The End of Work or the Renaissance of Slavery?
A Critique of Rifkin and Negri
by George Caffentzis
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The last few years in the U.S. has seen a return of a
discussion of work that is reminiscent of the mid-1970s, but
with a number of twists. In the earlier period, books like
Where Have All the Robots Gone? (Sheppard 1972), False
Promises (Aronowitz 1972)and Work in America (Special Task
Force 1973), and phrases like "blue collar blues,"
"zerowork" and "the refusal of work" revealed a crisis of
the assembly line worker which expressed itself most
dramatically in wildcat strikes in U.S. auto factories in
1973 and 1974 (Linebaugh and Ramirez 1992). These strikes
were aimed at negating the correlation between wages and
productivity that had been the basis of the "deal" auto
capital struck with the auto unions in the 1940s. As
Linebaugh and Ramirez wrote of the Dodge Truck plant wildcat
involving 6000 workers in Warren, Michigan between June
10-14, 1974:
"Demands were not formulated until the third day of the
strike. They asked for 'everything'. One worker said, 'I
just don't want to work'. The separation between income and
productivity, enforced by the struggle, could not have been
clearer." (Linebaugh and Ramirez 1992: 160)
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This clarity met an even stronger clarity in the auto
capitalists' decades-long campaign to reassert control over
the work process in their plants and assembly lines. These
capitalists did not hesitate to destroy these very plants
and assembly lines in order to save themselves. "Rust belt"
and "run away plant" became the phrases of the business
press when describing auto and other kinds of factory
production in the 1980's; these phrases flowed almost
seamlessly into "globalization" and "robotization" in the
1990s.
The unprecedented result of this campaign was that
full time weekly "real" wages in the U.S. manufacturing
industry had fallen almost 20% while the work time had
actually increased. But in the mid-1990s books like The End
of Work (Rifkin 1995), The Labor of Dionysus (Negri and
Hardt 1994) and The Jobless Future (Aronowitz and De Fazio
1994), and phrases like "downsizing" (New York Times 1996)
and "worker displacement" (Moore 1996) have revived themes
associated with the crisis of work at a time when the power
relation between workers and capital is the inverse of the
1970s. Whereas in the 1970s workers were refusing work, in
the 1990s capitalists presumably are refusing workers!
In
this paper I will show that these books and phrases are
misleading in claiming that
"scientifically based
technological change in the midst of sharpened
internationalization of production means that there are too
many workers for too few jobs, and even fewer of them are
well paid" (Aronowitz and De Fazio 1994: xii), or that
"technological innovations and market-directed forces ...
are moving us to the edge of a near workerless world"
(Rifkin 1995: xvi), or, even more abstractly, that the
"law
of labor-value, which tried to make sense of our history in
the name of the centrality of proletarian labor and its
quantitative reduction in step with capitalist development,
is completely bankrupt..." (Hardt and Negri 1994: 10).
Jobs and the Manifold of Work
A "jobless future" and a "workerless world" are the key
phrases of this literature, but before we can examine the
cogency of these phrases for the present and near future it
is worthwhile to reflect for a minute on the notions of job
and work that they imply. "Job" is the easier of the two. It
has a rather unsavory etymological past. In seventeenth and
eighteenth century England (and even today), "job" as a verb
suggested deceiving or cheating while as a noun it evoked
the scent of the world of petty crime and confidence games.
In this context, a "jobless future" would be a boon to
humanity. But by the mid-twentieth century "job" had become
the primary word used in American English to refer to a unit
of formal waged employment with some fixed, contractually
agreed upon length of tenure. To have a job on the docks
differs significantly from working on the docks; for one can
be working somewhere without having a job there. The job,
therefore, rose from the nether world of political economy
to become its holy grail. The mystic power of the word "job"
does not come from its association with work, however.
Indeed, "to do a job" or "to job" were phrases describing a
"crooked" way to refuse to work and gain an income. "Jobs,
Jobs, Jobs," became the shibboleth of late-twentieth century
U.S. politicians because the "job" emphasized the wage and
other contractual aspects of work in capitalist society
which were crucial to the physical and mental survival of
the electorate. Hence a "jobless future" would be hell for a
capitalist humanity, since it implies a future without wages
and contracts between workers and capitalists. Although its
salience is unmistakable, the job marks off, often quite
conventionally and even with dissemblance, a part of the
work process; but there is no one-to-one correlation between
jobs and work. The same work process can be broken down into
one, two or many jobs. Consequently, "work" and its apparent
semantic cognate "labor" seem to have a greater claim to
reality.
