Theoretical Saturday and I got one so long, that I will just print a little of it and post the link if you are interested in really reading this thingie. It is entitlted ‘Forward How? Forward Where?’ I: (Post-)Operaismo Beyond the Immaterial Labour Thesis' and is written by Rodrigo Nunes.
It is taken from Ephemera.
‘Forward How? Forward Where?’ I: (Post-)Operaismo Beyond the Immaterial Labour Thesis
Introduction
All accounts of the period known in Italy as the ‘Long 1968’, which lasted from 1969 to 1977, necessarily have to end with the brutal State repression brought upon the Italian
movement at the end of the 1970s. If
one pays attention to the tone of these accounts, however, something odd stands
out: the mass arrests and show trials appear more as an epilogue than as an
end; like the Minotaur in Borges’ (1996) ‘The House of Asterion’, it feels as
if, having nowhere else to move forward to, the movement had stayed put in the
place where the State could hunt it down. In a sense, it is the inability to
find common ways forward shown at the Bologna Congress that counts as the real
end of those years.
The theory and history written in
that period have enjoyed a revival in recent years, dating back to the
publication of Hardt and Negri’s Empire in 2000. This is one of those
cases where the production and circulation of ideas can be stripped of any
semblance of necessity, and related to bare, happy contingence: Empire was
so important not only because of its content – it remains arguably the most
ambitious attempt at charting the present in terms of both what ‘is’ and what
‘could be’ – but because it came out at a moment where a new way of reading the
present was in high demand. Those were the years of something that Empire itself,
written as it was before the ‘Battle of Seattle’, did not directly predict: the
resurgence of a powerful social movement in the global North, mostly embodied
in the counter-summit mobilisations; and the growing capability of movements in
the North and South to relay information and coordinate among them, generating
the towering spectre of a ‘global movement’ capable of becoming a social and
political force on a global scale. A ‘second superpower’, to use Chomsky’s
(2005) coinage? Or, to employ a key concept in (post-)Operaista2 thought,
a ‘new cycle of struggles’?
It is no coincidence then that Empire
should have been so greedily embraced by sympathisers and detractors alike,
and from there a lot of attention should have been transferred to other authors
from the same milieu and with similar trajectories (Virno, Bifo,
Lazzarato, to name a few); as well as to these trajectories and milieu themselves.
For those who in those years would attend a meeting or action in the day and
read (post-)Operaismo at night – or vice-versa – the fascination came
not only from what the theory said, but how it had been produced. These were
not angelic beings who had written about politics, these were political beings
who were still doing politics when they wrote. At last, people like us.
Political discourse is of course
never ‘pure’; in it are always mixed the personas of the scientist and the
demagogue, the prophet and the partisan, the functions of description and
persuasion, the affects of empathising and manipulating. So inextricably mixed,
in fact, that it is normally in telling them apart that one or another reading
of the same text differs. Much of (post-)Operaismo’s appeal was (and is)
to a great extent due to both its unashamed one-sidedness, and to how much the
texts are monuments of ongoing debates and struggles, living forces that a
contemporary reader can conjure up or find herself in the middle of again. In
short, much of the texts’ appeal lies in their context- dependence – both in
terms of what they carry of unreflected in them, and of how much __________
in them is geared towards responding
to immediate problems and needs. In other words, the immanence of this thought
to a movement.
In what follows I wish to pay this
context-dependence a double respect. Firstly, by being attentive to the
conditions of production of texts and theory, and thus trying to avoid turning
contingence into necessity, timeliness into atemporality. Secondly, by
attempting to read the paths opened by (post-)Operaismo through the
lenses of needs and expectations largely generated by the struggles of the last
decade, and the generalised feeling of crisis and impasse that has grown in the
last few years – when many people have felt as if they were living their own,
never-ending Bologna Congress.
My starting point is to look at
(post-)Operaismo in the ‘dominant’ form in which it has been received in
recent years – the immaterial labour thesis as found, importantly but not
exclusively, in Empire. In so doing I try to remain sensitive both to the
intellectual and political history behind ideas and to their ‘minoritarian’
reconfigurations in other writings. Still, I am under no illusion about how
much artifice there might be in this construction; it is up to each reader to
decide how accurate and useful it is.
At first I try to trace a certain
continuity between the immaterial labour thesis and the initial theoretical and
practical wagers of Operaismo, in order to sketch out the internal
mechanism of what I argue is a constitutive tension and oscillation in (post-)Operaista
thought between subjectivism and objectivism.
What follows examines the immaterial
labour thesis itself, in three steps. First, it lays out in general lines the
claims that are made as to the emancipatory potential of immaterial labour; it
then works backwards from these towards a discussion of how well they apply to
the different forms of labour that are described as immaterial; and finally, it
discusses what different meanings speaking of a hegemony of immaterial labour
may have. My goal here is not a refutation of the basic elements of the thesis,
but an attempt to, treating them as tools, sharpen their practical usefulness
by refining their scope and exploring their political implications.
