Against Autonomy: Capitalism Beyond Quantification in the Autonomist Reading of Marx

Duy Lap Nguyen (bio)
University of Houston

Abstract

This essay outlines a critique of the autonomist theory of post-Fordism as a stage of capitalism defined by immaterial forms of production that purportedly constitute “value beyond quantification,” which is to say, value exceeding the measure of spatialized time. The essay argues that this concept of immaterial labor – proposed as a corrective to Marx’s “quantitative theory of value” – elides the crucial distinction in Marx’s analysis between two entirely different kinds of spatialized time: the time required for the production of material goods and the time that determines their (exchange) value. This elision, the essay argues, results in a fundamental mischaracterization of contemporary capitalism.

Spatialized Time and the “Quantitative Theory of Value” in Capital

For past thirty years, the theory of post-Fordist production developed in the works of Autonomist Marxists (including Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno and Franco Berardi) has provided one of the most widely employed critical frameworks for understanding the increasing significance of culture, affect, information, and digital labor in the contemporary global economy. This theory emerged, in part, out of a phenomenological critique of the spatialized concept of time (as the measure of value) employed in Marx’s analyses of capitalism. For the Autonomists, this spatialized time – inherited from the Western metaphysical tradition – is no longer sufficient as a measure of value, given the prevalence within contemporary capitalism of immaterial (and immeasurable) forms of production. As I show in this essay, this account of post-Fordist production is based upon a fundamental misreading of Marx. The critique of the Autonomist reading of Marx outlined below draws extensively on the reinterpretation of Marx’s mature critical theory developed by thinkers – including Norbert Trenkle, Robert Kurz, Jean-Marie Vincent, Hans-Georg Backhaus and Moishe Postone – associated with the Marxian school of critical theory known as Wertkritik, or value critique. In particular, my analysis attempts to build upon the critique of Autonomist Marxism elaborated by Robert Kurz and Anselm Jappe in Les Habits neufs de l’Empire, as well as upon the critique of the Autonomist notion of bio-political production outlined in the work of Tiqqun. These texts extend Marx’s critique of the commodity form to an analysis of important secular trends within the contemporary global economy, including the decline of stable rates of exchange, the rise of financial derivatives, the prevalence of precarious labor, and the increasingly predominant role of information in the global economy. These developments, which have been the focus of Autonomist Marxist analyses of post-Fordist production, have been largely ignored in earlier works associated with Wertkritik, limiting the latter’s potential as critique. In proposing a critical reading of Autonomist theories of post- Fordist production, based on the work of the Wertkritik school and on related interpretations of Marx, this essay addresses this important limitation.

In Empire, Hardt and Negri situate Marx’s theory of value within the “great Western metaphysical tradition:” From “Aristotle’s theory of virtue as a measure to Hegel’s theory of measure as the key to the passage from existence to essence,” this tradition is one that “has always abhorred the immeasurable.” “Marx’s theory of value pays its dues to this metaphysical tradition: his theory of value is always been a theory of the measure of value” (Hardt and Negri, 2000, p. 355).¹

This account of Marx’s theory of value appears to rely upon Heidegger’s critique of the “vulgar conception of time” in the history of Western metaphysical thought. In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that, in both Aristotle and Hegel, the passage of time is understood as a succession of homogeneous “now-points” that is conceived on the model of the movements of physical objects in space (see Derrida 34-35). For Heidegger, it is this conversion of time into space that allows the former to serve as a measure of movement:1 time becomes subject to quantification through its reduction to spatialized units. In Marx’s theory of value, this vulgar conception of spatialized time is applied to an analysis of the exploitation of labor in capitalism.² As Melinda Cooper describes in her reading of Negri’s interpretation of Marx: “Aristotle’s writings on exchange and measure … [and] Hegel’s Science of Logic, with its reflections on measure, the limit and quantity[,] … provide… the logical scaffolding for [Marx’s] theory of surplus value,” a theory that “defines exploitation as a measurable quantity, locating it in [capital’s] extortion of surplus labor” (128). The Marxian theory of value, therefore, is a “quantitative theory of value” (Hardt and Negri Commonwealth, 313) a theory that assumes that the value created by labor can be measured in spatialized time. This assumption makes it possible to quantify exploitation, and to locate the latter in the division of the working day into necessary and surplus labor time. In Marx’s “theory of measure” (Hardt and Negri, Empire 355), the exploitation of labor – defined as a “measurable quantity” (Cooper 128) – is localized in a determinate place and a delimited duration of time: the factory during the working day, separated from leisure or non-laboring time.

For the Autonomists, however, this quantitative theory of value – which defines exploitation as a measurable quantity that capital appropriates in the factory – no longer provides a sufficient account of the domination of time within capitalism due to the transformation of labor in post-Fordist production. This transformation, as Franco Berardi and others have argued, was in part the result of the struggles against work in the factory in the era of Fordist production, an era in which industrial workers sought “freedom from capitalist domination” by “refusing their role in the factory” (Berardi, “What is the Meaning”). In Negri’s writings from the period, this strategy of the “refusal of work” is identified with the notion, attributed to Marx, that free time is inherently emancipatory (Negri, Marx Beyond Marx 167). Rather than liberating labor from the exploitation of capital, however, the refusal of work precipitated the rise of flexible labor and the development of new technologies applied to the manipulation of free time outside the factory.³ As a result, the “whole of society,” as Negri explains in Time for Revolution, “becomes productive. The time of production is the time of life” (44).

For Negri, this transformation of labor marks a definitive break with the metaphysical conception of time that Marx’s theory inherits:

The new temporalities of bio-political production cannot be understood in the frameworks of the traditional conceptions of time. … [I]n postmodernity … the Aristotelian tradition [that “defines time by the measure of the movement between a before and an after”] is broken … most decisively by the fact that it is now impossible to measure labor, either by convention or by calculation. (Empire 401)

In postmodernity, then, value can no longer be quantified because its production is no longer a function of physical labor alone. Instead, the creation of value assumes an increasingly immaterial form, one that exceeds every standard of measurement. Knowledge, science, affect, and culture (as immaterial and immeasurable forms of activity) become the “the highest value- producing forms of labor” (Hardt, “Affective Labor” 90). In the postmodern economy, “as labor moves outside the factory walls,” activities associated with “life” or social existence – communication, cooperation, and social interaction in general – acquire the capacity to constitute value outside the measure of spatialized time imposed in the workplace. As a result, “it is increasingly difficult to maintain the fiction of any measure of the working day and thus separate … work time from leisure time” (Hardt and Negri, Empire 401-402). Due to the “social diffusion of living labor” – through which life itself is subsumed as a source of surplus value for capital – the “intellectual energy and … communicative [capacity] of the multitude of … affective laborers” no longer “has a determinate place. … [E]xploitation can no longer be localized and quantified” (Hardt and Negri, Empire 401-403). Thus, as the “entire time of life … becomes the time of production,” the site in which the production of value occurs becomes coextensive with society itself as whole. In bio-political production, therefore, the “value of labor … is determined deep in the viscera of life,” produced by a multitude whose social existence creates an immeasurable time through its ability to generate value beyond every measure: “The activity of the multitude constitutes time beyond measure. Time might thus be defined as the immeasurability of the movement between a before and an after, an immanent process of constitution” (Hardt and Negri, Empire 401-402).

The immeasurable time, labor, and value produced by the multitude, then, constitutes a defining characteristic of a postmodern economy whose immaterial forms of production exceed the Aristotelian conception of time that Marx’s theory maintains as a measure of value. For Negri, this presupposition – that of “time-as-measure of value” (Negri, Time for Revolution 44) – constitutes the fundamental historical (and metaphysical) limit of Marx’s critical theory, a theory of the measure of value that emerged in a “period when capital was able to reduce value to measure” (Hardt and Negri, Empire 402): “The critique of political economy[,] … including the Marxist tradition, has generally focused on measurement and quantitative methods to understand surplus value and exploitation. Biopolitical products, however[,] … exceed all quantitative measurement” (Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth 135). “[W]hat escapes political economy,” therefore, and “freezes political economy in its tracks … is … value … beyond measure” (Hardt and Negri “Value and Affect” 87).

This account of post-Fordist production, of course, has been enormously influential in analyses of contemporary capitalism. In fields like anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and new media theory, concepts like the “real subsumption of labor,” derived from Autonomist Marxism, have become a predominant model for analyzing what Tiziana Terranova describes as the emergence of new forms of technical, cultural, and cognitive work that appear to “question … the legitimacy of a fixed distinction between production and consumption, labor and culture” (Terranova, “Free Labor” 35). Blurring the distinction between free time and labor, these new forms of productive activity combine elements that were once exclusive to each. The result is a “labourization of social activity” giving rise to new paradoxical forms of temporal control in which freedom and servitude are conjoined in a “free labour” or “unwaged immaterial work” (Brown and Quan-Haase; Brown) that is “[s]imultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited” (Terranova, “Free Labor” 33)).

