Re: [Marxism] Should IT workers unionize?

[Joonas Laine <jjonas@xxxxxx>]

Gavin Walker wrote:
> The work of the many thinkers around the journal _Multitudes_ such as  
> Moulier Boutang and Maurizio Lazaratto is highly pertinent to this  
> question. Perhaps the demands put forward by many of these thinkers,  
> centered to an extent around the movement for a global 'guaranteed  
> income', might possibly strike many Marxists as insufficient and  
> cursory. Nevertheless, they have the distinct advantage of seriously  

Well whatever global guaranteed income is, it's not a very good 
*political* slogan at present. The Finnish autonomists (associated with 
the EuroMayDay protests seen also elsewhere in Europe in recent years, 
maybe elsewhere too) have at least made the attempt to make it a bit 
more tangible by putting forward some suggestions on a national level, 
and their rather provocative slogans ("Money, not work!" etc) have 
indeed stirred something up at least in Finland.

The social-democratic party (SDP) and the Greens have both made their 
comments on it, the Greens even have their own version of the "basic 
income", which is 440â a month and said to be cost-neutral, i.e. by 
simplifying the tax and income transfer systems there's no need to raise 
the absolute amount of taxes collected.. in other words, an exercise in 
bourgeois reasonability, when the task - if guaranteed basic income is 
the slogan, transitory or otherwise - would be to find ways how to make 
*the capitalists* pay for it.

If the Greens have got it wrong IMO, the Finnish autonomists' idea is 
equally disingenious, because they basically say that because the 
construction of the wellfare state (70s-80s) would have been impossible 
without central bank money created ex nihilo, there is no argument in 
saying (like the SDP does) that we can't afford basic income, because 
central bank money ex nihilo is available today as well.

Now I'm no economist, but I'm not falling for this. And besides, they 
make explicitly the same bourgeois-reasonable argument as the Greens, 
that the basic income is completely compatible with capitalism, and like 
the write in their pamphlet, it would be a good way to ease the 
transition to post-fordist information capitalism.

Maybe their comrades in other countries have made better suggestions.

> effect of cognitive labor, and the new possibilities for recombination  
> occasioned by the increasingly general circulation of socialized  
> knowledge - the well-known "general intellect" of the _Grundrisse_. In  
> fact, I think that it can be argued that much of this work resembles  
> strongly an attempt to give a new significance to historical  
> materialism in our time, and to begin the analysis again from the  
> ground up. 

If anyone knows the source where the general intellect argument from 
Grundrisse is made the first time, I'd be interested to know. I haven't 
read Hardt-Negri's 'Empire', maybe it's there, or in some other 
influential book like it.

The reason I'm interested is that the Finnish autonomists in their 
pamphlet seem to muddle the Grundrisse passage when they try to claim it 
for their cause.

Below there's a snippet from an article by Paolo Virno that I googled up 
just now, he makes the same argument. As I understand it, in the 
Grundrisse passage in question (which I couldn't find on MIA, sorry) 
Marx talks about the continuous intertwining of producers and the 
crystallisation of the phenomenon together with the development of the 
forces of production into fixed capital which displaces workers. And 
when he talks about âbreakdown of production based on exchange valueâ, 
he's talking about a communist mode of production.

In my reading of the passage, that's all.

Virno et al. seem to take the argument a step further, arguing that 
whereas Marx talked about the transition from "fordist capitalism" to 
communism, it's now up-to-date to talk about the same stuff, but as the 
transition from fordist to post-fordist capitalism.

No doubt the case has some appeal, but at present I'm not convinced by 
it, as it seems to me that if the capitalist cannot get the 
surplus-value out of his/her own workers (the few of whom might use 
extreme high-tech, 100 % science based things or whatever), it has to 
come from other sectors of production - just like e.g. an accountant 
firm manages to grab some of the productive sectors' surplus-value 
without creating anything new itself, as they're basically just counting 
things. The kind of knowledge-based new labour/capital they talk about 
seems more like a parasitical type that needs to feed on productive 
labour performed in other sectors, perhaps mainly outside the 
imperialist heartlands.

