I was looking at this new introduction to a re-publication of the Guattari & Negri work (pre-Empire, pre-Hardt), Communists Like Us.
It's hard to get primary sources for Guattari in English on the internet. When he exists, it is as 'Deleuze-Guattari'. I doubt if most who know of Negri realize how significant this other working relationship was. Guattari is that French guy with an Italian-sounding name who is the human link between French post-structuralism at its most elite (Deleuze, Foucault) and Italian autonomism. http://www.after1968.org/app/webroot/uploads/mandarini-CLU.pdf So Negri affirms the following theses that he draws from Marx and Lenin: a) the history of capitalism is the history of class struggle and of the figures of class composition; b) economics and politics cannot be divorced and class composition is the plane on which they come together most directly; c) the subject can only be understood, in properly materialist fashion, via the notion of class composition; d) Lenin (building on Marx – ‘in a lively, original and yet absolutely faithful way’25) ‘effected a recognition of the real and […] proposed a full circulation between (subversive) political strategy and […] organization of the masses’.26 A little more should be said about this last, crucial moment d). It affirms that the party is the tool for the production of the antagonistic class subject, necessary for this movement because of the non-reducibility of political to technical class composition. It is precisely the non-linear line of determination from technical to political class composition that Negri draws from Lenin27 and which allows for a properly revolutionary politics: class composition is freed through the destruction of the class antagonist, and thereby becomes a moment of creation. So not simply the dialectical passage from class composition via its determinate negation vertically raised to the form of revolutionary organisation – but onwards further, the form of revolutionary organisation, through the insurrectionary moment establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat that sets in train a continuous revolutionary movement towards communism. As Negri wrote over 35 years ago, that which: …the organization mediates can be made immediate in the behaviour of the working class from the moment that overturning of the class adversary’s power, from the moment that the working class and the proletariat as such fully assume the task and weight of the construction of a new revolutionary society.28 If this is a correct summary of Negri’s Lenin, then it can be argued that Negri remains true to the “Lenin moment” throughout his career. For Negri’s texts rest upon a particular analysis of class composition, of the antagonistic subject from which he then operates a translation, or more properly a creation of a political form adequate to the demands of the class subject through which the communist impulse is given concrete form. This is most evident in his writings from the 1960s and ‘70s. But it is equally true of his more recent forays into political economy – into what he calls immaterial labour, cognitive capitalism and biopolitical production, which that mark a particular level of development of the subject that forms an already articulated biopolitical reality, the ‘subversive body of this “general intellect”’.29 It is not possible to properly evaluate this work in the space remaining but, to conclude, I want to highlight one of the risks of the new analysis – a risk that contains, I believe many of the ambiguities of Negri’s later relations to Lenin today. It is the risk of a refounded spontaneism. The question Negri poses is whether, today, socially cooperative immaterial labour can, thanks to its composite nature as communism prefigured, if it can be the ‘demiurge of its own body’, or whether it requires an external vanguard to ‘transform this flesh into a body, the body of the general intellect’.30 Negri’s sympathy for the former option is not in doubt, although he admits that it is a question that can only be decided through a ‘genuine movement of struggle’31 through which it must confirm its superior strength. It is this sympathy that made writing with Guattari all those years ago a possibility. But, if this miraculating of an organisational form is allowed, we may ask once again whether organisation would be anything other than what Negri had condemned as the strategy of revisionist ‘processorganisation’ in his 1970s book on Lenin? Of course, Negri would point to the transformations in the class composition – the emergence of immaterial labour, of the multitude – to signal the radical difference between conditions today and then (whether referring to early 1900s or to the 1970s); but doubts surely remain that changes in class composition have overcome the need for the instance of emersion from the ocean of productive multiplicities; that the exigency for a vertical – but not transcendent – political moment that slices through the cooperative productivity of the multitude, reconfiguring it in a form able to strike at capital and the practices of governance has been lain to rest. Negri’s 33 Lezzioni includes a beautiful little cautionary passage on this problem, that it is necessary to restate: either ‘organization is spontaneity that reflects upon itself. Otherwise it is impotence and defeat that try to justify themselves’.32 Communists Like Us is a formidable little précis of the political – and theoretical – contradictions and tensions that traverse communist politics. It is these tensions and the relentless struggle for their resolution that continue to make of communist thought the untranscendable horizon for any revolutionary politics of our times. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
