i do so relish these times of peril
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 …
I’m looking fwd to the piece.
Care to dabble into the question of what the political stakes are re the law of value debate? Sometimes I think I get it, other times it eludes me completely - like now.
Comment by s0metim3s — August 24, 2005 @ 3:24 pm
I find it confusing at times as well – and what follows is pretty rambling and confusing (my first response to my first blog comment - and I notice the text box is tiny!). I used to be fascinated with crisis theory a la Grossmann and Mattick, which can lead to an obsession with calculating the point at which capital’s overaccumulation brings its expanded reproduction to an end. At the same time, class struggle was seen as quite external to the process, or at best coming into play once a crisis situation had emerged.
Talk of the ‘law’ of value has its problems – I rather like John Holloway’s point (in ‘Capital Moves’) that ‘The law of value is simultaneously the lawlessness of value, the loss of any social control over society’s development, the presence of insubordination within subordination.’ Perhaps I am simply being seduced by the argument that suggests that capital as accumulated abstract labour (value) is driven, in the process of trying to expand, both to escape its dependence upon labour (by reducing necessary labour in favour of surplus labour), while having no other means to understand its success or otherwise except by measuring such efforts at expansion in terms of units of value. It might sound crazy – it is crazy, to the point where lots of people today do seem to question measuring human activity in terms exclusively of profit. Fewer people at present seem to be taking the next step, though, and concluding that if capital needs labour, ‘we’ need capital only so long as it and the state are able to maintain the separation between our needs and our capacities.
If value is indeed beyond measure, then capital is not bound by any such strictures – it can act with relative impunity. How does it expand itself? Is capital now nothing more than ‘power over’? In that case, how can it be undermined? I’m not sure that Negri has offered answers to these questions, at least not lately. Nor do I think he can explain the emergence of financial speculation as a key form of accumulation today. 30 years ago, Negri would have argued that the significance of money as capital lay precisely in its efforts to bypass the power of workers in the immediate process of production – but somewhere along the way, he seems to have abandoned that argument (which is not without its problems in any case). That discussion was pursued instead in the 1980s and 1990s by Holloway and Bonefeld – the things they wrote then on the politics of debt are still worth a look.
Comment by Administrator — August 25, 2005 @ 12:34 am
hi Steve,
I’m looking forward to the article.
Please, do get started about immaterial labor, I’dbe keen to hear your thoughts.
Can you recommend some decent sources with regard to this finance and financial speculation stuff? I have a really hard understanding it, particularly with regard to the connection to command over labor/subversion of command. I can sort of see it with regard to housing prices (I had a bit of experience at one point as a paid tenant organizer), which are a major issue in many US cities - prices of housing are inflated (there’s talk of a housing bubble, whatever that means) which impact wages and all that, and link to policies that break up enclaves of recalcitrant folks, but I have a hard time understanding the market and finance lingo, as well as the factors that enter into all that stuff. You seem to have a much better grip on it all than I do. Any material you can point out is much appreciated.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — August 25, 2005 @ 7:18 am
While I think of it, the latest issue of The Commoner has some useful essays on value relations, starting with one by George Caffentzis on alleged immeasurability. And the one by David Harvey is challenging too …
Comment by Administrator — August 25, 2005 @ 12:56 pm
Hi Steve
I enjoyed the article. I dont read you as anti immaterial labour only as putting it into context. Regarding the Orinco book and global info flows al la Castells being post WW2 - I have traced it back as far as the late 19th in terms of modern time machine technology but of course this is not the beginning. I am hunting for a good analysis of the dreamtime as well. I went to Australia for xmas - i dont think i ever want to go back to that Camp. Very very oppresive and over regulated.
M
Comment by martin — January 15, 2006 @ 5:43 am
Good to hear from you, Martin - and good to see your piece in Mute.
If I’d had more space I would have clarified that I have a problem with the very term ‘immaterial labour’, even if I’d agree that some of the processes that it’s meant to explain are important to try and understand. Then I disagree with the centrality and novelty that the term’s exponents tend to ascribe to it. On the other hand, I certainly wouldn’t claim that ‘nothing significant has changed since the heyday of fordism’ …
Comment by Steve — January 16, 2006 @ 8:30 am