Beverly Silver’s Forces of Labor uses world-systems theory to examine the history of workers’ movements in the 20th century and to evaluate the prospects for the revival of substantial labor unrest in the 21st century. Silver begins by addressing the widespread belief that the labor movement has been “in a general and severe crisis,” if not total decline, since the 1970s. Rather than offering one more obituary for the working class, Silver proposes to examine the issue from “a longer historical and wider geographical frame of analysis.” Like her husband Giovanni Arrighi, Silver uses the deep and broad perspective of world-systems theory to assess the novelty of the apparent decline of labor militancy in recent decades. One of the most common assumptions about globalization is that it creates an economic “race to the bottom.” In a globally unified labor market, capital can always relocate to cheaper and more manageable regions. As a result, labor’s bargaining power is severely weakened and wages and working conditions worldwide converge upon the lowest levels found in the world-system. This mobility of capital also undermines state sovereignty by threatening states that agree to costly social-welfare compacts with capital flight to other countries. New post-Fordist forms of organization also undermine traditional forms of workplace solidarity by spreading workers across heterogeneous, geographically dispersed networks. Silver argues that these well-known criticisms of globalization need to be approached with some skepticism. She points out that data shows that the majority of international capital movement continues to be between high-income countries, not from high- to low-income ones. In the new regions to which capital has moved, strong new labor movements have typically appeared in response. And there is evidence that post-Fordist “just-in-time (JIL) production increases the vulnerability of capital to disruptions in the flow of production, and thus can enhance workers’ bargaining power based on direct action at the point of production.” Finally, state sovereignty may have much more power and flexibility than is admitted by those who assert “there is no alternative” (TINA). Another common assumption about globalization is that it is in the middle of generating a “single homogeneous world working class with similar (and unpalatable) conditions of work and life.” At the end of this process, a global proletariat (or the multitude) will confront a transnational capitalist class. A more restrained version of this argument maintains that a new labor internationalism is necessary because multinational corporations must be confronted by labor militancy in every country in which they operate. Silver once again argues that these commonplaces need to be more carefully evaluated. She points out that “recent empirical research on world income inequality is not easy to square with the image of an emergent homogeneous global working class-in-itself.” Also, if the weakness of the state in the face of capital mobility is revealed to be a myth, support for national policies, especially in the key states in the world-system, might be more effective than labor internationalism. At this point, Silver turns to Karl Marx and Karl Polanyi to theorize the historical transformation of labor movements. For Polanyi, labor, like land and money, is a “fictitious commodity” because it is not produced for sale on the market. Each time capital attempts to treat labor as a commodity (as is the case when liberalism and neoliberalism predominate), its destructiveness provokes a protective response, a struggle for the “decommodification” of labor, a push for greater recognition of the human needs and desires of the worker. This decommodification of labor increases the capitalist’s costs and eventually strains profitability, leading to a new round of commodification of labor, producing a new protective response, and so on. For Marx, the capitalist purchases labor-power as a commodity, but soon finds out that this commodity is not like others because it is embodied in human beings who struggle within and against the capitalist’s organization of the production process. The history of the development of production is therefore a “shifting terrain of labor-capital” conflict, in which “new agencies and sites of conflict emerge along with new demands and forms of struggle.” Silver concludes, “while our reading of Polanyi suggest a pendular movement (or repetition), our reading of Marx suggests a succession of stages in which the organization of production (and hence the working class and the terrain on which it struggles) is continually and fundamentally transformed).” Silver makes use of both models of historical development, arguing, “The insight that labor and labor movements are continually made and remade provides an important antidote against the common tendency to be overly rigid in specifying who the working class is. . . . Thus, rather than seeing an ‘historically superseded’ movement . . . or a ‘residual endangered species’ . . . our eyes are open to the early signs of new working class formation as well as ‘backlash’ resistance from those working classes that are being ‘unmade.’” But Silver adds that this “temporal dynamic is deeply intertwined with a spatial dynamic. . . . the periodic oscillation over time between phases tending toward the commodification and de-commodification of labor is intertwined with an ongoing process of spatial differentiation among geographical areas with regard to the level/intensity of labor commodification.” Blanket statements about globalization need to be replaced with a careful examination of the expansion and transformation of the structure