The recent fuss about guaranteed income – presented at the conference on immaterial labour in Cambridge as a possible new Keynesian deal – suggests, if nothing else, something of what is at stake in the discussion of the validity of the labour theory of value in its classical Marxian formulation. To what extent would capital, given the impossibility of measuring labour, welcome such a demand through the state, and to what extent would such a severed connection between wage and measurable labour time presuppose massive force? The contribution of Emma Dowling at the Cambridge conference offers a discussion of value and affective labour that I believe to be helpful for dealing with these questions. Below follows some commentaries on her "Formulating New Social Subjects? – An Inquiry Into the Realities of an Affective Worker".
In her paper Dowling addresses her own experience as a waitress at a restaurant of the more fancy kind. She stresses how her work, by management, was formulated as to "make the customer feel happy, contented and entertained", that she’d produce a dining experience. On the one hand it is required that her services be personal and personalized and on the other hand there is a programme established by management of the sequence of service and a set of techniques to measure the performance of the waitress. Dowling points to these techniques to argue, against Antonio Negri, that this sort of affective labour is not, after all, beyond measure.
"Formulating…" is interesting in that it by focusing on a particular kind of immaterial labour seeks to clarify some of the more sweeping characterisations of the valorization of immaterial labour. Having said this, however, this procedure also carries some limitations. For one I want to point to how the isolation of one individual production process makes the categories according to which this production process is not only characterised as a labour process but also a valorization process somewhat abstract. Consider, for isntance, the following formulation: "enough space was left for me to add my personal touches to my table performance, because it was understood that we shouldn’t all be completely the same and that further value (and thus competitive advantage for the company) would be added to the product by granting us the scope to let our own personalities shape our engagement with the guest." I do not doubt that this is correct (though I might have some issues with the "added"-metaphor). But there is nothing here to say why we could not simply use the words price and profit instead of value and surplus-value. There is a difference between saying that a personal service makes it possible for a restaurant to charge a higher price and to say that this personal service increases value, but it is not possible to address this difference within the scope of an individual production process. So far as Dowling writes within the problematic of Hardt and Negri, this is an objection that is quite unfair, I know. But I want to raise this issue here because I experience it to be something not dealt with in a lot of discussions of immaterial labour. If I (or an advertisement company), for instance, convinces someone that one sort of shoe rather than another is smart, or some such, and hence to buy that sort of shoe rather than the other (or whatever other commodity he or she would otherwise have bought), to what extent is this to add to the so called "cultural content" of the commodity, to define tastes, consumer norms and all that; and to what extent is it to shift demand from one commodity to another commodity, so that one company increases its profits only to the extent that the profit of another company decreases? I believe this is a question that needs to be answered in order to develop an adequate concept of how personal charm, the soul of the worker, or what have you, could be not only a prerequisite for profit but also constitutive of value, and hence exploited. It seems to me that the distinction between the preconditions for the individual company’s increased profits and the precondition for accumulation of total social capital is often nivellated in the discussion of immaterial labour.
Private Labour
Anyway… even if Dowling for the most part is preoccupied with the level of the individual labour process, she does cover the question of social form. And in particular I think she has noteworthy things to say about the category of private labour. Antonio Negri has made much of the passage in the Grundrisse known as the fragment on machines where Marx writes about the subsumption of the means of production, where they turn from instrument-form to machine-form, which implies that the "cornerstone" of production turns from the "direct" labour of the individual worker to some sort of "mediated"/social labour. Negri argues that so far as the classical formulation of the labour theory of value implies that the mediation of different kinds of labour within a division of labour falls outside them, in exchange, so that they are "private" in their individuality and only becomes social as equalized in exchange – i.e. as abstract labour – this shifting of "cornerstone" implies serious trouble. With the cessation of the instrument-form (and the "direct" labour it implies), we have labour that is immediately social. (See, for instance, page 20 in Books For Burning. The same argument could also be found on page 222 in "General Economy: The Entrance of Multitude into Production" by Akseli Virtanen).
