Antonio Negri

Back To The Future

A Portable Document


WORK

There is too much work because everyone works, everyone contributes to the 
construction of social wealth, which arises from communication, circulation, and 
the capacity to coordinate the efforts of each person. As Christian Marazzi 
says, there is a biopolitical community of work, the primary characteristic of 
which is “disinflation”—in other words, the reduction of all costs that 
cooperation itself and the social conditions of cooperation demand. This passage 
within capitalism has been a passage from modernity to postmodernity, from 
Fordism to post-Fordism. It has been a political passage in which labor has been 
celebrated as the fundamental matrix of the production of wealth. But labor has 
been stripped of its political power. The political power of labor consisted in 
the fact of being gathered together in the factory, organized through powerful 
trade union and political structures. The destruction of these structures has 
created a mass of people that from the outside seems formless—proletarians who 
work on the social terrain, ants that produce wealth through collaboration and 
continuous cooperation. Really, if we look at things from below, from the world 
of ants where our lives unfold, we can recognize the incredible productive 
capacity that these new workers have already acquired. What an incredible 
paradox we are faced with. Labor is still considered as employment; that is, it 
is still considered as variable capital, as labor “employed” by capital, 
employed by capital through structures that link it immediately to fixed 
capital. Today this connection—which is an old Marxian connection, but before 
being Marxian it was a connection established by classical political 
economy—today this connection has been broken. Today the worker no longer needs 
the instruments of labor, that is, the fixed capital that capital furnishes. 
Fixed capital is something that is at this point in the brains of those who 
work; at this point it is the tool that everyone carries with him- or herself. 
This is the absolutely essential new element of productive life today. It is a 
completely essential phenomenon because capital itself, through its development 
and internal upheavals, through the revolution it has set in motion with 
neoliberalism, with the destruction of the welfare state, “devours” this labor 
power. But how does capital devour it? In a situation that is structurally 
ambiguous, contradictory, and antagonistic. Labor is not employment.

The unemployed work, and informal or under-the-table labor produces more wealth 
than employed labor does. The flexibility and mobility of the labor force are 
elements that were not imposed either by capital or by the dissolution of the 
welfarist or New Deal–style agreements that dominated politics for almost half a 
century. Today we find ourselves faced with a situation in which, precisely, 
labor is “free.”

Certainly, on one hand, capital has won; it has anticipated the possible 
political organizations and the political “power” of this labor. And yet, if we 
look for a moment behind this fact without being too optimistic, we also have to 
say that the labor power that we have recognized, the working class, has 
struggled to refuse factory discipline. Once again we find ourselves faced with 
evaluating a political passage, which is historically as important as the 
passage from the Ancien Régime to the French Revolution. We can truly say that 
in this second half of the twentieth century we have experienced a passage in 
which labor has been emancipated. It has been emancipated through its capacity 
to become immaterial and intellectual, and it has been emancipated from factory 
discipline. And this presents the possibility of a global, fundamental, and 
radical revolution of contemporary capitalist society. The capitalist has become 
a parasite, but not a parasite in classical Marxist terms—a finance 
capitalist—rather, a parasite insofar as the capitalist is no longer able to 
intervene in the structure of the working process.


BRAIN-MACHINE

Clearly when we say that the working tool is one that workers have taken away 
from capital and carry with themselves in their lives, embodied in their brains, 
and when we say that the refusal of work has won over the disciplinary regime of 
the factory, this is a very substantial and vital claim. In other words, if 
labor and the tool of labor are embodied in the brain, then the tool of labor, 
the brain, becomes the thing that today has the highest productive capacity to 
create wealth. But at the same time humans are “whole;” the brain is part of the 
body. The tool is embodied not only in the brain but also in all the organs of 
sensation, in the entire set of “animal spirits” that animate the life of a 
person. Labor is thus constructed by tools that have been embodied. This 
embodiment, then, envelops life through the appropriation of the tool. Life is 
what is put to work, but putting life to work means putting to work what 
exactly? The elements of communication of life. A single life will never be 
productive. A single life becomes productive, and intensely productive, only to 
the extent that it communicates with other bodies and other embodied tools. But 
then, if this is true, language, the fundamental form of cooperation and 
production of productive ideas, becomes central in this process.

But language is like the brain, linked to the body, and the body does not 
express itself only in rational or pseudo-rational forms or images. It expresses 
itself also through powers, powers of life, those powers that we call affects. 
Affective life, therefore, becomes one of the expressions of the incarnation of 
the tool in the body. This means that labor, as it is expressed today, is 
something that is not simply productive of wealth: it is above all productive of 
languages that produce, interpret, and enjoy wealth, and that are equally 
rational and affective. All this has extremely important consequences from the 
standpoint of the differences among subjects. Because once we have stripped from 
the working class the privilege of being the only representative of productive 
labor, and we have attributed it to any subject that has this embodied tool and 
expresses it through linguistic forms, at this point we have also said that all 
those who produce vital powers are part of this process and essential to it. 
Think for example of the entire circuit of the reproduction of labor power, from 
maternity to education and free time—all of this is part of production. Here we 
have the extraordinary possibility of reanimating the pathways of communism, but 
not with a model of the rationalization and acceleration or the modernization 
and supermodernization of capitalism.

