III.
Technologies of the common.
In
Foucault, the notion of power and the reproduction of its technologies is
crucially linked to the workings of economic rationality. As we have seen, in
his critique of liberal rationality he outlined the way in which political
economy invested the discourse of sovereignty and governmentality became the
principle of biopolitical rule. The question of production and reproduction
cannot avoid taking into account the way in which power normalises, disciplines
and regulates. Foucault’s notion of power is primarily one of a productive
force. The question of how this operates inside (or outside) what is
traditionally understood as the realm of production has guided our research into
Postfordism. Negri analyses the relation between capital and labour from the
perspective of power and struggle. It is clear that in the 1970s his work and
that of others in the current of Operaismo started looking to
Foucault’s theory as an important contribution to the critique of capitalism
in its changing form. Being concerned with class composition and the realm of
the social they shared Foucault’s attention to the capillary operations of
power in society. In analysing the shift from factory society to the social
factory, we would like to point to the crisis of the disciplinary regime and the
emergence of biopolitical rule and control society by focusing on the realm of
production, a production that is intended as a force operating at the levels of
power as well as subjectivity. In Negri’s analysis, with the emergence of
‘factory society’ the artificial separation between the political and the
economic lost effectiveness. No mediation was necessary and accumulation became
its own discipline. The state as the executive organ of capital represented the
direct negation of single capitalists in favour of the class interests of
capital. It embodied the ‘political law of collective capital’ and capital
became synonymous with the general interest.
The
‘democracy of labour’ and ‘social democracy’ both reside here: they
consist of the hypothesis of a form of labour that negates itself as the working
class and autonomously manages itself within the structures of capitalist
production as labour-power. At this point capitalist social interest, which has
already eliminated the privatistic (sic) and egoistic expressions of single
capitalists, attempts to configure itself as a comprehensive, objective social
interest.[3]
Thus
the post-war revolutionary import of socialist principles in the constitution is
annulled. In fact, organised labour comes to facilitate the restructuring of the
capitalist class.
As
an organised movement the working class is completely within the organisation of
capital, which is the organisation of society. Its watchwords and its
ideological and bureaucratic apparatuses are all elements that are situated
within the dialectic of bourgeois development.[4]
At
the point where capital is identified with the common interest of society, an
inversion occurs in the realm of social phenomenology wherein the labour nexus
appears as the strength of capital’s valorisation and the basis of society
itself.[5]
This is reflected in the incorporation of the socialist principles according to
which labour is the source of all wealth – which Marx had already taken up in
the Critique of the
Capitalism
penetrates much deeper into our existences. In the form in which it has
functioned in the 19th century, this regime has been forced to
develop a series of political techniques, or power techniques through which man
comes to be linked to something like labour; a series of techniques by means of
which the body and time of men become labour force and labour time, and can be
effectively used to become surplus-value. But in order to have surplus value
there must be sub-power. At the level of man’s existence, a capillary grille
of micropower must be established, which fixes men in apparatuses of production,
which makes them agents of production, workers. The link between man and labour
is synthetic and political; it is a link that power operates. By sub-power I
don’t mean what is traditionally called political power, it is neither the
apparatus of the state, nor that of the ruling class, but rather the ensemble of
micropowers, small institutions situated at the lowest level.[6]
This
regime was the target of the struggles they witnessed and was attacked and
progressively deconstructed in the 1960’s and the following years across the
West. Against the tyranny of both Trade Unions and the Party, with the birth of
autonomism and the creation of resistance cultures this regime of power is faced
with the total refusal of the very ideology of social democracy, organised
labour and their motto: Arbeit macht frei.[7]
The
pleasure in work
The
question of the emergence of civil society, as we have seen in Hobbes, and the
silencing of the discourse of the war of races is concomitant with the liberal
preoccupation with government that Foucault analyses. Through his contributions
on the emergence of the social and the policing of families, Jacques Donzelot
has carried out a series of researches at a number of levels following
Foucault’s reflections on the issue, in relation to the economy, the police
and the welfare state. Our interest lies in the outlined subsumption of
political rationality into economic rationality and, combined with Foucault’s
work on governmentality and biopower, Donzelot’s analysis of the development
and demise of the welfare state can help us introduce the analysis of
biopolitical production proper.
