Minor Politics: Deleuze, Marx and the Refusal of Work

Minor Politics:

Nicholas

Phl).

Deleuze, Marx, and the Refusal

of Work

J. Thoburn

in Sociology

Goldsmiths

College,

University

of London

79Vft _--_q

1

Abstract This thesis is concerned with political composition.

It uses Deleuze and Guattari's materialism, and specifically their concept of 'minor' processes, both to develop an understanding of a politics of difference against identity, and to interpret political composition in communist movements. Both the theoretical and empirical concerns are framed around the problematic of 'the refusal of work'. 'Work' is argued to be a pervasive mechanism of identity which a materialist politics of difference would seek to unsettle, and it is the specific site of political practice for the communist movements considered.

Though driven methodologicallyby Deleuze'swork, the theoreticalcore of the thesisdrawsrelationsbetweenDeleuzeand Marx around the categoriesof capitalismand communism. Thus, at a theoreticallevel, as well as exploring Deleuze'sempiricism and 6minor politics', the thesis also considers the concepts of the proletariat, the lumpenproletariat,the 'social factory', and the 'socialisedworker'. The empirical focus is on communistmovementsof 'cramped' minority groups. It is from the very cramped position of these minorities, lacking the subjective and materialresourcesto be describedas 'a people', that politics as a mode of complication andcreationof life is arguedto be situated. The communismand minor politics of these movementsis thusexploredasa situatedprocessof differenceand creationratherthan the product of 'identity'. The specific empirical focus is on the practices, political techniques,languages,conceptualconstructions, and cultures of the North American Industrial Workersof the World in the early yearsof the twentiethcentury, and the Italian operaisinoandautonondamovementsin the 1960s and 1970s.

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Acknowledgments The processesof life and work are such that the importanceof one's milieu transcends that of the hours spent in front of a word processor. I would thus like to acknowledge the greatdebt I haveto thosewho havesupportedand helpedme in the processof writing this thesis. First of all, the thesis is dedicatedto June, John, and Alan. Thankyou for folds in To Leah Hargreaves the of the cafe on the common: everything. and everyone Martha been have friendship disco, composed. well so never sustenance,coffee, and Michailidou has continually enrichedmy life at Goldsmiths and beyond. Thankyou to everyonewho hasreadand commentedon parts of the thesis, especiallyRuna Khalique, Margot Butler, and Andrew Barry. The work and archives of Red Notes have been invaluable. Many thanks also to the Kate Sharpley Library for archival material, Joe Kenyon for claimants'action material,andto Steveat AntagonismPress for conversation about left-communism. Indeed, the work of marginal publishers has fuelled me throughout. Finally, I owe a debt of gratitudeto my supervisor,the thesis would have beenvery different if Nikolas Rose had not been such a supportive, encouraging, and critical reader.

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Table of Contents 7

Abbreviations

ChapterI

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Introduction:Politics againstldentitX

8

Minor politics

8

Deleuze and Marx

10

Work and its refusal Against the identity principle

12

Chapter plan

18

Literature Review: Materialism and Diffierence Anti-dualism

22

Identity, equivalence,andthe revengeof the liberal subject Subalterninsurgency

25

Infidel heteroglossia:in and againstcapital

29

Conu-nunityagainstequivalence Conclusion

33

Empiricism: A Materialist Methodology for the Untimely Genealogy and 'counter-memory'

39 40

Matter

42

Relationsand resonance The empiriciststandpoint:the untimely minoritarian

44

Conclusion

51

The Minoritarian:

a Politics of Cramped Creation

17

23

27

37

48

53

Cramped space and the centrality of creation Deterritorialisation as first principle

54

The particular and the social in minor composition

61

The collective, the singular, and the minor author-function

68

Creation against resistance (Deleuze and Foucault)

70

Conclusion

72

The Lumpenproletariat and the Proletarian Unnamable

74

Marx's lumpenproletariat

76

57

Bakunin on the lumpenproletariat as radical identitY, and

Marx's critique

86

The unnamedproletariat

90

Work and manifold relations

93 4

Chapter6

The proletariatandthe minor The empiricallumpen/proletariat

95

Conclusion

99

The Wobblies:Abstract Labour,Minorities, and Industrial Sabotage

Chapter 7

Chapter 9

97

101

Abstract labour and the working class

104

Reductions and complications

109

The repetition and difference of wobbly culture

116

The hobo anomalous Sabotage

121

Conclusion

137

The Social Factoa and the Socialised Worker Introduction to autonomia for chapters 7 and 8

140

Introduction to chapter 7 Panzieri and Marx on machines and the social

143

131

140

144

The social factory: social capital, the collective capitalist, and the general interest of labour

149

The Fragment on Machines

152

Socialised workers

158

The capitalist BwO

166

The little work-machines of the social factory Conclusion

175

The Reversal of Persý2ecliveand the Enzafginati Class composition and the reversal of perspective

180

178

183

The refusal of work (against self-management) Needs and autovalorisation

185

Margins at the centre: emarginati and untorelli Inclusive disjunctive identities and 'autonomy'

192 195

The wacreand money

200

Factory and city Language and counterculture: the Metropolitan Indians and

202

Radio Alice Conclusion

188

205 211

5

Chapter 9

Bibliography

Conclusion

214

46 in our two different ways, perhaps" ... Capital, the line of flight, and the impossibilities of politics

215 216

221

Abbreviations Works by DeleuzeandGuattari: ME

(1983)Anti-Oedipus:Capitalismand SchizophreniaVolumeI

ATP

(1988)A ThousandPlateaus:Capitalismand SchizophreniaVolumeII

K

(1986)Kay'ka:Towarda Minor Literature

Works by Deleuze: N

(1995) Negotiations

Other works: RV

Kornbluh, J. L. (ed.) (1988) Rebel Voices: An IWWAnthology

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Chapter 1 Introduction:

Politics

aqainst

Identity

For the race summoned forth by art or philosophy is not the one that claims to be pure but rather an oppressed,bastard, lower, anarchical, nomadic, and irremediably minor race... (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 109)

Minor

Politics

This thesis is concerned with political composition. I argue that politics is a mode of life in which forms of community, techniques of practice, ethical demeanours, styles, knowledges, and cultural forms are composed. it is a site of innovation, of experimentation, and of the complication of life. In this sense, politics is not the terrain of the representation of a people (and hence does not circulate primarily around questions of 'justice' and 'truth'),

but of their creation.

But the conditions of this creative

composition are not the subjective and material resources (legally sanctioned and autonomous subjectivities, recognised histories, cultural consistencies) that one would conventionally associatewith self-creation. Rather, the creativity I am concerned with is a condition of those who lack these resources, or who experience them as oppressive or inadequate. It is a creativity of 'n-tinorities', who find their movements and expressions 'cramped' on all sides such that they can not in any conventional sense be said to have carved out a delineated social space of their 'own' such that they could be called 'a People'. It is from their very cramped and complex situations that politics emerges, but not as a process of facilitating and bolstering identity, or 'becoming-conscious'. If "the people are missing", as Deleuze (1989: 216) puts it, then there is possibility for a new configuration to emerge, unconstrained by fixed identity; a political configuration of engagementwith the complex social forces which traverse minorities, a 'minor politics'. Such a minor politics is the concern of this thesis. My specific focus (as I elaborate below) is on the minor processes in the theory and practice of communist movements which have developed a certain 'refusal of work'.

This concept of minor politics is developedin the work of Gilles Deleuzeand F61ixGuattari, and its explorationin this thesis is essentiallyan elaborationof Deleuze Guattari 1 One is Deleuze Guattari's that present and of my main arguments politics. and 2 is by for This innovative times. no means an unusual our politics and useful an 1 The term 'minor politics' is derived from Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the 'minor' and 'minor literature'. Though they have used the expressions "minorliterature and politics" and "Kafka politice' (K-. 86,7), 'minor politics' is not a term they employ. 2 Whilstthere is difference and variation in themes and styles between Deleuze's and Guattari's works, individual draws their this thesis between on and collective works as their collective work, and each and part of a single oeuvre, which, for convenience, I sometimessignify with the name 'Deleuze' (as in the thesis title). Guattari(1998: 192-3)discussesthe problemswith, and motives for the sometimes elision of his name from what he elsewherecalls the 'deleuzoguattarian'project (Guattari 1980: 234), but suggests that 'Deleuze' has becomean acceptablecommonnoun for it.

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statement.DeleuzeandGuattariare self-proclaimed'political' thinkers. Indeedpolitics is central enough to their understandingof the formation of life that they can write that "politics precedesbeing" (ATP: 203). In Deleuzeand Guattari's monist thought, 'life' has no primary forms or identities but is a perpetual process of configuration and variation, where politics is an art of composition, an art that affirms the variation and identity 'major' 'molar' life 'minor' and striation or creation of against processes, 3 dichotomy). is (though I there minor/major processes no simple as will show, The ramifications of this generalisationof politics across the plane of life are great,and this manoeuvreplays a not insignificant part in the positive receptionand use of Deleuze and Guattari's works, where a frequent theme is an explication of this politicised being, or becoming. For the developmentof a politics, however, this manoeuvrecan raise problems. If 'everything is political', one can be left wondering whether there is any specificity to politics. This argument figures in Alain Badiou's (1998: 16-7) critique of Deleuze. He makes the case that in generalising politics everywhere, Deleuze's system lacks a specifically 'political register of thought' (and hencehe suggeststhat Deleuze'spolitics reflect 'political' 'ideological' than rather a more vein of the politics of '68). But though Badiou is right to draw our attention to the possibleproblems of generalisingpolitics across the terrain of life, his critique at this level is not adequateto the depthandcomplexity of Deleuze'spolitics, becauseit does not end with this generalisingmanoeuvre.In Deleuzeand Guattari's works there is at once a rich conceptionof what a politics of life might be (and indeedone that is not 'ideological', but rather concretely, or 'materially' situated), and considerable discussion of more conventionalpolitical questions;questions that have been posed by what we can call revolutionary,radical,or proletarianpolitics (thesebeing signifiers of the form of politics that Badiou, with his Maoist affiliations, seeksto foreground). The interrelationof these two aspectsis particularly evidentin Deleuzeand Guattari's conceptof the minor. It is explicitly emphasisedwhen, employing Marx's political categoryof the proletariat, they write that "[t]he power of minority, of particularity, finds its figure or its universal consciousnessin the proletariat." (ATP: 472) Yet, though the fornier question of the is in life Deleuzescholarship,the latter questionof Deleuze receiving attention of politics is Guattari's less frequently addressed. In this thesis I am to radical politics relation and seeking to use the conceptof the minor to discuss both these aspectsof their work together. There are three core areasor debateswhich this elaboration of minor politics passesthrough, and to which the thesis seeks to contribute: relations between Deleuze 3 It is crucial to understandthat there is no primary elementto Deleuzeand Guattari's monism other than an infinite process,where "[m]atterequals energy"(ATP. 153):'The plane of consistency of Nature is like an immenseAbstract Machine, abstract yet real and individual; its pieces are the various assemblages and individuals,each of which groups together an infinity of particles entering into an infinity of more or less interconnectedrelations. There is therefore a unity to the plane of nature, which applies equally to the inanimateand the animate,the artificialand the natural....What we are talking about is not the unity of substance but the infinity of the modificationsthat are part of one another on this unique plane of life." (ATP.254) 9

and Marx, the politics of 'the refusal of work', and, more generally, a situatedpolitics of differenceandcompositionagainstidentity. Deleuze

and Marx

First, in using the conceptof minor politics to write aboutMarx andthe refusal of work, I am seeking to situate the thesis in relation to the small amount of current work on relationsbetweenDeleuzeand Marx. Though such relations have been noted certainly sinceAnti-Oedipus (cf. Lyotard 1977;Donzelot 1977), and Deleuzehimself more than once proposedthat he and Guattariwere Marxists (N: 171; 1995a:5 1), this remains a relatively unexamineddynamic in their work. 4 It is a dynamic, however, that has been brought forward a little by Deleuze's (1995a: 51) comment that his last book (uncompletedbeforehis death)was to be called Grandeurde Marx. The questionof how Deleuze, for whom 'resonance' rather than explication was the basis of philosophical interpretation,would composethe 'greatness'of Marx has left a fitting opennessto his oeuvre. Yet, as even a cursory reading of Capitalismand Schizophrenia(A(E, ATP) shows,such a resonancewould not have beenwholly new.5 Addressingthis question of Deleuze's relation to Marx, tric Alliez (1997: 81) suggests that "all of Deleuze's philosophy ... comes under the heading 'Capitalism and Schizophrenia...... Since the proper nameof such a concernis of course 'Marx', who more than anyone sought to developa politics from an analysisof the 'monstrous' configuration of capitalism,Alliez thuscontinues:"It can be realisedthereforejust how regrettableit is that Deleuzewas not able to write the work he planned as his last, which he wanted to entitle Grandeur de Marx." But this is not an unproductiveregret. For, asAlliez proposes,the possibility of this book mobilisesus to think something of a Marx-Deleuzeresonance:"we can take from the possibility of thinking that this virtual Marx, this philosophically cleancomfort shavenMarx that Deleuzealludes to in the opening pagesof Difference and Repetition, can be mobilised in the form of an empty square allowing us to move around the Deleuziancorpuson freshlegs." (Alliez 1997:81)6 The focus of interestin a Marx-Deleuzeresonancehas been on the centrality of in capitalism their works (cf. Holland 1998,1999; Massumi 1992,1998; Surin 1994, 1997). Indeed, Surin (1997) suggeststhat Deleuze'sMarxian concern with capitalism marks the very 'epochality' of his thought that could ground Foucault's enigmatic 7 day 'Deleuzian'. The be known that the twentieth one century may as suggestion 4A recent essay on the 'many' materialisms in Deleuze, for example, only mentions Marx once, and then is "no doubt lingering disparagingly to suggest that Anti-Oedipus' use of the term 'production' a ... influence of orthodox Marxian thought. " (Mullarkey 1997: 451) 5 Deleuze (1 995a: 51) himself writes that Capitalism and Schizophrenia is completely traversed by Marx and Marxism. 6 See Deleuze (1998) for discussion of the function of the 'empty square' in structuralism, as the forever vacated space of fixed meaning in any system. 7 The Deleuze analyses is a contemporary form of capitalism that Surin suggests particular 'hype rcapital ism' that followed the demise of the post-war world system with its three focal points of in the 'Third World'. Fordism in the West, Sovietism in the Eastern block, and developmentalism

10

analysisof capitalismmust indeedbe the basis of a Marx-Deleuzeresonance,for it is a concernwith the ways that the capitalist social machineengineersthe flows of life that is the declaredbasisof Deleuze'sMarxism.8 But one gets the sensethat the foregrounding of Marxian concernsthrough the categoryof capitalismhas, at times, led to a feeling of impasse,since capitalismappearsto be increasingly overtaking the kind of differences and mutationsaffirmed aspolitics in Anti-Oedipus(A(E). That is, the political injunction of Anti-Oedipus to continuous 'deterritorialisation'(essentially, the process of breaking open and escapingmolar identity)9 appearsto have becomeproblematicsince even the extremesof deterritorialisationare increasinglyisomorphic to capitalistrelations (Holland (1998) specifically makesthis point). If thereis a feeling of impassethis hasparticularramificationsfor reading Deleuze and Guattari, since, unlike the aporia-overdriveof some poststructuralism,their project has been particularly important for its 'affirmative' force.10 This is not to say that impasseis an alien condition for Deleuzeand Guattari, and one should not assumethat their 'joyful' project, like the worst forms of leftism, should circulatearound a continual optimism. Indeed,one can think of Beckett's (1979: 382) proposition that it is the very 'impossibility' of life that compelslife ("I can't go on, I'll go on") as expressinga more appropriatetenor for the Deleuzianpolitical than the popular image of unlicenseddesire. Nevertheless,it would be a pity if Alliez' suggestionof 'fresh legs' a movementaround Deleuze'scorpusthrough a 'virtual Marx' focusedexclusively on aspectswhich show a closing-down of political possibility (as if Marx returned to sober-up Deleuze and Guattari). This thesis thus contributes to debate on a Deleuze-Marx resonanceby considering how this relation opens political potential, how it helps us understand processesof political composition. With this in mind, I want to suggestthat it is in our possible impassethat Marx becomeseven more importantin exploring Deleuzeand Guattari's politics. This is not becauseof the centrality of an analysisof capitalismper se,but becauseMarx remainsthe pre-eminentthinker of the impossibility of any easy or given political escapefrom the infernal capitalistmachine,whilst simultaneouslypositing such possibility and potential on relations formed within capitalism itself. This condition is what Marx calls 6communism'. To foreground communismin Marx is not to turn to a different set of Marx's texts (for example,the early works rather than Capitao. For Marx, communism is the immanentpotentialthat haunts,andemergesin and through capitalism. It is thus a is (and hence interpreting for developing found politics capitalism and perspective

8 T61ix Guattari and I have remained Marxists, in our two different ways, perhaps, but both of us. You see, we think any political philosophy must turn on the analysis of capitalism and the ways it has developed. " (N. 171) 9 For example: "... one can never go far enough in the direction of deterritorialisation: you haven't seen anything yet... " (ACE. 321) 10 As Deleuze (1995: 6) wrote of his concentration on Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche against the conventional 'history of philosophy', what appealed to him was "their critique of negativity, their cultivation of joy... "

11

throughoutMarx's works).II DeleuzeandGuattarihaveresonancewith Marx here. For DeleuzeandGuattari,capitalismis a mode of social relation that is premisedon 'lines of flight'; socially engineeredflows that continually break-open, or deterritorialise fixed ways of being. Marx and Engels (1973: 36-7) similarly emphasisethe revolutionary creativity of the capitalistmodeof productionasa processof the continual transformation 12 into Deleuze Guattari's is (where "[a]ll and that air"). melts solid of social relations lines flight, interpretations these Marx's of of politics and communismaresimultaneously in different them ways, open new to them configure and critical engagementswith 'potential' 'virtuality' Deleuze the life, or of calls possibilities of and open out to what life. Sucha communistperspective,to use Nietzscheanterms, is not a reactivedenial of is but life, 'communist different a process of society', current or an elaborationof a Engels' in Marx is in and continual overcoming all of our social relations, as evident (1974: 56-7) deliberatelyambiguousdefinition: Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established,an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust. We call communism the real movement which abolishesthe present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premisesnow in existence. Such 'communism' is explored in the thesis in two ways. First, in a more theoretical vein, the minor is used to interpret Marx's 'proletariat' as a category of difference in and against capitalism, and second, in a more empirical fashion, minor processes are considered in actual communist movements. The question of the refusal of work runs

throughboth theseconcems.

Work and its refusal If one of the concerns of thesis is to consider forms of political composition through Deleuze between and Marx, I am also seeking to explore the question of a relations 'refusal of work'. Few of the social, political, and economic forecasts of the twentieth demise immanent foresaw been have of than those the more off-beam which century can by be 'leisure the 'mass to caused unemployment' or society' was either where work, has 13 the for humans. We old over-spilled which perform work substitution of machines boundaries of work-place, home, leisure, the 'working day', with the assorted regulatory job flexible part-time contracts, employment, zero-hours and productive techniques of 'unemployment), imperatives (rather Jobseeking' than portfolios,

key-tap monitoring

11 This is how I would interpret Bordiga's argument, as Dauv6 reports, that the whole of Marx's work is an 83). 1997: Martin (cf. Dauv6 and of communism elaboration 12 The question of the primacy of 'lines of flight' as against 'contradictions' (the latter being the prime5, 4 this Marx is Chapters in is discussed where reading and Marxism) for of put more conventional mover on a firmer setting. 13 Such predictions actually go as far back as Antiquity. In response to Cicero's and Aristotle's "Oh 532) heathens! (1976: those They Marx writes: that work, overcome propositions machines could understood nothing of political economy and Christianity... "

12

keyboards, work drug-tests, off-shore island-factories, micro-electronic sweat shop production, and so on, that show not a demise, but an intensification of work. 14 Yet, t. ) without opposition, there has beenrelatively little whilst this intensificationhas not gone critique, or work-placepolitics that hasseriouslyproblematisedthe social arrangementof 'work' itself. In Britain, for example,the central drive of Blairite social policy of 'social inclusion' through work (cf. Gray 1998)hasbeen surprisingly easily naturalised.15 This is in part due to our lack of critical traditions to draw upon. Though the early workers' its (as for politics visible, the of movementsaw critique of work as a central aspect example, in the persistenceof 'Saint Monday' - absenteeismon Mondays - and the campaign for the eight hour day (cf. Thompson 1967; Linebaugh 1991; Hunnicutt 1988)),it would seemthat, as modem political culture developed,work becamea rather unproblematiccategory. Bordiga (cited in Nigation 1975: 5 1) marks this point when he writes: The classical socialist goal is the abolition of wage labour. Only the abolition of wage labour can bring about the abolition of capitalism. But not having been able to abolish wage labour has, since it began, aimed at the the socialist movement ... abolition oýf the market economy.

Thus, even Marxist politics, for which work is a central category, has so often served less to problematise than to glorify work, in, as Benjamin (1992: 250-1) puts it, a certain resurrection of the old Protestant work ethic. This is amply evident in the demands for the 'right to work', 'full employment', or Lenin's 'war communism' and advocacy of Taylorism. (cf. Bell 1956: 41), Trotsky's 'ryfilitarisation of labour', Stalin's 'Stakhanovite' workers and so on. 16 Negri (1979: 124) thus writes:

14 This intensification of work is considered in detail in Chapter 7, but two anecdotes can make the point for now. A London Underground advertisement for Lemsip Extra in the winter of 1997/8 displayed a little of the imperatives and pernicious mechanisms of work when it asked: "What sort of person goes to work with the flu? " The response was: "The one after your job". Elsewhere, the intensification of work which accompanied the growth of flexible production techniques was such that the Japanese were induced to coin a new word - 'karoshi' - to describe a condition of sudden death through over-work (cf. Kamunist Krant! 1997). For an excellent and exhaustive account of the contemporary intensification of work from an anti-work perspective see Kamunist Kranti (1997). 15 The way that this naturalisation appears to have been eased by the Labour Party's historical relations to a socialist tradition (with the return of 'old Labour' talk of full employment, the right to work, and a community of workers) exemplifies a little of the mainstream left's uncritical relation with the category 'work'. 16 In a 1987 conversation with Pope John Paul 11, the Polish leader General Jaruzelski proposed that the block's toward but Eastern East West the the between capitalism, movement not and was ground common But such a affirmation of what he called "the Theology of Work" (cited in Hunnicutt 1988: 314-5). labour' is 'militarisation Trotsky's limited Stalinism. to of a useful example perspective on work was not is Marxism. As left image being the he has clearly evident in this of on of a popular since retained passage, in Trotsky's socialism there is to be no reduction in work: "Under capitalism, the system of have Taylor the etc., as their object to increase the the system, of application piece-work and of grading, Under Socialist by production, piece-work, the the value. surplus of squeezing-out exploitation of workers bonuses, etc., have as their problem to increase the volume of socialist product, and consequently to raise the general well-being. Those workers who do more for the general interest than others receive the disorganisers. lazy, the the " (1961: the than careless, and to the social product right a greater quantity of 149)

13

More than any other single watchword of the communist movement, the refusal of work has been continually and violently outlawed, suppressedand mystified by the traditions and the ideology of socialism. If you want to provoke a socialist to rage, or deflate his flights of demagogy, provoke him on the question of the refusal of work!

Yet Marx himself took a very different attitudeto work. Though his position was not Marxism dominant from his difference traditions are amply evident the of unambiguous, in this passagecarried on the back cover of the US journal Zerowork (1975,1977): It is one of the greatestmisunderstandingsto talk of free, human, social work, or inhuman, is 'Work' the unsocial unfree, essentially work without private property. The determined by activity, private property and creating private property. abolition of private property becomes a reality only when it is understood as the abolition of 'work'. (Marx, from 'Ueber Friedrich Lists Buch Das Nationale Systein der Politischen Oekononzies') A critique of work has, however, not been wholly absent from modem radical movements. In 1883 Paul Lafargue, Cuban-born Marxist and Marx's son-in-law, wrote a communist polemic, The Right to be Lazy, which can be seen as the start of the critique of work within the modem communist movement. 17 Lafargue's argument had a simple premise: A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilisation holds sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work. (Lafargue

1989:

21)

Lafargue was careful not to situate the cause of this furious passion solely in the hands of is irony Rights Man'. For its 'anaemic that those most bourgeoisie the tragic of the and basis it have their the 'the to of terrible make to scourge' sought most subject 17 Lafargue's essay is the first to explicitly emphasise the critique of work as the basis of a communist the broader In critique of work of course Marx-informed sense, a milieu. communist politics within a invention (cf. also is itself (1981) has capitalist Illich a modern As to this. work argued, emerges earlier ATP. 400-1,490-1). The problems with generalising sweeps through history aside, Illich argues that for the classical Greeks and Romans, work done with the hands was a more lowly practice than begging (not, Middle Ages, the labour it), through (as doing wage and this that and women slaves prevented of course, begging) and making, was a sign of misery trades shoe as household such subsistence, certain against it took considerable effort to turn In capitalism lack the modern of emergence of community. and Marx 1976: 899; and Thompson 1967). 1991; Linebaugh (cf. into the proletariat peasants and vagabonds In the politics of modern capitalism itself, Lafargue was by no means the first to raise the issue; anti-work (cf. Rawick 1972), and were feature resistance slave of perspectives and practices were a persistent prevalent amongst other elements of the transatlantic working class (cf. Linebaugh and Rediker 1990). 14

&revolutionaryprinciple' - the 'Right to Work': "... if the miseries of compulsory work and the torturesof hunger have descendedupon the proletariatmore in number than the locustsof the Bible, it is becausethe proletariatitself invited them." (28) Though this is not the place to assessLafargue's argument,against the 'right to work', he presents communismas a movementwhich, through the pressurefor shorter hours and higher wages,can force technologicaldevelopmenttoward a societywith a minimum possible of work-time, such that "[t]he end of revolution is not the triumph of justice, morality and liberty but to work the least possible and to enjoy oneself intellectuallyand physically ... the most possible." (cited in Cohn 1972: 160)18 At the same time as Lafargue was writing his Marxist polemic, Nietzsche was sayingsomethingnot wholly different: The impossible class. Poor, happy and independent! these things can go together; poor, happy and a slave! - thesethings can also go together - and I can think of no better news I could give to our factory slaves:provided, that is, they do not feel it to be in general a disgrace to be thus used, and used tip, as a part of a machine and as it were a stopgap to fill a hole in human inventiveness!...If have always in you ... your ears the flutings of the Socialist pied-pipers whose design is to enflame you with wild hopes? which bid you to be prepared and nothing further, prepared day upon day, so that you wait and wait for something to happenfrom outside and in all respectsgo on living as you have always lived... This would be the right attitude of mind: the workers of Europe ought henceforth to declare themselvesas a class a human impossibility... (1982: §206) The sense that these positions manifest is reflected, in diverse ways, in an antiwork tangent that develops through a number of modem communist and countercultural movements. The most prominent of these include the Industrial Workers of the World (cf. Chapter 6), Dada and Surrealism (cf. Huelsenbeck 1966; Thirion 1929), the Situationist International (cf. Knabb 1981), the Yippies (cf. Hoffman 1996; Rubin 1970; Neville 1971), the Black Panther Party (cf. Cleaver 1970), operaisnio and autono"lia (cf. Chapters 7 and 8), the British punk movement, and movements such as Rastafari and other elements of black expressive culture and politics (cf. Gilroy 1987: 199-203; Hall et Howe 1973; 'After Marx, 1978; April' Collective 1981), as well as, in Britain, al. elements of the Claimants' Union movement and, more recently, claimants' movements 181say that this is a'Marxist'text, but the degree to which Marx himselfwas in accordwith The Right to be Lazy is unclear. As Cohn (1972)has documented,though Marx was happy with the work of Guescleand Lafarguein LEgalit6 at the time when The Rightto be Lazy was serialised, he later fell out with Lafargue, famously suggesting, as a direct reference to Lafargue, that "if that's Marxism, I am not a Marxist" (as Engels reported Marx's words to Lafargue, in Cohn 1972: 167). It appears that for Marx, Guescle and Lafarguewere fast and lose with the word 'revolution', and displayed an "impatience without bounds" (1972: 167). Lafarguein particularwas admonishedfor his "infantileboastingon the revolutionary horrors of the future" (Marxcited in Cohn 1972: 168-9). But, whilst Marx wrote (November1882) that Lafargue's writings were in fact "reminiscencefrom Bakunin", it is unclear if this refers to The Right to be Lazy, becauseone month later (betweenits serialisation and its publication in pamphletform) Marx wrote that "Lately Paul has written his best things with humourand fun." (cited in Cohn 1972: 169) 15

Allowance andNew Deal (cf. Aufheben 1998; Bad Attitude 1995; againstthe Jobseekers, Carr 1975: 54-5; Job Shirkers Alliance n.d; Kenyon 1972; Unwaged Fightback 1987). The refusalof work hasalsoemergedin a myriad of smallergroups and journals, where "Ne TravaillezJainais" has developed the senseof the 1953St. GermaindesPr6sZ:graffiti ' in many different ways (cf., for example, Fatuous Times n.d.; Midnight Notes and ProcessedWorld generally).19This is far from saying, however, that there is a coherent politics or trajectoryof the refusal of work. The perspectiveswithin which a refusal of fundamentally different, in these even opposed, work emerges groups are often radically suchthat at most it is a point of disjunctionand innovation in political culture, rather than a 'school'. 20

My interest in the refusal of work, at a general level, is to bring the rather forgotten perspectiveof a critique of work into political debate. But I am not writing a 'history of the refusal of work' or setting out a body of programmatictenets. The way this thesisconsidersthe refusalof work is as a perspectivefor bringing Marx and Delcuze into relation. More empirically, I use it as a means of understanding communist movementswhich have sought to overcome 'work' and the subject of 'worker'. The refusal of work should thus be seen in this thesis as immanentto the anti-identitarian processesof the minor and the proletariat, and hence I sometimesuse the expression 'refusal of work/er' to emphasisethis. The groupsI considerin no senseexhaustthe potential of a politics of the refusal of work. My concernis with movementswhich havevery concretelyengagedwith work itself and havetakenwork asthe starting point of politics. That is, I am concernedwith groups which have engagedwith a quite conventional political territory (though their from far conventional). I should stressthat by exploring the refusal of work are politics within movementswhich fit, to degrees,with conventionaldefinitions of politics, rather than in more obviously popularcultural, countercultural,or avant gardist forms, I am not seekingto describethe 'autonomouspolitical register' that Badiou points out is absentin Deleuze. I would arguethat the 'specifically political' aspectsof Deleuze'swork that his Marx help elucidateare still to be situatedacross the social whole (rather with relations than in an autonomousregister).21 The reason for my focus is to consider explicitly framework work-based movements, concerns, a and problematisationswithin communist that emphasisessociocultural composition and creation. This is at once to draw from the anaemic territory of 'real politics' and orthodox away communist politics 19 A photograph of this graffiti ('Never Work') appeared in Intemationale Situationniste no. 8 1963 (cf. IS 1970), with the heading 'Preliminary program to the situationist movement', and it reappeared in the Sorbonne in May '68 (Pag6s 1998: 36). Much of the elaboration of the refusal of work in these smaller groups and journals has developed from the politics of the SI, but the best of it is part of a movement of overcoming the SI's very real problems. See for example Blissett (1995). 20 One example is the critique of Bob Black (whose 'The Abolition of Work' (1987) is one of the more popular anti-work essays) and John Zerzan by some of those who write under the Luther Blissett 'multiple name' (cf. Blissett 1987). 21 it is for similar reasons that Marx is a thinker of social rather than political revolution (cf. Marx and Engels 1973: 12), and why those related to left-communist milieu often pose their politics as 'anti-political' (cf. Bordiga n.d.; Dauvd and Martin 1997).

16

Marxism, and to bring some poststructuralist and cultural studies concerns with countercultureanddifferenceaway from the territory of the 'post-political'. By drawing out the refusal of work within workers movementsI hope to show how innovative political practicecan occur in direct engagementwith work. This is not to asserta return to a politics of work against an interest in countercultureand the cultural artistic avant garde(far from it - thesehavebeencrucial sites and processesof political and conceptual innovation),rather,it is to try andreaddressthe balance,andproblematisethe distinctions betweenthe more countercultural,artistic, and poetic aspectsof politics (which retain a continued, if marginal, popularity in cultural studies, as evident, for example, in the recentacademicinterestin the SituationistInternational),and work-basedpolitics (which are decidedlyunfashionable). Against

the identity

principle

To situate the thesis more widely, a third concern is with exploring a politics of difference and becoming against identity. This politics is signalled in the opening of this chapter as a 'minor politics'. In bringing together Deleuze's minor, Marx's proletariat, and the refusal of work I am considering how politics can operate as a creative, composing, and concretely situated process without being premised upon, or falling back on identity. I will leave further development of this for the following chapters. Here I want to suggest how this minor politics relates to a broader political debate. Through the influence of neo-Gramscian theories of 'hegemony' and the 6autonomy of the political' (most famously developed in Laclau. and Mouffe (1985)), a persistent concern of 1980s and 1990s sociology and cultural studies has been with developing a politics of minorities, difference, particularity, and new social movements, in a break from orthodox Marxian ideas of class, unity, teleology, and the centrality of These development have sometimes been called 'post-Marxism', 'the economy'. 4cultural politics', and 'post-politics' to signify this break. The politics I explore here is equally attuned to the problems of orthodox Marxian thought, and with an affirmation of difference, but it takes a different path to neo-Gramscian conceptionS.22 Rather than following an overcoming of Marx, the arguments of this thesis have a closer relation to Marxian problematics, hence I seek to show how a politics of difference relates to the categories of the proletariat, class, surplus value, and work, and the processes, flows, and captures that these categories describe. At a time of the intensification of work and the increasing capitalisation of life at the most micro levels, analysis at the level of the

22 It is noteworthy that the Italian operaismo and autonomia movements that I consider in Chapters 7 and 8 explicitly challenge the neo-Gramscian politics of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and offer a trajectory in Marxist politics that has been overshadowed by the concept of 'hegemony' and its popularity in European theory and politics (even though it had a particularly repressive function in Italy). 17

capitalist 'mode of production', or ISOCiUS123 would seem to be more, rather than less

necessary. This problematicof a politics against identity has been highlighted by Jean-Luc Nancy (1991) in his conceptof 'unworking community' (as discussedin Chapter 2). Against philosophiesof being, essence,and presence,'community' for Nancy is not found in the coherenceof a completed'work' or 'identity', but in a continuousprocessof connection,disjunction, and singularity - or 'unworking'. I mention Nancy here because he relatesthis unworking to communism. Indeed he suggests that unworking is the political imperativeof communism,insofarasit is a politics which radically problematises work (both in termsof 'identity' and the more conventionalsenseof the word) (1991: 7). Nancy's pursuit, at least in its broad sense,is one that this thesis has affinities with. 24 Minor politics is a processof engagementwhich enters"in the middle" (Deleuze1988a: 123) of any set of relations,practices,or movements. It describestechniques,modesof engagement,points of concern, and a political 'style', rather than proposes a political model or a 'school'. Hence, I am not using minor politics and the refusal of work to describean autonomoustheoretical or empirical community or identity, a 'work', but to see how it opens, or 'deterritorialises' fixed identities, and indeed conventional understandingsof the communistmovementand political practice. However, if this kind of perspectiveis to havecontemporarypertinence,it needsto be applied. Hence, where I differ from Nancy is in seekingto explore how this 'unworking' has operatedin rather concreteforrns of engagementwith work and its identities. That said, the empiricalcasestudiesare not examplesof 'correct practice'. The thesis contributesto contemporary political thought through developing the conceptsand techniquesof the minor and the refusalof work. The casestudiesshow how the minor can be used to 'interpret' political movements,and to offer accountsof a politics of the refusal of work. The potential use of the Industrial Workers of the World and autonorniatoday can only be in points of resonancethat they may offer, sites of problematisationand forms of composition that may havecontemporarypertinence,but not in any direct senseas exemplaryfon-ris. Chapter

plan

To summarise,the thesis develops an understandingof 'minor politics' as a form of creativity of 'cramped' minorities. This categorybrings togetherDeleuzeand Guattari's I In life, this am seekingto and a more plane of politics. of conventional radical politics in Marx Deleuze discussion between to the and a fashion that around relations contribute 23 Deleuze and Guattari's word 'socius' is used throughout the thesis. Essentially it means "social machine" (A(E-. 33) - the set of flows, relations, and identities of a social system - and is not wholly different to Marx's 'mode of production' (though see Chapter 7, note 54). 24 1 say this advisedly because, though Nancy and Deleuze share certain concerns, they work in very different philosophical frameworks. Whilst Deleuze suggests that he was never Heideggerian, reportedly referring to Heidegger as "the Nazi Druid" (Faye 1995), and is somewhat disparaging of Bataille's understanding of 'transgression' (cf. Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 47), these two form the basis of Nancy's discussion of community. See Nancy (1996) for his interpretation of their relation, and (1991 a: 4) where he uses Deleuze's concept of 'becoming-imperceptible'in an explanation of his 'being-in-common'.

18

talks about communism as much as capitalism, and that brings in a politics of the refusal is intervention in broader In the thesis an current political theory in sense, a of work/er. the development of a situated anti-identitarian or 'creative' perspective. The rest of the chapters are organised as follows. 2 is a literature review of poststructuralist work that has, at a largely theoretical level, sought to pose the possibility of a politics against identity and liberal humanist forms of equivalence through a relation with Marx and/or communism. Here I Chapter

(1995) Brown's Wendy Cultural', 'Merely Judith (1998) critique Butler's consider essay 'subaltern (1996) Spivak's in theory, identity 'new social movement' of the principle of insurgency', Haraway's (1991) 'cyborg' and 'situated knowledges', Nancy's (1991) This differend. (1988) Lyotard's chapter presents a of community, and terrain of relations between poststructuralism and Marx that is different to neo-Gramscian for background the and post-Marxist readings, and a set of problematics to act as a 6unworking'

discussion of Deleuze and Guattari's politics. I have chosen not to review the relevant secondary literature on Deleuze, the literature on the refusal of work, or more overtly 4communist' literature, for these bodies of work are used selectively in the substantive chapters. Chapter 3 is more methodological, and the start of my argument proper. It is an After elaboration of Foucault's and Deleuze's readings of Nietzsche's 'genealogy'. explaining the general framework of genealogy as a process of 'unmaking' ourselves, I explore Deleuze's 'empiricism' as a methodology of 'matter', 'relations', and 'resonance' that seeks to accentuatevariation and difference against identity. The chapter develops into an elaboration of the 'standpoint' of empiricism, the minor. As well as mapping Deleuze's understanding of 'life' and empiricism, the chapter is concerned to show how into histories them the turning writing of of radical movements without one can approach historical objects. Chapter 4 takes up the minor standpoint and considers the specific techniques from 'creation' 'deterritorialisation', 'cramped the to minor, and of space' and processes 4particular intrigues', and the minor relationship to the social, the 'line of flight', and 'minor is based Guattari's Delcuze This of concept tauthorship'. around and chapter literature', but it develops a more general economy of minor politics. Though I discuss is in detail, I the that not a set of the minor stress minor the techniques and concerns of but that 'Deleuzian of engagement mode a politics', correct of a programmatic rules 'in begins the middle' of any situation or movement. always Chapter 5 explores Marx's figures of the proletariat and lumpenproletariat to see After Marx's difference to standpoint. a detailed how a minoritarian concept of relates basis for the lumpenproletariat that the political emphasises the of consideration I despite its disputes (in Marx's the that anarchists), argue with the category emergence of frisson of excess (and its occasional foregrounding by some groups as a 'class' of the for Deleuzian is lumpenproletariat the category a reading a problematic refusal of work), 19

of Marx to adopt. This is becauseit is a categorythat seeksto describeidentity removed from social relations, even as it looks like difference. That said, I also show how the lumpenproletariatis a useful meansof drawing out the question of the refusal of work and the complexity of class formation, againstMarxian orthodoxy (and aspectsof Marx himself). The prime concern of this chapter is to develop an understandingof the proletariatas a situatedprocess,a minor figure or 'unnamable', rather than an identity, that is both of the manifolds of the capitalist socius and seeks to deterritorialisethem. The refusalof work is presentedas an extensionof Marx's argumentthat the proletariatis ZD both in and againstcapitalistforms of life. Chapter 6 is an interpretationof the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) using the frameworksof the minor andthe proletariatdevelopedin the previous chapters. I show the various techniques by which, through the plane of 'class', the IWW composed a minor people against the identities of worker, minority, American, immigrant, citizen, and 'People'. I show how a crampedspaceof work, and a paucity of cultural themesdevelopedinto a vibrant andcomplex movement. In particularI focus on the IWW migrant worker or hobo, not as a romanticisedwanderer, but as a site of political creationfrom the situationof being in an anomalousposition to work, migrancy, and the IWW. I also look at sabotageas a tactic immanentto a group formed not around identity but processesof the deterritorialisationof work. Chapters 7 and 8 are concernedwith the Italian operaismo and autonomia movements,and henceI start with a generalintroduction to the movements. The chapters are split around two concerns:the 'social factory', and the processesand techniquesof the operaistand autonomistformulation of the refusalof work. This division should not, however, be seen as following a narrative where the 'theory' is followed by a presentationof the 'practice'. As I show in Chapter 4, theory and practice are not distinct, but part of a generalminor creativity. The chaptersare so structured to enable discussionof two aspectsof the political productionof operaismoand autonomia. Chapter 7, on the 'social factory', moves from discussionof Panzieriand Marx on machinesand 'real subsumption', through Tronti's idea of 'social capital' and the social factory, to Marx's 'Fragmenton Machines' and Negri's 'socialisedworker'. In a critique of Negri's socialisedworker thesis I also include a quite lengthy discussion of Deleuzeand Guattari's conceptionof capitalism, 'axiomatics', 'control', and 'machinic factory. is in keeping the thesis that the social of a more concept as with surplusvalue', Whilst being an explorationof an aspectof the conceptualproduction of operaismoand is first presented that to the this understandingof capitalism chapteralso adds autonomia, in Chapter5. Thus the chapterendsby discussingcontemporaryforms of 'work'. Chapter 8 explores the theoreticaltechniquesand practices of the refusal of by I how in ('marginals'). the start showing operaismo work autonomiaand eniarginati 'class developed composition', the 'reversal of the of and autonomia concepts perspective',the 'refusal of work', and 4autovalorisation'to understandan antagonistic 20

political compositionthat brokewith the identity of worker (and with the neo-Gramscian eurocommunismof the PCI). I then consider the way autonomia developed into a politicisation of 'marginality'. What I stress in the discussion of the practices of the emarginatiis the way difference and particularity operated in the composition of the movement,and how problematisationsand practicesof counterculturewere brought into the terrain of a politics of work. I discuss this through the questions of 'inclusive disjunctive identitiesand autonomy', 'the socialwageand money', 'factory and city', and 'counterculture and language'. Whilst I developedthe social factory thesis into an understanding of contemporary capitalist sociality, in this chapter I stay with the elaborationof one movement. Chapter 9 concludesthe thesis with a return to the questionof a Deleuze-Marx resonance. I discussthe basis of Deleuzeand Guattari's 'Marxism', and consider how minor politics and the 'line of flight' can addressthe problemof the closureof politics.

21

Chapter 2 Literature

Review:

Materialism

and Difference

does not belong to communism, and communism does not let itself be one ... designatedby what it names.(Blanchot 1997: 295)

The thesis is structuredaround a relation betweenDeleuzeand Guattari's 'minoritarian' and Marx's 'proletariat'. But rather than attempt to cover the literature on Deleuze or on the communist movement (which will be selectively used in the argument of the thesis), by way of a literature review I want to illustrate a wider milieu of related poststructuralist thought. I focus here on recent influential poststructuralist conceptions of politics that have sought to analyse 'difference' in relation to the Marxian problematic of an immanent critique of capitalism and its identities. My purpose here is to present a general territory and set of concerns and problematics to contextualise my argument, and from which to develop the specific and detailed explanation of minor politics. This linking of poststructuralism and Marxism may sound like a return to an older debate from which a certain 'post-Marxism' emerged through conceptions of hegemony and civil society against theories founded on class; most prominently in Laclau and Mouffe's (1985) Hegeniony and Socialist Strategy. It is, however, a very different relation between Marx and poststructuralism that I want to explore. Throughout the thesis I am seeking to relate poststructuralist concerns back to more 'orthodox' Marxian problematics (even as they are so often politically unproductive in orthodox Marxism). I am concerned with how Marx's understanding of a milieu and its forces (life or labourpower in the capitalist mode of production) and an antagonistic politics that emerges in and against this milieu and its identities (communism), could form mutually productive relations with a poststructuralist politics of difference and critique of the liberal humanist subject. There are five parts to this review, each of which considers an aspect of one theorist's work: a problematisation of a resurgent material/cultural dualism (Butler), a critique of the implicit liberal subject of identity politics (Wendy Brown), a conception of agency as a materialist process of difference (Spivak), a continuation of this through an understanding of the relations between contemporary capitalism and political practice (Haraway), and a presentation of 'community' against identity and equivalence (Nancy is here important difference One Lyotard). the the question of concerns of more and in Laclau and Mouffe's A the equivalence place of against equivalence. critique of hegemony thesis and some post-Marxism is evident in the reading of Brown. In the figure last the Spivak Haraway, the on of communism and section sections on and and community in Nancy and Lyotard, politics is presented as a process of difference against equivalence. It is perhaps no accident that most of the theorists considered here are 22

influenced feminists. Feminist questions of structural inequality, the poststructuralist possibilities of a community that is nonetheless complex, an ambivalent relation with Marx and Marxism, and the project of the exploration and negation of dominant subject been feminism has dissimilar to the engaged, are not positions, with which contemporary wider concerns of this project.

Anti-dualism That Judith Butler's (1998)recentessayon the stateof US Left critique, and its apparent return to a dualistic base/superstructure model, was necessaryat all might seem rather tragic. Yet the essay itself is a useful opportunity to consider an example of the interrelation of contemporary poststructuralist politics (Butler's (1990) politics of 'performativity' having had considerable influence) with a more conventionally 4materialist'tradition. Against unnamedMarxist critics who have consigned'new social movements'to the realmsof a 'merely', at best derivative, 'cultural', where activism is seen as simply the affin-nation of particularistic identity, Butler contends that the material/culturaldichotomy is, to say the least, unstable. This is not a new position; indeedit is not even a critique that is unique to poststructuralistinterventions. Butler rightly points to Marxist influencedtheoristsincluding Williams, Hall, Spivak, and most notably Althusser, who have all problematisedthe dualism.' And we can go back to Marx himself to makethe case. If for Marx the first premiseof human history is the selfmaking of the human through an intricate interrelationwith Nature (as a complex life activity, or processof labour, where the whole ndlieu is the plane of composition), then delineate division in his work (cf. Marx not easily can a coherentbase/superstructure one 2 1974: 42). Engels and Butler suggests not only that 'cultural politics' are far from unrelated to a 4material'realm, but also that in invoking the distinction, the new vulgar materialismis seekingto reinscribe(or simply negate)that which, following 1970s feminism, actively broke with the subordinationof 'unity' enactedby the old Left's notion of 'real politiCS1.3 Butler writes that "there is no reasonto assumethat such social movementsare reducible to their identitarianforms." (37) Indeed, through a readingof Engels' (1948) critique of 1 As the prime example, in his concept of multiple 'overcletermination' Althusser (1969: 113) reads Marx to instances, in History, the "... these never seen step Engels that are to etc. superstructures, argue and his to Time done the is scatter pure phenomena, as their comes, or, when work respectfully aside when before His Majesty the Economy as he strides along the royal road of the Dialectic. From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the 'last instance' never comes. " 2 One can of course selectively find Marx in 'economic determinist' mode, but we should remember the direction of his argument is against a pervasive idealism such that in polemical vein he perhaps over-plays the is the delineation However, and superstructural economic not times. of 'economic'case a strict at an human life Nature (or the unity of thought of and theorist the to subdivisions such who read a useful way 'labour-power') were functional to capitalist social forms (and hence were bourgeois, not Marxist abstractions). 3 For example, Butler ponders whether the 'merely cultural' accusation against queer politics might be a deliberate performative exclusion. She suggests that this exclusion may be an 'unthinking response' to a (unable to cope with the kinds of these life that critics degradation such of cultural perceived sexual including deliberately their homosexuality own) that raise, may reopen the critique of all social relations dualism so as to consign queer politics to the subordinate realm in the dichotomy (1998: 44). 23

the centrality of the normativefamily structureto the modeof production, and Althusser's (1971) conceptionof the materialapparatusof ideology, she suggeststhat even queer politics (the archetypeof the 'merely cultural'), despitenot necessarilybeing a question of 'work', could be consideredin terms of that most materialistof categories,'class'. But Butler's argumentis not to tortuouslydraw cultural strugglesinto a bed of economism(or indeedto affirm an all encompassing'cultural monism' (cf. Butler 1997)). Rather, by marking the complexity andmutualdeterminationof economicand cultural forces, she is enabledto talk of the importanceof difference (in these 'new political formations') to politics generally. She suggeststhat normativeand oppressiveforms of identity can be challengedthrough the proliferation of difference, and that, as these movementsenter 'convergent fields of politicisation' and 'conflictual encounters', difference becomes a process of movement across and between political groups rather than a marker of delimited identity. She thus turns Left critique on its headin arguing that 'Unity' stifles politics, and proposes "... that difference remain constitutive of any struggle", even "...the cipher of democraticpromiseon the Left." (1998: 44) But if Butler problematisesa material/culturaldichotomy and affirms processesof differentiation, she does not offer much critique of the new social movements she considers. One gets the impression of an emerging dichotomy between an old style economismand a new political.4 Only once does she say that "... a narrowly identitarian construalof suchmovementsleadsto a narrowing of the political field... " (37), and only then to suggestthat we shouldnot assumethat they are so reducibleto identity. Perhaps this essay is not the place for her to take up a critique of these movements (it is, after all simultaneously a 'reply' and an attempt to open debate). But her assertion that "New political formations do not stand in an analogical relation with one another, as if they were

discreteand differentiatedentities..." but "... are overlapping, mutually determining, and convergentfields of politicisation" (37) is basedon a little bit of an assumptionthat all groups have similar ability to, and investmentin 'mutual determination'. Thus, though she professessome sympathy with theseMarxist critics, she does not raise the question of how movementsbasedaroundidentity and rights may enactrather than escapea rather bourgeoisnotion of identity, with all the exclusionsthis entails. Whilst Butler suggests that the differencesof thesemovementsare a certainbecoming(37) againstidentity, the ways this might occur, or indeed the reasons why this would occur at all are left for for its desire identity 5 is If form Marxism rightly a certain of challenged untouched. and unity (which affirms a hierarchyof identities and reinforces exclusion), one is left have left be to such desires assumed wondering why new social movementsshould

4 Butler's relation with the unnamed Marxists that she sets up, in the rather Derridean beginning of the essay, by situating herself in and against the critique that she is critiquing, is thus largely negated by the rest of the essay. 5 It does not really help the case that the only example offered of the escape from identity is in the academy, where efforts to delineate autonomous articulations of gender and race studies are said to 'invariably' expose the limits of autonomy (37).

24

behind such that their demand for rights and recognition should not be considered as a liberal politics?

Identity, equivalence, and the revenge of the liberal subject It is preciselyon thesetermsof a desirefor identitythatWendyBrown (1995)presentsa cogentcritiqueof 'newsocialmovements'.Througha readingof Nietzsche'sconceptof Brown suggeststhat identitypolitics are not so much an affirmationof ressentiment, differenceandcomplexity(againsttheteleologies andunitiesof orthodoxMarxism),but, rather,a reactionaryturning in (in Nietzsche'ssenseof a fear and hatredof life and difference)againstsuchcomplexity. The assertionof particularidentity, far from the beginningof contextualised fetishism difference, the toward tends of a more processes of decontextualised fragmentof life that offers somereactivesecurityagainstthe world, ratherthanactivepoliticsassuch.Brownwrites: Drawing upon the historically eclipsed meaning of disrupted and fragmented narratives of ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, region, continent, or nation, identity politics permits a senseof situation - and often a senseof filiation or community without requiring profound comprehension of the world in which one is situated. Identity politics permits positioning without temporal or spatial mapping, a feature that sharply distinguishes it from (Marxian) class analysis and reveals its proximity to (liberal) interest group politics. In this respect, identity politics, with its fierce assertion and production of subjects, appears less a radical political response to postmodernity than a symptom of its ruptures and disorienting effects... Identity politics emerges partly as a reaction, in other words, to an ensemble of distinctly postmodern assaults upon the integrity of modernist communities producing collective identity. (1995: 35) For Brown, in almost a reversal of Butter's position, a politics of particularity and identity is less attuned to the complexities of material/cultural forces than Marxian class analysis (though Brown is not referring to the vulgar materialists Butler critiques, and she is well aware of Marxism's totalising tendencies).6 Indeed, identity politics rather replicates, at the level of the particular, the very form of identity that Marxism and difference Where Butler to creative relations of will seemed poststructuralism critique. between and across new political forms, Brown shows how they tend toward precisely the reverse. Brown also critiques the notion of community in theories of new social movements. I want to briefly consider this under a critique of 'equivalence'. In talking of the mutual constitution of movements, Butler professes some relation with Laclau and

6 Brown clearly sees close similarities between her work and Butler's, and it would be misleading to present too much of a dichotomy between the two. Brown's work nevertheless quite explicitly challenges identity politics where Butler is more tangential to them. 25

Mouffe's concept of a 'chain of equivalence' as an 'equality' between identities as they emerge and change in mutual relation. 7 In so far as Butler aligns herself with this figure I think she is still subject to a certain separation of the political and the economic. But here I want to focus on the problem in Laclau and Mouffe. In conversation with Butler, Laclau writes that liberalism seeks to fix certain parameters to the community of these equivalent identities, and 'radical democratic politics' attempts to "... partially extend Laclau 1997: 8) " (Butler indefinite limit to their and equivalences and partially expansion. There seems to be an expansion of the content of the category of liberal identity ('extending equivalences') and a certain limitation, without a critique of the category per itself, despite identities Such seems, se. assertion of the possibility of an equivalence of to return to a base/superstructuredualism. Inasmuch as Laclau and Mouffe's argument is founded on an 'autonomy of the political', identity can be rather unproblematically nurtured into equality in civil society. Laclau seemsto suggest as much in his reading of what he calls 'the Sorelian-Gramscian tradition',

where ...Collective will',

'ororanic t: )

ideology', 'hegemonicgroup', and so forth becomeempty forms that can be filled by any imaginable political and social content." (1995: 95; emphasis added)g This kind of formulation, Brown argues, is necessarilymyopic toward the operationsof a globally intricate, differentiated, and multiple processesof the the economy, and structured production of identity that Foucault, amongstothers, has taught us (where, at the very least, identity is always simultaneouslyan economic, cultural, and political form - not simply something formed on the social democratic plane of social rights and responsibilities).9 Perhaps such democratic equalities are possible, but, as Brown is is degree imaginable to the than content such that, which some more others suggests, in differential in to, the even positioning of subjects relation without an awarenessof fits it is difficult in Laclau's from hegemonic to statement space, see what sense exclusion is it best is into At bring that 'politics' not to milieu a an attempt at all. all with a radical Eden fact in "is Marx informs by 'rights': disturbed very a capitalism, as us, particularly 172) " (1974: innate man. the of rights of

7 Butler (1988: 37) writes: "This is not quite the chain of equivalence proposed by Laclau and Mouffe, Laclau (Butler Laclau 1997) " In it. important to does and it with conversation relations sustain although logic formulation the "I is of equivalence, namely, as a of with your much agree very more certain: she 'process by which the differential nature of all identity is at the same time asserted and subverted. '" (9) It ICA between Butler and Laclau (London's is interesting in this context that at a recent discussion 18.5.1997), the only point of stark disagreement concerned the relevance of the category of class, that is, structured inequality across liberal categories (a category which Laclau was keen to deny). 8 As if to mark off consideration of the economic, Laclau asserts "... that for me it is only as an extension tendency that cleconstruction can present itself both as a and radicalisation of this ['Sorelian-Gramscian') of moment of its inscription in the Marxist tradition as well as a point of turning/cleepening/supersession the later. " (1995: 95; emphasis added) 9 Despite Laclau and Mouffe's fondness for Althusser, is clearly such multiplicity of determinants Althusser's (1969,1971) concern also. It is difficult to read in Althusser a definition like this: "The concept in the field of the symbolic, and has no meaning whatsoever outside of overdetermi nation is constituted it. " (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 97)

26

Subaltern

insurgency

Spivakalso indicatesan uneaseat the liberal humanisttone of Laclau and Mouffe's project(whenshesuggeststhatFoucault'sethicscannot be understoodon the planeof individualism(Spivak1996:142,167)).Here,however,I want to consider autonomous herconceptionof 'subalterninsurgency'as a politicalprocessattentiveto the problems with identitypoliticsandthedifferentialpositioningof subjectivities.Spivak'sconceptof Studies Group's Subaltern from the subalterninsurgency reading with emerges a relation of Gramsci's(1971)noteson the 'History of the SubalternClasses:Methodological Criteria'. HereGramscimakesan interestingdistinctionbetweenthe "...historicalunity of theruling classes[as] realisedin the State"(52), andthe disunityandimpurityin the historyof the subaltern,existentas it is, within states. 10 The attentionto an intertwined andnon-unitaryform is useful (as is his assertionthat subalternhistoriescan only be writtenmonographically, concerned andthenwith difficulty),but Gramsciis nevertheless the "fragmentedandepisodic"(54-5)natureof the subalternwithin with comprehending theanalyticregimeof continuityand 'permanent'victory (howevermuchthis potentialis subvertedby dominantgroups). Thushe statesof the Risorgimentothatoneshouldbe from subalterngroupsto hegemonic attentiveto "how theseinnovatoryforcesdeveloped, anddominantgroups"(53). Spivakis concerned with somethingdifferent;not with the but with theveryactof insurgency. comingto hegemony of thesubaltern, If Gramscimarksthedifficulty of ascertaining anhistoricalcontinuityin subaltern struggles,Spivakstartsfrom the assertionthat the subalternis by definition without continuityor coherence.Thereis no transparentsubjectof the subaltern. Spivak's as subalternmaybeableto talk,but it cannot 'speak'- it hasno self-identicalcoherence the 'oppressed' or the 'subaltern'as a passwordto politicaldiscourse.Wheninsurgent, thesubalternis not reflectingits identityas'theoppressed' expressing or uncomplicatedly but problematising its consciousness, theregimesof powerandpossibilitythatproduceit asan excluded,almostnon-identity: Now, if I understand the work of the Subalternists right, every moment of insurgency that they have fastened onto has been a moment when subalternity has been brought to a point of crisis: the cultural constructions that are allowed to exist within subalternity, removed as it is from other lines of mobility, are changed into militancy. In other words, every moment that is noticed as a case of subalter-nity is undermined. We are never looking at the pure subaltern. (Spivak 1996: 289)

The insurgency of the subaltern, then, is an engagementwith the conditions of a particular exclusion. What is important here is not the question of the emergenceof a new subjectconfigurationfrom this unseenand excludedsubalterncondition, so much as 10 "The subaltern classes, by definition, are not unified and cannot unite until they are able to become a 'State': their history, therefore, is intertwined with that of civil society, and thereby with the history of States and groups of States. " (Gramsci 1971: 52) 27

the very processof 'insurgency'. To consider subalterninsurgency is to focus on the militancy of the oppressedbut not as an expression of their known, determinable interests. Rather,it is looking at insurgencyas a spaceof the production of 'difference' :D that is both of the position of oppressionand exclusion, and againstit, and any achieved identity." To mark the difficulty of writing about such difference Spivak employs the word 'catachresis'- "abuseor perversionof a trope or metaphor"(OED cited in Spivak 1993: 298) - to namethe insurgent manoeuvre. If, as she writes, "no historically [or philosophically]adequateclaims can be producedin any spacefor the guiding words of political, military, economic,ideologicalemancipationand oppression", then the process of politics ascatachresisis to "take positionsin termsnot of the discovery of historical or philosophical grounds,but in termsof reversing,displacing,and seizing the apparatusof value-coding" (1993: 63). Spivak posits catachresison the terrain of 'value-coding' because of the intimate relation between identity and capitalist accumulation.12 Catachreticinsurgency is a manoeuvre of conflict against an identitarian chain of equivalence. Thus, in a rather bold statementshe writes: "... if we position ourselvesas identitiesin termsof links in the chain of value-coding", or identities in equivalence,"as if they were personsand things, and go on to ground our practice on that positioning, we becomepart of the problem..." (1993: 62-3). In this we can see the imperative and antagonismof Spivak's Marxism. For Spivak, whilst Marx's conceptsdescribedefinite relations and effects, they nevertheless producean inessential,openand discontinuoussystem. Furthermore,Spivak arguesthat Marx's concepts are part of a method that is politically motivated toward the transformation of the situation it conceives, without ever fixing the subject of transformation. Thus the apparentdistinction between 'interpretation' and 'change' in Marx's elevenththesison Feuerbach("The philosophershave only interpretedthe world, in various ways; the point is to changeit. " (Marx and Engels, 1974: 123)) is not so simple. Whilst 'interpret' (haben interpretiert)is a completed meaning commensurate with a phenomena,the word usedfor 'change' (zu verlindern)is an open 'making-other' (of, by inference,the self-identical)ratherthan a completedtransformation(Spivak 1996: 217-8). Not, then, a simple appealto proletarianpractice, it is the job of critique to continually 'make-other'the self-identical. The point of Spivak's 'interpretation' is never simply identifying the subaltern(aspresencein capitalismis the problem),bringing it into democraticpluralist space,but magnifying its processesof insurgency. 11 Spivak (1996: 293) puts it thus: 'The possibility of subalternity for me acts as a reminder. If it is true that when you seem to have solved a problem, that victory, that solution, is a warning, then I begin to look formula it's but I for look that not a substantive always at moment what would upset the apple cart. And that's quite often the moment when one begins to track the newly created subaltern, out of reach. It's more than just strategic exclusion; it's really something that would destroy my general isations. It's not something like'going in search of the primitive'. I don't know that it is an 'ever-receding horizon'. It is just a space of difference, if you like. " 12 Spivak and Deleuze and Guattari are very similar on this insistence that the question of identity is intimately linked with what Marx calls Value. To translate into Deleuzian terms, as explored later, "valuecoding' is the solidification of abstract force into specific determined forms such as 'worker' or indeed 'marginal' - what Deleuze and Guattari call the territorialisation and coding of desiring-production. 28

Infidel heteroglossia:

in and against capital in a complexmaterialmilieuwithoutever We nowhavea figureof a politicsthatoperates achievingpresenceas such, or settlingin a chain of equivalenceof strugglesand identities.Indeedequivalence (at a formallevel)hasbeenidentifiedas the very problem of liberalhumanistpoliticsin thatit is essentialto the formationof capitalistidentities(in processesof value-coding).We can now considerDonnaHaraway's(1991) political 13 ThoughHarawaydescribesthe figurationsof the 'cyborg' and 'situatedknowledges'. of a new cyborgasa hybridof machineandorganism,it is far from a 'cyber-celebration' infusedhumanbeings.14 It is betterunderstoodas the point of timeof technologically intersectionof a multiplicityof relationsof organicand inorganicforms; as a complex materialfigureat themeetingpointof thehuman,theeconomic,thecultural,the technical is if 15 the But besides, in the cyborg and much more time a of post-warcapitalism. currentconditionof capitalistlife, it is alsoa possiblemovementof politics:"The cyborg is our ontology;it givesus our politics." (150)16Suchpoliticsis at onceradical,situated, and,aswith Spivak,concerned with theaffirmationof differenceagainstequivalence. Thereis muchto besaidaboutHaraway,but I want to focuson two aspects:the immanentto centralplacecapitalismhasin hercyborgfigure,andthe politicaltechniques it. There is a certain ambivalence in Haraway's critique of capitalism that is not unrelated to that in Marx, and Deleuze and Guattari. She does not present a dualism between liberating and dominating aspects of modem technology (1991: 181), but rather C31

induces. it boundary disruption the that, complexity and she argues, affirms something of Thus, though in one sense she suggests a certain pragmatism where cyborgs are simply our reality, not something we choose (176), at the same time she argues that the forces high-tech life feminism, and politics generally, to complexity of multiplicity and break from an "... unreflexive participation in the logics, languages, and practices of white

13 In her later work Haraway usefully complicates the cyborg with other figures, but it is heuristically useful here as a figure that clearly links her politics to a conception of capitalism. It is also still timely to Deleuze Guattari's) its (and Haraway's in also and appropriation the perhaps cyborg against critique affirm by what Ansell Pearson (1997: 2) calls "cyber-celebrations of the transhuman" under which, he suggests, "a new theology of capital emerges to cavalierly justify and legitimise the inanities of the commodified postmodern present. " 14 Haraway identifies three late twentieth century 'boundary breakdowns' that make her analysis possible: between the human and the animal, the organism and the machine, and the physical and the non-physical (in terms of the invisibility of microelectronics). 15 "Cyborg figures such as the end-of-the-millennium seed, chip, gene, data-base, bomb, foetus, race, brain, and ecosystem - are the offspring of implosions of subjects and objects and of the natural and artificial. " (Haraway 1997: 12) 16 Haraway suggests that "Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonisation work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. " But the cyborg is also "... an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. " (1991: 150) 29

humanism... " (160) with its foundational myths, teleologies, unities, and privileged perspectives.17

Haraway characterisesthe social plane of the cyborg variously as 'advanced capitalism', the 'informatics of domination', and the 'homework economy'. Though she is clearly aware of the dangers of talking in totalising terms, she characterisesthe contemporaryterrainof life, particularly since the SecondWorld War (163) as a virulent disruption of boundariesrelatedto a speeded-upglobal capitalismwhere info- and biotechnologyenablethe permeationof elementsfar smallerthan any essentialcategory of organism, machine, animal, woman, man, and the simultaneous recoding and (she 'universal the in translation' uses reconfiguring these of of elements an equivalence 4ý describe this to military acronym C31 - command-control-communication-intelligence in That is, identities, process). capitalismnow operates ratherthan a questionof essential terms of the control, coding, and reconfiguration of flows and energies across boundaries, where 'rates' and 'degrees', 'probabilities' and 'statistics' delineate temporary and varying interfaces between ever-changing elements in an integrated system,suchthat identity is alwaysoverlappedand multiple) 8 Harawaywrites: Any objects or persons can be reasonably thought in terms of disassembly and reassembly, no 'natural' architectures constrain system design.... 'Integrity' or 'sincerity'

of the Western self gives way to decision procedures and expert systems....No objects, spaces,or bodies are sacred in themselves;any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language. (162,163) More than once Haraway compares this condition to Foucault's biopolitics. She 'texts have from biopolitical 'bodies that to and cyborg we moved works' and suggests is But it is Clinic' 'The Death (245). this that time to the not now write of surfaces', such because clinics, or any other spatio-temporal technique of biopower have vanished as such. Rather, these have become fluid, overlapping, and polymorphously interfaced: "Home, Market, Paid Work Place, State, School, Clinic-Hospital, and Church. Each of these idealised spaces is logically and practically implied in every other locus, perhaps depth, is There holographic " (170) to only no subjective a photograph. analogous by don't dominations "Our medicalisation and work coded units: reconfiguring

17This argumentis evident in these two passages. "It is no accident that the symbolic system of the family of man - and so the essenceof woman- breaksup at the same momentthat networks of connection among people on the planet are unprecedentedlymultiple, pregnant, and complex." (1991: 160) "Hightech culture challenges dualisms in intriguing ways.... In so far as we know ourselves in both formal ... discourse (for example, biology) and in daily practice (for example, the homework economy in the integratedcircuit), we find ourselvesto be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics,chimeras." (177) 18Guattari and Alliez, 'in an essay that importantly considers capitalism as composed of very different 'types', of which Haraway'sC31would be only one, talk here of capital workingon arrangementsof "optimal fluidity' (Guattari 1984: 286). 30

normalisation any more; they work by networking, communications redesign, stress management." (245)19 Despite the emphasis here on Haraway's conceptual configuration, she does offer concrete analysis of the forms of life in this coded system, particularly around her notion of the homework economy and in her later work (OncoMOUSeTm and so on, in Haraway (1997)). But the important point in this review is how Haraway sees this analysis of capital as integral to her mapping of a possible politics.

Situated politics Haraway's politics seekto challengeboth the Unities of humanism (in its 'White CapitalistPatriarchal'as well as its feminist versions) and the equivalences of capitalism. The materiallife of the cyborg is such that Haraway's politics moves well beyond theoriesattachedto coherentunities and fixed identities (such that the unnamed Marxists that Butler rallied againstseemquite archaicin comparison).20 As I have said, shedoesnot simply privilege technologicalchangein the formation of her politics. It is more that the speed and ever-more intricate boundary breakdowns of high technology capitalism give fen-tinismless of an 'excuse' (160) not to see the divergent subject positions that Eurocentricfeminism had subsumedin the subject 'Woman'. Thus the namedincarnationsof a cyborg condition are more likely to be SoutheastAsian peasants in JapaneseandUS electronicsfirms, than a Silicon Valley elite workforce.21 Haraway seeksto valorise the loss of a privileged political subjectin favour of a proliferation of partial, situatedpositions: With no available original dream of a common language or original symbiosis promising protection from hostile 'masculine' separation, but written into the play of a text that has no finally privileged reading or salvation history, to recognise 'oneself' as fully implicated in the world, frees us of the need to root politics in

19 Haraway and Deleuze are very similar here, though as far as I know they never cite each other. In a general sense, they both develop a kind of poststructuralist Marxism, and base politics in a certain machinism, but their points of overlap are never clearer than in their notions of control and coding that characterise the post-1945 era. Deleuze's later essay (first published in 1990) suggests that control may make us see harsh confinement as a "wonderful happy past" (1995: 175), as Haraway considers it will be seen as "idyllic" (1991: 150). Deleuze proposes that coherent analogical individuals are giving way to digital, continuously modulating 'dividuals', where Haraway talks of inessential cyborgs in continual mechanisms of 'coding'. Both offer an analysis of the ways specific sites of confinement now operate in an intensive and continuous interrelation, providing similar examples. And both argue that this new form of relation takes over from Foucault's configuration of disciplinary confinement, suggesting that Foucault named a system of power at the time of its overcoming (whilst using rather than negating Foucault's analysis). 20 Haraway writes that "Fhe boundary-maintaining images of base and superstructure, public and private, or material and ideal never seemed more feeble. " (1991: 165). It is interesting that writing at the same time, Spivak, also highly attuned to the intricate interrelation of the material and the cultural, takes a different perspective to Haraway here (perhaps reflecting the difference in their training, in bioscience and cleconstruction), suggesting that the dualism is so 'deeply entrenched' that "[t]he best one can envisage is the persistent undoing of the opposition, taking into account the fact that the complicity between ... cultural and economic value systems is acted out in almost every decision we make... " (1996: 122). 21 Ross et al. (1997) make a similar point that in the age of multinational sub-contracting and outsourcing, the extremes of 'post-industrial' infotech employment and the nineteenth century sweatshop are fully interfaced.

