[iDC] Social Production and the Labor Theory of Value (2)

[Sean Cubitt]

Morning Michel

Thanks for the kind words, and more for the suggestion that
"showing how the corporate/hierarchical structures are themselves
responsible for sabotaging true productivity, is therefore ultimately also a
very strong strategy". This is a very important argument. Without belittling
the work undertaken within existing firms and institutions (my own included
;7 ) I've tried to argue that change derives both from within and without
the existing schema, but especially from without. Pointing out that capital
is its own worst enemy, not a solid bloc, as you do is surely very important
(at risk of mentioning Marx yet again, you could call them the 'internal
contradictions'). 

In terms of the academic workplace, even as a head of department, the work
includes turning the vocationalist instrumentality of education towards
something more 'creative'.open, imaginative, enabling, in everything from
studio and classroom teaching to curriculum design and advising individual
students. Ultimately of course we'd all rather see a university / education
system without walls and some people work towards this as well as / instead
of working with the existing system - http://www.edu-factory.org/ for
example

I agree overestimating the enemy is a bad idea: there used to be a
Trotskyist faction in the UK that argued that Thatcherism had to make
everything totally grim so the working class would revolt: not a very
successful analysis. On the other hand underestimating is also risky.

Manzini is a name we should spend more time getting to know - there's a
short, fascinating recent essay in the very good 'debat' section of the
Copenhagen event Rethink
http://www.rethinkclimate.org/debat
http://www.rethinkclimate.org/debat/rethink-technology/?show=bvc
What is particular in his design approach is the local. This puzzles me - in
a good way - because of the constant theme of globalisation in both internet
studies and media and communications. It reflects back on your theme that
the 'Best' cannot exist without us, and the theme of autonomy. Fashion, pop,
and increasingly the art world rely on street culture and the exotic global
'periphery' for innovation: the Google/AT&T O3b network looks like doing the
same. The reason I stress out-creating is the same reason you stress
out-competing: time is the dimension in which change happens - in the
future, whose conditions we (the living) are responsible for creating. The
'new forms of the local' Manzini addresses are very significant here

The whole iDC process keeps opening up avenues like this. As martin Roberts
said in a recent post, we are still under the long shadow of the 19thC
master-thinkers (Darwin and Nietzsche included). And indeed of the 20thC.
What the debate seems to show is that we don't need master-thinkers but a
loose web of discussion and thinking. Like the Tour de France, there may be
the stars, but the real work is done by the peloton. Long may it provide the
engine of change!

