“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.”
Stephen Daedalus
From the Ashcan of History Department… a paper I wrote a while ago, which I disagree with fairly substantially at this point, pasted here as a reminder to myself to plunder it for what I can and render the rest aufgehoben, and so I’ll have it easily accessible for checking page refs etc while away from my home computer.
*
The Ontological Communism of the Multitude
I am grateful to Chris Hurl, Keir Milburn, Angelica Mortensen, Colin McQuillan, Sebastian Touza, and Steve Wright for their helpful comments on drafts of this paper.
What does ‘communism’ mean in postmodernity, after previously solid categories have melted into air? Marx and Marxism deploy multiple meanings of the term, two of which include communism as production by freely associated labor and communism as “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” These meanings typically refer to different temporal registers: the real movement exists now, while freely associated labor waits to make its entrance after the wreckage of history has been cleared away.
Antonio Negri is profoundly invested in the problem and project of communism. An important re-envisioning of communism has emerged in Negri’s work - and, for Negri, in the world - uniting these two meanings and temporalities of communism. Communism becomes the real movement of production by freely associated labor, which destroys the present order at the same time and to the degree that it carries a new world in its heart.
In a key essay, Negri writes that today “new technical conditions of proletarian independence are determined within the material passages of [capitalist] development”, opening up the “possibility of a rupture in the restructuration [of class relations] which is not recuperable and which is independent of the maturation of class consciousness.” These ruptures are communism, the ‘real movement’, operating now to destroy the present order. The possibilities of rupture arise from within the specific composition of the present. Marx states in The German Ideology, “[t]he conditions of this movement [of communism] result from the premises now in existence.” Negri sees new and profound conditions for communism in the premises of our current era. Negri’s understanding of these possibilities is linked to the twin themes of ontology and multitude.
Michael Hardt states “Negri will only accept ‘superficial’ responses to the question ‘what makes being possible?’” Negri addresses “a strictly immanent and materialist ontological discourse that refuses any deep or hidden foundation of being…. [Being] is fully expressed in the world.” Negri focuses on the production of being by cooperative practice, how “existence precedes the essence that founds it [and] beings are constitutive of the Being that makes them possible.” Put in Spinozian terms, Negri’s ontology “sets out from the ‘modes’, from practice in order to construct ‘substance’”.
Negri’s is a heterodox ontology, based, as Timothy Murphy notes, “in the categories of causal immanence and projective labor”. Negri’s is an ontology of how the present order is continually produced anew, how living labor calls the future into being. The most recent name for this labor in Negri’s work is multitude. The theme of multitude has arisen from Negri’s “effort to define ontological categories of subversive subjectivity”.
Before proceeding, it is important to note the different temporalities at work in these concepts. Negri identifies two orientations toward time in Marx’s work: diachronic and synchronic. The diachronic maps the present, tracing its shape. The synchronic seeks to read the historical tendency, noting where, when and how the future will emerge.
Hardt and Negri identify two orientations toward time in their own work: the always-already and the not-yet. The always-already, like the diachronic, operates a mapping and a criticism of the present. The not-yet is the time of the future, the project of the coming communism.
These times gesture toward a thoroughly non-theological communism, an earthly rather than a heavenly city. The heavenly city comes about only by an act of God, an intervention from outside the present order. The earthly city, by contrast, grows from moments of grace present within the fallen world. That is, communism is built from the interior of the present order.
The linchpin which holds these disparate times together is the central axiom of Negri’s ontology: “[t]he world is not a practico-inert backdrop but a context of activities.” This insight links the diachronic and the synchronic, the always-already and the not-yet. “With each instant the world is created anew in its totality.” The continual creation of the world occurs as “living labour takes the world in hand, transforming and innovating it radically in the common.” The permanently open door between past and future is living labor: the real movement of communism in the present. This makes Negri’s ontology historical and political. “The ontology of living labor is an ontology of liberation”, of the continuous and dynamic production of being, the permanence of subversive possibility.
