MONDAY CIRCLE

It's not Monday you hate...

[mondaycircle-blog]

Against Capitalism: Resisting Wage Labour in the 19th Century

In the advanced economies of Europe, you would be hard pressed to find somebody who still calls themselves an ‘artisan’. The closest you might find, perhaps, is a marketing savvy barista whose artisan job title indicates they have mastered the complex arts of pouring coffee in a fashionable café. Yet throughout most of the 19th century, skilled and independently employed artisans were a sizeable and relatively autonomous part of any national workforce. More importantly, this autonomy and casualised form of life meant that, for a time, they were able to mobilise collectively and politically in order to counter the existential threats posed by the industrial revolution.

Alongside the contemporary collapse of the labour market, we have seen the rise of the ‘informal economy’, self-employment, and a return to casualised work. In Britain and across Europe, this transformation has inadvertently stoked an anti-immigrant sentiment, whereby mass migration is blamed for the lack of full time jobs and meaningful employment. But those who genuinely feel the fullest effects of this dual crisis of work and migration, should perhaps remember that these crises are the systemic products of a historically volatile capitalist process. Although this process now operates on an unprecedented global scale, the British artisans and self-employed of the 19th century once suffered similar effects of coercion into meaningless wage-labour, and were also forced to continually migrate from town to town, or emigrate overseas.

In the following article I explore the work of a few historians who have researched this often overlooked period in our history, of working people who, as with many of my own generation today, spent most of their time not working, but looking for work.

Throughout the length and breadth of our native land there has not been a corner or village but what some of our members have perambulated in pursuit of employment; our high roads have resembled that of a mechanical workshop, or a mighty mass of moving human beings.

– Higenbottam, Our Society’s History, 1872

The masterless, migrating artisan is a recurring figure of mobilization throughout the history of socialist thought. The artisans appear, for example, during the social, religious and political upheaval of the English Revolution in the 1640s and 50s, roaming the countryside and woodlands in search of employment alongside preachers, vagabonds and beggars. The Marxist historian Christopher Hill dedicated a chapter to ‘Masterless Men’ in The World Turned Upside Down, describing “the seething mobility of forest squatters, itinerant craftsmen and building labourers, unemployed men and women seeking work […] congregating especially in London and the big cities, but also with footholds wherever newly-squatted areas escaped from the machinery of the Parish or in old squatted areas where labour was in demand.”2

John Rees’ The Leveller Revolution has more recently illustrated how the casualised labour, physical mobilisation and auto-didacticism of the London Apprentices (artisans in training), enabled them to become a core group of revolutionary subjects from which large numbers of Levellers, including the famous John Lilburne himself, emerged onto the political scene. They existed in vast numbers, he writes: the lowest estimates are above 10% and the highest above 20% of the population; it is likely true that apprenticeship in London made the capital into the largest educational site that existed in England before compulsory basic schooling was introduced in the late 19th century.3

Could this intense proliferation of educated individuals and unusually free political agency have had anything to do with the radical stirrings of the English Revolution? We are left with little doubt that Rees believes so. E.P Thompson has elsewhere provided us with incredibly rich accounts of the 18th century formations of the English working class, much owed to the central role of the radicalised artisans’ coordinated political gatherings and unionism.4 Iorwerth Prothero has notably examined the position of the skilled artisan in the politics of early nineteenth century London, and in another comparative study on radical artisans in England and France.5

The post-war period was a high water mark for Marxist Historiography in Britain. Its most recognisable methodology, ‘history from below’, was coined by E.P Thompson in an essay of the same name. In the preface to his 1963 book The Making of the English Working Class, he wrote: “I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.”6 Among the historically silenced voices of the oppressed and marginalised subjects unearthed by Thompson and his contemporaries, the artisans stand out as exemplary figures of mobilisation and resistance. Their traditional, pre-capitalist forms of life stood in stark opposition to the centralising encroachment of industrialisation. The emergence of bourgeois monopolies, rapid technological development and the introduction of wage-labour led to their eventual dissolution as a quantitatively significant social class. Yet this decline did not happen instantaneously.

So what form did this mobilised resistance ultimately take? The artisans were forced to initiate new processes of labour, systems of employment, and political organisation. Devised to deal with structural problems concerning the supply and demand of labour, unemployment and economic depression, their initiatives were instrumental to the formation of the early trade unions and modern kinds of welfare. Eric Hobsbawm’s 1951 essay The Tramping Artisan captured some of the key aspects of the systematic migration that took place during the industrial revolution. From the beginning of the 18th to the early 20th century, the ‘tramping system’ sustained calico printers, wool combers, paper-makers, hatters, smiths, carpenters, boot and shoe-makers, metal-workers, bakers, tailors, plumbers, painters and glaziers, bookbinders and others.7 It worked via documents, ‘blanks’, or ‘clearance’ which the artisan would carry on his travels, and affirmed his abilities as ‘a member in good standing of the society.’ He showed this upon arrival at his destination, a ‘clubhouse’ or ‘house of call’, which was ‘generally a pub ̶ receiving in return supper, lodging, perhaps a beer, and a tramp allowance. If there was work to be found, he took it; the call-book (if there was one) was of course kept at the house of call, an unofficial labour exchange. If there was none, he tramped on.’8

Hobsbawm’s essay was cited in The Making of the English Working Class — Thompson apparently enthused by the reference to the system as the artisans ‘Grand Tour’, which was about 2,800 miles long in the 1850’s.9 Thompson instead sought to demonstrate the artisans intellectual capacities, the political activities of The London Corresponding Society, of ‘organic intellectuals’ like John Thelwall, and the observations recorded directly by Henry Mayhew in his comparison with unskilled labourers. In his 1862 study, London Labour and the London Poor, Mayhew witnessed that “the artisans are almost to a man red-hot politicians. They are sufficiently educated and thoughtful to have a sense of their importance in the State…The unskilled labourers are a different class of people. As yet they are as unpolitical as footmen, and instead of entertaining violent democratic opinions, they appear to have no political opinions whatever; or, if they do… they rather lead towards the maintenance of ‘things as they are’, than towards the ascendancy of the working people.”10 Although participation varied across the country it is understood that the early trade unions, with their lodging and call houses facilitated a cross-fertilization of radical ideas, formalized in ‘friendly societies’, and within the walls of debating clubs. The tramping system itself sustained a similar circulation of radical thinking, as Hobsbawm discovered: “the traveller acted as a link between different areas, passing on information about local wage rates, advising on the best times to start a wage-movement, a walking encyclopedia of comparative trade-union knowledge.”11

Both Hobsbawm and Thompson fundamentally understood the system as a defensive measure. This defence was both lived and intellectual, consciously developed by the artisans in order to remain in frequent employment, and avoid subjection to mundane, restrictive, unskilled wage labour. They knew how a sustained and concerted migration could strengthen their bargaining power. Hobsbawm attributed its expansion and surge in popularity during the middle of the 19th century, to its ability to relieve strike funds, and provide means of countering victimization: from this to a more sophisticated calculation of political economy was only one step.

By removing the unemployed from places of slack trade, and keeping them in circulation, tramping kept the supply in the labour market limited. “If it had not been in our power”, wrote the General Union of Carpenters in 1846, “to keep up our tramping transport… a general reduction in wages would have taken place.”12 Just as it appeared at its height, with certain tramping trades perhaps coming close to the classical ideal of a perfectly mobile labour force, by the year 1860 the seeds of its undoing had already been sown. Aside from the technological advancement of public transport, such as the tram or train, one of the reasons for the tramping systems decline was the inability of small-scale competitive businesses to function within the dominant free market mechanism.

This new kind of economy led to the relative obsolescence of ‘casualism’ (the temporality of the artisans labour) as a viable form of life in Britain. As much as 36% of the workforce operated within the manufacturing industries as early as 1841, most of which was comprised of large private firms, factories and fixed capital.13 The rest of the population was largely concerned with agricultural production at this time. The centralized capitalist industries could not function without a constant influx of wage labourers willing to toil at the modern machinery, and had no need for independent, ‘self-employed’ artisans, unless they wished to join Britain’s reserve army of unemployed (although the actual term ‘unemployed’ was not in use at the time), or ‘surplus’ labourers.

