“Cognitive Capitalism” is an avalanche of words leading to murky marshes of not understanding.

In “Cognitive Capitalism” Yann Boutang tries to show he is a good Marxist fellow, knowing what valorization, surplus value and exploitation means. To understand “cognitive capitalism” he introduces “living labor” that “continues to exist”:

The solution is to split living labor into two, and to assume that — alongside living labor as an expenditure of energy that will be partially consumed and crystallized into new machinery in the following cycle — there is a living labor that continues to exist as a means of production throughout the cycle. In other words, this living labor is not destroyed as an intermediate consumption. It is consumed as bodily energy, certainly, but it also develops as a means of production of living as living labor. It builds itself as a skill, as a know-how resistant to its reduction to pure human capital that can be objectified.

How very strange. I understood that next to labor that went into machines (“dead labor” represented by fixed capital) there always was living labor consumed in the manufacture of goods or services for the consumer, represented by variable capital. So Boutang really proposes a third category: living labor that is not “destroyed” (=consumed) in the goods or services but which continues to be there as a kind of perpetuum mobile “a know-how resistant to its reduction to pure human capital that can be objectified” How very nice! A workforce with built-in resistance! Continue reading →