动者的肉体生命的再生产，但没有说明工人的特定主体性即其驯顺的品性是如何再生产出来的。因此，有必要打造一种专门的劳动主体再生产理论，作为马克思的资本理论的必要补充。在阿尔都塞看来，劳动主体的再生产是由一种国家机器来完成的：意识形态主体是意识形态国家机器的“询唤”产物，若非通过此种机制，劳动者就不能成为真正意义上的主体。

Althusser’s theory of the ideological state apparatus marks a profound transformation in ideology theory and the philosophy of the subject, a transformation necessary for understanding the operational mechanism of capitalism. The subject understood by modern philosophy is first and foremost the subject of consciousness, and Marx’s critique of ideology is first and foremost a critique of this idealist philosophy, so ideology is often understood as false consciousness. However, Althusser did not understand ideology in the sense of the philosophy of consciousness; rather, he pointed out that “ideology has a material existence.” [4]4 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” p. 166. Ideology is the “‘representation’ of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” [5]5 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” p. 162. The subject understands its own concrete situation through this relationship and acts accordingly. Although this relationship is imaginary, because the subject lives in reality and performs its real actions precisely through this relationship, this relationship also has a “material” real existence. In other words, the subject’s imaginary relationship to reality participates in the constitution of reality itself.

阿尔都塞的意识形态国家机器理论标志着意识形态理论和主体哲学的一种深刻变革，这种变革对于理解资本主义的运作机制是必需的。近代哲学所理解的主体首先是意识的主体，而马克思的意识形态批判首先是对这种观念论哲学的批判，所以意识形态往往也被理解为虚假意识。但是，阿尔都塞并未在意识哲学的意义上理解意识形态，而是指出“意识形态具有一种物质的存在”。意识形态是“个人与其实在生存条件的想象性关系的‘表述’”,主体通过这种关系理解自身的现实处境，并据此作出行动。尽管这种关系是想象性的，但由于主体正是通过这种关系而生活在现实之中并作出其现实行动的，所以这种关系又具有一种“物质的”现实存在。换言之，主体同现实的想象性关系参与了现实本身的构成。

Althusser’s theory of ideology helps to define the mechanism of reproduction of labor subjectivity under the logic of capital in an affirmative way. Traditional ideology theory, based on the critique of the philosophy of consciousness, tends to treat the reproduction of labor subjectivity as a secondary issue belonging to the category of social consciousness, understanding it as a negative mechanism by which bourgeois ideology “deceives” or “buys off” the worker. However, Althusser’s concept of ideology “has a material existence”; it cannot be reduced to the “deception” of false consciousness, but is more fundamentally grounded in those structures of social relations that condition the worker’s real actions, and it can influence the worker’s actions through affirmative means such as production, guidance, and even stimulation. Ideology in this sense does not obscure the capitalist relations of production; rather, it is a link in these relations of production themselves. It ensures the smooth operation of capitalist relations of production by interpellating people as specific subjects. This concept of ideology, possessing a material character, offers a possibility of establishing a connection between the theory of the subject and the critique of political economy.

阿尔都塞的意识形态理论有助于用肯定性的方式去规定资本逻辑下的劳动主体再生产机制。传统的意识形态理论基于对意识哲学的批判，倾向于将劳动主体的再生产视为一个属于社会意识范畴的次要问题，将其理解为资产阶级意识形态“欺骗”或“收买”劳动者的否定性机制。然而，阿尔都塞的意识形态概念“具有一种物质的存在”,它不能被归结为虚假意识的“欺骗”作用，而是更根本地奠基于那些制约着劳动者现实行动的社会关系结构，它能够通过生产、引导乃至激励等肯定性的方式来左右劳动者的行动。这种意义上的意识形态并不是遮蔽了资本主义的生产关系，而是这种生产关系本身的环节，它通过将人询唤为特定的主体来保证资本主义生产关系的顺利运行。这一具有实在性的意识形态概念，提供了一种在主体理论同政治经济学批判之间建立联系的可能。

It can be seen that Althusser’s concept of ideology is highly realistic and differs greatly from traditional theories of ideology. Foucault pushed this line of thought further, discarding the ambiguous concept of ideology and developing the theory of the subject into a theory of power or biopolitics. In texts such as *Truth and Juridical Forms*, Foucault argued that although Marx was critical of political economy, he shared a commonality with the economists: an uncritical acceptance of labor as the innate essence of human beings and the natural source of wealth. However, the fact that human beings become labor subjects, especially labor power that produces value, is a historical phenomenon of modern bourgeois society and a constructive product of social power. We should not simply accept this fact but should ask what mechanism of power constructs human beings into such subjects. Clearly, the subject here is not the subject of revolutionary action, but a subject subservient to a specific social power, capable of docile and continuous labor. The reason why this seemingly fully objectified worker is still understood as a subject is that wage labor requires the volitional qualities of the worker’s agency. Negative factors such as hunger, poverty, and coercion are not sufficient to force landless peasants to become wage workers; on the contrary, wage labor requires positive elements such as the worker’s willingness to work, industrious character, and sense of professional responsibility, all of which must be constructed from scratch within the worker. In Foucault’s view, the double meaning of the word “subject” in Western languages already hints at this ambiguous situation: the word means both “subject, nominative” and “to be subjected to, to be subordinated to,” implying that “becoming a subject” has always been the result of “subjection to power,” and that power itself cannot exist independently of the subject.

