Katja Diefenbach The paradoxes of the political.

On the post-workerist reading of Marx I would like to pose one single question today: how is the political thought in post-workerism? I will do so by reconstructing how, in the post-workerist reading of Marx, diverging theses are unified through the notion of living labor in a way which allows for identifying being and communism in the instance of potentiality, an identification, that runs into the risk of negating the political itself. Four diverging positions are at issue in this postworkerist operation: 1) the Marxian thesis of a real subsumption of labor by capital and of labor power as both radically expropriated and radically creative potentiality, 2) the feminist thesis that reproductive and affective activities are productive and value constituting alike 3) the Deleuzian thesis of the plane of immanence as a non-personal life that is not attributed to a subject and does not contain an object but only itself as its own cause, a desire desiring selfgeneration in indefinite differentiation 4) the Foucauldian thesis that the capitalist mode of production has been preceded by an inclusion of life to power mechanisms and that both are coexisting since. We will see how these four positions are radically transformed in the course of their ontologising unification by several post-workerist authors which I will exemplify by the difference how a non-actualisable potentiality of the not-now is grasped in Virno and in Deleuze, on one side as preinindiviudal anthropological general, on the other side as non-subjective, non-human virtuality. Why to debate the question of the political through a series of post-workerist theses? At the beginning of the 90s several post-workerist authors reemerged on the theoretical stage of Marxism with an interesting promise: they aimed at combining the analysis how valorisation, law and biopolitics relate to eachother with an actualisation of materialism in the line Machiavelli, Spinoza, Marx and the announcement of a renewed communist militancy. 1 | Marxs Heirs What does it mean to align oneself with Marx and to want to actualise his thought? To align oneself with Marx means taking on a heterogeneous, theoretically aporetic and politically dramatic legacy combining an activist, messianic and analytic aspect: the convening of an international workers movement, the promise of revolutionary change, and a critique of the political economy. This encounter has been catastrophically marked by the fact that it led to the creation of a productivistic and policing order. Therefore, the acceptance of Marxs legacy requires a critique, a choice and a revision. It requires the clarification of why, for one, the name of Marxism is treated as a militant promise, and what one hopes to achieve from the plurality of demands to which since Marx everyone who speaks or writes cannot fail to feel himself subjected, unless he or she is to feel himself failing in everything,[1] as Blanchot put it in 1968.

It requires a distance to the idealisations in Marxs texts, the violence of his theoretical blockages, and a positioning in relation to the graves of the policing Marxisms. Foucault has pointed out that one shouldnt pose the question of Stalinism in terms of error, but in terms of reality. Instead of searching for what might serve in Marxism to condemn the camp system, the productivism and the bureaucratisation of the political, one should search for what these developments made possible.[2] One disaster we inherited from communism is the extent to which socialist discipline, socialist conversion of the class enemy into a biological threat to the workers' state, which has to be immunized against theaft, against idleness, against deviance, is coextensive to a theoretical contradiction in Marx, namely the theoretical contradiction in the analysis of the social relations of production, to reject any concept of human essence, while at the same time, to repeatedly articulate the socially determining effect of the economy in such a way that productivity becomes the essence of the human and the man who improves this essence in his works and thereby regains his sense the horizon of communism.[3] 2 | Reading Marx What aspects of Marxs texts are activated by post-workerism? Which Marx does it read? If one abandons the simplifying idea of an epistemological rupture in Marxs works dividing it along the break-line of scientificity a thesis that was developed by structuralist Marxism in the 1960s and that Althusser revoked in 1973 as theoreticist error[4] the polyvalence of Marxs work is revealed. In his brief and essayistic text Marxs Three Voices, Blanchot distinguishes the disparate coexistence of three modes of speaking: firstly, a direct, long and both philosophical and antiphilosophical mode, in which Marx gives answers in terms of the history of logos alienation, the primacy of need, history as the process of material practice, the total human[5] answers that want to be what they say: a break with the former course of things, whose corresponding question remains, however, indeterminate; secondly, a political mode, which is brief, direct and rallying, announcing the immediate dissolution of bourgeois society through the praxis of the proletariat again expressig the urgency of what it announces; and thirdly, the indirect speech of the scientific, economical-critical discourse, in which the conditions of production and reproduction of capital are analysed; a speech that undermines itself since it designates itself () as a theory of mutation always in play in practice, just as in this practice the mutation is always also theoretical.