the digital metaphysics of cognitive capitalism

The Digital Metaphysics of Cognitive Capitalism: Abandoning Dialectics,the North Atlantic Left Invents a Spontaneous Communism withinCapitalism

Teresa L. Eberta∗

and Mas’ud Zavarzadehb

aEnglish Department, State University of New York at Albany, Albany, USA; bPublic Scholar, New York,USA

In North Atlantic left theory, the law of value “dies” because the dialectics of labor time andvalue, which is the ground of Marx’s labor theory of value, is assumed to have lost itsexplanatory power in cognitive capitalism in which the time of labor is close to zero, andlabor, therefore, is seen as having no central role in producing value. Value becomesimmeasurable and exploitation is displaced by expropriation. These assumptions are basedon an undialectical understanding of the relation of cognition and labor, in which they areregarded as binary oppositions and labor is reduced purely to “doing” as opposed to“knowing.” However, knowledge is always part of labor and “intensifies” labor according toMarx. Therefore, the same concrete labor times are translated into different abstract labortimes. The abstract labor time required in immaterial production (software) is more thanzero. The law of value operates as long as capitalism exists.

Keywords: Marxism; autonomist Marxism; cognitive capitalism; dialectics; communism

“Ailment of the Dialectic” (Hardt and Negri 1994)

In its post-Hegelian, “rational form,” the dialectic, Marx writes, is:

. . . a scandal and an abomination to the bourgeoisie and its doctrinaire spokesmen, because it includesin its positive understanding of what exists a simultaneous recognition of its negation, its inevitabledestruction; because it regards every historically developed form as being in a fluid state, in motion,and therefore grasps its transient aspect as well; and because it does not let itself be impressed byanything, being in its very essence critical and revolutionary. (Marx 1990, 103)

Following Nietzsche (1979, 10), who declared the “dialectic is a symptom of decadence,”North Atlantic left theory has abandoned dialectics and moved “from contradictions to antagon-ism” (Hardt and Negri 1994, 133), and from the revolutionary class struggles of labor againstcapital to a rebellious “exodus” that valorizes labor as autonomous from capital. The slogan ofthis reformist insurgency is a Nietzschean call: “the dialectics is finished” (Hardt and Negri1994, 135). Dialectics is finished and reform (as “refusal of work”) is the new name of revolutionbecause, it is assumed, in new capitalism there is no longer any conflict “between reform andrevolution” (Hardt and Negri 2004, 289). As Gilles Deleuze puts it,

# 2014 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

∗Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

International Critical Thought, 2014Vol. 4, No. 4, 397–417, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2014.954310

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. . . the essential relation of one force to another is never conceived of as a negative element in theessence. In its relation with the other, the force which makes itself obeyed does not deny the otheror that which it is not; it affirms its own difference and enjoys this difference. (Deleuze 1983, 8–9)

Dialectics, in other words, is displaced by a Vitalist difference in “antagonisms” that representschanges in the social not as the unfolding of class struggles but as a mutation by “events” thatexceed all materialist explanations, what Foucault dismisses as “regulative mechanisms” (Foucault1977, 154). In the post-dialectical social, the self-valorizing singularities of “alternative subjectiv-ities” in “the common” are seen as asserting the subjective power of labor by an “exodus” fromcapital and a “refusal of work,” thereby undoing capital. In the anti-dialectics of the left in theNorth, to say it differently, the social is the ontological: it is immanent, im-mediate, and spontaneous“life” itself (Negri 1999a, 27). The anti-dialectics of this social Vitalism is culturally normalizedthrough the interpretive strategies of the (post)humanities by which endless textualizations,capital-friendly meanings and values are produced from texts of culture.

But dialectics, in Alexander Herzen’s famous expression, is Hegel’s “algebra of revolution”(Herzen 1982, 237). Dialectics undoes the seemingly fixed and permanent order of things throughgrasping them in their concrete inter-relations in their totality and historical moments. It brings tothe surface their self-otherness: the reality that, as Hegel puts it, they are “afflicted with opposi-tion” (Hegel 1998, 76). By disclosing that all things are “self-contradictory, self-dissolving”(Hegel 2010b, 27) and “inherently fractured” (385), dialectics puts in question the Aristotelianlaw of non-contradiction. As Sean Sayers argues, the laws of (non)contradiction have been under-mined by the development of forms of alternative, non-standard symbolic and “many-valued”logic (Sayers, n.d.).

Dialectics negates the apparent, positive, integrated identities of all things and situates thembeyond their seemingly stable, sequestered singularities in the fluid unity of their oppositions:“contradiction is the root of all movement and life; it is only in so far as something has a contra-diction within it that it moves, is possessed of instinct and activity” (Hegel 2010b, 382). The nega-tive spurs the contradiction in and between identities and, by activating their otherness, transformsthem. Dialectics pulsates with the negative; it counters the metaphysics of affirmation thatcapitalist modernity rejoices in Nietzsche’s “yes”—“opposed to the dialectical ‘no’; affirmationto dialectical negation; difference to dialectical contradiction; joy, enjoyment, to dialecticallabour; lightness, dance, to dialectical responsibilities” (Deleuze 1983, 9).

Bourgeois and proletariat, to be specific, are contradictory sides of capitalist production. Onlyin metaphysical abstraction are they seen as empirical, self-affirming, positive, separate, and“ultimate” oppositional identities—as nothing but themselves. Dialectics unfolds their perceivedseparate singularities within the history of their mediated inter-relations and trans-laces theiroppositions in their concrete but transitory interlinking union in the totality of capitalist directproduction. Their antagonistic relations to each “other” are not merely external to their positive“self” identities but through dialectical negation are constitutive of identities. Dialectics is thetransformative negation: the process in which the positive is negated and the negated is itselfnegated to produce new determinate states, which contain what has emerged (aufheben). Tosay it differently, dialectics sublates oppositional identities—being and non-being—to alter theconditions of “becoming,” their “absolute unrest” (Hegel 1998, 101). Through dialectics, inshort, the classes of bourgeois and proletariat emerge into an alter state of “classlessness”: asocial site beyond the affirmative singularities of either class and open up an unending seriesof mediated transformations. Rest is conditional, motion is absolute (Lenin 1976, 360):

[P]ure change, . . . antithesis within the antithesis itself, or contradiction. For in the difference which isan inner difference, the opposite is not merely one of two—if it were, it would simply be, without

398 T. L. Ebert and M. Zavarzadeh

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being an opposite—but it is the opposite of an opposite, or the other is itself immediately present in it. . . I put the “opposite” here, and the “other” of which it is the opposite, there; the “opposite,” then, ison one side, is in and for itself without the “other.” But just because I have the “opposite” herein andfor itself, it is the opposite of itself, or it has, in fact, the “other” immediately present in it . . . it is itselfand its opposite in one unity. (Hegel 1998, 99)

But, dialectics, as Marx (1976, 163) remarks, is not the “ritual formula affirmation, negation andnegation of negation.” It is the “movement” that begins from the contradictory conflicts in thingsand leads to their transformation from what they are to an altered being. Dialectics is the “algebraof revolution.”

The transformative task of dialectics—changing what is—is the target of the war on dialectics inradical theories of the left in the global North. Left theories always advocate social change. However,by embracing a non-dialectical idea of change, the North Atlantic left theories are becoming latterday reformisms based on antagonism without contradictions: a static antagonism between two posi-tive, fixed identities of capital and labor. Although the war on dialectics is often presented in lefttheory as a philosophical inquiry (Cohen 1978; Colletti 1975; Derrida 1994; Negri 2003), it is anideological move to replace the mediated contradictions of direct production under cognitive capit-alism with spontaneous (unmediated) antagonisms, conflicts without contradictions in reproduction(Theorie Communiste 2008), to displace exploitation by expropriation and profit by rent (Vercellone,n.d.) and, as we will argue, rewrite the forces of production into another relation, either prior or sub-sequent to the social relations of production (Althusser and Balibar 1977, 235; Zizek 1989, 51). Theforces and relations of production are, of course, separate but united in a dialectical opposition withinthe unity of totality of what Marx calls “productive activity” (Marx 1993).

