#real subsumption

Alternatively, perhaps, the rupture is something to which we make a show of facing up; of recognising the misery of retreat, and holding ourselves in the melancholy recognition of the passing of all that was good, meanwhile nursing a flame for its eventual return. Either way it is the same: whether as presence or lack, the past shrouds the specificity of the present.

Walmart to compete with thrift stores,flea markets,garage sales

If one thinks about it carefully, the idea of this ‘real’ subsumption (which Marx opposes to merely ‘formal’ subsumption) goes a long way beyond the integration of the workers into the world of the contact, of money incomes, of law and official politics: it implies a transformation of human individuality, which extends from the education of the labour force to the constitution of a ‘dominant ideology’ capable of being adopted by the dominated themselves.

I remained convinced that the hegemony of the dominant classes was based, in the last analysis, on their capacity to organize the labour process and, beyond that, the reproduction of labour-power itself in a broad sense which includes both the workers’ subsistence and their cultural formation.