可见，阿尔都塞的意识形态概念具有很强的现实性，与传统的意识形态理论有很大的差异。福柯将这一思路进一步彻底化，抛弃了有歧义的意识形态概念,将主体理论发展成权力理论或生命政治理论。福柯在《真理与法权形式》等文本中提出，尽管马克思对国民经济学持批判态度，但马克思同国民经济学家之间也存在一种共性，即非批判地将劳动视为人的先天本质和财富的天然来源。然而，人成为劳动主体尤其是生产价值的劳动力这一事实，是现代资产阶级社会的历史性现象，是社会权力的构造性产物。我们不应当简单地接受这一事实，而应当追问是何种权力机制将人建构为这样的主体。显然，这里的主体也不是革命行动的主体，而是服膺于特定社会权力的、能够驯顺地持续劳动的主体。这种貌似充分客体化了的工人之所以仍然被理解为一种主体，是因为雇佣劳动需要工人的能动性的意志品质。饥饿、贫穷、强制等否定性因素并不足以迫使失地农民成为雇佣工人；相反，雇佣劳动需要工人的劳动意愿、勤劳品性、职业责任感等肯定性要素，这些都需要在工人身上从无到有地建构起来。在福柯看来，西方语言中“主体”一词的双重含义已然暗示了这种暧昧的情况：这个词既有“主体、主语”的意思，也有“服从于、屈从于”的意思，这意味着“成为主体”向来是“屈从于权力”的结果，而权力本身也不可能脱离主体而存在。

Driven by this problematic, Foucault meticulously examined the formation of the labor subject in early capitalist society. He studied various mechanisms of subject production in mid-19th-century British cities, such as penal systems, juridical-moral discourses, and medical and criminological discourses, elucidating how they constructed the urban poor into subjects capable of continuous labor. Foucault specifically pointed out that these mechanisms targeted the worker’s “body, desires, needs” and other agential elements, and their ultimate outcome was to internalize capital’s demands on labor as the worker’s own moral requirements: they demanded “a strict, intense, continuous labor—in short, the moral qualities of the worker.” This again demonstrates that the reproductive mechanism of the labor subject is absolutely necessary for capitalism; it needs to transform capital’s drive for valorization into the worker’s spontaneous desire and ethical responsibility.

出于上述问题意识，福柯细致考察了早期资本主义社会中劳动主体的形成。他研究了19世纪中期英国城市中的各种主体生产机制，如惩罚制度、法权—道德话语、医学和犯罪学话语等，阐明了它们如何将城市贫民建构成能够持续劳动的主体。福柯特别指出，这些机制的作用对象乃是“工人的身体、欲望、需求”等能动性要素，其最终成果是将资本对劳动的要求内化为劳动者自身的道德要求：它们“要求一种严格的、高强度的、连续的劳动——简言之，工人的道德品质”。这再次表明，劳动主体的再生产机制对于资本主义乃是绝对必要的，它需要将资本的增殖欲望转化为劳动者的自发欲求和伦理责任。

Subsequently, in texts such as *The Birth of Biopolitics*, Foucault also addressed the issue of subject reproduction under neoliberalism. In neoliberal society, the worker must not only be constructed as a labor subject but also as an investment subject or entrepreneur: “Homo economicus here is no longer at all one of the parties to exchange. Economic man is an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself.” [6]6 Michel Foucault, *The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979*, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 226. In this situation, the worker’s subjectivity undergoes a significant “capitalization”: the worker understands and arranges himself according to the rules of capital’s action, interpreting his own activities as investments in human capital. The worker is no longer merely a subject engaged in repetitive labor under the compulsion of capital, but a self-renewing, self-shaping autonomous subject akin to capital itself. Of course, this does not mean that the worker possesses capital or has gained freedom from capital’s domination; it only means that the requirements of capital’s reproduction have been embedded within the worker’s subjectivity, and the worker spontaneously cooperates with capital’s reproduction, treating it as his own will.

