Living Labour and Social Movements: A Dialogue with Antonio Negri

The seminar cycle Marxism(s) in Social Movements Studies: Is Marx Back in Social Theory?, held at the European University Institute in 2014–2015, arose from the hypothesis that the 2008 global economic crisis and the mobilizations accompanying it could problematize many of the analytical categories which have dominated ‘social movement studies’ since the end of the 1960s. What emerged from the seminar was the search for new analytical instruments capable of connecting social movements to the structural transformations of contemporary capitalism. We interviewed Antonio Negri about these issues, a thinker whose theories have profoundly questioned a number of decisive categories in both Marxism and sociology, such as that of social class.

Q. How would you define the concept of ‘social movements’ and their practice? Do you believe this notion can be incorporated and play a role in a Marxian analysis of society?

A. I think that the definition of social movement changes enormously throughout history. This is why I have a certain antipathy for the sociology of social movements, because it sees them as a static epistemological and social scientific object—much like, for example, how people use the notion of ‘generations’. I think, instead, that the notion of social movement is extremely changing.

In my intellectual trajectory, for instance, I have encountered Carl Schmitt’s definition of a ‘social movement’. A fascinating and important definition, according to which a social movement is something that demands from the state, a movement which pursues and actively desires to be organized by the state. The perfect example is the Nazi social movement, the SA. I have friends who have tried to reconcile this Schmittian definition with a Marxist one (which, instead, sees a social movement as an enemy of the state, wanting to destroy it), with the result of creating conceptual confusions. Thus, in my opinion, the first thing to do is to abandon the idea of a definition of social movements. Social movements can only be defined in situ, from the perspective of the relations of power inside which they are located and from which they arise in a precise historical moment.

From this perspective, I believe it is both useful and important to go back to something I had studied in my youth: the sociology of religious movements. It is an important branch of sociology, on which a number of important names have worked, including Max Weber. In that literature, for example, we see a distinction between ‘church’ and ‘sect’, developed on the basis of specific historical situations. It becomes clear that, for example, the millenarian theology of Gioacchino da Fiore and of many other protestant sects, as well as the consequent heretical nomadism, can only be defined empirically, without transforming them into a model or an ideal type. If we compare them to the millenarian tendencies of Eastern European Judaism—tendencies which, though they occur in a different historical period, are situated in the same phase of construction of modernity—we see that they are completely different. In short, one should not engage in homogenizing sociological reductions, for they do not help us in the understanding of these phenomena. It is more fruitful, instead, to go in the direction of historical specifications.

Thus, does a definition of ‘social movement’ exist? Of course it does! But it can only be a historically situated definition. I think that contemporary social movements operate in a specific capitalist structure (that of financial capitalism) and that, within it, they strive to create a process of liberation. Movements are always processes of liberation—in this phase, in particular, liberation from the various configurations through which financial capital exerts its domination. Thus, there will be, for example, anti-patriarchal struggles for the liberation of women, or struggles against debt to liberate the subalterns from a number of social conditions in which they are forced to live. There are, in sum, a number of elements which are, and this must be recognized as such, variations on the theme of class struggle, i.e., the struggle between rich and poor, between a system of exploitation and those that seek to break free from such a system.

Q. With this last claim, you touch upon the crucial node of the relationship between the theory of social movements and a Marxian analysis of society. We can formulate this node through a question. Do you believe that the agency of social movements can be fully incorporated in the notions of class and class struggle? Or, instead, are there elements which exceed these concepts and spaces of reciprocal autonomy between these two categories?

A. My answer has to be ambivalent here. Does class struggle exhaust the definition of social movements? Yes and no! No, if the class struggle is interpreted brutally, purely and uniquely as the movement of the poor, of the proletarians. Yes, if the social movement is interpreted as the representation of variable capital or, to put it better, of living labour, i.e., productive labour seeking to break free from a capitalistic relation which imprisons it. So, the point is that we should first of all define what class struggle is, and only then can we move on to the social movement. Nothing is more shallow than holding, like previous Marxisms, a static definition of class struggle and, consequently, of social movements. This tendency to create rigid concepts and to subsequently apply them is a cultural move which originated in the US, which I think is short-sighted.

