Abstract
Is a better society germinating inside world capitalism? The authors of this book – the third in a famous series that began with Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004) – answer affirmatively. Production, they say, is now ‘exceeding’ the realm of the private and proprietary, assuming new and communal forms. This is true wherever the center of gravity shifts from industry to the production of images, representations, and subjectivities – which the authors say is happening all around us.
The consequence, we are told, is that the poor, in their creative multitudes, are increasingly capable of the communal love which Hardt and Negri call our ultimate nature. ‘Evil’, they say, is an epiphenomenon, the corruption of love. Love will eventually triumph, flowering with ‘the common’ in a society overripe with half-realized, half-thwarted dreams. Capital will resist, but love inspires exodus, not combat; subversion, not opposition. In the end, today’s ‘rulers, destroyers and corrupters’ will find themselves powerless before ‘the laugh of armed angels’: ‘. . . we will suffer terribly, but still we laugh with joy. They will be buried by laughter.’
With these words, Hardt and Negri bring Commonwealth to a close.
This is a very curious argument. Not least, despite the bulk of the book, the authors seldom develop their core points – say, about love and the production of subjectivities. Nor do they clarify the ‘mechanisms’ that allegedly produce subjectivities, though they allude to this often (especially, but obliquely, with reference to the Foucauldian notion of the dispositif). While they devote many pages to ancillary topics (distinguishing the ‘minor Kant’ from the ‘major Kant’ and good from bad antimodernities), they leave ‘evil’ virtually undefined and ignore its psychic roots. They cite Spinoza’s line that people often embrace servitude as if it were their salvation, but they never ask why. They fail to seriously argue for the claim that love will triumph over its opponents and corruptions. Obiter dicta replace history, sociology, psychology, and economics. It is perhaps not wholly surprising, hence, that they find hope for their love-communist revolution in the oddest places, including the ascent of finance. This, in a book published a year after the global financial meltdown of 2008!
What are we to make of this eccentric argument? Hardt and Negri are celebrities. Their paired names electrify Google. Why do they use their bully pulpit to convey this particular message?
The key, I think, is that Hardt and Negri are torn between two poles of classical socialism. They admire Marx’s Capital and yet they call for an alternative theory of value. They have a lingering fondness for Lenin, the rhetoric of insurrection, and the ‘victorious socialist revolutions’ in authoritarian Russia, China, and Cuba. Yet they reject Leninism, insurrection, and authoritarianism. How do they square these tendencies? By declaring Capital and Leninism valid for classical capitalism, but wrong for today.
In a defining passage, Hardt and Negri cite Lenin’s claim, on the eve of 1917, that ‘the Russian people are not ready to rule themselves’: ‘They have been trained at work to need subordination, supervision, and managers; they have a boss on the job, and thus they need a boss in politics’ (p. 175). Hardt and Negri see this contention – ‘Lenin’s warning’ – as a challenge to their core premise that biopolitical production prepares the multitude for self-emancipation. ‘If one can realistically establish the capacities for self-organization and cooperation in people’s daily lives, in their work [and in] social production, then the political capacity of the multitude ceases to be a question’ (p. 176). Yet they fail to pursue this line of inquiry concretely. Occasionally they hint at specifics. They argue, in passing, that the computer advances of the biopolitical age should be credited, not to Jobs and Gates, but to the ‘multitudinous entrepreneurship’ of the digital masses, to the ‘hydra-headed multitude’ acting as ‘biopolitical entrepreneur’ (pp. 297–298). But no sooner do they say this than they proceed to other subjects – none of which they examine carefully. Hence, when they reply to Lenin’s challenge many pages later, their argument is a bolt from the blue:
Remember Lenin’s claim that since people are trained to need bosses at work, they also need bosses in politics. ‘Human nature as it is now. . . cannot do without subordination, control, and “managers ”.’ Today’s biopolitical production shows how much human nature has changed. People don’t need bosses at work. They need an expanding web of others with whom to communicate and collaborate. . . (p. 353)
So the answer is simply that human nature has changed. Once, we needed bosses. Now, we don’t. They produce no serious argument for this claim, but enunciating it allows them to pay homage to Lenin while still espousing love-communist revolution of the purest spontaneity.
