Lecture
The subordination of labor to capital is an attribute of capital as a production relation. Under the conditions of late capitalism and the genesis, within its bowels, of the creatosphere and the sprouts of the "realm of freedom," this subordination remains, but at the same time changes. What is new in this case is that the system of relations of hegemony of corporate capital now forms, under present conditions, the total subordination to capital not merely of labor, but of the Human Being as a person. To be sure, this tendency toward total hegemony is never realized absolutely, colliding with counterforces (above all, the global crisis of the common foundations of the world of alienation, a crisis that generates a powerful impulse toward the struggle against alienation along the paths of mass associated social creativity, growing out of the class struggle of the proletariat). And yet the genesis and expansion of the total subordination of labor to capital have become the banner of recent decades. Let us begin our analysis with a brief methodological "orientation": the total hegemony of capital, on the one hand, sublates—while reproducing in modified form—all the preceding "achievements" of capital in subordinating and exploiting wage labor; on the other hand, it introduces into this subordination something new, namely those prerequisites created by the "market of webs," neoprivatization and the dominance of virtual fictitious capital, as well as genuinely new parameters of the relation of exploitation. At the same time, the sublation of the earlier forms of the subordination of labor to capital is also an undermining (a partial negation) of the essence of the capitalist relation, which, however (here is the dialectic of the epoch of capital's "sunset"), leads directly to the strengthening of this subordination. The hierarchy of relations of total subordination is determined by the essence of the latter—the movement of capital toward hegemony over all the human qualities of all members of society (and not merely the exploitation of the labor power of the wage worker).
The main thing in these sprouts is the attempt to subordinate to capital, arising in the period of the "sunset" of the "realm of necessity," a new quality—creative activity—which is the foundation of the self-realization of the integral human being, of his "immortal soul." The orientation toward the subordination precisely of the integral personality is what makes this subordination total in its essence, in contrast to the classical system of capitalist subordination of predominantly reproductive labor as a function of labor power, i.e., "merely" one of the qualities of the Human Being—his being as (1) a partial worker within only (2) the labor process. These important points require more careful consideration. Creative activity, by its very content, is by its very nature: (1) inalienable, and therefore, from a substantive standpoint, its product must likewise be inalienable, and the subject of creative activity cannot be an object of exploitation; (2) universal, a priori socially necessary (and in this capacity it can serve as an analogue of money—the universal equivalent, the product of universal labor); yet at the same time, unlike money, it (3) creates boundless (from a quantitative standpoint) wealth, universal values. The subordination of such activity to capital in its classical form is, from a substantive standpoint, an insoluble task (it is no accident that classical capitalism never managed to create, on a mass scale, capitalistically organized forms of creative activity). But this does not mean that socio-economic forms capable of resolving this task—relations that subordinate to capital (and alienate from the creator) the social organization of such activity and the social existence of its objectified results (above all, ownership of the latter)—cannot arise. It is precisely this task that corporate capital began to address in the second half of the twentieth century, seeking transitional forms that would allow it, at the cost of undermining its own essential features (the subordination of labor to capital), to find an answer to the most fundamental challenge of the epoch—the threat of the replacement of the "realm of necessity," based on alienated reproductive labor, by the "realm of freedom," based on free creative activity. At the same time, in the near historical perspective, capital faces and will continue to face the task of subordinating not so much creative activity as such, but rather the relatively simpler phenomenon of the innovative, inventive, professional potential of workers and the processes of its reproduction. And here capital has tried out a complex system of transitional forms. The authors would like to draw attention to only three of them, showing the paths by which capital subordinates the innovative potential of "rank-and-file" workers, managers, and the creative "elite." The first consists of various mechanisms for the partial removal of the formal subordination of labor to capital by drawing workers into performing the functions of capital, in particular into management and ownership. In all the cases known to us (works councils in the FRG, "quality circles" in Japan, the (partial) transfer of shares to firms' employees—ESOP—in the United States and Western Europe, and many others), these mechanisms always keep the basic functions of control in the hands of capital, while mobilizing the innovative potential of workers for the purposes of capital's accumulation. At the same time, these mechanisms create certain elements of associated social creativity among workers and are for this reason especially valuable for the future. The second group of forms is connected with the development of the phenomena of entrepreneurship and management, in which the creative, innovative abilities of the human being (as a rule, of the most talented individuals) are subordinated by capital and directed into the sphere of activity aimed at strengthening its hegemony, which "draws off" humanity's creative potential from science, art, education, upbringing, and other aspects of the development of the creatosphere, to say nothing of associated social creativity (in various forms—from trade unions and the "greens" to left-democratic parties) as the antithesis of the hegemony of capital. Finally, the third form is reflected in the theories of "human capital." At the root of this theory lies the genuine phenomenon of a certain analogy between creative activity as universal labor, creating unlimited value, and capital as self-expanding value (worth). The human being as "capital" is a human being wholly, together with his innovative potential, turned into capital. Here, unlike the classical wage worker, whose labor power is converted into variable capital, "human capital" possesses other properties as well.
