bare life, immaterial labour, foxconn. first draft

First draft, complete. Citations, footnotes, etc. still incomplete, but this is the overall structure. Trying to get this into a single, semi-polished piece, so I have omitted some content. It still feels somewhat scattered, and I can't tell if it matters or not at this point. Outside opinions desired.



In Mountain View, California, Google employees sit in ergonomic chairs surrounded by a fluid environment designed to promote creativity and innovation. Lava lamps, exercise bicycles, and foosball tables are scattered about, in a casual, relaxed atmosphere conducive to informal conversation and fun. There is a cornucopia of free, organic food. The cafeterias are complete with a health-promoting layout that places healthier food at eye level, provides smaller portions, and labels food products according to how often they ought to be eaten. In the vending machines, the only place where food costs money, snacks are priced according to their health-one cent per gram of sugar, one dollar per gram of trans fat-to encourage a healthy diet. (footnote: ())




Encouraged to take twenty percent of their time for personal projects, employees collaborate with colleagues, pursue passions, and exercise their minds. Google executives are proud to tell us that popular products including Gmail and Google News originated from "Twenty Percent Time." A flexible and unpredictable world keeps them on their toes, demanding constant innovation, but they love their jobs. That pleasure and identification of personal pursuits with work translates directly into new products, expanded markets, and increased profit margins for Google.



At times, is seems as though work has become indistinguishable from life. Individual pursuits are paid time, and one's very health, fitness, and recreation is integrated into and encouraged by the physical environment of the workplace. Innovation requires flexibility, and perhaps the next big idea will pop into someone's head during a game of racquetball, or over a lunch of organic local greens, wild salmon, and an indulgent red-labeled package of two Oreos. Workers go home, and think about the problems they encountered during the day. Perhaps, at times, they awake from a dream to realize that they have solved a problem that has been plaguing them for days or weeks. (footnote: One tech-worker tells a story illustrating just this: "One morning recently I awoke with the thought of a bug in some code that I had written -- a bug which I had not previously realised was there. My sleeping mind had been examining a week's work, and had stumbled upon an inconsistency" ("Sleep Worker's Enquiry," ).)



In Christian Marrazzi's words, "New constant capital is constituted by a totality of immaterial organizational systems that suck surplus-value by pursuing citizen-laborers in every moment of their lives, with the result that the working day, the time of living labor, is excessively lengthened and intensified" (The Violence of Financial Capitalism, 55). Their lives, passions, thoughts, and relationships are all totally subsumed, shaped by the need to constantly produce surplus value. But it is not so bad, perhaps. In return for their passions, they get flexibility, toys, camaraderie, an engaging work environment. They are the lucky ones-those who reap the benefits of the demands of the last generation for meaningful work.

Meanwhile, half a world away in Shenzen, China, in the Foxconn factory, young workers with nimble fingers stand at assembly lines. Forbidden from speaking or leaving their post, surrounded by industrial machines, they perform material labor in a bizarre inversion of the Googleplex. Driving screws into cases over and over again, they turn electronic components-each component itself a piece of dead labor imported from the Phillipines, Malaysia, India-into iPhones, laptops, and MP3 players. Like their counterparts in Mountain View, a flexible and unpredictable world keeps them on their toes; at any moment an upsurge in demand for a new product could send them into mandatory overtime, working more than 12 hours a day for a month straight. Sleeping crammed into dormitories with anywhere from 30 to 200 workers, forced to work for free if they do not meet their production quota within the allocated time, the netting under their windows rules out even suicide as a means of escape.



In the cafeteria at Foxconn, just as in the cafeterias of Google, food is carefully regulated and designed. But, where in California the management of diet and life takes place through subtle design elements and soft apparatuses of management-placing healthy food at eye level, charging more for "unhealthy" food, and encouraging a discourse of physical fitness-here the control of food is directly visible. Employees can choose between a few entrees within a set price range; self-service rice is free, but regulated: "After finishing up the meal and returning the plates and utensils, there are employees designated to check for left over food. If one has left rice uneaten on the plate, he or she will be asked to finish it .If the worker did not finish the rice for other reasons, he is asked to give a sufficient reason. Employees who do not finish their rice are charged a fee. (Footnote: )



At times, is seems as though work has become indistinguishable from life. But this life is a nightmare of militarized control, surveillance, and forced labor, compared to the dream of creative, collaborative innovation. Here, too, all parts of life are pursued and sucked dry of surplus value. But where in the Googleplex one's very life becomes a source of value by the soft machinations of fitness programs, diet plans, and self-improvement, at Foxconn life is stripped bare of everything but its sheer potentiality. One worker reports that "A supervisor told us that working at Foxconn requires total obedience; you do not need to be intelligent or highly skilled. After a week of training, we concluded that at Foxconn, we shouldn't treat ourselves as human beings, we are just machines" ( h.org/pro/proshow-127.html). Workers are fed and housed enough to maintain them as a a functional pair of hands assembling the ideas of an innovation team thousands of miles away. The logic of flexibility, speed, and availability is the same as in California, but a legacy of uneven development and a need for raw labor power has reduced workers here to, in their own words, machines.



There is a popular argument in the vaguely post-Autonomist milieu: immaterial labor is now primary; work has left the workplace to become all encompassing (even more so than the 'social factory' of Operaismo/Autonomia); surplus value is found in the cognitive labor that we all perform on our computers, creating culture and new markets via Facebook and Kickstarter, or the hidden participation in production that takes place when we assemble Ikea furniture at home. In Marrazzi's words, "New constant capital is constituted by a totality of immaterial organizational systems that suck surplus-value by pursuing citizen-laborers in every moment of their lives, with the result that the working day, the time of living labor, is excessively lengthened and intensified" (55). Additionally, there is no separation now between 'finance' and 'production'; the two are concurrent, all production is immaterial, and finance is not a parasite on the back of industrial production but, rather, the way that value is created. All of this is more or less straightforward and easy to accept; the implications of this analysis, the way it is used, and the conclusions that those using it come to, however, are more problematic.



