This book is a selection of key political and theoretical articles by Toni Negri, spanning the period of his involvement in the Italian revolutionary left since the 1960s. These writings are essential for an understanding of the political outlook of the Italian autonomist movement; a movement which developed one of the most massive and coherent challenges in Europe to the system of austerity politics and the role of the established Left within it in the 1970s. These Negri essays provided a theoretical and critical reference point for ongoing debates in the development of this new class politics of communism, based on the liberation of needs and refusal of the capitalist system of work, from its origins in the "workerism" of the 1960s to the movement of "autonomy" in the 1970s. As such they are still more than relevant to an understanding of today's problems in a revolutionary class perspective.

Negri is best known abroad for the world-wide notoriety surrounding his arrest and imprisonment in 1979, along with many others, on conspiracy charges. His trial process took the form of an attempt to criminalise and destroy the ideas and memory of the entire movement to which he had contributed. One aim of this book is to put these ideas back into focus, against the general distortion to which they have been subjected.

He is now living in exile in France, having been sentenced to 30 years imprisonment in Italy for his political activities. Almost all of the original charges against him have since been dropped at the appeal stage (February 1987). After eight years of exile and/or imprisonment, his codefendants in the trial have been acquitted. It is now generally recognised that the April 7th trial was a political inquisition from start to finish, using "terrorist" labels to incriminate movements of the opposition outside and against the established political system. Negri, in short, was used as a political scapegoat to reinforce the party pact known as the "Historic Compromise".

In the English-speaking world, little is known of the quality, breadth and conceptual originality of Negri's work, as a contributor to new Marxist revolutionary perspectives. And yet his writings are a key point of reference for the much-needed "updating" of Marxist conceptual vocabulary today, if it is to grasp the radical changes in capitalist control over labour, the new form of state power, and new forms of class antagonism - the development of new class subjectivities and subjects, beyond traditional definitions of the working class -that have emerged in the period of the current crisis. Other European writers on these themes have been translated into English and assimilated (Foucault, the French "new philosophers", the German debate on the derivation of the state and legitimacy, to name only some). This has not been the case with Negri, despite extensive publication of his work and informed debate in other European countries - France, Germany, Spain etc.

It is hoped that our publication will fill this gap and stimulate a new level of analysis and debate on the originality of the class situation facing us today from a Marxist and communist perspective. At a time when it is widely felt that the existing vocabularies of class analysis are in crisis, that they are increasingly paralysed in the face of the new antagonisms of state power and class subjects today and unable to provide any new indications of the way ahead, this publication of Negri's writings is important and timely.

Its importance lies in Negri's sustained effort, throughout the period covered by these essays, to seek ways of updating the categories of class analysis by re-interpreting Marx in the light of contemporary changes. He develops his analysis of the changing state form by constant reference to a dynamic reading of the capital-labour relation and of class recomposition in the crisis. His method is based on a re-reading of Marx - in particular the much underplayed Marx of the Grundrisse, a text he interprets in ways which provide exciting new insights as regards the overall tendency of the class struggle towards communism.

Negri provides crucial indications as to how the present tendency of the class struggle, in its forms, content and composition, is qualitatively different to what it was in the past.

For Negri, the springboard of the contemporary permanent state of crisis lies in the autonomy of struggles for income and the liberation of proletarian life-needs, challenging capitalist relations of work, not only in production but in reproduction and circulation as a whole. Class antagonism has been recomposed at a higher level of socialisation around new subjectivities of struggle, directly presenting a communist content. The crisis is first and foremost a crisis of the wage work relation, a general crisis of the value form itself. This was already true from its inception, in the "mass worker" composition of the great international wave of struggles that undermined the Keynesian system from the late 1960s onwards. Following on from this, the multiple rebellions from the mid-1970s onwards against the austerity regime, throughout the capitalist (and socialist) world, are by no means revolts of "marginals" or a "reserve army", as according to the old Marxist schema. They represent movements for the self-valorisation of needs against the imposition of productivity and the discipline of the labour market. Hence new problems and perspectives for the Marxist analysis of class antagonism. And hence also insurmountable problems for the conventional outlook and vocabularies of socialism, still geared to the values of labour productivity and planning. The crisis is also a definitive crisis for socialism, as an anti-capitalist alternative. Negri argues that contemporary crisis and development are no longer those of an unregulated capitaiism: both the Keynesian state, which he defines as the "planner state" (stato piano), and the post-Keynesian "crisis state" consist of historic new levels of political and monetary control, redefinitions of the state form in response to the new levels of class challenge that they seek to contain. These are dimensions that can only be ignored at the cost of a debility in developing anticapitalist perspectives adequate to today's conditions.

To summarise: it is Negri's sustained and systematic concern to politicise and historicise economic categories from "a working-class standpoint" (punto di vista di classe) that makes him stand out as one of the most authentic Marxists of our period.

Our book presents six major articles and some supplementary materials relating to Negri's imprisonment and trial in the "April 7th" case. It includes essays from Negri's period in prison (1979-83). Each essay is prefaced by an editorial introduction, placing it in its political and theoretical context. The book also contains a reading list and brief biography.

It has taken us several years to bring this book to press . It is being printed as the first in a series of books which will eventually publish the entire contents of the Red Notes Italian Archive. (This collection of translated materials from the Italian revolutionary Left runs to around 2,000 pages, and is housed at the University of Reading and Ann Arbor libraries; the extensive collection of Italian-language materials is lodged with the British Library of Political and Economic Science - the LSE Library). The work on the book has been hard, but we are proud of the result achieved. We chose the title as a pointer to Negri's attempts to rescue the "revolutionary" Marx from the grip of those who have tried to deaden and mystify his radical impulse. We also chose the title as a hope for the future: social revolution in a working-class and communist
sense.

London, February 1988

Part One

To begin with, let us summarize some developments in capitalist and state policies that seem to characterize the 1980s. These are just approximations, examples that come immediately to mind:-

(1) the transition from the 'welfare state' to the 'warfare State';

(2) the 'negative' use of Keynesian economic policy as a means of reactivating a 'positive' use of the market;

(3) the restructuring of the interstices of the economy (the interstitial economy), involving a new attack against any element of homogeneity in the social composition of the class, especially in the critical area that links production with reproduction',

(4) the massive political and social retrenching of a 'new Right', which aims, for reasons of consensus and productivity, to recompose the fragmentation of the working class in terms of new institutional and state values.

Given the small amount of information that I have at my disposal (trans: Negri is writing from prisons, the following comments must be taken as extremely provisional and subject to further documentation. Here are some comments, under each of the four headings listed above.

(Point 1)

By the transition from 'welfare'' to 'warfare' state, I am referring to the internal effects of the restructuration of the state machine - its effect on class relations. This produces a much greater rigidity in the reproduction of the relations of production and in the class structure as a whole. Development is now planned in terms of ideologies of scarcity and austerity. This transition involves not just state policies, but most particularly the structure of the state, both political and administrative. The needs of the proletariat and of the poor are now rigidly subordinated to the necessities of capitalist reproduction. The material constitution of the state is certainly reshaped as regards the way in which political parties function - the pluralism party framework of the 'representative state' is transformed. More importantly, there is a transformation in terms of the forces admitted to the bargaining table (parties, trade unions, localities, class strata etc). These are admitted to negotiations only insofar as the may be functionaL to the system-and can serve its ends. From a mechanism based on formal procedures, we see a shift to a political process that is structurally geared to 'benefits' (constitutional, economic etc; in general those of productivity) which have to be safeguarded. The state has an array of military and repressive means available (army, police, legal etc) to exclude from this arena all forces that do not offer unconditional obedience to its austerity-based material constitution and to the static reproduction of class relations that goes with it.

This represents the final phase in the transformation of the state-form which I define as the 'crisis-state'. It is not surpassed, merely reformulated along functional lines. I shall return to this point in the sections that follow.

([Point 2)

The basic weapon that capital uses for its restructuration is the deployment of monetary policies. These involve a subtle combination of controlled inflationary manipulation together with various means (financial, credit, fiscal etc) made available to the capitalist entrepreneur as an aid to reconstituting profit margins - these means being conditional on high rates of productvity, Here, in other words, We have an interaction between the instruments of monetary control, which are perfectly manipulable on the part of the state, and the proportionalities required to reproduce the relations of capitalist domination, Thus we have seen, in the long period of high inflation for example, high unemployment and irreversible cuts in public spending moving in parallel with an increase in the financing of industry and an increasing concentration of means designed to guarantee the circulation of goods and the flow of capital. Hence Keynesian instruments of intervention have been used throughout this process, with a view to restoring and bringing back into balance the 'natural' framework of the market, the necessary conditions for the 'spontaneous' reproduction of relations of profit and command.

To say (as is often said) that this combination represents a huge paradox, that it has little chance of succeeding, that the capitalist ideal of 'spontaneous' reproduction via the market is a lurid utopia, is to say effectively nothing. What counts is that the instruments of coercion will be multiplied to ensure that the gains are made, equivalent to those that this market utopia offers. The counter-revolution of the capitals; entrepreneur today can only operate strictly wthin the context of an increase in the coercive powers of the state. The new Rightideology of laissez-faire implies as its corollary the extension of new techniques-of coercive and state intervention in society at large: or, to put it better, a decisive new increase in the subsumption of society within the state. This 'neo-liberal' version o the crisis-state form only brings into sharper relief what were the essential characteristics of the Keynesian state- planner form, translating them into explicitly authoritarian terms.

(Point 3)

Over the past few years, I have been drawing attention to the socialization of the proletariat as the fundamental element in the genesis of the present capitalist crisis. This proletariat is fully social- Keynesian, one might say - and it has extended the contdadiction/antagonism against capitalist accumulation of profit from them factory area to the whole of society.It is responsible- for upsetting and destabilizing the whole circuit circuit from production to reproduction. And it has developed the contradiction of the social conditions of the reproduction of labour- power as an obstacle against capitalist accumulation. The formation and social quality of this new proletariat has not been just an ideal force behind recent class struggles. It has above all represented a new quality of labour. This in the sense that it represents a mobile sort of labour force, both horizontally and vertically, a labour-power which is abstract, and which projects new needs. This new labour force has, for a long period, bargained its working hours (susceptible to commodity production and exchange), while maintaining a relative independence at the level of the whole working day. This fact has enabled it to create conditions for equality and homogeneity in the working class; it has acted as a factor strengthening class power.

In the face of this new, mobile, abstract and fully socialized proletariat, we saw a sort of armistice in the class war, as the initial response of the collective entrepreneur throughout the developed capitalist world. Indeed, for a first period, the expansion of the underground economy (mobile part-time work etc) diffused throughout the interstices of the system, went ahead in proportion to the expansion of welfare. For this Keynesian proletariat, wage gains went hand in hand with advances in the social wage and the conquest of free time. The struggles and goals of the new proletariat were organised in this perspective.

The capitalist counter-revolution of today is directed precisely against this homogeneity, this subjective and material quality of mobility of a fully socialized labour-power. Hence the activation of powerful instruments of control, to stabilize and restructure this interstitial economy. And hence, also, attempts to break political and behavioural unity in the struggles of this social proletariat, whenever and wherever this shows signs of appearing. Capital's need to restructure this process directly involves the whole sphere of reproduction. It has involved, for example, reactionary attempts to stroll back'' the autonomous struggles of feminist movements etc; above all, attempts to reconstitute the imperatives of the family and to attack any elements tending to impair the smooth reproduction of capitalist relations. It is within this same framework that we should understand the basic role of capital's present attempts to reconquer spatial control over the territorial reallocation of the forces of production.

All these mechanisms of restructuration have an important theoretical implication. In the process of this transformation, capital, through state power, recognised its own existence as collective social capital. Hence, and quite contrary to the principle of pure market competition (the ideology of the new Right), capital is being increasingly centralized at a societal level as a social factory.It is attempting to to reorganise its command over social labour time,through a 'correct administrative flow' over the entire time and space of proletarian life conditions and possibilities. It follows that the question of public spending and cuts is not just a question of state expenditure in the obvious sense that the state wants to extend and strengthen its control over overall spending. It is a problem, above all in the sense that through public spending, the problems facing social capital as a whole, and the contradictions brought about by this fully socialized proletariat, are taken on board as problems which crucially concern the very basis of the capitalist state as such; ie have to be directly subordinated by imposing a general command over labour.

(Point 4)

It is clear that there remain strong elements of contradiction in this relation between the composition of the class and the corresponding form of capitalist command over labour. There are points of rupture, difficulties in bringing the two processes into synchronisation, in treating them as homologous. This problem makes its appearance at the level of political consensus. And this 'legitimation problem' is a serious one for capital. It is serious because, seen formally, the urgent needs of 'output' from the point of view of command over labour are not symmetrical with the 'input' of consensus. And they must be made symmetrical, at least in hypothesis. Without this consensus,without an effective mystification,and the continuous manipulations this allows the whole system of the social factory, ie command over total social labour time cannott function.

This is where t e political activity of the 'new Right' is so important, in all the developed capitalist countries, both in terms of economic ideology, and above all in ideological control of the mass media. What is presented is a package of values - tradition, authority, law and order, the family, centralized leadership etc - which are asserted as principles which can transcend, go beyond, the supposed privatized 'balkanisation' of interests, and at the same time match the need for re-establishing overall command over labour. Both the ideological and the administrative apparatuses of the state have to be purged; the contradictions brought about by the class struggle at this level too have to be expunged.

Hence the new Right, in the first instance, is a sort of 'anti-body', capable of counteracting conflicts within and between state institutions, between the corporate bodies of the state, preventing any residual elements of the old dialectic of conflict-mediation from reaching a critical point of breaking apart the institutions themselves. (In Italy this is achieved by the durational solidarity'' pact of the party system). Secondly, the new Right is a powerful poison against forces that do not accept this material constitution of the state, that are not attached to those 'constitutional benefits , and which demand a fundamental transformation in the class relation. In both these instances, the production of ideologies of consent and their manipulation, turning them into industrial commodities to the point where they emerge as 'common sense' and 'public opinion' play a vital and relevant role, economically as well, in the contemporary form of the crisis-state.

Having Sketched these Points by way of example, I do not Suggest that they represent an exhaustive treatment of the innovative aspects of the present phase of development of the crisis-state form. These are only illustrations- to which others could be added -of the basic characteristic of the crisis-state: the adoption of a series of means to institutionalist, from the capitalist standpoint, and in military terms, the total rupture of any balance or proportionality between the struggles and needs of the proletariat on the one hand, and capitalist development on the other. We are now at the stage of the full maturation of this crisis-state form. What were the earlier stages in its development'? Its first emergence can be traced to the rupture in the relation between class struggle and capitalist development in the 1960s - a relation which had provided the basis for postwar reforming and democratic cohesion. This rupture came about through the quantitative emergence of disproportionate wage struggles, and, as a result, an upsetting of the 'virtuous circle' of proportions on which Keynesian development depended. In the second stage, in the 1970s, this split became deeper. The wage variable developed its own independence, its own autonomy, to a critical point at which it no longer simply represented a quantitative disproportion: it was now transformed, in an irreversible way,into a qualitative assertionof the wage as an expression of the sociality of the working class.[Trans: 'political wage'] At this point, capital began to respond by attempting to fragment and disperse the productive circuit on which the unity of sociall abour-power was based. But it had to do this by taking as its basis, as its point of departure the socialization of the working class, the irreversible recomposition of the class brought about by this advanced stage in the subordination of labour to capital.

It is this final level in the unfolding of the problem, as I have already emphasized, that leads to the 'crisis of the crisis-state', in which the crisis-state is forced, as a result, to perfect its own mechanisms. (In case the title of this article reads like a tautology, it should now be clear that I am alluding simply to the fuller realization of this crisis-state form). And it seems to me that the capitalist restoration of the 1970s, which began with a politics of national solidarity in its various forms, l represents in this sense a real counter-revolution. I am not arguing a rigidity of cause and effect in the coincidence between political changes and changes in economic policy. I am only indicating obvious points of coincidence. What I want to emphasize is that anyone who thinks that the connection is purely coincidental, between the more profound regulation and use of the instruments of crisis, and the new special forms of state persecution against working-class struggles and their subjects, is denying not just causality in this relation, which is always a debatable point. They also end up denying that this coincidence must be considered, even when it is not regarded as necessary or essential, as a permanent fact, on which there is 'no going back' and hence as a medium term forecast for the 1980s. It is only by seeing these problems as stable and ongoing, that we can present them in such a way as to make them amenable to rational explanation. This is the point which I want to develop in the following two sections.

What does this accentuation of the crisis-state form comprise, specifically? It means, above all, a definitive point of rupture with any. possible social contract. for planned developement. It means that democracy (as it was understood in the good old days, as a contractual regime - whether in its liberal or socialist forms) becomes obsolete. In other words, a form of state power structurally based on a dynamic relation between capitalist development and the development of working class and proletarian struggles - the latter acting as the motive force behind the former - no longer has this dynamic basis. The result is a profound change in the ways in which social conflict is registered at the political level. In institutional terms, this rupture is marked by a shift to a new relation of power, which is demonstrably on the side of capital. With this shift, the 'natural' (ie historical) basis of modern democracy is torn away. . There is an analogy between this definition of the crisis-state form and that of fascism, provided that we do not stretch this to the point of any historical similarity. It lies in a common basic dependence of the specific nature of the form of command (separated) on the specific nature of the relationship (interrupted) between forces and relations of production. In other words, the analogy can be drawn in formal terms only and, as such, has to be filled out analytically. Nor can this analogy be seen as linear in its consequences', the crisis-state form and the fascist type of regime do not lead to the same kind of predetermined result. If a 'fascist' state exists, this is not to say that there exists a fascist political economy. What does exist is a political form, a type of fascism: that is, a state-form premisses on the rupture between capitalist development and.working-class struggles, and the use of crisis as the institutionalists of capitalist command.

