From the mass worker to the multitude 101

From the mass worker to the

multitude:
A theoretical contextualisation of Hardt
and Negris Empire
Finn Bowring

This article examines Hardt and Negris Empire in

the context of the radical tradition of Italian Marxism
from which it developed. It discusses the influence of
previously untranslated writings by Marx on the Italian
New Left, and the way this prompted a new political
analysis which, in studying the interpenetration of
capital and labour, treated capital as the dependent
variable in the class struggle. The essay considers how
faithfully this analysis is sustained in Negris later
work, and suggests that the inconsistencies apparent
in Empire derive in part from the continuing influence
of Marxs prescient but ambiguous text: the so-called
Fragment on machines.

Italian Marxism and the New Left

T
he impact of Italian Marxism on Anglo-American
thought has, since the English translation of the
Prison Notebooks in , been largely restricted to
the study of Gramsci in the eld of cultural studies. In Italy
in the s, the Prison Notebooks had already circulated
widely amongst the intelligentsia of the Left. Coinciding
with the political optimism engendered by the new
democratic republic, Gramscis theory of hegemony oered
intellectual legitimacy to the decision of the major trade
unions and working-class parties to accept the merits of
parliamentary democracy, reject anarcho-syndicalism, and
to treat the state as a potential mechanism for national
solidarity and socialist reconstruction. This rapprochement
was not permanent, however. Over a decade of unbroken
political rule by the Christian Democrat Party, the preservation
102 Capital & Class #83

of repressive legislation, and the survival in oce of many civil

servants from the previous Fascist regime, undermined the
political consensus. By the late s, a non-Communist and
extra-parliamentary Left had emerged in Italy which was
suciently independent of party orthodoxy to advocate a
militant re-reading of Marx. Its eorts in this regard were
emboldened by the appearance of a number of previously
unavailable texts by Marxmost notably, the Results of
the immediate process of production, and the Grundrisse.
As the Italian New Left grew in size and inuence,
translations and interpretations of the work of theorists such
as Raneiro Panzieri, Mario Tronti, Galvano Della Volpe,
Guido Baldi, Sergio Bologna, Antonio Negri, Mariarosa
Dalla Costa, and others, began to lter through to the
English-speaking world. Their writings rst appeared in
Radical America and the short-lived journal Zerowork
(-), and later in the journal of the Boston-based
Midnight Notes Collective, Midnight Notes, the journal of
the Edinburgh Conference of Socialist Economists, Common
Sense (-), and most recently in the web-magazine The
Commoner. French readers also discovered their work in the
journal, founded by Negri and Jean-Marie Vincent, Futur
Antrieur (-).
Today, the dedicated scholar of the Italian New Left, Harry
Cleaver, maintains an extensive archive of its writings at the
University of Texas at Austin, having consolidated them with
a range of political literature dened as belonging to a
tradition of autonomist Marxism which stresses the self-
activity of the working class. A parallel archive of material
from the Italian revolutionary Left, much of it published or
assembled by the Red Notes Collective and translated by
Ed Emery, has also been lodged at the British Library of
Political and Economic Science in London.2
With the recent publication of Steve Wrights ()
detailed historical account of the origin and development of
Italian workerism, Nick Dyer-Withefords () attempt
to demonstrate the relevance of autonomist Marxism to post-
Fordist, informational capitalism, and George Katsiacass
() study of radical European social movements, a wealth
of literature now exists to facilitate a critical analysis of that
tradition of autonomist Italian Marxism which led to Hardt
and Negris Empire ().
From the mass worker to the multitude 103

From formal to real subsumption

The text entitled Results of the immediate process of
production was originally planned by Marx to be Part
Seven of the rst volume of Capital, but was discarded prior
to its publication.3 It was rst published in Russian and
German in , but only became the subject of serious
academic study in the s, when it was published in
French, Italian and other European languages, appearing as
an Appendix to the English Penguin edition of Capital in
.
Much of what appears in this text reprises the contents of
Part Four of Capital, which charts the historical transition
from capitalist manufacture and simple cooperation to
mechanisation and the emergence of large-scale industry.
Marx characterises this period partly in terms of a change
in the form of surplus value. In the early years of capitalist
manufacture, surplus value is increased primarily by
lengthening the working day: it increases absolutely. This
strategy soon reaches its limit, however, which is rst physical
and later, as the Factory Acts and the legal limitation of
working hours come into eect, political. Consequently,
surplus value is extracted by compressing that portion of
the working day spent producing the workers means of
subsistence. The reduction of necessary labour time by means
of improvements in productivity thus increases relative
surplus value. Marx recognises that this increase in labour
productivity is partly the result of the improved health and
tness of the worker, but its main source is the introduction
of machines (Marx, : ).
In the Results of the immediate process of production,
Marx describes this same transition from absolute surplus
value to relative surplus value as a change from the formal
to the real subsumption of labour under capital. Formal
subsumption occurs when capital takes over existing forms
of labour and labour processes and subjects them to the wage
relationship. It is the takeover by capital of a mode of labour
developed before the emergence of capitalist relations (Marx,
: ).
As capital begins to enlarge the scale of its productive
processes, Marx describes how a specically capitalist mode
of production comes into being, dened by the way capital
transforms the labour process and its actual conditions in
a process of real subsumption (). At this stage, capital
is able to mobilise what Marx calls the social productive
104 Capital & Class #83

forces of labour or the productive forces of social labour,

which refers to a form of socialised labour that is capable
of applying the general products of human development, such
as mathematics, to the immediate processes of production
().
In the light of the publication of this missing chapter of
Capital, and the distinction between formal and real
subsumption, many Marxists in the s, particularly in
Italy during what was a period of extreme left-wing militancy
and rapid industrial expansion, re-read Marxs account of
the development of mechanisation. They came to the
conclusion that the organisational and technological
innovations that characterise the real subsumption were
eectively driven by workers insubordination to and deance
of capital. Instead of seeing the history of capitalism as the
unfolding structural imperatives of capital, the picture was
reversed, with the conguration of capital determined by
the productive and organisational powers of labour. The laws
of accumulationand indeed the very exploitation that
makes accumulation possiblewere thus redened as a
defensive, reactive attempt by capital to escape its dependence
on, if not its subordination to, labour. The political history
of capital, as Mario Tronti (: ) theorised it, was thus
the history of the successive attempts of the capitalist class
to emancipate itself from the working class.
This reading of Marx was attractive from a political
perspective, since it returned class struggle to the centre of
economic life. Instead of the contradictions and conicts of
capitalist society residing at the purely structural levelas
between the forces and relations of production in orthodox
historical materialismthey were seen instead as the product
of active struggles between dominant and subordinate
groups. Instead of the forces of production expanding
according to their own autonomous logic, determined only
at their highest level by the constraints of outmoded social
relations, the accumulation of capital was seen to be driven
by class struggle, by the need to tame or dispense with what
Marx referred to as the refractory hand of labour. Instead
of the political mobilisation of workers being the nal
ingredient required by the Party to turn economic crisis into
revolution, economic crisis was now the result of the insubord-
ination and organised resistance of working people, and of
capitals need to regain control over workers command of
the business cycle.
From the mass worker to the multitude 105

