“We attain the power to produce the good life through our power to work or through having work.” should read “(…) through having worked.”

On that paragraph, what I mean to say is that labor power qua commodity is always greater than the specific use it is put to concretely - the boss can change the work and we can do the new work because the old work did not exhaustively actualize our potential. And the total set of our capacities (which is not subject to exhaustive delineation) is always greater than the total set of capacities that make up labor power qua commodity (which is also not subject to exhaustive delineation, however). Surplus value production, the imposition of work, is a reduction of us. We’re all always already more than that, than what the boss sees us as. In this sense then - and others - the omniproductivist perspective in Negri’s recent work - we’re always productive everywhere all the time, real subsumption such that there’s no longer any outside at all - is also wrong. (It has to be if communism is to have any meaning other than an alignment of interests between us and the bosses.)

Also, on the grad student labor, I meant to say that novelty or not is a red herring but that inquiry into how our labor in the university functions now - regardless of whether it was created only a second ago or has existed as is in perpetuity - is a pressing need. Especially inquiry not only as the production of knowledge objects but as the composition of collectivities with a desire to, commitment to, and power to act. Put differently, what’s needed is inquiry that seeks to produce knowledge useful for - and at the same time to practice - the building of the new society within the shell of the old.

As for the commodification of ethics, I’m not convinced, at least not as in an epochal shift. Ethics have always been commodified (the ethics involved in raising children - and in teaching students - who then enter the labor market, in caring for loved ones battered by waged labor, in producing mechanisms like the union, the welfare state, the party, which were turned into apparatuses of management, in fighting The Good War, fighting godless Communists, Christianizing savages, fighting moral turpitude in the name of temperance and decency, eradicating disease, working hard to give your kids a better life than you had, etc etc). This does not mean that ethics is only functional to capital, of course.

I’m also unconvinced of the accounts of office work and innovation within postfordism. That’s only true of small sectors of the proletariat. The majority are quite clearly told not to think, and among the small and rather privileged sectors that are encouraged to do so anyone who has ever “thought outside the box” in a way that management has disagreed with can attest that “thinking outside the box” is simply a practice within a differently configured box. To make those changes paradigmatic of a new era looks a good deal like an attempt to produce either a politically hegemonic figure or to serve the interests of a labor aristocracy. Like the argument about ethics, and Negri’s arguments about the temporal zone of indistinction of reproduction and production, the argument on the politicization of work is based on a historical narrative that wasn’t actually the case. If one criticizes Arendt’s separation of work and politics from the beginning then the picture looks differently than Virno’s (Virno, like Negri does with other concepts, accepts the account then argues that it has become historically exhausted or overcome, a quite Hegelian maneuver).

Negri, as I read him, believes that the good life’s material instantiation will come as a result of having worked. We attain the power to produce the good life through our power to work or through having work. (Hence the insistence upon pushing through empire to the other side.) I like to read Virno and Agamben on the good life differently, such that our power to work derives from our power to produce the good life. (Hence Virno’s calling the Empire thesis a mistake and his remarks against the notion of biopolitics.) In this sense, then, the good life arrives as a result of a subtraction, a refusal to produce surplus value with power that could be producing the good life. This is in one sense old fashionedly Aristotelian, wherein virtue and vice exist upon a continuum - at one end capital as vice and at the other communism as virtue.

As for grad student labor, I don’t think teaching is a political practice. I think that’s an idea to be abandoned and which was probably never a good idea. A variant on this same idea and affective structure is what keeps a lot of NGOs going, all the ones I’ve worked in anyway. The way one earns one’s wage should not be the way one is a communist. It can’t be, as far as I’m concerned. Of course, one does have ethical needs and so on - I wouldn’t work for a “defense” contractor or union busting lawyer - but that’s a matter of how does one live with the day to day of selling one’s (self as) labor power. That’s not a matter of producing communism.

Also on the ethical wage, Leopoldina Fortunati argues somewhere that love is a form of wage for the ostensibly unwaged (or unmonetarily waged) reproductive labors traditionally done by women, functional to the exchange between women and capital mediated by men. In that sense, then, the conscience wage is also not new.

