Abstract
This article establishes the continuity of ‘self-valorisation’ – the building of revolutionary subjectivity through workers’ opposition to capital and realisation of their own authentic needs – as a key concept in the work of the Italian Marxist political philosopher Antonio Negri: from his early analysis of Marxism and the Italian Operaismo movement for workers’ autonomy in the 1970s, to his recently co-authored trilogy with Michael Hardt. By reformulating Hardt and Negri's current theoretical project of the multitude in terms of what I call the exploration of the common, we can bridge the division between the technical and political aspects of contemporary class composition and understand how such pockets of workers’ resistance might be networked together. In this way, Negri's earlier theorisation of working-class organisation in 1970s Italy can help us rethink the crisis that organised and unionised labour face in the twenty-first century.
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Notes
With the transition from what Marx called the ‘formal subsumption’ to the ‘real subsumption’ of labour to capital, the labour process is radically transformed. Whereas in the period of ‘formal subsumption’ capital ‘subsumes the labour process as it finds it’, in the period of ‘real subsumption’ capital revolutionises productive capacity, rapidly developing the social forces of production with an increased application of science and technology (Marx, 1990, pp. 1021–1035).
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Acknowledgements
With thanks to the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice at the University of Nottingham, Caroline Edwards, Alex Dunst, my anonymous reviewers, and Ian Fraser and Larry Wilde.
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Harrison, O. Negri, self-valorisation and the exploration of the common. Subjectivity 4, 29–46 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2010.28
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2010.28