The following is extracted from A Grammar of the Multitude by Paolo Virno, published last year by Semiotext(e).The text is in two parts, the second of which you can find here.

"Ten Theses on the Multitude

and Post-Fordist Capitalism"

Paolo Virno

I have attempted to describe the nature of contemporary production, socalled post-Fordism, on the basis of categories drawn from political philosophy, ethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language. I
have done so not as a professional exercise, but because I am truly
convinced that, in order for it to be described clearly, the mode of
contemporary production demands this variety of analyses, this
breadth
of views. One cannot understand post-Fordism without having recourse
to a cluster of ethical-linguistic concepts. As is obvious, moreover,
this is where the matter of fact lies in the progressive
identification between poiesis and language, production and
communication.

In order to name with a unifying term the forms
of life and the linguistic games which characterize our era, I have
used the notion of "multitude." This notion, the polar opposite of
that of "people," is defined by a complex of breaks, landslides, and
innovations which I have tried to point out. Let me cite some of them
here, in no particular order: the life of the stranger (bios xenikos)
being experienced as an ordinary condition; the prevalence of "common
places" in discourse over "special" places; the publicness of the
intellect. as much an apotropaic device as a pillar of social
production; activity without end product (that is, virtuosity); the
centrality of the principle of individuation; the relation with the
possible in as much as it is possible (opportunism); the hypertrophic
development of the non-referential aspects of language (idle talk). In
the multitude there is a full historical, phenomenological,
empirical display of the ontological condition of the human animal:
biological artlessness, the indefinite or potential character of its
existence, lack of a determined envi-ronment, the linguistic intellect
as "compensation" for the shortage of specialized instincts. It is as
if the root has risen to the surface, finally revealing itself to the
naked eye. That which has always been true, is only now unveiled. The
multitude is this: a fundamental biological configuration which
becomes a historically determined way of being, ontology revealing
itself phenomenologically. One could even say that the postFordist
multitude manifests anthropogenesis as such on a historical-empirical
level; that is to say, the genesis itself of the human animal, its
distinguishing characteristics. The multitude epitomizes this genesis,
it sums it up. Upon reflection, these rather abstract considerations
are only another way of saying that the primary productive resource of
contemporary capitalism lies in the linguistic-relational abilities of
humankind, in the complex of communicative and cognitive faculties
(dynameis, powers) which distinguish humans.

Our seminar is now
over. That which could be said, has been (either well or poorly)
said. Now, at the end of our circumnavigation of the continent of the
"multitude," we need only to insist upon a few qualifying aspects of our analysis. Towards that end, I propose ten
statements
on the multitude and post-Fordist capitalism. I call these statements
theses only for the sake of convenience. They do not claim to be
exhaustive, nor do they seek to oppose other possible analyses or
definitions of post-Fordism. They have only the apodiptic appearance,
and (I hope) the precision of authentic theses. Some of these
statements could possibly have converged. making of themselves one
"thesis." Furthermore, the sequence is arbitrary: that which figures
as "thesis x" would lose nothing if it figured as "thesis y" (and vice
versa). Finally, it must be understood that often I affirm or deny
with more precision, or less nuance, than what might be correct or
(prudent) to do. In some cases I shall say more than I

think.

6.2. Thesis 1

Post-Fordism (and with it the
multitude) appeared,
in Italy, with the social unrest which is generally remembered
as the "movement of 1977"

Post-Fordism, in Italy arose from the
tumults of labor-power which was educated. uncertain, mobile; one
which hated the work ethic and opposed, at tunes head on. the
tradition and the culture of the historical left. marking a
clear discontinuity with respect to assembly-line workers, with their
practices and customs, with their ways of life. Post-Fordism arose
from conflicts centered upon social figures which, despite their
apparent marginal status, were about to become the authentic fulcrum
of the new cycle of capitalistic development. Besides, it had already
happened before that a radical revolution in the manner of production
was accompanied by premature political strife among those strata of
labor-power. which, a little later, would make up the supporting axis
of the production of surplus value. It is enough to recall the
dangerousness attributed in the eighteenth century to the British
vagabonds, already thrown out of the fields and on the verge of being
let in to the first factories. Or think of the struggles of the
unskilled American workers from 1910 to 1920, struggles which preceded
the Henry Ford and Frederick Taylor turning point, a turning point
based precisely on the systematic removal of skill from labor. Every
drastic metamorphosis of productive organization is destined from the
start, to conjure up the pangs of the "original accumulation,"
forcing, all over again, the transformation of a relationship among

things (new technologies, a different allocation of investments, etc.)
into a social relationship. It is exactly in this delicate interval
that, at times, the subjective aspect, which will later become an
irrefutable course of fact, reveals itself.

