Rulers of the Atlantic economy from the early seventeenth century through the early nineteenth, according to Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, found in the many-headed hydra “an antithetical symbol of disorder and resistance, a powerful threat to the building of state, empire, and capitalism.”Footnote 1 These rulers referred to the Hercules-Hydra myth “to describe the difficulty of imposing order on increasingly global systems of labor.” The heads of this monster, “though originally brought into productive combination by their Herculean rulers, soon developed among themselves new forms of cooperation against those rulers, from mutinies and strikes to riots and insurrections and revolution.”Footnote 2 Their collective power “profoundly shaped the history of the world.”Footnote 3 Linebaugh and Rediker argue that the Hydra myth reveals the extent of the challenges posed to the globalization process by the many-headed hydra and offers historians a hypothesis.Footnote 4 When docile and slavish, the proletariat is described as the hewers of wood and drawers of water. “Conversely, when the proletariat was rebellious and self-active, it was described as a monster, a many-headed hydra.”Footnote 5 This proletariat that contested its exploitation was “planetary in its origins, its motions, and its consciousness … self-active, creative”Footnote 6 and “ever ready from Africa to the Caribbean to Seattle to resist slavery and restore the commons.”Footnote 7
The Many-Headed Hydra was published the same year as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire. Produced in isolation from each other, they both confirm the creative power of the multitude, a century or two apart, against the transnational globalizers. Empire introduced to many Anglophone scholars for the first time the precepts of autonomist Marxist theory but was, in fact, a poor introduction to them. To many intelligent readers without already existing knowledge of autonomist Marxist theory, Empire's presentation of the multitude that would be the subject of history was a meaningless millenarian mishmash. Linebaugh and Rediker's work, without any explicit reference to autonomist theory, perhaps offers a better guide to the valuable insights labor historians might gain from autonomist Marxist theory by offering a fine example of history inspired by a hypothesis similar to that which underpins autonomist Marxism.Footnote 8
Introduction: Labor History and the Value of Autonomist Marxist Theory
Autonomist Marxist theory reverses the relationship between capital and labor that emerges in the dominant economic determinist interpretation of Marxism, which emphasizes the dominance of capital and its accumulative logic as the unilateral force shaping the world. Often presented as “classical Marxism,” Teodor Shanin refers to this “received version” of Marxism as “the massive brainwashing of interpretation initiated by the second International,” so Marx, according to Shanin, was “engelsized” after his death, and Engels, still further, “kautskized” and “plekhanovized.”Footnote 9 Nick Dyer-Witheford describes how autonomist theory consciously took issue with “most Western Marxisms” by placing labor, rather than capital, at the beginning of the dialectic of class struggle. Labor does not react to the development of capital; rather, the dynamism of capital is forged in reaction to the power of labor.
Far from being a passive object of capitalist designs, the worker is in fact the active subject of production, the wellspring of the skills, innovation, and cooperation on which capital depends. . .Labor is for capital always a problematic “other” that must constantly be controlled and subdued, and that, as persistently, circumvents or challenges this command.Footnote 10
Linebaugh and Rediker are hardly alone in stumbling across this hypothesis through intelligence gained by empiricism or experience. Paul Buhle's study of C.L.R. James, for example, writes of the importance James' ideas hold for the modern world:
Between Prospero and Caliban, the active role seems to fall to the former, the reactive to the latter. Or so the relation has generally been discussed. But perhaps we have got it backward, and when James discovered the Master-Slave relation in Hegel he merely recognized what he had suspected all along to be true. Early experience permitted him a rare glimpse at the personal dynamics of history's revolutionary moments.Footnote 11
Autonomist Marxist theory offers a potentially significant contribution to the critiques that have, from within the Western Marxist tradition, contested the economic determinist rendering of the classical Marxian legacy and influenced labor history. In the 1920s, Antonio Gramsci and others stressed agency and consciousness to underwrite a Marxist rejection of economic determinism for only allowing workers the role of fatalistic reaction to economic forces. However, the emphasis within Western Marxist thought then shifted away from the emancipatory potential of proletarian agency toward more pessimistic intellectual themes that again emphasized the domination of capital.Footnote 12 Yet rejection of determinism remained a submerged tradition within Western Marxist thought that attempted to advance not pure subjectivity but, at least, a “subject-object dialectic” against the older “objective” orthodoxy.Footnote 13 Those who have done battle on behalf of this submerged tradition include Jean-Paul Sartre and E.P. Thompson—for example, in their arguments with Louis Althusser, whose structuralist Marxism was seen by some as an extreme caricature of the determinist interpretation of Marxism handed down from the Second International.Footnote 14 More nuanced critiques, notably Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst's, contributed to the continued submersion of the antideterminist tradition within Western Marxist thought by accusing Marx of the same determinist inclinations manifested by Althusser.Footnote 15
For Sartre, Althusser's “Cartesian attitude” precludes transcendence [dépassement] made by people. History, to Sartre, was not order but rational disorder: At the moment when it maintains order—structure—history is already on the way to undoing it. Thus, the class struggle creates structures in the heart of which it exerts itself and which, in consequence, condition it—but to the extent that class struggle is prior to structures, it also continually overcomes them:
Man receives structures; and in a sense it can be said that they make him. But he receives them as he is engaged in history, engaged in such a way that he cannot fail to destroy them, to constitute anew that which in turn will condition him.Footnote 16
