Date: Tue, 22 Sep 1998 10:17:38 -0400
Subject: Re:  Re: AUT: Grundrisse/MBM


Here's Harry's intro to MBM. I prissily [sic]'d a few typos/misspelling
rather than correcting them. Enjoy.

Doug

----

Introduction to Antonio Negri's Marx Beyond Marx (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991)
by Harry Cleaver

I

First and foremost, Antonio Negri's Marx Beyond Marx is a book for
revolutionary militants. Formally, the book is a reading of Marx's
Grundrisse - a sweeping reinterpretation of the central thrust and
particular developments of Marx's 1857 notebooks. But it is more than that.
Marx Beyond Marx is above all a passionately political work designed to
present an alternative to orthodox interpretations of Marx by demonstrating
how the Grundrisse contains a Marxist science of class struggle and
revolution in action. To accomplish this demonstration, Negri weaves
together a fierce polemic and a detailed examination and reinterpretation
of the text itself. Marx Beyond Marx is a difficult book, and its
difficulty creates the danger that its study will be limited to academic
Marxists. This would be tragic. We have edited and translated this book,
not to contribute another volume to the shelves of English-speaking
Marxists, but to put a new and exciting weapon into the hands of
working-class militants. However difficult Marx Beyond Marx may be - and
its difficulty stems both from the raw complexities of the Grundrisse
itself and from Negri's own theoretical language - its study is more than
worth the effort to any militant seeking new ways to understand and use
Marxism to come to grips with working class struggle in the present crisis.

For Negri, the Grundrisse represents the "summit of Marx's revolutionary
thought"-a summit that can provide a powerful foundation for revolutionary
political practice. He contrasts the Grundrisse to Capital, which, he
correctly points out, has often been interpreted in an objectivist and
determinist fashion to justify reactionary politics. Negri argues that it
is harder to do this with the Grundrisse. In these notebooks, we discover a
less polished but more passionate Marx, writing feverishly far into the
nights of the crisis of 1857. The Grundrisse is no prelude to Capital, no
rough draft of a later, more mature work.

Rather it is the Grundrisse that is the broader, more sweeping work, and it
is here that we can find the richest, most complete working through of
Marx's understanding of the class struggle that both constitutes and
ultimately explodes capitalism. In this, Negri differs from many previous
interpreters of the Grundrisse, such as E. Hobsbaum [sic] or Roman
Rosdolsky, many of whose positions he takes to task in the course of the
book.

Negri begins his commentary on the Grundrisse noting how Marx's dissection
of Alfred Darimon's theory of money was partly a pretext for Marx to
explore the relationship between money and crisis, between money and the
class struggle. Many who will read Negri on Marx may object that his
interpretation of the Grundrisse is, sometimes, also a pretext to lay out
his own analysis of the class struggle. He has, they may protest, taken
from Marx only what suits him. As he works through Marx's notebooks,
spurning a bit of analysis here (of productive labor), lamenting the
absence of analysis there (the lack of a special chapter on the wage and
working class subjectivity), dismissing other pieces as philosophical
lapses (the general law of historical development) and marking many
instances of ambiguity and of limitations to the analysis, it does become
obvious that Negri has pieced together an interpretation of the major lines
of Marx's argument through his own selective process. But we should not be
afraid to pick and choose among Marx's ideas. This is what Marxists have
always done, whether they are honest about it or not. Traditional Marxists
have always focused on the objectivist elements of Marx because that fit
their political proclivities. Critical theory seems to have ignored Marx's
theory of the working class as subject because of a deep - seated pessimism
acquired in a period of crisis. For those of us who share Negri's
commitment to the constant renewal of revolutionary practice, we can focus
on those elements of Marx that inform the analysis of our own struggles.
Several generations of Marxists have given us the habit of perceiving the
mechanisms of domination. What we need now is to use Marx to help us
discover the mechanisms of liberation. We can leave to Marxologists the
debate as to whether Negri is right about what Marx really meant. We can
read Negri for Negri, and judge the insightfulness of his comments on their
own merits. When, at the end of chapter 5, Negri questions the correctness
of his interpretation, we are tempted to say it doesn't matter. If Marx did
not mean what Negri says he did, so much the worse for Marx. This, it seems
to me, is the only spirit that can take us along Marx's path in such a way
that we can indeed go "beyond Marx."