This class-centred approach also amounted to a radical

challenge to the idea of the political neutrality of the scientic
and technological apparatuses of productiona notion also
under critique from Herbert Marcuse4 and Harry Braver-
man5 in the , by the historian Stephen Marglin,6 by Andr
Gorz,7 and by gures in the emerging ecology and alternative
technology movement, such as Ivan Illich (). A classic
and often-cited statement in support of this class struggle
reading of Marx was the latters observation (: )
that It would be possible to write a whole history of the
inventions made since for the sole purpose of providing
capital with weapons against working-class revolt.
Probably the earliest intellectual formulation of this
position in Italy was published in the rst issue of Quaderni
Rossi in , and written by the erstwhile Cultural Secretary
of the Italian Socialist Party, Raniero Panzieri.

Faced by capitals interweaving of technology and power,

the prospect of an alternative (working-class) use of
machinery can clearly not be based on a pure and simple
overturning of the relations of production (of property),
where these are understood as a sheathing that is destined
to fall away at a certain level of productive expansion
simply because it has become too small. The relations of
production are within the productive forces, and these have
been moulded by capital. It is this that enables capitalist
development to perpetuate itself even after the expansion
of the productive forces has attained its highest level.
(Panzieri : , original emphasis)

Class composition: An historical sketch

To represent at a theoretical level the central historical
importance of class struggle, dissident Italian intellectuals
adapted Marxs economic formulation, the organic compo-
sition of capital, and talked instead of the composition of class.
Class composition denes the power and organisation of labour
power as it is congured in the struggle against capital. Class
composition precipitates de-composition by capital, and
the ensuing re-composition of labour. In periodising the
history of the real subsumption of labour under capital, the
best-known theoretician of the Italian New Left, Antonio
Negri, has identied three successive stages (see Negri, ).
The rst phase of large-scale industry, according to
Negri, extends from to World War One. Although the
106 Capital & Class #83

activities and competences of a predominantly artisan

workforce are, during this period, progressively narrowed
and subordinated to the functioning of machines, this is still
the era in which the skilled professional worker or labour
aristocracythe worker who possesses a strong identity as
producer and an understanding of the complete production
cyclecontinues to play a guiding role in the political
composition of the working class. The personication of the
professional worker was to be found in the machine tool,
electromechanical and optical industries of pre-war Germany,
where the dominant gure was the worker-inventor who
customised and refashioned his tools in the light of his skill
and experience (see also Bologna, ). The political
interests of labour are represented, during this period, by
workers parties modelled on the Leninist or council
communist tradition, with a mass membership and an
intellectual avant-garde. Class struggle is organised under
the banner of the dignity of labour, and is aimed at the
self-management of the production process. At the macro-
economic level, this is also a period of imperialist expansion,
in which crises of overproduction are haphazardly managed
by the conquering of overseas markets.
A second phase of large-scale industry extends, in Negris
account, from to . Here, the composition of labour
is destroyed by the introduction and spread of Taylorism,
which divorces labour power from specic productive
activities, separates conception from execution, and simplies
individual tasks while making the production process as a
whole more complex. In this process the professional worker
is steadily replaced by the mass worker, whose work meets
Marxs denition of abstract labourlabour which is
independent of the particular concrete form it takes at any
given time.

The emergence of the mass worker, the human appendage

to the assembly line, is the overcoming of the vanguard/
mass dichotomy upon which the Bolshevik Party is
modelled. The very aristocracy of labour that capital
created after in its attempt to control the
international circulation of the Paris Commune (the very
workers supposedly bribed by the eight-hour work day,
Saturdays o, and a high level of wages) became one of
the pivots of the circulation struggles in the Teens. Through
the assembly line capital launches a direct political attack,
From the mass worker to the multitude 107

in the form of technology, on the skills and the factory

model of the Councils professional workers. This attack
brings about the material destruction of that level of
organic composition which served as the basis of the self-
management project. (The political unity between
engineers and workers is also under attack. From Taylorism
on, engineers will appear to the workers not as direct
producers, but as mere functionaries of the scientic
organisation of exploitation; and the self-management
project, devoid of its original class impact, will reappear
as a caricature, the managerial revolution to come.)
(Baldi, : , original emphasis)

Though initially a product of capitalisms assault on the

skilled worker, the mass worker is quickly recomposed as a
new class subject empowered by the organisational advantage
of workers concentration in huge factories. After the Great
Depression, the era of the mass worker is also the era of
Fordist regulation, in which the economy is stabilised by
the interventionist state, and union-brokered productivity
increases are supported by the promise of full employment,
transfer payments for non-workers, and rising levels of
consumption negotiated through collective bargaining. The
original struggle over the length of the working dayover
how much of peoples lives will be converted into the
commodity format this point changes to become, instead,
a struggle over the price labour will fetch for its exchange
(Cleaver, : ).
The real interests of the mass worker, however, are now
represented by groups opposed to reformist trade unions
and the Communist Party. This era marks the rise, in Italy,
of the operaismo movement (literally, workerism), which
in dissolved (or evolved) into autonomia. Its leading
organisations were Potere Operaio (which was also the
newspaper of the workers at Porto Marghera), Avanguardia
Operaia, and Lotta Continua. Its chief intellectual organs
were the journals Quaderni Rossi (founded by Raniero
Panzieri in ) and Classe Operaia (which Mario Tronti
founded in after splitting from Quaderni Rossi). The
movement was most inuential in the North of Italy, whose
overcrowded cities had, since , absorbed million
migrants from the rural South. Many of these workers had a
history of non-union militancy against wealthy landowners,
and they faced aggressive discrimination in their search for
108 Capital & Class #83

