Yusef has been challenging me on some of my comments in my post on Negri. He also has been defending Negri in the discussion on a post at Steve Shaviro’s. To Yusef’s credit (much more than mine, I’m sad to say), he rises above some of the unpleasantries in that thread to try and have a real and substantive conversation.
He says the following, among other things, in defense of Negri. (I may recopy his and my posts from there for the sake of archiving here.)
I still don’t understand why the enormous changes in the composition of the labor force since the 19th century doesn’t demand “a new analysis of labor organization,” or why the changes aren’t well characterized by, “value becomes the cognitive and immaterial product of creative action.” I think automation does change the mental/manual equation–most work in the US is no longer manual and yet it is still compensated as if it was, on an hourly or other time-scale basis, as time worked. That doesn’t really make sense if the work is mental– years (or a lifetime)can go by with no product at all, or on the other hand, something great can be created in what seems like no time at all. (And with seemingly “no labor” at all.) The relationship of time and effort (labor) to value must be changed by this.
The relationship of a mental worker (I was wrong to narrow that down to “IT” workers,) to capital has got to be different to that of a farm or factory worker of one hundred years ago. You can’t be a farm worker without a farm to work on, or a factory worker without a factory to work in. You can be a mental worker with just a small amount of space (a cubicle) and some generally relatively inexpensive technology which can be located in your home. I can see how a factory owner rigidly controls the factory worker– I don’t see this nearly as clearly in the case of a mental worker. The nature of the control has changed. The ownership of the product, which would appear straightforward in the case of the farm or factory (I don’t think a farm worker could get away with “That’s my vegetable, I grew it!”) has to be secured with some long-winded legalistic verbiage–it’s not so clearcut. Securing the “intellectual property” is difficult.
I agree with Yusef completely that “the enormous changes in the composition of the labor force since the 19th century [demands] a new analysis of labor organization.” Negri and people he was close to have done a lot of analysis of this stuff, though the changes are not 19th century vs the present so much as mid-to-late 19th century vs early 20th century vs mid 20th century (from the undifferentiated worker to the professional worker to the mass worker), and then with Negri mid 20th century to present (mass worker to socialized worker and more recently multitude). I think there are real insights in a lot of that work (though the timing is different in the US than in Europe, as massification happened sooner in the US than in Italy – there was an influential book by Gisela Bock and Bruno Ramirez on US working class history circulating in Italy in the 70s, about this very thing, there’s details in Steve Wright’s book Storming Heaven). I wish Negri would do more of that kind of work nowadays. At the same time, I think there are real problems with it, tied primarily to the search for a single hegemonic class sector to serve as a class vanguard with the tradition of operaismo.
That’s part of why I don’t think the changes are well characterized by “value becomes the cognitive and immaterial product of creative action” and I don’t agree with you that “most work in the US is no longer manual.” If anyone has statistics to show that then I’ll take this back. And for whatever it’s worth I don’t think Hardt and Negri’s argument has to do with numerical predominance. I’ve heard Hardt defend their argument by saying something like “when Marx wrote about factories there were only about 400 factories on earth but he still could recognize that factory production was hegemonic in that it set the terms for all other labor”.
I also think that implied in what Yusef is saying – which is I think a fair restatement of Negri’s argument – is an assumption about the appropriateness for time based measurement of prior labors (this is the whole thing on measure, as if capitalist production’s remuneration before actually remunerated the full time of – that is, adequately measured – labor in the past). Yusef says “most work in the US is no longer manual and yet it is still compensated as if it was” – why the link between manual labor and hourly wages? Why is that a particularly apt way to handle manual labor? I think the same point holds for the example of a farm vs intellectual laborer, and you seem close to giving up on a pretty old marxist/communist view – that labor is entitled to all it creates (such that “that’s my vegetable, I grew it!” is just as appropriate as the appropriation of intellectual products by intellectual workers).
Also, what falls out of all this is that the types of labor Yusef is talking about – not technologically, but labor with the temporal qualities you talk about – has been around a long time. I was just looking at reports from Iowa in 1885 about unions of waiters, bartenders, retail clerks, musicians; on a related note, it might be worth revisiting Marx’s remarks in the early bits of v2 of Capital on the communications industry, by which Marx means transportation. Those immaterial labors – and I would say there’s an immaterial component to a lot of so-called material or manual labors – presumably had all the qualities of immaterial labor under discussion here. If that sort of work always had the qualities that make measure of value and time wages inappropriate then it doesn’t make sense to say value production across all of capitalism has changed, and it also seems to follow that for people who work in different sorts of industries (for instance, much of my family works in the unionized construction trades) the talk about the change in value production also doesn’t apply.
That is: the qualities Negri sees in the present are not as universal as he makes them sound, they’re more specific to one or a few strata than he makes it sound like. That means he’s taking the experiences of a smaller group and making them the defining experiences for an era. There may be grounds for that, but I’m not convinced. I think this is a holdover to what I mentioned before about the search for a hegemonic sector of the class as typified in the series professional worker-mass worker-social worker.
(Also for the record I think a lot of immaterial labor doesn’t work the way Yusef describes – I think a lot of cultural production requires putting in time that could totally be measured and remunerated by time wages and in some cases the claimed disjunct between time wages and immaterial labor could work to management’s credit: I teach, read, and write for a living. If all the time I spent on that was paid for I’d make more money than I do, and what I do could certainly be done with a time based wage – I could clock in when I’m reading, writing, discussing for the sake of my job.)
EDIT:
While I was traveling earlier in the month I took notes a few things that I want to make into blog posts. One set of notes, on the back of a small piece of cardstock, fell out of a book the other day. I’d completely forgotten about it. It’s in response to this post by Synth.
I’m just typing it up as is, not adding anything, mostly cuz I really should go to bed.
The immaterialization thesis:
1) Immaterialization of labor (or, becoming hegemonic of immaterial labor) has happened or is currently happening.
2) The conditions named above contain political possibilities which should be investigated.
3) The above mentioned possibilities are novel in some politically significant way.
4) The conditions named in point 1 are a profound change in capitalism, in objective conditions.
Something like that.
I’m not convinced of #1 but I won’t argue the point. I’m find to be wrong about that if someone can prove it or make a strong argument. My main objections are to claims about #1 is supposed to mean even if it were true. I will say I’m concerned over some things re: #1, including what I take to be insufficient attention to
a. what should done about (or, preferably, by those working in) the remaining material labor (or, labors where the hegemony of immaterial labor is less pronounced; I recognize there is an important difference that could be made between immaterialization and tendential hegemony of immaterial labor, either way I think a problem like what I’ve said occurs)
b. hierarchies and varied conditions within the labors named in #1.
c. ways some immaterial labors/immaterialization/tendential hegemony of immaterial labor functions as a means of managing workers and does not contain the liberatory possibilities ascribed to immaterial labor (this is in some ways a more specific version of b.)
Point #2 of the immaterialization thesis is a truism which could be said in response to any historical moment/conjuncture/situation (whatever preferred term you want), and so has force without #3 beyond an injunction to empirical research and organizing/political experimentation (I like this actually and wish it had that effect more often)
Point #3 strikes me as largely false, and as involving a mistaken derivation of subjective political possibility from objective and technical factors. Furthermore, it involves/conveys an impoverished understanding of the history of class struggle prior to whenever #1 is supposed to have happened/started. I suspect this ties to the search for hegemonic class figures.
Point#4 is false in so far as the claim is about the law of value, ditto on history re: #3.
crashcourse666 
Hey Nate, thanks for this post. I’m under the impression (as I slog through Capital and try to get a grip on things) that no matter what your product, if you are working for a capitalist firm the basic logic of your labor is the same as it has been since waged labor took off 400 years ago. It doesn’t matter if you are growing turnips or translating medical documents or writing screen plays. Your average (or nominal) product will be calculated by the firm, and the wage you are paid will be less than that product is worth. As long as you are maintaining that nominal product for the firm, and it can be realized in exchange, you’re exploitable labor. Voila, capital!
