A World of Work #9

the three forms of worker for Negri

A little late as I’ve been caught by a rotten cold the last week or so. I’ve begun reading The politics of subversion and trying to track the shifting concept of work in Negri.

In the essay From mass worker to socialised worker, contained within the collection The politics of subversionNegri explains one of his most interesting concepts. The socialised worker is the name given to the new dominant form of the working class. It marks a transition beyond what’s called the mass worker. This is one example of the way that the idea of ‘class composition’ plays out in practice.

Class composition is the well known - perhaps overly well known - aspect of Italian workerism / autonomist marxist theory. Roughly speaking, it acknowledges the ongoing shift in the form of work within capitalism, and as such the form of the worker. The working class is not an historical object, relegated to conversations about nineteenth or twentieth century capitalism. The ‘disappearance’ of the working class is a political lie told by liberals and bourgeois fools, but it is a lie that can take hold and be believed precisely because the image of the working class became ossified, literally stuck in the past. Much of the left remains stuck there with it, wondering why their words to the wise fall on such deaf and uninterested ears.

One of the things that makes autonomist marxism interesting is that it broke free of the mind-numbingly dumb version of marxist thought that still dominates much of the left. Key to breaking free from stupidity was paying attention to what was taking place in front of their eyes, and in Italy in the later 1950’s and early 1960’s, that was a massive demographic and organisational shift in the populations relationship to work. Where they worked and how they worked was changing. This change was what fascinated the Italian ‘workerists’. This changing nature of the working class is what is explored under the heading of ‘class composition’.

So the socialised worker is a name Negri gives to a new figure that arises as the mass worker declines. A new form of work produces a new form of the worker.

Professional worker

It’s useful to note that Negri tells a story of three forms of the worker, the first of which is the professional worker, “the first great representative of wage-labour within the system of large-scale industry. There, tools in hand, precisely because of his/her perfectionism, study and dedication to work s/he was capable of producing masterpieces however oppressed s/he was.” (ibid,p78)

This is the great age of the crafts. Engineering and tool making dominate the most concentrated forms of work, those places where the organisation of society has enabled great feats of machinery and metal and concrete. The ornate and the beautiful still occur as though part of the essence of making something. The mark of the worker is felt impressing itself onto the world. What the worker makes matters to them because it’s not simply flung into the realm of the market merely to be bought, it’s produced to do something and be loved and seen in it’s actions. At least, sometimes. In some workplaces. In some jobs.

Mass worker

After the professional worker came the mass worker. The great factories. These produce a different kind of worker because they enable and encourage particular kinds of consciousness.

For the professional worker the consciousness of skill, tool and hand. The intensities of work that are produced in the long hours of apprenticeship produce a kinetics of the body-brain-hand assemblage are difficult to achieve. The work of the professional worker needs a concentration of time and knowledge into the body of the worker, intensifying their capacities. This is what it means to be skilled. It’s not the hour of work they do now that is being paid for but the intensity of the work they are able to do in this hour because of the training and apprenticeship they have gone through.

For the mass worker the consciousness is quite different. The skill involved in working on a line is quite different from that of the professional worker. Anyone who has ever worked in a factory - or in a place of mass work of any kind - realises pretty quickly that the job involves just as much negotiating with fellow workers as it does carrying out repetitive tasks. The social interactions that enable the cooperative work of the factory shift the tacit content of work. The factory shifts the consciousness of the worker as they adapt their lives to fit the job. In particular the mass worker is “animated by an awareness of the productive co-operation which was involved in large areas of mass production” (ibid).

Socialised worker

The consciousness of the socialised worker is, of course, what interests Negri. We’ve already seen his interest in the specific form of class consciousness that might coalesce alongside a newly recomposing working world. This was the focus of Communists Like Us. The difference between the two works is locatable in the conceptual scheme - to use Quine’s concept - they arise from and it is clear that The politics of subversion is still deeply located inside a kind of marxism, even whilst proposing the move from the mass worker to the socialised worker. I say ‘even whilst’ because any attempt to redraw the boundaries of class struggle, the actors and agents and forces involved, almost immediately prompts some kind of ‘return to the class’ reflex from marxists, particularly organised marxists. CLU, on the other hand, moves more within a conceptual scheme of social desiring production, that redrawing of the concept of the mode of production that is found within the Capitalism and Schizophrenia project.

