Communism: some thoughts on the concept and practice - Antonio Negri

At the basis of historical materialism lies the
claim that history is the history of class struggle. When the
historical materialist investigates class struggle, she does so through
the critique of political economy. The critique concludes that the meaning
of the history of class struggle is communism, ‘the
real movement which abolishes the present state of things' (Marx, The
German Ideology). It is a case of being inside this
movement.

People often object to this claim that it is an
expression of a philosophy of history. But I think the political
meaning of critique should not be mistaken for a historical telos.
In history the productive forces normally produce the social relations
and institutions that contain and dominate them: this is evident in all
historical determinations. So why would anyone regard as historical
illusion, political ideology or metaphysical nonsense the possibility
of subverting this situation and freeing the productive forces from the
command of capitalist relations of production (following the meaning of
class struggle in operation)? We will try to demonstrate that the
opposite is the case.

1) Communists assume that history is
always the history of class struggle.

For some this position is untenable because history
is determined and now so totally dominated by capital that such an
assumption is ineffectual and unverifiable.

But they forget that capital is always a relation
of power [force], that whilst it might be able to organise
a solid and overbearing hegemony, this hegemony
is always the function of a particular command inside a power relation.
Neither the concept of capital nor its historical variants would exist
in the absence of a proletariat who, whilst being exploited by capital,
is always the living labour that produces it. Class struggle is the
power relation expressed between the boss and the worker: this relation
invests exploitation and capitalist command and is established in the
institutions that organise the production and circulation of profit.

Others who claim that history cannot simply be
reduced [traced back] to class struggle assume the permanent
[persistance/existance] subsistence of a 'use-value'. They qualify this
as the value of labour power or as the value of nature and of the
environmental surroundings of human labour. This assumption is not only
radically inadequate as an explanation of capitalist development, but
is also certainly wrong as a description of the current form of
capitalism.

Capital has conquered and enveloped the entire
life-world, its hegemony is global. There is no room for narodniki!
Class struggle develops here, ‘from the premises now
in existence', not under different circumstances: class relations are
founded on these historical determinations ( historical
determinism ) and the new production of
subjectivity (of the boss and worker alike).

Firstly, it is of interest to note that there is no
longer an 'outside' in this context, and that struggle (not only
struggle, but the substance of subjects in struggle) is now totally
'inside'; there is no longer any semblance or reflection of
'use-value'. We are completely immersed in the world of
'exchange-value' and its brutal and ferocious reality.

Historical materialism explains how and why
exchange value is so central to class struggle: 'In bourgeois society,
the worker e.g. stands there purely without objectivity, subjectively;
but the thing which stands opposite him has now
become the true community [ das
wahre Gemeinwesen ]', which the proletariat 'tries to make
a meal of, and which makes a meal of him' (Marx, Grundrisse,
Notebook V, trans. by M. Nicolaus, London: Pelican,
1973, p.496).

Yes, but in this alternative appropriation – that
of the capitalists against that of the workers - capital definitely
appears as a relation. Communism begins to take shape when the
proletarian takes it as her objective to re-appropriate the Gemeinwesen
, the community, to turn it into the order of a new
society.

Therefore exchange value is very important, it is
the common social reality, built and secured so that it can no longer
be traced back to the simple circulation of labour, money and even
capital. It is surplus value turned into profit, accumulated profit,
rent from land and estates, fixed capital, finance, the accumulation of
primary sources, machines and devices productive on earth and then
launched into space, communication networks, and - finally and
especially - money, the great common paradigm: '[Money] is itself the
community [ Gemeinwesen ] and can tolerate none
other standing above it' (Marx, Grundrisse,
Notebook II, p. 223). Here lies the historical determination. Exchange
value is already given in a common form. As Gemeinwesen .
It's here, it's the world, there is nothing else or other, no outside.

Take for instance the example of finance: who could
conceive of doing without money in the form of finance? Money has
become the common land where once the Heimat
[Homeland] lay, the consistency of populations at the end of the
'Gothic period', when possession was organised into commons .
Those commons and that land are now exchange
value in the hands of capitalists. If we want this land back, we
reclaim it in the conditions we find it in: at the apex of capitalist
appropriation, soiled by exchange value; under no illusions of purity
and innocence.

