[p2p-research] pdf : extra-economic measure of value - intellectualization of the production cycle

[Michel Bauwens]

Indeed a great text, thanks Dante

On Sat, Aug 15, 2009 at 8:06 PM, Dante-Gabryell Monson <
dante.monson at gmail.com> wrote:

> *The analytic separation between the sphere of economics and the sphere
> of consciousness*, which remains valid when productive labor is
> structurally separated from intellectual labor, *tends to lose its meaning
> when intellectual work becomes a constitutive element of the general
> production process.* Consequently, “the reduction of production to
> economic elements is a bad feature of the capitalist mode of production.”
> *Production cannot be considered as a purely economic process solely
>
> *http://www.16beavergroup.org/bifo/berardi.pdf
>
> Technology & Knowledge in a Universe of Indetermination
> determined by the laws of supply and demand: other, *extra-economic
> factors contribute to it, and they become all the more decisive with the
> progressive intellectualization of the production cycle.* Social culture,
> contrasting imaginations, expectations and disappointments, hate and
> loneliness: all these elements modify the rhythm and the fluidity of the
> production process. *The emotional, the ideological, and the linguistic
> spheres influence social productivity. And this becomes clearer when
> emotional, linguistic, and creative energies are increasingly involved in
> the production of value.
>
> *    Hans Jürgen Krahl was able to anticipate all of these developments—
> and the innovative content of the changes in production characteristic of
> these last decades, which have seen the obsolescence of the industrial
> model—at the conceptual level, following the threads of a reflection fully
> contained within the abstract categories of critical Marxism:
>
>          *Working time remains the measure of value even when it no longer
>          includes the qualitative extension of production. Science and
>          technology make possible the maximization of our labor capacity,
>          transforming it into a social combination that, in the course of
> the
>          capitalist development of machinery, increasingly becomes the main
>          productive force.*
>
>
> These analytic considerations necessarily lead the young theoretician to
> raise a decisive question, radically challenging the organizational
> modalities and the political projects of twentieth-century worker
> movements, which the anti-authoritarian groups of the 1960s had shaken
> without being able to break away from them:
>
>          *The absence of a reflection about the theoretical construction
> of
>          class consciousness as a non-empirical category [...] had the
>          consequence, within the socialist movement, of reducing the
>          concept of class consciousness to its Leninist meaning, which is
>          inadequate to the metropolis.*
>
> Leninism, as an organizational model and an understanding of the
> relation between social consciousness and the totality of the labor
> process,
> is inadequate when dealing with the metropolitan condition. *Leninism
> is founded on the separation between the labor process and higher
> activities of knowledge (consciousness). This separation is grounded in
> the proto-industrial work form, and is valid as long as the worker knows
> his job without having any awareness of the system of knowledge
> structuring society.* The basis for this distinction, though, becomes
> increasingly fragile when the mass-worker takes shape on the social
> scene, because the mass-worker, forced into an increasingly repetitive
> and fragmented activity, develops his sociality in an immediately
> subversive, anti-capitalistic dimension.
>
>      Finally, this separation becomes completely unfounded when we
> start talking about the mental nature of social labor, where the single,
> intellectualized operators become the bearers of a specific knowledge
> and develop a perception—tormented, tortuous, and fragmentary, to be
> sure—of the social system of knowledge traversing the totality of the
> productive cycle.
>
>
> II. Technology and One-Dimensional Thought
>      During those years, Marcuse was also considering the problem of
> the relation between forms of thought and social production. The
> teleology of technology in the productive sphere ends up enslaving the
> thought process from the viewpoint of its very epistemological structures:
>
>     *   The feature of operationalism – to make the concept synonymous
>        with the corresponding set of operations – recurs in the linguistic
>        tendency “to consider the names of things as being indicative at the
>        same time of their manner of functioning, and the names of
> properties
>        and processes as symbolical of the apparatus used to detect or
>        produce them.”*
>
>
> ...
>
> *
>         The key to political action [...] consists in developing the public
>         nature of Intellect outside of Work, and in opposition to it. [...]
> I use
>    the terms Exodus here to define mass defection from the State, the
>    alliance between general intellect and political action, and the
>    movement of the Intellect toward the public sphere.*
>
>


-- 
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