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

Sun Aug 16 13:07:41 CEST 2009

Thank you Dante, excellently put, I am just now finishing my book on how the
idea of 'employability' and associated government policy attempts to force
people's activities into economic measures of value, simultaneous requiring
a forced subjectivity of mind toward constant knowledge acquisition
according to market demands. Lifelong learning schemes are used to measure
corporations' 'excellence' barometer in South Korea, people can gain credits
for 'intangible cultural understandings' which can be used by potential
employers to measure productivity capabilities, skills competitions gage
tacit know-how of young enterpreneurs, the global competencies index, the
list goes on for these incredibly explicit economic measures of value in the
supposed global knowledge based economy.

-- 
Employment profile: http://www.espach.salford.ac.uk/politics/staff/moore.php

Capital and Class special issue 2009 on Peer to Peer Production:
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/parallel-visions-of-peer-production/2009/03/13
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/category/cognitive-capitalism

Manchester Film Cooperative: http://www.manchesterfilm.coop/

2009/8/16 Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>

> 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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