Marx in Movement. Antonio NegriЧитать онлайн книгу.
capitalist command that see its enemy subject in proletarian society as a whole. Capital relates to the phase of real subsumption as antagonism at the highest level. Capitalist analyses of command move from this awareness to develop two possible lines of approach. The first, which I would call ‘empirical’, regards social labour power as a purely economic subject, and therefore locates the necessary, control-oriented manoeuvrings within a continuous trial-and-error process of redistribution and reallocation of income – for example consumerist objectives and inflationary measures. The other, which I call ‘systemic’, is more refined. It assumes that the empirical policies pursued thus far have resolved nothing. Thus the only way of ensuring the effective exercise of command, with an ongoing reduction of the complexity of class conflict, is to maintain command over systemic information and circulation, to maintain a pre-ordered mechanism of planning and balancing inputs and outputs. At this level, capital’s science and practice of command reveal themselves as a set of techniques for analysing the social sphere – and as an undoubtedly involuntary recognition of the immediate sociality, structure and density of labour power.
I consider it important to understand these fundamental changes and to highlight their conceptual character. Thus I define restructuring as a parenthesis within the evolving process of the composition of the working class. Obviously, this is a necessary parenthesis: the interaction of productive forces (capital and the working class) is in no sense illusory. But at the same time I should stress that, within this process, the motor force of working-class struggles is fundamental, as are the intensity of their composition and the emergence of abstract labour as a social quality and as a unifying factor within production (and reproduction). As we used to say, capital’s great function is to create the conditions for its own destruction. This is still the case. Thus we must recognize that, in the restructuring process currently under way, these critical conditions of capitalist development are still respected. Obviously, such a recognition is possible only if our theory is up to it. And one of the fundamentals of an adequate theory is to have a concept of labour power that is not conceptually indiscriminate but that is historically and politically pregnant, is continually and materially in tune with class consciousness – in other words, with degrees of struggle and of capacity to effect change that come increasingly close to the classic concept of proletariat. However, I feel that it is still necessary to live through that ambiguity of production and relations of production, and the way they are always being newly determined.
3 Towards a critique of the political economy of the mass worker: From social labour power to the social worker
So our project is to resolve this fundamental ambiguity in the relationship that labour power (whether posited as individual commodity or as socialized abstract labour) has with class consciousness and with capital. In other words, at this point we have to ask ourselves whether the linear mechanism of Marx’s analysis, which locates the socialization and the abstraction of labour within the process of real subsumption of labour under capital, is not perhaps incorrect. The process of real subsumption, in Marx, concludes in a real and proper Aufhebung: the antagonism is transcended via an image of communism that is the necessary outcome of the dialectical process developed up to that point. In the more banal of the socialist vulgates, the Aufhebung – whose schema, in Marx, is conceptual, structural and synchronic – becomes diachronic, utopian and eschatological. To further clarify this point, I shall spell out my thesis: at the level of real subsumption (i.e. at the level of the complete socialization and abstraction of all the productive and reproductive segments of labour), we are dealing not with linearity and catastrophe, but with separation and antagonism. It seems to me that proof of this theory is to be sought first and foremost from empirical analysis (historical, sociological and political) of the movements of the working class, in other words from considering the characteristics of labour power when posited as social labour power.
Concretely, our argument could proceed from the examination of a familiar historical conjuncture: if, as some authors have done, we construct historical charts that map developments in the quality of work, then we can see how the entire direction of capitalist development is towards the destruction of skilled labour (of specific ‘skill’), reducing it to abstract labour (the multilateral ‘job’). The socialization of educational processes (schooling, skill training, apprenticeships) goes hand in hand with the process of the abstraction of labour, within a historical series of episodes that span the entire period since the Industrial Revolution. Within this time span, the tendency is progressive and broadly balanced, beginning from the eighteenth century and moving through to the 1920s–1930s: but at this point a break takes place in the balanced continuity of the historical series. The collapse of ‘skilled work’ can be located precisely in the period between the two big imperialist wars – that is, in the 1920s and 1930s. This resulted in the hegemony, as from that period, of the semi-skilled worker, the ouvrier spécialisé (OS) – what we call the mass worker. But it also turns out that this hegemony is transitory because the mass worker is in fact just the first figure in the collapse of the balanced relationship between ‘skill’ and ‘job’; the mass worker is the first moment of an extraordinary acceleration towards a complete abstraction of labour power. The mass worker, the semi-skilled worker (whatever his subjective consciousness) is not so much the final figure of the skilled worker, but rather the first impetuous prefiguration of the completely socialized worker.
This premiss has a number of important consequences. Without losing myself in casuistry, it is worth highlighting just one consequence, which seems fundamental in characterizing a critique of the political economy of the mass worker. It runs as follows: if ‘skill’ collapses into an indifferent element; if the division of labour as we know it (based on vertical scales of relative intensity and of structural quality) dissolves; if every theory of ‘human capital’ (i.e. of the self investment of labour power) reveals itself to be not only a mystification of a reality that is exploited and subjected to command but also pure and simple fantasizing apologetics; if, as I say, all this is given, it does nothing to remove the fact that capital still needs to exercise command by having and maintaining a differentiated and functional structuring of labour power to match the requirements of the labour process (whether this be individual or social).
In the previous section I noted some of the basic characteristics of capitalist restructuring in the transition from the mass worker to socialized labour power. We can grasp the theoretical kernel of the matter by returning to them for a moment. As I said, once there is a lapse of such vertical differentiations as between ‘skill’ and ‘job’, collective capital (and state command) tend to advance new differentiations, on the horizontal terrain of command, over the labour market, over the social mobility of labour power. In relation to advanced capitalism, this is familiar territory: it is the terrain of new industrial feudalism (what we would call ‘corporatism’). From within this particular balance of forces, there proliferate a host of theories about the division of labour power: the debate as to whether labour power is primary, secondary or tertiary; whether it is ‘central’ or ‘peripheral’; and so on. What is the substance of the problem? Social labour power is understood as mobility, and it is as such that it is to be regulated. (A short aside: in this regard, all static theories about industrial reserve armies and similar nineteenth-century archaeological constructs, as well as needing to be politically rejected by us, are obviously logically untenable.)
But let me be more precise about what I mean when I say that social labour power is understood as mobility. I mean that labour power is understood as social, mobile and subjectively capable of identity. I mean that capital understands as a present reality what, for the mass workers weighed down by the contradictions implicit in their own social gestation, was present purely as tendency. And above all I mean a substantial modification in the level at which we consider the problem.
Mobility is time, flow and circulation within time. Marxism bases its categories on the time measure of the working day. In certain wellknown Marxist texts, the convention of time measure becomes so solid and unquestioned as to postulate as its base a working day that is ‘normal’. Now, in our present situation, of all this there remains no trace. The time of social labour power is a working day so extended as not only to comprise within