Therefore, the "end of work" denotes a more radical
transformation than a "jobless future," because there were
many periods in human history when societies were
"jobless" - e.g., slave societies and subsistence-producing
peasant communities - but there were none, Eden excepted,
that were workless. Before one can speak of the end of work,
however, one should recognize that here has been a
conceptual revolution in the last political generation
concerning the meaning of work. For a long period of time,
perhaps coincident with the formulation of the collective
bargaining regimes in the 1930s and their collapse in the
1970s, "work" was synonymous with "the job," i.e., formal
waged work. But since then a vast manifold of work was
discovered (Caffentzis 1992; Caffentzis 1996/1998). This
manifold includes informal, "off the books" work which has a
wage but could not be officially deemed contractual because
it violates the legal or tax codes. This dimension of the
manifold tapers into the great region of purely criminal
activity which in many nations and neighborhoods rivals in
quantity and value the total formal job-related activity.
Even more important has been the feminist "discovery" of
housework in all its modalities that are crucial for social
reproduction (e.g., sexuality, biological reproduction,
child care, enculturation, therapeutic energy, subsistence
farming, hunting and gathering, and anti-entropic
production). Housework is the great Other in capitalist
societies, for it stubbornly remains unwaged and even
largely unrecognized in national statistics, even though it
is increasingly recognized as crucial for capitalist
development.
Finally, there is ur-level of capitalist hell
which collects all the coerced labor of this so-called
"post-slavery" era: prison labor, military labor, "sex
slavery," indentured servitude, child labor. By synthesizing
all these forms of work, we are forced to recognize an
intersecting and self-reflective manifold of energetic
investments that dwarf the "formal world of work" in
spatio-temporal and value terms. This vast emerging Presence
as well as the inverse manifold of its refusal has
transformed the understanding of work profoundly, even
though many seem not to have noticed. It certainly puts the
jejune distinctions between work and labor (Arendt), between
bio-power and capitalism (Foucault), and between labor and
communicative action (Habermas) into question while forcing
a remarkable expansion of class analysis and an enrichment
of revolutionary theory beyond the problematics of planning
for factory system of the future. Most importantly for our
discussion, this Manifold of Work problematizes the
discussion of work and its supposed end at the hands of
technological change.
The End of Work
Unfortunately, the notion of work that is often used in the
"end of work" literature is often antediluvian and forgetful
of work's capitalistic meaning. This is most clearly seen in
Rifkin's central argument in The End of Work. He is anxious
to refute those who argue that the new technological
revolution involving the application of genetic engineering
to agriculture, of robotization to manufacturing and of
computerization of service industries will lead to new
employment opportunities if there is a well-trained
workforce available to respond to the challenges of the
"information age." His refutation is simple.
In the past, when a technological revolution threatened the
wholesale loss of jobs in an economic sector, a new sector
emerged to absorb the surplus labor. Earlier in the century,
the fledgling manufacturing sector was able to absorb many
of the millions of farmhands and farm owners who were
displaced by the rapid mechanization of agriculture. Between
the mid-1950s and the early 1980s, the fast-growing service
sector was able to re-employ many of the blue collar workers
displaced by automation. Today, however, as all these
sectors fall victim to rapid restructuring and automation,
no "significant" new sector has developed to absorb the
millions who are being displaced (Rifkin 1995: 35).
Consequently, there will be a huge unemployment problem when
the last service worker is replaced by the latest ATM,
virtual office machine or heretofore unconceived application
of computer technology. Where will he/she find a job? There
is no going back to agriculture or manufacturing and no
going forward to a new sector beyond services. Rifkin
applies this scenario to a global context and foresees not
millions of unemployed people on the planet in the near
future, but billions.
The formal logic of the argument appears impeccable, but are
its empirical premises and theoretical presuppositions
correct? I argue that they are not, for Rifkin's
technological determinism does not take into account the
dynamics of employment and technological change in the
capitalist era. Let us begin with a categorical problem in
Rifkin's stage theory of employment. He uncritically uses
terms like "agriculture," "manufacturing" and, especially,
"services" to differentiate the three developmental stages
of a capitalist economy as indicated in the passage quote
above and in many other parts of The End of Work. One cannot
fault Rifkin for making an idiosyncratic choice here, since
major statistical agencies like the U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics also employ these categories to disaggregate
employment, production and productivity in the last few
decades. The core metaphors that helped shape this
trichotomy are rooted in a distinction between material
goods (produced on the farm or off) and immaterial services
and in the spatial distinction between farm, factory and
everywhere else (office, school, store, warehouse, road,
etc.) This trichotomy allows for a rough and ready economic
typology, with "the service industry" generally functioning
as something of a fuzzy default category. But it is one
thing to use a category ex post facto and another is to use
a category in a projective way (either into the past or the
future). Rifkin's somewhat Hegelian scheme sees
technological change as the autonomous moving spirit that
transforms one stage to another until it comes to a
catastrophic halt in the present "service" stage of history.
