Factory, territory, metropolis, Empire

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Notes

Alberto Toscano

Department of Sociology

Goldsmiths College

University of London

New Cross

London SE14 6NW

UK

E‐mail: [email protected]

See, for instance, Kumar 146–48, where he cites Foucault's characterization of the twentieth century as “the epoch of space.”

On all these debates see the superb insights provided by Marramao's Il passaggio a occidente. Filosofia e globalizzazione .

This is the case, in some respects, in David Harvey's historical geographical materialism, and its theorization of uneven development and the “spatial fixes” that capitalism produces in order to tame its internal contradictions. See The Limits to Capital 431–45.

Though methodologically Harvey maintains a classical Marxist perspective somewhat at odds with the theses of workerism, he has undertaken some very interesting studies of the construction of spaces and places from below; see “Body Politics and the Struggle for a Living Wage” in Spaces of Hope 117–30. In “The Geography of Class Power” in Spaces of Capital 381, he tellingly speaks of “the non‐neutrality of spatial organization in the dynamics of class struggle.”

It almost goes without saying that such a political topology would require to be complemented by an account of the temporalizing character of political subjectivity, coupling the dislocation of the place of production and the “biopolitical” extension of labour time. As Bologna writes in “La percezione dello spazio e del tempo nel lavoro indipendente”: “The labour time of the waged worker is a regulated time, the time of the independent worker is a labour time without rules, and therefore without limits.”

By far the most thorough and insightful treatment of workerism is to be found in Wright (2002); a bold attempt to update some of the tradition's theses, accompanied by an impressive CD‐ROM archive of interviews with its political and theoretical protagonists, is available in the Italian volume by Borio et al.; aside from Negri's work, much of which has been or will soon be translated, the anglophone reader can refer to the excellent collection by Lotringer and Marazzi or, for a more philosophical take, to Virno and Hardt's volume.

• In his review of Wright's Storming Heaven , Sergio Bologna pointedly asks:

  • Is it possible to apply the category of continuity to this movement? Doesn't continuity belong to the traditional methods of writing history? Is it not proper to the histories of dynasties and parties? Those who, from the beginning, positioned themselves outside of a party perspective, who regarded the revolution as a lifeblood rather than an event, do they have a right to continuity, do they have to be subject to it? (105)

• As far as this essay is concerned, the only continuity we have availed ourselves of is the continuity of a problematic, with all the internal ruptures and displacements that entails.

See Anthropologie du nom 166–76, where he discusses the factory as a multiple and non‐dialectical place of politics.

The New Imperialism 137–82.

Tronti 39. Apropos of Lenin, Tronti proposes the “neoleninist principle”: “the chain will break not where capitalism is weakest, but where the working class is strongest.” In the introduction to Operai e capitale , Tronti makes this point very forcefully: “We will never tire of repeating that predicting the development of capital does not mean subjecting ourselves to its iron laws: it means forcing it into a certain path, waiting for it with weapons stronger than steel, and there assaulting it and breaking it” (21). More recently, see Negri's Guide 176.

On the concept of real subsumption see Negri, Fabbriche del soggetto 9–25, 75–80. The principal source is the unpublished Book VI of chapter I of Das Kapital, “Results of the Immediate Process of Production,” now in Capital, Volume I: 1023–25 and 1034–38. A later formulation of real subsumption as socialization, but in the absence of the centrality of the factory, is the following: “production and living in society have become elements in one whole, and the consequent social productivity (generalized and without the factory) is captured by the company” (“Terreni di mezzo” 198).

“Archaeology and Project: From the Mass Worker to the Social Worker” (1982) in Revolution Retrieved 209.

Storming Heaven 3.

Search for a Method 81.

Balestrini and Moroni 46.

The phenomenon of migration was, of course, twofold, both to the north of Italy and giant factory complexes such as Fiat in Turin or the Petrolchimico in Marghera, near Venice, and spreading out to the burgeoning industrial centres of Europe:

• This new figure of the proletarian is the one that, emigrating from southern Italy, has made capitalist development throughout Europe: from Fiat to Volkswagen to Renault, from the mines of Belgium to the Ruhr. Who has made the great worker struggles of the last few years. Who has smashed everything, who has thrown Italy into crisis. Who determines today the desperate response of capital, at the level of both the factory and the institutions. Who today forces the owners to use the extreme weapon, the weapon of crisis. […] This enemy is the proletarian from the South: with a thousand trades because he has none, “uprooted, unemployed […] this mobile, disposable, interchangeable labour‐power” […]. Who cannot find work in the South and therefore looks for it in Turin, in Milan, in Switzerland, in Germany, anywhere in Europe. (Nanni Balestrini, Vogliamo tutto, quoted in Balestrini and Moroni 281–82)

“La migrazione” in Balestrini and Moroni 48–49.

It is worth noting that in a recent article, “La moltitudine e la metropoli,” Negri says that these “often were not places, but urban spaces, sites of public opinion.”

Whilst I shall not be able to do justice to the sociological (or historiographic) contributions of workerism, these are dealt with admirably by Wright in Storming Heaven , chapters 2 and 8.

Tronti 49.

Ibid. 51.

“Il New Deal e il nuovo assetto delle politiche capitalistiche” (1971), Dal post‐fordismo alla globalizzazione 66. “Appeasement” is in English in the original.

Storming Heaven 40–41.

The question is whether the factory is to be defined as a specific place, the industrial estab‐lishment, or rather more generally as “the place (whether tangible or not) of the organisation of the process of production” (Futuro anteriore 19). See also Guido Borio's comments in Dibattito su “Futuro Anteriore.”

“The Tribe of Moles” (1977) in Lotringer and Marazzi 40.

