From the Factory to the Metropolis

Essays Volume 2

Antonio Negri, Ed Emery

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781509503490
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

This second volume of a new three-part series of Antonio Negri's work is focussed on the consequences of the rapid process of deindustrialisation that has occurred across the West in recent years. In this volume Negri investigates exactly what happens when the class subjects of industrial capitalism are demobilised and the factories close. Evidently capital continues to make profit, but how and where? According to Negri, the creation of value extends beyond the factory walls to embrace the whole of society; the 'mass worker' of industrialism gives way to the 'socialised worker' ( operaio sociale ) and the terrain of exploitation now becomes the whole of human life. In postmodernity, the metropolis becomes the privileged arena of value extraction. We must therefore understand the global city, with its stratifications, its enclosures and its resistances. Old categories of the private and the public are inadequate to describe the new matrix of production, which is characterised rather by the 'common', the productive space of cognitive and immaterial labour. Today's metropolis can be defined as a space of antagonisms between forms of life produced, on the one hand, by finance capital (the capital that operates around rents), and on the other by the 'cognitive proletariat'. The central question is then how 'the common' of the latter can be mobilised for the destruction of capitalism. In an analysis that runs from the Italian workerism ( operaismo ) of the 1970s to the present day, From the Factory to the Metropolis offers readers valuable insight into the far-reaching impact of deindustrialisation, presenting both the challenges and opportunities. It will appeal to the many interested in the continuing development of Negri's project and to anyone interested in radical politics today.

Part I
Exodus from the Factory

1
The Reappropriation of Public Space

For twenty years things were going on their way – at least from the crisis of 1971–4, when, having digested the struggles of the 1960s and the defeat in Vietnam, multinational capital relaunched its project of development in terms of a postindustrial modernisation and a liberal policy. Those were the years when neoliberalism was imposed. They were grey years, although they were sometimes alleviated, as happened in France, by a number of workers’ offensives (in 1986 for example) and by a succession of student explosions – first expressions of the revolt of immaterial labour – around which social protest attempted in vain to organise itself. December 1995 in France marked the first mass break with the political, economic and ideological regime of the liberal period.

Why were the struggles of December 1995 such a breakthrough? Why is it that we see them as the beginning of the end of the counterrevolution of the second half of the twentieth century?

People have begun to give answers to these questions, and these are often interesting. It is eminently obvious that the growing awareness, particularly marked in France, of the intolerable nature of the processes of globalisation and European integration and the feeling of the new presidency’s betrayal of republican promises, along with the set of contradictions produced by the new organisation of social labour – mobility, flexibility, break-up of the labour market, exclusion – and by the crisis of welfare, had immediate effects on the process of formation and radicalisation of the struggle. What seems to me particularly important is the definition of the new context in which the various demands were produced: this was a ‘biopolitical’ context in the sense that the struggle came up against all the rules of discipline and control of all of the conditions of the reproduction of the proletariat. In short, the struggle took on a universal meaning and became a struggle ‘for the general interest’, to the extent of being a refusal of the diktat ‘liberalism or barbarism’ and of pointing to a new threshold of possibility for the activity of protest and for the expression of a desire for a new world.

However, if we want to understand the radical nature and significance of the epochal rupture that this struggle signals, we have to ask: Who is the protagonist? What is the hegemonic subject of this struggle? What is the stratum of society that has succeeded in a very short time in turning a demands-based struggle into a political struggle against globalised capitalist command? And why? What are the material dispositifs that determined the expansion of the struggle and of its political becoming?

It is easy to give an initial answer: this subject is called ‘workers in the public services’. They were the ones who – on the railways and in urban transport, in telecommunications, in postal services, in hospitals, in schools, in energy supplies… – triggered the struggle; they were the ones who led it, giving a generally offensive meaning to trade union claims. But, unless we ask in what sense these sectors represent something new today within the political and productive apparatus of advanced capitalism, that answer may not be of much interest. I mean that, in the history of working-class struggles, there have been other episodes in which the ability to block the circulation of goods has been fundamental to political confrontations (in particular, strikes on the railways have always been part of the insurrectional history of labour). But today, in the organisation of advanced capital, the ability – of workers in the public transport services, and in communications, health and energy – to assail a system of production with decisive political force becomes decisive by comparison to any other capacity. Thatcher and Reagan, those muscular initiators of liberal strategy, showed that they knew this well when, in launching their restructuring so as to set an example, they targeted workers in the energy sector and in the air transport industry. But why?