此后，福柯又在《生命政治的诞生》等文本中谈及了新自由主义的主体再生产问题。在新自由主义社会中，工人不仅要被建构为劳动主体，还要被建构为投资主体或企业人：“经济人在这里已经完全不是指交换中的某一方了。经济人是企业家、是自己的企业家。”在这种情况下，劳动者的主体性发生了显著的“资本化”:劳动者根据资本的行动规则来理解和安排自身，将自身的活动理解为人力资本的投资。劳动者不仅是在资本驱使下从事重复劳动的主体，更是像资本一样的自我更新、自我塑造的自为主体。当然，这并不意味着劳动者拥有了资本，或者摆脱了资本统治而获得了自由，而只是意味着资本再生产的要求被嵌入了劳动者的主体性内部，劳动者自发地配合资本的再生产，并将其当作自身的意愿。

In summary, it can be seen that in continental European left-wing thought since the 1960s, there exists a clear theoretical thread concerning the production of the subject under capitalism. This thread starts from the theory of ideology, breaks free from the philosophy of consciousness presupposed by traditional theories of ideology, and instead explores the objective mechanisms that constrain the actual actions of workers in capitalist society. Following this thread, Western left-wing thought’s understanding of power has continuously transitioned from negativity to positivity, in order to clarify how the subject’s own agency becomes a link in capital’s power. Foucault was very clearly aware of the necessity of this “positive” turn for understanding capitalist society: “We are trying to free ourselves from a legal and negative representation of power, to refuse to think of power in terms of law, taboo, freedom, and sovereignty… It is more complex and more positive than a simple ‘prohibition’ effect.” [7]7 Michel Foucault, *The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction*, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 90.

综上可见，在20世纪60年代以来的欧陆左翼思想中，存在着一条清晰的关于资本主义主体生产的理论线索。这条线索从意识形态理论出发，摆脱了传统意识形态理论所预设的意识哲学，转而探寻资本主义社会中制约劳动者现实行动的客观机制。沿着这条线索，西方左翼思想对于权力的理解不断地从否定性向肯定性过渡，以便阐明主体自身的能动性何以成为资本权力的一个环节。福柯非常清晰地意识到这种“肯定性”转向对于理解资本主义社会的必要性：“我们试图让自己摆脱一种对权力的法律的与否定的表现，拒绝根据法律、禁忌、自由和君权来思考权力……它比单一的‘禁止’效果更加复杂，也更加肯定。”

However, Foucault’s understanding of the production of the subject under capitalism also has certain shortcomings. Although Foucault recognized the necessity of a positive concept of power, his so-called “disciplinary power” still retains a certain negativity, as it operates through punishment, discipline, segregation, confinement, and the like. This kind of power can only produce docile, rule-following workers, but it struggles to produce industrious subjects with intrinsic positivity. According to Marx’s definition, capital is “a boundless and insatiable drive to go beyond its own limits,” [8]8 Karl Marx, *Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy*, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 334. a process of continuous repetition and intensified self-affirmation; correspondingly, the power capital uses to produce the labor subject should also be thoroughly positive, taking the form of “desire production.” This production of the subject as desire production is first elaborated in the works of Gilles Deleuze.

然而，福柯关于资本主义主体生产的理解也有一定的缺陷。尽管福柯已经意识到一种肯定性的权力概念是必要的，但他所谓的“规训权力”仍然带有一定的否定性，因为它是通过惩罚、纪律、隔离、禁闭等方式运作的。这种权力只能生产出循规蹈矩的驯顺工人，但难以生产出具有内在积极性的勤劳主体。按照马克思的界定，资本是“力图超越自己界限的一种无限制的和无止境的欲望”,是一种不断重复和强化的自我肯定；相应的，资本用以生产劳动主体的权力也应当是彻底肯定性的，即具有“欲望生产”的形式。这种作为欲望生产的主体生产，首先是在吉尔·德勒兹的著作中得到阐发的。

III. Deleuze’s Theory of the Desiring Subject and Its Contemporary Development

三、德勒兹的欲望主体理论 及其当代发展

In *Anti-Oedipus*, Deleuze equates general capitalist production with desire production: “Desire is the order of production; all production is at once desire production and social production.” [9]9 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, *Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia*, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 296. In this way, Deleuze bypasses the production of material goods such as commodities, money, and means of production, directly defining the object of capitalist production as a certain subjective element (i.e., desire). As the American Deleuze scholar Jason Read puts it, “The particular position of Deleuze and Guattari is to reject all those mediations and hierarchies that connect and separate the economy and subjectivity.” [10]10 Jason Read, *The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present* (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), 103. This definition captures Marx’s essential insight into capitalism, namely that capitalism is fundamentally the production of the subject and inter-subjective relations: “Society itself, i.e., the human being in his social relations, always appears as the final result of the social production process. Everything that has a fixed form, such as the product, etc., appears here only as a moment, as a vanishing moment in this movement.” [11]11 Karl Marx, *Grundrisse*, 712. Today, this essence of capitalism is directly manifested in everyday experience: human reproductive activities, such as consumption, learning, entertainment, and social interaction, have become indistinguishable from the sphere of production; the “products” of capitalism increasingly appear as human relations and human beings themselves, and all areas of social life have become sites for capital’s valorization, forming a “desiring machine” where “everything produces.”

