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Newsletter No. 1

“Immaterial Labour, Multitudes and New Social Subjects: Class Composition in Cognitive Capitalism”

to be held at the University of Cambridge: Venue to be announced.

Saturday 29 - Sunday 30 April 2006

Dear Colleagues,

A couple of weeks ago an informal mailing about our “Immaterial Labour” conference was sent to a handful of people. In no time at all, upwards of 50 people have responded from all around the world, expressing interest in attending the conference or in receiving conference mailings.

This is very positive, and suggests that our conference will have a strong take-up.

This letter is a brief update.

1. HISTORY OF THE CONFERENCE

This event is a follow-up to the conference “CLASS COMPOSITION IN COGNITIVE CAPITALISM” held in Paris on 15-16th February 2002.

It is a personal initiative by myself, operating under the aegis of the “Universitas adversitatis”, which is an informal network of collaborators operating in cyberspace and coming down to earth periodically to organise seminars, conferences and symposia on matters of mutual interest.

People from the Department of Politics, University of Cambridge and from the Uni-nomade network have indicated a willingness to collaborate in organising the event.

1. SHAPE OF THE CONFERENCE

The dates and location (Cambridge, 29-30 April 2006) are confirmed. The venue is still being arranged.

The likely shape of the conference will be presentations of papers, each 20 minutes long, with 10 minutes for discussion.

The languages of the conference will be English by preference and French where necessary.

We shall work to a maximum of 16 papers, and probably fewer.

There may also be a small social event on the Friday evening preceding the conference, for those who are able to arrive earlier.

1. CONTENT OF THE CONFERENCE

Our conference title is all-embracing, within a general terrain of analysis. We are now specifying the the areas of debate more precisely. Our intention is to create thematic focuses, around which papers can be grouped.

I shall be meeting with some of our Italian contributors (including the people from Uninomade) this week, in order to decide these thematic areas.

That will then lead into a formal Call for Papers which will be circulated to all interested parties. A website will also be established for publication of abstracts and CVs.

Part of our panel will consist of invited speakers. Some have already been approached (Toni Negri and Yann Moulier-Boutang among others) and have agreed to present papers.

Two likely thematic areas are:

(a) Inquiry / Inchiesta etc. Tracing the history, theory and practice of “The Inquiry”, from Marx’s “Workers’ Inquiry” to the present day.

An appropriate starting point might be the article by Toni Negri: “Logica, teoria dell’ inchiesta. La prassi militante come soggetto e come episteme”.

I am translating this piece, and shall have it ready for circulation by the end of September.

(b) A mapping of the intellectual history, and the specific contributions of individuals, involved in creating the notions of immaterial labour, cognitive capitalism, class composition etc. It would be particularly useful to map history of the “Italian” and “Italianate” elements of this tradition post-1979.

1. CONFERENCE ARRANGEMENTS

(a) Registration

The conference has zero funding. We cannot fund travel or expenses for speakers. There will be a modest registration fee for other participants (with reduced rate for concessions, and free entry for those who cannot afford either). Speakers programmed for presenting papers will not pay a registration fee.

Numbers will necessarily have to be limited for space reasons.

If you wish to attend the conference, I recommend that you register early. You can register by sending an e-mail to ed.emery@britishlibrary.net. A registration form will be sent by return.

(b) Accommodation

The conference will not organise accommodation, except for people presenting papers.

However, we shall lend a helping hand to those seeking accommodation in the city.

We shall circulate a list of possibilities for accommodation in the Cambridge area, so that attendees can make their own arrangements. We have a good list of “bed and breakfast” contacts.

If you have friends and contacts with whom you can stay in London, you may find it easier and cheaper to travel from London to Cambridge each day, by National Express bus (the 9.00am bus gets you to Cambridge for about 10.20, day-return fare about £9). Can be booked via the Internet.

(c) Travel

If you are arriving from Europe, the cheapest option is probably to fly RyanAir to Stansted Airport, which is about 30 minutes from Cambridge by bus. If you book well in advance you can obtain very cheap flights.

1. PROPOSALS OF PAPERS

The formal Call for Papers will go out in October. However if you have a proposal for a paper it would be good to hear from you earlier. That would help with our shaping of the eventual conference. Write to me at the address below.

1. EXCITEMENT

It is already clear that the conference will provide a platform for some profound and challenging discussions - the kinds of discussions which are fundamental in creating a new politics for the years ahead.

It is also clear that - as is natural in any field of hard-fought radical politics - there may be animosities and reservations between people invited to attend the conference.

There is great value in being able to debate our chosen topics in the framework of an English-speaking public, and I very much hope that historical reticences will not stand in the way of that happening.

If you have queries and questions about the conference, feel free to write.

Ed Emery [Class Composition Conference] Peterhouse Cambridge CB2 1RD UK

E-mail: ed.emery@britishlibrary.net

Fax: 0870 133 0145

I’ve been asked to write something on the knowledge economy, immaterial labour and the law of value, ranging across Negri et al. to critics such as Caffentzis. It’s a good prod, since I’ve wanted to do this for some time - if only I wasn’t already late with another piece that still isn’t finished …

Anyhow, with any luck that sort of discussion can be herded towards an encounter with the likes of Arrighi and Silver, who see the predominance of financial expansion within the current period as one sympton of hegemonic crisis within the world system.

