Negri: From exploitation to alienation

Negri’s deployment of the concept of alienation has been a slow evolution in contrast to Marx’s volleying of alienation amongst the opening salvos of his critique of capital.

Alienation has been elbowing its way into Negri’s conceptual lexicon by degrees. In his 2008 conversation with Cesare Casarino, Negri speaks of periods of reflection on Theodor W.

Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and the questions he was asking of Adorno in the 1950s. Critical of Adorno’s lack of interest in production in general, and his attempts to identify values ‘outside the logic of capitalism,’ Negri still esteems Adorno’s investigations: ‘but he was always very interested,’ he says, ‘in one of the crucial effects of production, namely, in alienation.’¹ However, if Negri had a concern for this crucial effect of production during the thirty years from 1950, his published work belies it. Instead, Negri’s works suggest that his recourse to the concept of alienation has resulted from a growing awareness that the concept of exploitation has become increasingly unable to explain processes of exploitation in what they argue is a transformed form of the organisation of production. Negri has undertaken a category shift, and his writings show that he has been progressively discarding the concept of exploitation in favour of alienation. Negri’s works also suggest that his conception of alienation has expanded as his analysis of the consequences of so-called biopolitical production upon subjectivity has progressed.

In Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, Negri’s 1979 exploration of class struggle and revolution by means of Marx’s theories on value in capitalism, Negri uses the concept of

1 Casarino and Negri ‘Vicissitudes of Constituent Thought’ 178.

alienation solely in a formal way. It is noteworthy to comment on the unusualness of this understanding given that Marx prioritises the function of alienation in terms of entfremdung in Grundrisse. For example, Marx speaks of ‘the alien quality [Fremdheit] of the objective conditions of labour’ and Marx deploys his arguments on this alien quality of the conditions of labour in his analyses of processes as general as ‘the creation of the conditions of social life.’¹ However, Negri limits his discussion of alienation to entäusserung and veräusserung, thinking alienation only in these formal terms of objectification, appropriation and the sale of labour-power.² In Marx Beyond Marx, Negri conceives of alienation in the same way as Hegel and the Classical Political Economists; alienation is something that happens when one person sells property to another and appropriation is merely objectification. And so Negri does not address the alienation of the Paris Manuscripts, despite the persistence of its arguments throughout Grundrisse. As such, the notion of alienation as the worker’s separation from some intimate or essential quality of the self through a process of objectification is not present in Negri’s theory because this character of separation is always subordinate to the autonomy of “living labour” and its new role as the producer of the field of social cooperation. I argue that this Hegelian tendency to regard labour as mere objectification remains in Negri’s thought.

Despite the lack of a positive enquiry into the power relations which proceed from alienated labour in Marx Beyond Marx, the inability of Negri’s conception of exploitation to explain the relation between the worker and the object of labour take a much more prominent role in his later taking up of ‘the conclusions of [his] previous works on the theory of value.’³ Marx Beyond Marx is fundamental to these previous works.⁴ Negri repudiates his earlier proposition in Marx Beyond Marx that ‘the theory of surplus-value is...immediately the theory of exploitation’ because, he argues in ‘Twenty Theses on Marx’, labour under capitalism has changed to such a degree that ‘value cannot be reduced to an objective measure.’⁵ Abstract labour, he argues, can no longer be regarded as commensurate to value; living labour, the qualitative character of labour-in-motion, is the aspect of labour that is most important to the production of economic value in the contemporary economy. Therefore, and Negri is alluding to the form of labour that he will later conceptualise as immaterial labour here, he argues that exploitation cannot be understood in terms of quantity of abstract labour time but only with

1 Marx Grundrisse 452, 162

2 Negri Marx Beyond Marx 34

3 Antonio Negri. ‘Twenty Theses on Marx: Interpretation of the Class Situation Today’ in Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino and Rebecca E. Karl (eds.) Marxism Beyond Marxism (Routledge: New York, 1996). 149. Written in 1992/3.

