Marx in Movement. Antonio Negri
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level of capitalist development, the concept of labour power (understood as an element of the dialectical relationship between workers and capital, a relationship in which capitalist logic has the upper hand) becomes dissolved. A dialectical relationship most certainly remains, but now the relationship between capital and labour power becomes the relationship of capital with the working class. Thus the dialectic of capitalist development is dominated by the relationship with the working class. The working class now constituted an independent polarity within capitalist development. Capitalist development was now dependent on the political variable of working-class behaviours. The concept of labour power could no longer be substantiated; only that of working class was adequate.
I have to admit that our theoretical and political positions in this period, while very rich in some respects, were very poor in others. Their richness lay in the fact that they provided a basis from which we could then develop an entirely political concept of labour power. We learned a lot from developments in the capitalist revolution of the 1930s and 1940s. In particular, we learned that it was possible to carry forward revolutionary struggles that had a marked effect both on the structure of the labour process and on the structure of economic and political domination – in other words, struggles that were capable of winning against Taylorism and within Keynesianism. On the other hand, the poverty of our theoretical and practical positions lay in the fact that, while individual struggles and the struggles of individual class sectors proved capable of understanding capital and taking it on, at the same time the potential of that struggle, its strategic dimension, and the re-establishment of a centre of revolutionary initiative remained beyond our grasp. Practice, even the highest working-class practice, at this level of the class struggle, always contains an element of uncertainty as regards its synthesis and resolution – what Lenin used to call ‘the art of insurrection’, an art that the workers today are seeking to turn into science. This science still had to be constructed – a science that the practice of the mass worker was demanding, but that it did not provide.
In fact capital’s science of domination was far ahead of us. At the time when we were introducing the concept of the mass worker and, by implication, a critique of the category of labour power in favour of a concept of dynamism of the working class, capital, for its part, had already made tremendous advances in its own practice, as regards its theory of domination and redressing the balance of power. (Note that within the specificities and the isolation of a few national situations – in Italy in particular – we were successful in developing a remarkable level of subjective action and in bringing about moments of deep capitalist crisis.) For, while from the working-class viewpoint the revolutionary practice of the mass worker was being advanced within individual factories and within the overall interlocked system of factories and companies, capital was already responding, generally at the global and social level, with domination and control. Keynesianism, at its roots, had already demonstrated this: an awareness not only that the wage relation extended between subjects that were different (capital and the working class), but above all that the solution (favourable to capitalist development) was to be sought across the entire span of production and circulation – in other words, involving the entire sociality of the relations of production and reproduction. In the Keynesian system, state budgeting was the means of recuperating and neutralizing the class struggle in the factory, and monetary policy was the means of subordinating the wage relation. Fordism, for its part, had already transformed the high level of cooperation on the assembly line (and thus corrected those elements of weakness that labour struggles, at that level of production, were able to turn against capitalist command) into a conscious policy, one might say, of the sociality of the assembly line – a policy of command over the relation between industrial production and the reproduction of labour power, a capitalist intervention within the social flexibility of labour power, a way of privileging social command and divisions within society as conditions for command and division on the assembly line. Fordism recuperated social motivations and made them functional to the Taylorist organization of work – it posed them as the prime and fundamental terrain of command in the factory. Gradually the labour market and the fabric of relations between production and reproduction was becoming an operative field (this also from the theoretical point of view) for the capitalist theory of factory command: hence the development from Keynes’s to Kaldor’s planning techniques to Kalecki’s microanalyses of the political cycle and to the present systemic theories of neo-functionalism.
Faced with these developments in capital’s understanding of the articulations of command, not only was the concept of the mass worker late in developing, but also, crucially, it now proved incapable of developing for itself a theory able to match the new dimensions of command. Of course, the old workerists of the 1960s knew that they had to go beyond the ‘empirical’ category of the factory and that the mass worker had to become effective over the entire span of the social factory – but the factoryist content of the concept and the circumstances of its genesis prevented its theoretical potential from becoming practical reality. Thus, in the end, this impotence of the mass worker left the way open for surreptitious operations of mediation and representation – and the whole old machinery of the party form was wheeled out as the means whereby issues could be posed at the social, political and general level. We should also add (and this is not only of historical relevance) that this was the basis on which the trade union was able to re-establish its powers of control over the working class. This had a paradoxical consequence: the trade union accepted the delegation of power and the general functions that the working class had restored to it, and then went on to impose rules that separated, in a corporatist sense, the working class from the other proletarianized strata of society. When the trade union (in its traditional function, as half party and half merchandiser, in the sense that it represents labour power within the bourgeois political market and also sells labour as a commodity on the capitalist market) finally caught up with and grasped – after ’68 – the new composition of the mass worker, it only reduced it to corporatism and divided it from the rest of social labour.
Hence it follows that a methodology such as I use, which seeks to indicate possibilities for subjective genesis within the categories of class struggle, cannot rest content with this old version of the concept of the mass worker. And indeed, the conditions for further theoretical progress on this front were plentiful, especially in the years immediately following the upheavals of 1968–9. Working-class struggles, which were extremely powerful in spite of (or perhaps because of) their ambiguity as struggles both within and against the system of the relative wage, now brought about a crisis in the mechanisms of capitalist control. The capitalist response during this period developed along two complementary lines – the social diffusion and decentralization of production; and the political isolation of the mass worker in the factory.
The only possible answer to this, from the working-class viewpoint, was to insist on and fight for the broadest definition of class unity, to modify and extend the concept of working-class productive labour, and to eliminate the theoretical isolation of the concept of mass worker (insofar as this concept had inevitably become tied to an empirical notion of the factory – a simplified factoryism – owing to the impact of the bosses’ counteroffensive, the corporatism of the unions, and the historical and theoretical limitations of the concept itself). On the other hand, the emergence and growth of diffused forms of production (the ‘diffuse factory’), while they enlarged the labour market enormously, also redefined, as directly productive and ‘working class’, a whole series of functions within social labour that would otherwise be seen as marginal or latent. Finally, there was a growing awareness of the interconnection between productive labour and the labour of reproduction, and it was expressed in a wide range of behaviours in social struggles, above all in the mass movements of women and youth, who affirmed all these activities, collectively, as labour. This development made necessary an innovation in the vocabulary of class concepts: as we used to put it, ‘from the mass worker to the social worker’. But it would be more correct to say ‘from the working class’, that is, from that working class massified in direct production in the factory, ‘to social labour power’, which represented the potentiality of a new working class, now extended throughout the entire span of production and reproduction – a conception more adequate to the wider and more searching dimensions of capitalist control over society and social labour as a whole.
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