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Title: Autonomia Author: Aufheben Date: 2003, 2005, 2006 Language: en Topics: autonomist, autonomous marxism, marxism, libertarian communism Source: http://libcom.org/library/aufheben-autonomia
Whether we have liked it or not, Aufheben has often been pigeon-holed as
an Autonomist Marxist magazine. It is certainly true that Autonomism had
been a defining influence and inspiration for those of us who launched
Aufheben in 1992. It was not so much the lucidity of the prose, the
rigour of the logic or even the empirical robustness of the arguments
contained in the autonomist writings which had been translated into
English over the previous decade or so that impressed us. There were
other more important reasons why we had been inspired by Autonomism.
First of all, autonomist theory could claim to have arisen from the
practice of an actual mass movement. From the accounts we had read, it
was apparent that the waves of class struggle that had swept across the
world during the 1960s and 70s had occurred on a significantly greater
scale and intensity in Italy (the home of Autonomism) than those that
had occurred elsewhere. But more significantly, the struggles in Italy â
with perhaps the brief exception of Paris for a few weeks in 1968 â
could be seen to have gone far further than anywhere else. In Italy, the
struggles of the 70s had given rise to a political and social movement
that could be seen to have been breaking free from the fetters imposed
by the organisational forms, practice and ideas of the old workers
movement and the left. By reflecting this movement in theory it could be
argued that the Italian Autonomism had given one of the most advanced
theoretical expressions of the waves of struggles of the 1960s and
1970s.
Secondly, autonomist theory provided us with a starting point from which
to understand non-traditional forms of social and political struggle in
class terms. In our editorial to the first issue of Aufheben we pointed
out that the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s had given rise to a
revival of many of the theoretical currents of the classical workers
movement which had previously been submerged by decades of Stalinism,
such as Trotskyism, class struggle anarchism and council communism.
These currents certainly put forward radical class analyses. However, we
argued that to a large extent these currents had merely âregurgitated as
ideology the theories they were [re]discoveringâ.1 To this extent they
had failed, as we rather obscurely put it, to âactually develop a theory
adequate to modern conditionsâ.2 Instead, we asserted that it had been
the autonomists, along with the Situationists, that had gone furthest in
recognizing that these âmodern conditionsâ â which had been established
after the defeat of the revolutionary workers movements of the 1920s and
30s â had radically altered the nature of the proletariat.
It was claimed that the emergence of this new proletariat was giving
rise to new needs, new demands and new forms of struggle. These new
needs, demands and struggles could be discerned both in the growth of
rank and file workers militancy, and in the ârefusal of workâ â evident
in individual acts of absenteeism and sabotage and the more general
disaffection with labour amongst the working class. But it could also be
claimed to be evident outside the workplace both with the spread of
counter-culture â with its anti-work, hedonistic and libertarian ethos â
as well as in the new social movements, which had largely grown out of
this counter-culture, such as the womenâs, student, peace and the
ecology movements.
But such claims did not appear as particularly obvious, in Britain at
least. After all, the counter-culture remained largely confined to
life-style politics and various other forms of cultural rebellion. While
counter-culture may claim to have created ânew proletarian needsâ, it
had also facilitated their commodification. At the same time the new
social movements rarely went beyond the limits of an ultimately
reformist radical liberalism. What is more, both the counter-culture and
the disparate new social movements had (for the most part) remained
quite separate to militant workplace struggles of the time â and even at
times radically opposed.
By developing and generalising the theories of workers self-creativity,
class composition and proletarian subjectivity â as early Operaismo
currents of Autonomism in relation to the workplace struggles of the
Fiat car workers had â Toni Negri and other Autonomia theorists provided
a way of understanding the diverse forms of struggles and social
phenomena, which had emerged outside the workplace, as manifestations of
the development of underlying class antagonisms driven by the
proletariat itself. What is more, such notions as the âsocial factoryâ
and the emergence of the âsocial workerâ as the ânew revolutionary
subjectâ, which had been developed by the Italian Autonomia, seemed to
have found their confirmation in the âMovement of â77â, and had appeared
as aspects of a single mass political and social movement that had
overtly challenged the Italian state.
Thirdly â and no less importantly â autonomist theory (particularly that
of Negri and Autonomia) appealed to us because of its unabashed
revolutionary rhetoric. In contrast to the scientific objectivism and
realism of traditional Marxism, the autonomist theorists seemed to place
themselves at the barricades â bolstering the âoptimism of the willâ
with an âoptimism of the intellectâ in order to urge the movement
forward. For them, what seemed most important was not to produce a
âboringâ analysis of the âempiricalâ reality of the current situation,
but to anticipate and proclaim its revolutionary possibilities.
By the early 1990s the waves of struggles that had swept Italy and
elsewhere in decade or so before had receded, but they were very far
from being ancient history. With the fall of Thatcher, the return of
economic crisis with the recession of the early 1990s and the
uncertainties created by the end of the cold war, it was still possible
to believe that the tide had not altogether turned. In such
circumstances Autonomism still remained fresh and relevant. Even if Toni
Negri, along with many others of the Italian Autonomia, had âsold outâ
and joined the ranks of the post-modernists, the Autonomist theory was
still being developed, particularly by the largely American Autonomist
Marxist current mostly ably represented by Harry Clever and those
surrounding the Midnight Notes collective.
However, even then the problems of Autonomist theory were becoming
evident to us. Their revolutionary rhetoric, which so impressed us, was
almost invariably based on heroic extrapolations of abstract social
phenomena and trends that were then asserted as being all but realised.3
But as the struggles of the 1970s receded, and the anticipations of
autonomist theory were disappointed, the gap between such assertions and
actual reality became evermore wider. In the case of Negri the
âdifficultyâ and obscurantism of much his writing â which it must be
admitted we often all too easily mistook for profundity âserved to cover
up this gap. For our more plain speaking American friends, however, this
was not the case.
In Aufheben#3 we presented a review of Midnight Oil, an anthology of
works by American Autonomist collectives Zerowork and Midnight Notes
that had been published shortly after the Gulf War, that we republish in
this volume. What immediately struck us about Midnight Oil was its crass
attempt to explain the complex geo-politics of the Gulf War simply in
terms of an unmediated and barely disguised class confrontation between
âcapitalâ and the âoil proletariatâ. The assertion that the war between
the US and Iraq was really little more than a ruse by capital to defeat
the âoil proletariatâ, along with the argument that âcapitalâ had been
able to arbitrarily raise or lower oil prices in order to impose its
strategy on the working class, was for us far from convincing. Indeed,
it exposed serious problems of Autonomist Marxistâs central notion of
the âtwo strategiesâ; in which the development of capitalism could be
simply explained in terms of an unmediated struggle between capital and
the working class as if they were two already constituted, conscious and
antagonistic subjects.
For us capital was essentially the self-expansion of alienated labour
that necessary took the objectified social form of value. Furthermore,
capital, like the proletariat, was not an already constituted totality
but a process of totalisation that resulted from the conflicting
interests of individual capitals. As such it was not the case, as George
Caffentzis sought to claim in his reply to our review of Midnight Oil,
that the issue was merely a matter of emphasis in that the Midnight
Notes collective sought to emphasise the âsubjectiveâ while Aufheben
sought to bring back the âobjectiveâ. As we made clear in our response
to his reply,4 by attempting to escape the law of value Midnight Notes
had abandoned any hope of understanding the complex mediations between
capital and labour, subject and object and the individual and totality
necessary to develop an adequate understanding of the concrete
development and history of capitalism.
The review of Midnight Notes, and the subsequent engagement with
Caffentzis, laid the basis of our critique and break with Autonomism
that has been developed more recently. However, at the time we did not
feel the need to go much further. After all interest in the Italian
Autonomia, Negri or even American Autonomous Marxism remained largely
confined to a small and diminishing circle of anarchists and
ultra-leftists and seemed to have little more to say. However, the
emergence of the anti-globalisation movement in the late 1990s brought a
dramatic revival in interest in Autonomism in the English speaking world
which was greatly boosted by the publication of Empire by Negri and
Hardt in 2000.
For us it was clear that the attempt by Negri and Hardt to foist what
were barely disguised post-modernist ideas on the anti-globalisation
movement was merely an attempt to refurbish their threadbare appearance
as radical intellectuals by attempting to make a tenuous connection with
a real political movement. Their rejection of class and their uncritical
and complacent celebration of the diversity of the movement only
confirmed for that for all their apparent radicalism they were little
more than radical liberal academics. Nevertheless, Empire and subsequent
the writings of Negri and Hardt, along with Autonomism more generally,
did have a significant resonance in the anti-globalisation movement. It
must be admitted that we were at first perhaps a little tardy and
haphazard in our responding to this.
In Aufheben #11 we took the opportunity of the publication of a new
edition of Harry Cleaverâs Reading Capital Politically and the
publication of Steve Wrightâs Storming Heaven to carry a joint review
comparing these two accounts of Autonomism. This review proved to
something of a missed opportunity in re-evaluating Autonomism. Due to
its haphazard conception, the review ended up with a rather confused
brief.5 Firstly, it was meant to promote that Steve Wrightâs more
historically based account and definition of Autonomism as having
superseded that of Harry Cleaver. Secondly, it was meant to criticise
the political conclusion usually drawn by autonomists in general,
particularly the well worn gripe of ultra-leftists that autonomists were
âsoftâ on left nationalists. Thirdly, the review was to criticise
Cleaver in particular, both for his reading of Marx and his development
of autonomous theory. As a result the review was unfocused. This allowed
Cleaver to make a rather patronising and schoolmasterly reply in which
he annotated a copy of our review with his âcorrectionsâ.
This prompted us to make a more focused and sustained critique of
autonomist theory that recognised and carefully distinguished its
distinct strands that had grown up since the 1970s. Three of the more
substantial articles and reviews of this critique are re-published in
this volume: âThe arcane of productive reproductionâ, âCarry on smilingâ
and âValue struggles or class struggle?â.
We began, perhaps more by accident than by design with a review in
Aufheben #13 (2005) of Leopoldina Fortunatiâs âThe arcane of
reproductionâ, in which we analysed the Autonomist understanding of
value production and its role in capitalism. In particular, we tackled
the Autonomist rejection of the distinction between workers as
âproductiveâ and âunproductiveâ of value, and their view of capitalism
as a âsocial factoryâ in which everybody contributes to the overall
process of value production.
Fortunatiâs book cannot be considered a principal Autonomist work; it
was a short, semi-obscure pamphlet. Yet it offered us the occasion to
consider why it was so crucial for Autonomia to argue that everybody in
the âsocial factoryâ was âproductiveâ. The answer to this question
allowed us to put pieces of the Autonomist puzzle together: with the
âlaw of commandâ replacing the âlaw of valueâ, value becomes the
immediate expression of subjective antagonism. This creates the
Autonomistsâ obsession with value: since production of value is taken as
an immediate measure of antagonism, non-productive workers, students,
housewives, etc. must produce value â or their struggle canât be
accounted by their theory. Thus Autonomiaâs stress on value was not
necessitated by the praxis of struggle, but by a problematic theory:
either the unproductive was declared âproductiveâ (either by modifying
the concept of value or just by butchering logic), or the Autonomist
theory had problems in explaining reality.
Also, the stress on productivity did not impress us very much. Since
most of us in the Aufheben editorial board were on the dole, we didnât
feel that our alleged production of value was essential to explain our
antagonism with capital. Rather, with their obsession with value,
Autonomia appeared to uncritically reproduce the Leninist worship of
productivity, although in an inverted form.6Like the old Leninist, the
young Autonomist assumes that the subject of struggle must be productive
â only, the âfactoryâ includes the street, the classroom and the
bedroom.
Fortunati took this doctrine to unexplored heights, as she laughably
attempted to derive a formula for the value produced by housework. But
in our review article we did not simply tease her embarrassing
pseudo-mathematics â we also explored the role of value in all the
Autonomist theory, and considered Cleaver, Negri and De Angelis, their
common positions as well as their differences.7
We also realised that the claim that all society is a âfactoryâ
undermined the understanding of an important distinction, that between
the spheres of production and circulation in capitalism. If for
Autonomia a subjective experience of âcapitalist commandâ only counts,
capital can be seen as a personalised enemy of each individual
subjectivity. Command, and so antagonism, can be experienced by the
poorest migrant, but also by the stressed NHS manager, by the university
professor, or by the shop keeper. They are all, equally, âcommandedâ by
capital either in the workplace or in the sphere of circulation.
While some Autonomists like Cleaver and De Angelis continued using a
Marxist language although stretching its original meanings, others,
perhaps more coherently, took these positions to their logical
consequences. Since the 80s Negri and other Autonomist theorists were
already moving along a trajectory that would lead them to repudiate the
âworking classâ. Negri enthusiastically adhered to a postmodernist view
of society as made by a âswarmâ of âfreeâ individuals, and which
disposes of the need for a class analysis. With Empire and Multitude,
Negri criticised the category of âworking classâ and adopted the
postmodernist concept of âmultitudeâ, elaborated by Autonomist Paolo
Virno.8
Having missed the boat somewhat in reviewing Empire in 2000 in Aufheben
In this review article we critiqued Negriâs optimistic view that capital
has created its own grave-digger in its new process of production â the
âimmaterial productionâ. We showed that this view was rooted in Negriâs
inability to consider the tragedy of production in capitalism â i.e.
that (either material or immaterial) production in a wage-work relation
unavoidably creates alienation. We also noticed that Negriâs new
production, like his old one, was unable to go beyond Leninism. Negriâs
celebration of immaterial production simply inverted the old Leninist
productivism, while uncritically accept its basic assumptions.
The reviews of Massimo De Angelisâs âThe Beginning of Historyâ and Paolo
Virnoâs âMultitudeâ in Aufheben #16 concluded a long period of
systematic analysis of Autonomia. In âThe beginning of historyâ De
Angelis adopted a recent and popular reading of the class struggle as a
struggle to defend âcommonsâ against capitalâs âenclosureâ; and built up
a grand theory around these concepts. While we praised De Angelisâs
strong critique of Negriâs immaterial labour, we were also critical of
De Angelisâs interest in âcommonsâ and âenclosuresâ. We saw these
concepts as the logical conclusion of a trajectory which has started
from the idea that the class struggle in capitalism could be immediately
see as a confrontation of autonomous subjects, capital versus the class.
While in the 70s such a subjectivist reading made sense, the retreat of
the class struggle left the Autonomist theorists bereft â the autonomous
subject had vanished. In the review we showed how this problem led Negri
to define immaterial production as the locus for an autonomous and
antagonistic subjectivity. Rejecting Negri, De Angelis looked outside
production for an unspoilt autonomous bubble of subjectivity, and found
it in the âcommunitiesâ struggling to defend their âcommonsâ.
While the concept of common and enclosure appear new and exciting, we
thought that it was a form of fetishism. Any conscious and collective
antagonism against capital cannot be defined âoutsideâ it. We showed
that outside and inside, are both necessary aspects for a conscious
development of antagonism and for a struggle of the class of the
dispossessed against capital.
Although Autonomism was a defining influence and inspiration on those us
who launched Aufheben seventeen years ago we would certainly not call
ourselves autonomists now. Times have changed, and it has become
apparent to us that many of the things that had inspired us about the
various strands of Autonomism have also proved to be serious weaknesses.
However, although we have increasingly distanced ourselves from
Autonomia, on our part there is no regret for our ongoing interest in
it, as a theory that stressed the importance of subjectivity,
antagonism, the experience of class struggle and that opened up to
struggles outside the workplace. By looking at it retroactively for this
anthology, we can say that in moving away from Autonomia, Aufheben has
precisely done what it promised in it first Editorial:
âTo recognise and seize the opportunity the changing situation offers we
need to arm ourselves theoretically and practically. The theoretical
side of this requires a preservation and superseding of the
revolutionary theory that has preceded usâ (#1, p.1).
In our dealing with Autonomia we have undergone a process of Aufhebung
that goes beyond given ideas but preserves their moment of truth. The
urge for a theory of subjectivity stimulated in us a process of
understanding, which, unlike Autonomia, seeks to preserve a class view.
We have never abandoned the importance to start from a materialistic
(not moralistic or purely subjectivist) understanding of reality. This
effort has not only led us to distance ourselves from Autonomia, but
also from theories that appeared to be at its polar opposite, for
example the Marxist Hegelianism of Postone and his likes, which collapse
the subjective into the objective.9
It is worth stressing that this Aufhebung was not the result of pure
theoretical thinking. Our practical experience of struggle in our last
15 years was central in this development: it faced us with questions
about the relation between theory and reality, subject and object,
âinsideâ and âoutsideâ, it forced us to adopt a class view. And so it
forced us to continually reassess our fascinations and ideas
critically.10
1.Aufheben #1, (Summer 1992), p1.
2.Aufheben #1, (Summer 1992), p1.
3.Thus for example, the introduction of robotics into the FIAT car
plants, in response to the car workers struggles of the early 1970s, was
taken as evidence that capitalist production in its entirety was all but
fully automated. Hence, Marxâs prediction in the Grundrisse (p. 705)
that labour in the direct form would cease to be well great spring of
wealthâ and that as such labour-time ceases and must cease to be its
measureâ, was now proclaimed as being almost fully realised. The law of
value was therefore dead. Labour was now merely a means of command and
control.
Similarly, the growth in the autonomists movements, and the ânew
proletarian needsâ it expressed, was extrapolated to the point where it
was implicitly assumed that it was about to encompass the entire
proletariat. Of course, the reality is that even in Italy at its height,
the autonomist movement never came close to encompassing the entire
proletariat. The vast majority of the Italian working class during the
1970s had little or no direct involvement in the autonomist movements.
4.The Escape from the âLaw of Valueâ?, Aufheben #5 (1996).
5.Originally the Harry Cleaverâs Reading Capital Politically was to have
been part of a joint review with Moshie Postoneâs Time Labour and Social
Domination. The Postone half of the review failed to materialise, so the
Cleaver half had to be rewritten to be counter posed to Steve Wrightâs
Storming Heaven. Unfortunately the Steve Wright half of the review ended
up not amounting to much either.
6.This worship substantiates Negriâs rather dubious and rather
apologetic conception of âself-valorisationâ.
7.In this anthology, the parts related to Fortunatiâs mathematics have
been abridged.
8.âThe language of retreat: Paolo Virnoâs A Grammar of the multitudeâ,
Aufheben #16 (2008).
9.Review of Moishe Postoneâs Time Labour and Social Domination, Aufheben
10.âTheoretical criticism and practical overflow fifteen years onââ,
Aufheben #15 (2007).
Italyâs âHot Autumnâ of 1969 and âMovement of 1977â were two of the high
points of late 20^(th) century revolutionary struggle. The recent
publication of two books on workerism and autonomia testify to the
continued interest in the theoretical development surrounding these
events. Steve Wrightâs Storming Heaven presents a critical history of
Italian workerism; and Harry Cleaverâs Reading âCapitalâ Politically has
been influential as an account of the âautonomistâ tradition. The review
of these two books gives us the opportunity for a critical reappraisal
of the contributions of workerism. We suggest that Cleaver reproduces
some of autonomiaâs problems as well as its useful theoretical tools.
These problems include the inadequacy of the concept of autonomy for a
class analysis; the absence of a critique of leftism; ambiguity over the
âlaw of valueâ; and an inability or unwillingness to theorize retreat.
We also argue that Cleaverâs âpoliticalâ reading of Capital lacks the
analytical rigour needed to make the connections between the categories
of Capital and the class struggle.
From Operaismo to âAutonomist Marxismâ
Review Article:
Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist
Marxism by Steve Wright (London: Pluto Press, 2002)
Reading âCapitalâ Politically (2^(nd) edn.) by Harry Cleaver (Leeds:
AK/Anti-thesis, 2000)
Harry Cleaverâs reply is located here:
The Italian âHot Autumnâ of 1969 was one of the high points of late
20^(th) century revolutionary struggle, and is associated with operaismo
(âworkerismâ), a Marxian approach that focused on rank-and-file
struggles in contrast to what was seen as the politics and opportunism
of the dominant (Stalinist) left. The wave of social struggles of that
year was echoed, although with important differences, in the tumultuous
âMovement of 1977â. Under the banner of autonomia, the workeristsâ
analysis of class struggle was extended through the actions of groups
outside the workplace. Intense street-fighting, self-reduction or
outright refusal of bills and fares, the explicit raising of radical
demands such as the abolition of wage-labour: all this hinted at a
movement for which what counts as âpoliticalâ had been seriously
questioned by struggles around wider desires and needs. Readers will be
aware of workerism and autonomia today through the works of its most
well-known theorists, such as Negri, through the US journal Midnight
Notes, and perhaps through the aut-op-sy website and discussion list.[1]
For many of those dissatisfied with the versions of Marxism and
anarchism available to them in the UK, the notions of âautonomyâ and
âautonomistâ have positive associations. For example, the recent
âanti-capitalistâ mobilizations of J18 and Seattle both drew on themes
and language associated with autonomia, such as autonomous struggles and
diversity.[2] However, the history and theory surrounding workerism and
autonomia are not always well known. The recent publication of two books
on operaismo and autonomia and their theoretical heritage testify to the
continued interest in this current. Harry Cleaverâs Reading âCapitalâ
Politically was originally published in 1979, and has now been
republished, with a new preface. Cleaverâs Introduction, in particular,
has been a point of reference to many in grasping the significance of
post-war developments, including struggles that donât necessarily
express themselves in traditional forms. Steve Wrightâs Storming heaven
presents a critical history of the Italian movementâs political and
theoretical development in relation to the struggles of the 1950s, â60s
and â70s â a history which, we argue, now supersedes the Cleaver
presentation.
The publication of these two books gives us the opportunity for a
critical reappraisal of the contributions of operaismo and autonomia,
and Cleaverâs attempt to keep them alive. In particular, we will examine
five issues. First, there is the question of whether the concept of
âautonomyâ is adequate as a basis for a class analysis. Second, we argue
that the workerists and hence those who have followed them suffered from
a lack of an adequate critique of leftism and nationalism. Third, there
is the issue of the ambiguity of those influenced by workerism in their
account of the status of the âlaw of valueâ. Fourth, the failure of
workerism and of autonomia to theorize retreat in the class struggle can
be linked to an implicit (or even explicit) satisfaction among some
theorists in this tradition with the current limits of the class
struggle. Finally, there is the question of whether the political
reading of Marxâs Capital offered by Cleaver actually works. We conclude
that the defeat of the movements that sustained the development of
workerism has led both to the abandonment of the project of world
revolution and the ideologization of theory among theorists in this
tradition.
To understand the workerist and the subsequent âautonomist Marxistâ take
on class we need to go back to the emergence of the currentâs key
theoretical concepts.
The origins of operaismo lie in research carried out on workersâ
behaviour in the 1950s. The concern of the research was with workersâ
own needs and perceptions: their definitions of their problems on the
shopfloor, and the nature of their struggles. Wright (p. 63) cites the
following as the core features of the workerist perspective emerging
from this research: the identification of the working class with the
labour subsumed to the immediate process of production; an emphasis on
the wage struggle as a key terrain of political conflict; and the
insistence that the working class was the driving force within
capitalist society.[3] All these features were a reaction against, and
the basis for a developed alternative to, the productivist reformism and
(bourgeois) politics of the traditional (Stalinist) left, i.e. the PCI
(the Italian Communist Party, by far the largest Communist Party in
Western Europe). For the PCI, âpoliticsâ was conducted primarily through
parliament (and the union bureaucracy). By contrast, in stressing the
significance of workersâ own struggles within industries, the workerists
rejected the classical Leninist distinction between âpoliticalâ and
âeconomicâ struggles.
Through relating workerist theory to the context of the struggles
through which it emerged, Storming Heaven examines workerismâs most
well-known category â that of class composition, which Wright (p. 49)
defines as the various behaviours which arise when particular forms of
labour-power are inserted in specific processes of production. operaismo
also introduced the concept of the mass worker, which describes the
subject identified through the research on the FIAT and Olivetti
factories. What characterizes the mass worker is its relatively simple
labour; its place at heart of immediate process of production; and its
lack of the bonds which had tied skilled workers to production (Wright,
p. 107).
As Cleaver points out, the traditional Marxian analysis, and political
practice, understands production and work itself as neutral. The aim is
to take over the means of production, and run them âin the interests of
the workersâ, to the ends of a fairer distribution. However, the
research on FIAT and Olivetti had shown that the division of labour, and
the definition of skills, operated as a process of domination rather
than being a technical matter. The workerists therefore proposed
concepts intended to grasp this non-neutrality of factory organization
and machinery. Particularly important here is the work of Panzieri, who
had argued that, unlike the reformist Stalinists, the working class
recognized the unity of the âtechnicalâ and âdespoticâ moments of the
organization of production.[4] Such concepts pointed to the limitations
of workersâ self-management which could be seen to be merely the
self-management of oneâs own domination.
Tronti developed this line of analysis with the notion of the social
factory. The idea of the factory as locus of power was extended to the
wider society as a whole which was seen to be organized around the same
principles of domination and value (re)production.[5] The implication of
this was that, since social organization in society is not neutral, then
resistance outside the factory could be a valid moment of the class
struggle.
Yet the emphasis on those (factory) workers in the immediate process of
production meant that operaismo was caught in a tension if not a
contradiction. Tronti and others were unable to reconcile their notion
of the social factory with the emphasis they wanted to place on what
happened in large factories: even as they pointed beyond the mass
worker, workerists continued to privilege the role of the factory
proletariat.
Autonomia (the âarea of autonomyâ), a loose network of groupings
including and influenced by radical workerists, emerged in the 1970s,
following the collapse of some of the workerist groups. This new
movement also saw the influx of a lot of younger people; they were often
university educated or working in small manufacturing or the service
sector. They characteristically emphasized the localized and personal
over class-wide struggle, need over duty, and difference over
homogeneity (Wright, p. 197). They thus sought to stretch the concept of
class composition beyond the immediate labour-process in the factories.
They were also less committed to totalizing concepts of class and to
their workplace identities; and they had less time for the PCI and the
unions. Some of these tendencies found theoretical expression in
Bolognaâs seminal âThe Tribe of Molesâ.[6]
The most controversial theoretical development in this period was Toni
Negriâs argument that the mass worker had been replaced by what he
called the socialized worker (operaio sociale). Negriâs thesis was that
capital, while maintaining the firm as the heart of its valorization
process, drives toward a greater socialization of labour, going beyond
the simple extension of the immediate process of production towards a
complete redefinition of the category of productive labour. The extent
of this category, according to Negri, was now ârelative to the level of
the advancement of the process of subsumption of labour to capital...
[W]e can now say that the concept of wage labourer and the concept of
productive labourer tend towards homogeneityâ, with the resulting
constitution of âthe new social figure of a unified proletariatâ.[7] In
short, all moments of the circulation process, and even reproduction,
were seen to be productive of value; the distinction between productive
and non-productive labour was obliterated. While Capital, volume 1,
assumes the reproduction of labour-power in the form of the family and
education, Negriâs theoretical innovation was to focus on this as a
locus of struggle. Negri suggested that, historically, there had been a
shift in emphasis after the end of the 1960s whereby capital adopted a
strategy to avoid exclusive dependence on the traditional working class
and to rely more heavily on the labour-power of social groups who were,
at that time, marginal and less organized.[8] Thus he and his followers
looked to the organized unemployed, the womenâs movement, the practice
of self-reduction and the increasing instances of organized looting that
characterised the Movement of 1977 as valid moments of anti-capitalist
practice; the revolutionary process was understood as a pluralism of
organs of proletarian self-rule (Wright, p. 173). As Wright discusses,
Negriâs account was criticized as ultimately too abstract because it
identified power as the dimension linking all the social groups and
practices referred to as constituting the socialized worker; this
emphasis had the effect of flattening out differences between the
different groups and practices. The redefinition of the category of
productive labour is problematic for the same reason. Moreover, it led
Negri to draw over-optimistic conclusions as to the class composition
resulting from the real subsumption of labour to capital. The
âsocialized workerâ also seemed to change over time. At first, the
socialized worker characteristically referred to precarious workers;
later, as Negriâs perspective wavered with his disconnection from the
movement, it was embodied in the âimmaterial workerâ, as exemplified by
the computer programmer.[9]
The area of autonomy reached its zenith with the Movement of 1977.
However, it wasnât just the well-documented massive state repression, in
the form of violence and imprisonment, that led to the breaking of
autonomia and the collapse of workerism. The development of autonomia
and the emphasis on extra-workplace struggles went hand in hand with the
isolation of the radical workerists from the wider working class. It was
this isolation and hence pessimism in the possibility of a wider
movement that led many ultimately to end up back in the PCI â or to join
the armed groups.
One problem often raised against the communist project is that of the
supposed disappearance of its agent â the working class. Marxâs
conception of revolution is said to be linked with a class structure
that was disappearing. This was a particularly pressing issue at the
time Cleaver originally wrote Reading âCapitalâ Politically, with Gorzâs
Farewell to the Working Class and similar sociological analyses becoming
fashionable. Cleaver offers a response to this by suggesting that the
working class is just changing shape and is in fact everywhere.[10] For
many of us, the most influential aspect of Harry Cleaverâs Reading
âCapitalâ Politically is less his âpoliticalâ account of the relation
between value and struggles (which we discuss below) than his
Introduction, in which a history of movements and ideas is used to
develop an âautonomistâ conceptualization of the working class in
opposition to that of traditional Marxism as well as to those who wanted
to argue that the working class was disappearing. (In fact, while
Cleaverâs book was photocopied and passed around by loads of people,
most people we know only read the Introduction!)
Cleaverâs class analysis can be seen to follow on from Trontiâs concept
of the social factory and Bolognaâs âThe Tribe of Molesâ. Thus, in his
account of developments in Italy, he suggests that the struggles of
non-factory workers â predominantly women in this case â both embodied
and clarified the new class composition (p. 71). âCommunityâ struggles
around the self-reduction of rents and food and utility prices, he
suggests, enabled these women participants to become more conscious of
their own role in value-production. Hence their own autonomous activity
could be grasped as an essential part of the class struggle, rather than
being limited to the auxiliary role of supporting the wage-based
struggles of their menfolk. Cleaver takes the Wages for Housework
campaign as the highest expression of this development.
In the new preface to Reading âCapitalâ Politically, Cleaver (pp. 16â17)
elaborates on this account of the nature of class. Descriptively, an
essential point here is the extension of the category of the working
class to cover not only the waged but also the unwaged. Cleaver claims
that this expanded definition is justified by historical research (e.g.
Linebaughâs The London Hanged[11]) which, it is suggested, shows in the
political culture of artisans and others that the working class predates
the predominance of the wage. Conceptually, the crux of Cleaverâs
argument is in terms of a social groupâs exploitation by, and hence
struggles against, capital. Moreover, the struggles of the social group
as such, rather than their subsumption within a general working class
struggle, are taken to be significant for their self-transformative
potential. For Cleaver, the ability of such social groups to re-create
themselves in struggle points to a problem with traditional (narrow)
definitions of the working class, which said nothing about this
self-re-creation.[12] In line with the tradition of autonomia, Cleaverâs
account recognizes resistance to capital as an inherent feature of the
majority of humanity, rather than â as in sociological and some Marxist
accounts of Western class structure â limited to the industrial
proletariat.
Cleaverâs account of an âautonomistâ tradition of struggles and theories
was important for us, as for many people seeking an adequate account of
class struggle in the 1980s and â90s. But, re-reading Cleaverâs
definition of the working class now, and in particular the social groups
he seeks to include (as social groups) within this definition, leads us
to argue that his account is not sufficient as a class analysis. The
question is whether exploitation is a feature of the social group he
refers to as such, and therefore whether resistance is inherent for the
group as such. Our argument is that there are differences and
distinctions that matter within and between the social categories that
Cleaver identifies as part of the working class. Wright argues that
operaismo and autonomia employ concepts which serve to flatten out and
lose important differences and distinctions in class analysis. Our point
is that Cleaver is heir to this tendency.
To flesh this argument out, let us consider each of the social
categories that Cleaver wants to (re-)define as part of the working
class.
Before doing so, however, we need to stress here the inadequacy of
playing the game of treating classes as categories into which we place
people. For us, class is not a form of stratification but a social
relation; rather than attempting to classify people we need to
understand how class is formed, as a process, within a relationship of
antagonism.[13] It is true that individuals are situated differently
with regards the fundamental social relation of how labour is pumped out
of the direct producers (and that identities and perceptions of
interests linked with these identities can form around these
situations). But our argument with Cleaverâs (re)classifications is
inadequate in its own right, and needs to be read within a broader
argument about class as a relation not (just) a stratum.
Cleaver states (p. 73):
The identification of the leading role of the unwaged in the struggles
of the 1960s in Italy, and the extension of the concept [of working
class political recomposition] to the peasantry, provided a theoretical
framework within which the struggles of American and European students
and housewives, the unemployed, ethnic and racial minorities, and Third
World [sic] peasants could all be grasped as moments of an international
cycle of working class struggle.
The unemployed
Organized unemployed struggles played a significant role in the Italian
experience of the â70s â the Neapolitan movement for example was able to
mobilize thousands of unemployed workers, becoming the regionâs central
reference point for militant activity (Wright, p. 165). In these pages
and in other publications, we have given much attention to such
struggles, which for us are often over benefits, for the very simple
reason that benefits are the other side of the coin of the working
wage[14] (and because we ourselves have relied on benefits so much!).
The unemployed are the lowest stratum of the proletariat â the most
dispossessed â and are likely to have a background in the working class
as such. In Capital, volume 1, Marx demonstrates that the unemployed are
necessary to value-production. Since they are defined as a category by
their relationship to the wage, the unemployed are obviously part of the
working class. But Marx also makes clear how the unemployed function to
instil discipline in those in work and hence put âa curb on their
pretensionsâ.[15] For traditional Marxism, the unemployed as such cannot
play the same role as the industrial working class; they lack both the
leverage and the potential for revolutionary class consciousness of
those in work. In this perspective, unemployed struggles must
necessarily be reduced to the role of tail-ending workersâ strikes; any
unemployed âautonomyâ could too easily take the form of scabbing.[16]
However, the functions of a social stratum for capital do not
necessarily define the limits of the subjectivity associated with it.
Historically, it has often been the least self-organized, or the least
autonomous, among the unemployed who have scabbed. The unemployed are,
among those Cleaver cites, the social group which can least
controversially be defined as part of the working class.
âRaceâ
In the case of âraceâ and ethnicity, what is being referred to here by
Cleaver is the construction by capital of divisions within the working
class in order to create and justify competition amongst workers. To the
extent that âracialâ and ethnic identities are constructed, working
class organization itself is âracializedâ or âethnicizedâ. In other
words, it is because racialization and ethnicity is part of way that
class division is constructed and the working class decomposed that
people might use âracialâ and ethnic identities as a basis for
organizing against capital. Blacks and those other ethnic minorities who
organize and resist autonomously do so because they, as a social
stratum, experience class more harshly, and are more often located at
the proletarian pole of the class relation; and this is because of the
way âblacknessâ and âwhitenessâ have been socially constructed (in the
USA). Those ethnic minorities which do not engage in such autonomous
action tend to be those that are more socially mobile; i.e. in US terms
they become âwhiteâ.
Particularly in the USA,[17] blacks are atypical of ethnic and âracialâ
groups: always at the bottom of the pile, even in relation to other
ethnic minorities. Blacks are the prototype of the working class; and
the black middle class is the exception that proves the rule.
Women
The emergence of women as collective subjects of social change
contributed to a reassessment of operaismoâs class analysis (Wright, p.
133). In particular, womenâs demands for a universal social wage were
seen to point to a solution to the limits of the over-emphasis on the
working wage (Wright, pp. 123, 135). Some in autonomia, such as the
Rosso group, began to talk of the emergence of a ânew female
proletariatâ; for them, along with the unemployed, feminists were seen
as integral components of the new social subject â the âsocialized
workerâ.
Likewise, for Cleaver, women are a key example of a social category
that, through their struggles, should be grasped as part of the working
class â in particular âhousewivesâ demanding wages for their work of
reproducing labour-power.[18] From our perspective, it is clear that it
is working class women â defined here in terms of the class position of
their family â who are more likely to be involved in such struggles.
Better-off women are less likely to need and want the âtransitional
demandâ of a wage, and can achieve âautonomyâ individually (through
pursuing a career) rather than needing to organize collectively.
Moreover, the form through which women have challenged exploitative
gender relations has varied historically. The identification and
questioning of womenâs roles that emerged in the 1960s was part of a
theorization and challenge to the reproduction of capitalist society
more broadly, and hence tended to be expressed as a movement of social
change. But, particularly since the retreat of the wider class struggle,
feminism has instead tended to be an ideology justifying either a
reduction of the political to the personal (with no link to social
transformation) or a vehicle for middle class womenâs careerism. Without
being grounded in â rather than trying to form the basis of â a class
analysis, the emphasis of the struggles of women as women inevitably
risks this dead-end.
Peasants
Cleaverâs inclusion of peasant struggles as part of the working class
differentiates him from statements in classical workerism. Although the
early workerists recognised that peasant struggles could contribute to
working class internationalism, they also suggested that the two should
not be confused, and that the âsalvationâ of peasants ultimately lay
with their counterparts in the more developed parts of the world
(Wright, p. 66).
