From the mass worker to the multitude: a theoretical contextualisation of Hardt and Negri's Empire.

Italian Marxism and the New Left

The impact of Italian Marxism on Anglo-American thought has, since the English translation of the Prison Notebooks in 1971, been largely restricted to the study of Gramsci in the field of cultural studies. In Italy in the 1950S, the Prison Notebooks had already circulated widely amongst the intelligentsia of the Left. Coinciding with the political optimism engendered by the new democratic republic, Gramsci's theory of hegemony offered intellectual legitimacy to the decision of the major trade unions and working-class parties to accept the merits of parliamentary democracy, reject anarcho-syndicalism, and to treat the state as a potential mechanism for national solidarity and socialist reconstruction. This rapprochement was not permanent, however. Over a decade of unbroken political rule by the Christian Democrat Party, the preservation of repressive legislation, and the survival in office of many civil servants from the previous Fascist regime, undermined the political consensus. By the late 1960s, a non-Communist and extra-parliamentary Left had emerged in Italy which was sufficiently independent of party orthodoxy to advocate a militant re-reading of Marx. Its efforts in this regard were emboldened by the appearance of a number of previously unavailable texts by Marx--most notably, the 'Results of the immediate process of production', and the Grundrisse.

As the Italian New Left grew in size and influence, translations and interpretations of the work of theorists such as Raneiro Panzieri, Mario Tronti, Galvano Della Volpe, Guido Baldi, Sergio Bologna, Antonio Negri, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and others, began to filter through to the English-speaking world. Their writings first appeared in Radical America and the short-lived us journal Zerowork (1975-77), and later in the journal of the Boston-based Midnight Notes Collective, Midnight Notes, the journal of the Edinburgh Conference of Socialist Economists, Common Sense (1987-99), and most recently in the web-magazine The Commoner. French readers also discovered their work in the journal, founded by Negri and Jean-Marie Vincent, Futur Anterieur (1990-97).

Today, the dedicated scholar of the Italian New Left, Harry Cleaver, maintains an extensive archive of its writings at the University of Texas at Austin, having consolidated them with a range of political literature defined as belonging to a tradition of 'autonomist Marxism' which stresses the 'self-activity of the working class'. (1) A parallel archive of material from the Italian revolutionary Left, much of it published or assembled by the Red Notes Collective and translated by Ed Emery, has also been lodged at the British Library of Political and Economic Science in London. (2)

With the recent publication of Steve Wright's (2002) detailed historical account of the origin and development of Italian 'workerism', Nick Dyer-Witheford's (1999) attempt to demonstrate the relevance of autonomist Marxism to post-Fordist, informational capitalism, and George Katsiaficas's (1997) study of radical European social movements, a wealth of literature now exists to facilitate a critical analysis of that tradition of autonomist Italian Marxism which led to Hardt and Negri's Empire (2001).

From formal to real subsumption 

The text entitled 'Results of the immediate process of production' was originally planned by Marx to be 'Part Seven' of the first volume of Capital, but was discarded prior to its publication. (3) It was first published in Russian and German in 1933, but only became the subject of serious academic study in the 1960s, when it was published in French, Italian and other European languages, appearing as an Appendix to the English Penguin edition of Capital in 1976.

Much of what appears in this text reprises the contents of Part Four of Capital, which charts the historical transition from capitalist manufacture and simple cooperation to mechanisation and the emergence of large-scale industry. Marx characterises this period partly in terms of a change in the form of surplus value. In the early years of capitalist manufacture, surplus value is increased primarily by lengthening the working day: it increases 'absolutely'. This strategy soon reaches its limit, however, which is first physical and later, as the Factory Acts and the legal limitation of working hours come into effect, political. Consequently, surplus value is extracted by compressing that portion of the working day spent producing the workers' means of subsistence. The reduction of necessary labour time by means of improvements in productivity thus increases 'relative' surplus value. Marx recognises that this increase in labour productivity is partly the result of the improved health and fitness of the worker, but its main source is the introduction of machines (Marx, 1976: 542).

In the 'Results of the immediate process of production', Marx describes this same transition from absolute surplus value to relative surplus value as a change from the 'formal' to the 'real' subsumption of labour under capital. Formal subsumption occurs when capital takes over existing forms of labour and labour processes and subjects them to the wage relationship. It is 'the takeover by capital of a mode of labour developed before the emergence of capitalist relations' (Marx, 1976: 1021).

As capital begins to enlarge the scale of its productive processes, Marx describes how 'a specifically capitalist mode of production' comes into being, defined by the way capital 'transforms the labour process and its actual conditions' in a process of 'real subsumption' (1035). At this stage, capital is able to mobilise what Marx calls the 'social productive forces of labour' or the productive forces of 'social labour', which refers to a form of 'socialised labour that is capable of applying the general products of human development, such as mathematics, to the immediate processes of production' (1024).

In the light of the publication of this missing chapter of Capital, and the distinction between formal and real subsumption, many Marxists in the 1960s, particularly in Italy during what was a period of extreme left-wing militancy and rapid industrial expansion, re-read Marx's account of the development of mechanisation. They came to the conclusion that the organisational and technological innovations that characterise the 'real subsumption' were effectively driven by workers' insubordination to and defiance of capital. Instead of seeing the history of capitalism as the unfolding structural imperatives of capital, the picture was reversed, with the configuration of capital determined by the productive and organisational powers of labour. The 'laws of accumulation'--and indeed the very exploitation that makes accumulation possible--were thus redefined as a defensive, reactive attempt by capital to escape its dependence on, if not its 'subordination' to, labour. The political history of capital, as Mario Tronti (1979: 10) theorised it, was thus 'the history of the successive attempts of the capitalist class to emancipate itself from the working class'.

This reading of Marx was attractive from a political perspective, since it returned class struggle to the centre of economic life. Instead of the contradictions and conflicts of capitalist society residing at the purely structural level--as between the forces and relations of production in orthodox historical materialism--they were seen instead as the product of active struggles between dominant and subordinate groups. Instead of the forces of production expanding according to their own autonomous logic, determined only at their highest level by the constraints of outmoded social relations, the accumulation of capital was seen to be driven by class struggle, by the need to tame or dispense with what Marx referred to as the 'refractory hand of labour'. Instead of the political mobilisation of workers being the final ingredient required by the Party to turn economic crisis into revolution, economic crisis was now the result of the insubordination and organised resistance of working people, and of capital's need to regain control over workers' command of the business cycle.