31

identification,

Stripped of identity, bastard race teaches about the power of the margins... (176) vanguard parties, purity, and mothering.

the

But suchpartial perspectivesarenot an affirmation of different identities(as a sub-divided Subject). Rather, as with Spivak, Haraway privileges the processesof difference and connectionthat are involved in the continualboundarybreakdownsof the cyborg (against is made explicit in her zn their coding into equivalentmicro identities). This argument epistemologicalfigure of 'situatedknowledges'. Whilst Haraway is conscious of the importance of a standpoint of the subjugated, she is adamant that the perspectives of marginal identity do not have privileged access to truth, and neither are they uncomplicated positions from which to produce critical knowledge. She writes that "in principle" the standpoints of the subjugated "are least likely to allow denial of the critical and interpretative core of knowledge. They are savvy to modes of denial through repression, forgetting, and disappearing acts - ways of being nowhere while claiming to see comprehensively. " (191). But, precisely because of this initial critically aware position, such locations are induced to consider that they are never 'innocent' identities. Particular location is itself enmeshed in a myriad of relations such that the production of knowledge (or indeed the practice of politics) does not arise from 'being' a particular identity: "One cannot 'be' either a cell or molecule or a woman, colonised person, labourer, and so on - if one intends to see and see from these positions critically. 'Being' is much more problematic and contingent. " (192) Instead, if there is no total or complete position from which critical knowledge can emerge, knowledge the production must be about exploring, engaging with, and problematising tD

'heterogeneousmultiplicities' that cross any partial perspective.22 Haraway would thus be misreadif 'partiality' was affirmed in its own right. Partial knowledge is intricately bound togetherwith 'connection' andchange. Though it is a little underdeveloped,Harawayoffers an exampleof the inessential categoryof 'women of color'. Without an appealto a coherentidentitarianlineage, she in identification, but in that this terms a 'political category of natural argues Operatesnot kinship' (156) of a community of excludedidentities (174). But within this 'community' Haraway presentsthe complex discontinuitiesof migrant labourers (offshore workers who would conventionallybe seen as undercutting wages and preventing solidarity), sciencefiction and Chicanaliterary traditions, and also high tech forms of work in a 'homework economy'. Suchcommunity is not, then,composedof a unitary or common language (as in Eurocentric feminism, money, or information code) but rather in a chargedatmosphereof contestation,deconstruction,translation,webbedconnectionsand so on 22 Haraway is explicitly concerned with producing what she calls 'usable accounts of the world' so this is far from a relativist position. It is just that in the production of 'real' knowledge the multiplicity of in any 'one' situation must communicate with each other: "Here is the perspectives and possibilities

32

So, if Spivak affirmed the movement of catachretic subaltern insurgency (not a subaltern subject) against value-coding, Haraway privileges the 'particular' and the 'local' not as reified positions, but as meeting points of complex relations that creatively 'communicate' with each other, such that any particularity is always complex and in motion, in a community not of identities but complex parts. Politics becomes something concerned with survival and creation within and across these communities such that the

boundary transgressionsof advancedcapitalism are not challengedwith identity, 'real' base-levelstruggles, an equivalenceof struggles,appealsfor choice, or autonomy, but with practicesthat attemptto resistthe impositionof coding and control through what she calls a material-semiotic'infidel heteroglossia'.

Community

against equivalence Jean-LucNancy's (1991,1991a) figure of an 'inoperativecommunity'has achieved for indeed (it considerable the attention,not only in poststructuralist theory was catalyst a bookby Blanchot(1988))but alsoin moreappliedattemptsto rethinkpoliticsfrom some communistand/or anti-identitarianpositions (for example,Agamben1998; Garcfa Diittmann1996;Illuminati 1997). At risk of over-simplifying,Nancy presentsus with two perspectiveson community:the Westerntradition of humanistcommunitarian equivalencewhere communityis a commonbeing ('essence')createdas a fulfilled identity or 'work' by the individual subjectswho enter into it; and that which is coextensive with such identity,but which is its 'unworking' toward a communityof disjunctionand mutation(basedon a perpetualand changingprocessof 'singular' relation).23 That the latter is a political imperativeis markedby Nancy's founding is in "I startout from the ideathat the thinkingof communityasessence statement: ... effecttheclosureof thepolitical." (1991:xxxviii) HereI want to considerhow Nancy's 'unworking'communityoperates asbotha conditionof being,anda politicalimperative. Nancy's proposition is that there is no being of community (completed essence) but rather there is only a being -in -connnon (existence): "... being is

Being-in-cornmon

" (1991 1) it is in but in the that a: property, common. sense of a common not common That is, the defining element in community is not the essence of what it produces (the in formed but the process of the that and unformed relations are community united) Common is existence what we all share, not as an addition to our existence. common being: but humanist individual/collective dichotomies), (following as our very selves "Community is simply the real position of existence." (1991a: 2) This positing of the primacy of community is not to extract community from political debate. Rather it is to promise of objectivity: a scientific knower seeks the subject position not of identity, but of objectivity; that is, partial connection. " (193) 23 "Community necessarily takes place in what Blanchot has called 'unworking', referring to that which, before or beyond the work, withdraws from the work, and which, no longer having to do either with Community is made of production or with completion, encounters interruption, fragmentation, suspension. the interruption of singularities, or of the suspension that singular beings are. " (Nancy 1991: 31)

33

reassert the fundamental importance of thinking about ourselves as irreducibly collective entities if we are to keep the sphere of the political (rather than the technocratic) open. Nancy must therefore think community and difference through each other (1991: xl). Community becomes what happens to 'singularities'. Or rather, our singularity is only in and through our community. Singularity is found at the moment of relation signified by the in of 'in common', the 'together' "that divides and joins at the same time... " (1991a: 8) By definition this is a process that is in no way concerned with identity' in it is 'lack identity, the a perpetual of sharing of a rather creating a new momentary 'just once, this time' where relations are based as much on their cutting as on their formation (1993: 66). Thus, in singularity-community Nancy is speaking "... of a bond that forms ties without attachments, or even less fusion, of a bond that unbinds by binding, that reunites through the infinite exposition of an irreducible finitude. " The necessity of thinking of community in these terms is to bring this relation is identifies into Nancy imperative The being-in-common the the political as political. of to contest liberal humanist culture of identity and equivalence by invoking the

Politics

inadmissible and the incommensurable. Here Nancy uses the word 'communism'. Communism can not be a thing or an identity (indeed the very fact that it has so often Nancy its is Nancy's be to wary makes of use). not that of such communism come Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky (Nancy 1991: 7). Instead he suggests it is a figure of Marx's politics of excess, and admiringly cites Blanchot from 1968: "Communism: that which itself from) Nancy " (in (and every community already excludes constituted. excludes 1991: 7) This said, Nancy's relation to Marx is not too clear, and his examples do not its became it basis He help. the that that was very of communism rightly argues really definition humans feature their the own of of as producers namely problematic most is he Marx's because But, (1991: 2). in 'work' this, to category of reluctant use essence force describing left is hence the of excess. 'labour-power', means of a without and of Thus, in elaborating the 'being-ecstatic' of communism, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy bring in Marx through a rather unenlightening section of the Critique of the Gotha Progranune that deals with the question of "the future public affairs of communist leaving But, Nancy 1997: 115,179). in " (Marx, Lacoue-Labarthe and cited society. is in for importance his Marx, Nancy's this naming chapter use of aside a critique of itself it (orthodox 'emblem' turned that against which only against, not communism as an Marxism), but also against theories of democracy that would consider politics as identity. facilitating bolstering and exclusively a process of Whilst Nancy is wary of critiquing democracy, he is equally attentive to "the risk of what we always call 'democracy"' namely, "settling for violent and flat appropriation Democracy does not open to the of the in of being-in-common" (1991a: 11). incommensurable because it is founded on similarity and commensurability, and the delineation of an 'inside' through the category of the citizen, rather than the excess of 34

is democracy But not only an abstraction, a 'work' from the singularity-community. multiplicity of life. It also hides a more conventional oppression in so far as it considers identity in terms of an autonomous plane of social-juridical rights, rather than seeing it as different differential the territories and spheres of through across composed positioning life (such that 'citizenship', and then, only for those who are recognised as citizens, can only be a formal equality). For Nancy, the political can not be separated from any sphere, least of all the economic. Thus he writes of a broadly pervasive democratic consensus [which] seems to make us forget that ... 'democracy', more and more frequently, servesonly to assurea play of economic its than forces own to other technical today end that no politics and subjects any expansion. (1991: xxxvii)

Against communicability and consensus,Nancy invites us to think a certain 'revolution' that perpetuallyforms relationsof singularity across any apparentplane of individuals, institutions, and social, juridical, economicspheres:"This moment - when the 'in-common' erupts, resists, and disrupts the relations of need and force - annuls collective and communalhypostases..." (1991: xl) But if Nancy proposes an abstract singularity-communityrelation againstidentity, he does not really offer much elaboration asto how actualcommunitiesmight exist beyondthe ideal of momentarysingularity. We know that community operates against the liberal democratic sphere of equivalent in every society and at every moment, 'community' is in fact identities:"In society, ... This 37). bond fabric... " (1991: the than of a consumption social nothing other or generalisedunworking acrossthe social meansalso that there can be no 'two societies'. But the ways that processesof unworking community may emergeand develop is not his Differend. helps Lyotard the notion of with us expand clear. Differends

In opening his book, Lyotard defines the differend thus:

differend would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot a ... be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both arguments A wrong results from the fact that the rules of the genre of discourse by which ... discourse. (1988: judged judges those the xi; of or genres genre are not of one subsequent references are to text numbers)

Basically, the differend points to the impossibility of consensus (or uncomplicated 'identity' in a single generally acceptedrealm of the social-juridical) since different groups are always composed of diverse, heterogeneous elements such that even the same word it is depending have different the within on regimes used (92). meanings will radically The problem, and this is the 'wrong' identified by his concept, is that one party is judged by the regime of another, such that the concerns of the former will not register in the 35

judgment of the latter.24 Lyotard offers a classic Marxian example of the work-contract which, though ostensibly a free agreement, presupposesthat the worker values her labour as a commodity to be sold and valued in terms of economic exchange. The idiom of social and economic law is that by which agreement is made, but it covers the differend between labour-power and capital. In this agreement, "If the labourer evokes his or her essence (labour-power), he or she cannot be heard by this tribunal... " (13). The word 6work' thus inserts into the different meaning regimes of worker and employer in very different ways, but it operates through social, juridical, and economic law on the basis of one regime, that of the exchange of commodities. The pervasiveness, beyond such a conventional example, of the apparent

exchangeof equivalents (which necessarily hide differends) is central to Lyotard's critique. He writes of the 'hegemonyof the economicgenre' (250,252) to suggestthat there is a pervasive valuation in terms of exchange("Capitalism does not constitute a universal history, it is trying to constitute a world market..." (255)), but such exchangeabilityis not confined to the econon-ticsphereof production and consumption. In an earlier essay(1978) on capitalism as a reactivereturn of the same, Lyotard thus includeseconomic,social,political processesin a 'Kapital' which managesthis repetition through "the equality of the parties involved in any metamorphosis" (47). Thus Freudianism,for example,is equally caught up in the 'law of value': "Eros-logos is the Kapital as the agentmaintainingconstantunities, stableinstitutions, investmentsalways " (48) recoverable. Against equivalenceas that which papers-overdifferends, Lyotard (1991) thus refersto and concurswith Nancy: is forgotten by political treatment in its constitution of a 'commonality' of what ... humans by dint of their belonging to the same polis, is the very thing that is not shareableamong them, what is not communicable or communal or common at all. Call it birth and/or death, even singularity. (43)

The differend is also the possibility of being-in-common in so far as it marks, at least in potential, a different way of doing things against this commonality of equivalence. But unlike Nancy, Lyotard refers to Marx's 'pure creative power' of excessive labour-power form identity force 'fidelity (in that to the of marks any and as a a certain non-enchained' equivalence): creative power, because Marx endows it with an attribute that no mechanismof exchangepossesses(be it chemical, physical, or human), namely, the I say 'pure'

property of expending or consuming less energy (less value) than it produces as it 24 "A case of differend between two parties takes place when the 'regulation' of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom." (1988: 12) 36

goes into action (into productive action, that is, as it goes to work). Thus, this power must be unleashedfrom the chains that bind it in the intrigue of the contract and on the stage of the market. It must be unbound from the pseudon (contract, work, averagesocial time required) in which it is proffered, imagined, exposed, betrayed. Revolution, according to Marx, clearly means this fidelity to the non-enchained. (45)

With Nancy and Lyotard together we have a politics that affirms an excessive singularity-communityagainstidentity and equivalence. But whereasNancy leaves his being-in-commona little vacant,Lyotard brings in a more materialistbasis for singularity; an excessivelabour-power. Lyotard also helps us to envisagewhere community may emergefrom: the sites of antagonisticdifferends that compose meaning and relation acrossand againstany delineatedindependentsphere and set of regulations. Thus he uses the exampleof May '68, precisely becauseit refusedthe regimesof work and the civil sphere,asa fidelity to the differend andthe non-enchained:"May '68 was faithful to the thing that would suffer from its being representedand directedtoward the civil sector, the thing that would be ill-treated,not only in the factory or the office, but also at school, and throughoutthe 'cultural' institution." (45)

Conclusion I have sketched a body of poststructuralist literature that brings together difference and the Marxian critique of capitalist relations. Butler argued that we need to overcome base/superstructuredichotomies, and argued that difference, as against 'unity', should be the basis of a cultural-material politics, but she appeared to have downgraded a sense of the pervasiveness of differential structuring that orthodox Marxism is based upon, such that the implications of an 'equivalence' of struggles were not fully considered. Brown made this point, and I explored it a little against Laclau and Mouffe's 'chain of equivalence'. The rest of the theorists operated on an assumption that there is no parity of terrns between the 'human' and 'identity', and argued that social democratic identity and equivalence served to exclude difference and community from the human. In their critique, a number of different inessential political figures were seen to emerge; the insurgent subaltern, the cyborg, being-in-common or unworking, and the non-enchained. All of these figures are not subjects, but processes of interrelation, that are premised on breakdowns forms difference boundary the of capitalist of an understanding and excess, of life, and on the need to challenge the imposition of coded and 'equivalent' identities on life. Lyotard argued that the processes of excess and difference (against identity and equivalence) were the essenceof Marx's 'practical materialism', and for this reason I am suggesting that there is a milieu of poststructuralist materialism that is not yet ready to embrace a 'post-political', or leave politics in the social democratic sphere, but rather has affinity with Marx's communism, even as it needs to be continually rethought.

37

When Nancy writes that community "is the unworking of work that is social, economic, technical, and institutional (1991: 31), he excludes the political so as to suggest that this unworking is the practice of politics (158). He then asks, how can the community without essence (the community that is neither 'people' ... nor 'nation', neither 'destiny' nor 'generic humanity', etc.) be presented as such? That is, what might a politics be that does not stem from the will to realise an essence? (1991: xxxix-xl)

The following chapterstake up Nancy's questionin an explorationof the conjunction of Deleuzeand Guattari's 'minor', and aspectsof Marx's 'proletariat' and the communist movement. That the community of this politics can not simply be representedor, as Spivak (1988) reminds us, 'spoken for' is the topic of the next chapteron Deleuze's 6empiricism'.

38

Chapter 3 Empiricism:

A Materialist

Methodology

for the Untimely

A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. (Benjamin 1992: 246) It is not a matter of identifying with various historical personages, but rather identifying the names of history with zones of intensity on the body without organs... No one has ever been as deeply involved in history as the schizo... (A(E: 21)

This thesis considers political creation as a process of juxtaposition, complication, and a certain indeterminacy without and against coherent identity (autonomous self-identical This chapter develops a research methodology appropriate to such a non-identitarian 'object'. it explores Deleuze's 'empiricism' as a methodology specifically attentive to difference, that not only critiques historicism as the

subjectivities, classes, or minorities).

The production of historical objects, but afhrms a 'creative' relation with history. specific problem that the chapter addressesis how to write 'political' histories of 'counter movements' without replicating the subject/object relation of representation. At a general level this empiricism is part of the tradition of 'genealogy', 6perspectivism', and 'interpretation' developed in different ways by Nietzsche, Foucault, and Deleuze. In as much as it is explicitly concerned with change, genealogy is an interpretation form that seeks to move beyond a knowledge / practice of overtly political dualism. As Deleuze (n. d.: n.p. ) puts it: "It is possible that in the current idea of interpretation, there is something that might go beyond the dialectical opposition between 'knowing' [connaitre] and 'transforming' the world. " In genealogy, the practice of interpretation is itself seen as a process of intervention and transformation. Genealogy follows two interrelated concerns. First, it problematises our contemporary forms of knowing and being through tracing the myriad disruptions and discontinuities in our composition, as Foucault (1980: 160) suggests, in order to sever the continuities of historical memory, to oppose history as a project of creating a 'memory' of our current reality, identity, and truth, and so to 'unrealise' ourselves. But genealogy is not simply an unmasking of our divergent historical trajectories. The genealogical imperative is to form a wholly different relation with history. It seeks to enact "a transfon-nation of history into a totally different form of time", a time of "counter-memory" (160) as an affirmation of the multiplicity and potential of historical past. History is a practice of engagement with the myriad of material relations across time and space that have been, and can be further put into play in ever-new relations, rather than an historicisation of a

39

demarcated moment. The question becomes one of the conditions by which difference has emerged, in a process of the further actualisation of difference such that, as Deleuze defines empiricism: "... the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness)." (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: vii). This needs to be explored in detail. The chapter starts with a consideration of Foucault's reading of Nietzsche's genealogy, and then considers Deleuze's empiricism as presenting a different focus to Foucault.

I consider three elements of Deleuze's empiricism: matter, relations and resonance, and the 'standpoint' of the minor.

Genealogy and 'counter-memory' Foucault's genealogiesare primarily problematisationsof the contemporary self (in relation to discursive formations of sanity, health, confinement, sexuality, governance and so on). His work deploys history as a resourceto disrupt our anthropologicaland metaphysicalunities, discovering not a different set of narratives, but difference itself-' Counter-memory,as Foucault (1977) elaboratesin 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', is not, then, a different 'alternative' memory. If the purpose of writing histories of our presentis to problematisehistorical objectsthrough which Man, as the subject of linear history, is composed,counter memory can not delineatea different historical object and subject through a 'bottom-up' kind of history, or assert a continuity that has been somehowforgotten, ignored, or excludedby traditional history. Such a project would perhapsbe an interesting counter to dominant histories, but ultimately would fail to manifestthe historical senseof genealogyasit would remain on the terrain of identity (as a seriesof 'different' historical objectsand subjects). Nevertheless,genealogydoes have somerelation to conventionalhistory. In a passagethat Foucaultgives some prominence, Nietzsche suggests that the European is a 'hybrid' entity that treats history as a 'storeroom' of different andchangingcostumesthat it in vain tries to solidify as identity: "... we paradeourselvesas romantic or classicalor Christian or Florentineor baroqueor 4national', in moribus et artibus: the 'cap doesn't fit'! " (1973: §223) Nietzsche and Foucault suggestthat the genealogistcan take some comfort in this process. Indeed Nietzscheproposesthat "Perhapsit is precisely here that we are discovering the realm of our invention..." (1973: §223). But such masqueradebecomescounter-memory and invention only when it ceasesto try and producea set of narrativesto bolster our present identity, and instead directly challenges memory-as-identityitself by affirming and parodying the complexity of thesecostumes. At this moment, according to Foucault's readingof 'the greatcarnival of time' we reacha point of: "No longer the identification of our faint individuality with the solid identitiesof the past, but our 'unrealisation' through 1 "What [genealogy] really does is to entertain the claims to attention of local, discontinuous, disqualified, illegitimate knowledges against the claims of a unitary body of theory which would filter, hierarchise and order them in the name of some true knowledge and some arbitrary idea of what constitutes a science and its objects. " (Foucault 1980a: 83) 40

the excessive choice of identities... " (Foucault 1980: 161). History, then, is something diverse relations; a multiplication of relations, not a with which we should entertain production of coherent memory: The study of history makes one 'happy, unlike the metaphysicians, to possessin oneself not an immortal soul but many mortal ones.' And in each of these souls, history will not discover a forgotten identity, eager to be reborn, but a complex by be the powers of distinct to mastered system of and multiple elements,unable synthesis... (Foucault 1980: 161) This said, despite the concern with affirming the genealogical 'carnival' of historical difference, Foucault tends to focus more on problematising our present through tracing specific configurations of power/knowledge that have composed our dominant ('most natural') forms. Foucault somewhat enigmatically suggests that "We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries." (1982: 216). And, most famously, and perhaps more 'positively', he suggests we could "... counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance." (1980: 157) Indeed, in the last two volumes of The History of Sexuality, Foucault (1990,1992) begins to elaborate alternate models of composition or 'techniques But beyond this, and a reference to how archaeological method could be applicable to the study of revolutionary movements (1972: 194-5), Foucault does not 115) (1988: Deleuze (though the too question of composition political explore much as

of the self'.

suggests, Foucault's interviews, which often discuss the relation of his historical work to does Foucault integral When his an work). part of contemporary political questions, are focus he 'resistance', to tends the on the capacity question of politics, or explicitly raise Foucault's 2 formations. The light to of relation on power/knowledge of resistance shed I but here in is Deleuze's discussed the should say that to next chapter, politics resistance though I think that there is little doubt that Foucault's method presents ample opportunity be than for to more need this the would to of resistance analysis end politics, material and a question of 'bringing to light power relations'. Deleuze and Guattari take a different path. It is misleading to suggest that the difference with Foucault is based on a hard distinction over the relative 'primacy' of is Guattari's desire. Despite Deleuze the stratified that power assertion and power or form of desire (cf. ATP: 53 1) and is hence secondary, and Foucault's distaste at Deleuze (cf. Deleuze its desire (with Guattari's the connotations) psychoanalytic of word use and 1997: 189), the Nietzschean conception of the primacy of 'force' in both presents more

2 As Foucault writes, in a text famous for its explicit discussion of 'freedom' and 'resistance': "... another way to go further towards a new economy of power relations ... consists of using this resistance as a chemical catalysts so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, find out their point of application and the methods used. " (1982: 210-11) 41

similarities than differences. At the same time it is clear that, as Deleuze (1997: 189) writes, the distinctions are "more than a question of words". I would suggest that these differences lead not to a fundamentally different understanding of life, but to a different focits in their works. Where Foucault uses genealogy to problematise our stratifications (such that resistance is considered to bring power relations to light), Deleuze and Guattad focus on the processes of deterritorialisation that escape stratifications. If this is only a difference in emphasis, it still leads to a different relation with history; where Foucault asks 'what could the emergence and descent of our apparently most natural forms beT, Deleuze and Guattari ask 'what unactualised potential lies in history for a different configuration of ourselves?13 Deleuze and Guattari quite explicitly frame their works of 'schizoanalysis' as an affirmation of hybrid relations and processesof difference. Moreover, though one would not find quite the elaboration of methodology as presented in The Archaeology of Knowledge, Deleuze and Guattari provide considerable, if dispersed, insight into their techniques. To develop the specific methodological deployment of 'perspective' in this project, as this different relation with history, I want to now move from the general framework of genealogy to what one could call Deleuze's form of counter-memory: empiriciSM.4 The rest of this chapter is a consideration of three interrelated aspects of Deleuze's empiricism: matter, relations of resonance, and the minoritarian standpoint Matter Deleuze's empiricism, as indeed all his and Guattari's concepts and categories, is intricately related to his Spinozist and Nietzschean materialism with its conception of the world as an ever-changing and intricately related 'monstrous' collection of forces that is always constituting modes of existence at the same time as it destroys them. Such a materialism conceives the world as not only without finitude, but also without delineated subjects or objects: let us call them 'things'. 5 Of course this is not a refutation of the existence of things, but it is a refusal to present them in any ontological or epistemological

3A comparison of Foucault's and Deleuze's book titles conveys a sense of their different emphasis (for example, the 'birth' and 'history'of the clinic, the prison, and sexuality, as against A Thousand Plateaus and Difference and Repetition). 4 'Empiricism' is used here, not because it offers a different framework to schizoanalysis, pragmatics, nomadology, stratoanalysis, micropolitics, rhizomatics and so on (though of course each of these concepts is at the same time interchangeable and different), but to emphasise the practical nature of Deleuze and Guattari's 'perspectivism' as a methodology. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore Deleuze's reading of the empiricist tradition through Hume and Whitehead. 5 Nietzsche (1969: §1067) puts it like this: "This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end-,a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expand itself but only transforms itself... ". Nietzsche's argument that there are no things, only perspectives, is applicable to even the smallest of 'units': "It is only after the model of the subject that we have invented the reality of things and projected them into the medley of sensations. If we no longer believe in the effective subject, then belief also disappears in effective things, in reciprocation, cause and effect between those phenomena that we call things. There also disappears, of course, the world of effective atoms... " (1968: §552) 42

There are things, but only as they are constituted in particular, varied, and 6 force. mutable relations of primacy.

If the world is at base a primary flux of matter without form or constant, then things are always a temporaryproduct of a channellingof this flux in what Deleuzeand Guattari call 'assemblages'or 'arrangements'(cf. AM 503-5).7 Nietzsche calls this is 'interpretation': the matter whereby cut and assembled process channellinga processof by a particular series of forces that, as Foucault's work has emphasised,respect no 'ideal' / 'material' dichotomy. Henceany interpretationof a thing or an event does not forces fact, is but thing the many one of the the as come after composition of part of immanentto it. As Deleuze(n.d: n.p.) puts it: "Nietzsche'sidea is that things and actions in interpretations interpret interpretations. is So, interpret and, this way, to are already to already to changethings, 'to changelife'. " The coherenceof things is not, then, a function of their position in the centreof a seriesof concentriccircles of interpretation. Things are far more unstablethan this. Without a primary form before interpretation,the thing is situated at a meeting point of a perpetually changing series of interpretations/forcesand is thus never 'finished'. 8 Without a 'model' and structured interpretation,the thing embodiesdifference within itself as a 'virtuality' or 'potential' to be actualisedin different interpretations(for Deleuze,every 'thing' has two aspects,the 'actual' andthe 'virtual', wherethe former is a 'selection' of the manifold potential of the latter (cf. Deleuze 1994,1996)). This 'potential' is not in oppositionto the 'real', ratherit is the reality of a creative matteras it exists in ever-newconfigurationsas the baseof the real (it is in opposition only to the fixed determinationof relations) (cf. ATP: 99). Nancy (1996: 110) puts this is It "thought does have for it 'object'. Deleuze's 'the 'object' has not real' no an well: anothereffectuationof the real, admitting that the real 'in itself' is chaos, a sort of it is it, Nietzsche (1968: §481) "9 Thus, not only puts as effectivity without effectuation. that "facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations" (derived from our historically formed values), but that we are called to an active creation of new and different interpretations,or 'lives'. If all is contestedinterpretationas the production of being, then "politics precedesbeing": "Practicedoes not come after the emplacementof the termsandtheir relations,but actively participatesin the drawing of the lines..." (ATP: 6 Deleuze writes that: "The history of a thing, in general, is the succession of forces which take possession of it and the co-existence of the forces which struggle for possession. " (1983: 3) There is, however, still something of a 'thing' in this expression. Foucault (1972: 47) perhaps expresses the Nietzschean conception of matter better when he writes: "What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense with 'things'... To substitute for the enigmatic treasure of 'things' anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse. " 7 Essentially, the term 'assemblage' describes a process of relations of proximity where the multiplicity of connection and flux across forces in relation is such that what defines the assemblage is its singular functioning (with forms of content and expression), and its mutation. 8 "A thing has as many senses as there are forces capable of taking possession of it. But the thing itself is not neutral and will have more or less affinity with the force in current possession. " (Deleuze 1983: 4) 9 Deleuze offers a useful example here of the polymorphous nature of May '68: "Ant! -Oedipus was about the univocity of the real, a sort of Spinozism of the unconscious. And I think '68 was this discovery itself.

43

Interpretation is both a process of intricate attention to what makes a thing cohere, what makes an assemblagework, and, as far as possible (it is not a product of a simple will to change, but is a complex and difficult engagement) an affirmation of new

203,208).

senses. Deletize (1994) presents 'empiricism' as a methodology appropriate to this materialism that seeksto expand difference through interpretation. 10

Relations

and resonance Empiricism is a perspectivism.toward an overturning of all thought of identity and representation(populatedas it is with the dualismsof subjects,objects, universals, and particulars), with an affirmation of relations of connectivity and resonanceacross, against,and within 'things': Representationhas only a single centre, a unique and receding perspective, and in consequence a false depth. It mediates everything, but mobilises and moves nothing. Movement, for its part, implies a plurality of centres, a superposition of perspectives,a tangle of points of view, a coexistence of moments which essentially distort representation...(Deleuze 1994: 55-6).

That Deleuze's'perspective'does not, then, coherearound a particular subject position should not surprise us, but that neither does it suggest a series of positions needs elaboration. Just as Deleuzerefusesa specific perspectivalidentity he also insists that a or perspectiveswould not transcendthe basic premiseof multiplication of representations identity, as this would continue to compose a structured dualistic relation between a its delineated object (however many subjects and objects are and subject seeing in is II if "[ilt But the that to order to not enough multiply perspectives principle collated). 69) (1994: challengesa simple appealto ever more particular perspectivism" establish in is the a meta-theoryof particular empirical perspectives,empiricism not a rejectionof universals. Perspectivism is concerned with "[n]either empirical particularities nor abstract identity. The because " (1994: the terrain these of on categories remain xxi) universals... is but it is is that not a thing a particularity crucial, nevertheless empirical particular (subject or object). The empiricist concern is with relations. Even the smallest is identity. For Deleuze's empiricism, as an still particularity as a unit of representation The people who hate '68, or say that it was a mistake, see it as something symbolic or imaginary. But that's precisely what it wasn't, it was pure reality breaking through. " (N. 144-5) 10 "The intense world of differences, in which we find the reason behind qualities and the being of the sensible, is precisely the object of a superior empiricism. This empiricism teaches us a strange 'reason', that of the multiple, chaos and difference (nomadic distributions, crowned anarchies). " (Deleuze 1994: 57) 11 "Infinite representation includes precisely an infinity of representations by either ensuring the convergence of all points of view on the same object or the same world, or by making all moments properties of the same Self.... The fact is that infinite representation is indissociable from a law which renders it possible: the form of the concept as a form of identity which constitutes on the one hand the initself of the represented (A is A) and on the other the for-itself of the representant (Self = Self). The prefix

44

should be clear from the discussion of materialism, relations are not derived from things, but vice versa: "Relations are not internal to a Whole; rather, the Whole is derived from the external relations of a given moment, and varies with them." (Deleuze 1997a: 59) The core premise of Deleuze's empiricism is hence that "relations ... are external to their terms." (Deleuze 1991: X)12 The particular as a unit of enipiricism is thus not a unit at all, but a multiplicity of relations. Faced with these multiplicities, empiricism seeks to create new differences through new relations. It is thus a methodology of 'and' rather than 'is' (cf. Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 54-9). The question arises as to the means of composing productive relations of the and'-type. This process is not an arbitrary smash-and-grab treatment of history where things are forced into alignment. 13 Empiricism seeks to find a more subtle relation between entities, what Deleuze and Guattari call a 'resonance'. A comparison with Benjamin's (1992) concept of 'constellation' in his Theses on the Philosophy of History

will help elaborate. Against the teleologies of historicism (and indeed, implicitly a vulgar historical materialism), Benjamin suggests that the historical materialist should treat history as a series of "monads", and seek to open a specific "life" out of the "homogenous course of history" (254). The materialist should form a "... unique experience with the past... " by "... seiz[ing] hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger." (1992: 254,247; emphasis added). Benjamin writes: Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of Years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he gasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. (255)

This senseof 'experience'and 'constellation' is a potent imageof a non-historicisthistory that at first glance seems similar to Deleuze's 'resonance'. There are, however, differencesbetweenBenjamin's constellationand Deleuze's resonance. The Thesesis somewhatresistantto interpretation;its aphoristic style, and its use of the not easily reconcilablemethodologiesof Marx andNietzsche,shoulddiscouragea simple reading.14 Nevertheless,it is possibleto teaseout a problematicpoint. One is left wondering about the natureof the historical memory that 'flashes up' in 'definite' constellationwith the RE- in the word representation signifies this conceptual form of the identical which subordinates differences." (Deleuze 1994: 56) 12"We will call 'nonempiricist'every theory accordingto which, in one way or another,relations are derived from the nature of things." (Deleuze1991: 109) 13Deleuze(1983:5) somewhatcryptically warns that "...genealogy does not appear on the first night..." and that "...a new force can only appear and appropriatean object by first of all putting on the mask of the forces which are already in possessionof the object."

45

present. This image has two apparent problems. First, it seems to follow a simple faith in the ability of an historical event to break through the strictures of historiography (and Benjamin is clear about the power of historicist conformism to police historical content). Without

the chronological narratives of historicism to draw-out a 'connection' (necessarily being against a history always written by the 'victors', and no longer using the teleologies of vulgar historical materialism), one wonders how transhistorical links are formed, how exactly events 'unexpectedly flash up', and how they can be recognised 'instantaneously' (before they 'disappear irretrievably'). There seems to be something of an involuntary political unconscious at work that 'recognises' the similarity of a previous era in some transhistorical lightning-flash of interconnection. Second, this constellation through a political unconscious appears to be formed through an understanding of definite subjects and objects of history. Thus, tying these two elements together, Benjamin writes that "history in the strict senseis thus an image out of involuntary mindfulness, an image that suddenly sets itself in to the subject of history in an instant of danger." (modified translation from thesis VI by Bahti (1979: 15); emphasis added) In an indirect way, Deleuze's (1972) work on memory and 'signs' in Proust addresses these problems of constellation and helps mark the difference of empiricism. Here Deleuze distances himself from a notion that the unity of Proust's 'search' lies in 'involuntary memory' (the spontaneous flash of 'remembrance' that is first experienced through the taste of the madeleine) for it is still posited on an historical object. He suggestsinstead that this is only the start, a 'setting in motion' of the search: involuntary memory, utilising only given resonances,is no more than a beginning ... of art in life, a first stage....it remains to be explained why, by the solicitation of the madeleine, Combray is not content to rise up again as it was once present (simple associationof ideas), but rises up absolutely, in a form which was never experienced, in its 'essence' or its eternity. (Deleuze 1972: 137,12) The search finds not an historical object of Combray in the memory induced by the taste of the madeleine, but, with much work, finds an 'experience' of complication of its present.15 Proustian memory, then, is not a past recollection or remembrance, but a process of creation from memory: "... to remember is to create, is to reach that point where the associative chain breaks, leaps over the constituted individual, is transferred to the birth of an individuating world. " (99) Memory brings fragments into resonance, but not as things. Rather, the Proustian unity of creation and memory arises in so far as resonance is a process of extracting "its own fragments" from the subject and object in

relation (134) in producinga new multiplicity:

14 Indeed for this reason Benjamin had not intended the Theses for publication, saying that "it would open both the door and the gate to enthusiastic misunderstanding" (cited in Bahti 1979: 3). 15 Deleuze presents five 'levels' of interpretation that Proust works through to reach a pure resonance.

46

It is in this sense that the work of art always constitutes and reconstitutes the beginning of the world, but also forms a specific world absolutely different from the others, and envelops a landscape or immaterial site quite distinct from the site where we have grasped it.... This is precisely the originality

of Proustian reminiscence: it proceeds from a mood, from a state of soul, and from its associative chains, to a creative or transcendent viewpoint - and no longer, in Plato's fashion, from a state of the world to seen objectivities. (Deleuze 1972: 98) Benjamin's

constellation

through

'involuntary

mindfulness'

seem,

would

then,

to

describe what Deleuze sees as only the first stage of an historical search. A stage which does not yet break with identity for it maintains subject and object intact. Where Benjamin looks for an instantaneous remembrance that forms a constellation between similarities, Deleuze seems to go further in insisting that what is 'found' is not an historical moment which fits with the present subject, but something of a sensation that is both within and against the historical object and the contemporary subject as they resonate (not resemble) to produce a different form. 16 To summarise so far, empiricism is not a process of opening historical events to find different historical truths to bolster a new perspective. This would remain in the realms of historical memory, simply of a new subject position. Both the object and the subject, the represented and the representant need to change in the relation. Perspective is the means by which different things are brought into a relation that in a new 'alliance' or 4encounter' opposes the coherence or identities of each (cf. Deleuze 1994: 57). This is a perpetual process such that the 'alliance'

is not a third different

complex and continual process of variation.

Essentially

identity,

but part of a

the point is that empiricism

pursues (observes and actualises) the specific form of relation that Deleuze and Guattari call a 'becoming'. multiplicities

A relation of becoming is an 'affiliation'

whereby two things relate as

such that elements within each side 'resonate' in a 'zone of proximity'

elements in the other and produce a third multiplicity, relations of resonance.

Becoming

which itself must enter different

is not a dialectical

process because there is no

dominance of one term over the other (thesis and antithesis), (synthesis).

There is only resonance.

or necessary outcome

Relations between things

'variable relations', and empiricism must continually

with

are always,

then,

affirm this variability:

The object must therefore be in no way identical, but torn asunder in a difference in which the identity of the object as seen by a seeing subject vanishes. Difference must become the element, the ultimate unity; it must therefore refer to other differences which never identify it but rather differenciate it. Each term of a series,

16 Benjamin's complex text has more of an ambiguous relation to the facticity of the historical object than presented here. Whilst Bahti (1979) also points to the paradox in Benjamin's fixing of the fleeting image of the past that I have focused on, in retranslating the expression Eingedenken (theses XV and B) from 'remembrance' to 'mindfulness' ('innering' or interiorising the past, and 'imagining') he makes the case that Benjamin also offers more than a remembrance, with a certain active production of meaning. 47

being already a difference, must be put into a variable relation with other terms, thereby constituting other seriesdevoid of centre or convergence. Divergence and decentring must be affirmed in the series itself. Every object, every thing, must see its own identity swallowedup in difference, each being no more than a difference between difference. Difference must be shown differing. (Deleuze 1994: 56) Yet, if empiricism seeks relations of resonance rather than constellations it is still not clear what might be the cause of the relation, the 'start' of the search. In Proust the search is driven and delineated by the narrative of an in&vidual life, where connectivity starts from a lived 'memory'. 17 Since I am concerned with empiricism as a more general methodology applicable to the histories of the ivorld where historical events have not usually been experienced by the 'subject' of research this is no solution. As I have shown, Benjamin overcomes this problem of expanding 'memory' into a relation with all of history by retaining a subject of history, the proletariat, in connection with a transhistorical political unconscious. But Benjamin's solution is not possible for Deleuze since the body of resonance that is produced has no historical subject. He suggests that the dialogue of resonance is more about 'hand-to-hand combat' and that "... the pairing of the present moment and the past one is more like a struggle than an agreement, and what is given us is neither a totality nor an eternity but "an irregular short-lived body. " ...... (1972: 109) Deleuze does, however, propose mechanisms for starting the search that indeed are based on a form of 'standpoint'.

The empiricist

the untimely minoritarian Empiricist resonancesoperate in an 'untimely' fashion. In Nietzsche's (1980: 8) formulation, they "...act againstthe ageand so havean effect on the ageto the advantage, it is hoped, of a coming age." From Anti-Oedipus to What is Philosophy?Deleuzeand standpoint:

Guattari thus write of, or indeedfor a "... future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist." (Deleuzeand Guattari 1994: 108; cf. also Aff: 382) At first sight this appearsto be a somewhat transcendentmodel for Deleuze and Guattari's immanent materialism. But their 'future form' is not astranscendentas it may seem, and, though it is infrequently commentedupon, it is an important elementin the mechanicsof their politics. There is a strong sense of a 'future' transcendence,a coming event in Nietzsche's, and Deleuze and Guattari's formulations. For Nietzsche it is the transvaluationof nihilism, for Deleuzeand Guattari, often sounding like Marx, it is the affirmation and destructionof capitalismin "the people to come and the new earth." (DeleuzeandGuattari 1994: 109). Ansell Pearson(1999: 211) aptly describesthis figure 17This statementavoidsdealingwith one of the many complexities of Deleuze's book on Proust, namely his assertionthat the Proustian'literary machine' is concerned with producing extra textual affects on its readers. Deleuze thus suggests that "The 'subject' of the Search is finally no self, it is that we without

48

and indeed it is intended as something for the earth to decipher (cf. also Holland (1999) for discussion of the 'new earth'). But, as is of overcoming

as a "vision

and riddle",

the nature of a 'riddle', there is always an immanence to the project.

If "... the new earth

('In truth, the earth will one day become a place of healing')

is no more behind than ... ahead... " (A(E: 382) then something of it is always present. The 'future form' is not awaited in temporal fashion, but is rather the very immanence of becoming as that zone of exchange between terms, as I have discussed, placed in resonance: "... it is this double becoming that constitutes the people to come and the new earth. " (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 109; cf. also Aff:

322)

Thus the project of overcoming does not follow C: 1

a

teleology, but always starts 'in the middle', in any situation; it is in "the middle" where the untimely emerges, where "very different times communicate" (Deleuze 1997c: 242). Thus, whilst for orthodox Marxism the immanent practice of the class is toward the coming communism (in and through the maximisation and the contradictions of capitalism), the empiricist coming age is always immanent to the present. As Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 100) write, this is "... to posit revolution as plane of immanence, infinite movement and absolute survey, but to the extent that these features connect up with what is real here and now in the struggle against capitalism. "' 8 This untimely fonri is what Deleuze and Guattari more commonly call the 'minor' or 'minoritarian', as distinct from the 'major' or 'majoritarian'. The next chapter explores in detail the specific techniques of minor composition, but a general mapping is useful here so as to understand the 'standpoint' of empiricism. Minor and major are expressions that characterise not entities, but processes It is not a question of size or number, but . relations across and between numbers. Essentially the major is defined as having fixed relations between its numbers such that each situation is denumerable and in relation to a standard, and the minor is nondenumerable in so far as it forms relations and connections of becoming and proliferation which deviate from any major axiom, or standard-19 Deleuze and Guattari identify three basic treatments of matter as "... the majoritarian as a constant and homogenous system; minorities as subsystems; and the rnýnoritarian as a potential, creative and created becoming. " (ATP: 105-6). The minoritarian is not, then, a minority 'sub-group', but is seen in the movement of groups, in their variations, mutations and differences and hence has no membership, coherence, identity, or constituency in itself. It is a becoming of which no one has 'ownership' (ATP: 106). But the minor is not somehow 'outside' of identity. Rather, it is always implicated in any major or 'identitarian' configuration.

Deleuze and Guattari are adamant that they are not

content which portions out Swann, the narrator, and Charlus, distributes or selects them without totalising them. " (1972: 114) 18This formation of 'the people to come and the new earth' is rather close to Marx's definition of the 'real movement' of communism cited in Chapter 1. 19"What distinguishes them is that in the case of a majority the relation internal to the number constitutes a set that may be finite or infinite, but it is always denumerable, whereas the minority is defined as a nondenumerable set, however many elements it may have. What characterises the nondenumerable is neither the set nor its elements; rather, it is the connection, the 'and' produced between elements, b-etA pnj3ets, and which belongs to neither.... " (ATFI 470) 49

intricately difference identity dualism; are and enmeshedin a continuum producinga new forms (the decoded looks like identity, less deterritorialised but it is molar and of more or is 'optical the 'likeness' that on surface of that, produced something effect', a or only always dissipating). Deleuzeand Guattari's materialismthus produces a nice twist on form does in that the that the asserting one not subject psychoanalyticconceptionsof is the major subJect20: achievecompleteness For the majority, insofar as it is analytically included in the abstract standard, is is Ulysses the the it is Nobody minority whereas never anybody, always becoming of everybody, one's potential becoming to the extent that one deviates from the model. There is a majoritarian 'fact', but it is the analytic fact of Nobody, 105) (ATP: becoming-minoritarian to the as opposed of everybody.

The minoritarian is thus a model of creation founded on the continual displacementand proliferation of contours as a 'universal' untimely process of the deterritorialisationof every componentof one's existence. It is somethingthat is active yet unformed. Or, rather, it is active in as much as it escapes the already formed. As Deleuze and Guattari say of the related concept of the war machine .....it exists only in its . own metamorphosis... " (ATP: 360). This is not to say, however, that the minor does not have concrete points of emergence. Though Deleuze writes that "[e]verybody's caught, if in becoming lead into that them would unknown paths one way or another, a minority they opted to follow it through" (N: 173), he and Guattari tend to look for mýinor in if have their 'subsystems' tendency, the they a of minorities, within as processes different form from deviations to the abstract molar standard, struggles and slight relations: Minorities, of course, are objectively definable states,statesof language,ethnicity, or be i but thought of as seeds, ties, they their territorial also must own ghetto sex with crystals of becoming whose value is to trigger uncontrollable movements and deterritorialisations of the mean or majority. (ATP: 106) The minor, then, is a category which links an empiricist understanding of the 'standpoint' A becoming emerges to strange minorities. relations of concrete primacy of as that which is of minorities, subaltern, marginalised, oppressed groups, not as the bolstering of their identities, but rather as their overcoming. Minor processes emerge through the problematisation and becoming of minority groups as they challenge the break identities. is, That they their which up of resonance seek relations as contours of the mechanisms which produce them as minority identities. An empiricist relation with history is not, then, driven by an identity, but by the set of aspects of minority identity 2() That the constant is hollow would not surprise Lacan, but an assertion form is saying more about part-objects than psychoanalysis can allow.

that this as the only incomplete

50

which would be problematised. So, there is no subjectof a political unconsciouswhich seemsto 'know' its similarity with the past, there are rather a series of problems and axiomswhich seekresonancewith the past in order to break open contemporarysubject positions. So, to consider the use of empiricism in this thesis, I do not problematise liberal and workerist politics by delineatinga new object of the refusal of work as some 'other' to the worker that would align with a contemporarysubjectof the refusal of work. Rather, a senseof a set of contemporaryconcerns(notably, the intensificationof work, the possibility of a politics of differenceand minority that does not fall back on identity, and a feeling of political impasse)drives researchinto historical momentsthat have some potentialto offer further problematisation,elaboration,extension,' or 'ways out' of these concernsand possibilities. It is not a questionof finding historical precedentor origin, but of putting historical eventsto use, framing them differently, seekingtheir differences and momentsthat containelementswhich resonatewith contemporaryconcerns.

Conclusion To sum up a little, an empiricist history serves not as a psychological or collective memory, a memory of a people already formed, or as a future-oriented coming to consciousness. Both thesemodels lack attentivenessto the present. Whilst empiricism neither forgetshistoriesof oppressionnor ignoresa temporalfuture, it is the possibilities of immanentcreationthat are its concern. Empiricism is an intricate grasping of 'things' that looks not for their coherencebut for their relations, and their power of difference, their 'virtuality'. The implicatednatureof the perspectiveis thus not only recognised,but affirmed. Against the will to researcha completeobject and presentits own core truths, the possibleproductivity of objects-as-multiplicitiestakesprecedence.This is an infinite processof interpretationand reinterpretationto which nothing, from the most abstract conceptto the apparentlyfinite particular,is immune. It is a meansof forming a relation betweentwo termsthat doesnot affirm either position, but cuts and draws both terms to form something new, disrupting our selves by multiplying our relations outside of an historically producedsubjectivity. In this, empiricism is a way of interpretingthe world that both witnesses and actualises processesof becoming. It is thus a political methodology,not becauseit servesto bolster the concernsof a new radical subjectivity, but becauseit seeksto actualiseminoritarianprocesses. These processesare actualised through forming relations with questions and problems that arise from the axioms of identity that minorities find themselveswithin. Such a move away from representationto creationand minoritarian actualisation may soundsomewhatpresumptuousand wilful. But, as Haraway (1991) has argued in her not unrelatedmethodologyof 'situated knowledges', it is actually the reverse: it is totalising representationthat is presumptuous, for it claims to have fully captured in knowledge that which is never finished. Empiricism may also appear to manifest a dishonestrelation with historical events. It might appear,for example,to 'misrepresent' 51

historical events which have had a hard enough time coming to the table of representation at all. Certainly there are Marxist guardians of the communist movement (perhaps even people involved in the movements I consider) which would consider empiricist interpretation as a false appropriation. Yet, whilst empiricist history is not a wilful disregard for the concerns of particular movements (to form a resonance one can not simply extract a movement from its context or concern), it is to be somewhat sceptical of the notion that being 'honest' to, or affirming a movement concerned with political change is to represent it as a closed historical thing within a particular self-determined Instead, responsibility and 'objectivity' might not be to a mapping of a particular set of activities and goals, but to affirming the 'sense' of political change in a movement (as this senseis rethought and redeployed in contemporary contexts), to affin-ri

trajectory.

the 'potential' of historical events. Deleuze puts it like this: "To affinn is not to take responsibility for, to take on the burden of what is, but to release, to set free what lives.... to invent new forms of life rather than separating life from what it can do. " (1983: 185)

52

Chapter 4 The Minoritarian:

a Politics

of Cramped

Creation

hold to the Particular as an innovative form... (ATP: 471; emphasis changed) we are not interested in characteristics;what interests us are modes of expansion, propagation, occupation, contagion, peopling. (ATP: 239) The last chapter presented empiricism as a 'political' methodology of placing things (as multiplicities) in resonance to amplify untimely minoritarian processes, where the minoritarian is a mode of composition that is processual and complex rather than identitarian, and one that is especially available to minorities as they problematise the This chapter explores the specific techniques and particularities of their identity. operations of the minor in detail. It describes how the minor functions as an intensive process through intimate engagement with the regimes, stratifications, and particularities that traverse minorities. This is a model of political composition that is at once intricately situated, and anti-identitarian. The chapter develops through an examination of a series of minor techniques. It is important to stress that these are only abstract techniques or general processes, which in concrete engagementwould be actualised in varied ways. Whilst the minor does offer certain political tools, it is more concerned with orienting analytic perception toward, and contributing to minor processes that already occur. First the chapter considers the identity by fully 'cramped', to traversed of a situation where reduction minorities are forces, Then first identity is but that the the such principle creation. social of minor not the general problematic of 'deterritorialisation' is explored to show how the minor is a continual process of engagement with molar regimes, rather than a marginal identity. The way that the 'particular' and the 'social' are treated in minor composition is then considered in detail. In this section the concepts of 'inclusive disjunction' (to show how a milieu emergesof continual experimentation and reconfiguration within and against each 6particular' situation or identity), and the primacy of social 'lines of flight' (such that the n-unorhas affinities with the 'proletariat') are brought out. This is a general presentation of the place of the social which is explored in detail as a capitalist system in subsequent chapters. The chapter then describes the minor 'author-function' and its relation to the collective, before moving outside the argument a little to consider Deleuze's reading of Foucault's 'resistance'. This section is intended to stress how the minor is different from

a theory of resistanceby considering Deleuze's interpretation of one of the more influential poststructuralistpolitical figures.

53

Cramped

space and the centrality of creation The minor is a politics for thosewho are composednot in terms of subjectiveautonomies and securities,but for oppressed,subaltern,minority peopleswho find their movements and expressions'cramped' on all sides such that they can not in any conventionalsense be said to have their own coherentself-defined 'identity', to have carved out a social spacesuchthat they could be called 'a People'. Minorities, in this sense,are those who are cut off, as Spivak (1996: 289) puts it, from the "lines of mobility" of a culture. They lack the ready made structures of history, narrative, tradition, principles, that would enablethe easypassageof a demarcatedautonomousidentity through a culture. Life for minorities is thus somewhatcomplicated. Ratherthan offer an easy path, eachparticular situation is a something of a "cramped space" (K: 17) and necessitatesa complex engagement.Practiceis thus not a simple caseof self-expressionalong legitimatesocial routes within which one 'fits' but is a tentative manoeuvrearound and within each situation. But Deleuze's(1989: 216) suggestionthat the minor begins from the knowledge that "the people are missing" is also an assertionthat the sociopolitical figure of 'the People' is itself the closure of politics (and dangerouslyso, insofar as 'the People' can becomeso easily functional to the parcelling out of complex desiring relations around identitarianattractors,most notably of 'race' and 'nation' (cf. Aff, esp.Ch. 2)), Indeed, any notion of plenitudeor coherentidentity is challenged,such that the minor opposes both the liberal humanist model of the 'citizen',. and the orthodox Marxist 'becoming2 conscious'. The minor beginsin a different site. In a manoeuvrethat confronts conventional liberal humanistnotionsof freedom (as a delimited autonomousspace)headon, Deleuze and Guattarisuggestthat it is preciselyin crampedsituations,in the enforcedproximity of peoples,histories, and languagesthat creation occurs: "Creation takes place in choked " (N: 133) Indeed, Deleuzegoes so far as to write that "[a] creator who isn't passages. grabbed around the throat by a set of impossibilities is no creator." (133) Thus, alongsidea perceptualsensitivity to very real crampedconditions, in minor composition there is also a certain "willed poverty" (K: 19) such that "one even strives to see [the 1 Deleuze (1989) argues that though Kafka was one of the first to write of a form of composition on the basis that the people were missing, the condition becomes most obviously apparent in the 'third world', or colonialism, where "a people ... is doubly colonised: colonised by stories that have come from elsewhere, but also by their own myths become impersonal entities at the service of the coloniser. " (222) Here the problematic of the minor emerges in the shift to postcolonial forms in order to avoid the transformation of these myths of the colonised into new nationalities. The actual complexity of this process is clearly Deleuze writes in impassioned fashion of the evident in Deleuze's writings on the Palestinians. Palestinians as a people who are missing. He writes that "From beginning to end, [Zionist terrorism] involved acting as if the Palestinian people not only must not exist, but had never existed" (1998a: 30). The particular processes of construction of the Palestinians as a non-people are described and decried by Deleuze, and he rightly talks of the need for recognition of the Palestinians as 'a people'. But his political model is such that he would be particularly attentive to the dangers in the construction of a Palestinian 'state', even if it could manage to be more than an efficient mechanism for the management of Palestinian struggle, as it seems to be at the moment (under the Arafat-Israeli peace process). I doubt Deleuze would today give Arafat the stature of "grandeur' he did in 1983 (Deleuze 1998a).

54

boundary] before it is there, and often seesthis limiting boundary everywhere" (Kafka cited in K. 17).3 The minor is thus markedby a certain 'impossibility'. Every movement presentsa boundaryor an impasseto movementratherthan a simple possibility or option. There is no identity that is not 'impossible' to inhabit unproblematically. Yet the impossibility of action is matchedwith the impossibility of passivity if anything is to be lived. As in Beckett's (1979: 382) formula, "I can't go on, I'll go on", creation thus becomesa process of "... tracing a path between impossibilities..." (N: 133) This difference betweencrampedcreativity and liberal freedom is expressedwell by Kafka (1978) in 'A Report to the Academy'. Here, an ape 'pinned down' in a cageon a ship suchthat he hasno possibility for movement,choosesto becomehuman to effect escape. It is the very condition of being crampedthat leadsto, or compelshis innovative change, but not becausehe desires abstractfreedom (or indeed anything particular about being human). Whilst 'freedom' appearsto have somevalue, it is an ambiguousform ("all too often men arebetrayedby the word freedorif' (1978: 150)), and in this caseonly offered a suicidal flight overboard. Insteadthe ape simply seeks a 'way out' of his particular condition, for which the human presentsa boundary and a possibility as, through close observationand laboriousrepetition,he learns and embodiesa seriesof human attributes (aidedby a certainanimality in the sailors, which is reflectedin a little double becoming when his first teacheris almostturnedinto an ape as the narrator's ape naturefled out of him). The ape-now-human describes his form of 'escape' thus: I fear that perhaps you do not quite understand what I mean by 'way out'. I use the expression in its fullest and most popular sense. I deliberately do not use the I do not mean the spacious feeling of freedom on all sides.... word 'freedom'. 'self-controlled

movement'.

What a mockery of holy Mother Nature!

Were the

apes to see such a spectacle, no theatre walls could stand the shock of their laughter. (Kafka 1978: 150)

The minoritarian, then, is not a pluralist process of minority groups 'speaking out', of voicing an identity. Whilst the minoritarian is concerned with expression (Deleuze even writes that it is a question of getting "... people without the right to speak, to speak." (N: 41)), such expression is not 'communication' as the manifestation of an identity or a process of bringing people into a public sphere where all may be heard, since the people are missing. The question is rather one of the 'invention' or creation that occurs in a cramped space. The minor political questions are not 'are we communicating enoughT, 'are we all heardT, but are of a different order, concerned with how we are how and we create and compose in fashions that deterritorialise dominant or composed,

2 Ever since the reterritorialisation of the Soviet revolution (Deleuze 1997a: 88), "[tlhere's no longer any image of proletarians around which it's just a matter of becoming conscious. " (N. 173) 3 Kafka seems to reflect this when he says to Janouch (1971: 20) that he is in a cage, "not only in the office, but everywhere.... I carry the bars within me all the time. " 55

major forms, where "Creating has always been something different communicating." (N: 175)

from

Deleuzeand Guattari explore the questionof a minor creativity most extensively underthe rubric of 'minor literature' and 'minor language'. Putting to use Kafka's (1972) diaries, particularly discussion of 'the literature of small peoples' in the entry for December25 1911, Deleuzeand Guattari (1986) explore 'Kafka' as a form of creation that challengespsychological, biographical, individualist readings with a model of a 4writing machine' that seeks to turn everything into assemblages,and to induce 4 As Morris (1994: 130)puts it, "Kajka is a biography experimentaleffectsin its readers. of a particular mode of creation." KaJka is simultaneouslya minor practice itself in 'treating' the works of a canonicalliterary figure,5 and an elaborationof the conditions and processesof the minor mode of creation. It is theselatter conditions and techniques that areelaboratedhere. Deleuze and Guattari (K: 18) draw out three closely interrelated defining characteristicsof minor literatures:they affect languageand major forms generallywith a 'high coefficient of deterritorialisation', the individual is fully traversed by social concerns such that 'everything is political', and they are a mode of 'collective enunciation'.6 BecauseI am consideringthe minor in a more generalaccountof Deleuze and Guattari's politics, these three characteristicsare loosely used to structure the discussion,in conjunction with other aspectsof their conceptualapparatus. I should say here(though it was signalledabove,and will becomeclear in the discussion)that 'minor literature' is not a specifically 'literary' concern. At one level it concernsany art form. Cinemaand theatrein particular get singled out (Deleuze 1989: 222; 1997c), and it is noteworthy that Beckett, a privileged figure in the discussionof the minor, works in all three mediums. But more than this, 'minor literature' describes a process of the composition of minorities, where 'art' and 'life' are fully entwined (K: 41). The importantaspectof minor literatureis not the literary, cinematic,theatricalproduct itself, but its expressionof a general process of deterritorialisationand minor composition. When situated around this general process, minor 'literature' should be read in this chapternot as a 'literary' procedure,but as a generalterm for the composition, intrigue, and practice of minority groups as part of more generaleconomy of 'minor politics'. Aspectsof this discussionfocus more on literary and linguistic production (notably the following section),whilst othersare more concernedwith interventionin social relations. 4 "Writing has a double function: to translate everything into assemblages and to dismantle assemblages. The two are the same thing. " (K. 47) 5 Deleuze and Guattari describe three components of Kafka's literary machine the letters, the short stories, and the novels. Though there is communication across them, each has particular modes of composition and effects (though the novels are singled out as the true achievement for their emphasis on social assemblages (cf. K. 39)). The diaries are seen as "the rhizome itself", the milieu or site of distribution of all the work (K. 96). 6 Kafka (1972: 150-1) himself characterised the 'literature of small peoples' thus: "Il. Liveliness: a. Conflict. b. Schools. c. Magazines. 2. Less constraint: a. Absence of principles. b. Minor themes. c. Easy formation of symbols. d. Throwing off of the untalented. 3. Popularity: a. Connection with politics. b. Literary history. c. Faith in literature, can make up their own laws. " 56

The point, however,is that when brought togetherthey show how minor composition as a whole occurs,a compositionin which cultural or literary production, and practice (what Deleuzeand Guattari call expression and content) are not clearly delineated, but are interlaced.7

Deterritoriallsation

as first principle

The minor is a rather self-effacing figure. Not only is it without demarcated subject positions, but it lacks the arrogance, certainty, and self-inflation of much overt statement of the political. This is not to say that its effects are not 'violent' in the sense conjured by Deleuze and Guattari's related concept of the 'war machine' (to be minor is "[flo hate all languages of masters." (K: 26)). But its violence is directed at the order, direction, and structure of major forms that cramp minority potential, and hence is manifest as an indeterminate, uncertain, tentative, and Guattari's (thus Deleuze and mutable process fondness for Kafka and Beckett, whose work they characterise in terms of 'stammering', 'dryness', 'sobriety', and a 'willed poverty'). Deleuze and Guattari's first characteristic of minor literature is thus that it effects language "with a high coefficient of deterritorialisation. " (K: 16). To explain this it is necessary to elucidate the difference between major and minor language. For Deleuze and Guattari, language is never a distinct and innocent universal plane of human relation that can be considered in itself outside of particular material assemblages. Language is not 'representation' but is as much a material form as any more apparently 'concrete' practice or process (though it has no priniary structuring agency), and is hence immanent to the system of relations that actualise configurations of matter, or assemblages (as with Foucault (1970), it is the composition of the milieu that counts, not any 'words and things' distinction). 8 A 'major language' is not an language, but a language that is immanent to the formation of molar identity autonomous (though one of the characteristics of major language is that it is naturalised, not least by linguistic 'science', as a distinct practice). It operates in terms of constants, universals, standardisation, and regularised grammar: it composes 'territory'. A 'minor language', on the other hand, is any language immanent to the process of 'deterritorialisation' of molar identity. It is less a process of communication between identities than creation across and against identities. But the minor does not designate a different language as

7 This will be clearer in the empirical chapters. For example, in Chapter 6 IWW songs and newspapers (expression) are seen to be immanent to practices of community building and tactic dispersal (content). 8 Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 83) put it like this: "A type of statement can be evaluated only as a function of its pragmatic implications, in other words, in relation to the implicit presuppositions, immanent acts, or incorporeal transformations it expresses and which introduce new configurations of bodies. " Following Henri Gobard, Kafka identifies four forms of language in terms of their territoriality and effects: 'vernacular' as local and rural, 'vehicular' as urban governmental associated with business and bureaucracy, 'referential' of a culture and its frame of sense-making, and 'mythic' as a spiritual language on the limits of cultures. Importantly, no national language can be identified as exclusively of one form. in Kafka's time for example, the different languages of German, Czech, Yiddish, and English operated in varying degrees of dominance in each of these forms. German, for example, was the vehicular bureaucratic language, whilst also, through Goethe, being a cultural referential language. 57

such. Minor languagesare not ghettoisedlanguagesof minorities that exist as selfidentical reflections of autonomouscommunities- if the people are missing, they can in live language but in language, home' be 'at that is 'not their always a rather a never in German). languages Minor insteaddescribe Jew, Kafka, Prague (hence writes a own' different fittictions, and insofar as they are political practices, treatmentsof a major language(whetherit is a 'majority' or a 6n-tinority'language):"Minor languagesdo not language in in to themselves: they a major and are also exist relation only exist investmentsof that languagefor the purpose of making it minor." (ATP: 105) The different techniquesand characteristicsof minor languagevary in different authors, but essentiallyit is characterisednot by constants,but by 'continuous variation'. Minor languagesrestrict constantsand overload and extend variables (though, it seems, more (K Joyce dryness Beckett Kafka, : than and exuberance with sobrietyand excess and 19)), such that one is not positionedwithin constants,but rather they are 'sidestepped' (ATP: 104). Deleuze(1994a: 25) writes: "as in music to the refers mode minor ... dynamiccombinationsin a stateof perpetualdisequilibrium." DeleuzeandGuattari often use the exampleof 'ghetto languages'. For example, the language of American black popular culture is presented not as an autonomous 'Black' language (or even a distinct 'patois') as other to English, but as a minoring of English, a 'Black English' (cf. ATP: 104). Kafka (1954) himself exemplifies the point in his description of Yiddish theatre. He presents Yiddish as a "tangle" in "continuous flux" without coherent grammar (382). Though Yiddish is of course a language in itself, for Kafka its importance is as a composite form, and mode of practice: It consists solely of foreign words. But these words are not firmly rooted in it, they retain the speed and liveliness with which they were adopted. Great migrations French, Hebrew, German, All Yiddish, from this through the to move other. one end English, Slavonic, Dutch, Rumanian, and even Latin, is seized with curiosity and frivolity once it is contaminated with Yiddish, and it takes a good deal of strength to hold all these languages together in this state.... (Kafka 1954: 382)

And this language has effects on identity. Kafka suggests that the mode of engagement 'sense' (as it is, is 'intuition' Yiddish, than that tangle not only more one of mutating with deterritorialisation is but, in this, of of the subject: a process representation), You begin to come quite close to Yiddish if you bear in mind that apart from what in forces forces know that there with active yourselves and associations are you intuitively... Yiddish has hold Yiddish But taken to once of understand enable you Chasidic Yiddish is the the and words, you everything, melody, moved you and East European Jewish himself have this the character actor of essential you will and forgotten your former reserve. Then you will come to feel the true unity of

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Yiddish, and so strongly that it will frighten you, yet it will no longer be fear of Yiddish but of yourselves. (385-6)

The minor, then, is not a questionof who one is, but where one is situatedvis-ývis a particular set of identities, relations, practices,and languages,and what one does with this situation. One is always 'in the middle' of a major language,working with a set of conditionsandpossibilitiesthat this languageoffers. Inasmuchas one feels cramped, and seeksto expressa different community, the minor is a processof forming relations with theseconditionsthat deterritorialisethem,or causethem to mutateas somethingnew is created: One must find the minor language, tile dialect or rather idiolect, on the basis of which one can make one's own major language minor.... It is in one's own language that one is bilingual or multilingual. Conquer the major language in order to delineate in it as yet unknown minor languages. Use the minor language to send the major language racing. (ATP: 105)

Jean Genet describes the creativity and politics of George Jackson's (1971) Prison Letters in these terms,9 but, so as to stress the non-exclusively literary focus of rriinor literature, a different example is useful. Genet (1989) reports the radical effects (what I translate here into Deleuzian terms) produced in a television interview with the Black Panther Party's Bobby Scale, filmed in San Quentin prison. Whatever the motives behind the Californian authorities' decision to let the film be broadcast, one can not really doubt that the arrangement had a rather heavy majoritarian tendency (it was certainly not the BPP's normal territory or mode of expression). And indeed, as Seale responds to the first question about food with detailed descriptions of his mother's and his wife's cooking, Genet reports being "shattered" at seeing "the revolutionary leader" reduced to "talking like a chef'. But then, "suddenly", he understood that Seale was not talking to him, that this was not a 'broad'-cast. He had misunderstood the process because he was not part of the community being created. The exchange did not reduce Seale to a decontextualised imprisoned revolutionary (molar form). Rather, the familiarity, ease, and loving detail of his account was part of the formation of lines of connection with his community (within and against this most major of forms, the TV talking-head). Because of this line and its direct affective links, when Seale moved to talk about politics Genet perceived effects that broke any representational major form (where Seale would be either 'chef', or decontextualised 'revolutionary'):

9"He has then only one recourse: to accept [the enemy's] language but to corrupt it so skilfully that the white men are caught in his trap. To accept it in all its richness, to increase that richness still further, and to suffuse it with all his obsessions and all his hatred of the white man. That is a task.... words will no longer serve concepts inculcated by the whites, but new concepts. " (Genet in Jackson 1971: 22) 59

Then suddenly - and it was suddenly, again - both his face and his voice hardened. And to all the Blacks listening in the ghetto he addressedrevolutionary slogans all the more open and uncompromising becausethe saucesrecommended at the outset had been so smooth. The political messagewas brief. Bobby had won. So much so that the television channel had to give the film a secondshowing. (1989: 216)

Minor literature,then,deterritorialiseslanguage.Onecan imaginethis in terms of :D C, literary andcultural creation,and also theoreticalcreation(deterritorialising,for example, forms of orthodox Marxism with conceptsthat emergethrough it, but that describeflux and non-identitarian relations). But it is not just on the 'literary' level that deterritorialisationis important. The importanceof deterritorialisationas a first principle is that it emphasisesprocessesof becomingin and againstthe stratificationsof identity, rather than the affirmation of a marginal identity. Gone is any existential or political securityof a ghettoisedmargin. Deleuzeis indeedsomewhatcontemptibleof such states: "Marginals havealwaysinspired fear in us, and a slight horror. They are not clandestine enough." (D: 139)10Marginals in this senseare those who appreciatethe cramping force of major forms, but, rather than chooseto engagewith these relations, seek instead to carveout an autonomousidentity againstthem, shoring up their own particularity against the world. This is perhapsthe greatestthreatto the minoritarian becoming of minority groups, who after deterritorialising major identity (as cultural or national minority, worker, heterosexualand so on) can easily reterritorialise around particular minority identity (as self-affirming - and outside-excluding- minority-Nationalist, Communist, Anarchist, Feminist, Homosexual and so on). Camatte (1995), who is particularly attentive to such dangers in the proletarian movement, has seen this as a pervasive tendency. He arguesthat leftist organisationstend to composethemselvesas particular identity through faith in a seriesof conceptualabstractionswith internal coherenceto a particularpolitical model. In this, a political 'racket' tendsto coalescein terms of what it it itself be in its to than terms what self-affirms practices, rather critical collectively of does, as internal differencesare subsumedaround particular models in an 'authentic' in forces (be to they opposition or other rackets). external relations social unity Coherenceand intemal hierarchy (be it formal or informal; cf. Freeman n.d.) are produced around attraction points of central characters,revered texts, or sanctioned practices,and enforcedthrough the motive power of political 'commitment'. Ultimately

10In a passagethat is worth citing at length, Deleuzecontinues:"in any case, they scare me. There is a molecularspeechof madness,or of the drug addict or the delinquent in vivo which is no more valid than the great discourses of a psychiatrist in vitro. There is as much self-assurance on the former's part as certainty on the latter's part. It is not the marginalswhich create the lines; they install themselves on these lines and make them their property,and this is fine when they have that strange modesty of men of the line, the prudenceof the experimenter,but it is a disaster when they slip into a black hole from which they no longer utter anything but the micro-fascist speech of their dependency and their giddiness: 'We are the avant-garde','We are the marginals'." 60

the racketmanifeststhe organisationalandidentitarianforms of capitalist society at large only, so often, more so.II The particular and the social in minor composition Summing up so far, the minor emergesin a crampedspacewhere major languagesare comPlexified, reduced, mixed, assembledto break their representationalfunction, so turning them into sites of creation againstidentity (i. e. deterritorialisation). I can now consider in more detail how this manifests in minor composition by exploring the relationshipof the particularandthe social. In the work of major literatures,autonomous,'particular', or individual concerns are able to soar into a self-actualising grandeur since the social exists as a mere backgroundor environment facilitator of the molar individual form. Of course these -a individual concernsmeetwith others,in a 'society' of sorts. But society here is only of the most liberal democraticform - individuals in communication- since each individual concernis on a similar scale,asan 'exclusive disjunction' (either this identity, or that, but neverin between)with a closetedinterior space: In major literatures individual concern (familial, marital, and so on) joins with the ... other no less individual concerns, the social milieu serving as a mere environment or a background; this is so much the case that none of these Oedipal intrigues are specifically indispensable or absolutely necessary but all become one in a large space. (K: 17)

In minor literatures, on the other hand, the social milieu is everything. There are 'individual concerns', but it is an individuality comprised of a conjunction of many different individual concerns of different forms and scales cramped and interlaced together, which are subject to a "multiplicity of interpretations" (Kafka 1972: 149). Because there is no autonomous identitarian space, these individual concerns are forces. There are two aspectsof this socially traversed of, and work on social composed particularity that needto be consideredin detail.

11Highlightingthis process, Luther Blissett (1997) and Blissettand Home (n.d.) have recently argued that the self-declarationof 'anarchist' has becomeenough of an entry card to an 'integral' anarchism that the apparent identity protects against critical interrogation, such that a wealth of reactionary theories and Anarchist Network, Green here is banner. Notable the broad the where a purist can exist under groups distinction between those 'in' and those 'against' the system of capital even includes claimants who struggleagainst the JobseekersAllowanceas part of the problem inasmuchas they seek to survive within capitalism,and where, in the Anarchist Lancaster Bomber,the suggestion is made for the necessity for populationculls in order to have a more ecologicalrelation to the earth. If this is a process of formation through inclusion,an exampleat the other extreme is the InternationalCommunistCurrent, which excels in a process of protecting its historic identity through the exclusions and denunciations of all who differ from it as'parasitical' (cf. for example ICC 1999:3; and for a critique, McIver 1999). 61

The particular and inclusive disjunction First, in minor literaturethere is a move away from grandthemes,traditions,and projectstoward a focus on particular, quotidian, 'minor' detail. Of this literatureof small peoplesKafka writes: There is universal delight in the literary treatment of petty themes whose scope is not permitted to exceed the capacity of small enthusiasmsand which are sustained by their polemical possibilities. Insults, intended as literature, roll back and forth. What in great literature goes on down below, constituting a not indispensable cellar of the structure, here takes place in the full light of day, what is there a matter of passing interest for a few, here absorbs everyone no less as a matter of life and death. (1972: 150)

Leaving aside the question of polemic for the moment, here Kafka suggests that the importanceof the quotidian 'petty theme' is amplified to a matterof 'life anddeath', yet at the sametime it is kept from exceedingits position as a 'small enthusiasm'as it is unable to hook up to normativestructuresthat would enablethe easy passageor elevationof the particularinto a grandautonomousevent in the erectionof a 'language' or a 'work'. 12 1 have alreadyexplainedthe basis of this 'inability' in terms of crampedspace,so now want to look at how the 'petty theme' works. This mode of engagementwith particularities, and the effects it has on the communityis describedby Deleuzeand Guattarias a processof 'inclusive disjunction'. 13 Deleuzeand Guattari frequently use Beckett to explain this process. Beckett does not presenta vast array of characterand intrigue, and neither is his composition of individual autonomousforms. Insteadhe movesinto the intricaciesof an apparentlysimple plane of life. For example,in Beckett's (1954) most successfulplay, the eponymousGodot never arrives, leaving us instead with a series of quotidian moments (where the 'end' or treason' is suspendedthrough the almost masochisticdeferral of Godot's arrival (cf. Deleuze 1991)). We encounterthe first character,Estragon,involved in a simple process that he starts, stops exhausted,and starts again, before uttering an apparentclosure in openingthe play:

12 Thus minor literature does not operate in conditions of conventional Kafka talks of literary production. Ischools' and 'magazines' as the site for the polemic, debate, and contestation of minor literatures. 13 Anti-Oedipus describes three 'syntheses' of desiring relations: the connective synthesis of production, the disjunctive synthesis of recording, and the conjunctive synthesis of consumption-consummation. The exploration of these three syntheses is one of the most difficult parts of the book, and I can not 'flow' of properly elaborate here. Essentially, though, the first synthesis is the site of the undifferentiated desiring production, the second is the recording 'break' of desiring production that inscribes production on and the third is the deepening of the a surface (the Body without Organs) as a series of disjunctions, Operating together subject through a localisation of sensual pleasure and a demarcation of disjunctions. in a social system, all of the three syntheses describe the production and investments of subjectivity which are indispensable, but all have approaches that tend toward the more minor or the more molar. The inclusive-disjunctive relation is the "greatest paradox" (AM 76) - the abstract extreme or limit-point of becoming. Its importance is to show how desiring production (rather than 'interest') can operate in an affirmative rather than oedipalising or identitarian way once disjunctions are already produced (since minor processes operate in relatively molar social systems, and disjunction, in any case, is necessary for abstract life to be lived).