When Spinoza told us that in the Hebrew state in
the year of the jubilee all debts were written off and the equality of
citizens restored, or when Machiavelli insisted on the fact that the
agrarian laws gave new life to Roman Republic because the plebs'
re-appropriation of the land also renewed the democratic process, they
were holding onto the illusion that it was possible to go back to
nature and democracy (Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourse on Livy
, Book I, Chapter 27, London: Penguin, p. 99; Benedict
de Spinoza, A Theological-Political Treatise ,
Chapter XVII, p. 230) .

But for us determining the liberation of the labour
force and being communists demands the re-appropriaton of a common
reality that is neither original nor democratically desirable, but
rather something that stands opposed to us as power after we have
reproduced it with effort and blood.

But let us not be discouraged. As Gramsci taught us
in his reading of class struggle, historical materialism proposes to
grasp the continuous metamorphosis or rather the
anthropology of the character of the worker through different
experiences of the proletarian use of technologies and capitalist
social organisation.

This introduces a new question, because as the
worker changes herself in struggle, she imposes a real metamorphosis
on capital. If there are epochs or cycles of struggle,
their ontological consistency is measured against this anthropological
basis. No nature, identity, gender or race can resist this movement of
transformation and historical metamorphosis of the relationship between
capital and workers. The multitudes are shaped and always re-qualified
by this dynamics. This is also valid for the definition of time in
class struggle. When class struggle appears as the production and
transformation of subjectivity, the revolutionary process assumes a
long-term temporality, an ontological accumulation of counter-power,
the 'optimism' of the material force of proletarian 'reason', the
desire that becomes solidarity, the love that is always rational, and
following Spinoza, the related 'pessimism of the will'. ' Caution
!', he said, when the passions are mobilised towards
the construction of political structures of freedom. Our guide is not
the aleatory emergence of rebellions, these divine sparks of hope that
can carve paths of light into the night, but the constant and critical
effort and work of organisation, the calculated risk of insurrection.
Philosophical imagination can give colour to the real but cannot
replace the effort of history-making: the event is always a result,
never a starting point.

2) Being communists means being
against the State. The State is the force that organises, always
normally yet always exceptionally, the relations that constitute
capital and discipline the conflicts between capitalists and the
proletarian labour force.

This being against the state is directed against
all the modes of organisation of private property
and the private ownership of the means of
production, as well as the private exploitation
of labour power and the private control of
capitals' circulation. But it also against the public ,
that is, the state and national
configurations of all these operations of alienation of the power
[potenza] of labour.

Being communist entails the recognition that the
public is a form of alienation and exploitation of labour - of common
labour, in our case. So what is the public? As the
great Rousseau said, the public is the enemy of private property, what
'belongs [itself] to nobody' (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Second
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality ). But it is just
sophism to attribute to the State what actually belongs to everyone.
The State says: 'The common does not belong to you, despite the fact
that you made it, produced it in common, and invented it and organised
it as common'. The State's manumission of the common, i.e. what we all
produced and thus belongs to us, will go under the name of management,
delegation and representation ... the implacable beauty of public
pragmatism.

Therefore communism is the enemy of socialism
because socialism is the classical form of this second model of
alienation of proletarian power [potenza], which also requires a
distorted organisation of the production of its subjectivity. The
perversions of 'real socialism' have neutralised a century of class
struggle and dispelled all the illusions of the philosophy of history.
It is interesting to see how 'real socialism', despite initiating
massive processes of collectivisation, never questioned the disciplines
of command, be they juridical, political or pertaining to the human
sciences. The institutional structure of socialism and its political
polarities was produced by an ideology that arbitrarily opposed private
to public - whilst these, following Rousseau, overlap one another - and
sanctified a ruling class whose functions of command reproduced the
ones of the capitalist elité whilst they claimed
to be self-elected 'vanguards'!

Being against the State means, first of all,
expressing the desire and ability to manage the entire system of
production, including the division of labour and the accumulation and
redistribution of wealth, in a radically democratic way - as a
'democracy of all'.