To state that peasant struggles are in effect working class struggles at
least serves to convey something about the social location of the
peasant in a capitalist world and the consequences of their actions for
the broader class struggle. Despite not depending exclusively upon a
wage, peasantsâ work is often commodified; the way they produce goods is
subject to the demands of the world market. Hence some peasantsâ
attempts in some sense to act like âthe working classâ â i.e.,
collectively to resist capitalâs requirements.
But Cleaverâs redefinition of âpeasantsâ as part of the wider working
class glosses significant differences within this heterogeneous social
category. The term âpeasantâ covers a multitude of economic positions:
there are varying degrees of communal relations, varying degrees of
production for the market (versus for subsistence), varying extents to
which some are moving towards the capitalist class, and varying degrees
to which peasants engage in wage labour. It is for this reason that
âpeasantsâ as such do not act like and therefore cannot simply be lumped
in with a broad working class.
Even if we take it that Cleaver simply means the majority of peasants
who have no chance of becoming capitalist farmers, there is nevertheless
a logic to their struggles which characteristically prevents them from
constituting themselves as the negation of capital. The peasant is
defined by a relationship to the land, and land is characteristically
the issue over which peasants struggle. Given this, the successes of
peasant struggles are also their limits. In the case of the wage, a
quantitative success (more money) preserves the qualitative relationship
of alienation but can point to its supersession: victory is still
unsatisfactory but any setback for the capitalist class may suggest the
vulnerability of the capital relation itself. But a victory in a
struggle over land is an end in itself which thereby impels no higher
level of struggle. There is no essential imperative in land struggles to
abolish land ownership itself. As we argued in a previous issue of
Aufheben, while we might acknowledge the revolutionary subjectivity of
peasant-based struggles such as that of the Chiapas Indians, the peasant
condition entails a conservative stability in social relations. Peasant
resistance tends to reflect external threat rather than internal class
antagonism. Consequently, the form of that resistance may often entail
alliances between small private farmers and those who depend on communal
landholdings â or even between a peasant mass and a leftist-nationalist
and urban-based leadership.[19] Thus, we do not see the resolution of
âthe agrarian (i.e., peasant) problemâ simply in âautonomousâ peasant
struggles, nor, obviously, in the proletarianization of the peasantry;
rather, with Marx[20] (and Camatte),[21] we might look to a revolution
in which peasant communal possibilities are aided by a wider proletarian
uprising at the heart of capitalist power.
Students
For workerist groups such as Potere Operaio (Workersâ Power), student
struggles had to be subordinated to those of factory workers. But
student movements were a part of both the Hot Autumn of 1969 and the
Movement of 1977, and were important for workerismâs attempt to theorize
the proletarianization of intellectual labour.[22] One of the
interesting developments of the Hot Autumn was the appropriation of a
faculty building at the Turin Medical College for the purpose of a
permanent general assembly.[23] The 1977 Movement involved practical
attempts to link workers and students both organizationally and in terms
of demands such as the generalized wage, which was seen as a way of
enabling more working class young people access to university.
Cleaverâs categorization of students as part of the working class might
be seen as somewhat prescient since the gulf between university students
and others in the labour market has narrowed in recent years. As more
students gain degrees, so the value of the degree decreases and the jobs
that graduates go into may often be no more privileged or well-paid than
those of their more basically-educated counterparts. Graduate
unemployment is higher now than ever.
However, these are only tendencies. Students are overwhelmingly middle
class in terms of their family background (income, values and
expectations) and their destinations. In line with the notion of the
social factory, Cleaver deals with such considerations by defining
studentsâ education as work to reproduce the commodity of
labour-power.[24] But their work as students is more than, and different
from, the simple reproduction of just any labour-power. In the first
place, the end product of the work of the university student isnât
necessarily skills at all but rather a qualification, the point of which
is just to provide access to more privileged occupations. What is being
reproduced, therefore, is hierarchy within the workforce â a division of
labour to enhance competition. This process is also ideological to the
extent that its beneficiaries internalize and identify with the
resultant hierarchical division â believing that they deserve their
privilege, and that only a talented and hard-working minority can
achieve their kind of status. Second, the âskillsâ that are reproduced
through university education are not only those of supervision and
management, but also (for those graduating in the humanities and social
sciences) those of classifying, bullshitting and playing a role â all of
which donât make sense outside of alienated social relations.
In focusing on autonomy and its possible consequences for capital,
Cleaverâs redefinition of student struggles as working class therefore
loses some important features of this social category.[25] It is an
overly cynical point of view, perhaps, to state that âstudent radicalsâ
mostly end up pursuing the same well-paid establishment careers as their
parents; but the moment of truth in such a claim lies in the fact that
there is no equivalent expectation for young working class radicals
mostly to end up becoming managers! Unlike students, the young working
class (in working class jobs) donât usually have the same choice.
Whatever happened to the middle class?
The âmiddle classâ is a label largely absent from Reading âCapitalâ
Politically, which is because for Cleaver it largely doesnât exist,
except perhaps sociologically. The âautonomist Marxistâ argument seems
to be that, in conditions of the âsocial factoryâ, the middle classes
are just a sector of the working class.
On the one hand, Cleaverâs analysis again reflects real tendencies. In a
number of domains, middle class work has been de-skilled and
proletarianized. Casualization, once limited only to working class jobs,
has now come to many in the middle classes. Moreover, many salaries,
particularly in the public sector, have increasingly lost value over the
past 20 years or so. At the same time, the salaries of those at the top
end of the middle classes, and particularly in the private sector (e.g.,
accountants, lawyers and the various types of âconsultantâ), have
continued to rise. Hence, as a shared identity assumed by people whose
conditions vary widely â from white-collar workers in insecure jobs with
salaries lower than their blue-collar counterparts, to executives and
senior managers â the âmiddle classâ as a whole is to say the least a
problematic category if not a mystification. In the USA, Cleaverâs home
country, the term is even more problematic due to the (self)description
of large sections of the (white) working class as âmiddle classâ.
On the other hand, to take these disjunctions, anomalies and tendencies
to mean that the category âmiddle classâ can be dispensed with is
one-sided. The analytic subsumption of most of the middle classes within
the working class is one-sided because it loses the explanatory power of
the middle class as a category.
Here again, we would argue, Cleaverâs analysis reflects the limits of
the approach he is heir to. As Wright argues, for all its vital
contributions to our understanding of struggle, one of the problems with
autonomia and operaismo more broadly is the way it misrepresents one
tendency as standing for the totality. In the same way, Cleaver
misrepresents a particular tendency as a characteristic of the class
situation as a whole.
While tendencies to proletarianization might push many of the middle
classes toward throwing in their lot with the working class, there are
other features of the middle class condition as such which operate in
the other direction. What is absent from Cleaverâs class analysis is an
acknowledgement of the ties that bind the middle class individual to his
role or class position and hence to the alienated world that gives rise
to that role and class position.
One feature which distinguishes the middle class from the working class,
and which has consequences for the possibility of revolutionary practice
and subjectivity, is the presence or absence of a career structure.
While wages in working class occupations typically rise to a relatively
early peak and then plateau off, middle class salaries more typically
develop in continual increments within which the middle class individual
can foresee a future of continually rising income and enhanced status.
In effect, the longer she carries on and sticks to the job, the
relatively less interest the middle class individual has in escaping
since the greater comfort the job provides him or her. Because the
working class job typically provides no such prospect, the imperative to
escape remains a lifespan constant.
Second, while pride in oneâs role can arise in many types of occupation,
middle class jobs often engender an identification of a type which is
characteristically absent in the case of working class jobs. Such middle
class identification has consequences for the form taken by resistance â
and for whether resistance takes place at all. The academic, social
worker, lawyer etc. may wish to attack capital but they
characteristically do so by premising their resistance on the continued
existence of their own role in a way unthinkable to the working class
individual. Thus there are radical psychologists, radical philosophers,
radical lawyers and so on,[26] but not radical bricklayers or radical
roadsweepers! The latter are simply radical people who wish to escape
their condition. By contrast, the former wish to engage in the struggle
while at the same time retaining their middle class identities,
including their specialized skills and roles. As such, their
participation presupposes rather than fundamentally challenges the
institutions and social relations that provide the basis of these
identities.[27] It is no coincidence, it seems to us, that the leading
figures of a post-autonomia scene which rejects (or at least neglects)
the situationistsâ critique of roles and academia, and which redefines
all areas of life â including academia â as working class, are
themselves academics.[28]
Some groups, such as the professionals â doctors, lawyers, academics â
who retain control of entry into their profession, should obviously be
defined as middle class. But there are other groups for which the
situation is less clear-cut. For the most part dealing with the thorny
issue of class, and in particular the status of the middle classes, is
inevitable messy. This is because class is a process not a box into
which we can simply categorize people, as in sociology.[29] In
Argentina, for example, we are seeing a process where middle class
identity breaks down; but to understand this it is necessary to
recognise that such an identity exists and has a material basis. As we
see it, the problem with the way Cleaver flattens out everything into
the working class is precisely the absence of class composition and
decomposition as a process. Class (composition) involves a constant
dynamic of proletarianization and âembourgeoismentâ. But if these poles
are not recognized â and if the middle classes are understood as already
working class â class composition appears only as a static given.
As we have seen, Cleaverâs fundamental point is that the unwaged, and
hence the other social categories he refers to, are part of the working
class only insofar as capital has sought to exploit and alienate their
unwaged labour or particular condition, and since these unwaged and
other categories are now fighting back against capital. It is their
struggle not their social category membership as such that makes them
part of the working class. Thus the key for Cleaver is autonomous action
against capital.
As such, Cleaver is again consistent with the tradition that has come
out of workerism, which sought to distinguish itself and go beyond the
poverty of traditional Marxism through focusing on precisely the
independent or autonomous activity of workers in struggle; their
collective activity and organization of resistance was shown to occur
without the mediation of the party or union â or even in opposition to
them. Antagonism itself, in the form of autonomy, was thus the basis of
class analysis.
In the sixties, the workerists subsumed the specificity of different
working class locations and experiences to those of the mass worker. In
the seventies, Negriâs work threatened to dissolve even this partially
concrete understanding of class into a generic proletariat, the
âsocialized workerâ. Bologna in âThe tribe of molesâ identified new
subjective determinations of class: âClasses have tended to lose their
âobjectiveâ characteristics and become defined in terms of political
subjectivityâ.[30] For Bologna, questions of social and cultural
identity, of acceptance or refusal to accept the norms of social
behaviour required by the state, now played a role in the reproduction
of classes. These new determinants were said to be evidenced in âthe
continuous reproduction and invention of systems of counter-culture and
struggle in the sphere of everyday living, which has become ever more
illegalâ.
In fact, Negri and others abandoned the central investigative approach
of the workerists â that of examining the relationship between âmaterial
conditions of exploitationâ and âpolitical behavioursâ. As Wright
discusses, the radical workerists overemphasized the subjective, the
âwill of destructionâ (Potere Operaio, 1972, cited in Wright, p. 138),
as judged, post festum, from an analysis of the struggle rather than
location in the labour process. The abandonment of the material
determinants of class composition leaves unresolved the question of how
the different subjects, or strata of the class, recognize themselves and
each other as proletariat, the universal revolutionary class.
For us, the reason why different groups organize autonomously against
capital is because they are already proletarian (or, at least, being
proletarianized). Antagonism arises because of class. It is implicit in
our arguments above in relation to the different social categories
referred to by Cleaver that the possibility of âautonomyâ may be
necessary but it is not sufficient for a class analysis. âAutonomyâ
requires, and therefore cannot be the basis of, a proper class analysis:
the subjective requires the objective.
perhaps tricky to define. It can be thought of in terms of those
practices which echo some of the language of communism but which in fact
represent the movement of the left-wing of capital. However, for us an
important point is to get away from the picture in which there is a pure
class struggle only interfered with and prevented from generating
communism by the interference of an exterior force (from the
bourgeoisie) of leftism. A question arises of why the class struggle
allows itself to be so diverted. It is important to recognize that,
though some leftists are clearly part of the bourgeoisie or at least of
the state, the power of leftism/trade unionism etc. comes from the fact
that the working class generates leftism from within itself as an
expression of its own current limits.
It was a vital insight of workerism to see workersâ refusal to
participate in union-sponsored token strikes not as the absence of class
conflict but as evidence of their autonomy. In debates today about the
state of the class struggle, the danger is to take such âpassivityâ as
just a refusal of representation when it might in fact be doubled-edged:
at the same time as being an expression of hostility to capital it might
also entail a paralysing fatalism. However, a weakness of workerism was
not an exaggerated sense of the significance of workersâ autonomous
antagonism not only to capital but to the institutional left; rather it
was an unwillingness or inability to reconcile their insights with their
conceptions of organization. Time and again, the same theorists who
provided us with the theoretical tools for a new approach caution us to
be modest in our understandings of workersâ struggles. For example,
Panzieri stressed that sabotage merely expressed workersâ political
defeat (Wright, p. 61); and Classe Operaia (âWorking Classâ) suggested
that spontaneous struggles were not enough (Wright, p. 69). While we
agree that different particular struggles need to be linked up if they
are to go beyond themselves, there is a crucial question of the nature
of this organization and how it may arise. For the most part, the
workerists tended to fetishize formal organizational structure in a way
which reflected their Leninist origins.
In the first place, there was for a long time an unwillingness to cut
the ties to the PCI. Thus, Tronti continued to argue for the necessity
of working within the PCI in order to âsaveâ it from reformism. Tronti
was not typical and ultimately abandoned workerism; but Potere Operaio
too maintained links with the PCI until the events of France 1968, and
even then still saw itself as Leninist. And Negri, despite having
written about the contradiction within autonomia between those who
privileged âthe movementâ and the champions of a âLeninistâ conception
of organization, affirmed his commitment to the necessity of the
Leninist Party even during the events of 1977 (Wright, p. 214).
In part, autonomia emerged as a grouping of militants who felt the need
to criticize Leninist forms of organization and practice (including the
formal party structure), placing emphasis instead on class needs: âTo
articulate such needs, organization was to be rooted directly in
factories and neighbourhoods, in bodies capable both of promoting
struggles managed directly by the class itself, and of restoring to the
latter that âawareness of proletarian power which the traditional
organisations have destroyedââ (Comitati Autonomi Operai, 1976, cited in
Wright p. 153). Ultimately, however, as Bologna argued, autonomia failed
in this regard, reverting to a vanguardism which forgot that
âorganisation is obliged to measure itself day by day against the new
composition of the class; and must find its political programme only in
the behaviour of the class and not in some set of statutes.â[31]
Despite their attempt to escape the âpoliticalâ, the workerists
themselves were in fact caught up in a politicism, in that they both
constantly tried to express the social movementâs needs in terms of
unifying political demands and were forever trying to reinvent the
party. Although they innovated in some ways, with ideas like the armed
party, their conception of organization remained Leninist in its
fetishism of formal organizational structure, and showed little sense of
Marxâs quite different conception of the (historical) party.[32] As
such, a proper critique of the left and of leftism was still not
developed. This problem is reproduced in current versions of the
workerist approach.
Our argument is that, if the concept of autonomy is insufficient for a
class analysis, it is also inadequate â in the sense of being too open
or ambiguous â for a critique of leftism. Whose âautonomous struggleâ is
it? The emphasis on autonomy itself, and the consequent absence of an
adequate critique of the left, has meant that some of the inheritors of
the tradition are uncritical of nationalism.[33]
Cleaver (p. 25) states âThe [Vietnam] antiwar movement joined many of
these diverse struggles, and its linkage with the peasants of Southeast
Asia became complete with the slogan of âVictory to the NLF [National
Liberation Front]â and with the flying of Vietcong flags from occupied
campus buildings.â In relation to this, the idea of âcirculation of
strugglesâ, which refers to how struggle in one area inspires that in
another, certainly described something of the social movements of the
â60s and â70s (though weâd also have to acknowledge the reverse process
whereby defeat of one section after another discouraged the rest). But
such a concept is inadequate in itself if it means, for example, that
the struggles of the Vietnamese peasants are considered without
referring to the nationalist and Stalinist frame in which they took
place, and if it means treating uncritically the way that an
anti-imperialist ideology dominated the minds of the students (i.e. they
tended to see the western proletariat as irretrievably âbought offâ and
themselves as a front for the âThird Worldâ).[34] Harry Cleaverâs
âautonomist Marxistâ treatment of leftists and nationalists is reflected
currently in his uncritical attitude to the Zapatistas.[35] In Cleaverâs
texts there isnât a proper critique of the role of leftism and
nationalism in struggles because such expressions are considered â
equally with the struggles of âhousewivesâ, students, the unemployed and
the industrial proletariat â moments of autonomy to the extent that they
appear to challenge the capitalist strategy of imposing work within
particular national and international frameworks. Any criticism of
nationalism in struggles, as in the case of Zapatistas, is dismissed by
him as ideological or dogmatic.
Given their necessary antipathy to the project of the negation of
capital, the âautonomyâ of leftist and nationalist tendencies must mean
their subsumption and indeed crushing of proletarian autonomy! This
analytic gap, through which the forces inherently opposed to working
class self-organization can emerge as equivalents to that working class
self-organization, appears to be a function of the failure of the
autonomia tendency to make quite the radical break from Leninism which
is sometimes claimed for it, and which Cleaver has inherited (despite
the fact that, unlike Negri, he has never endorsed any party). At its
worst, far from being an alternative to a leftism in which political
representation and nationalism are supported as vehicles of
ârevolutionâ, âautonomist Marxismâ can end up being just another variety
of such uncritical leftism. While they may reject the idea of the formal
party, the âautonomistsâ still seek to formulate political demands for
autonomous struggles in a similar way to the leftists.
A further workerist tension reproduced in Cleaverâs book is that
surrounding the status of the âlaw of valueâ. On the one hand, the very
emphasis on workers at the sharp end of the immediate process of
production appears to speak of a commitment to the centrality of
value-production in the explanation of the dynamic of class struggle. On
the other hand, the seeds of a revisionist approach were sewn as early
as 1970, when Potere Operaio argued that class struggle had broken free
of the bounds of accumulation; the mass worker was said to have
disrupted the functioning of the law of value, forcing capital to rely
more and more on the state (p. 137). Potere Operaio cited the Hot Autumn
as the turning point, but their analysis was prompted by a revolt in the
second half of 1970 among the population of Reggio Calabria against
proposed changes to the cityâs regional status which seemed to speak of
a widespread violent rejection of the institutions. This line of
reasoning was developed by Negri, who was led by his understanding of
the crisis as a product of class antagonism to argue that the law of
value was being superseded by relations of direct political
confrontation between classes,[36] and that money now needed to be
understood in terms of its function as âcommandâ.[37] Subsequent to
this, a distinctive feature of those influenced by the autonomia
tradition is the stress on the class struggle as a struggle not in
relation to value but for control over work: imposing it or resisting
it.
A major thrust of the whole American âautonomistâ scene has been to
argue not to follow Negri too far. But it seems to us that Cleaverâs
attempt to both embrace certain post-autonomia and âhereticalâ ideas
that go âbeyond Marxâ while at the same time claiming fidelity to
Capital gives rise to ambiguities in relation to this question of value.
Thus, on the one hand, Reading âCapitalâ Politically suggests, at least
in a footnote, that control is always tied to value; and in the second
edition of the book, against those (âautonomistsâ) who forget, Cleaver
re-iterates that the labour theory of value is the âindispensible coreâ
of Marxâs theory (p. 11). On the other hand, throughout Reading
âCapitalâ Politically, food and energy (Cleaverâs main examples) appear
essentially as means to struggle for control itself rather than
value-producing sectors; and work appears as a means of control in its
own right:
the ultimate use-value of the work, which is the use-value of
labour-power, is its role as the fundamental means of capitalist social
control. For the capitalist to be able to impose work is to retain
social control. But the use-value of labour-power for capital is also
its ability to produce value and surplus-value. (p. 100)
The use of the word âalsoâ seems indicative of the relative weighting
given to control over value as an explanation for the dynamics of class
struggle.
We accept that, although capital essentially treats all use-values as
arbitrary sources for valorization, capital cannot be unconcerned with
the particularities of use-values. Thus Cleaver is right, for example,
to point back to the moment of primitive accumulation where capital
creates the working class by driving peasants off the land and thus
their source of food. Moreover, with contemporary features like the
Common Agricultural Policy and similar measures in other countries, it
is true that the special use-value of food (and the political
significance of classes engaged in food production) has led to it being
perhaps more subject to strategic planning measures by
capital-in-general in the form of the state and supranational bodies.
Retrospectively, however, it now appears to us that the politicization
of the prices of food and energy â their appearance as manipulated
instruments of struggle between self-conscious capitalist and working
class subjects â was a particular feature of the crisis conditions of
the 1970s (e.g. the energy crisis and the focus on inflation state
intervention in bargaining between the working class and capital).
Cleaver, like others in the post-autonomia tradition, uses these
historically specific moments in the class struggle to make generic
points. In the present period, there has been a âdepoliticizationâ of
these price issues in conditions of low inflation; and the ideological
model has been that âthere is no alternativeâ to the âglobalizedâ
market.
As we have argued in these pages before, there is a problem with the
abandonment of the law of value by theorists identifying with
autonomia.[38] On our reading of Marx, and our understanding of capital,
capital as a whole comes to constitute itself as such out of disparate
and indeed conflicting elements. The conceptualization of capital as a
subject in conflict with the working class subject, each with their
distinctive strategies (âimposition of workâ versus ârefusal of workâ),
which Cleaver ultimately shares with Negri,[39] if taken as more than a
shorthand or metaphor, suggests an already-unified capital. Capital as a
subject can have a strategy only to the extent that there is a
(price-fixing) conspiracy among the different capitals or that one
particular capital (who? US capital? The World Bank?) agrees to act as
capital-in-general in the same way that a national government acts for
the national capitalist interest. Capital as a totality of course has
its interests; but these â all founded on the need to exploit the
working class as hard as possible â arise from and operate precisely
through its conflicting elements: the competition between individual
capitals. Capital may attain more consciousness at times of heightened
class conflict, and this consciousness may become institutionalized. But
capital is not essentially a conscious subject.
Tronti famously argued that each successful capitalist attack upon
labour only displaces class antagonism to a higher, more socialized
level (Wright, p. 37). Following this, Negri, Cleaver and others in and
influenced by the autonomia current stress the role of working class
struggle in driving capital forward. Working class activity is seen not
(just) as a response to the initiatives of capital but as the very motor
of capitalist development â the prime mover.[40] In this account,
capitalist crisis â the shutting down of industries, mass unemployment
and austerity â means that working class struggle simply changes form
rather than retreats. Class struggle is argued to be ubiquitous and
manifold in form.
This perspective therefore offers a valuable corrective to traditional
Marxismâs objectivist account of the workings of capital. Traditional
Marxismâs frozen and fetishized conceptions of class struggle could lead
one to wonder where resistance has gone and whether it will ever
reappear. By contrast, âautonomist Marxismâ finds it everywhere.
However, we would suggest that workerism in general and Cleaver in
particular perhaps bend the stick too far the other way. In arguing that
class struggle is âeverywhereâ and âalwaysâ, there is the explanatory
problem of the evidence of historical retreats in class struggle, as
well as the âpoliticalâ problem of responding to this retreat in
practice. These problems are linked.
In positing the âunity of abstract labourâ as the basis for the
recomposition of the class, Negri almost welcomed the âdisappearanceâ of
the mass worker and believed the defining moment of confrontation was
approaching: âAt the very moment when âthe old contradictionâ seemed to
have subsided, and living labour subsumed to capital, the entire force
of insubordination coagulates in that final front which is the
antagonistic and general permanence of social labourâ.[41] At a time
which could arguably be characterized as the beginning of capitalâs
counter-offensive of restructuring which resulted in a decomposition of
the class, he gave an account of a massive process of recomposition â a
qualitative leap in class unity. Wright (p. 167) concludes that this
account did not match up to Italian experience of the time. There
appears little evidence of the concrete unification between sectors upon
which Negriâs whole argument rested; the fierce industrial struggles in
the small factories of the North were cut off from other sectors of the
class. Wright suggests that, in 1975â6, it was proletarian youth circles
rather than the factory struggles that were making links across the
wider working class. The workers of the large factories were in a state
of âproductive truceâ at best, rampant defeat at worst â and subordinate
to the official labour movement, which had regained control in the
factories after the explosion of autonomous struggles in 1969 and the
years after. The unionsâ commitment to tailor labourâs demands to the
requirements of accumulation was mirrored in the political sphere by the
PCIâs âhistoric compromiseâ with the ruling Christian Democrats. The
historic left, PCI and CGIL were committed to the âmanagementâ of the
nationâs economic difficulties.
Bologna (1976, cited in Wright, pp. 170â1) accused Negri and autonomia
of âwashing their hands of the mass workerâs recent difficultiesâ. He
argued that there had been a âreassertion of reformist hegemony over the
factories, one that is brutal and relentless in its efforts to dismember
the class leftâ. Negri had failed to come to terms with the disarray and
defeat of the mass worker and preferred instead to âply the traditional
trade of the theorist in possession of some grand synthesisâ. The
Comitati Autonomi Operai, the Roman wing of autonomia, also rejected
Negriâs optimistic vision, and criticized his lack of an empirical basis
for his abstractions, something which had been so important to the
earlier workerists.[42]
In the intervening quarter of a century, little has happened, it seems
to us, to bear out Negriâs optimistic prognosis. The mass worker has
been decomposed through the flexibilization of labour, territorial
disarticulation of production, capital mobility in the world market, the
rationalization of production, decentralization; but the âsocialized
workerïżœïżœïżœ that has supposedly emerged from the ashes of the mass worker
has not been visible as a new universal proletariat capable of
fundamentally challenging the capital relation. Decomposition just is
decomposition sometimes, rather than necessarily being itself a
recomposition.
The âautonomist Marxismâ of Cleaver and those close to his perspective
argues that we need to acknowledge the validity of diverse and âhiddenâ
struggles (absenteeism, theft at work, various forms of work to rule
etc.) which are alive and well, despite the decline of the older forms
of overt collective resistance.[43] There is, of course, always
resistance to the specific way in which surplus-labour is pumped out of
the direct producers. However, the fact that the working class currently
tends to resist in a mostly fragmented and individualized form â the
fact that resistance is so fragmented or hidden â reflects the historic
weakness of the class as a whole. The significance of this is that it is
not clear how such hidden and individualized forms of resistance can in
themselves necessarily take us to the point of no return. Unless they
become overtly collective, they operate merely as a form of antagonism
that capital can cope with if not recuperate. This is the moment of
truth in Tronti and Panzieriâs warnings about the limits of autonomous
struggle.
Linked to this issue of retreat is the question of whether the working
class will be driving capital forward forever. Do the âautonomistsâ
argue too successfully that class struggle is the motor? If working
class struggle is always harnessed by capital, how does it escape the
harness?
The argument that class struggle is alive and well in manifold forms is
empowering; but it risks ending up as a satisfaction with the current
limits of the class struggle. The focus on the validity and importance
of the (plurality of) autonomous struggles themselves can mean the
abandonment of revolution as a totality. And as the possibility and
necessity of total revolution fades, so reformist campaigns, premised
upon the continued existence of the capital relation, become the focus.
A symptom of this worst side of post-autonomia is illustrated in demands
for a guaranteed income, which have allowed those influenced by
autonomia to link up with other reformists in campaigns which have
dovetailed with capitalâs current needs for welfare restructuring.[44]
Although not all the major figures of autonomia or the âautonomist
Marxistâ scene would endorse this ultimately conservative view of the
adequacy of fragmentation, it is not inconsistent with an understanding
of class struggle based around the concept of autonomy.
self-reduction of prices in one easy step
In his attempt to render a political reading of Marxâs critique of
political economy, Harry Cleaver is again following in the workerist
tradition: Negriâs âMarx on cycle and crisisâ, which was written in
1968, is an earlier example of the attempt to connect Marxâs categories
with notions of strategy and struggle. However, a sub-text of Cleaverâs
book is his defence of the importance of Capital against the arguments
made by (the later) Negri that, for the revolutionary project of our
time, Capital is superseded by the Grundrisse. In Marx beyond Marx,[45]
Negri argues that Capital has served to reduce critique to economic
theory, that the objectification of the categories in Capital functions
to block action by revolutionary subjectivity and to subject the
subversive capacity of the proletariat to the reorganizing and
repressive intelligence of capitalist power. The point of Marxâs
critique as whole is not âintellectualâ but revolutionary; hence the
Grundrisse, which is traversed throughout by an absolutely
insurmountable antagonism, is, according to Negri, the key text and can
even serve as a critique of the limits of Capital.
Cleaverâs Reading âCapitalâ Politically argues that the right way to
read Capital and its fundamental categories such as value is
âstrategicallyâ, from the perspective of the working class. Cleaver
therefore contends that any âblockageâ is due only to the inadequate
ways in which Capital has been read, and that the solution is to read it
politically.
We can agree with Cleaver that, despite the power of the Grundrisse and
its crucial indications that Marxâs theoretical project was wider than
the material which appears in Capital,[46] Capital is nevertheless the
better presentation of the critique of political economy (as Marx
himself clearly thought). But this is not the same as arguing that a
âpoliticalâ reading of Capital is useful or even tenable. Our argument
is that Cleaverâs âpoliticalâ reading ultimately fails.
5.1 Aims of Reading âCapitalâ Politically
The focus of Reading âCapitalâ Politically is the first three parts of
Chapter 1 of Capital, volume 1. Here, Marx shows how the commodity has
two aspects â use-value (a product of the concrete useful labour that
creates that particular commodity) and value (a representation of that
labour considered as general abstract labour); he shows how value must
take different forms; and from this he derives the logical necessity of
money as the universal equivalent form of value. Along with the chapter
on money, these are undeniably some of the most difficult parts of
Capital. While a lot of the rest of the book is fairly straightforward,
this beginning is often enough to make the reader turn away in
frustration. Thus it is worth acknowledging the merit of Cleaverâs
attempt at an accessible commentary.
The central thesis of Cleaverâs reading is that the category of value,
in its various forms (and aspects), needs to be related to class
struggles around human needs â to the subjective â rather than (simply)
to the objective workings of capital as a âsystemâ. In Cleaverâs words,
to read Capital politically is âto show how each category and
relationship relates to and clarifies the nature of the class struggle
and to show what that means for the political strategy of the working
classâ (p. 76). Cleaverâs attempt to render the subjective in Marxâs
account of value operates by short-circuiting most of Marxâs mediations,
leaping directly from the commodity-form to particular struggles. He
relates the material in Capital, Chapter 1, partly to later material in
the same volume over the struggle for the working day and primitive
accumulation, but most of all to more contemporary struggles â around
energy and food prices â in a way clearly distinct from Marxâs own
method.[47] He justifies this by saying âto the extent then that I bring
to bear on the interpretation of certain passages material from other
parts of Capital, or from other works, I do so with the aim of grasping
Chapter One within the larger analysis rather than reconstructing the
evolution of what Marx wrote and thoughtâ (p. 94, second edition).
5.2 Aims of Capital
A question Cleaver does not address is why is was that Marx said very
little about struggles in Volume 1, Chapter 1. If it is so necessary to
read Capital politically in the way that Cleaver does, then why didnât
Marx save us the trouble and simply write Capital politically? In
promoting Capital as a weapon for our struggles, Cleaver wants to stress
the moments of de-reification and de-fetishization in relation to Marxâs
categories. Indeed he claims that this project of a political reading
âis exactly the project called for in Marxâs discussion of fetishismâ
(p. 76). Thus for Cleaver there is no need for a âseparate analysis of
Section 4 of Chapter One which deals with fetishism, simply because ...
this whole essay involves going behind the appearances of the
commodity-form to get at the social relationsâ (p. 80). Cleaver is right
that the section on fetishism is crucial for âgetting at the social
relationsâ; but why did Marx insist on the type of presentation he does
despite the possible difficulty it entailed for his intended audience,
the working class? Moreover is Cleaverâs kind of political reading
really the way to understand what Marx deals with as commodity
fetishism?
An interesting comparison is Isaak Rubinâs Essays on Marxâs Theory of
Value,[48] which Cleaver mentions only briefly and dismissively, in a
footnote.[49] While Cleaver does not comment directly on the section in
Capital, Chapter 1, on fetishism, the whole first part of Rubinâs book
is on this subject. Rubinâs book was seminal precisely for
systematically grasping the inseparability of commodity fetishism and
Marxâs theory of value: âThe theory of fetishism is, per se, the basis
of Marxâs entire economic system, and in particular of his theory of
valueâ (Rubin, 1973, p. 5). Thus the value categories are expressions of
a topsy-turvy world in which peopleâs products dominate the producers,
where people are related through things, and where objects behave as
subjects and subjects as objects. Since Rubinâs book became available in
the English-speaking world through Fredy Perlmanâs translation, a whole
school of Marxism has developed, insisting like Rubin does that Marxâs
is not a neo-Ricardian embodied labour theory of value but an abstract
social labour theory of value;[50] such an analysis brings fetishism to
the fore and emphasises Marxâs work as a critique of political economy
rather than Marxist political economy.
Thus Rubin can be seen to make similar points to Cleaver but to do so by
explaining and illustrating value-categories in terms of such basic
mediations as social relations, labour and commodity fetishism, rather
than through the directly political reading favoured by Cleaver.
Moreover, the case of Rubin questions the schema Cleaver develops in his
Introduction, summarized in the following table:
Ideological Readings Strategic readings
Political economy readings From capitalâs perspective From capitalâs
perspective
Philosophical readings From capitalâs perspective Empty set
Political readings Empty set From a working class perspective
Approaches to the reading of Marx (Cleaver, p. 31)
Cleaver (p. 30) defines the bottom right box of this table as:
that strategic reading of Marx which is done from the point of view of
the working class. It is a reading that self-consciously and
unilaterally structures its approach to determine the meaning and
relevance of every concept to the immediate development of working-class
struggle. It is a reading which eschews all detached interpretation and
abstract theorising in favour of grasping concepts only within that
concrete totality of struggle whose determinations they designate. This
I would argue is the only kind of reading of Marx which can properly be
said to be from a working-class perspective because it is the only one
which speaks directly to the classâs needs for clarifying the scope and
structure of its own power and strategy.
Though the Stalinist state recognized the political significance of
Rubinâs âabstract reasoningâ,[51] Rubinâs book does not meet Cleaverâs
âpoliticalâ criteria. But neither does Rubinâs book seem to be obviously
a political economic or a philosophical reading. Weâd contend that one
of the reasons that Rubinâs is a seminal work is precisely because it
transcends such a distinction. Prompted by the revolutionary wave of the
1910s and 1920s, Rubin, like writers of the same period such as LukĂÂĄcs
and Korsch, was able to go beyond Second International Marxism and to
understand Capital as a critique of political economy â but without,
like the Frankfurt School, retreating into mere philosophy.
The fourth part of Capital, Chapter 1, âThe Fetishism of the Commodity
and its Secretâ, is crucial because in it Marx shows how the forms of
value are an expression of reification, and hence fetishized in our
experience. Rubinâs approach is key for drawing oneâs attention to the
inseparability of fetishism and the theory of value. By trying to
short-circuit the process, by immediately moving to the de-fetishising
aspect of class struggle, Cleaver jumps levels of abstraction. Our
argument would be that, analytically, it is necessary to explain
reification before examining its reversal. In other words, in order to
relate value to the kind of struggles Cleaver refers to, a whole series
of mediations must be developed,[52] not least the categories of
absolute and relative surplus-value, constant and variable capital, and
the relation between price and value (which Marx introduces later in
Volume 1), circulation (which Marx introduces in Volume 2) and the
distributional forms of surplus value â profit, rent and wages (which
donât come until Volume 3). Volume 1 concerns capital-in-general,
presented as particular examples of capitalist enterprises as an
analytic device to derive the later, more developed, categories.
For us it seems essential to grasp what Marx was trying to do in
Capital. If Marxâs overall project was âcapitalism and its overthrowâ it
was nevertheless necessary for him first to show what the capitalist
mode of production was, how it was possible; this led him
methodologically to make a provisional closure of class subjectivity in
order to grasp the logic of capital as an objective and positive system
of economic âlawsâ which is apparently independent of human will and
purpose.[53] Objectivist Marxism takes this provisional closure as
complete. What Cleaver is doing could be seen to be an attempt at
opening up the provisional closure by bringing in the subjectivity of
class struggle; but because he does not properly explain the
marginalization of the class struggle in the pages of Capital, what he
does comes across as bald assertion at variance with the flow of Marxâs
argument.
In short, in his understandable quest for the concrete and immediate,
Cleaver abandons the analytic rigour needed to make the connections
between Capital and the class struggle. While we may agree that Capital
needs to be understood as a weapon in the class war, it does not need to
be the crudely instrumental reading offered by Cleaver.
