Rabinbach, Anson. The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor. First edition. Forms of Living. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.
Etienne-Jules Marey chronophotograph. Source: graphicine.com
Overview
Claim: there is an eclipse of hopes that a more efficient workplace could provide the basis of a new, more socially satisfactory society.
Who deals with: European science of work, bridges intellectual history, labor history, and the history of the body. Marx’s productivism, Taylorism, Communism, the Nazi Beauty of Labor program, and the discourses of the digital workplace in the later 20thC.
Method: Analysis of labour. Establishes the idea of human motor as a figure of 19thC transcendental materialism. Then uses this definition in the context of dualism of human and machine to cut across history, identify the notion's decline in 20thC and analyse why it happened (the answer is it because of digital technology). Rabinbach's historical analysis is based on division of history into three parts (mimetic, transcendental, and digital). Chapters are mapped to this three stages.
Why important: for historians. General public, because more efficient workplace could provide the basis of a new, more socially satisfactory society.
Relevance to my research: important because also analyses differences between industrial and digital labour.
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Notes:
Explains categorisation into three historical stages:
1. Mimetic (18thC) - aims at imitating the nature.
2. Transcendental (19-20thC) the body as productive in the sense that it is capable of converting energy into work. Energy is a transcendental principle, that is, equally omnipresent in nature and society.
3. Digital (from 20thC onwards). Driven by the ideas that (1) the primacy of bodily functions was now replaced by the manipulation of signs (Walter Benjamin) and (2) that any mathematical operation can be reproduced mechnanically (Alan Turing) (ix).
Étienne- Jules Marey. Cat drop. Source: ucla.edu
Human motor in Marx
Claim: Marx saw labour as a '“metabolic exchange” between history and nature" (7)
Who deals with: discoveries of William Thomson and Helmholtz around steam engines (7). Thermodynamics theory of William Robert Grove (8). Clausius’s second law of thermodynamics (10). Ukrainian physician and socialist Sergei Podolinsky (11). The “Pope” of German socialism, Karl Kautsky (12).
Method: Looks at Marxism from the standpoint of physics, particlarly first and seconds laws of thermodynamics.
Why important: one reason why socialism is a utopia is because it ignores the 2nd law of thermodynamics, thus denying the environmental impact (“heat death of the universe” hypothesis)(10).
Relevance to my research: to compare application of Marxian analysis in Rabinbach with other digital labour theorists. He also points out the shift in Marx's thinking from more anthropological to economic analysis.
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Notes:
Marx considered his discovery of labour-power as one of his most important achievements (7). In his productvist shift, as observed by Rabinbach, Marx redefines the concrete and abstract labour as conversion of labour versus its generation (Moishe Postone) (8, 177). Once discovered, labour-power became quantifiable, which foregrounded emancipation from productive labour for the sake of even greater productivity over Marx's earlier claim of emancipation through labour (8). In Capital, Marx stresses the substance of exchange is nothing more but labour power, now understood as a commodity (Marx, Capital, 1:179).
In its most general sense, productivism is a belief that all growth is good (opposed by the belief of the finite planet and those who argue that it's up to the worker to put values on their free time). Rabinbach defines it as "primacy and ultimate interchangeability of productive activity of the body, technology, or nature" (vii). Getting back to Marx, he observes in this context that Marxian analysis is built on seeing labour as expenditure of human labour power (8).
Rabinbach argues that Marx and Engels failed to fully adopt the theory of "heat death" in their labour theory of value, and thus delineated their thinking from productivism (11).