We are toldby this milieu that the new form of capitalism is financial, the the new form of work is immaterial and precarious, that the new form of exploitation is through debt and credit rather than waged labor, that communism has arrived under the guise of capitalism, and all we have to do is raise the veil to discover that we already own the world in common. We are told that, as work and life have become indistinguishable, our alienation is at an end, and all we must do is demand a guaranteed basic income and build a global democratic force to retake the commons.

Alternately, we are told that our subsumption into capitalist social relations is so total that there is no hope. Our language, our patterns of thought, our social interactions have all become products of capitalism, and are all producers of surplus value. Thus, while there is no possibility of revolution in a conventional sense, we are reassured that any action we take outside of conventional society is an act of resistance. Sickness, depression, suicide, and school shootings are placed on an equal plane as riots, sabotage, and boss-nappings. Because value is produced everywhere and in everything, any interruption of normalcy is an attack on the reproduction of capital. As control has become molecular rather than molar, all that can be done is individual, ethical, personal. Even if there is no hope, we can find joy and brief moments of freedom in individual acts of resistance or attacks on systems of control and work.



At first these two visions seem dramatically different. But I would like to argue that they are both founded in similar conceptions of the way the world now works, and that they both share the same flaws and shortsightedness. As always, our ideas are products of our times and our conditions. As much as the proponents of global social democracy or the theorists of permanent revolt try to be contemporaries, they adhere to, but are unable to distance themselves from, their own time. (footnote: Agamben: "Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship with one's own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it") I believe that the positive projects of the former and the nihilistic revolt of the latter are both founded on a flattening of gendered and raced divisions of labor, a privileging of a fairly small portion of precarious, intellectual laborers as the new essential working class, an erasure of global divisions of labor, and a shared legacy of ignoring domestic or reproductive labor. Further, the focus on molecular control and resistance, I believe, ends up focusing exclusively on those forms of individual revolt that are common in the metropolitan West, ignoring the mass contradictions and forms of revolt that are playing out in centers of industrial production. While the forms of control and capitalism have changed, and the forms of critique have changed in kind, I believe that the shortcomings of today's insurrectionaries and today's social democrats are fundamentally the same as those of the twentieth century.

I would like to explore the underpinnings that allow these politics to emerge, and to propose a more nuanced understanding of class composition and neoliberalism that acknowledges a common logic of availability and flexibility but highlights the very concrete differences between distinct populations of workers. I begin with a dissection of the general intellect and subsumption, key concepts that both the Post-Operaists and communization theorists use in attempting to understand the present. While the concepts are useful, they are often utilized as ideals which the existing world is then forced into, rather than as tools. Much of the contemporary Italian left uses this framework to justify what is, I believe, simply a new post-fordist productivity compromise, privileging immaterial and cognitive labor and hiding the super-exploited subjects that hold the world together.

Foucault's understanding of neoliberalism as a politics of self-entrepreneurship helps to explain a common logic of self-improvement, while ethnographic research by Ann Anagost and Yan Hairong illustrates the process of neoliberal subject formation in China and its relation to excluded migrant and rural workers. Urban middle-class families invest heavily in the suzhi or 'quality' of their children, relying heavily on domestic labor. Their focus on self-development and their appropriation of value from less 'valuable' workers casts them as perfect neoliberal subjects, qualified lives whose predicates and experiences become investments for future gain, while the de-skilled, super-exploited lives of workers in export processing zones and domestic labor exist as pure potentiality, as bare lives valued only insofar as they can be molded and re-molded to meet market demands for basic assembly work.The bare lives of these assembly-line workers, and the intensive regimes of work and control that they exist under, match Agamben's description of the logic of the concentration camp as part of contemporary sovereignty: absolute control over life in a permanent state of exception.

These divisions between bare life and qualified life, between immaterial labor and deskilled, taylorized assembly-line work, are simultaneously harshly enforced and constantly shifting. While the global class composition is divided according to historical dynamics of white supremacy, patriarchy, and colonialism, there are always exceptions, and many of the dynamics cross both categories. This is not a diagnostic of proletarian identities, but a tool for understanding the nuances of dramatically different lived experiences. Even while the types of control and management vary intensely between assembly lines, Google software development, and service-sector workers in the metropolitan West, the very logic of minute control and absolute availability remains the same. It is this underlying similarity, I believe, that explains the similarity in revolt and refusal between rural Chinese villages, export processing zones, and excluded urban populations in Europe and the United States. Agamben tells us that "everyone is simply bending him- or herself to this flexibility that is today the primary quality that the market demands from each person" (2011, 45). Around the world we see a response to this "estrangement from impotentiality" in the form of destruction and looting without demands or perceived goals. I do not believe this is coincidental.

This text is extraordinarily limited. I omitted discussions of affective labor, of the forms of invisibilized emotional work that also takes place and props up the shiny veneer of digital entrepreneurship, as well as the restructuring of gender, family, and neighborhood relations that ensure the reproduction of a much more flexible, much more precarious class than the Fordist industrial class. I also entirely ignored debt as a fundamental element of contemporary social relations and work. There is much more to be said on these topics, and much that has been said already, much better than I could say it. If nothing else, I hope this will serve as a starting point for future conversations, as a way to work out some thoughts and ask more questions, and as a way to take the best of the post-Operaists and the nihilists while remaining critical of both of them. I hope to prioritize specificity and contemporaneity, and to remain critical and skeptical while rejecting both outright nihilism and fuzzy social democracy



SUBSUMPTION, THE GENERAL INTELLECT, AND A POST-FORDIST PRODUCTIVITY COMPROMISE



Before moving into the meat of my argument, I would like to outline some basic understandings of subsumption, the general intellect, and immaterial labor. These words often function as shibboleths, limiting the participants in a conversation to those fluent in obscure marxist theory, and similarly serve as placeholders for actual discussion. Nonetheless, words are important. So, for those who are less interested in burrowing through the writings of old dead white men, here is a basic summary of subsumption and the general intellect.