Another contributing factor to the tramping systems demise worth mentioning here, and which for Hobsbawm ‘marked an important stage in the education of the labour movement’, was the introduction of ordinary unemployment relief by the trade unions. This followed, in particular, the massive unemployment and social upheavals of the 1840s. The unions adopted ‘static-out-of-work pay’, and developed more efficient ways to send workers from “slack places to busy places more efficiently than the happy go lucky tramping systems.”14 These ‘new unions’ Hobsbawm credits with recognising that the capitalist economy was not something to be sidestepped, but had to be dealt with by understanding its specific laws of motion.15

It is clear, then, that for Hobsbawm the tramping system was a foundational stage in a genealogical development of trade unionism. By tracing a line to the later unions he implicitly refers to the artisans, although diverse in occupation, as members of a homogeneous working class movement, as agents of socially produced knowledge which the movement advanced from. Perhaps this is part of the reason why critics of his generation of Marxist historians railed against them for their supposed historical ‘determinism?’16 For concocting the sense of an inevitable working class march, or class struggle, moving towards a Communist horizon.

But for all his perceived partisan unionist tendencies, Hobsbawm understood clearly, largely due to Karl Marx’s critique of capital, the economic reasons that made the tramping system’s continued functioning within the capitalist heartlands of Britain an economic improbability. At the end of the essay he speculates: “no doubt a mass exodus from low wage centres, a mass influx of organized men refusing to work below the rate, might have levelled conditions. But in the nature of things, this could rarely happen.”17 The ideal of an oppositional, or ‘levelling’, ‘anti-capitalist’ tramping system remained a figment of a socialist imagination, an imaginary which Hobsbawm himself had almost seemed hopeful that he would find in his research. The system was in fact always the last line of defence for a pre-capitalist class of artisans, which had to transform itself if it wanted to survive, or else emigrate overseas, where freedom from alienated labour still remained a possibility.

I believe the artisan remains relevant today because it is a figure tied closely to the labour process, but not, historically speaking, to the wage relation itself. Their self-reliance and masterless existence should not be taken as an affirmation of contemporary ‘self-employment’, but rather as a vivid portrait of a historical subject which, if only temporarily, managed to resist wage labour and in the process distort the flow and structure of aggressive capitalisation. The fruits of their resistance ̶ the birth of trade unionism and the precursor to our contemporary welfare system ̶ should stand as a vindication of workplace organisation, and continue to inspire the ailing trade unions that nonetheless still remain an important resource for the workers of today.

Tom Holland, March 2017

This article is an excerpt from the essay Towards an Artisan Imaginary, commissioned by Nikki Kane as part of a project for CuratorLab at Konstfack, Stockholm

References

Higenbottam, Our Society’s History, (1872), as cited by Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour, (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), p.42

Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, (Penguin Books, 1972), p.49

John Rees, The Leveller Revolution, (Verso, 2016), p.24

P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, (Penguin Books, 1963)

Iorwerth Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London, (Routledge, 1979) & Radical Artisans in England & France 1830–1870, (Cambridge University Press, 1997)

P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, (Penguin Books, 1963), p.12

Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour, (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), p.36

p.34

P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, (Penguin Books, 1963), p.267

Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1862), III, p.243 & E.P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, (Penguin Books, 1963), p.20

Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour, (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), p.52

p.41

Office for National Statistics, 170 Years of Industrial Change across England and Wales, (Released: 05 June 2013) <http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census-analysis/170-years-of-industry/170-years-of-industrial-changeponent.html> [accessed February 2017]

Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour, (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), p.48

Ibid, p.48

See Geoffrey Elton’s essays: The Stuart Century, A High Road to Civil War? and The Unexplained Revolution in G. R. Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government: Volume II (Cambridge University Press, 1974)

Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour, (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), p.53

Originally published at www.eurstrat.eu on April 10, 2017.

[mondaycircle-blog]

Amazon Workers Sleeping in Tents: On the Logic of Serfdom

A brief analysis of the ‘economic rationalization’ that emerged throughout the comment sections of articles about Amazon employees, who chose to sleep in tents outside their warehouse to save money.

At the end of last year, stories emerged claiming that Amazon employees had been sleeping in tents directly outside their companies’ warehouse in Fife, Scotland. With Christmas approaching the combined prospect of cutting commuting costs whilst earning bonuses for overtime clearly made rough sleeping seem like a desperate but economical choice. Upon being interviewed one of the tent dwellers described Amazon as a “poor employer”, and confirmed that he had opted to stay in a tent as it was easier and cheaper than commuting from his home in Perth.* Given the extreme nature of the decision, the size of Amazon’s reputation and the freezing temperatures at the time, the news went viral. With one or two exceptions, dozens of mainstream media sites including The Independent, The Guardian and The Sun used the opportunity to publish various shallow criticisms of the company’s working practices, citing previous allegations of international tax evasion, or the overworking and mistreatment of staff.* The most vocal political critic of Amazon’s working model was the Liberal Democrat leader in Scotland Willie Rennie, who excoriated the “intolerable working conditions”, and “an oppressive culture where management and co-workers put undue pressure on other workers.”*

But while the establishment rhetoric of the media and those like Mr. Rennie who, with moderate political motives stood more or less united in condemnation of the retail giant, the ensuing public debate appeared definitively less so, and became extremely polarised. An indication of this division was expressed by an online poll on The Courier news website. It asked: ‘Should Amazon bear any blame for workers camping outside its Fife Centre?’ 50% (10,121) answered: ‘Yes, Amazon should do more to ensure workers welfare’, and the other 50% answered: ‘No, people look after themselves when they clock off.’ “We live in a society in which we are unconditionally free to choose where to work, and how to live” — this can be conceived as the base logic used to justify the answer of the latter 50%. This position was repeatedly reinforced by individual commenters across multiple news platforms covering the story, and on forums such as Reddit — enough so as to rid one of any doubts about the accuracy of the online poll:

“What people do in their own free time is their choice. […] He’s a grown man. You can’t blame your employer for your transport arrangements” — commenter from Reddit*

“If someone chooses to camp out to save money on a commute that has nothing to do with the company paying too little” — commenter on The Sun*

“Although I am not an Amazon fan, they are hardly “forced” to sleep in tents. The last time I checked the UK was still a democracy where people had the right to work where they wanted to.” — commenter on The Independent*

These comments clearly demonstrate a lack of interest in raising the debate to a level which acknowledges the rapid increase of precarious work, stagnant wages, and insecure housing in this country. Nor can we expect such detail to be effectively espoused in the comment sections of mainstream news sources. It is therefore easy to simply ignore or discard such comments as instances of a short-sighted, unduly harsh, or conservative reactions to the tent occupants’ situation. Reversely, it is tempting to settle for railing against Amazon’s ‘working conditions’, as Willie Rennie has, without elaborating in an accessible manner a criticism of the structural conditions which make such desperate situations like the Amazon workers’, seem like worthwhile opportunities in the first place. In absence of any meaningful mainstream criticism and structural debate about the tent situation, then (and to insist that the event itself necessarily warrant’s this would be to miss my overall point), the impassioned comments threaded below the tent articles stood out explicitly as voices of the ideologically dominant, economically conditioned subject. They are examples of economic rationalization in action. This rationalization asserts that if you say ‘yes’ to something, then you implicitly had a choice. Even if your situation is so desperate that you could not otherwise refuse the exploitative deal that is being offered to you.*

The opinions of the commenters who sought to rationalize and defend ‘freedom of choice’ and some vague conception of self-reliance, form part of a broad and significantly de-politicised ‘common sense.’ From both a socio-political and moral perspective, I’d argue that we can trace the roots of this common sense back to one of the architects of our current neoliberal economic system, Friedrich Hayek, who in his book ‘The Road to Serfdom’ claimed:

“Only where we ourselves are responsible for our own interests and are free to sacrifice them, has our decision moral value. We are neither entitled to be unselfish at someone else’s expense, nor is there any merit in being unselfish if we have no choice.”*

For Hayek, who believed that since the efficiency of the market and a competitive economy will in the long run benefit us all, moral action is only justified insofar as it can be turned into a profit. Any empathetic or moral response to the tent occupants’ situation would be, according to Hayek, misguided as soon as it is politicised. Political rationality, unless it acts in symbiosis with the principles of market competition via the state, is seen by the neoliberal economists as poisonous, precisely because it inevitably tends to constrain the market in ways that is detrimental to future profits.

