Info Labour and Lazy, by George Garthwaite, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi and Paul Lafargue

Intro 37 Questions George Garthwaite Nov 2015

                             

Are you one of them or one of us?

Whose agenda do you live by and work around?

Who is the authority? Who do you fear?

Do you choose your friends or your work?

Who is the one that dictates your time?

Who dictates the value of your efforts?

When you dream at night, what do you dream of?

Do your dream of work or do you dream of flying?

Who would you cut down to get to the top?

Who would you fuck to get to the top?

What is the top? Is it somewhere you want to be?

Is the top somewhere you can see yourself in five years?

What is your agenda? Is it your own agenda?

Who has influenced your agenda?

Are your interests really your interests?

Have you ever been in love?

Are you in love with who you think you are in love with?

Are you scared of the police? If so: Why? Who really makes the law? Do you live by it?

Does law extend beyond society?

If so: Are they not just rules? A moral code?

Do you live by a moral code?

Do you believe in hatred?

Have you ever hated someone?

Have you ever hated an idea?

Do you drink? If so: Why? Do you do drugs? If so: Why? Who makes the rules?

Do you make your own rules?

Are you one of them or one of us?

Part 1 Info-Labour and Precariousness Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi Translated from the Italian by Erik Empson

"We have no future because our present is too volatile.

The only possibility that remains is the management of risk. The spinning top of the scenarios of the present moment."

(W. Gibson: Pattern recognition, tr. It. L'accademia dei sogni)

In February 2003 the American journalist Bob Herbert published in the New York Times the results of a cognitive survey on a sample of hundreds of unemployed youths in Chicago: none of the interviewees expected to find work the next few years, none of them expected to be able to rebel, or to set off any form of large scale collective change. The general sense of the interviews was a sentiment of profound impotence. The perception of decline did not seem focused on politics, but on a deeper cause, the scenario of a social and psychical involution that seems to cancel every possibility of building alternatives.

The fragmentation of the present is reversed by the implosion of the future.

In The Corrosion of Character: The Transformation of Work in Modern Capitalism Richard Sennett reacts to this existential condition of precariousness and fragmentation with a nostalgia for a past epoch in which life was structured in relatively stable social roles, and time had enough linear consistency to construe paths of identity.

"The arrow of time is broken: in an economy under constant restructuring that is based on the short-term and hates routine, definite trajectories no longer exist. People miss stable human relations and long term objectives."

But this nostalgia has no hold on present reality, and the attempts to reactivate the community remain artificial and sterile.

In the essay "Precari-us?", Angela Mitropoulos observes that precariousness is a precarious notion. This is because it defines its object in an approximate manner, but also because from this notion derives paradoxical, self-contradictory, in other words, precarious strategies. If we concentrate our critical attention on the precarious character of job performance what would our proposed objective be?

That of a stable job, guaranteed for life? Naturally no, this would be a cultural regression that would definitely subordinate the role of work. Some started to speak of ‘Flexicurity’ to mean forms of wage independent of job performance. But we are still far from having a strategy of social decomposition of the labour movement to extricate ourselves from unlimited exploitation. We need to pick up again the thread of analysis of social composition and decomposition if we want to distinguish possible lines of a decomposition to come.

In the 1970s; the energy crisis, the consequent economic recession and finally the substitution of work with numerical machines resulted in the formation of a vast number of people with no guarantees. Since then the question of precariousness became central to social analysis, but also in the ambitions of the movement. We began by proposing to struggle for forms of guaranteed income, uncoupled from work, in order to face the fact that a large part of the young population had no prospect of guaranteed employment. The situation has changed since then, because what seemed a marginal and temporary condition has now become the prevalent form of labour relations. Precariousness is no longer a marginal and provisional characteristic, but it is the general form of the labour relation in a productive, digitalized sphere, reticular and re-combinative.