While keeping to this analysis at the level of general tendencies, l want to focus especially on the way this deepening of the crisis-state has taken place in our more immediate situation in the European countries. There is no doubt that in Europe the maximum development of democracy corresponded to the period of greatest working-class and proletarian struggles at the end of the 1960s. The dualistic and crisis- ridden nature of capitalist development and its democratic regime was extremely evident in that period. The degree of unity in the class movement was by now considerable. The widespread sense of being a 'state within the state' enabled the proletariat to be inventive and innovative in its own ways of being. It was now able to improve its quality of life. It was able to use its power to promote legislation, and to legitimate a whole area of 'counter-power'. There were also high points of struggle - and notable successes - in the fight for shorter working hours (which has always been a prime terrain of working-class and proletarian initiative).

These struggles involved, in particular, a redefinition of what was meant by 'politics' in the movement. The critique of official politics, which has always been a driving force of all working-class and proletarian discourse and struggle, now not only destroyed the old ways of making politics - it also developed a new method of autonomous class politics, absorbing and integrating into the collective politics of direct action all aspects of the social reproduction of labour-power. One recent commentator, Claus Offe, certainly no revolutionary, has emphasized the qualitatively new subjective features of these 'new boundarys of the political'.According to him,this new quality of political subjectivity leads to the emergence of a new conflictual pardigm- institutions as well as outside - which stretches the framework of traditional-democracy-to its ultimate limit.

The capitalist response in what we may define as the first phase in the development of the crisis-state consisted in the analysis and practice of functional means to overturn these working-class successes. The working class and proletariat had forced the state to devolve a growing proportion of its budget towards maintaining and guaranteeing the process of social reproduction. The recognition on the part of capital of this social nature of its accumulation was imposed upon it forcibly, as always happens in the class struggle, and at once became the basis for immediate, organised and monetarists bargaining demands on the part of the working class.

The capitalist response consisted first in blocking, then in controlling, and finally in attempting to overturn the functions attributed by the proletariat to the expansion of public spending - precisely the terrain of mobility and unification of proletarian power. Capital, together with the forces of reformism, now imposed on public spending the productivity criteria characteristic of private enterprise. This ''productivity paradigm'' was neatly timed, launched and managed ,through the co-option of the Trade Union movement(planning agreements etc). Thus the static principle of incorporation made its appearance through the period of the 1970s, as the main instrument for breaking up the unity of class behaviours and smoothing the way for capitalist reorganization. A similar line was also pursued with the aim of imposing divisions on the new areas of aggregation of labour-power, such as intellectual and tertiary sectors: these had emerged as an organised and antagonistic force in the 1960s, through the increasing socialization of production. This strategy, which we may call 'dseparating the ghetto from the new strata of a corporate bourgeoisie', was pursued far more fully in other European countries than in Italy. Over a long period of the 1970s, the crisis-state operated a conscious policy of demolishing all the parameters of any general equilibrium;political relations based on income policies of the Keynesian type were generally rejected.

This phase can be said to have lasted for as long as the process of fragmentation and demilitarization of class forces, of proletarian strata, could not yet allow the further leap forward, beyond corporative responsibilisation, to the creation of a new basis of equilibrium, this time based on relations of pure command. This final step probably requires, in most cases, the active demystification monition of the corporatist framework of the pact or at least those elements of it that had been adopted in the intervening period on a transitory basis. This is indicated by the nature and outcome of several of the major workers' struggles that occurred at this critical turning-point - such as Ford Cologne (1973); the Lorraine steel strike (1978); and the FIAT strike and mass sackings of 1980.

This, then, provides us with a three-phase schema: first phase - indiscriminate expansion of welfare and recognition of the new socialized nature of the labour force; second phase - a plan of control based on the productivity paradigm and a strategy of corporation combined with ghettoisation; third phase - reconstruction of a general equilibrium of a 'fascist' type (in the sense defined above) -which Aldo Moro, ironically, described as tithe third period''. This schema we find broadly applied by all the major governing forces in Europe. It was theorized and developed through the decade of the 1970s; and the origins of the model can be traced to certain anticipatory developments in the USA. It should, moreover, be emphasized that we find a strong coincidence of these phases in all the European countries, and, in particular, a coincidence of key support given to these state-strategies by established left or labour movements etc. This is true at least as regards t he second phase of restructuration. The PCI's Historic Compromise from 1974, the EUR line, the Pandolfi plan, are by no means exclusively Italian in their political meaning. Similar labour pacts occurred throughout Europe: an illusory practlce ot organlslng working- class consensus along corporation lines as a defence against the Protean onward march of capitalist restructuration - while on the other hand isolating and marginalising the new socialized proletariat, which became relegated to mere subsistence level, This was the politics of socialist and communist parties throughout Europe - and especially that of the various trade union organizations. But this kind of pact is, in reality, an old and extremely two-edged political instrument', corporation itself is a good example. Not only did this strategy fail to block the movement towards an authoritarian, command-based regime. It actually assisted in the full realization of the crisis-state form! And so the vain and self- defeating nature of these projects was in the end made manifest. What fostered this illusion of the established Left, and led to its failure, must be made clear. Right from the onset of the crisis, it was not simply the political structure of the state that was disarticulated, requiring a new consensual basis through the party system (PCl). What had broken down was the basic structural relation between command and consensus, between administrative structures and the real world of work. And at the roots of this structural crisis lay the irreversible emergence of a new class composition.

Let us now go back to the characteristic tendencies of the crisis-state form in this latest phase. Two basic elements should be stressed. The first is the further maturation of the theory of command:command becomes ever more fascistic in form, ever more anchored in simple reproduction ofItself, ever more emptied of any rationale other than the reproduction of its own effectiveness. The second element is the necessity for this command to be exercised in a way that is intrinsic to the totality of social relations, given the real sublimation of labour to capital.Posed in these terms, however, the overall project in this 'third phase' is clearly highly problematical. It implies two contradictions. The first is functional: how can command hope increasingly to transcend a reality of which it has to be increasingly part and parcel? The second contradiction is structural: how can command be articulated in a situation in which the rupture between command and consensus, between capital and the proletariat, is structurally irreversible?

The first of these contradictions has been covered in an extensive and helpful literature. Analysis has come to focus on capital's capacity to reproduce a simulacrum of society and to formulate command through an effective simulation of the social totality, to develop its constrictions through a duplication of social processes. This phenomenon should not surprise economists, who have always defined the sphere of monetary command in similar terms (functions of simulacrum). In the social factory, money is the prototype of this control within social relations. But while we should certainly stress this need for control over and within the social totality, of which monetary control is the prototype and lynch- pin, it is nonetheless probably the cultural dimension of command that is fundamental- culture, that pale allusion to the power of money. The velocity of mystifications, and their adequacy to the process of real transformation going on, becomes a fundamental condition for command to be exercised. The first of our contradictions, in other words, is not so much overcome as deflected, overdetermined by the functions of simulacrum, organised through the automatic micro- functioning of ideology through information systems. This is the normal, 'everyda'' fascism, whose most noticeable feature is how unnoticeable it is. It would, however, be wrong to locate this control exclusively at this level. Not only are these mechanisms themselves susceptible to crisis; they also have effects which are secondary in relation to the real transformations taking place in the sphere of circulation. And this crisis of circulation corresponds to the real sublimation of labour to capital. It is a 'secondary' crisis (if we are to continue to use Marxist terms); provided that the concept of circulation is now ridded of its econometric connotations (the term 'economy' can at best only be put in inverted commas). Circulation must now be redefined at the level of the real and total subsumption of labour. The second contradiction, on the other hand, is structural and determinant. Its crisis-inducing character must be seen as primary. For the productive quality of social labour-power - and not simply that of the working class in traditional terms - poses a contradiction that is insoluble. The various political theories that have been put forward on this issue, attempting to resolve the functioning of the system - for example in the work of Luhmann [Trans: cf. Truth and Power and Differentiation and Society, Columbia University Press] - are as faltering and fragile as they are utopian. Luhmann takes the productive contradiction out of its proper sphere - thus consciously contributing to the mystification of power', he then resolves it on the basis of its false duplication. The result is falsity and illusion at the point where science ceases to be meaningful; the concept of 'sociological fallacy' sums up the effective mystification functions of this operation, which is perfectly consonant with capitalist interests. But in terms of practice, such a discourse cannot even serve as an ideological cover', in terms of the exercise of real power, it has to be dispensed with. The only theoretical guarantee to overcome the contradiction on the terrain of circulation, to construct a simulacrum functional to a real power, immediately appears for what it is: a coercive, violent negation of the contradiction on the terrain of production itself , both in theory and in practice.

In Marxist terms, this second contradiction must be located within class relations, relations that have indeed been transformed, but are no less real. On the one hand, we have the productive forces now com- pletely embodied in a fully socialized proletariat', on the other, we have the relations of production completely reconstituted as systematic functions of mystification and domination. Moreover, this productive power of the proletariat is also exercised - directly - over the entire spatial and temporal dimensions of the reproduction process, which has now become a key sphere of antagonism, Thus the authoritarian character of the state has to be developed in this sphere with maximum coherence and power. It is only the negation of any mediators mechanisms in the real, direct area of class relations that can allow the totalitarian scope of the state system to be effective. The basic, structural contradiction has to be forcefully - and above all preventively - negated and turned into a functional contradiction that is susceptible to manipulation. The state transforms society into its simulacrum, into mostly, so that capital can spend it! In these features lie the fascistic characteristics of the crisis-state in this ulterior phase of its development.

Do these features also define the Warfare State? They would appear to do so. If we go beyond the purely formal definition, a series of characteristics can be summarised: a maximum technological objectification of the state's rationale of power (the nuclear state);

the maximum articulation of the state's production of consensus (information-system state); the possible - though not necessary - mediation in static terms through interest groups (the corporative state); the consequent pushing to the limit of mechanisms of exclusion, marginalisation and selective repression (the fascistic state) - and so on. Last but not least, we have the calculated and cynical use of internal war as an instrument of control. It is worth noting that, at the level of real sublimation of labour and as a solution to the problem of circulation seen as a problem of consensus, the terrorist factor is fundamental; as 'natural' to the contemporary state as fiscality was to the state of the ancien regime. Once again, crisis repeats and reproduces the genesis of the state form. It is a veritable Leviathan that presides over and against the forces of today's proletarian struggles.

Working-class science today is faced with a Socratic task - that of reimposing the principle of reality. Today's climate is a strange one, reminiscent of the 1920s; but Hoover's vendetta, the seditionist attack on the working class which many think is being repeated today, is itself a phantasms, a simulacrum of reality. The transformation of the composition of the working class, on the other hand, is the real and irreversible development, and has been since the 1960s. And the more capital attempts to track down and mystify this recomposition - in the knowledge that class antagonism has become widened and extended to the social sphere as a whole - the more it finds itself bereft of any positive logic, and is forced simply to arm itself with violence and brutality in order to exercise its domination.

It seems clear, however, that while we can identify a phase of the movement in the 1960s that saw an acceleration of this transformation, and a phase of political maturation at the social level in the 1970s, the present phase should be seen as one of a war posittion in the relation between classes. Certain theoretical and practical tasks arise from this definition of the current phase. Here I shall limit the discussion to some theoretical aspects of the question.

My own forecast is that, as far as the working class and proletariat are concerned, the 1980s will be dominated by the search - over a medium- term period - for more solid forms of political mediation within the class itself; between social groupings and different strata of wage labour, between the genders, across generations etc. The problems that have been passed down to us from the latest stage of confrontation are both negative and positive. The negative problem is how to break down the corporation strategies of domination (where, as seems likely, these are not already liquidated by the dialectic within the state institutions themselves); the task here is to build a generalized terrain of resistance. The positive problem is how to find a way of asserting as an effective force the qualitatively new social recomposition of subordinated labour in all its forms. Hence the key theoretical task is that of completing and updating the Marxist analysis based on the mass worker class com- position of the earlier period of the 1960s. The tamals worker'' class composition must now be considered as a phenomenon subordinated to the socialized, abstract and mobile characteristics of the proletariat in the epoch of the transition to communism. In other words, we have to develop a phenomenology of mediations of the new proletarian subject, able to grasp its cultural and social, spatial and temporal, horizontal and vertical mobility, as the basis for an entirely new chapter in the communist theory of the present. A number of theses put forward by a growing body of Marxist theorists (for example, De Gaudemar, Fox Piven and Cloward, Hossfeld or O'Connor) suggest that the theory of class composition should once again be taken up and systematically updated within the framework of a theory of time: in other words, in a dynamic form Which encompasses the internal relations within the class in their temporal dimension, and sees mobility as the key characteristic of the formation and process of reformation of the working class.

In a self=critical sense, we should consider the 'impasse' which the proletarian movement underwent in Italy at the end of the 1970s as the product of the capitalist ability to impose new strategies of division and to choose various tactics in order to discipline different sections of the class movement over time. The defeat by the corporation pact, the blockage imposed on the further expansion of revolutionary activity of important sectors - and above all of the mass worker sectora- took place in a precise time dimension. If we were to put this in philosophical terms, we could say that the constitutive time of the revolutionary tendency was opposed by the analytical time of capitalist command; and that the task now is to reduce the capitalist analysis of time to working-class and proletarian constitutive time. But philosophical modes of problematising the issue are not in order, even though these are probably the only way correctly to pose the problem of organization in a war of position. Hence empirical analysis should be developed in the time perspective of the recomposition of the class movement; while recognising that the analytical time dimension is fundamental as regards determining class antagonisms in their relation to capitalist strategies and inititatives of command.

In this strategic perspective, the importance of restructuring the class enemy should not be forgotten - indeed, it remains decisive. Temporal analysis of class relations must essentially be based on the subjectivity of proletarian forces. of the various strata of the c class, of their plurality. And the pluralism of proletarian subjectivity has to be seen in the temporal dimension of the total working day. As we know, class subjectivity is not a spiritual element; it is as material as all other elements that have a bearing on the working day. What we have to do is to consider dynamically the cultural, age, gender differences etc, in the process of class recomposition, in order to reach anew definition of class subjectivity. The basic task of today is to define and make possible an organizational synthesis out of these subjective processes. To clarify my argument, it is worthwhile going back for a moment to the problematic posed for the movement in the 1970s. From capital's side, as we have already said, the restoration was carried out through jpolicies of division and corporation strategies of co-optation. Fox Piven and Cloward have demonstrated this process quite clearly, at least as regards the USA, in their study of 'Poor People's Movements.' But what is lacking in their analysis is precisely a constitutive time dimension, capable of going beyond the various divisions imposed from above and grasping that new quality of class composition which is implicit in their analysis and which indicates the revolutionary tendency within the class movement as a whole. In other words, what we really need to understand is how the new quality and level of needs and new forms of mobility produce material circuits of recomposition within the class, In the old 'workerist' framework of analysis, centrality was accorded to the labour process - as distinct from the productive process as a whole. Analysis of the mass worker as such, within the labour process, was seen as sufficient to trace a sort of subjective circulation of struggle which was a simple reversal of the commodity process. This subjective circulation in turn provided the key to characterizing the subjectivity of the struggles that took place. In a vulgar sort of way (and not only in the italian workerist current), this technique of ('reversal'' was then extended to the analysis of public spending, to identify the circuits of struggle of the social worker alongside those of the mass worker:public spending is part of your wage packet'. Clearly, this analysis was insufficient. Similarly, what is needed now is not simply an analysis of working-class mobility, showing it to be the 'reverse side' of the paradigm of command, and indicating the possibility of a long-term convergence in avocational terms between unemployed and factory workers, exploited housewives and old-age pensioners, students and youth working in the black economy etc. Obviously we need this - but it is still not enough. The analysis has to be rooted in a communist perspective. Clearly, this must encompass the practical problems of struggle against the articulations of capitalist command, the problem of resisting and overthrowing the blackmail of public spending and the discipline of the total working day in a global sense - but the connecting thread of the analysis can only be found through a progressive movement, both theoretical and practical, which anticipates a communist future.

Let us examine a specific instance of this problem by looking at another aspect of the defeat of the movement in the late 1970s. This defeat took place, not only as a result of corporation state policies, but also through the ghettoisation of the movement itself ; the repression and/or isolation of particular struggles which proved incapable of being generalized at the level of the new quality of the class interest as a whole, and which consequently became prey to the repressive paradigm of capitalist control over public spending. This process has been particularly evident in the large European metropolitan centres. Recently, Karl Heinz Roth (in the journal Autonomie - Materialen gegen die Fabrikgesellschaft - Neue Folge, no. 4-5) has directly confronted this problem in the case of Germany, where these phenomena of ghettoisation and englobement have been exceptionally evident. In Germany, the defeat of the movement was entirely due to the inability to grasp and build upon that new quality of class separation and antagonism which alone could provide general goals for the movement as a whole; not in any sense externally imposed goals, but goals arising from the quality of proletarian existence itself .

