[p2p-research] book review on cognitive capitalism

[Michel Bauwens]

Source:
http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=620

Cognitive capitalism?

I just finished reading Yann Moulier Boutang's Le capitalisme cognitif
(Cognitive Capitalism). Boutang is the editor of Multitudes, a French
journal closely associated with Toni Negri. The basic thesis of his book —
in accord with what Hardt and Negri say in Empire and Multitude — is that we
are entering into a new phase of capitalism, the "cognitive" phase, which is
as different from classical industrial capitalism as that capitalism was
from the mercantile and slavery-based capitalism that preceded it. This is a
thesis that, in general, I am sympathetic to. On the one hand, it recognizes
the ways in which 19th-century formulations of the categories of class and
property are increasingly out of date in our highly virtualized "network
society"; while on the other hand, it recognizes that, for all these
changes, we are still involved in what has to be called "capitalism": a
regime in which socially produced surpluses are coded financially,
expropriated from !
the actual producers, and accumulated as capital.

Ah, but, as always, the devil is in the details. And I didn't find the
details of Boutang's exposition particularly satisfying or convincing. To be
snide about it, it would seem that Boutang, like all too many French
intellectuals, has become a bit too enamored of California. He takes those
Silicon Valley/libertarian ideas — about the value of continual innovation,
the worthiness of the free software movement, and the possibilities of
unlimited digital dissemination — more seriously, or at least to a much
greater extent, than they merit. The result is a sort of yuppie view of the
new capitalism, one that ignores much that is cruel and repressive about the
current regime of financial accumulation.

There, I've said it. But let me go through Boutang's argument a bit more
carefully. His starting point, like that of Hardt and Negri, and of Paolo
Virno as well, is what Marx calls "General Intellect" — a concept that only
comes up briefly in Marx, in the "Fragment on Machines" which is part of
that vast notebook (never published by Marx) known today as the Grundrisse;
but that has become a central term for (post-)Marxist theorists trying to
come to grips with the current "post-Fordist" economy. (Here's Paolo Virno's
discussion of general intellect). Basically, "general intellect" refers to
the set of knowledges, competencies, linguistic uses, and
ways-of-doing-things that are embedded in society in general, and that are
therefore more or less available to "everybody." According to the argument
of Virno, Mauricio Lazzarato, Hardt and Negri, Boutang, and others,
Post-Fordist capitalism has moved beyond just the exploitation of workers'
(ultimat!
ely physical) labor-power, and is now also involved in the appropriation, or
the extraction of a surplus from, all this embodied and embedded social
no-how. Rather than just drawing on the labor-power that the worker expends
in the eight hours he or she spends each day in the workplace, "cognitive
capitalism" also draws on the workers' expertise and "virtuosity" (Virno)
and ability to conceptualize and to make decisions: capacities that extend
beyond the hours of formal labor, since they involve the entire lifespan of
the workers. My verbal ability, my skill at networking, my gleanings of
general knowledge which can be applied in unexpected situations in order to
innovate and transform: these have been built up over my entire life; and
they become, more than labor-power per se, the sources of economic value.
Corporations can only profit if, in addition to raw labor power, they also
appropriate this background of general intellect as well. General intellect
necessa!
rily involves collaboration and cooperation; it arises, throug!
h, and i
s cultivated within, the networks that have become so important, and of such
wide extent, in the years since the invention of the Internet. In this way,
general intellect can be thought of as a "commons" (as Lawrence Lessig and
other cybertheorists say), or as the overall framework of what defines us
now as a "multitude" (rather than as a particular social class, or as a
"people" confined to a single nation, as was the case in the age of
industrial capitalism and the hegemony of print media).

All this is well and good, as far as it goes. While I would note that the
phenomena described under the term "general intellect" have not just been
invented since 1975, but have existed for a much longer time — and have been
exploited by capitalism for a much longer time — I don't doubt that they
have been so expanded in recent years as to constitute (as the dialecticians
would put it) "a transformation of quantity into quality." (See my past
discussion of McLuhanite Marxism). Let's provisionally accept, then,
Boutang's assertion that enough has changed in the last 30 years or so that
we are moving into a new regime of capitalist accumulation. The question is,
how do we describe this new regime?

It's the form of Boutang's description of this transformation that I find
problematic. He says that the new cognitive capitalism is concerned, not so
much with the transformations of material energy (labor-power) into physical
goods, as with the reproduction of affects and subjectivities, of knowledges
and competencies, of everything mental (or spiritual?) that cannot be
reduced to mere binarized "information." I don't really disagree with this,
to the extent that it is a question of "in addition" rather than "instead."
But Boutang leans a little too far to the opinion that "cognitive" or
virtual production (what Hardt and Negri call "affective labor," and what
Robert Reich calls "symbolic analysis") has displaced, rather than
supplemented, the production and distribution of physical goods and
services. The source of wealth is no longer labor-power, he says, nor even
that dead labor-power congealed into things that constitutes "capital" in t!
he traditionally Marxist sense, but rather the "intellectual capital" that
is possessed less by individuals than by networks of individuals, and that
is expressed in things like capacity for innovation, institutional know-how,
etc.

