“Reading Negri – Marxism in the Age of Empire” edited by P. Lemarche, M. Rosenkrantz, D. Sherman, 2011
There's a lot in this book and much of it is irrelevant or too abstract. Here is a sketch of some of Negri's thinking, which parallels his co-thinkers in Italy like Tronti and Hardt. Negri was jailed at least three times for a number of years in Italy for his writings – at one time being blamed for the plot to kill Aldo Moro tied to the Brigate Rosse. His politics were formed in the labor and Left rebellions of the 1950s-1960s in Italy after he broke with liberal Catholicism and moved towards Marxism. He became a professor in France and died in 2023 at the age of 90. I consider him a modern version of some kind of anarcho-communism, with positive and negative approaches, mainly the latter.
Negri understands the role of technology in driving down the rate of profit, per Marx. He goes on to consider workers as extensions of machines, not the reverse. Marx made a similar comment in the Grundrisse, but I think it's main point to show how brutalized workers are.
He extended the concept of the 'factory' to the circulation of capital in the community, tracking how every aspect of life is now commodified and 'produced' for profit. He calls this 'social capital' – usually a name for the capitalist commodification of the skills or background of an individual worker. This theory obliterates a distinction between the worksite and the community.
He opposes any concept of a party or parties or a united front in place of the 'autonomous activity of the workers.' This 'self-organized' current was first called 'workerism,' then 'autonomism.' It did include worksite committees.
He believed that capitalism could be fully planned and that a planned economy was not a hallmark of socialism. We have yet to discover a planned capitalist economy. He later saw that corporations had taken the place of the 'planning' state as the key command locus.
Negri replaces the 'labor theory of value' with the capitalist need to dominate all of society at all times. The temporal timing of surplus and necessary labor in the work day is overridden and useless to him. Capitalists who want to extend the workday to 24 hours would agree.
He contends that the 'law of value' only holds in an actual factory and that has been superseded by 'social value' and social control in general society. As a result economic 'value' can no longer be estimated.
He contended that 'immaterial labor' would slowly become dominant over ordinary worksite labor. 'Immaterial' seems a description of very real white collar labor that produces intellectual property, but that is not his definition. It extends beyond commodification to all forms of social creativity, intelligence and help, similar to Marx's concepts of unalienated labor, free creativity and the necessary work of social reproduction.
Instead of the proletariat, now the 'poor' or the 'multitude' are the main harbingers of revolution. The nature and analysis of the 'multitude' is left undefined that I can see, but it means just about everybody.
Some theories of imperialism posit the nation-state as the main actor, ignoring class. Negri maintains it is still class actors – or at least 'the multitude' - that motivate states.
Any class analysis has to look at 'class composition' and 're-composition' – the varied strata, castes, classes and sub-classes found in a country and within a country, along with their shifting nature in response to changes in capital.
At one time the duo of Hardt & Negri proposed winning over 'swing' voters by promoting consumerism – 'luxury communism' evidently. They dropped that.
The book includes a bit of history of the Italian New Left and 3 of its key figures during the 'creeping May' or 'years of lead' from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. This was a time when new Marxist groups like Avanguardia Operaia, Il Manifesto and Lotta Cotinua operated widely in northern Italy. Negri and the proletarian New Left worked in the political context of the deep reformism of the Italian Communist Party, but also took advantage of the long anti-fascist, labor and socialist movements in Italy that even reached into the peasantry.
Post-modern Capitalism?
The contributions in this book challenge aspects of Negri's thought and sometimes embrace it. Caffentzis's contributions come from a classical, orthodox Marxist point of view in his overall opposition to Negri. He shows Negri's growing distance from Marxism and closeness to Frankfurt School 'culturalism.' In a way Negri broke with 'workerism' to the point where productive worksites become banal, lost among everything. Others see his turn towards Spinoza as another marker of 'post-Marxism.' One writes of Negri and Hardt's “postmodernization of the global economy.” This means that 'production' is now the production of 'cooperation, social relations and communication' – i.e. the 'production of subjectivity,' combining the 'economic, political and cultural' aspects of society. It is “the creation of life” itself, not just commodities. This leap mashes commodities and social production, which reflects the totalizing effect of world capital but renders any understanding of exploitation, economics and profit moot. It dismantles some basics of Marxism into a vague classless, post-modern hash of general social 'dissatisfaction,' of anti-capitalist morality, of utopian thinking. In a way, it also partakes of the 'financialization' thesis.
Oddly the book does not look at current knowledge workers as a new strain of labor who have more power than before. They are able to shut down companies quite easily by turning an electronic switch. Like electricians, the techies in the server center have the ability to make everything stop. Many bosses do not understand what their employees are actually doing and this gives employees vast leverage. It also makes them less easily replaced. Skilled blue, pink and white collar labor can now, through knowledge of computers and just about anything, shut down a whole worksite or sector. Given many 'blue collar' and 'pink collar' jobs involve higher-tech training of some kind – retail, service, assemblers, machinists, mechanics, electricians, plumbers, drivers and more – this 'knowledge' is not exclusive to white collar types. It is essential for many workers in complex economies, which means education has an even bigger role to play as complexity grows.
Refuting Marx?
What Negri really tried to do was 'update' and borrow from Marx and refute Marx at the same time. Caffentzis says what he did is really “a broad negation of Marx's whole opus.” Caffentzis' essay is centered on the question of 'what does the anti-capitalist movement need from Marx?' According to him Negri's refutation consisted of rejecting Marx's 'law of value' and everything associated with it. He notes that this supposed 'law' actually involves many things. The general 'laws of value' in Marx are tied to math and time measures, while Negri & Hardt claim that value is now immeasurable, especially after Nixon's Bretton Woods' break with the gold standard. All is speculation! Math and time are irrelevant to analyzing capital because value has burst the bounds of the worksite.
In other words the concepts of the labor theory of value, surplus value, surplus labor, rate of profit, rate of exploitation, organic composition of capital, exchange rate, exports, subsumption, the real value of commodities, work hours, etc. are all impossible to measure because everything is now immaterial social reproduction of the 'general intellect.' Wooo! Caffentzis maintains that this method mixes the concept of labor with that of general 'activity,' approaching a nihilist view that renders the heart of capitalist production invisible. It can be added that social reproduction, like volunteer labor and home labor, can be measured in part, so even these areas are not immune from forms of quantification. Nor did general social labor suddenly appear in 1971.
Every working Marxist economist interested in 'numbers' would laugh at this high-flying misconception. So would the anti-capitalist movement, which by following Negri's plan would drop some heavy weapons in the fight against national and world capital. After all, why do brutal, continual and varied anti-labor measures make sense other than in defense of very real, defined profits?! Child labor? Getting rid of work breaks? Unpaid overtime? Stolen wages? Debt slavery? Social control is only a means to that end, as capitalists 'do the math' too. One contributor accuses the duo of the “fantasy of originality” in trying to substitute for Marx while still claiming Marxism. I won't go further in this book, but if this debate is interesting to you, pick it up somewhere.
Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “In Letter of Fire and Blood” (Caffentzis); “From the Factory to the Metropolis” (Negri & Hardt – 2 reviews); “The Unseen” (Belestrini); “Capitalism in the 21st Century” (Roberts-Carchedi); “Democracy, Planning and Big Data,” “Magical Marxism” (Merrifield); “The Voluntariat,” “Cyber-Proletariat,” “Wageless Life,” “Bit Tyrants,” “Fully-Automated Luxury Communism” (Bastani).
May Day has many books on left theory from various viewpoints, old and new.
I got this at the UGA Library!
Red Frog / March 2, 2024
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