By suspending dialectics and displacing contradictions (in direct production) with differenceand antagonism (without contradictions) in reproduction, left theory in the North invents a newcapitalism within capitalism—a cognitive capitalism—as a spontaneous communism thatrenders class struggle and revolution superfluous. Through a militant rhetoric, the left announcesthe “Time for Revolution” as a going beyond capitalism. But this is a revolution without dialec-tical negation; it is actually a return to the affirmation of capitalism as cognitive capitalism.Dialectics is the analytics of the transformation of history in the progress of human freedom:“the development of human powers as an end in itself” (Marx 1991, 959).

“The Dialectics Is Finished” (Hardt and Negri 1994)

But first, to take up the dogma that “the dialectic is finished” and its popularity on the left, thisdogma is the poiesis of a desire named “cognitive capitalism”—a desire to put an end to historicalmaterialism. The most rigorous and persistent suspension of dialectics in the (post)humanities inrecent years is in the writings of Antonio Negri, who refers to dialectics as “fossilized” (Negri2010). “The very form of the dialectic,” he writes, “that is, mediation as the content of dominationin its various different forms—is thus brought into question” (Negri 1996a, 220).

Dialectics, most commonly for Negri, is negation—“negative thought” as distinguished fromwhat he calls “constituent thought” (Negri 1999b, 211–16). Dialectical negation is, he argues, thework of capitalism—the negation of labor, freedom, the common, and of love, which for Negri isthe embodiment of the affirmative as an “ontological event . . . the creation of the new.” “Being,”in this narrative of the affirmative, “is constituted by love” (Hardt and Negri 2009, 181). Negri’sunderstanding of the negative in dialectics is reductive and formalist.

Dialectical negation, contrary to formalist logic, does not lead to the cancellation of the otherand thus indeterminacy but to what Hegel (1998, 51) calls “determinate negation.” In the “lesserlogic,” he argues that,

International Critical Thought 399

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[T]he dialectic has the negative as a result, the negative is equally positive, precisely as a result, forit contains within itself that from which it results, containing the latter as something it has sublated,and is not without what it has sublated. (Hegel 2010a, 131)

Following the dominant tendencies in left theory, Negri displaces dialectical contradictions—the bearer of the negative—with a mostly Lacanian notion of “antagonism” (Laclau and Mouffe2001, vii–xix, 122–27).

Negri’s general critique of dialectics is an ontological version of Derrida’s anti-metaphysics—thus Derrida’s charge that Negri writes “within the walled perimeter of a new ontological father-land” (Derrida 1999, 261). Like Derrida, he argues that dialectics imposes unity on differencesand ultimately totalizes singular antagonisms. Also like Derrida, and in line with post-Heidegger-ian left tendencies, he is opposed to binary “opposition” (e.g., labor and capital), and he movesbeyond duality and binarism through his interpretation of antagonism as an “unresolvable antag-onism” (Negri 1988, 88). Antagonism, for him, is not a (binary) “opposition” to capitalism. It isbeing “against” capitalism. It is conflict without (dialectical) contradictions (“From Contradic-tions to Antagonism” in Hardt and Negri 1994, 133–35).

Anti-dialectical antagonism, Negri maintains, is made plural in the “new epoch” ushered in bycapitalism’s “real subsumption” of society after the “event” of 1968 (Negri 1996b, 156). In the“new epoch” antagonism is plural because it is no longer limited to the factory. “Real subsump-tion” turns the entire society into a factory—what Mario Tronti (1973), in his “Social Capital”calls a “social factory.” According to Hardt and Negri,

Laboring processes were radically modified by the automation of factories and by the computerizationof society. Immediately productive labor was displaced from the central position it had occupiedduring the entire previous history of the capitalist organization of society. (Hardt and Negri 1994, 273)

Consequently, the binary “antagonism between labor and capital that had developed in the closedspaces of the shop floor now invested all forms of social interaction” (Hardt 1996, 3). However, atthe same time that he theorizes society in the “new epoch” as a social factory, Negri maintainsthat “capital,” as David Camfield (2007, 28) observes, “is unable to fully harness biopoliticalproductivity to value production.” His discourses are always situated in an in-between-nessthat avoids all class this-sidedness.

“Real subsumption” does, of course, change social relations and brings about social change.The question is whether these changes are a result of “real subsumption” itself or a relay of theoutcome of changes in production relations. What complicates this issue is that the war ondialectics is an ideological move to displace the relations of production with reproduction and,among other things, rewrite the forces of production as another mode of “social relations.”Slavoj Zizek, for example, interprets Marx’s theory of social change and history of capitalismas stating that,

[T]he formal subsumption precedes the real one; that is Capital first subsumes the process of productionas it found it (artisans, and so on), and only subsequently does it change the productive forces step bystep, shaping them in such a way as to create correspondence. (Zizek 1989, 51; emphasis in the original)

He therefore argues that “the form of the relations of production . . . drive the development ofproductive forces” (Zizek 1989, 51; emphasis in the original) and believes that to argue otherwise(as Marx does) is to subscribe to a “vulgar evolutionist dialectics” (Zizek 1989, 53). Zizek’s(2008, 339) argument is part of his grand narrative about the inner resources of capitalism andthe impossibility of ending it: “One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalismis indestructible.” The indestructibility of capitalism, according to Zizek (1989, 52), is caused by


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its insurgency against the “internal balance” that, he maintains, dialectics imposes on it. Theinstability of capitalism, in Zizek’s view, is its strength; dialectics (“internal balance”) fails to under-stand the secret of its resilience and predicts its end. In its productive restlessness, capitalism, forZizek, suspends the primacy of the forces of production and shaping of the social relations ofproduction in “accordance” to its needs, thus escaping the “internal balance”—the correspondencebetween forces and relations of production. Negri’s interpretation of the relation of the forces ofproduction and social relations of production that underlie his application of “real subsumption”to contemporary capitalism conforms to this standard anti-dialectical left view (with minor differ-ences that derive from his Spinozian model of antagonism between two powers).

When society is seen as a social factory, the lines between labor and life become blurred andantagonisms multiply because of “the gradual shift from the capitalist command over the factory. . . to the exploitation of society as a whole” (Negri 2010). Dialectics, Negri argues, reducesthese antagonisms to a single antagonism between proletariat and capital. Hardt and Negri(2000) thus replace the proletariat with the “multitude”—all who work under capitalism. Indoing so, they obliterate the difference between productive labor (which produces surplus value)and non-productive labor (which distributes surplus value). “Work” is, consequently, equatedwith “labor,” which is then equated with all daily “action.” Labor, of course, is not mere life“action.” It is a “purposive productive activity” (Marx 1987, 292). Unlike “action” which “is spon-taneous, creative, unique and cannot be imposed externally,” labor “has a beginning-middle-endtemporal structure” and can be “planned, repeated, reproduced and imposed” (Caffentzis 2005, 97).

Hardt and Negri’s main questioning of dialectics is twofold: the “dialectical relationshipbetween capital and labor,” in which they believe labor’s resistance is recuperated throughmediation by capital, and the “modern State-form” which stands on this dialectics: “The Statewas entrusted to a dialectic that could resolve every contradiction” (Hardt and Negri 1994,125). Although Negri offers different critiques of dialectics at different moments and in differenttones, these two seem to always be the underlying issues which he articulates in an anti-dialectical“affirmative” critique (Hardt and Negri 1994, 21).