Endnotes provides a thorough history of subsumption and its uses that is well worth reading, but I will stick to the basics here. The word itself refers to "the ranging ofsome mass of particulars under a universal," or more specifically, "the process whereby universal and particular are brought into relation" (Endnotes, 2010). For our purposes, subsumption refers to the different ways by which capital incorporates labor processes into its own reproduction. Formal subsumption is understood as the incorporation into the capitalist wage-relation of pre-capitalist modes of production. In a historical formulation, as newly proletarianized workers have their means of subsistence ripped from them they enter the labor market in order to survive. However, their labour is still organized according to its previous form: craftsmanship, agricultural production, and piecework, rather than organized according to specifically capitalist needs. Marx says: "the labour process, seen from the technological point of view, continues exactly as it did before, except that now it is a labour process subordinated to capital" (Marx and Engels 1975-2005, Volume 34, pp. 93-94). While formal subsumption is used to describe the historical process by which labour was initially captured by capital, it can also be viewed according to the content of the capital-labour relationship that it defines, a production of absolute surplus value. Because capital does not reorganize labour according to its own ends under formal subsumption, the amount of surplus value that can be extracted can only be increased by increasing the working day beyond that which the workers needs to reproduce themselves-the wages that are paid the worker are less than the value produced by the worker. Thus the organization of labour remains autonomous, and capital extracts absolute surplus value but cannot increase that rate of extraction without simply extending the length of the working day.



Under real subsumption, capital transforms the technology and structure of labor processes so as to increase the rate at which value is produced. Vercellone sees this as synonymous with the Industrial Revolution and Fordism. The increased division of labour, scientific management, and technological development allows capital to reinvent labor processes in its own image. Endnotes sees real subsumption as a shift from absolute to relative surplus value. As working conditions change and labor becomes more efficient and productive, the same amount of labour time produces an increased amount of value. Rather than extending the length of the working day to increase surplus value, capital develops increased technological capacity and organization which allows the working day to remain constant or decrease in length while still extracting surplus value. This is relative surplus value. Vercellone's formulation of real subsumption as a historical stage thus situates this period between the first Industrial Revolution and the crisis of Fordism in the 1970s (2007, 23).



For much of the postoperaist milieu, there is a third state or relation, the age of the general intellect. They draw heavily on the Fragment on Machines in the Grundrisse, and thus I will return there as well for clarity. This relation depends on the tendency of capital to throw off surplus labor, to reduce the working day and simultaneously valorize itself. Marx:



"It [capital] is thus, despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of a social disposable time, in order to reduce labour time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone's time for their own development. But its tendency always, on the one side, to create disposable time, on the other, to convert it into surplus labour The more this contradiction develops, the more does it become evident that the growth of the forces of production can no longer be bound up with the appropriation of alien labour, but that the mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour The most developed machinery thus forces the worker to work longer than the savage does, or than he himself did with the simplest, crudest tools" (Marx, Grundrisse, 708-709, emphasis mine).



Marx argues that "social knowledge has become a direct force of production" (Marx, 706), the general intellect. In Raunig's comments on the Fragment on Machines, he tells use that this general intellect is not contained only in fixed capital and in the social knowledge objectified in machines, but in "forms of social cooperation and communication, not only as machinic enslavement, but also as the capacity of immaterial labor" (Raunig 2010, 26.) Rob Horning describes the general intellect as "the lived praxis of the knowledge about everyday life within capitalism, the making of ideas or memes or new semiotic information or new meanings for goods, and so on" (2010). Thus as capital reduces the working day through increases in surplus value extraction characterizing real subsumption, it frees up social time for workers to develop themselves and their own capacities, which are then used by capital in valorizing itself.



Vercellone historicizes this dynamic, calling it an age of the general intellect, following first formal subsumption during the birth of capitalism and real subsumption running through the industrial revolution and Fordism until the crisis of the early 70s and the birth of neoliberalism. In this framework, labour processes are now organized autonomously from capital, as in formal subsumption, and capital exists primarily as a parasitic force extracting value from human self-organized activity. This is the result of a diffusion of knowledge and education brought on by Fordism, and the transition of fixed capital from machinery to "human minds and intellect". The Smithian division of labour has been overcome, and there is a crisis in the relation between wage-labour and production: there is no longer anything but a formal distinction between labour-time and non-labour time, which makes it impossible to determine the value produced by waged labour. Thus capital seeks to extract surplus value through financial tools and by an ongoing enclosure of intellectual commons.

Vercellone identifies contemporary 'immaterial workers' with Marx's description of humans under communism: people should be "fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers" (Capital Vol. 1, 534). This sets the foundation for a common Post-Operaist argument that we are on the verge of a transition directly to communism, but is flawed for two reasons. First, this description might fit the cognitive, immaterial worker who lives in urban centres in the West, but does not at all describe the migrant domestic worker, the industrial assembly-line worker in Poland, China, or Slovakia, or the sex-worker from the Phillipines or Russia, all of whom are expected to be pure labour-power. Further, the flexibility of this immaterial worker depends on a supposedly overcome division of labour; he uses a computer built by unskilled labor in China, eats food prepared by Latino migrant workers, and is reproduced daily by the invisible work of gendered and racialized subjects. Second, it is predicated on the desirability of a world in which use-value is privileged, and thus hangs on to the notion of work, operativity, and availability that so clearly underpins neoliberalism.