jobs and housing. These groups of militants and intellectuals,

often with the participation of activists from the student
movement, successfully mobilised workers at the Pirelli
rubber factory in Milan, the Montedison petrochemical
complex at Porto Marghera near Venice, and at the Fiat
plants in Turin.
From the perspective of Mario Tronti (: ), the
rational Fordist organisation of workers was now a passive
mirror of capital: the means by which the latter achieved
collective consciousness of itself by recognising its class
adversary. With the institutionalisation of the revolutionary
Left, class antagonism was, in Trontis account, being
transformed from an unpredictable element of risk and
instability into an eective motor of economic growth
organised labour had become the foundation for orderly
accumulation.
For this reason, Tronti (: ) advocated renunciation
of precisely that form of mass struggle which today unies
the movements led by the workers in the advanced capitalist
countries. Instead, a radical refusal of the capital-labour
relationship had to be articulated. The growing rationali-
sation of modern capital must nd an insurmountable limit
in the growing unreasonableness of organised workers
(Tronti, : ). This limit was signalled by calls to
disconnect income from productivity (and later income from
work), by exorbitant wage demands, by the self-limitation
of production by means of the go-slow or autoriduzione
(see Lumley, : ; Ramirez, ), and, in a multitude
of individual and collective forms, by the rejection of the
ideology of self-managementwhat Potere Operaio
disparagingly called factoryismand by the refusal of
work.

The simple worker must become indierent to his own

labour so that the working class can come to hate it.
Within the class, only the alienated worker is truly
revolutionary. In fact, there is a moment in which the
capitalist is the one who directly comes to the defence of
the workers personality. Only in its generically human
gure can labour-power voluntarily submit itself to capital.
Only as human needs do workers demands become freely
accepted by the capitalist. It is the point in which the
worker denitely discovers the cult of man as a bourgeois
sham. (Tronti, 1973: 117, original emphasis)
From the mass worker to the multitude 109

As Negri later reected on this period of class struggle:

The immediacy and the autonomous nature of struggles

ranging from wildcat strikes to mass sabotage, their
powerful negative eect on the structures of the cycle of
production, ran counter to the traditional view that xed
capital is sacrosanct, and also counter to the ideology of
liberation of (through) workin which work was the
subject of liberation, and Stakhanovism or high levels of
professional skill the form of liberation. Finally, the
intensication (whether at group or individual level) of
heightened forms of mobility, of absenteeism, of socialisa-
tion of the struggle, ran immediately counter to any
factory-centred conception of working-class interests, of
the kind that has come down to us from the workers
councilist tradition. All this gradually uncovered, in
increasingly socialised forms, an attitude of struggle
against work, a desire for liberation from workwhether
it be work in the big factory, with all its qualities of
alienation, or work in general, as conceded to the capitalist
in exchange for a wage. (Negri, a: -)

The radicalisation of Italian students in , which by the

spring of had escalated into violent confrontations with
the state, was an early indication that work-centred political
discourse no longer articulated with the concerns of the most
active protest movements in Italian society. The spontaneous
workers revolts that followed in the wake of the student
uprising conrmed this impression. More than a quarter of
the countrys workforce was involved in strikes in Italy during
the Hot Autumn of , which in terms of working hours
lost made this the third-largest strike movement in recorded
history after May in France and the British general strike
of (Lumley, : ). With the radical demands of
workers typied by egalitarian calls for lump-sum pay
increases for all grades of employees, reduction of the
working week, and the abolition of compulsory overtime,
the movement eventually produced signicant gains for the
Italian working class. These included the reform of the pension
system, progressive changes to trade union legislation and
labour laws, shorter working hours, limits on overtime, the
provision of paid study leave, equalisation of benets for
110 Capital & Class #83

manual and white-collar workers, and an increase in average

wages of . per cent in a single year (Dowson, : ).
Many of these gains were subsequently whittled away by
ination, of course, and by a far-reaching austerity
programme, launched in , which the supported as
part of its commitment to a coalition government of Natio-
nal Solidarity. The decade ended with the virtual decimation
of the Italian labour movement, as Fiat ruthlessly expelled
, troublesome workers from its labour force and
reasserted control over production. Meanwhile, most of the
intellectual theorists of the autonomist movement were
indiscriminately imprisoned or exiled, as the state reacted
mercilessly to the terrorism of the Red Brigades (see Abse,
; Lumley, ).

Post-industrial production and the social worker

In response to the growing power of the mass worker,
capitals attempt to destroy its political composition opened
up what Negri believes to be a third phase in the history of
class struggle. This epoch starts in the years following .
According to Negri, it is characterised at the techno-
logical level by a high level of computerisation and
automation of productive processes, such that immediately
productive labour loses its centrality in the process of
production (Negri, : ). Labour itself is now
completely abstract, immaterial, intellectual. The norms
of consumption are highly individualistic and market-
oriented, while capital itself exists in predominantly
multinational forms. The new macro-economic environment
of nancial deregulation and scal restraint is a direct
product of Nixons withdrawal of the dollar from the gold
standard in , and the establishment of the Trilateral
Commission in .8
Though the new conguration of capital is partly a
decomposing response to the mass rejection of work, it is
also an attempt to capture and exploit the new sources of
production and wealth opened up by the counter-culture
revolution of the sthe anti-conformism, experiments
in lifestyle, and the expressive transvaluation of values which
Hardt and Negri believe stimulated the growth of aective,
communicative and intellectual forms of labour. The
challenge for capital was now to dominate a new composition
that had already been produced autonomously (Hardt &
From the mass worker to the multitude 111

Negri, : ), a goal that is pursued via the extension

of wage-labour to all spheres of society, the decentralisation
of production sites at the global level, and the division of
workers into a small, privileged core and a marginalised
and insecure majority. There is a massive expansion of tertiary
labour, as activities regarded by Marx as unproductive
moments in the circulation of capitalcommunication and
media, transport, education, health and social care, nance,
advertising, entertainment and the production of culture
become extensively regulated by the wage relationship. This
also reects the fact that the potentially explosive
contradictions of metropolitan capitalism can no longer be
displaced by a strategy of imperialist expansionthe formal
subsumption of non-capitalist environments has, according
to Hardt and Negri (: -), reached its limitbut is
now forced to intensify the real subsumption of its own
internal environment: to commodify nature and culture itself.
The real subsumption of labour now develops into what
Negri calls the real subsumption of society in capital.
The hegemonic form of work in the new post-industrial
economy is immaterial labourlabour that produces an
immaterial good, such as a service, knowledge, or communi-
cation (Hardt, : ). Today productivity, wealth, and
the creation of social surpluses take the form of co-operative
interactivity through linguistic, communicational, and
aective networks. (Hardt & Negri, : ) This work
ranges from the manipulation and analysis of computer
symbols to the aective labour of human communication
and interaction. Service industries involving the creation
and manipulation of aects are no less immaterial, according
to Hardt, in the sense that the products they create are
intangible: a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excite-
ment, passioneven a sense of connectedness or community.
What aective labour produces are social networks, forms
of community, biopower. Consequently, the instrumental
action of economic production has merged with the
communicative action of human relations. (Hardt, :
)
The composition of the proletariat is now inherently social.
The cooperative nature of labour is no longer a deliberate
product of the capitalist mode of production; rather, it is
independent of economic rationality, and the basis for all
further economic growth.
112 Capital & Class #83