Yet when we look at capitalistic societies in the past, this
neat series is hardly accurate. For example, was seventeenth
and eighteenth century England agricultural? The "service
industry" in the form of household servants in the larger
agricultural estates at that time was quite substantial, but
these servants often worked as artisans (manufacturing) and
as farm hands (agriculture). Moreover, with the rise of
cottage industry agricultural workers or small farmers also
doubled or tripled as manufacturing workers on the farm.
Finally, throughout the history of capitalism we find a
complex shifting of workers among these three categories.
Instead of simple the move from agricultural to
manufacturing, and manufacturing to service, we find all six
possible transitions among these three categories. The vast
literature on the "development of underdevelopment" and on
the many periods of capitalist "deindustrialization"
abundantly illustrates these transitions which were clearly
caused not by some autonomous technological spirit, but by
historically concrete and ever varied class struggles and
power relations. A machine introduced by capitalists to
undermine industrial workers' power can lead to these
workers losing their employment and becoming "service
workers" or becoming "agricultural workers" according to a
complex conjucture of forces and possibilities. There is no
evidence from the total history of capitalism that there is
only a linear progression that ends with the last service
worker.
Rifkin's schema is further undermined if we examine its
future projection. After a look at the wide variety of
applications computer technology in the service industry
(from voice recognition, to expert systems, to digital
synthesizers), Rifkin ominously concludes:
"In the future,
advanced parallel computing machines, high-tech robotics,
and integrated electronic networks spanning the globe are
going to subsume more and more of the economic process,
leaving less and less room for direct hands-on human
participation in making, moving, selling, and servicing"
(Rifkin 1995: 162). But here the very defaulting function of
the category of service makes its future projection
problematic for Rifkin, since it will not stay in a single
place in logical space in order to be reduced to measure
zero by technological change. Let us consider one of the
standard definitions of what constitutes service work: the
modification of either a human being (giving a haircut or a
massage) or an object (repairing an automobile or a
computer). How can we possibly project such a category into
the future? Since there are no limitations on the type of
modification in question, there is no way one can say that
"advanced parallel computing machines, high-tech robotics,
and integrated electronic networks spanning the globe" will
be able to simulate and replace its possible realizations.
Indeed, the service work of the future might very well be
perversely defined (at least with respect to the
constructors of these machines) as modifications to humans
and objects that are not simulateable and replaceable by
machines! (1) Just as today there is a growth in the sale of
"organic," non-genetically engineered agricultural produce,
and "hand-made," garments made from non-synthetic fibers, so
too in the future there might be an interest in having a
human to play Bach (even if the synthesized version is
technically more correct) or to dance (even though a
digitalized hologram might give a better performance
according to the critics). I would be surprised if such
service industries do not arise. Could they "absorb" many
workers displaced from agricultural or manufacturing work?
That I do not know, but then again, neither does Rifkin.
Rifkin's inability to project his categorical schema either
into the past or into the future reveals an even deeper
problem: his inability to adequately explain why
technological change takes place in the first place. At the
beginning of The End of Work Rifkin rejects what he calls
"the trickle-down-technology argument" - i.e., the view that
technological change in one branch of industry, though
causing unemployment there, eventually leads to increased
employment throughout the rest of the economy - by appealing
to Marx's Capital and Grundrisse. Rifkin's view of Marx can
be surveyed in this extended passage:
"Karl Marx argued that producers continually attempt to
reduce labor costs and gain greater control over the means
of production by substituting capital equipment for workers
wherever and whenever possible ... Marx predicted that the
increasing automation of production would eventually
eliminate the worker altogether. The German philosopher
looked ahead to what he euphemistically referred to as the
'last...metamorphosis of labor', when 'an automatic system
of machinery' finally replaced human beings in the economic
process... Marx believed that the ongoing effort by producers
to continue to replace human labor with machines would prove
self-defeating in the end. ... [as] there would be fewer
and fewer consumers with sufficient purchasing power to buy
their products". (Rifkin 1995: 16-17)
This use of Marx is part of a new and widely noted trend
among social policy analysts on the U.S. Left, broadly
considered. But this revival of Marx's thought is often as
selective as is the use of Smith and Ricardo on the
Right. (2) In Rifkin's case, he definitely gets the broad
sweep of Marx's views on technology right, but with some
notable omissions.
The first omission is of workers'
struggles for higher wages, for reduced work, for better
conditions of work, and for a form of life that absolutely
refuses forced labor. These struggles are the prime reasons
why capitalists are so interested introducing machinery as
weapons in the class war. If workers were docile "factors of
production," the urgency for technological change would be
much reduced.