Negri’s work on ontology and multitude results from his analysis of real subsumption of labor by capital. As Jason Read puts it, “the question of real subsumption as the contemporary articulation of capitalism is the historical-political axis of Negri’s thought.” Real subsumption - identified by Hardt and Negri with the transition to postmodernity - has two aspects, one in which the labor process is internally reorganized to meet the dictates of capital, and another in which capitalist relations inhere throughout society, not simply in designated workplaces. Under real subsumption, production and reproduction tend to coincide. The borders of the space-times of life and work become increasingly fluid.
The tendentially hegemonic mode of labor under real subsumption is immaterial labor. Immaterial labor refers to the production of the immaterial content of commodities such as media and art, as well as the role of information and communication in sectors of material production, and the production of affect, in service work and elsewhere. Aspects of immaterial labor are logically differentiable, but Hardt and Negri note that in actuality these aspects functionally intermingle. “Most actual jobs involving immaterial labor combine these [different] forms.”
While the concept of immaterial labor has been criticized as overly broad, it has a key critical force: it foregrounds the centrality of the production of subjectivity in contemporary capitalism. Immaterial labor is the “production of subjectivity, the creation and reproduction of new subjectivities in society.” Today “it is no longer possible to imagine the production of wealth and of knowledges if not through the production of subjectivity”.
Today the production of subjectivity - what Paolo Virno, following Debord, terms ‘the spectacle’ - “plays the role of industry of the means of production”, producing “communicative procedures, which … function also as means of production in the more traditional sectors of our contemporary economy.” Immaterial labor produces products such as training manuals, computer code, or artistic technique that other immaterial labor may use in production, as well as the affective content which renders commodities desirable - advertising associating a product with a given lifestyle, product and showroom design, the ‘buying experience’ that a salesperson creates for customers, etc. Subjectivity today is a key means of production, both object and agent of production: “[s]ubjectivity … is produced through cooperation and communication and, in turn, this produced subjectivity itself produces new subjectivity, and so forth.”
The spectacle - that is, immaterial labor in the industries of the spectacle - produces the subjectivities and capacities, the “communication, social relations, and cooperation,” required for immaterial labor. These capacities are internal to social and biological life, so that biological life, society, and politics enter a zone of indistinction. The cooperative productivity of this zone tends to define and drive society. “The capitalist regime … no longer produces through factories alone, but makes the whole of society work for its enrichment … [it] has invested the whole of life.” Thus, the range broadens over which capital must impose and maintain command.
Central to immaterial production is general intellect. In Marx, general intellect refers to scientific knowledge used in value production, “social knowledge [that] has become a direct force of production”. For Marx, science and knowledge enter the labor process only via machinery, via fixed capital. Negri and others have reinterpreted general intellect to include the accumulation of knowledge and productive capacity within variable capital, that is, within the bodies and brains of the working class. General intellect becomes a potentiality of labor power, actualized for capital in immaterial labor.
General intellect radically transfigures the old project of seizing the means of production. The mass worker could collectively occupy the factory, seizing and alternatively employing the means of production. Where is the means of production, however, for a graphic designer? Spanish teacher? Author? Childcare provider? Variably in their laptop, home library, etc, but above all in their body and brain. “Today people have become the owners of the instruments, the tools with which they produce wealth. They no longer need to borrow their tools.” These tools reside in the bodies and brains of workers, linked in cooperative production with other bodies and brains. This means old modes of political action and subversive association are inadequate to present conditions. As Sergio Bologna remarks, computer operators in the diffused factory “cannot strike against their computer, because they sit basically alone in front of their screens and often do not know who their client is.”
The entry of general intellect into variable capital, into labor power, and the centrality of the production of subjectivity, entails that production becomes biopolitical. As Marx writes in the Grundrisse, “the conditions of the process of social life itself … come under the control of the general intellect”. If the laboring subject has already seized the means of production, the problem for capital becomes not defending the winter palace - preventing seizure of power - but policing those who have already stormed the palace gates, policing via mechanisms of precarization, monetary policy, ideological mechanisms, etc. Capital must continually repropose command in every instance of production throughout the social field, to sabotage and disrupt living labor’s ability to divert the means of production toward ends other than capital accumulation. Maintaining command forces power to map more tightly to the bodies, brains, and sociality of collective labor power. Power’s need to more closely control labor power opens new sites of struggle which give new meaning to old demands. As Virno writes, today “we cannot seriously invoke freedom of speech without aiming to suppress wage labour.” One could say the same of demands for reproductive and sexual freedom. At stake is control over the general intellect - whether it will be functional for capital accumulation or the desires of the multitude. Giorgio Agamben poses this as the difference between the “inscription of social knowledge into the production processes” and “intellectuality as an antagonistic power and form-of-life”.
