Premise

In this essay, I use two different words to express the concept of productive human activity. The first is the Latin term ‘labor’, whose etymology means ‘pain’, ‘punishment’, ‘torture’, ‘suffering’. The second one is the term ‘opus’, again from Latin, which means creative activity that unleashes the human being’s capacity for doing and thinking. The concept of ‘labor’ is assimilable to the Marxian concept of ‘abstract labour’, it is the human activity that produces ‘exchange value’ and is the pivot around which capitalistic wealth creation evolves. By contrast, the concept of ‘opus’ is assimilable to the Marxian concept of ‘concrete labour’, able to produce ‘use value’ for the immediate satisfaction of human needs and dreams. In the capitalist system of production, ‘labour’ is remunerated and codified since it is considered ‘productive’, while ‘opus’ in most cases is free (unpaid) activity, not capable of generating wealth for the economic system (surplus value). Therefore, when referring to capitalist production, only the term ‘labour’ is used. Conversely, the term ‘opus’ together with the term ‘otium’ does not imply capitalist activity. The central theme of contemporary capitalism, which, according to some scholars, can be defined as bio-cognitive capitalism,Footnote 1 is precisely the attempt to overcome this dichotomy, deconstructing the capital-labour relationship as we have known it since the industrial and French revolution of the late eighteenth century until today.

1 Theoretical Background: The Mystery of Living Labour

It is often said that the evolution of capitalism will increasingly lead to less need of labour, to the point of talking about the end of labour.Footnote 2 In the opinion of social scientists, this hypothesis would be desirable, especially if we consider labour as a survival necessity and not as a free choice. Unfortunately, we do not find ourselves in this situation. In this essay we try to argue why far from being in a context of ‘the end of labour’ we are unfortunately in a context of ‘labour without end’. For this purpose, it is necessary to go back to the beginnings of economic thought, with the Smith’s distinction between ‘contained labour’ and ‘commanded labour’ (Smith, 2014). Contained labour is the labour required to produce a commodity. If the final price of the commodity corresponded only to contained labour, there would be no difference between value and price and the theory of (contained) labour-value, as later enunciated by Ricardo, would be incontrovertibly verified. Contained labour can be quantified afterwards, when the labour activity ends. Adam Smith, who had first identified ‘productive’ labour (the one which produces goods that are exchanged on the final market) as the source of the wealth of Nations, perceives that in the exchange between capital and labour, there is the purchase of labour-power, a purchase that is formally free and therefore subject to negotiation. This exchange between capital and labour defines commanded labour, whose value is given (more or less, depending on the bargaining power) by the wage-commodities that ultimately represent their remuneration. Smith intuits that in this exchange there is a quantity of labour that exceeds that exchanged between capital and labour, which exceeds the wage paid to the worker.

As Christian Marazzi writes:

This surplus quantity of labour is no longer contained in the commodities that form the wage, but is the result of the production process along which capital commands labour: commodity A buys commodity B (labour force, which is a commodity like any other), but commodity B produces more than the value for which it was paid, and this more, this surplus value, is originated not by the quantity of labour contained in the commodity-wage, but by the quantity of labour commanded throughout the production process (Marazzi, 2016, p. 34).

Labour in human history is expressed as contained labour, labour-force that produces use value.

It is only in capitalism, in the period when, not by chance, labour activity becomes formally free, that transformation of labour takes place as source of surplus value: there is a shift from contained labour to commanded labour, from past labour, deposited in wage-commodities, to satisfy the needs of the individual (precisely use value), to labour that produces surplus value. We can call this ‘surplus’ with the Marxian term of living labour.

In other words, the worker:

realises his/her exchange value and alienates his/her use value (Marx, 1984, p. 228).

