Marx's fragment on machines, another explication

This from "From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism" by Carlo Vercellone (Historical Materialism 15 (2007) 13–36)

Vercellone provides the familiar three-part division of capitalist history. Built into it is an assumption that workers fight for a combination of autonomy in labor processes, for better wages, and for skill preservation ("socialization of access to knowledge"), and these factors determine capital formations and modes of capitalist control over labor:

(1) formal subsumption, when workers still controlled labor processes but relied on outside capital. Workers underwent ‘precarisation’, that is to say, their livelihood was made insecure and dependent on wages. Thus they were compelled to work to survive. This wage dependency could seem like freedom, though, in some workers' experience -- the ones who were no longer serfs, for instance.

(2) real subsumption, or Fordist relations of production, in which the division of labor has separated out management of labor processes from their execution. "The attempt to save time, founded on the law of value-labour, is accompanied by the reduction of complex labour into simple labour and by the incorporation of knowledge in fixed capital and in the organization of the firm." In other words, Taylorist management styles and machines make craft knowledge irrelevant among workers in factories. Craft knowledge survives only in fringe production as nostalgic artisanship while mass-produced goods made in assembly-line style factories come to dominate markets. Working for wages becomes a technological necessity -- modern production by and large becomes too complex to be done as a lone artisan.

Capital assumes control over the making of stuff and the making of demand for stuff -- forcing/enticing people to be happy with mass-produced goods. The mass production process dictates what sort of stuff is on the market and a grateful mass market is expected to accept it without customization options -- without it speaking to them as individuals. (The one color of Model T is the quintessential example.)

Labor is separated from leisure in this stage, as it is deliberately separated from "intellectual and creative quality" by management, who seeks to control proprietary work processes. Wages and the consumption culture that derives from them contribute to this separation of spheres. The welfare system of a living wage

(3) cognitive capitalism, or post-Fordism, or immaterial labor, or the general intellect, etc., in which labor processes become indistinguishable from the self-managed, quasi-voluntaristic life processes of workers. Less explicit management and compulsion needs to happen, labor processes require less hierarchical direction as technological developments allow for the more or less unobtrusive harvesting of useful information, knowledge, innovation, affect, etc. from the life processes. "The productive value of intellectual and scientific labour becomes dominant and knowledge re-socialises everything, becoming the principal productive force." More productivity can be reaped by encouraging worker-driven innovation and unstructured social cooperation (albeit mediated and monitored), not treating them like assembly-line drones. Friendship and sociality and public self-fashioning (identity manufacture and confirmation/validation) are made productive -- a kind of covert labor. But with less control over the labor process, capital must assert control through financialization. Capital "will tend to privilege indirect forms of domination of production and of the mechanisms of surplus appropriation realized by means of the sphere of monetary and financial circulation." In other words, if you are a capitalist, don't run factories; run banks.

Financialization is corollary of a more autonomous worker -- it allows for indirect ways of exploiting that worker, so that the worker can feel more in control in a local sense (choosing where and when to work), even though the choices are circumscribed at a "way of the world" level. The "cycle of valorization" is "ever more autonomous from a social labor process which it no longer subsumes in real terms." The worker is producing in the "social factory," and expropriated at the level of financialization.

Precarization at this stage is not a matter of possibly starving; it's a matter of feeling irrelevant, unfamous, uncool, out of date, etc.

At this stage, the fragment on machines comes into play and Marx's hypotheses about the "general intellect". The general intellect,as I understand it, is the lived praxis of the knowledge about everyday life within capitalism, the making of ideas or memes or new semiotic information or new meanings for goods, and so on. Fordism relies on a bargain with workers, enriching their general education and leisure time to compensate for meaningless working life. But this lays the foundation for the "crisis of Fordism" as better-educated workers living a more personalized and individuated life in leisure time begin to demand more-meaningful work. A generalized demand for meaning characterizes consumer capitalism -- consumption becomes a form of production of meaning.

Marx writes: "the saving of labor time [is] equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labor as itself the greatest productive power." Educational development in free time changes the nature of labor, the de facto social contract between capital and labor. Capital wants the old form of value, based on control of direct labor and labor time (keeping people in the office, paying them by the hour) -- but the new productive forms of labor have become social, happening online in various forms of innovation in lifestyles and fashion and so forth. So capital tries to strengthen intellectual property laws, create artificial scarcities in knowledge to reassert control. But now technology no longer supports a wage-paying system of labor control. Now technology supports networks, and the wealth of networks. Only massive state intervention could enforce the intellectual property laws that would restore the old regime of capital control over labor processes and innovation.

Hence this seems the key passage to me from the Fragment on Machines:

In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social
individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth.