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A country road. A tree. Evening. Estragon, sitting on a low mound, is trying to take off his boot. He pulls at it with both hands, panting. He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again. As before. Enter Vladimir. ESTRAGON:

(giving up again).

Nothing to be done. (1954: 6-7)

But Beckett's quotidian focus is important not so much as a space (something like a 6poetry of the everyday'), but as a particular mode of engagement where even the most simple situation (or demarcated 'disjunction') is still a composite form to be explored, reiterated, and reconfigured. Thus Deleuze suggests that Beckett's characters 'exhaust' the possible variations of a situation in a continual process of combination without order, preference, or end: "one combines the set of variables and perinutations of a situation, on the condition that one renounce any order of preference, any organisation in relation to a goal, any signification. " (1997a: 153) This is Anti-Oedipus' 'inclusive disjunction'. The exclusive disjunctions of "decisive choices between immutable terms" as an "either/or" formula (where each disjunction is "closet[ted] inside its own terms" (A(E: 78)) are ... replaced with an inclusive disjunction of "either or or" movement of continuous ... ... and relation across the disjunctions (Aff: 12). This relation 'across' disjunctions is not an Hegelian manoeuvre of a new synthesis of identity from the disjunctions (Aff: 76), neither is it a simple affin-nation of 'flow'. The disjunctions do not subsume in a new form; the differences between them are maintained. But, as they are placed in relation with each other in continuously reconfiguring permutations, a process of deindividualisation occurs that breaks the structures of exclusive disjunctions. The net effect of such inclusive disjunctions is the construction of an intensive milieu that is never autonomous in itself, but always composed of different variables in ever-new configurations. However small, personal, or individual such a milieu, it is still always characterised by a combinatorial process. Particularities and anomalies are not seen as alien bodies to be synthesised or negated (as if a 'better', more 'appropriate' disjunction could be found), rather they are to be actively engagedwith. As the engagement with the disjunctions (everything in a milieu that can in some way be embodied or used) accelerates,the components of a group (its members, theories, literatures, concepts) lose their distinct identities in a space of experimentation and reconfiguration (in the involution of a world and a subject in each other). Even the smallest intrigue becomes connected, debated, affirmed, negated, but above all, 'taken up' within the milieu. At the extremes the process affirms the infinite virtual within any particular actual, as in Nietzsche's delirious formula, "every name in history is V (cited in AM 21) (where each name signifies a state of being, a zone of intensity that is affirmed as part of a 63

The is 'subject' in Deleuze traverses). that the too extreme evident series reconfiguring and Guattari'saccountof the 'schizophrenic'process: [The schizophrenic] is and remains in disjunction: he does not abolish disjunction by identifying the contradictory elements by means of elaboration; instead, he indivisible distance. is He it through an spanning affirms a continuous overflight not simply bisexual, or between the two, or intersexual. He is transsexual. He is trans-alivedead,trans-parentchild. He does not reduce two contraries to an identity of the same-,he affirms their distance as that which relates the two as different. He does not confine himself inside contradictions; on the contrary, he opens out and, like a spore caseinflated with spores,releasesthem as so many singularities that he had improperly shut off (A(E: 76-7) ...

However, minority inclusive disjunctive processes,crampedas they are, never reachthis extremelimit-point. In practice they are more pragmatic and situated. Hence, with a more groundedfocus,Bensmah (1994: 214-5) describesthe processsuchthat "Literature no longer begins with man in general ... but rather with this particular man or that particular woman...... where the particular, even at its smallest levels (even in an apparentlyevent-lessspace)is itself a complex inclusive disjunction. Hence Kafka's 4particularity'is actuallyan inclusive seriesas"a Jew, a Czech, one who speaksYiddish and Czechbut writes in Germanin a Pragueghetto...")4 The minor, then,displaysan intricate attentionto, and affirmation of differencein the particularquotidian relationsthat a body finds itself crampedwithin, as a series of is 'indispensable' It the and movements. at once of configurations an assertion ever-new importanceof the marginalquotidianevent (a matterof 'life and death'), and a refusal to (so it 'small that enthusiasm'). configuration can exceed a not pailicular any ossify Indeed it raises the importance of the marginal event by affirming processes of its intimately is it. The of then, aware minor, complication and expansion within tsituations', the complex assemblageswithin which minorities are formed, and it is' an intensiveengagementwith themto draw out elementsthat can be used and reconfigured. It as if without an autonomous space of manoeuvre, every disjunction triggers an intensive vibration, some kind of rhizomatic domino-effect, such that "everything" in interconnect intrigues boundaries, One "is (K. 17). reaches minor composition political" Guattari In Deleuze this seek to show and way nothing can stand alone. and multiply, how desiring processescan break from investmentin identitarianforms and practices (mummy-daddy-me,boss- for oneselfand others,race,and nation to namethe dominant investmentsthey describe)andcometo invest the flows of the socius (a necessarymove interest', 'political is basis of their the the or critique manifestation of politics not since 14 Guattari (1996: 220) writes of Genet (who, in the best traditions of the minor, always sought to break from being a purely 'literary' figure) in similar terms: "His writing resulted not in a dialectical uplifting, but an exacerbation of his contradictions and upheavals. "

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'ideology', or 'consciousness',but the active assemblingof, and investmentin the flows of life (cf. ME: 104-5)). The social and the line of flight The particular individual concern is thus not a productof a demarcatedidentity, but of relationsacrossidentities, territories, and forms. This is not so much a suggestion that 'the personal is political', but rather that the personalis alwaysalreadycoextensivewith varied and diversesocial relations. Thus, the secondpoint to stressabout the particular in minor literature is its intimate relationship with social forces. If it is concernedwith minor detail and small intrigue, this is far from a parochial concern. Indeed, the parochial is a much more fitting characterisationof nzajor literatures since, in as much as they flourish in a social environment, major literaturesleavesocial forces largely unproblematised. Since, for minor literature, social forces fully traverseand cranip minority milieu, social, even global concernsare their very substance- the site of their deterritorialisation. Thus, if the minor tends to deterritorialise'sense' (as Kafka was seen to say about Yiddish), this in terms of the identities that are composedin sensible, molar regimes. The minor does not signify nonsensebut non-identity. Indeed,in as much as the deterritorialisationof identity is an engagementwith the 'real', it is immanentto a greater understandingof the world.15 Pursuing this minor relation to the social, Deleuzeand Guattari (1986: 41,95) point out that what made Kafka most indignant was being presentedas a writer of intimacy and solitudewithdrawn from the world. Indeed they suggestthat Kafka-studies only truly beganwhencritics noticedthe importanceof the 'double flux' of his belonging to the strong bureaucracyof the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institution, and his attraction to Prague's socialist and anarchist movements: from one end to the other, he is a political author, prophet of the future world, ... because he has two poles that he will know how to unify in a completely new assemblage:far from being a writer withdrawn into his room, Kafka finds that his room offers him a double flux, that of bureaucrat with a great future ahead of him, plugged into real assemblagesthat are in the processof coming into shape,and that of a nomad who is involved in fleeing things in the most contemporary way and who plugs into socialism, anarchism,social movements.(K: 41) By situating Kafka at this 'double flux' of 'most contemporary' forms of 'work' and 4socialmovements' Deleuze and Guattari are suggesting two very important aspects of the minor relationship to the social. First, the minor is specifically concerned with the intricacies of modern capitalist social arrangements. Thus, in comparison with the definition of major literature given above, Deleuze and Guattari write: 15 Writing of fetishism, value, and common sense in Marx, Deleuze (1994: 207-8) says that every 'solution' to a social problem is doubled with a 'false problem' where the identities produced in social

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Minor literature is completely different; its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern thus becomes because indispensable, the magnified, a whole other story is all more necessary, vibrating within it. In this way, the family triangle connects to other triangles commercial, economic, bureaucratic,juridical - that determine its values. (K: 17)

Kafka does not, then, write abstracttreatiseson becoming, but explores the modes of in forces (especially bureaucratic the these composition of commercial,economic, and novels) and displays a continuing fascinationwith maids, servants, workers, judges, bureaucrats,lawyers, bailiffs, and technical machines(all of which are part of social machines). Second,moving to the other side of Kafka's 'double flux', politics does not develop an ideal form or model that it seeks to manifest, nor does it abstractly affirm 4everyname in history', but rather it is brought forth around a 'most contemporary' problematisationof thesesocial forces, which is marked here as the 'social movements' of anarchismand socialism,but which I will call communismso asto easemy argument. There are two aspectsto this politics. First, it is contemporaryproblems which startthe political process.Thus, Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 470-1) write: "Once again, this is not to say that the struggleon the level of the axioms is without importance;on the contrary,it is determining(at the most diverse levels: women's struggle for the vote, for for jobs )." Essentiallypragmaticprocessthat the minor is, minorities could abortion, ... be expectedto begin with major forms they felt most pressing, or that offered some possibility for movement, and hence are likely to begin through already existing (cf. Massumi 1992: 102-3). Yet, to considerthe second or movements problematisations insofar is is The the the this as these only start of process. only actualised minor aspect, is deterritorialised, hence "But forms there the also are and passagecontinues: major alwaysa sign to indicatethat thesestrugglesarethe index of another,coexistentcombat". This 'other coexistentcombat' is the generalprocess of deterritorialisationthat is the far). But described in life (and is the so minor processes seen essence of deterritorialisationonly emergeswithin social systems,eachof which engineersits own lines of deterritorialisation,such that there are "objective lines [or deterritorialisations] is 1997: 189). If (Deleuze the minor an engagementwith social across society" cut which forces and begins from problematisationsof particular crampedsocial sites, the second in deterritorialisation link flux' does Kafka's 'double the to the minor not simply aspectof abstract,or to situatedsocial movementsin general,but to social movementsthat seek to (communism). flight immanent lines 'objective' to the the system social of engagewith This crucial point needs elaborating. Deleuzeand Guattari's affirmation of the is identity is 'warded identity difference flows that than such off' rather and primacy of through the prinzary processesof lines of flight (what I have more frequently called regimes become objective truths in social consciousness

(such that "[tlhe natural object of social 66

creation,deterritorialisation,or politics). For this reasonDeleuzeand Guattari write that "... the diagram and abstractmachinehave lines of flight that are primary, which are not phenomenaof resistanceor counterattackin an assemblage,but cutting edges of deterritorialisation. " (ATP: 531) Assemblagesare thus determinedas much as by what escapesthem, as by what they fix. This primacy is often posed against a Marxist affirmation of the primacy of 'contradiction' (for example,ATP: 216). Yet whilst it is true that Deleuzeand Guattari's conceptionof flight challengesa simple bi-polarity of contradictions(forces of production/ relationsof production, bourgeoisie/ proletariat), this is not such a profound differencewith Marx. For Marx and Deleuzeand Guattari, capitalismis a radically transformativesocial systemthat is premised on lines of flight; it was born through a new meansof mobilising and conjoining flows of money and flows of labour. Politics is not an assertionof a class or marginal identity, but is a processof engagementwith these 'objective' line of flight (of people, ideas, relations, machinesin mutual interrelation,that lead an assemblageelsewhere).But inasmuchas an assemblage 'works' in a social system, its lines of flight are functional to it (they are not in themselvesrevolutionary). Thus politics seeksto engineertheseflows differently, and in a sense,pushthem further or take them elsewhere.This is why for Marx the communist movementneedsto follow a path through the flows of capitalism, not opposean identity to it, and why DeleuzeandGuattarisuggestthat minorities do not so much createlines of flight, as attachthemselvesto them (cf. Deleuzeand Pamet 1987:43). The communistmovementis of course not the only site of escape,or movement to attach itself to social lines of flight, and that it has so often been the site of reterritorialisationis notedby Kafka, suchthat his relation to the workersmovementis, at 16 Nevertheless, insofar as "[Kafka] didn't 'flee the world"' but tangential. most, "[r]ather, it was the world and its representationthat he madetakeflight" (K: 46-7), and insofar as the minor seeks "to bring to bear the force of the non-denumerablesets, however small they may be, against the denumerablesets" (the plane of which is consciousness or common sense with regard to the recognition of value is the fetish.") 161tis worth saying a little about Kafka's personal relations with socialist and anarchist movements. As he reports to Janouch (1971: 86), an incident in his youth when his family cook playfully called him a Ravachol (the name of a French anarchist, though he knew this only later, being told at the time that it meant murderer and criminal) left him with a lasting "groundless sense of guilt" such that he says "I knew that I was an Ishmael, a criminal, in short -a ravachol. " (89) Later he studied in depth the lives and ideas of the historical figures of anarchism, and frequented various circles and meetings, including in 1910, the anarchist Club of the Young. He says that he "devoted much time and money to the subject" (90). But his relationship is clearly not a simple one of identity with these movements (as one would expect of a minor author). A sense of ambiguity is clear in this section form Janouch: [The anarchists] all attempted to realise the happiness of mankind without the aid of Grace. But -,' Kafka lifted both arms like a pair of broken wings and let the fall helplessly, 'I could not march shoulder to shoulder with them for long. '" (90). Kafka also says that he knows the Czech anarchists "A little", but, "very nice, jolly people" that they are, he has trouble taking their radical pretensions seriously. And when coming across a workers march he says: "These people are so self-possessed, so self-confident and good-humoured. They rule the streets, and therefore think they rule the world. In fact, they are mistaken. Behind them already are the secretaries, officials, professional politicians, and all the modern satraps for whom they are preparing the way to power... At the end of every truly revolutionary development there appears a Napoleon Bonaparte. " And in response to Janouch's questioning of his feelings about an expansion of the Russian Revolution, Kafka says: "As a flood spreads wider and wider, the water becomes shallower and dirtier. The Revolution evaporates, and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy. The chains of tormented mankind are made of red tape. " (119-20) 67

capitalisin as a whole) (A TP: 47 1), the framework set up in Kafka's 'double flux' has is This the not so much because of the concrete affinity with communist perspective. manifestations of communist practice (though Kafka and Deleuze and Guattari have relations to this), but because of their similar approach to the social processes of deterritorialisation (where politics emerges from the social, seeks to deterritorialise the social by starting from particular intrigues, and attaches itself to objective social lines of flight; such that in Kafka's case, for example, the exploration of animal-becomings is a fully social and political project). It is this situation of Kafka's 'double flux' that I would suggest is the basis for Deleuze and Guattari's alignment of the minor with the proletariat (ATP: 472), following their argument that the criteria of "proletarian literature" "are obviously difficult to establish if one doesn't start with a more objective concept - that of minor literature. " (K- 18)

The collective, the singular, and the minor author-function Expression and composition are not opposed in minor literature; "living and writing, art and life, are opposed only from the point of view of major literature. " (K: 41) The creative process is thus immanent to the process of composition, and hence has been the general subject of the chapter. But though the argument has now been largely made, I want to consider the role of the minor author (or 'creator'), and her relation to the collective. There are two models of literary or creative composition that Deleuze and Guattari refute: collective 'representation', and the individual 'master' author. If in this production "everything takes on a collective value" (K: 17) this is not because the rnýinor author is an "ethnologist of his people" (Deleuze 1989: 222). Such a model of authorship is still be based on an archetype of 'consciousness' as the knowledge of conditions and truths of a particular group situation, and a fully present people that the author would express - and we have seen that the people are missing. Deleuze (1989: 220) writes: The death-knell for becoming conscious was precisely the consciousness that there were no people, but always several peoples, an infinity of peoples, who remained to be united, or should not be united, in order for the problem to change.

But neither is the author an individual 'master'. Each authorial moment is not the product of an autonomous author committing his experiences to prose, but is rather a complex elaboration and proliferation of the collective intrigue as it is expressed in particular moments by particular authors. It is a 'collective enunciation' that emerges in the

crampedconditionsof a culture: Indeed, precisely becausetalent isn't abundant in a minor literature, there are no possibilities for an individuated enunciation that would belong to this or that 'master' and that could be separatedfrom a collective enunciation. Indeed, scarcity of talent is in fact beneficial and allows the conception of something other than a 68

literature of masters; what each author says individually already constitutes a common action, and what he or she says or does is necessarily political, even if others aren't in agreement.(K: 17) Yet this is not to say that there is no space for innovation or singularity - far from it. The author is both of the milieu that s/he actualises 'collectively' and, in as much as the people are missing or lack coherence, is in a position to express a different configuration, a different sensibility unconstrained by a fixed identity (and relatively freed from the weight of tradition that would come with a coherent people). The author is both part of the actual (community), but also draws out the virtual (the community to come) within the community and the social (cf. Bensmaa 1994: 217). At the same time, because there is no space for the elevation of master authors (cramped as the community is), the author function is distributed across the milieu, such that the collective and the author are both implicated in each other, in a process of continuous feed-back (a position evident in Deleuze's (1989: 221) expression: "The arteries of the people to which I belong, or the

people of my arteries..."). The minor author function

is thus a reversal of that identified

by Barthes and

Foucault as that which functions

to produce a coherent and regular individual oeuvre. Minor literature tends to emerge in what Kafka (1972: 148) describes as the "incessant bustle" of "magazines" and "schools" or 'anomalous'

in a series of ever-new and changing 'borderlines'

points that incorporate and amplify difference in a community.

author is like the 'subject' of this account of the 'pack-form',

The minor

only it is a characteristic of

all elements of the pack:

I ain on the edge of the crowd, at the periphery; but I belong to it, I ant attached to it by one of iny extremities,a hand or a foot. I know that the periphery is the only fray, into if let be drawn die I I be, the I the of centre that myself place can would but just as certainly if I let go of the crowd. (ATP: 29) There is, as Kafka (1972: 150) writes, plenty of space for polemic. Or as Guattari (1998: 196) puts it: "It's not a question of creating agreement; on the contrary, the less we agree, the more we create an area, a field of vitality... " But if polemic and disagreement are not to end up producing what Camatte (1995) called 'rackets' (closed in on themselves), they need to tend to be sites of productive borderlines, not of self-certainty and exclusive disjunction (for all groups, this is a real test). Thus, if the author-function is situated on the periphery, between the community and the outside, it is driven be the concerns of the limited community, but also by the relations that cross it. 17 In this sense the authorial moment, just as the general form of minor composition, is an engagement with an outside 17 "Sometimes Sometimes

it is a specific animal that draws and occupies the borderline, as leader of the pack. the borderline is defined or doubled by a being of another nature that no longer belongs to the

69

that is almost 'forced' rather than 'chosen', but that finds in such engagement,new relations,new inclusive disjunctions. Creation

against resistance (Deleuze and Foucault) As shouldbe clear by now, the minor is not a theory of 'resistance',but of creation. The conceptof resistancehashad someprominencein postmodernpolitical discourse, as if it conveys a situatednessand a more modest remit than the classic modern paradigm of class struggle. This focus has often, if implicitly, been associatedwith Foucault (no doubt this has been aidedby Foucault's refusal to link his work to the grand project of Marxism'8). Oncethe more malevolentcritiquesof Foucault (that he foreclosedpolitics in a disciplinary archipelago)were overcome,19his name has come to signify not only our times of micropowers,but also our appropriatepolitical response(seeing, as he did, in that a "multiplicity the power of points of resistance everywhere are present ... network" (1980: 95)). Yet this idea of resistanceis problematic (and actually a poor reading of Foucault). Before concluding this chapter, I want to briefly return to this questionof resistancein Foucault,or ratherin Deleuze'sinterpretationof it, to emphasise how the minor challengesa theory of resistance,and show how Deleuze's and Foucault's 20 might politics relate. The problematic of resistance is a persistent theme in Deleuze's engagement with Foucault. The great resonance between Deleuze's and Foucault's work (cf. N: 85) is such that it would be a stupid move indeed to pose this question in terms of a serious disjunction. It is much better to think of it as a productive differential in their relation, as the fact of Deleuze's not infrequent return to the subject conveys. The nub of Deleuze's is in his latter years Foucault had a sense of becoming "trapped in that argument he hated" (N. 109), namely 'power': that Foucault felt he was "getting locked something into the play of forces" that he had mapped and that "he needed 'some opening"'(N: 92, 109). Deleuze thus attaches considerable importance to Foucault's eight year break in book publication after the first volume of The History of Sexuality (Deleuze talks of this

pack, or never belonged to it, and that represents a power of another order, potentially acting as a threat as well as a trainer, outsider, etc." (ATP 245-6) 18 Foucault's 'anti-Marxism' is misconceived if it is seen as a refusal of a serious and wide ranging political project. If anything, Foucault's problem with Marxism is that it is not radical enough (being caught, as he sees it, in the nineteenth century paradigm of Man (Foucault 1970: 262)). It is thus noteworthy that Foucault also presents Marx alongside the privileged figure of Nietzsche as a force that decenters anthropology and humanism, albeit one that is continually subject to reterritorialisations: "One is led therefore to anthropologise Marx, to make him a historian of totalities, and to rediscover in him the message of humanism; one is led therefore to interpret Nietzsche in the terms of transcendental philosophy and to reduce his genealogy to the level of a search for origins... " (Foucault 1972: 13) 19 Bringing together the two dominant misinterpretations of Foucault that the 'death of man' was a nihilism, and that Foucault's later works marked a 'return to the subject' - Deleuze writes that misinterpretations are never innocent, they're mixtures of stupidity and malevolence" (N: 99). 20 1 am only reading this problematic from Deleuze's perspective, not 'objectively' assessing the accuracy of his reading of Foucault. It is beyond the scope of this thesis to approach the question through Foucault's work. It is worth noting, though, that if Foucault had problems with the question of resistance, he did not feel the need to respond directly to Deleuze's interpretation. Perhaps there is some truth in Deleuze's rather touching comment after Foucault's death about their relation: "I needed him much more than he needed me" (N. 83). 70

as a "generalcrisis" (N: 83)), when the planned structure of the series was suspended (eventhough the researchwas probably mostly completed(N: 108-9)), and from where emerges Volumes 11 and III around the new paradigm of 'subjectification', and 'techniquesof the self' (in what Foucault (1982: 208) calls his third "mode of inquiry"). Deleuzeis rightly very careful to presentthis third dimensionas the product of the whole of Foucault's work, as a "broken line" (N: 92) of invention, crisis, probing, blockage (that itself is "the mark of [his thought's] creativity, the mark of its ultimate consistency" (N: 83)), rather than as some kind of 'new Foucault' (it is "a creative crisis, not a recantation"(N: 98)). However, it is clear that Deleuzesees this point as Foucault's overcomingof theproblem of 'resistance'. It is preciselyat this time of 'crisis' that Deleuzetakes it upon himself to pass on to Foucault a seriesof notes on his interpretationof their similarities and differences-a piece which circulatesaround the questionsof resistanceand the line of flight (Deleuze 1997).21 Of all Deleuze'scommentaryon Foucault, these notes are the most critical (thoughthe essayfollows Deleuze'susualpracticeof drawing out lines of resonancewith other works, here he also quite explicitly marks his and Foucault's differences). Deleuze's argumentcentres around his positioning of the primacy of assemblagesof desire (rather than power) and the centrality of lines of flight in the constitution of assemblages(as I showedabove). Deleuzesuggeststhat, since for him lines of flight or desiring relations are primary, and hencethe site of political composition, he "ha[s] no needfor the statusof phenomenaof resistance"(189). In Foucault, on the other hand, becausedispositifsof power are constitutive(and there appearsto be no equivalentof the line of flight in his work), politics can only be a 'resistance'to power, and hencepolitics is a strangelyunmotivated, almost reactive phenomena(188). Though in Volume I Foucault (1980) presents three political possibilities (a fully situated set of microresistancesthat work 'vis-ý-vis' the dispositifs, a new conceptionof a counter politics of truth, and the affirmation of 'bodies and pleasures'against 'sex'-identity), Deleuzesees Foucaultgrapplingwith the problem of the 'status' of thesephenomena,the question of wherethey come from, and he arguesthat "their character,their origin, their production were still vague" (Deleuze 1997: 188; N: 98,109). Deleuze perceives this as most evident in 'The life of Infamous Men' (which he frequently presents as both a masterpiece,and as a text of the 'crisis' (N: 90,108)). Here Foucault (1979) grapples with the problem of bringing little momentsof excess,crime, transgression(in the mid seventeenthto mid eighteenthcentury) into analysiswithout losing their intensity. In the past, he says "for want of the necessarytalent" these intensitieswere left outside his fundamental he intensity these the as a vibration and moments analysis, yet credits of driving force of his research(77). We can think of Foucault willing himself to do something with this intensity, but his solution here is to simply present these little

71

transgressionsin picaresquefashion as they are lit, for brief moments, by power relations. Their intensity is not theorised,but displayed. However, once Foucault (1990,1992) moves into the problem of 'subjectification' and 'techniquesof the self' in Volumes 11 and III, Deleuze sees the problem of resistanceovercome. He reads the new work as the full emergenceof a problematicof the 'Outside' that pervadedall of Foucault's work, as itself the line of flight, or the primacy of undeterminedforce in a kind of vitalism (N: 91). This is no return of the subject, but an emphasison the ways power is deflected, opened, and a space of the self-as-event (or series of events) is produced in 'foldin,, s' of the Outside/forceand in the invention of 'styles of life' (N: 93,108-9,114-6). Thus, Deleuze's(1988) readingof Foucault's work as a whole ends with a considerationof 'Foldings' and the 'Oven-nan'through a kind of Foucauldian 'primacy of resistance' which has resonancewith his own emphasison composition (and includes noneof the positioning of his and Guattari's differences to Foucault, that were evident before (cf. Deleuze 1997;ATP: 530-1)).

Conclusion 'Resistance', then, is too plain a concept for minor politics. It is too binary, and not intimate enough with the creative deterritorialising forces of the world. But this is not to say that the minor is a simple affirmation of a people. Minor composition poses a direct challenge to political models founded on a delineated identity where a particular people with coherent consciousness seek to determine ordered programmes, concepts, histories, and trajectories. Minor politics is seen in the processes of creation, composition, and identities, intensive is It and within across programmes, an change and practices. engagement with the forces and relations which traverse minorities, disrupting the regimes of identity and equivalence which maintain a situation (a subject, a group, a in forms, ordered, molar and an opening to the potential or virtuality of the practice) world. One does not judge political movements by their successor failure - whether they achieved a set of goals or not - because the minor has no final goal, "only stagnation can do harm" (Kafka 1972: 148). This is not to say that creation is unrelated to intended goals, or that this is a renunciation of the possibility of radical social change (in favour of little creations). This would be a misunderstanding of Deleuze and Guattari's politics, and one which Deleuze (1994: xx) suggests is the "greatest danger" of his invocation of difference; letting it lapse "into the representations of a beautiful soul: there are only reconcilable and federative differences, far removed from bloody struggles.1122But the is interpret is that to the to consider their major and n-dnor movements way political point

21 Frangois Ewald (1994) explains how in 1977 Deleuze had entrusted these notes to him to pass them on but as having something intimate, Ewald describes the notes as not only unpublished, to Foucault. secret, and confidential about them. 22 When Deleuze (1994: 207) returns to this problem of misinterpretation of the philosophy of difference, Marx becomes a mechanism forwarding it off ("the name of Marx is sufficient to save it from this danger").

72

tendencies,what relationsof identity they deterritorialise,and what they manageto create (and what we may continueto createwith them), following the senseof Guattari's (1996: 124) observationthat "[o]ne cannotunderstandthe history of the workers' movementif one refuses to see that, in certain periods, institutions of the labour movement have produced new types of subjectivity...... "mutant" workers in "veritable wars of subjectiviV'. As this chaptershowed, the processesand techniquesof minor politics are twofold. First, politics beginswith specific andparticularminority identities and oppressions within which peopleare 'cramped'. Eachcrampedsituationshowsa point of departure,a point of deterritorialisation. Particularsituationsor disjunctions are intensively engaged with, elaborated,and complicated,to open out the either/or disjunctions of identity into movements and pen-nutationsacross disjunctions such that an intensive milieu of inclusive disjunction emerges. The particular thus becomesthe site of innovation (not identity) asminorities rework their territory and multiply their borders. But second, such an intensive milieu, even as its concerns become collective mattersof 'life and death', must always maintain a contact with social forces (and not reterritorialiseon particularintriguesand minority identities;the minor is not a marginalist escapefrom social relations). Thus, at the sametime as minor political processesaffirm and problematise their 'little intrigues', they draw-in and problematise new social relationsandconcerns.The closerelation to the social is markedby the fact that, without identity, autonomous compositioncan only be of social forces (that traverseminority an cramped space). Beyond this general process, the minor relation to the social is characterisedby Kafka's 'double flux' as a site of contemporarysocial arrangementsand their lines of flight. The first part of the double flux requiresa perceptualawarenessto both the ways social machineswork (for example, the bureaucracyof The Trial, as a complex machineof endlessdeferment), and to the ways they mutate and the lines of flight they engineer(henceKafka's bureaucracyis seento make 'impossible' connections wherepeopleand rooms are polymorphously connectedin a self-transforminglabyrinth, as a sign of 'diabolical powers to come' (cf. K: 83)). It is at this site of social assemblagesand their flight that the little intrigues of minor composition emerge and operate. Hence,following the secondside of the double flux, Kafka has affinity with the 6mostcontemporary'political movementswhich seek to addressthe flows of capitalism, and, more generally, the minor has affinities with 'the proletariat' and 'communism' as processeswhich havesoughtto find and actualisefissures, cracks, and deviationsin the flows and arrangementsof the capitalist socius. I have mapped a minor orientation, a set of concerns, techniques, and a As Deleuze Parnet however, has Beyond this, the programme. and minor no sensibility. (1987: 137) put it: "Politics is active experimentation,since we do not know in advance which way a line is going to turn." The next chapter moves to consider the relation betweenthe minor and the proletariatby consideringMarx's proletariatas a minor figure. 73

Chapter

5

The Lumpenproletariat

and the Proletarian

Unnamable

Let us accept once and for all that classesare not social super-individualities, neither as objects nor as subjects...(Balibar 1991: 179) When the proletariat proclaims the dissolution of the existing world order, it is only declaring the secret of its own existence, for it is the actual dissolution of that order. (Marx 1975a: 256)

In the last chapter I showed how the minor is related to the social as the process of problematisingthe social forces and relations that traverse minorities, and exacerbating the lines of flight that are immanent to the social. The emphasiswas placed on how minor composition occurs at this juncture. This chapter takes a step back from the techniquesof composition,so asto situatethe minor in relation to the 'proletariat'. I am essentiallyseeking to explain Deleuzeand Guattari's (1988: 472) comment that "[t]he power of minority, of particularity, finds its figure or its universal consciousnessin the proletariat." But, to this end, the chapteris an exploration of the proletariat in Marx's work, albeit an exploration that developsan understandingof the proletariat as a minor figure. In subsequentchaptersthe proletariat and the minor are brought together to considerparticular forms of composition. In exploring Marx's proletariatthe chapteralso considers Marx's lumpenproletariat. The degree of detail in the discussion of the lumpenproletariatmay appeara little indulgentsincethe categoryoften appearsto be little more than a polemicaland rather moralistic catch-all term of abuse for all non-Marxian radical positions. However, it is actually an important heuristic device in Marx's elaborationof theproletariat (evenasit is oneof the leastcritically developedcategoriesin his work). Beyond this, there are three specific reasons for considering the lumpenproletariatthat relateto the core problematicsof this thesis - the minor, the refusal of work, and a proletariatof difference. First, it is in the lumpenproletariatthat the questionof differenceand anomaly as a property of peoplesis most clearly foregrounded by Marx. Marx's category of the lumpenproletariatencompassesa rather ambiguous and nebulous set of assorted marginals and diclass9s 'without trace'. Hence, when placed in contrast with our conventionalimagesof the Marxian proletariat(as 'universalsubject'), it appearsto be an attractivecategoryfor resonancewith the minor (attentiveasthe minor is to difference and variation). It is noteworthy, for example,that when Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis (in Benjamin 1986)describethe porous,intoxicatedlife of the peopleof Naples in a fashion similar to Deleuzeand Guattari's minor (where "each private attitudeor act is permeated by streamsof communal life" and "[plovertly has brought about a stretchingof frontiers 74

that mirrors the most radiant freedomof thought" ( 171)), they are writing of what Marx I Engels lumpen the of cities. and seeas most Second, a core feature of Marx's lumpenproletariatis its lack, even refusal of work, henceit is an importantsite of interest. A number of movementsof the '68 era which developed forms of the refusal of work/er (from the Black Panther Party to counterculturalgroupslike the Dutch Provos and those on the fringes of the Situationist Internationalsuch as Heatwave and King Mob) have seen the lumpenproletariatas the arenaof revolutionary politieS.2 For example, though not actually holding a lumpen position themselves,the Situationist International suggest that "the lumpenproletariat embodiesa remarkably radical implicit critique of the society of work." (Vaneigemin Knabb 1981: 126) There are of coursedifferent reasonsfor the take-upof the category amongstthesegroups,but two elementsare prevalent. First, there seemsto have been a generalsensethat the CommunistParty's conflation of Marx's proletariatwith the Party, and the incorporatingeffects of regular employmentand consumerculture (in processes of 'embourgeoisment','one-dimensionality', 'recuperation' and so on) had curtailedthe proletariat's revolutionary potential. Second, a growing population of unwaged, marginalised,excluded,and counterculturalgroups were seento be unrepresentedin the conventionalfigure of the proletariat (work-based as it was).3 Thus whilst still being readersof Marx, andinsistenton praxis at the level of 'capital', thesegroups, in different ways, replaced the proletariat with a different, apparently revolutionary subject, and indeedone that carrieda particular frisson of radical excess. However, despitethe way the lumpen appearsto resonatewith the concernsof this thesis (the minor and the refusal of work), ultimately the lumpen is a problematic for be In I lumpenproletariat this to the minor politics. a category chapter show category fitting with Deleuze'sunderstandingof the 'marginal' as molar identity, rather than the minor as social becoming. Nevertheless,once this is shown through the elaborationof the conceptualform of the lumpenproletariatandproletariat,a third reasonfor considering 1 Engels saw Bakunin's popularity in Naples as evidence for calling him the "lumpen Prince" (cited in Bovenkerk 1984: 25). 2 For examples of these lumpenproletarlan positions see Clarke et aL (1994), Cleaver (1970,1972), Cleaver (1975), 'What is the Provotariat? ' in Heatwave (1993), and Gray and Radcliffe (1966). Eldridge Cleaver's (1970: 7-8) description of the lumpenproletariat, though more sophisticated than that of most of these groups in its attempt to theorise the class formation of the US black ghetto, is not untypical: "O. K. We are Lumpen. Right on. The Lumpenproletarlat are all those who have no secure relationship or vested interest in the means of production and the institutions of capitalist society. That part of the 'Industrial those on Welfare or Reserve Army' held perpetually in reserve; who have never worked and never will all ... receiving State Aid. I Also the so-called 'Criminal Element', those who live by their wits, existing on what they can rip off, who stick guns in the faces of businessmen and say 'stick'ern up', or 'give it up'! Those who don't even want a job, who hate to work... / But even though we are Lumpen, we are still members of the Proletariat... / In both the Mother Country and the Black Colony, the Working Class is the Right Wing of the Proletariat, and the Lumpenproletariat is the Left wing. " 3A similar approach is evident in academic sociology. Sixties and seventies work on deviancy and political marginality frequently employs a model of an integrated working class and an extra-legal and subcultural lumpen (cf. Hall 1974; Horowitz and Liebowitz 1968; Taylor and Taylor 1968). Horowitz and Liebowitz (1968: 293) clearly express this thesis when they write: "If any group has emerged as the human carrier of the breakdown between political and private deviance, it has been the lumpenproletariat, or the non-working class. This group has replaced the established working and middle classes as the deciding political force in America. " 75

the lumpen emerges;it helps move the empirical proletariat away from its orthodox moorings in the Eurocentricimage of the British factory working class (and its rather curtailedrepertoireof radical forms). That is, the particular forms and practicesthat are dismissedas lumpen can usefully complicatethose of the conventional proletariat, once they are consideredwithin the conceptualframework of the proletariat. Throughout the thesis I use the refusal of work as the conceptualemblem of this complication of the proletariat,but it includessuch attributesand forms as picaresqueand variable incomeattainment,counterculture,and the questionof crime and illegality (as will be clearer in the more empirical chapters). The chapteris in two main sections. The first considersthe contours of Marx's lumpenproletariat. It starts with a brief summaryof critical work on the category, and then showshow it emergesacrossMarx's works. The secondsection, on the proletariat, begins by showing how Marx's critique of the lumpenproletariatas a non-revolutionary (non-)classis related to his critique of anarchism. Despite looking like difference the lumpen is shown, at a conctptual level to be a political category of identity. The proletariatis then elaborated,using Balibar, as a situated and complex non-identitarian minor form - an 'unnameable'- linked to the mutational plane of capital. The chapter ends by considering how Marx's more empirical problem - his failure to successfully cleave-off lumpen peoples from proletarian peoples - is a point of departure for consideringwork and political practicein more complex ways than Marx and orthodox Marxism does, or rather, againstthe very real problems of these understandingsof the proletariat.4

Marx's

lumpenproletariat

In the relatively small amount of critical work on the lumpenproletariat Marx it is lumpenproletariat devoted Marx's that truism to a almost explication of work leaves the category rather undeveloped. Yet although one may be tempted to interpret this

Critical

conceptual underdevelopment as a sign of the relative insignificance of the category, hence (one business Marxian to the point might economy serious of political compared Caj)ital, in journalistic it is Marx's historical than where the that say rather essays, and out in has figures lumpenproletariat the a pivotal place actually most prominently), category Marx's understanding of radical class formation. The critical work on Marx's category falls roughly into two schools. First, in the 1970s it tends toward a mapping and clarification

of

the category,

and second,

in

the eighties and nineties,

the

41 should say here that my distinction between 'conceptual' and 'empirical' elaborationis not intended to reproducethe argument(immanentto orthodox understandingsof the Party) that distinguishes correct inevitably latter deviate from level) the (conceptual would where empirical application, practice political from conceptual purity. Whilst my 'conceptual' level does develop an abstract political and methodologicalperspective, it is one that seeks to understand and exacerbate processes of deviation and complicationin empiricalforms and practices (followingmy presentation of the minor). I should also state clearly here that, though the argumentis evident throughout the discussion, in the 'proletariat' I am not talking about an empirical group of people. This is a conceptual account of a constellation of, and project for social relations (which compose,traverse, and deterritorialiseempirical peoples). 76

lumpenproletariatreturnsasa site of differencein poststructuralistattemptsto deconstruct Marx, andopenup differencein his texts. I will briefly considertheseperspectiveS. 5 The classic work by Draper (1972) begins by lamenting the tangled "misunderstandings, misinterpretationsand even mistranslations" (2285) that have accompaniedthe categoryof the lumpenproletariat.In an admirableexplication, Draper developswhat he seesas the specific historical, political, and econon-dcmeaningsof the category, suggestingthat though underdeveloped,there is neverthelesssomething quite distinct about the lumpen as, most essentially,a description of those elementsthat "are being exuded, extruded, excreted from the class structure and onto the scraphead. " (2308). Though Draper's essayis devoid of the vehemenceof Marx's critique, his use of the category, now clarified, is largely uncritical (this is clearer in a later work, Draper (1978), when the category is used unproblematically as a definition of reactionary content). Hirst (1972) undertakesa similar task of clarification, though this time in favour of laying bare the facts of Marxian class analysis in an analytic arbitration that replicatesMarx's contempt,but now specifically directed at 'radical deviancy' theorists who would seek to include criminal practiceand marginalswithin the community of the workers movement. Hirst suggests that the condemnation of the lumpenproletariat should not be dismissedmerely as a bourgeoismoralism on the part of Marx and Engels; on the contrary, it is the result of a sophisticated materialist understanding of the reactionarynatureof the marginaland criminal classes.Thus, nestledin the certaintiesof seventiesstructuralist Marxism behind Marx and Engels' "uncompromisingly political" standpointof "the proletarianclass position", Hirst further reinforces the boundariesof scientific socialismagainstindividualist and idealist all-comers. Hirst's question to ask "of any socialclass or socio-politicalactivity [is] what is its effectivity in the struggle of the proletariatfor socialism,doesit contribute to the political victory of the exploited and " (40), and the answerwith the lumpenproletariatand crime is a decisive 'no'. oppressed? As I show, however, the conceptualcontours of the lumpenproletariatare far from easily identifiable. Marx's accountof this nebulousnon-classin its multiple guises (from financial aristocracyand Louis Bonaparteto secretsociety conspirators, criminals and indeed 'pen pushers') can not be easily read as a simple analytic cleansing of the dangerousclassesfor the simple fact that he does not succeedin producing a clear constituency- successfullyexcisedor not. Questioningthe historical accuracyof the variousaspectsof Marx's and Engels' account,Bovenkerk (1984) thus arguesthat their use of the categoryis sloppy and inconsistent.6 It sometimesseemsas though Marx is 5A third area of debateis more empiricallyand politicallygrounded around questions of race, crime, and unemployment(cf. for example Cleaver 1970; Gilroy and Simm 1985; Hall et at. 1978). Because this chapter works on a conceptuallevel, this complex field is largely beyond its scope. 6 Followingother historical work by Traugott (1980), Bovenkerk argues that the key groups Marx and Engels describe as lumpenand reactionary turn out not to be so easily definable as such, by their own criteria. The Bonapartist'swampflower'of the MobileGuard,for instance,are shown by Traugott (1980) to have been of a very similar social composition to the proletarianinsurgents, indeed being typically more skilled (with their relativeyouth being the most markeddifference). Most bizarrely Bovenkerk tells of how the December10 Society (which as we will see is almost the archetype of the lumpenproletariat,and for 77

playing a Fort-Da game where the identity of the proletariat is to be produced in relation to the continual exclusion and return of the non-identity of the lumpenproletariat. Yet rather than shoring-up identity, the Fort-Da process actually leaves us with much (not unproductive) confusion. This confusion has led some more recent psychoanalytic and poststructuralist influenced theorists to posit the lumpen as the moment of heterogeneity in Marx. In a fascination/repulsion account of lumpen decrepit excess Andrew Parker (1993) suggests that in Marx's lumpen we see the "(de)structuring effects of eroticism" Z:1 (23) and a repressed "economy of anal pleasures" (34) between Marx and Engels. And Peter Stallybrass (1990) argues that Marx practices a version of Lacanian identity forrnation whereby the purity of the dialectic is constituted through the spectacle of heterogeneity. In this he suggeststhat the lumpen may be the space of 'the political' as it escapes from deten-nined class composition (which would seem to make Laclau and Mouffe, with their 'autonomy of the political', cultivators of a contemporary lumpen swamp flower). But the classic work here is Jeffrey Mehlman's (1977) Revolution and Repetition. Mehlman argues that on Marx's contact with the lumpenproletariat in The Eighteenth Brumaire "a certain proliferating energy is (13) that disrupts all released" ... dialectical identities with an unassimilable heterogeneity: Where the higher was inevitably to be overthrown by the lower the bourgeoisie by the proletariat - those two poles remain constant and are mutually impoverished by For Bonaparte a strange irruption of something lower than the low the top. at ... seems to short-circuit both dialectic and class struggle in gathering in his service the 'scum (Auswurj), offal (Ab/all), refuse (Abhub) of all classes', the lumpen[A] specular - or reversible relation is exceeded by a heterogeneous, in instance displacement is deviation charged negatively or whose situation one of

proletariat...

relation to one of the poles of the initial opposition. (1977: 12,13)

Mehlman's rather Derridean conclusions that, despite himself, Marx can not help affirming the heterogeneity of the lumpen, and his notion that it is a specifically literary Marx where difference emerges, are problematic (not least, as is also the case in Derrida (1994), because the argument fails to seriously address the materialist core of Marx's thesis). However, MehIman's concern not to elaborate the identity of the lumpen but to consider its relation to heterogeneity in Marx is one I have some affinity with. Where I differ is that I present heterogeneity not as a lumpen disruption of a neat dialectical schema of the bourgeoisie and proletariat as two distinct classes, but as ultimately a property of the category of the proletariat (where the lumpen, despite appearances is detail identity). however, Marx's To the this of case, of make actually a category

Marx of central importancein Louis Bonaparte'saccessionto Emperor)is so undocumentedthat Traugott even suggests that this "mysterioussociety may have been largely imaginary"(cited in Bovenkerk 1984: 41). 78

lumpenproletariatneedsto be mapped. What follows is a brief accountof the main ways that the lumpenis described. The

knave Marx's category of the class proletariat as bourgeois lumpenproletariat does not emerge as a simple addition to an already fully developed historical materialist lexicon, populated with clearly elaborated class agents. Indeed in many ways the categories of the proletariat and lumpenproletariat develop integrally. In the 1840s

Bestor (1948) has shown, the vocabulary of the nascent socialist, as , communist, and anarchist movements was in a state of formation, and many different terms were coined in rapid succession in a veritable neological feast.7 It is striking, for example, that when in 1848 Marx and Engels announced that a communist spectre was haunting bourgeois culture, the word 'communist' was only eight years old (emerging from the secret societies under the July Monarchy) and was still very much undetermined in its content. 8 More importantly here, whilst the term proletarius was used to describe the lowest class of ancient Roman community, the European variants of the words 4proletariat' and 'proletarian' were only emerging into a modem definition as 'free wage worker' in the late thirties and forties with the developing workers movement after the 1830 revolution (cf. Bestor 1948: 275; Draper 1972: 2286; Linebaugh 1991: 121-2). Originally designating those who had no value other than that they produced offspring, then vanishing from use in the second Christian century (Briefs 1937), from the fourteenth century up until Marx's era, 'proletarian' was a derogatory term akin to 'rabble' and 'knave'. In Samuel Johnson's 1755 Dictionary (cited in Linebaugh 1991: 122) for example, the proletariat were described as "mean, wretched, vile, or vulgar", and later, in the 1838 Histoire des classes ouvriýres et des classes bourgeoises, Granier de Cassagnac described them as a sub-human class formed of a cross between robbers and prostitutes (cited in Benjamin 1983: 22). Haussmann wrote of a "mob of nomads", and in 1850 Thiers spoke of "this heterogeneous mob, this mob of vagabonds with no be fan-iily domicile, that they can nowhere mobile and no mob of persons so avowed a pinned down... " (cited in Chevalier 1973: 365,364). It seems as though Sismondi was the first to use the term in a modern sense in his Etudes sur Viconomie politique in 1837, and it is not without importance that Marx prefaces The Eighteenth Bruntaire (1978: 5)

7 As one example, a partial list of the Parisian 'sectes communistee in 1842 included 6galitaires, fraternitaires, humanitaires, unitaires, communitaires or icariens, communistes, communionistes, communautistes, and rationalistes (Louis Reybaud, Revue des Deux Mondes, cited in Bestor (1948: 291)). Bestor's analysis of the invention, mutation and differentiation of terms is a fascinating insight into the diversity and creativity of the early workers movement. With avid advocates of neologism around like Fourier it would of course be wrong to take the multiplication of terminology as simple evidence of diversity, but it would seem to indicate a degree of vitality. 8 Incidentally, as Bestor (1948) points out, Engels explains that Communist rather than Socialist was employed in the Manifesto because of its revolutionary connotations: "Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of a total social change, called itself Communist ... Thus, Socialism was, in 1847, a middleclass movement, Communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, respectable'; Communism was the very opposite. " (Engels' preface to the 1888 English edition of Marx and Engels 1973: 12-13) 79

with a referenceto his definition: "People forget Sismondi's significant saying: The Roman proletariat lived at the expenseof society, while modern society lives at the expenseof the proletariat." I will return to this 'modern' proletariatlater. The lumpenproletariat

as Marx's

knave class At the most basic level, the lumpenproletariatis Marx's mechanismfor freeing-uphis conceptof the proletariatfrom

this conceptionof a seethingrabble;he transfersall the old content into the new category 9 But inasmuchas Marx is concernedwith the problematic of of the lumpenproletariat. revolutionary class formation (rather than, as was the case in the bourgeois accounts, moral condemnationof the mass- thoughof coursethis was not without its own political effects),as this chapterargues,there is a lot going on in this transfer. Marx and Engels are credited by the OED as the first to coin the composite 'lumpenproletariat';initially in TheGennanIdeology whereit is usedto describeboth the ancientRomanplebeians(as"midway betweenfreemenandslaves,neverbecoming more than a proletarian rabble [lumpenproletariatin German]") and Max Stirner's selfprofessedradical constituencyof the Lumpenor ragamuffin (Marx and Engels 1976: 84, 202). The prefix 'lumpen' is not to be taken as synonymous with poverty. Though Marx and Engelsdo often usethe term to describethe very poor, Draper (1972) suggests that the principle root is not Lumpen meaning 'rag' and 'tatter', but Lump (pl. Lumpen, Lumpe)meaning'knave'. This definition of the lumpen as a class of depravedknaves is no clearer than in Marx's famously excessivedescription of Louis Bonaparte and his December10Society: On the pretext of founding a benevolent society, the lumpenproletariat of Paris had been organised into secret sections Decayed rottis with dubious means of ... subsistence and of dubious origin, ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, rubbed shoulders with vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux, brothel-keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars - in short, the whole of the nebulous, disintegrated mass,scattered hither and thither, which the French call la boUlne; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the core of the December 10 Society. A 'benevolent society' - in so far as, like Bonaparte,all its members felt the need to benefit themselvesat the expense of the labouring nation. This Bonaparte who constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat, who here alone rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognises in the scum,

9 Thus Marx's presentation of the lumpenproletariat is, at the level of description, not dissimilar to many of the old accounts of the proletariat and 'dangerous classes'. 80

offal and refuse of all classesthe only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally... (Marx 1978: 73)1()

The constituencyof this knave class is hybrid indeed. And as if to match this hybridity conceptually, the word lumpenproletariatis itself unstable in Marx's and Engels' work. In the various translations, including those by Engels, the German 'lumpenproletafiat'is variously translatedas 'social scum', 'dangerousclasses', 'mob', iswell-mob', 'ragamuffin', 'ragged-proletariat'. And Marx and Engels often use other terms in placeof 'lumpenproletariat'(particularly Va bohMie', and 'lazzarold' but also German versions of the above English translations), all of which conjure different specific meaningsas they are used to characterisean apparentgroup of people. This is indicative of the way Marx seemsto needto resort to empiricaldescriptionof the lumpen (albeitin a rather theatricalfashion) rather than presenta neat conceptualclass definition (such aswith wagelabourers:'those who have nothing to sell but their labour'). He sees the lumpenproletariatas by definition a nebulous, disintegratedgroup without stable collective determination- they are a 'non-class'. The lumpenproletariat,as Marx writes of the Mobile Guard (Louis-Bonaparte's lumpen rrfilitary constituency), are "people without a definite trace" (1973a:52-3). If Marx transfers nineteenthcentury understandingsof the proletariat into the categoryof the lumpen this is not the only function of the category;he does not leave it at that. One needsto considerthe specific ways the lumpen functions for Marx as it is filled with different characteristicsand attributes,and is seento have different political effects. The nebulouscharacterof the lumpenproletariat,and indeedits political danger, is made mostapparentin the way the categorydevelopsin the farcical story of Louis Bonaparte, whereit hasa specific function in Marx's accountof historical development. The lumpenproletariat

Marx's most detailed and the backing-up of history considerationof the lumpenproletariatemergesthrough his accounts of the 1848-52 revolutions in France (or more precisely the triumph of counter-revolution) in Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire o)f Louis Bonaparte. Indeed, in identifying the 27 times that Marx and Engels use the term 'lumpenproletafiat' and its direct cognates,Traugott (1980: 712) has shown that the bulk appearin this four year period. The yearsof reactionthat followed the wave of revolutions were not a good time for the emergingworkers movement,or for the predictive efficacy of Marx's historical method. MehIman (1977: 24-5) thus suggeststhat The EighteenthBrumaire reads as 1()1will refrainfrom explainingall of these terms, but one is worth noting. The lazzaroni were the lowest (and most numerous)class of Naples who lived in complex archaic fiefdoms without engaging in modern 'work' (cf. Hobsbawm(1959) for a more nuanced analysis). In the context of my general argument it is worth noting that though Nietzschecan present a good corrective to the love of work in Marxism, and at times even in Marx (with expressionslike this: "...the 'blessing of work' is the self-glorification of slaves. Incapacityfor otium [leisure]." (Nietzsche1968: §758; cf. also 1982: §173,206)), he is also critical of the lazzaroni,and (thoughI am jumpingahead of my argumenta little) for not dissimilar reasons to Marx; they are content in their identity (cf. Nietzsche1968: §911). 81

though"Marx must have lived the history of Francefrom 1848 to 1852 - the revolution careeningbackwards - as resemblingnothing so much as a latrine backing up..." In France,despite a relatively developedcapitalist social structure and the easeby which Louis-Philippe was deposedand the SecondRepublic established,Marx witnessed not the beginningsof proletarianpower, but the return of reaction under the leadershipof Louis Bonaparte. The EighteenthBrumaire is Marx's attemptto explain this reaction. Thus quite contrary to Engels' assertionthat the essayreflectsMarx's discovery of "the greatlaw of the motion of history" (prefaceto Marx 1978: 7), The EighteenthBrumaire readsasMarx's attemptto explain an historicaldevelopmentthat by his system is actually somewhatof an anomaly. Thus the opening pagesof this explanationconsider not the neatdevelopmentof classstruggle(aslaid out, for example,in the Manifesto, written just before the 1848 revolutions), but the nature of the relation between memory and forgettingin the passageof revolution in a fashion that resonatesmore with Nietzsche's accountof herd morality than the historical narrativesof orthodox Marxism. Marx writes that at the momentof revolution, rather than interrogate,borrow, criticise and ultimately overcome the inherited conditions and identities of the past in the process of a revolutionary transcendence,the people are insteadinclined to make a reactionaryreturn to the identitiesof the past. Hence history famously repeatsitself, as 'farce'; repetition, interprets 91-2) (1994: Deleuze the passage,falls short of accentuatingdifference." as Insteadof tragic metamorphosiswe seecomic involution: An entire people, which had imagined that by meansof a revolution it had imparted to itself an acceleratedpower of motion, suddenly finds itself set back into a defunct dates in doubt be the that to the old no possible, as relapse may epoch and, order long French, The the the the so again, old edicts... arise old chronology, old names, Napoleon in the they of memory were of engaged could not get rid as revolution, ... They hankered to return from the perils of revolution to the fleshpots of Egypt ... (Marx 1978: 12) Faced with this great historical anomaly, Marx's problem is how Bonaparte is in bourgeoisie the to or the proletariat proper. a state class-base constitute without a able

11 Here Marx's account of historical relation has resonance with Foucault's (1977) reading of Nietzsche's genealogy (as discussed in Chapter 3) where the "substitution" of "alternate identities" (160) from the historical store-room of costumes is merely a guise for the "comic" repetition of the identity form. The moment of the overcoming of identity, what Foucault describes as our'unrealisation', is described by Marx in the bourgeois revolutions as a borrowing from history that "exalts the new struggles" (1973: 148) and recovers the "spirit of revolution" against the repetition of the same (though despite "storm[ing] from success to success", they rapidly fall back on their limited content (150)). For the proletarian revolution, on the other hand, the content exceeds itself, exceeds it "words" or names. Marx hence writes that the social revolution "can only create its poetry from the future (149). But if this sounds like an undermining of a critical relation with history (in favour of an abstract 'future'), Marx insists that the formation is part of a tricky and complex repetition (with difference): "Proletarian revolutions ... constantly engage in selfcriticism, and in repeated interruptions of their own course. They return to what has apparently already been accomplished in order to begin the task again... " (150) Final resolution aside, the full account of this proletarian self-criticism has remarkable resonance with Kafka's (1972: 150) description of the particular intrigues of 'small peoples'. 82

Though he does say that Bonaparte also has a base in the peasant class, it is the lumpenproletariatwhich fulfils the explanatory role (and in any case, Marx presents considerablesimilarity between the conservativepeasantand the lumpenproletariat).12 The Bonapartist state is a great farcical ruse whereby the non-class of the lumpenproletariat,in the December10 Societyandthe Mobile Guard,seemto transfix the properworkings of history. They becomethe agent and the sign of the farcical return of the old identities. Thus, as I showed above, Marx presents Bonaparte's lumpen December10 Society as having set itself up as somethingthat it was not (a 'benevolent society' only in so far as it was a parasiteon society), and he provides a plethora of farcical identities, ruses, and anomaliesin a world turned upside down, where the bourgeoisiecried "Bourgeoissocietycan only be savednow by the headof the Society of 10 December! Only theft can still saveproperty; perjury, religion; bastardy, the family; disorder, order!" (1973: 245). As Parker (1993) has argued, Marx's reading of the period 1848-52is quite literally as a farcical pieceof theatrewhere correct class roles are underminedas the people act through their confused simulacral roles as "remplaqants" and "substitutes"(Marx 1973:244). Thus the descriptionof Bonaparteand his "society of disorder, prostitution and theft" (198), the "drunken soldiery, which he has brought with liquor and sausages"(124) continues: An old, cunning roui, he conceives of the historical life of nations and their state proceedings as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade in which the grand costumes, words and postures merely serve as a cover for the most petty trickery.... For his landing in Boulogne he put some London flunkeys into French uniforms to represent the army. In his Society of 10 December he assembled ten thousand rogues, who were supposed to represent the people in the way that Snug the joiner represented the lion.... the serious clown [Bonaparte] who no longer sees world history as a comedy but his comedy as world history.

The lumpenproletarian

(1973: 197-8)

financial

Marx continues to amass aristocracy characteristicsin the category of the lumpenproletariatin his discussion of the July Monarchy (1830-48) in Class Struggles in France, where this time the financial aristocracyarepresentedaslumpenproletarian: The July monarchy was nothing more than a joint-stock company for the exploitation of France's national wealth... Commerce, industry, agriculture, shipping interests industrial bourgeoisie in inevitably the the of permanent peril and at were a permanent disadvantage under this system.... the same prostitution, the same 12 "Bonaparte represents a class, and the most numerous class of French society at that, the smallholding [Przellen] peasants the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant; not the peasant that not ..... strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the small holding, but rather the peasant who wants to consolidate this holding ... those who, in stupefied seclusion within this old order, want to see

83

blatant swindling, the same mania for self-enrichment - not from production but by sleight-of-hand with other people's wealth - was to be found in all spheres of [disreputable bars and caf6s]. The same 4n society, from the Court to the Caf6 Borgne forth, broke and viscous appetites appetites which assertion of unhealthy unbridled were in permanentconflict with the bourgeois law itself, and which were to be found particularly in the upper reachesof society, appetites in which the wealth created by financial gamblesseeksits natural fulfilment, in which pleasure becomes crapuleux [debauched], in which money, filth and blood commingle. In the way it acquires is it financial the aristocracy nothing but the lumpenproletariat wealth and enjoys reborn at the pinnacle of bourgeois society. (1973a: 38-9) The lumpenproletariat is not, then, a category that only applies to the poor. If the December 10 Society was an historical inversion where the social dregs of society had find here the social elite performing as the top, to the their we way somehow swindled financial dregs, speculation replaces the proper class role of engagement where social leads industry, to crapuleux pleasures. and with productive Yet further complication of the category emerges in Marx tendencies the lumpenproletariat. The lumpen is radical writes of possible when in his Engels Though supports the shooting extremes not always counter-revolutionary.

Lumpenproletarian

spontaneity

Marx Engels' (cf. 17), beginning the the and sense of the thieves note of revolution at of is The lumpen the a as revolutionary group ambivalent. relative capacity of lumpenproletariat vacillate (in The Peasant War in Germany Engels suggeststhat each day of the revolution sees them change positions) and are prone to reaction, usually offering involved in find but bidder, highest themselves they the to can also their services into leaves lack them revolutionary up their swept easily stability of revolution, as fervour. 13 Thus even the lumpenproletarian 'swamp flower' of the Mobile Guard, in so far as it was "thoroughly tractable" was "capable of the greatest acts of heroism and the most exalted self-sacrifice" (as well as, of course, "the lowest forms of banditry and the

themselves and their small holdings saved and favoured by the ghost of the empire. " (Marx 1978: 125, 127) 13 Sergei Eisenstein provides a cinematic version of this thesis in his account of lumpenproletarian reaction in the'agitguignol' Strike (1924). Following the classic lumpen thesis (Bordwell (1993) talks of the film as a whole as an anatomy of a political process), the lumpenproletariat are drawn forth to help break the strike (ironically marked as 'work'), at the behest of a secret service agent and with the call from the lumpen king, "I need 5 unscrupulous men" (to which the reply naturally returns, "None of us have any scruples"). The scene emphasises extra-temporal debauched excess much like Marx's description in the Eighteenth Brumaire. The secret agent enters into a marginal space that is far from the mapped territory to film (factory, hanging in dead the an en route cat police scene office, avoiding a other street), of every encounter with the lumpen king where the comic effect, which pervades the whole encounter, is produced through a jazz soundtrack and the inversion of aristocratic trappings (before preening himself the 'king' spits in his dresser mirror, held by his midget servant, and he sleeps in a dilapidated car which doubles as a thrown, and so on). In a most bizarre scene we then meet a mass of assorted ragamuffins as they emerge from a field of sunken barrels. The stark contrast between the purity, coherence, and identity of the workers and the filthy proliferation of the lumpenproletariat is very clearly marked (cf. Bordwell (1993) for a reading of the deployment of animalistic tropes, machines, geometric shapes, and water to construct an identity/perversion dichotomy between the workers and their assorted class enemies). 84

foulest corruption") (Marx 1973a: 52-3). 14 Marx (1978) makes a similar case with regard to the secret society professional conspirators. 15 His argument is that their 'precarious' means of subsistence dependent on 'chance' in 'irregular lives', and their 'constant dangers' situate this group as part of la boUine with an inclination to spontaneity. First t:l Marx writes of their readiness to insurgency: insecurity, the more the conspirator hastensto seize the pleasures the the greater ... of the moment... The desperaterecklessnesswhich is exhibited in every insurrection in Paris is introduced precisely by these veteran professional conspirators, the hommesde coups de inain [Men of daring raids]. They are the ones who throw up and command the first barricades,who organise resistance,lead the looting of armsshops...In a word, they are the officers of the insurrection. (1978: 318)

But thoughinsurgent,Marx criticisesthe conspiratorsfor their spontaneity. As 'officers of the insurrection' (rather than the revolution) these conspiratorsmistake the adequate preparationof their conspiracyfor the revolution, and thus they attempt to launch a revolution on the spur of the moment, without the conditions for a ... revolution... They are like alchemists of the revolution... They leap at inventions miracles: incendiary bombs, destructive devices of magic effect, revolts which are expected to be all the more miraculous and astonishing in effect as their basis is less rational. (1978: 3 18) which are supposed to work revolutionary

It seems as if to social relations of the lumpenproletariat Mehlman (1977) was right. The content and contours of the lumpenproletariat appear to

The externality

is in indeterminate beyond This mass as a nebulous an category. all reason proliferate not, however, a simple emergence of undetermined difference without cause. There

14 This attribute of 'spontaneity' is a central basis of not only Bakunin's affirmation of the lumpen (as I show below), but also of its use as a revolutionary agent in the thought of a number of Marxist figures such as Mao Tse-Dung (cf. Bussard 1986: 20; Harris 1978: 18,32) and Fanon (1967). See Bussard (1986) for a fuller account of the place of the lumpen in Marxist thought more generally. 15 Marx's efforts to drive the secret societies out of the First International (as a Masonic social form far from the mass open movement that Marx saw in The Chartists and sought to develop in a 'proletarian' organisation (cf. Nicolaevsky, 1997)), owe much to his conflicts with the Bakuninists and the conspiratorial forms of revolutionary politics most clearly expressed by Nechayev (1989) in his Catechism of the Revolutionist. Nechayev describes the correct ethics of the covert nihilist revolutionary in full gory detail. To site one passage amongst many: "The revolutionary is a dedicated man. He has no interests of his own, no affairs, no feelings, no attachments, no belongings, not even a name. Everything in him is absorbed by a single exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion - the revolution.... Night and day he must have one thought, one aim - merciless destruction. " (4-5) Though the controversy as to the source of this essay seems to have cleared Bakunin from its authorship (cf. Avrich 1987), the conspiratorial and elitist thinking of Bakuninist anarchism whereby the revolution is declared as popular, but is to be secretly driven by a handful of conspirators, is put as strongly by Bakunin as Nechayev. For example, Bakunin (n.d.: 26-7) writes: 'We are bitter foes of all official power, even if it were ultrarevolutionary power. We are enemies of all publicly acknowledged dictatorship... Rejecting any power, by what power or rather by what force shall we direct the people's revolution? An invisible force - recognised by no one, imposed by no one - through which the collective dictatorship of our organisation will be all the mightier.. But imagine, in the midst of this general anarchy, a secret organisation which has scattered its members in small groups over the whole territory an organisation which acts everywhere according to a ... is This I what call the collective dictatorship of the secret organisation. " common plan... 85

defining characteristic that continues to recur throughout the accounts central one remains of the lumpenproletariat (as has been implicit above). The lumpenproletariat exists somehow outside, above, or below, social relations, being without social content. This is brought together in the assertion that the lumpenproletariat is an unproductive class. If the December 10 Society, the financial aristocracy, the bomb-throwers, and lazzaroni flows, is historical fact this to the that they to social closely related of exist outside seem live off national wealth without engaging in bourgeois industry or work (without for is Indeed Marx's 'surplus most vehement critique often saved value'). producing those who seem to revel in surviving outside of the wage relation. This point is made implicitly in Marx's critique of the debauched pleasures of the lumpenproletarian drunkard, but the point is also made explicitly. In an example highlighted by Draper (1972), Engels contemptuously describes a procession of the "unemployed" (his Democratic by Social H. M. Hyndman's (organised Mall Pall through parenthesis) Federation) as "mostly of the kind who do not wish to work - barrow-boys, idlers, police for (Engels had Hyndman lumpen taken the unemployed" proletariat spies and rogues... letter to Bebel 15.2.1886 in Marx and Engels 1995: 408; emphasis added). For Marx, then, the lumpenproletariat's debauched pleasures and unhealthy its fulfilment' 'natural instability in its of ethical and political practices, are a appetites, externality and unproductivity. It is the lack of clear relation to production that seems to have freed everything up. This is marked most clearly, in the negative, when Marx hard by Bonaparte be finally the theatrical that the of challenged will simulacra warns bubbles burst like "his when they experiments will soap reality of productive relations:

" (1978: 129) in the of production. with relations come contact Bakunin

on the lumpenproletariat

as radical

identity,

and Marx's

critique This characterisationof the lumpen does not occur in a political vacuum. The reasons Marx excludes the lumpenproletariatare as 'political' as they are 'conceptual' (that is, they relateto the politics of his time asmuch as to his conceptualsystem);and indeed, in the lumpenproletariatthe implication of thesetwo aspectsis very clear. If we think of Marx as immersedwithin a communistmilieu as much asin the Blue Books in the British library (despitehis apparentpreferencefor the latter)6),it is in the unfolding of the First 16 On this question of an apparent conflict between Marx's textual and political practice, Lyotard (1993) offers a rather damming critique of the libidinal economy of Marx's project. Lyotard perceives a conflict between Marx's obsession with the (textual) 'prosecution' of capital, and his continual deferral of the in libidinal function for this (which, Lyotard, the can elaboration of proletariat practical and conceptual his Russian from Marx letter to deferral). Lyotard (1993: 99) terms of a cites as evidence economy onlyin translator where, referring to the workers' movement, Marx writes: "there are circumstances where one is " busy less theoretical things than bound to research. oneself with study and much attractive morally Lyotard's point is not uninteresting (and Marx's more bourgeois pretensions are no doubt problematic), but it is not the only way to read Marx's inability to elaborate the contours of the proletariat. The argument of this chapter is a conceptual development of this point, but a minor reading of the sentiment displayed in Marx's letter would be equally attentive to the configuration of libidinal forces, but might see it pointing to a Marx that is a borderline for the workers movement, ambivalent about his community, and at times even standing outside it for a community to come. 86

International- the emergingsplit betweenanarchismand Marxism - that a political basis for the critique of the lumpen emerges.17 Though the conventional presentationof the split between Marx and Bakunin centres on a statism/anti-statismargument on the questionof the 'dictatorshipof the proletariat', what is important for my argumentis their differenceson the questionof the revolutionary agent.18 WhereasMarx, as I consider fully below, seesthe emergenceof the revolutionary proletariatas concomitantwith and internal to the developmentof capitalism (as in the Manifesto, for example, where not only global social labour developsas a new collective supra-individual force, but work itself is seento concentrateand discipline the class),Bakunin considersthis integration as destructive of more primary revolutionary forces. For Bakunin the revolutionary archetypeis found in a 'peasant' milieu (which is presentedas having long standing insurrectionarytraditions,aswell as a communistarchetypein its current social form - the peasantcommune19),and amongst educatedunemployed youth, assorted 'marginals' from all classes,and in the diclassi types, the brigands and robbers, the impoverished masses,those on the marginsof society who have escaped,been excludedfrom, or not yet subsumedin the discipline of emerging industrial work - in short, all who Marx lumpenproletariat in (cf. Pyziur 1968, esp. Ch. 5). the the to of category sought capture Thus, as the people capableof uniting "private peasantrevolts into one general allpeople'srevolt", Bakunin focuseson:

17The rationale behind the exclusion of Bakunin's Alliance of Social Democracy from the International is explained in some 120 pages (Marx and Engels 1988), but begins by stating that the danger of a broad banner workers movement, as the International's explicit concern, was always in letting in d6class6 (lumpen) elements. Draper (1972) makes this case that Marx's critique of the lumpenproletariat emerges through his conflict with the anarchists. Draper draws attention to the fact that Engels' most aggressive attack on the lumpenproletariat was in a later preface to The Peasant War in Germany which was written around the time of the split in the International and is hence suggestive of an implicit critique of the Bakuninist revolutionary agent. It is worth citing Engels' passage to convey the degree of hostility levelled at the lumpenproletariat: "The lumpenproletariat, this scum of the decaying elements of all classes, which establishes headquarters in all the big cities, is the worst of all possible allies. It is an absolutely venal, an absolutely brazen crew. If the French workers, in the course of the Revolution, inscribed on the houses: Mort aux voleurs! Death to thieves! and even shot down many, they did it not out of enthusiasm for property, but because they rightly considered it necessary to hold the bandit at arm's length. Every leader of the workers who utilises these gutter-proletarians as guards or supports, proves himself by this action alone a traitor to the movement. " (cited in Draper 1972: 2298-9) This said, it should be born in mind that the split between Bakunin and Marx only fully manifested in the late 1860 s, long after the main explication of the lumpenproletariat in The Eighteenth Brumaire. Indeed in 1864 Marx and Bakunin were close enough for Marx to write to Engels that "I must say that I liked him very much, and better than before. " (Marx and Engels 1981: 111) Bakunin was also the first translator of the Manifesto into Russian and was commissioned to translate yolume I of Capital (only pulling out in 1870 under Nechayev's influence). But this does not really alter the argument about the political causes for the emergence of the lumpen thesis, because in earlier explications the incitement to critique is Max Stirner, whose position on the lumpen is not wholly different to Bakunin's. 18The argument that Bakunin perceives in Marx the seeds of the statism of the Soviet Union is not uninteresting, but it can be made only by ignoring the centrality of Bakuninist notions of organisation and 'invisible dictatorship' (cf. note 15) to Leninist politics (cf. Bilissett and Home n.d. ). 19 Engels refers to this as "that old pan-Slav swindle of transforming ancient Slav common property into communism and portraying the Russian peasants as born communists" (Marx and Engels 1981: 44). For discussion of Marx's understanding of the possibilities of the commune see Camatte (1978). 87

free Cossacks,our innumerable saintly and not so saintly tramps (brodiagi), ... 20 'beguny' thieves, and brigands - this whole wide and of SeCtS, members pilgrims, immemorial from has protested against time world underground which numerous the state and statism... (Bakunin n.d.: 19)21

Such people, Bakunin argues in a fashion not so different from Marx's account of lumpen 'spontaneity"22 are fired with a transhistorical instinctual rage, a "Iwtive it is d.: 20), (n. "turbulent this revolutionary fervour aspart of and ocean" movement"of a their timelesspresence,not class composition within capitalism which elects them for their political role: Marx speaksdisdainfully, but quite unjustly of this Lumpenproletariat. For in them, in bourgeois in the strata of workers, are there crystallised them, not and and only the entire intelligence and power of the coming Social Revolution. A popular insurrection, by its very nature, is instinctive, chaotic, and destructive, and always entails great personal sacrifice and an enormous loss of public and private property. The massesare always ready to sacrifice themselves-, and this is what turns them into a brutal and savagehorde, capable of performing heroic and apparently impossible exploits, and since they possesslittle or nothing, they are not demoralised by the responsibilities of property ownership... they develop a passionfor destruction. This negative passion,it is true, is far from being sufficient to attain the heights of the revolutionary cause; but without it, revolution destruction, impossible. Revolution be a requires extensive and widespread would fecund and renovating destruction... (Bakunin 1973: 334)23

Marx's critique of the lumpenproletariatand anarchism is not, then, simply it 'bourgeois', (however times even racist and rather moralistic, polemical,and at polemic iS24).In the disputebetweenMarx and Bakunin we havetwo perspectiveson an identity. 20 An editors footnote explains: "The Beguny or Straniki were orthodox sects founded in 18th century Russia who believed that Antichrist ruled the world and that the Russian Tzars were his personification. They believed that all laws were unsupportable by true believers and were persecuted. " 21 Elsewhere Bakunin focuses in particular on the brigand, as "a hero, a protector, a people's avenger, the irreconcilable enemy of the state.... the revolutionary without phrases, without rhetoric culled from books, an indefatigable revolutionary, irreconcilable and irresistible in action, a popular and social revolutionary, not a political or class revolutionary... " He also suggests that "He who is not in sympathy with [brigandage] belongs to the enemy camp, among the supporters of the state... " (from The Setting of the ... Revolutionary Question, cited in Marx and Engels 1988: 520) 22 The Marxist critique of spontaneity and insurrection is usually a more or less explicit critique of anarchism. As one example, Engels dismisses the English Social Democratic Federation for attempting 'to conjure up overnight a militant movement which ... necessarily calls for years of work". In this they are (Marx " to the "childish and among anarchists. such as we are see only pranks otherwise wont employing Engels 1995: 408) 23 In The Principles of Revolution Bakunin writes that this destruction should reach the level of "complete amorphism"and in Publications of the 'People's Judgment' Society (no. 1) he writes of a "universal pandestruction" (cited in Marx and Engels 1988: 521,523; cf. also Pyziur 1968). 24 By not writing about the highly dubious moral sentiment that is pervasive in Marx's accounts of the lumpenproletariat I am in no sense trying to save Marx from critique, or suggest that his ethical dispositions are unrelated to his theoretical positions (a political interpretation of Marx's life would be very interesting). I am simply trying to extract a useful conceptual configuration. That said, the very real moral 88

Though Bakunin's categoryof the lumpenproletariatmay have a broader catchmentthan Marx's, both seemto largely agreeon the componentsof lumpenproletarian'identity' as that which is a volatile, almost extra-capitalistentity.25 Their differences reside on is identity is it is (Bakunin) this and a simple yes not a or no whether or revolutionary (Marx). But the point of division I want to emphasiselies not around the actualpeople, but around the questionof capitalistsocial relations. Bakunin affirms lumpen elements preciselybecausethey are marginal to capitalismand have not beeninculcatedwithin the 'bourgeoisstrataof workers', and for almost the samereason,Marx rejectsthem. Whilst Bakunin seeksto describea rebellious identity as the basis of his politics, Marx attempts to producean identity of disparateelementsto exclude them from his class-basedpolitics form. identitarian, basis the that they extra-social are an on Hereinlies the fundamentalsplit with anarchism. Marx's position, put into stark is International, in by the not an either/or presentation of two the conflict relief is intricately lumpenproletariat. Marx's identities politics or proletariat revolutionary but just to capitalism to mode of production amongst others, as one capitalism relatednot The that transformative proletariat and expansive social relations. system of radically asa is to emergeis, in a sense, wholly other. Bakunin, on the other hand, appeals to a Bakunin identity transhistorical. writes of almost pre-capitalist, or something as present instinctual rage, timelessradical groupings, a completelevelling of society in a 'pandestructive' 'amorphism', and simple revolutionary / counter-revolutionarychoices, that he into Thus, he does delve identities. immanent theory these places a to when are is 26 like freedom Anarchism humanist thus concepts and equality. premium on abstract Utopian Socialism, Marx as that which posits a against to the raised critique same subject decontextualised form, historically deploys idea and transcendent of a perfect social "eternaltruths" of "Human Nature" and "Man in General" rather than engagewith the

and racial problemswith his figure should be mentioned. It is in the accountof the correlateof the lumpen, the nationally and ethnically defined 'unhistorical peoples' (the Slavs for example) that Marx's and Engels' in for (as display Engels' their use most unsavoury example, methods aspects evident, especially of Hegel's expression'ethnic trash'). Ritter (1976) usefully argues that Engels' attitudes are a fall-out not so much of a nationalismand racism, but of the fanaticism of his proto-DarwinianEurocentric method (thoughof course, such Eurocentricevolutionismwas historically immanentto racist formations). Whilst it is probablymore productiveto critique Marx and Engels for their method than their personal prejudice, the two can not be wholly divorced. For example, Engels' (1943: 90-4) racist account of the Irish, in be the in itself, flawed to the to can of proletariat, seen contribute and reflect a reading contemptible formation of which, as Linebaugh (1991) has masterfully shown, the Irish contributed much in internationalismand practical innovation. All this said, though it is by no means an excuse, Marx and Engelsnever really match Bakunin in racist sentiment. 25 Bakunin seems to practice what Marx and Engels (1988: 520) refer to as a "law of anarchist assimilation",wherebya whole series of groups (from religious sects to student youth and brigands) are broughtunder the banner of a spontaneist 'anti-authoritarian'movement. Marx's critique is not just that this is often little more than a mere wilful dreaming, but that it is also a cynical deploymentof a populist rhetoric that disguises a tapestry of secret societies and 'invisible dictatorship', to use Bakunin's own expressionfor the secret guiding hand of his 'internationalbrotherhood'(cf. Marx and Engels 1988). 26 In RevolutionaryCatechismBakunin (1973:76) writes: "Replacingthe cult of God by respect and love of humanity,we proclaimhuman reason as the only criterion of truth; humanconscience as the basis of justice; individual and collective freedomas the only source of order in society," 89

expansive "fluid state" of material life in specific sociohistorical relations. (Marx and Engels 1973: 69,67, Marx 1976: 103)27

At a conceptualandpolitical level the naming of the lumpenproletariat,even as its characteristicsproliferate, and even as it is 'without trace', is Marx's attemptto exclude transcendentidentity from political practice. The repetitionof naming is not an attemptto but an assertionthat presentidentity, or extra-historicalidentity is C, z:1 the ungraspable, grasp not part of his politics.

