Immaterial Labour and Social Change at the Heart of the Crisis

Hardt and Negri’s purpose in Declaration is to ‘address the desire and accomplishments of the cycle of struggles that erupted in 2011’ (2012: 6). More specifically, they aspire to attack the ‘dominant forms of subjectivity’ – that is, ‘the indebted, the mediatized, the securitized and the represented’ – by unmasking and demystifying their currently ‘masked and mystified’ powers (2012: 7). In Declaration, Hardt and Negri restate their well-known view that ‘The centre of gravity of capitalist production no longer resides in the factory’ as ‘Capital increasingly exploits the entire range of our productive capacities, our bodies and minds, our capacities for communication, our intelligence and creativity’ (2012: 12). This position results in an understanding of capitalism in which exploitation is not primarily based on exchange, but on debt (2012: 12).

However, the fact that labour has become increasingly immaterial after 1968, as Hardt and Negri theorize, does not change the fact that it is still dominated by the straitjacket of capital and has only one purpose: the perpetual multiplication of money by money. Even workers who, by Negri’s definition, perform immaterial labour (such as computer programmers and the like) must still tailor their work to meet the demands of the market, that is, the demands of competition and the accumulation of wealth, the very values that capitalism’s survival depends upon. Regarding the contemporary worker, Hardt and Negri claim:

It thus seems more appropriate to think of such workers as not so much alienated as mediatized. Whereas the consciousness of the alienated worker is separated or divided, the consciousness of the mediatized is subsumed or absorbed in the web. (2012: 16)

Contrary to the judgement of Hardt and Negri, I maintain, in keeping with the view set out in Capital and the early Frankfurt School theory, that our doing should still be characterized as alienated because our concrete labour in capitalism must necessarily be transformed into abstract, objectified labour. No matter our inclinations, we must sell our labour power in order to sustain a living; thus we must succumb to the logic of the market that transforms our doing into abstract labour, into money. The transformation of our incommensurable doing into the commensurable value of money is a precondition of our survival under capitalism. Thus, the product of man’s labour becomes ‘objectified […] alien, hostile, powerful object independent of him’ (Marx, 1975: 278).

Only when the process that begins with the metamorphosis of labor-power into a commodity has permeated men through and through and objectified each of their impulses as formally commensurable variations of the exchange relationship, is it possible for life to reproduce itself under the prevailing relations of production. (Adorno, 2005: 229)

Therefore, all labour that takes place under the demand of the ‘performance principle’ is ‘an instrument of toil’ and is therefore ‘alienated work’ (Moyers, 2005: 157). To stop being mediatized, we must, according to Hardt and Negri, ‘Break the spell and discover a new way to communicate!’ and ‘make new truths’ (2012: 37). In the frame of reference of the proposed new way of communication, ‘Individualistic and privatistic rules and norms’ are ‘completely external to the new common sources of value’ (2012: 49). In my view, their conceptualization of constituent power (the counter-power to contemporary capitalism) as being external to the dominant form of power is central to their analysis in both the book and in their social theory in general. By adopting such an approach, however, they separate reality into two dimensions, one dominated by capitalism and another in which our constituent power can act in an alternative manner. As a result, not only can this philosophical approach not explain the spellbound character of the totality that we must break, it also fails to explicate the aforementioned ‘masked and mystified’ constituent counterpowers.

One philosopher who stressed the importance of the notion of a spellbound totality was Adorno, who acknowledged that his and Horkheimer’s philosophy was concerned with the ‘concept of the spell and all its implications’ (Adorno, 2006: 173). The fact that people are haunted by the logic of capital – that is, by the logic of ‘time is money’ – in order to survive is expressed by Adorno through the notion of the spell: ‘Present ideology […] is the ceaseless reproducer of the universal in the individuals. Spell and ideology are one and the same’ (Adorno, 1973: 349). The inversion that takes place in bourgeois democracy is such that, rather than people using money to fulfil their needs, the rule of money imposes its needs on people, the real subjects of history. Ultimately, this means that ‘human beings are modelled on the methods of production’ (Adorno, 1992: 241). According to Adorno, ‘that is the way of the world as long as human beings stand under the spell of social production instead of being its master’ (1992: 241). At its heart, the notion of the spell is identified with fetishism, or reification. ‘In human experience the spell is the equivalent of the fetish character of merchandise […] In the spell, the reified consciousness has become total’ (Adorno, 1973: 346). The ‘spellbound subjects’ ¹ reproduce the enchanted, inverted society that is formed according to the exchange principle.

