Los efectos de la movilidad geográfica docente sobre el trabajo con pares y en

The politics attendant to changes in the organisation of labour can be more fully understood by means of an inner-related method of immanent critique, empirical analysis, and dialectical abstraction. In my examination of the contemporary landscape of labour I bring the method of immanent critique to bear on concepts and theories that address themselves to apparent changes in both the organisation and the concrete forms of wage-labour in this conjunction of capitalism. In chapter two I deploy this method in an examination of the concepts of aesthetic labour, affective labour, emotional labour, and immaterial labour. These concepts are used to describe and demarcate what are purportedly “new” forms of labour, unique to a specifically post-modern/post-industrial economy. I use the term “emergent forms of labour” to describe these forms of work in their concreteness, distinct from my specific use of conceptual terms to describe the theoretical products – the “abstract” forms – that have emerged from the study of emergent forms of labour. From this process of immanent critique of these abstract concepts of labour, a series of internal contradictions emerge. Most urgently, a need to focus more carefully and specifically on the contradictions of post-operaismo theoretical systems emerges as a consequence of their generalising aspect and the embeddedness of their theories within a theory of capital. I undertake the critique of post-operaismo in chapter three. As such, the form of immanent critique begins with a concern for the internal contradictions of these concepts of labour and the contradictions that pertain between them in chapter two, to a concern with the contradictions that emerge from the post-operaismo characterisation of the politics of work in

1 Vilfredo Pareto. Les Systemes socialistes, II. (Paris, 1902). 332. Cf. Bertell Ollman. Alienation: Marx’s conception of man in capitalist society, Second edition. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 3.

chapter three. The terrain of critique shifts to an examination of the effects of post-operaismo epistemological assumptions upon their key concepts, their analyses and their conclusions. I navigate this terrain with an examination of post-operaisti understandings of alienation and the effect of these understandings on the key concepts of their theoretical matrix; namely, general intellect and autonomy. In this way the latter parts of chapter three situates post-operaismo theories within the Marxist tradition and brings critique to bear on their internal contradictions.

By chapter four, ‘Labour Processes and Indeterminate Bodies’, the focal point of the critique is turned to how these theories on labour in contemporary capitalism can be seen to address, or not, the concrete conditions of their object of study. This positive critique proceeds through an analysis of the labour process of two forms of labour that utilise the affective, aesthetic, emotional, cognitive and communicative capacities of the worker: the work of advertising

‘creative’ workers and that of front-line call centre workers. It is important to state here that these examinations proceed as illustrations of forms of labour that bear the key characteristics that are highlighted in the conceptual field of the contemporary landscape of labour and not as a form of generalisation; I am not arguing that these concrete forms of work are the same as other concrete forms of emergent labour. Rather that important elements of the political economy of emergent forms of labour can be seen at work here. As such, they provide an empirical focal point from which I can investigate the production of politics in forms of labour that utilise these embodied capacities of workers.

Finally, the thesis directly deploys the method of dialectical abstraction on two objects of study. Following from the key conclusion of chapter four – that the political capacities and potentialities of bodies are utilised in forms of labour that exploit the affective, aesthetic, emotional, cognitive and communicative capacities of the worker – chapter five produces a dialectical concept of ‘body work’ in order to further illuminate the political economic relations of emergent forms of labour. In doing so, the analysis brings the concepts of aesthetic and emotional labour more explicitly back into view. Chapter six deploys the dialectical method of abstraction in an examination of the question of alienation and the production of politics in the contemporary conjunction of capitalism.

This process raises a number of methodological requirements that should be set out before the enquiry begins. In this chapter I illustrate the characteristics of the method of immanent critique, a project which in turn requires a discussion of its intellectual history. I discuss some key features of Marx’s method of abstraction and its connection to enquiries into the relation between politics and production. This discussion of method concludes with an argument that labour is the nucleus of Marx’s theoretical system and his analysis; the critique of labour is the

essence of Marx’s political economy. As such, I argue in the final section of this chapter that to discard the theory of alienation is to abandon a head cornerstone of the critique of capitalism in both a negative and positive sense. To put this abstract statement in concrete historical terms, the failure to emancipate the workers, as noted by Marx in the epigraph I chose for the introduction to this work, is exactly the failure of all forms of so-called “actually existing socialism”. As Erich Fromm notes, ‘Marx's philosophy is one of protest; it is a protest imbued with faith in man, in his capacity to liberate himself, and to realise his potentialities.’¹ It is these twin notions of protest and the capacities of humanity that are the essence of my analysis of labour in the contemporary conjunction of capitalism. My interpretation of Marx thus proceeds from a prioritisation of “labour”, of the working class as the marginalised political subjects of capitalist societies, and therein proceeds as a thesis on bringing the working class back in to politics as a challenge to liberal understandings of the dimensions of political space and liberal characterisations of the political functions of capitalism. Attendant to this same aim to locate and examine political subjectivity in the contemporary conjunction of capitalism, my negative critique connects to three Marxist approaches to the political economy of work. My examination seeks to highlight the subjects that are absent from structuralist accounts of capitalist production and is brought to bear on the teleologies that follow from Althusserian economic determinism. Second, my analysis demonstrates that there are fields in critical studies in Marxism that produce the same teleology, but from the opposite side. Whereas Althusser produces an objective determinism – the position that the supersession of capitalism results from the inevitable structural overdeterminations produced by the capitalist organisation of production – the post-operaisti produce a subjective determinism – the position that communism already exists in an elemental form because the worker is already autonomous from capital and therefore a teleological ‘exodus’ from capital is an immanent condition of economic organisation in this period of capitalism. Finally, my critique is directed at the reduction of “labour” to “production” that is common in regulation approaches to political economy. I argue that, politically, the reduction of labour to production brings to the fore the very same absence of the essence of communism in “actually existing socialisms” – this essence being the emancipation of the workers – and as such is always in danger of producing the same ‘Marx-in-caricature opposite’ that is characteristic of the Soviet “Five-Year Plan for pig-iron production”.² To address the lack in each of these approaches to a political economy of work I draw upon elements of socialist humanist and Lukacsian readings of Marx, particularly Bertell Ollman and István Mészáros’ characterisations of Marx’s method and the

1 Erich Fromm. Marx’s Concept of Man. (London: Continuum, 2004). vi.

2 Paul Paolucci. Marx and the Politics of Abstraction. (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 1.

Frankfurt School’s approach to subject formation in late capitalism. In this synthesis I also seek to resolve the structuralist critique of socialist humanism, namely the error of an

‘anthropological interpretation of Marx.’¹ As such, my critique does not seek to obliterate its objects but rather aims for a critical examination and an attendant resolution of absences, contradiction, and incongruency within and between abstract characterisations and concrete conditions. Nonetheless, my critique also proceeds within an understanding of the impossibility of this project to resolve the abstract and the concrete; as George E. McCarthy argues, ‘the concrete subject…cannot be completely captured by a critical science for the two realms of thought and history can never be synthesized into a higher unity.’² My approach also proceeds on the basis of Adorno’s insight, as noted by J.M. Bernstein, that ‘the division of labour between disciplines such as sociology, philosophy, history and psychology is not contained in or dictated by their material, but has been forced on them from the outside.’³ As such, I reject the separation between philosophy and the social sciences and, in-keeping with my dialectical approach, regard these divisions as vantage points onto the same concrete totality.

Before I begin my discussion of each of these aspects of the method it is important to highlight that the process of immanent critique/empirical analysis/dialectical abstraction is exactly that – a process. These methodological operations are aspects of one intrinsically connected and inherently related method. Throughout this discussion I clarify how in Marx’s method the process of immanent critique, empirical analysis, dialectical abstraction and the development of his ontology proceed alongside one another. The principles of immanent critique emerge from the production of a materialist dialectic method; the fundamental characteristics of the materialist dialectic proceed from the process of immanent critique; immanent critique and dialectical abstraction are always connected to empirical analysis: Marx’s ontology is produced by these methods and the ontology determines the form of these methods. As well as describing the method of the thesis, a key aim of this discussion is to demonstrate that the validity and rigour of these seemingly circular procedures originates in the fact of political economy that ‘determinants’ do not stand ‘completely independent of what is determined.’⁴ With this in mind, because Marx’s ontology can be seen to emerge from the recursive manner in which the method is developed, this chapter is structured so as to illustrate this emergence and ontology will be discussed last.

1 Louis Althusser. For Marx. Tr. Ben Brewster. (London: Verso, 2005). 155-6.

2 George E. McCarthy. Marx’s Critique of Science and Positivism: The Methodological Foundations of Political Economy. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988). 107.

3 Theodor W. Adorno. Cf. J.M. Bernstein. Introduction to The Culture Industry: Selected essays on mass culture.

(London: Routledge Classics, 2001). 2-3.

4 Diane Elson. ‘The Value Theory of Labour’ in Diane Elson (ed.) Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism. London: CSE Books, 1979). 139.

The method of the thesis proceeds by way of an interpretation of Marx’s thought. The thesis adopts Marx’s categories and the sequence and mechanisms of his methods of enquiry with Marx’s central problematic in mind: the critique of capitalism. Notwithstanding, it does so without claiming that this is the definitive interpretation of Marx. I have no desire to engage in debates regarding the interpretation of Marx’s texts although I recognise that it is impossible to avoid engaging in interpretation itself; I set out an approach to my own problematic on the basis of an immanent critique of Marx, an immanent critique of research in Marxism and an immanent critique of the problematic itself that engages with liberal and social democratic approaches. I bring my interpretation of Marx’s ontology, method, concepts and categories to bear on the concrete problematic of the production of politics in emergent forms of labour and of course the character of my interpretation is informed by my problematic. As such I would hope that the question of rigour should be brought to bear on the concrete analysis, rather than the correctitude of the representation of Marx, on the cogency of the approach rather than the devotion to the text. As noted above, my approach engages with a number of streams of inquiry in critical research in Marxism and other epistemological approaches and as such I have also attempted to avoid too much fidelity to any one by taking an open and critical approach to elements of dogma and transcendence that can be present, while also being sympathetic to the problems of incommensurability that can attend synthetical approaches. Further to this question, the thesis argues that Marx requires revision in two important ways. Firstly, Marx requires revision because history has proceeded. The organisation of the labour is neither the same as in the 19^th century nor, as I will argue in chapter three, has its organisational form developed in the way that Marx thought it would. Secondly, Marx made some important errors in his analysis of capitalism that must be addressed. Importantly, although Marx offers elements toward a more full reading, I will argue in chapter five that his representation of the reproduction of labour-power is not expansive enough. Ultimately, I argue that Marx’s theory of alienation must be reconfigured in order to reflect the concrete transformations in the organisation of production in the so-called post-industrial economy. I argue that this revision of Marx is entirely cognate with Marx’s method and his ontological theory. Therefore, by way of this method, the thesis also adapts Marx’s categories and does so through a critical analysis of the concrete conditions of labour in the contemporary conjunction of capitalism.