Theory Culture Society 2015 Negri 25 38

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Theory, Culture & Society

2015, Vol. 32(7–8) 25–38

! The Author(s) 2015

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DOI: 10.1177/0263276415597977tcs.sagepub.com

Special Section: Eurocrisis, Neoliberalism and the Common

On the Constitution and

Financial CapitalToni NegriEuropean Graduate School

Abstract

Antonio Negri’s article explores the relationship between the juridical categories of

‘public’ and ‘private’ and the political concept of the common through the theme of the ‘material constitution’ defining actual relations of power which defy the crystal-

lization of ‘formal constitutions’. The financial convention shaping the material con-

stitution of contemporary capitalism refers to the rise of what Foucault called

biopower, where value is no longer the expression of a mere quantity of commodities

but of a set of activities and services, which are immediately cooperative. In this

context, any form of measure cannot but be political and hence it must be estab-

lished through new forms of economic governance. The social relation of capital

becomes immediately political once money displaces labour as rule, norm and meas-

ure of value. As a result, processes of political subjectivation within the Eurocrisiscombine de-stituent and con-stituent movements: requests for insolvencies, social

occupations, commoning and mutualization are the means through which social

struggles formulate the multitudes’ demands for ‘equality as a condition of freedom’.

Keywords

capitalism, commonfare, Euro, financial crisis, Marxism, money, neoliberalism,

self-education

I will organize my intervention around three basic points. First of all,I will try to define the financial convention that dominates today and theway it has modified the relation between the public and the private.Second, I will try to analyse the way in which the private and thepublic are inscribed in the 1948 [Italian] constitution and, more import-antly, how they figure in the construction of the European constitution.Finally, I will try to understand how the constitutional convention thatbinds us could be undone in the name of the common, by opposing

antagonistic dispositifs to the exercise of financial power and by devisinga ‘currency of the common’. In short, what does it mean to advance

Corresponding author: Toni Negri.

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towards the construction of the common within and against the currentEuropean financial convention?

1.1

The collective convention that dominates the contemporary constitu-tional relation is a financial convention. Labour-value, which was onceposited as a regulative norm and a measure of social and productiveactivities, has been replaced today by the financial rule.

Let us then analyse the relationship between financial capital andmaterial constitution. Today, financial capital is the effective authoritylegitimating the constitution of post-industrial societies. If, in the Fordist

era, the constitution took labour-value as its metric [tallone-misura] in theorganization of society, and this was the organizational structure of industrial society, now that standard has been replaced by a financialmetric. A number of consequences follow from this. Whereas the labour-measure, in the Fordist constitution, was hard and relatively stable, anddepended directly on the relation of forces between classes (this wasthe situation of any constitutional arrangement during the ‘short cen-tury’), the financial convention, when it takes up a constitutionalform, that is, when it comes to constitute capitalist political rela-

tions hegemonically, presents itself as an independent and supervenientpower [Potenza . . . eccedente]. The works of Andre ´ Orle ´ an and ChristianMarazzi have correctly stressed this institutional circumstance. We aredealing with an independence which, from the point of view of value,consolidates and fixes a ‘proprietor-sign’ [segno proprietario] (in terms of ‘private property’ see especially Leo Specht), but which, at the same time,also appears as ‘crisis’ and ‘surplus’ [eccedenza]. It does so not only inrelation to old and static determinations of labour-value but, also andabove all, in relation to the continuous work of ‘anticipation’ and ‘incre-

ment’ that characterize the financial capture of socially producedvalue and the extension of such operations on a global scale. The finan-cial convention therefore presents itself, institutionally, as global govern-ance, because, in so far as it is organic to the regime of financialcapital, the crisis is permanent. Under these conditions, it is more appro-priate to talk of different phases of the business cycle, rather than of crisis.