The second omission is Marx's Ricardian
recognition that every worker permanently replaced by a
machine reduces the total surplus value (and hence the total
profit) available to the capitalist class as a whole. Since
the capitalist class depends upon profits, technological
change can be as dangerous to it as to the workers. Hence
the capitalist class faces a permanent contradiction it must
finesse:
- the desire to eliminate recalcitrant, demanding
workers from production
- the desire to exploit the
largest mass of workers possible
Marx comments on this
eternal tension in Theories of Surplus Value:
"The one tendency throws the labourers on to the streets and
makes a part of the population redundant, and the absorbs
them again and extends wage-slavery absolutely, so that the
lot of the worker is always fluctuating but he never escapes
from it. The worker, therefore, justifiably regards the
development of the productive power of his own labour as
hostile to himself; the capitalist, on the other hand,
always treats him as an element to be eliminated from
production". (Marx 1977: 409)
Capital's problem with technological change is not the loss
of consumers, but the loss of profits.
Marx's most developed discussion of this story is to be
found in Part III, Capital III: 'The Law of the Falling
Tendency of the Rate of Profit'. There he recognizes that a
tendency towards the total replacement of humans by an
"automatic system of machinery" must continually be met by
"counteracting causes" or else the average rate of profit
will actually fall. These counteracting causes either
increase the mass of surplus value (e.g., raising the
intensity and duration of the working day), or decrease the
mass of variable capital (e.g, depress wages below their
value, expand foreign trade), or decrease the mass of
constant capital (e.g., increasing the productivity of labor
in the capital goods industry, expand foreign trade) or some
combination or these disjunctive possibilities (Marx 1909:
272-282). Contemporary US capitalism appears to be applying
the maximal synthesis of these counteracting causes while
the European capitals are being more selective. There is no
inevitable capitalist strategy in the drive to overcome
workers' struggles and prevent a dramatic decline in the
rate of profit. These struggles can lead to many
futures--from the reintroduction of slavery, to a dramatic
increase in the workday, to the negotiated reduction of the
waged workday to the end of capitalism--depending on the
class forces in the field.
But there is one outcome that
definitely cannot be included in the menu of possible
futures as long as capitalism is viable: Rifkin's vision of
"the high-tech revolution lead[ing] to the realization of
the ago-old utopian dream of substituting machines for human
labor, finally freeing humanity to journey into a
post-market era" (Rifkin 1995: 56). For capitalism requires
the stuff of profit, interest and rent which can only be
created by a huge mass of surplus labor, but the total
replacement of human work by machines would mean the end of
profit, interest and rent. Although Rifkin seems to agree
with much of Marx's analysis of the dynamics of capitalism,
Marx's fatal conclusion is carefully kept out of the
sanguine scenario presented at the last part of his book.
Rifkin lays out a future that would combine a drastic
reduction in the workday along with a "new social contract"
that would provide financial incentives (from "social" or
"shadow" wages to tax benefits) for working in "the third
sector" - the independent, "non-profit" or volunteer sector
between "the public and private" sectors. This sector can
become the "service industry" of the 21st century, since it
"offers the only viable means for constructively channeling
the surplus labor cast off by the global market" (Rifkin
1995: 292). That is, it absorbs workers who do not produce
surplus value, and provides them with a wage for
non-surplus-value creating work.
In other words, Rifkin's
vision of the "safe haven" for humanity is a form of
capitalism where most workers are not producing profits,
interest or rent. He contrasts this vision with a future
where
"civilization ... continue[s] to disintegrate into a
state of increasing destitution and lawlessness from which
there may be no easy return" (Rifkin 1995: 291). But how
viable is Rifkin's social Chimera with its techno-capitalist
head, its ample, woolly third-sector body, and its tiny
surplus-value producing tail? There are proportions that
must be respected even when dealing with futuristic
Chimeras, and Rifkin's cannot exist simply because the head,
however technologically sophisticated, cannot be nourished
by such a tiny tail.
The capitalism resulting from Rifkin's
"new social contract" is impossible, for it is by definition
a capitalism without profits, interest and rents. Why would
capitalists agree to such a deal after they trumpeted
throughout the Cold War that they would rather blow up half
the planet than give up a tenth of their income? This
"impossibility proof" is so obvious that one can not help
but asking why Rifkin invoked Marx so directly at the
beginning of The End of Work only to completely exorcise him
at the end? Is he avoiding reference to the unpleasantness
of world war, revolution and nuclear annihilation that his
earlier reflections stirred up? Is he trying to coax, with
veiled Marxian threats, the techno-capitalist class into an
act of suicide camouflaged as a new lease on life?
