Immaterial labour links

Some of these articles may be of interest if you'd like to look into the issue of 'immaterial labour' and its relation to autonomia, and indeed to Marx's own labour theory of value.

Immaterial labour is a concept used to explain the sense in which much of the produce of labour under contemporary capitalism does not involve producing physical things, but rather knowledge, 'affects' (the production of emotions, well being, etc.), and conducting communication. As these are intangible it can seem hard to consider them under the rubric of Marx's account.

Some writers - and I'm thinking mainly of Negri here, as he's the one I'm most familiar with - argue that this corresponds to a potential emancipation of labour from the 'tyranny' of 'measure', i.e. from regulating it and ordering it according to fixed economic laws (the implication being that any militant form of Marxism that did not ditch the labour theory of value would end up replicating a form of capitalism, or at least a form of social domination). According to this view, 'labour' should not be thought solely in terms of the workplace or in terms of physical products; rather, it should be considered as the production of the very life of society itself (Negri adopts Foucault's notion of 'biopolitics' here). This means that labour is in a position to simply shrug off the 'parasite' of capitalism and produce social life according to its own needs and desires (you can see the influence of autonomia here in the primacy given to labour over capital).

A pretty useful summary of the idea, presented via a critique, can be found here. This article may be useful as it argues against the concept on the basis of Marx's own account.

An example of Negri's rejection of the imposition of measure on labour can found here - well worth a look

...and you may also be interested in David Graeber's excellent commentary on the Art and Immaterial Labour conference held at the Tate a few years ago (more to do with the role of radicalism within art and academia than anything else if I remember righhtly, but it's a great text nonetheless).

Criticisms of the related Italian Marxists Virno and De Angelis, and of their use of the now famous concepts of 'multitude' and 'the commons' respectively, can be found here and here.

Finally, the whole of Hardt and Negri's Empire is available online here

Art and the 'right' to torture

Bruce Anderson, columnist for The Daily Mail and The Independent, tells us that "We not only have a right to use torture. We have a duty." He attempts to justify this assertion whilst implying that a society should be judged according to its cultural artefacts rather than its barbarity ("Our enjoyment of Shakespeare and Elizabethan madrigals is not blighted by Walsingham's rack-masters in the Tower of London"), and concludes with the following question: "which is the greater aesthetic affront: torture, or the destruction of the National Gallery?"
Not exactly what Marx had in mind when talking about objects acting like subjects and subjcts being reduced to objects, but its perhaps interesting to think of this in those terms - particularly if it's compared with some of the 20th Century avant-garde stuff on doing away with the notion of making 'things' and uniting art with life itself. Read Bruce and get irritated with him here, and perhaps compare and contrast with this, this, and this

I haven't had time this week to write anything pertaining to last week's discussion, but I thought these two links might be of interest. Firstly, this is a link to collection of Marx and Engels' own comments on literature and art. They don't all relate to the issue of value - some are more to do with aesthetics, others touch on ideology - but it would be worth having a look through. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/art/index.htm

Secondly, as regards the issue of aggregations of socially necessary labour time, I'd reccomend this: http://libcom.org/library/incomplete-marx-felton-c-shorthall
it's The Incomplete Marx by Felton Shortall, and it's a text that I found very useful when reading Capital. This chapter in particular may be worth a look - http://libcom.org/library/incomplete-marx-8 - as it raises this issue:

“Against any labour theory of value that suggests that labour is the substance of value it may be objected that labour is not homogeneous -- that there exists a vast array of different types of labour -- and that therefore labour cannot serve as the single substance of the value of all commodities. To overcome such an objection it is necessary to demonstrate how the multiplicity of different labours that enter the production of commodities can be reduced to particular expressions of some universal labour-in-general which may then itself serve as the homogeneous substance of value.”