The masterpiece of
Italian capitalism consists of having transformed into a productive
resource precisely those modes of behavior which, at first, made their
appearance under the semblance of radical conflict. The conversion of
the collective propensities of the 1977 movement (exit from the
factories, indifference to steady employment, familiarity with
learning and communication networks) into a renewed concept of
professionalism (opportunism, idle talk, virtuosity, etc.): this is
the most precious result of the Italian counter-revolution
("counter-revolution" meaning not the simple restoration of a previous
state of affairs, but, literally, a revolution to the contrary, that
is, a drastic innovation of the economy and institutions in order to
re-launch productivity and political domination).

The 1977
movement had the misfortune of being treated as if it were a movement
of marginal people and parasites. However, marginal and parasitical
was the point of view adopted by those making these accusations. In
fact, they identified themselves entirely with the Fordist paradigm,
believing that only a secure job in factories making lasting consumer
goods was "central" and "productive. Thus they identified with a
production cycle already in decline. Looking at it closely, the 1977
movement anticipated certain traits of the post-Fordist multitude. As
angry and coarse as it was, however. the virtuosity of this movement
was not servile.

6.3. Thesis 2

Post-Fordism is the empirical
realization of the "Fragment on Machines" by Marx.

Marx writes:
"The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based,
appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one [(the automated
system of machines) Virno addition, trans.] created by large-scale
industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be
the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to
be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the
measure] of use value. (Italics and brackets from Nicolaus's English
translation, trans.)" Grundrisse 705: In the "Fragment on Machines"
from the Grundrisse, from which I drew that citation, Marx upholds a
thesis that is hardly Marxist: abstract knowledge-scientific
knowledge, first and foremost, but not only that-moves towards
becoming nothing less than the principal productive force, relegating
parceled and repetitive labor to a residual position. We know that
Marx turns to a fairly suggestive image to indicate the complex of
knowledge which makes up the epicenter of social production and at the
same time prearranges its vital confines: general intellect. The
tendential pre-eminence of knowledge makes of labor time a "miserable
foundation." The so-called "law of value" (according to which the
value of a product is determined by the amount of labor time that went
into it), which Marx considers the keystone of modern social
relations, is, however, shattered and refuted by capitalist
development itself.

It is at this point that Marx proposes a
hypothesis on surpassing the rate of dominant production which is very
different from the more famous hypotheses presen'ted in his other
works. In the "Fragment," the crisis of capitalism is no longer
attributed to the disproportions inherent in a means of production
truly based on labor time supplied by individuals (it is no longer
attributed, therefore, to the imbalances connected to the full force
of the law, for example, to the fall of the rate of profit). Instead,
there comes to the foreground the splitting contradiction between a
productive process which directly and exclusively calls upon science,
and a unit of measurement of wealth which still coincides with the
quantity of labor incorporated in the products. The progressive
widening of this differential means, according to Marx, that
"production based on exchange value breaks down" Grundrisse: 705) and
leads thus to communism.

What is most obvious in the post-Ford
era is the full factual realization of the tendency described by Marx
without, however, any emancipating consequences. The disproportion
between the role accomplished by knowledge
--Page 101--
and
the decreasing
importance of labor time has given rise to new and stable forms of
power, rather than to a hotbed of crisis. The radical metamorphosis of
the very concept of production belongs, as always, in the sphere of
working under a boss. More than alluding to the overcoming of what
already exists, the "Fragment" is a toolbox for the sociologist. It
describes an empirical reality which lies in front of all our eyes:
the empirical reality of the post-Fordist structure.

6.4. Thesis 3

The crisis of the society of
labor is reflected in the
multitude itself.

The crisis of the society of labor certainly
does not coincide with a linear shrinking of labor time. Instead, the
latter exhibits an unheard of pervasiveness in today's world. The
positions of Gorz and Rifkin on the "end of work" (Gorz, Reclaiming
Work;Rifkin, The End of
Work)
are mistaken; they spread
misunderstandings of all kinds; and even worse, they prevent us from
focusing on the very question they raise.

The crisis of the
society of labor consists to the fact (brought up thesis 2) that
social wealth is produced from science, from the general intellect,
rather than from the work delivered by individuals. The work demanded
seems reducible to a virtually negligible portion of a life. Science,
information, knowledge in general, cooperation, these present
themselves as the key support system of production -- these, rather than
labor time. Nevertheless, this labor time continues to be valid as a
parameter of social development and of social wealth. Thus, the
overflow of labor from society establishes a contradictory process, a
theater of violent oppositions and disturbing paradoxes. Labor time is
the unit of measurement in use, but no longer the true one unit of
measurement. To ignore one or the other of the two sides -- that is, to
emphasize either the validity alone, or the lack of veracity
alone -- does not take us far: in the first case, one does not become
aware of the crisis of the society of labor, in the second case one
ends up guaranteeing conciliatory representations in the manner of
Gorz or Rifkin.

