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diacritics Volume 39.3 (2009) 21–27 © 2012 by the Johns Hopkins University Press

AN ITALIAN RUPTUREPRODUCTION AGAINST DEVELOPMENT

ANTONIO NEGRI

How can I begin to define the Italian “difference” within the philosophical framework of postwar Europe? I begin with the end of the 1950s, when a group of politicized intel-lectuals began to question the extent of the immanence of work in the development of capitalist technologies.1 What were the transformations that from within the modern fac-tory foisted labor-power on machines? Questions like these continued to be elaborated upon with respect to the violent social development of the postwar economic expansion. What, it was asked, was the impact of human activity on how society is structured, pass-ing from the factory to society? On the one hand is this question: what was the effect of capitalist command (and its technological instrumentation) on social life? And vice versa: what transformations did social movements force upon the structures and the institutions of capitalist command? Capitalist power was quickly extended to the control of social life until being configured as biopower, in spite of widespread and effective resistance. How could biopolitical relations be lived and organized so as to create alternatives to biopower?

1

I am convinced that these are the central points around which an original political philoso-phy has come to constitute itself in Italy within the tormented framework of the heterodox Marxist debate but that also has deep ties with the Italian phenomenological schools of the 1960s. The latter came on the scene by opposing the tedious but extremely widespread Heideggerian philosophy that was hegemonic both on the Right, in neo-scholasticism, and on the Left, with the last Sirens of the Frankfurt School. They offered an analysis of the antagonistic subjectivity in the phenomenologies of Enzo Paci, Giuseppe Semerari, and Enzo Melandri (as well as the new critical positivism of Giulio Preti and Ferruccio Rossi-Landi). They focused on the anthropological relations between the human being and the machine, productive activity and language, perception and action; in so doing they updated Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s humanism, following it up with insights and ap-proaches that “Western Marxism” had elaborated from Georg Lukács to Karel Kosíc.

Some research paths have been identified in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno in 1996 (with essays written in the 1980s and 1990s). From this period onward, the themes mentioned above (originally conceptualized in terms of the relationship between class movements and technological transformations) became entwined with and nourished by contact with poststructuralist philosophical literature, primarily, but not exclusively, from France. Through this themat-ic hybridization, the problems summarized above became central to the postindustrial, postmodern, and globalizing debate.

1 We recall that fascism had ended tragically only ten years earlier and that the Cold War was in full swing; new democracies were beginning to come to terms with capitalist economic develop-ment, while the socialist and communist masses were pressing for power without succeeding in creating space for themselves.

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If this is the overall framework in which the original adventure of the authors of The Italian Difference is to be located, allow me now to focus my attention on a concept, or better yet, on the watchword that was at the center of that period of research and political activity: a phrase that uniquely captured both the rational point of the period as well as its esprit de finesse. I want to ask what the “refusal of work” actually meant.2

To this end, I want to reflect upon a few concepts that, even though they do not im-mediately refer to the question of the meaning and significance of the “refusal of work,” will be useful to us if we wish to tackle this question. Here I would like to take up a few theoretical achievements that are relevant to our problem and that were set out decisively in Empire and then worked out above all in Commonwealth. Forgive me for employing concepts a posteriori but if I were to trace the development of these concepts from begin-ning to end, my thinking would become rather cumbersome. I would like to engage some hypotheses about the ways in which the ontology of human labor, or better, productive power [potenza] (as has been adopted in the social and political sciences), historically takes on a form and then in that form either becomes dominated (subjected and enjoyed, disciplined and controlled) or places itself in the condition of revolting, of liberating, and (in the words of the founding fathers) of pursuing happiness.

Labor and activity are typically the terms with which one qualifies the unfolding of this ontological power [potenza]. I understand these terms as “labor” (manual, industrial, valorizing) and as “activity” (generic). These are the very terms that the philosophy, eth-ics, and laws [diritto] of modernity have adopted as the base of political economy and of every project for administering the social production present at the origin of capitalism and available for what is to come [a-venire]. Then, in the postmodern era, as Michael Hardt and I argued in Empire, valorizing labor (that is, material, industrial labor) and generic activity (that is, productive intellectual and/or cognitive activity, immaterial, sci-entific, linguistic, affective, etc.) tended to become unified under the hegemony of the principle of activity. In the postindustrial and postmodern age, the “real subsumption” of society under capital is realized, i.e., when the complete subjection of bios to power has been realized and the canonical divisions of modern thought (and work)—namely, nature and culture, labor and technique, factory and society, etc.—are no longer given. On the contrary, with respect to what took place during industrialization, we see productive force now homogeneously investing the natural and social context. Whence the hegemony of “immaterial labor” or of generic activity, insofar as they are aimed not at individual pro-ductions but at the social cooperation for the production of the common.3 Thus, at the very moment when it covered the totality of natural and social existence, labor was reduced to generic activity: we understand how, as a result of this state of being generic [genericità] production emerged deprived of all preestablished normativity, of all objective measure and/or of any telos that would not be conventionally constructed.

