Part 3, Chapter 5 : Immaterial labour and the heart of capital

5. Immaterial labor and the heart of capital

We have focused so far on immaterial production as the production of knowledge and ideas. Another, central, aspect of immaterial production as defined by Negri and Hardt is the production of affects, communication and cooperation. In this section we address Negri and Hardt’s view that this production, which is capitalist production, is ‘elevated to the level of human relations’ and criticize their inability to understand the ontological inversion that turns affects and communication into abstract powers of capital and into our disempowerment.

5.1. ‘Immaterial production of communication and affects and subversion

Capital and affects, it seems, do not go along too well.

For Negri and Hardt capital was simply forced to incorporate affects and other subjective powers like communication and cooperation into production (Empire, pp. 275–6). Without the struggles of the ‘60s and ‘70s, they say, capital would have been content with conveyor belts and mechanical production. In fact, we are made to believe, by incorporating communication and affects in its production, capital incorporated its own gravediggers: what is subjective and human is inherently subversive and anti-capitalist by nature.

Hardt concedes that, in incorporating affects and human relations in production, capital ‘contaminated’ them. In his article ‘Affective Labor’ we read:

In a first moment in the computerization of industry... one might say that... human relations... have been instrumentalised.[199]

But, this is not the end of the story. Quite the contrary, capitalist production has been humanized in turn, by this subsumption of human faculties:

Through a reciprocal process... production has become communicative, affective, de-instrumentalised and elevated to the level of human relations. (‘Affective Labor’)

Negri and Hardt seem to propose something refreshing. From the Frankfurt School to Foucault, we have read plenty of pessimistic literature about how we are helplessly de-humanized by mass production or by the whole construction of power. Adorno endlessly moaned that capitalist production creates false ideology through a specific production of mass culture. Foucault, perhaps even more pessimistically, observed that our only subjectivity is inevitably the one created by power.

Negri and Hardt agree with Foucault that present production creates our collective subjectivity and society, and this happens, they add, because present production is the production of affects, affective labor. As Hardt writes:

Affective labor is itself and directly the constitution of communities and collective subjectivities… the processes whereby our laboring practices produce collective subjectivities… society itself. (‘Affective Labor’)

But, they add, this production is not negative, it is positive. It makes society ‘more affective’ and ‘more communicative’. And, since this is the result of immaterial labor, it is at odds with capital itself, it is human and potentially subversive. Negri and Hardt invert the pessimism of grumpy Foucault and Adorno into a euphoric adherence to the present.

Do we want to share this euphoria? Let us consider deeply the issue of communicative and affective labor, and what it means for us.

5.2. Immaterial production of communication and affects and real subsumption

The first question we ask is what happens to the nature of certain activities which involve primarily communications and affects (e.g. care, communication and entertainment) when they become productive for capital. There is only one answer. The integration of such activities as profit-making activities imply real subsumption and rationalization.

As Taylor did with material production, new studies now analyze human cooperation in terms of abstract principles, organizational schemes amenable to standardization and automation. As the machine for manual work the new technology of communication allows for standardization, rationalization and control of communication.[200] And, importantly, the imposition of efficiency in cost and time means the imposition of factory pace on affective activities such as hospital care.

5.3. Immaterial production of communication and affects and the ontological inversion

If we now consider the effect of this change for the worker, we will not be surprised to discover that we will find a similar pattern as the one seen in Section 4 for manufacture: de-humanization.

But is there a difference between the subsumption of craft work and the more recent subsumption of other ‘communicative and affective’ activities? Negri and Hardt seem to point at the fact that these latter have something special in their original, natural immateriality, and that, unlike craft work, their subsumption must have a reverse humanizing effect on production.

In fact these arguments seem to contain a basically wrong assumption. Thinking that nursing has something more specially social and human with respect to, for example, pot making and that, consequently, its subsumption implies something new and different for capitalist production, means to fall into an ideological trap. It means to take the established result of capitalist production on human activity as something natural.

In fact pot making, as all human activities including care, was fully social, communicative and affective before its subsumption by capital. It involved imagination and problem solving, a socially-shared conception of esthetics and utility and a social relation between the creator and the user. Capital took over all these human powers and, truly, ‘for a reciprocal process’ (which we call the ontological inversion!) assumed them as its powers. This ‘reciprocal process’ and humanization of capital is not, however, a silver lining of real subsumption but a curse for us, since it is one with our real experience of de-humanization.

Going back to the subsumption of service and communication, we wonder if we are not in the presence of some more of this incorporation and subsumption of human activity and powers.

For example, the activity of ‘spreading information’ was practiced in the courtyards and village squares and based on common understanding and experience. Taken over by capital, it becomes the task of helping strangers in exchange for a wage — first from ‘help desks’ in the same town; later, by phone. Eventually, from a distant country. Automation comes next: robots now phone us or answer our phone calls; web sites, i.e. automated interactive systems replace our interaction effectively. Meanwhile the content of information is made increasingly alien to both the ones who receive it and those who convey it.

