After the post-Fordist period, started in the mid-1990s, a new paradigm has emerged in a sufficiently hegemonic and pervasive way in a large part of the globe. Some scholars (including the authors of this book) have thus begun to speak of cognitive capitalism, a term which, as is well known, has conveyed a lot of controversy, especially within orthodox Marxist approaches that still consider Fordist ways of extracting surplus value as dominant. According to this view, real subsumption, the sharp separation between machines and humans, between productive waged labor and tendentially unproductive (residual) labor that incorporates cognitive and relational/intellectual activities still represented the basis for defining the nature and form of exploitation within the capital–labor relation.
First the crisis of the net-economy (2000), then the subprime crisis (2007–2009), have made this “continuist” reading even more obsolete. There are several reasons that justify this statement. The first concerns the nature of the accumulation and valorization process that followed the financial and GDP collapse in the two-year period from 2008 to 2009.
The subprime crisis can be read as the result of a deviation between a process of exploitation of a labor activity, however internal to the labor market governance (which caused an increasingly precarious and compressed remuneration) and a process of financial valorization characterized by a private ownership structure that wanted to be increasingly widespread even if increasingly impoverished.
The profits of large multinational companies only partially derived from the direct exploitation of labor, and if this happened that was the exploitation of some parts of the entire cycle of subcontracting and production: in particular, the nodes not directly concerned with the core production and technology. Despite the increase in the intensity of exploitation (high precariousness, reduction of previously acquired rights, decomposition of work, incapacity and often connivance of trade unions), this basis for extracting surplus value was no longer sufficient when confronted to the spread of global competition and the redefinition at the global scale of the geo-economic structure, with the emergence of new capitalist economic powers. Capitalism thus needed new value-sources. Financialization, on the one hand, and commodification of territories and natures alike, on the other, could provide an adequate response. However, that has proved insufficient.
Hence the need to include the life of individuals in the process of financialization in an ever-more pervasive way through the becoming-rent of increasing portions of wage (especially the deferred one, due to the dismantling of the welfare system in Europe or its extension in financial terms, as happened with the Obama health reform in the USA). The financial securitization of living conditions through the development of derivatives (from houses to intellectual property rights, to health insurance, social security, education, etc.) had to compensate in some way for the possible crisis of realization due to the increase in the concentration of incomes following a process of labor exploitation that had reached limits that could no longer be surpassed.
In other words, with the diffusion of the paradigm of cognitive capitalism, a process of self-valuing money—money (M-M′) was “tested,” mediated by the exploitation of physical labor (logistics), and, to an increasing extent, of cognitive labor within productive sites, which, breaking the boundaries of the traditional factory, innervate the space of human action to an ever-more pervasive extent, to the point of creating its own virtual space.
This first phase of cognitive capitalism, a hybrid in which traditional forms of work coexisted, some even pre-waged, with new forms of work, especially in immaterial productions, went into crisis in the second half of 2000s since the basis of its accumulation proved too narrow for the needs of exploitation, against a composition of intangible capital that still manifests itself mainly as constant capital (as a machinery).
In Marxian terms, we could say that in this first phase of cognitive capitalism, the organic composition of capital grows faster than the rate of exploitation, creating the bursting of the financial bubble as a site, predominant but uncertain, of valorization of surplus labor.
According to Fumagalli’s interpretation, the financial crisis of cognitive capitalism paves the way for bio-cognitive capitalism to emerge. The prefix bio is, in this case, decisive. It indicates that the current phase of capitalist accumulation is identified with the exploitation of life in its essence, going beyond the exploitation of productive labor certified as such and therefore remunerated. Value-labor leaves more and more room for value-life (Morini and Fumagalli 2011).
This process is both extensive and intensive. Extensive because life as a whole, in its singularity, becomes an object of exploitation, even in its simple everyday life. New productions are taking hold. Social (re)production, which has always operated in the history of mankind, becomes directly productive but only partially waged; the genesis of life (procreation) is transformed into business; free time is boxed, like friendly and sentimental relations, inside tracks and devices that, through algorithmic technologies, allow the extraction of surplus value (network value); the human body in its physical and cerebral components becomes the raw material for the production and planning of health and life extension, due to new bio-medical techniques.