A use value (labour) that no longer belongs to him. Labour force thus creates a higher value, through the period of labour. This is what Marx calls surplus labour, i.e. availability of labour (working time) that is exclusive (free) to the capitalist. It is then his task to ensure that the surplus labour is transformed into surplus value, hence into monetary profit. It should be noted that if the cost of reproducing labour-power requires, for instance, only half a day’s labour time when the actual working time of labour-force is a whole day, one is able to create a value double that of its reproduction. Formally, this is not ‘an injustice against the seller’ (the worker) (Marx, 2013, p. 228): he is paid at his exchange value, i.e. at the value of his reproduction: it is simply the law of exchange!

In fact, without violating any law, the capitalist calculates the value of labour-force not on the basis of its output (productivity), but on the cost necessary to reproduce it, as he would do with any other commodity.

Exploitation thus lies, in Marx’s view, in capital’s ability to translate what is the act of labour into the power of value, thanks to its ‘power to dispose of an unpaid quantity of other people’s labour’ (Marx, 2013, p. 583). This discrepancy between the actual value of the labour performance and the eventual value of the commodity produced defines at the same time the degree of exploitation and alienation of labour (Fumagalli, 2015, p. 30).

In conclusion, in the exchange on the labour market, what is sold is the labour availability (labour act) which the capitalist is able to translate into labour capacity (labour-force) which he/she unilaterally appropriates through an act of force and violence. The worker, however, while alienating the exchange value of labour-force, remains the owner of his own labour capacity.

In the exchange of labour, there is thus not an actual exchange of property rights (power), but rather an exchange of availability (potency) (Fumagalli, 2015, p. 31). Herein lies the mystery of living labour.

2 Labour Force and Living Labour

Marx, unlike Smith and Ricardo, deepens the contradiction between the two forms of labour: contained labour and commanded labour. Marx’s analysis is both dynamic and dialectical. Dynamic, because the time factor is fundamental to understanding the origin of value, dialectical because the value is the outcome of a social relationship in continuous metamorphosis.

There is neither the ‘organizational-technological’ determinism of Smith (the division of labour) nor the static nature of Ricardian analysis regarding income distribution. And even today, economic science, especially in its mainstream currents, has not learnt Marx’s lesson of method, which instead constitutes its essence: political economy as a social and dynamic science, two attributes that feed off each other.

In Marx, time is historical time and labour time. When in The Capital, Marx analyses the ‘factory’, the unit of measurement of time is the working day in the factory. Here the problem of measurement comes up. But to address this problem, one must first ask: what is ‘labour’? Is it a private good or a public good? It must be remembered that in the capitalist system there are goods that do not presuppose an ownership state, either public (State) or private. We need to go beyond the legal dichotomy of private and public, which mainstream economic theory has difficulty recognising. These goods include labour, money, and knowledge. It is no coincidence that these are the three axes supporting the accumulation process of the current bio-economic and cognitive paradigm.

On the basis of these premises, labour can be considered neither a public good, since it is provided on an individual basis, nor a private good in the sense of bourgeois political economy.

Herein lies the ideology that Marx intends to unmask and that even more today, in times of bio-cognitive capitalism, needs to be even more unmasked. One can indeed argue that by definition labour is a private good (like knowledge), but one is forced to admit that it cannot be separated, in its entirety, from its owner and over which the owner can claim property rights. Since the abolition of slavery (i.e. the private ownership by an individual of the body of another individual), every individual is the owner of him/herself, his/her talent, his/her ability, and his/her willingness to work. What is then exchanged on the labour market is not labour in the traditional sense, i.e. the mere ability to work, but something else. And it is this something else that Marx questions when he distinguishes between ‘labour’ and ‘labour force’ (Ciccarelli, 2018).

The key point, introducing the concept of labour-force, is that the worker does not sell his/her labour to the capitalist, as mainstream economists or labour lawyers still believe, but rather himself/herself as a labour capacity, for a certain number of hours per day. In fact, as soon as the worker crosses the threshold of the workplace, his/her labour no longer belongs to him/her, it becomes the formal and substantial property of the capitalist. From this point of view, in the exchange of labour, Marx states, it remains hidden that the worker does not generically sell labour, but rather his or her labour-force, i.e. his or her labour capacity.

