Author's Note: This Introduction was one of three written by the translators for the 1984 Bergin & Garvey publication of the book. Both Italian and French editions were referenced for the translation. All translators were amateurs and recommend consultation with the original.>
First and foremost, Antonio Negri's Marx Beyond Marx is a book for revolutionary militants. Formally, the book is a reading of Marx's Grundrisse - a sweeping reinterpretation of the central thrust and particular developments of Marx's 1857 notebooks. But it is more than that. Marx Beyond Marx is above all a passionately political work designed to present an alternative to orthodox interpretations of Marx by demonstrating how the Grundrisse contains a Marxist science of class struggle and revolution in action. To accomplish this demonstration, Negri weaves together a fierce polemic and a detailed examination and reinterpretation of the text itself. Marx Beyond Marx is a difficult book, and its difficulty creates the danger that its study will be limited to academic Marxists. This would be tragic. We have edited and translated this book, not to contribute another volume to the shelves of English-speaking Marxists, but to put a new and exciting weapon into the hands of working-class militants. However difficult Marx Beyond Marx may be - and its difficulty stems both from the raw complexities of the Grundrisse itself and from Negri's own theoretical language - its study is more than worth the effort to any militant seeking new ways to understand and use Marxism to come to grips with working class struggle in the present crisis.
For Negri, the Grundrisse represents the "summit
of Marx's revolutionary thought"-a summit that can provide a powerful
foundation for revolutionary political practice. He contrasts the Grundrisse
to Capital, which, he correctly points out, has often been interpreted
in an objectivist and determinist fashion to justify reactionary politics.
Negri argues that it is harder to do this with the Grundrisse. In
these notebooks, we discover a less polished but more passionate Marx,
writing feverishly far into the nights of the crisis of 1857. The Grundrisse
is no prelude to Capital, no rough draft of a later, more mature
work.
Rather it is the Grundrisse that is the broader,
more sweeping work, and it is here that we can find the richest, most complete
working through of Marx's understanding of the class struggle that both
constitutes and ultimately explodes capitalism. In this, Negri differs
from many previous interpreters of the Grundrisse, such as E. Hobsbawm
or Roman Rosdolsky, many of whose positions he takes to task in the course
of the book.
Negri begins his commentary on the Grundrisse
noting how Marx's dissection of Alfred Darimon's theory of money was partly
a pretext for Marx to explore the relationship between money and crisis,
between money and the class struggle. Many who will read Negri on Marx
may object that his interpretation of the Grundrisse is, sometimes,
also a pretext to lay out his own analysis of the class struggle. He has,
they may protest, taken from Marx only what suits him. As he works through
Marx's notebooks, spurning a bit of analysis here (of productive labor),
lamenting the absence of analysis there (the lack of a special chapter
on the wage and working class subjectivity), dismissing other pieces as
philosophical lapses (the general law of historical development) and marking
many instances of ambiguity and of limitations to the analysis, it does
become obvious that Negri has pieced together an interpretation of the
major lines of Marx's argument through his own selective process. But we
should not be afraid to pick and choose among Marx's ideas. This is what
Marxists have always done, whether they are honest about it or not. Traditional
Marxists have always focused on the objectivist elements of Marx because
that fit their political proclivities. Critical theory seems to have ignored
Marx's theory of the working class as subject because of a deep - seated
pessimism acquired in a period of crisis. For those of us who share Negri's
commitment to the constant renewal of revolutionary practice, we can focus
on those elements of Marx that inform the analysis of our own struggles.
Several generations of Marxists have given us the habit of perceiving the
mechanisms of domination. What we need now is to use Marx to help us discover
the mechanisms of liberation. We can leave to Marxologists the debate as
to whether Negri is right about what Marx really meant. We can read Negri
for Negri, and judge the insightfulness of his comments on their own merits.
When, at the end of chapter 5, Negri questions the correctness of his interpretation,
we are tempted to say it doesn't matter. If Marx did not mean what Negri
says he did, so much the worse for Marx. This, it seems to me, is the only
spirit that can take us along Marx's path in such a way that we can indeed
go "beyond Marx."
