| contents |
| inside |
| europa |
| international |
| special mayday 2005 |
| cultur |
 |
LIVING LABOUR’S LOST
From the realm of necessity towards the realm of freedom. Would Marx understand the concept of “Multitude”?
| Theodoros Rakopoulos (LONDON). There are moments in the Marxian literature, when the term “literature” prevails that of science — or may be not? The way in which Negri reads the Grundrisse indicates, in my opinion, new alternatives to speculate the real message of living labour, that looks too abstract, since Marx doesn’t offer much more than a poetical image on the issue — or not?
Living labour appropriated by the vampire of capital that lives off its viability is not yet — and it will never be, or else the vampire itself will cease to exist — substituted by dead labour; instead, it lies with all its potentialities still open, subject to the constant interaction between individuals participating in its viability. The very life of this labour manifests itself in the construction of the celebrated Ensemble, fruit of the formation of transindividual cooperation and of the depending needs of each one participating in the labour process on the other’s abilities and offerings. The constituting moment of the Vampire Capital is exactly the transformation of these living, active independent relations, these alive attributes into a social body that refers to Capital as a means of preserving the labour process and thus, the continuation of life of each individual participating in it. In the end of the constitutive process during the post-fordist cycle of production, lies the excessive consumption mental area where the needs are incorporated individually, where “the workers form a class consciousness inasmuch as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes” as Marx’s humour indicates... The pleasures of the production stage (i.e. commodities but also creativity itself) are enjoyed by each one of the workers in separation from the initial need for massive cooperation and collective creativity within the production process, which remains as a live Entity composed by different equivalences only in as much as the Vampire needs its blood to be fed.
When the very means of Capital’s survival collapse due to malnutrition (that is, e.g. the malfunction of banking turbo-capitalism), there rise in an instance a range of possibilities of reconstituting living labour that covers the whole spectrum from an individualistic/particularistic revolt (Albania ’97) to a massive rejection of the seizure of productivity by the workers themselves that expropriate the means of production by occupying them (Argentina ’01). Negri/Hardt provide us with the needed “optimism of the will”: the potential futures of the Multitude are as multiple as its very essence, a collection of material particularities that generate a concrete body via cooperation and interdependence. Now, it’s not a matter of luck which drives and instincts would prevail in this process; it is for the active and fighting subjectivity that is born by living labour and struggles against the subjectivity of Capital to choose its means and aims of struggle.
Thus, the Multitude itself decides (“the liberation of the working class is its own enterprise”, quote Marx) pointing at a formation of cooperation that would transcend the poor isolated needs and bring the realm of the Ensemble into the everyday understanding of each one’s lives, and would bring about the living forces of life and pleasure and put them again within the net of interdependence, transgressing the discontinuity between production and consumption. It is only then, that each member of the labour force understands its own powers as powers of the Ensemble and takes over his/her needs, appropriates his/her life by projecting them towards the future of the Multitude that his own living labour generates. The “potentia”, immanent force of living labour is constituted on a collective basis, the very moment it is produced by each and every member of/in that collectivity; hence, interdependence today implies that my own liberties are conditions for the liberties of the other tomorrow — from the realm of necessity towards the realm of freedom.