Reality check: are we living in an immaterial world?
A priest once came across a Zen master and, seeking to embarrass him, challenged him as follows: ‘Using neither sound nor silence, can you show me what is reality?’The Zen master punched him in the face.
Continued assertions that, today, we live in a knowledge economy or society raise many questions for reflection. In the next few pages, I want to discuss some aspects of these assertions, especially as they relate to the notion of immaterial labour. This term has developed within the camp of thought that is commonly labelled ‘postworkerist’, of which the best-known exponent is undoubtedly Antonio Negri. While its roots lie in that branch of postwar Italian marxism known as operaismo (workerism), this milieu has reworked many of the precepts developed during the Italian New Left’s heyday of 1968-78. If anything, it was the very defeat of the social subjects with which operaismo had identified – first and foremost, the so-called ‘mass worker’ engaged in the production of consumer durables through repetitive, ‘semi-skilled labour’ – that led Negri and others to insist that we are embarked upon a new age beyond modernity (see the Generation Online website for the best introduction to postworkerism).
According to this view of the world, a quite different kind of labour is currently either hegemonic amongst those with nothing to sell but their ability to work or, at the very least, is well on the way towards acquiring such hegemony. Secondly, capital’s growing dependence upon this different – immaterial – labour has serious implications for the process of self-expanding abstract labour (value) that defines capital as a social relation. Marx held that the ‘socially-necessary labour-time’ associated with their production provided the means by which capital could measure the value of commodities (and so the mass of surplus value that it hoped to realise with their sale). Negri, on the other hand, is of the opinion that in a time of increasingly complex and skilled labour, and of a ‘working day’ that more and more blurs the boundaries with (and ultimately colonises) the rest of our waking hours, value can no longer be calculated. As he put it a decade ago, in such circumstances the exploitation of labour still continues, but ‘outside any economic measure: its economic reality is fixed exclusively in political terms’ (Negri 1994: 28).
This is pretty esoteric stuff, particularly the arguments over the measurability (or otherwise) of value. Should we care one way or the other? What I hope to show below is that, for all their apparent obscurity, these debates matter. That is because they raise questions as to how we understand our immediate context, including how we interpret the possibilities latent within contemporary class composition. Is one sector of class composition likely to set the pace and tone in struggles against capital, or should we rather look instead towards the emergence of ‘strange loops … odd circuits and strange connections between and among various class sectors’ (as Midnight Notes once put it) as a necessary condition for moving beyond ‘the present state of things’?
Unpacking immaterial labour
Maurizio Lazzarato’s discussion of ‘Immaterial Labor’ was perhaps the first extended treatment of the topic to appear in English. Part of an important anthology of Italian text published in the mid-1990s, Lazzarato’s work defined immaterial labour as ‘labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity’ (Lazzarato 1996: 133). If the ‘classic’ forms of this labour were represented in the fields of ‘audiovisual production, advertising, fashion, the production of software, photography, cultural activities, and so forth’ (Lazzarato 1996: 137), those who perform such work commonly found themselves in highly casualised and exploited circumstances. This is part of what has, more recently and in certain Western European radical circles, has come to be called the ‘precariat’.
The Taylorist approach to production that confronted the mass worker decreed that ‘you are not paid to think’. With immaterial labour, Lazzarato (1996: 136) argued, management’s project was
even more totalitarian than the earlier rigid division between mental and manual labor (ideas and execution), because capitalism seeks to involve even the worker’s personality within the production of value.
At the same time this managerial approach carried real risks for capital, Lazzarato believed, since capital’s very existence was placed in the hands of a labour force called upon to exercise its creativity through collective endeavours. And unlike a century ago, when a layer of skilled workers likewise stood at the centre of key industries, even if largely cut off from the unorganised ‘masses’, today ‘immaterial labour’ could not be understood as the distinctive attribute of one stratum within the workforce. Instead, skilled labour was present (even if only in latent form) amongst broad sectors of the labour market, starting with the young.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire – a book that has come to stand (rightly or wrongly) as the centrepiece of postworkerist thought – built upon and modified Lazzarato’s work. Accepting the premise that immaterial labour was now central to capital’s survival (and by extension, to projects that aimed at its extinction), Hardt and Negri (2000: 30) identified three segments of immaterial labour:
a) the reshaped instances of industrial production which had embraced communication as their lifeblood;b) the ‘symbolic analysis and problem solving’ undertaken by knowledge workers;
c) the affective labour found, above all, within the service sector.
