For the Ontology of Labor

I have begun writing the final volume of the ontology of labor I imagined years ago. The title, The Earth on Fire: Essays on Life, Labor and the End of Sovereignty. It will be some time before it is finished and then hopefully published, but I think I will, from time to time, post about the progress I make with it.


I begin with a chapter on the mutations of labor. Obviously, I will not deal with the changes in the labor process from a technical point of view; rather, I will look at the effects of the recent changes on the time of labor   -- a recombined ontology of labor that produces new forms of life and is in turn propelled by them.


Instead of postulating, or even auspicating, the end of labor, the idea is to study, from an ontological point of view, the virtual identity of labor and life, the time of labor and the time of life. Of course, there is already a vast literature on this, but I think it might be useful to go over this question from the standpoint of the joint critique of productivity (productivism) and sovereignty. Indeed, this seems to me to be one of the most important questions in the world today. Doubtless, a certain regime of labor has come (or is coming) to an end. But what, exactly? And what comes next? To the first question, a quick answer (but that is one moment in a complex situation) would be 'job security.' To the second, a widespread precariousness (in labor and in life), "a permanent lack of permanence" (to use Joe Berry's wonderful phrase from Reclaiming the Ivory Tower)? Perhaps.


I begin my chapter by looking at some passages from Maurizio Lazzarato's Lavoro immateriale (Immaterial Labor; 1997). In particular, I look at a section in which Lazzarato deals with Marx's alleged "economicism" and with the work of Hans-Jürgen Krahl. This comes after noting that "contemporary capitalism no longer organizes the 'time of labor,' but the 'time of life" (p.82; translation mine). Lazzarato says that the problem is not that Marx did not distinguish between labor and action, but that he "did not sufficiently develop the concept of 'living labor' as an ontological, constitutive and independent power" (ibid.). Lazzarato is here addressing the question of the twofold character of labor power --Marx's discovery-- and he refers to Hans-Jürgen Krahl's criticism, in Konstitution und Klassenkampf (1971), of Marx's own reductive understanding of it. 


Lazzarato says that for Krahl "the discovery of the twofold character of labor power is diminished by the definition of labor as productive of value" (p.82). The consequence is that the concept of labor can only be developed "from within the standpoint of capital" (ibid.). This is a very important point, and indeed perhaps the most important for a proper understanding and an adequate development of the ontology of labor. But another very important consequence of this is, as Lazzarato adds, the "reduction of the revolutionary subject to the industrial proletariat" (p.83). 


Altogether this type of critique highlights the problems always and necessarily associated with a productivist logic, which often strangely remains in place even when capitalism itself is criticized and denounced -- 'strangely,' because really productivist logic (the obsession with profit and growth) is the logic of capital. The ontological critique, from within the perspective of the twofold character of labor (useful and abstract labor) shows that there can be labor that is not productive. The point is to develop the ontology of the labor (and labor power) capable of destroying, rather than producing and increasing, capital. To this I will go back in a later post.

Bruno Gulli: Sovereignty as Domination (Part 4)

Bruno Gulli: Sovereignty as Domination (Part 3)

Bruno Gulli: Sovereignty as Domination (Part 2)

Bruno Gulli: Sovereignty as Domination (Part 1)

Confucius, Laozi, and the Legitimation of Power: A Note on Syria and Elsewhere

Even when we accept a political philosophy of law and order, of institutional stability and rigidly codified norms, such as we may find in Confucius, we still retain -- and that is a great thing -- the principle of change, that is to say, the legitimation of what might seem to be, from the viewpoint of constituted power, the most illegitimate act -- the revolution.

Within the context of the Chinese tradition, despite the greatness of Confucius and his school, I have always preferred the anarchist and materialist philosophy of Daoism, with its principle of vital energies (the qi), its notions that the best way to govern is not to govern at all, the best way to teach is by not teaching, and that, following the example of the way (dao) itself, we should do nothing, and nothing will be left undone. Obviously, doing nothing (wu wei) is not to be taken in its most literal sense, as utter passivity; rather it is, as translators and commentators of the Daodejing never tire to repeat, effortless action, the enacting of nonaction, the doing of not-doing.