The notion of the spell as used by the first generation of the Frankfurt School originates in Marx’s theory of mystification, that of the ‘enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world, in which Monsieur le Capital and Madame le Terre do their ghost-walking as social characters and at the same time as mere things’ (Marx, 1998: 817). We thus live in an inverted, crazy world where money appears to be the real historical subject rather than people. In contrast to Negri’s position, then, the concept of the spell holds that we actively create the totality that dominates us, and thus our counterpower must also be a part of the spellbound totality.

Later in the book, Hardt and Negri confess that they have no clear answer to the questions of ‘How can such democratic counter-powers be constructed?’ and ‘what does counterpower mean?’ (2012: 59). They underline that ‘We must find the means to set in motion a dynamic that ensures a movement toward the common’ (2012: 80), but make no effort whatsoever to expand on the nature of these means. While I have no problem accepting the view that our insubordination to the logic of the system, the logic of capital, might take a form that is as yet unknown, I would expect Hardt and Negri to justify why we cannot know precisely what forms our counterpower can take. Unfortunately, Hardt and Negri make no such effort.

In contrast to Hardt and Negri’s omission on this point, the negative dialectics approach holds that uncertainty originates from the open character of the fetish-forms, such as the state, money as a social relationship and the bourgeois parliamentary system. From this perspective, any claim to certainty leads to identity thinking, an approach that unquestioningly equates the essence of our reality with its currently apparent estranged fetish-forms. In such identity thinking, then, human beings, the ghosts of capital, must necessarily adopt the values of capital, those of competition and accumulation of wealth, and are thus condemned to be haunted by the logic of profit. Such an approach presupposes that human action can be predicted and thus sets limits upon the extent of human creativity. Any detailed description of a future democratic society would necessitate turning concepts into transhistorical categories with a closed and predetermined content, which would then have to be imposed upon the multitude. This would annul negative dialectics itself.

The last point that caught my attention in Declaration is the idea that: ‘The movements are preparing ground for an event they cannot foresee or predict. The principles they promote […] can form the scaffolding on which, in the event of a radical social break, a new society can be built’ (2012: 103). For Hardt and Negri, then, it seems that demystification and defetishization will occur simultaneously with the coming of ‘the event of a radical social break’. This view contrasts sharply with a negative dialectics approach, which views defetishization not as the outcome of a radical future event, but as a process that takes place every time ordinary people – those who create the bewitched topsy-turvy world – refuse to bow to the logic of capital, to the rule of ‘time is money’ in their daily lives.

Another theorist who follows Negri’s approach is Maurizio Lazzarato. He too embraces the idea that today ‘it is no longer the activity of the worker that epitomizes “alienation”, but the activity of the cooperation between brains organized and controlled by the logic of the firm without factories’ (Lazzarato, 2004: 204).

Marxism and political economy enter into a crisis because the creation and realization of common goods […] are no longer explicable by their conception of the productive cooperation (organized and commanded by the capitalist). (2004: 200)

[T]he trade unions and institutional left […] have no answers to the blackmail operated by the ‘financial holes’ of the social budgets – the deficit in the pension regime, the deficit in the health insurance system, etc. – […] because they do not understand […] that the production of wealth exceeds the capital-labour relationship. (2004: 200)

The logic of finance, which functions according to the majoritarian principle of opinion and not according to the principle of exploitation, blurs the dividing lines between classes by establishing new divisions between those who profit and those who suffer from the accumulation of capital. (Lazzarato, 2007: 100)

In Lazzarato’s theory of contemporary capitalism, the ‘function of the Welfare State has thus completely changed’ so as to enable ‘a politics of totalization and individuation of authoritarian control’ to be implemented ‘over the indebted man’ (Lazzarato, 2012: 128). Social debt ‘informs and configures techniques for the control and production of users’ existence, without which the economy would not have a hold on subjectivity’ (2012: 137). So intense and dispersed throughout society are the various techniques of subjectivity manipulation that Lazzarato defines society as ‘the correlate of governmental techniques. Society is not a primary and immediate reality but part of the modern technology of government, its product’ (2012: 125).