It also serves as a distinctive variety of (1) constant capital, "wearing out" (losing qualification) over the course of a certain lengthy period (a number of turnover cycles) and requiring periodic investments in its own reproduction, etc., as well as (2) capital-as-function, since investments in "human capital" are directed at forming the corporation's own professionals, i.e., not so much "classical" wage workers as employees, members of the corporate hierarchy who in many cases perform partial entrepreneurial functions. However, the most important thing in the phenomenon of the subordination of creative labor to capital consists in the fact that creative activity creates value possessed of the capacity for constant "self-expansion" on a practically unlimited scale. The value of the product of creative labor increases infinitely, as it were "of itself," in the process of its de-objectification by new creators. Behind this "clever" phrase lies a meaning that is simple to the point of obviousness, yet very important: every pupil increases the creative potential of the teacher, if the latter carries out teaching as a creative process; every performing artist gives birth to a new phenomenon of culture; every innovating worker drawn into a "quality circle" or rationalization activity multiplies knowledge and raises productivity... It is precisely this universal wealth (the wealth of the phenomena of the creatosphere) that subordinates capital to itself, "dressing" it in the perverted form of [private] intellectual property. Exploitation, as capital's appropriation of wealth it did not itself create, is precisely the chief "secret" of the formal subordination of creative labor to capital. The authors would like to focus attention on the reverse process—the genesis, within the emerging relations of capital and the creative worker, of elements of pre-capitalist—personal—dependence, which is no accident and corresponds to formal subordination: the latter, both in the conditions of early capitalism and in the conditions of its "sunset," turns out to be bound up with a striving to subordinate personal qualities as well. Let us examine this problem in more detail. The syncretism characteristic of the subject of creative activity—of the quality of the human being as labor power and as a Person—which distinguishes him from the subject of reproductive labor, entails as its rather regular result the subordination to capital of the human being's personal qualities as well. This leads to the outwardly paradoxical process, in the contemporary global economy, of the restoration, in a new historical guise, of relations of the worker's alienation from the means of production based on personal dependence (ranging from slavery and serfdom to administrative-bureaucratic hierarchy). Methodologically, this phenomenon may be characterized as the result of the socio-economic reversibility of the historical process: the involution of capital leads to the re-actualization of pre-capitalist forms of alienation.
We disclosed this phenomenon theoretically above, showing the mechanism of the long-term contract, by means of which capital becomes the owner of the worker's creative potential, of the process and results of his activity, i.e., of the personal qualities of the Human Being, subordinating his "inspiration" or "immortal soul," that is, his Personality. This is how "creative slavery" arises, multiplying the effect of alienation characteristic of creative-material dependence. The creative "slave" of recent decades is an individual who in many cases enjoys a privileged (in comparison with the industrial wage worker) economic position, is engaged in relatively interesting work, has a considerable amount of free time, and often does not subjectively perceive his personal dependence on the corporation.
Yet in this he is not free in the main thing—in the goal-setting of his creative activity, whose basic directions are set for him externally by capital, which subordinates his creative intentions to considerations of increasing corporate profit and strengthening its "market power."1 After these remarks on the specifics of the formal subordination of the Human Being to capital, we can continue our study by showing that the development of creative activity, driven by the progress of late capitalism, leads both to the formation of a number of new forms of the real subordination of labor and of the Human Being to capital, and to the sprouting of an undermining of the real subordination of labor to capital—sprouts that, however, are used by capital to strengthen its dominion.
These phenomena appear when capital faces the task of so modifying its hegemony that the very "technology" of the life-activity of global corporate capital subordinates the human being to it as an integral personality. This task is in principle unresolvable in full measure, for, as already noted, activity that is creative in content is inalienable by its very nature. However, certain transitional relations can arise here, continuing the line of undermining (and simultaneously strengthening) the formal subordination of labor to capital (a historical analogy here might be the manufactory, or even the factory, employing the labor of serfs—a phenomenon well known to late feudalism).
Let us examine this question in more detail. Let us begin with a thesis crucial to our work: the new forms and mechanisms of the subordination to capital—of the human being, and not only of labor—specific to the twenty-first century are connected precisely with the process of transition "to the far side of material production." Under conditions of the relative contraction of material production and the necessity of developing the creatosphere, capital has only three possible ways of responding to this objective necessity.
The first: braking the progress of creative activity and conserving the former system, with the domination of traditional material production and the service sector (of an industrial or even pre-industrial type) and the corresponding socio-economic relations.
The second: developing substitutes for the creatosphere (the growth of the perverted sector). The third: subordinating to capital the time and space of the human being's free development (potentially open to the development of the creatosphere) and turning it into a constituent part of the economic process of capitalist production.
The first path dominates in systems oriented toward a conservative, "fundamentalist" direction of capitalism's evolution (it has, incidentally, begun to be actively propagated by a section of the Russian officialdom and capital at the time these lines are being written). The second and third are integrated by contemporary global capital, which creates conditions in which the creatosphere is replaced by its substitutes (quasi-creativity in finance and the like) and by perverted forms of organizing free time, which capital converts into leisure time. Let us examine somewhat more closely the phenomenon of the subordination to capital of the human being's free time, as a supplement to the process of the subordination of labor to capital. The transition "to the far side of material production" leads to a situation in which precisely the integral development of the individual during free time becomes the basic "capital" of a society in which the creatosphere is developing. Consequently, the economic subordination to capital of precisely this space-time of human life-activity—more precisely, the conversion of human life-activity during free time into a constituent part of the economic process of capitalist production—becomes an objectively necessary direction of capital's development.