I am now in a position

to consider

the proletariat.

If the

is a category of identity, the proletariat is a non-identity

which resides

in the complex, situated, and expansive relations of the capitalist socius.

To make this

lumpenproletariat

point I want to focus on two aspects of Marx's the proletariat, and the place of 'work'

notion of the proletariat: the 'absence' of

and manifold

relations.

I should say here that

these points neither encompass all that could be said on class in Marx, extracted as the 'truth'

nor are they

of Marx's class analysis (which can also be read in conventional

dialectical materialist terms - Marx's

work

is not unambiguous).

Rather they are

consideredto elaboratehow the proletariatcan be seenasa minor figure. The unnamed

proletariat

Balibar (1988,199428) presents a very useful explication of Marx's proletariat, and I for it basis the to my argument. Balibar begins by pointing to a central as want use paradox in Capital, namely that the agent of Marx's politics, the proletariat, that which links the analysis of exploitation to revolution, is almost completely absent. It is absent from the consideration of the labour process, the process of exploitation, and wages, instability, insecurity, in its terms and embodiment of an economically only of emerging instituted violence, rather than, say, its positive force. The proletariat appears almost his (1991) is led Negri This to the that the to elaborate same absence analysis. external Marx beyond Marx through the Grundrisse rather than Capital with its apparently 'closed' There is considerable force in Negri's argument of circulation. objectivist reading capital zl. ý 27 Debord (1983) presents one of the most concise and incisive Marxist critiques of utopian socialism and anarchism (albeit a critique that could be levelled at the Hegelian Marxism and'radical subjectivities' of the Situationist International itself (cf. Ansell Pearson 1997: 155-60; Blissett 1995; Debray 1995)). Having argued that Marx's 'science' is an understanding of forces and struggle rather than transcendent law (Debord 1983: §81), Debord writes that: "The utopian currents of socialism, although themselves historically grounded in the critique of the existing social organisation, can rightly be called utopian to the extent that they reject history - namely the real struggle taking place, as well as the passage of time beyond the immutable perfection of their picture of a happy society - but not because they reject science. On the contrary, the utopian thinkers are completely dominated by the scientific thought of earlier centuries. They sought the completion of this general rational system... As Sorel observed, it is on the model of astronomy that the utopians thought they would discover and demonstrate the laws of society. " (§83) Debord then continues to consider anarchism: 'The anarchists have an ideal to realise... It is the ideology of pure liberty which equalises everything and dismisses the very idea of historical evil.... Anarchism has merely to repeat and to replay the same simple, total conclusion in every single struggle, because the first conclusion was from the beginning identified with the entire outcome of the movement... [I]t leaves the historical terrain by assuming that the adequate forms for th[e] passage to practice have already been found and will never change. " (§92) 28 These two references are to different translations and versions of the same essay. The later version omits some useful explanatory references, including an acknowledgement of the importance of Tronti and operaismo and a short critique of Gorz's post-work/proletariat thesis. It does, however, have a slightly different conclusion, and at times is a clearer translation and so I reference both versions here. 90

that the Grundrisse,asagainstCapital, works on a structureof antagonismand difference (ratherthanclosedcategories)within which a revolutionary subjectof differenceemerges (and someof this is exploredin Chapters7 and 8), but here, rather than take the absence of the proletariatasindicative of a closedtext, I want to argue, following Balibar (who is as attentive as Negri to political and poststructuralist concerns against economistic readingsof Marx's categories, and also displaces Hegel with Spinoza in developing Marx's politics), that the absenceis centralto the radical possibility of Marx; it enablesthe proletariat to be seen within the framework of the minor (as a figure of potential and variation rather than identity). Balibar bases his explication of the possibility of the proletariat as 'political'29 (1994: Marx "new Althusser's thought" that of opens continent a on argument subject 149) vis-ý-vis not just liberal humanist categories of economics and politics, but also the is is he But this tradition not manifest as a neat part. opening of which radical political break, with the presentation of a new subject. Balibar argues that Marx's situated materialist method operates against presenting new positive identities within the terms of the milieu and epistenzehe works within. Balibar thus points to Marx's vacillations between oppositions of economics/politics, statism/anarchy, compulsion/freedom, hierarchy/equality not becauseMarx can not make up his mind, but because these are the is he his time, which the within political and conceptual argument of essence of is he 'full', 'cramped'), being (the with which and or perhaps space constrained is He his different thus position. sides off against own continually engaged, playing 'unable' to write an 'Anti-Lassalle' or an 'Anti-Bakunin' (however much more timely than Anti-DUhring these would have been), but rather he presents 'notes' on the Gotha Programme and various notes and critiques of Bakunin as interventions in a series of political arguments.30 As Balibar argues: In fact, what these still allusive analysesdemonstrateis that Marx's 'political' theory For his in ideological have time. the of configuration and action no proper space this configuration is itself a 'full' space,devoid of any gap in which a specifically Marxist discourse could have established itself alongside, or opposite, other discourses. This is why Marx finds himself reduced to playing these discourses off against one another. In the same vein, practically, all of his political 'art' consisted in building more and more massiveorganisations of the working-class movement, dilute different in to tendencies attempt an off against one another while playing their antagonismand add to their strengths,at least for a while. (1994: 135)

29 1use the quotation marks because Balibar rightly suggests that Marx's works break open bourgeois conceptionsof politics and economics as distinct categories. 30 1would suggestthat Marx's 'interventionist' engagementis not so much an expression of an 'inability' to write, for example, an 'Anti-Bakunin' (because there is much detailed critique of the various other positions),but is related to the nature of intensive, or minor political engagement(where, as I showed in Chapter4, int(iguestend to proliferatein 'schoolsand magazines'rather than in 'books'). 91

Nevertheless, something of Marx's proletariat must emerge from this 'full' space if Marx is to be seen as an innovator. Balibar makes two points in terms of Marx's explicit referencesin Capital. First he suggests that the dedication to Wolff, and Marx's citation of significant passages from earlier work draw a 'bridge' from the Communist League to the project of Capital that serve to embed the text in the communist movement (such that it is not an autonomous work). Second, Balibar draws attention to the addition of two references to the proletariat in the second 1872 edition: Marx's suggestion in the postface that the 1848 revolutions saw the irruption of the hidden political content of the proletariat into the terrain of 'scientific thought', and his discussion of autonomous development its law (around to the the relation of capital and class activity and working Combination Acts). Balibar's point is that in these additions Marx links the emerging Marxist perspective, political practice, and capitalist relations.31 Marx's inability to present a 'positive identity' is not, then, because he is stuck 262) because, (1970: Foucault's Derridean of or as presence, metaphysics within a is implicated in it, Marxism have completely a nineteenth century critique would because fish in breathe ("like to else"), a water unable anywhere paradigm productivist ... he is naming something that complicates and escapes these configurations, that is not an identity. 32 The proletariat can not be posited, because Marx's materialist method enables does but it 'disrupt' 'beyond', the space that that not not mean can no simple positing of a is disruption for Balibar Indeed the very this the act of and complication political. of essenceof the critical force of Marxism, as, rather than posit an identity within nineteenth interpretation, "perpetual it discourse, and a compels work of refutation, century political it 33 is is because It " (1994: 136). unnamed that the perhaps precisely reformulation. identities dichotomies force the the of nineteenth vis-ý-vis and of proletariat, radical here Balibar links From is this unnamed proletariat to the thought, maintained. century 31 The two passages are as follows. 'The Continental revolution of 1848 also had its reaction in England. Men who still claimed some scientific standing and aspired to be something more than mere sophists and sycophants of the ruling classes tried to harmonise the political economy of capital with claims, no longer to be ignored, of the proletariat. " (Marx 1976: 97-8) "The barbarous laws against combinations of workers collapsed in 1825 in the face of the threatening attitude of the proletariat. " (Marx 1976: 903) Balibar argues that the 1872 additions are linked to the contemporary developments and projects of the aftermath of the Paris Commune, the struggle with the English trade unionists and anarchists in the International, the return to the question of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat', and the work on the theory and organisation of the revolutionary party (1994: 129). 32 Caygill (1993) situates this problem of Marx's 'inability' to delineate a positive identity of the proletariat around a tension between critique and political decision; a tension that he argues is similarly evident in Nietzsche. Caygill proposes that their tension resides in the problem of invoking a subject of overcoming without succumbing to ressentiment (a problem which hence leads to the interminable nature of their projects). Whilst I agree with Caygill's analysis of the (productive) problem, by tying the proletariat to the extra-subjective manifolds of labour/life in capitalism, I argue below that it is possible to describe a process of proletarian composition which is not a subject (of ressentiment), whereas Caygill sees this as being human Marx humanist logic 'species "once the to abandoned a a early of return more problematic, (199). In my interpretation, following Deleuze and Guattari, 'species being' is not primarily a humanist category (though it clearly can be read this way), but is part of the flows of life that are as evident in Marx's late, as early works. 33 Whilst Balibar's thesis evidences a little of a rose-tinted image of the development of Marxist politics (within which autocriticism has not always been so prevalent), there would seem little doubt that Marxism has retained considerable prominence in political and intellectual life (even as a mechanism for the recuperation of radical energies, it needs to have some situated relevance to be an attractor). If the

92

(as indicated in 1872 the of capitalism relations' was additions). I will explain this social more generally.

Work and manifold

relations

If the proletariat is a political relations of capital. with labour-power

it is because it is a figure immanent to the social

'disruption'

In Marx's

work as a whole the proletariat exists in its interrelation

and the communist

movement.

inorganic Life (labour/Nature) and organic z:1

That is, it is part of the flow

as it is mobilised as supra-individual

of

force in

dissolution being the time the the existent of same process of communist capital, whilst at identity in "absolute becoming" beyond capitaliSM.34 So, Marx famously ties the 'work'. lumpen) 'abstract' (social) (in to the to productive contradistinction proletariat This is a 'work' that produces more than mere subsistence, or 'surplus value' as value in 35 Marx it, is, Spivak (1996: 109) "super-adequate"). (it the as puts excessof equivalent thus says some rather outrageous things about the educational benefits of child labour, 36 for highlight Marxism have legacy this, to as the or workerist of orthodox and we 37 into Union in Soviet slavery. the wage where communism a red was collapsed example But, and this point is often obscured (no doubt with the help of some of Marx's texts themselves), this necessary relation to work in the production of a revolutionary class is is from developing Marx itself. a situated relation to a politics work affirination of not an the sociohistorical composition of life (the social relations of the 'mode of production' of is his 'work' transcendental means of categories or practices: not any capitalism), describing the material community of capitalism. The point is that work hooks up identity history of Marxism had been the simple application of a set of coherent tenets across time and space it would have merged into the "banality of dominant ideas" (1994: 135) (at least at a quicker rate). 34 See in turn Marx (1975: 328) (1975: 328), Marx and Engels (1973: 36), and Marx (1973: 488), and the citation at the start of this chapter for the making of these points. 35 The point I am stressing here is that capitalism is an especially excessive and transformative social system compared to others, in that excess and dissipation are immanent to the transformation of identities (as Deleuze and Guattari argue, following Marx, it is the first to be premised on abstract flows and axioms rather than identity). The important question of the degree to which this super-adequate work is an exclusively human attribute (albeit a human that is in continual interrelation with a wider Nature), which seems to be Marx's point, or is something that is part of all animal life (cf. Ansell Pearson 1999: 2412), is beyond the scope of this chapter; though I can make a brief point. Inasmuch as all life is increasingly enmeshed in capitalist relations, as is particularly evident in Haraway's work, any anthropomorphism in Marx's category becomes increasingly redundant. That said, Marx's (1974: 341) first point of critique of the Gotha Programme can help us take his argument in this direction. He writes that it is capitalism that attributes supernatural powers only to labour rather than Nature as a whole (because primitive accumulation - the removal of the worker from the means of production - leaves labour as simultaneously the only means of survival for the mass of the world's population, and the 'variable' that must be induced to ever-greater productivity). For a communist account of the central place of animals (that is, a wider Nature) in primitive accumulation, in capitalism generally, and as an important site of capitalist innovation (from the emergence of work, through the Fordist production line, and into (1999). Beasts Burden see of xenotransplantation) 36The starkness of this point is evident not so much in the narrative of the Manifesto but in the Critique of the Ghotta Programme where Marx places work on a par with education as a necessary component in the production of the proletarian class - for children. He writes that a general prohibition of child labour "- if possible - would be a reactionary step ... the early combination of productive labour with education is one of the most powerful means for the transformation of present society. " (1974.358) 37 It is interesting to note that from 1937 the workers of 'socialist societies' were, in official Soviet definitions, no longer a 'proletariat' (Gould and Kolb 1964: 547). The difference between the empirical reality of Soviet workers' lives (cf. Haraszti 1977; Haynes and Semyonova 1979), and their conceptual

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1 to the manifold relations, super-adequate forces, and lines of flight of social labour. It is in work that identities are dissolved in complex global relations. Marx makes this clear, negatively, in the Eighteenth Brumaire when he describes the peasant class. The problem is that the peasant condition, however massive (they are 'the most numerous class'), is not one of multiple relations: The small peasantproprietors form an immense mass, the members of which live in tile same situation but do not enter into manifold relationshil?s with each other. Their mode of operation isolates them instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse... the smallholding, permits no division of labour in its cultivation, no application of science and therefore no diversity of development, variety of talent, 238,239) (1973: relationships. of social or wealth

The peasantclass Marx tells us, then, is composed of "the simple addition of isomorphousmagnitudes,much as potatoesin a sack form a sack of potatoes." (1973: 239) In contradistinction,the proletariatare composedof complex manifold relations, as they are hookedup to that systemwhere"[a]ll that is solid melts into air", and that covers "the whole surface of the world ... establishing connections everywhere" (Marx and Engels 1973: 37). By situating the relation to work at the level of complex social relations we can is In Marx's also a negation of work. work these manifold position understand why social relations are simultaneously of 'worker'

reterritorialised

and recoded into the identitarian

(with the attendant formal equalities and freedoms,

fetishisms,

form

alienations,

is that the to work also of surplus value, such extraction enable and exploitations) so as 38 in The the 'vampiric' cited as passage abolition of work, the mechanism of capitaliSM. (1975) in the introduction

Zerowork communist working

abolition

of property,

to the thesis showed,

is hence immanent

where as Dauvd puts it, "The proletariat

to the

is not the

" Martin (in Dauv6 the and the critique of work. class, rather class of

1997:

31). 39

definition (as a proletariat so much 'for itself' that it had self-dissolved in the end of pre-history) hardly needs pointing out. 38 Marx (1976: 342) famously describes the capital/labour relation thus: "Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. " Hence, in labour to the child passage about above, Marx (1976: 548) writes: "Factory work comparison stark exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost; at the same time, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity. " See Marx (1973: 123) for a clear statement that this is nothing peculiar to 'factory' work, and Midnight Notes (1981: 1) for a more recent version of this formula. 39 Inasmuch as the proletariat is its own destruction Dauvd links the refusal of work to the refusal of worker: "All theories (either bourgeois, fascist, stalinist, left-wing or 'gauchistes') which in any way glorify and praise the proletariat as it is and claim for it the positive role of defending values and regenerating society, are counter-revolutionary. Worship of the proletariat has become one of the most efficient and dangerous weapons of capital. " (in Dauvd and Martin 1997: 30) 94

The proletariat

and the minor

I am now in a position, and by way of summary, to contrast the lumpenproletariat and the proletariat, and show how the latter relates to the minor. I have argued that Marx refuses the lumpenproletariat at a concelvial level becauseit is a category of difference as present identity (however heterogeneous the identities are), not difference as the super-adequate process of life/labour and communism - the 'proletariat'. The proliferation of nan-iing of the lumpen without determining content is in contradistinction to the unnaming of the proletariat with a content that is the manifold potential of capitalist social relations. Hence, the lumpen is most interesting not because it is the moment of variation from class interest, the heterology of Marx, or that it indicates Marx's true polymorphous desire (though it may show some of these things), but because it signposts the problem of a politics at the level of molar identity as abstracted from expansive social relations, even as it looks like difference. In the process of the exclusion of the lumpenproletariat, Marx, in intricate relation to the workers movement, does not seek to compose a different proletarian identity, but a different tendency within the complexities of capital; a tendency that can not 'face' capital becauseit is entirely immanent to its relations. There can not be a proletarian subject as such because this would be to separate something from manifold 40 The proletariat is never present, or 'outside' these and expansive social relations. relations, but is rather always immanent to them. The proletariat is thus, as Balibar suggests, that 'nonsubject' that emerges inten-nittently (in dropping the 'subject of history' he breaks with latent evolutionism in Marx) from within the social relations and flows of capitalism, that is coniposed through these relations (but not guaranteed by them4l), and that actualises a complexity against them. The proletariat is hence not a description of a group of people (classically, the 'industrial working class'), but of a immanent "powers it is to the traverses that of the nether world" that the people; process is Engels 1973: (Marx has to and and unable control up, of capital conjured sorcerer 39). 42 It signifies a situated tendency that is composed within the social relations and t:1 identities of capital ('work'), and seeks to escape them, or make them escape ('absolute becoming') such that it is the process of its own abolition (Marx 1975a: 256). Thus, as for for identity, look look than the complexity proletarian minor, rather we should with both in its composition in capitalism, and in its forrns of politics against capitalism. 40 Balibar hence argues in another essay (1991) that there has been no contemporary movement from but rather class struggle to non-class struggle (in what is sometimes called 'new social movements'), and forms (which in the past might have been more frequently declared as class political expressions struggle) have always been an 'effect' of the political configuration of social relations (the important point is not how they self-declare, but whether they compose themselves as identity or complexity). 41 For Balibar, the great failure of Marxism was to think of the proletariat as the subject of history, and hence remain within the antinomies of dominant knowledge. This is manifested in two central problems of orthodox Marxism: first, the assumption that the Party represented the essential continuity of this subject in history, and the resultant illusion that Party unity equated with class unity; and second, the related positing of proletarian identity in terms of (true) 'consciousness', rather than in a more situated 'theory'. 42 Marx's definition of the proletariat is thus'social' ratherthan 'moral' or 'racial', and thus Benjamin (1983: 22) is right to emphasise the parody of the old definitions in Marx's presentation of the proletariat as a "race of peculiar commodity-owners". I would suggest that Deleuze and Guattari's (1994: 109) comment

95

Without going into detail (for the argument is made fully in Chapter 7), the core of Marx's understanding of the composition of life/labour in capitalism is taken up by AntiOedil)tts virtually whole. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari's (1983) presentation of class in capitalism, as something that is radically decoding and deterritorialising in its essence, is not of two classes, but of one capitalist class within which all are formed (253). 43 Once capitalism as the universal decoding and deterritorialising socius is constituted, the proletariat could not compose as an identity, but is rather that which attaches itself to the social forces of deterritorialisation, and pushes them further. Thus Deleuze and Guattari argue that the question, as I showed in Balibar, should not be between two identities, but between that which integrates within the identities immanent to the manifold social relations of capitalism, and that which 'escapes' it - with the proviso that (as I showed in the last chapter) escape is a radically anti-identitarian process that is not an escape from the social, but makes the social escape (A(E: 341). As we saw at the start of this chapter, the 'proletariat' is the 'universal consciousness' of this process (ATP: 472). 44 The proletariat, then, is a minor figure, an 'unnamable'. 45 It operates in Marx's work something like what Deleuze (1998) calls an "empty square". It is a never filled-in meaning or subject that haunts the manifold relations of the socius. But it is also the process of the deterritorialisation of these social relations. The question for Balibar and Deleuze and Guattari now becomes one of the composition of this proletarian unnarnable if it is not a process of identity, but rather of 'praxis' (A(E: 255). And this is where minor composition emerges. The abstract techniques of this composition were the subject of the last chapter, and can now be explored in empirical fashion in the rest of the thesis around what I am arguing is the nexus of the minor/proletarian condition, the refusal of work/er. But first there is one more use for the lumpenproletariat.

about the 'minor race' cited at the start of this thesis should be read in similar terms (though the context for their use of 'race' is a critique of Heidegger's relation to Nazi formations of race and nation). 43 Though this argument is made in Chapter 7,1 will briefly present this important point here. Against any kind of personification of capital, following Marx, Anti-Oedipus suggests that the abstract machine of capital is itself a kind of agent. (This is an interpretation that is fully in accord with Deleuze and Guattari's analysis at the level of extra- and supra-individuality - abstract machines, assemblages, and singularities. ) Once 'production for production's sake' takes off, the bourgeoisie, as much as the proletariat, become 'slaves of the machine': "... more utterly enslaved than the lowest of slaves, he is the first servant of the ravenous machine 'I too am a slave' - these are the new words spoken by the ... master. 'Only as personified capital is the capitalist respectable. As such, he shares with the miser the passion for wealth as wealth. But that which in the miser is a mere idiosyncrasy, is, in the capitalist, the effect of the social mechanism, of which he is but one of the wheels. ' [Capital" (254) In the same way 'the worker' is only a function of territorialised labour capacity (263). 44 --the theoretical opposition is not between two classes it is between, on the one hand, the decoded ... flows that enter into a class axiomatic on the full body of capital, and on the other hand, the decoded flows The opposition is between the class and those who are outside that free themselves from this axiomatic ... the class. " (ACE.255) As the translator notes, the French is les hors-classe which has affinity with horscaste (outcast) and hors-la-loi (outlaw), though it should be clear by now that this 'outside' is immanent to the system of social relations. Incidentally, it is at a similar point in A Thousand Plateaus that Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 472) mention the Italian 'refusal of work' as an example of minor processes. 45 1have used Beckett's (1979) term 'unnamable' because it fits well with the notion of the proletariat as an unnamed and immanent potential. Essentially though, following Deleuze and Guattari's (1983: 20-1) use of the term, the unnamable is another way of saying the minor. 96

The empirical

lumpen/proletariat

I have shown the conceptualform of the proletariat as a site of minor difference in it is lumpen. However, the to neverthelessthe case that Marx's contradistinction forms fornis the work, and and styles of proletarian of actual content and of accounts best, limited (and are at at worst, often moralistic and Eurocentric). If are, rather practice the proletariatin the abstractform is an unnameableor minor potential, in its actuality, through the teleologiesof Marxism, the fetish of the Party, and not least, the orthodox Marxist and social democraticaffirmation of 'work', it has neverthelesscome to be somewhat 'filled in' or molarised. The more empirical relationship between the lumpenproletariatand proletariathighlights a possible way out. In this I am taking up Guattari's (1995a: 42) suggestionthat the empirical question of the lumpenproletariat becomesan "interzone", or what Foucaultwould call a site of 'problematisation'.46 Despitethe various accountsand denunciationsof the lumpen, Marx is finally between the people that populate the category of the to split a clear unable make lumpenproletariatand the proletariatproper, as indeed is highlighted by the composite lumpenproletariatitself. This should be no surprise, given Balibar's point about Marx's interventionistmodeof engagementandrefusal to posit a 'subject'. But thereis an aspect A Marx. helps little differently here to Marx's think the that us proletariat a of problem few examplesfrom Marx's and Engels' work show the difficulty of making a clear lumpen/proletariansplit. In keeping with the way Marx transferspre-Marxist definitions free into his lumpen (so dregs to the the category up the new of as as proletariat social of In lumpen he this to the that the class proletariat. was a precursor suggests meaning) sensewe can see the lumpen clearly as part of the 'old society'. Marx makes this developmentcleartowardsthe end of Capital when he writes of the transformationof the forcibly folk "Thus into the expropriated the were agricultural modem worker: peasant from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded and tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline in The is for " (1976: 899). The the also made system wage-labour. of point necessary GennanIdeology (Marx and Engels 1976: 202) in the critique of Stimer: "ragalnuffins decline in have the of after every and whose existence existed epoch on a massscale who theMiddle Ages precededthe massformation of the ordinary proletariat..." Yet, despite this historical narrative, Marx and Engels, as we have seen, seem mostly to use the category of the lumpenproletariatin describing particularly modern situations. The motley crew of tinkers, pimps, and pick-pockets describedin the EighteenthBrumaire War in be in The Peasant Indeed to a particularly urban phenomenon. would appear Gennany Engels reverses the narrative by suggesting that amongst the plebeian 46 This is one of the very few times Deleuze or Guattarl mention the lumpenproletariat. (such as the aristocratic includes other social groups alongside the lumpenproletariat interzones of the proletariat, the non-guaranteed aristocracy elite) as problematising but inasmuch dichotomy, has a particular as the lumpenproletariat conceptual figure, not a descriptive of the proletariat (as a revolutionary term for understanding groups), it has a level of importance that is not drawn out by Guattari.

Here Guattari bourgeoisie, the of a neat class role in Marx's empirical social

97

lumpenproletariat, in "numerous the the who existed of even precursors were opposition lowest stages of urban development." (Marx and Engels 1978: 407; emphasis added). Further, making a direct relation between the modern industrial city and the lumpen, Engels explains lumpen involvement in the peasant war by saying that "a great many, had in living the towns, those a substantial share of sound peasant nature and still namely had not as yet been possessed by the venality and depravity of the present 'civilised' lumpenproletariat. " (1978: 408) If the historical placement is not clear-cut, neither is Marx and Engels' lumpen. Marx between the the the and proletariat relation contemporary of presentation distinct from forms in the lumpenproletariat "the towns, quite a mass that all writes ... industrial proletariat." (1973a: 52) And in Capital (1976: 797) he distinguishes the lumpenproletariat from even the lowest sediment of the 'relative surplus population' (the latter still having a productive role to play). But though the conceptual distinction between the two lies on an assertion of the 'unproductive' relations of the lumpen, in Struggles Class in Thus distinction. find is Marx to such a unable empirical observation in France, immediately before and after telling us of the distinction between the two, he (the Guard Mobile the lumpenproletariat the proletariat: are part of writes that the formed "to flower') the 'swamp lumpen proletariat of are section set one archetypal 24,000 by Paris Thus of an army the was confronted proletariat against the other.... in Then 52,53) from its " (1973a: drawn a foolhardy own midst. men, youthful, strong, letter to Engels in 1882 Marx even uses the term to describe a group of Cannes service belong the de doniestiques, to d'hotels, ("the who etc., cafý, and garýons workers industrial 1992: 272)) Engels " (Marx though an not Lunipenproletariat. who, and institutions. in 'working' modern proletariat, are clearly First, do from politics. Two points emerge this, to with productive relations, and is it lumpen description historical to the if at the level of pop up everywhere, seem (and 'unproductive' people Marx because could not separate off an empirical group of delineate a clear constituency of proletariat or lumpen) becauseeven in his time productive limit than themselves to the work-activities of to traverse the tended social, rather relations formation help historical the Such the narrative of alter an awarenesscan a single group. the factory from English and the production centrality of of a modem proletariat away Linebaugh, in in different is the of work evident ways white male working class, as Rediker, and Gilroy, where hybrid and transatlantic cultural and political forms are seen forwards if 47 And development immanent be the to we project of global capitaliSM. to

47Though Linebaugh (1991), Linebaugh and Rediker (1990), and Rediker (1987) do not discuss the the of the lumpenproletariat, they composition political and the emergence resituate problematic of lumpen, the to Engels Marx to such those close see as ever are wont of who and proletariat around many description the Rediker's in Linebaugh (as is of Irish, the and and slaves, sailors most evident escaped as By placing the working class grogshops, tippling houses, and dancing cellars of the Atlantic ports). transatlantic relations and flows of people, ideas and practices at the centre of analysis, Linebaugh and Rediker show how a complex, vibrant, multi-racial, transatlantic working class existed a good hundred years before Marx and Engels were writing in the Manifesto of the rather territorially and culturally fixed form. This methodological factory-based and political emphasis on transatlantic complex formations -

98

from Marx, we do not have to go as far as tric Alliez (1980: 119) who wrote in the seventies, no doubt polemically, that "[t]he factory becomes a sort of social welfare for unproductive workers", to suggest that we can no longer demarcate unitary spheres of productive and unproductive work, or of production, reproduction, consumption. All would seem to be included in ever-more subtle and sophisticated networks of value production (which, as I consider in Chapter 7, are by no means tied to conventional If this is so, one would need to consider the 'empirical' of understanding work). 4-) lumpenproletariat, the organ grinders, pen pushers, and escaped galley slaves, these people with picaresque, unstable, and complex modes of life, as part of the manifolds of capitalist production. Thus, and this is my second point, one must look at the practices of the people Marx dismissed as 'lumpenproletariat' as critically as at those of the more conventional 'working class'. The differences and variations of life for the people named by Marx as lumpenproletariat might throw up alternate forms of empirical proletarian practice, which remains so unfleshed out in Marx, and so filled in by orthodox Marxism. In this development of the proletariat we might want to orient our perceptual sensibilities away from the certainties, unities, and stabilities of the orthodox Marxian 'working class', and toward the great flux, permeability, instability, and virtuosity of modem life found by Benjamin and Lacis (in Benjamin 1986) amongst the poor of Naples. This is the point at which the thesis moves to more empirical considerations in the following chapters.

Conclusion I have argued that, far from a simple set of class subjects, Marx's lumpenproletariat and proletariat are complex figures. My elaboration of these figures is a direct challenge to orthodox Marxist understandings of the proletariat as universal class coming to selfis lumpenproletariat is It the that the a of also a problematisation notion consciousness. The it is difference (and, indeed, for 'criminal that the classes'). a neat category class of chapter argued that the lumpenproletariat and the proletariat emerge integrally in Marx's work. I showed the various ways that Marx used the category of the lumpenproletariat in his conceptual and political production and engagement. In each situation it appears to be being difference, its degrees decrepit of pleasures with varying a category of practices and contrasted, if sometimes only implicitly, to a rather pure set of correct class roles and farcical This is in description Bonaparte the the relations. most and social clear of against interpretationsbased on racial, cultural, and national essentiaiisms - is also developed by Gilroy (1993), though here the political formation, what he calls the 'black Atlantic', is followed from the experienceof slavery ("the concentrated intensity of the slave experience is somethingthat marked out blacks as the first truly modem people..." (221)) to contemporarysocial and cultural forms. Gilroy does not use the term 'proletariat'to describe this condition,at least in part becauseof its orthodox baggage of an affirmationof work (and which any thought about slavery could have no time for), and the deadening weight of orthodoxclass theory which tends to perceivenew movementsand minority politics and cultural creations as marginal and deviant (cf. 1993: 39-40; 1987: 199-203). Nevertheless the hybrid countercultural' form of the black Atlantic is a political figure specifically concerned with what I have describedin this chapter as the milieu of proletarian politics in that it is composed in the complexities of

99

'backing-up' of history, where revolutionary forces seem to have been tricked into a rý theatrical decrepit excess. Yet, when I moved to consider the proletariat, I showed that Marx was not simply replicating bourgeois morality (in a distaste directed against a new 'dangerous tý class'), or simply dismissingZýl a set of practices and lifestyles - though, no

doubt, this is evident. Rather, as becomesclear in the dispute with Bakunin, the lumpenproletariatis a category of identity; a category for those who would compose 'outside' of the manifold social relations of capitalism. Hence the lumpenproletariatis affirmed by Bakunin as a group that hasnot yet been subsumedin capitalistrelations and the 'bourgeoisstrataof workers'. I then moved to consider the proletariat, and showed how it is ratherabsentfrom Capital. The point was madethat this absenceis part of the constructionof a political categorythat is immanentto manifold relations, and hencecan not be seenas an identity, a simple presence,or even an empirical group of people. I showedhow Marx ties the proletariatto work; not becausework is to affirrned in itself, but becauseit is the mechanismof global interrelationand production of surplus value. We were thus able to understandMarx's apparentlycontradictory argumentsabout the necessityof work, and its alienating, exploitative, and oppressivenature, such that it neededto be 'abolished'. This is an ambiguity that orthodox Marxism resolved,no doubt with a little help from Marx, by affirri-iing work itself. I showed, however, that Marx's thesis can be taken in a different direction such that the proletariat is a class of work (which will later be seento include a wealth of social practices),and of its refusal. The identities the of work, as refusal of of capitalist relations, was argued to be the refusal core of the proletarianproject. The proletariatis thus a minor figure, an unnamable. It has no subjective form, but is rather a process of continual engagementwith, and problematisationof the regimes,relations, identities, and lines of flight of the capitalist socius. In Chapters4 and 5 the argumenthas been at a conceptuallevel, showing the This this. the not of milieu and niode,of political engagement, any concretemanifestation may appearodd, particularly in discussion of the proletariat. However, insofar as the proletariat and the minor are situated political figures rather than sets of subjects or groups, they can not be used to posit any timelessor transcendentpractices(this would be to close down potential into identity). Instead, they necessitatesituatedelaboration. The thesis now moves to considerparticular minor proletarianformations, starting with the Industrial Workers of the World.

global capitalist relations, whilst simultaneously creating cultural and political forms against these relationsin mutationalrather than identitarianprocesses. 100

Chapter

6

The Wobblies:

Abstract

Labour,

Minorities,

and Industrial

Sabotacie Shall we still be slaves and work for wages? It is outrageous - has been for ages... (from the IWW song 'Workingmen, Unite! ', in RV: 13) The wobbly movement has never been more than a radical fungus on the labour fit in Those to a normal rational movement. (Samuel could not who movement. Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labour, cited in The Wobblies 1979)

To an assembly of nearly 200 assorted unionists, revolutionaries, socialists and anarchists from thirty-four state, district, and national organisations, William D. Haywood opened the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Chicago, June 27 1905, with the words "Fellow Workers. This is the Continental Congress of the Working Class." (Proceedings of the First Convention of the I. W. W., cited in RV: 1) The Preamble to the Constitution, reiterated in every lWW publication, elaborates the contours of this 'working class' a little further: The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working have few, the all the good things of the employing class, up who make people and life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organise as a class, take possession of the earth and the machinery

of

production, and abolish the wage system. We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever-growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.

These conditions can be changed and the interests of the working class in its by formed in that any all members an organisation such a way upheld only one industry, or in all industries if necessary,cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

101

Instead of the conservative motto, 'A fair day's wages for a fair day's work', we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, 'Abolition of the wage system'. It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organised, not only for the everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organising industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old. (IWW 1972: 5-6)1 It would be difficult to produce a more concise definition of a constituency. This is the 'working class' as universal subject with identity and trajectory much like that found in There is no unnarnable the more naive sections of Marx and Engels' Manifesto. antagonistic multiplicity working its anti-teleological escape from the axioms of capital here - it is enough to make poststructuralist theorists of the political blanch. Such identity is not, however, as simple as it appears. For a start, the founding One member of the, convention was attended by many an unconventional 'worker'. it "the American Federation (AFL) described Labour as of albeit politically opposed, freaks that ever met in a convention. " (cited in Conlin 1969: of conglomeration greatest g t:1 41) But leaving aside the specific composition for the moment, in a number of ways the IWW's unified 'working class' is not a molar subject, but an abstract plane for the emergenceof minor relations. That is, the apparent identity of class becomes a plane of for Haywood's identity, If the condition and minor composition. composition against announcementof a global working class movement appropriate to the technical precision is by dated industrial exploitation and sanctioned conference, and manufacture of modern another founding image of the IWW conveys a sense of the more variable nature of the by known The IWW others and and affectionately are more commonly movement. is for There base legitimate Wobblies'. 'the this name, only a themselves no as amongst myth that it emerged from a strike in Vancouver where a Chinese man who had been feeding the strikers pronounced 'IWW', as 'I Wobble Wobble'. Or perhaps, though less usually proposed, it came from the lumberjacks 'wobble' saw (Murphy in Bird et al. 1987: 50). The name either comes from an experience peculiar to the IWW of North American political movements, 4racial' interrelation, or from a technical device used by I This is the full text of the 1908 Preamble that is still used today. It includes some important amendments to the 1905 version following the split with Daniel De Leon over his advocacy of 'political' (electoral) struggle. In the 1905 version the second paragraph reads: "Between these two classes a struggle must go on until all the toilers come together on the political, as well as on the industrial field, and take and hold that which they produce by their labour, through an economic organisation of the working class without affiliation with any political party." (in RV. 12). However minor the 1908 change appears, it evidences the outcome of an important and heated conflict in the IWW's early history. In some ways, as I am arguing here, it reduces the IWW's principles to an even simpler form. Gone are references not only to 'political' organisation, but also to 'economic' organisation. Instead the single word, 'class' is used. The 1908 version also appeals to an at once more generalised, and more specific appropriation of 'the earth and the machinery of production' and the 'abolition of the wage system' rather than the appropriation of the 'products of labour', itself a much less avowedly revolutionary goal (more akin to workers management of production than the overthrow of work). The last two paragraphs elaborating a more Marxian teleology of the destruction of capitalism were added in 1906 and 1908. 102

itinerant workers. Either way, 'Wobbly' is a name with uncertain origins, and a relativelycomplexconfigurationnot rootedin any single identity. The chapteris in five main sections. First, I consider the plane of work at this particularjuncture of industrial, and emergingTaylorist capitalistproduction. Second, I look at the seriesof cramped 'reductions' and complicationsof identity enactedby the IWW (vis-A-visthe dominantmolar forms of worker, minority, immigrant, the American citizen, the People). This movesinto considerationof the relation betweenthe 'rebel' and 'solidarity' as an anomalous/packrelation. Third, I discuss the generalmilieu of minor cultural composition, and fourth and fifth I draw out some of the specific rninoritarian aspectsof the hobo, and the practiceof sabotage. In doing this I am drawing on the structureof Marx's definition of the proletariat(as explored in the last chapter)that was into how develops 'manifold 'work' this a relations', and showing situatedaround and Marxian forms deterritorialise that notions of class constituencyand orthodox seriesof practice, following the framework of the minor (developed in Chapter 4). These processesincorporateattributesandpeoplesthat Marx dismissedas 'lumpenproletarian'degrees of refusal of work, 2 and 'marginal' groups and practices that would form. diclassi 'backward' be or conventionally seenas - within a proletarian I should saytwo things about the methodologicalapproachof the chapter. First, this is an 'interpretation' of the IWW. I am consideringthe IWW in terms of its minor is 3, in Chapter I 'representing' this the a completemovement;as said processes,not driving force of Deleuzianempiricism. But to approachan empiricist reading it is not in to the minor a particular event. Such exploration must also enoughsimply explore The two political questions problems. contemporary and with resonance encourage for IWW in (the thesis chosen generally this are and autonomia) movementsexplored what they may contribute to a contemporaryminor/ity politics and problematisationof figure is IWW In but the of they a minor also raises1mcificquestions. many ways work, 'mass first formation Italians different the the worker' time, the called of what political a (seeChapter7), or what we could as shorthandcall the Taylorist worker, rather than our its As (the 'post-fordism'). 'socialised resonancewith our worker' of worker such, own era can not be based on a simple similarity. That said, a number of elementsand problematisationspursued by the IWW remain pertinent to our time. Even as they 'formal birth Marx's (following 'skilled the the the of of at worker worker' emerge mass subsumption13),the IWW was a movementof highly flexible and mobile workers, and 2 The question of how much the wobblies developed a full 'refusal of work' (since they talk of 'workers The is I the problem concerned with. after not one am particularly revolution) of production management' is (as in the twentieth-century theme 'self movement) communist a prominent of parts of -management' discussed in the next chapter, but in considering the wobblies, it is enough for my methodological emphasis on the refusal of work/er as a tendency that they composed in and against the structure and form of work and identity of worker, and sought the'abolition of the wage system'. 3 The 'formal subsumption of labour in capital' is explored along with these other terms in Chapters 7 and 8, but essentially it is Marx's (1976: 948-1084) means of describing the configuration of early capitalism where capital appropriates labour as it finds it (such that individual craft skill retains a certain autonomy), before increasingly subsuming labour in the capitalist social machine, and so removing its autonomy ('real subsumption'). 103

their structuraland political composition is one of minorities, and indeed non-citizens. This composition has resonance with contemporary insecure flex-employment and increasingawarenessof a global ZID and flowing productive community of minorities (rather than, say, national unities), with differentially moulded juridical contours (cf. Appadurai 1996; Agamben 1996). Alliez (1980) thus suggests that the milieu of IWW activity, the Z, mobile worker, has made a kind of return in contemporary diffuse work (cf. Chapter 7), and Hardt and Negri (2000) also site the IWW as suggestive of organisational forms appropriate for the deterritorialised forces and apparatus of 'Empire' sovereignty. That said, it is beyond the scope of this chapter to 'make the links' explicitly, and hence whilst the chapter suggestsresonancethrough its focus, except for an extension of the question of 'sabotage' it is an exploration of one movement. Second, if looking for minor processes that resonate with contemporary questions, it is nevertheless important (indeed immanent to the concept of the minor) to let the object-as-multiplicity 'speak'. There is nothing less empiricist than a theory which Thus the reaches into social events to bolster its vreconceived interpretations. methodology of the minor developed in Chapter 3 is not overlaid on the IWW as a set of methodological rules which will force it to comply. Rather, the general framework of minor processes(cramped peoples, connection to the social, life/practice immanence, little inventions and small intrigues) are used to ask of the lWW 'what it can do'. The point is to see how the IWW operates or functions as a kind of machine for generating minor effects. What is important, then, is not whether this or that concept or practice sounds Gminor' or not, but how the machine as a whole operates. Thus certain aspects of the lWW may seem, or indeed are, rather un-Deleuzian (particularly a sometimes naive conception of scientific progress), but the minor will or will not be found in the overall consistency within which these aspects are functional. This said, one of the remarkable aspects of this investigation is how fitting the minor is as a means of interpreting the IWW, and this despite the general concerns of the milieu of modem radical politics, with its historical peoples, linear narratives and so on.

Abstract

labour

and the working

class

Prod uction- based inclusivity When the IWW declared that it was an organisation of the 'working class', it meant this in the most simple or pure, and dualistic of senses. The employing class and the working class composed two communities on either side of a cleavage derived from 'the essential point' (St. John 1988: 43) of production relations. This was the IWWs 'Declaration of Independence' (Smith, in RV. 113-20), as is evident in the Preattible. Whereas craft unionism had been composed of numerous distinct groupings and craft-subdi visions, representing an 'aristocracy' of skilled labour (against, not least, women, black descendants of slaves, and immigrants), the IWW sought to bring all workers into 'One Big Union' appropriate to modem machine-intensive work where, following a classic Marxist position, old craft distinctions were being subsumed 104

into a mass proletariat: "The worker, wholly separated from the land and the tools, with his skill of craftsmanship rendered useless,is sunk in the uniform mass of wage slaves." (IWW 1988: 7) Such a configuration of class is more than evident in the opening to the 1905 Manifesto: Social relations and groupings only reflect mechanical and industrial conditions. The greatfacts of presentindustry are the displacementof human skill by machines and the increaseof capitalist power through concentration in the possessionof the tools with which wealth is produced and distributed. Becauseof these facts trade divisions among labourers and competition among capitalists are alike disappearing. Class divisions grow ever more fixed and class antagonismsmore sharp. (IWW 1988: 7) This understanding of class makes the IWW a distinctly modem workers organisation. The political constituency of the working class is composed from a form of work that, in Marx's terminology, is becoming truly 'abstract', where the particularity of work as a distinct practice assembled around the rhythm of the labourer, has been subsumed in capital and the globalised interrelation and rhythm of the machine.4 The craft unions were thus seen by the IWW as reinforcing an old and redundant model of politics based on for itself, indeed for 'work' for the which particular subdivisions of work, and respect As a redundant form, craft unions were also IWW was simply 'wage slavery'. reactionary since they were unable to fight capital on its modem terrain. Indeed the craft identities, 'skills', the subdivisions and particular were seen as reinforcing unions institutions of work necessary,for the effective exploitation of abstract labour and as such in 1907, Union Bulletin (Industrial instrument "an themselves cited of capitalistif' were Ramirez 1978: 200; cf. also Oscar Ameringer's 'Union Scabs', in RV: 14-15). 5 In this 50). RV: 'class' (in from 'caste' Haywood it, IWW to the was a shift put situation, as The membership criteria of the One Big Union was: "None but actual wage workers shall be members... No one shall be excluded from membership because of creed, colour, or but inclusivity in itself 1972: 9) This " (IWW the groundbreaking, race and sex was sex. IWW also included itinerant labour (as we shall see, this group had considerable significance) and the unwaged (it was the first American labour union to consider

4 In Capital Marx was already looking to North American as starting to manifest the developed form of capitalism, or 'real subsumption', where labour becomes a fluid and abstract force distinct from any concrete identity: "Nowhere does the fluidity of capital, the versatility of labour and the indifference of the States North America... in United his than the the to of appear more vividly of work content worker nowhere are people so indifferent to the type of work they do as in the United States, nowhere are people so aware that their labour always produces the same product, money, and nowhere do they pass through the most divergent kinds of work with the same nonchalance. " (1976: 1014) 5 Ramirez (1978: 196) cites some contemporary employers' fears that a gap in representation by the craft AFL could be filled by the IWW. The advocate of collective bargaining, Ralph Easley, wrote that "if the (steel-workers] are not organised by the American Federation of Labour, an organisation standing for American Institutions, they will sooner or later be organised by the Industrial Workers of the World. " Gertrude Beeks similarly argued that "the AF of L is the greatest fighting force in the country against Socialism and the IWW's. " 105

housework as work, and to organise chambermaids and prostitutes and it is still unusual in this (Bird et al. 1987: 55-6)). Later constitutions thus continue: "No unemployed or retired worker, no working class student, apprentice, or housewife, shall be excluded from membership on the grounds that he or she is not currently receiving wages." JWW 1972: 9). 6

So, the criteria for working class unity is not a liberal humanist notion of inclusivity (which would make it a transcendentformation), but a practical necessity arising out of their notion of abstractlabour and understandingof the meansto refuse it (which makesit a situated'proletarian' formation). Bologna (1972), Davis (1975), and Ramirez(1978) have all stressedthis point. Davis argues that the IWW developedin direct relation to the emerging Taylorist configuration of labour with its semi- and unskilled mobile labour force. RamirezandBolognaboth arguethat this is the emergence of a 'mass worker', a "mass-productionand mass-serviceworker who generally lacked skills, was highly mobile, was largely of immigrant origin, and was increasingly female." (Ramirez 1978: 195). "[Ilt was the type of labour force on which the entrepreneurial dynamism of the mass-productionsectors largely rested, and thus it was an essential elementto the innovativeprocessesmarking the capitalist developmentof those years." (195) For the IWW it was through organising a massof differentially identified workers (aroundcraft, race,sex,nationality, language),or rather,against their differential identity on a more abstract plane as 'fellow workers' that their collective response to the employerswas to be effective. Effective organisationof the class as a whole neededto begin with those in the worst conditions, and indeed in the case of the unskilled, this was often against the skilled workers as much as the employers.7 This is especiallyevident in the IWW's 6 This account should be seen as marking the IWW from other movements, and showing at the very least its political intentions, not as suggesting that all social prejudice was overcome. Tax (1980) provides a fully critical analysis of the place of women in the IM which shows both its progressive and reactionary aspects, with much fascinating detail on the forms of organisation developed by IWW women, and their relation to the wider feminist movement (and their conflicts with some of the more reactionary male As well as organising radical activity amongst women, she argues that the IWW's most members). important contributions here were in linking the workplace and the community, and integrating the demand for (and indeed much practice of) reproductive freedom with the general class struggle. Tax locates the This is a not unsurprising problematic aspects of the IWW's gender politics around their "economism". target (since economistic workerism has been so exceptional in marginalising women from left-wing politics), but, as my argument should make clear, I think in this case it is an inadequate basis for critique, This since it is through the IWW's emphasis on class that so much innovation and broad appeal occurred. inadequacy is actually evident implicitly in Tax's work itself. These two sentences, for example, jar; "This economism ... was a severe weakness in the IWW's work. Despite it, the IWW was able to reach out in an extraordinarily sensitive way to women... " (127). 7 Haywood made this point at the founding congress: "I do not mean that this organisation is going to improve the condition of purely skilled workers, but I mean we are going to get at the mass of the workers and bring them up to a decent plane of living. I do not care a snap of my fingers whether or not the skilled workers join this industrial movement at the present time. When we get the unorganised and the unskilled labourer into this organisation the skilled worker will of necessity come here for his own protection. As strange as it may seem to you, the skilled worker today is exploiting the labour beneath him, the unskilled man, just as much as the capitalist is. " (cited in Ramirez 1978: 200) In this sense the IWW fit a very different configuration of work to another non-party form, the workers council movement in Germany at the same time. Bologna (1972) offers a very interesting analysis of how these two forms were intricately The workers councils had a related to particular developments or stages of capitalist production. revolutionary effect, but were essentially a last revolutionary fight of the labour aristocracy. In the USA at the same time, the labour aristocracy had been superseded.

106

efforts toward the organisation of black labour. As Foner (1976) has shown, the traditional craft unions had frequently been not only exclusionary, but often at the cutting edge of racist practice (racism and sexism were effective means of reinforcing craft The railroad brotherhoods of the late nineteenth century were often more backward than even the judiciary and the mainstream Church in their exclusion of black workers not only from the unions, but from jobs themselves, and into the twentieth identity).

century they continued to express a most pernicious racism. 8 The IWW on the other hand, even in the South, sought to organise black and white workers in the same unions. Essentially the point was always that working class equality was the only means of differential wages, strike breaking (a common AFL accusation against black preventing C) zn workers), and racial prejudice.9 "If you are a wage worker", an IWW leaflet addressed 'To Coloured Workingmen and Women' declared, "you are welcome in the IWW halls, no matter what your colour. By this you may see that the 1WW is not a white man's " but black man's union. a working not a red man's union, man's union, union, not a (cited in Foner 1976: 110-111)10 Such a concern with the recruitment of black workers 1912 To the a one example, give prejudices of white workers. also necessitatedwork on Eastman, by Phineas IWW Voice People in Southern the entitled the paper of article 'Down with Race Prejudice', asked that fellow workers of the South, if they wish real good feelings to exist between the ... two races (and each is necessary to the other's success), to please stop calling the Call less insult, is 'Nigger' the the tone word. some use an much coloured man him Negro if you must refer to his race, but 'fellow worker' salutation a rebel should use. (cited in Foner 1976: 109)

is the only form of

If the IWW's definition of class follows what based cramped politics Kornbluh (1988: 131) describes as their 'simple Marxism' (where class is tied directly to

Production

a single plane of definition against the (and is their of skill, stripped-down race, sex), so site of equally particularities or politics equally inclusive in this). Following the split with De Leon in 1908, the IWW concerned

the conditions of production,

forming

8 One example conveys the extremes of racism in this milieu. In 1910 the assistant grand chief of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers explained why they abandoned attempts to organise in Cuba in these terms: "...we were unable to distinguish the nigger from the white man. Our colour perception was not sensitive enough to draw a line. I do not believe the condition will improve in a year from now or in 10 years from now or in any other time, unless you stock the island of Cuba with a new race, entirely getting rid of the old ... I hope the time will never come when this organisation will have to join hands with the negro or a man with a fractional part of a negro in him." (cited in Foner 1976: 107) 9 When black workers did scab on craft unions the IWW argued that it was induced by the unions themselves: 'The whole trend of the white craft labour organisation is to discriminate against the negro and to refuse to accord him equal economic rights. When, as a consequence, the negro is used to their own undoing, they have no one but themselves to blame. " (cited in Foner 1976: 109) 10 Despite their progressive approach to the sexual division of labour and stance toward what we would now call sexism (cf. note 6), the IWW do tend to use the expression 'man' for the generic human. I have not highlighted this in citation partly because it clearly reflects a feature of the language of their time, and partly because much of the language cited has accidental and deliberate syntactical 'error', which, following Deleuze and Guattari's concept of deterritorialisation, has a certain importance for my argument. A differing use of 'sic'would get complex indeed. 107

itself exclusively with 'economic' struggle. That is, struggle at the 'point of production'. t:1 tý Unlike the contemporary Second International,

the IWW

discounted both parliamentary

politics and the vanguard Party; II leading to a split with Bolshevism.

Though the IWW

were initially very excited by the Soviet revolution, 12 and, according to Draper (1956: 150), were at first the Second International's

greatest hope for an American Communist

Party, by 1920 Lenin (1975: 46) condemned the IWW along with the left-communists their 'infantile'

refusal to work

Against Leninism, 1:ý

for the IWW,

within

orthodox

unions

for

system. 13

and the political

both immediate practice and future revolution

were to

the come through struggle at work under workers' own control. Zn The strictly limited franchise meant that the IWW's constituency was largely excluded from conventional political participation. 14 Thus, as Bologna (1972: 21) has argued, for the mass of people, the liberties of the bourgeois civil and political spheres had been reduced to a single 'freedom to work'. For the IWW's 'citizens of industry', work became the only site of possible struggle. This site was 'cramped' indeed; there was little space for political practice outside of it and it determined life in some rather certain ways. But if the IWW located their struggle in the 'economic' sphere of work, this was not a narrow, or a-political concern as such. Rather, through this focus, all aspectsof work become sites of politics. Haywood (1988) makes the expansiveness of this narrow 'economic' focus very clear. "The Industrial Workers of the World is not a political organisation" he says, but this does not mean that it is not 'political'. he puts it:

Indeed, as

industrial unionism is the broadest possible political interpretation of the working... class political power, because by organising the workers industrially you at once enfranchise the women in the shops, you at once give the black men who are 11 An IWW cartoon from 1916 called 'Now He Understands the Game' illustrates the argument clearly enough. A'class conscious worker'carrying 'demands legislated in the union hall' confronts a rotund tophatted capitalist hiding behind a puppet 'ballot box' with three identical characters all saying "Vote your power into my hands. I'll do your fighting for you. Vote, and be saved. " (in RV 57) Though the IWW decisively broke with 'political' struggle in 1908, it never prevented individual members campaigning for socialist candidates, and Union Hall's would sometimes carry electoral propaganda. 12 For example, Harold Lord Varney, a one time acting secretary of the IWW and father of the 'proletarian novel', though later editor of the extreme right-wing journal The Awakener, said in 1919 that "Bolshevism was but the Russian name for the I.W.W." (cited in Draper 1957: 111) 13 Draper (1956: 242-3) cites a letter from Moscow, intercepted in December 1919, that was intended for the American movement, which clearly includes the IWW in its expectations for an American Communist Party (the organisation of which was to be effected in Moscow, of course). Of the AFL the letter said "This must be smashed in pieces. " Only seven months later at the Second Congress of the Comintern in July and August 1920, following Lenin's policy of entering mainstream trade unions (as circulated to all the delegates in what became 'Left- Wing'Communism) the IWW's refusal to join the AFL led to their split with Bolshevism. An editors footnote to the Beijing edition of Lenin (1965: 130-1) describes the IVVWthus: "Its activities were marked by pronounced anarcho-syndicalist traits: it did not recognise the necessity of political struggle by the proletariat, denied the leading role of the proletarian party, the need for an armed uprising to overthrow capitalism and the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat. The I.W. W. refused to work in the American Federation of Labour unions and subsequently degenerated into a sectarian anarcho-syndicalist group exerting no influence whatsoever on the workers. " 14 As Georgakas (in Bird et al. 1987: 5) writes: "All women, all the many workers under twenty-one, and all unnaturalised foreign-born workers - the vast majority of working America - were legally disenfranchised. In those parts of the United States where black tabour was dominant, procedural harassment and outright

108

disenfranchised politically a voice in the operation of the industries; and tile same would extend to every worker. (1988: 50; emphasis added) At this apparently minimal 'point of production' struggle there was a simple political practice of 'class struggle', encapsulated in their one political goal: 'Abolition of the Wage System'.

There was no workers' identity to be found, or carved out in work itself. Work, as a plethora of images in the literature show, was a space of war. The Manifesto

for example,statesthat This

worn-out and corrupt system offers no promise of improvement and adaptation. There is no silver lining to the clouds of darkness and despair settling down upon the world of labour. This system offers only a perpetual struggle for slight relief within wage slavery. (IWW 1989: 8)

So far I have suggested that the IWW was based on an at once simple and unsophisticated, and yet also rather modem conception of class that was composed in work where all unskilled workers were essentially equal 'wage slaves', or at least should come to see themselves as such. These are a limited people, without rights or representation, unsophisticated and cramped in these conditions. But from this condition, 'everything is political' as the lWW challenges the cramped condition for a generalised abolition of work. From this simple unified plane of composition something of a minor

peopleemerges. Reductions

and complications

Having describedthe wobbly planeof compositionarounda simultaneouslyinclusive and crampedconceptionof class,now I want to considerin more detail the way this relatesto the major identities (and structured minority sub-identities) within which they were formed. A fitting placeto start is with a line from The Intemationale. As I will show, songhad central importancein the politics and lives of the wobblies, and it is hencenot surprising that The Intemationalewas sung (as it has been throughout labour history since it was written at the defeatof the Paris Communethrough the SpanishCivil War, May '68 and the 1989 Beijing uprisings) at the founding IWW congress. Summoning the wretchedof the earthto call forth the new world, it announces"We have beennaught, we shall be all". This section is structuredaround this distinction between zero and Z:I with the latter. totality, starting If the condition of the wobblies is crampedin work, they presentan image of a future transformation of the chaos of capital into a "well-ordered and scientifically managedsystem" (Wetter, in RV: 348). Notions of liberation, technologicalprogress, intimidation kept most blacks from voting.

Other large blocks of workers - seamen, itinerants, and 109

universal humanity, all figure strongly. The almost messianic religious structure to this is abundantly evident in wobbly literature. Countless wobbly cartoons feature the IWW logo (an IWW and three stars floating over a polar-coordinated world) as a brilliant rising sun on the horizon of assorted scenes of wage slavery, want, and degradation. One cartoon, for example, shows the workers, arms raised, emerging from the swamp of 4craft unionism' and 'capitalism', being ushered by a classically enrobed figure of 'science', and 'economic development' to a glorious FWW sun and 'industrial democracy' (in Bird et al. 1987: vii). The wobblies themselves were not averse to suggesting that the movement had a certain religious fervour and structure to it. As Giovannitti, an Italian born socialist and wobbly, said in court (in his defence against charges of accessory to murder of a striker by a policeman in the 1912 Lawrence Strike): But I say and I repeat, that we have been working in something that is dearer to us than our lives and our liberty. We have been working in what are our ideas, our ideals, our aspirations,our hopes - you may say our religion... But I say, whether you like it or not, we are now the heralds of a new civilisation. We have come here to proclaim a new truth. We are the apostles of a new evangel, of a new gospel, from heralded being is this one same moment and very proclaimed which now at side of the earth to the other. (in RV: 194) If the court-room induces intensities of rhetoric that are not commonly in evidence (and indeed pragmatic argument to win a jury's sympathy), there are many other examples. A journalist in the Anterican Magazine wrote of the same strike that "There was in it a in felt before if have intense, I that never spirit vital spirit, a religious you will, peculiar, described Gurley Flynn " 160). Elizabeth (RVThe wobbly activist prominent any strike. the importance of a religious sensibility in the mobilisation of strikers: "Stimulation, in a strike, means to make that strike and through it the class struggles their religion; to make them forget all about the fact that it's for a few cents or a few hours, but to make them feel it is a 'religious duty' for them to win that strike. " (in RV: 217) And, of the 'new civilisation', Haywood said to the 1913 Patterson strikers: "It will be utopian. " The IWW

had a characteristically

simple notion of a movement from

zero to

fulfilled industrial democracy through increased industrial action and an eventual general strike. 15 But in many ways the wobblies were, as Anderson (1961: 234) puts it, 'antievolutionary'.

If industrial

democracy

was an almost utopian

goal, 4:1

it was not a

mechanism for deferral of practice, or something which came from a gradual reform of

lumberjacks- were unable to maintainregistrationat fixed polling sites." 15This was not particularlynew. The roots of the general strike can be found in WilliamBenbow's (n.d.) 1832 treatise on the 'Grand National Holiday' (influential in the Chartist movement and the 1926 British GeneralStrike), and no doubt before that (the late-eighteenthcentury radical use of the biblical 'Jubilee' is anothersource (cf. Linebaugh1990)). 110

work. 16 It was, rather, a mobilising mechanism(however bland 'industrial democracy' may soundtoday) for the immanent practiceof 'class war'. It is this 'class war', linked to the other side of the formula, "we have been naught", through which the wobblies were composed,and which the rest of the chapterfocuseson. This W-lught' is fundamental. On a seriesof levels the wobblies could be said to be a zero people. The wobblies were a movement of immigrants, women, racial minorities, migrant workers, adventurousyouth, hobos (and various combinations of these) - none of which had anything like full citizenship. And when they became 'working class' they were not exactly subsumedin a wobbly unity or full plenitude. Rather,throughmembershipof the One Big Union and the formation of 'class' relations, they deterritorialisedcertain major identities, and composedminor forms. I will discuss the first part of this in terms of the main more or less major identitarian forms of the immigrant, the American,the citizen, the 'People', and the leader. Wobbly publications appearedin myriad Neither immigrants nor Americans... languages(Rosemont(1988: 439) lists Finnish, Russian, Hungarian, Czech, Italian, Spanish,Swedish,Bulgarian, Polish, Romanian,Lithuanian, Croatian, Yiddish, French, German,Chinese,and Japanese). They were a complex compositeindeed. An account Washington in illustrates in Aberdeen, fight' 1911 'free the constituencyof speech of a the IWW well. A seriesof wobblies take it in turns to standup on the soap box and utter fights free (the before being few taken and away speech was to object of arrested words a jails from towns the of and were prevented where wobblies swamp-to-bursting courts by is differentiated form17). Each it became quite an art one street-cornerspeaking,and his national or cultural background, and concomitant dialect. After a "Down East Yankee""descendentof the Pilgrims of the Mayflower" German, evidently from the Schwartzwald. 'Mein Fellow a short, came swarthy ... Vorkers! Schust you listen by me vhile I tells you somethings!' But what that 'something' was he could not tell before he was seized and hustled in the wake of the other two. After the German came a large, raw-boned Irishman with the brogue of the ould sod thick on his tongue. 'Fellow Workers! Oi'm not much of a spaker, but Oi don't suppose Oi'll be allowed to talk long, anyhow.' That was all the speechhe was allowed to make before he too was led away. 16 One wobbly later commented on the question of immediate gain and future revolution thus: "When I joined up in 1919,1 didn't know if there was going to be a revolution; but I knew there was going to be better conditions. That was what we were after, more for the immediate than the ultimate. The ultimate was more I but in in the talking there less the sky, anarchists and about, pie philosophic socialists were what or wanted the pork chops on the table right now. " (in Bird et aL 1987: 50-1) 17 An account by Kornbluh (1988: 71) seems quite typical of the style: "Another soapboxer, an outdoor Dressed as an old Southern lecturer in the Spokane area, had been a circuit preacher in the South. 'This is my text colonel in a longtailed black coat and a soft-brimmed black hat, he would drawl softly: It's about the three stars. They're not the stars of Bethlehem. They're better tonight, Fellow Workers. The stars of Bethlehem lead only to Heaven which nobody knows about. than the stars of Bethlehem. These are the three I.W. W. stars of education, organisation, They lead to porkchops and emancipation. which everybody wants. "'

ill

Next in line was an Italian who shouted the regular greeting of 'Fellow Workers', spoke a few rapid fire words and was taken towards tile jail. From another part of the crowd a five-foot man with the unmistakable rolling gait of a sailor sprang to center of the cleared street, shouted 'Fellow Workers', and had time enough to make perhaps the longest 'speech' of the evening. 'I have been run out of this town five times by the Citizen's Club, and every time I have found my way back. This proves conclusively that the world is round.' (Payne in RV: 103) The wobblies - their ideas, practices and people - seem to exceed the nation state. 'If you don't like it then go back where you came from', was a familiar heckle to wobbly agitators (and many were deported for political activity), as was a popular distrust of 'foreign' agitational ideas. Their continuous harassment and demonisation led one from in letter to prison, that "... the I. W. W. is like the Mexican an open wobbly suggest, in the movie show; he is always the villain. " (in RV: 348) But the wobblies 'imntigrant' identity 'foreign' They took no as their own. As the soapboxer J. status was complex. P. Thompson put it, "there is no such thing as a foreigner. We are all native-born members of this planet..." (in RV, 316). 18 But neither were the wobblies 'American' in the patriotic, rugged-individualist senseof the word. They left their old nations yet they experienced little of being 'American', save the freedom of wage-labour. One cartoon by Joe Hill (in RV: 129) interpreted the constitutional guarantee as "Life?, Liberty? and the pursuit of -a Job!" with a migratory worker pursuing a fleeing nymph with 'Job' on her crown, and holding a pork chop just out of reach (the veritable utopia of the pork chop is a persistent wobbly theme). A song, 'My Country', written by O. E. B. during the 191418 War, begins as a patriotic ode to the author's 'country', only to reveal later that "My / No king, limit is boundless / has It no potentate -/ Only a race of human no country beings." The absence of this country is then marked: "I do not dwell in my country, / But I can live in the hopes it holds / For the future... " (in RV: 329). Yet it is in America, amongst theseeclectic immigrant people that the wobblies emerged. The movement was not a collection of minorities and immigrants infusing in an American melting-pot, but a particular conjunction of modem industrial capital, poverty and oppression, internal

18This is evident in one of Joe Hill's most popular songs 'Scissor Bill', which describes the racism of the scissorbill, or'non-class conscious worker'. A few lines convey the sense of the song. "He'll say, 'This is my country', with an honest face... And Scissor Bill he says: 'This country must be freed / From Niggers, Japs and Dutchmen and the gol durn Swede. '/ He says that every cop would be a native son / If it wasn't for the Irishman, the son-of-a-gun. " (in RV 136) Another song, 'Dan McGann' by Dublin Dan enacts a conversation between a 'foreign man' and a scissorbill 'Dan McGann'. Dan McGann says: "Don't talk to me of the bourgeoisie, / Don't open your lips to speak / Of the socialists or the anarchist, / Don't mention the bolshevik/ I've heard enough of your foreign stuff... " The reply affirms not so much the other's 'foreigness'but the already hybrid nature of the USA: "The 'foreign' man looked at Dan McGann, / And in perfect English, said: VI cannot see, for the life of me, / What you have got in your head. / You boast and brag 'bout the grand old flag / And the foes you put to rout, / When you haven't a pot in which to spit, / Or a window to throw it out. / You howl and kick about the bolshevik, / The anarchist and Wob - Nou defend this rotten system when / you don't even own your own job. " "You're working for an Englishman, I You room with a French Canuck, / You board in a Swedish restaurant / Where a dutchman cooks your chuck; / You buy your clothes from a German Jew, I Your shoes from a Russian Pole, / And you place your hope in a dago pope, /To save your Irish soul... " (in RV 30-2) 112

marginals, and Europeanmigrants across the American social plane. An anonymous 1922article entitled 'Why I am a Member of the I.W.W. ' put it like this: And lastly, although I am a foreigner, it is only becauseI am in America that I am an I.W.W. For, contrary to the belief of many, the I.W.W. is an outgrowth of advanced economic development in America, and the Italian, the Russian or the Swede that you may find in the organisation here would not have been 'wobblies' had they remained in their native countries. (in RV: 289) I have already shown how the constituency of the citizens or 'People' wobblies was largely unrepresented in the form of the democratic 'citizen'. Women, blacks, immigrants, itinerant workers, youth were all 'denizens' (as Agamben (1996), nor ...

following Tomas Hammar, describes the current condition of the noncitizen refugee in the North). One wobbly, who says he is a 'citizen of industry' and has no other nationality, is asked by a prosecution council "Where is your home?", and the exchange continues: Cook County Jail Before that? County Jail, Cleveland, Ohio And before that? City Jail, Akron, Ohio Are you a citizen? No That's enough. (in RV: 345)

Yet, if the wobblieswere 'missing' from this social democraticcategory, the lWW made no attemptto enfranchiseits constituencyin any conventionalliberal democraticsensethis was the discreditedpracticeof 'politics' that only constitutedjuridical democracy. The 'citizen', eventhe 'People' were problematiccategoriesfor the IWW. The citizenry figure most frequently in wobbly literature as a molar majority that claims historical authenticityagainstthe foreignessof labour radicals. They are 'good Christian people' who, stars and stripes flying high above the cross, went to the new world to freely practicetheir religion, and force othersto do the same(cf. Smith in RV. 115, and the two wobbly versionsof 'Onward Christian Soldiers', and 'Christians at War' in RV: 327-8). A song to the executedanarchistsSaccoand Vanzettiby Jim Seymour conveys well the wobbly impressionof the 'American'. The American says: But the hell of it is, they ain't got no ... Wotta ya call it?Oh yes, no historic past. If they ever get one O'them they'll be all right.