6. Whither autonomia?
6.1 Negri and the retreat from the universal revolutionary subject
The continuing influence of operaismo and autonomia is evident today in
a number of recent movements, most notably perhaps Ya Basta! in Italy,
who draw upon some of the ideas of Negri. Negri himself has lately
caused interest in some circles. Empire, the book he has co-authored
with Michael Hardt,[54] has struck a chord with the concerns of some
âanti-capitalistâ/âglobalizationâ activists, academics and even a New
Labour policy adviser.[55] While Negriâs ideas were sometimes
controversial when he was part of the area of autonomy, after losing his
connections to the movement he ceased to produce worthwhile stuff, and
instead slipped into an academic quagmire whose reformist political
implications are all too clear.[56] The disconnection of ideas from the
movement, following the repression which culminated in the mass arrests
of 1979, has also meant that there has been to some extent a battle for
the heritage of the movement. Through journals like Zerowork and
Midnight Notes, Anglo-American theorists have kept âautonomist Marxismâ
going. Through emphasizing the continuing importance of value (albeit
ambiguously, as we have seen), these and Harry Cleaver among others have
distinguished themselves from the late Negri with his embrace of both
post-structuralism and the ideas of the (pre-Hegelian) philosopher
Spinoza.
But â and despite his innumerable self-contradictions â a continuity can
be traced from the early Negri, through autonomia to the late Negri. For
example, his recent arguments, along with other reformists, for a
guaranteed income can be traced back to the demand for a âpolitical
wageâ made by the radical Negri of Potere Operaio. It would seem to be
significant that, despite his earlier valuable insights, his relatively
recent theoretical work can be seen as at one with the arguments of
Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari justifying fragmented forms of resistance
and denying the need to confront the state.
Empire contains any number of arguments we see as problematic if not
counter-revolutionary and recuperative, including the abandonment of
value, the centrality of immaterial labour, the call for âreal
democracyâ and political proposals for âglobal citizenshipâ. What
stirred peopleâs interest, it seemed, was the thesis of âempireâ itself
â that of the emergence of a single unified global political-economic
capitalist entity â which seemed to offer an alternative to
unsatisfactory orthodox theories of imperialism. With the US war on
Afghanistan, however, the notion of imperialism has returned to the
forefront of political discourse.[57] What we are left with, then, as
Negriâs take on autonomia, is a celebration of fragmentation. The
abandonment of the concept of the proletariat (now replaced by âthe
multitudeâ), the universal revolutionary subject, is the abandonment of
world revolution. Negriâs work might therefore be said to express the
profound sense of defeat and disillusion that followed the failure of
the Movement of 1977.
6.2 History as ideology
Two different ways of writing history are evident in the books by Steve
Wright and Harry Cleaver. Wrightâs is a history of the politics of a
movement. But it is also critical, from a communist perspective. We
therefore thoroughly recommend it as an invaluable resource in helping
our understanding of the development, contributions and tensions of
workerism and autonomia in their historical context of Italy in the
1950s, â60s and â70s.
By contrast, for us, Cleaverâs account of the tradition of autonomia is
far more tendentious. Rather than focusing, as Wright does, on what is
clearly a single historical episode, Cleaver selects a number of
different movements and theorists, going back as far as C.L.R. James and
Raya Dunayevskaya, which he then designates as representatives of what
he calls âautonomist Marxismâ. Again, here Cleaver is consistent with
the tradition of workerist historiography which, looking back, found the
mass worker and hence a commonality with its own perspective in earlier
struggles, such as the Wobblies and the working class movement in
Germany in the 1920s.
In one sense it might seem thereâs nothing wrong with Cleaverâs attempt
simply to identify what he sees as the revolutionary use of Marx as a
particular tradition. And if we look at the groups and theorists that he
refers to (both in Reading âCapitalâ Politically and also in his
university course on âautonomist Marxismâ[58]) a very great deal of it
corresponds with our own assessment of the most valuable contributions.
However, there are two, related, problems. First, in grouping the
various movements and theorists together in the way that he does there
is an element of the same homogenizing or flattening out â a neglect of
differences â that we saw in Cleaverâs âautonomistâ class analysis, as
well as in the workerist concepts of mass worker and so on.
Second, it is revealing to consider which tendencies are excluded from
Cleaverâs canon, or at least addressed in only a cursory way. How might
these neglected tendencies be in tension with the rest of the material?
What contradictions might the formulation âautonomist Marxismâ suppress?
For us, as an account of developments in theory over the past century,
the most notable absences from Reading âCapitalâ Politically are the
Situationist International[59] and the Italian left and those influenced
by it, such as Barrot/Dauvé and Camatte. We can go so far as to say that
the attempt to specify such a thing as âautonomist Marxismâ is
ideological, with its emphasis on âsimilarâ ideas and its concealments
(the glossing of the limits of the âgoodâ theorists and movements, the
silence on those that donât fit). This is not unusual or strange. The
capitalist counter-offensive which culminated in the defeat of the
Movement of 1977 saw a disillusionment with the possibility of mass
revolutionary change that was expressed in the destinations of those
coming out of the area of autonomy: most went into the PCI or the armed
groups. Likewise, the turning of the general insights of the operaismo
and autonomia theorists into âautonomist Marxismâ can be seen as a
reflection of the retreat of the movement giving rise to the ideas.
Ideology is the freezing of theory; theory freezes when the practice on
which it is based is halted. âAutonomismâ seems to be non-dogmatic and
dynamic because of the emphasis on particular needs and diverse
struggles etc.; but the very principle of openness to new struggles has
itself become ideological as the wave of struggles has ebbed.
Thus the glossing of the limitations of those currents that Cleaver
gives approval to, and even cites as exemplifying autonomous struggle
(e.g. Wages for Housework),[60] goes hand in hand with the exclusion of
those that would contribute to the critique of those same currents. Any
radical current needs to critique itself in order transcend itself, as
in the proletariatâs self-liberation through self-abolition. Cleaverâs
identification of a thing with the label âautonomist Marxismâ is
ideological in that it is partial and attempts to close off rather than
open up a pathway to its own self-critique.
6.3 Towards a critical appraisal and appropriation of the contributions
of the workerists
While Cleaverâs book, and particularly his Introduction, has been
important to many of us in the past, we would suggest now that Wrightâs
book is more helpful than Reading âCapitalâ Politically in allowing us
to appropriate the best contributions of the workerist tradition. Wright
ends his book with the sentence âHaving helped to force the lock ...
obstructing the understanding of working-class behaviour in and against
capital, only to disintegrate in the process, the workerist tradition
has bequeathed to others the task of making sense of those treasures
which lie within.â In many ways Italian workerist analyses of class
struggle promised much, but delivered little. The whole tendency,
increasingly divided into separate camps, collapsed at the end of the
â70s. Whereas one camp favoured libertarian themes of autonomy, personal
development and the subjective determinations of class identity; the
other instead turned to debates over the âarmed partyâ and the
feasibility of civil war. Both camps abandoned the traditional workerist
focus on the relationship between technical and political class
composition â that is, between the classâs material structure in the
labour process and its behaviour as a subject autonomous from dictates
of both the labour movement and capital.
But what can we take from the whole experience? The âcomplex dialectic
of decomposition and recompositionâ of class forces, first elaborated by
Tronti and others, was a significant departure from traditional leftist
understanding of class struggle; the right questions were being asked:
what material determinants are there in understanding the behaviour of
the working class as (revolutionary) subject? But if the right questions
were being asked, the answers the workerists provided were not always
satisfactory; and tendency was often confused with totality. The early
workerists were rightly criticized for their unwillingness to theorise
moments of class struggle outside the large factories, and perhaps also
for seeing the wage as the privileged locus of struggle; however their
autonomia successors could be equally criticized for their problematic
abandonment of the âmass workerâ.
Wrightâs book focuses on the concept of class composition, workerismâs
most distinctive contribution. Class composition was important as an
attempt to express how the working class is an active subject, and thus
takes us beyond the poverty of objectivist Marxism which portrayed the
working class as passive and dependent. The concept grew from the
experience of autonomous struggle when the working class was on the
offensive, but is has come to seem less adequate when relied upon in
periods of crisis and retreat. To what extent was there a political
recomposition of the class with the decline of the mass worker? Was the
âsocialized workerâ made concrete by the self-reduction struggles of the
1970s and the student and unemployed movements of 1977? Certainly a
multiplicity of struggles erupted on the social level. But did the
struggles merge, did the new subjectivities forged in struggle coalesce?
Class recomposition would entail the formation of an increasingly
self-conscious proletarian movement. The dispersal of workers (operaio
disseminato), and the displacement of struggle to the wider social
terrain, because of the fluidity of situations and multiplicity of
moments of struggle, make it harder for a self-conscious movement to
emerge. But some in the area of autonomy point to the very same factors
as having the potential for rapid transmission of struggles to all
sectors of the class. But, while the refusal of work and the liberation
of needs manifested themselves in many different ways in the struggles
of the â70s (proletarian youth circles, riots, âfree shoppingâ or
reappropriations, squatting, organized âself-reductionâ of rent, utility
bills and transport fares etc.), they did not develop into the political
movement around the wage (redefined as a guaranteed social income) that
Negri theorized â let alone into any coherent class movement capable of
overturning capitalist social relations.
If this review article has devoted so much space to the problems of
workerism and autonomia it is only because of the historic importance of
this current. Today, ideas such as the non-neutrality of machinery and
factory organization, the focus on immediate struggles and needs (rather
than a separate âpoliticsâ), and the anti-capitalist nature of struggles
outside (as well as within) the workplace are characteristic of many
radical circles, not all of which would call themselves Marxist. The
workerists were among the first to theorize these issues. The extent to
which their arguments have been echoed by radicals down the years (as
well as co-opted and distorted by recuperators) is an index of their
articulation of the negation of the capital relation.
One of the main contentions at the core of Autonomist Marxism is that
all human activity in either the sphere of production or in circulation
and reproduction is potentially productive, that is, can contribute to
the valorisation of capital.</strong> The work of reproduction, which is
the work done on ourselves and on our families to reproduce ourselves,
reproduces our labour power, i.e. our capacity to work for capital â in
this sense, Autonomist Marxist theorists argue that the work of
reproduction is production for capital. Leopoldina Fortunatiâs The
Arcane of Reproduction, published in Italy in 1981 and in the US in
1995,[61] seems to be the most sophisticated contribution to this theme
so far. While reproductive labour may cover anything from playing video
games, attending courses, going to a gym, watching television, looking
for a job, etc., in her pamphlet Fortunati deals with culturally
specific female activities outside the sphere of production: housework
and prostitution.[62]
Fortunati comes from a tradition of Marxist feminism connected to the
Autonomist area. One can trace a study of the connection between female
work and capital to 70sâ Italy for example in Mariarosa Dalla Costa. In
her seminal work Women and the Subversion of the Community, written in
1971, Dalla Costa âaffirms... [that] the family under capitalism is... a
centre essentially of social productionâ; and that housework is not just
private work done for a husband and children.[63] Housework is then an
important social activity on which capitalist production thrives.
However, while Dalla Costa says that activities done within reproduction
are âif not immediately, then ultimately profitable to the expansion...
of the rule of capitalâ, Fortunati attempts the theoretical leap of
demonstrating that housework does produce value within a âMarxianâ
approach and tries to express this value-creation mathematically.[64]
This is brave indeed, as Marxâs analysis of capital would appear to show
that this is not the case â thus in order to achieve her aim Fortunati
has to revise Marxâs categories â or, in her words, âcombine them with
feminist criticismâ (p. 10) so that they can becomes suitable tools for
this aim.
Fortunatiâs claim that reproduction produces value is a challenge to the
Marxist âorthodoxyâ that agrees that the work of reproduction is a
precondition of a future creation of value and serves to keep the cost
of labour power low, but does not actually create value itself. In this
âorthodoxâ view the work of reproduction is just concrete labour, not
abstract labour. Since it is only concrete and not abstract labour, this
labour does not add any fresh value but preserves the values of the
means of subsistence consumed by the family as the value of labour
power. This value manifests itself as the exchange value of labour
power.
Fortunatiâs main arguments against this view are centered on her concept
of labour power, which is the specific product of the womanâs work as a
housewife or prostitute: in fact, Fortunati claims that labour power is,
without other specifications, âa commodity like all othersâ, which is
âcontained withinâ the person of the husband. It is true that when we
hire ourselves to the capitalist, our submission takes the form of a
sale, the sale of labour power. But, as we will argue in detail later,
it is also true that producing and selling labour power is not like
producing and selling other commodities, and this difference embodies
the essence of our condition as proletariat and dispossessed. With her
assumption of labour power as âa commodity like all othersâ Fortunati
eliminates this important difference on the one hand, and on the other
hand she is able to conclude straight away that labour power must
contain the value corresponding to the abstract labour time expended in
its production like âall other commoditiesâ do.[65]
If according to this deduction housework produces value, how can
Fortunati explain the fact that no value appears as a result of
housework?[66] This is because, she says, in capitalism the individual
has been âdisvested of all valueâ, devalued, i.e. denied the property of
being a carrier of value as a person. This is a devaluation in terms of
monetary value: âwhile a slave or serf, i.e. as the property of the
master or the feudal lord, the individual has a certain value... the
individual has no valueâ today (p. 10). If the individual cannot âcarryâ
the value produced by his wife, this value does not appear in the
exchange between labour power and capital, and slips through the worker
straight into the hands of the capitalist, without any recognition for
the housework done.[67] And only when the husbandâs labour power is in
the hands of the capitalist, when the worker actually works, does this
value manifests itself as value created during production. Housework
according to this theory is then part of the aggregate labour in society
that valorises capital, but since the âindividualâ is âdevaluedâ, its
contribution to capital is not recognised.
In the same way as Fortunati claims that reproduction really creates
value, âbut appears otherwiseâ, she asserts that the real status of the
housewife is that of a waged worker, but âappears otherwiseâ. In fact,
Fortunati says, the direct relation between the wife and the husband
hides a real relation of wage-work exchange between the wife and
capital, which is mediated by the husband as the womanâs work
âsupervisorâ.[68]
Although, as we will see below, Fortunatiâs arguments seem to diverge
from other theoretical Autonomist approaches, it has encountered some
appreciation within the Autonomist area. Dalla Costa mentions it for
example; and Harry Cleaver has it in the reading list for his
âAutonomist Marxismâ course.[69] Outside the area of Autonomia, her
pamphlet has been praised by AK distribution as âan excellent book worth
reading very carefully and a good example of immanent critique of Marxâs
workâ.[70] Surely no reader can miss Fortunatiâs in being able to deal
with âcomplexitiesâ: in her pamphlet the words âcomplexâ and
âcomplexityâ appear at least 26 times.[71] Her âdenseâ style, noticed by
AK distribution, which for example calls having sex a âwork of sexual
reproduction of the male workerâ is consistent with this fascination
with âcomplexityâ. No doubt this has inspired awe and respect in her
readers.
One reason for the present critique is first of all because the
disparity between the male and female condition in capitalist society is
a real problem. If our realisation as individuals having âvalueâ in
bourgeois society is only through our roles as buyers and sellers of
commodities (or specifically as sellers of labour power and earners of a
wage), bearing and rearing children is an obstacle to this realisation.
Although part of the toll of being parents can be shared, bearing the
child cannot â and, whatever her class, the woman is discriminated
against with respect to the male in capitalism. A study of the problem
connected to female work is then interesting for its potential criticism
of bourgeois relations of exchange â specifically of the fragmentation
of society into bourgeois individuals who recognise each other only as
buyers and sellers of commodities.
Fortunatiâs work is the product of her involvement with the âWages for
Houseworkâ movement in Italy in the 1970s. This movement produced plenty
of radical theory close to Autonomia (such as Dalla Costaâs work) and
received attention and respect from US Autonomist Marxism, especially
Harry Cleaver.[72] However in the present critique we have chosen to
deal only with the particular theoretical development by Leopoldina
Fortunati and not with the wider issue of Wages for Housework â a
treatment that would have to take on the rather cult-like behaviour of
the movement espousing this demand.
In fact, besides the interesting issues related to womenâs condition in
our society, the principal focus for this critique of Fortunatiâs work
is the specific issue of reproduction as âproductive workâ, which
Fortunati shares with the broader area of Autonomist Marxism. In
particular, we want to address the Autonomist elaboration of the concept
of value in the present mode of production. In this discussion we will
stress not only the similarities among various authors, but also their,
sometimes important, differences in their theoretical positions. We will
discuss in particular the following three points:
cost, even with the aid of âformulasâ, that the work of reproduction is
productive and a creator of value
as Fortunati would put it, âcapitalistically organisedâ; i.e.,
indirectly controlled by capital and having the character of waged work.
repression, and the parallel conception of the working class as
antagonism against capital.
In discussing these points, we will make parallels and reference to some
of the main authors who write, or wrote, within Autonomia or Autonomist
Marxism, and in particular Harry Cleaver (Reading Capital
Politically[73]), Massimo De Angelis (Beyond the Technological and the
Social Paradigms: A Political Reading of Abstract Labour as the
Substance of Value[74]), and Antonio Negri (Pipeline, Lettere da
Rebibbia[75]) and Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt (Empire[76]). We will
make clear the difference between these authors, who on the one side
share some basic tenets of the Autonomist tradition, but on the other
side may diverge on fundamental points and in their understanding of
capitalism.
In the following sections we will analyse the details of Fortunatiâs own
treatment of reproduction as productive work and her initial
assumptions. For simplicityâs sake we only deal with Fortunatiâs
approach to housework, and avoid the issue of prostitution.[77]
No Marxist would deny that housework and reproductive work are
functional and necessary for the whole process of capitalâs
self-valorisation. What makes Fortunatiâs book new or challenging is
that it aims to convince the reader that housework is a real expenditure
of abstract labour time, and a real creator of value, and that this can
be quantified.
In fact, the argument that work done outside production is productive is
a recurrent focus in Autonomist theory. In Reading Capital Politically,
Cleaver reminded the reader that abstract labour and abstract labour
time âmust be grasped in the totality of capitalâ (p. 118) and that in
the âtotal social massâ of abstract labour and value produced in
capitalism there is âa direct or indirect contributionâ from anybody who
is coerced into any form of work, either waged or unwaged, including
housework (pp. 122â123). Although any coerced activity can be functional
to the valorisation of capital, this does not mean that it is abstract
labour and produces value. In saying that, this contribution can be
âindirectâ, Cleaver leaves the question ambiguously open.[78] However,
this suggestion was later taken over and explicitly developed by his
student Massimo De Angelis. In his article mentioned above, De Angelis
attempted a logical âdemonstrationâ that any alienated, coerced and
boundless work amounts to an expenditure of abstract labour and thus
creates value for capital.
Why is it so important to argue for the creation of value outside the
sphere of production? The reason expressly given by Fortunati and, for
example, De Angelis is similar: this is somehow essential to explain the
struggles that may develop outside the sphere of production as working
class struggles. As De Angelis puts it, the recognition of a productive
role of all proletarians is important for a theory that can explain and
give âan appropriate interpretative frameworkâ to the struggles of the
non-waged as well as the waged, as struggles against capital (p. 122).
The categories of productive, unproductive, value, abstract labour, seem
then to be essential in the political (or moral?) evaluation of the role
and antagonism offered by sections of the proletariat.[79] Traditional
Marxists would think that it is rather odd to use the categories that
describe the dynamic of capital as analytical tools to interpret the
class struggle or as indicators of class antagonism. Capital, value, use
value, the falling rate of profit, the laws of the market, etc. are for
them constitutive of an objective reality that conditions the class
struggle, but are independent of our struggles and subjectivity. Yet
Marx had explained in Capital that these âthingsâ, real constraints on
our lives, are an expression of a social relation, which appears to us
in a mystified form, as independent of us. A merit of Autonomist theory
was to try to overcome this objectivistic understanding by emphasizing
the subjective dynamics of capitalism.
However, by criticising the purely objectivistic and economicistic
understanding of capitalism, they oppose to this reading one which is
purely subjectivistic: class struggle as a confrontation between two
opposing and Autonomous consciousnesses, capital and the
proletariat.[80] In this reading capital and its objective categories
become mere objectified phantoms of a purely subjective reality. Thus
for example, De Angelis warns the reader that when he mentions âthe law
of valueâ he actually means the âimposition of work and working class
resistance in and against capitalâ (p. 119). For Cleaver, âuse valueâ,
beyond being the physical body of the commodity (which is the
âeconomicisticâ phantom), has to be understood primarily as a
combination of qualities subjectively recognised in the commodity by the
two subjects in struggle, the working class and capital. This way Marxâs
Capital becomes a coded manuscript that has to be deciphered by looking
at the subjective class-struggle âmeaningsâ of the categories employed
in it; which is precisely what Cleaver attempted to do in Reading
Capital Politically.
Perhaps this one-to-one-relation of subjective and objective categories
can explain the Autonomist obsession for the most improbable quest after
that of the philosopherâs stone. If abstract labour is the expression of
a relation of antagonism between the dispossessed and the bourgeoisie,
then pointing at the value produced by sectors of the proletariat
becomes essential to understand their antagonism with capital and their
struggles. Indeed, how can you explain the antagonism of sections of the
proletariat who do not create value, if the expenditure of abstract
value, thus the production of value, is your litmus paper for detecting
class antagonism? In this perspective, recognising all the proletariat
as âproductiveâ becomes indispensable; conversely, a categorisation of
work as productive or unproductive becomes a âpolitically dangerousâ
thing to do.[81] The liberating realisation that the objective reality
of value and its law is ultimately related to our subjectivity,
antagonism and struggle, is then turned into a theoretical riddle. In
The Arcane of Reproduction Fortunati simply applies this Autonomist
approach to understanding and evaluating class struggle as an abstract
rule to the case of female work and gives her own peculiar contribution
to this theoretical riddle, as we will see later.
There is an important point that one has to stress here. The theoretical
problem faced by Fortunati, Cleaver and De Angelis arises from their
attempt to salvage Marxâs concept of value together with a
subjectivistic concept of âvalueâ as expression of political power and
class struggle. This is different from the position of Antonio Negri,
who in the â70s started to theorise value as a purely subjective
political force, âthe command of capitalâ. Unlike Fortunati and the
others, Negri explicitly distances himself from the Marxian conception
of value. He justifies this move by claiming that there has been an
historical change: in the â70s, he says, value and its law were
effectively suppressed and replaced by a political, direct, command by
capital.[82] In his recent work Empire, Negri reiterates his view that
today we live in a âpostmodernâ world in which capital is no longer
âable to reduce value to measureâ or to make a âdistinction between
productive, reproductive and unproductive labourâ â a world where value
is not anymore the result of an expenditure of abstract labour, but only
the expression of âproduction and reproduction of social lifeâ and of
the power of the system, of Empire (p. 402). This âvalueâ is obviously
âproducedâ by anybody who contributes to a general âreproduction of
social lifeâ. There is nothing to âdemonstrateâ in this case, no
âformulasâ to calculate, no complexities to disentangle. By distancing
himself from Marx and adopting a non-Marxian, postmodernist discourse,
Negri has indeed made his life easier than his Autonomist-still-Marxian
colleagues.[83]
Despite the theoretical problems that we have just seen, is there
something true in the Autonomist insight that all work, waged or not, is
productive? And, above all, does Fortunati share this insight? This is
what we will see in the next section.
As we have seen in Section 1, the arcane of the Autonomist interest in
demonstrating that the work of reproduction, or any work done outside
the sphere of production, is productive work, lies in a reading of
Marxist categories, which makes the categories of value, abstract
labour, etc. have âmeaningsâ in terms of subjective categories: the
imposition of work by capital and the resistance to work by the working
class. The way value and its laws can immediately mean a class relation
of antagonism is explained by De Angelis. Abstract labour, the creation
of value, being tantamount to imposed, boundless and alienated labour,
is the âformâ of work in capitalism. For De Angelis then any waged or
unwaged work, insofar as it is alienated, boundless and coerced, is
abstract labour and consequently a creation of value. And since
antagonism and resistance necessarily come out of the coercive and
alienated nature of this work, then antagonism is one with the
expenditure of abstract labour and the creation of value in capitalism,
and it can manifest itself among the waged as well as the unwaged
proletariat.
It is true that a good deal of antagonism to capital is experienced
outside the sphere of production: there are plenty of examples of
struggles of the unemployed, students, etc. It is also true that
antagonism is experienced within a society where capital effectively
subsumes many of the activities that are done outside the workplace, so
that not only are these activities functional to capital, but they also
acquire an imposed, boundless and alienated character. The whole of
society may then well be seen as an extended factory where direct or
self-imposed discipline, haste, boredom, misery and sweat are the
subjective aspects that necessarily complement the motion of
self-valorisation of capital.[84] To understand and explain the relation
of antagonism outside the sphere of production in relation to the way
capital subsumes unwaged work in this sphere is important and desirable;
however, the question is: is it necessary for this understanding to
assume that there must be creation of value outside the sphere of
production?
Let us consider first the relation between antagonism and the
subsumption of labour by capital within production. Productive labour
has a double nature, as work that is aimed to make something or have
some specific effect (concrete labour), and as the creation of value
(abstract labour). This double nature of labour is the fundamental
character of labour in the capitalist mode of production. Since the
capitalistâs aim of production is the valorisation of his capital, for
him production is principally an extraction of abstract labour, a
creation of value. This aim, and the movement of value, as Marx explains
in Capital, implies the subsumption of the concrete practice of labour,
the despotic organisation and command in production, the fragmentation
of its tasks, its rationalisation, etc. The capitalist subsumption of
labour in its concrete aspect implies, from the point of view of the
worker, boredom, exhaustion, misery, pain, â the character of alienation
and coercion of work then implies as a necessary consequence the
workerâs reaction against it.[85]
The concrete activities (concrete labour) that are done outside the
sphere of production can be subsumed and shaped by capital too. The
fundamental mechanism for the subsumption of activities outside the
sphere of production is their commodification. For example, since a
further education course can only be run with money, it is more likely
to attract finance if it shows to be âusefulâ, i.e. to make people more
âusefulâ to capital (or to a sponsor). This influences the nature, aim
and quality of the courses and tends to relate them to the needs of
capitalist production in general (or the needs of their sponsors).
Capital also shapes the form of the course besides its content, since
the need to pay for hiring staff, renting premises, etc. will impose
pace, deadlines, organisation, which will make the college more like a
workplace. The concrete subsumption of the course is then likely to
imply haste, boredom, and antagonism in the experience of the student.
This antagonism can be explained without necessarily assuming that the
work of these students is a creation of value.
The family is shaped by capital, too. The individualisation brought
about by bourgeois relations of exchange means that it is the value we
own as individuals, not our role in a social structure (family or
extended family), that is necessary for the satisfaction of our needs
and our social recognition. The family wage, paid by the employer to the
male chief family income earner, becomes the economic basis for a
patriarchal despotism which is intolerable within bourgeois relations â
and the direct relations of the family then become real obstacles to
individual freedom.[86] If on the one hand the stability of the family
is useful for the running of capitalism, on the other hand, the same
relations brought about by capital itself imply antagonism to the family
as a direct social relation. This antagonism is explained without having
to demonstrate that these family relations are hidden waged-work
relations.
Housework is shaped by capital, too. Once time is measured in terms of
the money it is worth as hourly wage, every hour spent in the kitchen
acquires the character of a... negative hourly wage, which is as real
for the woman insofar as her possibility of earning a wage outside home
is real for her. Confusing the two different facts of earning a wage and
producing value, Fortunati manages to analyse the phenomenon described
above as the creation of a negative value, a ânon-valueâ, i.e. a value
that capital does not reward.[87] What is interpreted by Fortunati as
the creation of non-value is in fact something substantially different.
It is the result of the fact that capital imposes the form of waged work
on non-waged activities â in this case housework â through the ânaturalâ
need to earn a wage and own money as individuals. The imposition of
capitalist temporality extends itself from the immediate production
process to the rest of non-productive activity.[88] Thus the character
of housework is made to conform with that of any waged work, either
productive or unproductive.
Let us look at the concrete aspects of this imposition. The time
attracted by waged work outside home will impose quality, form, pace, to
housework, shaping it concretely. The more capital subsumes housework,
the more it will require the purchase of appliances (washing machines,
food processors...) in order to free time for productive work; the more
the kitchen will look like a science-fiction âfactoryâ; the more the
work in it will have the pace of a workplace; the more boring,
unskilled, and alien the work in the kitchen will become â just the
evening chore of turning the microwave on and heat up some pre-made
food. Again, it is the concrete labour of housework that is shaped by
capital, and this will imply coercion, boredom, and misery.
Thus capitalism can affect any concrete labour in society, and generate
antagonism also where no value is actually created.[89] If we consider
the interrelation of abstract labour, concrete labour, value and it
laws, with antagonism (i.e. objectivity and subjectivity) we can have a
âtheoretical frameworkâ to explain the various struggles of the
dispossessed without any need whatsoever to demonstrate that every
proletarian must produce value. Although Autonomia had the great merit
of having highlighted the reality of the subsumption of society and its
relation to class antagonism, this relation is not so straightforward as
an equation antagonism = abstract labour (value).
Let us now consider the difference between the above Autonomist approach
and that attempted in The Arcane of Reproduction. To the students in
movement, someone like De Angelis would say: âIt should be clear for us
theorists something that is true in your real experience: the fact that
you are in movement against capital because, although you are unwaged,
you are subjected to capitalist work, and to the boredom and pain it
impliesâ. The students feel the real effects of a real alienated
âcapitalist workâ; they do not need De Angelis to tell them that they do
alienated capitalistic work. The students really feel antagonistic,
because of their real experience of alienation; they do not need De
Angelis to reveal anything to them in order to give them a space and aim
for struggle. Only, De Angelis tells the Marxian world that they ought
to describe the studentsâ work as it is really experienced by the
students and as it is really shaped by capital: i.e. as a waged work, if
they want to understand the roots of the studentsâ class antagonism.
Whatever its theoretical problems and incongruities are, this analysis
still has a moment of truth in the understanding of capitalism as class
struggle.
But Fortunati does not say this! In the case of housework she claims:
capital has contrived to âcamouflageâ the womanâs work as a non-waged,
non-productive, non-factory-like work âto reduce the space for struggle
against itâ (p. 110; see also p. 108).[90] To the housewife, Leopoldina
Fortunati would say: âyou cannot find the space for your struggle
against capital because capital has duped you into believing in
appearancesâ. But Leopoldina Fortunati is there to reveal the ârealityâ
behind these âappearancesâ and removes the ideological hindrances on
class antagonism.
One of the strengths of Autonomist Marxism is the way it links an
everyday experience of antagonism (boredom, hatred of work, conflict
with our bosses, etc.) with a theory of how capitalism functions.
Autonomist Marxism generally has intuitive appeal â it seems to capture
and explain how we experience the world and why we fight back. By
contrast, Fortunatiâs account creates a sharp divergence between the
world of experience (âillusionâ) and the real world of capital and its
needs (which only the intellectual like Fortunati can reveal). This is
only exacerbated by her excessive use of jargon and avoidance of
âeverydayâ language in relation to Marxian theory.
In the previous section we acknowledged the importance of the Autonomist
argument that human activity in society can be subsumed by capital, and
that this subsumption entails antagonism. We appreciated that this
understanding is a moment of truth in the understanding of capitalism.
Yet we have also seen that this does not necessarily imply that
attending a vocational course, hoovering, making love, sleeping, smiling
at a parent, etc. are productive labour for capital and create
value.[91] In this section we will see that there are in fact
differences between these activities and those done within a wage-work
relation, and that a view of bourgeois society as simply a social
factory misses out a dialectic understanding of capital. Indeed, when
the conception of society as a âsocial factoryâ was used as a polemical
device, it had some poignancy; but its overliteral use as a theoretical
model for capitalism is too drastic and reductive.
There are in fact important differences between waged work and
reproduction âworkâ, in the way the âcommandâ is given to us and how it
relates to class antagonism. In the workplace, we are subjected to
explicitly imposed orders, and we obey them consciously. Also, what we
do is never âfor ourselvesâ, but it is done for the sake of our
employerâs business. The subsumption of our activity and of our aims, as
well as the subsumption of the result of our activity and aim, is a real
subsumption.
Outside the workplace we are âfreeâ to choose what to do, and how to do
it. And we do what we do âfor ourselvesâ. However, this freedom hides an
indirect command of capital: in a world where âwhat I as a man cannot
do, i.e. what all my individual powers cannot do, I can do with the help
of moneyâ every need becomes necessarily subordinated to the need to
play along with the market and its laws.[92] Even leisure is conditioned
by what we can afford, both in terms of money, and time, since time is
money. If we are in a position to spend time and resources in leisure
and/or education, we may tend to spend more time in leisure and/or
courses that are useful to improve or maintain our capacity to earn a
wage. The mind exhaustion implied by alienated labour is likely to
dictate the mindless and alienated quality of leisure â after a dayâs
work our brain cannot sustain more than a boring and non-involving night
in front of the TV, for example. All this, is really âenjoyedâ âfor
ourselvesâ, and we do it with our free will, but it implies our
subjection to the law of value.
This command is indirect in the case of the family: it is for the sake
of an economic income that both husband and wife act of their own free
will. Of his free will, the husband will sign a contract with an
employer and will submit himself to the despotism of production for most
of his active day. In the same way, of her free will, the wife will try
her best to manage their home so that the husband will be able to go and
earn the money they need to live.[93]
The internalisation implied by commodity fetishism means that activity
or work outside the sphere of production is a special âworkâ in a
special âfactoryâ, where the âworkerâ is the âforemanâ of himself.[94]
In this special factory the command of capital is the opposite of the
despotism, organisation and discipline of any other factory: it is a
command based on freedom. This situation implies contradictions.
Paradoxically enough, the command which I impose on myself is
indispensable for my submission to the explicit despotism of capital in
the workplace â how would the capitalist keep me in the workplace, if I
did not see my job as in my own interest? My unfreedom, my forced
labour, my painful experience of being despotically commanded within
production is then one side of the same coin of my bourgeois freedom
outside production. A theory that sees the working class only as a chain
gang forced to work under a despotic command misses that other face of
capital, our domination that is one with the naturalisation of the
economy, of the necessity to exchange as an obvious and inevitable
condition of life â the âarcaneâ behind the fact that we reproduce
capital with our âfreeâ actions and âfreeâ choices.[95]
To summarise: even if the Autonomists argue correctly that capital
subsumes all society within or outside production, this does not mean
that all activities are the same, and that society is a mega factory.
This view is not useful, since it does not explain the differences. It
is really more useful to consider the two dialectical aspects of
capital, as despotism-of-production/freedom-of-exchange, and consider
them in their interrelation.[96]
In the next section we show how this undialectic approach to capital can
lead to politically dangerous consequences and consider Leopoldina
Fortunatiâs case.
imposition of workâ
We have seen that the Autonomist understanding of capital as âimposition
of workâ stresses only one aspect of capital, that of discipline,
organisation, despotism. This means that the other aspect of capital,
the freedom to exchange and own your own value in the sphere of
circulation is not spelled out.
This undialectic approach allows for two possible theoretical
understandings. One, clearly followed by Cleaver and De Angelis, is that
of incorporating the latter aspect of capital in the first, even if they
are opposite. In order to force two opposite dialectic aspects into one
âimposition of workâ, the concepts that describe this imposition (work,
command, foreman, etc.) must become extremely abstract â as this is the
only way to give the same name to opposite situations! For example, if
we abstract enough the concept of âforemanâ, we may argue with De
Angelis that the market is the âforemanâ of the freelance lorry driver,
in the same way as a foreman is for the blue-collar worker. This is
true, but in such an abstract way that our theory becomes as useful as
Hegelâs notorious black night where all cows are black: if value is
produced anyhow; if anything is productive work; if antagonism is
anywhere; if anybody who is under the pressure of a foreman even when he
is not because the market can be called a foreman; what does all this
clarify or explain besides being only a moralistic statement that we are
all âdominatedâ by capital? However, this approach still maintains a
criticism of capitalism as a whole and a revolutionary attitude towards
bourgeois relations.
But there is a second understanding that is possible once the opposed
aspects of capital are not both spelled out: one that takes only one
side of the dialectic, and considers capital just in its aspect of
despotism, of âimposition of work/ coercion/ disciplineâ. The other side
of capital, bourgeois freedom, whose experience is rooted in the freedom
to exchange, choose, consume, etc., is simply perceived as a force that
potentially opposes the despotism of capital and which is potentially
liberatory.
Negri and Hardt seem to have adopted such a vision of capitalism as
simply the imposition of a âdispliplinary regimeâ over both the spheres
of production and reproduction.[97] In Empire they describe the present
class struggle as the antagonism between the so called âmultitudeâ, a
multicultural mass of individuals, who want to be free to âflowâ, and a
despotic power (Empire, or âall the powers of the old worldâ) which
tries to impose âdisciplinaryâ local conditions on the proletariat (pp.
212, 213, and 400). They admit that this âfree flowâ is forced on âmanyâ
people by âdire circumstancesâ and that its effect âis hardly
liberatoryâ in itself (p. 253). Nevertheless for them it is the liberal
spirit and the abstract desire for freedom that this âfree flowâ
represents or suggests that what counts: mobility âalways expresses... a
search for liberation... the search for freedom... (p.212; p. 252). Thus
for Negri and Hardt migration is âa powerful form of class struggleâ (p.
213).