This raises a serious problem. The abandonment of the old Marxist framework of programmatic 'general demands' and of scientific rationalism in the movement - which everyone has flirted with at some time or other, and which was needed precisely in order to grasp the new quality of subjects and struggles - has also led to a collapse of possibilities of reconstructing particular subjectivities as links in any general material project. The result, as Roth shows, is that the productivity of movements of self-valorisation (particularly evident in the ghetto underground) has been recuperated within the capitalist segregation of labour markets and within the reorganization of the interstitial economy; and this to such an extent that capital is now free to reshape and manipulate this sector at will. Thus freedom becomes drug trafficking', self-valorisation is reduced to a business; the exercise of counter-power is negated through terrorism. The issues that provide partial contents of the struggle (anti-nuclear or ecological) themselves become detached and re-integrated within the general power of the simulacrum of social relations that governs capitalist production. The only solution to this impasse, according to Roth, is a radical recovery of the Marxist method of analysis in order to grasp the new quality of class behaviours; in a perspective that can reconstitute the class subject as a whole with its communist content and goals. However,I do not want these remarks to be misinterpreted as a plea for a sort of new, up-dated Gramscianism. In no sense am I suggesting that the concept of hegemony, with its obvious theoretical weaknesses and idealistic derivation, can now simply be given a more materialist consistency, translated into the terms of contemporary society. The differences in method that divide us from any 'hegemonic' resolution remain substantial, and no amount of self-criticism concerning the events of the past few years and the prospects ahead can bridge this gulf . Nor is it a question of self-criticism as regards analytical approach; indeed, the method must remain the same - a radical continuity of subversive method aimed at the destructuration and sabotage of the system. Any political determination of the future from a class point of view now requires a further leap forward in the cultural revolution of the proletariat. AIl the cards will have to be reshuffled in this process. What is required is a sort of Leninist 'New Economic Policy' which overturns the relations of production in order to bring out the subjectivity of the transformation engendered by the new socialized proletariat. Corporativism has to be destroyed as the major static force blocking any revolutionary emergence. And we have to grasp fully the central t importance of class mobility as the key element in the circuits of struggle leading to class recomposition. If the concept of hegemony - the classical conception of class unity in Leninist political science is to have any relevance to this process, this can only be within a perspective that sets the organization of mobility-in the continuous process of formation and re-formation of proletarian unity - against capitalist reproduction of the simulacrum (political, economic and informational) which is today's basic weapon of domination. We have to reinterpret mobility as a proletarian weapon, discover its working-class use as a means of conquering free time and redefining the working day. And we have to see this use of mobility as a key weapon against the rigidified and fascistic forms of command of the Warfare State - the petrified and illusory command over monetary liquidity, together with its cultural and institutional reflections.

From the Italian standpoint,I think that for future indications we have to go back to FIAT. This is as true now as it has been in allprevious critical turning points in the class struggle - as in 1962, 1969, or 1973. But now it is no longer sufficient to go back to the pickets on the pates. Gone are those times when the wildcat strike, the first primitive form of the insurgency of the mass worker, and the generalization of the mass worker's struggle-behaviour in the mass pickets, was a sufficient basis for indicating the direction of the class struggle as a whole. Now analysis has to encompass the whole metropolis and class recomposition has to be seen in terms of mobility; working-class freedom can now only be understood in terms of the total social working day, which - at the level of real, social subsumption of labour - is the same as life-time itself. We return to FIAT today for new answers: to prove the hegemony and the majoritarian status (both quantitatively and qualitatively) of the movements of recomposition of the social worker over all other sections or strata of the class.

The time has come to break definitively with all those who have mystified, divided and held back the proletariat, above all on the terrain of public spending; to push the schizoid possibilities of public spending to the limit, to accept with extractive irony the capitalist restoration of t e market, while materially revealing and attacking its ideal, utopian and reactionary nature; and to affirm, above all, that principle of reality which imposes the fundamental, structural contradiction against its functionalist distortions. In so doing, we can also render ineffective the state's deployment of its military capacities against the class movement. While all this will certainly not produce a celebration banquet for us, we can now say finally and definitively: itll won't be a picnic for them either''

Trani Special Prison:

November 1980

(Introduction & main text taken from Revolution Retrieved,a collection of Negri's work, published by Red Notes 1998, as part of their Red Notes Italian Archive)

Introduction

This text, like the preceding one, belongs to Negri's period in prison and was published, in the same anthology, Macchina Tempo, Feltrinelli, Milano 1982. The problematic of these essays is outlined in the introduction to the article above, 'crisis of the Crisis-state'. The underlying theme is the need to redefine the class antagonism in advanced capitalism, at a level corresponding to the real, total subsumption of society, of social labour as a whole, to capitalist domination. This means, as Negri argues here - but also in earlier articles included in this volume - that the conception of the 'working class' has to be broadened and extended to contradiction and antagonism in the sphere of social reproduction as a whole - ie beyond direct production as such.

It follows that the analysis of the Italian workerists of the 1960s is in urgent need of being updated in the light of the structural crisis of labour power as such, the main motive force underlying the present permanent state of crisis. This change in class composition, the recomposition of class antagonism at a social level, is the major issue addressed in this essay. Here Negri traces the analysis and method of class composition from its early exponents, in the Italian workerism of the 1960s, to the new problems posed for analysis of the recomposition of the class movement today, the 'remaking of the working class' at the level of social antagonism which has now been reached.

For Negri, in contrast to the various theories of neo-functionalism and post-industrial sociology, the new movements of struggle in the social sphere represent a new level of class antagonism, which cannot be- reduced to a mere proliferation of new subjectivities around life-needs 'signalling the end of any class relation based on the production of value and suplus-value.The crisis of the value form, seen as a class relation,is rather the starting point for a new level of class antagonism. And this analysis has to go beyond the narrow definitions of productive work, the 'factoryist' definitions of the working class that had dominated in orthodox Marxism for so long.

The emergence of this new social dimension of class struggle from the early-mid 1970s meant for Negri that the class analysis based on the concept of the 'mass worker', developed in the 1960s, had become too narrow to encompass the new level of antagonism, now extended beyond production to repoeduction as a whole. Hence the references to the need for a critique of and surpassallof the 'political economy of the mass worker'. It should be pointed out - and Negri makes this clear - that the old workerist analysis was never simply a 'factoryist' conception of the class. In Tronti, for instance, the extension of the factory, and of production relations, to society was central to his whole theory of class antagonism in advanced capitalism. And his definition of 'refusal of work' at the strategic direction of the class struggle was not subsequently abandoned; indeed, for Negri it remains key in his updated class analysis. What had changed was that this 'social extension ' could now no longer be seen simply in terms of the extension of wage demands from factory struggles. Through restructuration and the regime of austerity, the 'extensivity' of the factory wage struggle had been cut off , by division and segmentation of the labour market, between 'guaranteed' and 'non-guaranteed' sectors by expansion of the casual, part-time and underground economy etc, in short by what in italy is defined by the term 'diffused factory'. This was one factor in requalifying the new social nature of the working class. The other was the social nature of the capitalist response to the crisis, which consisted in an attack on the social wage as a whole, through cuts in public spending, to bring back what Negri calls the 'synchronisation' between the independent reproduction of a fully socialized labour-power and the discipline of the wage/work relation.

Negri's dynamic approach and analysis of the class antagonism today as that of fully socialised labour-power clearly puts him at variance with traditional, monolithic and corporation class definitions, restricted to waged workers in 'direct' production only. His emphasis on the growth of mobility, of part-time, casual and domestic work, the absence of job fixity, the diffusion of production in the 'nformal' economy, the unity of production, circulation and reproduction etc, in no way signals the 'end of the working class', but rather a higher level of socialization of the class antagonism over the whole social working day. The new social subjects of struggle are by no means 'marginal' - rather, their marginalisation is political.

This indeed was the key issue in the debate between the autonomists and the established Left in italy from the mid- 1970s onwards. Negri's orthodox critics - particularly from PCI quarters, and including the erstwhile workerists of the old school - cast him in an 'anti-worker' role, a theme taken up by his prosecuting judges (see below). For the PCI, the new social struggles were defined as marginal movements of a new 'dpetty-bourgeoisie' or 'lumpen proletariat' etc, in other words in terms from the traditional Marxist vulgate for defining movements of the far Right! For the ex-workerist PCI spokesman Asor Rosa, the autonomists represented 'non- privileged parasitic strata'; for Enrico Berlinguer, secretary of the PCI, nothing but 'plague carriers' and so on. For a major statement of the PCI positively supporting 'democratic' austerity at this time, see Enrico Berlinguer, Austerity, Occasione per Trasformare l'Italia ('Austerity - An Opportunity for Transforming lta1y'), Ed. Riuniti, Rome 1977. It is sad to see that this official thesis of marginality (and the portrayal of Negri as 'anti-workerist') has been broadly accepted in the few reviews and comments on Negri that have appeared from English would-be critics of the PCI (for example, Alex Callinicos, Socialist Worker Review, July-August 1984; or Tobias Abse, Judging the PCI , New Left Review 153, 1985), For such commentators, the 'marginals' remain marginal, and the working class is a static, monolithic entity defined in narrow trade-union terms. As for how far Negri's work 'anticipates André Gorz' (!) and represents 'everyday anarchism' (Callinicos), readers may iudze for themselves.

Negri himself answered the criticism that he denied the 'centrality of the working class' in a lengthy interview in 1978 'From the Mass Worker to the Social Worker', cited above). He also drew attention to his emphasis on the word 'worker' in the term he uses to define the composition of the new class subjects. This analysis of class recomposition, of the multiple subjectivities and movements for communism today, has continued to be the major focus of Negri's work, in dialogue with French collaborators, since his exile in France post- 1983: see Negri and Guattari, New Lines of Alliance, Semiotextte), Foreign Agents Series, New York 1986. For those who read French, the issues of contemporary class analysis in Italy are discussed further by Negri and others in a recent anthology: Italic, le Philosophy et le Gendarme, VLB Editeur, Montreal 1986. (European distribution: Réplique Diffusion, 66 rue René Boulanger, 75010 Paris, France.) The questions raised in this article are further developed in Negri's recent work Fin de Siecle; forthcoming English edition entitled Politics of Subversion, Polity Press, Cambridge 1989; and in Fabbriche del Sozgetto, XXI Secolo, Livorno 1987.

Archaeology and Project: The Mass Worker and the Social Worker

1. Functions and Limitations of the Concept of the Mass Worker

In the wake of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, the critique of Stalinism which developed within the Italian labour movement above all put into question the traditional conception of the trade union. This had become an area of key concern. In 1953, there had been a resounding defeat of the Communist union at FIAT; in the years that followed, there were equally resounding defeats in line for the farm workers' unions and the public sector unions (railway workers, postal workers etc). The fading (or downright disappearance) of any immediate prospect of a seizure of power, and a series of confusions at the ideological level, meant that the trade unions were being undermined as the transmission belt of the system; both their organizational form and their ideological basis were thrown into crisis.

But this crisis did not affect the radicalism of the working class. There began to appear a mass form of behaviour which was spontaneous, multiform, violent, mobile and disorderly -but which, nonetheless, was able to compensate for the lack of trade union leadership in ways that were both original and powerful - and while the union leaderships stuck to a repetition of the old forms, the working class reacted in ways that were autonomous. The union would call strike action and the entire workforce would go in to work - but then, after a week, a month, maybe a year, that same working class would explode in spontaneous demonstrations. The farm workers of the South also began spontaneous struggles. However, they had been defeated in the movement to take over agricultural land; they had been sold out by the government's agrarian reforms which condemned them to the poverty of having to work small holdings. As a result, the rural vanguards chose the path of large-scale emigration. This was a mass phenomenon - its causes and effects were complex, certainly, but its quality was political. Then things began to move: Milan in 1959, Genova in 1960, Turin in 1962, and Porto Marghera in 1963- a series of struggles which pushed to the forefront of the political scene. This succession of labour struggles involved every major sector of industry and all the major urban concentrations. They were all more or less spontaneous, mass events, and revealed a degree of general circulation of modes of struggle that had not previously been experienced, One might well ask for a definition of the spontaneity of the struggles. Because, while it is true that the struggles were in large part independent of the control and the command of the trade unions (and the unions were, sometimes, not even aware of them), at the same time, they appeared - and were - strongly structured. They revealed the existence of new working-class leaderships which were - as we used to say - 'invisible'. In part because many people simply didn't want to see them, But also (and mainly) because of their mass character', because of the new mechanisms of cooperation that were coming into play in the formation of workers' political understanding', because of the extraordinary Ability of these new forms of struggle to circulate', and because of the degree of understanding (understanding of the productive process) that they revealed. And whilst these new forms of struggle were at first seen by most people as 'irrational' in the course of their development they gradually began to reveal a coherent project and a tactical intelligence which finally began to problematise the very concept of working-class rationality - economic rationality? Socialist rationality? Rationality of the law of value? Rationality of trade union control? Rationality of law and order? Etc, etc. In effect, we could identify elements in the form that was taken by these struggles which were directly contradictory with the whole structure of trade unionist/ socialist ideology. The wage demands, and the extremes to which they went, contradicted the way in which, in traditional trade union practice, the wage had been used as a political instrument, as a means of mediation. The partisan nature (egotism) of the struggles ran heavily counter to the socialist ideology of the homogeneity of working-class interests which had prevailed up till then. 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 socialization 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 socialized 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.

The paradox of the situation was the fact that this mass spontaneity, highly structured within itself, negated in principle the very definition of spontaneity. Traditionally, spontaneity has been taken to mean a low level of working-class consciousness, a reduction of the working class to simple labour-power. Here, though, it was different. This spontaneity represented a very high level of class maturity. It was a spontaneous negation of the nature of the working class as labou power. This tendency was clearly present, and later developments were to reveal it still further. Thus anybody who wanted to analyse the new forms of struggle was going to have to be prepared to problematise the entire theoretical tradition of socialism. Within these struggles, there were new categories waiting to be discovered.

And this was what was done. In the early 1960s, on the fringes of the official labour movement, a number of working-class vanguards and a number of groups of intellectuals active within the class struggle produced a theory in which the mass worker was understood as the new subject of working-class struggles.

On the one hand, their studies identified the objective characteristics of this class-protagonist. These characteristics were determined as follows:

1) within the organization of the labour process, by Taylorism;

2) within the organization of the working day and the organisation of wage relations, by Fordism;

3) within economic/political relations, by Keynesianism;

4) within general social and state relations, by the model and the practice of the Planner-state.

On the other hand, they succeeded in defining (this was absolutely imperative) the new subjective characteristics of this new configuration of the class. These subjective characteristics were described in terms that were dynamic and highly productive. In other words, every aspect of the capitalist or animation of the factory society was to be seen as the product of a dialectic between working class struggle and capitalist development (including developments in technology; in the form of the wage; In economic policy; and in the form of the State) - the product a dialectic whose active and motion central force was the mass worker.

As our old friend Marx says, machines rush to where there are strikes. All the mechanisms of capitalist control of development were brought to bear at critical points within the system. By means of a continual theft of the information generated by the struggles, capital created increasingly complex mechanisms of domination. It was within this framework that the analysis undertaken by workerism unstitched the capitalist Moloch, following the indications provided by working-class struggle. The comrades arrived at a fundamental theoretical conclusion: that, given a certain level of capitalist development, the concept of labour-power (understood as an element of the dialectical relationship between workers and capital, a relationship in which capitalist logic has the upper hand) becomes dissolved. A dialectical relationship most certainly remains, but now the relationship of capital/labour-power becomes the relationship of capital/working class. Thus the dialectic of capitalist development is dominated by the relationship with the working class. The working class now constituted an independent polarity within capitalist development. Capitalist development was now dependent on the political variable of working-class behaviours.

The concept of labour- power could no longer be substantiated;only that of working-class was adequate. 1 have to admit that our theoretical and political positions in this period, while very rich in some respects, were very poor in others. Their richness lay in the fact that they provided a basis from which we could then develop an entirely political concept of labour-power. We learned a lot from developments in the capitalist revolution of the 1930s and 1940s. In particular, we learned that it was possible to carry forward revolutionary struggles having a marked effect both on the structure of the labour process, and on the structure of economic and political domination - in other words, struggles that were capable of winning against Taylorism and within Keynesianism. On the other hand, the poverty of our theoretical and practical positions lay in the fact that, while individual struggles and the struggles of individual class sectors proved capable of understanding capital and taking it on, at the same time, the potential of that struggle, its strategic dimension, the re-establishment of a centre of revolutionary initiative, remained beyond our grasp. Practice, even the very highest working-class practice - at this level of the class struggle - always contains an element of uncertainty as regards its synthesis and resolution - what Lenin used to call the 'art of insurrection', an art which the workers, today, are seeking to turn into science. This science still had to be constructed - a science which the practice of the mass worker was demanding, but which it did not provide.

