Class Struggle and the Common

For most people reading this, chances are you sell your labour power in return for a wage or a salary. Your work history has typically seen you relocate more or less daily to a place designed specifically for work. When you arrive you find the equipment, the organisation, the things you have to do are mostly arranged for you. As a typical worker you are a cog, a component fitting into a slot (or slots) within a wider division of labour. The employer, business, capital is central to making this happen. They have the authority and command to shape things, to boss you about.

In Marxism, this axis of command is central to capitalist exploitation. The selling of labour power for a certain period of time tacitly (and legally) confers capital the right to instruct the motions of these labouring bodies. This facilitates the creation of surplus labour as the first step to the realisation of surplus value and therefore profit. Labour as a collective of living, feeling human beings smarts, seethes, and resists under this state of affairs. Being compelled to do things under an authority whose recognition is purchased on pain of economic compulsion does not lead to the most cooperative of relationships, and the simmering tension and resentment bedeviling every workplace are the surface phenomena speaking of the antagonisms grinding beneath.

So much for "classical" exploitation. Does the shifting composition of capital from surplus value rooted in material commodity production to a growing dependence on immaterial labour change the terms of the class struggle? Traditionally, Marxists have understood this as the irreconcilable tension between the cooperative, social character of production (in a workplace) versus the private appropriation of the wealth generated. For Hardt and Negri, the switch to immaterial production changes the form surplus extraction assumes. Exploitation is less a mechanism hidden by the wage relation and more a visible process that looks like rent. How?

Immaterial labour produces social relations. The production of knowledge, information, services and subjectivities is a property common to all industrial societies, though it has only recently become a vector of major capital accumulation. Prior to that this social infrastructure, or the common, was indirectly and obliquely a source of value. Women's labour in the home, for instance, was/is immaterial in the sense it reproduced the household materially and socially for another round of exploitation and surplus extraction. She performed physical labour on domestic chores and mobilised affective/emotional labour to care and nurture her partner (Talcott Parsons famously likened the family to a warm bath for the bread-winning dad) and raise/socialise the next generation of workers. Capital isn't directly involved here, save in the supply of commodities that make modern domestic labour possible. In immaterial labour, the skills generations of women have performed in the home are increasingly prized at work: these are the capacities capital increasingly demands. To put it another way,  capital is a social relation bringing together living labour to work on fixed/constant capital (machines, tools) to make stuff to generate that all important surplus value. In immaterial labour, the properties formerly congealed in fixed capital has now sedimented into living, variable, cognitive labour. Or, beyond some basic orientation, business do not train programmers and IT specialists, nor instructors or professional service providers. These are employed because they are ready made, and what capital needs to exploit the networks thrown up by the common are people with that traditionally feminine attribute - social skills.

On the face of things this appears to benefit capital and weaken labour even further. It individuates workers as they're taken on on the basis of what unique skills, knowledge and, sometimes, subjectivity they bring to the table. In such a confrontation there is no contest, the individual worker cannot hope to stand against the weight of capital. Theoretically, capital can more or less impose its terms, and certainly does so when it comes to "unskilled" immaterial labour. However, it's not capital vs an individual. It's capital simultaneously taking on millions of individuals. The relation may be more individuated than the traditional wage relation, but capital is dependent on them to draw on knowledge, information and subject production competencies - what Hardt and Negri call biopolitical production - that is outside of capital. From being the organiser of production, the balance of power is objectively shifting. Capital is increasingly dependent on the organisation of (social) production by others. Or to present the issue in even starker terms, capital is proving itself surplus to the requirements of social production and is therefore assuming ever more parasitical, rentier forms.

Hardt and Negri describe this as 'one becoming two'. The antagonistic interdependence of capital and labour is fraying. The latter is growing autonomous and going off to do its own thing, which presents capital disciplinary and valorisation problems, especially if a sector is unattractive to work in. As labour is the core constituent of the common and the common talks to itself, is coalescing through networks and starting to represent a powerful, generalised intellect, how long can these parasitic relations last? When will Uber drivers call time on the very visible deductions made from their fares and replace the app with a cooperative effort? Is the time coming when Silicon Valley can no longer ponce off ad revenues generated from other people's content? And so on. This does not spell the end of capitalism, but it does represent a problem and a contradiction where a rupture in the system could tear the whole thing open.