Here it is worth providing new definitions.
Historical materialism is also an 'immanentism of subjectivity'. It
declares that not only there is no 'outside' to the world we live in,
but also that 'from inside' this world the workers, citizens and all
subjects are ever-present elements of singular resistance and moments
in the construction of a different form of common living.

They are present even when the most grievous and
dreariest historical lull is suffocating us. Multitude is a class
concept and the singularities that compose it are always nuclei of
resistance in the relation of subjugation imposed by capital. The
singular obeys because he must do so and cannot do otherwise, but
always as a resistance, there, inside the power relation. The breaking
of this relation is always a possibility, just as much as the
maintenance of the relation of command. Here, outside of any philosophy
of history, inside this common phenomenology, we perceive how central
and essential the possible indignation against power, its order and
abuses and the refusal of wage labour (and/or of labour subjected to
the end of reproducing capitalist society) are to the formation of
another model of society and the extent to which they point to the
present virtuality [virtual presence] of a different order, another
prospect of life. These push towards rupture, and can do so because the
rupture that is always possible can become real, or rather necessary
(and we will come back to the characters of this rupture). There can be
revolution.

The insistence on indignation, refusal and
rebellion must be able to translate into constituent power .
The struggle against the State and against all of the constitutions
that organise and represent it must also contain the ability to produce
new power by means of new knowledge. You can never grip a lightening
bolt with bare hands, only the multitude, the history of rebelling
class struggle, can do so. But the relation between the historical
circumstances and the production of subjectivity keeps changing. As we
said earlier, this is one of the realms of development of this
continuous metamorphosis of the anthropology of the worker. The technical
composition of the labour force is in constant motion
and corresponds to an always adequate, and different, production of
subjectivity. This is a political composition
that must find concrete forms of expression and desire for revolution
in its present circumstances.

The production of subjectivity and new political
composition can also anticipate the historical and social conditions in
which the revolutionary process is constructed, but there is always a
dialectical link between the material determination and the
revolutionary tension of collective desire: an elastic band that might
snap but remains itself. As Lenin said, dual power is always
short-lived, rebel power must hold back the time of history in
subjective anticipation (the pushing forward of subjectivity).
Constituent power is the key to anticipating and realising
revolutionary will against the State.

In traditional State theory, anarchy and
dictatorship are the opposite extremes of all possible forms of
sovereign command, but when we speak of communist democracy
against the State, we do not do so on the grounds of a possible
mediation between anarchy and dictatorship., on the contrary. We
propose the overcoming of this alternative because revolutionary
struggle not only has no outside but the inside that it defines knows a
subversive power, that is, a 'below' that is opposed to the 'above' of
sovereignty. Communist being is realised from this 'below', from the
turning of constituent desires into expressions of power and
alternative contents. So there can also be a revolution, as Gramsci
taught, 'against Das Kapital '.

3) Being communists means building a
new world where the exploitation of capital and subjection to the State
are eliminated. Starting from our present circumstances, realistically,
from the historical determinations that characterise our current
condition, how do we move forward towards the realisation of communism?

First of all, let us say that this determinism can
be broken and overcome only by building a force that is superior to
that of those in command. But how do we do that? As we said, political
rupture seems necessary once indignation, refusal, resistance and
struggle have produced a constituent power that wants to realise
itself. Only force makes this move forward, this constituent rupture
possible. From strikes, industrial sabotage, the breaking and piracy of
systems of domination, migrant flight and mobility to riots,
insurrections, and the concrete configurations of an alternative power:
these are the first recognisable figures of a collective revolutionary
will.

This shift is fundamental - communist imagination
is exalted in the moment of rupture. Higher wages against labour
exploitation, universal income against the financial crisis, a
democracy of all against dictatorship: these are the outcomes of a
history that produces constituent will. But this is not enough; even if
the cause is insufficient it does not make it less necessary, less sine
qua non . It is not enough because there is no revolution
without organisation, just as the exaltation of the event was not
enough, the resorting to myth, or the mystic reference to the bareness
of bodies, to a threshold of poverty opposed to the ubiquity of
oppression - none of this is enough because there still is no rational
design that invests and involves the movements of rupture with the
power of organisation.

