The Beginning of History

Value Struggles and Global Capital

By Massimo De Angelis

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2007 Massimo De Angelis
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7453-2035-9

Contents

List of Figures, viii,
List of Tables and Boxes, viii,
Preface, ix,
1 The beginning of history, 1,
PART I ORIENTATIONS: CO-PRODUCTION OF LIVELIHOODS AS CONTESTED TERRAIN,
2 Value struggles, 19,
3 Capital as a social force, 34,
4 With no limits, 43,
5 Production and reproduction, 51,
6 Production, reproduction and global loops, 65,
PART II GLOBAL LOOPS: SOME EXPLORATIONS ON THE CONTEMPORARY WORK MACHINE,
7 Enclosures and disciplinary integration, 79,
8 Global loops, 102,
9 The global work machine, 115,
PART III CONTEXT, CONTEST AND TEXT: DISCOURSES AND THEIR CLASHING PRACTICES,
10 Marx and the enclosures we face, 133,
11 Enclosures with no limits, 142,
12 The 'law of value', immaterial labour, and the 'centre' of power, 150,
13 The valuing and measuring of capital, 175,
14 Market freedom and the prison: Hayek and Bentham, 194,
15 The fractal panopticon and ubiquitous revolution, 213,
PART IV 'BY ASKING QUESTIONS WE WALK': THE PROBLEMATICS OF DECOUPLING,
16 The 'outside', 225,
17 Commons, 238,
Notes, 249,
References, 282,
Other Web Resources, 294,
Index, 295,

CHAPTER 1

The beginning of history

OTHER DIMENSIONS

Other dimensions! The problematic of the beginning of history is all about the beginning of other dimensions of living and co-production of livelihoods. A beginning that does not reside in texts and learned words, but arises out of diverse struggles emerging from within the global social body, and is thrown in the face of those who have proclaimed with crass certainty and ideological conviction that the era of the end of history has arrived. Yes, because the end of history is not simply the title of a scholarly book coinciding with the planting of the banner of neoliberal capital on the ruins of 'real socialism' and the Eastern bloc. It also signals the largest attack on the commons in the West, East and in the global South through a quarter of a century of privatisations, cuts in entitlements, structural adjustment, financial discipline, public transfers shifted from social entitlements to meet needs of reproduction (health, education among them) to subsidise corporations, and the general increase in wealth polarisation, poverty, environmental degradation, war and political stupidity.

To pose the problematic of the beginning of history is to refuse the construction of the world in the image of the end of history, it is to posit other values and embrace other horizons than democracy corrupted by money, social co-production corrupted by livelihood-threatening competition, and structural adjustment enclosing non-market commons. The process of social constitution of a reality beyond capitalism can only be the creation, the production of other dimensions of living, of other modes of doing and relating, valuing and judging, and co-producing livelihoods. All the rest, regulations, reforms, 'alternatives', the party, elections, social movements, 'Europe' and even 'revolutions', are just words with no meaning if not taken back to the question of other dimensions of living.

Children are often said to be living in another dimension. Leonardo, my 20-months-old child, teaches me something very important when I observe his praxis of time and reflect on how it is articulated to mine. He seems to be living in 'phase time' all the time, his attention being enthusiastically taken by new objects to which he points, to new directions to walk the street's walk. This of course means that my partner and I must constantly invent new ways of keeping him happy while we take him on our daily trivial yet necessary pursuits rooted in linear time (going to the shop, washing dishes, etc.) and circular time (the alternating of the rhythms of daily life, going to bed, eating, and so on). Phase time is the time of emergence of new dimensions and is part of life, as is linear and circular time. When we scale up this little domestic vignette to the problems of the making of a new world, what becomes clear is that none of these dimensions of time is specifically the time of revolution, the time of new modes of social co-production. Revolution is a mode of their articulation, a re-articulation of phase, linear and circular time. On the other hand, the widespread commodity production in the social system we call capitalism, subsumes and articulates all three dimensions of time in its own peculiar way.

Linear time characterises the sequence of transformations leading to output, the articulation of functions, the structuring of plans through timetables and schedules. Continuous acceleration of social doing registered by several observers of postmodernity and globalisation is what turns this linearity into delirium, even more so today in the age of globalisation, in which an increased number of social practices are subordinated to the calculus embedded in mission statements, objectives, market benchmarks and speeded up turnover. But this speeded up linearity that we are accustomed to lament could not come to dominate social practices if it were not for the modes of circular time to which it is articulated.

While linear time is the dimension of purposeful action, of achieving goals, of performing functions, circular time is the time in which action returns to itself, thus defining and giving shape to norms and values without which those actions and goals would be meaningless. 'True journey,' writes Ursula Le Guinn in her novel The Dispossessed, 'is return', and she could not be more insightful. The return of the action or practice to itself is the activity of measurement, loosely defined, in which the subjects compare, contrast, evaluate and hence create the conditions for new action and new processes. Circular time is therefore the time of measure, and for this reason it is the time that defines norms. The return of action to itself creating norms and values happens in many ways, depending on the mode of circularity at different scales of action, yet in whatever way, we see feedback processes occurring which in this book we shall simply refer to as loops. Thus, for example, the return of action can be overwhelmingly defined by the rhythms of nature, the alternating of nights and days as well as of the seasons, as for agricultural activities with little technological input. The sun is not yet high, and I am still in bed, but I can hear the mooing of my cows as they demand their daily milking. I am measured by a rhythm that is largely given to me by the coupling of human production to nature's cycles. I must get up and do my daily job, and so tomorrow and the next day. Or in a different context, loops are constituted by patterns of engagement, collision, and encounters with neighbours, friends and colleagues, in which a variety of direct exchanges and relational practices may end up forming patterns and coalesce into norms of given types. The acceleration of sequences of social production we are witnessing in today's capitalism is one with the increased number of loops in which actions and social practices return to themselves and in thus doing are measured. The pervasive commodification of new realms of social practices, many of which depend on enforcing enclosures on the social body (Chapter 10 and 11), inserts new practices...