This class-centred approach also amounted to a radical challenge to the idea of the political neutrality of the scientific and technological apparatuses of production--a notion also under critique from Herbert Marcuse (4) and Harry Braverman (5) in the us, by the historian Stephen Marglin, (6) by Andre Gorz, (7) and by figures in the emerging ecology and alternative technology movement, such as Ivan Illich (1973). A classic and often-cited statement in support of this 'class struggle' reading of Marx was the latter's observation (1976: 563) that 'It would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working-class revolt.'

Probably the earliest intellectual formulation of this position in Italy was published in the first issue of Quaderni Rossi in 1961, and written by the erstwhile Cultural Secretary of the Italian Socialist Party, Raniero Panzieri.

   Faced by capital's interweaving of technology and power,
   the prospect of an alternative (working-class) use of
   machinery can clearly not be based on a pure and simple
   overturning of the relations of production (of property),
   where these are understood as a sheathing that is destined
   to fall away at a certain level of productive expansion
   simply because it has become too small. The relations of
   production are within the productive forces, and these have
   been 'moulded' by capital. It is this that enables capitalist
   development to perpetuate itself even after the expansion
   of the productive forces has attained its highest level.
   (Panzieri 1976: 12, original emphasis)

Class composition: An historical sketch

To represent at a theoretical level the central historical importance of class struggle, dissident Italian intellectuals adapted Marx's economic formulation, 'the organic composition of capital', and talked instead of the composition of class. 'Class composition' defines the power and organisation of labour power as it is configured in the struggle against capital. Class composition precipitates 'de-composition' by capital, and the ensuing 're-composition' of labour. In periodising the history of the real subsumption of labour under capital, the best-known theoretician of the Italian New Left, Antonio Negri, has identified three successive stages (see Negri, 1992).

The first phase of 'large-scale industry', according to Negri, extends from 1848 to World War One. Although the activities and competences of a predominantly artisan workforce are, during this period, progressively narrowed and subordinated to the functioning of machines, this is still the era in which the skilled 'professional worker' or 'labour aristocracy'--the worker who possesses a strong identity as 'producer' and an understanding of the complete production cycle--continues to play a guiding role in the political composition of the working class. The personification of the professional worker was to be found in the machine tool, electromechanical and optical industries of pre-war Germany, where the dominant figure was the 'worker-inventor' who customised and refashioned his tools in the light of his skill and experience (see also Bologna, 1976). The political interests of labour are represented, during this period, by workers' parties modelled on the Leninist or council communist tradition, with a mass membership and an intellectual avant-garde. Class struggle is organised under the banner of the 'dignity of labour', and is aimed at the self-management of the production process. At the macroeconomic level, this is also a period of imperialist expansion, in which crises of overproduction are haphazardly managed by the conquering of overseas markets.

A second phase of large-scale industry extends, in Negri's account, from 1914 to 1968. Here, the composition of labour is destroyed by the introduction and spread of Taylorism, which divorces labour power from specific productive activities, separates conception from execution, and simplifies individual tasks while making the production process as a whole more complex. In this process the professional worker is steadily replaced by the 'mass worker', whose work meets Marx's definition of 'abstract labour'--labour which is independent of the particular concrete form it takes at any given time.

   The emergence of the mass worker, the human appendage
   to the assembly line, is the overcoming of the vanguard/
   mass dichotomy upon which the Bolshevik Party is
   modelled. The very 'aristocracy of labour' that capital
   created after 1870 in its attempt to control the
   international circulation of the Paris Commune (the very
   workers supposedly 'bribed' by the eight-hour work day,
   Saturdays off, and a high level of wages) became one of
   the pivots of the circulation struggles in the Teens. Through
   the assembly line capital launches a direct political attack,
   in the form of technology, on the skills and the factory
   model of the Councils' professional workers. This attack
   brings about the material destruction of that level of
   organic composition which served as the basis of the
   self-management project. (The political unity between
   engineers and workers is also under attack. From Taylorism
   on, engineers will appear to the workers not as direct
   producers, but as mere functionaries of the scientific
   organisation of exploitation; and the self-management
   project, devoid of its original class impact, will reappear
   as a caricature, the 'managerial revolution' to come.)
   (Baldi, 1972: II, original emphasis)

Though initially a product of capitalism's assault on the skilled worker, the mass worker is quickly recomposed as a new class subject empowered by the organisational advantage of workers' concentration in huge factories. After the Great Depression, the era of the mass worker is also the era of Fordist regulation, in which the economy is stabilised by the interventionist state, and union-brokered productivity increases are supported by the promise of full employment, transfer payments for non-workers, and rising levels of consumption negotiated through collective bargaining. The original struggle over the length of the working day--over how much of people's lives will be converted into the commodity form--at this point changes to become, instead, a struggle over the price labour will fetch for its exchange (Cleaver, 2000: 89).

The real interests of the mass worker, however, are now represented by groups opposed to reformist trade unions and the Communist Party. This era marks the rise, in Italy, of the 'operaismo' movement (literally, 'workerism'), which in 1973 dissolved (or evolved) into 'autonomia'. Its leading organisations were Potere Operaio (which was also the newspaper of the workers at Porto Marghera), Avanguardia Operaia, and Lotta Continua. Its chief intellectual organs were the journals Quaderni Rossi (founded by Raniero Panzieri in 1961) and Classe Operaia (which Mario Tronti founded in 1964 after splitting from Quaderni Rossi). The movement was most influential in the North of Italy, whose overcrowded cities had, since 1951, absorbed 4 million migrants from the rural South. Many of these workers had a history of non-union militancy against wealthy landowners, and they faced aggressive discrimination in their search for jobs and housing. These groups of militants and intellectuals, often with the participation of activists from the student movement, successfully mobilised workers at the Pirelli rubber factory in Milan, the Montedison petrochemical complex at Porto Marghera near Venice, and at the Fiat plants in Turin.

From the perspective of Mario Tronti (1972: 39), the rational Fordist organisation of workers was now a passive mirror of capital: the means by which the latter achieved collective consciousness of itself by recognising its class adversary. With the institutionalisation of the revolutionary Left, class antagonism was, in Tronti's account, being transformed from an unpredictable element of risk and instability into an effective motor of economic growth--organised labour had become the foundation for orderly accumulation.

