Andrea Fumagalli
In this chapter, our aim is twofold. On the one hand, it is an attempt at systematizing a series of reflections and concepts elaborated by a number of studies that appeared in the past decade. This research comes from scholars in different disciplines who identify, even in their internal differences, with a method of analysis rooted in the Italian workerist thought of the 1960s. For this reason, it is a work in progress and has no pretense of being exhaustive.1 On the other hand, it ambitiously tries to communicate and 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 state of capitalism. From the very title, we formulate a thesis: the contemporary form of capitalism is defined in a univocal way as bio-cognitive capitalism. The twenty theses that follow are a means of justifying this definition.
In the past forty years, the current process of capitalist accumulation and valorization has assumed different names: the most common of these, post-Fordism, is also the oldest. The term post-Fordism became popular during the 1990s, especially through the French école de la regulation. 2 The term, however, is not without its ambiguities and diverse interpretations, as are all terms defined in a negative way. Our idea is that with the term post-Fordism we define the period, from the 1975 crisis to the early 1990s crisis, during which the process of accumulation and valorization is no longer based on the centrality of Fordist material production, the vertically integrated, large factory. At the same time, in this period, we do not yet possess an alternative paradigm. Unsurprisingly, in the prefix post- we express what is no longer there, without underlining what actually appears in the present. The post-Fordist phase is in fact characterized by the conjoined presence of more productive models: from the Japanese Toyotist model of the “just in time” derived from Taylorism3 to the industrial district model of small enterprises4 and the development of productive lines that tend to become international according to a hierarchy.5 Among these models, it is still impossible to identify a hegemonic paradigm.
After the First Gulf War, 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” (geographic and virtual) as commodities a new foundation for dynamic skills of accumulation. As a consequence, two new dynamic economies of scale are formed, which are the basis for the growth in productivity (or, the source of surplus value): learning economies and network economies. The first are connected to the process of generation and creation of new knowledge (based on new systems of communication and information technologies and today the manipulation and processing of increasing share of data); the second derive from the organizational modalities of each district (territorial networks or system areas), which are no longer used for production and distribution only but increasingly as a vehicle of diffusion (and control) of knowledge and technological progress, the “right” environment in which social cooperation and reproduction can be fostered. We can name this paradigm of accumulation cognitive capitalism. 6
The term capitalism designates the permanence, though metamorphic, of the
fundamental variables of the capitalistic system: the leading role of profit, and the wage system in particular, or more precisely, the different forms of employed labor from which surplus value is extracted. The attribute cognitive evidences the new nature of labor, of the sources of valorization and property structure, on which the process of accumulation is founded, and the contradictions that this mutation generates.
(Lebert and Vercellone 2006: 36)
The centrality of learning and network economies, typical of cognitive capitalism, is put into question at the beginning of the new millennium, following the bursting of the Internet economy bubble and its speculations, in March 2000. The new cognitive paradigm alone is unable to protect the socio-economic system from the structural instability that characterizes it. It is also necessary for new liquidity to be directed into the financial markets. The ability of financial markets to generate “value” is tied to the development of “conventions” (speculative bubbles) which can create somewhat homogeneous expectations, thereby pushing the main financial operators to support certain types of financial activities (Orléan 2009). What the Internet economy did in the 1990s was followed in the 2000s by the great attraction to the development of Asian markets (China entered the World Trade Organization in December 2001) and real estate. Today, the focus is mostly on the performance of European welfare. Independently of the dominant convention, contemporary capitalism is always in search of new social and vital circles to absorb and commodify, involving more and more the bare vital faculties of human beings. It is for this reason that in the last few years we have been hearing about bioeconomy and biocapitalism. 7
At this point, the reader should clearly understand how the term used in these pages is nothing but the contraction between cognitive capitalism and biocapitalism: bio-cognitive capitalism is the phrase that defines contemporary capitalism.
Financial markets are the pulsating heart; knowledge is the brain; relational activities are the nervous system. Bio-cognitive capitalism is a single body, inside of which the “real” sphere cannot be separated from the “financial,” nor can the productive sphere be separated from the unproductive, or work-time from life-time, or production from reproduction and consumption.
