The original Italian text
is published on the Rekombinant mailing list (www.rekombinant.org). The
French translation by Serge Quadruppani is available at
http://infos.samizdat.net/article408.html.
A new European cycle
The struggle of French precarious and cognitive workers could mark the
beginning of a new political and cultural cycle in Europe. Fully aware
of being at once students, cognitive labourers, and precarious workers
in the fluid cycle of recombinative capital, they started occupying the
schools. This is a novelty: hitherto, such awareness had not been so
manifest in student struggles.
Let this be clear: the question raised by French precarious and
cognitive workers is directly European, although, as Villepin says, the
CPE is much better than the slave rulings adopted by other countries,
Italy above all. Biagi’s law and the Treu "package" are a hundred times
worse than the CPE French students are fighting against.
Hence if they win, the same question will be immediately raised in every
European country.
If the French students defeated the CPE, they would certainly not have
defeated precariousness: they will only have rejected its legal
formalization and initiated a new phase in European social history. This
phase of struggle and social invention will allow for the formulation of
new rules and criteria of regulation of the labour-capital relation
beyond neo-liberal slavery.
The dark core
Rather than a particular element of the productive relation,
precariousness is the dark core of the capitalist process of production
in the sphere of the global network in which
a flow of fragmented and recomposing info-labour continuously
circulates. Precariousness is the transformative element of the whole
cycle of production. Nobody is shielded from it. The wages of workers on
permanent contracts are hit, lowered and broken down; everyone’s life is
threatened by precarisation.
Digital info-labour can be broken down into fractal elements to be then
recomposed in a place separate from where labour is supplied.
From the standpoint of capital valorisation, this flow is continuous;
from the standpoint of the existence and time of cognitive workers, the
character of labour performance is so fragmented that it can be
recomposed in a cellular form. Pulsating cells of labour are lit and
extinguished in the large control board of global production. The
precarious nature of info-labour is not due to the accidental mischief
of the bosses: its reason simply lies in the nature of the supply of
labour time. Labour time can today be detached from the physical and
legal person of the worker and becomes an ocean of valorising cells
singularly called upon and recomposed by the subjectivity of capital.
Either guaranteed income or slavery
We need to rethink the relationship between recombinative capital and cognitive labour in a new referential framework. The
attainment of a contractual negotiation of the cost of labour based on
juridical persons is no longer possible because the supply of abstract
productive labour is detached from the physical individual worker: the
traditional wage form is outdated, it no longer guarantees anything.
Hence the income of subordinate workers and employees is constantly
decreasing whilst slave-like working conditions are being re-established.
Whilst it is true that the number of work places is on the rise, total
wages have decreased.
But unemployment is much better than slavery. And this is what the
French rebels have realised: they refuse the employers' blackmail : if
you want to work, you must put up with slavery.
The struggle of French precarious workers puts on the agenda the
question of wages as one of global politics and demands a new wage form:
a guaranteed income detached from work.
Clearly, guaranteed income can’t be seen as an extremist watchword. It
is the only chance to flee the constitution of the generalised slave
regime of labour relations. So long as the
criteria of social government remain confined to the conceptual
framework of economic growth and to the predominance of accumulation
over and at the expense of social interest, guaranteed income will
remain empty talk. The ties to growth and competitiveness, presented by
dogmatic neo-liberal theory as natural laws and accepted as such by a
Left incapable of non-dogmatic autonomous thought, are actually rules
established and founded on a relation of forces that digital
technologies have tilted in favour of capital through the
deterritorialisation of labour.
Rules and forces
Rules are not immutable and no rule compels us to comply with the rules.
This is what the legalist Left never understood. Fixated on idea that
rules must be respected, it was unable to withstand confrontation on the
new grounds opened by digital technologies and by the globalisation of
the cycle of info-labour.
The Right understood this very well and subverted rules that a century
of trade unionism had established. In the classical mode of industrial
production, rules were founded on a rigid relationship between labour
and capital, and on the possibility of determining the value of a
commodity on the basis of socially necessary labour time. However, the
stage of recombinative capital is founded on the exploitation of fluid
info-labour and there no longer is any deterministic relation between
labour and value.
Rather than restoring the rules violated by the Right we must invent new
rules that are adequate to the flexible nature of the labour-capital
relation that no longer presents any quantitative determination of value
and time or any invariable element in the relationships between
macro-economic forces.
Cultural insurrection in Europe
After the elections in Italy a cultural process of generalized
insurrection against precarious form of existence needs to take place.
Getting rid of the Right will only help to remove the tool of political
power from the hands of dangerous people; but the struggle will start
afterwards and we must strive to fight under the banner of a guaranteed
income detached from the fluid process of cellular recombinative labour
supply.
The struggle of French students can effect a revival of the European
process. The French “NON” on the referendum on the constitution was
essentially motivated by a refusal of the precarisation and devaluation
of wages.
Today, we see the "propositive" side of this NON.
The European process can be governed by the interests of capital, be it
protectionist or globalistic. But only labour, in its process of social
recomposition, can function as the source of European right and culture.
This is another lesson of the French March.