capitalisme cognitif

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Science & Society, Vol. 79, No. 3, July 2015, 363–387
363
Cognitive Capitalism and Contemporary Politics:
A World Historical Perspective
BRENDAN MCQUADE*
ABSTRACT: The recent upsurge of class struggle seemingly con-
rms the cognitive capitalism hypothesis and, particularly, the
political predictions of Hardt and Negri. Using world-systems analy-
sis as a heuristic device to facilitate comparison of Egypt’s Arab
Spring Revolt and Occupy Wall Street reveals complexities that
belie these conclusions. The “cognitariat” and “multitude” are not
uncomplicated revolutionary actors but fragmented and politically
ambiguous forces. Revolutionary subjectivity is not a structural fact
to be read off material conditions but remains a political project to
be realized through collective struggle. Meanwhile, the ideological
and practical appropriation of antiauthoritarian and antistatist
impulses by neoliberal forces poses the question of the passive
revolution, wherein the hegemonic center blunts and overtakes
revolutionary movements by incorporating some of their elements.
Cognitive capitalism does not appreciate these complexities, and
this undermined the full development of the contemporary cycle
of struggles.
THE 2008 FINANCIAL CRISIS shook the world and inaugu-
rated a period of revolutionary mobilization: the Arab Spring
uprisings, renewed militancy of workers and students, and the
occupations and general assembles that transformed Tahrir Square,
Syntagma Square, Plaza del Sol, Zuccotti Park, and Taksim Square
into something much greater than municipal parks. For a moment —
perhaps the autumn of 2011, when Arab Spring protests teetered on
the precipice of comprehensive social revolutions and Occupations
* Kaan Basaran, Roberto Ortiz, Valentine Moghadam, Thomas Reifer, David Laibman, and
the anonymous reviewers all provided valuable feedback at various points during the writing
and revising of this piece.

364 SCIENCE & SOCIETY
still dominated public squares across the normally quiescent United
States — it seemed as if world revolution was upon us. In the four
years since Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was forced from power,
however, the Arab Spring’s jubilant protests have given way to a winter
of civil war, foreign intervention and political violence. In the United
States, the Occupy Movement seems to be more properly character-
ized as the “Occupy Moment” — more performance and agitation
than organization and transformation. More generally, these “leader-
less” and horizontal movements have made dramatic demonstrations
and symbolic interventions but have failed to consolidate substantive,
structural change. In the case of Egypt, the return of the military to
power has reversed the political revolution that deposed Mubarak.
Meanwhile, the general crisis that defines the moment continues to
deepen and, despite the revolutionary upsurge, austerity and a disci-
plinary notion of security still stand as the dominant, albeit embattled,
conceptual rubrics organizing formal political discussion. What do
we make of the movements emerging and unfolding before us? Can
we apprehend the deeper social processes that define our historical
moment and provide needed perspective on the current travails?
Historically, the Marxist tradition has focused on the historical
and structural determinants of social change and, especially, revolu-
tionary change. Many interpretations of Marxism hold that the revo-
lutionary subject is synthesized from the most productive elements of
the working class. The workers found at the leading edge of capitalist
development are the most militant and class conscious. They are
the living labor that prefigures new, potentially non-capitalist social
relations. From this perspective, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s
reflections on contemporary politics deserve sustained attention.
In the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and related protests, they
see the emergence of a new era of capitalist development, cognitive
capitalism, and, with it, a transformation in revolutionary politics
(Hardt and Negri, 2011a; 2011b; 2012). Indeed, the wider literature
on cognitive capitalism sees it as a new mode of labor exploita-
tion and capital accumulation that undermines the labor theory of
value and demands new theories (Moulier-Boutang, 2012, 9, 78–79,
94; Vercellone, 2007). Politically, cognitive capitalism replaces the
Leninist vanguard with a new mode of revolutionary organization,
the multitude.

COGNITIVE CAPITALISM 365
The cognitive capitalism hypothesis is both exemplary and sugges-
tive and overstated and lacking global perspective.1 However, some of
its conclusions become more measured in light of Moulier-Boutang’s
(2012) acknowledgement that the scholarship is extrapolating on an
emergent trend. Rather than thinking of “a stabilized regime, a mode
of accumulation,” he sees cognitive capitalism as “a tendency towards
transformation in the mode of exploitation” (original emphasis). With
this in mind, the research agenda of cognitive capitalism becomes
“advanc[ing] a hypothesis . . . even to the point of exaggeration, in
order to bring development out of the shadows where we are con-
demned to it for as long as we limit ourselves to the cautious adding
up of ‘facts’” (60, 94). While this approach may be appropriate to
clarify the logic of an emergent tendency, we must limit ourselves to
adding up “facts,” when dealing with its uneven effects on contem-
porary politics.
In this paper, I use world-systems analysis as heuristic device to
evaluate the cognitive capitalism hypothesis in relation to the political
upsurge of the last three to four years. World-systems analysis is neither
a theory nor a paradigm, but rather “a call for a debate” that challenges
the often unacknowledged consensus of Marxist and liberal thought
(Wallerstein, 1974; 2011a, xxx). World-systems analysis complicates
both traditional Marxist and liberal thought by expanding the unit
of analysis from national society to historical systems that encompass
a larger “spatial/temporal zone which cuts across many political and
cultural units [and] . . . represents an integrated zone of activity and
institutions which obey certain systemic rules” (Wallerstein, 2004a, 17).
The goal of world-systems analysis, then, is not to produce an airtight,
universal and ahistorical theory of capitalism. Instead, it is a frame-
work for analysis that draws on the insights of Marxism, dependency
theory and the Annales school (among other bodies of literature) to
develop theoretically informed histories of capitalism as a globally
evolving relational system.
1 One must recognize that Hardt, Negri and the wider cognitive capitalism school take up
the fundamental questions of our times in a way that few do. Here it is necessary to identify
ecofeminism/the subsistence perspective and the rigorous attempts to investigate the labor
theory of value as similarly ambitious interventions into some of the most difcult and press-
ing questions of the contemporary moment. See Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen, 1999; Mies
and Shiva, 1993; Amin, 1978; 2010; Harvey, 1999; 2006.

366 SCIENCE & SOCIETY
In this way, this paper uses world-systems analysis to facilitate
comparison of revolutionary movements in distinct spatio-temporal
zones of the world economy: Egypt’s Arab Spring uprising and the
Occupy Moment in the United States. I validate elements of the
cognitive capitalism hypothesis and argue that it apprehends novel
facets of contemporary capitalism. At the same time, I show how the
failure of Egyptian revolutionaries to move from a political revolu-
tion to more comprehensive social revolution and the ephemeral
nature of the Occupy Moment point toward historical complexi-
ties that belie the political predictions of the cognitive capitalism
hypothesis and demand more complex and historically grounded
analysis. To this end, this paper proceeds in four sections: first, a
review of the cognitive capitalism hypothesis and its claim about the
dynamics of contemporary class struggle; second, a presentation of
world-systems analysis as heuristic device to help interrogate and
historicize the political predictions embedded in the cognitive capi-
talism hypothesis; third, a world-historical analysis of Egypt’s Arab
Spring Revolution and Occupy Wall Street that highlights a series
of structural factors ignored by the cognitive capitalism hypothesis;
fourth and finally, a concluding section that integrates elements
of the cognitive capitalism hypothesis in a theoretically informed
history of contemporary capitalism in a way that can help enliven
theories of historical capitalism and, more importantly, contempo-
rary revolutionary practice.
The Cognitive Capitalism Hypothesis
The foundation stone of cognitive capitalism is the apparent
hegemony of immaterial labor. The social worth of immaterial labor’s
products is more pronounced than its physical qualities. It “creates
not only material goods but also relationships and ultimately social
life itself” (Hardt and Negri, 2005, 109). Immaterial labor is biopo-
litical because it “blur[s the] . . . boundaries between labor and life,
between production and reproduction” (Hardt and Negri, 2010, 134).
While Hardt and Negri (2004) recognize that “immaterial labor con-
stitutes a minority of global labor and . . . is concentrated in some of
the dominant regions of the globe,” they argue that it is “hegemonic
in qualitative terms,” and “is today in the same position that industrial

COGNITIVE CAPITALISM 367
labor was in 150 years ago” (109, original emphasis).2 From here, some
write about the cognitariat or cognitive precariat, which replaces the
proletariat as the privileged revolutionary subject (Toscano, 2007, 5;
Moulier-Boutang, 2012, 134–135, 160; Hardt and Negri, 2012, 55).
For theorists of cognitive capitalism, the hegemony of immate-
rial labor and biopolitical production transforms social relations in
novel and politically important ways. Cognitive capitalism expands
exploitation beyond physical labor power to the “second degree”
to “capture a part of the invention-power” or the affects, subjectivi-
ties, knowledge and mental or spiritual capacities of labor (Moulier-
Boutang, 2012, 93–98). From here, theorists of cognitive capitalism
evoke an obscure concept in Marxist thought, “the general intellect”
or the “collective, social intelligence created by accumulated knowl-
edges, techniques and know-how” (Hardt and Negri, 2000, 364).3 As
information and communications technologies become increasingly
central to all aspects of capitalism, the general intellect expands from
being a contributing factor in production to its driving force. This
fundamental change in the organization of production speaks to the
deepening “real subsumption” of labor to capital: “In the biopolitical
context, capital might be said to subsume not just labor but society
as a whole or, really, social life itself, since life is both what is put to
work in biopolitical production and what is produced” (ibid., 142).
Paradoxically, the real subsumption of labor to capital is said to
increase the autonomy of labor. When capitalist control pervades all
social relations, it is everywhere and nowhere: the distinction between
waged and non-waged labor breaks down; the spatial location of
exploitation is no longer the workplace but the full web of relations
that constitutes an individual’s life and circumstances; the temporal
scope of exploitation extends beyond the workday to envelop the
entire life span. Instead of a “productivist” capitalism lording over
2 When Hardt and Negri speak of the hegemony of immaterial labor, they mean that it
imposes its tendency on all forms of labor. In the same way that industrial labor’s hege-
mony transformed agriculture, leading to “agricultural modernization [that] relied heavily
on mechanical technologies, from the Soviet tractor to the California irrigation systems,”
immaterial labor informationalizes agriculture with “biological and biochemical innova-
tions. . . . Seed corporations patent the new plan varieties they create. . . . agriculture is
being informationalized” (Hardt and Negri, 2004, 112–113).
3 See Bowring’s (2004) analysis of Hardt and Negri’s use of “the general intellect” for a detailed
account of the history of the concept and its contested and contradictory interpretations.