I was very excited to find this piece by Silvia Federici talking about feminism, precarious labor, post-operaismo, etc. It’s a talk called “Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint.” (See also these two interviews, with Maria Rosa dalla Costa and Alisa Del Re translated from the Futuro Anteriore [sp?] collecting. I should also take a crack at reading the interview with Federici in Italian, as it’s not been translated yet.)
I’ve been interested in this precarity stuff for a while now, and in feminism. It was feminism that made my early very vulgar marxism and unknowing maoism unravel. (Do I count as an ex-maoist if I was affiliated with a maoist party but didn’t know it was maoist?)
Likewise with a big chunk of my excitement over the post-operaismo parts of autonomist marxism.
So the Federici piece feels sort of like something I was looking for.
(This reminds me, I have to get the categories or tags or whatsits updated for my blog, that may make me repeat myself less. It might make me repeat myself less. I’m at least two years behind on the updating, maybe more. Ugh. I usually just use searches to find stuff that I think I’ve posted, which is not very efficient. I think I’ve got quite a few posts on this stuff now about feminism and women and Negri et al… for instance: this and this and this.)
Federici writes that recent works by people like Negri and Virno “capture important aspects of the developments that have taken place in the organization of work” and stresses that she does not
“want to minimize the importance of [these] theories (…) They have been inspired by much political organizing and striving to make sense of the changes that have taken place in the organization of work, which has affected all our lives. In Italy, in recent years, precarious labor has been one of the main terrains of mobilization together with the struggle for immigrant rights. I do not want to minimize the work that is taking place around issues of precarity.”
On precarity and immaterial/affective labor she writes:
“The precarity of labor is rooted in the new forms of production. Presumably, the shift to immaterial labor generates a precariazation of work relations because the structure of cognitive work is different from that of industrial, physical work. Cognitive and info work rely less on the continuous physical presence of the worker in what was the traditional workplace. The rhythms of work are much more intermittent, fluid and discontinuous.”
I’m not clear if this paragraph has an implied “for Negri and Virno and others” or “for real in the actual economy.” Either way, I don’t like the implied relationship here between the labor process and the conditions of work. That is, I don’t like the implication that the the structure of work leads to the conditions of the work, including the legal conditions. These conditions are not determined by the structure of work. At the least, they’re underdetermined by the structure of work. To put this differently, the main determinants are political whereas the quote sounds like the main determinants are technical. There’s no major non-political reason why immaterial labor should be (are) precarious and other labors should not be (are not). Rather those outcomes are the result of historical factors, class conflict, strategies, etc. Again, politically not technically determined.
Federici continues, noting that
“the development of precarious labor and shift to immaterial labor are not for Negri and other autonomist Marxists a completely negative phenomenon. On the contrary, they are seen as expressions of a trend towards the reduction of work and therefore the reduction of exploitation, resulting from capitalist development in response to the class struggle. This means that the development of the productive forces today is already giving us a glimpse of a world in which work can be transcended; in which we will liberate ourselves from the necessity to work and enter a new realm of freedom.”
The final sentence here hits the nail on the head for me: overemphasis on the forces of production and underemphasis on the relations of production, and mistaken account of their relationship.
In her criticisms, Federici states that “this theory is built on a faulty understanding of how capitalism works. It sees capitalist development as moving towards higher forms of production and labor.” What’s left out here is that
“the tremendous leap in technology required by the computerization of work and the integration of information into the work process has been paid at the cost of a tremendous increase of exploitation at the other end of the process. (…) The fundamental principle [neglected in the theoretical accounts of precarious and immaterial labor] is that capitalist development is always at the same time a process of underdevelopment. Maria Mies describes it eloquently in her work: ‘What appears as development in one part of the capitalist faction is underdevelopment in another part.’ (…) the restructuring of production has aimed at restructuring and deepening the divisions within the working class, rather than erasing them.”
Federici writes that this theory at least implicitly holds that “capitalist development is necessary to create the material conditions for communism,” which is a key part of what no longer works for me here. When in a polemical mood, want to say this implication has a theological or religious quality (which I mean here as a criticism).
