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The Brexit crisis is best understood through a strong methodological framework, argues John Rees

As the current crisis around Brexit lurches towards its latest moment of decision it's worth stopping to consider the problems that such an unprecedented political moment represents for Marxist theory.

It is the complexity of the class and political alignments around Brexit that pose a challenge to any political analysis, including a Marxist political analysis. Single issue referenda are only seemingly simple political events. In fact, because they exist outside of normal party political alignment, they can often produce complex alliances and coincidences of interest.

And we can add to this the fact that it is never a straightforward task to map economic interests onto forms of political consciousness or political party affiliations. Moreover, all this is happening while the leadership of the Labour Party is no longer in traditional right-wing social democratic hands, but under the control of the most left-wing leadership the party has ever had.

But, before we try to unravel these more complex determinations, let's try and clear the ground of some common methodological confusions. In the course of doing so, we hope to distinguish an effective Marxist analysis from both those merely "cultural" explanations, which stress chauvinistic or nationalistic aspects of the Brexit vote, or some overly reductionist explanations.

Firstly, let's be clear about the register in which this analysis should take place. It is still a common mistake among friends and enemies of Marxism alike to assume that the simple two-class model of capitalists and workers, which Karl Marx deploys in his most abstract economic analysis of the capitalist system, is applicable when examining complex, concrete political events.

Marx himself never made such a mistake. In his concrete historical writings, for instance, Class Struggles in France, or his masterly analysis of the Paris commune of 1871, the Civil War in France, we find not simply the classes of capitalists and workers, but more than a dozen other social classes, subsections of classes, or fractions of classes deployed in his analysis. The peasantry, the lumpen-proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie, finance capital, and others all play their part in Marx's sophisticated analysis.

Here, for instance, is the description of the class represented in the government in Class Struggles in France:

'It was not the French bourgeoisie that ruled under Louis Philippe, but one faction of it: bankers, stock-exchange kings, railway kings, owners of coal and iron mines and forests, a part of the landed proprietors associated with them - the so-called financial aristocracy. It sat on the throne, it dictated laws in the Chambers, it distributed public offices, from cabinet portfolios to tobacco bureau posts.

The industrial bourgeoisie proper formed part of the official opposition, that is, it was represented only as a minority in the Chambers.'

This does not of course invalidate Marx's more general statement that the capitalist state is merely 'an executive committee for the management of the common affairs of the bourgeoisie'. It merely makes that statement more specific, more concrete, in this particular case.

Nor does it, as some commentators argue, invalidate Marxist economic analysis which relies on abstracting a two-class model from the more complex reality of actually existing capitalist societies. It is simply a question of choosing the right level of abstraction for the purpose in hand. We all do this all the time in everyday life. For instance, "fruit" is a generalised abstraction from actually existing apples, pears, grapefruit, strawberries, etc, etc. But if I wish someone to go to a fruit shop, rather than a hardware shop, then the abstraction "fruit" is very useful rather than having to say 'can you go to a shop that sells apples, pears, etc, etc'. If, however, I wish them to buy strawberries for a trifle when they get to the shop it will not be good enough simply to say 'go to the fruit shop and buy some fruit'. For this purpose, a more concrete description is necessary.

If we are to follow this model, then we should first start by laying out the fundamental class alignment in the Brexit debate. It is now established beyond any real doubt, although like much else in the Brexit debate this does not stop it being a still contentious view, that the majority of major corporations want to remain in the European Union.

Some 99 out of 100 FTSE firms back Remain. As the deadline for leaving the EU approaches, many of these firms are making desperate and direct appeals to the political establishment and the wider population urging either an abandonment of Brexit, or the softest of soft Brexits. Airbus, all the major supermarkets and car manufacturers are just some of the household names that have joined the chorus of disapproval which also includes the CBI, the Bank of England, the Financial Times, and the Economist.

But this does not mean that the capitalist class is entirely united behind a Remain position. The bosses of Weatherspoon's, and Dyson, and, most famously of all, Aaron Banks, are just some of those who have associated themselves with Brexit. And they have enjoyed support from the most reactionary middle-class tabloids, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express.

So the capitalist class is divided between its major international conglomerates, on the one hand, and, on the other, some smaller, often more domestically oriented, capitalists. The methodological point which this fact exemplifies is important: class consciousness is always uneven, and this is true in both the working class and other classes. An economically homogenous class can hold a variety of different ideological positions, so class consciousness can never be reduced to class location. In part, this differentiation may reflect different social circumstances affecting different sections of a single class in different ways. But as importantly, the totality of social experience, not only the immediate economic circumstances, shapes class consciousness. So although a class may have its consciousness predominantly shaped by its own economic experience, it will also be shaped by ideological interventions by other classes, by its experience of struggles across the full spectrum of society, and by the dominant ideology, the media, etc.

As it happens, in this case, the economic differentiation in the capitalist class is fairly easily read across onto politics, at least on the right of the political spectrum. The majority of Tory MPs favour Remain, accurately reflecting the dominant position within the capitalist class. A minority of Tory MPs, plus UKIP, are for Brexit.

This political and economic division reflects a long-standing question at the heart of postwar British capitalism. Should the UK attempt to sustain a post-imperial global economic orientation, or should it throw its lot in with the European nations as a trading bloc competing with the United States, and latterly with newly industrialising competitors outside the old heartland of 20 th century capitalism?

By the late 20 th century, this question had been answered in favour of the European Union in the minds of the most powerful UK capitalists and the wider political establishment. But the old, Empire-nostalgic wing of the Tory party, with considerable support among the Tory activists, continued to hold high the anti-European banner.

Margaret Thatcher controlled this division with a combination of pro-European substance and high-octane, anti-European exceptionalism on specific issues. John Major had more trouble facing down the, in his words, anti-European "bastards", but the division did not render the Tory party inoperable during his prime-ministership. David Cameron, with typical Eton glibness, thought he could end the Tory civil war with the referendum. We know now but that was one of the greatest miscalculations in modern politics.

So far, pretty straightforward. As long as we recognise that a single class can contain one or more political strategies, then the nature of the division in the British establishment is pretty clear. But things became considerably more complex when Cameron called the referendum.

Who let the masses in?

The exact parallelogram of forces that produced the vote to leave the European Union will no doubt be debated by historians for many decades to come.