Why? Because the economic law, organizational rule, and ethico-political norms, such as David Ricardo and Karl Marx had defined them in their critique of political economy, were less in force. In fact, when the temporal relationship between necessary work, surplus labor, and surplus value henceforth becomes irreducible; when intellectual and scientific labor, knowledge and communication, in short when immaterial elements all become, with respect to the material ones, ever more central and indispensable in the valorization of commodities and thus escape the discipline of the organization of labor; in sum, when the circulation of productive factors becomes an integral part of the cycle

2 It is important that scholars turn their analysis to the authors mentioned above as well as to the journals of the Khrushchev Thaw that from 1956 on energized discourse.3 Let’s be clear: “immaterial labor” was a useful concept but it was only partially correct. It was an indication of the urgency there was to rid ourselves of the essentialism typical of the old discourses on nature and work, on naturalism and laborism.

23An Italian Rupture: Production against Development / Antonio Negri

of production and reproduction of commodities and destroys the spatial unity of produc-tion, then the realization of the “law of value” becomes impossible, and the relationship between labor-time and commodity’s value becomes obsolete [inattuale]. But all this applies only in the first instance.

2

Before considering a “second moment” in this reconstruction, let’s note that here— surrounding the perception of this crisis, from a capitalist viewpoint—a discussion began about a new “form” of development. One could not accept that the conversion of the production of industrial labor into the hegemony of social activity might exclude the very possibility of measuring production. By this I mean that capitalism, with impeccable tim-ing, has found a way to adapt itself to this new situation. It has constructed new forms of accumulation that mirror the new processes in the social and cognitive production of value. Capitalism has introduced new metrics of valorization and measurement that are abstract, monetary, and finance related. For example, capitalism replaces industrial value (profit) with the rules and measure of rent. “Energetic” rent as well as real estate and finances formed the new globalized universe ending with the financial. Here we can make out how a new economic measure of productive-human-generic activity emerged. And order is thus restored. In the total subjection to abstractly preconstituted values, to immobilized normative references, to the privileges that we recognize as neofeudal, and to the social inequalities that are both abysmal and absurd, in the total subjection to all this capitalism gives a new form, so to speak, to development. Of course, this happens between crises, because—as we underscored earlier—henceforth any real value is inac-cessible, and the temporalities of productive labor are constantly interrupted. Is it perhaps only violence now that is the embodiment of power and that organizes its continual per-manence and recomposition? And is it governance that structures global biopower?

Here, by design, not by accident, I would like to condemn those modes that we see in political culture claiming to be alternatives to the crisis in development, that is, those cul-tural and political hypotheses that, unable to reason in terms of energy, power [potenza], or form, assume as a model of thinking and the illusion of overcoming, the retracing [ricalco] of the crisis and its reversal [rovesciamento]. To capitalist development they oppose degrowth (or the weakening of the culture-nature relationship), or, better yet, they oppose nature to the historicity of the productive and political relationship, as if it were possible to disinvest “nature,” that is, to liberate it from the massive investment it has undergone and often autonomously reproduced; as if it were possible to disarticulate the lived world from those social practices that have transformed this very same nature and that have seen it positively react—practices including the new figures of sexuality, the effects of feminism, a just welfare system, new uses related to medical advances and bio-technology, etc. Yet in the border zones between the social and the natural, in the regions in which the lived world is most clearly articulated upon the natural world, it is certainly necessary to react to the crises induced by biopower (through the subsumption of soci-ety in capital) rather than through the insipid politics of degrowth and the proposals of ecological extremism. The hypothesis of a “return to nature” is not, in fact, an alternative but is rather consistent with, and symmetrical to, the capitalist integral “domestication” of nature.

Here, as elsewhere, the discussion comes back to production, that is, to how we will be able to invent values and organize forces that allow us to separate or eradicate, not na-ture from production but production “of man for man” from capitalist development, lib-erating us at the same time from any parasitic utopia of degrowth. The hypothesis that we have to try to demonstrate is one in which labor does not valorize industrial capital and

24 diacritics / fall 2009

social activity does not generate more exploitation through rent. We have to ask ourselves whether we can construct a society in which production on the part of workers no longer ends up valorizing capital or, to put it differently, valorize the development of biopower. Production against development: how can we justify this slogan theoretically?4