For this reason, Tronti (1979: 20) advocated 'renunciation of precisely that form of mass struggle which today unifies the movements led by the workers in the advanced capitalist countries'. Instead, a radical refusal of the capital-labour relationship had to be articulated. 'The growing rationalisation of modern capital must find an insurmountable limit in the growing unreasonableness of organised workers' (Tronti, 1973: 118). This limit was signalled by calls to disconnect income from productivity (and later income from work), by exorbitant wage demands, by the self-limitation of production by means of the 'go-slow' or 'autoriduzione' (see Lumley, 1990: 191; Ramirez, 1992), and, in a multitude of individual and collective forms, by the rejection of the ideology of self-management--what Potere Operaio disparagingly called 'factoryism'--and by the 'refusal of work'.

   The simple worker must become indifferent to his own
   labour so that the working class can come to hate it.
   Within the class, only the 'alienated' worker is truly
   revolutionary. In fact, there is a moment in which the
   capitalist is the one who directly comes to the defence of
   the worker's 'personality'. Only in its generically human
   figure can labour-power voluntarily submit itself to capital.
   Only as human needs do workers' demands become freely
   accepted by the capitalist. It is the point in which the
   worker definitely discovers the 'cult of man' as a bourgeois
   sham. (Tronti, 1973:117, original emphasis)

As Negri later reflected on this period of class struggle:

   The immediacy and the autonomous nature of struggles
   ranging from wildcat strikes to mass sabotage, their
   powerful negative effect on the structures of the cycle of
   production, ran counter to the traditional view that fixed
   capital is sacrosanct, and also counter to the ideology of
   liberation of (through) work--in which work was the
   subject of liberation, and Stakhanovism or high levels of
   professional skill the form of liberation. Finally, the
   intensification (whether at group or individual level) of
   heightened forms of mobility, of absenteeism, of socialisation
   of the struggle, ran immediately counter to any
   factory-centred conception of working-class interests, of
   the kind that has come down to us from the workers'
   councilist tradition. All this gradually uncovered, in
   increasingly socialised forms, an attitude of struggle
   against work, a desire for liberation from work--whether
   it be work in the big factory, with all its qualities of
   alienation, or work in general, as conceded to the capitalist
   in exchange for a wage. (Negri, 1988a: 204-5)

The radicalisation of Italian students in 1967, which by the spring of 1968 had escalated into violent confrontations with the state, was an early indication that work-centred political discourse no longer articulated with the concerns of the most active protest movements in Italian society. The spontaneous workers' revolts that followed in the wake of the student uprising confirmed this impression. More than a quarter of the country's workforce was involved in strikes in Italy during the 'Hot Autumn' of 1969, which in terms of working hours lost made this the third-largest strike movement in recorded history after May '68 in France and the British general strike of 1926 (Lumley, 1990: 167). With the radical demands of workers typified by egalitarian calls for lump-sum pay increases for all grades of employees, reduction of the working week, and the abolition of compulsory overtime, the movement eventually produced significant gains for the Italian working class. These included the reform of the pension system, progressive changes to trade union legislation and labour laws, shorter working hours, limits on overtime, the provision of paid study leave, equalisation of benefits for manual and white-collar workers, and an increase in average wages of 23.4 per cent in a single year (Dowson, 1973: 12).

Many of these gains were subsequently whittled away by inflation, of course, and by a far-reaching austerity programme, launched in 1976, which the PCI supported as part of its commitment to a coalition government of 'National Solidarity'. The decade ended with the virtual decimation of the Italian labour movement, as Fiat ruthlessly expelled 23,000 troublesome workers from its labour force and reasserted control over production. Meanwhile, most of the intellectual theorists of the autonomist movement were indiscriminately imprisoned or exiled, as the state reacted mercilessly to the terrorism of the Red Brigades (see Abse, 1985; Lumley, 1990).

Post-industrial production and the social worker

In response to the growing power of the mass worker, capital's attempt to destroy its political composition opened up what Negri believes to be a third phase in the history of class struggle. This epoch starts in the years following 1968.

According to Negri, it is characterised at the technological level by a high level of computerisation and automation of productive processes, such that 'immediately productive labour loses its centrality in the process of production' (Negri, 1992: 77). Labour itself is now 'completely abstract, immaterial, intellectual'. The norms of consumption are highly individualistic and market-oriented, while capital itself exists in predominantly multinational forms. The new macro-economic environment of financial deregulation and fiscal restraint is a direct product of Nixon's withdrawal of the dollar from the gold standard in 1971, and the establishment of the Trilateral Commission in 1973. (8)

Though the new configuration of capital is partly a decomposing response to the mass rejection of work, it is also an attempt to capture and exploit the new sources of production and wealth opened up by the counter-culture revolution of the 1960s--the anti-conformism, experiments in lifestyle, and the expressive 'transvaluation of values' which Hardt and Negri believe stimulated the growth of affective, communicative and intellectual forms of labour. The challenge for capital was now 'to dominate a new composition that had already been produced autonomously' (Hardt & Negri, 2001: 276), a goal that is pursued via the extension of wage-labour to all spheres of society, the decentralisation of production sites at the global level, and the division of workers into a small, privileged core and a marginalised and insecure majority. There is a massive expansion of tertiary labour, as activities regarded by Marx as 'unproductive' moments in the circulation of capital--communication and media, transport, education, health and social care, finance, advertising, entertainment and the production of culture--become extensively regulated by the wage relationship. This also reflects the fact that the potentially explosive contradictions of metropolitan capitalism can no longer be displaced by a strategy of imperialist expansion--the formal subsumption of non-capitalist environments has, according to Hardt and Negri (2001: 221-39), reached its limit--but is now forced to intensify the real subsumption of its own internal environment: to commodify nature and culture itself. The real subsumption of labour now develops into what Negri calls the 'real subsumption of society in capital.'

The hegemonic form of work in the new post-industrial economy is 'immaterial labour'--'labour that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, knowledge, or communication' (Hardt, 1999: 94). 'Today productivity, wealth, and the creation of social surpluses take the form of co-operative interactivity through linguistic, communicational, and affective networks.' (Hardt & Negri, 2001: 294) This work ranges from the manipulation and analysis of computer symbols to the 'affective labour' of human communication and interaction. Service industries involving the creation and manipulation of affects are no less immaterial, according to Hardt, in the sense that the products they create are intangible: 'a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion--even a sense of counectedness or community'. 'What affective labour produces are social networks, forms of community, biopower.' Consequently, 'the instrumental action of economic production has merged with the communicative action of human relations'. (Hardt, 1999: 96)

The composition of the proletariat is now inherently social. The cooperative nature of labour is no longer a deliberate product of the capitalist mode of production; rather, it is independent of economic rationality, and the basis for all further economic growth.

