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One task for general intellects might be to imagine a kind of common hacker class interest among those whose efforts end up being commodified as some sort of intellectual property: artists, scientists, engineers, even humanist and social science academics. We could imagine all of these as belonging to the same class from the point of view of the commodification of information. We all process information that is part of a complex natural-technical-social-cultural metabolism. But nearly all of us get to see a ruling class of a rather unprecedented kind extract most of the value from the combined efforts of hackers and workers worldwide. As general intellects, maybe we could stick our heads above our little cubicles, look around, and figure out how to cooperate with others who understand different parts of the labor process.
Marx did not have the intellectual tools to think about information as a regulator, and he was only just beginning to grasp how metabolic rifts were opening up due to commodified production’s disregard of its natural conditions of existence. Without input from those with more practical knowledge of those emerging developments, Marx allows his conceptual apparatus to overshoot the available data, and in the end to become a hostage to philosophizing. He constructs a false relation between a partially grasped totality and a future conceived via a merely abstract, formal, dialectical negation. He tries to do alone what only the cooperation of many kinds of general intellects could really do.
This is a point that needs insisting on in the tech-phobic world that is so much of the humanities and social sciences. There politics is the magic answer to all our problems. But not this actual politics whose dismal rituals we see all around us. Some other politics, a virtual politics that is a possibility latent in mere actual politics. For these general intellects, politics has this dual character, virtual and actual, but technology never does. Only the first part of Marx’s thinking on this is acknowledged—that science and tech, or today’s techno-science, is absorbed into capital and takes its form. That tech too is both virtual and actual, and could have other forms, is not up for discussion. General intellects might have to figure out together how all of the particular domains in which we work or which we study, from politics to culture to science to technology, are all at one and the same time part of the problem and part of any possible solution.
No kind of knowledge production, whether of science or culture or even philosophy, is exogenous to the commodity form any more. But neither is it as simple as saying that “invention becomes a business” (61). Rather, it became a new kind of business, which changed all the others. There is no eternal capital. It has no transhistorical essence. It mutates in both its particulars and its abstract forms. It can neither be negated from without, nor does merely accelerating it do anything other than open metabolic rifts. There can be no Promethean leap.
Borrowing from the energetic worldview, capital becomes an entropic system:
Capitalism is like a poorly designed steam engine that must be run at top speed, despite the fact that this speed contributes to a greater overall loss of heat. This increased overall heat can be neither transformed into productive work nor released in adequate quantities. Instead it threatens to blow up the engine itself. (91)
quoting amy wendling, karl marx on technology and alienation
The “Fragment” distinguishes fixed and circulating capital, where fixed capital is embodied in a particular use value (machines) and circulating capital realizes its value in exchange (money). Like natural resources such as water and air, the general level of technology is something capital gets “free of charge” from the commons. But capital has interests in fettering tech and science, which can undermine as well as augment a given regime of accumulation.
Fixed capital replaces labor, raising productivity and profits, but capital is chasing its own tail, and as fixed capital grows, the rate of profit (supposedly) falls. Workers become obsolete. Pushing up profits is a matter of intensifying work or lengthening the working day. Capital’s problem—as Georges Bataille well knew—is not scarcity but abundance, or rather the attempt to maintain scarcity within abundance.17 Against this, Marx sketches only the faintest outline of communism as noninstrumentalist use value, a theme picked up in different ways by Bataille, Marcuse and Haraway, where use value becomes the gift or pleasure or situations.18
Karatani sees the stages of the world market system in terms of the key world commodity of each. Thus for mercantilism it is textiles, for liberalism it is light industry, for finance capitalism it is heavy industry, for state monopoly capitalism it is durable consumer goods, and for multinational capitalism it is information. Brown would call this neoliberalism, but that’s too benign a term for such an imperialistic world system. The current stage, despite appearances, is one of the weakness of the old hegemon, the United States, within the world system. It is an era of the expanded export of capital and corresponding cuts to redistributive justice by the states at the core of the old world system, as “state-capital was freed from egalitarian demands” (279).
Secondly, one might ask if post-Fordism is much of a way of defining the present moment. The fulcrum moment of the mid-twentieth century might be less Adorno’s first-hand discovery of the culture industry and more JD Bernal’s first-hand discovery of the application of science to production, including information science.11 The world of the contemporary media and its idle talk grows more out of the latter than the former. The state may be in crisis more because of a technical infrastructure that assumes some of its functions than because of language-based labor.12 That language-based labor is more an exceptional experience of the overdeveloped world than a general characteristic.
Boutang is rather sparing with the term “neoliberal,” which is so often used now as a kind of linguistic operator to describe by contrast what this era is supposed to mean. The rise of finance is clearly a key feature of our times, but for Boutang (contra Brown) neither economic ideology nor financial speculation is causative. The rise of finance is what has to be explained.
The explanation is an interesting one. With the conversion of intellectual activities into tradable assets, work dematerialized, and the contours of the company became unclear. Financialization is a way of assessing the value of production when production is no longer just about labor and things. Finance both predicts and actualizes futures in which private companies extract value from the knowledge society, where the boundaries of who “owns” what can never be clear.
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Those are the problems cognitive capitalism appears completely unable to solve. What it did solve, after a fashion, is the problem of the network effect. Value creation now relies on public goods, on complex processes, and things that it is very difficult to price. Financialization is a response to that complexity.
Cognitive capitalism is not limited to the “tech” sector. As I argued in Telesthesia, if one looks at the top Fortune 500 companies, it is striking how much all of them now depend on something like cognitive labor, whether in the form of R+D, or logistics or the intangibles of managing the aura of brands and product lines.7 Moreover, this is not a simple story of the exogenous development of the forces of production. This is not a revival of the “information society” thesis of Daniel Bell and others, a theory which shied away from the complexities of capitalism. There’s a story here about power and hegemony, not just pure linear tech growth.
Given how different Boutang finds cognitive labor to be to physical labor, I question why it has to be thought as labor at all, rather than as the social activity of a quite different class. Boutang at least canvasses this possibility, in mentioning Berardi’s idea of a cognitariat and Ursula Huws’s of a cybertariat, but the least settled part of attempts to think the current mode of production seems to me to be questions of the classes it produces and which in turn reproduce it.10
The symptom of this for me is the emergence of new kinds of property relation, so-called “intellectual property,” which became private property rights, and which were extended to cover an ever wider range of information products. Boutang is aware of this:
One of the symptoms indicating that both the mode of production and the capitalist relations of production are changing is the importance assumed nowadays by institutional legal issues. Never has there been so much talk of property rights, by way of contesting them as well as by way of redefining them. (47)