Autonomy vs. Insecurity:
The (Mis)Fortunes of Mental Labor
in a Global Network
David B. Downing
I. “Free” Trade and Unfair Mental Labor
Shortly
after midnight on July 27, 2005, the US House of Representatives passed
by two votes (217-215) the Dominican Republic-Central American Free
Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA). The
political trading to get the winning votes was perhaps not quite so
free. It appears that when the official vote was tabulated
at the end of the regular time allotted, the result was 180 to 175
against CAFTA. Republican leaders,
however, kept extending the voting time, working the floors “in order
to bully legislators into approving the bill.”1
This document extends to the Dominican Republic and five other Central
American nations (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras,
Costa Rica, and Nicaragua) the privileges granted to corporations in
the 3 countries (US, Canada, Mexico) signed onto the 1994 NAFTA. And CAFTA itself is really only a stage towards
an even larger vision. President
Bush’s hope is to get 31 more South American nations under the more
ambitious Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) which is now in various
draft forms, waiting its day. Of
course, all these agreements in this hemisphere are linked to the
global network mapped out by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and
the General Agreement for Trade and Services (GATS, 1995).
Every one of these agreements publicly frames itself in the rhetoric of increased freedom, cooperation, and international exchange. (Just check out their web sites.) So on the surface at least, it’s hard to disagree with the expressly stated intentions of the agreements. Who, after all, would really argue against cooperation and freedom? Or against open, fair, democratically agreed-upon relations between nations? Yet very few citizens of some of the countries affected by them are free enough to have any power whatsoever to agree or disagree with these “agreements.” The actual contents of all these documents set the terms for deregulating capital, overriding indigenous governments’ socialized domains of public services, and regulating labor, thus setting in practice the neoliberal theory of letting the market rule. This network of trade regulations is what we really mean when we speak of “globalization,” a euphemism whose popularization in the media corresponds to the recent historical period of rapidly increasing economic inequality around the globe. And the creation, composition, and implementation of these agreements have had a great deal to do with the reconfiguration of mental labor in our deeply networked cultures.
Now it’s
also true that, in practice, the political and economic stages for
implementing these forms of globalization do not always run smoothly. Sometimes the neoliberal agenda runs into pockets
of resistance. For example,
when the Bush administration planned to implement CAFTA on January
1, 2006, the democratically elected parliaments of several of the
CAFTA countries forced a delay in Bush’s plans for fear of its far-reaching
changes.
Of course, there should be resistance. Where once “free trade” agreements focused on the reduction of tariffs and fees for international goods, these recent “service” agreements affect every dimension of social life. The underlying purpose of these complex documents is to grant the “freedom” of private capital investment managers to over-ride even those public regulations voted on by democratically elected representatives in many of the countries. These regulations often protect citizens’ rights to such basic services as healthcare, education, housing, drinking water, waste disposal, and social security.
In contrast,
among its many provisions, CAFTA allows for private takeover of such
public services while placing intellectual property primarily in the
hands of private interests (meaning corporations) so that basic health
and pharmaceutical products can be controlled by profit ratios rather
than human need in developing countries.
Except for the increased stability gained by the ruling elites,
most people experience increased destabilization and insecurity.
This “race to the bottom” by transnational corporations (TNCs)
to find the sites of cheapest labor possible all fueled by 30 years
of various “free trade agreements” has created massive suffering,
poverty, illness, and joblessness in many parts of the world.2
Even in the
As one might
well imagine, it takes a lot of mental labor to craft, draft, lobby,
and implement these many phony “free trade” agreements. They’re phony,
of course, because the freedom has been far too much on one side:
corporate elites over the rest of the world’s population.
While average worker salaries have declined in the past decade
relative to inflation, Bentley automobile corporation has seen a 1000%
growth in sales, and they don’t even make a car for less than $150
grand.4 A few people are having a good ride. The point is that what counts for mental labor
anymore is difficult to say. Through
the rose-tinted lenses of the champions of the New Economy, it is
a good and wonderful freedom when these privatized reaches of the
once (relatively) public domains of mental labor can go every which
way, socially, politically, economically, you name it.
Besides all the less visible blue collar workers required to clean the hotel rooms, carry luggage, cook meals, and maintain buildings, the basic workforce underlying these complex international trade agreements is a predominantly university-educated wave of lawyers, economists, translators, accountants, financial planners, diplomats, international relations experts, lobbyists, technical writers, editors, corporate managers, business administrators, computer experts, web designers, commercial artists, and multi-media technicians. Most members of this white collar labor force are working on salaried (if not hourly wages), and this kind of mental labor would seem to be ‘elevated’ primarily with respect to the huge sums of money paid to some (though certainly not all) such employees and bureaucrats hired to work out the details of these agreements and their accompanying public relations web sites.
