[The first part of the Ten Thesis is here.]

"Ten Thesis on Post-Fordist Capitalism (Part II)"

Paolo Virno

6.8. Thesis 7

In Post-Fordism, the general
intellect does not coincide with fixed capital, but manifests itself
principally as a linguistic reiteration of living labor.

As was
already said on the second day of our seminar, Marx, without reserve,
equated the general intellect (that is, knowledge as principal
productive force) with fixed capital, with the "objective scientific
capacity" inherent in the system of machines. In this way he omitted
the dimension, absolutely preeminent today, in which the general
intellect presents itself as living labor. It is necessary to analyze
post-Fordist production in order to support this criticism. In
so-called "second-generation independent labor," but also in the
operational procedures of a radically reformed factory such as the
Fiat factory in Melfi, it is not difficult to recognize that the
connection between knowledge and production is not at all exhausted
within the system of machines; on the contrary, it articulates itself
in the linguistic cooperation of men and women, in their actually
acting in concert. In the Post-Fordist environment, a decisive role is
played by the infinite variety of concepts and logical schemes which
cannot ever be set within fixed capital, being inseparable from the
reiteration of a plurality of living subjects. The general intellect

includes, thus, formal and informal knowledge, imagination. ethical
propensities, mindsets, and "linguistic games." In contemporary labor
processes, there are thoughts and discourses which function as
productive "machines," without having to adopt the form of a
mechanical body or of an electronic valve.

The general
intellect becomes an attribute of living labor when the activity of
the latter consists increasingly of linguistic services. Here we touch upon the lack of foundation in Jürgen Habermas's
position. Inspired by Hegel's teachings in Jena (Habermas, Arbeit and
Interaktion), he contrasts labor with interaction, "instrumental or
`strategic' action" with "communicative action." In his judgment, the
two spheres answer to standards that are mutually incommensurable:
labor comes straight from the logic of means/ends, linguistic
interaction rests upon exchange, upon reciprocal recognition, upon the
sharing of an identical ethos. Today, however, wage labor (employed,
surplus-value producing labor) is interaction. The labor process is no
longer taciturn, but loquacious. "Communicative action" no longer
holds its privileged, even exclusive, place within ethicalcultural
relations or within politics, no longer lies outside the sphere of the
material reproduction of life. To the contrary, the dialogical word is
seated at the very heart of capitalistic production. In short: to
understand fully the rules of post-Fordist labor, it is necessary to
turn more and more to Saussure and Wittgenstein. It is true that these
authors lost interest in the social relations of production;
nevertheless, since they reflected so deeply on linguistic experience,
they have more to teach us about the "loquacious factory" than do the
professional economists.

It has already been stated that one
part of the labor time of an individual is destined to enrich and
strengthen productive cooperation itself, the mosaic in which the
individual serves as one tessera. To put it more clearly: the task of
a worker is that of rendering better and more varied the connection
between individual labor and the services of others. It is this
reflective character of labor activity which insists that in labor the
linguistic-relational aspects assume an increasing importance; it also
insists that opportunism and idle talk become tools of great
importance. Hegel spoke of an "astuteness of labor," meaning by this
expression the capacity to further natural causality, with the aim of
utilizing its power in view of a determined goal. Accordingly, in the
realm of post-Fordism, Hegel's "astuteness" has been supplanted by
Heidegger's "idle talk."

6.9. Thesis 8

The whole of
post-Fordist labor-power, even the most unskilled, is an intellectual
labor-power, the "intellectuality of the masses."

