Labor, Emancipation, and the Critique of Craft-Skill

Abstract

The defense of craft-integrity as part of a critique of capitalist production has been central to Romantic anticapitalism (John Ruskin) as much as to Marx and William Morris. However, in Marx, distinct from both Ruskin and Morris, there is an unwillingness to fetishize craft as in and of itself liberating. For what is crucial to Marx's understanding of the emancipation of labor is the liberation of work from “capitalist time.” This places craftintegrity in an essentially subordinate and non-productivist position in the debate on postcapitalist labor. Recently though, the notion of craft-integrity has undergone a revival with the current debate on “immaterial labor” (labor that produces the creative informational content of a commodity, or labor that involves the routine processing and distribution of information within primary production or the service economy). This is due to the fact that immaterial labor tends to be valorized as a form of intellectual labor or craft (Toni Negri) that potentially, in its affective and communicative possibilities, puts in place a “communization of labor.” However, this is to obviate how immaterial labor is embedded in the capitalist technical division of labor, expressed most directly in the fact that most immaterial labor is utterly routinized; very few knowledge workers experience the same autonomy as artists or craftspeople. This article, then, criticizes this valorization of immaterial labor as another version of the autonomy of craft debate, maintaining, as with Marx, that it is the control over time as such that is fundamental to the emancipation of labor.