of the world-system. Specific cases must be thought in relation to both time and space: “this book attempts to create a narrative of working-class formation in which events unfold in dynamic time-space.” Silver’s first chapter examines the effects of capital mobility by looking at the history of the automobile industry. With very few exceptions, the automobile industry has produced a strong labor movement wherever it has opened up production facilities. The automobile industry has repeatedly responded to labor unrest by relocating to other regions across the globe. But rather than creating a “race to the bottom,” these spatial shifts have reproduced the same “social contradictions,” the same kind of strong labor movements. As David Harvey would put it, capital “’reschedules crises’; it does not permanently resolve them.” Silver concludes, “it appears that corporations in the automobile industry have been chasing the mirage of cheap and disciplined labor around the world, only to find themselves continuously recreating militant labor movements in the new locations. Rather than providing a permanent spatial fix to the problems of profitability and labor control, relocation has only succeeded in geographically relocating the contradictions from one site of production to another.” This historical pattern leads Silver to expect future labor unrest in the automobile industry: “If past dynamics are a guide to future trends, then we have good reasons to expect the emergence of strong, independent autoworkers’ movement in Mexico and China during the coming decade.” Silver does admit that by the 1980s automobile industries had turned to a “technological fix,” the introduction of post-Fordist organizational forms adapted from Japan. But whereas the “Toyotist” model offered employment security, at least to a certain core labor force, the “lean and mean” post-Fordism that spread across the globe did not offer such security, and therefore was not very capable of obtaining “active cooperation of the workforce.” She adds that just-in-time production, which reduces inventories to a minimum, has been demonstrated to make post-Fordist organizations vulnerable to direct action by labor. Silver’s next chapter investigates the effects of what she terms the “product fix.” “Capitalists respond to a squeeze on profits in a given industry, with geographical relocation (a spatial fix) or process innovations (a technological/organizational fix), but they also attempt to shift capital into new innovative and more profitable product lines and industries. This product fix involves relocating capital from industries and product lines subject to intense competition to new and/or less-crowded industries and product lines. Successive new labor movements have risen (and established labor movements declined) with these shifts.” But the success of a product fix and the labor movement it generates heavily depends on their position within the world-system. Wealthier countries tend to move into new products early in the “product cycle,” when “competitive pressures are low and thus costs are relatively unimportant.” In these wealthier countries, labor unrest, at least temporarily, can be contained by offering more concessions to labor. But when a spatial fix occurs and the industry is relocated, the new location is typically less able to offer such concessions because competition increasingly cuts into profit as the product cycle matures and the new locations tend to be poorer nations. As Silver shows elsewhere in the book, the inequality of the global North and South is therefore reproduced, not eliminated, by globalization. The automobile industry replaced the textile industry as the leading industry for most of the twentieth century. What product fix will dominate the 21st century is less clear, though Silver investigates the semiconductor, producer services, personal services, and education industries as potential successors to the automobile industry. Silver’s third chapter turns to world politics and repeats the fundamental claims of Giovanni Arrighi’s work. She offers a particularly nice account of the relative capital-labor accord in the two decades following WW II. The diminishment of labor unrest was brought about partially by “deep institutional reforms at the firm, national, and especially global levels that partially de-commodified labor.” However, these efforts “proceeded along the knife’s edge between a major crisis of profitability, due to the costs of the reforms, and a major crisis of legitimacy, due to the failure to deliver on the promised reforms fully. This contradiction eventually exploded in the crisis of the 1970s.” Three disastrous decades of neoliberalism and financialization followed. Nonetheless, “The world-scale dislocations of established ways of life and livelihood caused by this late-twentieth-century swing toward unregulated markets is once again producing a deep crisis of social legitimacy for world capitalism. Whether the crisis of social legitimacy is (will become) sufficiently troublesome to the world’s elites so as to provoke a new swing of the pendulum back toward an emphasis on livelihood and security remains to be seen.” But this cannot simply be a return to the institutions of the early postwar era, whose contradictions were never resolved and whose environmental limits and social inequalities have become all the more evident. Silver instead concludes with a veiled call for communism: “Thus the ultimate challenge faced by the workers of the world in the early twenty-first century is the struggle, not just against one’s own exploitation and exclusion, but for an international regime that truly subordinates profits to the livelihood of all.”