Much of this mental labor produces weightless or immaterial products (digital storage, reproduction, and retrieval shrink libraries to hard drives), and the productive processes require considerable amounts of creativity, imagination, flexibility, and autonomy. From a managerial perspective, the tension between having both a disciplined workforce and a creative workforce at the same time leads to the crux of the problem. In short, corporate mental and immaterial labor highlights conflicts between individual worker autonomy and administrative control, much as higher education management struggles with similar conflicts between academic freedom and business/corporate accounting sheets. Where once mental labor belonged to the privileged workplaces of scientists, educators, doctors, and artists, mental labor now comprises the core of the new information economy fueled by all the political initiatives for deregulation, privatization, and free market determinations of human value.5
Traditional views of mental labor all had something to do with public accountability: the professionalized development of disciplines of knowledge depended on what Steven Brint calls “social trustee professionalism.” Professionalized mental workers were granted a degree of autonomy with respect to the knowledge they would create, control, and disseminate (not unlike the old artisans’ guilds), and the accompanying privileges presumed a kind of implicit social contract to the extent that the knowledge would enter the public realm as a benefit to the society as a whole. These idealizations have now been pretty well unmasked since most expert professionals now work primarily for the benefit of private capital, and well out of view of public eyes.
Indeed, the various
trade agreements are all worked out in secret meetings, not available
to the public, and not accountable to any democratic governing body.
Since the final version of CAFTA actually runs to 2,500 pages,
it is easy to imagine that when brought before democratic legislatures,
such complexity works against any kind of public reading, let alone
critical assessment of such capacious texts. As Pierre Bourdieu puts it, we all live under
the hands of an “invisible world government” (78) of businessmen,
autocrats, technocrats whose mental labor transpires in secret meetings,
non-public commissions, and the gated enclaves of highly paid elites.
This is not exactly what Karl Marx had in mind when he worked out his own definition of the special quality of mental labor. Even closer to home, it might seem that there’s a long way from international free trade agreements to academic working conditions and the salaried mental labor that takes place in institutions of higher education. The premise of this essay is that there’s barely a sliver of a gap between them, even though most academics may try to go about the business of their teaching and research without so much as a blink of an eye towards GATS or CAFTA, or NAFTA. Indeed, higher educations’ exceptionalism has been built on the principle that the disinterested production and dissemination of knowledge should be free from narrow economic and political interests. That’s one version of the autonomy supposedly granted to some forms of mental labor.
Of course, times
have changed under the rules of academic capitalism in a digital age
(see especially Bousquet, Slaughter and Leslie, Washburn, Williams). Today, in what Jeffrey Williams appropriately
calls the “post-welfare university,” higher education is a powerful
social engine for ensuring continued economic inequality, especially
when the two-tiered class structure of tenured vs. part-time/temporary
has become an accepted way of life in academia.6
In some instances, the adoption of the neoliberal agenda by higher
education has been quite direct. If David Harvey is correct, we find that in
the last 25 years, economics departments in universities have been
deliberately retooled to school economists in neoliberal, transnational
capitalism drawing primarily on the work of Milton Friedman, ending
most of the previous Keynsian scholars advocating fiscal and government
regulation and social controls of various kinds.7
The connections
between our specialized disciplinary work and the activities of national
and international governing organizations should become part of a
general reworking of what it means to be a “mental worker” in and
out of academia. To the extent
that mental labor was supposed to elevate itself above such crass
material economic concerns, the economy now more clearly than ever
reveals that it does not really work that way.
Indeed, the traditional principles of “disinterested” research
even justifies why so many of us academic workers could focus on our
disciplinary specialties without ever having to worry, or even to
know about, international trade agreements, global politics, and planetary
ecology. Those days of academic or epistemological isolationism are
now over.8
But the struggle
for some measures of individual and collective autonomy from direct
state and capital control is certainly not over, whether in terms
of academic freedom, tenure, job security, fair wages and benefits.9
These battles must be fought with an ongoing knowledge and investigation
of the links between epistemology and labor, autonomy and economy,
immaterial and material labor, rather than a knee-jerk assertion that
they represent different orders of being. Indeed, those links vary dramatically in different
fields, different disciplines, different departments. Defending some specific places and spaces of
relative autonomy while acknowledging the material dependencies on
shifting ratios of public and private funding is the job of negotiating
more equitable contracts for all workers, in and out of academia.10
The key task is to link the battles for relative autonomy to the battles
for economic equality, rather than to sever those dimensions.
II: An Historical Sketch
of the Two Roots of Autonomy via Mental Labor
In the twenty-first century, the neoliberal
version of mental labor no longer corresponds in any meaningful way
with older nineteenth century versions of mental labor such as Karl
Marx’s association of mental labor and science. Likewise, in
the new class wars, the division between mental and physical labor
no longer describes a central feature of class struggle.
White collar workers from adjunct university faculty to digital
“net slaves” can be as poorly paid, exploited, and flexible as most
kinds of blue collar work. Sorting
out some of these differences may be the necessary first step to understanding
the multifarious turns of mental labor in the contemporary world.
Whereas mental labor might once have been a kind of ideological
lynch pin for asserting various kinds of professional autonomy, economic
and political circumstances radically inflect any such privileged
notion. In simplest terms,
the category of mental labor no longer accurately describes any substantive
version of autonomy. But before
we continue an analysis of present conditions, it may be useful to
sketch out the roots of nineteenth
century versions of mental labor.
Indeed,
it is difficult to understand the current situation without some understanding
of the two main, overlapping historical frames involved in the formation
of the concept of mental labor. The first is epistemological; the
other aesthetic; the first is based on idealized notions of knowledge;
the other on idealized notions of art.
