hydrarchist writes: "This article was originally published in the journal Historical Materialism."

"Going in the Wrong Direction,
or,

Mephistopheles: Not Saint Francis of Assisi"

by John Holloway

Toni Negri’s work is enormously attractive, not only for its own merits,
but because it responds to a desperate need. We are all looking for a way
forward. The old state-centred model of revolution has failed
catastrophically, reformism becomes more and more corrupt and barren, yet
revolutionary change is more urgent than ever. Negri refuses to give up
thinking and rethinking revolution: that is the great attraction of his
work.

The problem is that Negri leads us in the wrong theoretical direction.

Negri, and now Michael Hardt who joins him as co-author of Empire, seek to
develop Marxist and revolutionary theory as a positive theory, rather than a
negative theory. This has important consequences, theoretically, politically
and in terms of the analysis developed in Empire.

I

Behind the analysis of Empire lies a theoretical movement, a rigidifying of
the autonomist impulse. It is to this that we must turn before looking at
the analysis itself.

Autonomist Marxism came on the scene with a furious energy, which can be
seen in the oft-quoted passage by Tronti: ‘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, reverse the
polarity and start again from the beginning: and the beginning is the class
struggle of the working class’ (1964/1979, p. 1).

The force of autonomist theory is that it starts explicitly from the
subject, from the working class. It proclaims itself to be a theory of
struggle, rather than a theory of the framework of struggle, as mainstream
Marxism had become. It sees working-class struggle as the driving force of
social development, the key to the changing forms of capitalism. It suggests
a way of thinking about society in terms of our potential rather than in
terms of the oppressive power of capital, and thus immediately opens up the
perspective of a revolutionary transformation of society through the
unfolding of our creative energy. Where orthodox theory closes, the
autonomist impulse opens.

There has, however, always been a tension at the heart of the autonomist
project. On the one hand, struggle is negative, struggle-against, a
constantly shifting, never-defined against-ness, always moving
against-and-beyond the definitions of capitalist oppression. A theory
founded in struggle must be a negative theory, a theory of negation. This
does not mean that it is not important to understand the changing forms of
class struggle, but a theory of struggle implies that these must be
understood as just that, changing forms, forms which do not stand still,
which cannot be pinned down and defined, forms of struggle which constantly
negate themselves, forms which do not contain, but overflow. Like struggle
itself, a theory of struggle is negative, open, anti-definitional.

In the actual development of autonomist theory , on the other hand, there
has always been a tendency to seek a positive understanding of struggle.
Depite the ‘Copernican inversion of Marxism’ (Moulier 1989, p. 19) which
autonomism represented, the theoretical assumptions of orthodox authors
(Della Volpe and Lenin, for example) continued to influence autonomist
theorists. The result has been a tension in autonomism between the restless
negativity of struggle and the defining thrust of positive theory. Thus, for
example, the method of the workers’ inquiry has been confronted with the
problem of its relation to sociology, and the autonomist-inspired
investigation of the real conditions of class struggle has often evaporated
into industrial sociology and technology studies. Thus too, much practical
and theoretical energy has been dedicated to the question of the definition
of the working class and of the current class composition, when the working
class, conceived as struggle, is undefinable. Again, there has at times been
a tendency to rigidify the concept of class composition, to generalise from
the experiences of a particular group of workers and project it as a model
for judging all class struggle. There has been a tendency too to neglect the
mutual interpenetration of capital and anti-capital (conceptualised by Marx
in terms of fetishism, a category to which autonomist theory has paid little
attention), and consequently to conceive of the subject of struggle as
external to capital, to think of the working class as a pure subject, and of
the communist militant as the purest of the pure. All this does not mean
that the autonomist approach should be abandoned. On the contrary, the
restlessness of struggle constantly sharpens the starting point of the
autonomist impulse, but it does so against a positivisation of theory that
repeatedly threatens to blunt it. In other words, autonomist approaches have
often failed to develop the negativity of the initial impulse to its radical
imlications (cf. Bonefeld 1994, p. 44).

