<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px"> Hello,<br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px"><br></p><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 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-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 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-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 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-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; ">So, here it is:</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; ">Response to the Changing Labor Value panel</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 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="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 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><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 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><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 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="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 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><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px"> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></p><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 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><div><br></div></body></html>