But no serious analysis can possibly leave out the accumulated anger at the political system felt most deeply in some of the poorest working-class communities. Much of that anger was directly expressed in unmistakable terms, and some of it was displaced onto targets, like migrants, that had no share of the blame for the condition in which working people find themselves after a generation of neoliberal economic policy and a decade of austerity.

A study of voting intentions before the referendum came to this conclusion:

'The results are split here by social class. There is a distinct difference between two halves; in the top three social classes (A, B and C1), the majority of opinion is to remain a part of the European Union, however in the bottom three social classes (C2, D and E) the bulk wishes to exit.'

That pattern was maintained in the actual vote as Ipsos Mori confirmed in their study of the referendum. The first of their five key findings concluded that 'younger, more middle class, more educated and BME voters chose to remain; older, working class, less educated and white voters opted to leave.' The second key finding noted that while age was a factor in whether people voted Leave or Remain, nevertheless 'within each age group the middle-classes were more likely to vote to remain, and the working classes more likely to vote to leave'.

The Ipsos Mori study also revealed some differentiation within the working class:

'People in work (full or part-time, public sector or private sector), students, mortgage holders and private renters voted to remain. Those who own their home outright, social renters, the retired and those looking after homes all voted to leave.'

But a rather clearer and more important description of differentiation within the working class emerged from a third study. The Social Market Foundation found that 'As much as 9 percentage points of the 52 per cent support for Leave - around 3 million votes - was decided by concern about austerity and related issues'. In short, we can say that those most affected by austerity, the poorer sections of the working class, were most likely to vote Leave.

But who represented these voters politically? In the case of the capitalist class we saw it was relatively straightforward to map economic interest, political consciousness, and political representation. In the case of working-class Leave voters, it is by no means so simple.

The Leave vote in the referendum is an example of what happens when an economic interest, and the political consciousness it gives rise to, find no accurate political representation. So it was that the millions of working-class people voted Leave, but no mass organisation in the working-class movement represented their interests - not the unions, not the Labour Party. By default therefore, it appeared that the Tory right and UKIP were the representatives of 17 million people when in fact their ideology only accurately reflected the consciousness of a small minority of that figure.

And of course the relationship between political consciousness and political representation is not a linear, one way, relationship. Lack of adequate political representation narrows the horizon of those it is supposed to represent, excluding some elements of their political consciousness and exaggerating others. UKIP would stress nationalistic elements of the Leave voters' consciousness and suppress their deeper and more fundamental concern with austerity.

However that may be, what is undeniable is that the British political establishment were badly disconcerted by the defeat they suffered. As well they might be. First and foremost, the Tory party, the most successful Conservative party in any Parliamentary democracy, was now more divided than ever. Even more seriously, the Tory party was now bound by the referendum result to a Brexit policy to which the majority of its MPs, and the majority of the capitalist class that it exists to represent, are violently opposed.

There is some considerable irony in the fact that the majority of the British capitalist class now find themselves in the condition routinely experienced by the British working class: the political party which is supposed to represent their interests failing to do so.

The fact that such a rupture between the interests of the majority of the British capitalist class and its political representatives and institutions could occur points to a fundamental fact about the nature of politics and economics in capitalist society.

Capitalist society necessarily produces a separation of politics and economics. The economic world is supposed to be a natural order, the free market a necessary and unavoidable form of economic life. Politics is supposed to take place outside the economic sphere, and it is not supposed to interfere with the functioning of the free market. This institutionalises the fact that economic classes do not directly represent themselves politically. A state machine, at least to an important degree separate from economic interests, is the realm in which politics takes place. Economic actors, whether capitalists or trade unionists, do not represent themselves directly in this realm but form political parties and other organisations in which their interests predominate in order to be effective in the political world.

This is an important part of the explanation of why in the Brexit crisis party political alignment remains, so far, strong enough to prevent the majority of MPs across the House of Commons uniting to express the clearly articulated preference of the capitalist class. The capitalist class, usually happy to see a division between politics and economics because it disables the working-class movement, now finds itself disadvantaged by that very division. Only now, as the moment of decision is almost upon them, are MPs even contemplating the fact that they might have to abandon party loyalties if Brexit is to be either avoided or softened. And, in an unusual manoeuvre, the capitalist class is coming out from behind the arras to try and enforce its view.

And this of course is where the Labour Party comes in.

Labour's love lost

Before Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party, the divisions within the party over Europe followed traditional left-right lines. The leadership and the right of the party were pro-Europe, and the left of the party, including Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, were all opposed to the EU as an engine of neoliberal economic policy and as an institution over which no effective democratic control existed.

But in the early days of Corbyn's leadership, a deal was struck with the party right wing which committed Labour to Remain in the referendum. Had the referendum been won by Remain no doubt politics would soon have returned to business as usual (literally) and little more would have been heard of the matter.

But the Leave vote contained within it so many Labour voters that it has been impossible for the Labour Party to square the circle ever since. Of course, if Labour had fought the referendum on the Left Leave platform it would have put itself at the head of an anti-establishment revolt and paved the way for an early general election. That opportunity missed for fear of alienating right wing Labour MPs, the leadership have tried to make the best of the situation by opposing the Tories' hard Brexit, keeping faith with Leave voters, and pushing for an early general election.

That Plan B might still work, if Labour sticks to it. But now the entirety of the British political establishment, and the mass media, are pushing the Labour leadership to "save the nation" by joining in a Tory-inspired unity campaign aimed at achieving the seemingly politically impossible task of passing Theresa May's Brexit deal.

It is hard to overstate how disastrous such a course of action would be. If working-class Leave voters feel that Labour has joined a pro-establishment front with the Tories to deliver a Brexit-in-name-only, their frustration and anger could easily be exploited by the far right. UKIP, now fused with Tommy Robinson's street thugs, are just waiting for this opportunity to rebuild their fortunes. The Tory government and Theresa May's leadership would be rescued. The Labour right would be cock-a-hoop. A general election would be pushed into the distant future, and made so much more difficult for Labour to win. In all likelihood, Jeremy Corbyn would face another challenge to his leadership before an election.

The overriding lesson of the whole Brexit debacle is this: classes, both of the exploiters and exploited, have to fight to construct a political organisation capable of accurately expressing their class interests. In British politics, on the Brexit issue at least and for the moment, both the capitalist class and the working class lack such organisation. Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party, at least on this issue, has the potential to provide such leadership. But to do so it must not allow its right wing, always more loyal to the political establishment than to its working-class base, to drive the party to rescue the British capitalist class when it's own political party is incapable of doing so.