It is perhaps above all Toni Negri who has been concerned to establish
autonomism on a positive, ontologically secure basis, especially in recent
years. In The Savage Anomaly (Negri 1991) Negri turns to the study of
Spinoza in order to provide a positive foundation for a theory of struggle.
In doing so, he follows, surprisingly perhaps, in the footsteps of
Althusser, who turned to Spinoza to give support to his theorisation of
capitalism as a process without a subject (cf. Holland 1998). Negri does not
conceptualise capitalism as a process without a subject, but the subject
that emerges is a peculiarly abstract, dead subject. In this work, he
insists, through his discussion of Spinoza, that social development, or,
more precisely, ‘the genealogy of social forms’, ‘is not a dialectical
process: it implies negativity only in the sense that negativity is
understood as the enemy, as an object to destroy, as a space to occupy, not
as a motor of the process’ (1991, p. 162). The motor of the process is
positive: ‘the continuous pressure of being toward liberation’ (1991, p.
162). His concern is to develop the concept of revolutionary power (the
potentia of the multitude) as a positive, non-dialectical, ontological
concept. Autonomy is implicitly understood as the existing, positive drive
of the potentia of the multitude, pushing potestas (the power of the rulers)
onto ever new terrains.

To treat the subject as positive is attractive but it is inevitably a
fiction. In a world that dehumanises us, the only way in which we can exist
as humans is negatively, by struggling against our dehumanisation. To
understand the subject as positively autonomous (rather than as potentially
autonomous) is rather like a prisoner in a cell imagining that she is
already free: an attractive and stimulating idea, but a fiction, a fiction
that easily leads on to other fictions, to the construction of a whole
fictional world.

II

The problems inherent in the positivisation of the theory of struggle become
clear in Hardt and Negri’s Empire.

In Empire, the authors analyse the current terrain onto which working-class
struggle (the potentia of the multitude) has pushed capital. Empire is seen
as the new paradigm of rule: ‘In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes
no territorial centre of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or
barriers. It is a decentred and deterritorialising apparatus of rule that
progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open,
expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies,
and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct
national colours of the imperialist map of the word have merged and blended
in the imperial global rainbow.’ (2000, pp. xii-xiii) There is a change in
sovereignty, ‘a general passage from the paradigm of modern sovereignty
toward the paradigm of imperial sovereignty’. In the latter, it is no longer
possible to locate sovereignty territorially in the nation state, or indeed
in any particular place. Even the United States, although it plays a
particularly important part in the network of power, is not the locus of
power in the same way that the imperialist powers of the earlier age were.
One implication of this would seem to be that it no longer makes sense to
think of revolutionary transformation in terms of the taking of state power.

In this new paradigm, there is no longer any place of rule, and consequently
no longer any inside or any outside, no longer any possible external
standpoint. Empire is an all-embracing system of rule, the latest
re-formulation of what Negri had earlier characterised as the ‘social
factory’ or ‘integrated world capitalism (IWC)’. This does not mean that
all possibility of resistance or change has been obliterated. On the
contrary, the autonomist impulse is still central to the argument. Hardt and
Negri insist that Empire is to be understood as a reaction to the struggles
of the multitude. ‘The history of capitalist forms is always necessarily a
reactive history.’ (2000, p. 268) Thus, ‘the multitude is the real
productive force of our social world, whereas Empire is a mere apparatus of
capture that lives only off the vitality of the multitude – as Marx would
say, a vampire regime of accumulated dead labour that survives only by
sucking off the blood of the living.’ (2000, p. 62)

The autonomist impulse is still alive, yet it is almost smothered by the
weight of positive theory. It is in the concept of ‘paradigm’ that the
positive concept of class struggle and of class composition becomes
focussed. The argument of Hardt and Negri focuses on the shift from one
paradigm of rule to another. This shift is characterised primarily as a
shift from imperialism to Empire, but it is also variously described as a
move from modernity to post-modernity, from discipline to control, from
Fordism to post-Fordism, from an industrial to an informational economy.
What interests us here is not the name, but the assumption that capitalism
can be understood in terms of the replacement of one paradigm of rule by
another, one system of order by another.

