Notes towards the critical theory of post-industrialism capitalism

Introduction

Modernity is nothing if not dynamic. High modernists imagined a linear movement of progressive development; some among them imagined the end point of this movement in an emancipated society; others imagined that, once instituted, such progress was practically infinite. Today, modernity’s dynamism is more frequently imagined in non-linear terms. Agnes Heller (1992) captured this transformation in the self-understanding of modernity in the image of the pendulum. The steam train, that stalwart avatar of high modernity, pushes ever-forward. The pendulum, by contrast, swings to-and-fro: it leads, strictly speaking, nowhere, yet it is never in the same place for long. Needless to say, the pendulous character of modernity’s dynamism imposes certain imperatives on its denizens. On critical theory it imposes, perhaps above all, reflexivity: self-critique. For the early Frankfurt School, it was the transformations characteristic of the object of critical theory itself – that is, bourgeois society – that necessitated the transcendence of Marx’s critique of political economy. Such was also the case for the generation of thinkers who rose to prominence in the post-war decades. The mutual interlocking of state and economy in the form of what was variously termed state, late or bureaucratic capitalism both suggested the historical obsolescence and disclosed the conceptual limitations, of Marx’s critical economic project.

Modernity’s pendulum continues its to-and-fro: where, then, do we stand at present? The final decades of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st have seen a tremendous variety of sweeping social and political transformations (Dorahy, 2021). In the present paper, my aim is to continue to develop the thesis that such changes bring with them the need to rethink the relationship between social criticism and the critique of political economy. More specifically, in what follows I suggest the need to rethink, perhaps abandon completely, a number of the central categories of 20th century critical theory. The socio-historical backdrop against which such reflections take place is the now frequently discussed rise and proliferation of immaterial labour. Immaterial labour has been paradigmatically defined as that which is concerned with the handling or production of the informational and/or cultural content of the commodity (Lazzarato, 1996). It frequently involves cybernetics and the operation of computers, but also encompasses the creative work involved in defining and establishing fashions, aesthetic standards, consumer norms and public tastes. In the highly developed economies of the Global North immaterial labour has emerged as a decisive driver of cognitive-capitalist accumulation (Moulier-Boutang, 2001, 2011). Whilst knowledge has never failed to be a key element of economic growth, the knowledge that underwrites immaterial labour is less that of scientific or formal knowledge than what could be termed intelligence: the fusion of imagination and know-how, where the latter signifies the kind of practical knowledge that is built up through lived experience and involves the becoming intuitive of certain practices, facts and habits. Intelligence, then, encompasses not only the ability to combine in novel ways formal and experiential knowledge but also a range of capacities including judgement, discernment, creativity, and the aptitude to assimilate new experiences and data in innovative ways. For these reasons, immaterial labour is wholly resistant to quantification, formalization, and objectification. It pertains, that is, to the enculturated personality, the creative, expressive subjectivity, of the individual him or herself (Gorz, 2010). In these conditions, some of the most persistent and historically central concepts in the critique of capitalism that traces its roots to Marx can no longer offer a critical perspective. Chief among them is, I submit, the concept and critique of reification as it pertains to rationalization and, more specifically, the rationalization of work.