Answers to such questions would require a political analysis of the
type of rhetoric Rifkin and his circle employ. I forgo this
effort. But it is worth pointing out that Rifkin's
chimerical strategy is not totally mistaken. After all, he
is looking for a new sector for the expansion of capitalist
relations. He mistakenly chose the "non-profit," volunteer
sector, for if this sector is truly "non-profit" and
voluntary, it cannot be a serious basis for a new sector of
employment in a capitalist society. (And there is no way to
get out of capitalism via a massive fraud, however tempting
that might be). But Rifkin's intuition is correct. For the
Manifold of Work extends far beyond the dimension of formal
waged work and this non-waged work does produce surplus
value in abundance. If it is more directly and efficiently
exploited, this work can become the source of an new area of
surplus-value creating employment through the expansion of
forced labor, the extension of direct capitalist relations
into the region of labor reproduction and finally the
potentiation of micro- and criminal enterprises. That is why
"neoliberalism," "neo-slavery," "Grameenism," and the "drug
war" are the more appropriate shibboleths of the Third
Industrial Revolution rather than the "non-profit" third
sector touted by Rifkin, for they can activate the
"counteracting causes" to the precipitous decline in the
rate of profit computerization, robotization and genetic
engineering provoke.
Negri and The End of the Law of Value
Rifkin can, perhaps, be indulged in his half-baked use of
Marx's thought. After all, he did not come out of the
Marxist tradition and his previous references to Marx's work
were few and largely in passing. But the themes Rifkin so
clearly presented in The End of Work can be found in a
number of Marxist, Post-Marxist, and Post-modern Marxist
writers, often in a much more obscure and sibylline
versions.
One of the primary figures in this area is Antonio
Negri who developed arguments supporting conclusions very
similar to Rifkin's in the 1970s, but without the latter's
Marxist naiveté. His The Labors of Dionysius (with Michael
Hardt) which was published in 1994 continued a discourse
definitively begun in Marx Beyond Marx (Negri 1991,
originally published in 1979) and continued in Communists
Like Us (Guattari and Negri 1990, originally published in
1985). (3) In this section I will show how Negri's more
sophisticated and Marxiste analysis of contemporary
capitalism is as problematic as Rifkin's. It is hard to
discern Negri's similarity to Rifkin, simply because Negri's
work is rigorously anti-empirical - rarely does a fact or
factoid float through his prose - while Rifkin's The End of
Work is replete with statistics and journalistic set pieces
on high-tech. Negri does not deign to write plainly of an
era of "the end of work." He expresses an equivalent
proposition, however, in his theoretical rejection of the
classical Labor Theory or Law of Value with hypostasized
verbs. In the late 20th century, according to Negri, the Law
is "completely bankrupt" (Hardt and Negri 1994: 10) or it
"no longer operates" (Guattari and Negri 1990: 21) or "the
Law of Value dies" (Negri 1991: 172).
This is equivalent to Rifkin's more empirical claims, but
the equivalence can only be established after a vertiginous
theoretical reduction. Negri's version of the classic labor
theory of value has as its
"principal task... the
investigation of the social and economic laws that govern
the deployment of labor-power among the different sectors of
social production and thus to bring to light the capitalist
processes of valorization" (Hardt and Negri 1994: 8), or it
is
"an expression of the relation between concrete labor and
amounts of money needed to secure an existence" (Guattari
and Negri 1990: 21) or it is a measure of
"the determinate
proportionality between necessary labor and surplus labor"
(Negri 1991: 172). The Law of Value was alive in the 19th
century, but just like Nietzsche's God, it began to die
then. It took a bit longer for the Law to be formally issued
a death certificate, however. The bankruptcy,
inoperativeness, and death of the Law of Value simply mean
that the fundamental variables of capitalist life - profits,
interest, rents, wages, and prices - are no longer determined
by labor-time. Negri argues, as does Rifkin, that capitalism
has entered into a period that Marx, in his most visionary
mode, described the "Fragment on Machines" in the Grundrisse
(Negri 1991: 140-141) (Rifkin 1995: 16-17). Let me chose
just one of the many oft-quoted passages in this vision:
"The development of heavy industry means that the basis upon
which it rests - the appropriation of the labour time of
others - ceases to constitute or to create wealth; and at the
same time direct labour as such ceases to be the basis of
production, since it is transformed more and more into a
supervisory and regulating activity; and also because the
product ceases to be made by individual direct labour, and
results more for the combination of social activity ... on
the one hand, once the productive forces of the means of
labour have reached the level of an automatic process, the
prerequisite is the subordination of the natural forces to
the intelligence of society, while on the other hand
individual labour in its direct form is transformed into
social labour. In this way the other basis of this mode of
production vanishes". (Marx 1977: 382)
The development of "automatic processes" in genetic
engineering, computer programming and robotization since the
1960s have convinced both Negri and Rifkin that the dominant
features of contemporary capitalism are matched
point-for-point by Marx's vision in 1857-1858. The major
difference between Negri's work and Rifkin's The End of Work
is that while Rifkin emphasizes the consequences of these
"automatic processes" for the unemployment of masses of
workers Negri emphasizes the new workers that are centrally
involved in "the intelligence of society" and "social
labor." Whereas Rifkin argues that these new "knowledge
workers" (e.g., research scientists, design engineers,
software analysts, financial and tax consultants,
architects, marketing specialists, film producers and
editors, lawyers, investment bankers) can never be a
numerically large sector and hence are no solution to the
problems created by this phase of capitalist development,
Negri takes them as the key to the transformation to
communism beyond "real socialism."
