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The Refusal of Work – A Brief Review

Nietzsche

Nietzsche, one of the earliest proponents of an anti-work ethic, critiqued primarily the morality of the work ethic. For him the morality of the duty of work was operated as a means of control, which subjugated the development of the individual in favour of the impersonal needs of society. While his specific critique of work may appear as an unremarkable call for unrestrained individualism, his critique of work must be viewed in the context of his wider critique of morality and the values that govern a society. Modern society’s values and moral judgements he deemed insufficient and reactive, he hoped for a society which went beyond the slave morality of fear and resentment, and instead sought its own overcoming. It is this critique of society’s values that we must consider Nietzsche’s anti-work sentiment. Although Nietzsche was not explicitly political, the distinction between atomised individualism, as it is promoted in contemporary consumer culture, and autonomism worthy of a mention here. Both Nietzsche and autonomism rejected the platonic idea that there was a defined place for everyone in society, suited to their work or profession. This notion stunted personal self-discovery and led to an impoverished society, centred on control and slave morality. In autonomism, and many Marxian accounts of worker struggle, the shared problems faced by the workers, which they all felt individually, led to a sense of collectivity in struggle.

 

Lafargue

Paul Lafargue is one of the first to argue for the intelligence of laziness, how aristocratic societies in the classical era despised work and relegated it to slaves. It is interesting to draw parallels to past aristocratic societies and their attitude towards work with the rise of what Piketty terms the super-managers, those who are essentially the modern-day aristocrats, but now do not claim hereditary status for their positions but rather their value as senior leadership. Nietzsche would be cracking a wry smile at this turn of events, today even aristocrats no longer claim the right be above work, but instead pretend to be valuable workers.

 

Russell

Bertrand Russell’s 1935 essay ‘In praise of idleness’, remains very relevant today. In it, Russell examines the incongruence of the view of the moral goodness of productive activity coupled with the moral unsoundness of consumption, or unrestrained enjoyment, noting that consumption and production were closely linked. He questions why if someone were to make an investment in a business activity which proved unsuccessful, this person would be seen differently to one who spent all their money on pleasure and enjoyment. The desirability of work Russell argues comes from pre-industrial society, when there was a class of idle landowners who most certainly did not want their peasants following in their example. Only in industrial society do we have enough wealth and technology to allow greater leisure time. Importantly, Russell raises the feminist issue of unpaid reproductive and household labour, as well as noting that it was finance that allowed us to create this present state of industrial innovation by borrowing against the future.

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Combating Stultification in Critical Thought: Ranciere, Deleuze, Nietzsche

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

– Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

I decided to look into the history of the workers’ movement, to find out the reasons for the continual mismatching of workers and the intellectuals who came and visited them, either to instruct them or to be instructed by them. It was my good fortune to discover that this relationship wasn’t a matter of knowledge on one side and ignorance on the other, nor was it a matter of knowing versus acting or of individuality versus community.

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…Emancipation starts from the principle of equality. It begins when we dismiss the opposition between looking and acting and understand that the distribution of the visible itself is part of the configuration of domination and subjection.

It starts when we realise that looking is also an action that confirms or modifies that distribution, and that “interpreting the world” is already a means of transforming it.

…this is what emancipation means: the blurring of the opposition between those who look and those who act, between those who are individuals and those who are members of a collective body.

⁃ Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator

The philosopher of the future is the explorer of ancient worlds, of peaks and caves, who creates only inasmuch as he recalls something that has been essentially forgotten. That something, according to Nietzsche, is the unity of life and thought. It is a complex unity: one step for life, one step for thought. Modes of life inspire ways of thinking; modes of thinking create ways of living. Life activates thought, and thought in turn affirms life.

– Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy

This post is a continuation of my previous one on the usefulness of capitalism as a concept. From the quotes above there are several key themes to be explored. The first being the relationship of theory and practice, thought and action, and the tightly-linked second theme is the role of the intellectual. I want to make it clear from the start that when I will be discussing intellectuals or non-intellectuals I have Rancière’s axiom of the equality of intelligences firmly in mind (more on that later), so I’m not talking about certain classes of people (intellectuals) contra some other class (working class). I’m not implying that there are people more adept at the work of thought, and others more oriented towards practical endeavours, what I am concerned with rather is the relationship of the labour of theory to the labour of practice, which Rancière and Nietzsche assert everyone performs to varying degrees.

When I argue that capitalism is not a useful concept, this begs the question of what are theoretical concepts useful for, and to whom? This question is another angle on the question of the relationship of thought and action, theory and practical life. Deleuze has answered both these questions, the former in his last major book ‘What is Philosophy?‘ (WP) and the latter in one of his earliest books, ‘Nietzsche and Philosophy‘ (NP). 