In relation to structures, “each generation takes another distance, and it is this distance which allows the change of structure”; what man makes is history itself, the real overcoming of these structures in totalizing praxis, whereas Althusser, Sartre complained, wants to make the structure privileged in relation to history.Footnote 17 Sartre stresses Marx's comment that “the secret of the worker is the death of the bourgeoisie.”Footnote 18 His Critique of Dialectical Reason studies the overcoming of structures by distinguishing between “fused groups,” capable of overcoming passivity to assert freedom, and “alienated series,” which cannot.Footnote 19
Similarly, the determinist project is to Thompson an exercise of closure, at enmity with reason and censorious of freedom.Footnote 20 In his famous polemic against Althusser, Thompson emphasized that classes are the subjects of history and that the working class makes itself as much as it is made.Footnote 21 Marx and Engels, he reminds us, ceaselessly ridiculed the pretensions of bourgeois economy to disclose “fixed and eternal” laws:
When capital and its relations are seen as a structure, in a given moment of capital's forms, the structure can allow for no impingement which could modify its relations, for this would threaten the integrity of the categories themselves…
This is an extraordinary mode of thought to find in a materialist, for capital has become Idea, which unfolds itself in history.Footnote 22
The relevance to labor history of the issues posed by Sartre and Thompson is apparent; and the influence of Thompson on the writing of labor history has been profound. By contrast, the autonomist Marxist contribution to the critique of determinist Marxism—for example, the writings of Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Mario Tronti, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Harry Cleaver, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Franco Berardi—has received little attention from labor historians. Yet, for labor historians, autonomist Marxism is potentially the richest of the critiques of determinist Marxism because it commences with the standpoint of the working class. Within determinist Marxism, the dialectic begins with the accumulative logic of capital; the submerged tradition within Western Marxism tendered a subject-object dialectic; autonomism locates labor as both object and subject at the dawn of the dialectic. Autonomist theory, as we shall see, was developed in response to the problems for practical proletarian action of the determinist Marxian emphasis on the dominance and dynamism of capital.Footnote 23 “No one,” according to Negri, “should underestimate the damage” that “the mechanistic interpretation” has caused “in the course of a century of Marxian interpretations.” He argues this distortion has directly impeded “the inquiry into what the working class is.”Footnote 24
The Many-Headed Hydra suggests the fruitfulness of an approach that focuses on labor and its depiction by capital to understand both the laboring multitude and the trajectory of capitalist development. Negri's indifferent reputation among labor historians has suffered perhaps from the success of his most abstract and least grounded text, Empire, which prompted many criticisms that are less justifiable if his other writings—and those of autonomist theorists in general—are taken into consideration. Examination of other texts with an eye to the concerns of labor historians can help rescue autonomist theory from the enormous condescension of labor history. The divisions within autonomism, delineated by Steve Wright,Footnote 25 cannot be canvassed here. The purpose of this article is to sketch its broad contours—and the writings of Negri in particular—to suggest why labor historians could gain insights from the critical theoretical speculations of philosophers whose interest in interpreting the world is informed by a particular way of understanding how working-class action changes it.
The Positive Proletarian Subject and the Autonomy of the Working Class
The extraordinary working-class activity of the late 1960s–1970s Italy was the crucible in which autonomism was forged. Negri explains that in this period “we” experimented with some of the fundamental mechanisms of the dialectic of class struggle and found determinist Marxism unhelpful in responding to the felt needs of the Italian proletariat at this time of exceptional militancy.Footnote 26 Theory, he emphasized in 1971, must always move within “a continual re-elaboration” of analysis of the workers' needs.Footnote 27 According to Wright, the defense and extension of working-class needs against the logic of the market became an important part of autonomist belief.Footnote 28 Negri questioned the standard determinist interpretation of classical Marxism because of its inability to give the subjective standpoint of the working class a central role in the critical process. His working-class standpoint Marxism drew conclusions opposite to those drawn around the same time by Althusser, whose structural critique of political economy proceeded, from Negri's perspective, on a sterile, depopulated horizon that was not Marxism. “Far from ending up in a ‘process without a subject,’ the evolution of Marx's thought instead closely follows the organizational reality of the revolutionary subject.”Footnote 29
Negri emphasizes the significance of the Grundrisse in his reading of Capital because the objectivization of categories in Capital blocks the action of revolutionary subjectivity, whereas the Grundrisse “succeeds in rebuilding something that the Marxist tradition has all too often broken and split apart—that is, the unity between the constitutive process and the strategic project of working-class subjectivity.”Footnote 30Capital nourishes class hatred but has been used “to reduce criticism to economic theory, to the elimination of subjectivity into objectivity, and to the subjugation of the subversive proletariat by the repressive recomposing of knowledge in the form of a science of domination.” It is only possible to win back a correct reading of Capital if we reread it with the help of the Grundrisse, because
the Grundrisse is a critique of the capitalist “revolution from above,” launched from within the real movement; it is faith in the “revolution from below”; it is the highest potential for destroying all theoretical and political autonomies existing separately from the real movement—that real movement which the Grundrisse sees … as a constitutive force.Footnote 31
Negri insists that when Marx defines the characteristics of the proletarian historical subject, he brings out its revolutionary productivity, which is constantly held down and always capable of new explosions:
The working class is seen … as a power [potenza], as a continuous possibility of revolt, as a capacity for unceasing and repeated attacks on power. The working class has this revolutionary productivity for itself … the class knows itself to be infinitely productive, in the only sense in which labor can be productive, not for capital … but as a class power … taking as its starting point that true power—the power of attack against capital, and the ongoing invention of forms of organization and struggle.Footnote 32
Determinist Marxism, Negri maintains, subordinates the “positive proletarian project” to the critique of capital, whereas it was essential to subordinate the critique of capital to the positive proletarian project so as to understand the working class “not only as the object of exploitation, but as the subject of power.” In Negri's reading of Marx, the working class emerges as a strong social subject that projects a new society on the basis of its needs and desires, aspires toward power, and refines its capacities of self-expression and self-organization in society.Footnote 33
Harry Cleaver coined the term “autonomist” Marxism to describe those threads of the Marxist tradition that emphasize this “self-activity of the working class” and the autonomous power of workers: their ability to define their own interests and struggle for these, to go beyond mere reaction to exploitation and take the offensive in ways that shape the class struggle and define the future. In particular, this tradition within Marxism stresses the autonomy of the working class vis-à-vis capital.Footnote 34 The term carries with it, too, the notion that the working class is also autonomous in relation to the labor movement, whatever form that takes. In Italy in the 1970s Negri stressed the autonomy of the workers' movement from the “Historic Compromise” of the Italian Communist Party and the crisis of the revolutionary left groups.Footnote 35 His philosophy emphasizes the self-sufficiency of the proletarian masses: their ability to conceptualize, produce, and organize their own forms of struggle without external command of any kind.Footnote 36 Autonomism, according to Wright, is thus distinguished by the importance it places upon the relationship between the material structure of the working class and its behavior as a subject autonomous from the dictates of both the labor movement and capital.Footnote 37
However, the stress on the autonomy of the working class from capital is of greater consequence. Capital cannot exist without labor, but labor is a subject potentially independent of capital: It existed prior to capital and could do so once more. The working class can therefore do away with capitalism and create a different sort of society, but capitalists will always require a working class, because they are inescapably dependent on labor for the creation of surplus value—profit. The working class, according to Negri, is a “dynamic subject, antagonistic force tending toward its own independent identity;”Footnote 38 and “working-class struggles have within them a continuity of independent power.”Footnote 39 Dyer-Witheford argues that, in contrast to the dominant determinist tradition that emphasizes the power of capital, autonomists rediscovered that Marx's analysis affirms rather the power of the creative human energy Marx called “labor”—“the living, form-giving flame” constitutive of society.Footnote 40 For Negri, “Labor is the essence of capital. It always has been so. It is also the essence of man, inasmuch as man is productive capacity.”Footnote 41
This emphasis on proletarian autonomy has further implications. Autonomism insists not only upon the autonomy of the working class in relation to capital but also the priority of the working class's composition and action in determining the form and direction of the development of capital. According to Tronti, working-class struggles “set the pace to which the political mechanisms of capital's own reproduction must be tuned.” Berating determinists for working with “a concept that puts capitalist development first, and workers second,” he called for a reversal of this polarity, for “the beginning is the class struggle of the working class.”Footnote 42 Negri argues that “working-class struggle is a determining and all-embracing factor in the present phase of capitalist development” and refers to “the determining subjective action of objective, massified and economic movements of the working class.”Footnote 43
In Empire, Hardt and Negri argue that the history of capitalist forms is always necessarily reactive: “[C]apitalism undergoes systemic transformation only when it is forced to and when its current regime is no longer tenable.” To grasp the process from the perspective of its active element, Hardt and Negri insist that
[t]he power of the proletariat imposes limits on capital and not only determines the crisis but also dictates the terms and nature of the transformation. The proletariat actually invents the social and productive forces that capital will be forced to adopt in the future.Footnote 44
Determinist Marxism emphasizes the logical development of capital and relegates class struggle to a “but also” role; autonomist theory, John Holloway notes, liberates class struggle from this role by insisting that capital depends upon the working class for its reproduction, and, therefore, labor insubordination is the driving force of capital. “In the beginning is the scream.”Footnote 45 This contention that workers' struggles provide the dynamic of capitalist development is inspired by Marx's observation in Capital that the initial impetus for capital's intensifying use of industrial machinery came from proletarian movements demanding a shorter working day. Thus autonomists argue that capital does not develop according to ineluctable—even if finally self-destructive—laws. Capital does not unfold according to a self-contained logic, spinning new technologies and organizations out of its own body. Rather, it is driven by the need to forestall, coopt, and defeat labor—the “other” that is both indispensable and inimical to its existence—fleeing forward into what Tronti termed “successive attempts of the capitalist class to emancipate itself from the working class.”Footnote 46
Thus Negri observes that “bosses are only happy with production when the labor within it is totally under [their] command.”Footnote 47 Precisely because labor can exist without capital but capital is dependent upon labor for profit making, capital needs to coerce labor. The dynamic of capitalism resides in this need to “command” labor. And, in the final analysis, as Negri writes of capital, “fear for the future remains,” because of the “tendency of the power balance to consolidate in favor of the working class.” Capital can never expropriate that particularity of the working class that is its hatred of exploitation, “its uncontainability at any given level of equilibrium.” This is because the working class is also “a project for the destruction of the capitalist mode of production.”Footnote 48 It has autonomy.
Self-Valorization, the Real Subsumption of Capital, and the Social Factory
How does labor express its autonomy and present itself as a social subject? Negri describes this process as “self-valorization”: the autonomous generation of needs, demands, and values from within working-class experience to supplant the alien and coercive needs and values imposed upon workers by capitalism, leading to demands for transformation in the nature of work or even its total refusal, rather than simply the reduction of working hours and higher wages. Self-valorization means “to put the soul to work, to understand the positive, creative, radically alternative side (of the refusal of work).”Footnote 49
Negri's concept of self-valorization changes from a focus on the needs and desires of male factory workers to a more inclusive consideration of the needs and desires of all manner of workers, students, women, the unemployed, prisoners, and other subordinated groups.Footnote 50 The composition of the class engaged in self-valorization changes with the transition from Fordist large-scale factory production to post-Fordist smaller, disaggregated, post-industrial workplaces. Negri expressly acknowledges the expansion of the range of groups in society whose needs and desires constitute self-valorization and thereby propel society in new directions.Footnote 51 The ultimate end of self-valorization is when the dialectical spiral speeds the circulation of struggles until they attain an escape velocity in which labor tears itself away from incorporation within capital, the final realization of working-class autonomy.Footnote 52
This release of labor from capital is encouraged by the increasing subordination of all forms of labor in society to capitalist logic and relations of production, which Negri terms the “real subsumption” of capital as opposed to its “formal subsumption.” Formal subsumption refers to an earlier stage when capitalist relations operated at the highest levels of social exchange, such as finance and international trade, but did not penetrate into all individual forms of production and remake them along rationalized industrial lines. “In real subsumption, however, all forms of production are defined from the outset as homogenous in order to allow for profit.”Footnote 53 Under real subsumption, even the hardiest forms of traditional production are reorganized according to capitalist standards of efficiency, so capital's logic infiltrates and transforms every productive situation or relationship: “There is no outside to our world of real subsumption of society under capital. We live within it, but it has no exterior; we are engulfed in commodity fetishism.”Footnote 54 Negri describes it as “the mercantilization of life.”Footnote 55
By disseminating capitalist production relations throughout society, real subsumption demolishes the walls of workplaces. Negri's notion of the “social factory” describes how the principles of domination and production in the workplace are imposed upon the wider society so that it is organized increasingly by these same principles.Footnote 56 This makes all activities directly productive in immediately capitalist terms, which seems functional for capitalism but also expands opportunities for struggle against capitalism. The result of capital insinuating itself everywhere is that class struggle is refracted into a multiplicity of points of conflict. The front of struggle snakes through homes, schools, universities, hospitals, and media and takes the form not only of workplace strikes and confrontations, but also of resistance to the dismantling of the welfare state, demands over pay equity, child care, parenting and health benefits, and opposition to ecological despoliation.Footnote 57
Autonomist theory thus assists analysis of the interconnections between labor and other struggles. The period of the social factory is the moment of the new social movements; autonomist theory understands these as an aspect of struggle against capitalism rather than as evidence of the death or demise of class. For Negri, the new movements represent a new level of class antagonism—“an increasingly pressing and plural expansion of the antagonism”Footnote 58—which cannot be reduced to a mere proliferation of new subjectivities around life-needs that have nothing to do with class relations and the production of surplus value.Footnote 59 Autonomism affirms labor's fundamental otherness from capital but also the variety within labor, forming a polycentric concept of anticapitalist alliances-in-diversity, connecting a plurality of agencies in a “circulation of struggles.”Footnote 60 For labor historians wrestling with the issues for labor raised by the politics of identities other than class, the concept of the social factory has much to offer.
