Against Autonomy: Capitalism Beyond Quantification in the Autonomist Reading of Marx

This essay outlines a critique of the autonomist theory of post-Fordism as a stage of capitalism defined by immaterial forms of production that purportedly constitute “value beyond quantification,” which is to say, value exceeding the measure of spatialized time. The essay argues that this concept of immaterial labor – proposed as a corrective to Marx’s “quantitative theory of value” – elides the crucial distinction in Marx’s analysis between two entirely different kinds of spatialized time: the time required for the production of material goods and the time that determines their (exchange) value. This elision, the essay argues, results in a fundamental mischaracterization of contemporary capitalism.

Spatialized Time and the “Quantitative Theory of Value” in Capital

For past thirty years, the theory of post-Fordist production developed in the works of Autonomist Marxists (including Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno and Franco Berardi) has provided one of the most widely employed critical frameworks for understanding the increasing significance of culture, affect, information, and digital labor in the contemporary global economy. This theory emerged, in part, out of a phenomenological critique of the spatialized concept of time (as the measure of value) employed in Marx’s analyses of capitalism. For the Autonomists, this spatialized time – inherited from the Western metaphysical tradition – is no longer sufficient as a measure of value, given the prevalence within contemporary capitalism of immaterial (and immeasurable) forms of production. As I show in this essay, this account of post-Fordist production is based upon a fundamental misreading of Marx. The critique of the Autonomist reading of Marx outlined below draws extensively on the reinterpretation of Marx’s mature critical theory developed by thinkers – including Norbert Trenkle, Robert Kurz, Jean-Marie Vincent, Hans-Georg Backhaus and Moishe Postone – associated with the Marxian school of critical theory known as Wertkritik, or value critique. In particular, my analysis attempts to build upon the critique of Autonomist Marxism elaborated by Robert Kurz and Anselm Jappe in Les Habits neufs de l’Empire, as well as upon the critique of the Autonomist notion of bio-political production outlined in the work of Tiqqun. These texts extend Marx’s critique of the commodity form to an analysis of important secular trends within the contemporary global economy, including the decline of stable rates of exchange, the rise of financial derivatives, the prevalence of precarious labor, and the increasingly predominant role of information in the global economy. These developments, which have been the focus of Autonomist Marxist analyses of post-Fordist production, have been largely ignored in earlier works associated with Wertkritik, limiting the latter’s potential as critique. In proposing a critical reading of Autonomist theories of post-Fordist production, based on the work of the Wertkritik school and on related interpretations of Marx, this essay addresses this important limitation.

In Empire, Hardt and Negri situate Marx’s theory of value within the “great Western metaphysical tradition:” From “Aristotle’s theory of virtue as a measure to Hegel’s theory of measure as the key to the passage from existence to essence,” this tradition is one that “has always abhorred the immeasurable.” “Marx’s theory of value pays its dues to this metaphysical tradition: his theory of value is always been a theory of the measure of value” (Hardt and Negri, 2000, p. 355).¹

This account of Marx’s theory of value appears to rely upon Heidegger’s critique of the “vulgar conception of time” in the history of Western metaphysical thought. In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that, in both Aristotle and Hegel, the passage of time is understood as a succession of homogeneous “now-points” that is conceived on the model of the movements of physical objects in space (see Derrida 34–35). For Heidegger, it is this conversion of time into space that allows the former to serve as a measure of movement:¹ time becomes subject to quantification through its reduction to spatialized units. In Marx’s theory of value, this vulgar conception of spatialized time is applied to an analysis of the exploitation of labor in capitalism.² As Melinda Cooper describes in her reading...