4 Negri ‘Twenty Theses on Marx’ 180 fn.1

5 Negri Marx Beyond Marx 74; Negri ‘Twenty Theses on Marx’ 151

reference to the ‘labour time of full, whole social cooperation’ because the new forms of labour, in terms of their production of economic value, cannot be understood in terms of units of value-producing time.¹ Conceptual distinctions between use-value and exchange-value have evaporated, Negri argues, as a result of the profound socialisation and complexification of abstract labour, that is, as a result of the increasing importance of the qualitative aspects of labour and the concomitant negation of the analytical value of the concept of homogenous abstract labour. Negri thus rejects the validity of notions of abstract labour and surplus-value as reference-points to the understanding of exploitation in contemporary society, instead seeking to account for exploitation as ‘the production of an armoury of instruments for the control of the time of social cooperation.’² This kind of account requires more than a technical appraisal of the production and allocation of economic value. Insofar as cooperation is contingent upon subjectivity, it is explicit here that these beginnings of Negri’s reformulation of the concept of exploitation are central to his analysis of the production of subjectivity under contemporary capitalism.

The concepts of immaterial/affective labour}biopolitical production are fundamental to Negri’s questions on value and to his analysis of the production of subjectivity. His investigations into the changing character of labour are the genus of this rethinking of exploitation. Negri argues that labour has been subject to a paradigmatic reconstruction.³ Therefore, he argues, the Marxist distinctions between abstract and concrete labour, productive labour and unproductive labour, production and reproduction require revision.

This paradigmatic reconstruction of labour is constituted amongst the correspondence between the technical mechanisms of production and a social composition characterised by cooperation, and thereby forms new processes and apparatuses of exploitation. Social cooperation for Negri is the labour which ‘directly determine[s] the networks of productive cooperation that create and re-create society’, that is, immaterial and affective labour.⁴ Negri’s critique of the efficacy of the concept of exploitation in what he calls the phase of ‘the real subsumption of society under capital’ stems from this analysis.⁵ In Marx Beyond Marx Negri argues that the development of the form of labour creates the form of the constitution of a determinate society; therefore the analysis of labour is the analysis of this constitution, its

1 Negri ‘Twenty Theses on Marx’ 154

2 Negri ‘Twenty Theses on Marx’ 154

3 Hardt and Negri Multitude 111; Antonio Negri. ‘Archaeology and Project: The Mass Worker and the Social Worker’ in Revolution Retrieved: Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis and New Social Subjects (1967-83). (London: Red Notes, 1988). 201. First published in Macchina Tempo. (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1982.)

4 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State Form (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 10.

5 Hardt and Negri Empire 365

norms, its processes of production, distribution and exchange, and, ultimately, its system of accumulation of capital and the concomitant relations that produce subjectivity.¹ Labour has changed. Immaterial labour, Hardt and Negri argue, has usurped industrial labour of its hegemony at the end of the 20^th century and forms the content of labour activity in the fastest growing industries of the most developed economies. As such, they continue, the Marxist theory of the exploitation of surplus-value produced by abstract labour time cannot comprehend either the production or the expropriation of value under contemporary capitalism nor can it illuminate the human cost of labour under capitalism with the same potency as it does for industrial production. In Multitude Hardt and Negri begin to touch upon a more apposite conceptual guide to the power relations and politics that surround emerging forms of labour.

The conceptual content of Hardt and Negri’s notion of alienation limits itself to the explanation of new qualities of the processes of the exploitation of affective and immaterial labour. ‘Alienation,’ according to Hardt and Negri, ‘was always a poor concept for understanding the exploitation of factory workers.’² It is only the affective turn of wage-labour, they maintain, that gives validity to alienation as an analytical concept, albeit in this limited sense.Because they view notions of alienation in industrial labour as invalid, their understanding of alienation is intrinsically bound to theories and concepts which explain the changing landscape of labour. In light of their concept of immaterial labour, and its extension as biopolitical production inclusive of the concept of affective labour, it is not surprising that Hardt and Negri look to the concept of alienation to explain this character of exploitation but rather that it took so long for them to do so. Hardt’s earlier work on the co-opting of affective labour under the auspices of Lazzarato’s concept of immaterial labour makes no mention of the potential for alienation or the consequences of the exploitation of affective abilities upon the person.³ However, alienation had already been linked to this realm of labour by C. Wright Mills’ at the beginning of the 1950s.⁴ In Multitude Hardt and Negri propose that in ‘affective labour, as well as knowledge production and symbolic production...alienation does provide a useful conceptual key for understanding exploitation.’⁵ Hardt and Negri use alienation in their immaterial and affective labour in a very similar way to Mills’ use for his ‘new middle class.’