This cross-over between schizoanalysis and marxism that is found in Negri’s relationship to the work of Guattari is poorly understood by most marxists. Organised far too much by the Hegelian dialectic, the methodology of most marxists is philosophically poor and limited. The central tacit rule of the Hegelian system model means that, in general, organised marxists operate with a closed scheme within which various positions of consciousness can be located by the one who has knowledge. In practice this means locating any thought as merely a representative of already existing positions, which often comes down to a game of ‘hunt the traitor’. In a closed system the very use of an open methodology - implicit in any attempt to take seriously a concept of class composition - reeks of betrayal. Quite what is being betrayed is not always clear. The revolutionary implulse? The truth of Marx? More likely it is the ossified elements of the revolutionary movement, the elements that have survived only because the closed methodology enabled them to expel, like infections, any deviant thought. In the process, of course, thinking is transformed into dogma.

The consciousness of the socialised worker arises, for Negri, in such a way as to bypass the traditional forms of working class organisation - by which we mean the unions and labour movement structures that arose at the beginning of the twentieth century. Curiously, for a movement that at its height embraced the future, the avant garde, acts of creativity and joy, the organised marxist today too often appears like a conservative, cautious, anxiety ridden killjoy. It’s this archaism that attracts young students back into the arms of a necrotic stalinism, embracing ‘tankie’ thought and it’s authoritarianism. Some stability and clarity in a world of confusion can be exhilirating, particularly if the simple truth is mixed with moral superiority. Christianity long ago learnt the power of this archetypal power of absolution from thinking in the form of believing.

What is this consciousness of the socialised worker? The mass factory worker encounters social cooperation in the form of mass work, that experience of the whole machinery of the factory sucking in and distributing the individual into a specific place within the collective whole. The cog in the machine. But for the socialised worker the experiences are diverse, splintered, fragmented in appearance, whilst at the same time connected, sped up, wave-like in form. The key difference for Negri, however, is to do with the constitution of the cooperation needed for contemporary capitalism.

If the mass worker is organised into a cooperative machinery of production by the factory and the capitalist that commands it, the differentiation of the socialised worker arises as the mode of cooperation changes. No longer forced into the shapes of the factory floor, the socialised worker is “the producer of the social cooperation necessary for work” (ibid, p80). It’s not obvious what this means, although it’s suggestive of much. Negri develops his thought by pointing to one curious feature.

The socialised worker is, then, the originator of the social cooperation necesary for work. S/he does not want to have bosses because s/he cannot have bosses. (emphasis added: p80-81)

What on earth might this mean? It makes one immediately consider the idea ‘being one’s own boss’ and the role of autonomy at work. It paints in a whole new light the idea of being given autonomy to do your work, something that might appear appealing and be actually experienced as a kind of freedom. This autonomy is conceived of by Negri as containing within it a radical shift within the form of class struggle in capitalism because now the need to recuperate this autonomy becomes the driving force of capital. No longer so easily able to simply command, the capitalist system now needs to co-opt and cajole a force it must depend on in order to keep up with and innovate on the means of social production.

One thing that’s worth noting before continuing any exploration of the socialised worker is that the concept arises in the 1980’s. The shifts in the social organisation of labour in many capitalist societies that it attempts to articulate are now history. New moments have arisen, new forms developed, the whole concept of a ‘fourth industrial revolution’ might even be understood as an attempt to reclaim large sectors of the general intellect from the socialised worker, rendering that form itself archaic. Now, one wonders, what exists after the socialised worker, after the response from capitalism to the danger of the necessary autonomy of practice inherent in the concept of the socialised worker?

The politics of subversion - a manifesto for the twenty-first century, Antonio Negri, Polity 2005.

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