There is nothing, though, in Marx’ formulations that excludes an external mediation in exchange between different systems of machineries, something that would suggest some limits to the sociality that the labour of the worker "standing aside" so immediately coincides with. If the "machinery" we are speaking about is common knowledge and all that, this, however, becomes a less important objection. And it is precisely here that Dowling makes a point:
Of course any type of affective work by definition is social in nature, whereby the worker produces "forms of community" of sorts which rely heavily on the worker’s interpersonal skills that they learned in common with other people through their working and non-working lives. The fact that I was nice to my guests, engaged with them in conversation and read their every desire from their body language, personalities and conversations, did not mean that we were together creating a common "internal to labour" and "external to capital". First, the form of community that was created between guest and myself was an unequal one in which I was not simply under command to relate to other people in a way that I would anyway whether the capital relation existed or not, but one in which precisely because of the capital relation, I had to behave towards my guests in a particular way, namely one which involved me pandering to their needs and desires so that the company could make its profit. Hence the active involvement of capital fundamentally changed the nature of my relationship with the people who where my guests. Whereas the potential for the kinds of life activity that my labour as a waitress consisted of existed prior to the capital relation I was bound up in, it was capital that gave it its particular form in the relations established in the restaurant.
So there are "forms of community" involved in the labour process, yet they are not "internal to labour". Dowling could even have pushed this point further and – bringing out a theme dear to Maurizio Lazzarato – argued that the customer, perhaps, was co-constitutive of these forms, co-constitutive of the very product of consumption. Still, from the point of view of capital the important relation is not between the waitress and the customer as co-constitutive of whatever relation emerges between the two, but between the waitress and the customer as a worker in an entirely different production process, i.e. between the waitress and the others wage (or revenue, etc.). I would argue that this distinction constitutes two sets of relations. On the level of the co-constitutive customer we could speak of the use-value of affective labour and the labour process. On the level of the paying customer we could speak of the value of affective labour and the process of valorization.
To return to the question of the prerequisites of the labour theory of value, the point is that there is a conceptual distinction between on the one hand "direct" labour and on the other hand "private" labour. The first belongs to the level of the labour process and the second belongs to the level of the process of valorization. In other words: The question of private labour is not an issue of determining a pre-social source on which the "realization" of a product is predicated. Private labour is rather a social form that cuts through the social forms of the labour process. Labour that is social through and through on the level of the labour process could still be determined as private on the level of the process of valorization. The affective worker is, in the midst of various social forms, privatised "relative" towards the "eqivalent form" of the money of the paying customer. Thus, as equalized with money (i.e. as valuable) affective labour repels itself from itself in that this value – in so far as it is "its" value – is not expressed in itself according to its social, co-operative character, but in money. Thus affective labour is differentiated in such a way as to uphold a distinction between production and circulation even though it does not result in a product lasting longer than the labour process. A decisive point here is that it is this external circulation that mediates the reproduction of the prerequisites of the repetition of the labour process at hand, i.e. new groceries, rent, cleaning and renovation of the restaurant, and so on.
I want to add here that the passage quoted from Dowling above also testifies as to how the process of valorization manifests itself in – and is consequently not entirely external to – the labour process. In stressing this distinction I do not want to regress to a pre-panzierian productivism. Yet it seems to me that the two levels can not on the other hand be entirely conflated, the labour process could not be reduced to the process of valorization, if for no other reason that the way the former manifests itself in the later – hierarchy, command, fawning – is not by itself synonymous with capital.
Simple Labour
Dowling picks up yet another issue that has been the target of some debate concerning immaterial labour and the labour theory of value. I’m thinking about simple labour as the common measure of simple and complex labour. Dowling accentuates, in her account, the question of social skills. She writes for instance:
A substantive element of the investment in me on behalf of the company was in the training of my affective skills in line with the requirements of the restaurant and the script provided, although the service provision also relied extensively on my social skills, on me "being myself" for its success.
Later on she addresses the sorts of techniques according to which the management of the restaurant tries to measure these skills. But I want to return to these techniques later and for now turn once again to Negri. In the beginning of his "Value and Affect" he formulates two reasons why the possibility of measuring labour has disappeared (or more accurately "increasingly disappears"). One has to do with finance and the state as mediating between different sectors of the economic cycle, but the other has do precisely with the question of simple labour. Negri writes that this is because:
… labour – becoming more qualified and more complex, both at the individual and the collective level – could no longer be reduced to simple quantities.