An answer that is not mere platitudes is possible only if we recognise above all that, within the structure of advanced capitalism, the ensemble of transport, communications, education and energy, in other words the major public services, is no longer simply a moment in the circulation of goods or an element in the reproduction of wealth; rather it represents the global form that structures production itself. They told us a thousand times that production had become circulation, that we had to work by ‘just in time’ methods, and that the worker had to become a link in the social chain. The public service strikers have just shown that, when they hit the link of circulation, they also hit the whole chain of production; that, when they acted on the content, all the content had to react. And, since we are talking here not only of structures of production but also of subjective forces that come to be defined through them, we can see clearly why the struggle of public service workers ‘represented’ from the start the totality of workers and why, from the strategic place that the former occupy, their struggle immediately struck the entire production system and its new social and political dimensions.

To all those who define this fight as ‘reactionary’ and ‘conservative’, and also to those who are keen on objective analyses of the process of production, we can immediately retort that these struggles and their main actors have, on the contrary, a central and decisive role in the new mode of production: they have brought the [class] struggle to bear on the really decisive point of capitalist ‘reform’ and, for this reason alone, have blocked it.

* * *

But the protagonists of the fight were not only blue-collar workers and, more generally, workers in the public services. In a similar way, the million women and men who, in Paris and in all the cities of France, in order to get to work or simply to travel around, made efforts worthy of a time of war, in very difficult conditions – those people too were protagonists. The media portrayed these efforts and this daily toil with a certain lyricism – in an attempt first to organise a consumer revolt, then, once this operation had been massively rejected, to extol the civic-mindedness and conviviality of the public’s behaviours while harping on the hardships caused by the strike. But have not industrial sociology, neoliberal ideology and state literature been telling us for years that in the postindustrial system consumers are themselves producers of services? How did these producers of ideology manage to contradict themselves so blatantly, by trying to set the community of users against the public service workers or by attempting to define them at all costs as two separate communities?

Users are indeed ‘coproducers’ of public services. They come in different categories (the gamut ranges from maximally passive consumption to minimal interactivity and from minimal passive consumption to maximal interactivity; an example of the former is users in the energy service, while operatives in telecommunications, education and health are examples of the latter). In the struggle today, this ‘coproduction’ has manifested a very high level of consciousness. The users have recognised interests of their own in the fight of workers with whom they coproduce the services. If services are a form of coproduction, then they are public by definition. I am not denying that there may be opposition and that contradictions may emerge between supply and demand for services; I simply want to make the point that these contradictions occur within a public dimension. So, when the service workers turned their struggle into a defence of and a statement about the public nature of their production and called for it to be recognised as such, the ‘users’ recognised themselves completely as ‘coproducers’ of this same struggle. Trekking on foot in the snow, hitch-hiking, queuing, hours of waiting, all this has to be considered moments of struggle. The power of the strike was not demonstrated solely through noisy trade-union marches, but above all through the festive parades of people in the streets every morning and every evening. It was not a ‘strike by delegation’ but a diffuse strike that involved the whole of social life and people’s everyday routines. In the dictionary of strikes invented by the proletariat in struggle (trade-union strike, general strike, staggered strike, wildcat strike and so on) we should add this new entry: the metropolitan strike.

Let’s take a closer view: when we press this idea of a ‘coproduction’ of underground struggle, we are indicating a concept of the ‘public’ that has revolutionary value. It is impossible not to recognise an act of ‘reappropriation of administration’ in the feeling of co-responsibility that ‘users’ experience towards a practice such as a strike in the service sector; a direct and subversive act. Having understood the nature of this act, our thinking cannot but retrace its assumptions: the identification of the public service, and thus of its management and its productive functions, at a very general level, as something common to all; common to all in the manner of all products of cooperation, from language to democratic administration. This is a definition of the ‘public’ that has nothing more to do with its ‘statist’ definition.