The word 'precariat' generally stands for the area of work which is no longer definable by fixed rules relative to the labour relation, to salary and to the length of the working day. However if we analyse the past we see that these rules functioned only for a limited period in the history of relations between labour and capital. Only for a short period at the heart of the C20th, under the political pressures of unions and workers, in conditions of (almost) full employment and thanks to a role more or less strongly regulatory of the state in the economy, some limits to the natural violence of capitalist dynamics could be legally established. The legal obligations that in certain periods have protected society from the violence of capital were always founded on the existence of a relation between a political and material kind (workers' violence against the violence of capital). Thanks to political force it became possible to affirm rights, establish laws and protect them as personal rights. With the decline in the political force of the workers' movement, the natural precariousness of labour relations in capitalism and its brutality have re-emerged.

The new phenomenon is not the precarious character of the job market, but the technical and cultural conditions in which info-labour is made precarious. The technical conditions are those of digital recombination of info-work within networks. The cultural conditions are those of the education of the masses and the expectations of consumption inherited from late 20th Century society and continuously fed by the entire apparatus of marketing and media communication.

If we analyse the first aspect, i.e. the technical transformations introduced by the digitalisation of the production cycle, we see that the essential point is not the becoming precarious of the labour relation (which, after all, has always been precarious), but the dissolution of the person as an active productive agent, as a labour power. We have to look at the cyberspace of global production as an immense expanse of depersonalised human time.

Info-labour, the provision of time for the elaboration and the recombination of segments of info-commodities, is the extreme point of arrival of the process of

the abstraction from concrete activities that Marx analysed as a tendency inscribed in the capital labour relation.

The process of abstraction of labour has progressively stripped labour time of every concrete and individual particularity. The atom of time of which Marx speaks is the minimal unit of productive labour. But in industrial production, abstract labour time was impersonated by a physical and juridical bearer, embodied by a worker of flesh and bone, with a certified and political identity.

Naturally capital did not purchase a personal disposition, but the time for which the workers were its bearers. But if capital wanted to dispose of the necessary time for its valorisation, it was indispensable to hire a human being, to buy all of its time, and therefore needed to face up to the material needs and trade union and political demands of which the human was a bearer.

When we move onto the sphere of info-labour there is no longer a need to have bought over a person for eight hours a day indefinitely. Capital no longer recruits people, but buys packets of time, separated from their interchangeable and occasional bearers.

De-personalised time has become the real agent of the process of valorisation.

De-personalised time has no rights, nor any demands. It can only be either available or unavailable, but the alternative is purely theoretical because the physical body despite not being a legally recognised person still has to buy his food and pay his rent.

The re-combination of semiotic material has the effect of liquefying the 'objective' time necessary to produce the info-commodity. All the time of the human machine is there, pulsating and available, like a brain-sprawl in waiting. The extension of time is meticulously cellularised: cells of productive time can be mobilised in punctual, casual and fragmentary forms. The recombination of these fragments is automatically realised in the network. The mobile phone is the tool that makes possible the connection between the needs of semio-capital and the

mobilisation of the living labour of cyber-space. The ringtone of the mobile phone calls the workers to reconnect their abstract time to the reticular flux.

It's a strange word that with which we identify the ideology prevalent in the post human transition to digital slavery: liberalism. Liberty is its foundational myth, but the liberty of whom? The liberty of capital, certainly. Capital must be absolutely free to expand in every corner of the world to find the fragment of human time available to be exploited for the most miserable wage. But liberalism also predicates the liberty of the person. The juridical person is free to express itself, to choose its representatives, to be entrepreneurial at the level of politics and the economy.

Very interesting, the person has disappeared, what is left is like an inert object, irrelevant and useless. The person is free, sure. But his time is enslaved. His liberty is a juridical fiction to which nothing in concrete daily life corresponds. If we consider the conditions in which the work of the majority of humanity (proletariat and cognitariat) is actually carried out in our time, if we examine the conditions the average wage globally, if we consider the current and now largely realised cancellation of previous labour rights, we can say with no rhetorical exaggeration that we live in a regime of slavery. The average salary on the global level is hardly sufficient to buy the indispensable means for the mere survival of a person whose time is at the service of capital. And people do not have any right over the time of which they are formally the proprietors, but effectively expropriated. That time does not really belong to them, because it is separated from the social existence of the people who make it available to the recombinative cyber-productive circuit. The time of work is fractalised, that is reduced to minimal and re-assemblable fragments, and the fractualisation makes it possible for capital to continually find the conditions of minimum salary.

