[1] lists.village.virginia.edu

[2] The J18 mobilization sought to link up the autonomous struggles of “environmentalists, workers, the unemployed, indigenous peoples, trade unionists, peasant groups, women’s networks, the landless, students, peace activists and many more”. See bak.spc.org

[3] In political discourse in the UK, ‘workerism’ is usually a derogatory term for approaches we disagree with for fetishizing the significance of workplace struggles (and dismissing those outside the workplace). Italian operaismo, on the other hand, refers to the inversion of perspective from that of the operation of capital to that of the working class: “We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development first, and workers second. This is a mistake. And now we have to turn the problem on its head, reverse the polarity, and start from the beginning: and the beginning is the class struggle of the working class. At the level of socially developed capital, capitalist development becomes subordinated to working class struggles; it follows behind them, and they set the pace to which the political mechanisms of capital’s own reproduction must be tuned.” (M. Tronti, 1964, ‘Lenin in England’, in Working Class Autonomy and the Crisis (London: Red Notes/Conference of Socialist Economists, 1979). While the Italian usage is clearly positive rather than negative, as we shall see, one of the eventual limits of (versions of) Italian workerism was precisely the fetishizing of struggles on the factory floor.

[4] “The new ‘technical bases’ progressively attained in production provide capitalism with new possibilities for the consolidation of its power... But for this very reason, working-class overthrow of the system is a negation of the entire organization in which capitalist development is expressed — and first and foremost of technology as it is linked to productivity.” R. Panzieri, ‘The Capitalist Use of Machinery: Marx versus the Objectivists’ in P. Slater ed., Outlines of a Critique of Technology (London: Ink Links), pp. 49–60.

[5] “At the highest level of capitalist development, the social relation becomes a moment of the relation of production, the whole of society becomes an articulation of production; in other words, the whole of society exists as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination over the whole of society. It is on this basis that the machine of the political state tends ever-increasingly to become one with the figure of the collective capitalist.” M. Tronti, Operai e Capitale (Turin: Einaudi 1971).

[6] S. Bologna (1977),‘The Tribe of Moles’, in Working Class Autonomy and the Crisis (op. cit.).

[7] A. Negri (1973). ‘Partito Operaio Contro il Lavoro’, in S. Bologna et al., eds., Crisi e Organnizzazione Operaia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974)

[8] See Negri’s (1982) ‘Archaeology and Project: The Mass Worker and the Social Worker’, in Revolution Retrieved: Selected Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis & New Social Subjects 1967–83. (London: Red Notes, 1988).

[9] See ‘Decadence: The Theory of Decline or the Decline of Theory? Part II’, footnote 83, Aufheben 3 (Summer 1994).

[10] An opposite Marxian response to the ‘problem’ of the class basis of revolution, as provided by Moishe Postone in Time, Labor and Social Domination and the Krisis group, is to retain Marx’s work as a critique of commodity society and value but disconnect this from class.

[11] P. Linebaugh, The London Hanged (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991).

[12] Negri introduced the term ‘self-valorization’ for this process of autonomous self-development. See Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the ‘Grundrisse’ (New York/London: Autonomedia/Pluto, 1991). The attraction of the concept lies in its implication that the working class is an active subject, not just a function of capital’s valorization needs, and whose strategy is to take what it needs. However, in Marx, the concept of ‘valorization’ refers to capital’s own operation — specifically, its use of our activity to expand value, that is, our alienated labor. It therefore seems extremely odd to employ it to refer to our activity against capital — unless that activity too is itself alienated in some way. In the preface to the second edition of Reading ‘Capital’ Politically, Cleaver acknowledges that the concept is problematic (as he does in his interview with Massimo de Angelis in Vis-Ã -Vis , 1993). However, he still uses it to explain that, in being against capital, autonomous struggles are also for ‘a diverse variety of new ways of being’. See also his ‘The Inversion of Class Perspective in Marxian Theory: From Valorization to Self-valorization’ in W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn & K. Psychopedis eds., Open Marxism: Volume II: Theory and Practice (London: Pluto).

[13] The point is well put in ‘Marianne Duchamp talks to Tursan Polat about Class’: “First, there are differences, and not mere differences but oppositions of the first order, between the sociologic conception of socio-economic categories on the one hand and the hegelo-communist conception of social-class on the other. In the sociological conception, socio-economic categories, including ‘class’ and an inexhaustible number of constituent sub-strata, are defined: (a) beginning with the particular i.e. the individual, i.e. analytically/inductively; (b) as transtemporal aggregates of individuals who share commonalities of occupation, income, and even culture; (c) as static and normal presence within any society, i.e. biologically. In the hegelo-communist conception, social classes are defined: (a) beginning from the whole i.e. the social form i.e. synthetically/deductively; (b) as active bearers of the mutually opposed historical interests inherent within the social form; (c) with a view toward the abolition of state and economy; i.e. necrologically.”

[14] See Dole Autonomy versus the Re-imposition of Work: Analysis of the Current Tendency to Workfare in the UK (now only available on our website), ‘Unemployed Recalcitrance and Welfare Restructuring in the UK Today’ in Stop the Clock! Critiques of the New Social Workhouse and ‘Re-imposition of Work in Britain and the “Social Europe”’, Aufheben 8 (Autumn 1999).

[15] Penguin edition, p. 792.

[16] For example, in the 1930s, the Communist Party, which nominally controlled the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM), saw the NUWM’s role as limited to tail-ending existing industrial strikes. The NUWM leaders, despite their membership of the CPGB, asserted the role of the unemployed movement to act in its own right. See Wal Hannington, Unemployed Struggles 1919–1936: My Life and Struggles Among the Unemployed (Wakefield: EP Publishing 1936).

[17] American black struggles inspired the Italian workerists: “American Blacks do not simply represent, but rather are, the proletariat of the Third World within the very heart of the capitalist system... Black Power means therefore the autonomous revolutionary organization of Blacks” (Potere Operaio Veneto-Emilano, 1967, cited in Wright, p. 132).

[18] An examination (and critique) of the issues around the Dalla Costa & Selma James pamphlet The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community, the ‘Wages for Housework’ demand and more recent discussions (e.g. Fortunadi’s The Arcane of Reproduction) would be useful, but is beyond the scope of the present article.

[19] See ‘A Commune in Chiapas? Mexico and the Zapatista Rebellion’, Aufheben 9 (2000), especially pp. 20–22. While we took Holloway as the academic Marxist overestimating the working class and revolutionary significance of the Zapatista rebellion, Cleaver represents this tendency even more clearly. His refusal to consider criticisms of the Zapatistas and Marcos come across as just as ideological as previous Marxist defenses of ‘actually existing socialism’. For example: “a woman said of the ’96 encuentros: ‘the women [were] doing all the cooking and cleaning, including of toilets, invariably without any footwear (the men had the boots), even after the heavy rainfall... Harry Cleaver said ‘Well, maybe they like it’...’” (cited in You Make Plans — We Make History, 2001).

[20] See T. Shanin ed., Late Marx and the Russian Road (London: Routledge, 1983); and T. Shanin, The Awkward Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).

[21] J. Camatte (1972) Community and Communism in Russia.

[22] “The student was already a proletarian by virtue of a subordinate location within the university division of labor. To the extent that existing stipends became a fully-fledged wage, she would be transformed from an ‘impure social figure on the margins of the valorization process’ into a fully-fledged ‘wage worker producing surplus value’” (Cazzaniga et al., 1968, cited in Wright, p. 95).