Best

sean


On 19/11/09 8:44 AM, "Michael Bauwens" <michelsub2003 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Dear Sean:
> 
> I really enjoyed your contributions in NY last weekend, thanks for that, very
> impressive command of the issues.
> 
> I would like to post two main reactions to what you say below.
> 
> The first is to the nature of resistance as you describe it below. While
> certainly a reality in some workplaces, it is very difficult, and also
> psychologically very self-destructive, to keep this up in many functional
> environments, in the context of knowledge work. Think of yourself as an
> academic, knowing that many jobs in corporations are now very similar, how
> would you sabotabe yourself and your research!!
> 
> For me, showing how the corporate/hierarchical structures are themselves
> responsible for sabotaging true productivity, is therefore ultimately also a
> very strong strategy, and I think that this is what many young knowledge
> workers are now doing ,i.e. outrunning, outcompeting corporate productivity.
> 
> The second remark is about resistance needing to be 'endlessly inventive'.
> 
> Of course we all must be creative, but I object, but perhaps misread, to
> attitudes that are obsessed with the enemy (this is why I did not like the
> Exploit for example). The approach you mention at the end, Manzini's SLOC, is
> the opposite, it relentlessly focuses on our own need for autonomy,
> continuously look for interstices, and relentlessly constructs more autonomous
> alternatives.
> 
> I think we should cease to feed the Beast with our own illusions of its
> strength, totality and infinite capacity of cooptation ... Since it feeds on
> us, cannot exist without us, we are in fact so much stronger, and in a sense,
> 'ignoring' it (in a smart way, not in a dumb way of course), takes away the
> energy we feed it with,
> 
> Michel
> 
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----
>> From: Sean Cubitt <scubitt at unimelb.edu.au>
>> To: Michael Bauwens <michelsub2003 at yahoo.com>; Brian Holmes
>> <brian.holmes at aliceadsl.fr>; idc at mailman.thing.net
>> Sent: Sat, November 7, 2009 5:29:52 AM
>> Subject: Re: [iDC] Social Production and the Labor Theory of Value (2)
>> 
>> Curiously I just received a copy of a piece by colleagues from melbourne on
>> the topic of resistance: Looking for the Good Soldier, �Svejk:
>> Alternative Modalities of Resistance in the Contemporary Workplace, Peter
>> Fleming and Graham Sewell, Sociology Volume 36 n Number 4 n November 2002
>> 
>> The piece argues that looking for major spectacular resistance (strikes,
>> sit-ins) is pass�; that footdragging, flannelling, pretending ignorance,
>> skrimshanking and false compliance etc are the typical forms of resistance
>> in teamwork managemed workplaces and the like. They called it Sveikism,
>> after the Good Soldier Sveik
>> 
>> We know that capital historically has observed worker techniques for dodging
>> work and adopted them as efficiency techniques. (There is an analogy with
>> avant garde art being observed and adapted as advertising technique). It is
>> certainly possible that eg time stolen from work to play on social networks
>> is being recapitalised as creative labour. This doesn't necessarilty mean
>> that it isn't resistant, or that resistance is pointless, but that
>> resistance has to be endlessly inventive to keep ahead of its cooption.
>> Which in turn makes resistant invention the driver for capital's vaunted
>> ability to innovate.
>> 
>> One aspect raised in Michel Bauwens' post from Barcelona is the strictly
>> political idea that to become political (to seek large scale change rather
>> than short-term opportunism) requires becoming conscious - aware that the
>> stakes are political, and perhaps also motivated by a goal that is not
>> otherwise available in the political-economic system of the hour
>> 
>> Marx's ideas of class consciousness were always among the weakest aspects:
>> they certainly need updating to cope with the kind of seizure of
>> consciousness Michel is talking about. Ezio manzini's ideas of SLOC (small,
>> local, open, connected) innovations may also be significant here, in
>> parallel with but apart from the global projects of FLOSS?
>> 
>> sean
>> 
>> 
>> On 6/11/09 10:46 PM, "Michael Bauwens" wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>>  Dear Brian,
>>> 
>>> very interesting and illuminating contribution.
>>> 
>>> I have two remarks, Adam's point about the ethical economy does not refer to
>>> any social democratic pipe dream, but to capital is reacting to new social
>>> demands. For example, when a corporation operates on a open social network,
>>> it
>>> needs to behave differently in the context of that transparency and the
>>> circulating ethical demands of network users; or, when a corporation uses
>>> common code, as in GPL-based free software, it cannot but change its
>>> behaviour
>>> in accordance to these new demands. Of course, it can also destroy the
>>> commons
>>> for short term gain, but then it looses the advantage of the commonly
>>> developed code. In other words, communities, whether they are of sharers or
>>> commons-based peer producers, do carry weight. More fundamentally though,
>>> there is a growing new structure of desire, a new form of agency developing
>>> and emerging, which forces a mutual adaptation and a new tension between
>>> community and corporation. This doesn't necessary invalidate
>>>  your pessimistic scenario, but qualifies it, and I'm also keen to dispell
>>> any
>>> superficial analysis of Adam's point.
>>> 
>>> There is a second point I want to make. Are you sure that activists from the
>>> old waves are not too wedded to particular types of spectacular resistance?
>>> What I see for example is a huge constructive shift towards new forms of
>>> being
