What in the hell …

This is the text of a talk I gave at a conference recently, based on a longer thing that I wrote (included on this site under the post titled “… time do you work?”). Comments welcomed and appreciated.

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The basic problems that I’m working out for myself in this paper are two primary issues that I have with the recent work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, which are linked. They are that in my reading HN claim that reproductive labor - the labor of biological and social reproduction - is not value productive prior the present era. The second issue, which in HN is conceptually linked to the first, is that for HN the project of multitude, which I read as a project of communism, is not also possible prior to the present era. This
impossibility is linked to the non-productive status of reproductive labor prior to the present. I disagree with these points in HN, and I think these points blunt the possible force of the version of marxism in HN’s work.

A good starting point to discuss these narratives is the term ‘the social factory’, which derives from the operaismo tradition of Italian marxism, which Negri was an important contributor to and from which Hardt and Negri partially draw. The social factory has the exact same ambivalences which exist in HN’s work. This is a fraught distinction, but I would want to characterize the ambivalence in the concept of the social factory as a tension between being a hermeneutic optic and a narrative of historical progression. As an optic, the social factory means that the value production occurs across the social field. (See v2 of Capital, need to realize value thus value production needs - ie, capital needs to exert power across - the entirety of the circuity/cycle of accumulation.) Value production
occurs in recognized workplaces and remunerated labors, as well as in unrecognized places and unremunerated labors. Capitalist command and communist subversion both occur lines that cross the inside and the outside of the factory. What is for me the problematic version of the social factory, the narrative of historical progression - a version that stretches back right to the beginning of the concept’s use in Italy - holds that what I just described a moment ago comes to be the case, the inside and outside of the factory come to be contiguous.

Basically, it breaks down as follows: there are social factories and unsocial factories and there’s a historical progression in which unsocial factories become social factories. This is highly questionable at the theoretical level, at the level of historical research, and in its political consequences.

One of the key works for me in thinking about this is a book by Silvia Federici, who in some ways shares a certain political and theoretical trajectory with Negri, though she does differ from Negri. Her book is called Caliban and the Witch, which reads the originary processes of capitalism, the enclosures, what Marx called ’so-called primitive accumulation’. Her emphasis is on the role of reproductive activity in that time period. The argument, which is richly historically grounded - it’s much less of a theory book than a history book, boils down to the point that the process of creating what Marx calls the vogelfrei worker - the person who is free as a bird, in the sense of owning only one’s own body and therefore having to sell the use of that body in order to live - this process requires management and struggle over the labor of producing the body that brings labor power as a commodity into the market. I want to note here the different activities that are
included in the phrase I used, ‘producing the body’. I mean sexual reproduction, which is important as the production of future labor power bearing bodies. I mean the labor of raising children, as the preparation of existing bodies for future entry into the market as
bearers of the commodity labor power. I mean domestic labor including sex, which helps repair and maintain the body, getting the commodity labor power back into usable condition for the next workday. I also should note that the functions I’ve listed for these activities are the functions that capitalism has for these activities, their use value for capital in the production and accumulation of value. There are of course other use values possible for these activities, uses which exist in tension with the capitalist use, which is there are struggles in these arenas.

Hardt and Negri see the transition of reproductive labor from being non-productive to being productive as occurring in a transition within the present, a transition they variably call real subsumption, postfordism, and so forth. For Federici, though she doesn’t address
Hardt and Negri directly on this point, this transition happens in the originary transition of capitalism into existence, in primitive accumulation. That is, as soon as activity becomes value productive labor, reproductive activity becomes value productive reproductive
labor. Not globally, or not globally in a geographic sense as in the whole planet, but globally in a social sense in the areas where capitalism exists. Globally within capitalist social relations.

The issue of reproductive labor is the hinge for the issue of multitude and communism, because for Hardt and Negri their whole project of multitude is rooted in immaterial or affective labor. Briefly on multitude in case anyone’s not familiar with the term, in
my reading it means the capacity to autonomously and cooperatively produce biological and social life. I read this in terms of some of Marx’s definitions of communism. He defines communism as freely associated labor, and elsewhere he defines it as the real movement
which abolishes the present order. I read multitude, and more importantly, communism, as both of these at the same time - freely associated labor is the real movement that abolishes the present order. In other words, the communist project is the production - which involves the organization and self-defense - of communist social relations, just as for Marx capitalist production produces above all not just goods and services but social relations in the form of capitalism. I want to say that this capacity is always possible. For
Hardt and Negri this has recently become or is becoming possible.