Another problem is that “the precarious labor theory (…) presents itself as gender neutral.” (This reminds me, I need to type up my notes on Heidi Hartmann, and compare that work with stuff on slavery, like Johnson and Tomich.) This is part of what makes this work insufficient on divisions within the working class. There’s no discussion “of how the wage has been and continues to be used to organize these divisions and how therefore we must approach the wage struggle so that it does not become an instrument of further divisions,” a pressing political matter.
This stuff on immaterial and “precarious labor ignores, bypasses, one of the most important contributions of feminist theory and struggle, which is the redefinition of work, and the recognition of women’s unpaid reproductive labor as a key source of capitalist accumulation.” (See Boydston, Fortunati, Mies, as three that I’m aware of [which reminds me, I need to find my copy of the Mies and put up my notes, and start building a list on feminist {criticisms of} political economy].)
in the immaterial and precarious labor conversations, or risks being lost, and such a loss is or would be a serious problem.“In redefining housework as WORK, as not a personal service but the work that produces and reproduces labor power, feminists have uncovered a new crucial ground of exploitation that Marx and Marxist theory completely ignored. All of the important political insights contained in those analysis are now brushed aside as if they were of no relevance to an understanding of the present organization of production. (…) The feminist analysis of the function of the sexual division of labor, the function of gender hierarchies, the analysis of the way capitalism has used the wage to mobilize women’s work in the reproduction of the labor force–all of this is lost”
“[T]he lesson of the feminist movement is still crucial today. Feminists in the seventies tried to understand the roots of women’s oppression, of women’s exploitation and gender hierarchies. They describe them as stemming from a unequal division of labor forcing women to work for the reproduction of the working class. This analysis was basis of a radical social critique, the implications of which still have to be understood and developed to their full potential. When we said that housework is actually work for capital, that although it is unpaid work it contributes to the accumulation of capital, we established something extremely important about the nature of capitalism as a system of production. We established that capitalism is built on an immense amount of unpaid labor, that it not built exclusively or primarily on contractual relations; that the wage relation hides the unpaid, slave -like nature of so much of the work upon which capital accumulation is premised.”
Federici ends concluding that “the main problem of precarious labor theory is that it does not give us the tools to overcome the way we are being divided. But these divisions, which are continuously recreated, are our fundamental weakness with regard to our capacity to resist exploitation and create an equitable society.”
There’s more in the talk, like stuff on social struggles and reproduction as a terrain of struggle, which is definitely worth reading and which I won’t quote here. I’ll end these notes with Federici’s remarks about what may be going on politically in all this stuff, and her attempt at a partial explanation of explaining the relative popularity of this work. (Here’s at least part why it was so exciting to me personally back when.)
Federici expresses “suspicions that this theory expresses the interests of a select group of workers, even though it presumes to speak to all workers.” I think this is connected to an earlier/older/ongoing theme in the operaismo stuff, which is the hegemony of one class sector over another. People from Midnight Notes discuss this here, referring to it as a class vanguard and using the EZLN as an inspiration for criticizing this move. (Some discussion on this here and here.) The universality of immaterial labor is functional for the hegemony or attempted hegemony of one sector over the entire class. Federici argues that these theories “bring us back to a male-centric conception of work and social struggle.”
We can see why these theories have become popular. They have utopian elements especially attractive to cognitive workers–the “cognitariat” as Negri and some Italian activists call them. With the new theory, in fact, a new vocabulary has been invented. Instead of proletariat we have the “cognitariat.” Instead of working class, we have the “Multitude”, presumably because the concept of Multitude reveals the unity that is created by the new socialization of work; it expresses the communalization of the work process, the idea that within the work process workers are becoming more homogenized. For all forms of work incorporate elements of cognitive work, of computer work, communication work and so forth.