This essay outlines a critique of the Autonomist theory of post-Fordist production as a “social factory” (Hardt and Negri, Empire 273) in which immaterial forms of production, blurring the line between free time and labor, constitute value beyond quantification: value that can no longer be measured in spatialized time, and whose exploitation, therefore, is accomplished through new forms of temporal control that are no longer confined to either the factory or the “fiction” of a working day that can be clearly distinguished from free time or leisure (Hardt and Negri, Empire 402).

The concept of “value beyond measure” (which defines post-Fordist production) was derived in part from a reading of the so-called “Fragment on Machines,” a text that, for Autonomists – discussed in the final part of the paper – constitutes a radical departure from the “quantitative theory of value” developed in Capital. One of the main aims of this essay is to dispute this reading of Marx, and the relationship it proposes between the “Fragment” and Capital, as the textual basis for the Autonomist claim that immaterial labor in post-Fordist production creates value beyond measure. Contrary to the Autonomist reading, the “Fragment” does not imply a critique of the “quantitative theory of value” in Capital, but rather encapsulates the latter’s fundamental conclusions. The continuity between these two texts and their analyses is missed in the Autonomist reading because of the emphasis placed on the problem of measurability. The theory developed in both the “Fragment” and Capital, however, is not simply a theory of the measure of value; it is also – and more fundamentally – a critique of value itself, a (measurable) form that Marx defines in the “Fragment” as the very “foundation of bourgeois production” (Grundrisse 704). In the Autonomist reading of Marx, the critique of spatialized time (as the measure of value) ignores the historical character of the particular property (value) that it claims can no longer be quantified in post-Fordist production. As a result, the foundation of capitalism is affirmed in the immeasurable form of an immaterial labor that remains productive of value even while it exceeds all quantification.⁴

From the perspective of Marx’s critique, the focus on quantification conceals the difference between the creation of value (as the foundation of capitalism) and the process of production in general, both of which are measured in spatialized time. The same standard of measure is used to determine two entirely different kinds of duration: the time required for the production of goods and the time that determines their value. Because value is measured by labor time, a decrease in the time required for the production of goods – which should “equal to an increase in free time” (Marx, Grundrisse 711) – increases the time required for the production of value, thereby increasing the compulsion to labor. Because of this “antagonistic movement” in capitalism, the liberation from labor itself, from the time required for the production of goods, results in the domination of work by the time that determines their value (Marx, Capital 53). In the Autonomist reading of Marx, the contradictory movement between the (spatialized) time of production and valorization – which underlies the analysis in both the “Fragment” and Capital – is elided in the opposition between material and immaterial labor, measure and immeasurability. As a result, a crisis of value, which Marx believed would arise from this contradictory movement, is reduced to a crisis of quantification, as a consequence of the rise of an immaterial labor whose ability to constitute value exceeds measure itself. This theory of post-Fordist production, therefore, is based on a reading of Marx that fundamentally misrepresents his critique of both the domination of time under capitalism and the possibility of a liberation from labor, which the “Fragment” describes as a condition for the creation of post-capitalist society based on “disposable time” (Marx, Grundrisse, 708). ⁵

The Metaphysics of Value and Measure

Although the Heideggerian history of the concept of time that Negri appears to employ has been widely disputed,⁶ the references to this philosophical tradition in Marx’s critique would appear, at first sight, to correspond to Negri’s account of the latter as a theory of the measure of value. In the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, Marx explicitly formulates the notion of labor time as the measure of value in terms of Aristotle’s definition of time as the measure of motion: “Just as motion is measured by time, so is labor by labor time; it is the living quantitative reality (Dasein) of labor” (271-72). In Capital, moreover, the “discovery” that labor is the measure of value – which Negri defines as the limit of Marx’s analysis (“The limit of Marx’s consideration consists in his reducing the form of value to an objective measure” (Negri, Marxism Beyond Marxism 151) – is described as political economy’s most important achievement: “The scientific discovery … that the products of labour, so far as they are values, are but material expressions of the human labour spent in their production, marks, indeed, an epoch in the history of the development of the human race” (Marx, Capital 85).

Yet, although Marx accepts the validity of this “scientific discovery,” his critique of political economy cannot be reduced to its theory of the measure of value. For if Marx, in the passage above, “pays his dues” to a metaphysical tradition “that has always abhorred the immeasurable,” he also maintains, more importantly, that this theory of measure is based on the “metaphysical subtleties” of a commodity form whose mystery it entirely fails to unravel. As Marx emphasizes at the end of the sentence cited above, the “scientific discovery [that value is measured by labor time] … by no means … dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves” (Capital 85).

For Marx, therefore, what political economy and its theory of measure fails to demystify is not – in contrast to Negri’s critique of the theory – the “illusory manner” in which time is conceived on the model of space, but rather the illusion that value, determined by the duration of labor, is an objective characteristic of material objects. This property, however, is one that “no chemist has ever discovered … in a pearl or a diamond” (Capital 95). Political economy, then, is credited with the discovery of a scientific approach to the quantification of a “metaphysical” property that does not exist. It is a science that has succeeded in identifying the appropriate measure for a “supersensible” substance whose actuality is never called into question.

This critique of political economy draws upon Aristotle’s account of exchange in the Nicomachean Ethics, an account in which the method of measurement – and the principle that “all the comparables must possess an identical something whereby they are measured” (Aristotle 545) – is applied to the form of value. As Marx explains, this form is defined in the Ethics as a non-existing property attributed to incommensurable objects as a “makeshift” to allow exchange to occur:

“Exchange,” [Aristotle] says, “cannot take place without equality, and equality not without commensurability.”… Here … he … gives up the further analysis of the form of value. “It is … in reality … impossible that … unlike things can be commensurable” – i.e., qualitatively equal. Such an equalisation can only be something foreign to their real nature … only “a makeshift for practical purposes.” (Capital 68)

What Aristotle proposes, therefore, is a method with which to measure accurately a common “something” or attribute that does not exist in the material objects whose equivalence it serves to establish.⁷ Although this “common ‘something,’” as Marx explains, “cannot be either a geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities” (Marx, Capital 44), its magnitude, nevertheless, can be measured like an empirical property. But because of its measurable quality, value – as a “purely social” relation, constitutive of a capitalist society based on the exchange of incommensurable products – can be confused for a natural substance:

One of the measures that we apply to commodities as material substances, as use values, will serve to illustrate… . Just as … iron, as a measure of weight, represents in relation to the sugar-loaf weight alone, so, in our expression of value, the material object, coat, in relation to the linen, represents value alone. … Here, however, the analogy ceases. The iron, in the expression of the weight of the sugar-loaf, represents a natural property common to both bodies, namely their weight; but the coat, in the expression of value of the linen, represents a non-natural property of both, something purely social, namely, their value. (Capital 65-66)

The same method of measurement, then, is used in order to quantify both empirical properties and the “purely social” abstraction of value. Contrary to the Autonomist reading, therefore, the difference between use and exchange value, in Marx’s analysis, is not defined in terms of the opposition between quality and quantity, measure and immeasurability.⁸ Rather, use and exchange value refer to two different kinds of abstraction, both of which can be measured or quantified.

This distinction – which, according to Marx, constitutes “the pivot on which a clear comprehension of political economy turns” (Marx, Capital 48) – is elided in Negri’s critique of political economy as a mode of analysis that has always “abhorred the immeasurable” (Hardt and Negri, Empire 355). Like political economy, then, Negri’s critique of the “illusory manner” in which value is reduced to its measure affirms the illusory character of value itself, as a measurable but non-natural “something” that conditions the exchange of commodities. If the “Aristotelian tradition of measure,” therefore, is incapable of conceiving of value beyond measure, Negri’s critique of this metaphysical tradition remains bound to the limits of a political economy that, according to Marx, is incapable of thinking beyond value itself and its metaphysical subtleties. While Negri’s critique of the labor theory of value, therefore, rejects the metaphysics of measurement, it remains squarely within the metaphysics of value that constitutes, in Marx’s analysis, the fundamental presupposition of political economy.