Immaterial labour immediately involves social interaction

and cooperation. In other words, the cooperative aspect
of immaterial labour is not imposed or organised from
the outside, as it was in previous forms of labour, but
rather, cooperation is completely immanent to the laboring
activity itself. This fact calls into question the old notion
[] by which labour power is conceived as variable
capital, that is, a force that is activated and made coherent
only by capital, because the cooperative powers of labour
power (particularly immaterial labour power) aord
labour the possibility of valorising itself. Brains and
bodies still need others to produce value, but the others
they need are not necessarily provided by capital and its
capacities to orchestrate production. (Hardt & Negri,
: , original emphasis)

The new class subject that emerges in this society is, in

Negris view, the social worker (operaio sociale), sometimes
translated as socialised worker or diuse worker. This term
is used to convey the fact that the productive capacities of
the workers are embedded in, and work directly on, social
networks of communication and cooperation which spread
well beyond the domain of the factory: hence also the term
social factory, which was employed by a number of Italian
Marxists and feminists in the early s. In the s, Negri
and Hardt dened the social workerthough they
increasingly began to use the term multitude9 insteadas
characterised by a hybrid of material and immaterial
labouring activities linked together in social and productive
networks by highly developed labouring co-operation (Hardt
& Negri, : ). The productive abilities of these workers
are not the exclusive result of formal or occupational training,
but are increasingly a self-acquired prerequisite for informal
participation in the world of everyday life. In Maurizio
Lazzaratos account, capital today draws on a basin of
immaterial labour, which continually dissolves back into
the networks and ows that make possible the reproduction
and enrichment of its productive capacities. Consequently,
it becomes increasingly dicult to distinguish leisure time
from work. In a sense, life becomes inseparable from work.
(Lazzarato, : -)
This account of class composition was, of course, not
accepted by all Italian autonomists. Sergio Bologna, for
example, initially agreed on the chronological phases of
From the mass worker to the multitude 113

professional worker, mass worker, and social worker, though

for the latter category he preferred the term disseminated
worker (operaio disseminato), since it better conveyed the
risk of the movement dispersing itself into a thousand
decentralised struggles (Bologna, : ). Later, however,
Bologna questioned the putative hegemony of the
professional worker in the pre-World War One epoch, noting
the existence of a number of other class factions during this
period (such as the miners of the Ruhr), whose ranks were
often swelled by the presence of unskilled migrants, and
who were often engaged in militant forms of struggle,
independent of the skilled workers and their unions. The
political model for this early composition of the mass worker
was of course the Wobblies, an organisation unburdened by
Marxist doctrine and the Socialist Internationals, but which
successfully mobilised Americas impoverished, unskilled
and disenfranchised immigrants. Above all, Bologna and his
colleagues at the journal Primo Maggio emphasised the
complexity and divisions in working class politics and
culture, and rejected what they saw as Negris tendency to
ignore counter-trends and exaggerate class unity (see Wright,
: -, -).

The ambiguity of the Fragment

If the discovery of the missing chapter from Capital
precipitated the theory of class composition and the belief
that class struggle was the motor of economic development,
it was the Grundrisse, and in particular the famous Fragment
on machines, which lent support to Negris idea that
individual labour could no longer be identied, measured
and remunerated as the source of social wealth. Here Marx
describes, with notable ambiguity, both how collective human
knowledge, objectied in science and technology, becomes a
force of production whose power is out of all proportion to
the direct labour time spent on [] production, and how
the social individualthe workers reappropriation of his
own general productive power, his understanding of nature
and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social
bodybecomes the great foundation-stone of production
and wealth (Marx, : -).
The problem with the Fragment on machines, as
Thoburn () has pointed out, is that its ambiguous content
lends itself to two, potentially conicting, interpretations.
114 Capital & Class #83

On the one hand, Marx appears to be describing the

declining signicance of labour in comparison to the power
of xed capital, the latter being the objectication in machines
of societys accumulated knowledge and scientic expertise.
The passages that support this reading are generally
consistent with Marxs account of the alienation of work
under capitalism, in which the production cycle has ceased
to be a labour process in the sense of a process dominated
by labour as its governing unity.

The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general

productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed
into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as
an attribute of capital, and more specically of xed capital,
in so far as it enters into the production process as a
means of production proper. (Marx, : -, original
emphasis)

The contradiction ensuing from the fact that the creation

of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on
the amount of labour employed than on the power of the
agencies set in motion during labour time (), is primarily
located at the economic level of society. Surplus value cannot
be converted into capitaland thus capitalist social relations
cannot be smoothly reproducedwhen the income
distributed for the consumption of an expanding volume of
commodities is allocated to individuals in proportion to their
labour time, which is now an innitesimal, vanishing
magnitude.

[Capital] is thus, despite itself, instrumental in creating

the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce
labour time for the whole society to a diminishing
minimum, and thus to free everyones time for their own
development. But its tendency [is] always, on the one
side, to create disposable time, on the other, to convert it into
surplus labour. If it succeeds too well at the rst, then it
suers from surplus production, and then necessary labour
is interrupted, because no surplus labour can be realised by
capital. (, original emphasis)

A second interpretation of the Fragment, on the other hand,

draws deliberately on Marxs cryptic references to the general
intellect, the social brain, and the social individual. It
From the mass worker to the multitude 115

nds in his observation that direct labour no longer provides

the governing unity of production, the implicit and
subversive thesis that indirect labourthe general productive
force arising from social combination ()is instead
becoming the wellspring of wealth.

In this transformation, it is neither the direct human

labour he himself performs, nor the time during which
he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general
productive power, his understanding of nature and his
mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body
it is, in a word, the development of the social individual
which appears as the great foundation-stone of production
and wealth. ()

From this perspective, the increase in non-working time

brought about by the expansion of large-scale industry
outstrips the power of xed capital, so that The surplus labour
of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development
of general wealth (, original emphasis). Instead, we have
the development of the collective powers of labour as an
autonomous productive force.