There is a development in Hardt and Negri’s understanding of alienation, moving away from strictly veräusserung understandings and approaching a consideration of entfremdung. ‘When

1 Negri ‘Twenty Theses’ 150

2 Hardt and Negri Multitude 111

3 Michael Hardt. ‘Affective Labor’ Boundary2 26:2 (1999). 89-100.

4 Hardt and Negri Multitude 111; Wright Mills White Collar

5 Hardt and Negri Multitude 111

affective production becomes part of waged labour,’ they argue, ‘it can be extremely alienating: I am selling my ability to make human relationships, something extremely intimate, at the command of the client and the boss.’¹ The nexus of exploitation, the exchange of labour-power, the wage and the exploitation of surplus-value cannot fully capture the political economic dimensions of the expropriation of the value produced by affective labour.

One of the three key arenas of affective labour activity is the ‘culture industry’, in which affective labourers sell their ability to engage in the work of the productive shaping of affects.² Therefore, a key quality of the exchanges surrounding affective labour-power is that the wage-labour relation amounts to the worker selling his or her ability to persuade and coerce, to use powers of communication and imagination to manipulate and shape the subjectivities of other people according the requirements of the production and realisation of economic-value in the work of subjective interaction and the production of ‘affects’. From this point of an initial consideration of the potential for emergent forms of labour to be alienating I argue that they are not merely the reduction of the human relationship to an exchange-value to be exploited as a surplus-value but are constituted by a process which perverts those ‘intimate’ qualities that create such relationships. To what extent, therefore, do Hardt and Negri share this view that immaterial/affective labour}biopolitical production may result in a capitalistic shaping and perverting of these intimate qualities of living labour?

What do they propose are the politics of the alienation of ‘something extremely intimate’

under capitalist command?

We are living, the post-operaisti attest, in the time when ‘social relations become moments of the relations of production.’³ Furthermore, Hardt and Negri argue, there have been paradigmatic changes in the social and technical composition of labour that render the concept of alienation uniquely able to explain exploitation in a world where there are

‘increasingly blurred boundaries between labour and life, and between production and reproduction.’⁴ Biopolitical production, it is claimed, is the immediate production of social relations by the activity of living labour operating amidst but apart from capitalist apparatuses of domination. Hardt and Negri are at pains to sketch out the externality of capitalist accumulation to the production of value but to also give account to the power of capital over this production process. Cooperation, they argue, is produced by immaterial and affective labour autonomously from capitalist command and the economic-value produced by this

1 Hardt and Negri Multitude 111

2 Hardt ‘Affective Labor’ 94.

3 Mario Tronti in Quaderni Rossi no. 2, cf. Nicholas Thoburn ‘Autonomous Production? On Negri’s “New Synthesis”’ Theory, Culture & Society 18:5 (2001). 78.

4 Hardt and Negri Commonwealth 134

cooperation is expropriated by capital in the form of rent.¹ In biopolitical production it is argued, unlike in industry, capital has no role in the organisation of cooperation but merely absorbs the surplus-value created by the collectivity of social labour. Therefore, Negri argues, it is important to recognise that ‘this pull to the category of alienation is also due to the fact that some characteristics closely tied to exploitation, particularly those designating capital’s productive role, have faded.’² Capital, once parasitical of and dominant over labour, is according to Negri now only a leech upon biopolitical production, extracting surplus-value in the form of a rent levied upon the value-created by autonomous networks of social labour. I argue that this concept of capital is inchoate with the alienated labour process that Negri acknowledges.

