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<DIV>
<DIV>Very Sweet Paolo especially the very last
question suggesting "not of but from labor" I was noticing how
much Marx talked about cooperation when teaching Capital this
semester. And this doubleness alienation-cooperation
made me think how the psyche as explored by Freud and his others might
really need to be rethought beyond thermodynamics as one feature of work to
be done to understand the move from immaterial labor to the
commons--- not sure that word is so good. </DIV>
<DIV>Hope to see you at the conference Patricia </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>In a message dated 10/20/2009 1:21:08 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
carpi@newschool.edu writes:</DIV>
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<P style="MIN-HEIGHT: 14px; MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 12px Helvetica"> Hello,<BR
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<DIV style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 12px Helvetica">I am Paolo Carpignano. I
am Associate Professor of Media Studies and Sociology at the New School. This
semester I teach a course called The Political Economy of Media which focuses
specifically on the relationship between work and media and thus it deals with
some of the themes of the conference on Digital Labor. In fact, attending the
conference is one of the class assignments this semester. </DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 12px Helvetica">Also, the Vera List Center
asked me to respond to the Changing Labor Value panel, one of the Preludes to
the conference. What you will find below is my response in the form of a
posting that I wrote for my class discussion. </DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 12px Helvetica">I know that it is too long
and not very good for the format of this online discussion but Trebor
suggested that I post it anyway.</DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 12px Helvetica">So, here it is:</DIV>
<DIV style="MIN-HEIGHT: 14px; MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 12px Helvetica"><FONT
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<DIV style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 12px Helvetica">Response to the Changing Labor
Value panel</DIV>
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face=Arial size=2></FONT><BR></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 12px Helvetica">It might be useful to start
from the differences. Had Richard Sennet participated, as it was announced
originally, it would have been easier. After all his work is representative of
a very learned but moderately progressive critique of the current problems of
labor and it would have provided a more clear-cut counterpart to the more
radical and transformative approaches of Andrew Ross and Tiziana Terranova
(from now on AR and TT). In their case, difference might be too strong a word.
It might be more appropriate to talk about degrees of emphasis. Yet, I am
going to highlight a few areas where, in my opinion, they diverge in the hope
of adding some clarity to the current discourse on the nature of labor and on
its possible political ramifications.</DIV>
<DIV style="MIN-HEIGHT: 14px; MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 12px Helvetica"><FONT
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<DIV style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 12px Helvetica">There is a strong sense of
continuity, almost inevitability in the picture that AR gives of the current
restructuring of labor, particularly in the case of the so called creative
industries and new media industries, resulting in a high degree of flexibility
and precariousness of working conditions. AR explicitly claims that such
restructuring is but the latest stage of a trend that started in the 1920’s
under the managerial practices of Human Relations. I find this assertion
rather problematic because either it is too general a statement about the
constant attempt on the part of capital to regiment its workforce by force or
inducement (and in this case it can be applied to the history of capitalism
even before the advent of Human Relations), or, if it is the result of a
comparative analysis of specific managerial strategies , it misses the
important point that the current capitalist turn in regards to labor is a
repudiation of Human Relations’ theories and practices of the past. In fact,
at the risk of simplifying, one can say that the break between Fordism and
Post-Fordism, consists, to a great degree, in the substitution of Human
Relations with what it is often called distributed management or self
management, and therefore with an entirely new conception of what management
and labor are. Historically, Human Relations were developed to respond to the
failure of Taylorism and Scientific Management in order to create a docile
work force that could be molded to fit the dictates of standardized mass
production (the assembly line being the epitome of such arrangement),
and to recognize the need to deal with workers subjectivity and their
rebellion to work rules and rhythms. Thus, Human Relations began to consider
the work force as a counterpart to be dealt with through some form of
communication and negotiation. It led eventually to the recognition of shop
floor representation albeit with a clear separation of management from waged
labor. More broadly, it corresponded to the dialectics of classes of the
Keynesian system and of the welfare state. The neoliberal turn and the
Post-Fordist mode of production have drastically changed the terms of
engagement. In rethinking the enterprise, to the point of envisioning
its disappearance in a series of distributes entities, current management
theory tries to capture the realities of a drastically reconfigured labor
dynamics characterized by work teams, temporary employment, flexible skills
and amateur “free labor” . But for AR these new realities are but an extension
of old Human Relations strategies. The difference today is only in the degree
of “permissiveness” (his word). It is not by chance that for AR Harry
Braverman is a paradigmatic author. Capitalism leads inevitably to a
progressive impoverishment of the quality of labor and to a socialization of
alienation and exploitation, a sort of proletarianization of the whole society
that might not take the form of deskilling, as Braverman claims, but that
nevertheless leads to even worse conditions of sacrificial labor and self