In fact, capital's science of domination was far ahead of us.At the time when we were introducing the concept of the mass worker, and, by implication, a critique of the category of labour-power in favour of a concept of the dynamism of the working class, capital, for its part, had already made tremendous advances in its own practice, as regards its theory of domination and redressing the balance of power. (Note that within the specificities and the isolation of a few national situations - Italy in particular - we were successful in developing a remarkable level of subjective action, and in bringing about moments of deep capitalist crisis.) For, while from the working-class viewpoint the revolutionary practice of the mass worker was being advanced within individual factories, and within the overall interlocked system of factories and companies, capital was already responding in overall, global and social terms - in terms of global domination and control. Keynesianism at its roots had already demonstrated this: an awareness not only that the wage relation extended betweensubjects that were different (capital and the working class), but also - and above all - that the solution (favourable to capitalist development) was to be soughtacross the entire span of production and circulation - in other words, involving the entire sociality of the relations of production and reproduction. In the Keynesian system, state budgeting was the means of recuperating and neutralizing the class struggle in the factory, and monetary policy was the means of subordinating the wage relation. Fordism, for its part, had already transformed the high level of cooperation on the assembly line (and thus corrected those elements of weakness which labour struggles, at that level of production, were able to turn against capitalist command) into a conscious policy, one might say, of the socialite of the assembly line - in other words, a policy of command over the relation between industrial production and the reproduction of labour-power, a capitalist intervention within the social flexibility of labour-power, privileging social command and divisions within society as conditions for command and division on the assembly line. dism recuperated social motivations and made them functional to the Taylorist organization of workit posed them as the prime and fundamental terrain of command in the factory. Gradually, the labour market and the fabric of relations between production and reproduction was becoming an operative field (this also from the theoretical point of view) for the capitalist theory of factory command: hence the development from Keynes to Kaldor's planning techniques, to Kalecki's micro-analyses of the political cycle, to the present systemic theories of neo-functionalism, Faced with these developments in capital's understanding of the articulations of command, not only was the concept of the mass worker late in developing, but also, crucially, it now proved incapable of if for itself a theory able to match the new dimensions of command. Of course, the old workerists of the '60s knew that they had to go beyond the 'epirical' category of the factory, and that the mass worker had to become effective over the entire span of the social factory - but the factoryist content of the concept and the circumstances of its genesis prevented its theoretical potential from becoming practical reality. Thus, in the end, this impotence of the mass worker left the way open for surreptitious operations of mediation and representation - and the whole old machinery of the party-form was wheeled out as the means whereby issues could be posed at the social, political and general level.

We should also add (and this is not only merely of historical relevance)that this was the basis whereby the trade union was able to re-establish its powers of control over the working class. This had a paradoxical consequence: the trade union accepted the delegation of power and the general functions that the working class had restored to it, and then went on to impose rules which separated, in a corporation sense, the working class from the other proletarianised strata of society. When the trade union (ie in its traditional function as half party and half merchandiser, in the sense that it both represents labourr power within the bourgeois political market, and also sells labour as a commodity on the capitalist market) finally caught up with and grasped (post-'68) the new composition of the mass worker, it only reduced it to corporation, and divided it off from the rest of social labour.

Hence it follows that a methodology such as I use, which seeks to indicate possibilities for subjective genesis within the categories of class struggle, cannot rest content with this old version of the concept of the mass worker. And indeed, the conditions for further theoretical progress on this front were plentiful, especially in the years immediately following the upheavals of 1968-69. Working-class struggles, which were extremely powerful in spite of (or perhaps because of) their ambiguity as struggles both within and against the system of the relative wage, now brought about a crisis in the mechanisms of capitalist control. The capitalist response during this period developed along two complementary lines - the social diffusion, decentralization of pro- duction, and the political isolation of the mass worker in the factory.

The only possible answer to this, from the working-class viewpoint, was to insist on and fight for the broadest definition of class unity, to modify and extend the concept of working class produvtive labour and to eliminate the theoretical isolation (insofar as this concept had inevitably become tied to an empirical notion of the factory - a simplified factoryism - due to the impact of the bosses' counter-offensive, the corporation of the unions, and the historical and theoretical limitations of the concept itself). On the other hand,th emergence & growth ofdiffused forms of production(the "diffuse factory"), while it enlarged the labour market enormously, also redefined as directly productive and "working class" a whole series of functions within social labour that would otherwise be seen as marginally latent. Finally, there was a growing awareness of the interconnection between reductive labour and the labour of reproduction, which was expressed in a wide range of behaviours in social struggles, above all in the mass movements of women and youth, affirming all these activities collectively as labour. This development made necessary an innovation in the vocabulary of class concepts, As we used to put it: 'from the mass worker to the social worker'. But it would be more correct to say: from the working class, ie that working class massified in direct production in the factory, to social labour-power, representing the potentiality of a new working class, now extended throughout the entire span of production and reproduction - a conception more adequate to the wider and more searching dimensions of capitalist control over society and social labour as a whole.

There are numerous problems which arise at this point, and I have no intention of trying to avoid them. In what follows I hope to confront at least some of them. It will suffice at this stage to introduce what I consider to be the key methodological concept - that of class composition - which will help to clarify much of my further argument. By class composition, I mean that combination of political and material characteristics - both historical and physical - which makes up: (a) on the one hand, the historically given structure of labour-power, in all its manifestations, as produced by a given level of productive forces and relations; and (b) on the other hand, the working class as a determinate level of solidification of needs and desires, as a dynamic subject, an antagonistic force, tending towards its own independent identity in historical-political terms. AlI concepts that define the working class must be framed in terms of this historical transformability of the composition of the class. This is to be understood in the general sense of its ever wider and more refined productive capacity, the ever greater abstraction and socialization of its nature, and the ever greater intensity and weight of the political challenge it presents to capital. In other words, the re-making of the working class! It is by reference to this framework and these criteria, for example, that we can qualify more precisely a term like spontaneity. The concept of composition allows us to introduce a specific, determinate quality into our theoretical definition of spontaneity; it prevents us, in other words, from falling into the trap of ideological definitions (whether political - in which case spontaneity is conceived as an indifferent category', or econometric - in which case spontaneity is reduced to the semantic emptiness of the concept of labour-power pure and simple). The category of 'mass worker' must accordingly be re-assessed, in its functions and limitations, within this temporal framework of the transformations of the composition of the working class. And under today's conditions, it seems to me that this transformation is taking place througha process of real subsumtion of labour on the part of capital, which has now reached a level that encompasses the whole of' society. "Hic Rhodus, hic salts."

2. CapitalistRestructuring: From the Mass Worker to Social Labour- Power

So, let us return to the moment when the pressure of this new spontaneity (that is, the spontaneous - but, as in the paradox we have described, both structural and structured - forms of expression of the new class composition, ie of the mass worker) brings about a crisis in the means of capitalist control over the production and reproduction of commodities.

I would suggest that this moment can be located chronologically within the decade 1960-1970. In that period, strikes and struggles created an upheaval within the existing framework of development, inducing a major series of critical phenomena (crises of capitalist control), of which the following seem to be the most important:

1) The mass worker set in motion a mobility within the labour market. The subversive characteristics of this mobility appear to consist in an uncontrollable increase in the speed of flow/turnover of demands, and, at the same time, in a rigid and homogeneous escalation of those demands. If we include within our definition of the mass worker the fact that the mass worker represents a certain qualitative solidification of abstract labour (which is another way of saying a high level of subjective awareness of abstract labour), then these mobility-related phenomena reveal simply the centripetal potential of abstract labour (towards averageness, mediety) in a framework of mass production in modern capitalism. And this might be consistent with development. But instead, the forms and modes in which the mobility (subjectivity) of the mass worker expressed itself threw capitalist development out of proportion, subjected it to intolerable accelerations, and in particular confronted it with the quality of this very composition - those historical differences ' and divisions of sex, age, culture, etc, which were now tending towards a deeply-rooted political homogeneity. Mobility of abstract labour equals tendency for subjects and for struggles to unify.

2) On the other hand in a complementary process, the mass worker set in motion -both within individual factories and within the productive fabric of the metropolis - a downward rigidity of expectations and wage demands. This in itself (the demand for 'parity') became a subversive force. Drives towards egalitarianism served to reinforce this rigidity: we saw the collapse of all - or virtually all - the weaponry of division in the factory (piecework; employers' unilateral control of timings of the labour process; internal mobility, etc) and of the hierarchy which controls the labour process and the organization of production. In this period, sackings - together with all the other various forms of exclusion and marginalisation - were powerfully contested, resisted, and in large part blocked. Furthermore, the overall rigidity of the class brought about a reduction in effective labour time; it also provided defence and back-up for individual experiences of resistance to work, or refusal of work. The wage struggle, in both its qualitative and quantitative aspects, became a powerful independent variable of development: a kind of economic-political dual power which came into existence. In some instances we find this registered in factory legislation - most notably in Italy, for example). Rigidity of abstract labour equals qualitative consolidation of the above-mentioned unification of subjects and of struggles.

3) Thirdly, the social mobility and the political/wage rigidity of the social worker was also articulated within the sphere of circulation. But, for the mass worker, circulation means a radical change in the relation between daily work-time and non-worked time. We were not yet at the point where the latter had hegemony over the former. However, this was a phase in which the social relation of production (the relation between production and reproduction) was an area of powerful contestation. Without succeeding in fully controlling and carrying through this leap in the class struggle, the mass worker nevertheless spread the infection of his subjective behaviour into the fabric of proletarian society. First - just to take one example - although opt yet at the point of directly contesting the 'oedipal wage' (in other words, . the wage paid for the male worker's domination over his family), the mass worker nonetheless induced an awareness of the urgent need for . new wage forms in the management and development of the social sphere - new wage forms likely to have a decisive and dissolving effect on the unified family wage, and to liberate new labour power at an extremely high level of needs. The mass worker was an active factor in the circulation of working-class objectives, and in propagating the equality implicit in abstract labour. As such, the mass worker induced subversive effects within society which tended to ne ate the division between reductive and reproductive labour, and also to alter the established proportion between them. The circulation of the forms of behaviour of the mass worker was an extension of the unification of the subjects and of the struggles. 4) Finally, we have to stress that it is only by moving to a political expression that the series of subversive conditions implicit in the existence of the mass worker could be further advanced. The concept of the mass worker had an existence that was purely relative', the fact that s/he was the point of a class evolution which had not yet been fully realized, often permitted the surreptitious reintroduction of old political concepts and practices, such as the notion of vanguard and mass, and thus permitted the re-emergence of party representation and the mirroring of past forms. This political inadequacy results from, precisely, the social indeterminateness of the figure of the mass Worker. We should never underestimate this limitation, but if we look beyond it, we can see that a framework of new values was beginning to take shape - ideas of freedom to match the fact of mobility; ideas of community, as an aspect of the rigidity mentioned above; ideas of new life and universality, as a synthesis of people's relation to reproduction and liberated time. This framework of new values was incipient, was still dawning, but was nonetheless efficacious, because it existed at a mass level.

At this point, the capitalist crisis in the management of this labour power, with all its strength and richness, became decisive. Capital goes into crisis every time that labour-power transmutes to become working class - by working class I mean a level of composition incompatible with command, at a given historical leveled maturity of the productive forces. (lt is evident that consciousness cannotbe defined outside of this relation; so that it is possible to find extremely high levels of consciousness which remain totally ineffective, and, on the other hand, spontaneous levels of consciousness which are powerfully effective in revolutionary terms). As I say, every-time that labour power effects a revolutionary transformation in its comosition and becomes working class, at that point capital enters relations of crisis, and has only one weapon with which to respond: restructuration.An attempt to alter and tramsform class composition. In other words, for capital, restructuring is a political, economic and technological mechanism aimed at the enforced reduction of the working class to labour-power. To put it more correctly: capital aims to reduce the intensity of the political composition of the class. At this point, the problem becomes specific again. How did capital respond to the crisis in relations of production that was induced by the class offensive of the mass worker? How was restructuration articulated at this level of political composition of the class and its struggles? What happened after the 1960s? , It is not hard to identify and describe some major elements of the capitalist response. [Obviously, the notes that follow are very partial and indicative. They limit themselves to questions of class relations in the sphere of production, To deal adequately with the restructuring of labour power, we would really have to consider two fundamental shifts in imperialist development in the early 1970s - the freeing of the dollar from gold parity (1971) and the energy crisis of 1973-74. There is no space to deal with them here, and so the argument, as well as being partial and indicative, is frankly insufficient. However, I would ask you to trust the author and believe me when 1Isay that I have given a lot of thought to these other fundamental determinations of the overall framework. These, in my opinion, are not contradictory with the phenomena which are now studied at the level of production and reproduction. Rather, they present an overdetermination, an extension and a deepening of the logic which lies at the root of these phenomena.]

So, let's return to our initial question, to the analysts of the groundwork of capitalist restructuring. Let's begin by looking at mobility. In my opinion, as regards mobility, capital was already taking into account developments within the composition of the mass worker, and was in fact acting on their tendency to become realized, in order to throw the working class back to the position of being labour-power. While the composition of the mass worker from the 1960s onwards tended - via mobility - towards a unification in general of potential abstract labour, capital's restructuration project effectively grasps the social tendency towards abstract labour. It is against this abstract labour that capital exercises its capacity to repress, to fragment and to introduce hierarchical division. Capital does not mobilize against abstract labour and the social dimension which it assumes, but against the political unification which takes place at this level. Capital assumes subsumption of labour (abstraction and socialisation) as a process that has been realized. Experiments in job-design, segmentation of the labour market, policies of regrading, reforms of methodologies of command within production cooperation, etc - all this became fundamental. A restless, practical process of trial and error was now set in motion, aimed at destroying any possibility of proletarian unification. If we understand mobility as a tendency towards freedom, as a definition of time which is alternative to commanded time within the classic working day - and if we assume that from now on, in a parallel movement, it becomes impossible for capital to establish any fixed 'reserve army' of labour - then we understand why, in political and economic terms, it is so urgent for capital somehow to fix this labour- power (the first, spontaneous and structural manifestation of an abstract labour that has become subjectively realised) within mobility and via mobility.On the other hand,the class struggles within and against capitals's system.On the other,capital struggles within and against the new composition:within its mobility,its socialisation,its abstraction and against the subjective attitudes which these elements engender. All manpower and job-design interventions are to be understood as policies which learn from the progress of abstract labour towards its social unification: they intervene in order to stop further development of its subversive potential.

Capital's reaction against the rigidity evident within the composition of the mass worker was even more rigorous. This is because in this area mystification is harder to achieve, Policies aimed at segmenting the labour market (which are posed as 'positive" as against the 'negative' of mobility of abstract labour) tend to produce a galvanization of the labour market, and above all, important new effects of marginalisation. Marginalisation in the form of political blackmail repression and degeneration of values - much more than the familiar blackmail of poverty. l have said that the rigidity in the forms of behaviour of the mass worker (particularly on the wages front) expressed an essence that was qualitative - a complex of needs which became consolidated as power. Capital's problem was how to defuse this power, quantitatively and qualitatively.

Thus, on the one hand, we have seen the promotion of various forms of diffuse labour - ie the conscious shifting of productive functions not tied to extremely high degrees of organic composition of capital, towards the peripheries of metropolitan areas: this is the quantitative response, of scale and size. (The scale of this project is multinational, and should be understood against the backdrop of the energy crisis). On the other hand, capital has attacked the problem of qualitative rigidity, and has planned for one of two solutions:-it must be either corpratised or ghettoised This means a sytem of wage hierarchies, based on either simulated participation in development and/or on regimentation within development, and, on the other hand, marginalisation and isolation. On this terrain - a terrain which the experience of the struggles of the mass workers had revealed as strongly characterized by political values - capitalism's action of restructuration has often made direct use of legal instruments. It has regarded the boundary between legality and extra- legality in working-class behaviours as a question subordinate to the overall restoration of social hierarchy. Not even this is new - as we know, it has always been the case - and Marx, in his analysis of the working day, makes the point several times. Law and the regulation of the working day are linked by a substantial umbilical cord. If the organization of the working day is socially diffuse, then sanctions, penalties, fines etc will be entrusted to the competence of penal law. Capital also acted against the way in which the mass worker had made use of circulation - in other words, of the increasingly tight links between production and reproduction. Restructuration once again adopted the method of displacement - in other words, capital takes as given/realised th tendency set in motion working class struggles: it subsumes its behaviours (i.e the awareness of the circularity between production time and reproduction time) and begins working on how to control this situation. The 'welfare state' is the principal level geared to synchronizes this relationship.The benefits of the welfare state are the fruit of struggles, are counter-power. But the specific application of restructuration aims to use welfare in order to control, to articulate command via budgetary manoeuvrings. 'Public spending cuts' are not a negation of the welfare state', rather, they reorganize it in terms of productivity and/or repression. lf subsequently proletarian action within this network of control continues to produce breakdown, and to introduce blockages and disproportions, then capital's insistence on control reaches fever-pitch. The transition to the internal warfare state represents the corresponding overdetermination of the crisis of the welfare state. But it is important to stress once again capital's capacity for displacement. The restructuring which has followed the impact of the mass worker's struggles and the tendencies which the mass worker has instilled within the general framework of class power relations, is geared to match a labour-power which exists as completely socialised-whether it exists or potentially exists is not important. Capital is forced into anticipation. However, marginalisation is as far as capital can go in excluding people from the circuits of production - expulsion is impossible. Isolation within the circuit of production - this is the most that capital's action of restructuration can hope to achieve. It does not succeed in bringing about a restoration of the status quo, and in the struggle against the mass worker it is likely to assist in the even more compact formation of a completely socialized labour-power. There is much craftiness of proletarian reasoning in all this!