As William Davies concisely articulates; neoliberalism is the active ‘disenchantment of politics by economics.’ In his most recent book, ‘The Limits of Neoliberalism,’ Davies conceptualises our current socio-economic crisis by asserting that neoliberalism has entered a ‘contingent stage.’ He argues that an underlying ‘violent logic’ has gradually won out over the long history of neoliberal thought and policy making.* Perhaps it is the same violent logic which compels men to rough it in tents to get an increase in pay, ironically invoking a primitive image of the very same feudal ‘serfdom’ which Hayek once claimed to be the end product of socialism. In the book’s introduction Davies writes: “A political rationality that fails to recognise politics as a distinctive sphere of human existence was always going to be dumbfounded, once that sphere took on its own extra-economic life.”* Finally, this might go some way to explaining why the commenters who embody this economic rationality, blindly invoking ‘freedom of choice’ on the tent article’s comment threads appear so de-politicized, superfluous, and morally bankrupt.

Tom Holland January 2017

Originally published at www.eurstrat.eu on January 15, 2017.

[mondaycircle-blog]

Overcoming the Cult of Productivity

Economically unproductive labour — such is the nature of the work which an arts and humanities background can bestow. I am referring, in this Marxian sense (for whom productive labour was defined as productive labour for capital), specifically to the labour of gallery invigilation. So if it is not commercially productive, what is the actual content of such a role? Aside from welcoming visitors, providing information, and possessing the right to read disinterestedly throughout the shift, it’s also for example, to become a kind of embodied human insurance policy for the artwork on show. It’s a form of low maintenance administration (handing out surveys, filling out forms etc), it’s affective labour without the pressure of making a sale or undertaking extra ‘care work.’ The sustained bread and circus operation of the cafe/inner city gallery itself makes it an attractive place not just to work or to visit — the white cube space regularly houses other more exclusive private events. One example of this is the corporate takeover. This occurs in those liminal periods in-between exhibitions, when the clinical aesthetic of the gallery is hired in exchange for a contribution towards funding. The following paragraphs are some brief observations of an invigilator who worked at such a corporate investors evening in a gallery. The premise of the event was that young or ‘budding entrepreneurs’ pitch their ideas and portfolios, alongside the presentations of more experienced business clientele and pre-ordained productivity ‘gurus.’ We might say then, that these are the outsider perspectives of an unproductive labourer (invigilator), about what is structurally and politically recognised as productive and profitable labour (of the corporate, entrepreneurial class). This is an important distinction to make because ‘productivity’ was the focus of the keynote presentation, about which i’d like to offer up a few critical reflections.

After a degree of intermingling, coupled with the booze-fuelled potential of remuneration, the group of entrepreneurs and investors sat through the series of pitches and talks. These broadly speaking comprised of retail reps, product designers, interior furnishers and architects. By far the most interesting individual at the event however, was someone who we might simultaneously define as both an entrepreneur, and, to appropriate a term from the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, an organic intellectual of the entrepreneurial class.* The organic intellectual is someone who benefits their own class by giving it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function, not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields. Her presentation operated on this ‘directive’ intellectual level, and was not the same breed of business pitch as the others. Rather, it operated more like a morale boosting exercise in self-identification — as generating a palpable collective feeling of belonging amongst those present. Instead of the somewhat unfashionable word class however, she chose to use the word cult, endearingly addressing the room as fellow members of the cult of productivity. The light-hearted language and delivery seemed to win the audience over. She began by building up a consciously cliched picture of her past self as a successful but ultimately overworked business obsessive. She demonstrated through graphs, pie-charts and statistics how much of her personal life was previously eaten up by work time, and how it fits into a typical pattern within the wider culture of over-zealous and passionate business owners. Her transformative epiphany, namely, the realisation that her obsession with being productive could in fact become detrimental to her health, only came after she experienced a series of panic attacks. She subsequently spent a long time recovering from clinical depression, and discovered a book by the psychologist Paul Gilbert called The Compassionate Mind.* The book ‘outlines the latest findings about the value of compassion and how it works, and takes readers through basic mind training exercises to enhance the capacity for, and use of, compassion.’* By adopting this ‘mindful’ approach to her lifestyle, she had managed to overcome her depression, and demonstrated (with even more graphs and pie charts) how much extra time she now gives over to her personal life. Finally, she concluded by imploring the group to invest in their whole life, to invest in hobbies, and to invest in themselves by making their house look nice or by buying nice things. We could say that by demonstrating this kind of encouragement, she surpassed her traditional entrepreneurial role as an organiser of the “confidence” of investors in her business, of the customers for her product,* and instead, she attempted to organise the confidence of those present by encouraging them to invest in themselves. This, she reasoned, is the only truly effective way to increase your productivity in the workplace, and generate more profit for your private company.

The notion of using certain kinds of self-improvement methods as a tool, is obviously nothing new to the realms of finance and business. The opposite and less ‘compassionate’ end of the same motivation and mindfulness spectrum, is comprised of hundreds of similar volumes, with titles such as Think and Grow Rich, The Millionaire Next Door, and a personal favourite; Be Obsessed or Be Average.* Aided psychologically by the morality of Paul Gilbert’s book, her speech clearly assumed to contribute in it’s own uniquely compassionate way to this identifiable, popular canon of business oriented literature. For those present at the talk at least, it clearly seemed like a worthwhile contribution and was greeted with rapturous applause. And who could seriously assert that spending time with family, or taking up a hobby is a waste of time? Or that certain mindful methods of preventing mental illness should be avoided if they are proven to work for another individual? I’d argue, however, that the most important but ultimately flawed element of her talk, was her attempt to disassociate the perception of personal progress from the pursuit of private capital gain. In fact we could even viably say that the talk was, in this particular sense, a rudimentary critique of the contemporary work ethic. But there is an obvious contradiction in terms here. Let’s remind ourselves that this group of business owners, investors and entrepreneurial hopefuls almost by definition should be the foremost preachers of the corporate work ethic. Entrepreneur.com (yes, it’s a real website) defines an entrepreneur as ‘a person who starts a business and is willing to risk loss in order to make money.’* The website also stresses that being an entrepreneur ‘is not a job’ — and laments that: instead of getting a job and building a career, large numbers of people are finding ever more creative ways of hiding the fact that they’re unemployed, all the while telling themselves it’s OK since they’re entrepreneurs building their brand, platform, presence, following, or some other such nonsense.* It seems as though the article exists as a dubious propagandist attempt to kick aspiring business owners up the arse, urging them to work harder, and to undertake greater financial risk. What it also implicitly recognises, whichever way we look at it, is that being an entrepreneur is perceived by some as a ‘state of mind’, something you ‘just are’, something you ‘just do’, and not something that you write as your job title. The underlying mantra here is that success only comes to those ‘grafters’ and risk takers, not to that lumpen group who ‘pose’ as self employed. This line of argument is at odds with our speaker at the corporate investors evening, whose presentation went to some length to highlight the personal and psychological turmoil such a mentality can generate. But what both the journalist of entrepreneur.com and our corporate investors speaker do not allude to of course, is the wider contemporary socio-economic reality of self-employment. In Britain at least, as Novara Media aptly described, there is today a common experience of mass ‘entrepreneurial poverty.’* This follows a report by The Resolution Foundation last month, which claimed that the typical earnings of the self-employed are lower than 20 years ago: Whilst self-employment has grown by a remarkable 45 per cent since 2001–02 […] earnings have fallen by around £60 a week over the same period.* Furthermore, it has been suggested that 75 per cent of the self-employed working in London are currently earning less than the London Living Wage.* These figures clearly demonstrate that something more is at play than thousands of ‘failed’ entrepreneurs ‘hiding the fact that they are unemployed.’ They also show that the ability of the average self-employed ‘entrepreneur’ to satisfy their corporate ambitions through the pursuit of private capital accumulation, is becoming statistically less and less likely to materialise.