   Immaterial labour immediately involves social interaction
   and cooperation. In other words, the cooperative aspect
   of immaterial labour is not imposed or organised from
   the outside, as it was in previous forms of labour, but
   rather, cooperation is completely immanent to the laboring
   activity itself. This fact calls into question the old notion
   [...] by which labour power is conceived as 'variable
   capital', that is, a force that is activated and made coherent
   only by capital, because the cooperative powers of labour
   power (particularly immaterial labour power) afford
   labour the possibility of valorising itself. Brains and
   bodies still need others to produce value, but the others
   they need are not necessarily provided by capital and its
   capacities to orchestrate production. (Hardt & Negri,
   2001: 294, original emphasis)

The new class subject that emerges in this society is, in Negri's view, the 'social worker' (operaio sociale), sometimes translated as 'socialised worker' or 'diffuse worker'.This term is used to convey the fact that the productive capacities of the workers are embedded in, and work directly on, social networks of communication and cooperation which spread well beyond the domain of the factory: hence also the term 'social factory', which was employed by a number of Italian Marxists and feminists in the early 1970s. In the 1990s, Negri and Hardt defined the social worker--though they increasingly began to use the term 'multitude' (9) instead--as 'characterised by a hybrid of material and immaterial labouring activities linked together in social and productive networks by highly developed labouring co-operation' (Hardt & Negri, 1994: 274). The productive abilities of these workers are not the exclusive result of formal or occupational training, but are increasingly a self-acquired prerequisite for informal participation in the world of everyday life. In Maurizio Lazzarato's account, capital today draws on a 'basin of immaterial labour', which continually 'dissolves back into the networks and flows that make possible the reproduction and enrichment of its productive capacities'. Consequently, 'it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish leisure time from work. In a sense, life becomes inseparable from work.' (Lazzarato, 1996: 137-8)

This account of class composition was, of course, not accepted by all Italian autonomists. Sergio Bologna, for example, initially agreed on the chronological phases of professional worker, mass worker, and social worker, though for the latter category he preferred the term 'disseminated worker' (operaio disseminato), since it better conveyed the risk of 'the movement dispersing itself into a thousand decentralised struggles' (Bologna, 1979: 91). Later, however, Bologna questioned the putative hegemony of the professional worker in the pre-World War One epoch, noting the existence of a number of other class factions during this period (such as the miners of the Ruhr), whose ranks were often swelled by the presence of unskilled migrants, and who were often engaged in militant forms of struggle, independent of the skilled workers and their unions. The political model for this early composition of the mass worker was of course the Wobblies, an organisation unburdened by Marxist doctrine and the Socialist Internationals, but which successfully mobilised America's impoverished, unskilled and disenfranchised immigrants. Above all, Bologna and his colleagues at the journal Primo Maggio emphasised the complexity and divisions in working class politics and culture, and rejected what they saw as Negri's tendency to ignore counter-trends and exaggerate class unity (see Wright, 2002: 181-96, 170-1).

The ambiguity of the 'Fragment'

If the discovery of the 'missing chapter' from Capital precipitated the theory of class composition and the belief that class struggle was the motor of economic development, it was the Grundrisse, and in particular the famous 'Fragment on machines', which lent support to Negri's idea that individual labour could no longer be identified, measured and remunerated as the source of social wealth. Here Marx describes, with notable ambiguity, both how collective human knowledge, objectified in science and technology, becomes a force of production whose power is 'out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on [...] production', and how the 'social individual'--the worker's 'reappropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body'--becomes 'the great foundation-stone of production and wealth' (Marx, 1973: 704-5).

The problem with the 'Fragment on machines', as Thoburn (2001) has pointed out, is that its ambiguous content lends itself to two, potentially conflicting, interpretations. On the one hand, Marx appears to be describing the declining significance of labour in comparison to the power of fixed capital, the latter being the objectification in machines of society's accumulated knowledge and scientific expertise. The passages that support this reading are generally consistent with Marx's account of the alienation of work under capitalism, in which the production cycle 'has ceased to be a labour process in the sense of a process dominated by labour as its governing unity'.

   The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general
   productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed
   into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as
   an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital,
   in so far as it enters into the production process as a
   means of production proper. (Marx, 1973: 693-4, original
   emphasis)

The contradiction ensuing from the fact that 'the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time' (704), is primarily located at the economic level of society. Surplus value cannot be converted into capital--and thus capitalist social relations cannot be smoothly reproduced--when the income distributed for the consumption of an expanding volume of commodities is allocated to individuals in proportion to their labour time, which is now 'an infinitesimal, vanishing magnitude'.

   [Capital] is thus, despite itself, instrumental in creating
   the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce
   labour time for the whole society to a diminishing
   minimum, and thus to free everyone's time for their own
   development. But its tendency [is] always, on the one
   side, to create disposable time, on the other, to convert it into
   surplus labour. If it succeeds too well at the first, then it
   suffers from surplus production, and then necessary labour
   is interrupted, because no surplus labour can be realised by
   capital. (708, original emphasis)

A second interpretation of the 'Fragment', on the other hand, draws deliberately on Marx's cryptic references to the 'general intellect', the 'social brain', and the 'social individual'. It finds in his observation that 'direct' labour no longer provides the 'governing unity' of production, the implicit and subversive thesis that indirect labour--'the general productive force arising from social combination' (700)--is instead becoming the wellspring of wealth.

   In this transformation, it is neither the direct human
   labour he himself performs, nor the time during which
   he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general
   productive power, his understanding of nature and his
   mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body--it
   is, in a word, the development of the social individual
   which appears as the great foundation-stone of production
   and wealth. (705)

From this perspective, the increase in non-working time brought about by the expansion of large-scale industry outstrips the power of fixed capital, so that 'The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth' (705, original emphasis). Instead, we have the development of the collective powers of labour as an autonomous productive force.