I use the
term "intellectuality of the masses" for the whole of post-Ford era
living labor (not including certain specially qualified industries of
the tertiary sector) in that it is a depository of cognitive and
communicative skills which cannot be objectified within the system of
machines. The intellectuality of the masses is
the preeminent
form in which, today, the general intellect reveals itself (see thesis
7). I hardly need to say that I do not refer in any way to any
imaginary erudition of subordinate labor; I certainly do not think
that today's workers are experts in the fields of molecular biology or
classical philology. As was already mentioned in the preceding days,
what stands out is rather the intellect in general, the most generic
aptitudes of the mind: the faculty of language, the inclination to
learn, memory, the ability to abstract and to correlate, the
inclination toward self-reflection. The intellectuality of the masses
has nothing to do with acts of thought (books, algebraic formulas,
etc.) but with the simple faculty of thought and verbal
communication. Language (like intellect or memory) is much more
diffuse and less specialized than what has been thought. It is not the
scientists, but the simple speakers who are a good example of the
intellectuality of the masses. They have nothing to do with the new
"worker aristocracy"; rather, they stand at the opposite pole. Upon
close reflection, the intellectuality of the masses does nothing less
than prove completely true, for the first time, the Marxist definition
of laborpower already cited: "the aggregate of those mental and
physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living
personality, of a human being" (Capital,
Volume 1: 270).

With
regard to the intellectuality of the masses, it is necessary to avoid
those deadly simplifications that befall those who are always
searching for comfortable repetitions of past experiences. A way of
being that has its fulcrum in knowledge and language
cannot be
defined according to economic-productive categories. In sum, we are
not dealing here with the last link of that chain whose preceding
links are, as far as I know, the worker by trade and the assembly-line
worker. The characteristic aspects of the intellectuality of the
masses, its identity, so to speak, cannot be found in relation to
labor, but, above all, on the level of life forms, of cultural
consumption, of linguistic practices. Nevertheless, and this is the
other side of the coin, just when production is no longer in any way
the specific locus of the formation of identity, exactly at that point
does it project itself into every aspect of experience, subsuming
linguistic competencies, ethical propensities, and the nuances of
subjectivity.

The intellectuality of the masses lies at the
heart of this dialectic. Because it is difficult to describe in
economic-productive terms, for this reason exactly (and not in spite
of this reason). it is a fundamental component of today's
capitalistic accumulation, The intellectuality of the masses (another
name for the multitude) is at the center of the post-Ford economy
precisely because its mode of being completely avoids the concepts of
the political economy,

6.10. Thesis 9
The multitude throws the
"theory of proletarianization" out of the mix.

In Marxist
theoretical discussion, the comparison between "complex"
(intellectual, that is) labor and "simple" (unskilled) labor has
provoked more than a few problems. What is the unit of measurement
which permits this comparison? The prevalent answer is: the unit of
measurement coincides with "simple" labor, along with the pure waste
of psychophysical energy; "complex" labor is merely a multiple of
"simple" labor. The ratio between one and the other can be determined
by considering the different cost of education (school, varied
specializations, etc.) for the intellectual labor-power as opposed to
the unskilled labor-power. Little of this old and controversial
question interests me; here I would like, however, to capitalize on
the terminology used in its regard. I hold that the intellectuality of
the masses (see thesis 8) in its totality is "complex" labor -- but, note
carefully -- "complex" labor which is not reducible to "simple"
labor. The complexity, as well as the irreducibility, comes from the
fact that this labor-power mobilizes, in the fulfilling of its work
duties, linguistic-cognitive competencies which are generically
human. These competencies, or faculties, cause the duties of the
individual to be characterized always by a high rate of sociability
and intelligence, even though they are not all specialized duties (we
are not speaking of engineers or philologists here, but of ordinary
workers). That which is not reducible to "simple" labor is, if you
will, the cooperative quality of the concrete operations carried out
by the intellectuality of the masses.

To say that all post-Ford
era labor is complex labor, irreducible to simple labor, means also to
confirm that today the "theory of proletarianization" is completely
out of the mix. This theory had its peak of honor in signaling the
potential comparability of intellectual labor to manual
labor. Precisely for this reason, the theory ends up unsuited for
accounting for the intellectuality of the masses or, and this is the
same thing, for accounting for living labor as general intellect. The
theory of proletarianization fails when intellectual (or complex)
labor cannot be equated with a network of specialized knowledge, but
becomes one with the use of the generic linguistic-cognitive faculties
of the human animal. This is the conceptual (and practical) movement
which modifies all the terms of the question.

The lack of
proletarianization certainly does not mean that qualified workers
retain privileged niches. Instead it means that the sort of
homogeneity by subtraction which the concept of "proletariat" usually
implies does not characterize all post-Fordist labor-power, as complex
or intellectual as it may be. In other words,
the lack of
proletarianization means that post-Ford labor is multitude, not
people.