Intensive, because these processes are accompanied by new technical and organizational methods and new processes of commodification. Life put into production and therefore into value manifests itself in the first place as an undertaking of human and social relations. Social cooperation, understood as a set of more or less hierarchical human relationships, becomes the basis of capitalist accumulation. But this is not enough, as underlined by the research of Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby (Cooper and Waldby 2014); the human body itself, and its parts, become more and more the object of commodification and direct production of exchange value.
Recent debates, especially within Autonomous Marxism, have identified in the common a new mode of production (Negri 2016; Vercellone et al. 2015; Vercellone et al. 2017). This is an important aspect for understanding the forms of productive organization, of firm management and of labor.
The second reason to justify the structural change in the accumulation regime after the crisis of Fordism is based on the observation that bio-cognitive capitalism is accompanied by an acceleration of technological progress. There is no certainty that a new technological paradigm is under way, yet a number of trends seem to confirm such a hypothesis. What emerges is a progression in the hybridization between machines and humans in a direction that involves at the same time experimentation with forms of complete automation aimed at replacing the human being in some of their functions, on the one hand; and the becoming-machine of the human body, on the other. The fields of artificial intelligence, biotechnologies, nanotechnologies, the construction of human tissues with genetic experimentation,2 neurosciences, the industry of processing masses of increasingly complex and individualized data (big data), show a distinct process in which the becoming-human of the machine is combined with the becoming-machine of the human. Regardless of the future dynamics that these trajectories will take, although the construction of a “post-human” seems inevitable,3 what we are interested in observing is how the separation between human and machine is lacking. Not only does the relationship between abstract labor and concrete labor (Fumagalli 2007) undergo a twist, but also the relationship between constant and variable capital, between dead labor and living labor tends to change more and more, to the point of engendering a metamorphosis of the capital–labor nexus.
This dynamic poses a series of important theoretical and empirical problems. First, there is a structural change in the form of capital. In large US companies (listed on the Standard & Poor index), it is since the end of the twentieth century that the share of intangible capital (consisting mainly of R&D, brand, communication, and training) has exceeded the tangible one. The composition of investments has changed accordingly. The term human capital has become commonplace. Now the same investment in constant capital has increasingly involved the bios, to the point of making the traditional notion of fixed capital obsolete. Second, these transformations pose measurement problems that cannot always be defined, despite the fact that new indicators have been created, and it is not by chance that they are increasingly correlated to the dynamics of the share value of capital listed on the financial markets.
The third reason concerns the investigation of the new social composition of labor that has resulted from it. We are witnessing the subjective growth of multiple and differentiated works that makes it impossible, in the current state of affairs, to identify a homogeneous social class composition. The coexistence of non-waged forms, of unpaid forms of work (Armano and Murgia 2016; Coin 2017), of forms of semi-slavery, of forms of emotional-cerebral involvement, of direct heteroforms, of forms of third-generation autonomous work (Fumagalli 2015), of forms of self-realization and self-entrepreneurship (for example: the makers) make it difficult to codify both the technical and political composition of labor, provided that these two key expressions of the Autonomist literature still make sense.
The crisis of wage-earning labor, however, does not open up prospects of overcoming the working condition. On the contrary, it further fragments it and depresses it. Symptomatic in this regard is the current tendency to erase the monetary remuneration of a growing number of directly productive work performances that cannot be assimilated to the archipelago of voluntary and “free” work. The spread of unpaid labor does not imply that there is no longer any remuneration or that there is a theft of wages, but rather a new form of remuneration that is not defined by the wage form. We are thus witnessing new ways of labor remuneration, characterized by increasingly symbolic, relational, and immaterial elements.
These dynamics lead us to reconsider the concept of technical composition of labor, especially within a process that moves in the direction of overcoming the human–machine dichotomy. Does this tendency mean that the capital–labor relationship is no longer present? We strongly disagree with that. What is emerging, as is usual in when the dominant technological paradigm changes, is a new configuration of this relationship, where the material element and, consequently, its measure in terms of monetary remuneration, loses its effectiveness to the benefit of a new capital–labor relationship, even more imbued with subjective elements than it previously was.