Real economysavingconsists of the saving of labour

time [] but this saving [is] identical with the develop-
ment of the productive force [] The saving of labour
time [is] equal to an increase in free time, i.e. time for
the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts
back upon the productive power of labour as itself the
greatest productive power. From the standpoint of the
direct production process it can be regarded as the
production of xed capital, this xed capital being man
himself. (-, original emphasis)

Self-valorisation
It is, for the most part, this second interpretation that has
been adopted by Negri and his allies. Paolo Virno, for
example, believes Marx was wrong to equate the general
intellect with xed capital, thus neglecting the instance when
that same general intellect manifests itself on the contrary
as living labour, that is, forms of knowledge which structure
social communications and which impel the activity of mass
intellectual labour.
116 Capital & Class #83

Within the process of contemporary labour, Virno conti-

nues, there are entire constellations of concepts which
function all by themselves as productive machines, without
any need for a mechanical body or for a small electronic
soul. (Virno, b: , original emphasis) The general
intellect thus comes to present itself nally as a direct
attribute of living labour, as a repertoire of a diuse
intelligentsia, as a score that creates a common bond among
the members of the multitude. The conceptual constellations
and schemes of thinking that comprise this score cannot
ever be recuperated within xed capital, given that they are
actually inseparable from the interaction of a plurality of
living subjects (Virno, a: ).
For Negri himself, it is not culture and knowledge so
much as the cooperative processes of communicative
interaction and social reproduction that constitute a new,
potentially autonomous foundation for the production of
social wealth. In , already advancing this reading of the
Grundrisse, Negri condemned those who take an idealist
view of the emergence of this wealth of productive forces
as an already-existing, organic realisation, and not [] as a
powerful, antagonistic potential that arises from the terrible
and contemporary poverty of the proletariat (Negri, b:
). However, in an apparent departure from Marxs account
of the process of real subsumption, in which the
independent productive capacities of labour are destroyed
once it nds itself outside the framework of capitalism
(Marx, : ), Negri now argues that today we are
well beyond the terms of classical economics (and even those
of its critics) that recognise as productive only the labour
incorporated within capital (Hardt & Negri, : ).
This assertion derives from his lecture series on the
Grundrisse, delivered at the cole Normale Suprieure in
Paris in , where Negri introduced the concept of self-
valorisation to describe the growing self-determination of
the collective proletarian subject (Negri, : ).
Self-valorisation means, in Harry Cleavers sympathetic
summary of Negris position, a process of valorisation which
is autonomous from capitalist valorisationa self-dening,
self-determining process which goes beyond the mere
resistance to capitalist valorisation to a positive project of
self-constitution (Cleaver, : ). As Hardt and Negri
put it:
From the mass worker to the multitude 117

In the passage from Taylorism to post-Taylorism and from

Fordism to post-Fordism, subjectivity and productive co-
operation are posed as conditions not results of labour
processes [] Although in previous per iods the
development of the abstraction labour and the formation
of processes of social co-operation of the productive forces
were consequences of the development of the productive
and political capitalist machine, today co-operation is
posed prior to the capitalist machine as an independent
condition of development. The new era of the organisation
of capitalist production and reproduction of society is
dominated by the emergence of the labouring subjectivity
that claims its mass autonomy, its own independent
capacity of collective valorisation, that is, its self-
valorisation with respect to capital. (Hardt & Negri, :
-, original emphasis)

The logic of this argument, which concludes with the

assertion that the progressive function of capital has come
to an end, seems to depend on the idea that a post-capitalist
society must be based on a type of wealth dierent from the
commodity form. This is the wealth of the social individual,
the fullled species-being of the Manuscripts (see
Marx, : ; and also Marx, : ). The production
of wealth must, in other words, become identical to the
production of social relationships, which is to say that
humanity realises its richness not in the commodities it
consumes but through the depth and extensiveness of its
productive interactions and associations.

Communication as wealth
In previous forms of capitalism, the sociality of labour was
a creation of capitalism, a passive product engendered by
the real subsumption of labour under capital. Workers
produced their society, in these circumstances, only by
reproducing their total subordination to capital, their
impoverishment, negation and powerlessness. Today,
according to Negri, post-Fordist information capitalism has
inverted this relationship. Although the whole of society is
eectively subsumed in capital, the social worker is now
the producer, prior to any commodity, of social co-operation
itself (Negri, : ). Modern forms of production today
produce not only commodities but also rich and powerful
118 Capital & Class #83

social relationships (Hardt & Negri, : ). These

relations must be fashioned not only between cooperating
workers, but also, as Lazzarato points out, between workers
and consumers. Cultural and informational commodities,
for example, are not oriented towards producing, through
their own destruction, the physical capacity of individual
labour power. Instead, they are aimed at creating and
augmenting the cultural and ideological environment of
consumerstheir needs, tastes and imaginationsand at
activating consumers communicative competences and their
ability to articulate and display their fantasies and preferences.
Immaterial labour produces rst and foremost a social
relationship. (Lazzarato, : )
The model of base and superstructure, the dierentiation
of forces and relations of production, the supposed separation
of system and lifeworld, the classical distinction between
functional integration and social integration, between the
instrumental rationality of material production and the
communicative rationality of cultural reproduction, are thus
all overturned. Instead, there is an immediate translatability
between the social forces of production and the relations of
production themselves, as communication itself constitutes
the fabric of production and the substance of the form of
value (Negri, : ).

The superstructure is put to work, and the universe we

live in is a universe of productive linguistic networks.
The lines of production and those of representation cross
and mix in the same linguistic and productive realm. In
this context the distinctions that dene the central
categories of political economy tend to blur. Production
becomes indistinguishable from reproduction; productive
forces merge with relations of production; constant capital
tends to be constituted and represented within variable
capital, in the brains, bodies, and co-operation of
productive subjects. (Hardt & Negri, : )

This widening latitude for communicative self-valorisation

is a direct result of the expanding sphere of circulation in
the modern capitalist economy, where a growing volume of
capital is withdrawn from the process of accumulation and
used for a variety of indispensable but unproductive
activities, ranging from the transfer and exchange of a
proliferating volume of goods across the global marketplace,
From the mass worker to the multitude 119

to the work of the nance and marketing businesses, the

states co-ordination of dierent industrial sectors and, of
course, the reproduction of labour power (including the
reserve form) at ever-higher levels of welfare, education and
culture. Because Marx suered the noxious eect of the
limits of the workers movement, Negri argues (: ),
he adhered to a reductive concept of productive labour. This
concept obscured the way the distinction between production
and circulation becomes impossible to sustain when capital
becomes a social power dedicated to reproducing the
capitalist mode of production, rather than enriching the
individual capitalist (see Marx, : ). Now, when
production and reproduction are so closely mixed one with
the other, we can no longer distinguish productive labour
from reproductive labour. Productive circulation gathers,
in the assembly line of social capital, all social work dened
as directly or indirectly, immediately or mediately
productive. (Negri, : )0
The fact that production and reproduction become
coextensive does not mean that exploitation has disappeared,
but that the extraction and distribution of surplus value is
orchestrated at the social rather than individual level.
Capitalism as an economic system now becomes openly
political and parasitic. The law of value metamorphosises
into the law of command. The capitalist supersession of
the law of valuewhat Marx calls the process of real
subsumptiondislocates the relations of exploitation as a
whole. It transforms exploitation into a global social relation.
(Negri, : xvi)

Capital, displaced from its traditional role as orchestrator

of productive co-operation, thus tends to take the form of
an apparatus of capture. Productive social labour moves
historically toward becoming independent from any form
of direct capitalist command [] The role of capital and
the capitalist State is thus reduced to one of preying on
and controlling the essentially autonomous ows of social
production. (Hardt & Negri, : )

Now that The reproduction of social life no longer needs

capital (Hardt & Negri, : ), now that the production
of wealth rests on new foundations that are immanent to
social practices themselves, Reappropriation is a term which
becomes insucient as a mobilising goal for the Left
120 Capital & Class #83

(Negri, : ). Nor, however, can there be a defence of

those islands of non-capitalist practices and values that
formerly lay in the interstices and on the margins of capitalist
imperialism. These islands were the outside to which
capitalism displaced its internal contradictions, a vital source
of new consumers and workers without which the cycle of
accumulation would grind to a halt, but also the foundation,
from Rosa Luxemburgs perspective, for resistances that
could reorganise the noncapitalist use values of the multitude
in both the dominant and the subordinate countries (Negri
& Hardt, : ). The logic of imperialist expansion,
however, not only consumed and exhausted the non-capitalist
environment, but also created territorial boundaries and
conicts between capitalist nation-states that blocked the
free ow of capital, labour and goods, and thus the
development of the world market. According to Hardt and
Negri, capitalism therefore had to mutate into a new global
conguration: Empire.

Empire
Empire has no territorial centre of power, but is instead a
decentred and deter r itor ialising apparatus of rule that
progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its
open, expanding frontiers (Hardt & Negri, : xii, original
emphasis). The rise of Empire marks the absolute triumph
of the global market, a smooth space of uncoded and
deterritorialised ows. Insofar as Empire is a regime of
rule, it legitimises the economic or military disregard for
the sovereignty of nation-states by appealing to the principles
of international justice and human rights. Military force is
now mobilised in the name of global peace and order. Hardt
and Negri concede that this claim to universalitywhich
was frequently made during the -led invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraqmay be false, but only in the sense
that it conceals the controlling apparatus of Empire, and
not the national interests of specic (imperialist) states, such
as the (Hardt & Negri, : ).
Although the does indeed sit at the top of the pyramidal
structure which Hardt and Negri believe characterises the
new conguration of global power, its privileged position
and role as the enforcer of Empire is largely a result of its
own constitutional history, which makes it well-calibrated
for imperial rule.
From the mass worker to the multitude 121

Empire is eectively born through the global expansion

of the internal constitutional project (Hardt & Negri,
: ). The military mobilisation of the must also
articulate with a series of international institutions (the ,
the World Bank, the , the , the , etc.) that deploy
the instruments of diplomatic, monetary and cultural control.
This top tier of the imperial hierarchy, by securing the unity
and continuity of power, represents the function of monarchy
in the model of the mixed constitution (the separation of
powers), which the Greek historian Polybius believed had
been successfully implemented in Republican Rome, and
which informed, via the political philosophy of Montesquieu,
the construction of the United States Constitution.
A second tier of commandthe aristocracycomprises
networks of resource distribution and exchange, structured
by transnational corporations, and mediated and ltered by
the territorial organisations of nation-states. If the power of
the rst tier rests on monopoly of the means of violence,
particularly the absolute and indiscriminate violence of the
nuclear bomb, the second tier of Empire exerts control by
means of monetary regulation. The third and broadest tier
of the pyramiddemocracyis made of groups charged
with the mechanisms of popular representation and
communication, which in some global forums may be nation-
states themselves, but which also include the mass media
and culture industries, as well as the thousands of non-
governmental organisations (s). In truth, Hardt and Negri
argue, Empire is not a mixed constitution so much as a
hybrid constitution, with monarchic, aristocratic, and
democratic functions (the production of unity, circulation,
and cooperation, respectively) merging inextr icably.
Nonetheless, it is the third medium of imperial control
the management of communication, knowledge and
culturewhich Hardt and Negri believe, because it is
completely de-territorialised and dependent on mobilising
the productive subjectivities of the multitude, to be most
open to collective resistance and subversion (see chapters
. and .).
Empire is also distinctive in that it does not seek, as did
modern imperialism, to rule through the strategy of divide
and conquer. Instead, it exercises universal integration
through a neutralising liberal indierence to biological
diversity and dierence, combined with a pluralistic
armation of those merely cultural dierences which
122 Capital & Class #83

since they are treated never as a dierence of nature but

always as a dierence of degree, never as necessary but always
as accidentaldo not threaten social order. In general,
Empire does not create dierences. It takes what it is given
and works with it. Working with it involves advancing a
form of pluralism that accepts all the dierences of who we
are so long as we agree to act on the basis of these dierences
of identity. The divisions that derive from these dierences
are then managed as a means of hierarchising and controlling
labour power, as well as of diversifying and multiplying
global markets. Postmodernism is indeed the logic by which
global capital operates. This is why the post-modernist and
post-colonial politics of dierence, which used hybridity and
uidity to challenge the false essentialisms and binaries of
the imperialist mindset, not only is ineective against but
can even coincide with and support the functions and
practices of imperial rule (Hardt & Negri, : , ,
, , ).

Exodus
If Empire can be superseded neither by the reappropriation
of productive forces, nor by the defence of regional autonomy
and the assertion of distinctive cultural identities, what mode
of resistance is most appropriate to the new global
conguration of capital? Though Hardt and Negri are as
vague on this question as they are on any subject they address
in their work that requires the identication of agents, acts
and eects, one political response they do seem to favour is
conveyed by the notion of exodus.

