Antonio Negri The End of Sovereignty

The End of Sovereignty
Antonio Negri
The End of Sovereignty
Translated by Ed Emery
polity
Copyright © Antonio Negri, 2022.
This English edition © Polity Press, 2022.
‘Is there a Marxist doctrine of the state?’ first published in Which Socialism?
Marxism, Socialism and Democracy by Norberto Bobbio. Translated by Roger
Griffin. © Polity Press, 1988.
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Contents
Introduction: On the State Form 1
Part I Once Upon a Time . . .

1. John Maynard Keynes and the Capitalist Theory of
the State 9
2. Is There a Marxist Doctrine of the State? 38
Reply to Norberto Bobbio
Part II Having Done with Sovereignty

3. The End of Sovereignty 59
4. Roberto Esposito in Dialogue with Toni Negri 70
5. Toni Negri in Reply to Roberto Esposito 78
6. The State of the State 86
7. On the Concept of Nation State 98
8. Hegemony: Gramsci, Togliatti, Laclau 109
Part III The Extinction of the State

9. On Revolution 121
10. Lenin: From Theory to Practice 126
11. Who Are the Communists? 132
12. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 139
Notes149
Introduction
On the State Form
In selecting articles from among the many materials that could best
illustrate my path in the study of the state form (the work of a life-
time!), it struck me that the phrase that best sums up my work is – to
paraphrase Antonin Artaud – pour en finir avec la souveraineté [‘to
have done with sovereignty’]: I wanted to see an end to the sovereign
state, to that particular form of despotism that the capitalist organi-
zation of bourgeois society has imposed upon us. I wanted to show
how the sovereign bourgeois state, built in modernity (on the ruins
of, but also in continuity with, the barbaric worlds that preceded it),
has now become a weapon in the hands of a declining ruling class, a
class sometimes exhausted in its institutional expressions and at other
times frenetic, zombie, and parafascist. This happened after a few
centuries of development and unspeakable events of death, war, suf-
fering, and disasters imposed on citizen workers. The articles chosen
for this volume are a summary of what I have analysed and written on
the subject over the years.
But at the same time I realized that, while living my life in the
critique of the modern state machine and in the struggle against it,
I had gradually come to isolate myself from the theoretical currents
that dominate what claims to be critical thinking [pensiero critico] on
politics and the state. I emphasize critical thinking, because obviously
I always saw myself as far removed from the conservative or normal-
ized thought that exalts the state and sees it as a force for good in
society; far from ‘critical thinking’, then – in other words far from
those currents of thought in which my own education was completed
and my political passion formed, more than fifty years ago – I mean
the critique that was linked to the denunciation of the action of capi-
talism and its type of state. Why is that thought no longer my friend
2 The End of Sovereignty
today? Because I believe it betrayed the very vocation that had left
its stamp on me from the start. In my view, it has in fact abandoned
the quest for a society in which the despotic power of the state might
be abolished. This happened when the so-called critical thinking of
the second half of the twentieth century came to be identified with
the thought (and action) of the left. That is a left that can no longer
be my friend, because it has changed its attitude towards the state.
Instead of considering it a place of power that, once conquered,
should have had its despotic hold on society destroyed, should have
seen itself transformed as an ordering power of economic reproduc-
tion, and finally should have been dissolved as an autonomous figure
of the monopoly of legitimate violence, this left sees the state rather
as inevitable and has convinced itself to inhabit and use it for what
it is.
At their inception, socialism and, even more, communism defined
themselves as peace- bearing, anti-
war movements that promoted
work and happiness against the sad conditions of life and miserable
social reproduction of workers, and supported the fight for liberty
against the employers, their state, and its monopoly on legitimate
violence. On the other hand, the call was for the abolition of the
state: the state had to be removed. This was the call, and for this
people fought, sometimes losing, sometimes dying, sometimes win-
ning. This past has now been jettisoned by the left and is treated
outrageously by what still purports to be critical thinking. The left
has come to feel ashamed of having been ‘communist’ – as if to say
that communism is synonymous with Stalinism or similar horrors.
In reality it is the other way round, because the Stalinist bureaucrats
sent the rebellious worker to the gulag just as the tsar had done, and
as our capitalist democracies have always treated workers in revolt
or subaltern peoples in the colonies. The abolition of the state, they
say, is a utopian notion, a dangerous leftist fantasy, an extremist
delusion . . .
This was proclaimed by the r eactionaries – who, after the repres-
sion of the Paris Commune (a formidable first example of state
abolition), massacred and banished the communards. Then came
the fascists, who changed banishment into prisons and extermination
camps. They were followed by bureaucrats from all parties, revolu-
tionary and reformist alike, who with equal measures of unparalleled
cynicism and violence proclaimed the autonomy of the political as a
divinity on earth and ensured the exclusion and repression of those
who did not play along but still thought that the real meaning of ‘poli-
tics’ was to be found in class struggle in society. So the left ceased to
be what it was. It became indistinguishable from the right, and criti-

cal thought stopped thinking.
The call for the abolition of the state is still alive; there is no
moment of liberation, no subversive action, no communist project
or constituent practice that does not embody it – yes, as a utopia,
but a concrete one: a utopia that lives and becomes concrete in every
thought of liberation, where by ‘liberation’ we mean the abolition of
the conditions that subordinate human beings to the laws of capital-
ist productivity. This concrete utopia operates in every liberating
action, and its difference from what is not liberating lies in the inten-
sity of the will to erode that statehood, which was established in the
production of sociality and expressed in inequality and exploitation.
Put briefly, the task is to abolish the state as the central moment in
the organization of force against living labour and free citizenship.
Let our enemies smile if they see here again the old workerist banner
of ‘refusal of work’: it rediscovers its taste for the present when it is
raised against capitalist exploitation, which, through the state and
within globalization, has become an increasingly ferocious extraction
of value and wealth from associated living labour.
In order to clarify the rationale behind the present collection of
my writings on the state, I would like to recall an old story from the
world of publishing. In 1968 I was given the task of translating into
Italian and editing for Feltrinelli a German paperback volume of an
encyclopedia of political science. When the volume – 600 pages in
which the activity of the state was subjected to analysis by excellent
professors of public law and distinguished politicians – came out in
1970, being substantially redone in the Italian edition, I wrote as fol-
lows in the Preface:
Perhaps readers will be surprised not to see, among these many entries,
one that they might consider fundamental and that actually features
on the cover of the volume: the concept of the state. This could be
explained by the fact that an entry ‘State’ is also absent from the
German edition. But such an explanation is not convincing; in this case
an entry ‘State’ is absent precisely because of those academic and con-
servative assumptions that we have criticized and that are typical of that
volume. Indeed, the state has always presented itself to academic sci-
ence at least as an ambiguous concept, when trying to define it. On the
one hand, it tends to be representative of power itself, almost a syno-
nym for it. On the other, it looks like the limit of an uninterrupted series
of connotations: the state as sovereignty, as right, as legitimacy – or, in
parallel, as fiscal policy, welfare policy, and so on. Thus, in the light of
these considerations, the state appears as a horizon, a non-conclusive
but nonetheless effective entity that only a full treatment of the prob-
lems associated with it can address properly, as something that only the
entirety of political experience can allow us to define. The immediate
consequence, for academic science (but wasn’t it always its presupposi-
tion?) is that the state is indefinable, because within it is represented
a preconceptual radicality, an essential, foundational structure, from
which political life becomes analysable but which cannot itself be
defined. The mystification therefore becomes perfected in the mystical
representation of the state as something profoundly human, as complex
as humans themselves are, like a generic and collective entity: a limit
not only of series of facts, but of nature and history, of violence and
reasonability. To this we should add organization and subordination,
pointing out that they are necessary concomitants.
The reason why an entry ‘State’ is absent from this edition of the
volume Stato e politica [State and Politics] in the Enciclopedia Feltrinelli
Fischer is quite different. It is absent not because the state is regarded
here as a limit to be approached that will always remain obscure,
given its elusive ontological nature; it is absent because the state is
considered a reality that the new human beings produced by capital-
ist development – these human beings who know nature and history
not as a dark nexus but as their own reality – built and suffered in the
exploitation that the organization of labour determines; and they expe-
rience it as an imposture, to be destroyed by destroying all the forms
through which the state becomes a reality of domination. As if replying
to a long, painful, and terrible question of the oppressed of all times,
the modern proletariat, made master of the world by an alienating and
monstrous mode of production, now understands the state as both its
product and its alienation, all within the production and alienation of
labour. Its relation to power is one that only loathing and a longing
for destruction can characterize. And it is in this light that the state is
still a limit, not abstract but terribly concrete, and not of conceptual
definition but of practical destruction. To see how it works is to know
what it is: in this case, practice nurtures theory in order to impose its
own dissolution on it. Here is the new meaning of the absence of an
entry ‘State’ in this encyclopaedia, which is all aimed at combining the
understanding of political facts with a desire to separate a new proletar-
ian practice from the misery of state domination.1
These paragraphs were written between 1968 and 1970, during a

period when the working-class struggle proved to be decisive and
successful in every social conflict, both domestically and globally. We
were then at the end of the ‘glorious thirty’ – the name given to the 30
years during which Keynesianism and Fordism, introduced into the
economic and productive policies of European societies that emerged
after the Second World War, created the conditions for post-war
recovery and for the consolidation of capitalist development. That

was when my analysis of state form began; and it was devoted to
unravelling the law of class struggle as the cause of capitalist develop-
ment and the origin of its various compositions and crises. Not that
this law has not always been in operation, even before the period we
are considering. However, in the twentieth century (and in relation
to the Soviet revolution and the international action of the commu-
nists), it came fully to the fore. Step by step, then, a new figure of the
state emerged through the capitalist effort to hold back the expansion
of the red revolutionary movement, and at every turn the violent
content of state action was – directly or indirectly – defined by the
balance of power between the parties involved: the state and living
labour. Power and counterpower, too, we might say: it becomes
increasingly clear, in the eyes of living labour, that the well-being and
happiness achieved are inversely proportional to the effective power
of the state. Let’s see how things went. The October Revolution
compelled capitalist governments to carry out a fundamental reform
of their policy throughout the ‘short century’ (1917–1989): this was
the triumph of Keynesian policies and of a certain ‘politics of plan-
ning’, even in the advanced capitalist countries. It meant above all
the conquest and consolidation of the welfare state for the western
proletariat, or rather for the social reproduction of living labour.
This radical reform of the state would extend into the period after
the second great imperialist war of the twentieth century; and then,
around 1968, it would lead into another revolutionary phase, in
favour of the working classes. During that same period the greedy
imperialist and colonial talons were gradually cut off the central states
– only the talons, mind; yet something had been taken away, and the
central states were still hurting. Hence a new cycle: the invention of
neoliberalism, an extraordinary backlash for capitalist initiative. Was
this initiative a restoration of state power from before 1917? Certainly
not. To obtain a reversal in the negative trend of the rate of profit, to
start accumulating again by taming the movement of living labour,
capital had nevertheless been forced into globalization – and thus,
once again, large amounts of sovereignty were surrendered by the
state. Far from there being a restoration of the old power of the belle
époque, a certain rebalancing of the class relations was achieved only
by paying a very high price in terms of sovereignty.
The pieces contained in the present volume, the fifth that I have
put together for Polity, tell this history. Part I, ‘Once Upon a Time’,
has an article that I wrote in 1968 on the first great transformation
of the capitalist state in the twentieth century, the one caused by the
triumph of Keynesianism. This text has in some way become a staple

of Marxist reading on the theme of the capitalist state between the
two wars, up until the 1970s. It should be accompanied by two other
pieces from the 1970s, one on the communist theory of the state
and the other on the crisis of public finance and the state (the latter
cannot be published here but is already available in English since
1994).2 They address the historical configurations of the ‘planner
state’ of twentieth-century capitalism.
Referring the reader to these texts in addition to the one on Keynes
allows me to open the book up to research material on more current
topics. Part II contains my reflections on the crisis of modern sover-
eignty. For instance, in the 1970s I was engaged in a fierce debate
on the state with Norberto Bobbio, an eminent bourgeois political
scientist and recently I debated sovereignty with Roberto Esposito.
Both these encounters are useful for deepening our awareness of the
crisis of the modern state.
A further extension would be the pages that carry a reflection that
has characterized my work for many years. I’m talking about my
reflection on the shift from discipline to control in the transforma-
tion of capitalist command over living labour in the post-Fordist era
(post-Fordist in industrial policy, but also post-Taylorist when it
comes to labour policies and post-Keynesian in terms of economic
macro-politics). This is a study of the transformation of the form of
sovereignty from the figure of transcendent and local command into
a dispositif of immanent and global control. In Empire, together with
Michael Hardt, I followed this process of transformation (or extinc-
tion?) of the concept of sovereignty – a transformation that left empty
some central places in the table of categories of modern political
theory. In addition to the material in the present volume, the inter-
ested reader can consult my earlier Marx and Foucault (Polity, 2017).
Finally, I return to the initial slogan: abolition of the state. Here
too it would be necessary to expand our scope considerably, and in
particular to answer a question that immediately springs to the fore.
It is well and good to destroy the state, but where do we go from
there? I shall attempt an answer to this question in the next volume
of this collection, through a series of writings on the concept of
the common. For now, let us content ourselves with addressing the
old slogan of state abolition – with retracing the history that stands
between Lenin and us, between a past that is now almost distant and
a future that we wish were close.
Paris, spring 2021
Part I
Once Upon a Time . . .
1
John Maynard Keynes and the
Capitalist Theory of the State*
1929 as a fundamental moment for a periodization of

the modern state
Fifty years have passed since the events of Red October 1917. Those
events were the climax of a historical movement that began with the
June 1848 insurrection on the streets of Paris, when the modern
industrial proletariat first discovered its class autonomy, its own,
independent antagonism to the capitalist system. A further decisive
turning point was, again, in Paris: it was the Commune of 1871,
whose defeat led to the generalization of the idea of the party and to
awareness of the need to organize class autonomy politically.
The intervals 1848 to 1871, then 1871 to 1917: this periodization
seems to provide the only adequate framework for a theorization of
the contemporary state. A definition of today’s state has to take into
account the total change in relations of class power that was revealed
in the revolutionary crises that spanned the latter half of the nine-
teenth century. The problem imposed on political thought and action
by the class challenge of 1848 led to a new critical awareness, to some
extent confused, of the central role now assumed by the working
class in the capitalist system. Unless we grasp this class determi-
nant behind the transformation of capital and the state, we remain
trapped within bourgeois theory; we end up with a formalized sphere
of ‘politics’, separated from capital as a dynamic class relation. We
* Originally published in Antonio Negri, Revolution Retrieved: Writings on Marx,