When he defines communism as the "real movement by means of which the society of knowledge would liberate itself effectively from the capitalist logic that subsumes it" (Vercellone 2007, 35, footnote 57), he ignores the material underpinnings of deskilled, taylorized labour and domestic reproductive labor that makes such a society possible, envisioning a paradise of knowledge which continues to ride on the backs of those who are not white, Western subjects." Perhaps the clearest explication of this tendency is this short, simple sentence which is nonetheless rich with assumptions: "Precarization at this stage is not a matter of possibly starving; it's a matter of feeling irrelevant, unfamous, uncool, out of date, etc." (Horning 2010). This should be a warning bell, an indicator of precisely who these arguments are discussing. The subjects referenced here are those who, by their very definition, cannot be on the verge of starvation. This automatically precludes those whose precarity actually does look like possible starvation; these subjects do not exist. Another excerpt: "with production being done outside of wage paying situations, and appropriation of that value not benefiting the workers, the argument for a social wage mandated by the state strengthens -- this would enable workers to continue to learn, self-fashion, form identities, innovate lifestyles without stultifying fear of earning money."



Here is the ultimate conclusion of those immaterial workers who claim to be communists: we, the intellectual workers, the cognitive proletariat, we who work all the time by producing culture, identities, preferences, ideas, should be given a living wage. Because the differentiation between waged and un-waged labour has come to an end, because most of our productive work is unpaid, we should be guaranteed the means for our comfortable reproduction. In return for this, we promise to continue working, to accelerate our production of value and our production of ourselves as immaterial workers. In addition, within this new productivity compromise, we promise not to mention or think about those others whose material labour produces the machines that make our work possible. Like the factory workers of the golden age of Fordism, we will ignore the reproductive and affective work performed by domestic laborers, laundromats, nannies, and sex-workers that allows us to continue producing. Likewise, when we discuss the diffuse knowledge of humanity that allows us to produce, and glorify the new communism of technology and information, we will conveniently forget that the separation of intellectual and manual labor continues unabated, with manual labor performed by deskilled, super-exploited workers in places far enough away or sufficiently dehumanized by race or gender that we need not consider them at all. We will certainly not lay awake at night wondering whether in fact we are simply capital's way of managing contemporary intellectual powers of production, rather than theprecarious prometheus that has stolen communism from under the watchful eyes of capital.



We are being sold a new productivity compromise, re-engineered for a flexible, intellectual, post-Fordist world but characterized by the same self-interest of yesterday's suburban workers. If a guaranteed wage is indeed possible and not a pipe dream, it will be guaranteed to those who can prove themselves productive citizens, and kept far from the hands of migrants, criminals, and those living in other countries producing our goods. If such a goal is possible, it will be not communism but a new, biopolitical Fordism that continues to privilege certain sectors of the population while immiserating the rest. I will return to this argument in more detail later. For now, I would like to explore the underpinning of neoliberalism and examine contemporary class composition in our supposedly immaterial world.



NEOLIBERALISM, SUZHI, AND BARE LIFE



In the 1960s, a series of publications by economists Gary Becker and Theodore Schulz introduced the concept of 'human capital'. Rather than understanding labor as a factor of production or as a commodity, they proposed an understanding of workers as entrepreneurs, able to invest in themselves in order to increase their future returns. Foucault claimed that this shift was fundamental to the development of neoliberalism, and to a dramatic shift inthe way that both capitalism and governance function. As Foucault argues in his lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics, "the stake in all neo-liberal analysis is the replacement every time of homo oeconomicus as a partner of exchange with homo oeconomicus as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings" (Foucault in Dilts 2011, 2). Jason read tells us that where "classic liberalism focused on exchange, neoliberalism, according to Foucault, extends the process of making economic activity a general matrix of social and political relations, but it takes as its focus not exchange but competition"(2009, 27).



Thus, the worker is cast as an 'entrepreneur of the self,' as one who not only can but must constantly improve herself, make herself more marketable, develop her capacity for future profit-generating activities. Jason Read argues, following Foucault, that this neoliberal shift towards human capital arises at least in part to solve the problem of labor without Marx:



"Situating Marx and neoliberalism with respect to a similar problem makes it possible to grasp something of the politics of neoliberalism, which through a generalization of the idea of the 'entrepreneur,' 'investment' and 'risk' beyond the realm of finance capital to every quotidian relation, effaces the very fact of exploitation. Neoliberalism can be considered a particular version of 'capitalism without capitalism,' a way of maintaining not only private property but the existing distribution of wealth in capitalism while simultaneously doing away with the antagonism and social insecurity of capitalism, in this case paradoxically by extending capitalism, at least its symbols, terms, and logic, to all of society (Read 2009, 32)."



My intention here is not to delve too deeply into the history of neoliberalism or into Foucault's lectures on biopolitics (footnote: I highly recommend both Jason Read's "A Genealogy of Homo Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity" and Andrew Dilts' "From entrepreneur of the self to care of the self" as excellent overviews of the topic with important questions of their own). Rather, I want to establish a groundwork understanding of neoliberalism as an ideology ofself-entrepreneurship, as well as an extension of economics into every realm of life,the experience of real subsumption: "the incorporation of all subjective potential, the capacity to communicate, to feel, to create, to think, into productive powers for capital" (Read 2009, 33). This argument is a familiar one, but I would like to investigate the ways in which both discourses around real subsumption and self-improvement vary between across geopolitically diverse, racialized and gendered subjects.



Contemporary capital depends on a combination of rigid management structures and absolute flexibility. It requires the existence of populations who can be employed, scrutinized, and put to work in the most extreme taylorised space yet invented, yet can be dismissed without warning, discarded during a lull or put into overdrive at the whims of amazon orders or facebook 'likes'. This is the pure potentiality, the bare life, that is represented by migrants and so-called 'surplus populations': with no guarantees for reproduction, they are the most extreme reserve army of labor to ever exist, sheer productive capacity that can be flicked on and off like the electronic circuits they assemble.



