Part 3, Chapter 1 : Immaterial labour and a new theory for the ‘new era’

1. Immaterial labor and a new theory for the ‘new era’

In this section we show that the concept of immaterial labor, or better, immaterial production, is the pivotal element for Negri and Hardt’s analysis and for their popularity. On the one hand it allows them to subsume the bourgeois theories which, in the ‘80s, challenged traditional Marxism. But on the other hand it allows them to subsume these theories into a revolutionary, subjective, anti-capitalist theory. And it seems to offer an explanation for the new movements which sounds reasonable (and flattering) to the participants.

1.1 Immaterial labor and the millennial theories

As we anticipated in the Introduction, immaterial labor plays a fundamental role in a central quality of Negri and Hardt’s theory: its intellectual universality. Specifically, both Empire and Multitude, as well as Negri’s pre-Empire work, successfully appropriate a large range of theories of the present among the most fashionable of the ‘80s and early ‘90s.[141] As we will see, it is precisely the concept of immaterial production that enables this appropriation without making the result appear obviously eclectic.

In particular, Negri and Hardt adopt ‘truths’ from ‘millennial’ views of the present world which, in different ways and for different reasons say that we live in a ‘new era’: a post-industrial, postmodern, post-Fordist, society. Let us make a short list of such theories:

A) TOYOTISM AND POST-FORDISM

A widespread millennial theory is that we live in a ‘new’ era dominated by the transition from industrial/Fordist, production to post-industrial/post-Fordist production — with Toyotism as the champion of a new vision (‘paradigm’) of production.

This idea was theorized by the French Regulation School as early as the 1970s.[142] By the end of the ‘80s such ideas were widespread in the intellectual world, having perhaps lost rigor but gained inter-cultural, multidisciplinary breadth. It was widely acknowledged that the ‘new’ paradigm of post-Fordist production dictated a new view of life as ‘open networks’ and had buried linear or structured views of seeing the world, connected to industrial production.

The western business world was intrigued by Toyotism in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. Toyota’s methods such as ‘just-in-time’ (zero-stock) production and team work, together with plenty of ideological fripperies about ‘integrating’ the working class and winning their hearts and minds, were introduced in a number of factories e.g. Rover at Longbridge, UK, or FIAT at Melfi, Italy in the early ‘90s.[143]

However, this interest is in decline, if it has ever been that important at all.[144] For example, FIAT’s recent trends are to speed up conveyor belt work. Their notorious harsh method TMC2 has triggered recent fierce struggles in all their plants included Melfi![145] Although time moves on for the business, it does not for Negri and Hardt, who still consider Toyotism as ‘hegemonic’ in production — even when everybody else has given up the idea.

B) INFORMATION SOCIETY THEORIES AND KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY THEORIES

Championed by academics (or popularizers) such as Brzezinski, Toffler and Ohmae ‘information society theories’ claim that the ‘new’ hi-tech production has led to a ‘new’ post-capitalist society.[146] Similarly, academics and/or popularizers such as Robert Reich insist that we live in a

‘new era’ where knowledge and analytical labor is central in a new weightless, advanced economy. These changes have abolished the contradictions of capitalism, exposed the Marxist concept of value as meaningless, and/or abolished the division of western society into classes.[147]

C) MILLENNIAL SHIFT TO SERVICE WORK

Extrapolations of some trends in production have long led to the claim that we live in a ‘new era’ where production has moved to the service sector, taking the lead from industrial production and changed the paradigms of production. In this ‘new’ era where service is central, it is argued, Marx’s analysis of labor and value cannot be applied anymore — a view which we find in Rifkin, for example.[148]

D) POSTMODERNISM

Postmodernism suggest we live in a ‘new’ society characterized by a number of overlapping aspects, all of which imply that what has been said about capitalism is outdated. One aspect of the post-modern society is the fragmentation of identity and, crucially, the end of a working class identity. Another aspect, which we find for example in the work of Jean Baudrillard, is that since today production is centered on the symbolic meanings of commodities, the Marxist concept of ‘use values’, thus all Marxist analysis, is outdated.[149]

E) NEGRI AND HARDT’S SUMMARY OF BOURGEOIS THOUGHT

Let us seen now how the concept of immaterial production allows Negri and Hardt to appropriate all the diverse theorizations or observations above in what appears one, elegant, unified theory.