The problem, however, is to make this subordination not merely formal, socio-economic, but also real and technological. For this it is necessary not simply to convert free time and the process of the formation of the Human Being into a capitalist one in socio-economic form, but also to transform the very content ("technology," nature) of free time and of the entire process of the reproduction of the Human Being as a person, so that, regardless of the [capitalist] form, the very content of these processes makes of the human being a puppet of capital, a slave of its global hegemony. It is precisely such a transformation that is carried out through the conversion of free time into leisure time, of culture into mass culture, of knowledge into an intellectual commodity, of education into the production of "professionals" for the total market, and so on. Let us repeat: as a result of these transformations, what occurs is not merely the "donning" of a capitalist form by free time, culture, education, and the like, but a change in their content. Let us examine these aspects of the subordination of the human being to corporate capital in more detail. Let us begin with the transformation of free time into leisure time. The subordination to capital of free time is a relatively new phenomenon, characteristic precisely of late capitalism, for the "classical" model of capital presupposed that the economic power of capital over the worker ended at the factory gates. To be sure, the political and ideological power of capital had earlier also been part of the capitalist socio-economic formation. But earlier this was a phenomenon of the "superstructure."1 What is new in this phenomenon is the formation of production relations, in and through which the subordination to capital of free time is carried out (the formal subordination of the Human Being), the transformation of free time into leisure time. The mechanisms of this subordination and this transformation are well known and closely intertwined with the phenomena of the "consumer society" and simulative existence—ranging from mass-cultural and mass-media manipulation to the "culture" of shopping and advertising. Far more interesting is the content of this phenomenon, disclosed by foreign researchers as far back as the 1960s.2 Capital, by transforming the nature of non-working time, converts it into leisure time, within the framework of which the human being does not merely reproduce his labor power in order to re-enter relations of exploitation, but in all his life's manifestations becomes a function of the market and of capital. Thereby the possibility of using non-working time to attain even some elements of the free and harmonious development of the personality, to break free in even some small measure from subordination to capital, is blocked. The content of leisure is a manipulatively imposed technology of consuming goods and services, one that is predominantly a technology of mass and/or simulative consumption. The content of the free and harmonious development of the personality is the de-objectification of the phenomena of the creatosphere. In the first case, you carry out technological procedures imposed on you by capital. Either you consume, in a standardized way, mass real and simulative goods, spending time in supermalls and dreaming of a new "Ford" (the variant for the poor and lower middle class), or you standardly "stand out" from the general mass by means of equally standard procedures (whether by turning into some sort of "goth," or—the variant for the "upper middle class"—by patronizing one of the heavily advertised boutiques or standing in line for a collectible "Bentley"). In the second case, you develop individually in the world of culture and/or make history. The spheres of the first are shopping and other kinds of standardized and increasingly simulative consumption, Internet surfing, mass culture, and other forms of "relaxation" (up to and including drugs as an absolutely consummate form of simulative leisure). The spheres of the second are the education and upbringing of the Human Being (and not of a narrow professional—a partial worker), science, art, the recreation of society and nature, social creativity (participation in the life of civil society). To paraphrase, and somewhat soften, one of the contemporary Russian writers, one might say figuratively that food (utilitarian consumption) produces feces and garbage, while the dream (creativity, de-objectification) produces history and culture. It is significant, however, that in certain enclaves of social space-time (in socialized forms of its being, partially limited by society) capital at times retreats, allowing the development of genuinely free time as well. Moreover, this retreat is necessary for capital, for without the development of the creatosphere contemporary technological progress is impossible, and hence so is the accumulation of capital. (Here our methodology for analyzing the dialectic of transformations "works" once again: the "old" system, in order to strengthen itself, must partially retreat, giving room for the development of the sprouts of the "new" and of transitional relations.) The conversion of free time into leisure time presupposes, further, the formation by capital of a system of institutions for organizing non-working time that corresponds to the tasks of developing capital's hegemony and ensures the expanded reproduction of the aforementioned technologies of human existence as a puppet of capital. These are institutions (understood both as "rules of the game" and as organizational structures) for the reproduction of consumerist-conformist systems of values and motives of activity.
The latter may be either rational (classical "materialism," which still grows out of commodity fetishism and orients the worker toward achieving the standard of "a house, two cars, two children in college") or simulative, both material and spiritual (and it is here that mass culture and the media come into play). As a result, capital forms a certain way of life, turning the human being (to use an image from a film that made a great stir in the 2000s) into a slave of the matrix. Behind this image stands a system of consciously and subjectively formed, and objectively, spontaneously arisen, manipulative economic, social, and other influences, which convert the very content and manner of a person's life-activity into a function of capital, and turn the Personality into a passive conformist (a puppet reconciled to its social role) or into a Boor (an active subject reproducing the system of manipulation-subordination). Let us emphasize that all this today is not so much a specific function of the state and of the institutions of ideology, as it is part of the economic activity of corporately organized capital, one of the important components of its total hegemony. But the conversion of free time into leisure time and the subordination of non-working time are not the only direction of the real subordination to capital of the human being's personal qualities. Under present-day conditions, mechanisms are developing for the real subordination to capital not only of free time, but of creative activity itself. Among the principal directions of such subordination stand out not only the aforementioned processes of the development of mass culture and mass media, but also capital's monopolization of the "means of production" of creative activity. From a methodological-theoretical standpoint, this phenomenon should in principle be assigned to the formal subordination of creative activity to capital (proceeding from the capitalist form). But in practice, in this case the boundary between formal and real subordination is effaced owing to the specific nature of creativity, in which the activity itself and its prerequisites are fused. This is why the development of private ownership of know-how and other cultural values leads to a kind of "enclosure" by capital of cultural spaces, access to which is possible for the creator only by way of subordination to capital (taking a job with a firm under an obligation of non-disclosure of its secrets...). As a consequence, there arises a phenomenon irrational in its content—the corporation's ownership of the results of creative activity, of the cultural values created and of the new abilities of the worker-creator (the dominance of long-term contracts). The "production" of creative personalities is also monopolized by capital (from a methodological-theoretical standpoint this, again, is more a phenomenon of the formal subordination of creative activity). Capital controls the highest-quality educational institutions and personnel-retraining centers1 (there are well-known phenomena of the fusion of elite universities with the largest corporations, and of the transformation of the former—such as, for instance, Harvard in the USA—into TNCs).