[23] See ‘The Worker-Student Assemblies in Turin, 1969’ in Working Class Autonomy and the Crisis (op. cit.).

[24] An irony of such an approach is that it implies that the right thing for them to do is be bad students, yet Cleaver himself has been a good student and gathers other such good students around him.

[25] In fact, a focus on the side of struggle today might lead Cleaver to re-re-define students as middle class after all. With the wider retreat of collective proletarian resistance, and even as more people have entered university from working class backgrounds, so the incidence of overt struggles in the universities has declined.

[26] In fact, for many Marxist academics, the prefix ‘radical’ has now been replaced by ‘critical’, reflecting the general retreat of the class struggle which for the intelligentsia takes the form of a (still further) retreat into the realm of ideas and arguments.

[27] This point was ably made in Refuse (BM Combustion 1978): “The ‘opposition’ by counter-specialists to the authoritarian expertize of the authoritarian experts offers yet another false choice to the political consumer. These ‘radical’ specialists (radical lawyers, radical architects, radical philosophers, radical psychologists, radical social workers — everything but radical people) attempt to use their expertize to de-mystify expertize. The contradiction was best illustrated by a Case Con ‘revolutionary’ social worker, who cynically declared to a public meeting, ‘The difference between us and a straight social worker is that we know we’re oppressing our clients’. Case Con is the spirit of a spiritless situation, the sigh of the oppressed oppressor, it’s the ‘socialist’ conscience of the guilt ridden social worker, ensuring that vaguely conscious social workers remain in their job while feeling they are rejecting their role... The academic counter-specialists attempt to attack (purely bourgeois) ideology at the point of production: the university. Unwilling to attack the institution, the academic milieu, the very concept of education as a separate activity from which ideas of separate power arise, they remain trapped in the fragmented categories they attempt to criticize... In saying social workers are just like any other worker, he [the Case Con social worker] conveniently ignores the authority role that social workers intrinsically have, plus the fact that when they participate in the class struggle they don’t do so by ‘radicalizing’ their specific place in the division of labor (e.g. radical dockers, radical mechanics) but be revolting against it.” (pp. 10–11, 23).

[28] See ‘A Commune in Chiapas? Mexico and the Zapatista Rebellion’, footnote 33, Aufheben 9 (2000).

[29] “we cannot understand class unless we see it as a social and cultural formation, arising from processes which can only be studied as they work themselves out over a considerable historical period.” E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1963).

[30] Op. cit.

[31] ‘Leftism’ is a concept we find useful but is perhaps tricky to define. It can be thought of in terms of those practices which echo some of the language of communism but which in fact represent the movement of the left-wing of capital. However, for us an important point is to get away from the picture in which there is a pure class struggle only interfered with and prevented from generating communism by the interference of an exterior force (from the bourgeoisie) of leftism. A question arises of why the class struggle allows itself to be so diverted. It is important to recognize that, though some leftists are clearly part of the bourgeoisie or at least of the state, the power of leftism/trade unionism etc. comes from the fact that the working class generates leftism from within itself as an expression of its own current limits.

[32] ‘The Tribe of Moles’, op cit., p. 89.

[33] For Marx formal organizations were only episodes in “the history of the party which is growing spontaneously everywhere from the soil of modern society.” Quoted in J. Camatte, Origin and Function of the Party Form. Camatte’s discussion there in a sense takes the discourse on the party to the extreme where it dissolves, allowing his later perspectives of this in On Organization.

[34] Wright (p. 66) suggests that the earlier workerists had no time for the left’s Third Worldism and support for nationalist struggles. However, a front cover of Potere Operaio magazine from the 1970s called for victory to the PLO-ETA-IRA.

[35] This (moralistic) attitude of cheer-leading ‘Third World’ (national liberation) struggles and contempt for the Western working class was an expression of the middle class social relations characteristic of these students.

[36] See, for example, lanic.utexas.edu

[37] See ‘Crisis of the Planner-State: Communism and Revolutionary Organization’ (1971) in Revolution Retrieved (op. cit.).

[38] Though we like his phrase “money is the face of the boss”.

[39] See ‘Review: Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973–92’, Aufheben 3 (Summer 1994) and ‘Escape from the Law of Value?’, Aufheben 5 (Autumn 1996).

[40] See Cleaver’s useful summary of Negri’s position in his Introduction to Negri’s Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse (New York/London: Autonomedia/Pluto Press, 1991).

[41] See, for example, Toni Negri, ‘Keynes and the Capitalist Theory of the State post-1929’ in Revolution Retrieved (op. cit.).

[42] Negri Proletari e Stato (2^nd edn., Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976).

[43] “Your interest for the ‘emergent strata’ (proletarian youth, feminists, homosexuals) and for new, and reconceptualised, political subjects (the ‘operaio sociale’) has always been and is still shared by us. But precisely the undeniable political importance of these phenomena demands extreme analytical rigor, great investigative caution, a strongly empirical approach (facts, data, observations and still more observations, data, facts).” (Rivolta di classe, 1976, cited in Wright, p. 171).

[44] For a good account of the extent of recent ‘hidden’ struggles in the US today, see Curtis Price’s ‘Fragile Prosperity? Fragile Social Peace: Notes on the US’.

[45] See the Wildcat article ‘Reforming the Welfare State in Order to Save Capitalism’ in Stop the Clock! Critiques of the New Social Workhouse (Aufheben, 2000).

[46] Op. cit.

[47] See F.C. Shortall, The Incomplete Marx (Aldershot: Avebury, 1994).

[48] On the other hand, Cleaver also contends that what he is doing is not so different from Marx: “Marx illustrates these relations [of use-value and exchange-value] with a variety of apparently innocuous commodities: linen, iron, watches, and corn (wheat). I say apparently because most of these commodities played a key role in the period of capitalist development which Marx analyzed: linen in the textile industry, iron in the production of machinery and cannon, watches in the timing of work, wheat as the basic means of subsistence of the working class. To be just as careful in this exposition, I suggest that we focus on the key commodities of the current period: labor power, food and energy”. (p. 98). However, while Cleaver is probably right that Marx did not make an arbitrary choice of which commodities to mention in Chapter 1, their function in Marx’s presentation is arbitrary. Unlike the political economists, Marx does give attention to the use-value side of the economy; but here in his opening chapter he makes no mention of the concreteness of these use-values in the class struggle. At this point of Marx’s presentation of the capitalist mode of production, the precise use-values are irrelevant. Marx’s reference to linen, corn etc. is a part of a logical presentation, not a reference to concrete struggles.

[49] I.I. Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value (New York/Montreal: Black Rose Books 1973).

[50] Cleaver’s claim (p. 138) that while Marxists have examined the question of the content of value at length almost no work has been done on the issue of the form of value (and hence the necessity for Cleaver’s own analysis) includes reference to Rubin. But this in itself suggests that Cleaver hasn’t understood (and perhaps hasn’t even read) Rubin’s book, the whole of which is concerned precisely with the social form of value.

[51] Up until the 1970s, at least in the English speaking world, Marx was seen as having simply developed and refined Ricardo’s labor theory of value. In this traditional interpretation, Marx, like Ricardo, was seen to adhere to an embodied labor conception of value. What was common to all commodities, and hence what it was that made them commensurate with each other as manifestations of this common factor, was that they were all products of the “expenditure of human brains, nerves and muscles”, that is of human labor in general. Consequently, the value of a commodity was seen to be determined by the labor embodied in it during its production.