Marx has written some of his most beautiful books on social movements: his ‘historical’ texts, those on the class struggles in France, on 1848, on the Paris Commune. In these texts, we find a profound interpretation of the development not only of the fight of the proletarians, but also of the bourgeoisie, a profound analysis of the struggles, the ethics, the morality that characterized the two great poles of the class struggle. Do these great poles still exist? Of course they do! And on which terrain do they fight out their struggle? I am certainly moving too fast here, but my hypothesis is that this terrain is shaped by technological transformations—that is to say, that movements qualify and develop themselves in terms of appropriation of ‘fixed capital’. At present, everywhere we look, from urban struggles to workers’ struggles and environmental ones, we see the desire to control fixed capital. We could then say that contemporary movements are ‘entrepreneurial movements’: technological entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship of the multitude, entrepreneurship of the Common. A social movement today wants to control the common, to hold it, and to manage it. Pure protest movements have disappeared and they have been replaced by movements of potenza. ¹ I believe this conceptual widening comes, in part, from a Marxian reading of social movements.

Q. Would you then advice scholars of social movements to try to incorporate the concept of living labour in their analyses? Could the workerist interpretation of the Marxian notion of living labour function as a bridging concept for the analysis of social movements? And would it be possible to see the Workerism of the 1960s and 1970s as an attempt to study, through this concept, a social movement of workers which characterized that period?

A. Of course! And after many years, we can now see that it has been a correct interpretation. Workerism was not only a cultural current, but also a series of hypotheses, put forward by a small group of intellectuals, to understand how class struggle had changed after World War II. The historicity of this process and of this technique of investigation is thus very precise, very situated. There was a working class going through a process of profound transformation. In the post-war situation, the capitalist mechanisms of restructuring of capital could be observed in a number of precise needs expressing themselves in struggles for higher wages. Subsequently, this struggle for wages widened into a social struggle for the conquest of welfare. This lasted for a long phase: capitalist initiative was responding to the successful struggles of the proletariat, of the working class, and was trying to eliminate its potenza by assuming control over the needs expressed in those struggles.

Now, here is a methodology. If we incorporate the analysis of social movements inside a master–slave (to put in a Hegelian language), capital–labour (in Marxian terms) or authority–subject (in a Schmittian manner) relation, then what does a social movement become? That which ‘is in the middle’, and that always expresses itself as potenza against power. Without the antagonistic element, social movements are expressions of power, of the state, of the ruling class—as Schmitt held they were. Potenza on one side, power on the other: this is what we can say in general terms, before the necessary historicization. Without it, any general scheme one might have in mind will always become too rigid, and the situation is worse in the case of dialectical schemes, because they presuppose an Aufhebung, that is a top-down closure. Here, instead, there are no solutions, there is only the issue of keeping always open the practical option of conflict and the theoretical option of questioning. After Marx, Foucault shows us this way.

Movements are always characterized not only by the definition of their historical condition, but also by the strategy which, inside that wider historical condition, they express. This is the principle of the uniqueness, of the singularity, of each movement: this is the central node, especially if you have been part of movements.

Q. In parallel to the consolidation of the workerist method and hypotheses you have just described, what emerged in different contexts was a discourse of the so-called ‘post-materialist movements’, a formula that described the student, the women’s, the pacifist, and the civil rights’ movements. It is precisely from this perspective that the sociology of social movements (social movement studies) has emerged: as an attempt to highlight the politics and agency of these movements, elements which a materialist approach, with its supposedly Marxist insistence on economics, was incapable of detecting. From here came the exclusion of concepts such as capitalism, social classes, exploitation, and revolution from the sociology of social movements. What do you think of this approach and of these theoretical perspectives?

