Public Sphere, Labour and Multitude

BY ANTONIO NEGRI

I am perplexed when faced with the issue of the common. Every time I set out to follow this theme it flees in all directions because it is so pregnant with modern and ancient ideological suggestions. In fact, any attempt to distinguish the common from the private, the state or the public in the French sense is for me almost impossible. This is why I don’t claim to provide a conclusive definition and have reservations when it comes to definitions of strategy.

The common escapes any Marxian positive definition of what is produced. For me, and I am and remain a Marxist, the common is abstract labour: i.e. that set of products and energies of labour that gets appropriated by capital and thus becomes common. Basically, it is the result of the law of value that capitalism that creates the common. In Marx there isn’t a conception of the common as pre-capitalist phenomenon (yes, there are the commons, but they are not productive). If we want to reduce and consider the common from a modern conception we must accept this definition of the common as abstract, accumulated and consolidated labour. However, abstract, accumulated and consolidated labour is never merely an economic quantity; it is always a set of relations that are relations of exploitation: hierarchical relations, schemes of division of labour, organisation and social distribution of the functions of command, reproductive hypotheses, consumption capacities etc. etc.Evidently, we have to start conceiving of this as the commonality of exploitation. The question on the common -and here I start getting confused you see because it is always the same word that gets used- is how to take the common away from exploitation. So long as we speak of the common we always speak of the common of exploitation: we are all commonly exploited. The unexploited common has been proposed a thousand times by all utopias, for instance with respect to global goods such as air, water etc. But no! Air and water are not there anymore, there are air and water that are increasingly exploited, absorbed, colonised, made to produce and turned into profit! Only in this way they become common. The great capitalist expansion is that which sets out to get forests, to own air…this is globalisation: what makes common that rainforest that for me would have never been common.

Investment of Life

How do we liberate the common from exploitation? First of all, we have to grant that capital has, through abstract labour, put us in this happy -so to speak, obviously- situation where we are able to speak about the common. There was no common before the history of capitalism imposed it. Then, we must go and analyse how this common works, and this common largely corresponds to public space and the history of public space, because there is a modern production of public space that is a disciplinary production, i.e. a production of public space organised by the capacity of exerting power over individuals, of commonly putting individuals to work, of imposing a common measure on their labour, a measure so common that all capital (Marx ‘s and capitalism in general) becomes based on an abstract temporal measure that constitutes the common [comunanza] of labour. In post-modern production characterised by the investment of life by capital we see a mode of an extension of control not only simply on individuals but also on populations. When we talk of multitude, we do so in the face of this common colonisation of life.

The Problem of the Common

Why do we start talking of the multitude and pose the problem of the common, at this point, I think, still confusingly? For instance, there was an experiment in the tradition of classical operaismo, of attempting a subjectification of abstract labour. Practically, one of the fundamental elements of this dynamics of the common - of the common exploitation of the common - had come to be the working class: the working class was this attempt to subjectify a series of common structures within capitalist abstraction and capitalist relations of exploitation. We used to call it the capitalist relation, the general relation that sees on the one hand the subjectivity of the capitalist, of the enterpreneur and of capital as such; whilst on the other hand the working class, that of which one did not recognise the concrete specificity, but only looked at its capacity of posing itself within a wage relation, i.e. a quantitative relation, a capacity to divide this productive common. The wage was the ability to take a portion of this common product. Evidently, all this maintained that conception of the common and the working class had as its fundamental goal that of ‘managing’ that common. Socialism was represented as the management of this common according to the needs of the working class, not very differently from how capital did it, which proposed that this common was used for the reproduction of the system.

I can’t understand the public/private distinction from within this scheme, this situation, because I don’t think that public or private can identify alternatives at this point to that capitalist common that is the only one we have.The concept of the multitude can only emerge when the key foundation of this process (i.e. the exploitation of labour and its maximal abstraction) becomes something else: when labour starts being regarded, by the subjects involved in this continuous exchange of exploitation, as something that can no longer enter the relation of exploitation. When labour starts being regarded as something that can no longer be directly exploited. What is this labour that is no longer directly exploited? Unexploited labour is creative labour, immaterial, concrete labour that is expressed as such. Of course exploitation is still there, but exploitation is of the ensemble of this creation, it is exploitation that has broken the common and no longer recognises the common as a substance that is divided, produced by abstract labour, and that is divided between capitalist and worker in structures of command and exploitation. Today capital can no longer exploit the worker; it can only exploit cooperation amongst workers, amongst labourers. Today capital has no longer that internal function for which it became the soul of common labour, which produced that abstraction within which progress was made. Today capital is parasitical because it is no longer inside; it is outside of the creative capacity of the multitude.

Cooperation of Singularities.

Thus it goes war to perfect its control. War is a fundamental and destructive element that represents its parasitical nature. It is the element that wants to build the capitalist common, that wants to rebuild the body of capital, the people, the global people, the democratic people Bush tells us about, in this attempt to re-interiorise the common; whereas labour as activity constitutes the multitude, a multitude of singularities that is creative. As you can see, the common brings terrible confusion, as I cannot really define it. On the other hand, if I started talking about the common as basis, I would get somewhere. Undoubtedly it is almost impossible to define creative labour today without starting from the common activity of labour, i.e. the common that is construed by the cooperation of creative singularities. It is almost impossible to do it and it is evident that today all institutional economists keep saying: it is external economies, economies of transactions, all this accumulation of intelligence, cultural exchange that constitutes the basis of production of value. But this basis of the production of value is not there unless it goes through the capacity of singularities to make it live each time as provision of living labour. Cooperation itself is part of that creativity of singular labour. It is no longer something that is imposed from outside. We are no longer in that phase of capitalist accumulation that also functions in the construction of the workers’ labour capacity to be put into production. Singularities of and in the multitude have assumed cooperation as quality of their labour. Cooperation -and the common- as activity are anterior to capitalist accumulation. Hence we have a common that is a foundation of the economy, only in so far as it is seen as this element of cohesion of the production of singularity within the multitude. Examples of this could be networks and all the consequences of a definition of the common as the phenomenology of the web.