When I was young I tried to figure out what “to struggle against work” actually meant. This wasn’t an invitation to laziness, nor to leisure, nor indigence. It was intended to refute (and to try to break) the organic unity, the “knot,” that in both exploitation and capitalist development, united (contradictorily but efficiently) living labor and dead labor, the toil of being exploited and capital. Here too the worker was prisoner of this duality, which the salary-relation introduced into his consciousness. It was no accident that Marx found in the end of capitalism the moment in which the very same working class would be destroyed. When exploitation reaches the point where it is also felt at the social level, with alienation everywhere, then, in order to fight against exploitation and alienation, one also has to fight against work, against industry, and against society. This means fighting not only against exploitation but also against alienation. It follows that the fight is against those corporations that prospered through exploitation and prided themselves in negotiat-ing the extent of their exploitation; against those socialists who, in their desire to replace the capitalists, deceived workers by labeling as “public” those same goods that the bosses possessed privately. Capital was still exploited, even when the masters called themselves socialists; and the state still guaranteed and glorified the subjection of the masses (and at times exemplified this subjection in an extreme and purifying way by massacring those very same masses in “patriotic” wars that were both monstrous and cruel). My genera-tion lived this. Whether the battle that the working classes then fought against work was won or lost is something I honestly can’t say. Yet I do know that by the end of the “short century” (whether we place it in 1968 or in 1989), industrial labor became a vehicle for exploitation: capital replaced social activity and substituted the market for industry, the people for classes, the individual for the corporation, and global society for the state. Giv-en the power relations that the working class had determined, it could not be otherwise.

Much did change—and yet almost nothing changed. Almost nothing, for example, when we consider things from the point of view of exploitation. True, the “calloused hands” of manual laborers were succeeded by hands working with computers; after De-troit came IBM and Apple. Workers with lifetime positions were replaced by temporary labor, and by the thousands of others who toiled and migrated all over the world . . . in order to work even harder. And socialists were followed by ecologists. But we were still within biopower, even if credit cards began to replace paychecks and debt took the place of salaries. Of course there were some advantages to the mobility and flexibility of generic work when compared to the monstrous monotony and repetition in the prison of Fordism. Almost nothing changed, even if at the same time much had been transformed. In particular, what became clear is that the slavery of exploitation did not strike at indi-viduality so much as at cooperation; that it didn’t only fall on individuals but also on the multitude of singularities; it didn’t lessen the daily work schedule of the factory but it had an impact on the length of life: not in time spent in solitude or in private but on shared life. Now it was life, life in common, that was subordinated to the money of bankers and

4 When one says production against development, this “against development” doesn’t mean de-growth, which is to say to be against the growth of the production of goods. It means being against the market assuming the position of judge of production and of competition as determining the di-rection of production and therefore fighting against qualitative logic and capitalist quantification of development. Is there such a thing as a non-capitalist logic of the market? Can there be a planning “of man for man,” assuming, for example, the web of goods indicated by welfare as a qualitative and quantitative multiplier of production? Here then production is no longer against development but for the common.

25An Italian Rupture: Production against Development / Antonio Negri

of state financers. The theoretical “real subsumption” of society under capital had now fully become—practically and historically—biopower.

What a terrible misery—for that old working class now subordinated to the new authority, for that old working class that is now called poverty! At the same time what ter-rible power now emerges! The new generations of cognitive labor achieved an autonomy in work that can only be subjugated to capitalist command with tremendous difficulty. And so too the older classes, with their poverty under these conditions, have no other op-tion except to destroy their own misery, move away from capital, flee from the machine of common oppression.

3

But what is this “common”? Here we are at the second moment of our argument. We know that we have in common water, air, sea, and, according to the Bible, the earth as well. Yet none of this belongs to us anymore. From the start, the process of accumula-tion of capital has progressively appropriated these natural riches. But we are interested in that common that is a product of humanity because even though humanity—like the natural world that was once held in common—has been reabsorbed into and by the orga-nizational structures of capitalism, it constitutes a living, common humanity that is being expropriated. Indeed, the very milieu in which we live and reproduce has been expropri-ated by capital. And capitalism today is the capitalism of the common. We have already said this: cognitive capitalism, global finance, and life itself organized and exploited as such—this is the new portrait of the common. All of which is masked behind the archaic titles of private or public property, all of it subsumed in any case under capital. But that which capital has not been (and will never be) able to appropriate is the energy of the labor-force, or better still the productive force that today is called the cognitive activity, the knowledge, and the inventiveness of that multitude of singularities that produce the common. The common is not only the ensemble of wealth produced but also the produc-tive force par excellence. We can certainly affirm that today there is no production except that which is produced by the common out of the common.