As Marx argues, moreover, this presupposition – which constitutes “one of the chief failings of classical economy” (Marx, Capital 93) – has its origins in the universality of the value relation in capitalism. Because of its general character in capitalism, value – as a historically determinate form that the product of labor acquires in a bourgeois society based on the exchange of commodities – appears as an eternal and self-evident fact, a natural property that political economy can scientifically measure, but whose immutable existence it merely assumes:

[C]lassical economy … treat[s] the form of value as … having no connexion with the inherent nature of commodities. The reason for this is not solely because their attention is entirely absorbed in the analysis of the magnitude of value. It lies deeper. The value form of the product of labour is … the most universal form . . . taken by the product in bourgeois production … [and] thereby gives it its special historical character. If then we treat this mode of production as one eternally fixed by Nature for every state of society, we necessarily overlook that which is the differentia specifica of the value form. (Marx, Capital 93)

Political economy, then, is limited to a theory of measure because it assumes that the form that it measures – the determination of value by labor – exists in every society (an assumption that arises from the general character of the commodity form within capitalism). As a result, the defining historical feature of capitalism itself – its differentia specifica as a “definite historical … epoch when the labour spent on the production of a useful article becomes expressed as one of the objective qualities of that article, i.e., as its value” (Marx, Capital 93) – appears in political economy as an eternal and natural given.

This presupposition, of course, is preserved in Negri’s critique of political economy, which rejects the latter’s theory of measure but shares its fundamental assumption that value is “eternally fixed.” Thus, if the limit of Marx’s critique consists, as Negri maintains, “in reducing the form of value to an objective measure” (Negri, “Interpretation of the Class Situation Today” 71) the limit of Negri’s analysis lies in the fetishistic assumption that the form of value itself is an objective characteristic of the product of labor in all states of society. In Negri’s attempt to apply a phenomenological critique of spatialized time to Marx’s theory of value, therefore, the historically determinate problem of value is conflated with the problem of quantification in general. But as such, the concept of a bio-political production that constitutes value beyond every measure – proposed as a corrective to the historical limitations of Marx’s critique of political economy – is based on an ahistorical understanding of value, one that eternalizes the particular form “taken by the product in bourgeois production.”

Value and Immaterial Labor

This form – as the differentia specifica of bourgeois production – is presupposed in the Autonomist periodization of post-Fordist production as defined by a shift from material to immaterial labor, from a “period when capital was able to reduce value to measure” (Hardt and Negri, Empire 402), to an immeasurable form of production that escapes the quantitative theory of value developed in Capital. This presupposition is particularly clear in Paolo Virno’s discussion of immaterial labor. In A Grammar of the Multitude, Virno maintains that, for Marx, labor can generate value only by objectifying itself in a material object. In Marx’s analysis, “productive labor” – that is, labor that is productive of value – is necessarily labor that produces a physical product.

This assumption, however, “falls to pieces” in post-Fordist production, in which labor acquires the characteristics of an artistic performance: “[T]hose who produce surplus value behave … like the dancer,” a performer whose work does not produce a material “object distinguishable from the performance itself” (Virno 52). In post-Fordist production, therefore, labor generates value by producing an “activity without an end product” (Virno 52). According to Virno, this “labor without an end product (virtuosic labor) places Marx in an embarrassing situation,” since his theory assumes that only material labor is productive of value (54).

The problem of immaterial labor, of course – as Virno correctly contends – was largely excluded from Marx’s theory of capitalism due to the insignificant role that it played in the period of industrialization. In the “Results of the Direct Production Process” (the text that Virno employs in his reading), Marx maintains that “non-material production” (encompassing labor that “cannot be converted into products separable from the workers themselves”) can be “left out of account entirely” because this particular form of production is “infinitesimal … in comparison with the mass of [material] products under capitalist production” (448-452).

But if Marx, because of the limits imposed by the historical stage in which he developed his theory, believed that immaterial labor was too insignificant “to be considered when dealing with capitalist production as a whole” (“Results” 452), contrary to Virno, this theory does not simply assume that immaterial labor – or “activity without an end product” – is incapable of creating value. On the contrary, in the same section cited by Virno, Marx makes exactly the opposite argument: “A singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker…. The same singer [however] when engaged by an entrepreneur who has her sing in order to make money, is a productive worker, for she directly produces capital” (Marx, “Results” 448). A service, therefore, can be productive of value without producing a material product: “kinds of work which are only enjoyed as services … are capable of being exploited directly in the capitalist way [i.e., for surplus value], even though they cannot be converted into products separable from the workers themselves” (Marx, “Results” 448. Emphasis added).

For Marx, then, “productive labor” – as labor that is productive of value – is not defined by its material or immaterial content – that is, by whether it “results in commodities which exist separately from the producer,” or produces a “product … inseparable from the act of producing it.” Rather, Marx states unequivocally that: “productive labour … has absolutely nothing to do with the particular content of the labour… Labour with the same content can therefore be both productive and unproductive” (“Results” 448).⁹

As Marx mentions, moreover, this tendency within political economy to classify labor that counts as productive according to the content it creates arises from the “fetishistic” assumption that the (“purely social”) form of value exists as an objective characteristic of the product of labor, a product that, in capitalism, becomes a “material repositor[y]” for the form of value itself:

[T]he obsession with defining productive and unproductive labor in terms of its material content derives from … 1) the fetishistic notion, peculiar to the capitalist mode of production … that the formal economic determinations, such as being a commodity, or being productive labor … are qualities belonging to the material repositories of these formal determinations … in and of themselves; 2) the idea that, considering the labour process as such, only such labour is productive as results in a product (a material product, since here it is only a question of material wealth). (“Results” 450)

The description of the commodity in the passage above as a material repository for the formal determination of value is indicative, of course, of the limits imposed by Marx’s historical context, a period marked by the predominance of material production (which led Marx to assume that immaterial labor could be “left out of account entirely”). The problem, however, is primarily a terminological one, an ambiguity in the technical language employed in Marx’s critique, one that Virno interprets as the “embarrassment” of a theory that precludes the possibility that immaterial labor can be productive of value. For Marx, “material wealth” – produced by a “material process of production” as opposed to the formal determination of value – is a category that also includes immaterial products and forms of activity. The content of labor that serves as a material repository for value can also “consist … of extremely paltry products (use values), serving to satisfy the most miserable appetites, fancies, etc. But content is entirely irrelevant to whether the labour is determined to be productive or not” (Marx, “Results” 448). Thus, the use values or “material products” in which the value form is deposited can include both imaginary and useless productions: “labour is productive as produces capital; hence that labour which does not do this, regardless of how useful it may be – it may just as well be harmful – is … unproductive labour” (Marx, Grundrisse 306).

Moreover, instead of assuming that labor is productive of value only if it produces a material product, Marx – in the second point made in the earlier passage – insists that the predominance of material production in industrial capitalism disguises the fact that value can also emerge from immaterial services. This misconception, moreover, perpetuates the fetishistic illusion that labor itself, whether it assumes the form of a material product or an immaterial action, is identical to the creation of value. The “obsession with defining productive and unproductive labor in terms of its material content derives from … the idea that … only such labour is productive as results in … a material product” (Marx, “Results” 450), an idea that reinforces the fetishistic appearance that the formal determination of value is an objective characteristic of both service and labor as such.

The production of value, therefore – as something “peculiar to the capitalist mode of production” – is distinct from production in general, regardless of whether the latter produces a material good or an immaterial product inseparable from the act of producing it. As Marx explains: “Service … in general [is] only an expression for the particular use value of labour, in so far as this is useful not as a material object but as an activity” (“Results” 451). In capitalist production, however, the conversion of “all services … [“from the prostitute’s to the king’s”] … into wage labour … gives … grounds for confusing the two” (Marx, “Results” 446). As a result, services, like that of the singer whose performance generates value without creating a material product, are identified with immaterial labor in general. According to Marx, this confusion “makes it easy to pass over in silence the differentia specifica of this ‘productive worker’, and of capitalist production – as the production of surplus value, as the process of the self-valorisation of capital” (“Results” 446). The differentia specifica that defines the “productive worker” in capitalism, of course, is the ability to be productive of value, a property that constitutes the differentia specifica of the product of labor within bourgeois society. Thus, the immaterial form of value is a “non-natural” property that is distinct from its material and immaterial “repositories,” from the (potentially useless and imaginary) use values created by production or service in general.

