What in the hell …

In a recent post I referenced a text by Wu Ming from 2001. I think the text is beautiful and as I mentioned I think the sense of standing in a long line of historical continuity is important. The line is on the one hand that of the long history of communism understood as “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things,” in Marx’s words. Marx emphasized that “[t]he conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence,” and I think historical memory is one such condition. Someone from Wu Ming linked to my post, with an excerpt from their introduction to a short book of material by Thomas Muntzer. (Muntzer figures largely in the novel Q, which I can’t recommend enough. I also recommend the novel 54 highly. Check it out.) (more…)

The fine folk at Generation Online posted a translation of a talk by Negri, “Communism: some thoughts on the concept and practice.” Here’s my notes. (more…)

Or real subsumption. (more…)

This is a text written mainly by Paolo Virno, I believe, signed by the “Immaterial Workers of the World” which I found online here and here. The translation is by Myk Zeitlin. The text is online in Italian here and in Spanish here. It’s title is “What did I tell you?”, in Italian, “Che te lo dico a fare”. It first appeared in issue 18 of Derive Approdi, contents listed here. There’s a short preface to the text which isn’t translated. I may take a crack at that in the next week or so. (more…)

For Spanish readers, and interview with Paolo Virno by Colectivo Situaciones. Notes by yours truly forthcoming in English, but don’t hold your breath. (more…)

This is a short piece by a friend of mine. He and I translated it a while back and keep meaning to something with it. It’s now up here at least. (more…)

Since finding reference to “workers of thought” and “workers of the head” in the Sewell book I’ve found similar language. The Chainworkers‘ uniting of “brainworkers and chainworkers” isn’t a new thing. (more…)

Antonio Negri seeks in his recent work to found a political project, the construction of the insurgency of the multitude, on supposed changes in the present stage of capitalist development. Negri argues that there is a tendency for all of the life-time of all of humanity to be productive in the Marxian sense, and thus a tendency toward all of humanity being united against the same opponent. Negri seeks to forge a friend/enemy distinction based a narrative of progressive stages of the unfolding of capitalism. The effort to forge such a distinction in the present is a strong continuity throughout Negri’s career as a militant and theorist. The term for the present stage, the tactics advocated, and the name of the class figure may change, but the effort at intervention and construction is the same.
It is interesting to note that alongside Negri’s drive to enact a Schmittian constitution of a collectivity, there is also a strong similarity in how Schmitt and Negri read Marx. Schmitt writes:

“the antithesis formulated by Karl Marx: bourgeoisie and proletariat (…) concentrates all antagonisms (…) into one single and final battle (…) by integrating the many bourgeois parties on earth into a single order, on the one hand, and likewise the proletariat on the other. By so doing a mighty friend-enemy grouping is forged.”
Similarly, Hardt and Negri write,

“a theory of class not only reflects the existing lines of class struggle, it also proposes potential future lines. The task of a theory of class in this respect is to identify the existing conditions for potential struggle and express them as a political proposition. Class is really a constituent deployment, a project. This is clearly how one should read Marx’s claim about the tendency toward a binary model of class structures in capitalist society. (…) This claim is really part of a political proposal for the unification of the struggles of labor in the proletariat as a class. This political project is what most fundamentally divides Marx’s binary class conception from the liberal models of class pluralism.”
The difference, of course, is that Schmitt is not a Marxist. Rather, for Schmitt, Marx is an example of a political tendency that can today be described as Schmittian. Hardt and Negri, however, are Marxists in a fashion wherein they approve of and seek to replicate this tendency in Marx. They are, then, at the same time in at least some sense Schmittian.
In any case, Hardt and Negri continue, noting that today “the old distinction between economic and political struggles becomes merely an obstacle to understanding class relations.” In light of the above quote one must read ‘understanding’ as essentially synonymous with ’shaping’. The periodization in terms of historical break that Hardt and Negri posit is part of an attempt to construct a political community through positing the present as a historically and politically ripe moment. Furthermore, specific groups within the present, immaterial laborers, sit at points of particular ripeness of time. They are the temporal leading edge in the passage from present into future.
Historical periodization is a recurrent theme matter in Negri’s work, as in much of Marxism. The assertion of a historical break is a political operation posed in the ostensibly nonpolitical register of a narrative about a shift in the mode of production. This periodization can be made sense by addressing Schmitt’s discussion of the political nature of the delimitation of what is and is not political.
The determination of status as political or nonpolitical - regardless of the outcome of the determination - can be political. As Carl Schmitt writes in the preface to the second edition of Political Theology One, “any decision about whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision, irrespective of who decides and what reasons are advanced.” (PT p2) Schmitt expands on this point in his The Concept of the Political,