Christian Marazzi, echoing the analyses of Christophe Dejours (Dejours, 2013), defines living labour as a gap, the gap that exists between what is prescribed and what is real. In this definition, living labour ‘is defined as what the subject has to add to the prescriptions in order to be able to achieve the goals he has been assigned’ (Marazzi, 2016, p. 36).

It follows from this definition that living labour is an heterodirected activity, where prescriptions are present. These prescriptions require knowledge, which can give rise to some form of measurement. But this is not taken for granted, because it depends on the type of labour performance and how this performance relates to the machine.

The outcome of the labour process (the ‘real’) requires measurement, which is not always possible, depending on the degree of intangibility of the final output.

As is well known, this was remedied by using time as a unit of value. Thus we move, with Marx, from the valuation of labour to the valuation of labour time, ‘as if the two expressions were equivalent’ (Marazzi, 2016, p. 37). But this is not true. It is an arbitrary reasoning based on the abstraction of labour in its concreteness, as a subjective experience, which tends to be incommensurable. This (logical-mental) abstraction does not allow us to grasp the essentials of real labour, of living labour, its being a subjective activity, composed of skill, repetitiveness, suffering, creativity, intelligence, manual dexterity, that is, of all those tacit subjective resources that need to be activated to manage the gap between the prescribed and the real.

As long as we speak of labour-force within a tangible-material production (thus endowed with physical-conventional units of measurement)—the production of the factory system in Marx’s time—the abstraction of labour could be possible and labour time could serve as an invariant unit of measurement for different labour performances. However, this is only valid up to a point, since in any case the problem of transforming the values of physical commodities into prices was not completely solvable, even by resorting to a monetary theory of labour-value (Bellofiore, 1984; Lipietz, 1977).

With the transition to bio-cognitive and platform capitalism and the differentiated development of labour performance in favour of greater heterogeneity of the labour-force, the concept of abstract labour becomes more difficult to define. The labour-force, whose remuneration corresponds to the set of wage-commodities necessary for its reproduction, creates surplus value by transforming itself into living labour, which cannot be defined ‘abstractly’.

This transformation has important implications.

The first concerns the labour-value theory itself. The transformation of contained (employed) labour into living labour undermines the classical labour-value theory, according to which commodities are exchanged on the basis of the quantities of labour contained in them.

Since living labour is the engine of economic growth, it would be ‘like saying that there is no economic growth without a crisis of the labour theory of value, without a crisis of exchange between equivalents’ (Marazzi, 2016, p. 35). In this regard, Claudio Napoleoni writes:

It would be […] of the highest interest to see whether the contradiction into which the labour-value theory falls is nothing other than the consequence of the fact that this theory uncritically suffers from a real contradiction, which takes place between the market and a product distribution based on surplus. If it were possible to make this demonstration, it would appear clear that the theoretical relevance of the labour-value theory lies precisely in the contradiction to which it leads; and while it seems natural that Ricardo should try to reconcile the irreconcilable […], it seems on the other hand surprising that the same attempt was made by Marx, at least in the sense that if he had been fully consistent with the revolutionary content of his thought, he would have had to declare the contradiction openly, and would thus […] have been able […] to construct a theory of the crisis far more well-founded than he was actually able to give it (Napoleoni, 1981, p. 19).

Secondly, the distinction between abstract and concrete labour also comes into crisis. At the very moment when living labour becomes the pivot on which the contemporary process of valorization revolves and becomes incommensurable, abstract labour, insofar as it is no longer measurable and homogeneous, becomes a theoretical category that is no longer able to fully represent actual labour performance.

We will discuss this aspect in the following section. Here it suffices for us to say that the concept of living labour is a critical factor of the labour-value theory but does not disconfirm it.