   Real economy--saving--consists of the saving of labour
   time [...] but this saving [is] identical with the development
   of the productive force [...] The saving of labour
   time [is] equal to an increase in free time, i.e. time for
   the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts
   back upon the productive power of labour as itself the
   greatest productive power. From the standpoint of the
   direct production process it can be regarded as the
   production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being man
   himself. (711-12, original emphasis)

Self-valorisation

It is, for the most part, this second interpretation that has been adopted by Negri and his allies. Paolo Virno, for example, believes Marx was wrong to equate the 'general intellect' with fixed capital, 'thus neglecting the instance when that same general intellect manifests itself on the contrary as living labour', that is, 'forms of knowledge which structure social communications and which impel the activity of mass intellectual labour'.

'Within the process of contemporary labour,' Virno continues, 'there are entire constellations of concepts which function all by themselves as productive "machines", without any need for a mechanical body or for a small electronic soul.' (Virno, 1996b: 270, original emphasis) The general intellect thus 'comes to present itself finally as a direct attribute of living labour, as a repertoire of a diffuse intelligentsia, as a "score" that creates a common bond among the members of the multitude'.The 'conceptual constellations and schemes of thinking' that comprise this score 'cannot ever be recuperated within fixed capital, given that they are actually inseparable from the interaction of a plurality of living subjects' (Vireo, 1996a: 194).

For Negri himself, it is not culture and knowledge so much as the cooperative processes of communicative interaction and social reproduction that constitute a new, potentially autonomous foundation for the production of social wealth. In 1971, already advancing this reading of the Grundrisse, Negri condemned those who 'take an idealist view of the emergence of this wealth of productive forces--as an already-existing, organic realisation, and not [...] as a powerful, antagonistic potential that arises from the terrible and contemporary"poverty" of the proletariat' (Negri, 1988b: 137). However, in an apparent departure from Marx's account of the process of 'real subsumption', in which the 'independent productive capacities' of labour 'are destroyed once it finds itself outside the framework of capitalism' (Marx, 1976: 1055), Negri now argues that today 'we are well beyond the terms of classical economics (and even those of its critics) that recognise as productive only the labour incorporated within capital' (Hardt & Negri, 1994: 279). This assertion derives from his lecture series on the Grundrisse, delivered at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris in 1978, where Negri introduced the concept of 'self-valorisation' to describe the growing self-determination of the collective proletarian subject (Negri, 1991: 162).

Self-valorisation means, in Harry Cleaver's sympathetic summary of Negri's position, 'a process of valorisation which is autonomous from capitalist valorisation--a self-defining, self-determining process which goes beyond the mere resistance to capitalist valorisation to a positive project of self-constitution' (Cleaver, 1992: 129). As Hardt and Negri put it:

   In the passage from Taylorism to post-Taylorism and from
   Fordism to post-Fordism, subjectivity and productive cooperation
   are posed as conditions not results of labour
   processes [...] Although in previous periods the
   development of the abstraction labour and the formation
   of processes of social co-operation of the productive forces
   were consequences of the development of the productive
   and political capitalist machine, today co-operation is
   posed prior to the capitalist machine as an independent
   condition of development. The new era of the organisation
   of capitalist production and reproduction of society is
   dominated by the emergence of the labouring subjectivity
   that claims its mass autonomy, its own independent
   capacity of collective valorisation, that is, its self-valorisation
   with respect to capital. (Hardt & Negri, 1994:
   278-80, original emphasis)

The logic of this argument, which concludes with the assertion that 'the progressive function of capital has come to an end', seems to depend on the idea that a post-capitalist society must be based on a type of wealth different from the commodity form. This is the wealth of the 'social individual', the fulfilled 'species-being' of the 1844 Manuscripts (see Marx, 1975: 365; and also Marx, 1973: 488). The production of wealth must, in other words, become identical to the production of social relationships, which is to say that humanity realises its richness not in the commodities it consumes but through the depth and extensiveness of its productive interactions and associations.

Communication as wealth

In previous forms of capitalism, the sociality of labour was a creation of capitalism, a passive product engendered by the real subsumption of labour under capital. Workers produced their society, in these circumstances, only by reproducing their total subordination to capital, their impoverishment, negation and powerlessness. Today, according to Negri, post-Fordist information capitalism has inverted this relationship. Although the whole of society is effectively subsumed in capital, the social worker is now 'the producer, prior to any commodity, of social co-operation itself' (Negri, 1992: 88). Modern forms of production today 'produce not only commodities but also rich and powerful social relationships' (Hardt & Negri, 2001: 210). These relations must be fashioned not only between cooperating workers, but also, as Lazzarato points out, between workers and consumers. Cultural and informational commodities, for example, are not oriented towards producing, through their own destruction, the physical capacity of individual labour power. Instead, they are aimed at creating and augmenting the cultural and ideological environment of consumers--their needs, tastes and imaginations--and at activating consumers' communicative competences and their ability to articulate and display their fantasies and preferences. 'Immaterial labour produces first and foremost a "social relationship".' (Lazzarato, 1995: 138)

The model of base and superstructure, the differentiation of forces and relations of production, the supposed separation of system and lifeworld, the classical distinction between functional integration and social integration, between the instrumental rationality of material production and the communicative rationality of cultural reproduction, are thus all overturned. Instead, 'there is an immediate translatability between the social forces of production and the relations of production themselves', as 'communication' itself 'constitutes the fabric of production and the substance of the form of value' (Negri, 1992: 72).

   The superstructure is put to work, and the universe we
   live in is a universe of productive linguistic networks.
   The lines of production and those of representation cross
   and mix in the same linguistic and productive realm. In
   this context the distinctions that define the central
   categories of political economy tend to blur. Production
   becomes indistinguishable from reproduction; productive
   forces merge with relations of production; constant capital
   tends to be constituted and represented within variable
   capital, in the brains, bodies, and co-operation of
   productive subjects. (Hardt & Negri, 2001: 385)

This widening latitude for communicative self-valorisation is a direct result of the expanding sphere of circulation in the modern capitalist economy, where a growing volume of capital is withdrawn from the process of accumulation and used for a variety Of indispensable but 'unproductive' activities, ranging from the transfer and exchange of a proliferating volume of goods across the global marketplace, to the work of the finance and marketing businesses, the state's co-ordination of different industrial sectors and, of course, the reproduction of labour power (including the reserve form) at ever-higher levels of welfare, education and culture. Because 'Marx suffered the noxious effect of the limits of the workers' movement', Negri argues (1991: 183), he adhered to a reductive concept of productive labour. This concept obscured the way the distinction between production and circulation becomes impossible to sustain when capital becomes a 'social power' dedicated to reproducing the capitalist mode of production, rather than enriching the individual capitalist (see Marx, 1981: 373). 'Now, when production and reproduction are so closely mixed one with the other, we can no longer distinguish productive labour from reproductive labour. Productive circulation gathers, in the assembly line of social capital, all social work defined as directly or indirectly, immediately or mediately productive.' (Negri, 1991: 183) (10)