I don’t see how this changes with immaterial labor at all. Nor do I think that the years that might go into a single immaterial ‘production’ are all that different from the years of technical training that went into training masons or master carpenters. We will see a massive deskilling of intellectual workers in coming decades (as we already have seen with the replacement of loan officers with algorithms, etc), just as routinization massively simplified manufacture.
hi nate; isn’t the point of negri’s case not that conditions of labour have changed (no one, across the entire political spectrum, disputes this) but that because they have changed, capital is no longer exploiting labour. people are oppressed and controlled by the state for no reason (“biopolitics”) but surplus value is not extracted from them by capitalists anymore. the values of commodities derive from a chaotic combo of consumer psychology, happenstance and scarcity.
the value of production is extinct. When it is no longer retraceable to measure, it becomes dis-measured [11] . I want to underline here the paradox of a labour force that is no longer either inside or outside of capital. In the first case, the criterion that allowed, through measure, control, was its relative independence (that today no longer exists: the labour force is ‘really subsumed’); in the second case, the criterion that allowed, despite the fall of measure, command on the labour force consisted in its absorbtion into the monetary regime (Keynesianism, to mention the most sophisticated technique of control). But this criterion too has ended in so far as monetary control has become completely abstract. We have to conclude then that the labour force that one finds in the postmodern (in the global and/or imperial system of capitalist economy) is situated in a non-place with respect to capital.
…
…We have to recognise that, by reshaping its conceptual system in this manner, political economy has made much progress and it has attempted to pose itself outside of the classical dialectics of capital (without negating the instance of domination that characterises it but reproducing it in original languages). It accepts the impossibility to determine any ‘objective’ (and transcendental, as in the case of ‘use-value, and again transcendental in the case of money) measure of labour force productivity. Hence it tests itself on the terrain marked by the ‘production of subjectivity’, i.e. by productive subjectivity. The latent recognition that political economy grants to the fact that value is now an investment of desire, constitutes a real conceptual revolution.
So the main thing isn’t an observation about the growth of consultants, which is just obvious, but the conclusion that because there are all these consultants, “value is now an investment of desire”.
Chabert, isn’t that (“the value of production is desire”) just another way of putting marginal utility?
Oooppppps, wine: “value is now an investment of desire”.
yeah. Negri’s views, if you clear the generic jargon away and ignore the stated commitments, often really seem a lot like Gary Becker’s.
JCD,
I think you’re right that the material/immaterial labor distinction is, on the whole, insupportable. But one way that work in a knowledge-intensive industry is different from 19th-century artisanal labor is that the means of production in such industries are harder for capital to own, and also harder to monetize. It’s also much easier to trick people into doing unwaged work and then commodify the results. I think this holds true for, say, adjunct teachers in the university system, as much as it does for low-level tech workers.
Chabert,
JCD beat me to the punch with the marginal utility quip. Negri has clearly lost the thread with with his final–postmodern– stage. Earlier on, though, he made the claim that even once measure ceased to be actual, workers were still necessary, as measure, for capital to compare goods vis-a-vis value. I’m with him on that one, even if it might be better not to write it in terms of periods but of capital’s genesis from the beginning. I mean, I think he’s right about the ultimate fictitiousness (the real fictitiousness, if you will) of the law of value, and I think it’s important to keep in mind that, as both Postone and Cleaver make clear, value is capital’s law not a natural law; its ontology is, at base, political rather than natural. If you think of exploitation not as the seizure of products (distribution) but as the purchase of labor-power (production), then labor as the measure-of-dismeasure and labor-as-production are both still exploitation. To refer back to something Nate said earlier, I’m not sure, however gratifying and perhaps tactically useful it might be to say, that it’s really correct to say, “this is my vegetable, I grew that.” Or rather, it’s true to say it of the vegetable as a thing but not of the vegetable as a commodity. In Marx, the worker does indeed grow the individual vegetable as physical thing, as an object of real wealth, but the value of the carrot qua commodity is produced by the class of workers as a whole. This is why I think Negri’s onto something when he remands value to the larger social field.
Also, I don’t think biopolitics should mean “oppression that happens for no reason.” Even in that Value and Affect article you quote, he’s pretty clear that its purpose is the reproduction of the relations of production and creation of subjectivities (use-value), in order that capital continue to control the lion’s share of wealth. . . Even if we don’t want to slide into the marginal theory of utility, I don’t think we can avoid the fact that capital works on the side of use-value as much as exchange-value. Indeed, that’s one of the key reasons it has been able to exist as long as it has, by continually generating new lines of production into which it can divert excess capital.
Here’s my Negri counter-quote, from Marx beyond Marx. I think he shows a much better face there, before passing from the stage of command into the stage of biopolitical subjectivization:
“Here, the theory of value is no longer simply subordinated. It undergoes, in this subordination, an important displacement and is subjected to a fundamental metamorphosis. In other words, when the theory of value can not measure itself by a quantity of labor timme or by an individual dimension of labor, when a first displacement leads it to confront social time and the collective dimension of labor, at this moment the immpossibility of measuring exploitation modifies the form of exploitation. The emptiness that appears in the theory of value, the evacuation of any element of measure which is not a generic reference to social industriousness, the liberation of social industriousness and its constitution in collective individuality, does not suppress the law of value but reduces it to a mere formality. Of course, formality does not mean a lack of efficacy. Formality does not mean a lack of meaning. The form of the law of value is, on the contrary, efficient and full of meaning, but efficacy and meaning are given to it only by its irrationality, by the end of the progressive and rationalizing function of exploitation. The form is the empty, miserable base of exploitation. (148)
The point here is a lot like the one Spivak makes in “Scattered Speculations on Value.” I think it’s an important one.
I am sort of intrigued to see what the newly hip behavioral economics will contribute to academic intellectual product. On the ‘left’ I mean. Heh: maybe I could make that my schtick–er, niche–and starting publishing with Verso.
Jasper: yea, the whole apparatus of sustaining intellectual property (for one) as commodities is rather astounding. I’m not really sure what to make of how it works in cut and dry terms. Clearly 100+ million is spent on creating blockbusters with the understanding that more than that is going to come back; but at this point maybe the receipts from actual showings are less important than sidedeals, and all the rest, that are generated on the ‘buzz’ of a successfully orchestrated flick.
Thanks Jasper – ” value is capital’s law not a natural law; its ontology is, at base, political rather than natural” – not capital’s law, but a feature of capitalism (thus ‘political’); Spivak’s point about value being “textual” is merely that it is a social product, not dictated by capital or made by capital, but a result of the human relations and relations of property in capitalism. I admit “no reason” is flippant, but immeasurable value leaves a world without any imperatives, most importantly a world in which capital feels no pressure to increase productivity and this assumption, combined with the ‘theory’ of the state’s ever intensifying preference for stability and miromanagement of daily life, has its consequences in Negri, as in Foucault. “If you think of exploitation not as the seizure of products (distribution) but as the purchase of labor-power (production), then labor as the measure-of-dismeasure and labor-as-production are both still exploitation” For Marx exploitation is the use of purchased labour power to make commodities of measurably greater value, thus the extraction of a surplus; investment in any enterprise will depend on the ability of investors to measure profit. It is possible to purchase labour power (with all the oppression and control of “biopolitics” that go with it) without exploiting it – without deriving a surplus. As for “excess capital”, it goes into a fantastically expanding financial sector.
“I don’t think we can avoid the fact that capital works on the side of use-value as much as exchange-value.”
what does this mean? if it means that in capitalism, new needs are created, who would wish to avoid this? it seems to be an uncontroversial observation for nearly 300 years.
I can’t argue “capital’s law” vs. “feature of capitalism.” I think the way you phrase it is pretty close to what I’m getting at, as social contology, a social construction that becomes real, realized. . .
I do think, though, that we need to distinguish profit from value. As you know, the former only becomes the latter on average, and only when an economic equilibrium is presupposed. Value is a social logic, not an empirical fact; you can’t measure surplus-value qua individual commodities. What Negri is getting at–and he might be jumping the gun here–is that there is an increasing divergence between profit and value, the average becomes harder and harder to reach. Capital’s imperative to profit means a monopolization of a larger and larger pool of the real wealth, the real use-values that labor produces, but it can’t guarantee that those things will realize surplus value in the long run–hence the turn, first, to Keynesian administration, and second, to the liberalization of the financial sector, and hence the periodic carnage of structural adjustment programs, collapse of complicated financial instruments and home prices, two-faced monetarism. I’m no economist, but it seems like the stock-market’s great epic poem of itself has become evermore dependent on the fiction of labor values to be realized in a future-to-come, a future of GM cyborg workers rebuilding the new inland shorefront, and evermore predatory with regard to past values–pensions, the savings of workers, etc.