It is important to note a terminological difference between
Negri and Rifkin, because Negri has over the years termed
these Rifkin's "knowledge workers" first in the 1970s to be
"social workers," and later in the 1990s he baptized them as
"cyborgs" a la Donna Haraway (Haraway 1991: 149-181).
Although singularly infelicitous in its English translation,
the term "social worker" directly comes out of the pages of
the Grundrisse. For when looking for a descriptive phrase
that would contrast the new workers in the "information and
knowledge sector" to the "mass workers" of assembly line
era, many of Marx's sentences - e.g.,
"In this
transformation, what appears as the mainstay of production
and wealth is neither the immediate labour performed by the
worker, nor the time that he works-but the appropriation of
man by his own general productive force, his understanding
of nature and the mastery of it; in a word, the development
of the social individual" (Marx 1977: 380) - deeply
influenced him. The social worker is the subject of
"techno-scientific labor" and s/he steps out of the pages of
the Grundisse as a late 20th century cyborg, i.e.,
"a hybrid
of machine and organism that continually crosses the
boundaries between material and immaterial labor" (Hardt and
Negri 1994: 280,1) (4) The old mass worker's labor-time on
the assembly line was roughly correlated to (exchange-value
and use-value) productivity and s/he was alienated from the
factory system, the social cyborg's labor-time is
independent of its productivity but it is thoroughly
integrated into the terrain of production.
Rifkin sees the
"knowledge class" of "symbolic analysts" as fundamentally
identified with capital and explains the new interest in
intellectual property rights as a sign that the elite
capitalists have recognized the importance of the knowledge
class and are willing to share their wealth with it.
Knowledge workers are
"fast becoming the new aristocracy"
(Rifkin 1995: 175). Negri has a rather different reading of
this class' present and future. The existence of social
cyborgs not only is evidence that the dialectic of
capitalist development has been "broken," according to
Negri, but capital simply cannot "buy it out," because
"the
social worker has begun to produce a subjectivity that one
can no longer grasp in the terms of capitalist development
understood as an accomplished dialectical movement" (Hardt
and Negri 1994: 282)
In order words, techno-scientific labor
cannot be controlled by capital via its system of wages and
work discipline rounded out with the promise of entrance
into the top levels of managerial, financial and political
power for the "best." Not only is the social working cyborg
beyond the bounds of capital's time honored techniques of
control, it is also in the vanguard of the communist
revolution.
Why? Let us first hear and then interpret Negri's words:
"Cooperation, or the association of [cyborg] producers, is
posed independently of the organization capacity of capital;
the cooperation and subjectivity of labor have found a point
of contact outside of the machinations of capital. Capital
becomes merely an apparatus of capture, a phantasm, an idol.
Around it move radically autonomous processes of
self-valorization that not only constitute an alternative
basis of potential development but also actually represent a
new constituent foundation" (Hardt and Negri 1994: 282).
Negri claims that the cyborg workers have escaped capital's
gravitational field into a region where their work and life
is actually producing the fundamental social and productive
relations appropriate to a communism. These relations are
characterized by "self-valorization" - i.e., instead of
determining the value of labor power and work on the basis
of its exchange value for the capitalist, the workers value
their labor power for its capacity to determine their
autonomous development - arises from the period when
techno-scientific labor becomes paradigmatic (Negri 1991:
162-163) (Caffentzis 1987). In effect, Negri's notion of
"self-valorization" is similar to the "class for itself" or
"class consciousness" of more traditional Marxism; but
self-valorization distinguishes the cyborg from the politics
of the mass worker and marks the arrival of the true
communist revolution ironically percolating in the World
Wide Net rather than in the (old and new) haunts of the mass
workers, peasants and ghetto dwellers of the planet.
The clash between Negri's picture of the anti-capitalist
cyborg and Rifkin's image of the pro-capitalist knowledge
worker can make for an inviting theme. But just as Rifkin's
knowledge worker (as the last profit-making employee) is
built upon a faulty conception of capitalist development, so
too is Negri's cyborg. Consequently, it is more useful to
consider and critique the common basis of both these views.