[6] Even if Blanchot ignores the developments in Marxs work by concentrating entirely on the thesis that thought does not emerge unscathed from Marxs work and that its productivity consists in the multiplicity of its modes of speech, obliging everybody who reads it to constantly remodel his or her thought, Blanchot provides two insights that are important for an investigation of the post-workerist reception of Marx: firstly, to pay attention to the questions that can be found to Marxs answers; secondly, to investigate how the relationship between economy and politics can be understood, which oscillates in Marxs thought between a primacy of the economic form (i.e the contradictory unfolding of the valueform) and a primacy of the political content (which is twofold, firstly the actual reality of human labour, secondly the pure negativity of a class that is no class because it dissolutes the old ties of the bourgeois society and thus class itself and whose content is rupture itself). Later, after the failure of the revolution in 1848, slowly, partly, Marx withdrew from this materialism of praxis in which the political is thought as subjective activity like in idealism, especially in Fichte, and is substituted by a materialism of the political which is considered as organisation of forces, which might misdo, which might suffer a setback, which have to be reorganised.[7] With the question

of the question to which Marx answers, Blanchot varies the central motif of Althussers symptomatic reading of Marx. In Reading Capital, Althusser declared, that the crucial question Marx produces though still in the old Hegelian terms of inner essence and outer appearances is the question of the effect of a structure on its elements.[8] Marx would show, in a thousand different ways, the presence of a notion still absent in the framework of his discourse: namly the notion of the social formation as structured complexity in which the economic is determinant in the last instance, that is to say, not directly, not in a predetermined and prescribing way, but always displaced, transposed, distorted by the translation to other instances of the social. The economic is conceived as dominant contradiction structuring social complexity without being based in a substance or a subject, existing only in its effects, an immanent causality as he says with Spinoza.[9] The problem of this position is the following: If the economical would be determinant for any type of society in the last instance, it would have to be defined independently of any specific social relations. That is to say, the social would again be rationalized by an essentialist a priori category.[10] 3 | Marx beyond Marx What are the questions that post-workerism finds to the answers that Marx gives? How does it think the relationship between economy, labour and politics? How does it go beyond the dialectical and teleological idealisations of Marx? Let us begin by clarifying what it means, with Marx, to go beyond Marx. Balibar pointed out in the 1980s, that it implies at least two methodological aspects related to materialist thought: firstly, Marxism participates in the overcoming of its future perspectives since it starts from the historical specificity of a discourse, including its own, and is thus able to reflect the temporal conditionality of its thought, while on a non-discursive level the workers movement, the class struggles, the construction of the Soviet Union and the real socialist states contributed to the shift of capitalist strategies of valorisation and control so that they no longer correspond to the conditions analysed by Marx in the middle of the nineteenth century; secondly, Marxs theory contains passages that deconstruct its philosophical fictions and dialectical idealisations. Particularly Marxs institutional and historical analyses on the production of relative surplus value, working-time legislation, the formation of big industry and the machinisation of production in the Grundrisse and Capital reveals a thinking that is based neither on an evolutionary development of predetermined forms, nor collective forces embedded in the history of being, expressing the right content or qua that the antagonistic particular universality that will explode the wrong capitalist form. Instead, one encounters a theory that investigates the effects of antagonistic strategies: strategies of exploitation, domination and resistance, constantly being displaced and renewed as a consequence of their own effects.