The “Fragment on Machines” and the Grundrisse.The Workerist Reading in Question.

Riccardo Bellofiore* and Massimiliano Tomba**

Introduction: When History Begins

“In Westerns it often happens that the protagonist, confronted by a very concrete dilemma, quotes a passage from the Old Testament. The words of Psalms or of the book of Ezekiel, taken out of their context, wedge themselves naturally in the contingent situation in which they are pronounced. Philological care is out of place in the moment of danger, when it is about a revolver shot or the prosecution of an injustice. The biblical quotation creates a short-circuit with a practical urgency. It is in this way that from the early 1960s onwards the ‘Fragment on Machines’ of Karl Marx has been interpreted”.

Thus wrote Paolo Virno in the first number of Luogo Comune (1990), a journal that, beginning from the interpretation of Marx’s “Fragment on Machines”, sought to rethink politically what was happening in the Italian universities.1 It was the so-called ‘Panther movement’ [Movimento della Pantera], a student movement that erupted in 1989 in protest against the privatisation of the university proposed by the then minister Ruberti. Virno continues, writing that

“These pages [of the ‘Fragment’], written rapidly in 1858 under the pressure of urgent political tasks, have been recalled very often in order to orientate oneself in a slapdash way in front of the unprecedented quality of workers strikes, the mass absenteeism, certain behaviours of the youth, the introduction of robots in Mirafiori and of computers in the offices. The history of successive interpretations of the ‘Fragment’ is a story of crisis and new beginnings”.2

In these pages we want to trace the history of some of these interpretations ‘against the grain’, attempting at the same time to initiate an authentic confrontation with some of them by going back to their pre-histories.

The story begins with number 4 (1964) of Quaderni Rossi. 3. Reanto Solmi published here, for the first time in Italy, a translation of the “Fragment on Machines”. Marx’s manuscripts had been published by the Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus of Moscow in two parts, in 1939 and 1941, with the title Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Rohentwurf). The text was then reprinted by Dietz Verlag, the Berlin-based publisher of the works of Marx and Engels, in 1953.

The text on machines was greeted with enthusiasm by Italian Marxists who saw in these pages the possibility of renovating the reading of Marx. They saw in this text an excess of subjectivity that

* Riccardo Bellofiore is at the ‘Hyman P. Minsky’ Department of Economics of the University of Bergamo, where he teaches Monetary Economics, Hystory of Economic Thought, and Theories of Knowledge. He is a Research Associate of the Amsterdam History and Methodology of Economics Group.* * Massimiliano Tomba is researcher in Political Philosophy in the Department of Historical and Political Studies and he teaches Philosophy of Human Rights at the University of Padua. 1 Translator’s note: the “Fragment on Machines” [Frammento sulle macchine] was the title given to the Italian translation of a section of Marx’s manuscripts published in English in the Grundrisse, MECW 29, p. 82-92.2 P. Virno, “Edizione semicritica di un classico Frammento”, Luogo comune, 1 (1990), pp. 9-13.3 S. Wright, Storming Heaven. Class composition and struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London, 2002), pp. 32-62.

could unblock the consolidated interpretations of the Stalinist orthodoxy of the PCI. Raniero Panzieri, in “Plusvalore e pianificazione” [Surplus-value and planning], published in the same number of Quaderni Rossi as the “Fragment on Machines”, read in these pages of the Grundrisse “a theory of the ‘unsustainibility’ of capitalism at its maximum level of development, when the ‘superabundant’ productive forces come into conflict with the ‘restricted basis’ of the system, and the quantitative measurement of work becomes an evident absurdity”.4

Here are the coordinates of what will become the guiding track of the reading of Italian workerism. Capitalism, read and analysed “at its maximum level of development”, gives rise to a contradiction between the superabundant development of machinery and the restricted base of the system that turns the “quantitative measuring of work” into an absurdity. It was not Panzieri to draw the consequences of this approach, however. Other workerists, above all Mario Tronti and Toni Negri, were the ones who pushed these intuitions towards the liquidation of the law of value.

In order to do that, it was necessary to play off the Grundrisse against Capital. However, Panzieri had opened the way to this as well. “In the quoted fragment, there is a model of ‘transition’ of capitalism directly to communism: contra numerous passages of Capital and the Critique of the Gotha Programme”.5 For Tronti, the Grundrisse, in its freshness, was to be considered as a book politically “more advanced that the other two”, that is to say, more advanced than the first volume of Capital and also the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.6 Thus began the history of an overvaluation of the Grundrisse that, via Toni Negri and Paolo Virno, goes through to post-workerism, which reduces Marx to those few pages of the “Fragment on Machines”. It is now a rarity to find citations of Capital in the texts of the Italian post-workerists, as can be see in the most internationally noted books, Empire and Multitude. Let us be clear: it is not our intention to reopen the querelle of Capital against the Grundrisse or vice versa. We believe, however, that it is useful to reread Marx “backwards”, seeking to make him interact with the current situation; to make him sound like an alarm bell when faced by danger. We will take a few steps in this direction at the end of this text.

Looking at Prehistory

If we have to write the history of Italian interpretations of the “Fragment”, however, it is first necessary to go back to prehistory, that is, to the history prior to number 4 of Quaderni Rossi.

It is a history that remains rooted in the most consistent anti-Stalinist Marxism. The first to underline the importance of these pages in Italy was Amadeo Bordiga.7 He heard about them from Roger Dangeville, member of the Internationalist Communist Party and editor of the first French edition of the Grundrisse for Editions Anthropos (1967).8 Perhaps, via Danilo Montaldi and others, it is possible to identify a certain genealogy or indirect knowledge between the group of Quaderni Rossi and these writings of Bordiga.9 This is not our problem, however. We are more interested to show the theoretical and political questions that were raised by Bordiga in 1957.

Bordiga was interested in reading the automation of production from a Marxist perspective. It had cast both the “bourgeois economists” as well as those of the “workers’ gang of false Russian

4 R. Panzieri, “Plusvalore e pianificazione”, in R. Panzieri, Spontaneità e organizzazione (Pisa, 1994), p. 68.5 Ibid.6 M. Tronti, Operai e capitale (Torino, 1966), p. 210.7 A. Bordiga, “Traiettoria e catastrofe della forma capitalistica nella classica monolitica costruzione teorica del marxismo”, il programma comunista, 19-20 (1957), in A. Bordiga, Economia marxista ed economia controrivoluzionaria (Milano, 1976), pp. 189-208.8 Cf. L. Grilli, Amadeo Bordiga: capitalismo sovietico e comunismo (Milano, 1982), p. 253.9 On some analogies between Bordiga and Panzieri, cf. P.A. Rovatti, “Il problema del comunismo in Panzieri”, Aut-Aut, 149-150 (1975), pp. 75-101.

socialism” into confusion.10 Automation posed the problem of the drastic reduction of industrial labour-power, of a new unemployment and of the foreseeable difficulty, for a great mass of women and men, of earning money and, above all, of spending it in order to buy the enormous mass of commodities produced in the half-empty automated factories. On the one hand, Bordiga intended to attack the epigones of the Soviet formula of ‘full employment’ and the social democratic communists who pursued the democratisation of capital. On the other hand, there were the “pipsqueak Marxists” who, faced by the prospect of a “totalitarian automatic production”, were baffled by the fact that with it also the law according to which value derived from the labour of the workers would fall. Bordiga responded: “Out with the laws of value, of equivalent exchange and surplus-value: aonce they fall, the form of bourgeois production itself falls”.11 For Bordiga, it was a case of showing the necessity of communism directly from the phenomena of capitalism.

