Part 3, Chapter 4 : Immaterial labour and the mind of capital

4. Immaterial labor and the mind of capital

We now consider the subjective side of immaterial production i.e. how immaterial production is related to class antagonism and the necessity of the revolution. Negri and Hardt say that antagonism emerges from our resistance against capital’s efforts to tamper with our potentially autonomous deployment of creativity and to enclose what we produce in common. To this view we oppose that antagonism arises from the unacceptability of a division of labor that imposes our daily deprivation of creativity, and we explain why immaterial production is part of it.

4.1 The contradictions of immaterial production as the contradictions of capital

Negri and Hardt’s theory has the interesting aspect of speaking about subjectivity. Against bourgeois objectivism it tells us that the development of capital and its contradictions are the result of antagonism, of subjectivity. As we have seen in Section 1, for Negri and Hardt antagonism is triggered by capital’s attempt at imposing its command and control over immaterial production, which is increasingly done in common and which produces commons.

We wholeheartedly agree that history is moved by class struggle, and that class struggle is triggered by antagonism. However, we cannot find ourselves at ease with Negri and Hardt’s explanation. We have seen that the immaterial production of ideas and knowledge is an aspect of capital’s power to subsume our labor — that is, an aspect of the power of the bourgeoisie over the working class. What we want to explore now is the subjective side of this subsumption, i.e. how antagonism arises.

4.2 The ontological inversion

Marx’s Capital is an account, chapter by chapter, of how capital as value valorizing itself implies the deprivation of labor from its organizational, creative, knowledgeable sides.[187] Paradoxically, capital is produced by us but in this production we become its appendage; it acquires our human powers and we lose them, becoming subjects of its power. This inversion of powers, of who is the subject of the production of human activity and who is the object, who is the ruler and the ruled, has been called the ‘ontological inversion’.

The solution of this inversion only lies in a real subversion of the present system of production. It is not a question of re-interpreting reality. It is not a question of observing that since value is actually created by the working class then the working class must be a productive and creative subject. It is not a question of simply observing that ‘capital needs labor but labor does not need capital’, so we must be somehow the initiators of production and innovation — even if we are not really aware of it. In fact capital is real alienation and real power. Although capital needs labor, this is labor done in an historically specific form; a labor that is really subsumed and really deprived of knowledge, initiative and creativity. We will see that forgetting this important point is forgetting the very dynamics that makes the subversion of capitalism a possible reality.

4.3 Who shares the mind of capital?

As capital does not go to the market with its own legs but it needs the capitalist to circulate, capital is incapable of thinking, designing, organizing, as well: it needs man for this. This, at the beginning, was the capitalist himself: Wedgwood for example.

But Wedgwood’s creativity is the creativity of capital. This creativity is free insofar it has introjected the needs of capital, the objective constrains of the market and its laws. Indeed, what is thinkable is what is objectively realizable within a landscape of undeniable, objective constraints: the finances available, the reality of market demand, the availability (in terms of cost!) of means, materials, laborers; the reasonability (in terms of cost!) of the design itself; the state of competition, etc.

This is an aspect of bourgeois ‘alienation’: the need to adhere to an ‘objective’ reality external to the individual. Bourgeois alienation may be experienced as a burden, but all bourgeois stop whinging in front of the wealth and social power this alienation also means for them.

With the development of capitalism, the capitalist farmed out creative and organizational work to special categories of privileged workers: managers and professionals, who worked within their productive project or as independent professionals.

Today the state finances a large part of scientific research and the development of knowledge. Modern science could only develop through the influx of state funds because the capital needed for the expansion of modern scientific research would be too big for any reasonable capitalist venture. Also IT developed thanks to generous US state finance.[188] Within these fields, the socialization of labor, one aspect of capitalist production, was encouraged, while the fetters of private property were overridden by public finance. Sadly, this is not the norm but the exception that confirms a fundamental norm in capitalism.

The professionals, the top designer, the researcher share the effects of formal alienation with Wedgwood. They have to face competition. In a world based on exchange they have to produce for strangers who do not share a project or common interests with them.[189] But they normally feel fulfilled by their practice. They can see their work as creative and, as far as they identify themselves with the ‘objective’ requirements of their profession, autonomous. They can praise the present world as a world of ‘creativity’ and ‘intelligence’ because they do contribute to the creativity and intelligence of capital.

