Antagonism,Contradiction,Time: Conflict and Organization in Antonio Negri

Introduction

Antonio Negri's militant conception of organization undergoes several shifts over almost half a century of commitment to the critique of capital and to the development of a communist politics. Notwithstanding these shifts, there persists, throughout his thinking, a forceful undercutting of all homologies, objectivisms and determinisms.

Building upon the notion of ‘class composition’ in order to analyse the (re-)production of capitalist relations, Negri reveals how this notion short-circuits the linear, deterministic understanding of ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’, ‘forces’ and ‘relations of production’ and – at the same time – breaks the homology between workers and capital that, all too often, has been characteristic of orthodox Marxism. Negri's notion of organization affirms the discontinuities of development and the antagonism of the non-homologous because it comprehends how production is always in the service of reproduction and that elements of the latter are caught up in the former; and because capitalist organization supervenes upon a working class that is both within and against capital, i.e., is non-homologous with capitalist logic.

The working class progressively asserts itself and its forms of organization against those of capital, blocking any simple cyclicality between production and reproduction. According to Negri, capital posits the working class subject and organizes it technically (at the level of production) and politically (at the level of reproduction). Since it is posited only insofar as it can be exploited, the working class is immediately antagonistic. Thus, it refuses the capitalist form of organization and develops its own forms by way of a subversive re-appropriation of capitalist organization and the progressive development of a dialectic of separation that shatters the recuperative dialectic of capital. What we uncover in Negri is the passage from an understanding of the proletarian subject as determined by dialectical conflict with capitalism to one in which this subject is constituted in its autonomy from capitalist organization.

It is impossible to discuss the question of organization in Negri's work without providing a general outline of his political theory. I will also try to show that, for all the theoretical and practical fractures in the development of his thinking, all attempts to separate a Marxist (or Marxist-Leninist) Negri from a postmodern or, more properly, a post-structuralist one (his very own ‘epistemological break’) fail to grasp either his Marxism or his post-structuralism.

Operaismo

These two passages, written at a distance of almost forty years from one another, arguably represent the single most important methodological statements of the tradition of Italian Marxism called operaismo. ¹ They also express the central dynamic of Negri's notion of organization under capitalism. Before turning to Negri's own thinking, I believe it will be useful to outline, briefly, the foundations of operaismo in the work of Mario Tronti.

In the 1960s, operaismo concerned itself with capital's capacity for adaptation; that is, with the fundamental Marxist question of the (re)production of capitalist organization. In two seminal papers, ‘La fabbrica e la società’ and ‘Il piano del capitale’, Mario Tronti (1971a, 1971b) argued that capital had increasingly subsumed society as a whole, reducing it to the model of factory organization: the ‘factory-society’. In the first essay, Tronti showed how capital's extension of relative surplus value extraction in the struggle against labour socializes labour and its exploitation, thereby generalizing the more advanced productive processes so that ‘labour is not only exploited by the capitalist but is integrated within capital’ (Tronti, 1971a: 46) as society is further subsumed by capitalist relations.

The core of this unstable dynamic is the class struggle, and the non-homologous nature of the two subjects is represented by the struggle over necessary labour, the wage and, thus, over the basis of exploitation itself. These elements vary in accordance with the changing relations of force between the subjects in struggle. The stakes are highest for capitalist organization in the immediate process of production, where capitalist and worker confront one another directly and fight their decisive battles. The success of capitalist ‘rationalization’ stands or falls here. Capital's task, Tronti asserted, is to recuperate and neutralize its antagonist but it can only do so by perpetually renewing the conditions of the antagonism in ever-new regimes of exploitation; whereas the worker can only hope to escape subordination to capitalist organization by shattering capitalist relations themselves. The central problem, then, is that of the reproduction of a form of organization that is perpetually re-presented by the capitalist but that rests on a relation of force: exploitation.

Over a century prior to Tronti, classical political economy had established capital's dependence upon labour and Marx had described how its expansion is predicated on the possibility of reducing the value of labour-power through revolutionizing the means of relative surplus value extraction. Capital's ‘vital necessity’ (Tronti, 1971a: 57) is to integrate the worker (to subordinate and organize the worker) but this opens up a space in which the working class can intervene. The working class is within and against capital, it is the immanent critical moment – at once an ‘internal component of development and, at the same time, its internal contradiction’ (Tronti, 1971a: 57). The irreducible contradiction of capitalist development is the working class.

In the later essay, Tronti explores the question of the reproduction of the ‘total social capital’ as discussed by Marx (1978, part 3), i.e., not only capital's need to reproduce the world of commodities but the need to reproduce capitalist society itself, the capitalist class and the working class. The social organization of exploitation determines a specific level of capitalist development – in the case where capital subsumes society as a whole, the whole of society operates as a moment of production. The unintended consequence of this socialization of exploitation is the socialization of antagonism. When society itself becomes the basis of production and the class struggle is socialized, capital needs increasingly to achieve a rationalization of the process of integration across all sectors of society. The relationship of capitalist and worker is re-presented on an ever larger scale as the antagonism between two, massified subjects. The working class, once posited by capital, is always the dynamic element of capital but, increasingly, it is as a class, not as fragmented individuals that its dynamism is harnessed (through rationalization, planning) and placed in the service of the advance of capital. The working class cannot allow itself to be simply included, allocated a place within development, trying – perhaps – to attenuate some of capital's harsher aspects through mediation. Mediation always resolves conflict within the unity of the mediating system; i.e., it remains systemic. Rather, the working class must realize its centrality and its own antagonistic character, demonstrating both initiative and capacity for anticipation in its own organization.

