A World of Work #12
On class composition, immanence and autonomy
As a result of these processes, it should now be clear that labour-power, at this level of subsumption of social labour by capital, so far from presenting itself as an intermediate entity, suspended between being a function of variable capital and becoming working class, now presents itself as a social subject: a subject that has internalized at the social level its refusal to be a commodity.
At the political and social level, this subject presents a complete materialization of consciousness within the structures of its own existence. Class consciousness, in other words, comes neither from outside nor from afar: it must be seen as completely internal to1, a fact, a thing, of class composition. The concept of class composition, which was developed originally through the analysis of the mass worker - as a means of classifying changes in the nature of labour-power, and as a critique of purely logical and econometric characterizations of these changes, can now be updated as a historico-political, subjective, social definition of labour-power. In view of this, we can appreciate the importance of the theoretical current that developed through the analysis of the mass worker, and above all we can appreciate how the specific antagonistic subjectivity of this class protagonist contributed, through its struggles, to go beyond and overcome the limitations of the original theoretical conception. It seems to me that the mythical term proletariat has been given a historical dimension and has become founded as a specific material reality through the development of this theoretical approach.
Major consequences derive from all this. First, a demystification of a number of concepts and practices existing within the traditions of the labour movement. Second, in my opinion, important consequences (and, more particularly, problems) arise at the strictly theoretical level - in other words, relating to our conceptions of work and communism. Third - and not to be under-estimated in their importance - we also find indications for method.
Toni Negri, Archaeology and Project: The Mass Worker and the Social Worker, (libcom version), pp. 223-224 (Red Notes version). Emphases added.
The passing phrase, ‘completely internal to’, is a far-reaching, broad claim. It’s a total claim. ‘Completely internal to’. As opposed to what? What is the outside like here?
The ‘inside’ is found at the limit: the fact, the thing of class composition. Negri is, rightly so, proud of being part of the creation of this concept of class composition. It does it all, or does enough, more than was thought.
There are perhaps two ways of understanding this ‘inside’ that is being referred to in the claim that “class consciousness … comes neither from outside nor from afar: it must be seen as completely internal to, a fact, a thing, of class composition”. They can be distinguished in terms of the concept of autonomy - Negri’s preferred term - or they can be understood in terms of immanence.
A note on immanence and Deleuze
Immanence is one of the central and most important concepts of Deleuze. It is a strategic concept, being used to counter the concept of transcendent. The implications are wide-ranging for philosophical thought, but the details are perhaps obscure and nerdy, interesting things that only philosophers love. The core distinction, however, is between something that needs a creator and something that doesn’t.
Deleuze’s arguments against the explicit and implicit role of transcendents within philosophical thought might be thought of as targeting the vestiges of a dominant kind of theological thought. It’s an attempt to expel remnants of the idea of a creator as a kind of God, outside and beyond the creation. It’s motivated by an ongoing and continuous attempt - throughout Deleuze’s work - to think through the role of creation, the concept of creativity. To produce and create without falling back, in some ways, on a hidden genius or special power of ‘the creator’ is to try and avoid a conceptual (and political) error.
The argument would be something like this. If we assume an object or event is new, indeterminate, unpredictable or inexplicable from previous events and objects - if we assert the existence of actual creativity in other words - then how do we explain how this happens? If our explanation resorts in any way to the ‘special power’ of some form of creator then it is not an explanation, it merely appears to be such, it merely presents as an explanation. It satisfies some desire to locate a causal power and falls foul, in effect, of the problem of Kant’s transcendental illusion. If, however, we refuse to locate a causal source, then it looks like we have no explanation for a creative act, and it presents as randomness rather than creation. Thus, the concept of creativity needs to be reworked in some form to avoid both the false explanation of a transcendent power or the failure to explain how creativity is possible.
Deleuze’s approach attempts to describe a self-organising, self-producing creativity. It presents an account of problems, solution, and entities that are caught within a field of problems that produce a need for solutions. It is closer to the Darwinian model of evolution in this sense, shifted into the field of consciousness, ideas, concepts and language. Creativity arises as life responds to the problem of death, but it also develops out of the play of real experimentation that arises in the space of life that has been defended from death.