These experiences, it was conceded, could be quite disparate: knowledge workers, for example, were divided between high-end practitioners with considerable control over their working conditions, while others engaged in ‘low-value and low-skill jobs of routine symbol manipulation’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 292). Nonetheless, a common thread did exist between the three elements. As instances of service work, none of them produced a ‘material or durable good’. Moreover, since the output was physically intangible as a discrete object, the labour that produced it could be designated as ‘immaterial’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 290).
How can we make sense of such arguments? Doug Henwood (2003: 184-5), who praised Empire for the verve and optimism of its vision, was nonetheless moved to add:
Hardt and Negri are often uncritical and credulous in the face of orthodox propaganda about globalization and immateriality … They assert that immaterial labor – service work, basically – now prevails over the old-fashioned material kind, but they don’t cite any statistics: you’d never expect that far more Americans are truck drivers than are computer professionals. Nor would you have much of an inkling that three billion of us, half the earth’s population, live in the rural Third World, where the major occupation remains tilling the soil.
Nick Dyer-Witheford (2005: 151-55) likewise registered a number of concerns with Hardt and Negri’s account of class composition. To his mind, Empire glosses over the tensions between the three class fragments it identifies, while ultimately reading immaterial labour only through the lenses of its high-end manifestations. And was all of this really as new as Hardt and Negri intimated? It’s not as if ‘affective labour’, for instance, was anything but fundamental to social reproduction in the past, even if it did go unnoticed – because of its largely gendered composition perhaps – in many social analyses.
Another issue concerns Empire’s insistence that ‘the cooperative aspect of immaterial labor is not imposed or organized from the outside’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 294). Again, perhaps this is true for some work at the high-end. But does the obligation to ask ‘Do you want fries with that?’ really represent a break with Fordist work regimes? Or might many of the McJobs that are prevalent in the lower depths of so-called immaterial production be better characterised as ‘the Taylorized, deskilled descendants of earlier forms of office’ and other service work? (Huws 2003: 138)
More recently, Hardt and Negri have attempted to address some of their critics in Multitude, the 2004 sequel to Empire. The first thing to note here is that while immaterial labour remains a central pivot within the book’s arguments, it is presented in a rather more cautious and qualified form than before. Indeed, Hardt and Negri (2004: 109) are at pains to state that
a) ‘When we claim that immaterial labor is tending towards the hegemonic position we are not saying that most of the workers in the world today are producing primarily immaterial goods’;b) ‘The labor involved in all immaterial production, we should emphasize, remains material – it involves our bodies and brains as all labor does. What is immaterial is its product’.
Therefore, much like the ascendance of the multitude itself, here the hegemony of immaterial labour as the reference point (vanguard?) for ‘most of the workers in the world today’ is flagged as a tendency, albeit one that is inexorable. Towards the end of Multitude’s discussion of immaterial labour, Hardt and Negri (2004: 114) insist upon what they call a ‘reality check’, asking ‘what evidence do we have to substantiate our claim of a hegemony of immaterial labor?’ It’s the question we’ve all been waiting to be answered. Unfortunately the half page of discussion they proffer is something of a damp squib: an allusion to US Bureau of Statistics figures which indicate that service work is on the rise; the relocation of industrial production ‘to subordinate parts of the world’, said to signal the privileging of immaterial production at the heart of the Empire; the rising importance of ‘immaterial forms of property’; and, finally, the spread of network forms of organisation particular to immaterial labour (Hardt and Negri 2004: 115). Call me old-fashioned, but something more than this is needed in a book of 400 plus pages dedicated to understanding their claims regarding the latest manifestation of the proletariat as a revolutionary subject ...
Their reference to the growth in service sector activity is interesting for a number of reasons. Ursula Huws (2003: 130) argues that the unrelenting rise in service work within the West might be cast in a different light if the domestic employment so common 100 years ago was factored into the equation. Writing a decade earlier, Sergio Bologna (1992: 20-1) suggested that certain forms of work only came to be designated as ‘services’ within national statistics after they had been outsourced; previously, when they had been performed ‘in house’, they had counted as ‘manufacturing’. Neither author is seeking to deny that important shifts have occurred within the global economy, starting with countries like Britain, Australia, Canada and the United States. Yet they urge caution in interpreting the changes, and care in the categories used to explain them. Bologna (1992: 22-4) – a one-time collaborator with Negri in a variety of political projects in the 1960s and -70s – is particularly caustic about the notion of immaterial labour. He labels it a ‘myth’ that, more than anything else, obscures the lengthening of the working day.