The workers’ movement must present itself as the ‘irrational’ moment within capitalist ‘rationality’, both a part of capital but partisan – i.e., non-homologous. Once capitalist society presents itself as the subject of production itself (as social capital), the enemy of the working class is society as a whole and itself as variable capital, i.e., as subordinated partiality (Tronti, 1971b: 82–85; Žižek, 1991: 23). The task of the working class is to shatter the totality that aims to render it homologous and so reduce it to a one-sided moment of the whole by converting antagonism into a contradictory moment mediated by the totality. The working class must take contradiction back to the point of antagonism, affirming its partiality against all recuperative strategies of capitalist organization. Somewhat schematically, there are, for operaismo, two dominant modes of organization within capitalism: the mediatory one of capital itself, which aims to dis-organize and re-compose working-class organization in accordance with its own totalizing exigencies; and that of the working class, which attempts to dis-organize the capitalist regimentation of the working class and advance its own dynamic, antagonistic and autonomous organizational forms.

The pivotal notion adopted by operaismo to draw together these two modes of (dis)organization is that of class composition. It is in the immediate process of production that capitalist integration and working class antagonism come together. What are the relations between the capitalist organization of exploitation and the working class organization of conflict and how are they to be understood? How is the working class subject to be grasped in its autonomy and as a moment in the development of capital? How can one hold together these apparently contrasting positions? The answer is in the notion of ‘class composition’. There are two aspects to class composition: one ‘technical’, the other ‘political’. Each aspect can be relatively easily defined but the nature of their interrelation is complex and always requires specific analysis since it is only determined in struggle. Te chnical class composition is best understood in relation to the organic composition of capital (Marx, 1990a: 762ff). It is determined by the differing, historically specific valorization regimes; the varying intensity of the rate of exploitation that corresponds to the different distributions of capital into means of production employed and mass of labour necessary for their employment; changes in variable capital dictated by the different historically determined needs of the production and valorization processes; changing ratios of constant to variable capital dependent upon the conditions necessary for their reproduction, and so on. Each of these elements – and their precise interrelation – is determined by the level of struggle at any one time. Conversely, the political composition of the class concerns the subjective sphere of the working class: the needs, desires and co-operative relations established within the working class and the degree of unity or consistency of the class:

Separate discussion of the technical and political aspects of class composition is a theoretical convenience. It is only in their interrelation that the two aspects exist in practice. What must be carefully avoided is any simple economistic derivation of class composition from the organic composition of capital. ² The importance of the notion of class composition for Negri's analysis cannot be underestimated. If ‘at the beginning is the class struggle’ (Tronti, 1971c: 89), i.e., subjects in struggle, and if ‘the analysis of the subject must pass by way of class composition’ (Negri, 1979: 60), then the analysis of class composition is the theoretical core of any understanding of the dynamics of organization of the working class and of capital. Whereas capitalist recomposition of the production process can serve to break up a particular form of political composition of the workers, it is up to the workers correctly to appropriate the forms of organization deployed by capital within the workplace, which serve as the material of working class antagonism and to turn them against their intended aims, thus converting them into material for working class organization.

Class composition and the state-form

International capital reacted to the Bolshevik revolution, and the German and Italian council movements with a combination of social repression and technological restructuring that shattered those organizational forms by ‘destroying the key role of the professional worker’ (Negri, 1988a: 109). The repression was particularly fierce in Germany and Italy but, from the standpoint of revolutionary organization, the capitalist intervention in the composition of the class through technological restructuring in the advanced economies (particularly in the U.S. and Britain) was more important. Capital's aim was to prevent the formation of a class vanguard, which – as in Russia – could appropriate the technical conditions of capitalist production, interlinking ‘spontaneous’ economic demands with political ones. As we have seen, the organization-subordination of the working class within the workplace, in the immediate process of production, provides the material, the dispositif for the organization of the class as antagonistic subject. In pre-revolutionary Russia, for instance, a small, elite group of highly skilled workers (the professional worker), who understood the production process as a whole, existed alongside a large mass of unskilled workers who laboured under them. The vanguard model translates this dispositif into a weapon. Taylorism and Fordism were innovations designed to block this interlinking of technical composition and subversive political organization, thus preventing the proliferation of the Bolshevik vanguard model and separating the revolutionary vanguard-model of organization from the movement of the class as a whole. It was Keynes, however, who noted that reconfiguring the technical class composition in increasingly socialized terms by revolutionizing the forces of production would extend the pivotal position of an ever more homogeneous working class within capital and merely delay the political recomposition, unless capital was able to intervene in that recomposition.

Keynes pointed out that the massification of production and the resulting overproduction that characterizes the Great Crash, where a mass of goods was produced without a corresponding increase in demand, was the dual result of the strategy of technological repression and the transposition of war time industrial production to peace time. According to Keynes, overproduction crises arise when a mass of commodities is produced without sufficient levels of consumption, as this provokes a crisis of realization (and so the devaluation of capital). Moreover, where a mass of investment money exists without possible productive investment opportunities, this leads to a preference for liquidity and to an excess of money in the market that reroutes cash to unstable short-term speculative opportunities and generates a monetary flow that varies independently of production and of the real economy. In such a situation, Keynes argued, the capitalist State would have to intervene directly in consumption through expansive wage policies and in liquidity preference by control of the monetary flow (e.g., linking interest rates to the marginal efficiency of capital). The Great Crash demonstrated that the steady rise in the organic composition of capital could not co-exist with the anarchy of capital characteristic of a liberal State. The ensuing hegemony of the mass worker was, in conditions of rising organic composition of capital, able to bring the entire industrial machine to a standstill through struggle in any number of core sectors. Thus, State intervention and planning (of investment and production) became a technical necessity to assure that imbalances did not damage the system. Equally, the socialisation of antagonism called for a unified capitalist response, setting the collective (capitalist) good against private (capitalist) interest.