* * *

When it sets about privatising public services, the state reveals its capitalist face. On the contrary, these struggles reveal a subversive face beyond the state and its function as guardian of capital. Even when some of the actors support the idea of a ‘public service in French style’ [alla francese], I think that very few would consider defending this residue of the Third Republic, which is reactualised by the Fordist compromise between the popular forces of the Resistance and Gaullist technocracy and still exists in anachronistic ways, as a credible option today. Today’s struggles tell us that, if a ‘public service alla francese’ is to have any future, it will have to be set up in completely new terms: as a first experiment in the reconstruction of public service within a democratic dynamic of reappropriation of administration, of democratic coproduction of the service. In fact a new problematics is opening up through these struggles: a constitutive problematics. So we have to understand what it means to talk about a new ‘public nature of the services’, which, by allowing their removal from privatisation and from the rules of the world market, also allows their removal from the ideological mystifications that arise from the globalising and directly capitalistic function of the activity of the national state. Awareness of this problematic is implicit in the struggles; it represents their subversive potential. In addition, if it is true that services are now the ‘global form’ of every form of productivity, both statist and private, and if it is true that they reveal how the role of cooperation in production and circulation as a whole is central and exemplary, then this new concept of the public will be the paradigm of any new experience of socialised production.

In short, the public, understood as a set of activities under the supervision of the state that allow the reproduction of the capitalist system and of private accumulation, has ceased to exist here. We are facing a new concept of the public, namely that of a production organised on the basis of interactivity, in which the development of wealth and the development of democracy become indistinguishable, just as the interactive widening of the social bond [il legame sociale] is inseparable from the reappropriation of administration by the productive subjects. Here the elimination of exploitation becomes visible; it appears no longer as a myth but as a concrete possibility.

* * *

But this new subjective dimension of the public is not something that affects only the socialised workers [operai sociali], in other words the workers in the social services sector. It is something that, as we have seen, has also invested the subjectivity of the coproducers of services, and therefore of all the citizens who work. The ‘Tous ensemble’ [‘All Together’] element of the slogan used in the struggles has brought to light a new community, a productive social community that wants to be recognised. This recognition is twofold. At stake here in the first place is the dynamic of recomposition that runs through the movement, the community of struggle in which all workers [lavoratori] are called together by those factory workers [operai] who, by virtue of their position, form the substantial axis of productive cooperation. And this is the first dynamic of the process. Then, in the second place, the recognition claimed here consists in the reappropriation of the service, both by the community in struggle and by those who, in their work, use the services to produce wealth.

So the struggle functions as the prefiguration of the aim [fine] towards which it tends; the method – the ‘being together’ in order to win – is the prefiguration of the goal [finalità], it is ‘being together’ in order to build wealth outside capitalism and against it.

What is worth emphasising here is that, in the struggle we have lived through, and especially where public services were involved, the concept of community has been enriched with fundamental articulations. Especially in subversive thought, the concept of community has often been considered, as something that obfuscates the concrete articulations of exploitation, flattening them into a shape in which the association of subjects as a whole would be given in the unity of the function rather than in the contradictory articulation of the associative and productive process. In the course of the struggle that I am analysing, an extremely articulated community appears for the first time: a Gemeinschaft that has in it all the characteristics of multiplicity and opposes power, as a productive ensemble.

Reflection on the movement thus leads to raising the problem of the transition to a higher level in the organisation of production, where the public is regarded as a set of social functions that, thanks to the wealth of its articulations, does not require a separation between levels of production and levels of command. On the contrary, the reappropriation of command in the production function and the construction of the social bond now form a continuum. The problem of transition to an autonomous social community, to communism, lies now not only in the definition of the forms of struggle to be conducted against the state, but rather in the definition of stages and forms t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Part I Exodus from the Factory
• Part II Inventing the Common
• Part III First Fruits of the New Metropolis
• Origin of the Texts
• End User License Agreement