Keynes, Capitalist Crisis and New Social Subjects, 1967–1983, trans. Ed Emery
and John Merrington, Red Notes: London 1988, under the title ‘Keynes and the
Capitalist Theory of the State post-1929’.
must go beyond banal descriptions of the process of industrialization;

our starting point is the identification of a secular phase of capitalist
development in which the dialectic of exploitation (the inherent sub-
ordination and antagonism of the wage–work relation) was socialized
– a process that led to its extension over the entire fabric of political
and institutional relations in the modern state. Any definition of the
contemporary state that does not encompass these understandings is
like Hegel’s dark night in which all cows appear grey.
The year 1917 is a crucial point of rupture in the process: at
that point, history became contemporary. The truth already demon-
strated in 1848 – the possibility that the working class would appear
as an independent variable in the process of capitalist development,
even to the extent of imposing its own political autonomy – now
achieved full realization, Hegel’s Durchbruch ins Freie [‘breakthrough
into freedom’]. The land of the Soviets was the place where working-
class antagonism had been structured in the independent form of a
state. As such, it became a focus of internal political identification for
the working class internationally, because it was a present, immedi-
ately real, objective class possibility.
At that point socialism took a step from utopia into reality. From
then on, theories of the state would have to take into account more
than just the problems involved in the further socialization of exploi-
tation. They would have to come to terms with a working class that
had achieved political identity and had become a historical protago-
nist in its own right. The state would now have to face the subversive
potential of a whole series of class movements, which in their material
content already carried revolutionary overtones. This means that the
enormous political potential of this first leap into working-class world
revolution was internalized within the given composition of the class.
At every level of capitalist organization there was now a deeper, more
threatening and contradictory presence of the working class, which
was now autonomous and politically consistent. In this respect, the
originality of 1917, the unique character of the challenge it presented
by comparison to preceding cycles of working-class struggle, towers
supreme. From there on, all problems acquired new perspectives and
an entirely new dimension; the working-class viewpoint could now
find its full independent expression.
Of course, the capitalist class became aware of the real impact of
the October Revolution only slowly. At first the movement was seen
essentially as an external fact. The initial response was an attempt,
successful to a varying degree, to externalize the danger, to isolate
the Soviet republic militarily and diplomatically, and to turn the
John Maynard Keynes and the Capitalist Theory of the State 11
revolution into a foreign issue. Then there was the internal threat.
What was the general response of capital to the international wave
of workers’ struggles in the period that immediately followed – I
mean to the creation of powerful new mass trade unions and to the
explosion of the factory council movement, which competed for con-
trol over production?1 During this period, only backward, immature
ruling classes responded with fascist repression. But the more general
response, which was to reproduce reformist models of containment,
only scratched the surface of the new political reality. The overall
goal of capital in the period that followed was to defeat the working-
class vanguard or, more specifically, to undermine the material basis
of their leadership throughout this phase – that is, a class composition
that featured a relatively highly ‘professionalized’ sector (typically,
engineering), which came with an ideology of self-management as
its corollary. The primary objective, then, was to destroy the basis of
an alliance between workers’ vanguards and proletarian masses – the
very alliance on which Bolshevik organization was premised. To cut
the vanguard off from the factory and the factory from the class, to
eradicate the party from within the class: this was the aim of capitalist
reorganization, the specific form of counterattack against 1917 in the
West.
Taylorism, the Fordist revolution in production, and the new
‘American way’ of organizing work had precisely this function: to
isolate the Bolshevik vanguards from the class and to rob them of
their hegemonic role in production through the massification of the
productive process and the deskilling of the labour force. This in turn
accelerated the injection into production of new proletarian forces
that broke the striking power of the old working-class aristocracies,
neutralized their political potential, and prevented their regroup-
ment. Earlier, in the mid-nineteenth century, capital had attempted
to break the nascent proletarian front with the help of a new industrial
structure that fostered the creation of labour aristocracies. Similarly
after 1917, the working class had achieved political recomposition,
in the wake of that breaking point in the cycle, capital once again
turned to technological means of repression. As always, technological
attack – increases in the organic composition of new sectors, assem-
bly lines flow production, scientific organization of work, subdivision
and fragmentation of jobs, and so on – was capital’s first and almost
instinctive response to the rigidity of the existing class composition
and to the threat it engendered to capitalist control.
But the qualitatively new situation after 1917 imposed limits pre-
cisely here. The possibilities for the recomposition of the labour force
in the phase of post-war reconversion certainly existed in the short

run. But the capitalist class soon realized that this reorganization
would open up an even more threatening situation in the long term.
Not only would capital have to contend with the enlarged reproduc-
tion of the class that these changes would inevitably bring about; it
would have to face its immediate political recomposition too, and at
a higher level of massification and socialization of the workforce. The
October Revolution had introduced once and for all a political qual-
ity of subversion into the material needs and struggles of the working
class, a spectre that could not be exorcized. Given this new situation,
the technological solution would backfire in the end. It would only
relaunch the political recomposition of the class at a higher level. At
the same time, this response or counterattack was not sufficient for
confronting the real problem that faced capital, namely how to rec-
ognize the political emergence of the working class while finding new
means, through a complete restructuration of the social mechanism
for the extraction of relative surplus value, of controlling this new
class politically within the limits of the system. Conceding working
class autonomy had to be accompanied by an ability to control it
politically. The recognition of the originality of 1917, of the fact that
the entire existing material structure of capital had been thrown out
of gear and that there was no turning back, would sooner or later
become a political necessity for capital.
The day of reckoning was not long in coming. As always, capital’s
political initiative has to be forced to free itself. Soon after the defeat
of the General Strike in Britain – the event that seemed to mark the
outer limit of the expanding post-war revolutionary process – the
spectre of 1917 returned in a new and more threatening guise. The
collapse after 1929 was all the more critical as a result of this loom-
ing threat. Capitalism now confronted a working class that had been
socially levelled by the repression exerted against it, had become
massified to a point where its autonomy needed recognition, and
had to be both acknowledged in its subversive potential and grasped
as the decisive element and motive power behind any future model
of development. The great post-1929 crisis was a moment of truth,
a rebounding upon capital’s structure of the previous technological
attack on the working class, and the proof of capital’s limitations of
that attack: the lesson of 1917 now imposed itself on the system as
a whole via this delayed reaction. Controllable only in the short run,
the political initiative of the working class in 1917, in all its precise
and ferocious destructiveness, now manifested itself in a crisis of the
entire system, showing that it could not be ignored or evaded. The
earlier attempts to avoid the problem, to ignore the effective reality of

the specific political impact of the working class on the system, now
boomeranged on the system itself. The crisis struck deepest precisely
where capital was strongest and where technological conversion had
been most thorough: in the United States.
In this sense the post-1929 crisis represents a moment of decisive
importance in the emergence of the contemporary state: a political
turning point, largely misunderstood by the economistic traditions
of Marxism. The chief casualty of the crisis was the material basis of
the liberal constitutional state; 1929 swept away any residual nostal-
gia for the values that 1917 had destroyed. The Wall Street crash of
Black Thursday 1929 destroyed the political and state mythologies
of a century of bourgeois domination. It marked the historic end
of constitutional law [stato di diritto], understood as an apparatus of
state power aimed at formally protecting individual rights through
the bourgeois safeguards of due process, and established with a view
to guaranteeing bourgeois hegemony on the basis of citizenship. This
was the final burial of the classic liberal myth of the separation of
state and market, the end of laissez-faire.
But this was not simply a matter of collapse of the classic relation
between state and civil society and the arrival of an interventionist
state. After all, the period after 1871 had also seen a growth in state
intervention and a socialization of the mode of production. What
was new now and marked this moment as decisive was the recogni-
tion of the emergence of the working class and of the ineliminable
antagonism it represented within the system as a necessary feature,
which state power would have to accommodate. Too often (and not
just in Italy, with the limited perspective that fascism allowed)2 the
novelty of the new state that emerged from the great crisis has been
characterized as a transition from a liberal to a totalitarian form of
state power. This is a distorted view: it mistakes the immediate and
local recourse to fascist and corporatist solutions, the form of regime,
for the central, overriding feature that distinguishes the new histori-
cal form of the capitalist state: the reconstruction of a state based on
the discovery of the inherent antagonism of the working class. To be
sure, this reconstruction has possible totalitarian implications, but
only in the sense that it involved an awareness of intrinsic antagonism
and struggle at all levels of the state.
Paradoxically, capital turned to Marx, or at least learned to read
Das Kapital (from its own viewpoint, naturally, which, however
mystified, is nonetheless efficacious). Once the antagonism was rec-
ognized, the problem was to make it function in such a way as to
prevent one pole of the antagonism from breaking free into inde-
pendent destructive action.
Working-class political revolution could in the future turn its con-
tinuous struggle for power into a dynamic element within the system.
The working class was to be controlled functionally within a series
of mechanisms of equilibrium that would be dynamically readjusted
from time to time by a regulated phasing of the ‘income revolution’.
The state was now prepared to descend into civil society, as it were,
and re-create the source of its legitimacy continuously, in a process
of permanent readjustment of the conditions of equilibrium. The
new material basis of the constitution became the state as planner or,
better still, the state as the plan. For soon this mechanism for re-
equilibrating incomes between the forces in play was articulated in
the form of periodic planning. The model of equilibrium assumed
for a plan over a given period meant that every initiative, every read-
justment of equilibrium to the new level opened up a process of
revision in the constitutional state itself. The path to stability now
seemed to depend on the recognition of this new, precarious basis of
state power: the dynamic of state planning implied acceptance of a
sort of permanent revolution as its object – a paradoxical Aufhebung
(taking over, recuperating, transforming for own ends) of the slogan
by capital.
But the science of capital necessarily mystifies as much as it reveals.
It grasped the new relation of class forces; it registered the painful
process whereby the working class was internalized within the life of
the state, and also its central dynamic role as the mainspring of capi-
talist development. But at the same time it mystified and hid, not so
much the antagonistic nature of this emergence of the working class,
as the generality of its effects on the system. It concealed the violence
that was required to maintain this precarious, controlled equilibrium
as the new form of the state. Indeed it even exalted, and powerfully,
the new society and its violent sphere of action as the realization
of the common good, as a general will in action. In this interplay
between mystification and critical awareness of the new relation of
class forces, the science of capital once again revealed the neces-
sary co-presence of contradictory elements. As always, it was forced
to carry out the laborious task of analysis and apologetics, to steer
the narrow path between a critical awareness of the precariousness
of the existing framework and a determination to achieve stability.
Ultimately the only possible solution to this contradiction is to place
one’s faith in an independent political will, in a sort of political mira-
cle capable of reuniting the various necessary but opposing elements
of the capitalist system – socialization of the mode of production and

socialization of exploitation; organization and violence; organization
of society for the exploitation of the working class.
It is not the basic nature of the capitalist process that has changed
but rather the framework, the dimensions along which exploitation
now had to operate and the class protagonist over which capital was
obliged to assert itself. A political miracle seemed all the more neces-
sary as the antagonistic presence of the class meant that every sign of
friction was cause for alarm, every mistake was likely to prove cata-
strophic, and every movement could denote a dramatic change in the
power balance between the two classes locked in struggle. It was the
extraordinary strength of the working class, backed by the revolution-
ary experience it had accumulated, that made its mark and imposed
those disequilibria that constantly required intervention at all levels
of the system.
Capitalist science had to register this fact. The extent to which it
did so gives the measure, so to speak, of its grasp and understanding
of the new situation. To follow this complex process, unmasking it,
and distinguishing its scientific and ideological components is the
task of working-class critique. In this chapter I trace the development
of Keynes’ thought and reflection on the overall crisis of the capital-
ist system from the October Revolution to the depression years. For
it was he who showed the greatest awareness and the most refined
political intuition in confronting the new situation ahead of capital
at this crucial turning point. It was Keynes’ disenchanted diagnosis
that indicated to the international capitalist class the therapy to be
applied. Keynes was perhaps the most penetrating theorist of capital-
ist reconstruction and of the new form of the capitalist state, which
emerged in reaction to the impact of the 1917 revolutionary move-
ment of the working class.
Keynes and the period 1917–1929:

Understanding the impact of the October Revolution
on the structure of capitalism
How then can we trace the development of capitalist awareness

during this period? In what form and how deeply did capital grasp the
radical implications of the 1929 crisis? And above all, to what extent
did it become aware of the links between 1917 and 1929?
As noted earlier, the October Revolution was seen in two ways:
internationally, as a problem of counter-revolution, of isolating Soviet
Russia; domestically, as a problem of repressing the powerful trade

union and political movement of the working class, which extended
this revolutionary experience to the whole capitalist world. The expe-
rience showed itself to be homogeneous; both where the movement
took the form of workers’ councils (1918–26) and where it was more
straightforwardly trade unionist, the common reference point was a
certain type of class vanguard and a demand for self-management in
production.3
It is remarkable how these two aspects of the problem were kept
rigidly separate at the time by the international capitalist leadership.
Different techniques were used to respond to the two revolutionary
challenges. Capitalist thinking was not yet convinced of the interna-
tionally unified presence of the working class. Its separation of these
two aspects explains its catastrophic incomprehension of the real
situation.
This at least was the view of John Maynard Keynes. If the key
moment for a capitalist reconstruction of the international order was
the Versailles peace settlement, then this was an opportunity lost.
In this last act of a century-old tradition of power relations between
nation states, there was, he argued, a total failure to understand the
new dimensions of the class struggle, and this failure became evident
in the separation of the two aspects of the problem. How else could
the folly of Versailles be explained? The Treaty, instead of setting up
a plan to save Europe from ruin, merely expressed the frustrations
and vendettas of centuries of power politics. With revolution beating
at the gates, the leaders of the victorious powers merely set up a puni-
tive system, incapable of rebuilding the European order. Diplomatic
hypocrisy triumphed even over the commitments made in the armi-
stice agreements.
This was no way to defend the system and to give it a new struc-
ture. On the contrary, it could lead only to a deepening of the crisis.
In particular, the economic folly of the reparations imposed on
Germany ensured that the effects of the peace treaty would be disas-
trously prolonged, not just in Germany but cumulatively throughout
the integrated network of the world market:
If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, venge-

ance, I dare predict, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long
that final civil war between the forces of reaction and the despairing
convulsions of revolution, before which the horrors of the late German
war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the
civilization and the progress of our generation.4
What was the correct course, then? It was one and only one: to
consolidate the economy of Central Europe as a bulwark against the
Soviet threat from the East and as a check against internal revolution-
ary movements – in short, to reunite the two fronts in the capitalist
defence system:
Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist
system was to debauch the currency – Lenin was certainly right. There
is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society
. . . By combining a popular hatred of the class of entrepreneurs with
the blow already given to social security by the violent and arbitrary
disturbance of contract and of the established equilibrium of wealth
which is the inevitable result of inflation, these governments are fast
rendering impossible a continuance of the social and economic order of
the nineteenth century.5
This was Keynes’ position in 1919. By tracing his thought from

this polemic to the General Theory, we may perhaps be able to grasp
the difficult transition of the overall capitalist strategy during the
interwar crisis. At this early stage, Keynes was warning against the
Treaty’s disastrous consequences and the implicit illusion that class
relations had not been changed by the working class’s break with the
pre-war system. We are still far from any precise theoretical grasp of
the new political cycle of the contemporary state. There is scarcely
any hint of Keynes’ later capacity to transform his awareness of the
working class’s rupture with the system into a grasp of the raison
d’être of capitalist economic growth. Yet this intuition of the new
class situation, primitive but fundamental, already illuminates the
central problem of the years to come: how to block, how to control
the impact of the October Revolution on the capitalist order. In order
to discuss the question of the continuity of Keynes’ thought and its
theoretical coherence, we must go beyond the literal meaning of his
writings and uncover the general problematic underlying them.6
At this stage we are dealing with a political intuition. It is still far
from becoming a scientific system. Indeed, from the perspective of
the mature system, Ohlin was probably more Keynesian than Keynes
when he argued, in 1925, against the Keynesian view of the effect
of reparations, pointing out that the payment of reparations could
make a dynamic contribution to a new level of international eco-
nomic equilibrium.7 In any case, by 1922, Keynes’ own position had
changed. The ‘intolerable anguish and fury’8 that had forced him to
leave the Treaty’s negotiating table in Paris was by then placated and
his vision was more superficially optimistic:
If I look back two years and read again what I wrote then, I see
that perils which were ahead are now past safely. The patience of the
common people of Europe and the stability of its institutions have
survived the worst shocks they will receive. Two years ago, the Treaty,
which outraged justice, mercy and wisdom, represented the momen-
tary will of the victorious countries. Would the victims be patient? Or
would they be driven by despair and privation to shake society’s foun-
dations? We have the answer now. They have been patient.9
And yet Keynes’ basic political intuition already contained a