The surpassing of the society of labor occurs
in the forms prescribed by the social system based on wage
labor. Overtime, which is a potential source of wealth, manifests
itself as poverty: wages compensation, structural unemployment
(brought on by investments. not by the lack thereof), unlimited
flexibility in the use of labor-power, proliferation of
hierarchies. re-establishment of archaic disciplinary, measures to
control individuals no longer subject to the rules of the factory
system. This is the magnetic storm which allows. on the
phenomenological
plane, for the "surpassing" which is paradoxical to the
point of taking place upon the very foundation of that which was to be
surpassed.

Let me repeat the key-phrase: the surpassing of the
society of labor comes about in compliance with the rules of wage
labor. This phrase can be applied to the post-Fordist situation in the
same manner as Marx's observation regarding the first stock
companies. Marx writes: "the joint-stock system is an abolition
of capitalist private industry on the basis of the capitalist system
itself" (Capital, Volume 3:
570).
That is to say: the stock companies
assert the possibility of escaping the regime of private property, but
this assertion always takes place within the realm of private property
and, indeed, increases disproportionately the power of the latter. The
difficulty, with reference to post-Fordism as well as to the stock
companies, lies in considering simultaneously the two contradictory
points of view, that is to say, subsistence and ending, validity and
surmountability.

The crisis of the society of labor (if
correctly understood) implies that all of post-Fordist labor-power can
be described using the categories with which Marx analyzed the
"industrial reserve army," that is, unemployment. Marx believed
that the "industrial reserve army" was divisible into three types or
figures: fluid (today we would speak of turn-over, early retirement,
etc.), latent (where at any moment a technological innovation could
intervene, reducing employment), stagnant (in current terms: working
under the table, temporary work, atypical work). According to Marx, it
is the mass of the unemployed which is fluid, latent or stagnant,
certainly not the employed labor class; they are a marginal sector of
labor-power, not its main sector. Yet, the crisis of the society of
labor (with the complex characteristics which I tried to outline
earlier) causes these three determining categories to apply, in
effect, to all labor-power. Fluid, or latent, or stagnant, applies to
the employed labor class as such. Each allocation of wage labor allows
the nonnecessity of that labor and the excessive social cost inherent
in that labor to leak out. But this non-necessity, as always,
manifests itself as a perpetuation of wage labor in temporary or
"flexible" forms,

6.5. Thesis 4

For the post-Fordist
multitude every qualitative difference between labor time and
non-labor time falls short.

Social time, in today's world,
seems to have come unhinged because there is no longer anything which
distinguishes labor from the rest of human
activities. Therefore. since work ceases to constitute a special and
seperate praxis, with distinctive criteria and
procedures in effect at its center, completely different from those criteria and
procedures which regulate non-labor time, there is not a clean,
well-defined threshold separating labor time from non-labor time. In
Fordism, according to Gramsci, the intellect remains outside of
production; only when the work has been finished does the Fordist
worker read the newspaper, go to the local party headquarters, think,
have conversations. In post-Fordism, however, since the "life of the
mind" is included fully within the time-space of production, en
essential homogeneity prevails.

Labor and non-labor develop an
identical form of productivity, based on the exercise of generic human
faculties: language, memory, sociability, ethical and aesthetic
inclinations, the capacity for abstraction and learning. From the
point of view of "what" is done and "how" it is done, there is no
substantial difference between employment and unemployment. It could
be said that: unemployment is non-remunerated labor and labor, in
turn, is remunerated unemployment. Working endlessly can be justified
with good reasons, and working less and less frequently can be equally
justified. These paradoxical formulas, contradicting each other, when
put together demonstrate how social time has come unhinged.

The
old distinction between "labor" and "non-labor" ends up in the
distinction between remunerated life and non-remunerated life. The
bor-der between these two lives is arbitrary, changeable, subject to
political decision making.

The productive cooperation in which
labor-power participates is always larger and richer than the one put
into play by the labor process. It includes also the world of
non-labor, the experiences and knowledge matured out side of the
factory and the office. Labor-power increases the value of capital
only because it never loses its qualities of non-labor (that is, its
inherent connection to a productive cooperation richer than the one
implicit in the labor process in the strictest sense of the term).

Since social cooperation precedes end exceeds the work
process,
post-Fordist labor is always, also, hidden labor. This expression
should not be taken here to mean labor which is un-contracted, "under
the table." Hidden labor is, in the first place, non-remunerated
life, that is to say the pert of human activity which, alike in every
respect to the activity of labor, is not, however, calculated as
productive force.