It is this space of life that has been defended from death that is of interest here. Which death are we referring to?
At its most philosophical level the purpose of Deleuze’s work is to defend thought and thinking from death. This peculiar idea rests on a particular understanding of thought as something that is not common or widespread and which is rare and creative, new, innovative in some ways. Not merely a repetition. Everything pushes to destroy thought and the possibility of thought, since it is an excess and a subversive excess at that. However, this is a kind of spirit inhabiting the passions of philosophers, once that arises from an intimate relationship with curious and strange moments of encounter with the type of thinking found within some rare philosophical works. It’s closer to the kind of experiences of the artist who encounters the exhilaration of creation.
At a more prosaic and normal level, however, the space of life that is defended from death is precisely the space that is lived in the face of death.
Whilst this might still seem too poetic or abstract a formula to be related to something as practical as work, it’s not that hard to connect it. It might also offer a way in which we can begin to conceptualise how something like ‘class composition’ can have an inside.
the space of life that is defended from death is
the space that is lived in the face of death
Work, labour, autonomy
What might the formula of ‘the space of life that is defended from death is the space that is lived in the face of death’ mean in the context of work? If creativity arises as life responds to the problem of death, but also develops out of the play of real experimentation that arises in the space of life that has been defended from death, then when it comes to work, this space is the space of labour.
Work, we might say, puts to work the powers of human labour. In other words, work is the form by which human activity - our doing things - is connected into circuits of social production. Work does something to our labour such that it transforms it from mere activity into socially useful activity. It is the form in which social usefulness arises. If the activity is socially useful then it is work; if not, it’s a hobby, leisure activity, sport, self-care, who knows what. Something other than socially useful. Most often this will mean something like personally useful. “I do it for myself”.
It is, in principle, possible either for all our activity to be socially useful or none of it, and every mixture in-between. However, within capitalism, work is captured, or rather the form of social usefulness is captured, so that only work that contributes to productivity - ie: to profit making - is understood to be work. This understanding is not intellectual or conceptual but material, given in the form of money and the wage. It’s a machine of behavioural reinforcement that selects out useful from non-useful activity by paying for one and not the other.
This selection process is so ingrained, so self-imposed as to represent a form of colonisation of the mind. The artist or writer who doesn’t feel that they are ‘real’ until some money is exhanged for their labour is a common trope and one that is lived by that writer or artist. They literally feel themselves to be a ghost or image of the thing they actually are until paid, and so their existence is, quite strictly, paid for.
Similar things apply to the intellectual who needs to become an academic because this is the only way they will be paid, and thus exist, as an intellectual. Or even the activist who needs to get a wage to live and who identifies as an activist because they get paid by an NGO, when the most accurate description of what they are is a bureaucrat, not an activist2.
This relation between work, wage and labour contains within it, within capitalism, a struggle to defend life from death. This is no doubt to extend outwards from Marx in such a way as to perhaps appear unrecognisable. The point of connection, however, is to be found within Marx’s distinction between living and dead labour. This is such a bizarre and obscure concept as to be quite forgotten, passed over in silence.
In learning about Marx one will come across the distinction between living and dead labour, and will perhaps learn how to define it (eg. dead labour is contained in materials, machines and technology, for example) but rarely will we be given enough time to pause and think about the truly strange idea of dead labour. Why dead? Why not prior labour? Why not the results of previous labour? If it’s having an effect, if it still has to be counted in our analysis, then how is it dead?
It is somewhere here that we can begin to connect the dots - and no doubt much more will need to be done to cash this out.
The inside that is referred to by Negri, the inside constituted and named as class composition, is produced as an inside by the forms by which living labour defends itself from death, which includes not just actual physical expiration and decline but also the weight of dead labour. This weight directs and forms living labour - our actual work practices and lives - by giving it actual real forms. It puts the tools into our hands, produces the practices that we encounter and constructs the framework of thinking in which work takes place.
Autonomy, as Negri understands it, as a self-producing response to dead labour, arises in so far as living labour defends itself and this becomes class consciousness at the point at which that defense moves from confusion to refusal, at the point at which the defensive becomes sophisticated enough to acknowledge the existence of dead labour and the need to bring it back into the service of life. This is the production of a space that is lived in the face of death.
