Special Section: Eurocrisis, Neoliberalism and the Common

On the Constitution and

Financial Capital

Theory, Culture & Society

2015, Vol. 32(78) 2538
! The Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0263276415597977
tcs.sagepub.com

Toni Negri
European Graduate School

Abstract
Antonio Negris article explores the relationship between the juridical categories of
public and private and the political concept of the common through the theme of
the material constitution defining actual relations of power which defy the crystallization of formal constitutions. The financial convention shaping the material constitution of contemporary capitalism refers to the rise of what Foucault called
biopower, where value is no longer the expression of a mere quantity of commodities
but of a set of activities and services, which are immediately cooperative. In this
context, any form of measure cannot but be political and hence it must be established through new forms of economic governance. The social relation of capital
becomes immediately political once money displaces labour as rule, norm and measure of value. As a result, processes of political subjectivation within the Eurocrisis
combine de-stituent and con-stituent movements: requests for insolvencies, social
occupations, commoning and mutualization are the means through which social
struggles formulate the multitudes demands for equality as a condition of freedom.
Keywords
capitalism, commonfare, Euro, financial crisis, Marxism, money, neoliberalism,
self-education

I will organize my intervention around three basic points. First of all,

I will try to dene the nancial convention that dominates today and the
way it has modied the relation between the public and the private.
Second, I will try to analyse the way in which the private and the
public are inscribed in the 1948 [Italian] constitution and, more importantly, how they gure in the construction of the European constitution.
Finally, I will try to understand how the constitutional convention that
binds us could be undone in the name of the common, by opposing
antagonistic dispositifs to the exercise of nancial power and by devising
a currency of the common. In short, what does it mean to advance

Corresponding author: Toni Negri.

Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/
Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV OF LETHBRIDGE on February 1, 2016

26

Theory, Culture & Society 32(78)

towards the construction of the common within and against the current
European nancial convention?

1.1
The collective convention that dominates the contemporary constitutional relation is a nancial convention. Labour-value, which was once
posited as a regulative norm and a measure of social and productive
activities, has been replaced today by the nancial rule.
Let us then analyse the relationship between nancial capital and
material constitution. Today, nancial capital is the eective authority
legitimating the constitution of post-industrial societies. If, in the Fordist
era, the constitution took labour-value as its metric [tallone-misura] in the
organization of society, and this was the organizational structure of
industrial society, now that standard has been replaced by a nancial
metric. A number of consequences follow from this. Whereas the labourmeasure, in the Fordist constitution, was hard and relatively stable, and
depended directly on the relation of forces between classes (this was
the situation of any constitutional arrangement during the short century), the nancial convention, when it takes up a constitutional
form, that is, when it comes to constitute capitalist political relations hegemonically, presents itself as an independent and supervenient
power [Potenza . . . eccedente]. The works of Andre Orlean and Christian
Marazzi have correctly stressed this institutional circumstance. We are
dealing with an independence which, from the point of view of value,
consolidates and xes a proprietor-sign [segno proprietario] (in terms of
private property see especially Leo Specht), but which, at the same time,
also appears as crisis and surplus [eccedenza]. It does so not only in
relation to old and static determinations of labour-value but, also and
above all, in relation to the continuous work of anticipation and increment that characterize the nancial capture of socially produced
value and the extension of such operations on a global scale. The nancial convention therefore presents itself, institutionally, as global governance, because, in so far as it is organic to the regime of nancial
capital, the crisis is permanent. Under these conditions, it is more appropriate to talk of dierent phases of the business cycle, rather than of
crisis.
Let us be clear that, in this new conguration of constitutional rule,
there still is a material basis to the law of value, but it is no longer
individual labour that becomes abstract, but immediately social and
communal labour that is directly exploited by capital. The nancial
rule can become hegemonic because, in the new mode of production,
the common has emerged as an eminent power [potenza], as the substance
of relations of production, and it is progressively colonizing every social
space as a norm of valorization. Financial capital hunts this extending
Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV OF LETHBRIDGE on February 1, 2016