Let us be clear that, in this new configuration of constitutional rule,there still is a material basis to the law of value, but it is no longerindividual labour that becomes abstract, but immediately social and

communal labour that is directly exploited by capital. The financialrule can become hegemonic because, in the new mode of production,the common has emerged as an eminent power [ potenza], as the substanceof relations of production, and it is progressively colonizing every socialspace as a norm of valorization. Financial capital hunts this extending

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power, seeking to draw its profit by anticipating its extension, in the formof financial revenues. Harribey is correct when, in his discussion withOrle ´ an, he says that value, here, appears neither in substantial terms nor

as a simple accounting phantasmagoria, but as the sign of a productivecommon, mystified but effective, which grows ever more, both intensivelyand extensively.

To sum up: on the one hand, we can say that, in contemporary socie-ties, in the processes by which society is subsumed into capital, use-valueand exchange-value are superimposed. On the other hand, we sense thatabstract labour does not differ from concrete labour only because itrepresents the abstraction of the concrete form of labour: this, as itwere, is a purely epistemological difference. The real and positive differ-

ence consists in that all forms of labour are now equalized in abstractlabour and this happens in the context of a multilateral and cooperativeexchange of singular productive activities.

On the basis of this, we can draw two consequences. The first one isthat, when it appears as command over productive activities throughfinancial means, this subsumption of life embodies a biopower, i.e. thecapacity to exploit and extract surplus-value and to accumulate it on thewhole of social life. Money, financial products and banks become meansof production, not qua productive forces but as instruments for the extor-

tion of surplus-value. (For example, today, in France, the entirety of revenue from income tax is used to service the national debt.)The second consequence is that value appears on the market not so

much as substance – as mere quantity of goods – but as a combination of activities and services which are increasingly cooperative. Life is accord-ingly subsumed by power both in its entirety and in the ensemble of itssingular expressions; the relations of production, in other words, put themarkets and/or finance in contradiction with the productive common.

1.2

Hence, starting from the 1990s – after the long crisis that began in the1970s, with the demolition of the Bretton-Woods standard – a new globalstandard has been established in a progressively more orderly way; astandard that has replaced the labourist [lavorista] one.

Two conditions have allowed its development. The first is the consum-mation of globalization: it is by confronting globalization that theFordist convention has given up on an element central to its legitimacy

and function, that is, the nation-state as the foundation of sovereignty.The monetary convention has been removed from the nation-state anddirected towards global standards. Public debt has been removed fromsovereign regulations (simultaneously by capital and by individualnation-states) and subjected to value mechanisms which are determined

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on the global market by financial capitalists. The competition betweenthese actors always turns into solidarity against the exploited.

The second condition consists of the fact that, with the crisis of

(national) sovereignty, the public sphere has been substantially capitalized [ patrimonializzato] in a privatizing manner, even before this was accom-plished juridically. What I mean is that the ends of accumulation haveyielded to the direct private appropriation of all public goods. In thissituation, the mediation between class interests performed (starting fromthe 1930s) by public power and public property (and here it would benecessary to define the extent to which democratic political representationcould be identified with this mediating function) has been considerablyweakened, if not completely done away with (public property has been

weakened as much as political representation, because the latter, afterbeing increasingly emptied out of sovereignty by globalization, is nolonger directed to the government and ownership of the public).

In search for new conventions, bubbles (e.g. new economics, Asian,Argentinean, etc.) follow one after the other. As Marazzi and Orle ´ annote, ‘markets go mad, so to speak, but this is totally coherent withthe competition principle applied to finance’. Here, in fact, a good isnot desired because it is rare but, paradoxically, the more it is demanded,the more it is desired. It follows that the crisis is not ‘due to the fact that

the rules of the financial game have been circumvented, but to the factthat they have been implemented’. The crisis, in other words, is endogen-ous. It depends exclusively on the deregulation of capital markets and onthe privatization of public goods. Every use-value is thus transformedinto financial goods (bonds) subject to speculation. The real subsumptionof society into capital acts through financialization.

