It follows that the analysis
of the Italian workerists of the 1960s is in urgent need of being updated in
the light of the structural crisis of labour power as such, the main motive
force underlying the present permanent state of crisis. This change in class
composition, the recomposition of class antagonism at a social level, is the
major issue addressed in this essay. Here Negri traces the analysis and method
of class composition from its early exponents, in the Italian workerism of the
1960s, to the new problems posed for analysis of the recomposition of the class
movement today, the 'remaking of the working class' at the level of social
antagonism which has now been reached.
For Negri, in contrast to the
various theories of neo-functionalism and post-industrial sociology, the new
movements of struggle in the social sphere represent a new level of class
antagonism, which cannot be- reduced to a mere proliferation of new
subjectivities around life-needs 'signalling the end of any class relation
based on the production of value and suplus-value.The crisis of the value form,
seen as a class relation,is rather the starting point for a new level of class
antagonism. And this analysis has to go beyond the narrow definitions of
productive work, the 'factoryist' definitions of the working class that had
dominated in orthodox Marxism for so long.
The emergence of this new
social dimension of class struggle from the early-mid 1970s meant for Negri that
the class analysis based on the concept of the 'mass worker', developed in the
1960s, had become too narrow to encompass the new level of antagonism, now
extended beyond production to reproduction as a whole. Hence the references to
the need for a critique of and surpass allof the 'political economy of the mass
worker'. It should be pointed out and Negri makes this clear that the old
workerist analysis was never simply a 'factoryist' conception of the class. In
Tronti, for instance, the extension of the factory, and of production
relations, to society was central to his whole theory of class antagonism in
advanced capitalism. And his definition of 'refusal of work' at the strategic
direction of the class struggle was not subsequently abandoned; indeed, for
Negri it remains key in his updated class analysis. What had changed was that
this 'social extension ' could now no longer be seen simply in terms of the
extension of wage demands from factory struggles. Through restructuration and
the regime of austerity, the 'extensivity' of the factory wage struggle had
been cut off , by division and segmentation of the labour market, between
'guaranteed' and 'non-guaranteed' sectors by expansion of the casual, part-time
and underground economy etc, in short by what in Italy is defined by the term
'diffused factory'. This was one factor in requalifying the new social nature
of the working class. The other was the social nature of the capitalist
response to the crisis, which consisted in an attack on the social wage as a
whole, through cuts in public spending, to bring back what Negri calls the
'synchronisation' between the independent reproduction of a fully socialized
labour-power and the discipline of the wage/work relation.
Negri's dynamic approach and
analysis of the class antagonism today as that of fully socialised labour-power
clearly puts him at variance with traditional, monolithic and corporation class
definitions, restricted to waged workers in 'direct' production only. His
emphasis on the growth of mobility, of part-time, casual and domestic work, the
absence of job fixity, the diffusion of production in the informal' economy,
the unity of production, circulation and reproduction etc, in no way signals
the 'end of the working class', but rather a higher level of socialization of
the class antagonism over the whole social working day. The new social subjects
of struggle are by no means 'marginal' rather, their marginalisation is
political.
This indeed was the key issue
in the debate between the autonomists and the established Left in italy from
the mid- 1970s onwards. Negri's orthodox critics particularly from PCI
quarters, and including the erstwhile workerists of the old school cast him
in an 'anti-worker' role, a theme taken up by his prosecuting judges (see
below). For the PCI, the new social struggles were defined as marginal
movements of a new 'petty-bourgeoisie' or 'lumpen proletariat' etc, in other
words in terms from the traditional Marxist vulgate for defining movements of
the far Right! For the ex-workerist PCI spokesman Asor Rosa, the autonomists
represented 'non- privileged parasitic strata'; for Enrico Berlinguer,
secretary of the PCI, nothing but 'plague carriers' and so on. For a major
statement of the PCI positively supporting 'democratic' austerity at this time,
see Enrico Berlinguer, Austerity, Occasione per Trasformare l'Italia
('Austerity An Opportunity for Transforming lta1y'), Ed. Riuniti, Rome 1977.
It is sad to see that this official thesis of marginality (and the portrayal of
Negri as 'anti-workerist') has been broadly accepted in the few reviews and
comments on Negri that have appeared from English would-be critics of the PCI
(for example, Alex Callinicos, Socialist Worker Review, July-August
1984; or Tobias Abse, 'Judging the PCI', New Left Review 153, 1985), For
such commentators, the 'marginals' remain marginal, and the working class is a
static, monolithic entity defined in narrow trade-union terms. As for how far
Negri's work 'anticipates Andrι Gorz' (!) and represents 'everyday anarchism'
(Callinicos), readers may judge for themselves.
Negri himself answered the
criticism that he denied the 'centrality of the working class' in a lengthy
interview in 1978 'From the Mass Worker to the Social Worker', cited above). He
also drew attention to his emphasis on the word 'worker' in the term he uses to
define the composition of the new class subjects. This analysis of class
recomposition, of the multiple subjectivities and movements for communism
today, has continued to be the major focus of Negri's work, in dialogue with
French collaborators, since his exile in France post-1983: see Negri and
Guattari, New Lines of Alliance, Semiotexte), Foreign Agents Series, New
York 1986. For those who read French, the issues of contemporary class analysis
in Italy are discussed further by Negri and others in a recent anthology: Italie,
le Philosophe et le Gendarme, VLB Editeur, Montreal 1986. (European
distribution: Rιplique Diffusion, 66 rue Renι Boulanger, 75010 Paris,
France.) The questions raised in this article are further developed in Negri's
recent work Fin de Siecle; forthcoming English edition entitled Politics
of Subversion, Polity Press, Cambridge 1989; and in Fabbriche del
Sogetto, XXI Secolo, Livorno 1987. ]
In the wake of the 20th
Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, the critique of
Stalinism which developed within the Italian labour movement above all put into
question the traditional conception of the trade union. This had become an area
of key concern. In 1953, there had been a resounding defeat of the Communist
union at FIAT; in the years that followed, there were equally resounding
defeats in line for the farm workers' unions and the public sector unions
(railway workers, postal workers etc). The fading (or downright disappearance)
of any immediate prospect of a seizure of power, and a series of confusions at
the ideological level, meant that the trade unions were being undermined as the
transmission belt of the system; both their organizational form and their
ideological basis were thrown into crisis.
But this crisis did not affect
the radicalism of the working class. There began to appear a mass form of
behaviour which was spontaneous, multiform, violent, mobile and disorderly -but
which, nonetheless, was able to compensate for the lack of trade union
leadership in ways that were both original and powerful and while the union
leaderships stuck to a repetition of the old forms, the working class reacted
in ways that were autonomous. The union would call strike action and the entire
workforce would go in to work but then, after a week, a month, maybe a year,
that same working class would explode in spontaneous demonstrations. The farm
workers of the South also began spontaneous struggles. However, they had been
defeated in the movement to take over agricultural land; they had been sold out
by the government's agrarian reforms which condemned them to the poverty of
having to work small holdings. As a result, the rural vanguards chose the path
of large-scale emigration. This was a mass phenomenon its causes and effects
were complex, certainly, but its quality was political. Then things began to
move: Milan in 1959, Genova in 1960, Turin in 1962, and Porto Marghera in 1963-
a series of struggles which pushed to the forefront of the political scene.