A. Personally, I am a theorist of immaterial labour. I believe that cognitive labour is absolutely central and that it does not simply indicate a particular activity, but more widely a set of rationalities, affections, activities, wills, behaviours, and so on. I believe that the current figure of living labour possesses a cognitive, affective and cooperative consistency, something which can be described with all the adjectives that traditionally were used to define spirituality. Maybe it is because of this that when I hear people talking about ‘post-materialist movements’ I do not understand what they are talking about. Are we talking of the struggle of angels? The movements in question, it must be understood, are properly materialist ones. They are materialist—as are all behaviours that are historically rooted in reality—because they arise in a world of goods, of technologies, of reification and alienation, in a nature which has been fully transformed by human agency (so that we can speak of a second, a third, a fourth nature and so on), and because they arise in a relation of power which is always open ended, and which can be liberatory or destructive. Only through this approach it is possible to grasp the functions specific to living.

The feminist struggle is not a post-materialist struggle! It is a struggle about power, about material power. It is a struggle for wages, about domestic work, about the position of women in the family and in the wider society. Above all, it is a struggle of liberation from the centuries-old yoke imposed on women’s bodies, affections, emotions and potenze; it is a dynamic process of liberation, constantly on the move (unless it takes theological and identitarian stances, such as those defended by the feminism of ‘difference’).

All contemporary movements are linked to the discovery of the strength of immaterial labour, the strength of a cognitive and cooperative working class, and thus are linked to a wealth of emotions, affects, will, hate and love. All of this occurs in a world which is profoundly different from that of the past: it is not the world of man and nature, but that of man and a second, third, fourth nature, i.e. a world of man and machines. Thus, what does technological appropriation, the appropriation of fixed capital, mean? It means the ability to rule over the technical and material structures—set up by capital for purposes of acquisition and exploitation—that surround and ‘situate’ your life. This applies to life in a metropolis as well as to factory work. Deep down, it applies to the relations between two people who, as soon as they give birth to a child, immediately notice the importance of technologies and to what extent nature has now become—as Judith Butler claims—a mere ‘ordering’ of these natural (i.e., human and historical) elements.

Q. Your work with Michael Hardt is cited twice in this issue of Anthropological Theory. By way of conclusion, we would like to ask you two questions relating to the critiques you have been receiving. To start with, in “A Materialist Analysis of Contemporary Feminist Movements,” Brunella Casalini pays close attention to migrant women employed in caregiving and assistance to stress the differences between immaterial labour and caregiving and reproductive work. Thus, women’s labour, in the contemporary phase of capitalist accumulation, could show the impossibility of distinguishing between material and immaterial, rather than the affirmation of the latter element, whose dominance thus would seem to be limited to a minority of the global population.

A. I agree that it is impossible to distinguish between material and immaterial labour. As is known, the question of immaterial labour represented for us the necessity of affirming that labour was no longer merely that of callous hands, but also that of thought, of affection, of relation, of care. It was absolutely necessary, to deal with all the aspects of labour, to forcefully introduce this discourse, which we labelled ‘immaterial labour’. We underlined the limits and inadequacy of this term hundreds of times. But it was important to insist on this new, cognitive, affective, dimension of labour, for it allowed us to understand the ways in which neoliberalism was developing.

From this perspective, I both accept the critique regarding the impossibility of distinguishing material and immaterial labour, and, at the same time, insist on the danger of reaffirming a theoretical hegemony of materiality. It is sufficient to look at the ways in which factories and services are developing at present: this transformation has been going on for far too long to be denied, the cogency of these ‘immaterial’ aspects is too evident to allow for misunderstandings. And to consider women’s work as generally decisive in the affirmation of the pre-eminence of affective elements has been a correct and farsighted intuition.