With this physiological, or quasi-physicalist, conception of labor, the Ricardian labor theory of value conceived value as merely a technical relation: the value of a commodity was simply determined by the amount of labor-energy necessary for its production. As such the Ricardian labor theory of value could in principle be applied to any form of society.

For Rubin, what was specific about the capitalist mode of production was that producers did not produce products for their own immediate needs but rather produced commodities for sale. The labor allocated to the production of any particular commodity was not determined prior to production by custom or by a social plan and therefore it was not immediately social labor. Labor only became social labor, a recognized part of the social division of labor, through sale of the commodity it produced. Furthermore, the exchange of commodities was a process of real abstraction through which the various types of concrete labor were reduced to a common substance — abstract social labor. This abstract social labor was the social substance of value. Rubin’s abstract social labor theory of value necessarily entailed an account of commodity fetishism since it was concerned with how labor as a social relation must manifest itself in the form of value in a society in which relations between people manifest themselves as relations between things.

In the mid-1970s the labor theory of value came under attack from the neo-Ricardian school which argued that it was both redundant and inconsistent. Rubin’s abstract social labor theory of value was then rediscovered as a response to such criticisms in the late 1970s. Although Cleaver dismisses Rubin there have been attempts to address his abstract social labor theory of value from the tradition of autonomia — see for example the article by Massimo De Angelis in Capital & Class, 57 (Autumn 1995).

[52] “An official Soviet philosopher wrote that ‘The followers of Rubin and the Menshevizing Idealists ... treated Marx’s revolutionary method in the spirit of Hegelianism... The Communist Party has smashed these trends alien to Marxism.’ ... Rubin was imprisoned, accused of belonging to an organization that never existed, forced to ‘confess’ to events that never took place, and finally removed from among the living.” (Fredy Perlman, About the Author, in Rubin’s Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value (op. cit.)

[53] We made this same point in our reply to Cleaver’s associate George Caffentzis of Midnight Oil/Midnight Notes. See ‘Escape from the Law of Value?’, Aufheben 5 (Autumn 1996), p. 41.

[54] See F.C. Shortall, The Incomplete Marx (Aldershot: Avebury 1994).

[55] Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2000.

[56] Mark Leonard, ‘The Left Should Love Globalization’, New Statesman, 28^th May 2001. Leonard is director of the Foreign Policy Center think-tank and apparently a Blairite.

[57] This break was, as for a lot of militants of that period, quite physical. Arrested in 1979, Negri went into exile in 1983. However, his particular form of escape (getting elected as a MP) and the warm welcome and relatively cushy position that awaited him in France were based on the different status he held (as a professor) compared with other militants; thus sections of the movement saw him somewhat as a traitor. His return to Italy has not succeeded in redeeming him; nor has his credibility been restored by recent pronouncements, such as his advice to the anti-globalization movement that the ’20% of voters’ alienated from the political system need to be won back to electoral politics. (See ‘Social Struggles in Italy: Creating a New Left in Italy’)

[58] Of course, it is possible to reject the leftist inanities of ‘anti-imperialism’ while recognizing the realities of imperialist rivalries.

[59] www.eco.texas.edu

[60] The Society of the Spectacle, at least, appears in Cleaver’s bibliographical history of the ‘autonomist Marxist’ tradition, appended to Negri’s Marx Beyond Marx, op. cit.

[61] While Cleaver’s decision to leave Reading ‘Capital’ Politically as it was rather than re-write it is understandable, what is perhaps less understandable — unless one wants to suggest that he is simply dogmatic — is his failure to use the new Preface to acknowledge the weaknesses in his analysis that have emerged with hindsight. The continued uncritical lauding of ‘Wages for Housework’ is one example; another is the claims made about the role of inflation made in the 1970s.

[62] Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction, New York, Autonomedia, 1995.

[63] Today, when both husband and wife are supposed to work, the wife often works as well as doing most of the housework at home. For the sake of non-‘complexity’, we assume here that the housewife is a ‘pure housewife’ and that the family is formed by husband and wife, unless stated, since this does not alter the nature of our issue (value and reproduction).

[64] Selma James’s introduction in Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, Bristol, Falling Wall Press, 1972. All emphasis in all the quotes are ours.

[65] It is noticeable that, however, in the course of her pamphlet, Fortunati’s challenge is carried out with a certain caution. Here and there Fortunati seems to admit that the work of reproduction is only a precondition for future value production: ‘the surplus value produced within the process of reproduction posits itself as a precondition... of the surplus value produced within the process of reproduction’ (p. 102). And she seems to admit that value is actually created by the labor actually expended in production by the worker husband: ‘[reproduction] work transforms itself into capital only if the labor power that contains the housework surplus value is consumed productively within the process of production’ (p. 103).

[66] ‘It is [the whole family] that constitute the necessary nucleus for the production and reproduction of labor power. This is because the value of labor power, like that of any other commodity, is determined by the time necessary to produce and reproduce it. Hence the total work supplied by the work subjects in this nucleus constitutes the necessary work time for its reproduction.’ (p. 19) Or on page 23: ‘Given that [labor power] is a commodity, its reproduction must therefore be subject to the general laws governing commodity production, which presupposes an exchange of commodities.’ Or on page 158: ‘Reproduction functions as another process of commodity production. As such it is a process complete in itself and, like the others, one in which work is divided into necessary and surplus labor’ (p. 158). The fact that housework produces value, or is an expenditure of abstract labor time, is in these sentences the ‘logical consequence’ of the initial assumption that labor power is ‘a commodity like all others’.

[67] Or in her words, housework ‘appears’ as ‘the creation of non-value’ (p.10).

[68] ‘When selling their labor power on the capitalist market, the individuals cannot offer it as the product of their work of reproduction, as value, because they themselves... [have no] value.’ (29, p.11).

[69] Less crude than Fortunati, years before, Mariarosa Dalla Costa appreciated the importance of internalization of the housewife role in the housewife, an internalization that has material roots in her real social relations within society and can be broken down only through the material involvement in the struggle. It is a fact that the ones who really check the quality of housework are the woman’s female friends and relatives, not the husband!

[70] Cleaver: www.eco.utexas.edu Cleaver/ 387LautonomistMarxism.html (2002). Dalla Costa: www.commoner.org.uk (written after 1996).

[71] www.book-info.com

[72] .pp. 8; 9; 14 (three times); 15 (twice); 20; 22; 33; 34; 41; 47; 59; 55; 57 (three times); 91; 108 (three times): 109 (twice); 128 (twice, one of which is ‘extremely complex’).

[73] Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically, Anti/Theses, AK Press, 2000, p. 84. About Cleaver’s allegiance to the issues and the spirit of Wages for Housework see also his reply to our ‘From Operaismo to Autonomist Marxism’, Aufheben #11, www.eco.utexas.edu, p. 54.

[74] See previous footnote.

[75] Capital and Class 57, Autumn 1995, pp.107–134.

[76] As quoted in Anonimo Milanese, Due Note su Toni Negri, Renato Varani Editore, Milan, 1985, our translation.

[77] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, London, 2000]

[78] We do not deal with prostitution for simplicity’s sake, but it is important here to stress that Fortunati’s assimilation of housework and prostitution is not a straightforward task and requires a whole article of critique in itself.