Finally, it must be said that this
is the first instalment of three in a debate on the political significance of
(post-)Operaismo today. In the second and third parts, to be published
shortly, I develop more fully the weaving in of the themes of political
practice and theoretical production, immanence and transcendence, subjectivism
and objectivism; and then apply the conclusions drawn there to current debates
on and experiences of political organisation, and how they relate to the
challenges posed by a post-representational politics.
‘Before Our Very Eyes’
In the theoretical toolbox of
(post-)Operaismo, three elements stand out. The first is the famous Copernican
turn that inverts the dialectical relationship between capital and labour
by posing the second as the active element to which the first finds itself
obliged to react. This inversion necessitates the second concept, that of cycle
of struggles: instead of a linear accumulation towards an inevitable triad
of crisis, fall of the rate of
profit and defeat of capitalism, the
struggle between labour and capital is always being pushed to a next level by
periods of intensification of the former’s counterpower, which force the latter
into restructuring measures aimed at dispelling the antagonist’s strength.
Finally, the concept of class
composition is both part of this narrative and broader. Its basic idea is
that to the objective, material determinants of the capitalist organisation of
labour at any given moment (technical composition) there correspond certain
openings, behavioural patterns, a certain subjectivity among workers from which
the forms of political organisation and action that correspond to this moment
can be read, at least in embryonic form. It is hence part of the Operaista narrative,
in the sense that a given technical composition implies a certain political
composition which leads to a new cycle of struggles, and thence to capital’s
reaction – which in turn will lead to a new technical composition of the class,
starting the cycle all over again. But it also goes beyond, since it provides,
even if in skeletal form, a methodological instrument that subordinates
theoretical enquiry to political practice, but grounds the former in the latter
– and thus subordinates metahistorical constants to the experimental practice
of contingence.
It is the double nature of the
concept of class composition that provides us with a way of measuring the
relative distance of Operaismo from a teleological philosophy of
history. It is true that it breaks with the straight line of the accumulation
of forces of the proletariat against capital, by reintroducing an element of
contingence that is the affirmation of political subjectivity against the
lifeless objectivism of orthodox Marxism – in this sense, it is clear there
would be no Operaismo without Lenin. “[C]apitalist development runs
along a chain of conjuncture”, says Tronti (2006: 99). These moments of
conjuncture are, however, both the eruption of the untimely in history –
unpredictable times of creation and opening of possibilities3 – and the
affirmation of the proletariat as the metahistorical subject whose
self-activity directs capitalist development; the rude razza pagana (‘rude
pagan race’) becomes the secularisation of the Spirit that Hegel, via Plotinus,
adopts from Christian Trinitarian theology. The Copernican turn is thus an
inversion, merely displacing the active pole of the dialectical relationship,
instead of exiting it altogether; and there is a telos in the movement
of capital’s responses, in that it always reacts by increasing the
socialisation of labour, hence increasing the power of the proletariat to
attack the capitalist social relation from the inside (Tronti, 2006:
49-54).4 In other words, (post-)Operaismo will be more or less free from
a Hegelian philosophy of history depending on where one places the emphasis.
The conjunctural moments of opening and subjective affirmation yield an
immanent process where enquiry provides the elements for potential
(re)compositions, the possibility of an open-ended construction. The teleology
of struggle-induced capitalist development reintroduces a linearity in the
accumulation of proletarian force
and hence transcendence in the form
of the necessary development of a metahistorical subject.5 The oscillation and
tension between the two poles, however, is constitutive of (post-)Operaista thought;
the mechanic of the oscillation is in the relay between the production of
theory and political activity, which is to say, in the immanence of thought to
movement.
Nowhere is this tension best
expressed than in the constant reiteration of the topos of the beginning
of a new epoch – something that is bound to ring familiar to ears accustomed to
the discourse of more orthodox Marxisms. ‘Lenin in England’, in many ways the
founding text of Operaismo, opens with: “A new era in the class struggle
is beginning” (Tronti, 2006: 87). Empire, its best known offspring,
opens with: “Empire is materialising before our very eyes” (Hardt and Negri,
2001: xi). One can recognise the origin of the topos in the Preface of Phenomenology
of Spirit: at once a movement of historical and systematic completion,
where a system finds its whole justification in itself by the achievement of
its historical development – (self-)exposition and legitimation (Hegel, 1977).7
The political utility of such discourse is obvious: it not only provides
legitimation both to itself and whatever political activity is already
underway, but also affirms a break with the past that opens up a new time which
can only be grasped in its own terms.
