The Political Economy of the Common. Ed. by Andrea Fumagalli

(as yet untranslated Italian-language book)

Economia politica del comune, collects a series of essays, mostly published elsewhere, which summarize his analysis of post-crisis contemporary capitalism.

Capitalism has changed. Andrea Fumagalli says so. And he said that, for a long time, his school; the tradition of autonomy, starting from the early writings of Mario Tronti and Raniero Panzieri of the sixties, passing through the intellectually fertile experience of Potere Operaio of the seventies and the brilliant analysis of post-Fordism and the new figure of the social worker ‘of the eighties, always with the analysis firmly anchored in the thought of the now internationally recognized master of the Italian Theory Antonio Negri, has developed a Marxism for the digital age, focused on the Grundrisse, and in particular on the famous’ fragment on the machines ‘, more than on Capital. Together with Christian Marazzi and Maurizio Lazzarato, Andrea Fumagalli is the person who most contributed to this perspective, adding a solid empirical basis based on his experience as a professional economist.

The new book by Andrea, Economia politica del comune, collects a series of essays, mostly published elsewhere, which summarize his analysis of post-crisis contemporary capitalism. For the author, the scenario of the last ten years has been a strengthening of a model of biocapitalism where capitalist exploitation is based no longer on the mere theft of working time in factories or on the appropriation of intellectual production – in the form of technological innovation or intellectual property, central to the analysis of cognitive capitalism – but now on the subsumption – that is, the inclusion and putting to work – of the deepest dimensions of the human condition, such as those related to affections or relationships, particularly when they are articulated through the ubiquitous connectivity of smartphones and social media, and even to life itself as an object of biotechnology.

The man-machine union, visible and potential object of criticism or sabotage in the Fordist factories, has now progressed to become part of the human condition and in this way capable of making life itself – la nuda vita, Agamben would say – in its dimensions pre and post human, in vitro as well as in silico, object of appropriation and capitalist valorization.

In biocapitalism, production is based on putting the commons to work, a concept that is different from that of common goods, even if these are part of it, but which also refers to that life in common – made up of elements such as language, the gestures, the affections, the corporality and the relationships – which now, through digital technologies, is potentially put to work in its most varied manifestations: the freelancer who organizes his temporary cooperation with a team for a specific project, the Airbnb guest who strives to offer a positive stay experience or the teenager who posts a selfie with her favorite brand on Instagram.

Capitalist valorization has also progressed far beyond the Marxian model of the bourgeois drinker of the worker’ sweat. Financial markets play an increasingly central role and, through the financialization of life and productive relations, operate like giant vacuum cleaners that suck up crumbs of surplus value from the global productive and reproductive factory – the credit card, the shipping insurance required in the just-in-time value-chain – to then redistribute them, without transparency or democratic regulation, on financial markets. In this situation in which the socialization of the productive forces, the commons that constitute the true source of value – has now left the greedy pockets of the individual bourgeois to circulate on the financial markets in the form of digitized data – communism is already with us, only that does not belong to us. Biocapitalism represents the realization of the communism of capital, the famous concept taken up by Antonio Negri – and by Marx who, although he never uses it, mentions this possibility in the Grundrisse.

What to do then, comrades? There is no longer a factory to be sabotaged, nor a winter palace to be conquered. But, Andrea suggests, we can re-appropriate the tools in the hands of the capitalist class: finance and money. The currency, – writes Andrea – is now a direct expression of capitalist power, without the intermediation of the state. Andrea proposes the creation of coins and alternative financial instruments, suggesting the use of the seductive technology of the crypto-currencies: blokchain and bitcoin, which are able to establish circuits of valorization external to global finance; it would be desirable for a new currency of the commons suitable to finance a new welfare of the commons, triggering processes of local redistribution of wealth, to then let them grow and acquire more and more powerful autonomy. A strategy similar to that of the autonomy of the eighties, the age of the Hakim Beyi’s TAZ’s, the golden age of the Italian centri sociali of the nineties that, among other things, Andrea recognizes as his main source of inspiration.

The book offers a theoretical sum by one of the main representatives not only of the contemporary Marxist thought but of one of its most fruitful veins. As such it should be seen, in particular the introductory essay “The premise and Twenty thesis on bio-cognitive capitalism”, which sums up the subject with admirable clarity. For me it was a very fruitful reading: Andrea is and always has been, since its brilliant analysis of the new forms of self-employment of the second generation in 1994, a Master.