Yes, people want to flow. And the governments try to regulate their
flow. Thus flowing seems to be something inherently subversive. But
people want to flow where they think they can sell their labour power
dearer or, simply and desperately, find any possibility of income even
at the price of selling their labour power cheaper.[98] With the
analysis of De Angelis or Cleaver previously discussed in mind, we would
rather understand this flow of the unwaged as imposition of work outside
production, and not as something subersive in itself.
The freedom of the labour market underlying the workersâ mobility is in
fact a contradictory face of capital, the other face being exploitation,
xenophobic harassment, state control, the destruction of traditional
peasant production in many areas of the world by the market etc. The
same contradictions that arise from the dynamics of capital and from the
freedom of the market are thus material preconditions for the
constitution of movements of self-organisation and solidarity among the
dispossessed. So it is not so much the present blind, random,
individualistically spontaneous
freedom-to-flow-for-the-sake-of-an-income that has to be celebrated as a
âpowerfulâ example of class struggle. Rather we have to celebrate the
opposite: the rediscovery of a human reality of direct relations that
comes out not from the flow in itself but from the struggles of the
migrants.[99]
Coherently with their uncritical view, the political action of the
âmultitudeâ for Negri and Hardt must pivot around the demand for the
recognition of civil rights within a system of uncriticised bourgeois
freedom. The main demand that should unite the âmultitudeâ against
capital is in fact that of the recognition of full citizenship (p. 400)
and guaranteed income (p. 403). Crucially, for Negri the moral
entitlement to citizenship and guaranteed income lies in the fact that
each of us âproducesâ and contributes with waged or unwaged âworkâ to
the power of capital.
A similar direction is taken by Fortunati. On p. 24 she explains that
bourgeois freedom is illusory. And she always uses apostrophes around
the words âfreeâ and âfreedomâ. We agree with this, do we? We agree
because we know that our bourgeois freedom is one with bourgeois
relations mediated by exchange, thus with our fragmentation and with the
objectification of our social relations as value and capital and the
consequent power of capital over us... Well, forget it. This is not the
issue for Leopoldina Fortunati.
In fact, for Fortunati exchange is apparently an existential, universal
and ahistorical condition of humanity since the pre-capitalist past: the
relation between people in the past was in fact a form of exchange, if
not of money for commodities, of âwork for workâ (e.g. p. 27); and value
was the fundamental measure in human relations and a measure of human
priorities in every form of society, since as she said, in the past we
âhad valueâ insofar we were slaves, thus exchange value. Value as
measure of worthiness was a universal and ahistorical feature of
humanity! Also, Fortunati calls all interpersonal relations âexchangesâ
and claims that âequal opportunities for exchangeâ âseem to offer
potentially more equal opportunitiesâ (which appear as something
desirable). But, she adds, this freedom of exchange is obstructed and
fettered by capital as production. Let us look at this in detail.
For Fortunati it is capital-as-production that shapes the form of the
family and obstructs the free relation of exchange among individuals â
and it is this (not exchange!) that is the very reason for the
fragmentation of individuals within capitalism:
It is this reduction of interpersonal relationships to relations of
production (i.e. the family) that underlies the growing isolation of
individuals within capitalism. The individual becomes isolated not only
from outside society but also from other family members with whom he/she
has a relation based on production and not on the individual
him/herself. (p. 25)
Capitalist production, which is said to be one with the male-woman
relationship in the family, negatively affects other âexchangesâ, like
those between gays, and make their potential for liberation, for an
âescapeâ, difficult or in vain:
The development of various alternative exchanges (lesbian, gay male,
communal, etc.) seems to offer potentially more equal opportunities for
exchange, but at the social level the male/female relationship is so
influential that in practice it is difficult to modify or escape from
it, to create a more equal relationship between those exchanging (p.
34).
Freedom of choice and exchange, which is the good thing that capitalism
offers to âeach individualâ, is illusory only because the family as a
nucleus of capitalistic production binds the individuals and limits our
âreal opportunity for individual relationshipsâ â i.e., limits the
perfected bourgeois freedom based on exchange among individuals:
Thus while capitalism... offers each individual great freedom of choice
with whom to exchange within the relations of reproduction, it is
illusory, because [due to family relations] this âfreedomâ is matched by
minimal real opportunity for individual relations (p. 25).[100]
For Fortunati then, âcapitalâ as production is an evil entity that faces
us â facing capitalâs and the familyâs despotism, we, as individuals,
strive to develop âalternative exchangesâ and look for âopportuntintiesâ
for exchange. Capital wants to control our âfreeâ movements, choices and
exchanges in order to compel us to work within authoritarian relations
and one of the ways to do this is through the family. This is why
âfreedomâ in our system is illusory! And this is why she puts quote
marks round the word!
We may agree on the one hand that the individual freedom offered by
capitalism, which is liberatory from the constrains of the past, is the
carrot of this system whose stick is production â and none of us would
sacrifice our bourgeois freedom to go back to a suffocating Medieval
social relation. But on the other hand if we want to make a coherent
criticism of capital as production, we cannot and must not avoid
considering its aspect of bourgeois freedom, the freedom of exchange, as
an integral part of capital and of its power over us. It is wrong to
separate the two aspects and oppose production to bourgeois freedom, or
assume exchange as an ahistorical condition of life.
Fortunatiâs stress on equal opportunity for women and lack of equality
between men and women is ambiguous too, since her arguments seem to
pivot on the recognition of us as âvalueâ in a moral sense in relation
to our role as value or non-value-creating for capital.[101] Although
admitting that everybody, both men and women, are exploited in
capitalism, Fortunati complains that âunder capitalism men and women are
not exploited equallyâ (p. 39), and that the housewife is not a âvalueâ
within capitalism: â unlike the male worker... [the housewife] is
posited as non-value; she cannot obtain money for her work, she receives
no wage in exchange... she cannot hold money...â (p. 37) And that,
within the family, the housewife and her husband âenter into relation...
without equal rights, therefore not equal in the eyes of the law.â (p.
39).[102]
The one-sided vision of capitalism as production, as opposed to the
potential real opportunity for equality and freedom of exchange, has
consequences when it comes to analysing âclass struggleâ, as a ârefusal
of (any) workâ, a refusal to have anything to do with capital as
production and despotism, but still within capitalism as far as exchange
and consumption of commodities are concerned. In fact for Fortunati a
major demand against capital is that housewives should âbe allowed to
consumeâ (p. 76) â so major that, in Fortunatiâs perception, such a
demand âwould free everyone, not just women, from the iron laws of the
production of surplus valueâ (p. 76). While production is capital,
consumption is something against production and against capital!?
Proletarian shopping, as the reclaiming of our âright to consumeâ
without paying is revolutionary indeed â but only within a movement that
has consciously put the same concept of bourgeois exchange into the
dustbin of history, not one that uncritically retains it!
In Fortunatiâs undialectic vision, capital becomes a subject that
imposes production and repression on us, who are free from capital if we
ârefuseâ this discipline, if we step âoutside productionâ. Capital
totally incorporates us insofar as we are labour power and work for it,
or we are totally Autonomous from it if we refuse its discipline. Within
a view that focuses on the aspect of production and neglects the
contradiction of capital as despotism and freedom of exchange, there is
a risk of developing an uncritical attitude to what is âoutsideâ
production and imposition of discipline. This also appears to be true
for Negri. In Pipeline Lettere da Rebibbia Negri praises the rebellious
attitude of those who in the â70s avoided a job in industry to find a
niche in petty bourgeois semi-legal activity; and of those who got a
second job outside their main job in industry. Negri called this a
âreinvention of daily lifeâ (p. 32).[103] Consistent with this, in
Empire Negri celebrates âdropping outsâ and refusals of work done âin
every way possibleâ (p. 274), without any criticism of context, aim,
meanings or outcomes of these dropping-outs.
Fortunati too praises examples of ârefusal of workâ without any critical
insight. On page 146 she says that âthe fall in the birth rate is in
part a direct expression of the refusal of the female housewife to take
on the extra housework that children requireâ. A refusal of having
children can have many meanings including being part of an
anti-capitalist struggle, but it can also be the result of the
naturalisation of bourgeois relations of exchange, and of the domination
of value over our lives: millions of women have refused to have children
in order to become full-time wage slaves.[104] What is interesting is
actually to consider how this fact is contradictory for capital, and how
these contradictions act within it.
The most noticeable example of Fortunatiâs compartmentalised vision of
ârefusal of workâ as struggle-against-capital-by-default is the
following: for her the wave of abandonment of children that was caused
by the employment of women in large scale industry is as an example of
âwomenâsâ indisciplineâ and their ârefusal... to take on the extra
housework that children bringâ (p. 171). Against Marx who called this
phenomenon an âunnatural estrangement between mother and childâ (p. 172)
she launches a feminist attack, since is it not egalitarian to attribute
parental affection to women as ânaturalâ: âhereâ, she says, âMarx
himself is blinded by capitalist ideologyâ (p. 172). But in her feminist
passion, Fortunati does not understand that here Marx speaks about a
fundamental feature of capital as alienation: the ontological inversion
that makes money everything for the bourgeois individual and the
individual as person nothing. When the real need to earn a wage becomes
more important for your survival than your own child, capital has
completed the ultimate disintegration of society into alien individuals,
obstacles to each otherâs happiness, submitted to capital as wage
earners for all our needs and desires.
Against capital as the unity and opposition of despotism and bourgeois
freedom, a revolutionary movement can only challenge both production
together with the relations of free exchange, private property, and the
whole construction of our dispossession. The process of defetishisation
of value and capital is the real abolition of a material social
relation, of exchange; and thus the real repossession of the control
over our lives, âthe complete restoration of man to himself as social â
i.e. human â being, a restoration which has become consciousâ.[105] In
the struggle direct social relations will necessarily abolish the
mediation of social relations through market relations. Only within
direct social relations will value be abolished and the real individual,
who is himself because of who he is and what he does with the others,
and not because of what he has in his pockets, will be confirmed. Only
within direct social relations what the individual works towards, i.e.
the whole of his conscious activity, will be one with his result. And
this is real freedom, because if we desire or dislike something we are
really able to consciously work towards achieving it or changing it,
since nothing will rule over us despite us and behind our backs.[106]
The above leads us now straight into the core of Fortunatiâs work: her
original âdemonstrationâ that housework produces value. In fact, it is
not a demonstration, but simply, the declamation of a âtruthâ based on
an initial assumption that labour power is âa commodity like any otherâ
(p. 19). If this is the case, labour power must contain value, as the
crystallisation of the abstract labour expended by its producer. Thus
the labour of the housewife, the producer of the labour power of the
chief wage-earner of the family, must be abstract value and must create
value.
There is a general tendency in Autonomist theory to gloss over the
nature of labour power as a special commodity different from others. For
example in Reading Capital Politically Cleaver treats labour power in
the same way as other commodities, (food and energy) without any
specification. In fact, after having discussed labour power, he says:
âlet us now turn to food as a commodity and apply the same approachâ (p.
101). Surely, this does not mean that Cleaver does not know that there
are important differences between food and labour power as commodities â
it means only that he neglects the relevance of these differences for a
âpolitical readingâ of Capital.
Fortunati is surely more âcomplexâ than Cleaver. By maintaining that, as
far as its content in value is concerned, labour power is like all other
commodities, she admits that it is nevertheless a special commodity, but
only because:
Its use value is produced and consumed separately from its exchange
value; its use value is produced within the process of reproduction and
consumed within the process of production; its exchange value is
produced within the process of production and consumed within that of
reproduction (pp. 78â79).
But this âcomplexityâ does not touch upon the real reason why labour
power is a special commodity, and it is precisely in the fact that it
cannot contain value as the crystallisation of abstract labour! Let us
see why.
In order to exist, capital needs a precondition: the material
dispossession of the producers from the means of production. What does
this dispossession mean? That I do not have the means to produce what I
need. Because our relations are mediated by the market, the way in which
our dispossession manifests in our society is precisely the fact that as
proletariat we cannot produce value by ourselves, a fact that appears to
Fortunati intriguingly contradictory.
Dispossession of the means of production is a specific feature of
wage-work relations. In previous modes of production, a shaman or a
hunter was one with his herbs or weapons. There was no such a thing as a
shaman without her herbs or a hunter without his arrows âlooking for
employmentâ because a shaman or a hunter were not under waged-work
relations. In capitalism, where the wage-work relation is the base of
production, the unity of man and his activity is split into: labour
power on the one side and capital (the result of human activity turned
against the human) on the other. In contrast to the shaman, a baker
without an oven cannot make cakes. The baker has the labour power, the
faculty of making cakes, but if the oven is the private property of
someone else, the bakerâs faculty is suspended in the air. It is useless
â unless it is reunited with the oven. But this reunion can be possible
only if the capitalist, owner of the oven, hires the baker, and only
through this reunion can value be produced. The value that the baker
then subsequently produces will belong to the capitalist, the owner of
the means of production, as his capital.
This dispossession is even more striking if we think that our same
skills are shaped in order to be useful within a capitalist process, and
find no reason of existing outside it. Bakery is still an example of a
traditional craft, whose skills have been defined within a
non-capitalistic context. But if we think, for example, of the skills of
working with a computerised spreadsheet, we can understand how
tragically our skills are not only useless but even unimaginable without
capital.
In a society based on exchange, the fact that our dispossession obliges
us to hire ourselves to a capitalist for a wage takes the form of
commodity exchange, of a purchase and sale of labour power. This is why
labour power is not a commodity like a cake, but just the way our
dispossession and our exploitation by the capitalist appears, and the
expression of the ontological inversion that makes capital enrichment,
knowledge, science, creativity and us the opposite of all this: nothing
without capital.[107]
This is why saying to the proletariat, as Fortunati does, âAll right
mate, you cannot create value but considering everything, is not the
result of your reproduction a commodity and a value? Is not your labour
power a commodity like any other?â means just taking the piss out of our
real conditions. The very existence of labour power, of a âcapacity for
producingâ helplessly separated from the possibility of its realisation
as production, is one with the very fact that we cannot produce anymore
by and for ourselves, but we can produce value only as appendages of
capital. It is one with our experience of alienation both in production,
in our relation with our products, and in any other activity shaped by
capital.
If we want to scream the truth, we have to scream that we are
dispossessed, that we cannot create value with our reproduction, and
that labour power is not a commodity like any other. These are aspects
of the same truth: of our condition as proletariat! The idea that we
produce labour power in the same way as the independent baker produces
cakes to sell is a petty-bourgeois delusion, and not a contribution to
revolutionary theory at all.
Thus Fortunati starts with a mistake, the assumption that labour power
is âa commodity like any otherâ, that it must consequently carry some
value created by the housewife. Starting from an initial mistake, it is
no wonder that a theory is bound to be contradicted by facts:
Fortunatiâs theory clashes with the fact that the exchange value of
labour power does not reflect any housework-created value at all. But
for Fortunati, this is not because there must be something wrong in her
assumptions, but because of a hidden peculiarity of labour power, that
it can contain invisible value.
In fact, for Fortunati, labour power is such that its value and exchange
value are related to totally different mechanisms, this giving value the
possibility of having invisible contributions that are not reflected in
exchange value. While the exchange value of labour power accounts only
for the value of the means of subsistence consumed by the worker and his
family, the value of labour power can have a contribution on top of
this, which represents the abstract labour of housework.[108] This extra
âvalueâ on the top has no manifestation as exchange value and no
representation in terms of money: it is value in an invisible state
during the exchange between the worker and the capitalist, i.e.
invisible on the labour market.[109]
This is an important theoretical challenge, which needs to be supported
by solid arguments. But the only argument Fortunati brings about is that
Marx said that exchange value and value are different concepts. However,
she seems to be oblivious that in the same quote Marx says that these
values are related, exchange value being the manifestation of value (pp.
82â3).[110]
Indeed, the quote by Marx says: âWith the transformation of the
magnitude of value into the price this necessary relation appears as the
exchange-ratio between a single commodity and the money commodity which
exists outside it... However... the possibility... of a quantitative
incongruity between price and magnitude of value... is inherent in the
price form itself. This is not a defect but, on the contrary, it makes
this form the adequate one for a mode of production whose laws assert
themselves as blindly operating averages between constant
irregularitiesâ (p. 83). For Fortunati this means that Marx would agree
with her theory â that price could diverge from value for given,
mathematically expressible, lumps of invisible value. But Marx did not
say this! Marx simply means that price, a real expression of value (i.e.
its âappearanceâ), is realised through the blind working of the market,
in which prices necessarily fluctuate around value.
There is a tragic misunderstanding here. Fortunati does not realise that
for Marx the word âappearanceâ means âbeing a real expression of an
essenceâ. Grossly misunderstanding this, Fortunati redefines this word
in her own way (and uses this interpretation throughout her pamphlet):
âappearanceâ as âbeing an illusion totally unrelated to a hidden
realityâ. Only with this misunderstanding can she claim that Marx would
support her theory and agree that the price of labour power can be an
illusion which hides the reality of an invisible value.
While for Marx essence and appearance have a relation, appearance being
part of the same reality as essence, in Fortunatiâs conspiratorial
understanding of capitalism the concept of appearance is banalised into
the concept of a simple lie, a curtain that covers a totally different
reality, a mystification and a deception by nasty capital. This means
that the reality behind an appearance (the value of labour power behind
its exchange value in this case) cannot be grasped through the study of
this appearance. So how can we know the reality of the value of labour
power, the reality behind its price? This can be found only by feminine
intuition, which can neglect all the lies and âappearancesâ of this
man-made capitalist world.
Let us see then how Fortunati proceeds with showing how the ârealityâ of
the invisible value of labour power manifests itself. If this invisible
value does not manifest itself in the exchange value of labour power,
how and where does it manifest itself then? In the future creation of
value.
In fact, according to Fortunati, the invisible value created by the
housewife is a âvalue [which] raises the use-value of labour power,
use-value being the element which creates valueâ (p. 52). What does this
mean? In the case of any other commodity than labour power, one would
not mix the concept of use value and value of a product (e.g. a cake as
a lump of flour, butter, sugar, etc. and its value, expressed by its
price). But in the case of the use value of labour power one can be
tempted to mix value and use value up because of the particular nature
of labour power: that of being the capacity to create value for capital.
The use value of labour power is the potential creation of value, thus,
the Fortunatean syllogism concludes, if something has the capacity to
create value, this something must be value itself.[111]
The fact that labour creates value but is not value itself is a
fundamental concept to understand capitalism. With the separation of
property from labour, labour is posited as ânot-raw-material,
not-instrument-of labour, not-raw-product... [it is] labour separated
from all means and objects of labour, from its entire objectivity. This
living labour [exists] as an abstraction from these moments of its
actual reality (also, not-value); [as] complete denudation... stripped
of all objectivity. [It is] labour as absolute poverty: poverty not as
shortage, but as total exclusion of objective wealth. Or also as the
existing non-value, and hence purely objective use value... labour not
as an object, but as an activity; not as itself value, but as living
source of value...â [112]
But for Fortunati if something is able to create value, it is value
itself. It is an extra value, whose existence is mystified as non-value
by capitalism, and which is created by the housewife. This extra value
is real and already existing, in an invisible state, but it needs the
work of the husband worker in his workplace to âre-transform itselfâ
into visible value (pp. 95â6).
But if value is the expression of our social relations mediated by
things, i.e., mediated by a social relation between our commodities on
the market, how can the value of labour power exist and at the same time
be invisible on the labour market? And how can the invisible âabstractâ
labour time of housework be a reality? Fortunati answers: the value of
labour power âis determined by the time necessary to produce and
reproduce itâ, because this is âlike that of any other commodityâ (p.35)
Is it? Not at all. The fact that abstract labour time is âmeasuredâ by
considering labour time is not true for âany commodityâ at all! Abstract
labour time is not in fact the same thing as the actual labour time,
that is the time actually spent doing the work. We can only speak about
abstract labour only within a production process which is aimed at
exchange, i.e. at the market.[113]
So, how can abstract housework be only defined by the quantity of work
produced by the houseworker in the privacy of our homes, as she says on
page 35? How can we âmeasureâ the abstract labour time of tidying up the
house, vacuum cleaning, having sex, totally different concrete works,
without a process of abstraction and comparison that can occur only
through the market? No market, no production for a market, no abstract
value. Fortunatiâs idea that abstract housework time can be measured by
timing housework is a misconception of what abstract labour time is.
But at the very root of all these theoretical problems there is
something wrong in Fortunatiâs basic understanding of the same concept
of value. On p. 106, in order to demonstrate that reproduction work is
value-producing work, she says that âdespite being individual labour,
[reproduction work] is work in its immediate social form, like the work
that produces commodities.â Wrong. Why is this wrong? Value is the
manifestation of the way society rewards my work done for others, i.e.
my contribution to the total labour of society. Importantly, this
ârewardâ is indirect. Production in capitalism, unlike that in the past,
is a private and not immediately social activity, and the social
relation among producers is mediated by exchange of the things they
produce. Our products, then, engaged in a social relation on the market,
acquire the property of possessing value, as something âstamped upon
themâ. Thus the same existence of value is fundamentally related to the
fact that our work, which produces commodities, is NOT immediately
social. If Fortunati has no clue of the mechanism that produces value,
what credit can we give to her weirdest statements about invisible
value?
The Arcane of Reproduction reproduces the arcane of housework by
analysing it in a style that allows more than one interpretation. A
first superficial reading is bound to appeal to the liberal feminist
reader. It speaks explicitly about the inequality of men and women âin
the eyes of the lawâ, or about questions of social power between the
proletarian man and woman (p. 39). However, other parts insist that the
issue is âexploitationâ, that it is a Marxian issue.
But let us consider Fortunatiâs âMarxianâ arguments about the
housewifeâs âexploitationâ.[114] For Fortunati, this âexploitationâ
consists in the fact that the necessary labour time of the housewife âis
calculated only with respect to the male workerâs working dayâ (p. 91).
This is a bit ambiguous. What does it mean? In Fortunatiâs words: âthe
necessary labour time supplied by the male worker already contains the
[value of]... the means of subsistence of the female housewife too...
[thus she] must, with her work, re-earn [it]â (p. 93). That is, if the
husbandâs wage includes the means of the wifeâs reproduction, this
implies that with her housework the wife works again on top of what has
already been earned by her husband during his day of work.
The fact that the housewife must re-earn some money with her work, is
not the exploitation based on equal and fair exchange of wage for work
that Marx discovered. It is rather an âexploitationâ due to the fact
that there is something left unpaid, against the sacred bourgeois rules
of fair and equal exchange. Exploitation by making people re-earn
something, i.e. not paying a full honest wage, not exchanging
equivalents, is the bourgeois concept of exploitation that one hears
when Nikeâs sweatshops are under left liberal criticism.
However, if it is true that Fortunatiâs theory reveals that the
housewife has to do a second batch of work for nothing after that done
by her husband, this would be an interesting discovery anyway. Nobody
has ever noticed this before, and we should now wonder whether
Fortunatiâs theory of invisible value is really fit to expose this bad
accountancy of capitalist reward of wages for work. Let us then force
ourselves temporarily to adopt Fortunatiâs theory and check her own
claim, by evaluating the necessary labour time involved in the husbandâs
wage.
According to the theory, the housewife does some abstract labour, which
materialises in her contribution of value lh (value from housework); and
the husband worker does some abstract labour, which results in his
contribution of value lw (value from work). According to Fortunatiâs
instructions, âthe two valorisation processes must add upâ (p.89). This
means that, if invisible value lh is not bound to be invisible forever,
it must eventually manifest as a contribution in the total value ltot
(total value) of the product; or, better, in Fortunatiâs words,
âre-transforms itselfâ, in the final value created for the capitalist.
Thus total value is the sum of the value created by housework and that
created by work:
ltot = lh + lw.
The capitalist, who has never heard of Leopoldina Fortunati, does not
know anything about the invisible value lh. What he thinks is that he
has acquired a quantity of value ltot during the day. At the end of the
working day, the capitalist gives the wage to his worker. This wage is
the money necessary to maintain the worker as worker and his wife as
housewife. The capitalist is aware of this necessity, and has to give up
part of the value that he gained during the day â let us say for
example, one quarter of it. So, the necessary labour time coincides with
a quarter of the working day, that is a quarter of ltot. But, since we
are temporarily Fortunati, we know that âin realityâ ltot is the sum of
the two contributions of abstract labour (lh + lw). Thus, even if the
capitalist does not see it, we see that the wage actually paid
corresponds to necessary labour time, which is one quarter of the
abstract labours of both work and housework:
Wage paid = (1/4) ÂŽ ( lh + lw ) = necessary labour time.
Now, being Leopoldina Fortunati, I would conclude: âThe necessary labour
time that corresponds to the wage paid to the worker includes the
necessary labour time expended by the housewife at home. This means that
Leopoldina Fortunati (that is, me) is wrong in claiming that the
housewifeâs work constitutes a re-earning. Indeed, it is clear from the
formulas that the necessary labour time supplied by the housewife does
contribute part of the wage, thus her work at home is necessary for this
earning and does not amount to a re-earning. It is worth stressing that
we have just demonstrated that Fortunatiâs own theory contradicts her
own claims.
After having enjoyed the above exercise, which showed the inconsistency
between Fortunatiâs theory and her own claims, let us remember that it
was only an exercise, and that we have already argued that housework
does not produce value. Is the housewife rewarded or not by capital for
her work, then, and if she is in what sense is she? Assuming that the
manâs wage covers the reproduction of his whole family, the male worker
is paid in consideration of the existence and reproduction of himself as
worker, his wife as housewife, and his children as children. In the
âgenerosityâ of the capitalist to pay a family wage to the married and
father worker, the concrete existence and activity of the housewife is
taken into consideration, as well as the concrete existence of the
children and their activity. We do not need the elaboration of Fortunati
to see that housework is functional to capitalism, and that she, as well
as her husband, is paid only for her means of subsistence while capital
thrives on their lives.
Although the woman is ârewardedâ through her husbandâs wage and she is
not a waged worker, this ârewardâ has something in common with the
ârewardâ received by her husband for his work: indeed, both husband and
wife receive money for the value of their survival. The condition of the
woman may then be discussed in relation to a sound criticism of the wage
form. But also in this respect The Arcane of Reproduction is
disappointing. When the question of the wage form is considered,
Fortunati deploys all her skills of complexification and renders the
argument (deliberately?) obscure. For example, we read that:
In production, the elements, which are commodities, appear as such, and
the process of production is the process of production; workers are
labour power, therefore commodities, but they are also the working
class; work is waged work; the exchange is an exchange organised
capitalistically; the relation of production is the waged work relation.
Thus it is not at this level that capital hides its voracity in the
appropriation of value or the violence of exploitation, but at the level
of the capital worker relationship, which is in reality a relationship
based on the expropriation of surplus value, taking place in an exchange
which, while appearing to be one between equals, is in fact an exchange
of non-equivalents between non equals (pp. 20â21).
In this âcomplexâ paragraph we learn that it is not at the level of
production that capital hides its voracity for value and not in the fact
that âwork is waged workâ!? But in an âexchange of non-equivalentsâ, in
âunfair exchangeâ. The woman is exploited because her husbandâs labour
power is exchanged without regard for its invisible value so that âthe
capitalist buys [labour power] below costâ (p. 84).
Despite Fortunatiâs Marxian make-up, at the end of the day her arguments
pivot around the criticism of a male-centered society where the
capitalist and the worker, i.e. the masculine cross-class side of
society, share the tacit assumption that the wage is just the merit of
the male workerâs day work. The problem is that it is the husband who
cashes the cheque, and the woman is not âequal to him in front of the
lawâ and cannot âhold money herselfâ. Talks of âstruggleâ are eclipsed
behind complains about economic and legal inequality.
Fortunatiâs liberal ârealityâ behind her Marxian âappearanceâ seems to
be connected with the main problem of the book, highlighted in Section 4
above. Fortunati cannot go beyond theorising an âunfair exchangeâ
because of her initial assumption, that labour power is âa commodity
like all othersâ; because she cannot grasp the nature of labour power as
a special commodity whose (fair) exchange implies the (unfair)
submission of the worker to despotism and alienation. Because she cannot
grasp the important dialectic of bourgeois freedom and equality of
exchange with bourgeois despotism and exploitation in production. And
she cannot see that âexchange value or, more precisely, the money system
is in fact the system of equality and freedomâ and exploitation is
âinherent in it... merely the realisation of equality and freedom, which
prove to be inequality and unfreedomâ.[115]
Leopoldinaâs Mathematical skills (note scanned pictures of formulae from
the book are currently missing from this online version)
To finish, let us consider page 98 of The Arcane of Reproduction, which
must have undoubtedly inspired the deepest awe in its readers. This page
contains the âcalculationâ of... something. But what? This is a good
question indeed. Fortunati introduces these formulas by defining a
quantity pâ as âthe amount of the surplus value supplied in the
processes of production and reproductionâ and a quantity P as âthe
average surplus value supplied by the single labour powerâ (p. 98) but
then she presents a âformulaâ for a mysterious quantity Pâ that has
never been introduced at all. The âcomplexityâ of this formula is
already brewing in this mysterious introduction. But let us look at how
she proceeds (see p. 98)
Besides the clumsy introduction (is Pâ equal to pâ?) and the confusing
use of unnecessary labeling (why nâ instead of n? etc.), in these
âformulaeâ there is something more substantial than just a question of
sloppiness. What is written on the right of Pâ does not mean anything in
mathematical language. What is the relation between the âformulaeâ on
the right of Pâ, which are just piled up one on the top of the other?
What is the relation between the two âformulaeâ on the bottom right of
Pâ, which seem to be adjacent to each other, with no clear connection?
Mathematics is something âscientifically trueâ, black and white, only
because, by its own definition and nature, it talks a language that does
not leave the reader anything to guess.
But let us also look at the relation between the two âformulaeâ at the
bottom right of Pâ. They are separated by a mysterious empty space.
Again, we are obliged to make a guess, while the founding fathers of
mathematics turn in their grave.[116] Are perhaps these two formulae
multiplied by each other â i.e., is there a missing âxâ sign between
them? But this would mean that the mysterious quantity Pâ would be
proportional to the squares of a rate of surplus and the number of
workers â which is rather unlikely whatever Pâ is, and above all if we
have guessed right that Pâ is surplus value. On the other hand, the two
âformulaeâ cannot be added, subtracted or equated (+, -, = ) to each
other either! Indeed, the first of the two âformulaeâ contains fâ which,
as Fortunati says, is value; and (aâ/aâ) and nâ which are pure numbers:
so the first âformulaâ is value. The second âformulaâ contains only
(aâ/aâ) and nâ, so it is a pure number. Value cannot be added,
subtracted or equated to a number.[117] So what is this relation between
those two âformulaeâ? The only solution of this riddle is: it is an
unbelievably bad typo. Probably a whole chunk of formula (= fâ x) has
been unwittingly missed between the two âformulaeâ. But this is not just
a typo; it is the disappearance of a whole chunk of logical connections.
It turns the whole lot into an evident nonsense, and it should have been
spotted by the author.
If Fortunati had avoided âformulaeâ, not only would she have avoided
embarrassment for their mismanagement, but she would also have missed
nothing in her arguments. In fact, this use of mathematics is only a
rhetorical exercise. Let us consider the logic of this formulaic mess:
she claims she wants to âcalculateâ the total surplus value supplied to
the capitalists by both workers and housewives. In order to do this, she
just takes the known expression for the rate of surplus value and feeds
her invisible labour quantities into it. This is like claiming to be
able to control a magic force M, and then, in order to convince people
to believe in its existence, show them the law of Newton (F = ma; the
force applied to a body of mass m is equal to its acceleration
multiplied by its mass) as:
(F + M) = ma
The use of a formula here does not add anything to my claim of the
existence of the magical force M, and does not tell the readers how to
measure it. It also does not affect the acceleration a, if we define F
to be such to give the correct acceleration if added to M. In practice,
this âformulaâ has the only aim of giving my statements some respectful
âmathematicalâ decoration. Of making my readers say: âIf it is in a
formula, it must be true!â
However, formula 1 looks still too readable and it is not intimidating
enough. In order to sort this out, I can do a bit of cut-and-paste and
here you go:
(F+M) (F+Mâ) x
ma = (2)
+F Fâ x(F+M)
This is much more complex, thus more authoritative, and scary enough to
deter any criticism of my magic force.[118]
When it comes to âmathematicalâ demonstrations, going fuzzy seems to be
a general feature of the Autonomist tradition. Cleaver in Reading
Capital Politically, page 123, offers us a brilliant example of the use
of mathematics in order to complicate and even contradict, what he says
in plain words. Discussing the contribution of the housewife to
capitalâs profits, Cleaver correctly argues that housework serves to
lower the value of labour power, thus increasing the value pocketed by
the capitalist as surplus. This is clear, and an interesting point. But
then he tries to express this point with the following unfortunate
âformulaâ:
How do we read this âformulaâ? The cycle of production of capital, which
is the second line, says that at the beginning of a cycle the capitalist
invests money (M) to buy some labour power (LP) and some means of
production (MP); then the worker produces (P), and the outcome of
production is a new commodity Câ, which is worth more value and is
exchanged for a higher sum of money (Mâ) than the one initially
invested. This cycle repeats. The extra money, cycle by cycle, is
pocketed by the capitalist as surplus value.
In correspondence to the cycle of production, there is a cycle of
reproduction (first line). Let us read it step by step. At the beginning
of the cycle (day 1 of work), the worker sells to the capitalist the
labour power LP for a quantity of money M. With this money, the family
buys their means of subsistence C(MS). Then the workerâs wife does some
housework (P). After the housework is done, the worker finds himself to
be in possession of the labour power LP*. Cleaver states: LP* is
different from LP and it is worth less. This means that the labour power
that the worker has after his wifeâs work is worth less than the labour
power he sold to the capitalist the day before. Fortunately this is not
very bad for him because in the next cycle (day 2 of work), he is able
to rip off the capitalist, and apparently sell LP* for the same amount
of money M he had received the day before when he sold LP, although LP*
is worth less... Of course, all this is just ludicrous and if Cleaver
had left this âformulaâ out his arguments about housework would have
been clearer.
Cleaverâs âformulaâ also confirms the general and unavoidable curse of
housework: that of having always to contribute to capital valorisation
in an invisible way â no matter how much one twists mathematics, this
value seems to be just unable to appear in numbers, black and white! The
second line in the formula, i.e. the cycle of production, confirms that
for the capitalist nothing has changed from day 1: on day 2, he buys the
same labour power LP as the day before, whatever the amount of work done
by the housewife, and he is apparently unaware of LP*, which does not
play any role in the cycle of production.
As we said in the Introduction, the present critique of The Arcane of
Reproduction was principally aimed at commenting on a few questions that
have been central in the Autonomist tradition:
production) create value?
only produce value but are also organised as waged work?
capital, i.e. a subject that merely wants to impose (work) discipline,
and the working class?
In Section 1 we explored the reasons behind the Autonomist argument that
work outside the sphere of production creates value. We showed that this
âquestâ for value is consistent with the Autonomist subjectivist reading
of Marxâs categories, e.g. value and abstract labour: if value and
abstract labour have immediate meanings in terms of subjective
antagonism with capital, they may be extended to explain the struggles
of the unwaged: the unemployed, students, etc.
Starting from Fortunatiâs claim that the family is a hidden factory
organised âcapitalisticallyâ, in Section 2 we explored the Autonomist
thesis that all waged and unwaged work is organised by capital as in an
extended factory. We acknowledged that this theorization has a moment of
truth â it is true that capital tends to impose the discipline of waged
work onto unwaged activity. It is true that this can explain the
antagonism of the unwaged. It is also true that any disruption of
reproduction or circulation is a disruption of the workings of capital
as a whole â thus struggles outside the workplace can be effective
against capital. However, this does not necessarily mean, nor requires
as a precondition, that unwaged work must create value.
In Section 3 we discussed the way in which capital imposes âdisciplineâ
on unwaged activity. We considered the dialectical interplay of
capitalâs despotism within the workplace and bourgeois exchange, which
regulates the division of labour and defines the horizons for individual
choice and possibility in society. We stressed that bourgeois freedom
and equality and capitalâs despotism are two sides of the same coin.
In Section 4 we argued that The Arcane of Reproduction lacks this
dialectical understanding. We quoted a few sentences, among many, which
suggest that freedom, equality (and Bentham) are illusory in capitalism
only because they are constrained by despotism and distorted by unequal
exchange â an old Proudhonian idea. There is no clear attempt to explore
the role of bourgeois freedom of exchange and value in capitalâs rule â
instead, the centrality of exchange and value in human relations is
uncritically assumed as natural and ahistorical. We found a similar
one-sidedness in Negri and Hardt. In Empire the authors dream about
ârepublicanismâ, and claim that âa kind of spontaneous and elementary
communismâ is possible on the basis of the already existing wealth of
individual freedom and productive creativity.[119] And they denounce
capitalâs imposition of discipline and control over this freedom and
creativity. All this means is to theorise only one possible freedom or
creativity: the only ones defined within the bourgeois relations as
given.[120]
Section 5 went to the core of Fortunatiâs own theory in The Arcane of
Reproduction, i.e. that labour power is âa commodity like all othersâ
thus it must contain value as the crystallisation of abstract labour of
housework. We disagreed and argued that in wage-work relations labour
power is sold as a commodity, but it is a special commodity, different
from all others â this difference exposes the inequality inherent in the
wage-work relation. We argued that conceptualising labour power as âa
commodity like all othersâ and thinking that we all produce value means
to conceptualise society as being made up of independent producers:
producers of cakes, producers of labour power... and we felt that this
betrayed a petty bourgeois delusion. In general, we noticed a common
tendency in Autonomist Marxism to consider within the same theoretical
framework labour power and other commodities (e.g. energy and food); or
a tendency to conflate the despotism of the foreman on the waged worker
with the pressure of the market on the independent producer.[121]
In Section 6 we discussed the nature of value and abstract labour and
showed that Fortunatiâs understanding of these concepts is fundamentally
flawed. In general, one may be tempted to widen Marxâs original concept
of value in order to embrace both waged and unwaged work (students,
housewives...), or both productive and unproductive work (financial,
advertising industry...), within the same âtheoretical frameworkâ.