[11] This differential and relative mode of thinking is radicalized by Foucault. His decisive and precious intervention in relation to Marxism lays in the development of a non-juridical and noneconomical conception of power as strategic relation of forces to which no law of form and no political content is immanent. Thus, Foucault deconstructed the thesis of economic determination in the last instance put forward by Althusser and Balibar in the 1960s and 70s. More over, contradictoriness, in Foucault, is at best only one particular configuration of the social situation while, for Marx, power relations are only strategic moments of a constituent contradiction. And accordingly, for him, the social conflict is considered to develop through the interiorisation of the

power relationships whereby an antagonism becomes the function of these relationships.[12] Foucault translated his considerations about a strategic concept of power[13] into a series of methodological rules with which he has withdrawn from the interiorisation of power relations into an antagonism. These methodological rules are: the immanence of knowledge and power, the continual variations of their distributions, the double conditioning of micro- and macropolitical mechanisms, the polyvalence of regulating practices that are discontinuous and transformatory in their effects and merge together into various big strategies.[14] For Foucault, the political coexists with these power relations; it is a matter of two practices that mutually provoke, incite, shun, penetrate or attack each other. A social break is the improbable and evental result of a strong connection of different political practices, an idea that Balibar had defined in relation to a Marxian becoming-necessary of liberty as a becoming-contingent of resistances. [15] 4 | The Preconditions of Communism How then is the post-workerist discourse to be located in the field of Marx beyond Marx? Three Marxian traces are actualised in post-workerism: firstly, the early Marxian idea of an allsided unfolding of labour-power constituting the humanity of the human being, which leads to an anthropological and ontological thinking of communism; at its base we find an expressionsim of living labor which is grasped as stripped off all its qualities incarnating the mere potentiality to do this and that. Accordingly, value theory is suspended. Abstract labor is understood as general labor, as dynamis of an ludic animal that is allowed to do one thing today and another thing tomorrow. Secondly, the meta-political idea of class as a revolutionary mass whose force and positionality supersede the existing order which negates the idea of the political as it is identified with an ontological privilege; and thirdly, the anticipation of a socialisation of production encompassing the entire social field, subsuming it to capital. With this conflictual reading of Marx, the trans-historical theses of the young Marx on the creative vitality of labour are combined with the historical works of the late Marx on the socialisation of production and projected into each other. Hence, the question is revealed that post-workerism gave to Marxs answers, and which Blanchot had demanded that one search for if one wants to understand how Marx is received within a discourse: It is the question of the preconditions or prerequisites of communism in the history of being and in the historical development of the capitalist mode of production.[16] The cernel of this question and I mainly refer to Negri's position here is the following: Since 1968 the dialectics of the instruments of production is over: Historically", Negris says, "capital places the instrument of production at the disposal of the worker; as soon as the human brain reappropriates this instrument of production, capital loses the possibility of articulating the command by means of the instrument.[17] If we refer this diagnosis to both arguments combined in post-workerism politics of living labor and analytics of the socialisation of production a double eschaton has been reached: The socialisation of production arrives at a final stage. No longer, Negri states, labor power is constituted in capital; no longer capital directs and commands the production process. That is to say, in the post-Fordist production mode the instruments of labour are assumed to be incorporated in the body of the producer. This is the post-workerist notion of biopolitics: incarnation of labour instruments, and therefore autonomous self-governance of the multitude. For Negri, this tendency involves an overcoming of the Smithian logic of the division of labour proper to industrial capitalism, and posits the possibility

