From: pvh-AT-wfeet.za.net ()
Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2001 08:24:26 +0200
Subject: 'law of value' and 'immaterial labour' (was Re: AUT: Re: RE: Fw: reply)


On 5 Nov 2001, at 22:34, cwright wrote:

Sergio wrote this Reply bit:
> Reply: 
[snip]
> Moreover, I am
> not really sure the extent to what the idea of multitude 
> is 
> oppossed to that of the working class. Multitude is the political 
>
> constitution that labour takes in the struggle to cease to be working
> > class as a social condition, based on a multiplicty of desires and
> needs > and therefore forms of organisation and struggle. I think
> Negri made > always clear that its notion of multitude is
> ontologically grounded on > the process of capitalist production; it
> is way to theorise multiplicty > within the class through the end of
> class in actual action.
> 
> This is very nicely said.  I think it may be what Negri and Hardt
> would like it to mean.  However, when they go so far as to say that
> labor no longer exists as the source of value, i think that is
> nonsense.  At that point, their conception of multitude is exactly
> about the flight of their analysis from the point of production, and
> yet the entirety of human creativity in this society is organized in
> one form or another as production or the consumption of production. 
> Marx make labor so important because in this society the reduction of
> all creative activity to labor is the dominant tendency.  That,
> ultimately, is what commodification is. 

And labour, for Negri and Hardt, clearly still exists. The 'point of 
production', however, is simply spread throughout society, so that 
production and reproduction cannot clearly be distinguished. So, 
this, as I understand it, comes from the argument about the 'mass 
worker' being replaced by a 'social worker'. And in turn, I think the 
concept of 'immaterial labour' is very important here.

I'm still looking into these things (which is why I want to take a 
second look at the Caffentzis piece on the 'law of value'), but I can 
imagine a meaning that makes more sense than the meaning you 
ascribe to their ideas here.

Firstly, immaterial labour - I think this concept doesn't mean the 
creation of 'immaterial things' (computer programs and the like), but 
rather labour which operates not on the level of the production of 
things, but on the level of the production of social relations. This 
exists in many forms - one of them is managerial labour, which 
we've known forever - the organisation of work in a particular 
locality, in such a way as to impose capital as a social relation. I 
think that is a particularly interesting form of labour to examine, 
since I think that a case can be made that managerial labour has 
moved out of its position in the 'middle' of a hierarchical 
organisation of labour (boss, manager, shopfloor worker), and 
spread throughout the labour force (to some degree).

I'm very concious of the fact that capitalism expect me to 'self-
insert' into the capitalist system - the whole ideology around work 
at the moment emphasises 'doing what you like', and self-
educating, becoming your own advocate to fit yourself into the 
system. Now, in South Africa, the section of workers who work like 
this is limited - but my impression of Britian while I was there was 
that this kind of activity is much more common: a huge number of 
people work on contracts, on a temporary basis, in some form both 
'precarious' and 'flexible'. In this environment, one of the forms of 
labour which is emphasised, and crucial, is the creation of relations 
necessary to production, the organisation of a group of people into 
a productive unit according to capitalist logic. (I experienced this as 
well at the 'startup' company I worked for recently)

Certainly, in my field of IT, I've previously identified the self-
imposition of capitalist logic (what I call 'second-order Taylorism') 
as important. A friend of mine in London works as a computer 
security consultant. He has a bookshelf full of security / 
cryptography textbooks at home, and spent the Millenium eve in an 
office outside London tracking the activity of computer hackers.

Somehow, this strikes me as very different from my father's 
generation - my father was a factory manager, and worker 
subjectivity was closely tied to the factory as a point of production. 
Such subjectivity, I think, is no longer tied to the factory, but 
diffuses through society. (BTW. I think a study of the 'self-help' 
industry would be useful here - such people, and poeple like Oprah 
Winfrey, are 'affect workers' par excellance. And my impression is 
that this industry has boomed over the last couple of decades)

And then on the law of value - in my form of work, the socially 
necessary labour time is damn difficult to calculate. I just recently 
spent 3 weeks on a programming project which was planned for 3 
days, and that is pretty much run-of-the-mill. I have written in the 
past about the attempt to impose calculable norms of labour on 
computer programming, and the failure of that attempt (of which the 
'free software' movement is part). I think this is common for a 
significant section of the working class these days, not just in IT, 
but in other fields of work which generally 'build networks of flexibly 
useable components', but empirical study would be necessary, of 
course.

None of the above should suggest that this is the *only* form of 
labour. I had a brief discussion with a comrade recently on the 
relation of this kind of labour (associated with a 'society of control' 
rather than a 'disciplinary society', as N&H argue) to factory labour, 
home labour, piecework, etc. I think there is an important topic 
there, and the 'smoothing over' of all labour as fluid, flexible, 'self-
organising' is an important piece of capitalist ideology. But my 
point is that:

1) Labour can be productive of value even when the 'law of value' 
finds it hard to grip the productive process.

2) The 'self-organisation' of capitalist social relations (which comes 
on the back of 'hippie capitalism', the 'California ideology' - as N&H 
point out, is a capitalist recuperation of the demand that the 
organisation of life itself is individualised, diversified) is central in 
this dynamic of exploitation - and I think this might be what N&H 
are getting at with their talk about 'immaterial labour'.

3) This 'self-organisation' at the same time is a powerful starting 
point for a self-organisation of non-capitalist social relations. Thus 
the 'productive activity' of the multitude which reaches outside 
capital.

4) Point 3 is for me bedevilled by the point I made about the 
relation between 'immaterial labour' and the all-too-material labour 
of sweatshops, home work, etc etc. That's an issue I still need to 
hammer out. I don't think it does away with all of the above, though.

Hopefully this will be a useful starting point, especially since I feel 
that debate on these topics (the 'law of value', 'immaterial labour') 
has become rather dogmatic and rigid, not just on this list, but also 
in the 'autonomist' community in general.

Peter

--
Peter van Heusden                     pvh-AT-wfeet.za.net
Tel: +27 (0)83 256 0457


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