As we shall see, the central question has to do with the issue of the remuneration of labour. The remuneration of labour performance is always in some way related to the value of the goods produced, even if mainstream General Economic Equilibrium theory tries to deny this statement. But today we are witnessing a new fact: the value produced by living labour is increasingly becoming unmeasurable, at least with the traditional units of measurement. We are witnessing a paradox: the more the factors of production have to do with human life and present elements of non-rivalry and intangibility (thus they are relatively abundant), the more the traditional theory of value-utility, which defines price only as an index of scarcity, loses its meaning and explanatory validity. It follows that only labour-value theory is able, today more than ever, in times of intangible and bio-cognitive accumulation, to grasp the nature and essence of the valorisation process. But at the very moment when the labour-value theory is transformed into a life-value theory (Fumagalli & Morini, 2011), the question of measurement arises. Today, the theory of value is in crisis not because labour (i.e. its exploitation), having become living labour, is no longer the source of capitalist value, but because such value is not measurable. Put in another way: the more the subsumption of labour to capital is no longer, Marxianly speaking, only real and formal but becomes vital (thus increasing the intensity of the exploitation essay) (Fumagalli, 2019), the more the determination of its value becomes aleatory and discretionary. Carlo Vercellone sums up the problem in this way:

The increase in power of the cognitive dimension of labour determines, in this sense, a double crisis of the law of value. A crisis of measurement, since cognitive work is an activity that develops over the whole of life time. The time spent and certified in the enterprise is generally only a fraction of the actual social working time. In the new capitalism, the main source of value creation is, in fact, increasingly upstream or downstream of the sphere of direct production and the universe of enterprises. In this framework, not only are the ways in which work is organised less and less prescriptive, but the sources of competitiveness increasingly depend on productive social cooperation that develops outside the company boundaries. The result is also that profit, like rent, increasingly rests on mechanisms of appropriation of surplus value performed from a relationship of externality of capital with respect to the organisation of production. A crisis of control, since the encounter between diffuse intellectuality and information and communication technologies makes the collective re-appropriation of labour and the means of production a plausible prospect again, potentially generating conflicts concerning the very self-determination of the organisation of labour and the social aims of production. Thus, in many productive activities, the Taylorist model of job prescription gives way to that of subjectivity prescription. At the same time, as in the production of value, control over labour is increasingly moving downstream and upstream of the act of production itself, making total control over the time and behaviour of wage earners the central issue at stake. It takes the form of the multiplication of a whole panoply of instruments for evaluating the subjectivity of the worker and his conformity to the values of the company, often inducing what in psychology are called paradoxical injunctions (Vercellone, 2013).

In conclusion, the measurement crisis of the labour theory of value occurs precisely when it remains the only one able to explain the origin of exchange value. This apparent paradox stems from the fact that in bio-cognitive and platform capitalism, the inputs that underpin production activity and define the productive commons—knowledge, relationships, and social reproduction—are not subject to relative scarcity. Consequently, the theory of value-utility, which, since the second half of the nineteenth century, has represented the alternative to the labour-value theory, is no longer valid.

Neoclassical valorisation, now dominant in neoliberal thinking, takes place outside the sphere of production: it is in fact at the moment of exchange, when supply and demand intersect, that price, the only indicator of value, is determined. Since the choices of production (supply) and consumption (demand) depend on individual subjective preferences based on the degree of utility each person attributes to a given commodity, the neo-classical theory of value-utility is a theory of individual subjectivity.Footnote 3

The labour theory of value, on the other hand, in its Ricardian formulation, taken up by Marx, is an objective theory of value, which prescinds from individual or collective subjectivity.

This is why it is measurable, once a suitable unit of measurement has been identified. We have already discussed how such a unit of measure is defined by the temporal unit, and we have also argued how this temporal measure is increasingly inadequate in bio-cognitive and platform capitalism, where production increasingly takes on bio-political and subjective forms, at a time when learning, relation and social re/production constitute its foundations. If the theory of value-utility no longer makes sense today, the theory of labour-value needs to be revised in order to formulate a subjective theory of labour-value.