Marx had argued, very briefly, that the "qualitative" difference between simple and complex labour, when it comes to value, is reduced to a quantitative difference: a certain amount of complex labour equals a larger amount of simple labour. Complex labour is not reduced to simple labour, but to the measure of simple labour. The qualitative difference is not simply done away with (which is one reason to be somewhat careful about Marx first "physiological" characterisations of abstract labour in terms of expenditure of muscles and nerves and all that). Now, it seems to me that there is a contradiction in Negris statement that labour has become "more" qualified, and hence "more" qualitatively different. One would think that either there is a qualitative difference or there is not. To say that there has become "more" of this difference is already to imply quantity. This is, however, not what I want to address here. But it makes me, more importantly, recall something Roman Rosdolsky once wrote about Eugene von Böhm-Bawerk. In his famous criticism of Marx Böhm-Bawerk had, besides the relation between the first and the third volume of Capital, been preoccupied with Marx’ treatment of simple labour and the reduction of complex labour. Rosdolsky remarked, with some acidity, that the fact that the problem of the equalization of qualitative differences first became an issue for Böhm-Bawerk with the relation between simple and complex labour perhaps conveyed the prejudices of the educated circles concerning the exclusive character of complex labour. Adam Smith, for instance, used the words "common"/"skilled" for this distinction. Rosdolsky’s point is that the reduction of qualitative difference to quantitative difference is a moment of the equalization of concrete labour in abstract labour. It seems to me that Negri, in his argument about the more qualified labour, implies a natural equalization of un-qualified labour. But qualitative difference – i.e. division of labour – is a prerequisite for any equalization through exchange. There were never some common intrinsic quality in different un-skilled concrete labours that grounded their equalization in abstract labour. This equalization was always social (carried out by commodity exchange and implying the sort of mode of production that this exchange takes place in) and never "physical". And the proportion in which skilled labour is reduced to the measure of simple labour was always a touchy spot in marxist theory. Today there seems to be something of a consensus in the Marxist camp that the labour of education turns over with complex labour, and this is what explains the proportions in the reduction of qualitative difference to quantitative difference. I want here, in passing, also to suggest that Rudolf Hilferding might have had a point when, writing about Böhm-Bawerk, he argued that even if there were a certain arbitrariness in these quantitative proportions this would not necessarily do away with the law of value on the level of total social capital. One could, so to speak, think of an ideological determination of what counts as skills etc., without necessarily have to accept that this ideological valuation constitutes a second "source" of value next to labour. In such a case ideology, and the "demand" side, would determine quantitative proportions of value, but not increase value; a case of overdetermination rather than substance.
Virtuous Labour
Speaking of Rosdolsky there is also another point in his criticism of Böhm-Bawerk that I believe to be of importance in this discussion of affective immaterial labour. In his attempt to demonstrate that Marx argues in circles on the question of the reduction of complex labour Böhm-Bawerk had used the example of the relation between the labour of the sculptor and the stone-breaker. Rosdolsky objects to this example on the grounds that the products of the sculptor are unique and hence irreproducible objects, which falls outside Marx’ object of investigation. He suggests instead to turn back to the standard example of complex/skilled labour in classical political economy: the labour of the goldsmith.
If Marx, in Capital, treats the subject of simple/complex labour very briefly in explicit terms, the subject of the unique/reproducible commodities is treated even more so. It is just stated on two places in the third volume of Capital that he does not address the issue of the price of antiquities and art and so on. This might have been self-evident from the point in the first volume when he starts to write about reproduction and accumulation. Still, though, the distinction between what is skilled and what is unique is not always obvious, and it raises the question if the social skills of the affective worker is closer to the goldsmith or the sculptor. I would like to try to address this question by way of a detour through a discussion of a passage on productive labour in "Results of the Direct Production Process".
When Paolo Virno in "Virtuosity and Revolution" addresses what he finds to be a political character of labour in post-Fordism, he does this on the one hand by inverting Hanna Arendts argument about the subsumption of politics under production and on the other by bringing out a certain inability of Marx to handle the types of labour that do not result in a lasting product, and Virno is here above all interested in the virtuous performance. According to him, this kind of labour does not, for Marx, really fit with the definition of productive labour. In commenting the discussion of productive labour in "Results of the Direct Production Process" Virno states that this is because :
the absence of a finished work that lives on beyond the activity of performance puts modern intellectual virtuosity on a par with actions undertaken in the provision of a personal service: services that are seen as being non-productive, because in order to obtain them one spends income, not capital. The "performing artist," put down and parasitic, is thus consigned to the limbo of service work.
Virnos argument is not, in this text, that there is something in Marx’ formulation of surplus-value that would in principle exclude the virtuous performance from productive labour. The argument is rather that Marx gets confused about the issue because virtuosity traditionally "was the architrave of ethics and politics." Now, it is true that Marx hesitates about this sort of labour, but I would argue that it is in a different way and for a different reason than what Virno argues.
