Christian Marazzis Capital and Language - Essay Example

?Capital and Language: A Critical-Reflective Analysis Christian Marazzi’s Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy is his first work to be published in English as translated by Gregory Conti. Known as an Italian Post-Fordist theorist, Marazzi is an economist who can convey the intricacies of financial markets and economic policy to the lay persons through contemporary political and social theories. In Capital and Language, Marazzi explored on the significance of language and communication as a factor of economic inquiry based from his autonomist Marxist analysis and how it affects new forms of labour and production, making his arguments and viewpoints in the book to provide a better understanding of current developments in management, society, and new forms of work1. As such, Marazzi divided his thoughts on the subject of capital and language in four chapters: the transformation of economy from Post-Fordism to the New Economy, an account of the dot-com crash in 2001, the monetization of surplus value and the current trends, or the War Economy, in the business cycle as economic crisis continues to generate havoc throughout the global economies. The changes in working practices and patterns through the transition from Post-Fordism to the New Economy arose in the late 1980s and were fully established with the flourish of dot.com companies of the 1990s. The period of the dot-com bubble or the Information technology Bubble was marked by the formation of new Internet-based companies that maximized the use of steady commercial growth of the Internet. Several companies invested in ______________________ 1Haiven, M. 2009. In-Credible Wealth and Panic in the “New Economy”. Criticism. 51 (1): 165. using the e-prefix which increased the confidence of stock prices and future profits. Unfortunately, the bubble collapsed in early 2000s as large portion of market capitalization of numerous companies failed or declined dramatically2. With Post-Fordism being agreed as the transformation of the nature of work, the New Economy settles on the importance of finance specifically on the stock market. Marazzi relates work and finance through language by stating, …in the New Economy language and communication are structurally and contemporaneously present throughout both the sphere of the production and distribution of goods and services and the sphere of finance, and that it is for this very reason that changes in the world of work and modifications in the financial markets must be seen as two sides of the same coin3. Post-Fordism produces numerous goods and services that are set to the diversification of commercialized values and way of life. However, the centrality of communications and information technology in the United States and other Western countries has delivered a new breed of expensive managers and technicians. Increased worker participation and elastic work schedules are applied in production to maximize efficiency and flexibility while eroding job security through the employment of contract and outsourced labour4. Finance was first examined by the author, from its beginnings to the concerns of the ______________________ 2Lowenstein, R. 2004. Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble and its Undoing. Penguin Books. p. 114. 3Marazzi, C. 2008. Capital & Language: From New Economy to War Economy. Semiotext(e). p. 14. 4Holland, J. 2005. Fordism/Post-Fordism. Globalization & Autonomy Glossary. p. 2. http://globalautonomy.ca/global1/servlet/Glossarypdf?id=CO.0021 (Accessed November 9, 2012). financialisation of the economy. He noted that if savings had been focused in household economies before, the New Economy has shifted this habit into using the collective savings and pension schemes of individuals as investments for their financial future. In the past, labour was affected by economic crises through the loss of jobs and the cutback of public spending. However, labour is now directly invested in the performance capital making contemporary financial crises different from past ones. Hence, workers in the old economy perceive capital as an outer rival that can be organised and resist, while the public recognise the accomplishment of the financial markets as their own in the New Economy. Socialization of finance, or the massification of stock market investment, began in the 1970s when deregulation allowed the public to gain access to conjecture on the stock market. The rise of the pension funds in the 1980s has added to the eruption of investment until the 1990s in mutual funds. Individuals were exposed to speculating on the stock market by investing in mutual funds through their pension funds and even their nonretirement savings. Marazzi observed this phenomenon stating, The onset of pension funds and mutual funds began the draining of collective savings, first in America and then around the worlds, and their increasing investment in securities. What we call