The struggle, which no longer stopped at the factory door, would need to be absorbed at the level at which it was posed by the mass worker. To be able to truly disorganize-reorganize-subordinate the class enemy, preventing economic demands being taken up in a revolutionary political organization, capital would have to intervene directly at the level of needs, turning them into functional components of the system. In this way demand ceased to be a merely economic category and became a political one. Economic restructuring was followed by political and juridical re-organization, the properly recuperative dialectical moment of synthesis that follows upon the antagonism that shatters the previous regime. The ensuing changes in the US and British State-forms expanded the State functions beyond those of guarantor of bourgeois liberties. The coincidence of political and economic realms had to be registered so as to neutralise all subversive potential. This eminently political aim was realised by turning the antagonistic working class into a dynamic element of advance and by reducing new needs and demands arising from the struggle to a moment of the system, i.e., to consumption (by intervening in the wage and employment levels). What had emerged as an independent variable at the heart of capital, the working class, had to be recuperated on its own terms, as a political entity, if capitalist control was to be effectively organized. We can speak of this as the effective projection of a politically constituted equilibrium once the ‘natural’ equilibrium of free markets and the guarantor Liberal State had broken down or, in dialectical terms, as the need to turn antagonism into contradiction. The success of this strategy rested on the integration of politics and planning within capitalist organization, i.e., merging capital with the State, and on the activation of a general social interest that would operate a synthesis within a pacific totality. Keynes’ answer, however, proved to be a mystification. The reactivation of the labour theory of value through the re-establishment of the connection between money and production, without the acknowledgement of the law of exploitation that subtends it, could not co-exist with the Keynesian notion of ‘effective demand’. Whereas the former is designed to excise antagonism, the latter recognizes it. This latter notion is far more prescient politically and scientifically because it recognizes the antagonism at the heart of capital and provides capital with a set of tools to impose its own form of equilibrium. The mystification is a crucial moment in the newly emergent systematic account of capitalism. This dynamic tension – if not downright contradiction – brings together the foundations of the new reality of modern capitalism: (a) the ‘general interest,’ which serves to link the working class to the development of capital and (b) the working class as the class antagonist.

The situation described above leads us to pose a series of questions: with the advent of the mass worker, how does the State appropriate the mechanisms of political re-composition and subsume them to the expansion of social capital? What does it mean to turn antagonism into contradiction and how is it done? Given the antagonism at the heart of capitalist organization, what totality can act as mediator? What occurs to the State-form in order for this to occur? In answering these questions, we hope to clarify Negri's theorization of capitalist organization.

The constitutionalization of labour

Negri's critique of capitalism registers the changes in the State-form. The shift to a new accumulation regime, able to comprehend the new class antagonist, calls upon a transformation in the State-form itself. With the tendency towards the merger of State and capital, when science becomes a moment of the advance of capitalist accumulation through planning, comes the emergence of what Negri calls the ‘Planner’ or ‘Social-State.’ Central to this transformation in the State is the reconfiguration of juridical theory and practice, which goes hand in hand with the analysis of the transformations of capitalism discussed in the preceding sections. The fundamental mechanism explored is that of the transformation of the material relations of society into its legal framework, i.e., the form of appropriation and organization of the relations and dynamics that compose the materiality of society into the juridical sphere. This is the reformism of capital: i.e., the way capital appropriates and puts to work its class antagonist without altering the class nature of society. Once again, the question is that of the (re)production of capitalist organization.

The possibility of this succeeding depends upon a point of contact being found linking materiality and legality, fact and norm, in such a way that the State actually intervenes dynamically in the configuration of society. Negri finds a clue to what this element may be in Article One of the Italian Constitution: ‘Italy is a Democratic Republic, founded on work.’ But, before discussing Negri's conclusion, i.e., that abstract labour is the principle of unification, the basis of the capitalist ordering (material and juridical), let us take a brief digression to uncover the material relationships that subtend it. The increasing socialization of labour that capital produces in its response to worker antagonism requires capital to be ever vigilant, to watch over and control its negation. The socialization of labour advances as capital subsumes society and labour becomes all the more antagonistic, the more the ‘social accumulation of capital abstracts the value of labour and consolidates it in the dead substance of its own power’ (Negri, 1994: 60). What this conflict opens upon is an uninterrupted struggle between the capitalist class, ‘the managers of abstract labour’ and the working class. The latter is defined negatively in contrast to capitalist development and positively in struggle.

This dialectic is, and can only be, ‘virtuous’ for capital as long as the internal restructuring, the capitalist organizational dialectic, is able to bend antagonism to the specific requirements of development; i.e., working-class conflict must become a moment of the capitalist dynamic. As Althusser argued, it is only by presuming an internal essence, a ‘unique internal principle, which is the truth of all those concrete determinations’ (Althusser, 1990: 102), i.e., the principle of totality, that contradiction can be turned into the dynamic moment. Working class conflict must be relegated to the rank of moment of the capitalist totality, aufgehoben in the totality of capitalist development. But the working class perpetually presses beyond the particular stage of development of capital and, thereby, forces capital to restructure so as to reabsorb the threat. The Social or Planner-State emerges as a means to manage the increasing socialization of conflict.

