File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_1997/97-03-10.164, message 12


Date: Tue, 18 Feb 1997 19:37:33 +1100
From: bjlin1-AT-student.monash.edu.au (Bruce Lindsay)
Subject: Re: Strategy


Franco wrote:

>If I correctly understand Bruce's problem, the question is: how forms
>of exploitation based on the immaterial nature of labour can
>at the same time guarantee the reproduction of labour in its material
>form, whereby productivity increases can be measured and remunerated,
>either directly or indirectly, upon which the whole construction of
>the welfare state, and its associated mode of legitimacy, lay? And
>why should capital look for legitimacy among labouring subjects that
>have been "decomposed, dispensed with, destroyed"?

Thanks to Franco and Laura and others for responding to these questions and
clarifying them far better than I was able to deal with them. I think that
both Franco's and Laura's posts contain important points in response to the
limitations of my original one (and the term "constitued" and "constituent
labor" is a glaring mistake on my part, instead of "constituent power,"
etc!). Indeed, the question of immateriality of labor is one of class
composition and relates to the dimension of the production process
concerned with social communication and cooperation. This is a *real*
power, whose "logic" within the accumulation process, Franco summarises:

"Immaterial power" of labour essentially means a profound
>redefinition of the relationships between particular contributions to
>the valorization process and the social organization of production.
>It means that capital manages, to variable extents, to harness social
>cooperation and communication in the workplace as an independent
>value-generating dynamics which multiplies the power and potency of
>individual productivity increases. Whereby in the process of
>abstractization of labour these latter can still be measured,
>defined, economically calculated and predicted (and the welfare state
>was precisely a project of constitutionalization of the civil society
>on the basis of abstract labour and the possibility to calculate
>productivity increases), putting to value immaterial sides of
>labour implies that the value-creating capacity of labour becomes, as
>Toni Negri wrote in a recent paper, "smisurata" (un-measured and un-
>measurable).

Not only scientifically and technologically (although this occurs massively
in the production of material commodities via automation, etc), immaterial
labor is basic to the process of "multiplying the power and potency of
individual productivity increases." This process also depends heavily upon
the production of identities and culture, which Franco notes also, and I
think is the arena in which the problem of legitimation lies, as a problem
of relations of capitalist rationalization. It is in this sphere and
process of rationalization, the sphere precisely in which immaterial labor
functions under capital, that the development of identity, culture,
administration, etc, is increasingly now "objectified" and alienated in the
"machinery" of culture, politics, personality, etc. I mean real machinery,
with its material and immaterial components, contained in the computer
programs and data bases that control and monitor us, or the procedures and
codified systems that are invested in the "cult of expertise" (as Chomsky
said), or whatever. And this make the *work* of social, political and
cultural relations (production, reproduction/consumption) increasingly
mundane, drudgery. I tend to agree (despite revising myself) with Laura
that terror (for example) is an effect of capital's "unmediated power" of
exclusion/inclusion, it would seem then that the condition of terror now is
not simply based upon material poverty or political repression but also
upon (the imposition of) psychic breakdown, isolation and meaninglessness.
Terrorism seems to be automated (in that machinery is an automatic system),
and will this/is this likely to be the process on which capital relies more
and more? We are talking about barbarism again. On the other hand, and
maybe returning to my original point about violence against capital: under
what conditions and in what forms may violence actually reconstitute hope
and love, rebuild meaning within rationality, for all of humanity (as
distinct from partial recuperation within capitalist reformism)? If we
"violate" the capitalist machinery of rationalization, is this "violence,"
and is it adequate to the revolution of hope and love (eg. the mass
demonstrations of Serbia, etc, certainly violate this Power)?

Bruce Lindsay








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