Negri

27

power, seeking to draw its prot by anticipating its extension, in the form
of nancial revenues. Harribey is correct when, in his discussion with
Orlean, he says that value, here, appears neither in substantial terms nor
as a simple accounting phantasmagoria, but as the sign of a productive
common, mystied but eective, which grows ever more, both intensively
and extensively.
To sum up: on the one hand, we can say that, in contemporary societies, in the processes by which society is subsumed into capital, use-value
and exchange-value are superimposed. On the other hand, we sense that
abstract labour does not dier from concrete labour only because it
represents the abstraction of the concrete form of labour: this, as it
were, is a purely epistemological dierence. The real and positive dierence consists in that all forms of labour are now equalized in abstract
labour and this happens in the context of a multilateral and cooperative
exchange of singular productive activities.
On the basis of this, we can draw two consequences. The rst one is
that, when it appears as command over productive activities through
nancial means, this subsumption of life embodies a biopower, i.e. the
capacity to exploit and extract surplus-value and to accumulate it on the
whole of social life. Money, nancial products and banks become means
of production, not qua productive forces but as instruments for the extortion of surplus-value. (For example, today, in France, the entirety of
revenue from income tax is used to service the national debt.)
The second consequence is that value appears on the market not so
much as substance as mere quantity of goods but as a combination of
activities and services which are increasingly cooperative. Life is accordingly subsumed by power both in its entirety and in the ensemble of its
singular expressions; the relations of production, in other words, put the
markets and/or nance in contradiction with the productive common.

1.2
Hence, starting from the 1990s after the long crisis that began in the
1970s, with the demolition of the Bretton-Woods standard a new global
standard has been established in a progressively more orderly way; a
standard that has replaced the labourist [lavorista] one.
Two conditions have allowed its development. The rst is the consummation of globalization: it is by confronting globalization that the
Fordist convention has given up on an element central to its legitimacy
and function, that is, the nation-state as the foundation of sovereignty.
The monetary convention has been removed from the nation-state and
directed towards global standards. Public debt has been removed from
sovereign regulations (simultaneously by capital and by individual
nation-states) and subjected to value mechanisms which are determined
Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV OF LETHBRIDGE on February 1, 2016

28

Theory, Culture & Society 32(78)

on the global market by nancial capitalists. The competition between

these actors always turns into solidarity against the exploited.
The second condition consists of the fact that, with the crisis of
(national) sovereignty, the public sphere has been substantially capitalized
[patrimonializzato] in a privatizing manner, even before this was accomplished juridically. What I mean is that the ends of accumulation have
yielded to the direct private appropriation of all public goods. In this
situation, the mediation between class interests performed (starting from
the 1930s) by public power and public property (and here it would be
necessary to dene the extent to which democratic political representation
could be identied with this mediating function) has been considerably
weakened, if not completely done away with (public property has been
weakened as much as political representation, because the latter, after
being increasingly emptied out of sovereignty by globalization, is no
longer directed to the government and ownership of the public).
In search for new conventions, bubbles (e.g. new economics, Asian,
Argentinean, etc.) follow one after the other. As Marazzi and Orlean
note, markets go mad, so to speak, but this is totally coherent with
the competition principle applied to nance. Here, in fact, a good is
not desired because it is rare but, paradoxically, the more it is demanded,
the more it is desired. It follows that the crisis is not due to the fact that
the rules of the nancial game have been circumvented, but to the fact
that they have been implemented. The crisis, in other words, is endogenous. It depends exclusively on the deregulation of capital markets and on
the privatization of public goods. Every use-value is thus transformed
into nancial goods (bonds) subject to speculation. The real subsumption
of society into capital acts through nancialization.
In this process, nancialization has imposed its logic upon the entire
world, turning the crisis into its own way of working.
Financialization is a process of inclusion of cooperation of the
cognitive and social common and then of exclusion, i.e. a process
of extension of the capitalist mode of production to pre-capitalist
markets, attended by the subsequent expulsion and pauperization of
those who, in this process, have been deprived of the access to
common goods. It is a sort of continuous reenactment of primitive
accumulation, of the enclosure of common lands (goods) and of the
proletarization of growing masses of citizens.
To be more precise:
1. The constitutional dispositif in the mature phase of capitalism subordinates
living labour-power, qua cognitive and cooperative society, to the nancial
abstraction of the process of valorization. The biopower [biopotenza] of the
common is totally subjected to the fetishism of the nancial convention.
Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV OF LETHBRIDGE on February 1, 2016