of a direct transition to communism. "The socialized worker is a kind of actualization of communism, its developed condition;" he says, "the boss, by contrast, is no longer even a necessary condition for capitalism."[18] Correspondingly, labour power, in pos-workerism, is assumed to not create the means of social life any more, but life itself; the economical, the political and the social become one; productive forces are immediately translated into production relations.[19] To put it short, postworkerism substantialises labour power and desubstantialises capital capital is reduced to a parasitical mechanism that appropriates inventive productivity while labour power is conceived as ontological and biological entrepreneur of itself and of communism. 5 | Non-human life of infinite differentiation It is Virno who has most carefully elaborated the relation of potentiality and act in postworkerism.[20] He starts with the assumption that the body of the worker contains a preindividual, non-determinate generic capacity to do this or that. As already said, he further hypothesizes that in the course of the socialisation of production this indeterminate human potentiality to act, to react, to intervene, to reflect becomes the main productive force in capitalism. In this sense he, too, uses Marx concept of abstract labor in the sense of general labor, i.e., labor stripped of all specific skills in which an anthropological general comes to the fore: manifoldedness, initiative, improvisation, cooperation. Thus, Virno argues with reference to the Aristotelian distinction of poiesis (working) and practise (political activity) that labor has subsumed politics because it took over the features that have been decisive for the political act, as said, initiative, improvisation, invention, decision, etc. Poiesis has subsumed praxis.[21] Prototype of this new form of labour power is speaking, Virno says. Because to speak is not to produce a product but to make use only of the potentiality of the generic faculty of language, not of a pre-established text in detail. The virtuosity of the speaker is the prototype of all biopolitical labor, precisely because it includes within itself the relationship of potentiality and act. Virno defines this relationship like the following: Potentiality must not be reduced to the act. Potentiality is no potential act. Its not-now is no almost-now of a coming act. Potentiality is something what is not actualisable. It is the permanent not-now that evades the presence and suspends the linear continuity of time. It is the exteriority of the non-present, an idea that comes extremley close to Deleuze idea of virtuality as the milieu of becoming.[22] What is the difference between the postworkerist idea of potentiality and Deleuze' and Guattari's idea of virtuality? Deleuze and Guattari neither attribute the force of becoming to an anthropological general like speaking nor to labour power. For them, an unpersonal, prereflexive force is constituent. This force only exists in its effects which are continuous variation and infinite inner differentiation which exceed the order of linear time becoming time itself: the time of individuation that subtracts from the separation of before and after, moving and pulling in both directions at once. As Deleuze says with Lewis Carroll: Alice does not grow without shrinking, and vice versa. She becomes larger than she was and is yet smaller than she becomes. [23] This force of becoming is effect of the concatanations it generates. This force has no cause, no substance and no subject. It could not be traced back to a human capacity of cooperation or virtuosity. Life in this sense is not living labour but non-human pure becoming without form that does not refer to a subject or an object.[24] The political and that is important, too does not take place on this plane of immanence or virtuality. It takes place in an inbetween zone Deleuze

and Guattari call the molecular where parts of subjects, objects, institutions, strategies are transforming and recomposing by being traversed by the virtual force of absolute deterritorialisation, by the crack, by the event.[25] The question of politics is, then, how to open a machinic concatanations that is as I said composed of parts of subjects, objects, practises to a minoritarian becoming that subtracts from the normal distribution. This opening requires an active passivity in which the active power is able to become receptive, and the receptive capacity is able to become active. The machinic concatanation itself is not political in a positive way. The molecular might also be a zone of a reactionary intensification of forces. Deleuze and Guattari are very clear here, each power center exercises power on a micrological fabric, working in details and in the details of detail. The theoretical privilege of Deleuze' and Guattari's axiomatics of a non-human life, or, if you want, of desire, of the virtual or the plane of immanence they use a lot of synonyms to give a name to this force without qualities which is determined by the concatanations that are produced by it the theoretical privilege of this axiomatics of an anorganic life is the very position where the