>>> that go beyond the commodity form, the building of commons of knowledge,
>>> software and design, and new infrastructures based on it. Struggles that are
>>> based on the old contradictions are not the only ones to look for, nor are
>>> purely antagonistic protest attitudes. Just as interesting is a profound
>>> shift
>>> in values, relationships, infrastructure building, and the creation of a new
>>> culture.
>>> 
>>> If you take that into account, saying that there is 'no resistance' makes
>>> less
>>> and less sense. Perhaps some people are tired of fighting 'against capital'
>>> and rather more interested in constructing what comes emerging beyond it?
>>> 
>>> Michel
>>> 
>>> 
>>> ----- Original Message ----
>>>> From: Brian Holmes
>>>> To: idc at mailman.thing.net
>>>> Sent: Sat, October 31, 2009 3:39:54 AM
>>>> Subject: Re: [iDC] Social Production and the Labor Theory of Value (2)
>>>> 
>>>> I should stress that the critique in my previous post is not
>>>> specifically directed at Christian Fuchs (whose knowledge of the Marxist
>>>> tradition I quite admire) nor is it a rejection of Marx himself (still
>>>> the most important philosopher of social existence in my view). But I do
>>>> think there is a lot of time wasted trying to apply Marx's ideas
>>>> verbatim to vastly changed situations.
>>>> 
>>>> It's a matter of layers, and there is always a next layer. Thus, the
>>>> ontological status of human labor as the source and measure of value in
>>>> capitalist societies continues to justify the hyper-exploitation of
>>>> factory workers and sweatshop laborers all over the planet, and
>>>> therefore, to govern important aspects of the economic relations between
>>>> classes, as well as the geo-economic relations between core and
>>>> peripheral states. But at the same time, at least two further types of
>>>> social relations that Marx did not directly observe are layered onto
>>>> that. The first layer came in the 1930s and reached maturity in the
>>>> 1950s: it is the welfare state, which created large tracts of socialized
>>>> capital (public facilities of all kinds, redistribution mechanisms for
>>>> retirement, health care, education etc). This has been described
>>>> extensively by David Harvey as the "secondary circuit of capital" and it
>>>> has made a huge change in the way capitalism works within the core
>>>> states where it was applied, creating a new mediator class between
>>>> bourgeoisie and proletariat which is commonly and perhaps rightfully
>>>> described as the "middle class." One important consequence of this for
>>>> Marxist thought was the realization that the "socially necessary labor
>>>> time" required for the reproduction of the labor force was itself a
>>>> function of the standards that apply in any given society at any given
>>>> time, a fact to which Marx does allude at one point, but whose full
>>>> implications only became visible with the rise of the welfare state.
>>>> Today, some theorists including Harvey speak not of the labor theory of
>>>> value but rather of the "value theory of labor," stressing that it is
>>>> the agency of the working classes, gained through conflict and struggle,
>>>> that determines what the standard wage and the minimum acceptable
>>>> standard of living will be. For this, see an excellent short piece by
>>>> Bob Jessop:
>>>> 
>>>> http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/papers/jessop-limits-to-capital.pdf
>>>> 
>>>> So that's one important layer, and Marx did not theorize it because he
>>>> did not live to the 1930s. Another important layer is added from the
>>>> 1980s onward, and that is neoliberal finance. Of course, Marx has lots
>>>> of things to say about finance capital; but as he did not foresee the
>>>> vast expansion of the secondary circuit and therefore, the partial
>>>> socialization of the capitalist state, nor perforce the rise of the
>>>> "middle classes" as the mediators between what he thought was the
>>>> essential and inevitable conflict between the proletariat and the
>>>> bourgeoisie, he obviously did not foresee the emergence of a kind of
>>>> finance that would prey upon the vast amounts of capital won by working
>>>> class agency. Yet this is what has happened in our time: under the logic
>>>> of neoliberalism, much of what used to be welfare state entitlements has
>>>> been transformed into fungible private assets (health insurance
>>>> policies, 401k accounts, private suburban homes, etc) and delivered over
>>>> to the nominal control of individuals or relatively small and localized
>>>> groups. These individuals and groups then find themselves at the mercy
>>>> of large, sophisticated, rapacious financial operators who offer them
>>>> further market schemes encouraging them to speculate on their tiny stake
>>>> of capital, in order to expropriate some generous percentage of their
>>>> assets as we have just seen done so blatantly in the course of the
>>>> recent housing bubble. I think Marx can be used pretty successfully to
>>>> describe a lot of this, but just repeating his concepts adds nothing:
>>>> you have to get into the materiality of the social relations that have
>>>> emerged since the 1980s. For that there is a really excellent book by
>>>> James K. Galbraith, who interestingly enough is the son of the great
>>>> theorist of the welfare-warfare state, John Kenneth Galbraith. I really
>>>> recommend this short and well-written book to everyone: it is called
>>>> "The Predator State."
>>>> 
>>>> OK, all that takes us far from the Internet and it's another long,
>>>> soaring post which any uninterested person has already, I trust, stopped
>>>> reading. The point remains that treating Facebook users as the
>>>> nineteenth-century working class is not only absurd; it also distracts
>>>> from the enormous changes that are going on before our eyes. Adam
>>>> Arvidsson says we are moving into an "ethical economy" and he expects
