The real
not-capital
is
labor.
-Karl Marx,
Grundrisse
Working in the digital media industry is not as much fun as it
is made out to be. The "NetSlaves" of the eponymous Webzine are becoming
increasingly vociferous about the shamelessly exploitative nature of the
job, its punishing work rhythms, and its ruthless casualization. They
talk about "24-7 electronic sweatshops" and complain about the
ninety-hour weeks and the "moronic management of new media companies."
In early 1999, seven of the fifteen thousand "volunteers" of America
Online (AOL) rocked the info-loveboat by asking the Department of Labor
to investigate whether AOL owes them back wages for the years of playing
chathosts for free.
1
They used to work long hours and love it; now they are starting
to feel the pain of being burned by digital media.
These events point to a necessary backlash against the glamorization of digital labor, which highlights its continuities with the modern sweatshop and points to the increasing degradation of knowledge work. Yet the question of labor in a "digital economy" is not so easily dismissed as an innovative development of the familiar logic of capitalist exploitation. The NetSlaves are not simply a typical form of labor on the Internet; they also embody a complex relation to labor that is widespread in late capitalist societies.
In this essay I understand this relationship as a provision of
"free labor," a trait of the cultural economy at large, and an
important, and yet undervalued, force in advanced capitalist societies.
By looking at the Internet as a specific instance of the fundamental
role played by free labor, this essay also tries to highlight the
connections between the "digital economy" and what the Italian
autonomists have called the "social factory." The "social factory"
describes a process whereby "work processes have shifted from the
factory to society, thereby setting in motion a truly complex machine."
2
Simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and
exploited, free labor on the Net includes the activity of building Web
sites, modifying software packages, reading and participating in mailing
lists, and building virtual spaces on MUDs and MOOs. Far from being an
"unreal," empty space, the Internet is animated by cultural and
technical labor through and through, a continuous production of value
that is completely immanent to the flows of the network society at
large.
Support for this argument, however, is immediately complicated
by the recent history of critical theory. How to speak of labor,
especially cultural and technical labor, after the demolition job
carried out by thirty years of postmodernism? The postmodern socialist
feminism of Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" spelled out some of the
reasons behind the antipathy of 1980s critical theory for Marxist
analyses of labor. Haraway explicitly rejected the humanistic tendencies
of theorists who see labor as the "pre-eminently privileged category
enabling the Marxist to overcome illusion and find that point of view
which is necessary for changing the world."
3
Paul Gilroy similarly expressed his discontent at the inadequacy
of Marxist analyses of labor to describe the culture of the descendants
of slaves, who value artistic expression as "the means towards both
individual self-fashioning and communal liberation."
4
If labor is "the humanizing activity that makes [white] man,"
then, surely, humanizing labor does not really belong in the age of
networked, posthuman intelligence.
However, the "informatics of domination" that Haraway describes
in the "Manifesto" is certainly preoccupied with the relation between
cybernetics, labor, and capital. In the fifteen years since its
publication, this triangulation has become even more evident. The
expansion of the Internet has given ideological and material support to
contemporary trends toward increased flexibility of the workforce,
continuous reskilling, freelance work, and the diffusion of practices
such as "supplementing" (bringing supplementary work home from the
conventional office).
5
Advertising campaigns and business manuals suggest that the
Internet is not only a site of disintermediation (embodying the famous
death of the middle man, from bookshops to travel agencies to computer
stores), but also the means through which a flexible, collective
intelligence has come into being.
This essay does not seek to offer a judgment on the "effects" of the Internet, but rather to map the way in which the Internet connects to the autonomist "social factory." I am concerned with how the "outernet" - the network of social, cultural, and economic relationships that criss-crosses and exceeds the Internet - surrounds and connects the latter to larger flows of labor, culture, and power. It is fundamental to move beyond the notion that cyberspace is about escaping reality in order to understand how the reality of the Internet is deeply connected to the development of late postindustrial societies as a whole.