As I said this theory has gained much popularity, because there is a generation of young activists, with years of schooling and degrees who are now employed in precarious ways in different parts of the culture industry or the knowledge-production industry. Among them these theories are very popular because they tell them that, despite the misery and exploitation we are experiencing, we are nevertheless moving towards a higher level of production and social relations. This is a generation of workers who looks at the “Nine to Five” routine as a prison sentence. They see their precariousness as giving them new possibilities. And they have possibilities their parents did not have or dreamed of. The male youth of today (e.g.) is not as disciplined as their parents who could expect that their wife or partners would depend of them economically. Now they can count on social relationships involving much less financial dependence. Most women have autonomous access to the wage and often refuse to have children.
(…)
the theory of precarious and immaterial labor speaks to the situation and interests of workers working at the highest level of capitalistic technology. Its disinterest in reproductive labor and its presumption that all labor forms a common hides the fact that it is concerned with the most privileged section of the working class.”
EDIT:
I was just looking for something else and found this old blog post of mine, which includes a bit of my notes on the intro to the Negri collection Books For Burning. I had forgotten this, but in a recent comment on the stuff in that book Negri said part of the point of the writing collected in that book was “to legitimate a kind of leadership within the seventies movement.” Seems to me this supports Federici’s argument quite a bit.
This bit from Mezzadra is relevant too, re: Mike’s point in the comments below about retrospective homogenization of class composition. This relates to the point that Mike (S) and Jpool made arguing with me about the term ‘wage slavery’ here.
*
Notes to self: Revisit this - http://generation-online.org/p/fpnegri19.htm
Federici is awesome. I’m looking forward to reading this, as my thoughts keep revolving around the provocations in Caliban and the Witch. . .
I’ve often thought this myself, perhaps from stimulus I’ve received here, that the appeal of a certain robust version of the immaterial labor stuff has to do not only with precarious info workers, but particularly precarious academic workers, like me, especially in the period of the neoliberal U. There’s definitely a strong critique of this vis-a-vis not only Federici and Fortunati but The German Ideology. Still, even if we agree that there is a certain lurking technologism in the account, it does seem to me the forces of production have allowed for (been motivated by?) a rearrangement of the relations of production that have suited capital’s needs in the post-Fordist period and allowed for rising exploitation, especially of unwaged work. This isn’t as generalized as Virno and Negri suggest, and it doesn’t mean that other kinds of labor–Fordist, etc.– don’t exist, but it is a different development to some degree, and a potential point of attack, I’d say. Not the only point, and not the “weakest link,” or the vanguard, but a point. Modes of production surely overlap, as the Preface to the Contr. of a Crit. of Pol. Econ. tells us. There may be no epochal break, but there is an interrelation of these modes. I guess I’m trying, badly, to say I agree with Graeber and you and Federici on many of these points, but I also believe that there’s something about the period from ‘73 on that must be accounted for, even if its meaning for political strategy isn’t yet decided. I’m convinced, I suppose, by the accounts of a rising contradiction within the organic composition of capital. This doesn’t mean other contradictions, the inaugural contradictions of capital don’t exist too, just that that’s something to focus on as well.
Comment by Jasper — July 1, 2008 @ 2:53 pm
One thing that gets to me about this ‘immaterial labour’ stuff is how rarely stats are referred to. Surely if you want to establish something has changed and find out how widespread it is you could appeal to some statistical evidence? It’s not like labour stats are unavailable or even difficult to access. People seem to want to just describe it as some kind of zeitgeist, as if working people generally have the same kind of experience all over.
Comment by Mike Beggs — July 1, 2008 @ 9:20 pm
Mike, in his book on the new economy, Doug Henwood makes this point and says that according to labor statisticians in the U.S., the big growth in future jobs will be in occupations like truck driving and nursing. His point is that future jobs won’t be as “immaterial” as many, including both new-economy philosophers and Negri, believe them to be. This is fair, but I’m not convinced. Saying that there will still be way more truck drivers than systems analysts doesn’t account for how the nature of truck driving changes.