This is the general context. The analysis of some passages, always written in a heated polemic with progressivist Soviet Marxism, show the sharp edge of Bordiga’s politics. He writes: “Science that forces the inanimate limbs of the machine, in conformity to its construction to act as Automatons, does not exist in the consciousness of the Worker, but through the Machine it acts upon him as extraneous Power, as the Power of the machine itself”.12 The diverse limbs of the machinery act like a single automaton because the goal for which the machine was planned and constructed is that of being an automaton. Precisely due to how the machines are constructed and the end for which they are constructed, they act as an automaton [durch ihre Konstruktion zweckgemäß als Automat zu wirken]: the goal of machinic construction is simultaneously empowerment and intensification of labour (a goal that not only doesn’t exist in the consciousness of the workers, but which, rather, is counterposed to it), an external power [fremde Macht] that seeks to make them automatons.

It follows not only that “the whole system of automatic machinery forms a monster that squashes an enslaved and unhappy humanity under the weight of its oppression, and this is the monster that dominates the whole picture of present society drafted by Marx”, but also that science is “above all technological supremacy, monopoly of an exploiting minority”.13

Bordiga attacks the progressivist optimism of the reformism that sees in scientific and technological progress a new step towards greater well-being. What Bordiga puts in discussion is not scientific progress as such, but rather its class character: the fact that the production of well-being produces at the same time the malaise of another class. Against the apologetic enthusiasm of technological progress as such (which Bordiga, with his unmistakable prose, calls the “inauspicious apologists of dead labour (nefasti del lavoro morto)”), he writes: “Whoever appropriates the capital produced by living labour (surplus-value) is represented neither as a human person nor as a human class; he is the Monster, the objectified Labour, the fixed Capital, monopoly and fortress of the Capital Form in itself, Beast without soul and even without life, but which devours and kills living labour, the labour of the living and the living themselves”.14

Having Russian Marxism as his target, Bordiga strikes at diverse variants of Stalinist Marxism. In the first place, he attacks the Soviet ideology that presented the increase of Russian industrial production as aimed to produce a socialism of steel. For Bordiga, on the other hand, it is precisely the conversion of surplus labour into surplus-value for the production of fixed capital, instead of into free time, that denotes the capitalist mode of production: “fixed capital as machinery is the one that today, in the East as well as in the West, we call the ensemble of instrumental goods, with an equal tendency to exalt it in order to increase the mass of productive forces, the new

10 Bordiga, Economia marxista, p. 189.11 Bordiga, Economia marxista, p. 190.12 Bordiga, Economia marxista, p. 193.13 Bordiga, Economia marxista, pp. 193-4.14 Bordiga, Economia marxista, p. 200.

Monster that today suffocates humanity. This is a true indicator of the domination of the capitalist mode of production”.15

However, Bordiga is not only attacking Russian ideology for trying to pass off the development of the productive forces for socialism, an ideology present also in much self-styled anti-Stalinism. Bordiga also attacks the idea that what is monstrous in the capitalist mode of production is simply private appropriation by the capitalists of surplus-value. What is bestial above all is the fixed capital that devours living labour. “The Beast”, as Bordiga writes, “is the enterprise, not the fact that it has a boss”.16 Bordiga attacks the anti-worker variants of actually existing socialism with equal ferocity: the vision of socialism as self-management or workers’ control should be rejected: it does not posit an end to the despotism of the factory, which is due not to the evil of the capitalist but to the laws of capital, and it continues the process of valorisation of capital. The degradation of living labour in capitalist enterprises cannot be resolved by changing the owner of this firm, but by revolutionizing the mode and conditions of labour. For Bordiga, “the antithesis between capitalism and socialism is neither posited nor decided at the level of property or management, but at the level of production”.17

The apologetics of technological development served well to sustain capitalist accumulation in Russia and social democratic gradualism in the West, both visions of a capitalism able to be harmonised with socialism. Stalinism, just like Western social democracy, were for Bordiga the danger. They would continue to block the recommencement of the revolutionary class movement for many more years.

Panzieri and Tronti

Some of these points can be found in Panzieri and in Italian workerism. In Quaderni Rossi, Panzieri also challenged the then-dominant orthodox Marxism that was unable to comprehend the interrelations between technology and class domination. For Panzieri, what had to be placed in question was the idea of a neutral technological progress, external to the class relations. Thus, in number 1 of Quaderni Rossi, Panzieri published “On the Capitalist Use of Machines in Neo-capitalism” [Sull’uso capitalistico delle macchine nel neocapitalismo] (1961), where he maintained that the “capitalist use of machines is not […] the simple distortion or deviation from an ‘objective’ development, rational in itself, but, rather, determines technological development”.18 There is thus a technological development that is intrinsically capitalist: “technological development is manifested as development of capitalism”.19 Panzieri's reflections are based on Capital, not yet on the Grundrisse. While the theoreticians of the CGIL investigated the new capitalist organisation of labour by beginning from the intrinsic rationality of the labour process, Panzieri, following the Marx of Capital, demonstrated the non-neutrality of science, subjected to capital in order to augment “the power of the ‘boss’” [die Macht des ‘Meisters’ (master)]’.20. The automatic machine is for Panzieri as Marx describes it: “an instrument of torture” [Mittel der Tortur]21 that should be investigated beginning from the specific use-value of constant capital and of the technology that plans it; for machinery is, from its very conception, designed to maximise the subordination of living labour.

15 Bordiga, Economia marxista, p. 211.16 A. Bordiga, “I fondamenti del comunismo rivoluzionario marxista nella dottrina e nella storia della lotta proletaria internazionale”, il programma comunista, 13-15 (1957), p. 56.17 L. Grilli, Amadeo Bordiga, p. 264.18 R. Panzieri, “Sull’uso capitalistico delle macchine nel neocapitalismo”, in Spontaneità e organizzazione, p. 27.19 Ibid.20 Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 35 [Capital, Volume 1], p. 426.21 Ibid.

The critique of “stagnationism” that was widespread in traditional Marxism was accompanied by a capacity to find in Marx a “duplicity” of “labour-power” and “working class”, which had been lost in the Marxism of the Second and Third International. Both had proposed an ‘economistic’ vision of a world of labour characterised inevitably by ‘passivity’. After Panzieri, this theme was radicalised by Tronti. Panzieri progressively added to the emphasis on the non-neutrality of the productive forces and of machines the idea of a ‘plan of capital’. Total capital would be able to plan not only the economy but also society. This immediately constitutes a potent critique of the idea that socialism is identified with the mere ownership of the means of production and with planning. The anarchy of the market as limit of capitalist development is increasingly replaced by the struggle of the workers as principal if not exclusive contradiction: not so much insofar as labour is a ‘part’ inevitably integrated within capital, but insofar as those struggles assume political characteristics. Tronti begins from this insight. His point of departure was to split Marxism as science of capital from Marxism as revolutionary theory. Marxism as science of capital looks at the workers as ‘labour-power’, that is, from the point of view of the theory of economic development, reducing it integrally to variable capital, therefore to labour qua labour totally subaltern to capital. It is ‘labour’ seen with the lenses of capital. Marxism as revolutionary theory looks at the workers as ‘working class’, which refuses its inclusion within capital politically. It is Marxism as theory of the political dissolution of capital, which looks at capital form the point of view of the working class.