abstraction is made: The abstraction lays at the zeropoint of the system, where a non-human desire is presupposed. However, since then, the analysis examines concatanations of practises always and ever historically specific in the most possible proximity to a case and its movements. That is to say, that the political is the improbable but specific effect of different minoritarian practises that connect with eachother while opening to a becoming. The differences that are building a concatanation are not cleansed but affirmed. In opposition to that the heroic fidelity of the Badiouian subject that feeds the old political authoritarianism of being consequent presupposes a transcendent relation of a subject to the situation. What does St. Paul as one of Badiou's prototypes of political subjecitivity do? He testifies to the sudden coincidental nature of an event, which appears without cause and only becomes capable of being real and true at the moment when a subject professes total faith in it. And at this precise moment, the subject transgresses itself in the same way that the event transcends the conditions from which it emerged. Thus, for Badiou, the political event draws no support from the disparate; it is mercilessly subtracted from any pre-evental difference. For Deleuze and Guattari instead, there is no universal. There is only the effectivity of recomposed and recomposing differences. This distinguishes Deleuze and Guattari's idea of the political from all conceptualisations of the concrete universal. 6 | The Paradoxes of the Political The drama of post-workerist politics comes from it not being able to keep a distance to itself, whereby the political is understood in a Christian tradition as common being. Conflict, asociality, and impotentiality no longer have a place in the political. Instead, I propose to assume that the political is a name for the militant connection of different practices, which has no ontological, anthropological or groundless grounding, but is the effect of their connections. Militant connections are made where acts are committed to the freedom of the different, while they simultaneously incorporate this freedom and insist that the different doesnt count in the sense of a logic of social distrubion which is to say that it is not coupled with the attribution or suspension of identitary predicates, social rights or possibilities. The relation between the commitment to and the incorporation of the freedom of the different is very fragile; it quickly collapses, to be transformed into representation (when politics is pursued in the name of the other or the cause), calculation (when only the application of ones own interests are followed), or solipsism (when no concatanation is made). If the representative becomes too strong, the

intensity, the bliss of the moment disappears and the act is reduced to producing effects of resistance. This means the minoritarian intensity, everything that makes the act singular, is abandoned. If, on the other hand, the singular becomes too strong, the acts are no longer connected with each other and to the possibility of organising change. That is to say, the political inevitably encounters a number of paradoxes: firstly, it is exposed to the contingency of an event, which is not at its disposal. The political presupposes and coexists with events that cannot be reduced to the mediation of resistance; secondly, the political is exposed to normalising or disciplinary or selfdestructive displacements, its powers are permanently reintegrated, disappear, or are destroyed. They can take over the form of both, marginal normalisation and reactionary intensification, "the great disgust, the longing to kill and to die, the passion for abolition"[26]. The political has to be prepared to be nothing but a concatantion of forces that are related to power mechanisms. To initiate what can not be initiated, to initiate the possibility of a radical rupture requires a mobilisation that is opposed to the possibility not to have to choose between doing and leaving, to be open to the becoming, to the potential of impotentiality. Thus, an effect of the political can dangerously consists of subordinating everything to the economic primacy of effective and strategic doing. That is why the organisation which we are able to give to ourselves[27] would have to do alike: coordinate, force and keep a distance to the process of organising a radical break while at the same time these practises of forcing and distancing are eluding because they are never completely put at disposal of collective decision; at any price, "the organisation which we are able to give to ourselves" would have to reject the romantic tradition, by not equating the political with the living and a common to be produced as it woud have to reject the authoritarian tradition of occasional decisionism. Notes [1] Blanchot: Marxs Three Voices, p. 98. [2] cf. Foucault: Power and Strategies, p. 135. [3] cf. Balibar: The Non-Contemporaneity of Althusser, p. 