Class Composition and Cycles of Struggle
Careful consideration of the internal history—or composition—of the working class is a feature of autonomist Marxism. Tronti noted in 1966 in “Operai e capitale” that the Marxist camp had slowly acquired the idea of an internal history of capital but was still a long way from embracing “the idea of an internal history of the working class.”Footnote 61 For labor historians, “this historical transformability of the composition of the class” is illuminating: Class composition means that combination of characteristics that makes up the historically given structure of labor power, as produced by a given level of productive forces and relations, and the working class “as a determinate level of solidification of needs and desires, as a dynamic subject.”Footnote 62 It is determined by the interplay of the technical structure of work, the psychological pattern of class needs and desires, the institutional environment and other variables—detectable through careful empirical research into the sociology of work. This is precisely what Negri did, tracing the evolution of the typical proletarian figure from the “professional worker” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the “mass worker” of the middle decades of the twentieth century, to the “socialized worker” of the late twentieth century onward.
Evolution from one manifestation of class composition to another occurs through “cycles of struggle”: the process of composition, decomposition, and recomposition of the working class. Forms of struggle at any particular time are expressions of the composition of the working class; and class composition is in constant change. If workers resisting capital compose themselves as a collectivity, capital must strive to decompose this cohesion—by revolutionizing the means of production, by recurrent restructurings involving organizational changes and technological innovations that divide, deskill, or eliminate dangerous groups of workers.Footnote 63 Negri argues that
every time labor-power effects a revolutionary transformation in its composition and becomes working class, at that point capital enters relations of crisis, and has only one weapon with which to respond: restructuration.… for capital, restructuring is a political, economic, and technological mechanism … to reduce the intensity of the political composition of the class.Footnote 64
This decomposition gives rise eventually to new forms of struggle or a recomposition of the class. Rather than being made once over, the working class is, as Negri puts it, perpetually remaking itself again and again in a movement of constant transformation.Footnote 65
Negri refers to “the dynamism of the processes of recomposition.”Footnote 66 The dynamism of capital portrayed vividly in the Communist Manifesto is not inherent, because
[c]apital's dynamism … only results from a continuous struggle, in which the thrust of the working class is accepted, and new weapons are forged in order to prevent the class acting outside capital, and to make it act within a framework whose outlines are continually being drawn anew.Footnote 67
Dynamism is not the product of capital, as in determinist Marxism, but of labor whose recomposition periodically brings about change through crisis. For Negri, “It is the making of the struggle, the incessant internal modification in the relationship between classes, the continuity of the process of recomposition of the proletariat that determines the pace and forms of the crisis.”Footnote 68 The concept of “cycles of struggle,” he explains, “steers clear of forecasting the future” but recognizes “the continually self-renewing political composition of the working class.”Footnote 69
From the Professional Worker to the Mass Worker
At the beginning of the twentieth century, industrial production relied on the well-trained “professional worker” to operate and maintain the relatively simple machines that constituted fixed capital. Capital's dependence on the skills of professional workers gave them a degree of authority so they formed a technical vanguard within the factory hierarchy. Negri argues that the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution symbolized the successful class composition of the professional worker, the class that organized factory soviets and formed a vanguard party, the structure of which corresponded to the hierarchical composition of the working class at that time. However, the Bolshevik Revolution and widespread workers' councils between 1918 and 1926 persuaded capital of the need to decompose the class of professional workers.Footnote 70 The capitalist response was to eliminate the possibility of revolution and workers' councils again happening by reorganizing production to reduce the need for skilled workers: Complex machines replaced simple ones so unskilled workers could replace skilled workers, “destroying the key role of the professional worker in the labor process.”Footnote 71
In the interwar period, then, Negri identifies the emergence of the “mass worker,” characterized by the experience of unskilled factory labor on a mass scale. “At first, the mass worker produced everything and consumed nothing—this was a state of Metropolis—until his/her massive productive capacity brought about a crisis in the circulation of commodities and in the reproduction of capital.”Footnote 72 Employers managed to restore order to production but were unable to reimpose Metropolis: They were obliged to automate production and give workers more favorable conditions. The composition of the mass worker expressed itself politically through reformist parties and trade unions that struggled for higher wages.Footnote 73 The objective characteristics of the mass worker were determined within organization of the labor process by Taylorism; within organization of the working day and wage relations by Fordism; within economic/political relations by Keynesianism; and within general social and state relations by the Planner-State.Footnote 74 Having produced the mass worker of the mid-twentieth century, capitalists looked to set in motion “an operation of dynamic containment of the struggles of the new mass worker [operaio-massa] who was then coming to the forefront.”Footnote 75