The first derives from the various Kantian re-workings of Western
metaphysical ideals regarding the independence of knowledge as produced
by science. The second emerged in its modern form in the early nineteenth century Romantic
ideology whereby creative genius, aesthetic imagination, and poetic
vision could produce the grounds for an independent cultural domain
whose autonomy was based precisely on its claim to transcend the vulgar
materialism of the early industrial revolution. Both of these strands can be, and often have
been, quite closely intertwined (science is, after all, highly creative;
art is immersed in technology); at other times, they can actually
be at odds with each other.11
Marx’s
understanding of the nature of mental labor clearly derives from the
epistemological strand. He
equated mental labor in a general way with science. As he put it,
“The product of mental labor - science - always stands far below its
value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation
at all to the labor-time required for its original production” (353). What he means is that the scientific investigation
and discovery of new knowledge required so much labor time and effort
that entrepreneurs in his day had little incentive to fund it because
it was not cost-effective. Owners
could reproduce and use the fruits of the discovery (say, the discovery
of energy resources in petroleum).
But, simply put, nineteenth century factories just did not
have R&D divisions. In a sense, then, science required funding
outside direct capital investment (very unlike today where Pfizer
or IBM, for example, may fund more research than most universities).
Thus, in its nineteenth century idealizations, the mental labor of science was supposedly autonomous from direct capital coercion.12 If science could produce the truth as an empirically verifiable knowledge, the independence of such fact-based truths from capital interests and state control could supply the theoretical resources necessary to break at least some of the exploitive, and powerful, links between capital and labor. Marx’s analysis of class struggle was, in his mind, based on an epistemology free of direct capital control to the extent that such an analysis was objectively descriptive of the real material conditions of the subjects of history: class struggle, properly described, would serve as a scientific, thus objective description of social history. Of course, nobody paid him a lot to work out that objective history. Nevertheless, such a free or autonomous version of epistemology would, by implication, have moral and ethical consequences: the truth was a path towards social justice.
The
significance of this strand for our purposes here is that it contributed
to the formation of the modern university, both in Europe and the
United States, (although it was perhaps more modified and adapted
to suit practical needs in the era of reconstruction).
With the rise of professionalism, and thus the historical origins
of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), a new group of workers
claimed significant jurisdictional autonomy for determining value
by administering and setting
standards for the knowledge produced by the practitioners of the given
profession. They
institutionalized that power, especially in medicine, law, and the
specialized sciences primarily through the creation of the modern
disciplines of knowledge that re-structured the liberal arts colleges
into departmentalized universities.13
The
point of such non-proletarianized versions of mental labor was to
create gaps, or domains of relative autonomy, between knowledge, on
the one hand, and both capital and labor, on the other.
The elevated status of mental labor was by these definitions
its relative freedom from both crassly material business interests
and grossly menial forms of physical labor. The history of the struggle for academic freedom
hinges on the degrees of autonomy that faculty could carve out in
the battles with university management. As Christopher Newfield explains,
this struggle resulted in the system of
“divided governance” whereby faculty would maintain control
of epistemological decisions and administrators would have control
of economic and fiscal decisions, including hiring and firing within
the limits tenure allowed. In short, it was a form
of mental labor quite by definition at odds with the neoliberal versions
of knowledge for profit’s sake, freedom for the managers of capital,
and insecurity and oppression for the flexible workforce necessary
for the “new economy.”
I
have focused on the epistemological version of mental labor primarily
because it has been crucial to the modern university, but the aesthetic
version has also played a significant role in marking a cultural zone
of relative autonomy. Today, many have claimed that “creativity” is
the main engine of capital productivity.14 The historical roots here can be easily traced
to the work of the German and British romantic poets and philosophers,
and much of their work was aimed at creating the discourse of aesthetics,
a realm that in its imaginative creation of truth and beauty would
transcend industrialized
In the texts of Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge and others, the romantic ideology called for a re-writing of the neoclassical versions of aesthetic taste and sensibility into an even more ambitious project of individual creative genius that could transcend the social and political contingencies of everyday life to reach universal truths.15 In its extreme forms, this romantic ideology envisioned an inverse relation between artistic creativity and capital accumulation. Alienation, aloofness, and even poverty represented the artist’s justifiable sacrifice to the higher level aesthetic categories of what counted for the sacred, but unfunded and unfundable truths of art that rose above all forms of lucre and crass commercial ventures. The one-of-a-kind uniqueness of a work of art represented its autonomy from mass production as well as its later enormous market value based on its precious, irreplaceable nature.
Of
course, not all the romantic poets were poor.
When he was twenty-five Wordsworth received a legacy of 900
pounds from Raisley Calvert, and when he was thirty-two he received
his inheritance from his uncle’s estate which enabled him to live
in the Lake District with a lot of free-time and autonomy to write
poetry. Indeed, the rustic
wanderers outside his house in
In
short, there was always the irony, paradox, or double bind (depending
on how you viewed it) in the tension between the ideological visions
and the historical realities. And these double binds are true for both the
epistemological and aesthetic versions of autonomy. On the epistemological score, the claim for
objective, universal, autonomous knowledge provided the ideological
justification for the formation of the PMC and its position relative
to both capital and labor (see Ohmann, Politics
and Selling). On the aesthetic end, the universal, transcendent
truths of great art and literature usually mirrored the particular
historical values of the middle class and sustained a view of “high”
culture that rose above the “low” culture of the masses. So it was perhaps no accident that irony and
paradox themselves became key terms in the work of the New Critics
who established the most successful version of a disciplinary field
for English and American literature departments.
