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<nettime> bifo, Info-Labour and Precarisation |
Info-Labour and Precarisation http://www.generation-online.org/t/tinfolabour.htm Franco Berardi (Bifo) "We have no future because our present is too volatile. The only possibil ity that remains is the management of risk. The spinning top of the scenarios of the present moment." (W. Gibson: Pattern recognition, tr. It. L'accademia dei sogni) In February 2003 the American journalist Bob Herbert published in the New York Times the results of a cognitive survey on a sample of hundreds of unempl oyed youths in Chicago: none of their interviewees expected to find work the n ext few years, none of them expected to be able to rebel, or to set off large scale collective change. The general sense of the interviews was a sentiment of profound impotence. The perception of decline did not seem focused on pol itics, but on a deeper cause, the scenario of a social and psychical involution that seems to cancel every possibility of building alternatives. The fragmentation of the present time is reversed in the implosion of the future. In The Corrosion of Character: the Transformation of Work in Modern Capit alism (Norton: 1998; tr. It. L'Uomo Flessibile), Richard Sennett reacts to this existential condition of precariousness and fragmentation with nostalgia for a past epoch in which life was structured in relatively stable social roles , and time had enough linear consistency to construe paths of identity. "The ar row of time is broken: in an economy under constant restructuring that is based on the short-term and hates routine, definite trajectories no longer exist. Peop le miss stable human relations and long term objectives." (R. Sennett: The corrosion of character) But this nostalgia has no hold on present reality, and the attempts to reactivate the community remain artificial and sterile. In the essay "Precari-us?", Angela Mitropoulos observes that precariousne ss is a precarious notion. This because it defines its object in an approximate m anner, but also because from this notion derive paradoxical, self-contradictory, in other words precarious strategies. If we concentrate our critical attenti on on the precaricious character of job performance what would our proposed obj ective be? That of a stable job, guaranteed for life? Naturally no, this would b e a cultural regression that would definitely subordinate the role of work. S ome started to speak of Flexicurity to mean forms of wage independent of job performance. But we are still far from having a strategy of social recomposition of the labour movement to extricate ourselves from unlimite d exploitation. We need to pick up again the thread of analysis of the soci al composition and decompositon if we want to distinguish possible lines of a process of recomposition to come. In the 1970s the energy crisis, the consequent economic recession and fin ally the substitution of work with numerical machines resulted in the formatio n of a large number of people with no guarantees. Since then the question of the precarity became central to social analysis, but also in the ambitions of the movement. We began by proposing to struggle for forms of guaranteed incom e, uncoupled from work, in order to face the fact that a large part of the y oung population had no prospect of guaranteed employment. The situation has ch anged since then, because what seemed a marginal and temporary condition has no w become the prevalent form of labour relations. Precariousness is no longe r a marginal and provisional characteristic, but it is the general form of th e labour relation in a productive, digitalized sphere, reticular and recombinative. The word 'precariat' generally stands for the area of work which is no lo nger definable by fixed rules relative to the labour relation, to salary and t o the length of the working day. However if we analyse the past we see that the se rules functioned only for a limited period in the history of relations be tween labour and capital. Only for a short period at the heart of the C20th, un der the political pressures of unions and workers, in conditions of (almost) full employment and thanks to a role more or less strongly regulatory of the s tate in the economy, some limits to the natural violence of capitalist dynamic s could be legally established. The legal obligations that in certain perio ds have protected society from the violence of capital were always founded o n the existence of a relation of a force of a political and material kind (work ers' violence against the violence of capital). Thanks to political force it b ecame possible to affirm rights, establish laws and protect them as personal ri ghts. With the decline in the political force of the workers' movement, the nat ural precariousness of labour relations in capitalism and its brutality have reemerged. The new phenomenon is not the precarious character of the job market, but the technical and cultural conditions in which info-labour is made precarious .The technical conditions are those of digital recombination of info-work in networks. The cultural conditions are those of the education of the masse s and the expectations of consumption inherited from late C20th society and continuously fed by the entire apparatus of marketing and media communica tion. If we analyse the first aspect, i.e. the technical transformations introd uced by the digitalisation of the productive cycle, we see that the essential poi nt is not the becoming precarious of the labour relation (which, after all, has always been precarious), but the dissolution of the person as active prod uctive agent, as labour power. We have to look at the cyberspace of global produ ction as an immense expanse of depersonalised human time. Info-labour, the provision of time for the elaboration and the recombinat ion of segments of info-commodities, is the extreme