Marx in Movement

Operaismo in Context

Antonio Negri, Ed Emery

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509544257
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

This first volume in a new trilogy of books by Antonio Negri examines and develops the Italian tradition of radical Marxist thought known as operaismo or 'autonomist Marxism' – the tradition to which Negri himself adheres and in which he is a leading figure.

The tradition of operaismo emphasizes the role of the worker in capitalism and the primacy of class struggle. Within this framework, Negri's key contribution has been to theorize the transition from the 'mass worker' to the 'social worker' – that is, to broaden the concept of living labour and liberate it from the theoretical cages that locked it into the factory. It was only by moving beyond the ideology and political practice of the mass worker that the revolutionary character of the Marxist concept of class could be updated for our times and developed in relation to the exploitation and socialization of living labour, including networks of cognitive work, reproductive work and care work, networks which also have the potential to become the bases for new forms of resistance to capitalist exploitation.

By bringing together Negri's key contributions to the reconceptualization of the worker and class struggle, this volume demonstrates the vitality of the Marxist tradition of operaismo and its continued relevance for understanding the key social and political struggles of our time.

Part I
From the Mass Worker to the Social Worker

1
Archaeology and Project*
The Mass Worker and the Social Worker

1 Functions and limitations of the concept of the mass worker

In the wake of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, the critique of Stalinism, which developed within the Italian labour movement above all, put into question the traditional conception of the trade union. This had become an area of key concern. In 1953, there had been a resounding defeat of the communist union at FIAT; in the years that followed, there were equally resounding defeats in line for the farm workers’ unions and the public sector unions (railway workers, postal workers etc.). The fading (or downright disappearance) of any immediate prospect of a seizure of power and a series of confusions at the ideological level meant that the trade unions were being undermined as the transmission belt of the system; both their organizational form and their ideological basis were thrown into crisis. But this crisis did not affect the radicality of the working class. There began to appear a mass form of behaviour that was spontaneous, multiform, violent, mobile and disorderly – but that, nonetheless, was able to compensate for the lack of trade union leadership in ways that were both original and powerful – and while the union leaderships stuck to a repetition of the old forms, the working class reacted in ways that were autonomous. The union would call strike action and the entire workforce would go in to work – but then, after a week, a month, maybe a year, that same working class would explode in spontaneous demonstrations. The farm workers of the south also began spontaneous struggles. However, they had been defeated in the movement to take over agricultural land; they had been sold out by the government’s agrarian reform, which condemned them to the poverty of having to work small holdings. As a result, the rural vanguards chose the path of large-scale emigration. This was a mass phenomenon – its causes and effects were complex, certainly, but its quality was political. Then things began to move: Milan in 1959, Genova in 1960, Turin in 1962, and Porto Marghera in 1963 – a series of struggles that pushed to the forefront of the political scene. This succession of labour struggles involved every major sector of industry and all the major urban concentrations. They were all more or less spontaneous mass events and revealed a degree of general circulation of modes of struggle that had not previously been experienced.

One might well ask for a definition of this spontaneity of the struggles. For, while it is true that the struggles were in large part independent of the control and the command of the trade unions (and the unions were sometimes not even aware of them), at the same time they appeared – and were – strongly structured. They revealed the existence of new working-class leaderships that were, as we used to say, ‘invisible’ – in part because many people simply didn’t want to see them, but also (and mainly) because of their mass character, because of the new mechanisms of cooperation that were coming into play in the formation of workers’ political understanding, because of the extraordinary ability to circulate of these new forms of struggle, and because of the degree of understanding (of the productive process) that they revealed. And, while these new forms of struggle were at first seen by most people as ‘irrational’, in the course of their development they gradually began to reveal a coherent project and a tactical intelligence that finally began to problematize the very concept of working-class rationality. Economic rationality? Socialist rationality? Rationality of the law of value? Rationality of trade union control? Rationality of law and order? And so on. In effect, in the form taken by these struggles we could identify elements that were directly contradictory to the whole structure of trade unionist–socialist ideology. The wage demands, and the extremes to which they went, contradicted the way in which, in traditional trade union practice, the wage had been used as a political instrument, as a means of mediation. The partisan nature (egotism) of the struggles ran heavily counter to the socialist ideology of the homogeneity of working-class interests that had prevailed up until then. The immediacy and the autonomous nature of struggles ranging from wildcat strikes to mass sabotage, their powerful negative effect on the structures of the cycle of production, ran counter to the traditional view that fixed capital is sacrosanct, and also counter to the ideology of liberation of (through) work – in which work was the subject of liberation, and Stakhanovism or high levels of professional skill the form of liberation. Finally, the intensification (whether at group or at individual level) of heightened forms of mobility, of absenteeism, of socialization of the struggle, ran immediately counter to any factory-centred conception of working-class interests of the kind that has come down to us from the workers’ councilist tradition. All this gradually uncovered, in increasingly socialized forms, an attitude of struggle against work, a desire for liberation from work – whether it be work in the big factory, with all its qualities of alienation, or work in general, as conceded to the capitalist in exchange for a wage.