financialisation is the diversion of savings from household economies to stocks and securities5. The economist then evaluated the actions of the stock market under these new circumstances. Marazzi summarized that “financialization depends on mimetic rationality, a kind of herd ______________________ 5Marazzi, C. 2008. Capital & Language: From New Economy to War Economy. Semiotext(e). p. 21. behaviour based on the information deficit of individual investors.”6 Marazzi recognised the role of knowledge and communication in the contemporary workplace by centralizing his theory of language to the functioning of finance, stating that its role in Post-Fordist forms of work depend on its communicative-relation action. He relies on the Post-Fordist description of Boltanski and Chiapello on labour conditions and the re-reading of Marx on the general intellect by Paolo Virno. Marazzi observes, …the New Economy has given rise to reflective, cognitive, and communicative work, the living labour of the general intellect, centred on the linguistic cooperation of men and women, on the productive circulation of concepts and logical schema inseparable from the living interaction of people.7 In addition, Marazzi studied the effects of the masses’ attitude and self-assurance upon markets. He noted that “The theoretical analysis of financial market operations reveals the centrality of communication, of language, as a creative force.”8 This means that the creative and dynamic labour that language and communication create determine them as indistinct parts from the prolific scope of material production. The reason behind this is the performative abilities of language and it capability to actively accomplish things by means of verbal exclamations. The advances in communications technology has promoted the socialisation of finance as embraced by white collar workers that gain direct access to partake in the stock market by means ________________________ 6Ibid. 7Ibid, p. 140 8Ibid, p. 27 of their savings. As a result, the process of financialisation accelerated as machines and the Internet transformed the characteristics of Post-Fordist economy to the cooperative financialisation of the New Economy9. The stock market is self-referential, where prices are the manifestation of the action of communal opinion and the investor does not react to information instead into what he thinks will be the response of other investors by learning the information. And so, the values of securities listed on the stock exchange do not make reference on their economic value but to themselves. With this, Marazzi appeals on the theory of performativity by economist John Austin which states that the declarations must be supported by individuals with power and legal status. Marazzi claims that even men with authority have no performative power because the legitimacy of the performativeness of the agreement is based on its autonomy with respect to the array of individual beliefs. Furthermore, financialisation creates the transformation of the relationship between capital and labour. As the workers invest their savings into securities and mutual funds, the salary relationship of the workers and capital becomes singular. This structural change has resulted to the transformation of “salaries into an adjustment variable of the financial market.”10 Marazzi maintains that that the financialisation of the economy in the 1990s has produced an attention shortage which gave the producers and consumers enough time to generate and understand information, making them to form value through cultural commons while increasing the general intellect. _______________________ 9Mathiowetz, D. 2010. Paying Attention. Theory & Event. 13 (3): 3. 10Marazzi, C. 2008. Capital & Language: From New Economy to War Economy. Semiotext(e). p. 38. The article speculates Marazzi’s attention to economy particularly to media studies and the transformation of organizations by networked communication by stating, The technological revolution has certainly enlarged access to information enormously, but the limitless growth in the supply of information conflicts with a limited human demand, which is all the more limited the more work time reduce the attention time we are able to dedicate to ourselves and the people with whom we work and live.11 A network society is defined as “a society whose social structure is made of networks powered by microelectronic-based information and communication technologies.”12 Marazzi argues that even when the development of networked telecommunications machineries has exploded rapidly since the 1980s, “the fact is that on the demand side for goods and services, attention (and its allocation) has taken the place of the physical raw materials of the industrial economy. It is a scarce and extremely perishable good…”13 As such, several changes to the structure of work encompassed in the New Economy have led to poverty as working hours is extended and the stability of job in the Fordist perspective is underestimated. Workers became on call 24 hours a day and they tend to use their free time to find another job than concentrating on consuming informational goods and services.14 This crisis has led to digital overproduction or the excess of innovations that the market ______________________ 11Ibid, p. 64. 