In this process, financialization has imposed its logic upon the entire

world, turning the crisis into its own way of working.

Financialization is a process of inclusion of cooperation – of the

cognitive and social common – and then of exclusion, i.e. a process

of extension of the capitalist mode of production to pre-capitalist

markets, attended by the subsequent expulsion and pauperization of

those who, in this process, have been deprived of the access to

common goods. It is a sort of continuous reenactment of primitive

accumulation, of the enclosure of common lands (goods) and of the

proletarization of growing masses of citizens.

To be more precise:1. The constitutional dispositif in the mature phase of capitalism subordinates

living labour-power, qua cognitive and cooperative society, to the financial

abstraction of the process of valorization. The biopower [biopotenza] of the

common is totally subjected to the fetishism of the financial convention.





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2. The capitalist constitutional dispositif aims to assign a measure, to fix a regu-

latory standard within those crises that we have mentioned, where, in other

words, the breach of the Keynesian-Fordist relation calls for new measure-

conventions. Measure-value? To be sure, this measure, as we have seen, is notsomething substantial; it is rather a ‘political convention’, determined accord-

ing to variable circumstances. To be more precise: even though it is not

founded on substantial value, what makes this convention ‘capitalist’

(i.e. suited to the current organization of social labour for the sake of extract-

ing profit or accumulating financial revenues) is all the same a measure, a

class-bound measure, a dispositif of power. It is hardly necessary to recall

how Marx always defined value by subordinating it to surplus-value. Now,

this measure will still be founded on the relation between necessary time and

unpaid surplus time – sure, but only if this social relation will be considered

globally. The permanence of the crisis consists precisely of this: of the tension

of this infinite effort, of the tendency to approach an absolute limit, of this

accumulation of Russian dolls.

3. In order to fix this political measure, capitalist constitutional power (and the

convention that sustains it) must create a new form of government – of gov-

ernance, to be more precise. The latter does not act as a ‘power of exception’

[ potere di eccezione] but as the government of a ‘continuous emergency’

(it is an exception spread over time which reveals, negatively, a continu-

ous instability and, positively, unexpected capture of surplus, ruptures

and excesses, etc.) within a fractured temporality and a permanentuntimeliness.

It is also worth mentioning, in passing, that in the current phase the‘constitutive’ character of the neoliberal action is coupled with powerful‘destitutive’ strategies (the threat of default, the movement of capital as apolitical threat, etc.). As far as movements are concerned, moreover, theconstitutive imagination is fraught with destitutive contents (to take justone example, the right to insolvency is a first step to free the use of money

from direct exploitation).It follows that, today, a ‘constitutional’ reflection must also presup-pose the questioning and rethinking of the movement’s language andpractices upon which we have hitherto based our reflection. It is amatter of individuating some ‘instruments with which to impose a newrelation of forces on financial capital’.

2.1

Let us go back to the Italian constitution and to its first article –

‘the Republic is founded on labour’ – which used to torment us(or make us laugh) since we were kids. Let us simply recall that work-erism was born from the insight that this formula, in line with the inter-ventionist Stalinism of the 1930s, established the Keynesian-Fordistconvention as the norm of exploitation of workers and of the political

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regulation of a society in which, at best, the public was completely sub-ordinated to the enlarged reproduction of capital. The 1948 constitutionpromotes a capitalist society in reformist terms: the Soviet Union had

recently defeated the armies of European fascism and reformism was theonly option left to the capitalists. Under these conditions, it is under-standable how, in the class struggle, it became possible for the proletar-ians to exert pressure on the worker’s salary, as an instrument (note andbeware!) of democratic power, to be practised within and against theproductivity of the system: this process increases the (direct and indirect)income of the working class and of the working society.

