Friday, September 14, 2007
Immaterial Labor
We're going to be reading a piece on MySpace and immaterial labor. As a preview, there's an ongoing discussion thread devoted to the topic on the iDC list. I think this is the piece that set it off (which was a response to this essay). See what you think of the discussion of labor -- based on a quick look through some of the early posts, I noticed a preoccupation with coming up with what might be described as "subjective" or substantive definitions: if it doesn't feel like "work" then it's not labor, or if it's not physical work, it's not labor. This has very little to do with the relational definition that we discussed in class. What always fascinates me in this type of discussion is that marx, vulgar marxism, and marxists get tagged with imposing the term "labor" on a situation, finding it everywhere they look. I've read enough of the business literature on the topic to know that it's not (just) the marxists who are thinking of value generating interactivity as labor, it's the businesses who see this activity as consumer participation in the production process. Now this itself isn't dispositive from the point of view of the relational definition we've been working with, but it does tend to be overlooked by those who target those crusty marxists. Maybe they're trying to highlight the complicity of such marxists with the business world: both of them "don't get" that what they think of as labor (whether unwaged, directly waged or compensated in the form of convenience or free onlinge storage space etc.) is "really" something more. In other words, as D-W puts it, it's not (just) the marxists but contemporary capitalism which is vulgar and reductionist. Those businesses just don't get that what they think of as labor and invest in as such -- the contributions to the creation of information commodities that they buy, sell and profit from -- really isn't. We've already surpassed capitalism, but the problem is that capitalism just hasn't realized it yet.
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2 comments:
Our post was singling out Marxism for its pretension to critique capitalism. By accepting the terms of the debate (labor, value, man [sic] as economic being, etc.), Marxism makes itself no real alternative, or to paraphrase Baudrillard again, marxism fails to provide a radical perspective on capitalism - it is simply the mirror of [capitalist] production...and thus indeed "crusty."
I'm not sure marxists necessarily "accept the terms of the debate" in the sense in which you use this phrase. It certainly doesn't mean that marxists understand these terms in the same way as capitalists do (think of the marxist dismantling of the commodity "fetish" and of the notion of the "freely-entered-into" wage labor contract).
There is something a bit facile about the notion that terms cannot be understood as contested -- as themselves sites of struggle: that to call an activity labor is already to have been co-opted.
In using the term "capitalism" itself, according to the argument you're running, you have already "accepted the terms of the debate" (adopted a particular way of thinking about how society operates). To really critique capitalism would one have to avoid talking about it entirely?
This type of argument tends to default to a deeply regressive one. It resonates, for example, with the arguments of neo-conservatives who want to get rid of affirmative action programs because they "buy into the terms" of racism by acknowledging that race has served as the historical basis of violent exploitation. To the opponents of affirmative action, taking any action on the basis of race -- even if it is to redress the real effects of discrimination, exploitation, and injustice -- is to "buy into the terms" of racism itself. Such approaches strike me as a politically and theoretically dubious, at best.
Similarly, capitalist exploitation is based on the social relations that structure the reproduction of scarcity and the economics of waged labor...Can we contest capital without identifying its basis? Is contesting capitalism already "buying into the terms of the debate"? How convenient for capitalism!
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