As Spinoza wrote: “ Cupiditas, quae ex
ratione oritur, excessum habere nequit ” [Desire which
springs from reason cannot be excessive] (Spinoza, Ethics ,
Part IV, Proposition LXI, New York: Dover Publications, 1959, p. 229),
which thus prohibits any definition of desire that arrests itself
[censors itself] with (supposedly objective) limits. What I mean to say
is that when we think about and experiment with this framework, no
teleology or philosophy of history is at play, only a collective desire
that, with force, builds up its organised surplus throughout the entire
aleatory process of struggles: the surplus of communism in relation to
the dull repetition of the history of exploitation. To this end,
communism is closer to us today (which doesn't mean that it's around
the corner) because the surplus labour extracted from labour power - as
it changes with the cognitive metamorphosis - is only with difficulty
translated and turned into that surplus value that the capitalist
organises into profit. Cognitive labour is terribly indigestible to
capital.

But, as some tell us, there is no evidence to claim
that the relation between subjective excess and the communist project
is given through the subversive and insurrectional movements of the
multitude. This is true. But we would respond that historical
materialism and the immanence of the revolutionary project show us a
subject that goes against capital and a multitude of singularities that
organises into anti-capitalist power [forza], not formally, as a party,
a mature and accomplished organisation, but, by virtue of its
existence, as a resistance that is stronger and better articulated the
more the multitude is a whole of singular institutions
in itself. The latter include forms of life, struggle, economic and
union organisation, strikes, the rupture of social processes of
exploitation, experiences of re-appropriation, and nodes of resistance.
At times they win in great clashes on issues that are central to the
capitalist organisation of society, at other times they lose, though
always keeping levels of antagonism that function as residues in new
modes of subjectivation.

The multitude is a group of institutions that takes
on different political compositions time after time and in relation to
the shades and vicissitudes of power relations. They are more than the
elements of technical composition of the proletariat, and more than the
aleatory and/or conjunctural organisations of the oppressed: they are
actual moments of political recomposition and coagulates of the
subversive production of communist subjectivity. Cupiditates
! (TR: Passions, longings, desires, eagerness!)
Instances of these are different and diversified relations between the
expressions of a desire for emancipation (wage labour, social
movements, political expressions) and the demand of political and/or
economic reform.

From the standpoint of contemporary biopolitical
society, the relation between reform and revolution
is different from that of industrial societies. The
transformation that has intervened is substantial and can easily be
verified by an analysis of the generalisation of the methods of governance
in the exercise of sovereignty, in the current
weakening of the classical forms of government. The flows, pressures
and alterations of governance relations in
post-industrial societies show a new terrain where the collision
between movements and governments unfolds with alternate outcomes. But
they always all reveal the multiplication of assets for the struggle
and organisation of reform proposals and subversive tensions that give
shape to and internally articulate the multitude. Here we start
glimpsing the new institutions of the common .

This process is set off from below. It is a
movement that is affirmed with force. Rather than dialectics, what
describes it is its will to affirmation. It is not teleological, unless
we charge the materialist theory and subversive practice of Machiavelli
with ethical and historical finalism. Instead, the multitude is
immersed in a process of transition , that
started when 'one divided into two', when, as we said earlier, it is
difficult to turn the surplus labour of the cognitive proletariat into
profit and the latter reveals itself as revolutionary surplus [excess].
Rather than a transition from one stage or mode of production to
another, this is a change that unfolds inside the multitude itself, it
exposes and acts on the web that links the anthropological
metamorphoses of subjects to the changes of society and politics, and
thus to the possibility of communist emancipation. The society we live
in has been really and fully subsumed in capital. We call this command capitalist
biopower . But if biopower is the product of the activity
of capital even when its hegemony is global, this still needs to be
based on a relation: the capital relation, always contradictory and
possibly antagonistic, placed inside the biopolitical realm where life
itself is put to work and all of its aspects are invested by power; but
also where resistance is manifest and the proletariat is present in all
of the figures where social labour is realised; where cognitive labour
power expresses the excess of value and the multitude is formed. This
multitude is not disarmed, because all of these processes that traverse
it also describe its institutional articulations and accretion of
resistance and subjective emergences.