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As the current crisis around Brexit lurches towards its latest moment of decision it's worth stopping to consider the problems that such an unprecedented political moment represents for Marxist theory. It is the complexity of the class and political alignments around Brexit that pose a challenge to any political analysis, including a Marxist political analysis.

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HARDtalk interview with Marxist geographer David Harvey 

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HARDtalk interview with Marxist geographer David Harvey 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkWvx1QQ76c

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The state of the Nation are things worse or better in the UK today

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The state of the Nation are things worse or better in the UK today

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Britain has a deep social mobility problem which is getting worse for an entire generation of young people, the Social Mobility Commission's State of the Nation 2016 report warns today.

The impact is not just felt by the poorest in society but is also holding back whole tranches of middle- as well as low-income families - these treadmill families are running harder and harder, but are standing still.

The problem is not just social division, but a widening geographical divide between the big cities - London especially - and too many towns and counties across the country are being left behind economically and hollowed out socially.

The State of the Nation 2016 report, which was laid before Parliament this morning, lays bare the scale of the social mobility challenge facing the government. It finds fundamental barriers, including an unfair education system, a 2-tier labour market, a regionally imbalanced economy and an unaffordable housing market.

The Social Mobility Commission welcomes the high priority that the current, as well as successive, governments have given to social mobility, and finds that some real progress has been made. But it concludes that the twentieth-century expectation that each generation would be better off than the preceding one is no longer being met.

It points to evidence that those born in the 1980s are the first post-war cohort not to start their working years with higher incomes than their immediate predecessors. Home ownership, the aspiration of successive generations of ordinary people, is in sharp decline, among the young especially. Most shocking of all, today only 1 in 8 children from low-income backgrounds is likely to become a high-income earner as an adult.

The commission calls for new thinking and new approaches to deal with these deep structural problems. It recommends that an ambitious 10-year programme of social reform is needed which the government should lead and which employers and educators should join.

The Rt Hon Alan Milburn, chair of the Social Mobility Commission, said:

The rungs on the social mobility ladder are growing further apart. It is becoming harder for this generation of struggling families to move up.

The social divisions we face in Britain today impact many more people and places than the very poorest in society or the few thousands youngsters who miss out on a top university. Whole sections of society and whole tracts of Britain feel left behind.

The growing sense that we have become an 'us and them' society - where a few unfairly entrench power and wealth to themselves - is deeply corrosive of our cohesion as a nation.

As the EU referendum result showed, the public mood is sour and decision-makers have been far too slow to respond.

We applaud the Prime Minister's determination to heal social division and foster social progress. That is a big ambition. It will require big action. Fundamental reforms are needed in our country's education system, labour market and local economies to address Britain's social mobility problem. That should be the holy grail of public policy, the priority for government and the cause which unites the nation to action.

Key findings include:

Britain has a deep social mobility problem - the poorest find it hardest to progress but so do families with an annual income of around £22,500

people born in the 1980s are the first post-war cohort not to start their working years with higher incomes than their immediate predecessors

millions of workers - particularly women - are trapped in low pay with only 1 in 10 escaping

only 1 in 8 children from low-income backgrounds is likely to become a high-income earner as an adult

from the early years through to universities and the workplace, there is an entrenched and unbroken correlation between social class and success

in the last decade, 500,000 poorer children were not school-ready by age 5

children in deprived areas are twice as likely to be in childcare provision that is not good enough, compared with the most prosperous areas

families where both parents are highly educated now spend on average around 110 minutes a day on educational activities with their young children compared to 71 minutes a day for those with low education. This compares with around 20 to 30 minutes a day in the 1970s when there was no significant difference between the groups of parents

over the last 5 years 1.2 million 16-year-olds - disproportionately from low-income homes - have left school without 5 good GCSEs. At present, just 5% of children eligible for free school meals gain 5 A grades at GCSE

a child living in one of England's most disadvantaged areas is 27 times more likely to go to an inadequate school than a child in the most advantaged

young people from low-income homes with similar GCSEs to their better-off classmates are one third more likely to drop out of education at 16 and 30% less likely to study A-levels that could get them into a top university

young people are 6 times less likely to go to Oxbridge if they grow up in poor household. In the North East, not one child on free school meals went to Oxbridge after leaving school in 2010

in the North East and the South West, young people on free school meals are half as likely to start a higher-level apprenticeship

in London, the number of top-end occupational jobs has increased by 700,000 in the last 10 years compared to just under 56,000 in the North East

despite some efforts to change the social make-up of the professions, only 4% of doctors, 6% of barristers and 11% of journalists are from working-class backgrounds

home ownership is in sharp decline - particularly among the young. Rates among the under-44s have fallen by 17% in the last decade

people who own their homes have average non-pension wealth of £307,000, compared to less than £20,000 for social and private tenant households

there is a new geography of disadvantage, with many towns and rural areas - not just in the North - being left behind affluent London and the South East. In 40 local authority areas, one third of all employee jobs are paid below the living wage

more than half the adults in Wales, the North East, Yorkshire and the Humber, the West Midlands and Northern Ireland have less than £100 in savings

Key recommendations

Early years - the government should:

introduce a new parental support package at key points in a child's life to support children falling behind

set a clear objective that by 2025, every child should be school-ready at the age of 5 and the child development gap has been closed with a new strategy to increase high-quality childcare for low-income families

double funding for the early years pupil premium to ensure better childcare for those that need it most

Schools - the government should:

have as its core objective the ambition, within the next decade, of narrowing the attainment gap at GCSE between poorer children and their better-off classmates by two thirds, bringing the rest of the country to the level achieved in London today

rethink its plans for more grammar schools and more academies

mandate the 10 lowest performing local authorities to take part in improvement programmes so that by 2020 none of those schools are Ofsted-rated inadequate and all are progressing to good

reform the training and distribution of teachers and create new incentives - including better starting pay - to get more of the highest-quality teachers into the schools that need them

require independent schools and universities to provide high-quality careers advice, support with university applications and share their business networks with state schools

repurpose the National Citizen Service so that all children between the ages of 14 and 18 can have quality work experience or extra-curricular activity

Post 16-education and training - the government should:

develop a single UCAS-style portal over the next 4 years so that youngsters can make better choices about their post-school futures

make schools more accountable for the destinations of their pupils and the courses they take post-16

school sixth form provision should be extended and schools given a role in supporting FE colleges to deliver the Skills Plan. The number of 16- to 18-year-old NEETs should be zero by 2022

low-quality apprenticeships should be scrapped

a new social mobility league table should be published to encourage universities to widen access

over the next 10 years, higher education should be extended to those parts of Britain that have no or low provision