113

Then they can talk about 1776 Instead of yellin' their foot heads off About Garrybaldeye an' Spartycuss. But they're nothin' but God damn dagoes. Now me: I'm an American, I am.

We're the real people, we are They not only don't know nothin' about books W music, 'N' inventin' W science, 'N' makin' purty pictures W such things, But they don't even know howta talk The American language right. (in RV: 358)

Perhapsthe most famous wobbly, Joe Hill, wrote a short pieceon 'The People' (in RV. 136-7). It beginswith the opening line from 'The Red Flag' - "The People's flag is deepestred" - and the question, 'who are the peopleT Hill suggeststhat assorted bossesand governorshave always been 'for the people', but that "When the Red Flag 'the Tia Juana [the in California flying Lower there uprising] were not of people' any was in the ranks of the rebels. Common working stiffs and cow-punchers were in the is. " 'The 'outlaws', (137) little that people' of whatever sprinkling majority, with a back fleeing Red Flag" before "The to the their to with wild men gawp at simply came "Land of the Graft and the Home of the Slave". The lesson for Hill was that "... it is fact 'the to the that that time up people' and the working class wakes every rebel about have nothing in common. Let us sing after this 'The Work-ers'flag is deepest red' and to

hell with 'the people'." (137) One is tempted to see a little of the romanticism of the ... in figure is Hill's Yet here there the too the a reduction, or marginal of rebel. outsider and The breaks in but the the rebel with citizen not any splendid and people, a complexity. but 'rebels' in 'solidarity'

isolation. The rebel is only such as part of the community of the working class. Hill definite ('whatever is'), but 'outlaws' that a of with uncertainty are part rebels mentions 'working class' (which, as we have seen, is itself a compendium). I will consider this in terms of a solidarity/rebel couplet, following the framework of the pack/anomalous form (described in discussion of the minor 'author-function' in Chapter 4), as against a liberal form, or a vanguardist membership/Party arrangement. community/individual The wobblies were against any conventional forms of leadership (a popular leaders'), 'we are all practised a cult of anonymity, and subsumed the refrain was individual in the collective. One prisoner writes: We hardly thought of ourselves as individuals and gauged our actions by the value they would be to the defence, the organisation and the working class. We did not 114

feel this as those who profess religious conviction by some sort of sudden revelation, but by the association with one another and the realisation that the group and the thing that the group stood for were far more important than the individual. (from 'Jail Didn't make them Weaken' by Jack Leonard, in RV: 126) The wobblies frequently testify to an absolute faith in the organisation (and indeed many experienced harsh repression for membership and activity - thousands were imprisoned, tortured, tarred and feathered, beaten, lynched and shot). This faith is usually sanctioned in terms of 'solidarity'. Pierce C. Wetter writes: "Solidarity - the basic, ineradicable, human faith that an injury to one is an injury to all - is the spirit, the very essence of our organisation.... [T]o compromise the principle of solidarity is essentially disloyal not only to the rest of the group, but to the whole vital cause for which we stand." (in RV: 348) Yet this community, if a subsumption of an autonomous individual, is not a is function Singularity a not of the individual, but of 'the rebel'. negation of singularity. The rebel is a marker of creativity, or 'action', but his or her author-function is always part of the milieu, and as such can be seen as an 'anomalous' or 'bordering' tendency in a community rather than a distinct subject. The creation comes not from the rebel's from identity, but pushing and developing an aspect of a politicised rebellious configuration or situation (be it in literary production or tactic innovation and practice; in a strike, for example, effective 'individual' action is necessarily part of a collective). This is not to say that the wobblies did not have their prominent figures - Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Ben Fletcher, Joe Hill - but unlike a Lenin (at least once the Revolution stabilised) or a Stalin, these people were proper names that, when seen within their milieu, signified and induced minor rather than molar multiplicities. 19 These people had certain styles or competencies that at times tipped the community elsewhere, but they did not 'lead' as such and had no autonomous authorial role. 20

For example,we can interpret the proper name 'Joe Hill' in anomalousterms, following the 'turbulence' of the spread and use of his songs, cartoons, reputation, almost his 'myth', as they filtered through the wobbly movement. Two moments from the story of Joe Hill's imprisonmentand death illustrate the pack/anomalousrelation.21 First, an appeal for defence funds:

19 One deflection of a cult of biography is evidenced by Joe Hill, about to be executed, who, when asked for some biographical detail by a friend replied from prison that he was "a citizen of the world", and his birth place was "the planet earth" (cited in RV. 127). 20 Gurley Flynn makes this case in a speech analysing the failure of the Patterson strike of 1911 (in RV. 215-226). She insists that purist criticism of tactics, criticism from outside, falls to grasp the collective nature of the event which is a complex amalgam of workers, wobblies, appropriate tactics, local experience and tradition, reaction, and so on where IWW 'control' would make no practical sense. 21 Joe Hill was executed by firing squad 19.11.1915 after having been convicted of shooting and killing a Salt Lake City grocer. That there was only vague circumstantial evidence, and the trial (in the court and the media) was conducted as much against the IWW as against Hill leaves the question of his actual guilt open (cf. RV. 127-132). 115

Now there is not one in this organisation that can say he does not know this man. For wherever rebels meet, the name JOE HILL is known. Though we do not know him personally, what one among us can say he is not on speaking terms with 'Scissor Bill', 'Mr. Block' or who has not heard the 'White Slave' or listened to a rendering of tile famous 'Casey Jones' song and many others in the little red song book? (Solidarity 18.4.1914, in RV: 129)

Second,his funeral rites. After his execution, and a large and long funeral ceremony (therewere addressesin ten different languages),Hill was cremated. His wobbly badge, cuff-links and necktiewere removedto be preservedat fWW headquartersand the coffin handleswere detachedto be melteddown for a plate with the words of Hill's last letter engravedon it "Don't wastetime mourning for me - organise". The flowers were sent to IWW locals, and in a strangerite, his asheswere parcelledup into envelopesand sent to locals aroundthe world with instructionsto scatterthem to the winds on May Day 1916. So, in the Solidarity appeal,Hill's fame and influence is signalledvia his songsas they in turn arelinked to the obligatory marker of wobbly community, 'the little red song book', suchthat his namehelpsmanifestsolidarity, and then every aspectof his deathand body is utilised for the movement. It is as if nothing can be wasted for the cause of 'organisation', within which Hill's complexity and rebel creativity, rather than simple identity is implicated. The repetition

and difference

of wobbly

culture After thesereductions,the 'cramped' wobbly condition, I want to turn more clearly to the cultural productionsof the IWW. This section is a generalaccount of wobbly culture, following the senseof the minor literaturethesis, before a considerationof some more specific figures (the hobo and sabotage)in the following sections. I have mentionedthe rebel againstthe people, the proper nameas anomalousrather than the leader,but these forms are only suchwithin a general 4D movementor culture. What quickly becomes apparent in reading wobbly literature, history, biography, song, cartoon, accounts of tactics and organisation, and so on, is the interchangeability or interrelation of these forms. Propaganda, entertainment, community-building, and tactic dispersal can be found across each form. A pageant is valued in its artistic, morale building, and fund raising terms, and condemned if it is divisive or fails to raise enough money (even if it had a huge turnout and produced the spectacle of a ten foot high bright red electric light 'IWW' on the sides of Madison Square tower) (cf. R V: 201-2,210-14). Songs are propagated to boost morale or class consciousness, to raise money, to spread propaganda and tactics, and to tell histories. Even space travel for Joe Hill was to have wobbly possibilities: "Tomorrow I expect to take a trip to the planet Mars and, if so, will immediately commence to organise the Mars canal workers into the I. W. W (in RV: ...... 127).

116

Initially one sees a paucity of themes. There is a continual repetition of the simple propositions of 'One Big Union', 'fellow workers', 'an injury to one is an injury to all', 'solidarity forever'. 22 Yet the operation of this culture is not dogmatic or programmatic for this. These simple refrains could not lead far if they were not mined from within, applied in different contexts, communicated or lived in different sites, and put to use. The repetition of these expressions and concomitant practices needs to be understood as necessarily bringing in the difference of situation, and of 'rebel' practice.23 Every simple expression, following Kajka, connects to varied and particular intrigues as it traverses the cultural forms and life process of individual wobblies, and so becomes complicated and differentiated - imbued with a political vibration. Wobbly 'literature' is thus full of tales and ruses, comedy, parody, and coarse speech, pictures, poems and songs that convey the messagesand tactics in both blunt and subtle ways. The readiness to use every vehicle at hand and to pragmatically 'live' the tenets and tactics of the movement may go some way to explain how it was that the wobblies innovated in so many fields - they used montage as early as European Dada, were the first labour group to use cartoons, questioned the effectiveness of the tactic of the strike, and even subverted popular advertisements in a fashion that is conventionally credited as a Situationist invention (cf. Sakolsky 1990).24 This is not to say that the wobblies offer a wonderfully rich cultural formation - again, the standard for judgement should not be conventional aesthetics, they should not be set up as a popular cultural equivalent of Walt Whitman but that across their n-tilieu there is considerable production of culture and ways of life. The works themselves tend toward a 'collective enunciation' and they deterritorialise many major forms. Wobbly publications extend from prison pencilled newspapers (such as 'The Can Opener' from Cook County Jail (cf RV: 336)) to national dailies such as Solidarity and Industrial Worker. By 1920 close to 60 official and semiofficial IWW periodicals had been published. Anderson (1961: 188-9) suggests that important from hobos for this the material many an much of came whom writing was 22 The simplicity of IWW propaganda is evidenced well by Bill Haywood who, in his public speaking resisted 'theorising', and seemed able to convey a sense of wobbly politics through anecdote and tale, and waving his arms about a lot. G. D.H. Cole said that "Haywood could make himself understood by a crowd that did not know a word he said, merely by waving his arms and shouting. " (cited in RV. 45; cf. also Carlo Tresca'With Big Bill Haywood on the Battlefields of Labour in RV. 208-9) 23 This repetition and difference is reflected in the IWW's organisationai form. Built around the basic tenets, the IWW operated with considerable local autonomy, and though I do not have space to go into it here, there was much debate and argument about different practices and orientations. Even wobbly mainstays such as sabotage and the free speech fights were subject to widely differing opinions and Bird et al. (1987: 161-2) describe this process: "In contrast to the Communist interpretations. organisational method, the Wobblies lived by a kind of democratic decentralism in which every higher level of authority was rendered as powerless as possible. IWW's did not accept organisational limitations on individual freedoms. Members who disagreed with a particular policy simply didn't support it with their personal direct action and were free to use their own judgement on how much disagreement to air in public. The IWW halls and press were filled with criticism and debate which generally seemed to strengthen rather than weaken the morale of activist members. " Though this is no doubt a rather glowing representation (indeed the wobblies suffered a near death-blow over a centralism / decentralism schism in 1924), the sense that the possibility of dissent was a positive wobbly trait is clear. 24 16 subverted advertisements by William H. Hinkelman are in Rosemont (1988: 436). Two of those recognisable today are 'His Master's Voice', where the dog listens to the words "Be contented. Work hard. Save your money. Everything is all right. Blah-blah etc. ", and 'Arm and Hammer where the caption is "Labour produces all". 117

element in their practices of 'killing time' (even if it was not always intended, or used for publication). Letters pages in the various papers were the main sites of open publication, though there was also room for short stories. But the IWW developed and spread their culture in other ways. 'Silent agitator' stickers spread the cause with simple aphorisms and cartoons, for example: "Slow Down - The job you save may be your own! ", "What time is it? Time for a four hour day! ", "Beware Sabotage - Good pay or Bum work", "The Scissorbill's Prayer - Now I get me up to work, I pray the Lord I may not shirk. If I should die before the sun, I pray the Lord my work's well done" (cf. Bird et al. 1987; R V).

The wobblies also made considerable use of cartoons. These range from professional works, to, more usually, simple amateur drawings. As Rosemont (1988) writes, they tend to present the world in "defiant simplicity", showing a world of bosses, scabs, and strong noble workers. 25 Many have a utopian future in the background, and, as with the silent agitator stickers, there are frequent appearancesof the black cat and is But there variation and humour. One of Joe Hill's cartoons of sabotage. again, sabot depicts two wobblies dressed as deep-seadivers in an IWW submarine shaped as a sabot, firing a direct action torpedo at a ship called capitalism, carrying "all necessities of life" and manned by a typical rotund Mr Plute. Mr Plute, ever ignorant of the subtleties of wobbly tactics, is looking through a telescope saying "all is well and no I. W. W. 's in sight", whilst the torpedo comes up from underneath. A passing fish says "That's a new one on me" (in Bird et al. 1987: 26). Songs were a central aspect of wobbly composition, and the 'little red song book', started around 1909, was carried almost like a Bible. Often written anonymously, or credited to an individual wobbly's membership number, or the moniker 'slim', the folk hymns, They invariably traditional to material. were sung utilised existing songs tunes, even the star spangled banner, and usually retained an anchoring line from the original, making the parody stronger. Sometimes one tune would be sung to different lyrics and vice versa. The songs were spread at meetings, strikes, socials, hobo 'jungles' (camps), and sold in the little red song book or on individual cards as fund raisers. Words were sometimes changed to fit individual occasions (these were known as 'zipper songs' (Bruns 1980: 154)). Writing from prison Joe Hill reported that his song 'It's a Long Way Down to the Soupline' (sung to '... Tipperary') in "spreading like the smallpox" amongst the unemployed was changed to fit the brand of soup dished out in New York (in RV: 151).26 Even The Intemationale was sung with references to 25Althoughthere are a fair numberof hobos in these cartoons, by far the most prominentrepresentation of the lWW as a movementis a well-built white worker, in what we would now see as a very 'workerist' style. This is of course problematicfor a movementof minorities. Such a representationis usually used when, in a mythicalposture, the collective force of the movementis being conjured (either to encourage membershipand a sense of collectiveworth, to contrast the workers' power to that of the capitalists', or to convey the eventualtriumph of 'industrial democracy'). When the representationof particular struggles, recurrentpolitical problems,or picaresqueaspects of workers' lives is the purpose,the cartoons are more likely to use less workerist images. 26The genealogyof the wobbly battle song 'Hold the Fort' shows this form of emergence well. The title is from a Civil War incident when trapped Union troops read flag messages conveyed from mountain to mountainsaying 'GeneralShermansays hold fast. We are coming.' This anecdote was then used as the 118

industrial unionism. In these songs, again, there is a repetition of similar themes, sabotage,one big unionism, solidarity, but also elaborationof particular eventsin labour history, parablesof 'block head' workers, picaresquetales of hobo life, parodies of religion and nationalismand so on. Their function in the compositionof the movementis such that, asJack Leonardsuggests,eventhe 'tone' of the songs was politicised: "There was as much difference in the mannerof singing, as there was in the words. Our singing taught defiance,not obedienceto our masters." (in RV: 125) Storiesand parableswere a popular form. Theseare often parodies, particularly of religion, law, and nationalism. They usually make use of political events(often very bleak ones), dominantlanguage,stereotypesof wobblies, judicial procedureand so on. One examplefrom a Seattlemonthly 'smoker"27 called 'Their Court and Our Class', enactsa trial of a wobbly who had beenon the Verona,28as it rather subtly parodiesthe is in This humorous legal tragic terms episode. and recounts a argument, constructionof a short section: COUNCIL - Object! your honor, the witness by his own admission -PRISONER'S is in the habit of lying. JUDGE - Objection overruled! That is why the witness is here! PROSECUTOR- Tell the court what you saw from your reclining position on the dock. ANANIAS -I saw the Verona steam up to the dock and there was a crowd of I.W.W. 's on board. This man (indicating the prisoner) was one of the leaders. PROSECUTOR - How do you know he was a leader? ANANIAS - Becausethey were ALL leaders... ANANIAS - he cried out in a loud voice, 'Give me Liberty or Give me Death! ' ... ... There was no liberty in Everett to give him, so the deputies started to give death. I in RV: 114) bullets... C. Smith, him deliberately dodge (Walker several saw If the court is parodied to the point of ridicule, Christianity is treated in a more being itself is but The Church little considered contempt, manner. with complex populated with assorted hypocritical preachers, gore-loving Christian soldiers, and the 'Starvation Anny' (cf. 'Christians at War', RV: 328). Joe Hill's most famous song, 'The Preacher and the Slave', conveys the essence of the IWW critique of religion with its chorus, from the priest: "You will eat bye and bye / In that glorious land above the sky; / Work and pray, live on hay, / You'll get pie in the sky when you die. " (in Anderson 1961: 210)

But Christ himself is used a little more tactfully.

In one

theme for a gospel hymn by the popular evangelist Philip Bliss in 1870. This in turn was introduced by another evangelistto England,and in the late nineteenth century, membersof the British Transport and GeneralWorkersUnionparodied the hymn, singing the new version in strikes and demonstrations. This versionwas then popularisedby the wobblies (RV: 105-6). 27 'Smokers' were fund-raising socials that usually consisted of four three-round boxing bouts, a voluntaryprofessionalperformer,a propagandatalk, and a propagandasketch (PV.- 112).

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Johnson Goes bizarre by William ('Thightline Akers tale to Heaven'), particularly Johnson dreamshe is at the pearly gates of Heaven, a land without wages, but for understandablereasonshastrouble at Judgment. God, 'the squeeze',is dubious because Johnson has led a rugged hobo lifestyle, scorning the gifts of company, sexual and tl Cý by God! " "Kangarooed Johnson the again, gregariousurges, pleasuresof accumulation. family looked like "eyes but in Jesus, that those married man with a of a walks with says, who hasjust got the sack becausehe had the guts to carry a red card" (91), who lets Johnsonrecountthe life of the hobo in the strangehuman world of wage slavery, where it is not for a lack of desirethat's God's gifts are neglected. At the end of the tale, God, 'the old geezer',breaksdown and cries (in RV: 87-93).29 There are also some parodies for ham by Prayer' T-Bone Slim, Jack's Lumber In 'The and a prayer one, of prayer. is Quail toast, chops answered and pork on eggs,custardpies, for furnished He He has himself. by 'old tells and all plenty the me man' ...SUFFICIENTLY it's because I if I organised am not that am not getting mine in loosen He force to to any participate the master up... absolutely refuses strong to lines it believes in letting fight He the of out along us children's squabbles. Industrial Unionism. (in RV: 269)

In reply to another prayer, 'Jerusalem Slim' says: You say that you pray and work like a mule You're not a worker but Henry Ford's tool. You thank me for working 12 hours a day, Why blame it on me -I never made you that way. You scoff at the rebel and lynch him 'till dead

But I was an outcast and they called me a 'Red'. You call me Christ Jesuswith intelligence dim But I was a Rebel called JerusalemSlim. And my brothers: the outcast, the rebel and the tramp, And not the religious, the scab or the scamp... (from 'The Outcast's Prayer' Anon. in RV: 86) A last example has a prayer in the structure and style of the Old Testament recommending industrial sabotage: Chapter 13 .

28 260 wobblies, sailing from Seattle to Everett for a free speech fight, were shot at from the docks four were killed. 29 Another example tells us that "Christ was a TRAMP / Without a place / To 'lay his head', / And WE are tramps, / And I guess / That fifth chapter / Of the epistles of James, / Telling the RICH FOLKS I To weep and howl / For what was COMING, / Must have been written / By a WOBBLY! " (in RV: 272-3)

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(2) Where dwelleth one called Bill which is surnamed Scissor, and seeing him sore afflicted with patriotic leprosy we administered unto him much Industrial Unionism. (3) Saying unto him, Go thou into the harvest and work for a dollar, (4) And when the harvest is ripe and thy lord needeththee sorely (5) Strike for two dollars, saying unto thy lord: (5) Behold, thy fruit goeth unto the devil, pay us two dollars or great shall be the destruction thereof... (from 'The Flight into California' by W. Metcalf, in RV: 75)

It becomes apparent that the wobblies were able to create a cultural milieu through the repetition and difference of certain simple themes, in a series of languages and sites like Though their their a true something that were not essentially assertions of own. Christianity called the IWW are paralleled with assertions of a true America, it is clear, by their irreverence and refusal of 'pie and the sky' preaching, that these are sites of deterritorialisation and cultural creation ('using everything at hand'), not serious attempt but being have The rebels, and outsiders a sense of wobblies at starting a new church. these are not autonomous identities, but processes which traverse the cramped sites and identities of work, American, minority and so on, in a 'working class' collective that I in live the to now want to consider two aspects of wobbly practice. seems only itinerant hobo first in detail, the agitator, and second, worker and more composition sabotage.

The hobo

anomalous If the 'rebel' holds a specialplace in wobbly politics, no one group manifested this is There hobo. itinerant to say about the the much than worker, more position anomalous focus I fully but their hobos, to than lives contours, map attempt rather the of wobbly here on the complexitiesthat were maintained,even nourished in the hobo amalgam,or 'inclusive disjunction' of migrant worker, marginal outsider, and wobbly, and their inventions. political and cultural concomitant If the wobblies (largely composed of unskilled minority workers outside of traditionalunion and political structures)were not particularly the classicconstituencyof Marx's and Engels' working class,the hobo embodiesa good number of the attributesof the classic 'lumpenproletariat'. When a Departmentof Justice agent reported on the "chiefly it in IWW California Washington, the that composed was and saying activitiesof foreigners, homes, discontented the and unemployed, without mostly of panhandlers, hobo 60-1), (in Preston he 1963: to the to referring was who are not anxious work" The lumpenproletariat. be description Marx's but the this of could constituency, IWW, history in the (though terin the to the tend of classic themselves not use wobblies Dubofsky (1969: 346) suggests that the IWW constituency included "some of the lumpenproletariaf',and 'slum proletariat' figures occasionally(cf. Anderson 1961: 186,

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223)).30 This is hardly remarkablesinceMarxian terminology did not figure prominently in wobbly literature.31 But more than that, the hobo was a particularly popular wobbly figure, and, insofar as hobos were workers, they were a prime constituency for Haywood's conceptionof 'organising from the bottom up' (not an extra-sociallumpen). Workers and outsiders Essentially, the hobos were itinerant labourerswho travelled the country for seasonal and temporary employment, particularly in logging and agriculture (but also in construction, sheep shearing, fishing, ice harvesting, railroad laying, trench digging and so on (cf. Anderson 1961: 107-9;Bruns 1980: 137).32 In this emphasison work one can make a weak distinction betweenhobos,tramps,and bums: "a hobo works and wanders,a tramp dreamsand wanders,and a bum drinks and wanders." (Holbrook, cited in Feied 1964: 17; cf. also Anderson 1961: Ch. 6; Speek 1917) There is, unsurprisingly, much interrelation between these types, both in terms of their in hobo One hobo in dominant culture, and practice. anecdoteconveysthis representation well. A wobbly stands at a door asking for work. The little girl who answers says "Mama, there's a bum at the door", but her mother answers, "That isn't a bum; that's a harvestworker." A month later, when the harvest seasonis over, the sceneis repeated, only this time the little girl says, "Mama, there's a harvestworker at the door", and her mother replies, "That's no harvestworker; that's a bum." (Murphy in Bird et al. 1987: 45) There is a tendencyin secondaryliteratureto presenta narrativeof downward spiral from hobo to tramp (cf. Parker 1920: 121 for example),but I am concernedwith how the attributesof thesecategoriescirculatearoundthe hoboas migratory worker (since it is on this planethat they are part of the IWW). If the 'cowboy' was born of the capitalisationof cattle (Beastsof Burden 1999), Anderson (1961) suggeststhat the hobo was the cowboy of the secondfrontier, 'called 30 In one of the few times I have seen the term lumpenproletariat appear it is in a rather classic Marxian manner. In reminiscing on wobbly activism and its failings Joseph Murphy says: "I think now that one of the mistakes we made was to spend too much time trying to organise the riffraff instead of the home guard, the guys who stayed in one place.... We made men out of many of them on skid row, but when you have proletarian riffraff - as Marxists called them, the lumpenproletariat - you got an awful low life form to organise. " (in Bird et al. 1987: 45) This is a very strange statement in so far as it misses the points that migratory workers were both central to American industry - and hence needed to be organised (until changes in population and technology reduced the need for migrant labour following the 1914-18 War) and that it seems as though the hobos were recruited by other hobos, not a distant leadership. In 'The Floater' Charles Ashleigh offers a different perspective of the effectiveness and centrality of wobbly hoboes: "The proud aristocrats of labor had also stood aloof from [tramp workers], considering them worthless of organizing efforts. And, then, suddenly, lo and behold, the scorned floater evolved his own movement, far more revolutionary and scientific than his skilled brother ever dreamed of!" (in RV, 83) 31 This is not to say that individual wobblies did not read Marx. Along with Jack London novels and specific IWW literature, each Union Hall would carry copies of Capital in its library, and wobblies duty to read up on political economy (cf. Anderson 1961: 187-8 for an IWW it their considered recommended reading list). Reading was a particularly popular hobo pass time. Finding reading material through radical bookshops in 'Hobohemia' (such as'The hobo'and 'The Proletariat'in Chicago), from 'soap box' speakers, itinerant wobblies, and general circulation, hobo interests were eclectic. As well as radical literature, Anderson (1961: 186-7) reports that short story magazines, sex stories, and engineering, railroad, and popular mechanic magazines were particularly popular, as were works on phrenology, palmistry, Christian science, hypnotism, astronomy, and books on jokes, tricks, riddles, and detective stories. Hobos were thus often rather well informed (Parker 1920: 111), and indeed Bruns (1980: 136) suggests a number had professional skills and qualifications, even if they were not used.

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forth' by the railroad and the spread and intensification of industry across the (now largely colonised)territory, and disappearingwith the growth and spreadof mining and manufacturingtowns (that is, an increasingly sedentarypopulation), and technological change(both the increasingmechanisationof labour-intensivejobs, and the automobile, which enableda very different form of mobility (cf. Bruns 1980: Ch. 8)). If capital both requiredand madethe hobo, then concomitantwith his mobility was his autonomous, selective, and adaptive capacity: "Adapting to the strange and new in tools, work, machines,and sceneswas for him a normal consequenceof moving." (Anderson 1961: xiv) Thus, one wobbly writes that: The migratory workers were the most versatile body of men that ever developed on this continent. A tunnel had to dug, a bridge built, a dam constructed. The word went out and the workers with various skills would respond. The painters, riggers, mechanics, printers, teamsters- any trade you name would arrive at the job by boxcar. (Jack Miller, in Bird et al. 1987: 37)

The work that hobostook was both elusive, and, as for most wobblies, unpleasant- far from a positive sourceof identity. But the productive centrality, and concomitantethical fon-nationof the hobo - that which makesthem structurally 'proletarian' - was matched with much deterritorialisationandminor creation. This is evident in their senseof being 'outsiders' or the 'excluded'. If central to production, the itinerants were usually represented as rather sorry marginal and/or dangerous figures, 33 and were frequently arrested as vagrants. But little literature hobos themselves the the a convey outsider situation and wobbly The first four wobbly songs all concerned the life of the hobo. The most Bum'. is daft 'Hallelujah It the these wobbly song of was on untypically popular a not that, as the author claimed, appealed to the 'jungle stiffs' with its "rollicking, devil-maydifferently.

care lilt" (cited in RV: 71). The chorus runs: "Hallelujah, I'm a bum, / Hallelujah, bum again,/ Hallelujah, give us a handout 4 To revive us again." In the songs and other literature there are frequent referencesto complete exclusion and poverty ('It's not living, just saving funeral expenses' was a popular refrain). In one song, 'The Popular Wobbly' by T-Bone Slim (in RV: 85), a 'n-tild manner'd' wobbly experiences a whole host of oppressors from police, judge, jailer, to the bedbug and flea who "go wild, simply wild"

32Hoboswere often knownas 'blanketstiffs' or 'bindlestiffs' because of the bedding they carried on their backs, the only real propertythey owned (and even this was to be burned on each May Day). 3317or example,Carlton Parkerand RexfordTugwell, respectively,suggestthat the hobo was "stamped by the lowest, most miserablelabour conditionsand outlookwhich Americanindustrialismproduces" and was a rather patheticfigure ... wracked with strange diseases and tortured by unrealiseddreams that haunt his soul" (cited in RV*66). Parker (1920) presents a kind of materialist Freudianreading of the IWW as a psychological by-product of the neglected childhood of industrial America" (100), where "inferiority phobia" (46) induces "sublimation activities" (49) and aggressive "inferiority compensation" (51), most notably as inferior work, wanderlust, sabotage, and the strike. The determinism of Parker's reading is such that "it is impossibleto view an I.W.W. as a mobile and independentagent... he is more or less a finished product..." (96). 123

over him. Perhaps, he suggests, even the roses will do the same in his grave. Joe Hill's 'The Tramp' tells a similar story, where in the chorus the hobo is told to 'keep on atramping' by assorted figures who appear in each verse. Even Heaven casts him out, so "In despair he went to Hell. / With the Devil, for to dwellj For the reason he'd no other place to tlgo./ And he said, 'I'm full of sinj So for Christ's sake let me in! '/ But the Devil

said, 'Oh beat it, you're a 'bo. "' (in RV.- 139-40) Yet the hobos did not wallow in their exclusion; in many ways they affirmed it. They were indeedpoor and oppressed,the most zero of people, but there is a clear verve and vibrancy in the culture. Jack London presentsthe hobo, if a little romantically, in termsof Nietzsche'soverman(indeedit his direct experienceof hoboing that induces his unstableethical alignmentof Marx and Nietzsche)(cf. London 1907; Feied 1964). An article in Solidarity in 1914(cited in RV- 66-7) describedtheir situationthus: The nomadic worker of the West embodies the very spirit of the I.W.W. His cheerful cynicism, his frank and outspoken contempt for most of the conventions of bourgeois society, including the more stringent conventions which masquerade under the name of morality, make him an admirable exemplar of the iconoclastic doctrine of revolutionary unionism.

Such an account may be just good romantic propaganda, but descriptions of these attributesof irony, optimism, and verve are not only prevalentin wobbly literature, but also in critical (even hostile) accounts of the movement (though here, whilst these attributes are sometimesseen as a continuation of 'frontier spirit', they are usually diagnosedas an effect of psychological dysfunction (cf. Parker 1920, and note 33)). These accountsshould not hide what must have been a very complex affective and psychologicaldisposition, and inasmuchas I am arguing that the hobo is a proletarian figure, one should be awareof the need for its overcoming (toward which its creations are directed). Nevertheless,the degree to which wobbly literature is written by the wobbles themselvesmakes such accountsinteresting, at least as presenting a desired political and ethical form. This affirmation, however, did not stand alone. The importanceof theseattributesis in their relation to other aspectsof the hobo condition. The above account goes further: His anomalous position, half industrial slave, half vagabond adventurer, leaves him infinitely less servile than his fellow worker in the East. Unlike the factory slave of the Atlantic Seaboardand the Central States,he is most emphatically not 'afraid of his job. ' His mobility is amazing. Bouyantly confident of his ability to 'get by' somehow, he promptly shakes the dust of a locality from his feet whenever the board is bad, or the boss is too exacting, or the work unduly tiresome... (RV: 67)

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In this representationof the hobo's celeritas,skill, mobility, and contemptfor dominant culture is isolatedand linked to a condition of being in an anomalousposition. For the hobo was not simply a romantic wanderer, but simultaneouslya worker, a shirker, a hobohemian,a traveller, and a memberof the IWW, and it was through his position at the points of interrelationof theseforms that he composedhimself. jungle culture, and hobohemia If the hobo was a versatile worker, work was not a popular pastime. In most accounts,tales, and songs of the hobo, one finds him upping andleaving work ratherreadily; if going to anotherjob, it is distantjobs that are popular (rather than local, if better paid ones) (Anderson 1961: 5). In his

Anti-work,

in McGuckin (1987: 11) his first lesson hobo biography Henry recounts wobbly/hobo including judgement based Amongst theft things, a pragmatic on on the other ethics. friend be hobo "Work his likelihood to that conveys something was of capture, relative doneonly as a last resort. As long as you could eat and sleepwarm without it, leave it "[The dislike O'Brien " Dan 'King' suggests sirriilarly a of work was prevalent: alone. hobo] swearsthat when work becomesan art and a joy, he will take off his coat and go to work." (cited in Feied 1964: 17-8)34And, in 'The Hobo's Last Lament', the last words of a dying hobo are for "No tears"becausehe is going to a land "Where beef-stewsgrow 212) Other " 1961: hate (in Anderson Where bushes.... the they word called work. on for jobs have desperate hobos non-existent and rejectingthe notion that they are accounts bums.35 But for the 'proletarian' condition, these two positions are not mutually force is best It the to see anti-work ethic operating as a propulsive perhaps exclusive. job), in in 'class job indeed, from (and terms each of and against war', within each away job. (necessity the the to the of) new wage each of attractor conjunctionwith The nodal points of hobo life between work were the hobo 'jungles' and 'Hobohemia'. Quite a complex machine in itself, the jungle was usually situated near 'bum hobos junctions, to towns, to the of enable edges close enough and skirted railway rD lumps' (ask for handouts),find or steal food, and organise,but not so close as to attract hobo degree The Many jungle report a considerable of attention. ethicsand organisation. poet Harry Kemp describesthejungle in somedetail: It is often a marvel of cooperation. Discarded tin cans and battered boilers are made over into cooking utensils and dishes. Each member contributes to the common larder what he has begged for the day. There is usually in camp someone 34in one of the early sociological approaches to vagrancy, and one which advocates for the socialising and civilising effects of work, Lewis (1907: 611) links anti-worktendenciesto the 'downwardspiral' thesis: 'The love of change, the roving spirit, temporary accident or injury, are causes that tend to make the workmanan accidental vagrant, who is liable to acquire an intention not to work, and become thus an habitual vagrant." 35 Evenwhen hobos self-identify as bums, it is usually only in comparisonto the capitalists as the 'real' bums.One tale called 'The Two Bums' considers hobos alongside capitalists as bums, only the former is 'lighter'and his conditionis caused by the latter. One verse runs: "The bum on the rods is a load so light/ That his weight we scarcelyfeel,/ But it takes the labour of dozens of men/ To furnish the other a meal." (in Milbum 1930: 120-1) 125

whose occupational vocation is that of cook, and who takes upon himself, as his share of the work, the cooking of meals. Stews are on great favour in trampdom and especially do they like strong, scalding coffee. Usually the procuring of food in such a camp is reduced to a system such as would interest economists and sociologists. One tramp goes to the butcher shop for meat, one goes to the bakers for bread, and so forth. And when one gang breaks up, its members are always very careful to leave everything in good order for the next comers. They will even leave the coffee grounds in the pot for the next fellow so that he can make 'seconds' if he needs to. These things are part of tramp etiquet, as is the obligation each new arrival is under to bring, as he comes, some wood for the fire. (cited in RV: 67)

Anderson (1961: 20-1) lists seven main jungle crimes, including lighting fires at night (which might attract the police), robbing other hobos while they slept, wasting food, not washing up the pots, damaging any equipment, and not rustling wood for the fire. Relations in the jungles appear to have been based around news and some impromptu entertainment and song, where intimate attention to ethical form was concomitant with the maintenance of personal anonymity and temporary, though not unproductive, relationS.36 If the jungle was the temporary camp, 'Hobohemia' was a longer stay nodal point (especially in winter). Chicago (the largest railroad centre), or 'Big Chi', as Bruns (1980: 162) describes it, was the hobo Mecca: "For the 'boes all roads, it seemed, led to Chicago. " As Anderson's (1961) complex territorial and social map of hobohemia unfolds, one is left with little doubt that Marx and Engels would have found it a swamp of lumpen deviation. Hobohemia was an isolated part of Chicago, subdivided in four (though known West Madison Street marked a core), with a 'main the stem' all as parts, 37 'Loop', and was made up of 'flop houses', cheap meal houses, and saloons, central where "swarm[ed]" a "polyglot population" of bootleggers, dope peddlers, professional gamblers, 'jack rollers', drunks, 'lady barbers', 'bathing beauties', vagabond poets, nonhobo workers seeking a cosmopolitan night out, bohemians, and so on (1961: 5-9). 36 See Bird eta/ (1987: 30), Bruns (1980: 31), and Anderson (1961: after 10) for photographs of jungles. In the latter, a strangely empty jungle is captioned "A jungle camp - the 'bos' hid from the camera". Anderson (1961: 21-25) has a valuable first-hand account of 'a day in the jungles'. 37 Each area, and its sub areas has a particular constituency: 'West Madison' 'slave market' of employment agencies, and home of the more down and out, and petty criminal, 'Bum Park' -a place for sleeping and paper reading, 'Crumb Hill'- the same, but with more drunks, 'Bughouse Square' - the 'Latin Quarter of hobohemia, where bohemia and hobohemia meet. As one may guess, Anderson's account is extensive indeed (no doubt "the most far-reaching examination of Hobohemia ever undertaken. " (Bruns 1980: 183)). He himself had an immigrant and hobo background and lived in hobohemia whilst doing his research. The research itself was inspired by a meeting with the 'hobo surgeon' Ben Reitman, and written whilst a graduate student in Sociology at the University of Chicago. In the context of the empiricism of the Chicago School it is interesting that Anderson describes his research as not the kind of 'participant observation' where one would "descend into the pit, assume a role there, and later ascend to brush off the dust." (1961: xiii) Rather it was immanent to his "exit", a way of "getting by' (and he deliberately uses the wobbly term) on his way out, into the academy. Perhaps not unrelated to these conditions of production, the text has a strange oscillation between a love of detail that at times approaches affirmation, and an insistence on the paucity and poverty of hobo culture (such that each chapter ends in a list of policy suggestions to cure a problem). This is in interesting contrast to Parker's (1920) only slightly earlier research, which, whilst it claims a certain intimacy with its object against 'detached academic' observation, actually mobilises a most transcendent and determinist theoretical framework to capture the IWW as an always already foreclosed tragic product of an immature society (cf. note 33). 126

Unlike Marx's description of the lumpen of Paris, however, Anderson has a keen sense of the dynamic of hobohemia. This dynamic has multiple causes, but is most essentially linked to its condition as a centre for hobo workers. It is not just that, because of this, more money circulates, but that also a cosmopolitanism is brought in through the complexity and movement of hobo culture. He thus contrasts the mass of (propulsive) employment agencies in hobohemia to the similar numbers of (more inert) rescue missions in New York's Bowery (1961: xvi). Hobohemia was functional both to capital (as a labour exchange, or 'slave market'), and to the consolidation and multiplication of hobo styles. As well as having bookshops (such as 'The Hobo' and 'The Proletariat'; the latter also provided mail for hobos) and from 1915 the lWW Head Quarters collection and storage services (enabled largely from the membership dues of migratory workers (Bruns 1980: 157)), it was where the hobo arts of 'getting by' and 'killing time' were honed and spread. Listening to the speechesof 'Soap Boxers' was a constant activity. Though Anderson (1961: 219-20) describes the speeches as "like a game with a limited number of pieces disciplines limited the tricks, moves", wealth ethics, of of styles, number and a (economics, biology, psychology, sociology, class war, free love), that he describes (216-229), as well as their popularity, make it clear that there is considerable difference in the repetition. If the jungles and hobohemia were hobo nodal points, then the trajectories were defined by railroads under the impetus of possible jobs, radical actions,

Dromomania

'rattlers' by Hobos the the riding move would around country or changing seasons. Zn

(freight trains), inside or on the 'rods' (drawrods beneath the freight carriages) by 'flipping' (boarding a moving train) on the outskirts of towns. According to Parker (1920: 121),railroad companiesestimatedthat therewere half a million hoboes riding the fraction (this being time one only a of the total number). Though they would rails at any sometimeshave help from railroad workers, mostly it was a complicatedand dangerous practicesincethey were up againstnot only railroad police, but also hijackers who would extractmoneyor throw them off the train, so 'greasing the rails' (cf. Murphy in Bird et 23,964 According 46). Parker (1920: 121), 1987: between 1905 1901 to nearly and al. trespassers(largely tramps and hobos) were killed on the railroads, and over 25,236 injured. Nevertheless,freight riding was the only means of movement, and the YWW madeefforts to preventthe hijacking with 'flying squads', who had beenknown to cut faces hijackers 'IWW' the they caught. on of any and scar Though freight riding is often presentedas a necessity to be avoided (it was it is dangerous), also frequently explainedin terms of 'wanderlust', and what certainly 'dromomania'. 38 One wobbly describes'riding the rails' as a way z: 1 as was pathologised 38'Dromomaniacs'was the name given to deserters in the ancien regime, and in psychiatry, to compulsive walkers (Virilio 1986:153). If the hobo wobblies were dramomaniacs it was not in terms of the 'pure speed' 127

of experiencingthe 'grandeurand beauty' of the West, suggestingthat "That's the feeling we all had. I think that's one of the reasonswe kept on moving..." (Archie Green cited in RV: 7 1). Another 19 year old "does not know why he travels except that he gets a thrill out of it... He has tried [to settledown] a few times but the monotony of it made him so restless"(Anderson 1961:83). The famous 'hobo surgeon' (and sometimelover of EmmaGoldman),Ben Reitman, expressedhis ambivalentattitudeto freight riding by self-pathologising his love of movement as a "neuropathic craziness, a fugue, 'ambulatoryautomatism."' As Bruns (1980: 171) put it: "It was his hobby, his sport, " Whateverthe reason, the mobility of the hobo is reflected in a rather and his disease. individualisedpractice. There were virtually no women hobos until the 1930s (Feied 1964: 14), and the vast majority of hobos were single (Anderson 1961: 4). Homosexuality appearsto have been quite widespread (Anderson 1961: 144; Parker 1920: 73), and it seemsas if it developed(and was affirmed) in a form appropriatefor hobo culture, as a temporary'uncomplicated'meansto intimacy (Anderson 1961: 148). As Anderson (1961) describes in detail, hobos had a wealth of means, techniques,grafts for 'getting by' whilst on the road, themselvesoften described as Hobo songs often give practical and political information. In 'The Suckers Sadly Gather' by RichardBrazier, the practiceof theft is pitted againstthe 'suckers' that buy non-existentjobs. Oneverseruns like this: 'work'.

The Hoboes quietly gather 'round a distant water tank, While the Bulls [police] are safely resting home in bed, And they sadly sit and ponder on the days when they ate pie, And occasionally some moldy punk instead. But now they're living high when a chicken coop is nigh, For the rancherssend them chicken every day, So to the jungles they skidoo to dine on chicken stew Where the silvery Colorado wends its way. (in RV: 73) In another story Tightline Johnson breaks into a wealthy house, justifying himself along the lines of jungle ethics where a hobo would rightly help "himself to the grub, livin' strictly up to the code by whitlin' shavin's and washin' the dishes before mushin' on next mornin'. " (William Akers in RV: 89)

Hobo sang and hieroglyphics As is evident already, the hobos developed a describe to their various practicesand experiences. In an index on the slang particular languageof the migratory worker Kornbluh (1987: 405-8) lists some240 different terms, ZD that Virilio (1986) describes as the essence of late capital, but more what he calls a "revolutionary wandering" (1986: 5) that was immanent to a series of radical practices, of constructive planes, as much as capital flows, such that speed was part of composition (cf. ATR 559 and Plateau 12 generally for a delineation of Virilio's different forms of speed, which, whilst they are indeed always implicated in each other, also tend toward different forms of composition). 128

including: 'Angel food' - mission preaching; 'Carrying the banner' avoiding the expenseof a bed at night by walking, pretendingto wait for a train and so on; 'Cat' -a worker well fitted in with someoccupationalsubculture such as 'hep cat', or, sometimes short for 'sab cat' of sabotage,as in 'turn the cat loose'; 'Coll' - deluxe hobo dish of mashedpotatoes,onions and liverwurst; 'Crum' - louse; 'Gay cat' - new hobo; 'Glom' to catchonto, as in to 'glom a gump', to steal a chicken; 'Pearl diver' - dishwasher; 'Pot latch' - grandreunionor social; 'Snipe' - sectionhand,or cigarettebutt, and as a verb, to retrieve a cigarette butt; 'Stakebound' - having accumulateda sum of money on a temporaryjob and feeling free to leave it'. As Anderson (1961: 99) points out, the languagewas in continual flux. Extensive use of a term would lead to variation in meaning,and subdivisionand further invention of terms. At the extremeshe cites (1961: 100-1) a list by 'A No. V of 47 types of tramp, categorisedby everything from their practices (Troper stiff' - considers manual toil the acme of disgrace; Throniker' hoboedwith cooking utensils),to their physical coherence('Peg' -a train rider who has lost a foot; 'Wingy' - one or both arms). It seemsas though the hobos also developed ... a form of hieroglyphics. Symbols would be left at assortedsites of note by passing hobosto indicate such things as placesgood for handouts(a cross on a gate, or parallel lines on a station),hostile towns (two semicircleswith dots for eyes),and restaurantsthat offer food in exchangefor dish washing (a plate with knife and fork) (cf. for illustrations, Anderson 1961: 15; Bruns 1980:32; RV* 86). Hobo/wobblies

The lWW madeconsiderableeffort at organising hobos, and though involvement in initially Wheatland Hop Fields' their the after slow, very was recruitment Riot in 1913 (cf. Parker's (1920: 169-99) report to the Governor of California), membershipincreaseddramatically(andenabledthe founding of the Agricultural Workers Organisation). Whilst, evenat its high point, only a minority of hoboswere in the IWW, it was by far the most popular of hobo organisations(cf. Anderson 1961: Ch. 16). But for two main reasonsit is best not to think of the hobo/lWW relation simply in terms of numbers(of almost 'converts'). First, the relation between the organisation and hobo culture is less one of identity than becoming. Whilst wobbly rebel activity marked a changeof composition for the hobo, many lWW practices were formed through the structural and ethical practices of hobo culture (such that Anderson (1961: 230-1) suggeststhat "[The IWW] was conceivedon the 'stem', and cradled and nurtured by the floating workers"). Second,wobbly membershipwas quite a looseand fluctuating thing, relatedto particular events and situations. There are reports of wobblies effectively forcing membershipon hobos (the IWW red card enablingthem to enter certain jungles frowned is though trains; this there certain was ride no doubt and upon officially), and that membershipdues were central to the organisation(unlike the other prominent hobo less the radical InternationalBrotherhood Welfare Association, which was organisation, bank rolled, and largely controlled by James Eads How).

But membership is not best 129

All in 'direct' this way. reportsmakethe casethat on the whole hobos relatedto the seen organisationin a loose fashion, joining during periods or sites of radical action, and letting duesandinvolvementwane at other times (indeed dues tendednot to accumulate, but emergeas momentarystrike funds).39 Being a wobbly was not, then, an either/or question,but more of a fluid relation, dependingon situation. Thus, though of course it had many permanentcore militants, the lWW as a mass movementwas not so much a fixed body, but a seriesof intense'swells' from a milieu where individuals may or may not call themselveswobblies, or be permanentmembers. Parker (1961: 115) conveys this: In the history of American labour there has appeared no organisation so subject to fluctuation in membership and strength. Several times it seemed on the point of joining the Knights of Labour in the graveyard of labour class movements, but it flare force. by appears again as an active strike some energised

This senseof a 'swell', and rather anonymous, even mysteriousmovementis evident in is "... It Senator destroy One the said: you cannot organisation.... opinion. popular it. it is. is You You do It know cannot reach not at. not where somethingyou cannotget in writing. It is not in anything else. It is a simple understandingbetweenmen, and they " in RV: 255) (cited it of existence whatever. any evidence upon without act To give some examplesof IWW/hobo relations, one of the most successful wobbly unions,the Agricultural Workers Organisation(AWO, foundedin 1914) invented 40 based Unlike conventionalorganisation practices. migratory on of recruitment a system based around a particular stable territory, the recruitment of migratory workers was delegate 'job Essentially invention by the the system'. a group of mobile of enabled in late Autumn Spring Mexican border, in the the at and end would start early organisers, in the Canadianprovinces, recruiting new members, collecting dues, selling literature, passingon news and techniques,organising strikes and so on. As Georgakas(in Bird et it, in delegate. " 8) local 1987: "[al hat the puts could exist or satchelof a mobile al. Anderson (1961: 234) describesin more detail how the more skilled agitators would first 'official agitator' would arrive and merely 'fan the the three wave a strategy: operate flamesof discontent',making no attemptat organisation,the second,'pioneer organiser', forming the of work a local beforebeing dismissed,and the third, 'real organiser', started would work more subtly and quietly at detailedorganisation,often only becomingknown to the employeroncedemandswere first made. The characteristicwobbly practices of street-cornerpreaching and song also hobos, band, J. H. Walsh the the travelling when with organised a wobbly originated 39 Anderson (1961: 232) suggests that probably only a third or a quarter of those who called themselves wobblies were in good standing.

130

'Overalls Brigade', that, dressedin black shirts, denim overalls, and red kerchiefs, toured the Northwest around 1907-8, parodying Salvation Army hymns and popular songs to attractworkersto street-cornermeetings. The songs were printed on pocket-sizedcards and sold for 10 cents. Around 1909this was expandedto becomethe first wobbly song book (RV: 54-5). The Overalls Brigade was initially formed en route to the 1908 Conventionwhere its vocal enthusiasmfor direct action is said to have helped tip the (Bird et al. 1987:35). the tendency conventionagainst political action Cý Sabotage Of all the wobbly deterritorialisations of worker identity, little is more prominent, yet also elusive than 'sabotage'. 41 If wobbly composition can be seen in terms of minor processesacross the plane of class (rather than 'identity'), in sabotage we find a correlate in 'direct action' tactics. It links the aspects of culture, variability, work, and immediate economic goals together, whilst being immanent to anti-identitarian, or minor processes. The signs of sabotage - the black cat and the sabot (wooden clog) - crop-up throughout wobbly literature, song, cartoon and silent agitator sticker in varied fashion. This is not to say that sabotage can not be initially defined. Conventional wisdom is that the word derives from the act of French workers throwing their sabots into the works of the machine. This is, however, a little inaccurate. Erriile Pouget (1913), who first introduced the term to the syndicalist movement (at the General Confederation of Labour, CGT, Toulouse conference in 1897), traces the word to the expression "de travail e.V&utj 6conane et coups de sabots"' - 'to work clumsily as if by sabot blows', or '... as if derived from a wearing sabots' (Pouget 1977: 3; 1913: 37). This in turn, he suggests, tý Scottish practice of 'Go cannie', meaning to 'Go slow' (and he cites an English pamphlet from 1895 that sought to popularise the tactiC).42 Pouget's point is not that the practice from Balzac of its use in the 1831 Lyon riots, (he an account new cites was particularly and Gurley Flynn (1993: 10) calls it an instinctive defence), but that it was not until the

40 According

to Bird et aL, in the first year of its existence the AWO enrolled 3,000 members, increasing to 20,000 or 70,000 in 1917 and 1918 (Bird et al. and Kornbluh (1988) respectively), with the help of 300 mobile delegates. 41 Georgakas (in Bird et aL 1987: 6) suggests that the ambiguous use of the term sabotage resembled the 60 s civil rights movement's use of "the vague but menacing phrase 'by any means necessary"'. The difference, however, is that sabotage was linked rather concretely to the plane of work, and, probably for reasons not unrelated to this, has not been so easily incorporated within dominant cultural catch-phrases. 42 Fred Thompson (in RV 37) offers a slightly different inflection, suggesting that'saboteur' was a general term for peasants (still wearing wooden shoes whilst industrial workers were wearing leather) who were On return to work the workers would mimic the clumsy work of the frequently used as strike-breakers. saboteur. Following this, Gurley Flynn (1993: 11) cites a circular sent to all Scottish dockers after losing a strike in 1889: "The employers like the scabs, they have always praised their work, they have said how much superior they were to us, they have paid them twice as much as they ever paid us: now let us go back on the docks determined that since those are the kind of workers they like and that is the kind of work they endorse we will do the same thing. We will let the kegs of wine go over the docks as the scabs did. We will do the work just as clumsily, as slowly, as destructively, as the scabs did. And we will see how long our employers can stand that kind of work. " Apparently in this case the employers did not stand it for long, and the workers won most of the demands (that the strike had failed to achieve).

131

late 1890s that it was introduced into the fonnal labour movement. 43 From here first in in Solidarity (June 4 1910) IWW, the the word appears where sabotageemerged in the context of strike solidarity. 44 From here on, sabotage became hotly debated in it directly Between 1914 1918 and was circles. recommended by the and public wobbly lWW (but the practice extends before and after these dates in less formal ways - it seems as though the lWW ceased advocating sabotage for fear of prosecution). The Socialist Party of America, on the other hand, condemned the practice (as have all socialist parties that I know of) and included in their 1912 convention the 'Section Six' clause, that "any member who opposes political action or advocates crime, sabotage or other methods of violence as a weapon of the working class to aid in its emancipation, shall be expelled from membership of the party." (cited in Pouget 1913: 5)45 Work-based tactics Sabotage was particularly suited to the wobblies for a number of As I 'stripped down' it fitted First their to to work. attitude perfectly of all, reasons. have said above, work was a site of 'class war', a meeting point of two fundamentally identity in-between that no plane of compromise and possible produced opposed camps formation. As we saw in the Preanible, there was no identity founded on 'A fair day's wages for a fair day's work', but simply a complete 'Abolition of the wage system'. But, if work was a 'differend', in Lyotard's (1988) sense, one side had the ability to define the terrain; workers had to work. 46 The only route for the wobblies was, then, to push a particular tendency in the regime of work. This tendency was characteristically "No better (under hours, 'Fewer terms the wages and conditions' maxim: more simple: 'fair 147)). final" (Bruns 1980: With than tendency a a rather with an employer are demand', the lWW propagandised for anything from the eight hour day, to the six hour, labour day day, four four hour all and maintained of refusing week, a policy even

43 By focusing on the conjunction of sabotage and the organised labour movement I am in no way seeking to to valorise its 'organised' over 'unorganised' use. In his classic and influential study of resistance slavery, Rawick (1972) has shown how important sabotage can be for those for whom formal organisation is a near impossibility (and through this one can see how leftist condemnation of sabotage as ignoble and of political practice). primitive can be closely linked to Eurocentric and rather majoritarian understandings The effects of sabotage on accumulation will always be felt by capital (whether it is part of the composition of a movement, or a particular strategy or goal, such as a pay increase, or as a means of passing the is In any case, it would be wrong to suggest that sabotage outside of formal organisations time). For discussion of these points, which are largely beyond the scope of this chapter, see 'unorganised'. Kelley (1994); World generally; Echanges et Mouvernent (1979); Gidgit Digit (1982) and Processed Midnight Notes generally; and Sprouse (1992) (though these are only a few references to what is a persistent theme in communist and countercultural writings). 44 "[W]orkers in other firms where the material for the strike-bound firm was made, 'sabotaged' their work to such perfection" that the striking worker's demands were granted (Solidarity cited in RV 37). 45 it was this condemnation that is the expressed reason given by Charles H. Kerr for the translation and publication of Pouget's Sabotage into English. 46 Lyotard presents this example of work: "[C]ontracts and agreements between economic partners do has had to not prevent - on the contrary, they presuppose - that the labourer or his or her representative the and will have tD speak of his or her work as though it were the temporary cession of a commodity, 'service' which he or she putatively is required by the idiom in which the litigation is owns. This ... regulated ('bourgeois' social and economic law). " (§12)

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contracts. Contracts were seen as means of producing and supporting differentials betweenworkers,andpreventingsolidarity action.47 Wobbly work-basedpolitics tended, then, toward practical and pragmaticforms concernedwith the ability to pursuethis trajectory in and againstwork, and nothing else. "Right and wrong" one wobbly claims (in an essayexplaining why he took up a pieceratejob - something that the IWW discouraged)"is a matter of gettin' results" (Ralph Winsteadin RV: 283). This immanentconception of ethics (following Deleuze 1997a: 126-35, more a question of 'decision' and 'combat' than transcendentJudgernent') is repeatedin lWW propaganda.For example: As a revolutionary organisation the Industrial Workers of the World aims to use any and all tactics that will get the results sought with tile least expenditure of time an energy. The tactics used are determined solely by the power of the organisation to make good in their use. The question of 'right' and 'wrong' does not concern us. (cited in Bruns 1980: 145) Beyond

'the strike'

This practical orientation was the motive for Pouget's (1913) Sabotage pamphlet; to elucidate a new workers 'direct action' tactic. "Of all things revolutionary, so far", the report to the CGT on boycott and sabotage wrote, "we have as yet found and applied only the strike - and it is the strike alone that we continually resort to." (1913: 49). The strike was an old technology. Linebaugh and Rediker (1990: 240) describe its origin as far back as 1768 when sailors in London ports collectively decided to 'strike' the sails of their ships, bringing commerce to a halt. What is more, for the wobblies, the strike had certain draw-backs. Sabotage is best understood as an intensification of the strike; a manifestation of its 'sense' rather than its timeless structure. As one definition put it, to sabotage was to "strike and stay in the shop" (Frank Bohn 'Some Definitions: Direct Action - Sabotage' in RV. 53). There was no general critique of the strike tactic (and it remained a mainstay of wobbly practice), but an awarenessthat the strike was neither enough in itself (evidenced by the very emergence of a new tactic at all) and that it was at times counterproductive. Seen in the context of craft unionism, the strike had a divisive function. The ebb and flow of craft union workers striking, returning to work, accepting arbitration, and signing different contracts with non-interference clauses was such that the strike became part of the production of craft identity in and around work, not part of the process of the refusal of work. The strike can also be somewhat destructive of radical energies. Trautmann for how "a describes tremendous epidemic of strikes a few years ago, conflicts example 47A 1911essay by WilliamTrautman('Why Strikesare Lost' in RV 18-24) provides a damningcritique of craft autonomyand the respectof contracts. He argues that, in his example, the contract enabled craftunionjustificationof the continuedoperation of industryduring a strike that it itself had called, since only individualgroups of contractedworkers could strike. The wobbly song 'The Big Strike' put the case thus: "Why do you make agreementsthat divide you when you fight/ And let the bosses bluff you with the

133

discontentfinding its outlet in vehementeruptions" ended "only expressiveof a general rn with a pitiful exhaustionof vitality... " (in RV. 18) As a little aside,this problematisationof the strike is the start of a marginal theme in communistmovements. In the 1970s Zerzan (1974), for example, made a convincing triad of 'organisedlabour' casefor the destructivenatureof the union-management-strike and the 'spectacleof union strikes' (cf. Echangeset Mouvenient 1979). One examplehe providesfrom Brecher(1972) is particularly illuminating for the sourceof the discussion by in Wall Street Journal General Motors United Auto the representatives of articles and Workers. After reporting the discussionthe paperwrites: Surprisingly, among those who do understand the need for strikes to ease intraunion pressuresare many company bargainers ... They are aware that union leaders may need such strikes to get contracts ratified and to get re-elected. In fact, some company bargainersfigure strikes actually help stabilise fragmented unions and, by allowing workers to vent their 'strike need', actually buy peace in future years. (cited in Brecher 1972: 280)

The Indian collective Kamunist Kranti/Collectivities have more recently addressed this question. Through an analysis of a series of Indian strikes they have taken the critique of the strike as far as to deny outright its efficacy for the workers, seeing it instead as a managerial tool (Kamunist Kranti 1998; cf. also 1997,1998a; Goldner 1998). Kamunist Kranti's critique is particularly interesting in so far as it places strikes in the context of relations of identity appropriate to unions, traditional leftism, and managementwhere control in work and the elevation of what they call 'big' movements coincide. 48 Making the case for a 'non-linear connectivity' of workers' self-activity (rather than identity), Kamunist Kranti (1998) argue that 'big' mass movements produce 'direct confrontations' and 'mobilisation' of the media, personalities, parliamentarians, and so on. This replaces the transversal self-activity of workers with military-style operations that lead to defeat, disillusionment, passivity on the side of workers, but identity and control for management, trade union, and left

a spectacular arena of

institutions.49 contract's 'sacred right'? / Why stay at work when other crafts are battling with the foe; / You all must stick together, don't you know?... " (cited in RV 36) 48 In their A Ballad Against Work (1997: 59) Kamunist Kranti characterise their "collectivities" not as identities, but as having "neither a Centre nor a periphery" and "a multifacetedness that could be called faceless". In another piece they suggest that this composition functions not as one of 'equals' on a but 'not as similarity, as unequals' of differential practice and experience (Kamunist of plane universal Kranti 1998). 491t is worth citing Kamunist Kranti (1998: 17) at length: "Big implies mobilisation on a mass scale. Conducting and directing committees are intrinsic to such events. Seemingly a large number of people become active, but actually it is representatives and leaders who think, decide and issue orders whereas numbers at large have to march to the tunes trumpeted. Mobilisations by representatives are for representatives. Defeats are camouflaged as victories in order to legitimise the re-creations of these representational forms. Repeated experiences with 'big' have led wage-workers at large to keep aloof from them. This is often characterised as passivity and apathy of wage-workers. 134

This asideis intendedto illustrate a trajectorythat in the IWW is more latent (since the strike holdsconsiderableimportance),and that continuesthe critique of links between identity around work and tactics that I am suggesting lies at the core of FWW composition. Returning to the wobblies, we come back to the idea that sabotage embodies an intricate tactic in the overall 'tendency' against work. To extend one wobbly's proposition,they were "faced with a condition of things, not a stateof mind" or an abstractideal or identity, "and the only way for to deal with conditionsis by the use of tactics,not by using a line of appealsto be good", or a regimentedand a-historicalset of sanctionedsocialist tactics. Sabotageis not, then, a reflection of a plane of workers' identity. Ratherit is immanentto the structural situations and politics of the IWW. This is evident in Pouget's (1913: 59) argumentthat sabotageis "derived from the capitalist [as] " human labour More specifically, as Davis (1975) has commodity. conceptionof ... linked is intimately to the condition of mass semi- and unskilled the tactic argued, employmentin emergingTaylorist production. Thus, rather than a luddism, or outright destruction, sabotageis almost always presentedas a flexible, innovative engagement 50 following Gurley Flynn's (1993) definition of sabotage the work, of with particularities as"the consciouswithdrawal of the worker's efficiency". One had to be a 'cat' to be a saboteur. For example,JoeHill wrote that: Striking on the job is a science and should be taught as such. It is extremely interesting on account of its many possibilities. It develops mental keenness and inventive genius in the working class and is the only known antidote for the infamous 'Taylor System'. ('How to Make Work for the Unemployed'

in RV: 142-

3)

Rather than an heroic, identity-forming walk-out, the wobblies argued, then, that the workers' best weapon was more often 'striking on the job'. 51 There are countless testimoniesto the effectivenessof this tactic which enablesworkers to continue drawing pay, preventlay-offs and direct confrontationswith the police (who were far from averse When wage-workers daily routine oppositions become too much for a management or when a management has to go in for a major restructuring, retrenchment, wage-cut or intensification, it often resorts to spectacular work stoppage. Since production enterprise is no longer the private property of individuals (i.e. capitalist), prolonged stoppage of production is no longer a question of life and death for a management as it was for a capitalist. When necessary, managements resort to strikes, lockouts, work suspensions, suspension of operations by creating factory-wide, area-wide issues with the help of representatives. " 50 Or as Pouget (1913: 32-3) puts it, if overplaying the point a little: "Sabotage can be practised only by the most intelligent and the most skilful workers who know thoroughly the technique of their trade, as Sabotage does not consist in a clumsy and stupid destruction of the instruments of production, but in a delicate and highly skilful operation which puts the machine out of commission only for a temporary period. The worker that undertakes such a task must know thoroughly the anatomy of the machine which he is going to vivisect... " 51 Dashiell Hammett (1982: 12) shows a subtle take on wobbly awareness of the difference between effective tactics and historic (and tragic) identity when in Red Harvest an lWW organiser's advice to use sabotage rather than go on all out strike is disregarded for not being "active enough" (though in practice, the strike is used to break the movement). The narrator says, disparagingly, they "wanted to put themselves on the map, make labour history. " (Whether the use of insider knowledge (about the date of a return to work), for financial speculation was a popular wobbly practice is another matter. ) 135

to using guns), maintain anonymity, and yet cause considerable upset for the employer so encouraging him to meet the demands. Joe Hill thus advised: The best way to strike is to 'strike on the job'. First present your demands to the ... boss. If he should refuse to grant them, don't walk out and give the scabs a chance to take your places. No, just go back to work as though nothing had happened and try the new method of warfare. (in RV: 142) From this initial premise, sabotage characteristics has a number of characteristics. First of all it is anonymous. It is something that is carefully and selectively taken up, but unnamed and unidentified. In his rather romantic

Anonymity

and proliferating

turn of phrase, Pouget (1913: 36) writes that "[i]t is present everywhere and everywhere invincible... ": "There can be no injunction against it. No policeman's club. No rifle diet. No prison bars. It cannot be starved into submission. It cannot be discharged. It cannot be blacklisted. " It is "worse than a pestiferous epidemic... " (73) The mysterious, almost in itself is literature. black The also celebrated wobbly cat of sabotage mystical nature was already "an old symbol for malignant and sinister purposes, foul deeds, bad luck, in RV: 59), and the wobblies frequently conjure it Green " (Archie cited and witchcraft... better One for force. "They'd that poem suggests, not example, up as an almost abstract throw 'wobs' in jail/ And leave the kitten free. " ('The Kitten in the Wheat' in RV: 61) That sabotagewas a tactic of an unnamed collectivity is further suggested by the fact that it seems as though no wobbly was ever prosecuted for the practice (RV: 38). If it is anonymous, sabotage also offers of a proliferating series of practices and tricks. Since the particulars are determined by individual conditions and knowledges, Pouget (1913: 101) suggests that the possible forms are as infinite as "an endless rosary". The intricacy of the practice is exemplified with one of numerous sabotage variants: 'following the book of rules'. It is clear that the time needed to comply with safety rules and regulations is not compatible with the timetable of production. Yet if an accident individualisation book 'the the of rules' enables occurs, of responsibility to a particular (or itself). Deliberate and the than the production rather employer process employee responsible attention to the rule book thus operates as a break on production, utilising instituted regulations against that particular work regime (cf. Gurley Flynn 1993: 20-22). Other examples include: over-adulteration or under-adulteration, such as drug clerks ingredients (harming better the producer rather than the consumer); 'open quality using mouthed sabotage', such as leaking information about insanitary conditions; 'accidentally' diverting trains, as Haywood reported of French train workers (Pouget 1913: 55); and running streetcar services without collecting fares. Pouget (99) recounts how a group of striking fur factory workers reduced the size of the patterns by a third so that all orders completed whilst they were on strike would be wasted (and the patterns could easily be readjusted once they returned). In one court case the flexibility of the term enabled a defendant to twist the argument away from the worker's criminality by arguing 136

integral to the operationof capitalismas the everydaycapitalist that sabotage was actually rý 52cooking bad food, built-in obsolescence,general practicesof using shoddy materialS, cutting-cornersand so on, that profit margins could hinge upon (cf. Pouget Ch. 6; and 'Testimony of J. T. Doran' in RV: 61-3). Gurley Flynn even includes workers' family4:ý as at one with the spirit of sabotage('reducing the supply of producers'), and planning indeed,asTax (1980) shows,a class-basedreproductiveand sexualpolitics was a central aspectof feminist wobbly activity (when mainstreamfeminism shunnedit in favour of the suffragequestion). The point hereis that sabotageoffered a very useful tool for the wobbly tendency for 'fewer hours, more wagesand better conditions'. In using the work processagainst itself, sabotagedevelopeda very different relation betweenskill and knowledge than that requiredby work, and drew out rebel momentsin the community without naming him or her, so adding to the plane of the movementand its intensity, without contributing to a fixed identity. It alsoopenedup new technologyof collective action,that infused wobbly culture and beyond. The practice continued throughout modem political history, sometimesas an addition to the strike, other times as a meansof relieving stress and boredom at work as it moves into counterculturaltendencies. The San Franciscogroup ProcessedWorld, for example, has specialisedin spreading anecdotesand analysis of office worker sabotage,in what they call the 'contradiction' - though what I have argued is the natureof the minor proletariancondition - of "favouring workplace organising on the one hand,while on the other handadvocatingthe abolition of work." (1991: 237)

Conclusion I have arguedthat the IWW was a 'class' movementwhich sought to unite all workers, startingwith the unskilled andthe most marginalised(and including those usually seenas outsideof the realm of production, such as domesticworkers). It emergedfrom a new configuration of the 'mass worker', as capitalist production took flight from the formationsof the 'skilled worker'. It also emergedas a composition of the flows of diverse peoplesand cultures acrossthe plane of America. The IWW's class-form was intendedto overcomethe divisions, racisms,xenophobia,and trade identitiesof the trade union movement,and to composea group capableof combatingcapitalism and work as a whole. Politics was to begin at the 'site of production', for it was here that workers were 'cramped', and identities and practices formed which were compatible with the maintenanceof capitalist relations. However, this focus of politics on the terrain of less a reduction than an amplification of politics, a 'broadest possible' was production definition. It was an incitementto political activity not in an autonomoussphere, but throughoutthe experienceof work, in all its varied manifestations.