Donzelot
analyses the welfare state as an attempt to extend workers’ rights to the
whole national population.[8]
In looking at the transition from Taylorism to what he terms perpetual
training, he demonstrates that alongside the process of the deskilling of
the worker (demise of artisan/ professional worker) the political- juridical
nature of his social status was transformed (into being an abstract bearer of
rights).
Equally, at the same time as the worker becomes a subject of rights, he becomes an object of science. The political and economic struggle engenders new institutions; medical psychological and industrial doctors study the maximisation of worker productivity. These two separate discourses around the worker as subject of rights and object of science, is studied by Donzelot as a changing relation that is intrinsic to the political developments of the twentieth century. On one side there is the wage-labour relation. On another side, there is the scientific discourse. In the interwar period these two separate elements come together. The scientific and ideological discourses re-introduce the idea of the joy of work which is attached to social insurance schemes. The merging of the economic and social discourse into one operative field based on work created the conditions of possibility for its extreme form wherein the healthy working subject could clash violently with the non-working, sick outsider.
Donzelot
argues that after 1945 the idea of the nation becomes supplanted by that of
society in the political imaginary: if National Socialism aimed to eradicate the
vulnerable, society needed to look after them and heal its own wounds. The issue
of jurisdiction over what Agamben identifies as the biopolitical fracture is the
central function of the welfare state. In fact, Donzelot observes that the
post-war period saw the removal of the notion of mal-adjusted and invalidity
from the vocabulary of industrial relations, and the introduction of terms like handicap and deficit which
aimed to sustain a general notion - and legally sanctioned practice - that
working life, with enough training, could and should include everyone.
Industrial competitiveness and demands for profitability led corporations to
include those portions of society whom they previously would have judged too
volatile. Hence the industrial machinery brought together doctors and
psychologists who could confront problems of absenteeism, alcoholism, work place
accidents and their prevention and could deal with the intrinsic dangers of
refusal. In
The
redefinition of work and the relations of work become the main factor relating
to productivity. Whilst under Taylorism the occurrence of accidents for instance
was measured and analysed by looking at the technical relation of man and
machine and studied as a predictable and potentially preventable factor, in the
society of the 1950s accidents became increasingly understood as due to failure
of communication in the chain of command and the instance of accidents as being
proportional to the degree of work place satisfaction. Similar conclusions arose
out the studies on absenteeism. This reasoning was also sanctioned by 1975
legislation concerning sick pay. Whilst in the past sick leave was generally
paid at 50% of the wage by social security, it now had to be paid in full, half
of which was to be subsidised by the corporation. Hence the responsibility for
the working environment was shifted onto the enterprise.
The
neo-liberal offensive of the 1980s and 1990s signified that this arrangement
could no longer be sustained. The responsibility for health and training had to
be transferred from society back onto the individual. Thus the current return to
civil society in the political vocabulary is also a by product of the gradual
breakdown of the welfare state. What new forms of social regulation, inclusion
and responsibility accompany the governmentality of social relations within the
context of the changing relations of work in contemporary Western ‘control’
societies? Civil society initially will take up the task of ‘taking care of’
the destitute class, the ‘people’ that, as Agamben reminds us, resist
juridification into citizens. Recent developments in the theory of civil society
could be seen as an effect of the legitimation crisis of the sovereign discourse
and as an attempt to reconstitute a unitary political subjectivity. They need to
be read in the light of a wider debate on the autonomy of the political, a
debate that is always accompanied by the theoretical need to reconstitute a
theory of sovereignty in the modern day. [9]
In Hardt’s and Negri’s analysis[10]
total subsumption is also the process of a subsumption of civil society.[11]
However, at the level of political discourse, this process appears as its
reverse. Seen
from another perspective, if civil society is understood also – as in Hegel:
as system of needs, administration of justice and the police and corporation- as
the set of mediating infrastructures that are in part the locus operandi or at
least the laboratory for practices of disciplinary power, the end of mediation
must also be recognised within the progressive collapse of these institutions. [12]
According
to the theorists under analysis, with the paradigm of discipline and the
traditional centres where disciplinary techniques are deployed (class, party,
school, nuclear family, wage labour and what constitutes the realm of civil
society)[13]
come to face a deep crisis. Thus disciplinary rationality needs to be
increasingly substituted by more efficient, economical, discrete and implicit
procedures aimed at governing people. In Foucault’s analysis this begins in
the 19th century with the emergence of the social insurance systems
in
Foucault’s reflections on the role of war in
power relations also highlight the urgency to rethink the notion of refusal: a
refusal to play and to speak the language of power that characterised the
struggles of the 1970s. He recognises that the response to such refusals was new
and required a change in our analysis of power. It is refusal that introduces
the control paradigm. In fact, discipline is only one mode of 'expression' for
power. Once the system has changed to incorporate the new needs of a
post-welfare state and post-pastoral form of power, from surveillance on
criminality we have moved towards the control of the population. This is due to
the endorsement by the system of those resistances through its adoption of their
very techniques and creates a new function for power.
