3. Immaterial labor and capital as objectification

In this section we comment on Negri and Hardt’s thesis that immaterial production is ripe for self-management since this ‘new’ production is inherently independent from the individual capitalist. We argue that the apparent objectivity and autonomy of immaterial labor from the capitalist is only evidence that immaterial production is an aspect of capital. We argue that Negri and Hardt’s uncritical naturalization of the present production system derives from their lack of understanding of capital as an objectified social relation. We will see that this problem is mirrored by a parallel, opposite one: Negri and Hardt’s lack of critical understanding (and celebration) of capital as the product of bourgeois subjectivity.

3.1. Production as inherent in the practices of labor

Negri and Hardt tell us that there is something interestingly new in immaterial production that material production did not have — something that can really change our future and allow us to create a communist world based on the self-management of the present production.

Indeed, we read, immaterial production has disposed of external means of production and of the despotic direction of the capitalist. By its nature, immaterial production is in fact increasingly inherent in the same practice of labor:

The central forms of productive cooperation are no longer created by the capitalist as part of the project to organize labor but rather emerge from the productive energies of labor itself. (Multitude, p. 113)[170]

In immaterial production, continue Negri and Hardt, the capitalist is increasingly redundant as the organizer of production and the one responsible for innovation:[171]

[While in the past] the capitalist calls workers to the factory... directing them to collaborate and communicate in production and giving them the means to do so, in the paradigm of immaterial production, in contrast, labor itself tends to produce the means of interaction, communication and cooperation for production (Multitude, p. 147).

Is there an element of truth in Negri and Hardt’s claim that today labor itself produces the means for production? That production becomes increasingly inherent in the process of labor itself and autonomous from the capitalist? The answer is: yes, but this has always been true!

It is true in fact that in capitalism labor itself produces the means for other labor and production. In capitalism, more than any other previous form of production, nobody can produce without using the result of other people’s labor. The figure of the autonomous craftsman who uses his own self-created tools is unthinkable today. This is what traditional Marxism used to call the ‘socialization of labor’.

Also, it is true that in capitalism the logic of production is increasingly inherent in the practices of labor. This was not obvious in previous modes of production, where labor was deployed because of some human need (often the need of the ruling class) — only in capitalism do we have this peculiar fact: labor is demanded and necessitated by previous labor, production stimulates production, invention demands invention, according to a logic of expansion and development that goes beyond the will and control of the individual human being.

Crucially, it is important to stress, this logic goes beyond our own will and control. For example, our call center labor is commanded by phones ringing and a computer program that tell us what to say. This is the result of previous work. The labor of an IT worker is normally demanded by a gigantic project which asks for work done in a certain way and with a certain pace. This is the result of past IT work. Labor in a traditional factory is demanded by a machine. This was, too, the result of someone else’s past labor. A worker in a post-Fordist team works according to organizational systems which were devised by the thinking work of other people.

All our work in capitalism is given a logic, a pace, a necessity, by the result of other people’s work. It does not matter how immaterial or material this latter labor was. What matters for us is that it is dead labor: previous labor, alienated from us, which has turned to be our ruler: capital.

Negri and Hardt seem to know what dead labor is for Marx. They say that Marx would call Empire a regime of accumulated dead labor. (Empire, p. 62) However, they insist that labor, if immaterial and ‘biopolitical’, has a special, fresh, everlasting vitality. Living labor is, they say, ‘the ability to engage the world actively and create social relations’. And they add that living labor is a ‘fundamental human faculty’, an input of the human being, not something pertinent to capital as such.[172]

More mundanely, and less poetically, living labor is labor which is presently done for capital, for dead labor.[173] Living labor cannot be naturalized as an a-historical ‘fundamental human faculty’ as Negri and Hardt say, for the simple reason that living labor and dead labor are two faces of the same reality: capitalist alienation. In communism there will be no reason to speak of dead labor, thus there will be no reason to speak of living labor either.[174]

Negri and Hardt’s incapacity to understand capital as objectification of our (living) labor implies their incapacity to understand capital as objectification tout court.

3.2 It’s capital: this is why it does not need the capitalist

The objectification of capital is a real objectification for all humans, including the capitalist.

This is why the capitalist is not the initiator of a technical innovation: in front of capital with its inherent laws of self-expansion, the capitalist has no choice. He has to follow hard necessity and innovate in the rush for competition when others innovate. Or he goes bankrupt.

We can also see how the capitalist is ‘redundant’ not only as initiator but as organizer of the labor process. The more production is advanced the more the organization of labor becomes integrated in complex organizational system — production is better run by ‘objective’ mechanisms, laws or business principles which reflect more closely the laws of capital. The capitalist as an individual, with his whims and idiosyncrasies, can even be disruptive for his own capital.