Negri’s (1999b) arguments are Spinozian: the constituent power of (the subjectivity of) livinglabor provides it with an innate ontological power of resistance against the power of capital, thusenabling it to develop a “logic of separation” (Negri 1984, 130) that overcomes dialecticalmediation and gives labor autonomy from capital. Their conflicts are not seen as contradictionsbut as non-dialectical antagonisms that cannot be resolved by sublative mediation. Antagonismis the “expression” of pure subjectivity that defies the dialectical (“representation”) of totalityand logical unity (Negri 1984, 12). In “Five Theses on the Common,” Gigi Roggero sums upthe case against dialectics:

[T]he working class is the potentia that wants to exercise power; capital, on the other hand, is thepower that exploits potentia. The former is the master, the latter is the slave. But there is no dialecticalAufhebung possible between them. In fact the dialectic, which also necessitates the universal subject,dies in the partial insurgence of the workers “struggle.” (Roggero 2010, 363)

In Negri’s anti-dialectics, the subjectivity of living labor counters capital through acts of self-valorization, such as sabotage, and gains autonomy through, for instance, the “Refusal ofWork” (Negri 2005, 258–90), “exodus” (Hardt and Negri 2009, 150–64), “free shopping,”and “self-reduction of prices” (Negri 1988, 90, 119, 123).

Under capitalism, however, the autonomy of labor from capital—antagonism without contra-diction—is a left fantasy. This fantasy obscures the historical materiality of the place of workers inthe social relations of labor in which “The silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal onthe domination of the capitalist over the worker” (Marx 1990, 899). Negri’s representation of


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workers as the power of a (transhistorical) subjectivity—life force—that is autonomous fromactual material limits is a Vitalist poiesis: the making of an image of the worker as a self-standing,powerful force to whose actions capital is simply reactive. The worker in Negri’s politicalimaginary not only governs his own life, but is capable of controlling capital. “The history ofcapitalist forms is always necessarily a reactive history” (Negri 2005, 268)—reactive, that is,to the subjective acts of the desire of workers. Workers are seen as fashioning and re-fashioningcapitalism, making it an extension of their own desires. The workers’ agency, in Negri’s theory, isnot grounded in the process of production but in the spiritual spheres of “invention-power” bywhich workers affirm themselves without contradictory relations but in antagonism with capital.

We define invention-power as a capacity of the class to nourish the process of proletarian self-valorization in the most complete antagonistic independence; the capacity to found this innovativeindependence on the basis of abstract intellectual energy as a specific productive force (in an increas-ingly exclusive manner). (Negri 2005, 268; italics in the original)

The un-said of Negri’s theory is that it is the workers who are responsible for the state of theworld and its injustice, not capital—capital is always reactive to labor’s desires. Negri’s anti-capit-alism is a normalization of capitalism from the left under a new name.

Negri critiques dialectics for obliterating the workers’ subjective power and their autonomy byabsorbing the contradictions of labor and capital into what he assumes is a dialectical synthesis.

Negri’s notion of dialectical “synthesis” is rooted in his tropic reading of Grundrisse (Marx1993). In interpreting Grundrisse, Negri rejects (as “objectivism”) all textual evidence fromMarx’s writings before and after Grundrisse and disregards the arguments of Grundrisse itself(Mandel 1971; Rosdolsky 1968). Based on his affective interpretation of Marx’s text, Negriclaims that in Grundrisse, “labor is subjective power” (Negri 1984, 70); this provides theground for his meta-narrative of affirmation of a non-synthesizing and singularizing “love” asthe “composition of singularities in a common relationship” (Hardt and Negri 2009, 183). “Singu-larities,” in his writings, are a transcoding of bourgeois subjectivity into bio-politics and thepolitical reformism that it authorizes (Hardt and Negri 2009, 179–88, 376–83).

Negri, in other words, regards struggles between labor and capital not as an economic strugglebut as a power antagonism between two group subjectivities that are “unresolvable” (Negri 1984,16). The dialectic therefore is “as impotent as simple materialism to define the revolutionarymethod” (Negri 1984, 44). Although Negri’s critique of developing (dialectical) contradictionsand his translation of them into irresolvable antagonisms has a philosophical appearance, it isan economic move that ostensibly separates labor from capital but actually severs value fromlabor (time) and places exploitation outside of direct production (Hardt and Negri 2009, 137).

“The Californian Digital Revolution” and Its Strange Flirting with “Cybercommunism”

“What exclusively determines the magnitude of value of any article,” Marx (1990, 129) writes, “is. . . the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time necessary for its production.” Therelation of labor (time) and value is for Marx a dialectical relation that, through the contradictionsand mediations of the double temporalities of “necessary labor” and “surplus labor” time in “theWorking Day” (340–426), also marks the ratio of exploitation.

However, having abandoned dialectics, North Atlantic left theorists such as Negri isolate labortime from value and argue that the labor theory of value no longer explains the complexities ofcontemporary capitalism, which is, they claim, based on immaterial labor. In cognitive capitalism,the law of value “dies,” according to Negri (1984, 172), and “value” is freed from what he andMichael Hardt call the “metaphysics” of objective measuring (Hardt and Negri 2000, 353–59).


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In an ostensibly philosophical move to undo metaphysics, they actually obscure the economics ofthe accumulation of capital.

The suspension of the law of value is justified, they argue, by Marx’s Grundrisse. However,their reading of “The Fragment on Machines” (Marx 1993, 704–11) is an undialectical interpret-ation. Marx’s “general intellect” (Marx 1993, 694–711) is interpreted as “living labor” that isautonomous from “fixed capital” (Virno 2004, 106; Vercellone 2007, 18). Such a reading ofthe “general intellect” is a neo-Vitalist interpretation based on Bergson’s metaphysics. It rep-resents the social not as an effect of class struggles but as the articulation of an original lifeforce placed in a left-wing version of what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron (1996, 44–72) call a “Californian Ideology.” “Californian ideology,” is the American variety of neoliberal-ism. It proposes that techne, or what Hardt and Negri ecstatically call, the “triumph of computer-ized production” (Hardt and Negri 1994, 10), frees the individual from “the clutches of both bigbusiness and big government” (Barbrook 2007). This is because “informatization today marks anew mode of becoming human” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 289). Ultimately, Californian ideology isan apologetics for a neoliberal “deregulation of all economic activity” (Barbrook 2007). “Dereg-ulation” is, of course, what theorists of cognitive capitalism such as Hardt and Negri defend asfreedom from the metaphysics of “transcendent measure” (Hardt and Negri 2009, 38).

Thinking of “open source software” and free immaterial distributions (Moulier-Boutang 2011,69), Moulier-Boutang and other theorists of immaterial labor see “the ideology of the Californiandigital revolution” as “flirting” with “cybercommunism” (Moulier-Boutang 2011, 49) in a“desire” for “the digital transcendence of capitalism” (Barbrook 2007). Moulier-Boutang there-fore argues that:

California and the whiz-kids who have established its new businesses during the past thirty years areour modern physiocrats. Instead of sneering at their naıvete, which so irritates Europe’s posthistoricalsages, let us instead recognise that they have discovered and invented the new form of value.(Moulier-Boutang 2011, 49)

The embodiment of this “new form of value” is seen as a new capitalism within capitalism: acognitive capitalism of immaterial production, the other names of which are “cybercommunism”and what Paolo Virno (2004, 110–11) calls the “communism of capital.” (Cyber)communism isbroadly based on a utopian gift economy that puts an end to exchange value by fostering a givingwithout any reciprocation since any giving that receives a return is a re-entry into the capitalistrelations of exchange (Baudrillard 1993; Derrida 1992). Through ending exchange value bygifting (e.g., open source software), cognitive-capitalism-as-cybercommunism produces the“common” in which the distinction between private and public property disappears; propertyitself is said to cease to exist (Hardt 2010, 134–36), and wage labor is believed to come toan end.