This is not to say that Negri always underplays the human cost of biopolitical labour, or life, under capitalism; he doesn’t. But it is to say that he hides the ontological consequences of labour in the contemporary conjunction of capitalism in the shadow of the revolutionary figure of the autonomous worker. Using Giorgio Agamben’s concept of bare life, Negri posits the consequences of the domination of the constituted power of capital and the state over the constituent power of the ‘Multitude’ as an intended form of life designed to terrorise and oppress forces of resistance to capital and to the state.³ Bare life is a ‘nakedness imposed by ideology and by the violence of Power’, a perpetually intimidating apparatus of suffering.⁴ Bare life is a program of oppression, the denial of hope and resistance, the terminal production and reproduction of a monstrous form-of-life which is the result of the transfer of power from the individual and the community to sovereignty. This domination, oppression, and perversion of life, Negri states, is ‘an apologia of alienation.’⁵ The rule of the ‘well-born’

– those who organise constituted power – is an apparatus designed to push life toward an imperative to maintain only that biological life, life at its most instrumental. Negri argues that the form of power that produces bare life – the oppressive rule of the ‘well born’ – transcends the historical categories of political economy because it extends back to the city-states of Ancient Greece. The historical continuity of oppression notwithstanding, Negri argues that the new modes of exploitation and alienation of labour under capitalism establish the struggle

1 Hardt and Negri Commonwealth 140

2 Hardt and Negri Commonwealth 140

3 Negri’s ‘The Political Monster: Power and Naked Life’ translates ‘la nuda vita’ to ‘naked life’ throughout. For the sake of correspondence with English translations of Agamben I amend Negri’s use in this translation to ‘bare life’.

4 Antonio Negri. ‘The Political Monster: Power and Naked Life’ tr. Maurizio Boscagli in Casarino and Negri. In Praise of the Common. 208-9.

5 Negri ‘Political Monster’ 210. English translation states ‘apology’. However, while the Italian ‘apologia’ in the original text can translate to ‘apology’, given the context the most appropriate translation here is clearly the English ‘apologia’. Both the Italian and the English derive from the Ancient Greek ‘ἀπολογία’.

between constituted and constitutive power on the ideological plane. From well-travelled observations on tendencies toward the socialisation of production, Negri proposes the formation of a political struggle that is unique to this phase of capitalism.

On the one side of this struggle, there is the stripping down of life that is the basis and the result of capital and the state’s defence of the alienation of labour. Discourses extolling competition and the articulation of individualistic affects dominate. This, Negri argues, is the

‘well-born’ attempt to negate opposition and resistance by means of the perpetuation of economic rationality throughout non-economic spheres of life and thereby maintain its hold on power. ‘On the other side’ of this struggle ‘there’s the monster...’¹ Negri’s monster is a communistic one, a metaphor for Potenza, the mediating of the multitude and its opposition to, resistance from and attack upon constituted Power. Life, Negri argues, is not the ordeal of eternal suffering with which the ideological claim of bare life seeks to terrorise us, but one which is constituted by the ‘power of Being’, a power that is the articulation of cooperation and struggle.² For Negri, this power is the outcome of the communist monster’s becoming biopolitical. The worker, in the ‘monstrous’ form, has occupied the entire space of production with ‘his immaterial labour force’³

Negri is critical of the idea that capital’s domination over social reproduction is enduring, and he approaches this critique on the basis of a purported autonomous character to immaterial and affective labour activity. I argue that from the perspective of Hardt and Negri’s theory of immaterial/affective labour}biopolitical production, that is, on the own terms of the post-operaisti, that domination, oppression and perversion of life is only made more pronounced.

First, although Hardt and Negri argue that ‘capital alienates from the worker not just the product of labour but the labouring process itself, such that workers do not feel their own capacities for thinking, loving, and caring when they are on the job,’ Negri continues to claim that there is a qualitative difference between the lack of control over one’s labour activity writ large and a surfeit of subjective control over activity in biopolitical production, even when that subjective control is objectively commanded under capitalist power relations.⁴ As such, I argue that they eulogise apparent moments of micro-autonomy in the labour process at the expense of a consideration of how capitalist control over production is in relation to the production of subjectivity. First, they argue that the production of value in immaterial/

affective labour}biopolitical production is contingent upon labour-power that can adapt and

1 Negri ‘Political Monster’ 194. Emphasis in original.

2 Negri ‘Political Monster’ 209-210

2 Negri ‘Political Monster’ 209-210