52'Dynamiting' silk (mixing it with destructive chemicals to increase its apparent quality for sale, before it rots quickly afterwards) was a popular production practice highlighted by the IWW. 137

The IWW's plane of composition emerged between a fulfilled future identity ('we shall be all'), and a cramped immanent practice ('we have been nought'). This, however, followed not a gradual improvement of conditions, a 'progress'. Rather, the future-form operated as a mobilisation mechanism immanent to the particular practices of politics in the present. The rnilieu of practice for the struggle against work was always a cramped space. The wobblies sought no plenitude in work; even labour contracts were refused, since they were seen as means of carving out a territory and a legitimate identity that institutional ised political antagonism.

It was the way that the wobblies treated this cramped space that minor effects were produced. In their composition the identities of worker, American, Citizen, immigrant, minority were problematised. But the class-form of the One Big Union did not subsume difference. The particular conditions, cultures, and work sites of different minorities were seen to be the site of political innovation (in a composition that was so diverse and varied that the president of the AFL called it "a in (cited The Wobblies 1979)). The emphasis on fungus labour the movement" radical on in inflected form the organisational was of the IWW as a 'swellparticular experience type' organisation that was based less on formal rules and structures, than direct practice. The organisation was thus formed through the 'pack-form' of the solidarity/rebel couplet, where particular practices, creations, or anomalous moments were seen to emerge in various situations (not determined by fixed leaders), to be supported by, and distributed across the movement as a whole. I explored wobbly cultural production (literature, songs, cartoons) as a process of the complication of rather simple 'little intrigues' that were, in a sense, collectively authored and distributed, and that combined political practice, theory, propaganda, irreverent humour. dispersal, In particular the chapter tactic and morale-building, focused on one group, the migrant worker or hobo. The hobo was a most contemporary line of flight of that stage of capital. His culture and mode of life developed through the he But travel. of work was neither an affirmation of mobile work, or a and experience romantic wanderer or 'outsider'. Rather, work, travel, ghetto living, political practice and IWW membership combined together to produce a series of complex cultural forms; many of which infused the IWW as a whole. Last, the chapter considered the wobbly tactic of sabotage, as a form of practical engagement in and against work; a kind of 'striking on the job'. The tactic was noteworthy because it was functional to the IWW's mode of composition which was not concerned with forming a fixed 'historic' identity, but simply with having effect for the politics of more pay and less work. To this end, sabotage could be practiced at all 'points of production' in different ways depending on situation, by anyone, whilst anonymity could be maintained (such that the practice, and its signs, the black cat and sabot, took on an almost mystical character, as a practice of a individual than more of movement subjects). Sabotage also enabled political action without loss of pay (as a conventional strike necessitated). In these aspects, sabotage was a tactic that overcame some of the problems of 'the strike', which was used by the 138

distinctions, labour be dangerous to trade and could movement maintain union orthodox in drawn-out long disputes). (exhausting energies workers' and counterproductive If the IWW was a minor proletarian movementof the mass worker, the next in first is the two minor composition and refusal of work a the explore of which chapter different European the of a configuration of with emergence and movement, more recent, 'socialised factory' in 'social the the worker'. and work,

139

Chapter

7

The Social

Factory and the Socialised

Worker

Capitalism is a system of relationships, which go from inside to out, from outside to in, from above to below, and from below to above. Everything is relative, everything is in chains. Capitalism is a condition both of the world and of the soul. (Kafka, in Janouch 1971: 151-2) If in its beginnings the factory came out of the social body and tended to separate itself from it in order to elaborate its own rules of operation, it must now reincorporate this social body in order more than ever to dominate it... (de Gaudemar 1985: 286)

Introduction

to autonomia

for chapters

7 and 8

1havealreadymadethe casethat the methodologicalforegrounding of problematisations in is and empiricism more concernedwith creation and resonance creations genealogy and than representation,and indeedthat empiricism starts from a recognitionthat all histories are perspectival. I should,nevertheless,stressthat the next two chaptersin no way try to write a comprehensivehistory of operaismoand autonomia, since they are extremely complex political formations. Whilst the 'area of autonomia' has sometimes been representedas a flowering of post-political potential, it is comprised of such diverse political figures andperspectives(with organisedautonomyor ailtollonlia o1mraiaon one it feminism that the the other) creativa on more counterculturalautononda and side and it be to would problematic represent as a coherentmovement. Operaismoand autonomia have indeed forms the the took organised movements of pervasiveand parties, and never by by been than policy groups, characterised more small schools, and magazines always statementsand fixed groups. There was not even coherenceof position between key figures such as Tronti and Negri (cf. Bologna (1980a) for a short account of the variations of position, and Piotte (1986) for relations between Tronti and Negri). ' Thoughgroupslike Potere Operaio ('Workers' Power') andLotta Continua('Continuous Struggle') had considerableimportance, they never characterisedthe whole movement, and relatively quickly dissolved into the emerging 'area of autonomia'.2 Wright (1988: 287-8)conveysthe complexity well when he writes:

I Tronti rejoined the PCI in 1971 (Piotte 1987: 28). 2 Potere Operaio dissolved following a meeting in 1973 (Padova, July 28 to August 4), saying: 'We have rejected the logic of the political group in order to be within the real movement, in order to be within organised class autonomy. " (in Red Notes 1979: 32) Bifo (1980: 151-2) suggests that following the big FIAT-Mirafiori occupation earlier that year (cf. Negri 1979b), within which the revolutionary groups only had a marginal presence, Potere Operaio's dissolution showed that they were the only group to recognise the changes taking place in the movement. 140

Making

sense of Autonomia

Ideologically as a whole is no simple matter. heterogeneous, dispersed, fluid, territorially organisationally politically marginalised: Giorgio Bocca's analogy of an archipelago is an apt one. Never a single national organisation, much less the mass wing of the armed groups, the 'Area' of Autonomia would begin to disintegrate almost as soon as it had attained hegemony within the Italian far left.

And if operaismo and autonomia developed through the specific situation in Italy, the movement took much of its history and innovation from abroad, with people and movements from Martin Glaberman, George Rawick, and C.L. R. James, to Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, from the Wobblies to Socialisme ou Barbarie and American counterculture. Marazzi thus writes: What can be considered as the most original theoretical contribution to Italian workerism originated abroad.... There is nothing 'Italian-C about the class warfare in Italy.... To erect a monument to Italy is to play the game of the Italian State: to misrepresent as specific ('the production of certain intellectuals') what is in fact rooted in the worker's history, rooted, above all, in its international dimension. (in Sendotext(e) 1980: 12-13) I can, however, describe the core premises of operaismo and autonomia. The roots of autonomia lie in the early sixties with the emergence of operaismo ('workerism'3) which sought to analyse the new forms of work and politics based on an increasing concentration of Southern migrant workers in the industrial centres, and their distance from orthodox trade union and party structures. This analysis, found most importantly in the writings of Panzieri, Tronti, Alquati, Bologna, and Negri in the journals Quademi Rossi ('Red Notebooks' 1961-4), Classe Operaia ('Working Class' 1964-6), and later Potere Operaio ('Workers' Power' 1969-73), was based on a dual strategy of concrete interpretation of particular and new forms of work and struggle, and a rereading of Marx in a rather heretical focus on obscure unpublished material, the Grundrisse, the 'missing sixth chapter' of Volume I (Marx 1976: 948-1084), as well as Volumes 11and III of Capital. The operaists followed a methodological insistence on the primacy of (changing forms of) political antagonism in a dynamic 'class composition', and brought everything from absenteeism, housework, to changes in the petrochemical industry into consideration. 4 This approach was to remain central to the development and

3 The translation of operaismo as 'workerism' is, as Hardt (1990: 249) points out, problematic: "The English usage of 'workerism'and the French 'ouvri6risme' correspond to the Italian 'fabrichismo' in that they are used pejoratively to designate those who cannot or will not recognise the power of social strugglesoutside the factory. The characteristicof 'operaismo'is that it has been able to transform itself in step with the changing nature of work." 4 Pioneeredby RomanoAlquati the operaists adopted Marx's method the 'Workers' Inquiry' (cf. Marx of 1973b)as a means of 'hot investigation' into the conditions and forms of resistance in the factories (cf. Bologna 1991). Ironically, as Moulier (1989: 14) reports, such 'hot investigation' received considerable 141

mutation of autonomia, and proved to be a very practical, situated, and politically productive researchparadigm. The practicality of the operaist position is evidencedin Moulier's (1989: 13) anecdotethat the bedroom walls of activists saw the substitution of diagrammaticmaps of the FIAT-Mirafiori factory-city for the epinal figures of Mao or ZP Che Guevara. At the core of the readings of Marx by Panzieri, Tronti, and Negri was an understandingof capitalismin terms of Marx's prediction of the 'real subsumption' of societyin capital. Against the eurocommunistItalian Communist Party (PCI) for whom (following neo-Gramscianunderstandingsof the relative 'autonomy of the political') strugglewas to be of class alliancesin the legitimateterrain of social democraticpolitics, operaismo sought to show that capital had extended its control and processes of valorisationacrossthe social suchthat all of society was subjectto, or 'subsumed' within the demandsand structuresof capitalistproductivity in what they called a 'social factory' or 'diffuse factory'. In the social factory differencesbetweenproduction, reproduction, and consumption, work and non-work, were seen to be dissolving in a social 5 interest' The 'general of capital. political responseof operaismowas to and productivity break from any conceptionof the generalinterest and affirm a working class 'partiality' againstpolitical and economicintegrationin a 'society of work'. This was to be done throughan 'autonomy' from any form of political or trade unionist body that would seek to tie workers' practicesto the developmentof capital (cf. Tronti 1973: 118-9). Such function located in the productive was of work/er, but was composedthrough partiality its struggle against capitalism across the social factory (and hence it includes the in is As considered the next chapter,this is not in favour of a different, 'more unwaged). human' form of work (as Tronti put it, "labour equals exploitation" and nothing but (1972: 22)), but a generalisedinsubordination, a "labour anarchy" (Tronti 1973: 119), a 6 insubordination But the of worker. was not merely a and of subject refusal of work, if it into for descend (even this), two reasons. First, it was conceptualised could nihilism asthe very force that causedcapital to reconfigure itself (to effect the captureof revolt in new productive regimes), and develop new technologies;it was the creative force in capitalistrelations.7 This was not, however, a theory of progress(though elements,as I

interest from the employers who found it gave more insight to the functioning of their factories than conventional studies. 5 In talking of a diffuse factory against theories of the autonomy of the political it is important to be clear that this is not an 'economic determinism'. Rather it is a suggestion, not dissimilar to Foucault and Deleuze, that the whole of the social is caught up in intricate relations of productive power. Politics is hence immanent to socialised production rather than operating in a distinct sphere. 6 As Negri (1991: 27) puts it in his rather iconoclastic tone: "All progress in the socialisation of the form of circulation accentuates the content of exploitation: it is thus the progression of that nexus that should be destroyed, along with all the ideological and institutional forms that represent and dynamise it - all the more if they are 'socialist'. " 7 Negri's essay on Keynes (in Negri 1988), where Keynesianism (productivity/pay tie-ins, the welfare state, the general interest of labour) is presented as the capitalist response to the Soviet Revolution, is the classic example. Though Negri seems to move away from this understanding of the primacy of struggle, which at one point he calls "the rotten dialectic of workerism" (1989: 87-8), he returns to it in full force in Empire where he and Hardt write "it is always the initiatives of organised labour power that 142

show, did come to think of it as such). For, second,political practicesought to use each configurationto the proletariat'sadvantagefor lesswork and more pay, and to expand the values,ways of life, and forms of collective composition of the proletariatagainstwork, asexpressedin the operaistformula 'we want everything'. I will return to the conception of the refusal of work in Chapter8, but in Chapter71 want to develop the argumentof the social factory and real subsumptionin detail. Introduction

to chapter

7

In Chapter 81 consider the productivity of autonomia across the different territories of the social factory using the framework of minoritarian processes,but Chapter 7, on the social factory, is more exclusively concerned with operaismo's and autonomia's theories of work and capitalism. The concept of the social factory is still an aspect of minor induced Marxism by a set of cramped for it is deterritorialisation of a composition, in by PCI's dominant least (not the the the effected closure position political problematics left, and its emphasis on political and economic integration within the mechanisms of However, I do forms democracy the not of production of the map and work). social concept of the social factory, but rather have extracted it a little from its milieu. I have done this for two reasons. First, I am presenting autonon-tia as a political process intimately linked to an understanding of a form of capitalism. The social factory is thus presented as the plane of composition of autonomia, just as the IWW's understanding of abstract labour was the premise for the One Big Union. The difference, however, is that the understanding of capitalism developed by operaismo and autonomia is considerably is important IWW, its 'creation' than that the such and an of element of complex more that it necessitatesdetailed consideration. Second, and related, because the concept of the 'social factory' has maintained a vitality and a degree of consistency from Mario Tronti's in (collected in Capitale in 01)erai 1966) up to the 1960s the writings early e operaist present day (in recent work by Virno, Lazzarato, and Hardt and Negri for example), and is useful for understanding contemporary forms of production and work. Thus, as well as exploring operaismo's and autonomia's presentation, I also bring this into relation with Deleuze and Guattari (not that their work was uninfluenced by the Italian trajectory8). Hence, whilst this chapter is part of the discussion of autonomia, it also develops the

determine the figure of capitalist development" such that "[t]he history of capitalist forms is always necessarily a reactive history" (Hardt and Negri 2000: 208,268). 8A Thousand Plateaus, for example, cites Yann Moulier, Tronti, and Negri in terms of new forms of socialised work, the emarginati, the problem of the Subject of orthodox Marxism, and the refusal of Guattari wrote an essay with Negri (Guattari and Negri 1990) and had some work/er (469,571-2). involvement with autonomia (cf. Guattari 1980,1980a; and Semiotext(e) (1980 133) for a photograph of Guattari in Radio Alice's studio). He wrote the preface to Collective A/traverso (1977). As well as signing the petition against the repression of autonomia, along with Sartre, Barthes, and Foucault, amongst others (cf. Red Notes 1978: 36-7), Deleuze wrote a letter against Negri's imprisonment in 1979 (Deleuze 1980), and a preface to the French edition of Negri's The Savage Anomaly. The influence of Deleuze and Guattari on the emarginati was such that a student questioned in France about Franco Piperno (who had fled Italy to escape prison) was asked if he had read Anti-Oedipus (as reported in Lib6ration, cited in Massumi (1987: 71)). 143

understanding of capitalism presented in Chapters 4 and 5, and presents an understanding of contemporary work where a minor 'refusal of work' may be situated today. The chapter starts with Panzieri's presentation of the crucial operaist problematic of the immanence of forces and relations of production, and explores this through Marx's understanding of 'machines' and 'real subsumption'. I then consider the development of the social factory thesis in Tronti's interpretation of 'social capital'. The chapter then moves to consider the forms of 'worker' which populate the social factory. To do this I consider in some detail the 'general intellect' and the 'social individual' of Marx's 'Fragment on Machines' in the Grundrisse Whilst this may appear to be an indulgent . excursus into theory (and certainly the first part of the discussion takes a step back away from the argument), it has a specific purpose. Aside from the fact that the Fragment holds a pre-eminent place in operaist and autonomist theory, it is considered in detail to draw out two different aspects which are rarely recognised, but have important ramifications in its continued use, particularly in Negri's later work. I then consider Negri's presentation of the 'socialised worker' and the 'multitude'. This section is also a critique of Negri's late work (and leaves the question of a minor interpretation of the for the next chapter). Deleuze and Guattari's understanding of worker open socialised capital (axiomatics, control, and machinic surplus value) is then used as a corrective to Negri that returns to the conceptual plane of the social factory. I then end with a summary of the argument through a discussion of how the social factory thesis helps to forms of work. contemporary conceptualise

and Marx on machines and the social The operaist use of Marx is intensive. Surrounded and cramped by the culture of orthodox,and then eurocommunistMarxism that permeatedthe Italian left with its strong Communist Party (that, contrary to the dominant leftist interpretation in Britain, Panzieri

functioned"as a kind of prison chaplainto the proletariaC'(Abse 1985: 7)), the operaists chose to return to Marx.9 Moulier (1989: 35) reports that the Marx around which operaismocirculatedwas hereticalenough to at times be said by its opponentsto be a fabrication, and that indeed there was a joke that Enzo Grillo's translation of the Grundrissewas better than the original. Anecdoteaside, in many ways the focus was actually rather orthodox. A central concern was with the question of technology and

9 Abse (1985) argues that the dominant leftist interpretation of the PCI (by far the strongest Communist Party in Europe) found in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s (most notably in Marxism Today and includingEric Hobsbawmand perhaps even Stuart Hall, and seen in the developmentof neo-Gramscian ideas of 'hegemony' ) was that eurocommunismoffered an exemplary model of socialist practice for Europe,and one that could help in overcoming the deficiencies of labourism. What these interpretations failed to see was not only how efficient a mechanism the PCI was for curtailing radical energies and disrupting progressive political development (even in the most obvious forms of student and feminist politics),but also how it was used to implementthe most pernicious cuts in the standards of living of the Italianpopulation. The PCI did not overcomethe problems of labourism, but took them in new directions, and to the extreme. See Abse (1985) for an excellent and very measureddevelopmentof these points (despitehis rather poor presentationof autonomia). 144

social relations in 'real subsumption'. important.

Raniero Panzieri's work was particularly

Even at a basic level, Panzieri's analysis of the technology-capitalnexus is still oneof the relatively few analysesof Marx that has seriously consideredthe development tý of technology outsidethe double figure of good or evil (gradually freeing up the human or oppressinga naturalisedwork). Nietzsche's diagnosisof the need to overcome this limited framework of human judgment - good and evil - is appropriate insofar as

Panzieri's approachto technologicaldevelopmentseeks an uncertain 'beyond' that is formed within and againstsocial and technicalconfigurations;more of an 'overcoming' than a 'progress' or 'negation'. Panzieri (1976,1980) sought to show that technological development (fixed capital) played a centralrole in the intricate integrationof labour (variablecapital) in the developmentof a vast and pervasivecapitalist socius that Marx, in the 'missing sixth 10 Marxist Panzieri ('objectivist') 'real subsumption'. challenged orthodox chapter' called readings that posited a technological 'rationality' (as a self-moving development of scientific innovation as part of a politically neutral 'forces of production') distinct from capitalist 'relations of production'. In this objectivist approach politics is situated externally to the technical process, concerned with wages and consumption and an eventualassumptionof technologicalprocessesas they are in a socialist 'planning' (the USSR being the prime exemplar)." For Panzieri, technological rationality, or the 'machine' (and all the organisationalmethods and techniquesinvolved), was the direct manifestation(andnaturalisation)of capitalistpower andcontrol in a "unity of 'technical' 12 57). (1980: Any socialist assumption or planning of the 'despotic' moments" and 'forces of production' was thereforea misguided approachwhich failed to recognise(or, disguised) immanence the of capitalist relationsandtechnics: actively even, Faced by capital's 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 (property), where these are 1() 'Results of the Immediate Process of Production' (often known as 'the missing sixth chapter') was first published in 1933 in German and Russian, but took on particular importance when it was republished in other European languages in the late sixties (1976 in English). Its conceptual distinction between formal and real subsumption has had particular importance in the work of the Italian extraparliamentary communists (discussed here) and the neo- and post-Bordighist French ultra-left (the most prominent being the journal Invariance and Camatte, and Dauvd). 11 In a 1919 speech entitled 'Scientific Management and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat' Lenin thus wrote: "The possibility of socialism will be determined by our success in combining Soviet rule and Soviet organisation or management with the latest progressive measures of capitalism. We must introduce in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system and its systematic trial and adoption. " (cited in Bell 1956: 41) 12 'The capitalist objectivity of the productive mechanism with respect to the workers finds its optimal basis in the technical principle of the machine: the technically given speed, the coordination of the various phases and the uninterrupted flow of production are imposed on the will of the workers as a 'scientific necessity'... The capitalist social relationship is concealed within the technical demands of machinery and the division of labour seems to be totally independent of the capitalist's will. Rather, it seems to be the simple and necessary results of the means of labour's 'nature'. " (Panzieri 1976: 9). Marx (1976: 1024)

145

understoodas a sheathingthat is destined to fall away at a certain level of productive expansion simply becauseit 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 1976: 12) I will explain the detail of this argument through a consideration of two aspects of Marx's work - the question of machines, and the real subsumption thesis. In the spectrum of apparent 'determinisms' with which Marx's work has been charged (economic determinism, labour essentialism, teleological historicism and so Marx's 13 is However, deten-ninism' 'technological the not uncommon. charge of on),

Machines

(1976,1980) like Panzieri theorists and technical as machines, understanding of Rosenberg (1982) have argued, is rather sophisticated. I want to present it here in for framework for help Deleuze, the rest of the Foucault this the to will set up and relation familiar Foucault's (1991) We the analysis of of now example start with can chapter. Bentham's Panopticon. The Panopticon is most visibly an architectural technology where the structure of by is to a central tower with an unseen occupant, such observation open each prison cell that, not knowing whether s/he is being watched by another or not, the prisoner begins to internalised (such Panopticon his/her that the selfown produces practice check blue. from device does But the this not stand alone, or emerge architectural government). It only functions when seen within the social environment (what Foucault calls the The 'diagram', and Deleuze and Guattari call the 'abstract machine') of 'discipline'. in (which, Panopticon the a strict sense, remained unbuilt) with prisons, similarity of in but form in details the is barracks the their as such, of physical and so on not schools, in fashion in formed each together similar or way subjects and masses are assembled immanent diagram discipline is is, Panopticon's That to each space, even the of space. though in varying scales and degrees of intensity. It is not that the physical technology determines the practice, rather the technology is the solidification of a social practice. 14 As Deleuze (1988: 39) puts it: the machines are social before being technical. Or, rather, there is a human ... technology which exists before a material technology. No doubt the latter develops

is form the "With the altered it like this: production of relative production surplus-value of entire real puts " form level too). into being (at the technological of production comes capitalist and a specifically 13 As Rosenberg (1982: 36) points out, this accusation usually follows a citation from The Poverty of Philosophy, where Marx writes "The handmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist. " 14 This is not to deny the possibility of specifically innovation, but it is to say that it is only technological of social problematisations, possibilities, and lines of flight that a technological as an expression To paraphrase an expression of Marx's that innovation could be possible, and maintain any consistency. Deleuze is fond of using at these moments, a society only gets the answers to the questions that it is capable of posing (cf. Deleuze 1994: 186).

146

its effects within the whole social field; but in order for it to be even possible, the tools or material machines have to be chosen by a diagram and taken up by the assemblages.

Oncemanifestedin concreteform, the technologyof the Panopticonhas great efficacy, but only in so far as it manifests the diagram of discipline. So, to the degree that sovereignsocietiesexist before disciplinary ones,and discipline might be breaking down in 'control' societies(seebelow), the concretetechnology of the prison, "like a Cartesian diver", rises and falls in prominenceand effect "on a scalegauging the degreeto which the disciplinary diagram [or abstractmachine] [is] fulfilled. " (Deleuze 1988: 41-2). In this schema, the particular technology is only ever a visible sign of a set of social relations, even as, or becauseit has far reachingeffects and functions acrossthe social. That is, the visible technical machine is part of a more general or abstract machinic environment. Marx's works are full of accounts of technical machines in a conceptual frameworkthat bearsresemblancewith Foucaultand Deleuzeinsofar as the technology is presentedas the manifestation,the visible sign that is selectedby more abstractsocial relations (such that abstract machine and diagram in Deleuze and Foucault, roughly correspondto 'mode of production' in Marx (cf. note 54)). Thus, rather than the work of individual genius or autonomous scientific progress, Marx writes that: A critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions of the eighteenth century were the work of a single individual.... Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptionsthat flow from those relations. (Marx 1976: 493; emphasis added)

An examplecanmake the case. In a footnote to Capital Marx readsa particular form of rather rudimentaryplough as the visible technologyof an abstractmachine, or mode of production called slavery. The slave, bought wholesale rather than piecemealby the hour, is treated,following his definition in antiquity, as little more than an animal, as a "speakingimplement" (who combineswith a "semi-muteimplement" of the animal, and a implement"of the plough). In this assemblagethe plough employedis of a most 44mute unsophisticatedform, the "rudest and heaviest[of] implements" which is "difficult to damageowing to [its] very clumsiness." As Marx says,"In the slave statesbordering on the Gulf of Mexico, down to the dateof the Civil War, the only ploughsto be found were thoseconstructedon the old Chinesemodel, which turned up the earth like a pig or a Marx's point is that the mole, instead of making furrows." (1976: 303,304). instrument'sclumsinessis not due to a lack of technologicaldevelopment(it is 'rude' for its time), but rather it is a selectedcharacteristicappropriateto this slave-basedmode of 147

production which lacks the intricate device of the wage and complex structuring and orderingmachinesto preventthe rough treatment,or resistanceof the slave in his use of the plough. Real subsumption With this basic presentationof the relations between machinesand Marx 'real to an analysis of machines within what called can move relations we social subsumption'. In the 'missing sixth chapter' to Capital and in a sectionof the Grundrisse known asthe 'Fragmenton Machines' Marx developsa thesis(implicit in parts of Capital itself, notably Ch. 15) that with time, work loses any artisanalautonomy and worker control as it is 'subsumed' in an increasinglycomplex 'automaton', of human parts and concretetechnicalmachines. In 'fornial subsumption' capitalist forms of valorisation subsume the labour has labour basis it it finds ("on the technical the of conditions within which processas beencarriedon up to that point in history" (Marx 1976: 425)) and extractssurplus value by extendingthe working day ('absolutesurplusvalue'): The work may become more intensive, its duration may be extended,it may become in but interested the the capitalist, eye of more continuous or orderly under themselvesthese changesdo not affect the character of the actual labour process, the actual mode of working. (1976: 1021) This form of production has its problems, due both to the limited technical principle of handicraft, and the insubordination of workers, 15and hence over time labour becomes increasingly subdivided and mechanised, and concomitantly 'cooperative' (necessitating a form of overarching management and social plan (cf. 1976: Ch. 13; Panzieri 1976: 67)). 16 This social process with its technical consolidation in machines, develops into 'real "specifically Marx the subsumption' or mode capitalist of production" called what hence becomes 'subsumed', itself labour life and enmeshed or and social where transformed, in the intricate processes of machinery in large-scale industry. 17 Thus, to summarise the development, Marx writes:

15 Marx makes these points as follows. First: "... manufacture was unable either to seize upon the production of society to its full extent, or to revolutionise that production to its very core. it towered up as an artificial economic construction, on the broad foundation of the town handicrafts and the domestic industries of the countryside. At a certain stage of its development, the narrow technical basis on which " itself it had into created. contradiction which with requirements production came of rested manufacture Second: "the complaint that the workers lack discipline runs through the whole of the period of manufacture. " (1976- 490) 16 "Cooperation in its capitalist form is the first and basic expression of the law of (surplus) value" ... (Panzieri 1976: 7). This is the directly 'capitalist' process where the super-adequate power of collective labour is manifested after the sale of individual labour at its necessary price (cf. Marx 1976: 451). 17 "The specifically capitalist mode of production not only transforms the situations of the various agents of production, it also revolutionises their actual mode of labour and the real nature of the labour process as a whole. " (Marx 1976: 1021) 148

The social productive forces of labour, or the productive forces of directly social, socialised (i. e. collective) labour come into being through co-operation, division of labour within the workshop, the use of machinery, and in general the transformation of production by the conscious use of the sciences, of mechanics, chemistry etc. and similarly, through the enormous increase of scale corresponding to such developments... (1976: 1024)

It is herethat machinerycomesinto its own as a solution to the needof the social relationsof capital to reorient the motive force and unity of production away from the labourer ("It is machinesthat abolish the role of the handicraftsmanas the regulating principle of social production." (Marx 1976: 491)). 18 That is, what is crucial in the developmentof real subsumption (and why it is the specifically capitalist form of production)is that the unity of the labourer, alreadybroken-down in simple cooperation in manufacture, is radically disrupted and absorbed in a system driven by an "... autornaton consisting of numerous mechanicaland intellectual organs, so that the workers themselvesare cast merely as its consciouslinkages" (1973: 692). Hence the governing power or unity ceasesto be one of the rhythms of labour, but the rhythm of capital itself under the temporality of the machine which, as we saw in Panzieri, technicallyembodiesthe cooperationand socialisationof labour and thus "constitutesthe power of the 'master"' (Marx 1976:549). We haveseen,then,the immanentrelationsbetweenthe machineand the social in real subsumption. Here the extraction of relative surplus labour (the intensive use of labour rather than the 'absolute' surplus producedthrough the extensionof the working day) is enabledthrough a subsumptionof the labour processinto the technicalmachine is labourer that the the unity of replaced with that of the 'automatic system of such machinery', which itself is the "virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanicallaws acting through it" (1973: 693). As I showed,we should think of this 'automaton' not in terms of distinct technical machines, but more in terms of Deleuze and Guattari's 19 transversalsocialmachinic assemblage. in The social factory: social capital, general interest of labour

the collective

capitalist,

and the

This situation of human/technicalrelations and increasing socialisation of capitalist relationsin real subsumptionwas describedby Mario Tronti in 1962as a 'social factory', where political, economic,cultural sphereswere seen to be subsumedin a generalised social productivity. As he argued: 18 Marx thus writes: "it would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working-class revolt. " (1976: 563) Other crucial elements of this new machinic environment, as Linebaugh (1991) and Thompson (1967) have emphasised, are the wage and the clock. 19This is not to say that Marx does not sometimes break from this machinic definition (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 131; and the argument below). 149

The more capitalist developmentadvances,that is to say the more the production of relative surplus value penetrates everywhere, the more the circuit production distribution - exchange - consumption inevitably develops; that is to say that the relationship between capitalist production and bourgeois society, between the factory and society, between society and the state, become more and more organic... [Sjocial relations become moments of the relations of production, and the whole society becomes an articulation of production. In short, all of society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination over all of society. (in Quaderni Rossi no. 2, cited in Cleaver 1992: 137) Tronti's argument of the unity of the social factory follows Marx's interpretation in Cal-fital Volumes H and III of a subsumption of 'individual capital' in an aggregate 'total social capital': Every individual capital forms... but an individualised fraction, a fraction endowed individual it just individual life, the as were, of as every aggregate social capital, with capitalist is but an individual element of the capitalist class. (Marx, cited in Tronti 1973: 98) The argument needs breaking down a little. The maintenance of circulation on a broad individual (total the of annual commodity-product) necessitates not operability scale capital, or of 'production' and 'consumption' as distinct spheres, but the maintenance of capitalist relations as a whole across society, such that: "Capital's process of socialisation" becomes "the specific material base upon which [the process of development of capitalism] is founded" (Tronti 1973: 98; emphasis added). Though firm, level individual break-down the or the the of one moments may show of analysis at level the the of social value at of particular exchange of one composition commodity, capital, we see a continuity of circulation as the expansion and maintenance of value, where social capital operates like a "ramified factory system". This process is only possible, of course, insofar as tendencies toward competition are matched with a collective ownership, and hence both Panzieri (1976) and Tronti (1973) stress the importance of Marx's understanding of the socialisation of ownership of capital (through share holding and credit in Volumes 11and 111),such that profit will be a division of total social surplus value (not the surplus value the individual firm extracts - though it still seeks to extract above average surplus value (cf. Tronti 1973: 106)). 20 Such collective in Marx writes a suggestive way, is "the abolition of capital as private ownership, 20 In the second and third volumes of Capital Marx explains how through credit and finance, initially through the formation of stock companies, capital develops into a social system that is in a sense 'social' Individual capitalists and separate spheres of society, all competing with each other, in its ownership. (reproduction) sphere, are replaced by a mutually selfand necessarily not supporting an 'unproductive' Competition is no less important, but it increasingly becomes a supporting system of 'social capital'. mechanism internal to the social whole (rather than a game between distinct players).

150

propertywithin the framework of capitalist production itself' (1974c:436), or, as he says elsewhere,a "capitalist communism" (cf. Panzieri 1976: 23). "Here social capital is not just the total capital of society: it is not the simple sum of individual capitals. It is the whole processof socialisationof capitalist production: it is capital itself that becomes uncovered,at a certain level of its development,as a social power." (Tronti 1973: 105). Individual capitalists thus become less owners, than managers,that is, functions of capital: [Clapital comes to represent all capitalists, and the individual capitalist is reduced to an individual personification of this totality: the direct functionary, no longer of his own capital, but of the capitalist class.... Thus capital raises itself to the level of a 4general social power', while the capitalist is reduced to the level of a simple agent, functionary, or 'emissary' of this power... (Tronti 1973: 105,107)21

Concomitant with the collective capitalist is a new form of general interest of labour that emerges in social democracy and the welfare state (cf. Negri 1988). According to Bologna (n. d.: n.p. ), the operaist formulation of social capital was a deliberate and direct challenge to the neo-Gramscian notion of the 'autonomy of the its 'Historic PCI's (especially to the eurocommunism after so central political', Compromise' (cf. Negri 1979: 112)). The social factory thesis "eliminate[d] the very bases of the concept of hegemony", since, as Tronti put it, "[t]he process of composition of capitalist society as a unified whole ... no longer tolerates the existence of a political terrain which is even fon-nally independent of the network of social relations. " (cited in Bologna n.d.: n.p.) Operaismo argued that social democracy becomes not the means of a formation hegemonic leftist improvement cleaves conditions as a of working class gradual "society dreams development, but for a of socialist rather, progressive social open a space be 67) "general interest" (Negri 1994: labour" to actualised - as seen were and a social of the very basis of domination. In 1964, Negri (1994) thus describes the centrality of labour to the post-war Italian Constitution22 not as a capitalist ruse, but as the penetration Constitution" ideological heart "fundamental [in1to the the of socialism... of principles of (56-7):

21 Marx (1974c: 388) puts it like this: "But since, on the one hand, the mere owner of capital, the moneycapitalist, has to face the functioning capitalist, while money-capital itself assumes a social character with the advance of credit, being concentrated in banks and loaned out by them instead of its original hand, the the mere manager who has no title whatever to the capital, whether on other since, and owners, through borrowing it or otherwise, performs all the real functions pertaining to the functioning of capitalist as such, only the functionary remains and the capitalist disappears as superfluous from the production process. " Deleuze and Guattari (1983: 265) explain the process similarly: "Individual persons are social in i. functions the become first derived from they the concrete all, e., of abstract quantities; persons becoming-related or the axiomatic of these quantities, in their conjunction the capitalist as personified ... capital - i.e., as a function derived from the flow of capital; and the worker as personified labour capacity i.e., a function derived from the flow of labour. " 22 The first article of the 1948 Italian Constitution reads: "Italy is a democratic republic founded on labour. " (Hardt and Negri 1994: 55) 151

The 'democracy of labour' and 'social democracy' hypothesis of the consist of ... a form of labour-power that negates itself as the working class and autonomously managesitself within the structuresof capitalist production as labour-power. At this point, capitalist social interest, which has already eliminated the privatistic and itself to configure as a of single capitalists, attempts expressions egotistic comprehensive,objective social interest.... The models of humanitarian socialism are in The of common well-being as emblems of reunification. patriotism assumed social production is the ultimate slogan of the capitalist effort at solidarity. Like soldiers, all producers are equally employed in the common sacrifice of production in order to win the battle of accumulation. (62) In this regime of production, as Alliez and Feher (1985: 339) propose, workers need no Ionger be persuaded to be reasonable in their institutionalised demands against in business for the the a they of profitability are now responsible management, since image idyllic from is indeed long This "a its interests the of way owners. with sharing of in 80) 1994: (Negri from democracy development to socialism" a continual process of that socialism actually affirms the development of the social factory. 23

The Fragment

on Machines

Having seen how the capitalist becomes a functionary of total social capital, now I want but factory, forrns the that to to the social to move consider of worker were seen populate in order to do this I first need to step out of the narrative of the argument a little, and in Marx's intellect' individual' 'general 'social the the the theses and of consider 'Fragment on Machines'. 24 This is necessary because the Fragment has a central importance in operaismo, autonomia, and contemporary work by Negri and 'immaterial labour' theoriStS,25 and because, and this is the reason for their interest, it brings in the individual') 'social intellect' forms ('general the and and of productivity question of new lays the basis for the 'socialised worker' thesis that I develop below. Since its first publication in Italian in the same issue of Quademi Rossi (no. 4, 1964) as Panzieri's (1976) essay 'Surplus Value and Planning', the interpretation of the 'Fragment on Machines', as Paolo Virno (1996) suggests, has been akin to Biblical exegesis. Such exegesis has not been a replication of authorial truth, but a reiteration of 23The American journal Zerowork (1975: 6) neatly summarises the case against socialism: "Our analysis of the crisis implies a rejection of the basic proposal of the Left: socialism.... [Socialism] can mean only one of two dubious things. Either, as the ideology of the libertarian Left, it finds in small-scale production the solution to the 'degradation of work', or it is a capitalist strategy of economic planning. In the first is romantic and quaintly useless. In the second respect, however, socialism means socialism respect primarily disciplining the working class ... In both cases the demand for socialism clashes with the working class demands against work. " 24 The'Fragment on Machines' covers the end of Notebook VI and the beginning of VII of the Grundrisse, but the exact page references vary a little between commentators. I use Negri's (1991) inclusion of pages 690-712 (in the Penguin edition, 1973) rather than Virno's 693-706 because the extra later pages include some discussion of 'disposable labour time' that is useful for understanding the thesis.

152

the text in different sociohistoricalcontextsaspart of the composition of varying political forms: We have referred back many times to these pages - written in 1858 in a moment of intense concentration - in order to make some sense out of the unprecedented quality of workers' strikes, of the introduction of robots into the assembly lines and computers into the offices, and of certain kinds of youth behaviour. The history of the 'Fragment's' successive interpretations is a history of crises and of new beginnings. (265) The Fragment itself is indeed a particularly complex and provocative text26 that raises a number of possibilities for understanding the trajectories of capitalism and the possible processes and forms of communism that are rarely, if ever, so evident in Marx's work. The difficulty of the text, and this sense of its varied deployment make a general presentation of the thesis of the Fragment difficult. I will start with the general argument,

and then show two variationsthat it takes. The complex implication and disruption of unities in the machinism of real subsumption (the point made so far) is made especially clear in this famous passage from the Fragment: The production process has ceased to be a labour process in the sense of a process dominated by labour as its governing unity. Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points in the mechanical system; subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but insignificant individual, in his living (active) the machinery, which confronts rather

doings as a mighty organism. (Marx 1973: 693) The radical thesis of the Fragment is that in this 'automaton' or 'organism' it is no longer the distinct individual entities of the productive workers that are useful for capitalist production, nor even their 'work' in a conventional sense of the word, but the whole ensemble of sciences, languages, knowledges, skills that circulate through society that Marx seeks to describe with the terms general intellect (706), social brain (694), and social individual (705). This is a Marx that points to a very different understanding of productive labour than Marxian orthodoxy, and indeed the thesis is challenging enough that Virno (1996: 265) suggeststhat it is "not at all very 'marxist"'. There are, however, two different ways of reading the thesis, that, if they are not wholly at variance in Marx's

25 Negri for example suggests that the Fragment is "without doubt, the highest example of the use of the antagonistic and constituting dialectic that we can find, certainly in the Grundrisse, but perhaps also in the whole of Marx's work. " (1991: 139) 26 Because of its compressed complexity, Baldi (1985: 33) calls the Grundrisse Marx's Finnegan's Wake. 153

27 The following discussion of text, can certainly led to very different interpretationS. thesetwo interpretationsis basedaround two very similar citations (which I have noted [A] and [B] to help referencesto thesepassagesthroughoutthe chapter): [A] But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour titne and on the aniount o labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose 'powerful effectiveness' is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production. (704-5; emphasis added) [131 [The worker] steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct hunian labour [the worker] his during he but the the tinie of appropriation rather which works, performs, nor it by his his of and mastery power, understanding of nature productive own general virtue of his presence as a social body - it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appearsas the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. (705; emphasisadded)

Both thesecitations make the Fragment's general argumentthat labour time and direct labour diminish in importancein relation to a new force, but they offer slightly different inflections on this force. The first, [A], emphasisesthe productive power of 'science' individual' [B], 'social 'technology', the the as the new proposes whilst second, and Marx's force. The text. through need pursuing arguments resultant productive General intellect outside of work, and the 'watchman' As we have seen,Marx seesa narrativein the developmentof work toward ever-greater simplification and abstractionwherethe dissectionof the division of labour "... gradually [A] Contradiction?

transforms the workers' operationsinto more and more mechanicalones, so that at a certainpoint a mechanismcan step into their places." (1976: 704) In the Fragment this leadshim to introducesomethingof a dichotomy betweenthe worker on one side, and generalintellect andthe machineon the other. The dichotomy is signalledin [A], but he also puts it more firmly: "The accumulationof knowledge and of skill, of the general 27 In highlightingthis 'ambiguity' I am trying to show a productive 'problem' (rather than a 'mistake') in Marx's thinking. The text is traversedby so many lines of argumentand such a great concern to diagnose future developmentsin both capitalist and communist trajectories, that, almost by intent, it has many possibleinterpretations,none of which should fix its meaning. As will be evident, however, I do think that there are problematicelementsin the Fragment (though Marx does overcome them). That said, in all the interpretations that seek to utilise, update, or correct the Fragment(such as those of Negri, Virno, and Guattari used here), I have only found one - Rovatti (1973) - which raises the problem of its internal inconsistency. 154

productiveforcesof the social brain, is thus absorbedinto capital, as opposedto labour, and henceappearsas an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital..." (694) As the 'social brain' or 'general intellect' is absorbedinto machines,"the human beine,comesto relatemore as a watchmanand regulatorto the production processitself' (705). Contrary to what we might think, this relegationto 'watchman' function is less a sign that work hasbecometedious and alienated,than a manifestationof a new and fatal contradictionfor capital, and an indication of the possibilities for a communism without work. In as much as the productive force comes from general intellect embodied in machinesand not workers, productivity seemsto bypass work (indeed, compared to scienceembodied in machines. .....the value-creatingpower of the individual labour capacityis an infinitesimal, vanishing magnitude..." (1973: 694)). Hence the capitalist valuationof life in termsof work-done becomesincreasinglyanachronistic:"rhe theft of alien labour tinte, on which thepresentwealth is based,appearsa miserablefoundation in face of this new one, created by large-scaleindustry itself." (705) An explosive 'contradiction' emerges(705-6) becausecapitalismcontinuesto measurethese forces in termsof (increasinglyunproductive)labour and labour time, and the possibility emerges for the valuationandcreationof life basedon the needsof the 'social individual' and 'free time'. Thus we see in the forces of capital the potential for a communism where: labour time will be measured by the needs of the social one on side, necessary ... individual, and, on the other, the development of the power of social production will grow so rapidly that, even though production is now calculated for the wealth of all, disposable tinzewill grow for all. (708) The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessarylabour of society to a inininuan, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. developmentof the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them. (706; emphasisadded) This is a crucial moment in understanding Marx's politics (especially for an anti-work perspective) for it posits communism not on a militarisation of work, or an unalienated labour, but on the destruction of the category of work enabled through complex mechanical processes, and a life of expansive creativity, art, and science beyond the drudgery of repetitive manual labour, or, indeed, work at all. 28 In as much as this is presented as a possibility founded on an analysis of capital, and one that does require a politics ("the mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour"

28That said, there is a slight problem here in that communismappears to be less an overcomingof the division of human life into work and science/art, than an affirmation of the latter against the former (cf. Rovatti 1973). The problematisation of 'art' as a cultural form integral to capitalist relations had to wait until the emergenceof the early twentiethcentury avant garde (cf. BOrger1984). 155

(708)), this is, to use Deleuze and Guattari's (1994: 171) term, a crucial political 'fabulation'. But in asmuch asMarx presentsit as a 'contradiction' it is problematic. As we have seen, the contradiction is based on a disjunction between work and general intellect/machines, with an increasing diminution of the productive force of the former (both quantitatively and qualitatively (1973: 700) shrunk to mere 'watchman') vis-ii-vis the latter.29 But the contradiction only holds insofar as the new productive potential of general intellect lies outside of work in some kind of 'pure science' (if it did not, capitalist valuation would still circulate around a productive force and there would be no new contradiction). 30 But since 'work' is Marx's category for describing the capitalist structuring of human labour or life in general (which necessarily embodies varying historically formed competences, skills, and knowledges) and since all social systems call forth their human relations (there is no undetermined abstract form of human life), it is hard to imagine how in Marx's own terms this could be the case. With this dichotomy between work seen as 'watchman' and general intellect as the new productive force (an understandable interpretation of the trajectory of factory production of his time), and the contradiction this would manifest if it was the case, it is as if we witness Marx willing the new productive force of general intellect to be the foundation for a new communist mode of production. That it is actually not so simple is discussed in the next section. This 'contradiction' thesis has not been uncommon in interpretations of the Fragment. Leaving Negri until later, it is worth mentioning a few examples. Montano (1975) cites these sections of the Fragment to argue that "we are witnessing the ... abolition of productive work within the capitalist mode of production itself' (54) such that labour is no longer a form of production but of control (58). Most famously, Andr6 Gorz similarly (though without a class struggle perspective) uses the Fragment to argue that the majority of the population belong to a 'post-industrial neo-proletariat' whose precarious work "will Lin the not too distant future] be largely eliminated by automation" (1982: 69), that the "inicro-electronic revolution heralds the abolition of work" (1985: 32), and that already "the amount of time spent working and the relatively high level of employment have been artificially maintained" (1982: 72) in a capital that has moved from production to domination (1985: 39). Even Virno (1996), whose interpretation of the realisation of the Fragment's thesis within capitalism is similar to the argument of this chapter, still calls this a 'post-work society'. 31

29The contradiction also resides on a more familiar proposition that individual tabour time diminishes in importancecomparedto collective labour, which, in conjunction with machines enables the extraction of an ever-greater proportion of (relative) surplus tabour to necessary tabour, leading to problems of overproductionand realisationof surplus value. 30 There are, thus, sections in the Fragment,notably at the one point where Marx uses the expression 'general intellect' (706), which seem to present technologyas a generic 'human' creation, an almost 'pure knowledge'without referenceto capitalist relations. 31 For an excellent critique of these interpretations the end of work from an autonomist-influenced of perspectivesee Caffentzis (1996,1998). 156

[B] The social individual and more intensive work The potentialcommunism of generalintellect-richproduction Marx describeshas been far from materialised,even with a massiveexpansionin the use of machinesand the developmentof third generation information machines.32 We can usethe Fragmentto explain why. Insteadof positing a distinction between a 'watchman'-form of labour without content, and machines operatingon a generalintellect that seemsto emergeoutsideof capitalistrelations, we can point to other parts of the text which, following the argumentdevelopedabove through Panzieri, stressa more machinicintegration. In section [B] Marx says not that science embodiedin machineryis the productive force, but that 'the social individual appearsas the greatfoundation-stoneof production and of wealth'. Marx uses generalintellect and the social individual largely interchangeably,but when he talks of the social individual we see a much richer idea of social rather than technologicalproductivity. The social individual still seemsto free-float outsideof work, but if we follow the real subsumption thesis we could imagine that the 'automaton' that subsumesthe manual worker would also subsumethe social individual. Thus the productivity of the social individual would emergealways alreadyin a work relation. When Marx writes in the Fragment that the worker is "regulatedon all sidesby the movementof the machinery" (693) such that "The niost developednzachinerythusforces the worker to work longer than the savagedoes, or that he hiniself did with the simplest, crudesttools" (708-9) what we need to add is that this is not just becausegeneralintellect invents machinesthat are used to make more manualwork, but that generalintellect and the practicesof the social individual emergeas work - as parts of a social machinicsystem. The individual worker is still increasingly irrelevant(in her particularity asagainstthe socialwhole she contributesto), but this time it is becausegeneralintellect signifies the extractionof surplus value not from repetitive manual labour, but from all sorts of different, more complex forces in the social individual's 'combinationof socialactivity' acrosssociety (not just within, but including work time). It is not that a pure sciencebecomesproductive, but that a whole seriesof capacitiesandknowledgesareproductiveand exploitable;work is not emptiedof content, but filled with different content. The productivity of general intellect, then, signifies a process not toward an increased unproductivity and irrelevance of work, but to the greater expansion of the content of life that can count as work. 33 We can thus understand Marx's other, rather tragic conclusion concerning the "... paradox that the most powerful instrument for 32Caffentzis

(1997: 30) cites a range of sources to show that in the US the work day, the work year, and the number of waged workers have all significantly increased since the 1973-4 energy crisis (and that OECD figures show similar for the 'advanced capitalist world'). 33 This interpretation of the incursion of general intellect into the realm of work is most evident in the Fragment when Marx writes that free time or immersion in general intellect the subject of work changes so that when s/he reenters work s/he is more productive. Free time is "time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive its power.... Free time - which is both idle time and time for higher activity - has naturally transformed possessor into a different subject, and he then enters the direct production process as this different Though one might want to problematise this free-time/work subject. " (711,712) split, if the possessor of

157

reducinglabour-timesuffersa dialecticalinversionandbecomesthe most unfailing means for turning the whole lifetime of the worker and his family into labour-time at capital's disposalfor its own valorisation." (1976: 532). Socialised

workers

So far I have presentedthe social factory as a milieu of 'social capital' that composesa 'worker' individual' 'social body the the of as with of productive arrangements, unitary the process. Now I want to move into a closer examination of the social individual throughthe conceptof the 'socialisedworker'. 34 Due to the emphasisof this chapter, I its 'refusal forms leaving of work' the worker's of work, socialised am only considering (which is actuallyimmanentto the category)to the next chapter. Operaismowas based around the theory of the 'mass worker' (essentially the large including FIAT, North, large industrial the a and notably plants of workers of the But Southern though the massworker always stretched workers). migrant proportion of beyond the walls of the factory to include the community (inasmuch as Fordism was a development it is the the of work and seventies and arguably not until social system), factory 'socialised figure the that the social the worker of worker' of politics aroundthe worker is is That the the considerablymore socialised said, concept of proper theorised. by Alquati The term the than that coined was of mass worker. controversialandunstable in 1974, but it is closely associatedwith Antonio Negri (from Proletari e Stato in 1975 his is hence 306)) Wright 1988: (cf. on this commentary a and elaboration onwards that I the (in movement the of aspects consider more empirical next chapter conception this figure seeksto describe). Negri is a central figure in the developmentof operaismo bears his formation somerelation with the of analysis and variation and autonomia,and the movementfrom 'workers' centrality' in operaismo,to the diffuse 'area of autonomia' is beyond It the 'new '77, Movement the subjects'. of social the emergence of and and his (from development intricacies full Negri's more to the of scopeof this chapter chart Leninist understandingsof political praxis during Potere Operaiato his current Spinozist gconstituentpower' and 'multitude', and in any case,this has been done in considerable detail by Hardt (1990), Ryan (in Negri 1991)andWright (1988) amongstothers. Suffice little been has has Negri's times a at to say that changedconsiderably, and analysis is This he has been the no more so movements associatedwith. controversialamongst than with the figure of the socialised worker, a concept which itself has varied his in is Negri's Ch. It (cf. Wright 1988: 7). this of aspect own analysis considerably both focus Negri's I of to the on. writings on socialisedworker show aspects work want his importantcontribution to political theory (his situatedand rather rapid argument, the diffuse his innovation Marx, and and of poststructuralism, reading of novelty and general intellect uses it when s/he 're-enters' the production process, one would be inclined to think that s/he is doing more than 'guarding' a machine in this process. 34 'Sociallsed worker' is a translation of operaio sociale, which is also translated as 'diffuse worker' and 'social worker'. 158

changingforms of work and political practice), and his tendenciesto over-generalisation and wilful optimism (notably the argument,explainedbelow, that the technical-scientific labour of the global 'multitude' is currently the living practiceof communism, if only we 35 external capitalist control). would shrug-off If the theory of the mass worker marked the emergenceof a class of generalised abstractlabour, the socialisedworker thesis seeks to describethe class composition of fully socialisedcapital. Negri suggeststhat the massworker was a stagein the movement (1988b: fully between the the worker socialised skilled worker and of real subsumption 217). He links the emergenceof the socialisedworker with the strugglesof 1968, and been had large Europe, "[flor that the conceptualisedand of part suggests a niass worker had becomea realityjust when its period of existencewas in fact about to end." (1989: 75) Negri (1988a) argues that in the recomposition of capital away from the large factory-cities,the increasingdiffusion of workers across the social, and the regime of demands in 1970s, to the the extend the mass worker power of austerity measures beyond the factory was effectively curtailed.36 This necessitatedan expansion of the for from He the this the need explains as massworker. contentof classcomposition broadest definition the ...

and extend the concept of isolation labour, theoretical the to of the and eliminate working-class productive become inevitably had (insofar tied to an this as concept concept of mass worker impact due factoryism factory the the to of the simplified empirical notion of -a of class unity, to modify

bosses' counter-offensive, the corporatism of the unions, and the historical theoretical limitations of the concept itself). (1988a: 208)

and

The new classcompositionis that of the fully diffuse proletariat- the younger generations in the factories who were less schooled in the traditions of the orthodox communist the but (youth, and the minorities, sexual women, also enzarginati movement, unemployed),whose productive centrality was relatedto the expansionof casual, parttime and non-guaranteedwork, the underground economy, as well as housework and For PCI the this was the terrain of the non-disciplined class, work. non-remunerated 'parasitic bearers' in lumpenproletariat (as I 'plague the and the show next chapter, almost for Negri but and the Movement of '77, this diffuse proletariat was a new central strata'), force of production.37 Thus he suggeststhat this class composition might be better seen 'working but as a much class', as 'social labour-power', to reflect so not 35 One is better able to understand the style of Negri's work if one sees him as part of a theoretical and Negri's (1990: As Hardt 173-4) the of nature uneven rather suggests, sometimes movement. political its dynamics immediacy is to the the production. of much of political and complex attributable often prose but it does require one This is not a weakness of Negri's texts (indeed it is an aspect of minor creativity), to actively engage with his work, sometimes rather selectively, and should discourage treatment of Negri as an autonomous author. 36 Negri traces this development as a direct response by capital to the effective power of the mass worker (cf. 1988a: 212-6). 37 It is crucial to understand that this idea of marginality is very different to Marcuse's (1969) affirmation of the marginal. These marginals are the precarious, often highly-educated, casual, flexible workers that

159

the throughout the potentiality of a new working class now extended entire span ... of production and reproduction -a conception more adequate to the wider and more searching dimensions of capitalist control over society and social labour as a whole. (1988a: 209) Negri's expansion of the figure of the mass worker across the social is an important correction to the narrow definition of productive labour in Marxian orthodoxy. It also has considerable analytic force when seen in conjunction with the political movements that might express it (as considered in the next chapter). But from here on he makes some strange and unproductive moves that echo the problems of the Fragment's intellect, indeed general and evidences the potential problems with autonomous apparently the operaist 'reversal of perspective' in its sometime tendency to present resistance and Project' (cf. Holloway 1995). In 'Archaeology in terms and universalising autonomy Negri (1988b) still remains within the position mapped out by Tronti that because capitalist relations are immanent to work, the refusal of work is a necessary negation of the working class. Indeed Negri eloquently expresses the autonomist refusal of work formula: Labour is the essence of capital. It always has been so. It is also the essence of man, inasmuch as man is productive activity. But capital is real - while human essence is only a dream.

The only human essence of labour

which approximates

to the

concretenessof capital is the refusal of work. (1988b: 226)

But from here he begins to say somethingelse. I will trace the argumentthrough two interrelatedpoints.first, that the content of socialisedwork has a tendency to become increasingly'communicational'and 'immaterial', and second,that this form of work is Negri's I then socialised worker to communist compare majoritarian collectivity. Deleuze'sminor, since Negri makessome (problematic)links to it. In this discussionI There Negri's later his Hardt (1994,2000). Michael work and work with am combining is no doubt that Empire (Hardt and Negri 2000) stretchesto overcomethe conceptual problems I will identify, but it does not really manageit. That Negri himself does not seemto seethe accountof the socialisedworkersof Empire as a break from his previous work is marked by his decline to include this work in his critique of the 'immaterial labour' theorists(2000: 29).38

in the social factory are fully implicated in productive activity. But, against Alliez' (1980: 119) somewhat polemicalextreme(cited in Chapter5) which posits the factory as an almost parasitic strata, this should not be seen as denying the continued productivity of more conventional forms of work. The point is that distinctions betweenworkers and marginals are being overcome by a much more fluid and intricately differentiated process of productivity. 38The broader argumentof Empireconcerning the history and contemporaryforms of global community and governanceis beyond the scope of this thesis. 160

Communication

and affective labour Following aspects of the Fragment on Machines, Negri argues that socialised work is extremely rich in techno-scientific knowledge,becomingthe living collective of generalintellect, where "the productive side of work is now apparentprincipally on the intellectual level." (1989:47). In particular he saysthat communicationbecomescentral. Thus in The Politics of Subversion (1989) he writes that the "raw materialon which the very high level of productivity of the socialised worker is based... is science, communicationand the conitnunicationof knowledge." (116) Communicationbecomescentralbecauseit is the form of cooperationof the vast socialwhole: "intellectual work revealsthe mechanismof interactionfor all social labour it produces a specific social constitution - that of cooperation, or rather, that of ... intellectualcooperation,i. e. conimunication-a basis without which society is no longer conceivable." (1989: 51) Negri (1989: 117) thus employs Habermas' theory of 4communicative action' to saythat "It is on the basis of the interactionof communicative be " horizon to that the comes of reality constituted. acts Two contradictoryargumentsseemto develop from this, as is no more apparent than in Empire. On one side Negri recognisesthat this communicativelabour is a 'subjective', and later (Hardt and Negri 2000), a 'biopolitical' and 'affective' (that is, not just linguistic) interrelation.39 He even poses a critique of immaterial labour theorists (such as those collected in Vimo and Hardt (1996)), for presenting the forces of language horizon have "almost I been the of and considering exclusively on production communication." (Hardt and Negri 2000: 29).40 Enipire suggeststhat this immaterial labour is not an autonomousplane of production (though there are new forms of labour which involve the manipulationof information, code, and sign), but is immanentto the various regimesof production as a whole. Manufacture,for example,does not vanish, but is informationalised, increasingly orchestratedthrough information technologies Thus, as an emphasis on Foucauldian biopower would necessitate, communicativeand affective labour is seenasenmeshedin materialforms of practiceand in be ("constant tends to capital, capital constitutedandrepresentedwithin variable control (293).

the brains, bodies, and cooperation of productive subjects." (385)).

Subject as multitude If Negri left it at this he would have updatedthe social factory thesis to include affective labour. But then, on the other side, he continues to conflate affective biopolitical processeswith communication. But not only does he suggest that "... communication has increasinglybecomethe fabric of production" (Hardt and Negri 39 Hardt and Negri (1994: 235) give a fuller definition: "... living labour is manifest above all as abstract and immaterial labour (with regard to quality), as complex and cooperative labour (with regard to quantity), and as labour that is continually more intellectual and scientific (with regard to form). This is not reducible to simple iabour - on the contrary, there is a continually greater convergence in techno-scientific labour of artificial languages, complex articulations of cybernetics and systems theory, new epistemological paradigms, immaterial determinations, and communicative machines. This labour is social because the general conditions of the vital process (of production and reproduction) pass under its control and are remodelled in conformity with it."

161

2000: 404), but that affective labour tends toward increasing autonomy. Ignoring the radical divergence between Foucauldian frameworks (the discursive and diagrammatic implication of 'language' which is never 'autonomous') and Habermassian autonomous communicative action, Negri perceives a rather pure linguistic 'activity' coming to the fore in 'communicational society' (1992: 105). 41 Even when in Enipire a more biopolitical slant is offered, biopolitical immaterial labour still tends toward autonomy. Hardt and Negri write, for example, that biopolitical labour "calls into question the old is is, force is 'variable labour by that that a conceived as capital', power which notion ... activated and made coherent only by capital, because the cooperative powers of labour power (particularly immaterial labour power) afford labour the possibility of valorising itself. " (2000: 294) The reasons Negri tends to see the autonomy of immaterial labour, in immanence Deleuzian Foucauldian he the power all of conceptions of and even as uses in Fragment desire Marx's the to witness an emerging to unrelated social relations, are not

form. revolutionary Just as Marx wants to seethe new content of productive activity tending toward in (rather being than the subsumed capitalist relations), work abolition of communismand Negri similarly seesthis increasinglyautonomousplaneof communicationaland affective he 1988c), in Fragment (in Thus, the one readingof activity as a communistessence. (mass [A] to that the contradiction the argue quantitative above section noted uses labour-time head" in individual is "brought to terms) as a measured socialisedproduction is indeed a "dissolving factor", and science is "immediately incorporated into in Marx in follow Negri does this a pure work, seeing going on outside not production". he is Rather (for Negri, 'science' seessocialisedwork communication work). productive itself asincreasinglyoperatingnot in termsdominatedby numeration,equivalenceand the labouring individualities' by but in 'free determined ('ivork' terms capital), of value-form in a self-determinedfashion and driven by their own needs ('activities'). 42 He writes that:

4() There is no self-critique here, even though his version of Habermassian communicative action is considerably more extreme than that found in these theorists. 41 Negri talks of this communicational network of activity/work as both a Foucauldian 'spatial universe' (1989: 78) and a site of Habermassian 'communicative action'. The grounding premise of Foucault's work is of course that micro-powers proliferate and traverse the social, being its very constitution. The degrees of intensity and complexity of this is such, contra Habermas, that any talk of pure communication is a theoretical fiction. For Negri to utilise Foucault's image of proliferating networks as constituting a possibility for communism as an equality in communication is thus, to say the least, problematic. The idea that communism is collective control over a purified language resurfaces in Empire where Habermas is again deployed, only this time he is seen as presenting the possibilities of communicative action in a too limited fashion: "[Habermas] grants the liberated functions of language and communication only to individual and isolated segments of society' (Hardt and Negri 2000: 404). 42 Negri sees this process as an overcoming of the law of value, interpreted as a quantitative relation between labour-time and price (and its replacement with a 'law of command' (Negri 1991: 172); cf. also Hardt and Negri 2000: 357-8,401). This is a reductive interpretation of the law of value, which, as Elson (1979) argues, should not be seen as a question of the price of a commodity, but of the form labour takes in capital (hence she calls it a 'value theory of labour'). However, insofar as Negri suggests that production becomes determined by social needs rather than the extension of capitalist work he seems to have dropped both a limited, and a full concept of the law of value. Caffentzis (1998) explicitly takes up this point in Negri. 162

The exchange of labour-power is no longer something that occurs, in determinate quantity and specific quality, within the process of capital; rather, an interchange of is by determined now the precondition, the premise goals social needsand activities in is immediate Work the world of social now an participation production... of social wealth. (1988c: 117-8; emphasis added) This 'interchange of activities', then, tends to autonomous self-organisation where "cooperation is posed prior to the capitalist machine, as a condition independent of industry. " (Negri 1992: 78; cf. also Hardt and Negri 2000: 294)43 Thus, following Negri's substitution within Marxism of (his understanding of) Spinoza's plenitude for Hegel's dialectic (explored at length in The Savage Anomaly (1991a)), the qualitative process of socialised production is seen to develop beyond the subsumption of the become in (as in to thesis) the an real subsumption capitalist relations worker 'ontological' subject (1989: 50) of full communist plenitude, or the 'multitude' (defined knowledges the web of innumerable "the and social of powers multiplicity as ... is kind 81)). Here "The (1992: in a of worker socialised meanings everyday activity" is longer by boss, its developed The no contrast, condition. actualisation of communism, even a necessarycondition for capitalism. " (1989: 81)44 This is problematic for two reasons. It is difficult to see, first, how this 'subject' is really any different to liberal humanist or orthodox Marxist conceptions of an historical he force de-subjectified the (a the ontological multitude, when given all subject of subject importantly, 45 is it, most why this expansive superand and second, still a subject), gives intimately is Spinoza's Marx's (in structured and senses) not and adequate ontology traversed by capitalist relations (as Panzieri, Tronti, and Negri's earlier work on real 46 Negri Foucault Deleuze his seems and would suggeSt). use of subsumption, as well as to offer a strange inversion of the neo-Gramscian presentation of a tendency toward an 45 1)), 2000: Negri Hardt he (cf. (which the and rightly criticises political autonomy of That becomes it is the the autonomous. realm of econornic, or production which whereby is, he has gone from a position, mapped through Tronti above, that social capital cannot 43 Indeed, Negri writes that "[t]his combination of autonomy and cooperation means that the entrepreneurial power of productive labour is henceforth completely in the hands of the post-Fordist proletariat", and that "[c]apital becomes merely an apparatus of capture, a phantasm, an idol. Around it move radically autonomous processes of self -valorisation that not only constitute an alternative basis of potential development but also actually represent a new constituent foundation. " (Negri 1996: 216; Hardt and Negri 1994: 282-3) 44 "Living labour is organised independently of the capitalist organisation of labour" (Negri 1994: 234), as a "new principle, a new subjectivity, which is being constructed at the social level, and which is communist in its content. " (Negri 1988c: 116; emphasis added) 45 Negri even tells us that the socialised workers are "beginning to emerge as true historic subjects. " (1996: 222; emphasis added) 46 By moving toward the affirmation of the current composition of life as communist, Negri starts to sound like the 'planning' perspective critiqued by Panzieri which was based on the separation of relations and forces of production. Whilst, no doubt, certain forms of general intellect-rich labour are composed of much more diffuse and complex attributes and forces that far exceed the limited form of composition of to factory work, as Bifo (1980: 168) writes, "it would be simplistic to conclude that the revolution needs ... substitute a Leninist seizure of Knowledge for a Leninist seizure of the State. The problem is in reality

163

tolerate a political realm outside of its control, to almost an affirmation of work in the social factory as itself autonomous. Thus, though Negri oscillates between seeing this becomes in forms in forms the essentially resistance of work of resistance, and multitude has in a sense been overcome), but an by labour: "In the effect, working, the of affective collective embodiment of affirmation 47 2000: 395; itself (Hardt Negri emphasis added). as singularity" and multitude produces

(for 'work' a refusal of work not so much

This is not to say that Negri dismisses the category of exploitation. this labour

is "inextricably

and emotionally

linked

to the principle

He writes that characteristics

(exclusion, selection, hierarchy) of the labour market" (1989: 47), and that this "does not mean mocking the reality of exploitation" (1994: 235). 48 But insofar as the multitude tends toward autonomy, exploitation 238): "capitalist power dramatically it can only control them from

way. " (1994: 235)

exploitation

iS.49

work

'external'

controls the new configurations

and 'empty'

(1994:

of living labour, but

in invade it is because them to a the outside not allowed

disciplinary

To summarise,

becomes increasingly

It thus becomes increasingly

unclear what

exactly

when Marx sees general intellect tending to autonomy

outside

(either as a slightly

decontextualised

social individual,

it in Negri in fixed as work, emerging sees capital), embodied

or a general

intellect

but a work that itself is

largely autonomous and almost communist, at a time when the Fragment's

proposition

is

"the point at which the material basis of private appropriation " individual. itself law the to the too collective weak resist growth of are of profit and the (Negri 1989: 57). 50 At his extremes Negri even favours labour market deregulation (as if t:) t.,

apparently materialising:

'deregulation' was not always a process of intricate regulation) to enable the development in from the (1989: 79), turns the of a variant of work away this refusal and potential of "reappropriation 'self-management', a of the social essence of production theme as of old " (1996: labour. immaterial to ensure an ever-richer reproduction of accumulated ... 221). 51 The "blind objectivism" of orthodoxy which Negri writes "wait[s] for some for 'in labour itself' into living 'in the and to transform class working miraculous power itself ...... (1994a: 234) is indeed problematic, but it can not be opposed by a wilful naming of contemporary capitalist production as almost a communist multitude.

much more complicated, since not only the properties and use of Knowledge, but also its structure, are determined by its capitalist functioning. " 47 Further confusion is added when Negri describes living labour as having a "clandestine existence" (1992: 92). 48 See the very strange exchange between Negri and Derrida on this point in Sprinker (1999). 49 For example, "Exploitation" is defined as "the expropriation of cooperation and the nullification of the is the labour immaterial if " (Hardt Negri But 2000: 385) linguistic precisely production. and of meanings is it in linguistic what sense communication with an external capitalist control, one wonders effectivity of 'nullified'. 50 Negri's (1992: 89) assertion that "the new labouring processes are founded on the refusal to work" and that "[tlhe social worker's productive cooperation is the consolidation of the refusal to work" makes little sense unless we see, as Negri is seeming to do, these'new labouring processes' as already non-work. 51 Hardt (1994: 227) makes this point about self in Hardt it is and clearly and stated rather -management, Negri (2000: 411). 164

The minor as new majority This problem of an autonomousmultitude working its way to communism is highlighted most starkly in Negri's approach to Deleuze and Guattari's figure of the minoritarian and Haraway's cyborg. In conversation with Deleuze(N: 169-76), Negri asks if in 'communicationsociety'52the communismof the Fragmentas the "transversalorganisationof free individuals built on a technology that makesit possible"is "less utopian than it usedto be". He also raisesthe possibility that, though domination becomes more perfect, perhaps "any man, any minority, any singularity, is more than ever before potentially able to speakout and thereby recover a greaterdegreeof freedom" (N: 174). Though posed as a question, this is clearly a presentationof Negri's generalargument. Deleuzeresponds,however,by making a very different point. He suggests that instant communication is more concomitant with below) forms (see 'control' than 'communism', that "[tlhe quest for of advanced 'universals of communication' ought to make us shudder", and that speech and communicationare "thoroughly permeatedby money - and not by accidentbut by their very nature." (175) Here we have two Spinozists offering two fundamentallydifferent interpretationsof the socialisedworker. Negri seesa 'subject', a multitude of liberation emerging to communist presencethrough interconnectionand pure communication in in from Deleuze 'dividuals' and capital, sees cramped autonomy ever-more control societies, where politics would not reside in capital/communication-permeated 'speaking out', but in a much less 'present' form of lines of flight in "vacuoles of noncommunication". Haraway (1991) makesa similar point that the common language of communicationsciencesis not a freed-upspaceof communicatingcyborgs so much as "the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a searchfor a common languagein which all resistanceto instrumental control disappearsand all heterogeneitycan be submittedto disassembly,reassembly,investment,and exchange." (164) Despite these apparent differences, Negri suggests that the politics of the socialised worker is related both to the cyborg (Hardt and Negri 1994: 28 1) and Deleuze'sminority (Negri 1998: n.p.), but when thesefigures both expressa cramped, difficult, and minor position (that can in no sense be a simple affirmation of communicationand its collective whole), he wantsto read them as plenitudeand majority in a process that seems inevitable, that "cannot help revealing a telos, a material affin-nationof liberation" (Hardt and Negri 2000: 395)). Thus Negri (1998: n.p.) says that DeleuzeandGuattari'sconceptof the minoritarianwas a recognition of the socialised worker, but "from the point of view of phenomenologicalanalysis" the "sociopolitical

52 'Communicationsociety' is Negri's term for Deleuze's model of 'control society' (cf. Negri 1992:105). Deleuze's expression 'control' clearly brings pejorative connotations to an understanding of a system (wherecommunicationis indeed prevalent) that Negri would like to elide, as is evident in this question. Though in Empire control emerges to an apparently central place, as the book develops it seems to becomesubsumedin the categoryof 'Empire',which itself becomes increasingly 'empty'. When Deleuze andGuattari (1988:460) write of the return of 'empire' ("modernStates of the third age do indeed restore the most absolute of empires"),it is immanentto the most intricatecontrol. 165

definition given in A Thousand Plateaus does not really go much further than this" 53 He suggests that the minoritarian is a figure of the multitude and that it contributed to an understanding of a "new concept of the majority". Now we know that for Deleuze and Guattari the sine qua non of the minor is that it is never a majority, always by definition a deterritorialisation of the majority. In an earlier essay Negri (1992) acknowledges this by suggesting that the limitation of Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari is in "pose[ing] the critique of power as a line of flight" (105) and refusing to identify a "constitutive power". But then, on the same page, Negri recognises that actually they do have a constitutive power, but this is quite unfathornably linked to their typology of dominant abstract machines and diagrams: paradigm and Deleuze, around this final [control/communication] there is determined a qualitative leap which allows thinking a new, radically new, order of possibility: communism. If in the society of sovereignty democracy is republican, if in the disciplinary society democracy is