Antonio Negri (the “cyber-Negri” in the celebratory annotations of his work by such writers asNick Dyer-Witheford [2005] in “Cyber-Negri: General Intellect and Immaterial Labor”) isperhaps the most active mythographer of the end of wage labor within capitalism itself (Negri2008, 162, 188) and the mutation of capitalism (i.e., change without revolution) into a “spon-taneous communism” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 294). In Negri’s mythologies, cognitive capitalismis a “new epoch” in human history; it is “The third period of the capitalist mode of production,after manufacture and large-scale industry” which begins precisely “in the years immediately fol-lowing 1968” (Negri 1996b, 156). Its new information technologies are, he believes, reshapingthe entire society (Hardt and Negri 2004, 109). His master-myth is that in the new era—whathe often refers to as Post-fordism—“Immediately productive labor loses its centrality in theprocess of production,” and,


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[t]he political composition of the proletariat is social, as is also the territory where it resides; it iscompletely abstract, immaterial, and intellectual, in terms of the substance of labor; it is mobileand polyvalent in terms of its form. (Negri 1996b, 156)

His narratives are myths constructing a cognitive environment in which the class interests of anew petty bourgeoisie (intellectual workers) are normalized as the forward-looking interests of allin a “new epoch.”

“The Law of Value Dies” (Negri 1984)

The law of value is the “measure” exploitation. It is assumed by Negri and other theorists ofcognitive capitalism to be specific to industrial capitalism, which reaches its final moment inFordism. In the Post-fordist labor regime, “immaterial production,” as Moulier-Boutang (2011,8) puts it, “sits at the heart of economic value.” Consequently, the labor theory of value is“blown apart” (Hardt and Negri 1994, 11), they say, by high-tech, which has increased pro-ductivity beyond the measure of time, making labor a marginal agent of wealth, and also bythe (real) subsumption of total society by capital, turning society itself into a “social factory”and blurring the line between daily “life” and “labor.” The death of the law of value in lefttheory becomes the occasion for obscuring the distinction between necessary and surplus labortime and, consequently, for displacing exploitation in direct production (economic) by expropria-tion (power politics) since capital, in cognitive capitalism, is said to have become “external to theproduction process” (Hardt and Negri 2009, 137). Cognitive capitalism is represented as a newmode of “primitive accumulation” in which the extra-economic (power) and not direct productionis considered the source of wealth (De Angelis 2001; Zizek 2010).

In theories of cognitive capitalism, the value of value, therefore, is seen as no longer deter-mined by economic relations (exploitation in labor time) but by politics (expropriation inpower relations)—the capitalist “command” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 355). In the “new era” ofcognitive capitalism, “the political” (power) “tends to entirely absorb the economic and todefine it as separate only insofar as it fixes its rules of domination” (Negri 1996b, 153).

In the wake of the death of labor theory of value and the rise of cognitive capitalism, class, as asocial place where people

. . . occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation . . . to the meansof production, by their role in the social organization of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensionsof the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it . . . (Lenin 1965, 421)

is transformed into a technical and political-subjective “class composition” (Wright 2002), andthe objective economic relation of labor and capital is displaced by an autonomous (subjective)antagonism of labor to capital. However, the relations of labor and capital are dialectical: labor isnever autonomous from capital, nor is capital independent from labor; the two are always in adialectical antagonistic relation over the social surplus. The representation of labor as an auton-omous self-valorizing subjectivity that stands against capital is an activist mask for the deep socialpassivity that the new cognitive capitalism actually institutes in the proletariat. The discursiveactivism in left theory marginalizes human agency in ending capitalism by claiming that thenew techno-ontology, what Hardt and Negri (2000, 61) call “technological metamorphoses,”acts as a transforming power that mutates capitalism beyond the mediation of history (socialism)into a “new” communism and obviates the need for revolution (Negri 1990, 166–68). Technology(“informatization”) makes history. The social in left theory is a biopolitical machine: cognitivecapitalism-as-“new”-communism is a Vitalist technological determinism.


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Cognitive-capitalism theory is a stabilization of capitalism under a different name and on newgrounds, and this is what has made it the preset explanation of the contemporary situation.Dialectical analysis of capitalism—which demonstrates the inseparability of value from labor(time) and, by marking their internal contradictions, shows the falling rate of profit and thusthe instability of the system of wage labor (Marx 1991, 317–75)—is suspended in North Atlanticleft theory. The “dialectic is shit!” Negri writes, because, he says, it brings “everything together”(Casarino and Negri 2008, 122); it is a theory of capitalism in totality. In the dogma of the NorthAtlantic left, “the whole is the false” (Adorno 1974, 50). However, dialectically, “a determinate, afinite being, is one that refers to another; it is a content that stands in the relation of necessity toanother content, to the whole world” (Hegel 2010b, 62).

The death of the law of value, the exhaustion of dialectics and the end of industrial capitalismin North Atlantic left mythologies mean that we are in a “new era” with a new reality, and there-fore “We need new theories for the new reality” (Hardt and Negri 2004, 140). The “new” theory isgrounded in an imaginary—that “What Marx saw as future is our era” (Hardt and Negri 2000,364). The future, they believe, is already here, and thus there is no need for class struggle to trans-form capitalism to communism. Communism, which is “the most radical rupture with traditionalproperty relations” (Marx and Engels 1976, 504), is itself reformed so that it is no longer an econ-omic but a political regime: “the epoch of wages is finished and . . . the struggle has moved fromthe level of a fight between capital and labor regarding the wage, to a fight between the multitudeand the State” (Negri 2008, 162). “New” communism is a left capitalism.

Labor Time Matters

Proof of the deliverance of value from labor and its “immeasurability”—which marks the trans-formation of capitalism to a cognitive stage in left theories—lies in the condition of its immaterialproduction. Carlo Vercellone writes:

Where the time of labour directly dedicated to the production of commodities intensive in knowledgebecomes insignificant; or, to put it in the language of neoclassical economic theory, where themarginal costs of reproduction are practically nothing or extremely low, these commodities shouldbe given for free. (Vercellone 2007, 33–34)

The empirical ground of Vercellone’s argument is that while the labor time in immaterial laboris close to zero, software and other cognitive commodities are not usually given out free—thetransvaluation of value through open source movement and the digital disruption of value(“piracy”) notwithstanding—which means value is not produced by labor time. But, as such thin-kers as George Caffentzis (2013), Christian Fuchs (2014), Max Henninger (2007) and HessangJeon (2010) among others have pointed out, the theory of the immeasurability of value and itsautonomy from labor time is not only flawed conceptually but also empirically. It “does notseem to refer to what billions of people across the planet do every day under the surveillanceof bosses vitally concerned about how much time the workers are at their job and how wellthey do it again and again” (Caffentzis 2005, 97).

Vercellone and other cognitivists use Marx’s (1993) argument about “general intellect” inGrundrisse as the basis for their arguments. However, Marx is making a historical materialistargument about changes within capitalism not writing a myth, as the cognitivists do, about theahistorical mutation of capitalism beyond itself to a “spontaneous communism.” Marx’s conceptsof “social brain” (1993, 694), “general intellect” (706), and “social intellect” (709), in otherwords, are elements of a historical materialist morphology of the “subsumption” of labor bycapital within capitalism. Under “formal subsumption,” Marx writes, surplus value is extracted


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by lengthening the working day (Marx 1990). With the unfolding of an ever more violent relationof labor and capital, “real subsumption” supplements “formal subsumption,” and subsequently,“surplus value” is extracted from labor by high productivity in the working day through new tech-nologies that add to the “intensity” of labor. In other words, under “real subsumption” (which cog-nitivists regard to be the precondition for immaterial production), “the organic composition ofcapital”—namely, “the ratio between its active and its passive component, between variableand constant capital” (Marx 1991, 244)—changes.

