Marx in Movement: Operaismo in Context by Antonio Negri

Abstract

Reviewed by: Marx in Movement: Operaismo in Context by Antonio Negri Robert F. Carley (bio) Antonio Negri, Marx in Movement: Operaismo in Context, trans. Ed Emery. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021, ISBN 978-1-5095-4424-0. 184 pages. $24.95 (paperback) The essays and transcribed talks gathered under the title Marx in Movement: Operaismo in Context punctuate the extensive theoretical development of "operaismo," or "Workerism." Workerism is a political project developed as a theoretically wrought and non-party affiliated militant communist strategy that, as Harry Cleaver put it, reads Capital politically, specifically, as a document "that reflected a recognition and appreciation of the ability of workers to take the initiative in the class struggle." The necessarily cooperative and communicative social fabric of "living labor" are, in Workerism, prior to and constitutive of capital in an historical, sociological, political, and economic sense. Both Capital and the Grundrisse have, over time, provided to Workerism a foundation to understand both (the sociality of living) labor and class struggle as autonomous: socially and, then, politically instituent. Regarding the latter, Mario Tronti famously puts it this way: "[…] capitalist development becomes subordinated to working class struggles; it follows behind them, and they set the pace to which the political mechanisms of capital's own reproduction must be tuned." In Workerism, labor's de facto social autonomy and, especially, its ability to articulate its autonomy politically is a persistent threat to capital's ability to fix or dominate it. When it does, it does so principally through technological means; technology, over time, constitutes a part of the reorganization and political (re)activation of the working class. Capital responds; it struggles to compose from out of labor the political and technological means, however crude or sophisticated, to contain labor and extract wealth from it. This is, later on, reflected in Negri's Spinozism where revolutions in the relations of production are neither antagonistic nor dialectical; they represent two co-extensive singularities with, today, the multitude in the lead and empire treading heavily and directly on its path. Marx in Movement illustrates Negri's contributions to Workerism from readings of Marx's Capital and Grundrisse and in dialogue (initially) with Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, Romano Alquati, Sergio Bologna, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and then in a critical posture toward Keynesianism, structural-functionalism, post-industrial sociology, Marxist state theory (neo-Gramscian and German Derivationist), and finally in conversation with Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, and more contemporary theorists, in particular, Paulo Virno, Carlo Vercellone, Yann Moulier-Boutang, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Matteo Pasquinelli. This book, especially the last chapter, argues that the methodology of Workerism is conjunctural: responsive to the changing sociality of labor as an [End Page 115] inventive force that recomposes itself both politically and through the technological changes imposed upon it (to scatter and displace it). In Workerism, each conjuncture gives rise, or corresponds, to new characteristics that determine the places into which classes are organized in economic production and the positions that classes inhabit socially and spatially. It follows that there is no "post-Workerism" as Negri argues; rather, in each conjuncture, the autonomy or invention-power of the working class (an ontological foundation and substrate) changes its technical and political composition. Workerism's political strategy is based on a "hard core" postulate: the ontological priority of labor. As such, Workerism could be read as a "research program" described in Michael Burawoy's interpretation of Trotsky's Results and Prospects in his article "Two Methods in Search of a Social Science." Despite this, the hypotheses and, by extension, the theorization of Workerism changes (is re-specified) across each conjuncture as, first, the technical composition of the working class intensifies and expands, changing it and, second, as the working class begins to elaborate a political composition through new forms of organization, strategy, and tactics that exceed the ability of capital to contain it. Negri concludes that Workerism, in its most current phase, rests on the extraordinary potential of working class struggle due to its high levels of technical composition in the current conjuncture but, arguably, leaves open the question of the shape that its political strategy and organization will take on. The first two chapters are the longest...