In this context, the public was defined as the mediating function of capitalist social relations, that is to say, of the class struggle – and it is

around this function that bourgeois political representation (especiallythe Italian one) coalesces and takes form. As we all know, the Italianconstitution has never been completely realized. But even if it had, itwould not have given rise to that world of socialist wonders which wehad been promised. Already in the 1960s, M.S. Giannini – who did notwant to confuse the constitution with the spirit of the Resistance and therepublican constituent assembly, as all too many rhetoricians used to andstill do – noticed how claiming that the spirit of the constitution was stillalive simply amounted to taunting or cheating the citizens. However, the

1948 constitution was soon ‘conformed’, that is to say, adapted to theincremental development of Italian capitalism through the regulatoryaction of the state, as the representative of social capital, i.e. as themediator of the social struggle. And with the crisis of the 1970s andthe capitalist reforms of the 1980s began that reactionary process of general reorganization of the system in which we still live today.

What happened? The workers’ struggles at the centre of the empireand the struggles of liberation from colonial powers had undermined thepossibility of Fordist regulation. Capital took up the challenge and pro-

moted biocapitalism in its financial form. And it is not thanks to Foucaultthat, already in the 1960s, we started talking about social labour and theexploitation of the bios to define the new figures of capitalist regulationafter the ‘jolt’ of 1968. We were quite simply referring to the fact that,within the repeated fiscal crises of public regulation, capital had startedto resort to retirement funds and social insurances to balance the books.What happened? Capitalism was faced with the transformations inducedby the class struggle from within the industrial system, the lethal effectsof the ‘refusal of Fordist work’, the biopolitical pressure of the social

worker and the crisis of the planning state [Stato-piano]: its response wasto re-seize political control from the outside and to establish the politicalhegemony of the monetary sphere over the totality of social production.New York’s fiscal crisis lies at the beginning of this new political cycleand is exemplary.





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It is necessary to pay the closest attention to this passage (but alreadyat that time, Marazzi, Offe, O’Connor, Aglietta and others laid stress onits social character), because it has not only deprived the public of its

function as the mediator of exploitation (in favour of the so-called ‘mar-kets’), but also because it has brought about a new figure of exploitation:the exploitation of the bios, the use of welfare as a basis of financialvalorization. The world of health-production, of the insurance of youth and old age, of instruction and education, etc. – that is, theworld of the ‘production of man by man’ – has become the raw materialor, to be more precise, the blood that circulates in the arterial system of global financial capital. The world of labour has been exploited as bios:not only as ‘labour-force’ but as ‘living force’; not only as a productive

machine but as the communal body of the labouring society.And the same goes with the multinational corporations, which, espe-cially in the mining, oil and agro-business sectors, have begun to invadefurther territories, in Africa and Latin America. The more neoliberalismattacks the welfare state and sucks the blood of the living labour-forcein developed countries, the more it attacks and upsets the earth, asit destroys not only territories and forests but also the ways of livingof populations which had hitherto entertained a relation of sustenanceand invention with the earth. One is not only moved by the way

the countryside has been destroyed and invaded by soybean cultivationon an unlimited scale; by the way mountains have been hollowedout for the extraction of rare and precious minerals; by the way oilpollutes and blackens seacoasts: in this case too, the most importantform of exploitation concerns the indigenous populations, whose rela-tion to the land has been interrupted and whose lives have thus beenreduced to the most appalling misery. What is taking place is anew original accumulation, which affects the cognitive as much as thenatural world.

This is what the public has become as a consequence of the forms of exploitation and the practices of valorization that the new Europeanconstitution contains and which it imposes through the so-called ‘tech-nical governments’. After having embodied the mediation of capitalistpower in its struggle against the working class and social producers; afterfacing the impossibility to unblock the downward rigidity of wages andto outdo, through inflation, the relative advantages of the working soci-ety . . . this is what the public has become: in the name of capital it hasstarted to plunder pension funds, to empty the welfare state of its eman-

cipatory potential and to feed directly on the productive common. Allthis has happened thanks to the new monetary regimes that have beenimposed on the European subjects. With regard to the European cur-rency, the public sphere is totally subjected to, and harassed by, theprivate sector and its values.