The crucial point here is to recognize that
in the realm of labor, experiences which mature outside of labor bold
predominant weight; et the same time, we must be aware that this more
general sphere of experience, once included in the productive process,
is subordinate to the rules of the mode
--Page 104--
of
capitalistic
production. Here also there is a double risk: either to deny the
breadth of what is included in the mode of production, or, in the name
of this breadth, to deny the existence of a specific mode of
production.

6.6. Thesis 5

In post-Fordism there exists a
permanent
disproportion between "labor time" and the more ample "production
time."

Marx distinguishes between "labor time" and "production
time" in chapters XII and XIII of the second book of the
Capital. Think of the cycle of sowing and harvesting. The farm laborer
works for a month (labor time); then a long interval follows for the
growing of the grain (production time, but no longer labor time); and
at last, the period of harvesting arrives (once again, labor time). In
agriculture and other sectors, production is more extensive than labor
activity, in the proper sense of the term; the latter makes up hardly
a fraction of the overall cycle. The pairing of the terms "labor
time"/"production time" is an extraordinarily pertinent conceptual
tool for understanding post-Fordist reality, that is to say, the
modern expression of the social working day. Beyond the examples from
agriculture adopted by Marx, the disproportion between "production"
and "labor" fits fairly well the situation described in "Fragment on
Machines"; in other words, it fits a situation in which labor time
presents itself as "miserable residue."

The disproportion takes
on two different forms. In the first place, it is revealed within
every single working day of every single worker. The worker oversees
and coordinates (labor time) the automatic system of machines
(whose function defines production time); the worker's activity
often ends up being a sort of maintenance. It could be said that in
the post-Fordist environment production time is interrupted only at
intervals by labor time. While sowing is a necessary condition for the
subsequent phase of the grain's growth, the modern activity of
overseeing and coordinating is placed, from beginning to end,
alongside the automated process.

There is a second, and more
radical, way of conceiving this disproportion. In post-Fordism
"production time" includes non-labor time, duringhich social
cooperation takes its root (see thesis 4). Hence I define
"production time" as that indissoluble unity of remunerated life and
non-remunerated life, labor and non-labor, emerged social cooperation
and Submerged social cooperation. "Labor time" is only one component,
and not necessarily the most prominent one, of "production time"
understood in this way. This evidence drives us to
reformulate, in part or entirely, the theory of
surplus-value. According to Marx, surplus-value springs from
surplus-labor, that is, from the difference between necessary labor
(which compensates the capitalist for the expense sustained in
acquiring the laborpower) and the entirety of the working day. So
then, one would have to say that in the post-Fordist era,
surplus-value is determined above all by the gap between production
time which is not calculated as labor time and labor time in the true
sense of the term. What matters is not only the disproportion,
inherent in labor time, between necessary labor and surplus-labor, but
also, and perhaps even more, the disproportion between production time
(which includes non-labor, its own distinctive productivity) and labor
time.

6.7. Thesis 6

In one way, post-Fordism is
characterized by the
co-existence of the most diverse productive models and, in another
way, by essentially homogeneous socialization which takes place
outside of the workplace.

Differently from the Fordist organization of
labor, today's organization of labor is always
spotty. Technological innovation is not universal: more than
determining an unequivocal and leading productive model, it keeps a
myriad of different models alive, including the resuscitation of some
outdated and anachronistic models. Post-Fordism re-edits the entire
history of labor, from islands of mass labor to enclaves of
professional workers, from re-inflated independent labor to reinstated
forms of personal power. The production models which have followed one
another during this long period re-present themselves synchronically,
as if according to the standards of a World's Fair. The background and
the hypothesis behind this proliferation of differences, this
shattering of organizing forms, is established, however, by the
general intellect, by computerized data communication technology, by
productive cooperation which includes within itself the time of
non-labor. Paradoxically, just when knowledge and language become the
principal productive force, there is an unrestrained multiplication of
the models of labor organization, not to mention their eclectic
co-existence.

We may well ask what the software engineer has in
common with the Fiat worker, or with the temporary worker. We must
have the courage to answer: precious little. with regard to job
description, to professional skills, to the nature of the labor
process. But we can also answer: everything, with regard to the
make-up and contents of the socialization of single individuals
outside of the work place. That is to say, these workers have in
common emotional tonalities, interests, mentality,
expectations. Except that, while in the advanced sectors this
homogeneous ethos (opportunism, idle talk, etc.) is included in
production and delineates professional profiles, this ethos
strengthens, instead, the "world of life" for those who fall into the
traditional sectors, as well as for the border-workers who swing
between work and unemployment. To put it succinctly: the seam is to be
found between the opportunism at work and the universal opportunism
demanded by the urban experience. The essentially unitary character of
socialization detached from the labor process stands in counterpoint
to the fragmentation of productive models, to their World's Fair style
co-existence.

The text is in two parts, the second of which you can find here.