Hardt and Negri are not alone, of course, in this paradigmatic approach.
Another approach which relies heavily on the notion of a shift from one
paradigm to another and which has had great influence in recent years is the
regulationist school, which analyses capitalism in terms of a shift from a
Fordist to a post-Fordist mode of regulation. The paradigmatic approach has
obvious attractions as a method of trying to understand the current changes
in the world. It permits one to bring together many apparently disparate
phenomena into a coherent whole. It allows one to paint an extremely rich
and satisfying picture in which all the millions of pieces of the jigsaw
click into place. This is immensely stimulating, for it suggests a whole
series of correspondences that were not obvious before. It is also very
attractive to academics because it suggests a whole world of research
projects which can be completed with no jagged edges.

The problem with a paradigmatic approach, however, is that it separates
existence from constitution. It rests on a notion of duration. Society is
painted as being relatively stable during a certain period, and in this
period we can recognise certain solid parameters. A paradigm creates a space
in which we can say the world is so. A paradigm identifies. It may be argued
that identification is necessary for thought: that is so, but, unless the
identification bears its own negation, so that it is no more than the
recognition of a fragile and evanescent moment torn by its own
contradictions (us), then a world of order is created, a stability that
reifies. A paradigm paints an orderly world of correspondence. The negative
impulse which is the starting point becomes converted into a positive
science. The working class refusal (Tronti 1965/1979) is slotted into a
world of order. Although Hardt and Negri insist that order must be
understood as the response to disorder, it is in fact difficult for them to
avoid the predominance of order that a paradigmatic approach implies. As the
title of the book implies, their tale is told through an account of order,
not through disorder. Although they insist that refusal is the driving force
of domination, refusal is in fact relegated to a subordinate place: it is
only in the closing pages of the book (2000, p. 393) that the authors say,
‘Now that we have dealt extensively with Empire, we should focus directly on
the multitude and its potential political power.’

The paradigmatic approach takes classification to extremes. There is an
eagerness to capture the new, to classify it, label it, make it fit into the
paradigmatic order. There is almost indecent haste to declare the old order
dead and proclaim the new. ‘The King is dead! Long live the King!’ As soon
as one system of rule is in crisis, the new system of rule is proclaimed.
‘At this point the disciplinary system has become completely obsolete and
must be left behind. Capital must accomplish a negative mirroring and an
inversion of the new quality of labour power: it must adjust itself so as to
be able to command once again.’ (2000, p. 276) The adjustment to the new
command is assumed as reality, not just seen as a project: this is the
substance of the new paradigm, this is Empire.

The desire to make everything fit, to see the new paradigm as established,
leads easily to an exaggeration that often seems quite unreal. Thus,
‘autonomous movement is what defines the place proper to the multitude.
Increasingly less will passports or legal documents be able to regulate our
movement across borders.’ (2000, p. 397) Or: ‘there are no time-clocks to
punch on the terrain of biopolitical production; the proletariat produces in
all its generality everywhere all day long.’ (2000, p. 403)

The paradigmatic approach shades into functionalism. In a world of
correspondences, everything is functional, everything contributes to the
maintenance of a coherent whole. Thus, for Negri and Hardt (as earlier for
Negri) , crisis is not so much a moment of rupture as a force of
regeneration in capitalism, a ‘creative destruction’. Thus, ‘as it is for
modernity as a whole, crisis is for capital a normal condition that
indicates not its end but its tendency and mode of operation.’ (2000, p.
222) Or: ‘the crisis of modern sovereignty was not temporary or exceptional
(as one would refer to the stock market crash of 1929 as a crisis), but
rather the norm of modernity. In a similar way, corruption is not an
aberration of imperial sovereignty but its very essence and modus operandi.’
(2000, p. 202) Although the project of the book is very clearly one of
rupture, the method adopted seems to absorb the possibility of rupture, to
integrate movement into a photograph. A paradigmatic approach inevitably
involves a freezing of time.

