Negri, Marx after Marx

The Italian group 'autonomia', founded in the 1970s, tries to open up new possibilities for the theory and practice of class struggle (not mere theory but praxis certainly, evident in Negri's militant position, aggressively reading the economy politically) - somewhat influenced on a conceptual level by post-structuralism (particularly Deleuze, drawing upon his philosophical position as well as co-writing Communists Like Us; also Marx after Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse results from a series of lectures at the Universitˇ Paris in 1978 at the invitation of Louis Althusser). The complexity of the argument is somewhat exemplified by the book title Marx Beyond Marx - in that what lies beyond Marx is in itself a return to Marx. The idea of the book is to move beyond what has become the orthodoxy of an understanding of Marx - for Negri, this is expressed as Marx's Grundrisse (1981) beyond Marx's Capital (the conceptual subtlety of this is engendered by an understanding that the Grundrisse notebooks predate Capital and informs its arguments - for Negri, it restores Marx through its rawness and openness, exuding more revolutionary passion). A non-Marxist historiography would find this problematic but it is in entirely in keeping with a historical materialist process of overturning, reversal, supercession, inversion; as 'conversion' (as a 'simultaneous separation and coherence', according to Jim Fleming, in 'Editor's Preface', to, Negri, 1991: vii).

Autonomia has a complex history bound up with the specific political context of Italy - the detail of which is not so relevant to this study but crucial to an understanding of Negri's position (and in the context of his lengthy imprisonment - note: Negri at once sees the world as a prison, that 'jail equals factory' and to 'to break with capital is to make a prison break', in 'Author's Preface(s)' where he writes in the form of a dialogue between a prisoner and free man, 1991: xvi). There are also a parallel set of political concepts that Autonomia responds to, such as 'hegemony' (from Gramsci, also imprisoned for his political views) that implies a passive working class determined by its relation to Capital, preferring to develop new organisational forms of resistance and collective agents of change (later developed in Empire as the 'multitude' rejecting many of the orthodoxies of worker's parties). Fundamental to this is the interrogation of the nature of work and the value of labour. In the introduction, Fleming (who incidentally set up the publishers Autonomedia - clearly alluding to Autonomia's project) explains the significance of this: 
'If work by the worker was the source of surplus value for the capitalist - working class autonomy indicated the present path of departure or separation for the anti-capitalist struggle, one based not on the "general social interest" of need subordinated to labor, but antagonistic to and against the social whole. This tendency, through refusal of work, was the overall orientation toward the strategy of immanent communism. In the absence of this strategy at this cycle of the struggle, communism would be indefinitely deferred' (1991: xi-xii; note: Negri uses the term Communism in preference to Marxism to emphasise revolutionary action over mere analysis). 

Whereas Capital seeks to valorise work (even unpaid work in homes, schooling, etc), and to re-establish the wage-work relation at all costs, Autonomia seeks to politicise 'work' and undermine spurious hierarchies related to qualifications and different wage levels (in this, it goes beyond Marx who concentrates on wage labour). Autonomia charts a shift from exploitation to domination - no longer through the model of exchange but through force (and hence force must be used to counter force - rational argument in the factory is no longer effective). Thus, a critique of capital suited to the times is posited, one that rejects the conventional pessimism towards revolutionary change evident in much critical theory. (note: although utopian conceptions of the end of capitalism are rejected in Negri, as in Marx - in not conceived of a teleological vision of an end goal but in a continued movement into the future without determinancy. This might be described as wandering, or drifting to use the Situationist term - turning away from orthodoxies on an irregular course, 'to wander is the activity of those who do not have a fixed destination and yet despise immobility'; in an 'uneasy balance between the stillness of a satisfied ontology and the teleology of those who move as if they possess the correct coordinates', in the words of Viano, in Negri 1991, xxxi).

The term 'autonomy' is clearly important in this connection. This constitutes a departure from other leftist political positions in Italy at the time of writing that would advocate a 'Statist' (state-centred) approach (the discredited too-rigid model of Soviet Marxism for instance). The state simply had to be overthrown - no longer simply bargaining for better conditions in factories (through trade unions) but simply taking them over (with or without unions). One technique was to simply refuse work; paralleled by the artstrike calling on cultural workers to stop making or discussing their work from 1990 to 1993 - proclaimed under the ¾gis of 'Neoism' plagiarising Gustav Metzger's 1974 proposal for an Art Strike, says Stewart Home (1993), in 'Assessing the Artstrike 1990-1993', http://www.thing.de/projekte/7:9%23/y_Assessing_the_Art_Strike.html). The working principle here is that capitalism as an irrational system cannot be replaced by anything through better planning or anything that employs its same logic. The term 'autonomy' is to be seen in this light, as a description of the revolutionary subject that works to its 'own multilateral productive potential' (Ryan, in Negri, 1991: xxx). Any militancy needs to be tuned to these 'autonomous voices'.