德勒兹在《反俄狄浦斯》中将一般的资本主义生产等同于欲望生产：“欲望是生产的秩序，一切生产都同时是欲望生产和社会生产。”这样一来，德勒兹就越过了商品、货币、生产资料等物质产品的生产，将资本主义生产的对象直接定义成某种主体性要素(即欲望)。如美国的德勒兹研究者贾森·里德所说，“德勒兹和加塔利的特殊立场是拒绝所有那些将经济与主体性连接起来又分离开来的中介和等级”。这种规定切中了马克思关于资本主义的本质洞见，即资本主义在根本上是主体以及主体间关系的生产：“社会本身，即处于社会关系中的人本身，总是表现为社会生产过程的最终结果。具有固定形式的一切东西，例如产品等等，在这个运动中只是作为要素，作为转瞬即逝的要素出现。”今天，资本主义的这一本质在日常经验中直接表现了出来：人的再生产活动，如消费、学习、娱乐、交往等，已经变得同生产领域无法区分；资本主义的“产品”越发表现为人的关系以及人本身，社会生活的各领域都成为资本增殖的场所，形成了一台“一切皆生产”的“欲望机器”。

In order to define capitalist production as desire production, Deleuze first transforms the concept of desire itself, reversing the negative understanding of desire. Contemporary French philosophy, often building on Kojève and Lacan, understands desire in a negative way: desire is a “constitutive lack” caused by the primordial loss of “object a,” and the subjectivity based on this is an empty impossibility. However, this negative concept of desire applies at most to human consumer desire, not to capital’s drive for valorization. Capital’s valorization does not occur because of some lack; on the contrary, it is a process of producing value from value, a self-referential spiral ascending process. It lacks no external object (such as some use-value), but proceeds from itself, affirming itself to a greater degree. Therefore, in *Anti-Oedipus*, Deleuze vigorously criticizes Lacan’s negative concept of desire, thereby defining desire production as positive: “Desire lacks nothing; it does not lack its object.” [12]12 Deleuze and Guattari, *Anti-Oedipus*, 25.

德勒兹为了将资本主义生产规定为欲望生产，首先变革了欲望概念本身，颠倒了关于欲望的否定性理解。当代法国哲学往往站在科耶夫和拉康的基础上，以否定性的方式理解欲望：欲望是“对象a”的原初失落所造成的“构成性匮乏”,以此为基础的主体性是一种空乏的不可能性。然而，这种否定性的欲望概念至多只适用于人的消费欲望，并不适用于资本的增殖欲望。资本增殖并不是因为某种匮乏而发生的；相反，它是一个用价值生产价值的过程，是一个以自身为目的的螺旋上升过程。它不缺乏任何外在的对象(如某种使用价值),而是从自身出发，在更大的程度上肯定自身。因此，德勒兹在《反俄狄浦斯》中着力批判了拉康的否定性欲望概念，从而将欲望生产规定为肯定性的。“欲望什么也不缺乏，它并不缺乏它的对象。”

This affirmative determination of capital’s desire also contains a new concept of value and a new concept of labor, thereby redefining the structure of the laboring subject. First, surplus value, as what capital desires, cannot be defined as an external object that capital lacks, that is, it cannot be defined as an increment or difference in the magnitude of value: “[Surplus value] should not be defined as the difference between labor power and the value it creates, but rather through the incommensurability between two flows that are immanent to each other (namely capital and labor – author’s note).” [13]13 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, *Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia*, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 227. That is to say, between surplus labor and necessary labor there is not only a quantitative difference but also a qualitative difference; the affirmative determination of surplus value requires that the relation between capital and labor be defined as a qualitative relation, which, through a specific mechanism of power, shapes a labor with a new qualitative determination, namely surplus labor. This qualitative determination of surplus labor hits upon Marx’s understanding of surplus labor in the *Grundrisse*: “Necessary labor time is labor for mere use value, for subsistence. Surplus working day is labor for exchange value, for wealth.” [14]14 Karl Marx, *Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy*, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 325. Here, Marx does not define necessary labor and surplus labor as two different quantities of labor, but rather as two different types of labor with different purposes: surplus labor not only exceeds necessary labor in quantity, but also tends in its internal structure to constantly exceed itself.