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Beverly Silver: Forces of Labor
Beverly Silver’s Forces of Labor uses world-systems theory to examine the history of workers’ movements in the 20th century and to evaluate the prospects for the revival of substantial labor unrest in the 21st century. Silver begins by addressing the widespread belief that the labor movement has been “in a general and severe crisis,” if not total decline, since the 1970s. Rather than offering one more obituary for the working class, Silver proposes to examine the issue from “a longer historical and wider geographical frame of analysis.” Like her husband Giovanni Arrighi, Silver uses the deep and broad perspective of world-systems theory to assess the novelty of the apparent decline of labor militancy in recent decades. One of the most common assumptions about globalization is that it creates an economic “race to the bottom.” In a globally unified labor market, capital can always relocate to cheaper and more manageable regions. As a result, labor’s bargaining power is severely weakened and wages and working conditions worldwide converge upon the lowest levels found in the world-system. This mobility of capital also undermines state sovereignty by threatening states that agree to costly social-welfare compacts with capital flight to other countries. New post-Fordist forms of organization also undermine traditional forms of workplace solidarity by spreading workers across heterogeneous, geographically dispersed networks. Silver argues that these well-known criticisms of globalization need to be approached with some skepticism. She points out that data shows that the majority of international capital movement continues to be between high-income countries, not from high- to low-income ones. In the new regions to which capital has moved, strong new labor movements have typically appeared in response. And there is evidence that post-Fordist “just-in-time (JIL) production increases the vulnerability of capital to disruptions in the flow of production, and thus can enhance workers’ bargaining power based on direct action at the point of production.” Finally, state sovereignty may have much more power and flexibility than is admitted by those who assert “there is no alternative” (TINA). Another common assumption about globalization is that it is in the middle of generating a “single homogeneous world working class with similar (and unpalatable) conditions of work and life.” At the end of this process, a global proletariat (or the multitude) will confront a transnational capitalist class. A more restrained version of this argument maintains that a new labor internationalism is necessary because multinational corporations must be confronted by labor militancy in every country in which they operate. Silver once again argues that these commonplaces need to be more carefully evaluated. She points out that “recent empirical research on world income inequality is not easy to square with the image of an emergent homogeneous global working class-in-itself.” Also, if the weakness of the state in the face of capital mobility is revealed to be a myth, support for national policies, especially in the key states in the world-system, might be more effective than labor internationalism. At this point, Silver turns to Karl Marx and Karl Polanyi to theorize the historical transformation of labor movements. For Polanyi, labor, like land and money, is a “fictitious commodity” because it is not produced for sale on the market. Each time capital attempts to treat labor as a commodity (as is the case when liberalism and neoliberalism predominate), its destructiveness provokes a protective response, a struggle for the “decommodification” of labor, a push for greater recognition of the human needs and desires of the worker. This decommodification of labor increases the capitalist’s costs and eventually strains profitability, leading to a new round of commodification of labor, producing a new protective response, and so on. For Marx, the capitalist purchases labor-power as a commodity, but soon finds out that this commodity is not like others because it is embodied in human beings who struggle within and against the capitalist’s organization of the production process. The history of the development of production is therefore a “shifting terrain of labor-capital” conflict, in which “new agencies and sites of conflict emerge along with new demands and forms of struggle.” Silver concludes, “while our reading of Polanyi suggest a pendular movement (or repetition), our reading of Marx suggests a succession of stages in which the organization of production (and hence the working class and the terrain on which it struggles) is continually and fundamentally transformed).” Silver makes use of both models of historical development, arguing, “The insight that labor and labor movements are continually made and remade provides an important antidote against the common tendency to be overly rigid in specifying who the working class is. . . . Thus, rather than seeing an ‘historically superseded’ movement . . . or a ‘residual endangered species’ . . . our eyes are open to the early signs of new working class formation as well as ‘backlash’ resistance from those working classes that are being ‘unmade.’” But Silver adds that this “temporal dynamic is deeply intertwined with a spatial dynamic. . . . the periodic oscillation over time between phases tending toward the commodification and de-commodification of labor is intertwined with an ongoing process of spatial differentiation among geographical areas with regard to the level/intensity of labor commodification.” Blanket statements about globalization need to be replaced with a careful examination of the