This succession of labour struggles involved every major sector of industry and
all the major urban concentrations. They were all more or less spontaneous,
mass events, and revealed a degree of general circulation of modes of struggle
that had not previously been experienced, One might well ask for a definition
of the spontaneity of the struggles. Because, while it is true that the
struggles were in large part independent of the control and the command of the
trade unions (and the unions were, sometimes, not even aware of them), at the
same time, they appeared and were strongly structured. They revealed the
existence of new working-class leaderships which were as we used to say
'invisible'. In part because many people simply didn't want to see them, But
also (and mainly) because of their mass character', because of the new mechanisms
of cooperation that were coming into play in the formation of workers'
political understanding', because of the extraordinary Ability of these new
forms of struggle to circulate', and because of the degree of understanding
(understanding of the productive process) that they revealed. And whilst these
new forms of struggle were at first seen by most people as 'irrational' in the
course of their development they gradually began to reveal a coherent project
and a tactical intelligence which finally began to problematise the very
concept of working-class rationality economic rationality? Socialist
rationality? Rationality of the law of value? Rationality of trade union
control? Rationality of law and order? Etc, etc. In effect, we could identify
elements in the form that was taken by these struggles which were directly
contradictory with the whole structure of trade unionist/ socialist ideology.
The wage demands, and the extremes to which they went, contradicted the way in
which, in traditional trade union practice, the wage had been used as a
political instrument, as a means of mediation. The partisan nature (egotism) of
the struggles ran heavily counter to the socialist ideology of the homogeneity
of working-class interests which had prevailed up till then. The immediacy and
the autonomous nature of struggles ranging from wildcat strikes to mass
sabotage, their powerful negative effect on the structures of the cycle of
production, ran counter to the traditional view that fixed capital is
sacrosanct, and also counter to the ideology of liberation of (through) work
in which work was the subject of liberation, and Stakhanovism or high levels of
professional skill the form of liberation, Finally, the intensification
(whether at group or individual level) of heightened forms of mobility. of
absenteeism, of socialization of the struggle, ran immediately counter to any
factory-centred conception of working-class interests, of the kind that has
come down to us from the workers' councilist tradition. All this gradually
uncovered, in increasingly socialized forms, an attitude of struggle against
work, a desire for liberation from work whether it be work in the big
factory, with all its qualities of alienation, or work in general, as conceded
to the capitalist in exchange for a wage.
The paradox of the situation
was the fact that this mass spontaneity, highly structured within itself,
negated in principle the very definition of spontaneity. Traditionally,
spontaneity has been taken to mean a low level of working-class consciousness,
a reduction of the working class to simple labour-power. Here, though, it was
different. This spontaneity represented a very high level of class maturity. It
was a spontaneous negation of the nature of the working class as labour power.
This tendency was clearly present, and later developments were to reveal it
still further. Thus anybody who wanted to analyse the new forms of struggle was
going to have to be prepared to problematise the entire theoretical tradition
of socialism. Within these struggles, there were new categories waiting to be
discovered.
And this was what was done. In
the early 1960s, on the fringes of the official labour movement, a number of
working-class vanguards and a number of groups of intellectuals active within
the class struggle produced a theory in which the mass worker was understood as
the new subject of working-class struggles.
On the one hand, their studies
identified the objective characteristics of this class-protagonist. These
characteristics were determined as follows:
1) within the organization of
the labour process, by Taylorism;
2) within the organization of
the working day and the organisation of wage relations, by Fordism;
3) within economic/political
relations, by Keynesianism;
4) within general social and
state relations, by the model and the practice of the Planner-state.
On the other hand, they
succeeded in defining (this was absolutely imperative) the new subjective
characteristics of this new configuration of the class. These subjective
characteristics were described in terms that were dynamic and highly
productive. In other words, every aspect of the capitalist or animation of the
factory society was to be seen as the product of a dialectic between working
class struggle and capitalist development (including developments in
technology; in the form of the wage; In economic policy; and in the form of the
State) the product a dialectic whose active and motion central force was
the mass worker. As our old friend Marx says, machines rush to where there
are strikes. All the mechanisms of capitalist control of development were
brought to bear at critical points within the system. By means of a continual
theft of the information generated by the struggles, capital created increasingly
complex mechanisms of domination. It was within this framework that the
analysis undertaken by workerism unstitched the capitalist Moloch, following
the indications provided by working-class struggle. The comrades arrived at a
fundamental theoretical conclusion: that, given a certain level of capitalist
development, the concept of labour-power (understood as an element of the
dialectical relationship between workers and capital, a relationship in which
capitalist logic has the upper hand) becomes dissolved. A dialectical
relationship most certainly remains, but now the relationship of
capital/labour-power becomes the relationship of capital/working class. Thus
the dialectic of capitalist development is dominated by the relationship with
the working class. The working class now constituted an independent polarity
within capitalist development. Capitalist development was now dependent on the
political variable of working-class behaviours.
The concept of labour- power
could no longer be substantiated;only that of working-class was adequate. I
have to admit that our theoretical and political positions in this period,
while very rich in some respects, were very poor in others. Their richness lay
in the fact that they provided a basis from which we could then develop an
entirely political concept of labour-power. We learned a lot from developments
in the capitalist revolution of the 1930s and 1940s. In particular, we learned
that it was possible to carry forward revolutionary struggles having a marked
effect both on the structure of the labour process, and on the structure of
economic and political domination in other words, struggles that were capable
of winning against Taylorism and within Keynesianism. On the other hand, the
poverty of our theoretical and practical positions lay in the fact that, while
individual struggles and the struggles of individual class sectors proved
capable of understanding capital and taking it on, at the same time, the
potential of that struggle, its strategic dimension, the re-establishment of a
centre of revolutionary initiative, remained beyond our grasp. Practice, even
the very highest working-class practice at this level of the class struggle
always contains an element of uncertainty as regards its synthesis and resolution
what Lenin used to call the 'art of insurrection', an art which the workers,
today, are seeking to turn into science. This science still had to be
constructed a science which the practice of the mass worker was demanding,
but which it did not provide. In fact, capital's science of domination was far
ahead of us.At the time when we were introducing the concept of the mass
worker, and, by implication, a critique of the category of labour-power in
favour of a concept of the dynamism of the working class, capital, for its
part, had already made tremendous advances in its own practice, as regards its
theory of domination and redressing the balance of power. (Note that within the
specificities and the isolation of a few national situations Italy in particular
we were successful in developing a remarkable level of subjective action, and
in bringing about moments of deep capitalist crisis.) For, while from the
working-class viewpoint the revolutionary practice of the mass worker was being
advanced within individual factories, and within the overall interlocked system
of factories and companies, capital was already responding in overall, global
and social terms in terms of global domination and control. Keynesianism at
its roots had already demonstrated this: an awareness not only that the wage
relation extended between subjects that were different (capital and the
working class), but also and above all that the solution (favourable to
capitalist development) was to be sought across the entire span of production
and circulation in other words, involving the entire sociality of the
relations of production and reproduction. In the Keynesian system, state
budgeting was the means of recuperating and neutralizing the class struggle in
the factory, and monetary policy was the means of subordinating the wage
relation. Fordism, for its part, had already transformed the high level of
cooperation on the assembly line (and thus corrected those elements of weakness
which labour struggles, at that level of production, were able to turn against
capitalist command) into a conscious policy, one might say, of the socialite of
the assembly line in other words, a policy of command over the relation
between industrial production and the reproduction of labour-power, a capitalist
intervention within the social flexibility of labour-power, privileging social
command and divisions within society as conditions for command and division on
the assembly line. Fordism recuperated social motivations and made them
functional to the Taylorist organization of work -it posed them as the
prime and fundamental terrain of command in the factory. Gradually, the labour
market and the fabric of relations between production and reproduction was
becoming an operative field (this also from the theoretical point of view) for
the capitalist theory of factory command: hence the development from Keynes to
Kaldor's planning techniques, to Kalecki's micro-analyses of the political
cycle, to the present systemic theories of neo-functionalism, Faced with these
developments in capital's understanding of the articulations of command, not
only was the concept of the mass worker late in developing, but also,
crucially, it now proved incapable of if for itself a theory able to match the
new dimensions of command. Of course, the old workerists of the '60s knew that
they had to go beyond the 'empirical' category of the factory, and that the
mass worker had to become effective over the entire span of the social factory
but the factoryist content of the concept and the circumstances of its
genesis prevented its theoretical potential from becoming practical reality.