At the same time I think that the book a little exaggerate the grip and power of bio-capitalism. The result is a totalitarian image, where every human activity is immediately subsumed and exploited, from pedaling for Deliveroo to being on Facebook, and, using the same logic – why not -, playing soccer is actually a way to help reproduce the basics of the football market that exploits the fans as well as the television audience. What to me it sounds “weird”, however, it is the astonishing ineffectiveness of contemporary capitalism in exploiting the common which has partly generated. Facebook, Airbnb and Amazon earnings all in all modest, Uber and Deliveroo are at a loss, start-up incubators around the world are abandoning the cash for equity model, finding that they do not make a lot of money by incubating start-ups. Above all, there is a lack of innovation and ideas: large multinational companies have liquid reserves of unprecedented historical size – Apple announces a stock buy back of $ 100 billion – and no one seems able to find profitable use of big data or algorithms that go beyond the completion of the advertising targeting or the advice of other songs you may like on Spotify.

Capitalism like that will definitely not be able to survive the radical challenges that await us as we begin to cross the Anthropocene. To paraphrase another great master of Italian postwar Marxism, Giovanni Arrighi, the problem is not that the cognitive biocapitalism exploits our life, but that it isn’t able to do it well enough. I say this because as long as there is exploitation at least there is a rationality to criticize or sabotage. Instead contemporary biocapitalism looks increasingly like a rotting body that no one has the power to take away, as the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck claims. In this context, the alternative currency will certainly contribute to creating alternative valorisation circuits. My intuition is that the protagonists of this process are not so much those of Macao or Teatro Valle, but rather the entrepreneurs of that pirate modernity that now connects the small Chinese factories with the needs of the popular classes of Lagos or Tangier, passing through Piazza Garibaldi of Naples.

Photo by Lanpernas .

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2. (Andrew Keen): The digital utopian much heralded “democratization” of media will have a destructive impact upon culture, particularly upon criticism. “Good taste” is, as Adorno never tired of telling us, undemocratic. Taste must reside with an elite (“truth makers”) of historically progressive cultural critics able to determine, on behalf of the public, the value of a work-of-art. The digital utopia seeks to flatten this elite into an ochlocracy. The danger, therefore, is that the future will be tasteless.

Adam: …well, that depends. if you look at the history of taste formation it is true that for first hundred years or so of modern consumer culture (roughtly) ‘good taste’ was mainly dictated by the elites (se Thorstein Veblen’s classic (1899) Theory of the Leisure Class), but form the 1950s and on the creative and consumer industries have restructured to capture the innovation that goes on among non-elite groups. Today ‘good taste’ is largely dictated by trend setting groups like teens our subcultures, or by the participatory judgement of large and complex lifestyle communities (like, for example, in the case of the wine market). And before modern consumer society the there was a radical divide betwen elite and mass markets, with the conesqeuence that elite and popular ‘good tastes’ were largely separate. Popular culture largely following a ‘fashion’ dynamics of its own (see Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe.)

3. To imagine the dystopian future, we need to reread Adorno, as well as Kafka and Borges (the Web 2.0 dystopia can be mapped to that triangular space between Frankfurt, Prague and Buenos Aires). Unchecked technology threatens to undermine reality and turn media into a rival version of life, a 21st century version of “The Castle” or “The Library of Babel”. This might make a fantastic movie or short piece of fiction. But real life, like art, shouldnâ€t be fantasy; it shouldnâ€t be fiction.

Well ,every tehcnology has its dystopian implications. Kafka’s writings were inspired by the tehcnological triad of typewriter, telegraph and filing cabinet, which made up the basis for bureaucracy…

8. There is something of the philosophical assumptions of early Marx and Rousseau in the digital utopian movement, particularly in its holy trinity of online community, individual creativity and common intellectual property ownership. Most of all, itâ€s in the marriage of abstract theory and absolute faith in the virtue of human nature that lends the digital utopians their intellectual debt to intellectual Casanovas like young Marx and Rousseau.

Probably the old Marx is more adequate as a reference, in particular the thesis on General Intellect. Here Marx points at the secular trend within capitalism to promote society-wide cooperation throught he progressive socialization of capital. This is a better way to understand web 2.0. It has very little to do with human nature, and more to do with the stuctural consequences of the ‘real subsumtion’ of society under capital: This process creates extended networks of productive cooperation that reaches far beyond beyond the control of capital and thus contain a real potential for creating alternatives- wait and see what one-laptop-per -child plus wifi meshworks can do..(see my text on Ethics an General Intellect on this site)

10. The cultural consequence of uncontrolled digital development will be social vertigo. Culture will be spinning and whirling and in continual flux. Everything will be in motion; everything will be opinion. This social vertigo of ubiquitous opinion was recognized by Plato. Thatâ€s why he was of the opinion that opinionated artists should be banned from his Republic.