I would like to note that the engine of these changes is struggle and production on the part of living labor. Living labor is ontologically the “first agent,” the motor force which produces social reality. As Deleuze puts it, “the final word on power is that resistance comes first.” Taking the ontological priority of living labor as his point of departure allows Negri to analyze the globality of capitalism without becoming a theorist of domination. The transition to real subsumption is “precisely the result of our struggles.” Capital was compelled to change, to take into the labor process demands and practices of subversive struggles. Virno explains, capital “transformed into a productive resource precisely those modes of behavior which, at first, made their appearance under the semblance of radical conflict,” converting “collective propensities … [such as] exit from the factories, indifference to steady employment, [and] familiarity with learning and communication networks” into the requisite qualities of labor power.
Not only is the progression of capitalist development conditioned by struggle, but so are the everyday workings of capital. While living labor is within capital and empire, it does not exist as simply a mode of empire. If anything, empire is a mode of the multitude, just as in parts of the marxist tradition capital is only alienated labor. “Empire is constantly dependent on the multitude and its social productivity, [but] the multitude is potentially autonomous and has the capacity to create society on its own.” The multitude produces and can over-run the bounds of capital and Empire.
The multitude can produce without capital, but the reverse is not true. The movement ontologically is from mode to substance. Capital exists as a mode of the multitude. In real subsumption, struggle becomes not seizing but escaping constituted power: autonomously exercising the multitude’s productive capacity, or in other words, seeking to control its own collective life and invent new ways of being: “the multitude is an ontological power [that] … wishes to recreate the world in its image and likeness, … to make a broad horizon of subjectivities that freely express themselves and that constitute a community of free [humanity].” The multitude as the power and desire to produce communism
Multitude is an old name. Virno argues that multitude once referred to the groups of humans who pre-existed the rise of the nation state. This multitude exercised the right to resist against encroaching power. The right to resist is less of a juridical category than an antagonistic practice, a collective hostility and self-defense. The right to resist was the defense of a certain sociability and organization of being - the commons - against capital’s command, “safeguarding forms of life which have already been affirmed as free-standing forms, … defending something positive”. The multitude rematerializes under real subsumption, transformed “in the shift from the modern to the postmodern (or if you like, from Fordism to Postfordism).”
It seem paradoxical to discuss the many-as-many under one name, ‘the multitude’. The point, however, is to sketch the possibilities of a collectivity in action that does not collapse into simple unity and homogeneity. While the multitude is internally heterogeneous, Hardt and Negri point out the multitude “is not fragmented, anarchical, or incoherent.” The multitude has a common-ness. Negri writes “we can see [the multitude] as something organized.” This organization is the basis by which the multitude differentiates itself internally.
The multitude is organized along the contours of its capacity for action and thought, the general intellect. Thought here indicates communication, sociality, affect, and should be understood as something corporeal. As Giorgio Agamben says, thought is “the nexus that constitutes the forms of life … an experience, an experimentum that has as its object the potential character of life and of human intelligence.”
In his recent work, Negri refers primarily to ‘the common’ rather than ‘general intellect’, in recognition that the general intellect lives in our bodies just as much as our brains. My paper from this point will follow Negri’s shift in terminology. The term ‘common’ underlines the corporeal and biopolitical aspects of general intellect. To quote Marx again, “the powers of social production [tend to be] produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life practice.” The common is the multitude’s capacity to produce, both under capitalist command and autonomously.
For capital the common is labor power, the capacity to work. For the multitude the common is the potentiality for counterpower. The same capacities that produce value compose counterpower. This renders work and society - increasing synonymous terms - tremendously volatile for capitalist management: “labor today is life itself, and society can no longer define itself in any other form than as a productive general synergy … following the circle of life along the length of a tangent” of value production. Sites and forms of antagonism multiply exponentially. Production and circulation of subversive knowledges and sociabilities occur with unprecedented rapidity. Myriad points of constitution and disruption become possible within the heart of the global labor process, exactly because the heart of the labor process tends toward being all of social and biological life: the biopolitical common.