Workers’ control, for example, is often spouted by lefties in some abstract way, often in terms of things like ownership or control functions. So we see conceptualisations of workers’ control in the form of plans that workers produce, or committees that control production. The most archetypal and abstract of these occurs in reference to soviets and workers councils. Always central here is the idea of taking control.
Yet this obscures and forgets, perhaps at times deliberately, the more fundamental mode of workers control, which is the capacity to get paid for fuck all, or as little as possible. To work as a function of getting a wage, not as a function of my activity. The core of workers’ control is a subversion of the capture of labour by work. The worker who goes to work for the wage, not because their trying to be socially useful, has a higher degree of class consciousness than the member of the worker-owned co-op producing some ‘ethical’ product to fulfill the contemporary culture of choice that capitalism depends on to generate generalised complicity. The worker who does as little as possible for the maximum return is a class fighter.
The problem, of course, is that this activity is individual and not collective, and so the actual dynamics of this form of refusal play out as a kind of zero-sum game with other workers. If they don’t do it, someone else will have to pick up the slack. All of which is true, but misses the point that this recognition of the real function of work for the working class is simply the acquisition of a wage, not meaning, fulfillment or job satisfaction - all of which are modes of colonisation for capitalism because all those meanings, feelings of fulfillment or job satisfactions go to do is produce the only recognised socially useful product, profit.
To disentangle those things, those acts of subversion and their effects, is a crucial task if we are to think through the real existences that live within those abstract worlds we describe with the concept of class composition.
This passage was copy-pasted from a version of this essay on libcom.org but unfortunately these words have been mangled somehow, I suspect by an OCR reading because I recognise the random ‘A’ from old corrupted word files of the nineties and noughties that I still access occasionally, and the glitch happening after this random A - the ‘com betel’. (On libcom the words that copy-paste reads are ‘As com betel internal to’).
These chinese-whisper-like corruptions fo texts within the digital domain, these small glitches, remind me of early digital film making. During the late nineties there was much talk about ‘lossy’ procedures, and strategies of minimisation of loss between analogue, tape based recordings. The ‘lossless digital realm’ that replaced it in tecnohological triumph is less lossless than is imagined, particularly if we imagine things in terms of thousands of years (at a historico-cultural level that is) not decades or years or even generations.
(Things of course read even differently at a radically ecological or gelological scale, although the ecological is more ambiguous in terms of its level, perhaps more varied).
I have corrected the citation according to the text, the book, Revolution Retrieved: writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis and new Social Subjects (1967-83), Red Notes, London 1988.
The book describes itself, on the opening page, as ‘Volume 1 of the Red Notes Italy Archive’. Interestingly the book has a revolutionary provenance, at some point passing through the spaces of the movement. It - and Negri - passed me by at the time, even though I was reading Marx and marxists and actively involved in a revolutionary organisation. It’s worth reminding ourselves at times of how much we fail to notice even if it might be thought we shouldnt have. Our awareness is by definition not panoptic (it always presumes something outside it).
There’s a great artifact within the book that reminds me of why I love books - and I have a lot, possibly more than 5000. It’s a book stamp from the Scottish Radical Library at the Autonomous Centre of Edinburgh.
Books carry traces. Next to my altar is another book of traces, this time an old ‘populist’ Christian text with a familial genealogy scribbled into the frontispiece. These physical artifacts, and things within them that are a bit like a frontispiece, are spaces of knowledge transmission, of a cheirotonia, the ‘laying on of hands’ which is at the same time the ‘show of hands’ (‘the usual method of voting in the Greek popular assemblies’).
(The actual meaning of frontispiece is something like ‘an image facing the title page’, often bringing in some allusion to a mythic or imaginary realm. It’s a connection, or complication, or joke, or decoration, or eventually just an illustration. Still, a mark, made for some reason. Capable of carrying information).
This is one of the reasons - as my co-reseracher in The Freudian Spaceship project will be familiar - that I find the very concept of ‘activist’ to be problematic in our contemporary moment. Once it was a description of someone whose activity over, above or outside of work was a contribution to the movement for change and revolution. Now ‘activist’ too often describes someone with a particular kind of job, paid for by grants or subscriptions of others.