For somebody working outside the immediate sphere of business, like an invigilator within an art gallery for example…the real problem concerning the obsessive measurement of one’s own ‘productivity’ might in fact be fairly obvious. The question is not ‘how can I work more, or less?’ or ‘how can I be productive responsibly whilst simultaneously boosting profits?’, rather, it would make logical sense for them to ask: ‘who is perceived by society to be productive in the first place?’ If one’s notion of productivity is so entangled with the private accruement of wealth (as our speaker concluded in her talk) then what are those who strive and toil, but still remain within the demoralizing strictures of ‘entrepreneurial poverty’ actually doing with their time? It is clearly not satisfactory to pass their livelihoods off as only so much ‘nonsense’ — as the journalist at entrepreneur.com insinuates. The concept of entrepreneurial poverty, i’d add, can easily be extended to describe the situation of those who are actually employed by others, the underemployed, and increasingly (with the Conservatives punitive Universal Credit system), those who are unemployed too. If there’s anything new that this current benefit system has shown, it’s that even when there is no paid work to turn to, the unemployed are still required to continually demonstrate their entrepreneurial flair, or hypothetical capacity to obtain work.* Even without going deeper into any structural analysis of the governmental institutions, business and financial sectors, then, we can already see that ‘productivity’ is itself a very broad, and should remain a highly contentious term. Although it is certainly not immune from the commercial sector, the non-commercial, publicly funded contemporary art gallery is one of the few public spaces in which we are regularly invited to question and reflect upon forms of production that are not always explicitly linked to the economy. But the debate about how to (re)define productivity should not be limited to cultural institutions, the reflections of aloof invigilators, or corporate investors evenings filled with entrepreneurs. If there is anything at all to take from this anecdotal insight into the entrepreneur’s thoughts about how to profit the most from her own workload, it is how socially pervasive and psychologically harmful this entrepreneurs ideological conception of productivity has become. And if there is any way to truly overcome the ‘cult of productivity’, and combat such an ideology, then the first step is to unashamedly recognise that the limits of productivity are always primarily defined by, and geared towards, the interests of the ideologically dominant entrepreneurial class.

Tom Holland 07/11/16

[mondaycircle-blog]

[mondaycircle-blog]

A Recourse to Melancholy

‘Who is not sick or ill disposed? In whom does not passion, anger, envy, discontent, fear and sorrow reign? Who labours not of this disease? Give me but a little leave, and you shall see by what testimonies, confessions, arguments I will evince it, that most men are mad.’ 

Robert Burton - The Anatomy of Melancholy

It is not uncommon to suggest that the dominant psychology behind the last generation of left politics is that of melancholia. ‘Left melancholia’ denoted our impoverished subjectivity in the face of rampant neoliberalism, and refers to the rhetoric of some of the left’s most treasured ideologues. It’s most important role in left political thought however, is not wholly negative, and could be used as leverage for a mode of discourse that (in theory at least) contributes to a counter-hegemonic project. So as we begin to eschew the gloomy leftist stereotype through Occupations, a renewed appetite for automation and fresh popular demands for a Universal Basic Income, perhaps we would do well not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Perhaps the only positive element of melancholia politically speaking (and all mental illnesses for that matter) is it’s actual proliferation under capitalism. It could after all be said to be the default mentality of an overworked and overstimulated late capitalist society. This phenomenon could viably be used as a weapon. Melancholy is deeply embedded within our social fabric and our feverish work ethic. It is these two possible sources our contemporary melancholia that I simply want to reflect on here briefly - the dominant ideologies of labour and stimulation - whilst trying to comparatively re-establish a seemingly lost historical lineage.

‘Now that we have philosophically, medicinally and historically opened and cut up our most widespread affliction, we can finally make a few bucks from the misery of others.’ Such is the raison d’etre of our neoliberal régime when faced with widespread societal depression. A pandemic undoubtedly fuelled by this pervasive form of economic degeneracy. Depression is afterall an abundant resource that the kind folks of “Big Pharma” are more than happy to exploit. The ‘black dog’ of depression was once known exclusively as melancholia, and is man’s most loyal and miserable of companions. It has followed us through the centuries being ignored, beaten, banished and misinterpreted, its tail sagging between its legs. Today it is no longer violently confined or repressed as in the recent past. It walks freely among us, visits us in the workplace, climbs onto the sofa with us to catch the latest episode of Stranger Things. The result is a thin veneer of smiles and a sedated culture of optimism, Prozac for 35 million people and prescribed therapy only for an affluent few. But as Clark Lawlor has recently asked: do the drugs actually work as a solution? He joins a chorus of theorists in a call to ditch the dogmatism associated with the biomedical model in favour of a more humanistic, combinatory understanding of depression.* Most interestingly he suggests that we should do this by returning to a form of melancholia. By invoking this ancient and scientifically dormant conception of depression, Lawlor taps into a historically rich seam of knowledge that once prioritized (admittedly out of technological necessity) a more holistic, communicative, and therapeutic method of treatment.

Aside from the frequent bloodletting and the prescription of violent laxatives, perhaps there is in fact still much to be learned from the medical professionals of ages past. By far the most interesting tome on the subject was published back in 1621 by the English scholar and divine Robert Burton. Described by some academics as the ‘messiest book in the English language’, The Anatomy of Melancholy, otherwise handily known as The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptoms, Prognostics, and Several Cures of it. In Three Main Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up - is a behemoth of Renaissance scholarship (as well as of book titles). The preface to the 1638 edition, titled Democritus Junior to the Reader was published in Burton’s lifetime and offers a lucidly clear window into his own melancholic state of mind. He is palpably modest and demonstrates with great honesty the impetus behind the penning of The Anatomy’s 1400 or so pages. Grappling with what we would now consider serious clinical depression, he writes: I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy. There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness, no better cure than business. Writing and scholarship was therefore Burton’s therapeutic approach to his illness. Ironically he fought idleness by stimulating his mind through study - which is itself a form of idleness. It was because the book became intimately entwined with his illness and provided a vital activity for his own mental stability that the book grew and grew, and gave so many later scholars their intellectual headache. It is The Arcades Project of 16th century England, prefiguring the fragmented techniques of postmodernism by over 400 years. It does not take such a great leap of the imagination to see past the Elizabethan prose and recognize the Benjaminian method of his research here: if it is of greater offence to steal dead men's labours, than their clothes, what shall become of most writers? I hold up my hand at the bar amongst others and am guilty of felony in this kind. [...] I am but a smatterer, I confess, a stranger, here and there I pull a flower; I do easily grant, if a rigid censurer should criticize on this which I have writ, he should not find three sole faults, but 300. This discloses a healthy acknowledgement of early concerns of intellectual property, and a disregard for ‘originality.’ The original editions of his book have gradually transformed into significant cultural artefacts over time, transforming into works of art in their own right. Burton’s lively prose endlessly reaffirms William Morris’ later belief that art is man’s expression of his joy in labour. But Robert Burton’s book is not simply an artistic relic. In contemporary society with our aching, screen drunk eyes scrolling online, we are no strangers to idleness, passionate labour and over-stimulation - we have all become Robert Burton in his study - (along with a greater or lesser degree of scholarly competence). We are the unrelenting content providers, labouring and anatomically analysing our own contemporary melancholy acts of distraction. This complex of labour and stimulation which presents itself in the work of Burton therefore prefigures and provides the literary basis of what we now call depression. Burton’s analysis of melancholia precedes both the age of modern medicine and capitalism itself, and it is for this very reason that his discussion may have political purchase. As Clark Lawlor has insinuated, the term depression carries with it the negative and shallow connotations of a scientific, impersonal and non-humanist approach to the treatment of illness. But the task of returning to melancholia cannot be limited to the realms of medicine, and aim solely to convince the scientific community - do they not already know that a more communicative and therapeutic method is desirable!? Therefore if we are to revive the concept of melancholia we must begin by ascribing to it a political function, which always begins with the raising of public consciousness and the intellect.