These reflections allowed new fields of research and political intervention to be opened up: the non-neutrality of the process of rationalisation, the non-neutrality of sciences and of technology could be comprehended only assuming the partisan point of view of living labour. It will be the workers of Marghera, and not only them, who produce new reflections and political battles on the noxiousness, beginning from the fact that “diseases and disorders that are contracted in the factory are directly linked to the technological evolution”.22

As we will see, there political ideas were abandoned in the 1970s, because a new phase, with its new reading of the “Fragment”, began to substitute the social worker for the mass worker. It was a theory that ‘would finally call the whole meaning of workerism into question’.23 This transition, notwithstanding the elements of strong political innovation owed to Negri, could find a point of support in the history of workerism. In the second number of Quaderni Rossi, Tronti fired a burning arrow: The Factory and the Society (1962). Here, Tronti radicalised the points of heterodox Marxism of the nascent workerism, emphasising the fact that the relations of production are above all relations of power. At the same time, as Steve Wright observes, Tronti's intervention “bore within it a number of ambiguities and misconceptions soon to be transmitted to workerism itself. The most striking of these concerned the essay’s central theme of the socialisation of labour under ‘specifically’ capitalist production, and the implications of this for the delineation of the modern working class”.24 Tronti came to sustain that labour-power potentially produces surplus-value before the labour process insofar as it is on the labour market, in the wage contract, that the amount of labour to be performed is stipulated. The productivity of value is potentially constituted. That ‘potentially’ progressively vanished from the workerist discourse; but already the consequences are immediately clear. Struggles over the wage that make it rise in excess with respect to productivity, or the refusal of labour within production, signal practically the transition from ‘labour-power’ to ‘working class’. Just as soon as the working class engages in conflict, it immediately becomes antagonism and revolutionary rupture. Capital reacts with development, and development extends the antagonism from the factory to society.

Crisis is immediatistically affirmed as consequent to antagonism. At the same time, it is equally immediately negated, insofar as it is transfigured immediately into the development of capital. The opposite is also true. The development of capital is simultaneously development of the 22 Assemblea Autonoma di Marghera, Assenteismo: un terreno di lotta operaia (Padova, 1975), p. 65.23 Wright, Storming Heaven, p. 141.24 Wright, Storming Heaven, p. 40.

working class, or of the antagonistic subjectivity selected as dominant in each period. Development and crisis are in the end the same thing, referable to the ‘independence’ that the power of ‘labour’ has assumed in fixing the ‘necessary labour’, with the struggle over the wage or over income, and to the immediate productivity of value that social cooperation gives to ‘living labour’, which will soon be ready for ‘exodus’. At that point, the premises of the ‘post-workerist’ dispositif are almost fully constituted; and with them, the incapacity to deconstruct theoretically and practically the moments of class decomposition that result from the phase of crisis and restructuring of capital, as is already evident in Negri’s thought during the 1970s.

Negri and Virno

In “Workers’ Party against Labour” (1973), taking his cue from two texts prior to the writing of Capital – that is, the Grundrisse and the previously unpublished sixth Chapter of Capital (“Results of the Immediate Process of Production”) – Negri confronted the changes relative to the conflictuality of class and to capitalist accumulation in the phase of the real subsumption of labour to capital. The law of value is definitively rejected. Beginning from new forms of insurgency, such as the refusal of labour by large masses of youth, a theoretical structure is reread and redefined that made the parts of the working day – that is, necessary labour and surplus-value – two independent variables struggling with each other.

Negri begins at this point to work on an extension of the notion of productive labour, which comes tendentially to coincide with wage labour, thus giving rise to “the new social figure of a unified proletariat”.25 These points are progressively developed. In Proletarians and State [Proletari e Stato] (1976), the transition from the mass worker to the social worker is explicit: the entire theoretical frame is structured so as to make way for a new revolutionary subjectivity individuated on the limits of marginalisation.26 The scheme was then replicated many times. From forms of conflictuality of a new subject, declared each time to be hegemonic, an analysis of the capitalist tendency is delineated again and again that redeploys other figures of the worker to a residual position.

Negri had to push Marx beyond Marx. In order to do this, he again turned to the Grundrisse. The Grundrisse's insight, according to Negri, is greatest precisely in the analysis of the “Fragment on Machines”. Here there is expressed the “necessary tendency of capital” towards the subsumption of the entire society.27 At this point, Negri affirms that “the capitalist appropriation of society is complete”.28 Negri follows Marx enthusiastically when Marx writes that “production based on exchange-value falls”; for Negri, it is a case of the “impossibility of the measure of exploitation”, of the “emptying out of the theory of value”.29 The evacuation of the “theory of value” – a term which is not Marx’s – from every element of comparison transforms it into “pure and simple command, pure and simple form of politics”.30 Negri individuates “the apex of Marx’s investigation” in the crisis of the law of value. He supposes that at the end of the 1970s we had “broadly entered into a phase of crisis of the material functioning of the law of value”.31 Why? Simply because now value would no longer be measurable, and therefore “the theory of surplus-value, in its centrality, eliminates any scientific claim to centralization and of domination conceived from inside the theory

25 A. Negri, “Partito operaio contro il lavoro” (1973), in S. Bologna et al., Crisi e organizzazione operaia (Milano 1974), p. 129.26 A. Negri, Proletari e Stato (Milano 1976), p. 65.27 A. Negri, Marx oltre Marx (1978) (Roma 1998), p. 170.28 Negri, Marx oltre Marx, p. 173.29 Negri, Marx oltre Marx, p. 178.30 Negri, Marx oltre Marx, p. 178.31 Negri, Marx oltre Marx, p. 29.

of value”.32 It is precisely here that Negri finds the superiority of the Grundrisse, not (yet?) ensnared in the analysis of value and thus open to the “action of revolutionary subjectivity”, which are instead supposed to be blocked by the categories of Capital.33

But one should rather say that the ‘collapsism’ implied in the fall of the rate of profit of the “Fragment on Machines” results, besides being a political dimension that Marx wanted to give to his thoughts in a period of economic crisis, from a categorial opacity on points that are absolutely fundamental for the comprehension of the relation between absolute and relative surplus-value.

Marx has not yet defined in an adequate way the notion of value, a definition that was only elaborated precisely in the period of the writing of these manuscripts. The first chapter that was supposed to treat it was not written. The incipit of the Grundrisse – “II. Money” – refers to a first chapter, still not written, on value. It is therefore false to maintain that the “Fragment” celebrates the downfall of the law of value, if Marx's reflection on value was still not yet mature at that stage. This theoretical work occurs in the manuscripts of the 1860s. It is also important, however, for the question posed by the “Fragment”, that Marx, in the Grundrisse, had not yet defined his own notion of socially necessary labour as labour that, in a determinate quantity, is objectified in exchange-value. When he speaks of necessary labour, his reasoning remains blocked by difficulties that Marx continues to attribute to Ricardo, whose theory of value, still sometimes considered legitimate in 1858,34 will be definitively presented as the bearer of a confusion between values and cost prices in the middle of the writing of the economic manuscripts of 1861-3.35

In a text at the end of the 1970s on the “Fragment on Machines”, Paolo Virno, after having shown how the objectivist reading of the “collapsism implicit in the fall of the rate of profit” blocks the subjective enrichening of living labour as non-capital, analysed the modalities of socialisation brought into being by the development of production based on machinery, a socialisation that is developed throughout the system of machines. “The devastating effect of the integral subsumption of the labour process to capital is the gigantic extension of the tasks of control”, such that the socialisation of labour occurs outside the immediate production process.36 The conclusions of Virno were interesting, because, complicating Marx’s reading, he could read the General Intellect not as coincident with fixed capital, but as articulating itself “by means of the specific dislocation of living labour at the key points of production”.

