I just stumbled across “The Sadness of Post-Workerism,” a review by David Graeber of an event that several thinkers from post-operaismo (often called autonomist marxism in a narrowing conflation). Graeber’s brief positive claims or gestures toward positive claims don’t move me, but his negative remarks are dead on. In many ways the essay works out his closing class for post-operaismo thinkers to “extricate [them]selves from the shackles of fashion, the need to constantly say that whatever is happening now is necessarily unique and unprecedented.” Extensive quotes below of the bits I like best. The review is worth reading in its entirety. Brought to you by the good people at The Commoner (commoner.org.uk). http://www.commoner.org.uk/?p=33
Oh yeah, let me just add: “workerism” is an annoying translation of “operaismo.” It’s correct in a literal sense, but misleading in that it blurs the specific currents of Italian operaismo into broader/disparate currents derided as workerist by their opponents. I’m told the term had as much to do with the name of a journal (Classe operaiso) as it did with them being ‘workerist’. Anyhow, the quotes:
Post-operaismo involves a “trick [which] only works if you do not, under any circumstances, reinterpret the past in the light of the present. One could after all go back and ask whether it ever really made sense to think of commodities as objects whose value was simply the product of factory labor in the first place. (…)Wasn’t the creation of value always in this sense a collective undertaking? One could, even, start from the belated recognition of the importance of women’s labor to reimagine Marxist categories in general, to recognize that what we call “domestic” or even “reproductive” labor, the labor of creating people and social relations, has always been the most important form of human endeavor in any society”
Immaterial labor is “a genuinely strange concept, combining a kind of frenzied postmodernism, with the most clunky, old-fashioned Marxist material determinism.” The “very notion that there is something that can be referred to as “immaterial labor” relies on a remarkably crude, old fashioned kind of Marxism. Immaterial labor, we are told, is labor that produces information and culture. In other words it is “immaterial” not because the labor itself is immaterial (how could it be?) but because it produces immaterial things. This idea that different sorts of labor can be sorted into more material, and less material categories according to the nature of their product is the basis for the whole conception that societies consist of a “material base” (the production, again, of wheat, socks and petrochemicals) and “ideological superstructure” (the production of music, culture, laws, religion, essays such as this). This is what’s allowed generations of Marxists to declare that most of what we call “culture” is really just so much fluff, at best a reflex of the really important stuff going on in fields and foundries. What all such conceptions ignore what is to my mind probably the single most powerful, and enduring insight of Marxist theory: that the world does not really consist (as capitalists would encourage us to believe) of a collection of discrete objects, that can then be bought and sold, but of actions and processes.”
“By bringing in terms like “immaterial labor”, authors like Lazzarato and Negri, bizarrely, seem to want to turn back the theory clock to somewhere around 1935.” Graeber adds in a footnote: “Lazzarato for example argues that “the old dichotomy between ‘mental and manual labor,’ or between ‘material labor and immaterial labor,’ risks failing to grasp the new nature of productive activity, which takes the separation on board and transforms it. The split between conception and execution, between labor and creativity, between author and audience, is simultaneously transcended within the ‘labor process’ and reimposed as political command within the ‘process of valorization’” (Maurizio Lazzarato, “General Intellect: Towards an Inquiry into Immaterial Labour”, http://www.geocities.com/immateriallabour/lazzarato-immaterial-labor.html. Note here that (a) Lazzarato implies that the old manual/mental distinction was appropriate in earlier periods, and (b) what he describes appears to be for all intents and purposes exactly the kind of dialectical motion of encompassment he elsewhere condemns and rejects as way of understanding history (or anything else): an opposition is “transcended”, yet maintained. No doubt Lazzarato would come up with reasons about why what he is arguing is in fact profoundly different and un-dialectical, but for me, this is precisely the aspect of dialectics we might do well to question; a more helpful approach would be to ask how the opposition between manual and mental (etc) is produced.”