However, unlike the bourgeois, for the waged creative and professional workers their privileged position in society is not due to the power of their own capital at all: they are unable to live without selling their (very dear) labor power to capital, or without a wage or grant from the state. The recent retreat of social democracy has implied a retreat of the state from financing academia and the sciences. Squeezed by the lack of financial perspective, some of the intelligentsia have moved to radical anti-capitalism. This is indeed a ‘new’ era, when precisely the ‘new’ gospel by radical academics Negri and Hardt can sell lots of books.

For the unprivileged, large mass of donkey workers who do not create but execute, there is another story.

4.4 The subjective side of real subsumption

The (either material or immaterial!) donkey worker who works under the command of blueprints, organizational IT frameworks, designs, etc. does not share the mind of capital or any creative ‘pleasure’ from it. In the ontological inversion, the information and knowledge of capital means the opposite for the worker.

There is a good example from recent news. By June this year transport and delivery workers in warehouses across Britain had started complaining of having to wear computers on their wrists, arms and fingers which instructed them in their daily work. As GMB spokesman Paul Campbell said: ‘We are having reports of people walking our of their jobs after a few days work, in some cases just a few hours. They are all saying that they don’t like the job because they have no input. They just follow a computer’s instruction.’[190] Informationalisation has not made delivery more intelligent or autonomous, but more brain-numbing and controlled.

As clever computerized systems are sold as gadgets for personal consumption, society at large tends to become less intelligent too! Try a trip in a car which has the new-fangled satellite-driven pilot in it, and experience the feel of divesting yourself of your geographical and orientation skills!.

This ontological inversion is one with a subjective experience of boredom and pain.[191] Morris denounced the new pain created by the expropriation of creativity and autonomy from craft work with manufacture, i.e. the beginning of capitalist production. Since the dawn of capitalism many people experienced hatred of design. For example, the typographer Koch, whose ideas were close to Morris’s, fantasized about, and experimented with, a ‘design-less typography’ as an unconscious reaction to the sufferance of the present. In the ‘new’ era of immaterial production, this same pain has compelled many British transport workers to leave their job after just a few hours of computer-commanded work!

4.5 Hatred as contradiction of capital

With Autonomia and Mario Tronti in particular, the concrete experience of labor under subsumption was seen as the trigger of antagonism. For Tronti the labor which is commanded and made meaningless by real subsumption implies the disaffection of the worker from their daily activity: it implies hatred. This process was associated by Tronti with the fact that labor under capitalism is abstract labor, the source of value — capital as self-valorizing capital needs then to rationalize and deskill concrete labor against our resistance in order to extract surplus value.[192]

Hatred is then the subjective aspect of the objective existence of capital as self-valorizing value — and of a real subsumption which has to be reimposed continually and is continually challenged because it is incompatible with a fulfilling life. Hatred is the inherent unacceptability of the present system of production and the present division of labor. Hatred is the feel-bad factor in our optimistic view of capital as an unsolvable contradiction.

4.6 Negri and Hardt’s conception of immaterial labor as ‘abstract labor’ and the contradictions of capital

Negri and Hardt cannot deny the undeniable. For example, in Empire they cannot deny that IT is a means to control and deskill labor in the new service sector.[193] The deskilling based on IT, they add, turns all concrete labors into ‘abstract labor’, a homogenized jelly of manipulations of symbols (Empire, p. 292). Are we perhaps unfair to Negri and Hardt, if they seem to repeat word by word what we have just said?

No. In fact, if we carry on reading, we find a twist. Through the practice of computer work, they continue, all labor becomes an undifferentiated jelly of the same activity: an abstract ‘manipulation of [computer] symbols’. This, they conclude, is the concept of ‘abstract labor’.

Although Negri and Hardt seem to consider deskilling and real subsumption, they focus their attention on the material aspects of labor, the bare manipulation of symbols. The social context of this manipulation (for whom, why, under what plans, etc.) becomes inessential. If we all press computer keys when we work, immaterial labor becomes the same jelly of abstract activity, i.e. the same for Professor Negri as it is for everybody else. The theory of immaterial labor then becomes universal and dismisses the distinction about who shares the mind of capital and who executes.

