The Concept of Subsumption of Labour to Capital: Towards Life Subsumption in Bio-Cognitive Capitalism

Abstract

In the last forty years, the current process of capitalist accumulation and valorization has assumed different names1: the most common of these, post-Fordism, is also the oldest. The term post-Fordism became popular during the 1990s, especially through the French école de la régulation.2 This term, however, is not without its ambiguities and diverse interpretations, as are all terms that are defined in a negative way. With the term post-Fordism we define the period, from the 1975 crisis to the early 1990s crisis, during which the process of accumulation and valorization was no longer based on the centrality of Fordist material production, the vertically integrated, large factory. At the same time, in this period, we do not yet possess an alternative paradigm. Unsurprisingly, in the prefix “post-” we express what is no longer there, without underlining what actually appears in the present. The post-Fordist phase is, in fact, characterized by the conjoined presence of more productive models: from the Japanese Toyotist model of the “just in time” derived from Taylorism3 to the industrial district model of small enterprises4 and the development of productive lines that tend to become international according to a hierarchy.5 Among these models, it is still impossible to identify a hegemonic paradigm. After the first Gulf War, innovations in the fields of transportation, language and communication (ICT) started to gather around a new single paradigm of accumulation and valorization.