Virno tried to trace an analytic of concrete labour and of the subjective comportments not in the unity but in the rupture between General Intellect and fixed capital: if in this rupture living labour becomes labour of surveillance and coordination not immediately referable to factory tasks, then the attitudes and actions of refusal can be read as the crisis of the relation of capital in terms of subjectivity.

In 1990, this theoretical-political analysis thought to have found the subject of its dreams: the movement of the Pantera. The high school and university students in struggle became the

32 Negri, Marx oltre Marx, p. 30.33 Negri, Marx oltre Marx, p. 22.34 Vygodskij claims that at the time of the Poverty of Philosophy Marx was still ‘on the terrain of the theory of value of Ricardo’, lacking here ‘the concept of abstract labour as labour that creates value’: V.S. Vygodskij, Istorija odnogo velikogo otkrytija Karla Marksa, Moskva, 1965, Italian translation by C. Pennavaja, Introduzione ai “Grundrisse” di Marx, Milano, 1974, pp. 20-1. According to Vygodskij the great discovery of Marx, the theory of surplus-value, occurs in 1857-58 and presupposes the theory of value. Also for Walter Tuchscheerer, at the time of the Poverty of Philosophy, Marx remained at positions substantially Ricardian as far as regards the theory of value. The theory of value, Tuchscheerer maintains, is elaborated during the 1850s and comes to a ‘provisional conclusion’ in the Grundrisse. Cf. W. Tuchscheerer, Bevor «Das Kapital» entstand, Berlin, 1968, Italian translation by L. Berti, Prima del «Capitale». La formazione del pensiero economico di Marx (1843/1858), Firenze, 1980, pp. 370-1, but also pp. 222 et sqq. Recent studies have emphasised that Marx continued to work on value also during the different editions of Capital: R. Hecker, Zur Entwicklung der Werttheorie von der 1. Zur 3. Auflage des ersten Bandes des ‘Kapitals’ von Karl Marx (1867-1883) in Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch, n.10 (1987), pp.147-96.35 Marx to Engels, 2nd August 1862, MECW 41, p. 394.36 P. Virno, “Lavoro e conoscenza”, in Pre-print 3/2, p. 48.

synecdoche able to explain the current relations of production. With a habitual gesture of workerism, what was grasped was the “deep tendency of capitalist development”; beginning from this, having seen that “the tendential primacy of knowledge turns working time into an abject basis”,37 the new subjectivity in struggle was individuated, a subjectivity which declared from the occupied universities “the function of central productive force that is assumed today by knowledge”, the new barycentre of the connection between production and knowledge. Thus the new and “principal productive force” was discovered that relegated “parcelised and repetitive work” to “a residual position”. Marx’s analysis in the “Fragment” was thus once more taken up there at that point where it was most weak, short-circuiting it with the present: “what leaps out at the eyes, in these years, is the full actual realisation of the tendency described by Marx”. Just as for Negri, for Virno also the so called law of value had been “dissolved and confuted by capitalist development itself”. At the base of this analysis there is a stagist image of modes of production. Negri never renounces a stagist image that begins from the professional workers, goes via the mass workers of the taylorist and fordist regimes, and ends up at the social worker, in which figure “the various threads of immaterial labor-power are being woven together”.38 The certainty of having individuated the tendency, or rather of producing it, is such so as to permit Negri to trace out equations: “I am convinced that the metropolis is related to the multitude like the working class was to the factory”.39

For Negri, the Grundrisse represents “an extraordinary theoretical anticipation of mature capitalist society”, where Marx tells us “that capitalist development leads to a society in which industrial workers’ labour (insofar as immediate labour) is now only a secondary element in the organisation of capitalism”. When capitalism has subsumed the society, “productive labour becomes intellectual, cooperative, immaterial labour”. The consequence that Negri draws is clear: “we live today in a society evermore characterised by the hegemony of immaterial labour”. 40 If, on the one hand, according to Negri, “all forms of labor are today socially productive […] there is [nevertheless] always one figure of labor that exerts hegemony over the others”.41 Thus the industrial labour of the nineteenth and twentieth century has lost its hegemony and, in the last decades of the twentieth century, “immaterial labour” has emerged in its place.42 The General Intellect becomes “hegemonic in capitalist production”, “immaterial cognitive labour becomes immediately productive” and the “cognitariat” becomes the “fundamental productive force that makes the system function”: the new hegemonic figure.43 Having to respond in some way to the critiques of those who replied that “immaterial labour” is limited to a minoritarian part of the planet, Hardt and Negri affirm that “immaterial labour constitutes a minority of global labor, and it is concentrated in some of the dominant regions of the globe. Our claim, rather, is that immaterial labor has become hegemonic in qualitative terms and has imposed a tendency on other forms of labor and society itself”.44 However, Hardt and Negri do nothing more than bypass the question: to critiques regarding the minoritarian character of immaterial labour, quantitatively important perhaps only in a fifth of the planet, they reply that it is a case of a qualitative and tendential predominance. That immaterial labour is minoritarian and linked only to some areas of the Western metropolis doesn’t interest Negri, because what he is interested in is its character of tendency.

37 P. Virno, “Edizione semicritica di un classico Frammento. Citazioni di fronte al pericolo”, Luogo comune, 1 (1990), p. 10.38 M. Hardt and A. Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), pp. 409-10. The same stagist paradigm can be found in Goodbye Mr Socialism (New York, 2008), pp. 113-4.39 A. Negri, Goodbye Mr Socialism (New York, Seven Stories Press) p. 221.40 Negri, Prefazione (1997) a Id., Marx oltre Marx, cit., pp. 7-8.41 M. Hardt / A. Negri, Multitude, Penguin Press, 2004, pp. 106-7.42 Hardt/Negri, Multitude, p. 108.43 Negri, Goodbye Mr Socialism, p. 167 and pp. 183-4.44 Hardt/Negri, Multitude, p. 109.

Toward an Anti-Historicist Reading

In this linear vision the highest point of development precedes the backward sectors, prefiguring their future: “Immaterial labour … is today in the same position that industrial labor was 150 years ago, when it accounted for only a small fraction of global production and was concentrated in a small part of the world but nonetheless exerted hegemony over all other forms of production. Just as in that phase all form of labor and society itself had to industrialize, today labor and society have to informationalize, become intelligent, become communicative, become affective”.45

The question certainly is not that of measuring quantitatively the extension of so-called immaterial labour; the question is rather that this schema, entirely centred on tendency, does not see the intertwining of the diverse forms of extortion of surplus-value, irreducible to a linear sequence or to a sum that sees them as rigidly separate. The augmentation of the technical composition of capital in some parts of the world does not generate automatically a tendency in this sense; rather, just as the development of the textile industry in England incremented slavery in the Americas, that development can produce, on the one hand, a massive expulsion of labour-power in the Western metropolis, transforming it into precarious and underpaid labour; and, on the other hand, it can give rise to transfers of surplus-value from productive areas with low salaries, low technical composition and high absolute exploitation.