In a broader sense, financialization marks the definitive passage from commodity money to sign money (Amato and Fantacci 2009: 65–90). With the complete dematerialization of money (after the Bretton Woods crash in 1971, marking the end of the convertibility of the dollar to gold), financial markets define the social and hierarchic conventions that are able to secure short-term monetary value. At the same time, they leave open the relations of debit and credit, provided sufficient trust is generated in the operators. From this viewpoint, financial markets lubricate the process of accumulation. In the capitalistic system, in fact, there is no accumulation without debt. It is no coincidence that, from the 1990s onward, financial markets have taken care of financing accumulation activities: the liquidity drawn by financial markets rewards the restructuring of production aimed at exploiting knowledge and the control of spaces external to the enterprise. Second, in the presence of surplus value, financial markets have the same role in the current economic system that the Keynesian multiplier (activated by deficit spending) had in industrial-Fordist capitalism. However, unlike the classic Keynesian multiplier, the new financial multiplier leads to a distorted redistribution of revenues. For such multiplier to be operative (> 1), the financial basis (that is, the extension of financial markets) must be constantly growing, and the capital gain must be, on average, higher than the median salary loss. On the other hand, the polarization of revenues increases the risk of debt insolvency, which is the basis of the growth of the very financial foundation, and reduces the median salary.8 Third, financial markets, forcibly channeling growing portions of work revenues (such as severance indemnity and social security, as well as earnings that, through the social state, turn into institutions for health and public education), substitute in this way the state as a social provider. From this point of view, financial markets represent the privatization of the reproductive sphere of life. Finally, financial markets are the place where today capitalistic valorization is established, that is, the place where the exploitation of social cooperation and of the general intellect is measured by way of the dynamic of stock-market values. As a consequence, profit transforms into rent (see Thesis 3), and financial markets become the place where labor value is determined and transformed into finance value. The latter is nothing other than the subjective expression of the expectation of future profits articulated by financial markets, which in this way secure a rent. Financial markets thus exercise biopower (Lucarelli 2010).
Rent is the main capturing tool of both surplus value and the desocialization/privatization of what is common. The meaning and the key role of this becoming-rent of profit can be appreciated at two levels. On the one hand, this process is evident at the level of the social organization of production and of the distribution of revenues: the criteria underlying the traditional distinction between profit and rent become less and less pertinent. The confusion of the frontiers between rent and profit finds one of its expressions in the way in which financial power remodels the very criteria of company governance under the sole aim of creating value for the shareholder. In cognitive biocapitalism, not only do we witness the final decline of the Weberian entrepreneur (the figure combining the functions of ownership and direction of the firm, who had already partly disappeared in industrial-Fordist capitalism after the marginalist revolution of the 1930s). We also see the irreversible crisis of the Galbraithian techno-structure, legitimized in its role by the planning of innovation and the organization of labor. The new governance of today’s companies is increasingly founded on a type of management whose principal competence is exercising financial and speculative functions while delegating to employed labor the real functions of the organization of production.
On the other hand, the competitiveness of a company is largely dependent not on internal economies but on external ones, that is to say on the ability to capture productive surpluses that come from the cognitive resources of a territory. Capital, then, does benefit freely from the collective knowledge of society, as if it were a “gift of nature.” From this point of view, the becoming-rent of profit takes the form of a privatization of what is common,10 gaining revenues from the creation of a scarcity of resources that is only artificial. It is the common that links together, in a single logic, the rent coming from real-estate speculation and financial rent, which, since the beginning of the 1980s, played a major role in fiscal crisis and the dismantling of welfare-state institutions, as a result of the privatization of currency and public debt. The becoming-rent of profit derives, then, from the attempt at privatizing knowledge and life (bios). This is achieved thanks to a politics promoting the reinforcement of intellectual property rights so that the cost of numerous commodities is kept artificially high, although their reproduction costs are extremely low or even close to zero.
Productive activity is increasingly based on immaterial elements, that is to say, on intangible “raw materials,” which are very hard to measure and quantify and which come directly from the utilization of the relational, sentimental, and cerebral faculties of human beings. The process of valorization loses, in this way, the measuring unit usually connected to material production. This measure used to be somewhat defined according to the necessary amount of labor needed for the production of commodities, measurable on the basis of the tangibility of production and the necessary time for production. With the advent of cognitive capitalism, valorization tends to graft itself onto different forms of labor, which go beyond the official work-time and coincide more and more with the whole lifetime. Today, the value of labor at the basis of biocapitalistic accumulation is also the value of knowledge, of affects and relationships; it is the value of the imaginary and the symbolic (cf. Thesis 15).
The activity of production is carried out with different organizational modes, which are characterized by a network structure, thanks to the development of technologies for linguistic communication and transportation. What follows is a disruption of the traditional and unilateral hierarchic form typical of the factory. This is substituted by hierarchic structures activated on the territory along sub-supply production chains and characterized by relations of cooperation and/or control.