radically new appreciation of the major dimensions of capitalist
development. Robertson recognized this with extreme lucidity:
Now the startling thing about this analysis of the economic structure
of Europe is that it is in some respects very different from, and indeed
diametrically opposed to, that of pre-war optimistic, free-trade, pacific
philosophy, and represents much more nearly that upon which, con-
sciously or unconsciously, the edifices of protectionism, militarism and
imperialism are reared.10
Robertson goes on to point out that this implicitly goes against

the concept of laissez-faire and that here questions of international
politics are seen in terms of the internal organization of the relation
of forces.
Apart from its public notoriety, Keynes’ warning of 1919 appears
to have had little influence. It was rejected by the press: ‘Indeed
one of the most striking features of Mr Keynes’ book is the political
inexperience, not to say ingenuousness, which it reveals.’11 Politicians
young and old responded basically in one voice, of univocal derision.
Here is Clémenceau:
Strong in economic argument, Mr Keynes . . . challenges without any

moderation the abusive demands of the Allies (read ‘of France’) . . .
These reproaches are made with such brutal violence that I would
not comment upon them, if the author had not shamelessly thought
to serve his cause by giving them publicity. This demonstrates all too
clearly how unbalanced certain minds have become.12
And here is Churchill:
With an indisputable common sense Keynes illustrated the monstrous-

ness of the financial and economic clauses. On all these points his
opinion is good. But, dragged on by his natural distaste for the eco-
nomic terms which were to be solemnly dictated, he made a wholesale
condemnation of the entire edifice of the peace treaties. That he is
qualified to speak of the economic aspects, one cannot doubt; but on

the other and more important side of the problem, he could judge no
better than others.13
As for capital, its response was the old one, as old as 1848 or 1871,
albeit pursued more drastically. It involved the use of repressive force
to defeat the political movements of the class, mass sackings of mili-
tants, and, in the second instance, fresh advances in the absorption
of labour power through a technological leap and a refinement of the
mechanisms for the extraction of relative surplus value. The workers’
councils and the powerful current of revolutionary syndicalism of the
early 1920s were defeated – or rather were denied the possibility of
any revolutionary dialectic between the class vanguard and the prole-
tarian masses, which had been their organizational basis. They were
simply undermined by the recomposition of the workforce in key sec-
tors: by new techniques for rationalizing labour, deskilling, and the
mass assembly line. As always, the first response imposed on capital
by the wave of working-class struggles was reformist: by the early
1920s this became a generalized process of technological innovation.
Capital was forced to absorb the thrust of the working class via an
expansion into new sectors, through a radical reorganization of the
factors of production.
But how far was it possible to pursue this old path? Had not the
situation totally altered? Keynes’ position, against the classic liberal
separation of politics, was a generic insistence on the interiorization
of the political element within the economy. But even this generic
truth was forgotten by the capitalist class; there was a refusal – grave
in its consequences – to face the fact that Soviet Russia now offered
the working class an inescapable political point of reference. If its
project of containment was going to succeed, the capitalist system
would have to prove itself capable of recuperating the working class
as a political entity. The mechanism of relative surplus value was
not sufficient. Indeed, its only effect was to enlarge the contradic-
tions of capitalist development, creating a further massification of the
class and accentuating the propensity for cyclical crisis. The expan-
sion of supply (growth in productive capacity and mass production
industries) did not effectively call forth a corresponding pressure in
demand. ‘Demand’ was not yet recognized as an effective subject – the
working class.
Keynes’ position, still only at the stage of political intuition, was
insufficient also from a different standpoint: it required to be worked
out scientifically. His strength lay in the fact that he laid down the
methodological conditions for a solution; he identified the problem

correctly. To follow his scientific and political activity in the 1920s
is to follow a voice that cried in the wilderness, in the bitter tones
of a prophet unarmed. But at the same time we witness the gradual
transformation of a political intuition into scientific discourse. This
took place under the continuous impact of political events, under the
pressure of the working class and the political necessities imposed on
capital.14
I have already noted how, according to Robertson, laissez-faire
was abandoned as early as in the Economic Consequences of the Peace.
But this was only implicitly the case in Keynes’ understanding of the
precarious state of the international order after the destructiveness
of the world war and the revolutionary upsurge that followed. From
now on, the problem of the crisis of the old order was to stay focused
primarily on the British political scene.
Say’s law was no longer valid, because it did not recognize that the
maintenance of the capitalist system might be a problem. It postu-
lated that the system was entirely self-regulating and spontaneous,
which means that it denied the existence of the working class as a
potential negation of the system. Now it is true that, as the problem
of the working class gradually assumed a scientific formulation in
Keynes’ writings, it tended to be defined according to the mystified
professional tradition of economic science: as a problem of employ-
ment in the crude objectivist tradition of classical economics.15 But
during this early phase of his political approach to the problem, it is
the class struggle that is given the upper hand and is called to his-
toricize the categories of economic science. Science is backtracked to
historical reality. The British working class appears in these writings
in all its revolutionary autonomy.16 To his university colleagues and
liberal-minded friends, to those who clamoured that the General
Strike was illegal and that it stepped outside the limits of constitu-
tional action, Keynes gave a short reply: ‘That may be, but so what?’
Class movements may appear illegal, but this is only because the
balance of the forces that conditioned the previous system and deter-
mined the previous legality has disappeared. The relations of force
have changed, and legality must be adjusted to fit the new situation?17
Say’s law was no longer valid because the variables of the political
and economic equilibrium had altered. The new factor in the situa-
tion was the autonomy of the working class.
The trade unions are strong enough to interfere with the free play of
the forces of supply and demand, and public opinion, albeit with a
grumble and with more than a suspicion that the trade unions are grow-
ing dangerous, supports the trade unions in their main contention that
coal-miners ought not to be the victims of cruel economic forces which
they never put in motion.18
To create a new political equilibrium thus meant taking this new

situation, these new relations of force into account. If Say’s equations
of supply and demand no longer functioned, that was because new
unknowns had been introduced. And it was now necessary to inte-
grate these unknowns into economic science.
The idea of the old-world party, that you can, for example, alter the
value of money and then leave the consequential adjustments to be
brought about by the forces of supply and demand, belongs to the days
of fifty or a hundred years ago when trade unions were powerless, and
when the economic juggernaut was allowed to crash along the highway
of progress without obstruction and even with applause.19
One should not underestimate the depth and importance of this

critique in the period of the 1920s, and from a scientific point of
view, too. This attack on Say’s law implied the destruction of a
century-old ideology, a deeply rooted mental attitude that was turn-
ing all the more solid the less it corresponded to reality. It implied
the demystification of a set of fundamental values and norms that had
guided bourgeois political science in the nineteenth century.
‘The same bourgeois mind’, Marx wrote,
which praises division of labour in the workshop, life-long annexation

of the labourer to a partial operation, and his complete subjection to
capital as being an organisation of labour that increases its productive-
ness, that same bourgeois mind denounces with equal vigour every
conscious attempt to socially control and regulate the process of pro-
duction as an inroad upon such sacred things as the right of property,
freedom and unrestricted play for the bent of the individual capitalist.
It is very characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists of the factory
system have nothing more damning to urge against a general organisa-
tion of the labour of society than that it would turn all society into one
immense factory.20
The Keynesian critique of Say’s law was thus a radical destruction

of the object of economic science, insofar as political economy was
structurally premised on the theory of economic equilibrium, on an
integrated and functional symbiosis of elements that allowed infi-
nite free access to the world of wealth. Economic science had been
constructed on the notion that these presuppositions were somehow

‘natural’. Once they were subjected to a fundamental critique, the
‘risk’ that Marx referred to, indeed the likelihood, that the whole
society would be transformed into one gigantic factory was implicitly
accepted.
This, however, is as far as Keynes’ critique went. The destruc-
tion of the object served only for its reconstruction. Later he would
even state that the neoclassical laws of economic equilibrium would
again come into their own, once conditions of full employment were
reached.21 The bourgeois dialectic knows no sublation, it cannot over-
throw its object. Whenever Keynes reaches the extreme limits of his
critique, he is paralysed by a philosophy that stops him in his tracks.
Even when renouncing the more vulgar mystifications, he remains
trapped within the arcane world of commodity fetishism; he falls
back on formal schemas and sets about reconstructing the conditions
for a balanced economy. Apart from equilibrium, the reaffirmation
of the mystifying form of general equivalence, there is no other goal
to aim for. There is nothing left but the ‘party of catastrophe’,22 the
despairing conviction that history – that is, everything beyond the
equilibrium – is nothing but the work of imbeciles: ‘Neither profound
causes nor inevitable fate, nor magnificent wickedness.’23
‘The problem of want and poverty and the economic struggle
between classes and nations is nothing but a frightful muddle, a tran-
sitory and unnecessary muddle.’24
Hence the formal equilibrium that the scientist attempts to restore
at the very limit of the possibilities of bourgeois knowledge. There is
not even a sense of full and secure conviction: he is consciously dis-
guising what is, basically and necessarily, an irrational obligation, an
obscure substitute for any content of rationality.25
Clearly, then, after this first attack on the nineteenth-century ide-
ology of laissez-faire, after this instinctive appreciation of the new
situation created by the irruption of working-class autonomy, Keynes’
objective would be to reconstruct a new model of equilibrium. But
it was only with the General Theory of 1936 that this project took
definitive form. In the 1920s his work remained primarily critical:
he attacked the restoration of the gold standard26 and identified the
new phase of socialization that capitalist production had entered.27
Above all, he insisted on the need for state intervention to mediate
class conflict and guarantee economic equilibrium.28 This work was
essentially of a critical rather than systematic nature. The terms of the
new class relationship are not yet integrated within Keynes’ analysis
in any systematic way; they have not yet become a constitutive part
of the notions of effective demand and growing risk, or of the new

theory regarding interest rates. They have not yet become a system.
If we examine the most significant element of this preparatory
phase in Keynes’ work, his argument for state interventionism, it is
evident that this is simply a corollary of his critique of laissez-faire:
this critique implied awareness of the massification of the working
class and the consequent difficulty of ensuring equilibrium. What is
still lacking is the specification of the new qualitative consequences
of this irruption of the working class for capitalist development as
a whole. The proposed state intervention is still theorized only in
political terms: it derives from the need to ensure a wider base for
development through an alliance between the progressive bourgeoisie
and the socialists. It is not yet argued on the basis of a clear scientific
appreciation of the new dynamic of class relations and the role of the
working class in it.29
In making this distinction, one needs to stress yet another gen-
eral theoretical factor. It was neither original nor sufficient simply
to register the socialization and massification of capitalist produc-
tion, and hence to argue for increased state intervention. First, this
could grasp only partially the character of the new form of state that
emerged through the crisis. And, secondly, that form corresponded
historically just to the first type of conceptualization of the state, the
one organized against the emergent working class. The Bonapartist
regime, the fascist regime in the case of backward Italy, or certain
variants of Prussian state socialism during the period of struggle after
1870 are examples of this type. The specific characteristic of the
new form of state that emerged after 1929 was rather a type of class
dynamic, at work within the framework of state interventionism – that is,
on which intervention was premised. Only the experience of the great
crisis of 1929 would allow capitalist science to make this further step
towards a new definition of the state. For this to be possible, the 1917
Revolution had to triumph historically over the isolation into which
capitalism had sought to constrict it.
Keynes: The shift from politics to science (1929:

The working class within capital)
It would seem natural to suppose that the events of 1917 had no

bearing on those of 1929. But behind the obviousness of this state-
ment lies a fabric of historical relations that, if we can identify them,
will give a greater overall meaning to the crisis of 1929, even if they
do not wholly explain it. This is because, while on the one hand the
1929 crisis was a direct product of the nature of the United States’
economic system, on the other hand it was created (a) by an accu-
mulation of contradictions within the system that went back to the
beginning of the century, and (b) in particular by their accentuation,
by the fact that the impact of the working class in individual capital-
ist countries in the 1920s, at the political and trade union level, had
made the massification of production necessary. A further reason for
the fact that the crisis immediately took international dimensions was
the series of instabilities in trade relations that war, peace, revolution,
and the attempted counter-revolution had brought about.30 Even
capitalist understandings of the crisis accept this chain of causes – at
least at the political level, where 1917 appears as one of the causes of
1929 by virtue of the looming alternative it represents.31
As an external explanation, this is all right as far as it goes. Now,
the role played by Keynes was to make this explanation work within
an analysis of the crisis – to make it scientific. An ongoing problem
finally finds a possible solution, being spurred by the rigours of the
crisis:
While Keynes did much for the Great Depression, it is no less true
that the Great Depression did much for Keynes. It provided challenge,
drama, experimental confirmation. He entered it the sort of man who
might be expected to embrace the General Theory if it were explained
to him. From the previous record, one cannot say more. Before it was
over, he had emerged with the prize in hand, the system of thought for
which he will be remembered.32
In fact the crisis revealed the dialectical functioning of the indi-

vidual elements that his analysis had identified. What, in his view,
were the factors underlying the 1929 crisis? It was a build-up of an
excess of supply that had a direct effect on the level of net investment,
lowering it, and therefore also determined lower values in capital’s
schedule of marginal efficiency. This means that we can understand
the specificity of the 1929 crisis only if we understand the conditions
of economic development in the 1920s, when the broadening of the
supply base – a process that occurred in the course of reconverting
war industry via technological innovation, an extraordinary increase
in the productivity of labour, and a consequent growth in the pro-
duction of durable goods – was not accompanied by a change in
the relationship of supply to demand. The political ruling class of
the period held on virtuously to notions of ‘financial prudence’ that
were a crude mask for dyed-in-the-wool conservatism. It would not
accept that the massification of supply should be matched by an