Grundrisse: 

Marx after Marx responds to the Grundrisse (1981) as it is in this that the law of value is articulated. What Marx calls 'real subsumption' that dislocates class exploitation to the wider (global) social realm somewhat masks class antagonism. To Negri, this doesn't mean that class antagonism has disappeared but is present in the social realm, in everyday life - thus undermining the classical Marxist formulation of the base and superstructure. For Negri, a communist critique for the post-modern world responds to an understanding of surplus value within this framework of real subsumption (explain subsumption?). In the Author's Preface, where he sets up a dialogue between his present and former selves, as prisoner and free man accordingly, the free man states: 'To be a communist today means to live as a communist'; to which the prisoner responds: 'This, I think, is possible even in prison, But not outside, until you free us all' (1991: xvii).

Here the dialogue becomes dialectical evoking the master-slave relation in Hegelian style - in that it is only the slave who can become truly free. That is to say:
'here, domination and reversal can only be accomplished by those who participate in an antagonistic relation' (Negri, 1991: 9). He adds: 'In practice only the freedom of necessary labor, the creativity of labor applied to itself, its force both creative and destructive, constitutes the real limit of capital and the manifold, recurrent cause of its crisis; up to the point of its reversibility...' (1991: 102). 

Rather than simply see the critique of capitalist hegemony embedded in its internal contradictions, Negri also points to another non-dialectical dimension. In addition to the imposed unity of dialectical relations between worker and capitalist, there is another logic of 'separation' from the forms of domination (note: if the negative trajectory of dialectics needs to be superseded, can this problem be accounted for by the negation of negation?). For Negri, dialectics is no metaphysical law but the temporary logic of capitalist times and part of its internal contradictions to be overthrown along with its domineering class in the 'transition' from socialism to communism. Transition here represents the shift between the crisis and the emergence of revolutionary subjectivity. For the autonomists, the binary informational logic of yes/no has been internalised to such an extent to seem natural and causal rather than complex and multidirectional - and is inadequate to describe subjectivity. He is partly emphasising that any interpretation of Marx must be adapted to the times: particularly to take account of the crisis of value, but more generally in keeping with the transformative power of praxis (in the sense that theoretical analysis leads to revolutionary practice). It is crisis that ruptures the dialectic for Negri, and indicates the autonomy of the proletariat (1991: 104).

The concept of surplus value has aptly described capital, but Negri would contend that the law of value does not go far enough in describing the dynamic of capital. He adds: 'The only reality we know is that ruled by theft, capitalist alienation and the objectification of living labor, of its use value. Of its creativity. To make all that function according to the law of value, supposing it were possible, would modify nothing. Because there is no value without exploitation. [...] Communism is the destruction of exploitation and the emancipation of living labor. Of non-labor. That and it is enough. Simply.' (1991: 83)

Surplus value in turn becomes profit when it is made social - to Marx, 'it is a distributive phenomenon and not a creative one' (in the Grundrisse, 1981: 668-9; and in, Negri 1991: 93). One might see how, applying this formulation, how the distribution of free software remains creative. It is through circulation that social capital exerts its power. Capital works socially and expansively, combining labour with everyday life. The antithesis of social capital is proletarian subjectivity for Negri (1991: 128) 

Value:

In this formulation, value, in the form of money, is always kept in a contradictory state that cannot be resolved. To Negri this is all too clear:
'Money has the advantage of presenting me immediately the lurid face of the social relation of value; it shows me value right away as exchange, commanded and organized for exploitation [for the generation of surplus value]. I do not need to plunge into Hegelianism in order to discover the double face of the commodity, of value: money has only one face, that of the boss.'(Negri, 1991: 23)
This summarises the theoretical tendency in the Grundrisse, as Negri reads it, in shifting from a critique of value to a critique of power.
This draws upon a particular description of the dialectic: 'that is not a Hegelian one of necessary mediation, that is not a Proudhonian one of the law of value, but is the logic of antagonism, of risk, of opening' (1991: 31).  