First and most importantly, immaterial production is appropriately defined to include all the different activities (from IT to services) considered above.

Second, immaterial production appears to explain Baudrillard’s observation that goods are increasingly produced and bought for their symbolic meanings. Indeed, as we said earlier, under the ‘hegemony’ of immaterial production the production of material goods is increasingly the production of images, ideas or affects.[150]

Third, under the ‘hegemony’ of immaterial production, which stresses ‘communication’ and ‘cooperation’, all material production tends to adopt post-Fordist methods of production such as, er... Toyotism. In fact Toyotism involves lots of communication, cooperation, use of ‘synergy’ etc. — at least if we believe in the Japanese-management-inspired business plans of the late ‘80s.

Last but not least, the hegemony of immaterial production on society explains the postmodernist observation concerning the present fragmentation of workers’ identity. The new organization of immaterial production in fact defines a new way, in general, that we interrelate in society: as networks of free ‘singularities’. The party, and other such rigid structures made sense only within a paradigm of industrial production, and now are rejected. Negri and Hardt stick to the ideology of postmodernism, by celebrating the isolation of recent struggles, and suggest that their failure to spread could mean that they were ‘immediately subversive in themselves’ (Empire, p. 58). For Negri and Hardt, a new cycle of struggle will not be characterized by an extension of struggles, but by a constellation of individual struggles, which will be flexibly and loosely connected in networks (Empire, p.58.).[151]

Thus ‘immaterial labor’ has elegantly embraced, explained and surpassed all the above theories and observations in one Unified Theory.[152]

Negri and Hardt’s appropriation of such postmodernist and post-Fordist bourgeois theories, no doubt earns them respect in the academic world. Indeed in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, grim times of retreat of class struggle, the balance of academic prestige tilted on the side of bourgeois, triumphant theories. It was the right time to proclaim the end of the working class and the end of history; to sneer at ‘paleo-Marxism’;[153] and propose individualistic, postmodern, post-industrial, ‘new’ theories for the ‘new’ world. Unlike the Marxists that tried to refute their theories, Negri and Hardt rather appropriate them. In doing this they do not side with the loser, with the paleo-Marxist — they side with the intellectual winners who have history on their side.

1.2 Immaterial labor, and the contradictions of capital

While on the one hand Negri and Hardt take onboard the bourgeois celebrations of the end of history and class struggle, on the other they are able to incorporate these views in a theory which still speaks about class struggle and still sees capital as a contradiction.[154] This again is made possible by the concept of immaterial production.

In fact for Negri and Hardt immaterial production is itself a contradiction for capital, precisely because of its immaterial nature. Unlike material activity, Negri and Hardt suggest, the production of communication, ideas or affects escape capital’s control and make labor increasingly autonomous from capital. Capital is thus trapped in a dilemma: on the one hand it needs to encourage heart and mind activities, on the other its control is undermined by them.

‘Immaterial production’ creates also another contradiction: it undermines private property.[155] Indeed, repeat Negri and Hardt ad nauseam, immaterial products, which are products of thought, are necessarily created in common as commons — ‘no one thinks alone’, they insist, and add: no production of ideas can exist without a socially shared world of ideas, shared languages and culture (Multitude, p. 147).

Facing this threatening form of production, capital, it is argued, has to strive to reestablish private property by appropriating, enclosing, controlling, what it is currently produced ‘in common’ (Multitude, pp. 149; 113). In trying to interfere and restrain the freedom of ‘common’ production, however, capital hinders its productivity. Capital then is trapped in a contradiction: that between the socialization of the forces of (immaterial) production and the logic of private property.

