Consider these passages:

Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature. Later on he sold the product for £5 and to that extent became a dealer in a commodity. But the Leipzig literary proletarian who produces books, e.g. compendia on political economy, at the instructions of his publisher is roughly speaking a productive worker, in so far as his production is subsumed under capital and only takes place for the purpose of the latter’s valorisation. A singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker. If she sells her singing for money, she is to that extent a wage labourer or a commodity dealer. But the same singer, when engaged by an entrepreneur who has her sing in order to make money, is a productive worker, for she directly produces capital.

And…

A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will.

The relation between these passages raises a number of questions about the character of the concept of labour process. Hanna Arendt writes that the later of these passages constitutes a sort of exception in Marx’ writings in that it is about work and not labour. I believe this is simply wrong. Arendt might have a point in terms of a description of the character of this process. But her statement does not imply a consideration of the relation this passage holds to the theme of the development of the means of production etc. And besides, Milton, in the former passage, would seem to wind up on the wrong side of the labour/work distinction. In fact, the Aristotelian terms would seem almost reversed.

Something is fishy about the concept of labour process.

I’d like to consider three possible interpretations:

1. We could take Marx at his words (that is: the words of the opening of the chapter on the labour process in the first volume of Capital) and consider it an anthropological concept. The problem, then, is what it possibly could mean that the labour process carries the process of valorization once the means of production takes the form of machinery. With machinery the imagined end-product is not inherent in the worker – except, perhaps, but with a few engineers – and the process of production could not easily be conceived as the realization of a purpose that is in any way his or hers. If we stick with the anthropological definition of the labour process it would seem that the production process would cease to be a labour process with machinery.

2. We could consider it a construction within the method of systematic dialectics. This would, I believe, accentuate how the character of the imaginative/purposive in the labour process turns from the producer to the instrument (from the subject to the middle term between subject and object), within the chapter under discussion, as the establishment of an abstract form of what later will be machinery. I cannot say that I handle this approach well enough to really understand how the contradiction between labour process and process of valorization then is to be understood, or, for that matter, why Marx uses the anthropological terms in Capital.

3. We could also consider it a conceptual construction made possible by the distinction between intellectual and manual labour implied by machinery, so that, fundamentally, the labour process is not inherent in the human individual, but in the relation between intellectual and manual labour, which is then projected back on the handicraft type of worker, or, perhaps, comes to constitute a transcendental precondition for the conception of handicraft type of work. The object of the concept of the labour process, then, exists at different social levels before and after machinery. I believe that this, perhaps, might be a reason why the age of machinery conceives its prehistory in anthropological terms. The point is not that an imagined end-result never "really" been involved in the production process, but that the conception of the practice of the production process in terms of a realization/phenomenon of this ideal/imagined purpose is not an ontological one, but is engaged critically within the marxian problematic of the production process.

Moishe Postone and Jennifer Bajorek are two people that in different ways have argued for a conception of the concept the labour process in terms that seem relatively close to the third point above by way of bringing this concept together with the concept of ideology. Postone have argued that Marx’ dialectical critique is of a presuppositionless character in the sense that he sets out from popular ideological terms, and his critique of political economy is an ideology critique. Bajorek have, quite brilliantly, argued that one should keep in mind how the ideal is defined in Marx’ concept of ideology when dealing with the ideal of the concept of the labour process. But this does still not explain how Milton escapes the concept of labour process. Which is something I will have to come back to. I suspect that it will involve a consideration of the repellation or non-coincidence of labour with itself; a non-coincidence that derives from the value-form but in the machine-form is articulated in the division of intellectual and manual labour, or something like that…