Negri

29

2. The capitalist constitutional dispositif aims to assign a measure, to x a regulatory standard within those crises that we have mentioned, where, in other
words, the breach of the Keynesian-Fordist relation calls for new measureconventions. Measure-value? To be sure, this measure, as we have seen, is not
something substantial; it is rather a political convention, determined according to variable circumstances. To be more precise: even though it is not
founded on substantial value, what makes this convention capitalist
(i.e. suited to the current organization of social labour for the sake of extracting prot or accumulating nancial revenues) is all the same a measure, a
class-bound measure, a dispositif of power. It is hardly necessary to recall
how Marx always dened value by subordinating it to surplus-value. Now,
this measure will still be founded on the relation between necessary time and
unpaid surplus time sure, but only if this social relation will be considered
globally. The permanence of the crisis consists precisely of this: of the tension
of this innite eort, of the tendency to approach an absolute limit, of this
accumulation of Russian dolls.
3. In order to x this political measure, capitalist constitutional power (and the
convention that sustains it) must create a new form of government of governance, to be more precise. The latter does not act as a power of exception
[potere di eccezione] but as the government of a continuous emergency
(it is an exception spread over time which reveals, negatively, a continuous instability and, positively, unexpected capture of surplus, ruptures
and excesses, etc.) within a fractured temporality and a permanent
untimeliness.

It is also worth mentioning, in passing, that in the current phase the

constitutive character of the neoliberal action is coupled with powerful
destitutive strategies (the threat of default, the movement of capital as a
political threat, etc.). As far as movements are concerned, moreover, the
constitutive imagination is fraught with destitutive contents (to take just
one example, the right to insolvency is a rst step to free the use of money
from direct exploitation).
It follows that, today, a constitutional reection must also presuppose the questioning and rethinking of the movements language and
practices upon which we have hitherto based our reection. It is a
matter of individuating some instruments with which to impose a new
relation of forces on nancial capital.

2.1
Let us go back to the Italian constitution and to its rst article
the Republic is founded on labour which used to torment us
(or make us laugh) since we were kids. Let us simply recall that workerism was born from the insight that this formula, in line with the interventionist Stalinism of the 1930s, established the Keynesian-Fordist
convention as the norm of exploitation of workers and of the political
Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV OF LETHBRIDGE on February 1, 2016

30

Theory, Culture & Society 32(78)