Thus, it is correct to say that work is always one, and that materiality and immateriality are always two abstractions from the concrete reality of work. They are even more so in the face of the materiality of what Tronti called the ‘working class subject’ [soggetto operaio], in the face of its emotional and cognitive, as well as material intensity. At the same time, it is also true that the fundamental primacy, which probably came to us through the ‘feminine virtues’ of work, is that of cognitive labour: it is here that neoliberalism affirmed itself.

All of this calls for a second reflection, inherent to the fact that our work—mine and Michael Hardt’s—has been essentially a work of rupture. We have opened up a space, and it is inside this space that the results of this work can be corrected and critiqued. We have elaborated a Workerism for new times, and it hasn’t been easy, it took ten years of work. But the main point is that it was about breaking up a rock-solid front, that in many ways is still with us today, as can be seen in some of the limits of contemporary struggles in France and in the traditional blocks of the socialist fronts, surely in a state of decomposition but still present and active.

Thus, I agree on the inconsistency of the distinction between material and immaterial labour, but on the other hand I reaffirm—in relation to women’s work and to those aspects of it that now are being reinserted in, to put it brutally, male work—the prevalence of this new immaterial ‘quality’ of the workforce as a very real tendency.

Q. A second point touched upon by Casalini, concerns your optimistic reading of the connection between the composition of contemporary living labour and the opening up of potential spaces of resistance, freedom, or even global rebellion. You have often been critiqued for your optimistic stance. Would you like to say something about it?

A. I have been hearing this argument for 40 years, this optimism/pessimism juxtaposition, which has now found a more mature formulation in terms of eschaton/catechon. But I think that this distinction is silly, and that it can, at times, bring with it a more serious risk.

I was saying before that our theoretical discourse—mine and Micheal Hardt’s, but also that of Workerism more in general—has always been a discourse of rupture. From this perspective, we have certainly been optimists, if by optimism you mean openness, dealing with things at their root, reasoning from open questions which we threw out there. To act is to proceed through devices, and I would say that in this optimism as a ‘thought of openness’ we can effectively find the best in contemporary thought: Foucault, Deleuze, the great historians, starting with EP Thompson. It is a thought that sees the world in fully materialist terms and sees its own truth only in the capacity of constructing it bottom up. Let me recall the debate between Chomsky and Foucault, when the latter told the former ‘you are the real optimist, affirming great principles and, in parallel, a theoretical practice unable to come into contact with them. I try to unite these two elements, as Spinoza taught us to do’. And he added that the working class is not moved by great ideals, but by the desire to construct its own happiness. This is a first kind of response to those who critique my optimism.

Secondly, it is important to understand what is this ‘pessimism’ which opposes it. It is the pessimism of reason—untiringly spoken of by those that in humanities and sociology consider themselves ‘scientists’—and complemented by the optimism of the will: a conceptual couple which I find incomprehensible. This pessimism is castrating. Does it amount to ‘realism’? Yes, but it is a realism which is subservient to the given, to power, to the status quo. In my opinion, any open thought—especially if its ambition is to root itself in struggles, in materiality, i.e., if it aspires to be bottom up—cannot but be optimistic. An optimism of reason, according to the classical definition of the enlightenment given by Kant and developed by Foucault.

Our thought is not just concerned with ruptures, but also with struggles. Openness is not simply that which contrasts or cuts through the rupture, but something which is constructed through the struggle: it is a constructive, constitutive, productive thought. Marx is an optimist. Marxism acted and constructed within history. I am thinking of Tronti in Operai e Capitale: who could define him as a pessimist? He only became a pessimist later on, with the reflection on the autonomy of the political. My optimism, it must be understood, has never been this optimism of the will. That kind of optimism can only be terroristic or reactionary.

The unity of work and the unity of man imply, on the one hand, a search for something, an openness of reason, and hence optimism, and on the other, a clash with reality in which it is important to keep one’s willpower in difficult situations. I have spent eleven years in jail, and it is above all there that I have learnt how the optimism of reason and the pessimism of the will are fundamental weapons not only in order to resist, but in order to live and to continue building.