How can we oppose the decimation of the working class and its systemic de-personalisation, the slavery that is affirmed as a mode of command of precarious and depersonalised work?

This is the question that is posed with insistence by whoever still has a sense of human dignity. Nevertheless the answer does not come out because the form of resistance and of struggle that were efficacious in the 20th Century appear to no longer have the capacity to spread and consolidate themselves, nor consequently can they stop the absolutism of capital. An experience that derives from worker’s struggle in the last years, is that the struggle of precarious workers does not make a cycle. Fractalised work can also punctually rebel, but this does not set into motion any wave of struggle. The reason is easy to understand. In order for struggles to form a cycle there must be a spatial proximity of the bodies of labour and an existential temporal continuity. Without this proximity and this continuity, we lack the conditions for the cellularised bodies to become community. No wave can be created, because the workers do not share their existence in time, and behaviours can only come a wave when there is a continuous proximity in time that info-labour no longer allows.

Part 2 The Right To Be Lazy [Excerpt] Paul Lafargue Translated from the French by Charles Kerr

Written in Saint Pélagie Prison, 1883

Preface M. Thiers, at a private session of the debate on primary education of 1849, said: “I wish to make the influence of the clergy all powerful because I count upon it to propagate that good philosophy which teaches man that he is here below to suffer, and not that other philosophy which on the contrary bids man to enjoy.”

M. Thiers was stating the ethics of the capitalist class, whose fierce egoism and narrow intelligence he has incarnated.

The Bourgeoisie, when it was struggling against the nobility sustained by the clergy, hoisted the flag of free thought and atheism; but once triumphant, it changed its tone and manner and today it uses religion to support its economic and political supremacy.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it had joyfully taken up the pagan tradition and glorified the flesh and its passions, reproved by Christianity; in our days, gorged with goods and with pleasures, it denies the teachings of its thinkers like Rabelais and Diderot, and preaches abstinence to the wageworkers. Capitalist ethics, a pitiful parody on Christian ethics, strikes with its anathema the flesh of the labourer; its ideal is to reduce the producer to the smallest number of needs, to suppress his joys and his passions and to condemn him to play the part of a machine turning out work without respite and without thanks.

The revolutionary socialists must take up again the battle fought by the philosophers and pamphleteers of the bourgeoisie; they must march up to the assault of the ethics and the social theories of capitalism; they must demolish in the heads of the class which they call to action the prejudices sown in them by the ruling class; they must proclaim in the faces of the hypocrites of all ethical systems that the earth shall cease to be the vale of tears for the labourer; that in the communist society of the future, which we shall establish “peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must,” the impulses of men will be given a

free rein, for “all these impulses are by nature good, we have nothing to avoid but their misuse and their excesses,” and they will not be avoided except by their mutual counterbalancing, by the harmonious development of the human organism, for as Dr. Beddoe says, “It is only when a race reaches its maximum of physical development, that it arrives at its highest point of energy and moral vigour.” Such was also the opinion of the great naturalist Charles Darwin.

This refutation of the “Right to Work” which I am republishing with some additional notes appeared in the weekly Egalité, 1880, second series.

P.L

Chapter IV, New Songs to New Music [‌] We have seen that by diminishing the hours of labour new mechanical forces will be conquered for social production. Furthermore, by obliging the labourers to consume their products the army of workers will be immensely increased. The capitalist class once relieved from its function of universal consumer will hasten to dismiss its train of soldiers, magistrates, journalists, procurers, which it has withdrawn from useful labour to help it in consuming and wasting. Then the labour market will overflow. Then will be required an iron law to put a limit on work. It will be impossible to find employment for that swarm of former unproductive, more numerous than insect parasites, and after them must be considered all those who provide for their needs and their vain and expensive tastes. When there are no more lackeys and generals to decorate, no more free and married prostitutes to be covered with laces, no more cannons to bore, no more palaces to build, there will be need of severe laws to compel the working women and working men who have been employed on embroidered laces, iron workings, buildings, to take the hygienic and callisthenic exercises requisite to reestablish their health and improve their race. When once we begin to consume European products at home instead of sending them to the devil, it will be necessary that the sailors, dock handlers and the draymen sit down and learn to twiddle their thumbs. The happy Polynesians may then love as they like without fearing the civilized Venus and the sermons of European moralists.