General Intellect by Paolo Virno
http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpvirno10.htm

[..]

Given the tendency for knowledge to become predominant, labour-time 
becomes a âmiserable foundationâ: the worker âsteps to the side of the 
production process instead of being its chief actorâ. The so-called law 
of value (that the value of a commodity is determined by the labour time 
embodied in it) is regarded by Marx as the architrave of modern social 
relations, yet it crumbles in the face of the development of capitalism. 
Nonetheless capital continues undeterred to âwant to use labour time as 
the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby createdâ, with the 
aid of the organised working class movement, because the latter turned 
wage labour into its own solid reason for being.

At this point Marx suggests a radically different hypothesis for 
emancipation from the more renowned ones exposed in other texts. In the 
âFragmentâ the crisis of capitalism is no longer due to the 
disproportion intrinsic to the mode of production based on the labour 
time of individuals, nor to the imbalances related to the full workings 
of the law of value, for instance to the fall of the rate of profit. 
Instead, the main lacerating contradiction outlined here is that between 
productive processes that now directly and exclusively rely on science 
and a unit of measure of wealth that still coincides with the quantity 
of labour embodied in the product. According to Marx, the development of 
this contradiction leads to the âbreakdown of production based on 
exchange valueâ and therefore to communism.

In Postfordism, the tendency described by Marx is actually realised but 
surprisingly with no revolutionary or even conflictual implication. 
Rather than a plethora of crises, the disproportion between the role of 
the knowledge objectified in machines and the decreasing relevance of 
labour time gave rise to new and stable forms of domination. Disposable 
time, a potential wealth, is manifested as poverty: forced redundancy, 
early retirement, structural unemployment and the proliferation of 
hierarchies. The radical metamorphosis of the concept of production 
itself is still tied down to the idea of working for a boss. Rather than 
an allusion to the overcoming of the existent, the âFragmentâ is a 
sociologistâs toolbox and the last chapter of a natural history of 
society. It describes the empirical reality as it is seen. For example, 
at the end of the âFragmentâ Marx claims that in a communist society, 
rather than an amputated worker, the whole individual will produce. That 
is the individual who has changed as a result of a large amount of free 
time, cultural consumption and a sort of âpower to enjoyâ. Most of us 
will recognise that the Postfordist labouring process actually takes 
advantage in its way of this very transformation albeit depriving it of 
all emancipatory qualities. What is learned, carried out and consumed in 
the time outside of labour is then utilised in the production of 
commodities, becomes a part of the use value of labour power and is 
computed as profitable resource. Even the greater âpower to enjoyâ is 
always on the verge of being turned into labouring task.

In order to take hold of the conflict of this new situation we need to 
level a fundamental criticism at the âFragmentâ. According to Marx, the 
general intellect â i.e. knowledge as the main productive force â fully 
coincides with fixed capital â i.e. the âscientific powerâ objectified 
in the system of machinery. Marx thus neglects the way in which the 
general intellect manifests itself as living labour. The analysis of 
Postfordist production compels us to make such criticism; the so-called 
âsecond-generation autonomous labourâ and the procedural operations of 
radically innovated factories such as Fiat in Melfi show how the 
relation between knowledge and production is articulated in the 
linguistic cooperation of men and women and their concrete acting in 
concert, rather than being exhausted in the system of machinery. In 
Postfordism, conceptual and logical schema play a decisive role and 
cannot be reduced to fixed capital in so far as they are inseparable 
from the interaction of a plurality of living subjects. The âgeneral 
intellectâ includes formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical 
tendencies, mentalities and âlanguage gamesâ. Thoughts and discourses 
function in themselves as productive âmachinesâ in contemporary labour 
and do not need to take on a mechanical body or an electronic soul. The 
matrix of conflict and the condition for small and great âdisorders 
under the skyâ must be seen in the progressive rupture between general 
intellect and fixed capital that occurs in this process of 
redistribution of the former within living labour.

[..]

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