Jobs, careers and earnings - the government should:

create a new deal with employers to define business' social obligations and the support they will get

develop a second chance career fund to help older workers retrain and write off advanced learner loans for part-time workers

work with large employers, local councils and local enterprise partnerships (LEPs) to bring new high-quality job opportunities backed by financial incentives to the country's social mobility cold spots

support LEPs in social mobility cold spots to tackle local skills gaps and attract better jobs to the area

all large business should develop strategies to provide low-skilled workers with opportunities for career progression

introduce a legal ban on unpaid internships

Housing - the government should:

commit to a target of building 3 million homes over the next decade - with one third being commissioned by the public sector

expand the sale of public-sector land for new homes and allow targeted house-building on green-belt land

modify the starter home initiative to focus on households with average incomes and ensure these homes when sold go to other low-income households at the same discount

introduce tax incentives to encourage longer private-sector tenancies

complement plans to redevelop the worst estates, with a £140-million fund to improve opportunities for social tenants to get work

For further information, please contact Kirsty Walker, Social Mobility Commission, on 020 7227 5371 or 07768 446167 or kirsty.walker@education.gov.uk.

Notes for editors

The Social Mobility Commission is an advisory, non-departmental public body established under the Life Chances Act 2010 as modified by the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016. It has a duty to assess progress in improving social mobility in the United Kingdom and to promote social mobility in England. It currently consists of 4 commissioners and is supported by a small secretariat.

The commission board currently comprises:

Alan Milburn (chair)

Baroness Gillian Shephard (deputy chair)

Paul Gregg, Professor of Economic and Social Policy, University of Bath

David Johnston, Chief Executive of the Social Mobility Foundation

The functions of the commission include:

monitoring progress on improving social mobility

providing published advice to ministers on matters relating to social mobility

undertaking social mobility advocacy

Today's report is the fourth annual assessment by the commission of the government's progress on social mobility.

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State of the Nation report on social mobility in Great Britain

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Britain has a deep social mobility problem which is getting worse for an entire generation of young people, the Social Mobility Commission's State of the Nation 2016 report warns today. The impact is not just felt by the poorest in society but is also holding back whole tranches of middle- as well as low-income families - these treadmill families are running harder and harder, but are standing still.

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Kirsteen Paton Immaterial Labor -Maurizio Lazzarato

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Kirsteen Paton Immaterial Labor -Maurizio Lazzarato

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A significant amount of empirical research has been conducted concerning the new forms of the organization of work. This, combined with a corresponding wealth of theoretical reflection, has made possible the identification of a new conception of what work is nowadays and what new power relations it implies.

An initial synthesis of these results - framed in terms of an attempt to define the technical and subjective-political composition of the working class can be expressed in the concept of immaterial labor, which is defined as the labor that produces the informational and cultural concent of the commodity. The concept of immaterial labor refers to two different aspects of labor. On the one hand, as regards the "informational content" of the commodity, it refers directly to the changes taking place in workers' labor processes in big companies in the industrial and tertiary sectors, where the skills involved in direct labor are increasingly skills involving cybernetics and computer control (and horizontal and vertical communication). On che other hand, as regards the activity that produces the "cultural content" of the commodity, immaterial labor involves a series of activities that are not normally recognized as "work" - in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opinion. Once the privileged domain of the bourgeoisie and its children, these activities have since the end of the 1970s become the domain of what we have come to define as "mass intellectuality." The profound changes in these strategic sectors have radically modified not only the composition, management, and regulation of the workforce - the organization of production - but also, and more deeply, the role and function of intellectuals and their activities within society.

The "great transformation" that began at the start of the 1970s has changed the very terms in which the question is posed. Manual labor is increasingly coming to involve procedures that could be defined as "intellectual," and the new communications technologies increasingly require subjectivities that are rich in knowledge. It is not simply that intellectual labor has become subjected to the norms of capitalist production. What has happened is that a new "mass intellectuality" has come into being, created out of a combination of the demands of capitalist production and the forms of "self-valorization" that the struggle against work has produced. The old dichotomy between "mental and manual labor," or between "material labor and immaterial labor," risks failing to grasp the new nature of productive activity, which takes this separation on board and transforms it. The split between conception and execution, between labor and creativity, between author and audience, is simultaneously transcended within the "labor process" and reimposed as political command within the "process of valorization."

The restructured worker

Twenty years of restructuring of the big factories has led to a curious paradox. The various different post-Fordist models have been constructed both on the defeat of the Fordist worker and on the recognition of the centrality of (an ever increasingly intellectualized) living labor within production. In today's large restructured company, a worker's work increasingly involves, at various levels, an ability to choose among different alternatives and thus a degree of responsibility regarding decision making. The concept of "interface" used by communications sociologists provides a fair definition of the activities of this kind of worker - as an interface between different functions, between different work teams, between different levels of the hierarchy, and so forth. What modern management techniques are looking for is for "the worker's soul to become part of the factory." The worker's personality and subjectivity have to be made susceptible to organization and command. It is around immateriality that the quality and quantity of labor are organized. This transformation of working-class labor into a labor of control, of handling information, into a decision-making capacity that involves the investment of subjectivity, affects workers in varying ways according to their positions within the factory hierarchy, but it is nevertheless present as an irreversible process. Work can thus be defined as the capacity to activate and manage productive cooperation. In this phase, workers are expected to become "active subjects" in the coordination of the various functions of production, instead of being subjected to it as simple command. We arrive at a point where a collective learning process becomes the heart of productivity, because it is no longer a matter of finding different ways of composing or organizing already existing job functions, but of looking for new ones.

