The contemporary state of what we might call Late
Capitalism has, over time, dramatically shifted the balance between work and
leisure, according to theorists such as Fisher (2013), who argue that with the
insertion of digital technologies into work and everyday life, there is now little
or no escape from work. On this account,
work spills beyond the boundaries of the workplace, encroaching into every
corner of life, facilitated by digital communicative technologies which pay no
regard to the ‘work-life balance’. The
idea of the expansion of the workplace across all social life is not new. This notion is articulated most notably by
theorists in the autonomous Marxist, or autonomist, tradition, who argue that the
idea of the ‘social factory’ can be identified as a defining characteristic of
post-Fordist capitalism. Here, post-Fordism is broadly taken to denote the mode
of capitalist production and work relations which have developed since the
1970s. The autonomists further argue
that shifting away from the prior Fordist model of the assembly line, the factory
and the regimented work relations therein, the paradigm of post-Fordism,
spanning the “totality of contemporary social production” (Virno, 2004: 61) is
characterized by its emphasis on communication, affective labour and
‘virtuosity’, which can be observed in modern cross-workplace emphases such as
customer ‘service’, ‘likeability’ and the generation of purchasing desire (ibid.: 57), and the performativity
involved in these affective tasks (Fisher, 2013).
Indeed,
within the autonomist tradition, post-Fordism has been described as an
articulation of working class demands and desires being met and articulated by
capital in its own ‘deformed’ way (Virno, 2004). However, at the heart of their discourse
around the social factory is a normative position which argues that the
expansion of the ‘workplace’ is a negative
phenomenon, necessarily eroding our
personal time and asserting ‘work’ as the dominant mode of subjectivity. This suggestion has been carried into many contemporary
debates in both activist and theoretical circles, concerning the growing prevalence
of digital technology in our work lives, and indeed in providing a means of
extension for work into everyday life.
In this
essay I want to explore the normativity implicit in this formulation, engaging
with positions which have been articulated by what has been called an ‘accelerationist’
Marxist tradition (see Srnicek, 2013). This argues for a ‘properly’ Marxist attitude
towards technology as a necessary condition of any development beyond
capitalism (Srnicek, 2013). This builds
upon and develops the arguments made by Hardt and Negri in Empire around informatization and the commons. I want to explore
the idea that the autonomist negative
critique of the social factory is inconsistent with the fundamental autonomist
analysis of labour as the motor of capitalist recomposition, and that following
the logic implicit in the potential for communicative and educative engagement
with digital technologies that rather than a “social factory” new possibilities
are made latent for potential recomposition towards post-capitalist objectives. If, as Gorz (2012: 8) argues, our socialism
cannot and should not be “reduced to the restoration of the pre-modern,
undifferentiated unity of the individual, community and functional spheres of
paid work and self-determined activities”, then we should be taking up the
challenges presented to us by digital communicative technologies in work, and
articulating the possibilities for the reduction of work through technologies diffusion
and repurposing.
I will first
examine the idea of the social factory; locating it within the condition of
‘post-Fordism’ and explicating what these concepts are both absorbing and
denoting. I will then discuss the conflicting
contemporary articulations of the role of digital technology within the ‘social
factory’ which, I will argue, seem to centre around a tension over whether we
are losing or gaining something through the process of informatization. I will argue that the reactionary normative
assumptions of the social factory demonstrate an instrumental view of
technology as an agent in the ‘hollowing out’ of the social, whereas the
alternative, communicative view of technology asserts the role of technology in
the creation of a new rhizomatic and cooperative multitude which instead ‘fills
in’ the social. In order to resolve this
tension, I will argue that there is indeed a dual-effect arising from the
intersection of digital communicative technologies and work, but that these
must be schematized and separated out, seen not as directly opposed but as
playing out on the different terrains which drive epochal shifts as the
assemblage of motors Marx identifies as operative in the transition from
feudalism to industrial capitalism, and currently underlying the present transition
through late capitalism. I will go on to
contribute to the current discussions on technology being generated by the
nascent accelerationist Marxist project, arguing that the insertion of digital
communicative technologies into work presents possibilities for future (post-) capitalist
recomposition and social change through the repurposing of these technologies,
the creation of new technologies and the generation of new social imaginaries.