Cultural and technical work is central to the Internet but is
also a widespread activity throughout advanced capitalist societies. I
argue that such labor is not exclusive to the so-called knowledge
workers, but is a pervasive feature of the postindustrial economy. The
pervasiveness of such production questions the legitimacy of a fixed
distinction between production and consumption, labor and culture. It
also undermines Gilroy's distinction between work as "servitude, misery
and subordination" and artistic expression as the means to
self-fashioning and communal liberation. The increasingly blurred
territory between production and consumption, work and cultural
expression, however, does not signal the recomposition of the alienated
Marxist worker. The Internet does not automatically turn every user into
an active producer, and every worker into a creative subject. The
process whereby production and consumption are reconfigured within the
category of free labor signals the unfolding of a different (rather than
completely new) logic of value, whose operations need careful analysis.
6
The Digital Economy
The term digital economy has recently emerged as a way to summarize some of the processes described above. As a term, it seems to describe a formation that intersects on the one hand with the postmodern cultural economy (the media, the university, and the arts) and on the other hand with the information industry (the information and communication complex). Such an intersection of two different fields of production constitutes a challenge to a theoretical and practical engagement with the question of labor, a question that has become marginal for media studies as compared with questions of ownership (within political economy) and consumption (within cultural studies).
In Richard Barbrook's definition, the digital economy is
characterized by the emergence of new technologies (computer networks)
and new types of workers (the digital artisans).
7
According to Barbrook, the digital economy is a mixed economy:
it includes a public element (the state's funding of the original
research that produced Arpanet, the financial support to academic
activities that had a substantial role in shaping the culture of the
Internet); a market-driven element (a latecomer that tries to
appropriate the digital economy by reintroducing commodification); and a
gift economy element, the true expression of the cutting edge of
capitalist production that prepares its eventual overcoming into a
future "anarcho-communism":
Within the developed world, most politicians and corporate
leaders believe that the future of capitalism lies in the
commodification of information.... Yet at the "cutting-edge" of the
emerging information society, money-commodity relations play a secondary
role to those created by a really existing form of anarcho-communism.
For most of its users, the net is somewhere to work, play, love, learn
and discuss with other people.... Unrestricted by physical distance,
they collaborate with each other without the direct mediation of money
and politics. Unconcerned about copyright, they give and receive
information without thought of payment. In the absence of states or
markets to mediate social bonds, network communities are instead formed
through the mutual obligations created by gifts of time and ideas.
8
From a Marxist-Hegelian angle, Barbrook sees the high-tech gift
economy as a process of overcoming capitalism from the inside. The
high-tech gift economy is a pioneering moment that transcends both the
purism of the New Left do-it-yourself culture and the neoliberalism of
the free market ideologues: "money-commodity and gift relations are not
just in conflict with each other, but also co-exist in symbiosis."
9
Participants in the gift economy are not reluctant to use market
resources and government funding to pursue a potlatch economy of free
exchange. However, the potlatch and the economy ultimately remain
irreconcilable, and the market economy is always threatening to
reprivatize the common enclaves of the gift economy. Commodification,
the reimposition of a regime of property, is, in Barbrook's opinion, the
main strategy through which capitalism tries to reabsorb the
anarcho-communism of the Net into its folds. I believe that Barbrook
overemphasizes the autonomy of the high-tech gift economy from
capitalism. The processes of exchange that characterize the Internet are
not simply the reemergence of communism within the cutting edge of the
economy, a repressed other that resurfaces just at the moment when
communism seems defeated. It is important to remember that the gift
economy, as part of a larger digital economy, is itself an important
force within the reproduction of the labor force in late capitalism as a
whole. The provision of "free labor," as we will see later, is a
fundamental moment in the creation of value in the digital economies. As
will be made clear, the conditions that make free labor an important
element of the digital economy are based in a difficult, experimental
compromise between the historically rooted cultural and affective desire
for creative production (of the kind more commonly associated with
Gilroy's emphasis on "individual self-fashioning and communal
liberation") and the current capitalist emphasis on knowledge as the
main source of value-added.
The volunteers for America Online, the NetSlaves, and the amateur Web designers are not working only because capital wants them to; they are acting out a desire for affective and cultural production that is nonetheless real just because it is socially shaped. The cultural, technical, and creative work that supports the digital economy has been made possible by the development of capital beyond the early industrial and Fordist modes of production and therefore is particularly abundant in those areas where post-Fordism has been at work for a few decades. In the overdeveloped countries, the end of the factory has spelled out the obsolescence of the old working class, but it has also produced generations of workers who have been repeatedly addressed as active consumers of meaningful commodities. Free labor is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited.
