Marx in Movement: Operaismo in Context by Antonio Negri (review)

Abstract

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