Things become even clearer when we come to the fourth area in which capital's activity of restructuration has to prove itself and be proven. In other words, the terrain of politics. Here, every attempt at mystification - this seems to me the most interesting aspect - is forced to assume the complete socialization of labour-power as normal, as a fact of life - a necessary precondition of any action against the proletarian antagonism. In other words - as many writers now accept - the only remote possibility of mystifying (mystifying, controlling, commanding etc) struggles is conditional on an advancement of the terms in which the problem is considered: in other words, an approach to the problem at the level of policies of capitalist command which see its enemy subject in proletarian society as a whole. Capital relates to the phase of real subfunction as antagonism at the highest level. Capitalist analyses of command move from this awareness to develop two possible lines of approach.The first, which I would call empirical, regards social labour- power as a purely economic subject, and therefore locates the necessary control-oriented manoeuvrings within a continuous trial and error process of redistribution and reallocation of income - eg consumerism objectives, inflationary measures, etc. The other, which I call systemic, is more refined. This assumes that the empirical policies pursued thus far have resolved nothing. Thus the only way of ensuring the effective exercise of command, with an ongoing reduction of the complexity of class conflict, is to maintain command over systemic information and circulation', to maintain a pre-ordered mechanism of planning and balancing inputs and outputs. At this level, capital's science and practice of command reveal themselves as a set of techniques for analysing the social sphere - and as an undoubtedly involuntary recognition of the immediate socialite, structure and density of labour-power.

I consider it important to understand these fundamental changes and to highlight their conceptual character. Thus I define restructuration as a parenthesis within the evolving process if the composition of the working class. Obviously, this is a necessary parenthesis: the interaction of productive forces (capital and the working class) is in no sense illusory. But at the same time, we should stress that within this process, the motor force of working-class struggles is fundamental, as is the intensity of their composition, and the emergence of abstract labour as a social quality and as a unifying factor within production (and reproduction). As we used to say: capital's great function is to create the conditions for its own destruction. This is still the case. Thus we must recognise that in the restructuring process currently under way, these critical conditions of capitalist development are still respected. Obviously, such a recognition is possible only if our theory is up to it. And one of the fundamentals of adequate theory is to have a concept of labour power which is not conceptually indiscriminate, but which is historically and politically pregnant, is continually and materially in tune with class consciousness - in other words, with degrees of struggle and of capacity to effect change which come increasingly close do the classic concept of proletariat. However, I feel it is still necessary to live through that ambiguity of production and the relations of production, and the way they are always being newly determined.

3. Towards a Critique of the Political Economy of the Mass Worker, from Social Labour Power to the Social Worker

So, our project is to resolve this fundamental ambiguity in the relationship that labour-power (whether posed as individual commodity or as socialized abstract labour) has with class consciousness and with capital. In other words, at this point we have to ask ourselves whether the linear mechanism of Marx's analysis, which locates the socialization and the abstraction of labour within the process of real sublimation of labour under capital, is not perhaps incorrect. The process of real sublimation, in Marx, concludes in a real and proper Aufhebung: the antagonism is transcended via an image of communism which is the necessary outcome of the dialectical process developed up to that point. In the more banal of the socialist vulgates, the Aufhebung - whose schema, in Marx, is conceptual, structural and synchronic - becomes diachronic, utopian and eschatological. To further clarify this point, I shall spell out my thesis: at the level ifreal subsumption (ie at the level of the complete socialization and abstraction of all the productive and reproductive segments of labour) , we are dealing not with linearity-and catastrophe but with seperation and antagonism. It seems to me that proof of this theory is to be sought first and foremost from empirical analysis (historical, sociological and political) of the movements of the working class. In other words, from considering the characteristics of labour-power when posed as social labour-power.

Concretely, our argument could proceed from examination of a familiar historical conjuncture: if, as sole authors have done, we construct historical charts mapping developments in the quality of work, then we can see how the entire direction of capitalist development is towards the destruction of skilled labour (of specific 'skill'), reducing it to abstract labour (the multilateral 'job'). The socialization of educational processes (schooling, skill training, apprenticeships etc) goes hand in hand with the process of the abstraction of labour, within a historical series of episodes which span the entire period since the Industrial Revolution. Within this time-span, the tendency is pro- gressive and broadly balanced, beginning from the 18th century, and moving through to the 1920s-1930s: but at this point a break takes place in the balanced continuity of the historical series.The collapse of 'skilled work' can be located precisely in the period between the two big imperialist wars - ie in the 1920s and 1930s. This resulted in the hegemony, as from that period, of the semi-skilled worker, the ouvrier specialist (O.S.) - in other words, what we call the mass worker. But it also turns out that this hegemony is transitory, because the mass worker is in fact just first figure in the 'collapse' of the balanced relationship between 'skill' and 'job'; the mass worker is the first moment of an extraordinary acceleration towards a complete abstraction of labour- power. The mass worker, the semi-skilled worker (whatever his subjective consciousness) is not so much the final figure of the skilled worker, but rather the first impetuous prefiguration of the completely socialized worker.

This premiss has a number of important consequences. Without losing ourselves in casuistry, it is worth highlighting just one consequence, which seems fundamental in characterizing a critique of the political economy of the mass worker. As follows: if 'skill' collapses into an indifferent element; if the division of labour as we know it (based on vertical scales of relative intensity and of structural quality) dissolves', if , in other words, every theory of inhuman capital" (ie the self- investment of labour-power) reveals itself to be not only a mystification of a reality which is both exploited and subjected to command, but also pure and simple fantasizing apologetics', if , as I say, all this is given. it does nothing to remove the fact that capital still needs to exercise command by having and maintaining a differentiated and functional structuring of labour power to match the requirements of the labour process (whether this be individual or social).

In the previous section, we noted some o the basic characteristics of capitalist restructuring in the transition from the mass worker to socialized labour-power. We can grasp the theoretical kernel of the matter by returning to them for a moment. As I said, once there is a lapsing of such vertical differentiations as between 'skill"and (job' then collective capital (and State command) tend to advance new differentiations on the horizontal terrain of command, over the labour market, over the social mobility of labour power. In relation to relatively advanced capitalism this is familiar territory: it is the terrain of new industrial feudalism (what we would call corporatism). From within this particular balance of forces, there proliferates a host of theories about the division of labour-power: the debate as to whether labour-power is primary, secondary or tertiary', whether it is 'central' or 'peripheral' etc. What is the substance of the problem? Social labour-power is understood as mobility, and it is as such that it is to be regulated. [A short aside: In this regard, all static theories about industrial reserve armies - and similar nineteenth century archaeological constructs - as well as needing to be politically rejected by us, are obviously logically untenable.]

But let me be more precise about what l mean when I say that social labour-power is understood as mobility. I mean that labour-power is understood as social, mobile and subjectively capable of identity. I mean that capital understands as a present reality what, for the mass worker, weighed down by the contradictions implicit in his own social gestation, was present purely as tendency. And above all I mean a substantial modification in the level at which we consider the problem.

Mobility is time, flow and circulation within time. Marxism bases its categories on the time-measure of the working day.In certain well- known Marxist texts, the convention of time-measure becomes so solid and unquestioned as to postulate as its base a working day that is 'normal'. Now, in our present situation, of all this there remains no trace. The time of social labour-power is a working day so extended as not only to comprise within itself the relation between production time and reproduction time, as a single whole, but also and above all to extend the consideration of time over the entire life-space of the labour market. From the working day to the labour market, from working hours to the mobility of labour - this transition means countermoving two opposing conceptions of time: the capitalist conception of time-measure, and the conception of working-class freedom over the temporal span of life. The capitalist operation of reducing life-time to abstract labour time- measure becomes an operation which is absolutely antagonistic. In its conception of time and of development, it reveals a substantial dissymmetry with proletarian life, with the very existence of social labour-power. Here we can say that the dissymmetry of command in general (the dissymmetry revealed by theories of the state) and in particular the dissymmetry which regulates the categories of exploitation, become dislocated and reshaped in the face of the long and social time of proletarian existence.

In arguing my case, 1 want to stress this point. The reason is clear. lf it is true that the terms of exploitation are now relocated on the social terrain, and if, within this social terrain, it is no longer possible to reduce quantity and quality of exploitation, absolute surplus value and relative surplus value, to the time-measure of a 'normal' working day - then the proletarian subject is reborn in antagonistic terms, around a radical alternative, an alternative of life-time as against the time-measure of capittal. But even if we limit our arguments to a critique of the political economy of the mass worker, we are still able to achieve positive results on this question. Namely that the ambiguous concept of the mass worker here reveals its structural indeterminacy and instability: its ambiguity is that between a system of domination still internalized by the mass worker (capital's time-measure) and a perspective of work which is calculated and envisaged over the time of an entire life. The mass worker is still prey to ideology - his memory is of slavery, while his actions speak of freedom. The capitalist restructuration which anticipates and out manoeuvres the struggles of the mass worker by introducing the dimension of social labour-power, at this point arrives at a definitive contradiction, inasmuch as any transcendence of the mass worker has to be not a reproduction and reformulation of domination over socialized labour-power, but a resolution of the contradictory tensions within the figure of the mass worker, and the structural realization of the antagonism in a new form.

The social worker. Let us define the way the antagonism has besom subjectivised at this level, and call socialized labour-power 'the social worker'. In this way, we are clearly introducing a specific methodological difference - in any event a position which differs from those developed in earlier phases of the theory of the mass worker and in the methodology which was considered adequate for the maturation of that theory. The specificity and the difference lie in the quality of the antagonism which appears at this point. In other words, this abstract, social and mobile labour-power - to the extent that it subjectivises itself around its own concept of time, and a temporal constitution of its own (which are irreducible to the time measurement of capitalist command) - brings about an irreducible antagonism. That is, irreducible not only to labour power conceived as variable capital, and to the theoretical dialectic of value - all of which is perfectly obvious - but also and above all an irreducible antagonism to the far more refined dialectic of composition/restructuration/recomposition which, from a class point of view, had been developed as a portrayal integral to the historical experience of the mass worker. In reality, this portrayal, in its further versions, maintained a concept of the working day which was modelled on the capitalist conception of time-measure. But when the whole of life becomes production, capitalist time measures only that which it directly commands. And socialized labour-power tends to unloose itself from command, insofar as it proposes a life-alternative - and thus projects a different time for its own existence, both in the present and in the future. When all life-time becomes production-time, who measures whom? The two conceptions of time and life come into direct conflict in a separation which becomes increasingly deep and rigidly structured. But we shall come to all this in the next section.

Let's now return to our critique of the political economy of the mass worker. At the cost of repeating myself, l must stress once again both the importance and the ambiguity of that category. Its importance lies in the fact that, with the historical emergence of the mass worker, the concept of labour-power removes itself definitively from the theory- imposed destiny of being a component - albeit variable - of capital. But in the act of revealing itself as an independent variable (and clashing with a capitalist restructuration which relentlessly tracks, adjusts and recomposes the struggles), the constitutive activity of the mass worker - even though it is moving within a situation of a complete socialization of production - failed to reach a sufficient degree of maturity. This brought about powerful ambiguities, and alloy in the 1970s, a degree of political retrogression: a corporation of certain strata of the mass worker, new divisions within the class, etc. But this is the point where the character of the social worker emerges as a new force, and as a subjective qualification of social labour power. The social worker completed and concluded the dynamic which existed within the mass worker as a tendency, and transformed the independent variable into independence tout court. This antagonism develops at a pace dictated by the rhythms of the real sublimation which capital puts into operation in relation to social labour. As real sublimation advances, so the social worker is brought into existence, as irresolvable antagonism. Antagonism as regards conceptions of life, the liberation of time, and thus in bringing about spatial-temporal conditions which are wholly alternative. A sort of 'a priori' of liberation.

But before I resume this line of argument, allow me to point out an apparent paradox in the theory - which in this case turns out to be a function of mystification. In the so-called post-modern (or 'post- capitalist') conceptions which are so current in political debate today, the process of subsumption is conceived in terms of linearity and catastrophe. In some instances, these terms can also be found in Marx - and in far more developed form, and sometimes completely explicitly, in the socialist vulgate. Subsumption is given as a system, as labour-power realized within capital's social domination, as a levelling-off of the antagonism - and therefore the antagonism is conceived as a utopian and catastrophist alternative. Such positions are fairly widespread, and sometimes also include exponents of the mass-worker theory. In these workerist theories which are flirting with theories of post-modernism (stressing tendency and objectivity, and eliminating antagonism and subjectivity), some would say that workerism is committing hari kiri. The paradox, and at the same time the mystification, consists in the fact that here Marx's thinking (and the considerable tensions which run through it, right up to the point where he defines real sublimation, whether in the Unpublished Sixth Chapter, or, a good while previously, in the Fragment on Machinery in the Grundrisse - texts which must be seen as complementary) appears to be respected, whereas in fact it is deeply and irreparably misrepresented. In fact, the focus in Marx is always the actuality and the determinacy of the antagonism. It is indeed true that the theoretical tendency of capital, which Marx also describes (but only episodically: and, as I have said, in terms rather subordinated to the antagonistic spirit of his overall argument), on occasion accepts this criticism, and fights shy of the more banal mystifications. Nevertheless, when pushed to the limit, the most we can get from this conception of the antagonism is to see it in an exogenous form: catastrophe. But our task, in going beyond Marx, is to grasp the antagonism in its endogenous form, also at the level of real sublimation. By this I mean that: real sublimation of labour is a form of the crisis of capital. Understanding real sublimation of labour as crisis is one of the discoveries in store for communism as it goes 'beyond Marx'.

But this is not enough.In our rejection of post-modern ideologies (without, of course, denying their analytical efficacity), we also retrieve another element of the theoretical history of our Italian movement since the 1960s. Namely: while the ambiguous theory and methodology of the mass worker implied a dialectic of value which today the social worker rejects, there was also articulated therein an inherent practical activity of subversion, a self-valorising independence(autonomy) ,which now the social worker lives as his own dignity and essence. Massimo Cacclari, [trans: PCI member since 1969] the philosopher of Krisis cries:

Where there is crisis, there is no dialectic. Crisis is not a form of the dialectic. Or, rather, crisis can only be dialecticised in the form of its transcendence - an Aufhebung. (M. Cacciari, Krisis, Feltrinelli, Milano 1978)

No, replies the social worker, here there can be no Aufhebung, because here the confrontation is between subjects which are different.

In moving from formal subsumption to real sublimation, capital overcomes obstacles, lives the continual reduction of the working class to labour- power in terms of a continuous, long-term and progressive socialization of labour - in terms of a transition between class compositions at increasingly high levels of intensity and potential. Once subsumption is completely realized, the only possible development ia a transition from socialized labour-power to the social worker, to the new classs subject. The tradition and theory of the mass worker can still be of help in stimulating us towards this new definition.

4. A Political Conception of Labour Power: the Proletariat.

Some Problems

Having reached this point, we can now attempt a summary of some basic methodological assumptions which should help us to reach a partial conclusion, and to pose new problems. To start with, I regard as logically untenable any theory of labour power as a logical construct, an ambiguous and volatile essence, caught in a dichotomy between a tendency to become variable capital (the variable part of organic capital) and a tendency to become working class (ie a receptacle for consciousness which derives from the outside, the substance of a new Aristotelian synolus). This instrumental and pure- logic definition of labour power, which is both abstract and open to manipulation, has, historically speaking, been progressively negated through (if I may simplify) at least three concomitant processes. -The first process is the advance in the organic composition of capital which, as it internalizes massively labour-power's relation to the structure of capital, at the same time eliminates from it all measure of proportionality, in terms of the relationship between the work done by the individual worker and the level of productivity achieved.Labour- power as presented within the labour market as a multiplicity ofindividual labour powers can now only be concieved of as a totally marginal phenomenon.

The second process, which takes the development of the organic composition of capital beyond the scope of the single firm, and which goes beyond its phenomenological appearance to see it in terms of the realization of the subsumption official labour within collective capital, has shown labour-power to be a social entity. That which is marginalised in individual terms becomes transformed, at the social level, into mobility, into an equivalence of abstract labour, into a global potentiality which has within it that generalized social knowledge which is now an essential condition of production.

The third process, concomitant with those of individual marginalisation and collective socialization, has brought about a conjunction between (a) the refusal of labour-power to make itself available as a commodity (I see this as the effect of individual marginalisation and the collapse of any relationship between 'job' and 'skill') and (b) the socialization of this mode of class behaviour, l designate this as a 'third' process, and I consider it both innovative and conceptually very rich, since the coming together of individual marginalisation with collective socialization is no simple process of addition. Rather it is a historical process which both combines material elements and becomes at the same time subjectivised; this in the sense that historical experience becomes transformed into irreversible qualities, into a second nature. Through the genesis of this process, new subjective forces make their appearance.

As a result of these processes, it should now be clear that labour- power, at this level of subsumption of social labour by capital, so far from presenting itself as an intermediate entity, suspended between being a function of variable capital and becoming working class, now presents itself as a social subject: a subject that has internalized at the social level its refusal to be a commodity.

At the political and social level, this subject presents a complete materialization of consciousness within the structures of its own 'existence. Class consciousness, in other words, comes neither from outside nor from afar: it must be seen As com betel internal to, a fact, a thing, of class composition. The concept of class composition, which was developed originally through the analysis of the mass worker - as a means of classifying changes in the nature of labour-power, and as a critique of purely logical and econometric characterizations of these changes, can now be updated as a historico-political, subjective, social definition of labour-power. In view of this, we can appreciate the importance of the theoretical current that developed through the analysis of the mass worker, and above all we can appreciate how the specific antagonistic subjectivity of this class protagonist contributed, through its struggles, to go beyond and overcome the limitations of the original theoretical conception. It seems to me that the mythical term proletariat has been given a historical dimension and has become founded as a specific material reality through the development of this theoretical approach.

Major consequences derive from all this. First, a demystification of a number of concepts and practices existing within the traditions of the labour movement. Second, in my opinion, important consequences (and, more particularly, problems) arise at the strictly theoretical level - in other words, relating to our conceptions of work and communism. Third - and not to be under-estimated in their importance - we also find indications for method.