Putting the common to work means exploitation becomes expropriating and domesticating the cooperative production of the multitude. Capitalism increasingly requires communism - production and innovation by freely associated labor via the common: “[c]ontrary to what is believed, people have become more communist than before…. Today levels of community and sharing exist everywhere: even writing an article on a computer means relying on a common knowledge.” The multitude continually produces new ways of being, new modes of the common, in producing for capital and for itself. Capital continually must reimpose command over the multitude, neutralize the subversive potentiality of this excess - the multitude’s capacity to mobilize the common toward abolishing the present order - so as to render the multitude’s activity value productive. Capital’s command is a Sisyphean task, however, as “[b]iopolitical production is … always excessive with respect to the value that capital can extract from it because capital can never capture all of life.”
The common is the means by which the working class produces itself as multitude. While the historical commons were largely destroyed in the birth of capitalism, the multitude continually produces the new common. Capitalism’s current arrangement requires this common. “Nothing is produced that is not produced through the common…. The common is production, and all that is produced must be related back to the common.” At the same time, “the common is the product of the multitude.”
In the postmodern common, the right to resist recurs, as the multitude produces, reorganizes, and defends the common against capitalist command. “[T]he co-operation and productivity that postmodern individuals experience” is part of “an antagonism towards exploitation … the constitution of new co-operative constellations” beginning from “the network of production, … social reproduction, and … participation in the ‘general intellect’”. Against capitalist and imperial subjugation, Hardt and Negri pose configuring the common as absolute democracy; this “rule of everyone by everyone, a democracy without qualifiers” echoes the Müntzerite religiousbattle cry “Omnia Sunt Communia” - “Everything belongs to everyone!” in Luther Blissett’s novel Q. The key point, however, is that Hardt and Negri are not making a moralistic or utopian demand for communist democracy, but rather believe there are real bases for potential communism at work within our world: “democracy is really the basis of every society. The vast majority of our political, economic, affective, linguistic, and productive interactions are always based on democratic relations”, that is, on the common, on collective and cooperative activity. Absolute democracy is the multitude exercising “the power of command over itself, overcoming all other forms of organized social existence”, to “develop a new power of life, of organization and of production.”
Absolute democracy and counterpower do not constitute a political program formulated from outside the multitude, but rather are internal to the multitude’s being multitude. The becoming-multitude of the proletariat in real subsumption is the production of multitudinous counterpower - in both senses of the word production: the proletariat produces itself as multitude by struggle, and becoming-multitude produces new struggles and challenges to constituted power. The multitude’s autonomous activity, production of alternative values, ways of being and sociabilities, disrupts constituted forms of power. The multitude disrupts, undermines, and blocks the operations of representative political structures by its own working existence, by its very becoming-multitude. The communism of the multitude “can be thought only in the form of expressions and not in the form of representations.”
Constituted power seeks to include the multitude in the representational order. Representation limits and segments the multitude into unity and identity. Representational strategies are inadequate to the proletariat as it becomes multitude. Forcing the multitude into unity and identity is an operation of violence and subordination.
Failing incorporation into representational schema, power seeks to crush instantiations of the multitude directly. In Agamben’s words, “[t]he threat the state is not willing to come to terms with is precisely the fact that the unrepresentable should exist and form a community without either presuppositions or conditions of belonging.” Incorporation or scorched earth are the only options for power, since capital and sovereignty cannot coexist with the multitude as multitude.
The multitude de-stitutes constituted forms. The animating force of constituted power is constituent power. De-stitution is exodus, the withdrawal of constituent power, such that constituted power collapses, brittle and empty.
Exodus is a moment of counterpower, of constitution of alternative sociabilities that render representation superfluous. Exodus produces the common as space-times of encounter, as freely associated production. The common is a zone of indistinction of life, labor, society, and politics. From the perspective of capital, exodus produces this zone as an empty negative space outside the legal order, a threatening nonjuridical space. In response, constituted power seeks to reimpose command by formatting this zone as the juridically empty space of the state of exception, the space most internal to power.