The source of value is networked humans coming up with new instantiations of generalized, shared collective knowledge about living in current times (the "general intellect"). Value is created there, in networks, in what Vercellone calls the "the totality of social times", not by machines streamlining production processes.

But with production being done outside of wage paying situations, and appropriation of that value not benefiting the workers, the argument for a social wage mandated by the state strengthens -- this would enable workers to continue to learn, self-fashion, form identities, innovate lifestyles without stultifying fear of earning money. Immaterial labor seems well suited to fit with a social wage and indirect methods of capital expropriation of value generated on networks (or to put that less pejoratively, entrepreneurs can find value on networks and profit while the value creators live their lives and get paid in identity, knowledge and self-satisfaction in creativity.)

Tribalism and decision-making

Ryan Avent, responding to Akerlof and Kranton's Identity Economics"

I've found the idea of tribalism to be increasingly useful in understanding political behaviour. Faced with the need to make a decision based on incomplete information, people may often attempt to understand how others like them are behaving and behave in that fashion. This isn't really a new insight; politicians have been playing to group identities forever. But it certainly seems that economists have been slow to incorporate it into their models of consumer behaviour. As in: I buy this phone because those I recognise as being like me buy this phone, I borrow against my home in this way because others like me do too, I develop expectations about the proper level of educational attainment because those like me have similar expectations, and so on.

Economists are sure to be uncomfortable with this kind of behaviour because it's much more difficult to model than simple rationality. But if they hope to contribute to the policymaking process, economists need to work harder to understand when a simple price incentive will work appropriately, and when identity filters mean that price changes will generate unexpected results.

My bold above. What makes this more interesting is that the feeling of "having incomplete information" is itself subjective and subject to manipulation. Politicians may try to instigate that feeling in order to evoke tribalist responses in constituents and voters that are easier to predict even than mathematically modeled, neoclassicist rational choice. (After all, who has the time for all that math?)

Similarly, marketers and retailers may also direct their energies at managing the consumer's relationship and comfort level with the information relevant to a particular decision by emphasizing lifestyle and tribalistic associations. With the identity aspects foregrounded, consumers might be more comfortable ignoring or not bothering to seek out the other information that might help clarify a decision in cost-benefit terms.

Impulse purchasing is an example of this; perhaps it can be understood as identity components overwhelming desire to work out what's a "good deal" or what's "fair". Fairness (in the economic sense, or in general) obviously has little to do with tribalism or the urgency and exigencies of personal identity. Identity is never a game of fairness; it is a game of invidious comparison and advantage and pointed exclusion -- a zero-sum game. Identity economics, ideally, recognizes that, how identity concerns can trump a Pareto-based efficiency of decisionmaking that leaves no one worse off. Identity issues and the symbolic aspects of exchange guarantee that someone is always worse off. And that aspect of exchange can be intensified.

Maureen Tkacik makes what may be the same basic point in this essay:

As a rule of thumb (and with some notable exceptions), the profit margins you could achieve selling a good or service were directly correlated to the total idiocy and/or moral bankruptcy of the demand you drummed up for it.

The best way to drum up idiotic and morally bankrupt demand (which might include racist, nationalistic sorts of wishes) is to inject as much concern for identity as possible into an exchange -- to attempt to control the rhetoric around a transaction and make it about who the buyer is, not what the buyer is ultimately getting. The entire history of advertising bears this insight out. Creating demand rarely involves the direct usefulness of the product itself but rather the associations that can be attached to it that make it correspond to a lifestyle, an identity ideal. What sucks about consumerism as a hegemonic economic system is precisely this circulation of lifestyles, creating a fog of "imperfect information" and imperfect ideas about that fog, so we don't know how uninformed we are even about the identity ideals we are pursuing, let alone how far we are from rationally calculating. Profits are largest when the identity quotient within the demand is highest, because it is the most irrational demand, while the corporate form on the supply side keeps it disciplined to adhering to rational calculation. Thus, very rationally, corporations those try to encourage the isolated humans they deal with into worrying more and more about identity issues, catering to our worst tribalistic impulses and insecurities about who we really are.

Amanda Marcotte, discussing choice architecture and political affiliation, writes, "Even simple information can be distorted through an ideological or tribal lens." This doesn't make people "stupid," as she points out; it just suggests how efforts to align our identity with some idealized version (shaped by ads, or tradition, or institution, or personal imagination, or a desire to resist and identities those forces have imposed on us) can shift our perceptions about what information we need and what choices we feel we need to actively make to define ourselves. There is no rational approach to understanding the various bigotries of tribal identification, but there are systematic ways to exploit them and feed into them.

In other words, Thomas Frank's points in What's the Matter with Kansas have a broader application. We vote with our dollars for some blinkered evocation of our identity rather than for what economics tells us is in our best interests.

