Part 2, Chapter 4 : Consequences of the undialectical conception of capital as ‘just imposition of work’

4. Consequences of the undialectical conception of capital as ‘just imposition of work’

We have seen that the Autonomist understanding of capital as ‘imposition of work’ stresses only one aspect of capital, that of discipline, organization, despotism. This means that the other aspect of capital, the freedom to exchange and own your own value in the sphere of circulation is not spelled out.

This undialectic approach allows for two possible theoretical understandings. One, clearly followed by Cleaver and De Angelis, is that of incorporating the latter aspect of capital in the first, even if they are opposite. In order to force two opposite dialectic aspects into one ‘imposition of work’, the concepts that describe this imposition (work, command, foreman, etc.) must become extremely abstract — as this is the only way to give the same name to opposite situations! For example, if we abstract enough the concept of ‘foreman’, we may argue with De Angelis that the market is the ‘foreman’ of the freelance lorry driver, in the same way as a foreman is for the blue-collar worker. This is true, but in such an abstract way that our theory becomes as useful as Hegel’s notorious black night where all cows are black: if value is produced anyhow; if anything is productive work; if antagonism is anywhere; if anybody who is under the pressure of a foreman even when he is not because the market can be called a foreman; what does all this clarify or explain besides being only a moralistic statement that we are all ‘dominated’ by capital? However, this approach still maintains a criticism of capitalism as a whole and a revolutionary attitude towards bourgeois relations.

But there is a second understanding that is possible once the opposed aspects of capital are not both spelled out: one that takes only one side of the dialectic, and considers capital just in its aspect of despotism, of ‘imposition of work/ coercion/ discipline’. The other side of capital, bourgeois freedom, whose experience is rooted in the freedom to exchange, choose, consume, etc., is simply perceived as a force that potentially opposes the despotism of capital and which is potentially liberatory.

Negri and Hardt seem to have adopted such a vision of capitalism as simply the imposition of a ‘displiplinary regime’ over both the spheres of production and reproduction.[98] In Empire they describe the present class struggle as the antagonism between the so called ‘multitude’, a multicultural mass of individuals, who want to be free to ‘flow’, and a despotic power (Empire, or ‘all the powers of the old world’) which tries to impose ‘disciplinary’ local conditions on the proletariat (pp. 212, 213, and 400). They admit that this ‘free flow’ is forced on ‘many’ people by ‘dire circumstances’ and that its effect ‘is hardly liberatory’ in itself (p. 253). Nevertheless for them it is the liberal spirit and the abstract desire for freedom that this ‘free flow’ represents or suggests that what counts: mobility ‘always expresses... a search for liberation... the search for freedom... (p.212; p. 252). Thus for Negri and Hardt migration is ‘a powerful form of class struggle’ (p. 213).

Yes, people want to flow. And the governments try to regulate their flow. Thus flowing seems to be something inherently subversive. But people want to flow where they think they can sell their labor power dearer or, simply and desperately, find any possibility of income even at the price of selling their labor power cheaper.[99] With the analysis of De Angelis or Cleaver previously discussed in mind, we would rather understand this flow of the unwaged as imposition of work outside production, and not as something subersive in itself.

The freedom of the labor market underlying the workers’ mobility is in fact a contradictory face of capital, the other face being exploitation, xenophobic harassment, state control, the destruction of traditional peasant production in many areas of the world by the market etc. The same contradictions that arise from the dynamics of capital and from the freedom of the market are thus material preconditions for the constitution of movements of self-organization and solidarity among the dispossessed. So it is not so much the present blind, random, individualistically spontaneous freedom-to-flow-for-the-sake-of-an-income that has to be celebrated as a ‘powerful’ example of class struggle. Rather we have to celebrate the opposite: the rediscovery of a human reality of direct relations that comes out not from the flow in itself but from the struggles of the migrants.[100]

Coherently with their uncritical view, the political action of the ‘multitude’ for Negri and Hardt must pivot around the demand for the recognition of civil rights within a system of uncriticized bourgeois freedom. The main demand that should unite the ‘multitude’ against capital is in fact that of the recognition of full citizenship (p. 400) and guaranteed income (p. 403). Crucially, for Negri the moral entitlement to citizenship and guaranteed income lies in the fact that each of us ‘produces’ and contributes with waged or unwaged ‘work’ to the power of capital.