Negri's reading of the Grundrisse is what I call a political reading in the
sense that his work tries to show how each category and relationship
examined by Marx, "relates to and clarifies the antagonistic nature of the
class struggle." At the same time - and here is the domain of his polemic -
he examines the meaning of the analysis for the political strategy of the
working class. From the earliest chapters of Marx Beyond Marx, in his
examination of Marx's analysis of money as a critique of power, we
recognize that for Negri there is no separate "political" sphere in Marx.
Understood as the domain of class struggle, politics is omnipresent; all of
the categories are political. There is no need to riffle Marx Beyond Marx
looking for the 1, political" passages. Every line is a political moment.
There is a political excitement here that carries the reader forward,
through the more difficult passages, toward ever more concrete analyses of
the class struggle.

This approach is radically different from traditional Marxism, which has
always treated politics as one subject among others, especially distinct
from economics, and often carefully tucked away in the attic of the
superstructure. Over the years Marxism has been all but sterilized by being
reduced to a critique of capitalist hegemony and its "laws of motion." The
fascination of Marxists with capitalist mechanisms of despotism in the
factory, of cultural domination and of the instrumentalization of
working-class struggle has blinded them to the presence of a truly
antagonistic subject. The capitalist class is the only subject they
recognize. When they do see working-class struggle, it is almost always
treated as a derivative of capital's own development. The true dynamic of
capitalist development is invariably located in such "internal"
contradictions among capitalists as competition.

Negri's reading of the Grundrisse is designed to teach - or to remind -
that there have always been not one, but two subjects in the history of
capitalism. His political reading follows the chronological development of
the notebooks on two interconnected levels; he simultaneously carries out
an analysis of the political content of the categories and examines Marx's
method at work in their development. On both levels he argues that what we
observe is a growing tension between capital's dialectic and an
antagonistic working-class logic of separation. The dialectic is not some
metaphysical law of cosmological development. It is rather the form within
which capital seeks to bind workingclass struggle. In other words, when
capital succeeds in harnessing working-class subjectivity to the yoke of
capitalist development, it has imposed the contradictory unity of a
dialectical relation. But to bind working-class struggle, to impose a
unity, means that capital must overcome this other subject - the working
class - that moves and develops with its own separate logic. This logic,
Negri argues, is a non-dialectical one. It is a logic of antagonism, of
separation, that characterizes a class seeking not to control another, but
to destroy it in order to free itself. Two different logics for two
different and opposed classes.

Negri shows that Marx saw clearly how the historical development of
capitalist society has always involved the development of the working class
as a separate and antagonistic subject - a subject which develops the power
to throw the system into crisis and to destroy it. He points out how, in
the Grundrisse, Marx is able to trace the simultaneous development of both
subjects. At the same time that Marx tracks capital from its formal
domination of production via money, through its direct domination of both
production and circulation, to the level of the world market and crisis, he
also simultaneously brings to light the growth of the working class from
dominated living labor power, through its stage as industrial proletariat,
to its full development as revolutionary class at the level of social
reproduction. Two subjects, locked together by the power of the one to
dominate the other, but never the less two historical subjects, each with
the power to act, to seize the initiative in the class struggle.

What has happened to capitalist hegemony? To the objectivity of capital's
laws of motion? To the location of the sources of capitalist growth in the
competitive interaction of capitalists? From the point of view of the
developing working-class subject, capitalist hegemony is at best a tenuous,
momentary control that is broken again and again by workers' struggle. We
should not confuse the fact that capitalists have, so far, been able to
regain control with the concept of an unchallengeable hegemony. In a world
of two antagonistic subjects, the only objectivity is the outcome of their
conflicts. As in physics, where two vector forces create a resultant force
whose direction and magnitude is distinct from either of the two, so too in
the class struggle that constitutes the development of capital the "laws of
motion" are the unplanned outcomes of confrontation. However, in the
development of this clash of subjectivities the continual development of
the working class from dominated labor power to revolutionary class (a
growth in the relative strength of the working class vector) increasingly
undermines capitalist control and imposes its own directions on social
development. Because of this, competition among capitalists is less a
driving force and more what Negri calls "sordid family quarrels" over which
managers are at best imposing discipline on the working class.