However, it is questionable that âlabelingâ everything that happens
under the sun of capital as âproduction of valueâ is a useful way of
explaining how capital works and dominates.[122]
In fact, the Autonomist attempt to âvaloriseâ all activity tends to mix
up a moral conception of âvalorisationâ with an economic one. The claim
of a social reward which society supposedly âowesâ the unwaged because
of some alleged role in âproducing valueâ is part of a tradition of
struggles of the unemployed and housewives of the â70s which confronted
their States and ended up demanding social support from them. This
tradition has survived in some theorists who belonged or still belong to
the Autonomist tradition.[123] As we discussed earlier, in Empire the
claim that unwaged work creates value is explicitly aimed at justifying
moralistically the demand for a ârewardâ, a âcitizenâs wageâ, for the
unwaged.
The Arcane of Reproduction contributes to this tendency and theorises
that housewives are denied recognition of social and economic status
within the present social relations as producers of âvalueâ. She cannot
imagine any reality beyond that offered by bourgeois relations and
cannot think or claim anything beyond this restricted horizon. This is
why she claims that demanding that the housewife be âallowed to consumeâ
or praising parentsâ practice in giving pocket money to children is
âvery anti-capitalistâ![124]
As it was discussed throughout this article, some authors within the
Autonomist Marxist tradition still retain a criticism of the commodity
form, e.g. De Angelis and Cleaver. While it was important to consider
that Fortunati shares themes and jargon with these authors, it was also
necessary to stress their differences.[125]
Only a few words about Fortunatiâs style and methodology. Fortunatiâs
âdenseâ style is one of the main reasons for our disappointment as
readers. A text intended to present a new theory should have the quality
of rigour, a quality that this pamphlet does not have. What can we make
of her theory if we read one thing on one page and the opposite on the
next? In fact we showed that Fortunatiâs convoluted style actually hides
contradictions and the lack of conceptual clarity in her content.
If readers are not intimidated enough by Fortunatiâs style, they will
surely be by her methodology. Fortunatiâs analysis starts with an axiom,
a âtruthâ, which the reader has to accept without arguments or
justifications for it: âlabour power is a commodity like all others,
contained within the person of the workerâ. This âtruthâ and its
âlogicalâ consequences contradict facts and previous theories, but this
does not mean that there is something wrong â only that those facts are
âapparentâ and those theories are âmisconceivedâ â she says with an
authoritative tone which does not admit reply.[126] The result of this
methodology is a ânew theoryâ which needs plenty of suspended disbelief
because it is at odds with reality, theories, logic, common sense, or
concrete experience. This methodology explains the... arcane of all the
âcomplexitiesâ that Fortunati seems to find in her subject matter page
by page.[127] Indeed, even very simple facts become âextremely complexâ
if they are analysed through a theory that is at odds with reality and
which has rejected theories previously devised to explain reality
straightforwardly.
So then, does housework create value, or not? We have seen in the
previous sections that the answer is: no. Housework does not produce
commodities, and the labour involved in it cannot be abstracted and
measured as abstract labour, as a contribution to value. But we have
also seen the value supposedly created by housework cannot be pinned
down anywhere.
In the TV comedy The Fast Show which was popular in UK at the end of the
â90s one of the sketches was a studio interview, where a journalist
invited an explorer to talk about a discovery he had made, of a monster
in the wild. But, question by question, the explorer reveals that he did
not see the monster because it was invisible; that the monster made a
terrifying silence; and that it did not leave traces because it hovered
about. At this point the journalist gets up in anger and chases the
explorer out of the studio. Fortunatiâs invisible value, which does not
manifest itself on the market, which floats in the air, and that needs
to be created again by the husband worker during the process of
production while it had allegedly already been created by his wife in
the process of reproduction, has exactly the same qualities of the Fast
Showâs monster: i.e., if it is really there or not, if you swear about
its existence or not, it does not make any difference in the world.
Toni Negri and Michael Hardtâs recent works, Empire[128] and
Multitude,[129] have earned these authors great popularity in the
Anglo-Saxon world. Negri is known in Italy for belonging to autonomia
operaia in the â70s and for being on the receiving end of political
persecution by the Italian state at the end of that decade. His earlier
work (above all Marx Beyond Marx)[130] was a valid contribution to the
understanding of the nature of capitalism and influenced many among us
who sought an answer to Marxist objectivism and a theory of history
based on class struggle.
However, Negriâs earlier work circulated among a restricted public, via
obscure publishers. The new Toni Negri for the ânewâ era emerges in 2000
with Empire. A tome written with literature professor Michaelâs Hardt,
Empire was warmly welcomed even by the bourgeois press.[131]
Negriâs popularity is to be found above all in the fact that his new
work addresses important questions, opened by the end of the cycle of
struggles of the â70s. In particular: can we still speak about
communism, the revolution, classes, in a world where the conditions for
working class struggle seem to have been dismantled?
The new Negri proclaims the advent of a new, postmodern, phase of
capitalism, in which orthodox Marxism no longer applies; and which needs
a new theory: theirs. As Negri and Hardt say:
Social reality changes... then the old theories are no longer adequate.
We need new theories for the new reality... Capitalist production and
capitalist society has changed... (Multitude, p. 140)
Negri and Hardtâs work to find a new theory for the ânewâ world proceeds
alongside other academics, such as Paolo Virno or Maurizio Lazzarato.
Their effort contributed to the development of new concepts such as that
of âimmaterial labourâ and the âmultitudeâ.
An important reason for Negri and Hardtâs popularity is that their work
seems to integrate the most fashionable theories of the last twenty
years: postmodernism, theories of post-Fordism, weightless economy, etc.
â but it is also a theory that presents itself as revolutionary and
anti-capitalist.
Another important reason for Negri and Hardtâs success is that their
theory is able to cover an enormous number of popular and urgent issues:
globalisation, the retreat of traditional class struggle, aspects of
capitalist restructuring, the emergence of new social movements, the
Zapatistas or the anti-GM peasant struggles in India.
We may perhaps be surprised that one book (or two: Multitude appears
mainly to clarify Empireâs arguments[132]) can contain all this. But
Negri and Hardt have a secret: they employ a new, postmodern style
suitable, as Maria Turchetto comments, âfor zappingâ rather than for a
systematic reading.[133] Thanks to this style Negri and Hardt can
swiftly touch upon a broad range of loosely interrelated issues, often
in passing, often addressing the immediately obvious and the immediately
agreeable. And indeed, for example, Autonomy & Solidarity notices that
Negri and Hardtâs attractiveness is in the unquestionable positivity of
their âdemands for true democracy, freedom from poverty and an end to
the warâ.[134]
Although it has generated innumerable criticisms and comments, Negri and
Hardtâs theory of everything escapes a comprehensive critique simply
because of this fractalic nature.[135] We, too, are obliged to focus, of
course. But we choose an issue that seems to be the backbone of their
whole construction: the concept of immaterial labour/production.
In Empire Negri and Hardt claim they contributed to an international
theoretical effort of definition and understanding of the concept of
immaterial labour, the new labour for the ânewâ era.[136] Initially
conceived as labour based on the use of thought and knowledge,
immaterial labour was later enriched by Negri and Hardt with the aspect
of âmanipulation of affectsâ. And it was redefined in terms of its aims
rather than the nature of its material activity in order to dodge
obvious objections (any labour, let alone âaffectiveâ labour like care,
always involves physical activity, etc.).
By Empire then, the newest definition of immaterial labour was: labour
whose aim is to produce immaterial goods (Multitude, p. 334). As Negri
and Hardt explain in Multitude:
The labour involved in all immaterial production, we should emphasise,
remains material... what is immaterial is its product. (Multitude, p.
111)
So defined, immaterial labour has two main aspects:
a) it is âmanipulation of symbolsâ (i.e. IT work, production of
knowledge, problem-solving, etc.)
and/or
b) it is âmanipulation of affectsâ (production of emotions, well-being,
smiles, etc.).[137]
Despite this stress, in the course of their work Negri and Hardt freely
use both the definitions considered above: immaterial labour as the
creation of immaterial products and as any labour implying âimmaterialâ
practices (e.g. post-Fordism and computerisation).
If this conceptual freedom may confuse us, it is only because we still
think of production in a traditional way: as production of commodities.
A more open mind like theirs, which sees production as anything done in
society, can easily conceive the communication between staff in a car
factory as a product in its own rights. Thus post-Fordist production can
be seen as immaterial production alongside services and IT.
In fact, under the âhegemonyâ of immaterial production, all production,
including material production, tends to become more immaterial â living
in a world where immaterial production is central, we increasingly tend
to produce all goods for their images and meanings rather than their
material functionality.
Not only all production, but, Negri and Hardt repeat many times, society
as a whole is shaped by immaterial production. Immaterial production
defines the way we see the world and the way we act in the world â in
Hardtâs words, it has âanthropological implicationsâ.[138] As we read in
Multitude, immaterial production shapes society in its image. It makes
society more informationalised, intelligent, affective:
Our claim... is that immaterial labour has become hegemonic in
qualitative terms and has imposed a tendency on other forms of labour
and society itself... Just as in [the times of the âhegemonyâ of
industrial production] society itself had to industrialise itself, today
âsociety has to informationalise, become intelligent, become affective.
(Multitude, p. 109)
Daring more, Negri and Hardt argue that not only does immaterial
production influence society, but it actually produces it. This is true,
they say, because this new production mainly aims at the production of
communication and affects. Daily, tons of communication and affects are
created by services, by selling âwith a smileâ, by the advertising
industry, and via the Internet â not to speak about all the
communication encouraged by Toyotism. Taking this production of
communications and affects as a production of âsocial relations and
social lifeâ in its entirety, Negri and Hardt call immaterial production
a âbiopolitical productionâ, i.e. a production of life:[139]
It might be better to understand [immaterial labour] as âbiopolitical
labourâ, that is labour which creates not only material goods but also
relationships and ultimately social life itself. (Multitude, p. 111)
As we will see later in detail, immaterial production defines a ânewâ
form of capitalist exploitation by the new global capitalist regime,
Empire. But it also makes a revolution against this regime possible.
How? Immaterial production, being based on the powers of our thoughts
and hearts, is already potentially autonomous from the capitalist they
say. Only a little step then separates us from taking this production
over from the parasitic capitalist and self-manage it.
We can appreciate then how immaterial production sustains Negri and
Hardtâs arguments and their political project. And, as we shall see
below, it allows Negri and Hardt to construct a broad, universal theory
that can present itself as radical. This is the reason why we will focus
on immaterial production in this article. If we want to critique a
multicoloured necklace it is not good enough to speak about the necklace
as a whole and miss the beads â but it is not good enough too, to focus
on one bead. What we try to do is to have a go at the string.
In this article we will argue that under the appearance of a
revolutionary theory, Negri and Hardtâs work hides a subtle apology for
capital and constitutes an inverted version of the traditional Marxism
that it was set to oppose.
In Section 1 we see how the concept of immaterial labour substantiates
all the most interesting aspects of Negri and Hardtâs theory and keeps
apparently contradictory or incompatible elements of it together in an
elegant unity.
In Section 2 we explore Negri and Hardtâs idea of history as class
struggle, specifically, the historical emergence of immaterial
production.
In Section 3 we comment on Negri and Hardtâs argument that immaterial
production is inherently autonomous from the control of the capitalist,
thus potentially free from capital and amenable to self-management.
In Section 4 we consider the origin of class antagonism in the case of
immaterial production of ideas and knowledge.
In Section 5 we consider the issue of class antagonism in the case of
immaterial production of affections and communication.
In this section we show that the concept of immaterial labour, or
better, immaterial production, is the pivotal element for Negri and
Hardtâs analysis and for their popularity. On the one hand it allows
them to subsume the bourgeois theories which, in the â80s, challenged
traditional Marxism. But on the other hand it allows them to subsume
these theories into a revolutionary, subjective, anti-capitalist theory.
And it seems to offer an explanation for the new movements which sounds
reasonable (and flattering) to the participants.
As we anticipated in the Introduction, immaterial labour plays a
fundamental role in a central quality of Negri and Hardtâs theory: its
intellectual universality. Specifically, both Empire and Multitude, as
well as Negriâs pre-Empire work, successfully appropriate a large range
of theories of the present among the most fashionable of the â80s and
early â90s.[140] As we will see, it is precisely the concept of
immaterial production that enables this appropriation without making the
result appear obviously eclectic.
In particular, Negri and Hardt adopt âtruthsâ from âmillennialâ views of
the present world which, in different ways and for different reasons say
that we live in a ânew eraâ: a post-industrial, postmodern,
post-Fordist, society. Let us make a short list of such theories:
A) TOYOTISM AND POST-FORDISM
A widespread millennial theory is that we live in a ânewâ era dominated
by the transition from industrial/Fordist, production to
post-industrial/post-Fordist production â with Toyotism as the champion
of a new vision (âparadigmâ) of production.
This idea was theorised by the French Regulation School as early as the
1970s.[141] By the end of the â80s such ideas were widespread in the
intellectual world, having perhaps lost rigour but gained
inter-cultural, multidisciplinary breadth. It was widely acknowledged
that the ânewâ paradigm of post-Fordist production dictated a new view
of life as âopen networksâ and had buried linear or structured views of
seeing the world, connected to industrial production.
The western business world was intrigued by Toyotism in the â80s and
early â90s. Toyotaâs methods such as âjust-in-timeâ (zero-stock)
production and team work, together with plenty of ideological fripperies
about âintegratingâ the working class and winning their hearts and
minds, were introduced in a number of factories e.g. Rover at
Longbridge, UK, or FIAT at Melfi, Italy in the early â90s.[142]
However, this interest is in decline, if it has ever been that important
at all.[143] For example, FIATâs recent trends are to speed up conveyor
belt work. Their notorious harsh method TMC2 has triggered recent fierce
struggles in all their plants included Melfi![144] Although time moves
on for the business, it does not for Negri and Hardt, who still consider
Toyotism as âhegemonicâ in production â even when everybody else has
given up the idea.
B) INFORMATION SOCIETY THEORIES AND KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY THEORIES
Championed by academics (or popularisers) such as Brzezinski, Toffler
and Ohmae âinformation society theoriesâ claim that the ânewâ hi-tech
production has led to a ânewâ post-capitalist society.[145] Similarly,
academics and/or popularisers such as Robert Reich insist that we live
in a
ânew eraâ where knowledge and analytical labour is central in a new
weightless, advanced economy. These changes have abolished the
contradictions of capitalism, exposed the Marxist concept of value as
meaningless, and/or abolished the division of western society into
classes.[146]
C) MILLENNIAL SHIFT TO SERVICE WORK
Extrapolations of some trends in production have long led to the claim
that we live in a ânew eraâ where production has moved to the service
sector, taking the lead from industrial production and changed the
paradigms of production. In this ânewâ era where service is central, it
is argued, Marxâs analysis of labour and value cannot be applied anymore
â a view which we find in Rifkin, for example.[147]
D) POSTMODERNISM
Postmodernism suggest we live in a ânewâ society characterised by a
number of overlapping aspects, all of which imply that what has been
said about capitalism is outdated. One aspect of the post-modern society
is the fragmentation of identity and, crucially, the end of a working
class identity. Another aspect, which we find for example in the work of
Jean Baudrillard, is that since today production is centred on the
symbolic meanings of commodities, the Marxist concept of âuse valuesâ,
thus all Marxist analysis, is outdated.[148]
E) NEGRI AND HARDTâS SUMMARY OF BOURGEOIS THOUGHT
Let us seen now how the concept of immaterial production allows Negri
and Hardt to appropriate all the diverse theorisations or observations
above in what appears one, elegant, unified theory.
First and most importantly, immaterial production is appropriately
defined to include all the different activities (from IT to services)
considered above.
Second, immaterial production appears to explain Baudrillardâs
observation that goods are increasingly produced and bought for their
symbolic meanings. Indeed, as we said earlier, under the âhegemonyâ of
immaterial production the production of material goods is increasingly
the production of images, ideas or affects.[149]
Third, under the âhegemonyâ of immaterial production, which stresses
âcommunicationâ and âcooperationâ, all material production tends to
adopt post-Fordist methods of production such as, er... Toyotism. In
fact Toyotism involves lots of communication, co-operation, use of
âsynergyâ etc. â at least if we believe in the
Japanese-management-inspired business plans of the late â80s.
Last but not least, the hegemony of immaterial production on society
explains the postmodernist observation concerning the present
fragmentation of workersâ identity. The new organisation of immaterial
production in fact defines a new way, in general, that we interrelate in
society: as networks of free âsingularitiesâ. The party, and other such
rigid structures made sense only within a paradigm of industrial
production, and now are rejected. Negri and Hardt stick to the ideology
of postmodernism, by celebrating the isolation of recent struggles, and
suggest that their failure to spread could mean that they were
âimmediately subversive in themselvesâ (Empire, p. 58). For Negri and
Hardt, a new cycle of struggle will not be characterised by an extension
of struggles, but by a constellation of individual struggles, which will
be flexibly and loosely connected in networks (Empire, p.58.).[150]
Thus âimmaterial labourâ has elegantly embraced, explained and surpassed
all the above theories and observations in one Unified Theory.[151]
Negri and Hardtâs appropriation of such postmodernist and post-Fordist
bourgeois theories, no doubt earns them respect in the academic world.
Indeed in the â80s and early â90s, grim times of retreat of class
struggle, the balance of academic prestige tilted on the side of
bourgeois, triumphant theories. It was the right time to proclaim the
end of the working class and the end of history; to sneer at
âpaleo-Marxismâ;[152] and propose individualistic, postmodern,
post-industrial, ânewâ theories for the ânewâ world. Unlike the Marxists
that tried to refute their theories, Negri and Hardt rather appropriate
them. In doing this they do not side with the loser, with the
paleo-Marxist â they side with the intellectual winners who have history
on their side.
While on the one hand Negri and Hardt take onboard the bourgeois
celebrations of the end of history and class struggle, on the other they
are able to incorporate these views in a theory which still speaks about
class struggle and still sees capital as a contradiction.[153] This
again is made possible by the concept of immaterial production.
In fact for Negri and Hardt immaterial production is itself a
contradiction for capital, precisely because of its immaterial nature.
Unlike material activity, Negri and Hardt suggest, the production of
communication, ideas or affects escape capitalâs control and make labour
increasingly autonomous from capital. Capital is thus trapped in a
dilemma: on the one hand it needs to encourage heart and mind
activities, on the other its control is undermined by them.
âImmaterial productionâ creates also another contradiction: it
undermines private property.[154] Indeed, repeat Negri and Hardt ad
nauseam, immaterial products, which are products of thought, are
necessarily created in common as commons â âno one thinks aloneâ, they
insist, and add: no production of ideas can exist without a socially
shared world of ideas, shared languages and culture (Multitude, p. 147).
Facing this threatening form of production, capital, it is argued, has
to strive to re-establish private property by appropriating, enclosing,
controlling, what it is currently produced âin commonâ (Multitude, pp.
149; 113). In trying to interfere and restrain the freedom of âcommonâ
production, however, capital hinders its productivity. Capital then is
trapped in a contradiction: that between the socialisation of the forces
of (immaterial) production and the logic of private property.
The concept of immaterial production serves Negri and Hardt to have the
cake of adopting bourgeois objectivistic theories and to eat them in a
subjectivistic custard.
The post-Fordist and information theories which are taken onboard by
Negri and Hardt are in fact essentially doctrines of autonomous
technology or autonomous forms of production where technology or methods
of production are the prime mover of history and capable of shaping
subjectivity and society as a whole.[155] We can appreciate how attached
Negri and Hardt are to these theories when we read, for example, that
the present âparadigmâ of production âdictatesâ... âour ways of
understanding the world and acting in itâ (Multitude, p. 142). Or that:
âpostmodernisation or informationalisation today marks a new way of
becoming humanâ (Empire, p. 289).
On the other hand, while toying with such objectivistic ideas, Negri
needs to give them a radical twist, in order to make his theory exciting
and to be true to his revolutionary past. But how can Negri realise this
twist? Thanks, we say, to the concept of immaterial production.
In fact, first of all, immaterial production is itself the product of
subjectivity and class struggle. In fact it was born in the â60s and
â70s, as the classâs subjective, autonomous, experimentation with ânew
ways of producingâ. Capital was forced to move into immaterial
production to dominate a new labour power that had redefined itself,
autonomously, as creative, communicative and affective (Empire, p. 276).
Second, once established as dominant production, in its ongoing practice
immaterial production has a subjective, autonomous, drive. It is
immaterial, it is the result of out thoughts, thus the result of our
subjectivities and it is then inherently autonomous from capital. With
immaterial production labour manifests its autonomy from capital, which
Autonomia has always seen hidden behind capitalist production. As
Witheford notices:
[For] Autonomist Marxism ... the worker is the active subject of
production, the well-spring of the skills, innovation and co-operation
on which capital must draw... Capital needs labour but labour does not
need capital. Labour... can dispense with the wage relation... it is
potentially autonomous. (Witheford, âAutonomist Marxismâ, p. 89)
Immaterial labour hence produces a ânewâ condition in which subjectivity
has a central role as a prime mover of capitalâs innovations, today.
Having proclaimed that production is today driven by our autonomous
subjectivity, Negri and Hardt can claim without appearing objectivistic
that the paradigm of immaterial production shapes our subjectivity in
turn. Whatâs wrong in saying that our subjectivity is determined by
something, if we have discovered that, ultimately, this something was
created by our subjectivity itself?
Lastly, class struggle against capital is led by subjectivity too. We
are shaped by production, but, Negri and Hardt add in a generosity of
overdetermination, âworkersâ subjectivity is also created in the
antagonism of the experience of exploitationâ (Multitude, pp. 151, our
italic).
Exploitation? Did they not say that today immaterial labour is done âin
common, autonomously from capital? Negri is clear indeed: in the ânewâ
era of immaterial production we can no longer speak of the real
subsumption of labour. Today we are all free, independent craftsmen, all
producing with our own means of production: our brain. If now, Negri
says, âwe have all the tools we need to work in our heads... [then]
capitalism today needs to make free men work â free men who have their
own means, their own toolsâ.[156]
But Negri and Hardt cannot deny the undeniable. Exploitation and
capitalist control still exist â only, they explain to the increasingly
confused reader, in a new form. Capital today superimposes and
appropriates what we produce âin commonâ, as free and independent
producers. As Negri says:
Capital must... superimpose itself on the autonomous capability of
manufacturing knowledge.... This is the form which expropriation takes
in advanced capitalism (Toni Negri, The Politics of Subversion: A
Manifesto for the Twenty First Century, Polity, Cambridge, 1989, p. 116)
In this conception, we are petty producers â or if we prefer, autonomous
peasants â while capital only acts as a predator, an aristocrat who
comes to the village and appropriates a part (âor allâ) of what we have
produced.[157] This new form of exploitation is the cause of antagonism,
a subjective spring of struggle.
And what about the future communist world? Also here the concept of
immaterial production plays an important role. Thanks to immaterial
production, revolution becomes something feasible and rational.
How? Negri and Hardt explain: unlike previous production, the rationale
and means necessary for immaterial production are increasingly inherent
in labour practice itself â this means that immaterial production is
already under our control and the capitalist already parasitical.
Revolution as self-management is only the next feasible and rational
step (Multitude, p. 336).
Beyond production our new society as a whole is also increasingly
amenable to political self-management, thanks to immaterial production.
This happens because, in Negri and Hardtâs view, immaterial production
is also production of life, biopolitical production. Their logic is
straightforward: if immaterial production is increasingly autonomous
from capital, society as a whole is too, because production is one with
production of life and society. This, Negri and Hardt tell us, happens
now, under our unbelieving eyes![158] Indeed today,
The balance has tipped such that the ruled now [sic] tend to be the
exclusive producers of social organisation... the rulers become even
more parasitical the ruled become increasingly autonomous, capable of
forming society on their own.... (Multitude, p. 336)[159]
In this optimistic view, the revolution will be the liberation, reached
at a political level, of already developing immaterial forces of
production and social relations from the parasitic control of already
redundant capitalist rulers. This kind of revolution appears rational
and viable, being based on something already present.
Revolutionary theories are normally rather scary â but this one is
reassuring, thanks to immaterial production.
It is a theory which speaks about a future that is imaginable, thus
acceptable: the revolution will not require radical subversions, jumps
in the dark, too much imagination or other such uncomfortable things. In
this view the future will simply be the completion of the present, based
on already existing conditions created by immaterial production
now.[160]
Crucially we are reassured that the future will be democratic and
egalitarian. The present un-democracy and inequality are effects of a
distortion â of the fact that capital overlaps and channels our
production, creating despotism and spurious selectivity on our
capacities, thus inequality of rewards.[161] But this is not, they
insist, inherent in immaterial production in itself. Indeed, the
relations currently created by immaterial production are âcivil
processes of democratic exchangeâ, democratic in nature (Multitude, p.
311) and confer on us âequal opportunity of struggleâ â and thus the
equal opportunity to negotiate power in the future society.
The most attractive aspect of Negri and Hardtâs theory is that
âimmaterial labour has the quality to be about unquestionably positive
things: democracy first, but also creativity, affections, communication,
and so on. Communism as the self management of the present will be based
on all these unquestionably good things. Who would not like the idea of
communism if this means lots of good things?
The concept of immaterial labour also serves Negri and Hardt to appeal
to those from the advanced western countries involved in current
anti-capitalist protests, the movements for global âsocial justiceâ,
etc.
In the present times of defeat and weakness, the demonstrations in Genoa
and Seattle, the anti-war movement, and many large or small radical
activities are indeed a demonstration of power, but they do not, because
they cannot, challenge our daily work relations and reproduction as an
immediate target.
This audience wants to hear about the end of capitalism, but through
democratic values and practices which are the only values and practices
that seem conceivable in our conditions. As we have seen already, Negri
and Hardt can satisfy them with their stress on âidealâ democracy.
This audience want a theory which explains their struggles, which are
not struggles for bread and butter. Negri and Hardt fit the bill. In a
ânew eraâ which focuses on immaterial rather than material goods, it is
no surprise that the new struggles are not about bread and butter issues
anymore, but over the control of âcommunicational resourcesâ; over âthe
communal appropriation of computer and media networks, over the freeing
of educational and research resources...â. (Witheford, âAutonomist
Marxsimâ, p. 110) Or we can always see any present struggle as an
expression of âbiopoliticalâ production of communication and affects, if
we want to.
In Negri and Hardtâs theory these ânew strugglesâ have then a centrality
in history, they are part of the very revolution which leads us to
communism. For a protester who is told by the Marxist that what he does
is historically epiphenomenal, Negri and Hardtâs theory is the best
doctrine around. What can be more exciting to be told: âWell done, you
are in the driving seat of Historyâ?
In this section we comment on one of the central issues in Negri and
Hardt, that immaterial production is itself the result of the struggles
of the â60s and â70s, when the class experimented with ânew
productivityâ, and autonomously redefined itself as creative, flexible,
communicative labour power. We agree that the emergence of what Negri
and Hardt call immaterial production should be analysed as class
struggle, but we argue that immaterial production is an aspect of the
domination of capital over labour, though contradictory and unstable. We
then question Negri and Hardtâs vision of immaterial production as
having inherent anti-capitalist aspects in itself and their view of a
communist future based on its self-management.
struggle â myth and reality
How did immaterial labour come about? According to Empire, during the
struggles in the â60s and â70s against large scale industry, the working
class produced its âparadigmâ. The mass worker was so strong that they
could fold its arms and stop capital exploiting them. Many proletarians,
still students, refused to enter the factory. This free people, Negri
and Hardt say, embraced Bohemian life, artistic activity and psychedelic
production in LSD (which is, we admit, immaterial per excellence).
Thus, Negri and Hardt conclude, the class redefined itself,
autonomously, as creative, communicative, flexible labour power, forcing
capital to adopt immaterial production in order to exploit it. This
marks the birth of immaterial production according to Negri and Hardt:
capital had to abandon the large scale factory, its linear production,
its inflexible working day and its mechanistic logic and employ open
networks and flexi-time and give space to creativity. Since then
immaterial production becomes âhegemonicâ.
Negri and Hardtâs theory is unproblematically subjective, exciting and
revolutionary. It tells us that there is something inherently positive
in the present hegemonic production, and that this is the result of our
autonomous vitality. Do we agree with this exciting history of
immaterial production as class struggle? We agree, of course, with the
principle that history is the history of class struggle, and that the
dynamics of capital are aspect of this struggle, but we are sceptical
about the specific way in which Empire seems to apply this principle.
Let us then consider the emergence of immaterial production more
closely, and see how this articulates with class struggle. What we will
see will no doubt inspire less feel-good effects to our readers than
Toni Negriâs inspiring, rose tinted optimism. But, as we will discuss
later, the reality of capital as a contradiction is not that we feel
good in it but that we inescapably feel bad.
the creation of ideas and knowledge
Let us consider first the aspect of immaterial production as the
creation of ideas and knowledge.
Against traditional Marxism, which saw history as driven by the
development of the forces of production, Autonomia, with Mario Tronti in
particular, re-proposed in the â70s that history is a history of class
struggle and that the objectivity of capital is a result of this
struggle.[162] The laws of capital hide the continual necessity to
undermine working class resistance, its entrenchment in their existing
skills. This is why capital needs to continually innovate and
rationalise production, in order to deskill labour and weaken the
working class. This is class struggle which appears, post facto,
crystallised in the objective laws of capital or in the objective
rationale of innovation, progress and development of capitalist
production. However, this objectification is the result of a continuous
process of impositions and rebellions, which obliges capital into
compromises and makes it vulnerable to further struggles.
The emergence of immaterial production as the production of ideas and
knowledge can be explained as part of this process. Since the beginning
of capitalism, this continuous battle has led to the need to separate
mental from manual labour. With Wedgwoodâs pottery manufacture, we have
an important example of how craft work was separated from its elements
of autonomy and creativity. Making pots became a painting-by-numbers
activity, while designemerged as an alien ruler, a tool for the
subsumption of the workerâs labour.
While in the transition to capitalism the capitalist Wedgwood has a role
of master craftsman, later the capitalists farmed out his creative role
to independent or waged designers, specialists, engineers and managers.
We have now the new figure of a creative professional worker,
unthinkable in the past.
Increasingly, the place where ideas and organisational frameworks were
devised was separated off. This eventually gave rise to what Negri and
Hardt call immaterial production: the production of designs, IT systems,
etc. as âcommoditiesâ in their own rights. These are sold to other
capitalists for the second stage of production: execution.
With the commodification of immaterial products we have the beginning of
a trend to rationalise immaterial production itself. This is the next
stage of class struggle: increasingly, we see the multiplication of
figures such as the engineer who just calculates elasticity factors
within a project on which he has no control. Increasingly, being a
qualified designer may not mean to have a highly paid, secure and
creative job.
As we will see later, the dynamic which separates creative from
executive labour involves antagonism. Thus this process starts and ends
with class struggle.
The bourgeois ideology of the ânewâ era of immaterial production is the
celebration of the production of weightless goods as todayâs main or
fundamental product.
It is possible to make sense of this ideology. In a world where ideas
and execution are separated and the latter deskilled, the bourgeois
economist correctly considers the production of ideas and design as the
most valuable and costly part of all production. In turn, the bourgeois
ideologue can generalise this interest and conclude that what is
âmainlyâ produced today is ideas and design.
In fact if we consider the material reproduction of society as a whole,
we can be satisfied that our reproduction cannot happen only though the
production of pure ideas. We do not eat, drive or wear ideas. Pure
ideation can exist as such only because there is a stage of pure
execution somewhere else. Thus behind the partial truth of the bourgeois
(and the Marxian simpleton) we discover a more concrete, important,
truth: what is mainly produced and reproduced today is not ideas and
knowledge, but a specific division of labour.
That Negri and Hardt uncritically adopt the postmodern and bourgeois
fetishism of weightless production means quite a lot: their inability to
see the existence of immaterial production as a class relation.
Negri and Hardtâs incapacity to understand the emergence of immaterial
production as the imposition of a specific division of labour leads them
to see immaterial production as something natural, and potentially
autonomous from capital. To them we raise the same objection that
Italian workerists raised to traditional Marxists. Against a vision of
production as neutral and potentially good for self-management, Raniero
Panzieri warned that this conception hid an uncritical acceptance of
capitalism. Of socialist background, Panzieri accepted self-management
as a reasonable step in the revolution, but he gave a warning: communism
needs a rethinking of society which necessarily leads to a rupture with
its processes of production.[163]
Of course, Negri and Hardt would say: history moves and things change.
Immaterial production is different from the industrial production of
traditional Marxist times. We may not argue (here) with this âtruthâ,
but this does not change what we have said. Rather, it makes what we
said more compelling. If our ânewâ times are characterised by immaterial
production then the new revolution for the ânewâ times will have to
imply a rupture, precisely, from immaterial production![164]
the creation of communication and affects
We have so far focused on the emergence of immaterial production as the
creation of knowledge and ideas.
But it is also possible to account for the emergence of post-Fordist
methods of production in terms of class struggle. In the face of the
strength of the mass workers centred in the large scale industry in the
â70s, restructuring meant to fragment industrial production. Team work
was a way to separate the workers within the same industry and
disintegrate their solidarity. Outsourcing, moving production abroad,
re-divided labour on a world scale. This process, too, separated the
workers not only physically but more importantly in terms of their
interests, employment contracts and working conditions.
It is possible to account for the recent shift of capital into the
service sector as class struggle, too. We can see how the restructuring
at the end of the â70s indeed led to a substantial shift of capital into
service, where workers were still unorganised and thus more compliant.
Again, our account of the origin of immaterial is miles away from Negri
and Hardt, from the fairytale that immaterial production emerged in
response to our autonomous redefinition as âflexibleâ and immaterial.
Negri and Hardtâs rather peculiar account of the emergence of immaterial
production is based on a peculiar axiom: that history is moved by an
autonomous will, the will of the autonomous class. This assumption,
which traces its intellectual authority to one of the founding fathers
of bourgeois philosophy (Spinoza), has already been shown to be
undialectical.[165]
Allegations of being non-dialectical should not be taken as a banal
insult. Being non-dialectical would not be too bad in itself, if this
did not create serious problems in Negri and Hardtâs theorisation.
Indeed, a view of history as pure will and subjectivity is bound to
smash its head against its non dialectical counterpart: a view of
history as pure objectivity â the bourgeois idea that we are âshapedâ by
the paradigms of production. To the non-dialectical mind this second
aspect of reality appears as compelling as the first, and still cannot
find a place in their theorisation except as a juxtaposition. Empire and
Multitude confuse the reader with contradictory assertions which are
presented without any serious effort to resolve their contradictions. Do
we create history as autonomous subjects? Or are our thoughts and
actions dictated by the paradigms of production â then is history
determined at every paradigmatical moment?[166]
The clash of one truth and its anti-truth and the consequent explosive
annihilation of the whole theoretical construction is however, safely
and cleverly prevented by keeping these âtruthsâ separated in time and
space. Thus, Negri and Hardt say: today, in the mundane present, we are
shaped by production in our hearts, minds and actions (this will please
our academic colleagues in the literature department); yesterday, during
the mythical â68, we lived a moment of absolute freedom to redefine
ourselves outside existing paradigms (this will please Nick Witheford).
Negri and Hardtâs method of juxtaposition, however, is not good enough
to convince the experienced and knowledgeable readers who have
associated talks about paradigms of production and technology with
bourgeois and conservative literature.
To convince us that there is a revolutionary logic in saying that we are
shaped by paradigms of production, Negri and Hardt manipulate our sense
of respect for our elders and invoke the authority of old Marx himself.
For Marx too, they say, âof course [sic] everything starts with
productionâ (Multitude, p. 143). For him too, they say, âproduction
makes a subject for the objectâ (Multitude, p. 109). This no doubt will
defuse most objections.
Since we in Aufheben are not confused by any sense of respect for our
elders, we bothered to check on old Marx. We found simply that Negri and
Hardt had cut quotes out of their context and twisted their original
meanings!
In fact for Marx everything starts with âthe real individuals and their
intercoursesâ.[167] Marxâs Capital does not starts from modern industry
to explain society but it starts from our relations of exchange to
explain modern industry.[168]
Marx himself would agree, of course, that all starts with production;
but only if we intend production as something concrete, embedded in a
social relation: as production of commodities for the market. As such,
production is the reproduction of our social relations as market
relations and as such it reproduces us as proletariat. However, this is
miles away from what Negri and Hardt simplistically meant.