Let
me elaborate a bit on the fate of New Critic’s accomplishment within my
home disciplines of English studies if only because I think it offers
a powerful configuration of how mental labor in the humanities gained
disciplinary legitimation by virtue of its very claims to transcend
the merely historical and political domains. One of the remarkable achievements of New Criticism
was that it combined both versions of mental labor: the epistemological
version was based on the secondary, disciplinary work of the critic
who could use the method of ‘close reading’ to produce stable, and
relatively objective interpretations of literary texts. Humanists of the New Critical variety had a
great advantage over previous literary impressionists of the belles
lettres tradition because they could produce a stable body of knowledge
in a field defined by the parameters of the literary objects they
studied. At the same time, they could claim that the
texts themselves embodied the unparaphrasable, transcendent “simulacra
of experience” in the “well-wrought urn” (Brooks) or the “verbal icon”
(Wimsatt). New Critics could
have their mental labor both ways and in the same department. You were no longer forced to concede the “two
cultures” distinction whereby the “hard” sciences had their epistemological
autonomy and the “soft” humanities had their aesthetic/cultural autonomy. New Critics got both epistemological autonomy
(the products of their mental labor were free of economic and political
interest in the name of critical objectivity), and aesthetic autonomy
(the “elevated,” spiritual work of the creative imagination as a form
of elevated mental labor free of the market place).
Perhaps
even more importantly, the ideological components of the theory directly
impacted the material labor of teaching. The
number of published authors at any given time in the profession is,
of course, a relatively small minority of faculty members, but especially
in the case of the New Critics, their adaptation of both epistemological
and aesthetic versions of autonomy carried over perfectly into the
daily teaching practices of many faculty. In simple terms, a textbook like Cleanth Brooks’
Understanding Poetry granted
considerable authority to any teacher whose disciplinary skills and
knowledge could lead students towards the determinate meanings of
literary texts. A professor could lecture successfully to large
classes of returning GIs who had little experience with the mysteries
of poetry, and the secondary critical knowledge gained by such methodically
precise close reading of literary texts could be accomplished without
ever having to interfere with the claims for the spiritual transcendence
of poetic experience.16
The
pedagogical gains were accompanied by equally powerful curricular
gains. Even in the formative period of the 1940s-60s,
there were, of course, other kinds of critical writing besides New
Criticism, and no doubt many teachers engaged different kinds of critical
assumptions. Nevertheless,
the New Critical assumptions enabled the creation of relatively standardized
English curricula across the country.
Indeed, the New Critics gained great power in the material
world of the mid-twentieth century institutions of higher education
insofar as they established the English literature curriculum based
first on the separation of reading from writing (literature from composition),
and the organization of the literary field into clearly defined periods
and genres. It was a good bargain
with the devil because much of their curricular accomplishments persist
to this day. Trouble is, neither
the epistemological nor the aesthetic versions of mental labor correspond
in any meaningful way with what’s actually happening in the Educational
Management Organization (EMO, Bousquet), the “post-welfare university,”
and the vast reaches of the neoliberal economy in general. Both versions need to be deeply reworked, and
in order to do that I will briefly turn to some of the most promising
work done on reconfiguring the relations between mental labor and
autonomy that took place in Italy thirty to forty years ago, although
it is still being carried on today, even though the 1980s wave of
neoliberalism suppressed most labor movements and social movements.17
III: Autonomy by the Autonomists:
Working with the Weightless and the Immaterial
Of
the many labor movements in the twentieth century, certainly one of
the most instructive has to be the work of the Italian autonomists
of the 1960s and 70s. Nowhere was the empowerment of social collectivities
against the dictates of both the state and capital worked out in such
an effective integration of theory and practice. The Autonomia, as it was called, also provides
a good historical model of a movement that brought together students,
workers, women’s groups, environmentalists, radical youths, labor
leaders, and media figures, all of whom created in different but related
circumstances a range of relatively “autonomous” collectives.
Despite each groups’ concern for specific forms of recognition
and rights (gender, race, ethnicity, etc.), what they all shared was
a belief in the injustice of economic inequality, the workers’ right
to refuse to work, and the need to contest the conditions of their
employment. Yet many of these social collectives would be
simply invisible in the terms of traditional class analyses if only
because changing economic conditions have involved a redefinition
of social class. They will also be invisible if we look to identify
them in either of the two traditional versions of mental labor I outlined
above, mainly because autonomy and social commitment to particular
social and political goals merge rather than separate into different
realms. There was no fundamental division between the
civic and the political as there often has been in much of the cultural
left in the
The
Italian autonomists created “new democratic forms of social organization and political
action in horizontal, nonhierarchical networks” (Hardt 2.3). Nothing quite like this appeared in America,
even as the Women’s Movement, Civil Rights, SDS, the Weathermen, the
New American Movement, Greenpeace, the New Left, and the Labor Movement
all played important roles in social activism. The fragmentation and
divergences in tactical, organizational, and theoretical differences
in
The work of autonomists
such as Maurizio Lazzarato, Paolo Virno, Franco Piperno, Antonio Negri,
and others remains indispensable to the tasks of rethinking the problems
of mental or immaterial labor. First, their notion of “immaterial
labor” is not a synonym for mental labor, even though there are clear
resemblances and crossovers. The
basic difference is that, whereas mental labor supposedly designated
a realm independent of capital, immaterial labor is a notion intending
to describe particular features of the way “mental” labor has been
inserted into the regimes of capital production.