Outside of the labor process, the means for dynamic containment of the mass worker was the “Planner-State,” influenced by Keynesian economic policies, which commenced with the New Deal in the United States before spreading globally and remaining dominant until the 1970s.Footnote 76 Negri describes Keynes as “perhaps the most penetrating theorist of capitalist reconstruction.”Footnote 77 Revolution could be avoided by making the working class function within an overall mechanism that would “sublimate” its continuous struggle for power into a dynamic element within the system: “The working class was to be controlled functionally within a series of mechanisms of equilibrium that would be dynamically readjusted from time to time.”Footnote 78 Negri thus relates the intricacies of Keynesian economic theory to the problem of working-class antagonism. It was necessary to “increase the volume of demand, raise the propensity to consume” so the ultimate independent variable is the wage-unit as determined by the bargains reached between employers and employed. Keynes' theory “recognizes and makes use of the power of the working class, in all its autonomy. The class can be neither put down nor removed: the only option is to understand the way it moves, and regulate its revolution.” Keynes' theory of effective demand “assumes class struggle, and sets out to resolve it, on a day-to-day basis, in ways that are favorable to capitalist development.”Footnote 79
The Turn to Neoliberalism
However, working-class autonomy meant that, in the long run, the Keynesian moment constituted an “impossible dream” on the part of capitalFootnote 80 because of the “tendency of the power balance to consolidate in favor of the working class.”Footnote 81 During the 1960s the highly composed working class used its power to promote legislation, so wage gains went hand-in-hand with advances in the social wage and reduction of working hours.Footnote 82 “The benefits of the welfare state are the fruit of struggles, are counter-power …”Footnote 83 The strikes and struggles of the 1960s brought about a crisis in capitalist control, for working-class pressure on capital was reducing its profit margins.Footnote 84 In the 1970s the crisis deepened: “The wage variable developed its own independence, its own autonomy…”Footnote 85 The wage struggle became so marked that “a kind of economic-political dual power came into existence.”Footnote 86
It was at this point that capital abandoned the Keynesian-Fordist form of management to embark upon neoliberal globalization.Footnote 87 Capitalists realized they had to “establish positions of counterattack from which they might destroy proletarian and working-class hegemony.”Footnote 88 Within production, capitalists responded to the militancy of mass workers by decentralizing production “to fragment and disperse the productive circuit on which the unity of social labor-power was based.”Footnote 89 The “restructuring of the interstices of the economy” constituted an “attack on the homogeneity of the working class” by beginning to break down the large factories and disperse the mass workers throughout the whole space and time of society, decomposing both the technical structure of their work discipline and the political organizations that expressed their demands (the unions and reformist parties).Footnote 90 Restructuring from the mid-1970s onward saw capital mobilizing against labor to prevent unification, by constantly exercising its capacity to repress, fragment, and introduce hierarchical division. This involved experiments in job design, segmentation of the labor market, policies of regrading, reforms of methodologies of command within production.
A restless, practical, process of trial and error was now set in motion, aimed at destroying any possibility of proletarian unification. … All manpower and job-design interventions are to be understood as policies which learn from the progress of abstract labor towards its social unification: they intervene in order to block further development of its subversive potential.Footnote 91
The continuing process of decomposition of the mass worker in developed countries was facilitated by the relocation of mass industrial production to lower-wage economies: “a search began for countries where ‘peripheral Fordism’ might be implemented.”Footnote 92
The welfare state in developed countries had, from the capitalist viewpoint, become too generous and sustained proletarian power, so public spending had to be reoriented to undermine working-class aspirations.Footnote 93
Capital, together with the forces of reformism, now imposed on public spending the productivity criteria characteristic of private enterprise. This “productivity paradigm” was neatly timed, launched, and managed through the cooptation of the trade union movement through the period of the 1970s, breaking up the unity of class behaviors and smoothing the way for capitalist reorganization.Footnote 94
The restructuring of public spending aimed to use welfare to command labor via budgetary maneuverings and marked the transition from welfare state to warfare state.Footnote 95 It indicated a break with Keynesian attempts to stimulate demand, which contradicted the aims of profit making but was consistent with the ideology of poverty and divisiveness that capital began promoting within the working class. This was “deliberately planned by the ruling powers” because a large number of poor people obstructs proletarian solidarity and “gives rise to the vicious blackmail represented by the unconcealed manifestation of widespread misery—i.e. to the obfuscation of the imagination, the reawakening of atavic fears and the encouragement of monstrous piety.”Footnote 96 In other words, desperation for any wage rate, racism, and religiosity would work together to rupture working-class unity against capital.