regulation of a society in which, at best, the public was completely subordinated to the enlarged reproduction of capital. The 1948 constitution
promotes a capitalist society in reformist terms: the Soviet Union had
recently defeated the armies of European fascism and reformism was the
only option left to the capitalists. Under these conditions, it is understandable how, in the class struggle, it became possible for the proletarians to exert pressure on the workers salary, as an instrument (note and
beware!) of democratic power, to be practised within and against the
productivity of the system: this process increases the (direct and indirect)
income of the working class and of the working society.
In this context, the public was dened as the mediating function of
capitalist social relations, that is to say, of the class struggle and it is
around this function that bourgeois political representation (especially
the Italian one) coalesces and takes form. As we all know, the Italian
constitution has never been completely realized. But even if it had, it
would not have given rise to that world of socialist wonders which we
had been promised. Already in the 1960s, M.S. Giannini who did not
want to confuse the constitution with the spirit of the Resistance and the
republican constituent assembly, as all too many rhetoricians used to and
still do noticed how claiming that the spirit of the constitution was still
alive simply amounted to taunting or cheating the citizens. However, the
1948 constitution was soon conformed, that is to say, adapted to the
incremental development of Italian capitalism through the regulatory
action of the state, as the representative of social capital, i.e. as the
mediator of the social struggle. And with the crisis of the 1970s and
the capitalist reforms of the 1980s began that reactionary process of
general reorganization of the system in which we still live today.
What happened? The workers struggles at the centre of the empire
and the struggles of liberation from colonial powers had undermined the
possibility of Fordist regulation. Capital took up the challenge and promoted biocapitalism in its nancial form. And it is not thanks to Foucault
that, already in the 1960s, we started talking about social labour and the
exploitation of the bios to dene the new gures of capitalist regulation
after the jolt of 1968. We were quite simply referring to the fact that,
within the repeated scal crises of public regulation, capital had started
to resort to retirement funds and social insurances to balance the books.
What happened? Capitalism was faced with the transformations induced
by the class struggle from within the industrial system, the lethal eects
of the refusal of Fordist work, the biopolitical pressure of the social
worker and the crisis of the planning state [Stato-piano]: its response was
to re-seize political control from the outside and to establish the political
hegemony of the monetary sphere over the totality of social production.
New Yorks scal crisis lies at the beginning of this new political cycle
and is exemplary.

Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV OF LETHBRIDGE on February 1, 2016

Negri

31

It is necessary to pay the closest attention to this passage (but already

at that time, Marazzi, Oe, OConnor, Aglietta and others laid stress on
its social character), because it has not only deprived the public of its
function as the mediator of exploitation (in favour of the so-called markets), but also because it has brought about a new gure of exploitation:
the exploitation of the bios, the use of welfare as a basis of nancial
valorization. The world of health-production, of the insurance of
youth and old age, of instruction and education, etc. that is, the
world of the production of man by man has become the raw material
or, to be more precise, the blood that circulates in the arterial system of
global nancial capital. The world of labour has been exploited as bios:
not only as labour-force but as living force; not only as a productive
machine but as the communal body of the labouring society.
And the same goes with the multinational corporations, which, especially in the mining, oil and agro-business sectors, have begun to invade
further territories, in Africa and Latin America. The more neoliberalism
attacks the welfare state and sucks the blood of the living labour-force
in developed countries, the more it attacks and upsets the earth, as
it destroys not only territories and forests but also the ways of living
of populations which had hitherto entertained a relation of sustenance
and invention with the earth. One is not only moved by the way
the countryside has been destroyed and invaded by soybean cultivation
on an unlimited scale; by the way mountains have been hollowed
out for the extraction of rare and precious minerals; by the way oil
pollutes and blackens seacoasts: in this case too, the most important
form of exploitation concerns the indigenous populations, whose relation to the land has been interrupted and whose lives have thus been
reduced to the most appalling misery. What is taking place is a
new original accumulation, which aects the cognitive as much as the
natural world.
This is what the public has become as a consequence of the forms of
exploitation and the practices of valorization that the new European
constitution contains and which it imposes through the so-called technical governments. After having embodied the mediation of capitalist
power in its struggle against the working class and social producers; after
facing the impossibility to unblock the downward rigidity of wages and
to outdo, through ination, the relative advantages of the working society . . . this is what the public has become: in the name of capital it has
started to plunder pension funds, to empty the welfare state of its emancipatory potential and to feed directly on the productive common. All
this has happened thanks to the new monetary regimes that have been
imposed on the European subjects. With regard to the European currency, the public sphere is totally subjected to, and harassed by, the
private sector and its values.

Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV OF LETHBRIDGE on February 1, 2016

32

Theory, Culture & Society 32(78)

2.2
As soon as we consider, even in a cursory manner, the way the public has
been codied juridically by the emerging European constitution, we obviously nd that it is a sort of codication of what we have dened above
as the new order of capitalist biopower.
When we speak of the European constitution today, we basically
speak of economic governance, and when we speak of economic governance, we are translating, in substantial terms, the German concept of
Ordo-liberalismus (we have been told, in fact, that this translation is
also used in ocial documents). This amounts to an authoritarian
market social economy, one which, under the pressure of the markets,
has lost all social and reformist character and has gloried instead its
authoritarian and ordering dimensions. This order is the product of a
school of thought that, starting from the 1920s and up until the present,
has appeared under dierent and often disquieting political guises, and
dominates todays European constituent process. The principles to
follow even if their consequences contribute to the dissolution of any
(formal) democratic rule are price stability, repressive regulation of
unjustied budget decit and a monetary union detached from the
political union. The control and bureaucratic supervision of budgets
lacks in fact any democratic legitimation (of both national and communitarian institutions); regulative interventions are repeatedly individualized outside of any general norm (communitarian action has been
emptied out of any form of justice); while, nally, European policies of
social, distributive and compensatory regulation have eectively dissolved. To use Jorges words, the crisis has made Europe shift from a
jurisdictional construction to an authoritarian constitution, and from a
democratic decit to democratic default.
But, now that we have stared at the dreadful face of the new constitution of the public, will we be enchanted by it and fall prey to its
gorgon-like grin? Certainly not. Whether we do or do not consider it
as a class, we have to examine the sphere of the material constitution of
the European multitude. Now, the separation between the economic
organization of power and the social structure of the working classes
where the former is entrenched in the European constitution, while the
latter are left to the individual member states reveals not only a profound democratic crisis; it also produces to use again Jorges words a
sort of big bang which paradoxically reveals what was meant to remain
hidden.
The fact that the European constituent process is guided by a monetary power which is democratically unaccountable; that there is a technically independent biopower which exceeds economically the social
misery which it creates; that an unbearable social austerity appears as
the only criterion for the construction of a regulatory mechanism all
Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV OF LETHBRIDGE on February 1, 2016

Negri

33

this only proves that the new public power embodied by the ESM
(European Stability Mechanism) and by the TSCG (Treaty on
Stability, Coordination and Governance) represents a dreadful machine
for original accumulation by the private sector, at the expense of the
communal fabric of social cooperation and the substratum of productive
activities that the working class struggles and social upheavals had hitherto secured.
If, on the one hand, this process destroys any possibility of a more or
less democratic national politics (but we have seen to what extent the
less already prevailed) and does not help to determine new communitarian powers [potenze], it is nonetheless also true that, paradoxically, in
the current process of unication, the application of the golden rule casts
light on or, better said, forcefully accentuates the new consistency of
the multitude, eectively resistant and virtually antagonist . . . which is to
be governed! But it will not be easy to govern this proletariat who can
organize its common autonomy in cooperation and production.

3
How is it possible to break the (constitutional) nancial convention that
now dominates us, from the point of view of the workers and with the
force of the common? In order to advance along this path, it might be
worth recalling a few denitions and, rst of all, some of the presuppositions informing our analysis.
Financial capital is capital tout court and therefore it is not a parasitic
entity or a mere set of accounting tools. It is rather a gure of capital in
the fullest sense of the term, in the same sense as industrial capital was
and is, and as also were those other gures of the ruling class that
emerged and/or disappeared in the course of the class struggle. It is a
social relation but a social relation between whom?
In order to fully understand this point, it is rst necessary to dene as
precisely as possible the relation between constant capital and variable
capital i.e. between capitalist control and the labour force and to
detail the ways in which the former subjugates the latter in the present.
Now, this process of subjugation is new and singular, even though it is
real, i.e. total. In the phase under analysis, the labour force as
cooperative and cognitive labour-force has in fact reappropriated
parts (fragments, attributes, modalities, etc.) of xed capital.
If by constant capital we indicate the set of productive conditions in
the hands of capital; if by variable capital we indicate the set of values
transferred to the workers for their reproduction; and if by xed capital
we indicate the machinery and the structures used in the productive
process we must then recognize that (in the phase under analysis)
the labour-force, far from functioning solely as variable capital, has
come to appropriate or, to be more precise, to incorporate parts of
Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV OF LETHBRIDGE on February 1, 2016

34

Theory, Culture & Society 32(78)

xed capital. The labour-force thus becomes virtually (relatively, yet

potentially) extraneous to capitalist control, i.e. to the capitalist synthesis. Moreover, when considering that, in addition to the working multitudes subtraction and incorporation of parts of xed capital, there are
also episodes in which circulating capital is being reappropriated (in the
gure of, for example, a migrant labour-force), the situation, then, may
exhibit a new and positive critical threshold.
It is in this modied condition that the subsumption of living labour
into constant capital i.e. into nancial capital, that is to say, into the
key gure in which capitalist control appears today is realized. If the
technical composition of the labour-force has become overly rigid
(having absorbed parts of xed and circulating capital), and the capitalist
synthesis is called to control this composition (i.e. it is called to render
this rigidity exible or, better said, it is called to fragment and crush it),
capital, then, can only exercise its control in relation to the eld of production vertically, that is to say, by externalizing (as it were) and, in any
case, by emphasizing, the political dimension of control over and above
any other element (such as ideologies, functionality, etc.). Financial capital is endowed with these characteristics and carries out this task.
Now, this abstract gure of capitalist control is subjected to great
strain and, arguably, to contradiction by the fact that today the
process of valorization, and therefore the processes of exploitation of
living labour, is becoming more and more internal to those bodies
which are the direct expression of the productive functions and which,
through social cooperation, play a role in the organization of production.
This, in turn, amounts to the global investment of life on the part of
capital: capital becomes biopolitical. But this also implies a fundamental
contradiction: on the one hand, capital demands variable capital to be
fully internalized within the process of valorization (see below); on the
other hand, there is a powerful, if total, abstraction of constant capital
(in its nancial form) from variable capital (as social living labour and
cognitive labour which are irreducible, partially at least, to commodication). Financial capital thus appears to turn the social relation,
which denes the concept of capital [concetto di capitale], into a primarily
political relation.
Now, as seen, in the convention of nancial capital, money takes the
place of labour-value. In the political relation, which constitutes nancial capital, the convention of value is monetary. The monetary convention takes the place of the labour-value convention (i.e. it represents a
new gure overcoming the law of value, as interpreted during the phase
of the industrial exploitation of labour, in an individualistic, factory- and
wage-based way). Now the convention is instead singularized, social and
debt-based. Contrary to what used to be the case in Keynesianism, it
denes the wage part as the residue of the monetary unities that are the
equivalent of abstract labour.
Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV OF LETHBRIDGE on February 1, 2016