Knowledge can be divided into four levels: (1) information; (2) codified knowledge; (3) tacit knowledge; and (4) culture (or systemic knowledge), characterized by unilateral relations of dependence. Information is the basic level of knowledge that is more and more incorporated into the machine element. Codified knowledge is a specialized knowledge (a know-how) that derives from tacit knowledge but that is transmitted through standardized procedures, with machines as intermediary, as a consequence of which its bearer can be substituted at any moment, having no contractual power. Tacit knowledge can derive from personal learning processes, or from specific investments in R&D (thanks to intellectual property rights); furthermore, at least until codified, it can only be transmitted through a human being, thus possibly generating forms of enclosures. Those who possess tacit knowledge, which is relevant for the productive process, therefore have a high contractual power and define the hierarchical structure of labor and production. However, tacit knowledge, if relevant, is destined to transform into codified knowledge, sooner or later, and thus lose value. Lastly, culture is the set of knowledges that allows one to hold the intellectual function, that is to say, the ability to act critically and creatively, not immediately subsumed to the logic of biocapitalist valorization. As a consequence, culture is dangerous for the reproducibility of the socio-economic system, and it constitutes also a surplus that exceeds control.
This derives from the fact that nomadic individualities are put to work, and the primacy of private rights over workers’ rights brings about a transformation of the contribution of individualities, especially if characterized by cognitive, relational, and affective activities, into contractual individualism. Work relations based on precarious conditions, that is to say, the temporal limit and spatial mobility of labor, are the basic paradigm in which the relationship between capital and labor takes place. Precarity then becomes a structural, existential, and generalized condition.
If knowledge is the basis of accumulation, it becomes unavoidable to analyze how its exchange and diffusion affect the dynamics of productivity. The peculiarity of bio-cognitive capitalism is its ability to enlarge both knowledge-learning processes and network economies. Learning economies depend on the degree of cumulativeness, opportunity and appropriability (Nelson and Winter 1982). Here, opportunity is defined as the expected rate of profit and, therefore, the higher the expected profit in adopting a new technology, the higher is the speed of its diffusion. Cumulativeness and appropriability represent the capacity of new knowledge to generate further innovation while avoiding the possibility of its imitation, thanks to the existence of intellectual property rights. Network economies depend on the level of income and positive externalities. When learning economies are constrained by intellectual property rights, we shall see that the consequence is that the greater the degree of appropriability of knowledge, the smaller becomes its capacity of diffusion—affecting, de facto, its ability to positively influence the associated productivity.11While it is during the learning process that the generation of knowledge occurs, network economies define the way in which the produced knowledge is diffused. In a social system geared around innovation and production, investment policies depend upon R&D and “learning by doing” strategies and processes. In cognitive biocapitalism, the impact of new information and communication technologies based on computer science, micro-electronics and the new organizational productive changes (e.g., just-in-time, zero stock) have sped up the “learning by doing” processes, spreading them well beyond the firm. At the same time, part of the R&D process unfolds within territories each having one or more specific competencies. Where to locate economic activities is determined mainly by the search on the part of the firm for advantages in the development of its competencies (Mouhoud 2006). Consequently, the productivity entailed by the exchange of knowledge cannot be assimilated to material productivity.
This process lies at the origin of one of the paradoxes of new capitalism: the contradiction between the rise in importance of cognitive work as a lever for the production of wealth and, at the same time, the devaluation of that work as far as salary and the profession are concerned. This paradox is inherent in Marazzi’s definition of “the anthropogenetic character of contemporary capitalistic production,” underlined in one of his essays.12 In bio-cognitive capitalism, the living being contains within itself the functions of both fixed and variable capital, that is, of both the material and machinery forms of labor belonging to the past and of the living labor of the present: bios.
First of all, what Marx used to call “concrete labor,” or labor producing use value, can be renamed today creative labor. 13 This term allows us to better understand the cerebral contribution inherent in such activity, while the term “concrete labor,” though being conceptually its synonym, refers more to the realm of “making” than to that of “thinking,” with a closer allusion to craftsmanship proper.
Space, be it geographic or virtual, becomes a place of production no longer characterized by a unique and self-centered presence but rather by an ensemble of polycentric formal and informal networks. Production is the result of a flux structure, and such flux is always more immaterial or redesigned and directed by immaterial networks, especially when the commodities produced are material. A flux structure presupposes the centrality of linguistic networks of communication and the development of social cooperation. Such cooperation involves both the transmission of symbols and the logistical transportation of commodities and goods. Within this space, however, cooperation, which is far from being horizontal, develops along new trajectories of spatial partition of production, and cognitive division of labor. Reticular production—the network—is, in other words, a molecular space, and as such it is individualized, characterized by individual relations that most of the time produce cooperation in the end, but are not necessarily cooperative with one another.