Like I said, perhaps this should be best thought of as a tendency of contemporary capitalism, one that is in the process of being realized. I do think that the divergence between the productive capacity of contemporary capitalism and the labor theory of value (proportioning this excess with regard to who works and how much) creates a greater and greater disequilibrium of the sort that Negri’s getting at. Negri’s wrong, though, that there’s no longer a progressive, rationalizing effect to capitalism. It’s clear that productive forces continue to grow, but more slowly, for sure, as Brenner and others have pointed out.
I’m not sure, ultimately, what the difference between our two positions, if there is one, means politically. I do like the fact that, in Negri’s version, the law of value becomes anachronistic, and it becomes more and more patently obvious that communism is a real possibility, and that the old saw about capitalism’s ennobling and civilizing features and the eventual enrichment it brings is just bullshit. Even if such claims were always false, and I think they were, they are, given current technological means, false in a different way today.
As for the claim about biopolitics and new needs, yes, that’s what I mean, and I realize that it’s fairly obvious. Still, I think there are many Marxisms that simply imagine the worker qua worker, not the worker qua consumer. A successful revolution would mean seizing the side of both supply and demand, exchange-value and use-value and, in fact, destroying the distinction between the two. To focus only on the supply side runs the risk of an administrative domination of demand, and therefore jeopardizes the possibility of a free association of producers and consumers. . . It’s not uncommon to see use-value posited as some kind of authentic existential ground from which to critique exchange-value.
All right. That’s the best I got.
Spivak’s point is the opposite, to reaffirm the ltv, to underline that Marx wrote, clearly and repeatedly, that since every commodities’ value is reflected in every other commodity – since the value of a cup of coffee is the totality of its relation to a mobile phone call, a tshirt, oil futures, condos in manhattan, an hour of cleaning service, etc, it is a product of many simultaneous and diverse social and political realities. Then she says this context text in which value appears or which produces value – and she prefers the metaphor of stew, of something cooked – can be addressed by deconstruction as text in an interesting way. The last part is debatable, but the whole basis justifying it is the orthodox marxist understanding of value (which Negri misconstrues first ad then rejects, the first to enable the second i suspect).
I can’t argue “capital’s law” vs. “feature of capitalism.”
I just mean that in Marxism, capitalism is not the dictatorship of capital. Capitalism is the mode of production; the form of property held by the ruling class in capitalism is capital. But the ruling class in capitalism is not despotic, competes internally and in blocks, struggles with other classes principally labour, and has no monopoly on power. The result of these relations, these antagonisms, these arrangements, include the laws of motion of capital and the production of the value of commodities including labour power.
“What Negri is getting at–and he might be jumping the gun here–is that there is an increasing divergence between profit and value, the average becomes harder and harder to reach. ”
Let’s go back to the theory that Negri is claiming is no longer correct because of the consultants. That theory is Marx’. Now for Marx, there is total social production of use values, including the social production of needs and knowledges which determine whether any particular thing is a use value, the kind of social production of needs described in popular enlightenment literature, say Volatire l’homme aux quarante écus – French people with disposable income now have need of coffee and refined sugar, etc, an historical development which industrial, merchant and finance capital have played no small role encouraging. So Marx says okay, there is global social production of use values, which includes the production of consumer markets, of needs and tastes, etc.. The bourgeoisie as a ruling class appropriates a portion of this total social production. It does not do so as feudal lords did once, by sending a baliff to take away the vegetable somebody grew. It has new features etc etc. We know the story. Now Marx writes that each industry is different, that rates of profit vary, that entrepreneurs compete, that capital moves, that the rate of profit therefore has a tendency to equalise and to fall, and that capitalists, competing with one another, react to these tendencies, with capital always seeking higher rates of profit. Therefore in competition capital feels the imperative to increase the productivity of labour; this can be done lowering wages or innovating technologically. We see both these imperatives driving capitalists all the time to this day. However, Marx also notes, the benefits of these individual competitive practises are spread out across the whole class through markets. Negri is arguing that this description has become untrue and innacurate; it would seem however that it is more true than ever, that is, there are fewer sites of exceptions to this. The way the total surplus of the capitalist mode of production, the total surplus including profits, rents, interest, is distributed across the ruling class means of course, as Marx described, “you can’t measure surplus-value qua individual commodities”. This is why Marx spoke of abstract labour – the total social production, social productivity – not some particular concrete labour in relation to this or that concrete commodity, in his analysis of value.
N pepperell has a recent post i think noting Marx’ remarks on how Smith made this discovery of labour in general and how the historical conditions allowed for this discovery of labour in general (capitalist production and the division of labour makes it possible to speak and think of labour in general, as opposed to a world where shepherds play their flutes at night on the hillsides and women spin and tell stories and social production is exploited at a different point, the taking away of part of the concrete product, the concrete use values, wheat, cloth, sheep.) The form of property that is capital differs from previous forms of property in wealth precisely for this feature Negri is “suddenly discovering”, that the individual capitalist does not possess an individual concrete estate with individual concrete serfs from whom all his surplus derives, so that one could say the profit is the five hours this serf worked on this product the owner took as opposed to the three hours he worked on that product he used himself. Capitalists are like shareholders of a coop that is the world, they own a little percentage of all the serfs, who have variable productivity.
Yes, I agree with that distinction vis-a-vis classes. It’s an important one, and avoids both scapegoating–focusing on people rather than systems–and a miserabilism on the part of the working class. . .I just mean it has a social origin, that’s all, and that it has to compel certain kinds of behavior and is thus mutable and permeated by those behaviors (subjectivities). . .
I disagree about Spivak, though. I think she’s pretty clear that value is indeterminate, discontinuous, and ultimately immeasurable, but no less a social force for all that, and that’s why she appeals to the example of unwaged work, of reproductive labor, and of the geopolitical differential between core and periphery. . .
[Yet the definition of Value in Marx establishes it as not only a representation but also a differential. What is represented or represents itself in the commodity-differential is Value: “In the exchange-relation of commodities their exchange-value appeared to us as totally in- dependent of their use-value. But if we abstract their use-value from the product of labor, we obtain their value, as it has just been defined. The common element that represents itself (sich darstellt) in the exchange-relation of the exchange-value of the commodity, is thus value” [Capital 1 128; translation modified]. Marx is writing, then, of a differential represent- ing itself or being represented by an agency (“we”) no more fixable than the empty and ad hoc place of the investigator or community of investigators (in the fields of economics, plan- ning, business management). Only the continuist urge that I have already described can represent this differential as representing labor, even if “labor” is taken only to imply “as ob- jectified in the commodity.”]
[If a view of affectively necessary labor (as possible within the present state of socialized consumer capitalism) as labor as such is proposed without careful attention to the interna- tional division of labor, its fate may be a mere political avant-gardism. This, in spite of its sincere evocations of the world economic system, is, I believe, a possible problem with Antonio Negri’s theory of zerowork.8 The resistance of the syncategoremes strategically ex- cluded from the system so that the great semantemes can control its morphology (Derrida) can perhaps be related to the heterogeneity of use-value as a private grammar. For Derrida, however, capital is generally interest-bearing commercial capital. Hence surplus-value for him is the super-adequation of capital rather than a “materialist” predication of the subject as super-adequate to itself. This restricted notion can only lead to “idealist” analogies between capital and subject, or commodity and subject.
The concept of socially necessary labor is based on an identification of subsistence and reproduction. Necessary labor is the amount of labor required by the worker to “reproduce” himself in order to remain optimally useful for capital in terms of the current price-structure. Now if the dynamics of birth-growth-family-life reproduction is given as much attention as, let us say, the relationship between fixed and variable capitals in their several moments, the “materialist” predication of the subject as labor-power is rendered indeterminate in another way, without therefore being “refuted” by varieties of utopianism and “idealism.” This expan- sion of the textuality of value has often gone unrecognized by feminists as well as mainstream Marxists, when they are caught within hegemonic positivism or orthodox dialectics.9 They have sometimes tried to close off the expansion, by considering it as an opposi- tion (between Marxism and feminism), or by way of inscribing, in a continuist spirit, the socializing or ideology-forming functions of the family as direct means of producing the worker and thus involved in the circuit of the production of surplus-value for the capitalist. They have also attempted to legitimize domestic labor within capital logic. Most of these positions arise from situational exigencies. My own involvement with them does not permit critical distance, as witness in the last page of this essay. That these closing off gestures are situationally admirable is evident from the practical difficulty of offering alternatives to them.