Comment by Eric — July 2, 2008 @ 8:55 am
hey y’all,
I know Hardt and Negri have pressed the point that they don’t mean numerical prominence so much as the key type of work. (They call it the hegemonic type of work, a use which I find odd - I don’t really know Gramsci but I’d always though hegemony was a political thing whereas the prominence of immaterial labor is a technical matter with political consequences, I don’t know that it matters much but I think there may be a slip here somewhere about a technical vs a political meaning of hegemony.) I’ve heard the example used that when Marx wrote about factories there were only say 500 or 1000 factories in the world, most labor took other forms, but factory labor was the sort that set the agenda for a lot of the rest of the global economy. I’m not convinced of the comparison, and I’m not sure how this sort of prominence could really be assessed, but even if it is true I still don’t find the immaterial labor thesis/theses - the political consequences that are supposed to follow from the changes in the economy - all that compelling.
This is not to say there haven’t been important changes, there definitely have. I’m not sure how much Negri et al help understand that, and I’m not sure what the over all political significance of these changes are (other than underling the urgency of the need for … something to happen, something good for our side I mean). Trucking for instance, to take up one of the examples Eric mentioned from Henwood, has definitely changed, my grandfather got out of long-haul trucking in the early 80s due to what he took be negative results of deregulation (I only ever heard Reagan referred to as “that god damn Reagan” and knew the phrase from a very early age “Reagan deregulated trucking,” though I didn’t know what it meant), I believe it was basically wage cuts and speed ups. There’s also been big changes in short-haul trucking. My good friend and comrade Adam wrote a big piece on short-haul trucking and trucker organizing in California, some of it’s here: http://machete408.wordpress.com/2008/04/14/the-central-valley-california-%e2%80%9cthe-beautiful-and-the-damned%e2%80%9d/
He could say a lot more than I can about trucking and what’s happening in the industry and how it ties into the global economy and changes in the logistics industry.
Nursing has also massively changed, there;s a major nurse shortage, hours are really long, conditions poor (but wages relatively high), and at least as of 2003 a majorly aging workforce that is not being replaced at the same rate they are or will be retiring. (There’s also been some waves of unionization in response.)
That said, I’d say against Henwood on this point (not read his book, I should do) that nursing falls pretty clearly under what Hardt and Negri would call immaterial and affective labor in a variety of ways - caring for bodies, interpretive-intellectual work (reading vital signs etc), and working with information/medical technology.
cheers,
Nate
Comment by Nate — July 2, 2008 @ 11:07 am
Henwood in the early chapter where he first introduces the BLS stats is taking on ‘new economy’ ideas rather than Negri-esque ‘immaterial labour’ - in particular Robert Reich’s concept of ’symbolic analysts’, which Reich claimed was the most rapidly growing job category, and which he used to explain rising income inequality. The thrust of Henwood’s argument is against this being an adequate explanation for rising income inequality, and especially challenging bullshit about ’skills’.
The engagement with Hardt and Negri comes later in the book, where he calls ‘Empire’ “an excellent starting place for understanding the present and finding the way to a better future”, even though “there’s a lot wrong with the book”. [p. 180]
He admires H+N’s optimism, but (and this is where the truck drivers come in): “Unfortunately, Empire sometimes reads like a cascade of assertions with little or no evidence. Its heavy reliance on metaphors and religious imagery makes it seem at times like a theological fantasy, more a dreamwork than an exercise in political economy… Hardt and Negri are often uncritical and credulous in the face of orthodox propaganda about globalisation and immateriality… They asset that immaterial labour - service work, basically - now prevails over the old-fashioned material kind, but they don’t cite any statistics: you’d never know that far more Americans are truck drivers than are computer professionals. Nor would you have much of an inkling that three billion of us, half the earth’s population, live in the rural Third World, where the major occupation remains tilling the soil.”