expansion and transformation of the structure of the world-system. Specific cases must be thought in relation to both time and space: “this book attempts to create a narrative of working-class formation in which events unfold in dynamic time-space.” Silver’s first chapter examines the effects of capital mobility by looking at the history of the automobile industry. With very few exceptions, the automobile industry has produced a strong labor movement wherever it has opened up production facilities. The automobile industry has repeatedly responded to labor unrest by relocating to other regions across the globe. But rather than creating a “race to the bottom,” these spatial shifts have reproduced the same “social contradictions,” the same kind of strong labor movements. As David Harvey would put it, capital “’reschedules crises’; it does not permanently resolve them.” Silver concludes, “it appears that corporations in the automobile industry have been chasing the mirage of cheap and disciplined labor around the world, only to find themselves continuously recreating militant labor movements in the new locations. Rather than providing a permanent spatial fix to the problems of profitability and labor control, relocation has only succeeded in geographically relocating the contradictions from one site of production to another.” This historical pattern leads Silver to expect future labor unrest in the automobile industry: “If past dynamics are a guide to future trends, then we have good reasons to expect the emergence of strong, independent autoworkers’ movement in Mexico and China during the coming decade.” Silver does admit that by the 1980s automobile industries had turned to a “technological fix,” the introduction of post-Fordist organizational forms adapted from Japan. But whereas the “Toyotist” model offered employment security, at least to a certain core labor force, the “lean and mean” post-Fordism that spread across the globe did not offer such security, and therefore was not very capable of obtaining “active cooperation of the workforce.” She adds that just-in-time production, which reduces inventories to a minimum, has been demonstrated to make post-Fordist organizations vulnerable to direct action by labor. Silver’s next chapter investigates the effects of what she terms the “product fix.” “Capitalists respond to a squeeze on profits in a given industry, with geographical relocation (a spatial fix) or process innovations (a technological/organizational fix), but they also attempt to shift capital into new innovative and more profitable product lines and industries. This product fix involves relocating capital from industries and product lines subject to intense competition to new and/or less-crowded industries and product lines. Successive new labor movements have risen (and established labor movements declined) with these shifts.” But the success of a product fix and the labor movement it generates heavily depends on their position within the world-system. Wealthier countries tend to move into new products early in the “product cycle,” when “competitive pressures are low and thus costs are relatively unimportant.” In these wealthier countries, labor unrest, at least temporarily, can be contained by offering more concessions to labor. But when a spatial fix occurs and the industry is relocated, the new location is typically less able to offer such concessions because competition increasingly cuts into profit as the product cycle matures and the new locations tend to be poorer nations. As Silver shows elsewhere in the book, the inequality of the global North and South is therefore reproduced, not eliminated, by globalization. The automobile industry replaced the textile industry as the leading industry for most of the twentieth century. What product fix will dominate the 21st century is less clear, though Silver investigates the semiconductor, producer services, personal services, and education industries as potential successors to the automobile industry. Silver’s third chapter turns to world politics and repeats the fundamental claims of Giovanni Arrighi’s work. She offers a particularly nice account of the relative capital-labor accord in the two decades following WW II. The diminishment of labor unrest was brought about partially by “deep institutional reforms at the firm, national, and especially global levels that partially de-commodified labor.” However, these efforts “proceeded along the knife’s edge between a major crisis of profitability, due to the costs of the reforms, and a major crisis of legitimacy, due to the failure to deliver on the promised reforms fully. This contradiction eventually exploded in the crisis of the 1970s.” Three disastrous decades of neoliberalism and financialization followed. Nonetheless, “The world-scale dislocations of established ways of life and livelihood caused by this late-twentieth-century swing toward unregulated markets is once again producing a deep crisis of social legitimacy for world capitalism. Whether the crisis of social legitimacy is (will become) sufficiently troublesome to the world’s elites so as to provoke a new swing of the pendulum back toward an emphasis on livelihood and security remains to be seen.” But this cannot simply be a return to the institutions of the early postwar era, whose contradictions were never resolved and whose environmental limits and social inequalities have become all the more evident. Silver instead concludes with a veiled call for communism: “Thus the ultimate challenge faced by the workers of the world in the early twenty-first century is the struggle, not just against one’s own exploitation and exclusion, but for an international regime that truly subordinates profits to the livelihood of all.”