8For excellent elaborations of this theory, see the “Introduction’-s and indeed the entire issues of Zerowork: Political Materials 1 & 2 (December 1975 and Fall 1977). One of the most revolutionary sug- gestions of this thought is that the working class includes the unwaged as well as the waged. I am sug- gesting that the unwaged under socialized capital has a different status and definition from the unwaged in the peripheral capitalisms.]
In any case, I believe that’s what Marx seems to believe, too, that value is not an empirically observable thing but a social logic predicated upon contradiction and indeterminacy. I think she is upholding the labor theory of value, but in a different way than most orthodox Marxists do.
I missed your last post before I posted mine, Chabert, so I’ll respond before I head off to make up my course reader. . .
I agree with most of what you say. And, like I said, I’m not disputing that there’s growth in productive forces via competition. But you can make a case that there are limits to this growth–hence the last 30 years of stagnation in the imperial core–and this stagnation has to do with an inability to continually expand the available lines of production (create new use values) and also the tendency of such growth of the technological forces to create unemployment. (Cf. Marx on the Free Laborer as Pauper and Overproduction and Overpopulation). I think this bears out of you look at the growth of, for instance, slums in the megacities of the periphery, not to mention the expansion of contingent labor in, say, the US. This might be a limit, and I think it’s such a limit to which Negri is responding. . .
thanks jasper….Spivak writes: “In fact, the basic premise of the recent critique of the labour theory of value” – this could include Negri – “is predicated on the assumption that, according to Marx, Value represents Labour.” (We have to bear in mind the emphasis deconstruction gives to the verb.) Spivak continues “Yet the definition of Value in Marx establishes it as not only a representation but also a differential. What is represented or represents itself in the commodity-differential is Value; ‘In the exchange-relation of commodities their exchange-value appeared to us as totally independent of their use-value. But if we abstract their use-value from the product of labour, we obtain their value, as it has just been defined. The common element that represents itself in the exchange-relation of the exchange-value of the commodity, is thus value.’ Marx is writing, then, of a differential representing itself or being represented by an agency (“we”) no more fixable than the empty and ad hoc place of the investigator or community of investigators (in the fields of economics, planning, business management.) Only the continuist urge that I have already described can represent this differential as representing labour, even if ‘labour’ is taken only to imply ‘as objectified in the commodity.’”
There’s room of course for debate about whether Spivak is misreading but not about whether she thinks she is; much of her point is a way of noting that in imperial core situations, workers are effectively arbitraging labour power, and this is clear if you accept Marx’ description of value production (which she then makes analogous to meaning production as understood by deconstruction for certain perhaps dubious, perhaps trivial purposes; where she goes with that will be acceptable to the reader depending not only on one’s understanding of ltv but on whether one accepts the derridean account of signification production in text in the ordinary sense of text; ‘value’ is ‘indeterminate’ only to the degree and in the same way that meaning is, ‘ultimately’, so this is arguably pretty trivial.)
Negri rejects this big point (arbitraging labour power giving the soft landing etc) but again his description of what he’s rejection seems deliberately unclear and ambiguous.
“But you can make a case that there are limits to this growth”
agreed; clearly the actual amount of dead labour which now exists as property is a new condition; but Negri’s picture of it is basically to say there can be no such thing as an asset bubble etc.. because all there is is perception – it’s pretty much taking the puffery of financial industries and their jorno courtiers for fact I think.
(just a note this: “The concept of socially necessary labor is based on an identification of subsistence and reproduction. Necessary labor is the amount of labor required by the worker to “reproduce” himself in order to remain optimally useful for capital in terms of the current price-structure.” always troubled me, because it is simply wildly wrong if it refers to that phrase ‘socially necessary’ which appears in Marx on value, and its not clear if Spivak is speaking in her own voice or characterising the position(s) she is rejecting, in the statements of which the same bizarre error can often be found.)
“but Negri’s picture of it is basically to say there can be no such thing as an asset bubble etc.. because all there is is perception – it’s pretty much taking the puffery of financial industries and their jorno courtiers for fact I think.”
I think Negri’s meaning is just the opposite–I think he would say it is all one big asset bubble. One big con job and one big ripoff. The only question is how such a deception can possibly be sustainable…
Do you think that bubbleonomics would be unwanted by financiers, not a product of their design? If so, I would like to hear your arguments for that.
thanks yusef: “I think Negri’s meaning is just the opposite–I think he would say it is all one big asset bubble.”
well this is much the same; that is, if everything is a bubble then there are no bubbles.
“The only question is how such a deception can possibly be sustainable… ”
terror mainly.
“Do you think that bubbleonomics would be unwanted by financiers, not a product of their design?’
It’s definitely by design. But you can’t overvalue if there is no value to go over; you can’t pop a bubble if there is no condition other than bubble. If that were the case it would be difficult to say why bubbles would be engineered – if not for expropriation, then what? amusement?
I do agree that the way he puts it is that capital is one big bubble, a kind of illusion one could wish away, rather than the concrete subjection of humanity to the ruling class/owners of capital, accomplished mainly by force with some (not insignificant) consent.
Just to add a final note here, Chabert, I wasn’t defending Negri circa the turn to the “consumption theory of value” but trying to point out that there was an earlier Negri–the Negri of Marx beyond Marx, Books for Burning and the first half of Time for Revolution–that can’t in any way be characterized as saying all there is is perception, or that capital can be wished away, or that value comes entirely from the side of demand or subjectivity. I think the quote above from MbM above bears that out. Saying value is an abstraction that has become real, and that has come to constitute an impersonal form of domination is rather far, in my book, from making the hyper-voluntarist claims you ascribe to him–indeed “the concrete subjection of humanity to the ruling class/owners of capital, accomplished mainly by force with some (not insignificant) consent” seems like a pretty good statement of his position in those works, although I might back us up about six posts and replace ruling class with capital proper, per your objections there.
Thanks so much for taking the time to debate this stuff. It’s been very edifying.
hi all,
Sorry for not replying sooner, I haven’t had time to really read this. Interesting stuff, here, I’ve enjoyed reading. In case y’all didn’t notice (and if y’all care) I edited the post a bit, added something. Not sure it really adds to this conversation.
JCD,
Thank you. “no matter what your product, if you are working for a capitalist firm the basic logic of your labor is the same as it has been since waged labor took off 400 years ago.” I have the same inclination. I mean, a lot depends on how one interprets “basic logic” – for instance, is the difference between absolute surplus value production and relative surplus value production of basic logic? (I’m inclined to say no, but I could imagine arguments that say yes for perhaps good reason).
“Nor do I think that the years that might go into a single immaterial ‘production’ are all that different from the years of technical training that went into training masons or master carpenters.”
I agree 100%. I said something similar in my post about Iowa recently. I had the idea tonight to try and write a call out for people to read labor history, focusing on a broad swath (as broad as the types of activity Negri and others call immaterial labor), and to read it in relation to the philosophical remarks made on immaterial labor, partly to criticize them, partly to see where they may actually be useful, and partly to get a bit closer to a history immaterial labor as part of all those debates. If I write it up I’ll post it here.
Colonel,
“[For Negri] capital is no longer exploiting labour.” I disagree. I think Negri thinks exploitation still exists and capitalists are still the class enemy. It may be that given his remarks on value he doesn’t have a coherent explanation/concept of this, but that’s a different issue.
I agree with you 100% on this: “immeasurable value leaves a world without any imperatives, most importantly a world in which capital feels no pressure to increase productivity and this assumption”
Jasper,
Before I forget – what’s that long bracketed quote from in your comment #15, and can you supply a page number please? I assume that’s Spivak.
“work in a knowledge-intensive industry is different from 19th-century artisanal labor” On the one hand I think everyone agrees that knowledge work is different from 19th century artisan labor (though the real distinctions Negri is working with is not now vs 19th century, it’s now vs what for Negri is the mid 20th century figure of the mass worker vs the professional worker vs the undifferentiated worker [this latter term I’ve only seen him use in Art and Multitude, I’m not sure it’s a term he’s really invested in, I hope not]). On the other hand, I think that a lot of what Negri describes could also be described as a return to earlier forms of labor relations (not of labor processes, to be clear), in the sort of independence called for as well as the quality of being productive all the time. If a sculptor is productive all the time now then presumably prior sculptors were too, and I don’t see why other sorts of ornate craftsmanship should have that same quality.
I don’t understand how “the means of production in such [knowledge production] industries are harder for capital to own.” The university I work at owns the computers, most of the books, the classroom space (both the ones I occupy as a student and as a teacher), the information required to contact a lot of students and faculty, the journal and database subscriptions, etc.