12Castells, M. 2004. Informationalism, Networks, and the Network Society: A Theoretical Blueprint. In: The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. M. Castells (Ed.). Edward Elgar. p. 1 13Marazzi, C. 2008. Capital & Language: From New Economy to War Economy. Semiotext(e). p. 66 14Ouye, J.A. and Knoll, Inc. 2001. Five Trends that are Dramatically Changing Work and the Workplace. p.1. http://www.knoll.com/research/downloads/WP_FiveTrends.pdf (Accessed on November 10, 2012). cannot absorb all of them anymore. Marazzi believes that the nature of digital overproduction is one of its kinds and can be resolved with two old answers on surplus value. The first solution is by using the notion of imperialism and colonialism through the search of external outlets from the capitalist circuit, while the second solution involves the search inside the circuit. The realization of surplus value is realised through the new income generated from Keynesian deficit spending, although it reaches a boundary as the growth rate of consumption slows down and the economy approaches full employment. As such, the link of Marazzi’s work on free labour and network cultures supports the claim of Terranova that “free labour is structural to the late capitalist cultural economy.”15 The Internet is inherent to late capitalism which is used against labour. As information is utilized as a form of capitalization, the interaction of workers becomes the central form of the general intellect. Although Marazzi has presented a thorough and innovative view on the present status of the economy, his optimism on the future of the War Economy seems too profound. The “entrenchment of capital in the wake of the recent ‘Great Recession’, not to mention Web 2.0 and the Tea Party phenomenon”16 was greatly underscored as well as the belief that the general intellect in the symbolic cooperation of workers is likely to fail due to the rise of “cloud intelligence” by corporations like Google which put forth ownership over several banks of these “clouds”. ______________________ 15Terranova, T. 2000. Free labour: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy. Social Text 63. 18 (2): 53. 16Mathiowetz, D. 2010. Paying Attention. Theory & Event. 13 (3): 6. Another limitation of the study is the failure of Marazzi to further explicate the account of language on the transformations in capital that might affect the perspectives of the reader in the articulation of the political economy. Mathiowetz criticised this shortcoming by noting, “What if we were also to consider language as a destructuring force, to attend directly to its moments of subversion, slippage, in its affective power to reconstitute the social world?”17 The uprooting of language from the notion of a biological conception and a common human capacity and turn it into a structuring force of production might provide some confusion without complex explanations. Nevertheless, Capital and Language offers a fascinating and innovative attitude to comprehend the main changes which society has experienced from the 1980?s to the 2000’s from a socio-economic perspective while acknowledging the significance of language in the contemporary form of capitalism. It analyses on the transformations of base and superstructure organizations by networked communication, focuses on the roles of knowledge and communication in the workplace, on the origins and ambiguities of the attention economy, changes in working practices and patterns and how the financialisation of savings involve workers in the extensive capitalist system to greater heights. ________________________ 17Ibid, p. 7. References Castells, M. 2004. Informationalism, Networks, and the Network Society: A Theoretical Blueprint. In: The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. M. Castells (Ed.). Edward Elgar. pp. 1-27. Haiven, M. 2009. In-Credible Wealth and Panic in the “New Economy”. Criticism. 51 (1): 165- 174. Holland, J. 2005. Fordism/Post-Fordism. Globalization & Autonomy Glossary. http://globalautonomy.ca/global1/servlet/Glossarypdf?id=CO.0021 (Accessed November 9, 2012). Lowenstein, R. 2004. Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble and its Undoing. Penguin Books. Marazzi, C. 2008. Capital & Language: From New Economy to War Economy. Semiotext(e). Mathiowetz, D. 2010. Paying Attention. Theory & Event. 13 (3): 1-7. Ouye, J.A. and Knoll, Inc. 2001. Five Trends that are Dramatically Changing Work and the Workplace. http://www.knoll.com/research/downloads/WP_FiveTrends.pdf (Accessed on November 10, 2012). Terranova, T. 2000. Free labour: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy. Social Text 63. 18 (2): 33-58. Read More