In Virno’s account of post-Fordist production, the distinction between “productive labor” in capitalism and production and service in general is elided in the opposition between material and immaterial labor. But as such, the notion of a “virtuosic labor” that constitutes value without a material product – a notion that, according to Virno, defines the historical limits of Marx’s critique – presupposes the production of value as “eternally fixed.” But in that case, Marx’s critique of the concept of “productive labor” in classical bourgeois economy – which assumes that the production of value is the only “natural form of production” – also applies to the Autonomist notion of immaterial labor, which is based on the same “narrow-minded” confusion between value and “material wealth” (a category that can also include immaterial forms of activity):

Only the narrow-minded bourgeois, who regards the capitalist form of production … as the sole natural form of production, can confuse the question of what are productive labour and productive workers from the standpoint of capital with the question of
what productive labour is in general, and can therefore be satisfied with the tautological answer that all that labour is productive which produces, which results in a product, or any kind of use value, which has any result at all. (Marx, “Results” 443)

In Virno’s discussion of immaterial labor, the “differentia specifica of [the] ‘productive worker’” in capitalism is affirmed in the form of a multitude whose “labor is productive (of surplus-value) labor precisely because it functions in a … virtuosic manner” (29). Because this virtuosic labor does not objectify itself in the form of a physical product, its capacity for value creation, in contrast to industrial labor (with which Marx’s political economy was solely concerned), exceeds the metaphysics of measure that Marx inherits from Aristotle: “There is an easy measuring stick for the worker … which is quantitative: … the factory produce[s] so many pieces per hour… [With immaterial labor] it is different. … How does one measure the skill of a priest, or … a journalist, or … someone in public relations?” (Virno 26).

The Socially and Technically Necessary Time of Production

In Marx’s analysis, however, the metaphysical presupposition that defines the limit of political economy is not that the value created by labor can be measured in spatialized time. Rather, the fundamental question that political economy precludes is why value is determined by labor at all:

Political economy has … analysed … the magnitude of value. . . . It has never even so much as posed the question: Why does labour manifest itself in value … ? [These] forms … belong to a social formation wherein the process of production masters men but not yet does man master the process of production – such forms count for their bourgeois consciousness as just such a self-evident natural necessity as productive labour itself (Marx, Capital 92-3).

Political economy fails to grasp the determination of value by labor time as a distinguishing feature of bourgeois production because it identifies this phenomenon with productive labor in general, that is, with the production of use values as things and intangible services that “by [their natural or immaterial] properties satisf[y] human wants” (Marx, Capital 41). Productive labor, therefore – or what Marx refers to (ambiguously) as the “material process of production” – is distinct from the determination of value according to labor, from a “process of valorization” whose historical character is masked by its identification with productive labor as a condition of human existence in all forms of society.

This process of valorization is tied to what Marx describes in the passage above as a historically determinate form of social compulsion (“wherein the process of production masters men”), one that assumes the fetishistic appearance of the natural necessity to labor itself. Contrary to the Autonomist reading of Marx’s critique as a theory that “defines exploitation as a measurable quantity,” this compulsion cannot be identified with the exploitation of labor measured in spatialized units of time. In Capital, Marx insists upon the distinction between the exploitation of labor as a measurable quantity – which exists in both capitalist and non-capitalist societies – and the domination of labor by a process of valorization in which labor, as the measure of value, “appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves” (Marx, Capital 85):

Compulsory labour [in feudalism] is just as properly measured by time … as commodity- producing labour. … No matter … what we may think of the parts played by the different classes of people themselves in [feudal] society, the social relations [in feudalism] … are not disguised under the shape of social relations between the products of labour. (Marx, Capital 89. Emphasis added)

Although labor, therefore, is measured in all forms of society, the labor that constitutes value – as a “social” relationship of equivalence between incommensurable products – entails a form of compulsion or “mastery” that cannot be reduced to either class exploitation (“No matter … what we may think of the parts played by the different classes of people”) or the natural necessity to labor in general. But since both forms of compulsion are “just as properly measured by time,” the time required to constitute value can be difficult to distinguish from the time required for production in general.

Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself. Society … has to distribute its time in a purposeful way, in order to achieve a production adequate to its overall needs. … Thus, economy of time … remains the first economic law. … However, this is essentially different from a measurement of exchange values (labour or products) by labour time (Marx, Grundrisse 173. Emphasis added.).

The production of goods to meet the needs of society – that is, the production of use values that satisfy human desires – requires an organization of labor time, one that presupposes, of course, the quantification of labor. The need for an “economy of time,” however, is “essentially different” from the compulsion associated with labor time as the measure of exchange value (a compulsion that, because of its measurability, is conflated by political economy with the necessity of productive labor in general). In capitalism, workers are not only compelled – by necessity or class exploitation – to produce use values that satisfy needs. In order to obtain the “full” value of their commodities on the market, they must also produce them as a socially average rate of production: the “economy of time” imposed by the necessity to labor (as the “first law” for every society) is coupled in capitalism, then, with the social (and historically specific) compulsion of “socially necessary labor time,” a compulsion that is “just as properly measured” by spatialized time as the process of production itself.

For Marx, then, this socially necessary labor time cannot be identified with the spatialized time of production imposed in the factory during the working day, as the determinate location and time in which labor is quantified and exploited. Rather, as Marx describes in Capital, the homogeneous time imposed in the factory through the use of time-discipline and technology – through the “technical subordination of the workman to the uniform motion of the instruments of labour” (Marx, Capital 463) – is essentially different from the compulsion to labor at a socially average rate of production:

[In manufacture] [i]t is clear that the direct mutual interdependence of the different pieces of work … compels each [worker] to spend on his work no more than the necessary time. This creates a continuity, a uniformity, a regularity, an order, and even an intensity of labour. … [On the other hand] [t]he rule that the labour-time expended on a commodity should not exceed the amount socially necessary to produce it is one that appears, in the production of commodities in general, to be enforced from outside by the action of competition: to put it superficially, each single producer is obliged to sell his commodity at its market price. In manufacture, on the contrary, the provision of a given quantity of the product in a given period of labour is a technical law of the process of production itself. (Marx, Capital 379)

In this passage, Marx – developing the earlier distinction between productive labor and value – distinguishes between a socially necessary labor time, identified with the sphere of exchange (or the “action of competition”), and a technically necessary time of production that is applied in the factory. Although both forms of time are quantifiable (and thus spatialized), the time technically necessary to produce a particular product in a given period of time (which imposes “a continuity, a uniformity, a regularity” to which labor is compelled to conform) pertains to the production of goods, as opposed to their price or their value. This time, then, refers to the efficiency – or “economy of time” – achieved through the application of timesaving devices and discipline to the production of objects whose empirical (and immaterial) properties satisfy particular needs and desires. In the factory, then, a social compulsion, established in the sphere of exchange – and which therefore cannot be confined to the determinate time and space of the factory – forces producers (in the sphere of production) to adopt or develop the technical means required to achieve this temporal norm. Conversely, a reduction in the technically necessary time of production achieved in the factory can act reciprocally, in the sphere of exchange, to reduce the socially average rate of production that determines the value of goods.

As Marx argues in Capital, the “mutual interaction” between these two forms of temporal compulsion – which are elided in the Autonomist interpretation of Marx’s critique as a theory that defines exploitation as a measurable quantity – is rooted in the “antagonistic movement” between the spatialized time of production and valorization. Because exchange value is measured according to labor time, a more efficient economy of time (just as properly measured by spatialized time) – one that decreases the labor required to satisfy needs by increasing the quantity of use values that can be produced in a given period of time – can diminish the amount of exchange value expressed in commodities: “With two coats two men can be clothed, with one coat only one man. Nevertheless, an increased quantity of material wealth may correspond to a simultaneous fall in the magnitude of its value” (Marx, Capital 53). Thus, an increase in things that, by their empirical or immaterial properties, satisfy human desires, can correspond to a decrease in the “purely social” relation of value (as a property that the product of labor acquires in capitalism).

But since the use values that satisfy needs are obtained, under capitalism, through the exchange of commodities, a decrease in the exchange value created by labor (due to an increase in productivity that reduces socially necessary labor time) can result, paradoxically, in an increase in the social compulsion to work: “Hence … the economic paradox, that the most powerful instrument for shortening labour-time [i.e., machinery], becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the labourer’s time … at the disposal of … expanding the value of … capital” (Marx, Capital 445). Laborers, then, must paradoxically work longer to generate value (measured in socially necessary labor time) because less time is required to produce use values that satisfy human desires. Due to the inverse relation between productive labor and value, therefore, a decrease in the natural necessity to labor can lead to an increase in the social compulsion to work. In capitalist production, the “saving of labour time”– which, in a “real economy,” based on the production of use values, would be “equal to an increase in free time” (Marx, Grundrisse 711) – prolongs the labor required in order to constitute value: the potential for free time, of freedom from labor, engenders a social domination or servitude that underlies a specific form of society “wherein the process of production masters men.”