He continues: “something very similar is happening with the
notion of “the biopolitical”, the premise that it is the peculiar quality of modern states that they concern themselves with health, fertility, the regulation of life itself. The premise is extremely dubious: states have been concerned with promulgating health and fertility since the time of Frazerian sacred kings, but the same thing seems to be happening here. The insistence that we are dealing with something entirely, dramatically new becomes a way of preserving extremely old-fashioned habits of thought that might otherwise be thrown into question. After all, one of the typical ways of dismissing the importance of women’s work has always been to relegate it to the domain of nature. The process of caring for, educating, nurturing, and generally crafting human beings is reduced to the implicitly biological domain of “reproduction”, which is then considered secondary for that very reason. Instead of using new developments to problematize this split, the impulse seems to be to declare that, just as commodity production has exploded the factory walls and come to pervade every aspect of our experience, so has biological reproduction exploded the walls of the home and pervade everything as well—this time, through the state. The result is a kind of sledge-hammer approach that once again, makes it almost impossible to reexamine our original theoretical assumptions.”
“In each case, we are presented with a series of historical stages: from societies of discipline to societies of security, from conjunction to connection, etc. We are not dealing with a series of complete conceptual breaks; at least, no one seems to imagine that is impossible to understand any one stage from the perspective of any of the others. But oddly, all of the speakers in question subscribed to the theory that history should be conceived as a series of complete conceptual breaks, so total, in fact, that it’s hard to see how this would be possible. In part this is the legacy of Marxism, which always tends to insist that since capitalism forms an all-encompassing totality that shapes our most basic assumptions about the nature of society, we simply cannot conceive what a future society would be like. (Though no Marxist, oddly, seems to think we should have similar problems trying to understand past societies.) In this case, though, it is just as much the legacy of Michel Foucault, who radicalized this idea of a series of all-encompassing historical stages even further with his notion of epistemes: that the very conception of truth changes completely from one historical period to the next. Here, too, each historical period forms such a total system that it is impossible to imagine one gradually transforming into another; instead, we have a series of conceptual revolutions, of total breaks or ruptures. All of the speakers at the conference were drawing, in one way another, on both the Marxian and Foucauldian traditions—and some of the terms used for historical stages (“real subsumption”, “societies of discipline”…) drew explicitly on one or the other. Thus all of them were faced with the same conceptual problem. How could it be possible to come up with such a typology? How is it possible for someone trapped inside one historical period to be able to grasp the overall structure of history through which one stage replaces the other?”
Another sociological correction for the file…. I don’t get it. Why is it so vital to insist that capital has been the same since the beginning, that it’s always used unwaged reproductive labor, that it’s always had an “immaterial” aspect, etc.? Lazzarato, Negri, Virno, et al. may be overly earnest in their spotting of the new, but at least they are receptive to changes, fissures, and openings. Critics like Graeber and their insistence that there is nothing new under the sun can only conservatively insist on continuity. There are plenty of reasons to criticize the post-operaisti, but this one smells exclusively of ideological correction to me. It certainly doesn’t have any political urgency.
Comment by Eric — May 7, 2008 @ 4:52 pm
hi Eric,
There’s some Kant quote that’s relevant here, I’ll have to see if I can find it. He says basically “it’s so irritating that people always look to history and find some precedent and say ‘we have seen this before;’ I am sure someone will do that with my system, which is genuinely new.” It’s smarter sounding than that, though I remember it also being funny too. I’ll see if I can dig it up. Some of the issue here may just be that. I like history. I like precedents and predecessors. I like being able to say “there’s a commonality here” more than “there’s a rupture here” (except around some things, like bosses). That’s why I love these two things, for instance:
“We Have Fed You All A Thousand Years”
http://www.utahphillips.org/fedyouall.html
“From the Multitudes of Europe Rising Up Against the Empire and Marching on Genoa”
http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/giap/Giap_multitudes.html
and why I like Benjamin’s remarks in that philosophy of history or theses on history, I forget the title, where he says that social democracy is too future centered and it robs the working class of its memory which is a source of both class anger (he may even say class hatred) and therefore some of its strength.
Maybe this is just like a taste thing, I dunno. But in any case, I disagree with you.