For this purpose, Lazzarato and his colleagues have drawn on
the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and others of the Leningrad circle who
first began to develop such a theory of “aesthetic production” and
“a theory of the social cycle of immaterial production” (146).
The fruitfulness of this conjunction, as I see it, was an attempt
to integrate and transform the two historical versions of the autonomy
of mental labor, both the aesthetic and the epistemological, into
a new theory of the social and economic function of modern working
conditions.
In the information economy and the knowledge industry, even the idealized versions of mental labor no longer correspond in any meaningful way with work independent of capital interests since much of it is the very backbone of the neoliberal market economy. Lazzarato’s notion of immaterial labor addresses exactly this transformation of knowledge and aesthetics. Indeed, for Lazzarato, the concept of immaterial labor refers to the altering of the workplace when multimedia communication and digitized information creates new power relations in the organization of work.
As Lazzarato
defines it, there are two dimensions of immaterial labor, and, interestingly,
these correspond roughly to the two older versions of mental labor
I described in the previous section, although each has been modified
to fit the new circumstances of the information economy. The epistemological
version of mental labor now supplies the technical expertise in cybernetics,
semi-conductors, and computer skills; the aesthetic version of mental
labor serves capital accumulation through the necessary forms of innovation
and creativity required to produce marketable new tastes, fashions,
markets, and artistic standards. But both the technical and the aesthetic now
provide the primary resources for neoliberal, “free market” capitalism. Let’s look at each a bit more closely.
The cybernetic,
computer, and technological skills are an offshoot of the epistemological
version of mental labor, only now the borders between "pure" (autonomous)
science (Marx’s view of mental labor) and "applied" (commercialized)
technology can no longer be drawn with any precision.
The direct labor involved in producing various forms of “weightless”
electronic information now occurs at most all levels of capital production
and requires specialized technical skills.
Scientific forms of mental labor are thus integrated into the
core of corporate productivity ranging from industrial manufacture
to commodity sales, marketing, and distribution (in which consumption
dictates the shape of production, rather than the reverse as in Fordist
models of mass production).18
The second category of immaterial labor deserves special attention because the activities referred to here relate more directly to the traditional “high level” aesthetic values except they are now mass marketed across all geographical and political borders in the creation of taste, fashion, public opinion, artistic standards or what Lazzarato calls “mass intellectuality.” (133). The old categories of mental and physical labor just will not hold, but as he also admits, even the distinctions between “’material labor and immaterial labor,’ risks failing to grasp the new nature of productive activity” (133). This admission is a good qualification because “immaterial” really refers to two dimensions: the weightless, immaterial products of digital production, and the internalized subjectivities required of information workers whereby cooperation with peers in and between office cubicles is matched by cooperation with management prerogatives and directives regarding wage, hiring, and funding decisions.
Consequently,
with respect to the second dimension of immaterial labor, we have
a potential management problem. In
the digital world, productivity depends not on repetition but innovation,
creativity, transformation.19 So you need regulated
autonomy (oxymoron intended). This
corporate circumstance requires the creation of worker subjectivities
suitable for cooperation and creativity, yet still limited by the
regimes of production determined by management.
According to Lazzarato, under these circumstances the specifically
“immaterial” dimension of the new labor force refers to internalized
identities, the formation of subjectivities that participate in cooperative
innovation, rather than material labor, at, say, attaching a bolt
to a fender on an assembly line.20
Many kinds of
contemporary information workers must have considerable degrees of
freedom for learning and innovation. But such degrees of relative
autonomy can lead to some troubling criticism of management decisions.
That is, the direct control of the shop floor by a foreman who can
directly oversee how the worker assembles the fender is useless when
employees are working on immaterial, multimedia products that are
often difficult to see let alone discipline. The freedom/constraint ratios must be internalized,
made immaterial in the subjectivities of the employees. It’s as if Althusser’s version of the Ideological
State Apparatus (ISA) had turned into the Ideological Corporate Apparatus
(ICA): in the shift from loyalty to nation-states to fealty to corporate
branding, private capital in the information economy requires the
interpellation and hailing of active subjectivities whose creative
inventions still fit within the regimes of production.
Productivity is thus much more dependent on a double bind internal to the workplace: on the one hand, management not only recognizes that workers must have a degree of freedom and autonomy to make decisions, which requires a redistribution of authority quite unlike the old physical labor factory foreman who could directly reprimand poor performance. How else can you get an attractive web site designed and implemented? But, on the other hand, there is even more need to organize management decisions around rapidly shifting economic market forces.