And that is not all: In order to find work for all the non-producers of our present society, in order to leave room for the industrial equipment to go on developing indefinitely, the working class will be compelled, like the capitalist class, to do violence to its taste for abstinence and to develop indefinitely its consuming capacities. Instead of eating an ounce or two of gristly meat once a day, when it eats any, it will eat juicy beefsteaks of a pound or two; instead of drinking moderately of bad wine, it will become more orthodox than the pope and will

drink broad and deep bumpers of Bordeaux and Burgundy without commercial baptism and will leave water to the beasts.

The proletarians have taken into their heads to inflict upon the capitalists ten hours of forge and factory; that is their great mistake, because of social antagonisms and civil wars. Work ought to be forbidden and not imposed. The Rothschilds and other capitalists should be allowed to bring testimony to the fact that throughout their whole lives they have been perfect vagabonds, and if they swear they wish to continue to live as perfect vagabonds in spite of the general mania for work, they should be pensioned and should receive every morning at the city hall a five-dollar gold piece for their pocket money. Social discords will vanish. Bond holders and capitalists will be first to rally to the popular party, once convinced that far from wishing them harm, its purpose is rather to relieve them of the labour of over-consumption and waste, with which they have been overwhelmed since their birth. As for the capitalists who are incapable of proving their title to the name of vagabond, they will be allowed to follow their instincts.

There are plenty of disgusting occupations in which to place them. Dufaure 1 might be set at cleaning public toilets; Gallifet2might perform surgical operations on diseased horses and hogs. The members of the amnesty commission might be sent to the stockyards to pick out the oxen and the sheep to be slaughtered.

The senators might play the part of undertakers and lackeys in funeral processions. As for the others, occupations could be found for them on a level with their intelligence. Lorgeril and Eroglie3 could cork champagne bottles, only they would have to be muzzled as a precaution against intoxication. Ferry, Freycinet and Tirard4 might destroy the bugs and vermin in the departments of state and other public houses. It would, however, be necessary to put the public funds out of the reach of the capitalists out of due regard for their acquired habits.

1

French Minister for public works

2

Gallifet was the general who was directly responsible for the massacre of thousands or

French workingmen at the closing days of the Paris Commune.

3

4

Prominent Vineyard owners dating back to C17 French Prime Ministers

But vengeance, harsh and prolonged, will be heaped upon the moralists who have perverted nature. The bigots, the canters, the hypocrites, and other such sects of men who disguise themselves like maskers to deceive the world. For whilst they give the common people to understand that they are busied about nothing but contemplation and devotion in fasting and maceration of their sensuality, – and that only to sustain and aliment the small fragility of their humanity, – it is so far otherwise that on the contrary, God knows, what cheer they make; et Curies simulant, sed Bacchanalia vivunt. ( They simulate saints but live like drunks.) You may read it in great letters, in the colouring of their red snouts, and mulching bellies as big as a ton, unless it be when they perfume themselves with sulphur.

On the days of great popular rejoicing, when instead of swallowing dust as on the 15th of August and 14th of July under capitalism, the communists and collectivists will eat, drink and dance to their hearts' content, the members of the Academy, of moral and political sciences, the priests with long robes and short, of the economic, catholic, protestant, jewish, positivist and free-thought church; the propagandists of Malthusianism, and of Christian, altruistic, independent or dependent ethics, clothed in yellow, shall be compelled to hold a candle until it bums their fingers, shall starve in sight of tables loaded with meats, fruits and flowers and shall agonize with thirst in sight of flowing hogsheads. Four times a year with the changing seasons they shall be shut up like the knife grinders' dogs in great wheels and condemned to grind wind for ten hours.

The lawyers and legislators shall suffer the same punishment. Under the regime of idleness, to kill the time, which kills us second by second, there will be shows and theatrical performances always and always. And here we have the very work for our bourgeois legislators. We shall organize them into traveling companies to go to the fairs and villages, giving legislative exhibitions. The generals in riding boots, their breasts brilliantly decorated with medals and crosses, shall go through the streets and courts levying recruits among the good people.