1.3 Immaterial labor and subjectivity

The concept of immaterial production serves Negri and Hardt to have the cake of adopting bourgeois objectivistic theories and to eat them in a subjectivistic custard.

The post-Fordist and information theories which are taken onboard by Negri and Hardt are in fact essentially doctrines of autonomous technology or autonomous forms of production where technology or methods of production are the prime mover of history and capable of shaping subjectivity and society as a whole.[156] We can appreciate how attached Negri and Hardt are to these theories when we read, for example, that the present ‘paradigm’ of production ‘dictates’... ‘our ways of understanding the world and acting in it’ (Multitude, p. 142). Or that: ‘postmodernisation or informationalisation today marks a new way of becoming human’ (Empire, p. 289).

On the other hand, while toying with such objectivistic ideas, Negri needs to give them a radical twist, in order to make his theory exciting and to be true to his revolutionary past. But how can Negri realize this twist? Thanks, we say, to the concept of immaterial production.

In fact, first of all, immaterial production is itself the product of subjectivity and class struggle. In fact it was born in the ‘60s and ‘70s, as the class’s subjective, autonomous, experimentation with ‘new ways of producing’. Capital was forced to move into immaterial production to dominate a new labor power that had redefined itself, autonomously, as creative, communicative and affective (Empire, p. 276).

Second, once established as dominant production, in its ongoing practice immaterial production has a subjective, autonomous, drive. It is immaterial, it is the result of out thoughts, thus the result of our subjectivities and it is then inherently autonomous from capital. With immaterial production labor manifests its autonomy from capital, which Autonomia has always seen hidden behind capitalist production. As Witheford notices:

[For] Autonomist Marxism ... the worker is the active subject of production, the well-spring of the skills, innovation and cooperation on which capital must draw... Capital needs labor but labor does not need capital. Labor... can dispense with the wage relation... it is potentially autonomous. (Witheford, ‘Autonomist Marxism’, p. 89)

Immaterial labor hence produces a ‘new’ condition in which subjectivity has a central role as a prime mover of capital’s innovations, today.

Having proclaimed that production is today driven by our autonomous subjectivity, Negri and Hardt can claim without appearing objectivistic that the paradigm of immaterial production shapes our subjectivity in turn. What’s wrong in saying that our subjectivity is determined by something, if we have discovered that, ultimately, this something was created by our subjectivity itself?

Lastly, class struggle against capital is led by subjectivity too. We are shaped by production, but, Negri and Hardt add in a generosity of overdetermination, ‘workers’ subjectivity is also created in the antagonism of the experience of exploitation’ (Multitude, pp. 151, our italic).

Exploitation? Did they not say that today immaterial labor is done ‘in common, autonomously from capital? Negri is clear indeed: in the ‘new’ era of immaterial production we can no longer speak of the real subsumption of labor. Today we are all free, independent craftsmen, all producing with our own means of production: our brain. If now, Negri says, ‘we have all the tools we need to work in our heads... [then] capitalism today needs to make free men work — free men who have their own means, their own tools’.[157]

But Negri and Hardt cannot deny the undeniable. Exploitation and capitalist control still exist — only, they explain to the increasingly confused reader, in a new form. Capital today superimposes and appropriates what we produce ‘in common’, as free and independent producers. As Negri says:

Capital must... superimpose itself on the autonomous capability of manufacturing knowledge.... This is the form which expropriation takes in advanced capitalism (Toni Negri, The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty First Century, Polity, Cambridge, 1989, p. 116)

In this conception, we are petty producers — or if we prefer, autonomous peasants — while capital only acts as a predator, an aristocrat who comes to the village and appropriates a part (‘or all’) of what we have produced.[158] This new form of exploitation is the cause of antagonism, a subjective spring of struggle.