Let's take the first point. This social labour-power which exists as a political reality, this social worker, this proletariat, embraces within itself so many dimensions, both intensive and extensive, as to render many categories obsolete. In other words, proletarian antagonism (within real subsumption) poses itself on the one hand (intensively) as an irreversibility of the given levelly needs that has been arrived at, and, on the other hand, (extensively) as a potentiality of action, as a capacity to extend its action across the entire span of the working day. If we want a tighter conceptual definition, we mightily that this socialized labour- power not only (a) dissolves any possibility for capitalism to consider it as a commodity, as the variable component of capitalist command for exploitation, but also (b) denies capitalism any possibility of transforming necessary labour into the wagee and transforming surplus value (absolute or relative) into profit. Clearly, profit and the wage continue to exist, but they exist only as quantities regulated by a relation of power - a relation of forces which no longer admits the threefold partition of the working day into necessary labour time, surplus labour time, and free time or reproduction-time. We now have a labour-power which is both social and subjective, which recognises the value-partition of the working day only as a system of command which capital may or may not succeed in imposing over and against the continuous flow of labour-power within the working day. The conditions for the extraction of surplus value now exist only in the fonts of a general social relation. Profit and the wage become forms of the division of a value content which no longer relates to any specific mechanisms of exploitation, other than the specific asymmetry of the relationship of command within society. Capital has the form and substance of profit, as an average, a mediacy of command', labour-power has the form and the substance of the wage: but in no way can a 'natural rate' be said to exist between the two of them. In other words, the mechanism of transformation and mediation which characterizes the Marxian genesis of these concepts has now reached its point of fullest maturity. Exploitation consists in command. It is violence against the antagonism of sociaI subjects that aare fighting for liberation.

As a consequence, the marketing of labour-power is no longer an undertaking for minions and sycophants: if anything, the marketing of labour-power today has become a totally political operation. This consists in extending Marx's çiwar between capitalism's tendency towards the limitless working day and the tendency of the proletariat to limit (to nil, if possible) the provision of labour-power, and transforming that 'war' into formalized and viable political procedures which extend from the concrete labour process (within production and reproduction) to the overall scenario of the organization of command - ie to political and state forms of the management of the economy, management of the labour market, of public spending, etc, etc. Only in this political dimension can success or failure in the marketing of labour-power now be gauged.

All of which is another way of saying that at our given level of development, the old dialectic of labour-power within/against capital (la dialectics dellaforza Iavoro) is now played out, has become obsolete, is only of archaeological interest. lf there exists any real negotiation or bargaining, this can no longer be encompassed by trade union forms of bargaining, or other such antique practices. In other words, dualism- of power is now the norm. The working day can only be described in terms of an active dualism of power, wherein the old dialectic of unity, transcendence and equilibrium is obsolete. In making this point, l need only refer, by way of example, to the inadequacy of the most normal, everyday and (as it often seems) obvious institutional form of the traditional labour movement - the trade union.

Far more dangerous, as regards potential mystification of our own (rediscovered and reconstructed) concept of the proletariat, are those ideologies which take labour-power as a material that can be led to class consciousness (although they are also more ineffective, given the historical experience of 'realised Socialism' in the East). To turn labour-power into what? To transmute exploited labour into liberated labour, via the magic wand of a mystical 'political consciousness', in other words of its vanguard representatives. What has changed in reality? Nothing - only words. The dialectic of labour functions here perfectly. The word 'labour' replaces the word capital : the system remains the same. The working day is not touched. Time-measure continues to be the regulative function of command and of partition/division. No - the new (and even the old?) concept of the proletariat really cannot accept these mystifications. The truth is that, from the proletarian point of view, the process of real subsumption brings about such a massive intensification of the composition of the working class, and such an extension of its potentiality, as to eliminate any dualism between being-and consciousness, any isolation of single aspects within it. The proletariat acts directly over the entire-.span of the social working day. Production and reproduction are now in parallel and on equal terms, the spheres of action proper to and adequate to the reality of labour-power. Consciousness is an attribute, entirely within and of its material structure.

And now let's look at work, labour. Here we come to the second set of consequences deriving from our political concept of socialized labour- power, of composition (ie of the social worker). Labour is the essence of capital. It always has been so. It is also the essence of man, inasmuch as man is productive activity. But capital is real - while human essence is only a dream. The only human essence of labour which a approximates to the conctretness of capital is the refusal of work. Or, rather, that kind of productivity which, for capital, is purely negative - because while it represents a sine qua non of production, capital nonetheless tends to reduce it, and, precisely insofar as it is an essence of human nature, to eliminate it from production. Human labour, when posed as proletarian reality, is a negative element in capitalist production. Of course, it is true to say that only labour produces. But it is also true that bosses are only happy with production when the labour within it is totally under command: command is sadistic, it requires the presence of human labour, but only in order, then, to deny it, to nullify it. This process has functioned in the past, as the classic steely scourge of capitalist domination - until and unless labour-power presents itself as a social subject. In other words, we have here, within the intensity and extension of the composition of the proletarian subject, a negative form of labour, which has such broad dimensions and is so articulated as to render problematical its very definition as 'negative'. We often refer to it as 'alternative' 'self-valorising' etc. But I prefer to continue calling it 'negative labour', not in order to flirt with the language of crisis, but simply because I do not yet feel the strengthto be able to call it liberated work (ie work that is wholly positive). It is difficult to describe any work as 'positive' so long as it is contained within capital, such is the quantity of death and pain that it bears within it. For us to call working-class and proletarian work 'positive' and socially useful, we would have to be capable - the proletarian subject in its overall complexity would have to be capable of the statement in prefigurative terms of its alternative form of production. We would require a vision of how its own productive potential could unfold. (Only certain sectors of the proletariat within the area of reproduction - the feminist movement chief among them - have so far proved capable of producing a positive image of forms of work that could be proletarian, alternative and revolutionary. But the fact that we cannot spell it out does not necessarily mean that it does not exist. It exists as a murmuring among the proletariat. Negative work, amid the whispers of everyday life and the noise and shouting of the struggle, is beginning to gain a general form of expression. What I think needs stressing particularly is the material character of negative work, its institutionality. The concept of proletariat is becoming an institutional reality. A practical emergence - not lifeless, but living. A different conception of time. A universality held within that second nature, entirely factitious (in etymological terms: velum ipsum factum). An institutionalism, thus, which seeks order and a systematization of its own values. The levels, the spaces of this experience are truly thousand-fold. But they all have a centripetal impulse which increases according to the extent of their liberty, their expansively. If we are to translate the word 'communism' into present- day language, then perhaps it means reinforcing and solidifying this proletarian institutionalism and developing its potential contents.

However, for the moment, we still require a long period of clarification, of study, and of specific struggles. The method remains tactical. Methodological consequences derive from our definition of the proletarian subject as antagonism within realised subsumption - and they derive, above all, from our understanding of the various aspects of the transition from mass worker to socialized labour-power, to the social worker. Within this transition, simultaneously with the breakdown of the regulatory principles of capitalist development (the market; value', the division between production and reproduction etc), there also unfolds the impossibility of any homogeneous/unified determination not only of the overall design of development, but also - and particularly - of its categories, its norms. When the concept of labour-power is realized within a socialized and subjectivity class composition - and this, precisely, takes place at the highest point of unity from capital's viewpoint (real subsumption) - then all the established terms of scientific argument break down. They become blocked, definitively non-recuperable for the old dialectical logic of unity and transcendence. The only way that any scientific category, whether in logic or in ethics, in politics or in political economy, can constitute itself as a norm, is as a negotiated settlement: a formalization and balancing of opposing forces', in the human sciences, as a moment of voluntary agreement. It is clear that none of what defined the old conception of scientific norms is present here. What we have instead, exclusively, is the logical results brought about by the development of class composition - subsumption'to capital realized in the form of permanent crisis. What we are presented with is the positive emergence of negative labour as an institutionalized counter-power acting against work that is subsumed within capital. While labour subsumed within capital corresponded to a logic of unity, of command, and its transcendence, negative labour produces instead a logic based on separateness a logic that operates entirely within, is endogenous to, hat separateness. The institutionalized forms now assumed by labour-power as a separate entity also represent its de- institutionalisation in relation to the present framework of economy and politics, to capital and the state. This relation is precisely a negative one, and inasmuch as negative labour has the power and possibility of imposing it on the system, the only unifying logic that remains is one of duality, two-sidedness: a logic that is ephemeral, that is reduced to mere semblance. In reality, it can only represent a moment in a historical phase of crisis, in which the point of reference for all rationality or intelligibility is being rapidly shifted towards a fully socialized labour- power, the new class subject, the 'social worker'. So, we have covered, in outline, some aspects of the formation of labour-power into a social subject. A very rich phenomenology could be provided for this transformation, starting from the mass worker and the history of the mass worker's struggles. I think that such an account would confirm the theoretical and methodological assumptions I have outlined here.

In conclusion, however, I would stress that so far this is only a half- way stage in the analysis. For, if it is true that every scientific category concerning the relation of capital can now only be understood within a dualistic matrix, then a further logical problem is posed: the question of the multiplicity and mobility of the forms of this transformation of the class subject, and how this multiversity can be grasped within a mature political concept of labour-power. In other words, how we can develop a theory of the new institutionalism of the proletariat in its multiple matrices. But this will have to wait for another occasion.

And now let's look at work, labour. Here we come to the second set of consequences deriving from our political concept of socialized labour- power, of composition (ie of the social worker).

Labour is the essence of capital. It always has been so. It is also the essence of man, inasmuch as man is productive activity. But capital is real - while human essence is only a dream. The only human essence of labour which a approximates to the conctretness of capital is the refusal of work. Or, rather, that kind of productivity which, for capital, is purely negative - because while it represents a sine qua non of production, capital nonetheless tends to reduce it, and, precisely insofar as it is an essence of human nature, to eliminate it from production. Human labour, when posed as proletarian reality, is a negative element in capitalist production. Of course, it is true to say that only labour produces. But it is also true that bosses are only happy with production when the labour within it is totally under command: command is sadistic, it requires the presence of human labour, but only in order, then, to deny it, to nullify it. This process has functioned in the past, as the classic steely scourge of capitalist domination - until and unless labour-power presents itself as a social subject. In other words, we have here, within the intensity and extension of the composition of the proletarian subject, a negative form of labour, which has such broad dimensions and is so articulated as to render problematical its very definition as 'negative'. We often refer to it as 'alternative' 'self-valorising' etc. But I prefer to continue calling it 'negative labour', not in order to flirt with the language of crisis, but simply because I do not yet feel the strengthto be able to call it liberated work (ie work that is wholly positive). It is difficult to describe any work as 'positive' so long as it is contained within capital, such is the quantity of death and pain that it bears within it. For us to call working-class and proletarian work 'positive' and socially useful, we would have to be capable - the proletarian subject in its overall complexity would have to be capable of the statement in prefigurative terms of its alternative form of production. We would require a vision of how its own productive potential could unfold. (Only certain sectors of the proletariat within the area of reproduction - the feminist movement chief among them - have so far proved capable of producing a positive image of forms of work that could be proletarian, alternative and revolutionary. But the fact that we cannot spell it out does not necessarily mean that it does not exist. It exists as a murmuring among the proletariat. Negative work, amid the whispers of everyday life and the noise and shouting of the struggle, is beginning to gain a general form of expression. What I think needs stressing particularly is the material character of negative work, its institutionality. The concept of proletariat is becoming an institutional reality. A practical emergence - not lifeless, but living. A different conception of time. A universality held within that second nature, entirely factitious (in etymological terms: velum ipsum factum). An institutionalism, thus, which seeks order and a systematization of its own values. The levels, the spaces of this experience are truly thousand-fold. But they all have a centripetal impulse which increases according to the extent of their liberty, their expansively. If we are to translate the word 'communism' into present- day language, then perhaps it means reinforcing and solidifying this proletarian institutionalism and developing its potential contents.

However, for the moment, we still require a long period of clarification, of study, and of specific struggles. The method remains tactical. Methodological consequences derive from our definition of the proletarian subject as antagonism within realised subsumption - and they derive, above all, from our understanding of the various aspects of the transition from mass worker to socialized labour-power, to the social worker. Within this transition, simultaneously with the breakdown of the regulatory principles of capitalist development (the market; value', the division between production and reproduction etc), there also unfolds the impossibility of any homogeneous/unified determination not only of the overall design of development, but also - and particularly - of its categories, its norms. When the concept of labour-power is realized within a socialized and subjectivity class composition - and this, precisely, takes place at the highest point of unity from capital's viewpoint (real subsumption) - then all the established terms of scientific argument break down. They become blocked, definitively non-recuperable for the old dialectical logic of unity and transcendence. The only way that any scientific category, whether in logic or in ethics, in politics or in political economy, can constitute itself as a norm, is as a negotiated settlement: a formalization and balancing of opposing forces', in the human sciences, as a moment of voluntary agreement. It is clear that none of what defined the old conception of scientific norms is present here. What we have instead, exclusively, is the logical results brought about by the development of class composition - subsumption'to capital realized in the form of permanent crisis. What we are presented with is the positive emergence of negative labour as an institutionalized counter-power acting against work that is subsumed within capital. While labour subsumed within capital corresponded to a logic of unity, of command, and its transcendence, negative labour produces instead a logic based on separateness a logic that operates entirely within, is endogenous to, hat separateness. The institutionalized forms now assumed by labour-power as a separate entity also represent its de- institutionalisation in relation to the present framework of economy and politics, to capital and the state. This relation is precisely a negative one, and inasmuch as negative labour has the power and possibility of imposing it on the system, the only unifying logic that remains is one of duality, two-sidedness: a logic that is ephemeral, that is reduced to mere semblance. In reality, it can only represent a moment in a historical phase of crisis, in which the point of reference for all rationality or intelligibility is being rapidly shifted towards a fully socialized labour- power, the new class subject, the 'social worker'.

So, we have covered, in outline, some aspects of the formation of labour-power into a social subject. A very rich phenomenology could be provided for this transformation, starting from the mass worker and the history of the mass worker's struggles. I think that such an account would confirm the theoretical and methodological assumptions I have outlined here.

In conclusion, however, I would stress that so far this is only a half- way stage in the analysis. For, if it is true that every scientific category concerning the relation of capital can now only be understood within a dualistic matrix, then a further logical problem is posed: the question of the multiplicity and mobility of the forms of this transformation of the class subject, and how this multiversity can be grasped within a mature political concept of labour-power. In other words, how we can develop a theory of the new institutionalism of the proletariat in its multiple matrices. But this will have to wait for another occasion.

The second process, which takes the development of the organic composition of capital beyond the scope of the single firm, and which goes beyond its phenomenological appearance to see it in terms of the realization of the subsumption official labour within collective capital, has shown labour-power to be a social entity. That which is marginalised in individual terms becomes transformed, at the social level, into mobility, into an equivalence of abstract labour, into a global potentiality which has within it that generalized social knowledge which is now an essential condition of production.

The third process, concomitant with those of individual marginalisation and collective socialization, has brought about a conjunction between (a) the refusal of labour-power to make itself available as a commodity (I see this as the effect of individual marginalisation and the collapse of any relationship between 'job' and 'skill') and (b) the socialization of this mode of class behaviour, l designate this as a 'third' process, and I consider it both innovative and conceptually very rich, since the coming together of individual marginalisation with collective socialization is no simple process of addition. Rather it is a historical process which both combines material elements and becomes at the same time subjectivised; this in the sense that historical experience becomes transformed into irreversible qualities, into a second nature. Through the genesis of this process, new subjective forces make their appearance.

As a result of these processes, it should now be clear that labour- power, at this level of subsumption of social labour by capital, so far from presenting itself as an intermediate entity, suspended between being a function of variable capital and becoming working class, now presents itself as a social subject: a subject that has internalized at the social level its refusal to be a commodity.

At the political and social level, this subject presents a complete materialization of consciousness within the structures of its own 'existence. Class consciousness, in other words, comes neither from outside nor from afar: it must be seen As com betel internal to, a fact, a thing, of class composition. The concept of class composition, which was developed originally through the analysis of the mass worker - as a means of classifying changes in the nature of labour-power, and as a critique of purely logical and econometric characterizations of these changes, can now be updated as a historico-political, subjective, social definition of labour-power. In view of this, we can appreciate the importance of the theoretical current that developed through the analysis of the mass worker, and above all we can appreciate how the specific antagonistic subjectivity of this class protagonist contributed, through its struggles, to go beyond and overcome the limitations of the original theoretical conception. It seems to me that the mythical term proletariat has been given a historical dimension and has become founded as a specific material reality through the development of this theoretical approach.

Major consequences derive from all this. First, a demystification of a number of concepts and practices existing within the traditions of the labour movement. Second, in my opinion, important consequences (and, more particularly, problems) arise at the strictly theoretical level - in other words, relating to our conceptions of work and communism. Third - and not to be under-estimated in their importance - we also find indications for method.