Exodus is the freely associated production of the common as resource for the abolition of the present order, and the assertion of the ontological priority of the multitude against the vampirism of transcendent power. Capital can not eliminate the possibility of counterpower, because the multitude’s practices of counterpower use the same capacities mobilized in immaterial production. Communism is a permanent potentiality of labor, continually pressing from the future into the present. Better, communism continually threatens to erupt from inside the present, to throw off the nightmarish weight of dead traditions and invent a new future in which many futures fit.
The multitude opens the possibility for a new communism produced “[o]n the edge of being,” in the time of a new communist transition, a transition from the always-already to the not-yet, from the productivity of the common for capital to the production of the common for the multitude’s own needs. The communist project now is to produce, in Giorgio Agamben’s words, “a nonstatal and nonjuridical politics and human life”. This project entails many changes in political action and theoretical practice. I would like to briefly note three such results:
First, the old project of seizing state power goes out the window. Instead, revolution becomes exercising power, not seizing power, or, in other words, configuring the commons as a moment of communism.
Second, the division between political and economic action breaks down, since the economic and the social now have a political character and political forms of sovereignty have a character closely paralleling the economic.
Thirdly, the project of struggle occurs increasingly at the level of the everyday, and in a transverse form. Struggle becomes the autonomous exercise of our collective capacitities, the articulation of practices of the right to resistance, meeting our own eeds, and composing relationships among the multitude of singularities and ensembles of struggle.
These notes are schematic, and don’t go far enough to address Agamben’s observation that the new politics and life “are yet to be entirely thought.” This political thought requires starting from our positions situated inside the multitude. This thinking must seek to understand the multitude’s specific determinations, the history of its self-production, and its potential to produce the future.
One area of needed analysis is the history of the composition of the labor prosess and the changing hegemonic class figure - from professional worker, to mass worker, to socialized worker, to multitude. As Matteo Mandarini writes, “it is only through an exploration of the transformation of the class composition of the working class that one can arrive at an adequate notion of … the composition of the multitude.”
The multitude consists of particular acts and compositional processes. These process or microprocesses that compose the multitude are concrete and specific. We must attend not only to spectacular conflagrations in which the multitude’s profile can be traced in relief behind clouds of tear gas, but also to the less visible dynamics out of which large events emerge. As Sergio Bologna’s has discussed, what is called spontaneity is actually the product of microscopic arrangements of struggle. More research is needed into these microscopic arrangements. If we agree with Hardt and Negri that “[o]nly the multitude through its practical experimentation will offer the models and determine when and how the possible becomes real” then surely attention to the struggles of the multitude in their concreteness and specificity is a pressing intellectual and political task. After all, as Negri has said, today “What Is To Be Done can only be written from inside the analysis of the cycle of struggles.”
Notes:
1 Bottomore, editor, A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, 87-90.
2 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 26.
3 Negri, “Twenty Theses on Marx,” 164.
4 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 26.
5 Hardt, “The Art of Organization.”
6 Negri, Time For Revolution, 16.
7 Murphy, “The Ontological Turn in the Marxism of Georg Lukacs and Antonio Negri,” 164.
8 Negri, “Twenty Theses on Marx”, 165.
9 Negri, Time For Revolution, 26.
10 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 222.
11 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 392-396.
12 Negri, Time For Revolution, 185.
13 Negri, Time For Revolution, 185.
14 Negri, Time For Revolution, 176.
15 Negri, “Twenty Theses on Marx”, 169.
16 Read, “The Antagonistic Ground of Constitutive Power,” 8.
17 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 255. ‘Complete’ subordination does not mean final or fully accomplished subordination. Rather, it means ‘global’ subordination, which stretches spatially and temporally across the entire surface of the globe, into our everyday lives and implicating the myriad processes of social and biological reproduction.
18 For one treatment of immaterial labor, see Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor.”
19 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 108.
20 Dyer-Witheford, “Empire, Immaterial Labor, the New Combinations, and the Global Worker.”
21Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 66.
22 Negri, El Exilio, 36, my translation. On the role of the production of subjectivity in capitalism and theories of subjectivity in Marxism, see Jason Read, The Micropolitics of Capital.
23 Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, 61.
24 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 189.
