Context

Alessandro Longo:

"Adam Arvidsson, grounding his work on the historian Fernand Braudel, analysed this middle tier of the economy in Changemakers. Arvidsson argues that a middle layer of small producers, who compete within markets without dominating them, is returning today as industrious modernity: a growing number of people, many of them graduates pushed out of corporate careers, who make a living through small ventures built on shared knowledge and cheap tools. Their economy is labour intensive and capital poor, and their earnings are usually low. It is also, in Arvidsson’s words, “in the midst of life”. Economic calculation remains embedded in social relations, and the motivations of its actors exceed pure profit: they’re looking for creativity, dignity, and a less boring life."

(https://reincantamentox.substack.com/p/drop-58-mods-of-production?)

Description

"This book argues that, as industrial capitalism enters a period of prolonged crisis, a new paradigm of ‘industrious modernity’ is emerging. Based on small-scale, commons-based and market-oriented entrepreneurship, this industrious modernity is being pioneered by the many outcasts that no longer find a place within a crumbling industrial modernity. This new industriousness draws on the new planetary commons that have been generated by the globalization of industrial capitalism itself. The outsourcing of material production to global supply chains has made the skills necessary to engage in commodity production generic and common, and the globalization of media culture and the internet have generated new knowledge commons. Together these new commons have radically reduced the capital requirements to engage in economic activity, and are providing new, highly efficient tools of productive organization at little cost. This timely analysis of the new forces of change in our societies today will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the impact of digital technologies and the future of capitalism."

Contextual Quote

Adam Arvidsson:

“I suggest that the people excluded from an industrial modernity that is declining in importance and attractiveness are driving to make up a new industrious modernity. Like the industrious revolution that pioneered the emergence of a new market society during the European Middle Ages, industrious modernity is marked by labor intensive and capital poor actors that rely to a large extent on common knowledge, resources or technologies and that are driven by endogenous motivations like creativity, impact or self-realization. Taking this industriousness seriously provides us with a new perspective on the future of digital society, capitalist or not. “

(http://aihr.uva.nl/content/events/events/2018/11/industrious-modernity.html)

Discussion

The Agent Bricoleur

Alessandro Longo:

"The Agentic Bricoleur I’m summoning in this piece moves at this economic height: never able to set the market’s terms, but working in its interstices to capture local value.

Arvidsson, however, is the first to warn that this middle layer is never immune to capture. Capital accumulation, he argues, increasingly depends on the ability to control a multitude of industrious actors who remain formally independent of the corporations that profit from them. Digital capitalism achieves this through “a combination of mass industriousness and top–down despotic control”.

His clearest example lies near Liangzhu. The “Taobao villages” are rural communities that turned into networks of small enterprises by selling through Taobao, the e-commerce platform of Alibaba, and in his account they generated 37 million jobs. Each villager owns their shop, but it is Alibaba that owns the marketplace, sets its rules and collects its data, and even regulates access to microcredit for small businesses depending on scores calculated from their online behaviour. Silvia Lindtner’s Prototype Nation tells a similar story of how the Chinese state captured the maker movement born in Shenzhen in the late 2000s.

In this dialectic between capitalist centralisation and its lines of flight, what matters most for Arvidsson is the creation, or liberation, of new commons.

All the Agentic Bricoleurs we presented are slowly but certainly producing a commons of this kind: code, templates, tutorials, reverse-engineering techniques, in the form of examples that circulate from one bricoleur to the next. But the commons cannot stop at the software produced through these networks. The substrate on which this production runs is itself part of the political question."

(https://reincantamentox.substack.com/p/drop-58-mods-of-production?)

More information

Industrious Revolution

Industrious Future of the Digital Economy

Contents