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Alfred Sohn-Rethel: Intellectual and Manual Labour
Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labour argues that the “real abstraction” of commodity exchange makes possible “ideal abstraction” in cognition. In a radical version of the Marxist base-superstructure argument, Sohn-Rethel claims that abstraction must first exist in reality before it can appear in a pure form in the intellect. Mirroring Marx’s “critique of political economy,” Sohn-Rethel’s “critique of epistemology” attempts to prove that Kant’s a priori categories should not be grounded in the timeless transcendental subject but rather in the historical development of human society. In brief, Sohn-Rethel maintains: “(a) that commodity exchange is an original source of abstraction; (b) that this abstraction contains the formal elements essential for the cognitive faculty of conceptual thinking; (c) that the real abstraction operating in exchange engenders the ideal abstraction basic to Greek philosophy and to modern science.” At the center of Sohn-Rethel’s argument is the idea of “real abstraction.” Abstraction is typically treated as unique to human consciousness; the concreteness of reality is set in opposition to the abstractions of human cognition. Sohn-Rethel’s radical proposal is that there can be abstraction outside of and before the mind’s abstraction. In fact, this “real abstraction” is a condition for the development of intellectual abstraction in a pure form. Situated squarely within Marxism, Sohn-Rethel asserts that commodity exchange is precisely such a real abstraction. In societies oriented toward commodity production, the “the social synthesis”—“the network of relations by which society forms a coherent whole”—is accomplished through the abstraction of commodity exchange. As the universal equivalent that makes possible this social synthesis, money must exhibit a high level of abstraction so as to function in the exchange of any commodity with any other commodity that may appear on the market. But the “money abstraction” merely makes conspicuous the real abstraction hidden in all commodity exchange. Sohn-Rethel argues, “The form of commodity is abstract and abstractness governs its whole orbit.” First, the commodity functions as a bearer of value that is abstract. “The economic concept of value . . . is characterized by a complete absence of quality, a differentiation purely by quantity and by applicability to every kind of commodity and service which can occur on the market.” Next, exchange and use “must take place separately at different times. This is because exchange serves only a change of ownership, a change that is, in terms of a purely social status of the commodities as owned property.” “There, in the market-place and in shop windows, things stand still. They are under the spell of one activity only; to change owners. They stand there waiting to be sold. While they are there for exchange they are there not for use.” So “[w]herever commodity exchange takes place, it does so in effective ‘abstraction’ from use. This is an abstraction not in mind, but in fact.” Of course the individuals involved in exchange usually have specific use values in mind, but the action of exchange itself remains abstract. “The consciousness and the action of the people part company in exchange and go different ways.” Exchange abstraction enters consciousness only later in the form of money: “In money the exchange abstraction achieves concentrated representation, but a mere functional one – embodied in a coin. It is not recognizable in its true identity as abstract form, but disguised as a thing one carries about in one’s pocket, hands out to others, or receives from them.” Sohn-Rethel continues to investigate the exchange abstraction in order to specifically locate the origins of Kant’s a priori categories in commodity exchange rather than in the human mind. He shows that “the act of exchange has to be described as abstract movement through abstract (homogeneous, continuous and empty) space and time of abstract substances (materially real but bare of sense-qualities) which thereby suffer no material change and which allow for none but quantitative differentiation (differentiation in abstract, non-dimensional quantity).” He concludes, “The unvarying formal features of exchange . . . constitute a mechanism of real abstraction indispensable for the social synthesis throughout and supplying a matrix for the abstract conceptual reasoning characteristic of all societies based on commodity production.” The “conversion of the real abstraction of exchange into the ideal abstraction of conceptual thought” is first evident in ancient Greece, where the development of exchange and coinage created the conditions for Parmenides’ pure logic. Much later, real abstraction made possible Galileo’s work on “inertial motion” and modern science. With modern science, “intellectual labor” is separated from “manual labor.” Rejecting Kant’s argument about timeless a priori categories one more time, Sohn-Rethel claims, “The basic categories of intellectual labour . . . are replicas of the elements of the real abstraction,” that is, commodity exchange. The “mechanistic thinking” of science normatively prescribes how nature should act and allows intellectual labor to “yield a knowledge of nature from sources totally alien to manual labor.” At this point, Sohn-Rethel goes back and offers a more detailed history from ancient Egypt to the present of the social synthesis, showing how the development of real abstraction led to changes in ideal abstraction. In capitalism, the capitalist is responsible for production. The capitalist purchases everything needed in the production process, but does not partake in that process. As a result, long before automatic machinery is introduced in history the production process must function in an “automatic” manner. “From the perspective of the capitalist entrepreneur the essential characteristic of the production process for which he is responsible is that it must operate itself. The controlling power of the capitalist hinges on this postulate of the self-acting or ‘automatic’ character of the labour process of production. This all-important postulate of automatism does not spring from any source in the technology of production but is inherent in the production relations of capitalism.” The capitalist therefore depends on the abstract power of science to acquire control over the production process. In other words, the real abstraction of commodity exchange makes possible the ideal abstraction of science, which is now increasingly applied to the production of commodities themselves. This trend is most evident in Taylorism, which, instituting a strict division between mental and manual labor, abstractly analyzes the labor process and then forces the worker to attempt to conform to that abstraction in reality. However, machines are more suited to carrying out actions determined by abstraction, so there is the gradual move toward full automation. But as both Marx and Paolo Virno have noted, the growth of science-based automation socializes labor and threatens to burst the limits of the capitalist mode of production. Sohn-Rethal writes, “Technological devices, in substituting for the workers’ personal attributes, emancipate the subjectivity of labour from the organic limitations of the individual and transform it into a social power of machinery. Thus the electronics of an automated labor process act, not for the subjectivity of one worker only, but for all the workers employed in its previous manual stage. Automation amounts to the socialization of the human labour-power.” “We thus have the result that now man would, in principle, have at his disposal production forces which in themselves embrace in their physical reality the socialization which in the ages of commodity production had grown up in the intellectual work of the human mind – that is, in science.”
