Frederick Harry Pitts

A crisis of measurability? Critiquing post-operaismo on labour, value and the basic income

This article critiques post-operaist conceptualisations of immaterial labour from the perspective of Marxian value-form theory. Critiquing the idea of the ‘crisis of measurability’ created by immaterial labour and the contention that this makes redundant the law of value, it contests the novelty, immediate abstractness and immeasurable productivity post-operaists attribute to contemporary labour using the New Reading of Marx. The first part explores this theoretical conflict, asserting that post-operaismo refutes Marx’s value theory only insofar as it holds a productivist understanding of value to begin with. The second reflects upon the political implications through a consideration of the post-operaist advocacy of a universal basic income. Appeals to reward, recompense and redistribution rest upon the veracity of the claims made in the post-operaist treatment of labour, value and their immateriality and immeasurability. A value-form analysis exposes flaws in the assumptions about value and labour that support their case for a universal basic income.

Beyond the Fragment: postoperaismo, postcapitalism and Marx’s ‘Notes on machines’, 45 years on

Abstract The year 2017 marks 45 years since the first English publication of Marx’s ‘Notes on machines’ in Economy and Society. This paper critiques how Marx’s ‘Fragment’ has subsequently been repurposed in postoperaist thought, and how this wields influence on contemporary left thinking via the work of Paul Mason. Changes in labour lead proponents to posit a ‘crisis of measurability’ and an incipient communism. I use the ‘New Reading of Marx’, which picks up where debates in Economy and Society in the 1970s left off, to dispute this. Based on an analysis of value as a social form undergirded in antagonistic social relations, I argue that the Fragment’s reception runs contrary to Marx’s critique of political economy as a critical theory of society, with implications for left praxis today.

Corbynism’s conveyor belt of ideas: Postcapitalism and the politics of social reproduction

In this reflection, we assess the theoretical faultline running through the contested current of Corbynist thought and politics at present. On one hand, we find a techno-utopian strand preoccupied with automation and the end of work. On the other hand, a nascent politics of social reproduction with a foreshortened potential to realise the promise of a continental-style solidarity economics in the United Kingdom. Both represent the latest in a series of left attempts to confront the crisis of social democracy that rages across Europe, a crisis to which the British Labour Party has not been alone in succumbing despite recent appearances otherwise. Deindustrialisation collapsed labour’s role in everyday life, and a crisis in the society of work eventually passed over into its representative party’s electoral decline. Subsequent financial crisis and subsequent austerity have only made things worse. A poverty of ideas prevails that all sides of social democracy’s unsteady compromise seek desperately to solve. However, the recent UK General Election shows evidence that Corbynism has renewed Labour’s fortunes to some extent. Surveying the competing intellectual currents behind its rise, we suggest that the politics of social reproduction offer a better route forward for the Labour Party than the popular siren call of postcapitalism, and reflect on what the recent general election result suggests for their future development.

Rhythms of Creativity and Power in Freelance Creative Work

Freelancers work for companies, but also apart from them—at home, on-site, or in shared workspaces. This chapter examines how clients and freelancers manage the employment relationship at a distance. Utilising interview data with Dutch creative freelancers, Lefebvre’s method of ‘rhythmanalysis’, Nitzan and Bichler’s theory of ‘capital as power’, and Holloway’s understanding of human creativity as ‘doing’, the chapter examines the conflicting rhythms of freelance creative work. It shows that freelancers remain subject to traditional workplace-oriented structures of control, particularly in creative agencies. Freelancers’ use of time must correspond to client processes of measurement and valuation. Different client relationships, and the proximity they imply, produce different rhythms of work.