exploitation.</DIV>
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<DIV style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 12px Helvetica">For TT, instead, the importance
of the present restructuring consists in the novelty and discontinuity that
they represent in relation to the previous social economic formation. TT is
interested in understanding the current changes in managerial practices, but
also in reading these changes against the grain, so to speak , from the other
side of the relationships of production. Thus, she is interested in analyzing
not only the new forms of extraction of value from labor, but also the new
subjective practices that accompany and shape those relations, and in drawing
implications for a new political strategy. Interestingly enough it is Marx
that provides a guide for the understanding of the present turn in the nature
of labor. Marx shows that there are always two inextricably connected sides of
the labor process: the side of exploitation and alienation, and the side of
cooperation. In general, the Marxist tradition has emphasized the former and
left the latter to the realm of politics and consciousness, beyond the labor
process. Yet, the changing nature of labor in Post-Fordism has shifted the
balance of productive forces on the side of cooperation. Increasingly, it is
social engagement, both in the sense of interpersonal relationship and
symbiosis with technological artifacts, that drives innovation and creativity
to the center of production by transforming machinery into media. But
cooperation is also the site of subjective practices of resistance, and here
is where TT sees the opening of new possibilities for alternative forms of
production. We could say succinctly that where AR is describing the new
conditions of labor as a social factory, TT sees them as a factory of the
social. Work in the new productive landscape is increasingly characterized by
communication, symbolic interaction, affective engagements. It entails less
and less fabrication and more social cooperation, (what she and others call
“immaterial labor”). And these are the material conditions that give rise to
new subjective practices. </DIV>
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<DIV style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 12px Helvetica">The difference between the two
approaches becomes even more evident when they try to envision future
developments and to formulate alternatives. In my view, AR analysis
leads ultimately to a very defensive position. It seems that his main concern
is to alleviate the deteriorating working conditions of the labor force and to
fight the onslaught of neoliberalism’s restructuring, which undoubtedly has
created, particularly in the present crisis, massive unemployment, the
increase in precarity and the abolition of safety nets. To respond to
such devastating dislocations much more has to be done in terms of providing
adequate income maintenance programs (see for instance the current push on
health care) or for the development of new forms of labor organization that
expand across economic sectors and global fragmentation. But if we follow TT’s
perspective, these struggles have a much greater strategic value to the extent
to which, in addition to being defensive measures, they prefigure new
productive arrangements and alternative social configurations. </DIV>
<DIV style="MIN-HEIGHT: 14px; MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 12px Helvetica"><FONT
face=Arial size=2></FONT><BR></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 12px Helvetica">Take for instant the proposal
of a guarantee income. Whatever the difference between Europe and the
US, in terms of historical circumstances and short term feasibility, it
appears to be an issue that is gaining ground and could be central to a policy
debate in the near future. However, a guarantee income can be conceptualized
quite differently and have different political implications. For AR a
guarantee income is a remedy for the instability and flexibility of
employment. By providing income security it increases the chances of finding
adequate employment. For TT a guarantee income is, in a larger context, a
stepping stone in the direction of severing the relation between income and
work. A guarantee income based on life needs and not productive performance
goes a long way in prefiguring and give sustenance to experiments of non
economic productive arrangements. The political value of a struggle around a
guarantee income is in the linking of immediate defensive measures to the
strategic new institutions of cooperation, what TT calls the commons. Seen
from this point of view, the path from the guarantee income to the commons is
part of the process that, in the Italian Marxist literature that TT refers to,
is called the “exodus”. In other words, the potentials expressed by the
current social dynamics point to the opening of areas of self valorization and
autonomous social practices that are quite different from the preceding
dialectics of classes.</DIV>
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face=Arial size=2></FONT><BR class=webkit-block-placeholder> </P>
<DIV style="MARGIN: 0px; FONT: 12px Helvetica">I think it is clear by now
where my preferences lie. However I think that the conceptual framework and
the practice of the new commons are still, to say the least, in their infancy
and there are some fundamental political and theoretical issues that have to
be addressed and clarified. What is the nature of the commonality that it is
detected in current subjective practices and proposed for future institutional
forms? For instance, it is not clear to me to what extent there is a direct
path from immaterial labor to the commons. Is the common a realization
of labor, albeit a labor based on cooperation rather than competition? Is it
the old Marxist notion of emancipation of labor through labor? And if so, how
does it differ from the historical experience of soviets and workers’
councils, except from the heightened sociality of immaterial labor? It could
be just another version of industrial democracy, a democracy for the social
factory. If, on the contrary, it means not just exodus of labor but
<I>from</I> labor, and from its connotations of productivity, utility and
efficacy, then it would be nothing short of a redefinition of praxis itself.
And maybe that is what is required today.</DIV>
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