In
our view, what is analysed as control society is the state of 'executive power'
or policing, monitoring and recording that constitutes the excess which is the
actuality of the norm. This political state of permanent exception is tightly
linked to the ideology of governmentability and of security. The way a society
of control functions is no more based on the individuation and subjectifying of
individuals as 'types', it doesn't work on individuation of the marginalized
finalised to their subsequent 'inclusive rehabilitation'. Statistics have come
to dissect the individual and fragment it to its smallest components. This is
most evident in the division of labour into skills and of the body into genes.
Hence, control can be exercised in virtue of its own creation and 'positive'
determination of multiple subjectifications within the same individual. The role
of law itself changes with it in so far as instead of functioning as the arbiter
or regulator of incompatible interests, it abdicates its ambition to social
integration and with the crisis of welfare it is forced to reduce its scope to
that of only representing negotiable interests whilst neutralising and silencing
the rest.[17]
One
of the focal concerns of Hardt and Negri’s use of the formula society of
control[18]
lies in the notion of ‘democratisation’ and 'immanentisation' of mechanisms
of command. We have seen that 'exceptionality' refers to the self-legitimising
ideology of continuous policing when looking into Agamben’s State
of Exception and Foucault's reversal of Clausewitz's idea that war is the
continuation of politics by other means. If politics is the continuation of war
by other means, the 'conflicts' arising in times of peace and the internal
dissent arising domestically amount to a re-sanctioning of the same dynamics
applied in times of war. This poses the problem of defining 'the Enemy' as
barbarous when it resides within the social that is the field of modern civil
wars. The disciplinary society is in crisis and traditional modes of
normalisation via institutions are replaced by a more capillary and less
dichotomising strategy; thus, attempts at normalising or justifying forms of
institutional marginalisation in the language of social integration and
contractual agreement become superfluous: the question becomes one of
negotiation of hybrid identities. Once the function of the liberal state
abdicates its pretence of neutral regulatory dispositif of conflicting
interests in defence of a contract that aims at social integration and assumes
an active role in neutralising –through 'criminalisation' or silencing-
conflicting interests and identities (when they present themselves as
disintegrating forces), then the function of right and law coincides with the
exercise of continuous policing. This is what Negri and Hardt mean when they
assert that there is a 'conceptual inseparability of the title and the exercise
of power'.
Control
and Biopower
We
would argue that today the science of control functions through a predictive
medicine (with no doctors nor patients) whereby it treats society as a reserve
of diseases and individuals as carriers of pathologies; through an education
that is transformed into life long learning where each individual is compelled
to remain productive throughout his/her life; through a surveillance that is
used not as evidence of crime but as a preventive tool for recognising,
inserting into databases and scanning human bodies and behaviour. Every
individual who acts suspiciously becomes a carrier of criminality. What Hardt
and Negri see as the end of the outside coincides with the crisis of traditional
disciplinary institutions and the diffusion of mechanisms of interiorisation:
self-exploitation, self-rationalisation and internalisation of responsibility
prove to be more effective tools of government. As Deleuze rightly observes:
Factories
formed individuals into a body of men for the convenience of a management that
could monitor each component into this mass, and trade unions that could
mobilise this mass resistance; but businesses are constantly introducing an
inexorable rivalry presented as healthy competition, a wonderful motivation that
sets individuals against one another and sets itself up in each of them,
dividing each within himself. Even the state education system has been looking
at the principle of ‘getting paid for results’: in fact, just as business
are replacing factories, school is being replaced by continuing education and
exams by continuous assessment (control). It’s the surest way of turning
education into a business. In disciplinary societies you were always starting
all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory),
while in control societies you never finish anything -business, training, and
military service being coexisting metastable states of a single modulation, a
sort of universal transmutation.[19]
This
move towards control societies also causes a re-territorialisation of the place
for struggle. The retreat of disciplinary institutions opens spaces of
‘abandonment’, ghettos, refugee camps, where bare life is at the mercy of
the lawless management of the Polizeistaat,
which acts on the basis of a permanent state of exception. Hardt and Negri see
the notion of exceptionality as crucial to the way power speaks of itself:
Empire is not formed on the basis of force itself
but on the basis of the capacity to present force as being in the service of
right and peace. Empire operates on the terrain of crisis, in the name of the
exceptionality of the intervention there is the creation of a new right of the
police.[20]
In the biopolitical paradigm,
where regulation and security are the main operative function of politics, the
function of war becomes one of securing the lives of people, where power speaks
of itself in terms of the ‘evolutionist’ racist motto (mors tua vita mea).