Boutang claims that this "intellectual capital" [a phrase I hate, because an
individual's skills, knowledge, etc. is precisely not "capital"] is not
depleted daily (so that it needs to be replenished) in the way that physical
labor-power is under industrial capitalism; rather, it is something that
increases with use (as you do more of these things, you become better at
them), so that the process of replenishment (learning more, gaining skills,
improving these skills or virtuosities through practice) is itself what adds
value. Also, this "intellectual capital" is an intrinsically common or
social good, rather than a private or individualized one. It can only be
realized through network-wide (ultimately world-wide) collaboration and
cooperation. For both these reasons, the appropriation of this "general
intellect" is a vastly different process from that of appropriating
individual workers' labor-power. All this is exemplified for Boutang in
phenomena like o!
nline peer to peer file trading, and in the open source software movement —
he sees collaborative production in the manner of Linux as the new economic
paradigm.

Now, I am in favor, as much as anybody is, of violating copyright, and of
open source (for things like academic publications as well as for software);
but I do not believe that these can constitute a new economic paradigm —
they still exist very much as marginal practices within a regime that is
still based largely on private property "rights" and the extortion of a
surplus on the basis of those "rights." [I should say, as I have said many
times before, that I am happy for my words to be disseminated in any form,
without payment, as long as the attribution of the words to my authorship —
to use a dubious but unavoidable word or concept — is retained]. Boutang is
so excited by the "communist" aspects of networked collaboration, or general
intellect, that he forgets to say anything about how all this "cognitive"
power gets expropriated and transformed into (privately owned) capital —
which is precisely what "cognitive capitalism" does. He optimistic!
ally asserts that the attempts of corporations to control "intellectual
property," or extract it from the commons, will necessarily fail — something
that I am far less sure of. "Intellectual property" is an oxymoron, but this
doesn't mean that "intellectual property rights" cannot be successfully
enforced. You can point to things like the record companies' gradual (and
only partial) retreat from insisting upon DRM for all music files; but this
retreat coincides with, and is unthinkable without, a general
commodification of things like ideas, songs, genetic traits, and mental
abilities in the first place.

Boutang gives no real account of just how corporations, or the owners of
capital, expropriate general intellect (or, as he puts it in neoliberal
economistic jargon, how they capture "positive externalities"). He seems to
think that the switch from mere "labor-power" to "general intellect" as the
source of surplus value is basically a liberating change. I would argue
precisely the opposite: that now capital is not just expropriating from us
the product of the particular hours that we put in at the workplace; but
that it is expropriating, or extracting surplus value from, our entire
lives: our leisure time, our time when we go to the movies or watch TV, and
even when we sleep. The switch to general intellect as a source of value is
strictly correlative with the commodification of all aspects of human
activity, far beyond the confines of the workplace. Just as the capitalist
cannot exploit the worker's labor per se, but must extract it in the form of
labor power, !
so the capitalist cannot exploit general intellect without transforming it
into something like "cognition-power" — and this is extracted from
individuals just as labor-power is. When the division between physical and
mental labor is made less pronounced than it was in the Fordist factory,
this only means that the "mental" no less than the "physical" is transformed
into a commodified "capacity" that the employer can purchase from the
employee in a way that is lesser than, and incommensurate with, the "use"
the employer gets from that power or capacity. Boutang makes much of the
fact that cognition is not "used up" in the way that the physical
expenditure of energy is; but I don't think this contrast is as telling as
he claims. The fatigue of expending cognitive power in an actual work
situation is strictly comparable to the fatigue of expending physical power
in a factory. And the stocking-up of physical power and cognitive ability
over the lifeti!
me of the workers entirely go together, rather than being subj!
ect to o
pposite principles.

Boutang seems to ignore the fact that the regime of "intellectual property"
leads to grotesque consequences such as the fact that an idea that a
Microsoft employee might have when she is taking a bath, or even when she is
asleep (consider all the stories of innovative ideas that come to people in
dreams, like Kekule's discovery of the "ring" structure of benzene) "belong"
to the corporation, and must be left behind if and when she moves on to
another job. (Let me add that it is just as absurd to assert that an idea
that I come up with from a dream "belongs" to me as it is to assert that the
idea belongs to my employer. All ideas come out of other ideas; nothing I do
is independent of all the store of "general intellect" that I draw upon).