Thus, in the end, this impotence of the mass worker left the way open
for surreptitious operations of mediation and representation and the whole
old machinery of the party-form was wheeled out as the means whereby issues
could be posed at the social, political and general level.
We should also add (and this
is not only merely of historical relevance)that this was the basis whereby the
trade union was able to re-establish its powers of control over the working
class. This had a paradoxical consequence: the trade union accepted the
delegation of power and the general functions that the working class had
restored to it, and then went on to impose rules which separated, in a
corporation sense, the working class from the other proletarianised strata of
society. When the trade union (ie in its traditional function as half party and
half merchandiser, in the sense that it both represents labourr power within the
bourgeois political market, and also sells labour as a commodity on the
capitalist market) finally caught up with and grasped (post-'68) the new
composition of the mass worker, it only reduced it to corporation, and divided
it off from the rest of social labour.
Hence it follows that a
methodology such as I use, which seeks to indicate possibilities for subjective
genesis within the categories of class struggle, cannot rest content with this
old version of the concept of the mass worker. And indeed, the conditions for
further theoretical progress on this front were plentiful, especially in the
years immediately following the upheavals of 1968-69. Working-class struggles,
which were extremely powerful in spite of (or perhaps because of) their
ambiguity as struggles both within and against the system of the
relative wage, now brought about a crisis in the mechanisms of capitalist
control. The capitalist response during this period developed along two
complementary lines the social diffusion, decentralization of production, and
the political isolation of the mass worker in the factory.
The only possible answer to
this, from the working-class viewpoint, was to insist on and fight for the
broadest definition of class unity, to modify and extend the concept of working
class productive labour and to eliminate the theoretical isolation (insofar as
this concept had inevitably become tied to an empirical notion of the factory
a simplified factoryism due to the impact of the bosses' counter-offensive,
the corporation of the unions, and the historical and theoretical limitations
of the concept itself). On the other hand,the emergence & growth of
diffused forms of production(the ''diffuse factory''), while it enlarged the
labour market enormously, also redefined as directly productive and ''working
class'' a whole series of functions within social labour that would otherwise
be seen as marginally latent. Finally, there was a growing awareness of the
interconnection between reductive labour and the labour of reproduction, which
was expressed in a wide range of behaviours in social struggles, above all in
the mass movements of women and youth, affirming all these activities
collectively as labour. This development made necessary an innovation in the
vocabulary of class concepts, As we used to put it: 'from the mass worker to
the social worker'. But it would be more correct to say: from the working
class, ie that working class massified in direct production in the factory, to
social labour-power, representing the potentiality of a new working class, now
extended throughout the entire span of production and reproduction a
conception more adequate to the wider and more searching dimensions of
capitalist control over society and social labour as a whole.
There are numerous problems
which arise at this point, and I have no intention of trying to avoid them. In
what follows I hope to confront at least some of them. It will suffice at this
stage to introduce what I consider to be the key methodological concept that
of class composition which will help to clarify much of my further argument.
By class composition, I mean that combination of political and material
characteristics both historical and physical which makes up: (a) on the one
hand, the historically given structure of labour-power, in all its
manifestations, as produced by a given level of productive forces and
relations; and (b) on the other hand, the working class as a determinate level
of solidification of needs and desires, as a dynamic subject, an antagonistic
force, tending towards its own independent identity in historical-political
terms. AlI concepts that define the working class must be framed in terms of
this historical transformability of the composition of the class. This
is to be understood in the general sense of its ever wider and more refined
productive capacity, the ever greater abstraction and socialization of its
nature, and the ever greater intensity and weight of the political challenge it
presents to capital. In other words, the re-making of the working class! It
is by reference to this framework and these criteria, for example, that we can
qualify more precisely a term like spontaneity. The concept of composition
allows us to introduce a specific, determinate quality into our theoretical
definition of spontaneity; it prevents us, in other words, from falling into
the trap of ideological definitions (whether political in which case
spontaneity is conceived as an indifferent category', or econometric in which
case spontaneity is reduced to the semantic emptiness of the concept of
labour-power pure and simple). The category of 'mass worker' must accordingly
be re-assessed, in its functions and limitations, within this temporal
framework of the transformations of the composition of the working class. And
under today's conditions, it seems to me that this transformation is taking
place through a process of real subsumtion of labour on the part of capital,
which has now reached a level that encompasses the whole of' society. ''Hic
Rhodus, hic salta.''
So, let us return to the
moment when the pressure of this new spontaneity (that is, the spontaneous
but, as in the paradox we have described, both structural and structured
forms of expression of the new class composition, ie of the mass worker) brings
about a crisis in the means of capitalist control over the production and
reproduction of commodities.
I would suggest that this moment
can be located chronologically within the decade 1960-1970. In that period,
strikes and struggles created an upheaval within the existing framework of
development, inducing a major series of critical phenomena (crises of
capitalist control), of which the following seem to be the most important:
1) The mass worker set in
motion a mobility within the labour market. The subversive characteristics of
this mobility appear to consist in an uncontrollable increase in the speed of
flow/turnover of demands, and, at the same time, in a rigid and homogeneous
escalation of those demands. If we include within our definition of the mass
worker the fact that the mass worker represents a certain qualitative
solidification of abstract labour (which is another way of saying a high level
of subjective awareness of abstract labour), then these mobility-related
phenomena reveal simply the centripetal potential of abstract labour (towards
averageness, mediety) in a framework of mass production in modern capitalism.
And this might be consistent with development. But instead, the forms and modes
in which the mobility (subjectivity) of the mass worker expressed itself threw
capitalist development out of proportion, subjected it to intolerable
accelerations, and in particular confronted it with the quality of this very
composition those historical differences ' and divisions of sex, age,
culture, etc, which were now tending towards a deeply-rooted political
homogeneity. Mobility of abstract labour equals tendency for subjects and
for struggles to unify.
2) On the other hand in a
complementary process, the mass worker set in motion -both within individual
factories and within the productive fabric of the metropolis a downward
rigidity of expectations and wage demands. This in itself (the demand for
'parity') became a subversive force. Drives towards egalitarianism served to
reinforce this rigidity: we saw the collapse of all or virtually all the
weaponry of division in the factory (piecework; employers' unilateral control
of timings of the labour process; internal mobility, etc) and of the hierarchy
which controls the labour process and the organization of production. In this
period, sackings together with all the other various forms of exclusion and
marginalisation were powerfully contested, resisted, and in large part
blocked. Furthermore, the overall rigidity of the class brought about a
reduction in effective labour time; it also provided defence and back-up for
individual experiences of resistance to work, or refusal of work. The wage
struggle, in both its qualitative and quantitative aspects, became a powerful
independent variable of development: a kind of economic-political dual power
which came into existence. In some instances we find this registered in factory
legislation most notably in Italy, for example). Rigidity of abstract
labour equals qualitative consolidation of the above-mentioned unification of
subjects and of struggles.