The problem, however, of subjectivity and its collective form, its constitution and its development, has immediately expressed itself as a clash between social classes within the organization of work. I should point out that what I am describing is not some utopian vision of recomposition, but the very real terrain and conditions of the conflict between social classes. The capitalist needs to find an unmediated way of establishing command over subjectivity itself; the prescription and definition of tasks transforms into a prescription of subjectivities. The new slogan of Western societies is that we should all "become subjects". Participative management is a technology of power, a technology for creating and controlling the "subjective processes." As it is no longer possible to confine subjectivity merely to tasks of execution, it becomes necessary for the subject's competence in the areas of management, communication, and creativity to be made compatible with the conditions of "production for production's sake." Thus the slogan "become subjects," far from eliminating the antagonism between hierarchy and cooperation, between autonomy and command, actually re-poses the antagonism at a higher level, because it both mobilizes and clashes with the very personality of the individual worker. First and foremost, we have here a discourse that is authoritarian: one has to express oneself, one has to speak, communicate, cooperate, and so forth. The "tone" is that of the people who were in executive command under Taylorization; all that has changed is the content. Second, if it is no longer possible to lay down and specify jobs and responsibilities rigidly (in the way that was once done with "scientific" studies of work), but if, on the contrary, jobs now require cooperation and collective coordination, then the subjects of that production must be capable of communication - they must be active participants within a work team. The communicational relationship (both vertically and horizontally) is thus completely predetermined in both form and content; it is subordinated to the "circulation of information" and is not expected to be anything other. The subject becomes a simple relayer of codification and decodification, whose transmitted messages must be "clear and free of ambiguity," within a communications context that has been completely normalized by management. The necessity of imposing command and the violence that goes along with it here take on a normative communicative form.

The management mandate to "become subjects of communication" threatens to be even more totalitarian than the earlier rigid division between mental and manual labor (ideas and execution), because capitalism seeks to involve even the worker's personality and subjectivity within the production of value. Capital wants a situation where command resides within the subject him- or herself, and within the communicative process. The worker is to be responsible for his or her own control and motivation within the work group without a foreman needing to intervene, and the foreman's role is redefined into that of a facilitator. In fact, employers are extremely worried by the double problem this creates: on one hand, they are forced to recognize the autonomy and freedom of labor as the only possible form of cooperation in production, but on the other hand, at the same time, they are obliged (a life-and-death necessity for the capitalist) not to "redistribute" the power that the new quality of labor and its organization imply. Today's management thinking takes workers' subjectivity into consideration only in order to codify it in line with the requirements of production. And once again this phase of transformation succeeds in concealing the fact that the individual and collective interests of workers and those of the company are not identical.

I have defined working-class labor as an abstract activity that nowadays involves the application of subjectivity. In order to avoid misunderstandings, however, I should add that this form of productive activity is not limited only to highly skilled workers; it refers to a use value of labor power today, and, more generally, to the form of activity of every productive subject within postindustrial society. One could say that in the highly skilled, qualified worker, the "communicational model" is already given, already constituted, and that its potentialities are already defined. In the young worker, however, the "precarious" worker, and the unemployed youth, we are dealing with a pure virtuality, a capacity that is as yet undetermined but that already shares all the characteristics of postindustrial productive subjectivity. The virtuality of this capacity is neither empty nor ahistoric; it is, rather, an opening and a potentiality that have as their historical origins and antecedents the "struggle against work" of the Fordist worker and, in more recent times, the processes of socialization, educational formation, and cultural self-valorization.

This transformation of the world of work appears even more evident when one studies the social cycle of production: the "diffuse factory" and decentralization of production on the one hand and the various forms of tertiarizarion on the other. Here one can measure the extent to which the cycle of immaterial labor has come to assume a strategic role within the global organization of production. The various activities of research, conceptualization, management of human resources, and so forth, together with all the various tertiary activities, are organized within computerized and multimedia networks. These are the terms in which we have to understand the cycle of production and the organization of labor. The integration of scientific labor into industrial and tertiary labor has become one of the principal sources of productivity, and it is becoming a growing factor in the cycles of production that organize it.

"Immaterial Labor" in the Classic Definition

All the characteristics of the postindustrial economy (both in industry and society as a whole) are highly present within the classic forms of "immaterial" production: audiovisual production, advertising, fashion, the production of software, photography, cultural activities, and so forth. The activities of this kind of immaterial labor force us to question the classic definitions of work and workforce, because they combine the results of various different types of work skill: intellectual skills, as regards the cultural-informational content; manual skills for the ability to combine creativity, imagination, and technical and manual labor; and entrepreneurial skills in the management of social relations and the structuring of that social cooperation of which they are a part. This immaterial labor constitutes itself in forms that are immediately collective, and we might say that it exists only in the form of networks and flows. The organization of the cycle of production of immaterial labor (because this is exactly what it is, once we abandon our factoryist prejudices - a cycle of production) is not obviously apparent to the eye, because it is not defined by the four walls of a factory. The location in which it operates is outside in the society at large, at a territorial level that we could call "the basin of immaterial labor." Small and sometimes very small "productive units" (often consisting of only one individual) are organized for specific ad hoc projects, and may exist only for the duration of those particular jobs. The cycle of production comes into operation only when it is required by the capitalist; once the job has been done, the cycle dissolves back into the networks and flows that make possible the reproduction and enrichment of its productive capacities. Precariousness, hyperexploitation, mobility, and hierarchy are the most obvious characteristics of metropolitan immaterial labor. Behind the label of the independent "self-employed" worker, what we actually find is an intellectual proletarian, but who is recognized as such only by the employers who exploit him or her. It is worth noting that in this kind of working existence it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish leisure time from work time. In a sense, life becomes inseparable from work.This labor form is also characterized by real managerial functions that consist in (1) a certain ability to manage its social relations and (2) the eliciting of social cooperation within the structures of the basin of immaterial labor.

The quality of this kind of labor power is thus defined not only by its professional capacities (which make possible the construction of the cultural-informational content of the commodity), but also by its ability to "manage" its own activity and act as the coordinator of the immaterial labor of others (production and management of the cycle). This immaterial labor appears as a real mutation of "living labor." Here we are quite far from the Taylorist model of organization.

Immaterial labor finds itself at the crossroads (or rather, it is the interface) of a new relationship between production and consumption. The activation of both productive cooperation and the social relationship with the consumer is materialized within and by the process of communication. The role of immaterial labor is to promote continual innovation in the forms and conditions of communication (and thus in work and consumption). It gives form to and materializes needs, the imaginary, consumer tastes, and so forth, and these products in turn become powerful producers of needs, images, and tastes. The particularity of the commodity produced through immaterial labor (its essential use value being given by its value as informational and cultural content) consists in the fact that it is not destroyed in the act of consumption, but rather it enlarges, transforms, and creates the "ideological" and cultural environment of the consumer. This commodity does not produce the physical capacity of labor power; instead, it transforms the person who uses it. Immaterial labor produces first and foremost a "social relationship" (a relationship of innovation, production, and consumption). Only if it succeeds in this production does its activity have an economic value. This activity makes immediately apparent something that material production had "hidden," namely, that labor produces not only commodities, but first and foremost it produces the capital relation.

