something mute
A link to something I wrote for the next book from the Mute crowd. Or rather, the cleaned-up version based on Ange’s editing, that I think got there too late for the deadline (so they’ll be publishing the less elegant version - sad face here). Posting it tonight is really a way of me avoiding work on something I have to (and want to) write about Luciano Ferrari Bravo …
It still could do with some work (you noticed too, huh?). Apart from anything else, reflecting on Massimo De Angelis’ work on value would help.
Now, if I can’t work out how to link to it, I guess you’ll just get the whole thing below. Let’s see what happens.
hi Steve,
I really like this article.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — November 22, 2005 @ 1:05 am
hi steve, its a great article. can i put it out there a bit. slash, a few friends, brian holmes… ta
Comment by dr.woooo — November 29, 2005 @ 2:13 am
hello Steve - This is a good text, and I quite agree with the stress on socially necessary labor time. It’s still the only bottom-line measure that capital knows and you can see the degrading effects on human beings as globalized competition pulls it down to ever lower levels. Negri and friends had a brilliant insight that the freedoms and the meaning-making activity implied in cultural, informational and affective labor could lead certain class fractions to challenge this sole measure (and they have at times, cf. copyleft and everything associated); but to make the mere possibility of that challenge into a new teleology - a new contradiction or crisis-tendency - becomes self-deluding.
What has happened over the past 30 years is a huge induction of people all over the world into the service of finance capital (which means, the management of credit money in all its forms, especially intergovernmental debt, as Hudson shows in his book on Super Imperialism). That’s the hegemonic force, which has completely subordinated any merely industrial logic. Unfortunately, the ideological efforts and monetary rewards required to insure that the great numbers of people performing these services remain loyal to their real masters - the top 0.1% of the hierarchy - have been quite effective.
Arrighi, Silver et al. have indeed shown that there are historical precedents for this hegemony of finance capital. The point, I think, is to re-examine the global division of labor and power, in order to better understand the basis of possible antagonisms. Why do people make serious efforts to go beyond the capitalist system, or even to reform it, to reshape it from the inside, as was done in the period of 1930-70?
Theoretical examination of the nature of service-sector labor processes will never reveal any inherent weakness in the hierarchies that have come to prevail since financialization really took off (i.e. around the mid-70s). Just as the European bourgoisie successfully produced its own legitimacy and self-justification, so have the new elites that emerged from the American-led globalization of the post-WWII period. And just as it was primarily peasants that drove the revolutions of the 20th century, so it will undoubtedly be peasants and disinherited industrial workers who will rise up in the 21st. How to cooperate with them? I think this is the most interesting question for people at our class level, though of course any substantial answer also requires that we, the disaffected servants of finance capital, learn to cooperate with each other. Only a transnational articulation of very different local ideas about equality, social justice, rights, and desireable futures can put together forces powerful enough to make the dominant states deviate from their path toward the natural contradictions of capitalism, which are fascism, inter-imperialist rivalry and war. So it means there is a lot of subversive and revolutionary work to do in the cultural, informational and affective domains - and without any wage for it either!
best, Brian
Comment by Brian Holmes — December 2, 2005 @ 6:24 pm
Thanks for your comments, Brian - a lot to think about there …
Comment by Administrator — December 5, 2005 @ 11:38 am
Just thought id finally email (ahem, repost) something on yr piece for mute. I reckon I agree with much of the criticism, but also think you missed taking on some of the richer parts of the immaterial labour deal. Negri et al do say some interesting stuff – mostly about the role of ‘performance’ in immaterial labour. But virno et al seem to make a more interesting case I reckon, for the multitude as well.
I reckon the focus in the paper on the same workers negri identifies as the ‘non-vanguard vanguard’ is worthwhile for taking the vanguard thing to task, but misses (or I reckon minimizes) the growth of the tertiary sectors in the North (the doug quote emphasizes this I reckon
– id say there are more cleaners, chainworkers, tourism workers, etc than truck drivers). The category immaterial labourers, like chainworkers, or precariat, obscures the changing class composition, but still does point to real changes I think. Where negri et al fuck up (and this includes virno), is that they want a historical agent, where there isn’t one (and I doubt there ever was – but that could just be the sectarian anarchist in me coming out). what do you think of the precarias derive mob in spain on this tendency?