Boutang also seems to buy into many other of the myths of cognitive
capitalism. He endorses the idea that the "flexibilization" of employment
(or what in Europe is often called "precarization") is on the whole a good
and progressive thing: it "liberates" workers from the oppression of the
"salariat" (I am not sure how to translate this word into English — the
"regime of salary," perhaps?). Boutang goes so far as to point to the way
"new economy" corporations in the late 1990s gave out stock options in lieu
of higher salary as a harbinger of the way things are being rearranged under
cognitive capitalism. This seems entirely wrong to me, because it is only a
subset of highly skilled programmers, and executives, who get these options.
As far as I know, the people who wash the windows or sweep the floors at
Microsoft or Google do not get stock options. (I don't think the people who
sit at the phones to answer consumer complaints do either).

Not to mention that you'd never know from Boutang's discussion that over a
billion people in the world currently live in what Mike Davis calls "global
slums". William Gibson is right to say that "the street finds its own uses
for things"; and there are certainly a lot of interesting and inventive and
innovative things going on in the ways that people in these slums are using
mobile phones and other "trickle-down" digital technology. (See Ian
Macdonald's SF novel Brasyl for a good speculative account, or
extrapolation, of this). But all this goes on in an overall situation of
extreme oppression and deprivation, and it can only be understood in the
context of the "hegemonic" uses of these technologies in the richer parts of
the world (or richer segments of the societies in which these slums are
located).

Also, Boutang needs to account for the fact that WalMart, rather than
Microsoft or Google, is the quintessential example of a corporation
operating under the conditions of cognitive capitalism. Walmart could not
exist in its present form without the new technologies of information and
communication — it draws upon the resources of "general intellect" and the
force of continual, collectively-improvised innovation for everything that
it does. Also, and quite significantly, it focuses entirely upon circulation
and distribution, rather than upon old-style manufacturing — showing that
the sphere of circulation now (in contrast to Marx's own time) plays a major
role in the actual extraction of surplus value. Yet WalMart shows no signs
of unleashing the "creativity of the multitude" in its workings, nor of
replacing the "salariat" with things like stock options for its workers. On
that front, its largest innovation consists in getting rid of the central
Fordist pr!
inciple of paying the workers enough so that they can afford to buy what
they manufacture. Instead, WalMart has pioneered the inverse principle:
paying the workers so little that they cannot afford to shop anywhere other
than at WalMart. It might even be said, not too hyperbolically, that WalMart
has singlehandedly preserved the American economy from total collapse, in
that their lowered prices are the only thing that has allowed millions of
the "working poor" to retain the status of consumers at all, rather than
falling into the "black hole" of total immiseration. WalMart is part and
parcel of how the "new economy" has largely been founded upon transferring
wealth from the less wealthy to the already-extremely-rich. But this is a
process that Boutang altogether ignores; he writes as if "neoliberalism"
were some sort of rear-guard action by those who simply "don't get" the new
cognitive economy. In fact, though, neoliberalism is no mere ideology: it
is!
  the actual "cognitive" motor of cognitive capitalism's !
developm
ent.

Boutang even buys into the neoliberal program, to the extent that he
maintains that the role of financial speculation in the current postfordist
regime is largely a benevolent one, having to do with the management of the
newly impalpable sources of value in the "cognitive" economy. He denies that
financial speculation increasingly drives economic processes, rather than
merely reflecting them or being of use to them. He needs to think more about
the functioning of derivatives in "actually existing capitalism."

All in all, Le capitalisme cognitif buys into the current capitalist
mythology of "innovation" and "creativity" way too uncritically — without
thinking through what it might mean to detach these notions from their
association with startups and marketing plans and advertising campaigns (and
how this might be done). (As a philosophical question, this is what my work
with Whitehead and Deleuze leads me to).

The book ends, however, with an excellent proposal. Boutang argues for an
unconditional "social wage": to be given to everyone, without exception, and
without any of the current requirements that welfare and unemployment
programs impose on their recipients (requirements like behaving properly, or
having to look for work, or whatever). This social wage — he gives a
provisional figure of 700 euros per month, or about $1000/month at today's
exchange rates) would be paid in recompense for the fact that "general
intellect," from which corporations extract profit, is in fact the work of
everyone — even and especially outside of formal work situations. Boutang
spends a lot of energy showing how this proposal is fiscally feasible in
Europe today, how it would rejuvenate the economy (and thus lead, in the
long run, to enhanced profits for the corporations whose tax payments would
finance it). What he doesn't say, however — and perhaps does not recognize —
is that,!
  even though this proposal is perfectly feasible in terms of the overall
wealth of the world economy), if it were really adopted universally — that
is to say, worldwide, to all human beings on the face of the planet — it
would severly disrupt the regime of appropriation that he calls "cognitive
capitalism." This is yet another example of bat020's and k-punk's maxim that
(reversing a slogan from May 1968) we must "be unrealistic, demand the
possible." The unconditional social wage is entirely possible in terms of
what the world can economically afford, but it is "unrealistic" in terms of
the way that "cognitive capitalism" is structured. Demanding it pushes the
system to a point of paradox, a critical point — at least notionally.


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