Herein lies the challenge before us.

3 Some Implications of the Non-measurability of Living Labour and the Hybridisation of Abstract and Concrete Labour: Network Value and Unpaid Labour

Let us start with some stylised facts.

In European economies (Eurostat data, 2020), the manufacturing sector has been losing ground over the last twenty-five years (1992–2017). In Italy, it fell from 18.5 to 14.7% of GDP. A similar process occurred in the other two largest EU economies: Germany went from 23.5 to 20.6% and France from 15.6 to 10.2%.

In the same period, on the other hand, the share of services increased (whose added value already had a significantly higher impact on GDP than manufacturing since 1992, both in Italy, France, and Germany).

In Italy its weight on GDP rose from 60.9 to 66.3%, in Germany from 57.3 to 61.9%, in France from 63.6 to 70.2%. In the United States, the share of manufacturing is even lower and the share of services reaches almost 73% of the total GDP. According to the World Bank, in China, the weight of manufacturing is steadily declining in China’s total GDP, until 26.7% in 2019.

These data tell us that wealth production is no longer solely and exclusively based on material production, but is increasingly based̀ on elements of immateriality, i.e. on intangible ‘goods’, which are difficult to measure and quantify, and directly deriving from the use of the human beings’ faculties̀, relations, feelings and brains.

Today, the highest value-added sectors are less and less related to the production of physical goods but are linked to the production of services. But increasingly, these are advanced services for business and increasingly technological consumption: platform capitalism (Bin-Italia, 2017, 2019; Gambetta, 2018; Morozov, 2013; Srnicek, 2016; Vecchi, 2020; Zuboff, 2018).

From a technological point of view, in recent years we have witnessed an acceleration of technical progress, with particular regard to technologies that have to do with biological life (ζωη) and relational life (βιος), on the one hand, and with the processes of automation and speeding up of computation, thanks to algorithmic technologies, on the other hand.

This innovative capacity moves mainly in three directions.

The first has to do with the technologies of life, biotechnologies. Ever since the discovery at the beginning of the new millennium that there is an alphabet of life (decryption of the human genome) and then in 2012 it was discovered how to decipher and alter it (the discovery of the molecular scissors CRISPR/Cas9), we are faced with a swarm of innovations that ultimately open the field to the possibility of creating artificial living material in the laboratory. These are revolutionary discoveries with an impact similar to one of the periodic tables of the natural elements by the Russian chemist Mendeleev (1897 [1871]), which gave impetus to the development of inorganic chemistry and the possibility of creating artificial materials, without which the Taylorist paradigm would never have taken off.

At the same time, thanks to algorithmic technology and nano-technologies, the last few years have seen an exponential increase in the capacity to calculate, manage, manipulate, and organise an increasing amount of data and information in ever smaller spaces, leading to the creation of cloud and big data technologies, thanks to which platform capitalism can flourish. This dynamic has also significantly affected the labour organisation and productive and financial governance.

The third trend, on the other hand, concerns the development of hybrid human–machine technologies, today increasingly present in the semi-automated learning processes of machine learning and deep-learning technologies, capable of creating the conditions for ‘intelligent’ automation, the short-term perspective of which is mainly represented by artificial intelligence (Internet of Thing, Industry 4.0, etc.).

These three trends are synergetic and feed off each other, thus fostering the development of an innovation cluster, typical of the emergence of a new technological paradigm.

This potential new technological paradigm profoundly affects the processes of organising production and, above all, living labour. The joint use of algorithmic and computational technologies allows the creation of technological infrastructures which play the role of intermediary between supply and demand, with reference to communicative and relational services. Thus, the new model of organising intangible production that we now call a platform takes hold. We can now say that the ‘platform’ model has penetrated as an organisational mode in all strategic sectors of contemporary accumulation, not only in the area of advanced services related to symbolic, relational, advertising, design, etc. production, but also in more traditional manufacturing activities and logistics.