The contemporary thinker that best articulates and activates the symbiosis between labour, stimulation and psychological illness towards political ends, is arguably the Italian philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi. The gloomy high priest of post-Fordism is known for penning books with pleasant titles such as The Soul at Work, and Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. In these texts he in fact integrates a politically potent form of pessimism into his thought, by attempting to use mental illness as a weapon against its capitalist overseers. In a chapter titled The Semiotics of Schizophrenia from The Soul at Work he expounds the relationship between our digital age and mental illness as such: In the video-electronic infosphere we all exist under the conditions that describe schizophrenic communication. To this end he ascribes a biopolitical, authoritarian dimension to contemporary digital information and hierarchy, what he calls - infocracy. The infocratic regime of Semiocapital founds instead it’s power on overloading: accelerating semiotic flows which let sources of information proliferate until they become the white noise of the indistinguishable, of the irrelevant, of the unintelligible. His vision of capital is one of chaos, excess stimuli, hyper-expressivity and biological deterioration. The Soul at Work is a book which feeds the depression that is spread thick by capital back to itself, instrumentalizing filmic visions, suicidal statistics and obscene news reports along the way. Building upon the psychoanalytical philosophy of Deleuze & Guattari, he unpicks the all-too-human side effects of our digitized economy of immaterial labour. Like Virilio’s shipwreck, the creation of widespread cognitive forms of (largely computer-based) labour is for Berardi the simultaneous creation of the cognitive malfunction - which is inextricably tied to the workplace in its expanded sense. Info-producers, or neuro-workers actively partake in this new factory of over-stimulatory unhappiness. It is the schizophrenic landscape of a fiercely competitive cognitive capitalism, a narcissistic landscape of winners and losers where the latter eclipses the former. The sense one gets from reading the book is that of nervous desperation, both on the part of the author and society at large. It demonstrates an intense desire for a new form of collective therapy. It is also however, easy to get carried away with Berardi’s incessant coining of new terminology, and his apparent belief that what we are witnessing with our schizo, manic depressive society is an entirely novel experience. A quick recourse to Burton’s Anatomy, and we can see that the scholars of antiquity in fact faced the same form of psychological torment and confusion: I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method, I have confusedly tumbled over dozens of authors in our libraries, with small profit, for want of art, order, memory, judgement. [...] I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged. [...] A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, corantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion. The tormented melancholy intellect of the medieval scholar, sat in his library, grappling with the burdensome weight of information, is a scene that has in our contemporary age been augmented tenfold and bestowed upon us all. Scaled to the whole of society, the internet’s accessibility through mobile technology has meant that we all too easily carry this infocratic burden. The psychological torment of the news feed, the notification, the pressing emails to attend to, the compressed sense of time and our hyper-connectivity, it’s all there, prefigured in Burton’s text - if one looks hard enough. This technological malaise is what similarly led Berardi in The Soul at Work to repeat a quote that could be straight from the pages of Burton’s text: Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fly off, that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into others that we no longer master.

As a form of therapy, Berardi proposes the collective recalibration of desire towards art understood as Chaoid. He draws this concept from Guattari’s book Chaosmosis and his emphasis on the aesthetic paradigm as a core part of a therapeutic, political perspective on tackling the neoliberal depression. “Art is a chaoid” means precisely this: that art builds devices that can temporarily model chaos. “Art transforms chaotic variability into chaoid [...] Art struggles with chaos but it does so in order to render it sensory.” This formulation is most notable for the positing of art as the process of producing refrains, the creation of tuned rhythms. I would argue that this notion of refrain as an antidote to depression has the potential to contribute towards a progressive form of political healing. The method of refrain, scaled up from the subjective work of art quickly becomes the political act of refusal. It prioritizes the benefits of de-motivation and inactivity through the figure of the artist and intellectual, actions that sit in stark opposition to the neoliberal pathological hunger for new ‘entrepreneurial’ energy, innovation, and new sources of profit. These two dimensions, the personal refrain (through meaningful labour) and the socio-economic act of refusal (of meaningless toil) could become two sides of the same liberatory post-work coin. The symbiotic relationship of refrain and refusal enacts a holistic fusion of two seemingly disconnected fields of our psyche: could, for examples sake, such a fusion enable the return of the figure of the artisan? Berardi was certainly not the first to implicitly elaborate a critique of labour whilst tracing the kinds of depression that seethes through our every-day crisis prone society. Freud, whom Berardi is heavily influenced by, most famously explored the epidemic of societal illness and guilt in Civilization and its Discontents. In the book Freud similarly noted the existence of ‘healthy’ pathological states where the ego is subsumed by an ‘oceanic feeling’ of wholeness. This could be said to provide the scientific basis of an experience geared towards a new social therapy and the pleasure principle. Over forty years earlier, at the beginning of The Right to be Lazy, Paul Lafargue wrote: a strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work. In his own instrumentalization of the depressive dimension fuelled by the capitalist work ethic, Lafargue also saw this economic systems approach to labour as the cause of all intellectual degeneracy, of all organic deformity. As things currently stand in a world grappling with a double ecological and economic crisis, and the total precarisation of the working classes, a deconstruction of the work ethic is still urgently required. A return to the refrain oriented championing of laziness via Paul Lafargue might help to bring about a healing of the social organism, finally ridding it of the foulness of unwarranted toil. But such a process can only begin when we recognise, with the help of figures like Berardi, the ways in which we can re-cast the corrosion of our nervous systems as themselves problems of a socio-political nature. Most importantly, such a deconstruction of our collectively willed pathology of toil has to start with the individual. Our hyper-connectivity and access to boundless quantities of information might mean that we all get to be Robert Burton in his study. But in order to fully heal ourselves of our depression, we must each undertake our very own Anatomy of Melancholy.

Tom Holland 29/08/16

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‘Art is what makes life more interesting than art’ - Robert Filliou

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Manifesto of the Paris Commune’s Federation of Artists

Assembly of artists

Yesterday, at two o’clock, the meeting of artists brought about by Mr. Courbet with the permission of the Commune took place in the grand lecture hall of the School of Medicine. The hall was absolutely full up, and all the arts were amply represented. Among the painters we noticed Messrs Feyen-Perrin and Héreau; among the sculptors, Messrs Moulin and Delaplanche; cartooning sent Bertall; engraving, Mr. Michelin; and criticism Mr. Philippe Burty – many architects and ornamentalists. An assembly of more than four hundred persons.

Mr. Courbet presiding, assisted by Messrs Moulin and Pottier. The latter, first and foremost, read a report drawn up by a preparatory committee and edited by him. This very interesting document contained truly lofty considerations of the needs and the destinies of contemporary art.

Entrust to artists alone the management of their interests.

It was this idea that appeared to prevail in the spirit of the subcommittee’s report. It was a question of establishing afederation of Paris artists, comprising under that title all who exhibit their works to Paris.

* * *

Federation of Paris artists

The artists of Paris, in adhering to the principles of the Communal Republic, have formed a federation.

This uniting of all the artistic intellects has as its bases:

“The free expansion of art, free from all governmental supervision and from all privileges.”

“Equality of rights among all the members of the federation.”

“The independence and dignity of every artist taken under the protection of all through the creation of a committee elected by the universal suffrage of artists.” This committee strengthened the bonds of solidarity and achieved unity of action.

Composition of the committee

The committee is composed of 47 members representing various faculties, namely:

16 painters;

10 sculptors;

5 architects;

6 engravers; and

10 members representing the decorative arts, incorrectly called the industrial arts.

They were appointed by the list system and by secret vote.

Citizens of both sexes who proved their position as artists – whether through the fame of their works, or through an exhibitor’s card, or through a written attestation from two sponsor artists – had the right to take part in the vote.

Committee members were elected for one year.

Upon the expiration of the mandate, fifteen members designated by a secret vote of the committee will remain in office over the following year; the other thirty-two members will be replaced.

The outgoing members may only be re-elected at the end of an interval of one year.

The right of recall may be exercised against a member who is not fulfilling their mandate. This recall may only be pronounced one month after the demand for it has been made, and – if voted on in general assembly – on a majority of two thirds of the voters.

The imperial Vendome Column, brought down by Communards at the suggestion of Courbet

Establishing mandate

This government of the world of the arts by the artists has as its mission:

Preserving of the treasures of the past;

Implementing and illuminating all the elements of the present; and

Regenerating the future through education.

Monuments, museums.

Monuments, from the artistic point of view, museums and Paris establishments containing galleries, collections, and libraries of works of art not belonging to private individuals, are entrusted to the keeping and the administrative supervision of the committee.

It will erect them, preserve them, and adjust them, and it will complete plans, inventories, indexes and catalogues.

It will place these at the disposal of the public in order to encourage studies and satisfy the curiosity of visitors.

It will note the state of preservation of buildings, indicate urgent repairs, and present the Commune with a frequent account of its works.

After examination of their capacity and inquiry into their morality, it will appoint administrators, a secretary, archivists and wardens, in order to assure the service needs of these establishments and for exhibitions, which will be spoken of later.

Exhibitions

The committee will organize communal, national and international exhibitions taking place in Paris.

For national and international exhibitions not taking place in Paris, it will delegate a commission in charge of the interests of Parisian artists.

It will only admit works signed by their authors, original creations or translations from one art to another, such as engravings rendering paintings, etc.

It rejects absolutely all mercenary exhibitions that tend to substitute the name of the editor or the manufacturer for that of the real creator.

It has not been given awards.

Ordinary works commissioned by the Commune will be distributed among the artists that the votes of all the exhibitors will have designated.

Extraordinary works will be submitted to competition.

