Work and the Immaterial Labour of Music, Marx 200, KARL records, Berlin
Money is our shelter, the only way to access life. But at the same time, if you want money you have to renounce life. (1)
Franco ‘Biffo’ Berardi, 2015
First, having been lucky. Because basically I’ve never worked for a living. I consider working for a living slightly imbecilic from an economic point of view. I hope that someday we’ll be able to live without being obliged to work. (2)
Marcel Duchamp, 1966
For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time. (3)
Karl Marx, 1858
Marx’s epochal critique of the domination of everyday life by capitalist labour is more pertinent now than ever. In fact, the globalised scenario in which we live today, rather than representing a contemporary era of enlightened progress, has in many ways reinstalled some of the most regressive aspects of 19th Century industrialisation: a radical escalation of the divide between rich and poor, colonial domination by other (economic) means, the deracination of politics in favour of a ‘post-political’ ethos controlled almost entirely by business interests. At the same time, ethical and philosophical considerations are regularly swamped by the return of myths of technological progress and the promise of an ideal future.
Key to our current neoliberalised situation, impacted by the global application of virulently financialised capital, is the oft-remarked shift from Fordist to post-Fordist labour. This shift marks the transition from a type of labour determined by manual production to one dominated by the immaterial production of ‘values’. That is to say, the neoliberal economy values intellectual production in the guise of the symbolic generation of ‘concepts’. The immaterialist dimension of the conceptual values generated by neoliberal capitalism, is abstract in the extreme. The extent of its abstraction fulfills Marx’s prophetic dictum of capital’s inherent occultation of financial value - capital’s seemingly magical ability to make something out of nothing and to install desire where once there was none - more literally than ever before. Such immaterial capital is indicated by the contemporary preponderance for ‘branding’ (of anything) and the migration of money into the virtual realm of endless online speculation.
Yet, how abstract immaterial values are manifested in the world still depends on workers. Only now, these workers are globally dispersed in so-called ‘peripheral’ ‘Third World’ nations where, to all intents and purposes, they are invisible: the toiling labourer is reduced to nothing, vanished. This represents a situation very unlike that apparent under industrialisation where large cities were choked with factories and unignorable evidence of the squalor of the lives of the exploited. Different today also is the fact that the ‘ideas’ worker, unlike the labourer working for extended hours in places of production like factories, is essentially at work all the time. Today’s post Fordist worker often works ‘flexible hours’ and is no longer habitually at work from 9 to 5. Instead, such workers labour, willingly, in perpetuity. An idea that occurs to this new type of intellectual labourer, at any time of the night or day, effectively belongs to the company or organisation that employs them. Thus not being at work all the time means that the freedom granted this new type of worker - the freedom to be ‘inspired’ by work outside the official spaces of work - feeds back into the global capitalist organism to which it is ultimately tied and which benefits from such spontaneousness.
This contemporary scenario, determined by a new kind of immaterialist economy, where the worker is always at work, is weirdly reminiscent of the labour typically engaged by artists. Historically the labour of art has been difficult to instrumentally categorise. This has meant that artists, and despite attendant clichés, have often laboured for nothing. Even those products of artistic labour not guaranteed to find favour on prevailing markets, may still retain value despite their apparent worthlessness. Indeed, this particular condition of worthlessness has been for many decades, indicative of another type of immaterial value, one not so easily appropriated by a perniciously ‘outcomes based’ economy. Elusiveness to capture by the generically capitalist economy has paradoxically generated much financial value within the realm of art. The price of art, at one extreme, has soared to ludicrous heights making art a paradigmatic exemplar of the hugely inflationary capacity of global markets. Contemporary art has become in a strange way, the closest mirror of the most valorised, immaterial, form of contemporary labour.
Inherently immaterial, music escapes physical capture as much as it is increasingly accessible via online download. The popular music industry, somewhat like the art industry, has been capable of generating massive profits on behalf of some its most successful inventions. Musicians and performers feted by music corporations are often just that, ‘inventions’. These individual performers and groups are conglomerates of the ‘conceptual labour’ expended by executives keen to broach a new market (for all her ‘avant-garde’ styling and ‘outrageous’ public display, it is not surprising that the music of ‘Lady Gaga’ for example, is so insipidly predictable and user-friendly). On the other hand, the new dematerialised state of labour, including the labour of music, have seen an incredible proliferation of alternatives via a variety of online music platforms such as Bandcamp or independent publishers such as Karl Records (to name but one). Regardless of the significant profits of large record companies, such obvious unfunded proliferation has effectively stripped them of their unchallenged priority. Trading in immaterial concepts and images has meant too that those musicians and artists critical of the ‘business of music’ have also flourished and multiplied. Of course, and given the prodigiously adaptive and territorialising capacity of contemporary capitalism, those seeking to profit by such an obvious outgrowth of alternatives, will frequently attempt to ‘buy-out’ critics via their inclusion. Large music corporations therefore incorporate many subsidiaries releasing less obviously popular fare. By doing so, they attempt to assure their continued currency and ongoing ‘street-cred’.
Music however, is never just itself. Music is temporal and, from one perspective, un-ownable: we can own an album but do we ever really ‘own’ the music it contains? If we own the music then surely we own it in a subjective sense, we incorporate its rhythms, textures, harmonies and patterns into the organic circumstances of our own lives. We ‘live the music’. Nonetheless music also creates imagery and consequently ‘scenes’ attendant with such imagery. Once upon a time, we have would called these ‘subcultures’. And they were easy to identify. Today, such easy identification is more difficult and more complex. The music scenes with which we identify are frequently fluid, open and mutable. We internalise their idioms without necessarily displaying their branding. While contemporary labour has shifted into the immaterial generation of concepts as value and their financial exploitation, music has long been ensconced in the productive conditions of its own immateriality. Music as immateriality has further indicated post-capitalist possibilities – the elevation of uselessness to a value (as if) for nothing (or next to nothing). Actually, “these two steps towards the senseless - producing useless things and renouncing payment - in fact turn out to be two steps in the direction of freedom” (4).
Music (and certain types of art) can perhaps now assist in creating “Marx’s free association of producers” (5), producers whose immaterial ideas are a living embodiment of possibilities accessible to the receptive yet stubbornly inaccessible to the instrumentalising flows of the neoliberal economy as far as they everywhere seek to transform meaning into branding. This album dedicated to the 200th Anniversary of Marx’s birth, is a singularity housing multiplicities. It is the product of immaterial labour, the living labour of music. The multiplicity of voices comprising this release celebrates one of history’s most persistent singularities, Marx’s critique of capitalist labour. By no means free of the affective constraints of ‘real’ labour (the need to ‘earn a living’), music testing the bounds of its own definitions, defies capital by recognising musical production as a labour of thought alive precisely in opposition to those constraints.
Alex Gawronski
Originally published in the booklet accompanying the two CD compilation ‘MARX 200’, released on the occasion of the 200th Anniversary of Marx’s birth, KARL Records, Berlin, 2018.
1. Berardi, Franco. Heroes, Verso, London/New York, 2015, p - 215.
2. Duchamp, Marcel, in Dialogues with Duchamp ed. Pierre Cabanne, Da Capo Press, London, 1987, p -15.
3. Marx, Karl, Grundrisse, (Notebook VII. The Chapter on Capital), Penguin, London, 1993. p – 629.
4. Miklós Hiraszti quoted in Hatherley, Owen, Landscapes of Communism, Penguin, London, 2015. p-370.
5. Milovan Djilas, ibid. p - 399.