Marx in Movement. Antonio Negri
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with which to respond: restructuring – an attempt to attack and transform class composition. In other words, for capital, restructuring is a political, economic and technological mechanism aimed at the enforced reduction of the working class to labour power. To put it more correctly, capital aims to reduce the intensity of the political composition of the class.
At this point, the problem becomes specific again. How did capital respond to the crisis in relations of production that was induced by the class offensive of the mass worker? How was restructuring articulated at this level of political composition of the class and its struggles? What happened after the 1960s?
It is not hard to identify and describe some major elements of the capitalist response. Obviously, the notes that follow are very partial and indicative. They limit themselves to questions of class relations in the sphere of production. To deal adequately with the restructuring of labour power, I would really have to consider two fundamental shifts in imperialist development in the early 1970s: the freeing of the dollar from gold parity (1971) and the energy crisis of 1973–74. There is no space to deal with them here, and so the argument, as well as being partial and indicative, is frankly insufficient. However, I would ask you to trust the author and believe me when I say that I have given a lot of thought to these other fundamental determinations of the overall framework. These, in my opinion, are not contradictory with the phenomena that are now studied at the level of production and reproduction. Rather they present an overdetermination, an extension and a deepening of the logic which lies at the root of these phenomena.
So let’s return to my initial question, to the analysis of the groundwork of capitalist restructuring. Let’s begin by looking at mobility. In my opinion, as regards mobility, capital was already taking into account developments in the composition of the mass worker and was in fact acting on their tendency to become realized, in order to throw the working class back to the position of being labour power. While the composition of the mass worker from the 1960s onwards tended, via mobility, towards a unification in general of potential abstract labour, capital’s restructuring project effectively grasps the social tendency towards abstract labour. It is against this abstract labour that capital exercises its capacity to repress, to fragment and to introduce hierarchical division. Capital does not mobilize against abstract labour and the social dimension it assumes, but against the political unification that takes place at this level. Capital assumes subsumption of labour (abstraction and socialization) as a process that has been realized. Experiments in job design, segmentation of the labour market, policies of regrading, reforms of methodologies of command within production cooperation, and so on – all this became fundamental. A restless, practical process of trial and error was now set in motion, aimed at destroying any possibility of proletarian unification. If we understand mobility as a tendency towards freedom, as a definition of time that is alternative to commanded time within the classic working day – and if we assume that from now on, in a parallel movement, it becomes impossible for capital to establish any fixed ‘reserve army’ of labour – then we understand why, in political and economic terms, it is so urgent for capital somehow to fix this labour power (the first, spontaneous and structural manifestation of an abstract labour that has become subjectively realized) within mobility and via mobility. We have on the one hand class struggles within and against capital’s system and, on the other, capital struggles within and against the new composition: within its mobility, its socialization, its abstraction, and against the subjective attitudes which these elements engender. All manpower and job design interventions are to be understood as policies that learn from the progress of abstract labour towards its social unification: they intervene in order to block further development of its subversive potential.
Capital’s reaction against the rigidity evident in the composition of the mass worker was even more rigorous. This is because in this area mystification is harder to achieve. Policies aimed at segmenting the labour market (which are posited as ‘positive’, as against the ‘negative’ of mobility of abstract labour) tend to produce a balkanization of the labour market and, above all, important new effects of marginalization: marginalization in the form of political blackmail, repression and degeneration of values – much more than the familiar blackmail of poverty. I have said that the rigidity in the forms of behaviour of the mass worker (particularly on the wages front) expressed an essence that was qualitative – a complex of needs that became consolidated as power. Capital’s problem was how to defuse this power, quantitatively and qualitatively.
Thus, on the one hand, we have seen the promotion of various forms of diffuse labour –the conscious shifting of productive functions not tied to extremely high degrees of organic composition of capital towards the peripheries of metropolitan areas: this is the quantitative response, of scale and size. (The scale of this project is multinational and should be understood against the backdrop of the energy crisis.) On the other hand, capital has attacked the problem of qualitative rigidity and has planned for one of two solutions: it must be either corporatized or ghettoized. This means on the one hand a system of wage hierarchies, based on either simulated participation in development or regimentation within development, and on the other hand marginalization and isolation. On this terrain – a terrain that the experience of the struggles of the mass workers had revealed as strongly characterized by political values – capitalism’s action of restructuring has often made direct use of legal instruments. It has regarded the boundary between legality and extralegality in working-class behaviours as a question subordinate to the overall restoration of social hierarchy. Not even this is new – as we know, it has always been the case – and Marx, in his analysis of the working day, makes the point several times. Law and the regulation of the working day are linked by a substantial umbilical cord. If the organization of the working day is socially diffuse, then sanctions, penalties, fines and so on will be entrusted to the competence of penal law.
Capital also acted against the way in which the mass worker had made use of circulation – in other words, of the increasingly tight links between production and reproduction. Restructuring once again adopted the method of displacement: capital takes as given or realized the tendency set in motion by working-class struggles, it subsumes its behaviours (i.e. the awareness of the circularity between production time and reproduction time) and begins working on how to control this situation. The welfare state is the principal level geared to synchronizing this relationship. The benefits of the welfare state are the fruit of struggles, the counterpower. But the specific application of restructuring aims to use welfare in order to control, to articulate command via budgetary manoeuvrings. ‘Public spending cuts’ are not a negation of the welfare state; rather they reorganize it in terms of productivity and repression. If subsequently proletarian action within this network of control continues to produce breakdown and to introduce blockages and disproportions, then capital’s insistence on control reaches fever pitch. The transition to the internal warfare state represents the corresponding overdetermination of the crisis of the welfare state. But it is important to stress once again capital’s capacity for displacement. The restructuring that has followed the impact of the mass worker’s struggles and the tendencies that the mass worker has instilled within the general framework of class power relations are geared to match a labour power that exists as completely socialized – whether it exists or potentially exists is not important. Capital is forced into anticipation. However, marginalization is as far as capital can go in excluding people from the circuits of production; expulsion is impossible. Isolation within the circuit of production – this is the most that capital’s action of restructuring can hope to achieve. It does not succeed in bringing about a restoration of the status quo, and in the struggle against the mass worker it is likely to assist in the even more compact formation of a completely socialized labour power. There is much craftiness of proletarian reasoning in all this!
Things become even clearer when we come to the fourth area in which capital’s activity of restructuring has to prove itself and be proven: the terrain of politics. Here every attempt at mystification – this seems to me the most interesting aspect – is forced to assume the complete socialization of labour power as normal, as a fact of life, a necessary precondition of any action against proletarian antagonism. In other words, as many writers now accept, the only, remote possibility of mystifying (controlling, commanding etc.) struggles is conditional on an advancement of the terms in which