A World of Work #5

and the imperceptibility of impermanence

Continuing the discussion of work, Communists Like Us and associated ideas.

A brief summary of where we got to in the discussion so far. As a first step the problem was one of trying to get a sense of what ‘work’ is within the text of Communists Like Us (CLU). There is much talk of work in that book but what is meant by it in that text? The first line of thought was to explore the possibility that the concept of work that is being used is one where we can contrast work and play. This didn’t seem to fit, and after a little further exploration we reached the idea of thinking of work as the transformations and arrangements of production. This appears to be the definition of work in CLU.

For some clarity, this is plainly a definition that derives much from Marxism. This is not suprising since Negri was part of a particular school of autonomist Marxists, one that I’m interested in. The particular stream of Marxism that Negri and the autonomists make up originates in large part from the work of Mario Tronti, in particular a book called Workers and Capital. Within this collection of essays from Tronti’s early period of work we find located a whole series of concepts that later become a common feature in discussions of autonomist Marxism - class composition, the partisan proletarian viewpoint, the ‘Copernican revolution’ and the social factory - amongst others. The broad theme, however, of Tronti’s work is what we might indeed call the transformations and arrangements of production. There is a clear continuity, in other words, between Workers and Capital and Communists Like Us. They share something in common, although this is not to say that there aren’t differences too.

The relevance of this becomes apparent when we think of work as a something that can and does change as we move through history. What it means to work, why we work, in what form work takes place, all these things have a history, a development, a dynamic. This is to remind ourselves that it’s never a good idea to treat a concept as fixed. Concepts have a life and tracking their processes of development is crucial if we are to be able to understand the meanings or usages of a concept. Work, like almost all concepts, has a history and what it means for me to work today, in my here and now, is not the same as what it means elsewhere, elsewhen.

So if we define work as the transformations and arrangements of production, the first thing is to note that we’re giving work a history. What kind of history? The next thing to note is this idea of production. It might be easier if we added in something and spoke explicitly of social production and reproduction. What does it take for a society to produce itself - in other words, to feed, house, clothe, educate, culture, learn and survive and be able to keep doing it for generations. What drives this process - this is the Marxist claim - is the forms and arrangements of production. In other words, how those things such as feeding, educating and such like are organised.

If this seems obvious then just be cautious since what this is saying is that it’s not who we think we are that matters so much as what we do. Or to use the language of vulgar philosophy, it’s not about ideas, it’s about material realities. Human society is not a development of better understanding, more sophisticated reason or a higher and higher relationship to truth, rather it’s the result of the developments and dynamics of work, those transformations and arrangements of production. For Marx, of course, the key feature of these material realities was conflict between different classes, that is, between different sections of society who have different relationships to material reality (slave owners and slaves, for example). All history is the history of class struggle, this was Marx - and his mate Engels of course.

It’s remarkable, for example, how many people believe that human development is about ideas or truth. Human discourse, the chatter of the newspapers, media, social media and academics, all the talk of the ‘problem solvers’ of the world, all of it assumes that what is needed is the right idea, or some agreement between people as to the right idea. ‘If we only knew what to do then the world would be a better place.’ Climate change, for example, would not be a problem if people just could accept the truth. These frankly ridiculous and naive ideas underly the educational method of change, the strategy of making change happen through spreading information.

Education is important and useful, of course, and information can sometimes help things, but as a strategy of change it’s about as useful as talking to your plants in order to help them grow. It’s not totally useless, but compared to a good fertiliser it’s pretty stupid - and your plants won’t thankyou for starving them of food because you think they just need some loving conversation. They’ll just starve. And the same with people.

Taking seriously the idea that material realities make the real difference often feels difficult because we don’t know how to change them. Part of the nature of a material reality is that it seems natural or immutable or just how things are. This is unsurprising because from our limited perspectives we are unable to get an adequate impression of the dynamics of change and if we can’t see the dynamics we damn sure can’t make out any inflection points and possible causes. How can we change something that to all intents and purposes presents as unchangeable?

Step one is to realise that this sense of permanence, of something being natural, is delusional. It’s a gross error of perception that then promotes gross errors of understanding and whilst we can understand the error, correcting it is far harder. We do have something we call the ‘scientific method’ that can help but even that can be problematic as it too suffers from being turned into something without a history, fuelled by the delusion of ‘the right idea’. When it comes to the human social realm the problems proliferate and too often any attempt to use a scientific method results in a crude contempt for human life rather than a greater degree of understanding. Having said that, the idea of something like a ‘scientific’ understanding of human society - and Marx himself uses this term - still holds part of the secret to a more sophisticated response to the inbuilt delusions of our perceptions. If how we see things as an individual is delusional then correcting those mistakes can be possible through something that we can - very, very broadly speaking - call the scientific method.

If we can grasp the impermamence of nature, the absence of anything that even remotely stays the same, then we might be able to grasp the vastly greater impermanence of the human society we are born into. The main problem is that this impermanence is beyond the individual human scale and as such is an imperceptible. The imperceptibility of impermanence is a key feature of the contemporary human individual.

to be continued…

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