By dismissing (and rewriting) Marxâs theory of labour, sadly, Negri and
Hardt dismiss a theory that can effectively oppose technological
determinism as well as understand its aspects of truth. This theory sees
the real individual in their social relation with others as the concrete
reality behind both the apparent objectivity of production and our
continual challenge to this objectivity. This view, importantly, does
not need any desperate separations of mythical past and mundane present,
because it sees history as a continuous process and a continuous
struggle.
In this section we comment on Negri and Hardtâs thesis that immaterial
production is ripe for self-management since this ânewâ production is
inherently independent from the individual capitalist. We argue that the
apparent objectivity and autonomy of immaterial labour from the
capitalist is only evidence that immaterial production is an aspect of
capital. We argue that Negri and Hardtâs uncritical naturalisation of
the present production system derives from their lack of understanding
of capital as an objectified social relation. We will see that this
problem is mirrored by a parallel, opposite one: Negri and Hardtâs lack
of critical understanding (and celebration) of capital as the product of
bourgeois subjectivity.
Negri and Hardt tell us that there is something interestingly new in
immaterial production that material production did not have â something
that can really change our future and allow us to create a communist
world based on the self-management of the present production.
Indeed, we read, immaterial production has disposed of external means of
production and of the despotic direction of the capitalist. By its
nature, immaterial production is in fact increasingly inherent in the
same practice of labour:
The central forms of productive co-operation are no longer created by
the capitalist as part of the project to organise labour but rather
emerge from the productive energies of labour itself. (Multitude, p.
113)[169]
In immaterial production, continue Negri and Hardt, the capitalist is
increasingly redundant as the organiser of production and the one
responsible for innovation:[170]
[While in the past] the capitalist calls workers to the factory...
directing them to collaborate and communicate in production and giving
them the means to do so, in the paradigm of immaterial production, in
contrast, labour itself tends to produce the means of interaction,
communication and co-operation for production (Multitude, p. 147).
Is there an element of truth in Negri and Hardtâs claim that today
labour itself produces the means for production? That production becomes
increasingly inherent in the process of labour itself and autonomous
from the capitalist? The answer is: yes, but this has always been true!
It is true in fact that in capitalism labour itself produces the means
for other labour and production. In capitalism, more than any other
previous form of production, nobody can produce without using the result
of other peopleâs labour. The figure of the autonomous craftsman who
uses his own self-created tools is unthinkable today. This is what
traditional Marxism used to call the âsocialisation of labourâ.
Also, it is true that in capitalism the logic of production is
increasingly inherent in the practices of labour. This was not obvious
in previous modes of production, where labour was deployed because of
some human need (often the need of the ruling class) â only in
capitalism do we have this peculiar fact: labour is demanded and
necessitated by previous labour, production stimulates production,
invention demands invention, according to a logic of expansion and
development that goes beyond the will and control of the individual
human being.
Crucially, it is important to stress, this logic goes beyond our own
will and control. For example, our call centre labour is commanded by
phones ringing and a computer programme that tell us what to say. This
is the result of previous work. The labour of an IT worker is normally
demanded by a gigantic project which asks for work done in a certain way
and with a certain pace. This is the result of past IT work. Labour in a
traditional factory is demanded by a machine. This was, too, the result
of someone elseâs past labour. A worker in a post-Fordist team works
according to organisational systems which were devised by the thinking
work of other people.
All our work in capitalism is given a logic, a pace, a necessity, by the
result of other peopleâs work. It does not matter how immaterial or
material this latter labour was. What matters for us is that it is dead
labour: previous labour, alienated from us, which has turned to be our
ruler: capital.
Negri and Hardt seem to know what dead labour is for Marx. They say that
Marx would call Empire a regime of accumulated dead labour. (Empire, p.
62) However, they insist that labour, if immaterial and âbiopoliticalâ,
has a special, fresh, everlasting vitality. Living labour is, they say,
âthe ability to engage the world actively and create social relationsâ.
And they add that living labour is a âfundamental human facultyâ, an
input of the human being, not something pertinent to capital as
such.[171]
More mundanely, and less poetically, living labour is labour which is
presently done for capital, for dead labour.[172] Living labour cannot
be naturalised as an a-historical âfundamental human facultyâ as Negri
and Hardt say, for the simple reason that living labour and dead labour
are two faces of the same reality: capitalist alienation. In communism
there will be no reason to speak of dead labour, thus there will be no
reason to speak of living labour either.[173]
Negri and Hardtâs incapacity to understand capital as objectification of
our (living) labour implies their incapacity to understand capital as
objectification tout court.
The objectification of capital is a real objectification for all humans,
including the capitalist.
This is why the capitalist is not the initiator of a technical
innovation: in front of capital with its inherent laws of
self-expansion, the capitalist has no choice. He has to follow hard
necessity and innovate in the rush for competition when others innovate.
Or he goes bankrupt.
We can also see how the capitalist is âredundantâ not only as initiator
but as organiser of the labour process. The more production is advanced
the more the organisation of labour becomes integrated in complex
organisational system â production is better run by âobjectiveâ
mechanisms, laws or business principles which reflect more closely the
laws of capital. The capitalist as an individual, with his whims and
idiosyncrasies, can even be disruptive for his own capital.
Toyotaâs system is presented in Empire as an example of the new
immaterial production that can dispense with the capitalist and which
âseems to provide the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary
communismâ (Empire, p. 294).
The lure of Toyotism is that it presents itself to the post-Fordist
simpleton as a gigantic automated feedback system from demand to
production. In its original idea, Toyotism is similar to a fast-food
shop: customer A demands a piece of work from worker B. Worker B writes
down an order for the materials he need to serve A on a tag (called
âkanbanâ) and passes the tag to worker C upstream. In turn, worker B
becomes the âcustomerâ of worker C and commands worker D, etc.[174]
Hence Toyotism may seem to be a system of production free from
centralised command.
In fact subtly, Negri and Hardt[175] do not say that Toyotism has no
authoritarian aspects. Only, the alienating aspects of Toyotism are
contingent, due to capitalâs control, while the good aspects of Toyotism
are inherent in this ânewâ immaterial form of production.
We cannot share such excitement. We see Toyotism, first of all, as an
effective way to produce more closely in response to market demand.[176]
What makes it different from Fordism and so special for the liberal
heart is that it simply perfects the liberal dream of âcustomer
sovereigntyâ within a perfected market society.
Having observed that Toyotism is a production system devised for
satisfying the market, we cannot simplistically think that the liberal
aspects of Toyotism (the apparent autonomy given to the workers) are
inherent while the illiberal ones (the overall control) are contingent.
The demand of the market is something alien from the individual workerâs
desires, needs or aspirations: Toyotism is necessarily a system aimed to
rein the workersâ will and activity towards an alien aim â only, it is
devised in a different way than Fordism.[177] On closer inspection, in
fact, it is not difficult to see that Toyotaâs workers are free to do or
suggest only what is already harmonising with the strategies of
production â and crucially its overall system is devised to be
structurally inaccessible to changes from the bottom.
Any further illusion of the inherent liberalism in Toyotism is exposed
by its development: its increasing computerisation, which allows the
Toyota managers to dispose of the kanban system and plan production in
detail.
Thus Toyotism inevitably mirrors the nature of capital itself. As such,
that it has a liberal face and a despotic face does not surprise us at
all: capital has indeed a democratic face and an authoritarian face,
each necessary to the other. None of these two faces is a distortion of
the other, and none can be ârescuedâ from the other.
The democratic face of capital, which we find mirrored in the democratic
face of Toyotism, is nothing else than our submission to impersonal
forces, to the market. It is our individual freedom to be slaves under
the intangible despotism of the customerâs sovereignty.
Negri and Hardtâs inability to see how capital dominates us through
impersonal forces prevents them, paradoxically, from seeing that
immaterial productionneeds the capitalist in order to stay in existence.
Let us look closely at this point.
A production system that demands labour from us because of its own
rationale cannot be nothing else but our old enemy: capital as value
valorising itself through the exploitation of labour. As we have seen in
Section 2, capitalâs self-valorisation implies for capital the need to
overcome workersâ resistance and the striving to subsume, rationalise,
deskill and command labour. The existence of immaterial production
itself, we have seen, is one with this striving.
In Section 4 we will see in detail that this same process implies, for
the worker, daily pain and boredom, thus daily resistance. The
consequence of this is that capital necessitates a âcapitalistâ class.
Or, better, capital needs a class of people who materially gain from the
daily alienation of others and are ready to exert violence in order to
keep the others under capitalâs command.[178]
In their view present (immaterial) production increasingly does not need
the capitalist and thus does not need force exerted on us, Negri and
Hardt seem only to echo the bourgeois delusions of the â80s, which
sought the integration of the working class in production as possible
and non-contradictory.
This ideology was applied in Europe through experiments with Toyotism
and other post-Fordist methods in the early â90s. These methods tried to
encourage workers to take individual responsibility in improving the
quality of production and identify themselves with the business.
But they all inevitably failed. An interesting example of this failure
was that of the Rover factory in Longbridge. With the project Rover
Tomorrow, work was initially organised in teams, with leaders elected
among the team. The imaginable result was that the workers never
respected the commands of their team leaders, so that the leaders had to
be appointed by the company as someone above them (Pugliano,
âRestructuring of Workâ, pp. 38â9). The workersâ disrespect for peers
with a leadership role was not just something cultural: it is in the
contradictory nature of capital that we cannot identify ourselves with
capital without contradictions.
But why does Negri and Hardtâs talk about the increasing possibility of
self-management seem to make sense? When we speak about âimmaterial
labourâ, normally our mind goes to certain administrative, creative or
professional jobs where there is a real experience of identification and
self-direction. Self-management was realisable and desirable, for
example, for the highly skilled workers at Lucas Aerospace in the UK and
at Toshiba-Amplex in Japan, who went on a strike to demand autonomous
control of production from their managers (Witheford, âAutonomist
Marxismâ, pp. 103â4).
Can we speak about autonomy of production in this case? Not at all. In
fact, the existence of autonomy in certain privileged activities does
not mean that this activity is autonomous from capital but the other way
round: that the professional or creative workers identify so much with
the aims and interests of their business that they can become the
managers of it themselves, in the same way as a petty bourgeois is the
manager of his own business.
Negri and Hardtâs idea that we can all become the managers of ourselves,
that we can take the present system of production over and self-manage
it, is then a petty bourgeois delusion that does not acknowledges the
imposition of capitalâs command only because it is used to internalise
it.
We have seen that a doubt arises, that Negri and Hardt cannot see that
the apparent objectivity of the present production system, rather than
being evidence of its autonomy from the capitalist, is instead evidence
of its nature as capital. Negri and Hardtâs incapacity to grasp
objectivity in capitalism makes us suspicious about their insight in the
other, opposite, concept: subjectivity. Let us then focus on their idea
of subjectivity and collective consciousness.
We have said that for Negri and Hardt immaterial production potentially
escapes capital, being the result of our individual subjectivities:
thoughts, decisions, desires and âdemocratic exchangesâ.[179] The
multitude, which is our collective consciousness, is the ultimate result
of this same dynamic â of innumerable individual interactions which take
place within the present immaterial production. Negri and Hardtâs theory
is hence both the theorisation and the celebration of a ânewâ world
which is ultimately shaped in its collective consciousness, and driven
in its productivity, by subjectivity itself.
Subjectivity for Negri and Hardt is then nothing else than the ensemble
of each individualâs desires and thoughts. In fact, it is unquestionable
that desires and thoughts come out of free subjects. But this is,
precisely, where Negri and Hardt have caught reality totally wrong.
Capital is, and has always been, the result of innumerable, perfectly
free, democratic exchanges, decisions, desires and thoughts of
individual subjectivities! The fact that capital is created by the will
and actions of individuals however does not make it less objective and
less powerful â instead, its power lies in our individual freedom of
choice and exchange itself.
Negri and Hardt do not speak of a new world at all. The Multitude, a
by-product[180] of immaterial production seems, in fact to be, merely,
socially-shared bourgeois consciousness: the socially-shared belief that
the only way to produce and reproduce ourselves is through acts of
âdemocratic exchangeâ and the only way to see ourselves is as free
individuals[181] engaged in such exchange. This collective consciousness
is only an aspect of the same process that creates the objectivity of
capital! This collective consciousness is objectified as capital itself,
since it emerges as an unconscious result of innumerable exchanges and
activities, in the same way as the invisible hand of Adam Smith emerges
from innumerable exchanges based on individual greed.[182]
Negri and Hardtâs naturalisation of bourgeois relations is so uncritical
that they even see their preservation as a âcreativeâ aspect of
struggles which are not able to go beyond them! In Multitude, Negri and
Hardt hail recent struggles which are, they say, âpositive and
creativeâ. Why? Because, for example, as we read with dismay in
Argentina people invented new forms of money (Multitude, p. 216).
Again, Negri and Hardtâs problem is their ideological rejection of
dialectics. In the dialectic of capital, subjectivity and objectivity
play opposite but interrelated parts. An undialectical approach that
takes âsubjectivityâ as something positive on its own is bound to
misunderstand both subjectivity and objectivity. It is bound to
confusingly celebrate capital as bourgeois subjectivity (not recognising
that capital is the product of individual free subjects). And it is also
bound to confusingly celebrate present production as autonomous from
capital (not recognising that we are ruled by objectified and impersonal
forces).
Such an approach is also bound to encourage passivity. Seeing Empire
(capital) as something that develops in separation from us and âopens up
spaces for struggleâ by itself, Negri preaches to us not to resist
âglobalisationâ and vote âyesâ for the neoliberal European Constitution
in France.[183] In fact the âspace for struggleâ is created by capitalâs
development and its dialectical counterpart: our resistance to it â such
as the struggles against gas privatisation in Bolivia and the riots in
Argentina.
To conclude, considering Negri and Hardtâs inability to see the relation
between objectivity and subjectivity in capitalism, we cannot be too
surprised then when we see them move along a conceptual parabola: start
from shouted, crass subjectivism and dive head down into a crass
objectivism, a neo-traditional-Marxist fetishisation of the present
immaterial forces of production.[184] And, to close the parabola into an
ellipse, they teach us that our subjectivity is, after all, the result
of the paradigm of immaterial production itself â something
objective.[185]
We now consider the subjective side of immaterial production i.e. how
immaterial production is related to class antagonism and the necessity
of the revolution. Negri and Hardt say that antagonism emerges from our
resistance against capitalâs efforts to tamper with our potentially
autonomous deployment of creativity and to enclose what we produce in
common. To this view we oppose that antagonism arises from the
unacceptability of a division of labour that imposes our daily
deprivation of creativity, and we explain why immaterial production is
part of it.
contradictions of capital
Negri and Hardtâs theory has the interesting aspect of speaking about
subjectivity. Against bourgeois objectivism it tells us that the
development of capital and its contradictions are the result of
antagonism, of subjectivity. As we have seen in Section 1, for Negri and
Hardt antagonism is triggered by capitalâs attempt at imposing its
command and control over immaterial production, which is increasingly
done in common and which produces commons.
We wholeheartedly agree that history is moved by class struggle, and
that class struggle is triggered by antagonism. However, we cannot find
ourselves at ease with Negri and Hardtâs explanation. We have seen that
the immaterial production of ideas and knowledge is an aspect of
capitalâs power to subsume our labour â that is, an aspect of the power
of the bourgeoisie over the working class. What we want to explore now
is the subjective side of this subsumption, i.e. how antagonism arises.
Marxâs Capital is an account, chapter by chapter, of how capital as
value valorising itself implies the deprivation of labour from its
organisational, creative, knowledgeable sides.[186] Paradoxically,
capital is produced by us but in this production we become its
appendage; it acquires our human powers and we lose them, becoming
subjects of its power. This inversion of powers, of who is the subject
of the production of human activity and who is the object, who is the
ruler and the ruled, has been called the âontological inversionâ.
The solution of this inversion only lies in a real subversion of the
present system of production. It is not a question of re-interpreting
reality. It is not a question of observing that since value is actually
created by the working class then the working class must be a productive
and creative subject. It is not a question of simply observing that
âcapital needs labour but labour does not need capitalâ, so we must be
somehow the initiators of production and innovation â even if we are not
really aware of it. In fact capital is real alienation and real power.
Although capital needs labour, this is labour done in an historically
specific form; a labour that is really subsumed and really deprived of
knowledge, initiative and creativity. We will see that forgetting this
important point is forgetting the very dynamics that makes the
subversion of capitalism a possible reality.
As capital does not go to the market with its own legs but it needs the
capitalist to circulate, capital is incapable of thinking, designing,
organising, as well: it needs man for this. This, at the beginning, was
the capitalist himself: Wedgwood for example.
But Wedgwoodâs creativity is the creativity of capital. This creativity
is free insofar it has introjected the needs of capital, the objective
constrains of the market and its laws. Indeed, what is thinkable is what
is objectively realisable within a landscape of undeniable, objective
constraints: the finances available, the reality of market demand, the
availability (in terms of cost!) of means, materials, labourers; the
reasonability (in terms of cost!) of the design itself; the state of
competition, etc.
This is an aspect of bourgeois âalienationâ: the need to adhere to an
âobjectiveâ reality external to the individual. Bourgeois alienation may
be experienced as a burden, but all bourgeois stop whinging in front of
the wealth and social power this alienation also means for them.
With the development of capitalism, the capitalist farmed out creative
and organisational work to special categories of privileged workers:
managers and professionals, who worked within their productive project
or as independent professionals.
Today the state finances a large part of scientific research and the
development of knowledge. Modern science could only develop through the
influx of state funds because the capital needed for the expansion of
modern scientific research would be too big for any reasonable
capitalist venture. Also IT developed thanks to generous US state
finance.[187] Within these fields, the socialisation of labour, one
aspect of capitalist production, was encouraged, while the fetters of
private property were overridden by public finance. Sadly, this is not
the norm but the exception that confirms a fundamental norm in
capitalism.
The professionals, the top designer, the researcher share the effects of
formal alienation with Wedgwood. They have to face competition. In a
world based on exchange they have to produce for strangers who do not
share a project or common interests with them.[188] But they normally
feel fulfilled by their practice. They can see their work as creative
and, as far as they identify themselves with the âobjectiveâ
requirements of their profession, autonomous. They can praise the
present world as a world of âcreativityâ and âintelligenceâ because they
do contribute to the creativity and intelligence of capital.
However, unlike the bourgeois, for the waged creative and professional
workers their privileged position in society is not due to the power of
their own capital at all: they are unable to live without selling their
(very dear) labour power to capital, or without a wage or grant from the
state. The recent retreat of social democracy has implied a retreat of
the state from financing academia and the sciences. Squeezed by the lack
of financial perspective, some of the intelligentsia have moved to
radical anti-capitalism. This is indeed a ânewâ era, when precisely the
ânewâ gospel by radical academics Negri and Hardt can sell lots of
books.
For the unprivileged, large mass of donkey workers who do not create but
execute, there is another story.
The (either material or immaterial!) donkey worker who works under the
command of blueprints, organisational IT frameworks, designs, etc. does
not share the mind of capital or any creative âpleasureâ from it. In the
ontological inversion, the information and knowledge of capital means
the opposite for the worker.
There is a good example from recent news. By June this year transport
and delivery workers in warehouses across Britain had started
complaining of having to wear computers on their wrists, arms and
fingers which instructed them in their daily work. As GMB spokesman Paul
Campbell said: âWe are having reports of people walking our of their
jobs after a few days work, in some cases just a few hours. They are all
saying that they donât like the job because they have no input. They
just follow a computerâs instruction.â[189] Informationalisation has not
made delivery more intelligent or autonomous, but more brain-numbing and
controlled.
As clever computerised systems are sold as gadgets for personal
consumption, society at large tends to become less intelligent too! Try
a trip in a car which has the new-fangled satellite-driven pilot in it,
and experience the feel of divesting yourself of your geographical and
orientation skills!.
This ontological inversion is one with a subjective experience of
boredom and pain.[190] Morris denounced the new pain created by the
expropriation of creativity and autonomy from craft work with
manufacture, i.e. the beginning of capitalist production. Since the dawn
of capitalism many people experienced hatred of design. For example, the
typographer Koch, whose ideas were close to Morrisâs, fantasised about,
and experimented with, a âdesign-less typographyâ as an unconscious
reaction to the sufferance of the present. In the ânewâ era of
immaterial production, this same pain has compelled many British
transport workers to leave their job after just a few hours of
computer-commanded work!
With Autonomia and Mario Tronti in particular, the concrete experience
of labour under subsumption was seen as the trigger of antagonism. For
Tronti the labour which is commanded and made meaningless by real
subsumption implies the disaffection of the worker from their daily
activity: it implies hatred. This process was associated by Tronti with
the fact that labour under capitalism is abstract labour, the source of
value â capital as self-valorising capital needs then to rationalise and
deskill concrete labour against our resistance in order to extract
surplus value.[191]
Hatred is then the subjective aspect of the objective existence of
capital as self-valorising value â and of a real subsumption which has
to be reimposed continually and is continually challenged because it is
incompatible with a fulfilling life. Hatred is the inherent
unacceptability of the present system of production and the present
division of labour. Hatred is the feel-bad factor in our optimistic view
of capital as an unsolvable contradiction.
labourâ and the contradictions of capital
Negri and Hardt cannot deny the undeniable. For example, in Empire they
cannot deny that IT is a means to control and deskill labour in the new
service sector.[192] The deskilling based on IT, they add, turns all
concrete labours into âabstract labourâ, a homogenised jelly of
manipulations of symbols (Empire, p. 292). Are we perhaps unfair to
Negri and Hardt, if they seem to repeat word by word what we have just
said?
No. In fact, if we carry on reading, we find a twist. Through the
practice of computer work, they continue, all labour becomes an
undifferentiated jelly of the same activity: an abstract âmanipulation
of [computer] symbolsâ. This, they conclude, is the concept of âabstract
labourâ.
Although Negri and Hardt seem to consider deskilling and real
subsumption, they focus their attention on the material aspects of
labour, the bare manipulation of symbols. The social context of this
manipulation (for whom, why, under what plans, etc.) becomes
inessential. If we all press computer keys when we work, immaterial
labour becomes the same jelly of abstract activity, i.e. the same for
Professor Negri as it is for everybody else. The theory of immaterial
labour then becomes universal and dismisses the distinction about who
shares the mind of capital and who executes.
Hatred, which hardly applies to the top designer or for Professor Negri,
has no place in this theory. If hatred has no place here, the
contradiction of capital as its unacceptability has no place either.
Where is then the main contradiction of capital for Negri and Hardt? It
arises, they explain, not from the inherent unacceptability of the
present production, but from its inherent positivity. Antagonism arises,
they explain, from our will to develop the present system of production
and franchise it from the capitalist.
This is indeed a theory which does not see the need for a rupture, which
is a rupture with a convenient division of labour. No surprise that for
Negri and his followers a struggle for âthe subversive reintegration of
execution and conceptionâ is exemplified by the struggles of IT workers
for the right of self-management of their very skilled labour
(Witheford, âAutonomist Marxismâ, p. 104). No surprise that for Negri
and Hardt what counts for our anti-capitalist struggles is not a
subversion of the present division of labour but the banal question of
who controls the results of labour (information, the GM code,
âcommunicational resourcesâ, etc.) as it is divided now!
Negri and Hardt will say, no doubt, that all that we have said so far,
in our analysis of antagonism and hatred based on the real subsumption
of labour is outdated. Today, they will say, immaterial production has
broken out with labour confined in the workplace and is done in the
street, within unspecified âcommunitiesâ, by anti-capitalist protesters,
even tribes on small islands in the Pacific Ocean, by consumers who
collectively help create the meanings of their commodity world,
etc.[193] The list is never-ending.
Today, then, there is no such thing as real subsumption anymore. As we
have already said, for Negri and Hardt today society at large organises
our communication and co-operation, while capital only overlaps on them
and by overlapping it âcontrols, commands and channels our
actionsâ.[194]
Another reason why we are wrong, and Marxism is outdated, Negri and
Hardt will say, is because not only is production delocalised, but the
product exceeds the commodity. Whatâs this âexcessâ? As immaterial
workers in the service sector, we may make friends in our immaterial job
with the customers, above all if we smile a lot: this is an âexcessâ. As
migrants, our first language and our links with our relatives are
excesses too. As unemployed, our skill in making houses of cards is an
excess too. And in general, as workers and poor, we produce lots of
excesses in the forms of needs and desires (Multitude, p. 148).[195]
Is this true â and, consequently, is our theory outdated? In fact all
the above is true, but has always been true in capitalism and has never
denied the dynamics of capital and real subsumption. Capitalist
production has always thrived on given social and cultural backgrounds.
The very concept of use value has always been rooted in society and its
culture.[196]
If the above is true, however, Negri and Hardt make a logical leap and
claim that this background for capitalist production, today, is
production in its own rights, production tout court:
Insofar as life tends to be completely invested by acts of production
and reproduction, social life itself becomes a productive machine.
(Multitude, p. 148)
In this interpretation of production which incorporates non-production,
then all can be production.
We do not need to waste more words on this distortion of reality. Negri
and Hardtâs logical leap which conflates all activity with production
has already been criticised by Caffentzis who stressed that there is a
difference between labour, as a specific activity, and any odd
activity.[197]
We also do not need to waste more words to convince the reader that real
subsumption is still a reality today â everyone can experience it. As
Gilles Dauvé says:
Managers know their Marx better than Toni Negri: they keep tracing and
measuring productive places and moments to try and rationalise them even
more. They even locate and develop âprofit centresâ within the company.
Work is not diffuse. It is separated from the rest (âTo Work or Not to
Work?â)
Only, what we are concerned with here, is the ideological conclusions of
a theory of âgeneral intellectâ. First of all, this theory seems
democratic and egalitarian but hides a sneaking contentment for the
present. In a society where all is productive, there is no distinction
between the owners of the means of production and the proletariat. There
are no classes, only one large class of productive producers, some of
goods and some of needs. Second, this theory seems to flatter us about
our creative and knowledgeable inputs into society, but hides
contentment for a situation where in reality we have no input. We may
work 43 hours a week in a call centre, but Negri and Hardt give us a
word of consolation: in the information we employ, in the spreadsheet we
use, there is a drop of our socially-shared creativity â we are the
co-creators of it. What we need is only to become aware of this.
In conclusion, we are confident that the questions we put forward are
not outdated! There is no easy escape for Negri and Hardt from these
questions into a dream world of happy general intellectual and excessive
production.
We have focused so far on immaterial production as the production of
knowledge and ideas. Another, central, aspect of immaterial production
as defined by Negri and Hardt is the production of affects,
communication and cooperation. In this section we address Negri and
Hardtâs view that this production, which is capitalist production, is
âelevated to the level of human relationsâ and criticise their inability
to understand the ontological inversion that turns affects and
communication into abstract powers of capital and into our
disempowerment.
subversion
Capital and affects, it seems, do not go along too well.
For Negri and Hardt capital was simply forced to incorporate affects and
other subjective powers like communication and cooperation into
production (Empire, pp. 275â6). Without the struggles of the â60s and
â70s, they say, capital would have been content with conveyor belts and
mechanical production. In fact, we are made to believe, by incorporating
communication and affects in its production, capital incorporated its
own gravediggers: what is subjective and human is inherently subversive
and anti-capitalist by nature.
Hardt concedes that, in incorporating affects and human relations in
production, capital âcontaminatedâ them. In his article âAffective
Labourâ we read:
In a first moment in the computerisation of industry... one might say
that... human relations... have been instrumentalised.[198]
But, this is not the end of the story. Quite the contrary, capitalist
production has been humanised in turn, by this subsumption of human
faculties:
Through a reciprocal process... production has become communicative,
affective, de-instrumentalised and elevated to the level of human
relations. (âAffective Labourâ)
Negri and Hardt seem to propose something refreshing. From the Frankfurt
School to Foucault, we have read plenty of pessimistic literature about
how we are helplessly de-humanised by mass production or by the whole
construction of power. Adorno endlessly moaned that capitalist
production creates false ideology through a specific production of mass
culture. Foucault, perhaps even more pessimistically, observed that our
only subjectivity is inevitably the one created by power.
Negri and Hardt agree with Foucault that present production creates our
collective subjectivity and society, and this happens, they add, because
present production is the production of affects, affective labour. As
Hardt writes:
Affective labour is itself and directly the constitution of communities
and collective subjectivities⊠the processes whereby our labouring
practices produce collective subjectivities⊠society itself. (âAffective
Labourâ)
But, they add, this production is not negative, it is positive. It makes
society âmore affectiveâ and âmore communicativeâ. And, since this is
the result of immaterial labour, it is at odds with capital itself, it
is human and potentially subversive. Negri and Hardt invert the
pessimism of grumpy Foucault and Adorno into a euphoric adherence to the
present.
Do we want to share this euphoria? Let us consider deeply the issue of
communicative and affective labour, and what it means for us.
subsumption
The first question we ask is what happens to the nature of certain
activities which involve primarily communications and affects (e.g.
care, communication and entertainment) when they become productive for
capital. There is only one answer. The integration of such activities as
profit-making activities imply real subsumption and rationalisation.
As Taylor did with material production, new studies now analyse human
cooperation in terms of abstract principles, organisational schemes
amenable to standardisation and automation. As the machine for manual
work the new technology of communication allows for standardisation,
rationalisation and control of communication.[199] And, importantly, the
imposition of efficiency in cost and time means the imposition of
factory pace on affective activities such as hospital care.
ontological inversion
If we now consider the effect of this change for the worker, we will not
be surprised to discover that we will find a similar pattern as the one
seen in Section 4 for manufacture: de-humanisation.
But is there a difference between the subsumption of craft work and the
more recent subsumption of other âcommunicative and affectiveâ
activities? Negri and Hardt seem to point at the fact that these latter
have something special in their original, natural immateriality, and
that, unlike craft work, their subsumption must have a reverse
humanising effect on production.
In fact these arguments seem to contain a basically wrong assumption.
Thinking that nursing has something more specially social and human with
respect to, for example, pot making and that, consequently, its
subsumption implies something new and different for capitalist
production, means to fall into an ideological trap. It means to take the
established result of capitalist production on human activity as
something natural.
In fact pot making, as all human activities including care, was fully
social, communicative and affective before its subsumption by capital.
It involved imagination and problem solving, a socially-shared
conception of aesthetics and utility and a social relation between the
creator and the user. Capital took over all these human powers and,
truly, âfor a reciprocal processâ (which we call the ontological
inversion!) assumed them as its powers. This âreciprocal processâ and
humanisation of capital is not, however, a silver lining of real
subsumption but a curse for us, since it is one with our real experience
of de-humanisation.
Going back to the subsumption of service and communication, we wonder if
we are not in the presence of some more of this incorporation and
subsumption of human activity and powers.
For example, the activity of âspreading informationâ was practised in
the courtyards and village squares and based on common understanding and
experience. Taken over by capital, it becomes the task of helping
strangers in exchange for a wage â first from âhelp desksâ in the same
town; later, by phone. Eventually, from a distant country. Automation
comes next: robots now phone us or answer our phone calls; web sites,
i.e. automated interactive systems replace our interaction effectively.
Meanwhile the content of information is made increasingly alien to both
the ones who receive it and those who convey it.
This process increasingly distances the communicators concretely, in
âaffectsâ as well as in life and struggle. People from two sides of a
desk can still find common grounds of understanding and struggle, for
example through sharing social milieus outside alienating customer
relations. Brighton Against Benefit Cuts benefited from the wealth of
Brighton life: this created friendship and understanding and allowed for
the build-up of solidarity among the more militant dole workers and the
unemployed in a common struggle against dole privatisation. But the
possibility of building solidarity on common grounds is more difficult
the more people are delocalised and estranged.[200]
In the sector of entertainment, the manipulation of affects must be able
to leave the producer and be consumed by strangers. This transforms
collective events of the past (fairs, storytelling etc.) which involved
complex interplay of full human relations, into the consumption of
commodities.
The experience of affects in care is de-humanised too. For example, the
direct relation of the village doctor and his patients, or women
neighbours in midwifery roles and new mothers, etc. gets increasingly
standardised by privatisation. The nurse who deals with patients in a
conveyor-belt system cannot know them personally: his âmanipulation of
affectsâ is necessarily depersonalised. A surgery under economic
pressure now tends to rotate patients among doctors so that even the
flimsy relation between the individual patient and âhisâ doctor is
sacrificed on the altar of economic efficiency. Eventually, hospital
consultants will be asked to interact with their patients through TV
monitors on wheels.
In front of this systematic denial of communication and socialisation
inherent in a profit-making process, and in front of the parallel
build-up of âcommunicativeâ and âaffectiveâ powers of capital, Negri and
Hardt do not flinch. It does not matter if our contact is automated or
virtual, Hardt says, ânot for that reason is [it] any less realâ
(âAffective Labourâ). It does not matter if it is very difficult today
to realise the conditions for communication and solidarity among
individuals or groups in struggle: this is communication anyway â only
it is a ânewâ kind of communication, vertical instead of
horizontal.[201]
The question that immediately comes to our mind is: in a historical
moment when most of us have to keep our heads down in our âflexibleâ
jobs as call centre workers, waiters, carers, bank employees,
receptionists, etc., how subversive is it to tell us that the alienated
and alienating âcommunicationâ and âaffectionsâ we produce are
nonetheless real?
The clearest example of how Negri and Hardt turn a blind eye to the
ontological inversion of communication and affects in immaterial
production is their enthusiastic approach to post-Fordist methods of
production. Post-Fordism is welcomed by Negri and Hardt as an aspect of
immaterial production, being based on exchange of information and
cooperation between interrelated work units â thus it demands and
stimulates communicativity in the worker.
In fact, as we argued earlier, post-Fordism aimed to fragment the
large-scale factory production process. This fragmentation needs a
stress on âcommunicationâ at a managerial level however, since the
company finds itself with the need to sow the bits of production back
together. Of course the Japanese-oriented business brochures of the â80s
made a big fuss about âcommunicationâ and âsynergiesâ. They had to.
But, as it was more clear to the workers themselves than to Negri and
Hardt, the breakdown of production into teams increased
managerial-controlled communication to the extent that it reduced the
possibility for uncontrolled, antagonistic, communication across the
factory.
For example in Longbridge, where as we have said earlier Rover
production was restructured, the separation of work into units increased
face-to-face âcommunicationâ between the workers and their own team
(group) leader while curtailing the mobility of the shop stewards
(Pugliano, âRestructuring of Workâ, pp. 39â41).[202] Rather than
encouraging new alternative, anti-capitalist communications, simply and
sadly, this system individualised the workers and encouraged them to
look to their leaders for the solutions to their grudges. At the same
time it discouraged them to look for collective and antagonistic
solutions, even if in the mild form of union disputes. This is another
example of ontological inversion, whereby the development and increase
of capitalâs âcommunicationâ is realised through the denial of
ours.[203]
alternative networks
Besides the production of communication and affects, the ânetworksâ of
social relations that results as a by-product of âserving with a smileâ
cannot but harmonise with capital.
For example, the social niceness produced between hostesses and
aeroplane passengers is an ephemeral connection founded on money
transaction. The real nature of this relation appears in full when it is
broken down during a strike â then the passengers affectively turn
against the strikers, having lost their value for money. If we accept
that a negative affect is an affect, it is worth while to paraphrase
Hardt and say that consumersâ resentment is by no means less real.
Indeed, social relations of bourgeois exchange are real and imply real
oppression and repression.
Networks of social relations alternative to those of âdemocratic
exchangeâ can instead emerge in the very moment in which we deny
capitalist social relations. This can even be a humble strike or a
street protest limited in time and aims. Or it may be something even
humbler and more limited. When we steal time from our âaffectiveâ job in
our service office and hang about in the corridor with our colleagues,
this is the moment in which we build up affections beyond work
relations, affections that can be a basis for future solidarity.
Only if we can build up and rely on direct social relations alternative
to those of exchange can we concretely dispose of capitalist relations.
The more we break away from capital, the more we defetishise its power,
the more important these alternative relations become for our survival
and victory. The revolution, the final triumph and abolition of the
proletariat will only be possible on the basis of social relations
consciously built through struggle â surely not on the basis of our
smiles to passengers or hamburger eaters.[204]
actually mean?
Perhaps, again, we have considered the wrong example: i.e. that of a
âtraditionalâ strike â or a âtraditionalâ micro-struggle such as
hanging-out in the corridor with our colleagues.
In the famous confrontation between Toni Negri and Socialist Workers
Party intellectual, Alex Callinicos, at the Paris European Social Forum
in 2003, Callinicos criticised Negri for allegedly not including
âstrikersâ in the âmultitudeâ and for having thus abandoned a working
class perspective. Negri easily rebuffed these allegations: he never
excluded strikers, he said, and he always speaks about the antagonistic
class.[205] However, what we read about immaterial labour poses serious
doubts about what, precisely, Negriâs view of class struggle is.