Platforms thus represent modes of organisation capable of putting life to value, even without necessarily going through labour intermediation. This is an organisational innovation of the same importance as the scientific organisation of labour represented by the assembly line in the Taylorist factory. The heart of the organisation lies in the function of ‘business intelligence’, capable of transforming data and information from everyday life, often freely offered as use value, into an output that is exchanged on the market (exchange value), capable of producing profit and income.Footnote 4

As far as labour is concerned, in platforms it is often invisible, performed at home, partly piecework and in any case underpaid, without any contractual form. Logistics labour does not experience better conditions. Agricultural production in many cases exploits migrant labour, often illegal and without rights, in conditions of semi-slavery.

A picture that flies in the face of the concept of ‘smart’ work, which has nothing ‘smart’ about it at all.

The situation does not change much when labour performance becomes intertwined with knowledge, expertise, and knowledge, i.e. becomes more ‘intellectual’, where relational, communication and cerebral activity become more and more co-present and important. It is this idea that fuels the illusion of ‘good work’. Such activities̀ require training, skills, and attention: the separation of mind and arms, typical of Taylorist performance, is reduced to the point of developing a combination of routines and intense active participation in the production cycle.

To the traditional division of labour by tasks is added the cognitive division of knowledge and skills, increasing the degree of subjection of the worker to the times of the production process.

This subjection is no longer imposed in a disciplinary manner by a direct command, but most̀ of the time is introjected and developed through forms of conditioning and social control. The resulting contractual individualism represents the legal institutional framework, within which the process of emulation and individual competition tends to become the guiding line of labour behaviour.

These transformations and the increasing fragmentation and heterogeneity of labour performance favour the emergence of new modes of remuneration. In addition to the traditional wage, there are, in monetary terms, withholding tax, job on commission, and remuneration in instalments. But non-monetary forms of remuneration are also spreading, linked to the symbolic nature deriving from the unfolding of that ‘economy of the promise’ (Bascetta, 2015), which, in the name of an unspecified future advantage, induces people to perform labour for free.

The phenomenon of unpaid labour is booming. We also refer to the figure of the ‘prosumer’, i.e. the user of a service provided by a technological platform who is forced to provide a series of information and data, which, after being given away for free, are used for profiling, surveillance, and advertising activities. Our daily acts, aimed at satisfying the needs of that moment (use value), boxed in an application, become the basis on which to graft the process of enhancing our own lives, for the benefit of a few (exchange value).

Our individual lives produce wealth but this wealth does not belong to us.

All this̀ takes place in the presence of an increase in the degree of income precariousness of the majority of workers. The blackmail of need, which ensured̀ that the harsh discipline of the factory was accepted in material production, continues to play, unperturbed, the historical role that underlies class division and the subordination of labour to capital, even in completely new and novel forms.

4 Final Considerations #1

Zygmut Bauman (2000) spoke of liquid society and liquid modernity. Today we should speak of a liquid economy. The classical dichotomies on which the development of the Fordist economic paradigm was based have now been liquefied.

We are not just referring to the disappearance of the separation between labour time and living time, between production and consumption, between production and reproduction, between wages and income (Fumagalli, 2007), but to the emergence of new forms of hybridisation. The first has to do with the labour-life relationship, the second with the human–machine relationship.

When life, in its immediacy, is put to value and transformed into a commodity as happens with labour-force and is thus transformed into life-force, the distinction between concrete labour, capable of producing use value, and abstract labour, which produces exchange value, loses its meaning. The Smithian distinction between productive and unproductive labour also tends to disappear. Everything becomes productive, starting with the acts of everyday life.

Herein lies the mystery of endless labour performance.