Negri's reading of the Grundrisse is what
I call a political reading in the sense that his work tries to show how
each category and relationship examined by Marx, "relates to and clarifies
the antagonistic nature of the class struggle." At the same time -
and here is the domain of his polemic - he examines the meaning of the
analysis for the political strategy of the working class. From the earliest
chapters of Marx Beyond Marx, in his examination of Marx's analysis
of money as a critique of power, we recognize that for Negri there is no
separate "political" sphere in Marx. Understood as the domain
of class struggle, politics is omnipresent; all of the categories are political.
There is no need to riffle Marx Beyond Marx looking for the "political"
passages. Every line is a political moment. There is a political excitement
here that carries the reader forward, through the more difficult passages,
toward ever more concrete analyses of the class struggle.
This approach is radically different from traditional
Marxism, which has always treated politics as one subject among others,
especially distinct from economics, and often carefully tucked away in
the attic of the superstructure. Over the years Marxism has been all but
sterilized by being reduced to a critique of capitalist hegemony and its
"laws of motion." The fascination of Marxists with capitalist
mechanisms of despotism in the factory, of cultural domination and of the
instrumentalization of working-class struggle has blinded them to the presence
of a truly antagonistic subject. The capitalist class is the only subject
they recognize. When they do see working-class struggle, it is almost always
treated as a derivative of capital's own development. The true dynamic
of capitalist development is invariably located in such "internal"
contradictions among capitalists as competition.
Negri's reading of the Grundrisse is designed
to teach - or to remind - that there have always been not one, but two
subjects in the history of capitalism. His political reading follows the
chronological development of the notebooks on two interconnected levels;
he simultaneously carries out an analysis of the political content of the
categories and examines Marx's method at work in their development. On
both levels he argues that what we observe is a growing tension between
capital's dialectic and an antagonistic working-class logic of separation.
The dialectic is not some metaphysical law of cosmological development.
It is rather the form within which capital seeks to bind working class
struggle. In other words, when capital succeeds in harnessing working class
subjectivity to the yoke of capitalist development, it has imposed the
contradictory unity of a dialectical relation. But to bind working class
struggle, to impose a unity, means that capital must overcome this other
subject - the working class - that moves and develops with its own separate
logic. This logic, Negri argues, is a non-dialectical one. It is a logic
of antagonism, of separation, that characterizes a class seeking not to
control another, but to destroy it in order to free itself. Two different
logics for two different and opposed classes.
Negri shows that Marx saw clearly how the historical
development of capitalist society has always involved the development of
the working class as a separate and antagonistic subject - a subject which
develops the power to throw the system into crisis and to destroy it. He
points out how, in the Grundrisse, Marx is able to trace the simultaneous
development of both subjects. At the same time that Marx tracks capital
from its formal domination of production via money, through its direct
domination of both production and circulation, to the level of the world
market and crisis, he also simultaneously brings to light the growth of
the working class from dominated living labor power, through its stage
as industrial proletariat, to its full development as revolutionary class
at the level of social reproduction. Two subjects, locked together by the
power of the one to dominate the other, but never the less two historical
subjects, each with the power to act, to seize the initiative in the class
struggle.
What has happened to capitalist hegemony? To the
objectivity of capital's laws of motion? To the location of the sources
of capitalist growth in the competitive interaction of capitalists? From
the point of view of the developing working-class subject, capitalist hegemony
is at best a tenuous, momentary control that is broken again and again
by workers' struggle. We should not confuse the fact that capitalists have,
so far, been able to regain control with the concept of an unchallengeable
hegemony. In a world of two antagonistic subjects, the only objectivity
is the outcome of their conflicts. As in physics, where two vector forces
create a resultant force whose direction and magnitude is distinct from
either of the two, so too in the class struggle that constitutes the development
of capital the "laws of motion" are the unplanned outcomes of
confrontation. However, in the development of this clash of subjectivities
the continual development of the working class from dominated labor power
to revolutionary class (a growth in the relative strength of the working
class vector) increasingly undermines capitalist control and imposes its
own directions on social development. Because of this, competition among
capitalists is less a driving force and more what Negri calls "sordid
family quarrels" over which managers are at best imposing discipline
on the working class.
It is this analysis of working class subjectivity
that infuses Negri's work with immediate relevance to those in struggle.