Let's take the first point. This social labour-power which exists as a political reality, this social worker, this proletariat, embraces within itself so many dimensions, both intensive and extensive, as to render many categories obsolete. In other words, proletarian antagonism (within real subsumption) poses itself on the one hand (intensively) as an irreversibility of the given levelly needs that has been arrived at, and, on the other hand, (extensively) as a potentiality of action, as a capacity to extend its action across the entire span of the working day. If we want a tighter conceptual definition, we mightily that this socialized labour- power not only (a) dissolves any possibility for capitalism to consider it as a commodity, as the variable component of capitalist command for exploitation, but also (b) denies capitalism any possibility of transforming necessary labour into the wagee and transforming surplus value (absolute or relative) into profit. Clearly, profit and the wage continue to exist, but they exist only as quantities regulated by a relation of power - a relation of forces which no longer admits the threefold partition of the working day into necessary labour time, surplus labour time, and free time or reproduction-time. We now have a labour-power which is both social and subjective, which recognises the value-partition of the working day only as a system of command which capital may or may not succeed in imposing over and against the continuous flow of labour-power within the working day. The conditions for the extraction of surplus value now exist only in the fonts of a general social relation. Profit and the wage become forms of the division of a value content which no longer relates to any specific mechanisms of exploitation, other than the specific asymmetry of the relationship of command within society. Capital has the form and substance of profit, as an average, a mediacy of command', labour-power has the form and the substance of the wage: but in no way can a 'natural rate' be said to exist between the two of them. In other words, the mechanism of transformation and mediation which characterizes the Marxian genesis of these concepts has now reached its point of fullest maturity. Exploitation consists in command. It is violence against the antagonism of sociaI subjects that aare fighting for liberation.

As a consequence, the marketing of labour-power is no longer an undertaking for minions and sycophants: if anything, the marketing of labour-power today has become a totally political operation. This consists in extending Marx's çiwar between capitalism's tendency towards the limitless working day and the tendency of the proletariat to limit (to nil, if possible) the provision of labour-power, and transforming that 'war' into formalized and viable political procedures which extend from the concrete labour process (within production and reproduction) to the overall scenario of the organization of command - ie to political and state forms of the management of the economy, management of the labour market, of public spending, etc, etc. Only in this political dimension can success or failure in the marketing of labour-power now be gauged.

All of which is another way of saying that at our given level of development, the old dialectic of labour-power within/against capital (la dialectics dellaforza Iavoro) is now played out, has become obsolete, is only of archaeological interest. lf there exists any real negotiation or bargaining, this can no longer be encompassed by trade union forms of bargaining, or other such antique practices. In other words, dualism- of power is now the norm. The working day can only be described in terms of an active dualism of power, wherein the old dialectic of unity, transcendence and equilibrium is obsolete. In making this point, l need only refer, by way of example, to the inadequacy of the most normal, everyday and (as it often seems) obvious institutional form of the traditional labour movement - the trade union.

Far more dangerous, as regards potential mystification of our own (rediscovered and reconstructed) concept of the proletariat, are those ideologies which take labour-power as a material that can be led to class consciousness (although they are also more ineffective, given the historical experience of 'realised Socialism' in the East). To turn labour-power into what? To transmute exploited labour into liberated labour, via the magic wand of a mystical 'political consciousness', in other words of its vanguard representatives. What has changed in reality? Nothing - only words. The dialectic of labour functions here perfectly. The word 'labour' replaces the word capital : the system remains the same. The working day is not touched. Time-measure continues to be the regulative function of command and of partition/division. No - the new (and even the o1d?) concept of the proletariat really cannot accept these mystifications. The truth is that, from the proletarian point of view, the process of real subsumption brings about such a massive intensification of the composition of the working class, and such an extension of its potentiality, as to eliminate any dualism between being-and consciousness, any isolation of single aspects within it. The proletariat acts directly over the entire-.span of the social working day. Production and reproduction are now in parallel and on equal terms, the spheres of action proper to and adequate to the reality of labour-power. Consciousness is an attribute, entirely within and of its material structure.

And now let's look at work, labour. Here we come to the second set of consequences deriving from our political concept of socialized labour- power, of composition (ie of the social worker). Labour is the essence of capital. It always has been so. It is also the essence of man, inasmuch as man is productive activity. But capital is real - while human essence is only a dream. The only human essence of labour which a approximates to the conctretness of capital is the refusal of work. Or, rather, that kind of productivity which, for capital, is purely negative - because while it represents a sine qua non of production, capital nonetheless tends to reduce it, and, precisely insofar as it is an essence of human nature, to eliminate it from production. Human labour, when posed as proletarian reality, is a negative element in capitalist production. Of course, it is true to say that only labour produces. But it is also true that bosses are only happy with production when the labour within it is totally under command: command is sadistic, it requires the presence of human labour, but only in order, then, to deny it, to nullify it. This process has functioned in the past, as the classic steely scourge of capitalist domination - until and unless labour-power presents itself as a social subject. In other words, we have here, within the intensity and extension of the composition of the proletarian subject, a negative form of labour, which has such broad dimensions and is so articulated as to render problematical its very definition as 'negative'. We often refer to it as 'alternative' 'self-valorising' etc. But I prefer to continue calling it 'negative labour', not in order to flirt with the language of crisis, but simply because I do not yet feel the strengthto be able to call it liberated work (ie work that is wholly positive). It is difficult to describe any work as 'positive' so long as it is contained within capital, such is the quantity of death and pain that it bears within it. For us to call working-class and proletarian work 'positive' and socially useful, we would have to be capable - the proletarian subject in its overall complexity would have to be capable of the statement in prefigurative terms of its alternative form of production. We would require a vision of how its own productive potential could unfold. (Only certain sectors of the proletariat within the area of reproduction - the feminist movement chief among them - have so far proved capable of producing a positive image of forms of work that could be proletarian, alternative and revolutionary. But the fact that we cannot spell it out does not necessarily mean that it does not exist. It exists as a murmuring among the proletariat. Negative work, amid the whispers of everyday life and the noise and shouting of the struggle, is beginning to gain a general form of expression. What I think needs stressing particularly is the material character of negative work, its institutionality. The concept of proletariat is becoming an institutional reality. A practical emergence - not lifeless, but living. A different conception of time. A universality held within that second nature, entirely factitious (in etymological terms: velum ipsum factum). An institutionalism, thus, which seeks order and a systematization of its own values. The levels, the spaces of this experience are truly thousand-fold. But they all have a centripetal impulse which increases according to the extent of their liberty, their expansively. If we are to translate the word 'communism' into present- day language, then perhaps it means reinforcing and solidifying this proletarian institutionalism and developing its potential contents.

However, for the moment, we still require a long period of clarification, of study, and of specific struggles. The method remains tactical. Methodological consequences derive from our definition of the proletarian subject as antagonism within realised subsumption - and they derive, above all, from our understanding of the various aspects of the transition from mass worker to socialized labour-power, to the social worker. Within this transition, simultaneously with the breakdown of the regulatory principles of capitalist development (the market; value', the division between production and reproduction etc), there also unfolds the impossibility of any homogeneous/unified determination not only of the overall design of development, but also - and particularly - of its categories, its norms. When the concept of labour-power is realized within a socialized and subjectivity class composition - and this, precisely, takes place at the highest point of unity from capital's viewpoint (real subsumption) - then all the established terms of scientific argument break down. They become blocked, definitively non-recuperable for the old dialectical logic of unity and transcendence. The only way that any scientific category, whether in logic or in ethics, in politics or in political economy, can constitute itself as a norm, is as a negotiated settlement: a formalization and balancing of opposing forces', in the human sciences, as a moment of voluntary agreement. It is clear that none of what defined the old conception of scientific norms is present here. What we have instead, exclusively, is the logical results brought about by the development of class composition - subsumption'to capital realized in the form of permanent crisis. What we are presented with is the positive emergence of negative labour as an institutionalized counter-power acting against work that is subsumed within capital. While labour subsumed within capital corresponded to a logic of unity, of command, and its transcendence, negative labour produces instead a logic based on separateness a logic that operates entirely within, is endogenous to, hat separateness. The institutionalized forms now assumed by labour-power as a separate entity also represent its de- institutionalisation in relation to the present framework of economy and politics, to capital and the state. This relation is precisely a negative one, and inasmuch as negative labour has the power and possibility of imposing it on the system, the only unifying logic that remains is one of duality, two-sidedness: a logic that is ephemeral, that is reduced to mere semblance. In reality, it can only represent a moment in a historical phase of crisis, in which the point of reference for all rationality or intelligibility is being rapidly shifted towards a fully socialized labour- power, the new class subject, the 'social worker'.

So, we have covered, in outline, some aspects of the formation of labour-power into a social subject. A very rich phenomenology could be provided for this transformation, starting from the mass worker and the history of the mass worker's struggles. I think that such an account would confirm the theoretical and methodological assumptions I have outlined here.

In conclusion, however, 1 would stress that so far this is only a half- way stage in the analysis. For, if it is true that every scientific category concerning the relation of capital can now only be understood within a dualistic matrix, then a further logical problem is posed: the question of the multiplicity and mobility of the forms of this transformation of the class subject, and how this multiversity can be grasped within a mature political concept of labour-power. In other words, how we can develop a theory of the new institutionalism of the proletariat in its multiple matrices. But this will have to wait for another occasion.

(Introduction & main text taken from Revolution Retrieved,a collection of Negri's work,published by Red Notes 1998,as part of their Red Notes Italian Archive)

A Proposal for an Interpretation of the Italian Movement in the 1970s

by Toni Negri and Others

Note: This document was written from prison by eleven of the defendants from the Workers' Autonomy movement, arraigned on trial in the "April 7th" show trial in Rome. It was published in the Left newspaper Il Manifesto (20-22 February 1983), shortly before the trial began. Against the prosecution's attempt to reduce ten years of independent communist opposition struggles in Italy to a single conspiracy on the part of a centralised leadership (allegedly linked to the armed terrorist groups), the defendants here present their own reconstruction of the changing shape of the movement since 1968.

Preface

Looking back to re-examine the movement of the 1970s, one thing at least is clear to us. The history of the extra-parliamentary oppositions,and then of the autonomy, was not a history of marginals, fringe eccentricity or sectarian fantasies from some underground ghetto. It is important to affirm that this history (part of which is now the object of our trial) is inextricably part of the overall development of class struggle in the period and the decisive changes and discontinuities that took place at a national level.

From this point of view (which might seem banal, were it not for the times we now live in, so full of fears and provocations), we want to propose some historical-political theses on the past decade, which go beyond our own immediate defence concerns in the trial. The problems we are posing are not addressed to the judges, but rather to all those involved in the struggles of these years, from the comrades of '68 to those of 1977; to all those intellectuals who "dissented" (as we now say), judging rebellion to be rational. So that they may intervene in their turn to break the vicious circle of memory distortion and conformity.

We think that the time has come for a realistic reappraisal of the movement of the 1970s. Against the distortions imposed by the state and the pentiti (trans: "terrorists" who have turned state witness), we need to clear the way for our own political clarification as a movement, to arrive at a proper political judgement of the relation between the movement and the institutions in the context of the new situation of "post­terrorism" today.

That we have nothing in common with armed terrorism is obvious. That we have been "subversive" is equally obvious. Between these two truths lies the key issue at stake in our trials. But it is important that our defence in court, which will be fought with the appropriate technical­political means, is paralleled by a wider debate in the movement, among the social subjects who have been the real protagonists of the "great transformation" of these years. This debate is vitally necessary in order to confront adequately the new tensions facing us in the 1980s.

Signed: Lucio Castellano, Arrigo Cavallina, Giustino Cortiana, Mario Dalmaviva, Luciano Ferrari Bravo, Chicco Funaro, Toni Negri, Paolo Pozzi, Franco Tommei, Emilio Vesce, Paolo Virno.

Rebibbia Prison, Rome, January 1983

Do You Remember Revolution?

1.

The specific characteristic of the "Italian '68" was a combination of new, explosive social phenomena - together with the classic paradigm of communist political revolution.

The critique of wage labour, its refusal on a mass scale, was the central driving force behind the mass struggles, the matrix of a strong and lasting antagonism, the material content of all the future hopes that the movement represented. This gave substance to the mass challenge directed against professional roles and hierarchies; to the struggle for equal pay, for income separated from productivity; to the attack on the organisation of social knowledge; to qualitative demands for changes in the structure of everyday life - in short, to the general striving towards concrete forms of freedom.

In other countries (Germany and the USA for example), these same forces of transformation were developed in the form of molecular changes in social relations, without directly posing the problem of political power - ie an alterative running of the state. In France and Italy, owing to institutional rigidities and a somewhat simplified way of regulating conflicts, the question of state power - and of its "seizure" ­immediately became central.

In Italy especially, despite the fact that the wave of mass struggles from '68 onwards marked, in many ways, a sharp break with the labourist and state socialist traditions of the established working-class movement, the classical political models of communism still found a real space in the new movements. The extreme polarisation of the class confrontation, and the lack of any real political mediation or adequate response at an institutional level (in factories, the "internal com­missions", or in social welfare, an over-centralised structure with no local/regional bodies) created a situation where struggles for income and new spaces for freedom became linked to the classic Leninist question of "smashing the state machine".

2.

Between 1968 and the early 1970s, the problem of finding a political outlet and outcome for the mass struggles was on the agenda of the entire Left, both old and new.

Both the Communist Party and unions, and the extra-parliamentary groups, were working for a drastic change in the power structure, one which would carry through and realise the change in the relation of forces that had already occurred in the factories and the labour market. About the nature and the quality of this political solution - generally held to be necessary - there was a prolonged battle for hegemony within the Left.

The revolutionary groups, which held a majority in the schools and the universities, but with roots also in the factories and service industries, realised that the wave of struggles and social transformations coincided with a sharp rupture with the framework of legality that had hitherto existed. They emphasised this aspect of the situation, in order to prevent any institutional-reformist recovery of profit margins and capitalist command. The extension of the struggles to the entire social sphere at a territorial level and the building of forms of counter-power were seen as necessary steps against the blackmail of economic crisis. The Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the unions, on the other hand, saw the breaking up of the Centre-Left goverment and "structural reforms" as the natural outcome of the mass struggles. A new "framework of compatibility" and more institutional mediations would, in their view, guarantee a more active role for the working class in the relaunching of economic growth.

Polemics and divisions took place both within and between these boundaries of the old and new Left. It is sufficient to recall, for example, the polemics of the PCI right wing (Amendola) against the Turin engineering workers' federation (FLM) on the question of a "new unionism" representing the movement; or, within the far Left, the sharp differences between the workerist current and the Marxist-Leninist organisations.

These divisions, however, revolved around the common basic problem: how to translate into terms of political power the upheaval in social relations that had developed from the wave of struggles post-1968.

3.

In the early 1970s, the extra-parliamentary Left posed the problem of the use of force, of violence, in terms that were completely within the classical communist tradition; judging it as one of the means necessary for any struggle on the terrain of power.

There was no fetishism of the use of violence. On the contrary, it was strictly subordinated to the advancement of the movement. But there was a clear appreciation of its relevance. The development of mass conflicts throughout society undeniably posed the question of political power in new terms. After the violent clashes of Battipaglia, near Naples, or Corso Traiano, Turin (1969), the state's monopoly of the use of force appeared as an unavoidable obstacle, which had to be systematically confronted.

Hence the programme and slogans of this period conceptualised the violent breaking of legality as the manifestation of a new counter-power. Slogans such as Take Over the City or Insurrection synthesised this perspective, which was considered as inescapable, albeit not in any immediate sense.

On the other hand, in concrete terms of the mass movements themselves, organisation within the framework of illegality had much more limited and modest defensive goals: defence of pickets, of housing occupations, of demonstrations, security measures to prevent possible right-wing reaction (which was seen as a real threat after the bombing provocation of Piazza Fontana, Milano, December 1969).

In short, a theory of attack was widespread, based on the combination of a communist outlook and the "new political subject" that emerged from 1968. It remains a fact that for thousands of militants following the "Red Years" of 1968-9 - including trade union cadres - the organisation of struggles on an illegal level, and public debates on the forms and timing of confrontation with the repressive structures of the state, were widespread and commonplace themes in the movement.

4.

In these years, the role of the first clandestine armed organisations (the GAP - Partisan Action Groups - and BR - Red Brigades) was quite marginal and outside the general outlook and debate within the movement.

Clandestine organisation itself, the obsessive appeal to the partisan tradition of the wartime resistance, and the reference to the "skilled" working class that accompanied it, had absolutely nothing in common with the organisation of violence in the class vanguards and revolutionary groups of the movement.

The GAP, linked to the old anti-Fascist resistance and the Communist Party tradition of organising at "dual levels" (mass and clandestine) which goes back to the 1950s, put forward the need for preventive measures against what they saw as an imminent Fascist coup. The BR, on the other hand, were formed from a confluence of Marxist­Leninists (Trento), ex Communists, and Communist Youth Federation personnel from the Milan and Emilia areas. Throughout this early phase, they looked for support and contacts among the PCI rank and file, and not at all in the movement. Their operations were characterised by anti-Fascism and "armed struggle in support of reforms".

Paradoxical though it may seem, the adoption on the part of the revolutionary groups in the movement of a perspective of struggle that included illegality and violence, made the gap between this and the strategy of "armed clandestinity" even wider and more unbridgeable. The sporadic contacts that existed between the groups and the first armed organisations only confirmed the gulf in language, outlook and political line that divided them.

5.

In 1973-74 the political context within which the movement had developed began to disintegrate. Within a short period of time, there were multiple ruptures in the movement, sharp changes in political perspective, and changes in the very conditions of the conflict itself. These changes were due to a number of interacting factors. The first was the change in the policy of the PCI, which now judged the situation at the international level such as to render a socialist alternative government impossible. Hence the PCI turned to its compromise strategy of finding an immediate political solution within the existing balance of forces.

This led to a split, which became increasingly deep, within the political and social forces that had, up to this time, in spite of internal differences, shared the common goal of finding an alternative power structure that would reflect and realise the radical content of the mass struggles. The PCI and its union federation now began to draw nearer to the government and became increasingly opposed to wide sectors of the movement.