The functionalism extends to the understanding of sovereignty and the state.
The authors interpret Marx’s view of the state as a functionalist one.
Referring to Marx and Engels’ characterisation of the state as the executive
that manages the interests of capitalists, they comment: ‘by this they mean
that although the action of the state will at times contradict the immediate
interests of individual capitalists, it will always be in the long-term
interest of the collective capitalist, that is, the collective subject of
social capital as a whole.’(2000, p. 304) Thus, the system of modern states
succeeded in ‘guaranteeing the interests of total social capital against
crises’ (p. 306), while in the postmodern age of Empire, ‘government and
politics come to be completely integrated into the system of transnational
command’. (p. 307) The political and the economic come to form a closed
system, an ‘integrated world capitalism’.

It is entirely consistent with this paradigmatic approach that Hardt and
Negri are very explicitly anti-dialectical and anti-humanist in their
approach. Hegel is repeatedly dismissed as the philosopher of order rather
than seeing him as being also the philosopher who made subversive movement
the centre of his thought. Dialectics is understood as the logic of
synthesis rather than as the movement of negation. It is quite consistent
with this that the authors insist on the continuity between animals, humans
and machines. They see themselves as carrying on ‘the antihumanism that was
such an important project for Foucault and Althusser in the 1960s’ and quote
with approval Haraway’s insistence upon ‘breaking down the barriers we pose
among the human, the animal and the machine’. (2000, p. 91) Postmodernism
gives us the opportunity to ‘recognise our posthuman bodies and minds, [to]
see ourselves for the simians and cyborgs we are’ (2000, p. 92). In the new
paradigm ‘interactive and cybernetic machines become a new prosthesis
integrated into our bodies and minds and a lens through which to redefine
our bodies and minds themselves. The anthropology of cyberspace is really a
recognition of the new human condition.’ (2000, p. 291) The problem with
this approach, surely, is that neither ants nor machines revolt, neither
ants nor machines refuse to labour. A theory that is grounded in revolt has
little option but to recognise the distinctive character of humanity.

Surprisingly, perhaps, given their general project, Hardt and Negri have no
concept of capital as class struggle. It is not that they do not attach
importance to class struggle; it is rather that they do not understand
capital as class struggle. There is a tendency to treat capital as an
economic category, reproducing in this (as in other points) the assumptions
of the Marxist orthodoxy which they so rightly attack. Thus, in apparent
contradiction of their insistence on understanding the shift of paradigm as
a response to class struggle, they assert that ‘in addition to looking at
the development of capital itself, we must also understand the genealogy
from the perspective of class struggle’ (2000, p. 234 – my emphasis) – thus
implying that the development of capital and class struggle are two separate
processes. The actual analysis of ‘the development of capital itself’ is in
terms of under-consumptionism rather than the antagonism between capital and
labour. The barriers to capitalist development all ‘flow from a single
barrier defined by the unequal relationship between the worker as producer
and the worker as consumer’. (2000, p. 222) In order to explain the movement
from imperialism to Empire, they follow Rosa Luxemburg’s
under-consumptionist theory that capitalism can survive only through the
colonisation of non-capitalist spheres. ‘At this point we can recognise the
fundamental contradiction of capitalist expansion: capital’s reliance on its
outside, on the non-capitalist environment, which satisfies the need to
realise surplus value, conflicts with the internalisation of the
non-capitalist environment, which satisfies the need to capitalise that
realised surplus value.’ (2000, p. 227 – my emphasis) According to the
authors, capital finds a solution to the exhaustion of the non-capitalist
world by turning from the formal subsumption of the non-capitalist sphere to
the real subsumption of the capitalist world. It is after this explanation
of the passage from imperialism to Empire that it is pointed out that ‘we
must also understand the genealogy from the perspective of class struggle’
(2000, p. 234 – my emphasis).