As this
essay is concerned with the intersection between digital technology and the
changing nature of work, it seems pertinent to operationalize the term ‘work’
as it has no universally-accepted parameters as a concept. For reasons of efficacy I will adopt the term
as it is used by Andre Gorz. It should
be made clear, as Gorz (ibid.: 54)
notes, that “’work’…represents a sociohistorical category”. ‘Work’ should not be used to refer to poiesis in the sense of “the activities
of subsistence, reproduction, maintenance and care performed within the
household” (ibid.: 53) because “the
notion of work assumed its present meaning only as commodity production and
consumption came to gain precedence over production for self”; that is, with
the rise of industrial capitalism (ibid.). Gorz outlines two essential properties of
‘work’: “1. It must be performed in the public, not the private sphere. 2. It
must be intended for others as social,
not private individuals” (ibid.:
54). Therefore the reason poiesis should not be considered work
does not refer to whether it constitutes paid work, i.e. wage labour, but
rather because ‘work’ “is done in the public domain and appears there as a measurable, exchangeable and interchangeable
performance; as a performance which possesses a use-value for others, not
simply for the members of the household community carrying it out: for others in general, without
distinction or restriction, not for a particular, private person” (ibid.: 53). This notion of work is not without caveats,
however. As Gorz rightly notes, this
notion of work has its roots in the early industrial working class, and as this
essay will cover, work in post-industrial society has a very different character. Here Gorz raises an apposite point which will
be of significance when this essay turns to the discussion the sociohistorical
changes being played out on the terrains Marx identifies as driving epochal
shifts:
“The
question, however, is to what extent this conception of work, handed down to us
essentially by the skilled industrial workers of the nineteenth century
(workers who were still close to artisan production, and had a complete grasp
of manufacturing procedures and the products to be made), can apply to the
largely de-materialized, pre-determined, specialized work which is the
predominant form in today’s macro-social space – a form of activity which has
no purchase or influence either on the way it is performed or on the final
purpose it is to serve, and is commonly referred to simply as ‘work’.”
(ibid.: 55-56)
The
notion of work outlined here will demonstrate its efficacy when later
discussing digital technological developments in the way we interact with work,
particularly in the issues raised by Berry (2011) on data streams. In order that there can be no risk of
confusion or conflation over the perennial suggestion that work represents all
activities of subsistence, i.e. poiesis,
Gorz defends the everyday usage of the term by saying: “In continuing to apply
the idea of work-as-poiesis...one
runs the risk of demanding that today’s workers or employees regard as their
‘means of personal fulfilment’ precisely those tasks which prevent such
fulfilment” (Gorz, 2012: 56).
In the
contemporary experience of work, technology is ubiquitous. From the dependence on computers both on the
shop floor and throughout the logistics chain to the provision of company
smartphones with their constant state of readiness both in terms of the device
(sleep mode) and the user (push notifications), “digital technologies open a
completely new perspective for labour” (Berardi, 2009: 75). Indeed the centrality of technology within
work has drawn observations about the changes these technological developments
have brought to the experience of what it means to work. Referring to the prevalence of smartphones,
Mark Fisher (2013) notes, “email means that there is no such thing as a
workplace or a working day. You start
working the minute you wake up.” This
current mode of work within post-industrial, ‘late’ capitalism can be referred
to as post-Fordism. ‘Post-Fordism’ is
so-called because it denotes a development from ‘Fordism’ which was
characterized in its epitome by the factory assembly line. Where the Fordist production line was marked
by its ‘rigidity’, the advent of post-Fordism was characterized by a new
‘flexibility’ (Fisher, 2009: 33). This
break away from rigidity can be observed both in the practices of the
workplace, and in terms of the ‘boundaries’ of the workplace, or the divide
between ‘work’ and ‘life’. Let us take
each in turn.