Education

The committee will supervise the teaching of drawing and modeling in the communal primary and professional schools, in which the teachers are appointed through competition; it encourages the introduction of attractive, logical methods; it stamps models; and it designs the subjects among which a higher spirit is revealed, and the studies of which must be completed at the expense of the Commune.

It prompts and encourages the construction of vast halls for higher education, for conferences on the aesthetics, history, and philosophy of art.

Publicity

It will create a publicity organ entitled: Officiel des arts.

Under the control and the responsibility of the committee, this journal will publish events concerning the world of the arts and useful information for artists.

It will publish accounts of the committee’s works, the minutes of its meetings, the budget of receipts and expenditures, and all the statistical works that bring light and prepare order.

The literary section, dedicated to essays on aesthetics, will be a neutral field open to all opinions and all systems.

Progressive, independent, dignified and sincere, Officiel des arts will be the most serious statement of our regeneration.

Arbitrations

For all contentious disputes relating to the arts, the committee – upon the request of the interested parties (artists or others) – will appoint conciliating arbiters.

On issues of principle and general interest, the committee will form into an arbitral council, and its decisions will be inserted into Officiel des arts.

Individual initiative

The committee invites all citizens to send it all proposals, projects, reports, and opinions having the progress of art, the moral or intellectual emancipation of artists, or the material improvement of their lot as a goal.

It will give an account of this to the Commune and lend its moral support and its collaboration to everything it judges feasible.

It calls public opinion to sanction all attempts at progress, giving these proposals the publicity of Officiel des arts.

Lastly, by the word, by the pen, by the pencil, through popular reproduction of masterpieces, and through intelligent and edifying images that can be spread in profusion and displayed in the town halls of the most humble villages in France, the committee will work towards our regeneration, the inauguration of communal wealth, the splendors of the future and the Universal Republic.

G. COURBET, MOULINET, STEPHEN MARTIN, ALEXANDRE JOUSSE, ROSZEZENCH, TRICHON, DALOU, JULES HÉREAU, C. CHABERT, H. DUBOIS, A. FALEYNIÈRE, EUGÈNE POTTIER, PERRIN, A. MOUILLIARD.

Translated from the French by Jeff Skinner. (The first widely available English translation of the manifesto of the Paris Federation of Artists)

Image: The Imperial Vendome Column, brought down by Communards at the suggestion of Courbet*

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‘The Dismeasure of Art. An Interview with Paolo Virno’ by Sonja Iavaert & Pascal Gielen

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eM20vIaFVdnZMHngNHFi4Q1y4pXBcUdECEVqlbXpznY/edit?hl

This interview with Paolo Virno has become a great resource for the text I am currently writing, in particular for his articulation of the concept of Virtuosity:

“I see virtuosity as a model for post-Fordist work in general. And there is more: what strikes me is that the earliest type of virtuosity, the one that precedes all others, precedes the dance, the concert, the actors performance and so on, is typically the activity of human kind, namely the use of language.

Using human language is an activity that does not result in any autonomous and remaining ‘work’; it does not end in a material result, and this is the lesson De Saussure, Chomsky and Wittgenstein taught. Post-Fordist work is virtuoso and it became virtuoso when it became linguistic and communicative.”

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Hans Hollein, Mobiles Büro, 1969. Austrian architect and designer Hans Hollein created a mobile office in the form of a plastic bubble. Inside, the individualized, nomadic worker was simultaneously shielded from the outside and connected to it by telephone and telefax.

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‘WORK IS BAD, SAY SCIENTISTS’ - A humorous dissection of the psychological and scientific criticism of labour, by Andrew Smart of The Idler.

http://idler.co.uk/article/work-is-bad-say-scientists/

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http://joancornella.net

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The Composition of the Café

(Happy Barista - Stock Image)

‘The affinity between a pianist and a waiter finds unexpected confirmation in our epoch where all wage labour has something in common with the performing artist.’ - Paolo Virno

I recently came across an article that criticized the emotional labour enforced onto staff by certain corporate café chains. The decidedly liberal journalist, in struggling to characterise this phenomenon, resorted to using the Marxist concept of ‘affective labour.’ Seemingly embarrassed by his own adoption of this term, in the footnoted reference he quipped:

‘Specifically, the idea of "affective labour" came from the Italian Autonomists. One of the central texts, apparently, is Empire by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, published in 2000. Don't ask me what this book says because I don't speak Marxist.’

In light of recent Trump/Clinton shaped events, I think it’s a shame more Americans don’t speak Marxist. Either way, by situating both language and socialist critique within the context of the café, I believe this journalist was actually onto something…

In his prophetic anticipation of post-Fordist labour in ‘Fragment on Machines’ from Grundrisse, Marx upholds a thesis which is hardly Marxist; abstract knowledge – scientific knowledge, first and foremost, but not only that – moves towards becoming nothing less than the principal productive force, relegating parcelled and repetitive labour to a residual position.  This concept of knowledge itself becoming the primary productive force is what he called general intellect: ‘the intellectuality of the masses.’

With the upsurge of fashionable discourse around ‘cognitive’ and ‘affective’ labour, ‘hyper-capitalism’ and such like, it is easy to overlook the continued existence of the repetitive, residual labour described here by Marx. Although many Autonomist thinkers acknowledge the shift of mass industry to the Global South, the Western service industry receives little attention in their work. It is relegated, and for good reason. The service industry is rightly perceived as surplus, neoliberal, resisting automation, superfluous to actual progressive and productive activity. One only need think of the coffee giants who still haven’t paid their corporation tax.

Among these ‘relegated’ spheres of labour is the site of the café. Aesthetically more or less the same as a traditional café, the contemporary café (not adverse to a perennially profit driven sameness) has I’d argue, under the surface, radically changed in composition. The repetitive physical movements of the barista are the only remaining residues of the ageing Fordist conveyor belt model. The composition of the café has transitioned, hybridized, and augmented itself as an increasingly desirable place to work, but not necessarily for the employees themselves. Armed with laptops, notepads and voice boxes, the multitudes individuated, atomized, hidden labour has become part of the furniture of the neoliberal café. Why hold a meeting in the office when you could do the same in a café? This reformulation of the café as a space of work is not just due to innovations in portable technology, but also because communication itself has become the pre-condition of production. Thus allowing the traditional divisions of labour and leisure to essentially collapse.

In his book ‘A Grammar of the Multitude’, Paolo Virno formulates a number of compelling theses about post-Fordist labour. His emphasis on the role of language when describing the living labour of the general intellect is, I believe, particularly relevant when discerning the kinds of labour undertaken within the cafe. ‘The general intellect includes, formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical propensities, mind-sets, and “linguistic games.” In contemporary labour processes, there are thoughts and discourses which function as productive “machines”, without having to adopt the form of a mechanical body or of an electronic valve.’

The fluid, linguistic potential of post-Fordist labour is not necessarily a negative development, and Virno provides us with many other conceptual tools for discerning its nature. I believe that it is only when this cognitive, emotional method of working is encapsulated in an ethos by companies, and crassly re-sold as a labour model to low wage service workers, that it becomes unsustainable. In the high street neoliberal café, the quality and worth of an employee is not only judged by their ability to produce good coffee, but increasingly on their ability to perform both emotionally and enthusiastically.

Instead of being trusted to deliver good customer service, the most progressive aspects of the workers general intellect are being subdued through ‘soft forms’ of control, and the creation of a highly competitive atmosphere. Bizarre training rituals and barista inductions are prevalent. These can involve being asked to ‘close your eyes and imagine how the people you love make you feel’ then being told to apply those feelings to their service job. Or to respond intuitively (but always positively!) to Coca Cola or Starbucks logos by saying the first words come into your head, followed by a forced discussion about what makes them so great and successful. In one of the largest café chains; ‘after a day’s trial, your fellow workers vote on how well you fit the profile; if your performance lacks ‘sparkle’, you’re sent home with a few quid.’  If hired, the competition doesn’t stop there. Employees gain prizes for hitting sales targets; but instead of being allowed to take the prize, the winner has to donate it instead to the co-worker who they believe has worked the hardest that day.