[79] Unlike De Angelis and Fortunati, Cleaver prefers to remain ambiguous on this crucial point. In another part of his book, he just suggests that the work outside production ‘counts as surplus value’ in the social factory. (p. 84) This is not the same as saying that this work creates value, because a work that reduces the cost for the capitalist even without creating value can be accounted as higher surplus value for the capitalist.

[80] This can be seen as a reaction to the equally moralistic approach within the old workers’ movement and especially within Stalinism which celebrated and prioritized the importance of productive workers as ‘real’ workers against the parasitism or lack or relevance of unproductive labor. An extreme of this was the Stakhanovist glorification of work in Russia.

[81] For a similar critique of Autonomist Marxist subjectivism see our review article on Midnight Oil, Aufheben #3, Summer 1994]

[82] In Reading Capital Politically, page 118, Cleaver says that such a categorization would involve a political categorization of workers into ‘real’ workers and others.

[83] For Negri, the detaching of the dollar from gold in the years 1971–3 was the beginning of a new world dominated directly by a law of command. This change, as Negri says in Pipelines, Lettere da Rebibbia, (p. 132) consists in the fact that: ‘the dollar is now the ghost of [Nixon’s] will, the whimsical and hard reality of [his] power’. This change, Negri says, indicated a new phase of accumulation at a world level where ‘the vetero-Marxist law of value is over; now the “law of command” rules... The subjection of value to the dollar, of life to the American diktat... [means that] the economic crisis now are dictated by command’.

[84] Pity that this postmodern world looks too much like capitalism to justify the abandonment of Marx’s theory!

[85] Likewise, Harry Cleaver maintains that society today is ‘one great social factory’ where ‘all activities would contribute to the expanded reproduction of the system’. And where even leisure is shaped by capital so that what we may do for our own recreation serves to reproduce us as workers for capital, i.e. as labor power (pp. 122–123). Similarly, for De Angelis today ‘capitalist work... can be imposed in a variety of different forms including, but not limited to, the wage form’ (p. 122).

[86] Abstract labor is the other aspect of labor and it has also a role in class antagonism, as it manifests itself as the wealth and power of our employer and in capital (the world of money), alien and hostile to us; and it is related to the exertion of concrete labor by concretizing itself as the capital that imposes it[but it is not the same as the concrete labor, the labor that we experience as boredom and pain.

[87] Likewise, Negri in Empire criticizes the family wage as it allows capital to control the wife through the husband as a mediator (p. 403).

[88] For the great confusion made by Fortunati in this subject see the Conclusions.

[89] For an interesting discussion on capitalist temporality see Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

[90] It is important to notice that, in order to demonstrate that activities or work outside production create value, De Angelis looks at their concrete aspects (that cause pain and boredom). Fortunati likewise often looks at concrete aspects of housework and/or prostitution in order to argue their role in value creation[for example, she assimilates housework and prostitution because of the fact that they share the concrete sexual act; or she looks at concrete activities of the housewife in her ‘working day’. Is however looking at the concrete aspect of work in order to deduce its aspect as abstract labor a deeper insight in Marxist theory, or a theoretical mistake? In order to understand whether a work creates value, which is an abstraction, a manifestation of our social relations, should we not abstract from its concreteness and consider its role in a mechanism that mediates our social relations?

[91] And she adds that if the real nature of the system of reproduction as a factory were made explicit the entire system of reproduction would fall into a crisis (p. 114).

[92] ‘Smiling at parents’ is the most utterly ridiculous example of ‘work’ done for capital within the family as a ‘labor-power-factory’. In Fortunati’s words: ‘even a newly born child reproduces its parents at a non-material level... when it smiles for example... producing a large quantity of use-value for its parents.’ (p. 128).

[93] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in Early Writings, London: Penguin Books, 1975 p. 378]

[94] Housework keeps the cost of labor power low, especially if the housewife is encouraged to employ ‘home economic’ means to get the most (commodities) out of the family income. The employment of ‘home economics’ is understood by Harry Cleaver as work, or discipline, imposed on women by capital in order to increase the surplus rate of profit (Cleaver, op. cit., pp. 122–3). But this interpretation neglects the fact that the housewife sees the need for saving money as something that she freely does ‘in her own interest’. Indeed, in bourgeois society what is experienced as free will is something paradoxical, because we really do experience this freedom, but this same freedom is one with the capital domination of our life through the market. Calling this mechanism a ‘blackmail of the market’, or the imposition of a coerced work, as De Angelis and Cleaver do, does not help to demistify the ‘mystery’ behind the commodity form and value, their apparent naturalness.

[95] Commodity fetishism is not an illusion or an ideological mystification but something having a material reality: ‘To the producers... the social relations between their private labors appear as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material relations between persons and social relations between things’ (Marx, Capital, London: Penguin Classics 1990, pp. 165–166] ) About this important point see for example Geoffrey Pilling, Marx’s Capital, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980, pp. 169–173]

[96] An extreme case of an unwaged ‘work’ subsumed by capital is the way the so-called ‘Anti-Social Behavior Orders’ (ASBOs) are enforced by the UK State against youngsters who graffiti or roam in the gardens of their neighbors and knock on their doors. Enforcing these orders, which means sending a child to jail, would be economically impossible for the UK State. The State cannot afford to pay the police to monitor twelve year olds hassling their neighbors: the only way the ASBOs are enforced is through the collaboration of neighbors, who then ‘work’ for the State as guards and police for free. They do this to protect their private property. Sure there is a blackmail behind their unwaged work: the imposition of the commodity form makes everybody dependent on the little private property they own, and this divides the class and fragments the proletariat into individuals, enemies of each other and loyal to the bourgeois order. But (unfortunately) this blackmail is subjectively felt as a ‘natural’ condition, not as coercion, and it would not induce antagonism in ‘alienated workers’, who are ‘coerced’ in this ‘boundless’ job.

[97] These two opposite aspects of capitalism are discussed by Marx in Capital (op. cit., pp. 470–480).

[98] For example on p. 248 they say that the history of the modern era (‘modernity’) is basically substantiated by ‘imposition of discipline’[a concept that is theoretically not well defined, but emotionally attractive to the intellectual (liberal) reader. Money is a tool to impose discipline too: the monetary mechanisms, they complain on page 346, ‘are the primary means to control the market’. Should we be really morally outraged along with Negri and Hardt that the market is controlled by a despotic mechanism, or is it more intelligent to consider how the whole system of power in capitalism is rooted in free relations of exchange?

[99] While Negri and Hardt make a distinction between the ‘freedom’ of this flow and the market, this distinction is based on the fact that, unlike the free flow, the market is ‘dominated by capital’ and ‘integrated’ into the logic of its ‘imperialist command’ (p. 363). But, as we explain in the main text, it is the ideally pure freedom of the market (the same freedom that is behind the ‘free flow’) that what substantiates the opposite of freedom, the despotic side of capital[thus the distinction made by Negri and Hardt hides their uncritical attitude towards bourgeois freedom and bourgeois values which we discuss in the main text.

[100] Negri and Hardt admit that their so celebrated celebrated mass mobility is ‘still... a spontaneous level of class struggle’ (p. 213–214); however, they cannot think of a future struggle in which this magic spontaneity is abandoned and where we will gain direct and conscious control over the world and ourselves . The only way for them of thinking of an organized struggle that still preserves the spontaneity of the masses is that of theorizing the necessity of ‘a force’ capable of drawing from the’ destructive capacities and desires’ of the multitude and organizing the struggle. This in a sense is the theorization of a separation that we want to overcome in a revolutionary movement and it is for us as exciting as... Leninism.

