Tendential Fall of Capital’s Control of the Division of Labor

Discussion

By Arwin Lund:

"The interesting thing about autonomist Marxism is that the tradition turns the understanding of the capital relation upside down. It is no longer capital that is the main actor, but rather the working class within cycles of struggles. Desire, play and class composition explain the historical changes of the working class (Negri, 1988: 209–210, 212–214, 218, 220). The cycle of struggle theory gains relevance from the last decade’s developments in cognitive capitalism. Carlo Vercellone maintains that capitalist production’s dependency on the general intellect signals a third step in the history of the division of labour, and enables a direct transition to communism (Vercellone, 2007: 15). The qualitative change in capital’s organic composition due to the general intellect of the social brain turns the subordination of living labour under dead labour (constant capital) upside down. Vercellone calls this “the tendential fall of the capital’s control of the division of labour” (Vercellone, 2007: 18). When intellectual and scientific work becomes the dominant productive force, knowledge re-socialises everything, which eventually becomes an unsustainable problem for capital. The cognitive social worker is still dependent on the wage, but has an autonomy in the immediate labour process that resembles that of the craftsman under an earlier period of labour’s formal subsumption under capital. As a consequence, capitalism can be expected to become more brutal and extra-economic in its operations to maintain control over an increasingly autonomous immediate labour process (Vercellone, 2007: 20–22, 31–32).

The rising independence and strength of some privileged parts of the social worker have consequences for PPPs. It seems plausible that the cognitive type of social worker is drawn to peer production, and that the social worker as peer producer only is indirectly connected to the class system of capitalism. The political-awareness processes within peer production not only stem from capitalism’s class relations, but also from productive activities outside of capitalism. Vercellone’s argument implies an increasingly strengthened position for peer production, as capital becomes more dependent on more independent social workers, free software, open knowledge and open data for its production. Successful PPPs can force capital to find new niches for its value production, but these niches are increasingly found within the activities connected to the general intellect, and are increasingly populated by the cognitive social worker, and could therefore be increasingly harder to control for capital." (http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-10-peer-production-and-work/peer-reviewed-papers/a-critical-political-economic-framework-for-peer-productions-relation-to-capitalism/)