..well, Plato’s banning of poets was probably much more related to his struggle to establish the authority of philosophy against the largely oral tradition of the (homeric) poets: to etablish logos against doxa. As Havelock clearly shows in his classic Preface to Plato, homeric poetry was, more than enything else, a moral code, an ethical and practical instruction manual transmitted through (easier to remember) poetry.

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by way fo the acticsblog

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At the same time consumers and other members of the public often perceive that they have few ways of channelling their objections to the bad behaviour of companies and other actors beyond the level of individual frustration and malcontent. What is needed is some form of aggregator that can translate such individual frustrations into a social value that can potentially have an economic relevance for the companies concerned.

The actics system is an attempt in this direction. (See the plug –in here on the right). Instead of trying to measure the ethical performance of companies according to certain pre-established standards, actics aggregates the judgements of individual users into a common index. It is an attempt to develop a folksonomy of ethics, where the values of the social impact of a company or organization results from aggregating the opinions of the net-worked multitude of users. Is this a viable way of giving a new, tangible value to ethics?

more on actics:

www.actics.com

blog.actics.com

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Since the end of the cold war system, slavery along with organized crime has been on the rise. There is an unprecedented supply of potential slaves in the substantial share of the world’s population that live in absolute poverty ($ 1 a day or less), in Africa and, increasingly, the most destitute parts of the former Soviet Union. In fact slaves have never been as cheap as they are today. While slavery is a long established practice- as old as human civilization- the price of slaves is estimated to have varied around $ 10.000- 40.000 (in current prices) over the last 3.500 years or so. Today the average price of a human life has collapsed to a historic low of $ 100.

The economic weight of slave labour is small in absolute terms. (American pre-civil war cotton was primarily a slave-made good, the proportion of today’s global cotton harvest touched by slaves may be 1 or 2 per cent at most.) But the practice is so widespread at the bottom of today’s global commodity chains that it is difficult to find products that have not been made by slaves to at least some extent:

‘In Brazil, for example, slaves cut down forests and burn the wood into charcoal to be used to make steel. The European Union imports nearly a million tonnes of Brazilian steel each year to produce everything from cars to buildings to toys. Slavery is in fruit bowls and fridges too. There are documented cases of slaves being used to harvest or produce coffee, sugar, beef, tomatoes, lettuce, apples and other fruit. The list goes on: shrimp and other fish products are suspect, as are cocoa, steel, gold, tin, diamonds, jewellery and bangles, tantalum (used in mobile phones and laptops), shoes, sporting goods, clothing, fireworks, rice, bricks.’

From Kavin Bales of free the slaves, by way of financial times (premium content, alas!)

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Their own blurb:

Creativity is attractive again. The Catholic church is promoting old creationism in the new guise of intelligent design; cultural entrepreneurs are invoked with the creative industries; the hypes of the creative class and the high-flying rise of the digital Boheme are consolidating into a renaissance of the creative. Yet at the same time, very different functions are attributed to the concept of creativity. In the tradition of the aesthetics of genius it continues to serve the distinction of truly “creative” actors, who are capable of generating and asserting innovations. In cognitive capitalism, however, there are also powerful populist impulses at work, in which the revolutionary cultural-political demands for “culture from all” or the Beuysian dictum of “everyone is an artist” are perverted in a logic of the total creative imperative.

find the links here:

http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0207

http://eipcp.net/policies/cci

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The scary thing is not only the Pentagon’s apparent inability to learn anything form the Iraqi war (where gadgetry and advanced hard-ware apparently do not work) is their idea of a future as a perpetual and globally extended Baghdad. The US must prepare to fight unidentified ‘ terrorists’ for a long time, and not only in Iraq, but also in Mogdishu, Caracas and (why not) downtown LA. Furthermore the terrorist is so loosely defined as to encompass virtually anybody who doesn’t subscribe wholeheartedly to the prescribed consumerist and politically passive lifestyle. The Pentagon mentions drug smugglers, organized criminals, but also politically active ‘angry crowds’ and computer hackers. These are subject no only to brute force, but also to brute ‘statistics’, as future surveillance will rely mainly on data-mining and pattern recognition tools that do not take people’s intentions or even individual actions into account.