I agree with you completely when you say “it might be better not to write it in terms of periods but of capital’s genesis from the beginning,” part of what frustrates me about some of Negri is that I think if he refigured his enterprise, dropped the bad historical claims, it would make his work stronger and more useful, and extend the period of time it would apply to. It would also remove what he thinks is a correct analysis of the present which serves to ground his political claims, that may be part of why he hangs on to some of this.
On the carrot thing, I’m happy to drop that example. My point is that I don’t think there’s some qualitative difference between ‘material’ and ‘immaterial’ commodities such that there’s a qualitative difference in proletarian claims to a right (or practices of) appropriation of those commodities as being the product of our labor. I think it’s implied in what Yusef was saying that there is such a difference, and I think Yusef was accurately stating Negri’s position (or a Negrian one, following logically from some of what Negri has written).
On the “tendency of contemporary capitalism (…) that is in the process of being realized,” with its attendant crises … maybe. But this sounds in part like traditional marxist crisis theory and falling rate of profit. And I think there may be simpler (but more boring and perhaps politically more depressing) explanations for the same phenomena, without recourse to odd periodizations and claims about informational labor – for instance, the growth of finance capital, and speculation which produces profit for firms/investors but doesn’t produce new value. (I admit I’m rocky on this stuff, and I find all the Negri I read doesn’t make me understand it better, which frustrates me now that I want to understand finance and all that.)
On this: “it becomes more and more patently obvious that communism is a real possibility, and that the old saw about capitalism’s ennobling and civilizing features and the eventual enrichment it brings is just bullshit” I like the optimism that comes with this, but there’s two problems: if it’s based on a false analysis then it will collapse when the analysis collapses, and the “more obvious” bit implies there were better reasons to believe in capitalism in the past, which I don’t think makes sense. (I wrote a thing on this ages ago, if anyone cares – http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2005/10/17/time-do-you-work/)
take care,
Nate
Hey Nate
Yes, it’s Spivak–“Scattered Speculations of the Question of Value.” If you have JSTOR, it’s here http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=0300-7162(198524)15%3A4%3C73%3ASSOTQO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-M
Anybody who doesn’t have JSTOR is welcome to e-mail me and I’ll shoot them a copy: bernes [at] berkeley dot edu. Page #’s for the two quotes are 77 and 80 (in the journal article version not the book version. It’s also in In Other Worlds.
I still think it’s a dead match for Negri in Marx Beyond Marx. If anything she goes further in the direction of immeasurability/overdetermination by suggesting that value doesn’t even represent labor. But regardless of their claims about the fundamental “super-adequation” of value vis-a-vis labor, I don’t think either of them in those works doubt for a second that the value-form such that it constitutes capital’s raison d’etre ever does anything less than compel people to work to survive, or stops being a kind of self-propulsive drive. . . Saying that the amount of work in any commodity or even in the system as a whole can’t be given as a quantitative measure, and that abstract labor is mediated by a welter of other activities–unwaged work, reproductive labor, the differentials between imperial core and periphery–doesn’t mean that abstract labor doesn’t exist as a logic, isn’t the basic character of capital. . .Thus, I still disagree that these accounts leave us without any explanation of capital’s dynamic. But that’s me, I guess.
Best to you,
J
thanks Jasper; I know I am exaggerating about Negri, meaning “this is the upshot”, just as it is of marginalism, which doesn’t sound outright silly either on the surface.
“immeasurability/overdetermination by suggesting that value doesn’t even represent labor.”
But as Spivak points out, this is Marx. She’s being very precise is all. Commodities represent labour (some quantity of concrete labour, and some percentage of abstract alabour). Their VALUE is the relations between them and every other commodity. That’s for Marx, not Spivak’s invention. And it’s important, since this straw man ltv is often constructed on the misinterpretation that “value represents labour”. Spivak just points this out and then adds a couple of caveats – one is, maybe value is the relations between commodities and every other use value perhaps, including what’s not commodified. And two – who perceives abstract labour? Abstract labour is abstract, thus an intellectual product, thus implying a subject, etc…
I mean to clarify Spivak:
She first corrects a broad misconception about LTV. (that a commodity’s value is some fixed quantity of abstract labour, treating abstract labour then as a fungible substance; so she’s correcting an idealist tendency.)
Then she emphasises that value is “textual” – its produced by global relations in which a commodity is embedded.
Then she emphasises that not all use-values are actually commodified.
Then she stresses that the international division of labour has developed to a certain condition which did not always exist.
So at one time perhaps the value of commodities was the relations to every other commodity that could be found in the First World Market, say; the relations to the third world was just the products that travelled basically. Now that capital is fully ‘globalised’, the uncommodified use-values of the third world – the unwaged labour of third world women for example – is part of the text of value of every commodified use value.
Then she takes this to indicate discontinuities, impossibility of totalising, which is probably not right or interesting, which reacts to the huge huge discrepancies of prices of labour power and just says its too big a gap you can’t make sense of this relation, (i think you can, she leaves out the production of poverty, propertylessness and low wages, its costs and labour contributed by imperialists) but you can see why she comes to that conclusion.
Spivak’s concerns are not Negri’s, whose idea is there is no imperialism. Spivak is concerned with the international division of labour imperialism creates. And basically her one central meaningful point about LTV is that if there are in the world women in sweatshops in the third world whose labour power is so artificially, stucturally, unnterruptedly pushed toward zero, and their labour power, and their their unwaged work, and the commodities they produce, are part of the text of value of financial products in the first world, then you have to take this fact on board in considering the production of value. There is something here more than market exchange intervening in the value of those women’s labour power and labour product, its systematic, its vast, its structural, and because the value of commodities is their relations to all others, not a fixed quantity- of abstract labour, those artifically depressed and nullified use values impact on the values of every commodity and every use value everywhere. Her point in stressing the materialist content of Marx’ analysis is to show you can’t just set the third world and the most exploited in the international division of labour aside, like its not a part of the whole text of value globally – as does Negri and many others.
(and the “biopolitics” narrative of ever increasing micromanagement of life which goes with the big bubble also falls apart around these subjects whose condition and situation Spivak is describing).
last thing sory for the multiple comments – SPivak’s point is “value represents labour” is kind f a causal vernacular approximation of Marx and it would be okay, not so bad, not precise but close enough, if we were talking about a world in which labour power’s conditions of sale were pretty uniform across the various markets in the global quilt. The reason one can no longer tolerate that imprecise approximation of Marx’ theory is the international division of labour; this is why the approach of Negri and others is so bad (Federici made this point too).
I know I said (or implied) that I was making my final comment here, but this is such an exciting conversation, it’s so much what I care about now, that I couldn’t resist an addition.
I have a friend who has been schooling me on the whole tendency of the rate of profit to fall thing. His claim is that there are actually two constructions of this in Marx. One is a model of periodic crises of over-accumulation, in which competition forces overproduction and then the workers are cast into the street and capital is destroyed. But this, in his terms, doesn’t really effect profit, because the surpluses, or at least those that survive the onslaught, move into new lines. Plus, as Negri among other has shown, there are excellent techniques for managing such crises. . . The second model, though, is an account of an absolute crisis, in which productive forces become so great that the ratio of constant to variable capital hits its limit point, and the revolutionizing of the productive forces stops producing extra surpluses, since each revolution produces half as much extra surplus value, and half again, onward to the asymptote or long tail. This second model is closer to Marx’s claims in the so-called “Fragment on Machines” and also in the section of the Grundrisse on overproduction (401-449). Of course, one can claim that this is just messianic optimism, but I think the argument is compelling. Once the developed productive forces get to a certain point they start to effect costs in all lines, and even destruction of individual fixed capital doesn’t matter, because the capital has become, partly, knowledge (that is, not-capital). The time to reconstruction will increase, and so will unemployment. It’s inescapable except by political means, I think: a turn to some kind of totally administered society, what Marx calls the “papacy of production.” Thus, it’s the old split: socialism or barbarism. . .
Both Harvey and Brenner make the case that the stagnation in the economy in the last thirty years is not the effect of the dominance of an auto-telic financial sector but rather its cause. . .For Brenner, I think, it’s just overcapacity that needs to be destroyed, and then production can return to normal levels. His model is pretty cyclical. But the model above is not cyclical; it’s rather a spiral. . .
