[iDC] Intro and response to Ross/Terranova
paolo carpignano
carpi at newschool.edu
Tue Oct 20 17:05:14 UTC 2009
Hello,
I am Paolo Carpignano. I am Associate Professor of Media Studies and
Sociology at the New School. This semester I teach a course called The
Political Economy of Media which focuses specifically on the
relationship between work and media and thus it deals with some of the
themes of the conference on Digital Labor. In fact, attending the
conference is one of the class assignments this semester.
Also, the Vera List Center asked me to respond to the Changing Labor
Value panel, one of the Preludes to the conference. What you will find
below is my response in the form of a posting that I wrote for my
class discussion.
I know that it is too long and not very good for the format of this
online discussion but Trebor suggested that I post it anyway.
So, here it is:
Response to the Changing Labor Value panel
It might be useful to start from the differences. Had Richard Sennet
participated, as it was announced originally, it would have been
easier. After all his work is representative of a very learned but
moderately progressive critique of the current problems of labor and
it would have provided a more clear-cut counterpart to the more
radical and transformative approaches of Andrew Ross and Tiziana
Terranova (from now on AR and TT). In their case, difference might be
too strong a word. It might be more appropriate to talk about degrees
of emphasis. Yet, I am going to highlight a few areas where, in my
opinion, they diverge in the hope of adding some clarity to the
current discourse on the nature of labor and on its possible political
ramifications.
There is a strong sense of continuity, almost inevitability in the
picture that AR gives of the current restructuring of labor,
particularly in the case of the so called creative industries and new
media industries, resulting in a high degree of flexibility and
precariousness of working conditions. AR explicitly claims that such
restructuring is but the latest stage of a trend that started in the
1920’s under the managerial practices of Human Relations. I find this
assertion rather problematic because either it is too general a
statement about the constant attempt on the part of capital to
regiment its workforce by force or inducement (and in this case it can
be applied to the history of capitalism even before the advent of
Human Relations), or, if it is the result of a comparative analysis of
specific managerial strategies , it misses the important point that
the current capitalist turn in regards to labor is a repudiation of
Human Relations’ theories and practices of the past. In fact, at the
risk of simplifying, one can say that the break between Fordism and
Post-Fordism, consists, to a great degree, in the substitution of
Human Relations with what it is often called distributed management or
self management, and therefore with an entirely new conception of what
management and labor are. Historically, Human Relations were developed
to respond to the failure of Taylorism and Scientific Management in
order to create a docile work force that could be molded to fit the
dictates of standardized mass production (the assembly line being
the epitome of such arrangement), and to recognize the need to deal
with workers subjectivity and their rebellion to work rules and
rhythms. Thus, Human Relations began to consider the work force as a
counterpart to be dealt with through some form of communication and
negotiation. It led eventually to the recognition of shop floor
representation albeit with a clear separation of management from waged
labor. More broadly, it corresponded to the dialectics of classes of
the Keynesian system and of the welfare state. The neoliberal turn and
the Post-Fordist mode of production have drastically changed the terms
of engagement. In rethinking the enterprise, to the point of
envisioning its disappearance in a series of distributes entities,
current management theory tries to capture the realities of a
drastically reconfigured labor dynamics characterized by work teams,
temporary employment, flexible skills and amateur “free labor” . But
for AR these new realities are but an extension of old Human Relations
strategies. The difference today is only in the degree of
“permissiveness” (his word). It is not by chance that for AR Harry
Braverman is a paradigmatic author. Capitalism leads inevitably to a
progressive impoverishment of the quality of labor and to a
socialization of alienation and exploitation, a sort of
proletarianization of the whole society that might not take the form
of deskilling, as Braverman claims, but that nevertheless leads to
even worse conditions of sacrificial labor and self exploitation.
For TT, instead, the importance of the present restructuring consists
in the novelty and discontinuity that they represent in relation to
the previous social economic formation. TT is interested in
understanding the current changes in managerial practices, but also in
reading these changes against the grain, so to speak , from the other
side of the relationships of production. Thus, she is interested in
analyzing not only the new forms of extraction of value from labor,
but also the new subjective practices that accompany and shape those
relations, and in drawing implications for a new political strategy.
