Introduction: After the Law of Value Is “Blown Apart”: Labor as Value in the Contemporary

This forum of the minnesota review is situated in the contemporary dogma that “the future,” as Yann Moulier Boutang writes, “is already here for those who know how to read it” (2011, 8). This is the future in which “the so-called ‘law of value’ (according to which the value of a product is determined by the amount of labor time that went into it), which Marx considers the keystone of modern social relations, is, however, shattered and refuted by capitalist development itself” (Virno 2004, 100). To argue, then, for the centrality of the law of value in contemporary capitalism (or sometimes even to bring up the issue) has become a mark of an unacceptable orthodoxy within Left circles in the global North that have embraced the orthodoxies of the “communism of capital” (Beverungen, Murtola, and Schwartz 2013)—from its “common” to its “commonsense”—which declares, “There is no conflict here between reform and revolution” (Hardt and Negri 2004, 289).

The theory of the “communism of capital” takes as its starting point the presupposition that technological advances within the development of capital have shifted commodity production from material goods to immaterial products such as “knowledge, language, science, culture, art, information, forms of life, relations with oneself, others and the world” (Lazzarato 2004, 197) and, in turn, transformed the relations of capital from within, such that “the production of value depends increasingly on creative intellectual activity which, apart from placing itself beyond any valorization related to scarcity, also places itself beyond mass accumulation, factory accumulation and the like” (Negri 2008, 64). Immaterial labor is said to have become a problem for capital in that it cannot be contained within the boundaries of what Marx theorized as the “working day,” or the difference between surplus and necessary labor-time that is the basis of the law of value (Marx 1996, 239–43). Instead, the “communism of capital” is based upon the notion that “the traditional opposition between labour and non-labour loses any foundation” (Vercellone 2007, 30) and that, as a result, the law of value based upon the exploitation of labor has been “blown apart” (Hardt and Negri 1994, 11).

Instead of social transformation, what is presented as the “alternative” to capital’s “negative” power (ibid., 59) is liberating the “affirmative” energy that is the “vis viva” (living force) of life itself (ibid., 21). As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write, “Living labor is the internal force that constantly poses not only the subversion of the capitalist process of production but also the construction of an alternative. In other words, living labor not only refuses its abstraction in the process of capitalist valorization and the production of surplus value, but also poses an alternative schema of valorization, the self-valorization of labor” (6). In this model of postlabor capitalism, labor is dematerialized and redefined as “a social analytic that interprets the production of value” (7), while capitalism becomes a cultural antagonism that the “creativity” of immaterial labor endlessly deconstructs.

The “communism of capital” represents a “left fantasy” (Ebert and Zavarzadeh 2014, 401) of a capitalism without labor, without contradictions such as class and exploitation, and, as a consequence, without the necessity of revolutionary transformation. This approach is reflected in the various “new communist” theories that have emerged, such as “accelerationism” and “communization,” in which the exploitation of labor is refigured as “the problem of work” which “cannot be reduced to the extraction of surplus value or the degradation of skill, but extends to the ways that work dominates our lives” (Weeks 2011, 13). As the Endnotes Collective argues, “If, after a revolution, the bourgeoisie is expropriated but workers remain workers, producing in separate enterprises, dependent on their relation to that workplace for their subsistence, and exchanging with other enterprises, then whether that exchange is self-organised by the workers or given central direction by a ‘workers’ state’ means very little: the capitalist content remains” (2010). “Work,” in this context, becomes the mechanism by which control over the creative force of living labor is perpetuated and maintained by capital. In the...