About my claims about the means of production and knowledge work above, I’ll admit it’s partial and relative. Still, it’s easier to get access to a computer than a forklift or a lathe, and the contact information for students is, at least ideally, free (or cheaper). The books and journals are a problem, especially since most university libraries are *secured* from the general public. Piracy can help there, though. It’s easier to imagine getting hold of that stuff. An academic Napster? Plus, a good deal of the means of production for teaching are in our head. . .None of this, though, means I agree with plans for an autonomous university at, say, edu-factory. I think your critiques there are right on. I just think the nature of the capital in some of these places is slipperier than elsewhere, and something to think about. But maybe I’m wrong.
Negri: Here, the theory of value is no longer simply subordinated. It undergoes, in this subordination, an important displacement and is subjected to a fundamental metamorphosis. In other words, when the theory of value can not measure itself by a quantity of labor time or by an individual dimension of labor, when a first displacement leads it to confront social time and the collective dimension of labor, at this moment the impossibility of measuring exploitation modifies the form of exploitation. The emptiness that appears in the theory of value, the evacuation of any element of measure which is not a generic reference to social industriousness, the liberation of social industriousness and its constitution in collective individuality, does not suppress the law of value but reduces it to a mere formality. Of course, formality does not mean a lack of efficacy. Formality does not mean a lack of meaning. The form of the law of value is, on the contrary, efficient and full of meaning, but efficacy and meaning are given to it only by its irrationality, by the end of the progressive and rationalizing function of exploitation. The form is the empty, miserable base of exploitation.
Spivak: I draw attention…to the fact that even as circulation time attains that apparent instantaneity of thought (and more), the continuity of production ensured by that attainment of apparent coincidence must be broken up by capital; its means of doing so is to keep the labour reserve in the comprador countries outside of this instantaneity, this to make sure that multinational investment does not realise itself fully there through assimilation of the working class into consumerist-humanism. It is one of the truisms of Capital I that technological inventions open the door to the production of relative rather than absolute surplus value…Since the production and realization of relative surplus-value, usually attendant upon technological progress and the socialized growth of consumerism, increase capital expenditure in an indefinite spiral, there is the contradictory drive within capitalism to produce more absolute and less relative surplus-value as part of its crisis management. In terms of this drive, it is in the “interest” of capital to preserve the comprador theatre in a state of relatively primitive labour legislation and environmental regulation. Further, since the optimal relationship between fixed and variable capital has been disrupted by the accelerated rate of obsolescence of the former under the rapid progress within telecommunications research and attendant competition, the comprador theatre is also often obliged to accept scrapped and out of date machinery from post-industrialist economies. To state the problem in the philosophical idiom of this essay: as the subject as super-adequation in labour-power [able to produce more than self reproduction, thus can be exploited] seems to negate itself within telecommunication, a negation of the negation is continually produced by the shifting lines of the international division of labour. This is why any critique of the labour theory of value, pointing at the unfeasibility of the theory under post-industrialism, or as a calculus of economic indicators, ignores the dark presence of the Third World.
They seem to me to disagree really strongly.
“Colonel,
“[For Negri] capital is no longer exploiting labour.” I disagree. I think Negri thinks exploitation still exists and capitalists are still the class enemy. It may be that given his remarks on value he doesn’t have a coherent explanation/concept of this, but that’s a different issue.”
thanks nate; i agree that negri believes capitalists are the class enemy. but he is explicit that the value of capital derives from the desires of humanity not their labour. so one can say he sees capitalists as owning and taking advantage of people’s desires – its humanity envisioned mainly as consumers, a popular way of looking at people in fact. ‘exploiting’ in the colloquial sense of taking advantage of (and manipulating, controlling, biopolicing etc). it’s not the same as exploiting labour in the specific sense – isn’t that his point? otherwise it’s not clear what he is objecting to in Capital.
“capitalists are still the class enemy”
but also, importantly, by far the most productive class, outstripping even the petty bourgeoisie in socialising, taste creating, network construction, communications use, and other “immaterial” labouring, in negri’s account of the creation of capital in postmodernity.
hi Colonel,
On the go but I can’t resist…! On this last, I don’t think I agree on this: [capitalists are for Negri] “the most productive class”, nowadays that is. Negri has this thing about cooperation and all that, how the capitalist who buys labor power and sets it to work no longer supplies cooperation in the way that the factory owning capitalist did – that’s part of the tremendous new potential of the new labor for him. I think he exaggerates both the autonomy of immaterial labor(ers) and by implication paints prior labor(ers) are much less autonomous than was the case. He seems to me a have a pretty orthodox marxist understanding of factory labor, say, one that I think is wrong (this may be me also disagreeing with Marx). I think generally if one brackets Negri’s claims about the era after what he sees as the start of real subsumption the remaining claims, perhaps mostly implict, about what he takes to be a prior era are often quite orthodox and also quite problematic.
gotta go.
take care,
Nate
thanks nate –
‘Negri has this thing about cooperation and all that, how the capitalist who buys labor power and sets it to work no longer supplies cooperation in the way that the factory owning capitalist did – that’s part of the tremendous new potential of the new labor for him’
that’s just in the role of management; the bourgeoisie as consumers and socialisers are more productive of capital than anybody if socialising, consuming, networking, taste exercising, produces capital as negri contends. owners of capital are people, they do, according to negri, heaps and heaps of unwaged value productive immaterial labour – far more of what negri describes as value production per capita than anybody else.
jasper points out the 1978 description of capitalism, grundrisse with a certain emphasis; this is presumably that very specific “past” pre post capitalism that negri is now saying doesn’t exist anymore. The feature of that fordist 70s thing he emphasised was labour’s agency in struggle and capital’s reactivity (i think that’s accurate except that he reduces competition among capitalists to insignificance); so what’s new then? if this world now is to be significantly new, really different, a different era, it has to be that the significant feature, not just the trappings, of capital accumulation have changed, and for negri the significant and defining feature was the constant class struggle and capital’s sort of backfooted reactive constant crisis management. That’s what he is saying is no longer true, (he never accepted ltv precisely, though he accepted a kind of blunt enslavement/control model of surplus extraction with some shared features) thus a new world.
hey y’all,
I had another thought. Part of the immaterial labor arguments for Negri goes something like this – with immaterial labor at least of a certain type people are productive off the clock, or rather, all the time. This then turns into something like “under real subsumption we’re all always productive everywhere.” I don’t think any of this is true, at least not in a politically significant way – I think the argument is based on a slip or a metaphor around different senses of production, it’s not true for _value_ production in a marxist sense. But bracketing that, even conceding this point, I don’t think the next piece of the argument would actually follow. The next piece is something about how value production can no longer be measured. This seems to me to rely on an implicit equalization of all value production. That is, the argument really only states a yes/no kind of thing – is value producttive/ is not value productive. Again, even conceding the preliminary points, so everyone everywhere at all times is value productive, that doesn’t establish that production is immeasurable – two people (or firms, industries, places, times, activities) could both be value productive but have a difference in their level of productivity. To make an analogy to the era before what Negri calls the real subsumption of society, two people on the clock at a factory – or two departments in a factory, or two factories in a firm, or two firms in an industry, take your pick – would be value productive during their time of operation (during the time in which purchased labor power is put to use, to work), but that common trait – being value productive – has little to say about their comparable rates of value production. Know what I mean?
take care,
Nate
Chabert,
Look, I really respect your intelligence and your ruthless, as it were, criticism of all that exists, but I guess I feel we’re sort of talking past each other here; you’re talking about Negri circa 1996 and I’m talking about early Negri, and it seems you’re insisting on the identity of the two, or even conflating them. Perhaps there is some necessary continuity between the two Negris, but I don’t see it, and I’ve never read anything convincing to demonstrate that there is–at least not the features I’m interested in. It’s like insisting on the identity of Lukacs circa Soul and Form and Lukacs circa History and Class Consciouusness. . . Insisting that labor can’t be measured completely doesn’t mean that exploitation doesn’t exist–as the quote above makes clear–nor does it give up on the predictive power of the ltv. To make an analogy–and forgive me if you’re allergic to science analogies, it’s understandable–quarks and other subatomic particles can’t be measured exactly, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be detected, or that they don’t exist, nor does it foreclose all kinds of theoretical articulations and verifiable predictions based upon those theories. I don’t think that for Negri circa 1978 abstract labor is any less of a distinguishing feature of life than quarks are of the atom. The unconscious in Freudian/Lacanian psychology is also a good analogy–it exists but it can’t be apprehended directly.
