[iDC] Intro and response to Ross/Terranova
Stmart96 at aol.com
Stmart96 at aol.com
Tue Oct 20 19:12:22 UTC 2009
Very Sweet Paolo especially the very last question suggesting "not of
but from labor" I was noticing how much Marx talked about cooperation
when teaching Capital this semester. And this doubleness
alienation-cooperation made me think how the psyche as explored by Freud and his others
might really need to be rethought beyond thermodynamics as one feature of work
to be done to understand the move from immaterial labor to the
commons--- not sure that word is so good.
Hope to see you at the conference Patricia
In a message dated 10/20/2009 1:21:08 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
carpi at newschool.edu writes:
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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