The value of commodities is no longer definable only along the lines of necessary “work-time”. To that value, which does not disappear, another value is added, which derives from the degree of social symbolicity [simbolicità] that the commodity contains. The symbolic value of commodities increases in direct relation to their level of immateriality. It is in this field that the relation between production and realization (consumption) of commodities is played out. Not only does consumption realize the value of commodities, but it valorizes them at the same time (Arvidsson 2005).
The labor-value theory becomes a life theory of value (Fumagalli and Morini 2011). This happens through the valorization of the differences that individuals possess. These differences, in their uniqueness, make possible the relational activities that are the basis of the social cooperation producing general intellect. Beside the general differences based on race, gender, and so on, we need to add up differences tout court, which are valorized without any relation to the anthropological characteristics that define them. What is now starting to be segmented and divided are cerebral differences, that is to say, individualities. Spatial and biologic differences, gender and race in particular, can at most be instruments for the immediate disciplining of the social body. The preoccupying emerging tendency, however, is the constitution of a human subjectivity characterized by the contradictory conflict between creative actions and cerebral standardization: the creation of a sort of bionic being, capable of managing the anthropogenetic process of production. These elements suggest a world where individuality is erased but individualism is exalted. Bio-cognitive capitalism is bioeconomic production: it is bioeconomy.
The traditional binary dichotomies inherited from industrial-Fordist capitalism are no longer topical. We are witnessing the overcoming of the separation between life-time and work-time. As soon as work activities use the vital faculties of individuals, it becomes impossible to define a temporal barrier between work time and non-work time. Even if this distinction can nominally continue to exist on a formal-juridical level, the difference between life and work no longer exists in reality, and this is also due to the new language and communication technologies. Life appears completely subsumed into work. We are also witnessing the overcoming of the separation between workplace and life space. The multiple forms of bio-labor are in fact nomadic labor, where mobility is a primary requisite. This phenomenon leads to the definition of non-places of work, as opposed to classic forms of domestication. In this case, indeed, we should not talk about a coincidence between workplace and life space but rather about the expropriation of the workplace, and of all possible consequences that this process might have on work identity. We are witnessing the overcoming of the separation between production and reproduction. This is the first consequence of life becoming work. When we talk about life, we do not only mean it as directly finalized to productive activity but also to the social reproduction of life itself—a clear example of which is the almost exclusively female caretaking work. But, not only: Social reproduction is going to have a preeminent role in the present valorization when it has to do with welfare, health, and education conditions (Morini 2013). Having said this, we can state that the erasure of this distinction implies the partial overcoming of the specific gender difference and poses the question of differences tout court (Morini 2013). In conclusion, we are witnessing the overcoming of the separation between production, circulation, and consumption. In bio-cognitive capitalism, the act of consumption is, at the same time, a participation of public opinion, an act of communication, and self-marketing. In this sense, it allows further valorization of the commodities (see Thesis 10).
The general intellect is the outcome of basic social cooperation: it allows the passage from tacit knowledge to codified knowledge as social knowledge. This passage is regulated by the evolution of the juridical forms of intellectual property rights. Such a property is thereby added to that of the means of production, giving private property the control of the process of generation (intellectual property) and diffusion of knowledge (ownership of the means of production). Since the exploitation of the general intellect implies the valorization of the very existence of individuals, the process of value creation is no longer limited to the workday but extends to include the entire human existence. This means that the measure of exploitation is not really the time of the workday generating surplus work but rather that part of the life span that is necessary to generate tacit knowledge—and hence social knowledge—which is then expropriated by the process of accumulation. The effective and direct forms with which the expropriation of the general intellect creates value can be different. Among these, the valorization of commodities through the branding process is particularly significant. The value of commodities increases together with the increase of their symbolic meaning and of their ability to create an imaginary which is shared by consumers. Even in this case, surplus value originates from totally immaterial elements created by behavioral conventions and by shared relational activities, just as happens for the financial markets. If private ownership of the means of production implies partly stealing the workday and allowing for the generation of surplus work, private intellectual property is then the theft of social knowledge understood as commonwealth [bene comune]. In bio-cognitive capitalism, creation of value happens through the expropriation of the “common.”14
One of the primary elements for the constitution of commonwealth, beyond the general intellect, is the social reproduction. It is the result of the (re)productive commonwealth, generated not only by the care work but by the same welfare, in a broader sense. After the dismantling of the public welfare system, as it was known after the Second World War period, today, welfare is becoming a “mode of production,”15 that is, the source of a direct capitalistic valorization. Social reproduction at the same time is a paradigmatic representation of the potential power of the commonwealth and of its expropriation, through privatization and gender discrimination.