25 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, (New York: The Penguin Press), p.113
26 See Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, 49-71.
27 Negri, Time For Revolution, 144.
28 See Virno “Notes on the ‘General Intellect’.”
29 Marx, Grundrisse, 706.
30 Negri and Dufourmantelle, Negri on Negri, 91.
31 As such, immaterial production may be something of a misnomer, as it is eminently corporeal and affective. In their newest book, Hardt and Negri prefer the term ‘biopolitical’, which has the dual function of underscoring the corporeal, affective, and political (that is, contested) nature of current forms of work.
32 Ronneberger and Schollhammer, “No Past? No!”
33 Marx, Grundrisse, 706.
34 See Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 112 for the traits of labor in our era. See Virno, “The Ambivalence of Disenchantment” and A Grammar Of The Multitude on the prevailing affective structures of our era.
35 I owe this insight, that the process of precarization in immaterial labor cuts both ways, rendering capitalist command precarious as well as the conditions of labor, to Angela Mitropoulos. Angela Mitropoulos, personal communication.
36 Virno, “Labour and Language.”
37 Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes On Politics, 10.
38 “This is an old Marxist idea, that struggles are what make history; not only history, in fact, because such struggles diffuse a certain consciousness everywhere. This is one way of expressing a principle that is found in all my theoretical work.” Negri and Dufourmantelle, Negri on Negri, 19.
39 Negri, Time For Revolution, 128.
40 Deleuze, Foucault, 89. See also Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 64.
41Negri and Dufourmantelle, Negri on Negri, 63.
42 “The power of the proletariat imposes limits on capital and not only determines the crisis but also dictates the terms and nature of the transformation. The proletariat actually invents the social and productive forms that capital will be forced to adopt in the future.” Hardt and Negri, Empire, 268, emphasis in the orginal. In the Italian case, the transition to real subsumption occurred with the rise and decomposition of the cycles of struggles from 1968 to the Movement Of 1977. For more on the Italian context specifically, see Bologna, “Tribe of Moles”, Red Notes “Italy: Living In An Earthquake”, Wright “Storming Heaven” and “A Party of Autonomy?”
43 Virno, A Grammar Of The Multitude, 98.
44 This transition “disrupted the existing balance of power - and gave rise to other power relations”. Negri and Dufourmantelle, Negri on Negri, 18. Elsewhere Negri identifies this change with a passage from passage from disciplinary power to systems of control. Negri, Time For Revolution, 144.
45 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 225.
46 Negri and Dufourmantelle, Negri on Negri, 112.
47 Virno, A Grammar Of The Multitude, 21.
48 Virno, A Grammar Of The Multitude, 42-43.
49 Negri, “Approximations: Toward an ontological definition of the multitude.”
50 Hardt and Negri, “Adventures of the Multitude,” 242-243.
51 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 99.
52 Negri, “Approximations.”
53 Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, 25.
54 Agamben, Means Without End, 9.
55 Marx, Grundrisse, 706
56 Negri, Antonio. Job, la fuerza del esclavo, 37, my translation.
57 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 385.
58 Negri and Dufourmantelle, Negri on Negri, 27.
59 This suggests a rethinking of the Marxian categories of primitive accumulation and enclosure. Rather than a historically accomplished fact, primitive accumulation is the continual - and contested - process of capital seeking to reimpose command and secure the conditions of its continued existence. Several contemporary marxists have begun rethinking the category primitive accumulation. See contributions by De Angelis, Bonefeld, nd Midnight Notes, in De Angelis, The Commoner issue 2. See also Cleaver “Study guide to Capital” and Read, Micro-Politics of Capital.
60 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 146. The conditions which make biopolitical production so productive for capital are the same which make it so volatile.
60 Virno, A Grammar Of The Multitude, 21. Again, it must be remembered that the entry of general intellect into production, the transition to real subsumption, occurred precisely as a result of the struggles of the working class. That is, producing itself is the very volatility of biopolitical production tha
61 Virno, A Grammar Of The Multitude, 21. Again, it must be remembered that the entry of general intellect into production, the transition to real subsumption, occurred precisely as a result of the struggles of the working class. That is, producing itself in struggle as multitude, the proletariat imposes conditions wherein labor power, variable capital - that is, the working class for capital, rather than for itself - takes on a form of being as multitude.