Whereas in the disciplinar y era sabotage was the

fundamental notion of resistance, in the era of imperial
control it may be desertion. Whereas being-against in
modernity often meant a direct and/or dialectical
opposition of forces, in postmodernity being-against might
well be most eective in an oblique or diagonal stance.
Battles against the Empire might be won through
subtraction and defection. This desertion does not have a
place; it is the evacuation of the places of power. (Hardt
& Negri, : , original emphasis)

Exodus is seen as an ecacious political practice because

the power of capital, from the perspective of the Italian theory
From the mass worker to the multitude 123

of class composition, is directly engendered by the struggles,

the counter-power, of labour. In Paolo Virnos (a)
account, the strategy of desertionwhich he also calls an
engaged withdrawalmeans cutting the link which binds
the operation of the general intellect to wage labour and
the production of commodities. Virno believes that post-
Fordism has overturned the distinction between work (the
creation of material artefacts) and action (political
association and communication) advanced by Hannah Arendt
in The Human Condition (). Modern political praxis is
now thoroughly permeated with a productivist ethos and
driven by instrumental rationality, while the work of
producing is now taking on the intellectual, linguistic and
relational attributes of action: politics oers a communi-
cative network and a cognitive content that are weaker and
poorer than those to be found within the present-day process
of production.
In Virnos analysis, the battle is between an excess of
communicative cooperation, which seeks to give rise to a
political community and a public sphere, and the capitalist
imperative to reduce aective and immaterial activities
activities-without-nished-work, in which the performance
is inseparable from the productto a modern form of servile
labour: There is none so poor as the one who sees her or
his own ability to relate to the presence of others, or her
or his own possession of language, reduced to wage labour
(Virno, a: , ). Or, as Lazzarato (: ) puts
it: The management mandate to become subjects of
communication threatens to be even more totalitarian than
the earlier rigid division between mental and manual labour
(ideas and execution), because capitalism seeks to involve
even the workers personality and subjectivity within the
production of value.
The Hegelian passage from absolute loss to complete
redemption is thus rejected. The multitude, according to Virno,
have more than their chains to lose: they have a latent wealth
of knowledge and communication which, through a free-
thinking inventiveness that changes the rules of the game
and disorients the enemy, they can deploy to stage an exit
with emancipatory eects, populating and inhabiting in a
stable way a territory situated beyond the reach of the wage.
It is the conscious migration away from factory work, the
inveterate distaste, detectable amongst many young graduates,
for continuous work requiring personal fealty to a corporate
124 Capital & Class #83

employer, which Virno cites as paradigmatic of the strategy

of secession (Virno, a: ; c: -).

Evaluating Empire
Considered on its own merits, Empire adds a thought-
provoking chapter to the Negrian strand of autonomist
Marxism, but one that is riddled with problems and incons-
istencies. The picture of Empire as a smooth space of
abstract domination, devoid of internal conicts and
centrifugal forces, does not account for the real concentration
of wealth and power in the privileged territories of the world,
the inescapable features of Western cultural imperialism, and
the military and economic conicts that currently exist
between many nation states which, when fought in resource-
poor regions of the globe, do not provoke the military or
humanitarian arm of Empire. For a work that belongs to a
tradition of social analysis focused on the central role of
class struggle, the authors refusal to identify dialectical forces
and contradictions in the reproduction of Empire, and what
Trotsky called the uneven and combined development of
capitalist systems, is surprising. As Callinicos () points
out, the discordances, imbalances, and accumulated contra-
dictions of capitalism are precisely what reveal the vulnera-
bilities of the capitalist mode of production, the very points
of weakness that make worthwhile the kind of strategic
political analysis that is conspicuously absent from this long
and sprawling text.
The central role given to immaterial labour in Hardt and
Negris analysis may also be challenged for its Western bias,
and its failure to acknowledge the growth of low-tech factory
production in the least developed countries of the South. In
addition, the denition of the self-valorising multitude as a
counter-power of global communication, circulation and
cooperative exchange, cannot be logically reconciled with
the authors curious assertion that the most important social
struggles of the last decade have become all but incommuni-
cable (Hardt & Negri, : , original emphasis). This
statement stands in stark contrast to Nick Dyer-Withefords
autonomist analysis of high-technology capitalism, which
highlights instead the way the diusion of the means of
communication by globalising capital has unintentionally
opened the routes for a global contraow of news, dialogue,
controversy, and support between movements in dierent
From the mass worker to the multitude 125

parts of the planet. To a degree, the very communication

channels that circulate commodities also circulate struggles.
(Dyer-Witheford, : )
Closer analysis also shows that Hardt and Negris book
contains signicant inconsistencies in its treatment of power.
How can the strategy of resistance be an evacuation of the
places of power, for example, when the authors are so keen
to repudiate the notion of a bounded locus of power; when,
in this smooth space of Empire, there is no place of power?
(Hardt & Negri, : , , original emphasis) The
strategy of desertion clearly ts a model of production in
which the productive resources of the multitudetheir
collective capacity for corporeal and intellectual self-
valorisation, their biopoweris increasingly independent
of, and prior to, its orchestration by capital. But Hardt and
Negri also state that Biopower becomes an agent of
production when the entire context of reproduction is
subsumed under capitalist rule, and describe biopower as
another name for the real subsumption of society under
capital (-).
This inconsistency is equally apparent when Hardt and
Negri attempt to characterise Empire in Foucauldian terms
as the replacement of the disciplinary society with the
society of control. This distinction conveys the way power
is no longer exercised via the prescriptive, normalising and
compartmentalising eorts of the modern state and its
disciplinary institutions, but instead seeks to mobilise and
direct, from the inside, and without institutional obstruction,
the vitality and productive energies of the population.