In this period when capital is trying to wield fiscal and monetary policy
as weapons against the working class, Negri's analysis helps us see that
capitalist crisis is always a crisis in its ability to control the working
class. A global crisis, such as the present one, Negri argues, can only
be produced by the combined and complementary struggles of the world's
working classes operating simultaneously in production and reproduction
- at the highest level of socialization. In Negri's reading we discover
all of this at that abstract and general level Marx could reach writing
in the midst of crisis in 1857. But we can also examine these abstractions
within the concrete determinations of our own situation and struggles within
capitalism. Negri's work is clearly conceived with such a project in mind.
And isn't this, always, the most exciting aspect of Marxism: its usefulness
for exploring our own transformative power as living subjects?
The reading begins with Marx's own first notes: on
money, money in the crisis, and ultimately money as power. Within and behind
money Marx discovers value, and the social relations of production. At
the social level money is (above all) capitalist power over labor. But
capitalist power over labor is the ability to force people into the labor
market, to force people to work for capital in production, and to coerce
surplus labor in the labor process. What could be more relevant today,
when capital is using monetary policy at both the national and international
levels as a weapon against working class consumption? Moreover, that monetary
attack on consumption is aimed directly at forcing people to work, and
at controlling the exchange between labor and capital so that profits (surplus
labor) are increased.
Even at this stage Marx's arguments - and Negri's
analysis of Marx surprise us with their topicality, their ability to inform
the present. Yet if Marx had stopped here, he would have been just one
more Marxist peering deeply into the nature of capitalist exploitation.
He doesn't.
As Negri points out, Marx is keenly aware that capital's
power to extort surplus labor is a power exerted over an "other"
whose own active subjectivity must be harnessed to capital's designs. Marx
explored this subjectivity and saw that it fought the primitive accumulation
of the classes: the forced creation of the labor market and the forced
submission of people to the lives of workers. He explored this subjectivity
and saw that it struggles against being forced to work.
Although he paints a true horror story of living
labor being dominated by capitalist-controlled dead labor, Marx also makes
clear that living labor cannot be killed off totally or capital itself
would die. The irony of capitalist reproduction is that it must assure
the continued reproduction of the living subject. The antagonism is recreated
on higher and higher levels as capital develops. What begins as the horror
of zombie-like dead labor being summoned against living labor, becomes,
over time, an increasingly desperate attempt by capital to protect its
own existence against an ever-more-powerful-and-hostile working class.
Capital can never win, totally, once and forever. It must tolerate the
continued existence of an alien subjectivity which constantly threatens
to destroy it. What a vision: capital, living in everlasting fear of losing
control over the hostile class it has brought into existence! This is the
peacefully placid capitalist hegemony of traditional Marxism turned inside
out, become a nightmare for the ruling class.
When surplus labor (value) takes on its monetary
form of profit, it becomes a socialized surplus value at the level of social
capital. It becomes both a pole and a measure of the antagonistic development
of capital. At this point the law of capitalist crisis emerges in the Grundrisse
as the continuing contradiction between the working class as necessary
labor and capital as surplus labor. The most fundamental dynamic of that
law produces the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This tendency,
which has been for so long mystified by Marxists, becomes in Negri's interpretation
of Marx an easily understood manifestation of the way working class struggle
blocks capitalist development. Although we can critique part of Negri's
formulation (it is not necessary to argue that working-class struggle raises
necessary labor as long as that struggle forces capital to raise the organic
composition of capital through its relative surplus-value strategy), the
basic thrust is keen and revealing. It is the continued working-class pressure
on capital that accentuates the contradictions and creates crisis. Every
time capital responds to workers' demands by expanding fixed capital and
reorganizing the labor process, the working class politically recomposes
itself in a new cycle of struggle. The full implications of this process
become clear in Negri's reading of Marx's fragment on machines. We see
how the frantic accumulation of fixed capital leaves less and less scope
for capital to impose work and to extract surplus work, thus undermining
the very basis of capitalist command. The more value capital sets in motion,
the smaller the proportion of surplus value it is able to extort. Today,
as capital proceeds to substitute ever more robot machines for increasingly
threatened and threatening industrial workers, it faces the very problem
Marx foresaw in the Grundrisse: a growing difficulty in finding
new ways of putting people to work in order to control them socially.