[101] In Fortunati’s jargon, ‘freedom to whom to exchange’ implies sexual freedom, but this is related to an economic concept of exchange. So what Fortunati really means here is: ‘the form of the family does not allow us to swap partners freely as soon as we find a potential for a more profitable exchange’. By saying this Fortunati equates marriage or sexual partnership with a simple economic transaction, a job contract, not dissimilar in this from bourgeois philosophers, such as Kant! (See for example pp. 57–67) Thus the idea of sexual liberation is here one with the idea of a perfectly liberal economic market for human relations. Notice also that Fortunati’s jargon (‘equal relationship’, ‘real opportunity’, ‘freedom with whom to exchange’) can be easily shared by an American Express top manager.

[102] Marx says that ‘the more value [the worker] creates, the more worthless he becomes’ (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, op. cit., p. 325), but he means that in capitalism the dispossessed are worth nothing when a question of choice or priority is considered, not that, in the transition from pre-capitalist to capitalist modes of production he has lost some (monetary) value! Rather, precisely in the fact that in capitalism value becomes everything and we become nothing (unless we are worth some exchange value, or better, unless we have exchange value in our pockets) Marx sees the ontological inversion of capital to humans. By complete contrast, Fortunati uncritically accepts the bourgeois concept of a human value which is embodied and expressed by exchange value, to the extent to claim that the individual in capitalism has lost the (money) value he was worth when he was a slave[because, at least then he had value by being a commodity! This (mad) idea assumes that commodity relations are the only imaginable human relations and that (exchange) value is ahistorically pivotal in human life. By assuming this Fortunati does the same ‘Robinsonade’ that Marx criticized in the classical political economists which amounts to a covert assumption of the naturalness of the present social relations.

[103] Before saying this, she quotes Marx, who speaks about the formal equality of the worker and the capitalist in front of the law in the sphere of circulation, but it escapes from Fortunati’s understanding that Marx wants to highlight the paradox of bourgeois equality and freedom, not to make an apology of it.

[104] A ‘Milanian Anonymous’ ultra left pamphlet criticizes Negri’s assumption of working class ‘Autonomy’ by considering uncritically the ‘immediate subjectivity... of the individual as immediately given’ within the conditions imposed in capitalism. Thus as they say for Negri ‘Autonomy’ and ‘self-valorization’ of the individual are considered within the limits of what exists, ‘for his “free” submission to the capitalist society’. (Anonimo Milanese, op. cit. pp. 64–65, our translation).

[105] Against the trend for women flooding on to the labor market any appeal to traditional values and moralism cannot work on its own. This is why the right-wing party Forza Nuova has to take into consideration the reality of commodity fetishism and propose a wage for housework in order to counter-balance the attractiveness of a proper wage. Their political manifesto says: ‘Proposals at the legislative level: ... the demographic growth must be encouraged with subsidies for every child and with further subsidies for the families with more children... female housework must be paid with a family checque, to discourage work outside home.’ (www.tmcrew.org, our translation).

[106] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, op. cit. p. 348, punctuation slightly changed.

[107] This does not mean that one should not recognize liberal struggles (as well as struggles in the workplaces limited to higher wages) as being expressions of the contradictions of capitalism and containing potentials for development beyond the conditions that cradled them; but one needs to understand both the contradictions that give rise to these struggles and the inner contradictions of these struggles.

[108] See Karl Marx Capital, Chapters 14 and 15, for the ontological inversion of man and capital realized first with rationalization in manufacture and later perfected with large-scale industry.

[109] ‘The magnitude of value [of labor power] is greater than the sum of values of the commodities used to produce it... i.e.. its exchange value’ (p.84).

[110] When the worker sells his labor power to the capitalist, ‘the housework process [which creates this value] passes over to the capitalist leaving no visible trace’. (p. 97)

[111] ‘The fact that the magnitude of the value of labor power is not fully represented by its exchange value is not surprising because the value of a commodity is expressed in an independent manner throughout its representation as exchange value’ (p. 82).

[112] ‘While the use value of other commodities cannot constitute the measure of their value... in the case of labor power it is its...use-value that constitutes the measure of its value’[she says on p.81]

[113] Karl Marx, Grundrisse, London: Penguin Books, 1993, pp. 295–6]

[114] As Marx found in his analysis of capital, value (and abstract labor as well) is social since it is inseparable from the nature of the commodities and of the nature (aim) of their production: ‘I call this commodity fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor as soon as they are produced as commodities... This fetishism arises from the peculiar character of the labor which produces them.’ (Marx, Capital, op. cit., p. 165).

[115] Which she presents against the accusation of ‘double counting’ labor in her theory (p. 93).

[116] Karl Marx, Grundrisse, op. cit. pp. 248–249]

[117] 25,000 Mhz.

[118] The question: ‘How many apples do I have if I add one apple to five apples?’ makes sense. The question: ‘What do I have if I add five apples to five’ does not make any sense. In order to add, subtract or equate two quantities, they must be quantities of something homogeneous.

[119] All we have available to us is the English version of The Arcane of Reproduction. We assume that it reflects the original Italian version.

[120] Negri and Hardt, Empire, op. cit. p. 294] They quote Spinoza to support this bourgeois dream of an ideally free civil society.

[121] This does not mean to dismiss struggles that may start in order to defend rights of freedom and equality, as well as struggles that may start in order to demand a higher wage[but we cannot be but disappointed by ‘revolutionary’ or ‘anti-capitalist’ theories that cannot criticize the present social relations.

[122] This does not mean to dismiss threat, stress and potential antagonism that industrial capital competition implies for the petty bourgeoisie.

[123] ‘This formalism... imagines that it has comprehended and expressed the nature and life of a form when it has endowed it with some determination of the schema as a predicate. The predicate may be subjectivity or objectivity, or say, magnetism, electricity... contraction and expansion, east or west, [value/non value creation], and the like... In this sort of circle of reciprocity one never learns what the thing itself is... In such a procedure, sometimes determinations of sense are picked up from everyday intuition [or political-theoretical jargon], and they are supposed of course to mean something different from what they say; something that is in itself meaningful...’ [Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface, Oxford Paperbacks, p. 29, our adjustments in square brackets].

[124] For example, De Angelis, who theorizes that any coerced, waged or unwaged work creates value, is also a keen supporter of the demand ‘that all of us receive a guaranteed income which is sufficient to meet basic needs’ and which ‘pays the invisible work of students’ and other low waged and unwaged proletarians so that everybody ‘have less pressure and more time to think for themselves and imagine different ways of being’ (www.eco.utexas.edu). The idea of sharing the world with capitalism while creating bubbles of ‘different ways of being’, which is the theme of the conference Life Despite Capitalism, (London School of Economics, 16–17 October 2004) is in De Angelis’s quote above expressed as ‘imagining different ways of being’[Aufheben cannot but agree with this. Indeed, we think that only when capitalism is subverted and new social relations are established we will be able to create a different way of being that is not...imaginary!!

