William Rodney Herring

So Jim dropped in to see me the other day and chided me for not blogging in a while. In response, I’m offering something kinda up his alley. Early in Multitude, Hardt & Negri describe the question of “how class struggle can be transformed into social war” or “how the interimperialist war can become the occasion for a revolutionary war” as “old, tired, and faded” (89). These two propose instead a “form of organization” that can “deploy the full power of today’s biopolitical production and also fully realize the promise of a democratic society” (90). The question is, if we buy the first part of this argument—that we really have entered a new age of biopolitical production—and I find this persuasive (even if I’m hesitant to go so far as to say that “The political times and the mode of production have changed” [50])—does the latter part actually follow? That a shared goal of democracy is adequate as an organizing principle for revolution (or rather the term they prefer, insurrection)?

So let’s concede that much of our labor now is biopolitical or immaterial. Let’s even accept that new subjectivities are available (and older subjectivities now unavailable) as a result of our present, immaterial forms of labor, given that biopolitical production suffuses our lives. To take an example, we meet and interact with friends on MySpace through a labor that produces profits and property that MySpace can claim rights over. We (laborers) may or may not think of our energy and time spent updating and loading pages as work, and we may or may not recognize our effort as production. But clearly the host appropriates some benefit from our presence there.

But let’s say that we object to MySpace’s decision making—the company’s not sharing profits (generated by ad revenues, etc.) with us, e.g., even though its profits couldn’t exist without our traffic, which is generated largely by our labor. Partly, I assume, H&N would argue that we already live in a world where decision making is quasi-democratic, where our input uniquely informs the company’s decisions (has any company so often assured clients or workers that its policy changes are a response to their demands as Tom does?). More importantly, however, H&N would point out that the MySpace network itself (not to mention our already networked dispositions) makes our organization possible and potentially potent in radically new ways. Such organizational possibility makes the rule of all by all more obtainable than ever before.

My question is whether this potentiality is sufficient to drive an effective mass movement (against MySpace, in this case, but against capital—or Empire—more generally) in the way that exploitation could generate resistance. H&N are clear that immaterial production requires us to retheorize exploitation:

today, in the paradigm of immaterial production, the theory of value cannot be conceived in terms of measured quantities of time, and so exploitation cannot be understood in these terms. Just as we must understand the production of value in terms of the common, so too must we try to conceive exploitation as the expropriation of the common. (150)

Fair enough. Except that exploitation was always something more than expropriation of the product of labor. In Erik Olin Wright’s analysis, for exploitation to occur, three criteria must be satisfied: (1) the material interests of exploiter and exploited must be inversely aligned, so that their “relations are not merely different, they are antagonistic”; (2) the exploited must be excluded “from access to certain productive resources”; and (3) the economic advantages exploiters accrue are appropriated from the labor of the exploited. While exclusion and ap/ex-propriation exist in the relation between MySpace users and MySpace.com, does the “inverse independent welfare principle”? That is, in this relationship, is there any sense in which the user is locked into a relation with an employer? Are there significant opportunity costs associated with the affective labor one does on (and for) MySpace? Is such affective production the same as the production in an employer/employee relationship, where “the realization of the interests of the exploiters imposes harms on the exploited” (Wright)?