IV: Immaterial
Labor’s Insecurity as Managerial Leverage
How does management achieve these double but seemingly contradictory goals?21 The answer I draw from the autonomists is relatively simple: job insecurity is not a liability to corporate production but a crucial re-enforcer of management ability to integrate innovation and control. The mental or immaterial laborer must by necessity become an entrepreneur, selling his/her goods to the marketplace. In Lazzarato’s terms, the new intellectual workers become, “polymorphous self-employed autonomous” individuals each of whom must competitively present themselves as entrepreneurs “inserted within a market that is constantly shifting and within networks that are changeable in time and space” (139). In principle, such hyper-individualism militates against solidarity in the workforce. This vast array of vulnerable, individual entrepreneurs (in contrast to powerful corporate entrepreneurship) all confront the material liability of working to insure their temporary employment contracts by meeting various, and often quite different, managerial needs and objectives.22
The power of controlling subjectivity by management thus emerges from precariousness itself which now works in their favor because it gives them power over an increasingly insecure and hyper-exploited work force.23 As Tiziana Terranova explains, under these conditions, management has sought “a mode of control that does not require an absolute and total knowledge of all the state of each single component of the system or a rigid specification that rules behavior exactly and sequentially” (119) as it did on the shop floor. She calls this the model of “soft control.” Nevertheless, these soft controls can still yield some pretty hard consequences: no matter how much your knowledge that the company you work for is directly exploiting workers in other countries on the basis of the many “free trade” agreements that legitimate various maquilladora enterprises, your subjectivity must be one where you keep such moral qualms to yourself if you want to keep your job.
Moreover, in this new economy, performing labor for the production of weightless or immaterial products is no guarantee of decent wages.24 The transformation in labor means that insecurity and low wages do not just correspond to physical labor: economic inequality and job insecurity provide powerful forms of coercion for many immaterial laborers. Since vulnerability increases management control of the immaterial labor workforce, and since immateriality now extends both deeply inside and vastly outside higher education, the main hope of resistance (and relative autonomy) is to develop entirely new lines of solidarity.
There are two
main ways to think about collectively working to alter these circumstances.
The first strategic answer is to develop worker solidarity across
fields united by job insecurity and economic inequality. The old division between secure mental labor
versus insecure physical labor is meaningless and non-descriptive. Entirely new lines of solidarity can be located
in coalitions among all kinds of low paid, temporary, contingent,
flex workers some of whom produce “weightless” products, some of whom
produce services such as secretarial work, and some of whom produce
the heavy material of traditional industries.25
Of course, it is not quite as easy as saying “SEIU, AFSCME, AAUP unite!”
(although that might not be such a bad idea). Nevertheless, we would be well-advised to see
that the forthcoming World Universities Forum in Davos, Switzerland
(January, 2008) can be linked not only to the World Economic Forum
but also to the more sweeping goals of the World Social Forum, the
Free Higher Education movement, Workplace, Global Exchange,
and many other social activist groups working towards more economic
and social equity in the world.26 The immaterial,
digital network here provides access to lines of very material kinds
of social solidarity which have begun to arise around the world in
opposition to the current financial order.
Although many
of the differences in the new workplace can no longer be described
in terms of mental vs. physical labor, the multiple new (and old)
types of labor get segmented in very real material and social coordinates
that can be described according to the degree of stability granted
on the basis of wage, benefits, and hours on the job.
As Tiziana Terranova argues, the key distinctions in the digital
workforce with its amplification of the “immateriality of information”
also register in the unequal distribution of the physical substructure
of the digital network around the globe.
The seemingly immaterial communication network is sustained
by a “concrete assemblage of technical machines, the DNS servers,
which are arranged in a hierarchical structure. Thirteen root servers, ten of which are currently
located in the USA, two in Europe and one in Asia” (44). Besides geographical location, the segmented
and hierarchical workforce includes a huge range of both paid and
unpaid labor, as well as a widely different kind and quality of remuneration
for different kinds of work. The
networks and flows of the new economy may sound so positive and freeing
in the ears of the wealthy, but the mobility of the super-rich globe
trotters is of a very different order from the mobility of, say, the
“freeway flyers,” flex workers, cheap teachers running between their
part-time gigs to make a living.
In the university,
this means that the traditional tasks of creating and maintaining
zones of epistemological and pedagogical autonomy from the market
must be carefully re-worked.27 Such domains
of contestable academic freedom are not just an intellectual matter
but a material task of insuring job security: there is no autonomy
for over-worked, underpaid, temporary teachers. Cheap teachers and
cheap factory workers share considerable interests and needs for socialized
protections from the reaches of private capital. The twentieth-century models of “divided governance”
in which epistemological and aesthetic autonomy could be granted to
faculty while financial power would be given exclusively to administrators
no longer works very well. The
idealized mythologies clearly seem helpless before the rush of market
forces that gives all power to management.
Tenure, academic freedom, and job security in higher education
are all part of the larger struggles of exploited workers across a
much broader spectrum of labor fields and economic inequalities than
those just within the academy. In this re-description of the fate of immaterial
labor, the old epistemological and aesthetic versions of autonomous
mental labor can no longer sustain university labor as either transcendent
of, or in ignorance of, the GATS/CAFTA/NAFTA agreements that organize
the flow of capital and the exploitation of workers around the globe.
In concrete terms,
this means that in thinking about new lines of solidarity in our networked
cultures, the social values of relative autonomy, independence, creativity,
and social justice can be integrated and coordinated, rather than
fragmented and disorganized. Working
for job security, livable wages, environmental sustainability, socialized
education and health care all call for a lot of creative work. Those like myself who enjoy tenure and decent
wages have a social obligation to materially support those movements
and coalitions. If we don’t, no matter how creative our work,
we’re just contributing to the very problems we may be trying to escape.
A highly literate and creative workforce is always open to shared
insights about economic injustice even if the owners of capital would
prefer that we just fulfill our contracts in their terms.
