A World of Work #14

Notes on the introductions to Marx beyond Marx

To sum up Negri's exposition of Marx's line of argument in the Grundrisse: capitalism is a social system with two subjectivities, in which one subject (capital) controls the other subject (working class) through the imposition of work and surplus work. The logic of this control is the dialectic which constrains human development within the limits of capitalist valorization. Therefore, the central struggle of the working class as independent subject is to break capitalist control through the refusal of work. The logic of this refusal is the logic of antagonistic separation and its realization undermines and destroys capital's dialectic. In the space gained by this destruction the revolutionary class builds its own independent prbjects - its own self-valorization. Revolution then is the simultaneous overthrow of capital and the constitution of a new society: Communism. The refusal of work becomes the planned abolition of work as the basis of the constitution of a new mode of producing a new multidimensional society.

Harry Cleaver, Introduction to Marx Beyond Marx, pxxvii (available here online)

Cleaver’s summary is a brilliant little crystallisation of the way that an autonomist Marxism reconfigures a theory through returning to the problem that capitalism, as it were, tries to solve.

Rather than trying to give some kind of natural law, over-arching interpretative principle or claim to scientific status as the ground for using a Marxist framework, this line of argument imputed to Marx locates something closer to a living dynamic. This is poorly described by simply invoking a vague concept of ‘dialectic’ but even a poor description is better than none. Instead, something like a co-constitution or co-evolution is posited, a systemic understanding grounded on an intrinsic tension of position. Control and the need to control are recognised as the primary modes of this tension being enacted. In return, that which resists that form of control, in all the varieties such resistance might take, becomes the source of the revolutionary subjectivity. As refusal and resistance reach a reflective point of strategic horizons, their logic can be fused and connected across multiple domains of lived reality.

Michael Ryan, in his own introduction to Negri’s text, locates this still abstract summary in the place of a political organisation.

The slogans of Potere Operaia were the "refusal of work" (empirically, as absenteeism and sabotage, and in principle, as the denial of the law of value which establishes a false equivalence between hours worked and wages paid, while operating a real disequivalence of wages paid and value produced), and the "political" or "social" wage, a call for greater wages independent of productivity. It called itself "the party of insurrection."

Ryan makes this useful distinction between an empirical understanding of the refusal of work and a theoretical or conceptual understanding. This latter, with its focus on equivalents and their form of relation, points to the philosophical core of the autonomist Marxism of Negri. It’s also worth noting, however, that for Ryan the slogan of the refusal of work goes together with the call for a social wage.

These two components often seem adrift. It might be that the concept of a social wage is now distorted by discussion of Universal Basic Incomes (UBI) and such, but it’s far easier to understand this broadly as the welfare that supposedly stood at the heart of the welfare state. Wages independent of productivity. This is now so far removed from the common sense and consciousness as to appear almost ludicrously radical. To pay the lazy. To pay, without even having a category of ‘lazy’ or ‘deserving’ - this is the content of wages independent of productivity. It’s of course applied in some areas of care, but extending this from a contingent case by case model to a generalised mode of the wage has profound anti-capitalist potentials.

Michael Ryan’s short introduction, sandwiched between Cleaver and Viano, has some interesting history of the shift in slogans and concepts on the ground during the 1970s, but the history is a compressed and contingent moment. Are the political concepts of autonomism tied to this context, or only capable of first being expressed and formulated once some conditions have been found? At the same time, the organisation Potere Operaia (Workers Power) dissolves in 1973 in a decision that follows an apparently intense discussion. The development of these concepts is bound into that organisational question as much as anything else. Somewhere around 1975 the concept of the ‘social worker’ develops on from that of the ‘mass worker’ and social reproduction begins to get addressed.

Ryan continues to give a kind of inter-meshed conceptual political history in which the political developments (such as the dissolution of Potere Operaia) almost appear to arise as a result of theoretical shifts, although it looks far more like we have correlations not causations. So we move from refusal of work, through the decline in the importance of the law of value to proletarian self-valorisation in a seemingly inexorable logic of development. It reads as echoes of an unfamiliar past.

It’s of course fascinating to see much continuity - as well as the more celebrated discontinuity - between the time of Marx beyond Marx and in particular the time of the English translation and Viano’s introduction. The role of terrorism, for example, often located in the post 9-11 war on Islam dynamic, as part of the state response to crisis and resistance. Terrorism has long been a tool to demonise opponents whilst also mobilising and justifying direct repressive measures such as imprisonment and death. The main thrust of Maurizio Viano’s introduction, for example, is to undermine and dismiss the connections between Negri’s imprisonment and the Red Brigades, not just empirically but in principle. Autonomism is defined as incompatible with the Red Brigades not because of political opposition so much as organic composition. The very nature of autonomism as a movement prevents the concept of leaders making sense.