The forces admitted to the bargaining table within the warfare state were welcomed only if ultimately subservient to capitalist imperatives.Footnote 97 Negri refers to the key support given to such strategies by established left organizations and labor movements, for example the Italian Communists' Historic Compromise from 1974 and similar labor pacts throughout Europe.Footnote 98 At the same time, the state confronted sections of the labor movement that resisted incorporation with “an array of military and repressive means,” which subdued “all forces that do not offer unconditional obedience to its austerity-based material constitution and to the static reproduction of class relations that goes with it.”Footnote 99 Negri stresses how the rise of free-market ideology went hand-in-hand with increasingly authoritarian suppression of those who stood to lose from capital's reorientation away from Keynesianism towards neoliberalism.Footnote 100 The “new Right” operated as “a powerful poison” against progressive forces that demanded greater equality between classes and played a vital role in producing right-wing “ideologies of consent” to the point where they emerged as “common sense” and “public opinion.” The result was a decisive shift to a new relation of power, “demonstrably on the side of capital …”Footnote 101
Empire: From the Mass Worker to the Socialized Worker
This new relation of power demonstrably on the side of capital is expressed in the globalization project of capital, motivated by the desire to “decompose” the mass worker. Globalization in autonomist thought is not an inevitable, inescapable, and inexorable process happening to the world due to the internal momentum and dynamism of capital, but a deliberate strategy on the part of capital to subdue and subordinate labor. The mass worker had only just become the new subject of working-class struggles, but already this mass worker was being decomposed and replaced by another kind of worker: “[C]apital was already responding in overall, global and social terms—in terms of global domination and control.”Footnote 102
To describe the new dimensions of command embodied in globalization, Hardt and Negri coined the term “Empire,” an “apparatus of capture” that lives off the vitality of the multitude, “a vampire regime of accumulated dead labor.”Footnote 103 They note how “The primary factors of production and exchange—money, technology, people, and goods—move with increasing ease across national boundaries; hence the nation-state has less and less power to regulate these flows and impose its authority over the economy.”Footnote 104 However, the decline in sovereignty of nation-states does not mean sovereignty itself has declined. Rather, sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule:
The declining sovereignty of nation-states and their increasing inability to regulate economic and cultural exchanges is in fact one of the primary symptoms of the coming of Empire … In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The transformation of the modern imperialist geography of the globe and the realization of the world market signal a passage within the capitalist mode of production.Footnote 105
The most recent mutation in class composition emerging in the globalizing period in developed societies is the “socialized worker.” This new proletarian subject is characterized by “its cultural and social, spatial and temporal, horizontal and vertical mobility.”Footnote 106 Technical skill and knowledge defined the productive composition of the professional worker; collective discipline defined the composition of the mass worker; communication and sociability define the new composition and work discipline of the socialized worker. This worker is socialized because
[p]roduction is, in fact, social, and it has become so to an increasing extent. Productive cooperation is diffused throughout society; it permeates productive networks which in their turn are entirely social in nature. Precisely because it is social, production finds its exclusive center in communication, in the processes of information and in the spheres of communicative structure.
To critique the exploitation of the socialized worker it is therefore necessary to critique communication.Footnote 107 “Bifo” Berardi has analyzed the conditions for resistance to the pathologies associated with embeddedness in the circuits of aggressively competitive capitalism: With twenty-four-hour availability, the contemporary cognitive worker is always potentially at work.Footnote 108
Far from signaling a contraction in number of the working class, this process enlarges the labor market enormously, and redefines as directly productive and “working class” a whole series of functions that would otherwise be seen as marginal.Footnote 109 Negri emphasizes the need to broaden the conception of the working class, for we have moved from the working class massified in direct production in the factory to social labor-power, “representing the potentiality of a new working class, now extended throughout the entire span of production and reproduction.”Footnote 110 The time of social labor-power is a working day so extended as not only to comprise within itself the relation between production time and reproduction time, as a single whole, but also to extend the consideration of time over the entire life-space of the labor market.Footnote 111
From Empire to Multitude: The Antagonism of the Socialized Worker
This socialized worker produces value for capital anywhere and everywhere: “[A] large number of the prerequisites of production are present and continually reproduced in society.”Footnote 112 The factory is no longer the specific site of the consolidation of laboring activity and its transformation into value—these processes are now diffused throughout society and include such infrastructures as communications networks, information systems, and so on.Footnote 113 Labor is not only performed everywhere within each society, but across all societies. The world economy of the socialized worker is “the unified world market.”Footnote 114
Because of this diffusion within and across societies of the processes of labor, the socialized worker is exceedingly productive. “Value exists wherever social locations of working cooperation are to be found and wherever accumulated and hidden labor is extracted from the turgid depths of society. This value is not reducible to a common standard. Rather, it is excessive.”Footnote 115 This highly productive worker is popularly depicted as nonproletarian or at least outside of any recognizable class structure. Negri argues this is because the socialized worker is in the early stages of development and not yet a fully composed class subject. Traditional aspirations to alterity cannot recognize the composing of this subject; and yet, Negri warns, “from inside this fetishistic world, the antagonism of living work is affirming itself and resistance is building.”Footnote 116
The fetishistic world is the key. The potential for composition is there precisely because of the all-consuming nature of socialized work: Because it is no longer possible to reduce quantity and quality of exploitation to the time-measure of a normal working day, “then the proletarian subject is reborn in antagonistic terms, around a radical alternative, an alternative of life-time as against the time-measure of capital.”Footnote 117 Because of its higher productivity, “intellectual labor has a larger capacity to solve the problems of exploitation … the specific subjectivity involved in socialized work and communicative intelligence gives rise to the power of subversion … subversion is countervailing power.” And this countervailing power assumes more significant proportions the more the labor force, or the working subject, becomes intellectual and social.Footnote 118
The principal defining characteristics of the socialized worker are productivity and capacity to reappropriate control of the labor process.Footnote 119 When the whole of life becomes production, all life-time becomes production-time, but socialized labor-power tends to unloose itself from command insofar as it proposes a life-alternative. “When all life-time becomes production-time, who measures whom? The two conceptions of time and life come into direct conflict in a separation which becomes increasingly deep and rigidly structured.”Footnote 120 As the socialized worker begrudges capital's colonization of his/her life-time, these attributes of productivity and capacity to reappropriate control of the labor process heighten the antagonism of the socialized worker; “and the more that property-rights and managerial prerogatives are reduced to, or resemble, old aristocratic privileges, the stronger, more aggressive, arrogant and joyful is the opposition.”Footnote 121 As real subsumption advances, the antagonism of the socialized worker becomes irresolvable: “Antagonism as regards conceptions of life, the liberation of time, and thus in bringing about spatial-temporal conditions which are wholly alternative. A sort of ‘a priori’ of liberation.”Footnote 122 Thus the real substance of Empire is less the overwhelming power of capital expressed through this new formation but the potential power of labor.