Friday, April 22, 2011
Dan Schiller: Digital Capitalism
Digital Capitalism examines how the interaction of business interests, neoliberal policies, and information technologies has shaped the development of the Internet and the capitalist world-system. Calling into question utopian conceptions of the Internet, Schiller argues, “Far from delivering us into a high-tech Eden, in fact, cyberspace itself is being rapidly colonized by the familiar workings of the market system. Across their breadth and depth, computer networks link with existing capitalism to massively broaden the effective reach of the marketplace. Indeed, the Internet comprises nothing less than the central production and control apparatus of an increasingly supranational market system.” Schiller’s books show how this “digital capitalism” was made possible through the installation of neoliberal policies in the telecommunications system in the U.S. and then across the globe. During the era of mainframe computing, businesses in the U.S. began to computerize more and more of their activities. The development of business computer networks that would “make data-processing available more broadly throughout business organizations,” however, was limited by the U.S. government’s strict regulation of the telecommunications system. So “[b]etween the mid-1950s and 1970, business users elaborated a policy agenda around a general objective: freedom to develop corporate network systems and services as they preferred.” They “demanded nothing less than an autonomous sphere of corporate network applications that was essentially free of regulatory oversight and was parasitic on the existing telecommunications network.” This neoliberal project succeeded by instituting a (fictional) division between “telecommunications” and “computing” domains. “On the telecommunications side of the line, the existing rules of public service would continue to apply. However, on the computing side, established exit, entry, and price controls would be relaxed and progressively abandoned. So long as network applications were categorized by regulators as data-processing services, they could be pursued freely.” As computer networks grew at a staggering rate in the following decades, more and more services ended up “on the liberalized computing side of the line,” and eventually even regulated telecommunications companies were allowed to set up subsidiaries in the less regulated domain. “What had originated as a specialized networking industry endowed with exceptional market freedom was now set to expand comprehensively into the greater telecommunications system.” Computer networks were adopted early on in the banking and finance sectors, but soon spread across the economy as businesses sought out a competitive edge. Businesses began to spend enormous sums of money on information technologies needed for information sharing within corporations, between corporations, and between corporations and individuals. “Between 1970 and 1996 . . . the percentage of all U.S. corporate capital investment allocated to information technology climbed steeply, from 7 percent to around 45 percent.” The Internet may have been developed in a Cold War context, but its subsequent history was largely determined by its maturation in a deregulated zone open to market forces aiming to profit from this corporate frenzy for information sharing. Many businesses approached the Internet, a network of networks, as an instrument for extending the information sharing capabilities of their existing local-area networks (LANs) and intranets to greater distances and more users, such as business partners and, eventually, consumers themselves. By the late 1990s, “corporate networks and the open Internet were becoming ‘inextricably intertwined.’” “Only a thoroughgoing modernization of underlying telecommunications systems could sustain such a comprehensive, economywide move into electronic commerce,” so telecommunications companies, which had been slowly adapting to demands for carrying data, were jolted into upgrading system capacities and offering their own Internet services. One reason businesses so strongly demanded powerful and robust networks was the growing importance of “transnational production chains” (TNCs). “Sophisticated network systems . . . comprised the increasingly essential infrastructure for engorged transnational corporations, pursuing export-oriented or even globally integrated production strategies.” However, in order for global telecommunications networks to satisfy the demands of digital capitalism, the neoliberal reforms pioneered in the U.S. had to be exported; the old era of national sovereignty and regulation of telecommunications had to go. “Corresponding to the ongoing buildup of transnational production chains, therefore, was a powerful pan-corporate attempt to subject worldwide telecommunications policy to United States—originated, neoliberal regulatory norms.” Neoliberal telecommunications policies swept across the globe in the 1980s and 90s. National telecommunications systems were privatized in large numbers, and telecommunications became a lucrative sector subject to the speculative excesses of finance capital. The traditional “social-welfare features” of telecommunications systems were dismantled and neoliberalism’s negative effects