Whether these examples sound like exciting things to be doing with your time or not is beside the point. What is increasingly clear in the neoliberal café is that it requires a heavy psychological investment that many including myself deem unnecessary. When one considers the meagre sums, far below the living wage that most coffee chains pay their employees in the UK, friendly competition can all too easily be perceived as another patronizing form of wage slavery. Or rather, when the linguistic games, affectations and the most progressive aspects of post-Fordist labour are co-opted by neoliberalism, things can quickly turn surreal. In these cases, the former site of leisure is transformed into a site of intensification. It does not remain fluid with potential but becomes a coagulation of cognitive labour. In many ways, the neoliberal café employee could be said to be the archetypal contemporary labourer: highly competitive, physically free, linguistically oriented and affective. In this way the composition of the café has been updated and transformed, but this is not necessarily a good thing.

* Here is an extract from an imaginary disciplinary hearing, inspired by my own experience working for a large café chain:

A. Why do you think a customer would complain?

B. Because I didn’t do my job correctly?

A. More specifically?

B. I didn’t give a satisfactory service, the drink I gave her had cream, she didn’t want cream, she shouted, I reacted.

A. Why do you think this is important to us?

B. Because it affects the business?

A. No, because you stopped performing.

B. What?

A. You ceased to commit emotionally to the company ethos, and failed to deliver the correct linguistic terminology.

B. I don’t understand…

A. It doesn’t require much to work in our café, all we need from you is a permanently flexible availability to work, and full control of your linguistic and emotional capacities.

B. I’m sorry but I thought this was about making coffee?

A. Don’t be ridiculous!

B. …

Tom Holland 31/03/2016

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“History has a habit of intruding”: Save the Lukács Archive

As the Hungarian government moves to close the archives of the Marxist philosopher and political theorist Georg Lukács, we share an article originally published by RS21 opposing the closure. - Verso

The Hungarian government is threatening to close the Georg Lukács Archive. Anyone with an interest in the role that intellectuals have played in left-wing politics should be appalled at such a possibility, writes Joe Sabatini. Sign the petition to keep it open here.

http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2554-history-has-a-habit-of-intruding-save-the-lukacs-archive

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Nietzsche Rages Against the Machine

from ‘Daybreak’ (Book III, Aphorism, p.206)

‘The impossible class.  Poor, happy and independent!  these things can go together; poor, happy and a slave!  these things can also go together  and I can think of no better news I could give to our factory slaves: provided, that is, they do not feel it to be in general a disgrace to be thus used, and used up, as a part of a machine and as it were a stopgap to fill a hole in human inventiveness! To the devil with the belief that higher payment could lift from them the essence of their miserable condition  I mean their impersonal enslavement! 

To the devil with the idea of being persuaded that an enhancement of this impersonality within the mechanical operation of a new society could transform the disgrace of slavery into a virtue! To the devil with setting a price on oneself in exchange for which one ceases to be a person and becomes a part of a machine! Are you accomplices in the current folly of the nations  the folly of wanting above all to produce as much as possible and to become as rich as possible? What you ought to do, rather, is to hold up to them the counter-reckoning: how great a sum of inner value is thrown away in pursuit of this external goal! But where is your inner value if you no longer know what it is to breathe freely? if you no longer possess the slightest power over yourselves? if you all too often grow weary of yourselves like a drink that has been left too long standing? if you pay heed to the newspapers and look askance at your wealthy neighbour, made covetous by the rapid rise and fall of power, money and opinions? if you no longer believe in philosophy that wears rags, in the free-heartedness of him without needs? if voluntary poverty and freedom from profession and marriage, such as would very well suit the more spiritual among you, have become to you things to laugh at? 

If, on the other hand, you have always in your ears the flutings of the Socialist pied-pipers whose design is to enflame you with wild hopes? which bid you to be prepared and nothing further, prepared day upon day, so that you wait and wait for something to happen from outside and in all other respects go on living as you have always lived  until this waiting turns to hunger and thirst and fever and madness, and at last the day of the bestia triumphans dawns in all its glory?  In contrast to all this, everyone ought to say to himself: 'better to go abroad, to seek to become master in new and savage regions of the world and above all master over myself; to keep moving from place to place for just as long as any sign of slavery seems to threaten me; to shun neither adventure nor war and, if the worst should come to the worst, to be prepared for death: all this rather than further to endure this indecent servitude, rather than to go on becoming soured and malicious and conspiratorial!' This would be the right attitude of mind: the workers of Europe ought henceforth to declare themselves as a class a human impossibility and not, as usually happens, only a somewhat harsh and inappropriate social arrangement; they ought to inaugurate within the European beehive an age of a great swarming-out such as has never been seen before, and through this act of free emigration in the grand manner to protest against the machine, against capital, and against the choice now threatening them of being compelled to become either the slave of the state or the slave of a party of disruption. 

Let Europe be relieved of a fourth part of its inhabitants! They and it will be all the better for it! Only in distant lands and in the undertakings of swarming trains of colonists will it really become clear how much reason and fairness, how much healthy mistrust, mother Europe has embodied in her sons  sons who could no longer endure it with the dull old woman and were in danger of becoming as querulous, irritable and pleasure-seeking as she herself was. Outside of Europe the virtues of Europe will go on their wanderings with these workers; and that which was at home beginning to degenerate into dangerous ill humour and inclination for crime will, once abroad, acquire a wild beautiful naturalness and be called heroism.  Thus a cleaner air would at last waft over old, over-populated and self-absorbed Europe! No matter if its 'workforce' should be a little depleted! Perhaps it may then be recalled that we grew accustomed to needing many things only when these needs became so easy to satisfy  we shall again relinquish some of them! Perhaps we shall also bring in numerous Chinese: and they will bring with them the modes of life and thought suitable to industrious ants. Indeed, they might as a whole contribute to the blood of restless and fretful Europe something of Asiatic calm and contemplativeness and what is probably needed most  Asiatic ‘perseverance.’

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The ‘Gift’ of Flexibility

From our first waking moments of the day we begin a process of mentally and physically preparing for labour of some kind. This is why I do not think the image above is simply a crude online meme. It illustrates (in an admittedly crude way) our very modern conception of time as linked to machinery. Historically stemming from the growth of factory industry, where people clocked in and out, and produced things within certain time frames, this industrial notion of time has been with us since the dawn of the modern era.

Today, with digital saturation dominating our lives, our eyes are never too far away from the screen. But these devices are not just used to check the time; our relationship with technology has become much deeper. In many cases our phones themselves function as the new factory, or at least a portable office. More people find themselves replying to work related emails on the train home from work. Or undertaking unpaid overtime, answering phone calls in the name of some ill defined notion of 'casual work.' Work contracts are increasingly ‘casual’ or ‘zero hours’, as we can see across our libraries or leisure services for example. Many highly skilled people now find themselves unsure of when they will be given the next shift, or when their contract will be renewed.

The new delivery startup 'Deliveroo' pride themselves on their 'casual', 'flexible' work ethic. All you need is an iPhone 4s or an Android device in order to become the time trial king of deliveries. Oh and you will also need a bike or a scooter... The phone in this case acts literally as a portable manager, linking drivers immediately to job opportunities and challenging them to complete the deliveries within strict time limits; for something just over minimum wage. At the same time, there is never a guarantee of work, nor any kind of binding contract or obligation on the part of the employer to support the workers. It is little wonder that the Deliveroo drivers I frequently see around town look so distraught with stress or exhaustion (its true!)...

I wonder whether this new 'flexible' delivery service really gives the driver more autonomy, or whether this flexibility in fact furthers their dependance on both a digital device and a fundamentally insecure form of employment. By removing nearly all of the traditional, physical distinctions between work time and leisure time via the iphone device for example, this form of labour creates a new kind of deterritorialized, precariously nomadic working method. One that thrives on low paid competition. We are yet to truly see how these increasingly precarious, competitive types of work effect both the psyche and, in the absence of any union to turn to, the issue of workers rights... As we have seen before with the Uber taxi driver strikes across European capitals, there is sometimes a heavy price to pay for the ‘gift of flexibility’ in the gig economy.

The merging of social devices with those of a work oriented purpose, and the increasing precarity with regards to the definition of work are problems surfacing in many other fields too. Think how the artificially social realm of Facebook is used to organise work meetings, advertise job opportunities or market products or events. In the case of both social and overtly commercial websites for example: 'any given transaction may take only a few minutes or even seconds, but multiplied across a whole economy, having everybody book their own tickets, submit their tax returns, upload articles, order groceries, update their profiles, and log their own working hours saves millions of pounds in wages not paid - and adds cumulatively to the cyber-bureaucratic load of unpaid "consumption work" required for everyday survival.'

