Oppression, Liberation, and General Intellect

My positioning of Negri’s alienation in his broader conceptual schema is still not complete.

My drawing out of the relations and relevance of alienation in Negri’s theory notwithstanding, it is important to reiterate that he does not regard alienation as a central or overarching concept. Alienation can rather be seen as a link between his main theoretical concerns; a link which he nonetheless introduces and which, I argue below, both undermines his main concerns and is more central to them than he accounts for. There is a conceptual category which is not only more central to Negri’s philosophy but is also fundamental to post-operaismo; general intellect. For Marx, alienation is a category which bridges oppression and liberation. In the Paris Manuscripts he asserts that the dehumanising consequences of labour under capitalism are one of many spurs to the revolutionary transformation of society, one in which the practice of labour as ‘conscious life-activity’ can be achieved.¹ Like alienation, the general intellect as a category covers the entire range of relations, and therefore the contradictions and conflicts, which produce social, political, and economic life. Negri and the post-operaisti deploy general intellect to explain and critique the dynamic between oppression and liberation.

I argue that Marx’s concept of ‘general intellect’ offers four approaches to examining alienation in emergent forms of labour and alienated labour in post-operaismo thought. First, Marx proposes the general intellect as a prediction of new qualities and processes of the exploitation of surplus-value and of a new character to this exploitation which comes as a result of a growing centrality of knowledge in the production process. The category of general intellect is not a mere law of value but is a category that accounts for the extent to which ‘the conditions of the process of social life’ and the degree to which ‘the powers of social production have been produced...as immediate organs of social practice.’² According to Marx, general intellect is a category that applies to labour in society when general social knowledge has become a force of production; that is, when knowledge has become both a means of labour as well as a property of labour-power. The post-operaisti claim that this condition is the definitive characteristic of our contemporary political economy; general social knowledge

1 Marx 1844 76

2 Marx Grundrisse 706

is a force of production. Second, there is broad assent to the importance of the general intellect by post-operaisti. Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Carlo Vercellone, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi, the most prominent of post-operaisti, emphasise the operation and significance of general intellect in their investigations to understand exploitation, the labour process, production, the production of life, and the production of subjectivity. Third, the post-operaisti are unique among Marxist scholars in ascribing significance to the general intellect. Marx uses the term only once, in the ‘Fragment on Machines’ from Grundrisse.¹ The post-operaisti, however, argue that characteristics of this category of general intellect remain throughout the works of Marx following Grundrisse.² Finally, I argue that the concept of alienation is central to Marx’s general intellect because Marx predicates the general intellect on the basis of the absence of alienated labour time.³ The post-operaisti forego the consideration of this element of Marx’s theory. These four approaches that I take to examine the contradictions and antagonisms of the contemporary constitution of capitalism allows me to broaden the enquiry and consider the contribution of those who share a similar epistemological position with Negri, further examine the qualities of Negri’s and the operaisti notions of alienation, and to begin to explore the post-operaisti claim that a qualitative distinction must be made between the nature of capitalist control over the labour process in monopoly capitalism and the role of power in the labour process today.

If we were to assume that the post-operaisti justification for the priority for Marx’s concept of general intellect is its conceptual prescience in terms of the organisation of production in contemporary life, its significance lies in their notion that in it, they argue, Marx foresaw the coming ‘hegemony of intelligence’ in which ‘knowledges make up the epicentre of social production and pre-ordain all areas of life.’⁴ The key to the Fragment’s significance, they argue, is that it offers ‘elements that allow for the identification of the radically new character of the contradictions and of the antagonism that traverses cognitive capitalism.’⁵ Thus the post-operaismo interpretation of general intellect is that it is a signifier for a new phase in the development of the capitalist mode of production. As intelligence and knowledge are essentially embodied characteristics of subjects, at least in the first instance, the general intellect is a category which purports to describe a new form of subjectivity. Therefore,

1 Although he does underline it twice.

2 Marx Grundrisse 690-712

3 Marx Grundrisse 705

4 Antonio Negri. Reflections on Empire. Tr. Ed Emery. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008). 126.; Paulo Virno.

‘General Intellect’. Historical Materialism 15:3 (2007). 3-4.

5 Carlo Vercellone. ‘From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism.’ Historical Materialism 15: (2007). 15.

general intellect is a term which purports to describe a phase of capitalism, a particular form of subjectivity within that phase, and a particular form of the processes of the production of subjectivity. What then according to Marx’s Fragment on Machines might these new features of the capitalist mode of production be and what are the conditions of their development?