For one thing, Graeber never said “nothing is new under the sun,” he said “the claims to novelty here don’t bear scrutiny” and no one said “capital has been the same since the beginning,” rather “the particular profound changes in capitalism that some people seem to see in the present may not actually be there or be as profound as they’re made out to be.” It’s totally fair to say that that’s not very interesting or that it’s purely negative and offers no alternative way of understanding things. But saying those things doesn’t make the point wrong - it makes it’s boring or not very useful. And I worry I’m being a jerk in saying this - if so then I really am sorry, I don’t want to be a jerk - but it’s not like Negri’s book on Spinoza or his discussion of art that Graeber describes, quite a bit like the story in Negri’s book Art and Multitude, is politically urgent either. Ditto of course for other many, many, many of the other books I own and love, and like everything on this blog except maybe the occasional “please make a phone call for my union” posts.
So yeah - I don’t think this is all that urgent. I also don’t think it’s urgent to announce that everything’s new, whereas in the way I read Negri he _does_ think or at least sound like the announcement of novelty is politically urgent (and I think the rhetoric of novelty is a big part of where Negri’s recent work got its power to energize readers, that was my experience anyway).
And not to be dismissive, but if you’re going to say Negri et al are receptive to fissures and changes and openings, isn’t it worth asking whether or not said fissures exist?
Or rather - what order or register they exist within? From what I know of Negri’s career, most of which comes from reading Steve Wright’s book, he’s been announcing ruptures since the mid-70s, tied to the declaration of a new (potentially) revolutionary class fraction, tied to his vanguardist organizational affiliations. Nowadays he’s gotten rid of the explicit vanguardism (which is nice, though he still makes overly approving mention of Lenin and Mao in my opinion) but the search for a hegemonic class fraction to serve as vanguard subject leaves a remnant in the search for the leading edge of technological change/change in the objective processes of capital. That’s reductive I know - and I’m not saying his work isn’t valuable as a result, far from it - but if there’s any rightness in what I’m saying then it’s a problem if those changes haven’t actually happened and the need for the ever-new is itself problematic here.
Or rather, the need to always find an objective potential for novelty from which subjective novelty can arise, that’s the problem. That’s highly problematic, and fails to follow some of the most important stuff the earlier operaisti ever said - that ‘objective’ categories of capital are political, that the technical composition of the class probably originated as a political weapon against (aimed at causing the decomposition of) the prior political composition of the class. To go from forms of labor and valorization to _then_ deducing possibilities of subjective action - of self valorization - is a mistake and it’s this mistake which I think this ever-new stuff helps facilitate.
All that said, this may not have any political urgency, I’ll go along with that.
I will say, however, that this _is_ a matter of class memory which while not perhaps urgent in a political sense is something I care very much about and … well, just … ethically - getting people’s lives wrong is fucked up, especially people who got stepped on a lot in life and who are largely not remembered. For them to forgotten from/on the left and written out of the theoretical categories, that bugs me.
The complaint here basically amounts to this, I think:
Negri et al change their account of the present but don’t change their account of the past. That’s most of what Graeber said that I liked a lot, variations on that. I’d say they do this by mistaking the character of their own innovations. They think they’re onto a novel quality of the present when really they’re onto a previously not thought of (certainly for them, perhaps for others) aspect of capitalist production. That mistake makes it less likely for them to back to historical predecessors - predecessors in struggle, in experiences of exploitation (in its myriad forms), and theoretical predecessors. On the last only, theoretical predecessors - there have been calls for the remuneration of unwaged work, for the immaterial and biopolitical labors of childcare and so forth, since at least 1910. None of that is ever mentioned by these folk from what I’ve read. Not a big deal in the long run, but I do think it smells vaguely of sexism (surely a smell equally noxious as the urge to ideological correction, right?), especially when coupled with the litany of great men thinkers they hold up. I think that kind of error is worth pausing over. Negri’s also made remarks to the effect of the progressive nature of prior developments in/of capitalism - the arguments about immaterial labor could be read that way too, arguably - which is quite different from the arguments made by marxist feminists of a similar background, like Federici and Dalla Costa. They argue that based on women’s experiences the claims to progress made by many marxists on behalf of capitalism are ludicrous. That too - like debates over whether or not slavery was capitalist - may have no bearing on the present at all. I’m willing to assume that. And I’m will to assume that re: the criticism in terms of novelty.