point of arrival of the proc ess of the abstraction from concrete activities that Marx analysed as a tendency inscribed in the capital labour relation. The process of abstraction of labour has progressively stripped labour ti me of every concrete and individual particularity. The atom of time of which Ma rx speaks is the minimal unit of productive labour. But in industrial produc tion, abstract labour time was impersonated by a physical and juridcal bearer, embodied in a worker in flesh and bone, with a certified and political identity. Naturally capital did not purchase a personal disposition, but the time for which the workers were its bearers. But if capital wanted to dis pose of the necessary time for its valorization, it was indispensable to hire a human being, to buy all of its time, and therefore needed to face up to t he material needs and trade union and political demands of which the human w as a bearer. When we move onto the sphere of info-labour there is no longer a need to have bought over a person for eight hours a day indefinitely. Capital no longe r recruits people, but buys packets of time, separated from their interchan geable and occasional bearers. De-personalised time has become the real agent of the process of valorisa tion, and de-personalised time has no rights, nor any demands either. It can on ly be either available or unavailable, but the alternative is purely theoretica l because the physical body despite not being a legally recognised person s till has to buy his food and pay his rent. The informatic procedures of the recombination of semiotic material have the effect of liquifying the 'objective' time necesssary to produce the info-commodity. All the time of life the human machines is there, pulsati ng and available, like a brain-sprawl in waiting. The extension of time is metic uously cellularised: cells of productive time can be mobilised in punctual, casu al and fragmentary forms. The recombination of these fragments is automatically realised in the network. The mobile phone is the tool that makes possible the connection between the needs of semio-capital and the mobilisation of the living labour of cyber-space. The ringtone of the mobile phone calls the workers to reconnect their abstract time to the reticular flux. It's a strange word that with which we identify the ideology prevalent in the posthuman transition to digital slavery: liberalism. Liberty is its foundational myth, but the liberty of whom? The liberty of capital, certa inly. Capital must be absolutely free to expand in every corner of the world to find the fragment of human time available to be exploitated for the most miser able wage. But liberalism also predicates the liberty of the person. The jurid ical person is free to express itself, to choose its representatives, to be entrepreneurial at the level of politics and the economy. Very interesting, only that the person has disappeared, what is left is l ike an inert object, irrelevant and useless. The person is free, sure. But his t ime is enslaved. His liberty is a juridical fiction to which nothing in concrete daily life corresponds. If we consider the conditions in which the work of the majority of humanity, proletariat and cognitariat, is actually carried ou t in our time, if we examine the conditions the average wage globally, if we consider the current and now largely realised cancellation of previous la bour rights, we can say with no rhetorical exaggeration that we live in a regi me of slavery. The average salary on the global level is hardly sufficient to b uy the indispensible means for the mere survival of a person whose time is at th e service of capital. And people do not have any right over the time of whi ch they are formally the proprietors, but effectively expropriated. That tim e does not really belong to them, because it is separated from the social existe nce of the people who who make it available to the recombinative cyberproductvie circuit. The time of work is fractalised, that is reduced to minimal and reassemblable fragments, and the fractualisation makes it possible for ca pital to constantly find the conditions of minimum salary. How can we oppose the decimation of the working class and its systemic de-personalisation, the slavery that is affirmed as a mode of command of precarious and de-personalised work? This is the question that is posed w ith insistence by whoever still has a sense of human dignity. Nevertheless th e answer does not come out because the form of resistance and of struggle t hat were efficacious in the C20th appear to no longer have the capacity to sp read and consolidate themselves, nor consequently can they stop the absolutism of capital. An experience that derives from worker92s struggle in the last years, is that the struggle of precarious workers does not make a cycle. Fractal ised work can also punctually rebel, but this does not set into motion any wav e of struggle. The reason is easy to understand. In order for struggles to for m a cycle there must be a spatial proximity of the bodies of labour and an existential temporal continuity. Without this proximity and this continui ty, we lack the conditions for the cellularised bodies to become community. No w ave can be created, because the workers do not share their existence in time, and behaviours can only become a wave when there is a continuous proximity in time that info-labour no longer allows. Translated by Erik Empson Published in Italian on http://www.rekombinant.org/print.php?sid3D2578 -- sig/ * - / \ | ^ ^^^^ http://www.weareeverywhere.org http://www.uhc-collective.org.uk/toolbox.htm http://www.eco-action.org/dod http://www.noborder.org http://www.makeworlds.org http://www.ainfos.ca http://slash.autonomedia.org http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/3909/index/links.html http://www.reclaimthestreets.net # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net