At this point, incongruously, finance enters the story. Hardt and Negri claim to detect a spectrum of ‘mechanisms of the common’, leverage points to move the world, in the ‘advanced forms of militant knowledge production’ that are ‘completely embedded in the circuits of social practice’ (‘in social centers and nomad universities, on Web sites and in movement journals’) (p. 127). But they realize that unity is needed as well as diversity. They say that, in classical capitalism, unity was achieved largely by the reduction of concrete labor to ‘abstract’ labor in exchange. Since every worker’s labor was rendered equally abstract, workers had something essential in common. On this ground, they claim that Marx felt ambivalent towards abstract labor (which he defined as the ‘substance’ of value and the defining social principle of commodity production). ‘Without abstract labor there is no working class!’ (p. 159)
This is a very strange argument. Labor products have value, for Marx, only when individual, concrete labor (your labor or mine) is treated as abstract, average, anonymous social labor. Materially, your labor, like mine, is always unique, always different from the labor of others. But socially, when labor products are exchanged, they are treated as if the labor they embody is qualitatively the same, dissimilar only in quantity. For Marx, this is radically dehumanizing. And the idea that Marx would feel half-kindly towards value because, without it, the working class wouldn’t exist, is simply wrong. Marx wanted the workers to abolish classes – precisely because he felt that labor should not be dehumanized or exploited. In a great many societies, commodities have been produced by forced laborers. Would Hardt and Negri deduce that Marx felt ‘ambivalent’ towards abstract labor because, without it, plantation slaves could not have produced cotton for sale to the textile industry? Surely not. But Marx’s allegedly half-positive attitude towards value is important to them because they believe that finance ‘represents’ biopolitical production in the same way that abstract labor ‘represents’ industrial production. Eo ipso, ambivalence towards finance is equally appropriate.
This leads them to distinguish, with Marx, between money’s ‘two faces’. Money is not only the commodity universally equivalent to all others in exchange, but the power that enables capitalists to buy labor power from workers and dominate them in the workplace. Only the latter use of money do they reject. They know well, of course, that many radicals, Marx included, sought to abolish money entirely, ‘dreaming of an antediluvian world of use values’ (p. 295). But they themselves envisage a handshake between money and freedom: ‘Might the power of money (and the finance world in general) to represent the social field of production be, in the hands of the multitude, an instrument of freedom, with the capacity to overthrow misery and poverty? Just as the concept of abstract labor was necessary for understanding. . . workers in [many] sectors, do the abstractions of money and finance similarly provide the instruments for making the multitude from the diverse forms of flexible, mobile, and precarious labor?’ They hazard a confident guess: ‘We cannot answer these questions satisfactorily yet, but it seems to us that efforts to reappropriate money in this way point in the direction of revolutionary activity today’ (p. 295).
This is their conclusion – a leap of intuition, a fuzzy poetics posing as theory. Other, unavowed guesses are advanced with equal assurance: ‘Finance capital is in essence an elaborate machine for representing the common. . . .’ (p. 157). Exactly how or in what sense this could be true they never say.
In short, unlike Marx, Hardt and Negri embrace finance as if it were their salvation. They show themselves to be surprisingly uncritical, not only in their claim that money-fueled ‘revolution’ can free us from the domination of money, but in their credulous willingness to take seriously Lenin’s apology for dictatorship. Meanwhile, a very different call has emerged since Commonwealth appeared in Year 1 of the financial crisis – a call to confront finance, not redeploy it for love and the poor. This is the common denominator of Occupy Wall Street and the European anti-austerity movements. Commonwealth offers movements of this kind very little.