sgb writes:

"From Capital-Labour to Capital-Life"
Maurizio Lazzarato

Abstract

"The most important element for anyone who looks at my objects is my fundamental thesis: each human being is an artist. It is even my fundamental contribution to the history of art (…). Within each human being lies a virtual creative ability. This is not to say that everyone is a painter or a sculptor, but that there is some latent creativity within each domain of human work… each type of work has a connection to art; and art is no longer a type of activity or an isolated group, with people able to do art whilst the others have to do another type of work. …

Therefore culture and economy are one and the same thing and, within our society, the most important means of production, the most important factories that create capital are schools and universities. This is why they are in the hands of the state, and this why we have to free them." — Joseph Beuys

How to understand concepts of labour, production, cooperation and communication when capitalism is not only a mode of production but a production of worlds? To speak in these conditions about ‘production’, it is necessary to construct a radically different method than we find in political economy, economics and sociology. The question is not of the ‘end of work’ nor of ‘everything turning into work’. It is rather that we have to change the principles of valuation, the ways in which we understand the value of value. We need a new concept of ‘wealth’, a new concept of ‘production’. To create these new concepts, it is necessary to forget the philosophy of subject and that of labour, which restrain us from understanding cooperation between minds. Spirit, like intellectual or immaterial labour, has a tendency to cross the borders; it is without spatial existence and does not reduce to its manifestations. In the era of immaterial labour and cooperation between minds it is not possible to think social conflicts in terms of the friend/enemy dichotomy or in terms of the conflict between two classes, nor in terms of liberal (private/public) or socialist (individual/collective) traditions. Creation acts in another way than exclusion, competition or contradiction, the evolutionary principles of the above. How should we then translate the concept of the multitude into politics? A fertile starting point might be Gabriel Tarde’s sociology of ‘difference and repetition’, which allows us to understand that some of the key concepts of Tarde, like those of invention, imitation, memory and sympathy, might be very appropriate for explaining the mode of the cooperation of the multitude.

[Translated from the French by Valerie Fournier, Akseli Virtanen and Jussi Vähämäki. This article first appeared in 'ephemera: theory & politics in organization', Vol. 4, Iss. 3 (Aug 2004). The full-text pdf version can be downloaded here.]