Change in the organic composition of capital which increases productivity in “The WorkingDay” is interpreted by Negri and others as meaning that “the law of value is no longer current orfunctional” (Negri 2003, 43) and that labor (time) has lost its standing as the objective measure ofvalue. This is another way of saying that, under capitalism today, exploitation as the effect ofdirect production is no longer quantifiable (Negri 1996b, 153–54, 157). “Real subsumption” issaid to have ushered in the “biopolitical products” that “tend to exceed all quantitative measure-ment” (Hardt and Negri 2009, 135–36). The “immeasurable,” we argue, is the digital metaphy-sics of cognitive capitalism. By deploying the Vitalist fantasies of Deleuze and Bergson, itnormalizes the alienated reality of contemporary capitalism as freedom-without-bounds.Writing in Capital (after the Grundrisse), Marx undoes the metaphysics of the “immeasurable”through a dialectical critique that marks the interrelation of labor and value-profit. Wefocus especially on his concept of the “equalization of the profit rate” as well as his notion ofthe “intensity” of labor. In Capital volume 3, he writes:

A complex social process intervenes here, the equalization of capitals, which cuts the relative averageprices of commodities loose from their values, and the average profits in the various spheres ofproduction from the actual exploitation of labour by the particular capitals involved (quite apartfrom the individual capital investments in each particular sphere of production). The average pricesof commodities not only seem to differ from their value, i.e. from the labour realized in them, but actu-ally do differ, and the average profit of a particular capital differs from the surplus-value this capitalhas extracted from the workers employed by it. The value of commodities appears directly only in theinfluence of the changing productivity of labour on the rise and fall of prices of production; on theirmovement, not on their final limits. Profit now appears as determined only secondarily by the directexploitation of labour, in so far as, given market prices that are seemingly independent of this exploi-tation; it permits the capitalist to realize a profit departing from the average. Normal average profit assuch seems immanent in capital independently of exploitation; abnormal exploitation or even averageexploitation under exceptionally favourable conditions seems only to determine divergences fromaverage profit, and not this average profit itself. (Marx 1991, 967–68)

As Ernest Mandel points out, although Marx had not yet developed the concept of “price ofproduction” when he wrote Grundrisse (1993, 338–39, 549–50), it is an active analytic in its argu-ment. “In this last passage,” Mandel (1971, 101–2) writes, “Marx uses the wording of ‘generalprice’ which is identical with the wording used later, ‘price of production.’” Analyzing the roleof “price of production” in equalizing the rate of profit (the measurability of value), George Caf-fentzis (2005, 105) argues that the introduction of high technologies into the production processleads to a variety of “vertical spectrum of organic composition possibilities”—from labor-less tohighly labor-intensive production. Capitalists who invest in these different enterprises

. . . demand an equal rate of profit . . . even if “their” workers produce next to no surplus value. In otherwords, these capitalists will demand the price of production (i.e., the sum of their constant capital andtheir variable capital plus the product of this sum and the rate of profit) in value terms instead of theactual value of their commodities. (Caffentzis 2005, 105)

Caffentzis goes on to emphasize that this


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. . . is why Marx writes in the Grundrisse that the notion of value “explodes” in the period when scienceand technology takes an increasing role in the production process in many industries. For in these indus-tries there is no correlation between the labor-time expended there and the price of the commodities sold.But it is not that the value of these commodities is immeasurable. Marx introduces a notion of “price ofproduction” after the Grundrisse to point out that this situation will not automatically lead to a funda-mental breakdown in capitalism. On the contrary, the prices of the commodities produced in manybranches of production with relatively little labor have a mathematically determined character: theirprice of production includes surplus value created in other branches of production of lower organic com-position in proportion to the capital invested in the industry. . . . “General Intellect” and “immateriallabor” are not invitations to go beyond capital, . . . [they] have always been part of the work capitalhas exploited whether it was waged or not. . . . [T]he amount of labor involved in computerized labordoes not change the dynamics of capitalist accumulation. . . . In fact, the Law of Value has been mosttyrannical in the current neoliberal period! (Caffentzis 2005, 105–6)

The “law of value” is not “blown apart” as Negri claims. It continues to determine the econ-omics of “The Working Day”:

. . . entrepreneurs continue to measure, compare, and remunerate labor-power in terms of clearlydefined units of time. Recognizing this means recognizing that the law of value is anything butdefunct when it comes to issues as quotidian—and as important—as paying one’s rent, obtainingone’s means of subsistence, and conquering for oneself and others a measure of individual andcollective autonomy that allows for combating the wage relation and the mechanisms of exploitationinherent in it. (Henninger 2007, 174)

The reduction of labor-time in production is deployed by theorists of cognitive capitalism toshift the analysis of capitalism from direct production to reproduction and is attributed to thenew role of knowledge. Cognitivists insist that knowledge is a new element of labor. It is whatturns the material into immaterial labor as the hegemonic form of labor today, and, they claim,it is the absent element in Marx’s labor theory of value. Contrary to this cognitivist logic, the dia-lectics of labor and knowledge—what Marx (1990, 129) calls “intensity”—is in fact the verygrounding of Marx’s theory. Knowledge, as Hessang Jeon (2010, 101) argues, is a “virtual inten-sification of commodity producing labour.” However, the dialectics of labor and knowledge isobscured in the theories of cognitive capitalism. They conceal the relation of knowledge andlabor by what Jeon (2010, 100) describes as a “naturalistic interpretation of value theory whichconsiders abstract labour as pure expenditure of human energy.” The ahistoricity of this viewof abstract labor (time) is clear in Hardt and Negri’s (2004, 144) Multitude, in which theydeclare that all the different (concrete) industrial labors are “equivalent or commensurablebecause they each contain a common element, abstract labor, labor in general, labor withoutrespect to its specific form.” Like most theorists of cognitive capitalism, they do not seem torecognize the social logic of the conversion of concrete labor time to abstract labor time.

For Marx abstract labor and its time are historical and social processes. Like all social pro-cesses, they are dialectical and differential: concrete and abstract labor are not, in other words,in direct correspondence. An unskilled worker produces less value in an hour than a skilled(“knowledge”-able) worker. Abstract labor, to say it differently, is constructed socially:

. . . the labour time which is necessary on an average, or in other words is socially necessary. Sociallynecessary labour-time is the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions ofproduction normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labourprevalent in that society. (Marx 1990, 129)

The time of abstract labor is a socially folded time; it is a time within time—the time in whichthe worker has acquired knowledge and skill within labor time. “Socially necessary” time is the


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expression of “general intellect” (Marx 1993, 704–11), namely, historically existing socialknowledge and skill and the technologies historically available to workers. Cognition andexecution are dialectically interlaced. However, in theories of cognitive capitalism, the foldedtime of abstract labor is reduced, as Jeon argues, to a simple linear (execution) time, and historicaltime and its social dimensions are suspended. Cognitivists talk a great deal about “general intel-lect” (Moulier-Boutang 2011; Lazzarato 1996) and its formative role in production, but in theirinterpretation of labor theory of value, they isolate knowledge (the social processes embeddedin skill, which is an integral part of all labor time) from labor (execution). “General intellect”thus becomes more an ideological topos in their theory than an active concept for analysis ofthe relation of labor, knowledge, value and time, which in some of their writings, actually acquiresmystical properties—as in, for instance, Negri’s notion of kairos (Negri 2003, 147–80).