Finally, contemporary capital brings to perfection mechanisms, characteristic of any society of the epoch of alienation (from Asiatic despotism to mutant socialism and corporate capitalism), for subordinating the intelligentsia to the dominant socio-economic force. The specific feature in this case consists in the fact that these mechanisms are predominantly economic in character, resting on the same relations of the total hegemony of capital as in other cases. The question of the real subordination to capital of creative activity as such presents the greatest interest, and the greatest difficulties, in this regard.
The paradox of this phenomenon consists in the fact that, on the one hand, in terms of content, creativity cannot be capitalist—the content of creative activity (unlike the divided, partial labor of a worker as an appendage of a machine) liberates the human being and therefore does not allow him to be subordinated to any alienated external force, capital included. On the other hand, however, capital objectively strives for such an organization of creativity that it becomes, in its very content, a mechanism for subordinating the Human Being to capital. Thus arises a vicious antinomy: capital cannot subordinate the content of creative activity, and it cannot fail to subordinate it. The only thing that can bring about not a resolution, but a [pseudo-]sublation of this paradox, is the existence of an activity that will, in content, subordinate the human being to capital while at the same time being, as it were, creativity (a perverted form and/or a simulacrum of the latter). Such a form might theoretically be the creation of, as it were, new results (simulacra of the phenomena of culture) in the process of the activity of, as it were, creators (subjects of labor that subordinates the Human Being to capital).
In practice these phenomena are well known and have long been described in the literature—this is the activity of professionals in the perverted sector. It is precisely here that simulacra of new cultural phenomena are created (from advertising spots urging you to buy an absolutely new kind of Coca-Cola, or the newest blockbusters with their 3-D, 4-D... special effects, to elitist performance art and psycho-sexo-...-and-so-on-logical philosophical treatises). What has been said is nothing other than the derivation (by conducting a theoretical investigation, reinforced by an appeal to practice, of the problem of the only possible way of resolving the real contradiction between capital and creative activity) of the following proposition: the [perverted] capitalist form of the genesis of the creatosphere is characterized by a twofold substitution: (1) of the creatosphere by the perverted sector, and (2) of the creator by the "professional."
As a result of this substitution, the dominant space for the development of new forms of capital and its hegemony becomes the sphere of "secondary" and "tertiary" production relations and, more broadly, of the perverted (useless) sector, where, par excellence, the contemporary (including simulative, often virtual in appearance) forms of the market and of capital develop most intensively. From the standpoint of the processes of the genesis of creative activity, the twofold substitution mentioned above signifies a very important shift. The substitution of the creatosphere by the perverted sector means not only that the spheres of creativity proper (education, science, art) are displaced by spheres simulating creativity, but also that the properly creative spheres themselves, in subordinating themselves to global capital, are turned into its functions and themselves acquire simulative forms. The creatosphere, like the perverted sector, begins to a certain degree (the degree depending on the balance of forces between hegemony and liberation) to turn into a domain for creating virtual simulacra of culture (mass culture), of values (symbolic consumption), of knowledge (education as corporate capital's production of "professionals" whose qualities are determined by the parameters of the total market)... As a result, a twofold process unfolds: (1) the gradual extensive expansion of the perverted sector, displacing the creatosphere, i.e., the external substitution of the creatosphere by the perverted sector; and (2) the intensive self-degeneration of the creatosphere into the perverted sector, the conversion of practices immanent to the creatosphere (activities, subjects, spaces, results) into branches of the perverted sector.1 This is precisely the deep politico-economic and, more broadly, socio-philosophical meaning of processes typical of the present stage of the involution of late capitalism: (1) the contraction of the spaces and role of fundamental, personality-developing education, high culture, and voluntary activity for the recreation of society and nature, and their substitution by the functional training of professionals, mass culture, and the like; as well as (2) the commercialization and bureaucratization of education, art, science, social and natural recreation, and so on. The second aspect of the "twofold substitution" mentioned above also requires some comment. The "professional" becomes a substitute for homo creator to the extent that not only is the creatosphere substituted by the perverted sector, but also to the extent that, in place of the subject of free, universal, general creative activity, there comes the subject of predominantly reproductive, divided (partial) intellectual labor, subordinated in its basic goals, motives, and functions to an external force (in this case, corporate capital). This connection may be expressed somewhat more precisely as follows: to the extent that a worker carrying out intellectual activity requiring high qualifications (1) freely and independently chooses the goals and mechanisms of his activity, the "resources" required for it (knowledge, cultural goods), and the circle of persons with whom he enters into dialogue in the course of carrying it out; (2) has values and motives connected with self-realization in the process of this activity (labor is its own stimulus2); (3) whose time for this activity is free and unregulated, while the labor itself (4) bears a universal, general character and has creative content—to this extent we may speak of a subject of creative activity. To the extent that the subject of intellectual, highly qualified labor (1) works in accordance with goals, functions, and forms of cooperation set from outside; (2) is motivated by values external to creativity (above all, monetary and other alienated values); (3) carries out his labor during working time (separated from leisure), while his labor bears the character of (4) reproductive and divided labor—to this extent we may speak of a "professional," a subject subordinated to the alienated forces [of corporate capital].
The twofold substitution mentioned above is the most important foundation for the creation of mechanisms of real subordination and division of labor that are, in principle, not characteristic of creative activity. What has been said allows us to take a further step in the study of the relations of subordination of the Human Being to capital, and to show that the present epoch is characterized by the dominance of corporate capital not merely as financial capital, but as information-creative capital as well, since the informational sphere is becoming the dominant perverted form of the creatosphere. Thereby the leap "to the far side of material production," under conditions of the hegemony of corporate capital, turns out to be the beginning of a movement in the direction of turning information into the basic form of the movement of capital (investment, financial, marketing, and other processes). What is especially important here is that the monopolization of this form ensures control over financial capital, and, through control over financial processes, control over the movement of capital as a whole and, consequently, over the functioning of all material production, insofar as it proceeds in capitalist form. The reverse (or, rather, on the contrary, the "obverse") side of this process is the monopolization by corporate capital of key innovations, inventions, and know-how (as the most important components of the competitiveness of commodity-goods and commodity-services) and of information as a commodity in the contemporary world. In much the same way, contemporary corporate capital subordinates the state to itself (or, more precisely, fuses with it, for it is here difficult to say who possesses more power—transnational corporations or national state institutions). National state institutions are also undergoing substantial changes. All the "standard" functions of the state (an institution that defends the domination of the bourgeoisie by forceful, including political and ideological, methods; that ensures a certain balance of class interests and the reproduction of society as a whole; that guarantees observance of the institutional rules governing the functioning of the bourgeois economy, the rights of private property, etc.) are to a great extent subordinated to this new function. Since (1) throughout the entire twentieth century, and especially in its second half, the state also carried out functions of regulating the economy and society, and moreover (2) the largest corporations are also capable of partially regulating the market and social life, the fusion of these forces means that, under conditions of the transition to a new quality of economy and society, the relations and processes that lie "on the far side of material production proper" also become an object of state regulation. Under conditions of the genesis of the creatosphere, the regulatory functions not only of corporations, but of the state as well, are supplemented by functions of informational servicing and control. These functions fuse with the informational control of corporations, and this united power is a new phenomenon characterizing the present level of the hegemony of corporate capital. As a result of all these processes, the joining of the sprouts of a new real subordination not only of labor, but of the Human Being, to capital with the use of new mechanisms of formal subordination creates the prerequisites for the fusion of the elite of corporate capital with the elite of innovators ("professionals"), multiplying the power of capital, as it were "multiplying" the power of contemporary corporate capital by the "power" of the creators. And whereas in earlier epochs this phenomenon, known in principle, was more the exception than the rule of the practices of alienation, owing to the rarity and uniqueness of creative activity, in recent decades, in connection with the transformation of the "creative class" into a mass stratum producing the key resources of capital's enrichment, this multiplication has become the most important component of the power of corporate capital.
At the same time, naturally, the hegemony of capital leads to a situation in which the progress of creative activity and of its material factors proceeds in forms most adequate not to free creative activity, but to the subordination of innovative abilities to capital.
As a result, the progress of creative activity flows predominantly into the channel of the development of perverted forms of creativity: • the expansion of the useless sector (in particular, of the perverted forms of the creatosphere);
• the formation of narrow specialists (a perverted form of the universally developing homo creator), working predominantly to order for the perverted sector (financial capital, the military-industrial complex, mass culture, and the like); • the conversion of cultural values into intellectual property, owing to the fact that capital "dresses" them in the perverted form of informational commodities held in the private ownership of the largest corporations, and so on. As for creative labor proper in its actual content, capital here finds itself in a dual position. On the one hand, it cannot but develop creative activity, for it needs its products in order to raise labor productivity, which makes it possible to obtain surplus surplus-value, and in order to create universal social wealth—scientific, artistic, pedagogical, and other innovations, whose appropriation by capital allows it to appropriate an intellectual (cultural) rent. On the other hand, capital cannot substantively subordinate this labor to itself. As a result, a system of transitional relations is formed in which, on the one hand, capital strives to subordinate creativity to itself formally and by "roundabout ways" (we wrote about these above, in reflecting on the transformation of free time, etc.), while, on the other hand, it is compelled to go in for compromises, developing not only pragmatically oriented and/or simulative but also real, fundamental education, science, and the like.