A detailed dissection of labor processes and subject formation in China provides a foilto understand class composition on a global scale, as well as providing more extreme examples of super-exploitation and self-entrepreneurship. Specifically, I contrast the development of a neoliberal 'entrepreneur of the self' framework in the United States with a discourse around improving quality, or suzhi, in China. Additionally, I contrast the urban, middle class focus on investing in human capital and making oneself marketable with the need for hidden, raw potential labour-power in the form of the migrant, racialized, or gendered labor in both the United States and China. The logic of availability and potentiality that is at play in the extraction of value from every part of our lives is equally present, but manifested with important differences, in the superexploitation of the bare lives of migrant family workers and domestic laborers. Finally, I use Agamben's understanding of bare life and the camp as the absolute biopolitical space to understand the logic of export processing zones and contemporary industrial production.

Self-Improvement and Suzhi

Ann Anagost describes witnessing a conversation between two urbanites on a train in Shanghai, discussing why Chinese development was below expectations. The reason, according to the younger of the two, was that "the quality of the people is too low, and the reason that the quality of the people is too low is because they are too many" (1995, 14). While in the United States the ideology of self-improvement has been promoted more through market forces, self-help books, and entrepreneurship seminars (although the actions of a government focused on 'improving the quality' of parts of the population are certainly not absent in the US; see for instance the Moynihan Report in 1965 and its effect on welfare programs and discourses around race), in post-Mao China it is part of an official project of development. According to Anagost, "The discourse of population quality (renko suzhi) may have first appeared in the 1980s .This idea represents a shift in state policy from regulating births to raising the quality of the population as a whole; in other words, a shift from quantity to quality" (2004, 190, emphasis mine).

In this case, suzhi or "quality" is discursively equivalent to human capital. Parents of middle-class children invest heavily in their development, their schooling and their environment to increase their suzhi and make them more competitive on the global market. Anagost again: "suzhi is what defines the middle-class family as a theater of neoliberal subject production through the project of building quality into the child" (2004, 192). Investing in suzhi becomes central to urban Chinese subjects concurrent with the post-Mao modernization drive and the entrance of China into the global economy (Hairong 2006, 15); that is, with the shift toward neoliberal policies and ideologies. So it seems possible to draw a rough equivalence between the neoliberal shift in the United States since the 1970s and the Chinese modernization drive since the 1980s in both government policies (a shift towards competition, gutting of social services, and the growth of 'individual responsibility') and in individual practices of self-improvement. There remain dramatic differences, and I do not mean to downplay the continued powerful intervention of the Chinese state. My main intention is to use Chinese discourses around suzhi, development, and the vast perceived differences between Chinese urban and rural populations as a foil for understanding the equivalent discontinuities in the United States and Western Europe that are often glossed over by theorists of immaterial labor.

While urban middle-class families in China invest time, money and effort into increasing the suzhi of their children, they also depend on a rural population both for the material production of the commodities and finance that they rely on and the domestic labor that allows them to invest in their children. Not only does this low-valued rural population provide a massive reserve army of labor in order to keep wages down in industrial centers of production on the coast, but that same rural population provides a steady stream of migrant domestic workers for urban families. Yan Hairong tells us that "marketization in the post-Mao reform has created a fast-expanding domestic service for urban households, drawing hundreds of thousands of rural migrant women into this labor force." 7.6 percent of households in Beijing and over 10 percent in Shanghai employ these domestic workers (Hairong 2006, 18). These rural domestic workers are seen as unskilled, lacking suzhi, and needing constant supervision.



Here, then, we can see the uneven ways in which the neoliberal logic of total availability is applied to different populations: on the one hand, we have the urban family whose every activity is aimed at increasing suzhi and making their child more marketable, while on the other hand we have an intensely regulated domestic worker whose every activity is dictated by her employer. Those who argue that our creativity and self-directed activities are at the heart of value production may be partially right, but they should also recall those domestic workers and industrial laborers whose activity is entirely regulated and controlled-not by the soft apparatuses of ideology but by the very brutal and visible machinations of Taylorist control and militaristic discipline.



There is a comparison to be made here with the relation between cognitive workers or 'productive citizens' in the United States and Western Europe and the migrant labor upon which they rely. Our relationships are productive of value through their shift into the realms of Facebook and social networking; our interests are tracked through Google searches and sold to advertisers; our participation in crowdsourced production from beta testing to kickstarter is monetized without any compensation. The work that we do crafting ourselves, improving ourselves, caring for ourselves, is directly productive of surplus value. Our general intellect, the argument goes, is subsumed under and appropriated by capital. Our very lives are sources of value. These arguments, as salient as they may be, focus only on those lives that are seen as valuable, those lives which, in China, would be seen as having high suzhi(one could, perhaps, describe a life filled with suzhi, or quality, as a 'qualified' life. I will return to this later.) As in China, however, these productive lives are dependent on de-skilled, invisibilized, and highly regulated labor performed by migrants and people of color. The clothing that we wear to signify our hipness and individuality (that very individuality and culture that, it is argued, is the source of profit), is produced in sweatshops by migrant workers in Los Angeles. The parents who are too busy producing themselves (through work, through entrepreneurship, through recreation and clubs) must hire flexible domestic workers to raise their children. As in China, the very value or quality which characterizes urban workers and producers of culture is extracted, invisibly, from de-skilled, de-humanized rural and excluded workers seen as value-less.



I do not mean to draw an impermeable distinction between privileged intellectual laborers and de-skilled superexploited workers, or to argue for a politics of guilt. I do, however, believe that a specific class composition with very determined divisions of labor is an integral part of contemporary capitalism, and that obscuring those relations is crucial to maintaining the current order and to recuperating radical politics. Further, there is a long tradition of communists ignoring or devaluaing certain types of labor in order to pursue their own political program free of untidy complications.



