Marx in Movement: Operaismo in Context

Abstract

Antonio Negri’s Marx in Movement: Operaismo in Context (2022) is the first installment of a planned trilogy. This work collects Negri’s foundational texts and recent talks relating to his theoretical interventions on operaismo or workerism. The book contains three parts. The first theorizes the formation of what Negri calls the social worker, emphasizing the importance of cognitive labor, and the processes of subjectivation as a response to worker upheavals with three essays published between 1974 and 1992. The second section, “Workers and Capital Today,” investigates contemporary alterations in class composition. Negri here uses the concept of immaterial labor, as well as Karl Marx’s notions of the general intellect and real subsumption. Finally, in the third section, “Polemical Considerations,” Negri strongly opposes the “post” in so-called post-operaismo and reflects on his own political break with Mario Tronti. This break, Negri suggests, came down to Tronti’s calculation that national political sovereignty is required to tame transnational capital. Negri theorizes transformations in labor since the 1960s. He argues that changes in labor after ‘1968’ can primarily be understood as a reaction by capital to worker militancy. The production and modulation of subjectivity takes on greater focus as labor becomes more collaborative, non-repetitive, and integrated alongside information technologies. Negri compares what he calls the “mass” worker—whom he associates with Taylorism’s labor process, Fordism’s working-day and wage relation, and Keynesian state intervention (14–15)—to the social worker, who takes form following the social protests symbolized by the year 1968. For him, the end of the Bretton Woods system and the 1973 oil crisis informed capital’s reaction to worker upheaval. Mobility thus becomes a key governing strategy as it is re-signified as constitutive of freedom and prevents worker organization (22). The ascendance of the social worker transforms class struggle and requires new theoretical tools (35). Immaterial labor is the labor of the social worker, who finds herself increasingly enmeshed within digital networks and flows of information. On the topic of immaterial labor, Negri mobilizes Marx’s concept of real subsumption to extend Michel Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism’s production of the “entrepreneur of the self.” Post-