Interestingly enough it is Marx that provides a guide for the
understanding of the present turn in the nature of labor. Marx shows
that there are always two inextricably connected sides of the labor
process: the side of exploitation and alienation, and the side of
cooperation. In general, the Marxist tradition has emphasized the
former and left the latter to the realm of politics and consciousness,
beyond the labor process. Yet, the changing nature of labor in Post-
Fordism has shifted the balance of productive forces on the side of
cooperation. Increasingly, it is social engagement, both in the sense
of interpersonal relationship and symbiosis with technological
artifacts, that drives innovation and creativity to the center of
production by transforming machinery into media. But cooperation is
also the site of subjective practices of resistance, and here is where
TT sees the opening of new possibilities for alternative forms of
production. We could say succinctly that where AR is describing the
new conditions of labor as a social factory, TT sees them as a factory
of the social. Work in the new productive landscape is increasingly
characterized by communication, symbolic interaction, affective
engagements. It entails less and less fabrication and more social
cooperation, (what she and others call “immaterial labor”). And these
are the material conditions that give rise to new subjective practices.
The difference between the two approaches becomes even more evident
when they try to envision future developments and to formulate
alternatives. In my view, AR analysis leads ultimately to a very
defensive position. It seems that his main concern is to alleviate the
deteriorating working conditions of the labor force and to fight the
onslaught of neoliberalism’s restructuring, which undoubtedly has
created, particularly in the present crisis, massive unemployment, the
increase in precarity and the abolition of safety nets. To respond
to such devastating dislocations much more has to be done in terms of
providing adequate income maintenance programs (see for instance the
current push on health care) or for the development of new forms of
labor organization that expand across economic sectors and global
fragmentation. But if we follow TT’s perspective, these struggles have
a much greater strategic value to the extent to which, in addition to
being defensive measures, they prefigure new productive arrangements
and alternative social configurations.
Take for instant the proposal of a guarantee income. Whatever the
difference between Europe and the US, in terms of historical
circumstances and short term feasibility, it appears to be an issue
that is gaining ground and could be central to a policy debate in the
near future. However, a guarantee income can be conceptualized quite
differently and have different political implications. For AR a
guarantee income is a remedy for the instability and flexibility of
employment. By providing income security it increases the chances of
finding adequate employment. For TT a guarantee income is, in a larger
context, a stepping stone in the direction of severing the relation
between income and work. A guarantee income based on life needs and
not productive performance goes a long way in prefiguring and give
sustenance to experiments of non economic productive arrangements. The
political value of a struggle around a guarantee income is in the
linking of immediate defensive measures to the strategic new
institutions of cooperation, what TT calls the commons. Seen from this
point of view, the path from the guarantee income to the commons is
part of the process that, in the Italian Marxist literature that TT
refers to, is called the “exodus”. In other words, the potentials
expressed by the current social dynamics point to the opening of areas
of self valorization and autonomous social practices that are quite
different from the preceding dialectics of classes.
I think it is clear by now where my preferences lie. However I think
that the conceptual framework and the practice of the new commons are
still, to say the least, in their infancy and there are some
fundamental political and theoretical issues that have to be addressed
and clarified. What is the nature of the commonality that it is
detected in current subjective practices and proposed for future
institutional forms? For instance, it is not clear to me to what
extent there is a direct path from immaterial labor to the commons.
Is the common a realization of labor, albeit a labor based on
cooperation rather than competition? Is it the old Marxist notion of
emancipation of labor through labor? And if so, how does it differ
from the historical experience of soviets and workers’ councils,
except from the heightened sociality of immaterial labor? It could be
just another version of industrial democracy, a democracy for the
social factory. If, on the contrary, it means not just exodus of
labor but from labor, and from its connotations of productivity,
utility and efficacy, then it would be nothing short of a redefinition
of praxis itself. And maybe that is what is required today.
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