On Domestic Labor and Value



A tangent, here, on the obscured nature of value in domestic labor. There is a consistent history among Marxists of de-prioritizing domestic or reproductive labor. It is seen as outside of capitalism, as not productive of value, as 'not work,' and so forth. While this tendency has been eloquently contested over and over again, most notably among the autonomous feminists of Italy and the United States in the 1960s and 1970sthrough the works of Silvia Federici, Selma James, and the Wages for Housework campaign, the tendency to minimize or hide the importance of reproductive and service labor continually recurs. Most recently, we can see this tendency in two very different places: the work of the Post-Operaists focusing on cognitive and immaterial labor, and the work of the (largely French) ultra-left communists such as Theorie Communiste and the journal Endnotes. While the former erases this domestic labor by lumping it in with a general perception of total subsumption (everything we do is work, thus there is no use in distinguishing between the work of a computer programmer and the work of a nanny), the latter dismisses it in a more conventional way, by arguing that it is not productive of relative surplus value, and is thus incidental to capitalism rather than central to it. To Endnotes, service work results simply from a high-income differential, and is only formally subsumed (Endnotes 2010). Thus to them service labor is constant, always the same, and arises in similar forms when income differentials are high enough to warrant it-Victorian England, suburban enclaves of wealth in the United States, or urban families in China.



To counter these arguments, I will return to Italy in 1981, and to Leopoldina Fortunati's book The Arcane of Reproduction, as well as Yan Hairong's ethnography on contemporary and Mao-era domestic labor in China, and Ann Anagost's work on suzhi. While reproductive or domestic labor is no longer primarily performed as unpaid labor by wives unable to access the wage-labor market, as in Italy and the United States in the mid-twentieth century, but is rather performed by underpaid and informal migrant laborers (often female, often from rural areas in China andfrom racialized groups in the US), Fortunati's understanding of the way that reproductive labor is obscured is still relevant. She argues that capitalism depends on obscuring the value-producing nature of reproductive labor:



While within production the exchange between worker and capital is two-sided in the sense that it appears formally as an exchange of equivalents between equals, but is in reality an exchange of non-equivalents between unequals .[reproduction] is an exchange that appears to take place between male workers and women, but in reality takes place between capital and women, with the male workers acting as intermediaries (Fortunati 1989, 9).

As a 'free' worker under capitalism, the individual has no value: only his or her labor power has value .And it is because of this that the reproduction of the individual cannot be posited as an economic aim of capitalist production; neither can it enter into the sphere of those social relations that are directly governed by exchange-value (Fortunati 1989, 10).



and, later:



It is only by positing the process of reproduction as 'natural' and reproduction work as a 'natural force of social labor' that costs capital nothing, that capitalism can valorize itself (Fortunati 1989, 11).



Fortunati argues that, as individuals can have no value under capitalism except that of labor-power, and that because the value of that labor-power is visible only in waged production (in her time, in the production of male factory workers), the domestic work that goes into reproducing that labor power is invisible. In actuality, she argues, that reproductive labor directly produces value. Let us apply her argument to contemporary neoliberal processes of the production of the self.If work is now all-encompassing, and if a large part of the production of ourselves as workers takes place on the level of work on the self, then the value that is created by reproductive work or by self-work is not immediately visible in the form of conventional industrial wage-labor, but in the ways that our selves are sources of value for immaterial production. We'll take as an example the hypothetical child of a middle-class urban family in China. The value of that child as potential worker is proportionate to her suzhi, or quality; the more that is invested in the child's human capital, the more potential that child has to produce value and be (partially) compensated for it. Anagost: "It is self-development that 'qualifies' neoliberal subjects, so that the actualization of the body's latent potentialities becomes an expression of value" (2004, 201). The Post-Operaist tendency would agree that self-improvement is a crucial component of productive, western subjects, but they ignore the domestic and reproductive labor that goes into producing those subjects, that goes into imbuing them with value that can then be appropriated by capital.



Further, Yan Hairong argues that domestic labor can be, and is, really subsumed, not only formally subsumed-that the form domestic labor takes has shifted in the post-Mao era to more closely resemble conventional, highly regulated waged labor. Where in the Mao era and particularly after the Cultural Revolution rurality was highly valued as proletarian and non-bourgeois, and rural domestic workers were given a high degree of autonomy in their work, contemporary domestic laborers are perceived as having low suzhi and must be highly regulated: "[w]hen urban childcare is carried out predominantly by hired wage labor in post-Mao society, employer authority has begun to bear upon the actual labor process itself in terms of detailed supervision and disciplining" (Hairong 2006, 16-17). Young, largely female workers are sought as domestic laborers because of their flexibility and submissiveness: "she becomes-in the eyes of employers-a domestic wageworker without subjectivity. Many employers say, 'They are like a piece of blank slate'" (Hairong 2006, 23).



So, this value that is imbued in urban middle-class children in China or in well-off children in the United States who are groomed from a young age to be competitive, flexible and desirable, is derived from the reproductive labor of a highly regulated, super-exploited flexible class of migrant domestic workers. While this labor is paid, unlike the reproductive labor of the wife or mother in Fortunati's formulation, I believe that the relation between obscured domestic work and the productive, "high-quality" bodies of cognitive laborers is the same. The former are portrayed as unskilled or, in Endnotes' formulation, as merely a result of high income-differentials, and not productive of value, while the latter are seen as the true workers of our immaterial age. This blindness to the value-producing nature of racialized, gendered domestic work is comparable to the refusal to see women's work as 'real work' by Marxists in the mid-twentieth century, and is, as I shall argue later, necessary to Post-Operaist discourses about immaterial labor and their subsequent arguments for social democracy.