Negri bases his version of "the social worker" on Marx's
Grundrisse just as Rifkin does for his knowledge worker, but
we should remember that the "Fragment on Machines" was not
Marx's last word on machines in a capitalist society. Marx
continued work for another decade and filled Volumes I, II,
and III of Capital with new observations. This is not the
place to review these developments in depth. It should be
pointed out that in Volume I Marx recognized not only the
great powers machinery threw into the production process; he
also emphasized machines' lack of value creativity analogous
to the thermodynamical limits on availability of work in a
given energy field (Caffentzis 1997), but even more crucial
for our project is the part of Capital III where Marx
revisited the terrain of the "Fragment on Machines." In
these passages he recognized that in any era where
capitalism approaches the stage of "automatic processes,"
the system as a whole must face a dramatic acceleration of
the tendency for rate of profit to fall. He asked,
"How is
it that this fall is not greater and more rapid?" His answer
was that there are built-in processes in capitalist activity
that resist this tendency and therefore the system's
technological finale. These are to be found directly in the
Chapter XIV on "counteracting causes" and indirectly in Part
II on the formation of the average rate of profit. I
mentioned the critical consequences of "counteracting
causes" in my discussion of Rifkin, and they apply to Negri
as well.
Negri imperiously denies
"the social and economic
laws that govern the deployment of labor-power among the
different sectors of social production" and rejects the view
that labor-time is crucial to "the capitalist processes of
valorization". But capital and capitalists are still
devoutly interested in both. That is why there is such a
drive to send capital to low waged areas and why there is so
much resistance to the reduction of the waged work day. For
the computerization and robotization of factories and
offices in Western Europe, North America and Japan has been
accompanied by a process of "globalization" and "new
enclosures."
Capitalists have been fighting as fiercely to have the right
to put assembly zones and brothels in the least mechanized
parts of the world as to have the right to patent life
forms. Instead of a decline, there has been a great
expansion of factory production throughout many regions of
the planet. Indeed, much of the profit of global
corporations and much of the interest received by
international banks has been created out of this low-tech,
factory and sexual work (Federici 1998). In order to get
workers for these factories and brothels, a vast new
enclosure has been taking place throughout Africa, Asia and
the Americas. The very capital that owns
"the ethereal
information machines which supplant industrial production"
is also involved in the enclosure of lands throughout the
planet, provoking famine, disease, low-intensity war and
collective misery in the process (Caffentzis 1990)
(Caffentzis 1995). Why is capital worried about communal
land tenure in Africa, for example, if the true source of
productivity is to be found in the cyborgs of the planet?
One answer is simply that these factories, lands, and
brothels in the Third World are locales of "the
counteracting causes" to the tendency of the falling rate of
profit. They increase the total pool of surplus labor, help
depress wages, cheapen the elements of constant capital, and
tremendously expand the labor market and make possible the
development of high-tech industries which directly employ
only a few knowledge workers or cyborgs.
But another
complementary answer can be gleaned from Part II of Capital
III: 'Conversion of Profit into Average Profit', which shows
the existence of a sort of capitalist self-valuation. In
order for there to be an average rate of profit throughout
the capitalist system, branches of industry that employ very
little labor but a lot of machinery must be able to have the
right to call on the pool of value that high-labor, low-tech
branches create. If there were no such branches or no such
right, then the average rate of profit would be so low in
the high-tech, low-labor industries that all investment
would stop and the system would terminate. Consequently,
"new enclosures" in the countryside must accompany the rise
of "automatic processes" in industry, the computer requires
the sweat shop, and the cyborg's existence is premised on
the slave. Negri is correct in connecting the rise of the
new workers in the high-tech fields with self-valuation, but
it has more to do with capitalist self-valuation - i.e., the
right of "dead labor" to demand a proportionate share of
"living labor" - rather than workers' self-valuation. Indeed,
capital's self-valuation is premised on the planetary
proletariat's degradation.
One can easily dismiss Negri's
analysis as being profoundly Eurocentric in its neglect of
the value-creating labor of billions of people on the
planet. Indeed he is Eurocentric in a rather archaic way. He
would do well, at least, to look to the new global
capitalist multiculturalism and the ideologies it has
spawned (Federici 1995), instead of to the rather small
circle of postmodern thinkers that constitute his immediate
horizon, in order to begin to appreciate the class struggles
of today, even from a capitalist perspective. But the charge
of Eurocentricism is a bit too general. What can better
account for Negri's methodological oblivion of the planetary
proletariat is his adherence to one of the axioms of the
Marxist-Leninism: the revolutionary subject in any era is
synthesized from the most "productive" elements of the
class. It is true that Negri has nothing but scorn for the
metaphysics of dialectical materialism and for the history
of "real socialism," but on the choice of the revolutionary
subject he is Leninist to the core. Negri makes so much of
computer programmers and their ilk because of their
purported productivity. Since the General Intelligence is
productive, then these intellectual workers are its ideal
(and hence revolutionary) representatives, even though they
have not yet launched a concrete struggle against capitalist
accumulation qua "social workers" or "cyborgs." But this
methodological identity between revolution and production
has proven false time and again in history. Leninists and
Leninist parties in the past have often paid for this
mistake with their lives. Mao's political development
clearly shows that it took the massacre of Communist workers
in the cities and many near mortal experiences in the
countryside before he recognized that the Taoist
principle - the seemingly weakest and least productive can be
the most powerful in a struggle - was more accurate than the
Leninist. Negri's choice of revolutionary subject in this
period - the masters of the ethereal machines - is as
questionable as the industrial worker bias of Leninists in
the past. Indeed, the failure of The Labor of Dionysius
which was published in the US 1994 to address the
revolutionary struggles of the indigenous peoples of the
planet, especially the Zapatistas in Mexico, is a definite
sign that Negri's revolutionary geography needs expansion.