According

to

Foucault

socialist, then in the society of communication democracy cannot but be communist. Historically, the passage which is determined between disciplinary society and the society of communication is the final possible dialectical passage. Afterwards, the ontological constitution cannot but be the product of the multitude of free individuals... (1992: 105) Nothing in Deleuze and Guattari (let alone in Foucault, of all people) suggests that their 0 free inevitable leads "the to of communist plenitude of multitude a seemingly politics individuals", or that this could be a determined epochal relation as natural to 'the society

of communication' as 'socialism' was to discipline. The way DeleuzeandGuattari'sminor can be usedto analysethe refusal of work but in factory/socialised is developed thesis the the chapter, worker next social within in I to turn their to capitalism, now want understanding contemporary elaborate of t7 particular the 'axiomatic', 'control', and 'machinic surplus value', to problematise Negri's thesis of an emergingautonomy, in a position more in keeping with the social factory thesis. The capitalist BwO BwO, axiornatics, and class For Deleuze and Guattari, the capitalist socius operates as an ever-mutating 'abstract machine', 'megamachine', or 'Body without Organs' (BwO). The abstractsocial machine of capitalism is fundamentallydifferent from the 'prin-dtive' and 'despotic' abstract social machines in that it functions not by codes (coding and overcodingmaterial flows) but on codes(decodingand deterritorialisation)53 In EmpireHardt and Negri (2000) go so far as to suggest that Foucault "fails to grasp the real ... dynamics of production in biopolitical society", that Deleuze and Guattari "discover the productivity of

166

this is its "most characteristic" and "most important tendency" (A(E: 34). 54 The two principle flows that are brought into conjunction are the deterritorialised and unqualified worker 'free' to sell his labour capacity (no longer coded as slave or serf), and decoded and unqualified money (no longer determined as merchant or landed wealth) capable of buying labour power. But this in itself is not sufficient a description. After all, all social machines operate some form of decoding and deterritorialisation. There are two marked differences with the capitalist socius. First, it is characterised by a generalised and continuous process of decoding and deterritorialisation. 55 This is because there is no particular structural regime or configuration of life to maintain, but a single objective of 'production for production's sake'. The 'essence of wealth' is no longer a concrete objective thing, but "the activity of production in generar' (A(E: 270). 56 Second, concomitant with this deterritorialisation is a simultaneous reterritorialisation, for 'production in general' does have a purpose - the extraction of the capacities of life as 4surplus value'. For the creation and realisation of value (utilisation of existing capital, commodity consumption, reinvestment in new capital, and profit), there needs to be a form of control, measurement, and organisation that determines and creates particular forms (such as worker and consumer) immanent to this abstract production. Capital, the continuous deterritorialisation of life, is thus necessarily populated by, or it "miraculates" (A(E: 144) at every moment, particular determined forms or identities. We could call these identities 'codes', except that through the continual process of de/reterritorialisation they are forever changing. They are thus 'conjunctions' or 'axioms'. In the axiomatic

social reproduction ... but manage to articulate it only superficially and ephemerally" (28), and that, indeed,their responseswere "pallid" againsta metaphysicaltraditionthat can now be overcome(368). 54Anti-Oedipusprovides a'universal history' of three types of abstract social machine: primitive/ savage territorial, barbariandespotic, and civilised capitalist. What defines each social machine is its mode of compositiondefined by three syntheses (connective,disjunctive,conjunctive(cf. Chapter 4, note 13)) by which the whole and its parts operate as a socius (ACE:33). The question is one of the territories and codes by which each social machine engineers its material flows in specific relations and so fashions a 'memory' (followingNietzsche'sGenealogy- though 'memory' does not have to be particularly 'deep' (cf. Ansell Pearson 1999: 217-8)) of corporeal, incorporeal, technical, relations for the human: "The social machineis literally a machine, irrespective of any metaphor, inasmuch as it exhibits an immobile motor and undertakesa variety of interventions: flows are set apart, elements are detached from a chain, and portions of the task to be performedare distributed." (ACE.141) Despite the clear intones of linearity, Deleuzeand Guattari's universal history describes abstract social machines not by their temporality, but by their mode of operation. That is, they "define social formations by machinic processes and not by modes of production (these on the contrary depend on the processes)" (ATR 435), where 'modes of production'are dated concrete configurations (though I think that this should be seen as an addition to, rather than negationof Marx's method, which is equally more concerned with modes of composition than dated histories). And further, each concrete form is always a composite of different abstract social machines - the abstract machines are coexistent 'extrinsically' (they all interrelate - even the primitive machine, following Clastres.(1989), has to 'ward off' the State) and 'intrinsically' (each machine can be taken up into another machinicform, as for example, the return of the despotic Urstaat or 'empire' in the capitalist socius) (cf. ATR 435-7,460). Thus, in a sense, the abstract comes before the concrete, and within the concretewe can always find a coextensivefunctioningof different abstract machines. 55 Thus Deleuze and Guattari are fully in accord with Marx when he famously marked capitalism as "Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation ... All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudicesand opinions,are swept away, all new-formedones becomeantiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holly is profaned, and man is at last compelledto face with sober faces his real conditionsof life and his relationswith his kind." (Marx and Engels 1973:36-7) 56 For Marx's account of the centralityand novelty the of quest for 'wealth itself' in disrupting all previous modes of community(and the denunciationof such practicein antiquityfor fear of this very potential) see Marx (1973: 540-1). 167

process, intrinsic (more 'intemalised') codes are replaced by a plethora of immanent (more 'surface') abstractrelationswhich traversethe socius, but which have no essence, rules,or meaningbeyondtheir immediaterelation, and what is functional to them: "... the axiomaticdealsdirectly with purely functional elementsand relations whose nature is not specified,and which are immediatelyrealisedin highly varied domains simultaneously." (ATP: 454) This axiomaticprocessis enabledthrough the transformationof particular wealth-creatingpractices, and forces and forms into an abstract or universal form of wealth ('abstract labour') through the medium of money.57 Money is the general equivalentwhich enablesthe commensurabilityof all activity, and, becauseit can be accumulated,the potentiality of surplusor boundlessproduction beyond that immediately necessary(A(E: 258-9). Any flow of labour (as an abstractquality) can then conjoin in an axiomatic 'cash nexus' in any relation with a flow of capital in ever-new ways and alwaysbegetmoneyin a fashion that is not determinedby its current concreteform and, as I havesaid, is independentof any formal rules beyond simply the begettingof wealth (cf. ATP: 453). There is no overall code, rather every axiom composesan immanent in The (A(E: 33). flows between terms axiomatic valued quantitatively monetary relation determinate is 'images', 'organs', the of or creation ever-changing or application process relations, acrossa socius, capitalism, which is in itself wholly virtual and imageless,a BWO.58 The axiomatic process is both the means to conjugate an infinite series of relations,and to formalisetheserelationsat eachinstantso asto extracta surplus. This is how the processis 'directly economic': The socius as full body has become directly economic as capital-money; it does not tolerate any other preconditions. What is inscribed or marked is no longer the producers or non-producers, but the forces and means of production as abstract quantities that become effectively concrete in their becoming related or their conjunction... (A(E: 263)

Following Marx, Deleuzeand Guattari argue that the capitalist socius operates, then, on two levels, evidencedin the way money works on two (intersecting)planes. 'The true economicforce', the full body of the BwO of capital, is the total productivity of this process(where surplus value emerges),where money begetsmoney in the realm of financing. The other level is the reterritorialisation in (at anyone time) axiornatised 57 In this Marxian sense, money is first and foremost not a mechanism of exchange, but of command and management of labour (across the social whole). For an explanation of this proposition, and a series of analyses of the politics of money that follow from it, see Bonefeld and Holloway (1996). 58 Massumi (1992: incorporeal 128-9) explains functions directly this well: "Capital through Capital can be given an image - in fact transformation, without having to step down or up to another level .... it must have one in order to act - but it is imageless as such. It is a body without organs. In other words, a network of virtual relations, a selection of which is immediately actualised at ground level wherever one of (components of passage). capitalism's working images (organs) goes. These images are conveyances They bring to designated bodies at each spatiotemporal coordinate through which they circulate a relation that fundamentally That relation is capital as an changes those bodies' social and physical reality. immanent social agency. -

168

subjects that receive 'impotent' money as payment in an individualised quantitative valuation. The two planes necessarily function in tandem because capital always needs to exceed and realise itself. The process of exceeding itself (producing surplus value) is discussed in the next section. To realise itself, everybody must be invested in the system, form of 'wage' ('impotent' money) and concomitant identity from their receiving some ZD

contribution to the total process(be this from work done in a factory, from managing a sub-stationof a business,from shareownership,or from 'indirect wages', statebenefits, 'family wages', and so on). Due to this investment: longer even any masters,but only slaves commanding other slaves; there are no ... there is no longer any need to burden the animal from the outside, it shoulders its own burden. Not that man is ever the slave of technical machines; he is rather the slave of the social machine. ...there is only one machine, that of the great mutant decoded flow - cut off from goods - and one class of servants, the decoding bourgeoisie, the class that decodes the castesand the statuses,and that draws from the machine an undivided flow of income convertible into consumer and production goods, a flow on which profits and wages are based. (A(E: 254-5)59

Deleuzeand Guattari(1983: 253) thus write that here"there is only one class,a class with a universalistvocation" (they call this classthe 'bourgeoisie',but it is easierto think of it asa generalisedcapitalist class). This is because'class' signifies the very decoding and deterritorialisationof castesand statusgroups. In as much as capitalismfunctions across the social whole, it continually breaksdown any fixed identity or group: "the very notion is insofar it 'negative' implies designates there the that only one of codes, as of class, ... in in demarcate " (255) Whilst this a scale on one can groups of people system class. termsof how they accruemoney for their practices,with wages (even no wages) on one side and profit on the other (that is, they are not saying we are all equal, far from it), essentiallyall are concreteaxiornatisedembodimentsof the abstractprocess (and hence politics, as I arguedin Chapter4, emergeswith minority problematisationsrather than distinct 'classes', even though they are expressionsof a 'proletarian' tendency that deterritorialises the 'one class') To say that the capitalist axiomatic system operates on the level of abstract quantities and is composed of one class is not to say that it does not produce subjects. Deleuze and Guattari distinguish two subjective forms, both of which operate 59 This 'investment', as fundamental to identity as it is (since that which is invested produces the identity and its investment in the first place), is the basis for Deleuze and Guattari's crucial assertion that the question of support for, and critique of the status quo resides not in one's 'interest', but in one's 'desire', or libidinal investment. Since we are all, as Guattari (1996: 101-5) puts it, "machinic junkies", AntiOedipus asks, how can one not invest in the great mutant flow of capitalism?: "... a pure joy in feeling oneself a wheel in the machine, traversed by flows, broken by schizzes. Placing oneself in a position where one is thus traversed, broken, fucked by the socius, looking for the right place where, according to the aims and the interests assigned to us, one feels something moving that has neither an interest nor a purpose.... a taste for a job well done... " (346-7) It is precisely because of this investment in the

169

simultaneouslyin the capitalist axiomatic- niachinic enslavementand social subjection. Machinic enslavementcomposesan integratedmachineof human, animal, tool subjectto first but Marx's is despotic State-form (the higher the productive example, unity a 'automaton' could be another), whereas social subjection isolates the human from the is longer being human itself higher ("The become the a componentof no to unity machine the machinebut a worker, a user. He or she is subjectedto the machineand no longer functioning 457)). In by " (ATP: the the of the the capitalist socius, machine. enslaved determined force into (turning comparable through a a quanta abstract axiomatic conjunctionor practice)is the elementof machinicenslavement,and the production of the is the the the the worker, consumer, this, personified capitalist, out of molar aggregate Z-1 t:1 An is But and enslavement. simultaneously subjection eachmoment social subjection. 458) (ATP: Guattari's Deleuze television can exemplify this. example of and adaptationof The worker is subjectedin asmuch as s/heis subjectto the statements'you must work... is (where the for to to statement a the good of your soul/ contribute society' to survive/ 'I the anz a this with enunciation core as a subjective materialcompulsion) and enfolds is in is for And it is a series the s/he worker enslaved as much as me'. good worker and illustrates (1996: 122) Spivak the in a work machine. reconfiguring of componentquanta is "It forms two a paradox that capitalist these when she writes: cofunctioning of humanism does indeed tacitly make its plans by the 'materialist' predication of Value [what is here called the machinic enslavementof labour-power], even as its official ideology offers the discourseof humanismas such..." If this is the general axiomatic process, in 'Postscript on Societies of Control' (N: 177-182) Deleuze makes some specific comments about the operation of (which, Control in as time or of real subsumption, contemporary axiomatic processes a

Control

60 Deleuze that, 'Empire'). Negri 'communication have argues society' and calls seen, we breakdown the Second World War, to the of the witness we are particularly after is based Discipline disciplinary Foucault's (1991) distinct enclosure. spacesof relatively on the double figure of individual and mass, where each site of disciplinary enclosure both disciplines and maximises collective energies, and produces individual identities Panopticon, in form is I Though (as the the to that showed enclosure. similar appropriate individual toward oriented system self-surveillance and self-maximisation), each a certain different its has individuality. The traverses type own subject of mass and confinement being subjects of the function of worker, prisoner, patient, student and of enclosure sites so on, in series. In control, there is a tendency to a collapse of these enclosures and distinctions, such that one is always in a 'superposition', occupying a number of these is (in there discrete 'moulds' Rather a than each enclosure), positions at any one time. individuals 'modulation'. Hence and masses, analogical coherent continuous variation or break/flows of capital that politics needs to be thought in terms of machinic relations, and why it comes in and through capital, rather than from outside it. 170

arereplacedwith much more fluid and digital 'dividuals' caught in overlapping seriesof different 'self-transforming' and metastableconfigurations, where the contours of the dividual are modulated through continuous absorption and feed-back of information across 'data banks' (or 'nodal points' in communicatingnetworks - including agencies such as the police, social work, psychiatry, as well as more recent consumer profiling, and credit assessmentprocesses(cf. Rose 1999: 260)). The expression 'dividual' is importantin emphasisingthat the self-autonomyof the individual (subjection)is breaking down into a sub-divided series of changing capacities,possibilities and limits in each modulation(enslavement),wheredividuals are not just 'normalised' but maintainedwith a certaindegreeof what we could call functional differences(such as, for example, new milieu of cultural innovation,or social and political 'danger'), such that the thresholdsof knowledge and practice are always being reconfigured (cf. Rose 1999). There is no discretepracticeor dispensionof energy in eachsite (work-time here, educationthere), rather a varying overlay of these practicesin one site, where, as Joseph K testified in Kafka's (1953) The Trial, one is never 'done' with anything. At any one time, of course, thereare precisemechanismsof dividualised 'identity' (or 'subjection'). For Deleuze this is both an extension of discipline, a kind of permeation (Massumi (1998: 56) describesit is a 'release' of discipline acrossthe social), and also something new that is directly related to a post-Second World War "mutation of capitalism" (N: 180). Rose(1999: 234) has warned againstreading 'Control' in epochal terms since, like all Deleuze'sabstractmachines,it is a mode of 'configuration' rather than a specific spatio-temporalsystem, and hence always operatesin conjunction with other configurations(cf note 54). IndeedDeleuzeseesKafka's work, at the turn of the discipline and control (hencethe super-positionsof The Trial - the as straddling century, labyrinths that emergewithin apparentlydistinct disciplinary territories self-transfbrrnýing such as the court-house, and the endless postponementof the verdict - are control Nevertheless, does Deleuze also specifically link control to some pervasive experiences). featuresof post-War capitalism: the end of the gold standard and the emergenceof floating exchangerates (N: 180), and a form of capital based not on production and proprietorship, but on businesses,services, administrators,and computers. In many ways 'business'becomesthe societalwide 'technology' much as the Panopticonwas the technologyof the abstractmachineof discipline. Deleuzeis suggestingnot so much a 'social factory', but a 'social business'. "Capitalism in its presentform" is dispersive, with factories giving way to businesses. Family, school, essentially ... army, and factory are no longer so many analogous but different sites converging in an owner, whether the state or some private power, but transmutable or

60 Incidentally, Deleuze (1995a: 51) calls this text "completely marxist". 171

transformable coded configurations of a single business where the only people left are administrators. (N: 181)61 surplus value I will return to the 'social business' below, but first I want to consider the labour and 'value' of this system. The question of the content of the productivity of this axiomatic process is complicated, and here we get to that most heated of Marxist debates, that of Value. I have shown how Marx raised this question of a

Machinic

different content of activity as the general intellect and the social individual, and how Negri tried to see it as the near actualisation of communism within the regimes of biopolitical labour that had escaped the law of value. Deleuze and Guattari explicitly Negri, 'machinic but they this unlike what call surplus value', address question around

they firmly situateit asan axiornatisedcapitalistform. DeleuzeandGuattariwrite that capital dependsincreasinglyless on the extraction 206; 1996: "complex (Guattari labour than time on a process" qualitative of and quantity ATP: 492; emphasis added) in a fashion that at times seems to tie in with Negri's thesis that we are heading beyond the labour theory of value. On closer inspection, however, they are more 'Marxist'. In Anti-Oedipus they suggest, a little like section [A] of the Fragment, that alongside conventional 'human' surplus value, machine-rich production 41: 1 is (232) 'machinic the that the surplus capital value' of constant emergence of a sees (233). distinct from labour labour "intellectual the the worker" of manual an product of But this is a mistake in their own terms, in that it presents machines and humans as distinct entities rather than, as they always insist, products of a social machinic process (and it makes a split between intellectual labour - 'machinic surplus value', and manual labour - 'human surplus value', that makes little conceptual sense in that it seems to 62 is, however, from This labour human). intellectual the the not realm of exclude fundamental to their argument, and it is later rectified. The fundamental point of AntiOedipus' discussion of surplus value is that the aggregate of the two surplus values is a 4surplus value of flux'. In A Thousand Plateaus surplus value of flux is replaced with 'machinic surplus value' (that is, this time defining the product of the whole machinic 61The importance of business as a variously concretely embodied diagram in diverse spheres is stressed in a number of examples: TV game-shows are said to be popular "because they're a perfect reflection of the way businesses are run" 179), continuing education and continuous assessment are "the surest way of turning education into a business" (M. 179), and "[ejven art has moved away from closed sites and into the open circuits of banking. " (181) This 'business' or 'enterprise' model is also forwarded by earlier Negri as central to what he calls the 'crisis-state'. As with Deleuze, this is a form of control that arises with the collapse of distinct enclosure, and of the normalising regulation of labour through Keynesian wage/productivity tie-ins. In ever-more fluid productive space, the 'enterprise' comes to be the site of productivity across the social as a modulating capture of energies, able to remove the stabilities of largescale production and compose forms of identity and self-control in varying and changing forms: "The key control mechanism in this transformation is the enterprise, in the sense that it extends the norms of factory-command over work to the whole social labour time." (Negri 1988: 123) 62 Clearly aware of the centrality of Marx's argument that machines cannot create value, Anti-Oedipus' proposition of machinic surplus value is couched in what Deleuze and Guattari rather self-consciously call a deliberate "indispensable incompetence". This is a ruse they take from Maurice Clavel's apparent use of "wilfully incompetent questions" to Marxist economists concerning the credibility of the centrality of human surplus value in the face of the productive power of machines (ACE:232), but they situate their

172

regimerather thanjust constantcapital). In this framework 'machinic surplus value' is defined in two (fully interrelated)senses. First, it signifies not the differential between the value of, and the value createdby labour capacity, but the break between the two forms of capital - the flow of the full BwO and the axiomatisedidentities that are its reterritorialisation. Thus the 'exploitation' of surplus value is the very forin that axiomatisedsubjectstake in capital (as discussedabove).63 Second, machinic surplus value signifies the societalwide extraction or production of the complex, qualitative, machinicprocessthat the socialisedworker thesissoughtto describe,and the very diffuse and unlocatablenatureof value in this system(ATP: 458,491-2).64 1 will consider this second point (having developed the first, above, in the explanationof axiomatics). In an essayby Guattari (1996) that is in many ways a reading of the Fragment's general intellect and social individual as categories of capitalist productivity (he suggests,for example,that "The recastingof the quantificationof value basedon work-time won't be, as Marx assumed,the privilege of a classlesssociety." (206)), there is an explicit attemptto 'lift' Marx's 'collective worker' from a category based on average labour with a generaliseddispension of energy (which can be quantitativelycalculated)to a focuson the qualitativeintensity and variation of work. The 65 few has problems. Nevertheless, it emphasisesthe important point that a essay a qualitativevariationexistsin the contentof value beyond a simple definition of work and work time. Thus Guattari writes that "it is complex arrangements- training, innovation, internal structures,union relationsetc. - which circumscribethe magnitudeof capitalist zonesof profit, and not simply a levy on work-time" (1996: 205), and that capitalism actualisesproductivesocio-economicforms in varied desires,aesthetics,ecologiesand so on (1995: 55). But capital still operates as the universal plane of these different 'universesof value'. That is, each of the different universes of value is subsumedin capitalist generalequivalence(Guattari 1995: 54-5), or in a "machinic phylum which traverses,bypasses,disperses,miniaturises,and coopts all human activities." (Guattari 'incompetence' around the question of the surplus value of flux which, as I am arguing, is fully comprehensiblewithin the labour theory of value. 63Diane Elson (1979) has argued that this is the essenceof Marx's labour theory of value theory not of -a the determinationof prices, but of the form iabour takes in capital (to stress this point she thus calls it a 'value theory of labour'):"the objectof Marx's theory of value was labour. It is not a matter of seeking an explanation of why prices are what they are and finding it in labour, But rather of seeking an understandingof why labour takes the forms it does, and what the political consequencesare." (123) 64Though A ThousandPlateaus (492) suggests that machinic surplus value emerges "less and less by the striation of space-timecorrespondingto the physicosocialconcept of worW'we have seen already how 'business' becomes a pervasive model for an increasingly subdivided and diffuse 'productivity', and hence I would suggest that they are here using the word 'work' in a limited,descriptivesense rather than in a machinic sense. In the sense in which this thesis defines work in abstract terms as the axiornatised reterritorialisationof human practice (immersed in machinic configurations) immanent to the capitalist mission of 'productionfor production'ssake', the extensionof machinic enslavementis simultaneously an extensionof work (which, after all, is an inventionor product of machinicenvironments(cf. ATP: 400-1)). 65Notablythe essay overplaysthe reductionof work-timeas a measure of value (since the quantification of labour, however impossible it is to really measure individual contribution, is still fundamental to capitalist valuation of life), and suggests that the concept of 'average social labour' is an abstraction inappropriatefor an understandingof the concrete practices of labour (when in fact it is related to an understandingof the processesof abstractionnecessaryfor unbounded'productivity',as I argued above through Anti-Oedipus). 173

1996: 207) There is now a qualitative variation in the 'value' of these practices- any is be, that can capitalised. As Camatte (1995) argues, a 'capitalised human activity fixed has base-valuesuch that "human beings are fixed to its escaped any activity' movement,which can take off from the normal or abnormal, moral or immoral human being." (43) But, if subsumedin generalequivalence,this is not to say that this machinic surplus value is produced 'autonomously' in society. Rather it is "miraculated", or is (AM becoming it 144), by the needed a "required" machinic surplus created sociusas value (cf. Guattari 1996: 208). There is no play of autonomouscreativity and capitalist recuperation(cf. A(E: 337-8), but rather, as Massumi (1998: 57) puts it: "Control involves the assimilationof powersof existence,at the momentof their emergence". And form, is ... Normal' is there the new normalisation of each where axiomatic at eachstage, for little " free-standing. New a while. of social productivity might escape aspects now Indeedcapitalismhasmany little autonomouszoneswhere creationis allowed to operate image (Anti-Oedipus of the mad scientist creating on the offers an outside productivity fringes, and we could add, at a different level, youth or countercultural practices as for internet in labour (2000) Terranova (cf. these terms)) an examination of examples before it is generalisedas a new productive activity, but such spaces(or lines of flight) enrichratherthancontradictcapital- at leastin normal functioning. Again the 'business' is the archetype. Deleuze writes that in disciplinary production discrete amounts of energy were extracted in the factory and costs were buying 'activities', Deleuze in 'fixing but of a a of rates'. we see and control reduced, thus writes that factory was a body of men whose internal forces reached an equilibrium the ... between possible production and the lowest possible wages; but in a control society businessestake over from factories, and a business is a soul, a gas. There were of course bonus systemsin factories, but businessesstrive to introduce a deeper level of modulation into wages, bringing them into a state of constant metastability punctuatedby ludicrous challenges, competitions, and seminars. (N: 179)

But I do not think that marketingshould be 'Marketing' lies at the centreof this ISOU11.66 seenasa distinct practicecircumscribedin a single social group,but more as a sign of the business' free floating ability discern and require a wealth of activities through its intimate and control of social life, and understandingof the variation and pen-neation its 'data banks' provide. Inasmuchas we all becomepart of the that activity of potential 'business', marketingcan also be seen to be a generalisedfeature of social activity (a necessaryattributeof the 'dividual'). Making this caseLazzarato(1996) writes that, what he calls 'communication' (marketing,productionof 'cultural content' such as fashion and ID

174

taste,consumerfeedbackmechanisms,public opinion) is enmeshedin "the postindustrial commodity" suchthat it "is the result of a creativeprocessthat involves both the producer and the consumer." (142) This 'communication' emergesin a condition of intimate axiornatisationwhere "one has to express oneself, one has to speak, communicate, cooperate,and so forth" (135) and hence leads to a situation where every aspect of subjectivity itself becomesproductive of value (143). But this is not only a 'subjective' phenomena.As Massumi (1996) and Morris (1998) have startedto show, this processof 6communication'or 'work' occurs in a sub-human fashion, as the communicationand axiomatisationof 'affect' or intensity immanent to particular machinic environments (witnessthe useof biofeedbackmechanismsin focus-groupresearch67). of the social factory Returningto the termsof the social individual and the generalintellect in the Fragment, I can now presenta clearerpicture. When Marx writes of the subsumptionof the general

The little work-machines

intellect in machinerythis is actually a subsumptionof all society in capitalist relations (where production thus extends into the realms, to use the Marxian categories, of circulation and reproduction (cf. Negri 1991: 142-50)). That is, we can not consider it is in [A]. Rather immanent to the social intellect terms of machinery solely general individual [131acrossthe plane of the social, but (unlike Marx's hope, and in different individual is in continual mechanisms of Negri's this social analysis) ways, axiomatisation. Thus, if we think of generalintellect/machineryin more machinic terms, we could subdivide Marx's technicalmachineinto a seriesof smaller and more complex increasingly fluid, (traversing the the, space of across society assemblages machinic division of 'work time' and 'free time'). Each would be composedof varying quantities in instance human the societal wide competences, where each technical parts, and of languages,knowledges, physical forces, interactions, skills, expertisesare present in different degreesin the worker and the technicalmachine,andwhereeachwould maintain a 'social' productivity, regardlessof whether they immediatelycontribute to what we conventionally call work. As Guattari (1996) puts it, in this system, fixed capital, variablecapital,and free time are interlacedin particular 'machinic environments', where the whole ensembleof affects in each environment are 'axiomatised' and produce a 'machinic surplusvalue': "exploitation concernsmachinicarrangements at first - man and his faculties havin9 becomean integral part of these arrangements. " (209) And even t:, when"Machinesin the factory seemto be working all by themselves,... in fact it is the whole of society which is adjacentto them." (1996: 212) Since 'work' is the extraction of surplusvalue andthe maintenanceof value in a particular form, then (adding to Marx's 66"The sales departmentbecomesa businesscentre or'soul' Marketingis now the instrument of social ... control and producesthe arrogantbreed who are our masters." (N. 181) 67 Massumi (1996) provides an example of a study of children's experience of a TV film where, not linguistic, but non-verbal bodily response, which contradicted verbal response, was the basis for judgment of affect. 175

conceptionof work to include generalintellect) the activities of the social individual are a form of work, including those activities which maintain the correct functioning of the system,evenif they haveno wage. We can envisageexamplesof these axiornatisedmachinic work regimes (of the most modern and traditional kinds), from a fully automatedcar-plantat one end, fitting well with Marx's accountof the 'watchman' thesis, to an advertising industry brainstorming session, a garment worker sweat shop, the key-tap regulatedkey board, the hourly labour contract, the zero-hours contract, the ResearchAssessmentExercise and 4vocationalism' in higher education, work-place drug-tests, telephone call-time monitoring, e-mail answering speed regulation, housework, 'jobseeking', career opportunity maximisation,collective responsibility, pleasingthe boss, neo-Puritanethics, sheer poverty-driven hard work, to, indeed, consumer-feedbackmechanisms, and correctly competentfashion-consciousconsumption. This analysis has the advantageof accounting for the great mutability and flexibility of a good deal of contemporarywork. Rather than one general portfolio of skills that may be employedin the narrativeof a single careeror job over a life time, these incorporate little would pick up and a whole series of different myriad work-machines This being different times. sense of perpetually able to reskill, selfcompetencesat employ, modulate ones demeanour, skill, aptitude, and competenceis, for example, particularly evident in the emphasis on training and pursuit of jobs for the British unemployed,now receiving their 'JobseekersAllowance' and their 'New Deal' on the basisthat they are always ready, prepared,and preparingto be propelled into productive arrangements. Vimo writes (1996: 22) that "[1]ooking for a job develops those genericallysocialtalents- aswell asthe habit of developingno durablehabits at all - that function astrue andproper 'tools of the trade' once work is found.1168In theseregimes, one's lifestyles, ethics, even rebellious identities, and one's consumption and reproductionpatternsbecomedirectly productive as generalisedpotential, actualisedin varying specific enactmentof work. And within work-time, or the quantitativebasisfor a wage, vastly different, varying, and expansive qualitative skills, knowledges, 68 Fox-Piven and Cloward (1972: 6-7) draw attention to the historical problem of unemployment which the JSA and the New Deal are the latest attempts to overcome: "The regulation of civil behaviour in all societies is intimately dependent on stable occupational arrangements. So long as people are fixed in their work roles, their activities and outlooks are also fixed.... Each behaviour and attitude is shaped by the reward of a good harvest or the penalty of a bad one, by the factory paycheck or the danger of loosing it. But mass unemployment breaks that bond, loosening people from the main institution by which they are regulated and controlled. Moreover, mass unemployment that persists for any length of time diminishes the capacity of other institutions to bind and constrain people.... without work, people cannot conform to familial and communal roles; and if the dislocation is widespread, the legitimacy of the social order itself may come to be questioned. " It is with this in mind that Walters (11994)has shown how the 'invention' of unemployment and its institutional apparatus was a strategy intended to construct a coherent If today the emphasis in neo-liberal unemployed subject comparable to the employed subject. governance has moved toward an ethically intensive process of 'jobseeking' (where benefit is only paid on the basis that the jobseeker enters into arrangements of self optimisation - including training and maintenance of acceptable physical appearance - and continual job application), the core focus on the development of coherent subjective forms has not (and indeed JSA can be seen as a direct response to the failure of the model of the unemployed subject that became evident under Thatcher and Reagan (cf. Aufheben 1998)).

176

interactions, disciplines, languages and skills across social are competences, relations, actualised, where it matters at least as much that workers work on themselves (optimise their skills, and deploy and feed-back their complex knowledges and capacities in each axiomised work relation) to enable the productivity of vastly complex assemblages, as that they 'put in. their time' (even though labour-time retains a continued role as the - albeit modulating rather than fixed - measurement of the 'value' of the system that the worker accrues to herself). We should not infer from all this that we have left behind the extremes of workplace enclosure and control (indeed, in the age of multinational sub-contracting and outsourcing, the extremes of 'post-industrial' infotech employment and the nineteenth century sweatshop are fully interfaced - often in one and the same 'subject' (cf. Ross et it is Caffentzis 1996)), but 1996: 137; 1997; Lazzarato the relative stability of al. fluid, in be disappearing is to that axiomatic, and socialised model a more seen enclosure it, 137) by Lazzarato (1996: "Precariousness, (characterised, puts as work of hyperexploitation, mobility, and hierarchy"). Lazzarato thus characterises production under the general intellect, or 'immaterial labour', not as a machine-based automated system but more as a societal-wide machinic system, ever coming into being, and dispersing again: This immaterial labour constitutes itself in forms that are immediately collective, and we might say that it exists in the form of networks and flows. The organisation of the cycle of production of immaterial labour ... is not obviously apparent to the eye, because it is not defined by the four walls of the factory. The location in which it into is in large... The the society at cycle of comes outside production operates is by job been done, it has tile the the only when required capitalist; once operation into back flows dissolves the that make possible the networks and cycle reproduction and enrichment of its productive capacities. (1996: 137)

This analysis does not fundamentally alter Marx's account, it just brings the generalintellect and social individual into the framework of real subsumption (whilst adding axiomatics and machinic surplus value to this), so resolving the apparent contradictionof a society of watchmen/machinesand an indeterminatespaceof general intellect. It is not that machines'end work society within capitalism', or that we are witness to Negri's autonomousmultitude within work. Rather, the argument is that through the ability of little work machinesto structure and mediate complex social relations, induce the emergenceand productivity of diverse affective and biopolitical forces (in a continual inducementto self-'marketing' and self-developmentof 'general intellect'-competence)all kinds of socialrelationsandknowledgesbecomeproductivein a more diffuse and machinic 'automatic systemof machinery'. Just as the Panopticonwas the archetypeof productiveself-surveillanceandregulation('discipline') that was actually embodiedin varying shapes, sizes, forms, and degreesof intensity across the social, 177

these little work assemblages of the social factory similarly embody something of the archetype of the intelligent structuring technical machine. As Paulo Virno (1996: 22) puts it: "In contemporary labour processes there are entire conceptual constellations that function by themselves as productive 'machines', without ever having to adopt either a brain. " body or an electronic mechanical Conclusion I have presented operaismo as a site of problematisation and political production that forms forms Marx, through new of political new of work, and of analysis emerged This chapter analysed operaismo's and autonomia's conception of discussion I forms of started with work, and worker. of capitalism, contemporary Panzieri's and Marx's conceptualisation of machines and the 'real subsumption' of 'social 'social Tronti's the in of capital' and presentation and capitalist relations, society

composition.

factory'. In this analysis, distinctions between relations and forces of production, work be in to the the seen overcome economic were a machinic and political and non-work, in interest 'society labour'. The the a of people of a general and society-wide production but functional in be 'subjects' to the not nodal points worker were seen capitalist and Marxist both 'objectivist' 'management of For this reason, socialised production. PCI's democratic the specifically understanding politics socialist social production', and figures be 'hegemony' to 'autonomy the the of were seen the and politics political' of of immanent to the maintenance of capitalist relations. The chapter then explored the revered text of Marx's 'Fragment on Machines'. I developing One be how two contradiction made. sees an explosive can readings showed fixed in in is intellect' 'general that emerges science, embodied around a vastly productive The other capacity. capital, and empties-out work of content and value-creating interpretation places more stress on the emergence of a complex social productivity, the though Marx sees this as part of the contradiction, in forms the to think productivity social means of new of capitalist nevertheless offers keeping with the real subsumption thesis. I then discussed Negri's figure of the 6socialised worker'. I showed how this is an extension of Marx's social individual that 6social individual',

which,

is innovations The both a worker the that socialised and problems of category. reflects figure of complex communicational and affective labour across the social factory. It enables us to think of work as a varied practice immersed in global networks that make a have 'productive', including 'work', those which social attributes of or wealth however, been functioning I in 'reproduction'. argued, seen as a realm of conventionally that Negri replicates the problem with Marx's thesis in that this socialised work tends to 'so becomes down labour breaks theory the and communism of value autonomy, where Negri's The (Negri 1994a) the of aspect problematic as almost practice of work. near' thesis was seen to be most evident in his interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the minor. I then used Deleuze and Guattari's understanding of the capitalist socius, 178

axiomatics,class,control, and machinic surplus value to see how we can understandthe socialisedworker, and the new attributesand networksof production,as emerging within capitalistrelations,andbeing intricately structuredby them. This was seento be more in keepingwith the real subsumptionand social factory thesis. As well as exploring operaismo's and autonomia's conceptionof the intricately crampedsite of work (where politics is to be situated)this analysis has fleshed out the framework of the capitalist socius first proposed in Chapter 5.1 thus ended with a summaryof the argumentthrougha considerationof contemporarywork; the little workmachinesof the social factory. Any contemporarypolitics of the refusal of work would need to engage with such work relations. The next chapter discusses the political compositionof autonomia,as a movementwhich sought to politicise the emergingwork regimesof the social factory.

179

Chapter

8

The Reversal

of Perspective

and the Emarginati

It won't be a few plague-bearers [untorelli] who will uproot Bologna. (PCI general secretaryEnrico Berlinguer, cited in Morris 1978: 67) is emerging: from the Chants de Maldoror to the struggles for reducing the work-day. It speaks in the Paris Commune and in Artaud's poetry, it speaks in Surrealism and in the French May, in the Italian Autumn and in

All the 'unstated'

immediate liberation;

it speaks across the separate orders of the language of rebellion. (Collective A/traverso 1980: 131) This chapter is concerned with

the techniques and forms

of political

composition

of

in factory. the social autonorrýa operaismo and

I focus largely on the same constituency as Negri - the socialised workers of the social factory - but I seek to understand it as a minoritarian composition immanent to capitalist relations, and hence I take the politics of the socialised worker in a different direction to Negri and his affirmation 4-: 1

of a majoritarian

multitude that is seen as increasingly distinct from capitalist relations (even as I use some do formulations Negri's this). The chapter is in two main parts: the first to of earlier explores operaist and autonomist techniques and conceptions of antagonistic class formation, and the second pursues these techniques into the politics of the 'emarginati' in autonomia and the Movement of '77. At first sight this may look like a false subsumption of very different forms of politics in an overarching schema - the first part is the conceptual constellation of operaismo that circulated around the figure of the mass worker, and the second concerns the practices of autonomia and the socialised worker. There are two things to say about this apparent continuity. First, there is no doubt that much changed between the early sixties and the late seventies such that the Movement of '77 was indeed a very different political configuration to the Hot Autumn of '69.1 Nevertheless, in many ways the Movement of '77 can be seen as an extension and proliferation of the techniques developed in the operaist organisations into the terrain of socialised work and counterculture, Showing this link enables a move away from thinking of a distinct break between the politics of 'factory work' and 'immaterial labour' (which enables Negri, for example, to forward the refusal of the former, and an affirmation of the latter) and to think of the ongoing relevance of the refusal of work within the social factory, even as it includes a wealth of

I The Movementof '77 was the high point of autonomia,characterisedby the emergenceand politicisation of a wealthof marginalpractices, and mass occupations, especially in Romeand Bolognain the Spring. The Hot Autumn of '69 was the central event in the autonomous struggles of the mass worker in the Northernfactories. See Lumley (1990) for a detailed history of both movements. 180

practices,cultures, margins that are very different to those of the mass workers in the factories. However, second, if the techniques of operaismo can be seen to develop through autonom-ia, in no way do they form the structure for a continuous movement. As I indicated in the introduction to Chapters 7 and 8, autonornýiadeveloped in vastly different ways, and it would be misguided to try and neatly subsume these proliferations into one coherent 'history of a movement'. This chapter seeks to draw out one particular aspect of these movements. It is concerned with how, through a certain understanding of political antagonism and composition, a wealth of politicised 'margins', or 'minority' concerns and forms come to proliferate within and against the terrain of the social factory, following the autonomist argument that the seventies saw the development of "margins at the centre" (of production and politics) (Alliez 1980: 118). My particular focus is on the immanent develops to more conventional questions of that counterculture ways proletarian politics (work, income, collective needs and so on), as it seeks to become, in a in (cf. Cleaver Bonefeld and Holloway 1996: 154). funded by (social) the wage sense, This is evident, at one extreme, in the expression of one member of the movement, that "the Mao of Western Marxism will grow the long hair of American counter-culture" (cited in Lumley 1990: 297). But counterculture is also considered here in broader terms, such as in the kind of social problematisations posed by the feminist movement, which are equally concerned with alternate ways of living to dominant cultural forms. It should be born in mind that my analysis of political practice starts at a time after nearly a decade of intense political activity of the mass worker in the factories. It should thus be born in discussion is background the to this that one of considerable worker unrest (cf. Red mind Notes 1979); autonomia is not a political explosion of marginals against a background of but rather the extension of political unrest to new areas. That said, stability, social '77 Movement the of emerge as the power of the mass worker was and autonomia becoming curtailed through the closure of the large Northern factories, the decentralisation of production, mass unemployment, and a wealth of austerity measures. Most of the aspects of the movement that I consider operate, of necessity, outside the conventional realm of production. That is, the refusal of work is here most definitely a practice of the social factory. It is, however, a social factory that was yet to fully develop the kind of diffuse productivity that I described as 'little work machines' at the end of the last chapter. If, as I show below, the operaists argued that the primacy of struggle is the cutting edge of capitalist reconfiguration (as it seeks to capture workers' struggle and innovation), arguably the Movement of '77, operating in a 'most contemporary' way, was at once a deterritorialisation of work, and a laboratory for new forms of diffuse, in 1977 but factory foresaw, that that the theory the cultural work picaresque, of social were still emergent (cf. Vimo 1996). What is most interesting in this regard is the way that autonomia sought not to carve out an autonomous counterculture (as US sixties counterculture tended to do, for example), though this was a feature, but to form 181

connections across the social factory

with,

or within

other groups,

workers, and sought to gain a social wage for their practices.

including

factory

That is, the importance of

autonomia is the way that the new practices of the emarginati were seen to be part of a socialised work,

not a simple space of 'freedom'.

It was, arguably, this'understanding

and these connections that necessitated first the assertion by dominant groups, such as the PCI, that these people were unproductive the destruction of the movement. disturb the transformation

'parasites' rather than workers (see below), and

For it is precisely these forms of relations which could practices (new media, alternate forms

of countercultural

picaresque work) into the new regime of work

consumption,

and accumulation

of

that the

social factory thesis foresaw. The argument of this chapter is not, then, that autonomia is a flowering

of a hugely innovative political culture (though it is a considerably

creative

movement) that could join the pantheon of innovative political art (as, for example, dada, surrealism, and more recently the Situationist

International

have come to be viewed),

but

that it is a process of political engagement that sought to compose political communities, relations, and practices against an emerging form of work. this trajectory I am focusing on a vein in autonomia that can be seen

In following as lying

between, even within

the more molar

forms

of orthodox

vanguardist aspects of autonomia operaia, and even the small 'militarised' emerged in the late seventies and the 'diffuse

violence'

the

workerism,

groups that

of the P. 38 phenomenon

(cf.

Senza Tregua 1980) (which, though largely a response to the repression, ended up being not wholly 'diffuse'

different

from the Red Brigades,

to being 'clandestine').

autonomia',

particularly

when it moved from

Because of the considerable complexity

of the 'area of

these different aspects and forms were often interlaced, each being "crossed

by a multiplicity minor/proletarian

of tendencies" (Albertani

1981: n. p. ). 2 My point is to emphasise the

aspects of autonomia, from within a movement that was characterised

by much else besides.

That said, this is a situated reading.

emerge here do not fit with a formalised set of 'minor politics'. on the IWW,

being

I am using the minor methodologically

The minor processes that Rather, as in the chapter

to consider the development

and

forms of a political movement. First, I map the theoretical framework of operaismo and autonomia around the concepts of 'class composition', the 'reversal of perspective', and the 'refusal of work'. The point here is to show the almost 'technical' means by which operaismo and formed a cramped and politically charged proletariat. Then I develop the autonomia concept of 'autovalorisation', and bring in the 'emarginati'. The rest of the chapter considers forms of composition across four planes: inclusive disjunctive identities and 4autonomy', money and the wage, factory and city, and language and counterculture.

2A

left between 1968 and 1977 complex flow diagram of the development of the extraparliamentary Leninists, Trotskyists, (including Bordighists) to the illustrative anarchists, situationists, resorts technique of an amorphous bubble to 'map' the area of autonomia (from L'Espresso, duplicated and translated in Red Notes 1979: 204-5).

182

Class composition and the reversal of perspective The operaistfigure of 'classcomposition' is two-sided and dynamic, encompassingboth the specific forms of work relations and axiomatics, and the political practices, knowledges,needsand styles of its different elements. As Negri (1988: 209) explains, first a more conventionalcompositionin termsof the developmentof capitalistproduction andstratification: By

class composition,

I

mean that

combination

of

political

and

material characteristics - both historical and physical - which makes up: a) on the one hand, the historically given structure of labour-power, in all its manifestations, as produced by a given level of productive forces and relations...

Then an antagonistic,'political' composition: b) on the other hand, the working class as a determinate level of solidification and ... force, dynamic desires, tending towards its an a subject, antagonistic as of needsand own independentidentity in historical-political terms.

Leaving aside the question of 'independentidentity', the emphasisis placed, then, on in Class is [its] historical "framed terms of variation. and political structural transfornzability..." (Negri 1988: 209); it is a "quality linked to dynamics and a field of force." (Moulier 1989: 14) Ratherthan a Leninist or Trotskyist distinction between the is injected from the itself' (where 'consciousness' itself' 'for 'in political and class outsideinto an alreadystructurallyformed class),or a detached'objective' analysis, class composition is the effect of a more machinic co-functioning and variation of social, economic,technical,political, andcultural processes. This said,emphasisis placedon the 'political' forms, variations, and creationsof the composition. Class composition is to be understood through an immersion in struggle, in a 'hot investigation' able to detect immanent changing forms of practice (notably, unofficial strikes, 'base' committees, absenteeism,and sabotage, emerging from traditionally non-active sectors, particularly the Southern migrant workers in the Northern factories), and contribute to their development. This emphasis on political practice arises from operaismo's fundamental assertion, following its 'reversal of perspective', that working class struggle has a determining place in the dynamics of capitalism, as the motor of its development. As Tronti's foundational text, 'Lenin in England', put it: We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development first, and workers second. This is a mistake. And now we have to turn the problem on its head, reversethe polarity, and start again from the beginning: and the beginning is the class struggle of the working class. At the level of socially developed capital, 183

capitalist development becomes subordinated to working class struggles; it follows behind them, and they set the pace to which the political mechanisms of capital's own reproduction must be tuned. (1979a: 1)3

For Moulier (1989: 15),this emphasison the primacy of struggle, and the social factory thesis are the two "essentialdiscoveries"of operaismo. In this reversal of perspective, capitalism proceedsfrom the imposition of machinesto structure and control workers (following the manufacturersobsession with the obstinate worker) toward an everincreasingsocialisation(real subsumption)in so far as each stageof developmenthas its refusal, its unproductive entropy (mass strikes in the factory and the break in the Keynesianproductivity-wage tie-in lead to a dispersed social factory) which compels capital to a new development('decomposition' of each new 'class composition'). The has is degree trouble reconfiguring around to the which capital revolutionary moment 4 working classcomposition. This propositionis at oncea marker of operaismo'sand autonon-ýa'sinnovation the emphasis on struggle, composition, and variability against an analysis based on bi-polar danger It its the a war of presenting skirts problems. objectivist categories- and immanent labour, between than understanding two more and rather a camps,capital game is interrelations. In their as capital much a configuration or axiornatisationof as of labour, its forms mutatenot solely as a result of struggleand resistance,but as a result of the wealth of attributesof labour and its manifold 'lines of flight', including its variable its its inventions, its desires its and entropy unproductive as much as productivity, in its if d. Tillium ). But Holloway (cf. 1995; naive such a principle n. resistance is simplicity problematic,and many of the assertionsof operaismoand autonomiacan be it the indulgent, as seen not should over-optimistic, and appearwilfully simplistic, Rather, truth. as with the other conceptsconsidered presentationof an all encompassing here,it is a first premisethat needsto be consideredin its ramificationsand proliferations in political composition, not as an autonomous'theory'. As Moulier (1989: 23) writes, "it is futile to point to its reductionistcharacterindependentlyof its results, and what it Lumley's " have Thus, to though with sympathy one may some enablesus understand. (1980) criticism of some of the 'phantasmatic'assertionsof operaismoand autonomia, be importance not can the theories the and assertions of someof more naive and polemical deniedsimply becausethey are simplistic or do not always describethe 'reality' of the ideologism" the is If, Lumley (1980: 129) it, "new Tronti's and as puts work a situation. 3 This is somethingof a sine qua non for autonomist theory. Midnight Notes (1981: 1), for example, is This for development. not "our its thus: the struggles against capital are only motors principle reiterate dominion; rather, defeat in harder the the capital's which we struggles more perfect a pictureof some pure the strugglesthat developin one mix of living and dead labour, in one social arrangementof exploitation, force the specific arrangementto collapse. A crisis ensues. In the labyrinthof the crisis, capital can only find its way by following the working class and trying to devour it at the exit." 4 The emphasison struggle immanentto capitalist social relationsis such that, as Tronti puts it, politics is a situated and continuous process within capitalist relations, where "the workers' perspective does not prefigurethe future" (cited in Piotte 1987: 20). 184

emphasis on the primacy of struggle "a theoretical and political regression" one wonders what status should be given to the subsequent ramifications of this thesis in the imbibed it. For the purposes of drawing out the minor aspects of movements which autonomia I would suggest that this thesis on the primacy of resistance can be read in Deleuzian terms as an account of the primacy of lines of flight - lines which are not in themselves 'resistance' or radical class composition, but are the site of its practice. Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 571) themselves saw this operaist principle as a fundamental innovation, and when Deleuze (1988: 89,144) addressesthe question of the irreducibility of resistance at the heart of power relations in Foucault he likens this to Tronti's

argument. The refusal

(against

self -management) The central political aspectof class composition was 'the refusal of work'. As I have beensuggesting,the refusal of work is best seennot so much as a programme,but as a of work

developments The of autonomia's understanding of this particular perspective. perspectiveis the subject of this chapter, and so here I only want to map its initial in for last Tronti the generalisationof As I Tronti. the through showed chapter, premise, work across the social factory subsumesthe working class in a 'general interest' of labour (in the Keynesian tie-in between production and the wage and the juridical illegal). 5 There are two conventionalleftist this to regime as constructionof any outside responsesto this situation. One is a socialismthat largely affirms this processin a social democraticequality through work (as was the role of the PCI). The other is the affirmation of a working classparticularity through the reclamationof work in a councilcommunist or anarcho-syndicalist community of workers, or 'self-management'. Becauseof its influence, and so as to distinguishTronti's position I will say a little about the latter. it Leninism developed Self-management 'councilism' the through as of critique or in the Dutch, German, and Italian ultra-left, and groups such as Socialismeou Barbarie has maintaineda degreeof prominencein the far left (despitetheir critique of work, the workers' council remainedthe revolutionary model for the Situationist International for example).6 The introduction to Barrot (1987: 7) suggeststhat councilism "dominated virtually the entire theoreticalcorpus of the revolutionary minorities between 1945 and 1970" - though it should be said that some groups, notably those that emergedthrough Bordiga to and the Italian Communist Left maintaineda critique of selfrelation some 5 Tronti (1973: 115-6) writes: "the real generalisation of the workers' conditions can introduce the appearanceof its formal extinction. It is on this basis that the specific concept of labour's power is immediatelyabsorbedin the genericconcept of popular sovereignty:the political mediationhere serves to allow the explosivecontent of labour's productiveforce to function peacefullywithin the beautiful forms of the modern relation of capitalist production. Because of this, at this level, when the working class politically refuses to becomepeople, it does not close, but opens the most direct way to the socialist revolution."

185

form of 'producer consciousness' from as early as 1918.7 Though management as a tn devised as a means of organisation that was immanent to the workers themselves (as against the abstracted Party form), 'self-management' often tends to function as an irreproachable form of organisation in apparently radical political theories (following a logic where workers or the oppressed speaking out and organising thentselves can not be wrong). Here, a form of organisation is seen to display revolutionary content almost in and of itself. 8 Such a possibility tends to be founded on variations of essentialist conceptions of human nature or presence, which, if left to 'self-organise', will fully realise itself. Camatte (1995: 161) thus argues: The illusion [to 'participation'

that breaks passivity and dependence in selfmanagement] is very great with those who, in thinking that they have superseded Marx, say that the economy is no longer determinant, if it ever was, they add, that is, only the struggle counts, that man is always there in fact, present in the social and economic frame and in everyday acts and facts etc., and that there would always be an immediate and continuous possibility of emancipation, which occurs with selfmanagement.

Such an interpretationof 'self-management' is amply evident in a recent book on European 'autonomous movements' (Katsiaficas 1997), including autonomia, which arguesthat "our natural tendenciesto favour equality and love freedom" are enabledin a forth Though (as lets (239). 'F that the politics) speak against vanguard self-management the movementsKatsiaficasdiscussesare primarily a product of large industrial and postindustrialcities (the very preconditionof metropolitansquatting, for example),he wants to distil their essence(sometimes,it hasto be said, with the aid of the pronouncementsof for humanity. He to themselves) these suggests, a naturalised movements some of 6 Thoughthey also offer considerably more than the 'self here figures thesis, the are main -management' Pannekoek,Gorter, and RGhle- those who Lenin (1965) describedas manifestingthe 'infantile disorder' of left communism. 7 For this perspective see the introduction to Barrot (1987), Camatte (1995), Dauv6 and Martin (1997), and, for a history of the Italian CommunistLeft, InternationalCommunistCurrent (1992). As one example from this milieu, following Bordiga's assertion that "[s]ocialism resides entirely in the revolutionary negation of the ENTERPRISE,not in granting the enterprise to the factory workers" (cited in N6gation 1975:81), the Frenchgroup Ndgationpresent a fascinatingcritique of this tendency of self-management, in the case of the (early 1970s French)Lip watch factory occupation. Followingthe threat of closure the workers occupied and ran 'their' factory, maintainedproduction and, with considerable support from the left, even marketed their own watches (paying themselves from the profits - hence maintainingrelations betweenwork-doneand wage, and the correct market price of the commodity). Such self-management was for N6gationa reflection of both a 'producer consciousness' of the workers, and an example of real subsumptionin so far as the workers (mistaking the boss rather than the enterprise as the problem) becamea collectivecapitalist,exploitingtheir own labour - evidencedby their continued sporting of workshirts after the end of the working day and at support meetings, their continued practice of clocking-in every day, and the organisationof themselvesand the communityaround the factory. 8 Dauv6('Leninismand the Ultra-Left' in Dauv6 and Martin 1997) argues that the ultra-left's assertion of the centralityof the 'workers themselves' (against the Leninist Party) ultimately only affirms one subject of capitalist relations, 'the workers', against another, 'the capitalist', because it posits its critique on the terrain of 'management'rather than on that of the capitalist mode of production itself. Assertion and fear of the Party (Leninismand ultra-ieftism respectively) are thus false problems (and mirror images of each other) which over-emphasisethe 'form' of the communist movement against its 'content' which is the

186

example, that against Haraway's 'cyborg' figure, a "role of movement participation is to preserve and expand the domain of the heart in social relations - of A that is uniquely human, all that stands opposed to machine culture. " (238) Returning to Tronti, 'self-management' is for him simply a microcosm of the is This that there of work. perspective still assumes an autonomous affin-nation socialist 'labour' that the workers could manage for themselves, extracted from capital, as if capitalism is composed of two simple classes, one of which is already the communist fails into is For Tronti to take the that this always account way work perspective subject. already capital. This is not just because it is sold to capital, but because work, and the hence is is capital: capital, and working class composed within The anarcho-syndicalist 'general strike', which was supposed to provoke the from It is the already a romantic naivete word go. collapse of capitalist society, is, Lassallian it it demand the to that oppose which appears a contains within demand for a 'fair share of the fruits of labour' - in other words, a fairer idea it is incorrect] 'working is [This in that the the of capital.... profit participation it is labour', 'givers the concern of workpeople that true the of and people' who are to defend the dignity of this thing which they provide, against all those who would seek to debaseit. (Tronti 1979: 9) Because the working class are always already structured as a capitalist class, they are by The in fashion labour', but 'giving structured capital. energy expending a only never form 'work' (as a relation between fixed and variable capital) has the class relation immanent to it: "Thus, the worker provides capital, not only insofar as he sells labour From he insofar the the but the outset, class relation.... enibodies as also power, 9). " (1979: in hands labour the the capitalist. of are conditions of There is, then, no simple subject of the working class. Everything about work 'cramps' workers' possibility such that there can be no space for self-affirmed identity. Indeed, to be alienated from work, its form, function and subject, becomes the revolutionary premise (Tronti 1973: 117). Politics is hence not a reclamation of work against an 'external' control, but a refusal of work and the very subject of worker, following Tronti's formula: "To struggle against capital, the working class must fight in insofar it is " So, itself (cited ATP: 57 1) as capital. summarising the argument, against Tronti (1972: 22) writes: No worker today is disposed to recognise the existence of labour outside capital. Labour equals exploitation: This is the logical prerequisite and historical result of have is Workers From here there no time of return. civilisation. no point capitalist for the dignity

of labour.... Today, the working

class need only look at itself to

organic product of the capitalist mode of production itself (which was where Marx's few comments on the Party as a product of the 'real movement' are located).

187

understandcapital. It need only combat itself in order to destroy capital. It has to recogniseitself as political power, deny itself as a productive force.

Needs

and autovalorisation

The reversal of perspectiveand the refusal of work are the basic operaist means of conceivinga situatedpolitical trajectoryrather than an identity. With the developmentof autonomia another conceptual tool emerges, that of 'autovalorisation' (or selfvalorisation). Autovalorisation is at once one of the more important conceptuaL developmentsof autonomia,and one of the leastcoherentlydefined. The ambiguity of the conceptresidesin the fact that it is situatedat the most problematicsite of autonomia, the site of the political 'subject'. Autovalorisationcan tip either way as a definition of complexsituatedcreativity in a minor fashion that resonateswith the refusal of work, or as an accountof a coming to presenceof a more 'autonomous'subject(asit tendsto do in the later Negri). The conceptof autovalorisationis closely associatedwith Negri from his 1977 La Forina Stato(wherehe takesup RomanoAlquati's use of the expression)up to his most "the Alquati the question of possibility that the working class can use poses work. recent the productive forces for valorising itself againstcapital, as an antagonisticclass. If an forces is " in developed (cited Hardt and highly productive possible. use of alternative Negri 1994: 200) The basic framework of autovalorisationis laid out here. It is a but through relations and processes of valorisation work, questionof opposingcapitalist in forces in be that to the that way seeks are created some of a composition with capitalism (as developedin Chapter 5 as the problematicof the proletariat). In many follows Panzieri's the problematisationof orthodox concept of autovalorisation ways Marxist conceptionsof the socialistassumptionof alreadyexisting 'forces of production' (Chapter 7). But it develops from Panzieri's critique in seeking to explore new and different forms of radical class composition with the forces of capitalist life (and hence 'forces' in Alquati's words should be read in a broad senseas 'potential' and 'objective lines of flight' ratherthan as the strict 'forces of production' of orthodox Marxism). It is the play between forces actualisedin capital, forces in and against capital, and forces 'independent'of capital that autovalorisationseeksto comprehend. I will discuss this in two parts,the proliferation of differences,and the centrality of the wage. and difference Negri's most sustained account of autovalorisation is in Dondnation and Sabotage (1979), written as a direct response to the Movement of '77. In so far as capitalism is a socialised mode of production, autovalorisation is

Autovalorisation

by Negri forces is It totality the as of capitalist and conceived relations. concerned with the site of the 'power' of working class composition, and comprises two elements: the 'destructuration' of capital (essentially the practices of the refusal of work), and a movement toward 'independence' (1979: 96). It is the question of 'independence' that 188

needselaborating. Negri presents "proletarian self-valorisation as alternative to, and radically different from, the totality of the processes of capitalist production and reproduction." (1979: 97) He describesthis 'alternative' site (which he calls an 'intensive condition' and a 'productive being' (97-8)) with three methodologicalcriteria. First, autovalorisationpresentsan 'otherness' to the orthodox workers movement, and as is injunction to continual diversity anddiscontinuity in the forms and practicesof what Karl Heinz Roth calledthe "other workers' movement". Second, the relationshipto capitalist development is one of separateness,seen as a relation of destructuration and recompositionrather than linear development(as in the reversalof perspective). Third, and asa direct consequence,the forms, practicesand languagesof autovalorisationare to be deliberately divergent from those of normative capitalist culture: "there is no homology, no possible immediate translatability of languages, of logics, of signs, framework of capitalist between the reality of the movement the and overall ... development,with its contentsand objectives." (98-9) This definition of autovalorisation has clear importance as a promotion of innovative and continuously varying political composition, and clearly reflects the diversity, variability, and productivity of the Movement of '77 (as will be explored below). It does,however,indicate some of the problems that developedin Negri's later work. Though the proletariatis presentedas a processof innovation and discontinuity, and indeed as continually 'destructuring' capitalist relations, the content of activity appearsto tend towards an independence'outside' of capital, a liberated subjectivity 9 its is The definition of self'being'. of autovalorisation an affirmation own where valorisationin the glossaryin Virno and Hardt (1996: 264) conveysthis ratherclearly: that is founded to alternative of value an social structure self-valorisation refers ... ... not on the production of surplus value but on the collective needsand desires of the producing community. In Italy, this concept has been deployed to describe the practices of local and community-based forms of social organisation and welfare that are relatively independentof capitalist relations of production and state control. This approach skirts the problems of autonomous subjectivity, of an 'authentic' space outside of capital, a kind of "pure socialisation" (Virno's 1980: 113) which, as I showed through Tronti and the critique of self management, is problematic. It certainly leads to problems of conceiving political composition when increasing areas of life become capitalised. 10 There are, however, other ways to read autovalorisation, where other work by Negri ( 199 1) is useful.

9 Thus Hardt and Negri (1994: 280) link autovalorisation to the argument about productive autonomy that I considered in the last chapter: "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. " 10 See Castellano in Semiotext(e) (1980: 229-30) for discussion of the problems with the tendency to selfaffirmed marginality in the demarcation of autonomous marginal spaces.

189

Autovalorisation

and the wage To move away from thinking autovalorisation as the self-affirmation of a working class subject we can situate it around the question of 'valorisation' and 'needs'. Valorisation in Marx is the process whereby surplus labour is produced in productive processes and actualised in circulation as surplus value. It is a term that applies both to the specific production and actualisation of surplus value, and the whole capitalist social milieu which supports this. Central to the process of valorisation is the category of 'needs'. Workers work in order to gain a monetary wage which they exchange in consumption to meet their needs. In general, the process leaves the workers with enough wage to meet their 'necessary labour' - their current form of being, or historically accumulated needs. For Marx, needs are necessarily variable over time and place. This is his fundamental proposition about the nature of human development. At a basic level, capitalism is only an expression (albeit at a rather exponential rate) of what Marx saw as the ratchet-system of human composition around an expansion of needs, in interrelation in human the with Nature ("in expansive as an assemblage a conception of 11 285)). In this formulation, 'values' (ethics, lifestyles, (1976: Bible" the spite of desires, competences and so on) are as central as the apparently more structural forms of 'work', for needs are to be met through capitalist practices alone. That is, valorisation occurs only insofar as needs are formed and met in terms of capitalist identities, for increase (working to a wage, maximising capacities and money a wage, commodities, the equation of desire and consumption), since needs are only to be met indirectly (through consumption following the sale of one's labour for money). Because 'needs', then, are the 'form of life', they are a crucial site of politics, and one that autovalorisation is specifically concerned with. But rather than thinking of autonomous, independent needs outside of capital, we can think of autovalorisation operating in the machinic environments of capitalism, at the meeting points of the expansion of needs and their axiornatisation. Autovalorisation would then be a process of the proliferation of the former, and the disruption of the latter. There was much talk in the seventies of affirming particular needs and expanding the needs, values, and styles of the class composition and its minorities. Whilst aspects of these practices and needs were concerned with cleaving-off autonomous spaces for self-production relatively independent from direct capitalist relations (such as in self-managed squatted social centres), they were also concerned with strengthening the collection of needs of the class as a whole. And, since in the community of capitalism money is the means to meet needs, the proliferation of needs and values was also part of a politics of increasing the wage. At first sight this might seem to be problematic, since, as I have argued, the labour. is in for terrns the of money means moulding controlling of activity and valuation However, for autovalorisation, money is a political site, which, whilst expressing the

190

essenceof capitalist axiomatisation, can also be subverted. For Negri (199 1), money and the wage were crucial sites of struggle (and the subject of one of the more important books that Marx left undeveloped, despite his initial plan (cf. Negri 1991: Lesson 7)). Hence, in seeking to have the proliferation of needs met by a wage, autovalorisation was also part of a demand, and set of practices for 'more pay and less work' and 'we want everything' (in a kind of 'reclamation' of surplus value) against any mechanism which sought to tie the wage to productivity and correct practice. But if the mass worker fought on the terrain of the 'wage' (according to Bifo (1980: 150), in 1969 alone wage rises increased labour costs by more than 20%), and extended this beyond the factory to cover the costs of transportation, housing and so on, as the socialised worker thesis developed to consider the productivity of the social whole, the 'wage' was expanded to encompass a 6socialwage'. Negri reads Marx's assertion that, with the development of abstract labour and social capital, the workers movement comes to demand a proportion of total profit, rather than an individual wage (Negri 1988c: 114-5; Marx 1973: 597), as an argument for the extension of wage demands not merely within the 'working day', but over the entire 'life span' (Negri 1989b: 219). The politics of the wage thus extends to include sectors previously excluded from wage payment, and social services and consumption. This became particularly important since it was on the terrain of the social wage that capital was seeking to recoup the gains of the mass worker through austerity packages and inflation (Negri 1979b).12 If we bring together the two aspects of autovalorisation - the continual innovation that Negri developed in Domination and Sabotage, and the process of the expansion of needs within the social wage, and against its axiornatising mechanisms - autovalorisation can be seen as a proletarian minor practice. Autovalorisation is a kind of bordering which it is intrigues' (for 'little to the through money the social whole of autonomia connects and the wage that the social axiomatic operates as a metastable whole). It is concerned with developing new needs and styles that emerge through the particularities of minorities (what Guattari (1995: 55) calls new "universes of value"), it situates these not as 'independent' or 'real' needs, but as immanent to the capitalist socius (as they emerge from the machinic processes of the social factory and seek to be supported by a wage), and it seeksto deterritorialise the axioms of identity that capitalist valorisation is premised upon (not least by breaking the link between productivity and the wage, and seeking a 11 As Marx and Engels (1974: 49) put it: "the satisfaction of the first need (the action of satisfying, and the instrument of satisfaction which has been acquired) leads to new needs; and this production of new needs is the first historical act." 12 This was at a time of a mass of austerity measures, instituted in 1976 by the Andreotti government and backed and often implemented by the PCI (which had control of municipalities like Bologna) and the By the beginning of 1977 there was acute economic hardship with 25% inflation and unions. unprecedented unemployment (1,700,000 officially). Giorgio Amendola, secretary of the PCI, wrote in 1976 of the austerity measures: "... it wouid be wrong 'concessions' given to the to view sacrifices as ... ... capitalists and the government.... On the contrary, the sacrifices are necessary in order to serve primarily the interests of the working class by pulling the country out of crisis: so that the young might find employment, for the betterment of the living conditions of the people etc." (cited in Semiotext(e) 1980: 91) The PCI's leader, Berlinguer, even went so far as to forward austerity as a communist moral ideal (in opposition to the wealth and waste of 'consumer society') (cf. Abse 1985: 27). 191

wage for a wealth of 'non-work' practices). Anything which attempts to settle this expansion of needs and styles in equivalence is to be rejected, and hence autovalorisation is a site of the continual problematisation of received subjectivity, of coherent languages, or normative values and ethics, producing not an independent subjectivity, but a form of practice. The expansive and continuous nature of this project is well expressed in 'Lia's' version of the operaist formula: "I do not refuse anything, I want everything. But I do not want what exists already... " (in Magale 1980: 140) It is put on, firmer conceptual ground by Virno (1980: 112), when he describes the development of the Movement of '77 as a practice of disrupting the identities and equivalence of work and Value, not with a new identity, but with a qualitative and varied 'doing': The practices and the languages adopted by the Movement seem to suggest an alternate type of socialisation, different than that based on the exchange of equivalent values...What counts is the qualitative consistency, profoundly varied, of To understand this proliferation of the concrete and the different within socialised labour requires a constellation of materialistic concepts which are totally detachedfrom that universality characteristic of the 'general equivalent' and

their 'doing'.

which are not used as the basesor synthesising elements for the actual processesof liberation.

Margins

at the centre:

emarginati

and untorelli

Having mappedthe techniquesof an antagonisticand variablecomposition,the rest of the chapter considers specific aspects of the composition of autonomia. Of central importancein the developmentof operaismo and autonomia was the role played by minority and marginal groups. Two minority groups were particularly central to the developmentof operaismo,- southern migrant workers in the industrial North, and feminist (the is in the the next section). movement considered autonon-tia women role of The migrant workers, who had a huge presencein the northern factories, were said to be "squeezedlike a lemonin the factory andmarginalisedin the city" (Lumley 1990: 210). 13 Without the networks and cultural security of the establishednorthern working class, migrant workers had traditionally actedas a brake on union pressures(Bifo 1980: 150), but in the strugglesof the operaist'Hot Autumn' in 1969they played a central role. That the migrantshad lessof a work ethic than northernworkers is possible, but what is more easilyverifiable is that the traditional PCI party and union structurehad less influence in the immigrant ghettos, and further, had little understandingof the broader concernsof immigrant workers that extended beyond the workplace to questions of housing, discrimination, and welfare (Lumley 1990: 28). Hence, in their emergenceas an 13 According to Lumley (1990: 31,209), between 1951 and 196177% of the 1,439,013 rise in population of the Northern industrial triangle was the result of immigration and in 1967 and the opening of FIAT's Rivalta car plant sixty thousand arrived in Turin. A member of Lotta Continua stresses the importance of immigrant workers in the 1969 struggles, and says that something like 75% of FIAT's workforce were immigrant workers (in Red Notes 1979: 184).

