Exploitation of the self in community-based software production: workers' freedoms or firm foundations?
Capital & Class › Nbr. 2009, June 2009
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Exploitation of the self in community-based software production: workers' freedoms or firm foundations?
Introduction
Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue in the world, with the world and with each other. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paolo Freire Emblematic of the way in which information society rhetoric often occludes more basic, underlying political questions, the intrusive bio-politics of informational capitalism is frequently and tautologically celebrated as an end in itself. For example, the writings of such theorists as Hardt and Negri, Poster, Lash and Jenkins, etc. are all rich with novelty-based aspirations, but are rather more penurious when asked to supply examples of how more abstract, globally-fluid informational environments actually empower in practice. Hardt and Negri, for example, rely upon the eponymously vague formulations of both Empire (2000) and Multitude (2005); Poster (2006) is excessively dependent on dramatic (albeit clumsy) neologisms like humachines, while Lash (2002) and Jenkins (2006) overprivilege immanence (see Taylor, 2006 and Lash, 2006 for an extended debate on this theme) and convergence, respectively. An under-acknowledged issue in these works is the small number of workers who, even in the more developed West, prove to be well-placed to profit from new mobilities when set against the much greater number of workers more typically on the receiving end of capitalism's fleetness of informational foot. Even if it is granted that informationalised jobs are growing steadily, in this paper we explore the naivety of the assumption that such jobs represent significant gains for the individual's quality of life when compared to industrial jobs or work done in a more obviously measurable and less 'flexibilised' way (Moore, 2006). We show how this assumption fails to acknowledge the extent to which such re-skilling is subsidised by the personal initiative and self-training of a whole new generation of workers, for whom an overtly felt ideological conflict with capital risks becoming replaced by a bio-political, naturalised sense that self-obtained skills smooth one's entry to the only game in town: the information society. Braverman and other Marxist analysts revealed inequalities and power relations based on labour regulation within the industrial capitalist production model. However, it can generally be agreed by those on the left and right of the political spectrum alike that such contemporary community-based models of production of software as are found within FOSS represent dramatically different production techniques to those devised by Ford and Taylor in the industrial age. In the Taylorist industrial m...See the full content of this document
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