The most immediate exemplification is network value (Fumagalli, 2018b). The more the acts of everyday life are intermediated by a technological infrastructure (app), the more they are monitored and able to produce data. These data at the very moment they are provided (e.g. the request for information) are functional to the immediate satisfaction of a need and/or desire. It is concrete labour. They are therefore presented as use value. But thanks to big data technologies, the technological platform, on which these data are uploaded, transforms the data into exchange value, output to be valued in the relevant outlet markets, the outcome of an abstract labour process. This happens thanks to algorithmic technologies managed by the new managerial function defined ‘business intelligence’ (Davemport, 2014). The functions of collecting, manipulating, classifying, and selling constitute the new intangible production cycle, a new highly automated assembly line where human–machine hybridisation is able to develop synergistically.

The life cycle of Big Data Management by the following nexus: capture \(\to\) organise \(\to\) integrate \(\to\) analyse \(\to\) act.

It is worth dwelling on the two operations of ‘organising’ and ‘integrating’. These are two operations that only in recent years have been able to reach a certain degree of sophistication, thanks to the technological evolution of 2nd generation algorithms. The organisation and integration of data is the basis for the production of network value. It is the production aspect of exchange value, while ‘analysis’ and ‘action’ represent its commercialisation, i.e. its monetary realisation on the output markets.

It is in fact in these two phases that ‘platform capitalism’ begins to structure itself. After all, platforms allow a new composition of capital (not labour!) capable of managing in an increasingly automated way a process of data division according to the commercial use that can be derived from it. It is based on the more or less conscious participation of individual users, now transformed into prosumers. It is in fact the users of the various platforms, whether they are aimed at providing information to satisfy their desires or virtual spaces for communication, play and the development of relationships, who provide the raw material that is then subsumed into the productive capitalist organisation.

If the collection of ‘our’ data falls within a process of extraction (formal subsumption), their transformation into exchange value capable of generating a network value is comparable to a process of real subsumption, also characterised not only by the ‘thinking’ algorithms, but also by the click-workers’ labour-force (Casilli, 2019).

The two forms of subsumption only allow the valorization of life acts if they operate.

together. They cannot operate without each other. This is why it is appropriate to define this joint process with the term life subsumption (Fumagalli, 2019, Chap. 3).

When life is subsumed to capital, it becomes productive for capital but unproductive for the individual. Living labour is betrayed. Only the part of life that is certified as productive by the prevailing norms and the needs of capital is recognised as such and thus somehow remunerated.

The other parts of life, dedicated to otium, opus, and play, are not considered productive by the norms inherited from Fordist labour law and the labour bargaining system. This is why they are not remunerated, even though they constitute by far the main source of contemporary surplus value, as the main source of living labour.

5 Final Considerations #2

The syndemic crisis shaking Europe and the world economy is not, despite its seemingly accidental nature, an exogenous shock, but the sign of a systemic crisis of the productivist logic of contemporary capitalism and its increasing commodification of life and of the environment.

It shows the structural incompatibility of this mode of accumulation with the very conditions of the reproduction of society, whether it be the ecological balances of the planet or the devastation of the productions of the human through the human (health system, care work, education, research) that constitute the material basis of the bio-cognitive and platform capitalism. In its dramatic nature, the current crisis reveals all the misery of the present, but also the richness of the possibilities (Gorz, 1997) inherent in the historical bifurcation we are facing.

It requires us to think not only of short-term policies to counter, as a matter of urgency, the spiral that would lead from the collapse of production and incomes to that of the financial system, but also of structural reforms that could pave the way for another model of organising the economy and society. The very founding questions of political economy are thus put back on the table of democratic deliberation: what and how to produce? To satisfy what needs? On the basis of which rules of income distribution between individuals and social classes?

It is in this context that the issue of a new welfare adapted to the new valorization mechanisms of bio-cognitive platform capitalism is inscribed.

This objective has not always been considered of central interest both in the mainstream politics and also in alternative economic thought. This refractoriness limits the welfare debate to the dichotomy between the idea of a welfare in line with the neoliberal approach of workfare (seasoned, more or less, with subsidiarity) and the nostalgic defence of Keynesian state welfare.