But even on that, if that’s true then it has a corrollary. Not only is the “it’s not so new” part politically trivial, but the “it’s new” part is too - the claim to temporal novelty or non-novelty aren’t politically urgent, ie, the non-urgentness of Graeber’s piece is something he has in common with the claims to novelty made by Negri et al.
One last thing on this, while I wouldn’t say it’s urgent, I will say that I’ve had conversations where I think this novelty stuff has had a pernicious effect among some people I know (myself included a few years ago). This may not be in the argument but it does play out in the rhetorical uses of the argument this way in conversations I’ve had way too many times to feel patient with them - a number of people I know in the education and other immaterial labor centered industries have used arguments about the uniqueness of the present conjuncture and of their mode of work to make arguments justifying not paying much attention to ways other workers have organized themselves - because things are so much different now/for us, we don’t have lessons to learn from other struggles in the same way that other times/industries did/do. I’ve also seen this play out as an argument against making distinctions between those who have the power to hire and fire and those who don’t. Now, that distinctions may well not be relevant in some cases and certainly not all contexts have lessons for all other contexts, but the arguments as I’ve encountered them work to stop the process of inquiry before it even starts. Not “the lesson didn’t apply (or, this distinction has not proven useful for our workplace struggle) and this analysis explains why” but “because of this analysis I don’t even need to look for or try to apply lessons like this (or see if the distinction has a practical efficacy).” Again, not politically urgent but there are some stakes to those things.
Gah. Sorry to go on at such tedious length.
Anyhow, nice to hear from you Eric, and thanks for raising this. I was really worn out when I saw your comment, a good argument has perked me up a bit.
How’s Austin? It’s just starting to not feel wintery in Minneapolis, with occasional flashes already of too summery. Oh well. I was in Dallas this spring seeing my mom. I didn’t have any time go anywhere else (hadn’t seen her in maybe 3 years, I forget how long - too long). I thought of you, though, for whatever that’s worth.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — May 7, 2008 @ 5:50 pm
Actually, for what it’s worth, I said that clearly there are things that are dramatically new nowadays but you’re never going to understand them if all you know how to say is “oh my god, everything’s totally different now! We’ve entered an entirely new stage of history!” I said you have to use the present to re-examine the past (feminist scholarship provides a good example of this sort of thing), and that you can only understand what’s really new by understanding what isn’t. As for my own analysis of what’s new, I have provided any number of those, in that essay and elsewhere. It’s kind of foolish to accuse someone of saying things like “there’s nothing new under the sun” or claiming “he offers no suggestions of his own” without actually checking to see if either statement are in any way true. I mean the essay was right there online. How hard could it have been? Unless, that is, you don’t really care whether what you say is true or not.
Comment by David Graeber — May 7, 2008 @ 8:27 pm
Thanks for the thorough response, Nate, and for your response, David. It’s late and I’ve had quite a day — What a day Dad had, as Dr. Seuss said — so I’ll respond briefly for now, to just a couple of things, and hopefully tomorrow after I’ve had a chance to finish reading the full essay say some more.
First, the part about “nothing new under the sun” was inaccurate and possible scurrilous. Sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that anyone was presenting a vulgar-Marxist argument for the timeless essence of capitalism. What I meant was that I’m unmoved by arguments that insist that feature X has already been identified or has existed since the beginning. Unfortunately, having now read half of David’s article, he seems to me to be making just these sorts of arguments. For example, one of his criticisms of immaterial-labor discourse is that Haraway and other feminists beat Lazzarato et al. to the punch and did it to “better effect.” It’s fine to point out feminists got there first, and though I tend to agree that their arguments are better, David doesn’t really tell us why. But even if they are, it’s hardly a criticism of Lazzarato et al. to say that they are using their arguments, is it? If the feminists’ questions are so good, shouldn’t we encourage people to keep asking them? (Yes, you make other arguments against the concept of immaterial labor, which I hope to get to tomorrow.)