6.11. Thesis 10

Post-Fordism is the "communism of
capital."

The metamorphosis of social systems in the West,
during the 1930's, has at times been designated with an expression as
clear as it is apparently paradoxical: socialism of capital. With this
term one alludes to the determining role taken on by the State within
the economic cycle, to the end of the laissez-faire liberalist, to the
processes of centralization and planning guided by public industry, to
the politics of full employment, to the beginning of Welfare. The
capitalistic response to the October Revolution and the crisis of 1929
was the gigantic socialization (or better, nationalization) of the
means of production. To put it in the words of Marx which I cited a
little while ago, there was "an abolition of the capitalist private
industry on the basis of the capitalist system itself" (Capital,
Volume 3: 570).

The metamorphosis of social systems in the
West, during the 1980's and 1990's, can be synthesized in a more
pertinent manner with the expression: communism of capital. This means
that the capitalistic initiative orchestrates for its own
benefit precisely those material and cultural conditions which would
guarantee a calm version of realism for the potential communist. Think
of the objectives which constitute the fulcrum of such a prospect: the
abolition of that intolerable scandal, the persistence of wage labor;
the extinction of the State as an industry of coercion and as a
"monopoly of political decision-making"; the valorization of all that
which renders the life of an individual unique. Yet, in the course of
the last twenty years, an insidious and terrible interpretation of
these same objectives has been put forth. First of all, the
irreversible shrinking of socially necessary labor time has taken
place, with an increase in labor time for those on the
"inside" and the alienation of those on the "outside." Even when
squeezed by temporary workers, the entity of employed workers presents
itself as "overpopulation" or as the "industrial reserve army."
Secondly, the radical crisis, or actually the desegregation, of the
national States expresses itself as the miniature reproduction, like a
Chinese box, of the form-of-State. Thirdly. after the fall of a
"universal equivalent" capable of operating effectively, we witness a
fetishistic cult of differences -- except that these differences,
claiming a substantial surreptitious foundation. give rise to all
sorts of domineering and discriminating hierarchies.

If we can
say that Fordism incorporated, and rewrote in its own way, some
aspects of the socialist experience, then post-Fordism has
fundamentally dismissed both Keynesianism and socialism. Post-Fordism,
hinging as it does upon the general intellect and the multitude, puts
forth, in its own way, typical demands of communism (abolition of
work, dissolution of the State, etc.). Post-Fordism is the communism
of capital.

Following on the heels of the Ford era, there was
the socialist revolution in Russia (and, even if defeated, an attempt
at revolution in western Europe). It is appropriate to ask which
experience of social unrest served as the prelude to
post-Fordism. Well, I believe that during the 1960's and 1970's there
was, in the West, a defeated revolution -- the first revolution aimed not
against poverty and backwardness, but specifically against the means
of capitalistic production, thus, against wage labor. If I speak of a
defeated revolution, it is not because a lot of people were blathering
on about revolution. I am not referring to the circus of subjectivity,
but to a sober fact: for a long period of time, both in the factories
and in the lower income urban areas, in the schools as in certain
fragile state institutions, two opposing powers confronted one
another, resulting in the paralysis of political decision-making. From
this point of view -- objective, serious -- it can be maintained that in
Italy and in other Western countries there was a defeated
revolution. Post-Fordism, or the "communism of capital," is the answer
to this defeated revolution, so different from those of the
1920's. The quality of the "answer" is equal to and opposed to the
quality of the "question." I believe that the social struggles of the
1960's and 1970's expressed non-socialist demands, indeed
anti-socialist demands: radical criticism of labor; an accentuated
taste for differences, or, if you prefer, a refining of the "principle
of individuation"; no longer the desire to take possession of the
State, but the aptitude (at times violent, certainly) for defending
oneself from the State, for dissolving the bondage to the State as
such. It is not difficult to recognize communist inspiration and
orientation in the failed revolution of the 1960's and 1970's. For
this reason, post-Fordism, which constitutes a response to that
revolution, has given life to a sort of paradoxical "communism of
capital."