In terms
of the ‘workplace’ itself, where Fordism denotes the industrial, blue-collar
ontology of factory-based manufacturing work, post-Fordism instead denotes a
more service-oriented mode of work, with a heavy focus on communicative and
affective labour, or what Virno calls ‘virtuosity’; and a strong emphasis on
digital, communicative technologies through the informatization of work (Hardt
& Negri, 2001: 280). This is not to deny that the manufacturing of
products still accounts for a sizeable, if diminished, proportion of work
carried out within late-capitalist society.
While the notion of post-Fordism does assert we are living in a
post-industrial mode of capitalism, this is not to suggest industrial
production is resigned to history, but rather that its dominant position as the
primary mode of work has been supplanted by communicative capital, aided by the
reduction in the number of industrial jobs with the rise of automation in
factories, but more importantly a
qualitative alteration in the work carried out by the worker in those
workplaces. Where the Fordist mode was
driven by Taylorist principles of scientific management and the repetition of
simple tasks, the crucial difference in post-Fordism is that “while the
material production of objects is delegated to an automated system of machines,
the services rendered by living labour, instead, resemble linguistic-virtuosic
services more and more” (Virno, 2004: 58).
Where the services of living labour within Fordism could be typified by
piece-work and a strict separation of tasks, “in post-Fordism, when the
assembly line becomes a ‘flux of information’, people work by communicating”
(Fisher, 2009: 34).
The emphasis
on flexibility and communication is also central to the second way in which
post-Fordism departs from Fordism. A key
observation of post-Fordism is the perceived expansion of work beyond the
parameters of the physical workplace and into all corners of life. The ‘social factory’, i.e. the expansion of
the factory over the social, denotes the point at which “work and life become
inseparable” (ibid.). So characterized by affective
linguistic-virtuosity is our working life that “there is no longer anything
which distinguishes labour[-time] from the rest of human activities” (Virno,
2004: 102) in terms of our mental disposition.
In this sense we are ‘attending to work’ all the time. This constant work-subjectivity is
continually aided and maintained by digital communicative technologies which
blur the distinction between ‘work’ and ‘life’, the publicly-performed and
private. Technologies which can be
regarded as ‘intimate’ such as our smartphone (Berry, 2011: 149) are
simultaneously used to organise, administrate and perform our multiple subject-identities
of ‘employee’, ‘job candidate’ and ‘lover’, providing a constant in threading
together what Fisher (2009: 34) calls the conditions of total instability, or
‘precarity’, that we must learn to live in.
As Marazzi identifies, these communicative technologies have been
crucial to the establishment of post-Fordism, the present conditions both
requiring and emerging from “an increased cybernetization of the working
environment” (ibid.: 33). With the
growth of the social factory, we can also then see the development and
production of the ‘socialized’ worker-subjectivity: constantly connected to
both public ‘work’ life and private life simultaneously, while “the factory is,
with the indispensable aid of information technologies, disseminated into
society” (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 80).