Then:
“These are not minor flaws, but making these complaints almost feels like quibbling. Even though the book isn’t really a Capital for our times, it’s provocative in every sense of the word. The authors’ emphasis on the dispersed nature of power today, the rich potential of the social networks uniting people worldwide, and the refusal of all nostalgias is often profound.” [pp. 184-85]
I have to say I think Henwood is too kind and I have trouble taking Hardt and Negri seriously because it is ‘dreamwork’, and not grounded in evidence about the real social world. I think there’s plenty of interesting things to argue about historical changes in labour processes and class composition. I don’t buy ‘new era’ or ’stagist’ arguments - for basically the reason Todd put well in another comments thread, that social changes “are partial, complex, and copresent with continuity”. But that obviously doesn’t commit us to thinking that there is ‘nothing new under the capitalist sun’.
Comment by Mike Beggs — July 2, 2008 @ 10:07 pm
Well, tentatively, I’ll get specific about what I think is different.
For the most part, I find all of the claims that David Harvey made in his Postmodernity book about “flexible accumulation” as a post-’73 conjuncture pretty compelling. Informationalization of industries is one part of this, and certainly not the most important. (I will say I’m no longer comfortable with the term immaterial labor, since it seems like it depends upon a distinction between the physical/intellectual that was never that well-formed with regard to work in capitalism, a post-Hegelian hangover. . . If the working class mediates between matter and the dictates of the ruling class, as well as its own opposition, then work was always “informational” or “immaterial” since it consists of rules, protocols, etc., and strategies for getting around these. The product/service distinction seems problematic for many reasons. . .)
But a point that he makes and that Virno makes, as do H&N, in a needlessly ontologized/theological format, is that, at least with respect to the 45-73 period, reproduction of the relations of production is taken over, more and more, by the working-class itself. In other words, more self-management, and less centralized, top-to-bottom management. Management becomes immanentized: de-hierarchization, de-regulation, dispersal of labor, networked systems, the whole bogus rhetoric of co-gestion, the financialization of pension plans as a kind of sham embourgeoisement, the rhetoric of “team players,” etc., and a successful defense against unionization/aggressive unions by way of all this stuff. I think Virno’s compelling on the way that demands for autonomy were, essentially, turned to capital’s advantage in the 80s and 90s.
This becomes, I think, a really powerful ideological tool–dampening antagonism, it seems. It’s certainly limited to the most privileged sectors, especially when you assume an international perspective.
And then there’s a generalization of unwaged work. I don’t think you need to buy into the whole productive ontology thing that you get with H&N, nor should this be seen as contradicting the idea, a la Federici, that unwaged work has existed since the transition forward. But I do think that leisure time is increasingly time spent interacting with commodities, and not just buying them but making them, and thereby helping various firms get a larger share of the available surpluses (a question of price, I think, more than value). This is mostly what I think the internet is for: unwaged work, making things that are useful for capital while experiencing it as disposable time (admittedly, this may apply best to the middle class and to the most privileged sectors of the working-class). This is a far more efficient way to enforce unwaged work than, say, an afterschool detention program. I sort of take this from Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, and I think Negri and Virno, for all of their flaws, are some of the best readers of Debord. . . Maybe these things have existed forever, but it sure seems like there’s a good deal more of it now. That is, the ratio seems different than during Keynesian-Fordist days. I could be convinced otherwise. But so it seems today. In any case, I don’t think this is a claim about a new “stage” or that it means, say, Fordist production has gone away (or even a certain Keynesian–of the Iraq War /Bear Stears bailout sort), just that these things are in different proportions with older/newer formations. . .
I’m not sure what the political upshot of all this is. I’m certainly not as sunny about it all as H&N are. I don’t really see this as to the advantage of an anti-capitalist movement. To the contrary, at least for now. But I have an Adornian streak that way.
Sloppy, I know. But that’s all I’ve got for now.
Comment by Jasper — July 2, 2008 @ 10:49 pm
Nate,
Those are some good points about ‘the key type of work’. I agree that numbers on their own don’t say a lot, but a decent argument must be able to account for them. I also agree that ‘hegemony’ doesn’t make sense as a concept in labour economics. Whereas Marx’s expectation of the growth of factory labour was well-grounded in a theory of capital accumulation.