One last note before returning to the main current of this piece: Hairong tells us that employers see the malleability of domestic laborers as a 'blank slate' that can be shaped according to their own needs, while Anagost tells us that she observed in discourses of suzhi "nothing less than a substitution of bodies in which the extraction of value from one body was being accumulated in the other (2004, 191). She argues that the bare life of migrant workers, their pure potentiality-or in Hairong's formulation the 'blank slate' of their subjectivity-is appropriated in order to form the 'qualified life' of middle-class, intellectual workers (Anagost 2004, 193). Here we can begin to see the relation between bare life and qualified life as sources of value, one hidden and obscured and one privileged through attention both from middle-class intellectual workers and supposedly critical anti-capitalists. In the next section, I will address more fully this notion of bare life and qualified life in domestic labor, industrial production, and cognitive labor, the omission of these nuances among contemporary post-operaists, and the effect of this lacuna on their analyses and political strategies.



Bare Life and Qualified Life: Factories, Camps, and Computer Labs



According to Agamben, classical Greeks used two different terms to describe life: "zo , which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or group .what was at issue [in using bios] for both thinkers was not at all simple natural life but rather a qualified life, a particular way of life" (Agamben 1998, 1). He then offers us a framework for understanding both the historical and contemporary logic of sovereignty and biopolitics: "The fundamental categorical pair of Western politics is not that of friend/enemy but that of bare life/political existence, zo /bios, exclusion/inclusion. There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion" (1998, 9).

While I find Agamben's framework extraordinarily important overall, I would like to focus particularly on the production of bare life and qualified life, zo and bios, in the realms of production. The extraction of value from bare life is fundamental to contemporary capitalism, but there remains an important distinction between the extraction of value from bare life and from qualified life, even as those distinctions may be experienced by the same bodies. Thus while for the Western or urban cognitive worker value is extracted from their bare life, it is additionally extracted from their qualified life: they are subjectivized as both zo and bios, in line with Agamben's formulation of the inseparability of the two under contemporary sovereignty. However, the Chinese factory worker or the migrant domestic worker are subjected purely as zo , as a source of bare life existing outside of the law and functioning only to produce value. I argue for this distinction in contrast to Marazzi, who sees bare life as interchangeable with the proletariat (Marazzi 2011, 41-42), even while unwittingly focusing on those forms of labor that are most qualified. What I take issue with is not the argument that the body is an exploited source of value for all subjects under contemporary capitalism, but the failure to recognize the dramatic differences in how that exploitation functions and is distributed according to race, gender, and geographical location.



Christian Marazzi tells us, in his critique of financial capitalism, that "bio-capitalism produces value by extracting it not only from the body functioning as the material instrument of work, but also from the body understood as a whole." (2011, 49). This may be correct, but let us examine the arenas in which this value extraction takes place in his work. Echoing our earlier discussion of the birth of neoliberalism, he tells us of "the emergence of atypical labor and of second generation autonomous labor, former employees who become self-employed" (2011, 50), and then of the massive value produced by our cooperative labor in the form of co-production: "These crowdsourcing strategies, leaching vital resources from the multitudes, represent the new organic composition of capital, the relationship between constant capital dispersed throughout society and variable capital as the whole of sociality, emotions, desires, relational capacities and a lot of 'free labor' (unpaid labor) dispersed in the sphere of the consumption and reproduction in the forms of life, of individual and collective imaginary" (2011, 115).



Who are the "multitudes" in this formulation? Who are the productive workers, and is this value that is extracted from them extracted from their bare life or from qualified life? By seeing value as produced only through the collective intellectual work of those people who are plugged into the internet, into culture, into crowdsourcing, Marazzi casts those workers from excluded populations as irrelevant, as always already not part of the multitudes. From where does the productive capacity of these "multitudes" come? Are these creative subjects produced only through their own self-work? Do the physical tools that they use spring into existence from the general intellect? From where do their computers, their iphones, their network routers and servers come?

I would like to return here to Anagost's formulation of bare life and suzhi, and the notion of the qualified life, bios. The neoliberal subject is precisely not bare life, it is in fact an extraordinarily qualified life, imbued with values, qualities, and skills that make it so productive in Marazzi's view. I do not think it entirely coincidental that suzhi translates into quality, and that Anagost and Hairong perceive the presence of migrant domestic workers in urban families as part of a process of investing in and increasing the suzhi of the children. This value that is extracted from domestic workers, the value that is transferred to children who will become cognitive laborers, computer programmers, entrepreneurs-Marazzi's multitudes-is an accumulation of quality: the future entrepreneur becomes 'qualified' precisely by an extraction of value from the unqualified, bare life of the domestic worker.



Anagost still sees bare life as fundamental to the experience of both: "it would seem that the body-or if not the body as such, then Agamben's 'bare life'-provides a common substrate that underlies both the Chinese state's strategies for developing the latent potentialities of the masses and the absorption of the individual in technologies of the self, in which care of the body becomes an obsessive focus of bourgeois consumption-an intensification of the body as a site of investment" (2004, 200). However, even if the bare life of Marazzi's multitude is extracted for value, they still exist as bios as well. The domestic workers, and, as we shall soon see, the industrial workers producing the very digital devices needed for co-production, exist entirely as excluded bare life, in a state of exception much more brutal than that which extracts value from our qualified life. Citing Agamben, Nicholas De Genova defines bare life as "what remains when human existence, while yet alive, is nonetheless stripped of all the encumbrances of social location and juridical identity, and thus bereft of all of the qualifications for properly political inclusion and belonging" (De Genova 2012, 133). It is hard to imagine describing the cognitive worker of the post-operaists' multitudes as "stripped of social location and juridical identity." Indeed, it is precisely their social existence that makes them productive of value.