equivalent massification of demand – in fact it went out of its way to
try to defend political guarantees for the independence of supply. An
increasing socialization of capital was matched by capital’s misguided
claims to a political autonomy. And now, Keynes concludes, we are
paying the price for our lack of understanding.33
This is the origin of the General Theory, Keynes’ political mani-
festo. It is a manifesto of conservative political thinking, in which,
paradoxically, a sense of present depression combines with anxiety
about a doubtful future to force a systematic revolutionizing of the
whole of capitalist economics. It has been said that ‘the vision of
capitalism as a system always in imminent danger of falling into a
state of stagnation . . . permeates and, in a certain sense, dominates
the General Theory’.34
This is true if we understand that imminent crisis as a political
fact that Keynes registers as such and pits himself against in order to
reverse it. In the General Theory his references to theories of stagna-
tion are polemical, an implication that a capitalist destiny that may
have been unavoidable yesterday is clearly unacceptable today, if the
system is to have any hope of saving itself. This is because to refer
to ‘demand’ is to refer to the working class, to a mass movement
that has found a political identity, to the possibility of insurrection
and subversion of the system. Keynes is a clear-sighted, intelligent
conservative who prepares to fight what he knows is coming. And
it is from this tension born of desperation that political will gains
the strength to offer itself as a complete and systematic ideological
proposition. Herein lies the necessity of Keynesian ideology.
Right from the early sections of the General Theory, we see how the
relationship with the future is an essential part of Keynes’ analysis of
the inner workings of capital. The notion of expectation unites the
present with the future: expectations have a direct influence on levels
of employment inasmuch as they have a direct effect on determining
capital’s level of marginal efficiency.35
Up to this point, Keynes is with the classical economists. But today
the situation is different: those expectations, which must be based
on entrepreneurial confidence if they are to produce positive values,
have now been thrown off balance by a whole gamut of uncontrol-
lable risks – and this at a time when the highly organic composition
of capital has even less tolerance for large areas of uncertainty. The
crisis has destroyed confidence and certainty in the future; it has
destroyed capital’s fundamental convention according to which
results and consequences must match up to expectations. So Keynes’
first imperative is to remove the fear of the future. The future must be
fixed as present. The convention must be guaranteed.36
Here we have our first precise definition of interventionism.
Interventionism is no longer a matter of political convenience but a
technical necessity; it is not just about registering the socialization of
economic development but about establishing a substantial reference
point for the forms and rhythms of development.37 Investment risks
must be eliminated or reduced to the convention, and the state must
assume the function of guaranteeing this basic convention of eco-
nomics. The state has to defend the present from the future. And if
the only way to do this is to project the future from within the present,
to plan the future according to present expectations, then the state
must extend its intervention to take up the role of planner, and thus
the economic is incorporated into the juridical. In its intervention,
the state will act according to a series of norms; it will dictate what
is to be. It will not guarantee the certainty of future events but will
guarantee the certainty of the convention; it will seek the certainty of
the present projected into the future. This is a first step, a first form
of bringing together of capital’s productive and political ruling classes
– a form that is still indirect, yet extremely necessary. In effect the life
of the system no longer depends on the spirit of entrepreneurialism;
it depends on liberation from the fear of the future. And on this, by
definition, the juridical basis of the state stands or falls.
Defence against the future, an urgent desire to stabilize the power of
capitalism in the face of the future: this is Keynes’ frame of reference,
and its class nature is self-evident. It’s another way of saying what the
critique of Say’s law has already said. But here the situation – that
of a relationship with new variables, which science has to study and
understand – acquires a new and dramatic urgency as a result of the
crisis. What is this ‘future’ that Keynes is so eager to call to account?
Once again, it is catastrophe, the catastrophe that haunts him and
his kind, that ‘party of catastrophe’ that he sees represented before
him in the living form of the working class. This sheds a new light on
Keynes’ statement, so often repeated as a superficial witticism: in the
long run, we are all dead. Here it feels more like a premonition of the
fate of his own class. And we should see Keynes’ oft-criticized deter-
mination to lead his whole analysis back within static parameters as
yet another attempt to rule out a range of catastrophic possibilities
and to cancel out the future by prolonging the present.38
So here too Keynes’ project for capitalist reconstruction has to
pay heed to working-class struggle. And his analysis, once faced with
this fact, goes deeper. A second element is added to the definition of
interventionism: the state appears as the sole collective representative

of productive capital.39 Specific political necessities brought Keynes
to this conclusion. Already in his analysis of expectations, he had
identified a number of structural elements that, together with patho-
logical elements such as speculation, were liable to bring the system
crashing down – patterns of competition, expectational forecasting
errors, and the like. It is not enough that the pathological elements
can be eliminated by the rule of law; both the pathological and the
structural elements have to be eliminated de facto. In any event, they
cannot be allowed to jeopardize the security of the system’s future.
‘For my own part, I am now somewhat sceptical of the success of a
merely monetary policy directed towards influencing the rate of inter-
est. I expect to see the State . . . taking an ever greater responsibility
for directly organising investment.’40
So more solid, more deep-rooted overall guarantees for the future
are required. Juridical and indirect forms of state intervention will not
suffice. It is not enough for the state to guarantee the fundamental
economic convention that links present and future; something fur-
ther is required. The state itself has to become an economic structure
and, by virtue of being an economic structure, a productive subject.
The state needs to be the marshalling centre of all economic activ-
ity. A major step forward! As Marx says, ‘[t]o the extent that it seizes
control of social production, the technique and social organization of
the labour-process are revolutionized, and with them the economico-
historical type of society’.41
Not to mention the state: in guaranteeing the convention that links
the present to the future, the state is still a structure at the service of
capitalists; but when it imposes itself directly as productive capital,
the state also seeks to overcome the structural frictions that a market
economy and its indirect relationship with individual capitalists may
bring about.42 Thus it becomes a new form of state: the state of social
capital.
For the moment I shall pass over the more obvious examples of this
new definition of interventionism, or rather of this new kind of state.
I shall return to them later. I want to look instead at a particular and
fundamental theoretical moment, which both illustrates and speci-
fies this further step forward in Keynes’ thinking: the postulate of an
equivalence between savings and investment.
We know that this equivalence was not postulated in the Treatise;
there the relation between savings and investment was seen as the
objective of an economic policy aimed at maintaining stable price
levels. But between the Treatise in 1930 and the General Theory
in 1936 Keynes changes his mind and postulates a concept of a

measurable equivalence,43 within the system, between savings and
investment. The reasons for this change of heart become apparent
when we ponder when it happened: the years between 1930 and
1936 represented the height of the crisis. At that point, the political
imperatives were becoming more pressing and were pushing Keynes
to adopt a more radical position.
In short, the new economic model had to eliminate every trace and
possibility of a non-consumed, non-invested income, every overpro-
duction of capital, that is, any dysfunction in circulation. Note that
this model no longer describes forms of behaviour – it is prescriptive,
it lays down necessary preconditions. It is prescriptive because only
if these preconditions can be guaranteed by and within the person of
the state will there be any hope of confronting (or rather preventing
and controlling) the depressive moments of the economic cycle and,
in general, of enabling a political manoeuvrability of the overall eco-
nomic order. Otherwise all this would remain an impossibility.
Hence the unit of account makes its appearance as a budgeting
device and becomes a basic element of state activity; thus armed, the
state is confirmed in its role of acting as a marshalling centre of social
production.44
Obviously this description of the state as a marshalling point of
social productive capital raises more problems than it solves. In the
first place, given that Keynes does not conceive of state socialism
as the necessary outcome of his premises, he inevitably has to face
the problem of the relationship between capital’s economic ruling
strata and the state or political strata, the problem of communica-
tion and articulation between the two of them, and the problem of
the institutions that are to guarantee and develop this relationship.
Here Keynes balances his abuse of speculators and private capital-
ists with declarations of loyalty to private capital – and the problem
remains unresolved. In the second place, Keynes’ intention with this
equation is to mark the transition from a phase in which the banks
tend to dominate investment to a new phase, in which the productive
sphere itself determines investment; more generally, he seeks to ‘push
monetary theory back to becoming a theory of output as a whole’.45
But all this is only hinted at.46
One could go on to identify a whole series of problems that are
raised but not solved. Nonetheless, despite the fact that it is tenta-
tive and couched in allusion, the equivalence that Keynes proposes
between savings and investment gives a definitively new configura-
tion to the state: the latter is no longer a mere source of economic
support and incentive, of stabilization and innovation; it has become

a prime mover of economic activity. Here the critique of laissez-faire
is pushed to the limit: society itself is cast in the mould of the factory
– and the last vestiges of individual capitalism come increasingly
under pressure.
Up to this point, the relationship with the future – insofar as it is
a relationship of struggle with the working class – is established in
terms internal to the structure of capital, strictly defined. Up to this
point, Keynes has set out to explain the need for a capitalist reform
of the state, with a view to lessening (and, if possible, eliminating)
the fears that weigh on the future. Up to this point, working-class
struggle has imposed a movement that signifies reformism of capi-
tal. But how does it locate itself within capital? How do we find
the contradiction-loaded presence of the working class re-expressing
itself at this advanced level of restructuration? Interventionism, in
its evolution, had imposed itself on the capitalist state right from the
early 1920s, in response to the political and trade union movement
of that period; now, after the crisis and the restructuring, it becomes
decisive. But what is the nature and quality of the relationship with
the working class that is constituted ‘within’ capital?
With Keynes, capitalist science takes a remarkable leap forward:
it recognizes the working class as an autonomous moment within
capital. With his theory of effective demand, Keynes introduces into
political economy the political notion of a balance of power between
classes in struggle.47 Obviously the ideological (but also necessary)
aim of Keynes’ argument is to shore up the system: for Keynes, the
problem is how to establish a balance of effective demand in a context
where the various balances of power that make up effective demand
are conceived of as unchanging. But this political objective – which
would require working-class autonomy to be forever constrained
within a given existing power structure – is precisely the paradox
of Keynesianism: the latter is forced to recognize that the working
class is the driving motor of development, and that therefore Keynes’
statically defined notions of equilibrium can in fact never be attained
statically. Any attempt to define an equation of static equilibrium is,
and will remain, a laborious search for equilibrium within what has to
be a developing situation. In effect – as Keynes appears to recognize
– the system functions not because the working class is always inside
capital but because it is also capable of stepping out of it, because
there is the continual threat that it will really do so. The problem for
science, and the aim of politics, must be to contain this threat, this
refusal, and to absorb it always at new levels. But how, and what
next? Capital must ensure that the dynamic factors of growth are
controlled in such a way that the balance of power remains the same.
The problem, then, is never resolved; it is only postponed. Looking
closely, one can see that capital’s dynamism at this point results only
from a continuous struggle, in which the thrust of the working class
is accepted and new weapons are forged in order to prevent the class
from acting outside capital and to make it act within a framework
whose outlines are continually being redrawn.
To what extent is this possible? The concept of effective demand
contains within it decades of experience of how the working class
has made its impact on capital – and that impact shows no sign of
diminishing. In Keynes, though, you find only an awareness that
the political situation is dramatic, which is then transformed into
an attempt to turn the crisis, the struggle, into the driving motor of
development. How far could this be taken? In the long run, we are
all dead.
But let’s look at the situation in more detail. The reasons underly-
ing the great crisis were that an excess of supply became evident in
a political situation where demand, the propensity to consume, was
under pressure; this caused major imbalances on the broad economic
front; and they had a deleterious effect on net investment. The diag-
nosis itself offers a remedy: increase the volume of demand, raise the
propensity to consume. But, since variations in the propensity to con-
sume are essentially variations in income measured in wage units,48
the equilibrium that corresponds to a given stage of effectively real-
ized demand will be the value at which the level of working-class
employment determines the price of the aggregate supply of output
and the entrepreneur’s expectations of gain.
It has to be said that, when you read Keynes in this way – in an
almost circular interdependence of the various internal parts of the
system that Keynes tries to pin down and finalize – it is not easy to
locate the political quality of his thinking.49 But a closer look shows
that his entire system of interrelationships rests on a single postulate:
the downward rigidity of wages.50 The ‘ultimate independent vari-
able’ that underlies his thinking is ‘the wage-unit as determined by
the bargains reached between employers and employed’.51 It is here,
around this motif, that Keynes’ theory reveals itself for what it is: it
recognizes and makes use of the power of the working class, in all its
autonomy. The class can be neither put down nor removed: the only
option is to understand the way it moves and to regulate its revolution.
At this point, Keynes’ intervention – made dialectical by the prin-
ciple of effective demand – becomes completely political, inasmuch
as it turns into an attempt at conscious control of the movements of

the class: these movements have to be accepted as given, as necessary
and valid elements of the process. The whole conceptual content of
Keynes’ thinking is coloured by the notion of balance of forces.52 And
thus the task of economic policy is to dictate a continual revolution
of incomes and of the propensity to consume, which will maintain
global production and investment and will thus bring about the only
form of political equilibrium that is possible – which will be effective
only if it is prepared to take on board the risk and precariousness of
a balance of power that is and remains open-ended. This, then, is
how we can sum up the spirit of the theory of effective demand: that
it assumes class struggle and sets out to resolve it, on a day-to-day
basis, in ways that are favourable to capitalist development.
Capitalist reconstruction and the social state
If we now take a closer look at the problem in hand – how the expe-
rience of 1929 led to changes in the structure of the state – we can
see how radical Keynes’ contribution was. The transformation of
the capitalist state consisted not only in how the state’s capacity
for intervention was extended throughout the whole of society, but
also in how the state’s structures had to reflect the impact of the
working class. After 1929, the state adopted a general organizational
structure, characterized not so much by interventionism as by the
particular type of class dynamic it embodied. Thus the only way to
understand the specificity of our present state form is to highlight the
dramatic impact of the working class on the structures of capitalism.
Given that the state form has to register the impact of the working
class in society, it is now precisely at the social level that the state
constructs – within its own fabric – a specific form of control of the
movements of the class. Moving from the earlier antithesis between
despotism in the factory and anarchy in society (and from the first
attempt to organize this contradiction-loaded relationship in the form
of a state based on constitutional law), capital is now obliged to pro-
ceed to the social organization of that despotism and to diffuse the
organization of exploitation throughout society in the new form of
a planning-based state, which reproduces the figure of the factory
directly, in the particular way in which it articulates organization and
repression throughout society.
Thus Keynes makes a decisive contribution to the new definition of
the state. So far we have studied a number of separate strands in his
thinking that go to make up this final overall picture. But this is not
to say that Keynes lacks a general perspective, which goes beyond the
mere sum of individual and partial strands of analysis. This general
perspective springs ready-made from his theory of the rate of interest.
This aspect of Keynesian theory is polemical in relation to neoclas-
sical economic thought, since the latter sees the interest rate as being
determined by anarchic factors that operate outside the sphere of
production, in a non-socialized phase of capitalism (rather than as
a reward for abstinence and a natural balancing factor between the
supply and demand of capital goods). For Keynes, it derives from
liquidity preference and from the quantity of money in the market.
But if this is true, then once again capitalist society is prey to intol-
erable risks. The individual capitalist and the rentier are endowed
with functions that should not be entrusted to them. This can only
lead to disaster. Why do we have to accept such a disaster? Do
we really have to leave the inevitable dissolution of that anarchic
order to the objective forces of the process of production? As well as
destroying the rentier, such a course risked sending the whole system
toppling. And the day of reckoning was near at hand.
Keynes concluded that, if we want to take action to save the
system, we have to aim at the ‘euthanasia of the rentier’ (which, apart
from being politically urgent, is also morally legitimate). This will
enable collective capital to embark on manoeuvring the interest rates
downward, towards ‘that point relative to the schedule of marginal
efficiency of capital at which there is full employment’.53
The whole of Keynes’ prescriptive remedy is summed up in this
single proposition. This aims to provide a definitive guarantee, in
the crucial sphere of money circulation, that imbalances can be
controlled.54
At first sight, all this seems to indicate simply a further refinement
of Keynes’ arguments, towards an integration of monetary theory
and theory of production at the level where capital has become social
capital, that is, has become totally integrated and collective. But
on closer inspection, we see that subordinating interest rates to the
schedule of capital’s marginal efficiency in relation to full employ-
ment has further effects: in particular, it has the paradoxical effect
of linking Keynesian theory back to the classical doctrine of labour
value55 – and to such an extent that the reactivation of the law of
value ends up yielding the sinew and substance of the Keynesian
perspective: all the factors that are heterogeneous to the full function-
ing and direct control of the law of value are to be eliminated. Most
particularly, the system – namely the new system, the new state – is
thus strengthened, in that it becomes more fully a product of the

realization of the law of labour value. Here, indeed, we can say that
the equivalence ‘social state equals state based on labour’ begins to
apply: a final and necessary conclusion to Keynes’ bourgeois utopian-
ism and to his apologetics for capital!56
If we now examine this theoretical tendency in a critical light, we
shall see how it is articulated. One might say that Keynes seeks to test
a number of classical (or preclassical, as he would put it) intuitions
in the context of social capital. In fact, returning to the relationship
between the monetary and the productive aspects of social capital, he
introduces two tendential laws: the law of average profit and the law
stating that money wages and real wages tend to converge.57
Here he approaches the purity of the classical economists’ descrip-
tion of the law of value. One could almost say that, having developed
to the point where it becomes social capital, capital becomes Marxist.
Obviously this is an optical illusion, but at the same time there are
historical similarities. While the theory of the individual firm effec-
tively ignored the problem of the law of value – that is, how general,
average value is arrived at – now the necessity of considering capital’s
collective identity reinstates it. It reappears in terms that are not
Marxist but render a rather reformist and social-democratic version
of Marxism. And it reappears not only as a means of describing the
process (as an implicit and tendential law of how value functions)
but mostly as a political norm and as one of the strategic objectives
of economic strategy.
This is why Keynes’ renewed use of the law of value introduces
into his thinking the mystified notion of social interest or the common
good. With his reduction of monetary theory to the theory of pro-
duction and with his analysis of both the political necessity of this
reduction and the controlled forms within which it was to be real-
ized, Keynes attempts to represent an end situation that could be
attained ‘without revolution’: a situation in which profit and interest
would tend to zero and the monetary relation (this being the sphere
of autonomy within capitalist power) would disappear, since money
would become a mere accounting unit, a general symbol of equiva-
lence between the commodities produced, and hence all reasons for
preferring money would disappear.58 Thus social interest, stripped
of intermediary and subsidiary elements, and the law of value would
come to govern the entirety of development. Capital becomes com-
munist: this is what Marx had termed the communism of capital.59
But this is a curious way for Keynes to proceed – to forget, in the
course of the argument, the premises on which his own analysis was
based. For to put one’s faith in the full realization of the law of value
is effectively to put one’s faith in the full realization of the capitalist
law of the extraction of surplus value. Profit and interest, unified
and reduced to zero, are in reality no different from the expression
of the average rate of surplus value in capital’s social production.60
Exploitation is not eliminated – only its anarchic and competitive
aspects are. Profit and interest are not eliminated either; they are
merely prevented from exceeding an average. Marx’s antithesis
remains intact even if this fact would be of little interest to Keynes.61
What is more interesting is that Keynes’ conclusion here is in open
contradiction with other significant parts of his system – in particular
as regards the theory of effective demand. His assertion of a social
interest untouched by class contradictions, by struggle, by power
relations between two counterposing classes negates that theory. Not
only is the social reality described earlier now mystified, but there
is also a contradiction in his science, because he had constructed
the law of development precisely on that reality whose existence he
now denies. Furthermore, Keynes ventures here onto the terrain of
utopianism, which is unusual for him but perhaps inspired by the
Cambridge school of moral philosophy.62
For this notion of capital is indeed utopian. It is a capital so totally
social as to refuse not so much to articulate itself via the monetary
mechanism63 as to present itself as a social force for exploitation
and thus to make itself autonomous, to pose as a separate essence
and hegemonic power. It is a short-term utopia, up to the point
where capitalism takes advantage of the qualitative leap imposed by
struggles and by the crisis and manages to abolish the most evident
distortions in the process of profit realization through the market.
Then, once this has been done, there ensues an immediate mystifica-
tion of the relationship of domination and exploitation that exists at
the social level.64 The necessity for this mystification is dictated by
the reconstruction of capitalism within a power balance that, since
1917, has changed in favour of the working class.
Nevertheless, such a project is completely determined within the
framework of the history of capital. It reflects necessities that are
immediately practical as well as being theoretical: theoretical insofar
as politically pressing and effective. Identical necessities, provoked
by similar reflections on crisis, are at the basis of the New Deal, as
they are at the basis of any experience of reconstruction in mature
capitalism. Certainly, if we were to research the New Deal to see
how faithfully Keynesian it was, we would be quickly disabused – in
fact the activities of Schacht were far more in line with Cambridge
thinking. Keynes himself noted something to this effect: ‘It seems

politically impossible for a capitalist democracy to organize expendi-
ture on the scale necessary to make the grand experiment which
would prove my case – except in war conditions.’65
Equally disappointing would be any analysis of Keynes’ personal
relationship with anyone on the US political scene in that period,
particularly with Roosevelt.66
And yet all the theoretical elements that we have identified as
making up the Keynesian system also play their part – and are put
into effect in similar, if not identical ways – in the experience of the
New Deal, from the recognition of the impact of the working class
on the structure of capitalism to political and economic techniques
aimed at stimulating effective demand via new and publicly funded
investment, or from emphasis on the urgency of a radical capitalist
reconstruction of society to the particular kind of state that follows.67
In fact one could say that, in relation to changing state forms, only
the experience of the New Deal makes explicit what I have found to
be a fundamental characteristic of Keynesianism: the recognition of
(a) a changed relationship between the economic forces in play and
(b) a matching restructuring of capital’s hegemony in this new con-
text. It makes this recognition explicit by radically altering the rules
of the game, through a striking synthesis between the enthusiasm for
reconstruction exhibited by capital’s ruling elite and long-standing
constitutional practices of ‘due process’, now updated. Here, finally,
we have a capitalist state audaciously taking on board and recuperat-
ing, for its own preservation, the notion of ‘permanent revolution’.
And it does so with no reservations, asserting its own class essence
as a capitalist state and shunning the taint of populist or traditional
progressive ideologies. What is imposed is a capitalist reformism that
is very different from social democratic whinings about imbalances in
the system and is supremely confident about being able to resolve its
problems through self-reproduction.68
How could Keynes fail to see how close this radical historical
experiment was to the essentials of his own theoretical and political
thinking? How could he fail to register the possibility of his utopia
and the mystification that was its necessary concomitant? In the
event, he failed on both counts. The mystification is revealed for what
it is by one final aspect, which is characteristic of the mature capitalist
state: the increasing use of violence. This violence may be direct or
indirect, but it is nonetheless always present in the development of
the overall promotional and regulative activity that the modern state
undertakes.
And, once again, this fundamental truth arises in Keynes only in

passing – not only in the despairing philosophy of history that accom-
panies his scientific activity69 but also in his system itself. Precisely
at the point where Keynes outlines a capitalist reconstruction that
verges on utopia, we find him going back on himself and character-
izing the basic problem as capital’s weakness within the class relation
that defines it (and thus neither forgetting the realities that were his
starting point nor placing his faith exclusively in the models he had
proposed for capitalist reconstruction). The illustration comes at a
decisive point in the General Theory – the rediscovery of the law of
tendential fall in the rate of interest.
I do not intend here to pass judgement on the scientific validity or
otherwise of this Keynesian proposition. Suffice to say that its present
formulation appears more convincing than the classic Marxian for-
mulation, because it is based on forecasting not an overproduction of
capital but ‘a drop in the discounted return to additional capital and
an increase in the supply price of new capital goods’.70
In using this formulation, Keynes draws conclusions that are much
more down to earth than his utopian schemas and arise from the
basic situation that was his starting point. And he uses the schema
provided by the theory of effective demand no longer just as an index
for policies aimed at achieving stability, but as an instrument for fore-
casting and prediction. This prediction, derived from the application
of policies of effective demand, is that demand will outstrip supply
and that the deflationary tendencies of the preceding period will give
way to a continual danger of inflation. In short, Keynes forecasts the
definitive and irreversible appearance of all the effects that the mas-
sive pressure of the working class was objectively to produce – within
this modified relationship between the classes – on the new machin-
ery of capital. This is in fact what happened in the development of
class relations in the immediate sphere of productive activity, after
the capitalist reforms imposed by the events of 1929; we can already
see it happening, even under the New Deal, in the shape of the reces-
sion of 1937.71
But at the end of all this scientific effort designed to set aside fear,
the fear for the future still remains, the fear of catastrophe and of the
party of catastrophe. For Keynes, fears arise precisely from a combi-
nation of the necessity to reconstruct capital and the recognition of a
tendency of the power balance to consolidate in favour of the working
class. In a situation where the relationship between the classes has
become dynamic, any attempt to create a new equilibrium is bound
to be insecure, and it becomes impossible to stabilize movement
around a fixed point. The only option in such a situation is to place

one’s faith in power, as a separate and distinct reality.
Is this perhaps how we should read Keynes’ elevation of the general
interest to an absolute, and his emancipation from his own theoreti-
cal schema of effective demand? Is it perhaps possible to see in the
twofold movement of Keynes’ thinking – open to an identification
of the state’s structure with the socio-economic process, and at the
same time inclined to recognize a general interest of the state that is
separate and distinct from the particularities of social movement – a
contradiction that is necessary to the new life of the system?
What is certain is that this sense of precariousness is not going to
diminish. Perhaps its only adequate translation into institutional lan-
guage is the extreme violence characteristic of the modern state. State,
once again, means fear, the need for repression, violence. Perhaps
this is how Keynes’ utopianism and mystification dissolve. The set-
tling of accounts with the party of catastrophe becomes a daily event.
The communism of capital can absorb all values in its movement and
can represent to the full the general social goal of development; but
it can never expropriate that particularity of the working class that
is its hatred of exploitation, its uncontainability at any given level of
equilibrium. For the working class is also a project for the destruction
of the capitalist mode of production.
2
Is There a Marxist Doctrine of
the State?
Reply to Norberto Bobbio*
Translated by Roger Griffin
‘Is there such a thing nowadays as a Marxist doctrine of the state?’,

asks Bobbio.1 In actual fact this is not intended as a question, and
even less as a provocation, but simply a way of asserting a fact: the
official working- class movement (which in this particular context
means the Italian communist movement) does not have a doctrine of
the state. If Bobbio had not gone to such lengths to develop his argu-
ment, the first rejoinders to his article, which appeared in Rinascita,2
would have been quite enough to confirm his assumption: while the
working-class movement has renounced a Marxist doctrine of the
state (i.e. a doctrine distinct from and hostile to the constitutional-
ist theory of the capitalist state), it has not proceeded to work out a
proper alternative to it. The most that can be said is that the reformist
working-class movement, which has rejected a revolutionary doctrine
of the state, operates with a functionalist theory of law (one neither
revolutionary nor Marxist): this is what so-called alternative theories
of right actually signify.3
But Bobbio takes his argument further: if this is the situation in
actual fact, why persist in dreaming up (on the basis of a few pages
from Marx and Lenin) schemes for an alternative society that are
as unrealizable as they are abstract? Thus Bobbio follows up his
* This chapter originally appeared in Italian in 1976, in the left-wing liter-

ary magazine Aut Aut, 151–3. The English translation reproduced here with
small adjustments and updated references comes from Norberto Bobbio,
Which Socialism: Marxism, Socialism and Democracy, Cambridge: Polity 1988,
pp. 121–38.
Is There a Marxist Doctrine of the State? 39
statement of fact with a plea: why not put an end to playing with
words? Why not accept that the only route to socialism is via the
progress of modern democracy, its institutions, its striving for liberty?
Democracy is subversive.
‘Remember Bad Godesberg’, would have been the reply of a com-
munist of the old guard. Instead, one after the other, the responses
in Rinascita provide ample demonstration of how times have changed
by showing their agreement with Bobbio, even if in passing or in a
roundabout way: a bit more democracy, a bit more socialism, a few
dialectical somersaults, a few dance steps to the music of the Central
Committee. According to this approach, the theoretical issue basi-
cally boils down to the old chestnut about which came first, the
chicken or the egg. The urge to avoid the issue becomes painfully
obvious when the discussion turns to the choice between ‘capitalism
with democracy’ and ‘socialism without democracy’, as if Bobbio’s
dialogue with Roderigo di Castiglia were still continuing and the cli-
mate were still that of the ‘thaw’ following the Cold War.4
Since the discussion did not originate within the official workers’
movement, perhaps it is worth drawing Bobbio’s attention to the fact
that outside the reformist wing of this movement there continue to
exist schools of thought that are still engaged in refining a Marxist
theory of the state, taking as their starting point (what is presumed
to be) a workers’ point of view, that is, one based on the needs, atti-
tudes, and struggles of the proletariat. If we leave the reformist camp
to their own devices, along with their unseemly haste to concur with
Bobbio’s request to abandon revolutionary theory, we for our part
still have a duty to give some thought to the fact that, as he himself
would be the first to admit, the problems he raises have various
dimensions and admit various approaches. In particular, if we take
it as read that the reformist workers’ movement has no revolutionary
doctrine of the state, we have to ask ourselves whether the revolu-
tionary Marxist movement can provide a political theory – one based
(for whatever motives) on genuine Marxian principles – of the revo-
lutionary struggle against the state, one that would allow us to ignore
Bobbio’s entreaty and give a proper response to his initial question.
Certainly, the reasoning in Bobbio’s article is watertight once his
premises are accepted. It is no coincidence that the arguments he
invokes to support his thesis are rhetorically addressed ad homi-
nem; they are arguments that are directly aimed at the intentions of
the reformists, their attitudes, and the ambiguities of their position,
while they only strike a glancing blow at the impressive edifice of the
Marxists’ theory of capital, and consequently at their theory of the
state (the four passages from Marx and Lenin have little bearing on
the foundation of the Marxist theory of the state) – in short, they are
an indictment more of the bad conscience of the reformists than of
the consistency of Marxist thinking on the subject.
As a matter of fact, if we want to play Bobbio at his own game
by accepting his definition of what is at stake, we could use his own
arguments against him: for example, why attribute the impossibility
of an autonomous (independent) working-class theory of the state to
the abuse of authoritative texts, and not to an inadequate interpre-
tation of the works of Marx?5 ln reality, the integrity of Marxism is
not at stake here, but rather reformism, and the answer is a foregone
conclusion. But if the question is approached from a revolutionary
position (sit venia verbis!),* it remains a totally open one, and there is
no reason why Bobbio’s arguments cannot serve as a useful reference
point for bringing out significant differences between the conflicting
positions. It is possible to give a satisfactory response to him in his
own terms, even accepting the provocations and paradoxes that arise
from his way of defining the central issue. Arguments based on the
logic of the raison d’état can in fact make a substantial contribution to
political theory, as long as they do not bear the mark of an age that is
tired, sanctimonious, spineless, and despotic; but this is not the case
here.
Thus, is there a Marxist doctrine of the state? What would it con-
sist of if it did exist? And if it does not exist, is it nevertheless implicit
as a subordinate part of the working-class theory of the revolution-
ary process? In short, there is a case for raising as substantive issues
those questions, which Bobbio asked only rhetorically (though no
less effectively for that, in political terms), not so as to give exhaustive
responses, but simply to redefine the questions and place them in a
different conceptual framework, within which it might eventually be
possible to resolve them.
I would suggest that, within Marxism, the elaboration of a theory
of the state broadly speaking centres on the following points:
(1) the definition of a method for the materialistic and dialectic

analysis of existing institutions;
(2) the definition of the material process underlying the character-
istic ethos and social composition of the class that holds power
in the state;
* ‘May these words be forgiven!’ (Lat.).

