In the passage from the “Mass worker and Social worker” essay that I was discussing last time, that curious idea of one thing being ‘internal to’ another thing, in this case class consciousness being ‘completely internal to’ class composition, was the focus. It had stuck out, like a philosophical red light, primarily because of the qualifier ‘completely’. The universalisation function (universal quantifier) is always a red light, not because of any problems with universals themselves (this is always too naive an inference) but because of the extension of the claim. It flashes a warning because it over-extends its claim. It raises too many potential counter-claims, ones that might often be confused, but which are also confusing.
Not only that, but it’s a distraction to try and focus on universals, unless you happen to be doing some philosophical training. It’s also a perennial problem with Marxists because they tend to get their philosophy, if they get much at all, from Hegel, the arch system building universalist of all time and the bane of Deleuze, perhaps more than Kant who at least produces something we can use. With Hegel, almost everything is fucked from the get-go. You’re trapped as soon as you concede his beginning points, from the moment you let the little idealist lunatic loose in your head. Spit it out. Don’t swallow Hegel, it’s not good for you.
So Marxists arguing with Negri about his interpretation of labour and the universalising nature of his account often sound like they’re just missing the point. The same thing applies broadly speaking to many of the criticisms of value as well, but for now let’s just stick with labour and work.
If, as we suggested last time, we see the internal space of class composition as a space claimed in the face of death, as a struggle between dead labour and living labour, then despite the high-stakes suggested by framing things in terms of a struggle of life and death the actual practices of living become potential sources for understanding political resistance and class consciousness. That which makes me more alive is part of the revolution or the potential of the revolution, it’s capacity.
There’s a fascinating dialogue fragment at the beginning of the English translation of ‘Marx beyond Marx’, the text by Negri based on his seminars on the Grundrisse. It’s between the Negri teaching the seminar, a free man, and the Negri reviewing the material a few years late whilst incarcerated. The dialogue between the free man and the prisoner is kinda cute, a little bit humblebrag, and clearly a kind of literary device, one that we can almost feel is being used to enable something to be said rather than because it had to be said this way. Like any dialogue, however, it forces the thoughts to be broken from the high language of theory and become the spoken. In it a kind of bluntness can sometimes clarify things, and so we find the free man saying the following:
The most illuminating moment of this is the extension that is claimed. Capital has subjugated ‘all of lived time’, once again the universal quantifier. The revealing moment, however, is in this phrase “not only that of the working day”.
This maybe gets us somewhere interesting because the focus on work, in particular in the form of class composition, goes astray if it simply focuses on the working day. The work day and the control mechanisms that are specific to a particular work often raise tensions and conflicts along exactly this kind of line between working and non-working time. This is the work/life balance discourse as a site of class consciousness. This is ‘work from home’ as a means of asserting autonomy. Or the directed time limit of a professional secondary school teacher.
My youngest - who is coming up for thirty (I had a family young) - works in an IT space, an operations manager for a small firm. Just like my eldest, she had a ‘30k by 30’ plan, what seemed to be a pretty pragmatic relation to work careers. She recently got through her pay negotiation and achieved this, although curiously on a kind of pro rata basis that leveraged more time off for the same money rather than extra cash in her pocket. Quite a lot more time off, enough to enable her to do what she really wants to do at the moment, which involves being away from the UK for a big chunk of time. Not my bag, I don’t like travelling, but great for her.
This interest in time as much as money is the obvious thought, but actually this is too quick. It’s not that it’s simply a matter of reclaiming time off from work, even if this does mean you also claim a higher wage for time at work, it is far more to do with the kind of control over that time, the purpose of that time. Does that time open up the world - break open the prison walls - and allow a little light and life back in, does it come to the defence of life against death?
The fear amongst the Marxists in the face of this is that somehow they will be lost as specialists of revolution if the wider, existential, even ontological aspects of the struggle over work become foregrounded, not least because many of those aspects are actually more capable of being directly grasped than abstruse language disputes over the correct way to understand Marx1.
It’s little surprise then that a focus on work, autonomy and the antagonisms of autonomous labour faced with capital’s attempt to control it, looks strange when encountered by abstract theory. The actual existence of labour, and in particular of a class of society that is constantly being forced to labour, reveals itself in the way such labour is articulated, connected into and joined up with other aspects of life. Life thus subsumes labour in a positive model, in one where the possibility of such subsumption is revealed as a positive, affirmative alternative to the subsumption of life (and labour) by capital.
Hence, sabotage, subversion, disobedience and non-compliance all become as interesting, if not more so, than the simple withdrawal of labour.
There’s another quote in the dialogue that Negri writes which speaks to this. “Beyond the disfiguration of Marxism operated by Marxists. Marxism shows Marx as a professor and not as a militant. Moreover, Marxism shows us Marx as the author of the old competitive capitalism, incapable of coping with the social capitalism of the present stage. I hate this betrayal as much as I hate the mummification.” ibid, p.xv