To return to our argument, if the mode in which the power [potenza] of common production is now put into the form, or mode, in which is shown the common energy that today constitutes concrete historicity, this allows us to dispense with an a priori distinc-tion between the human order [bios] and a potential natural order [zoē]. This condition, however, does not diminish the need to ask that this form of the common enjoy the very same separation that live labor demands from dead labor as well as that which the pro-duction of man for man opposes against capitalist valorization. This is the only way to recognize in our singular existence the form of the common, and, therefore, to form the experience (which can even become an urgency) of giving a political figure and force to this commonality. Will this be the constitutive relationship that is proposed in the name of the multitude, the new name of democracy? It is probable. It is in our control.

But this can only come about through a social revolution: a democratic one, wherever “revolution” and “democracy” are compatible. Any attempt at democracy today must be founded on the establishment of new rights of reappropriation and/or of social ownership of common goods. And let us add that this reappropriation will not occur without refusing the concentration of power while privileging its diffusion; it will not occur without the rejection of all hierarchical (and/or competitive) forms, by institutionalizing the common as the content of a participatory government in a cooperative spirit, capable of promoting and of absorbing new communities of producers. A democracy of producers, then, against exploitative labor and generic activity, against development (and degrowth).

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Now let us return to our topic, that is, the refusal of work, understood now as a theo-retical matrix of the Italian “difference.” In the decade between 1956 and 1966, in the realm of Italian Marxism (but not only), a true Copernican revolution takes place against the Soviet tradition of Diamat, accelerating its end after the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR. After 1956, a true and proper paradigm shift takes place in revolutionary thought. A new anthropology (expressed through militant experience and the sociology of the factory) acquires hegemony, an anthropology and a sociology that are no longer simply those of the homo faber, of the productive human being in industrial work and in general in relation to machines. (They are no longer simply this, even though we are still dealing with a mode of thinking that is turned in revolt against every thanatol-ogy of more or less Heideggerian inspiration.)

I would like to recall this in biographical terms. Our problem then was that of rein-venting the anthropology of labor. The “refusal of work” was not in fact a voluntaristic act but an operation that took place from within the system of machines; it was not a cultural operation for the transformation of nature but a new, natural-cultural organiza-tion: not simply a political act but an act constitutive of another humanity. I would like to invite research that would again traverse (just as we did) the sociology and anthropo-logical philosophies of the first half of the twentieth century. For example, the phenom-enological anthropology of Merleau-Ponty prompted us to hybridize phenomenological practices with Marxist analyses. A new humanism began to emerge following the death of Man, a communist humanism. This is something that Jürgen Habermas, for example, observes polemically when he recalls that in Merleau-Ponty there is the fundamental idea, “The categories of the expressive body, of behavior, of action, and of language introduce relations that the socialized organism of a subject capable of speaking and acting already has to the world, before this subject takes up an objectivating relation to something in the world” [45]. It is the realism of a social, non-alienated transformation, of the laboring subject—one that is common—that has the power to break exploitation and thereby rupture capitalist development; to make-produce man for man. In Italy, Paci, Semerari, Melandri and others insist on this “hyperdialectical” phenomenology. It was, as we have said, a new humanism after the death of Man. The Heideggerian diagnostic (or any catastrophic and eschatological pessimism in the consideration of the relation-ship between technology and the establishment of the human) stands in opposition to the conception that considers the relationships culture-nature, man-machine, and socialized labor-biopolitical structure to be indestructible, that proposes a liberatory anthropology, a new praxis within this relationship.

Essays by Raniero Panzieri and Mario Tronti and, even more so, the powerful re-search of Romano Alquati in the first Quaderni rossi, defined the “refusal of work,” by describing the production of worker-struggles (their forms and their cycles) against capi-talist development (and its forms and cycles). With this background, we can once again research the ontology of labor and the relationship between critical phenomenology and practices of militant and revolutionary intervention. Of course, these topics also reopen the problem of the relationship between true knowledge and the ethics of transformation.

Translated by Bruno Bosteels

27An Italian Rupture: Production against Development / Antonio Negri

WORKS CITED

Alquati, Romano. “Relazione sulle ‘forze nuove’: Convegno del PSI sulla FIAT.” Quad-erni rossi 1 (1961): 215–39. Print.

Chiesa, Lorenzo, and Alberto Toscano, eds. The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics. Melbourne: Re-press, 2009. Print.

Habermas, Jürgen. Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays. Trans. William Mark Hohengarten. Cambridge: MIT P, 1992. Print.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009. Print.

———. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000. Print.Panzieri, Raniero. “Sull’uso capitalistico delle macchine nel neocapitalismo.” Quaderni

rossi 1 (1961): 53–72. Print.Tronti, Mario. “La fabbrica e la società.” Quaderni rossi 2 (1962): 1–31. Print.Virno, Paolo, and Michael Hardt, eds. Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics.

Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Print.