Gambetta5 and his comrade Cassagnac6 shall tend door. Cassagnac, in full duellist costume, rolling his eyes and twisting his mustache, spitting out burning tobacco, shall threaten every one with his father’s pistol and sink into a hole as soon as they show him Lullier’s portrait. Gambetta will discourse on foreign politics and on little Greece, who makes a doctor of him and would set Europe on fire to pilfer Turkey; on great Russia that stultifies him with the mincemeat she promises to make of Prussia and who would fain see mischief brewing in the west of Europe so as to feather her nest in the east and to strangle nihilism at home; on Mr. Bismark7 who was good enough to allow him to pronounce himself on the amnesty ... then uncovering his mountainous belly smeared over with red and white and blue, the three national colours, he will beat the tattoo on it, and enumerate the delicate little ortolans8, the truffles and the glasses of Margaux and Y'quem that it has gulped down to encourage agriculture, and to keep his electors of Belleville in good spirits.

In the barracks the entertainment will open with the Electoral Farce: In the presence of the voters with wooden heads and asses’ ears, the bourgeois candidates, dressed as clowns, will dance the dance of political liberties, wiping themselves fore and aft with their freely promising electoral programs, and talking with tears in their eyes of the miseries of the people and with copper in their voices of the glories of France. Then the heads of the voters will bray solidly in chorus: he haw! he haw!

5

Leon Gambetta, a French statesman, prominent during and after the Franco-Prussian War.

6

Paul de Cassagnac, like his father, Orsnier, was prominent as a conservative politician, journalist and duellist. It is also the name for a cream liquor 7

Otto von Bismarck, was a conservative Prussian statesman who dominated German and European affairs from the 1860s until 1890. In the 1860s he engineered a series of wars that unified the German states 8

French Delicacy, now illegal due to the protected status of the ortolan songbird

Then will start the great play, The Theft of the Nation’s Goods: Capitalist France, an enormous female, hairy-faced and bald-headed, fat, flabby, puffy and pale, with sunken eyes, sleepy and yawning, is stretching herself out on a velvet couch. At her feet Industrial Capitalism, a gigantic organism of iron, with an ape-like mask, is mechanically devouring men, women and children, who’s thrilling and heart-rending cries fill the air; the bank with a marten’s muzzle; a hyena’s body and harpy-hands, is nimbly flipping coins out of his pocket. Hordes of miserable, emaciated proletarians in rags, escorted by gendarmes with drawn sabers, pursued by furies lashing them with whips of hunger, are bringing to the feet of capitalist France heaps of merchandise, casks of wine, sacks of gold and wheat. Langlois, his nether garment in one hand, the testament of Proudhon in the other and the book of the national budget between his teeth, is encamped at the head of the defenders of national property and is mounting guard. When the labourers, beaten with gun stocks and pricked with bayonets, have laid down their burdens, they are driven away and the door is opened to the manufacturers, merchants and bankers. They hurl themselves pell mell upon the heap, devouring cotton goods, sacks of wheat, ingots of gold, emptying casks of wine. When they have devoured all they can, they sink down, filthy and disgusting objects in their ordure and vomit. Then the thunder bursts forth, the earth shakes and opens, Historic Destiny arises, with her iron foot she crushes the heads of the capitalists, hiccoughing, staggering, falling, unable to flee. With her broad hand she overthrows capitalist France, astounded and sweating

with

fear.

If, uprooting from its heart the vice which dominates it and degrades its nature, the working class were to arise in its terrible strength, not to demand the Rights of Man, which are but the rights of capitalist exploitation, not to demand the Right to Work which is but the right to misery, but to forge a brazen law forbidding any man to work more than three hours a day, the earth, the old earth, trembling with joy would feel a new universe leaping within her. But how should we ask a proletariat corrupted by capitalist ethics, to take a resolution?

Like Christ, the doleful personification of ancient slavery, the men, the women and the children of the proletariat have been climbing painfully for a century up the hard Calvary of pain; for a century compulsory toil has broken their bones, bruised their flesh, tortured their nerves; for a century hunger has torn their entrails and their brains.

O Laziness, have pity on our long misery!

O Laziness, mother of the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish!

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