Toyota’s system is presented in Empire as an example of the new immaterial production that can dispense with the capitalist and which ‘seems to provide the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism’ (Empire, p. 294).

The lure of Toyotism is that it presents itself to the post-Fordist simpleton as a gigantic automated feedback system from demand to production. In its original idea, Toyotism is similar to a fast-food shop: customer A demands a piece of work from worker B. Worker B writes down an order for the materials he need to serve A on a tag (called ‘kanban’) and passes the tag to worker C upstream. In turn, worker B becomes the ‘customer’ of worker C and commands worker D, etc.[175] Hence Toyotism may seem to be a system of production free from centralized command.

In fact subtly, Negri and Hardt[176] do not say that Toyotism has no authoritarian aspects. Only, the alienating aspects of Toyotism are contingent, due to capital’s control, while the good aspects of Toyotism are inherent in this ‘new’ immaterial form of production.

We cannot share such excitement. We see Toyotism, first of all, as an effective way to produce more closely in response to market demand.[177] What makes it different from Fordism and so special for the liberal heart is that it simply perfects the liberal dream of ‘customer sovereignty’ within a perfected market society.

Having observed that Toyotism is a production system devised for satisfying the market, we cannot simplistically think that the liberal aspects of Toyotism (the apparent autonomy given to the workers) are inherent while the illiberal ones (the overall control) are contingent. The demand of the market is something alien from the individual worker’s desires, needs or aspirations: Toyotism is necessarily a system aimed to rein the workers’ will and activity towards an alien aim — only, it is devised in a different way than Fordism.[178] On closer inspection, in fact, it is not difficult to see that Toyota’s workers are free to do or suggest only what is already harmonizing with the strategies of production — and crucially its overall system is devised to be structurally inaccessible to changes from the bottom.

Any further illusion of the inherent liberalism in Toyotism is exposed by its development: its increasing computerization, which allows the Toyota managers to dispose of the kanban system and plan production in detail.

Thus Toyotism inevitably mirrors the nature of capital itself. As such, that it has a liberal face and a despotic face does not surprise us at all: capital has indeed a democratic face and an authoritarian face, each necessary to the other. None of these two faces is a distortion of the other, and none can be ‘rescued’ from the other.

The democratic face of capital, which we find mirrored in the democratic face of Toyotism, is nothing else than our submission to impersonal forces, to the market. It is our individual freedom to be slaves under the intangible despotism of the customer’s sovereignty.

Negri and Hardt’s inability to see how capital dominates us through impersonal forces prevents them, paradoxically, from seeing that immaterial productionneeds the capitalist in order to stay in existence. Let us look closely at this point.

3.3 It’s capital: this is why it needs the capitalist

A production system that demands labor from us because of its own rationale cannot be nothing else but our old enemy: capital as value valorizing itself through the exploitation of labor. As we have seen in Section 2, capital’s self-valorization implies for capital the need to overcome workers’ resistance and the striving to subsume, rationalize, deskill and command labor. The existence of immaterial production itself, we have seen, is one with this striving.

In Section 4 we will see in detail that this same process implies, for the worker, daily pain and boredom, thus daily resistance. The consequence of this is that capital necessitates a ‘capitalist’ class. Or, better, capital needs a class of people who materially gain from the daily alienation of others and are ready to exert violence in order to keep the others under capital’s command.[179]

In their view present (immaterial) production increasingly does not need the capitalist and thus does not need force exerted on us, Negri and Hardt seem only to echo the bourgeois delusions of the ‘80s, which sought the integration of the working class in production as possible and non-contradictory.

This ideology was applied in Europe through experiments with Toyotism and other post-Fordist methods in the early ‘90s. These methods tried to encourage workers to take individual responsibility in improving the quality of production and identify themselves with the business.

But they all inevitably failed. An interesting example of this failure was that of the Rover factory in Longbridge. With the project Rover Tomorrow, work was initially organized in teams, with leaders elected among the team. The imaginable result was that the workers never respected the commands of their team leaders, so that the leaders had to be appointed by the company as someone above them (Pugliano, ‘Restructuring of Work’, pp. 38–9). The workers’ disrespect for peers with a leadership role was not just something cultural: it is in the contradictory nature of capital that we cannot identify ourselves with capital without contradictions.