Conclusion
Negri and Rifkin are major participants in the "end of work"
discourse of the 1990s, although they occupy two ends of the
rhetorical spectrum. Rifkin is empirical and pessimistic in
his assessment of the "end of work" while Negri is
aprioristic and optimistic.
However, both seem to invoke
technological determinism by claiming that there is only one
way for capitalism to develop. They, and most others who
operate this discourse, forget that capitalism is
constrained (and protected) by proportionalities and
contradictory tendencies. The system is not going to go out
of business through the simple-minded addition of more
high-tech machines, techniques, and workers come what may,
for Marx's ironic dictum:
"The real barrier of capitalist
production is capital itself" (Marx 1909: 293), is truer
than ever. It might be an old and miserable truth, but still
to this day profit, interest, wages and labor in certain
proportions are particular, but necessary conditions for the
existence of capitalism. Capital cannot will itself into
oblivion, but neither can it be tricked or cursed out of
existence.
Rifkin tries to trick the system into believing
that a viable way out of the unemployment crises he foresees
is to abandon profit creating sectors of the economy. He
reassuringly says that all will be well if the capitalists
are in control of automated agriculture, manufacturing, and
service industries and nearly everyone else is working in a
non-profit third sector which makes no claim on hegemony.
But this scenario can hardly to pass the eagle eyes of the
capitalist press much less those of the boardroom without
ridicule. So it cannot succeed.
Negri tries philosophical
cursing instead. He calls late 20th century capitalism
"merely an apparatus of capture, a phantasm, an idol"
ontologically (Hardt and Negri 1994: 282). I appreciate
Negri's desire to put a curse on this system of decimation,
humiliation and misery, but I question his "merely". As the
highest organs of capitalist intelligence (like the Ford
Foundation) have shown, capital is as impervious to these
ontological curses as the conquistadors were to the
theological curses of the Aztec priests. Indeed, capital
revels in its phantom-like character. Its main concern is
with the duration of the phantasm, not its ontological
status.
The "end of work" literature of the 1990s,
therefore, is not only theoretically and empirically
disconfirmed. It also creates a failed politics because it
ultimately tries to convince both friend and foe that,
behind everyone's back, capitalism has ended. It's motto is
not the Third International's
"Don't worry, capital will
collapse by itself sooner or later"; rather it is,
"Capitalism has always already ended at the high-tech end of
the system, just wake up to it". But such an anti-capitalist
version of Nietzsche's motto "God is dead" is hardly
inspiring when millions are still being slaughtered in the
many names of both God and Capital.
-
– George Caffentzis - , Spring 1998
Notes:
[1] This "perverse" definition is reminiscent of Cantor's
diagonal method that has proven so fruitful in mathematical
research in this century. The trick of this method is to
assume that there is a list that exhausts all items of a
particular class K and then to define a member of K that is
not on the list by using special properties of the list itself.
[2] For example, in much of the current discussion of free
trade, a low wage level is considered by many to be a
Ricardian "comparative advantage." But such a reading is a
distortion of Ricardo's views and an invitation to justify
repressing workers' struggles. The sources of comparative
advantage for Ricardo are quasi-permanent features of the
physical and cultural environment of a country, not economic
variables like wages, profits or rents.
[3] This is not the place to discuss Negri political and
juridical life since the 1970s. For more of this see Yann
Moulier's Introduction to The Politics of Subversion (Negri
1989). He volunterally returned to from exile in France in
July 1997 and is now in Rabbi Prison (Rome). There is an
international campaign demanding his release.
[4] Negri often describes the work of the social worker
cyborg as "immaterial." But an analysis of Turing machine
theory shows that there is no fundamental difference between
what is standardly called material labor (e.g., weaving or
digging) and immaterial labor (e.g., constructing a software
program). Consequently, one must look to other aspects of
the labor situation to locate its value creating properties
(Caffentzis 1997).
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Author Details:
Constantine George Caffentzis
Dept. of Philosophy
University of Southern Maine
P.O. Box 9300
Portland, Maine
04104-9300 USA
caffentz@usm.maine.edu
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