Conclusion: a bad string makes a bad necklace

New old categories for the ‘new’ era

In the course of this article we have addressed the inadequacy of Negri and Hardt’s concepts of material and immaterial labor for the understanding of capitalism and its contradictions — the string of their fascinating necklace.

Negri and Hardt’s categories of material and immaterial labor replace the old categories of manual and mental labor of traditional Marxist times.[212] The latter were intended to conceptualize the ‘manual’ as a potentially revolutionary agent of class struggle. It is important to notice that the essential distinction between those who create and those who execute within production — thus a distinction in roles and privileges — became conflated with ‘mental’ and ‘manual’ work, i.e. the type of work done.

The increasing investment of capital into what Negri and Hardt call immaterial production and the consequent increasing rationalization of mental labor has now put this categorization into question. ‘Mental’ labor now cuts across the lines of privileges and proletarianization and includes, side by side, the call center worker and the top designer. Having thus lost its original rationale, it is now a bad category.

Negri and Hardt’s ‘new’ category of ‘immaterial’ labor, however, does not seem to be better than this. Like ‘mental labor’, we have seen that immaterial labor includes, side by side, the call center worker and the top designer too. Using the wrong category, Negri and Hardt give themselves a hard time in trying to convince us why this category correctly encircles the potentially subversive ‘new subject’: why the migrant, although he does manual work, is immaterial, and why the top designer, who is included in the category, is a revolutionary subject.

The problem of bad categories can be solved either by looking for more appropriate categories — or by making the bad category elastic enough to patch up all its shortcomings. Negri and Hardt choose the second solution. The old concept of mental labor excluded manual labor, thus it was far too rigid. Negri and Hardt define the new concept, immaterial labor, in a more comprehensive way: as any possible human activity — either manual or mental, either done inside or outside the workplace — that produces ideas, communication or affections, either as product or a byproduct. With this definition, immaterial labor can include anything. Indeed, what human activity is not an expenditure of thoughts, affects or an act of communication after all? Even the production of nothing can be seen as production of something: needs and desires, which are indeed human forms of affects and communication.

The convenient elasticity[213] of the category of ‘immaterial’ labor allows Negri and Hardt to sneak into and out of the ‘subject’ of immaterial labor the ‘right’/ ‘wrong’ groups according to the current rating of sympathy scored in the liberal-leftist world. Thus black ‘communities’, tribes in the Pacific, housewives, students, Indian farmers fighting against the genetic industry, protesters involved in the anti-capitalist movement, workers in flexible jobs, economic migrants, the radical student and the academic like Negri are all in.[214]

Being amenable to include what is ‘cool’ and exclude what is ‘dated’, the new categories for the ‘new’ era have the power to please and flatter a large range of readers. Their elasticity is good for ‘explaining’ anything as effects or acts of immaterial production.

This is the secret behind the intellectual universality of Negri and Hardt. When anything can be described as the creation of ‘communication’ or ‘affects’; when anything, even the production of nothing at all (sorry: needs), can be considered as ‘production’, we have found the Holy Grail of the theorist, the magic key for the Theory of Everything capable of accommodating everything and in the end explaining nothing.

A new fetishism of production for the ‘new’ era

By inheriting the traditional Marxist categorization, although having turned them into stretchable rubber, Negri and Hardt uncritically inherit assumptions and values which were implicit in their use.

First of all, they inherit the tendency to attribute some form of moral value to the role of ‘producer’ in capitalism. For the traditional Marxist there was a moral value to be a productive manual worker — for Negri and Hardt, turning the scale of moralistic ‘value’ upside down, there is a moral value in being a productive immaterial worker. Negri and Hardt try very hard to convince the reader that tribes of the Pacific islands are productive (of herbal remedies) and that those excluded from the labor market are productive (of needs and desires). For people like us who do not share this same productivist moralism (in either its straight or inverted form) this is just a waste of ink.[215] We noticed that this construction serves, no doubt, an ideological agenda. Behind the appearance to reclaim moral ‘value’ for the dispossessed it feeds us in fact with a petty bourgeois vision of a society of equally worthy ‘producers’: some of valuable pieces of design, some of needs and desires.

