Direct Labor and Social Taylorism

I recall in a previous class we posited a distinction between direct (material) and indirect (immaterial) labor. Bearing that distinction in mind, I was struck by Marx’s use of “direct” throughout his treatment on machines in the Grundisse: “It is the tendency of capital to give production a scientific character; direct labor is reduced to a mere moment of this process.” Marx uses “direct” to describe a process of manual labor that decreases with the tendency for increased surplus value and the use of social and scientific knowledge. Marx ends with this idea of free time as “transforming its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject.” This reminded me of the subjectivity referenced by Lazzarato as the means of immaterial labor that capital tries to rationalize and appropriate.

This leads to my main first impression of Lazzarato and Virno. After reading Robins & Webster and their “Taylorism lives!” argument, I was struck by how they believe that advanced capitalism represents a departure from Fordism and Taylorism.

For Robins & Webster, “Fordism entails the progressive intrusion into the sphere of reproduction (free time) by capitalist social relations...the growth of consumerism as a way of life...the reproduction of social life is fueled by the products of capitalist factories.” Despite Lazzarato’s claims that immaterial labor represents “the furthest point from the Taylorist model,” their descriptions of advanced capitalist labor aren’t very different.

I also want to echo Robin and the idea of the Panopticon. Again, Robins & Webster really espoused this idea of social Taylorism through the concept of the Panopticon: “A central figure for understanding the modalities of power in the information society. In the Panoptic machine, mobilization is achieved by means of the isolation of individuals, combined with the development of surveillance and intelligence by centralized agencies” (122). When Lazzarato explains that immaterial labor is defined by its ability to manage its own activity and that capital seeks to command and organize subjectivity through normative communicative forms (which he claims is “quite far from the Taylorist model of organization”) it really doesn’t seem too different from the panoptic model set up by social Taylorism.