Human capital as financial instrument

From "The human capital strategy," by Morgan Adamson, Ephemera 9(4): 271-284.

Adamson writes about the ideological weight "huamn capital" carries as a concept.

In essence, the technology of human capital produces its object, human ability conceived of as a fixed form of capital, in order to measure it.

The qualitative nature of human experience and capabilities is flattened into something that can be quantified and captured by capital's investment schema.

Interesting:

Foucault explicitly examines the introduction of human capital into neo-liberal discourse in his lectures at the Collège de France in 1979 as that which transforms the classical function of labour and homo oeconomicus into an “entrepreneur of himself” (Foucault, 2008: 226).

This seems like the fundamental form of alienation under the regime of financial capitalism. Less jargony: a persuasive selling point for capitalism is the idea of investing in oneself, of growing one's identity/subjectivity by using the analytical tools of capitalism, by collaborating with capitalism's ordering and taxonomizing schemes. We buy into the idea that the purpose of life is to grow ourselves like a business, rather than to merely live.

Adamson sketches the insidious development of instruments for investing in the income stream a person will produce in the future -- to buy an equity slice of a person in a modernized version of indentured servitude.

it is not merely the products of intellectual labour that are to be traded; rather, it is private rights to the actual “acquired useful abilities” of the population that constitute the commodity of human capital markets. Emerging markets in human capital are symptomatic of a tendency towards forms of exploitation of human life that are both innovative and anachronistic, in that they deploy long-standing forms of exploitation through new financial technologies.

Just imagine the derivative possibilities -- collateralized-labor obligations, with tranches of souls to match Huxley's vision in Brave New World.

Adamson points out that elaborating the concept of human capital leads inevitably to speculation in it -- that is why the concept is developed; it is a form of innovation allowing for new ways to invest idle capital for a promised return.

Hedonism and revolution

Re "Living labour and the labour of living," by Darko Suvin. Critical Quarterly 46.1.

Suvin advocates an Epicurian "swerve" into hedonism, a sort of update of Marcuse circa Eros and Civilization.

We typically think of hedonism in terms of excess, but that is a distortion that suits a social system that relies on alienated labor. We reject hedonism and pursue workaholism. Glossing Epicurus, Suvin makes the point that with hedonism, the body itself sets limits, whereas there are no limits with capitalist greed. As Aristotle noted, "There is no limit to the aim of money-making." Hedonism hence has the potential to demarcate a natural limit to the scope of production. ("To each according to his need.)

David Harvey, in his course on Marx's Capital, makes a point of highlighting how Marx uses this idea to argue that competition in capitalism drives capitalists to strive for endless accumulation. Capital, by definition, is never enough; always depreciating, never safe. Capitalism therefore requires creative destruction, instability, recurring crises, to facilitate the constant striving.

Styles of consumption vs. specific tastes

From Douglas Holt, "Distinction in America? Recovering Bourdieu's theory of tastes from its critics"

In these instances, class boundaries are formed only to the extent that there exist social interactional processes through which otherwise incommensurate field-specific cultural capitals are aggregated into meta-field attributions of status. For example, does one, as a nonparticipant in the consumption field of leisure reading, acknowledge and grant status to friends and acquaintances who have highly developed tastes for prose? I believe that this conversion of field-specific to abstracted cultural capital - while a problematic iterative process - is a pervasive feature of contemporary social interaction. People constantly make such judgments to assess their affinities with others' tastes in the process of choosing friends, lovers, and business acquaintances. If this process is significant, it suggests that in an increasingly fragmented cultural world, status judgments based on shared interests are less important than those based upon similar styles of consuming, which can be applied to any cultural category.

An alternative to the hierarchies within hierarchies idea -- or perhaps a reference to the code which transcends local hierarchies and makes them commensurable. Styles of consumption -- the form of distinction -- are more significant than what is specifically consumed. Those meanings are transient and contingent, fashion changes them all the time. What doesn't change is the mastery of how fashion changes, being able to anticipate it or even guide it. The struggle within consumption is to be a tastemaker and the specific tastes involved are irrelevant, ultimately arbitrary. Thus you can never be dethroned by a series of bad recommendations.

Work ethic as ideology

From Stanley Aronowitz "Why Work?" Chapter 7 of Politics of Identity:

He wants "to suggest a campaign to reduce work on social and ideological grounds," as a way of counteracting degraded form of compulsory labor under capitalism. Since productivity enhancements have to some degree eliminated the possibility of worker autonomy within the work world, and the prevailing ideology of consumerism has helped make leisure the more pressing and meaningful engagement in everyday life, the workplace is mainly a place where domination is established and reproduced -- not a place where skills are learned, social ties are developed and species being is expressed. Work could be severed from income and have meaning thereby restored to it -- "Work is that human activity which expresses creative achievement and corresponds, therefore, to part of desire, our will to objectivate ourselves individually and collectively by creating objects or social relations." But capital needs to be able to compel low-wage workers to sweat. Society is held together, as Marcuse argued, surplus repression derived from compulsory work -- if we all got to do our own thing, it would be anarchy. So we work not because it produces useful stuff, but because it disciplines us to the existing order. To "civilization," as Freud would have it.

