The invention of the “cognitive capitalism” concept rests on a capitulation to the method of vulgar economics based on “measurement” of the specific productivities of “factors of production” (labor, capital, and nature). One “discovers” then that the rates of growth recorded by these partial productivities explain only 50 or 60 or 70 percent of the “general progress” (of “growth”). This difference is ascribed to the intervention of science and technology, considered as constituting a fourth, independent, “factor.” Some think to have rediscovered in this “factor” the general intellect, whose central position in the definition of the productivity of social labor had already been pointed out by Marx. But in fact there is nothing very new there, in the sense that labor and scientific/technical knowledge have been inseparable through all the stages of human history.11
There is but a single productivity, that of social labor working with adequate tools, in a given natural framework, and on the basis of scientific and technical knowledge whose elements are indissociable one from the other. What vulgar economics artificially pulls apart Marx unites, thus giving the concept of value that emerges from this unity its fundamental status: the condition in its turn for a radical critique of capitalist reality.
Cognitive capitalism is an oxymoron. We will be able to talk of a “cognitive economy” only then, when social relations different from those on which capitalism is based have been established. Instead and in place of this deviant notion inspired by the climate of opinion, I have tried to formulate the metamorphoses that the transformations of capitalism engender in forms of expression of the law of value.
In my work I have imagined a capitalism that has reached the furthest limits of its tendency to reduce the amount of labor used for material production (hard goods: manufactured objects and food products) through an imaginary generalization of automation.12 The departments of production no longer set in motion more than a tiny fraction of the labor force: what is used partly for the production of science and technology (soft goods) needed for that of hard goods and partly for services linked to consumption. In those conditions, the domination of capital is expressed in the unequal distribution of the total income, and value has no longer any meaning except on this integrated and global scale. The concept of value would persist only because society would still be alienated, mired in scarcity thinking.
Would a system that had reached such a stage of its evolution still merit the appellation “capitalism”? It would probably not. It would be a neo-tributary system based on systematic application of the political violence (linked to ideological procedures capable of giving it the appearance of legitimacy) indispensable for the perpetuation of inequality. Such a system is, alas, thinkable on a globalized scale: it is already in the course of being built. I have called it “apartheid on the world scale.” The logic of the forces governing capitalist reproduction works in that direction, which is to say, in the direction of making “another possible world,” one even more barbaric than any of the class societies that have succeeded each other throughout history.
ANNEX TO CHAPTER ONE
An Algebraic Model of Extended Reproduction
1. PARAMETERS OF THE SYSTEM
I shall begin with a broad analysis of the system, linking real wages (and surplus-value rates) with the development rates of the productive forces. Each Department (I for production of means of production E and II for production of consumer goods C) is defined, for each phase, by an equation in value terms, as follows:
| Phase 1 | Department 1 | 1e + ah = pe1 |
| Department 2 | 1e + bh = qc2 | |
| Phase 2 | Department 1 | 1e + aδh = pe1 |
| Department 2 | 1e + bρh = qc2 | |
| Phase 3 | Department 1 | 1e + aδ2h = pe1 |
| Department 2 | 1e + bρ2h = qc2, etc. |
The first term of each equation stands for the value of constant capital consumed in the production process, reduced to a physical unit of equipment E, estimated at the unit value e (e1 ≠ e2 ≠ e3, etc.) The second term represents the physical quantity a, b, aδ, bρ, etc., of total direct labor (necessary labor and surplus labor) employed by one unit of E in each Department and each phase. The parameter h measures the value product of one hour of labor (not to be confused with hourly wage). The physical product of each department, p and q respectively, is estimated at its unit value e and c (similarly c1 ≠ c2 ≠ c3, etc.).
The system comprises three pairs of parameters (a, b, p, q, δ, and ρ) and two unknowns (e and c) for each pair of equations that describe one phase. Parameters a and b measure the physical labor intensity in the productive process (their reciprocals are related to the organic compositions), parameters p and q represent the physical product of the productive processes using one unit of equipment E in each Department, and parameter t.
Obviously δ and ρ are less than 1 since technical progress enables us to obtain, with less direct labor, a higher physical product per unit of equipment.
2. DETERMINATION OF UNIT PRICES E AND C
If we assume h = 1, the equations supply the pairs e and c:
etc.
As the first set of equations shows, as we produce the capital equipment from capital equipment and direct labor, the unit prices of e fall from one phase to the next at the rate of growth of productivity in Department I. On the other hand, consumer goods being produced from capital equipment and direct labor, the unit prices c fall at a rate that is a combination of δ and ρ.
3. EQUATIONS OF EXTENDED REPRODUCTION
If the capital equipment E is distributed between Departments I and II in the ratios n1 and 1-n1, for phase 1, n2 and 1–n2 for the next phase, the equations for the production in value terms are as follows:
K is a neutral factor of proportionality.
The dynamic equilibrium of the extended reproduction requires that two conditions be fulfilled:
1. that the wages distributed for each phase (in both Departments) enable the entire output of consumer goods produced during that phase to be bought;
2. that the surplus-value generated during one phase (in both Departments) makes it possible to purchase the entire output of Department I during the next phase.
(a) Equations of supply/demand of consumer goods:
(b) Equations of supply/demand of equipment:
Nominal Wages S are determined as follows:
And Real Wages S′1 = S1/c1 and S′2 = S2/c2 are: