Time for Revolution

Antonio Negri

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780936666
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Antonio Negri wrote the two essays that comprise Time for Revolution while serving a prison sentence for alleged involvement with radical left-wing groups. Although the essays were written two decades apart, their concerns are the same: is there a place for resistance in a society utterly subsumed by capitalism? In the wake of the global crisis of capitalism heralded by the 2008 crash, the question has never been more relevant and Negri remains an insightful and passionate guide to any attempt to answer it.

PART ONE

The Constitution of Time

The timepieces of capital and communist liberation

Premble

. . . voici le temps

ou l’on connnaîtra I’avenir

sans mourir de connaissance . . .

APOLLINAIRE

These notes constitute some pure and simple prolegomena to the construction of the communist idea of time, to a new proletarian practice of time. The level of discussion is abstract, but the analysis is directed towards and supported by the interpretation of concrete behaviours. I say concrete and not simply real for the good reason that all that is concrete is real while not all that is real is concrete. By insisting on the concrete, I insist on the surface and the opening of life and of the struggle against metaphysical and mystificatory hypostasis. Time is the concrete reality of my life in so far as it is the substance of my collective, productive and constitutive-of-the-new being. Outside of a materialist, dynamic and collective conception of time it is impossible to think the revolution. Time is not only a horizon, however, it is also a measure. It has been conceived of as the quantitative measure of exploitation; now it can be thought of as the qualitative measure of the alternative and of change. Reactionary mysticism (and there exist no other forms) has always constituted itself around the unreality of time, and thus of its exploitation—revolution is born from the pathways of a constitutive phenomenology of temporality. The needs, the desires, their organization in the working day of exploitation and of repression are all in play here; in the face of this organization, they have constituted temporal aporias that dictate the practical innovation of the paradigm of the working day—that is to say, of its creative destruction. The enormous power of scientific labour, of the intellectual organization of associated human labour, enables us to repropose the project of the imagination to Power, or better, against Power. As the classics teach us, the imagination is the most concrete of temporal powers.

I ask my readers to forgive me for presenting only some notes/prolegomena, but the destructive fury of State repression has destroyed the materials gathered over a long year of work. Here only broken fragments are offered for discussion in a collage that I nevertheless consider useful. I dedicate these prolegomena to two dear teachers: Giulio Preti and Enzo Paci.

Chapter 1

First Displacement: The Time of Subsumed Being

Time-as-measure and productive time

A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because abstract human labour is objectified or materialized in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? By means of the quantity of the ‘value-forming substance’, the labour, contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration, and the labour- time is itself measured in determinate portions of time such as hours, days, etc.

(Marx 1990, p. 129—translation modified)

All the problems begin here. In fact, if time is quantity, it is not only quantity. Time does not only measure labour, but reduces it to homogenous substance.

[T]he labour that forms the substance of value is equal human labour, the expenditure of equal human labour-power . . . Socially necessary labour-time is the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour.

(Ibid.)

This reduction is dialectical. Marx refers explicitly to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (ibid., p. 135, n. 14). That is to say, the homogenous temporal substance is at once the medium [medietá]; of labour and the overcoming of that medium [medietá];¹ it is at once the form of equivalence (and of reversibility) and the form of productive power.

The value of a commodity is related to the value of any other commodity as the labour-time necessary for the production of the one is related to the labour-time necessary for the production of the other . . . [it] changes with every variation in the productive force of labour.

(ibid., p. 130—translation modified)

Therefore, time measures labour in so far as it reduces it to homogenous substance, but it also determines its productive power in the same form: through the multiplication of average temporal units. Therefore, in relation to labour, time is at once measure and matter, form and substance.

With these first propositions in mind we are able to note some possible aporias. The first aporia concerns the definition of the temporal unit of measure itself. This unit of measure is an abstract element, a quantity of simple necessary labour that is established ‘by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers’ (ibid., p. 135). A social process behind the backs of, that is, external—but to what? External to production. So ‘external’ can only be understood with a reference to use-value. The measure of exchange-value is determined from outside, that is by temporal quantities founded on use-value, determined immediately. The immediacy of the determination, considered in relation to the function of mediation that the quantitative unit determines, is a real enigma. It is an enigma that is at the very least exhibited by these aporias, or rather, by these insurmountable theoretical difficulties that emerge in the process of exposition: (1) the definition of qualified or complex labour, (2) of productive as opposed to unproductive labour, (3) of productive labour-power, and (4) of the productive function of intellectual or scientific labour. At least in these cases, but also in others, qualified labour is not reducible to simple labour, to the accumulation of units of measure. A substantive element—an increased productivity of this labour-power, an intensification of its use-value—lies at the basis of the definition and shows this element to be an irreversible component. The same is true of the definition of productive labour. In this case also the definition is given in an equivocal way: on the one hand productive labour, in so far as it produces surplus-value, is reduced to the simple temporal unit of measure. But this is not true absolutely. Another element intervenes in the distinction of productive from unproductive labour, and that is the formal participation of productive labour in the whole machine of capitalist production—so that in this case also the use-value of productive labour is multiplied, not primarily as a quantitative increment, so much as substantively, on the basis of a functional relationship, and is in this way contrasted with the use-value of unproductive labour. Thirdly, the productive force of human labour is irreducible to pure temporal measurement: to this is added the use-value of co-operation (as such) that raises and modifies qualitatively the value of labour-power as productive force. Also insoluble is the problem of the productive value of intellectual and scientific forces. In each case the insurmountable theoretical difficulty consists in the impossibility of loading or making homologous a reversible, equivalent temporal unit with substantive qualitative multiplicators. Marx resorts to use-value—however qualified—that is to an external element, in order to explain what is most internal: productive power. This is a veritable enigma.

The aporia dissolves, at least in this first form with its resort to an extraneous element, only when we enter the phase of labour’s real subsumption by the regime of capital. As I have already demonstrated in my Marx Beyond Marx [1991b], one can say without doubt that the whole systematic development of Marx’s thinking is dominated by the necessity of resolving the aforementioned aporias. Or, one could go as far as to say that Marx’s systematic thinking presupposes the theoretical model of subsumption, and only then adapts it to the empirical analytic. Or even, once within real subsumption, we pass from the aporia on to a pure and simple tautology. In fact, at the stage of the real subsumption of labour by capital, capitalist production (therefore the production of exchange-values) is not only the effect, but also the condition of production.

This immanent tendency of capitalist relations is realized adequately—and becomes a necessary condition even from the technological point of view—only when the specifically capitalist mode of production is developed and, with it, the real subsumption of labour by capital.

(Marx 1990, p. 1037—translation modified)

Here use-value cannot appear except under the guise of exchange-value. There is no longer an external vantage point upon which use-value can depend. The overcoming of capitalism occurs on the basis of needs constructed by capitalism. But in that case, time-as-measure of value is identical to the value of labour, to time of labour as substance. To say that time measures labour is here but a pure and simple tautology:

Let us deepen our analysis. Two threads run through all of Marx’s thinking, one analytic, another materialistic.² The first thread, particularly evident in some of Marx’s writings (especially in the Grundrisse [1973], in the first chapters of Capital Vol. 1 [1990], and also in the ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’),³ focuses on the abstract linear elements of the capitalist relations of production—here the analytic is fundamentally synchronic. The second thread is materialistic and fundamentally diachronic. It is particularly evident in the Theories of Surplus Value and in the unfinished volumes of Capital. Historical, material, weighty, irreversible elements serve here to qualify the relations of production. In Marx it is indubitably the case that the dialectical apparel of the exposition serves to mollify these opposed approaches. But dialectical manipulation does not remove the logical struggle that traverses the system. On the contrary, dialectics often plays the coquette, it does not cleave to substance: the system is returned to us in its aporetic form. An absolutely clear example of the aporia’s return, even within the most polished parts of Marx’s theory, is provided in the celebrated pages on the working day (Marx 1990, Chapter 10). In these pages, whether the working day is considered in terms of its length, its form, or of the dynamics of its transformation, the relationship between the capitalist drive towards the limitlessness of the working day and the worker’s exertion towards its limitation remains always unresolved. While the analytic and linear discourse continuously renders the constitutive elements of the working day reversible, the materialistic moment places the irreversibility of the struggle, of the ‘civil war’, at the forefront: ‘our worker leaves the productive process differently from how he entered it’ (ibid., pp. 412, 415). But this difference destroys the analytic premises that had founded the equivalence of the temporal measure on natural and physical concepts. The aporia is a potent one in this case also. How are we to overcome it? The only possibility for a logical solution Marx provides is through the destruction of all the irreversible and static premises of the analysis. Only when the working day becomes a global flow (and therefore conceivable at the level of real subsumption), only then is the aporia removed and time-as-measure has no need to fix its foundations outside the productive circuit. The measure is in the flow between labour and time. A continuous time. A tautological time.