soon appeared: quality declined as corruption spread, inequality increased as businesses—freed from the goal of universal access—privileged wealthier customers and neighborhoods, and employees in the telecommunications industry were subjected to downsizing. Policy changes allowing consolidation of the telecommunications industry led to a wave of mergers and partnerships and a glut of system building on both national and international scales. Neoliberalism is of course not unique to telecommunications. But Schiller argues that the Internet has functioned as a key “policy wedge” for driving forward the global spread of digital capitalism’s neoliberal policies. Since the computer’s 0s and 1s don’t distinguish between speech and commerce, the defense of the freedom of the former has tended to assist in the extension of the freedom of the latter. Upholding free speech on the Internet has gone hand in hand with the framing of the Internet as an international free-trade zone. “Capital’s stewardship of the Net, taking the form of multilateral support for cyberspace as a stateless jurisdiction, works to ensure that the market development process will only deepen and broaden its incursions on national sovereignty.” Schiller’s next chapter examines the (re)construction of the Internet as “a new consumer medium.” Schiller pessimistically argues, “The practices that saturate our culture and that are being transferred wholesale to the Net are market-driven in intent and in effect. That doesn’t mean they cannot sometimes eventuate in true artistry but rather that art itself is generally placed in harness to a narrow and exclusionary social purpose: selling.” “If the present trend is not comprehensively interrupted, the extent to which cyberspace becomes a commercial consumer medium will be largely determined by profit-seeking companies themselves. Non-profit prospects or alternative visions of cyberspace will either be marginalized or else incorporated—and exploited—by sponsors seeking access to their services and perhaps a patina of legitimacy.” Schiller’s final chapter is a specific study of the role of information technologies in the evolution of the “higher-learning industry.” He claims, “Cyberspace lent itself both to an unparalleled market takeover of the learning process and to a relentless vocationalism.”
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Paolo Virno: A Grammar of the Multitude
Virno begins by reviving from 17th-century political philosophy the distinction between the concept of the “people” and the concept of the “multitude.” The people is a unified One formed through the establishment of the State. In contrast, the multitude, which Hobbes vilified, is a “plurality which persists as such in the public scene.” The multitude “is the form of social and political existence for the many, seen as being many.” Whereas substantial communities attempted to secure a stable “inside” as a refuge from an uncertain “outside,” the contemporary multitude finds itself exposed to a more uncanny situation, “united by the risk which derives from ‘not feeling at home,’ from being exposed omnilaterally to the world.” Unable to rely on customary, differentiated discourses tied to specific sites and contexts within society, the contemporary multitude must orient and protect itself out in the contingent world through “generic logical-linguistic forms,” what Virno, borrowing from Aristotle, terms “common places.” For the contemporary multitude, confronting a world in which all that is solid has long since melted into air, the human animal’s general linguistic-cognitive capabilities have moved to the “forefront.” The “life of the mind” has become “public,” and the “intellect, even in its most rarefied functions is presented as something common and conspicuous.” This rise of a public intellect needs to be understood in relation to political economy, and specifically in relation to the emergence of the post-Fordist mode of production. Virno proposes to use the category of “virtuosity” to analyze the characteristic labor process of post-Fordism. Virtuosity is “an activity which finds its own fulfillment (that is, its own purpose) in itself, without objectifying itself into an end product.” Virtuosity is also “an activity which requires the presence of others, which exists only in the presence of an audience.” A piano performance by Glenn Gould clearly illustrates these features of virtuosity, but Virno is quick to extend the label of virtuosity to any form of action that is socially oriented and does not result in an “end product.” In fact, the “fundamental model of virtuosity . . . is the activity of the speaker. . . . Every utterance is a virtuosic performance.” Mankind’s “general faculty of language” therefore makes everyone a potential virtuoso. Contemporary production first became virtuosic in the culture industries, which specialized in communicative activity as an end in itself. But the “model of action of the culture industry” has since become “exemplary and pervasive.” Today, “virtuosity . . . not only characterizes the culture industry but the totality of contemporary social production. One could say that in the organization of labor in the post-Ford era, activity without an end product, previously a special and problematic case . . . , becomes