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| Mario Tronti |
What is
being absorbed by the emergence of post-Fordism and the development of the
social factory? Virno (2004: 98) argues
that post-Fordism demonstrates a recomposition of capitalism which is, in its
own deformed way, meeting and rearticulating the demands made by the labour
force towards the end of Fordism during the 1970s. Fisher (2009: 34) agrees, stating that
post-Fordism is “Capital’s mobilization and metabolization of the desire for
emancipation from Fordist routine.” Both
of these analyses reflect an acceptance of what has come to be known as the
‘Trontian inversion’ at the crux of autonomous Marxism. In his 1965 essay The Strategy of Refusal, Tronti argues that where an orthodox or
Leninist reading of Marx holds that the labour force is conditioned by the
movement of Capital, it is rather the case that “capitalist power seeks to use
the workers’ antagonistic will-to-struggle as a motor for its own development”
(Tronti, 1965). Labour is therefore the force which moves Capital through
capitalist recomposition in response to the desires and actions of the labour
force. As we can see, and hence why
Virno choses to use the term ‘deformed’, the capitalist recomposition into
post-Fordism has both enabled and limited the labour force. For desired flexibility and freedom of work
we also see these coupled with precarity and nomadism (Fisher, 2009: 28). Yet there is a question mark over how we
should interpret the social factory in this case. As much as it could be argued that the social
factory and situating of digital communicative technologies at the centre of
life are the articulation of working class desires through capital, there also
appears to be a normative assumption within the notion of the ‘social factory’
that the expansion of work beyond the workplace is an ‘encroachment’ into
social life which is emblematic of the insidious expansion of the logic of
commodification into every realm of life (Crary, 2013: 3). Two things are being played out here. On one hand there seems a repositioning of
work as the central and dominant mode of life, while on the other there seems
to be a diffusion and flexibility which represents a release from the strict
rigidity of the Fordist epoch. While the
social factory has its benefits as a concept in helping us visualise the spread
of work from the factory outwards, it also carries with it the reactionary
normative suggestion that work is better off being reduced through its
containment rather than its diffusion.
The
central point of contention between the conflicting positions we can see
emerging relates to two differing conceptions of technology. On one hand, the instrumental view of
technology argues the role played by digital technologies in post-Fordism is driven
by economic rationality and is ‘hollowing out’ society. On the other hand, the communicative view of
technology is arguing that digital technologies are changing the way we
experience work such that our creative and cooperative possibilities are expanded,
and therefore that technology is actually serving to ‘fill in’ or provide gains
for society.
We can
plainly observe ways in which digital communicative technologies have been
purposed to benefit capital. It has been
noted that technology is optimized towards “the maximisation of output/profit”
(Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 147) and that digital technologies are also used and
monitored within a ‘dispersed corporation’ for the purposes of control (Fisher,
2009: 22). Crary (2013: 11) is also
quick to denounce the ‘economic imperative’ that comes with the development and
spread of new technologies. However, it
cannot be said on the basis of technology being used for capitalist ends that
the expansion of digital technologies can
only serve to benefit capital, for at the same time we can observe work
becoming more diffuse and communicative in character, leading to new
subjectivities filling the void left behind by the Fordist industrial
worker. While from an instrumentalist point
of view we might see the notion of the “computationally supported subject”
(Berry, 2011: 147) as somehow detracting from or compromising the subject, from
a communicative standpoint we can instead view this notion positively as a
‘computationally enabled subject’. Next
to the bleak imperatives of the instrumental standpoint of technology, a
communicative standpoint presents new possibilities. Rather than lamenting the
decline of the industrial labour force and the subjectivity of the industrial
worker, we can instead look to technology and communication as tools for
developing an intellectual and inventive labour force (Negri, 1989: 116; Hardt
& Negri, 2001: 292).
 |
| Wasp T12 Speechtool: it's well weapon |
Franco
‘Bifo’ Berardi (2009:88) argues that while the “dissemination of the labour process”
to dispersed individuals through digital technologies might seem ‘formally
autonomous’, they are “actually coordinated and ultimately dependent.” As an example of this dependency, he asks us
to consider cellular phones: “The cellular phone is left on by the great
majority of info-workers even when they are not working. It has a major function in the organization
of labour as self-enterprise that is formally autonomous but substantially
dependent… [it is] constantly coordinating and localizing in real time the
fragments of info production. Cellular
phones, the most important article of consumption of the last decade, provide
this very function at a mass level” (ibid.:
89). In this sense, it is argued that
while work may be dispersed in terms of proximity, we are in fact attending to
work just as much, if not more, than if we were engaged physically at a
workplace. While we are ‘formally
autonomous’, the fact that ‘fragments’ of production – tasks, updates,
communications – reach us in real time wherever we are, means we have not left
the workplace but taken it with us.