Interestingly, Negri defends the dialectics of the Grundrisse, as decidedly not 'methodological fetishism' but rather more open-ended:
'We can see in it the passion for totality, but only in the form of a multiplicity of sequences and leaps, never in a monolithic sense; we can find it, above all, a dynamic which has the plurality and the same diversity of subjectivity, and is nowhere closed.' (1991: 13) 
Is this simply a question of a more open-ended definition of dialectics? 
Negri reiterates that in Marx's method, 'every new constitution of a new structure is the constitution of a new antagonism' (Negri, 1991: 56). 

This partly legitimates his own revisionist project of re-reading the Grundrisse, to rediscover the 'Marxist critique of all forms. It is there, finally, that we find the practical character of Marx's thought. The end of the dialectic? Yes, because the act of thinking here does not have the autonomy from the collective force, from the collective praxis which constitutes the subject as dynamism tending toward communism. The adversary must be destroyed.' (1991: 190)   


Labour:

The problem in classical Marxism, for Negri, is in regarding the working class as the necessary antagonistic subject of capitalism. Perversely, he looks to Marx to overcome this problem and argues that Marx describes two logics: a dialectical and a non-dialectical one suited to the development of the working class from dominated labour power to a revolutionary class (note: I think this is to avoid themselves necessarily becoming a domineering force, in following the same logic. Anyway, 'working-class power is not the reversal of capitalist power, not even formally' 1991: 150). The revolutionary subject breaks the capitalist dialectic through the refusal to work through 'separation' leading to 'self-valorisation' (note: these terms are explained elsewhere). The idea was/is, put simply, to work for oneself as an individual and as a class. (Cornelia Sollfrank simply says: 'A smart artist makes the machine do the work' - quoted from her web page).

It should be emphasised that for capitalism to produce surplus value, it has to construct an appropriate subjectivity to do so, and this subjectivity must be antagonistic even for the success of capitalism - without this would be no surplus, and for surplus capital to be generated, there must be exploitation of labour. There are two oppositions at work: 'exchange value against use value' and also 'objectified labor against subjective labor' (Negri, 1991: 68). In the former opposition, 'behind the appearance of exchange a theft takes place' (Negri, 1991: 79) and surplus value in general is 'value in excess of the equivalent' (Marx, 1981: 324); the conventional wisdom of classical Marxism is that surplus labour is stolen from the worker and turned into surplus value or capital. In this latter opposition, Negri drawing upon a passage from the Grundrisse in which labour is characterised in terms of subjectivity (in Marx, 1981: 271-2). Negri translates this as: 'The figures take the form of the opposition and of subjectivity: worker and capitalist, collective worker and collective capitalist' (1991: 77). Negri reads Marx in such a way as to develop a theory of proletarian subjectivity in opposition to capitalist subjectivity.    

Under capitalism, the passive subjectivity of the worker renders it incapable of changing its own lived labour conditions and ensures the success. The worker is denied autonomous subjectivity in other words. Capitalism evidently contains the seeds of its own destruction but knows it - aware of its immanent crisis in other words. To Negri, the 1960s and 1970s demonstrate autonomous needs of the workers and the refusal of capitalist work (through denying the logic of labour value - practically expressed through being absent or sabotage). The 1980s and 1990s seem to demonstrate a counter strategy to contain this refusal through wage controls and worsening labour conditions (such as temporary contracts, and free trade zones). The pointlessness of all the labouring (and the link of money to shit) is made evident in the following quote from the Grundrisse: 
'In fact, of course, this "productive" worker cares as much about this crappy shit he has to make as does the capitalist himself who employs him, and who also couldn't give a damn for the junk' (Marx, 1981: 273). What is being produced is the crappy shit of exploitation and surplus value of course. 