It is labour that assumes the role of internal principle, the truth of the organization of capitalist accumulation (the source of dynamism, of accumulation and ordering). ³ With the socialization of exploitation in the factory-society, the distinction between political and economic realms begins to dissolve. Furthermore, the rule of accumulation and the regulation of abstract labour together become the framework for the productive and normative organization of society. This means that command over the technical composition of the class is not enough; equally important is its political composition. More precisely, command can no longer operate through the attempted divorce of these two spheres. In the factory-society, subordination-organization extends across the whole of society. By turning labour into the exclusive element of valorization investing the social totality, the Italian Constitution is able to connect the ‘juridical organization of power with the social structuring of power’ (Negri, 1994: 65). The Social State turns abstract labour into the ‘exclusive criterion’ (Negri, 1994: 80) unifying the social totality, i.e., society is immediately capitalist society, society based on the exploitation of labour. In the Social State, the maintenance and production of right operates ‘as norm and plan of development’ (Negri, 1994: 94). The law loses its purely formal character in order to become subordinated to administration (direct intervention, planning and construction of the social order), turning class conflict into a moment of integration through the effective management of dissent (to capitalist subordination) and consent (submission to capitalist accumulation) and turning abstract labour into the source of the self-government (the ‘democracy of labour’) of capitalist development and the unifying foundation for the production of law. In this way, a series of normative values finds its origin in a set of real, social forces expressed in law while the constitutionalization of (abstract) labour ensures that the integration of labour no longer stops at the gates of the factory (Negri, 1994: 80–81).

Crisis and separation

Whereas the capitalist organizational dynamic should be quite clear by now, that of the working class remains indistinct. Indeed, the entire dynamic is said to stem from a subject whose consistency is anything but determined. There is an antagonism to which capital reacts but the negation to which it responds is an indeterminate, abstract one. The negative has been the dynamic principle but the determinacy of the negative appears, so far, to be afforded by that which it negates (i.e., capitalist organization), thereby making capitalist aufheben possible. With a Spinozist shift, Negri returns to the question of the negative and tries to think it in its autonomy, in the substantial consistency of its organizational forms (see Spinoza, Ethics, I, Pro: VIII, Sc. I,: 88). He does so by considering the positivity of working class composition or the ‘negative power of the positive’ (Negri, 1997: 282) in the organizational dynamic of the working class. Central to this enterprise is Negri's adoption of a dialectic that – in contrast to the recuperative Hegelian one – appears as an ‘articulation of separation’ (Negri, 1980: 15). This is a crucial shift in Negri's development; one that signals a deficit in his early analyses but that could only have materialized with the advance of struggle, of capitalist development and through the recomposition of working-class organization.

To clarify this passage, let us briefly return to the Planner-State. It emerges as a result of the extension of working class demands by taking those demands and making them functional to the system. This strategy works until wage demands (but not only) outstrip the capacity of capitalist organization to recuperate them. The clarion call of the mass worker is ‘the wage as independent variable’; i.e., that the wage should be detached from productivity. The mass worker's attack proceeds through a progressive autonomisation of its subjective composition resulting from the increasing mobility of labour. Abstract labour assumes a subjective aspect that refuses to be allocated a place according to the demands of capitalist organization but only according to workers’ desires and workers’ use of circulation, i.e., refusal of the capitalist organization of the working day into work-time and non-work-time. Thus, the equality at the heart of abstract labour is advanced to block the separation between production and reproduction, resulting in increased demands upon wage and Welfare structures (see Negri, 1988b: 210ff and 1980: chapter 2). The mass worker advances the socialization of antagonism. The capitalist response is ‘developed along two complementary lines – the social diffusion, decentralization of production, and the political isolation of the mass worker in the factory’ (Negri, 1988b: 208). These changes (extension of production outside the factory and breakdown of the distinction between productive, unproductive and reproductive labour, etc.) set the course for the new subject of fully socialized, increasingly autonomous antagonism: the social worker, in whom mobility – the generalized equivalence of abstract labour – becomes a ‘global potentiality which has within it that generalized social knowledge which is now an essential condition of production’ (ibid.: 223). From the standpoint of the technical composition of the class, this is the passage from the hegemony of immediately productive material labour exploited in the factory to that of abstract and intellectual labour distributed and exploited across the social space. From the standpoint of the political composition, this new figure of antagonism is no longer within and against capital but autonomous and against. Whereas the previous form of organization stemmed from the factory regime and could be appropriated and deployed in antagonistic fashion; that of the social worker is produced immanently, in the co-operative networks of the social. This fundamentally alters the balance of the organization-subordination coupling, in which the latter preceded and was the condition of the former. With the advent of the social worker, capitalism relies upon the immanent organization of cooperating productive subjects, whose productivity it must appropriate (subordinate) post factum. No longer is antagonism understood as a contradiction that can be recuperated through the ‘virtuous’ dialectic of capitalist restructuring and as a need to serve as dynamic element for the development of capitalist organization. The working class is immediately antagonistic. It breaks with all measures of proportionality and all possibility of being reduced to labour-power, to variable capital, to a moment of development.

With the real subsumption (Marx, 1990b) of labour by capital and the social diffusion and decentralization of production that inserts ever new subjects into the category of productive labour, dissolving the division between work time and non-work time and shattering the rationale of mediation by time-as-measure (of value) until it reappears in the form of command, the struggle ceases to be over the wage and takes the form of a struggle for appropriation of the social product. Struggles gain momentum, crisis strikes the Planner-State's recuperative mechanisms (i.e., capital's positive dialectic) and a new State-form steps in to manage crisis: the Crisis-State. At this stage, ‘no longer the dialectic that leads difference (however it may have been produced) to unity but antagonistic difference, unity against unity’ (Negri, 1988a: 104, translation modified). That is not to say that capitalism is able to do without the working class – that is mere capitalist utopia – it is simply that there are no longer any ‘organic links’ between production and development. In other words, the labour theory of value is no longer the intrinsic rationale of development but measure must be imposed from without, by capital, upon the increasing consistency of class autonomy. The emergence of the Crisis-State marks the end of capital's positive dialectic.

