Productivism

Definition

Productivism is the discursive formation The Mirror of Production opens by diagnosing: the assumption, shared by the bourgeoisie and its revolutionary critics, that production is the ultimate dimension of value, and that liberation means freeing the productive forces. Its canonical sentence is the book's first: "A specter haunts the revolutionary imagination: the phantom of production. Everywhere it sustains an unbridled romanticism of productivity. The critical theory of the mode of production does not touch the principle of production" (Preface, p. 17). The critique of political economy, on this account, only rearranges contents: "all the concepts it articulates describe only the dialectical and historical genealogy of the contents of production, leaving production as a form intact. This form reemerges, idealized, behind the critique of the capitalist mode of production" (Preface, p. 17).

Productivism is not confined to party Marxism; it is the common form of an era's radicalism. "The capitalist system of production is to be subverted in the name of an authentic and radical productivity. The capitalist law of value is to be abolished in the name of a de-alienated hyperproductivity, a productive hyperspace. Capital develops the productive forces but also restrains them: they must be liberated" (Preface, pp. 17–18). The liberation of productive forces is therefore not a Marxist corrective to political economy but political economy's own formula, adopted by its critics. The two exemplary cases named are contemporary: "from the liberation of productive forces in the unlimited 'textual productivity' of Tel Quel to Deleuze's factory-machine productivity of the unconscious (including the 'labor' of the unconscious), no revolution can place itself under any other sign. The general formula is that of a productive Eros" (Preface, pp. 17–18). Semiotics and psychoanalysis repeat the move: "the exchange of signifieds has always hidden the 'labor' of the signifier: let us liberate the signifier and the textual production of meaning! … let us restore it as a productive machine!" — after which "everywhere productivist discourse reigns and, whether this productivity has objective ends or is deployed for itself, it is itself the form of value" (Preface, pp. 17–18).

The discourse has a moral and an aesthetic face: "on this dialectical base, Marxist philosophy unfolds in two directions: an ethic of labor and an esthetic of non-labor" (ch. I, "Ethic of Labor; Esthetic of Play"). The ethic sanctifies work as value (Marcuse's labor as "an ontological concept of human existence as such"; Benjamin's verdict that with German workers "the old Protestant ethic of work celebrated, in a secular form, its resurrection"); the esthetic makes play the deferred completion of labor, so that "the sphere of play is defined as the fulfillment of human rationality, the dialectical culmination of man's activity of incessant objectification of nature and control of his exchanges with it" — "the esthetic sublimation of labor's constraints" (same section). The verdict: "confronted by the absolute idealism of labor, dialectical materialism is perhaps only a dialectical idealism of productive forces" (same section; see ethic-of-labor-and-esthetic-of-play, play).

Politically, productivism supplies the revolutionary class its definition. "In the guise of historical materialism, the idealism of production ends by giving a positive definition to the revolutionary class. The class is then defined in the universal, according to the universality of labor power" (ch. V, "Marxist Theory and the Workers' Movement: The Concept of Class"). The "ethic of rational labor, which is of bourgeois origin and which served historically to define the bourgeoisie as a class, is found renewed with fantastic amplitude at the level of the working class, also contributing to define it as a class" (same section). Its managerial form is self-management: the artisan's "he 'disposes' of himself; he is his own usufruct. This is self-management at the level of the individual producer, but self-management as we know is nothing but the metamorphosis of productive management" (ch. IV, "The Artisan", p. 104). Workplace reform follows the same logic — "choice of work schedule, job enrichment, anti-assembly line" appear only as "technocratic reformism" (ch. V, "Contradiction and Subversion: The Displacement of the Political") — and the question "does the mastery of the process of production constitute a revolution?" is answered in the negative: "autonomous or not, master of himself or not (individually or collectively), labor can only inscribe in production a sublimated Eros, or in the case of the phantasm of self-management, a repressively desublimated Eros" (ch. IV, "The Artisan").

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the diagnosis's author: the phantom of production; the productive Eros of Tel Quel and of Deleuze; the idealism of production defining the class (1973/1975).
• Karl Marx — the central case: the liberation of productive forces and the productive-forces/relations dialectic as the schema productivism inherits.
• Gilles Deleuze — named for the "factory-machine productivity of the unconscious" whose desiring-production repeats the productivist form.
• Walter Benjamin — cited on the workers' movement's secularized "Protestant ethic of work," the moral face of productivism.
• Herbert Marcuse (not yet paged) — the "ontological concept of labor" and the play that completes it; the book's most-cited philosophical ally and target.
• Paul Lafargue (not yet paged) — The Right to Be Lazy, cited for the "strange delusion" of the working classes in the same section.

Related Concepts

• ethic-of-labor-and-esthetic-of-play — productivism's normative pair: labor as value, play as its sublimated beyond.
• labor-power — the concept in which the productive vocation is expressed as a human essence.
• mirror-of-production — the figure: production as the imaginary in which the species recognizes itself.
• play — the term that, made labor's continuation, marks productivism's limit.
• revolution-as-finality — the political form productivism takes when liberation is deferred to a future.
• species-essentiality — the productive vocation as a species essence, which productivism presupposes rather than argues.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — the diagnosis in the book's opening pages: "a specter haunts the revolutionary imagination: the phantom of production… the critical theory of the mode of production does not touch the principle of production" (Preface, p. 17); the "unlimited 'textual productivity' of Tel Quel" and "Deleuze's factory-machine productivity of the unconscious" under "the general formula… of a productive Eros" (Preface, pp. 17–18); "self-management as we know is nothing but the metamorphosis of productive management" (ch. IV, p. 104); and "the idealism of production ends by giving a positive definition to the revolutionary class" (ch. V, "The Concept of Class").
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Is the charge against Deleuze or against a shared form? Desiring-production is named as an example of the productivist metaphor, not analyzed in its own terms — the page should not overstate the engagement.
• If productivism is a form rather than a doctrine, what would non-productivist radical practice look like? Baudrillard's answer — symbolic exchange, the refusal of production — is asserted; the book offers no institutional analysis.
• Is "self-management" only productive management? The claim is made in passing, and it is the strongest available test of whether the critique can distinguish liberation of labor from its reorganization.
• Does the argument's use of Benjamin and Lafargue commit the same universalizing it condemns — reading the whole workers' movement through a single ethic? Poster's objection about untheorised discontinuity is adjacent.