Thinking about world systems theory, I finally started reading a book that Ron had recommended some time ago - Orinoco flow : culture, narrative, and the political economy of information by Benjamin Keith Belton. The book begins by arguing that the ‘production and reproduction of [the] global information economy’, which Castells identifies as a post-WWII phenomenon, ‘has been a major strategy of global capital since the fifteenth century’ (p.3). This in turn conjured up some recent comments from Nate or Ange (or both?) concerning the propensity in Negri to emphasise the novelty within present day capitalism above all else - as if the practices incompletely grasped in the category of ‘affective labour’, for example, haven’t been crucial to accumulation for hundreds of years. And don’t even get me started on immaterial labour …

One of the many operaisti who deserve to be better known is Mario Dalmaviva. A crucial ‘external’ militant at FIAT during the Hot Autumn, he brought talents previously honed in the advertising industry to bear within the Italian movement of the late sixties and seventies. And a fine cartoonist, whose ‘Doors’ have been making the rounds in Europe. Here’s some thoughts he offered when interviewed for the Futuro Anteriore project back on 19 February 2001:

‘‘In my opinion there was a great social revolution in Italy. It didn’t become a political revolution as we had wanted, and yet it happened, and it prompted a ferocious reaction from the other side [controparte] that’s continued up until today. They won, but not only don’t they know where they’re going, they don’t even know where they are. The problem is that we don’t know either.’

G. Borio, F. Pozzi & G. Roggero (2002) Futuro anteriore. Dai “Quaderni Rossi” ai movimenti globali: ricchezze e limiti dell’operaismo italiano. Rome: Derive Approdi.

Adrian Wilding’s essay ‘The Complicity of Posthistory’ (to be found in W. Bonefeld et al (1995) Emancipating Marx. Open Marxism Volume 3. London: Pluto Press) offers the following quote from Benjamin:

‘Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world-history. But perhaps it is completely different. Perhaps revolutions are the people on these trains reaching for the emergency brake.’

Prospectus:

Papers are invited for a conference: 
”Immaterial Labour, Multitudes and New Social Subjects: Class Composition in Cognitive Capitalism”

Venue: University of Cambridge, UK: Location: to be announced.

Date: Saturday 29 – Sunday 30 April 2006

Among other themes the conference will address issues of cognitive capitalism, class composition, new social subjects, the knowledge economy and immaterial labour. 

Papers will be provided in advance of the conference. They will be translated into English. They will be circulated via the medium of website and internet mailing lists.

The papers will eventually be published in book form.

Conference organised under the aegis of “Universitas adversitatis”, a peripatetic university. Supported by the Uninomade network. With possible involvement of other organising bodies.

A full prospectus for the conference is being prepared.

For proposals of papers, and for participation in the conference, further details from:

Ed Emery [Class Composition Conference] Peterhouse Cambridge CB2 1RD

E-mail: ed.emery@britishlibrary.net

28.v.05

prol-position news #3 (see link in sidebar) carries an interview with Beverly Silver, where amongst other things she compares her work with that of the operaisti

from G. Arrighi & B. Silver (1999) Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp.272, 275, 278, 282, 286

Proposition 1 ‘The global financial expansion of the last twenty years or so is neither a new stage of world capitalism nor the harbinger of a “common hegemony of the global markets”. Rather, it is the clearest sign that we are in the midst of a hegemonic crisis. As such, the expansion can be expected to be a temporary phenomenon that will end more or less catastrophically, depending on how the crisis is handled by the declining hegemon.

Proposition 2 ‘The most important geopolitical novelty of the present hegemonic crisis is a bifurcation of military and financial capabilities that has no precedent in earlier hegemonic transitions. The bifurcation decreases the likelihood of an outbreak of war among the system’s most powerful units. But it does not reduce the chances of a deterioration of the present hegemonic crisis into a more or less long period of systemic chaos.

Proposition 3 ‘Unlike the global financial expansion, the proliferation in the number and variety of transnational business organizations and communities is a novel and probably irreversible feature of the present hegemonic crisis. It has been a major factor in the disintegration of the U.S. hegemonic order and can be expected to continue to shape ongoing systemic chance through a general, though by no means universal, disempowerment of states.

Proposition 4 ‘The disempowerment of social movements - the labor movement in particular - that has accompanied the global financial expansion of the 1980s and 1990s is largely a conjunctural phenomenon. It signals the difficulties involved in delivering on the promises of the U.S.-sponsored global New Deal. A new wave of social conflict is likely, and can be expected to reflect the greater proletarianization, increasing feminization, and changing spatial and ethnic configuration of the world’s labor forces.

Proposition 5 ‘The clash between Western and non-Western civilizations lies behind us rather than in front of us. What lies in front of us are the difficulties involved in transforming the modern world into a commonwealth of civilizations that reflects the changing balance of power between Western and non-Western civilizations, first and foremost the reemerging China-centered civilization. How drastic and painful the transformation is going to be - and, indeed, whether it will eventually result in a commonwealth rather than in the mutual destruction of the world’s civilizations - ultimately depends on two conditions. It depends, first, on how intelligently the main centers of Western civilization can adjust to a less exalted status and, second, on whether the main centers of the reemerging China-centered civilizaiton can collectively rise up to the task of providing system-level solutions to the system-level problems left behind by U.S. hegemony.’

Loren Goldner has written a couple of pieces this year that are also relevant here:

Fictitious Capital and the Transition Out of Capitalism and

China in the Contemporary World Dynamic of Accumulation and Class Struggle: A Challenge for the Radical Left

With any luck, this site will compile a list of resources concerning where ‘the present state of things’ might be heading, and what that could mean for the peculiar commodity labour-power.

I’ll start with Beverley Silver’s book Forces of Labor, which offers a world systems take on global patterns of class conflict over the past 150 years, and into the early part of this century. An excellent jump off point is the series of links compiled by Wildcat Germany - http://www.wildcat-www.de/dossiers/forcesoflabor/fol_dossier.htm - which also includes some recent writings by Giovanni Arrighi on the decline of US hegemony.

Saw the Gramsci quote (top left corner of page) in the local TV guide yesterday, so must be onto something …