But there are pockets of resistance to administered consumerism: Aronowitz cites the example of furloughed longshoremen. They demonstrate

that the shift from production to consumption as the locus of everyday life is by no means automatic when "free" time dominates "necessary" labor time. When the workplace and the neighborhood are spatially contiguous and workers have succeeded in preserving an institutional equivalent of the shop floor to provide for the basis for their social interaction, consumerism is relegated to a subordinate place in their everyday experience.

Suburbanization and commuting, etc., all serve to destroy that work-life integrity, and make work time seem "unreal" and dead and leisure time seem the time for identity forging.

The classic model of contemporary mass society is provided by the suburban or exurban location of industrial and commercial working spaces. The horizontal patterns of home construction produce low density living arrangements. Hence the nuclear family, the shopping center, the mass media constitute the nexus of social relationships that often effectively counterveil the collective tasks performed at the workplace.

So much for the "general intellect"? Aronowitz's analysis sounds a lot like what I grew up with in a 1980s exurb. Work was a drag, consumption dictated identity, and life was a struggle to find ways to connect meaningfully with peers and to escape the isolation of family. WE face "the crisis in leisure -- the effort of people to regain their sense of craft, and liberate themselves from their complete dependence on the wage relation for personal and social meaning."

The question then is whether the networked society has upended that isolation-meaningless-work-consumerism balance. Can we upset the crisis of leisure through immaterial labor -- or is immaterial labor a further alienation?

The underlying logic: capitalist management techniques make work empty "unwork", but capitalism produces enough goods to make consumerism appear to compensate for the emptiness. But we will only accept consumerism (promoted by mass media and by insecurity about social belonging) if we are unnaturally isolated from our natural companions in society, those who we would have formed solidarity with in the workplace.

Indeed, millions still seek jobs, but only to earn a living. Few jobs still carry with them the idea of a vocation such as is usually associated with professions or genuine crafts (neither of which correspond to their contemporary practices). Even much industrial labor of the past -- mining for example -- was closely linked with work cultures that far overshadowed the semi-skilled character of the work itself. The sense of vocation experienced by workers in retail trades or civil trades (two of the most important service sectors) was long eclipsed by the advent of corporate selling

Work used to provide a culture and a sense of belonging. It meant something to be a steelworker, etc. This is why lost working class culture gets sentimentalized, and rendered nostalgically. But it doesn't exist anymore; only the mass monoculture that the Frankfurt school lamented -- or is that monoculture being fractured by network culture and its alleged niches?

Aronowitz cites Baudrillard argument about the end of politics: "The family cannot be said to form an alternate cultural sphere capable of resistance.... Privatization is not only a rebellion against being represented by the political. According to Baudrillard in his In the Shadow of Silent Majorities, it signifies the end of the social." The masses are neither subject nor object but are "now purely a series of signifiers, their representation entirely simulated." Here we arrive at why networked sociality is not a solution to the atomization problem but is instead its apotheosis. It materializes the notion that we are a series of signifiers articulated serially in prescribed, administered commercial spaces.

Basically this is the all-important question: post Facebook, do we now more than ever live in a world in which "friendship and community-making have become as rare talents as good cabinet-making" as Aronowitz puts it? Or has social network worsened the erosion of those skills that work microcultures once nurtured? Can we stop instrumentalizing work to rediscover the real work of reforging the general intellect, only outside the work world subsumed by capital? Facebook of course is completely subsumed. Must discard Facebook and meet face to face, to rid ourselves of partial mediated, partially administered sociality and compulsory sharing as immaterial labor, and recapture the social, the fulfilling work of making friends and communities.

The end of working-class culture

From an essay by Barbara and John Ehrenreich, in Between Labor and Capital

The accumulation and concentration of capital which occurred in the last decades of the 19th century allowed for an extensive reorganization of working-class life -- both in the community and in the workplace. This reorganization was aimed at both social control and the development of a mass consumer market. The net effect of this drive to reorganize and reshape working-class life with the social atomization of the working class: the fragmentation of work (and workers) in the productive process, a withdrawal of aspirations from the workplace into private goals, the disruption of indigenous networks of support and mutual aid, the destruction of autonomous working-class culture and its replacement by "mass culture" defined by the privatized consumption of commodities (health care, recreation, etc.)

The most fiendish aspect of this process was its retrospective invisibility.