This analysis of the working class subject at the
point of production is then displaced in Marx's analysis to the sphere
of circulation. Here Negri carefully brings out Marx's argument that circulation
is the sinew which organizes and ties together not only all of the separate
moments of production, but also all of the social conditions of reproduction.
Circulation involves the socialization of capital - its emergence as social
capital. But again, we are not left with simply an ode to the comprehensiveness
of capitalist hegemony. By exploring Marx's analysis of the two-sided character
of the wage, Negri is able to bring out how the wage functions for the
working class. This is the domain of small-scale circulation: of the exchange
of labor power for the wage and the subsequent exchange of the wage for
use-values those products of necessary labor which satisfy working-class
needs. The wage here appears as working-class power to impose its needs,
and the extent of that power is only determined by the class struggle itself.
Once more we can study that unusual but inspiring
vision of capital striving desperately to contain an autonomously developing
working-class subject, hell-bent on the continuous extension and diversification
of its own projects and needs at the same time that it increasingly refuses
capitalist control via the imposition of surplus labor. Are we not, once
again, at a most contemporary moment of the analysis? What were the 1960s
and 1970s, if not a simultaneous explosion of both autonomous needs and
of the refusal of capitalist work? What are the 1980s, if not a renewed
capitalist offensive to contain the explosion of needs, to roll them back
through a vicious attack on consumption, on the wage?
Negri argues that the analysis reaches its highest
development in Marx at the level of the world market, where capitalist
imperialism, fleeing the obstacles created by class struggle at home, spreads
its class antagonisms across the globe. This is the moment of the world
market, but also of the global factory and the international working class.
From this point on, capital can only respond to working class attack by
reorganizing its modern industrial apparatus internationally and by attempting
to reorganize the global reproduction of labor and the labor market. Is
this not the present project of capital in the crisis? Is not what is called
"reindustrialization" actually capitalist restructuration designed
to decompose that working-class power which created the crisis, and to
create new conditions for development? Certainly it is trying to do this,
in many ways, in many countries.
But the crisis continues because so far capital has
failed to achieve this decomposition. And that failure is simultaneously
a measure of the power of the working class to protect the ground it has
gained, and even, in places, to push forward its offensive. To listen to
the droning litanies of traditional Marxist hymns to capitalist power is
to be overwhelmed and exhausted by doomsaying. To read Negri - and through
him, Marx - is to be invigorated with the sense of working-class movement
and dynamism. It is to see the tenuousness of capitalist control and the
real, tangible possibilities of its destruction!
At the end of this book Negri takes up directly the
central issue raised by the emergence of working class subjectivity: revolution,
the end of capitalism, and the creation of a new society. The bulk of his
discussion of these issues is reminiscent of the Communist Manifesto,
as he outlines the implications of his reading of the Grundrisse
for the emergence of the new society Communism (he retains Marx's
word for it) and rejects other contemporary positions.
In the language of traditional Marxism, revolution
and the emergence of a new society has always been addressed as the question
of the "transition": of the passage through socialism to communism.
Negri argues forcibly that this is totally inconsistent with Marx's analysis
in the Grundrisse. The only "transition" in that work
is the reversal and overthrow of all of capital's determinations by the
revolutionary subject. Because capital's central means of social domination
is the imposition of work and surplus work, the subordination of necessary
labor to surplus labor, Negri sees that one of the two most fundamental
aspects of working class struggle is the struggle against work. Where profit
is the measure of capitalist development and control, Negri argues that
the refusal of work measures the transition out of capital. The refusal
of work appears as a constituting praxis that produces a new mode of production,
in which the capitalist relation is reversed and surplus labor is totally
subordinated to working-class need.
The second, positive side to revolutionary struggle
is the elaboration of the self-determined multiple projects of the working
class in the time set free from work and in the transformation of work
itself. This self-determined project Negri calls self-valorization. Communism
is thus constituted both by the refusal of work that destroys capital's
imposed unity and by the self-valorization that builds diversity and "rich,
independent multilaterality."