[125] A striking ambiguity is Fortunati’s claim that the children’s demand for economic support from their parents in the form of pocket money is ‘a very anti-capitalist idea’ because ‘the children earn [this money] solely in virtue of the fact that they exist as individuals and not because they are active as labor powers’ (pp. 141–2). In fact, children will get money from their parents not because they are free individuals, but because they are elements of the direct relationship of the family, which is not a relation among free individuals. Free individuals are so free to let each other freely starve, unless they exchange[and this does not apply to the children in a family. While on the one hand Fortunati complains all the time about the illiberal relation of the family for obstructing our perfected ‘freedom to exchange with whom we want’, it is precisely the form of the family that grants a right to the children to extract money out of the pockets of their parents with nothing in exchange! If this is anti-capitalist, it is in virtue of the clash between capitalism and an archaic form of social relationship, in the same sense that the Christian concept of giving charity to the undeserving poor is... very anti-capitalist too indeed. On the other hand, the form of parental support as pocket money, unlike that in form of directly providing the child what he needs, is a very capitalist form which the archaic relation of parents and children assumes in capitalism! Indeed, modern parents feel the importance of teaching their children ‘the value of money’ by giving them money, not use values. This obliges the children to think about budgeting and to take up jobs outside home if they go above budget beyond their parents’ economic possibilities[which is the necessary training to accept the conditions of life imposed by the commodity form, including the curse of being in waged work for the rest of their life, as the natural and only possible way of living.

[126] There are also differences between Fortunati and Dalla Costa. In The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, Dalla Costa sees the demand of wages for housework as a useful way to build up a struggle[but the real aim of housewives’ struggle, she says correctly, is to develop new social relations, to challenge the present ones, which substantiate the housewives’ self-identification with their roles, and their isolation. Fortunati, instead, merely limits herself to demand better economic and social status for women in terms of a bourgeois definition of status: more money, more consumption, a reduction of housework hours, and a wage for the houseworker (See also Polda Fortunati, ‘The Housewife’, in All Work and No Pay, Women, Housework, and the Wages Due, (1974) Ed. Wendy Edmond and Suzie Fleming, London: Power of Woman Collective and Falling Wall Press, pp.13–19).

[127] For example, she denounces ‘errors’ (p.73); ‘misunderstandings’ (pp. 73, 80, 81); ‘lack of clarity’ (p. 91); ‘misconceptions’ (p. 59); ‘blindness’ (p. 91); ‘misplaced assumptions’ (p. 59); ‘general confusion’ and ‘erroneous theories’ (p. 116), etc. in all the history of Marxist thought previous to Fortunati.

[128] Fortunati also posits the ‘existence’ of a social relation of wage-work for the housewife, which ‘appears otherwise’ too, because it is mystified by the mediation of the husband, who acts as an ‘agent’ of capital. Again, the existence of this invisible wage-work relation is declared and sustained although it clashes with facts: every feature of family relations which does not fit with wage-work relations or productive work is declared to be a ‘specific’ feature of this particular wage relation, or of this particular production. See for example p. 105; p. 129; p. 139; or p. 157]

[129] Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire, Harvard University Press, London, 2000.

[130] Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Multitude, The Penguin Press, New York, 2004.

[131] Marx Beyond Marx, Autonomedia, London, 1991.

[132] For example, The New York Times, as socialist Alex Callinicos, embittered by Negri’s attacks on traditional Marxism, reminds to us in ‘Toni Negri in perspective’, International Socialism Journal, Autumn 2001, www.isj1text.ble.org.uk

[133] In fact Multitude seem to have been written with the aim to patch up the disastrous effect of the war in Iraq on their theory. Or to answer to a number of criticisms from the left: for example , to endorse not a revolution but decentralized micro-struggles.

[134] ‘L’ Impero Colpisce Ancora’,

[135] auto_sol.tao.ca. This review also praises their ‘critical rethinking’ of basic political concepts such as democracy, sovereignty, representation.

[136] Among many articles on Negri and Hardt: Ugo Rossi, ‘The Counter-Empire to Come’, Science & Society, Vol. 69, no. 2, April 2005, pp. 191–217; Maria Turchetto, L’Impero; Paul Thompson ‘Foundation and Empire: A Critique of Negri and Hardt’, Capital and Class 86, Summer 2005, pp. 73–95. http://www. intermarx.com/interventi/impero.html.

[137] In Empire, p. 29, they mention the work of ‘Italian radicals’ and quote the philosopher Virno as a reference. An important review of Negri’s pre-Empire work is Nick Witheford’s ‘Autonomist Marxism and the Information Society’, Capital and Class 52, pp. 85–125.

[138] Negri and Hardt stress that these two aspects are normally entangled. Elsewhere immaterial production is described as three-fold, regrouping their aspects differently. See, for example, Michael’s Hardt’s ‘Affective Labor’, Makeworlds, Friday 26 /12/2003, www.makeworlds.org0]

[139] Michael Hardt, ‘Affective Labor’.

[140] The term ‘biopolitical’ is borrowed from Foucault, but, as Maria Turchetto (L’Impero) shows, it is subverted from its original sense.

[141] In fact Negri and Hardt scan the whole history of bourgeois thought since Spinoza and (very!) freely appropriate concepts and observations of others.

[142] For the Regulation School (Aglietta, Coriat, etc.), Fordism and post-Fordism were periods of socio-political equilibrium reached around the two forms of productions. This is more sophisticated than just focusing on the simple material process of production. For a critique of these ideas see, Ferruccio Gambino, ‘A Critique of the Fordism of the Regulation School’,
www.wildcat-www.de 28/z28e_gam.htm.

[143] See Valeria Pugliano, ‘Restructuring of Work and Union Representation’, Capital and Class 76, Spring 2002, pp. 29–63.

[144] As Gambino finds out, there is numerical evidence that, between the end of the ‘80s and the end of the ‘90s in France, post-Fordist production did not displace convey-belt practices of work at all (Gambino A Critique).

[145] If some aspects of Toyotism could be still in use, they are within a system which is essentially a conveyor belt system. For the struggles in Melfi see, e.g.
www.marxismo.net pomigliano.html.

[146] These ideas went up and down in popularity according to the state of health of capitalism. For example, it was popular at the end of the ‘60s and ‘70s with Brzezinski, Bell and others (Witheford, op. cit. pp. 86–8). See our review of Witheford’s CyberMarx in this issue.

[147] It has to be added that after the deflation of the dot.com boom such theories have lost most of their puff.

[148] See George Caffentzis, ‘The End of Work or the Renaissance of Slavery? A Critique of Rifkin and Negri’,
korotonomedya.net/ otonomi/caffentzis.html.
The concept of service is in fact miscellaneous. It only means: anything except production of material products. Service includes also the financial sector, which diverts surplus value produced in mainly material production elsewhere (see our review of CyberMarx in this issue).

[149] See, for example, For a Political Economy of the Sign, Telos Press, 1981. Baudrillard’s argument conflates use value with the utility of an object. In fact for Marx ‘the form of use value is the form of the commodity’s body itself’ (‘The Value-Form’ in Debates in Value Theory, Ed. Simon Mohun, The MacMillan Press Ltd, 1994).

[150] This aspect is central in Maurizio Lazzarato’s concept of immaterial labor. See, for example, ‘General Intellect, Towards an Inquiry into Immaterial Labor’,
www.emery.archive.mcmail.com

[151] Negri thus appeals to those, among whom us, who object to the traditional working class organization based on the party. However, it is not good enough to embrace postmodernist enthusiasm for fragmentation and isolation and delude ourselves that this is subversive.