1.4 Immaterial labor and viability of revolution — self-management

And what about the future communist world? Also here the concept of immaterial production plays an important role. Thanks to immaterial production, revolution becomes something feasible and rational.

How? Negri and Hardt explain: unlike previous production, the rationale and means necessary for immaterial production are increasingly inherent in labor practice itself — this means that immaterial production is already under our control and the capitalist already parasitical. Revolution as self-management is only the next feasible and rational step (Multitude, p. 336).

Beyond production our new society as a whole is also increasingly amenable to political self-management, thanks to immaterial production. This happens because, in Negri and Hardt’s view, immaterial production is also production of life, biopolitical production. Their logic is straightforward: if immaterial production is increasingly autonomous from capital, society as a whole is too, because production is one with production of life and society. This, Negri and Hardt tell us, happens now, under our unbelieving eyes![159] Indeed today,

The balance has tipped such that the ruled now [sic] tend to be the exclusive producers of social organization... the rulers become even more parasitical the ruled become increasingly autonomous, capable of forming society on their own.... (Multitude, p. 336)[160]

In this optimistic view, the revolution will be the liberation, reached at a political level, of already developing immaterial forces of production and social relations from the parasitic control of already redundant capitalist rulers. This kind of revolution appears rational and viable, being based on something already present.

1.5 Immaterial labor and a reassuring new world

Revolutionary theories are normally rather scary — but this one is reassuring, thanks to immaterial production.

It is a theory which speaks about a future that is imaginable, thus acceptable: the revolution will not require radical subversions, jumps in the dark, too much imagination or other such uncomfortable things. In this view the future will simply be the completion of the present, based on already existing conditions created by immaterial production now.[161]

Crucially we are reassured that the future will be democratic and egalitarian. The present un-democracy and inequality are effects of a distortion — of the fact that capital overlaps and channels our production, creating despotism and spurious selectivity on our capacities, thus inequality of rewards.[162] But this is not, they insist, inherent in immaterial production in itself. Indeed, the relations currently created by immaterial production are ‘civil processes of democratic exchange’, democratic in nature (Multitude, p. 311) and confer on us ‘equal opportunity of struggle’ — and thus the equal opportunity to negotiate power in the future society.

The most attractive aspect of Negri and Hardt’s theory is that ‘immaterial labor has the quality to be about unquestionably positive things: democracy first, but also creativity, affections, communication, and so on. Communism as the self management of the present will be based on all these unquestionably good things. Who would not like the idea of communism if this means lots of good things?

1.6 Immaterial labor, and the new movements

The concept of immaterial labor also serves Negri and Hardt to appeal to those from the advanced western countries involved in current anti-capitalist protests, the movements for global ‘social justice’, etc.

In the present times of defeat and weakness, the demonstrations in Genoa and Seattle, the anti-war movement, and many large or small radical activities are indeed a demonstration of power, but they do not, because they cannot, challenge our daily work relations and reproduction as an immediate target.

This audience wants to hear about the end of capitalism, but through democratic values and practices which are the only values and practices that seem conceivable in our conditions. As we have seen already, Negri and Hardt can satisfy them with their stress on ‘ideal’ democracy.

This audience want a theory which explains their struggles, which are not struggles for bread and butter. Negri and Hardt fit the bill. In a ‘new era’ which focuses on immaterial rather than material goods, it is no surprise that the new struggles are not about bread and butter issues anymore, but over the control of ‘communicational resources’; over ‘the communal appropriation of computer and media networks, over the freeing of educational and research resources...’. (Witheford, ‘Autonomist Marxsim’, p. 110) Or we can always see any present struggle as an expression of ‘biopolitical’ production of communication and affects, if we want to.

In Negri and Hardt’s theory these ‘new struggles’ have then a centrality in history, they are part of the very revolution which leads us to communism. For a protester who is told by the Marxist that what he does is historically epiphenomenal, Negri and Hardt’s theory is the best doctrine around. What can be more exciting to be told: ‘Well done, you are in the driving seat of History’?