The idea of basic income is centered on the concept of “remuneration” or “compensation” and not of support or assistance (subsidies, transfer payments, etc.). The logic that justifies its existence is then completely opposed to the doxastic interpretation of the current situation, that is, to measures which would guarantee a continuity of revenue in a temporary, conditioned way.16 In the present context of bio-cognitive capitalism, wealth is divided between those whose life becomes value (all residents regardless of citizenship, etc.), on the one hand, and all those (much less) who create value from the private appropriation of common goods [beni comuni] (exploitation of intellectual property rights, of the territory, of financial flux, etc.), or who profit from productive and service activities. As a consequence, basic income is by definition unconditioned and perpetual (for the duration of one’s life).In other words, basic income is nothing other, today, than the equivalent of salary in Fordist times (Fumagalli 2009).
The welfare of the common is based on two important concepts. On the one hand, the guarantee of a continuity of unconditioned revenue, disregarding working conditions, professional, or citizenship status. This is complementary to any other form of direct revenue, as compensation for the productive social cooperation that forms the basis of value creation, currently expropriated for private rent and profit. On the other hand, access to common material and immaterial goods that allows full participation in social life by way of the free fruition of common natural/environmental goods (water, air, environment) and immaterial common goods (knowledge, mobility, socialization, currency, primary social services).
We are witnessing an ethical overturning of how we conceive of actual work activity. If in industrial-Fordist capitalism the right to work is the foundation of many national constitutions (the Italian first of all) as well as the first objective of union struggle as a pass to revenue stability and the enjoyment of civil rights, in cognitive biocapitalism, insofar as life itself is productive, the necessity of work has largely taken up a function of blackmailing and control of the actual work activity and is increasingly less relevant to accumulation. From this point of view, capital tends to reach “autonomy,” even though it still depends on the social connections that are inherent in the relationship between labor and capital. In contrast, the right to choose one’s work opens the path to autonomous work, and for this reason this objective is not compatible with the current capitalistic valorization or subsumed by it. In other words, if in industrial-Fordist capitalism the right to work was, on the one hand, functional to the process of accumulation, while, on the other, it represented the basic condition for the right to struggle, in bio-cognitive capitalism the right to choose one’s work is uniquely the right of subversion.
No new new deal is possible. And this is increasingly true the more we seem to detect measures that favor a re-stabilizing of the process of accumulation. These measures promote a salary regulation based on the proposition of basic income and a productive ability founded on free circulation of knowledge. These proposals, from a purely theoretical and economic point of view, could have the effect of exploiting the economies of learning in a better way (a continuity of revenue increments the ability and intensity of learning). They could also better exploit network economies (the free circulation of knowledge augments their diffusion and valorisation). As a consequence, they could compensate for the structural instability deriving from the distorted effects of financialization on productive activity and revenue distribution. In any case, these measures would undermine the very nature of the capitalist system, that is to say, the necessity of work, the blackmailing allowed by differences in revenues as an instrument of domination of a class over another, and the principle of private ownership of the means of production (machines yesterday, knowledge today). In other words, we can conclude that in bio-cognitive capitalism a possible social Keynesian compromise, one adequate to the characteristics of the new process of accumulation, is possible only in theory, but could not be carried out politically sic rebus stantibus. A real reformist politics that can guarantee structural stability of the paradigm of bio-cognitive capitalism (which would tend to individuate a form of mediation between labor and capital that is satisfying for both, without paving the way to the overcoming of this very economic system) cannot exist. Let us clarify this point: a possible social compromise based on basic income and the free diffusion of knowledge and other common goods undermines the basis, the real foundations of the capitalistic economic system, that is, the necessity of work to live (hence its subaltern condition), and private property as a source of accumulation. Such compromise is not possible, unless it is imposed by force (Fumagalli and Negri 2008).
Acknowledgments
This chapter has been already published on Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, vol. 16, 2011, pp. 7–17, under the title: “Twenty Theses on Contemporary Capitalism (Cognitive Biocapitalism).”
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