3) Thirdly, the social
mobility and the political/wage rigidity of the social worker was also
articulated within the sphere of circulation. But, for the mass worker,
circulation means a radical change in the relation between daily work-time and
non-worked time. We were not yet at the point where the latter had hegemony
over the former. However, this was a phase in which the social relation of
production (the relation between production and reproduction) was an area of
powerful contestation. Without succeeding in fully controlling and carrying
through this leap in the class struggle, the mass worker nevertheless spread
the infection of his subjective behaviour into the fabric of proletarian
society. First just to take one example although opt yet at the point of
directly contesting the 'oedipal wage' (in other words, . the wage paid for the
male worker's domination over his family), the mass worker nonetheless induced
an awareness of the urgent need for . new wage forms in the management and
development of the social sphere new wage forms likely to have a decisive and
dissolving effect on the unified family wage, and to liberate new labour power
at an extremely high level of needs. The mass worker was an active factor in
the circulation of working-class objectives, and in propagating the equality
implicit in abstract labour. As such, the mass worker induced subversive
effects within society which tended to ne ate the division between reductive
and reproductive labour, and also to alter the established proportion between
them. The circulation of the forms of behaviour of the mass worker was an
extension of the unification of the subjects and of the struggles.
4) Finally, we have to stress
that it is only by moving to a political expression that the series of
subversive conditions implicit in the existence of the mass worker could be
further advanced. The concept of the mass worker had an existence that was
purely relative', the fact that s/he was the point of a class evolution which
had not yet been fully realized, often permitted the surreptitious
reintroduction of old political concepts and practices, such as the notion of
vanguard and mass, and thus permitted the re-emergence of party representation
and the mirroring of past forms. This political inadequacy results from,
precisely, the social indeterminateness of the figure of the mass Worker. We
should never underestimate this limitation, but if we look beyond it, we can
see that a framework of new values was beginning to take shape ideas of
freedom to match the fact of mobility; ideas of community, as an aspect of the
rigidity mentioned above; ideas of new life and universality, as a synthesis of
people's relation to reproduction and liberated time. This framework of new
values was incipient, was still dawning, but was nonetheless efficacious,
because it existed at a mass level.
At this point, the capitalist
crisis in the management of this labour power, with all its strength and
richness, became decisive. Capital goes into crisis every time that
labour-power transmutes to become working class by working class I mean a
level of composition incompatible with command, at a given historical levelled
maturity of the productive forces. (lt is evident that consciousness cannot
be defined outside of this relation; so that it is possible to find extremely
high levels of consciousness which remain totally ineffective, and, on the
other hand, spontaneous levels of consciousness which are powerfully effective
in revolutionary terms). As I say, every-time that labour power effects a
revolutionary transformation in its composition and becomes working class, at
that point capital enters relations of crisis, and has only one weapon with
which to respond:<>An attempt to alter and tramsform class composition.
In other words, for capital, restructuring is a political, economic and technological
mechanism aimed at the enforced reduction of the working class to labour-power.
To put it more correctly: capital aims to reduce the intensity of the
political composition of the class. At this point, the problem becomes specific
again. How did capital respond to the crisis in relations of production that
was induced by the class offensive of the mass worker? How was restructuration
articulated at this level of political composition of the class and its
struggles? What happened after the 1960s? , It is not hard to identify and
describe some major elements of the capitalist response. [Obviously, the notes
that follow are very partial and indicative. They limit themselves to questions
of class relations in the sphere of production, To deal adequately with the
restructuring of labour power, we would really have to consider two fundamental
shifts in imperialist development in the early 1970s the freeing of the
dollar from gold parity (1971) and the energy crisis of 1973-74. There is no
space to deal with them here, and so the argument, as well as being partial and
indicative, is frankly insufficient. However, I would ask you to trust the
author and believe me when I say that I have given a lot of thought to these
other fundamental determinations of the overall framework. These, in my
opinion, are not contradictory with the phenomena which are now studied at the
level of production and reproduction. Rather, they present an
overdetermination, an extension and a deepening of the logic which lies at the
root of these phenomena.]
So, let's return to our
initial question, to the analysts of the groundwork of capitalist
restructuring. Let's begin by looking at mobility. In my opinion, as
regards mobility, capital was already taking into account developments within
the composition of the mass worker, and was in fact acting on their tendency to
become realized, in order to throw the working class back to the position of
being labour-power. While the composition of the mass worker from the 1960s
onwards tended via mobility towards a unification in general of potential
abstract labour, capital's restructuration project effectively grasps the
social tendency towards abstract labour. It is against this abstract labour
that capital exercises its capacity to repress, to fragment and to introduce
hierarchical division. Capital does not mobilize against abstract labour and
the social dimension which it assumes, but against the political unification
which takes place at this level. Capital assumes subsumption of labour
(abstraction and socialisation) as a process that has been realized.
Experiments in job-design, segmentation of the labour market, policies of
regrading, reforms of methodologies of command within production cooperation, etc
all this became fundamental. A restless, practical process of trial and error
was now set in motion, aimed at destroying any possibility of proletarian
unification. If we understand mobility as a tendency towards freedom, as a
definition of time which is alternative to commanded time within the classic
working day and if we assume that from now on, in a parallel movement, it
becomes impossible for capital to establish any fixed 'reserve army' of labour
then we understand why, in political and economic terms, it is so urgent for
capital somehow to fix this labour- power (the first, spontaneous and
structural manifestation of an abstract labour that has become subjectively
realised) within mobility and via mobility.On the other hand,the class struggles
within and against capitals's system.On the other,capital struggles within and
against the new composition:within its mobility,its socialisation,its
abstraction and against the subjective attitudes which these elements engender.
All manpower and job-design interventions are to be understood as policies
which learn from the progress of abstract labour towards its social
unification: they intervene in order to stop further development of its
subversive potential.
Capital's reaction against the
rigidity evident within the composition of the mass worker was even more
rigorous. This is because in this area mystification is harder to achieve,
Policies aimed at segmenting the labour market (which are posed as 'positive''
as against the 'negative' of mobility of abstract labour) tend to produce a
galvanization of the labour market, and above all, important new effects of
marginalisation. Marginalisation in the form of political blackmail repression
and degeneration of values much more than the familiar blackmail of poverty.
l have said that the rigidity in the forms of behaviour of the mass worker
(particularly on the wages front) expressed an essence that was qualitative a
complex of needs which became consolidated as power. Capital's problem was how
to defuse this power, quantitatively and qualitatively.