The growth of the tertiary sectors, along with the rise of contractors, the loss of ‘industiral jobs’ in the North, and the growth of a peticular kind of underemployment, are all interesting and new developments. And I reckon you could call some of them immaterial, but calling them as such adds nothing to the understanding of them: its just an an attempt to form a historical subject, as you pointed
out. I reckon that the tone of the piece though seems to indicated
that you don’t think there are any substantial changes (im thinking of
the doug quote, and later on the one about mc’jobs being taylorist) –
is that right? Am I reading too much? Id say that the most interesting
parts of this transformation are the underemployment - hence my
interest in precarity-as-tendency como the precarious lexicon – the
rise of a particular kind of management theory and contractorism (and dare I say the growth, marginal as it seems, of small businesses?),
and the growth of the service industries, within which are many
divisions, including a ‘performative’ one (like tourism, call centres,
chainstores, etc). As for outside the North, again I reckon negri is
right to point to ‘the poors’, but he doesn’t really do much with it.
I think there is some interesting stuff on the rise of what mike davis
calls an informal lumpen proletariat, but none of it is in empire or
multitudes, and virno’s ‘virtuosity’ doesn’t really seem to have
anything to do with them. Mikes ‘planet of slums’ is still the best
thing ive read, though there is probably more out there. Its very
apparent – a mass of ‘abandonded’ or ‘failed’ peoples who live in a
parrallel economy that intersects via drugs, militas, smuggling,
remittance payments and when they interact with tourists. Which is a
damn interesting composition in my mind, one that points towards
banditry and religious revival.
The only other thing I had to say was on the fragments of machines bit: I reckon that one of the workerists weakpoints was the denial that capital (and state) had any potenza of their own – I figure deleuze was far more interesting/productive in some ways because of this. Labour is definetly the measure of value, but this is confronted with the paradox of increasing productivity – both human and non-human. And it seems that the more spaces brought into the matrix, the fewer people that can be involved as workers or consumers as a
percentage. and the faster the growth of the underemployed. Im not so sure about the growth of work hours either, or the social factory. Im
still fuzzy on this point, and not sure exactly what the social factory is. Im not so sure that there has been a general penetration of work into what was non-work time. Or not too the extent that its decried. I think the idea of colonization as the situationists used it is probably more productive than the social factory, but im just talking out of my arse. I don’t think that in general there has been an increase in work time, and I think that taking work home isn’t as common as you suggest – I reckon a worker who has a high-value job is likely to take work home, but someone who works at maccas is not. What there was, was a dip in work time that collapsed around the time women, young people, the South, etc all decided they weren’t going to give white men, especially the rich ones, a free ride anymore. 100yrs ago, working 14 hr days wasn’t unusual, where today in Australia
working 9 is still the norm, when you have a full time job that is, which is the minority.
anyway, i liked brians comment about the ‘motors’ of rebellion in the 20thC - campasinos. i reckon any attempt to theorise a ‘historical actor’ that ignores the majority of the world and tries to base its analysis on a few whiteys is doomed from the start to failure. understanding the changes taking place in the South really has to be a priority…
nico
Comment by nico — January 17, 2006 @ 6:27 pm
hi Steve, Nik,
Interesting stuff as always comrades. FYI, I’m told there’s a future article of Ephemera going to be done eventually on immaterial labor, maybe some of the questions here could be turned into stuff to be submitted to that. Anyway, for me the stuff on immaterial labor has to be squared with the sort of Wages for Housework perspective, that sees unwaged reproductive activity as labor and as bound up with value production. That viewpoint I think takes away a lot of the trumpeting of the new that goes on in Negri. Not that there’s nothing new, just that the new thing is not that now for the first time activities off the clock are productive for (and subjected to attempts at management by) the boss. Nor is it the case that now there’s for the first time a capacity for revolutionary autonomous organization. I think the problem w/ Negri et al on this is precisely that they want a historical agent, that’s really well put. I think the claims about the totally new era are related to the attempt to declare a new found historical subject. If we dropped that I wonder what’d be left. Like class composition analysis, it’s different if it’s looking for (trying to produce) a historical agent than if it’s more just a matter of seeing what we do and know now and how to do and know that better in order to work less or not at all. I think.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — January 19, 2006 @ 9:47 pm
Heya nate & steve,
Im still a bit hazy on the house work as value production thing - im not exactly sure what is meant by value here. is there a good basic intro to the marxist concept of value floating around? i recently read the aufheben review on the arcane of reproduction (sic?) and though i tend to think they are a bunch of ultra-left tossers i did like their point about the autonomist streaching the concept of value (even if i dont quite understand what that is) which seems to make the concept a little threadbare - that its not necessary to make housework a site of capitalist value production to see it as ‘colonised’ by the logic of capital, etc (i feel like im increasingly returning to deleuze and there notion of a continual colonisation/decolonisation of social ‘logics’, and that older forms of opresión – like partiarchy – are partially recoded by capital but never completely). i guess that the implication was, AFAIK, that pushing for all of the struggles that occurred outside of the factory in the 70’s to be included in the factory (a.k.a working class) via a ’social factory’ is just another move to centre revolt/revolution on the working class, when (and this is just me) i reckon that if anything that myth was done away with by those exact struggles.i think that the concept of the working class was always short hand to begin with, and in the last 100 yrs of composition / recomposition its kinda vacuous – im not sure what good it does, or what help it is, to say that we are all working class – even if you then go on to analyse the various ‘sub’-compositions. It seems that its just an attempt to preserve the prillvillaged place of the proletariat in struggle. And for that matter, the privillaged place of capitalism in repression.