The passage to Empire and its processes of globalization offer new possibilities to the forces of liberation … The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges. The struggles to contest and subvert Empire, as well as those to construct a real alternative, will thus take place on the imperial terrain itself—indeed, such new struggles have already begun to emerge. Through these struggles and many more like them, the multitude will have to invent new democratic forms and a new constituent power that will one day take us through and beyond Empire.Footnote 123
Hardt and Negri conclude Empire with praise for the revolutionary figure of the Industrial Workers of the World as the prototypical example of the militant “who best expresses the life of the multitude,” whose activity consisted “in the collective construction and exercise of a counter power capable of destructuring the power of capitalism and opposing it with an alternative program of government.”Footnote 124 The multitude is “the living alternative that grows within Empire,” which might be conceived as a network “that provides the means of encounter so that we can work and live in common.”Footnote 125
The phenomenon of Empire and the antagonism of the socialized worker require reversal of Gramsci's famous adage to “[o]ptimism of the intellect and pessimism of the will.” The latter was necessary to reject the temptation to attempt prematurely to overturn the power of the collective capitalist, given the terrible difficulties this adversary puts in the way of the political endeavors of the working class. Yet optimism of the intellect was indicated because “we must realistically recognize the extraordinary possibility for the development of human creativity that the reappropriation of labor in the brain [lavoro al cervello] today permits.”Footnote 126
Conclusion
Autonomist Marxism speaks to twentieth-first-century labor historians' concerns about the current epoch of capitalism and what it means for workers. It explains how labor decomposition has been the principal aim of transnational capital's globalization project; these “larger forces acting upon workers” do indeed explain the “race to workplace quietude.”Footnote 127 Yet optimism of the intellect is simultaneously indicated. Alongside significant left uprisings from Madrid to Manhattan, labor internationally shows signs of recomposition and development of novel strategies to chase capital to the furthest corners of the globe.Footnote 128 A special issue of the European Journal of Industrial Relations is devoted to “labor movement revitalization.”Footnote 129 A recent issue of ILWCH revealed a transnational migrant labor force contesting its exploitation in the Middle East through innovative forms of association and industrial offensive.Footnote 130 In words meaningful to labor historians, Negri emphasizes the transformability of the composition of the class: “its ever wider and more refined productive capacity … and the ever greater intensity and weight of the political challenge it presents to capital. In other words, the remaking of the working class!”Footnote 131
Labor historians have long studied worker and labor movement connections, exchanges, and influences beyond national boundaries; and the effects of capitalist development on a variety of people, places, and spaces around the globe.Footnote 132 However, the purposefulness of “the transnational turn in labor history” suggests instincts that accord with autonomist Marxist insights. Neville Kirk points also to an important way in which the labor of labor historians might be understood in autonomist terms: “Given the often centrality of solidarity and cooperation in labor movements, how fitting that we as their historians would practice our own form of collective labor.”Footnote 133
Like Hardt and Negri, labor historians are reconsidering the Wobblies as more than a colorful footnote, as exemplars rather than mere precursors of serious unionism. For Staughton Lynd, the One Big Union is “the organizational form required for effective response to the power of multinational corporations.”Footnote 134 Hardt and Negri's finale potentially renews vows for Lynd's “brokenhearted lovers”Footnote 135 of the official labor movement: “Militancy today is a positive, constructive and innovative activity … it repeats the virtues of insurrectional action of two hundred years of subversive experience … This militancy make resistance into counterpower and makes rebellion into a project of love.”Footnote 136
Autonomist Marxism does not, as some might argue, replace the determinism of capital with the determinism of labor. Autonomist Marxist theory acknowledges fully the actual power of capital and the current subordination of labor but stresses the inherent power of labor due to its autonomy and capital's dependence upon it. Autonomism's inversion of the determinist Marxian emphasis on the power of capital in relation to labor renders this theoretical perspective especially valuable for making sense of the cycles of struggle that have long intrigued labor historians: the constant and continuing capacity of labor not only to contest the power of capital and affect its subsequent development, but also profoundly shape the history of the world—as did the many-headed hydra of the revolutionary Atlantic.