Of course, novelty or not is a non sequitur. It clearly is the case that a conscience wage exists in our industry, and in different ways in others. I met someone from Kolinko, the German group who did the Hotlines inquiry into call centers. They said one reason many people worked in call centers in Germany is because there was a lot of sex to be had, due to the office culture, the types of folks who worked there, etc. That, like a certain type of camaraderie (anywhere someone works where they love their co-workers) is a type of wage, though one that’s not or not entirely derived from - and a cost for - capital. As such it’s potentially functional for attacks on capital, but is also often actually quite functional for capital. Not least because the more one’s life is tied up in one’s job the more capital can hold it over one’s head - “losing this job is like losing a family” etc. This was my experience working as a union organizer. Many people had relocated for the job, only knew people from the job and worked too many hours to change that, and it was a big part of our sense of self for many of us (”fighting the good fight” etc). So when the boss through his weight around it not only impacted how the rent was going to be paid, but also meant it impeded our access to important relationships with each other and the workers we were organizing, and our access to the (immediate) means to be or to think of ourselves as the types of people we wanted to be. I suspect it’s the same with a lot of people in the university industry (and I suspect it’s common to employees of unions, parties, philanthropists, and governments ever since they’ve existed such that there was any kind of ethical goal allegedly being aimed at in the work).

That ethics has been commodified is surely nothing new: there is even a brand of water called “ethics,” from which a tiny fraction of the profits go to NGO run water-table research and sustainability projects (“we wanted to give consumers a way to put their politics in practice,” I think I remember reading in the NYTimes Magazine awhile back.) This is not exactly what Virno has in mind, though. Instead, this passage hints that ethics and the striving for the good life have been thoroughly subsumed and are today put to work by capitalism. Here are two examples, with a few thoughts on each:

1) Groups like MPIRG, Sierra Club, etc., for which folks go canvas neighborhoods and are paid on a commission. No wonder the perfect employees are folks in college or right out of college: idealism and the desire to “change the world” make up for shitty wages and long hours, as well as the surfeit of “community building” events (the subject of another post, I think, but suffice to say here that the socialization and friendship ties not only make up for ridiculous labor conditions but also pressure people to work harder, not give up, not quit, etc.)

2) Grad student labor: think of how for lots of folks there is a sort of cultural or ethical “wage” that augments their real wage. The thought here is that since teaching is political practice, it makes up for low wages, long hours, and relations of domination between bosses (i.e. administrators AND profs) and workers-students. I agree that teaching is political practice; that is objectively true—nevertheless, this cliché also keeps a lot of grad workers over-identifying with the bosses, working way too much, and all in all acts as a political blockage. (I’m not even sure it’s politically useful for any grad workers to say that “teaching is political practice” anymore, unless perhaps it is determined in this instance as grad student labor.)

Really, though, we should want to speak in a little broader terms, lest these two examples or instances get confused for paradigms. Today, the desired job skills are different than in the days of the “organizational man”: employees are expected to exercise the ability to modify linguistic contexts, “to think outside the box,” “interrogate the frame,” to practice autonomy and self-determination, and generally put to work a capacity of resistance and aptitude for rebellion. (In this way, I would try to ally this discussion with Virno’s suggestive phrase “the politicization of work” in Grammar of the Multitude. Anybody else find this concept useful or compelling? I’d love to hear more about this, if anyone has any thoughts.) Instead of disrupting the capitalist myth of progress, by “striving for the good life,” workers provide the creative, dynamic innovation that capital can never provide for itself: in other words, ethical action has become not only indistinguishable from but the very content of routine wage labor today. Nothing is more common than the office worker who, having lit up the conference room in passionate defense of a just and true idea, refills a coffee mug and retreats to an assigned cubicle. The inclusion of ethics within the capitalist organization of labor is precisely the response of a counter-revolution that captures and puts to work what for so long has was resistant to it. That counter-revolution goes by the name of Post-Fordism.

So the polemical link, then, becomes not only one for research, but a political insistence: obviously, capitalism can never provide us with the good life—this we know; but also, and more importantly, that it is precisely this kind of desire, this kind of labor, and this kind of capacity—to change the world—that is captured and constrained by the relations of production and domination. That the ability to change the world has always been, in the strictest sense, the Marxian definition of labor, is another thing all together.