Time and subjectivity

The class composition of the social worker has yet to be illustrated. Around what does class composition and struggle coalesce? In the cases of the professional worker and the mass worker, the factory formed the organizational space in which class composition emerged and gained an organizational consistency, thanks both to the technical composition of the production process as well as to the workers’ struggle against its dictates and the desires and needs emerging from within the dialectics of conflict. In the case of the social worker, capital has broken down the disciplinary spaces of the factory, shifting its regime of exploitation across the social itself. This same shift in the form of capitalist command forms has been described by Deleuze as the passage from ‘disciplinary’ to ‘control societies’ (Deleuze, 1995). What, now, gives consistency to class composition, to its antagonism and in what way does capital hope to organize its forms of exploitation? Within the factory space labour can be disciplined by the overseers of the production process and by the machinery itself. The factory provides the space for antagonism to be transmuted into contradiction in the service of production (mediated further through the State's planning mechanisms). But it is less clear how this can occur in a system of diffuse production where the positive dialectic comes to an end.

At this point, the question of the origin or source of resistance also rears its head. This issue is best understood in relation to the so-called crisis of the labour theory of value. The labour theory of value, the immanent rationale of capitalist development, is first formulated on the basis of an analysis of primitive accumulation. Individuals ‘freed’ from the land and their means of production are then (formally) subsumed into the process of production and put to work. Thus, there is a set of relatively autonomous (from capital) subjective elements – understood through the category of ‘use value’ – that are not shaped by capital and that can form the ground of antagonism outside capital. Money acts as mediator between capital and its (relative) ‘outside’, i.e., labour. This dialectic of inside/outside formed the very rationale of capitalist development as expressed in the classical labour theory of value. In order to calculate this value quantitatively, however, it was necessary to have a common temporal unit by which labour-power could be measured as well as a means of reducing the various concrete forms of labour to a simple unit of abstract labour. ⁴ Concrete or complex labour could thus become a multiplication of simple abstract social labour. ‘The various proportions in which different kinds of labour are reduced to simple labour as their unit of measurement are established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers’ (Marx, 1990a: 135). These determinations were immediately social.

In ‘The Constitution of Time’ Negri identifies how time ‘measures labour in so far as it reduces it to homogenous substance, but also determines its productive power in the same form: through the multiplication of average temporal units’ (Negri, 2003a: 24). This central aporia, which affirms the immediacy of the temporal determination of value and its operation of mediation, is born of Marx's failure to reduce the complex, material, qualitative elements – of struggle, of new social subjectivities, of productive innovation – to the analytic, synchronic, reversible elements of the theory of value. By highlighting the aporia, Negri shows how Marx holds the key to moving beyond Marx. The aporia is resolved by displacing the terrain upon which it operates. As we have seen, the labour theory of value demanded that labour-power existed, in some sense, outside the disciplinary regime of capital and needed to be drawn in; its form of organization determined immediately by the productive regime. One could only think of measuring value by understanding the temporal unit of measure through which it would be calculated as being formed independently of exchange value (i.e., as dependent upon a relatively independent use-value). But capital increasingly draws labour-power under its rule. It does so, initially, through the de-skilling that fuelled the generation of the mass worker, whose labour is entirely abstract but, increasingly, by subsuming the whole of social life and extending its regime of exploitation socially in the attempt to remodel its accumulation regime across the co-operative networks of the social worker and to fully accomplish the redefinition of use-value (and the circuits of [re]production generally) in terms of exchange-value. The result of this is that there is no obvious place from which a dialectical recuperation can proceed (as in the Keynesian recuperation of workers’ desires through control over consumption via the wage, linking the satisfaction of desire to productivity) since the notion of a rational measure to value ends with the demise of an external unit of measure and monetary command becomes increasingly abstract – i.e., unrelated to the exchange between capital and labour-power – and tautological. ⁵ Equally, there is no exteriority from which resistance can stem. Antagonism must, therefore, be discovered on the same plane as real subsumption. But the end of a positive dialectic of capitalist organization also means that antagonism cannot be determined in a dialectical relation with capital. The social worker signals the death of all forms of mediation. The question is one of identifying the mechanism capital employs to organize exploitation after the end of the (recuperative) dialectic. What does ‘organization’ mean once the subjective composition of the new antagonistic subject asserts itself in its autonomy and separation from capital? What does Negri mean when he speaks of a dialectic of separation? The key is to be found in the return to the question of time beyond the understanding of time-as-measure.

We have noted that the real subsumption of labour by social capital means that time ceases to be understood as measure and becomes substance. It becomes ‘the fabric of the whole of being, because all being is implicated in the web of social life: being is equal to product of labour: temporal being’ (Negri, 2003a: 34). Time gains a consistency and autonomy; ‘it is life itself’ (ibid.: 35), it ‘becomes the exclusive material of the construction of life’. Equally, the end of time-as-measure in real subsumption gives us time as ‘collective and structural’ (ibid.: 49) even on its own terms: as collective capital, collective labour, etc. All too often, real subsumption is interpreted as the production of indifference and, hence, as the denial of the persistence of antagonism: the utopia of total control, the complete victory of capitalist organization. But what is forgotten is that real subsumption is, nevertheless, based upon exploitation and, so, upon a constitutive antagonism.

These two polarities, which bring to mind the distinction between Chronos and Aion of which Deleuze (1995: 162–168) spoke, differentiate radically asymmetrical organizations of time or practices of time. On the one hand, a ‘formal schema of manifold time, a scientific centralisation of the combination of multiple times … in other words a new space of organization of time … an analytic of the combination of these modalities’ (Negri, 2003a: 42–43). On the other hand, the ‘multiple, antagonistic, productive, constitutive’ (ibid.: 42) time of the collective proletarian subject. Capital aims to perpetually reorganize this collective subject on the basis of a ‘functional schema’ (ibid.: 49), perpetually reconstituting a dynamic equilibrium of organization ‘within the recapitulative totality’ (ibid.: 50). With the crisis of the law of value, mediation no longer characterizes capitalist organization. Instead, capital aims to occupy, in advance, ‘the whole of social space’ (ibid.: 51). The ‘totality is presupposed’ (ibid.: 52) in the shape of a formal schematism of organization by which unity is recomposed and difference is subsumed through an analytic of time that aims to segment, disassemble, render reversible the constitutive times of proletarian class composition.