关于资本欲望的这种肯定性规定也蕴含着新的价值概念和劳动概念，从而重新规定了劳动主体的结构。首先，剩余价值作为资本所欲求的东西，不能被规定为资本所缺乏的外在对象，即不能被规定为价值量的一个增量或差额：“[剩余价值]不应该被定义为劳动力与劳动力所创造的价值之间的差异，而是应该通过两种彼此内在的流(即资本与劳动——引者注)之间的不可通约性……来定义。”也就是说，剩余劳动与必要劳动之间不仅有量的差异，还有质的差异；对剩余价值的肯定性规定，要求将资本与劳动的关系规定为一种质性关系，它通过特定的权力机制塑造了一种具有新的质性规定的劳动，即剩余劳动。对剩余劳动的这种质性规定切中了马克思在《1857—1858年经济学手稿》中对剩余劳动的理解：“必要劳动时间是为单纯的使用价值、为生活而进行的劳动。剩余工作日是为交换价值、为财富而进行的劳动。”在这里，马克思并没有把必要劳动和剩余劳动规定为两个不同的劳动量，而是将其规定为两种不同类型的、具有不同目的的劳动：剩余劳动不只是在量上超出了必要劳动，更是在内在结构上倾向于不断超出自身。

Since surplus labor is defined as a particular quality, and not merely a divisible quantity, Deleuze argues that all labor time under capitalism already bears the character of surplus labor, and that the general laboring subject has always already been a subject of surplus labor. “Labor only occurs accompanied by the constitution of a surplus… labor (in the proper sense) only occurs with what we call surplus labor.” [15]15 Deleuze and Guattari, *Anti-Oedipus*, p. 230. For this kind of labor, “there is no longer any need for a code to guarantee surplus labor, because surplus labor is already qualitatively and temporally mixed with labor itself in the same simple quantity.” [16]16 Deleuze and Guattari, *Anti-Oedipus*, p. 230. Thus, the mechanism for producing surplus labor is not a mechanism of expropriation external to the subject, but rather a structure of desire internal to the subject. In Deleuze’s view, this structure is that “the desire of the most destitute creature, with all its force, without any economic knowledge or misrecognition, can invest the entire social field of capitalism.” [17]17 Deleuze and Guattari, *Anti-Oedipus*, p. 230. In other words, the desire of the proletarian itself, without any mediation by false consciousness, can spontaneously desire surplus labor, thereby satisfying the requirements of capital’s reproduction and serving as the energy for capital’s valorization. Through this proposition, Deleuze penetrates a crucial dimension of capitalist subject production: the mode of capital’s desire must be embedded within the subjectivity of the laborer; the laboring subject must be able to “desire the desire of capital.”

由于剩余劳动被规定为一种特别的质，而不仅仅是一种可分割的量，所以德勒兹主张，资本主义的一切劳动时间都已经带有剩余劳动的性质，一般的劳动主体向来已经是剩余劳动的主体。“劳动仅当伴随着一种剩余的构建时才会出现……(恰当意义上的)劳动只有伴随着我们称为剩余劳动的东西才会发生。”对于这种劳动来说，“不再需要有一种编码来保证剩余劳动，因为剩余劳动已经在质上和时间上同劳动本身混合在同一个简单的量之中”。可见，剩余劳动的产生机制不是某种外在于主体的剥夺机制，而是某种内在于主体的欲望结构。在德勒兹看来，这种结构就是，“最贫苦的受造物的欲望，以其全部的力量、无须任何经济上的认识或误认，就能投注到资本主义社会领域整体之中”。换言之，无产者自身的欲望，无须经过任何虚假意识的中介，就能自发地欲求着剩余劳动，从而满足资本再生产的要求，充当资本增殖的能量。通过这一命题，德勒兹深入资本主义主体生产的一个至关重要的层面：资本的欲望模式必须被嵌入劳动者的主体性内部，劳动主体必须能够“欲望着资本的欲望”。

Going further, Deleuze deduces the mechanism of constitution of the laboring subject from the characteristics of the capitalist reproduction process. Capitalism operates not through externally imposed laws, but through an internal relational structure; it does not govern social members with predetermined rules, but allows multiple subjects to spontaneously constitute a specific relation, thereby carrying out an internal, flexible regulation of themselves. In Deleuze’s terminology, the social rule of capitalism is not a “code” but an “axiomatic.” [18]18 “Axiomatic” here refers to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of capitalism as an abstract system of quantitative relations that operates without fixed codes or transcendent laws, regulating social flows through immanent axioms like the market. Therefore, the reproduction of the capitalist subject does not require reliance on some discipline, belief, or ideology; it does not need to take the subject’s consciousness as its medium, but can directly constitute the subject’s actions and desires, making them coincide with the desire of capital. The prominent manifestation of this mechanism is the rule of money: money unifies various different desires into a desire for money itself, and establishes a direct quantitative relation among them, allowing the capitalist “axiomatic” to operate automatically through relations of equivalent exchange. In this way, even if the subject has no identification with or belief in capitalism, he will still spontaneously act according to relations of equivalent exchange. More importantly, in the object of money, the desire of the proletarian is unified with the desire of capital: although the money possessed by the proletarian is only enough to meet subsistence needs and cannot be transformed into capital, the homogeneity of the object of money obscures this fundamental difference between the proletarian’s desire and capital’s desire. The result is that the proletarian’s aspiration to improve his own situation is realized not through class revolution, but through earning money, which precisely reproduces capitalism itself.