But we have also
reached a stage where the super rich themselves are realizing that
the neoliberal program of free markets, privatization, and deregulation
is reaching crisis proportions. The United States bears enormous responsibility
for precipitating these crises from its failure to sign the Kyoto
agreements, its refusal to support the World Millenium Development
Goals, its efforts to unilaterally control international finance through
its hegemony in the WTO, IMF, World Bank nexus, its utter failure
to address world-wide poverty, and its increasing authoritarianism
and militarism around the world. But one consequence of these failures is that
even many of the leaders of the neoliberal movement are now beginning
to sound more like neo-Keynsians (to flip the neo around) calling
for institutional regulations that might in fact somewhat curb the
current array of exploitive international trade agreements and re-write
them to serve more public and democratic forms of social justice.
Consider, for
example, one of the ways for redressing the disturbing maldistribution
of global wealth proposed by the celebrated economist, Jeffrey Sachs,
who in the 1990s was seen by some as the neoliberal savior of the
economies of Bolivia, Poland, and elsewhere.
As the current Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia
University and as a founder of the Millennium Development Goals, he
is now regarded by many as one of the most publicly influential academics
in the world. In his controversial
2005 best-selling book, The End of Poverty, he estimates that it would only take about $150
billion dollars a year over a twenty-year period to eliminate all
forms of extreme poverty from the face of the earth.29
I don’t know whether this is true or not.
But what if it is? That amount is about one third of the current
US Defense Department annual budget.
Of course, there are innumerable ways to raise such a relatively
trivial amount of money. For
instance, according to Merrill Lynch’s 2006 survey, the 9.6 million
people in the world who own more than 1 million dollars in assets
also collectively own roughly 37.2 trillion dollars of material assets.
If that is even approximately true, it would only take less
than one half of one percent of annual interest on those assets (all
owned by less than one half of one percent of the total world population)
to end starvation in the world in relatively short order.30
Or, in Sachs’ own calculations, it would only take 0.7% of the GNP
of the industrialized nations of the world to supply this investment
(the US currently directs only 0.16% to global economic development).
Now, even to put such ideas into circulation hardly means that I expect them to happen (Sachs does). It does, however, register as one of many provocative ideas that need to be circulated widely, and that is an educational task for many immaterial laborers. Such tasks have very material consequences: “Whether at the level of individuals or nations, the ‘immaterial’ rests on very real structures, such as education systems and laboratories, not to mention banks and firms” (Bourdieu 33). For some (myself included) it might at first come as shocking how minor (and how reasonable!) the problem of the redistribution of wealth might actually be in material terms, but I also have historical reasons for doubting that any such changes will happen without a much broader base of support. Sachs’ proposal depends an awful lot on a top-down management approach to social problems, and history tells us that we should not rely on the benevolence of the rich to solve the problems of economic injustice. Indeed, as Harvey explains, members of the elite classes have generally preferred to “crash the system,” (rather than give up some of their money and redistribute wealth towards the economically disenfranchised), and then buy up the left-over devalued assets at rock bottom prices. Sachs’ proposals as outlined in the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)31 will also require bottom-up or populist forms of social solidarity from workers and the dispossessed that have almost always been the real source of social change for a more just world governed by political democracies. And for that to happen we need systemic changes through democratically sustained regulations to protect public interests in crucial social service areas in many areas of the world—no handouts from the rich will accomplish those tasks alone. And it has been far too easy for nations to sign up for the MDGs as a principle and then behave in contradictory ways.
The real problems,
or course, are not simple dollar amounts regarding poverty but systemic,
institutional, economic organizations and trade agreements that fail
to meet basic human entitlements for water, food, shelter, health
care, and education. These
problems call for concerted collective theorizing, research, and action. For this to happen we must “construct meaningful
mechanisms of social solidarity” (Harvey 171). Higher education in the United States has a
crucial role in exactly those tasks, but it needs to start at home
since the transformation of a 1975 75%/25% ratio of tenure/tenure
track to temporary faculty into an inversely configured 2005 25%/75%
ratio has not supported the creativity and innovation that so many
have been championing. Indeed, the knowledge and creativity we produce
in the precincts of higher education circulates with, in, beside,
and sometimes against the net of global trade agreements whose “freedoms”
often function to conceal such knowledge from many citizens of the
world. In other words, instead of the false dichotomy
between a “disinterested” scholarship of mental labor and a committed
social activism of physical labor, we must, as Pierre Bourdieu puts
it, “invent a new relationship between researchers and social movements”
(14).32 Perhaps then the fields of science,
art, literature, politics and history could be more vigorous forms
of inquiry into basic human interests for taking intelligent social
action in the world.
Part of the educational
goal of creating an international, critical cosmopolitanism (such
as advocated by Kwame Anthony Appiah) is to directly combat the opposition:
narrowly provincial, ethnocentric, uneducated fundamentalism based
on prejudice, ignorance, and fear that now thrives in and beyond the
United States. It’s certainly
not easy in these times, but many progressive educators continue to
work to make education and the work of immaterial labor a collective
task of producing knowledge, art, creativity, innovation, and technical
skills that address and contest the fundamental problems of human
suffering and economic inequality. Now that’s an academic workplace
worth fighting for.
Notes
3 Two main indices can be sited: the ratio of average CEO salaries
to average worker salaries is now more than 400-1, about the same
as in 1928. Most of the European
social democracies have maintained CEO-worker ratios of about 40-1,
just about what it was in the
4 According to
5 As
6 We are really much closer to the situation Walter Benn Michaels
describes where “American universities are propaganda machines that
might as well have been designed to ensure that the class structure
of American society remains unchallenged” (17).