The Autonomy of the Productive Synergies of Immaterial Labor

My working hypothesis, then, is that the cycle of immaterial labor takes as its starting point a social labor power that is independent and able to organize both its own work and its relations with business entities. Industry does not form or create this new labor power, but simply takes it on board and adapts it. Industry's control over this new labor power presupposes the independent organization and "free entrepreneurial activity" of the labor power. Advancing further on this terrain brings us into the debate on the nature of work in the post-Fordist phase of the organization of labor. Among economists, the predominant view of this problematic can be expressed in a single statement: immaterial labor operates within the forms of organization that the centralization of industry allows. Moving from this common basis, there are two differing schools of thought: one is the extension of neoclassical analysis; the other is that of systems theory.In the former, the attempt to solve the problem comes through a redefinition of the problematic of the market. It is suggested that in order to explain the phenomena of communication and the new dimensions of organization one should introduce not only cooperation and intensity of labor, but also other analytic variables (anthropological variables? immaterial variables?) and that on this basis one might introduce other objectives of optimization and so forth. In fact, the neoclassical model has considerable difficulty in freeing itself from the coherence constraints imposed by the theory of general equilibrium. The new phenomenologies of labor, the new dimensions of organization, communication, the potentiality of spontaneous synergies, the autonomy of the subjects involved, and the independence of the networks were neither foreseen nor foreseeable by a general theory that believed that material labor and an industrial economy were indispensable.

Today, with the new data available, we find the microeconomy in revolt against the macroeconomy, and the classical model is corroded by a new and irreducible anthropological reality.

Systems theory, by eliminating the constraint of the market and giving pride of place to organization, is more open to the new phenomenology of labor and in particular to the emergence of immaterial labor. In more developed systemic theories, organization is conceived as an ensemble of factors, both material and immaterial, both individual and collective, that can permit a given group to reach objectives. The success of this organizational process requires instruments of regulation, either voluntary or automatic. It becomes possible to look at things from the point of view of social synergies, and immaterial labor can be taken on board by virtue of its global efficacy. These viewpoints, however, are still tied to an image of the organization of work and its social territory within which effective activity from an economic viewpoint (in other words, the activity conforming to the objective) must inevitably be considered as a surplus in relation to collective cognitive mechanisms. Sociology and labor economics, being systemic disciplines, are both incapable of detaching themselves from this position.

I believe that an analysis of immaterial labor and a description of its organization can lead us beyond the presuppositions of business theory - whether in its neoclassical school or its systems theory school. It can lead us to define, at a territorial level, a space for a radical autonomy of the productive synergies of immaterial labor. We can thus move against the old schools of thought to establish, decisively, the viewpoint of an "anthropo-sociology" that is constitutive.

Once this viewpoint comes to dominate within social produc - tion, we find that we have an interruption in the continuity of models of production. By this I mean that, unlike the position held by many theoreticians of post-Fordism, I do not believe that this new labor power is merely functional to a new historical phase of capitalism and its processes of accumulation and reproduction. This labor power is the product of a "silent revolution" taking place within the anthropological realities of work and within the reconfiguration of its meanings. Waged labor and direct subjugation (to organization) no longer constitute the principal form of the contractual relationship between capitalist and worker. A polymorphous self-employed autonomous work has emerged as the dominant form, a kind of "intellectual worker" who is him or herself an entrepreneur, inserted within a market that is constantly shifting and within networks that are changeable in time and space.

The cycle of immaterial production

Up to this point I have been analyzing and constructing the concept of immaterial labor from a point of view that could be defined, so to speak, as "microeconomic." If now we consider immaterial labor within the globality of the production cycle, of which it is the strategic stage, we will be able to see a series of characteristics of post-Taylorist production that have not yet been taken into consideration.

I want to demonstrate in particular how the process of valorization tends to be identified with the process of the production of social communication and how the two stages (valorization and communication) immediately have a social and territorial dimension. The concept of immaterial labor presupposes and results in an enlargement of productive cooperation that even includes the production and reproduction of communication and hence of its most important contents: subjectivity.

If Fordism integrated consumption into the cycle of the reproduction of capital, post-Fordism integrates communication into it. From a strictly economic point of view, the cycle of reproduction of immaterial labor dislocates the production-consumption relationship as it is defined as much by the "virtuous Keynesian circle" as by the Marxist reproduction schemes of the second volume of Capital. Now, rather than speaking of the toppling of "supply and demand," we should speak about a redefinition of the production-consumption relationship. As we saw earlier, the consumer is inscribed in the manufacturing of the product from its conception. The consumer is no longer limited to consuming commodities (destroying them in the act of consumption). On the contrary, his or her consumption should be productive in accordance to the necessary conditions and the new products. Consumption is then first of all a consumption of information. Consumption is no longer only the "realization" of a product, but a real and proper social process that for the moment is defined with the term communication.

Large-scale industry and services

To recognize the new characteristics of the production cycle of immaterial labor, we should compare it with the production of large-scale industry and services. If the cycle of immaterial production immediately demonstrates to us the secret of post-Taylorist production (that is to say, that social communication and the social relationship that constitutes it become productive), then it would be interesting to examine how these new social relationships innervate even industry and services, and how they oblige us to reformulate and reorganize even the classical forms of "production."

Large-scale industry

The postindustrial enterprise and economy are founded on the manipulation of information. Rather than ensuring (as 19th century enterprises did) the surveillance of the inner workings of the production process and the supervision of the markets of raw materials (labor included), business is focused on the terrain outside of the production process: sales and the relationship with the consumer. It always leans more toward commercialization and financing than toward production. Prior to being manufactured, a product must be sold, even in "heavy" industries such as automobile manufacturing; a car is put into production only after the sales network orders it. This strategy is based on the production and consumption of information. It mobilizes important communication and marketing strategies in order to gather information (recognizing the tendencies of the market) and circulate it (constructing a market). In the Taylorist and Fordist systems of production, by introducing the mass consumption of standardized commodities, Ford could still say that the consumer has the choice between one black model T5 and another black model T5. "Today the standard commodity is no longer the recipe to success, and the automobile industry itself, which used to be the champion of the great 'low price' series, would want to boast about having become a neoindustry of singularization" - and quality. ¹ For the majority of businesses, survival involves the permanent search for new commercial openings that lead to the identification of always more ample or differentiated product lines. Innovation is no longer sub - ordinated only to the rationalization of labor, but also to commercial imperatives. It seems then that the postindustrial commodity is the result of a creative process that involves both the producer and the consumer.

