Sobre la lectura que en “Gramática de la multitud” Paolo Virno hace de la distinción entre trabajo productivo e improductivo en Marx. Anexo: comentario a “Arte y Postfordismo” de Octavi Comeron

Abstract

In this paper I will discuss one of the key arguments of the post-autonomist Italian thinker Paolo Virno as it appears in its well-known ‘A Grammar of the Multitude’ (Los Angeles, 2004). His main standpoint says that in today’s stage of capitalism, which Virno understands it as post-Fordism, productive labour takes on the appearance of servile labour and resembles virtuosic activities like the speech of the politician, the performance of the stage actor or the concert pianist. According to Virno, one key characteristic shared by all these activities is that they do not leave us with a defined object distinguishable from the performance itself, i.e. there is not a separate end product once the activity is completed. Virno draws his argument on a concrete reading of Marx’s distinction between productive and unproductive labour. In a certain moment of the ‘A Grammar of the Multitude’ Virno argues that virtuosic labour, for Marx, is a form of wage labour which is not, at the same time, productive labour. I will challenge this assumption through a close reading of those passages of Marx that Virno uses to support this concrete claim. In the appendix I will discuss some of the assumptions Octavi Comeron makes in his recent book ‘Arte y Postfordismo’ (2007) since Comeron draws his arguments particularly on Virno ideas on labour and more generally on post-autonomist thought.