Indeed, for a theory which sees immaterial production as anti-capitalist
in itself, the real, effective struggle cannot be found in refusing and
disrupting immaterial production.[206] The ânewâ era thus opens up, in
this view, possibilities for ânewâ positive and exciting struggles that
create and develop immaterial production. For many of us this idea does
not make much sense. But it makes really good sense for the radical
academic or the radical top designer. They can consider struggles based
on their writing and designing. They can use their skills against
capital, and, at the same time improve their CV and âself-valoriseâ
their privileged labour power.[207]
Although Callinicos made the mistake of not acknowledging Negriâs
subtleties seriously enough, in his allegations there is a moment of
truth. It is true that Negri still speaks about the âantagonisticâ
class, but he has emptied this concept of meaning. For him class is
simply a cultural belonging, a re-groupment created by (any) struggle.
When anybody can be âthe classâ, including top designer Oliviero
Toscani, the concept of class becomes meaningless. Thus Negriâs world of
the multitude becomes in practice a classless society. This is why Negri
can find a basis for academic collaboration, with post-modernists who
have, more openly (and honestly) just disowned a class perspective.[208]
In the next and last subsection we will show how Negri and Hardt, as new
ideologues for the ânewâ era, manage to present their particularistic
theory as universal.
inversion
Like all bourgeois theories, a theory that can only reflect the
perspective of a privileged part of society must nevertheless present
itself as universal. The easiest way of achieving universality is to
speak about unquestionably and universally good things. Like what? Like
capital itself.
Capital can be seen as an unquestionably and universally good thing
indeed. The secret of the bourgeois apologist of capital is in fact to
exploit the ontological inversion. Does capital deny our creativity,
affections, communication? Never mind. The other side of this coin is a
real production of the same human powers, but now assumed by capital as
its own, and appearing to us as âcreativityâ, âaffectionsâ or
âcommunicationâ of a vaguely defined âsocietyâ (or ânewâ era). The fact
that none of them actually belongs to the McDonaldâs waiter can be then
swiftly dismissed as a contingent disfunction of this unquestionably
positive society (or ânewâ era). When Negri and Hardt talk about
âcreativityâ, âaffectionsâ or âcommunicationâ we cannot avoid thinking
of the old bourgeois apology for capital as âprogressâ, âcultureâ or
âcivilisationâ. This old apology is now re-proposed in a ânewâ
Toyotaistic and cybernetic salad dressing.
Mitchell Cohen has already noticed that Negri and Hardt tend to
attribute to us the powers and dynamics of capital itself. Commenting on
their enthusiasm for the freedom of circulation of migrants, he says,
lucidly:
Poor migrants in our globalising world donât pursue âcontinuous
movementâ as an end in itself; they seek places in which to live decent
and secure lives. Only capital pursuing profits can live in restless
movement. (Well, perhaps cosmopolitan intellectuals can too when they
chase conferences and international celebrity. But they also want â and
need â the security of tenure).[209]
The broadness and abstractedness of concepts such as âcommunicationâ and
âaffectsâ has also another interesting function. It serves Negri and
Hardt in the creation of a cheap Theory of Everything in One Book that
can explain any facts ever observed and incorporate anything ever
written. If this seems too easy, however, Negri and Hardt pay a price.
The price is the appalling meaningless of a theory that can say only
something too general or too abstract.[210]
Reading Negri and Hardt, we find lots of abstract truths. Our labour is
so communicative and affective today. Of course this is true. All we can
possibly do or we could have ever done since we came down from the trees
can be categorised as communication or affections! Our production
creates social relations. Of course this is true. All production, as an
aspect of our social relations, has always implied the reproduction of
social relations! Today language is fundamental for production because
âwe could not interact... in our daily lives if languages... were not
commonâ (Multitude, p. 188). Of course this is true too and has always
been. Does all this prove Negri and Hardtâs theory of everything is
true, or it is only the case that we are in front of trans-historical
banalities?
In the course of this article we have addressed the inadequacy of Negri
and Hardtâs concepts of material and immaterial labour for the
understanding of capitalism and its contradictions â the string of their
fascinating necklace.
Negri and Hardtâs categories of material and immaterial labour replace
the old categories of manual and mental labour of traditional Marxist
times.[211] The latter were intended to conceptualise the âmanualâ as a
potentially revolutionary agent of class struggle. It is important to
notice that the essential distinction between those who create and those
who execute within production â thus a distinction in roles and
privileges â became conflated with âmentalâ and âmanualâ work, i.e. the
type of work done.
The increasing investment of capital into what Negri and Hardt call
immaterial production and the consequent increasing rationalisation of
mental labour has now put this categorisation into question. âMentalâ
labour now cuts across the lines of privileges and proletarianisation
and includes, side by side, the call centre worker and the top designer.
Having thus lost its original rationale, it is now a bad category.
Negri and Hardtâs ânewâ category of âimmaterialâ labour, however, does
not seem to be better than this. Like âmental labourâ, we have seen that
immaterial labour includes, side by side, the call centre worker and the
top designer too. Using the wrong category, Negri and Hardt give
themselves a hard time in trying to convince us why this category
correctly encircles the potentially subversive ânew subjectâ: why the
migrant, although he does manual work, is immaterial, and why the top
designer, who is included in the category, is a revolutionary subject.
The problem of bad categories can be solved either by looking for more
appropriate categories â or by making the bad category elastic enough to
patch up all its shortcomings. Negri and Hardt choose the second
solution. The old concept of mental labour excluded manual labour, thus
it was far too rigid. Negri and Hardt define the new concept, immaterial
labour, in a more comprehensive way: as any possible human activity â
either manual or mental, either done inside or outside the workplace â
that produces ideas, communication or affections, either as product or a
by-product. With this definition, immaterial labour can include
anything. Indeed, what human activity is not an expenditure of thoughts,
affects or an act of communication after all? Even the production of
nothing can be seen as production of something: needs and desires, which
are indeed human forms of affects and communication.
The convenient elasticity[212] of the category of âimmaterialâ labour
allows Negri and Hardt to sneak into and out of the âsubjectâ of
immaterial labour the ârightâ/ âwrongâ groups according to the current
rating of sympathy scored in the liberal-leftist world. Thus black
âcommunitiesâ, tribes in the Pacific, housewives, students, Indian
farmers fighting against the genetic industry, protesters involved in
the anti-capitalist movement, workers in flexible jobs, economic
migrants, the radical student and the academic like Negri are all
in.[213]
Being amenable to include what is âcoolâ and exclude what is âdatedâ,
the new categories for the ânewâ era have the power to please and
flatter a large range of readers. Their elasticity is good for
âexplainingâ anything as effects or acts of immaterial production.
This is the secret behind the intellectual universality of Negri and
Hardt. When anything can be described as the creation of âcommunicationâ
or âaffectsâ; when anything, even the production of nothing at all
(sorry: needs), can be considered as âproductionâ, we have found the
Holy Grail of the theorist, the magic key for the Theory of Everything
capable of accommodating everything and in the end explaining nothing.
By inheriting the traditional Marxist categorisation, although having
turned them into stretchable rubber, Negri and Hardt uncritically
inherit assumptions and values which were implicit in their use.
First of all, they inherit the tendency to attribute some form of moral
value to the role of âproducerâ in capitalism. For the traditional
Marxist there was a moral value to be a productive manual worker â for
Negri and Hardt, turning the scale of moralistic âvalueâ upside down,
there is a moral value in being a productive immaterial worker. Negri
and Hardt try very hard to convince the reader that tribes of the
Pacific islands are productive (of herbal remedies) and that those
excluded from the labour market are productive (of needs and desires).
For people like us who do not share this same productivist moralism (in
either its straight or inverted form) this is just a waste of ink.[214]
We noticed that this construction serves, no doubt, an ideological
agenda. Behind the appearance to reclaim moral âvalueâ for the
dispossessed it feeds us in fact with a petty bourgeois vision of a
society of equally worthy âproducersâ: some of valuable pieces of
design, some of needs and desires.
Together with uncritical productivism, Negri and Hardt inherit an
uncritical fetishism of the productive forces â again, turned upside
down. The traditional Marxist trusts the development of (industrial)
forces of production as neutral and potentially fit for future
self-management; Negri and Hardt trust the development of (immaterial)
forces of production as inherently subversive and potentially fit for
self-management. But now the machine is substituted by a loose
entanglement of networks of social relations.
We have stressed that like traditional Marxism and like much bourgeois
thought, Negri and Hardt cannot see our social relations, i.e. capital,
behind the apparent objectivity of production. This blindness reaches
the climax when they mistake the apparent autonomy of production from
the individual human, which is evidence of its nature as capital, as
evidence of its autonomy from capital!
In fact Negri and Hardt draw a curtain of simplistic enthusiasm over
reality. By addressing immaterial production overlook what the existence
of production of pure ideas and communicational frameworks actually
implies: the separation of the creative side from the executive side of
human activity; real subsumption of labour; the daily boredom and pain
lived by the worker who is engaged in activity that has been subsumed.
And crucially it is one with the existence of privileged producers of
designs, IT frameworks and all the apparatus of control over the labour
of others. The fact that members of society who partake of such
privileges cannot see this problem is perhaps not a coincidence.
Consistent with their uncritical acceptance of the present, Negri and
Hardt do not see the contradictions of capitalism in its inhumanity and
unacceptability, in its denial of creativity, intelligence or affections
for us, and in our hatred.Instead, for them the main contradiction of
capitalism is in the humanity, creativity and affections that immaterial
production develops; in the inherent goodness of the present conditions,
which we should not resist but enhance.
But let us be fair to Negri and Hardt. They do not replicate old
Marxism: theirs is a ânewâ old Marxism for a ânewâ era. It is a vulgar
Marxism turned upside down, which inverts the âworthinessâ from the
manual worker to the immaterial worker. Coherently with a preference for
a ânewâ category for the revolutionary âsubjectâ which includes the
middle class, this doctrine embraces perfect middle-class liberal
values: the idealisation of bourgeois democracy, the dream of consumer
sovereignty as the best solution for the future, the rejection of the
despotism of past working class organisation, and so on.[215]
Despite trying to appear to oppose old Marxism and to be new and
exciting, however, Negri and Hardtâs theory smells musty already! Not
only because it is based on old fads such as the enthusiasm for
Toyotism, already long out of fashion. But also because Negri and Hardt
cannot get out of the impasse of traditional Marxism, since they share
the same fundamental problems: a lack of understanding of capital as
objectification of social relations and the consequent hopeless
cul-de-sac of intending revolution as self-management of the present
production.
Negri and Hardtâs uncritical acceptance of apparently objectivistic
ideas may surprise us, since their books are full of subjectivistic
assertions of Autonomist inheritance.
However, in this article we have seen that at a closer inspection Negri
and Hardtâs conception of subjectivity is as mistaken and confused as
their conception of objectivity. We have argued that the subjectivity
that Negri and Hardt celebrate as the âmultitudeâ is merely bourgeois
consciousness, the product of our bourgeois relations of exchange. This
subjectivity is precisely that which creates capital as an objectivity.
Thus Negri and Hardt end up celebrating the coin of capital in both its
two faces: the objectivity of immaterial production and the intriguing
vitality of bourgeois subjectivity and democratic exchanges.
This shows, we said, a lack of dialectical understanding. This is why
under the sheepâs clothes of Negri and Hardtâs shallow subjectivism we
discover the wolf of uncritical objectivism, which is, ultimately,
bourgeois. We cannot be too surprised then if Negri and Hardt
uncritically adhere to post-Fordist technological determinism, and
proclaim that the paradigms of immaterial production can shape us down
to our marrows. Despite their apparent supersession of those bourgeois
theories, Negri and Hardt simply adhere to them and only give them some
incoherent and decorative radical twist.
era
We have seen that Negri and Hardt are able to present their theory as
excitingly subjectivistic. âWeâ created immaterial labour in our
autonomous struggle, âweâ imposed it on capital. Behind the power of
capital we have got our own unofficial but effective power.
Against this view we have presented a history of capitalist development
that sees restructuring and class compromises as the re-imposition of
the domination of capital on labour. It wonât be of any use for us to
deny that we still live in capitalism as Negri and Hardt do.[216] But
for us the reality of capitalism as the present domination is
double-sided. The positive side of restructuring is not something that
doubles its negative side but it is an aspect of it â it is the
increasing unacceptability of capital, now extended more deeply to the
globe. That immaterial labour has contradictions inherent in itself is
true, but they are not its inherent goodness, but its potential
fragility. The new weapons used by capital to subsume us make capital
more crucially dependent on our compliance: within the practice of
immaterial production, for example, the zero-stock policies or the
volatility of smiles and sense-of-humour required in team work are
rather vulnerable points. And, with the flight of capital abroad, the
working class involved in (any and mainly industrial) production in the
globe has increased, increasing the potentials for uncontrollable new
cycles of struggle at a global level.
To stress how capitalist production is bad for our health and happiness,
to stress that immaterial production is contradictory and bound to be
dismantled with the revolution, this is the real answer to pessimism.
Negri and Hardtâs striving to find a hidden silver lining in capitalist
production is real pessimism instead. Their celebration of
unquestionably good things as aspects of the present system of
production is in fact the celebration of the human powers that capital
has assumed, disempowering and dehumanising us in the ontological
inversion. This celebration is an ideological capitulation â which we
have equated with bourgeois enthusiasm for âprogressâ and
âcivilisationâ.
InversionWe assume Alexiej Sayle and his company donât mind if we have
freely adopted the concept of Negative Reality Inversion presented in
âSickâ, The Young Ones, series 2.
Once the string of Negri and Hardtâs necklace has been cut we can still
be fascinated by the single, colourful beads. We have read about a world
where we are overwhelmingly and hegemonically surrounded by immaterial
production done in common, and escaping subsumption and control. No
doubt many assertions in Negri and Hardtâs books are exciting and
consolatory. So exciting that it is hard to raise our head from their
books and look around us.
In fact what is described in Negri and Hardtâs work is not the world we
know. It is not our daily experience of commodification and subsumption.
But we are told: although what we see is the opposite, we have to
believe that what we see around is simply a distortion due to capitalâs
overlap with an otherwise free and autonomous process of production and
ideal democratic exchange.
If we have to abandon Marxism, which seemed to correctly describe the
present world, for a doctrine which correctly describes what we cannot
actually see, we need faith: Negri and Hardtâs doctrine is indeed a new
religion for a ânewâ world. Like all religion, we are told not to look
at the world and our experience, but to something beyond, which we
cannot see. In fact, we can entirely apply to Negri and Hardt, one by
one, Marxâs words about religion:
[Negri and Hardtâs work] is the general theory of this world, its
encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point
dâhonneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement,
and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the
fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has
not acquired any true reality. The struggle against [Negri and Hardtâs
work] is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose
spiritual aroma is [the creativity and communicativity of immaterial
production] (Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegelâs
Philosophy of Right, Introduction, italics from the original.[217]).
The new religion for the ânewâ times, however, can present itself only
as rational and based on âfactsâ. Thus it can be only based on a skilful
capacity to find facts as evidences of their inverse, and indeed Negri
and Hardt are very skilled in this. We call this the method of Negative
Reality Inversion.
Does our work get increasingly commanded through IT means? This means
that the âintelligenceâ of IT âpermeatesâ us and makes us âmore
informationalisedâ and âmore intelligentâ.
Do we interact through automated systems? This does not mean that our
communication is not real, it is only virtual.
Do scientists complain about the recent increasing privatisation of
research, previously supported by state funds â e.g. patenting DNA,
etc.? This is evidence that production is âincreasinglyâ made in
common.[218]
Are services increasingly privatised and increasingly run like
businesses? This means that today all production is increasingly run
like services![219]
Does Toyotism imposes stricter managerial control over the communication
between workers? This means that Toyotism has increased communication
because the control of it is central in production.
Are recent struggles such as the Los Angeles riots, the revolt in
Chiapas, etc. isolated explosions that do not communicate in an âeraâ of
communication and cooperation? This means that they are communicative â
but itâs a new communication, not horizontal but... vertical (Empire, p.
55).
Are the propertyless deprived of the power to produce? This means that
they are productive (of needs).
Are the poor âsubjugatedâ? This means that they are âpowerful, always
more powerfulâ (sic, Empire, p. 157).
To conclude, we invite readers to recall their healthy suspicions about
priests.The critique of religion is the prerequisite of all critique.
[1]
[2] The J18 mobilization sought to link up the autonomous struggles of
âenvironmentalists, workers, the unemployed, indigenous peoples, trade
unionists, peasant groups, womenâs networks, the landless, students,
peace activists and many moreâ. See
[3] In political discourse in the UK, âworkerismâ is usually a
derogatory term for approaches we disagree with for fetishizing the
significance of workplace struggles (and dismissing those outside the
workplace). Italian operaismo, on the other hand, refers to the
inversion of perspective from that of the operation of capital to that
of the working class: âWe too have worked with a concept that puts
capitalist development first, and workers second. This is a mistake. And
now we have to turn the problem on its head, reverse the polarity, and
start from the beginning: and the beginning is the class struggle of the
working class. At the level of socially developed capital, capitalist
development becomes subordinated to working class struggles; it follows
behind them, and they set the pace to which the political mechanisms of
capitalâs own reproduction must be tuned.â (M. Tronti, 1964, âLenin in
Englandâ, in Working Class Autonomy and the Crisis (London: Red
Notes/Conference of Socialist Economists, 1979). While the Italian usage
is clearly positive rather than negative, as we shall see, one of the
eventual limits of (versions of) Italian workerism was precisely the
fetishizing of struggles on the factory floor.
[4] âThe new âtechnical basesâ progressively attained in production
provide capitalism with new possibilities for the consolidation of its
power... But for this very reason, working-class overthrow of the system
is a negation of the entire organization in which capitalist development
is expressed â and first and foremost of technology as it is linked to
productivity.â R. Panzieri, âThe Capitalist Use of Machinery: Marx
versus the Objectivistsâ in P. Slater ed., Outlines of a Critique of
Technology (London: Ink Links), pp. 49â60.
[5] âAt the highest level of capitalist development, the social relation
becomes a moment of the relation of production, the whole of society
becomes an articulation of production; in other words, the whole of
society exists as a function of the factory and the factory extends its
exclusive domination over the whole of society. It is on this basis that
the machine of the political state tends ever-increasingly to become one
with the figure of the collective capitalist.â M. Tronti, Operai e
Capitale (Turin: Einaudi 1971).
[6]
S. Bologna (1977),âThe Tribe of Molesâ, in Working Class Autonomy and
the Crisis (op. cit.).
[7]
A. Negri (1973). âPartito Operaio Contro il Lavoroâ, in S. Bologna et
al., eds., Crisi e Organnizzazione Operaia (Milan: Feltrinelli,
1974)
[8] See Negriâs (1982) âArchaeology and Project: The Mass Worker and the
Social Workerâ, in Revolution Retrieved: Selected Writings on Marx,
Keynes, Capitalist Crisis & New Social Subjects 1967â83. (London: Red
Notes, 1988).
[9] See âDecadence: The Theory of Decline or the Decline of Theory? Part
IIâ, footnote 83, Aufheben 3 (Summer 1994).
[10] An opposite Marxian response to the âproblemâ of the class basis of
revolution, as provided by Moishe Postone in Time, Labor and Social
Domination and the Krisis group, is to retain Marxâs work as a critique
of commodity society and value but disconnect this from class.
[11]
P. Linebaugh, The London Hanged (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991).
[12] Negri introduced the term âself-valorizationâ for this process of
autonomous self-development. See Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the
âGrundrisseâ (New York/London: Autonomedia/Pluto, 1991). The attraction
of the concept lies in its implication that the working class is an
active subject, not just a function of capitalâs valorization needs, and
whose strategy is to take what it needs. However, in Marx, the concept
of âvalorizationâ refers to capitalâs own operation â specifically, its
use of our activity to expand value, that is, our alienated labour. It
therefore seems extremely odd to employ it to refer to our activity
against capital â unless that activity too is itself alienated in some
way. In the preface to the second edition of Reading âCapitalâ
Politically, Cleaver acknowledges that the concept is problematic (as he
does in his interview with Massimo de Angelis in Vis-Ă -Vis , 1993).
However, he still uses it to explain that, in being against capital,
autonomous struggles are also for âa diverse variety of new ways of
beingâ. See also his âThe Inversion of Class Perspective in Marxian
Theory: From Valorization to Self-valorizationâ in W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn
& K. Psychopedis eds., Open Marxism: Volume II: Theory and Practice
(London: Pluto).
[13] The point is well put in âMarianne Duchamp talks to Tursan Polat
about Classâ: âFirst, there are differences, and not mere differences
but oppositions of the first order, between the sociologic conception of
socio-economic categories on the one hand and the hegelo-communist
conception of social-class on the other. In the sociological conception,
socio-economic categories, including âclassâ and an inexhaustible number
of constituent sub-strata, are defined: (a) beginning with the
particular i.e. the individual, i.e. analytically/inductively; (b) as
transtemporal aggregates of individuals who share commonalities of
occupation, income, and even culture; (c) as static and normal presence
within any society, i.e. biologically. In the hegelo-communist
conception, social classes are defined: (a) beginning from the whole
i.e. the social form i.e. synthetically/deductively; (b) as active
bearers of the mutually opposed historical interests inherent within the
social form; (c) with a view toward the abolition of state and economy;
i.e. necrologically.â
[14] See Dole Autonomy versus the Re-imposition of Work: Analysis of the
Current Tendency to Workfare in the UK (now only available on our
website), âUnemployed Recalcitrance and Welfare Restructuring in the UK
Todayâ in Stop the Clock! Critiques of the New Social Workhouse and
âRe-imposition of Work in Britain and the âSocial Europeââ, Aufheben 8
(Autumn 1999).
[15] Penguin edition, p. 792.
[16] For example, in the 1930s, the Communist Party, which nominally
controlled the National Unemployed Workersâ Movement (NUWM), saw the
NUWMâs role as limited to tail-ending existing industrial strikes. The
NUWM leaders, despite their membership of the CPGB, asserted the role of
the unemployed movement to act in its own right. See Wal Hannington,
Unemployed Struggles 1919â1936: My Life and Struggles Amongst the
Unemployed (Wakefield: EP Publishing 1936).
[17] American black struggles inspired the Italian workerists: âAmerican
Blacks do not simply represent, but rather are, the proletariat of the
Third World within the very heart of the capitalist system... Black
Power means therefore the autonomous revolutionary organisation of
Blacksâ (Potere Operaio Veneto-Emilano, 1967, cited in Wright, p. 132).
[18] An examination (and critique) of the issues around the Dalla Costa
& Selma James pamphlet The Power of Women and the Subversion of
Community, the âWages for Houseworkâ demand and more recent discussions
(e.g. Fortunadiâs The Arcane of Reproduction) would be useful, but is
beyond the scope of the present article.
[19] See âA Commune in Chiapas? Mexico and the Zapatista Rebellionâ,
Aufheben 9 (2000), especially pp. 20â22. While we took Holloway as the
academic Marxist overestimating the working class and revolutionary
significance of the Zapatista rebellion, Cleaver represents this
tendency even more clearly. His refusal to consider criticisms of the
Zapatistas and Marcos come across as just as ideological as previous
Marxist defences of âactually existing socialismâ. For example: âa woman
said of the â96 encuentros: âthe women [were] doing all the cooking and
cleaning, including of toilets, invariably without any footwear (the men
had the boots), even after the heavy rainfall... Harry Cleaver said
âWell, maybe they like itâ...ââ (cited in You Make Plans â We Make
History, 2001).
[20] See T. Shanin ed., Late Marx and the Russian Road (London:
Routledge, 1983); and T. Shanin, The Awkward Class (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1972).
[21]
J. Camatte (1972) Community and Communism in Russia.
[22] âThe student was already a proletarian by virtue of a subordinate
location within the university division of labour. To the extent that
existing stipends became a fully-fledged wage, she would be transformed
from an âimpure social figure on the margins of the valorisation
processâ into a fully-fledged âwage worker producing surplus valueââ
(Cazzaniga et al., 1968, cited in Wright, p. 95).
[23] See âThe Worker-Student Assemblies in Turin, 1969â in Working Class
Autonomy and the Crisis (op. cit.).
[24] An irony of such an approach is that it implies that the right
thing for them to do is be bad students, yet Cleaver himself has been a
good student and gathers other such good students around him.
[25] In fact, a focus on the side of struggle today might lead Cleaver
to re-re-define students as middle class after all. With the wider
retreat of collective proletarian resistance, and even as more people
have entered university from working class backgrounds, so the incidence
of overt struggles in the universities has declined.
[26] In fact, for many Marxist academics, the prefix âradicalâ has now
been replaced by âcriticalâ, reflecting the general retreat of the class
struggle which for the intelligentsia takes the form of a (still
further) retreat into the realm of ideas and arguments.
[27] This point was ably made in Refuse (BM Combustion 1978): âThe
âoppositionâ by counter-specialists to the authoritarian expertise of
the authoritarian experts offers yet another false choice to the
political consumer. These âradicalâ specialists (radical lawyers,
radical architects, radical philosophers, radical psychologists, radical
social workers â everything but radical people) attempt to use their
expertise to de-mystify expertise. The contradiction was best
illustrated by a Case Con ârevolutionaryâ social worker, who cynically
declared to a public meeting, âThe difference between us and a straight
social worker is that we know weâre oppressing our clientsâ. Case Con is
the spirit of a spiritless situation, the sigh of the oppressed
oppressor, itâs the âsocialistâ conscience of the guilt ridden social
worker, ensuring that vaguely conscious social workers remain in their
job while feeling they are rejecting their role... The academic
counter-specialists attempt to attack (purely bourgeois) ideology at the
point of production: the university. Unwilling to attack the
institution, the academic milieu, the very concept of education as a
separate activity from which ideas of separate power arise, they remain
trapped in the fragmented categories they attempt to criticise... In
saying social workers are just like any other worker, he [the Case Con
social worker] conveniently ignores the authority role that social
workers intrinsically have, plus the fact that when they participate in
the class struggle they donât do so by âradicalizingâ their specific
place in the division of labour (e.g. radical dockers, radical
mechanics) but be revolting against it.â (pp. 10â11, 23).
[28] See âA Commune in Chiapas? Mexico and the Zapatista Rebellionâ,
footnote 33, Aufheben 9 (2000).
[29] âwe cannot understand class unless we see it as a social and
cultural formation, arising from processes which can only be studied as
they work themselves out over a considerable historical period.â E.P.
Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth:
Penguin 1963).
[30] Op. cit.
[31] âThe Tribe of Molesâ, op cit., p. 89.
[32] For Marx formal organizations were only episodes in âthe history of
the party which is growing spontaneously everywhere from the soil of
modern society.â Quoted in J. Camatte, Origin and Function of the Party
Form. Camatteâs discussion there in a sense takes the discourse on the
party to the extreme where it dissolves, allowing his later perspectives
of this in On Organization.
[33] Wright (p. 66) suggests that the earlier workerists had no time for
the leftâs Third Worldism and support for nationalist struggles.
However, a front cover of Potere Operaio magazine from the 1970s called
for victory to the PLO-ETA-IRA.
[34] This (moralistic) attitude of cheer-leading âThird Worldâ (national
liberation) struggles and contempt for the Western working class was an
expression of the middle class social relations characteristic of these
students.
[35] See, for example,
[36] See âCrisis of the Planner-State: Communism and Revolutionary
Organizationâ (1971) in Revolution Retrieved (op. cit.).
[37] Though we like his phrase âmoney is the face of the bossâ.
[38] See âReview: Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973â92â, Aufheben 3
(Summer 1994) and âEscape from the Law of Value?â, Aufheben 5 (Autumn
1996).
[39] See Cleaverâs useful summary of Negriâs position in his
Introduction to Negriâs Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse (New
York/London: Autonomedia/Pluto Press, 1991).
[40] See, for example, Toni Negri, âKeynes and the Capitalist Theory of
the State post-1929â in Revolution Retrieved (op. cit.).
[41] Negri Proletari e Stato (2^(nd) edn., Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976).
[42] âYour interest for the âemergent strataâ (proletarian youth,
feminists, homosexuals) and for new, and reconceptualised, political
subjects (the âoperaio socialeâ) has always been and is still shared by
us. But precisely the undeniable political importance of these phenomena
demands extreme analytical rigour, great investigative caution, a
strongly empirical approach (facts, data, observations and still more
observations, data, facts).â (Rivolta di classe, 1976, cited in Wright,
p. 171).
[43] For a good account of the extent of recent âhiddenâ struggles in
the US today, see Curtis Priceâs âFragile Prosperity? Fragile Social
Peace: Notes on the USâ.
[44] See the Wildcat article âReforming the Welfare State in Order to
Save Capitalismâ in Stop the Clock! Critiques of the New Social
Workhouse (Aufheben, 2000).
[45] Op. cit.
[46] See F.C. Shortall, The Incomplete Marx (Aldershot: Avebury, 1994).
[47] On the other hand, Cleaver also contends that what he is doing is
not so different from Marx: âMarx illustrates these relations [of
use-value and exchange-value] with a variety of apparently innocuous
commodities: linen, iron, watches, and corn (wheat). I say apparently
because most of these commodities played a key role in the period of
capitalist development which Marx analysed: linen in the textile
industry, iron in the production of machinery and cannon, watches in the
timing of work, wheat as the basic means of subsistence of the working
class. To be just as careful in this exposition, I suggest that we focus
on the key commodities of the current period: labour power, food and
energyâ. (p. 98). However, while Cleaver is probably right that Marx did
not make an arbitrary choice of which commodities to mention in Chapter
1, their function in Marxâs presentation is arbitrary. Unlike the
political economists, Marx does give attention to the use-value side of
the economy; but here in his opening chapter he makes no mention of the
concreteness of these use-values in the class struggle. At this point of
Marxâs presentation of the capitalist mode of production, the precise
use-values are irrelevant. Marxâs reference to linen, corn etc. is a
part of a logical presentation, not a reference to concrete struggles.
[48] I.I. Rubin, Essays on Marxâs Theory of Value (New York/Montreal:
Black Rose Books 1973).
[49] Cleaverâs claim (p. 138) that while Marxists have examined the
question of the content of value at length almost no work has been done
on the issue of the form of value (and hence the necessity for Cleaverâs
own analysis) includes reference to Rubin. But this in itself suggests
that Cleaver hasnât understood (and perhaps hasnât even read) Rubinâs
book, the whole of which is concerned precisely with the social form of
value.
[50] Up until the 1970s, at least in the English speaking world, Marx
was seen as having simply developed and refined Ricardoâs labour theory
of value. In this traditional interpretation, Marx, like Ricardo, was
seen to adhere to an embodied labour conception of value. What was
common to all commodities, and hence what it was that made them
commensurate with each other as manifestations of this common factor,
was that they were all products of the âexpenditure of human brains,
nerves and musclesâ, that is of human labour in general. Consequently,
the value of a commodity was seen to be determined by the labour
embodied in it during its production.
With this physiological, or quasi-physicalist, conception of labour, the
Ricardian labour theory of value conceived value as merely a technical
relation: the value of a commodity was simply determined by the amount
of labour-energy necessary for its production. As such the Ricardian
labour theory of value could in principle be applied to any form of
society.
For Rubin, what was specific about the capitalist mode of production was
that producers did not produce products for their own immediate needs
but rather produced commodities for sale. The labour allocated to the
production of any particular commodity was not determined prior to
production by custom or by a social plan and therefore it was not
immediately social labour. Labour only became social labour, a
recognised part of the social division of labour, through sale of the
commodity it produced. Furthermore, the exchange of commodities was a
process of real abstraction through which the various types of concrete
labour were reduced to a common substance â abstract social labour. This
abstract social labour was the social substance of value. Rubinâs
abstract social labour theory of value necessarily entailed an account
of commodity fetishism since it was concerned with how labour as a
social relation must manifest itself in the form of value in a society
in which relations between people manifest themselves as relations
between things.
In the mid-1970s the labour theory of value came under attack from the
neo-Ricardian school which argued that it was both redundant and
inconsistent. Rubinâs abstract social labour theory of value was then
rediscovered as a response to such criticisms in the late 1970s.
Although Cleaver dismisses Rubin there have been attempts to address his
abstract social labour theory of value from the tradition of autonomia â
see for example the article by Massimo De Angelis in Capital & Class, 57
(Autumn 1995).
[51] âAn official Soviet philosopher wrote that âThe followers of Rubin
and the Menshevizing Idealists ... treated Marxâs revolutionary method
in the spirit of Hegelianism... The Communist Party has smashed these
trends alien to Marxism.â ... Rubin was imprisoned, accused of belonging
to an organization that never existed, forced to âconfessâ to events
that never took place, and finally removed from among the living.â
(Fredy Perlman, About the Author, in Rubinâs Essays on Marxâs Theory of
Value (op. cit.)
[52] We made this same point in our reply to Cleaverâs associate George
Caffentzis of Midnight Oil/Midnight Notes. See âEscape from the Law of
Value?â, Aufheben 5 (Autumn 1996), p. 41.
[53] See F.C. Shortall, The Incomplete Marx (Aldershot: Avebury 1994).
[54] Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2000.
[55] Mark Leonard, âThe Left Should Love Globalizationâ, New Statesman,
28^(th) May 2001. Leonard is director of the Foreign Policy Centre
think-tank and apparently a Blairite.
[56] This break was, as for a lot of militants of that period, quite
physical. Arrested in 1979, Negri went into exile in 1983. However, his
particular form of escape (getting elected as a MP) and the warm welcome
and relatively cushy position that awaited him in France were based on
the different status he held (as a professor) compared with other
militants; thus sections of the movement saw him somewhat as a traitor.
His return to Italy has not succeeded in redeeming him; nor has his
credibility been restored by recent pronouncements, such as his advice
to the anti-globalization movement that the â20% of votersâ alienated
from the political system need to be won back to electoral politics.
(See âSocial Struggles in Italy: Creating a New Left in Italyâ)
[57] Of course, it is possible to reject the leftist inanities of
âanti-imperialismâ while recognizing the realities of imperialist
rivalries.
[58]
[59] The Society of the Spectacle, at least, appears in Cleaverâs
bibliographical history of the âautonomist Marxistâ tradition, appended
to Negriâs Marx Beyond Marx, op. cit.
[60] While Cleaverâs decision to leave Reading âCapitalâ Politically as
it was rather than re-write it is understandable, what is perhaps less
understandable â unless one wants to suggest that he is simply dogmatic
â is his failure to use the new Preface to acknowledge the weaknesses in
his analysis that have emerged with hindsight. The continued uncritical
lauding of âWages for Houseworkâ is one example; another is the claims
made about the role of inflation made in the 1970s.
[61] Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction, New York,
Autonomedia, 1995.
[62] Today, when both husband and wife are supposed to work, the wife
often works as well as doing most of the housework at home. For the sake
of non-âcomplexityâ, we assume here that the housewife is a âpure
housewifeâ and that the family is formed by husband and wife, unless
stated, since this does not alter the nature of our issue (value and
reproduction).
[63] Selma Jamesâs introduction in Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma
James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, Bristol,
Falling Wall Press, 1972. All emphasis in all the quotes are ours.
[64] It is noticeable that, however, in the course of her pamphlet,
Fortunatiâs challenge is carried out with a certain caution. Here and
there Fortunati seems to admit that the work of reproduction is only a
precondition for future value production: âthe surplus value produced
within the process of reproduction posits itself as a precondition... of
the surplus value produced within the process of reproductionâ (p. 102).
And she seems to admit that value is actually created by the labour
actually expended in production by the worker husband: â[reproduction]
work transforms itself into capital only if the labour power that
contains the housework surplus value is consumed productively within the
process of productionâ (p. 103).
[65] âIt is [the whole family] that constitute the necessary nucleus for
the production and reproduction of labour power. This is because the
value of labour power, like that of any other commodity, is determined
by the time necessary to produce and reproduce it. Hence the total work
supplied by the work subjects in this nucleus constitutes the necessary
work time for its reproduction.â (p. 19) Or on page 23: âGiven that
[labour power] is a commodity, its reproduction must therefore be
subject to the general laws governing commodity production, which
presupposes an exchange of commodities.â Or on page 158: âReproduction
functions as another process of commodity production. As such it is a
process complete in itself and, like the others, one in which work is
divided into necessary and surplus labourâ (p. 158). The fact that
housework produces value, or is an expenditure of abstract labour time,
is in these sentences the âlogical consequenceâ of the initial
assumption that labour power is âa commodity like all othersâ.
[66] Or in her words, housework âappearsâ as âthe creation of non-valueâ
(p.10).
[67] âWhen selling their labour power on the capitalist market, the
individuals cannot offer it as the product of their work of
reproduction, as value, because they themselves... [have no] value.â
(29, p.11).
[68] Less crude than Fortunati, years before, Mariarosa Dalla Costa
appreciated the importance of internalisation of the housewife role in
the housewife, an internalisation that has material roots in her real
social relations within society and can be broken down only through the
material involvement in the struggle. It is a fact that the ones who
really check the quality of housework are the womanâs female friends and
relatives, not the husband!
[69] Cleaver:
Cleaver/ 387LautonomistMarxism.html (2002). Dalla Costa:
(written after 1996).
[70]
[71] .pp. 8; 9; 14 (three times); 15 (twice); 20; 22; 33; 34; 41; 47;
59; 55; 57 (three times); 91; 108 (three times): 109 (twice); 128
(twice, one of which is âextremely complexâ).
