nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

happens by way of a new externalisation of labour by capital; with the freelancercapital is not interested in the working day or the labour process, but simplyin the product. Marx spoke of formal subsumption as capital subsumingexisting modes of production (manufacture, crafts, traditional agriculture,etc.) whileleaving their techniques and labour processes intact.Today, however, it is not pre-existing technologies and labour processes,but labourers working with means produced by capital, engaging in processesthat are based on capitalist principles and forms of organisation and subjectivity...44 If we can speak of real subsumption in this case it is not immediatein the sense it is in industry (capital organising production and co-operation,controlling the working day directly), but mediate, working through the subjectivityof the entrepreneurs, and enforced by the need to pay rent, make aliving, report to funders and most crucially repay the debt incurred to set upshop. This means that while the self-employed habitually practice networkedself-organisation and self-management this activity is immediately faced withthe problematic of formal subsumption or ‘mediate’ real subsumption.So, contrary to the discourses of information and knowledge societies,the proliferation of so-called ‘self-organised’ teams and entrepreneurs donot mean we are beyond proletarianisation, but that capital has found ways– as Boltanski and Chiapello show – to subsume the ‘intrinsic teleologies’,the goals and desires of workers, by rendering them productive of value...Capital can dothat as longas our desiresareforced213