(3) the identification of the historical mission of the revolutionary

subject (i.e. of the mechanisms antagonistic to the state set in
motion by the proletariat) destined to bring about a radical trans-
formation in praxis;
(4) the recognition and investigation of the basic dichotomy at the
heart of the problem of the state, namely the conflict between the
political structure of the class system and the dynamic forces that
bring about the transition to a communist society.
It is only when these issues have been clarified that the problem of
an alternative to bourgeois representative democracy can be raised at
all, and it can be established whether there is any point left in raising
it. (For, in spite of the heroic efforts of reformist theoreticians, this is
the ultimate problem that Marxists have to face in their deliberations
on the state, in terms not of its importance but of the place it occupies
in Marxist discourse. In fact, only someone with a fetishistic obses-
sion with institutions could think of making this question the first on
the agenda in a Marxist context; and this, to make the point again,
would not be because of excessive regard for the canonical sources
of Marxist theory, but for quite the opposite reason, namely an unre-
strained revisionism.)
The names and the things: the first thing a materialist and dialecti-
cal method should set out to do is specify the correlation between
the former and the latter. I have the impression that those in the
reformist camp underestimate the importance of this problem. I do
not know whether the love–hate complex of Cerroni and his cro-
nies focuses more on the definitions of Hegel or on those of Locke.
Bobbio does not know either; nevertheless he rightly assumes that the
debate is referring to a linguistic entity, and thus, within the game,
there is some sense to it. But outside the game? Outside the context
that has been ‘contrived’ for the sake of the discussion? If it is true
that theory can provide tough questions with some tough answers, it
is all the more important for words to carry some weight.
Democracy: when heard on television, this word sounds different
from the one that is shouted in town squares by Saint-Just or Lenin.
And that ‘democracy is subversive’ may well be, but in different
senses when it is said by Jerry Rubin and by Richard Nixon (that
is, if we accept that both are ‘subversive’). I think these are truisms.
But if we do not want to pile truism on truism, we should at least

ask whether this ambiguity in the word’s meanings does not suggest
that the reality being referred to can change significantly. In Bobbio’s
article there is a section of his argument that struck me as particularly
flawed, when he involves the issue of modern government’s growing
complexity as if it were for the exclusive use of reformists, a sacro-
sanct point in their polemic against direct democracy. But is it not
in fact the case that the Weberian analysis of this subject constitutes
a lucid and anguished denunciation of the contradiction between
democracy tout court, as a system of government based on freedom,
and the demands of capitalist concentration?
Personally I do not think that nowadays revolutionary Marxism
sets much store by some paragraphs Marx or Lenin wrote about
nineteenth-century ‘democracy’, while it is somewhat conversant
with the analyses of the development of capitalism made by Marx,
Hilferding, Luxemburg, and Lenin – and, why not, with Weber’s
analysis of the antagonisms intrinsic to the administrative system
of capitalism.6 An analysis of the development of capital must be
the starting point and basis for any discussion of the state – and, if
it comes to that, of democracy. Anyone is at liberty to play around
with Hegel and Locke, or with Pufendorf, for that matter: but once
the criticism of the existing political economy is made the premise,
things (i.e. what stand behind the names) change. This is because
democracy is a played-out term with a purely obscurantist function,
a blanket term for a system of power completely dominated by the
collective forces of capital. There is not a single revolutionary Marxist
who does not think this; and this is the context in which, ever since
the 1960s, the Marxist theory of the state has been undergoing an
impressive process of renewal.7 As a result of this process, the revo-
lutionary analysis of the state (in the sense of an institution through
which the collective forces of capital direct economic development
and manage crises) has developed a new perspective, one supported
by solid empirical data. Democracy is now considered a leftover from
an earlier historical phase, while the contemporary state, on the other
hand, is regarded as a mechanism designed for the planning and con-
trol of a growing condition of social conflict, and especially for the
anticipation of the political behaviour of the masses: it is always pre-
pared to resort to provocation and take political and terroristic steps
against them. There is a rich bibliography on this theme,8 but the
contributors to Rinascita ignore it, forget it, or allude to it with vague
generalizations. This is inevitably the case: anyone who refuses to
consider the political system as the guise assumed by, and no longer
as a last resort of, capitalism as an economic system and refuses to

perceive the state at this stage in its development – as the fulfilment
of Marx’s analysis in Capital – is condemned to thrash around in the
vacuum of ideology. But when confronted by a critique of the politi-
cal economy of capitalism that is increasingly successful at exposing
the central role of its administrative structures, at revealing the state
as the agent of social exploitation, and at identifying the overtly polit-
ical dimension that the various processes of accumulation acquire,
then this ideology becomes decidedly hostile and repressive.9
In this respect the complexity of government apparatuses is nei-
ther here nor there. It is not this that is destroying democracy, but
a profound alteration in the source of sovereignty: the complexity of
the state structure has been brought about by (and mystifies) the fact
that the brain of capitalism has directly turned itself into the state;
that there is no longer anything remotely resembling the neutrality
of the state (that is, if it ever existed at all, even in the form imagined
in the instrumentalist theories of state monopoly capitalism); that
democracy is quite simply the external form adopted by the capitalist
negation of the working class as a political force and class. In short,
this is a state in which every source of legitimacy and sovereignty is
becoming increasingly subordinated to the control and productive
rationality of the development (or crisis) of capitalism.
Bobbio maintains that the only serious critique of democracy is
the one carried out by reactionary thinkers. This may well be the
case: but which democracy are we talking about? The democracy
of the market place. But there is no longer much point in quot-
ing Nietzsche, given the enormous scale of capitalist accumulation
and the intensity of ideological manipulation that we are faced with
today. That is, unless people want to act as high priests of ideas of the
past, because here we are back in prehistory. If anything, we should
be drawing attention to the reactionary arrogance of the analysis of
democracy that emanates from the writings of contemporary Italian
political commentators such as Andreatta and Napolitano.10 Why
dig up the classics, when these writers are perfect exponents of the
conception of democracy as a form of power and as the political
system of the forces of capital, and when, with them, democratic
thought expresses itself in overtly reactionary terms? On the other
hand, if we accept the advice of these gentlemen, we must ask our-
selves: is it possible to talk meaningfully of democracy, of consensus,
of participation, without making allowances for the development of
capitalism? And the reply of modern ‘democratic’ thinkers is nega-
tive: liberty is possible only within certain limits (quantitative and
qualitative) imposed by capitalist development, and the self-evidence

of this state of affairs is as natural to these gentlemen as the profit
from landed property as a function of market forces was for others
before them. The democratic legitimacy of the state is thus based
on the cycle of exploitation, which takes place in accordance with
capitalist principles (whatever the phase of this process, up or down,
expansionist or critical). Why dig up the classics? Nowadays it is not
even market forces that dominate society but the forces generated by
the evolution of the capitalist power nexus. Given these strict limits
to democracy and the way things stand, the only question we can
realistically be allowed to ask is the following: are there any alterna-
tives to the way this power of capital could be exercised, alternatives
that could be instituted in the name of liberty? But even such hypo-
thetical and extremely ill-defined alternatives would be open to the
same objections. It is never possible to specify how alternatives to
capitalism would work in practice, and the discussion of them never
moves beyond the realm of sophistry. The only true answer lies in
criticism, struggle, the radical alternative: it is only in movement that
the nature of motion reveals itself. In short, as long as capitalism
exists there is no freedom.
The first task of the communist theory of the state is to get to the
bottom of the present conception of democracy and to demystify it
(which means providing a critique of the relationship between state
institutions and the realities of exploitation so as to unmask the
external forms assumed by power). In this context the four passages
of classical Marxist theory on the state do not cut much ice. What
does cut some ice is the Marxist critique of the evolution of capi-
talism, that is, of the evolution of exploitation, and the immediate
realization that the institutional transformations of democracy rep-
resent transformations in capitalist ideology and its adaptation in
order to perpetuate the repression of the struggles of the proletariat
to emancipate itself. If I may be allowed a personal observation, an
immediate subjective corollary of this insight is that analysis based
on these premises goes hand in hand with the fact that rebellion
is just (as the oldest revolutionary leader and the oldest Cartesian
philosopher put it so nicely).*
*
Presumably a reference to John Locke.
Bobbio dedicates a large part of his article to an analysis of the

paradoxes of democracy. Naturally the contributors to Rinascita and
Mondoperaio concentrate on these in order to bring out their points
of difference. But what if these paradoxes had already exploded
into open conflicts? What if the crisis was no passing phase in the
economic cycle, but profound and serious, structurally rooted in
the consciousness of the masses and in the way the system works?
The current crisis in the social sciences, impotent to control events
or intervene in them effectively (in economic, sociological, plan-
ning terms) and just as incapable of offering interpretive frameworks
(either specific or general) to explain the present situation, seems to
confirm this suspicion. Medium-term goals are unattainable and the
long term dismissed as wishful thinking, while the short term defies
analysis and is hence uncontrollable.11
Thus in my view the second task of a possible Marxist theory of
the state is to define the ethos characteristic of the real enemies of the
working class, one that is forced to the surface by the class struggle
and that pervades all the administrative structures of the capitalist
state.
Bobbio insists that the fact that democracy is working success-
fully only serves to deepen the crises it faces, leading to the growing
complexity of organs of government, bureaucratic dysfunctions,
technocratic aloofness, the rising tide of standardization and con-
formism in every sphere, and so on. But knowledge of the nature of
these crises could also be deepened. And a whole school of Marxist
revolutionary theorists, from Altvater to O’Connor, from Agnoli to
Offe, have carried this out, showing, with scrupulous scholarship and
stringent empirical research, the concrete asymmetries and dysfunc-
tions that accompany the way the state regulates the social processes
of accumulation.12 But this is not the problem: as far as I can see,
the real problem lies in the way in which, faced with the grow-
ing paradoxes of democracy, the contradictions at the heart of state
institutions are becoming steadily more profound. If this process con-
tinues we shall honestly be able to say that democracy is subversive.
But we have to be specific about the constellation of forces involved
in this subversive trend, if we do not want the term ‘democracy’ to
become a meaningless sound or an empty piece of moralistic rheto-
ric. (In this respect we are, as Glucksmann has recently pointed out,13
still at the stage – mutatis mutandis – of Lenin’s famous call for the
rule of housewives; but this did not save us then, nor will it save us
now, from the hell of the Gulag.)
The fact is that, outside the realm of moralistic appeals (even
in their new versions, of the type ‘why I cannot but call myself a
Christian’),14 the democracy that traditional Marxists spoke of no
longer exists. The question of whether people are more free in the
West or in the eastern bloc is as empty as the one that a slave puts to
his shadow. This is not just because the (Weberian) mechanisms of
bureaucratic development have fossilized into precisely those func-
tions that channel the power of capital; not just because science and
technology (transforming themselves into technocracy) have, each
in turn, been subsumed within capitalism in the strictest sense of the
word; not just because the complexity of state organs in reality cor-
responds to the full range of coordinated and specialized functions
performed by the engine of capitalist power; not just because the
mechanisms of integration and repression, mediation and selection
tend, in an increasingly conspicuous and heavy-handed fashion, to
take the form of direct state control (while the pale image of bour-
geois civil society slowly sinks below the horizon). Above all, it is
because the material foundation of the specific mode of democracy
that is now being discussed has been dissolved by the development
of capitalism itself. This is not so much a loss of nerve on the part of
the acquisitive spirit of liberalism, which converts the market place
into a political arena; nor is it merely a question of the vertiginous
fall in the rate of capitalist profit producing a crisis – in the sense
of a critical point reached in the dynamism that legitimizes the
development of both democracy and capitalism. Rather, what is at
the root of this situation is a radical change in the law of surplus
value. If Rinascita devoted some pages to relating this problem to
those of liberal and socialist democracy, it might be energy better
spent. Because this is the crux of the matter: a moment has been
reached when, in accordance with the law of surplus value, the
capitalist rationality behind the rules of free exchange is breaking
down, when commodity fetishism no longer adequately conceals or
mystifies a ‘rational’ capacity for exploitation and instead the naked
irrationality of power comes to act as the only sanction for the pro-
portions and expressions of exploitation, its only justification being
its self-perpetuation.15
At this point the emergence of a Gulag of a different sort becomes
no accident, but is necessary: it comes about as the logical conse-
quence of the isolation of capital from the reasons for making a profit,
and of its exclusive use for the purpose of maintaining power – let
us cast the nets of democracy over this archipelago, if we have the

courage. By doing so we would trap monsters: we would see how
the whole development of capital is underpinned by the way the
state functions, how capitalist accumulation and reproduction come
to create their own political institutions, and how the tendency of
the capitalist state to resort to bestial forms of terrorism is becom-
ing more and more overt (however, this fact invites us to begin to
develop, on the basis of the critique of political economy, a critique of
the political economy of administration, hence an effective critique of
liberal politics). Revisionist socialists are constantly reading the influ-
ence of the eternal Hobbes into the theoreticians who came after him.
We must follow this path in the opposite direction, not to lose sight
of the forms that power assumes, but to define them with precision in
the light of the nature of power itself.
If, when we have assessed the full implications of this tendency,
there still seems to be some value in turning our attention to rep-
resentative democracy (if only, as Bobbio puts it, as the lesser of
evils), let us by all means consider it. But in this case there is a risk
that perhaps we will be confused by our analysis, certainly that we
will be disarmed in practice and will lose our revolutionary impetus.
In fact the ‘lesser of evils’ needs to measure itself against reality, if it
is not to become a rhetorical argument itself. The lesser of evils, in
some versions of democratic thought, would thus mean ‘guarantee
of individual rights’ and, more generally, ‘constitutional guarantees’,
‘separation of powers’, and so on. This is not how we see it. Perhaps
there are even now some people ingenuous enough to think that the
powers of the democratic state are distributed through a system of
checks and balances, that countervailing power is exercised effec-
tively, and that the freedom of the citizen still has some substantial
guarantees. But, if it had not been for the workers’ struggle and for
the countervailing power being exercised daily by the masses, there
would be no liberty left: no grotesque mass media parody of a trial of
those responsible for the various Watergates that occur will convince
us that representative democracy and constitutionalism are the ‘lesser
of evils’ – unless, that is, Bobbio’s argument on this point does not
seem more complex than it actually is: namely that it should really
be interpreted as a metaphysical argument according to which the
‘repressive’ reality of power is a priori necessary and the ‘expansive’
communist conception of it is utopian and false. If the theorists of
the Italian Communist Party agree with this, they should realize the
implications for their philosophy: it would mean that a carefully con-
sidered neo-Kantianism would be more appropriate than dialectical
materialism. In this case Cerroni would deserve a chair of philosophy

at Rome University alongside Cotta.16
In the analysis of Marx and Engels, the process whereby capital

