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Midway Terrains

Notes on the productive beehives of our metropolis, which sometimes look like anthills, or like communities of slaves, or other times like phalansteries, namely communities of people free and joyful

Companies without Factories

Hear ye, hear ye: Alcatel (a major French electronics company) and the Dutch giant Philips have announced that they will be selling all their factories and their direct production activities. They will thus become 'companies without factories'; so from now on they are referring to themselves as 'virtual enterprises'. It is obvious that behind these proclamations (and the extensive scientific literature that wraps them up in ideological frills) lies first of all a restructuring of production processes. Obviously the factories will continue to exist, Alcatel's power stations and Philips' TV sets will continue to be produced with a lot of sweat, and labour will be exploited in them, possibly even more than before - but management and shareholders will no longer be involved with the dirty stuff. Financial capital is hoping to shift the costs and risks of managing the labour force on to subordinate segments of the production process. And it is getting better and better at it. At the same time the production of sophistry around the so-called 'abolition' of work is growing, so that, confronted with the 'relocation' of production from the central enterprises (which are now transformed into finance companies), these companies are not ashamed to say that 'production has been taken out of the world of labour' and that 'the post-Fordist company is a completely virtual company'. However, when we consider even the most bizarre descriptions of this new stage of production, we must admit that they are not solely demented. In post-Fordist production, the company without factories does not content itself with relocating production, assigning sections of it to subordinate productive units, and 'outsourcing' both material and immaterial services. In addition to these and similar things, it is able to benefit from the renewal of the general conditions of the reproduction of society, whereby production and living in society have become elements of the same whole; and the resulting social productivity (generalised and without factories) is captured [captata] by the company. It is now as meaningless as it is pointlessly captious to ask whether the additional value that accrues to 'companies without factories' comes in fact from the relocation of factories or directly and without mediation from societal productivity. And, while it is true that the life of a number of institutions (of old-style capitalism and of socialist trade unionism, not to mention other corporations) may depend on the answer to this question, the fact remains that the answer is of little interest to the millions of workers who labour day and night in small factories and workplaces, between basements and living rooms, in large leftover factories and warehouses for the centralisation of intangible services, and in universities and private laboratories. The societal productivity of labour is formed in fact in a kind of metropolitan beehive, in which are counterposed or combined old sites of production and new activities that have no specific place. An extreme mobility of labour is now matched by a circulation of production space that does not lag far behind, through a meaningless urban scenario whereby now an excedence of productivity constitutes itself - a productivity beyond measure, which knots itself together productively but at the same time represents itself in a monstrous way: these are not sailors' knots, but Gordian knots that no sword can cut. Beehives, transversality, very high productivity.

What Do We Mean by 'Capturing Social Value'?

Moving around in these beehives you run the risk of a headache. We find ourselves needing to get our bearings in a very large-scale transformation, where 'companies without factories' and 'profit without labour' appear to have become a possibility. But we know - not through elaborate science but simply from common sense - that there is no value without labour and no surplus value without exploitation of labour. Hence we have to ask: What do we mean by 'capturing social value'? How do we identify that exploitation that runs through society and gives meaning to the fact of capturing value in the beehive (or rather in those parts of the postmodern productive beehive in which factories really do no longer exist)? Social value? In what sector of society, in which of its places or functions, under what conditions (once we eliminate the factory) will it succeed in capturing value? It is interesting to note that virtually the whole of the industrial economy is now asking these questions. The key issue is the valuation of the company's social capital. This social capital consists in turn of social capital proper (i.e., the productive interrelations and social relations) and of intellectual capital (i.e., the ensemble of know-how and independent knowledge, patents and research, communitarian being together and inventive mobility) that live in the enterprise - or rather live in the enterprise as a potential for gathering the value that is produced in society, both through social intelligences and through social cooperation. The 'company without factories' is like a windmill: its blades are driven by the power of social production. Thus it does not produce anything, but rather collects the production that is done elsewhere, the energy that comes from society, from outside the enterprise. The capitalists thus see exploited workers as windmills: however, value derives from the workers, not from the windmills. Now, social production, on the other hand, is a real stream of value. If we look at it as it flows into the metropolitan beehive from which I started my critical reading of the entrepreneurial capture [captazione] of social value, we shall see how different forms of extraction of value accumulate from the exploitation of workers; and at the same time we shall see how new forms of exploitation get established, almost a new primitive accumulation, in the area of computers and in the application of their qualities to the world of work. The enterprise, or rather the totality of enterprises, thus extends its command over the swarm of activities that produce value in the new digital accumulation - people who exploit themselves, thinking (rightly) that they are being creative; people who bring together workers and activities, thinking (rightly) that they are making themselves free by producing communities; people who discover new productive powers in the times they live and in attention to each moment of social communication . and a thousand other experiences! Businessmen like to call these things human capital and relational capital; but in fact this is a reversal of reality! Because we are dealing here with human labour and relational labour: labour, not capital. Then the enterprise grasps it, squeezes it tight in its logic, subsumes labour and exploitation, and calls them capital. Political control and juridical control become exclusive here. They replace social reality, its conflicts, and the productive power that flows from them.

Where Is the Measure?

It is obvious that we are dealing with exploitation: there is no creation of added value that does not involve in some way extracting from workers more than what they are paid for. But, although intellectual and, more generally, immaterial and social labour is subject to this rule (and of this there is no doubt), nevertheless in these cases the old rule no longer exists that justifies capitalist exploitation or at least gives it a semblance of reasonableness: the capitalist provision of means of production, of tools for work, and of the organisation of cooperation. None of this is in place any longer (which means that capitalism's painful mystification and proud justification of exploitation are gone, too): the exploitation of the intellectual (immaterial) social labour is, purely and simply, arbitrary. Capital does not provide and does not risk anything in this matter. It simply steals. It organises, through company structures [le strutture d'impresa], both individual and collective, dispositifs of expropriation and outright theft, or piracy, or robbery, or - increasingly - slavery and war. There is no longer any justification for exploitation. The new proletarians are tossed from one place to the next in the beehive of production, when they are not excluded and dumped to the edge, like idiots. They know this; and they show it by building waves of resistance, one after the other, in a cyclicity of behaviours that cannot but create the event - sooner or later. But it is even more interesting to note that this irrationality and senselessness of the postmodern situation of labour, the precariousness of capitalist ownership, and that fierce fragility of exploitation are also part and parcel of the self-awareness of capital - of its functionaries, in other words of the entrepreneurs. They no longer know what they are earning or why they are earning it. They have no criteria for measurement . And it is not as if they had not tried to find them: here too we find ourselves faced with endless and insubstantial...