Thus, on the one hand, we have
seen the promotion of various forms of diffuse labour ie the conscious
shifting of productive functions not tied to extremely high degrees of organic
composition of capital, towards the peripheries of metropolitan areas: this is
the quantitative response, of scale and size. (The scale of this project is
multinational, and should be understood against the backdrop of the energy
crisis). On the other hand, capital has attacked the problem of qualitative
rigidity, and has planned for one of two solutions:-it must be either
corpratised or ghettoised This means a sytem of wage hierarchies, based on
either simulated participation in development and/or on regimentation
within development, and, on the other hand, marginalisation and isolation. On
this terrain a terrain which the experience of the struggles of the mass
workers had revealed as strongly characterized by political values
capitalism's action of restructuration has often made direct use of legal
instruments. It has regarded the boundary between legality and extra- legality
in working-class behaviours as a question subordinate to the overall
restoration of social hierarchy. Not even this is new as we know, it has
always been the case and Marx, in his analysis of the working day, makes the
point several times. Law and the regulation of the working day are linked by a
substantial umbilical cord. If the organization of the working day is socially
diffuse, then sanctions, penalties, fines etc will be entrusted to the
competence of penal law. Capital also acted against the way in which the mass
worker had made use of circulation in other words, of the increasingly tight
links between production and reproduction. Restructuration once again adopted
the method of displacement in other words, capital takes as given/realised
the tendency set in motion working class struggles: it subsumes its behaviours
(i.e the awareness of the circularity between production time and reproduction
time) and begins working on how to control this situation. The 'welfare state'
is the principal level geared to synchronizes this relationship.The benefits of
the welfare state are the fruit of struggles, are counter-power. But the
specific application of restructuration aims to use welfare in order to
control, to articulate command via budgetary manoeuvrings. 'Public spending
cuts' are not a negation of the welfare state', rather, they reorganize it in
terms of productivity and/or repression. lf subsequently proletarian action
within this network of control continues to produce breakdown, and to introduce
blockages and disproportions, then capital's insistence on control reaches
fever-pitch. The transition to the internal warfare state represents the corresponding
overdetermination of the crisis of the welfare state. But it is important
to stress once again capital's capacity for displacement. The restructuring
which has followed the impact of the mass worker's struggles and the tendencies
which the mass worker has instilled within the general framework of class power
relations, is geared to match a labour-power which exists as completely
socialised-whether it exists or potentially exists is not important. Capital is
forced into anticipation. However, marginalisation is as far as capital can go
in excluding people from the circuits of production expulsion is impossible.
Isolation within the circuit of production this is the most that capital's
action of restructuration can hope to achieve. It does not succeed in bringing
about a restoration of the status quo, and in the struggle against the mass
worker it is likely to assist in the even more compact formation of a
completely socialized labour-power. There is much craftiness of proletarian
reasoning in all this!
Things become even clearer
when we come to the fourth area in which capital's activity of restructuration
has to prove itself and be proven. In other words, the terrain of politics.
Here, every attempt at mystification this seems to me the most interesting
aspect is forced to assume the complete socialization of labour-power as
normal, as a fact of life a necessary precondition of any action against the
proletarian antagonism. In other words as many writers now accept the only
remote possibility of mystifying (mystifying, controlling, commanding etc)
struggles is conditional on an advancement of the terms in which the problem is
considered: in other words, an approach to the problem at the level of policies
of capitalist command which see its enemy subject in proletarian society as a
whole. Capital relates to the phase of real subfunction as antagonism at the
highest level. Capitalist analyses of command move from this awareness to
develop two possible lines of approach.The first, which I would call empirical,
regards social labour- power as a purely economic subject, and therefore
locates the necessary control-oriented manoeuvrings within a continuous trial
and error process of redistribution and reallocation of income eg consumerism
objectives, inflationary measures, etc. The other, which I call systemic,
is more refined. This assumes that the empirical policies pursued thus far have
resolved nothing. Thus the only way of ensuring the effective exercise of
command, with an ongoing reduction of the complexity of class conflict, is to
maintain command over systemic information and circulation', to maintain a
pre-ordered mechanism of planning and balancing inputs and outputs. At this
level, capital's science and practice of command reveal themselves as a set
of techniques for analysing the social sphere and as an undoubtedly
involuntary recognition of the immediate socialite, structure and density of
labour-power.
I consider it important to
understand these fundamental changes and to highlight their conceptual
character. Thus I define restructuration as a parenthesis within the evolving
process if the composition of the working class. Obviously, this is a necessary
parenthesis: the interaction of productive forces (capital and the working class)
is in no sense illusory. But at the same time, we should stress that within
this process, the motor force of working-class struggles is fundamental, as is
the intensity of their composition, and the emergence of abstract labour as a
social quality and as a unifying factor within production (and reproduction).
As we used to say: capital's great function is to create the conditions for its
own destruction. This is still the case. Thus we must recognise that in the
restructuring process currently under way, these critical conditions of
capitalist development are still respected. Obviously, such a recognition is
possible only if our theory is up to it. And one of the fundamentals of
adequate theory is to have a concept of labour power which is not conceptually
indiscriminate, but which is historically and politically pregnant, is
continually and materially in tune with class consciousness in other words,
with degrees of struggle and of capacity to effect change which come
increasingly close do the classic concept of proletariat. However, I feel it is
still necessary to live through that ambiguity of production and the relations
of production, and the way they are always being newly determined.
So, our project is to resolve
this fundamental ambiguity in the relationship that labour-power (whether posed
as individual commodity or as socialized abstract labour) has with class
consciousness and with capital. In other words, at this point we have to ask
ourselves whether the linear mechanism of Marx's analysis, which locates the
socialization and the abstraction of labour within the process of real
sublimation of labour under capital, is not perhaps incorrect. The process of
real sublimation, in Marx, concludes in a real and proper Aufhebung: the
antagonism is transcended via an image of communism which is the necessary
outcome of the dialectical process developed up to that point. In the more banal
of the socialist vulgates, the Aufhebung whose schema, in Marx, is
conceptual, structural and synchronic becomes diachronic, utopian and
eschatological. To further clarify this point, I shall spell out my thesis: at
the level if real subsumption (ie at the level of the complete socialization
and abstraction of all the productive and reproductive segments of labour) , we
are dealing not with linearity-and catastrophe but with separation and
antagonism. It seems to me that proof of this theory is to be sought first
and foremost from empirical analysis (historical, sociological and political)
of the movements of the working class. In other words, from considering the
characteristics of labour-power when posed as social labour-power.
Concretely, our argument could
proceed from examination of a familiar historical conjuncture: if, as sole
authors have done, we construct historical charts mapping developments in the
quality of work, then we can see how the entire direction of capitalist
development is towards the destruction of skilled labour (of specific 'skill'),
reducing it to abstract labour (the multilateral 'job'). The socialization of
educational processes (schooling, skill training, apprenticeships etc) goes
hand in hand with the process of the abstraction of labour, within a historical
series of episodes which span the entire period since the Industrial
Revolution. Within this time-span, the tendency is progressive and broadly
balanced, beginning from the 18th century, and moving through to the 1920s-1930s:
but at this point a break takes place in the balanced continuity of the
historical series.The collapse of 'skilled work' can be located precisely
in the period between the two big imperialist wars ie in the 1920s and 1930s.
This resulted in the hegemony, as from that period, of the semi-skilled worker,
the ouvrier specialist (O.S.) in other words, what we call the mass worker.
But it also turns out that this hegemony is transitory, because the mass worker
is in fact just first figure in the 'collapse' of the balanced relationship
between 'skill' and 'job'; the mass worker is the first moment of an
extraordinary acceleration towards a complete abstraction of labour- power. The
mass worker, the semi-skilled worker (whatever his subjective consciousness) is
not so much the final figure of the skilled worker, but rather the first
impetuous prefiguration of the completely socialized worker.
This premise has a number of
important consequences. Without losing ourselves in casuistry, it is worth highlighting
just one consequence, which seems fundamental in characterizing a critique of
the political economy of the mass worker. As follows: if 'skill' collapses into
an indifferent element; if the division of labour as we know it (based on
vertical scales of relative intensity and of structural quality) dissolves', if
, in other words, every theory of inhuman capital'' (ie the self- investment of
labour-power) reveals itself to be not only a mystification of a reality which
is both exploited and subjected to command, but also pure and simple
fantasizing apologetics', if , as I say, all this is given. it does nothing to
remove the fact that capital still needs to exercise command by having and
maintaining a differentiated and functional structuring of labour power to
match the requirements of the labour process (whether this be individual or
social).