Theorists of cognitive capitalism suspend the social constitution of abstract labor time andtreat “execution” and “cognition” as separate modes of labor. Justifying the separation, AndreaFumagalli (2011, 11) states that, “in cognitive biocapitalism, the separation between abstractlabor and concrete labor is not as clear as it was in industrial-Fordist capitalism.” He goes onto suggest that,

. . . “concrete labor,” or labor producing use value, can be renamed today creative labor. This termallows us to better understand the cerebral contribution inherent in such activity, while the term . . .“concrete labor,” though being conceptually its synonym, refers more to the realm of “making”than to that of “thinking,” with a closer allusion. (Fumagalli 2011, 11)

The non-dialectical class ideologic of opposing, without contradiction, “making” (proletariat)and “thinking” (petty bourgeois intellectual worker) is deployed to construct a new typology ofcapitalism. As Jeon (2010, 103) argues, the two are represented as mutually exclusive: one usesknowledge and is an expenditure of human energy, the other produces knowledge and is concep-tual; one is bound by time and is measured by time, the other is extra-temporal and, to use Hardtand Negri’s (2000, 354) word, “outside measure.” Material labor is planned (and enforced) bycapital; immaterial labor is an expression of labor’s creativity and the workers’ independencefrom capital and thus is inherently a resistance to capital (Aufheben 2006).

Deploying these binaries, cognitivists construct an anti-dialectical typology of capitalism thatclaims the labor theory of value is a local theory (of industrial capitalism). Unlike pre-capitalism(the “formal subsumption” time of a “putting-out” system) in which knowledge was produced byworkers, knowledge in industrial capitalism is designed by capital and imposed on workers. Incognitive capitalism (post-“real subsumption”), workers reclaim knowledge and achieve auton-omy from capital. Only in industrial capitalism, according to cognitivists, does the time oflabor become the measure of value.

Cognitive capitalism, in many ways is a re-appearance of the “putting-out” system of labor,the regime of small producers. It is, in other words, the expression of the class interests of the newpetty bourgeoisie—the intellectual workers—whose class interests are antagonistic not only to theproletariat but also to large-scale capitalism. The opposition to capitalism in the revolutionaryvocabularies that Negri, Zizek and other “new” communists use to describe their antagonismto capitalism is only the opposition of the new petty bourgeoisie to big capitalism. It is not anopposition to capitalism. “New” communism and its cognitive economics are reformist projectsto secure a place for intellectual workers within existing capitalism and not to overthrow thesystem. Theories of cognitive capitalism, in other words, are what Radhika Desai (2011, 205)calls the “twenty-first century avatar of the Proudhonism of the 19th century.”

Outside this class imaginary, the objective reality of accumulation in actually existing capit-alism is that in direct production, “Knowledge plays an important, even if varied, role in the


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determination of value through . . . the virtual intensification of commodity producing labour”(Jeon 2010, 101). Material labor, like immaterial labor, is always an expression of knowl-edge—the collective social cognition (“general intellect”). Breaking the dialectical relation ofexecution and cognition in the labor theory of value, the cognitivists fail to understand that“Qualitatively different concrete labours are equalised, but with quantitative differences” (Jeon2010, 107):

If worker A produces three desks and worker B produces two desks in an hour, one-hour work ofworker A is counted 1.5 times as much as that of worker B . . . due to a more productive use of knowl-edge, . . . [T]his conversion is not a technical process . . . , but is a result of social processes. . . . Theeveryday practice of exchange between commodities assures that the conversion works well. (Jeon2010, 106)

To be clearer, it is worth repeating Marx (1990, 129) who, in theorizing abstract labor, indicatesthat, “Socially necessary labour-time is the labour-time required to produce any use-value underthe conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill andintensity of labour prevalent in that society.”

“Intensity of labor” in Marx’s theory is broadly, as Jeon notes, the knowledge—socialprocess—by which labor produces more value in the same amount of labor time. In support ofhis reading that labor theory of value is not an “execution-labor theory of value” in whichthere is no role for knowledge, Jeon quotes Marx’s words that “exceptionally productivelabour acts as intensified labour” and “[m]ore complex labour counts only as intensified, orrather multiplied simple labour” (Marx 1990, 435, 135). Jeon terms knowledge a “virtual inten-sification of commodity producing labour” (2010, 101) and argues that,

. . . as the skill and/or intensity of labour varies, the same concrete labour times are converted intodifferent abstract labour times. . . . Thus the more intense work has the same effect as an extensionof the working day. . . . Introducing new production methods can have the same result as intensifica-tion, creating more value in a given period of time, without any changes to the intensity of commod-ity-producing labour. . . . Virtual intensification refers to such social processes by which the sameamount of labour time produces more value . . . due to, for example, the use of better knowledge.. . . Whereas commodity-producing labour produces value, knowledge labour does not create value,but determines the value-producing capacity of commodity-producing labour. . . . [A]lthough concretedirect labour time to produce a unit of microprocessor of computer software is close to zero, . . . theabstract labour time required to produce a unit of microprocessor of software, or the direct labourportion of the value of microprocessor of software, can be higher than zero. (Jeon 2010, 107–8)

It is abstract labor time that determines value, and therefore the reduction of concrete labortime in immaterial production does not mean that the value of an immaterial product is closeto zero, or that the time of labor is no longer determinant of value. The reduction of productiontime is the historical effect of the development of collective social knowledge (“general intel-lect”), the increased skill of labor that produces more value in a given time. Knowledge isalready written into the labor theory of value. The theoretical violence of cognitivists separatesknowledge from labor and undialectically posits cognitive capitalism as reclaiming knowledgefor labor as they represent it as a break—a “radical leap” as Moulier-Boutang (2011, 48) callsit—in the history of capitalism. Cognitive capitalism is assumed to be a mutation that is ontologi-cally outside the dialectics of history and class struggles and thus beyond capitalist exploitation indirect production. The theories of cognitive capitalism cover over the bloody history of capital-ism, which, in Marx’s words (1990, 926), is “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, withblood and dirt.” They construct contemporary capitalism in the bourgeois imaginary as a trans-cendence (without transcendentalism) of capitalism—the arrival of the Vitalist social as a new


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biocommunism now: “The future is already here for those who know how to read it” (Moulier-Boutang 2011, 8). On the other side of this Nietzschean affirmation of what is as the site of differ-ence, is the dialectical reality:

The law of value operates as long as capitalism exists: it does not stop operating because of the emer-gence of social or knowledge work. . . . High productivity is a precondition of communism, but it isnot communism itself and does not automatically lead to communism. There are communist potentialswithin capitalism; however, communism can only be established by struggles. (Fuchs 2014, 264)

Antagonisms without Resolutions

In cognitive capitalism, “command” (power) fashions the economic (Hardt and Negri 2000, 266,355), and political (power) becomes the “value form of our society” (Negri 1996b, 166). Thesocial after dialectics is the scene of the “microphysics of power” (Negri 1984, 14). Throughthe microphysics of power, the economic relationship between exploiter and exploited issuspended, and “exploitation” is quietly turned into an “empty signifier” that rearranges chainsof equivalences (Laclau 1996, 36–46) and critiques capitalism as a power relation but legitimatesit as an economic system.