Together with uncritical productivism, Negri and Hardt inherit an uncritical fetishism of the productive forces — again, turned upside down. The traditional Marxist trusts the development of (industrial) forces of production as neutral and potentially fit for future self-management; Negri and Hardt trust the development of (immaterial) forces of production as inherently subversive and potentially fit for self-management. But now the machine is substituted by a loose entanglement of networks of social relations.

We have stressed that like traditional Marxism and like much bourgeois thought, Negri and Hardt cannot see our social relations, i.e. capital, behind the apparent objectivity of production. This blindness reaches the climax when they mistake the apparent autonomy of production from the individual human, which is evidence of its nature as capital, as evidence of its autonomy from capital!

In fact Negri and Hardt draw a curtain of simplistic enthusiasm over reality. By addressing immaterial production overlook what the existence of production of pure ideas and communicational frameworks actually implies: the separation of the creative side from the executive side of human activity; real subsumption of labor; the daily boredom and pain lived by the worker who is engaged in activity that has been subsumed. And crucially it is one with the existence of privileged producers of designs, IT frameworks and all the apparatus of control over the labor of others. The fact that members of society who partake of such privileges cannot see this problem is perhaps not a coincidence.

Consistent with their uncritical acceptance of the present, Negri and Hardt do not see the contradictions of capitalism in its inhumanity and unacceptability, in its denial of creativity, intelligence or affections for us, and in our hatred.Instead, for them the main contradiction of capitalism is in the humanity, creativity and affections that immaterial production develops; in the inherent goodness of the present conditions, which we should not resist but enhance.

A new paleo-Marxism for the ‘new’ era

But let us be fair to Negri and Hardt. They do not replicate old Marxism: theirs is a ‘new’ old Marxism for a ‘new’ era. It is a vulgar Marxism turned upside down, which inverts the ‘worthiness’ from the manual worker to the immaterial worker. Coherently with a preference for a ‘new’ category for the revolutionary ‘subject’ which includes the middle class, this doctrine embraces perfect middle-class liberal values: the idealization of bourgeois democracy, the dream of consumer sovereignty as the best solution for the future, the rejection of the despotism of past working class organization, and so on.[216]

Despite trying to appear to oppose old Marxism and to be new and exciting, however, Negri and Hardt’s theory smells musty already! Not only because it is based on old fads such as the enthusiasm for Toyotism, already long out of fashion. But also because Negri and Hardt cannot get out of the impasse of traditional Marxism, since they share the same fundamental problems: a lack of understanding of capital as objectification of social relations and the consequent hopeless cul-de-sac of intending revolution as self-management of the present production.

Objectivism and subjectivism for the ‘new’ era

Negri and Hardt’s uncritical acceptance of apparently objectivistic ideas may surprise us, since their books are full of subjectivistic assertions of Autonomist inheritance.

However, in this article we have seen that at a closer inspection Negri and Hardt’s conception of subjectivity is as mistaken and confused as their conception of objectivity. We have argued that the subjectivity that Negri and Hardt celebrate as the ‘multitude’ is merely bourgeois consciousness, the product of our bourgeois relations of exchange. This subjectivity is precisely that which creates capital as an objectivity. Thus Negri and Hardt end up celebrating the coin of capital in both its two faces: the objectivity of immaterial production and the intriguing vitality of bourgeois subjectivity and democratic exchanges.

This shows, we said, a lack of dialectical understanding. This is why under the sheep’s clothes of Negri and Hardt’s shallow subjectivism we discover the wolf of uncritical objectivism, which is, ultimately, bourgeois. We cannot be too surprised then if Negri and Hardt uncritically adhere to post-Fordist technological determinism, and proclaim that the paradigms of immaterial production can shape us down to our marrows. Despite their apparent supersession of those bourgeois theories, Negri and Hardt simply adhere to them and only give them some incoherent and decorative radical twist.

The silver linings of capital: optimism and pessimism for the ‘new’ era

We have seen that Negri and Hardt are able to present their theory as excitingly subjectivistic. ‘We’ created immaterial labor in our autonomous struggle, ‘we’ imposed it on capital. Behind the power of capital we have got our own unofficial but effective power.

