Foundation and Empire: A critique of Hardt and Negri Capital & Class, Summer 2005 by Thompson, Paul
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3780/is_200507/ai_n14685515/print
"An alternative picture of the new working class from the French view, with its emphasis on technicians and selfmanagement, Italian Marxism drew attention to the struggles of the deskilled or semi-skilled who refused the conditions of work and developed a new, expansive workplace politics. In doing so, it helped to create the conditions for the development of labour process theory (LPT), which has been a crucial resource for critical debates on the workplace and political economy."
"Suddenly, production is presented as biopolitical-an 'uninterrupted circuit of life, production and polities' (p. 64). Companies, states and supra-national agencies, which previously at least had concrete half-lives, are dissolved into the ('paradoxical and contradictory') collective biopolitical body. This shadowy formulation recalls, at one level, the concept of 'social factory' that was developed by Italian autonomists in the icyos to justify their shift of attention from the workplace where, despite some successes, the Communist party still dominated, to broader community struggles."
EMPIRE AS A WORK OF META THEORY
"Horizontally networked enterprises are coordinated through new information technologies that facilitate communication, and break the link between size and efficiency9. One can observe a similar line in the recent work of Gorz (1999: 53), who writes 'post-Fordism, the networked interaction of fractal factories and the "immaterial" economy are based on a wealth production which is increasingly disconnected from work and an accumulation of profit increasingly disconnected from any production'."
"The lineage is, however, much longer. Wright (2002: 163) shows that by the mid-1970s, Negri and operaismo had ceased to say much about the mass worker, reaching out instead to a new class subject within which productive intelligence, drawing on intellectual and technical labour, had become determinate. This was not another equivalent of the mass worker, but a means of embracing the whole prole-tariat or anyone in struggle, including students ('pre-workers'), under the concepts of 'socialised worker' and the expanded reproduction of capital."
"For all the Marxist language of immaterial labour and self-valorisation, this is fundamentally the same idea as that promoted by management theorists and, as discussed earlier, of the 'free worker' for whom knowledge enables the reversal of power. Or, as another leading organisation theorist put it, 'power in the knowledge economy resides more with workers than owners or managers. Serving the needs of these workers is a leadership imperative' (Bennis, 1999: 37)."
"Hardt and Negri are clear that any analysis is deficient that does not give 'a coherent indication of what type of political subjectivities might contest and overthrow the forces of Empire' (p. 205)."
"Instead, Hardt and Negri continue to believe that the refusal of work in general, and of factory work in particular, still lies at the heart of the attack on what is now called, with a nod to Foucault, the disciplinary regimes of capitalist labour (p. 261)."
"In 1981, Negri wrote that the new political generation was more revolutionary because it was without memory (see Wright, 2002: 174-5). Furnished with a partly new language and context, Empire is Negri's (and Hardt's) offering to yet another new generation. This paper has been a contribution to the recovery of memory about a flawed and failed doctrine."
"An alternative picture of the new working class from the French view, with its emphasis on technicians and selfmanagement, Italian Marxism drew attention to the struggles of the deskilled or semi-skilled who refused the conditions of work and developed a new, expansive workplace politics. In doing so, it helped to create the conditions for the development of labour process theory (LPT), which has been a crucial resource for critical debates on the workplace and political economy."
"Suddenly, production is presented as biopolitical-an 'uninterrupted circuit of life, production and polities' (p. 64). Companies, states and supra-national agencies, which previously at least had concrete half-lives, are dissolved into the ('paradoxical and contradictory') collective biopolitical body. This shadowy formulation recalls, at one level, the concept of 'social factory' that was developed by Italian autonomists in the icyos to justify their shift of attention from the workplace where, despite some successes, the Communist party still dominated, to broader community struggles."
EMPIRE AS A WORK OF META THEORY
"Horizontally networked enterprises are coordinated through new information technologies that facilitate communication, and break the link between size and efficiency9. One can observe a similar line in the recent work of Gorz (1999: 53), who writes 'post-Fordism, the networked interaction of fractal factories and the "immaterial" economy are based on a wealth production which is increasingly disconnected from work and an accumulation of profit increasingly disconnected from any production'."
"The lineage is, however, much longer. Wright (2002: 163) shows that by the mid-1970s, Negri and operaismo had ceased to say much about the mass worker, reaching out instead to a new class subject within which productive intelligence, drawing on intellectual and technical labour, had become determinate. This was not another equivalent of the mass worker, but a means of embracing the whole prole-tariat or anyone in struggle, including students ('pre-workers'), under the concepts of 'socialised worker' and the expanded reproduction of capital."
"For all the Marxist language of immaterial labour and self-valorisation, this is fundamentally the same idea as that promoted by management theorists and, as discussed earlier, of the 'free worker' for whom knowledge enables the reversal of power. Or, as another leading organisation theorist put it, 'power in the knowledge economy resides more with workers than owners or managers. Serving the needs of these workers is a leadership imperative' (Bennis, 1999: 37)."
"Hardt and Negri are clear that any analysis is deficient that does not give 'a coherent indication of what type of political subjectivities might contest and overthrow the forces of Empire' (p. 205)."
"Instead, Hardt and Negri continue to believe that the refusal of work in general, and of factory work in particular, still lies at the heart of the attack on what is now called, with a nod to Foucault, the disciplinary regimes of capitalist labour (p. 261)."
"In 1981, Negri wrote that the new political generation was more revolutionary because it was without memory (see Wright, 2002: 174-5). Furnished with a partly new language and context, Empire is Negri's (and Hardt's) offering to yet another new generation. This paper has been a contribution to the recovery of memory about a flawed and failed doctrine."
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