As for Spivak, given the part you quote, I don’t think they disagree so much as they are talking about entirely different things. As far as I can tell, she’s simply restating the claims of contemporary world-systems theory. I haven’t read everything Negri has written, but I’ve always understood that his rejection of the notion of imperialism–which is rather complex and ambiguous, I think, for all its wrongness–comes at the time of Empire. From what I’ve read, he doesn’t even really address it in that early stuff. In any case, if you look at the Spivak bit I quoted, and the surrounding context, you see that she’s including Negri among the “discontinuists” with whom she aligns against the “continuists.” Rather than lump him in with Sraffa and Co., she praises Negri, in the footnote 8, for his radical suggestion that waged and unwaged labor are productive of value, and, rather than putting a yoke on Negri’s model, suggests that it doesn’t go far enough, that the overdetermination–super-adequation– of unwaged labor is itself overdetermined by the price differential–the ‘price pump’– between periphery and core, and by the fact that there is a relation of employment/unemployment between periphery and core. She’s not just making an argument about waged workers, but endorsing his claim that unwaged work is productive as well. If unwaged work is productive then what you have with the ltv is determiniation in the sense of a limit (cf. Raymond Williams in Keywords) not in the sense of a fixity. Because the system is constantly under construction, constantly in disequilibrium on the side of both use-value and exchange-value, the lonely hour of the last instance is also perpetually pended. That doesn’t mean, however, that there are no tendencies of limits.
Nate,
I’m surprised by the last comment because I’d always thought you’d endorsed–per Federici–the notion that reproductive labor and unwaged work wer productive, and that, as a result, Negri’s theory would be fine if one ditched the vanguardist focus on a hegemonic class fraction and the slapdash periodization. I’ve taken all those claims to heart, but I think the unwaged work thing is right, that value can’t exist without the force of the industrial reserve army, without the lowering of socially necessary labor time that, for instance, women have historically allowed through housework, and that, at the same time, the entirety of the underclass is subjectivated in ways that allow for value to be realized, though a constant retooling of what’s considered socially necessary labor time. Without this, the value wouldn’t exist. Thus value requires those activities outside of the workplace, and I don’t think it can be exactly measured because it’s dispersed throughout the time of life. It’s certainly false to say that every activity everywhere is productive, and I reject the ontological productivism of Negri’s later stuff. Still, I don’t think it can be precisely located in the workplace, nor do I think we can just treat those places where unwaged work occur as workplaces as well (I might be wrong about this last). How could it be figured in terms of abstract labor, except by way of the surpluses? How could you tell what came from where? This is, I think, precisely what both Negri and Spivak are getting at. I think the political consequences of such a notion are important, that they allow for a broader front against capitalism–without the looseness of “multitude”–and avoid the possibility of an exclusionary focus on, as you’ve noted, the most privileged sectors of the working class. (As a sidenote, I’ll say there are very few places where I think Marx is wrong, but his writing about productive vs. unproductive labor is one of them. All that stuff about “the pope and the whore” in the Grundrisse strikes me as really wrong. . .) In any case, I don’t think any of this speaks to immaterial labor per se. The one thing I think you’re right on about is the ambiguity in the specific definitions of imm. lab.–part of the time I think that the post-op people are really talking about workers that should be rightly thought of as a class fraction, the technical class, what the French call, I think, petit cadre, but in other cases they’re talking about proletarians proper. Virno, I think, collapses the two and makes the case that the proletariat has become its own technical class–self-reproducing self-managing–but I suspect that if I read the right sociological books I’d see that there are significant strata that are getting obscured in that lumping. I think a revolutionary appeal to the former is probably mostly useless, as is satirizing them as Debord did in the first 15 minutes of In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni, but that it must be the opposite with the latter.
Back there, Chabert, at the end of my last paragraph directed your way, I meant “tendencies or limits.”
sorry jasper; i didn’t mean to conflate the two negris just to accept there really is only one! and just to say, it is negri, author of Marx beyond Marx, who says that the capitalism he himself described in that book existed then when he described it but doesn’t exist now. So there could be an early negri and a late negri, but from negri’s point of view rather it is capitalism, not negri, that has changed; there is a fordism – described by what you quote, and according to negri then and negri now accurately so described – and a post fordism, and just one negri, observing both correctly.
so that description, in MBM, is, let’s say we agree, pretty good description of 1978. Perhaps its also a good description of 2008 but Negri, its author, says it isn’t. So that’s the assertion I thought was in question.
nate: ” Again, even conceding the preliminary points, so everyone everywhere at all times is value productive, that doesn’t establish that production is immeasurable – two people (or firms, industries, places, times, activities) could both be value productive but have a difference in their level of productivity.”
There’s something to his point about value measurement I think, though it ends in a confusion; the starting point – the political determination of capital – is important (and true to Marx, too). Negri avoids addressing property so his discussion gets very airy fairy. But that aside for a minute, it’s like there’s a distinction between measuring and comparing here; value cannot be measured, there’s no instrument to measure it, no yardstick, nothing against which to measure it – no units because the units themselves which serve (money) fluctuate and are the substance of value itself. You can’t measure a grain in grains.The closest thing to a meter, say, or kilo, of value would be a currency figure, a dollar, a euro, but that’s not constant and fixed like a meter. What about abstract labour units? The Ablab? As Spivak is emphasising, this too is not fixed, but “textual” (historical, political, processual, relational). So failed or necessarily circular value measurement reveals the processual nature of value, its historical and material quality. Negri draws this picture, very important to him, of potentia and potestas. Implicitly then “value” is like energy perhaps, and he is positing a kind of conservation of value. So, everywhere everyone always creating value means the world is or has value, it’s a property of the world as a total. And people are reproducing the world thus producing the value of the world even in activities we would normally consider destructive of value – for example, blowing up some people. Say you killed a million people, as has been done recently in Iraq. How is this producing value? With a notion of conservation of value, the total value of the destroyed people is transferred to what’s left over. The total value of the world with those people in it is the same as the total value without, its just the total; when they were in the world they contained some of its value, but by removing them one destroyed that portion of the world’s value but also produced the equivalent “elsewhere” simultaneously. It’s a very simple precapitalist luxury commodity market model – destroy most of the nutmeg in the world, the value of what remains rises per unit to match the previous total, since the value is determined by the demand for nutmeg, the “invested desire”. In the potentia/potestas image, this kind of is implied on a grand scale; there is just so much value in the world; collective humanity collectively desires the whole world; that collective desire is not measureable, its always just All, it is just the total of global stuff and people; what can change is the distribution of control over parts of All, but not the total, its just a total, Value itself, it can’t be measured, there’s nothing to measure it against or compare it to.
this is not really an insane way of looking at value, so long as your focus would be on the struggle over control of parts of it, the unequal distribution of access to total value and how parts are transferred from some people to other people.
Yes, Chabert, that’s very interesting. What you’ve described is the value theory of the mercantilists, no? It’s certainly to be rejected, wherever it’s found. Perhaps this is, at root, the ontological notion that subtends the later kind of ontological productivism (although I’d say it’s probably closer to the physiocrats). But again, I just don’t see it in MbM. There, growth, dynamism, accumulation, tendency, etc., the whole asymmetrical shebang, are integral parts of the early theory. . .I just don’t see it as at all circulationist.
“As far as I can tell, she’s simply restating the claims of contemporary world-systems theory. ”
yeah, except she says they totalise and you can’t but she doesn’t have an alternative (this also about Negri’s position, unwaged labour produces the commodity labour power. I think on that question she’s wrong that this is inadequate and Negri is right).
As for Spivak, given the part you quote, I don’t think they disagree so much as they are talking about entirely different things.
I don’t think they are talking about different things, though it could seem so because they think they are; one is talking about a world with immeasurable surplus, the other about a world with measureable surplus though “ultimately” the measurement is complicated and imperfect. But both think they are talking about the actual world. The disagreement is these different descriptions of what actually exists.
It’s true that negri’s observation that there is no imperialism is from the 90s, but its not that he thinks he has changed his mind, that he’s a new negri, its that he thinks imperialism has ceased to be, that the same negri who wrote about imperialism as an adjustment to labour’s active challenges now sees that imperialism has ceased to be. All the theorising of the immaterial labour and its consequences pertains to a postimperialist world.
