The dubious historical character of the concept of real subsumption is something that also James D. White has written about. If Björkhagengruppen, in the way they approach the concept, on the one hand are preoccupied with the althusserian critique of historicism and on the other an attempt to defend (after the work of Panzieri and Postone and so on) the orthodox conception of revolution in terms of appropriation of the productive force, James D. White is more preoccupied with what he calls "deliberate application of force" in the destruction of agrarian communities.

I want to copy a bit of White’s argument about real subsumption below, even though I’m not really impressed or convinced by it. The very formulation of "deliberate application of force" disturbes enough of spinozian sensibilities to make me question where a total abandonment of the concept of real subsumption eventually might lead. Still, though, I want to copy it because it does bring attention to something with the concept that I haven’t seen under discussion all to often.

This is from pages 200-207 in the book Marx and the Origins of Dialectical Materialism:

[White is, where we enter the text, writing about the relation between the various drafts of Capital and has just come to the published version of Capital which he compares to the unpublished sequel to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy which sometimes goes by the name The Manuscripts of 1861-63.]

The removal of the concept of Subsumption from the section on the labour and valorization processes was not an isolated occurrence. Apart from a passage in which formal and real Subsumption of labour under capital were defined, all references to Subsumption had been excised from Capital. This was noticeable in the fifth chapter in which the three methods of increasing the productivity of labour were discussed. Although cooperation , the division of labour and machinery received a great deal of attention, they were no longer presented as being progressive stages in the Subsumption of labour under capital, and thereby linked to the Subsumption of the labour process under the process of valorization. Chapter Six, in which the formal and real Subsumption of labour under capital had been developed in detail, and in which the action of Subsumption in rendering various spheres of activity adequate to commodity production was discussed, had of course been discarded.

The elimination of the concept of Subsumption removed much of the coherence that Marx had achieved in the second draft of "The Critique of Political Economy" and rendered the various sections of the work more descriptive than in previous drafts, a feature accentuated by the inclusion of a great deal of factual and statistical material. But the absence of Subsumption had consequences not only for the structure of Capital, but the interpretation of Marx’s system as a whole. For when he had written the Preface to A Constribution to a Critique of Political Economy with its reference to ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’, he clearly imagined that his words would be amplified by the entire work which was to follow, as indeed happened in the second draft. The excision of Subsumption from the exposition in the published version of Capital, however, left the preface to A Constribution to a Critique of Political Economy high and dry in a splendid isolation […].

The exclusion of Chapter Six from the published version of Capital signalized not only the elimination of Subsumption as the process by which capital made labour adequate to itself, but also that which extended the ambit of capital. Expanding capitalist Society at the expense of the ancient communities. These two aspects of Subsumption had been brought together in Chapter Six and shown to be part of the same process. It was logical, therefore, that the rejection of the one should be accompanied by the rejection of the other.

The result was not only to make Capital less coherent than the previous drafts had been, but to deprive Capital of its historical dimension, that is the dynamic by which capital increasingly created a Society adequate to itself. […]

[Here follows a discussion of how these changes between unpublished manuscripts and the published Capital relates to how Marx changed his opinion on some historians of agrarian society, most notable Georg Maurer]

What impressed Marx was not so much the fact that the communal form of organization was so widespread, but that it was so resilient. Later, in 1881, he was to use the survival of the village community in the Trier region to prove that it was capable of surviving in a capitalist environment. Reading Maurer’s work confirmed what he must have suspected for some time: that the reproductive cycle of capitalism did not necessarily destroy the ancient communities. Henceforth Marx adopted the point of view that the agrarian commune could survive all economic development; it was only destroyed by deliberate application of force.

Marx had been slow to arrive at this viewpoint, though he consoled himself with the thought that ‘even the best minds’ could fail to see the obvious. What he called his ‘judicial blindness’ (the phrase in English) was rooted deep in the evolution of German thought. For the belief that capitalism would inevitably strip away the traditional and feudal agrarian relations had its origins in the anti-Romantic campaign on which his system had been based. To admit that these institutions might survive meant adopting a point of view which had always been the opposite of his own. His letter [to Engels on Maurer] recognized that his former anti-Romantic standpoint was no longer tenable.