A similar direction is taken by Fortunati. On p. 24 she explains that bourgeois freedom is illusory. And she always uses apostrophes around the words ‘free’ and ‘freedom’. We agree with this, do we? We agree because we know that our bourgeois freedom is one with bourgeois relations mediated by exchange, thus with our fragmentation and with the objectification of our social relations as value and capital and the consequent power of capital over us... Well, forget it. This is not the issue for Leopoldina Fortunati.

In fact, for Fortunati exchange is apparently an existential, universal and ahistorical condition of humanity since the pre-capitalist past: the relation between people in the past was in fact a form of exchange, if not of money for commodities, of ‘work for work’ (e.g. p. 27); and value was the fundamental measure in human relations and a measure of human priorities in every form of society, since as she said, in the past we ‘had value’ insofar we were slaves, thus exchange value. Value as measure of worthiness was a universal and ahistorical feature of humanity! Also, Fortunati calls all interpersonal relations ‘exchanges’ and claims that ‘equal opportunities for exchange’ ‘seem to offer potentially more equal opportunities’ (which appear as something desirable). But, she adds, this freedom of exchange is obstructed and fettered by capital as production. Let us look at this in detail.

For Fortunati it is capital-as-production that shapes the form of the family and obstructs the free relation of exchange among individuals — and it is this (not exchange!) that is the very reason for the fragmentation of individuals within capitalism:

It is this reduction of interpersonal relationships to relations of production (i.e. the family) that underlies the growing isolation of individuals within capitalism. The individual becomes isolated not only from outside society but also from other family members with whom he/she has a relation based on production and not on the individual him/herself. (p. 25)

Capitalist production, which is said to be one with the male-woman relationship in the family, negatively affects other ‘exchanges’, like those between gays, and make their potential for liberation, for an ‘escape’, difficult or in vain:

The development of various alternative exchanges (lesbian, gay male, communal, etc.) seems to offer potentially more equal opportunities for exchange, but at the social level the male/female relationship is so influential that in practice it is difficult to modify or escape from it, to create a more equal relationship between those exchanging (p. 34).

Freedom of choice and exchange, which is the good thing that capitalism offers to ‘each individual’, is illusory only because the family as a nucleus of capitalistic production binds the individuals and limits our ‘real opportunity for individual relationships’ — i.e., limits the perfected bourgeois freedom based on exchange among individuals:

Thus while capitalism... offers each individual great freedom of choice with whom to exchange within the relations of reproduction, it is illusory, because [due to family relations] this ‘freedom’ is matched by minimal real opportunity for individual relations (p. 25).[101]

For Fortunati then, ‘capital’ as production is an evil entity that faces us – facing capital’s and the family’s despotism, we, as individuals, strive to develop ‘alternative exchanges’ and look for ‘opportuntinties’ for exchange. Capital wants to control our ‘free’ movements, choices and exchanges in order to compel us to work within authoritarian relations and one of the ways to do this is through the family. This is why ‘freedom’ in our system is illusory! And this is why she puts quote marks round the word!

We may agree on the one hand that the individual freedom offered by capitalism, which is liberatory from the constrains of the past, is the carrot of this system whose stick is production — and none of us would sacrifice our bourgeois freedom to go back to a suffocating Medieval social relation. But on the other hand if we want to make a coherent criticism of capital as production, we cannot and must not avoid considering its aspect of bourgeois freedom, the freedom of exchange, as an integral part of capital and of its power over us. It is wrong to separate the two aspects and oppose production to bourgeois freedom, or assume exchange as an ahistorical condition of life.

Fortunati’s stress on equal opportunity for women and lack of equality between men and women is ambiguous too, since her arguments seem to pivot on the recognition of us as ‘value’ in a moral sense in relation to our role as value or non-value-creating for capital.[102] Although admitting that everybody, both men and women, are exploited in capitalism, Fortunati complains that ‘under capitalism men and women are not exploited equally’ (p. 39), and that the housewife is not a ‘value’ within capitalism: ‘ unlike the male worker... [the housewife] is posited as non-value; she cannot obtain money for her work, she receives no wage in exchange... she cannot hold money...’ (p. 37) And that, within the family, the housewife and her husband ‘enter into relation... without equal rights, therefore not equal in the eyes of the law.’ (p. 39).[103]