“For example, the navy/marines recently launched a program seeking to develop algorithms to predict the criminality of a given building or neighborhood. The project, titled “Finding Repetitive Crime Supporting Structures”, defines cities as nothing more than a collection of “urban clutter [that] affords considerable concealment for the actors that we must capture”. The “hostile behavior bad actors”, as the program terms them, are defined not just as “terrorists”, today’s favorite catch-all bogiemen, but as a panoply of nightmare archetypes: “insurgents, serial killers, drug dealers, etc”

So forget about habeas corpus, it’s enough that you fit into the right (or wrong!) purchasing or internet surfing pattern, or even live in the wrong neighborhood, for you to be micro-waved by a high-tech non-lethal weapon.

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“Peter Chernin, News Corp president said at a recent conference: “We do not see big advertisers advertising with YouTube or MySpace. They have concerns about the content …so there is very little ability to monetise video advertising on user-generated video.”

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After Rupert Murdoch and NewsCorp invested $580 million in MySpace, young users are fleeing the site. (Read more here) The reasons are primarily three. One, MySpace is getting “old hat”: You donâ€t want to keep doing what everybody did a year ago. Two, the fact that the site is going mainstream (since Rupert bought it) means that it is no longer cool and alternative. There are many other sites who are. Three, since the site has gone mainstream, teachers, parents and policemen have begun surveying profiles searching for signs of sexual promiscuity alcohol and drug abuse, and other naughty things. That way MySpace is no longer the free space it originally was. (This is crucial since, as Danah Boyd has documented one of the reasons American teenagers used MySpace in the first place was that schools, shopping malls and other physical places are now so surveyed and controlled that they offer very few opportunities for spontaneous and free social interaction.)

Users fleeing MySpace is a good illustration of a key contradiction in informational capitalism. Companies recognize that innovation and other forms of immaterial wealth is often best produced by users themselves- be this technological innovation or affective innovation, the innovation of new forms of life, like MySpace. Consequently the best way to make money is to try to appropriate and valorize this immaterial wealth. But that very move brings these innovations into the mainstream, saturate them with advertising, censor them (like Google might have to do with all the copyrighted material on YouTube) and generally make them less attractive. Consequently, the users, who make up the true labour force in this immaterial economy, flee to other, not yet commercialized venues. Maybe the great by-outs of Web 2.0 platforms that we have seen recently are a sign of the inability of cooperate capitalism to digest this new productive force?

see also the forthcoming issue of Ephemera for some good stuff on MySpace

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‘Fred Stutzman recently argued for designers of social networking software (SNS) to adopt OpenID to bypass the problem of achieving critical mass on your SNS to get the social going. Thereâ€s a lot of network effects (no wonder) and rich-get-richer in social networks, and you simply cannot push everybody on to new sites however great they might be. So, you should simply connect them between their present ‘homesâ€. OpenID is a new standard offering cross media authentication and ID management. In this context it means basically providing for socializing across different SNS†(being friends, sending/leaving messages, logging visiting friends from other SNS†etc). Stutzmanâ€s compelling analogy is allowing people to mail other recipients than gmail users when using gmail yourself.

Today Steve Poland of Vested Ventures writes on TechCrunch:

MyBlogLog has built the next generation social networking service. If Friendster/MySpace/etc are v1.0 of social networking websites, this is v2.0. The service has created a distributed social networking platform — allowing websites and blogs to enable social networking amongst their community of visitors.

Polandâ€s argument is very much in line with Stutzman (and he actually already voiced it back in June) and what I havce been arguing in Actics. Why not provide cross media socialization? This should be equally obvious as cross service mailing or cross carrier phone calling. People are more than ‘Studying†at Facebook, ‘Music†at MySpace and ‘Ethics†at Actics.com. Thereâ€s something quite old fashioned provincially local about the big social sites refusing things like OpenID. ‘Go ahead and socialize as much as you like – but only in our siloâ€. People are signed up to all sorts of sites due to chance, timing or personal taste. But that shouldnâ€t keep them from forming all sorts of communities across their different ‘villagesâ€. This is simple web-globalization.

Naturally, I also agree with Stutzman and Polandâ€s expectation to see an explosion of services offering cross-media socializing soon. And MySpace, FaceBook and the other major players to support these services in order not to loose members expecting this new natural freedom offered at the next social site. Distributed communities seem such a natural development. And all the talk about widgets the last couple of months is an indicator of this as well.

Acitcs is in the process of launching a widget that works this way.

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