9. [4] In For Marx, Althusser adopted Bachelards concept of the epistemological break, arranging Marxs writings into the early works, the works of the break, the transitional works and the mature works (cf. For Marx, pp. 32-35). He contrasted the ideological works of Marxs youth with the scientificity of the texts after 1845, a classification that Althusser renounced in 1973 as a theoreticist error, because it implied an equation of science with truth and ideology with error, cf. Elements of Self-Criticism, p. 119. [5] Blanchot: Marxs Three Voices, p. 98. [6] Blanchot: p. 99. [7] Balibar: The Vacillation of Ideology in Marxism, p. 101: "The principal ideal, with respect to the revolution, is no longer that of an act at once complete and instantaneous, although this image always haunts its catastrophic vision of the crisis of capitalism. Rather, it is a process, or a transition, that will bring about the change from a class society to a classless society, starting from social contradictions in their actual configurations." [8] cf. Althussers remarks on this concept in Reading Capital, 2 vols., pp. 28-30, 170-174, 184189. [9] cf. Althusser/ Balibar: Reading Capital, Part 2, p. 188-189: "This is an extremely important point if we are to avoid even the slightest, in a sense inadvertent relapse into the diversions of the classical conception of the economic object, if we are to avoid saying that the Marxist conception

of the economic object is, for Marx, determined from the outside by a non-economic structure. The structure is not an essence outside the economic phenomena which comes and alters their aspect, forms and relations and which is effective on them as an absent cause, absent because it is outside them. The absence of the cause in the structure's 'metonymic causality' on its effects is not the fault of the exteriority of the structure with respect to the economic phenomena ; on the contrary, it is the very form of the interiority of the structure, as a structure, in its effects. This implies therefore that the effects are not outside the structure, are not a pre-existing object, element or space in which the structure arrives to imprint its mark: on the contrary, it implies that the structure is immanent in its effects, a cause immanent in its effects in the Spinozist sense of the term, that the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects, in short that the structure, which is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects." [10] cf. Laclau/ Mouffe: Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 99. [11] Balibar: From Class Struggle to Classless Struggle, p. 164; on the thesis that Marxism participated in the superseding of its own future prospects, cf. Balibar: p. 155. [12] cf. Balibar: Marx and Foucault, p. 52. [13] One need to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society. (Foucault: History of Sexuality, p. 93). [14] cf. once again Foucaults seminal methodological remarks in History of Sexuality, pp. 92102. [15] Balibar: Three Concepts of Politics, p. 17. [16] cf. Negri/ Hardt: Labor of Dionysos, pp. 271-283. [17] Negri: Zur gesellschaftlichen Ontologie, p. 21. [18] Negri: From mass worker to socialized worker, p. 81. [19] cf. Negri, Twenty Theses on Marx, p. 152: There is an immediate translatability between the social forces of production and the relation of production themselves. [20] cf. Virno: The Grammar of the Multitude, especialy the fourth and fifth chapter on virtuosity and the subjectivity of the multitude, pp. 47-94. [21] cf. Virno: The Grammar of the Multitude: "In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle distinguishes labor (or poiesis) from political action (or praxis), utilizing precisely the notion of virtuosity: we have labor when an object is produced, an opus which can be separated from action; we have praxis when the purpose of action is found in action itself. [...] One could say: at a certain level in the development of productive social forces, labor cooperation introjects verbal communication into itself, or, more precisely, a complex of political actions." (pp. 52; 55). [22] cf. Brett Neilson: Potenza nuda?, pp. 71-74. [23] cf. Deleuze's explanation of becoming as simultaneous movement in both directions at the very beginning of "Logic of Sense": "When I say 'Alice becomes larger', I mean that she becomes larger than she was. By the same token, however, she becomes smaller than she is now. Certainly, she is not bigger and smaller at the same time. She is larger now, she was smaller before. But it is at the same moment that one becomes larger than one was and smaller than one becomes. This is the simultaneity of becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present." (p. 1) [24] cf. especially Deleuze's last text "Immanence: a life ..." and Deleuze's and Guattari's remarks on the plane of immanence in "What is Philosophy?", pp. 35-60. [25] cf. the chapter on micropolitics in Deleuze/ Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 229-255.

