More thoughts on immaterial production
In the review of Michael Hardt’s The Common in Communism that was previously posted, I suggested that Hardt may have overstated how much immaterial production has transformed capitalism. Let me correct this: I believe Hardt is generally wrong.
First, here is a summary of his basic argument: today’s dominant form of capitalism has pushed material production to the periphery of global society (the South and the East) and has invested into an economy based on immaterial production. This immaterial economic formation amounts to a new set of relations between capital and workers: the former removes itself from the minutia of the labour process, extracting rent on the distribution of the completed product and not a surplus from the discrepancy between wages and value. The latter, meanwhile, have begun to produce in much more spontaneous ways; ideas are filtered and found through a commons of social knowledge, making any attempt to control the labour process stifling and futile. Hardt states that these relations open up a new space for revolution: if we rebel against the monopolizers of distribution – financial capital and intellectual property controls – whose actions amount to the theft of society’s imaginationary impulse, we can realize a new way of life free the shackles of property, where we make each other through the open sharing of ourselves.
My disagreement with this his argument is this: While I think to some extent we are witnessing the birth of a new class of producers who have unprecedented control over the labour process, interacting with each other through a social ‘common’, the real overwhelming feature of the transition towards the immaterial economy is the reification of social labour, i.e. taking immaterial work and positioning it within the familiar world of object production. Where Hardt sees the development of un-capturable interaction, I see a more intrusive system of commoditization.
The ideology of neoliberalism, in vogue in the Northern capitalist countries since the mid-1970s, has as its salient features: neo-colonization of non-capitalist states, political policy restructuring to better service the dynamics of the financial sector (austerity), and globalization of production. The floodgates for this ideology were opened when China’s dictators created an unbeatably cheap working army by forcibly expropriating masses of peasants from their land. Simultaneously, innovations in communications technologies and transportation allowed/developed-with Japanese firms to pioneer the ‘Just In Time’ production model, where automobiles began to be produced with utmost subservience to efficiency and economy. Coupled with a piece-work system of parts production that incorporated a sizeable portion of the Japanese working class, Just-In-Time revolutionized the way companies interacted with supply and demand. Global supply chains emerged in the East in the 1980s that are still unrivalled in their ability to pump out quality goods in record speed and number. Material production in the old capitalist economies simply did not have the technological drive nor the legal legitimacy to so easily re-tool the workforce for equally cheap mass production, so they shut down factories and began outsourcing labour, which itself became a standard systems logic for the telecommunications industry, allowing a techno-indsustrial class to flourish in India. The composition of the workforce since the 1980s has thus changed immensely in the global north.
But contrary to Hardt’s thesis, this recomposition has not necessarily revolutionized the labour process. Instead, the logic of material production has been extended to the immaterial world. People are self-branded, objectified forms offered to companies. Interaction is optimized. Performance evaluation numerically-renders complex social activity. Where the alienated body – whose physicality was set to work for the sole purpose of producing more value than it was hired for – once was the central force of capitalist production, today in the neoliberal economy it is the alienated personality. The soul is the target of value production, and the healthy-happy individual is its source. Arlie Russell details this in her seminal text, The Managed Heart (1973, reprinted in 2003). In it, she explores the way feeling has been captured and objectified in the work done by airline stewards, but one easily sees how it permeates many forms of work in the immaterial economy.
Further, if we see the economic structure of society as being in a state of neoliberal revolution, we can also see how this has enlivened the consciousness in the superstructures of the north (for clarification of these terms structure-superstucture, see the Review post). State austerity has adopted the language of just-in-time production. Services are provided to ‘customers’, not just to the general public itself. The way services are delivered by all levels of the state is in flux: third parties like NGO’s or not-for-profits (or for-profits!) often perform the services that were once sacrosanct pillars of state legitimacy. Taking a market-abstraction view, the state acts as a consumer of prior-produced commoditized services, advertised through grant proposals. Of course people groups have always formed external organizations to solve problems the state has been unable to, or refuses to, address (harm prevention for drug users would be a typical example). But these things have always been in conjunction with state institutions like welfare, hospitals that offer reasonably reliable care, or accessible public transit, and never in lieu of them.
In the realm of civil society, cultural institutions have also been captured by the ideology of neoliberal production: leanness, targeting, optimization, speed, and maximization have impacted the way schools, hospitals, media, food provision, and social interaction functions. Advertising has adapted itself to the task of selling of immaterial goods, admittedly a much more complex process than hawking physical use-values.
So where does the notion of the common fit in? I suppose we might accept that a cadre of producers whose jobs are built in the superstructure – artists, intellectuals, engineers, and activists – do in fact produce in a uniquely socialized realm, their work free from intrusions by capital into the process of production itself. But this makes up a rather small class in society. The majority of immaterial labourers are still being objectified under the old model of surplus-value extraction, where the result of their labour – a cup of coffee, a resolved bill, a great meal – is but an intangible replacement of a physical form; a credit where hard currency once stood. Capital has not abandoned surplus value extraction at all; it has merely modified it. One notable example is the re-birth of piece-work, which has grown out of the vast knowledge monopolies of ubiquity. In a recent segment on Spark, a CBC Radio show that documents human-technology relationships, a comparison was made between work that was crowdsourced from Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and the industrial revolution-era lace manufacturers in 19th century England. Interestingly, Marx understood piece work (work taken out of a direct assembly and performed by an individual who is then paid per piece) to be the form of production most amenable to capitalism. With its reliance on worker competition, its tendency to drive the cost of labour down (the most efficient workers set the standard wage, while the average worker is underpaid), and its informality of contract, is it really any wonder that technology companies have turned to an army of “freelancers” to complete copious quantities of menial tasks like tagging and sorting? (Seriously, this is a very interesting episode – pertinent bit starts at 16:30)We can concede to Hardt that the labour process for immaterial production appears to be much more complex, less time-based than physical value production. But then Hardt must also concede that its evaluation is also less revolutionary, less common-based than he has suggested.
In sum, (and in agreement with Hardt) we should recognize neoliberalism as a transformative moment for capitalism (all moments are revolutionary) where – among other unprecedented changes – immaterial production has emerged as the dominant type in the northern economic base – changing the way daily life is itself (re)produced. Its effects have reorganized the consciousness of the superstructure, changing distribution of services, forms of state, and dissemination of socio-culture. To an un-registered extent, neoliberalism has also pervaded the realm of cultural production, interpellating who we are and how we struggle for subjectivity. Immaterial production has been therefore subjected it to the dictates of capitalism both in distribution and in what is manufactured. The way that these two things work cannot be divided as Hardt suggests. Rather, they are constantly evolving in a symbiotic ever-present.
The Irredentist 