[152] Of course, their theory is presented as superior to postmodernism and all the other theories they appropriate! See, for instance, how they discuss postmodernism in Empire p. 142–3.

[153] Term of insult given to Marxism by postmodern author Jean Baudrillard in his work.

[154] Witheford, ‘Autonomist Marxism’, pp. 85–6; 88; 96–7 values Negri for his apparent capacity to supersede the bourgeois theories.

[155] An important contradiction which we do not deal with here is that ‘immaterial’ production affects the substance of value since immaterial products can be duplicated[for Negri and Hardt this makes private property and the imposition of wage work increasingly untenable (Multitude p. 311).

[156] Witheford, ‘Autonomist Marxism’,. p. 88.

[157] Toni Negri, interview with Mark Leonard, ‘The Left should Love Globalization’ New Statesman, 28 May 2001, www.findarticles.com.

[158] ‘There is a distinct... neo-feudal flavor in today’s privatizations’, Negri and Hardt state in Multitude (p. 186).

[159] ‘The biopolitical social organization begins to appear absolutely immanent... the various elements present in society are able collaboratively to organize society themselves (p. 337).

[160] Or, on p. 339: ‘Just as the multitude produces in common... it can produce... the political organization of society’ (p. 339).

[161] See Multitude, p. 354, sentence cited later. The shortcomings of revolutionary utopia is ‘solved’ by Negri and Hardt by proposing a future which is based on what we have now! These two views are in fact two sides of the same coin the one as bad as the others.

[162] As Witheford in ‘Autonomist Marxism’ explains, pp. 110–1.

[163] See Witheford, ‘Autonomist Marxism’, p. 89.

[164] Raniero Panzieri, ‘The Capitalist Use of Machinery: Marx Versus the Objectivists’,
www.reocities.com.
Wanting a rupture does not mean to be Luddite. In our daily struggle we are bound to twist and use capital’s resources and exploit its contradictions. For example, deskilling the typographers has allowed the thickest of us to be a poster designer for our political campaigns.

[165] Our idea of revolution is that of supersession: This is not a banal abolition of the present but a qualitative subversion that can only be realized from within and against the present. The abolition of immaterial production for us is not the abolition of creativity but the reintegration of the unity of aims and execution in the production of our life.

[166] For the non-dialectical approach in Negri and Hardt see, John Holloway, ‘Going in the Wrong Direction, or Mephistopheles, Not Saint Francis of Assisi’,
www.slash.autonomedia.org.
Despite the reservations we have about John Holloway’s thought (see our review article in Aufheben, # 11, 2003, pp. 53–56), we think his critique of Negri is sound, clearly expressed, and very close to our criticism.

[167] Some readers like Maria Turchetto (L’Impero) blamed an alleged ‘dialectic’ in Negri and Hardt for the apparent contradictions in their theorization. In fact these contradictions are due to an undialectical juxtaposition.

[168] Karl Marx, ‘The German Ideology’ in Early Writings, Ed. Lucio Colletti, Pelican, London 1975.

[169] Marx never held a material theory of labor, which started from material aspects of production or the products, but a social theory of labor. His ‘materialism’ was a theory that saw society as a material starting point, in opposition to idealism which started from ideas.

[170] See also: ‘Such new forms of labor… present new possibilities for economic self-management, since the mechanisms of cooperation necessary for production are contained in the labor itself.’ (Multitude, p. 336)

[171] Also: ‘We can see numerous instances in which unitary control is not necessary for innovation and that on the contrary innovation requires common resources, open access... [e.g.] in the sectors that have most recently emerged as central to the global economy, such as information knowledge and communication’ (Multitude, p. 337)

[172] ‘Living labor, the form-giving fire of our creative capacities. Living labor is the fundamental human faculty: the ability to engage the world actively and create social life. Living labor can be corralled by capital and pared down to the labor power that is bought and sold and that produces commodities and capital, but living labor always exceeds that’ (Multitude, p. 146). Marx said this, they claim. Believe them.

[173] See, John Holloway ‘Time to Revolt[Reflections on Empire’, Dissonance, Issue 1, www.messmedia.net: ‘Living doing is subjected to past done. Living doing is subjected to the things made by past doing, things which stand on their own and deny all doing’.

[174] We object that ‘labor’ is not a ‘human faculty’[‘labor power’ is. The conflation of labor power with labor in Negri is not due to imprecision, but is ideological. In a new mode of production that needs only our brain as a tool, the faculty of laboring can be immediately conflated with the deployment of labor.

[175] For a description of Toyotism and a (really) rational consideration of the contradictory authoritarian and liberal aspects in it see, Andrew Sayer, ‘New Developments in Manufacturing: The Just-in-Time System, Capital and Class, 30, Winter 1986, pp. 43–72.

[176] As well as other fetishists of Toyotism like Maurizio Lazzarato (‘General Intellect…’).

[177] Negri and Hardt admit that they are aware of caveats by the Frankfurt School (Habermas), that a transmission of ‘market data’ is somehow impoverished. However, they add, the service sector presents a richer model of productive communication, in that this production aims to produce more immaterial products. And in a footnote they suggest that Habermas’s ideas are surpassed and critiqued (Empire, p. 290).

[178] In their account of the struggle in Fiat Melfi, Mouvement Communiste explain how Toyotism was introduced to improve exploitation and impose massacring shifts within a conveyor-belt production. In order to introduce this system without resistance Fiat employed in Melfi mainly young people with no experience of organized struggle from a region which had a very high unemployment level. However this failed to stop increasing resignations and resistance. (‘Fiat Melfi: La Classe Ouvrière d’Italie Contre-Attaque’, La Lettre de Mouvement Communiste, 13, May 2004, BP 1666, Center Monnail 1000, Bruxelles 1, Belgique).

[179] In general capital needs a class who has an interest in imposing its rule on the others. See, ‘What was the USSR?’ in Aufheben # 6–9, 1997–2000]

[180] Negri and Hardt celebrate the ideal freedom of democratic exchange. If there is something wrong in our real exchanges and communications, they argue, this is due to an undue overlap of capital’s control: ‘exchanges and communications dominated by capital are integrated into its logic’ (Empire, p. 363).

[181] Sorry: bio-product?

[182] Sorry: singularities?

[183] To get rid of the objectivity of capital it is not good enough to give a different name (potenza) to our potentially autonomous power and another name (potere) to the power of capital, as if they really existed side by side and if it were only a matter of becoming aware of our existing power!

[184] See, for example, Roberto Sarti, ‘Toni Negri Against the Empire... For a Capitalist Europe!’, Interactivist Info Exchange, May 30, 2005 info.interactivist.net? sid= 05/05/31/0447208&mode=nested&tid=4analysis/05/05/31/044720] shtml?tid=4.

[185] Negri and Hardt resurrect a theory which pivots on potentially free and powerful subjective ‘will’ from one of the first founders of bourgeois thought: Spinoza.