[26] Deleuze/ Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus, p. 229. [27] Hlderlin: Hyperion Fragment, quoted in Laclau/ Mouffe: Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 145. Literature Louis Althusser - (1965): For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster, London: Verso, 2005 - (1974): Elements of Self-Criticism, in Essays in Self-Criticism, pp. 105-155 - (1976): Essays in Self-Criticism, translated by Grahame Lock, London: NLB Louis Althusser/ tienne Balibar (1968): Reading Capital, translated by Ben Brewster, London: Verso, 2006 Etienne Balibar: - (1982-1991): Masses, Classes, Ideas. Studies on Politics and Philosophy before and after Marx, translated by James Swenson, London and New York: Routledge, 1994 - (1983): The Vacillation of Ideology in Marxism I, in Masses, Classes, Ideas, pp. 87-123 - (1987): From Class Struggle to Classless Struggle, in tienne Balibar/ Immanuel Wallerstein: Race, Nation, Class, translated by Chris Turner, London and New York: Verso, 1991, pp. 153184 - (1992) Foucault and Marx. The question of nominalism, in F. Ewald: Foucault, Philosopher, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, pp. 39-57 - (1991): The Non-Contemporaneity of Althusser, in E. Ann Kaplan/ Michael Sprinker (eds.): The Althusserian Legacy, London and New York: Verso, 1993, pp. 1-16 - (1996): Three Concepts of Politics, in Politics and the other Scene, translated by Daniel Hahn, London and New York: Verso, 2002, pp. 1-39 Maurice Blanchot - (1968): Marxs Three Voices, in Friendship, translated by Elisabeth Rottenberg, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997, pp. 98-100 Gilles Deleuze (1969): The Logic of Sense, translated by Marc Lester with Charles Stivale, New York: Columbia University Press Gilles Deleuze/ Flix Guattari - (1980): A Thousand Plateaus, translated by Brian Massumi, London: Continuum 1984 - (1991): What is Philosophy?, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, London and New York: Verso, 1994 Michel Foucault - (1976): The History of Sexuality. An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley, London: Penguin Books, 1990 - (1977): Power and Strategies, in Colin Gordon (ed.): Michel Foucault. Power/Knowledge, Harvester: Hemel Hempstead, 1980, pp. 134-145 - (1982): Subject and Power, in Paul Rabinow/ Nikolas Rose (eds.): The Essential Foucault,

New York: New Press, 2003, pp. 126-144. Ernesto Laclau/ Chantal Mouffe (1985): Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London and New York: Verso Alain Lipietz (1993): From Althusserianism to Regulation Theory, in E. Ann Kaplan/ Michael Sprinker (eds.): The Althusserian Legacy, London and New York: Verso, pp. 99-138 Toni Negri - (1979): Vom Massenarbeiter zum gesellschaftlichen Arbeiter und darber hinaus, in ArbeiterInnen-Macht gegen die Arbeit. Eine Autonomie-Anthologie, Berlin: Sisina 1988 - (1996): Twenty Theses on Marx. Interpretation of the Class Situation Today, in Saree Makdisi et.al. (eds.): Marxism beyond Marxism, pp. 149-180 - (2007): Zur gesellschaftlichen Ontologie. Materielle Arbeit, immaterielle Arbeit und Biopolitik, in Thomas Atzert et al. (eds.): Empire und die biopolitische Wende, pp. 17-31 Antonio Negri/ Michael Hardt (1994): Labor of Dionysus. A Critique of the State-Form, London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Brett Neilson (2004): Potenza nuda? Sovereignty, Biopolitics, Capitalism, in Contretemps 5, pp. 63-78 Katja Diefenbach Multitude. Introduction to a concept. In their books Empire and Multitude, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt linked the analysis of a new imperial world order with the promise of updating communism and combining figures of argumentation drawn from Marxist, poststructuralist and feminist theories. One of their pivotal concepts to address political subjectivity is that of the multitude, derived from the Latin K#multitudo#K that is commonly translated as mass or multiplicity. Important in this context are two politico-historical references: on the one hand, Negri and Hardt take up the debate on the expanded class composition in the Italian Operaism movement of the 1960 and 70s, in which groups left of the PCI such as Potere Operaio and Autonomia Organizzata attempted to link factory strikes and the minority struggles flaring up at the time. On the other, their issue is the historically dated juxtaposition of Hobbes's theory of sovereignty and Spinoza's theory of democracy, which contained a positive political concept of multitudo and its potentiality. Negri and Hardt have reformulated the problematics of a radical break with the capitalist mode of production within a debate that endeavors to open Marxism to non-dialectical thought. This means that the relations of capital, bio-power, law and resistance are analyzed without following the logic of a progressing contradiction in which the capitalist mode of production already provides the means of its own abolition either grasped in an economic and objective perspective or in a political and subjective perspective of a historical collective subject. Into this debate, which to make things easier we can call post-Marxist, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, along with other authors belonging to the theoretical field of post-Operaism such

as Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, Antonella Corsani or Judith Revel, have introduced a constituent, i.e., historically effective and in this sense autonomous class, which they term multitude. Their theoretical strategy lies in an elaborate conceptual concatenation. The ideas of living labor and antagonistic class division found in early Marx are combined with other concepts and revalued in a remarkable maneuver. Elements of this concatenation include, above all, the concept of Being as potentiality in Spinoza, the primacy of desire in Deleuze, and the analytics of a bio-power directed toward the body and the population in Foucault. With this theoretical and political move, the multitude is conceived as a maximally composed class matching the broadest definition of the proletariat. It includes all people working under capitalist conditions in post-Fordism. At once poor and productive, it is characterized by a threefold protocommunist capacity: being active in a cooperative way, expressing the general intellect of informational, social production, and resisting capitalism. Post-Operaism renews the Marxist proposition of a progressing socialization of production, according to which all forms of expression and activity in life are now subjected to valorization. Marx's early, anthropological concept of living labor as shaping fire is thus expanded to life in general. It is turned into the basis of a future communism, which thus attains its first principle and an ontological foundation. As the potentiality of creative being, life will one day overcome the false capitalist form of the abstraction of exchange. In this manner, post-Operaism transfers Foucault's concept of bio-power to a theory of the potentiality of living labor. As a result, one of Foucault's passionate stakes disappears. He had countered the misunderstanding in the radical left of power as a repressive and ideological function of the state apparatus guaranteeing the capital relation with a positive analysis of power, the first historical effects of which were subjectivity and life itself. Virno, in particular, is working on an extreme revaluation of the biopolitical, which he understands as the seizing of a proto-communist force of the generic being. While Foucault analyzed the production of a body integrated in the mechanisms and calculi of power and subjected to them to the extent to which it gained ability and autonomy, Virno grasps the body as the jelly of human labor, a tabernacle of human potentiality. In his view, the various human capacities (speaking, thinking, remembering, acting) form the general and pre-individual starting point of the multitude, which evolves from the general to the singular. He thus elaborates an anthropological theory of individuation, in which perception, movement and language are the potential elements of communism. Despite its reductionism, the concept of multitude gained an interesting intensity when it encountered the debates of leftist globalization movements, in which an array of issues were negotiated that were also addressed in post-Operaism. To be mentioned here are foremost capital$$$s thrust of internationalization following 1989, the significance of biopolitical government strategies, the development of a policing war regime, the system-affirming function of NGOs, and the debates on forms of militancy that distance themselves from both the subcultural spontaneity of small autonomous groups and the militarism of the concept of urban guerilla. This encounter between theory and practice brought about the post-Operaistic event, i.e., a remarkable ferocity with which the concept of multitude was discussed. But it also implied the task of designating the dangerous threshold to which it leads: a potentiality oriented toward productivism and creative Being which no longer is potentiality. One must object to the vitalism of Being with which Negri and Hardt wait for us to mingle together the flesh and the intellect of the multitude, [to] generate a new youth of humanity through an enormous enterprise of love,

because the community of the political is supplementary and characterized by dissent. The collective intelligence of cooperative labor is not intrinsic to it. In Jacques Rancire's works, one finds a range of interesting comments setting this anthropological content in Marx's thought in relation to Schiller's notion of aesthetic education, Romanticism and the avant-garde movements. Marx had attributed to humans the content of the essential, the true destiny of Being, cooperative and freely associated practice, which was still objectified in the false form of capitalist production. For Rancire, this kind of thought starts with Schiller's aesthetic education, which after the failure of the French Revolution saw its task in shaping humans capable of living in a free community. Hence, with Schiller, the notion of the sensuous fulfillment of a yet latent humanity emerges, which at the beginning of the 20th century results in what Rancire in his book, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, describes as the short but decisive encounter between the architects of the Marxist revolution and the architects of new life-forms. The following must be maintained vis--vis this encounter: communism is not intrinsic to the history of Being.