Free Time and the Autonomist Reading of the “Fragment on Machines”

In the Autonomist reading of Marx, this antagonistic movement between concrete productive activity and socially necessary labor time is collapsed in the opposition between qualitative and quantitative time. As Robert Kurz has argued, the Autonomists fail to distinguish between the process of valorization – the “creation of value” measured according to socially necessary labor time – and the material process of production (a difference that follows directly from the distinction between use and exchange value) (Kurz 1).

This conflation is most readily apparent in the Autonomist interpretation of the “Fragment on Machines.” As Tiziana Terranova has noted, this text played a pivotal role in the development of Autonomist theories of post-Fordist production: “In the vivid pages of the ‘Fragment,’ [we see] the ‘other’ Marx of the Grundrisse … adopted by the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s against the more orthodox endorsement of Capital.” In the “Fragment,” Marx proposes what Paolo Virno describes as the “hardly Marxist” (100) suggestion that, with the rise of industrial production, science (and knowledge more generally) displaces direct human labor from its primary role in the process of production:

But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time … than on … the general state of science and on the progress of technology. … Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process. … [G]eneral social knowledge has become a direct force of production…. [T]he conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. … [L]abour time ceases and must cease to be … measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. … [The] theft of … surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth. … With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. … (Marx, Grundrisse 705)

Eliding the distinction between valorization and material production, Virno, in his reading of this part of the “Fragment,” interprets Marx’s description of heavy industry – as a technical process in which knowledge, displacing direct human labor, becomes the “chief actor” in the production of use values¹⁰ – to imply that the immaterial labor of the “general intellect” has become the primary source of value creation. This “one-sided” reading, however, completely removes the “antithesis” – or antagonistic movement – that underlies Marx’s analysis in the “Fragment” (Osborne 21). For Marx, the application of knowledge and science as a direct force in material production invalidates the immaterial process of valorization, since it reduces socially necessary labor time to a “vanishing minimum,” thereby rendering labor time itself largely irrelevant as a measure of material wealth. “[L]abour time must cease to be … the measure … of use value” because labor no longer plays a significant role in the material process of production.¹¹ In the Autonomist account, on the other hand, this antagonistic movement between value and material wealth is elided in the opposition between measure and immeasurability, that is, between physical labor, which is subject to quantification, and an immaterial labor that is supposed to exceed every standard of measure. In Negri and Hardt’s terms, the displacement of direct human labor by the general intellect “negates every possibility of measure, even monetary measure” (82). As a result, “the value of labor-power is today … s-misurato (immeasurable and immense) … [,]outside of measure but at the same time beyond measure” (Negri and Hardt 82).¹²

Whereas for Marx, then, the application of the general intellect in the production of material wealth invalidates the creation of value measured according to labor time, for Hardt and Negri, the general intellect constitutes an immeasurable source of value creation, of value without measure, exchange value without equivalence. Thus, a crisis of value, resulting from the obsolescence of labor as the measure of exchange value, is reduced in the Autonomist reading to a “crisis of quantification,” resulting from the rise of immeasurable forms of immaterial work that remain productive of value.

In the Autonomist interpretation of Marx, this argument is attributed to the “Fragment” itself: Because Marx’s critique of temporal control presupposed spatialized time expropriated from physical labor, Marx believed that the crisis of measure would lead to the abolition of capital. However, contrary to this prediction (incorrectly attributed to Marx), the displacement of material labor did not lead to a “hotbed of crisis” (Virno 101). The immeasurability of immaterial labor did not create the conditions for the demise of capitalism, but instead, “has given rise to new and stable forms of power” (Virno 101). With the development of post-Fordist production, activities associated with non-laboring time – which, for the Autonomists, include not only science and technical knowledge, but also language, cognition, and affect – are subsumed as a new a source of surplus value for capital (Berardi, The Soul 33). In the social factory, there is no longer any “well defined threshold separating labor time from non-labor time” (Virno 103). The “qualitative difference between labor time and non-labor time” is completely collapsed (Virno 102), with the result that the exploitation of value, which was once only imposed on the labor performed in the factory during the working day, is extended to linguistic performance and other immaterial forms of activity that occur outside of the workplace: “Capital,” as Berardi explains, “must be absolutely free to expand in every corner of the world to find the fragment of human time available to be exploited” (Precarious Rhapsody 33). In that sense, “the post-Ford era is the full factual realization of the tendency described by Marx without, however, any emancipating consequences” (Virno 100). Thus, the “free time” that Marx mistook as a condition for the abolition of capital (Marx, Grundrisse 708) is subsumed in a new stage of production in which the “time of production is the time of life” (Negri, Time for Revolution 44). According to Berardi, therefore:

In the classical mode of industrial production … rule was based … on the possibility of determining the value of goods on the basis of socially necessary working time. But in [post-Fordist production] based on exploitation of fluid info-work, there no longer exists any deterministic relations between work and value (After the Future 92).¹³

This account of post-Fordist production is based upon a misreading of the concept of socially necessary labor time, one in which the latter is identified with the “spatial boundaries” of the working day. Marx’s critique of temporal domination is thereby reduced to an analysis of the exploitation of quantified time through the use of time discipline applied in the factory during the “dominant temporality” of the “normalizing day.”¹⁴ The alleged historical limitations in Marx’s approach – based on a nineteenth-century capitalism still largely confined to the production of material goods measured in spatialized units of time – can then be transcended, purportedly, by simply removing the “fiction” that supposedly separates labor from non-labor time, socially necessary labor time and free time, quantitative and qualitative time (Hardt and Negri, Empire 401-402).

For Marx, however, socially necessary labor time is not identified with the quantified time of production applied in the factory. Rather, it refers to a socially determined temporal norm that imposes an abstract compulsion upon the technical process of production. (“[S]ocially necessary [labor time] … appears … to be enforced from outside by the action of competition. … In manufacture, on the contrary, the provision of a given quantity of the product in a given period of labour is a technical law of the process of production itself” (Marx, Capital 379).) In Capital, this technical process is opposed to the process of valorization, insofar as a reduction in the technically necessary time of production increases the quantity of use values that can be produced in a given period of time while simultaneously decreasing the socially necessary labor time that measures the latter’s exchange value.

This “antagonistic movement” corresponds to what Marx refers to in the title of “Fragment” as the “[c]ontradiction between the foundation of bourgeois production (value as measure) and its development … [in m]achines” (Grundrisse 704). In this contradiction, a technical process of production that no longer depends upon labor (“machines”) is measured by a social abstraction of value whose quantity is determined by labor time: “Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth” (Marx, Grundrisse 706). Hence, the continual reduction of labor time due to machinery (and the application of the general intellect) is opposed to the measurement of material wealth according to value determined by labor time, a measure that Marx defines in the section title as a historically determinate feature of capitalism, as the “foundation of bourgeois production” itself.

This characterization of capital – as a moving contradiction that continually reduces the labor it must always apply as a measure of material production – is entirely consistent with the antagonistic movement described in Capital between socially necessary labor time and the time technically necessary for the production of material wealth. Contrary to the Autonomist interpretation, therefore, the “Fragment” does not represent a “hardly Marxist” departure from the analysis developed in Capital. On the contrary, the text appears to encapsulate the historical implications of the “antagonistic movement” described in the opening chapter of Capital.

These implications, moreover, would appear to be directly opposed to the Autonomist interpretation of the “Fragment.” In this interpretation, the process of valorization – as the historically determinate “foundation of bourgeois production” that machinery has rendered invalid – is affirmed in the form of an immaterial labor that purportedly constitutes an immeasurable source of value creation. This reading, however, presupposes what Marx describes – with reference to bourgeois political economy – as a conflation of valorization and material production that “eternalizes” historical relations specific to capitalism.¹⁵ But as such, the attempts by Autonomist thinkers to overcome the historical limitations of Marx’s critical theory – namely, the presupposition that only spatialized time can be exploited by capital – amounts to a periodization of post-Fordist production that is predicated upon an ahistorical conception of labor as value-creating activity. In that sense, the attempt to define a new stage of post-Fordist production in terms of an immaterial labor that collapses the “well-defined threshold between labor and non-labor time” (Virno 103) (a threshold that is purportedly maintained in Marx’s analysis) results in what the Krisis Group describes as a “moralising broadening of the concept of labor,” one that results in a “further extension of the capitalist ontology of labor.” As a consequence, “life” itself is invested with the power of producing exchange value beyond every measure, a power of “self-valorization” on the part of a multitude whose capacity for creating surplus value for capital can no longer be quantified. As Tiqqun has argued, moreover, this affirmation of the immeasurable ability of life to generate value affirms the very domination of abstract labor and value that continues to alienate individuals from their own social activity: “Each … creates value in their own way, creates value in the maximum of sections of their existence … but self-valorization of each only measures the estrangement from self that the value-system has extorted, and only sanctions the massive victory of this system” (Tiqqun 119).