For Lazzarato, these new characteristics of capital lead to the conclusion that ‘Once one leaves the factory, Marx’s teachings on the “machinic” nature of capitalism seem to be lost’ (2012: 149). He holds that because Marx theorized social relations according to the difference between essence and phenomenon, his theory of totality is unable to embrace the pluralism of the contemporary world (Lazzarato, 2005: 103) and that Lukacs’s concept of totality, ² which he contends expands significantly on Marx’s view, is more applicable to the postmodern world (2005: 104–5). His overall conclusion is that in Marxism there can be no possibility of creations that are ‘untimely and unpredictable as they are already given or implied in the structure and stem from the essence’ (2005: 107). In his view, this explains why Marxism ‘always had a great difficulty in front of movements which did not refer directly or exclusively to the class relation’ (2005: 110). For the above reasons, he claims that ‘we are here far beyond the various theories of domination (e.g. Frankfurt School)’ (Lazzarato, 2004: 191).

However, Lazzarato’s approach to the concept of class is both orthodox and rigid. It is one in which:

classes [are regarded] as pigeonholes or ‘locations’ to which the sociologist must assign individuals [and thus] ultimately invokes static and struggle-disconnected structures. Current fordist/post-fordist debates about the class significance of work at computer terminals or in the service industries are to the same effect. These are quantitative conceptions of class, presupposing that the political significance of class can be established by counting heads. The alternative qualitative conception of class, which addresses it not as matter of grouping individuals but as a contradictory and antagonistic social relation, has hitherto been a somewhat marginalized tradition of Marxist thought. (Bonefeld et al., 1992: xiii)

Lazzarato and Negri’s concepts of class and capital are thus fetishized, rigid and closed. Their human content is not apparent since they are not perceived as forms that express the inherent logic of capitalism and how people experience it in their daily lives. Lazzarato maintains that since there are multiple relations that are not directly connected to capital, capitalism must therefore operate at one level of society, function within one part of society, rather than acting upon society in its totality. For Lazzarato and Negri, then, there are multiple social relations: the capital-labour relation inside the workplace and others outside it. However, if we regard capital as the rule of money that ‘vampire-like’ (Marx, 1996: 241) sucks living labour, then Lazzarato and Negri’s position becomes less tenable. In the negative dialectics tradition, class is a critical concept, an inverted form that when examined critically/dialectically reveals the negativity, contradiction and the irrationality that lie hidden in its content, that is, the way in which people are pressured to live as ‘personifications of economic categories’ (1996: 10). For the Frankfurt School, society is viewed as a totality, a ‘forced unity’ (Adorno, 2003: 128) because it demands the transformation of the immeasurable variety of human creativity into the measurable relation of money. Capital therefore does not pertain solely to a capitalist class; exploitation does not manifest itself only in the workplace, but every time we are forced to succumb to the logic of ‘growth’, the multiplication of wealth, the rule of money. The question that Adorno’s theory poses is how identities – social roles – that appear not to be connected with capital are formed and how their origins lie in our alienated everyday doing, our having to fit our activity to the logic of time is money. What if these roles are in fact perverted forms, expressions of the irrationality of ‘time is money’ and therefore part of the topsy-turvy world?

In contrast to Lazzarato’s belief that because government imposes manipulative techniques on society, society can thus be viewed as ‘the correlate of governmental techniques’, Adorno views society as the embodiment of class struggle precisely because society is constituted by the perverted forms that express our objectified labour. The question, then, is how is the existence of government to be explained? How is debt created and what is its relation to our alienated existence? Unlike Lazzarato, who fetishizes, mystifies the notion of government and the existence of debt, I contend that Marx’s dialectical criticism of Hegel and of bourgeois thinking in general focused on how the existence of the fetishized, mystified forms can be explained. In a critical, negative dialectical reading of debt and money, ‘the speculative dimension of accumulation and the power of labour’s insubordination are two parts of the same walnut’. ³ Totality is not a closed category that is presupposed upon the existence of its parts, as Lazzarato maintains. Lastly, essence is not, as Lazzarato believes, a transhistorical category with a preformed content. Instead, by shedding light on the hidden essence in every social form (such as the state) – that is, the way in which people come into contact with each other in order to satisfy their basic human needs – the critical philosopher demystifies the fetishized forms by revealing that their true content is our social doing, our objectified labour.