It all begins with the “becoming-rent of profit.” This process is intrinsic to the financialization of the capitalist mode of production and gets even more complex once cognitive capital turns into the core of the accumulation process. The consequences are remarkable, especially considering neoliberal policies aimed at desocializing the economy. As is well known, the goal of such measures is to enlarge market spaces through an ever-increasing colonization of welfare institutions by deepening both precariousness and individualization of wage relations. Vercellone, Giuliani, and Dughera emphasize that the emergence of cognitive capitalism entails a rupture within the mode of production and regulation of the knowledge economy—a rupture which is particularly based on knowledge and the immaterial becoming the key value source, so that the composition of fixed capital is perturbed. Fumagalli and Lucarelli emphasize that such composition in structurally fragile. This is especially clear once two assumptions are considered: first, knowledge and the immaterial are central features of fixed capital; rhythms and modalities of innovation not only accelerate (to the point of imposing a new international division of labor) but dramatize the productive process by affecting the relationship between capital and labor between fixed capital and living labor. Precarization and individualization, destabilization of collective welfare provisions and privatization of knowledge definitely signal such condition as a character of permanent crisis within knowledge economy.
More analytically in cognitive capitalism, the boundaries between profit and income disintegrate; the role of rent is not only a way of extracting value but constitutes an inextricable mechanism of desocialization of the common and of the politics, through spatial and socio-economic segmentations of the labor force” (see p. 000).
From this consideration derives, according in particular to Fumagalli and Lucarelli’s essays in this volume, a structural requalification and a spatial recollocation of processes of value extraction. The “becoming-rent of profit” discloses a bio-cognitive capitalism since capital freely benefits from collective knowledge produced by society as if it were a “gift of nature.” Bio-cognitive capitalism can, in this case, be seen as an anthropogenetic model of production and accumulation—and (ironically!) an enrichment of “human nature” and of society. This welcome effect is, however, prevented by intellectual property rights (in the context of more general sovereign requalifications of property), which develop a profound effect of privatization, of direct capitalist appropriation, and of financialization of “the common” (“the gift of human nature”). From this Fumagalli deduces (in an economistic reading on which also Vercellone, Giuliani and Lucarelli may converge) that, once the system is faced with such need of “the common,” it presents threatening unbalances and is made more and more fragile by the ever-increasing privatization of the common—only a generalized “basic income,” he concludes, could bring the system back to a form of equilibrium. Yet, isn’t it the case that such arguments (almost a renewal, mutatis mutandis, of the Keynesian approach) channel the analysis towards a balanced system when it is known, and politically desired, that this balance cannot be realized? I believe that this first take on cognitive capitalism within the current, financialized mode of production opens up, rather than prevents, a space of contamination with different approaches and points of view. As if insisting on the analysis of bio-cognitive capital represents, at last, a new beginning for the political experience of class struggle.
It is not by chance, thus, that the analysis comes back to the capital–labor relation; better: the link between variable capital and constant capital. What does this cognitive figure modify with regard to the capital relation? And how? How does a conflictual practice get determined—if it still gets determined—within knowledge economy? On this terrain, two options emerge: the first is, so to speak, external. Knowledge which is incorporated and mobilized by labor is described against the background of the technical and social division of labor and of the institutional mechanisms that determine a general level of Bildung (education) for the working class as a whole. A second option is, as it were, internal: knowledge (installed on variable capital) is incorporated by capital and somehow essentially presents itself as constant capital. Both Vercellone and Fumagalli and Lucarelli insist on the importance of the external relation: the cognitive and relational dimensions of labor in its relationship with capital (and the relative autonomy of variable capital as well as the autonomy of living labor) are determined by the social conditions and collective productions of welfare policies—namely the ways in which the “production of man by means of man” takes place and develops. More extensively, such externality is repeatedly proclaimed in the volume, especially by Fumagalli and Lucarelli, when bio-cognitive capitalism is said to essentially ground its process of accumulation on the dynamic of network economies and knowledge-learning processes that traverse social spaces, with a fundamental dematerialization of constant capital and the transposition of productive and organizational functions of capital onto the “living body of labor-power.”
However, Vercellone and Giuliani attenuate such generically “humanist” conception by underlining the fact that
The dynamics of the common expresses the vital force of the knowledge economy that comes from the meeting of collective intelligence, the development of welfare institutions and finally the ICT of the digital revolution. This dynamic directly enters in contradiction with the logic of cognitive capitalism based on commodification, ownership and industrialization (corporatization = entrepreneurship) of knowledge.