[186] While Negri and Hardt conflate the object into the subject (‘all is due to subjectivity’), Theorie Communiste, (we surely do not need to remind our readers of them), as Negri’s negative mirror image, end up conflating the subject into the object (‘all is due to the relations of capital and labor’), and appear to assert the same millennial gospel but for completely opposite reasons: due to forces that are beyond our individual consciousness and will, we now live in a ‘new’ era when the revolution is possible. For a critique of such theories which claim that our collective subjectivity is somehow ‘forced’ towards a certain historical direction (the revolution) by capital itself see, Gilles Dauvé, ‘To Work or not to Work? Is That the Question?’, http://troploin0] free.fr/biblio/lovlabuk/

[187] Capitalist subsumption of labor has consequences for society as a whole, inside and outside the workplace, so that many activities which are done outside production are reshaped according to the pace and character of productive labor. For a discussion of how housework is affected by capitalist production, see ‘The Arcane of Productive Reproduction’ in Aufheben # 13, 2005, pp. 20–36.

[188] In the context of the military Star Wars project. See our article on China in this issue.

[189] For the alienation of the university professor, see Harry Cleaver ‘From Operaismo to Autonomist Marxism: A Response: www.eco.utexas.edu AufhebenResponse2.pdf.

[190] David Hencke, ‘Firms Tag Workers to Improve Efficiency’, The Guardian, June 7, 2005.

[191] We deliberately used Autonomist De Angelis’s words ‘boredom and pain’ that he uses to describe the effects of real subsumption in ‘Beyond the Technological and the Social Paradigms’, Capital and Class 57, Autumn 1995, pp. 107–134.

[192] See Mario Tronti, ‘Social Capital’, www.reocities.com/cordobakaf Following this initial suggestion, other Autonomist Marxist authors, such as Massimo De Angelis, later adopted the concept of ‘abstract labor’ for the concrete ‘boring and painful’ experience of labor under real subsumption (in De Angelis, ‘Beyond the Technological’). Although we do not agree with such use of the concept of ‘abstract labor’, we agree with the Autonomist understanding of the basis for antagonism.

[193] See also Witheford, ‘Autonomist Marxism’, p. 92.

[194] However, to patch up the gap between their theory and reality, Negri and Hardt add: ‘the impersonal rule of capital extends throughout society... the places of exploitation, by contrast, are always determinate and concrete.’ (Multitude, p. 100–101) A theory that says one thing and its opposite is the best theory ever.

[195] Negri, Politics of Subversion, p. 116 cited in Witheford, ‘Autonomist Marxism’, p. 101. Negri safely adds that capital even ‘anticipates’ our production ‘in common’ (Politics of Subversion, p. 116). This genially explains why this ‘production in common’ is never actually observable in reality!

[196] On how productive the ‘poor’ is see also, Empire, p. 158. In the concept of ‘excess’ there is a moment of truth for the skilled creative worker. This excess has a value today and can make the difference between who guides and controls a struggle and who does not tomorrow. We cannot see how, instead, the McDonald worker’s skills in showing servile niceness all the time gives to them ‘equal opportunities of struggle’.

[197] Marx mentioned in his times the human (i.e. social) meaning of food in opposition to something that serves only to fill the stomach. See, ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844)’ in Early Writings, Pelican, London 1975, p. 353.

[198] George Caffentzis, ‘Immeasurable Value? An Essay on Marx’s Legacy’, The Commoner, 10, p. 97, 1997. And by us in Aufheben # 13.

[199] In Makeworlds, www.makeworlds.org0]

[200] In the ‘70s and ‘80s many, following Braverman, focused their analysis of IT as being the new machine (see Nick Witheford, ‘Autonomist Marxism’ and our review of CyberMarx in this issue).

[201] The call center worker is in the front line in a relation between clients and their providers of service, and often take the brunt for this alienating situation. See Amelia Gentleman, ‘Indian Call Staff Quit Over Abuse on the Line’ The Observer, 28 May 2005. So much for the... creation of affects.

[202] Paraphrased from Empire, p. 55.

[203] Pugliano notices that also in the FIAT factory in Melfi the establishment of increased inter-personal communication between workers and their leaders or other persons in key roles in the factory reduced oppositional activity to the minimum (Pugliano, ‘Restructuring of Work’, p. 47).

[204] As Mouvement Communiste notice in Fiat Melfi, the introduction of Toyotism, with its heavy shifts, destroyed all ‘possibilities of any social life outside the factory’ for the workers. So much for the creation of social relations…

[205] We notice that the recent BA strike in support of Gate Gourmet workers (a catering outsource of BA) was based on ‘networks’ of friendship and family relations created outside work. Importantly, those who showed solidarity with the Gate Gourmet workers were the ‘material’ baggage handlers and not the ‘immaterial’ hostesses and stewards.

[206] For the debate, see e.g., J. Walker, ‘ESF: Another Venue is Possible: Negri vs. Callinicos’, www.indymedia.org.uk.

[207] See our review of CyberMarx in this issue for examples of ‘effective’ forms of struggles suggested to us by the Negrian Nick Witheford.

[208] Radical-chic tutors of design encourage young, would-be graphic designers to have a few anti-capitalist ad-busting works in their portfolio.

[209] Lazzarato hails the end of the class system ‘as a model of action and subjectivation’ (Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘What Possibilities for Action Exist Today in the Public Sphere?’, www.nettime.org).

[210] In ‘An Empire of Cant, Hardt, Negri and Postmodern Political Theory’, Dissonance, Issue 1, www.messmedia.net

[211] In ‘Alma Venus’ Negri avoids spelling out how he conceives the transition to communism by speaking rather of ‘leaning further beyond the edge of being’. This pure abstractedness is, we suspect, convenient (www.messmedia.net). Let us notice that all human thought is based on abstractions. Bourgeois thought, however, uses abstract concepts as starting points, to explain reality in separation from its context.

[212] To be fair to traditional Marxism, we should specify that Negri and Hardt seem to have absorbed and re-elaborated vulgar Marxism.

[213] Sorry: flexibility?

[214] The most popular social group for the intellectual world is the intellectual world. This is immaterial by default.

[215] In ‘Must Try Harder’ and ‘The Arcane of Productive Reproduction’, Aufheben # 13, we similarly criticized as moralistic the autonomist attempts to convince the world that the unwaged produce value.

[216] And Michael Hardt’s acrobatics to condemn the anarchists’ attacks against Starbucks’ windows in Seattle[as well as his passive acceptance to call these attacks ‘violence’.

[217] ‘I don’t deny, it’s nice to dream, but it is less nice to have hallucinations. Seeing a fallen empire and a triumphing communism where, instead, there is an aggressive capitalism... more than a beautiful utopia this seems to me, frankly, hallucination’ (Maria Turchetto, ‘L’Impero’).

[218] We assume Alexiej Sayle and his company don’t mind if we have freely adopted the concept of Negative Reality Inversion presented in ‘Sick’, The Young Ones, series 2.

[219] www.marxists.org. See also Early Writings, p. 244.

[220] See Multitude, pp. 337–8 and pp. 185–6.

[221] The prescription to run businesses like services, popular in the business literature of the ‘80s, were nothing other than the re-edition of old the bourgeois ideology of the 19^th century. The prescription to run production for profit like a service, or simply to understand it as a service, hides the delusion to abolish its inherent contradictions as a production for profitthrough a change of the staff’s attitude towards the customer or towards themselves. Instead, the recent increasing privatization of state-run services like the British National Health Service is a concrete change of a service into a profit-making machine. This has really concrete effects, it is not simply the ideological prescription of a change in attitude. But Negri and Hardt, who pay respect to business guru prescriptions, do not bother about these much more relevant changes in the ‘new’ era of increasing privatization!