The consequence of understanding class struggle and capital as being
separate, and of seeing the ‘fundamental contradiction of capitalist
expansion’ as being something other than capital’s dependence upon the
subordination of labour, is that there is no understanding of the way in
which the insubordination of labour constitutes the weakness of capital
(especially in capitalist crisis). In this book, as in all of Negri’s
analyses, there is a clash of Titans: a powerful, monolithic capital
(‘Empire’) confronts a powerful, monolithic ‘multitude’. The power of each
side does not appear to penetrate the other. The relation between the two
sides of the capitalist antagonism is treated as an external one, as is
indicated, indeed, by the authors’ choice of the word ‘multitude’ to
describe the opposition to capital, a term which has the grave disadvantage
of losing all trace of the relation of dependence of capital upon labour.

It would be quite wrong to take Negri as standing for all autonomist authors
(or indeed to try to classify autonomism as a homogeneous ‘school’). What
Negri draws out and takes to its extreme is the positive understanding of
class struggle that is present in many autonomist writings, and, by doing
so, he tames the initial vigour of the autonomist impulse, converts it into
a matter for academic discussion.

Politically, the emphasis on the power of the working class movement has an
obvious appeal. Nevertheless, the understanding of labour and capital in
terms of an external relationship leads to a paradoxical (and romantic)
magnification of the power of both. The failure to explore the internal
nature of the relation between labour and capital leads the analysis to
underestimate the degree to which labour exists within capitalist forms. The
existence of labour within capitalist forms implies both the subordination
of labour to capital and the internal fragility of capital. To overlook the
internal nature of the relation between labour and capital thus means both
to underestimate the containment of labour within capital (and hence
overestimate the power of labour against capital) and to underestimate the
power of labour as internal contradiction within capital (and hence
overestimate the power of capital against labour). If the inter-penetration
of power and anti-power is ignored, then we are left with two pure subjects
on either side. On the side of capital stands Empire, the perfect subject,
and on the side of the working class stands: the militant. Hardt and Negri’s
discussion of Empire ends with a paean to the militant: ‘the militant is the
one who best expresses the life of the multitude: the agent of biopolitical
production and resistance against empire.’ (2000, p. 411)

The example of communist militancy which they propose in the closing
paragraph of the book (2000, p. 413) is the perfect embodiment of the Pure
Subject: Saint Francis of Assisi! ‘There is an ancient legend that might
serve to illuminate the future life of communist militancy: that of Saint
Francis of Assisi. Consider his work. To denounce the poverty of the
multitude he adopted that common condition and discovered there the
ontological power of a new society. The communist militant does the same,
identifying in the common condition of the multitude its enormous wealth.’

III

A joke, a provocation? Perhaps, and yet it is more than that. The idea of
Saint Francis of Assisi as the example of communist militancy is the
repugnant culmination of positive thought. For over a hundred years
communism has suffered the nightmare of the Pure Subject: the Party, the
working class hero, the unsullied militant. To resurrect the image of the
Pure Subject, just when it seemed at last to have died the indecent death
that it merited, is not just a joke, it is grotesque. We hate capitalism and
fight against it, but that does not make us into the embodiment of good
fighting against evil. On the contrary, we hate it not just because we adopt
the common condition of the multitude, but because it tears us apart,
because it penetrates us, because it turns us against ourselves, because it
maims us. Communism is not the struggle of the Pure Subject, but the
struggle of the maimed and schizophrenic. Unless we start from there, there
is no hope.