Services

If from industry proper we move on to the "services" sector (large banking services, insurance, and so forth), the characteristics of the process I have described appear even more clearly. We are witnessing today not really a growth of services, but rather a development of the "relations of service." The move beyond the Taylorist organization of services is characterized by the integration of the relationship between production and consumption, where in fact the consumer intervenes in an active way in the composition of the product. The product "service" becomes a social construction and a social process of "conception" and innovation. In service industries, the "back-office" tasks (the classic work of services) have diminished and the tasks of the "front office" (the relationship with clients) have grown. There has been thus a shift of human resources toward the outer part of business. As recent sociological analyses tell us, the more a product handled by the service sector is characterized as an immaterial product, the more it distances itself from the model of industrial organization of the relationship between production and consumption. The change in this relationship between production and consumption has direct consequences for the organization of the Taylorist labor of production of services, because it draws into question both the contents of labor and the division of labor (and thus the relationship between conception and execution loses its unilateral character). If the product is defined through the intervention of the consumer, and is therefore in permanent evolution, it becomes always more difficult to define the norms of the production of services and establish an "objective" measure of productivity.

Immaterial Labor

All of these characteristics of postindustrial economics (present both in large-scale industry and the tertiary sector) are accentuated in the form of properly "immaterial" production. Audiovisual production, advertising, fashion, software, the management of territory, and so forth are all defined by means of the particular relationship between production and its market or consumers. Here we are at the furthest point from the Taylorist model. Immaterial labor continually creates and modifies the forms and conditions of communication, which in turn acts as the interface that negotiates the relationship between production and consumption. As I noted earlier, immaterial labor produces first and foremost a social relation - it produces not only commodities, but also the capital relation.

If production today is directly the production of a social relation, then the "raw material" of immaterial labor is subjectivity and the "ideological" environment in which this subjectivity lives and reproduces. The production of subjectivity ceases to be only an instrument of social control (for the reproduc - tion of mercantile relationships) and becomes directly productive, because the goal of our postindustrial society is to construct the consumer/communicator - and to construct it as "active." Immaterial workers (those who work in advertising, fashion, marketing, television, cybernetics, and so forth) satisfy a demand by the consumer and at the same time establish that demand. The fact that immaterial labor produces subjectivity and economic value at the same time demonstrates how capitalist production has invaded our lives and has broken down all the oppositions among economy, power, and knowledge. The process of social communication (and its principal content, the production of subjectivity) becomes here directly productive because in a certain way it "produces" production. The process by which the "social" (and what is even more social, that is, language, communication, and so forth) becomes "economic" has not yet been sufficiently studied. In effect, on the one hand, we are familiar with an analysis of the production of subjectivity defined as the constitutive "process" specific to a "relation to the self with respect to the forms of production particular to knowledge and power (as in a certain vein of poststructuralist French philosophy), but this analysis never intersects sufficiently with the forms of capitalist valorization. On the other hand, in the 1980s a network of economists and sociologists (and before them the Italian postworkerist tradition) developed an extensive analysis of the "social form of production," but that analysis does not integrate sufficiently the production of subjectivity as the content of valorization. Now, the post-Taylorist mode of production is defined precisely by putting subjectivity to work both in the activation of productive cooperation and in the production of the "cultural" contents of commodities.

The aesthetic model

But how is the production process of social communication formed? How does the production of subjectivity take place within this process? How does the production of subjectivity become the production of the consumer/communicator and its capacities to consume and communicate? What role does immaterial labor have in this process? As I have already said, my hypothesis is this: the process of the production of communication tends to become immediately the process of valorization. If in the past communication was organized fundamentally by means of language and the institutions of ideological and literary/artistic production, today, because it is invested with industrial production, communication is reproduced by means of specific technological schemes (knowledge, thought, image, sound, and language reproduction technologies) and by means of forms of organization and "management" that are bearers of a new mode of production.

It is more useful, in attempting to grasp the process of the formation of social communication and its subsumption within the "economic," to use, rather than the "material" model of production, the "aesthetic" model that involves author, reproduction, and reception. This model reveals aspects that traditional economic categories tend to obscure and that, as I will show, constitute the "specific differences" of the post-Taylorist means of production. ² The "aesthetic/ideological" model of production will be transformed into a small-scale sociological model with all the limits and difficulties that such a sociological transformation brings. The model of author, reproduction, and reception requires a double transformation: in the first place, the three stages of this creation process must be immediately characterized by their social form; in the second place, the three stages must be under - stood as the articulations of an actual productive cycle. ³

The "author" must lose its individual dimension and be transformed into an industrially organized production process (with a division of labor, investments, orders, and so forth), "reproduction" becomes a mass reproduction organized according to the imperatives of profitability, and the audience ("reception") tends to become the consumer/communicator. In this process of socialization and subsumption within the economy of intellectual activity the "ideological" product tends to assume the form of a commodity. I should emphasize, however, that the subsumption of this process under capitalist logic and the transformation of its products into commodities does not abolish the specificity of aesthetic production, that is to say, the creative relationship between author and audience.

The specific differences of the immaterial labor cycle

Allow me to underline briefly the specific differences of the "stages" that make up the production cycle of immaterial labor (immaterial labor itself, its "ideological/ commodity products," and the "public/consumer") in relation to the classical forms of the reproduction of "capital."

As far as immaterial labor being an "author" is concerned, it is necessary to emphasize the radical autonomy of its productive synergies. As we have seen, immaterial labor forces us to question the classical definitions of work and workforce, because it results from a synthesis of different types of knowhow: intellectual skills, manual skills, and entrepreneurial skills. Immaterial labor constitutes itself in immediately collective forms that exist as networks and flows. The subjugation of this form of cooperation and the "use value" of these skills to capitalist logic does not take away the autonomy of the constitution and meaning of immate - rial labor. On the contrary, it opens up antagonisms and contradictions that, to use once again a Marxist formula, demand at least a "new form of exposition."

The "ideological product" becomes in every respect a commodity. The term ideological does not characterize the product as a "reflection" of reality, as false or true consciousness of reality. Ideological products produce, on the contrary, new stratifications of reality; they are the intersection where human power, knowledge, and action meet. New modes of seeing and knowing demand new technologies, and new technologies demand new forms of seeing and knowing. These ideological products are completely internal to the processes of the formation of social communication; that is, they are at once the results and the prerequisites of these processes. The ensemble of ideological products constitutes the human ideological environment. Ideological products are transformed into commodities without ever losing their specificity; that is, they are always addressed to someone, they are "ideally signifying," and thus they pose the problem of "meaning."