In the previous section, we
noted some o the basic characteristics of capitalist restructuring in the
transition from the mass worker to socialized labour-power. We can grasp the
theoretical kernel of the matter by returning to them for a moment. As I said,
once there is a lapsing of such vertical differentiations as between
'skill''and (job' then collective capital (and State command) tend to advance
new differentiations on the horizontal terrain of command, over the labour
market, over the social mobility of labour power. In relation to relatively
advanced capitalism this is familiar territory: it is the terrain of new
industrial feudalism (what we would call corporatism). From within this
particular balance of forces, there proliferates a host of theories about the
division of labour-power: the debate as to whether labour-power is primary,
secondary or tertiary', whether it is 'central' or 'peripheral' etc. What is
the substance of the problem? Social labour-power is understood as mobility,
and it is as such that it is to be regulated. [A short aside: In this regard,
all static theories about industrial reserve armies and similar nineteenth
century archaeological constructs as well as needing to be politically
rejected by us, are obviously logically untenable.]
But let me be more precise
about what l mean when I say that social labour-power is understood as
mobility. I mean that labour-power is understood as social, mobile and
subjectively capable of identity. I mean that capital understands as a present
reality what, for the mass worker, weighed down by the contradictions implicit
in his own social gestation, was present purely as tendency. And above all I
mean a substantial modification in the level at which we consider the problem.
Mobility is
time, flow and circulation within time. Marxism bases its categories on the
time-measure of the working day.In certain well- known Marxist
texts, the convention of time-measure becomes so solid and unquestioned as to
postulate as its base a working day that is 'normal'. Now, in our present
situation, of all this there remains no trace. The time of social
labour-power is a working day so extended as not only to comprise within
itself the relation between production time and reproduction time, as a
single whole, but also and above all to extend the consideration of time
over the entire life-space of the labour market. From the working day to the
labour market, from working hours to the mobility of labour this
transition means countermoving two opposing conceptions of time: the capitalist
conception of time-measure, and the conception of working-class freedom over
the temporal span of life. The capitalist operation of reducing life-time
to abstract labour time- measure becomes an operation which is absolutely
antagonistic. In its conception of time and of development, it reveals a
substantial dissymmetry with proletarian life, with the very existence of
social labour-power. Here we can say that the dissymmetry of command in general
(the dissymmetry revealed by theories of the state) and in particular the
dissymmetry which regulates the categories of exploitation, become dislocated
and reshaped in the face of the long and social time of proletarian existence.
In arguing my case, i want to
stress this point. The reason is clear.If it is true that the terms of
exploitation are now relocated on the social terrain, and if, within this
social terrain, it is no longer possible to reduce quantity and quality of
exploitation, absolute surplus value and relative surplus value, to the
time-measure of a 'normal' working day then the proletarian subject is
reborn in antagonistic terms, around a radical alternative, an alternative of
life-time as against the time-measure of capittal. But even if we limit our
arguments to a critique of the political economy of the mass worker, we are
still able to achieve positive results on this question. Namely that the
ambiguous concept of the mass worker here reveals its structural indeterminacy
and instability: its ambiguity is that between a system of domination still
internalized by the mass worker (capital's time-measure) and a perspective of
work which is calculated and envisaged over the time of an entire life. The
mass worker is still prey to ideology his memory is of slavery, while his
actions speak of freedom. The capitalist restructuration which anticipates
and out manoeuvres the struggles of the mass worker by introducing the
dimension of social labour-power, at this point arrives at a definitive
contradiction, inasmuch as any transcendence of the mass worker has to be not a
reproduction and reformulation of domination over socialized labour-power, but
a resolution of the contradictory tensions within the figure of the mass
worker, and the structural realization of the antagonism in a new form.
The social
worker. Let us define the way the antagonism has besom
subjectivised at this level, and call socialized labour-power 'the social worker'.
In this way, we are clearly introducing a specific methodological difference
in any event a position which differs from those developed in earlier phases of
the theory of the mass worker and in the methodology which was considered
adequate for the maturation of that theory. The specificity and the difference
lie in the quality of the antagonism which appears at this point. In other
words, this abstract, social and mobile labour-power to the extent that it
subjectivises itself around its own concept of time, and a temporal
constitution of its own (which are irreducible to the time measurement of
capitalist command) brings about an irreducible antagonism. That is,
irreducible not only to labour power conceived as variable capital, and to the
theoretical dialectic of value all of which is perfectly obvious but also
and above all an irreducible antagonism to the far more refined dialectic of
composition/restructuration/recomposition which, from a class point of
view, had been developed as a portrayal integral to the historical experience
of the mass worker. In reality, this portrayal, in its further versions,
maintained a concept of the working day which was modelled on the capitalist
conception of time-measure. But when the whole of life becomes production,
capitalist time measures only that which it directly commands. And socialized
labour-power tends to unloose itself from command, insofar as it proposes a
life-alternative and thus projects a different time for its own existence,
both in the present and in the future. When all life-time becomes
production-time, who measures whom? The two conceptions of time and life come
into direct conflict in a separation which becomes increasingly deep and
rigidly structured. But we shall come to all this in the next section.
Let's now return to our
critique of the political economy of the mass worker. At the cost of repeating
myself, l must stress once again both the importance and the ambiguity of that
category. Its importance lies in the fact that, with the historical emergence
of the mass worker, the concept of labour-power removes itself definitively
from the theory- imposed destiny of being a component albeit variable of
capital. But in the act of revealing itself as an independent variable (and
clashing with a capitalist restructuration which relentlessly tracks, adjusts
and recomposes the struggles), the constitutive activity of the mass worker
even though it is moving within a situation of a complete socialization of
production failed to reach a sufficient degree of maturity. This brought
about powerful ambiguities, and alloy in the 1970s, a degree of political
retrogression: a corporation of certain strata of the mass worker, new
divisions within the class, etc. But this is the point where the character of
the social worker emerges as a new force, and as a subjective qualification
of social labour power. The social worker completed and concluded the
dynamic which existed within the mass worker as a tendency, and transformed
the independent variable into independence tout court. This antagonism
develops at a pace dictated by the rhythms of the real sublimation which
capital puts into operation in relation to social labour. As real sublimation
advances, so the social worker is brought into existence, as irresolvable
antagonism. Antagonism as regards conceptions of life, the liberation of time,
and thus in bringing about spatial-temporal conditions which are wholly
alternative. A sort of 'a priori' of liberation.
But before I resume this line
of argument, allow me to point out an apparent paradox in the theory which in
this case turns out to be a function of mystification. In the so-called
post-modern (or 'post- capitalist') conceptions which are so current in
political debate today, the process of subsumption is conceived in terms
of linearity and catastrophe. In some instances, these terms can also be
found in Marx and in far more developed form, and sometimes completely
explicitly, in the socialist vulgate. Subsumption is given as a system, as
labour-power realized within capital's social domination, as a levelling-off of
the antagonism and therefore the antagonism is conceived as a utopian and
catastrophist alternative. Such positions are fairly widespread, and sometimes
also include exponents of the mass-worker theory. In these workerist theories
which are flirting with theories of post-modernism (stressing tendency and
objectivity, and eliminating antagonism and subjectivity), some would say that
workerism is committing hari kiri. The paradox, and at the same time the
mystification, consists in the fact that here Marx's thinking (and the
considerable tensions which run through it, right up to the point where he
defines real sublimation, whether in the Unpublished Sixth Chapter, or, a good
while previously, in the Fragment on Machinery in the Grundrisse texts which
must be seen as complementary) appears to be respected, whereas in fact
it is deeply and irreparably misrepresented. In fact, the focus in Marx is
always the actuality and the determinacy of the antagonism. It is indeed true
that the theoretical tendency of capital, which Marx also describes (but only
episodically: and, as I have said, in terms rather subordinated to the
antagonistic spirit of his overall argument), on occasion accepts this
criticism, and fights shy of the more banal mystifications. Nevertheless, when
pushed to the limit, the most we can get from this conception of the antagonism
is to see it in an exogenous form: catastrophe. But our task, in going
beyond Marx, is to grasp the antagonism in its endogenous form, also at
the level of real sublimation. By this I mean that: real sublimation of labour
is a form of the crisis of capital. Understanding real sublimation of labour as
crisis is one of the discoveries in store for communism as it goes 'beyond
Marx'. But this is not enough.In our rejection of post-modern ideologies
(without, of course, denying their analytical efficacity), we also retrieve
another element of the theoretical history of our Italian movement since the
1960s. Namely: while the ambiguous theory and methodology of the mass worker
implied a dialectic of value which today the social worker rejects, there was
also articulated therein an inherent practical activity of subversion, a
self-valorising independence(autonomy) ,which now the social worker lives as
his own dignity and essence. Massimo Cacclari, [trans: PCI member since 1969]
the philosopher of Krisis cries:
Where there is crisis, there
is no dialectic. Crisis is not a form of the dialectic. Or, rather, crisis can
only be dialecticised in the form of its transcendence an Aufhebung''. (M.