Against this view we have presented a history of capitalist development that sees restructuring and class compromises as the re-imposition of the domination of capital on labor. It won’t be of any use for us to deny that we still live in capitalism as Negri and Hardt do.[217] But for us the reality of capitalism as the present domination is double-sided. The positive side of restructuring is not something that doubles its negative side but it is an aspect of it — it is the increasing unacceptability of capital, now extended more deeply to the globe. That immaterial labor has contradictions inherent in itself is true, but they are not its inherent goodness, but its potential fragility. The new weapons used by capital to subsume us make capital more crucially dependent on our compliance: within the practice of immaterial production, for example, the zero-stock policies or the volatility of smiles and sense-of-humor required in team work are rather vulnerable points. And, with the flight of capital abroad, the working class involved in (any and mainly industrial) production in the globe has increased, increasing the potentials for uncontrollable new cycles of struggle at a global level.

To stress how capitalist production is bad for our health and happiness, to stress that immaterial production is contradictory and bound to be dismantled with the revolution, this is the real answer to pessimism.

Negri and Hardt’s striving to find a hidden silver lining in capitalist production is real pessimism instead. Their celebration of unquestionably good things as aspects of the present system of production is in fact the celebration of the human powers that capital has assumed, disempowering and dehumanizing us in the ontological inversion. This celebration is an ideological capitulation — which we have equated with bourgeois enthusiasm for ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’.

A ‘new’ religion for a ‘new’ era: the doctrine of Negative Reality Inversion[218]

Once the string of Negri and Hardt’s necklace has been cut we can still be fascinated by the single, colorful beads. We have read about a world where we are overwhelmingly and hegemonically surrounded by immaterial production done in common, and escaping subsumption and control. No doubt many assertions in Negri and Hardt’s books are exciting and consolatory. So exciting that it is hard to raise our head from their books and look around us.

In fact what is described in Negri and Hardt’s work is not the world we know. It is not our daily experience of commodification and subsumption. But we are told: although what we see is the opposite, we have to believe that what we see around is simply a distortion due to capital’s overlap with an otherwise free and autonomous process of production and ideal democratic exchange.

If we have to abandon Marxism, which seemed to correctly describe the present world, for a doctrine which correctly describes what we cannot actually see, we need faith: Negri and Hardt’s doctrine is indeed a new religion for a ‘new’ world. Like all religion, we are told not to look at the world and our experience, but to something beyond, which we cannot see. In fact, we can entirely apply to Negri and Hardt, one by one, Marx’s words about religion:

[Negri and Hardt’s work] is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against [Negri and Hardt’s work] is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is [the creativity and communicativity of immaterial production] (Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction, italics from the original.[219]).

The new religion for the ‘new’ times, however, can present itself only as rational and based on ‘facts’. Thus it can be only based on a skillful capacity to find facts as evidences of their inverse, and indeed Negri and Hardt are very skilled in this. We call this the method of Negative Reality Inversion.

Does our work get increasingly commanded through IT means? This means that the ‘intelligence’ of IT ‘permeates’ us and makes us ‘more informationalised’ and ‘more intelligent’.

Do we interact through automated systems? This does not mean that our communication is not real, it is only virtual.

Do scientists complain about the recent increasing privatization of research, previously supported by state funds — e.g. patenting DNA, etc.? This is evidence that production is ‘increasingly’ made in common.[220]

Are services increasingly privatized and increasingly run like businesses? This means that today all production is increasingly run like services![221]

Does Toyotism imposes stricter managerial control over the communication between workers? This means that Toyotism has increased communication because the control of it is central in production.

Are recent struggles such as the Los Angeles riots, the revolt in Chiapas, etc. isolated explosions that do not communicate in an ‘era’ of communication and cooperation? This means that they are communicative — but it’s a new communication, not horizontal but... vertical (Empire, p. 55).

Are the propertyless deprived of the power to produce? This means that they are productive (of needs).

Are the poor ‘subjugated’? This means that they are ‘powerful, always more powerful’ (sic, Empire, p. 157).

To conclude, we invite readers to recall their healthy suspicions about priests.The critique of religion is the prerequisite of all critique.