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2.2

As soon as we consider, even in a cursory manner, the way the public hasbeen codified juridically by the emerging European constitution, we obvi-ously find that it is a sort of codification of what we have defined aboveas the new order of capitalist biopower.

When we speak of the European constitution today, we basicallyspeak of economic governance, and when we speak of economic govern-ance, we are translating, in substantial terms, the German concept of Ordo-liberalismus (we have been told, in fact, that this translation isalso used in official documents). This amounts to an authoritarian‘market social economy’, one which, under the pressure of the markets,has lost all social and reformist character and has glorified instead itsauthoritarian and ordering dimensions. This order is the product of aschool of thought that, starting from the 1920s and up until the present,has appeared under different and often disquieting political guises, anddominates today’s European constituent process. The principles tofollow – even if their consequences contribute to the dissolution of any(formal) democratic rule – are price stability, repressive regulation of unjustified budget deficit and a monetary union detached from thepolitical union. The control and bureaucratic supervision of budgetslacks in fact any democratic legitimation (of both national and commu-nitarian institutions); regulative interventions are repeatedly individua-lized outside of any general norm (communitarian action has beenemptied out of any form of justice); while, finally, European policies of social, distributive and compensatory regulation have effectively dis-solved. To use Jo ¨ rges’ words, the crisis has made Europe shift from a

jurisdictional construction to an authoritarian constitution, and from ademocratic deficit to democratic default.

But, now that we have stared at the dreadful face of the new consti-tution of the public, will we be enchanted by it and fall prey to its

gorgon-like grin? Certainly not. Whether we do or do not consider itas a class, we have to examine the sphere of the material constitution of the European multitude. Now, the separation between the economicorganization of power and the social structure of the working classes – where the former is entrenched in the European constitution, while thelatter are left to the individual member states – reveals not only a pro-found democratic crisis; it also produces – to use again Jo ¨ rges’ words – asort of ‘big bang’ which paradoxically reveals what was meant to remainhidden.

The fact that the European constituent process is guided by a monet-ary power which is democratically unaccountable; that there is a tech-nically independent biopower which exceeds economically the socialmisery which it creates; that an unbearable social austerity appears asthe only criterion for the construction of a regulatory mechanism – all





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this only proves that the ‘new’ public power embodied by the ESM(European Stability Mechanism) and by the TSCG (Treaty onStability, Coordination and Governance) represents a dreadful machine

for original accumulation by the private sector, at the expense of thecommunal fabric of social cooperation and the substratum of productiveactivities that the working class struggles and social upheavals had hith-erto secured.

If, on the one hand, this process destroys any possibility of a more orless democratic national politics (but we have seen to what extent the‘less’ already prevailed) and does not help to determine new communi-tarian powers [ potenze], it is nonetheless also true that, paradoxically, inthe current process of unification, the application of the golden rule castslight on – or, better said, forcefully accentuates – the new consistency of the multitude, effectively resistant and virtually antagonist

. . .

which is tobe governed! But it will not be easy to govern this proletariat who canorganize its common autonomy in cooperation and production.

3

How is it possible to break the (constitutional) financial convention thatnow dominates us, from the point of view of the workers and with the

force of the common? In order to advance along this path, it might beworth recalling a few definitions and, first of all, some of the presuppos-itions informing our analysis.

Financial capital is capital tout court and therefore it is not a parasiticentity or a mere set of accounting tools. It is rather a figure of capital inthe fullest sense of the term, in the same sense as industrial capital wasand is, and as also were those other figures of the ruling class thatemerged and/or disappeared in the course of the class struggle. It is asocial relation – but a social relation between whom?

In order to fully understand this point, it is first necessary to define asprecisely as possible the relation between ‘constant capital’ and ‘variablecapital’ – i.e. between capitalist control and the labour force – and todetail the ways in which the former subjugates the latter in the present.Now, this process of subjugation is new and singular, even though it is‘real’, i.e. total. In the phase under analysis, the labour force – ascooperative and cognitive labour-force – has in fact reappropriatedparts (fragments, attributes, modalities, etc.) of ‘fixed capital’.