The fact that production and reproduction become coextensive does not mean that exploitation has disappeared, but that the extraction and distribution of surplus value is orchestrated at the social rather than individual level. Capitalism as an economic system now becomes openly political and parasitic. The law of value metamorphosises into the 'law of command'. 'The capitalist supersession of the law of value--what Marx calls the process of real subsumption--dislocates the relations of exploitation as a whole. It transforms exploitation into a global social relation.' (Negri, 1991: xvi)

   Capital, displaced from its traditional role as orchestrator
   of productive co-operation, thus tends to take the form of
   an apparatus of capture. Productive social labour moves
   historically toward becoming independent from any form
   of direct capitalist command [...] The role of capital and
   the capitalist State is thus reduced to one of preying on
   and controlling the essentially autonomous flows of social
   production. (Hardt & Negri, 1994: 309)

Now that 'The reproduction of social life no longer needs capital' (Hardt & Negri, 1994: 282), now that the production of wealth rests on new foundations that are immanent to social practices themselves, 'Reappropriation is a term which becomes insufficient' as a mobilising goal for the Left (Negri, 1991: 165). Nor, however, can there be a defence of those islands of non-capitalist practices and values that formerly lay in the interstices and on the margins of capitalist imperialism. These islands were the 'outside' to which capitalism displaced its internal contradictions, a vital source of new consumers and workers without which the cycle of accumulation would grind to a halt, but also the foundation, from Rosa Luxemburg's perspective, for 'resistances that could reorganise the noncapitalist use values of the multitude in both the dominant and the subordinate countries' (Negri & Hardt, 2001: 233). The logic of imperialist expansion, however, not only consumed and exhausted the non-capitalist environment, but also created territorial boundaries and conflicts between capitalist nation-states that blocked the free flow of capital, labour and goods, and thus the development of the world market. According to Hardt and Negri, capitalism therefore had to mutate into a new global configuration: 'Empire'.

Empire

Empire 'has no territorial centre of power', but is instead 'a decentred and deterritorialising apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers' (Hardt & Negri, 2001: xii, original emphasis). The rise of Empire marks the absolute triumph of the global market, 'a smooth space of uncoded and deterritorialised flows'. Insofar as Empire is a regime of rule, it legitimises the economic or military disregard for the sovereignty of nation-states by appealing to the principles of international justice and human rights. Military force is now mobilised in the name of global peace and order. Hardt and Negri concede that this claim to universality--which was frequently made during the us-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq--may he false, but only in the sense that it conceals the controlling apparatus of Empire, and not the national interests of specific (imperialist) states, such as the us (Hardt & Negri, 2001: 180).

Although the us does indeed sit at the top of the pyramidal structure which Hardt and Negri believe characterises the new configuration of global power, its privileged position and role as the enforcer of Empire is largely a result of its own constitutional history, which makes it well-calibrated for imperial rule.

Empire is effectively 'born through the global expansion of the internal us constitutional project' (Hardt & Negri, 2001: 182). The military mobilisation of the us must also articulate with a series of international institutions (the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, the G8, the WTO, etc.) that deploy the instruments of diplomatic, monetary and cultural control. This top tier of the imperial hierarchy, by securing the unity and continuity of power, represents the function of monarchy in the model of the mixed constitution (the separation of powers), which the Greek historian Polybius believed had been successfully implemented in Republican Rome, and which informed, via the political philosophy of Montesquieu, the construction of the United States Constitution. (11)

A second tier of command--the aristocracy--comprises networks of resource distribution and exchange, structured by transnational corporations, and mediated and filtered by the territorial organisations of nation-states. If the power of the first tier rests on monopoly of the means of violence, particularly the absolute and indiscriminate violence of the nuclear bomb, the second tier of Empire exerts control by means of monetary regulation. The third and broadest tier of the pyramid--democracy--is made of groups charged with the mechanisms of popular representation and communication, which in some global forums may be nation-states themselves, but which also include the mass media and culture industries, as well as the thousands of non-governmental organisations (NGOs). In truth, Hardt and Negri argue, Empire is not a mixed constitution so much as a 'hybrid constitution', with monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic functions (the production of unity, circulation, and cooperation, respectively) merging inextricably. Nonetheless, it is the third medium of imperial control--the management of communication, knowledge and culture--which Hardt and Negri believe, because it is completely de-territorialised and dependent on mobilising the productive subjectivities of the multitude, to be most open to collective resistance and subversion (see chapters 3.5 and 3.6).

Empire is also distinctive in that it does not seek, as did modern imperialism, to rule through the strategy of divide and conquer. Instead, it exercises universal integration through a neutralising liberal indifference to biological diversity and difference, combined with a pluralistic affirmation of those 'merely cultural' differences which--since they are treated 'never as a difference of nature but always as a difference of degree, never as necessary but always as accidental'--do not threaten social order. 'In general, Empire does not create differences. It takes what it is given and works with it.' Working with it involves advancing a form of pluralism that 'accepts all the differences of who we are so long as we agree to act on the basis of these differences of identity'. The divisions that derive from these differences are then managed as a means of hierarchising and controlling labour power, as well as of diversifying and multiplying global markets. 'Postmodernism is indeed the logic by which global capital operates.' This is why the post-modernist and post-colonial politics of difference, which used hybridity and fluidity to challenge the false essentialisms and binaries of the imperialist mindset, 'not only is ineffective against but can even coincide with and support the functions and practices of imperial rule' (Hardt & Negri, 2001; 194, 199, 192, 151, 142).

Exodus

If Empire can be superseded neither by the reappropriation of productive forces, nor by the defence of regional autonomy and the assertion of distinctive cultural identities, what mode of resistance is most appropriate to the new global configuration of capital? Though Hardt and Negri are as vague on this question as they are on any subject they address in their work that requires the identification of agents, acts and effects, one political response they do seem to favour is conveyed by the notion of 'exodus'.