[72] Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically, Anti/Theses, AK Press,
2000, p. 84. About Cleaverâs allegiance to the issues and the spirit of
Wages for Housework see also his reply to our âFrom Operaismo to
Autonomist Marxismâ, Aufheben #11,
, p. 54.
[73] See previous footnote.
[74] Capital and Class 57, Autumn 1995, pp.107â134.
[75] As quoted in Anonimo Milanese, Due Note su Toni Negri, Renato
Varani Editore, Milan, 1985, our translation.
[76] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press,
London, 2000]
[77] We do not deal with prostitution for simplicityâs sake, but it is
important here to stress that Fortunatiâs assimilation of housework and
prostitution is not a straightforward task and requires a whole article
of critique in itself.
[78] Unlike De Angelis and Fortunati, Cleaver prefers to remain
ambiguous on this crucial point. In another part of his book, he just
suggests that the work outside production âcounts as surplus valueâ in
the social factory. (p. 84) This is not the same as saying that this
work creates value, because a work that reduces the cost for the
capitalist even without creating value can be accounted as higher
surplus value for the capitalist.
[79] This can be seen as a reaction to the equally moralistic approach
within the old workersâ movement and especially within Stalinism which
celebrated and prioritised the importance of productive workers as
ârealâ workers against the parasitism or lack or relevance of
unproductive labour. An extreme of this was the Stakhanovist
glorification of work in Russia.
[80] For a similar critique of Autonomist Marxist subjectivism see our
review article on Midnight Oil, Aufheben #3, Summer 1994]
[81] In Reading Capital Politically, page 118, Cleaver says that such a
categorisation would involve a political categorization of workers into
ârealâ workers and others.
[82] For Negri, the detaching of the dollar from gold in the years
1971â3 was the beginning of a new world dominated directly by a law of
command. This change, as Negri says in Pipelines, Lettere da Rebibbia,
(p. 132) consists in the fact that: âthe dollar is now the ghost of
[Nixonâs] will, the whimsical and hard reality of [his] powerâ. This
change, Negri says, indicated a new phase of accumulation at a world
level where âthe vetero-Marxist law of value is over; now the âlaw of
commandâ rules... The subjection of value to the dollar, of life to the
American diktat... [means that] the economic crisis now are dictated by
commandâ.
[83] Pity that this postmodern world looks too much like capitalism to
justify the abandonment of Marxâs theory!
[84] Likewise, Harry Cleaver maintains that society today is âone great
social factoryâ where âall activities would contribute to the expanded
reproduction of the systemâ. And where even leisure is shaped by capital
so that what we may do for our own recreation serves to reproduce us as
workers for capital, i.e. as labour power (pp. 122â123). Similarly, for
De Angelis today âcapitalist work... can be imposed in a variety of
different forms including, but not limited to, the wage formâ (p. 122).
[85] Abstract labour is the other aspect of labour and it has also a
role in class antagonism, as it manifests itself as the wealth and power
of our employer and in capital (the world of money), alien and hostile
to us; and it is related to the exertion of concrete labour by
concretising itself as the capital that imposes it[but it is not the
same as the concrete labour, the labour that we experience as boredom
and pain.
[86] Likewise, Negri in Empire criticises the family wage as it allows
capital to control the wife through the husband as a mediator (p. 403).
[87] For the great confusion made by Fortunati in this subject see the
Conclusions.
[88] For an interesting discussion on capitalist temporality see Moishe
Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination (Cambridge University Press,
1996).
[89] It is important to notice that, in order to demonstrate that
activities or work outside production create value, De Angelis looks at
their concrete aspects (that cause pain and boredom). Fortunati likewise
often looks at concrete aspects of housework and/or prostitution in
order to argue their role in value creation[for example, she assimilates
housework and prostitution because of the fact that they share the
concrete sexual act; or she looks at concrete activities of the
housewife in her âworking dayâ. Is however looking at the concrete
aspect of work in order to deduce its aspect as abstract labour a deeper
insight in Marxist theory, or a theoretical mistake? In order to
understand whether a work creates value, which is an abstraction, a
manifestation of our social relations, should we not abstract from its
concreteness and consider its role in a mechanism that mediates our
social relations?
[90] And she adds that if the real nature of the system of reproduction
as a factory were made explicit the entire system of reproduction would
fall into a crisis (p. 114).
[91] âSmiling at parentsâ is the most utterly ridiculous example of
âworkâ done for capital within the family as a âlabour-power-factoryâ.
In Fortunatiâs words: âeven a newly born child reproduces its parents at
a non-material level... when it smiles for example... producing a large
quantity of use-value for its parents.â (p. 128).
[92] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in Early
Writings, London: Penguin Books, 1975 p. 378]
[93] Housework keeps the cost of labour power low, especially if the
housewife is encouraged to employ âhome economicâ means to get the most
(commodities) out of the family income. The employment of âhome
economicsâ is understood by Harry Cleaver as work, or discipline,
imposed on women by capital in order to increase the surplus rate of
profit (Cleaver, op. cit., pp. 122â3). But this interpretation neglects
the fact that the housewife sees the need for saving money as something
that she freely does âin her own interestâ. Indeed, in bourgeois society
what is experienced as free will is something paradoxical, because we
really do experience this freedom, but this same freedom is one with the
capital domination of our life through the market. Calling this
mechanism a âblackmail of the marketâ, or the imposition of a coerced
work, as De Angelis and Cleaver do, does not help to demistify the
âmysteryâ behind the commodity form and value, their apparent
naturalness.
[94] Commodity fetishism is not an illusion or an ideological
mystification but something having a material reality: âTo the
producers... the social relations between their private labours appear
as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations
between persons in their work, but rather as material relations between
persons and social relations between thingsâ (Marx, Capital, London:
Penguin Classics 1990, pp. 165â166] ) About this important point see for
example Geoffrey Pilling, Marxâs Capital, London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1980, pp. 169â173]
[95] An extreme case of an unwaged âworkâ subsumed by capital is the way
the so-called âAnti-Social Behaviour Ordersâ (ASBOs) are enforced by the
UK State against youngsters who graffiti or roam in the gardens of their
neighbours and knock on their doors. Enforcing these orders, which means
sending a child to jail, would be economically impossible for the UK
State. The State cannot afford to pay the police to monitor twelve year
olds hassling their neighbours: the only way the ASBOs are enforced is
through the collaboration of neighbours, who then âworkâ for the State
as guards and police for free. They do this to protect their private
property. Sure there is a blackmail behind their unwaged work: the
imposition of the commodity form makes everybody dependent on the little
private property they own, and this divides the class and fragments the
proletariat into individuals, enemies of each other and loyal to the
bourgeois order. But (unfortunately) this blackmail is subjectively felt
as a ânaturalâ condition, not as coercion, and it would not induce
antagonism in âalienated workersâ, who are âcoercedâ in this âboundlessâ
job.
[96] These two opposite aspects of capitalism are discussed by Marx in
Capital (op. cit., pp. 470â480).
[97] For example on p. 248 they say that the history of the modern era
(âmodernityâ) is basically substantiated by âimposition of disciplineâ[a
concept that is theoretically not well defined, but emotionally
attractive to the intellectual (liberal) reader. Money is a tool to
impose discipline too: the monetary mechanisms, they complain on page
346, âare the primary means to control the marketâ. Should we be really
morally outraged along with Negri and Hardt that the market is
controlled by a despotic mechanism, or is it more intelligent to
consider how the whole system of power in capitalism is rooted in free
relations of exchange?
[98] While Negri and Hardt make a distinction between the âfreedomâ of
this flow and the market, this distinction is based on the fact that,
unlike the free flow, the market is âdominated by capitalâ and
âintegratedâ into the logic of its âimperialist commandâ (p. 363). But,
as we explain in the main text, it is the ideally pure freedom of the
market (the same freedom that is behind the âfree flowâ) that what
substantiates the opposite of freedom, the despotic side of capital[thus
the distinction made by Negri and Hardt hides their uncritical attitude
towards bourgeois freedom and bourgeois values which we discuss in the
main text.
[99] Negri and Hardt admit that their so celebrated celebrated mass
mobility is âstill... a spontaneous level of class struggleâ (p.
213â214); however, they cannot think of a future struggle in which this
magic spontaneity is abandoned and where we will gain direct and
conscious control over the world and ourselves . The only way for them
of thinking of an organised struggle that still preserves the
spontaneity of the masses is that of theorising the necessity of âa
forceâ capable of drawing from theâ destructive capacities and desiresâ
of the multitude and organising the struggle. This in a sense is the
theorisation of a separation that we want to overcome in a revolutionary
movement and it is for us as exciting as... Leninism.
[100] In Fortunatiâs jargon, âfreedom to whom to exchangeâ implies
sexual freedom, but this is related to an economic concept of exchange.
So what Fortunati really means here is: âthe form of the family does not
allow us to swap partners freely as soon as we find a potential for a
more profitable exchangeâ. By saying this Fortunati equates marriage or
sexual partnership with a simple economic transaction, a job contract,
not dissimilar in this from bourgeois philosophers, such as Kant! (See
for example pp. 57â67) Thus the idea of sexual liberation is here one
with the idea of a perfectly liberal economic market for human
relations. Notice also that Fortunatiâs jargon (âequal relationshipâ,
âreal opportunityâ, âfreedom with whom to exchangeâ) can be easily
shared by an American Express top manager.
[101] Marx says that âthe more value [the worker] creates, the more
worthless he becomesâ (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, op. cit.,
p. 325), but he means that in capitalism the dispossessed are worth
nothing when a question of choice or priority is considered, not that,
in the transition from pre-capitalist to capitalist modes of production
he has lost some (monetary) value! Rather, precisely in the fact that in
capitalism value becomes everything and we become nothing (unless we are
worth some exchange value, or better, unless we have exchange value in
our pockets) Marx sees the ontological inversion of capital to humans.
By complete contrast, Fortunati uncritically accepts the bourgeois
concept of a human value which is embodied and expressed by exchange
value, to the extent to claim that the individual in capitalism has lost
the (money) value he was worth when he was a slave[because, at least
then he had value by being a commodity! This (mad) idea assumes that
commodity relations are the only imaginable human relations and that
(exchange) value is ahistorically pivotal in human life. By assuming
this Fortunati does the same âRobinsonadeâ that Marx criticised in the
classical political economists which amounts to a covert assumption of
the naturalness of the present social relations.
[102] Before saying this, she quotes Marx, who speaks about the formal
equality of the worker and the capitalist in front of the law in the
sphere of circulation, but it escapes from Fortunatiâs understanding
that Marx wants to highlight the paradox of bourgeois equality and
freedom, not to make an apology of it.
[103] A âMilanian Anonymousâ ultra left pamphlet criticises Negriâs
assumption of working class âAutonomyâ by considering uncritically the
âimmediate subjectivity... of the individual as immediately givenâ
within the conditions imposed in capitalism. Thus as they say for Negri
âAutonomyâ and âself-valorisationâ of the individual are considered
within the limits of what exists, âfor his âfreeâ submission to the
capitalist societyâ. (Anonimo Milanese, op. cit. pp. 64â65, our
translation).
[104] Against the trend for women flooding on to the labour market any
appeal to traditional values and moralism cannot work on its own. This
is why the right-wing party Forza Nuova has to take into consideration
the reality of commodity fetishism and propose a wage for housework in
order to counter-balance the attractiveness of a proper wage. Their
political manifesto says: âProposals at the legislative level: ... the
demographic growth must be encouraged with subsidies for every child and
with further subsidies for the families with more children... female
housework must be paid with a family checque, to discourage work outside
home.â (
, our translation).
[105] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, op. cit. p.
348, punctuation slightly changed.
[106] This does not mean that one should not recognise liberal struggles
(as well as struggles in the workplaces limited to higher wages) as
being expressions of the contradictions of capitalism and containing
potentials for development beyond the conditions that cradled them; but
one needs to understand both the contradictions that give rise to these
struggles and the inner contradictions of these struggles.
[107] See Karl Marx Capital, Chapters 14 and 15, for the ontological
inversion of man and capital realised first with rationalisation in
manufacture and later perfected with large-scale industry.
[108] âThe magnitude of value [of labour power] is greater than the sum
of values of the commodities used to produce it... i.e.. its exchange
valueâ (p.84).
[109] When the worker sells his labour power to the capitalist, âthe
housework process [which creates this value] passes over to the
capitalist leaving no visible traceâ. (p. 97)
[110] âThe fact that the magnitude of the value of labour power is not
fully represented by its exchange value is not surprising because the
value of a commodity is expressed in an independent manner throughout
its representation as exchange valueâ (p. 82).
[111] âWhile the use value of other commodities cannot constitute the
measure of their value... in the case of labour power it is
its...use-value that constitutes the measure of its valueâ[she says on
p.81]
[112] Karl Marx, Grundrisse, London: Penguin Books, 1993, pp. 295â6]
[113] As Marx found in his analysis of capital, value (and abstract
labour as well) is social since it is inseparable from the nature of the
commodities and of the nature (aim) of their production: âI call this
commodity fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as
soon as they are produced as commodities... This fetishism arises from
the peculiar character of the labour which produces them.â (Marx,
Capital, op. cit., p. 165).
[114] Which she presents against the accusation of âdouble countingâ
labour in her theory (p. 93).
[115] Karl Marx, Grundrisse, op. cit. pp. 248â249]
[116] 25,000 Mhz.
[117] The question: âHow many apples do I have if I add one apple to
five apples?â makes sense. The question: âWhat do I have if I add five
apples to fiveâ does not make any sense. In order to add, subtract or
equate two quantities, they must be quantities of something homogeneous.
[118] All we have available to us is the English version of The Arcane
of Reproduction. We assume that it reflects the original Italian
version.
[119] Negri and Hardt, Empire, op. cit. p. 294] They quote Spinoza to
support this bourgeois dream of an ideally free civil society.
[120] This does not mean to dismiss struggles that may start in order to
defend rights of freedom and equality, as well as struggles that may
start in order to demand a higher wage[but we cannot be but disappointed
by ârevolutionaryâ or âanti-capitalistâ theories that cannot criticise
the present social relations.
[121] This does not mean to dismiss threat, stress and potential
antagonism that industrial capital competition implies for the petty
bourgeoisie.
[122] âThis formalism... imagines that it has comprehended and expressed
the nature and life of a form when it has endowed it with some
determination of the schema as a predicate. The predicate may be
subjectivity or objectivity, or say, magnetism, electricity...
contraction and expansion, east or west, [value/non value creation], and
the like... In this sort of circle of reciprocity one never learns what
the thing itself is... In such a procedure, sometimes determinations of
sense are picked up from everyday intuition [or political-theoretical
jargon], and they are supposed of course to mean something different
from what they say; something that is in itself meaningful...â [Hegel,
Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface, Oxford Paperbacks, p. 29, our
adjustments in square brackets].
[123] For example, De Angelis, who theorises that any coerced, waged or
unwaged work creates value, is also a keen supporter of the demand âthat
all of us receive a guaranteed income which is sufficient to meet basic
needsâ and which âpays the invisible work of studentsâ and other low
waged and unwaged proletarians so that everybody âhave less pressure and
more time to think for themselves and imagine different ways of beingâ (
). The idea of sharing the world with capitalism while creating bubbles
of âdifferent ways of beingâ, which is the theme of the conference Life
Despite Capitalism, (London School of Economics, 16â17 October 2004) is
in De Angelisâs quote above expressed as âimagining different ways of
beingâ[Aufheben cannot but agree with this. Indeed, we think that only
when capitalism is subverted and new social relations are established we
will be able to create a different way of being that is
not...imaginary!!
[124] A striking ambiguity is Fortunatiâs claim that the childrenâs
demand for economic support from their parents in the form of pocket
money is âa very anti-capitalist ideaâ because âthe children earn [this
money] solely in virtue of the fact that they exist as individuals and
not because they are active as labour powersâ (pp. 141â2). In fact,
children will get money from their parents not because they are free
individuals, but because they are elements of the direct relationship of
the family, which is not a relation among free individuals. Free
individuals are so free to let each other freely starve, unless they
exchange[and this does not apply to the children in a family. While on
the one hand Fortunati complains all the time about the illiberal
relation of the family for obstructing our perfected âfreedom to
exchange with whom we wantâ, it is precisely the form of the family that
grants a right to the children to extract money out of the pockets of
their parents with nothing in exchange! If this is anti-capitalist, it
is in virtue of the clash between capitalism and an archaic form of
social relationship, in the same sense that the Christian concept of
giving charity to the undeserving poor is... very anti-capitalist too
indeed. On the other hand, the form of parental support as pocket money,
unlike that in form of directly providing the child what he needs, is a
very capitalist form which the archaic relation of parents and children
assumes in capitalism! Indeed, modern parents feel the importance of
teaching their children âthe value of moneyâ by giving them money, not
use values. This obliges the children to think about budgeting and to
take up jobs outside home if they go above budget beyond their parentsâ
economic possibilities[which is the necessary training to accept the
conditions of life imposed by the commodity form, including the curse of
being in waged work for the rest of their life, as the natural and only
possible way of living.
[125] There are also differences between Fortunati and Dalla Costa. In
The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, Dalla Costa sees
the demand of wages for housework as a useful way to build up a
struggle[but the real aim of housewivesâ struggle, she says correctly,
is to develop new social relations, to challenge the present ones, which
substantiate the housewivesâ self-identification with their roles, and
their isolation. Fortunati, instead, merely limits herself to demand
better economic and social status for women in terms of a bourgeois
definition of status: more money, more consumption, a reduction of
housework hours, and a wage for the houseworker (See also Polda
Fortunati, âThe Housewifeâ, in All Work and No Pay, Women, Housework,
and the Wages Due, (1974) Ed. Wendy Edmond and Suzie Fleming, London:
Power of Woman Collective and Falling Wall Press, pp.13â19).
[126] For example, she denounces âerrorsâ (p.73); âmisunderstandingsâ
(pp. 73, 80, 81); âlack of clarityâ (p. 91); âmisconceptionsâ (p. 59);
âblindnessâ (p. 91); âmisplaced assumptionsâ (p. 59); âgeneral
confusionâ and âerroneous theoriesâ (p. 116), etc. in all the history of
Marxist thought previous to Fortunati.
[127] Fortunati also posits the âexistenceâ of a social relation of
wage-work for the housewife, which âappears otherwiseâ too, because it
is mystified by the mediation of the husband, who acts as an âagentâ of
capital. Again, the existence of this invisible wage-work relation is
declared and sustained although it clashes with facts: every feature of
family relations which does not fit with wage-work relations or
productive work is declared to be a âspecificâ feature of this
particular wage relation, or of this particular production. See for
example p. 105; p. 129; p. 139; or p. 157]
[128] Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire, Harvard University Press,
London, 2000.
[129] Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Multitude, The Penguin Press, New
York, 2004.
[130] Marx Beyond Marx, Autonomedia, London, 1991.
[131] For example, The New York Times, as socialist Alex Callinicos,
embittered by Negriâs attacks on traditional Marxism, reminds to us in
âToni Negri in perspectiveâ, International Socialism Journal, Autumn
2001,
[132] In fact Multitude seem to have been written with the aim to patch
up the disastrous effect of the war in Iraq on their theory. Or to
answer to a number of criticisms from the left: for example , to endorse
not a revolution but decentralised micro-struggles.
[133] âLâ Impero Colpisce Ancoraâ,
[134]
. This review also praises their âcritical rethinkingâ of basic
political concepts such as democracy, sovereignty, representation.
[135] Among many articles on Negri and Hardt: Ugo Rossi, âThe
Counter-Empire to Comeâ, Science & Society, Vol. 69, no. 2, April 2005,
pp. 191â217; Maria Turchetto, LâImpero; Paul Thompson âFoundation and
Empire: A Critique of Negri and Hardtâ, Capital and Class 86, Summer
2005, pp. 73â95. http://www. intermarx.com/interventi/impero.html.
[136] In Empire, p. 29, they mention the work of âItalian radicalsâ and
quote the philosopher Virno as a reference. An important review of
Negriâs pre-Empire work is Nick Withefordâs âAutonomist Marxism and the
Information Societyâ, Capital and Class 52, pp. 85â125.
[137] Negri and Hardt stress that these two aspects are normally
entangled. Elsewhere immaterial production is described as three-fold,
regrouping their aspects differently. See, for example, Michaelâs
Hardtâs âAffective Labourâ, Makeworlds, Friday 26 /12/2003,
0]
[138] Michael Hardt, âAffective Labourâ.
[139] The term âbiopoliticalâ is borrowed from Foucault, but, as Maria
Turchetto (LâImpero) shows, it is subverted from its original sense.
[140] In fact Negri and Hardt scan the whole history of bourgeois
thought since Spinoza and (very!) freely appropriate concepts and
observations of others.
[141] For the Regulation School (Aglietta, Coriat, etc.), Fordism and
post-Fordism were periods of socio-political equilibrium reached around
the two forms of productions. This is more sophisticated than just
focusing on the simple material process of production. For a critique of
these ideas see, Ferruccio Gambino, âA Critique of the Fordism of the
Regulation Schoolâ,
28/z28e_gam.htm.
[142] See Valeria Pugliano, âRestructuring of Work and Union
Representationâ, Capital and Class 76, Spring 2002, pp. 29â63.
[143] As Gambino finds out, there is numerical evidence that, between
the end of the â80s and the end of the â90s in France, post-Fordist
production did not displace convey-belt practices of work at all
(Gambino A Critique).
[144] If some aspects of Toyotism could be still in use, they are within
a system which is essentially a conveyor belt system. For the struggles
in Melfi see, e.g.
pomigliano.html.
[145] These ideas went up and down in popularity according to the state
of health of capitalism. For example, it was popular at the end of the
â60s and â70s with Brzezinski, Bell and others (Witheford, op. cit. pp.
86â8). See our review of Withefordâs CyberMarx in this issue.
[146] It has to be added that after the deflation of the dot.com boom
such theories have lost most of their puff.
[147] See George Caffentzis, âThe End of Work or the Renaissance of
Slavery? A Critique of Rifkin and Negriâ,
/ otonomi/caffentzis.html.
The concept of service is in fact miscellaneous. It only means: anything
except production of material products. Service includes also the
financial sector, which diverts surplus value produced in mainly
material production elsewhere (see our review of CyberMarx in this
issue).
[148] See, for example, For a Political Economy of the Sign, Telos
Press, 1981. Baudrillardâs argument conflates use value with the utility
of an object. In fact for Marx âthe form of use value is the form of the
commodityâs body itselfâ (âThe Value-Formâ in Debates in Value Theory,
Ed. Simon Mohun, The MacMillan Press Ltd, 1994).
[149] This aspect is central in Maurizio Lazzaratoâs concept of
immaterial labour. See, for example, âGeneral Intellect, Towards an
Inquiry into Immaterial Labourâ,
[150] Negri thus appeals to those, among whom us, who object to the
traditional working class organisation based on the party. However, it
is not good enough to embrace postmodernist enthusiasm for fragmentation
and isolation and delude ourselves that this is subversive.
[151] Of course, their theory is presented as superior to postmodernism
and all the other theories they appropriate! See, for instance, how they
discuss postmodernism in Empire p. 142â3.
[152] Term of insult given to Marxism by postmodern author Jean
Baudrillard in his work.
[153] Witheford, âAutonomist Marxismâ, pp. 85â6; 88; 96â7 values Negri
for his apparent capacity to supersede the bourgeois theories.
[154] An important contradiction which we do not deal with here is that
âimmaterialâ production affects the substance of value since immaterial
products can be duplicated[for Negri and Hardt this makes private
property and the imposition of wage work increasingly untenable
(Multitude p. 311).
[155] Witheford, âAutonomist Marxismâ,. p. 88.
[156] Toni Negri, interview with Mark Leonard, âThe Left should Love
Globalisationâ New Statesman, 28 May 2001,
.
[157] âThere is a distinct... neo-feudal flavour in todayâs
privatisationsâ, Negri and Hardt state in Multitude (p. 186).
[158] âThe biopolitical social organisation begins to appear absolutely
immanent... the various elements present in society are able
collaboratively to organise society themselves (p. 337).
[159] Or, on p. 339: âJust as the multitude produces in common... it can
produce... the political organisation of societyâ (p. 339).
[160] See Multitude, p. 354, sentence cited later. The shortcomings of
revolutionary utopia is âsolvedâ by Negri and Hardt by proposing a
future which is based on what we have now! These two views are in fact
two sides of the same coin the one as bad as the others.
[161] As Witheford in âAutonomist Marxismâ explains, pp. 110â1.
[162] See Witheford, âAutonomist Marxismâ, p. 89.
[163] Raniero Panzieri, âThe Capitalist Use of Machinery: Marx Versus
the Objectivistsâ,
.
Wanting a rupture does not mean to be Luddite. In our daily struggle we
are bound to twist and use capitalâs resources and exploit its
contradictions. For example, deskilling the typographers has allowed the
thickest of us to be a poster designer for our political campaigns.
[164] Our idea of revolution is that of supersession: This is not a
banal abolition of the present but a qualitative subversion that can
only be realised from within and against the present. The abolition of
immaterial production for us is not the abolition of creativity but the
reintegration of the unity of aims and execution in the production of
our life.
[165] For the non-dialectical approach in Negri and Hardt see, John
Holloway, âGoing in the Wrong Direction, or Mephistopheles, Not Saint
Francis of Assisiâ,
.
Despite the reservations we have about John Hollowayâs thought (see our
review article in Aufheben, # 11, 2003, pp. 53â56), we think his
critique of Negri is sound, clearly expressed, and very close to our
criticism.
[166] Some readers like Maria Turchetto (LâImpero) blamed an alleged
âdialecticâ in Negri and Hardt for the apparent contradictions in their
theorisation. In fact these contradictions are due to an undialectical
juxtaposition.
[167] Karl Marx, âThe German Ideologyâ in Early Writings, Ed. Lucio
Colletti, Pelican, London 1975.
[168] Marx never held a material theory of labour, which started from
material aspects of production or the products, but a social theory of
labour. His âmaterialismâ was a theory that saw society as a material
starting point, in opposition to idealism which started from ideas.
[169] See also: âSuch new forms of labour⊠present new possibilities for
economic self-management, since the mechanisms of cooperation necessary
for production are contained in the labour itself.â (Multitude, p. 336)
[170] Also: âWe can see numerous instances in which unitary control is
not necessary for innovation and that on the contrary innovation
requires common resources, open access... [e.g.] in the sectors that
have most recently emerged as central to the global economy, such as
information knowledge and communicationâ (Multitude, p. 337)
[171] âLiving labour, the form-giving fire of our creative capacities.
Living labour is the fundamental human faculty: the ability to engage
the world actively and create social life. Living labour can be
corralled by capital and pared down to the labour power that is bought
and sold and that produces commodities and capital, but living labour
always exceeds thatâ (Multitude, p. 146). Marx said this, they claim.
Believe them.
[172] See, John Holloway âTime to Revolt[Reflections on Empireâ,
Dissonance, Issue 1,
: âLiving doing is subjected to past done. Living doing is subjected to
the things made by past doing, things which stand on their own and deny
all doingâ.
[173] We object that âlabourâ is not a âhuman facultyâ[âlabour powerâ
is. The conflation of labour power with labour in Negri is not due to
imprecision, but is ideological. In a new mode of production that needs
only our brain as a tool, the faculty of labouring can be immediately
conflated with the deployment of labour.
[174] For a description of Toyotism and a (really) rational
consideration of the contradictory authoritarian and liberal aspects in
it see, Andrew Sayer, âNew Developments in Manufacturing: The
Just-in-Time System, Capital and Class, 30, Winter 1986, pp. 43â72.
[175] As well as other fetishists of Toyotism like Maurizio Lazzarato
(âGeneral IntellectâŠâ).
[176] Negri and Hardt admit that they are aware of caveats by the
Frankfurt School (Habermas), that a transmission of âmarket dataâ is
somehow impoverished. However, they add, the service sector presents a
richer model of productive communication, in that this production aims
to produce more immaterial products. And in a footnote they suggest that
Habermasâs ideas are surpassed and critiqued (Empire, p. 290).
[177] In their account of the struggle in Fiat Melfi, Mouvement
Communiste explain how Toyotism was introduced to improve exploitation
and impose massacring shifts within a conveyor-belt production. In order
to introduce this system without resistance Fiat employed in Melfi
mainly young people with no experience of organised struggle from a
region which had a very high unemployment level. However this failed to
stop increasing resignations and resistance. (âFiat Melfi: La Classe
OuvriĂšre dâItalie Contre-Attaqueâ, La Lettre de Mouvement Communiste,
13, May 2004, BP 1666, Centre Monnail 1000, Bruxelles 1, Belgique).
[178] In general capital needs a class who has an interest in imposing
its rule on the others. See, âWhat was the USSR?â in Aufheben # 6â9,
1997â2000]
[179] Negri and Hardt celebrate the ideal freedom of democratic
exchange. If there is something wrong in our real exchanges and
communications, they argue, this is due to an undue overlap of capitalâs
control: âexchanges and communications dominated by capital are
integrated into its logicâ (Empire, p. 363).
[180] Sorry: bio-product?
[181] Sorry: singularities?
[182] To get rid of the objectivity of capital it is not good enough to
give a different name (potenza) to our potentially autonomous power and
another name (potere) to the power of capital, as if they really existed
side by side and if it were only a matter of becoming aware of our
existing power!
[183] See, for example, Roberto Sarti, âToni Negri Against the Empire...
For a Capitalist Europe!â, Interactivist Info Exchange, May 30, 2005
? sid= 05/05/31/0447208&mode=nested&tid=4analysis/05/05/31/044720]
shtml?tid=4.
[184] Negri and Hardt resurrect a theory which pivots on potentially
free and powerful subjective âwillâ from one of the first founders of
bourgeois thought: Spinoza.
[185] While Negri and Hardt conflate the object into the subject (âall
is due to subjectivityâ), Theorie Communiste, (we surely do not need to
remind our readers of them), as Negriâs negative mirror image, end up
conflating the subject into the object (âall is due to the relations of
capital and labourâ), and appear to assert the same millennial gospel
but for completely opposite reasons: due to forces that are beyond our
individual consciousness and will, we now live in a ânewâ era when the
revolution is possible. For a critique of such theories which claim that
our collective subjectivity is somehow âforcedâ towards a certain
historical direction (the revolution) by capital itself see, Gilles
DauvĂ©, âTo Work or not to Work? Is That the Question?â,
http://troploin0] free.fr/biblio/lovlabuk/
[186] Capitalist subsumption of labour has consequences for society as a
whole, inside and outside the workplace, so that many activities which
are done outside production are reshaped according to the pace and
character of productive labour. For a discussion of how housework is
affected by capitalist production, see âThe Arcane of Productive
Reproductionâ in Aufheben # 13, 2005, pp. 20â36.
[187] In the context of the military Star Wars project. See our article
on China in this issue.
[188] For the alienation of the university professor, see Harry Cleaver
âFrom Operaismo to Autonomist Marxism: A Response:
AufhebenResponse2.pdf.
[189] David Hencke, âFirms Tag Workers to Improve Efficiencyâ, The
Guardian, June 7, 2005.
[190] We deliberately used Autonomist De Angelisâs words âboredom and
painâ that he uses to describe the effects of real subsumption in
âBeyond the Technological and the Social Paradigmsâ, Capital and Class
57, Autumn 1995, pp. 107â134.
[191] See Mario Tronti, âSocial Capitalâ, www.reocities.com/cordobakaf
Following this initial suggestion, other Autonomist Marxist authors,
such as Massimo De Angelis, later adopted the concept of âabstract
labourâ for the concrete âboring and painfulâ experience of labour under
real subsumption (in De Angelis, âBeyond the Technologicalâ). Although
we do not agree with such use of the concept of âabstract labourâ, we
agree with the Autonomist understanding of the basis for antagonism.
[192] See also Witheford, âAutonomist Marxismâ, p. 92.
[193] However, to patch up the gap between their theory and reality,
Negri and Hardt add: âthe impersonal rule of capital extends throughout
society... the places of exploitation, by contrast, are always
determinate and concrete.â (Multitude, p. 100â101) A theory that says
one thing and its opposite is the best theory ever.
[194] Negri, Politics of Subversion, p. 116 cited in Witheford,
âAutonomist Marxismâ, p. 101. Negri safely adds that capital even
âanticipatesâ our production âin commonâ (Politics of Subversion, p.
116). This genially explains why this âproduction in commonâ is never
actually observable in reality!
[195] On how productive the âpoorâ is see also, Empire, p. 158. In the
concept of âexcessâ there is a moment of truth for the skilled creative
worker. This excess has a value today and can make the difference
between who guides and controls a struggle and who does not tomorrow. We
cannot see how, instead, the McDonald workerâs skills in showing servile
niceness all the time gives to them âequal opportunities of struggleâ.
[196] Marx mentioned in his times the human (i.e. social) meaning of
food in opposition to something that serves only to fill the stomach.
See, âEconomic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844)â in Early Writings,
Pelican, London 1975, p. 353.
[197] George Caffentzis, âImmeasurable Value? An Essay on Marxâs
Legacyâ, The Commoner, 10, p. 97, 1997. And by us in Aufheben # 13.
[198] In Makeworlds,
0]
[199] In the â70s and â80s many, following Braverman, focused their
analysis of IT as being the new machine (see Nick Witheford, âAutonomist
Marxismâ and our review of CyberMarx in this issue).
[200] The call centre worker is in the front line in a relation between
clients and their providers of service, and often take the brunt for
this alienating situation. See Amelia Gentleman, âIndian Call Staff Quit
Over Abuse on the Lineâ The Observer, 28 May 2005. So much for the...
creation of affects.
[201] Paraphrased from Empire, p. 55.
[202] Pugliano notices that also in the FIAT factory in Melfi the
establishment of increased inter-personal communication between workers
and their leaders or other persons in key roles in the factory reduced
oppositional activity to the minimum (Pugliano, âRestructuring of Workâ,
p. 47).
[203] As Mouvement Communiste notice in Fiat Melfi, the introduction of
Toyotism, with its heavy shifts, destroyed all âpossibilities of any
social life outside the factoryâ for the workers. So much for the
creation of social relationsâŠ
[204] We notice that the recent BA strike in support of Gate Gourmet
workers (a catering outsource of BA) was based on ânetworksâ of
friendship and family relations created outside work. Importantly, those
who showed solidarity with the Gate Gourmet workers were the âmaterialâ
baggage handlers and not the âimmaterialâ hostesses and stewards.
[205] For the debate, see e.g., J. Walker, âESF: Another Venue is
Possible: Negri vs. Callinicosâ,
.
[206] See our review of CyberMarx in this issue for examples of
âeffectiveâ forms of struggles suggested to us by the Negrian Nick
Witheford.
[207] Radical-chic tutors of design encourage young, would-be graphic
designers to have a few anti-capitalist ad-busting works in their
portfolio.
[208] Lazzarato hails the end of the class system âas a model of action
and subjectivationâ (Maurizio Lazzarato, âWhat Possibilities for Action
Exist Today in the Public Sphere?â,
).
[209] In âAn Empire of Cant, Hardt, Negri and Postmodern Political
Theoryâ, Dissonance, Issue 1,
[210] In âAlma Venusâ Negri avoids spelling out how he conceives the
transition to communism by speaking rather of âleaning further beyond
the edge of beingâ. This pure abstractedness is, we suspect, convenient
(
). Let us notice that all human thought is based on abstractions.
Bourgeois thought, however, uses abstract concepts as starting points,
to explain reality in separation from its context.
[211] To be fair to traditional Marxism, we should specify that Negri
and Hardt seem to have absorbed and re-elaborated vulgar Marxism.
[212] Sorry: flexibility?
[213] The most popular social group for the intellectual world is the
intellectual world. This is immaterial by default.
[214] In âMust Try Harderâ and âThe Arcane of Productive Reproductionâ,
Aufheben # 13, we similarly criticised as moralistic the autonomist
attempts to convince the world that the unwaged produce value.
[215] And Michael Hardtâs acrobatics to condemn the anarchistsâ attacks
against Starbucksâ windows in Seattle[as well as his passive acceptance
to call these attacks âviolenceâ.
[216] âI donât deny, itâs nice to dream, but it is less nice to have
hallucinations. Seeing a fallen empire and a triumphing communism where,
instead, there is an aggressive capitalism... more than a beautiful
utopia this seems to me, frankly, hallucinationâ (Maria Turchetto,
âLâImperoâ).
[217]
. See also Early Writings, p. 244.
[218] See Multitude, pp. 337â8 and pp. 185â6.
[219] The prescription to run businesses like services, popular in the
business literature of the â80s, were nothing other than the re-edition
of old the bourgeois ideology of the 19^(th) century. The prescription
to run production for profit like a service, or simply to understand it
as a service, hides the delusion to abolish its inherent contradictions
as a production for profitthrough a change of the staffâs attitude
towards the customer or towards themselves. Instead, the recent
increasing privatisation of state-run services like the British National
Health Service is a concrete change of a service into a profit-making
machine. This has really concrete effects, it is not simply the
ideological prescription of a change in attitude. But Negri and Hardt,
who pay respect to business guru prescriptions, do not bother about
these much more relevant changes in the ânewâ era of increasing
privatisation!