We have the opportunity to explain production and thus organize human life 
within this wealth of powers that constitute the tool: languages and affects.


THE BECOMING-WOMAN OF LABOR

With the concept of “the becoming-woman of labor” you can grasp one of the most 
central aspects of this revolution we are living through. Really, it is no 
longer possible to imagine the production of wealth and knowledge except through 
the production of subjectivity, and thus through the general reproduction of 
vital processes. Women have been central in this. And precisely because they 
have been at the center of the production of subjectivity, of vitality as such, 
they have been excluded from the old conceptions of production. Now, saying “the 
becoming-woman of labor” is saying too much and too little. It is saying too 
much because it means enveloping the entire significance of this transformation 
within the feminist tradition. It is saying too little because in effect what 
interests us is this general transgressive character of labor among men, women, 
and community. In fact, the processes of production of knowledge and wealth, of 
language and affects, reside in the general reproduction of society. If I 
reflect back self-critically on the classical distinction between production and 
reproduction and its consequences, that is, on the exclusion of women from the 
capacity to produce value, economic value, and I recognize that we ourselves 
were dealing with this mystification in the classical workerist tradition, then 
I have to say that today effectively the feminization of labor is an absolutely 
extraordinary affirmation; because precisely reproduction, precisely the 
processes of production and communication, because the affective investments, 
the investments of education and the material reproduction of brains, have all 
become more essential.

Certainly, it is not only women that are engaged with these processes; there is 
a masculinization of women and a feminization of men that moves forward 
ineluctably in this process. And this seems to me to be extremely important.


MULTITUDE

Some historical clarification is needed here. The term multitude is a 
pejorative, negative term that classical political science posed as a reference 
point. The multitude is the set of people who live in a society and who must be 
dominated. Multitude is the term Hobbes used to mean precisely this. In all of 
classical, modern, and postmodern political science the term multitude refers to 
the rabble, the mob, and so on. The statesman is the one who confronts the 
multitude that he has to dominate. All this came in the modern era before the 
formation of capitalism. It is clear that capitalism modified things, because it 
transformed the multitude into social classes. In other words, this division of 
the multitude into social classes fixed a series of criteria that were criteria 
of the distribution of wealth to which these classes were subordinated according 
to a very specific and adequate division of labor. Today, in the transformation 
from modernity to postmodernity, the problem of the multitude reappears.

To the extent that social classes as such are falling apart, the possibility of 
the self-organizational concentration of a social class also disappears. 
Therefore we find ourselves faced again with a set of individuals, but this 
multitude has become something profoundly different. It has become a multitude 
that, as we have seen, is an intellectual grouping. It is a multitude that can 
no longer be called a rabble or a mob. It is a rich multitude. This makes me 
think of Spinoza’s use of the term multitude because Spinoza theorized from the 
perspective of that specific anomaly that was the great Dutch republic, which 
Braudel called the center of the world, and which was a society that had 
mandatory education already in the seventeenth century. This was a society in 
which the structure of the community was extremely strong and a form of welfare 
existed already, an extremely widespread form of welfare. A society in which 
individuals were already rich individuals. And Spinoza thought that democracy is 
the greatest expression of the creative activity of this rich multitude. 
Therefore, I think of Spinoza’s use of the term, which had already reversed the 
negative sense of the multitude, like the wild beast Hegel called it, which has 
to be organized and dominated. And this rich multitude that Spinoza conceived 
instead is the real counterthought of modernity, in that line of thought that 
goes from Machiavelli to Marx, of which Spinoza forms more or less the center, 
the central apex, the transition point; ambiguous, anomalous, but strong.Well, 
this concept of the multitude is the concept that we invoked before. There 
exists today a multitude of citizens, but saying “citizens” is not sufficient 
because it simply defines in formal and juridical terms the individuals that are 
formally free. You have to say rather that today there exists a multitude of 
intellectual workers, but even that is not enough. You have to say: there exists 
a multitude of productive instruments that have been internalized and embodied 
in subjects that constitute society. But even this is insufficient. You have to 
add precisely the affective and reproductive reality, the need for enjoyment. 
Well, this is the multitude today. Therefore, a multitude that strips every 
possible transcendence from power, is a multitude that cannot be dominated 
except in a parasitic and thus brutal way.