The general public tends to become the model for the consumer (audience/client). The public (in the sense of the user - the reader, the music listener, the television audience) whom the author addresses has as such a double productive function. In the first place, as the addressee of the ideological product, the public is a constitutive element of the production process. In the second place, the public is productive by means of the reception that gives the product "a place in life" (in other words, integrates it into social communication) and allows it to live and evolve. Reception is thus, from this point of view, a creative act and an integrative part of the product. The transformation of the product into a commodity cannot abolish this double process of "creativity"; it must rather assume it as it is, and attempt to control it and subordinate it to its own values.

What the transformation of the product into a commodity cannot remove, then, is the character of event, the open process of creation that is established between immaterial labor and the public and organized by communication. If the innovation in immaterial production is introduced by this open process of creation, the entrepreneur, in order to further consumption and its perpetual renewal, will be constrained to draw from the "values" that the public/consumer produces. These values presuppose the modes of being, modes of existing, and forms of life that support them. From these considerations there emerge two principal consequences. First, values are "put to work." The transformation of the ideological product into a commodity distorts or deflects the social imaginary that is produced in the forms of life, but at the same time, commodity production must recognize itself as powerless as far as its own production is concerned. The second consequence is that the forms of life (in their collective and cooperative forms) are now the source of innovation.

The analysis of the different "stages" of the cycle of immaterial labor permits me to advance the hypothesis that what is "productive" is the whole of the social relation (here represented by the author-work-audience relationship) according to modalities that directly bring into play the "meaning." The specificity of this type of production not only leaves its imprint on the "form" of the process of production by establishing a new relationship between production and consumption, but it also poses a problem of legitimacy for the capitalist appropriation of this process. This cooperation can in no case be predetermined by economics, because it deals with the very life of society. "Economics" can only appropriate the forms and products of this cooperation, normalizing and standardizing them. The creative and innovative elements are tightly linked to the values that only the forms of life produce. Creativity and productivity in postindustrial societies reside, on the one hand, in the dialectic between the forms of life and values they produce and, on the other, in the activities of subjects that constitute them. The legitimation that the (Schumpeterian) entrepreneur found in his or her capacity for innovation has lost its foundation. Because the capitalist entrepreneur does not produce the forms and contents of immaterial labor, he or she does not even produce innovation. For economics there remains only the possibility of managing and regulating the activity of immaterial labor and creating some devices for the control and creation of the public/consumer by means of the control of communication and information technologies and their organizational processes.

Creation and intellectual labor

These brief considerations permit us to begin questioning the model of creation and diffusion specific to intellectual labor and to get beyond the concept of creativity as an expression of "individuality" or as the patrimony of the "superior" classes. The works of Simmel and Bakhtin, conceived in a time when immaterial production had just begun to become "productive," present us with two completely different ways of posing the relationship between immaterial labor and society. The first, Simmel's, remain completely invested in the division between manual labor and intellectual labor and give us a theory of the creativity of intellectual labor. The second, Bakhtin's, in refusing to accept the capitalist division of labor as a given, elaborate a theory of social creativity. Simmel, in effect, explains the function of "fashion" by means of the phenomenon of imitation or distinction as regulated and commanded by class relationships. Thus the superior levels of the middle classes are the ones that create fashion, and the lower classes attempt to imitate them. Fashion here functions like a barrier that incessantly comes up because it is incessantly battered down. What is interesting for this discussion is that, according to this conception, the immaterial labor of creation is limited to a specific social group and is not diffused except through imitation. At a deeper level, this model accepts the division of labor founded on the opposition between manual and intellectual labor that has as its end the regulation and "mystification" of the social process of creation and innovation. If this model had some probability of corresponding to the dynamics of the market of immaterial labor at the moment of the birth of mass consumption (whose effects Simmel very intelligently anticipates), it could not be utilized to account for the relationship between immaterial labor and consumer-public in postindustrial society. Bakhtin, on the contrary, defines immaterial labor as the superseding of the division between "material labor and intellectual labor" and demonstrates how creativity is a social process. In fact, the work on "aesthetic production" of Bakhtin and the rest of the Leningrad Circle has this same social focus.

This is the line of investigation that seems most promising for developing a theory of the social cycle of immaterial production.

Translated by Paul Colilli and Ed Emery
Notes
1. Yves Clot, "Renouveau de 1'industrialisme et activite philosophique," Futur anterieur, no. 10(1992);

2. Both the creative and the social elements of this production encourage me to venture the use of the - "aesthetic model." It is interesting to see how one could arrive at this new concept of labor by starting eitherfrom artistic activity (following the situationists) or from the traditional activity of the factory (following Italian workerist theories), both relying on the very Marxist concept of "living labor."

3. Walter Benjamin has already analyzed how since the end of the nineteenth century both artistic production and reproduction, along with its perception, have assumed collective forms. I cannot pause here to consider his works, but they are certainly fundamental for any genealogy of immaterial labor and its forms of reproduction.

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Maurizio Lazzarato @ EE + AB www.generation-online.org

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A significant amount of empirical research has been conducted concerning the new forms of the organization of work. This, combined with a corresponding wealth of theoretical reflection, has made possible the identification of a new conception of what work is nowadays and what new power relations it implies.

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Debt, neoliberalism and crisis: interview with Maurizio Lazzarato on the indebted condition

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Debt, neoliberalism and crisis: interview with Maurizio Lazzarato on the indebted condition

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Debt, neoliberalism and crisis: interview with Maurizio Lazzarato on the indebted condition

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Debt, neoliberalism and crisis: interview with Maurizio Lazzarato on the indebted condition

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Kirsteen Paton Communist Manifesto link to pdf 

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Kirsteen Paton Communist Manifesto link to pdf 

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How was Lenin (who the Germans were so afraid of put in a seal box car to Russia) different from Marx? These are great historical questions but you can not answer them fully until you read the book to start. So download my version of the Communist Manifesto in PDF above.

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Gillian Anderson narrating Karl Marx's thoughts on Alineation

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Karl Marx on Alienation, Catharine Edwards on Seneca and Facing Death, A History of Ideas - BBC Radio 4

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Karl Marx believed that work, at its best, is what makes us human.