>>>> that the reputation-ranking functions of social media will create a new
>>>> breed of what you might call "clean and serene" corporations, to replace
>>>> the old "lean and mean" ones. I would submit instead that while
>>>> intellectuals waste their time pandering to people who are fascinated by
>>>> the tawdry narcissism of networked environments organized to promote the
>>>> delusion of transparency and community, the major predators are
>>>> organizing the last great suicidal development of the capitalist
>>>> economy, in which a newly concentrated and now truly global banking
>>>> sector will systematize and intensify the chaotic trends of the three
>>>> preceding decades, in order to promote and realize an extreme version of
>>>> neoliberal development unencumbered by any organized resistance
>>>> whatsoever. This new social order will continue to depend on large
>>>> consumer and prosumer classes to manage surplus and to waste lots of it,
>>>> while laying waste to the environment at the same time; so I am afraid
>>>> you will still not have the simple face-off between bourgeoisie and
>>>> proletariat that Marx predicted. But the new social order, if it is left
>>>> to establish itself without resistance as is presently being done, will
>>>> also require all the trappings of an extreme security state, in order to
>>>> ward off the attacks of great percentages of the population thrown into
>>>> poverty even in the core states, and also great numbers of people,
>>>> initially in the underdeveloped world, whose cities will be underwater
>>>> and who will be migrating towards the golden towers. Under these
>>>> conditions, those who labor, and do not speculate on their assets or
>>>> human capital as most middle-class Internet users do -- nor much less
>>>> have access to venture capital, as was just described in the interesting
>>>> post by Christopher Kelty -- will see their capacities for resistance
>>>> and agency reduced to nil, and both the "labor theory of value" and the
>>>> "value theory of labor" will finally be obsolete. What's left in the
>>>> absence of organized resistance is just one thing: capital as power, the
>>>> power to create social relations and impose an order upon them. This is
>>>> subject of Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan's new book, Capital as
>>>> Power: A Study of Order and Creorder, which among many other things
>>>> contains a specific refutation of the labor theory of value.
>>>> 
>>>> I actually don't think we are there yet -- that is, I think there is
>>>> still some organized resistance left in the world, from the working
>>>> classes, from peasant classes unwilling to be entirely expropriated of
>>>> their traditional relations to the land, and also among middle classes
>>>> who know how to protect and develop their relative political autonomy
>>>> won over the course of centuries -- but nonetheless, I do highly
>>>> recommend reading Bichler and Nitzan if you want to understand how
>>>> corporate power is expressing itself right now, and how far we are from
>>>> the social-democratic pipe dream of an "ethical economy." The first
>>>> chapter of their book can be downloaded from their archive, as can an
>>>> earlier essay including similar references to the subject of our
>>>> conversation here, the famous labor theory of value:
>>>> 
>>>> http://tinyurl.com/capital-as-power
>>>> 
>>>> http://tinyurl.com/dominant-capital
>>>> 
>>>> For the next layer of capitalist power to be fully installed -- and for
>>>> the economy to "recover" from its present state of uncertainty and flux
>>>> -- I think the developed societies need a perfected system of
>>>> second-order cybernetic control over the consciousness of their middle
>>>> classes, exactly the kind of world-creating and attention-channeling
>>>> system that is discussed by Greg Elmer and his co-authors in their
>>>> excellent article. The initial basis of this system is contemporary
>>>> social media in its dominant corporate 2.0 forms. It really has to be
>>>> explored a little more seriously, within the existing social relations
>>>> and not in terms borrowed from the past. But that kind of exploration
>>>> remains very rare, leaving media theory in a realm of fantasy. So in my
>>>> opinion, friends, we can talk all we want about the marvelous freedoms
>>>> of playlabor, or on the contrary, about the horrifying expropriation of
>>>> our proletarian toil by Facebook or Orkut: so doing, we'll be shooting
>>>> the breeze, no autonomy will be won and the processes underway will run
>>>> their course.
>>>> 
>>>> Here's hoping for a better future,
>>>> 
>>>> Brian
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>> 
>> Prof Sean Cubitt
>> scubitt at unimelb.edu.au
>> Director
>> Media and Communications Program
>> Faculty of Arts
>> Room 127�John Medley East
>> The University of Melbourne
>> Parkville VIC 3010
>> Australia
>> 
>> Tel: + 61 3 8344 3667
>> Fax:+ 61 3 8344 5494
>> M: 0448 304 004
>> Skype: seancubitt
>> http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/media-communications/
>> http://www.digital-light.net.au/
>> http://homepage.mac.com/waikatoscreen/
>> http://seancubitt.blogspot.com/
>> http://del.icio.us/seancubitt
>> 
>> Editor-in-Chief Leonardo Book Series
>> http://leonardo.info
> 
> 
> 
> 

Prof Sean Cubitt
scubitt at unimelb.edu.au
Director
Media and Communications Program
Faculty of Arts
Room 127 John Medley East
The University of Melbourne
Parkville VIC 3010
Australia

Tel: + 61 3 8344 3667
Fax:+ 61 3 8344 5494
M: 0448 304 004
Skype: seancubitt
http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/media-communications/
http://www.digital-light.net.au/
http://homepage.mac.com/waikatoscreen/
http://seancubitt.blogspot.com/
http://del.icio.us/seancubitt

Editor-in-Chief Leonardo Book Series
http://leonardo.info