As I have already mentioned, however, the distinction (or spatial boundary) between labor and non-labor time – whose disappearance defines the new “bio-political economy of time” (Sharma 17) – cannot be identified with the distinction between “free time” and “socially necessary labor time” within Marx’s analysis. In the “Fragment,” “free time” (or “disposable time”) does not refer to a qualitative time that exists outside of the quantified time applied in the factory as the measure of physical labor. Rather, free time refers to a non-laboring time that could be appropriated potentially as a result of the reduction of time technically necessary for the production of material wealth. Insofar as socially necessary labor time, however, remains the measure of the material wealth produced by this technical process, the free time that the latter potentially generates can exist only in the form of surplus labor for capital:

Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition – question of life or death – for the necessary.

… But its tendency [is] always, on the one side, to create disposable time, on the other, to convert it into surplus labour. If it succeeds too well at the first, then it suffers from surplus production, and then necessary labour is interrupted, because no surplus labour can be realized by capital (Marx, Grundrisse 706).

In this passage, the antithesis between disposable time and surplus labor time – or what Marx refers to elsewhere in the “Fragment” as the “abstract antithesis” between free time and direct labor time – corresponds to the antagonistic movement between use and exchange value that constitutes the foundation of Marx’s critique in Capital. Due to the contradictory movement of capital, the technical possibility of disposable time – a possibility that Marx identifies with that of a post-capitalist society based on the “general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum” (Grundrisse 706) – becomes the condition for crises in the creation of value. In these crises, production can no longer continue – and thus wage labor cannot be employed – because the free time created potentially by increased efficiency in the production of material wealth cannot be appropriated as surplus value by capital. Insofar as socially necessary labor time continues to serve as the measure of an industrial process of production in which labor is no longer technically necessary, the potential for free time that the latter creates must be converted into a further reduction of socially necessary labor time, thereby perpetuating the latter’s abstract compulsion on the material process of production.

This compulsion (the compulsion continually to convert the possibility of a socially general reduction of labor time into a means for achieving greater output per hour) constitutes a fundamental feature of Marx’s analysis of temporal domination in capitalism. Measured according to labor time, an increase in material wealth and disposable time results in a reduction in the exchange value of goods, leading to crises characterized paradoxically by scarcity, lack of employment, and an increased compulsion to labor: “Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or, the positing of an individual’s entire time as labour time… The most developed machinery thus forces the worker to work longer than the savage does … with the simplest, crudest tools” (Marx, Grundrisse 708-9).

In the Autonomist account of the “Fragment,” the antithetical character of disposable time – as existing potentially in capitalism only “in and because” of surplus labor time – is elided in the literal interpretation of free time and socially necessary labor time as spatially delimited segments of time. This literal interpretation appears to underlie the Autonomist strategy of “refusal of work,” proposed by thinkers like Negri during the ‘70s. In Negri’s writings from the period, temporal domination in capitalism is associated with the exploitation of labor time in the factory: “Therefore, when we spoke of the refusal to work, one should have understood a refusal to work in the factory” (qtd. in Tiqqun 130). Thus, socially necessary labor time is identified with the determinate time and place of the factory during the working day. For Marx, however, socially necessary labor time does not refer to the spatialized time imposed in the process of production, but rather to an abstract form of temporal domination (“just as properly measured” in spatialized time), one that is established in the sphere of exchange. As such, the impersonal form of compulsion that this social abstraction engenders cannot be abolished by a refusal of work at the physical point of production.

Moreover, failing to recognize the antithetical existence of free time in capitalism, the Autonomists conceived of the refusal of work as a “reclamation of surplus value” (Thoburn 136), as opposed to the appropriation of the potential for free time (a potential that, in capitalism, exists only “in and because” of surplus labor time). The refusal of work, then, is an attempt to reclaim disposable time as exchange value. As a result, the possibility described in the “Fragment” of appropriating an abundance of use values liberated from the measure of labor (which machinery has rendered invalid) is replaced by the Workerist demand for “wage increases without regard for productivity” (see Cleaver, “Work”) – that is, for an excessive appropriation from capital of a surplus value that immaterial labor purportedly generates beyond every measure: “Today, there is no longer any measure, and hence there is no longer any reasonable appropriation either. Today, we are outside measure— and that is so because we are in a state of productive surplus” (Casarino and Negri 77). Thus, in the “refusal of work,” the abolition of labor as the measure of value is reduced to the demand for a wage labor remunerated in value without measure.¹⁶ As a result, the possibility of a liberation from labor (implied in the “Fragment”) is replaced by the demand for a liberation of labor from quantification.¹⁷

For Marx, however, disposable time – as a potential that emerges from the reduction of time technically necessary for the production of material wealth in industrial capitalism – cannot be appropriated so long as labor continues to determine exchange value, regardless of whether it is measured or not. But insofar as such an appropriation of free time as value presupposes the determination of value by labor (a fetish that, in the notion of “bio-political production,” is extended to life or existence in general), the strategy would appear to preclude the possibility of eliminating the “foundation of bourgeois production” itself. In that sense, the refusal of work (based on the claim that immaterial labor produces immeasurable value) is directly opposed to the abolition of labor as the measure of value.¹⁸ From the perspective of Marx’s analysis, then, such a refusal of work – which elides the distinction between surplus value and free time – confuses a condition for the emergence of crises in capitalism with a condition for the abolition of capitalism itself.

Conclusion: The Multitude and Surplus Humanity

For Negri, of course, what emerged after the crises produced by the refusal of work in the ‘70s – or what Franco Berardi describes as the demand for “freedom from the life-time prison of the industrial factory” (Berardi, “What is the Meaning of Autonomy”) – was a new bio-political mode of production that, dissolving the distinction between free time and labor, exploits existence itself as a source of surplus value. Thus, society itself becomes a site for the control of quality time outside the industrial factory. From the perspective of Marx’s analysis, however, this new stage of production is not a bio-political economy of time, one in which the life of the multitude is incorporated as a new source of value-creating activity that can no longer be measured. Rather, it is a political economy that, by preserving a social measure of value according to labor that is no longer (technically) necessary, creates a growing “surplus humanity” that is excluded from the conditions of life because its labor is no longer productive of value.¹⁹ As Moishe Postone has described, in the political economy of contemporary capitalism, the increase in the potential for free time, “the growing superfluity of labor[,] … is expressed as the growing superfluity of people” (Postone, “Critical Theory” 10). Contrary to the Autonomist theory of post-Fordist production, contemporary capitalism is not defined by the manipulation of free time, understood as the quality time of existence separated from the quantified time of production. Rather, it is a society in which the potential for free time, and the possibility of a post-capitalist society, remains unrealizable insofar as free time continues to be appropriated as value measured according to labor.

Footnotes

This article grew out of a presentation delivered during the 2013–14 Pembroke Seminar at Brown University on the theme of socialism and post-socialism. In developing the argument for this essay, I benefited greatly from discussions with Joshua Neves. My thanks also to Alessandro Carrera at the University of Houston for his critical comments on earlier drafts of the essay, and for his generous assistance in deepening my understanding of the intellectual and political genealogy of Autonomist Marxism. Any errors or inaccuracies in my account of the latter, of course, are my own.

1. “Aristotle sees the essence of time in the nun, Hegel in the ‘now’ (jetzt). Aristotle takes the nun as oros; Hegel takes the ‘now’ as ‘boundary’ (Grenze). Aristotle understands the nun as stigme; Hegel interprets the ‘now’ as a point. That space is time.” (Heidegger 500, footnote xxx).

2. Although Negri’s account, in Empire, of the Western metaphysical tradition does not rely explicitly on Heidegger’s history of the concept of time, his critique of spatialized time in Aristotle and in Hegel is consistent with Heidegger’s. This critique, moreover (as applied, in particular, to the theory of value), is one that Negri appears to maintain throughout his writings, despite the significant changes in his assessment of the concept of time in Marx and in Heidegger. Thus, in Empire, Marx’s theory is described in apparently Heideggerian terms as belonging to the “Aristotelian tradition of measure” (401). In Insurgencies, on the other hand, Negri argues that “Marx’s metaphysics of time is much more radical than Heidegger’s” (28, 9), precisely because the Marxian notion of time as immanent to praxis and to the process of production departs from the Aristotelian tradition (which Heidegger is said to inherit) that conceives time as a transcendent form. As Negri explains, “‘temporality [in Marx] is rooted in man’s productive capacity, in the ontology of his becoming. … [Temporality here is] absolutely constitutive… [in that it] does not reveal Being but produces beings” (Negri and Boscagli 29). This verdict, however, is reversed in “Power and Ontology.” Here, the “absolutely constitutive” temporality that supposedly separates Marx’s “metaphysics of time” from Heidegger’s is attributed to Heidegger’s philosophy as well: “Heidegger … points to a conception of time as ontologically constitutive, which radically breaks the hegemony [of] … the transcendental … Time aspires to be power, it alludes to its productivity” (310–311). In ‘‘Twenty Theses on Marx,’’ a similar reversal occurs in relation to Negri’s interpretation of Marx: for Negri, the “limit of Marx’s consideration consists in his reducing the form of value to an objective measure,” even though this limitation is one that Marx already exceeds: “Certainly Marx goes beyond Marx, and one should never pretend that his discussions of labor and value are only a discourse on measure” (“Twenty Theses” 151). What remains consistent throughout these contradictory statements, of course, is the critique of spatialized time: Marx and Heidegger fall in and out of the Aristotelian tradition of measure, depending on whether they are interpreted as endorsing the concept of time as a transcendent measure of movement, or not.

