As anyone who has read some of his writings know, Antonio Negri has since the late 1970s been of the opinion that the marxian labour theory of value no longer is of any use in the analysis of present day capitalism. This, he says, is due to the changes taken place in the nature of capitalism in the second half of the 20th century (the process of subsumption of the labour process and life in general under capital). Undoubtedly some changes seem to have taken place in the labour process in the recent 30 years or so, and this seems so especially with regard to the mass employment of computers throughout society. But, even though it seems pretty clear that something has happened, the form that this historical change takes in Negri’s work is in my opinion not satisfactory.

Negri casts the historical process which has lead forth to our present situation in terms of a narrative which centers in on a radical break between past and present in the realm of the economic. In the past it was f.ex. possible to sort out simple from complex labour, and as a consequence of this, the production process also actually produced value which, in a fairly unproblematic way, was possible to determine in quantitative terms. In present day on the other hand, the production process has gone through a fundamental metamorphosis: there is no longer any possibility of measuring the value produced since there, as a consequence of capitals subsumption of all of society under itself, is no unambiguous way of determining when and where the working day begins or ends, and thus it is no longer possible to determine the value produced in quantitative terms. Variants of this scheme also operates in Paolo Virno’s and Maurizio Lazzarato’s attempts at conceptualizing the “new” in the new situation (obviously their respective narratives are a bit more subtle than the one presented here, and that is also so for Negri, but I would like to argue that their conceptions all share this basic structure), and this is what one could call, following Lazzarato, the process of immaterialization of the labour process.

The concept of immaterial labour raises many questions in relation to the orthodox Marxist conception of labour and of value, and hence also of the labour theory of value. This is what Negri is occupied with (even though in an unsatisfactory way – see Eriks post “The problematic aura of immaterial labour” below). This is not the only major question in motion within the question of immaterial labour - another one which is also present in Negri, though not in any explicitly thematized way, is one of the major philosophical problems of all time: the epistemological problem of the relation between knowledge and the object of which the knowledge is knowledge.

This problem is present in immaterial labour on at least two levels. The first one is of course that of the status and character of the knowledge or mental/emotional capacities involved and produced in the immaterial aspects of a labour process. The second one on the other hand does not stem directly from the concept of immaterial labour itself, but rather from the operation by which Negri et al determines the historical change in which labour, by becoming immaterial, isn’t labour anymore. These two epistemological problems are closely connected and form something of a doublet, in this sketch though, my focus will be on the second aspect which relates to Negri’s immaterial labour/theoretical practice.

In “Value and Affect” Negri proposes a history of political economy divided into three phases: the classical, the Keynesian and the post-modern. In the first phase, Negri argues, the science of political economy could determine the value produced because there existed use values autonomous of the capital relation which could function as a measure. In the second phase on the other hand, “use value is inside the society of capital”, and as such it was impossible to conceive of any use value apart from exchange value, which then is “repelled” from the capital relation in form of the nothingness of money. In this way money functioned as a measure which was an artificial, self-projected outside to capital. In the third phase, present day that is, the use value of labour power is “situated in a non-place with respect to capital” Negri tells us. This place is neither inside, nor outside of capital, and because this place, as a non-place, doesn’t have any boundaries there is no possibility of determining an outside in relation to it, and thus it is not possible to establish any measure with respect to labour power. Here labour power takes on the character of being “affect”, which Negri following Spinoza defines as the “power to act”.

What is really at stake here for Negri is the possibility for capital to control and dominate the social ensemble of labour processes and thus control the working class. It is at this point that the relation between the science of political economy and the “real” political economy becomes obscure. Negri seems to take as his point of departure the classical science of political economy, and from that point draw conclusions about the “ontological” (understood in the naïve sense of properties inherent to the object in question) status of labour power and the “real” political economy. This seems to presuppose some uncanny correspondence between “science” and “reality”, where the science of political economy of the past could construct valid mathematical models of one or the other kind because labour power actually was inherently measurable. Of course this is no longer the case, since according to Negri the recent development of the structure of the labour process has constituted labour power ontologically (still in the naïve sense) as “affect”, and thus made labour power both un-measurable and beyond measure. This is something that present day science of political economy has to come to terms with, and this process reveals the "interested"/ideological character of this science:

It [the science of political economy] accepts the impossibility to determine any ‘objective’ (and transcendental, as in the case of ‘use-value’, and again transcendental in the case of money) measure of labour force productivity. […] If the measuring of this new productive reality is impossible, because affect is not measurable, this very context, so rich of productive subjectivity, still needs to be controlled. Political economy has become deontological science.

I find the way that the problem is put rather problematic. I have to admit that I find the terms in which it is put interesting - that is the transcendental character of both use-value and money - but the way Negri inserts them in historical narrative is more troubling. First of all it seems strange to introduce “affect” in the guise of an at the same time ontological and historical category – this seems to amount to the worst kind of vulgar historicism but it also points towards the question of in what way it is possible to separate the history of the science of political economy from the history of political economy. Since Negri in the case of “affect” refers explicitly to “reality” as opposed to “science” it should be both possible and desirable to be more precise on the character of this relation.

If one were to detach the terms in which Negri poses the problem from the type of ontological narrative that he connects them to, it might be possible to draw other conclusions about the implications of the tendency towards an immaterialization (or at least the possibility of articulating certain immaterial aspects) of the labour process in many sectors of production. The problem of immaterial labour puts into question the character of the relation between thought and extension, between thought and “corporeality”: the tendency of immaterialization points to a certain change in emphasis from the body/motor to “reason”, “understanding”, “sensitivity”, or “affectivity” (at this point we obviously have entered the first aspect of the epistemological problem). Put in another way, it seems problematic to conceive of labour power in terms of a positive “some-thing” (etwas). At a first glance it might seem paradoxical, but if it is possible to imagine something like the far end of the scale of immaterialization where the labour process would be pure thought or pure sensitivity or relationship, this “unreal” reality actually tells us more about the relationship between science and reality than does reality itself. This is so because in the confrontation with this “unreal” reality, another problem appears. In a certain sense this new problem has always been present, although in an absent way. The confrontation with the “unreal” reality of immaterial labour reveals not so much a new ontological status of labour power as the type of fetish that surrounds the concept of labour and labour power. As it is not possible to conceive the reality of immaterial labour in terms of an unproblematic givenness, measuring it using only common sense becomes troublesome or even impossible. This does not mean that the properties inherent to labour power has changed and due to this measuring is not possible any more – rather it means that the properties inherent to labour power (which certainly have changed) never were inherently possible to measure in the first place.

This tells us three things: I.) that the labour theory of value’s law of value never was grounded in an measure outside of capital in an ontological way; II.) to look for the possibility of measuring and the establishment of a measure not in labour power or the “immediate production process” as such, but rather on the level of social relations; III.)  that it is more obvious than ever that the relation between science and “reality” needs to be dealt with in terms of effectivity rather than reflection (distorted or otherwise).