Maurizio Lazzarato on the Evolution from Labor for Capital to Life for Capital

* Article: From capital-labour to capital-life. By Maurizio Lazzarato. Ephemera, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 187-208

URL = http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/capital-labour-capital-life pdf

Summary

Reading notes from Michel Bauwens, 2006:

Contemporary companies do not sell products and services, but create worlds for their objects, and make objects that create worlds; the company creates a world in which the subjects exist.

Consumption is belonging to a world , adhering to a certain universe. A company is in essence the totality of the means of expression in this world, which is why it can exist without factories. This world consists of a 'regime of signs' (an arrangement of statements), which are invitations/incitements to a way of life. They aim to change our sensibilities, to effect incorporeal transformations. First, there is an actualization of the soul; second, there is a realization in the body. These are 2 different moments. The poor go through the first, but cannot afford the latter.

Thus this creation of worlds is the real production (through 'events'), while material production is only reproduction. Marxist and economic theories are no longer adequate. Labour itself becomes a series of unpredictable events. Citing Zafirian, Lazzarato says that a worker similarly must belong to a universe. He now works 'alone', but in a monastic form of individualism, which is constructed through multiple relations.

The same logic of semiotic valuation applies to finance and the stock market, which is now more a product of opinion than of objective and impersonal market mechanisms. The ability to create shared beliefs is instrumental in obtaining valuation.

Tarde remarked that 2 groups can shape collective opinion;

- 1) leaders, who create it by giving expression to it

- 2) forces of coercion, which can violate us.

So there is no market, but groups of opinion vying for dominance. Money speaks about the possible which is why finance is dominant today:

- "In societies of control, money represents the colonizing power of virtuality by the capitalist." (p. 196)

Value is no longer created by exploiting surplus value because the logic "production => markets => consumption", no longer holds. Instead, cooperating minds create software, which IP directly renders into a monopoly. Microsoft's profits are based on its capacity to create clientele and to extract a monopoly rent on it.

Today, cooperative production and the effectuation of a product through its users tend to merge. But cognitive capitalism aims to artificially divide those processes.

Cooperation between minds creates 'common' (and not collective) goods, which are inappropriable, inexchangeable, inconsumable. Instead of the destruction through consumption of the common good, we get increased value through circulation.

Exploitation today is the gap between the creativity of the multitudes, which is appropriated largely for free, and a distribution of income, which only rewards subjugated work (a little), and capital (a lot).

On what does cognitive capitalism work or 'aims to transform' ? - The answer is: the raw material are the habits, tastes, opinions, lifestyles, and behaviours.

What forces have to be mobilized to do so ? - The answer is: Attention and Memory.

Capitalism is therefore no longer just exploiting labour, but 'life' as such.

The cooperation of minds is a process of 'difference and repetition', not competition and contradiction:

- "To contrary terms can pass their contradiction only by the definitive victory of one over the other, while two different terms can combine their heterogenity by hybridization." (p. 207)

More information

• The Capital-Labour/Capital-Life Reading Group

URL = https://aboutabicycle.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/capitallabour-capitallife.pdf

"This Winter 2012-13, About a Bicycle will host a series on economics, with a focus on how Capitalism functions (or doesn’t) now. We’ll explore texts that will address capitals transmutation during the recent global economic crisis, the precarious conditions of labour and life, economic principles that situate capitalism’s avant-gardes and the avant-gardes of its opposition, and the current state of financialization and its “obscene superego” that floods public and cognitive values, and how (beginning with the introduction of standardized time) the machinery of Capital becomes internalized as a moral imperative."

• Book: The Making of the Indebted Man. By Maurizio Lazzarato.