Lukács and the reification of the consciousness of the proletariat

As we approach the centenary of its initial publication, Lukács’ essay ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ remains the most historically significant statement of the problem of reification. There is, then, little reason to rehearse its argument here in any great depth. Nonetheless, to the extent that Lukács’ analysis of the mechanization of work qua reification is, in particular, germane to the overriding aims of the present essay, a brief restatement of its key claims and consequences is not entirely unnecessary. According to Lukács, modern capitalism is characterized by a historically intensifying dynamic of rationalization. Within the domain of work, the modernization process unfolds along two distinct though complementary and mutually reinforcing axes. The first is the breaking up of the processes of work into ever-more specialized, fragmented operations such that activity of working is itself reduced to the mechanical repetition of a highly circumscribed set of simple operations. This rationalization of the spatial-corporeal dimensions of work is buttressed, in Lukács’ account, by the rationalization of socially necessary labour time. That which in pre-modern social formations signifies simply an empirically observable average is transformed in and through the mechanization and rationalization of the labour process into an objectively calculable work stint (Lukács, 1968: 262; 1971: 88). For Lukács the industrial capitalist rationalization of labouring time and space finds its apotheosis in the Taylorist organization of production – a system whose ultimate end lies in wholesale suppression (die Ausschaltung) of the ‘qualitative, human-individual characteristics of the worker’ (Lukács, 1968: 262; 1971: 88). In consequence of the rationalization of the labour process and the concomitant instrumentalization of the worker, he or she ceases to act as the carrier or bearer (der Träger) of the system of social reproduction. Lukács registers this transformation in both objective-structural and subjective-phenomenological terms. Speaking to the latter, Lukács argues that the worker confronts or experiences the world of rationalized work as a closed and completed system. A system whose laws, acting independently of his or her will, demand acquiescence with the force of necessity. The atrophy of conscious direction over work means that it loses its agentic and active character; in short, praxis is reduced to poiēsis. Subsequently, the worker assumes an increasingly detached, contemplative stance towards his or her productive action. The broader consequences of these transformations are, of course, well known: the rationalization of work and the reification of consciousness, the latter being consummated in a constellation of complex cultural mediations, together engender a socio-cultural milieu in which the capitalist form of life is experienced as a kind of ‘second nature’ (Lukács, 1968: 260; 1971: 86) – a self-sufficient, pre-existing totality beyond history and resistant to conscious human transformation.

Whilst some of the best of recent Lukács scholarship has been directed towards establishing continuing relevance of this diagnosis of the pathologies of capitalist modernity for the critical understanding of contemporary democratic politics (Kavoulakos, 2020), I am, at least at present, more specifically concerned with what Lukács posits as the underlying logic of the processes of capitalist rationalization; that is, the tendency towards the reduction of the working subject to the status and function of a mere object. This is, one would presume, a relatively uncontroversial claim. Indeed, it is this aspect of Lukács’ theory that has been most vociferously criticized – as an untenable remnant of the ideology of humanism – by theorists broadly working within the parameters of Althusser’s structuralist reading of Marx (Žižek, 1997). Yet, it is a claim that has been radically challenged in a similarly recent essay by Thomas Telios (2020).

The crux of Telios’ argument is for a ‘rehabilitation’ of Lukács’ early Marxist critique of capitalism along lines inspired by post-structuralism. More specifically, Telios argues that henceforth we should understand the Lukácsian conception of reification as denoting a process of subjectification – that is, ‘as a process of subjectivity production and leave behind the more common understanding of reification as a mere social pathology, or distortion of an original human nature’ (Telios, 2020: 224). Only in this way, Telios (2020: 224) contends, can the critique of reification avoid the pitfalls of ‘subject centred essentialism’. To be sure, there is not insignificant value in such claims. As will be discussed momentarily, we are witnessing today a growing recognition of the relationship between transformations in work, technology, and the production of subjectivity. However, pace Telios, even a ‘rehabilitated’ Lukács appears unable to offer conceptual and political resources for confronting the crucially significant challenges we face today. More to the point: even a rehabilitated Lukács appears unable to offer a conceptual schema within which it is possible to discern the pathological developments engendered by the ongoing transformations characteristic of contemporary capitalism as pathologies. The first, and ‘merely’ scholarly, concern that must be expressed here is that the suggested post-structuralist reading of Lukács involves considerable distortions of the text. In defending the claim that Lukács’ essay on reification ‘contains elements of a constructivist concept of subjectivity’ (Telios, 2020: 240), Telios marshals a well-known passage detailing the dynamics of reifying processes:

Just as the capitalist system continuously produces and reproduces itself economically on higher and higher levels, the structure of reification progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully and more definitely into the consciousness of man. (Lukács, 1968: 268; 1971: 93)

Castoriadis and the contradictions of capitalism

If Lukács’ work has without doubt retained its seminal status, it nevertheless finds its most theoretically defensible, though somewhat neglected, critique in the early works of Cornelius Castoriadis. Like Lukács, Castoriadis sees reification as the essential tendency underwriting both the process of modernization and the ongoing reproduction of the capitalist system. There is, however, a crucial divergence between the two as concerns the problem of the limits of capitalist rationalization. For Lukács, the ultimate irrationality of capitalist reason was expressed primarily at the level of the social whole. This is an irrationality that is brought to the fore in moments of economic crisis, and in this sense, but not this alone, Lukács remained an orthodox Marxist, even in his most heterodox text. Castoriadis, by contrast, discerns the limits of rationalization at the very point that, according to Lukács, it reaches its apex: the organization and performance of work. Throughout the 1950s and ‘60s this basic insight, derived from his collaboration with the other members of Socialism or Barbarism and his studies of the relations of work within the factory, was the driving force in Castoriadis’ reformulation of the project of socialism and his wide-ranging critique of bureaucratization. It was given decisive form, however, in the opening pages of The Imaginary Institution of Society (Castoriadis, 1987). Reification, he explains, precisely as the essential tendency of capitalist society, can never, in fact, be total (a point on which, as we have seen, Lukács concurs). Were this the case, were the capitalist organization of work and the systemic application of capitalist technology to accomplish its ultimate aim, that is the reduction of the worker to an object, the system itself would immediately break down. Contrary to Lukács’ account of the passivity of the worker engendered by the reification of work, Castoriadis’ essays of the ‘50s and ‘60s are replete with examples which attest to the systemically stimulated activity of workers – both in the form of active struggle against the tendency towards reification and, equally importantly, in the form of creative, spontaneous, and autonomous adaptation to the exigencies of rationalized production. Remarkably, Castoriadis arrives at a conclusion that is almost the exact inverse of that announced by Lukács: the reproduction of the capitalist system can only be accomplished by drawing upon the genuinely human capabilities of the worker, even if, at the same time, it tends towards the suppression of precisely these same capabilities.

For Castoriadis, this was capitalism’s ultimate contradiction, the contradiction which capitalism could not resolve without ceasing to function as capitalism. The advent of cognitive capitalism and the centrality of immaterial labour, however, bring this thesis directly into question; with this, they suggest the need to rethink the place of the critique of reification within the critical theory of contemporary capitalism. The issue at stake is not simply the quantitative expansion of white collar, service, and tech jobs, at the expense of industrial manufacturing, throughout the Global North. The issue is that of a qualitative transformation in the logic of capitalist rationalization itself. If, that is, the tendency of industrial capitalism’s rationalization was towards the reduction of the worker to the status of a passive object, then the tendency of today’s cognitive capitalism must be understood as developing towards the production of the worker as a competent and creative subject. André Gorz (2010) has effectively summed up this transformation as follows: to work, today, is, he claims, to produce oneself.

The soul at work?

What does all of this mean for contemporary critique? Modernity’s pendulum does indeed continue its to-and-fro. Where do we go from here? The first, rather evident, conclusion to be drawn here is that today any attempt to renew or revisit the critique of political economy, understood as the genealogy of the economic determinations of form that characterize the capitalist economy, must do so on the basis of a renewed attention to the centrality of the biopolitical and biopower within economic life and the life of work in particular (Just, 2016). As Castoriadis demonstrated, the processes of capitalist rationalization are not possible without the conscious development and implementation of a specifically capitalist, and specifically industrial capitalist, technology. This should not be confused, of course, with the notion that there exists a specifically capitalist technique or a specifically capitalist science, notions explicitly and rightly rejected by Castoriadis. Rather, it expresses the idea that capitalism develops and deploys those technologies that best promote the imperatives of its specific form of rationalization: those technologies, that is, which facilitate the accumulation of capital on the basis of the extension of quantification, manipulation, and objectification. However, if the logic of capitalist rationalization mutates from the reduction of the worker to an object to the production of the worker as subject, then the question of technology and, in particular, the changing forms of technology in work, are central to understanding this mutation and the biopolitical mechanisms by which it is sustained. So too, what remains ahead of us is to identify the consequences of such developments.