Fisher (2013) describes this in comparison to the relative burden the
Fordist worker was tasked with: “Most of us find ourselves compulsively gripped
by the imperatives of communicative capitalism (to check email, to update our
statuses). This mode of work makes Sisyphus’s interminable labours seem quaint;
at least, Sisyphus was condemned to perform the same task over and over again.
Semio-capitalism is more like confronting the mythical hydra: cut off one head
and three more grow in its place, the more emails we answer, the more we
receive in return.” For Crary (2013: 3)
the logical, and intended, progression of this is towards the 24/7 sleepless
worker, constantly available to attend to the whims of economic opportunity.
Srnicek,
of the emergent accelerationist school contends that it is simply naïve to
posit that “technology has been reduced to a particular capacity” (Srnicek,
2013), however it is argued that this hollowing out of social life goes beyond
our capacities and activities just as workers, “but as students, consumers,
shoppers, and television viewers [we] are now directly integrated into the
production process” (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 80).
If anything this presents us with a far bleaker picture in which we are
constantly ready to perform for the benefit of economic ends, each “lived
day…subject to a semiotic activation” (Berardi, 2009: 90) because “we are the
commodities; so that any time not spent selling ourselves is wasted time”
(Fisher, 2013). Although the hollowing
out of society being described can be expanded beyond the role of worker to the
role of consumer, this account still maintains a basic normative assumption
that the expansion of communicative technology necessarily results in the
expansion of the profit motive. Srnicek
(2013) responds that it is reactionary to say that “every technology is bound
to only serve the function of extracting surplus value. The political conclusion that’s drawn from
this is then what makes it a reactionary viewpoint: in order to get beyond
capitalism, one has to destroy its infrastructure”. Here Srnicek highlights an important
point. These concerns around the social
factory, the expansion of work and the mediation brought by communicative
technologies all come from a position of some notion of progressing to
post-capitalism. How then are we to
imagine progress beyond our present condition?
We seem faced with a choice of either destroying the infrastructure of
capitalism, which would surely denote a regression, or we are forced to engage
with the present processes in order to see how the can be repurposed or
‘accelerated’ through. Possibilities
arise if we try to understand the effects of the expansion of digital
technological processes as ‘filling in’ rather than ‘hollowing out’ social
life. If we instead look at what these
processes and mediations do provide
us, perhaps we can then generate a more positive account of what is at stake.
Speaking
of the internet, Virno (2004: 43) refers to the world-wide web as a “common
place”, whereas Hardt & Negri (2001: 291) note the “continual
interactivity” it facilitates. While
none of these theorists would deny the existent capitalist purposing of these
technologies, they are not willing to reduce technological advances merely to
economic benefits. Instead, as work
becomes ever-more characterised by communication and informatization, this allows
the worker to be part of an interconnected network which provides new
opportunities for creativity and different forms of cooperative intelligence
which are more virtuosic and “immanent to the labouring activity itself”
(ibid.: 294). Therefore while we can
observe that the deterritorialization of production the labour force finds
itself in a “weakened bargaining position” (ibid.: 295), this is only insofar
as we can judge strength of the labour force qua industrial power. As Gorz
(2012: 8) is quick to note, “the social actors pressing for…development are no
longer, first and foremost, the rapidly declining class of industrial workers.” There both in order to maintain clarity in
our discussions and in order to reflect the true present situation of things,
we need to regard the working class as ‘multitude’ rather than ‘people’, or in
other words as a theoretical concept rather than a ‘snap-shot picture’ to be
equated “with certain habits, with certain usages and customs” (Virno, 2004:
45). Constrained by a rigid notion of
the social factory and the reactionary, instrumental stance towards technology,
Berardi simply cannot accept that possibilities for post-capitalism, for the
reduction of work, can arise from the technological diffusion of work though
society, instead seeing is as a direct encroachment of the social by the factory
which simply must be constrained. He
asks, “Why does this new kind of worker value labour as the most interesting
part of his or her life and therefore no longer opposes the prolongation of the
working day but is actually ready to lengthen it out of personal choice and
will?” (Berardi, 2009: 79). Here
Berardi, while identifying a new kind of worker,
fails to acknowledge the changing nature and experience of work, typified by linguistic-virtuosic activity through which “our
economic and social reality is defined less by the material objects that are
made and consumed than by co-produced services and relationships” (Hardt &
Negri, 2001: 302). While within this
framework, the burden of success or failure of work is “judged in reference to
current continual output” (Berry, 2011: 150), this form of production “can be
distributed and…feed into other shared work” (ibid.: 151). With this in mind we can appreciate a
developing inversion of the original early-modernity notion of work, as in the
workhouse, which “referred not to a creative or productive act but to the
activity in so far as it entailed pain, annoyance and fatigue” (Gorz, 2012: 53),
and seems to correspond more closely to the outmoded normative assumption of
the experience of work as upheld by Berardi.
