7376-Going in the Wrong

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John Holloway

Going in the Wrong Direction;Or,Mephistopheles – Not Saint Francis of Assisi

Toni Negri’s work is enormously attractive, not onlyfor its own merits, but because it responds to a des-perate need. We are all looking for a way forward.The old state-centred model of revolution has failedcatastrophically, reformism becomes more and morecorrupt and barren, yet revolutionary change is moreurgent than ever. Negri refuses to give up thinkingand rethinking revolution: that is the great attractionof his work. The problem is that Negri leads us inthe wrong theoretical direction.Negri, and now Michael Hardt who joins him asco-author of

Empire

, seek to develop Marxist andrevolutionary theory as a positive theory, rather thana negative theory. This has important consequences,theoretically, politically and in terms of the analysisdeveloped in

Empire

.

Part I

Behind the analysis of

Empire

lies a theoretical move-ment, a rigidifying of the autonomist impulse. Itis to this that we must turn before looking at theanalysis itself.

Historical Materialism

, volume 10:1 (79–91)©Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2002

Autonomist Marxism came on the scene with a furious energy, which can be seen in the oft-quoted passage by Tronti:

We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development rst,and workers second. This is a mistake. And now we have to turn the prob-lem on its head, reverse the polarity and start again from the beginning:and the beginning is the class struggle of the working class.

1

The force of autonomist theory is that it starts explicitly from the subject,from the working class. It proclaims itself to be a theory of struggle, ratherthan a theory of the framework of struggle, as mainstream Marxism had become. It sees working-class struggle as the driving force of social devel-opment, the key to the changing forms of capitalism. It suggests a way ofthinking about society in terms of our potential rather than in terms of theoppressive power of capital, and thus immediately opens up the perspectiveof a revolutionary transformation of society through the unfolding of our cre-ative energy. Where orthodox theory closes, the autonomist impulse opens.There has, however, always been a tension at the heart of the autonomistproject. On the one hand, struggle is negative, struggle-against, a constantlyshifting, never-dened against-ness, always moving against-and-beyondthe denitions of capitalist oppression. Atheory founded in struggle must be a negative theory, a theory of negation. This does not mean that it is notimportant to understand the changing forms of class struggle, but a theoryof struggle implies that these must be understood as just that, changing forms,forms which do not stand still, which cannot be pinned down and dened,forms of struggle which constantly negate themselves, forms which do notcontain, but overow. Like struggle itself, a theory of struggle is negative,open, anti-denitional.In the actual development of autonomist theory,

2

on the other hand, therehas always been a tendency to seek a positive understanding of struggle.Despite the ‘Copernican inversion of Marxism’

3

which autonomism repre-sented, the theoretical assumptions of orthodox authors (Della Volpe andLenin, for example) continued to inuence autonomist theorists. The resulthas been a tension in autonomism between the restless negativity of strug-

80John Holloway

1

Tronti 1979a, p. 1.

2

For an excellent account, see Wright 2002.

3

Moulier 1989, p. 19.

gle and the dening thrust of positive theory. Thus, for example, the methodof the workers’ inquiry has been confronted with the problem of its relationto sociology, and the autonomist-inspired investigation of the real conditionsof class struggle has often evaporated into industrial sociology and technologystudies. Thus, too much practical and theoretical energy has been dedicatedto the question of the denition of the working class and of the current classcomposition, when the working class, conceived as struggle, is indenable.Again, there has at times been a tendency to rigidify the concept of class com-position, to generalise from the experiences of a particular group of workersand project it as a model for judging all class struggle. There has been a ten-dency also to neglect the mutual interpenetration of capital and anti-capital(conceptualised by Marx in terms of fetishism, a category to which autono-mist theory has paid little attention), and, consequently, to conceive of thesubject of struggle as external to capital, to think of the working class as apure subject, and of the communist militant as the purest of the pure. All thisdoes not mean that the autonomist approach should be abandoned. On thecontrary, the restlessness of struggle constantly sharpens the starting pointof the autonomist impulse, but it does so against a positivisation of theorythat repeatedly threatens to blunt it. In other words, autonomist approacheshave often failed to develop the negativity of the initial impulse to its radi-cal implications.

4

It is perhaps above all Toni Negri who has been concerned to establishautonomism on a positive, ontologically secure basis, especially in recentyears. In

The Savage Anomaly

,

5

Negri turns to the study of Spinoza in orderto provide a positive foundation for a theory of struggle. In doing so, he fol-lows, surprisingly perhaps, in the footsteps of Althusser, who turned toSpinoza to give support to his theorisation of capitalism as a process with-out a subject.

6

Negri does not conceptualise capitalism as a process withouta subject, but the subject that emerges is a peculiarly abstract, dead subject.In this work, he insists, through his discussion of Spinoza, that social devel-opment, or, more precisely, ‘the genealogy of social forms’, ‘is not a dialecticalprocess: it implies negativity only in the sense that negativity is understoodas the enemy, as an object to destroy, as a space to occupy, not as a motor of

Going in the Wrong Direction81

4

Bonefeld 1994, p. 44.

5

Negri 1991.

6

Holland 1998.

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