This move is repeated in Empire in
a way that is by now quite well-known. It is here a matter of, following a
methodology that the Negri of the early 1970s had already found in the Marx of
the Grundrisse, identifying a tendency that both allows one to see into
the future – “which seeds will grow and which wither” (Hardt and Negri, 2006:
141; Negri, 2003) – and to identify the points of leverage in the present that
can lead there. In line with the basic tenets of Operaismo, then, Empire
seeks the present forms of resistance as given (even if just latently) in
what is variedly described as post-Fordist, postmodern or biopolitical
production. This tendency is identified with the becoming- hegemonic of a form
of labour – immaterial labour – and it is from this hegemony that the
possibilities of resistance can be read, both as openings and as already
existing behaviours.
There is unfortunately no time here
to go deeper into the relations between subjectivism and objectivism, immanence
and transcendence and theory and practice in
(post-)Operaista discourse, which merit
a study of their own. So before we move on, let us just raise two sceptical
questions about the recurring theme of the new epoch.
The first is that determining an
epoch is always a work of selection – naming in a given time what is essential
and what is accidental to it (“which seeds will grow and which wither”), what
makes it different from what came before. It is in this moment of abstraction,
where the real is depurated of its messy plurality so that the actuality that
underlines it can shine through, that teleology will tend to walk in through
the backdoor, carrying objectivism by the hand. If the epoch we live in
corresponds precisely to the culmination of the Operaista teleology of
socialisation of labour, it is easy to endow it with an inertia where its
‘natural’ direction leads inevitably, objectively, to a conclusion that is no
other than communism. The burden of agency in the dialectical relationship
between capital and labour is shifted when it approaches its conclusion – it
would be capitalist restructuring itself that now “works towards its
dissolution” (Marx, 1973: 700).
The other question is: if the
question of identifying the places “where the working class is strongest”8 entails
determining where to focus political activity (as the most likely to yield
results in the form of agitation and social unrest that maximises conflict),
this means that the areas where the possibility of (or already ongoing)
political activity is the strongest will always tend to appear as the poles
of class recomposition. Is one not entitled to suspect that it is precisely
this immediacy of the theory-practice relay, this immanence of thought to
movement, that contaminates such theory to the extent that, whenever it speaks
the language of universality (the present epoch), what it is doing is in
fact reorganising reality from the perspective given not by a universal
condition (the point of view of the class), but by the position
of the theory in relation to the movement, and the movement in relation to
everything else? In other words, not from the god’s-eye point of view
(metahistorically, metaphilosophically) guaranteed by the proletariat’s
condition as universal subject, but from the conic perspective of the
movement’s (geographical, systemic, political) position.9
This is the crucial juncture where
the thesis concerning the alleged hegemony of immaterial labour, ascribed the
role of naming what is essential about the present condition, finds itself.
Precisely because this is not theory for theory’s sake, but purports to be able
to produce political effects, my method in dealing with the immaterial labour
thesis will be to turn its Darstellung around. This means working backwards
from the claims made about the potentials for resistance that the passage to
post-Fordism (and the hegemony of immaterial labour) allegedly bring about, so
as to understand what features of immaterial labour justify such claims; and
then to examine whether these features are applicable to all the cases that one
intends to include under the common name of immaterial labour. If they are not
– that is, if the features of immaterial labour
that justify the claims made about
the potential for resistance are not applicable to all forms of labour that are
described as ‘immaterial’ – that still does not necessarily invalidate the
arguments advanced, since it could be argued that such features, even if not
universalisable, represent precisely what is ‘hegemonic’ about (at least
certain forms of) immaterial labour. It is the idea of hegemony that must then
be looked at: what is the nature of this hegemony? How is it exercised over
other forms of labour, material or immaterial, and with what political
implications?
The aim is not to invalidate any claims – one should always be
very slow to invalidate claims about the possibility of resistance – let alone
to prove or disprove anything: if a tendency is by definition what is not
actual, but may be brought about, how can it be disproved? The question here is
rather the extent of these claims’ applicability. And this applicability is
exactly not to be understood exclusively as a theoretical, but first and
foremost as a practico-political question about the present’s potential of
resistance.
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Since 2004, South Africa has experienced a movement of local protests amounting to a rebellion of the poor. This has been widespread and intense, reaching insurrectionary proportions in some cases. On the surface, the protests have been about service delivery and against uncaring, self-serving, and corrupt leaders of municipalities. A key feature has been mass participation by a new generation of fighters, especially unemployed youth but also school students. Many issues that underpinned the ascendency of Jacob Zuma also fuel the present action, including a sense of injustice arising from the realities of persistent inequality. While the inter-connections between the local protests, and between the local protests and militant action involving other elements of civil society, are limited, it is suggested that this is likely to change. The analysis presented here draws on rapid-response research conducted by the author and his colleagues in five of the so-called ‘hot spots’.