If by ‘constant capital’ we indicate the set of productive conditions inthe hands of capital; if by ‘variable capital’ we indicate the set of values

transferred to the workers for their reproduction; and if by ‘fixed capital’we indicate the machinery and the structures used in the productiveprocess – we must then recognize that (in the phase under analysis)the labour-force, far from functioning solely as variable capital, hascome to appropriate – or, to be more precise, to incorporate – parts of

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fixed capital. The labour-force thus becomes virtually (relatively, yetpotentially) extraneous to capitalist control, i.e. to the capitalist synthe-sis. Moreover, when considering that, in addition to the working multi-

tude’s subtraction and incorporation of parts of fixed capital, there arealso episodes in which ‘circulating capital’ is being reappropriated (in thefigure of, for example, a migrant labour-force), the situation, then, mayexhibit a new and positive critical threshold.

It is in this modified condition that the subsumption of living labourinto constant capital – i.e. into financial capital, that is to say, into thekey figure in which capitalist control appears today – is realized. If thetechnical composition of the labour-force has become overly rigid(having absorbed parts of fixed and circulating capital), and the capitalist

synthesis is called to control this composition (i.e. it is called to renderthis rigidity flexible or, better said, it is called to fragment and crush it),capital, then, can only exercise its control in relation to the field of pro-duction ‘vertically’, that is to say, by externalizing (as it were) and, in anycase, by emphasizing, the ‘political’ dimension of control over and aboveany other element (such as ideologies, functionality, etc.). Financial cap-ital is endowed with these characteristics and carries out this task.

Now, this abstract figure of capitalist control is subjected to greatstrain – and, arguably, to contradiction – by the fact that today theprocess of valorization, and therefore the processes of exploitation of living labour, is becoming more and more internal to those bodieswhich are the direct expression of the productive functions and which,through social cooperation, play a role in the organization of production.This, in turn, amounts to the global investment of life on the part of capital: capital becomes biopolitical. But this also implies a fundamentalcontradiction: on the one hand, capital demands variable capital to befully internalized within the process of valorization (see below); on theother hand, there is a powerful, if total, abstraction of constant capital(in its financial form) from variable capital (as social living labour andcognitive labour which are irreducible, partially at least, to commodifi-cation). Financial capital thus appears to turn the social relation,which defines the concept of capital [concetto di capitale], into a primarily

political relation.Now, as seen, in the convention of financial capital, money takes the

place of labour-value. In the ‘political relation’, which constitutes finan-cial capital, the convention of value is monetary. The monetary conven-tion takes the place of the labour-value convention (i.e. it represents anew figure overcoming the ‘law of value’, as interpreted during the phase

of the industrial exploitation of labour, in an individualistic, factory- andwage-based way). Now the convention is instead singularized, social anddebt-based. Contrary to what used to be the case in Keynesianism, itdefines the wage part as the residue of the monetary unities that are theequivalent of abstract labour.





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How to proceed at this point? We have repeated (sometimes annoy-ingly) that the demand for a new constitutionalization of labour repre-sents a completely abstract attempt to resume classical public

[ pubblicistiche] mediations. We have thus concluded (citing GisoAmendola’s Precariat Constitution [Costituzione precaria]) that

today the meaning of a possible constitutive moment consists in

untying the very idea of constitution from the public-sovereign

mediation, within which it was given originally, and to understand

processes of such constitution as a struggle for the continuous open-

ing of constituent processes, in opposition to how governance tends

to neutralize and channel them within pre-constituted forms of

expression. In a (not overly) provocative way, it might be saidthat ‘precarious’ subjectivities have an interest in the ‘precarization’

of the constitution itself, in keeping it open to continual develop-

ments and to processes of self-organization.