For this reason, the explosion of strikes in the so-called periphery of the world, here almost completely ignored, speaks directly to the proletariat of the Western metropolis: not from a backward position, but at the very height of the current global form of capitalist production.

Workerism has criticised and taken its distances from the millenarian objectivism of the collapse, but it has still carried along with it a little piece of the philosophy of history. The thesis according to which the distinction between centre and periphery is supposed to have become less is turned by postmodernism against the theory of value. We would need instead to show how the “peripheral” forms of exploitation are in the “centre” and vice versa, in accordance precisely with the law of value. We need to show how the growth of the production of relative surplus-value produces, through a competition between capitals, an increase of the production of absolute surplus-value. This idea can be found already in the Grundrisse, but it is only in the Manuscripts of 1861-3 that Marx concentrates on this relation. “The fall [in the rate of profit] may also be checked by the creation of new branches of production in which more immediate labour is needed in proportion to capital, or in which the productive power of labour, i.e. the productive power of capital, is not yet developed”.46

By reading Marx “backwards”, that is, reading the Grundrisse by beginning from Capital, we see that he is more concerned with this second aspect, with the counter tendencies put into play by the creation of new branches of production with high extortion of absolute surplus-value and intensification of labour. These do not simply coexist beside forms of production of relative surplus-value and high tech, as if in a ‘universal exposition’ of the forms of production; 47 rather,

45 Ibid.46 MECW 29 [Grundrisse], p. 135.47 Sandro Mezzadra (La condizione postcoloniale. Storia e politica nel presente globale, Verona 2008) analyses the question of the co-presence between real subsumption and formal subsumption, referring almost exclusively to the Grundrisse. The analysis is inadequate because, firstly, it is fundamentally internal to the categorial plan of the Grundrisse and thus unable to comprehend the problematisation present in Capital; the analysis is then mistaken because it doesn’t comprehend the relation between the two forms of surplus-value. The question doesn’t in fact regard the co-presence of diverse forms of exploitation, but rather how the production of relative surplus-value gives place to the production of enormous masses of absolute surplus-value. The different forms of exploitation aren’t the one beside the other in a sort of postmodern universal exposition. Rather, capital must continually produce, through the use of extra-economic violence, differentiations of wages and of intensity of labour. From this point of view, George Caffentzis’s affirmation is not exaggerated: he argues that ‘the computer requires the sweatshop, and the cyborg’s

they are violently produced and reproduced in order to brake the fall of the rate of profit and in order to continue to produce relative surplus-value.

Today, there is no longer the need for this reading of the Grundrisse. Other readings are certainly possible. Today we need a comprehension of the forms of exploitation at the height of the Weltmarkt, of the ‘world market’.48 If we really want to go beyond the dualism between centre and periphery, we also need to go beyond a stagist idea according to which we live “today in a society evermore characterised by the hegemony of immaterial labour”, in a society that, after having being characterised by real subsumption, would be denoted now by “total subsumption”. We need to read the reciprocal relation between diverse forms of exploitation, without sinking into an idea of tendency from which we could look at other labour forms as residual or secondary.49

Ambiguities of the Grundrisse

In order to answer the question regarding the relationship of this workerism with the Marx of the Grundrisse, we need to go beyond the “Fragment on Machines” and investigate the ‘ambiguities’ of the 1857-8 manuscripts regarding ‘labour’, ‘development’ and ‘crisis’.

The central question, in the Grundrisse as in Capital, is: how is it possible that money begins to produce more money, to “transform itself” into capital? Marx systematically uses in Capital – and also in the Grundrisse at one point – the metaphor of the “chrysalis” that, wrapping itself up in the “cocoon”, then manages to transform itself into a “butterfly”50. The solution naturally lies, in the last instance, in the reference to the category of “living labour”, which is crystallised in more value than the advanced capital value. The point is that in the Grundrisse, Marx, who has very clearly seen the distinction between “living labour capacity” and labour as such, as “activity”, nonetheless expresses himself with great ambiguity. The expression “living labour”, or even simply “labour”, in 1857-8, is often and easily used generically in order to indicate the two dimensions: an ambiguity that will soon disappear almost entirely in Capital.

Marx sometimes even speaks in the Grundrisse, somewhat dismissively, of exchange of “labour” with capital, an exchange in which “labour” is ceded to capital, and capital obtains in this very exchange more “labour”. If we read these phrases “backwards” from Capital, the ambiguity is resolved. Here, we are not speaking of anything but the twofold nature of the social relation between capital and labour: marked, on the one hand, by “sale” on the labour market of labour-power acquired by wages; on the other hand, by the “use” or exploitation of labour-power in the immediate process of production. We are thus speaking about how, that is, the first moment, in circulation, opens up to the second moment, in production: opens up to the extraction (potentially conflictual) of the labour “in movement” of the labourer; an “activity” that in its nature is “fluid”, in becoming. This process can be defined as “exchange” only figuratively, as Marx himself doesn’t stop reiterating in his following reflections.

The direction of the reflection that Marx has undertaken is clear, and if we want to interpret the Grundrisse we need to read him “backwards”. Thus we understand the deployment of a conceptual articulation in which, when we speak of “labour”, it is necessary always to distinguish carefully between “labour capacity”, which is potential of labour as “activity”, and the performance of labour as such. Both the first (labour-power), and the second (living labour) are inseparable from

existence is premised on the slave’ (G. Caffentzis, "The End of Work or the Renaissance of Slavery? A Critique of Rifkin and Negri", available at <http://info.interactivist.net/node/1287> [2008]). 48 D. Sacchetto and M. Tomba (Ed.), La lunga accumulazione originaria. Politica e lavoro nel mercato mondiale, Verona, Ombre Corte, 200849 See M. Tomba, “Differentials of Surplus-Value in the contemporary forms of exploitation”, The Commoner, 12 (2007), pp. 23-37 (available at <http://www.commoner.org.uk/>).50 MECW 28 [Grundrisse], p. 242.

the formally ‘free’ labourer, insofar as socially determined human being. The ambiguity of the prose of the Grundrisse, however, opens the way to the vision of living labour “as subjectivity”,51

where living labour can be identified with either the one or the other, or both at the same time: with “labour capacity”, or with the labourer. This ambiguity opens the way to those who now use the notion of living labour to refer to non-activity rather than activity: thus a “living labour” that in the end is everything, except “labour”; right up to the oxymoron that is today the proposal of an “exodus of living labour”. This is precisely what occurred in theoretical workerism first, and in post-workerism after.

The “labour” of the producer of commodities for the general exchange of commodities, that is, the “labour” of the wage worker commanded by capital, we are told in the Grundrisse, “lacks an object”. This “lacking of an object” invests all dimensions of “labour”: and perhaps this justifies in some way the terminological ambiguity in Marx’s use of this term that we have lamented. It invests the “living labour capacity”, for which the worker doesn’t have property or possession of the means of production, and therefore cannot even procure for himself the means of subsistence, and is constrained to alienate his labour-power to the capitalist. It invests, consequently, also labour qua “activity”, insofar as the use of such capacity is now “of the others”. Insofar as it is a product of an activity now itself “estranged”, the same product doesn’t belong to it. The worker, as human being, is “naked subjectivity”. He exits from the process as he entered. He is “absolute poverty”52, whatever his retribution might be.