This process increasingly distances the communicators concretely, in ‘affects’ as well as in life and struggle. People from two sides of a desk can still find common grounds of understanding and struggle, for example through sharing social milieus outside alienating customer relations. Brighton Against Benefit Cuts benefited from the wealth of Brighton life: this created friendship and understanding and allowed for the buildup of solidarity among the more militant dole workers and the unemployed in a common struggle against dole privatization. But the possibility of building solidarity on common grounds is more difficult the more people are delocalized and estranged.[201]

In the sector of entertainment, the manipulation of affects must be able to leave the producer and be consumed by strangers. This transforms collective events of the past (fairs, storytelling etc.) which involved complex interplay of full human relations, into the consumption of commodities.

The experience of affects in care is de-humanized too. For example, the direct relation of the village doctor and his patients, or women neighbors in midwifery roles and new mothers, etc. gets increasingly standardized by privatization. The nurse who deals with patients in a conveyor-belt system cannot know them personally: his ‘manipulation of affects’ is necessarily depersonalized. A surgery under economic pressure now tends to rotate patients among doctors so that even the flimsy relation between the individual patient and ‘his’ doctor is sacrificed on the altar of economic efficiency. Eventually, hospital consultants will be asked to interact with their patients through TV monitors on wheels.

In front of this systematic denial of communication and socialization inherent in a profit-making process, and in front of the parallel buildup of ‘communicative’ and ‘affective’ powers of capital, Negri and Hardt do not flinch. It does not matter if our contact is automated or virtual, Hardt says, ‘not for that reason is [it] any less real’ (‘Affective Labor’). It does not matter if it is very difficult today to realize the conditions for communication and solidarity among individuals or groups in struggle: this is communication anyway — only it is a ‘new’ kind of communication, vertical instead of horizontal.[202]

The question that immediately comes to our mind is: in a historical moment when most of us have to keep our heads down in our ‘flexible’ jobs as call center workers, waiters, carers, bank employes, receptionists, etc., how subversive is it to tell us that the alienated and alienating ‘communication’ and ‘affections’ we produce are nonetheless real?

5.4. Post-Fordism and the ontological inversion

The clearest example of how Negri and Hardt turn a blind eye to the ontological inversion of communication and affects in immaterial production is their enthusiastic approach to post-Fordist methods of production. Post-Fordism is welcomed by Negri and Hardt as an aspect of immaterial production, being based on exchange of information and cooperation between interrelated work units — thus it demands and stimulates communicativity in the worker.

In fact, as we argued earlier, post-Fordism aimed to fragment the large-scale factory production process. This fragmentation needs a stress on ‘communication’ at a managerial level however, since the company finds itself with the need to sow the bits of production back together. Of course the Japanese-oriented business brochures of the ‘80s made a big fuss about ‘communication’ and ‘synergies’. They had to.

But, as it was more clear to the workers themselves than to Negri and Hardt, the breakdown of production into teams increased managerial-controlled communication to the extent that it reduced the possibility for uncontrolled, antagonistic, communication across the factory.

For example in Longbridge, where as we have said earlier Rover production was restructured, the separation of work into units increased face-to-face ‘communication’ between the workers and their own team (group) leader while curtailing the mobility of the shop stewards (Pugliano, ‘Restructuring of Work’, pp. 39–41).[203] Rather than encouraging new alternative, anti-capitalist communications, simply and sadly, this system individualized the workers and encouraged them to look to their leaders for the solutions to their grudges. At the same time it discouraged them to look for collective and antagonistic solutions, even if in the mild form of union disputes. This is another example of ontological inversion, whereby the development and increase of capital’s ‘communication’ is realized through the denial of ours.[204]

5.5. Immaterial production of networks of social relations and alternative networks

Besides the production of communication and affects, the ‘networks’ of social relations that results as a byproduct of ‘serving with a smile’ cannot but harmonize with capital.

For example, the social niceness produced between hostesses and airplane passengers is an ephemeral connection founded on money transaction. The real nature of this relation appears in full when it is broken down during a strike — then the passengers affectively turn against the strikers, having lost their value for money. If we accept that a negative affect is an affect, it is worth while to paraphrase Hardt and say that consumers’ resentment is by no means less real. Indeed, social relations of bourgeois exchange are real and imply real oppression and repression.

Networks of social relations alternative to those of ‘democratic exchange’ can instead emerge in the very moment in which we deny capitalist social relations. This can even be a humble strike or a street protest limited in time and aims. Or it may be something even humbler and more limited. When we steal time from our ‘affective’ job in our service office and hang about in the corridor with our colleagues, this is the moment in which we build up affections beyond work relations, affections that can be a basis for future solidarity.