In both cases, it is an idea of welfare that does not take into account that today we should address the two main elements that characterise the current economic phase:

  • precarity and debt as devices of social control and domination, capable of fueling the vital subsumption of labour to capital;

  • the re-appropriation (in terms of distribution and not just re-distribution) of wealth from the valued life and general intellect of individuals.

The existence of learning and network economies are the variables behind productivity gains: a productivity that increasingly comes from the exploitation of both common and public goods, resulting from the social cooperation of humankind (such as education, health, knowledge, space, social relations, etc.). It follows that, in this context, a redefinition of welfare policies should be able to respond to the following trade-off: the negative relationship between the precariousness of life and social cooperation, life itself, as a source of value. More specifically, it is necessary to remunerate social cooperation, on the one hand, and to foster forms of social production, on the other.

These two aspects form the basis of what some scholars refer to as Commonfare or welfare of the commonwealth (General Intellect, 2018). The first pillar of the commonfare proposal concerns the remuneration of social cooperation through the introduction, at the individual level, of an unconditional basic income for all those who are residents (and not only citizens) in the territory regardless of their professional and civic status. Basic income should be understood as a kind of monetary compensation (remuneration) for that living labour and productive time that are not certified by current industrial relations. It occurs at the primary level of income distribution (it is a primary income) (Fumagalli, 2016, Vercellone), therefore it cannot be considered as a welfare intervention, according to the typical logic of workfare (in a selective way) and Keynesian public welfare (in a universal way). Moreover, this measure should be accompanied by the introduction of a minimum wage, in order to avoid a substitution effect (dumping) between basic income and wages in favour of firms and to the detriment of the workers. The basic income together with the minimum wage makes possible to broaden the range of choices in the labour market, i.e. to refuse an undesirable and/or underpaid and/or precarious job and thus affect the working conditions themselves. The unconditional possibility of refusing job opens up perspectives of liberation that go far beyond the mere measure of a fair distribution. This is a first step that, however, does not solve, if only partially, the problem of the disproportionate value of living labour and the hybridization between concrete and abstract labour. In fact, the problem remains open as to what is the fair remuneration of the different vital subjectivities put to value. In this regard, we limit ourselves to observing that basic income, in addition to being unconditional (free from behavioural obligations), must be of a level such as to allow the exercise of the right of self-determination (minimum value) and compatible with the level of income of the territory (maximum value). The second pillar concerns the management of common goods. The idea of Commonfare implies, as a prerequisite, the social re-appropriation of the profits derived from the exploitation of life (i.e. the set of human activities and faculties that promote social reproduction and the cognitive processes of learning and relationships) and common goods that underpin today’s accumulation. This re-appropriation does not necessarily require that private property must become public (in the sense of ‘state’).

These two aspects—among others—point to a prospect of overcoming the productivist logic of capitalist matrix, even in its more immaterial dimension of valorization. In this context, it is possible, thanks to the growth of the ‘immaterial’ sectors, to actually think of alternative forms of production, compatible with environmental constraints, respectful of human nature, and above all aimed at valorizing the activity of creative otium and opus against today’s dictatorship/constraint of labour: a dictatorship composed of performativity, efficiency, productivism as an end in itself and capital, with the consequent destruction of social and natural ties.

In short, Commonfare is also adapted to the ecological constraints that have arisen after more than 50 years of Taylorist productivism. And this can be done along two lines. The first has to do directly with a ‘common’ management of environmental goods, which are subject to scarcity, from air, to water, to nature in general (forests, animals, seas, etc.). The second derives from the implementation of an unconditional basic income, which, in the name of the right to choose and self-determination of one’s own life, can favour the production of eco-friendly use value to the detriment of the production of exchange value that is more harmful to the environmental balance. We are not referring here to the theories of degrowth, which, today, clash with the fact that the principle of scarcity is no more operating when the dimension of life today is at the basis of the processes of accumulation and exploitation and therefore of valorization. Welfare is today the element that condenses these issues as a mode of production. Is it possible to think of an alternative model of production and life?