Management theory is also increasingly concerned with the
question of knowledge work, that indefinable quality that is essential
to the processes of stimulating innovation and achieving the goals of
competitiveness. For example, Don Tapscott, in a classic example of
managerial literature,
The Digital Economy, describes the digital economy as a "new economy based on the
networking of human intelligence."
10
Human intelligence provides the much needed value-added, which
is essential to the economic health of the organization. Human
intelligence, however, also poses a problem: it cannot be managed in
quite the same way as more traditional types of labor. Knowledge workers
need open organizational structures to produce, because the production
of knowledge is rooted in collaboration, that is, in what Barbrook
defined as the "gift economy":
The concept of supervision and management is changing to
team-based structures. Anyone responsible for managing knowledge workers
knows they cannot be "managed" in the traditional sense. Often they have
specialized knowledge and skills that cannot be matched or even
understood by management. A new challenge to management is first to
attract and retain these assets by marketing the organization to them,
and second
to provide the creative and open
communications environment where such workers can effectively apply and
enhance their knowledge.
11
For Tapscott, therefore, the digital economy magically resolves
the contradictions of industrial societies, such as class struggle:
while in the industrial economy the "worker tried to achieve fulfillment
through leisure [and]... was alienated from the means of production
which were owned and controlled by someone else," in the digital economy
the worker achieves fulfillment through work and finds in her brain her
own, unalienated means of production.
12
Such means of production need to be cultivated by encouraging
the worker to participate in a culture of exchange, whose flows are
mainly kept within the company but also need to involve an "outside," a
contact with the fast-moving world of knowledge in general. The
convention, the exhibition, and the conference - the more traditional
ways of supporting this general exchange - are supplemented by network
technologies both inside and outside the company. Although the traffic
of these flows of knowledge needs to be monitored (hence the corporate
concerns about the use of intranets), the Internet effectively functions
as a channel through which "human intelligence" renews its capacity to
produce.
This essay looks beyond the totalizing hype of the managerial literature but also beyond some of the conceptual limits of Barbrook's work. It looks at some possible explanation for the coexistence, within the debate about the digital economy, of discourses that see it as an oppositional movement and others that see it as a functional development to new mechanisms of extraction of value. Is the end of Marxist alienation wished for by the manager guru the same thing as the gift economy heralded by leftist discourse?
We can start undoing this deadlock by subtracting the label digital economy from its exclusive anchorage within advanced forms of labor (we can start then by depioneering it). This essay describes the digital economy as a specific mechanism of internal "capture" of larger pools of social and cultural knowledge. The digital economy is an important area of experimentation with value and free cultural/affective labor. It is about specific forms of production (Web design, multimedia production, digital services, and so on), but is also about forms of labor we do not immediately recognize as such: chat, real-life stories, mailing lists, amateur newsletters, and so on. These types of cultural and technical labor are not produced by capitalism in any direct, cause-and-effect fashion; that is, they have not developed simply as an answer to the economic needs of capital. However, they have developed in relation to the expansion of the cultural industries and are part of a process of economic experimentation with the creation of monetary value out of knowledge/culture/affect.
This process is different from that described by popular, left-wing wisdom about the incorporation of authentic cultural moments: it is not, then, about the bad boys of capital moving in on underground subcultures/subordinate cultures and "incorporating" the fruits of their production (styles, languages, music) into the media food chain. This process is usually considered the end of a particular cultural formation, or at least the end of its "authentic" phase. After incorporation, local cultures are picked up and distributed globally, thus contributing to cultural hybridization or cultural imperialism (depending on whom you listen to).
Rather than capital "incorporating" from the outside the authentic fruits of the collective imagination, it seems more reasonable to think of cultural flows as originating within a field that is always and already capitalism. Incorporation is not about capital descending on authentic culture but a more immanent process of channeling collective labor (even as cultural labor) into monetary flows and its structuration within capitalist business practices.
Subcultural movements have stuffed the pockets of multinational
capitalism for decades. Nurtured by the consumption of earlier cultural
moments, subcultures have provided the look, style, and sounds that sell
clothes, CDs, video games, films, and advertising slots on television.
This has often happened through the active participation of subcultural
members in the production of cultural goods (e.g., independent labels in
music, small designer shops in fashion).
13
This participation is, as the word suggests, a voluntary
phenomenon, although it is regularly accompanied by cries of sellouts.
The fruit of collective cultural labor has been not simply appropriated,
but voluntarily
channeled
and controversially
structured
within capitalist business practices. The relation between
culture, the cultural industry, and labor in these movements is much
more complex than the notion of incorporation suggests. In this sense,
the digital economy is not a new phenomenon but simply a new phase of
this longer history of experimentation.
Knowledge Class and Immaterial Labor
In spite of the numerous, more or less disingenuous endorsements
of the democratic potential of the Internet, the links between it and
capitalism look a bit too tight for comfort to concerned political
minds. It has been very tempting to counteract the naive technological
utopianism by pointing out how computer networks are the material and
ideological heart of informated capital. The Internet advertised on
television and portrayed by print media seems not just the latest
incarnation of capital's inexhaustible search for new markets, but also
a full consensus-creating machine, which socializes the mass of
proletarianized knowledge workers into the economy of continuous
innovation.
14
After all, if we do not get on-line soon, the hype suggests, we
will become obsolete, unnecessary, disposable. If we do, we are
promised, we will become part of the "hive mind," the immaterial economy
of networked, intelligent subjects in charge of speeding up the rhythms
of capital's "incessant waves of branching innovations."
15
Multimedia artists, writers, journalists, software programmers,
graphic designers, and activists together with small and large companies
are at the core of this project. For some they are its cultural elite,
for others a new form of proletarianized labor.
16
Accordingly, the digital workers are described as resisting or
supporting the project of capital, often in direct relation to their
positions in the networked, horizontal, and yet hierarchical world of
knowledge work.
Any judgment on the political potential of the Internet, then, is tied not only to its much vaunted capacity to allow decentralized access to information but also to the question of who uses the Internet and how. If the decentralized structure of the Net is to count for anything at all, the argument goes, then we need to know about its constituent population (hence the endless statistics about use, income, gender, and race of Internet users, the most polled, probed, and yet opaque survey material of the world). If this population of Internet users is largely made up of "knowledge workers," then it matters whether these are seen as the owners of elitist cultural and economic power or the avant-garde of new configurations of labor that do not automatically guarantee elite status.
As I argue in this essay, this is a necessary question and yet a
misleading one. It is necessary because we have to ask who is
participating in the digital economy before we can pass a judgment on
it. It is misleading because it implies that all we need to know is how
to locate the knowledge workers within a "class," and knowing which
class it is will give us an answer to the political potential of the Net
as a whole. If we can prove that knowledge workers are the avant-garde
of labor, then the Net becomes a site of resistance;
17
if we can prove that knowledge workers wield the power in
informated societies, then the Net is an extended gated community for
the middle classes.
18
Even admitting that knowledge workers are indeed fragmented in
terms of hierarchy and status won't help us that much; it will still
lead to a simple system of categorization, where the Net becomes a field
of struggle between the diverse constituents of the knowledge class.
The question is further complicated by the stubborn resistance
of "knowledge" to quantification: knowledge cannot be exclusively pinned
down to specific social segments. Although the shift from factory to
office work, from production to services is widely acknowledged, it just
isn't clear why some people qualify and some others do not.
19
The "knowledge worker" is a very contested sociological
category.
A more interesting move, however, is possible by not looking for the knowledge class within quantifiable parameters and concentrating instead on "labor." Although the notion of class retains a material value that is indispensable to make sense of the experience of concrete historical subjects, it also has its limits: for example, it "freezes" the subject, just like a substance within the chemical periodical table, where one is born as a certain element (working-class metal) but then might become something else (middle-class silicon) if submitted to the proper alchemical processes (education and income). Such an understanding of class also freezes out the flows of culture and money that mobilize the labor force as a whole. In terms of Internet use, it gives rise to the generalized endorsements and condemnations that I have described above and does not explain or make sense of the heterogeneity and yet commonalities of Internet users. I have therefore found it more useful to think in terms of what the Italian autonomists, and especially Maurizio Lazzarato, have described as immaterial labor. For Lazzarato the concept of immaterial labor refers to two different aspects of labor:
On the one hand, as regards the "informational content" of the
commodity, it refers directly to the changes taking place in workers'
labor processes... where the skills involved in direct labor are
increasingly skills involving cybernetics and computer control (and
horizontal and vertical communication). On the other hand, as regards
the activity that produces the "cultural content" of the commodity,
immaterial labor involves a series of activities that are not normally
recognized as "work" - in other words, the kinds of activities involved
in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions,
tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion.