“Above all the polemical determines the use of the word political regardless of whether the adversary is designated as nonpolitical (in the sense of harmless), or vice versa if one wants to disqualify or denounce him as political in order to portray him in order to portray oneself as nonpolitical (in the sense of purely scientific, purely moral, purely juristic, purely aesthetic, purely economic, or on the basis of similar purities) and thereby superior.”(CotP p31-32)
Designation as nonpolitical is what Schmitt calls a depoliticalization, a decision which renders nonpolitical, or rather, ostensibly nonpolitical for political purposes. Depoliticalization is one of Schmitt’s charges against liberalism. Such rendering can itself be a powerful political activity. As Schmitt writes: “designating the adversary as political and oneself as nonpolitical (i.e., scientific, just, objective, neutral, etc) is in actuality a typical and unusually intensive way of pursuing politics” (CotP p21, note 2). Schmitt does not offer a corresponding term for designation as political. This designation can be called a politicalization, deriving the term from Schmitt’s term ‘depoliticalization.’
Reading Schmitt on the politics of the designation of status as political or nonpolitical might lead one to inquire about the status of Schmitt’s own work, whether political or nonpolitical. Doing so, however, risks missing the important point of Schmitt’s with regard to the politics of (de)politicalizations. The terms depoliticalization and politicalization are nominalizations, verbs rendered into a noun form. The nomimalized verbs implied within the terms depoliticalization and politicalization are depoliticalize and politicalize: to render nonpolitical and to render political. To depoliticalize and to politicalize are actions, decisions. Prior to the decision on any concept as either political or nonpolitical, the concept is a sort of (non)political Schrodinger’s cat, an indeterminate that is neither political nor nonpolitical until a decision occurs which renders a status as political or nonpolitical.
Schmitt’s formulation suggests dealing with actions rather than with conditions and being. Being and conditions - status as political or nonpolitical - are dealt with in relation to and as the effect of actions. Schmitt here is akin to Marx, for whom objectivity is subject, living labor, rendered as objective, as in the account of fixed capital as an accumulation of dead or objectified variable capital. The political and the nonpolitical are the rendered-political and the rendered-nonpolitical. This rendering is what is most interesting and important. Even more so, rendering or decision as such are addressed with the aim of helping understand and act within the field of renderings or decisions specific to any particular situation.
Decision need not necessarily be deliberate, hence this paper’s use of decision and rendering interchangeably. Depoliticalization as a category of analysis helps make clear how ostensibly nonpolitical factors can serve to determine and impact a political field or maneuver. This can occur without deliberate intent. Put differently, politicalizations and depoliticalizations are observer dependent phenomena, not subject a priori to agreement across different perspectives. One could, for example, imagine an exchange between someone championing the feminist slogan “the personal is political” and someone defending as nonpolitical a certain familial arrangement, wherein the two would be unable to reach agreement over the (non)political status of the object of their discussion. This disagreement would be precisely a political one, and as the contest between equal rights, the deciding factor would be some form of force. The relationship between these two positions would be precisely polemical, to use Schmitt’s term.
Marxism as a tradition of political thought and other activity has seen many polemical depoliticalizations and politicalizations. Mapping the history of these polemics and and their roots in and effects upon Marxism is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is one of the primary issues this paper hopes to be of use to. Depoliticalizations of a certain type within Marxism, such as appeal to objective forces, historical progress, and objective science, have their roots in the political project that Marx assembled in his reconfiguration of the politicalizations and depoliticalizations within English political economy, French socialism, and German philosophy. The depoliticalizations operated by Negri via historical periodization are thus part of a long and storied tradition within Marxism.
Negri writes in “Twenty Theses on Marx” that in the present “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.” For Negri, proletarian independence is conditioned technically, which is to say, nonpolitically. This implies a nonpolitical condition for the politics of working class movements. It is also instructive to note that Negri speaks of proletarian independence as technically determined, rather than as determining. There is an important sense in which Negri’s proletarian independence is precisely not independence, in the sense of self-determination, but rather a determination by objective forces. This same sensibility is evidenced in Negri’s copious remarks on the political possibilities opened up and closed off by the hegemony of immaterial labor in the technical aspects of production. The depoliticalized sense of the technical here differs from the account of technology in the work of an early thinker in similar circles as Negri, Raniero Panzieri, for whom ostensibly nonpolitical technology was precisely political and politically determined, as opposed to finding the political to be technically nonpolitically determined.
Along similar lines, Negri says in an interview with Anne Dufourmantelle that today “people have become more communist than before (…) levels of community and sharing exist everywhere: even writing an article on a computer means relying on a common knowledge.” This is the general sense of Negri’s claims about the hegemony of immaterial labor within the technical processes of production, communism as a generalized world condition is closer today than ever before. The present is already the transition to communism.
Communism for Negri here is technically determined. This puts Hardt and Negri’s project, quoted earlier, of the unification of the working class in a new light. The working class as a subject productive of communism is, the account goes, preceded by a technical unity. This technical unity is held as a variant on the Marxist class-in-itself, a nonpolitical precondition for the formation of a collective political subject, the class-for-itself. Hardt and Negri take their subject, the multitude, to have been impossible prior to the present with its technically produced unity of the working class.
The class-in-itself is analogous to the figure of the people, a collective entity which exists with interests in common. The people is, for Schmitt, the condition of possibility for the political as it is precisely in the relation of the people to an enemy that threatens the people’s way of life that the political appears. The claims in Negri’s work about a present moment wherein a technical unity obtains such that a political subject can emerge amount to a depoliticalized theological picture, wherein a people, defined by what is taken for a non- or pre-political collectivity, comes into being such that a political grouping can now be forged from it. This is the millenarian moment in Negri’s work, an apocalypticism evident throughout his career wherein the last days – termed real subsumption – have always just begun and the new kingdom – communism – is always about to be ushered in. The drive behind this sentiment, the desire to constitute an acting collectivity, is laudable, but it must be noted that the constitutive operation here relies on a type of depoliticalization in service of a politics. It is tempting to speculate that this is the case for Marxist reference of a political content to nonhuman or structural objective forces, which is to say, to all objectivity that is taken for non-objectified. There is certainly a lingering theological quality to much of Marxism and to Marx’s work, bound up with a political depoliticalizing impulse.
Jacob Taubes writes:

“Apocalyptic science implies a passive posture toward historical events. All capacity for action is enfeebled. Universal history is predetermined, and all efforts to resist that inevitable destiny are pointless. The passive voice is an essential element of apocalyptic style.. In apocalyptic works, no one ‘acts’; things rather “come to pass.” (…) The apocalyptic style, which one also finds in Karl Marx, founds itself in the lack of confidence characteristic of humanity. The long age of wretchedness and ill-fortune, of recurring delusions, the devastating power of evil, the immense colossus of the diabolical on earth, together occasion the loss of hope, expressed in the apocalypse, in any future prosperity and wellbeing which would depend on the good will and consent of humanity. In this sense, one can speak of at least an implied determinism within the conceptual structure of the Marxist apocalypse. Marx also saw superior forces at work in history, over which the individual had no control, and, using the mythological terminology of his era, and named them “productive forces.”" [quoted In Tronti, p152. I am grateful to AV Worden for assistance with the translation of this quote.]

What Taubes identifies as an apocalyptic strain in Marx, continued in Negri and in much of the rest of Marxism, is a depoliticalization, one which, in keeping with Schmitt’s analysis, can serve as a tremendously powerful act of politics. It’s not surprising in this sense that certain Marxisms and millenarian religious groups - or perhaps it would be better to say ‘certain Marxisms and other millenarian religious groups’ - have made use of an ostensibly nonpolitical foundation, the science of historical materialism or the revealed holy word, as constitutive of their political project.
Taubes identifies “productive forces” as a remainder of theology or mythology in Marx and Marxism. The term also functions as a depoliticalization in many uses. This is not unique within Marxism. Other related terms subject to frequent theological and depoliticalized uses in Marxism include the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and various events that are taken to be inevitable: crisis, false consciousness, communism. The terms and their deployment vary with the liturgy under question, but they retain a frequent function as depoliticalizations with storied political uses.
None of this, of course, occurs in a vacuum. Schmitt has noted that the political can emerge from any other sphere, at any location at all. In a similar vein, Jacques Ranciere writes that all “theoretical discourse is always simultaneously an aesthetic form, a sensible reconfiguration of the facts it is arguing about.” The term reconfiguration is noteworthy. All theory begins within what Ranciere calls a distribution of the sensible, a “system of self evident facts that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.” That is to say, renderings and decisions are made in relation to other past, as well as present, renderings and decisions. These acts do of course change the distribution of the sensible that they are within, which is the entire point of the activity and of the term reconfiguration. The point in all this is not to get outside of all distributions of the sensible, but to know what particular distribution or distributions one takes part in or constitutes, its effects, and how to act within and upon it to produce a new distribution - or defend a prior one - favorable toward one’s collective goals.
The depoliticalizations of Negri and Schmitt and Marx are forms of producing distributions of the sensible for political ends. There aims, at least in the cases of Negri and Marx, are laudable, but their means less so. They effectively re-enact a version of the noble lie Plato wrote of, in which a distribution of the political and ostensibly nonpolitical is produced, a distribution which is political - and as such is the result of a decision - in the sense of constituting a collectivity capable of having enemies.

[note: add in a short discussion of Negri on guaranteed income vs the political use of the wage in earlier Italian contexts - for Negri the basis is the productivity of activity for capital (hence a pomo replay of the old slogan “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work”) as opposed to on the basis of the political power to force that upon the bosses. Contra all this, an anti-totalizing politics, or an invidualizing antipolitics - antiplatonism in the sense of not legislating who is and is not capable: this ascription of capabilities is precisely, in practice, the building of measures to police who can and can not act. It’s the positing of places that people are told to stay in. One key piece to this antipolitics would be the construction of collectivities that declare themselves collectivities on the basis of their own declaration. This usurps the power to determine a collectivity, a power which sovereignty seeks to monopolize. It must also aim to undermine the sovereign as having the monopoly on force and the decision of who is friend and enemy - which in a sense undermines the sovereign qua sovereign. This would in a sense be the enactment of Hallward’s description of the politics of prescription, by turning all politics into a politics of prescription (and the undermining of any other possible form of politics). Virno on Marx as individualization theorist, Benjamin on the right to use force. Instead of periodization, dialectical images in Benjamin, Ranciere’s histories, Chakrabarty’s notes on and attempts at a different type of history]