Negrian real subsumption, ontologically substantial and constructed in struggle, concretizes the Deleuzian plane of immanence. A political ontology of time, a politics of immanence or a biopolitics ⁶ of endogenous antagonism emerges in which a ‘political precept’ (ibid.: 43) of the organization of command is counterpoised to a ‘political precept’ of multiple practices of time, a ‘new proletarian practice of time’ (ibid.: 21). Here, time is ‘interior to class composition … the motor of its very existence and of its specific configuration’ (ibid.: 35). We witness, here, the gradual transformation of social labour power from being a relatively independent variable to ‘independence tout court’ (Negri, 1988b: 221), organized around the exacerbation of abstract labour's subjectification of mobility and understood as a practice of time. As social labour extends across the entire day, existing as ‘flow and circulation within time’ (ibid.: 218) – and comprising ‘the relation between production time and reproduction time, as a single whole’ (ibid.: 219) – capital aims to impose time-as-measure against ‘the conception of working-class freedom over the temporal span of life’ (ibid.). In effect, the crisis – of the mechanisms of mediation, of measure, of the positive dialectic – that real subsumption reveals leaves us with two distinct subjects, each one subjectivised ‘around its own conception of time, and a temporal constitution of its own’ (ibid.: 220). This new class composition of the working class, no longer reducible to a variable part of capital, is able to act ‘across the entire span of the working day’ (ibid.: 224), which now comprises production time and reproduction time. We find ourselves with a labour-power that is entirely social and subjective. Its organization is no longer pre-determined by the composition of capital because there is no longer any ‘natural rate’ between capitalist profit and wage. It is truly immeasurable as the subjective consistency of needs and desires augments its autonomy. No longer do we have a positive dialectic of recuperation of antagonism, then, but an endogenous dialectic of separation.

Beyond the dialectic?

The boldness of some of Negri's statements can sometimes be misleading. In this passage, Negri somewhat schematically situates the whole of his work squarely against ‘the dialectic’ and affirms, instead, ‘historical materialism’ or ‘absolute immanence’. The analysis of his work until the early 1980s provided above problematises the categorical nature of this claim by uncovering the way in which he champions a variety of dialectics.

We can explain the schematic, if not the ambiguous nature of such statements, by noting that what Negri attacks is simply the commonly understood notion of the dialectic, which proceeds through the notion of Aufheben, ‘supersession’, ‘sublation’ or, more formally, ‘synthesis’ in which oppositions are ‘integrated’ into a ‘reasonable totality’ (Miller, 1977: x) or into ‘the state of annulment [as] an absolute’ (Lukács, 1975: 276). We have referred to this dialectic as the recuperative or positive (capitalist or bourgeois) dialectic, in which contradiction is always subsumed in an integrating totality. Against this, Negri advances two distinct notions of dialectics, both of which emphasize antagonism since the dynamic is all on the side of the negative and there is no possible moment – other than in mystified form – for rest in a pacific totality. These dialectics are resistant to all homologies, socialist or capitalist, which seek resolution to the antagonism either in the sublation of one or the other side by a common demand – profitability, productivity – that presupposes a fundamental rational unity (as exemplified in the notion of the worker as merely an aspect of capital or in Lenin's idea that Soviets and Fordism could co-exist under communism). The decisive importance of periodization should, now, be stressed. All attempts to make general, ‘supra-historical’ statements (to borrow Marx's phrase) concerning the efficacy or otherwise of ‘the dialectic’ or any other methodological criterion for that matter, fails to grasp the specificity, the materiality of the class struggle. The problem of dialectics is not (or is not only) an academic one. Not only should it be recognized that ‘every metaphysic is in some way a political ontology’ but also that the continuing validity of such a metaphysic ‘is linked to the power of the political dispositif implicit in the ontology’ (Negri, forthcoming), i.e., to the relations of force that structure reality. The validity or otherwise of dialectics and the form that a possible dialectics takes must always be measured against the concrete reality of subjects in struggle. As Negri puts it:

Nevertheless, Negri's notion of a dialectic of separation is highly paradoxical. Can one truly speak of dialectics when the two subjects in struggle are conceived of as absolutely separate? The absoluteness of this separation is especially problematic when it comes to defining capital, which, Negri argues, is increasingly parasitic on labour but no less so with reference to labour, as Negri notes in his comments on the escalating violence of capital's relation to labour. Also, can a dialectic exist with the demise of mediation? The problematic nature of Negri's position did not escape him (Negri, 2003a: 131–132) but formed an important part of his thought throughout the 1980s. Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to consider the course this question took during those years, examination of Negri's latest works, including the collaborations with Michael Hardt, points to a reconfiguration of the notion of organization stemming directly from the answers to these questions developed through the engagement with thinkers such as Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault (see, for example, Hardt and Negri, 1994: 309).

In the later work, Negri's analysis advances the definition of immanent forms of control and resistance, which – in the collaborative work with Michael Hardt – come under the headings of Empire and Multitude.

Empire

Once again, at the heart of the analysis of this new transformation in the capitalist accumulation regime, we find the composition of the proletarian subject. Before turning to this question, we should note the subtle shift in Negri's terminology. This ‘shift’ is both a substantial marker of discontinuity and a return to some of his concerns of three decades ago. In the wake of the analyses of the relationship between legal and constitutional theory, the State and the economy (discussed above), Negri redefines ‘sovereignty’ in capitalist societies as: ‘the control over the reproduction of capital, that is, the command over the proportions between the forces (workers and bosses, proletariat and bourgeoisie, multitudes and Imperial monarchy) that constitutes it’ (Negri, 2003c: 36).