One thing i did like about Brians point about the peasants is something that it reminded me of. I read bookchins book on the spanish revolution and the history leading up to it and one thing i got from it at the time was the central role of peoples-in-transition in the revolt – factory workers, et al – ie, the traditional working class – wore some of the least radical and last people to get involved. There was a discusion amongst some of us at the time and it seemed that a few of us got the feeling from history that this was generally the case – that the traditional working class as seen by say the ISO/SWP were far more likely to be less radical and more fascistic than bodies in transition from one space (peasants) to another (factory workers). Wasnt this the case in italy, where it was migrants who formed the basis of the most radical action?
Anyway, i reckon i would like to understand the whole value debate a bit better. At the moment the social factory doesnt really seem. That real to me.
catchyas
n
Comment by nico — January 20, 2006 @ 5:06 pm
hi, great thread, is there discussion on metamute.org , on this, cant see link ?
Call for Papers: Affective and Immaterial Labour Explored - at link
Comment by dr.woooo — January 26, 2006 @ 12:14 am
No, I don’t think any of these posts are over at the new mute site, apart from Brian’s. The article itself is at http://www.metamute.org/en/node/5594
N, I’m not sure how well the category of ’social factory’ explains a lot, beyond its initial, evocative assertion (’the production of value is not confined to what traditionally has been called a factory’) - someone needs to put it through its paces, and see how well it stands up.
As for the debate around the militancy or otherwise of groups of people who are undergoing proletarianisation, there are some useful debates around this in academia as well as beyond. One good place to start is Silver’s book Forces of Labor.
Comment by Steve — January 26, 2006 @ 12:38 am
that link is in the aut-op-sy archive done know why it missed.
Comment by dr.woooo — January 27, 2006 @ 12:21 am
hey gang,
Missed the responses here, sorry to come late… Nik, I’ve not read the Aufheben piece yet that you mentioned. I’m not sure what’s at stake in whether or not a concept of value is threadbare or full. I generally think capitalism’s not very complicated intellectually, nor is the revolution. It’s just really, really, really hard. (I imagine it’s like running a marathon - what’s complicated about that? Just, you know, run for a super long time and try not to keel over.) I like Harry Cleaver’s take on value, which as far as I can tell means basically just “imposed work for someone else, done in a way that helps preserve their power”. In that sense then housework is definitely value productive: if I don’t wash my clothes I will be less effective at my job. Same thing if I don’t eat or bathe or occasionally have a nice time. That’s all stuff that impacts on whether or not my boss gets what he wants from me, and none of it is compensated. And if the people who the majority of that work stop doing it, it will cause a problem for the bosses. I think that’s the basic point, but I could be wrong.
As for the social factory, I’d love to write something on the concept but I need some solid representative pieces on what the concept is (Steve, any recommendations from the stuff you know of?). To my mind, the idea in one version is great - work doesn’t just occur on the clock. On the other hand, there’s a way to handle it that I really don’t like: work has become something that doesn’t just occur on the clock. That strikes me as super problematic.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — February 17, 2006 @ 1:18 am
I’m struggling to remember any sustained discussion of the notion of the social factory (more often, ‘factory-society’). The most likely place is in articles from the journal Aut Aut during the seventies - eg G. Bossi (1975) ‘Classe e composizione di classe—Per una riconiderazione delle ipotesi della nuova sinistra’, Aut Aut 149-50, September-October. And I once saw something in English about social planning and (I think) the social factory, but will need to wait until my papers are unpacked again to be sure …
Comment by Steve — February 22, 2006 @ 10:03 am