To begin with I want to point out that when Marx first, in "Results… ", addresses the labour bought to be consumed as a service he is addressing a class relation. The decisive distinction here is between capital and revenue, not – as Virno argues – between capital and income. He does address workers consumption of services later in the same text, but then the distinction between capital and income is not an issue since the money of workers consumption never function as capital anyway.
Secondly I want to argue that Marx, in this passage, not is particularly swayed by any distinction between poiesis and praxis, but is preoccupied with social form in a sense that is indifferent to whether there is a lasting product or not. If one considers the following, for instance, Virnos conclusion does not seem so obvious:
Milton, for example, who did Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. In contrast to this, the writer who delivers hackwork for his publisher is a productive worker. Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature. Later on he sold the product for £5 and to that extent became a dealer in a commodity. But the Leipzig literary proletarian who produces books, e.g. compendia on political economy, at the instructions of his publisher is roughly speaking a productive worker, in so far as his production is subsumed under capital and only takes place for the purpose of the latter’s valorisation. A singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker. If she sells her singing for money, she is to that extent a wage labourer or a commodity dealer. But the same singer, when engaged by an entrepreneur who has her sing in order to make money, is a productive worker, for she directly produces capital.
So much for the unproductive virtuous. Yet, though, - and this is the odd thing that Virno draws upon – he states, right after, that:
On the whole, the kinds of work which are only enjoyed as services, and yet are capable of being exploited directly in the capitalist way, even though they cannot be converted into products separable from the workers themselves and therefore existing outside them as independent commodities, only constitute infinitesimal magnitudes in comparison with the mass of products under capitalist production. They should therefore be left out of account entirely, and treated only under wage labour, under the category of wage labour which is not at the same time productive labour.
Something is troubling Marx. That virtuous performances constitutes a small portion of the mass of products in society does not really make for an argument to treat it as unproductive. It is clearly something else than the small magnitude that is making him hesitate, but its not clear what it is. I’d like to suggest – perhaps somewhat speculative, but at least as hypotheses – three possible incentives for this hesitation:
i) The lack of means of production in the virtuous labour of his examples constitutes a problem. Right before the passages quoted above Marx had just characterized capitalist relations of production as exploitation of living labour by means of dead labour. The problem is why the virtuous would accept exploitation – and not rather become a simple commodity producer – if his or her labour is not dependent upon means of production in the hands of the capitalist.
ii) Marx might also be preoccupied with the disposition of his own text. Non-productive service labour could be characterised as something in between simple commodity production and wage-labouring commodity production when it comes to its relation to the means of production and to the consumer. If it would be productive of surplus value the relation between the first and the fourth chapter of the first volume of Capital would be disturbed; Marx would loose something of the elegance of his Darstellung. This might be a base reading, but I believe there is still something further in motion here, which just might be of more crucial importance, namely:
iii) The intimate connection between the virtuous worker and his or her specific kind of virtuous labour makes the distinction between labour power and labour problematic. I am here thinking of the, in these passages by Marx, often repeated statement that what is bought in services is a specific use value of labour. This is a question of form, for sure, as his example with the singer clearly shows. But it is not only a question of form in this sense. If what is bought is not labour power but labour itself, there is no distinction between necessary labour time and surplus labour. This is the standard argument about improductive labour. So what does it have to do with virtuous labour employed by capital (and not by revenue/wage) where there, in principle, seem to be possible to make such a distinction? The point is that the distinction between necessary labour and surplus labour as well as the corresponding concept of labour power not primarily addresses the single production process and its contingent exchange, but the reproduction of capital: the repeated production and the repeated exchange. The virtuous worker can produce the value of his or her own wage (and an additional surplus value), and it is hence possible to speak of the reproduction of labour power in a formal sense. But as long as the use value of the virtuous labour is intimately tied to the virtuous person there is a limit to this reproduction that is posited by this very connection: the problem of aging and health and so on puts some limits to simple reproduction, and expanded reproduction is simply out of the question.