The extra-parliamentary oppositions now had to redefine themselves in relation to the PCI's "Historic Compromise". This led to a crisis and a progressive loss of identity for the groups. The struggle for hegemony on the Left, that had to some extent justified the existence of the revolutionary groups, now seemed to have been resolved unilaterally in a way that closed the debate altogether.

From now on, the old question of "finding the political outlet", a "solution in terms of alternative government" etc, was identified with the moderate politics of the PCI compromise. Those extra­parliamentary organisations that still followed this perspective were forced to try to go along with the PCI, influencing the outcome of the compromise as best they could - for example, participating in the 1975 (local) and the 1976 (national) elections. Other groups found that they had reached the limits of their own experience. They found no alternative but to dissolve themselves. (This was the case with Potere Operaio - "Workers' Power" - 1969-73, which is the main object of the prosecution in the current trial.)

6.

The second factor in this change of 1973-74 was the fact that the central class force behind the mass struggles post 1968, i.e. the assembly line workers of the major factories, began, with the union-employer contracts of 1972-73, to lose their role as a vanguard of class recomposition in an offensive sense. The restructuration of large-scale enterprises was beginning to take its toll.

The increasing use of redundancies (cassa integrazione) and the first partial though radical changes in technology and work organisation, blunted the thrust of preceding forms of struggle, including the mass strike. The homogeneity of the shop floor and its capacity to exercise power over the overall process of production were undercut by new machinery, new systems of control, and by the restructuring of the working day. The representative functions of the new "Factory Councils", and hence their division into Left and Right, had a paralysing effect on the unity and autonomy underlying the preceding struggles.

Not that the power of the line worker (the "mass worker") was weakened by any reserve army or competition from the unemployed in the traditional sense. The point is that industrial reconversion tended towards investment in sectors outside the sphere of mass production. This brought sectors of labour-power which had been relatively marginal - such as women, youth, highly educated new strata etc - to a central position in social production as a whole. These new strata had less organised history behind them. Hence the terrain of confrontation began to shift from the "factory" (in the literal sense) to the overall mechanisms of the labour market, public expenditure, the social wage, reproduction of the proletariat and in general to the distribution of income independent of remuneration for work.

7.

In the third place, a change occurred within the subjectivity of the movement, in its culture and outlook towards the future. To summarise: a complete rejection took place of the labourism of the official working­class tradition. The idea of revolution as "seizure of power" and "dictatorship of the proletariat" in its orthodox forms, was rejected, along with the residual baggage of "realised Socialism" in Eastern Europe, and any project of "alternative management" of the system.

As for the links that had existed within the post-'68 movement between new qualitative goals and the old model of communist revolution, these were now totally broken. Power was now seen as a foreign enemy force in society, to be defended against, but which it was no use "conquering" or "taking over". Rather, it was now a question of its reduction, of keeping it at a distance. The key to this new outlook was the affirmation of the movement itself as an "alternative society", with its own richness of communication, free productive creativity, its own life force. To conquer and to control its own "spaces" - this became the dominant form of struggle of the new "social subjects". Wage labour was no longer seen as the terrain of socialisation and the mass reference point. It was now regarded only in an episodic sense, as something contingent and of negative value.

The feminist movement, with its practices of communalism and separatism, its critique of politics and the social articulations of power, its deep distrust of any form of "general representation" of needs and desires, its love of differences, must be seen as the clearest archetypal form of this new phase of the movement. It provided the inspiration, whether explicitly or not, for the new movements of proletarian youth in the mid-1970s. The referendum on divorce (1974) itself gave a first indication of this tendency towards the "autonomy of the social".

From that point on, it becomes impossible to regard the Left movement as a "family tree" - unless one is referring to a family in crisis! The new subjectivity of the movement was totally alien to the official working-class movement. Their language and objectives no longer had any common ground. The very category of "extremism" no longer explained anything. One can only be "extremist" in relation to something similar: but this similarity, these common points of reference etc, were fast disappearing. Those who look for a continuity at this point of the story (as the prosecution does in our trial!) can only find that "family album" of continuity in the separate and sectarian existence of the Marxist-Leninist "combattant organisations".

8.

All these factors, but especially the latter, contributed, between 1973 and 1975 to the birth of "Workers' Autonomy".

The autonomous movement was formed against the PCI project of the Historic Compromise, in response to the crisis and failure of the revolutionary Left groups, and as an analysis and practice of struggle which sought to go beyond the previous "workerist factory" perspective and to understand the changes in the labour process which were taking place. But above all, it expressed the new subjectivity of the movement, the richness of its multiple differences, its rejection of formal politics and of mechanisms of representation. It did not seek a "political outlet" or "solution". It embodied an immediate exercise of power within society.

In this sense, localism and pluralism are a defining characteristic of the experience of autonomy. Rejecting any perspective of an alterative running of the state, there could be no centralised leadership of the movement. Every regional or local collective which was part of the "area of autonomy" had its own particular characteristics of class composition and class interests. These differences were not seen as a limitation, but as their raison d'etre. It is therefore absurd and impossible to try and reconstruct a unitary history of these movements between Rome, Milan, the Veneto and the South.

9.

From 1974 to 1976, the practice of mass illegality and violence became more intensified and diffuse. But this phenomenon had no overall "anti­state" objective behind it. It was not a preparation for any "revolutionary" project. In the big cities, violence developed as a function of the need for an immediate satisfaction of needs, the conquest of "spaces" that could be autonomously controlled, and largely in response to cuts in public spending.

In 1974, the self-reduction of transport fares, organised by the unions in Turin, relaunched a mass illegality that had already been practised particularly during rent strikes. From now on, and in relation to the whole range of public services, this form of "guaranteed income" was widely put into practice. While the unions had intended this self­reduction to be a symbolic gesture, the movement transformed it into a generalised, material form of struggle.

But it was the occupation of housing in San Basilio, Rome (October 1974) which above all marked a turning point: a massive and spontaneous militarisation by the proletariat as a defensive response to violent police aggression. A further step for the movement was the big Milan demonstrations in the Spring of 1975, following the killings of Varelli and Zibecchi by Fascists and police. Violent street confrontations were the point of departure for a whole series of struggles against the government's austerity measures - the first steps in the so­called "politics of sacrifice". Throughout 1975 and 1976, we experienced the trajectory - in many ways classic - of the history of welfare struggles: from self-reduction to appropriation; from a defensive struggle in the face of increases in prices and bills, to an offensive struggle for collective satisfaction of needs.

"Appropriation", of which the greatest example was the "looting" during the night of the New York Blackout, became part of collective behaviour in all aspects of metropolitan life: free or "political" shopping; occupation of premises for free associative activities; the custom of young people refusing to pay for cinemas or concerts; overtime bans, lengthening of rest periods in factories, etc. Above all, it represented the appropriation of free time, liberation from the constraints of factory command, the search for a new community.

10.

By the mid-1970s, two distinct tendencies in class violence had become apparent. These may be approximately defined as two different paths in the birth of the so-called "militarisation of the movement". The first path was the movement of violent resistance against the restructuring of production taking place in the large and medium-sized enterprises.

Here the protagonists were above all worker militants, formed politically in the period 1968-73, who were determined to defend at all costs the material basis on which their bargaining strength had depended. Restructuring was seen as a political disaster. Above all, those factory militants who were most involved in the experience of the Factory Councils tended to identify the restructuring with defeat; this was confirmed by repeated union sell-outs on work conditions. To preserve the factory as it was, in order to maintain a favourable relation of force - this was their aim.

It was around this set of problems and among this political/trade union base, that the Red Brigades - in their second phase, from 1974 to 1975 - found support and were able to take root.

11.

The second path of illegality, in many ways diametrically opposed to the first, was made up of all those "social subjects" who were the result of restructuring, of decentralisation of production, and of mobility in the labour force. Violence here was the product of a situation of part-time work, of fragmented forms of income, of the immediate impact of the social organisation of capitalist command.

This new proletariat that was emerging from the process of restructuring violently confronted local governments and the administration of income transfers, and fought for self-determination of the working day. This second type of illegality, which we can more or less identify with the autonomous movement, was never an "organic project". It was distinguished by the fit between the form of struggle chosen and the attainment of specific objectives. This also meant an absence of separate military structures specialised in the use of force.

Unless we accept the views of Pasolini - of violence as "natural" to certain lumpen social strata - it is impossible to deny that the diffuse violence of the movement in these years was a necessary process of self­identification. It was a positive affirmation of a new and powerful productive agency, born out of the decline of the centrality of the factory, and exposed to the full pressure of the economic crisis.

12.

The movement that exploded in 1977, in its essentials, expressed this new composition of the class and was by no means a phenomenon of "marginalised strata".

Described at this time as a marginal "second society" (by PCI cultural spokesperson Asor Rosa), this new class composition was already becoming the "first society" from the point of view of its productive capacity, its technical-scientific intelligence, and its advanced forms of social cooperation. The new social subjects reflected or anticipated in their struggles the growing identity between new productive processes and forms of communication - in short, the new reality of the information-system factory and the advanced tertiary sector.

The movement of 1977 was itself a productive force, independent and antagonistic. The critique of wage labour now took an affirmative direction: creatively asserting itself in the form of "self-organised entrepreneurship" and in the partial success of running, "from below", the mechanisms of the welfare system.

This "second society" that confronted the state in 1977 was asymmetrical in its relation to state power. No longer was there a frontal counterposition; rather there was a search for freedom and income, in which the movement could consolidate and grow.

This asymmetrical relation was precious, a great achievement, and showed the authentic basis of the social processes that underlay it - the emergence of a great new social force of antagonism. But it needed time, and needed new forms of mediation, a "New Deal", in order to come to fruition.

13.

However, this outcome was denied. Instead, the forces of the "Historic Compromise" reacted to the movement entirely negatively, denying it any time or space, and imposing a symmetrical relation of opposition between the struggles and the state.

This was quite different from the process in other European countries, most obviously in the case of Germany, where the repressive operation was accompanied by forms of bargaining with the mass movements, and hence did not directly attack their reproduction. Not so with the Italian "Historic Compromise" government; here, the repressive net was cast exceedingly widely; legitimacy was denied to any forces developing outside of the "social pact"; the new avenues of corporative regulation of conflict were denied. Repression itself developed a generality that was aimed directly against spontaneous social forces.

14.

The organisations of Autonomy (autonomia organizzata) found themselves caught in a dilemma between consignment to a marginalised role and a social ghetto; or immediate confrontation, at a tempo imposed by the state. Their eventual defeat can be traced to the attempt to close this gap - by maintaining roots in the social network of the movement, while at the same time confronting the state.

This attempt proved, quickly, to be quite impossible, and failed at both levels. On the one hand the political acceleration imposed on the movement led to the organisations losing contact with the social subjects, who rejected "traditional politics" and followed their own various solutions - at times individualist, or through constitutional channels, in order to work less, live better, and maintain their own spaces for freely creative production. On the other hand, this same acceleration pushed the autonomous organisations into a series of splits over the question of militarisation. The contacts with the militarist groups were rejected, and these soon became a separate tendency in the movement, pushing for the formation of armed organisations.

The dilemma was not resolved; it only became deeper. The whole form of autonomy, its organisation, its concept of politics, was thrown into question and crisis.

15.

From the end of 1977 and throughout 1978, there was a growth and multiplication of formations operating at a specifically military level, while the crisis of the autonomous organisations became more acute.

Many saw in the equation "political struggle equals armed struggle" the only adequate response to the trap that the movement was caught in by the reactionary politics of the Historic Compromise. In a first phase - in a scenario frequently repeated and typical - numbers of militants made the so-called "leap" to armed struggle, conceiving this choice as an "articulation" of the movement's struggles, as a sort of "servicing structure". But the very form of organisation specifically geared to armed actions soon revealed its lack of links with the practices of the movement. It could only sooner or later go its own separate way. Thus the numerous armed groups that proliferated in the period 1977-78 ended up resembling the model of the Red Brigades (which they had initially rejected) or joining them. The BR, as the historic guerrilla formation, totally separated from the dynamic of the movement, ended by parasitically growing in the wake of the defeat of the mass organisations of the movement.

In Rome especially, from the end of 1977, the BR made a large-scale recruitment from the movement, which was in deep crisis. Autonomy had come up against all its own limitations, opposing state militarism with street confrontations, which only produced a dispersion of the potential the movement represented. The repressive strait jacket, and the real errors of the autonomists in Rome and some other areas, opened the way for the expansion of the BR. The Brigades had been external to, and critical of, the mass struggles of 1977. Paradoxically, they now gathered their fruits in terms of reinforcing their organisation.

16.

The defeat of the Movement of 1977 began with the kidnapping and killing of Aldo Moro in March-May 1978.

The BR, in a sort of tragic parody of the way the official Left had developed its policies from the mid-1970s, pursued their own politics in complete separation from and outside of developments of currents of resistance in society at large.

The "culture" of the BR, with its "people's courts, prisoners and trials" - and its practice of an "armed fraction" totally within the logic of a separate sphere of "politics" - played against the new subjects of social antagonism, as much as against the institutional framework.

With the Moro operation, the unity of the movement was definitively broken. There began a situation of emergency, terror and State blackmail, a closing-off of space, in which the autonomy frontally attacked the BR, while large sectors of the movement retired from the struggle. The emergency proclaimed by the state and the PCI was not successful as far as "anti-terrorism" was concerned; on the contrary, it tended to select its victims from among those publicly known as "subversives", who were used as scapegoats in a general witch-hunt. Autonomy soon found itself facing a violent attack, starting in the factories of the North. The Factory Collectives of the autonomy were denounced by trade union and PCI watchdogs as "neo-terrorists" and were weeded out. Right in the period of the Moro kidnap, the autonomists were launching a struggle at Alfa Romeo against Saturday working. They were branded by the official Left as "terrorists". Thus began the process of the expulsion of a new generation of autonomous militants from the factories, a process that reached its climax with the mass sackings at FIAT in the Autumn of 1979.

17.

After the Moro operation, in the desolation of a general State of Emergency and a militarisation of the whole of civil society, the state and the Red Brigades now faced each other as if opposite reflections in the same mirror.

The BR rapidly went down the path already set for them; the so­called "armed struggle" became terrorism in the true sense of the word. From 1977 to 1978, the targets on the death list were selected only according to their functions - police, magistrates, factory managers, trade unionists etc - as the revelations of those who turned state evidence have shown.

The repressive wave of arrests and imprisonment against the movement of autonomy in 1979 eliminated the only political network which was in a position to fight against this logic of terroristic escalation. This can be demonstrated in practice by the fact that between 1979 and 1981, the Red Brigades were able to recruit, for the first time, not only militants from the lesser armed combattant organisations, but also more widely from a desperate and scarcely politicised youth, whose anger was now deprived of any political outlet or expression.

18.

The state witnesses, those who have turned state evidence in exchange for remission of sentences (the pentiti) are only the other side of the terrorist coin.

The state informers, the supergrasses, are only a conditioned reflex of terrorism itself. They are the final truth of its total abstractness and separation from the struggles of the movement. The total divorce of the "armed struggle" from any relation to the struggles of the new social subject is revealed in a distorted, horrendous way by this merchandising of state informers.

The system of remission for state informers (set up by law in December 1979) has given rise to a logic of destruction of the whole judicial framework, as well as a judicial, public destruction of the memory of the movement. The individual memory of the pentiti is manipulated and distorted, with indiscriminate vendettas being settled en route. Even when they tell the truth, they abolish the real motivations and context of what they describe, establishing hypothetical links, effects without causes, interpreted according to theorems constructed by the prosecution.

19.

The sharp, definitive defeat of the political organisations of the movement at the end of the 1970s by no means coincided with any defeat of the new political subjects which had emerged in the eruption of 1977.

This new social subject has carried out a "long march" through the workplaces, the organisation of social knowledge, the alternative economy, local services, administration and communications. It proceeds by keeping itself to the ground, avoiding any direct political confrontation between the underground ghetto and institutional deals, between separateness and co-management. Though under pressure and often forced into passivity, this underground movement today constitutes - even more than in the past -the unresolved problem of the Italian crisis.

The renewal of struggles and debates on the working day; the pressure on public spending; the question of protection of the environment and choice of technologies; the crisis of the party system; and the problem of finding new constitutional formulae of government - behind all these questions lies the density and living reality of a mass subject, still entirely intact and present, with its multiple demands for income, freedom and peace.

20.

Now that the Historic Compromise has come to an end, and in the post-terrorist situation today, the same question is again, as in 1977, on the agenda: how to open spaces which can allow the movement to express itself and grow.

We come back to the basic issue: how to relate struggles and their political outlets; how to relate the struggles within a New Deal at the institutional level. This perspective, in Italy as in Germany, is both possible and necessary, not because of the backwardness of social conflict, but because of the extreme maturity of its content.

We must now take a clear stand, to take up once more and develop the thread of the movement of 1977. This means opposing both the militarism of the state and any tendency to relaunch that of the "armed struggle" (there is no "good versus bad" version of "armed struggle", no alternative to the elitist practice of the Red Brigades: all versions end by being antithetical to the new movements) . A powerful new social force, both individually and collectively, outside and opposed to the frame­work of wage labour, has emerged. The state is going to have to take this phenomenon into account, not least in its administrative and economic policy calculations. This new social force is such that it can be at one and the same time separate, antagonistic, and capable of seeking and finding its own mediations.