进而言之，德勒兹根据资本主义再生产过程的特性，推论出了其劳动主体的构造机制。资本主义的运转不是依靠外加的法则，而是依靠内在的关系结构；它不是用预定的规则支配社会成员，而是让诸多主体自行构成一种特定的关系，从而对其自身展开内在的、灵活的调节。用德勒兹的术语来说，资本主义的社会规则不是“编码”,而是“公理”。因此，资本主义的主体再生产不需要依靠某种纪律、信念或意识形态；它不必以主体的意识为中介，就能直接构造主体的行动和欲望，使之与资本的欲望相契合。这种机制的突出表现是货币的统治：货币将各种不同的欲望都统一成对于货币自身的欲望，并在它们之间建立了直接的数量关系，使资本主义的“公理”可以通过等价交换关系而自动运行。这样一来，即使主体对于资本主义没有任何认同和信仰，他仍然会自发地按照等价交换关系去行动。更重要的是，在货币这一对象上，无产者的欲望同资本的欲望统一起来：尽管无产者所占有的货币只够满足生存需要，不可能转化成资本，但货币这一对象的同质性却遮蔽了无产者的欲望与资本欲望之间的这一根本差异。其结果是，无产者改善自身处境的欲求不是通过阶级革命来实现，而是通过赚取货币来实现，但这恰恰再生产了资本主义本身。

Deleuze’s theory of desire production represents an important advancement of the Western Marxist theory of subject reproduction, achieving a relatively thorough turn from the theory of ideology to the theory of power, and from the concept of negative power to the concept of affirmative power. Since the 21st century, global capitalism has broken through various former restrictions, incorporating all social spheres into its own scope and turning subjects and inter-subjective relations into instruments of production and products. This situation has made Deleuze’s theory of capital timely as a common discourse of contemporary left-wing thought. Against this background, Byung-Chul Han, based on Deleuze’s fundamental insights, has made a summative study of the condition of the contemporary laboring subject, introducing this line of thought from France into Germany under the name of psychopolitics. [19]19 Byung-Chul Han, *Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power*, trans. Erik Butler (London: Verso, 2017). Han argues that the contemporary achievement society differs from the former disciplinary society, its main characteristic being not the negativity of power but an excess of positivity; the plight of the contemporary laborer is not the frustration of being unable to become a subject, but the “self-exploitation” imposed by an excess of subjectivity upon oneself.

德勒兹的欲望生产理论是对西方马克思主义主体再生产理论的一种重要推进，它较为彻底地实现了从意识形态理论到权力理论、从否定性权力概念到肯定性权力概念的转向。21世纪以来，全球资本主义冲破了从前的各种限制，将各个社会领域都纳入自身的范围，将主体以及主体间的关系变成生产工具和产品。这种局面让德勒兹的资本理论恰逢其时地成为当代左翼思想的通用话语。在此背景下，韩炳哲基于德勒兹的基本洞见，对当代劳动主体的境况作出了总结性的研究，以精神政治学的名义将这条思想线索从法国引入德国。韩炳哲认为，当代的绩效社会不同于过去的规训社会，其主要特点不是权力的否定性，而是过剩的肯定性；当代劳动者的困境不是难以成为主体的挫败感，而是过剩的主体性施加给自己的“自我剥削”。

However, Han also points out the fatal error Deleuze made at the final juncture of his theory. Although Deleuze had already understood capital as affirmative desire production or “general decoding,” he did not fully贯彻 the affirmative concept of power, nor did he completely purge the negative concept of power, thus hastily reducing the mode of operation of capital’s power to “re-territorialization,” that is, capital’s restriction of the possibilities of desire. [20]20 “Re-territorialization” (re-territorialiser) is a Deleuzo-Guattarian term for the process by which capital, after decoding and deterritorializing pre-capitalist social codes, re-imposes new limits and constraints on desire within the capitalist axiomatic. In this way, Deleuze failed to see thoroughly that capital’s power is fundamentally the constantly expanding desire itself, the release and intensification of desire. Correspondingly, the strategy of liberation Deleuze proposed is to overcome capital’s “re-territorialization” and expand capital’s “general deterritorialization” as much as possible, which in effect advocates fully liberating capital, removing restrictions on capital, and hoping that the extreme development of capital will sublate itself. However, in the era of the neoliberal transformation of Western states, this is precisely what capital itself most wants. It can be seen that Deleuze’s theory of the subject still retains remnants of the negative concept of power, and thus could not avoid the fate of “Weberian Marxism,” that is, forming a complicity with neoliberalism. [21]21 “Weberian Marxism” refers to a current of Marxist thought that, following Max Weber, emphasizes the role of rationalization, bureaucracy, and formal rationality in capitalism, often seen as converging with neoliberal logic by treating capitalist structures as neutral or inevitable.