That said, I think a lot of people go astray in thinking of past class compositions as much more homogeneous than they really were. You know, maybe a picture in our minds of early trade unions being full of unskilled interchangeable labourers. When in fact 19th century labour was very heterogeneous and the organised were likely to be highly skilled technicians. And Victorian London had plenty of ‘affective’ or ‘immaterial’ labourers… think David Copperfield, apprentice proctor. What in the hell is a proctor?
Comment by Mike Beggs — July 2, 2008 @ 10:53 pm
hey friends,
Jasper I somehow missed your initial comment, that’s why I didn’t reply, sorry about that. I agree 100% that at least some of the appeal of this stuff has to do with conditions in academia. I have a cynical response that I’m not proud of - this stuff’s recent reception fits into the “must find the next big thing” economy and culture of academia - and a more positive response in that this stuff really does sound like it’s talking about what I do for a living (also a contingent academic worker) and is the only sort of work I’ve done in the past ten years (broadly speaking, immaterial and affective labor in the way that Hardt and Negri et al mean the terms). That’s important, and in so far as this stuff makes people’s experiences make sense and helps them think through what they live with, then great. Part of what I don’t like about this stuff, though, especially the academic reception of it when it comes to trying to change things on the job for academic workers, is that I think it fits into or is used to express a lot of the negative aspects of academic work-culture. (A lot of the edu-factory stuff is an example of this in my opinion, though I feel bad saying that as I like those people a lot.) Like academic exceptionalism - “we do an entirely novel sort of work! we exemplify an unprecedented mode of capitalist production!” - which in turn makes academic workers who try to organize fail to look for examples they could learn from. (In my experience this is way, way more common than the sort “it’s a job like any other, let’s just import what’s common to all workplace organizing into this setting and run with that” kind of line that I like to yammer on about.) As for what’s different today, I can’t really speak to that with much confidence. I’m not very well informed about a lot of the current world. I’m certainly open to the view that a lot has changed. (I’m way less open to the view that the type of change between the recent past and the present is somehow a change of a qualitatively different order when compared with say the changes between 1890 and 1920 in the US.) The main thing for me is that I hear lot of claims about the present’s novel qualities and they remind me of things I’ve read about prior moments and they don’t sound so novel to me. I’m not against novelty per se, though.
Mike, you hit the nail on the head for me, that’s the issue exactly, the retrospective homogenization of past compositions of our class. Here’s a parallel. I’ve been researching workmen’s compensation programs in the US, their origins. The story goes that this was good for the workers because workers lost so much in court cases earlier. I found a dissertation recently that said this may not be true for Ohio. Likewise the preliminary research I’ve done makes me wonder if this true for Minnesota (and especially for women waged workers who got hurt on the job). The dissertation I found (notes to come eventually) suggested that the standard story told in a lot of the historical writing on workmen’s comp actually came from a certain group of reformers who used that claim as a way to argue for workmen’s comp programs. The claim is that some historians basically took the winning side’s claim about their moment as the accurate description of their moment. Maybe it was, but it’s not clear. Likewise with homogenizing prior class compositions: the hegemony of one sector/stratum over the rest of the class may involve claims to the primacy of a certain type of work (one case in point is Marx’s questionable comments about women workers in the chapters on the work day and machinery in v1). Retrospectively the move is to take the politically hegemonic class stratum and make it the exemplary figure of the class, then act as if the class was only that figure. (Case in point is the periodization of professional worker, mass worker, socialized worker in Negri et al prior the turn to the multitude-talk, the hegemony of the professional worker at least in the US was hotly contested among other things by the IWW, that’s part of what the denunciations of the AFL for trade/craft unionism and chauvinism about ’skilled’ labor.) On the homogenization thing, Ranciere has a great quote on this that I’ll have to see if I can find. He says something like he was never taken with what he heard about postmodernity/postmodernism because he had spent a lot of time in archives and knew that the working class was always very different internally.
Massimiliano Tomba had a good essay in the Commoner a while back about some of this, specifically in relation to Negri et al, it’s here: www.commoner.org.uk/12tomba.pdf
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — July 2, 2008 @ 11:32 pm