The paradox of the situation was that this mass spontaneity, highly structured in itself, negated in principle the very definition of spontaneity. Traditionally, spontaneity has been taken to mean a low level of working-class consciousness, a reduction of the working class to simple labour power. Here, though, it was different. This spontaneity represented a very high level of class maturity. It was a spontaneous negation of the nature of the working class as labour power. This tendency was clearly present, and later developments were to reveal it still further. Thus anybody who wanted to analyse the new forms of struggle was going to have to be prepared to problematize the entire theoretical tradition of socialism. Within these struggles there were new categories waiting to be discovered.

And this is what was done. In the early 1960s, on the fringes of the official labour movement, a number of working-class vanguards and a number of groups of intellectuals active within the class struggle produced a theory in which the mass worker was understood as the new subject of working-class struggles.

On the one hand, their studies identified the objective characteristics of this class protagonist. These characteristics were determined as follows:

• within the organization of the labour process, by Taylorism;
• within the organization of the working day and of wage relations, by Fordism;
• within economic–political relations, by Keynesianism;
• within general social and state relations, by the model and the practice of the planner state.

On the other hand, they succeeded in defining (this was absolutely imperative) the new subjective characteristics of this new configuration of the class. These subjective characteristics were described in terms that were dynamic and highly productive. In other words, every aspect of the capitalist organization of the factory society was to be seen as the product of a dialectic between working-class struggle and capitalist development (including developments in technology, in the form of the wage, in economic policy, and in the form of the state) – the product of a dialectic whose active and motive central force was the mass worker.

As our old friend Marx says, machines rush to where there are strikes.

All the mechanisms of capitalist control of development were brought to bear at critical points within the system. By means of a continual theft of the information generated by the struggles, capital created increasingly complex mechanisms of domination. It was within this framework that the analysis undertaken by workerism unstitched the capitalist Moloch, following the indications provided by working-class struggle. The comrades arrived at a fundamental theoretical conclusion: that, given a certain level of capitalist development, the concept of labour power (understood as an element of the dialectical relationship between workers and capital, a relationship in which capitalist logic has the upper hand) becomes dissolved. A dialectical relationship most certainly remains, but now the relationship between capital and labour power becomes the relationship of capital with the working class. Thus the dialectic of capitalist development is dominated by the relationship with the working class. The working class now constituted an independent polarity within capitalist development. Capitalist development was now dependent on the political variable of working-class behaviours. The concept of labour power could no longer be substantiated; only that of working class was adequate.

I have to admit that our theoretical and political positions in this period, while very rich in some respects, were very poor in others. Their richness lay in the fact that they provided a basis from which we could then develop an entirely political concept of labour power. We learned a lot from developments in the capitalist revolution of the 1930s and 1940s. In particular, we learned that it was possible to carry forward revolutionary struggles that had a marked effect both on the structure of the labour process and on the structure of economic and political domination – in other words, struggles that were capable of winning against Taylorism and within Keynesianism. On the other hand, the poverty of our theoretical and practical positions lay in the fact that, while individual struggles and the struggles of individual class sectors proved capable of understanding capital and taking it on, at the same time the potential of that struggle, its strategic dimension, and the re-establishment of a centre of revolutionary initiative remained beyond our grasp. Practice, even the highest working-class practice, at this level of the class struggle, always contains an element of uncertainty as regards its synthesis and resolution – what Lenin used to call ‘the art of insurrection’, an art that the workers today are seeking to turn into science. This science still had to be constructed – a science that the practice of the mass worker was demanding, but that it did not provide.

In fact capital’s science of domination was far ahead of us. At the time when we were introducing the concept of the mass worker and, by implication, a critique of the category of labour power in favour of a concept of dynamism of the working class, capital, for its part, had already made tremendous advances in its own practice, as regards its theory of domination and redressing the balance of power. (Note that within the specificities and the isolation of a few national situations – in Italy in particular – we were successful in developing a remarkable level of subjective action and in bringing about moments of deep capitalist crisis.) For, while from the working-class viewpoint the revolutionary practice of the mass worker was being advanced within individual factories and within the overall interlocked system of factories and companies, capital was already responding, generally at the global and social level, with domination and control. Keynesianism, at its roots, had already demonstrated this: an awareness not only that the wage relation extended between subjects that were different (capital and the working class), but above all that the solution (favourable to capitalist development) was to be sought across the entire span of production and circulation – in other words, involving the entire sociality of the relations of production and reproduction. In the Keynesian system, state budgeting was the means of recuperating and neutralizing the class struggle in the factory, and monetary policy was the means of subordinating the wage relation. Fordism, for its part, had already transformed the high level of cooperation on the assembly line (and thus corrected those elements of weakness that labour struggles, at that level of production, were able to turn against capitalist command) into a conscious policy, one might say, of the sociality of the assembly line – a policy of command over the relation between industrial production and the reproduction of labour power, a capitalist intervention within the social flexibility of labour power, a way of privileging social command and divisions with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Introduction: Marx in operaismo, a Long Road
• Part I From the Mass Worker to the Social Worker
• Part II Workers and Capital Today
• Part III Polemical Considerations
• End User License Agreement