This clearly recalls the 1964 essay, ‘Labour in the Constitution’, in which Negri shows how the development of capitalist organization draws ever closer the notions of the State (sovereignty) and capital. This process of combination or unification intensifies with the development of capitalist relations. Indeed, ‘in real subsumption, command is no longer something added from outside the process of exploitation but is something that organizes it directly’ (Negri, 2003c: 51). As the nation state's ability to regulate the (re)production of capital diminished, sovereignty migrated to another level. In the period following 1968, capital was forced to restructure in order to break the workers’ (and anti-colonial and anti-imperialist) struggles that had eroded its profit rate and threatened its regime of accumulation. This period was characterized by massive changes in the production process and, hence, in the technical composition of the class: downsizing of large-scale industry in the ‘advanced’ economies, de-localization (to countries with lower labour-costs), outsourcing, tertiarization, and regulation along multinational lines, deploying a whole set of apparatuses for capitalist accumulation across the entirety of an increasingly internationalized social and productive space. As we noted in the discussion of the social worker, capital was faced with a working class subjectivity that was no longer determined immediately by itself (unlike the mass worker within the confines of the factory) and whose organization was no longer something brought to labour from the outside, by capital, but was inherent in labour itself: today, ‘cooperation is completely immanent to the labouring activity itself’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 294). Progressively, capital's operation of restructuring aimed to draw ever larger numbers of this new, socialized and co-operative labouring subject under its rule, extending exploitation across the social totality internationally. This process of erosion of the sovereignty of the nation state as the space of accumulation continued with the shift to dollar inconvertibility (1971), the first oil crisis (1973) and the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty (1972). These changes attacked some of the central pillars of the modern conception of sovereignty; namely, the ability to coin money and the monopoly of force, which includes the right to go to war. Restructuring followed upon struggle. As we have seen, capital's response to such struggles was to decentralize production and to raise the mobility of capital and the (relative) mobility of workers. But the corollary of this was that the nation state could no longer regulate the flows by which it was now exceeded. The relative decline of the sovereign power of nation states does not mean that they have become redundant (political controls and regulations persist) but that sovereignty has changed its form. ‘Empire’ is the name that Hardt and Negri give to the political organization of global capital and global sovereignty.

Empire is understood on the model of the mixed constitution that Polybius provides in his discussion of the Roman Empire, where the three principal forms of government – Monarchy, Aristocracy and Democracy – are brought together. The modern-day successors to these forms are represented by the IMF, World Bank, WTO, NATO (Monarchy); trans-national capital (Aristocracy); and nation states and NGOs (Democracy). This model of global sovereignty allows for a modulated and non-univocal understanding of the lines and operations of capitalist organization and points to the underlying changes in the material organization discussed above. It presupposes that capitalist relations have expanded ‘to subsume all aspects of social production and reproduction, the entire realm of life’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 275). This total subsumption expresses the material conditions grounding the claim that, in Empire, there is no longer an outside. Capital subsumes the whole of social life and the emerging juridical constitution watches over the process, supervising and regulating the relations at a global level. The escalating subsumption of labour and society leaves us with no outside to capital, so that even nationally differentiated accumulation regimes are situated within a fully integrated, modulated and flexible space of reproduction.

This means that all borders are internal to real subsumption; thus, the organization of control and of antagonism can only be conceived immanently. ‘Not only the political transcendental but also the transcendental as such has ceased to determine measure’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 354–355). In fact, such a ‘pure field of immanence’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 354) can only be immeasurable – outside and beyond measure. For, as we have seen, with the end of all natural rates, measure can only be enforced. Consequently, Negri later describes Empire as a ‘non-place’ (Negri, 2003c: 37), lacking both outside and centre, existing, as he writes with Hardt, ‘outside of every preconstituted measure’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 355). ‘Empire constitutes the ontological fabric in which all relations of power are woven together’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 354). Its operations are biopolitical. While Hardt and Negri borrow from Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault, they also reconfirm the fundamental theses of operaismo, arguing that the ontological fabric of the Imperial order is not constitutive but constituted; i.e., ‘resistance is actually prior to power’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 360). What Empire reveals is the absolute immanence of the immeasurable social relations of co-operation, of the subjective antagonist of the age of Empire, i.e., the multitude.

Talk of ‘sovereignty’ marks a discontinuity in Negri's thought as well. The genealogy of the multitude assumes the end of the nation state as the space of capitalist accumulation and the end of the transcendental function of the State as that point from which ‘the people’ is defined (as theorized in modern political thought from Hobbes to Hegel and beyond). The multitude is defined as that ‘reality that remains once the concept of the people is freed from transcendence’ (Negri, 2003c: 129). Despite the fact that in ‘the concept of the multitude, there is an incomplete, imperfect, superimposition of a legal-political concept and a political-economic concept’ (Negri, 2003d: 98–99), the discontinuity marked by the shift to a concern with sovereignty (as defined in Negri, 2003c: 36) is one that allows for the comprehension of the ‘universality of work as a constituent function of the social and the political’ (Negri, 2003d: 99). From the standpoint of Empire, the definition of the multitude signals the point at which the integration of politics and economics has been completed, at which real subsumption is realized absolutely.

The multitude, or, the immanent organization of antagonism

A full-length account of the multitude would require detailed discussion of immaterial labour; that is, of the informationalisation or computerisation of labour practices in industrial production as well as the analytical, symbolic functions and affective forms of labour in the tertiary (or service) sectors of the economy. Suffice it to say, here, that when the computer becomes the central tool of production, whether of immaterial or material goods, it becomes the ‘universal tool’ that homogenizes labouring processes. In this way, ‘labour tends toward the position of abstract labour’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 292). ⁷ The need to comment on the political ontology of the multitude (i.e., on the notion of immanent organization of the immeasurable subject of Empire); on the question of the dialectic and on the question of Empire post-9/11 is also pressing.