In developing the sprouts of new mechanisms of the formal and real subordination to capital not only of labor, but of the human being and his creative abilities, the present epoch supplements them with a system of relations of the corporate domination of capital over labor and (more broadly) over the human being. The essence of this domination consists in the fact that contemporary corporate monopoly capital represents not merely an enterprise, but, as it were, an "administrative-command system"1 in miniature, in some respects similar to the bureaucratic subsystem of "real socialism," and including many of the channels of power/subordination characteristic of that type of system. This is a closed, and to a certain degree bureaucratic, system. Upon entering it, the worker becomes not so much a free hireling as a member of a closed "clan," which grants certain privileges and guarantees, protects against certain external influences, and so on, but which at the same time also demands certain sacrifices and obligations toward the system (this is especially characteristic of Japanese and other Asian TNCs). Relations of management, acquiring the traits of bureaucratism, also contribute their share to the system of the subordination of the worker as a personality to capital, which in this case appears in a form of power fundamentally alien to it, but characteristic of large corporations—the form of the power of the "bureau," the chancery, formality. Thereby the corporation is built as a complex hierarchical system that integrally (including administratively-bureaucratically) subordinates the personality of the human being (and not only his labor power) to some faceless, impersonal mechanism—administrative-bureaucratic power. Let us emphasize: such a character of power signifies not so much its inefficiency as other qualities of bureaucracy—the power of a closed, faceless, privileged stratum, set apart from the rank and file and from the real process of activity; while this stratum itself is subordinated to the interests of preserving the domination and expansion of the faceless machine as a whole, and is weighed down by the fetishism of form, by tendencies toward the domination of vertical power ("I am the boss, you are the fool") amid the chronic ailments of departmentalism, corruption, etc.
1 The term appeared in the article by G. Popov, "From an Economist's Point of View" (Science and Life, 1987, No. 4). In it, drawing on references to Alexander Bek's novel The New Appointment, G. Popov attempted to reduce the essence of the USSR's planned economy to the command functions of the administrative system.
And although every corporate structure is constantly struggling against this, expending a mass of effort and resources on creating effective management, on the whole it remains, in essence, a bureaucratic system, that is, a system based on the alienation of management from labor. This approach of the authors sharply contrasts with contemporary interpretations of intra-corporate relations and management systems in corporations. Most researchers writing about corporations in the epoch of the genesis of the information society focus attention on something quite different. As a rule, the discussion concerns not even the "managerial revolution" as a new (in comparison with nineteenth-century capital) effective managing force-power (this was characteristic predominantly of works before the 1960s), but rather the new role of intellectuals ("meritocracy"), of professionals as persons relatively independent of management but of fundamental importance to the corporation; the transition from vertically hierarchical to modular organization of labor and to hypertextual organization of management; the diminishing role of administrative channels of power and the growing importance of intra-corporate culture and traditions, and so on. How, then, is this radical divergence of approaches to be explained? We by no means ignore the new tendencies mentioned above; however, in our view, most foreign authors writing on this subject (one may mention the works of such scholars as Bell, Drucker, Cannon, Toffler, Naisbitt, and many others) and their Russian followers (V. Inozemtsev, above all) in fact, first, single out only one of many tendencies. They emphasize the phenomena that we have called the undermining of relations of the subordination of labor to capital in the spheres of management and organization, phenomena that develop as the importance of the innovative and entrepreneurial abilities of middle- and upper-level employees grows. Second, as their object of analysis they take not so much the facts and actual relations within corporations as the declarations of intent of companies' top management and the precepts of management courses, models of the management and organization of corporations. Finally, third—and this is especially important, which is why we repeat it—as the relations within a corporation, the authors mentioned above as a rule examine the models for managing the employees of the head office, rather than all the links of gigantic transnational corporate structures.
As for the network of clients, that is not even worth discussing. As a result there occurs an idealization (a prettifying) of actual intra-firm relations, similar to the idealization of the "socialist organization of management." These texts resemble the realities of corporate management to roughly the same degree that Soviet planning theory resembled the actual work of Gosplan and the ministries in the USSR. As a result of the TNC's existence as an administrative-command system in miniature, its wage worker is turned, additionally, into an employee of a hierarchical system with all the specific laws, interests, and values characteristic of it (ranging from careerism to corruption), which are in principle not characteristic of the "classical" industrial wage worker. He is subordinated to capital not only as a partial worker within a complex system of technologically divided labor, but also as a "cog" of the bureaucratic system. As a consequence of the reasons mentioned, "professionals" are turned into servants (if not household serfs, some of whom lived no worse than impoverished landowners) of the corporation. In this sense they become, to some degree (varying for different workers of different corporations), high-ranking slaves of a certain "matrix" of corporate relations.1 In this sense they are subordinated not so much even to a particular corporation (though under conditions of "lifetime employment" or long-term contracts
this too is possible), but rather to corporate capital as the concretely universal content of the contemporary system of economic relations. Moreover, as a "cog" of this corporately organized capital-function, the worker becomes a workaholic prone to self-exploitation not so much because of the creative content of the labor as because of his subordination to this capital-function—his transformation, so to speak, into an infinitesimally small "partial capitalist" (and this not so much in his capacity as owner of his own human and social capital or of shares, but rather as an element of corporate capital as a whole). The latter arises when this transformation is combined with (1) the possibility of socially prestigious creative activity within the corporation (for example, working at "Microsoft," which since the late twentieth century has been a priori prestigious for young people), which yields progress (2) not only in labor power but also in the worker's human and social "capital," plus (3) participation in the ownership of the given corporation, as well as (4) modern management methods for the stratum of "professionals" (i.e., the smaller part of the wage workers within the TNC pyramid). When all these parameters are integrated, a powerful new system of motivation is created for the "professional" to work for the good of the firm, thereby finally turning him into a "slave of the matrix." The material basis for the mass development of this type of worker and their administrative-bureaucratic subordination to capital is the above-noted growth of the transactional sphere, and above all the increasing relocation of the most powerful corporate structures into the sphere of the movement and management of fictitious capital, as well as into other kinds of activity within the transactional sphere (from audit and consulting to marketing and finance). As such, the corporate system acts upon the worker's personality, creating social, legal, psychological, ideological, and similar mechanisms for subordinating the worker to the hierarchy. Here again the totality of capital's hegemony manifests itself—a peculiar kind of "economic imperialism," the use of non-economic mechanisms to strengthen economic subordination. This subordination can be carried out in the subtle and "delicate" forms characteristic of the "human relations" system, or it can take the form of totalitarian suppression in its essence, widely employing mechanisms of violence (chiefly in developing countries). Finally, the corporate system complicates and "blurs" the boundary between capitalist and wage worker, "drawing" the latter (as an employee of the managing hierarchical system) into partial performance of activity characteristic of capital-function.