While we
do not want to reduce the technological mediation of work to a solely unitary function of maximizing
surplus value (Srnicek, 2013), we can clearly see there does exist a degree of
instrumentality and optimization towards economic ends at some level. Similarly, while we can agree with Negri that
through communicative technologies, “capitalism has succeeded in liberating
desires and subjects to some degree…capitalism restrains these liberating
forces at the same time” (ibid.). How
then are we to resolve this friction?
In
footnote 4 of chapter 15 in Capital, Marx (1976: 493) identifies six terrains upon
which sociohistorical epochs shift and evolve:
technology, the relation of man to nature, the modes of production, the
reproduction of daily life, social relations and mental conceptions of the
world. Rather than being seen as
separate spheres, these terrains should be seen as forming an assemblage or
ecology of moments which coevolve (Harvey, 2010: 196), linked through the modes
of production which guide social evolution (ibid.: 192). With post-Fordist capitalism as the mode of
production, we can begin to schematize and map out the effects upon each of
these terrains. With digital
communicative technologies plotted on the terrain of technology, we can
separate out the instrumental as being operative on the terrain of the reproduction
of daily life and the logistics contained therein, while as has been
highlighted by Negri, social relations are characterized by their
communicability. Hence we can maintain a
communicative notion of digital technologies, while also observing the
tendencies towards both instrumental and economic reason between the terrains
of the reproduction of daily life at the level of work and the mode of
production which maintains a dual character, reducible neither to instrumentality,
nor wholly to communicative procedures, even if they do constitute an
increasingly conspicuous part of the means of production through the virtuosic
competencies of living labour (Virno, 2004: 61), which maintain a balance
between the creative and intelligent manipulation of communication and
information on one hand, and the routine-symbolic work of data handling on the
other
(Hardt & Negri, 2001: 293). Vitally,
“these elements are…not static but in motion” (Harvey, 2010: 192) which leaves
room for new possibilities and recompositions through movement across and
between these terrains.
Perhaps
most interesting from the perspective of progression towards post-capitalism is
possibilities opened up by different mental conceptions of the world in
relation to the other terrains.
Certainly a new mental conception of the world is what Fisher (2009) is advocating
in his provocation against ‘capitalist realism’, and the generation of new imaginaries
in relation to technological development is at the centre of the
accelerationist project (Williams & Srnicek, 2013). Indeed we can see this kind of interplay
between terrains in our mental experiences of technological developments such
as the digital streams which have replaced the model of web ‘pages’, generating
a new technological imaginary in the process (Berry, 2011: 143). Where our prior usage of the internet was
based on internet retrieval (ibid.),
data streams operate in real time, are co-creative and “constitute a new kind
of public” (ibid.: 144), and
naturally as this imaginary takes root, new models and augmentations of
existing streams are almost certain to emerge.