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Capitalism is not a Useful Concept

I stumbled across this fantastic book chapter by D. T. Cochrane.

academics experience similar difficulties when speaking of ‘capital.’ Economists, political scientists, even literary theorists, freely employ the concept, yet few can say what the word ‘capital’ truly signifies. Either unaware of or unconcerned by the serious problems with both the Marxist labor theory of value (LToV) and the neoclassical utility theory of value, they continue to discuss ‘capital’ as if it were conceptually unproblematic…academics may have an intuitive grasp of capital that they are unable to articulate adequately: they know it when they ‘see’ it. However, while we may live perfectly well with fuzzy conceptions of our emotions and the emotions of others, theoretical concepts cannot rest upon intuition; they must be clear and distinct. Otherwise, they risk becoming a catch-all, ascribed to almost anything, explaining almost nothing. If capital is one of the most important institutions of our current political economic system, then it demands as precise a meaning as we can give it. If concepts are meant to help us understand the institutions that order our lives, then we must constantly work to make our theoretical significations resemble, as closely as possible, the real world counterparts to which they refer.

Capitalism means absolutely nothing. It’s like listening to old fogeys grow lyrical about cyberspace(aka the internet), and you’ve grown up with it, you’re just trying to make the best of a world in which the internet is a ubiquitous fact. At least the internet has an agreed definition, unlike this thing the paranoids call capitalism. As if, we could get to the root of all evil, once and for all, excise it, then, POW…utopia Adventure Time world The book chapter continues:

“The prevailing, and largely unacknowledged, uncertainty around capital puts a question mark behind many proclamations regarding the ideology, theory, and praxis of the capitalist system. The ‘I know it when I see it’-approach results in a confusing hodgepodge of material and social entities being described as ‘capital’: money is capital, investment is capital, machinery is capital, workers are capital, political largesse is capital … Eventually, capital is everything and everywhere, and the concept is rendered meaningless. A clearer understanding of ‘what we talk about when we talk about capital’ is a priority if we wish to distinguish useful theoretical positions from misguided pretenders. Such an understanding aims at a working definition that encapsulates the actual political-economic conditions of business and the on-going efforts of accumulation.Currently, Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler are among the few contemporary theorists calling attention to the hollowness of the dominant theories of capital and the only theorists offering a radically new realist perspective”

Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View argument on the limit of us understanding ourselves, humans, as rational beings is a similar argument to why I think capitalism is not a useful explanatory concept. I am told that Bruno Bosteels raises a similar question albeit about communism in his The Actuality of Communism. Just as Kant invokes the improbable but not impossible existence of rational aliens, which would be a necessary comparative referent for defining what a species endowed with reason is, we lack a referent for a global, fair and sustainable alternative economic system, beyond minor historical experiments, which don’t scale up and never had to deal with the global problems or technology of the present. Capitalism thus is everything and nothing, and is as problematic as any generalised statements on human nature. Power, exploitation, violence, environmental destruction, wage slavery, oligarchy: these are things to denounce, but capitalism is NOT a good explanatory concept for these nasty human tendencies. What is non-capitalism then? Do we even know? Does dispensing with capitalism as a concept make the struggle for a better world any less worthwhile a fight? Not at all, it just highlights the open-ended contingency of the future as the only ontological necessity, and resists any theological sense of historical finality. We don’t know what a fair world would look like, and we don’t know if in a fair world we would still need to fight against the undesirable tendencies of unchecked power, as we don’t know how collective human behaviour would change in this possible future. Humans minus ‘capitalism’ ≠ paradise. The question of capitalism is tied to the problem of an adequate theory of value, the power theory of value is certainly a useful way of understanding political economy, but it’s not sufficient on on its own.

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Yet More Differential Accumulation (by Breadth) in the Tech Sector

From an article on Forbes about Amazon.

The reported Dell-EMC deal, one that neither company has confirmed, epitomizes the sort of financial engineering that has inflamed older tech companies of late. Companies like EMC,IBM, and Hewlett-Packard garner headlines more for their M&A activity (or litigation) than for their new products and services.

This kind of financial engineering is not new in large industry, it is only relatively new in the information technology technology sector because the sector itself a relatively new one. Bichler and Nitzan would call this differential accumulation by breath. The purpose of mergers and acquisitions is hardly ever driven by the supposed efficiencies of economies of scale that is usually the official reason for such operations. Like the Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, both these companies have so many duplicate product lines that the only benefit from such operations is for the owners. For customers, usually the experience is a bad one, as working product lines are dropped, and prices never decrease thanks to the supposed economies of scale efficiencies. Apart from perhaps Google and Facebook, usually an IPO or an acquisition signals the end of the innovation that grew the start-up in the first place.

Also, it is mainly in the information technology sector that M&A events are heralded as portents of great new products and never before seen innovation. Other industries don’t bother to maintain this fiction, as stock price is determined by expected future earnings, and by the relative power of a corporation to manage demand and competitors in its sector.

It’s also not surprising that software-centric tech companies have huge market capitalisations, despite owning few tangible capital assets and having pitiful (or nil) revenue (Amazon). Again, this is due to the market’s perception of future earning potential, which has little, if any, relationship to a corporation’s fixed assets, revenue or past earnings. The primacy of finance-capital, certainly not a recent development.

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