Prsentation(s) de louvrage La vie mise au travail

par Andrea Fumagalli, co-traduit par D. Gallo

Lassere e C. Degoutin ,
Prface de C. Marazzi,
Editions Eterotopia France Rhizome

Andrea Fumagalli (Universit du Pavia Italie)

THE CONCEPT OF LIFE

SUBSUMPTION IN COGNITIVE
BIOCAPITALISM: VALORIZATION
AND GOVERNANCE

Formal subsumption and

real subsumption in
Marx

Capitalist exploitation is described by Marx

with two different forms of subsumption
(subordination): formal and real, as
outcome of the historical evolution of
capitalism and the continuous
metamorphosis of the capital-labour ratio.
These two forms of subsum-ption refer to
two different concepts of surplus value:
absolute and relative. According to Marx,
the stage of the formal subsumption of
labour to capital is characterized by the

Formal subsumption
The historical period of formal subsumption
corresponds to the period of pre-industrial
capitalism that leads up to the threshold of
the Industrial Revolution and the first craft
capitalism, in which the exploitation of labour
and its submission to the capital takes place
on the basis of a pre-existing labour
process. In this context, the plus value
derives from the extensification of labour
overall through the continued lengthening of
daily working time:
"I call absolute surplus value the surplus

Formal subsumption
The first stage of capitalism can therefore be
read as the stage in which the production
activity is not affected by a strong
acceleration of technological progress, except
for the period of the industrial revolution at
the end of XVIII century, which marks the
widespread introduction of machines and
relatively affects the know-how of the
workers. However, what it is structurally
certified at this stage of formal subsumption
is the more or less gradual, more or less
violent transition towards the figure of the
craft labourer. With this step, the artisan

Formal subsumption
The extraction of absolute surplus value,
however, meets an insurmountable limit: 24
hours a day. The prolonga-tion of the working
day cannot be such as to endanger the
reproduction of the labour-force. In the first
half of the XIX century some legislative limits
on labour-time are thus introduced: maximum
10 hours a day, with further limits for women
and children.
Salarization and the prolongation of the daily
labour time are the two aspects of the formal
subsumption of labour to capital: they are the
starting point of the beginning of capitalism
and, at the same time, the arrival point of the

Real subsumption
With the transition to real subsumption, the
process of exploitation and extraction of surplus
value passes from the extensification to the
intensification of the labour process. This
transition takes place through a succession of
three different models of organization . The initial
"simple cooperation ", typical of the first phase
of pre-capitalist formal subsumption, leaves
room to the s.c. "manufacture system" of the
late XVIII century, in which labour still has a
direct result and the worker uses his own tools,
albeit in an increasingly exclusive and in
confined areas. It is the stage described by Adam
Smith , when the "simple cooperation" changes
its configuration and transforms itself in the

Real subsumption
The stage of "manufacture system" of the mid-XIX
century, then, turns in the third organizational
model which Marx calls the "factory system", where
there is no more specialization and the worker is
forced by the "machine" to perform monotonous
operations throughout the entire workday. The
worker becomes so completely servant (enslaved
to) of the machine, by reducing himself to a body
that acts without thinking. It is in this
transformation that takes place the transition to the
real subsumption of labour to capital. The extraction
of surplus value (now, relative) is thus determined
by the increase of the intensification of the pace
dictated by the speed of the machines. This
intensification ( what economists call "labour

Real subsumption
It is with the emergence of the factory system
that time becomes the measure of labour and
the labour time socially emerges as a central
factor. Thus, the chronometer, as a means to
quantify the economic value of labour, becomes,
together with the mechanization, the essence of
economic and cultural changes of the work
determined by the industrial revolution and the
fundamental characteristics of real subsumption.
"In this way, labour becomes more abstract, not only
in the form of exchange value , but also in its
content, devoid of any intellectual quality and
creative element (Vercellone, 2007)

In other words, the subsumption of labour to

Tayloristic real
subsumption
Fig. 1 Philosophy and dialectics of real
subsumtion (tayloristic labour)

disciplinary control

division
(parcellization)
operation

Labour
Passive
Co-

Towards new form of

subsumption?

Towards life
subsumption
With the crisis of the Fordist paradigm, that is
the crisis of real subsumption based on
material production, it starts a transition,
where we see a shift from the production of
money by means of commodities: (M-C-M') to
the production of money by means of
knowledge and relational activities [C( k ]: [MC(k)-M'], with structural effects on the mode
of production and on the valorization process
(bio-cognitive capitalism) .
We are entering a new phase of subsumption
of labor to capital, where at the same time
formal subsumption and real subsumption

The formal subsumption in life

subsumption
Today we can still talk of formal subsumption
of labor to capital when the labour activity
refers to the ability and to relational learning
processes that the individual worker holds on
the basis of his life experience. These are
skills that that are partially completed in a
period prior to time of their use for the
production of exchange value. The learning
and the relationship, initially, arise as use
values and, such as tools and manual skills of
the artisans of the first pre-tayloristic stage of
capitalist, are then "salarized", obtorto collo,

The formal subsumption in life

subsumption

"The mass-education and the development of a

diffuse intellectuality will make the educational
system in a central place as origin of the crisis of
the Fordist wage relation. The key role attributed
to the issue of the development of "socialized and
free" teaching inside the conflicts inherent in the
control of "intellectual powers of production" is
therefore, in our view, an essential element of
Marx's elaboration of the hypothesis of the
general intellect. The emergence of a diffuse
intellectuality is configured as the necessary
historical condition, even if in the Grundrisse this
reference is implicit and in some cases concealed
by a dialectical approach to the evolution of
division of labor that favors the analysis of