But why does Negri and Hardt’s talk about the increasing possibility of self-management seem to make sense? When we speak about ‘immaterial labor’, normally our mind goes to certain administrative, creative or professional jobs where there is a real experience of identification and self-direction. Self-management was realizable and desirable, for example, for the highly skilled workers at Lucas Aerospace in the UK and at Toshiba-Amplex in Japan, who went on a strike to demand autonomous control of production from their managers (Witheford, ‘Autonomist Marxism’, pp. 103–4).

Can we speak about autonomy of production in this case? Not at all. In fact, the existence of autonomy in certain privileged activities does not mean that this activity is autonomous from capital but the other way round: that the professional or creative workers identify so much with the aims and interests of their business that they can become the managers of it themselves, in the same way as a petty bourgeois is the manager of his own business.

Negri and Hardt’s idea that we can all become the managers of ourselves, that we can take the present system of production over and self-manage it, is then a petty bourgeois delusion that does not acknowledges the imposition of capital’s command only because it is used to internalize it.

3.4 Subjectivity and the invisible hand of... immaterial labor

We have seen that a doubt arises, that Negri and Hardt cannot see that the apparent objectivity of the present production system, rather than being evidence of its autonomy from the capitalist, is instead evidence of its nature as capital. Negri and Hardt’s incapacity to grasp objectivity in capitalism makes us suspicious about their insight in the other, opposite, concept: subjectivity. Let us then focus on their idea of subjectivity and collective consciousness.

We have said that for Negri and Hardt immaterial production potentially escapes capital, being the result of our individual subjectivities: thoughts, decisions, desires and ‘democratic exchanges’.[180] The multitude, which is our collective consciousness, is the ultimate result of this same dynamic — of innumerable individual interactions which take place within the present immaterial production. Negri and Hardt’s theory is hence both the theorization and the celebration of a ‘new’ world which is ultimately shaped in its collective consciousness, and driven in its productivity, by subjectivity itself.

Subjectivity for Negri and Hardt is then nothing else than the ensemble of each individual’s desires and thoughts. In fact, it is unquestionable that desires and thoughts come out of free subjects. But this is, precisely, where Negri and Hardt have caught reality totally wrong. Capital is, and has always been, the result of innumerable, perfectly free, democratic exchanges, decisions, desires and thoughts of individual subjectivities! The fact that capital is created by the will and actions of individuals however does not make it less objective and less powerful — instead, its power lies in our individual freedom of choice and exchange itself.

Negri and Hardt do not speak of a new world at all. The Multitude, a byproduct[181] of immaterial production seems, in fact to be, merely, socially-shared bourgeois consciousness: the socially-shared belief that the only way to produce and reproduce ourselves is through acts of ‘democratic exchange’ and the only way to see ourselves is as free individuals[182] engaged in such exchange. This collective consciousness is only an aspect of the same process that creates the objectivity of capital! This collective consciousness is objectified as capital itself, since it emerges as an unconscious result of innumerable exchanges and activities, in the same way as the invisible hand of Adam Smith emerges from innumerable exchanges based on individual greed.[183]

Negri and Hardt’s naturalization of bourgeois relations is so uncritical that they even see their preservation as a ‘creative’ aspect of struggles which are not able to go beyond them! In Multitude, Negri and Hardt hail recent struggles which are, they say, ‘positive and creative’. Why? Because, for example, as we read with dismay in Argentina people invented new forms of money (Multitude, p. 216).

Again, Negri and Hardt’s problem is their ideological rejection of dialectics. In the dialectic of capital, subjectivity and objectivity play opposite but interrelated parts. An undialectical approach that takes ‘subjectivity’ as something positive on its own is bound to misunderstand both subjectivity and objectivity. It is bound to confusingly celebrate capital as bourgeois subjectivity (not recognizing that capital is the product of individual free subjects). And it is also bound to confusingly celebrate present production as autonomous from capital (not recognizing that we are ruled by objectified and impersonal forces).

Such an approach is also bound to encourage passivity. Seeing Empire (capital) as something that develops in separation from us and ‘opens up spaces for struggle’ by itself, Negri preaches to us not to resist ‘globalization’ and vote ‘yes’ for the neoliberal European Constitution in France.[184] In fact the ‘space for struggle’ is created by capital’s development and its dialectical counterpart: our resistance to it — such as the struggles against gas privatization in Bolivia and the riots in Argentina.

To conclude, considering Negri and Hardt’s inability to see the relation between objectivity and subjectivity in capitalism, we cannot be too surprised then when we see them move along a conceptual parabola: start from shouted, crass subjectivism and dove head down into a crass objectivism, a neo-traditional-Marxist fetishization of the present immaterial forces of production.[185] And, to close the parabola into an ellipse, they teach us that our subjectivity is, after all, the result of the paradigm of immaterial production itself — something objective.[186]