Capitalism is not normal. The twin deaths of dialectics and the law of value are necessary forrestoring “normality” to contemporary capitalism. Negri’s theories, as we have pointed out, disman-tle dialectics; blow apart the law of value; displace class by “class composition”; replace the prole-tariat with the “multitude”; obscure material labor through immaterial labor, and thus are one of themost effective restorative cultural discourses in capitalism. They discredit all analytical conceptsthat can provide knowledge of direct production (class, labor, dialectics, law of value . . .) andput in their place a poetics of the affects of “a joyous life, including all of being and nature, theanimals, sister moon, brother sun, the birds of the field” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 413). By dissolvingdialectics, Negri’s theories restore capitalism’s normalcy—which constantly slips under the pressureof emerging class contradictions—and substitute “A Reformist Program for Capital” for revolution.Instead of abolishing wages, reform universalizes them through “the establishment of a minimumguaranteed income” (Hardt and Negri 2009, 306–11). It is Negri’s restorative discourses that havebrought him what he calls “world wide success” (Negri and Dufourmantelle 2004, 114).

Negri’s suspension of dialectics in social analysis relies on a left commonsense in whichdialectics is depicted as a “synthesis” (Casarino and Negri 2008, 118–21) and then is seen astreating contradictions as simply two sides of the same reality and thus as equal oppositeswithout difference. The role of mediation, for Negri, is then to reconcile the two. Dialectics, inother words, “always tries to recombine and reconcile everything, to bring everything together”(Casarino and Negri 2008, 122). Dialectics fails, he maintains, because it is a totalizationthat erases differences. This critique, however, is hard to take seriously because Negri’s ownanti-dialectical writings are nothing but totalizations and squashing of differences. “Empire,”for instance, is not only a totalization, but its underlying arguments are also chains of totalizationsrelying on other totalizations from “counter-empire,” through “two modernities” to “smoothspace” to the totalization of all totalizations: the “multitude.” Negri’s portrayal of mediation(as resolution through totalization) was quite common among left Hegelians, whose philosophicalarguments Negri, like most contemporary left thinkers, often repeats. But this view of mediationhas been thoroughly critiqued by Marx. In a line-by-line reading of Hegel’s investigation of “civilsociety” and “monarchy,” in which Hegel proposes the legislature as the mediator between thetwo, Marx writes that such a middle term is “mixtum compositum” [a melange] of “the twoextremes”: “The middle term is the wooden sword, the concealed opposition between generalityand singularity” (Marx 1975a, 84; emphasis added).


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Quite contrary to Negri’s representation of materialist dialectics, mediation, for Marx, is not “apeaceful process of reconciliation,” John Rees (1998, 64) argues, “but the elaboration of thedifferent forms in which the central contradiction of the age is played out in every aspect ofsocial development.”

In his critique of Hegel’s narrative of master and slave in The Phenomenology of Spirit, Marxwrites:

As one can see, this is a society pugnacious at heart but too afraid of bruises to ever really fight. Thetwo who want to fight arrange it so that the third who steps between them will get the beating, butimmediately one of the two appears as the third, and because of all this caution they never arriveat a decision. (Marx 1975a, 88)

The question of mediation, of course, has been a source of contestation both in Western Marxism(e.g., Adorno’s [1977] notion that synthesis is an illusory solution and enforced reconciliation) andin Chinese Marxism’s debates over “one and two.” Is the unity of the two in one the essence ofdialectics as Yang Xianzhen (Harmin 1986, 1991) argues, or is it explained, as Mao argues, byLenin’s thesis that “The splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts . . .is the essence . . . of dialectics” (Lenin 1976, 357; Mao 1967, 311–47; Mao 1977, 384–421)?

Negri’s anti-dialectical statements, in other words, are a rehearsal of the already said.However, he presents his interpretation of dialectics with the triumphalist tone of one whothinks he has gone beyond dialectics. Like all “beyond-ers,” he finds that what he has just discov-ered (as Marx’s critique indicates) has been part of the theories of dialectics all along. The histori-cal history of dialectics in Hegel’s and Marx’s writings, however, is irrelevant to Negri. He needs anarrative in which dialectics is seen as reconciling everything and establishing equilibrium ratherthan as sharpening antagonisms and propelling revolution. He then uses it to structure his “logicof separation” because the grand conclusion of his interpretation of mediation as “synthesis” isthat contradictions no longer express the relation of capital and labor in cognitive capitalism,in which there has been a mutation, he argues, “From Contradiction to Antagonism” (Hardtand Negri 1994, 133–35):

Why does it appear today that the dialectic of capitalist development which we have experienced his-torically, has been broken? The response to this question is determined around a phenomenologicallysupported affirmation: at the point in which capital yielded the command over associative productivelabor to the social worker, it was no longer capable of the synthesis of development. The social workerhas begun to produce a subjectivity that one can no longer grasp in the terms of capitalist developmentunderstood as an accomplished dialectical movement. (Hardt and Negri 1994, 282)

Labor and capital, under the conditions of real subsumption for Negri, are irresolvable antagon-isms: “We must see in these two spaces the formation of opposed subjectivities, opposed wills andintellects, opposed processes of valorization: in short, an antagonistic dynamism” (Negri 1984,93). He goes on to say that “on this plane, antagonism,” renders “mediation useless” (Hardtand Negri 1994, 134) since there is now a “definitive separation between the two subjects” (283).

Negri suspends dialectics through “irreconcilable antagonism”—which is, of course, a reflec-tion of Marx’s (1975a, 86) materialist concept of “irreconcilable contradiction.” However, Negriproduces a logic of self-directed antagonisms separated by the force of their subjectivities, therebyturning Marx’s concept inside out. As a sign of the autonomy of labor, he argues that within thisspace wages are separate from economic conditions:

It is worth pausing briefly to consider . . . proletarian self-valorization. . . . [A]t this point, the wage isno longer, in its economic identity, an independent variable. It is completely subordinated to the entire


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dynamic of power, to the entire framework of the political autonomy of the state. The wage is reducedto the hierarchy of command, in a process that is the counterpart, the obverse of the repression ofproletarian unity at the social level. (Negri 2005, 249).

The undoing of dialectical totality and the formation of the “logic of separation,” is not philoso-phical or political: it is an expression of the economic interests of the owning class. Not only doesit make the falling rate of profit—which Marx (1991, 317–75) argues is an effect of the changingcomposition of capital—into an outcome of the subjectivities of workers (Hardt and Negri 2000,261), but it also disconnects wages from the economics of capital. In Marx’s dialectical theory,wages are a dependent variable (Rosdolsky 1968, 282–313). Or, as Callinicos explains, wagesare variable,

. . . relative to the accumulation of capital because capitalists, through their control over the rate ofinvestment, also determine the rate of unemployment. When confronted by militant workers theycan shift the balance of class forces in their favour by staging an investment strike and therebyforcing up unemployment. Workers, faced with the threat of the dole, come under pressure toaccept lower wages and more generally an increase in the rate of exploitation. This is preciselywhat happened in Italy (and indeed in Britain, the other weak link of European capitalism) fromthe mid-1970s onwards. (Callinicos 2001, 41)

What Negri represents as a sign of the autonomy and power of the subjectivity of workers, aswe have already implied, is in fact a strategy for protecting capital: capitalism, according toNegri’s discourse, is not accountable for lower wages; it is the weakness of workers that haskept them low. The mutation of contradictions into antagonism makes mediation useless andmaintains antagonism as an eternal irreconcilability. It is, in effect, an ontological shielding ofcontemporary relations of capitalist production from an analysis that would unmask them as a dia-lectical totality in the grip of internal contradictions as they develop into their other.

Negri often obscures the significance of the dialectical totality by setting it against material-ism: materialism, he writes, is an active force because “The path of materialism passes preciselythrough subjectivity” (Negri 1984, 154) whereas dialectics is, for him, an objectivist instrumen-tality: “The dialectic is returned to capital. Materialism becomes the only horizon, entirelyanimated by the logic of antagonism and by subjectivity” (Negri 1984, 168). Here and inalmost all of his more recent writings, Negri (2010) puts dialectics against materialism: “Thenew constitution of the common, no longer dialectical but still materialist.”