The assemblage of terrains comprising the sociohistorical motor does not
only allow us to resolve the friction between instrumental and communicative
interpretations of technology, but it also creates the conditions of
possibility for the shared normative intention to progress to post-capitalism. As Rainer Land (1990: 633-4) states, “For it to be
possible for development to be shaped and directed, the most important point is
that processes of innovation and selection should be tied in to the aspirations
and life interest of individuals, i.e. that procedures of political
participation should be established which allow individuals to bring the
‘autonomized social machine’ into line with – and place it in the service of –
their life interests.”
The
development towards post-capitalism is possible because of the degree of
contingency across these terrains, particularly in the application and benefits
of digital technologies. Contrary to
Crary, technology is not the life- (and sleep-) stripping tool of squeezing
every last ounce of surplus value from society (Crary, 2013: 5). As I have demonstrated, technology is neither
essentialist in its application and outcomes, nor reducible to economic
imperatives. While it may be true that many
industrially-applied digital technologies are “policed in such a way as to
guarantee order and profits” (Hardt & Negri, 2001: 298), this demonstrates
precisely that they are contingent on multiple factors or else they would not
need to be policed into getting the ‘right’ outcomes. Indeed this reflects our current reality in
terms of radical social change as articulated by accelerationist theorists: at
present, “our technological development is being supressed by capitalism, as
much as it has been unleashed” (Williams & Srnicek, 2013). However if it is the case that communicative
technologies and ‘techno-habitats’ are expanding beyond the control of
capitalist authority (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 84), this provides the opportunity
for a repurposing of those technologies and habitats, in order “to limit the
field in which economic rationality may find expression” (Gorz, 2012: 8). Of the issues discussed in this essay there
are two significant contributions which can be made. Firstly, what has been termed the ‘proper Marxist
idea of technology’ encourages a positive engagement with digital technologies
both in terms of their repurposing and creation. On this account, “the improvement of the
built environment is a necessary [but not merely sufficient] condition for the
emergence of a post-capitalist society” (Srnicek, 2013). However, as no one terrain on the assemblage
driving sociohistorical change “prevails over the others” (Harvey, 2010: 196),
there also needs to be a positive engagement with the idea of communicative-virtuosic
work as it is found within post-Fordism.
It is precisely because “work ceases to constitute a special and
separate praxis…different from those criteria…which regulate non-labour
time" (Virno, 2004: 102-3) that we can observe that post-Fordism is
articulating the desire for the reduction of work through the capitalist mode
of production. In ceasing to be
separate, in dissolving work qualitatively into the social, post-Fordist
communicative capital is articulating that desire as far as it can within
bounds of the wage-relation and economic logic of capitalism. It is for this reason Virno so famously
declares post-Fordism to be “the communism of capital” (ibid.: 110).
If “the
transformation of work – of all work – into an autonomous activity was,
according to Marx, the meaning of communism as a lived historical horizon”
(Gorz, 2012: 56), then we should be repurposing digital technologies in our
favour in order to drive further capitalist recomposition. If within post-Fordism “productive cooperation
is a ‘publicly-organized space’” (Virno, 2004: 63) this presents its own
opportunities for cooperation and the percolation of desire, which can generate
new mental conceptions of the world. As
has been noted, this was a key factor in the shift to post-Fordism: “The
disintegration of stable working patterns was in part driven by the desires of
workers – it was they who, quite rightly, did not wish to work in the same
factory for forty years” (Fisher, 2009: 34).
As a result, “today we participate in a more radical and profound
commonality than has ever been experienced in the history of capitalism” (Hardt
& Negri, 2001: 302). In any case it
must surely be said that the changing nature of work and the role of digital
technologies therein open up new possibilities for multitudinal organization
and future recomposition, therefore it must be said that the autonomists’
notion of the ‘social factory’ is an inadequate theorization of the political
possibilities in Late Capitalism.
</xlrtr>
Bibliography
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Campagna,
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