Nate, you ask “isn’t it worth asking whether or not said fissures exist?” Yes, absolutely. That’s exactly the question I think is important. Whether they exist, whether they are worth exploiting, what use can be made of them. I say dismiss Negri’s arguments because they see something that’s not there, not for their lack of novelty, even if Negri himself insists on that novelty.
I like this: “they’re onto a previously not thought of (certainly for them, perhaps for others) aspect of capitalist production.” Part of what I like about “new” arguments — with the caveat that a lot of them turn out to be wrong — is not that they locate a new era of capitalism but that they can be in tune with its new combinations and manifestations. Let me put it this way: It’s possible that at this point we “know” everything about capital, all its elements, its expressions, etc. But even if that’s true, the possibilities for its combinations and presentations, what it emphasizes, what it attempts to silence, etc., are limitless. I’m all for attempts at exploring those specific combinations, especially attempts that take into account and reflect the struggles of, say, feminists over the 100 or more years, as David tacitly admits Lazzarato does.
Okay, now it’s ridiculously late. Good to chat with you again, Nate. Austin is good. Funny you mention the weather, because after a mild spring, today was the first day that reminded of the yucky eternal summer to come: humid, 90 degrees, brutal sun. Ugh. And hey, if you are in Texas again soon, give me a holler. Maybe we can arrange a get-together. Best.
Comment by Eric — May 8, 2008 @ 2:08 am
Hi Eric,
I certainly got a great deal out of the postfordism etc arguments. I went from “oh, under postfordism so-called “women’s work” is also work in the marxist sense” to asking questions about marxist categories as I’d understood them before. That was huge for me. But it seems to me that if we take on a theoretical innovation we can’t really say if that innovation tracks onto a new fact about the present unless we know that the theoretical innovation doesn’t also show the same facts (however newly conscious of them we are) for the past. I like history and I want Negri et al or others using their work to do historical inquiry using their theoretical innovations. That’s not actually my objection, though. My objection is that without doing that historical inquiry they can’t say whether or not the facts they’re concerned about in the present are new or not. That doesn’t mean they have to do historical inquiry. It means the temporal framing of the issue should be different. Instead of “this is new” it should be “this is a key part of our present conjuncture.” This analogy may not work very well but it’s the best I can come up with - I can imagine some situation where a person ends up believing in the importance of class and exploitation and all the rest of the stuff involved in a marxist-ish criticism of capitalism, except the person says “this stuff is newly important.” That person would be wrong about the newness and right about the important - they would be mistaking “it’s new for me” for “it’s new in the world.” To my mind that person wouldn’t need to go read history and all that as long as they drop the newness thing, instead they should just say “this is a huge part of the present moment,” leaving aside the issue of novelty or not and just operating on a power analysis/economic analysis of the present as a way to guide their political practice. Does that make sense?
That said, on the issue of crediting others - this is uncharitable on my part, but my gut feeling is that it’s not just “other made the argument first” but rather specifically that feminists made the argument first. So it’s not like “oh, that stuff that Negri found in Spinoza could all be found in an earlier philosopher,” that type of argument doesn’t move me in the same way (I mean, I like it, cuz I think the history of philosophy is neat, but it’s a different issue). It’s not just that other people thought of it first, it’s that other people who were connected to an important social movement thought of it first, a movement undervalued by marxists traditionally, both for its ideas and for the populations involved in it (this also goes for arguments about race, I’d say). There’s also the issue of the temporal specificity of the claim - fixing the claims to the present lays out a very different narrative of the past than some feminist accounts of history. To my mind that implies less of a concern with the history of women’s experiences and of gender. This ties into the “is there a fissure or not” thing. I’m really out to lunch on the claims made about immaterial labor.