The formal subsumption in life

subsumption
Unlike Marx, the general intellect is
not fixed in machinery, it is not just
"growth of fixed capital" but today is
more and more dependent on li-ving
labour, ie the variable capital (Virno,
2004).
As well argued by Marazzi, the biocognitive capitalism tends to be seen
as an anthropoge-netic model of
production and accumulation (Marazzi,

The formal subsumption in life

subsumption

The valorization process works by exploiting the

capabilities of learning, relationship, and social
(re)production of human beings. It is in effect a
kind of primitive accumulation, which is able to
put to labour and to value those activities that in
the Fordist-Taylorist paradigm were considered
unproductive. The formal subsumption in the bio
capitalism, therefore, has the effect of broadening
the basis of accumulation, including training,
care, breeding, consumption, social, cultural,
artistic and leisure activities. The idea of human
productive act changes, the distinction between
directly productive labour (labor), the artistic and
cultural work (opus/work), leisure activities (otium

The real subsumption in life

subsumption
In the bio - cognitive capitalism, the real
subsumption is modified with respect to the
Taylorism, as consequence of the transition
from repetitive, mechanical technologies to
linguistic, relational ones. Static technologies,
at the basis of the growth of productivity and of
intensity in labour performance (size scale
economies) switch to dynamic technologies
able to exploit learning and network economies,
by simultaneously combining manual tasks and
brain-relational activities. The result has been
the increase of new, more flexible forms of
labour, in which design and manufacturing

Towards life
subsumption

In the bio-cognitive capitalism, real

subsumption and formal subsumption
are two sides of the same coin and
feed off one each other. They,
together, create a new form of
subsumption, we can define life or
subsumption of general intellect and
human relations. This new form of the
modern capitalist accumulation
highlights some aspects that are at the
root of the crisis of industrial

Towards life
subsumption
The traditional theory of labour value needs
to be revised towards a new theory of value,
in which the concept of labour is
increasingly characterized by "knowledge"
and is permeated with the human life and
life time. We can call this step as the
transition to a theory of life value
(Fumagalli-Morini, 2011), where the fixed
capital is the human being "in whose brain
resides the knowledge accumulated by the
company (Marx, Grundrisse, p. 725).
Life (composed by labour, work, leisure

Towards life
subsumption

When life becomes labour-force, the working

time is not measured in standard units of
measurement (hours, days). The working
day has no limits, if not the natural ones. We
are in the presence of formal subsumption
and extraction of absolute surplus value.
When life becomes labor-force because brain
becomes machine, or "fixed capital and
variable capital at the same time", the
intensification of labour performance
reaches its maximum: we are so also in the
presence of real subsumption and extraction

The governance of life

subsumption

"Foucault located the disciplinary societies in

the 18th and 19th centuries; they reach their

peak at the beginning of the twentieth. They
proceed to the organization of large areas of
imprisonment. The individual never ceases
passing from one closed environment to
another, each with its own laws: first the family,
then the school ("you are no longer in the
family"), then the barracks ("you are no longer
at school"), then the factory, sometime the
hospital, and eventually the prison, which is
the disciplinary environ-ment for excellence.
(Deleuze, 1990)

The governance of life

subsumption

Deleuze points out that in the society of control,

the individual is not defined as a "signature" and
"a number" but by "a figure": the figure is a kind
of password, access code, while the disciplinary
societies are regulated by mots dordre both
from the point of view of integration and from the
resistance. The digital language of control is
made of digits (figures) that mark access to
information or rejection.
"We are no more in front of the couple
mass/individual. Individuals have become
"dividuals," and masses statistical samples, data,
markets or "banks" (big data in the cloud?)

The governance of life

subsumption

Three forms of social control

1. Debt and the violence of

financial markets (Marazzi,
2013) i.e: austerity policy
Today, debt is no more only an
economic and accountability term,
but an indirect discipli-nary tool (and
therefore of social control), able to
regulate the individual psychology up

The governance of life

subsumption

2. Precarity (Fumagalli, 2013, Standing, 2013)

The precarious condition today is synonymous
with uncer-tainty, instability, nomadism,
blackmail and psychological subordination by the
means of survival. It is a dependency condition
that does not manifest itself at the very moment
in which it formally defines a labour contract but
it is upstream and downstream. Its an existential
condition that induces total forms of self-control
and self-control with even stronger results than
those of the direct discipline of the factory. The
precarious condition defines an anthropology and
behavioral psychology that is as strong as the

The governance of life

subsumption

3. The governance of subjectivity of

individuals
Two ways:
a. the control of the processes of formation of
knowledge (education system)
privatization, specialization, less critical
analysis the false ideology of meritocracy
b. the creation of an ad hoc individualistic
imaginary brandisation of life in term of
total commodification of existence leads to

The governance of life

subsumption

In conclusion, the governance of the life

subsum-ption is based on a calibrated
use of two main di-spositifs: the social
subjugation and enslavement.
The social subjugation is precisely the
production of subjectivity appropriated
by the capital, at the very moment in
which the subject worker is freely
involved in the valorization process, since
in it he/she sees or, better, has the

The governance of life

subsumption

The enslavement is, instead, primarily

machinic and psychological
enslavement. The two attributes are
totally interdependent, when the
machine is inside the individual brain
and affects the psyche.
Unlike social subjection, in the
enslavement our subjectivity, our
perception, our psychology, our (false)
consciousness are not required. There is
no relationship between subject and

Andrea Fumagalli
Thank-you for your attention

Emancipate yourselves from

mental slavery; none but
ourselves can free our minds.
Bob Marley, Redemption Song