It is in these experiences, as well as in a provocative reading of Marx's writings, that authors from the workerist tradition draw the resources for a theory of “exodus.” See Hardt and Negri's Empire , but especially Virno, “Dell'Esodo” in Esercizi di esodo 179–84.

As demonstrated by “Lotta sociale e organizzazione nella metropolis,” a text dated January 1971, from the Collettivo Politico Metropolitano – a group that was shortly thereafter to give birth to the Red Brigades – a particular take on the collapse of the factory as the site of a spatial dialectic between, on the one hand, accumulation and command, and, on the other, workers' needs and autonomy could also be at the source of a turn to clandestine violence and armed struggle, a direct confrontation with a supposedly monolithic state in the absence of any social dialectic.

Revolution Retrieved 210.

“Proletari, è guerra di classe,” Potere Operaio 47–48, quoted in Storming Heaven 138.

On the variety of these post‐factory practices of autonomy, see the collective, retrospective text “Do You Remember Revolution?” (1983) in Revolution Retrieved 237–38, and Eddi Cherki and Michel Wievorka, “Autoreduction Movements in Turin” in Lotringer and Marazzi, Semiotext(e) 72–79.

See especially “Archaeology and Project: The Mass Worker and the Social Worker” in Revolution Retrieved 203–28.

“Do You Remember Revolution?” 236–37. This move out of the factory was also an exquisitely tactical question: “the extension of the struggles to the entire social sphere at a territorial level and the building of forms of counter‐power were seen as necessary steps against the blackmail of economic crisis” (232).

By subjectivities I am not simply referring to a dimension of militancy and political organization, but also to the more widespread effects of these spatial dislocations of production on the “phenomenology” of work and the worker. We are dealing with

• a historical phase in which the organisation of space moulded by Taylorism, both in the factory and in offices, was being destructured. The perception of space of the waged worker was referred to clearly distinct “places,” two separate systems of culture and rules, the house and the factory, the flat and the office, the place of private life, of the family, of affections, on the one hand, and the place of work, on the other. […] Whilst the “alienation” of waged work divided the individual into two socio‐affective cycles, the cycle of private life and the cycle of working life, the (apparent) non‐alienation of independent work reduces existence to a single socio‐affective cycle, that of private life. […] Whatever return to the Taylorist organisation of space we might imagine, it will no longer be possible to delete the new mental disposition of autonomous work, born of the superimposition of the socio‐affective domestic sphere and the sphere of work. (See Sergio Bologna, “La percezione dello spazio e del tempo nel lavoro indipendente”)

“The Tribe of Moles” 56.

Quoted in Krasivyj, “For the Recomposition of Social Labour.”

“Do You Remember Revolution?” 237.

Revolution Retrieved 208, 214.

Bologna, “Prefazione” in Luciano Ferrari Bravo, Dal post‐fordismo alla globalizzazione 25.

An “industrial district” was defined at the beginning of the century by Alfred Marshall, writing about areas such as Manchester, as a “factory without walls.” This theory, whose modern counterpart is the network intra muros – which emerges once the reticular structure of the industrial district is grasped as a model for the internal space of the factory and the company itself – was revived by those trying to think the social reality of the Italian Northeast after the demise of the centrality of the large factory. In a more optimistic vein, the industrial district was viewed as a more positive terrain of struggle than the factory with its rigidity and its limits as a site for mobilization, especially to the extent it could incorporate the role of extra‐economic variables in the functioning of networked “territorialized” industries, and brought about new forms of class composition in networks of interaction combining competition, imitation and cooperation. See Maurizio Grassi, “Distretti industriali” in Zanini and Fadini, Lessico postfordista 94–100.

“Reti produttive” 67. The research Negri is referring to is contained in the book Benetton et Sentier. Des enterprises pas comme les autres .

“Reti produttive” 73. For Negri, this sequence did peak around the years 1977–83, in the phenomenon of small to medium enterprises and was swallowed up again, after 1983, by the return of the large company hoarding information and services with the aid of state policies.

Time for Revolution 212–13.

Guide 58–59.

Guide 63.

“La crisi dello spazio politico” in L'Europa e l'Impero 20. This is a crucial essay for capturing the role of political topology in the work of Negri.

Guide 175–76.

Balestrini and Moroni 276–77.

Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth 8. Tafuri collaborated with Massimo Cacciari, Asor Rosa, and Negri (who would stay only for the first issue) on Contropiano—a journal close to the workerist tendency. It was in the first issue of this journal that he published his pioneering study of the relation between architectural theory and the critique of ideology, “Per una critica dell'ideologia archittetonica,” later incorporated in the book Progetto e utopia, translated into English as Architecture and Utopia.

Guide 175–76

“Crisis of the Planner‐State: Communism and Revolutionary Organisation” in Revolution Retrieved 97–148.

Architecture and Utopia 124.

“La moltitudine e la metropoli.”

In “Terreni di mezzo” 198, Negri speaks of an alveare metropolitano to describe a formidable mobility of the spaces of production and a mixed site in which “are combined new productive places and new activities without place.”

“La moltitudine e la metropoli.”

“La moltitudine e la metropoli.”

See Maurizio Lazzarato's key essay “Immaterial Labor” in Virno and Hardt, Radical Thought in Italy .

“Terreni di mezzo” 201. Whence Negri's focus on the increasing role within “imperial” capitalism of non‐dialectical spatial strategies of policing, exclusion, war. In this respect his reference to the works of Mike Davis on the militarization of Los Angeles is instructive.

It is as an interface between immaterial cooperation and material productivity that “the school” as a locus of formation, that is, of subjectivation, receives special attention from Negri in “Terreni di mezzo.”

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alberto toscano

Alberto Toscano Department of Sociology Goldsmiths College University of London New Cross London SE14 6NW UK E‐mail: [email protected]