Our struggle is negative, our thought can only be negative. Our struggle is
a refusal, a NO, a NO to capitalism and therefore a NO to our capitalist
selves. We are not a Pure Subject, we are not God, the Party or Saint
Francis of Assisi. There is no way, then, that we can stand above the
distortions of capitalism and say how the world is. The world is not, there
is no being, there is only doing, a doing torn asunder in such a manner that
the done takes on a life of its own and appears to be, as Marx points out in
chapter one of Capital. To try to establish an ontological basis for Marxist
theory is to take one’s stand on fetishised social relations, to destroy
Marxism (cf, Martínez 2001). A theory of struggle is necessarily
anti-ontological, a theory turned against being, a struggle to recover
theoretically the doing which being oppresses. Critique, in other words: the
negation of being to recover the social doing which is our only true
potentia.

No, not Francis of Assisi (with or without his sainthood): it is
Mephistopheles who must be our guiding darkness – Mephistopheles, the spirit
who always negates. It is negation that drives us forward, negation that is
the substance of hope, the stuff of dreams, the heart of struggle (cf. Bloch
1964). Negri and Hardt's book is often stimulating and exciting, even
sensible, yet much of what they propose is smothered in their own
generalising positivity. The result is claustrophobic. Enough of Polybius,
Machiavelli, Spinoza and Harrington. Bring back Joachim of Fiore, Abiezer
Coppe and William Blake. Let us rant!

‘Now the sneaking serpent walks

In mild humility,

And the just man rages in the wilds

Where lions roam'

(William Blake, 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell')

References:

Adorno, Theodor W. (1990)
Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge)

Bloch, Ernst (1964)
Tübinger Einleitung in die Philosophie (2 Bde) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp)

Bonefeld, Werner (1991)
‘The Reformulation of State Theory’, in Bonefeld and Holloway (1991), pp.
35-68

Bonefeld, Werner (1994)
‘Human Practice and Perversion: Between Autonomy and Structure’, Common
Sense no. 15, pp. 43-52

Bonefeld, Werner and Holloway John (eds) (1991)
Post-Fordism and Social Form (London: Macmillan)

Guattari, Félix and Negri, Antonio (1990)
Communists Like Us (New York: Semiotext(e))

Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio
Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press)

Hirsch, Joachim (1978)
‘The State Apparatus and Social Reproduction: Elements of a Theory of the
Bourgeois State’, in Holloway and Picciotto (1978), pp. 57-107

Holland, Eugene (1998)
"Spinoza and Marx", Cultural Logic, Volume 2, Number 1, Fall

Holloway John (1992)
"Crisis, Fetishism, Class Decomposition", in W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn and K.
Psychopedis (eds), Essays on Open Marxism, Pluto Press, London, pp. 145-169

Holloway (2002)
Change the World without taking Power. The Meaning of Revolution
Today. (London: Pluto)

Holloway, John and Picciotto, Sol (eds) (1978a)
The State and Capital: A Marxist Debate (London: Edward Arnold)

Holloway, John and Picciotto, Sol (1978b)
‘Introduction: Towards a Materialist Theory of the State’, in Holloway and
Picciotto (1978a), pp. 1-31

Martínez, José Manuel (2001)
'Marxismo y Ontología', Bajo el Volcán no. 3

Moulier, Yann (1989)
‘Introduction’, in Negri (1989), pp. 1-44

Negri, Antonio (1989)
The Politics of Subversion (Cambridge: Polity)

Negri, Antonio (1991)
The Savage Anomaly (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press)

Red Notes, (1979)
Working Class Autonomy and the Crisis: Italian Marxist Texts of the Theory
and Practice of a Class Movement: 1964–79 (London: Red Notes)

Tronti, Mario (1964/1979)
‘Lenin in England’, in Red Notes (1979), pp. 1-6

Tronti, Mario (1965/1979b)
‘The Strategy of the Refusal’, in Red Notes (1979), pp. 7-21
Wright, Steve (2002)

Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist
Marxism (London: Pluto).