As I understand them, a lot of the arguments go something like this:
1. immaterial labor has these interesting and different potentials compared to other types of labor,
2. immaterial labor has a new and newly important position in the economy now,
3. therefore there is a new or newly important presence of these interesting and different potentials.
I don’t know what I think of 1 or 2 for various reasons. Re: 1, I think this can’t be adequately assessed without a longer historical view. My hunch is that immaterial labor does not have the potentials that Negri et al think are there. My hunch is that only some forms of immaterial labor have those potentials. A historical view would help disaggregate the many forms of labor that fall under the heading of immaterial labor.
Re: 2, likewise I think the claim to a new and newly important position of immaterial labor only makes sense with a longer historical view, and my hunch is that such a view will likewise help disaggregate the category: _some_ immaterial labors clearly do have a new and newly important position in the economy. Others don’t. Housework hasn’t changed so much, for instance. I find the rhetorical move in making claims about all immaterial labor (or biopolitical labor as they sometimes put it) very suspicious because I suspect that the changes they see and the potentials they think are present are unevenly distributed across the populations that fall under these terms.
Covering over those differences doesn’t have any result that I think is good, and it sounds to me a lot like older claims to class unity which actually serve different strata of the working class differently - helping some more than others and perhaps not helping or even hindering others. Put differently, I think this stuff is way, way insufficient on the matter of differences and hierarchies within the working class, which is to my mind one of the most important political problems there is. So, I think the novelty stuff is tied to other potential problems. I think the lack of attention to others who have said similar things before (but about different time periods than just the present) is indicative of those short comings. Again, I may be being uncharitable, I’ll accept that, and I’d be happy to be proven wrong — I got a lot out of these thinkers and I think they’re really sophisticated and intelligent, I wish they weren’t making what I think are these mistakes because I think the mistakes limits the power of their ideas and analyses.
One last thing - it may be that I’m overly sensitive to this because I work in a university and a lot of these arguments remind me of problematic stuff in this industry. I recognize that different arguments can have different uses in different contexts (I recognize it intellectually, at a gut level it’s harder to really understand that).
For instance, I think the argument about the global economy and global political power in _Empire_ may well be wrong - Empire instead of Imperialism and so on - but I’m not sure and I’m not really invested in it either way. Despite that, the Empire thesis had a huge role for me and others I know who read _Empire_ when it first came out because the argument helped in doing a run around other marxists who were heavily invested in the term imperialism, it helped getting into marx and marxism without having to get mired in debates with marxists who used the vocabulary of imperialism, anti-imperialism, etc. Even if the Empire thesis ultimately proves wrong, that effect was still useful and good. Likewise as I said the arguments made about immaterial labor and all that, the ones I think are overly tied to the present, they helped me start paying attention to stuff I didn’t pay attention to otherwise. That’s a good thing too. I like to call these examples of the power of wrong ideas, something which should not be underestimated. That may sound insulting, it’s not meant to be. But all of that said, in the context I’m in of working in a university, I think there’s some real downsides to these sorts of arguments aside from the women and gender stuff I mentioned about. I won’t go into the details of that (I need to run, and I don’t want to bury you in verbiage, honest), but it’s tied to the stuff I wrote about in my edufactory post. If you’re interested, that post (with all its many typos) is online here:
http://www.edu-factory.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=88&Itemid=41
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — May 10, 2008 @ 12:47 pm
you know I tried to post a reply too but it never made it up there. There’s something wrong with the posting mechanism
now I’m afraid to type much lest it disappear into the ether.
testing 1 2 3…
Comment by David Graeber — May 23, 2008 @ 10:20 am
hi David,
Sorry to hear that. That’s frustrating. I’ve occasionally lost a post I’ve worked a while on, it really sucks. I just checked and there’s no comments in moderation (sometimes the blog sends comments to moderation, I can’t identify much rhyme or reason to it) so I don;t know what happened to your reply. If you like you can email me your reply instead of (or in addition to?) posting it here, then I’ll make sure it gets up here.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — May 23, 2008 @ 10:27 am