For the "twilight" states of economic systems (and late capitalism is precisely such a state), the diffusion of "classical" relations and structures is the rule rather than the exception, and this is exactly what happens in this case with the relation between capitalist and wage worker. Thus a wage worker performing managerial functions (even at the lowest level) is drawn by the corporation into activity subordinating labor, generating a kind of self-subordination and self-exploitation (naturally, also partial). The corporate structure thereby creates an objective appearance (an inverted form concealing all the above-described "layers" of capital's hegemony) of the wage worker's transformation into a member of the corporation, linked to other workers by a system of "contracts" within a single structure. This creates the basis for the objective appearance of a unity of interests, values, and so on between the worker-member of the corporation and corporate capital. This subordinates the former to the latter even further, totally "dissolving" the worker in the corporation and subordinating him not so much to an individual capitalist as to the whole—the corporate structure (which, as already noted, has in the final analysis actually been privatized by the corporate-capitalist nomenklatura controlling the main bundles of property rights).
By including the professional worker in the hierarchy of the corporate organization, capital must thereby substantially modify the parameters of reproduction of the commodity labor power—above all, the capacities for labor of the innovator-worker, who is at the same time also a "slave of the matrix." What, then, are these new qualities? Such a worker (innovator and simultaneously "slave of the matrix") must have (1) a high level of education; (2) a certain stability of life activity; owing to this, (3) a high life expectancy and good health, as well as (4) significant non-working time for reproducing his qualifications... The list could easily be continued. If these parameters are not provided by a universally accessible social system, the worker (the family) must reproduce them himself. Hence, in particular, follows directly the need for wage workers, on a mass scale (to the extent that "professionals" are numerous), to carry out significant savings (sufficient at least to solve tasks 1–4), directly connected with the named parameters of reproducing the quality of the person as expensive labor power and as a "cog" of capital-function. Capital itself thereby brings into being mass savings (among the upper and middle strata of developed countries) and itself appropriates control over them and the rights to use them (note that here the authors, from a new angle, arrive at an additional grounding for the scheme they proposed at the beginning of the section, of the production and appropriation of surplus value under conditions of the development of workers' mass savings).
Such a model of reproduction of the employee-worker (let us also add here the regularities of the reproduction of the "consumer society") produces the formation of a "society of old people," where, alongside the positive process of a significant increase in life expectancy, one observes the displacement of all aspects of a person's extra-corporate life and their postponement to the period of old age. The latter, incidentally, is thereby also turned into the "leisure" of the consumer-client... Let us summarize: under conditions of late capitalism, the human being is wholly subordinated to corporate capital, while simultaneously reproducing the latter through the whole of his life activity. The main channels of such subordination-reproduction become, first, human labor as not merely that of a wage worker but of a "slave of the matrix"—a workaholic-professional whose innovative qualities and striving for quality activity are subordinated to and absorbed by the corporation; second, his existence as a client-consumer; and third, the accumulation of his savings. Let us now turn to the long-deferred question of the (non-)subordination to capital of extra-corporate creative activity—of those intellectuals who, at first glance, work independently (by contract) for any of the consumers represented in the network, while situated in their own "electronic cottage." The development, at the end of the twentieth century, of information technologies, flexible production systems, processes of miniaturization, and the like, gave (apparently) a new impetus to the development of extra-corporate systems of labor organization (work from home, part-time employment, job sharing, and others).