With Laozi and his followers, the very notions of legitimacy and legitimation make little sense. Asking the question as to whether a political and social order can be legitimized is a nonstarter; it is, in fact, the wrong question to ask. Any established  and constituted order can only be the result of tampering with the mysterious, yet manifest, unfolding of the way. It is in what is withdrawn, and thus resists -- the void, the nothing, a trace of the apparently disorderly movement of that which does not rest (yet moves as if it were not moving, in an extremely slow fashion -- that's the origin of tai chi, after all), it is there that the only order worthy of the name (really, a non-order, but a balance and a dance, and a false false-movement) can be attained, or rather, not-attained, but experienced along the way. To use a type of terminology that today has become fashionable (but with good reason), we can say that it is the order/disorder of the common. Indeed, the way is the most common. Its order is this/order. Certainly the way does not order about, but abides by the thisness of its own reluctance.

Confucian philosophy, on the other hand, gives us a precise hierarchical scheme, an order that must be constructed and later respected, a system of rites and duties. Everybody knows their place in society, and they must stick to it. Yet, even in such a system, where legitimation is possible, and indeed necessary, there is a point of torsion. Then things must change -- not the structure itself, but its contingent and historical expression. In Chinese history, that would be a change of dynasty, justified by the principle of the Mandate of Heaven, withdrawn from one dynasty and given to another. I quote from a book that I am presently reading, J. M. Roberts' The Penguin History of the World: "Confucian principles taught that, although rebellion was wrong if a true king reigned, a government which provoked rebellion and could not control it ought to be replaced for it was ipso facto illegitimate."

This is what, perhaps naively, comes to mind when one follows the events unfolding in Syria and in many other places of the world. If you provoke a rebellion and are not able to control it, why do you linger? Why do you keep exerting all possible force, until it is exhausted, disgrace and ruin yourself, while causing unimaginable suffering? Why don't you go, for that would be simpler?

Back from Confucius to Laozi, I need to add that these questions do not apply only to the current situation in Syria and other countries descended into civil war or into systemic and manifest brutality, relapsed into a Hobbesian "war of everybody against everybody," but also to those countries that still appear to be able to manage and control the coming rebellion, from China itself, with its gross human rights violations (including the  superexploitation of its workforce) to the many governments of Europe, unable to let people breathe, to the United States, with its global/imperial offense against the dictates of Heaven and its domestic crackdown on dissent.

On Marx, Kant, and Human Rights (Part 2)

I wanted to add a few lines to the post I wrote a few days ago: On Marx, Kant, and Human Rights.

I was, and am, not defending a generic and formal idea of human rights. Indeed, in the expression 'human rights,' what is especially problematic is not the word 'human,' but the word 'rights.' Obviously, it is the latter, not the former, that must be properly understood, and thus affirmed, established, recognized, and respected -- or perhaps deconstructed and rethought. In this sense, one is also justified in speaking about animal rights, or the rights of the mountain and the river, as the Bolivians do. The great ambiguity of the word 'rights' alone indicates that something is at stakes here. And what is at stakes is the zone of ambiguity between ethics (or life/being-there) and the law.

Human rights are rights that humans (should) have only on account of being human, and for no other reason. That is to say, not according to whether one is or is not a citizen of this or that country, 'able-bodied' or 'disabled,' 'productive' or 'unproductive,' and so on. These rights should not simply be basic rights, or subsistence rights. They should instead go to the depths and richness of the individuating ontology of the existent, be informed by that ontology, and turned, not into a commodity, a fetish, a legal makeshift, but rather into a firm ethical ground. From this ground, there stems the dignity of the existent, which is much more than merely basic, for it is a flourishing and an unfolding, a constant joy and a plenitude.

In this sense, human rights may very well not simply be rights, but much more than that -- or not be rights at all, but something other than that. I myself have never liked the word 'rights' very much. But words are what they are, and they betray us more often than not. Let's then take 'rights' to be 'the confidence of the potency of one's being.' This potency, however, is common, for the simple reason that each being, each existent, is made of all the others. As the Bantu saying goes -- to limit ourselves again to the human context -- "Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu" (a human being is a human being because of other human beings).

To say then, for instance, that workers' rights are human rights -- as I do in Earthly Plenitudes following a book edited by James A. Gross, whose title is, precisely, Workers' Rights as Human Rights -- is not inconsequential, even when one started from a Marxist premise. In The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx speaks of the workers' loss of humanity, insofar as they are workers. The workers' re-appropriation of the wealth they have produced, and which has been taken away from them by the capitalist class, is also a re-appropriation of their humanity, because in stealing the wealth they have produced, the capitalists have also deprived them of their humanity. Re-appropriation here means shedding one's workerness, becoming a direct producer, a creator, as well as regaining one's humanity.