Class struggle under these circumstances incorporates the configuration of class struggles past, and gives it a new twist. For Hardt and Negri, the basis of cognitive labour, the common, is "not only the earth we share but also the languages we create, the social practices we establish, the modes of sociality that define our relationships, and so forth. This form of the common does not lend itself to a logic of scarcity as does the first" (Commonwealth, 2009, p.139). The stuff of social production, the knowledges and relations are slippery because of their immaterial and reproducible character. They necessarily resist command because they cannot be contained. This failure of capture, the increasing autonomy of labour embedded in the common sees class struggle rewired as exodus, a refusal to be bound by the strictures of capitalist command. To emphasise and avoid false impressions, exodus does not mean retreat. Class war as practiced by socialised workers still takes the bosses on at the point of production. That guerrilla struggle is as live as it ever was. The skirmishes at the level of ideas, or class struggle in theory as Louis Althusser memorably defined philosophy, remains. The argy-bargy of struggle refracted through politics continues unabated. Exodus is the simultaneous attending to and strengthening of the common's incipient constitutive power. That is, if the common through social production is in the business of self-organising, communicating, creating its own subjectivities and making a world for itself, a core aspect of 21st century class struggle is to enhance this power. Revolutionary activity in the new millennium simultaneously creates new ways of life, proliferates networks, brings identity locations into common activity and develops institutions that spur the development of all.

Capital threatens the common in two ways. Just like the unsustainable relationship capitalism imperils the biosphere and the support systems that make human life and therefore it possible, there is an analogous relation to the common. For instance before this weekend's cowardly attack by Islamists, Barcelona had hit the news for its high profile "anti-tourist" protests. The city's landlords, thanks to the low cost and easy availability of Airbnb, were increasingly making their properties available to tourists. Higher profits for them, but the result is to price Barcelonians out of the residential rents market, forcing them from the city and thereby undermining the very culture that is such a huge tourist draw in the first place. We see something similar wherever gentrification occurs, or the profit takers try and muscle in on some hip fad coming from the streets - a process well described in Naomi Klein's No Logo. Social production begets more social production, but capital's attempts at capturing it runs the risk of turning it into dust.

Second, because economics has fused with biopolitical production, identity politics is less a distraction from "the class struggle" but more its contemporary form. The front line of the fight against capitalism is the production of the human soul. Capital is long-practiced in using gendered and racial hierarchies to undermine the collective power of workers, plus ça change, and it is always fighting to turn out human beings in its own image. However, these divisions don't exist solely because of capital's nefarious machinations - they are produced by the common too. Hardt and Negri argue that the family, the corporation, and the nation, all of which are located in whole or part in the common, distort and frustrate its potential. The interests of going beyond capital means a positive transcendence and abolition of identity locations (singularities) as carriers of inequality and symbolic violence, while the familial, chauvinist, status, and nationalist practices all work to fix identities in some way, limiting the potential of those caught up in them and frustrating the possibilities pregnant in the common to build a better society. Naturally, capital likewise seeks to articulate with these to preserve command even though accumulation is better served by the further development of the common.

Overcoming these issues raises the question of organisation and politics. What is to be done is an issue leftists return to time and again. What is clear for Hardt and Negri is the revolutionary party is out. As the properties of fixed capital are distributed among our growing legions of cognitive and socialised workers, the 'functions' of the revolutionary party are diffused among the politicising networks. Rather than the received conception of a vanguard of class conscious cadres providing leadership for the rest to follow, cadre building applies to the class as a whole. The power of the multitude lies in its being the living substance of the common, and increasingly their common lines of flight are putting them on a collision course with capital. Biopolitical production wrapped up in dense webs of communication brings people together, educates them, politicises them. For example, the incessant identity-related debates are no longer the concern of radical elites beavering away in academies but are now the property of millions of people, as the fall out from Charlottesville demonstrates. The aim then is to build up the capacity for self-organisation, forge new institutions that bring out the common interests of socialised workers without denying their difference. The image is of a self-activating, self-coordinating swarm that can simply overwhelm capital and the state in a process of creative destruction, of replacing one form of organising society with another.

The task for radicals and revolutionaries now is to grasp the general movement of things, to think and analyse, to grasp tendencies and directions of processes for ultimately that is where future political possibilities lie. And all the while this work has to be tied to building the capacities of the common, of making good its constituent, self-organising power. That's the object of the class struggle now, so the rupture with capitalism can be made good not in the far distant future but starting in the here and now.