Cacciari, Krisis, Feltrinelli, Milano 1978)
No, replies the social worker,
here there can be no Aufhebung, because here the confrontation is between subjects
which are different.
In moving from formal
subsumption to real sublimation, capital overcomes obstacles, lives the
continual reduction of the working class to labour- power in terms of a continuous,
long-term and progressive socialization of labour in terms of a transition
between class compositions at increasingly high levels of intensity and
potential. Once subsumption is completely realized, the only possible
development ia a transition from socialized labour-power to the social worker,
to the new class subject. The tradition and theory of the mass worker can
still be of help in stimulating us towards this new definition.
Having reached this point, we
can now attempt a summary of some basic methodological assumptions which should
help us to reach a partial conclusion, and to pose new problems. To start with,
I regard as logically untenable any theory of labour power as a logical
construct, an ambiguous and volatile essence, caught in a dichotomy between a
tendency to become variable capital (the variable part of organic capital) and
a tendency to become working class (ie a receptacle for consciousness which derives
from the outside, the substance of a new Aristotelian synolus). This
instrumental and pure- logic definition of labour power, which is both abstract
and open to manipulation, has, historically speaking, been progressively
negated through (if I may simplify) at least three concomitant processes. -The
first process is the advance in the organic composition of capital which,
as it internalizes massively labour-power's relation to the structure of
capital, at the same time eliminates from it all measure of proportionality, in
terms of the relationship between the work done by the individual worker and
the level of productivity achieved.Labour- power as presented within the labour
market as a multiplicity of individual labour powers can now only be concieved
of as a totally marginal phenomenon.
The second process, which
takes the development of the organic composition of capital beyond the scope of
the single firm, and which goes beyond its phenomenological appearance to see
it in terms of the realization of the subsumption official labour within
collective capital, has shown labour-power to be a social entity. That
which is marginalised in individual terms becomes transformed, at the social
level, into mobility, into an equivalence of abstract labour, into a global
potentiality which has within it that generalized social knowledge which is now
an essential condition of production.
The third process, concomitant
with those of individual marginalisation and collective socialization, has
brought about a conjunction between (a) the refusal of labour-power to make
itself available as a commodity (I see this as the effect of individual
marginalisation and the collapse of any relationship between 'job' and 'skill')
and (b) the socialization of this mode of class behaviour, l designate this as
a 'third' process, and I consider it both innovative and conceptually very
rich, since the coming together of individual marginalisation with
collective socialization is no simple process of addition. Rather it is a
historical process which both combines material elements and becomes at the
same time subjectivised; this in the sense that historical experience becomes
transformed into irreversible qualities, into a second nature. Through the
genesis of this process, new subjective forces make their appearance. As
a result of these processes, it should now be clear that labour- power, at this
level of subsumption of social labour by capital, so far from presenting itself
as an intermediate entity, suspended between being a function of variable
capital and becoming working class, now presents itself as a social subject:
a subject that has internalized at the social level its refusal to be a
commodity.
At the political and social
level, this subject presents a complete materialization of consciousness within
the structures of its own 'existence. Class consciousness, in other words,
comes neither from outside nor from afar: it must be seen As completely
internal to, a fact, a thing, of class composition. The concept of class composition,
which was developed originally through the analysis of the mass worker as a
means of classifying changes in the nature of labour-power, and as a critique
of purely logical and econometric characterizations of these changes, can now
be updated as a historico-political, subjective, social definition of
labour-power. In view of this, we can appreciate the importance of the
theoretical current that developed through the analysis of the mass worker, and
above all we can appreciate how the specific antagonistic subjectivity of this
class protagonist contributed, through its struggles, to go beyond and overcome
the limitations of the original theoretical conception. It seems to me that the
mythical term proletariat has been given a historical dimension and has
become founded as a specific material reality through the development of this
theoretical approach.
Major consequences derive from
all this. First, a demystification of a number of concepts and practices
existing within the traditions of the labour movement. Second, in my opinion,
important consequences (and, more particularly, problems) arise at the strictly
theoretical level in other words, relating to our conceptions of work and
communism. Third and not to be underestimated in their importance we
also find indications for method.
Let's take the first point.
This social labour-power which exists as a political reality, this social
worker, this proletariat, embraces within itself so many dimensions, both
intensive and extensive, as to render many categories obsolete. In other
words, proletarian antagonism (within real subsumption) poses itself on the one
hand (intensively) as an irreversibility of the given levelly needs that has
been arrived at, and, on the other hand, (extensively) as a potentiality of
action, as a capacity to extend its action across the entire span of the
working day. If we want a tighter conceptual definition, we mightily that this
socialized labour- power not only (a) dissolves any possibility for capitalism
to consider it as a commodity, as the variable component of capitalist command
for exploitation, but also (b) denies capitalism any possibility of
transforming necessary labour into the wagee and transforming surplus value
(absolute or relative) into profit. Clearly, profit and the wage continue
to exist, but they exist only as quantities regulated by a relation of power
a relation of forces which no longer admits the threefold partition of the
working day into necessary labour time, surplus labour time, and free time or
reproduction-time. We now have a labour-power which is both social and
subjective, which recognises the value-partition of the working day only as a
system of command which capital may or may not succeed in imposing over and
against the continuous flow of labour-power within the working day. The
conditions for the extraction of surplus value now exist only in the fonts of a
general social relation. Profit and the wage become forms of the division
of a value content which no longer relates to any specific mechanisms of
exploitation, other than the specific asymmetry of the relationship of command
within society. Capital has the form and substance of profit, as an average, a
mediacy of command', labour-power has the form and the substance of the wage:
but in no way can a 'natural rate' be said to exist between the two of them. In
other words, the mechanism of transformation and mediation which characterizes
the Marxian genesis of these concepts has now reached its point of fullest
maturity. Exploitation consists in command. It is violence against the
antagonism of sociaI subjects that are fighting for liberation.
As a consequence, the
marketing of labour-power is no longer an undertaking for minions and
sycophants: if anything, the marketing of labour-power today has become a
totally political operation. This consists in extending Marx's "war''
between capitalism's tendency towards the limitless working day and the
tendency of the proletariat to limit (to nil, if possible) the provision of
labour-power, and transforming that 'war' into formalized and viable political
procedures which extend from the concrete labour process (within production and
reproduction) to the overall scenario of the organization of command ie to
political and state forms of the management of the economy, management of the
labour market, of public spending, etc, etc. Only in this political dimension
can success or failure in the marketing of labour-power now be gauged.