As Foucault notes:
Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign
who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone;
entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the
name of life necessity: massacres have become vital.[21]
We have seen that Foucault’s
studies on liberalism and the police state point to the transition from
territorial to population state by looking at the introduction of political
economy in the paradigm of sovereignty, which in turn changes the role of the
state from sovereign into government. In the face of the emergence of the modern
state as government, the question of associating the law with legitimacy by
assigning it the role of being ‘the barometer of truth’ collapses onto
itself. Law is to be the last resort of sovereignty, rather than its
constitutive foundation, in its functioning as the legitimate defence of the
‘universality of the few’ or the ‘singularity of the many’. In this
respect, it is merely procedural. One of the features of modern political
rationality is that very presupposition that you can separate and pose against
one another right and administration, law and order. One might argue that the
legitimation of the state (the executive) comes today from this attempt at
reconciliation of these two elements, which can only take the form of an
integration of the law in the order of the state. As we have seen, Foucault’s
work on the political historical discourse of the 17th century, in
‘Il faut défendre la société’ as well as his 1978-79 course at the
Collège de France on ‘Security, territory and population’ show how
liberalism needs the police to reduce government. The main point of Smith’s
invisible hand thus lies in its invisibility.
Hardt
and Negri see this particular process as culminating in a politics of avoidance:
In the development of the postmodern liberal
argument State power is not exerted according to what Foucault calls a
disciplinary paradigm […]. State power here does not involve the exposure and
subjugation of social subjects as part of an effort to engage, mediate, and
organise conflictual forces within the limits of order. The thin state avoids
such engagement: this is what characterises its liberal politics. […] The
liberal notion of tolerance coincides here perfectly with the decidedly
illiberal mechanism of exclusion. The thin state of postmodern liberalism
appears, in effect, as a refinement and extension of the German tradition of the
science of the police. The police are necessary to afford the system abstraction
and isolation: the “thin blue line” delimits the boundaries of what will be
accepted as inputs in the system of rule. […]The crucial development presented
by the postmodern Polizeiwissenschaft, is that now society is not
infiltrated and engaged, but separated and controlled: not a disciplinary
society but a pacified society of control. The police function creates and
maintains a pacified society, or the image of a pacified society, by preventing
the incidence of conflicts on the machine of equilibrium. […] The method of
avoidance then carries implicitly a postmodern Polizeiwissenschaft that
effectively, and in practical terms, abstracts the system from the field of
potential conflicts, thus allowing the system to order an efficient,
administered society.[22]
Whereas
the factory society corresponded to the Fordist mechanisms of labour
exploitation, which attempted to homogenise labour and break down the power of
the professional worker,[23]
the society of control corresponds and is a response to the movement away from
the ‘productive labourer’ as the essential substance of the alienated labour
that produces value and surplus value. Biopower entered history by turning the
ancient right to ‘take life or let live’ into a power to ‘foster life or
disallow it into the point of death’.[24]
Foucault writes: ‘this power was
without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the
latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies
into the machinery of production’.[25]
In
his writings Foucault attacked forms of economic determinism that tended to
reinforce the labour paradigm.