The Fragment on Machines

This chapter assesses the significance of Marx’s Fragment on Machines, a few pages of his notebooks for Capital, the Grundrisse, for the development of the postoperaist prospectus of incipient communism and capitalist collapse. It begins by evaluating how the discovery of the Fragment chimes with the analysis of empirical changes in capitalist labour to suggest a utopian scenario taken up increasingly on the contemporary left. It considers how Hardt and Negri’s ‘molecular’ understanding of history, focusing on immediate changes in the content of labour, elides the ‘molar’ continuities of the forms this labour assumes in exchange. The posing of successive paradigm shifts through which postoperaists like Bifo suggest measurement has been replaced progressively by control, command and violence, ignore what the value-form already dialectically conceals.

Class, Critique and Capitalist Crisis

Using Werner Bonefeld’s theorisation of the social constitution of capitalist society in class antagonism, this chapter considers the critique of political economy as a critical theory of society that uncovers the concrete social relations concealed within value’s abstract social form. This centres on Bonefeld’s critique of the conceptualisation of value as a purely abstract unfolding uprooted from ongoing processes of primitive accumulation. The chapter then explores how the ‘real appearance’ of social relations in the value-form is captured in the work of Marx and the Frankfurt School on the commodity fetish. The theorisation of class on which this rests is counterposed to contemporary sociological understandings. Finally, the implications for Marxist theories of crisis are outlined, drawing on the work of Michael Heinrich and Simon Clarke.

Immanence, Multitude and Empire

This chapter surveys the philosophical and theoretical foundations of Antonio Negri’s postoperaist conceptualisation of a crisis in the law of value. Central to this is Negri’s turn from Marx to Spinoza. The chapter begins by outlining the shift from operaismo to postoperaismo in Negri’s work and the wider tradition. It then considers how, in the development of thinking around the social factory and real subsumption comes a shift from the refusal of work to its celebration as an expression of the constituent power of the ‘multitude’. The chapter then assays Negri’s rejection of dialectics, contradiction, abstraction and mediation for the Spinozist immanence of ‘Empire’. This, the chapter suggests, forecloses the capacity to grasp the negativity and antagonism central to the critique of political economy.

Creative labour, before and after ‘going freelance’: Contextual factors and coalition-building practices.

This chapter presents empirical findings to oppose the discourses of liberation presented in postoperaist accounts of ‘immaterial labour’ and their modern proponents. It suggests that for creative labour the potential for creativity exists only in denial: capitalist development alone will not deliver fulfilled work. There must be struggle to recapture creative activity from its imbrication in capitalist social relations. Focusing on the movement of creatives from formal employment to freelancing, the chapter explores the possibilities of, and barriers to, this struggle. In a case study of creative labour in the UK and the Netherlands, it examines the wider economic and employment context behind the movement of creatives from formal employment to freelancing, the struggle they wage to be creative and their nascent forms of coalition-building.

Creative Industries and Commodity Exchange

This chapter confronts the concept of immaterial labour through an analysis of an archetypal example: creative industries like advertising, branding and graphic design. Interrogating Andrea Fumagalli’s account of the value added by immaterial labour’s ‘general intellect’, it suggests that both traditional Marxist and postoperaist notions of circulation’s productiveness or unproductiveness elide the latter’s determination by the law of value. In intervening in the buying and selling of commodities, fields like advertising play a more fundamental role than is captured in such conceptualisations, making possible the value relation itself. This is supported by Marx’s writings in Capital Vol. 2 on the ‘work of combustion’ and transportation, and applied to an understanding of capitalist crisis as centring on a classed contradiction of constrained consumption resulting in overproduction.

Value, Time and Abstract Labour

This chapter charts the differing interpretations of how value relates to labour within the New Reading of Marx and so-called ‘embodied labour’ approaches. The chapter first surveys the attempts to get to grips with value in the classical political economy of Smith and Ricardo, and the specificity of Marx’s critique. The chapter then outlines the divergent readings of Marx’s value theory between a traditional Marxism focused on the quantification of labour time as the key to value and the New Reading of Marx, which focuses instead on what Michael Heinrich calls the ‘social validation’ of abstract labour-time in commodity exchange. Finally, the chapter goes on to consider the concept of socially necessary labour-time, through the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Chris Arthur.