It is in this ambiguity that we find the source of that error that flattens out labour as “activity” onto labour as “labour capacity” and that indirectly ends up tracing back “living labour” to the mere subjectivity of the living being53. The attribution of “cooperation” as property of “social” labour to living workers, and finally to any subject, before and independently of their “incorporation” in capital, also leads to this result54. Once again, we have the “vulgar” reading of the “Fragment on Machines”.

Expansion and Crisis in the World Market

In the Grundrisse, the internal drive to the extraction of surplus-value is in agreement with the drive to produce “more” abstract wealth, in a spiral without end. Capital is identified with the universal tendency to maximum, unlimited extraction of ‘surplus labour’, beyond necessary labour. Here is the seed of the universality of capital, of a world of evermore developed needs, of a general laboriousness – the irresistible drive of capital towards the constitution of a “world market”. Capital, in the drive to maximise surplus-value, ends up squeezing wages in relative terms. In its “pure” form, this tendency is actualised by means of methods aiming at the extraction of relative surplus-value. If things are so, and if valorisation is pulled by demand, how can the problem of the realisation of values in commodities be overcome?55 In the Grundrisse, Marx clarifies how already with the extraction of absolute surplus-value, but even more systematically with that of relative surplus-value, the expansion of one capital without the contemporaneous constitution of other capitals is unthinkable. This means, evidently, the simultaneous presence of other points of labour

51 For a reconstruction of this notion in workerism from a sympathetic perspective, see A. Zanini, Sui ‘fondamenti filosofici’ dell’operaismo italiano, in R. Bellofiore (ed.), Da Marx a Marx? Un bilancio del marxismo italiano nel Novecento (Roma, 2007).52 MECW 28, p. 222. But also MECW 28, pp. 381-82, p. 522.53 We refer here especially to Tronti and Negri. On this, see again Wright, Storming Heaven, especially charter 3, 6 and 7.54 This is rather the conclusion of many post-workerist authors. See most of the writings included in P. Virno and M. Hardt (es.), Radical Thought in Italy. A Potential Politics, University of Minnesota Press, 1996; and also A. Fumagalli, Bioeconomia e capitalismo cognitivo (Roma, 2008). 55 MECW 28, pp. 329-76.

and other points of exchange. The creation of value and surplus-value, the extraction of labour and surplus-labour, proceed, and must proceed, side by side thanks to the multiplication of branches of production. To the ‘quantitative’ extension and to the ‘qualitative’ deepening of the division of labour on the market there must correspond, in order for supply to find somewhere a corresponding and adequate demand, the effective realisation of definite and precise quantitative relations between branches of production in exchange.

Now, the Grundrisse tells us, these genuine conditions of “equilibrium” are linked in a necessary way to the relation that is determined between ‘surplus labour’ and ‘necessary labour’: therefore, they are linked to the rate of surplus-value that is fixed in immediate production. They depend, furthermore, on how this surplus-value is divided into consumption (spending of surplus-value as income) and investment (spending of surplus-value as capital). If the conditions of equilibrium express an “internal necessity” in order for the accumulation of capital to occur without upsets, the fact that this internal necessity is really affirmed in reality is completely casual 56. For Marx, the problem is not so much, or fundamentally, the “casuality” of exchange relations, the “erraticity of conditions of equilibrium” in and for themselves. It is much more the fact that, precisely because capital is the impulse to the continuous growth of surplus-value, the rate of surplus-value cannot but continuously change. At the same time, therefore, the relations of equilibrium between industries must change, both in material terms and in terms of value. The crisis of “overproduction of commodities” then occurs, not due to the mere “anarchy” of the market, but for reasons “internal” to capital, related to the distinctive features of the production of surplus-value and the establishment of a “specifically” capitalist mode of production. The crisis, from being merely “possible”, becomes evermore “probable”: and it is precisely its dilation thanks to credit that renders it more devastating at the moment when it occurs.

Here is one of the more interesting points of the Grundrisse. The capitalist crisis can be led back to an integration between explosion of the “disproportions” and their generalisation in an excess of global supply over total demand caused by the “restricted consumption of the masses”57. The problem is that, as we have anticipated, the more we go into the reading of the Grundrisse, the more another reason of crisis internal to capital becomes evident, more radical, but of a “collapsist” variety.

Fall in the Rate of Profit

Capital, Marx says, is “contradiction in movement”, the embodiment of contradiction58. On the one hand, the exigency of valorisation impels it to maximise the quantity of labour “sucked up” or absorbed. On the other hand, however, the methods that one must use in order to obtain surplus-value on a growing scale, and in particular the extraction of relative surplus-value, leads inevitably to an expulsion, explicit or implicit, of workers from immediate production. They therefore lead to the exclusion from the “hidden abode of production” of those human subjects who, alone, can deliver living labour, which is the exclusive source of the new value produced in the course of each period.

In the beginning, capital can resolve the difficulty by “extending” or “intensifying” labour time in the individual labour process. Another solution is to multiply the “simultaneous” working days. This, seen properly, is precisely the other side of the coin of the multiplication of points of exchange and of points of production that is connected to the extraction of relative surplus-value: a multiplication that, in itself, signifies inclusion of new workers in the spiral of valorisation and extraction of new labour. It is, that is, the corresponding element of the tendency towards the 56 MECW 28, pp. 341-43, 371-73.57 MECW 28, pp. 341-375.58 MECW 28, p. 350.

“world market” and of the connected tendency towards crisis from general overproduction which has “behind” it disproportions, and “in front” of it, precisely, the fall of the profit rate. The Marx of Capital, without abandoning completely this finalistic perspective, will deviate it towards a dialectic internal to the “cycle” of tendency and countertendency. The Marx of the Grundrisse appears to tend rather to the idea that these processes will lead, due to a purely economic dynamic, to a mechanical end of accumulation. The reason lies, substantially, in the fact that the progressive augmentation of dead labour, of labour “objectified” [vergegenständlicht] in the material elements of constant capital, does not have limits. The “social working day” that can be extracted from a given determinate working population, on the other hand, does have a limit. It has a limit even if we imagine, somewhat ridiculously, that workers can live on air (that is, that variable capital is zero) and that they work twenty four hours a day (that is, that the time of living labour is completely time of surplus-value). Surplus-value would therefore be at a “maximum” and would absorb the entire social working day. If the maximum rate of profit has a ceiling, this is not the case for the denominator. It follows that if the extraction of relative surplus-value leads to a growth of constant capital, the maximum rate of profit must sooner or later fall, and as a consequence sooner or later the actual rate of profit must also fall.59 The reasoning is however mistaken. The specifically capitalist mode of production “devalorises” the unitary value of the individual commodities, and it is not guaranteed that the growth of elements of constant capital from the point of view of use-value is accompanied by a growth from the point of view of their value. Furthermore, if there are productive sectors in the world market with a low composition of capital and a high production of absolute surplus-value, these keep the average productive power of socially necessary labour low, so as to permit the production of relative surplus-value where the composition of capital is highest.60

It is in the perspective of this double background sketched out in the Grundrisse regarding the theory of crisis (the crisis of realisation, the fall of the rate of profit), in its turn placed on the foundation of the “world market”, that we must also consider the “Fragment on Machines”, and its specific vision of “collapse”.