192

antagonistic group (in the 1969 struggles at the FIAT plants in Turin), these workers developed novel practices unconditioned by traditional demands and structures that crossed the work / community divide. Indeed, the early break with union structures marked by the expression 'autonomy at the base', was coined by the migrant workers in the large northern factories. By the time of the Movement of '77, marginality developed into a prominent political concern around the figure of the 'emarginati'. The emarginati were all those active in the Movement of '77 who did not conform to the conventional model of (mass) 'worker'. A partial list would include proletarian youth, cultural workers, off-the-books and precarious workers, students, sexual minorities, temporary workers, houseworkers, feminists, the unemployed, service workers, and young workers of the small factories. 14 The nature of the 'marginality' of this group is complex, relating to political marginalisation, counterculture, and economic productivity. The term is in part used because a normative conception of 'the marginal' was employed by dominant political and cultural groups to split the new active sectors from 'the workers' (in what Bologna (1980: 39) describes as a process of "Hunt the Parasite"). Thus the PCI characterised the emarginati in decrepit lumpenproletarian terms as "parasitical strata" (cf. Printo Maggio in Red Notes 1978: 47). The PCI journal Vie wrote of those involved in the '77 Bologna occupations that they were "just common delinquents, organised Fascists, and misled youth" (in Red Notes 1978: 7), and

Nuove

after the Rome university occupation a PCI sociology lecturer is reported to have said that "there weren't any real students in there, only hippies, queers and people from the slumdistricts" (in Red Notes 1978: 54). The most famous of these attempts at naming the disease of the ernarginati was the expression used by the PCI's general secretary Enrico Berlinguer, who called them untorelli, or plague bearers. 15 The emarginati did not, however, affirm a lumpenproletarian status. To challenge this marginalisation and insist on the productive centrality of the class composition of autonomia, a number of theorists for Movement Bologna (1980), the the example, rejected category of emarginati. of sought to firmly situate the Movement around the diffused workers that emerged with the 14 The diversity of experience of the emarginati, even at a formal level, is evidenced by the myriad of terms used to describe the socio-political position of these groups. Thus as well as the unemployed, feminists, and emarginati, Lumley (1990: 341) lists: emergent groups (ceti emergentl), proletarian youth (giovani proletan), minorities (minoranze), the unprotected (non garantiti), the precarious (precan), and plebeians (plebe). That we are clearly on a terrain of ambiguity rather than distinct identity is evident in an article in Primo Maggio in 1977 which states that this group "seems not to have any objective, material reality" and yet that it comes together precisely "through a denial of its own material condition (the position of being casual labour, lump labour, students etc)" (in Red Notes 1978: 41). 15 Such a position was not only held by the orthodox left. The British journal of the International Communist Current (which situates itself in some relation to the German, Dutch and Italian left-communist currents), expressed its opinion of this 'swamp' in no uncertain terms: "Today people talk about the 'Area froth Workers' Autonomy. than The into Autonomy' has turned g6my rather a somewhat of milieu composed of all kind of petty-bourgeois fringe groups, from students to street theatre performers, from feminists to marginally employed teachers, all of them united in exalting their own 'specificity' and in frantically rejecting the working class as the only revolutionary class of our epoch.... Contrary to what is written in the bourgeois press, these marginal movements do not represent the Hundred Flowers of a revolutionary spring: they are simply some of the thousand and one purulent snares of this degenerating society. " (Beyle 1979: 20)

193

restructuring and break-up of the large factories. But in doing this he seems to exclude the countercultural elements, arguing that the refusal of work lost its critical force 1970

as it moved outside of work, becoming a question of "individual subjectivity - everything from absenteeismto the liberation of personal desires, from the worker who comes out as dope. " (Bologna 1978: 121) The problem here, to the worker who sits and smokes gay, aside from the dubious practice of splitting cultural practices from politics, is that the diffuse workers and those that raised these questions of 'individual subjectivity' were enmeshed in each other such that these countercultural practices were part of the class composition. Whilst many of those active in the Movement of '77 sought to compose ways of life outside of work altogether, or with a minimum of necessary work, opting for temporary, flexible, impermanent and non-guaranteed work (such that Bifo (1980: 155) wrote of a "self-declared marginal living" (cf. also Echanges et Mouvenlent 1979)), the refusal of work, even as it became a countercultural question, was rarely seen as independent from the questions of work and income. Even those who withdrew from be in unproblematically seen as they were part of a movement, can not work, as much as 16 The expression 'emarginati' thus continued to be opting out of capitalist relations. bringing both for Movement the of productivity and counterculture a means as useful together. That is, the term emarginati enabled both discussion of the political practices of diffuse workers (those who were no longer amassed in the factories, but were constituted in marginal, diffuse ways across the social factory), and marginal, minority, or framework the of productive relations and class within countercultural questions be If the the characterised structural position of emarginati can political and composition. (the "margins Bolognesi's the the centre of production and of at centre" expression with politics), this is not because they were simply the new exclusive site of politics and production, but because they (and their sometimes rather 'marginal' countercultural practices) raise complex political questions and processes across the terrain of the social factory, drawing in and complexifying an understanding of class composition. This is important because what was emerging, following the social factory thesis, was not an increased marginalisation of the population, but an increased integration and differentiation of productive networks. It is on this terrain that questions of difference in be thought to conjunction with relations of connection across needed and particularity the social whole. 17 16 Thus, whilst talking of marginal living, Bifo (1978: 97) also writes: "I do not at all share the definition of 'marginalisation' which is being given to the mass of people who have been in the forefront of the struggle in the Universities this week. In particular I do not believe that there exists, in Italy, an area of society that is radically excluded from the relations of production... " 17This perspective had some influence in the analysis of the political and cultural formations of black populations (and others) in the British inner cities in the 1980 s- those who became the focus of official attention through the apparent phenomena of 'mugging' and 'race riots'. Whilst the orthodox left talked of the lumpenproletariat and the 'problem of unemployment', groups like Race Today (cf. 1974; Hall et al. 1978; Howe 1973) and the Riot Not to Work Collective (1982; 'After Marx, April' Collective 1981), though attentive to the problems of poverty and racism, took a different perspective. In autonomous cultural forms (such as blues dances and shebeen), long-term unemployment, hustling, and rioting, these groups discerned a complex formation of counterculture, the refusal of conventional (low paid, unskilled,

194

We can return to the PCI's attempt at naming the untorelli. Whilst this act of namingwas effective in mobilising PCI and popular opinion (in an amalgamof ridicule, condemnation,and excision (cf. Massumi 1987; Morris 1978)), it failed to reduce the Movement(at leastat first) becausein many ways the expressionquite aptly characterised their self-declaredviral-form. The name was not limited to identity, it expressedtheir practice. That is, the emarginati-as-untorellican be seenas precisely concernedwith the movement'sinsinuationin, andcontaminationof the recognisedand formalised structures of the politico-socialwithin which they emerged;they were plague-bearerson the society of work and austerity(cf. Recherches1977).18 1 will now turn to consider the form of organisationof the emarginati,the different territorieswithin which it operated,and some of its practices. and 'autonomy' 'Emarginati' is not, then, a short-handfor describing a diverse milieu. It is, rather, a categorywhich describesa particularmodeof composition. The emarginatiwere first of all a collection of productive subjects in the complex productive arrangementsof the social factory, eachwith diverse experience. But they were not distinct groupings. The Inclusive

disjunctive

identities

emarginati were not exclusively unemployed, or students, or gays, or squatters, or workers, but combinations(in varying degreesof intensity) of all of these. Thus, there were ex-studentsand gaysand feminists in the factories,or doing off-the-books work, or being 'unemployed' whilst working, or deliberatelytaking temporarywork, and so on. In this sense the emarginati was a site of 'combinatorial' processesand 'inclusive disjunction' (asdiscussedin Chapter4). 19They were studentsand squattersand off-thebooks workers, or feminists and part of a 'class' movementand cultural workers and so on, at once embodying these different disjunctions, and moving across them. One

insecure) work, and income attainment through a collection of state benefits, practices in the unofficial and illegal economy, and collective forms of mutual aid. For the Riot Not to Work Collective (1982), following the sense of the figure of the emarginati, this was the emergence of an "impossible class" whose relations of production did not separate into a conventional work / unemployment distinction, but emerged through a "subterranean unofficial economy" which problematised distinctions between production and consumption, work and leisure, and challenged the notion that leisure should be determined by work. Rather than focus on the'problem'of these groups, emphasis was placed, then, on the forms of political composition, following the sense of Darcus Howe's comment (about his experience of the Caribbean) that the unwaged were not the "down-trodden, beaten population" that the "White Left" proposed, but a "vibrant powerful section of the society" (in the Caribbean, the site of emergence of steel band, Calypso, and reggae) (cited in Hall et at. 1978: 373). 18 This inversion of naming is not uncommon amongst radical groups. A recent example is the appropriation of the word casseur (literally wrecker or hooligan) by the student and beur movement in France in 1994 (cf. Nous Sommes tous des Casseurs n.d.) which replicates the form of the May '68 slogan used after the deportation of Cohn-Bendit as an 'undesirable German Jew': "Nous sommes tous des ind6sirables", "Nous sommes tous des juits allemands". 19 AsThe women of Studio Rlpetta' (in Magale 1980: 138) put it: "Not an abstract identity, but existence, not a focusing but a diffusion. Everything within everything else, everywhere, always at the same time. Comblement is not planned any more, it is not a goal to reach, it is an excess, an extra."

195

'Metropolitan Indian' (discussedbelow) describesa desire to manifest the complexity of identity in the letterspagesof Lotta Continua:20 We're tired (at least I am) of being the 'vanguard' which has to 'shoulder its responsibilities', in the same way the Metropolitan Indians are tired of 'having' to be ironic and witty, and the feminists are tired of 'having' to think about liberation, and the gays are tired of 'having' to worry about sexuality, and even the freaks who 'have' to be into hypodermics and joints. We've got to stop this division of roles. I want to be a whole militant fighting for the liberation of the total human being. I want to be vanguard,Indian, gay, freak, and I want to roll joints (I already do). (in Kunzle 1980: 23-4) There is perhaps a certain amount of 'subsumption' here (around the 'total human being'), but there is also a clear expression of a desire for combinatorial processes of inclusive disjunction, where each disjunction - 'vanguard, [Metropolitan] Indian, gay, freak' - is both maintained (with its own particular concern), and affirmed in one 'subject'. Such an inclusive disjunctive form is particularly evident in the figure of the university student. The combination of the liberalisation of access to the universities since 1969, and the '150 hours' scheme of workers' paid study-leave from 1972 (which may well have been intended to encourage social integration through upward social mobility (Bologna 1980: 39)) led to a university composition that was no longer of a privileged strata (Bologna 1978: 98), but of 'worker-students' (1978,1980). 21 Thus, the big 1977 Rome and Bologna university occupations included all sorts of different proletarianised social groups (including many who had been politicised in the factory and high school movements), not so much because 'outside elements' infiltrated the One 'students' because but themselves. the the relations complex of university, of account describes the 'strange figure' of the student as something more than a coherent identity: There is a dense network

and overlaps between the students' movement and sectors of the proletariat ... the 'strange' figure of the student crops up in the disputes involving door-to-door booksellers, squats of empty Property, and in the shape of the unemployed intellectuals going to the labour exchange ... s/he appears equally as the 'strange' worker with the diploma, or the organised unemployed, who study in the 150-Hours Scheme, or go to evening classes. of connections

(Manconi and Sinibaldi cited in Lumley 1990: 299)

20After its virtual disintegration as a Party under pressure from the margins, the Lotta Continua paper (which dramaticallyincreasedits sales with the demise of the Party) opened its letters pages to facilitate discussionamongstthe mass of the Movement(cf. Kunzle 1980). 21 See Caffentzis (1975) for a detailed analysis of the changing composition and politics of American studentsas they similarly became more internal to the social factory. 196

This inclusive disjunctive formation had ramifications for autonomia's mode of is in be Autonomy 'autonomy'. term that a complex autonon-tia should not organisation in in 'societies Such terms miniature'. of communist a popular notion of understood is ideas, is interchangeable 'autonomy' with self-management a often where autonomy form from direct life 'free' the the mainstream, either as embodiment of of a of separation freedom, "the direct leap of the social movement into communist relations", or as "prefiguring the society to come, as being the embryonic form by virtue of the relations set up in their being" (Pour une Intervention Conintuniste 1996: 6,8). 22 Arising from the 'reversal of perspective', and particularly prominent amongst the southern migrant North, for in industrial the the of autonomy operaismo was primarily a centres workers notion of 'autonomy at the base' (vis-ii-vis the union hierarchy and the PCI), a certain 'independence' of the needs of the working class, and something of a 'comportment' (cf. Negri in Recherches 1977: 81-3). Against the PCI's 'hegemony', autonomy signified a from 'autonomously' interests lay or material against, conflictual class whose particular the 'general interest' of capitalist social organisation.

In this sense, practices of the But, pertinent to this section, as

refusal of work and autonomy were the same thing. operaismo and autonomia developed, autonomy also came to characterise relations internal to the movement. An important aspect of autonomia was its ability to overcome the problem of organisation that had plagued the twentieth century communist movement.

Rather than replicate the pro- and anti-Party dualism central to the split between Marxism developed 8), (cf. Leninism a communism note autonomia and council and anarchism, form of organisation that was immanent to its practices. It enabled both the development it be 'movement', links, that without called a such can of political and maintenance 23 forms difference. Though, of course, or negating structural orchestrated constructing this was always a complex and negotiated process which veered off toward a certain

22In an interestinganalysisof the dangersof 'autonomy' from a sympathetic group, PIC continue: "... the for the describes filled it longer becomes the 'autonomy' search with confusion, as no vague and word political independenceof the proletariat. The word develops a magical quality whereby some people imagine that they can shield themselves from events as they hold the key to the future: to be 'autonomous'is to have Ali Baba's'open sesame', ... which sometimesamountsto having 'already left this worldT!" (1997: 7) "in the social movementtowards communism,the proletariat no more prefigures the society to come through this autonomy, anymorethan it is the bearer of a political programwhich it then realisesto the letter. Reachingout for its goal, it undeniablydisplays 'powerful indicators' of these new from born 'of it Communism be but the new people gravedigger remains above all of capital. shall relations, the heightof a new world.' (Marx)"(4) With this in mind, Hakim Bey's (1991) relatively popular idea of the TemporaryAutonomous Zone as a momentary escape from capitalist relations, though an interesting interventionin self-sacrificial 'militant' circles, and at times sounding a little like Deleuze and Guattari in their more effusivemoments,tends to reflect the more immanent idea of autonomy, and for all its dadaist frisson, limits the constructionof politics to a certain naturalism. Thus he valorises 'secret societies' for their very secrecy ('escaping the eyes of the spectacle' - oddly invoking Foucault to help make his loses is becomes through the "that the that and unreal, seen mediation which of media somehow argument its power' (MoorishOrthodox Radio Crusade Collective 1992: 10)), and emphasises humanface-to-face kidding ("We're 'unmediated' humanity the not as essence of radical politics and contact or'immediatism' (MORCC insist in hyperbole indulging face-to-face is 'the that revolution when we meeting already or 1992: 13)). 23Though this is a concerndevelopedin considerabledetail by the left-communistsmilieu (cf. Dauv6 and Martin 1997; and Camatte 1995), autonomia is rather unique in recent European history in operating in these terms. 197

Lepinism at one extreme (particularly during the repression with the emergence of militarised clandestine bands), and an anarchism at the other, it was, nevertheless, a central aspect of autonomia's vibrancy and ability to ward-off identity (marked, negatively, by the Italian State's need to construct an identity for the movement in order to effect its repression24). Rather than a general subsumption of all in a generic working class, each term in the inclusive disjunctive series, with its particular interest, style, and form of oppression, saw its relation with the movement as one of 'autonomy'. Such autonomy was not a distinct separation, but a working process, a kind of relay of interrelation and independence, alliance and disruption, or of borders and connections. It was akin to the he described Guattari (1980) to this sought explain process when minor pack-form. autonomia as a "proliferation of margins": Their different components will in no way be required to agree on everything, or to irreducible Contradictions, language. even the same stereotypical speak Here contradiction does not paralyse into is desire, (110) but that put question. single position, a specific a action, proves

antagonisms, will be allowed to co-exist...

The difficult and complex operation of this form of inclusive disjunction and feminism between in is the and clearly relationship shown particularly autonomy because its Perhaps of problematic relationship to the precisely autonomia. Catholic Italian because least left (not the morality of of prevalent extraparliamentary in development influential the of the was strongly movement women's culture), from being broke (as importance The the the women women's movement of autonomia. 'girl-friends of the militants' and 'Florence Nightingales of the duplicator'; Red Notes 1978: 114) is marked by Negri et al. (1988: 236) in their review of the movement (from prison in 1983): its its separatism, and practices of communalism with movement, form its deep distrust the any of social articulations of power, critique of politics and be its differences, desires, love 'general seen must of of needs and of representation'

The feminist

as the clearest archetypal form of this new [post-19741 phase of the movement.

It was the very problematicand varied situation of women in the social factory (expressedwell by the decision of the Roman collectives, during a discussion of the 4manytypesof woman's time' to placenot an hourglass,but a score by Sch6enbergon

24 Thus the prosecution said of a clandestine organisation which apparently united the whole of the movement behind the Red Brigades: "this is the specific characteristic of the V under examination, which some have defined as Negri's organisational miracle: namely the ability to create an appearance of a lack of coordination between groups which, in reality, were rigidly centralised. " (in Italy'79 Committee 1982: 9) 198

the cover of their magazineDifferenceS25) that brought in many of the novel aspectsof autonomia. Whereoperaismotalked of the social factory, the centrality of wage workers still predominated,but the feminist movementbrought to centrality the question of the non-waged (emerging, in one form, into an international 'Wages for Housework' movement),the critique of the ethical form of the militant (as a separationof politics and life), andthe politicisation of needs(Bologna 1980:49). After the feminist intervention it becamelesseasyto subsumethe political within the frameworks of 'workers' centrality', and to prioritise the factory, or even paid work at all, over unpaid, socialisedwork, and activity in 'the community'. (It alsobecomesdifficult to periodise'socialised' labour in a simple fashion, as the factory is revealedto have never been the exclusive site of the productionof value.) As one feminist put it in the late seventies: we have fought to establish the fact that our daily life is political - we are autonomous political agents. We have challenged the holy myth of the 'centrality' of the industrial working class. We have stressed that social life has a primary far importance, as especially as women are concerned, as part and parcel of political the new restructuring of Italian capitalism along the lines of the 'diffused

factory'.

(in Red Notes 1978: 114) But the feminist movement did not present a simple independence from the workers movement. Rather, it was an inclusive disjunction with it. One example of this process can be seen in the workings of Lotta Continua's Rimini Congress (November 1976). This congress was a significant event in the development of autonomia for it marked the dissolution of one of the major leftist groups under the influence of the increasing inconsistencies it embodied under the pressure from the margins. The in its is thematic the the to concerns of emarginati evidenced address congress' attempt organisation around 'feminism', 'workers' centrality', and 'the nature of political leadership' (Viale in Red Notes 1978: 82). 26 But pertinent to this discussion, problems from Turin' provides a telling story: 'Laura with autonomy were also raised. 25 This is an interesting example of the strong sense of complexity these groups expressed: "The idea came up almost by chance. We were pondering over time, on the many types of woman's time: on work time and love time, on'free'time and 'liberated' time, on research time. One of us put forward the idea of having an hourglass on the cover, an ancient instrument of time keeping. Then musical time came to (sic) just by Schonberg Someone the playing mind, perhaps on words. else suggested putting score of a piece on the cover, a piece called 'All in due time'. Later, we were not able to trace that score. In the meantime we had started discussing Schonberg, whom some of us loved, some did not, and others knew little about. It seemed that the contrasting readings offered on Schonberg were relevant to us: the drama of dissolution of tonality and the ultimate failure in the attempt to construct a new musical norm, said somebody. Others did not agree. Atonality and 12-tone music, breakdown of the old order and the impossibility of a'spontaneous' and non-painful journey towards a new order of things... " (The Women of the Centre Collective in Magale 1980: 137) 26 The crisis of the old form of organisation was evidenced most spectacularly by Adriano Sofri's (LC's founder and leader of seven years) public self-criticism at the end of the congress. Sofri stated, for example: "even though I am, and have been, firmly critical of comrade Lenin's thesis [of the external vanguard'] and the conditions that gave birth to it, I myself, in all my life, have never managed to be an internal vanguard of anything! " 1 am a very heavy paternalist - and my paternalism is proportionate to the very widespread 'followerism' that exists in our organisation. In recent times, comrades have started to question this seriously, and my position has become very uncomfortable. " (in Red Notes 1978: 95)

199

I remember that in the branch meetings I tried to explain how we women were organising ourselves, what we were doing in the area etc etc - all of which was completely ignored. It was as though we had come from another planet. It was impossible to get our ideas across. This

increasingly and women comrades started working outside the structures of our party. And what was the response to this? It was: "We recognise the autonomy of women ..... ..We wouldn't want to stick our noses into women's affairs ..... ..The women have their own autonomy - they can do what the fuck they like. " (in Red Notes 1978: 88-9) situation

continued

The point is starkly made. Autonomy should not be a process of the 'independence' of different perspectives. In this case such operaist independence had operated to keep feminist politics outside of the 'workers' position'. The simple demand that this speaker put forward was that 'the workers' should entertain some relation with feminist perspectives. 'Autonomy' should operate not as a line of demarcation between two groups, but as a more complex interrelation (which is not to say subsumption of one in another27).

The wage and money I have already considered the central place of money and the wage and social wage in the theory of autovalorisation. I can now consider an example, in the 'Wages for Housework' campaign.28 Wages for Housework is consistently misrepresented as a simple campaign for the wage. Gorz (1982: 40), as one example among many, uses this campaign as an example of a workerist politics that seeks not the abolition of work, but the translation of all activity into market relations, and as such sees it as the 'height of alienation'. 29 The campaign, in fact, is a rather sophisticated attempt to consider the politics of particularity - feminism, and the condition of the unwaged - in conjunction

27 The necessarily pragmatic form of interrelation and separation that the feminist movement embodied (what Magale (1980: 139) formulates as the continual problem of a relation with the 'outside' - dominant institutions, male politics, the other marginalised) is marked by a particularly prominent and defining event in autonomia, when male Lotta Continua stewards attacked a women-only march (the first big national demonstration over abortion, December 6 1975) because they wanted to join in (cf. Red Notes 1978: 113). One of the leading figures in autonomia creativa, Bifo, was expelled from Rosso, one of the organs of the more hard line autonomia operaia (cf. Red Notes 1978: 111-2), for criticising this action (cf. 'AutonomieAutonomies' in Recherches 1980: 92-3). 28 The Wages for Housework campaign emerged with Lotta Feminista in the 1972 Programmatic Manifesto of Housewives in the Neighbourhood (cf. Bono and Kemp 1991 -, Edmond and Fleming 1975 Federici 1982; Fortunat! 1995; and, for some of the heated argument, Malos 1982). 1am only considering the early theory of this campaign, as an aspect of the area of autonomia, not assessing its subsequent development. 29Gorz contrasts the "logical conclusion" of wages for housework as a "full-scale statisation" of family services (not actually the position at all) with, implicitly his own position, a "redefinition of relations within the couple" based on an equal sharing of household tasks between "male and female partners". With a politics based on a movement away from the individualised activity of the housewife in the family presented as "alienation" (and any talk of socialisation of activity subsumed in a category of "statisation"), non-alienation seems to be found in the self-presence of 'household tasks' - equally shared within the heterosexual couple. 200

with a class framework. Wages for Housework is best conceived, as Federici (1980) argues,aswagesagainst housework,and againstwork in general. The foundationaltext for this perspectiveis Mariarosa Dalla Costa's and Selma James'(1972) Wonzenand the Subversiono the Community. Jamesand Dalla Costa are concernedwith developingan analysisof unwaged'housework' as a complex historically structuredpracticethat createsthe subjectof Woman as 'housewife'. They arguethat the division of the homeand work-place,and the valorisationof the latter via the wage is the basis for the estrangementof women from socialised activity. Yet the housework economyand the fan-dlyare integral to capitalist production in 'liberating' the labourer from the sphereof reproductionto sell his labour. But not only do they stress that the unwagedare performing work integral to capital, but show how the lack of a wage for housework has servedto mask its existenceas capitalistwork. Indeed 'housework' is seento be doubly subordinated,first by capital as work without a wage, and secondby the left itself which, becauseof the traditional emphasison production, excludedwomen, from 'non-productive' the realm of 'real' politics. By recognising category as a housework as integral to capital (rather than a natural 'injustice' or a decontextualised patriarchyoutsideof capital) this perspectiveenablesan understandingof the way women are as equally exploited by, and are as entwined within the wage-relationas working men. The importanceof the politics of the wage, then, is not in raising all into full Costa James 35), but in in 1972: (Dalla traversing the and exploitation equality distinctionsbetweenthe unwagedand the waged,and in forming a milieu that generalises the refusalof work, by including the wealth 'women's work' in the categoryof capitalist work. As Federici (1982: 221) puts it, wages for housework "is the demandby which because just for housework begins to wages means ends and our struggle want our nature to refuse that work as the expression of our nature". Simultaneously, becausethe "peculiar combination of physical, emotional and sexual services" that are involved in 'housework', all sorts of previously 'hidden' questionsaround the nature of work and social reproductionbecomepoliticised (Federici 1982: 220). This foregrounding of the complexitiesof housework is thus an important point of departurein autonomiafor the considerationof a wealth of attributesthat are included in the work of the social factory as a whole (which, in a different context, Haraway(1991: 166)describesas a 'feminisation' of work in a global 'homework economy'). The inclusive disjunctive mode of 'autonomy' is also evident in Wages for Housework,taking as it did neither a distinct feminist, nor class position: "Rejecting on the one hand class subordinatedto feminism and on the other feminism subordinatedto Costa James (Dalla 1972: 9). and class"

Such a position necessitated a complex engagement around the questions of particular autonomy and interrelation with other littered is Women Community Subversion thus the the the movement. and elements of of with notes and comments about the nature of demands and practices as contextual and limited, representing perspectives and temporary points of struggle rather than distinct 4D 201

and timeless 'positions'. For example: "the demand for a wage for housework is only a basis, a perspective, from which to start The practical, continuous translation of this ... is perspective the task the movement is facing in Italy and elsewhere." (54) This is not just an abstract position, but translates into specific strategic questions. Hence, the question of separatism is framed in terms of uncertainty as to "how long these tendencies will continue to drive the movement forward and when they will turn into their opposite" (53), whilst particular politics of child support, equal pay, access to abortion, are presented as necessarily embedded in broader feminist and class frameworks. Returning to autonomia more generally, as well as a politics of the extension of the wage to cover unremunerated work, the social wage was also seen to encompass consumption. If the wage was to be expanded, the costs of consumption were to be reduced. This was particularly important at a time of mass austerity (cf. note 12). One innovative practice here was 'autoreduction', or self-reduction. Autoreduction had its origins in the early seventies around a collective reduction in the payment of rents, but quickly spread to other areasof social consumption such as public transport, utilities, and later cinemas and festivals. In 1974 when commuters between Pinerolo and Turin found

that their bus fares had increasedby 30% they refused to pay, insteadsubstituting their own fare reducedtickets and forcing a formal reduction (Ramirez 1975: 144; cf. also Cherki and Wieviorka 1980). This sparked a spread of factory and community-based autoreductioncommitteeswhich effectively institutedreductionon a wealth of utility bills (wherepolitical relationswith workers in the statecontrolled electricity corporation were such that they took part in refusing to disconnectsupply). As the Movement of '77 developed,this practiceextendedto include the realmsof popularcultural expressionwith 'proletarian youth circles', and Metropolitan Indians not paying at the cinema, or expensiverestaurants,or going on 'autonomousprice-setting' (shoplifting) expeditions). Factory

and city

Though this chapter is largely concerned with the refusal of work in the social factory, this should not be seen to exclude the factory (even though its break-up coincided with the rise of autonomia, it did not disappear). The factory had maintained a strong disciplinary coherence since the Second World War (with FIAT using complex vetting involving local police and priests to keep trouble-makers out (Abse 1985: procedures 12)), and the 'dignity of labour' had been largely embodied in PCI ethics. 30 The experience of work in the large Northern automobile plants such as FIAT-Rivalta and FIAT-Mirafiori (the biggest 'city-factory' in the world, just outside the centre of Turin (cf. Partridge n. d. )31) is central to an understanding of the mass worker and the

30Platania (1979: 176) writes: I couldn't understand the Communist Party blokes in the factory. They made it a point of honour never to be faulted in their work by the foreman. " 31 A description of the Mirafiori plant from La Republica (21.2.1980, cited in Partridge n.d. ) presents a statistical sense of its vastness. The plant covered a surface area of three million square meters, with 30 miles of railway tracks, nearly 120 miles of conveyor belts, 13,000 pieces of machinery, and an estimated

202

emergence of the refusal of work (cf. Balestrini n. d.; Platania 1979). Balestrini's fictionalised autobiography of a FIAT worker, Voglianio Tutto, describes the experience thus: On the production line it was not a question of learning anything, but of habituating the muscles. That is, habituating them under pressure to those movements, those speeds... movementsfaster than the heartbeat ... operations that the muscles and the in instantly (cited had do by the to think themselves, to all. without need at eye Lumley 1990: 210) By the 1969 'Hot Autumn', however, things had changed. The struggles of the Hot Autumn are well characterised by the graffiti running along the external walls of the FIAT-Mirafiori plant: "The only music the bosses can hear is the sound of shut-down d.: ). The in Partridge, in Turin (cited "We too" the n. p. n. sun want machinery", and PCI from different and union conventional the very were mass worker struggles of They became an 'intensification'

of the space of work that matched the struggles. intricacies of Taylorist production with refusal (not unlike the IWW's 'striking on the job'). Under a general demand of 'We Want Everything' (Voglialno Tutto), 32the refusal 'internal high levels by strikes, wild-cat of absenteeism, of work was characterised increases demands for 'snakes', pay and pay equalisation sabotage, marches' or (1980) (Bologna differential the and grading abolition of regardless of productivity, and Negri (1988b) offer the classic accounts). Operaismo's strikes were not formal, union factories, during the production but the within wildcats rather spontaneous run events, forms differently Each the to of particular according strike manifested process. hiccups, different local snakes, chains, with names: each experience, production, skill, Snakes 1990: 227-8). Lumley 1971; Flame Big (cf. were processions or chequer-boards in. In joined in factory, work-station the number as each growing marches around it in into to divided turns factory take would the which up sections was chequer-boards by by sections of the alphabet station, or shift, or work stop work, sometimes organised in 33 (as As leaflets 'dazibao' the to well as strikes, workers' names. and corresponding Chinese Cultural Revolution) were put up on the walls of factory, and thousands of leaflets, often produced twice-daily, were distributed inside the factories and at the gates 65,000 workers ('we cannot be sure how many work there today'). One conveyor belt still had 60 radiators from an old FIAT model circulating for more than ten years because they could not be removed without stopping the whole factory (Red Notes (1979: 194) has an aerial photograph). 32The expression 'we want everything' originated in one of the first big struggles of the mass worker to in Corso Traiano factory in July A the 1969. beyond the strike organised walls, events of union extend FIAT plants Mirafiori and Rivalta in Turin extended beyond its formal structure to end in a day of streetfighting. Written on a poster on one of the barricades was 'What Do We Want? We Want Everything! ' (cf. Red Notes 1978: 191-3). 33 One worker describes the process: "it was enough that you struck for half an hour in the morning and the same in the evening to make the mechanism break down. When you strike, you go around as pleased as punch and you can't be stopped.... When you are busy with a 'checquer-board' action not even the bosses The damage to the the to was understand manage comings-and-goings.... gatekeepers

203

(cf. Red Notes 1978: 183-191). The factories resourceswere also used. As Viale (cited in Lumley 1990:222) reports,"in many factoriesthey are using the foremen's telephones to communicateand organisestruggles." By the seventies,amongst the youth there seems to have been a widespread disaffectionwith work acrossthe board. Hilary Partridge(n.d.: n.p.) reports that by the late seventiesamongstthe mediatherewas a commonsensethat "the 'honest worker' has been transformed into long-haired beatniks making love in empty car-bodies and displaying completecontemptfor work, for the trade unions, for the Party.1134And the young workers said somethingsimilar: "... we young ones go into the factory.... with a different kind of experience,a less serious way of seeing things; a bit of the outside world comes into the factory with us...... "Look at me, look at me well: My gym-shoes meandiscotheque,my shirt says'extremist', I've got the hair of a pop-singer,and an earring like a homosexual. Nothing about me says 'worker'! " (in Partridge). One account of relationswith the foremen from a young worker at Mirafiori capturesthe senseof the 'ungovernablefactory' well: On the line there are people who can quote Foucault (a psychologist) and the creeps explode with rage because they haven't even heard of him. Then there are the gays. They blow kisses and write 'Long Live Renato Zero (a pop singer) on the walls. Others roll a joint and laugh like they're crazy-high. The feminists too, giggle every time a man tries to give them orders. The FIAT foremen have never seen the workers laughing, and they get really angry. (in Partridge)

If the territory of the factory was disrupted, the city too became a site of

factory into The the the community was most prominent movement outside contestation. in the wave of squattingfor housing and social centres. This was prominent in Lotta Continua's politics of 'Take Over the City'. LC's position was essentially that the communityand the workplace were the samestruggle, and that an over-emphasison the factory enabledthe workers' gainsto be offset in the community (cf. Take Over the City 1971: 2). 35 However, despitetalking of a diffusion of capitalist power, the Take Over the City slogan was still basedon a work/community divide, where factory work took precedence.The city, for example,is referred to as "an enormous dormitory in which workersare allowed to regaintheir strengthafter it has beenbroken at work" (Take Over basis and the City 1971: 2), and the factory working class "continues to be the ... indispensableprecondition of any future developmentof the class struggle" (12) (and enormous,unlike in the case of pre-organisedstrikes of previous years.... It was the expression of mass creativity and inventiveness." (cited in Lumley 1990: 228) 34 The difference between the young workers and the Party is marked in the same piece by a PCI maintenanceworker at Mirafiori:"so, you go and try to explain things to the young ones. If you tell them that work dignifies a man, they laugh in your face." 35 The refrainfrom a Lotta Continua song put it like this: "A red wind is blowing/ Over the factories and estates./ It unites everyoneof us / Who've decided to fight / For revolution/ For freedom / Let's take over the city." (Take Over the City n.d.: 7) 204

indeed factory workers 'leadership' will give social struggles a revolutionary orientation (13)). As the Movement of '77 developed, a more complex understanding of the city emerged, both in the growth of social centres, communal squatted living, housing struggles, but also in a more poetic relationship to the city itself. This overall process is exemplified in the change in demonstrations. Mass demonstrations were of course a regular occurrence throughout the sixties and seventies. But with the emergence of the emarginati there was a movement away from the orchestrated march toward a more diffuse occupation of space.36 Torealta (1980: 105) reports how, during the national meeting in Bologna in September '77, whilst one part of the movement chose to gather in a sports amphitheatre, the rest entered the city, "conveying furniture and chairs outdoors, conducting discussions and seminars in thousands of small groups, passing out the little illegalities that had been produced for the occasion (fake train tickets, drugs, keys to open telephone coin boxes and traffic lights, etc.)" Another account of the Bologna Spring '77 talks of an intermeshing of the city and the Movement: During those days there seemed to be a real and strong 'contact' between the young people and the City. There were all kinds of different people, with all kinds of different ideologies, acting in all different ways, and this fed and nourished the inventivenessand creativity of the movement. New demonstrationswere continually being spawned; there were meetings everywhere, all the time (ranging from nighttime marchesto big meetings); new forms of organisation were being thought up all the time. For example, after March 15th, the police, the official political parties and the local authorities were trying to deny the movement any possible political space for coordination etc. The movement was drive out of the Old Centre of the city, and was denied the use of premises. But the movement responded by planning on a basis, in basis: set up, on cinemas on the were a rotation meetings geographic outskirts of town (where the owners didn't make any difficulties), as well as in parks, local squaresetc - which had the added advantage of involving local people even more than before! (Pritno Maggio, in Red Notes 1978: 43-4)

Language Radio

and counterculture:

the Metropolitan

Indians

and

Alice

The last site of minor productionI want to consideris that of languageand a more clearly foregroundedcounterculture. The Movementof '77 developedforms of countercultural deliberately that were opposed to common sense, general equivalence, and practice Two models. communicational groups were particularly influential, the rational MetropolitanIndiansandCollective A/traverso and their Radio Alice. Before discussing 36

direct the seventies, often becoming the police (this is at a time when the police, sometimes dressed as freaks, were using with confrontations

More conventional demonstrationscontinuedthroughout

205

these groups it is worth saying a little about the form of language of autonomia more a generally. In keeping with Deleuze and Guattari's argument about the deterritorialisation of language, Moulier (1989: 20-1) suggests that the rather complex and arcane terminology ZD of operaismo was a necessary aspect of its emergence through the PCI-dominated left milieu. He writes: doubtless by the same token that Althusser ventured into the French Communist ... Party under cover of scientific Marxism and Spinoza, the adherents of operaisillo proceeded to use formulae that would not have shocked the old Stalinist communists. One could even say that part of the strange character of operaisino in the years 1964 to 1971 lies in this paradoxical way of saying in the very language of the Communist Party things which are so contrary foundation as to imitate its internal rupture.

to its whole theoretical

But if the complex terminology had a cloaking function, it also reflected the considerable creativity of the movement. Thus, though operaismo and autonomia used received Marxian terminology, they also coined many other terms, from 'class composition' to 'autovalorisation' and 'autoreduction', each seeking to describe particular phenomena and maintain an 'operationality'. The political problematics of the development of operaist in by Negri (from isolation Rebibbia prison language the raised wing are and autonomist in 1979) in response to a question about the difficulty of his language (and the consequent difficulty of rank and file militants using it), and it is worth citing at length: Certainly, the language is occasionally obscure. But it was far more obscure 20 find inserting had Marxist and revolutionary At to that time ways of we years ago. debates into the official labour movement, and since at the same time we had to avoid being expelled and marginalised, we found a hermetic style of language. The bureaucrats did not understand it, and underestimated the power of what we were saying. But since then things have changeda lot. Nowadays revolutionary students are far more able to understandthe language that I and my friends use, rather than the 'clear and distinct' language of the ideological falsifications of the official parties. Our language is difficult, but distinct. It speaksof things. Theirs is clear, but not distinct: they speak of nothing. Our languageis difficult: but our comrades study it, as they study the classics of Marxism, the critique of political economy and many other things. (in Red Notes 1979: 206)37 live ammunition, which, under the provisions of the Reale Law, killed an estimated 150 people (Bifo 1980: 154)). 37 Viano (in Negri 1991: xxxviii-xxxix) makes some interesting points about the nature and form of language in Negri and autonomia. Arguing that it is a bourgeois fallacy (rooted in the figure of a fully present universal humanity) that assumes that a book should be consumed similarly by the spectrum of social subjects, he suggests that Negri's language is a 'homage to difference' rooted in a cultural milieu 206

Indians and Radio Alice the deterritorialisation

In the Metropolitan

of language is

extended beyond Marxism into the realms of dominant culture and the Movement Placing great stay in parody and irony (in conjunction surveyed),

the Metropolitan political

conventional expeditions,

parodied

PCI

with the other practices I have

Indians painted their faces, parodied political

practices,

went

on

demonstrations

'autonomous

collective

(by,

itself.

for example,

figures

and

price-setting'

bowing

down

speakers and chanting such things as: "We are hooligans and provocateurs.

to the

The only true

and called demonstrations where communists are Lama and Cossiga [PCI luminaries]"), they did not appear, or where they hung-out and had open discussion rather than marched (distributing

contraband,

drugs and irreverent

leaflets against the "pale faces" of the

pCI. 38 But they did this not to forge a new formalised identity.

Torealta (1980) suggests

that the mainstream media sought to focus on their painted faces as signs of a distinct He argues that the identity, and so conceal the transversal nature of their practices. painted faces tactic should counterculture,

but,

as "an

not be seen as the mark arbitrary

characterisation

of of

a coherent a future

autonomous

people... "

who

"appropriates in an exhaustive way all possible terms and treats language as a science of zn If the emarginati, generally, formed an inclusive imaginary solutions... " (102) disjunctive collective, the Metropolitan think of the Metropolitan

Indians sought to intensify this process.

Indians as an attempt to develop a politics

that enaa-ed with the increasing fluidity 4:1 z:1

and 'dividuality'

We can

of autovalorisation

of the social factory.

Torealta

(1980) arguesthat the condition of socialised work had disrupted clearly demarcated hence do the this that subject other than of process must political matricesof value, and identity. He forms to and writes: of equivalence retreat is diffuse and forced into a relation with fluctuating and that ... indeterminate wages (and the question of wages, by definition, is the general 'political discourses 'pangs the on of conscience' and signs), referent of all

For a social subject

economy' are completely useless-,one can not struggle against transience and dispersion with the blows of purpose and conscience, Thus the social conditions of simulation and of the arbitrary come into being: there arises a social subject that is not reducible to one precise identity.... (1980: 103)

opposed to the repetition of the regular refrains and meanings of 'normal' discourse. He implies that the language of the movement is more akin to atonal music, is self-consciously positioned at the margins of the system of symbolic reproduction, and is comprised of many different parallel and divergent expressions. This, of course, can not be an excuse for incoherent writing (and when traversing and developing extremely complex Marxian figures such language is not without its problems), but it does raise the question of the affective nature of language in a context - Marxian political discourse - where by is the Negri's A less difficulty the marked prose evident. of are rarely poetic reading of concerns such English translators (who are well schooled in the milieu) of the best-selling Domination and Sabotage (Negri 1979), when they choose to omit a couple of pages because, as they say, "In translating, we found the first two pages of this section almost incomprehensible. " (1116) See also Chapter 7, note 35. 38 See Morris (1978: 70) and Red Notes (1978: 57) for two of these leaflets, and 6 il '77 (1977) and Grimshaw and Gardner (1977: 16) for photographs of'Metropolitan Indians'. 207

Thus, following the Rome University occupation (February 1977, consideredbelow), Torealta(1980: 104) writes that "from that day will gush rivers of speecheson the new needsof the youthful strataof the population; on that day hundreds of self-critical and remorsefuldiscourseswill be made,yet only the Metropolitan Indians will remain silent." They would remainsilent because,at least in Torealta's presentation,they were part of a continual provocationand creation, an exerciseof difference that sought to open needs As they put it: and possibilities, rather than settle on any in particular. future for you the Metropolitan Indians have "Workers students. no -There's ... ... arrived!" (Red Notes 1978: 124) To give an example, when Luciano Lama (the secretary of the General Confederationof Workers, close to the PCI) entered the occupied Rome campus, fascists" by he University is defend "to PCI the the which occupied call spearheading be daubed that would warning capitalists and revisionists graffiti with entereda space "buried by a burst of laughter" signed by Godere Operaio and Godimento Studentesco Joy' and 'Students' Enjoyment' - both puns on the formal operaist 52). Lama 1988: In Notes (in Red the was to speak there courtyard where organisations) was anotherplatform with a replica dummy of Lama, completewith a Valentine's heart Morkers'

with the words Nessuno LAnza ('Lama Nobody', or 'Nobody Loves Him'). As Lama beganto speaka crowd of Metropolitan Indians took to chanting 'Sacrifices, Sacrifices, We Want Sacrifices!", "Build us more churchesand fewer houses", and "We demandto into descended (at This less! " (53). harder a riot event characteristically and earn work this time a suresign of impendingconfrontationwas the arrival of traderswith barrels of lemonsto counteractthe effects of tear gas). But the event offered no program or even direct assaulton the speaker(at leastnot at first), and no one took the podium. Rather it was more an event intendedto underminethe regime of negotiation('leave now and we by be done for situation') utilising and returning the expressions your shall seewhat can of austerityand work that were deployedagainstthe emarginati. Turning to the secondprominent counterculturalgroup, Collective A/traverso and their Radio Alice was a configuration of operaist and autonomist understandings of generalintellect and qualitativework (a number of membersof Alice had been in Potere Operaio(cf. Collective A/traverso 1977: 104-9)), dadaisttheoriesof language,the avant breaking the separationof art and everyday life, and US pop and of project garde counterculture. In A/traverso's more theoretical texts, the general intellect thesis is rehearsedto elucidatea 'techno-scientific'intellectuallabour that is enmeshedin capitalist language the through simplification, mathernaticisation, of and codification relations (Collective A/traverso 1977: 104). But unlike Negri's more recent tendenciestoward Habermassiancommunicativeaction, Altraverso considered language as part of the generalrelationsof equivalence:

208

Tile system of production which is based upon the reduction of all aspects of human life to abstract work, exchangeable against wages,could not separate itself from the logic of language. Human language had to be reduced by capitalism to a simple instrument of production, and thus first codified, confined within tile canons of comprehensibility, and therefore had to root out all contradiction, and - given that contradiction lay in the existence of the subject/class- root out the subject. (Collective A/traverso 1977: 109-10; my translation)

Thus, building on an already developedform of political slang known as sinistresse, A/traverso expandedtheir practice to include dadaist nonsense, and the disruption of conventionalmodesof political expression(whilst seeking to locate this practice in the terrain of the movementand the socialisedworker rather than in literatureor art). They called this practice'mao-dadaism'(115) (Morris (1978), following Macciocchi (1978), 39 delinquency"). The refusal of work was central to the project, it "semiological sees asa link 'transversal', in they across the the or called what connective, and a sensewas A/traverso's The their specific point of critique of work and practice. variousaspectsof is in this passage: the culture clear codified of on question engagement The guerrilla war of information, the organised disruption of the circulation of known between broadcasting in break the the the and making of relationship news, is to be found within the general struggle against the organisation and facts ... domination of work... The interruption and subversion of the fluxes of production and the transmission of the signs given by authority represent a field of direct action... (Collective A/traverso, in Guattari 1984: 236-7)40

A/traverso's activities were most evident in Radio Alice, one of the more in broadcasting deregulation free the the that of proliferated after radio's prominent of 1976 (cf. Downing 1980).41 As well as 'mao-dadaism', Radio Alice also used the composite 'Guattareuze' to characterise their practice. Indeed the name Alice was taken from Deleuze's discussion of Through the Looking Glass in The Logic of Sense (as

39 The extension of this process of disruption through the milieu as a whole was not always popular. Bifo's intervention in the September 1977 Conference on Repression (by letter from exile in France), which began with the expression "[w]e have to go against the stream even when the stream is going against the stream", was greeted by at least one of the audience with dismay, and an assertion of the need to communicate with the masses with simplicity and immediacy (cf. Kunzle 1980: 115-6). 40 See also the mao-dadaist parody of the 'right to work', 'Work Makes You Free and Beautiful' (in Morris 1978: 70). 41 Downing (1980: 204) reports that in June 1878 there were an estimated 2275 radio stations and 503 television stations spread fairly evenly across the population centres of the country. Alice transmitted from February 9 1976 until March 12 1977, using an old military transmitter located in two rooms of an apartment building in a residential area of Bologna (cf. Cowan 1978; Grimshaw and Gardner 1977). A Primo Maggio article reports that no sooner had Alice come on air than it was able to mobilise 2000 people for a musical jam session, and that it had an average listening audience of 30000 (in Red Notes 1978: 41).

209

Umberto Eco (1977b) sought to 'expose'). 42 Following Deleuze (1990), Radio Alice's adventures sought to open up not an 'underground' as such, but a world of surfaces, nonsense, and events. With the 'circles of proletarian youth' as its particular foCUS,43 Radio Alice aimed to problematise 'radio' and 'language', to open cramped spaces (the separation of home, work, families, sexism, individualising relationships (Collective A/traverso 1980: 133)), to make language intensive, 'unproductive', tactile, and 'political' (indeed, their collection, Collective A/traverso (1977: 67-72), includes a pr6cis of the minor literature thesis), and open to, as they put it, the 'unstated' and the 'uncanny'. Alice's transmission was a complex of music (the broadcast transcript in Collective A/traverso (1977) includes Frank Zappa, the Rolling Stones, Don Cherry, Bob Dylan, Monteverdi, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and the Beatles), discussion ("Stop the blackmail of poverty. Value of desire programmes, phone-ins, and poetry 41: 1 value in use - labour value. Working-class aristocracy and Lunilmnproletariat ... What poverty? What work? Time must be reappropriated. It is our right to forget what time it is" (Collective A/traverso in Guattari 1984: 237)). But Alice's Guattareuze was not limited to language and radio content. It was specifically concerned with the connections ;z tD between producer and audience that radio could enable (being heavily influenced by Brecht's (1993) theories of radio's socialist potential). This is no more evidenced than in its involvement in the Bologna '77 Spring.

Opening its airwaves to telephone booth callers in the midst of demonstrations and occupations, Alice enabled an ongoing communication and coordination of the events by the people involved themselves (relaying positions of the police and activists, suggesting actions and so on). This was a common structural feature of the free radios that Eco (1994) describes as the form of 'token reporter' where calls from public telephone boxes were immediately relayed on air. A/traverso saw this as breaking down the 'crossword' approach of conventional phonein's which are based on limited and structured responses (Downing 1980: 207). In Alice's case, such arrangements were the pretext for its closure by armed police, under the charge of "military coordination". The closure itself was transmitted live with hidden microphones, and makes an unusual read, with the last words broadcast: "Police: Hands up there! B: "We've got our hands up. They're telling us that this is a 'hive of 42 Umberto

Eco suggested that Radio Alice was not being quite honest about the avant gardist and (1977: 116), that Anti-Oedipus academic origin of their mao-dadaism and its 'metaphor' of desiring machines needed to be read seriously, not reduced to easy slogans (116), and that the workers didn't really understand (1977a: 126) and were using a 'laboratory language' in a (by implication, dangerous) practical fashion (1994: 172). Bifo, and Pasquini (1977) responded by suggesting that "in Eco's article, everything could be reduced to a little abstract game between Norm and Violation... But this is to forget that behind this transgression there is a of the Norm and the gestural and linguistic transformation subject, which produced behaviour and signs capable of violating the codes of practical, collective, interpretation precisely because the social practice of the subject is capable of violating that productivist code of sacrificing a lifetime to an exploitative society. " (cited in Morris 1978: 69) For Bifo and Pasquino (1977: 135) it was not the workers who did not understand (indeed they were practising 'mao-dadaism' in FIAT-Mirafiori), but the bourgeoisie, or "Pale Faces". 43 "During the months of spring-summer'75, a new subject, the young proletarian, appeared on the scene, no longer with the old frames of reference of the avant garde; a subject which moved in a certain transversal fashion through the seperate orders, not reducible to the categories of politics, and therefore

210

subversiveactivity ...... (cf. the transcription in Red Notes 1978: 31-3).44 Albertani (1981: n.p.) reports that some membersof the collective escapedover the roof tops and continuedbroadcastingfrom a car driving through the Bologna streets. ..,

Conclusion I haveargued(bringing in a little of Chapter7) that operaismoand autonomiacan be seen as a plane of minor creativity. As with the IWW, work was the central site of an apparently stripped-down politics. Through the social factory thesis, workers were conceptualisedas a generalisedplane of socialisedabstractlabour. This gives 'mass', then 'socialised' workers productive centrality, where a wealth of attributes become subsumedin capitalist regimesof production and valorisation. However, it does not give them a political identity, for the identities formed within work are capitalist 'worker' identities. I thus presenteda seriesof 'cramping' manoeuvreswhich reducedthe identity of worker and compelled political composition: 'class composition', the 'reversal of perspective',and the 'refusal of work'. The political project which follows residesin the immediatelyreduced (by the reformists and fascists) to the categories of criminology, of psychiatry, of sociology,of spectacle." (CollectiveA/traverso 1977: 89-90; my translation) 44Theclosure of RadioAlice was part of the general repression of autonomia. This repression took a complexpath indeed,and a full accountis beyondthe scope of this chapter. Nevertheless, a little needs to be said. In the judicial procedures and criminal prosecutions the complex and mutating nature of autonomia was converted into a hierarchical and organised body (displaying an efficiency that lead Debord(1983a: 19) to describeItaly as "the most modern laboratory of internationalcounter-revolution." ) Central to the process was the deployment of the Red Brigades (BR) as a kind of consolidating 'agent' enablingthe axiomaticsolidification of identity-forming regimes across the movement, The BR's politics was always rather orthodoxworkerist,and, with their politics of "carry the attack to the heart of the State", becameincreasinglyspectacular(with links to the secret services which, since the 1969-1973/4'strategy of tension', had been a characteristic of Italian political control (cf. Bologna 1980: 45; Debord 1983a; Sanguinetti1982)),and very far removed from the diffuse politics of autonomia (the Metropolitan Indians parodiedthe BR position with the slogan: "Carry the attack to the heart of the Papacy! All power to the armedvicars!" (in Red Notes 1978: 124)). Nevertheless,with the pretext of increasedviolence, the vague historicallinks across the whole of the extraparliamentarymovement, and no doubt aided by some of the violent rhetoric and practice of aspects of autonomia, the judiciary sought to 'expose' the subterranean links betweenautonomiaand the BR, and prosecute the lot (though many 'repentant' Brigadists received large commutations for implicating, frequently in contradictory ways, elements of autonomia). The specific techniquesof identificationare described by Lotringerand Marazzi (in Semiotext(e) 1980: 19) as a process whereby the state assumed something of its adversary's form: it "simulated the fluidity characteristicof Autonomy." Thus, in considering the judicial procedure Deleuze (1980) argues that the prosecution overcame two fundamental principles of democratic law: that justice must conform to a principleof 'identifiableconsistency'where the content and subject of the charge must have a precise and non-contradictory identity, and that in the committal hearings 'facts' must confirm to a principle of 'disjunction and exclusion' ("Either A is the case, or B; if B, then it is not X'; 182). The state thus presented not a distinct series of subjects (there was only one, Potere Operaio = autonomia = Red Brigades)but an 'orgy of identifications'that replicatedAnti-Oedipus'inclusive disjunction with a principle of inclusion and accumulation of all contradictions. The fatal proviso was that the construction of the inclusive disjunctive plane served to produce criminal subjects of the law, as the total plane was subdividedinto units with degrees of responsibility for the whole. Thus everything from political actions, texts, and archivecollections(all of Negri's works and files were trawled through and form the basis of his prosecution (cf. Negri (1988d) for a sobering transcript of the process of the prosecution of ideas), mysterious phone calls (Negri's alleged telephone call to Aldo Moro's wife), and, if we expand beyond Negri's case, to cartoons (a comic strip in Metropoliillustrating the similarity of position between the BR and the state was said to display knowledge of Aldo Moro's kidnap that only the BR could have (cf Semiotext(e)(1980: 300-14)for the comic strip) were used as points of connectionto 'autonomia/BR',with simultaneously serious and vague and nebulous charges such as 'subversive association', and 'insurrection against the powers of the state'. Once 'connected' there was no need to maintain consistencyin the charges since the specific content does not change the generalised guilt. Hence the continual mutation in the charges against Negri (in a kind of 'endless deferment' that would have done Kafka proud), enabledby the possibilityof up to 10 years of preventative detention, the use of witnesses

211

creation of forms of collective worker,

and, with

Autovalorisation

composition

the development

of

disrupt

autonomia,

Practices

(against any naturalisation

measures or essentialist understandings was

But autovalorisation

for

of the movement

of needs,

to identity

in

was to assert and develop

its

warding-off

tendencies

these across the movement.

was also linked to the question of the social wage.

the social wage that autovalorisation

connected the 'little intrigues'

It was through

of autonornia to the

The social wage becomes the site of a certain 'reclamation

of surplus

and requires a continual process of struggle for a wage independent of work-

done, following political

'autovalorisation'.

In this expansion

particular needs and new forms of practice, and distribute

value',

of

of

of needs determined by austerity

of the human).

also a mechanism

autonomia itself, for every minority

social whole.

and the subject

work

is a process of expanding and changing 'needs' (as forms and styles of

life) in the class composition

autovalorisation

which

the basic operaist demand for more pay and less work.

innovation

simultaneous,

and the

struggle

as, for example,

to

increase

the

in the practices of

social

wage

'autonomous

In practice, tended

price-setting'

to

be and

'autoreduction'. With the emergence of the Movement of '77 the project of composition of the emarginati. 4:1 around the figure

These 'marginals'

are not 'outside'

circulates

of capitalist

relations; they are central to the productivity of the social factory. In their processes of the refusal of work/er and autovalorisation there is a tendency toward the enfolding and distribution of various identities, needs, cultures across the plane of the movement, in a politics which seeks not an independent outside, but an expansion and deterritorialisation of collective composition in capitalism. The difference between this minor interpretation is Negri's later that, rather than talk of production the work worker and of socialised tending toward autonomy and communist form, here composition is always a deterritorialisation of the identities, and potentially the 'dividualities' of a work fully traversed by axiomatic capitalist relations. I showed a number of techniques, territories, First I this occurred. argued that these groups were within which process practices and inclusive disjunctive (for example, students and workers, feminists and components of the workers' movement), and showed how the organisational form of 'autonomy' manifested and facilitated this. I stressed, however, that this process of autonomy was always complex, difficult, and involved much intensive engagement, debate, and polernic. I then considered three aspects or territories of composition: the wage and money, factory and city, and language and counterculture in the Metropolitan Indians and Collective A/traverso. The importance of each of these territories and practices was found both in the processes of deterritorialisation of particular sites and identities, and in the t; l tý 4: 1 and social wage. with questions of the wage engagement

with contradictory testimonies, and the refusal to present the prosecution's evidence to the defendants (cf. Italy '79 Committee1982). 212

If, as Negri (1989: 75) argues, the mass worker was theorised at a time of its passingaway, the socialisedworker thesis was very much of its time. Indeed, in many ways the Movementof '77 was the emergenceof a political tendency immanent to, perhapsevenin advanceof new forms of socialisedwork. It thus operatedat a time of high unemployment. That the various spaces of reproduction, consumption, unemployment,andcultural formation were conceptualisedin terms of (socialised)work, and that the questionsof the social wageand money were brought in to theseterritories is one of the most radical aspectsof autonomia. But if autonomiawas a responseto these structural changes, as the developmentof a new 'class composition' (the socialised worker), it was destroyedbefore it fully developeda politics immanentto the new forms of diffuse work. Instead,as Virno (1996c) argues,its innovations in the refusal of work (suchas the affirmation of picaresquetemporarywork, new needsand styles, new forms forms is, basis it became That the of new of whilst work. creativity) of autonomous Movement '77 level the opened new spacesand the of of counterculture, on operated in kind 'counterrevolution'. a of capitalist capitalised styles which were subsequently Whilst for Negri this is a sign that the new labour of the socialisedworker is almost itself is innovative for Virno it is it built (since these upon practices), a communistplenitude part of a new regimeof capitalistproduction: The masterpieceof the Italian counterrevolution was its having transformed these intransigent in Movement '77 the tendencies, manifested as of were which collective antagonism,into professional prerequisites, ingredients of the production of surplus value, and leavening for a new cycle of capitalist development. (Virno 1996c: 243)

Nevertheless,insofar as the Movement of '77 was an anticipation (perhaps even the for its forms Vimo its future of of production, political potential regimes conjuration)of interrelation between groups, its struggle for the social wage, its intertwining of is questions of money more work and with conventional counterculture - still current, as a "future at our backs" (243).

213

Chapter

9

Conclusion One never commences; one never has a tabula rasa-, one slips in, enters in the middle; one takes up or lays down rhythms. (Deleuze 1988a: 123) Paolo Vimo

(1996b:

189) expresses a common

sentiment about the state of current

political thought when he writes: "If nobody asks me what political action is, I seem to know; but if I have to explain it to somebody who asks, this presumed knowledge evaporates into incoherence. " This is a problem, but it is not a wholly new one. Indeed, inasmuch as it is in the nature of politics to have an openness to virtuality, to potential, and to undetermined worlds, a certain amount of uncertainty, of its central features. At the same time, however, form of ordering,

a stratification

of political

if not 'incoherence',

is one

uncertainty is necessarily subject to a

forms and potential around the question,

is an attempt to call forth other worlds through intricacies The problem is that such the with of the present. concrete engagement 'what is to be doneT,

since politics

ordering and engagement has so often occurred through processes of truth and certainty, where politics has become less a site of uncertainty, experimentation, and creation than dogma and resentiment. It would be wrong to say that Marxism was the only vehicle of this form of stratification;

the effacement

of political

virtuality

in social democratic

consensus is at least as effective, and certainly more pervasive. Nevertheless, the Marxist Party-form did such a good job of curtailing the innovation of politics that most serious attempts, certainly within

the academy, to conceptualise

politics

and open its potential

have, since the late 1970s sought to stay clear of Marxism, and even venture a certain , Deleuze and 6post-politics', or a 'cultural politics' to get away from its anaernic territory. Guattari's

work

is, I would suggest, in many ways attributable to a similar

desire to

radically rethink politics away from certainty and dogma, and to address, in their own particular way, the question of 'what is to be doneT Yet, rather than sever links with Marxism, Deleuze and Guattari worked through a much more nuanced relation with it; as if Marxism, as life in general, needed to be engaged with 'in the middle'. As I showed in Chapter 1, Alliez (1997) made this clear when he suggested that all of Deleuze's works Cý

come under the heading of 'capitalism and schizophrenia', and that we could use Deleuze's missing book on Marx to think through a Deleuze-Marx resonance, or a 'virtual Marx'. This thesis has sought to consider something of this Deleuze-Marx resonance through a 'minor politics'.

In conclusion, rather than summarise each chapter (for the introduction, and conclusions to the chapters have done this), I will draw out the sense of my argument by returning to a central underlying theme of the thesis; the nature of Deleuze and Guattari's 'Marxism'. I want to emphasise in particular how this is a politics but subjects, of not of forces, flows,

and composition that, as well as showing 214

techniquesand points of departure,is able to live with the 'impossibilities' of the closure of the political that our capital-permeatedsocietiesseemto haveinduced.

"... in our two different ways, perhaps" Deleuzehimself only came to Marx in the sixties. He says that he read Marx and Nietzschetogether(Deleuze1995a:51), and indeed a considerableamount of Deleuze's work can be seen as a product of this reading. The reterritorialisation of Marx's and Nietzsche's'untimely' thought (for a 'people to corne') in the most oppressiveof national socialismsand fully presenthistorical peoples is such that the need to read Marx and Nietzscheagainst their identities is apparent long before one discusses the details of Deleuze's empiricist philosophy. Arguably, however, post-war French thought has largely managedto delink Nietzsche's philosophy from National Socialism. One can henceseeDeleuzeasa kind of Nietzscheanwithout offending too many sensibilities. Yet to seeDeleuzeasa Marxist appearsto be more problematic, as if the identity of Marxism is still too much of a molar attractor. We thus tend to put expressionssuch as 'new', 'unorthodox', 'post-communist' in front of the 'Marxism' that someone like Deleuze danger identity Marxist is even marked by The be the of of sense might pursuing. Deleuzehimself, who more than once presentsMarx as a figure of oppressive molar thoughtand politics (cf. Deleuzeand Parnet 1987: 14). In following Deleuze'srelations with Marx we are, hence, simultaneouslycompelledto maintain a certain separation. I would not want to suggestanything else. The necessaryfocus of this thesis should be seen as an attemptto add to, rather than circumscribe understandingsof Deleuze and Guattari's politics. To consider a Deleuze-Marxresonanceis not to produce an identity; to reduceDeleuzeto Marxism. What sucha resonanceshould do, rather,is to explore the between Deleuze Marx. in doing And this, and complication and connection of points identity like little find is the to the the that, operaists way sought overcome of a what we Marxism by returning to Marx, the Marxism of Deleuzeand Guattari is best seen as a difference) (in to somecore Marxian problematics. of repetition and return a process These two aspectsof a certain distancefrom Marxist identity, and a return to Marxian problematicsareevidentin the personalrelationsof both Deleuzeand Guattari to Marxism, and in their reasonsfor self-declarationas Marxists. Deleuzemust be rather unique in his generationfor never having joined the French Communist Party (even Foucaulthad a brief stint in the PCF (cf. Macey 1993: 37)), just as he was never in psychoanalysis;he remainedoutside the two dominant schools of French theoreticaland his direct and political practice was never particularly 'practical' (cf. practice, political Guattari 1995a:28-30; Deleuze 1997b). Guattari, on the other hand (no doubt as part of the "wild rodeo" of his life (Deleuzeand Parnet1987: 11)),had a life-long involvement in left wing politics, from an early membershipof the PCF, through Trotskyist splinter different then many post-'68 'groupuscules'; with his base not in the groups and in but the psychiatric clinic La Borde (cf. Guattari 1995a; Genosko's academy, 215

introduction to Guattari 1996;N: 13-24). It is a combination of thesetwo positions an outside,at most borderingof Marxist politics, and an intensive engagementwith it - that is perhapsthe basis of Deleuze's comment that he and Guattari were Marxists 'in two different ways' (N: 171). It is also a useful way to see their Marxism; as somethingthat operatedboth outside and beyond the identity of Marxism, and within its interstices, following Guattari's (1996: 88) commentthat "[flor me, Marxism in general has never existed." But if Deleuzeand Guattari make a deterritorialisationof Marxism, it takes place on Marx's terrain. There is no post-Marxist shift from the 'economic' to the 'cultural' (indeedtalk of the 'post' (be it -Marxist, -modern, or -political) is inimical to Deleuzeand Guattari's conceptualapparatuswith its incessant mixture of social and conceptualmachines(cf. Guattari 1996: 86-7; 1994: 7)). Political thought, Deleuze(N: 171) proposes,must begin from an analysisof the capitalist socius, and it is becauseof this proposition that he sayshe and Guattari were Marxists (N: 171). Capital, however, is a dangerousword to brandishin political analysissince it can easily function as one of those"earplugs", as Donzelot (1979: 73) puts it, which simultaneouslytotalise and close down the territory of political culture. We should thus be very clear about Deleuzeand Guattari's understanding. the line of flight, and the impossibilities of politics As I arguedin Chapters5 and 7, capitalism is not a 'thing'. It is a mode of relation, or a 'socius', within which abstractlife is continually reconfigured. If politics is to begin Capital,

from analysisof the capitalist socius,it is to begin with the forms of assemblagethat exist levels, it both for politics is always a situated engagement at macro and micro within with currentlife, not an abstractset of principles, ideals, or utopias . So, to foreground 6capital'is not to close down analysisand politics, but to open it up to the level of the life. intimate If is first this the the configuration of and complex and principle of social Deleuze'sMarxism, it is inseparablefrom another proposition; that societies are to be analysedin termsof, and politics is to be founded upon 'lines of flight'. The peculiarityof the capitalist socius for Marx and Deleuzeis that it is premised on flows rather than identities. If all social systemsflee all over the place (ATP: 204), capital takesthis processas its raison d'&re: it not so much shores up the lines of flight, asseeksto continually engineermore. At the sametime it needsto composeidentities (or 6axioms')to keep the whole stable, and actualisesurplus value. The capitalist socius is very efficient at this. As I arguedin Chapter7, value can now be composed from the most variedof practicesandextremesof radical subjectivity. Thus, whenever 'capital' is foregroundedin analysis,politics seemsto shrink to an ineffectual margin, in the shadow of the greatmutantmachine. Certainly, as the operaistssaid in the 1960s , in their very different readingsof Marx to neo-Gramscianthought, faced with this system of the 'social factory' (and, as I added, 'control'), any understandingof the 'autonomy of the best seems at archaic, and at worst part of the legitimation and technocratic political' 216

z:1 of the statusquo. Work and non-work, the cultural and the economic, the management

biological and the political would seem to have been subsumed in one another irrevocably. But with this subsumption, other political positions also look more than a little problematic. Even countercultural and avant gardist politics can look lack-lustre in the face of the wealth of innovations and cultural forms of the capitalist work and market he it if is (1996b: 191) Virno that today writes perceptive when appears as place. "politics offers a communicative network and a cognitive content that are weaker and found be to than those within the present-day process of production. [Political] poorer [a]ction appears as less complex than Work. " It is this recognition that has led Hardt and Negri (2000) to see the biopolitical labour of the global multitude as the site of political in life look flows the global capitalist machine as the site of politics the to of at practice; (as I showed in Chapter 7). 1 would suggest that they are right to do this. The problem is, however, that in order to avoid any overly-depressing conclusions about the state of figure kind inversion Gramscian the they with a of of a produce capitalist axiornatisation forces but 'the of productive and the global multitude. political', certain autonomy, not of Thus we seem to be poised on the edge of a coming communism in a theory which is not Marxian but thought little the very real problems of orthodox replicates wilful, only a where work itself is seen to produce a universal class, and one which would simply manage its own work'better, once it throws off external productive relations. Zizek's less The Communist Manifesto "nothing Empire than that a rewriting of offers comment for our time" (Hardt and Negri 200: flycover) has some pertinence, but not for the right reasons. It is precisely at this point of the apparent closure of politics in 'real subsumption' (of the social processes of production in axiomatic relations, even at sub-individual or 'dividual' levels), that Deleuze and Guattari's prioratisation of cramped minor processes in little If flight becomes line the a naive operaists were pertinent. most of and the in the edge any configuration of cutting of creation presenting resistance as primary, Politics, they as articulated something crucial. nevertheless constant and variable capital, I showed in Chapter 8, was not the manifestation of a fully present people; in the social factory there was no autonomous subject of the working class, no plenitude either in or did departure; But leave this without a not politics point of quite the reverse. out of work. For the operaists, politics was to be the refusal of the subject of worker across the social in innovation, in the of process engagement with points of mutation a change, and whole, the social system. For Deleuze and Guattari, flight is not a product of 'resistance' or it is but the site of political practice. Because there is no autonomous politics alone, between life in distinction (no politics, and general), minor politics seeks not neat politics it 'capitalist' 'non-capitalist'; delineate territories seeks rather of and to pure spheres and flight immanent to the socius as a whole. that the to tries processes of are affirm and out No longer is politics a reflection of identity, stability, and radical subjectivity somehow 'outside' capitalist relations, rather, it is a process of engagement with the complexity and 217

becoming throughout and within the capitalist socius, at every moment of the configurationof life. The problem identified by Deleuzeand Guattari is that the flows actualisedby the capitalistsocius are immanentlysubject to identity or axiornatisation. I have made this point already. What I want to focus on now is the generality of this process,sincethis can show us wherepolitics might commence. For Marx, this axiomatisation,but also this politics, has a generality through 'work', for work is both the point of participation in manifold capitalist relations, and the site of exploitation. By our time, work is no longer as easily conceived as it was for Marx (evenin his time Marx's definition had problematicaspects). A plethora of lines of flight and axiomshavebeen addedto the capitalistsocius such that Deleuzeand Guattari (1988: 469) suggestthat "[o]urs is becomingthe age of minorities". Thus, for Deleuze and Guattari, politics and community do not so much begin from the site of our identity. from As I the axioms of minority as work, conventionalunderstandingof draw in intrigues, it begins in Chapter 4, social and compose minorities as argued themselvesthrough the problematisationsof these intrigues, intensifying their cramped is Guattari for Deleuze there However, also a certain universality to this and spaces. its figure' (ATP: 472). 'universal hence the to the they proletariat, as minor align process; I have tried to take this suggestionof an alignmentseriously, and have hencesuggested that a dominant featureof social life is still the 'proletarian' experienceof 'work'. For DeleuzeandGuattari,every aspectof life is production (cf. for exampleAff: 4), and thus I arguedthat insofar as production is always axiomatised,it is simultaneouslya form of be in 'Putting to thought to as work needs even new ways, and work', work, or a in understood termsof the maintenanceof the productivity of the social whole rather than if (as in Chapter 7). Thus, 'realm the minor seen the of production' conventional simply lines flight flows figures figures, 'class' the of the capitalist of of or the proletariatare and flows in 'putting figures these the to to challenge work' of they seek which are socius, For described be 'work'. this still usefully as can which axiomatic processes;processes reasonI have combinedan understandingof minor and proletarian politics as untimely figures, with a politics of the 'refusal of work/er', following a sense of Marx's by "the deten-nined life tries to the movement which abolish as conditions of communism wagelabour." (Dauv6,in Dauv6and Martin 1997: 17) Aspects of this politics were seen in the minor composition of the IWW and 6,7, 8). Because (Chapters and of my emphasison the situatednature of autonomia minor proletarianpolitics, neither the IWW nor autonomiawere presentedas 'correct models' or 'exemplarypractice' that could be repeatedtoday. The importanceof these is functioned for for they the that times way as machines producing minor our groups in but from freedom from and against sites of closure, autonomy, and sitesof effects,not both They able to engagewith the mundane- with questionsof the wage and were work. in innovative identity, forms the and of work and worker work-time, and with - with new this they developed new forms of culture, political technique, and composition, 218

distributing all of this across a milieu that 'warded off' coherent identity. It was not, 0 then, in identity, but in political practice that life was affirmed.

Benjamin expressed this process, and the peculiar character of radical politics, when he wrote: something of Zý The class struggle, Z:) which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless,it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselvesin this struggle as courage, humour, cunning, and fortitude. (Benjamin 1992: 246)

These movements were, of course, also inadequate. Though it may seem counter-intuitive (given Deleuze and Guattari's rightful popularity as philosophers of affirmation), one of the most important aspectsof Deleuze and Guattari's politics is that it is a difficult, forever unfinished, and even 'impossible' process. They are not the kind of thinkers to tell us that everything is all right, that if we become-minor in little autonomous zones we can leave this world behind (we are always 'cramped' and 'choked' in impossibilities). Minor politics is at once both a process of little intrigue, cramped space, and intimate deterritorialisation, and a kind of 'impossible' project of calling forth a 'new earth' and a 'people to come'. Though this might sound like the kind of slightly has thought teleological that thought utopianism or postmodern sought to embarrassing it in Guattari's has a particularly functional effect. Rather Deleuze politics and overcome, than a deferral of political practice or the affirmation of a teleology, it is a mechanism for the continual problematisation of any notion that political practice achieves a full By 'arrive'. to the that situating politics between the extremes of come people plenitude, like (much 'new 'missing' the IWW, which minor politics earth', people and a a 'all') develop in between 'naught' to the and seeks an affective condition space composed (through inclusive disjunction, little intrigues, engagement with the flows of the social) that is able to live with, even be nourished by its incompleteness, its difficulties, and its 'impossibilities'. Minor politics develops a condition, that is, where Beckett's (1989: 101) formula - "Fail again. Fail better." - is manifest as an aff-innation of life; for it is only if we are able to affirm experimentation, uncertainty, minor intrigue, even failure, that we will be able to shift our affective investments away from our self-secure molar

identities. To come back to Virno's problem of 'incoherence', in this thesis I have tried to Guattari's Deleuze how and minor politics, in relation to Marx's proletariatand the show indicate By both level the out. a way situating politics of work, might at of refusal tý capitalist axioms and flows, and minority intrigues, techniques, and inventions, this politics offers a set of political methodologiesand techniquesfor generatingor guiding political practice. Beyond this, however,minor politics is still a site of the undetermined,

219

for it is an intensiveandexperimentalengagementwith life and its virtualities, amongsta tP peoplewho are missing.

220

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