As we have seen, the increasing autonomization, the independence tout court of the antagonistic subject, passes through a subjective appropriation of a time beyond measure, of the immeasurable as an alternative to the dead-time of capitalist measure. The problem was that of:

The question posed is that of the practical construction of an alternative organization of time that is able to re-appropriate, in subversive form, the subjectivation processes of control within Empire. The precondition for this lies in the quality of the subjective composition of the labouring subject, of the multitude, whose labour is increasingly immaterial, relational and collective. The extreme level of socialization of labour – the immanence of the collective itself to the productive labour of the multitude – means that production of goods is simultaneously production of (collective) subjectivity, of commonality itself. Certainly, Empire extends its forms of control over this immanent productivity – of goods, of subjectivity, of the common – and produces subjectivities but it does so from within a relation by which it is limited. The relations of power – capital/labour, Empire/multitude – can be tipped towards sovereign power if the relations of force are favourable. But the relation itself is fundamental. Imperial organization finds an obstacle in the multitude and a limit in the very relation of exploitation that subtends it. After all, what is capitalism without the relation of exploitation? What is Imperial sovereignty without a multitude to govern? In contrast, the multitude has no need of sovereign power that produces only control. Returning briefly to the question of dialectics, it is clear that there is no homology, no chance of a resolution from the standpoint of sovereign power. The antagonism cannot be removed if Empire is to persist, whereas the multitude has no need of a dialectical relation to Empire. The multitude produces; it constructs and organizes common-being across the immeasurable plane of immanence (Negri, 2003c: 137).

We cannot pretend that this is a wholly satisfying conclusion to the problem of dialectics. It is not. At least one niggling question remains: if the dynamic moves from the side of antagonism – that is, from the side of negation – can one do without a form of dialectics? Perhaps a more satisfactory resolution would move from a consideration of the question of the critique of the negative and the notion of positive – non-dialectical – differenc/tiation in the work of Deleuze (see Deleuze, 1994, especially chapters 4 and 5) and the question of multiplicities in Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988, especially chapter 10). Whether this can be combined with a concrete notion of antagonism remains to be seen. We can appreciate how this might work by considering Negri's call for resistance as a creative and constructive exodus from relations of sovereignty (Negri, 2003d: 96–97), which affirms the necessity for the multitude ‘to take leave of domination, to take leave of the Power of the State and of every transcendental illusion’ (Negri, 2003b: 259–260ff). Nevertheless, we are faced with the same problem. On the one hand, there is the positing of an absolute separation of the multitude, already independent tout court in the case of the social worker. On the other, Negri admits that he still does not feel able to speak of fully liberated labour. In fact, capital, in its Imperial form, remains parasitical upon the co-operative multitudes and its forms of control can be equally brutal and are even more totalizing than those deployed by the earlier, disciplinary accumulation regimes. The multitude is, thus, antagonistic to the order of reasons of Empire. The problem is to think the multitude as autonomous and antagonistic without thinking that antagonism as a negation of Imperial power but as one that undercuts the relation. As we have seen, sovereignty, capital, in contrast to the multitude, is dependent upon a structuring, antagonistic relation. By severing the relation through an alternative subjectivization, could capital, Empire be cut free? But have we not seen capital violently re-impose measure, control despite the end of natural rates? If so, if the multitude is not able to directly attack the structures of Imperial command, is there a risk that the relation is perpetually, violently re-established? Although these indications may serve towards a resolution, we, as yet, have to leave this problem open.

The need to re-examine the Imperial tendency post-9/11 is pertinent owing to claims that, on the one hand, in the wake of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, ‘nothing will be the same again’. At the same time as, on the other hand, the US response to the attacks, in Afghanistan and, to an even greater extent, in Iraq, led many to argue that imperialism was not dead and that, therefore, one of the fundamental presuppositions for Empire, of Empire, had been disproved by the facts (see, for example, many of the articles in Balakrishnan, 2003). Of course, it is not enough to point out that these statements are in apparent contradiction to confirm the analysis made by Hardt and Negri. But surely, the US failure in Iraq and its return to the UN to legitimize its occupation indicates that not even the United States is capable of acting as a sovereign power ruling over the global order. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that Hardt and Negri's discourse on Empire aims to uncover certain tendencies. This does not exclude the possibility that counter-tendencies will block the full expression of Imperial tendencies; nor does it deny various intra-tendencies or attempts by different elements of the Imperial complex (Monarchical, Aristocratic and Democratic) to gain an ascendancy in the determination of Imperial command. For example, Negri has spoken of the Bush administration as carrying out a monarchical coup within Empire. But aside from questions that are – at least partly – empirical, that of war is central to a comprehension of the process of Imperial formation. Negri insists that ‘it is through war that the material forces that constitute Empire, that determine the hierarchies and the internal circulation of powers, come to light’ (Negri, 2003c: 154; see also Hardt & Negri, 2004, pt. 1).

Thus, the doctrine of pre-emptive war ‘is not only a military doctrine but a constituent strategy of Empire’ (Negri, 2003e: 127) and what we are experiencing is an ‘ordering Imperial war’ (Negri, 2003c: 155). This interpretation sees war no longer as the extension of politics but as the foundation of Imperial politics, ordering new national spaces, hierarchies and new legal regulations. There is no space of mediation for the recuperation of the multitude, nor can it be defeated (without an Imperial implosion). War deploys strategies of control and legal tribunals completely unrelated to the old international legal order. It produces subjects, enemies, the structuring relation, perpetually. Negri reminds us: ‘It is their war; we are left with resistance and exodus’ (2003c: 156). But we are left with the question, given this new strategy of infinite war as a constituent strategy constantly re-establishing the antagonistic relation, if exodus, however creative and innovative it may be, is sufficient without an attack on Imperial command itself.