It
is wrong to say that the concrete existence of man is labour. For the life and
times of man are not by nature labour, they are: pleasure, discontinuity,
celebration, rest, needs, appetite, violence, deprecation, etc. Capital is
supposed to transform all this explosive energy into a continuous labour force
continually available on the market. Capital is supposed to synthesize life into
a labour force, in a way which implies coercion: that of a system of
appropriation. […] If it is true that the economic structure characterized by
the accumulation of capital has the property of being able to transform the
labour force into a productive force, then the power structures which have the
form of appropriation have the ultimate aim of transforming living time into a
labour force. Appropriation is the correlative in terms of the power of that
which, in economic terms, is the accumulation of capital.[26]
In
its current guise, we would say that biopolitics is the form of this
appropriation, one that invests life, and it is precisely the subsumption of
living time under labour time in control society that is analysed by the studies
of Postfordism in the guise of immaterial labour. For Hardt and Negri total
subsumption and the society of control operate at the level of biopolitical
production precisely because production has subsumed life itself, and as the
whole of society becomes a factory (diffuse factory) it also becomes a school, a
hospital, a prison and an army.[27]
The studies of Postfordism under analysis here take Foucault’s analysis
further and look at biopolitical production precisely at the point where this
process has reached its apex. In the paradigm of immaterial labour, the body is
fixed capital. Labour is no longer ‘employed’ by capital and the instruments
of labour are the brain-machines of social cooperation.[28]
In so far as disciplinary power was productive of subjectivities within
institutions, it had a ‘place’. Now these institutions are breaking down and
with them the function of representation, negotiation, and delegation.
Subjectivity is immediately individuated by power and made productive by
capital; the importance of immaterial and affective labour lies in its function
as producer of value-subjectivities.
From
the point of view of labour, the working class through the endeavour of its own
agents collapses the privileged sector of the Fordist worker and instantiates
new forms of subjectivities and a different class composition.
Negri is decisive about the periodisation in the movement towards the
social worker. The fact that he locates it in 1968 shows the persistent
political dimension of his thought about reality and the importance of the
event. For our theorists, the 1970s undoubtedly marked a bloody period in what
were the staged battles of this transition. Against the powerful labour force,
the crisis state became centralised as a constant reality. But what is more
crucial perhaps is the birth of struggles outside of the factory, which was
reflected in the extension of the state administration of discipline (now
control) into directly managing the production of subjectivity, whilst (and as a
response to) subjects resisting the reduction of themselves to labour power.
Clintonomics is the name
ascribed to a set of policies implemented during
In the long run, the products of immaterial labour
will be the crucial assets for each nation: scientific and technological
research, training of the labour-force, development of management,
communication, electronic financial networks. In the universe of intellectual
labour we find: researchers, engineers, computer scientists, lawyers, some
creative accountant, management consultants, financial advisors, publicists, the
‘practitioners’, editors and journalists, university professors. This
‘rank’ is destined to accelerate the process of decline of all activities of
the Taylorist kind, i.e. the repetitive and executive ones, that are easy to
reproduce in countries with low-cost labour force; whilst services to people,
even though still important in a society with a strong tertiary sector, cannot
benefit from material subsidies, since they are not, according to Reich, value
creating activities. The economist’s reasoning runs more or less like this:
the globalisation of the economy does no longer allow one to refer ownership of
capital to the national composition of the means of production. For instance, a
Ford is the result of partial and combined activities that are dispersed around
the globe and concerted within global webs, where what counts is efficiency and
the productivity of communication. The car that results from this process of
production is a composite of parts produced in different nations, by means of a
capital of multinational ownership. However, what is lost as a consequence of
the de-nationalisation of capital ownership (i.e. the means of production,
constant capital) is recuperated at the level of ownership of immaterial labour,
of the control of knowledge production. The denationalisation of
physical-material capital is counterbalanced by the nationalisation of
knowledge, and the command on its organisation. ‘Buy American’ means from
now on: ‘Valorise American knowledge’. Nationality, according to Reich’s
reasoning, is recuperated through a strategic investment in activities that
create more value, i.e. immaterial activities that characterise the postfordist
mode of production. The income generated by immaterial activity must be
nationalised in order to deal with the unemployment of the unskilled American
labour-force and reduce the disparity of income between skilled labourers and
the working poor (competition with emerging countries) without inhibiting the
comparative advantage of the
We
can see here how knowledge production becomes crucial to the economy of control
society. This is no longer simply the production of that scientific knowledge
used in the disciplinary operations of integration and exclusion, that which
could ‘scientifically’ establish the difference between the sane and the
insane, the dangerous and the safe, the normal and the deviant. Here the double
capture of the worker Donzelot analyses in its inscription into political
discourse as the subject of rights and object of science implodes onto itself.