但是，韩炳哲也指出了德勒兹在其理论的最后关头所犯的致命错误。尽管德勒兹已然将资本理解为肯定性的欲望生产或“一般解码”,但他并没有完全贯彻权力的肯定性概念，没有完全涤除权力的否定性概念，因而仓促地将资本权力的运作方式归结为“再结域”(re-territorialiser),即资本对欲望的可能性的限制。这样一来，德勒兹就没能透彻地看到，资本权力在根本上就是不断扩张的欲望本身，就是欲望的释放与强化。相应的，德勒兹提出的解放策略是克服资本的“再结域”、尽可能地扩大资本的“一般解域”,这实际上是主张充分地解放资本、取消对资本的限制，指望资本的极致化发展能扬弃自身。然而，在西方国家向新自由主义转型的时代，这正是资本本身最想要的东西。可见，德勒兹的主体理论仍然保留着否定性权力概念的残余，所以也没能避免“韦伯式马克思主义”的命运，即同新自由主义形成共谋。

This error of Deleuze has also profoundly influenced 21st-century Western left-wing thought, making it overly optimistic, when facing the flexible and elastic characteristics of contemporary capitalism, that it helps enhance the liberatory potential of laborers. For example, autonomists like Antonio Negri argue that contemporary production activity is primarily “biopolitical production,” that is, “producing subjects with subjects,” a kind of common production based on the free association of laborers. [22]22 See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, *Empire* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), and *Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire* (New York: Penguin, 2004). This means that the mode of labor’s subsumption under capital has regressed from “real subsumption” to “formal subsumption”; capital can no longer directly control the labor process, and laborers have more hope than before of escaping capital’s domination. “We claim that Empire is better than previous social formations and modes of production, just as Marx claimed that capitalism was better than what came before it… Empire eliminates the cruel regimes of modern power and enhances the potential for liberation.” [23]23 Hardt and Negri, *Empire*, p. 43. Another example: the school of cognitive capitalism, represented by scholars like Yann Moulier Boutang, argues that contemporary production activity is primarily “producing knowledge with knowledge”; the instruments and products of this “cognitive labor” are knowledge itself, and therefore cannot be expropriated by capital. [24]24 See Yann Moulier Boutang, *Cognitive Capitalism*, trans. Ed Emery (Cambridge: Polity, 2011). Consequently, the laboring subject can appropriate some capital, becoming a “cognitariat,” thereby leading to the attenuation or even disappearance of capitalist exploitation.

德勒兹的这一错误也深刻影响了21世纪的西方左翼思想，使之在面对当代资本主义的灵活化、弹性化特征时，过于乐观地认为它有助于增强劳动者的解放潜力。例如，内格里等自治主义者认为，当代生产活动主要是“生命政治生产”,即“用主体生产主体”,它是一种基于劳动者自由联合的公共性生产。这意味着，劳动对资本的从属方式从“实际从属”退化为“形式从属”,资本不再能直接控制劳动过程，劳动者比从前更有希望摆脱资本的支配。“我们主张帝国比从前的社会形态和生产方式更好，就像马克思认为资本主义比从前更好一样……帝国消灭了现代权力的残酷体制，并增强了解放的潜力。”再如，以雅安·布当等学者为代表的认知资本主义学派认为，当代生产活动主要是“用知识生产知识”,这种“认知劳动”的工具和产品都是知识本身，因而不可能被资本剥夺。因此，劳动主体可以占有某种资本，成为“知产阶级”,进而导向资本主义剥削的减弱乃至消失。

Although these theories have grasped the characteristics of contemporary capitalism, they clearly repeat the error of “Weberian Marxism,” [25]25 “Weberian Marxism” refers to a current of Marxist thought that incorporates Max Weber’s analysis of rationalization and bureaucracy, often emphasizing the domination of capital as a form of rationalized control that negates worker autonomy. namely, equating the power of capital with the negation of labor subjectivity, and equating the liberation of the worker with the restoration of labor subjectivity, while ignoring that this view is only partially valid in the era of industrial capitalism. Therefore, contemporary left-wing thought inevitably overlooks another possibility: the enhancement of contemporary workers’ subjectivity and the improvement of their labor skills do not point toward the liberation of the worker, but rather constitute a contemporary form of the subordination of labor to capital; these labor skills must rely on the means of production owned by capital in order to function, and their content has already been constructed into a form conducive to expanding capital’s valorization and strengthening capital’s power, thereby further reinforcing labor’s dependence on capital. As Marx said, “He now belongs to capitalist production and is dominated by capital, not only because he lacks the means of labor, but also because of his labor capacity itself, because of the nature and mode of his labor.” [26]26 This quotation is adapted from Marx’s *Capital*, Volume 1, Chapter 21 (on piece-wages), where he discusses how the worker’s dependence on capital is deepened not only by the lack of means of production but also by the very nature of his labor. In this situation, it is less that the worker has accumulated capital and gained the potential to resist capital, and more that capital has accumulated itself on the worker, shifting the cost of fixed capital onto the worker’s investment in his own human capital.