Hatred, which hardly applies to the top designer or for Professor Negri, has no place in this theory. If hatred has no place here, the contradiction of capital as its unacceptability has no place either. Where is then the main contradiction of capital for Negri and Hardt? It arises, they explain, not from the inherent unacceptability of the present production, but from its inherent positivity. Antagonism arises, they explain, from our will to develop the present system of production and franchise it from the capitalist.

This is indeed a theory which does not see the need for a rupture, which is a rupture with a convenient division of labor. No surprise that for Negri and his followers a struggle for ‘the subversive reintegration of execution and conception’ is exemplified by the struggles of IT workers for the right of self-management of their very skilled labor (Witheford, ‘Autonomist Marxism’, p. 104). No surprise that for Negri and Hardt what counts for our anti-capitalist struggles is not a subversion of the present division of labor but the banal question of who controls the results of labor (information, the GM code, ‘communicational resources’, etc.) as it is divided now!

4.7 An outdated theory?

Negri and Hardt will say, no doubt, that all that we have said so far, in our analysis of antagonism and hatred based on the real subsumption of labor is outdated. Today, they will say, immaterial production has broken out with labor confined in the workplace and is done in the street, within unspecified ‘communities’, by anti-capitalist protesters, even tribes on small islands in the Pacific Ocean, by consumers who collectively help create the meanings of their commodity world, etc.[194] The list is never-ending.

Today, then, there is no such thing as real subsumption anymore. As we have already said, for Negri and Hardt today society at large organizes our communication and cooperation, while capital only overlaps on them and by overlapping it ‘controls, commands and channels our actions’.[195]

Another reason why we are wrong, and Marxism is outdated, Negri and Hardt will say, is because not only is production delocalized, but the product exceeds the commodity. What’s this ‘excess’? As immaterial workers in the service sector, we may make friends in our immaterial job with the customers, above all if we smile a lot: this is an ‘excess’. As migrants, our first language and our links with our relatives are excesses too. As unemployed, our skill in making houses of cards is an excess too. And in general, as workers and poor, we produce lots of excesses in the forms of needs and desires (Multitude, p. 148).[196]

Is this true — and, consequently, is our theory outdated? In fact all the above is true, but has always been true in capitalism and has never denied the dynamics of capital and real subsumption. Capitalist production has always thrived on given social and cultural backgrounds. The very concept of use value has always been rooted in society and its culture.[197]

If the above is true, however, Negri and Hardt make a logical leap and claim that this background for capitalist production, today, is production in its own rights, production tout court:

Insofar as life tends to be completely invested by acts of production and reproduction, social life itself becomes a productive machine. (Multitude, p. 148)

In this interpretation of production which incorporates non-production, then all can be production.

We do not need to waste more words on this distortion of reality. Negri and Hardt’s logical leap which conflates all activity with production has already been criticized by Caffentzis who stressed that there is a difference between labor, as a specific activity, and any odd activity.[198]

We also do not need to waste more words to convince the reader that real subsumption is still a reality today — everyone can experience it. As Gilles Dauvé says:

Managers know their Marx better than Toni Negri: they keep tracing and measuring productive places and moments to try and rationalize them even more. They even locate and develop “profit centers” within the company. Work is not diffuse. It is separated from the rest (‘To Work or Not to Work?’)

Only, what we are concerned with here, is the ideological conclusions of a theory of ‘general intellect’. First of all, this theory seems democratic and egalitarian but hides a sneaking contentment for the present. In a society where all is productive, there is no distinction between the owners of the means of production and the proletariat. There are no classes, only one large class of productive producers, some of goods and some of needs. Second, this theory seems to flatter us about our creative and knowledgeable inputs into society, but hides contentment for a situation where in reality we have no input. We may work 43 hours a week in a call center, but Negri and Hardt give us a word of consolation: in the information we employ, in the spreadsheet we use, there is a drop of our socially-shared creativity — we are the co-creators of it. What we need is only to become aware of this.

In conclusion, we are confident that the questions we put forward are not outdated! There is no easy escape for Negri and Hardt from these questions into a dream world of happy general intellectual and excessive production.