Not so with the workers in China's Foxconn factories or the Export Processing Zones of Southeast Asia. These workers exist in conditions of super-exploitation, working 12 hours daily and up to a month straight without time off during periods of high demand (China Labor Watch). They are the hands that assemble the ideas of Marazzi's multitudes. Like the blank slate of the domestic worker, they are pure potentiality, desired for their malleability and their dexterity, performing repetitive actions as quickly as possible. Here there is no need for them to improve themselves; there is no entrepreneurship of the self, only a massive reserve army of labor that can be used and discarded as needed. Here is where value is truly extracted from bare life, from bodies "stripped of social location and juridical identity." Anagost again:



In neoliberal economic logics, this latent potentiality of the body as a body for exploitation is unleashed by the positioning of the subject at the edge of a precipice, through the threat ofa failure to be recognized as a body of value or even annihilation of the body's very existence due to unsafe labor conditions. In other words, not only does potentiality define capacities that are expressed in the usual sense of being the product of education and training, but there is a superexploitation of the body through an expansion of what it can be made to tolerate in terms of work discipline and stress. (2004, 201, emphasis mine).



De Genova agrees with this characterization of the migrant laborer as bare life: "to the extent that migrant labor commonly confronts territorially-defined 'national' states with the raw force and vital energies of human life--as labor-power-with no juridical sanction, we may recognize anew the figure of bare life, the negative, abject counterpart to human universality and pure potentiality, which sovereign power can only seek to banish" (De Genova 2012, 145). With this foundation, I would like to turn now to the concentration camp, to Agamben's argument that the camp contains the logic of modern sovereignty, is the "nomos of the modern." Specifically, I argue that those sites of production most ignored by theorists of cognitive labor-sweatshops in LA, export processing zones (EPZ) in SE Asia, industrial centers in China-are camps in Agamben's sense, states of exception where workers are reduced entirely to bare life.

In describing the concentration camps of Nazi Germany and the subsequent extension of their logic into the heart of sovereign power in democracy, Agamben tells us that "[i]nsofar as its inhabitants were stripped of every political status and wholly reduced to bare life, the camp was also the most biopolitical space ever to have been realized, in which power confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation" (1998, 169). Later: "if the essence of the camp consists in the materialization of the state of exception and in the subsequent creation of a space in which bare life and the juridical rule enter into a threshold of indistinction, then we must admit that we find ourselves virtually in the presence of a camp every time such a structure is created, independent of the kinds of crimes that are committed there and whatever its denomination and specific topography" (Agamben 1998, 174). Thus the Nazi concentration camps, the refugee camps into which refugees without political status are herded and held in a zone of indistinction, or, as I argue following Jon Seltin, the export processing zones that exist specifically in a state of exception, are all part of the same logic of sovereignty and reduction of life to bare life.



As Seltin tells us: "The EPZ is by its very definition a 'state of exception', the logic of which establishes the conditions for the production of instrumentalized bare life. The definitional feature of an EPZ is that the laws and policy framework governing its operations are 'distinct from what applies elsewhere" (2009, 54). EPZs are granted exemptions from the labor laws of the countries in which they reside, tax breaks, and tariff relaxations; they are, literally, camps designed according to the needs of capital, in which the citizens of the countries of their geographical location are stripped of their juridical existence. We can see this logic at play in maquiladoras, in the EPZs of SE Asia, in the use of undocumented migrants in sweatshops in LA, and in the use of interns in Foxconn's factories to circumvent minimum wage standards (Friends of Gongchao, 2013).



The conditions of these camps, or industrial centers, are likewise characterized by their role as "the most biopolitical space to ever have been realized." Seltin again: "The workers in EPZs are often subject to strict biopolitical regimes of control, regulation and observation .Wright [in an ethnographical study of Mexican electronics maquiladoras workers] describes how the female employees are expected to, very literally, 'embody the very concept of flexibility' in that they are regarded as incomplete subjects, as untrainable bare life whose bodies serve "merely a conduit for the supervisor's knowledge.' Thus the maquiladora floor-worker is produced through the utter differentiation of zo and bios, that is, as a body which is governed and operated through what Wright describes as a 'prosthetics of supervision" (2009, 54). The use of suicide nets in Foxconn factories as a response to a spate of worker suicides in 2010 is the clearest example of this level of absolute control over life. Forced to work, constantly available for overtime shifts, workers are robbed of their ability to choose death over work; their lives exist only as labor in the eyes of capital.



If these industrial centers are the fundamental biopolitical space where bare life is put to work, it seems disingenuous to view the labor of cognitive workers in the United States and Western Europe through the same lens. While the logic of availability, total mobilization of one's potentiality, and total subsumption under capital may be the same, the practical application is extraordinarily different. It is no coincidence that these divisions of labor are separated along racialized, gendered, and geopolitical lines; capitalism has depended on and continues to depend on an uneven population and uneven geographical development. It is also no coincidence, I believe, that those theorists of cognitive labor and the general intellect, those so concerned about the ways our affects are put to work and our creativity exploited, cast labor as universal and homogenous, with an enormous blindspot hovering over superexploited portions of the proletariat: migrants, workers in post-colonial or post-socialist countries, those cast as inferior by white supremacy and patriarchy. The social democrats and orthodox Marxists of yesteryear focused only on the formal industrial working class, dismissing domestic labor, reproductive work, or agricultural labor as unimportant, and dismissing the struggles of people of color or women as superfluous to the primary contradiction of labor and capital. Likewise, the social democrats of today, the self-appointed theorists of the multitude and global insurgency, see only that type of work that they themselves perform, and not the underlying labor that props them up.



Jon Seltin makes a similar argument about transhumanists, those who dream of a post-human future in which we transcend the boundaries of our physical bodies and use technology to become immortal. They, too, ignore the physical reality of the machines they use, and the hidden labor that produces them. As he puts it: "The supposed fluidity, transcendence and liberation associated with digital technologies and hyperbolic post-human futures are structurally conting
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