Negri

35

How to proceed at this point? We have repeated (sometimes annoyingly) that the demand for a new constitutionalization of labour represents a completely abstract attempt to resume classical public
[pubblicistiche] mediations. We have thus concluded (citing Giso
Amendolas Precariat Constitution [Costituzione precaria]) that
today the meaning of a possible constitutive moment consists in
untying the very idea of constitution from the public-sovereign
mediation, within which it was given originally, and to understand
processes of such constitution as a struggle for the continuous opening of constituent processes, in opposition to how governance tends
to neutralize and channel them within pre-constituted forms of
expression. In a (not overly) provocative way, it might be said
that precarious subjectivities have an interest in the precarization
of the constitution itself, in keeping it open to continual developments and to processes of self-organization.
The new battleeld for the constituent struggle is therefore the terrain
of governmentality. The point that needs to be stressed is that the latter
does not exclude the law [il diritto], but rather traverses it, thus promoting its progressive decentralization and exibilization and, at the same
time, nullifying its traditional claim to autonomy from the other social
sciences. It is just necessary to dispel the illusion that, within governance,
it would be possible to institute a sort of dualism of power, which could
strain the constituent process and which would eventually make it
explode. No, we are denitely not in an insurrectional situation; we
should not expect any Bolshevist exploits because we are not dealing
with the symmetrical confrontation between two powers. We are
rather dealing with the powerful asymmetry of the new cognitive
labour-force its rich poverty which does indeed confront the domination of the master (i.e. constant capital), but which is not induced to
rush into a struggle because it is at the same time irreducibly resistant and
rigid in its precariousness, since it has incorporated parts of circulating
and xed capital.
We are thus touching on the real problem, freed from any catastrophic
or palingenetic presupposition: what would it mean (starting from the
ever-renewing production of subjectivity and from the incorporation of
parts of xed capital) to consider the constituent processes not as denitive, but as co-essential to a new constitutional process? To be sure, a new
constitutional formation of labour would be a thoroughly reactionary
idea, mere nostalgia for the public-sovereign mediation: but, again, what
would it mean to have a constituent process that recognizes fragmentation, the pluralism of the multitude of labour and society? What would it
mean to constitute a common we within a social reality in which every
Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV OF LETHBRIDGE on February 1, 2016

36

Theory, Culture & Society 32(78)

identity has dissolved and every recomposition, accordingly, can only be

constituent?
At this point, we need to emphasize, once more, the extraordinary
opportunity oered by the monetary constitutional convention: the
latter reveals that anti-capitalist antagonism does not only concern
restricted portions of the social labour-force (it does not concern the
living labour hired in an individualistic, localized and wage-based
manner) but the multitude, as a singularized and social reality, one
that is in a relation of dependence (since it is indebted), but which can
nonetheless reappropriate wealth through the recognition and construction of the common. The reality of the multitude: indebted, subjected to
the alienation of the media, permeated by the sad passions of insecurity,
and alienated from democratic representation by the revulsion that the
latter deserves and by the political impotence that it displays and yet,
precisely because of this, impelled to express a powerful will to struggle.
The indignados and occupy movements have convincingly initiated
these constituent behaviours. The Italian movements concerned with
common goods are also active in the same sphere. But it is now essential
to utilize the constituent dimension in order to break with all corporative, identicatory and/or localistic moments of struggle. We most
denitely do not want to deny that any moment of struggle is linked to
particular interests and/or places, but the struggle today is either construed
against the universal image of nancial domination or simply cannot exist.
We have never been luddites vis-a`-vis machinery, but rather saboteurs of
the exploitation generated by the organization of labour. Similarly, today,
we do not smash ATMs, but we sabotage the system of nancial domination because we want to constitutionalize i.e. we want to appropriate
the banks and the powers which, through money, organize and reward,
separate and dominate, capture and subtract the value autonomously and
communally produced by the workers.

3.2
At this point, it is possible to ask how to study the processes of subjectivation as they appear under these circumstances and what favourable or
obstructing conditions could facilitate or block a politics of the common.
As far as the Italian movement is concerned, the references to the 1948
constitution or, even worse, to the constitutional reforms that are being
proposed at the European level, are without a doubt detrimental. We are
rather interested in considering the political actions that might contribute
to create an alternative to the crisis and to facilitate processes of
subjectivation which would be adequate to new projects of struggle.
A rst group of initiatives falls under the label of insolvency. By ghting against debt and in support of the citizenship income, these struggles
are inspired by the old ones about the relative wage, and they are
Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV OF LETHBRIDGE on February 1, 2016

Negri

37

revolutionary in so far as they question the measure of labour. Along the

same lines, it is also necessary to formulate a theory and a practice of
precariate strikes: in other words, it is a matter of understanding what
struggles might harm the bosses, starting from the condition of misery
(i.e. precariousness) that has been imposed upon the workers. The struggles aimed at reappropriating places, squares, theatres, community centres, squats, etc., also fall within this framework. But the most important
initiatives in this respect will be those that succeed in mutualizing [mutualizzare], in alternative ways, the administration of welfare, of education,
of housing policies, etc. In this case too, the question is to act on the
direct wage of the workers, in order to improve it both from a monetary
perspective and in terms of social quality.