3. “The industrial workers had been refusing their role in the factory and gaining freedom from capitalist domination. However, this situation drove the capitalists to invest in labour-saving technologies and also to change the technical composition of the work-process, in order to expel the well organised industrial workers and to create a new organisation of labour which could be more flexible” (Berardi, “What is the Meaning”).

4. “Even if the political has become a realm outside measure, value nonetheless remains. Even if in postmodern capitalism there is no longer a fixed scale that measures value, value nonetheless is still powerful and ubiquitous” (Hardt and Negri, Empire 356, emphasis added).

5. There is, of course, an enormous body of critical literature on the concept of immaterial labor. Much of this work – especially that informed by conventional Marxist approaches that insist upon the irreducible materiality of production and labor – has been largely confined to challenging the Autonomist claim that immaterial labor constitutes a defining feature of the contemporary capitalist economy. This claim, according to critics, is belied by the “persistence of all-too-material forms of labour,” both in the “developing world” as well as within the “postmodern economies” of Europe, the US, and Japan (Gill and Pratt 9). As Harman, Henwood (184–185), and Thompson (84–85) have noted, for instance, industrial labor, contrary to the Autonomist claim, has in fact expanded in the era of post-Fordist production, while those engaged in the industries that the Autonomists define as immaterial labor continue to constitute only a tiny minority of the global work force. The emphasis on immaterial labor, therefore, has served to obscure the prevalence of manual labor in non-Western economies: “Negri’s analysis [is] profoundly Eurocentric in its neglect of the value-creating labor of billions of people on the planet” (Caffentzis, In Letters 79).

Critics, moreover, have also called into question the very distinction between material and immaterial labor. According to Caffentzis, Hardt and Negri’s classification of reproductive work as immaterial labor implies a sexist denial of the latter’s bodily character: “[A]fter the women’s movement’s long struggle to have ‘housework,’ ‘reproductive’ work and the body be recognized as central to the analysis of capitalism, it is discouraging to have two men come along and describe the very embodied reproductive work done largely by women as ‘immaterial’!” (In Letters 199). Moreover, in response to the Autonomist insistence on the unlocalizable character of virtual networks, critics have underscored the embeddedness of Internet companies in specific locales (English-Lueck et al. 90–108, Indergaard 4, and Perrons 45–61), while emphasizing the materiality of digital labor: “[E]ven the zeros and ones that make up the Internet’s codes have to be written, and entered, by someone, somewhere” (Gill and Pratt 9). For Caffentzis, the dependence of immaterial labor on physical infrastructures and embodied experiences calls into question the category of immaterial labor itself: “[I]mmaterial labor as defined … by Hardt and Negri… —‘labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication’—does not exist. … The products of services, from stylish hair cuts to massages, are embodied material goods” (In Letters 177).

As Ben Trott has argued, however, “many of [these] criticisms have … been based on a failure to fully comprehend the tendential nature of [Hardt and Negri’s] argument. … [This] argument … is qualitative as opposed to quantitative. … In other words, their argument that immaterial labour is tending to … influence other forms of production … is in no way contradicted by the claim that there has been no overall decline in the number of people involved in industrial or … agricultural production” (218).

These statements, however, expose an important assumption underlying the debate on immaterial labor. This assumption – shared by both the Autonomists as well as those of their critics who insist on the “stubborn materiality” of labor – is that the historical trajectory of capitalist production can be adequately understood in terms of the opposition between material and immaterial labor, and therefore in terms of either a qualitative tendency toward immaterial labor or the (quantitative) persistence of physical labor in the postmodern economy. As a result of this presupposition, the debate on post-Fordist production has tended to focus on the significance of material versus immaterial labor in the production of value while failing to analyze critically the production of value itself, which Marx defines as a historically determinate feature (or differentia specifica) of both material and immaterial labor in capitalism. Thus, in a recent analysis of the crisis in 2008, Hardt argues against the “standard narrative” that the “fictional economy” of speculation and finance had lead to the falsification of “real … industrial value,” insisting that it is “not a question of real and fiction anyway [but] of measure and immeasurability. . . The value of material and tangible products corresponded to regimes of economic measure, but the value of immaterial or intangible products are not measureable” (“Falsify”). On the other hand, in the essay “Immeasurable Value?” Caffentzis contends that value and labor time remain measurable in post-Fordist production despite their supposedly immaterial character (115). What these arguments fail to call into question is the fictional character of value itself, understood as a measurable quantity underlying both the real as well as fictional economy in capitalism. In contrast to the Marxist critiques outlined above, Marx’s critical theory does not affirm the materiality of production and labor as an indispensible principle for understanding the capitalist economy. On the contrary, for Marx, as David Harvey has mentioned, capitalist production is identified with the “immaterial” concept of value: “[M]any are surprised to find that Marx’s most fundamental concept [of value] is ‘immaterial…’ given the way he is usually depicted as a materialist for whom anything immaterial would be anathema” (142). In capitalism, according to Marx, the production of value – as an immaterial and fictional (or fetishistic) quantity – becomes a function of both material and immaterial labor: both physical goods and intangible products or services become the “material repository” for the “supersensible” substance of value (Marx, “Results” 452). The tendency of capitalist production, moreover, is defined in Marx’s analysis by the “antagonistic movement” between the (immaterial) process of valorization and what Marx refers to as the “material process of production” (a category that, as Fiona Tregenna points out, also includes immaterial labor or service (11)). This contradiction is elided in the opposition between material and immaterial labor that has continued to frame much of the debate on post-Fordist production. As I argue in the final part of this essay, this elision results in a fundamental mischaracterization of the tendency of capitalist production.

6. As Derrida argues in “Ousia and Grammé,” for example, Heidegger’s critique of “intra-temporality,” or the “vulgar conception of time” as a “homogenous medium in which the movement of daily existence” (Derrida 35) occurs, is already anticipated in the writings of Aristotle and Hegel. Although Aristotle defines time as the “number” or measure of movement, he also maintains that time cannot be reduced to this measure: “There is time only in the extent to which movement has number, but time, in the rigorous sense, is neither movement nor number” (Derrida 59; emphasis added). If time, in Aristotle, is conceived on the model of space, this “spatial and linear representation,” nevertheless, “is inadequate” as a figure for time (Derrida 56). In Hegel, likewise, time is not simply conceived as a homogenous medium in which movement occurs. As Hegel explains in the Encyclopaedia, ‘it is not in time … that everything comes to be and passes away, rather time itself is the becoming’” (Derrida 44). According to Derrida, such formulations suggest “an entire Hegelian critique of intratemporality.” (Derrida 45). If time, then, for Aristotle and Hegel is the measure of motion, this measure of motion, nevertheless, cannot be equated with time (Derrida 45).

7. My reading of Marx’s commentary on Aristotle differs from one Cornelius Castoriadis famously proposed. In Capital, Marx maintains that Aristotle failed to discover the “secret of the expression of value, namely, that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent” (a secret whose “scientific discovery” is attributed to political economy), due to the existence of slavery in Greek society and the “inequality of men and of their labour powers.” These “peculiar conditions … alone prevented [Aristotle] from discovering what, ‘in truth,’ was at the bottom of this equality” (Capital 69). But insofar as this equality, Castoriadis maintains, is established on the basis of a property that (“in truth”) does not exist in the products of labor, what Aristotle fails to uncover is a secret with no scientific validity: Aristotle “did not see [abstract labor] because there was nothing to see, because the equality of human labors, as far as it ‘exists’… [is] the historical constructum of an effective pseudohomogeneity of individuals and labors … [a] creation of capitalism” (Castoriadis 688). In Marx’s criticism of Aristotle, therefore, abstract labor, as “a creation of capitalism,” is accorded a scientific status, transforming it into a “trans-historical determination, into the Substance Labor” (Castoriadis 688). For Castoriadis, this “ambiguity” in Marx’s criticism of Aristotle reveals an “antinomy … that perpetually divides the thought of Marx between the idea of a ‘historical production’ of social categories … and the idea of an ultimate ‘rationality’ of the historical process.” I would argue, however, that these positions are not mutually exclusive. Marx’s critique of political economy, as having discovered a secret property (abstract labor and value) whose existence it merely assumes, suggests that, for Marx, political economy provides a scientific account of a society based on the measurement of a “metaphysical” and historically determinate property.