The new battlefield for the constituent struggle is therefore the terrainof governmentality. The point that needs to be stressed is that the latter‘does not exclude the law [il diritto], but rather traverses it, thus promot-ing its progressive decentralization and flexibilization and, at the same

time, nullifying its traditional claim to autonomy from the other socialsciences’. It is just necessary to dispel the illusion that, within governance,it would be possible to institute a sort of ‘dualism of power’, which couldstrain the constituent process and which would eventually make itexplode. No, we are definitely not in an insurrectional situation; weshould not expect any Bolshevist exploits because we are not dealingwith the symmetrical confrontation between two powers. We arerather dealing with the powerful asymmetry of the new cognitivelabour-force – its ‘rich poverty’ – which does indeed confront the dom-

ination of the master (i.e. constant capital), but which is not induced torush into a struggle because it is at the same time irreducibly resistant andrigid in its precariousness, since it has incorporated parts of circulatingand fixed capital.

We are thus touching on the real problem, freed from any catastrophicor palingenetic presupposition: what would it mean (starting from theever-renewing production of subjectivity and from the incorporation of parts of fixed capital) to consider the constituent processes not as defini-tive, but as co-essential to a new constitutional process? To be sure, a new

constitutional formation of labour would be a thoroughly reactionaryidea, mere nostalgia for the public-sovereign mediation: but, again, whatwould it mean to have a constituent process that recognizes fragmenta-tion, the pluralism of the multitude of labour and society? What would itmean to constitute a common ‘we’ within a social reality in which every

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identity has dissolved and every recomposition, accordingly, can only be‘constituent’?

At this point, we need to emphasize, once more, the extraordinary

opportunity offered by the monetary constitutional convention: thelatter reveals that anti-capitalist antagonism does not only concernrestricted portions of the social labour-force (it does not concern theliving labour hired in an individualistic, localized and wage-basedmanner) but the multitude, as a singularized and social reality, onethat is in a relation of dependence (since it is indebted), but which cannonetheless reappropriate wealth through the recognition and construc-tion of the common. The reality of the multitude: indebted, subjected tothe alienation of the media, permeated by the sad passions of insecurity,and alienated from democratic representation by the revulsion that thelatter deserves and by the political impotence that it displays – and yet,precisely because of this, impelled to express a powerful will to struggle.

The ‘indignados’ and ‘occupy’ movements have convincingly initiatedthese constituent behaviours. The Italian movements concerned with‘common goods’ are also active in the same sphere. But it is now essentialto utilize the ‘constituent’ dimension in order to break with all ‘corpora-tive’, identificatory and/or localistic moments of struggle. We mostdefinitely do not want to deny that any moment of struggle is linked toparticular interests and/or places, but the struggle today is either construed

against the universal image of financial domination or simply cannot exist.We have never been luddites vis-a ` -vis machinery, but rather saboteurs of the exploitation generated by the organization of labour. Similarly, today,we do not smash ATMs, but we sabotage the system of financial domin-ation because we want to constitutionalize – i.e. we want to appropriate – the banks and the powers which, through money, organize and reward,separate and dominate, capture and subtract the value autonomously andcommunally produced by the workers.

3.2

At this point, it is possible to ask how to study the processes of subjecti-vation as they appear under these circumstances and what favourable orobstructing conditions could facilitate or block a politics of the common.

As far as the Italian movement is concerned, the references to the 1948constitution or, even worse, to the constitutional reforms that are beingproposed at the European level, are without a doubt detrimental. We arerather interested in considering the political actions that might contribute

to create an alternative to the crisis and to facilitate processes of subjectivation which would be adequate to new projects of struggle.