这些理论尽管洞见了当代资本主义的特征，但显然又重复了“韦伯式马克思主义”的错误，即把资本权力等同于对劳动主体性的否定，把劳动者的解放等同于劳动主体性的恢复，却忽略了这种观点仅在工业资本主义时代才有一定的合理性。因此，当代左翼思想不免忽视了另一种可能性：当代劳动者主体性的增强和劳动技能的提高并不指向劳动者的解放，而是劳动从属于资本的当代形式；这些劳动技能必须依附于资本所占有的生产资料才能发挥作用，其内容已经被建构成有利于扩大资本增殖、强化资本权力的形态，因而进一步强化了劳动对资本的依附。如马克思所说，“他现在从属于资本主义生产、受资本的支配，不只是由于他缺少劳动资料，而且是由于他的劳动能力本身，由于他的劳动的性质和方式”。在这种情况下，与其说是劳动者积累了资本，获得了对抗资本的潜力，不如说是资本将自身积累在了劳动者身上，将固定资本的成本转嫁为劳动者对自身人力资本的投资。

The above misjudgment of contemporary left-wing thought prompts us to reimagine the possibility of labor liberation in the contemporary context. In the neoliberal era, “domination” proceeds in the form of “liberation”: trends such as the flexible mobility of workers, the flexibilization and cognitivization of the labor process, and the deepening of the ideology of human capital cause the enhancement of labor subjectivity to become deeply entangled with capital’s domination of labor. This shows that the labor subject constructed by capitalism itself cannot directly serve as the political subject that resists capitalism; it is impossible to elucidate the trajectory of workers’ liberation struggles by relying on a general category of the subject. Instead, it is necessary to distinguish between the subject of wage labor and the subject of political action. On this point, it is particularly beneficial to reawaken the original problematic of the Western Marxist theory of the reproduction of the subject. As mentioned earlier, Althusser from the very beginning distinguished the subject of political action from the “ideological subject” under the rule of capital, [27]27 Louis Althusser, in works such as *Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses*, distinguished between concrete individuals as “subjects” of ideology (who are interpellated by capitalist structures) and the revolutionary “subject” of political action, which must be constituted through class struggle. with the intention of showing that the development of labor subjectivity within capitalism is essentially different from the political organization required for revolutionary action. At a moment when economic contradictions have become highly acute and all other conditions for revolution are in place, the obstacle to revolution may lie precisely in the very subjects that the revolution must rely on, mobilize, and liberate: they are products of capitalism’s mechanism for reproducing subjects, internally adapted to the requirements of capital’s reproduction, and they resist revolution with their own will. Therefore, political action against capital must distinguish and screen between these two types of subjects, and through specific political procedures, transform the “labor subject” of capitalism into a “political subject.” If this link is neglected, then revolutionary action is necessarily failed, false, or recurrent. In the contemporary context, reimagining the possibility of political action and its subject requires frequently recalling the above insight; this is also the significance of examining the Western Marxist theory of the reproduction of the subject in the present day. (Notes omitted)

当代左翼思想的上述误判向我们提示了在当代语境下重新想象劳动解放的可能性。在新自由主义时代，“支配”是以“解放”的形式进行的：劳动者的灵活流动、劳动过程的弹性化和认知化、人力资本意识形态的深化等趋势，让劳动主体性的增强与资本对劳动的支配深刻地纠缠在一起。这表明，资本主义本身所构造的劳动主体难以直接充当反抗资本主义的政治主体；我们不可能凭借一般的主体范畴阐明劳动者解放斗争的轨迹，而是有必要在雇佣劳动的主体与政治行动的主体之间作出区分。在这一点上，重新唤起西方马克思主义的主体再生产理论的原初问题意识乃是殊为有益的。如前所述，阿尔都塞从一开始就区分了政治行动的主体与资本统治下的“意识形态主体”,其意图在于表明：劳动主体性在资本主义内部的发展，同革命行动所需要的政治组织之间有着本质的差别。在经济矛盾已经高度激化、革命的其他条件均已就绪的时刻，革命的障碍可能恰恰在于革命所要倚仗、动员和解放的那部分主体自身：它们是资本主义的主体再生产机制的产物，内在地适应了资本再生产的要求，并且以自身的意志抵抗着革命。因此，反抗资本的政治行动有必要在上述两种主体之间进行区分和甄别，通过特定的政治程序，将资本主义的“劳动主体”转化为“政治主体”。如果忽略了这一环节，那么革命行动就必然是失败的、虚假的或反复的。在当代语境下重新构想政治行动及其主体的可能性，有必要频繁唤起上述洞见；这也是在当代考察西方马克思主义的主体再生产理论的重要意义所在。（注释略）

Online editor: Zhang Jian

网络编辑：张剑