   Whereas in the disciplinary era sabotage was the
   fundamental notion of resistance, in the era of imperial
   control it may be desertion. Whereas being-against in
   modernity often meant a direct and/or dialectical
   opposition of forces, in postmodernity being-against might
   well be most effective in an oblique or diagonal stance.
   Battles against the Empire might be won through
   subtraction and defection. This desertion does not have a
   place; it is the evacuation of the places of power. (Hardt
   & Negri, 2001: 212, original emphasis)

Exodus is seen as an efficacious political practice because the power of capital, from the perspective of the Italian theory of class composition, is directly engendered by the struggles, the counter-power, of labour. In Paolo Virno's (1996a) account, the strategy of desertion--which he also calls an 'engaged withdrawal'--means cutting the link which binds the operation of the 'general intellect' to wage labour and the production of commodities. Virno believes that post-Fordism has overturned the distinction between 'work' (the creation of material artefacts) and 'action' (political association and communication) advanced by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition (1998). Modern political praxis is now thoroughly permeated with a productivist ethos and driven by instrumental rationality, while the work of producing is now taking on the intellectual, linguistic and relational attributes of action: 'politics offers a communicative network and a cognitive content that are weaker and poorer than those to be found within the present-day process of production'.

In Virno's analysis, the battle is between an 'excess' of communicative cooperation, which seeks to give rise to a political community and a public sphere, and the capitalist imperative to reduce affective and immaterial activities--'activities-without-finished-work', in which the performance is inseparable from the product--to a modern form of servile labour: 'There is none so poor as the one who sees her or his own ability to relate to the "presence of others", or her or his own possession of language, reduced to wage labour' (Vireo, 1996a: 191, 193). Or, as Lazzarato (1996: 136) puts it: 'The management mandate to "become subjects of communication" threatens to be even more totalitarian than the earlier rigid division between mental and manual labour (ideas and execution), because capitalism seeks to involve even the worker's personality and subjectivity within the production of value.'

The Hegelian passage from absolute loss to complete redemption is thus rejected. The multitude, according to Virno, have more than their chains to lose: they have a latent wealth of knowledge and communication which, through 'a freethinking inventiveness that changes the rules of the game and disorients the enemy', they can deploy to stage an 'exit' with emancipatory effects, 'populating and inhabiting in a stable way a territory situated beyond the reach of the wage'. It is the 'conscious migration away from factory work', the inveterate distaste, detectable amongst many young graduates, for continuous work requiring personal fealty to a corporate employer, which Virno cites as paradigmatic of the strategy of secession (Virno, 1996a: 199; 1996c: 244-5).

Evaluating Empire

Considered on its own merits, Empire adds a thought-provoking chapter to the Negrian strand of autonomist Marxism, but one that is riddled with problems and inconsistencies. The picture of Empire as a 'smooth space' of abstract domination, devoid of internal conflicts and centrifugal forces, does not account for the real concentration of wealth and power in the privileged territories of the world, the inescapable features of Western cultural imperialism, and the military and economic conflicts that currently exist between many nation states which, when fought in resource-poor regions of the globe, do not provoke the military or humanitarian arm of Empire. For a work that belongs to a tradition of social analysis focused on the central role of class struggle, the authors' refusal to identify dialectical forces and contradictions in the reproduction of Empire, and what Trotsky called the 'uneven and combined development' of capitalist systems, is surprising. As Callinicos (2001) points out, the discordances, imbalances, and accumulated contradictions of capitalism are precisely what reveal the vulnerabilities of the capitalist mode of production, the very points of weakness that make worthwhile the kind of strategic political analysis that is conspicuously absent from this long and sprawling text.

The central role given to immaterial labour in Hardt and Negri's analysis may also be challenged for its Western bias, and its failure to acknowledge the growth of low-tech factory production in the least developed countries of the South. In addition, the definition of the self-valorising multitude as a counter-power of global communication, circulation and cooperative exchange, cannot be logically reconciled with the authors' curious assertion that the most important social struggles of the last decade 'have become all but incommunicable' (Hardt & Negri, 2001: 54, original emphasis). This statement stands in stark contrast to Nick Dyer-Witheford's autonomist analysis of high-technology capitalism, which highlights instead the way the diffusion of the means of communication by globalising capital 'has unintentionally opened the routes for a global contraflow of news, dialogue, controversy, and support between movements in different parts of the planet. To a degree, the very communication channels that circulate commodities also circulate struggles.' (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 146)

Closer analysis also shows that Hardt and Negri's book contains significant inconsistencies in its treatment of power. How can the strategy of resistance be 'an evacuation of the places of power', for example, when the authors are so keen to repudiate the notion of a bounded locus of power; when, in 'this smooth space of Empire, there is no place of power'? (Hardt & Negri, 2001: 212, 190 original emphasis) The strategy of desertion clearly fits a model of production in which the productive resources of the multitude--their collective capacity for corporeal and intellectual self-valorisation, their 'biopower'--is increasingly independent of, and prior to, its orchestration by capital. But Hardt and Negri also state that 'Biopower becomes an agent of production when the entire context of reproduction is subsumed under capitalist rule', and describe biopower as 'another name for the real subsumption of society under capital' (364-5).

This inconsistency is equally apparent when Hardt and Negri attempt to characterise Empire in Foucauldian terms as the replacement of the 'disciplinary society' with the 'society of control'. This distinction conveys the way power is no longer exercised via the prescriptive, normalising and compartmentalising efforts of the modern state and its disciplinary institutions, but instead seeks to mobilise and direct, from the inside, and without institutional obstruction, the vitality and productive energies of the population.

   Biopower is a form of power that regulates social life
   from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing
   it, and rearticulating it. Power can achieve an effective
   command over the entire life of the population only when
   it becomes an integral, vital function that every individual
   embraces and reactivates of his other own accord. (Hardt
   & Negri, 2001: 23-4)

Once again, the depth and pervasiveness of biopolitical control seems difficult to reconcile with the notion that 'postmodern capitalism' engenders new and greater possibilities for the 'biopolitical self-organisation' of the multitude, and has given rise to a type of immaterial labour which 'seems to provide the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism' (294). 'Use value and all the other references to values and processes of valorisation that were conceived to be outside the capitalist mode of production have progressively vanished' (386). Isn't this statement from Empire precisely the opposite of Hardt and Negri's claim that their analysis of immaterial labour 'calls into question the old notion [...] by which labour power is conceived as "variable capital", that is, a force that is activated and made coherent only by capital, because the cooperative powers of labour power (particularly immaterial labour power) afford labour the possibility of valorising itself' (294)?