Fetishism and Fetish Character of Machines

The introduction of machines and the General Intellect are significant part of Marx’s theorisation of the specifically capitalist mode of production. The machines are the “body” of capital in its material constitution, which includes “labour” within it61. The means of production are no longer instruments of labour: on the contrary, it is labour that becomes an instrument of its instruments. It is an evident case of “real hypostatisation”, of inversion of subject and predicate. This inversion is essential for producing that increment of the productive power of social labour that is mystified as “productivity of capital”. Producing surplus-value and surplus product seems a natural property of the “things” themselves qua things (means of production, money). This “fetishism”, Capital will say in a better way, descends from the “fetish character” of capital. Those ‘things’, when they are within the capitalist social relation, really have those ‘supersensible’ properties; not as a ‘natural’ character of ‘things’, but due to the social nature of capital. The same ‘social’ dimension of the cooperation within labour is imposed on the workers by capital.

The delimitation of the time of valorisation constitutes an important scientific and political

59 MECW 29 [Grundrisse], pp. 133 ff. What is proposed in the text is a ‘reconstruction’ of the spirit of Marx’s argument, rather than a literal ‘interpretation’.60 M. Tomba, Forme di produzione, accumulazione, schiavitù moderna, in La lunga accumulazione originaria. Politica e lavoro nel mercato mondiale, a cura di Sacchetto e Tomba, pp. 106-22.61 Marx’s notion of ‘embodiment’ as ‘inclusion’ of labour within capital will be maintained and expanded in Capital. In that more mature work there will be a crucial second meaning of ‘embodiment’, which does not seem equally present in the Grundrisse: namely, the ‘incarnation’ of the ‘ghost’ of value into the ‘body’ of gold as money.

acquisition for the political economy of the working class. If the capacity to generate surplus-value were an intrinsic quality of capital, this would be a pure automaton, without any exterior and without any limits. It would be an automatic fetish.62 There would be produced the phantasmagorical image of a subject autonomised and elevated to totality: the secular religion of fetishism with its Trinitarian formula.63 Those who propose the end of the law of value thanks to a process of valorisation that would have subsumed every human activity, such that communication and human relationality in itself would become productive of value, fall into fetishism and conceal the clash between living labour and dead labour in production. In a way that is not different from what happens in neoclassical economics, the form M-C-M’ is reduced to the two extremes M-M’, and capital appears as an “automatic fetish”.64 This fetishism is manifested also in the rhetoric employed, where the dissolution of the real relations of production are expressed in celestial “immaterial labours” undertaken by immaterial workers. Everything remains in circulation. The same politics, as much as it declares itself to be subversive, does not look at the old and new forms of noxiousness of labour, but at contractual forms and rights. When it claims a basic income, it still claims it as a right that regards individuals insofar as productive by nature of value and wealth, the distinction between the latter two having been declared to be obsolete. In this claim as well it finds itself in the company of neoliberal policies (which however, more coherently, concede basic income as compensation for the privatisation of the social common wealth of the welfare state, or, in similar terms, also in the company of the social-liberal policies that claim that it is possible to distribute in a (more) egalitarian way wealth that can be produced only in a non-egalitarian way.

An alternative reading of the “Fragment on Machines”

What does the “Fragment on Machines” tell us? In the machines, in the “body” of the productive process, there is science and its capitalist use. “Wealth”, that is, use-values, quantitatively and qualitatively, depend increasingly on the employment of the General Intellect. In this sense, capital as ensemble of objective and subjective factors, qualitatively and technologically specified, is alone productive of use-values: and to this corresponds the “concrete” labour of collective labour organised and commanded by many capitals in competition. At a certain point, the Grundrisse tells us, labour time must cease to be the measure of “wealth” – of concrete wealth – of this dimension. There would be here another reason for the “breakdown” of production based on exchange-value.65

But in what sense? If this reasoning were extended to the productivity of “value”, the reasoning would not appear convincing. Productivity of capital in terms of use-values doesn’t take away the fact that capital is valorised only by means of the “activity” of the workers: that is, of “living labour” insofar as “abstract” labour, measured quantitatively. From this point of view, the reduction of labour time crystallized in the single commodity means only that the labour time (paid by capital) that is necessary for the reproduction of the working class according to a certain subsistence level is reduced, directly or indirectly. Thanks to the continual growth of the productivity of use-values to which capital incessantly gives life, capital reduces the “value of labour (-power)” and frees “superfluous” time, that is, it amplifies the time rendered “disposable” beyond subsistence.66 The Marx of Capital reminds us, however, that capital will never turn this disposable time into a shortening of the working day of the direct producers. On the contrary, it will maintain the disposable time as labour time, extending and intensifying it. The machines and the General Intellect do not lead to a reduction of the total, “macro” time of labour; they lead to the opposite, to

62 MEW 26.3 [Theories of Surplus Value, Volume 3], p. 447.63 MECW 37 [Capital, Volume 3], p. 839 and p. 801 et sqq.64 MECW 32 [1861-63 Economic Manuscripts], p. 451.65 MECW 29, pp. 90-92.66 MECW 29, pp. 92-94.

its increase.However, a different reading of the “Fragment on Machines” is possible if we relate it to the

problematic of the crisis of general overproduction of commodities and to the tendency towards the “world market”. In the commodity, there is always “use-value” and (exchange-) value. Capital, which produces commodities in order to produce money and more money, organises and commands a “collective” worker. This “combined” worker is also a technical body to which capital gives its imprint. The material, quantitative, side of this process cannot be uncoupled from its ‘formal determination’, which marks the qualitative side of the commodity-product that is always to be realised on the market, in final circulation. It is true that the potential shortening of the working day that the ‘specifically’ capitalist mode of production brings with it cannot be actually realised, due to capital’s inexhaustable hunger for ‘living’ labour and surplus labour. However, it is precisely this tendency to the maximisation of the (surplus) labour that leads to the concretisation, sooner or later, of a limit to capital posed by capital itself: because this means the general crisis from the side of demand. Capital, expanding, needs more market. An extension of the market requires a development of needs, which in their turn lead to the constitution of “universally developed individuals”. But there are universally developed individuals only if at a certain point a shortening of the working day becomes actual; only if, in other words, disposable labour time is not translated integrally into surplus labour time, but also into time dedicated to something other than production. This is however exactly that which capital, due to its own nature, cannot allow if not forced by conflict and within determinate limits. It is due to this that the “theft of alien labour time” becomes a “miserable foundation” for the development of the productive forces – without placing in discussion in any way the validity of the Marxian value theory as a theory of the exploitation of ‘labour’.

Labour as Subjectivity, Crisis and Capital’s Response

“Labour as subjectivity” (that is, the workers) is included within capital, because capital has acquired their labour-power on the labour market. This labour-power, this “labour capacity”, has to become “living labour” evermore “liquid”, until capital attains, for itself and for immediately unproductive strata, surplus-value in absolutely and relatively growing quantity. But the “fluid” of living labour has to be extracted from bearers of labour-power, and the bearers of labour-power are the workers themselves, a determinate social subject that can “resist”. It is not possible “to use” labour-power without making the workers work as human beings, socially determined. Capital is not interested in the worker as such; it is interested in labour, which is the source of value. However, in order to have labour, it must acquire labour-power. It must therefore include and subordinate workers in immediate production. Precisely in the Grundrisse, Marx writes that the ideal condition for capital would be if it could obtain labour without workers. It is true that, once acquired by capital, labour-power is ‘capital’s’ labour-power; and thus also its use, the performance of labour, is capital’s. Nonetheless, it is equally true that living labour cannot but remain always, and simultaneously, an activity of the worker. It is from this that the unavoidable “class struggle in production” derives.