It is this analysis of working-class subjectivity that infuses Negri's work
with immediate relevance to those in struggle. In this period when capital
is trying to wield fiscal and monetary policy as weapons against the
working class, Negri's analysis helps us see that capitalist crisis is
always a crisis in its ability to control the working class. A global
crisis, such as the present one, Negri argues, can only be produced by the
combined and complementary struggles of the world's working classes
operating simultaneously in production and reproduction - at the highest
level of socialization. In Negri's reading we discover all of this at that
abstract and general level Marx could reach writing in the midst of crisis
in 1857. But we can also examine these abstractions within the concrete
determinations of our own situation and struggles within capitalism.
Negri's work is clearly conceived with such a project in mind, And isn't
this, always, the most exciting aspect of Marxism: its usefulness for
exploring our own transformative power as living subjects?

The reading begins with Marx's own first notes: on money, money in the
crisis, and ultimately money as power. Within and behind money Marx
discovers value, and the social relations of production. At the social
level money is (above all) capitalist power over labor. But capitalist
power over labor is the ability to force people into the labor market, to
force people to work for capital in production, and to coerce surplus labor
in the labor process. What could be more relevant today, when capital is
using monetary policy at both the national and international levels as a
weapon against working-class consumption? Moreover, that monetary attack on
consumption is aimed directly at forcing people to work, and at controlling
the exchange between labor and capital so that profits (surplus labor) are
increased.

Even at this stage Marx's arguments - and Negri's analysis of Marxsurprise
us with their topicality, their ability to inform the present. Yet if Marx
had stopped here, he would have been just one more Marxist peering deeply
into the nature of capitalist exploitation. He doesn't.

As Negri points out, Marx is keenly aware that capital's power to extort
surplus labor is a power exerted over an "other" whose own active
subjectivity must be harnessed to capital's designs. Marx explored this
subjectivity and saw that it fought the primitive accumulation of the
classes: the forced creation of the labor market and the forced submission
of people to the lives of workers. He explored this subjectivity and saw
that it struggles against being forced to work.

Although he paints a true horror story of living labor being dominated by
capitalist-controlled dead labor, Marx also makes clear that living labor
cannot be killed off totally or capital itself would die. The irony of
capitalist reproduction is that it must assure the continued reproduction
of the living subject. The antagonism is recreated on higher and higher
levels as capital develops. What begins as the horror of zombie-like dead
labor being summoned against living labor, becomes, over time, an
increasingly desperate attempt by capital to protect its own existence
against an ever-more-powerful-and-hostile working class. Capital can never
win, totally, once and for ever. It must tolerate the continued existence
of an alien subjectivity which constantly threatens to destroy it. What a
vision: capital, living in everlasting fear of losing control over the
hostile class it has brought into existence! This is the peacefully placid
capitalist hegemony of traditional Marxism turned inside out, become a
nightmare for the ruling class.

When surplus labor (value) takes on its monetary form of profit, it becomes
a socialized surplus value at the level of social capital. It becomes both
a pole and a measure of the antagonistic development of capital. At this
point the law of capitalist crisis emerges in the Grundrisse as the
continuing contradiction between the working class as necessary labor and
capital as surplus labor. The most fundamental dynamic of that law produces
the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This tendency, which has been
for so long mystified by Marxists, becomes in Negri's interpretation of
Marx an easily understood manifestation of the way working-class struggle
blocks capitalist development. Although we can critique part of Negri's
formulation (it is not necessary to argue that working-class struggle
raises necessary labor as long as that struggle forces capital to raise the
organic composition of capital through its relative surplus-value
strategy), the basic thrust is keen and revealing. It is the continued
working-class pressure on capital that accentuates the contradictions and
creates crisis. Every time capital responds to workers' demands by
expanding fixed capital and reorganizing the labor process, the working
class politically recomposes itself in a new cycle of struggle. The full
implications of this process become clear in Negri's reading of Marx's
fragment on machines. We see how the frantic accumulation of fixed capital
leaves less and less scope for capital to impose work and to extract
surplus work, thus undermining the very basis of capitalist command. The
more value capital sets in motion, the smaller the proportion of surplus
value it is able to extort. Today, as capital proceeds to substitute ever
more robot machines for increasingly threatened and threatening industrial
workers, it faces the very problem Marx forsaw [sic] in the Grundrisse: a
growing difficulty in finding new ways of putting people to work in order
to control them socially.