Negri explains that money figures at the centre of the process of domination: 'we find it each time that capital should restructure its command over the crisis - over the insurrection of the workers' use value' (1991: 61). The current global economy proves the point in spreading class antagonism far and wide across the globe, restructuring itself in the pursuit of surplus and constructing the necessary conditions to do so, and continually developing new schemes to avoid dissent ('regeneration' projects are a contemporary local example of the same principles). The mode of production itself is modified - the mode of production made informational is a case in point. Negri says 'every period of crisis is therefore followed by an extensive period of restructuration' (1991: 95) but crisis is merely deferred not altogether avoided. Negri explains the strategy: 'Capital's permanent revolution discloses the motor of its development. Every time we come to a global definition of it the picture undergoes a reversal. Separation, not contradiction, moves the process.' (1991: 116) - new obstacles are produced, not through contradiction but through separation (and it does this currently through 'the world market', what we now think of as globalisation. It is this picture that needs to be inverted, and contradiction needs to be reinstated. 


Machines (see other notes from Capital):

Capitalism finds it harder to contain the pressure from below as it introduces more and more automation. In Marx's 'Fragment on Machines', Negri sees antagonism moving into subversion. To Marx, the introduction of automatic system of machinery subsumes living labour, and is, 
'set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages. [...] Not as with the instrument, which the worker animates and makes into his organ with his skill and strength, and whose handling therefore depends on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal, oil etc, just as the worker consumes food, to keep up its perpetual motion.' (1981: 692-4)

In this, living labour is appropriated by objectified labour in the form of capital's machinery. This is entirely in keeping with the negation of necessary labour, its use-value, and skill is stolen from the workers by the application of technology and science (a parallel might be struck here with Bowles's essay on hardware in which the Apple Mac is regarded as the perfect capitalist machine because of this aspect). For Negri: 'the capitalist appropriation of society is total. The subjectivity of capital has been violently activated. Machines and science have constituted and produced it.' (1991: 143) 
This is crucial as it described the production process as not dependent on labour, but in addition, technology. Dialectically, the proletariat's collective power becomes more pronounced as capital seeks to diminish it on an individual basis. 


Subjectivity:

In Marx's method, 'antagonism is the motor of development of the system' (Negri, 1991: 54). The anti-capitalist movement thus performs its function as the antagonistic class with more or less success. The immanent crisis is connected to labour: 'the fundamental law of the crisis lies therefore in the contradictory relation between necessary labor and surplus labor, that is, in the functioning of the law of surplus value' which leads Negri to surmise that: 'The subjectivity of living labor opposes in such an antagonistic fashion the consolidation of dead labor into an exploiting power that it negates itself as a value, as an exploited essence, thus proposing itself as the negation of value and exploitation' (1991: 97-8). This is not enough for Negri, negation is simply the first stage of revolutionary consciousness. The point is to move beyond understanding of the conditions to changing them. 
    
The question remains, at this point in time, as to how organise this labouring opposition into an effective political force (this is where the more recent book Empire again figures - and the soon to be published sequel - that offers a more inclusive definition of the proletariat as the revolutionary subject - for instance that would include the 'marginalised proletariat' of students, the unemployed and unpaid house workers). 

It is the revolutionary subject that concerns Negri, how to conceive of new forms of refusal to produce surplus. Praxis in this way constitutes a reversal, and a transition from surplus value to the redeployment of surplus labour to human needs. Thus, Negri rejects socialism as this doesn't go far enough in transforming labour - seeing it as a repressed alternative to capitalism (and clearly looking towards the failed examples of the time when this was first written in 1985). Free from enforced work, work itself can be transformed according to Negri, through self-determination - what he calls 'self-valorisation' (1991: xxv; note: rather than capitalist valorisation - system of imposed values). He calls for a multiplicity of autonomously-determined needs and projects. He advocates a form of 'terrorism' (note: or what would be commonly described as this, now and then by his imprisoners; he is a militant exemplified in his views on the necessity of violence: 'Proletarian violence, insofar as it is a positive allusion to communism, is an essential element of the dynamic of communism. To suppress the violence of this process can only deliver it - tied hand and foot - to capital. 1991: 173) to achieve these ends in keeping with the conditions for the multinational worker. 

The revolutionary subject is 'self-constituting' building upon the relative 'successes' of feminism that somewhat rejected the preferred (centralised) organisational model (note: I wonder if this new models falls into the trap, like Marxism, of assuming the autonomy of the human subject??). Autonomia rejects a 'verticist' mentality and hierarchical lines of organisation, for a 'pointillist' multilateral militancy of a 'recomposed proletariat and the exaltation of the concept of difference' according to Maurizio Viano (in Negri, 1991: xxxiii). By these means: 'work is no longer work, it is work which is liberated from work' (Negri, 1991: 160).