This refers to a problem in which we find the essence of the theory of value of Marx, and which is instead, at the same time, intuited and evaded by workerism. This is a problem that is already posed in the Grundrisse, but in a still preliminary and confused way, at least in the form of exposition. It is a problem that will instead be rendered clear in Capital, until it constitutes its true hidden “centre” and moves its dialectic, beginning from the first volume: the problem of the contradictory internal unity, in capital, of labour-power and living labour through the workers as a whole. Paradoxically, however, precisely the confusion of the Grundrisse gives the possibility of thematising how this internal unity is also a contradiction. This is what comes to the fore with the

“social” crisis of the relations of production between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s.67 Extremely briefly: the capacity that the “mass worker” then had to contribute in an essential way to the rupture of the process of valorisation in that historically defined figure of capital can be read relatively easily within an optic of this type. The reverse is also true. Those struggles opened up to dimensions of Marx’s work that had remained latent and little understood before. On the other hand, an optic of this type also allows us to comprehend the answer of capital that continues to mark the present.

What is in fact the financial globalisation of our days?68 The manipulation of the symbolic nature of money is an essential part of the new forms of economic policies, which are nothing more than a mediated “command” over labour. It is by means of them that the “casualisation” of labour is generalised. It is the other side of an unprecedented “centralisation without concentration”.69 The merging of capitals – ‘centralization’ – is no longer accompanied by technical ‘concentration’. At least in the sense that the ‘large scale’ of production, the use of science within it, the design and the capitalist use of machines and knowledge – in short, the mode of production that is ‘specific’ to capital, and with it that extraction of relative surplus value that carries behind it greater extension and intensity of labour – do not necessarily require anymore an increase in the technical dimension of the unities of production, the continuous broadening of the ‘factory’, the amassing of workers in the same site, their juridical and qualitative homogenisation. The accumulation of capital doesn’t necessarily mean anymore, as Marx maintained, correctly for his time and for at least the century after him, the augmentation of the workers commanded by single capitals in the same place of production. From the status of the ‘tendency’, both the concentration of capital as well as the homogenisation of the workers appear to have been violently transformed into the ‘counter-tendency’. The fragmentation and dispersion of labour is the consequence, part of the ‘tendency’. The ultimate response of capital to the “social” crisis of the 1960s and 1970s consists exactly in this inversion: that dramatic “decomposition” of “labour”, which is the condition of current valorisation, and which, however, emerging also from fear of the great concentrations of workers, creates the seeds of new crises and new conflicts.

Intuitions and Dead-Ends

Tronti was undoubtedly very lucid in intuiting, with his distinction between “labour-power” and “working class”, and against the inherited and in many respects ossified Marxism, the triangulation of labour-power, living labour and worker, on which all of Marx’s discourse is based.70 The point cannot be undervalued: something of this kind had not been “thought” before by almost any Marxism and even afterwards it remained foreign to a large part of Marxism; just as it is foreign to the contemporary “Marx renaissance”. However, it remains an intuition that is immediately distorted. Labour as “labour-power” is reduced to a dimension completely integrated within capital. Labour as the “working class”, on the other hand, is the workers themselves, only, however, if and when they ask for more wages, or refuse labour as activity. More than within and against, as we

67 On this see R. Bellofiore, ‘I lunghi anni Settanta. Crisi sociale e integrazione economica internazionale’, in L. Baldissara (ed.), Le radici della crisi. L’Italia tra gli anni Sessanta e gli anni Settanta (Roma, 2001), pp. 57-102.68 The following is indebted to R. Bellofiore ‘After Fordism, what? Capitalism at the end of the century: beyond the myths’, in R.Bellofiore (ed.), Which labour next? Global money, capital restructuring and the changing patterns of production (Aldershot, 1999), pp. 10-32, to R. Bellofiore-J. Halevi, ‘Deconstructing Labour. What is “new” in contemporary capitalism and economic policies: a Marxian-Kaleckian perspective’, in C. Gnos and L. P. Rochon (eds), Credit, Money and Macroeconomic Policy. A Post-Keynesian Approach (Cheltenham, 20009, forthcoming) and R. Bellofiore-J. Halevi, ‘A Minsky moment? The 2007 subprime crisis and the “new” capitalism’, in C. Gnos and L. P. Rochon (eds), Employment, Growth and Development. A Post-Keynesian Approach (Cheltenham, 2009, forthcoming).69 R. Bellofiore, Centralizzazione senza concentrazione?, in C. Arruzza (ed.), Pensare con Marx. Ripensare Marx (Roma, 2008) pp. 15-29.70 Cf. M. Tronti, Operai e capitale.

once used to say with Tronti, “labour” is either within or it is against. These are all points on which Negri followed Tronti and radicalised his insights.71 The Grundrisse can, due to its ambiguity, furnish an ample arsenal of munitions for this type of reading.

It is, however, a mistaken reading, even if not impossible, of the Grundrisse. It wedges itself onto that point where the maximum of objectivism of that text is conjugated to the maximum of subjectivism. According to this way of seeing things, when capital has acquired labour capacity on the labour market, it is as if it had already acquired living labour. The only possibility of struggle is played out theoretically on this alternative: the (merely) distributive struggle, or the exodus (in reality, impossible) from labour. The contradiction capital-labour is flattened out onto the labour market, onto the “incompatibility” of wage struggles, onto the wage as an “independent variable”. 72

In this perspective, the worker’s wage was soon substituted by the social wage, then the wage of citizenship, then a guaranteed basic income. The centrality of labour exists, but only in its negative dimension. This workerism distracts attention from the daily forms of class conflict within labour, because antagonism arises for this perspective only when workers don’t work – only, that is, when the workers negate work within the process of production. There is the working class, in its entirety, exclusively in sabotage, in the refusal of labour.

Here is the original sin of “theoretical” workerism. It is a sin that will remain for some time hidden in the power of the richness of the concrete positive experience of early workerism; a sin that, however, will bring forth its increasingly poisoned fruits in the decades to come, with an acceleration from the middle of the 1970s onwards.

Translated by Sara R. Farris and Peter Thomas

71 For a detailed criticism of Tronti’s and Negri’s thought in the 1960s and early 1970s on these aspects, cf. R. Bellofiore, ‘L’operaismo italiano e la critica dell'economia politica’, Unità Proletaria, n. 1-2, pp. 100-112, 1982. See also the ‘Afterword’ by R. Bellofiore-M. Tomba to the Italian translation of Wright, Storming Heaven, published by Edizione Alegre (Rome, 2008), pp. 291-306. 72 This theoretical point explains the convergence of this tradition both with some Neoricardian ‘conflictualist’ approaches in the 1970s as well as with authors within the regulation approach turned social-liberals in the 1990s. Workerism transmuted into a postmodern, distributive postworkerism: begging a basic income, and dreaming of gaining from some imaginary new New Deal (reduced once again only to a redistributive dimension).