This analysis of the working-class subject at the point of production is
then displaced in Marx's analysis to the sphere of circulation. Here Negri
carefully brings out Marx's argument that circulation is the sinew which
organizes and ties together not only all of the separate moments of
production, but also all of the social conditions of reproduction.
Circulation involves the socialization of capital - its emergence as social
capital. But again, we are not left with simply an ode to the
comprehensiveness of capitalist hegemony. By exploring Marx's analysis of
the twosided character of the wage, Negri is able to bring out how the wage
functions for the working class. This is the domain of small-scale
circulation: of the exchange of labor power for the wage and the subsequent
exchange of the wage for use-values - those products of necessary labor
which satisfy working-class needs. The wage here appears as working-class
power to impose its needs, and the extent of that power is only determined
by the class struggle itself.

Once more we can study that unusual but inspiring vision of capital
striving desperately to contain an autonomously developing working-class
subject, hell-bent on the continuous extension and diversification of its
own projects and needs at the same time that it increasingly refuses
capitalist control via the imposition of surplus labor. Are we not, once
again, at a most contemporary moment of the analysis? What were the 1960s
and 1970s, if not a simultaneous explosion of both autonomous needs and of
the refusal of capitalist work? What are the 1980s, if not a renewed
capitalist offensive to contain the explosion of needs, to roll them back
through a vicious attack on consumption, on the wage?

Negri argues that the analysis reaches its highest development in Marx at
the level of the world market, where capitalist imperialism, fleeing the
obstacles created by class struggle at home, spreads its class antagonisms
across the globe. This is the moment of the world market, but also of the
global factory and the international working class. From this point on,
capital can only respond to working-class attack by reorganizing its modern
industrial apparatus internationally and by attempting to reorganize the
global reproduction of labor and the labor market. Is this not the present
project of capital in the crisis? Is not what is called
"reindustrialization" actually capitalist restructuration designed to
decompose that working-class power which created the crisis, and to create
new conditions for development? Certainly it is trying to do this, in many
ways, in many countries.

But the crisis continues because so far capital has failed to achieve this
decomposition. And that failure is simultaneously a measure of the power of
the working class to protect the ground it has gained, and even, in places,
to push forward its offensive. To listen to the droning litanies of
traditional Marxist hymns to capitalist power is to be overwhelmed and
exhausted by doomsaying. To read Negri - and through him, Marx - is to be
invigorated with the sense of working-class movement and dynamism. It is to
see the tenuousness of capitalist control and the real, tangible
possibilities of its destruction!

At the end of this book Negri takes up directly the central issue raised by
the emergence of working-class subjectivity: revolution, the end of
capitalism, and the creation of a new society. The bulk of his discussion
of these issues is reminicent [sic] of the Communist Manifesto, as he
outlines the implications of his reading of the Grundrisse for the
emergence of the new societyCommunism (he retains Marx's word for it) - and
rejects other contemporary positions.

In the language of traditional Marxism, revolution and the emergence of a
new society has always been addressed as the question of the "transition":
of the passage through socialism to communism. Negri argues forcibly that
this is totally inconsistent with Marx's analysis in the Grundrisse. The
only "transition" in that work is the reversal and overthrow of all of
capital's determinations by the revolutionary subject. Because capital's
central means of social domination is the imposition of work and surplus
work, the subordination of necessary labor to surplus labor, Negri sees
that one of the two most fundamental aspects of working-class struggle is
the struggle against work. Where profit is the measure of capitalist
development and control, Negri argues that the refusal of work measures the
transition out of capital. The refusal of work appears as a constituting
praxis that produces a new mode of production, in which the capitalist
relation is reversed and surplus labor is totally subordinated to
working-class need.

The second, positive side to revolutionary struggle is the elaboration of
the self-determined multiple projects of the working class in the time set
free from work and in the transformation of work itself. This
self-determined project Negri calls self-valorization. Communism is thus
constituted both by
the refusal of work that destroys capital's imposed unity and by the
selfvalorization that builds diversity and "rich, independent
multilaterality."