The one-sided vision of capitalism as production, as opposed to the potential real opportunity for equality and freedom of exchange, has consequences when it comes to analyzing ‘class struggle’, as a ‘refusal of (any) work’, a refusal to have anything to do with capital as production and despotism, but still within capitalism as far as exchange and consumption of commodities are concerned. In fact for Fortunati a major demand against capital is that housewives should ‘be allowed to consume’ (p. 76) — so major that, in Fortunati’s perception, such a demand ‘would free everyone, not just women, from the iron laws of the production of surplus value’ (p. 76). While production is capital, consumption is something against production and against capital!? Proletarian shopping, as the reclaiming of our ‘right to consume’ without paying is revolutionary indeed — but only within a movement that has consciously put the same concept of bourgeois exchange into the dustbin of history, not one that uncritically retains it!

In Fortunati’s undialectic vision, capital becomes a subject that imposes production and repression on us, who are free from capital if we ‘refuse’ this discipline, if we step ‘outside production’. Capital totally incorporates us insofar as we are labor power and work for it, or we are totally Autonomous from it if we refuse its discipline. Within a view that focuses on the aspect of production and neglects the contradiction of capital as despotism and freedom of exchange, there is a risk of developing an uncritical attitude to what is ‘outside’ production and imposition of discipline. This also appears to be true for Negri. In Pipeline Lettere da Rebibbia Negri praises the rebellious attitude of those who in the ’70s avoided a job in industry to find a niche in petty bourgeois semi-legal activity; and of those who got a second job outside their main job in industry. Negri called this a ‘reinvention of daily life’ (p. 32).[104] Consistent with this, in Empire Negri celebrates ‘dropping outs’ and refusals of work done ‘in every way possible’ (p. 274), without any criticism of context, aim, meanings or outcomes of these dropping-outs.

Fortunati too praises examples of ‘refusal of work’ without any critical insight. On page 146 she says that ‘the fall in the birth rate is in part a direct expression of the refusal of the female housewife to take on the extra housework that children require’. A refusal of having children can have many meanings including being part of an anti-capitalist struggle, but it can also be the result of the naturalization of bourgeois relations of exchange, and of the domination of value over our lives: millions of women have refused to have children in order to become full-time wage slaves.[105] What is interesting is actually to consider how this fact is contradictory for capital, and how these contradictions act within it.

The most noticeable example of Fortunati’s compartmentalized vision of ‘refusal of work’ as struggle-against-capital-by-default is the following: for her the wave of abandonment of children that was caused by the employment of women in large scale industry is as an example of ‘women’s’ indiscipline’ and their ‘refusal... to take on the extra housework that children bring’ (p. 171). Against Marx who called this phenomenon an ‘unnatural estrangement between mother and child’ (p. 172) she launches a feminist attack, since is it not egalitarian to attribute parental affection to women as ‘natural’: ‘here’, she says, ‘Marx himself is blinded by capitalist ideology’ (p. 172). But in her feminist passion, Fortunati does not understand that here Marx speaks about a fundamental feature of capital as alienation: the ontological inversion that makes money everything for the bourgeois individual and the individual as person nothing. When the real need to earn a wage becomes more important for your survival than your own child, capital has completed the ultimate disintegration of society into alien individuals, obstacles to each other’s happiness, submitted to capital as wage earners for all our needs and desires.

Against capital as the unity and opposition of despotism and bourgeois freedom, a revolutionary movement can only challenge both production together with the relations of free exchange, private property, and the whole construction of our dispossession. The process of defetishisation of value and capital is the real abolition of a material social relation, of exchange; and thus the real repossession of the control over our lives, ‘the complete restoration of man to himself as social — i.e. human — being, a restoration which has become conscious’.[106] In the struggle direct social relations will necessarily abolish the mediation of social relations through market relations. Only within direct social relations will value be abolished and the real individual, who is himself because of who he is and what he does with the others, and not because of what he has in his pockets, will be confirmed. Only within direct social relations what the individual works towards, i.e. the whole of his conscious activity, will be one with his result. And this is real freedom, because if we desire or dislike something we are really able to consciously work towards achieving it or changing it, since nothing will rule over us despite us and behind our backs.[107]