THE BIOPOLITICAL ENTREPRENEUR

Here too, as usual, we are dealing with a sphere in which all the terms have 
been inverted—direct terms. We must really succeed in inventing a different 
language, even when we speak of democracy and administration. What is the 
democracy of biopolitics? Clearly it is no longer formal democracy, but an 
absolute democracy, as Spinoza says. How long can such a concept still be 
defined in terms of democracy? In any case, it cannot be defined in the terms of 
classical constitutional democracy. The same thing is true when we speak of the 
entrepreneur, when we speak of the political entrepreneur, or better the 
“biopolitical” entrepreneur. Or, rather, when we speak of the one who could be 
single or a set of collective forces, that succeeds at times in focusing 
productive capacities in a social context. What should we say at this point? 
Should this collective entrepreneur be given a prize? Frankly, I do think so, 
but all this has to be evaluated within the biopolitical process. I would say 
that here we really have the opposite of any capitalist theory of a parasitic 
entrepreneur. This is the ontological entrepreneur, the entrepreneur of 
fullness, who seeks essentially to construct a productive fabric. We have a 
whole series of examples that have each been at times very positive. There is no 
doubt that in certain community experiences, red (communist) collectivities, 
cooperatives basically, and in certain experiences of white (liberal) 
communities based on solidarity, we can see examples of collective 
entrepreneurship. As usual, today, we must first of all begin to speak not only 
of a political entrepreneur, but also of a biopolitical entrepreneur, and then 
begin to recognize also the inflationary or deflationary biopolitical 
entrepreneur. The biopolitical entrepreneur determines always greater needs 
while organizing the community; the entrepreneur represses and redisciplines the 
forces at play on the biopolitical terrain. There is no doubt that an 
entrepreneur in the Sentier neighborhood, to take an example from the studies we 
did here in France, is a biopolitical entrepreneur, one who often acts in a 
deflationary way. Benetton is the same thing. I really believe that the concept 
of entrepreneur, as a concept of the militant within a biopolitical structure, 
and thus as a militant that brings wealth and equality, is a concept that we 
have to begin to develop. If there is to be a fifth, a sixth, or a seventh 
Internationale, this will be its militant. This will be both an entrepreneur of 
subjectivity and an entrepreneur of equality, biopolitically.


GUARANTEED WAGE

There are reductive conceptions of the guaranteed wage, such as those we have 
seen in France—for example, the French RMI laws [Revenu Minimum d’Insertion: the 
“minimum income” required for integration into society], in the form they were 
passed, are a kind of wage structure of poverty, and thus a wage structure of 
exclusion, laws for the poor. In other words, there is a mass of poor people—but 
keep in mind that these are people who work, who cannot manage to get into the 
wage circuit in a constant way, who are given a little money so that they can 
care for their own reproduction, so that they don’t create a social scandal. 
Therefore there exist minimum levels of the guaranteed wage, subsistence wages, 
that correspond to the need of a society to avoid the scandal of death and 
plague, because exclusion can easily lead to plague. And poor laws were born of 
this danger in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There are 
thus forms of the guaranteed wage that amount to this. But the real question of 
the guaranteed wage is a different one. It is a question of understanding that 
the basis of productivity is not capitalist investment but the investment of the 
socialized human brain. Therefore, the maximum freedom, the break with the 
disciplinary relationship of the factory, the maximum freedom of labor is the 
absolute foundation of the production of wealth. The guaranteed wage means the 
distribution of a large part of income and giving the productive subjects the 
ability to spend it for their own productive reproduction. This becomes the 
fundamental element. The guaranteed wage is the condition of the reproduction of 
a society in which people, through their freedom, become productive. Clearly, at 
this point, the problems of production and political organization tend to 
overlap. Once we have pursued this discourse all the way, we have to recognize 
that political economy and political science, or the science of government, tend 
to coincide. Because we maintain that democratic forms, forms of a radical, 
absolute democracy—I don’t know if the term democracy can still be used—are the 
only forms that can define productivity. But a substantial, real democracy, in 
which the equality of guaranteed incomes becomes ever larger, and ever more 
fundamental. We can then realistically talk about incentives, but these are 
discourses that in today’s world are not very relevant.

Today the big problem is that of inverting the standpoint on which the critique 
of political economy itself is based. In other words, the standpoint of the 
necessity of capitalist investment.

We have said before and we have been saying for years that the fundamental 
problem is the reinvention of the productive instrument through life, the 
linguistic, affective life of subjects. Today, then, the guaranteed wage, as a 
condition of the reproduction of these subjects and their wealth, becomes an 
essential element. There is no longer any lever of power, there is no longer 
need for any transcendental, any investment.

This is a utopia, it is one of those utopias that become machines of the 
transformation of reality once they are set in motion. And one of the most 
beautiful things today is precisely the fact that this public space of freedom 
and production is beginning to be defined, but it carries with itself, really, 
the means to destroy the current organization of productive power and thus 
political power.