A first group of initiatives falls under the label of insolvency. By fight-ing against debt and in support of the ‘citizenship income’, these strugglesare inspired by the old ones about the relative wage, and they are





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revolutionary in so far as they question the measure of labour. Along thesame lines, it is also necessary to formulate a theory and a practice of ‘precariate strikes’: in other words, it is a matter of understanding what

struggles might ‘harm’ the bosses, starting from the condition of misery(i.e. precariousness) that has been imposed upon the workers. The strug-gles aimed at reappropriating places, squares, theatres, community cen-tres, squats, etc., also fall within this framework. But the most importantinitiatives in this respect will be those that succeed in mutualizing [mutua-lizzare], in alternative ways, the administration of welfare, of education,of housing policies, etc. In this case too, the question is to act on thedirect wage of the workers, in order to improve it both from a monetaryperspective and in terms of social quality.

Destitutions

This is the second area in which today’s struggles are taking place. The firstpoint is to try to destitute the chains of capitalist control. In neoliberalism,social and juridical chaos is deemed normal. To take it up and transformthe litigious character of governance into a moment of ‘counter-power’ isthe task of any force that opposes neoliberalism. In Latin America, wehave witnessed examples of movements that have devised and imposedtheir agenda on their governments for long periods of time. It will not be

easy to repeat this experience in Europe, but it is nonetheless worth trying,without deceiving ourselves that these ruptures could turn into stablemechanisms of counter-power. In this case, the destituent effect is stillpredominant over the constituent one, and yet, it is not useless.

Why do riots and uprisings not result in new institutions? This ques-tion is idle, if not provocative, if it implicitly presupposes the demonstra-tion that riots and uprisings cannot create new institutions. For the timebeing they do not – as already said – because the destituent effect is stilleducating and predominant.

A second battlefield consists of the actions against the constitutionalstructures of capitalist biopower. The question, in this case, is the devel-opment of the democratic, mass constituent power of the multitude [mol-titudinario]. The question is to attack wealth, not simply its control, butwealth itself, not simply the capitalist capacity to subjugate society, butthe subjugated structures of society. At this point, the destituent strugglesbecome crucial to create and impose an alternative constituent dispositif upon the existing chaos (the transformation of juridical systems and theincapacity of capitalism to recompose their effectiveness outside of

governance).

Communalizations

Here the constituent initiatives come into the picture. From the public tothe common: the aim is to affirm the right of ‘access to the common’, to

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realize the desire for the common which is already lodged in the workers’hearts. Finally, to communalize amounts to building new institutions of the common and, in particular, that ‘currency of the common’ which will

allow the citizens to produce freely, while respecting solidarity.From what has been said so far, the following alternative appearsclearly: on the one hand, there is the bio-value captured (i.e. extracted)by capitalism across the whole of society; on the other hand, there is itsmonetary form and the way it is made functional to the exploitation of the whole of society. What does it mean to speak of the ‘currency of thecommon’ in this respect? It means freeing the power [ potenza] of thelabour-force from capitalist domination; it means establishing equalityas the condition of freedom.

Note

This article is based on a paper given at a conference held at Universita ` FedericoII, Naples, on 7 December 2012.

Acknowledgement

The TCS editors would like to acknowledge the help of Paolo Palladino in the general

editorial process for the section and improving the translations.

Antonio Negri is a Marxist political philosopher and a key figure of theItalian Autonomia Movement. Beyond co-founding groundbreaking

journals such as Quaderni Rossi (1961–8), Futur Anté rieur (1990–98)and Multitudes (2000–), he has also participated in the establishmentof institutions for autonomous education and research: UniNomade(2004–10), UniNomade 2.0 (2010–13) and EuroNomade (2013–). His

numerous publications and indefatigable intellectual activity have hada fundamental impact in renewing and sharpening the tools of Marxisttheory to match the new challenges facing class struggle. His essays andbooks have been translated into many languages. Together with MichaelHardt, he is the author of Empire (2000), Multitude (2004) andCommonwealth (2009).

This article is part of the Theory, Culture & Society special section,

Eurocrisis, Neoliberalism and the Common, edited by Tiziana Terranova,Adalgiso Amendola and Sandro Mezzadra.


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