62 Negri, Time For Revolution, 188-189.
63 Negri, Time For Revolution, 195.
64 “Living labour … escapes from the transcendental dominion of dead labour, when it reappropriates the tool”, which is the commons, the biopolitical being of the multitude itself. Negri, Time For Revolution, 242.
65 Negri, Time For Revolution, 141.
66 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 237. See also Negri, “Reliqua Desiderantur”.
67 Luther Blissett, Q, 13 and 25. The practices and writings of the Luther Blissett Project and its heir, the Wu Ming Foundation, are sorely lacking in scholarly attention, which is unfortunate given that they are both descendants of the same political traditions and experiences that Negri’s work arises from, and a direct political response to the current era of capitalism.
68 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 311.
69 Negri, “Contrapoder”, 88, my translation.
70 See Negri, “Contrapoder”, 83-86, my translation.
71 Negri and Colectivo Situaciones, “Entrevista a Toni Negri,” 122, my translation.
72 Negri, “Labor in the Constitution.”
73 “The people” names the multitude produced as unity, as the political subject which can be represented. I have not spent time on the conceptual pairing “multitude” and “people” in this paper, for reasons of space and in order to avoid defining the multitude by what it is not. A great deal has been written on “the people” as unitary and state oriented. See for instance Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, 21-25, and Agamben, Means Without End, 29-35.
74 Agamben, Means Without End, 89.
75 See Colectivo Situaciones, “Causes and Happenstance.”
76 Analysis of the state of exception runs throughout the body of Giorgio Agamben’s work. One good example of writing on the exception is Agamben, Means Without End. On page ix Agamben defines the exception succintly as “that temporary suspension of law that is revealed to constitute the fundamental structure of the legal system itself”.
77 Negri, Time For Revolution, 176.
78 Agamben, Means Without End, 112.
79 For an account of the division between the political and the economic within the Marxist tradition - and the varying political strategies bound up with this debate - see Bologna, “Class Composition and the Theory of the Party at the Origin of the Workers-Council Movement.” On the outmoded nature of this division under the current arrangment of production, see Negri, “Twenty Theses on Marx”. On the increasing structural parallel of the sovereign relationship to the capital-labor relation, see Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 335.
80 Agamben, Means Without End, 112.
81 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 409-410.
82 Negri, Time For Revolution, 7.
83 See Cunninghame, “For an Analysis of Autonomia.”
84 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 411.
85 See Emery, “No Politics Without Inquiry.”
86 Negri and Colectivo Situaciones, “Entrevista a Toni Negri,” 123, my translation.
Works cited:
Agamben, Giorgio. Means Without End: Notes On Politics. Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Blissett, Luther. Q. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. London: William Heinemann, 2003.
Bologna, Sergio. “Class Composition and the Theory of the Party at the Origin of the
Workers-Council Movement.” Translated by Ed Emery. Telos No. 13 (1972).
Online at www.endpage.com/Archives/Subversive_Texts/Bologna/Class_Comp_Workers_Councils.xhtml
_____. “The Tribe of Moles.” Translated by Ed Emery. Online, Internet,
http://www.endpage.org/Archives/Subversive_Texts/Bologna/Tribe_of_Moles.
xhtml [accessed 8/17/04]
Bottomore, Tom, editor. A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Cleaver, Harry. “Study guide to Capital.” Online, Internet, http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/357ksg.html [accessed 8/17/04]
Colectivo Situaciones. “Causes and Happenstance (dilemmas of Argentina’s new social protagonism).” In The Commoner, issue 8. Online, Internet,
http://www.commoner.org.uk/previous_issues.htm [accessed 8/17/04]
Cunninghame, Patrick. “For an Analysis of Autonomia - An Interview with Sergio Bologna.” In Movimiento, Anno 2, 1. Online, Internet,
http://www.swan.ac.uk/italian/movimento/mov1/archivio/I;%200/1;5/patrick.htm [accessed 8/17/04]
De Angelis, Massimo, editor. The Commoner. Issue 2. Online, Internet, http://www.commoner.org.uk/previous_issues.htm [accessed 8/17/04]
Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Translated by Sean Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Dyer-Witheford, Nick. “Empire, Immaterial Labor, the New Combinations, and the Global Worker.” Rethinking Marxism Volume 13, 3-4 (2001): 70-80
Emery, Ed. “No Politics Without Inquiry.” In: Common Sense, No. 18, December 1995. Online at http://www.wildcat-www.de/en/material/cs18inqu.htm [accessed 8/17/04]
Hardt, Michael. “The Art of Organization.” Online, Internet, http://www.duke.edu/literature/Hardt/HardtWriting.html [accessed 8/17/04]
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.
