Four P2P seminars, part Two: the controversies surrounding the Immaterial Labour Conference

Michel Bauwens: I’m continuing the promised report about the four P2P seminars which took place in April 2006. Again, since I’m late and have lost my notes, I will refer to reports by others. The previous report is here.

The ILC, was held from April 28th to 30th in the Keynes Hall at King’s College, Cambridge. Though controversial, I found it to be a landmark event, in that it brought together various analysts regarding the new ‘Class Composition in Cognitive Capitalism’. It was an occasion to see and meet such people as Yann-Moulier Boutang, Carlo Vercellone, and others who have been instrumental in fostering a better understanding of the workings of this third phase of capitalism, after the mercantile and industrial stages. The various papers are available right from the programme page, with an extra archive of historical texts. As far as I’m concerned, the most interesting paper was the one by Nick Dyer-Whiteford, about which I blogged about earlier, on the Circulation of the Common. In my own paper, I introduced the hypothesis of Netarchical Capitalism.

The best review of the conference so far is that by Chris Carlsson. It does not cover every speaker, but is a very balanced judgment on the overall quality and atmosphere of the event, which touches on a controversy which was launched through Mute Magazine, which has scathing assessments of this conference. If you’re interested, I recommend the various commentaries in Mute.
The problem is that the conference was rooted in ‘post-workerism’, basically inspired by the ideas of Hardt and Negri, expressed in books like Empire and Multitude, and inspired by their ‘post-Marxist’ assessments. As their generation has evolved, and has been developing alternatives such as the basic income, they have started to clash with those who want the maintain the Autonomist tradition intact, carried by a new young generation of militants (according to one of the speakers, Andrea Fumagalli, those dissenters where actually Trotskyists … I don’t know). The latter inevitably call the former reformist. Ed Emery, the organizer, had chosen for an academic-type organisation, and as the speakers invariably went over their allotted twenty minuties, the space for dialogue was too much reduced. But in a large part, this was motivated by a desire to avoid sectarian discussions of the ultraleft tradition. My conclusion, is that yes, more dialogue would have been better, but there would have been a serious risk of making the conference unpalatable and uninteresting for those less interested in the intricacies of the Autonomist tradition. So all in all, despite my own misgivings, I am happy with the way the conference went: very interesting contributions, and lots of interesting people to meet and discuss with during the pauses and the evenings.

Amonst those interesting attendees where Chris Carlsson himself, who has a very human and thoughtfull blog, a mix of travelogue and musings about which way forward for our civilization.

Take some time to discover his personal website, which links to his writings, the Processed World magazine (about dehumanization through capitalist-quantitative processes), and an novel about post-scarcity San Francisco, which should be quite close to the peer to peer paradigm. This interview is a nice background to his work and personality.

Anyway, to further clarify the contentious debates in the halls of this conference, I conclude with the assessment of Nick Dyer-Whiteford, who’s also responding to the critics at the above-cited Mute page:

“I too think that there was far more of substance to the Cambridge conference than some previous posts suggest. Rather than declaring the event the death of this or that, it might be considered an occasion for some overdue, if contentious, conversations within the infrared spectrum. I won’t recapitulate any of the several fine papers, many of which are now on-line at the conference web site, but rather note three points brought up, not from the platform speakers, but in responses to them, or in later conversations. None are my own– I elaborate on them only as an exercise in “general intellect.â€?

a) Global basic income? Much of the discussion at the conference centered on the “basic income� strategy proposed by Andrea Fumagalli, Carlo Vercellone, Yves Moulier Boutang and others. Some see this a valuable strategic demand, others as mere acquiescence to welfare state social democracy (see below). Debate was set in an almost entirely European context. One point raised in questions but perhaps not adequately addressed was the matter of “basic income� on a global scale. A guaranteed annual income of $350, relatively negligible on an OECD scale, would double the monetary livelihood of one sixth of the planet’s population. It would fundamentally alter the floor of immiseration on which global exploitation rests. “Guaranteed income� and “citizen’s wage� have, to date, been mainly (though not exclusively) articulated as a (expensive) strategy for the affluent global Northwest. Global basic income may, paradoxically, be a demand that is at once more radical and more practical.
b) Autonomist transitions? A charge brought against the basic income program, and, by some, against the conference as a whole, is that of reformism. But this well-worn label is too easily used to avoid discussing the real difficulties of strategies for transit from capitalism to communism (or, if you prefer, commonism). For good historical reason many on the ultra-left dislike all mention of transitional regimes. The “go straight to revolution� slogan should, however, be backed with a clear, plausible concept of an immediately actualizable post-capitalist, trans-national economy, one that does not fall back either on the centralized command state or catastrophic survivalism. Absent this, thinking through intermediate demands, though beset with pitfalls, is neither dishonest nor foolish.
c) Networked Leninism? This phrase–guaranteed provocative– circulated in the coffee break and post-conference conversations about the role of “immaterialâ€? networks in today’s struggles. It connotes an apprehension that the rhizomatic, swarming logic of Net-connected “movement of movementsâ€? may not be as working as well as once hoped. Can a decentered multiplicitous movement develop demands and strategies that amount to more than an aggregation of what everybody wanted to do in the first place? Is it possible in a networked setting to develop a political program that, without reflecting the totality of every groupsucles aspirations, nonetheless provides a sufficiently common platform to be pursued with transversal coordination and in a self-disciplined way?

Questions, not answers. But questions from a worthwhile event, questions deserving discussion animated by vigorous disagreements but also by mutual respect.”

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