However, his materialism, as the passages we have quoted indicate, is a biomateriality, anidealist Vitalism that, in a Nietzschean move and following Bergson and Deleuze, situates thesocial, the political and the economic outside the dialectics of history and as ontologicalexpressions of what Bergson calls elan vital—life force. In other words, he proposes (while inhis usual double-sidedness critiquing Bergson’s views) an immaterial materialism that identifiesmateriality with the matter-ity of life as the concrete, the tangible, the body, language, strike, andself-reduction of prices. But materialism is not matterism. Rather, it is the “ultimate determinationby the mode of production” (Jameson 1981, 45).

As a materiality, “life” for Negri is an affirmation that does not need justification since, for himas for Deleuze (1983, 16), “life is essentially just.” Life affirmation becomes an ontological meansfor Negri to not only abandon dialectics (as the negative) but to, in effect, affirm the way things areas the way they ought to be (and thus always will be). But, dialectics is the negation of life as is; itis the analytics of contradiction, showing how seemingly static (separate) antagonisms are histori-cal contradictions, which are the dynamics of social change. “Contradiction” is the “real nucleusof dialectics, its central category” (Ilyenkov 1977, 320). It is the dynamic of a materialist totalitythat by negation it is transformed and through the negation of negation transforms the


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transformed. The dialectical marks the struggles between labor and capital as a materialist totalityand not as unresolvable (static) isolated and everlasting antagonisms of two separate subjectiv-ities. In short, it understands the two in unity in their opposition. This move is what concernsNegri (2010) most, and this is why he denounces the dialectical as “imposing of the coexistenceof the opposites.”

Having reached the limits of his “philosophical” arguments against dialectics, Negri, in hisMoscow lecture, appeals to “newness,” in order to suspend it. Dialectics, he claims can onlydeal with old materialism and this is the time of a new materialism: “the ontology of materialismitself had changed. Materialism, today, is the biopolitical context.” Materialism is a “new” com-modity for him beyond the reach of the negation of the dialectics; it is an affirmation, a “biopo-litical excess of living labor expressed in the figures of cognitive and immaterial productivity”(Negri 2010).

In dialectics, labor is the negation of the world as is; the subject transforms the world and istransformed by it. Through labor, the human acts “upon external nature and changes it, and in thisway he simultaneously changes his own nature” (Marx 1990, 283).

Negri’s suspension of dialectics is a means for keeping antagonisms always as antagonisms,namely, to block any moving away from the perpetual conflicts that are constitutive of bourgeoissociety. His irreconcilable antagonisms naturalize class conflicts. To say it differently, Negri’sopposition to dialectics—which is an economic not a philosophical question—is an oppositionto communism as a post-antagonism society without classes. Communism is a “radical rupturewith traditional property relations.” As the “transcendence of private property” (Marx 1975b,293–306), communism has “crossed” the “narrow horizon of bourgeois right” and boldly“inscribes on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”(Marx 1989, 79–90). Negri displaces this communism of needs with one of desire—celebratingdesire as liberatory when it is desire that normalizes the increasing demands for commodities,prodigality and expenditure without reserve (Bataille 1985, 116–29) that sustain capital.Negri’s communism is constructed not out of the class struggles of workers over the socialsurplus but by the militant prayers of Saint Francis of Assisi (Hardt and Negri 2000, 413) overbliss. His is the bourgeois fantasy of “the irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist”as “a joyous life, including all of being and nature, the animals, sister moon, brother sun, thebirds of the field” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 413; emphasis in the original).

Irreconcilable antagonisms are Negri’s poetics of the “irrepressible lightness and joy” of life.They are produced by freeing what he assumes to be a state of dialectical equilibrium imposed onthem by the state. This poetics of antagonisms without resolution, however, is a reification of anin-between-ness: the space between Kant’s antinomies—irreconcilable differences—and MaoZedong’s (1977, 384–421) “antagonistic contradictions.” It is a space that rebels against itsown in-between-ness with an aggressive revolutionary vocabulary but remains at a permanenthalt. This is the hybrid re/de-territorialized space of the North Atlantic left in which “dialectics”is “at a standstill” (Benjamin 1999, 457–88): the space of a radical “tailism” that, in a vocabularyof rebellion, refusal, exodus, and strike, has always “insisted on the spontaneity of the masses,negated the necessity of a Marxist party and denied the significance of class consciousness”(Illes 2000, 42–43).

In his analysis of materialism, Georg Lukacs (1971, 11) refers to thinkers who have sought to“ignore” or show that social contradictions are “surface phenomenon, unrelated to” capitalism, by“either the thorough-going elimination of dialectics from proletarian science, or at best its ‘criti-cal’ refinement.’” He then gives the exemplary case of Max Adler’s (2012) interpretation of thedialectics in which Adler, like Negri, reduces dialectical contradictions to mere antagonism.Adler’s dialectics-as-antagonism, Lukacs argues, simply asserts the existence of oppositions.By reducing dialectics to antagonism, Lukacs (1971, 11) writes, “the objective economic


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antagonism as expressed in the class struggle evaporates, leaving only a conflict” between oppo-sitions. Dialectics reduced to antagonism, “means that neither the emergence of internal problems,nor the collapse of capitalist society, can be seen as necessary.” Moreover,

. . . the central problem Max Adler tackles of the real “dialectics or, better, antagonism” is nothing butone of the typical ideological forms of the capitalist social order. But whether capitalism is renderedimmortal on economic or on ideological grounds, whether with naive nonchalance, or with criticalrefinement is of little importance. Thus with the rejection or blurring of the dialectical methodhistory becomes unknowable. (Lukacs 1971, 11–12)

The displacing of dialectics in contemporary social theories of the North Atlantic left is done inthe name of accounting for, “The nature of the radical leap that separates the earlier transform-ations from the present one” (Moulier-Boutang 2011, 48). What is represented as “unprece-dented,” however, is “unprecedented” only because it is treated as an “event” beyond the reachof history by a void in time—a time without time, what Negri calls “kairos”:

6.5 Kairos rests then in the eternal. Better still: kairos is the eternal that creates. This eternal is prior tous, because it is at its edge that we create and that we augment being, that is to say, eternity. All thatkairos opens is eternal. And so we are at once responsible for eternity and for producing it.

7.1 If the “before” is eternal and the “after” is to-come, time—in the arrow that constitutes it—is theimmeasurableness of production between this “before” and this “after.” (Negri 2003, 167)

Although the “immeasurable,” Negri adds, is “neither indefinite, nor indeterminate,” the“product of the expression of kairos is indeed always singular (the hæcceitas)” (Negri 2003, 167).

The “singular,” for the North Atlantic left, is the means for untying the dialectical through atime without time, a leap into the immeasurable, and a reification of what “is” as a self-standingpositive antagonism that defies the negative. But the dialectical is the negation of the is-ness ofwhat is in the double temporalities of necessary and surplus labor time.

Notes on ContributorsTeresa L. Ebert is the author most recently of The Task of Cultural Critique as well as such books as LudicFeminism and After. Her essays have appeared in such journals as Rethinking Marxism, Cultural Critique,Textual Practice, Women’s Review of Books and College English. She is professor of cultural theory at theUniversity at Albany, State University of New York. Teresa L. Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh are co-authorsof Class in Culture and the forthcoming Marxism and the Work of (Post) Humanities.

Mas’ud Zavarzadeh has written on Marxist theory, contemporary critical thought and capitalism. He is theauthor of Seeing Films Politically, The Mythopoeic Reality and The Class Imperative. He has taught at anumber of universities, including Syracuse University in New York. Teresa L. Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadehare co-authors of Class in Culture and the forthcoming Marxism and the Work of (Post) Humanities.

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the digital metaphysics of cognitive capitalism

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