From the standpoint of most (though not all!) Western researchers of this phenomenon and their Russian followers, in all these cases forms of intellectual labor free of subordination to capital are developing. The authors, however, will try to show below that in reality, in most cases, these forms camouflage the opposite process: the growth of labor's real dependence on capital as a whole (as the concretely universal), that is, the progress of precisely total dependence. The point is that this dependence unfolds in forms that camouflage its content, and through channels that are often barely noticeable. Among the latter are: • the absence of substantial social security guarantees and, what is especially important, of employment guarantees, for persons working part-time, on temporary contracts, from home, and so on;
the resulting increase not only in the rate of exploitation but also in such a worker's dependence both on an individual employer and on the capitalist system as a whole; • a substantial limitation of the possibility of self-organization and collective resistance to the hegemony of capital; • the reproduction, at a new stage, of the mechanisms of "dispersed manufacture," depriving workers of the advantages of socialized labor and failing to create collectives (like factory workforces) within which relations of solidarity develop; • the intensification of competition among wage workers; the "privatization" not only of labor but of all aspects of the worker's social life, which leads to an even greater subordination of the human being to the total power not only of capital but also of the market. As a result, there forms (this thesis is developed within the framework of the dual economy concept) a division of working people, not only in the world as a whole but also within developed countries, into an "elite" of permanently (and sometimes even with guarantees) employed staff fused with corporate capital, and the rest of the wage workers, who fall (owing to the lack of social protection) into semi-servile dependence on capital. Especially important in this context is the transition to an ever wider use of the form that we, back in the late 1990s, called "postindustrial dispersed manufacture." The use of the widely publicized "electronic cottage" form, dating back to the works of D. Bell, created the appearance of a transition, in the case of the postindustrial worker, from the form of wage labor to the form of labor consisting of the provision of services by one independent commodity producer (the postindustrial worker) to another (the corporation). This appearance is not accidental: the relations between wage labor and capital have always seemingly been, and remain, relations between two independent commodity owners, as Karl Marx specifically emphasized. But it is equally true that in their essence they have been and remain relations of the subordination of labor to capital. The point is only that the form of this subordination can be, has been, and will be different for capitalist enterprises that differ technologically and organizationally.
It is not by chance that we have devoted some attention to the theory of the formal and real subordination of labor to capital. It "works" in many cases, including the case of "postindustrial dispersed manufacture." In this case we indeed see a departure from the relations of real subordination of labor to capital typical of industrial capitalism (the factory, assembly-line production). But this process does not abolish the old mechanisms of formal subordination of labor to capital, and it adds new mechanisms of total subordination of the intellectual worker to capital, described above. So the comparison of the "electronic cottage" with dispersed manufacture is more than a mere analogy.
This is a characterization of the genuine similarity in the methodological-theoretical nature of the relations of subordination of labor to capital. Let us continue our analysis. The system of the named channels of human subordination to capital, multiplied by the development of the "society of professionals" (being, let us repeat, one of the inverted forms of the genesis of the creatosphere), leads to the destruction of the "two-thirds society," to the erosion of the "middle class." What is formed is not only a social stratum (a "proto-class") personifying the hegemony of corporate capital (the "corporate nomenklatura"), but also a social stratum (a "proto-class") that directly carries out this hegemony (chiefly in the inverted sector)—the "professionals" (a new quality of capital-function).1
1 The identification of these strata is carried out in accordance with classical Marxist criteria, above all the place occupied in the system of the social division of labor and in the system of production relations.
Overall, these two divisions of the new corporate bourgeoisie, together with the intellectuals integrated into this system, turned into "human capital" and directly servicing the hegemony of capital in spiritual production, plus the middle and successful part of the petty bourgeoisie, form a new "upper" one-third (and in some places even less) of the society of developed countries. The social status, income, and power of this third have been actively growing (not only absolutely but also relatively) over the past 20–30 years. In contrast, the actual wage workers proper (potential subjects of mass, universally accessible creative activity—teachers and educators, "rank-and-file" medical personnel, engineers, those who work to restore society and nature) are increasingly falling behind this upper stratum. The dynamics of their social position (the absence of substantial positive shifts over the past 30–40 years, together with growing labor intensity) is coming ever closer to the position of the lower third of the population of developed countries. As a result, one may suppose that, if these tendencies persist, developed countries will in the near future become "societies of one third (or one quarter...)," casting the majority of their citizens beyond the threshold of "progress." As a result, an amorphous but constantly growing mass stratum of persons "excluded" from the system of stable, institutionally guaranteed relations of labor and capital is taking shape in the world as a whole—the precariat (in some cases the concept of "precariat" is translated into Russian as "the outcast/rejected," which, given the tradition of translating Victor Hugo, is in fact even closer to the Russian-speaking reader).'
1 The precariat is a concept that as yet has no stable meaning. As a rule, it is understood to denote a rather amorphous stratum of persons lacking stable employment or, in a broader sense, persons lacking stable foundations for life, guarantees for the future (see: Boltanski L., Chiapello E. The New Spirit of Capitalism. L.–N.Y.: Verso, 2005; Standing G. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. L.; N.Y.: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011).
Concluding our analysis of the subordination to capital of the Human Being and of creative activity, of the hegemony of corporate capital in the spheres lying "beyond material production proper," let us recall that many of the contradictions of the subordination of industrial labor to capital, not examined in this subsection, are now being "exported" to the countries of the "Third" World, where these "old" forms of the domination of capital remain the most relevant to this day. They are also fully relevant for the greater part of the service industries throughout the world, including in the developed countries. Moreover, the wave of reindustrialization beginning in the EU and the US after the global economic crisis of 2007–2009 may reactualize the problems noted above, expanding the sphere of material production in these countries, where traditional industrial labor of the "ordinary" wage worker, and his "ordinary" formal and real subordination to capital as already described by Karl Marx, never fully disappeared. Finally, let us not forget that the hegemony of corporate capital also reproduces a whole series of pre-bourgeois relations of alienation, as it were "restored" in a new quality. The latter are not only incorporated into the system of relations of the hegemony of corporate capital but are also reproduced in parallel with it in the countries of the "Third World" and the former "World Socialist System." As we wrote above, in developed countries these pre-bourgeois relations of dependence
продолжение следует...
Часть 1 Chapter 7. The Subordination of Labor, Free Time, and the Human Being: Capital, Its Hegemony,
Часть 2 Self-check questions - Chapter 7. The Subordination of Labor, Free
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