College Library Browsing #4

 “From the Factory to the Metropolis,” by Antonio Negri, (Essays, Vol. II), 2018

(This is the fourth in a series of four looking at purely academic books, as I’ve run out of books by public intellectuals or left authors.  This is part 1 of the review...)

This book of essays is unusual because it attempts to deal with what Negri calls the ‘post-modern’ and ‘post-industrial’ economy, i.e. the exploitation of white collar labor in Europe/U.S./Japan, where intellectual labor produces intellectual commodities and property like patent rent. What is also unusual about this is that Negri was an advocate of blue-collar ‘workerism’ (operaismo) and a leading proponent of spontaneous ‘libertarian’ socialism (autonomia) in the 1970s-1980s during the severe class war in Italy.  Here he tries to extend his ‘workerist’ analysis to another strata of the class. (Part of workerism is that it is against party organizations...) He now lives in Paris and Venice after spending years in jail for a political crime he did not commit.

IMMATERIAL ECONOMY

This thesis of ‘post-industrialism’ is not new.  Negri’s contention is that the biggest profits are now garnered not by blue collar surplus value, but by ‘immaterial’ digital corporations like Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google, AirBnB, Uber and Microsoft.  So it is a twist on the old theory, still focusing on profit.  It reflects a section of big capital’s parallel move to financial speculation and profiteering in markets and real estate, related to the profit stagnation of a broad range of older technologies.  The issue for Negri is proving this.  

Negri’s focus on ‘intellectual labor’ might be a reflection of his own life as a professor.  His insistence that Europe is ‘post-industrial’ ignores imperialism’s global reach, as capital is a world system not limited to a set of countries.  It also ignores the quite real nature of European industrial and rural capitalism, not to mention the massive industrial infrastructure supporting ‘immaterial’ corporations – fiber lines, wifi routers, satellites, server farms, electrical grids, computers, phones, undersea cables, robots, etc.  This kind of technology is built upon industrial labor, just as industry is built on agricultural labor.  There is a reason that Bill Gates is now the largest owner of farmland in the U.S. In the same way, ‘post-modernism’ is usually understood as distaining any systems theory, especially Marxism.  He uses it in a different way.  So his ‘hip’ use of these two terms is odd.  

Negri understands that capital, through advertising and data, monetarizes the internet with much content provided free by ‘social users.’  (This blog is an example.) This he calls part of a ‘new primitive accumulation’ - “immaterial post-modern production” – by white collar workers who ‘produce subjectivity.’  His contention is that this is part of the ‘knowledge economy’ and the twilight of industrial capitalism’– a key transition.  

He maintains that white collar / service workers produce ‘social wealth’ – telecommunications and education being most prominent to him. But all workers are hired for their skills and knowledge.  Take a retail hairdresser, while using only a few products, mainly contribute their skill in cutting or styling hair.  Capital essentially commodifies their knowledge or their ability to learn...and then profits off their labor.  No 'commodity' is produced, unless you call a haircut a 'commodity.'  Digital coders produce software code, which is intellectual property.  Lawyers produce documents - again, a form of intellectual property.  Chemists might produce a patent for rent, architects a blue-print, bartenders a drink, janitors a clean office so that work can continue. Teachers produce skills and health workers heal - their 'products' are immaterial.  Although an A on a test or a cast on a leg or removal of a diseased organ might be a 'product.'  And sex workers?    

The rebellion of the Metropolis. Fritz Lang Would Be Proud...

RIGHT TO THE METRO

It is also a book similar to the thesis of the ‘right to the city’ first mentioned by the Situationists and later elucidated by leftists like David Harvey.  Hence the name of this book.  Negri considers city dwellers who honor strikes, such as the 12/1995 transport strikes in France, as ‘co-producers’ with the striking workers, uniting both groups. These events he calls, not a general strike, but a ‘metro strike’ based on a certain territory, a ‘metropolitan beehive.’  Those in the precariat who aid these strikes he cleverly calls ‘the sans papiers,’ riffing off of their probable role as blue-collar or retail workers who don’t work with ‘paper.’  He reminds readers of the ‘red bases’ in Italy in 2002, when the left controlled sections of some cities.  This evolved into the ‘squares’ revolts after the 2008 crash.

As you can see, part of philosophy is ‘naming’ new concepts, or renaming old ones.  While Negri focuses on ‘intellectual’ as a catch-all term, it actually involves emotional, linguistic and artistic skills too.   

Negri bases his argument about a new division of labor by referring to Marx’s concept of the ‘general intellect.’  His main contention is that at this point intellectual labor has become a social product and has outstripped the capitalists, pointing the way to post-capitalism.  The worldwide spread of post-Fordist, post-Smithian ‘cognitive capital’ in cities makes economic measurement more and more difficult according to Negri - or even impossible. In this you can see his enjoyment at throwing out basic ideas, which gives the impression that he is over-stating for emphasis, not fact.

(Traveling.  This review will be continued...)    

Other prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left: “The Unseen,” (forward by Negri); “Wageless Life,” “In Letters of Fire and Blood.”

And I got it at the University of Georgia library!

Red Frog

March 18, 2021