Goodbye to value as measure?
As stated earlier, one of the distinguishing features of postworkerism is the rejection of Marx’s so-called ‘law of value’. George Caffentzis (2005) reminds us that Marx himself rarely spoke of such a law, but there is also no doubting his opinion that under the rule of capital the amount of labour time socially necessary to produce commodities ultimately determined their value. In breaking with Marx in this regard, postworkerists draw some of their inspiration from a passage of the Grundrisse known as the ‘Fragment on Machines’. This envisages a situation, in line with capital’s perennial attempt to free itself from dependence upon labour, where knowledge has become the lifeblood of fixed capital, and the direct input of labour to production is merely incidental. In these circumstances, Marx argues (1973: 705), capital effectively cuts the ground from under its own feet:
As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value.
Negri, among others, has insisted for many years and in a variety of ways that capital has now reached this stage. Therefore, nothing but sheer domination keeps capital’s rule in place: ‘the logic of capital is no longer functional to development, but is simply command for its own reproduction’ (Negri 1994: 28). In fact, a range of social commentators have evoked the ‘Fragment on Machines’ in recent times. Apart from anything else, it has held a certain popularity among those, like Jeremy Rifkin, who tell us that we live in an increasingly work-free society. It’s a pity, then, that few of these writers follow the logic of Marx’s argument in the ‘Fragment’ to its conclusions. For while he indicates that capital does indeed seek ‘to reduce labour time to a minimum’, Marx (1973: 706) also reminds us that capital is itself nothing other than accumulated labour time. In other words, capital is abstract labour as value. As a consequence, capital is obliged by its very nature, and for as long as we are stuck with it, to pose ‘labour time ... as sole measure and source of wealth’.
In its efforts to escape from labour, capital attempts a number of things that, each in their own way, fuel arguments that make labour time appears as irrelevant in the measure of capital’s development. Looked at more carefully, however, each of these can be seen in a somewhat different light. To begin with, capital tries as much as possible to externalise its labour costs. To take a banal example (although not so banal if you are a former bank employee), it can do this by encouraging online and teller machine banking and discouraging over-the-counter customer service. Or many of us find ourselves bringing more and more work home (or on the train, or in the car). More and more of us also seem to be on perpetual stand-by, accessible through the net or by phone, and increasingly in their mobile versions. Added together, such strategies (which may well intersect with our own individual aspirations for greater flexibility) go a long way to help explain that blurring of the line between the ‘work’ and ‘non work’ components of our day that Negri decries. On the other hand, they also cast that boundary in another light than that of the collapse of labour-time as the measure of value, one in which – and precisely because the quantity of labour time is crucial to capital’s existence – as much labour as possible comes to be performed in its unpaid form.
Secondly, in seeking to decrease labour costs within individual organisations, capital also reshapes the process through which profits are distributed on a sectoral and global scale. In a number of essays over the past fifteen years, George Caffentzis (1997) has outlined the idea, first elaborated at some length in the third volume of Marx’s Capital, that average rates of profit suck surplus value from labour-intensive sectors towards those with much greater investment in fixed capital:
In order for there to be an average rate of profit throughout the capitalist system, branches of industry that employ very little labor but a lot of machinery must be able to have the right to call on the pool of value that high-labor, low-tech branches create. If there were no such branches or no such right, then the average rate of profit would be so low in the high-tech, low-labor industries that all investment would stop and the system would terminate. Consequently, ‘new enclosures’ in the countryside must accompany the rise of ‘automatic processes’ in industry, the computer requires the sweat shop, and the cyborg’s existence is premised on the slave.
In this instance, if there appears to be no immediate correlation between the value of an individual commodity and the profit that it returns in the market, the answer may well be that there is none. The puzzle of value can only be solved by examining the sector as a whole, in a sweep that reaches far beyond the horizons of immaterial labour. Here too, it’s a matter of which parameters we choose to frame our enquiry.