the prototype of all wage labor.” Of course material commodities are still produced in mass quantities, but such material production is now differently articulated with immaterial production. “The crucial point is . . . that while the material production of objects is delegated to an automated system of machines, the services rendered by living labor, instead, resemble linguistic-virtuosic services more and more.” In the famous “Fragment on Machines” in the Grundrisse, Marx anticipated these developments. Marx demonstrated how the introduction of automated machinery led labor to step “to the side of the immediate productive process.” For Marx, at least in this fragment, the “general intellect,” the scientific knowledge embodied in machines, historically became the principal productive force. Virno modifies Marx’s argument in order to make it more applicable to the post-Fordist mode of production, which obviously has not used automation to free mankind from the burden of wage labor. Virno argues, “We should consider the dimension where the general intellect instead of being incarnated (or rather, cast in iron) into the system of machines, exists as attribute of living labor. The general intellect manifests itself today, above all, as the communication, abstraction, self-reflection of living subjects. It seems legitimate to maintain that, according to the very logic of economic development, it is necessary that a part of the general intellect not congeal as fixed capital but unfold in communicative interaction, under the guise of epistemic paradigms, dialogical performances, linguistic games.” In extending the general intellect from dead to living labor, Virno also transforms it from a historical notion (about the “progress” of human knowledge and social productivity) into a biological faculty whose potential becomes unleashed and central only at a specific historical stage. He argues, “General intellect should not necessarily mean the aggregate of the knowledge acquired by the species, but the faculty of thinking; potential as such, not its countless particular realizations. The ‘general intellect’ is nothing but the intellect in general.” The general intellect, the “most generic communicative and cognitive faculties of the human animal,” is “pure and simple potential.” It is “the foundation of a social cooperation broader than that cooperation which is specifically related to labor.” But capitalism, which ties the general intellect to wage labor, distorts this potential for cooperation into a “thick net of hierarchical relations” characterized by “personal dependence.” In addition to a radical form of “civil disobedience,” Virno proposes that the general intellect be made politically autonomous through “exit.” “Nothing is less passive than the act of fleeing, of exiting. Defection modifies the conditions within which the struggle takes place, rather than presupposing those conditions to be an unalterable horizon. . . . In short, exit consists of unrestrained invention which alters the rules of the game and throws the adversary completely off balance.” “What is at stake, obviously, is not a spatial ‘frontier,’ but the surplus of knowledge, communication, virtuosic acting in concert, all presupposed by the publicness of the general intellect. Defection allows for a dramatic, autonomous, and affirmative expression of this surplus; and in this way it impedes the ‘transfer’ of this surplus into the power of state administration, impedes its configuration as productive resource of the capitalistic enterprise.” Virno continues to add heterogeneous “philosophical ‘predicates’” to his “grammatical subject” through a fairly routine application of Simondon’s theory of individuation to the production of “the many” of the multitude. He then shows how Foucault’s theory of biopolitics allows one to understand how capitalism takes an increasing interest in the living body of the worker, which only has value as “the substratum” of the immaterial potential of labor-power. Virno concludes with “Ten Theses on the Multitude and Post-Fordist Capitalism”: 1) “Post-Fordism (and with it the multitude) appeared, in Italy, with the social unrest which is generally remembered as the ‘movement of 1977.’” 2) “Post-Fordism is the empirical realization of the “Fragment on Machines” by Marx.” 3) “The crisis of the society of labor is reflected in the multitude itself.” 4) “For the post-Fordist multitude every qualitative difference between labor time and non-labor time falls short.” 5) “In Post-Fordism there exists a permanent disproportion between ‘labor time’ and the more ample ‘production time.’” 6) “In one way, post-Fordism is characterized by the co-existence of the most diverse productive models and, in another way, by essentially homogeneous socialization which takes place outside of the workplace.” 7) “In Post-Fordism, the general intellect does not coincide with fixed capital, but manifests itself principally as a linguistic reiteration of living labor.” 8) “The whole of post-Fordist labor-power, even the most unskilled, is an intellectual labor-power, the ‘intellectuality of the masses.’” 9) “The multitude throws the ‘theory of proletarianization’ out of the mix.” 10) “Post-Fordism is the ‘communism of capital.’”
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