Dinu Lipatti's bones

Capitalism needs a certain sort of subject, and so must produce more than simply commodities: the ‘production of capitalists and wage labourers is a chief product of capital’s realization process’ . Political economy has its ideal subjects: ‘the ascetic but extortionate miser and the ascetic but productive slave’. But capitalism does not merely require ideals, and the individual is not merely a myth of bourgeois ideology, nor even simply a result of the process of commodity exchange. The individual is produced for and in the production process itself, as a material reality, with each individualized worker a necessary part of the collective machinery of production. It is not enough that, expropriated from the land and separated from the means of production, the proletariat is tied to capitalism by ‘the silent compulsion of economic relations’: capitalism needs ‘a working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws’. There develops in each factory an ‘industrial army of workers under the command of a capitalist’. The label – ‘industrial army’ – is no mere rhetorical flourish of the pen: Marx specifies, in an analysis as detailed as Foucault’s, the ‘barrack-like discipline’ to which workers are submitted in order to increase and assure ‘the regularity, uniformity, order, continuity and energy of labour’.

Choat, Simon. Marx Through Post-Structuralism : Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze.