Politics Without Action, Economy Without Labor

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Politics without Action, Economy without Labor Brett Neilson (bio)

1. The bipolar machine

Politics and economy, sovereignty and governance, Father and Son, law and order: this is the seriesof binaries along which Giorgio Agamben, in Il regno e la gloria , strings his analysis of the currentdominance of management over all aspects of social life.

1 By seeking to demonstrate how the

paradigm of oikonomia , particularly as developed in arguments about the Trinity among 2nd-century AD theologians, provides a hidden but crucial current in the genealogy of contemporary forms of power, Agamben parts ways with the main thrust of Western political theory, which focuses itsanalysis upon sovereignty. Conversely, he refuses the path of many of Michel Foucault's latter dayinterpreters, who insist that the historical break with sovereignty has been decisive and that power now takes exclusively the horizontal and decentered form of governance. For Agamben, there arealways two poles to what he calls the bipolar machine of power. Even if, as today, there is a primacyof governance, both poles remain present. If sovereign power were absent, there would be nogovernment. Rather, there would be another form of power.

The strength of Agamben's analysis is to account for what thinkers all over the world describe as aprocess of depoliticization, without relinquishing the possibility of repoliticization. The apparentdominance of economics over politics that seems a hallmark of modern capitalism is not a definitivevictory or "end of politics" but rather part of a longer historical tension or conflict between sovereigntyand governance that is constitutive of the so-called bipolar machine. Agamben's genealogicalreconstruction of the economy is thus something other than a political economy, which assumes(once and for all) the dominance of politics over economy. At the same time, it is something other than what Marx dubbed the critique of political economy, to remember the subtitleof Capital. Agamben's analysis shares affinities with that of Hannah Arendt, who laments Marx'selevation of the animal laborans to a position of primacy in his vision of human existence .

2 Like

Arendt, Agamben seems to believe that the emergence of the private concerns of the oikos within thepublic sphere signals an eclipse of meaningful political action. Yet there can be no return to theancient polis. The political and the economic remain locked as two poles of a single machine of power, their fluctuations and relative dominance shaping not only micro negotiations of power butalso the unfolding of entire historical epochs.

In tracing the theological origins of modern economy to patristic debates about the trinity, Agamben builds a genealogical configuration of the economy that parallels the one he constructedin State of Exception , where the theological political figure had been forged to represent the practiceof state violence.

3 Put simply, 2nd-century theologians such as Irenaeus introduced the Greek

concept of oikonomia to theology to explain how the oneness of God could be reconciled with thetripartite structure of the trinity. Just as the master of the Greek oikos could share the management of the household without losing power, so God can remain one in substance or being but divided intothree as regards his practical actions. The mystery of the Trinity thus pertains not to the ontologicaldimension of God's being but rather to his management of the world and salvation. Agambendiscovers in this mystery the hidden epistemological paradigm of economic theology that not onlyanimates current neoliberal administration but also leaves occasional traces in the history of

economic thought, such as the entry on "animal economy" in Diderot andd'Alambert's Encyclopedia or Adam Smith's metaphor of the invisible hand.

2. The Trinity formula

The gambit of this paper is to read Agamben's genealogical analysis of modern government against astriking moment of Trinitarian thinking that, despite its pre-eminent positioning in the archive of political economy, goes strangely un-analyzed in his sweeping reconstruction of the paradigm of economic theology. I have in mind Chapter 48 of Marx's Capital: Volume III entitled "The Trinity

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Formula." The first sentence of this chapter makes it clear that Marx does not shy away from themysteries Agamben seeks to broach:

Capital-profit (profit of enterprise plus interest), land-ground-rent, labour-wages, this Trinity form holds initself all the mysteries of the social production process.4

There is a sense in which this statement can be read as the archetypal resurfacing of the patristicdoctrine on the Trinity in modern political economic thought. Profit, rent, wages: these three sources

of revenue, already identified in the works of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, appear to "belong tocompletely disparate spheres and to have not the slightest analogy with each other. "

5 As far as

bourgeois economics is concerned, their "mutual relationship is like that of lawyer's fees, beetroot andmusic."

6 Yet, disparate as these relations may appear, they "all belong to the same sphere, that of

value."7 Marx insists that it is the same substance that is transformed into these various categories:

They are also sources of revenue in the sense that capital fixes one portion of the value of a year'slabour and hence of its product in the form of profit, landed property fixes another part in the form of rentand wage-labour a third portion in the form of wages, and that it is precisely by this transformation thatthese portions are converted into the revenues of the capitalist, the landowner and the worker, withoutcreating the substance itself that is transformed into these various categories. The distribution rather presupposes this substance as already present, i.e. the total value of the annual product, which isnothing more than objectified social labour .8

It is certainly possible to trace here the division between substance and practice, ontology and

action, which animates Agamben's identification of the Trinity as the basis of the double structure of power. Things become more difficult when Marx attempts to correlate this "economic three-in-one" tothe political demands of social class.

9 As is well known, the final chapter of Capital: Volume III ,

entitled "Classes," is a fragment, which breaks off just as Marx seems on the verge of elaborating onehis most crucial concepts.

The fragment begins by correlating the "three great classes of modern society" - "wage-laborers,capitalists and landowners" - with the respective sources of income addressed in the chapter on "TheTrinity Formula."

10 Marx then states that even in England, where the capitalist mode of production is

most highly developed, "this class articulation does not appear in its pure form."11

Due to processes of transition, the class Trinity only ever appears tendentially. Furthermore, the "identity of revenues andrevenue sources" only partly explains what "makes" the "three great social classes. "

12 There is

something more to class than its link with a particular source of income. As Mario Tronti observes, it

is on this profoundly anti-economistic note that Capital breaks off .

13

Just as Marx's chief work seemspoised to develop a conception of class adequate to the social antagonism of class struggle and theproduction of political subjectivities, his writing jarringly ceases, never to be returned to in theremaining years of his life.

3. Two is not three

Agamben's discussion of the bipolar machine allows us to speculate on the reasons for Marx'sreticence beyond the familiar explanation offered in Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.

14 According to Schumpeter, Marx was so habituated to thinking in terms of class that he

could not recognize it as a theoretical problem or see the need of giving it a precise conceptualdefinition. Poised on the brink between politics and oikonomia , Marx is unable to make the switchthat would resolve three "great social classes" into a single political substance. In this sense, there is

something anti-Trinitarian about Marx's thought. The problem arises with the discovery of productivelabor and its alienation. Or to recall the phrase offered at the beginning of "The Trinity Formula," withthe fact that capital "is not a thing" but "a definite social relation of production pertaining to a particular historical social formation."

15

Already in the work of the Physiocrats, who introduced the distinction between productive andunproductive labor, there was an uneasy superposition of a tripartite division of class and adichotomous vision that contrasts those who produce wealth with those who appropriate it. By theend of the eighteenth century, with the publication of Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population , this dichotomous vision had hardened into a view of society as "divided into a class of

















































proprietors, and a class of laborers, and with self-love as the main-spring of the greatmachine."

16Malthus supplies one of the clearest antecedents for those sections of Marx's oeuvre that

identify a central social conflict between a class of laborers and a class of capitalists. Undoubtedly themost famous of these passages is found in Marx and Engel's "Manifesto of the Communist Party,"which identifies the struggle of "two great classes directly facing each other" not only as the conditionof contemporary society but also as the principle animating the "history of all hitherto existing society":

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word,

oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, nowhidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society atlarge, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.17

There is never any real attempt in Marx to reconcile this dichotomous view of class struggle, inwhich class underlies a political bifurcation founded on an economic basis, with the Trinitarian view,which tentatively but inadequately (in Marx's own admission) correlates class with the three sourcesof revenue in modern society: rent, profit, and wages. Two is not three. Only by isolating rent as arelic of the feudal system that perversely persists in capitalist society can the Trinitarian view of classbe made to sit aside the historical and political narrative of class struggle between capitalist andproletariat. In this sense, Marx's understanding of class displays an underlying tension. Class isirredeemably multiple, two or three, but in so far as it might furnish a coherent political concept, itmust be one. Between the dialectical model that synthesizes opposites into wholes and the Trinitarian

model that collapses threes into ones, Marx appears caught.

This is how Antonio Negri puts it in his Il Manifesto review of Il regno e la gloria. Remembering that Agamben too wants to posit a bipolar model of power alongside a Trinitarian logic that reconciles theoneness of sovereignty with the decentered multiplicity of governance, Negri correlates the logic of exception, which in the account of Homo Sacer invests sovereign power, with the violence of capitalist accumulation:

In the capitalistic economy, that excessive and founding political act that is the exception finds itsequivalent in the act of original accumulation, of taking possession. Now, no matter what the violence bywhich that original act has been done, there is still the fact that "primitive accumulation," granting"possession" as the source of "right," are operations that, far from reassembling the unit of power, split itup. "Primitive expropriation means separation of the worker and the implements of work," writes Marx,"inaugurating," so to say, the class struggle. Here there is neither unity nor trinity: there is only the two.18

Negri's most fundamental objection to Il regno e la gloria is its projection of the economic "onto aweb on which there is no productive subject, there is no worker - there is only the subject of the stateand the machine - pure alienation."

19 Agamben, in his view, constructs a genealogy of political and

economic power in which there emerges no subject that can offer resistance. By contrast, Negrirecalls Marx and Feuerbach's conviction that "to destroy the state of the owners was to destroy their God. Both the One and the Triune."

20 I will not explore in detail the knot of tensions and affinities that

bind the writings of Agamben and Negri.21

Suffice it to say that in Il regno e la gloria , Agambenrevisits the discussion of constituent and constituted power he makes in Part 3.2 of HomoSacer.

22 Again, these categories (whose separability is, for Negri, the condition for the primacy and

autonomy of constituent struggle) are found to be tied in a circular and dialectical relation. Agamben'spoint here is to establish the vicarious nature of governmental power. Precisely because the attemptto ground oikonomia in politics, or to ground law in order, runs into this unresolvable paradox of sovereignty, does government appear as a groundless and essentially anarchical power.

4. An ethics of inoperability

In Homo Sacer , this impossibility of breaking the sovereign bind leads Agamben to advocate apolitics of potentiality - an ethics of preferring not to (do or be) that exceeds even the refusal of labor advocated by exponents of Italian operaismo.

23 In Il Regno e la gloria , he seeks to develop an ethics

of inoperability (inoperabilità ). Already prefigured in "In This Exile (Italian Diary 1992-1994)" and thereading of a key passage from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics published in 2004 as "The Work of Man," the notion of inoperability entails "the exposition of humankind's absence of work as well as the


































exposition of humankind's creative semi-indifference to any task."24

The parallel to Agamben'sadvocacy of a politics without action is thus the construction of an economy without labor.

It is not simply or only, as Negri would imply, a matter of the productive subject falling out of Agamben's analysis of the theological precedents of modern economy. Inoperability is somethingother than a declaration of the right to laziness or the excess of leisure as figured by thinkers asdiverse as Lafargue and Veblen. For Agamben, it describes "the metaphysical operations of theanthropogenesis that liberates man from his biological and social destiny and places him in thatundefinable dimension that we have come to call politics."

25 Given that Agamben promises a final

volume of the Homo Sacer series on inoperability in the preface to Il regno e la gloria (itself identifiedas Vol. II, 2 of this series), it is difficult at this stage to fully grasp his elaboration of this concept. For now, it is clear that it is linked to the category of glory, for which Il regno e la gloriasupplies a lengthyarchaeology.

Glory, in this text, is posed as the polar opposite and necessary supplement to reign ( regno ),much as government is positioned with respect to sovereignty. Apart from the lengthy archaeology of the uses of the term in theology - which, Agamben aims to show, assigns glory not merely anaesthetic but also a political role - glory is essential to the formation of consensus in the modern state.If, in the past, consensus was inscribed through the forms of acclamation and enthusiasm, today ittakes the form of public opinion. In the current political environment, glory thus coincides with the

forms of display and mediation described by Debord in The Society of the Spectacle. 26The linkbetween glory and inoperability becomes evident in the paradigm of economic theology:

In so far as it names the end of man and the condition that follows universal judgement, glory coincideswith the cessation of all activity and work (opera ). It is what remains when the machine of divine oikonomia has reached its completion and the hierarchies and angelic ministers have become fullyinoperative.27

Furthermore, glory takes the place of that "unthinkable vacuum that is the inoperability of power."

28 At the center of the bipolar machine, where sovereignty and government incessantly

interact and distinguish themselves from one another, there is nothing but emptiness. Precisely for this reason, the inoperability, which is essential for the functioning of the machine, must be"maintained at all costs … in the form of glory."

29 Agamben goes on to note that in the iconography of

power, both profane and religious, this central void of glory finds its exemplary symbol in the image of the empty throne. Moreover, in an analysis that refers to Aristotle, Spinoza and Philo, he surmisesthat inoperability does not mean inertia or inactivity but rather a form of action that does not implysuffering or tiredness:

The self, subjectivity, is that which opens itself like a central inoperability in every action, like theliveability of every life. In this inoperability, the life we live is above all the life through which we live - it isabove all our power to act and live, our ability to act and live. The bios here coincides without residuewith the zoē. 30

Inoperability here seems to describe an ethical device for liberation from exceptional power, whichseeks to violently reduce the bios to the zoē. Clearly it is closely linked to Heidegger's conceptof Gelassenheit , which describes a will-less "releasement" into a relation with technology foundedneither on domination nor mastery. Inoperability is a resistance that is interiorized but never realizedin concrete works, which Agamben implies would only perpetuate the operations of biopower. Thus,the final chapter of Il regno e la gloria associates it with the Aristotelian concept of poiesis rather than

that of praxis.

5. The return of rent

It is tempting to ask how we should read Agamben's emphasis on inoperability in the context of post-Fordist capitalism, in which, according to Paolo Virno, "labor has introjected itself into manycharacteristics which originally marked the experience of politics" and " poiesis has taken onnumerous aspects of praxis. "

31 What Virno seeks to outline is a movement equal and opposite to

what Hannah Arendt identifies as the propensity for politics in the twentieth century to imitate labor, tobecome a sort of fabrication of new objects: the state, the party, history, and so on.

32 In claiming that






































it is rather labor that has taken on characteristics of political action, Virno follows other Italian operaista thinkers - e.g. Christian Marazzi - who argue that contemporary work involvescommunicational, affective, and relational tasks that are immanent to the ties between humanbeings.

33 "[I]n the 'world of contemporary labor," Virno argues, "we find the 'being in the presence of

others,' the relationship with the presence of others, the beginning of new processes, and theconstitutive familiarity with contingency, the unforeseen and the possible."

34 While it is important to

remember that, for Agamben, inoperability does not necessarily entail an exclusion of praxis , Virno'scontentions raise important questions about the relation of inoperability to labor and the productivesubject, which necessitate a revisiting of the Trinity formula of wages, profit, and rent.

Part and parcel of the view of contemporary labor as based on communicative and affectiverelations immanent to the human animal is the notion that capital comes to depend on processes of collective creation, which it can neither compose nor orchestrate. This entails less a system for theextraction of surplus value through the generation of profit than one for the imposition of rents bymeans of devices such as intellectual property rights. For Carlo Vercellone, the "currenttransformation of capitalism is characterized by a full-fledged comeback and proliferation of forms of rent paralleled by a complete change in the relationship between wages, rent and profit."

35 In the

period of industrial or Fordist capitalism, there was a progressive marginalization of rent, whichencouraged the view derived from Ricardo and repeated by Marx in Theories of Surplus Value , thatrent was a precapitalist legacy and an obstacle to the progressive movement of capitalist

accumulation.36 In the era of post-Fordist or cognitive capitalism, however, there is rather a blurring of the distinction between rent and profit, both of which "tend to manifest themselves merely as arelation of distribution that is mostly dissociated from any positive function within the organisation of production and wealth generation."

37

According to this view, which Vercellone argues was foreshadowed by Marx in Capital Volume III ,rent is the other side of the common, the moment of appropriation by capital of a fully socialized labor that can only be weakly subject to the measure of time. Objections to the proposition of theimmeasurability of labor aside, the question remains as to how this reconfiguration of the tripartitedivision wages, profit, and rent intersects the ethics of inoperability advocated by Agamben.

38 At first

glance there would appear to be a glaring contradiction between the notion of inoperability, whichentails a kind of action that exceeds all ends, and the claim that life in the post-Fordist era has beencolonized by work. But there is no reason why Agamben's political radicalism must manifest itself, as

he states rather polemically in the preface to Il regno e la gloria , against "the disingenuous emphasison productivity and labor that has severely impeded the access of modernity to politics understood asthe proper dimension of man."

39 Indeed, the genealogical reconstruction of the modern economy

could truly contribute to the filling of that gap marked out by the unexplained break in Marx's writing -a gap that despite many attempts, both theoretical and pragmatic, has never really been crossed.

The thesis of a collapse of profit and rent in post-Fordist capitalism suggests a realignment of Marx's Trinity formula. Profit and rent remain analytically distinct but, in practice, they alignthemselves around a single pole, since both require the appropriation of the surplus generated by thesocial cooperation of labor. The tripartite scheme of wages, profit and rent thus tends to reorganizeitself into a bipolar structure. On the one side, there are wages, which continue to designate theremuneration for productive labor, while, on the other, the blurring of profit and rent signifies theappearance of a whole new set of strategies for the extraction of surplus: the gradual replacement of

factory discipline with an ethos of self-management, the precarization of labor, intellectual propertyrights, and so on.

Under these circumstances, in which life and work have become thoroughly intertwined, it makessense to posit a political struggle based on the opposition of life and work. As Weeks argues, such acritical standpoint and political project requires "not the discovery of a space or defense of asubjectivity that is outside, but the struggle for a different quality of experience."

40 In a post-Fordist

economy where the dominant forms of work are about establishing communicative and affectiverelations with other humans, one does not imagine life as a condition of privation where such relationsare minimized or eliminated. Rather it is about building such relations in ways that resist the



































appropriation of capital, striving "towards relations of equality and autonomy rather than hierarchy andcommand."

41 In this sense, an ethics of inoperability might sit alongside a sensibility that recognizes

the existence of the productive subject but, as Agamben insists, affirms the "liveability" of "the lifethrough which we live."

42

6. The "most inconspicuous of all transformations"

I am aware that the above sketch of a political position in which inoperability dovetails with anapproach committed to the productive subject and the production of subjectivity is perhaps impossibleto achieve through the reconciliation of philosophical systems - say, that of Agamben with that of Marx, or even Negri. But this is precisely the point. It is not about the reconciliation of existingphilosophical systems but rather their reinvention or revision, on both sides, to accommodate thepotentialities and sensibilities they seem to exclude or disdain. In the case of a work like Il regno e lagloria , which builds upon a tradition of theological erudition, it is all too easy to dismiss thecelebration of an ethics of inoperability as an aesthetic or spiritual exquisiteness that remainsindifferent to the materiality of politics. The more sophisticated or challenging reading seeks to turn Agamben against himself, or at least his preferred theoretical witnesses, to bring the notion of inoperability into interaction with that of class struggle. Let us recall the words of Walter Benjaminin On the Concept of History :

The class struggle, which always remains in view for a historian schooled in Marx, is a struggle for therough and material things, without which there is nothing fine and spiritual. Nevertheless these latter arepresent in the class struggle as something other than mere booty, which falls to the victor. They arepresent as confidence, as courage, as humor, as cunning, as steadfastness in this struggle, and theyreach far back into the mists of time. They will, ever and anon, call every victory which has ever beenwon by the rulers into question. Just as flowers turn their heads towards the sun, so too does that whichhas been turned, by virtue of a secret kind of heliotropism, towards the sun which is dawning in the sky of history. To this most inconspicuous of all transformations the historical materialist must pay heed.43

Agamben could 'pay heed' to these sentences from Benjamin, one of his most favoredphilosophical predecessors, in his attempt to fashion a conception of the political adequate to therepoliticization of the present. It would be possible to relate the ethics of inoperability to the qualitiesof confidence, courage, humor, cunning and steadfastness mentioned by Benjamin here. It iscertainly not a matter of seeking to return to the class struggle of proletarians and capitalists aspracticed and imagined in the heyday of industrial capitalism. If, as Mario Tronti has recently

commented, "that which remains of class struggle is more the struggle than the class," the challengeshould rather be to search out the present contradictions in the political and economic forms of capitalism.

44 As Benjamin implies, such forces and fissures may be detectable only in the "most

inconspicuous of all transformations." Agamben is an acute enough reader and shaper of the presentto discern this "secret kind" of movement. He undoubtedly has the capacity to address the gap leftopen by Marx, to relate it to the void of inoperability he locates at the heart of the bipolar machine. Mysense is that he would prefer not to.

