Mikołaj Ratajczak
(Research Group on Philosophy of Culture, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. “Praktyka Teoretyczna” Journal for Marxist and Critical Theory)
Abstract:
Any Marxist approach to the critique of political economy of digital or cognitive capitalism should begin from the basic dichotomy between concrete and abstract labour. The key theoretical problem here is whether abstract labour – the substance of value – is still produced and measured the same way that is was done in the regime of industrial capitalism. The presentation will propose a philosophical analysis of the difference between concrete and abstract labour in cognitive capitalism. The thesis will be based on Paolo Virno’s project of linguistic philosophical anthropology and the theories of cognitive capitalism. The paper will then analyse the “immaterial” aspect of labour, which is increasingly central to contemporary processes of labour and production, as “application of rules”, with the act of utterance (the application of linguistic rules) as a paradigm. From there it will ask the question, how today this immaterial aspect of labour (of life, basically) is transformed into abstract activity and how it is measured, i.e. how application of rules is transformed into economic value (and surplus value). Such a perspective allows to formulate a coherent economical and philosophical critique of digital / cognitive capitalism that includes both the problems of exploitation, tendency towards crisis and the question of alienation. The paper will hence be also a discussion and further elaboration of basic terms and notions of the post-Operaist critique of contemporary capitalism. Starting from the theories of immaterial labour and cognitive capitalism, I will try to show, to what extent they can be still relevant and perform their critical function.
Mikołaj Ratajczak – assistant professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and a member of the editorial collective of “Praktyka Teorethyczna”, an on-line journal for critical and Marxist theory. His work focuses on political philosophy and history of ideas, especially the history of intersection between political theories and philosophy of language, political theology, political economy and biopolitics. Currently he is focused on the idea of the common and the problem of crisis.