8. “Marxists analyze how this qualitative conception is transformed into a quantitative notion of the law of value centered on the problem of the measure of the value of labor. The magnitude of value expresses the link between a certain commodity and the labor time necessary to produce it, which can be expressed in units of ‘simple labor’” (Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth 166).

9. “The difference between a material product and an ‘immaterial’ service consists solely of a different temporal relationship between production and consumption: the material product is first produced and subsequently consumed. … In the case of a service (whether we are talking about a taxi ride, a massage, or a theater performance), the act of production is concurrent with the act of consumption” (Heinrich 44). Virno’s reading conflates Marx’s position on immaterial labor with what Fiona Tregenna describes as the “physicalist approach of earlier classical economists” such as Smith, Malthus, and Ricardo (Tregenna 9). As Tregenna explains, this approach “equate[d] production with the production of physical goods and defined productive labour in terms of the labour involved in the production of such goods” (9). In “Results of the Direct Production Process,” Marx not only criticizes this view explicitly, he also argues that the identification of “productive labor” with the production of physical goods obscures the historical character of the category of “productive labor” itself – that is, labor that generates value – as a characteristic that both material and “non-material” labor acquires only in capitalism.

10. In Capital, Marx cites Aristotle’s definition of real wealth as “values in use:” “‘True wealth (o aleqinos ploutos) consists of such values in use’” (170).

11. According to Peter Osborne, “Negri’s rejection of Marx’s theory of value[,] … the claim that, under conditions of real subsumption, the productive power of science and technology abolishes the possibility of labour-time functioning as a measure of value,” is based upon a “misreading of the temporal grammar” of Marx’s statement in the “Fragment” that “‘labour time ceases … to be … measure’” (Osborne 21). This statement, as Osborne explains, does not imply that labor is no longer the measure of value. Rather, Marx is “describing a hypothetical, counterfactual situation” (Osborne 21). “There is a characteristic movement between an exhortatory … ‘must’ and a speculatively already achieved future present (‘ceases’, ‘has ceased’, ‘breaks down’ and ‘is stripped’)” (Osborne 21). Yet, according to Osborne, despite this “one-sided” reading – which “conflate[s] the categories of wealth and value” – Negri succeeds in identifying the “main problem with Marx’s account[,] … his assumptions about the use of disposable time within capitalism, in its antithesis to labour-time: namely, that everyone’s time is freed ‘for their own development.’ … These are now utterly untenable, nineteenth century assumptions. … Existing society has turned free or disposable time into the site for the realization of value. . . . This is the terrain of Negri’s and Virno’s concepts of … the real subsumption of the social” (Osborne 21–22). This interpretation of the concept of free time, however, is based on an equally one-sided “misreading of the temporal grammar” in Marx, one that removes the antithetical relation between free time and labor time within capitalism. Like the Autonomists, Osborne assumes that “free time” refers to non-laboring time in “existing society,” to “disposable time within capitalism.” For Marx, however, free time refers to the non-laboring time that could be appropriated potentially in a society in which labor ceases to be the measure of value. In capitalism, however, “disposable time … exist[s] in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time” (Marx, Grundrisse 708). Free time, in other words, refers to a “hypothetical, counterfactual situation” (Osborne 21), not to leisure in existing society. But as such, Marx’s “nineteenth century assumptions” about free time are not contradicted by the commodification of leisure – or the prevalence of yoga and time-management specialists – in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (see Sharma 92). Marx’s assumption is not that leisure cannot be commodified, but that, under capitalism, the reduction of labor time in the production of material wealth cannot be appropriated as disposable time, but must be converted into surplus value for capital.

12. Negri and Hardt’s interpretation of the contradiction of capital as a contradiction between the value created by labor and its measure or quantification is partly derived from Raniero Panzieri’s reading of the “Fragment.” According to Panzieri, “Marx asserts … a theory of capitalism’s ‘untenability’ at its maximum level of development, when the ‘superabundant’ productive forces enter into conflict with the system’s ‘restricted base’ and the quantitative measurement of labour becomes an obvious absurdity” (36). In the “Fragment,” however, the “restricted base” that comes into conflict with the industrial process of production is not the “quantitative measurement of labour.” Rather, the contradiction lies in the valuation of goods according to labor time despite the development of a mode of production in which the “creation of [material] wealth” has become “independent of labor” (Marx, Grundrisse 706).

13. “The Fordist industrial economy was founded on the production of objectively measurable value quantifiable by socially necessary labor time. The postindustrial economy is based on linguistic exchange, the value of simulation. This simulation becomes the decisive element in in the determination of value” (Berardi, After the Future 106).

14. See Sarah Sharma’s Autonomist critique of Marx’s analysis of socially necessary labor time as a theory of the “role of clocks and other timekeeping devices to control workers” in the factory during the working day (141).

15. In Capital, for example, Marx criticizes the “ambiguous” “analysis of the commodity in terms of ‘labour’ [that has in general been] … carried out … by all previous economists” (Marx, “Results” 401): “It is not sufficient to reduce the commodity to ‘labour’; labour must be broken down into its twofold form – on the one hand, into concrete labour in the use-values of the commodity, and on the other hand, into socially necessary labour as calculated in exchange-value. … By confusing the appropriation of the labour process by capital with the labour process itself, the economists transform the material elements of the labour process into capital. … But it is evident … that this is a very convenient method by which to demonstrate the eternal validity of the capitalist mode of production.…” (Marx, “Results” 401, emphasis added).

16. This position is one that Negri maintains in his later writings as well. For Hardt and Negri, the immeasurability of the value produced by immaterial labor serves as the basis for their demand for a social wage:

In the passage to … biopolitical production, labor power has become increasingly collective and social. It is not even possible to support the old slogan “equal pay for equal work” when labor cannot be individualized and measured. The demand for a social wage extends to the entire population the demand that all activity necessary for the production of capital be recognized with an equal compensation such that a social wage is really a guaranteed income (Hardt and Negri, Empire 403).

17.

Here, the rallying cry of communists like … Negri is not the abolition of work, but it’s “real liberation;” not the cessation of work time (which is the “essential component of life time”!), but the project of reclaiming mastery over it, in the interest of liberating suppressed “creative energies;” in short, not the end of work, but the unleashing of its enormous potential. … The goal of this new, postmodern communism (the way to package and sell our revolution today) is to celebrate subjectivities and make good on desires, even if some of them seem intractably stamped with the commodity form, and hence anathema to any substantial social transformation. (Lamarche 61)

18. My interpretation of Negri departs from readings, such as those of Harry Cleaver and Kathi Weeks, that attempt to identify the critique of labor in Marx with the “refusal of labor” proposed in the work of Autonomist writers. In his introduction to Negri’s Marx beyond Marx, Cleaver argues that “Capital … is … largely consistent with the main lines of Negri’s [interpretation of the Grundrisse]” (Cleaver, “Introduction” xxvii). Similarly, in The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks argues that, in “replacing [the] slogan… ‘the right to work’ with … ‘the refusal of work,’ the autonomists … follow in the footsteps of Marx, the Marx who, for example, insisted that freedom depended on the shortening of the working day” (Weeks 97–8). For Negri, moreover, according to Cleaver, the “refusal of work appears as a constituting praxis that produces a new mode of production, in which the capitalist relation is reversed and surplus labor is totally subordinated to working-class need.” (Cleaver, “Introduction” xxv). Contrary to Cleaver, I argue that the refusal of work cannot be equated with the abolition of labor in Marx, since the strategy (in Negri’s formulation at least) presupposes (in an immeasurable form) the determination of value according to labor that Marx identifies as the very foundation of bourgeois production. In that sense, the refusal of work is an attempt to establish a new mode of production on the same foundation as the one it seeks to abolish.

19. “In this society, those who cannot sell their labor are considered ‘superfluous’ and are discarded in the social waste dump. Those who do not work shall not eat! This cynical principle is still in effect, today more than ever, precisely because it is hopelessly obsolete. It is absurd: Although work has become superfluous, society has never been more of a labor society” (Krisis).

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