20
Immaterial labor, unlike the knowledge worker, is not completely
confined to a specific class formation. Lazzarato insists that this form
of labor power is not limited to highly skilled workers but is a form of
activity of every productive subject within postindustrial societies. In
the highly skilled worker, these capacities are already there. However,
in the young worker, the "precarious worker," and the unemployed youth,
these capacities are "virtual," that is they are there but are still
undetermined. This means that immaterial labor is a virtuality (an
undetermined capacity) that belongs to the postindustrial productive
subjectivity as a whole. For example, the obsessive emphasis on
education of 1990s governments can be read as an attempt to stop this
virtuality from disappearing or from being channeled into places that
would not be as acceptable to the current power structures. In spite of
all the contradictions of advanced capital and its relation to
structural unemployment, postmodern governments do not like the
completely unemployable. The potentialities of work must be kept alive,
the unemployed must undergo continuous training in order both to be
monitored and kept alive as some kind of postindustrial reserve force.
Nor can they be allowed to channel their energy into the experimental,
nomadic, and antiproductive life-styles which in Britain have been so
savagely attacked by the Criminal Justice Act in the mid-1990s.
21
However, unlike the post-Fordists, and in accordance with his autonomist origins, Lazzarato does not conceive of immaterial labor as purely functional to a new historical phase of capitalism:
The virtuality of this capacity is neither empty nor ahistoric;
it is rather an opening and a potentiality, that have as their
historical origins and antecedents the "struggle against work" of the
Fordist worker and, in more recent times, the processes of
socialization, educational formation, and cultural self-valorization.
22
This dispersal of immaterial labor (as a virtuality and an
actuality) problematizes the idea of the "knowledge worker" as a class
in the "industrial" sense of the word. As a collective quality of the
labor force, immaterial labor can be understood to pervade the social
body with different degrees of intensity. This intensity is produced by
the processes of "channeling" a characteristic of the capitalist
formation which distributes value according to its logic of profit.
23
If knowledge is inherently collective, it is even more so in the
case of the postmodern cultural economy: music, fashion, and information
are all produced collectively but are selectively compensated. Only some
companies are picked up by corporate distribution chains in the case of
fashion and music; only a few sites are invested in by venture capital.
However, it is a form of collective cultural labor that makes these
products possible even as the profit is disproportionately appropriated
by established corporations.
From this point of view, the well-known notion that the Internet
materializes a "collective intelligence" is not completely off the mark.
The Internet highlights the existence of networks of immaterial labor
and speeds up their accretion into a collective entity. The productive
capacities of immaterial labor on the Internet encompass the work of
writing/reading/managing and participating in mailing lists/Web
sites/chatlines. These activities fall outside the concept of "abstract
labor," which Marx defined as the provision of time for the production
of value regardless of the useful qualities of the product.
24
They witness an investment of desire into production of the kind
cultural theorists have mainly theorized in relation to consumption.
This explosion of productive activities is undermined for various commentators by the minoritarian, gendered, and raced character of the Internet population. However, we might also argue that to recognize the existence of immaterial labor as a diffuse, collective quality of postindustrial labor in its entirety does not deny the existence of hierarchies of knowledge (both technical and cultural) which prestructure (but do not determine) the nature of such activities. These hierarchies shape the degrees to which such virtualities become actualities; that is, they go from being potential to being realized as processual, constituting moments of cultural, affective, and technical production. Neither capital nor living labor want a labor force that is permanently excluded from the possibilities of immaterial labor. But this is where their desires stop from coinciding. Capital wants to retain control over the unfolding of these virtualities and the processes of valorization. The relative abundance of cultural/technical/affective production on the Net, then, does not exist as a free-floating postindustrial utopia but in full, mutually constituting interaction with late capitalism, especially in its manifestation as global-venture capital.
Collective Minds
The collective nature of networked, immaterial labor has been
simplified by the utopian statements of the cyberlibertarians. Kevin
Kelly's popular thesis in
Out of Control, for example, is that the Internet is a collective "hive mind."
According to Kelly, the Internet is another manifestation of a principle
of self-organization that is widespread throughout technical, natural,
and social systems. The Internet is the material evidence of the
existence of the self-organizing, infinitely productive activities of
connected human minds.
25
From a different perspective Pierre Levy draws on cognitive
anthropology and poststructuralist philosophy to argue that computers
and computer networks are sites that enable the emergence of a
"collective intelligence." According to Eugene Provenzo, Levy, who is
inspired by early computer pioneers such as Douglas Engelbart, argues
for a new humanism "that incorporates and enlarges the scope of
self-knowledge and collective thought."
26
According to Levy, we are passing from a Cartesian model of
thought based on the singular idea of
cogito
(I think) to a collective or plural
cogitamus
(we think).
What is collective intelligence? It is a form of
universally distributed
intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting
in the effective mobilization of skills.... The basis and goal of
collective intelligence is the mutual recognition and enrichment of
individuals rather than the cult of fetishized or hypostatized
communities.
27
Like Kelly, Levy frames his argument within the common rhetoric
of competition and flexibility that dominates the hegemonic discourse
around digitalization: "The more we are able to form intelligent
communities, as open-minded, cognitive subjects capable of initiative,
imagination, and rapid response, the more we will be able to ensure our
success in a highly competitive environment."
28
In Levy's view, the digital economy highlights the impossibility
of absorbing intelligence within the process of automation: unlike the
first wave of cybernetics, which displaced workers from the factory,
computer networks highlight the unique value of human intelligence as
the true creator of value in a knowledge economy. In his opinion, since
the economy is increasingly reliant on the production of creative
subjectivities, this production is highly likely to engender a new
humanism, a new centrality of man's [
sic
] creative potentials. Especially in Kelly's case, it has been
easy to dismiss the notions of a "hive mind" and a self-organizing
Internet-as-free-market as euphoric capitalist mumbo jumbo. One cannot
help being deeply irritated by the blindness of the digital capitalist
to the realities of working in the high-tech industries, from the
poisoning world of the silicon chips factories to the electronic
sweatshops of America Online, where technical work is downgraded and
worker obsolescence is high.
29
How can we hold on to the notion that cultural production and
immaterial labor are collective on the Net (both inner and outer)
without subscribing to the idealistic cyberdrool of the digerati?
We could start with a simple observation: the self-organizing, collective intelligence of cybercultural thought captures the existence of networked immaterial labor, but also neutralizes the operations of capital. Capital, after all, is the unnatural environment within which the collective intelligence materializes. The collective dimension of networked intelligence needs to be understood historically, as part of a specific momentum of capitalist development. The Italian writers who are identified with the post-Gramscian Marxism of autonomia have consistently engaged with this relationship by focusing on the mutation undergone by labor in the aftermath of the factory. The notion of a self-organizing "collective intelligence" looks uncannily like one of their central concepts, the "general intellect," a notion that the autonomists "extracted" out of the spirit, if not the actual wording, of Marx's Grundrisse. The "collective intelligence" or "hive mind" captures some of the spirit of the "general intellect," but removes the autonomists' critical theorization of its relation to capital.
In the autonomists' favorite text, the
Grundrisse, and especially in the "Fragment on Machines," Marx argues that
"knowledge - scientific knowledge in the first place, but not
exclusively - tends to become precisely by virtue of its autonomy from
production, nothing less than the principal productive force, thus
relegating repetitive and compartmentalized labor to a residual
position. Here one is dealing with knowledge... which has become
incarnate... in the automatic system of machines."
30
In the vivid pages of the "Fragment," the "other" Marx of the
Grundrisse
(adopted by the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s against
the more orthodox endorsement of
Capital), describes the system of industrial machines as a horrific
monster of metal and flesh:
The production process has ceased to be a labor process in the
sense of a process dominated by labor as its governing unity. Labor
appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the
individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system;
subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only
a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but
rather in the living, (active) machinery, which confronts his
individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism.
31
The Italian autonomists extracted from these pages the notion of
the "general intellect" as "the ensemble of knowledge... which
constitute[s] the epicenter of social production."
32
Unlike Marx's original formulation, however, the autonomists
eschewed the modernist imagery of the general intellect as a hellish
machine. They claimed that Marx completely identified the general
intellect (or knowledge as the principal productive force) with fixed
capital (the machine) and thus neglected to account for the fact that
the general intellect cannot exist independently of the concrete
subjects who mediate