Brett Neilson Brett Neilson is Director of the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney. Recent publicationshave appeared in venues such as Rue Descartes, Transeuropéennes, Subjectivity, Cultural Critique and Theory, and Culture and Society. He is the author of Free Trade in the Bermuda Triangle ... and Other Tales of Counterglobalization (Minnesota 2004).

Notes

1. Giorgio Agamben, Il regno e la gloria: Per una genealogia teologica dell' economia e del governo (Vicenza: NeriPozza, 2007).

2. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition , (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

3. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception , trans. Kevin Attell (2003; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,2003/2005).

4. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume III , trans. David Fernbach (1894; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 953.













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5. Marx, Capital: Volume III , 953.








13. Mario Tronti, "Classe," in Lessico Marxiano , ed. Libera Università Metropolitana (Roma: Manifesto Libri, 2008),65-76.

14. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942; reprint, London: Routledge, 1994).


16. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London: St. Paul's Church Yard,1798),http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/malthus/malthus.10.html (accessed 27 January 2009).

17. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party," in Marx/Engels Selected Works , Vol. 1,trans. Samuel Moore and Frederick Engels (1848; reprint, Moscow: Progress Publishers,1969),http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/manifest.pdf (accessed 27 January 2009).

18. Antonio Negri, "Sovereignty: That Divine Mystery of the Affairs of Earthly Life," Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 9, 1 (2008): 98-99.

19. Negri, "Sovereignty: That Divine Mystery of the Affairs of Earthly Life," 98.

20. Negri, "Sovereignty: That Divine Mystery of the Affairs of Earthly Life," 100.

21. However, see Brett Neilson, "Potenza Nuda ? Sovereignty, Biopolitics, Capitalism," Contretemps 5 (2004): 63-78.

22. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life , trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1998).

23. For a longer discussion of Agamben's relation with operaista thinkers, see Brett Neilson, "Cultural Studies andGiorgio Agamben," in New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory , ed. Gary Hall and Clare Birchall (Edinburgh:Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 128-145.

24. Giorgio Agamben, "In this Exile (Italian Diary 1992-1994)," in Means without End: Notes on Politics , trans.Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (1996; reprint, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 142;Giorgio Agamben, "The Work of Man," trans. Kevin Attell, in Sovereignty and Life , ed. Matthew Calarco and Steven

DeCaroli (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1-10.

25. Agamben, Il regno e la gloria , 274. My translation.

26. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle , trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1967; reprint, New York: ZoneBooks, 1994).
















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31. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life , trans. IsabellaBertoletti et al. (2000; reprint, New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 50.

32. Arendt, The Human Condition.

33. Christian Marazzi, Il posto dei calzini: La svolta linguistica dell' economia e i suoi effetti sulla politica (Torino:Bollati Boringhieri, 1999).

34. Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life , 51.

35. Carlo Vercellone, "The New Articulation of Wages, Rent and Profit in Cognitive Capitalism" (paper presented at Art of Rent Seminar Series, School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London, February 29,2008), http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/26/55/84/PDF/The_new_articulation_of_wagesHall1.pdf (accessed 27January 2009).

36. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value , Vol. 1, trans. Emile Burns (Moscow: Progress Publishers,1963),http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/index.htm (accessed 27 January2009).

37. Vercellone, "The New Articulation of Wages, Rent and Profit in Cognitive Capitalism", 2.

38. For a critical approach to the proposition of the immeasurability of labor in post-Fordism, see George Caffentzis,"Immeasurable Value? An Essay on Marx's Legacy," The Commoner 10 (2005): 87-114,http://www.commoner.org.uk/10caffentzis.pdf (accessed 27 January 2009).


40. Kathi Weeks, "Life Within and Against Work: Affective Labor, Feminist Critique, and Post-FordistPolitics,"Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 7, no.1 (2007): 247, http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/7-1/71weeks.pdf (accessed 27 January 2009).

41. Weeks, Ephemera , 248.


43. Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History," trans. Dennis Redmond, in Gesammelten Schriften , Vol.1.2(1940; reprint, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag,1974),http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm (accessed 27 January 2009).

44. Tronti, "Classe", 76. My translation.

Copyright © 2010 Brett Neilson and The Johns Hopkins University Press








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Politics Without Action, Economy Without Labor