“What you’ve described is the value theory of the mercantilists, no?”
but with negri its enlarged and it becomes very abstract because the wealth he is talking about is capital, including fictitious capital, profits anticipated maybe even beyond the survival of the species. and maybe that’s a qualitative difference.
but negri on these matters is more pertinent to “what is value” (not that interesting a question) than to “how is exploitation and accumulation accomplished”…
Just one quick comment, all I’ve time for. Jasper, I’m not sure what I think of the wages for housework stuff these days. I like it politically, am unsure it hangs together such that housework is value productive. That’s neither here nor there, though. Even accepting that housework is value productive (which I do, just not as certain as I used to be), I don;t see how that makes value per se immeasurable. Clearly it’s not measured with regard to much unwaged labor, but that’s different from measurability (and that lack of measuring can contribute to more it happening, along the lines of what you mentioned above about unpaid labor in universities). Caffentzis has a piece on value as measurable, I can’t remember if I’ve actaully read it but if memory serves he opposes the immeasurability stuff while also holding to the Federici/Wages For Housework/etc understanding.
gotta go
take care
Nate
One more thing, sorry – I agree with Jasper on the important difference between earlier and more recent Negri. Harry Cleaver is quite good on early Negri, and takes that work in I think more interesting and better places than Negri later took it himself.
“the important difference between earlier and more recent Negri”
okay, but if the issue is negri’s claims about postness, about what happened in the mid 80s, how this new epoch arrived, the issue in the post;
I still don’t understand why the enormous changes in the composition of the labor force since the 19th century doesn’t demand “a new analysis of labor organization,” or why the changes aren’t well characterized by, “value becomes the cognitive and immaterial product of creative action.”
then its difficult to compare early and late negri on this topic, as the early negri, writing prior to these events, prior to these enormous changes, prior to the demise of imperialism he dates to the 80s, prior to the second industrial revolution he dates also to the 80s, didn’t comment on them.
sorry to be ruthless, but just mean the later negri is not just something out of the blue; it is the same negri challenged to explain how what did in fact observably happen in the 80s was possible given his description of the status quo at the end of the 70s, hegemony overrated, capital reactive, etc..
hi Colonel,
I’m ambivalent about what you’re saying. On the one hand, I do think the recent Negri is in many ways re-iterating points he’s been making for a very long time, just in a different vocabulary (for instance, I think a lot of the multitude stuff sounds a fair bit like what I’ve read by him [and heard others say who’ve read more of him in Italian] about the social/socialized worker). On the other hand, I do think there’s a departure sometime after he went to or got out of prison. I also don’t think he’s talking about stuff that “observably did happen in the 80s” except in a limited sense (I believe a lot of his remarks about immaterial labor are based on sociological studies he was part of in early 90s in Paris, commissioned by some piece of the french gov’t, which means there may be some empirical basis for some of his claims – though that work’s never been translated to it’s hard to say, and he dramatically generalizes from that info).
I do think revisiting Negri’s earlier work would be valuable for sorting out where he’s gone since, and what’s of value in his work over all and what’s not so much.
take care,
Nate
thanks nate – i agree with you, his observations are the problem. But this is continuity – theoretically, philosophically and hermeneutically he’s the same, and there’s no problem with those aspects (one can argue always about the consequence of metaphors, but in these areas he’s certainly not crazy or self contradictory or anything). When there are objections to Negri, its as a journalist and historian – his perception and account of reality. In 78, many marxists for example who liked his grundrisse reading objected to his assessment of the actual balance of forces and of capital’s weakness – nothing wrong there in theory, only capital wasn’t weak as most people saw it and the early stages of neoliberalism, evident then, looked proactive to most people with similar commitments. If indeed the past of capitalism had been as Negri portrays it, and the present as he portrays it – if imperialism had really ended, if consultants were a proletarian vanguard, if time and space, interest and arbitrage abolished by the telecom technology – his analysis would be unobjectionable and also theoretically consistent with his prior work. Or at least not inconsistent. I think the issue with him is just as you say, he’s too credulous in the face of propagandistic discourses (of the EC, of the business press, White House pr etc)
I also don’t think he’s talking about stuff that “observably did happen in the 80s” except in a limited sense
I mean, he tells a story, not a true story, but this story is necessary to account for what did happen – the abolition of capital controls, internet, personal computing and the expansion of telecom, financialisation, privatisations, the conquest of Eastern Europe and the collapse of state capitalism, the roll back of the welfare states, significant reduction of trade union power, etc. He tells a story about this which is largely determined by the picture he commits himself to in the 70s.
Thanks for the Caffentzis ref., Nate. I’ve now read it, but I’m not at all convinced that he’s demonstrated “measurability” as such, and I think he completely misreads Negri’s chapter on the “Chapter on Money” in The Grundrisse. I think N’s point there, by imputing value as fiction, is against ontologizing the law of value (and abstract labor) as transhistorical, as in some actually existing socialisms. . . Caffentzis even admits as much that you can’t actually give a perfect formula for the transformation of value into price, and that real subsumption, despite its drive to quantity, screws all this up. If whatever “results” or “some relationship” means measurability, then that’s fine, I’m fine with that notion of measurability–that value is a part of price. I think that’s what Marx and Negri (despite N’s claims about Marxian metaphysics) are saying. I don’t think Negri is rejecting quantity and numeration per se, just that it can be anything more approximate, contingent, rigged by state and individual and collective agents at every step of the way. If that’s measurement, sure, then I guess it seems like we all want largely the same thing from the LTV, whether or not we think we can get it in Negri. Like I said, I think quantum mechanics or, perhaps, Prigogine’s theory of thermodynamics (which Negri and Walllerstein both ref on this point) is a good example, and perhaps mathematically comparable. . .I keep thinking that Badiou on uncountable elements in sets–the event, etc., and forcing–would be useful here. Does he talk about it like that anywhere? I haven’t read B&E. . .
It’s obviously super-important for a worker to be able to say, “You’ve stolen surplus-value from me.” But is it necessary to be able to give an exact figure–“You’ve stolen x units from me”? Doesn’t that just lead to circulationist notions of economic justice, ones that focus on ownership of the products of production rather self-control over production and demand itself? I think efforts at redistribution should be supported, that they are intensely meaningful and even, at times, a threat, but not a threat to the law of value as such, and I keep the destruction of that as my long-term horizon. . .
I’ll say, though, that I agree with Caffentzis’s critiques about the periodization of formal/real subsumption, as well as the quantitative objective of real subsumption–and, of course, all the critiques of 90s Negri are well-deserved. There’s actually an interesting (but very long) critique by Brenner of the Regulation School in the NLR (from ’91, I think), that makes similar points.
But, you know, maybe all three of us want some relatively similar from a theory of value, and can stand with a tolerable amount of irreconcilability together on the barricades?
hi Jasper,
Sorry your comments keep getting moderated. I don’t know what that is. I think sometimes it’s more like to moderate when you don’t enter a URL (it’s moderated my own comments sometiems which is extra annoying). Anyway –
I’ll have to give the Caffentzis a look again when I get time before responding on that in particular. I suspect you and I are quite close on the LTV and measure. I can say for myself I’ve never been interested in calculating value and am happy for things to be fuzzy. Even more than that, I insist that the political/subjective meaning of all this stuff is underdetermined, not overdetermined, by these sorts of objective considerations. There’s this comrade of mine who has charts and spreadsheets and graphs and things to show that heavy industry and transport have higher rates of profit per worker (presumably true) or maybe it’s higher absolute profit, I forget; he uses that to push a line that we should orient toward those sectors because they’re key to capitalism and because those workers are more exploited (‘exploitation’ understood as a ratio of wages to profit, in terms of relative or absolute surplus value – I know that’s an important distinction but not for the purposes of this example right now). I think that doesn’t hold, and I also think that the profit margin per worker could be interpreted another way – as the room to maneuver that firms in those industries have. But I digress.
I’m okay with not calculating and am hesitant about that sort of marxism. I’m even okay with immeasurability of value, provided that doesn’t mean rejection of the LTV (and provided it’s not used to argue against calculations as such, like comparing prices paid for labor power to income to a firm). What I’m definitely not okay with is any transition from prior measurability to immeasurability (this is not to say practices of measure, but rather measurability/immeasurability as such) particularly not as linked to an account of imamterial labor.
take care,
Nate
I greatly appreciated this conversation. As someone above mentioned, it has been very edifying. I love this essay by Spivak. There’s a lot of food for thought here. The pot’s on the stove and cooking.
Ditto what Yusef said.
cheers,
Nate