Management and self-activity: Accounting for the crisis in profit-taking

The crisis in measurement identified by those working in the tradition of Italian autonomia has consequences for the critique of accounting and management. If both capitalist work and the commodity are today communicative and overtly political, a critique that merely points to these characteristics will have no transformative effect. This paper uses the Trinidadian Marxist theorist C.L.R. James's notion of self-activity to suggest that the crisis in measurement is a symptom of the separation of work and value. The institution of forms of self-management and what might be called wars of command begin to replace the governmentality of the wage and the general equivalent in the imposition of capitalist work. In the face of these capital-state developments, critiques in accounting and management might seek out a new object in the self-activity of the future.