Thirdly, and following on from the above, the division of labour in many organisations, industries and firms has reached the point where it is difficult – and probably pointless – to determine the contribution of an individual employee to the mass of commodities that they help to produce (Harvie 2005). Again, this can foster the sense that the labour time involved in producing such commodities (whether tangible or not) is irrelevant to the value they contain. Marx (1976: 1040, quoted in Cleaver 2001: 119), for his part, argued that the central question in making sense of all this was one of perspective:
If we consider the aggregate worker, i.e. if we take all the members comprising the workshop together, then we see that their combined activity results materially in an aggregate product which is at the same time a quantity of goods. And here it is quite immaterial whether the job of a particular worker, who is merely a limb of this aggregate worker, is at a greater or smaller distance from the actual manual labour.
In this regard, Huws’ critique of notions of ‘the weightless economy’ deserves careful attention. Like Henwood (2003) in his fierce deconstruction of the ‘new economy’, Huws (2003: 142-3) draws our attention not only to the massive infrastructure that underpins ‘the knowledge economy’, but also to ‘the fact that real people with real bodies have contributed real time to the development of these ”weightless” commodities’. As for determining the contribution of human labour within the production of immaterial products, Huws argues that while this might ‘be difficult to model’, that ‘does not render the task impossible’. Or, in David Harvie’s words (2005: 151, 154), ‘every day the personifications of capital – whether private or state – make judgements regarding value and its measure’ in their efforts ‘to reinforc[e] the connection between value and work’. He adds:
Hardt and Negri may believe in the ‘impossibility of power’s calculating and ordering production at a global level’ (2000: 357), but ‘power’ hasn’t stopped trying and the ‘impossibility’ of its project derives directly from our own struggles against the reduction of life to measure.
Other leads?
Not long ago, Dr Woo pointed me to a presentation by Brian Holmes (2005) entitled ‘Continental Drift Or, The Other Side of Neoliberal Globalization’. In large part, his talk is a reflection upon the arguments in Hardt and Negri’s Empire, taking advantage of the hindsight provided by five years of events since the book’s publication. For Holmes, many of the arguments advanced in Empire were important for challenging commonplace assumptions about how to make sense of the ‘big picture’ of global power relations, forcing a reconsideration of terms such as globalisation and imperialism. But if the book helped in clearing away certain misconceptions, it has not been nearly so successful in supplanting them with more adequate ways of seeing.
‘Continental Drift’ addresses a host of issues, but the three points most relevant to the current discussion are these:
a) a privileged focus upon ‘immaterial labour’ is increasingly unsatisfactory for efforts to understand what is happening within contemporary class composition;b) global events since the publication of Empire cast doubt upon the usefulness of seeing capital’s domination as a smooth space that lacks centre(s);
c) more attention has to be paid to the reasons why the world of finance has become such a crucial aspect of capital’s rule in our time.
Regarding the first point, Holmes offers similar criticisms to those made by Dyer-Witheford. If the concept immaterial labour is important for analysing certain kinds of work ‘in the so-called tertiary or service sectors of the developed economies’, talk of its hegemony can obscure not only ‘the global division of labour’ and thus ‘the precise conditions under which people work and reproduce themselves’, but also how ‘they conceive their subordination and their possible agency, or their desire for change’. As for the second point, Holmes argues that global capitalism is better understood through the analysis of ‘regional blocs’, such as the European Union or the increasing engagement between China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. Finally, he believes that a far better understanding is needed of the role of money – and, above all, of finance – in capital’s efforts to maintain control at both the international and individual level (on this score, see also Goldner 2005a & 2005b).
The richest explorations of regional blocs that I have encountered are those developed by ‘world systems’ analysts such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly Silver. Interestingly enough, their efforts to explain the emergence of a new cycle of global accumulation with its epicentre in Asia is intimately bound up with their attempt to understand why the expansion of money as capital has come become so pronounced over the past thirty years or so. For them, the predominance of financial expansion is symptomatic of a necessary phase in the cycle of accumulation when, as doubts mount concerning the profitability to be found within production, industries are relocated, unemployed capital and labour pile up, and ‘a sharp acceleration of economic polarization [occurs] both globally and within states’ (Wallerstein 2003: 275). In recent times, Arrighi (who also penned one of the more considered reviews of Empire) has devoted much of his efforts to understanding the waning fortunes of the US state and capital (Arrighi 2005a, 2005b), while Silver (2003) has concentrated upon the prospects facing contemporary labour in an age of capital flight. The work of these authors (much of which is on the net) is well worth a look: in part for the challenges they offer to a number of radical orthodoxies, but also for the depth of analysis that they bring to their account of the conflicts between and within the forces of labour and capital today.