Hardt and Negri root this possibility in affective labor, in the becoming affective or becoming immaterial labor. I don’t have time to go into this at length, but, given the traits they ascribe to affective labor, then to my mind the paradigmatic case of this type of
labor is two-fold, the labor of parenting and the labor of cohabitating, of partnering. These activities occur all throughout history, though of course in various instantiated modes with important differences between them. These activities have historically been and are still today typically unwaged, and are frequently a site of conflict. So we don’t just have conflict around these activities when they occur as reproductive labor under postfordism, or under capitalism. We don’t just have, say, abortion policy fights today, but there have been tremendous fights around these issues since the beginning of capitalism and before, bound up with struggles over how our time and our bodies will be used and by whom.

Instead of Hardt and Negri’s version of multitude, I prefer Paolo Virno’s, who states in an interview that we can see multitude has having been historically instantiated at certain specific moments in history. Virno sees one example in Marx’s descriptions of the US
frontier in volume one of Capital. This means that multitude has not become possible for the first time in the present. I read Virno’s sense of multitude along the lines of Benjamin, when he says that we should read history and recognize that every historical moment,
including our own but not just our own, is a narrow gate through which the messiah might pass or might have been able to pass. There are material possibilities for communism, at least in potentia, all the time. I recognize that there are some problems with this formulation, and I am happy to be challenged on them.

The basic question I have in all this, is what rhetorical, political, and analytic work is being done by Hardt and Negri’s insistence - and they’re very insistent on this in their books and in interviews - that it’s right now, that this becomes the case right now. One effect is that it produces a reading of history that basically sides with the bad guys all along - I’m thinking again of Benjamin, in the piece on the Concept of History, when he writes that historians and historicists sympathize with the winners in prior historical conflicts. Hardt and Negri don’t say this directly, but if we look at the historical accounts in their work and if we push on them, they end up doing what Benjamin says. There’s another Marx quote that helps me to understand this. Marx says in the Grundrisse that there are relations within capitalist society which are so many mines with which the whole edifice can be blown up. If there weren’t then communism would be a quixotic project. Essentially, Hardt and Negri argue that wide swaths of social relations and activities are inert up until postfordism. Therefore, people struggling, in anything but the most limited sense, in and against those relations were trying to make something inert explode. They were trying to set fire to stones, and so were quixotic. I find this tremendously problematic, at a minimum because it makes important forbears in struggle into Quixote figures, who were a priori incapable of the things HN think we’re capable of today, and who didn’t realize their own incapacity.

Against all of this, I’d want to pose Benjamin, Virno, and Ranciere. There’s a quote I like from Ranciere from when he broke with Althusser. He said that Althusser plays a little loose with his reading of Descartes and Plato, but that the much more important issue is that Althusser had a nonchalant endorsement of the history of the labor movement, which adds the weight of its falsifications to the firing squads and the prison sentences of the bourgeoisie. I wouldn’t want to be quite that harsh with Hardt and Negri, but that’s the
danger here. The other thing that’s problematic in all this, beyond historiographically, is that in the present today, politically, if we identify the possibilities for multitude, for communism, in a tendency of the becoming immaterial of labor, this implies that the sectors that are most immaterialized, the most new, have the most multitudinary or communist potential. Hardt and Negri explicit disavow this, they say we’re not for the political hegemony of immaterial labor or of one sector of immaterial laborers, they’re only laying out the technical hegemony of immaterial labor in the labor process. But, to my mind, their reading their own theoretical work in a way that’s problematic. Their theoretical work is more given to a vanguard reading, where there’s a leading edge to be followed. Negri throughout much of his career, certainly before he went to prison was a vanguardist, though he was innovative in his vanguardism. I think there are holdovers of this in his more recent work, and I would want to claim, though I admit I’d have trouble supporting it today if challenged, that the turn to ontology and Spinoza and so forth is at
least in part a way to justify those types of claims. My suspicion is that Negri has these proclivities and that the turn to Spinoza is a way to continue to carry them out. (Ranciere quote about labor aristorcracies.)

I want to end just by repeating the different historical perspective I find in Benjamin, Virno and Ranciere. I’m not entirely sure what’s at stake with this in the present, it might only be a negative corrective to Hardt and Negri’s work, but it might not. There’s a quote I really like from the 1970s French historical research collective, Revoltes Logiques, “An episode from the past interests us only in as much as it becomes an episode of the present wherein our own strategies, thoughts, and actions are decided.” That resonates a good deal with me and what I’m interested in, and it suggests that reading history is not only a matter of curiousity. Rather, it might be a moment of what we can call from Ranciere or Foucault, political subjectification, which, in less inflated terms, history can be part of the process, which both Benjamin and Negri have written on the importance of within marxism, which is class hatred. I’m going to leave it there for today. Thank you.