It is therefore not unwise to assert that our current condition consists of not having a clue when we are working and when we are not. The boundaries of work and leisure time have been broken, and the lines definitively blurred. Perhaps it is not the case then, that from our very first waking moments of the day we start preparing mentally for labour of some kind. Perhaps we are already working.

[mondaycircle-blog]

http://www.thelocal.es/20160212/spanish-civil-servant-takes-6-years-off-work-no-one-notices

Spanish civil servant takes six years off work. No-one notices:

“Garcia, now 69 and retired, claims he was the victim of workplace bullying and had turned up each day only to find he had no work to do. He claimed he did not report the situation because he was worried it could lead to an end to his employment and he had a family to support. 

Instead, he read extensively and became an "expert on the philosopher Spinoza”.

[mondaycircle-blog]

Surplus Labour: Two Extremes

“Without food, clothing and shelter, man would most certainly die; no shadow of doubt about it. And since no service can be rendered to man that is more valuable than to prevent him from dying, is it possible, as a matter of actual fact, for any kind of labour to be worthy of greater compensation than that which is devoted to the production of food, clothing and shelter?” - From Socialism Made Plain: Why the Few are Rich and the Many Poor by Allen L.Benson (1904)

Mobilizing around a vast, empty Scottish hospital last weekend, a group of individuals dissatisfied with normative working models organised in solidarity. They often worked unpaid, some of them 15 hours at a time with indeterminate shift patterns. The hospital was for them simultaneously a site of abandonment and creative fertility, a rotten husk from which a new, collective experience might emerge. They had struggled to receive the little funding they had by tumbling head first through funding applications, just another form of unsolicited labour to add to the ever growing list...

Meanwhile in the south, a group of people with decidedly more practical vocational interest, the junior doctors, mobilized in a desperate attempt to protect the most vital aspects of their profession. In contrast, the hospitals they operate in are often overflowing with people in need of care, stretched to their limits by a receding pool of funding and resources. They are also overworked and underpaid. Unfortunately for us all, their livelihoods are currently under siege from politicians and bureaucrats with no first hand knowledge of how their care can be most effectively implemented (See Aaron Bastani’s insightful account of Mr.Hunt’s aristocratic inheritance and shaky legitimacy for the role of Health Secretary*). The Conservatives are hell-bent on privatising weekend treatments, arguing for a ‘Seven Day NHS’; a straw man proposal - the NHS already operates across seven days. Subsequently ninety eight per cent of junior doctors voted in favour of strike action. This was a last ditch attempt to resist the unreasonable encroachment of rampant privatisation currently being implemented by a stone face Tory party.

It is frankly unnerving that in my short, basic analysis of the two social groups above, many similarities and connections may be traced. This is because these two social groups should by all means, conventionally speaking, share almost nothing directly in common. In the first instance, I was referring to my own voluntary participation in the production of a film that will be premiered at Glasgow International 2016. I was actively a part of this group of unpaid, overworked artists chasing the golden carrot of ‘experience’, but then this picture is nothing new in the contemporary art field. ‘Free labour and rampant exploitation are the invisible dark matter that keeps the cultural sector going’ as Hito Steyerl rightfully observed. I therefore consider my committee membership at an artist-led gallery as existing within the realm of some form of creative solidarity, but one with an underlying voluntary self-exploitation. For precisely the same reason that the artist filmmaker might view an asbestos ridden husk of a hospital as a sight of boundless opportunity, they elsewhere in society may not fit so comfortably into traditional categories of labour. An artists job is to see things differently. Aside from being expected to labour for free, there is also the widely accepted view that the work of the contemporary artist is, quite necessarily, functionally useless. In times of austerity such as ours then, it is almost understandable that the arts struggle to maintain their place alongside more serious issues on the policy making table.

In marked contrast, the work of a junior doctor is necessarily functionally useful. Unlike an upturned urinal, a lobster telephone, or an ambiguous film projection, it will not be a surprise to hear that a junior doctor is usually far more effective at saving lives. So what then are these similarities of vocation that I mention previously? Why on earth would I bother attempting to make such an absurd connection between an artist and a doctor? Perhaps we can begin to unearth some semblance by looking at a couple of quotes by junior doctors themselves, both of which were used recently on the Andrew Marr show as ammunition against a disconcertingly smug Jeremy Hunt:

“Mr Hunt has made me feel demoralised, insulted and cheap. He implies we are the problem. Well I give my life to the NHS. It’s so grim on the frontline now, I sometimes work 14 or 15 hours straight without a second to even eat. I have never felt so despairing or close to quitting medicine.” - Rachel Clarke, Doctor in Oxford

“With so many patients to see I am absolutely petrified, I’m too exhausted to look after them safely. If we are stretched even more thinly over 7 days I’m certain patients are going to die.” - Andy King, also a Doctor in Oxford

As we can see the issue is not so much about pay, or even the method of work currently undertaken by the junior doctors. The source of their frustration and stress lies in their exhaustion, a symptom of being consistently overworked. This exhaustion is now coupled with the looming threat of becoming forcibly estranged from their patients. In trying to understand the details of the deliberately deceptive Tory proposal, we cannot find a direct increase in hours worked mentioned, but rather a careful deconstruction of the barriers between doctors normative and so called ‘unsocial working hours.’ As the BMA states on their website:

‘An increase in funding is needed if the health service is to provide a comprehensive seven day service. Seven day services cannot, and should not, be funded from the current pay envelope. Nor should they be resourced by increasing the burden of unsocial working across the current workforce. However, Jeremy Hunt, the secretary of state for health, has so far failed to provide details of how seven day service will be funded or staffed.’

This persistent increase in ‘unsocial working hours’ should be read as the increasing precarity of a profession that should fundamentally remain stable and secure. The junior doctors like many other workers under this government find their job security, material and psychological welfare under threat. It is through these notions of precarity and ‘unsocial working hours’ that the labour of both junior doctors and artist has become unknowingly intertwined. The sheer characteristic polarity of these vocations: functional/deliberately un-functional, rational/irrational, in this case simply demonstrates the phenomenal extent to which precariousness has spread across society. The study of precarity is subsequently a popular, even fashionable method of critique for a Neoliberal age. However in all of my research around labour and the precarious nature of work today: from readings of Franco Berardi, Guy Standing, Alex Williams & Nick Srnicek or David Frayne, I have not once heard the figure of the doctor used as an example of the precariat. This is not to say these thinkers would necessarily reject it in their analyses, the doctor is just not usually counted among the victims of state oppression.

At each end of this spectrum of contemporary labour, there are also questions of value and importance. The Conservative government apparently, paradoxically, deems the work of the junior doctors as too important to be left to the whims of the doctors themselves, or even their representatives the BMA. Preferring what would be for many an economically unattainable service, in the name of a ‘quality service.’ This question of value cuts to the heart of the NHS debate, for the junior doctors find themselves stuck in the middle of oppositional political agendas: the market fundamentalist approach vs the last remnants of a socialist welfare programme.

Whereas the junior doctors work within a sphere of solicited importance, the artist on the other hand operates within a realm of un-solicited importance. The artist and art worker often exists in a state of permanent precariousness, consistently required to prove him or herself through funding applications, receiving little or no commercial return. The artist or art worker is frequently expected to work for free. This unpaid work is rationalised by the employer or gallery as ‘work experience’, or as a labour of love. It is interesting to note that this is also the case with the junior doctor, and even more so under the new contract proposal. They are required to prove themselves through working ‘unsocial hours’, sometimes unpaid, because they are expected to enjoy every minute, or because they too need the experience. In both cases then, it is the surplus labour that becomes the problem. It is the expectation of a society that thrives on exhaustion, stress, and toil that is the problem.

Tom Holland

* IMO: Jeremy Hunt: Aristocrat, Liar, Secretary of State for Nepotism and Privatisation: http://novaramedia.com/2016/02/imo-jeremy-hunt-aristocrat-liar-secretary-of-state-for-nepotism-and-privatisation/

* Karolina Bregula - Glasgow International: http://glasgowinternational.org/artists/karolina-bregula/

* Hito Steyerl - Politics of Art: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/politics-of-art-contemporary-art-and-the-transition-to-post-democracy/

* Andrew Marr Show: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b070rt5r/the-andrew-marr-show-07022016

* BMA Website: http://careers.bmj.com/careers/advice/Junior_doctor_contract_reform%E2%80%94as_bad_as_it_seems%3F