Marx’s aim in the Fragment on Machines is to historically categorise the material conditions of the forms of production processes which correspond to the concept of capital. Capital, he says, sorts itself into three qualitatively different elements: ‘the material of labour,’ or circulating capital, ‘the means of labour’, or fixed capital, and ‘living labour’, or variable capital. The labour process, he argues, is the ‘moving unity’ of these three elements within a production process.¹ Marx’s focus in the Fragment is to examine the effect of the development of capital in its different forms, and he takes the development of fixed capital towards its most adequate form – the machine – as his vantage point. With the development of the means of labour, Marx argues that workers become ‘conscious linkages’ within a process of production over which they are ‘watchmen.’² This development is two-fold in character. First, the development of fixed capital is a process of the objectification of the knowledge of living labour as machines and is contingent on the diffusion of general social knowledge.³ Second, Marx argues that the development of fixed capital creates the conditions for ‘the free development of individualities.’⁴ Taking these two conditions together, the Fragment should be read in part as a product of Marx’s assessment and reassessment of the antagonism he presents in The Communist Manifesto when he argues that ‘not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons.’⁵ As a result of the application of scientific knowledge to production the labour time necessary for the reproduction of capital is reduced and is therefore replaced with a non-labour free time; I demonstrate below that this ‘therefore’ is a problem here. For Marx this is a general condition of production – the application of knowledge is always able to be a source for the reduction of labour time – and is a condition of capitalist production, which is visible particularly when viewed from the perspective of the production of relative surplus-value. The distinction here, Marx argues, is that with this stage of the development of fixed capital surplus-time cannot be appropriated as surplus-labour. As such, Finn Bowring summarises, ‘surplus-value cannot be converted into capital – and thus capitalist social relations cannot be smoothly reproduced – when the income distributed for

1 Marx Grundrisse 691

2 Marx Grundrisse 692

3 Marx Grundrisse 694

4 Marx Grundrisse 699 and 706

5 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Tr. Samuel Moore. (London: Penguin Classics, 2002). 226.

the consumption of an expanding volume of commodities is allocated to individuals in proportion to their labour time, which is now “an infinitesimal, vanishing magnitude.”’¹ Thus the development of fixed capital creates the social conditions for the general intellectuality which will prefigure what the post-operaisti call the exodus from capital; what Alberto Toscano defines as ‘communism as separation.’² In this way, the post-operaisti interpret this section of the Fragment as Marx’s prediction of our contemporary capitalism. This development of fixed capital, and this is the key focus of post-operaismo thought on the general intellect, results in paradigm altering consequences in terms of the social productions which proceed from realignments in the loci of the production of economic value and the concomitant alterations in the organic composition of capital. This dialectical development of capital in turn bears upon the political composition of the working class, forms of the production of political subjectivity and, therefore, upon the potential for liberation from capital and the supersession of bare life.

There is a distinct tension between Marx’s writings in the Fragment and the post-operaisti interpretations. I argue that this tension centres upon approaches to understandings of transformations in the labour process in this phase of the capitalist mode of production. The post-operaisti go beyond Marx and depart from Marx in two important ways. First, they depart from Marx by inverting Marx’s theories on alienated labour, arguing that the capacity for alienated labour to distort, pervert and prevent the development of human potentiality is actually a means by which the full realisation of the refusal of and liberation from capital is to be realised. It is by means of this reconfiguration that the post-operaisti, in a philosophically idealistic manoeuvre, transform the politics attendant to capital’s enduring ability reabsorb surplus-time as labour time, and present these politics as being characteristic of political liberation. Second, they go beyond Marx – paradoxically – by inferring the concrete labour process from the theories of Marx. As a result they amputate the central point of Marx’s theory of general intellect – that the general intellect is characterised by the absence of alienated labour time. Instead, they propose that the free development of individualities can proceed under the conditions of wage-labour and thereby transpose the conditions of the production of subjectivity in “free time” onto the labour time of immaterial labour.

1 Bowring ‘From the mass worker to the multitude’ 114; Marx Grundrisse 704

2 Alberto Toscano. ‘Chronicles of Insurrection: Tronti, Negri and the Subject of Antagonism’, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 5:1 (2009). 77. Emphasis in original.