Knowledge production under Postfordism becomes directly the production of
subjectivity, of linguistic and social performances that are immediately
valorised. Whilst in the period of Fordist manufacture labour activity could be
silent and automated, now the labourer is required to invest his/her
subjectivity in the activity of work, for the latter consists of symbolic
interactions and the production of meaning. When analysing immaterial labour we
see how both the labouring activity and the nature of the products has changed.
As far as the products are concerned, the formation of brands is only one aspect
of the process of cultural revalorisation mentioned by Marazzi. Yet it is
important, for one of the shifts occurring in Postfordism is that an increasing
separation occurs between factory and enterprise,[31]
whereby the latter assumes as its main role that of the production of
subjectivity. The idea that immaterial labour directly
produces the capital relation – whilst with material labour, this was
clandestine- changes the phenomenology of capital and the substance of its
social power and the nature of labour, for immaterial workers are primarily
producers of subjectivity.[32]
If
production today is directly the production of a social relation, then the
‘raw material’ of immaterial labour is subjectivity and the
‘ideological’ environment in which subjectivity lives and reproduces. The
production of subjectivity ceases to be only an instrument of social control
(for the production of mercantile relationships) and becomes directly
productive, because the goal of our post-industrial society is to construct the
consumer/communicator -and to construct it as ‘active’. Immaterial workers
(those who work in advertising, fashion, marketing, television, cybernetics, and
so forth) satisfy a demand by the consumer and at the same time establish that
demand.[33]
In
this sense, the function of the enterprise is one of producing the world which
the consumer, the producer and the product inhabit.[34]
This is where the role of communication and the linguistic production becomes
pivotal. ‘Consumption is not reduced to the act of buying and carrying out a
service or a product, as political economics and its criticism teach, but
instead means, first of all, belonging to a world or a universe.’[35]
The
workings of financial capital too are based on the self-referentiality of social
conventions that functions through the production of affects. So alongside the
informational content of immaterial labour, and the cultural aspect of its
productive role, what is valorised in contemporary capitalism is also its
‘affective’ character. Affective labour is that ‘embedded in moments of
human interaction and communication’. It acts wherever human contact is
required and is essentially involved with ‘producing social networks, forms of
community and biopower. What is created in the networks of affective labour is a
form-of-life’.[37]
Affective
labour ends the dominating tendency in the measure of value that was only
appropriate to the time when labour was outside of capital and needed to be
reduced to labour power.[38]
Biopolitical production is directly involved with the production of social
relations and that becomes coextensive with social reproduction.
The biopolitical notions of life and body are determined in the political
constitution and in the real daily affirmations of social subjectivity.[39]
The putting to work of what is common, of language and the intellect, causes a
‘personalisation’ of subjectivation that is all the more evident in the
development of a sinister drive towards self-exploitation of immaterial
labourers, one of the results of the subsumption of life under production,[40]
proved by the fact that rather than reducing labour time, new technologies and
the new economy have in fact increased the length of the working day by
exploiting the process that had driven towards a form of mass entrepreneurship.[41]
Theories
of immaterial labour rely on the idea that communication has acquired an active
role in the process of production, since the shift from Fordist to lean
production. What this entails at the 'bio-political' level and at the level of
subjectivity is not only a change in the nature of labour as productive
activity, but more profoundly of social relations. It means that we are
producers at all times, simply by virtue of communicating, of being social, of
speaking and that there is no realm out of production since the process of
valorisation and the time of exploitation is dislocated in time and space and
extended to our whole lifetime/bios. In this sense, this notion of immaterial
labour also sharply opposes the ‘conventional’ discourse of neo-liberal
economics that emphasises that consumption and demand and supply are a
politically 'empowering' feature of capitalism. Theorists of postfordism shift
this political emphasis from the consumers on the producers, hence emphasising
the potential immanent to social cooperation in productive activity. The process
whereby the need for labour to function through networks of cooperation
corresponds to a hierarchical centralisation of modes of control over production
turns command into parasitical and arbitrary.[47]
On the one hand then, the deterritorialisation of production, fully integrated
with techniques of 'labour management', 'place labour in a weakened bargaining
position'[48]
at the level of rights, whilst on the other hand, 'the cooperative powers of
labour power afford labour the possibility of valorising itself.'[49]
This is a process in the making and not something we can
easily take a distance from: in so far as it is developing and founded upon
social cooperation it is from the latter we need to start to reverse -where
possible -or negate- where necessary - its operations.