_____. “Adventures of the Multitude.” Rethinking Marxism Volume 13, 3-4 (2001): 236- 243
_____. Multitude. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004
Lazzarato, Maurizio. “Immaterial Labor.” Translated by Paul Collili and Ed Emory. In Radical Thought In Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt. Minnesota: Universtiy of Minnesota Press, 1996. 133-147.
Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. New York: Vintage, 1973.
Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology. New York: International Publishers, 1947.
Murphy, T.S. “The Ontological Turn in the Marxism of Georg Lukacs and Antonio Negri.” Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture, and Politics volume 16, 2 (2003): 163-184.
Negri, Antonio. “Labor in the Constitution.” In Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1994. 53-135.
_____. “Twenty Theses on Marx,” translated by Michael Hardt. In Marxism Beyond Marxism, edited by Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl. New York, London: Routledge, 1996. 149-180.
_____. “Reliqua Desiderantur: A Conjecture for a Definition of the Concept of Democracy in the Final Spinoza.” In Warren Montag and Ted Stolze, editors. The New Spinoza. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1997. 218-247.
_____. El Exilio. Translated by Raul Sanchez. Barcelona: El Viejo Topo, 1998.
_____. “Contrapoder.” In Contrapoder: una introduccion. Edited by Colectio Situaciones. Buenos Aires: De mano en mano, 2001. 83-92.
_____. Job, la fuerza del esclavo. Buenos Aires: Paidos, 2003.
_____. Time For Revolution. Translated by Matteo Mandarini. London: Continuum, 2003.
_____. “Approximations: Toward an ontological definition of the multitude.” Translated by Arianna Bove. Online, Internet,
http://www.generation-online.org/t/approximations.htm [accessed 8/17/04]
Negri, Antonio and Colectivo Situaciones. “Entrevista a Toni Negri.” In Contrapoder: una introduccion. Edited by Colectio Situaciones. Buenos Aires: De mano en mano, 2001. 107-132.
Negri, Antonio, and Anne Dufourmantelle. Negri on Negri. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Read, Jason. The Micropolitics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present. New York: SUNY Press, 2003.
_____. “The Antagonistic Ground of Constitutive Power: An Essay on the Thought of Antonio Negri.” Rethinking Marxism Volume 11, 2 (1999). Online at http://www.nd.edu/~remarx/rm/pdf/rmsi_one.pdf [accessed 8/17/04]
Red Notes. “Italy: Living in an Earthquake.” Online, Internet, http://www.endpage.org/Archives/Subversive_Texts/Red_Notes/index.php [accessed 8/17/04]
Ronneberger, Klaus and Georg Schollhammer, “‘No Past? No!’ An interview with the Italian Analyst of Post-Fordism, Sergio Bologna.” Online, Internet, http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=04/05/27/0245248&mode=nested&tid=4
[accessed 8/17/04]
Virno, Paolo. “The Ambivalence of Disenchantment.” Translated by Michael Turits. In Radical Thought In Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt. Minnesota: Universtiy of Minnesota Press, 1996. 13-34.
_____. “Notes on the ‘General Intellect’.” translated by Cesara Casarino. In Marxism Beyond Marxism, edited by Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl. New York, London: Routledge, 1996. 265-272.
_____. A Grammar of the Multitude. Translated by Isabela Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson. New York: Semiotext(e), 2004
_____. “Labour and Language.” Translated by Arianna Bove. Online, Intenet, http://www.generation-online.org/t/labourlanguage.htm [accessed 8/17/04]
Wright, Steve. Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism. London: Pluto, 2002.
_____. “A Party of Autonomy?” Online, Internet,
http://www.endpage.org/Archives/Subversive_Texts/Wright_S/A_Party_of_
Autonomy.xhtml [accessed 8/17/04]