Destitutions
This is the second area in which todays struggles are taking place. The rst
point is to try to destitute the chains of capitalist control. In neoliberalism,
social and juridical chaos is deemed normal. To take it up and transform
the litigious character of governance into a moment of counter-power is
the task of any force that opposes neoliberalism. In Latin America, we
have witnessed examples of movements that have devised and imposed
their agenda on their governments for long periods of time. It will not be
easy to repeat this experience in Europe, but it is nonetheless worth trying,
without deceiving ourselves that these ruptures could turn into stable
mechanisms of counter-power. In this case, the destituent eect is still
predominant over the constituent one, and yet, it is not useless.
Why do riots and uprisings not result in new institutions? This question is idle, if not provocative, if it implicitly presupposes the demonstration that riots and uprisings cannot create new institutions. For the time
being they do not as already said because the destituent eect is still
educating and predominant.
A second battleeld consists of the actions against the constitutional
structures of capitalist biopower. The question, in this case, is the development of the democratic, mass constituent power of the multitude [moltitudinario]. The question is to attack wealth, not simply its control, but
wealth itself, not simply the capitalist capacity to subjugate society, but
the subjugated structures of society. At this point, the destituent struggles
become crucial to create and impose an alternative constituent dispositif
upon the existing chaos (the transformation of juridical systems and the
incapacity of capitalism to recompose their eectiveness outside of
governance).

Communalizations
Here the constituent initiatives come into the picture. From the public to
the common: the aim is to arm the right of access to the common, to
Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV OF LETHBRIDGE on February 1, 2016

38

Theory, Culture & Society 32(78)

realize the desire for the common which is already lodged in the workers
hearts. Finally, to communalize amounts to building new institutions of
the common and, in particular, that currency of the common which will
allow the citizens to produce freely, while respecting solidarity.
From what has been said so far, the following alternative appears
clearly: on the one hand, there is the bio-value captured (i.e. extracted)
by capitalism across the whole of society; on the other hand, there is its
monetary form and the way it is made functional to the exploitation of
the whole of society. What does it mean to speak of the currency of the
common in this respect? It means freeing the power [potenza] of the
labour-force from capitalist domination; it means establishing equality
as the condition of freedom.

Note
This article is based on a paper given at a conference held at Universita` Federico
II, Naples, on 7 December 2012.

Acknowledgement
The TCS editors would like to acknowledge the help of Paolo Palladino in the general
editorial process for the section and improving the translations.

Antonio Negri is a Marxist political philosopher and a key gure of the

Italian Autonomia Movement. Beyond co-founding groundbreaking
journals such as Quaderni Rossi (19618), Futur Anterieur (199098)
and Multitudes (2000), he has also participated in the establishment
of institutions for autonomous education and research: UniNomade
(200410), UniNomade 2.0 (201013) and EuroNomade (2013). His
numerous publications and indefatigable intellectual activity have had
a fundamental impact in renewing and sharpening the tools of Marxist
theory to match the new challenges facing class struggle. His essays and
books have been translated into many languages. Together with Michael
Hardt, he is the author of Empire (2000), Multitude (2004) and
Commonwealth (2009).
This article is part of the Theory, Culture & Society special section,
Eurocrisis, Neoliberalism and the Common, edited by Tiziana Terranova,
Adalgiso Amendola and Sandro Mezzadra.

Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at UNIV OF LETHBRIDGE on February 1, 2016