It might be useful to start with differences. Had Richard Sennett not fallen ill and participated, as intended, 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 cases, 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.

There is a strong sense of continuity, almost inevitability, in AR’s picture of the current restructuring of labor, particularly in the case of the so called creative industries and new media industries with working conditions of a high degree of flexibility and precariousness. AR explicitly claims that such restructuring is but the latest stage of a trend that started in the 1920s 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 deal with workers’ subjectivity and their rebellion to work rules and work 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 distributed entities, current management theory tries to capture the realities of drastically reconfigured labor dynamics characterized by work teams, temporary employment, flexible skills, and amateur “free labor.” For AR, these new realities are but an extension of old Human Relations strategies. The difference today is only in the degree of “permissiveness” (AR). 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 the 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 leads to even worse conditions of sacrificial labor and self exploitation.

For TT, the importance of the present restructuring consists instead 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 to understand the current shift 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 towards the side of cooperation. Increasingly, it is social engagement, both in the sense of interpersonal relationship and symbiosis with technological artifacts, that pushes 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, something that TT and others call “immaterial labor.” And these are the material conditions that give rise to new subjective practices.

The difference between the two approaches becomes even more evident when their proponents envision future developments and formulate alternatives. In my view, AR’s 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 indeed 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 developing 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.

Take, for instance, the proposal of guarantee income. Whatever the difference between Europe and the U.S., in terms of historical circumstances and short term feasibility, it appears to be an proposal that is gaining ground and could be central to a policy debate in the near future. However, guarantee income can be conceptualized quite differently and have different political implications: For AR, 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, guarantee income is, in a larger context, a stepping stone in the direction of severing the relation between income and work. Guarantee income that is based on life needs and not productive performance goes a long way in prefiguring and giving sustenance to experiments of non-economic productive arrangements. The political value of a struggle around guarantee income is in 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.

By now, it must be quite apparent where my preferences lie. The conceptual framework and the practice of the new commons, however, are still in their infancy. Thereare some fundamental political and theoretical issues that have to be addressed and clarified. What is the nature of 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 commons 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 Soviet and workers’ councils, in other ways than the heightened sociality of immaterial labor? Could it just be another version of industrial democracy, a democracy for the social factory?  If, on the contrary, it means not just exodus of labor but from 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.

Posted on November 11, 2009

For the complete conference schedule and registration

This conference, organized by Lang faculty member Trebor Scholz and, among others, supported by the Vera List Center, confronts the urgent need to interrogate the concepts of labor and value in the digital economy and seeks to inspire proposals for action. There are currently few adequate definitions of labor that fit the complex, hybrid realities of the digital economy. The Internet as Playground and Factory poses a series of questions about the conundrums surrounding labor (and often the labor of love) in relation to our digital present. It is the first in a series of biennial conferences titled The Politics of Digital Media.

The conference was preceded by a panel on September 29 entitled Changing Labor Value that featured Andrew Ross, Tiziana Terranova and McKenzie Wark and presented as annotations in space Web-based art projects by Burak Arikan, Ursula Endlicher, Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott, Aaron Koblin, and Stephanie Rothenberg and Jeff Crouse.

Sponsored by Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts and presented in cooperation with the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons The New School for Design and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics on occasion of the center’s 2009/2010 program cycle “Speculating on Change.”

Posted on September 20, 2009

Drawing from critical perspectives on labor, social media, political theory, this panel discussion addresses the nature of the work of Internet users and networked workers, focusing on the relationship between invisible labor, play, exploitation, pleasure, and the production of value. What constitutes work in the digital era? What are some alternatives to the seamless corporate expropriation of value from millions of net users? Is it possible to acknowledge the moments of ruthless exploitation while not eradicating optimism, inspiration, and the many instances of individual financial and political empowerment?

As annotations to the panel, several web-based projects by artists including Burak Arikan, Jeff Crouse, Ursula Endlicher, Scott Kildall, Aaron Koblin, Stephanie Rothenberg and Victoria Scott will be installed in the same lecture hall from 5:30 p.m. onwards through the evening.

This event is presented as a prelude to “The Internet as Playground and Factory,” a conference organized by Eugene Lang faculty member Trebor Scholz that will take place at Eugene Lang College (The New School), from November 12 to 14, 2009 (www.digitallabor.org). The conference will address the massive transformations in economy, labor, and life related to digital media and confront the urgent need to interrogate what constitutes labor and value in the digital economy.

Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2009/2010 program theme “Speculating on Change.”

Posted on September 20, 2009