Current capitalist valorization is increasingly based on the production of subjectivity. Fixed capital hybridizes with variable capital, dead labor with living labor and vice versa. The challenge facing us is not only the reappropriation of our fixed capital but also, and perhaps above all, the capacity for self-managing our variable capital.
The various contributions in this book aim at analyzing the main characteristics of the process of accumulation and enhancement of contemporary capitalism, based on a distinctive methodological approach. The theoretical research in this book moves, in fact, along the lines of the (neo)-workerist methodology, a methodology that takes root in co-research on the working condition of the mass-worker, at the beginning of the 1960s in Italy.
Today we live in structurally different times and face very different theoretical problems and empirical analyses. However, there is a methodological element that links those times to today with a thin red thread. It is the intuition, provided by the militant journal Quaderni Rossi, that the capital–labor relationship involves conflicting subjectivities: different subjectivities that move on different and asymmetrical planes. We can translate this intuition in the terms used by Mario Tronti (2019) in Operai e Capitale, namely in the simple and enlightening observation that labor expresses its own subjectivity (composite, and therefore worth of analysis) which can in any case operate without capital; the same cannot be said of capital, whose existence depends on the relationship with labor and for this reason this latter needs to be subordinated. This book aims to analyze the evolution of this relationship between a full subjectivity (living labor) and a maimed subjectivity (capital’s dead labor), in a historical phase where living knowledge embodied in the general intellect has become, today more than ever, the pivot on which valorization revolves. And there is more: the force of invention and the potential autonomy of labor cooperation also lead to processes of exodus from the wage condition and to the experimentation of alternative forms of self-organization of production based on the common.
All authors argue that an emphasis on this experimental attitude is the shared element of a consistent number of studies on the transformations of the capital–labor relation in the past thirty years, namely since the first researches on post-Fordism were published in the early 1990s. It is a line of research that, today as in the early 1990s, looks with distrust at a sociological approach to the analysis of class conflict, often stiffened in an idea of “class” historically determined and unable to grasp its evolution, which is visible through its subjective changes.4
Today, we speak of “neo-workerism” precisely to underline this methodological red thread. It seems to us that this term is more explicit and theoretically coherent than the term, often used (especially by the adversaries), of “post-workerism,” which carries the typical ambiguity and approximation of all terms that begin with the prefix post-.
The concept of neo-workerism allows us to underline the substantial continuity of a methodology based on the driving role of labor subjectivity, “within and against capital,” despite the changes that have taken place in the object of analysis, that is, the transformations that occurred in the class composition and in the regime of accumulation of capital between the Fordist age of the first workerism of the 1960s and that of cognitive capitalism.
It is clear that the term “neo-workerism” no longer refers to the centrality of the mass-worker of the 1960s or to its evolution into the term “social worker” of the 1970s. But it is precisely this method of research that allows us to say that today “the” central subject of reference of social conflict in industrial capitalism has disappeared.
Precisely for this reason, neo-workerist thought is also anything but homogeneous and cohesive. Consonance with a method of analysis does not directly imply a single theoretical elaboration and a single interpretation of the capital–labor relationship, a relationship always object of metamorphosis (as Marx’s method taught us) and, consequently, political proposals can vary while referring to a common root. The counterproof of this is the current debate between the different analyses on the concept of subsumption: subsumption of the general intellect for some, life subsumption for others, to the point of fearing the uselessness of such a concept in the current capitalist phase.
The index of the book (largely composed of unpublished contributions)is designed precisely to allow the reader to reconstruct the main hypotheses shared by neo-workerist approaches, without however concealing hesitations and doubts, as well as some real differences of analysis regarding the origins, meaning and stakes of the current mutations of capitalism.