By this time it should be clear that Negri rejects "socialism" as, at best,
an advanced form of capitalism. His major objection is that while socialism
is understood as the planned redistribution of income and property, it
invariably retains the planned imposition of work, and thus fails to escape
the dynamic of capitalist extortion of surplus work and the subordination
of needs to accumulation. Any existing socialist regime or socialist party
program could be taken as an example. But the point is more than a critique
of the Italian Communist Party's participation in the imposition of
austerity, or of the Soviet labor camps. It is an affirmation that the
concept of socialism has never grasped the real issue: the abolition of
work or the liberation of society from narrow production fetishism.
Socialism can only constitute a repressive alternative to the collapse of
market capitalism - a more advanced level of capitalist planning at the
level of the state. Today, when there is a growing "socialist" movement in
the United States calling for national planning, the nationalization of
industry, and "more jobs," Negri's arguments deserve the closest attention.

Negri also rejects all utopian approaches to the conceptualization of the
end of capitalism. Very much in the tradition of Marx's own denunciation of
utopianism, Negri refuses to think of the transition in terms of the
achievement of some preconceived goal, however laudable. At this point
scientific Marxism not only demands that the present movement be followed
forward into the future, but, Negri argues, we must also recognize that
this movement occurs without determinacy or teleology. In this
interpretation of Marx we are simultaneously freed from the blinding
romanticism of utopia and the paralysing weight of determinism. The central
present movement that will constitute the future is that of the
revolutionary subject as it reverses capital's determinations and
constitutes its own self-valorization. The antagonistic logic of
working-class separation reaches its conclusion as it explodes and destroys
capital's dialectic. It explodes all binary formulae, as Negri says,
bursting the dialectical integument and liberating a multidimensional and
ever-changing set of human needs and projects.

As we discover the revolutionary subject to be both self-constituting and
rich in multilaterality, we are also implicitly freed of the traditional
organizational formula of the party. There is no place here for any narrow
formulation of "class interest" to be interpreted by a revolutionary elite.
There is only the multiplicity of autonomously-determined needs and
projects. Although Negri does not take up the issue of revolutionary
organization here - it is not his project at this point - he does strongly
reject one variant on the party theme: a voluntarist violence that only
negates capitalist violence, which by not being organized on the material
basis of revolutionary self - valorization falls into terrorism. This is
one of the many points in his work that shows his distance from and
antagonism toward those armed vanguards" with which the Italian state has
sought to associate him as an excuse for imprisoning him.

To sum up Negri's exposition of Marx's line of argument in the Grundrisse:
capitalism is a social system with two subjectivities, in which one subject
(capital) controls the other subject (working class) through the imposition
of work and surplus work. The logic of this control is the dialectic which
constrains human development within the limits of capitalist valorization.
Therefore, the central struggle of the working class as independent subject
is to break capitalist control through the refusal of work. The logic of
this refusal is the logic of antagonistic separation and its realization
undermines and destroys capital's dialectic. In the space gained by this
destruction the revolutionary class builds its own independent projects -
its own self - valorization. Revolution then is the simultaneous overthrow
of capital and the constitution of a new society: Communism, The refusal of
work becomes the planned abolition of work as the basis of the constitution
of a new mode of producing a new multidimensional society.

What are the implications of learning to read the categories of Marx's
analysis politically? For one thing we can now readdress the question of
Capital. Negri is absolutely correct when he points out that Capital has
often been interpreted in an objectivist fashion. But it should now be
clear that there is an alternative. Once we have learned to recognize and
avoid the traps of objectivism and to carry out a political or class
analysis of Marx's categories, we can read Capital (or any of Marx's
writings) in this manner. There are many aspects of Marx's analysis in the
Grundrisse which are more carefully and fully explored in Capital.
Certainly we can gain from the study of this material. When we do read
Capital politically, as I have tried to do elsewhere, we generate an
interpretation that is not only largely consistent with the main lines of
Negri's book, but which sharpens and enriches the analysis - the fruit of
the ten years of Marx's work from 1857 to 1867, when the first volume of
Capital appeared.

We follow Marx's path "beyond Marx" when we read Marx politically, from
within the class struggle, and when we critique Marx from the vantage point
of our own needs. It is precisely this kind of reading and critique that
Negri has carried out. It is this that makes his work valuable and exciting.




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