Let us continue. Wherever the passage towards real subsumption occurs (one can always bear in mind the ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’ as an example), time-as-measure, as equivalent, as reversible, etc., manifests its aporias in definitively tautological form. The relationship between the analytic and materialistic threads of the exposition was in fact based on the possibility of recourse to an external element. (Some, such as Agnes Heller, have considered this external element so fundamental as to link its supposed natural and humanist qualities to the worth of Marx’s thought.) When the dialectic is resolved (and we know that under real subsumption that indeed occurs), tautology reigns. Real subsumption means the complete realization of the law of value. At first glance indifference rules in real subsumption. Labour is quality, time is quantity; in real subsumption quality falls away, so all labour is reduced to mere quantity, to time. Before us we have only quantities of time. Use-value, which in Capital was still given as separation from, and irreducible to, value tout court, is here absorbed by capital. The aporia consists in the fact that since time has become entirely hegemonic over the process, in so far as it is its only measure, it also reveals itself as its only substance. But this complete superimposition of measure and substance denies any dialectical significance to the relationship, reducing it therefore to pure and simple tautology.

To summarize. (1) in real subsumption all use-value is drawn into exchange-value; (2) but with that the external origin of the measure of time (based on the externality of use-value) recedes and measure is flattened onto the process itself; (3) if measure measures itself, it follows that the process of value concludes in that of command, in tautology and indifference; (4) the trend of productive forces (increase, decrease, transformation) bears no relation to the magnitude of value; (5) complex, productive, scientific labour is definitively irreducible to elementary temporal units; (6) productive force is inexplicable. In short, a non-dialectical tautology comes in at the end of the process in place of the initial dialectic. And so it is only possible to explain the movement of the class struggle by rejecting the notion of temporal measure as equivalence. The form of equivalence is simply an effect of coercion. For example, every mutation in the composition of labour-power (equivalent to different forms of the composition of the temporal units of measure of the productivity of labour) is in the dialectical Marx submitted to a mechanism of reversibility, of equivalence and of command. This reversibility needs to be broken. Here we see the exceptional importance of the Grundrisse [Marx 1973], where the equivalent: is all in the hands of capital, given in the form of surplus-value—consequently the antagonism comes at the beginning and irreversibility is the key to the process.

But the argumentation that reveals, in the course of Marx’s thought, the reduction of the aporia of time-as-measure and time-as-substance to tautology is, when we enter the stage of real subsumption (which summarizes in intensive form the argument so far), confirmed by another series of observations that we can call extensive, that is to say, that concern the extension of the realization of the tautology. Real subsumption once again:

First, with the development of the real subsumption of labour under capital, or the specifically capitalist mode of production, the real functionary of the overall labour process is increasingly not the individual worker. Instead, labour-power socially combined and the various competing labour-powers which together form the entire productive machine participate in very different ways in the immediate process of making commodities, or, more accurately in this context, creating the product. Some work better with their hands, others with their brains, one as a manager, engineer, technologist, etc., the other as overseer, the third as manual labourer or even drudge. An ever increasing number of types of labour-power are included in the immediate concept of productive labour, and those who perform it are classed as productive workers, workers directly exploited by capital and subordinated to its process of production and valorization. If we consider that collective worker that is the factory, then we see that its combined activity results materially in an aggregate product, which is at the same time a total mass of goods. And here it is quite immaterial whether the function of a particular worker, who is merely a member of the collective worker, is at a greater or smaller distance from the actual manual labour. But then: the activity of this collective labour- power is its immediate produc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Translators Introduction
• Part One The Constitution of Time
• Part Two Kairs, Alma Venus, Multitudo
• Notes
• Bibliography