Assembly by Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri

Author:Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

From social production to finance

When we look from below at finance, then, we can recognize social production in the double sense that we proposed earlier: it results from social interaction and it produces society. We can also see that the contemporary predominance of finance comes about as a reaction to the growing centrality of social production and ultimately it responds to the accumulation of resistances and revolts that destroyed the bases of the industrial and disciplinary regime. This passage is thus characterized by a new relationship between capital and labor: from Fordism to post-Fordism. Whereas in the Fordist period capitalist production was structured by disciplinary regimes and accumulation was driven by profits generated in the planned cooperation of industrial labor, in post-Fordism, as productive knowledges and social capacities of cooperation spread increasingly widely through society, finance serves both to control social production and to extract the value it generates in the form of rent.26

This new predominance of extraction—specifically, extracting the social wealth produced in common—changes the nature of exploitation, which must now be analyzed with new criteria. In particular, the “temporal” analytic of Marx’s concept of exploitation no longer applies. Marx explains, pedagogically, that under wage labor workers are paid the value produced during the first hours of the working day and the capitalist expropriates the value produced in the remaining hours. This explanation has the virtue of revealing an intimate connection between exploitation and the organization of production, but today the mechanisms of exploitation and productive organization tend to diverge. Capitalist entrepreneurs, who extract value at a distance and only see productive subjects abstractly as a mass, tend to regard the results of social production as a natural gift, manna from heaven.27 With their eyes fixed on derivatives markets and arbitrage strategies, they are no longer the central protagonists who organize production, forge new combinations, and generate labor cooperation, as Schumpeter theorized. Instead, those who produce value increasingly are able autonomously to cooperate and to plan production.

One key, then, is to recognize the generality of social production and the figures of labor that animate it. Contemporary labor is often characterized in terms of the power of knowledge, intelligence, and cognitive capacities.28 But social production takes place throughout the economy, not just at the pinnacle of the digital world, in the rarefied air of “cognitive workshops” like Google’s Alphabet. We need to dispel the idea that different strata of labor are entirely separate and fit neatly within each other like a Russian doll—no collars at their keyboards inside white collars in their office cubicles inside blue collars of the factory inside pink collars of health, education, and home care. Moreover, there is no time lag as if industry today were to function as it did in 1930 or agriculture as it did in 1830. Instead labor conditions and processes, which certainly vary in each country and across the global market, intersect and mix irregularly in ways that are coeval and equally contemporary: metalworkers throughout the world today perform highly specialized

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