Retrofitting Drucker: Knowledge work under cognitive capitalism

Abstract

This article uses Peter Drucker's work vector-like, to carry the thesis of cognitive capitalism into the management field. Drucker's prophetic insights into the knowledge society are juxtaposed with recent, Italian autonomist Marxist-inspired analyses of capitalism's cognitive phase. If the capacity to create knowledge – or what autonomists call the ‘general intellect’ – is becoming the key productive force, arguably there is a need for a full-blown social form of knowledge management. Our reading of Drucker thus retrieves the one worthwhile thing from the rubble of normative knowledge management. It is the idea of society-level knowledge management premised on a universal and unconditional guaranteed basic income (GBI; or social wage). Basic income represents not just a social investment in knowledge, which Drucker himself called for, but also compensation for biolabour's augmented social productivity. With Drucker as the steppingstone, we conclude, the autonomist tradition merits greater attention from critical management and organisational scholars interested in factoring class and gender back into the knowledge management equation.

Keywords:

• Drucker
• knowledge work
• autonomism
• cognitive capitalism
• general intellect
• basic income

Notes

1. Operaismo originated in early 1960s Italian worker activism independent of formal labour organisations (S. Wright 2002). Negri and Virno both were imprisoned in April 1979. Virno was released after two years (Lotringer 2004, 11). Negri languished in jail until 1983 when, after getting enough votes to win an Italian parliamentary seat, he was released and then fled the country, only to return years later to serve a further jail term (Fleming 1991, x–xi). Negri and Virno's recent work puts them at the forefront of a diverse ‘post-operaismo’ Marxist tradition whose members include Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (S. Wright 2008, 112).

2. For a useful account of Marx's concept see Virtanen and Vähämäki (2003, emphasis added), who translate Marx as follows:

The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge [das allgemeine gesellschaftliche Wissen, knowledge] has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of the social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it.

3. Ephemera is an important venue for the airing of autonomist ideas; a February 2007 special issue on immaterial labour includes treatments of the Operaismo tradition and its offshoots.

4. To recast the refusal strategy as a rejection of capitalist belief that income's prerequisite must be work, see Berardi (2009).

5. We are solely concerned with change in core Western-style capitalist societies.

6. To position these authors within autonomism, see S. Wright (2008).

7. They differ from Virno in his accenting the negative ‘political capacities’ of their prime social actor, ‘the multitude’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 167). Still, Hardt and Negri (2005: 201) draw on Virno's general intellect work; their thinking also has parallels in Gorz (1999). They prefer to talk of immaterial labour, bridging affectivity and corporeality, largely because ‘the discourse of the general intellect…risks remaining entirely on the plane of thought’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 364).

8. Undoubtedly this is what Hardt and Negri (2005, 109, emphasis omitted) mean when they assert ‘immaterial labor has become hegemonic in qualitative terms’.

9. While Adler and Heckscher (2006) develop a quasi-Marxist argument about capitalism inhibiting knowledge production, the tension they identify between ‘valorisation’ and ‘socialisation’ however is a false one. As we explain, cognitive capitalism's sine qua non is that the creation of surplus value (valorisation) increasingly occurs in the socialised realm of community activity.

10. In particular, ‘a pathogenic separation between cognitive functions and material [embodied] sociality’ (Berardi 2009: 109). Berardi mines more of a Guattarian psychoanalytic vein than Hardt and Negri; we will explore this point of difference in subsequent work on neo-autonomist diversity.

11. This does not nullify Marx's value theoretic framework, as concerned one reviewer. Even ardent Marxist economists update his value ratios to fit contemporary capitalism (Laibman 2007, chapter 4). Our point is that in cognitive capitalism new value is not just created by the classically ‘productive’ fraction of the working class in their paid working hours. Empirically, therefore, the rate of exploitation cannot be determined without factoring in the transformation of labour into biolabour.

12. On the parasitic relationship between capital and labour, see Hardt and Negri (2009, 142).

13. Using Marx's classic value ratios, Fuchs (2010, 191) shows that the unpaid immaterial labour of knowledge-generating produsers creates new value under Web 2.0 applications, so the rate of exploitation (surplus value/wages) tends to infinity.

14. Marazzi (2008, 54) defines ‘social productivity’ in terms of value extracted from the ‘social territory’ or ‘community, over which [cognitive capitalism seeks] to exercise capitalist command’.

15. As Vercellone (2007, 34) puts it, the social wage ‘is conceived as the remuneration for the totality of social times and for the activities that participate in the creation of value appropriated by enterprises’.

16. We follow Hardt and Negri's (2009, 288) reworking of Marx's rate of exploitation into ‘the expression of the level of exploitation by capital on not only the labor-power of the worker but also the common powers of production that constitute social labor-power’.