Only if we can build up and rely on direct social relations alternative to those of exchange can we concretely dispose of capitalist relations. The more we break away from capital, the more we defetishise its power, the more important these alternative relations become for our survival and victory. The revolution, the final triumph and abolition of the proletariat will only be possible on the basis of social relations consciously built through struggle — surely not on the basis of our smiles to passengers or hamburger eaters.[205]

5.6. How subversive is immaterial production and what does this actually mean?

Perhaps, again, we have considered the wrong example: i.e. that of a ‘traditional’ strike — or a ‘traditional’ micro-struggle such as hanging-out in the corridor with our colleagues.

In the famous confrontation between Toni Negri and Socialist Workers Party intellectual, Alex Callinicos, at the Paris European Social Forum in 2003, Callinicos criticized Negri for allegedly not including ‘strikers’ in the ‘multitude’ and for having thus abandoned a working class perspective. Negri easily rebuffed these allegations: he never excluded strikers, he said, and he always speaks about the antagonistic class.[206] However, what we read about immaterial labor poses serious doubts about what, precisely, Negri’s view of class struggle is.

Indeed, for a theory which sees immaterial production as anti-capitalist in itself, the real, effective struggle cannot be found in refusing and disrupting immaterial production.[207] The ‘new’ era thus opens up, in this view, possibilities for ‘new’ positive and exciting struggles that create and develop immaterial production. For many of us this idea does not make much sense. But it makes really good sense for the radical academic or the radical top designer. They can consider struggles based on their writing and designing. They can use their skills against capital, and, at the same time improve their CV and ‘self-valorize’ their privileged labor power.[208]

Although Callinicos made the mistake of not acknowledging Negri’s subtleties seriously enough, in his allegations there is a moment of truth. It is true that Negri still speaks about the ‘antagonistic’ class, but he has emptied this concept of meaning. For him class is simply a cultural belonging, a re-groupment created by (any) struggle. When anybody can be ‘the class’, including top designer Oliviero Toscani, the concept of class becomes meaningless. Thus Negri’s world of the multitude becomes in practice a classless society. This is why Negri can find a basis for academic collaboration, with post-modernists who have, more openly (and honestly) just disowned a class perspective.[209]

In the next and last subsection we will show how Negri and Hardt, as new ideologues for the ‘new’ era, manage to present their particularistic theory as universal.

5.7. Immaterial production as the apology for the ontological inversion

Like all bourgeois theories, a theory that can only reflect the perspective of a privileged part of society must nevertheless present itself as universal. The easiest way of achieving universality is to speak about unquestionably and universally good things. Like what? Like capital itself.

Capital can be seen as an unquestionably and universally good thing indeed. The secret of the bourgeois apologist of capital is in fact to exploit the ontological inversion. Does capital deny our creativity, affections, communication? Never mind. The other side of this coin is a real production of the same human powers, but now assumed by capital as its own, and appearing to us as ‘creativity’, ‘affections’ or ‘communication’ of a vaguely defined ‘society’ (or ‘new’ era). The fact that none of them actually belongs to the McDonald’s waiter can be then swiftly dismissed as a contingent disfunction of this unquestionably positive society (or ‘new’ era). When Negri and Hardt talk about ‘creativity’, ‘affections’ or ‘communication’ we cannot avoid thinking of the old bourgeois apology for capital as ‘progress’, ‘culture’ or ‘civilization’. This old apology is now re-proposed in a ‘new’ Toyotaistic and cybernetic salad dressing.

Mitchell Cohen has already noticed that Negri and Hardt tend to attribute to us the powers and dynamics of capital itself. Commenting on their enthusiasm for the freedom of circulation of migrants, he says, lucidly:

Poor migrants in our globalizing world don’t pursue “continuous movement” as an end in itself; they seek places in which to live decent and secure lives. Only capital pursuing profits can live in restless movement. (Well, perhaps cosmopolitan intellectuals can too when they chase conferences and international celebrity. But they also want — and need — the security of tenure).[210]

The broadness and abstractedness of concepts such as ‘communication’ and ‘affects’ has also another interesting function. It serves Negri and Hardt in the creation of a cheap Theory of Everything in One Book that can explain any facts ever observed and incorporate anything ever written. If this seems too easy, however, Negri and Hardt pay a price. The price is the appalling meaningless of a theory that can say only something too general or too abstract.[211]

Reading Negri and Hardt, we find lots of abstract truths. Our labor is so communicative and affective today. Of course this is true. All we can possibly do or we could have ever done since we came down from the trees can be categorized as communication or affections! Our production creates social relations. Of course this is true. All production, as an aspect of our social relations, has always implied the reproduction of social relations! Today language is fundamental for production because ‘we could not interact... in our daily lives if languages... were not common’ (Multitude, p. 188). Of course this is true too and has always been. Does all this prove Negri and Hardt’s theory of everything is true, or it is only the case that we are in front of trans-historical banalities?