Biopower is a form of power that regulates social life

from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing
it, and rearticulating it. Power can achieve an eective
command over the entire life of the population only when
it becomes an integral, vital function that every individual
embraces and reactivates of his or her own accord. (Hardt
& Negri, : -)

Once again, the depth and pervasiveness of biopolitical

control seems dicult to reconcile with the notion that
postmodern capitalism engenders new and greater
possibilities for the biopolitical self-organisation of the
multitude, and has given rise to a type of immaterial labour
which seems to provide the potential for a kind of
126 Capital & Class #83

spontaneous and elementary communism (). Use value

and all the other references to values and processes of
valorisation that were conceived to be outside the capitalist
mode of production have progressively vanished (). Isnt
this statement from Empire precisely the opposite of Hardt
and Negris claim that their analysis of immaterial labour
calls into question the old notion [] by which labour power
is conceived as variable capital, that is, a force that is
activated and made coherent only by capital, because the
cooperative powers of labour power (particularly immaterial
labour power) aord labour the possibility of valorising itself
()?
One could reasonably argue that these contradictions in
Hardt and Negris work ultimately derive from the peculiar
ambiguities in the text that is their prime inspiration: Marxs
Fragment on machines. In commenting on this text, Virno
observes that, in the s, reading the Fragment was
aimed at unveiling the supposed neutrality of science and of
knowledge in general, and at demonstrating the
impossibility of dissociating machines from hierarchy, the
technical realm from that of command (Virno, b: ).
This was consistent with what is surely the most important
contribution of autonomist Marxism to modern political
theory, which is the critique of economic rationality and the
exposure of the way economic relations, calculations and
interestsand the technologies and forms of labour that arise
from themare always expressions of political will, of the
need to perpetuate relations of domination and manage forms
of resistance. The exercise of social control, in other words,
satises an interest that is always in potential competition
with the interests of productivity, eciency and prot, with
no economic judgements made which are knowingly
detrimental to the concentration of power and the continuity
of rule. As the inaugural issue of Zerowork interpreted
Marxs reections on the monstrous disproportion between
labour time and its products:

When the productive appearance and economic

justication of labour are taken away what is left is the
general political characteristic of the capitalist relation
[] In a word, what is left is the exercise of capitals
command as the power to control the political behaviour
of the class and so to contain the anti-capitalist struggle.
(Montano, : )12
From the mass worker to the multitude 127

In adopting a rather dierent interpretation of the

Grundrisse, namely, that in a knowledge-intensive economy
the social individual becomes the principal force of
production, Hardt and Negri have, in Thoburns (: )
view, abandoned the essence of the social factory thesis
the immanence of capital to all social relationswhich
lay at the heart of autonomist Italian Marxism during the
s. Thoburns assessment seems to gain further credibility
from Negris decision to replace the notion of the social
worker with that of the multitude. Although this move has
been interpreted as an attempt by Negri to depict a higher
political composition of labour that, unlike the social worker,
can eectively confront the fully globalised, transnational
form of modern capitalism (Mandarini, : -), less
sympathetic readers may well see this as a theoretical retreat
towards a more elusive form of abstraction.
From this more critical perspective, the concept of the
multitude, whose members take the indeterminate form of
constellations of singularities (Hardt & Negri, : ),
oers a picture of class identity that is inoculated against its
enemy, but at a price: by dispensing with the interpenetration
of capital and labour, what is also lost is a conception of the
interiority and negativity of the class subject. Without this
conception, the prospects of transcending the alienating
conditions of class determination look unnecessarily bleak.

Notes

. At <http://www.eco.utexas.edu/Homepages/Faculty/
Cleaver/txarchintro.html>
. At <http://www.emery.archive.mcmail.com/public_html/
rednotes/index.html>
. The manuscript was actually headed Chapter Six,
because at that time what became Part One was intended
as an introduction. In the published version, the chapters
were converted into parts.
. As Marcuse famously challenged Webers identication
of the shell of bondage with the triumph of technical
progress and reason: Specic purposes and interests of
domination are not foisted upon technology subsequ-
ently and from the outside; they enter the ver y
construction of the technical apparatus. Technology is
always a historical-social project: in it is projected what a
128 Capital & Class #83

society and its ruling interests intend to do with men and

things. (Marcuse, : , original emphasis)
. Braverman argued against reading Marx as a
technological determinist: technology, instead of simply
producing social relations, is produced by the social relation
represented by capital. (Braverman, : , original
emphasis)
. Marglins seminal study of the rise of industrial capitalism
showed how the capitalist division of labour and the
factory system were constructed with the primary goal
of divesting workers of control over the pace, content
and product of the labour process, as well as combating
the backward-bending labour-supply curve (workers
spontaneous preference for leisure over paid work).
Marglin (: ) concludes that the primar y
determinant of basic choices with respect to the
organisation of production has not been technology
exogenous and inexorablebut the exercise of power
endogenous and resistible.
. Gorzs (: xi) argument that a communist life-style
cannot be based on the technology, institutions and
division of labour which derive from capitalism, was
subsequently developed into a provocative critique of
work-centred Marxism (see Gorz, ).
. The Trilateral Commission was founded by David
Rockefeller, and initially brought together around
individuals from the global banking, business, media,
and academic communities, as well as representatives
from governments and conservative trade unions. Its goal
was to establish a close managerial relationship between
the dominant groups in the , Western Europe and Japan,
in order to combat the excess of democracyto use a
phrase from The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the
Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission
()which seemed to be threatening the stability of
the modern capitalist regime. (See Sklar, )
. The concept of the multitude derives from Hobbes, for
whom it represents an unruly threat to the popular unity
of the nation. The nations people, according to Hardt,
Negri, and Paulo Virno, are united in obedience to the
sovereign and through opposition to the other, the out-
side. While the people is a bounded unity, the multitude
is an unbounded multiplicity, which shuns political unity,
is recalcitrant to obedience, never achieves the status of
From the mass worker to the multitude 129

juridical personage, and is thus unable to make promises,

to make pacts, or to acquire and transfer rights. It is
anti-State, but, precisely for this reason, it is also anti-
popular: the citizens, when they rebel against the State,
are the Multitude against the People [Hobbes]. (Virno,
a: -)
. When Marx discusses the unproductive labour of state
employees in the Grundrisse, this ambiguity is clearly
apparent: All general, communal conditions of production
[] are therefore paid for out of a part of the countrys
revenueout of the governments treasuryand the
workers do not appear as productive workers, even though
they increase the productive force of capital. (Marx, :
, original emphasis)
. According to Polybius, the three possible forms of simple
constitutionmonarchy, aristocracy, and democracy (rule
by the one, the few, and the many, respectively)are all,
when established as single regimes, destined to follow a
cyclical path of degeneration and corruption (monarchy
degenerates into tyranny, which is replaced by aristocracy,
which degenerates into oligarchy, which is replaced by
democracy, which degenerates into mob rule, after which
monarchy is restored). Hence the need for a mixed consti-
tution in which each branch of government checks the
strengths and balances the weaknesses of the other two.
. The most inuential contemporary exponent of this posit-
ion is Andr Gorz, who has repeatedly argued that the
preservation of work-centred society is a political rather
than economic project, and that modern capitalist societies
will tolerate all means of perversions to economic
rationality, and will nance all kinds of anti- or sub-
economic activity, in order to shore up the wage
relationship and perpetuate the relations of domination
that come with it.

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