One could reasonably argue that these contradictions in Hardt and Negri's work ultimately derive from the peculiar ambiguities in the text that is their prime inspiration: Marx's 'Fragment on machines'. In commenting on this text, Virno observes that, in the 1960s, 'reading the "Fragment" was aimed at unveiling the supposed neutrality of science and of knowledge in general', and at demonstrating 'the impossibility of dissociating machines from hierarchy, the technical realm from that of command' (Virno, 1996b: 266).

This was consistent with what is surely the most important contribution of autonomist Marxism to modern political theory, which is the critique of economic rationality and the exposure of the way economic relations, calculations and interests--and the technologies and forms of labour that arise from them--are always expressions of political will, of the need to perpetuate relations of domination and manage forms of resistance. The exercise of social control, in other words, satisfies an interest that is always in potential competition with the interests of productivity, efficiency and profit, with no economic judgements made which are knowingly detrimental to the concentration of power and the continuity of rule. As the inaugural 1975 issue of Zerowork interpreted Marx's reflections on the 'monstrous disproportion' between labour time and its products:

   When the productive appearance and economic
   justification of labour are taken away what is left is the
   general political characteristic of the capitalist relation
   [...] In a word, what is left is the exercise of capital's
   command as the power to control the political behaviour
   of the class and so to contain the anti-capitalist struggle.
   (Montano, 1992: 140) (12)

In adopting a rather different interpretation of the Grundrisse, namely, that in a knowledge-intensive economy the 'social individual' becomes the principal force of production, Hardt and Negri have, in Thoburn's (2001: 87) view, abandoned the essence of the social factory thesis--'the immanence of capital to all social relations'--which lay at the heart of autonomist Italian Marxism during the 1970s. Thoburn's assessment seems to gain further credibility from Negri's decision to replace the notion of the 'social worker' with that of the 'multitude'. Although this move has been interpreted as an attempt by Negri to depict a higher political composition of labour that, unlike the social worker, can effectively confront the fully globalised, transnational form of modern capitalism (Mandarini, 2003: 14-5), less sympathetic readers may well see this as a theoretical retreat towards a more elusive form of abstraction.

From this more critical perspective, the concept of the multitude, whose members take the indeterminate form of 'constellations of singularities' (Hardt & Negri, 2001: 60), offers a picture of class identity that is inoculated against its enemy, but at a price: by dispensing with the interpenetration of capital and labour, what is also lost is a conception of the interiority and negativity of the class subject. Without this conception, the prospects of transcending the alienating conditions of class determination look unnecessarily bleak.

Notes

(1.) At <http://www.eco.utexas.edu/Homepages/Faculty/ Cleaver/txarchintro.html>

(2.) At <http://www.emery.archive.mcmail.com/public_html/ rednotes/index.html>

(3.) The manuscript was actually headed 'Chapter Six', because at that time what became Part One was intended as an introduction. In the published version, the 'chapters' were converted into 'parts'.

(4.) As Marcuse famously challenged Weber's identification of the 'shell of bondage' with the triumph of technical progress and reason: 'Specific purposes and interests of domination are not foisted upon technology "subsequently" and from the outside; they enter the very construction of the technical apparatus. Technology is always a historical-social project: in it is projected what a society and its ruling interests intend to do with men and things.' (Marcuse, 1968: 224, original emphasis)

(5.) Braverman argued against reading Marx as a technological determinist: 'technology, instead of simply producing social relations, is produced by the social relation represented by capital'. (Braverman, 1974: 20, original emphasis)

(6.) Marglin's seminal study of the rise of industrial capitalism showed how the capitalist division of labour and the factory system were constructed with the primary goal of divesting workers of control over the pace, content and product of the labour process, as well as combating the backward-bending labour-supply curve (workers' spontaneous preference for leisure over paid work). Marglin (1976: 47) concludes that 'the primary determinant of basic choices with respect to the organisation of production has not been technology--exogenous and inexorable--but the exercise of power--endogenous and resistible.'

(7.) Gorz's (1976: xi) argument that 'a communist life-style cannot be based on the technology, institutions and division of labour which derive from capitalism', was subsequently developed into a provocative critique of work-centred Marxism (see Gorz, 1982).

(8.) The Trilateral Commission was founded by David Rockefeller, and initially brought together around 200 individuals from the global banking, business, media, and academic communities, as well as representatives from governments and conservative trade unions. Its goal was to establish a close managerial relationship between the dominant groups in the us, Western Europe and Japan, in order to combat the 'excess of democracy'--to use a phrase from The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (1975)--which seemed to be threatening the stability of the modern capitalist regime. (See Sklar, 1980)

(9.) The concept of the 'multitude' derives from Hobbes, for whom it represents an unruly threat to the popular unity of the nation. The nation's 'people', according to Hardt, Negri, and Paulo Virno, are united in obedience to the sovereign and through opposition to the 'other', the outside. While 'the people' is a bounded unity, 'the multitude' is an unbounded multiplicity, which 'shuns political unity, is recalcitrant to obedience, never achieves the status of juridical personage, and is thus unable to make promises, to make pacts, or to acquire and transfer rights. It is anti-State, but, precisely for this reason, it is also anti-popular: the citizens, when they rebel against the State, are "the Multitude against the People" [Hobbes]'. (Virno, 1996a: 200-201)

(10.) When Marx discusses the unproductive labour of state employees in the Grundrisse, this ambiguity is clearly apparent: 'All general, communal conditions of production [...] are therefore paid for out of a part of the country's revenue--out of the government's treasury--and the workers do not appear as productive workers, even though they increase the productive force of capital.' (Marx, 1973: 533, original emphasis)

(11.) According to Polybius, the three possible forms of simple constitution--monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy (rule by the one, the few, and the many, respectively)--are all, when established as single regimes, destined to follow a cyclical path of degeneration and corruption (monarchy degenerates into tyranny, which is replaced by aristocracy, which degenerates into oligarchy, which is replaced by democracy, which degenerates into mob rule, after which monarchy is restored). Hence the need for a mixed constitution in which each branch of government checks the strengths and balances the weaknesses of the other two.

(12.) The most influential contemporary exponent of this position is Andre Gorz, who has repeatedly argued that the preservation of work-centred society is a political rather than economic project, and that modern capitalist societies will tolerate all means of perversions to economic rationality, and will finance all kinds of anti- or sub-economic activity, in order to shore up the wage relationship and perpetuate the relations of domination that come with it.

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