All of which is another way of
saying that at our given level of development, the old dialectic of
labour-power within/against capital (la dialectics dellaforza Iavoro) is now
played out, has become obsolete, is only of archaeological interest. lf there
exists any real negotiation or bargaining, this can no longer be encompassed by
trade union forms of bargaining, or other such antique practices. In other
words, dualism- of power is now the norm. The working day can only be
described in terms of an active dualism of power, wherein the old dialectic of unity,
transcendence and equilibrium is obsolete. In making this point, l need only
refer, by way of example, to the inadequacy of the most normal, everyday and
(as it often seems) obvious institutional form of the traditional labour
movement the trade union.
Far more dangerous, as regards
potential mystification of our own (rediscovered and reconstructed) concept of
the proletariat, are those ideologies which take labour-power as a material
that can be led to class consciousness (although they are also more
ineffective, given the historical experience of 'realised Socialism' in the
East). To turn labour-power into what? To transmute exploited labour into
liberated labour, via the magic wand of a mystical 'political consciousness',
in other words of its vanguard representatives. What has changed in reality?
Nothing only words. The dialectic of labour functions here perfectly. The
word 'labour' replaces the word capital : the system remains the same. The
working day is not touched. Time-measure continues to be the regulative
function of command and of partition/division. No the new (and even the old?)
concept of the proletariat really cannot accept these mystifications. The truth
is that, from the proletarian point of view, the process of real subsumption
brings about such a massive intensification of the composition of the working
class, and such an extension of its potentiality, as to eliminate any dualism
between being-and consciousness, any isolation of single aspects within it. The
proletariat acts directly over the entire span of the social working day.
Production and reproduction are now in parallel and on equal terms, the spheres
of action proper to and adequate to the reality of labour-power. Consciousness
is an attribute, entirely within and of its material structure.
And now let's look at work,
labour. Here we come to the second set of consequences deriving from our
political concept of socialized labour- power, of composition (ie of the social
worker). Labour is the essence of capital. It always has been so. It is also
the essence of man, inasmuch as man is productive activity. But capital is real
while human essence is only a dream. The only human essence of labour
which a approximates to the conctretness of capital is the refusal of work. Or,
rather, that kind of productivity which, for capital, is purely negative
because while it represents a sine qua non of production, capital
nonetheless tends to reduce it, and, precisely insofar as it is an essence of
human nature, to eliminate it from production. Human labour, when posed as
proletarian reality, is a negative element in capitalist production. Of course,
it is true to say that only labour produces. But it is also true that bosses
are only happy with production when the labour within it is totally under
command: command is sadistic, it requires the presence of human labour, but
only in order, then, to deny it, to nullify it. This process has functioned in
the past, as the classic steely scourge of capitalist domination until and
unless labour-power presents itself as a social subject. In other words, we
have here, within the intensity and extension of the composition of the
proletarian subject, a negative form of labour, which has such broad
dimensions and is so articulated as to render problematical its very definition
as 'negative'. We often refer to it as 'alternative' 'self-valorising' etc.
But I prefer to continue calling it 'negative labour', not in order to flirt
with the language of crisis, but simply because I do not yet feel the strength
to be able to call it liberated work (ie work that is wholly positive). It
is difficult to describe any work as 'positive' so long as it is contained
within capital, such is the quantity of death and pain that it bears within it.
For us to call working-class and proletarian work 'positive' and socially
useful, we would have to be capable the proletarian subject in its overall
complexity would have to be capable of the statement in prefigurative terms of
its alternative form of production. We would require a vision of how its own
productive potential could unfold. (Only certain sectors of the proletariat
within the area of reproduction the feminist movement chief among them have
so far proved capable of producing a positive image of forms of work that could
be proletarian, alternative and revolutionary. But the fact that we cannot
spell it out does not necessarily mean that it does not exist. It exists as a
murmuring among the proletariat. Negative work, amid the whispers of everyday
life and the noise and shouting of the struggle, is beginning to gain a general
form of expression. What I think needs stressing particularly is the material
character of negative work, its institutionality. concept of proletariat is
becoming an institutional reality. A practical emergence not lifeless, but
living. A different conception of time. A universality held within that second
nature, entirely factitious (in etymological terms: velum ipsum factum ).
An institutionalism, thus, which seeks order and a systematization of its own
values. The levels, the spaces of this experience are truly thousand-fold. But
they all have a centripetal impulse which increases according to the extent of
their liberty, their expansively. If we are to translate the word 'communism' into
present- day language, then perhaps it means reinforcing and solidifying this
proletarian institutionalism and developing its potential contents.
However, for the moment, we
still require a long period of clarification, of study, and of specific struggles.
The method remains tactical. Methodological consequences derive from our
definition of the proletarian subject as antagonism within realised
subsumption and they derive, above all, from our understanding of the
various aspects of the transition from mass worker to socialized labour-power,
to the social worker. Within this transition, simultaneously with the breakdown
of the regulatory principles of capitalist development (the market; value', the
division between production and reproduction etc), there also unfolds the
impossibility of any homogeneous/unified determination not only of the overall
design of development, but also and particularly of its categories, its
norms. When the concept of labour-power is realized within a socialized and subjectivity
class composition and this, precisely, takes place at the highest point of
unity from capital's viewpoint (real subsumption) then all the established
terms of scientific argument break down. They become blocked, definitively
non-recuperable for the old dialectical logic of unity and transcendence. The
only way that any scientific category, whether in logic or in ethics, in
politics or in political economy, can constitute itself as a norm, is as a negotiated
settlement: a formalization and balancing of opposing forces', in the human
sciences, as a moment of voluntary agreement. It is clear that none of what
defined the old conception of scientific norms is present here. What we have
instead, exclusively, is the logical results brought about by the development
of class composition subsumption'to capital realized in the form of
permanent crisis. What we are presented with is the positive emergence of
negative labour as an institutionalized counter-power acting against work that
is subsumed within capital. While labour subsumed within capital corresponded
to a logic of unity, of command, and its transcendence, negative labour
produces instead a logic based on separateness a logic that operates
entirely within, is endogenous to, that separateness. The
institutionalized forms now assumed by labour-power as a separate entity also
represent its de- institutionalisation in relation to the present framework of
economy and politics, to capital and the state. This relation is precisely a
negative one, and inasmuch as negative labour has the power and possibility of
imposing it on the system, the only unifying logic that remains is one of
duality, two-sidedness: a logic that is ephemeral, that is reduced to mere
semblance. In reality, it can only represent a moment in a historical phase of
crisis, in which the point of reference for all rationality or intelligibility
is being rapidly shifted towards a fully socialized labour- power, the new
class subject, the 'social worker'. So, we have covered, in outline, some
aspects of the formation of labour-power into a social subject. A very rich
phenomenology could be provided for this transformation, starting from the mass
worker and the history of the mass worker's struggles. I think that such an
account would confirm the theoretical and methodological assumptions I have
outlined here.
In conclusion, however, I
would stress that so far this is only a half-way stage in the analysis. For, if
it is true that every scientific category concerning the relation of capital
can now only be understood within a dualistic matrix, then a further
logical problem is posed: the question of the multiplicity and mobility of the
forms of this transformation of the class subject, and how this multiversity
can be grasped within a mature political concept of labour-power. In
other words, how we can develop a theory of the new institutionalism of the
proletariat in its multiple matrices. But this will have to wait for another
occasion.
Reproduced
from Revolution Retrieved: Selected Writings of Toni Negri, Red Notes,
London, 1983
Ends