In this context, the writings of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi are instructive. Berardi’s thought emerges in response to the so-called operaismo movement in Italian Marxism of the 1960s and 1970s (Wright, 2002). In his The Soul at Work, Berardi (2009) offers a synoptic account of the multiplicity of transformations that distinguish not only working activity itself but also the social perception, and pathologies, of work characteristic of contemporary, post-industrial capitalism. The point of departure here is the dual tendency today towards, on the one hand, the increasing ergonomic and physical homogenization of work, and, on the other, the increasing differentiation of the cognitive operations workers must perform:

Architects, travel agents, software developers and attorneys share the same physical gestures, but they could never exchange jobs since each and every one of them develops a specific and local ability which cannot be transmitted to those who do not share the same curricular preparation and are not familiar with the same cognitive contents. (Berardi, 2009: 74)

Criticism of the industrial rationalization of work has tended, and rightly so, towards the problems of standardization and mechanization. As we have seen, in Lukács, for example, there is strong link between the standardization of work and its depersonalization – within the industrial system the worker becomes an interchangeable figure. Under such conditions, Berardi claims, work is experienced as it is: as something foreign, something hierarchically imposed, a sort of ‘temporary death from which s/he could wake up only after the alarm bells rang, announcing the end of the working day’ (Berardi, 2009: 77). Immaterial labour, by contrast, is increasingly personalized. Immaterial workers are incomparably less interchangeable than their industrial forebears precisely because of the range of individual and specific competencies required in the performance of their role. This fact, in turn, brings about an important shift in the social relationships between high tech or immaterial workers and their work. Whilst industrial workers invested their physical energies in the process of social production, immaterial workers are called upon to invest, amongst other things, their creative sensibilities and communicative capacities. Concomitant to this is the tendency of such work to emerge as a primary centre in the focus of individual desire. Contemporary work, for increasing sections of society, has become ‘the object of an investment that is not only economical but psychological’ (Berardi, 2009: 78).

To be sure, part of the significance of Berardi’s analysis lies in its non-reductionist character. In ways that cannot be fully elaborated here, he resists any notion that the general ‘psycho-social’ change of attitude towards work – which can be summarized as the shift from disaffection to positive integration – outlined here can be reduced to factors immanent in the processes of labour itself. The decline of working-class political movements, the affective impoverishment of everyday life, the neoliberal culture of competition and the prevailing fixation on the creation of wealth as the end of life, where wealth itself is seen only in terms of economic purchasing power, are each and all addressed in illuminating ways. At present, however, of most import are Berardi’s discussions of the pathologies which have grown in tandem with these decisive transformations. At the psychological level, Berardi explores the links between a culture of competition and happiness, the imperatives of self-actualization in work and the emergence of panic depressive syndrome and our growing dependence upon psychotropic substances, both legal and illegal. At the phenomenological level, Berardi discerns traces of a new, historically unprecedented, form of alienation. ‘In the industrial domain,’ he explains, ‘[alienation] manifests as reification’ (Berardi, 2009: 108). As described so vividly in Lukács’ early-Marxist masterpiece, industrial alienation – being other than oneself, in the process of rationalized production – manifests as the self becoming thing-like. The commodity form coupled with the social conditions of industrialized labour permeate the practical self-relations of massified workers such that their very corporeal existence is experienced as something expropriated and foreign. Alienation as reification thus signifies a pathological division of the self and a loss of agentic activity derived from the separation of what Lukács termed the soul of the workers from their productive functions. Conversely, today we inhabit ‘an era marked by the submission of the soul, in which animated, creative, linguistic, emotional corporeality is subsumed and incorporated by the production of value’ (Berardi, 2009: 109). Under such conditions, the phenomenology of alienation no longer, Berardi claims, can be understood as the becoming thing-like of the subject, that is, as reification. Rather, we are compelled today to address ourselves to the phenomenon of de-realization: the ‘pathogenic separation between cognitive functions and material sociality’ (Berardi, 2009: 109).