As we said, the multitude is a totality of desires
and trajectories of resistance, struggle and constituent power. We also
add that it is a whole made of institutions. Communism is possible
because it already exists in this transition, not as an end, but as a
condition, it is the development of singularities, the experimentation
of this construction and - in the constant wave of power relations - it
is tension, tendency and metamorphosis.

4) What is a communist ethics? As we
have seen, it is an ethics of struggle against the State because it
moves from the indignation towards subjection and the refusal of
exploitation. On the node of indignation and refusal lies the second
element of the definition of a communist ethics, which is that of
militance and the common construction of
struggle against exclusion and poverty, alienation and exploitation.

These two elements (struggle and common militance)
already open onto a new plane: that of a whole of singularities that,
withdrawing from solitude, work to make themselves multitude - a
multitude that looks for the common against privacy. Does this mean to
achieve a democracy? For almost three centuries we have conceived of
democracy as the administration of the public good, the
institutionalisation of the state appropriation of the common. If we
seek democracy today, we need to radically rethink it as the common
management of the common. This management entails a redefinition of
(cosmopolitan) space and (constituent) temporality. It is no longer the
case of defining the form of a social contract where everything is
everyone's and thus belongs to no one: everything, as it is produced by
everyone, belongs to all.

This shift will only occur in the name of
organisation. The whole history of the communist movements regarded the
issue of organisation as fundamental, because organisation is a
collective-being-against, a principle of institution, and thus the very
essence of making-multitude. The facts of the crisis of neo-liberalism,
the cultures of individualism, the natural refusal of solitude of human
beings who are born and grow up in society, the recognition that
solitude is death, manifest themselves as an organisation of resistance
against the new reduction to solitude that, in individualist morality,
capital tries to re-impose upon subjects.

The first three elements of a communist ethics are:
revolt against the State, common militance, and production of
institutions. Clearly these are traversed by two fundamental passions:
the passion that pushes from natural neediness and economic poverty
towards a power of labour and science freed from capital's command; and
the passion of love that from the refusal of solitude leads to the
political constitution of the common (unsurprisingly religion,
bourgeois aesthetics and all new age ideologies
try to recuperate, mystify and neutralise these passions). By coming
together, developing new forms of common coexistence in resistance and
organisation the constituent power of communism is invented. This
concept of constituent power has nothing to do with the constitutional
structures that capital and its State have organised. At this point,
the power [potenza] of labour power, the invention of the multitude and
the constituent expression of the proletariat on the one hand and
capitalist power, the disciplinary arrogance of the bourgeoisie and the
repressive vocation of the State on the other are not homologous.
Because the constituent ethics of communism runs much deeper and
invests the biopolitical dimension of historical reproduction, and as
class struggle makes historical being, it is now going to spread inside
the determinations of our age onto the whole set of biopolitical
dispositifs. Here communist ethics touches upon the great issues of
life (and of death) and takes on the character of great dignity when it
appears as the generous and creative articulation of the power
[potenza] of the poor and the common desire for love, equality and
solidarity.

We have now come to the point where the idea of a
practice of 'use-value' re-emerges. This use-value is no longer outside
but inside the history made
by struggles. It is no longer a remembrance of nature or the reflection
of a presumed origin, nor an instance in time or an event of
perception, but an expression, a language and a practice.

Finally, under no circumstances is it an identity,
a reflection on the concrete characters assumed as the point of the
insertion in a universal, but a mixture, a communal, multitudinal,
hybrid and mongrel construction, the overcoming of everything that was
otherwise known as identity in the dark centuries that precede us. The
man emerging out of this ethics is a multicoloured Orpheus, a poverty
that history returns to us as wealth rather than origin, as desire
to-come rather than misery. This is the new use-value: the common
. Our existence signals a series of common conditions
that we keep wanting to emancipate by withdrawing them from capitalist
alienation and State command. Use-value is the newly acquired form of
the technical composition of labour, as well as the common political
dispositif that lies at the foundation of the practices of constitution
of the world in history. The new use-value consists in these
dispositifs of the common that are opening up new paths for the
organisation of struggle and the forces of destruction of capitalist
command and exploitation.