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Negri quotes

1971 We must make sure “that the proletariat, as a revolutionary subject, is conceived in its relation to the determinacy of the capital relation.” (RR 129)

“[T]he forms of production are increasingly moving from a state of contradiction with the social forces of production, into a state of antagonism.” (RR129)

“[I]n the enterprise form of capitalist domination, violence has lost (…) all relation with any project that could be deemed progressive. The enterprise form of violence (…) is an irrational form within which exchange value is imposed on social relations in which the conditions of the exchange relation no longer exist.” Given that this is the case, “[t]he old perspectives (…) based on representing and constituting working class action within the cycle (…) must now be replaced by action aimed at drawing out every emergning instance of the proletariat against the key moments of capitalist repression which now take the form of the enterprise.” (RR 131)

1980 Negri distinguishes between labor power and working class (find reference) – the former is class-in-itself, the former is class-for-itself, we might think of this as subjected labor and labor as (self-constructed) subject.

“In the old ‘workerist’ framework of analysis, centrality was accorded to the labour process – as distinct from the productive process as a whole.” (RR194)

“Now analysis has to encompass the whole metropolis and class recomposition has to be (…) understood in terms of the total social working day, which – at the level of real, social subsumption of labour – is the same as life-time itself.” (RR197)

1982 “If it is true that the terms of exploitation are now relocated on the social terrain, and if, within this social terrain, it is no longer possible to reduce quantity and quality of exploitation, absolute surplus value and relative surplus value, to the time-measure of a ‘normal’ working day – then the proletarian subject is reborn in antagonistic terms, around a radical alternative, an alternative of life-time as against the time-measure of capital.” (RR219)

“[W]hen the whole of life become production, capitalist time measures only that it directly commands. And socialized labour-power tends to unloose itself from command, insofar as it proposes a life-alternative – and thus projects a different time for its own existence, both in the present and in the future.” (RR220)

“As real subsumption advances, so the social worker is brought into existence, as irresolvable antagonism.” (RR221)

“[L]abour-power, at this level of subsumption of social labour by capital (…) now presents itself as a social subject” (RR223)

“[T]he process of real subsumption brings about such a massive intensification of the composition of the working class, and such an extension of its potentiality, as to eliminate any dualism between being and consciousness, any isolation of single aspects within it. (…) Production and reproduction are, now in parallel and on equal terms, the spheres of action proper to and adequate to the reality of labour-power.” (RR226)

“[A]ll has become productive” (TFR 44)

In real subsumption, “production is only given as social productive circulation, productivity is systemic (…) There is only abstraction of surplus-value on the basis of the functional co-operation of all of social labour, there is only organization of exploitation as command that expresses itsel fover the whole of social labour.” (TFR 65)

“The time of class struggle in itself contains the future and it continually attempts to shape it. The contemporaneity of the future and of the present at the level of real subsumption does not produce utopian confusion: it is the collective which constructs, the future that is brought back to the dimension of the collective, and it is subordinated to the enormous productive power that class composition (…) possesses.” (TFR 97)

[What date?] “I have continually sought to bring two traditional thematics, the question of the validity of the law of value, and the development of the transition between socialism and communism, into contact with the new phase of political history: the subsumption of the entire society under capital in the process of capitalist accumulation, and therefore the end of the centrality of the factory working class as the site of the emergence of revolutionary subjectivity.” (20 Theses, 149)

“The periodization of capitalist development shows that we are at the beginning of a new epoch.” (20 Theses, 154) In this new epoch, “[i]mmediately productive labor loses its centrality in the process of production, while the “social worker” assumes a hegemonic position.” (20 theses 156)

“[P]roductive labor is no longer ‘that which directly produces capital,’ but that which reproduces society (…) production is ‘subsumed within circulation’, and vice versa, to a continually greater extent.” (20 Theses 157)

In our era, “new technical conditions of proletarian independence are determined within the material passages of development, and therefore, for the first time, there is the possibility of a rupture in the restructuration [of capitalist social relations] which is not recuperable and which is independent of the maturation of class consciousness.” (20 Theses 165)

“Today the revolutionary point of contradiction is the antagonism between social cooperation and productive command.” (20 Theses 165)

“What differentiates the present from the previous phases of development of the capitalist mode of production is the fact that productive social cooperation, previously produced by capital, is now presupposed in all of its policies, or better it is a condition of its existence. (…) The social worker is the producer (…) prior to any commodity, of social cooperation itself.” (20 Theses 165)