In the first chapter, some central hypotheses for a neo-Marxist approach to the thesis of cognitive capitalism are proposed. They are based on an interpretative grid in which the transformations of the role of knowledge in the economy are grasped on the basis of the key role of antagonism between living knowledge of labor and dead knowledge of capital. In this perspective, Vercellone and Giuliani start from a critique of the knowledge-based economy, then show how the thesis of cognitive capitalism constitutes a renewal of the research program of the French Regulation school. Finally, they proceed to the elaboration and interpretation of the main stylized facts that make it possible to diagnose the passage from industrial capitalism to a new phase of capitalism, i.e. cognitive capitalism.
In the second chapter, Vercellone and Dughera specify this research agenda both at the level of its Marxist theoretical foundations and at the level of the main characters of new capitalism. The aim of this contribution is to clarify with precision the logical and historical meaning of the crisis of the law of value founded on labor time and to put it in relation with the tendency of “becoming-rent of profit”. This analysis addresses to two necessities. The first, within the theoretical development of the neo-workerist approach, is to show the close link that unites the theses on the general intellect and the crisis of the law of value, on the one hand, and the analysis of the transformation of the rules of distribution between wages, income and profit, on the other. The second necessity is to put an end to the many misunderstandings that the expression “crisis of the law of value” has caused in hasty readings of the approach of cognitive capitalism, to the point of assimilating it to an abandonment of the Marxist foundations of value and surplus-value theory.
The third chapter by Andrea Fumagalli tries to clarify an issue that has provoked much debate in the past few years, especially in the field of heretic and heterodox thought, that is to say, the analysis of the salient characteristics of the current phase of capitalism. In the past two decades, innovations in the fields of transportation, language, and communication started to gather around a new single paradigm of accumulation and valorization. The new capitalist configuration tends to identify in “knowledge” and “space,” conceived of as productive factors, a new foundation for accumulation. Fumagalli defines the contemporary form of capitalism as bio-cognitive capitalism. Independently of the dominant convention, contemporary capitalism is always in search of new social and vital circles to absorb, and of new means of production to commodify, involving more and more the bare vital faculties of human beings.
Following this reasoning, in Chapter 4, new form of valorization and exploitation in contemporary capitalism are analyzed. Capitalist exploitation is described by Marx with two forms of subsumption: “formal” and “real,” as outcome of the historical evolution of capitalism and the continuous metamorphosis of the capital–labor ratio. Those two subsumptions refer to two different concepts of surplus value: absolute and relative. Nowadays, in time of bio-cognitive capitalism, we see a new metamorphosis of the capital–labor ratio and the emergence of a new form of subsumption, which Fumagalli proposes to define life subsumption, as a result of the entire life (body, soul, brain) being put to work, then to value.
In the fifth chapter, Fumagalli and Lucarelli provide a theoretical framework to describe the shift from a monetary production economy to a financial production economy. In accordance with the Schumpeterian perspective, this framework points to both the monetary-financial nature of, and qualitative changes in, the capitalist system. The financialization of the monetary economy of production can be better explained if we understand the shift to a new technological paradigm as a general outlook on the productive problems faced by firms, whereby the relevance of the so-called immaterial production takes on greater importance.
Chapter 6, written by Fumagalli and Lucarelli, describes the main features of the accumulation paradigm in cognitive capitalism. It provides a theoretical framework of it and discusses the conditions of stability and instability of the model. In cognitive capitalism instability turns out to be structural. Once competition has become a specific productive factor, new light can be shed on the uncertainty which characterize economic activities. Such light can then better explain the causes of systemic instabilities.
In the seventh chapter, Vercellone and Giuliani go back to the contradiction between cognitive capitalism and the knowledge-based economy in order to show how it generated the development of a new “mode of production” founded on the common. A twofold process must be highlighted: while traditional and more distributive forms of capital–labor antagonism seemed to be decreasing in their intensity, the development of a collective intelligence disclosed a new conflict zone directly on the ground of the development of productive forces. Both its size and penetration in different sectors would be unimaginable in a Fordist context. Politically speaking, however, a wide variety of scenarios can be envisaged. The extreme plasticity on which the resilience of capitalism depends (Braudel 1967) and its ability to integrate “artistic criticism and social criticism” as an engine of its development (Boltanski and Chiappello 1999), have already allowed it to subsume within its logic of enhancement consistent forms of production based on the common.
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