(p. 164)
Also Fumagalli, more cautiously, in Chapter 4 of this volume, attenuates the degree of heterogeneity of the forms of accumulation generated by the separation of the human element from the machinic one; here he rather stresses the hybridization of such realities, of such process.
Yet this line of external relationship between capital and cognitive labor is still fundamental. Its importance is shown by the emphasis on the forms in which welfare provisions constitute a huge space of knowledge production. Exactly such emphasis, however, should bring about a complementary observation: here what gets highlighted is the alternative, internal line. The analysis now assumes as a key factor, beyond the effects of constant and variable capital clashing on the social field, also the appropriation of fixed capital by workers, by living labor.
This determination becomes more and more important in so far as the capitalist mode of production crosses cognitive living labor. Crossing: namely, capital exploits living cognitive labor, extracts value from it, looks for appropriating it but, simultaneously, clashes with it. “We must hear the distant roar of battle,” said someone who studied such crossing. If it is true that cognitive living labor, unfolded and spread on the biopolitical terrain, turns into the force that challenges capitalist accumulation (this is the external scenario), it is equally true that constant capital is made more flexible by this clash and is more and more diluted on the social and productive terrain as it confronts the singular performances of productive subjects and the qualitative self-valorization of living labor. On this terrain—namely that on which constant capital seems to dissolve in the battle against living labor, on which capital’s productive force seems to be overcome by the power of living labor (variable capital)—the internal line of appropriation of fixed capital by living labor appears to become more and more central, more and more consistent.
Thus, it seems to me insufficient to only pay attention to that process which installs on welfare institutions—namely on the enlargement of the wage-sphere—the paradigm of the current transformation of variable capital. The importance of this form of socialization should not be denied. However, it is still essential to keep into account the appropriation of fixed capital by workers. The anthropological transformation which follows such determination, as shown more than once by Christian Marazzi, seems preferable if the critique of political economy is to be followed by indications for class struggle—in this case, for processes of subjectification. And I believe all of us share the idea of deriving political indications from economic analysis.
Finally, let me elaborate on the central argument of the book, namely the continuity of the process of subsumption through its “formal” and “real” phases until a third form, the “subsumption of the General Intellect.” As it is well known, the emergence of the General Intellect corresponds to the structural crisis of industrial capitalism as determined by working-class struggles and by the key qualitative role of knowledge within living labor incorporated in fixed capital. Vercellone and Dughera connect the hypothesis of this third phase of subsumption, marked by the identification of the General Intellect, to the recent development of the Regulation Theory. This latter—according to them—skims over such passage without fully grasping it: this happens because Regulation theorists lack a historically correct analysis of capitalist development and, consequently, do not dispose of adequate concepts. However, Vercellone especially insists that Marx’s analysis of rent in volume III of Capital introduces—just as the Grundrisse—an adequate conception of the General Intellect. These pages are of great value.
Let me come back to the issue at stake: all the authors share the refusal (with the exception of few economistic passages) of a teleological definition of the subsequent shifts from one form of subsumption to another. Their insistence on the non-teleological nature of phases development is appreciable: history is not a linear process and, rather, proceeds by hybridizations and superimpositions, articulations and subsumptions of different modes of accumulation. In my opinion, however, it should be retained that such process is tendential. What does tendential mean? Tendency does not refer to a determinist direction, a Darwinian movement—although it describes an evolution. Moreover, such evolution—with its interplay of tendencies and countertendencies (as is analyzed in Capital more than once)—shows that capital is fragile in its development and that the organic composition of capital always presents itself differently as it registers the impact of social movements and of workers’ struggles. From another point of view, in fact, the organic composition of capital should and must be seen as a composition that mutates according to the balance of power between classes. If there is tendency, thus, countertendency invariably arises. For example, referring to the case object of this study, both the appropriation of fixed capital by workers and the possible consideration of welfare policies as an autonomous space for variable capital lower the organic composition of capital. Moreover, as it is well known, both these lines of appropriation of fixed capital and of enrichment of variable capital productive capacity install the “figure of the common” within duration. It is only in this way that the hoary “problem of amortization,” which is to say of the productivity of fixed capital over time, can be solved. My hope is that we can come back to discussing this point soon in the future.
What do we learn from this volume? Essentially, we learn that class politics needs to keep together appropriation of fixed capital and welfare provisions, dismantling of capital and de-stabilization of its political system.