Suggestive and as immediately plausible as such claims may be, within the work in question, scant elaboration is offered. Nevertheless, Berardi’s thought offers a wealth of psychological and phenomenological insight. More than anything it testifies to the very real fact that the questions of today cannot be addressed on the basis of yesterday’s answers. Yet, it must equally be emphasized that considerable barriers remain to the mobilization of these psycho-social and phenomenological analyses within the structure of a critical social theory of contemporary capitalism. Of course, today, more than ever, critical theory means many things to many people. For those working within the tradition of critique that runs from contemporary thinkers such as Axel Honneth and Rahel Jaeggi, through Habermas and Wellmer, to Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer, and ultimately to Marx, Hegel and Kant, critical theory encompasses at least two core postulates (Stahl, 2020). The first it the postulate of reflexivity. This involves incorporating the theory itself within its domain of analysis. The reflexivity of critique requires that theory be able to give account of its own conditions of possibility, to incorporate itself as amongst the forms of social practice it is seeking to both explain and interpret. Secondly, critical theory entails the primacy of immanent critique. This means that, unlike other forms of critique, critical social theories derive their normative force from standards that are already embedded within existing social practices. Whatever their merits, and they are substantial, Berardi’s phenomenological and psychological excursions face considerable challenges in light of such requirements. This is particularly so when we probe the central concept of the soul employed within his work.

The soul, Berardi (2009: 21) explains, on which his analysis is based has little in common with the spirit. It is rather ‘the vital breath that converts biological matter into an animated body’ (Berardi, 2009: 21). Alternatively, ‘the soul is the relation to the other, its attraction, conflict, relationship. The soul is language as the construction of the relationship with alterity, a game of seduction, submission, domination and rebellion’ (Berardi, 2009: 115). In deploying such a conception of the soul in the critique of alienation, Berardi is clearly, and rightfully, seeking to avoid the kind of metaphysical essentialism that characterizes, say, the early Marx, and the conception of alienation as the scission between the existence and essence of human beings. So, too, one senses a strong desire, again, wholly justified, to avoid the idealistic bifurcation of the subject. However, it is not clear to what extent the conception of soul as ‘vital breath’ or ‘energy’ offered by Berardi is sufficient to ground an imminent critique of contemporary cognitive capitalism. Berardi himself writes of the process from alienation to autonomy – but one is compelled to query: what kind of energy or vital breath is dependent upon autonomy for its flourishing? If we are soul, what kind of beings must we be for the phenomenon of de-realization to have its pathological effects? What is needed, then, is an account of the subject qua soul that is capable of answering these and other questions, thereby affording autonomy an immanent grounding in the social practices of human beings. For this, however, we must look elsewhere. The stakes in doing so are, as we are beginning to perceive, high.

Modernity’s pendulum will continue its to-and-fro. No longer imbued with the confidence afforded by the grand narrative of historical progress, we are, today, with good reason, hesitant to legislate over its future direction. Still, this does not divest us of the responsibility of interpreting the specificity of our shared present as the de facto outcome of what Agnes Heller, the philosopher whose life this paper was written to commemorate, termed the ‘past of the present’. How could it? As she reminds us, and this is not the least of her philosophical legacy, to do so would be to divest ourselves of the very autonomy which we ultimately seek.