I believe this is a reason to not simply interpret labour power as an ontological category – dynamis – indifferent to the mode of production. The important thing to recognize is the specific character of the institutionalisation of dynamis in the capitalist mode of production. Labour power is not simply an issue of that the piano player can play piano, that this playing is predicated on the player, or something like that. As commodity, labour power is also determined on the level of circulation as a continual disruption from, and reencounter with, the prerequisites of its actualisation. When the particular encounter in exchange is measured against the profits of every other encounter, capital moves so as to maximise its profits, and consequently equalize the profitability of different labour powers. The realization of a specific use value of a specific labour power is rather contingent in relation to the necessity this movement constitutes for the particular capital. In this sense every labour power implies every other in a way that makes the "labour power"-ness of a specific labour power indifferent to the labour that is its use value. And is it not in this indifference that we encounter the substance of value – i.e. abstract labour – as it exists on the level of the production process? If so, the conceptualisation of abstract labour exclusively in terms of the "retroactive" equalization of labour through the equalization of its products would be only partially true. On the level of the singular and contingent exchange it might as well be, as Böhm-Bawerk argues, scarcity that is what is common to the commodities in exchange. But isn’t it the repetition of the encounter between worker and capital – and the way this repetition comes to imply every labour power in every other labour power – that constitutes the movement of value from contingent form of exchange to social substance? It seems to me that it is in this sense we should understand the following statement by Marx: "That worker alone is productive whose labour process = the process of the productive consumption of labour capacity – the vehicle of the labour – by capital or the capitalist."
So, if I am right in my arguments above I think one could sum up Marx position on virtuous labour as follows: There is nothing in principle, with the specific character of virtuous labour, that excludes it from the category of productive labour. But if it is to play a substantial part in accumulation on the level of total social capital the intimate connection between virtuous labour and the virtuous person has to somehow be broken. The distinction between skilled labour and unique labour (between which virtuous labour oscillates) is not to be found in intrinsic properties. It is not an issue of asking whether Marx perhaps operated with a Kantian problematic and conceptualised this distinction in terms of following rules and positing rules. In fact, this distinction is a practical one; it is a question of to what extent capital on the level of the production process has managed to establish a scheme (of the virtuous) according to which the individual worker becomes exchangeable.
Socially Necessary Labour
Returning at last to Dowling, the point I hope I made (or at least suggested) through this long detour, is that of a distinction between on the one hand the measure implied in the scheme of the virtuous production process subsumed under capital and on the other hand the measure of socially necessary labour.
Dowling writes about the practice of so called "mystery dining" where "mystery dining firms… assess how well the dining experience lives up to the standards [the restaurants] set for themselves, which are continuously assessed and improved upon." This implies secret visits after which written reports are formulated:
The written report correlated elapsed time and key moments in the sequence of service with the overall fulfilment of the service requirements, measured in percent. In a further correlation, the scores for "fulfilment" by department (reservations, kitchen, management etc) and fulfilment by key indicators (service, hospitality, attention to detail, revenue generation, food, atmosphere) were compared with former reports at the same restaurant as well as fulfilment percentage averages of other restaurants owned by the same company, shown in bar charts and correlation matrices with the respective percentage figures.
After accounting for techniques and practices such as these she draws the conclusion that:
Thus, whilst we might believe that we cannot place a value on affect in any abstract way, we can see that activities are not beyond measure when the purpose of measurement activity described is to place an objective value on the affective labour of the worker, to measure and through this determine the value produced.
Given the object of my detour, it is here I want to make an objection. It seems to me that if the techniques Dowling writes about serves the purpose of establishing a standard – or, as I wrote: scheme – according to which capital makes itself relatively independent to the unique personalities of different waitresses by controlling the way this unique personality is inscribed and function in the labour process, so as to make it exchangeable by other unique personalities, this is a measure of a given sort of labour and not labour tout court, and hence it is not the measure of value. This is quite the same as how the "time unit" of the taylorised labour process is not the same thing as socially necessary labour time. The measure of value – i.e. socially necessary labour time – is established on the market and nowhere else, and it is established as the proportions of equalization between different virtuous and non-virtuous labours and the movement of capital in between these moments of equalization. But it is as a way of handling the interrelation of measurement on the market that capital needs to establish the (perhaps arbitrary, but still functional) measurement of the scheme of virtuous labour in the virtuous labour process, and time units in the taylorised labour process. The measure of value motivates, so to speak, the measure of the scheme.
It seems to me that the formal indifference towards labour, established in the scheme of the virtuous labour process, possibly might have a political dimension in the Lukácsian/Trontian sense. At least this would be something to hope for if one in the affective dimension of present day capitalism sees more of neurosis than joy and doesn’t feel particularly moved by the concept of a (non-state) public sphere of cymbol analysts or the democracy of the interior to labour, and what not. It still needs to be worked out in what sense and under what conjunctural conditions this dimension could possibly become politically effective.