By this time it should be clear that Negri rejects
"socialism" as, at best, an advanced form of capitalism. His
major objection is that while socialism is understood as the planned redistribution
of income and property, it invariably retains the planned imposition of
work, and thus fails to escape the dynamic of capitalist extortion of surplus
work and the subordination of needs to accumulation. Any existing socialist
regime or socialist party program could be taken as an example. But the
point is more than a critique of the Italian Communist Party's participation
in the imposition of austerity, or of the Soviet labor camps. It is an
affirmation that the concept of socialism has never grasped the real issue:
the abolition of work or the liberation of society from narrow production
fetishism. Socialism can only constitute a repressive alternative to the
collapse of market capitalism - a more advanced level of capitalist planning
at the level of the state. Today, when there is a growing "socialist"
movement in the United States calling for national planning, the nationalization
of industry, and "more jobs," Negri's arguments deserve the closest
attention.
Negri also rejects all utopian approaches to the
conceptualization of the end of capitalism. Very much in the tradition
of Marx's own denunciation of utopianism, Negri refuses to think of the
transition in terms of the achievement of some preconceived goal, however
laudable. At this point scientific Marxism not only demands that the present
movement be followed forward into the future, but, Negri argues, we must
also recognize that this movement occurs without determinacy or teleology.
In this interpretation of Marx we are simultaneously freed from the blinding
romanticism of utopia and the paralysing weight of determinism. The central
present movement that will constitute the future is that of the revolutionary
subject as it reverses capital's determinations and constitutes its own
self-valorization. The antagonistic logic of working class separation reaches
its conclusion as it explodes and destroys capital's dialectic. It explodes
all binary formulae, as Negri says, bursting the dialectical integument
and liberating a multidimensional and ever-changing set of human needs
and projects.
As we discover the revolutionary subject to be both
self-constituting and rich in multilaterality, we are also implicitly freed
of the traditional organizational formula of the party. There is no place
here for any narrow formulation of "class interest" to be interpreted
by a revolutionary elite. There is only the multiplicity of autonomously
determined needs and projects. Although Negri does not take up the issue
of revolutionary organization here - it is not his project at this point
- he does strongly reject one variant on the party theme: a voluntarist
violence that only negates capitalist violence, which by not being organized
on the material basis of revolutionary self-valorization falls into terrorism.
This is one of the many points in his work that shows his distance from
and antagonism toward those armed vanguards" with which the Italian
state has sought to associate him as an excuse for imprisoning him.
To sum up Negri's exposition of Marx's line of argument
in the Grundrisse: capitalism is a social system with two subjectivities,
in which one subject (capital) controls the other subject (working class)
through the imposition of work and surplus work. The logic of this control
is the dialectic which constrains human development within the limits of
capitalist valorization. Therefore, the central struggle of the working
class as independent subject is to break capitalist control through the
refusal of work. The logic of this refusal is the logic of antagonistic
separation and its realization undermines and destroys capital's dialectic.
In the space gained by this destruction the revolutionary class builds
its own independent projects - its own self-valorization. Revolution then
is the simultaneous overthrow of capital and the constitution of a new
society: Communism. The refusal of work becomes the planned abolition of
work as the basis of the constitution of a new mode of producing a new
multidimensional society.
What are the implications of learning to read the
categories of Marx's analysis politically? For one thing we can now readdress
the question of Capital. Negri is absolutely correct when he points
out that Capital has often been interpreted in an objectivist fashion.
But it should now be clear that there is an alternative. Once we have learned
to recognize and avoid the traps of objectivism and to carry out a political
or class analysis of Marx's categories, we can read Capital (or
any of Marx's writings) in this manner. There are many aspects of Marx's
analysis in the Grundrisse which are more carefully and fully explored
in Capital. Certainly we can gain from the study of this material.
When we do read Capital politically, as I have tried to do elsewhere,
we generate an interpretation that is not only largely consistent with
the main lines of Negri's book, but which sharpens and enriches the analysis
- the fruit of the ten years of Marx's work from 1857 to 1867, when the
first volume of Capital appeared.
We follow Marx's path "beyond Marx" when
we read Marx politically, from within the class struggle, and when we critique
Marx from the vantage point of our own needs. It is precisely this kind
of reading and critique that Negri has carried out. It is this that makes
his work valuable and exciting.