There is still a great deal to unravel in the issues touched upon here. For example, the current centrality of money as capital, with all the peculiarities that this entails, may offer another reason why it might appear that socially necessary labour time no longer has any bearing upon capital’s existence as value in search of greater value. Speculative ventures – of which the past decade has been rife – seem to make money out of thin air. But in actuality, they do nothing to increase the total pool of value. At best, they redistribute what already exists. More uncertainly, they seek to sidestep the sphere of production and, instead, make money ‘from betting on the future exploitation of labour’ (Bonefeld & Holloway 1995: 213-4). In the meantime, debt continues to balloon, from the micro scale of individual and family credit cards, to the macro level of public sector budgets and current account deficits. Whatever the ingenious ways through which the burden of such debt is redistributed, the terms of the wager cannot be forestalled forever. When it is finally called in, things will become very interesting indeed. If nothing else, we may then find out at last whether, as Madonna sang:
the boy with the cold hard cash/Is always Mister Right, ‘cause we are/
Living in a material world
Some texts worth reading
G. Arrighi (2005a) ‘Hegemony Unravelling – 1’, New Left Review 32, March-April, http://newleftreview.net/Issue32.asp?Article=02.
G. Arrighi (2005b) ‘Hegemony Unravelling – 2’, New Left Review 33, May-June, http://newleftreview.net/Issue33.asp?Article=07.
S. Bologna (1992) ‘Problematiche del lavoro autonomo in Italia (I)’, Altreragioni 1, June.
W. Bonefeld & J. Holloway (1995) ‘Conclusion: Money and Class Struggle’, in W. Bonefeld & J. Holloway (eds.) Global Capital, National State, and the Politics of Money. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
G. Caffentzis (1990) ‘On Africa and Self-Reproducing Automata’, Midnight Notes 10.
G. Caffentzis (1997) ‘Why Machines Cannot Create Value or, Marx’s Theory of Machines’, in J. Davis, T. Hirschl & M. Stack (eds.) Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism and Social Revolution. London: Verso.
G. Caffentzis (1998) ‘The End of Work or the Renaissance of Slavery? A Critique of Rifkin and Negri’, http://korotonomedya.net/otonomi/caffentzis.html
G. Caffentzis (2005) ‘Immeasurable Value?: An Essay on Marx’s Legacy’, The Commoner 10, Spring/Summer.
H. Cleaver (2001) Reading Capital Politically. Second Edition. Antithesis.
N. Dyer-Witheford (2005) ‘Cyber-Negri: General Intellect and Immaterial Labor’, in T. Murphy & A. Mustapha (eds.) Resistance in Practice: The Philosophy of Antonio Negri. London: Pluto Press.
L. Goldner (2005a) ‘China In the Contemporary World Dynamic of Accumulation and Class Struggle’, http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/china.html
L. Goldner (2005b) ‘Fictitious Capital and the Transition out of Capitalism’, http://home.earthlink.net/%7Elrgoldner/program.html
M. Hardt & A. Negri (2000) Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
M. Hardt & A. Negri (2004) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin.
D. Harvie (2005) ‘All Labour is Productive and Unproductive’, The Commoner 10, Spring/Summer.
D. Henwood (2003) After the New Economy. New York: New Press.
B. Holmes (2005) ‘Continental Drift Or, The Other Side of Neoliberal Globalization’, http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=05/09/27/131214&mode=nocomment&tid=9
U. Huws (2003) The Making of a Cybertariat. New York: Monthly Review Press.
M. Lazzarato (1996) ‘Immaterial Labor’, in P. Virno & M. Hardt (eds.) Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
K. Marx (1973) Grundrisse. Hardmondsworth: Penguin.
K. Marx (1976) ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’, now in Capital Vol. I. Hardmondsworth: Penguin.
A. Negri (1994) ‘Oltre la legge di valore’, DeriveApprodi 5-6, Winter.
B. Silver (2002) Forces of Labor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
I. Wallerstein (2003) The Decline of American Power. New York: The New Press.
Thanks to Hobo for telling me the Zen master story. Thanks too to Angela Mitropoulos and Nate Holdren for their helpful suggestions with this piece. All mistakes my own etc.