That said, chattel slavey and slavery are not identical. Not all slavery is chattel slavery: not all slavery involves the children of slaves also being slaves. That’s one distinction. All slavery is awful, chattel slavery is probably the worst. But the point is that there’s multiple forms of slavey. Why can’t waged slavery be one form of it? (And some slaves did receive wages, by the way, there’s a book on this - Divided Mastery - not wages from their owners but wages from people they were rented to by their masters: not trying to minimize any of this, just be clear on these differnces.)

I agree with JPool about the differnces in legal status between slaves and workers, important stuff and real differences. But again here too I want to say it’s a continuum. I don’t have time right now but I’ll find it later - there’s groups doing work on slavery now even though slavery is illegal. The legal status isn’t the issue. Likewise post-Emancipation many African Americans lived in debt peonage which recreated slavery-like conditions through the 1940s, despite the illegality of both slavery and peonage (stuff on this in the book The Lost Promise of Civil Rights). There’s other important forms of legally disqualified or legally secondary labor too, which are also on a continuum with this - women workers at many points in time, child laborers, non-citizen workers (either undocumented or documented in a variety of ways like visas tied to one and only one type of work, “guest” workers, etc).

While I share and do want to preserve the horror at chattel slavery, I think the move to section that off as unique is problematic. THat’s not well put, I’m not sure I can do better — what I mean, is the depth of the horrors of slavery were (are?) awful, no question, and more awful. But more awful is a quantitative relation - others things can have some quantity of awfulness too. Sectioning off slavery as not just the most awful but a qualitatively different order of awfulness seems to me to minimize other awful things which shared common origins and functions.

As for not using the term because it makes lefties sound like relics - yes, of course. Likewise with talking about Marx and many other topics. All you’re really saying is ‘be deliberate about how you walk with different people’, to which the only answer can be ‘yes, of course.’

Re: factories and wage slaves - I was nothing like a chattel slave in the factory jobs I did. I’d say many restaurant workers and certainly home health care workers (both growth industries I believe) have it worse than I did, and I can think of other examples. So I don’t find the “wage slave/factory worker” equation convincing - if you mean that the term wage slavery was once appropriate for factory workers and was generally appropriate because there were many factory workers but is no longer appropriate because there aren’t many factory workers.

Finally, on the function of the term in the old days as a way to steal abolitionists’ thunder, I’m unconvinced. I’ll get back to you on this. Certainly some uses of the term had that function. I don’t think all did, and I think abolitionists had multiple agendas and I don’t feel much affinity for some of them beyond shared opposition to slavery (ditto for a lot of reds etc today, not to mention liberals etc). I get some of this from a book called From Bondage To Contract. The other agenda for me here is emphasizing the capitalist nature of slavery and getting at the idea of free or voluntary labor - the difference between involuntary and voluntary labor is super, super important, but as just an opposition it’s inadequate and lots falls into the gaps between the two. More on all this later, I gotta run.

take care,
Nate

The first, as MIke notes, is that historically the term emerged from a tendency in the white labor movement to steal the thunder from earlier abolitionist movements and to marginalize the concerns and expreience of black workers. Look at the way that Debs used it, nearly half a century after abolition. Essentially he used it to argue that this whole negro problem thing was either a distraction or a very slight variation on workers conditions. If you get a chance, go see the August Wilson play, “Gem of the Sea”, at the Guthrie right now. At one point in it, a young man, born after the end of slavery, is describing the combination of legal and economic coersion being used to control African Americans in both the South and the North, and he says, “It’s worse than slavery.” The older man he’s been talking to responds quickly and definitively, “Nothing is worse than slavery!” I could go on, but it should be clear to anyone has has studied systems of chattel slavery that they mark something of an ultimate instance of coercion and dehumanization. As with rape, there is a kind of violence that comes with trying to turn the experience of slavery into simply a metaphor.

Second, Mads doesn’t go nearly far enough. The position of labor that Debs and others were describing at the end of the nineteeth and beginning of the twentieth centuries just aren’t the conditions that most folks face in the contemporary U.S. Of course capitalism is still theft and folks are still suffering, but let’s not pretend that, say, most people still work in factories. The term has a kind of retro-cool feel to it, but as anything other than an in-joke it’s likely to reenforce the perception of socialists/labor activists as a relic.

Third, and probably least importantly, the term is just technically wrong. This isn’t so much a problem, becuase it’s never been used as a technical term, rather as either cultural critique or rallying metaphor. There’s a fundamental difference, however, between the legal status of a slave and that of a free worker. Depending on the society, this doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about the conditions of their lives after that, but if one can be bought and sold its always different than if one cannot.

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

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.