See also
7 In
8 A significant qualification is in order here. Higher educations exceptionalism was always a myth to the extent that academic disciplines were closely tied to professional and business interests outside the academy (see Barrow; Larson). And as Richard Ohmann so eloquently documents in Selling Culture, the advertising-business matrix was enormously influential in the late nineteenth century. In short, these kinds of mental labor were deeply part of capitalism during this period.
9 In this regard, see especially the AAUP’s new movement and statement on academic freedom that was recently circulated to more than 350,000 mental workers globally.
10 In The Knowledge Contract, I address the problems of contracts in higher education more fully.
11 Andrew Ross addresses many of these issues in “The Problem
of Mental Labor.”
12 Bruno Latour’s critique of the “myth of the modern” is based on the modern attempt to separate Nature from Society, as he puts it: “the modern Constitution invents a separation between the scientific power charged with representing things and the political power charged with representing subjects” (29).
13 The stories of the rise of the disciplines, the professions, and the university have been well-described elsewhere. See, for example, Larson, Bledstein, Ohmann, Veysey, Barrows.
14 See especially Richard
15 Ross describes this process: “The noble ethos of the unattached
artist was conceived in the struggle to break free from aristocratic
patronage and was clearly compromised by the simultaneous emergence
of a mass commercial audience from the womb of the bourgeois public. Most fatefully, from the perspective of the
artist wage, this ethos was soaked in the full torrent of Romantic
thought about the separation of art and culture from the commodity
production of industrialization” (14).
Ross’s essay provides a good overview of “The Problem of Mental
Labor.”
16 I thank Jeff Williams for pointing out to me the significance of the qualifications and differences between the minority of published scholars and the majority of teaching instructors in higher education.
17 What stands out in the global scale of things is the almost
simultaneous collapse of all these movements right around 1980. In
18 As Lazzarato puts it, “business is focused on the terrain outside of the production process: sales and the relationship with the consumer” (140), which is another way of saying that this is a measure of how consumption drives production, rather than vice versa.
19 Richard Florida’s influential study, The Rise of the Creative
Class, clearly takes as it central concern this historically exceptional
rise of creativity and independent work at the heart of capitalist
production. His central claim
is that 30% of the new work force fit this “creative” description,
and that this group now represents a class.
20 Lazzarato elaborates: “The management mandate to ‘become subjects of communication’ threatens to be even more totalitarian than the earlier rigid division between mental and manual labor (ideas and execution), because capitalism seeks to involve even the worker’s personality and subjectivity within the production of value. Capital wants a situation where command resides within the subject him- or herself, and within the communicative process” (135).
21 I have for purposes of this essay, focused on the double bind at the level of management, but it is, I believe, reflective of the larger contradictions in the global economy such as David Harvey describes between neoliberal openness, deregulated capital, on the one hand, and neoconservative authoritarianism and militarism, on the other; or as Paul Smith describes the central dialectic of American culture as that between “hot” progressive, innovative, energetic expansion and cold, “primitive” fundamental authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism, and ignorance.
22 As Lazzarato puts it, workers must compete in a world where “Precariousness, hyerpexploitation, mobility, and hierarchy are the most obvious characteristics of metropolitan immaterial labor” (136).
23 As Bourdieu explains: “Thus has come into being an economic regime that is inseparable from a political regime, a mode of production that entails a mode of domination based on the institution of insecurity, domination through precariousness: a deregulated financial market fosters a deregulated labor market and thereby the casualization of labor that cows workers into submission” (29).
24 This is the main point that
25 See Dan Clawson’s The Next Upsurge for an articulate view of the possibilities of linking new forms of labor unionism across a wide spectrum of workplaces with social movements for social and economic justice.
26 See, for example, Tom Mertes’ new collection, A Movement of Movements, and the collaboratively produced, We Are Everywhere, edited by Notes from Nowhere.
27 Along these lines, see the AAUPs new statement, “Academic Freedom in the Classroom,” which was recently distributed globally to more than 350,000 mental workers.
28 This part of my argument is clearly closest to
29 Kwame Anthony Appiah also cites Sachs in his recent book,
Cosmpolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers.
Appiah comments that: “Faced with impossible demands, we are
likely to throw up our hands in horror.
But the obligations we have are not monstrous or unreasonable”
(173), at least if Sach’s figures are even approximately true.
30
31 These consist of 8 primary goals in the areas of extreme poverty, universal primary education, promote gender equality, reduce child/infant morality, improve maternal health, combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensure environmental stability, and develop a global partnership for development. The last goal relates most directly to the international trade agreements that I have highlighted in this essay, and the stated purpose is to: “Develop further an open, rule-based, predictable, nondiscriminatory trading and financial system (includes a commitment to good governance, development, and poverty reduction both nationally and internationally)” (see Millennium Project). For it to be open and nondiscriminatory would of course mean respect for democratic governing bodies and procedures, and therefore such forms of cooperation and agreement would, in principle, be much different than the ones we now have.
32 As Bourdieu elaborates: “And we must work to design new forms
of organization capable of bringing together researchers and activists
in a collective work of critique and proposition, leading to novel
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