"The Festival of General Intellect"

Paolo Virno

In the '70s, May Day was a rancid and miserable celebration. Rancid,
because workers' struggles and politics, like life in general, were
tightly dilated. In those days — totally devoid of happiness
— there was only the union, the weak point of the Keynesian state.

The unions found their voice, sometimes rabid and solitary, in their role as legal representatives of the
commodity 'labor power': the sole true strategist in modern
industrial societies. But the workers in struggle, who wanted to abolish
precisely that commodity (inflating its price until it
exploded), did not march in the name of a new model of
development. As adults, it scarcely seems reasonable to lose more time behind
these Wisemen.With the old and new models of capitalist development, matters are
all settled in the office: declaring a strike is as if it were a chess game,
'salto de la scocca'. Internal meetings in the leadership office, the wage
as independent variable. Also miserably, that celebration, without shame, was called a 'labor holiday — as if wage
labor wasn't a disgrace, as if one could feel proud (the union spoke
precisely of 'pride') of producing surplus value on the assembly line.
The hatred and contempt for the factory regime evoked the necessity of
a holiday against labor.

After Seattle and Genoa, May Day flipped, with a giddy
leap backwards, into what it had been at the end of the 19th century: the
privileged moment in which a new social and productive species
emerges. The old appointment is reinvented, today, by mass
intellectuality, that is to say, by the multitude of men and women
that, using thought and language as tool and primary material,
constitute the authentic pillar of the wealth of nations. Immigrants,
the precarious of all types, the frontiers between work and non-work, the part-timers at
McDonalds and the piecework chat-line operators, the researchers and
informatic workers: all these are, with full right, the 'general
intellect' that Marx spoke of. That general intellect (knowledge,
initiative, subjectivity, creative power) that is, in combination, the
principal productive force of postfordist capitalism and the material
base for finishing with commodity society and the state as 'monopoly
of political decision'. At the end of the 19th century, the
typographers, tanners, textile workers, etc… the definitive members of
the innumerable professional associations, discovered that they could
unite: being, all of them, an abstract abundance of psychophysical
energy, labor in general.

May Day sanctioned this discovery and, for
more than a generation, was entirely one with the demand for the eight
hour day (less work — that is the foundation of the modern ethic).

Today, a multitude of 'social individuals' even more proud of their
irrepeatable singularity, more related among themselves in a dense
weave of cooperative interaction, recognizes itself as the general
intellect of society. Today's May Day, the great holiday of the
general intellect (thought that desires and desire that thinks), has
as its axis the reasonable pretension of a 'citizen's income' and in
the refusal of all copyright over the products of that common resource
that is the human mind.

But there's more. The globalized and postfordist May Day makes the
19th century May Day return as well for a more thorny motive. In
both cases, the crucial question sounds like: how to organize a
plurality (of different professions then, of 'social individuals' now)
that, for the moment, seems fragmented, constitutively exposed to
blackmail, unorganizable in the end?

It can not be denied that mass
intellectuality manages only with difficulty to turn its productive
potentiality into political potentiality. It still has not managed to
impact the rate of profit, nor even manage to throw business
leaders into a panic. For these reasons it is necessary to summon the
"general conditions" ["estados generales"] themselves, to coordinate
and deliberate.

The first question of the order of the day, under the spring sun of
2004, is that of the forms of struggle. It is stupid to believe that
determining the modality of conflict (strike, sabotage, etc) could be
a technical problem, the simple corollary of the political program. To
the contrary: the discussion over forms of struggle is more intricate:
a veritable bank for testing [banco de prueba] for all political
theory (that does not reduce itself to an illuminist conspiracy of
democratic jurists). Initiative, shared consciousness, the capacity to
relate and to interact: these "professional traits" of the postfordist
multitude should become fearsome weapons of pressure. The revived
platforms, synthesizing "what do we want", depend entirely on "how can
we act", to modify the relations of forces inside the social
organization of time and space. Everything depends, then, on the
unprejudiced invention of new "pickets" and new "internal marches", that
will be rise to the height of the reigning flexibility, of the
reigning model of accumulation based on general intellect. I want to
say more: the departure from the organizational models of the 90s,
unfortunately preached by those who have elevated non-violence to a
fetish, finds here, in the question of forms of struggle, its
effective moment of truth. To be clear: the overcoming of the party
form is completely one with the discovery, on the part of immigrants,
of the precarious 'Tim', of the collaborators in determinate time, in
the most incisive way to blackmail the blackmailers themselves.

The great difficulty in discovering adequate forms of struggle is also
a great opportunity. The difficulty as much as the opportunity derives
from those people and things that are included, today, in the
productive process. Postfordist capitalism mobilizes, and benefits
from, the principal faculties of our species: thought, language,
memory, affects, aesthetic tastes, etc. Now, if this is true, the
conflict over the place of work can not do other than concern an
entire form of life. To overcome a revived conflict, it is necessary
to travel through the metropolitan network of relations that make each
one of us a social individual, one of the "many" from which the
multitude is composed. It from here that an autonomous cooperative
force condenses: it is here that we exchange information, gain
consciousness, build tighter friendships. Only from this network, that
as a commodity is called the "recipient of the mass intellectuality",
can conflicts in the productive space grow. And to give voice to the
recipient of mass intellectuality means creating new democratic
organisms.

Here then is the great difficulty, but that, however, is also the
great opportunity. The demand for more wages implies, here and now,
the outline of unknown forms of self-government, the experimental
construction of political institutions of the multitude, the great
premiere of a public sphere, finally separate from the myths and rites
of state sovereignty.

[English translation in progress, edited from a rough draft by Nate Holdren. A Spanish version is online here.

Originally published in the MayDay004 special issue of the
italian magazine DeriveApprodi (Rome 2004). The issue had the title "ora o
may day" (ora o mai means: now or never), the text by Paolo was titled "la
festa del general intellect".]