The General, the Watchman and the Engineer of Control: The Relationship between Cooperation, Communication, and Command in the Society of Control

Taking cue from the Marxian analysis of the relationship between cooperation and capitalist command in Capital and the Grundrisse, the article reviews how Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have addressed this matter. Drawing from the notorious fragment of the Grundrisse on the general intellect, Hardt and Negri argue that in post-industrial societies the production of value tends to coincide with the ensemble of social activities. Hardt and Negri maintain that since any social activity is potentially a value-generating practice, the capitalist organization of labor is increasingly parasitical and external to the social bios. From this flows that labor can no longer be measured in abstract units of time and the exploitation of living labor leaves way to the expropriation of the common. The second part of the article challenges Hardt and Negri’s idealized view of the common by arguing that in the society of control communication and cooperation are always affected and tinged by the media that enable them—the vast majority of which are owned by private corporations. Neither the general in Marx’s Capital who organizes the workers from above nor the watchman and regulator of the Grundrisse, the contemporary engineer of control deploys micro-mechanisms of control inside the digital networks that modulate social cooperation. Drawing from Andrejevic’s notion of the “digital enclosure” and Terranova’s analysis of subjectification in the societies of control, the article concludes with a reflection on post-consensual forms of cooperation that cannot be integrated without igniting a catastrophic transformation of the system.