develops and is subsumed within the collective entity of the state17
acquires a specific dialectical dimension. This creates the possibility
of theoretical predictions concerning the evolution of the state as the
collective expression of the power of capital, a possibility that has an
immediate bearing on the third task of a Marxist doctrine of the state
and can be applied directly to it – namely the definition of the practi-
cal turning point in the process, the identification of the subject of
exploitation, the analysis of the technical and political composition
of the revolutionary subject, the assignment to the proletariat – in
the first instance – of the mission to take upon itself the global ten-
sions generated by the struggle against the principal instigator of an
obscene relationship of exploitation, the state.18
Marxism is primarily a theory that explains the necessity for a
transformation of productive relations, and hence of history. It is a
scientific theory because it predicts this necessity. A crucial part in
the creation and expression of this necessity is played by the subjec-
tive will of the individuals who embody it; the necessity is a function
of needs registered in the proletarian consciousness, and out of them
emerges the desire for transformation. Therefore it is vital to have
empathy with these needs, and to have analytical tools appropriate
for their investigation. This can take the form of a leaflet, an offen-
sive weapon, or a computer, as the occasion demands, but it always
means direct involvement in the struggles and life of the proletariat.
Anyone speaking as an outsider lies. Coming from this point of
view, it is impossible to foresee developments in the abstract, and
there is no point in asking what will take the place of representative
democracy. The ‘how’ and the ‘who’ of the revolutionary process
are the same. There is no revolutionary subject that does not mould
the form and content of the revolutionary project to its own situa-
tion, so that the anticipation of what will occur, if possible at all, can
only be the expression of the class struggle in a certain configuration
of social forces. Only the expression of this struggle can justify the
desire for transformation and determine its outcome: this, as Spinoza
maintained,19 is a law of materialism (before being a law of dialectical
materialism). But it is also a law of dialectical materialism. As such,
it imposes itself from within on the relationship between the efforts

of the working class to emancipate itself and the modifications in the
structure of the state that eventually ensue. And so? So, what hap-
pens is that the tendency for the forces of capital to close ranks and
unite, as a response to the impact of the proletarian struggle, gives
rise in its turn to the need for the highest degree of unification on
the part of the workers. That this process is actually taking place can
be verified both empirically and practically, both sociologically and
politically. Here the breakdown in the operation of the law of surplus
value is perceived by the subjective consciousness of the masses and
so potentially brings about the affective basis of a revolutionary rela-
tionship with the state.20 The state is radically hostile to it, in exactly
the same way as the boss, wage slavery, and the time wasted in
soul-destroying drudgery are all expressions of hostility. The state is
radically hostile because its functions and functionaries are the direct
functions and functionaries of capital. If, through a process of mys-
tification, they come to be assigned these roles through the general
consensus of the electorate or the consensus of political parties, or, in
a more overt way, through the wage paid by the boss, what difference
does it make? So what if Pravda is more or less free than Il Corriere
or La Stampa? So what if the secret services or antiterrorist forces are
more democratic in the United States or in Russia, in Germany or
in Italy?
The intimate relation between the breakdown of the law of surplus
value and the emergence of the new and highly unified proletarian
subject calls for a political analysis that cannot be carried out using
traditional categories and thus requires a new conceptual framework.
Certainly, if by revolutionary doctrine of the state we mean a step-
by-step recipe for action, then there can be no talk of there being one
in a Marxist sense. But why must the alternative to this consist in
nostalgic evocations of the market society, a stage in capitalism’s pre-
history? Marxist theory demonstrates that a return to such a society
is in any case impossible and that any attempt to guarantee freedom
under those conditions is illusory and dangerous. Hence the defence
of proletarian liberty – which is intimately bound up with the Marxist
critique of capital and the state – can only come about, at a theoreti-
cal level, through a refinement of the analysis of the new proletarian
subject and, at a practical level, only by entrusting this subject with
the task of inventing institutional forms appropriate for carrying out
the revolutionary process. We are at liberty to call ‘democratic’ a
campaign by workers on the wage front that upsets the capitalist
rate of accumulation; proletarian claims for wages that destroy the
existing disproportion between work and the reward it secures; the

rapid spread of a desire on the part of the young to reappropriate
wealth; a demand by women, who can no longer be ignored, to regain
not just their bodies but dignity and fair pay: in short, we can see all
these things as part of the extension of democracy – but is it not more
important to study these struggles as expressions of the practical basis
of a process of renewal that takes place in the political and organiza-
tional power of the masses?
The importance of assessing the rich potential of these new pat-
terns of behaviour in this way becomes all the more obvious when
we consider that what they themselves never express is a call for
representation – in the sense of either delegating power or entrusting
an intermediary with power in the future. It is thus beyond doubt
that, from this point of view, ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is a term
much more profitably applied to these phenomena than ‘representa-
tive democracy’.
But clearly the central problem is not one of which label to choose.
The Marxist theory of the state can, as we have seen, provide the
basis for a coherent materialist critique of existing institutions, iden-
tify the underlying direction in which they are evolving, and entrust
the revolutionary proletariat with the task of discovering the precise
forms the process of total transformation will take: at this point it
becomes essential to avoid misunderstandings over the term ‘dicta-
torship of the proletariat’ by defining it, as ever, in materialist terms,
and hence in terms of class structure. One point immediately calls for
clarification: undeniably the term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is
inappropriate when applied to the historical process by which social-
ism has been established in the eastern bloc, because what soon came
about there was dictatorship pure and simple, the dictatorship of a
party bureaucracy. But the term is equally misleading if applied to the
concept of the establishment of socialism in general, just as much as
the term ‘representative democracy’ can be. For one might suppose
that, given the advanced stage of development that capitalism has
now reached, socialism is impossible to achieve, if we use ‘social-
ism’ as a blanket term for a real transformation that synthesizes class
antagonism with the need for structural change, the negative and pos-
itive dynamics of the revolutionary dialectic. The central concepts of
socialism as a political theory lose their incisiveness by being applied
to travesties of it in practice (even if they retain effectiveness as means

of ideological mystification). What does socialism mean nowadays?
It can only mean the perpetuation of the state, the application of
central planning to ensure that the law of surplus value is fulfilled. In
this way capitalism and socialism become bedfellows. But to present
things in this way is a grotesque fairy tale for the proletariat, if one
thinks of its struggle to achieve its own unification (in social terms, a
highly productive process)21 and to fight off increasing pressures for
it to be incorporated within the waged class. Socialism ceases to have
a clear identity, and at this point runs the risk of only being able to
take the form of the Gulag, as inevitable as the desperate and fero-
cious defence of the operation of the law of surplus value – as much
in the Soviet Union as in West Germany, as much in the United
States as in South Africa. What difference does it make if the special
antiterrorist forces deployed are ‘responsible’ to a parliament or to
the state party? Paradoxically, after the campaign in the West against
Soviet concentration camps and lunatic asylums, it seems that such
forces are much more intelligent and humane in people’s democra-
cies than in parliamentary ones. What does it matter? Despotism can
be draconian, as in the West, or enlightened (?), as in ‘socialist’ states
(or vice versa), but it remains despotism all the same. The universal
trend of capitalism, reacting to the threat of working-class struggles,
is to move towards a stage where all productive forces are completely
subsumed to capital, so that the only way liberty can be thought of
is as revolt. Moreover, capital is tending to compel all productive
forces to join together, in collusion with it. In a situation where these
processes are reaching their climax, socialism merely represents the
ultimate ‘rational’ application of the law of exploitation (of surplus
value) to the whole of society, and becomes the direct mystification of
capital. Marx actually talks of ‘the communism of capital’,22 but the
reformists keep their ‘orthodoxy’ well out of the reach of such provo-
cations. Democracy, whatever adjective one chooses to pair it with, is
the last remaining form to be adopted by the exercise of power in the
old society, of power over the proletariat that is an outward expres-
sion of capital’s irrational will to survive.
Thus, given this situation, the phrase ‘the dictatorship of the prole-
tariat’ can only allude to the potential of the working class to exercise
power as a mass, on the basis of the unification of the proletariat in
a concrete communist sense. It means seeing in communism the
final stage of the process of social transformation, when it comes
to fruition, and situating oneself within it, taking into account the
material relations that define it in all their manifestations. ‘Direct
democracy’ is a term that, among its ambiguous connotations, con-

tains an individualistic component, something utterly foreign to the
mature logic of a mass communist movement, which as such, far
from being amorphous, is clearly defined in terms of the collective
reappropriation of social planning, technology, and the satisfaction of
human requirements. The logic of individual needs and of the scar-
city of resources dominates thinking on direct democracy; the logic
of abundance and the collective is the cornerstone of the concept of
dictatorship of the proletariat. Even when, in Soviet democracy (a
system that corresponds to a political and technical stage in the pro-
letariat’s development that is highly different from the western one),
it seemed as if direct democracy as such was winning through, the
expression of class power in an authentically communist resolution
of social tensions was denied.23 The process of transition involves
the simultaneous destruction of the old and the construction of the
new: in the case of the institutional issue under discussion, the tran-
sition starts with the direct proletarian conquest of the state as a
collective and social mode of capitalism, proceeds with its system-
atic destruction, and culminates with the revelation of the power of
the proletariat in its most mature stage of formation. Communist
dictatorship has no need to evoke all over again nostalgia for the
democratic utopia of the bourgeoisie in order to give itself a pedigree.
The new configuration of class forces has nothing to do with that
past, a past that was not only pathetic in what it accomplished but
rarely more than a sheer mystification of reality. On the other hand,
it makes little sense for the youth of today either to invoke the ideals
of representative parliamentary democracy, whose blemishes stare
us in the face and whose merits are conspicuous by their absence,
or to hark back to the tarnished purity of the Third International.
However, such statements tend to encounter incredulity, disdainful
scepticism, and mental blocks. Too often working-class power has
put the wind up bourgeois intellectuals by highlighting the filth that
accompanies power: the egoism of the bosses, the terrorist tactics of
the state. Too often the struggles of the proletariat have unmasked
the confidence trick of representative democracy. If we take only the
example of Italy, the hundred years since unification have seen a
dozen or so coups d’état, successful or otherwise, by the bourgeoisie.
It has naturally become essential to suppress this image of how things
really are for power to be retained. Yet it has proved impossible to
suppress it. Because the prospect of a real alternative has become an
integral element of class struggles and, passed down from the strug-
gles, is now part of what constitutes class consciousness and hence
something that can be neither censored nor suppressed. I honestly

fail to comprehend, as do workers and members of the proletariat,
why a representative democracy that legitimizes mass unemployment
should be any more credible than a proletarian regime that is able to
pass decrees for a guaranteed wage and a reduction in the working
week. Nor do I understand how it can seem credible that these two
things could ever go hand in hand: socialism and democracy can,
apparently, but not democracy and communism. Thus, while others
play with words discussing the choice between democracy without
socialism and socialism without democracy, we talk simply of com-
munism, meaning by this a mature class structure that, according to
Marx’s predictions, synthesizes the need for communism with the
conditions brought about by technological progress, the shift away
from manual labour and the breakdown of the law of surplus value.
But let us consider this question from another point of view. I
really cannot see what guarantees of freedom can be provided by a
constitutional system based on the separation of powers (which no
longer exists, if it ever did), whereas I find no problem in under-
standing the liberty that all can enjoy in a society organized on the
principle of a dialectical relationship between state power and the
autonomy enjoyed in spheres where popular power holds sway. Nor
do I understand how the capitalist method for the acquisition and
control of intellectual productive forces (guaranteed by constitutional
democracy) can be more free than the emancipation of intellectual
force, as a form of collective social power, from its submission to any
other power. I am convinced that these ideas and these ways of think-
ing are gradually becoming consolidated within the counteroffensive
represented by the masses, one that resists any attempts to absorb it
into bourgeois constitutional democracy. To want to accommodate
such attitudes within democratic thought may be a laudable under-
taking for those who cultivate continuity at all costs (so numerous
in a country as priest-ridden as Italy), but does not mean so much,
and can be dismissed as a half-hearted attempt at trasformismo,24
when set against the rich resources the revolutionary tradition has
to draw on – since even now, albeit in different forms, the only
guarantees of freedom are those offered by the proletarian counter-
offensive against the state. The phase when sophistry concerning
the democratic dilemma was possible (freedom is possible, but the
subject of freedom is continually being confused by being defined
‘equivocally’, and thus neither ‘unambiguously’ nor ‘analogically’)
has been historically superseded: what point is there in still talking
of democracy and communism? Today, in the light of developments
within capitalism and of the crisis that the struggles against it have
provoked, we are finally in a position to begin to tackle the problem
– approaching it from within this struggle – of how the masses must
organize themselves so as to construct a communist society. Class
consciousness creates the will and transcends both the spontaneous
impulses directed to the satisfaction of immediate needs and the
immediate struggle. Will it be possible to erect a theory and praxis of
the destruction of the state and the transition to communism on such
a foundation? If it is true that transitional consciousness slowly turns
into mass consciousness, then the true beginning of the transition is
to be traced back to the moment when this question was formulated
and to the state of consciousness that generated it. As a result, the
only analysis of the transition to communism that can be envisaged
is one centred on the institutions of the proletarian counteroffensive
that have been forged in the course of these struggles. There is noth-
ing more desolate than the psychological block that finds some tactic
to avoid confronting this truth (e.g. by cherishing vague hopes of a
‘period of Giolittian trasformismo’25 in reverse, as some people are
attempting to bring about now, with Pascolian ingenuousness).
To articulate ideas clearly, follow through a variety of analytical

approaches, take stock of important issues, propose a point of view
with haughty democratic aplomb – these have always been Bobbio’s
professional qualities. Even in the case of this controversy, I acknowl-
edge their presence. But I must at the same time put on record that
the classical Marxist tradition of political thought obliges us to part
company with his verdict on this issue. Orthodoxy is of little concern
to me. What does concern me, enormously, is the constant reap-
praisal of the Marxist point of view. It interests me that the subjective
will to bring about the revolutionary transformation of the world
underpins and complements the analysis. The revolutionary prole-
tarian movement does not have a theory of the state because, unlike
the reformists, it has no need of predictions or of mystifications. The
‘who’ and the ‘how’ of the revolutionary transformation constitute
a single process, so that there is little point in wondering how the
confidence tricksters who form the government will be elected in
a communist society and whether their mandate will be revocable
and imperative. The problem with the classics is that they define the
conditions under which the revolutionary process can take place, and
must – necessarily – succeed. The history of the last hundred years

has seen the working class win too many crushing victories for it to get
very excited about turning back to watch the old democratic rites still
being performed. Rather it observes with intensified hatred the new
Gulag being created by the miseries of reformism and socialism. In
this state of mind none of us has a particularly soft spot for the dicta-
torship of the proletariat commemorated by the Third International.
But is it possible to change the term? (I personally would suggest,
if a little ironically, ‘communist power’.) Admittedly we have even
less sympathy for the great synthesis of Monsieur le Capital, Liberté,
égalité, fraternité, or for the term ‘planned economy’, which since
the breakdown of the law of surplus value has come to mean the
form taken by capitalist power in order to manage economic recovery
or crisis: a power that tries to compensate for the failure to trap the
working class in the net of exploitation by invoking the ‘neutrality’
of ‘rational’ objectives to be attained through public consensus. It is
much more important to recognize from the outset that nothing in
the present situation makes any sense in the light of the Marxist clas-
sics than to get bogged down in the concepts of democracy and law.
This insight provides us with the basis and the strength to proceed.
Everything else, everything the reformists offer, is – according to the
classics – a fraud.
Hence, moving beyond words and their supposed sacredness, it
is better if, with the help of Marxist theory, we set about identifying
revolutionary processes, taking full account of the deeper impulses
and needs they express, the desires that are constantly shaping and
remoulding them, the future communist institutions of power that
are latent in them, and the potential for destruction that they can
unleash. Lamartine never understood what the doomed proletariat
uprisings of June 1848 actually expressed. The concept of democracy
will never help us understand what the workers of Turin, Detroit,
Prague, Danzig were doing in the sixties. Marx, on the other hand,
has provided analytical tools whose value is not to be overrated, but
that nevertheless still enable us to communicate with these members
of a genuine working class – not about the past, but about the future.
It is for us, therefore, to take up Bobbio’s calumny of Marxist politi-
cal science, which was aimed at the reformist camp, as a challenge for
us to construct, with a view to promoting through the agency of this
working class in transition to communism, our own theory of how the
state is to be destroyed.
Part II
Having Done with Sovereignty
3
The End of Sovereignty*
I shall begin with a critique of the autonomy of the (national) politi-

cal, a notion that provides an umbrella for various positions, all of
them nostalgic about sovereignty.
Nowadays the autonomy of the political [l’autonomia del politico] is
viewed by many as a redemptive force for the left. I, for one, consider
it to be a curse and something to be shunned. I use this phrase to
designate arguments that claim that the decision-making process in
politics can and should be kept separate from the pressures of eco-
nomic and social life, from the reality of social needs.
Some of the more intelligent contemporary figures who propose
the autonomy of the political see it as a way of restoring liberal (left)
political thought by rescuing it from the ideological domination of
neoliberalism. They consider it to be an antidote – n ot only for the
destructive economic policies of neoliberalism, including privatiza-
tion and deregulation, and not so much for these as for the ways in
which neoliberalism transforms and dominates the public and the
political discourse, imposes economic rationality onto the latter, and
undermines any political reasoning that does not obey the logic of the
* Originally published in French, in EuroNomade, on 14 December 2014, under

the title ‘Pour en finir avec la souveraineté?’ [‘To put an end to sovereignty?’]
(http://www.euronomade.info/?p=8520). The title evokes Antonin Artaud’s
banned radio composition ‘Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu’ [‘To put an
end to God’s judgement’], which can be found in English in Antonin Artaud,
Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1976), pp. 553–7. Here and passim, the endnotes in editorial (square) brackets
mark material unsourced in the original and have been added in the present
edition.
market. While liberal democracy, as Wendy Brown explains, main-

tains a ‘modest’ ethical separation between economics and politics,
neoliberal political rationality closes this separation and subjects every
aspect of social and political life to ‘economic calculation’. From this
point of view, neoliberalism is the discursive and ideological face of
the real subsumption of society under capital or, as Wendy Brown
puts it, the ‘saturation’ of political and social realities by capital.1
It should be noted that the ideological project of subordinating
all political reasoning to the logic of the market certainly did not
originate with neoliberalism, although perhaps it presents itself today
more forcefully. Methodological individualism and social choice
research models, which were key components of Cold War ideology
in matters of social choice (particularly in the United States, and in
the work of authors such as Kenneth Arrow), also insisted that, in
order to be scientific, research has to base political rationality on the
economic logic of individual choice – in the market and in business.
Supporting the autonomy of the political in this context is there-
fore a way to reject the domination of market logic and to restore a
political discourse that is not that of the economic liberalism of the
free market but that of the liberal tradition of political thought, to
be found in rights, freedom, and equality – of égaliberté, as Étienne
Balibar called it – a tradition that has strong resonances in the work
of Hannah Arendt and goes back at least to John Stuart Mill.
One can recognize these liberal criticisms of neoliberalism as
honest, but it has to be said that they are inadequate for a democratic
project. On the one hand, political notions of freedom and equality
that do not attack directly the economic and social foundations of
inequality and lack of freedom, in particular the laws of ownership
and command over our productive and reproductive life, have always
been the proof of the inadequacy of such criticisms. On the other
hand, the potential, or the existing capacity, of people to govern
themselves collectively will always be obscured in such approaches;
in consequence, that true democracy, made up of a multitude capable
of political decisions, will always remain a noble ideal in an indefinite
future. The liberal theorists driving the train of the autonomy of the
political will never arrive at their destination, as a friend of mine puts
it, rather graphically.
A second set of arguments comes from the left, from well-
intentioned but equally ineffective authors. They seek to counter the
economic aspect of neoliberalism, with its projects for privatization
and deregulation. For this group, the autonomy of the political means,
first, a return to some form of public and state control. In response
The End of Sovereignty 61
to the neoliberal globalization that has eroded the powers of national

sovereignty, they propose a return to Keynesian and socialist mecha-
nisms in order to reaffirm the powers of the state over the economy
and thereby contain the monstrous powers of finance and corpora-
tions. We find, in the writings of a number of North American and
European intellectuals – the likes of Paul Krugman, Alvaro Garcia
Linera, and Thomas Piketty – both implicit and explicit calls for
a ‘return of the state’ as a force designed to block neoliberalism. I
would be inclined to see the authors of this version of the autonomy
of the political as allies, and their intentions strike me as sympathetic;
but, since we are (by nature, I would say) unable to view state and
public authority positively, as desirable, I find that contemporary
appeals for state control of a Keynesian or socialist type, although
presented in an eminently pragmatic way, are essentially unrealistic
and unachievable. The social and political conditions on which these
projects were based in the twentieth century no longer exist. Under
neoliberal rule, traditional trade unions and working-class organiza-
tions have been destroyed and massacred, and the associations that
underlie political citizenship have been so hollowed as to arouse nos-
talgia even among elites of the right. This does not mean that we have
to abandon all hope and resign ourselves to neoliberal rule; rather we
have to build a new, alternative starting point, one that involves the
productive and reproductive life of the multitudes, as they are today
– recognizing their potential and trying to realize their capacity for
organization and cooperation.
Finally, a small group of left-wing intellectuals is excited about
the autonomy of the political in avant-garde forms, often presented
as a response to the inability of today’s social, horizontal move-
ments to overthrow existing capitalist structures and to raise the
problem of seizing power. Slavoj Žižek, for example, following Alain
Badiou, proclaims that ‘a new figure of the Master’ (in Alexandre
Kojève’s sense) ‘is needed’, and proposes that ‘what we need today,
in this situation, is a Thatcher of the Left: a leader who would repeat
Thatcher’s gesture in the opposite direction’.2 Knowing Žižek’s work,
I do not read these statements literally, as a proposal to raise some
left-wing leader to the position of ultimate and definitive authority. I
do not ask him who should be the new master, or even whether Žižek
is putting in for the job himself. Žižek’s proclamations should rather
be understood as a provocative gesture, on the one hand supported
by an understandable frustration with the failure of leaderless move-
ments (he writes in early 2013, when Zuccotti Park, Tahrir Square,
and Puerta del Sol had been evicted by the police), and on the other
hand conditioned by his dogmatic psychoanalytical views regarding

the formation of groups – statements that I obviously do not share.
Jodi Dean, expressing similar frustrations in the face of the defeat
of Occupy, but without Žižek’s ability to hide behind ambiguous
and tongue-in-cheek provocations, pushes the idea of a vanguard
leadership and proposes the founding of a new communist party. As
I believe I have already said, given the widespread development of
immune systems within the movements, it seems impossible to us
today – thank God! – to impose traditional central committees and
leaderships onto social movements that are dynamic and creative.
These various claims for the autonomy of the political, ranging
from liberals to the radical left, express not only the reality of being
struck by fear and almost hypnotized by the authority of neoliberal-
ism but also a belief in sovereignty as a bulwark and as a means of
restoring the power of the left. It is true, as many of these authors
agree, that neoliberalism has undermined traditional sovereign politi-
cal powers. One does not have to look very far to recall how the forces
of global capitalism in Europe have managed the crisis since 2008
and the somewhat inelegant form in which the leaders of finance
capital, overcoming all obstacles and operating through the pressure
of ‘markets’, have imposed their will not only on debtor states but
on all European countries. European societies have been literally
rebuilt as a result of the hierarchical criteria created by the power
of money. This has resulted in new coercive configurations of the
division of labour (precariousness, mass unemployment, etc.), plus
the random but systematic organization of productive infrastruc-
tures, plus variable wage scales in the reorganization of the norms of
social reproduction and the different designs and alternative meas-
ures that have been rigidly proposed as programmes of exit from
crisis but that, through this crisis, have served only to deepen class
divisions. Finance capital under neoliberal command has thus freed
itself from any need to respond to the traditional political structures
of representation and functioning of national governments: electoral
mechanisms, fundamental legal structures, and so on.
Those appeals to sovereignty are therefore currently ineffective.
But they are also dangerous. They are dangerous because they lose
sight of what sovereignty has been in the course of its history and
what it still seeks to be. It has always sought only to detach power
from subjects, to centralize the power of decision-making against
subjects, to impose dominion over their lives, and to send them to die
in wars. Our problem is how to defend ourselves from sovereignty.
We have tried to do so, in the centuries of modernity, by limiting it,
by removing at least a part of the absolutist – even worse, colonial

– character it had gradually assumed. But those ways of controlling
it are no longer applicable. I wouldn’t want to play the part of the
professor of history of political thought and show once more how two
sets of regulatory ideas in the bourgeois world about organizing sov-
ereignty and potentially limiting it – namely ideas related to property
and freedom and ideas related to representation – have been trans-
formed, from illusory forms of control over the sovereign, into figures
of the sovereign’s domination. We have already begun to discuss
the first damned conversion: property and bourgeois freedom, con-
verted, via the market, into the structure of capitalist command. But
there is something to add about the second – that of the representa-
tion that constitutes sovereignty.
Here we might bring up the deception set in place by Rousseau.
On the one hand, he has individuals participating in the foundation of
the public sovereign, which he defines as follows: ‘Just as nature gives
each man absolute power over his members, the social pact gives the
body politic absolute power over all of its members, and it is this same
power which, directed by the general will, bears, as I have said, the
name of sovereignty’;3 on the other hand, in Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality, he curses private property – the first person who said, ‘this
is mine’. But our good Rousseau, who was so lucid and severe when
identifying private property as the source of all corruption and as
the cause of human suffering, immediately stumbles when he makes
property confront that general will that had solved the problem of
sovereignty for him. Since private property generates inequality,
how can a political system be created (invented) in which everything
belongs simultaneously to everyone and to no one – as it happened,
or rather as it should have happened, in that general will that attrib-
uted the sovereignty to everyone and to nobody? Here the trap closes
on the good Jean Jacques. If the concept of public is in fact offered
in answer to the question, ‘What belongs to each and everyone?’ and
if Rousseau’s answer is, ‘It is what belongs to the state’, well, in this
case Rousseau has invented something that only adorns, embellishes,
and mystifies the continuity of property-owning individuals’ taking
possession of the common. And he tries to convince us that this pro-
cess includes us. It is legitimate for the public to assume our rights
and to make decisions about what we produce – so the reasoning goes
– when the ‘we’ is again pushed (despite the general will) towards an
individual foundation, towards private property – that same founda-
tion from which we had triumphantly emerged in the name of the
general will. Here is the relentless logic of public pragmatism.
Conservative intellectuals have long since debunked the demo-

cratic claims of political representation and romantic Rousseauism,
and although their arguments have often been directed against
democracy itself, they contain a grain of truth. Already at the start
of the twentieth century, for example, Roberto Michels theorized
the ‘iron (or bronze) law of the oligarchy’ where political parties are
concerned, and their inevitable closure into a small clique. There
was a powerful allusion here to the fate of sovereign mystification
through representation. Today many conservatives openly argue that
the democratic claims of representation are false. Here we need only
recall, as an extraordinary example of this attitude, the decision of
the American Supreme Court (Citizens United v. FEC, 2010) that
removed all limits on how much individuals and corporations can
spend to support candidates in political elections. To any observer,
the legitimacy of unlimited contributions seems clearly to constitute
a corruption of the representative system, since such contributions
guarantee the influence of certain representatives against others. So
the Court’s decision moves, so to speak, from a conviction that the
representative system is already corrupt and cannot be different. One
can see the equation that Justice Anthony Kennedy, representing the
majority of the Court, establishes regarding the relationship between
representatives and their voters and contributors respectively:
It is in the nature of an elected representative to favor certain policies,
and, by necessary corollary, to favor the voters and contributors who
support those policies. It is well understood that a substantial and
legitimate reason, if not the only reason, to cast a vote for, or to make
a contribution to, one candidate over another is that the candidate will
respond by producing those political outcomes the supporter favors.
Democracy is premised on responsiveness.4
When one reads Kennedy’s reasoning, which echoes that of Michels,

one understands how substantially false the demand for democratic
political representation is. Having said that, allow me to return to a
point on which I have tried on other occasions to propose an alter-
native to sovereign power: the concept of constituent power. It is a
revolutionary act, an event conceived of as a juridical exception that
expresses a new political order ex nihilo, ‘out of nothing’; this is its
usual definition. The American, French, and Russian revolutions are
the examples most frequently cited. The act of taking power is defined
here by the spatial and temporal unity of the victorious revolutionary
event. The sovereignty of constituent power thus derives, in juridical
terms, from its exceptional nature. Now, that assumption of mine has
been criticized in recent decades, for example by Giorgio Agamben

and Jacques Derrida. According to both, the juridical notion of con-
stituent power could be convincingly criticized, given the claim that
it separates itself from constituted power; to quote Derrida, ‘the very
violence of the foundation or position of law (Rechtsetzende Gewalt)
must envelop the violence of conservation (Rechtserhaltende Gewalt)
and cannot break with it’.5 And yet, once this criticism has been
accepted, the conception of constituent power that I have proposed
remains valid, because it is not based on its juridical figure but on
the materiality of the revolutionary process. We can thus pass from
constituent power to constituent action, from constituent power as
a legal concept to constituent power as a political dispositif. This
passage offers us a subversive basis that empties out any link to the
notion of a unified event and proposes the revolutionary process as
an open and plural machine that progressively produces its norms.
In order to restore usefulness to the concept of constituent power
beyond its configurations in legal and political thought, it is always
necessary to differentiate, to recognize its social heterogeneity and its
temporal duration, that is, to configure it as a continuous power that
always replicates itself and establishes new figures.
Here I would highlight some key concepts, or rather some new
political conditions, with a view to redefining constituent power
beyond its model in modernity. First, we must consider the radi-
cal difference in how the legal and administrative apparatuses are
positioned with respect to – and are subsequently absorbed by – the
economic structures of society dominated by global capital. Society
as a whole is progressively subsumed into the circuits of economic
organization and capitalist command, first and foremost through the
action of finance capital, which reorganizes the division of labour
at a global level, appropriates profit from the material and intan-
gible forms of social labour, and extracts rent from the production
and reproduction of life and from the communication and circula-
tion of value. Money is the primary vehicle through which finance
commands the productive commons, appropriates the value that it
produces, and makes it functional to exploitation and to the hierar-
chy of social organization.
Second, the construction of the global market weakens the powers
of the nation states and diminishes their constitutional autonomy.
Obviously nation states retain important legal, economic, and admin-
istrative powers, but they are progressively located within structures
and institutions of global government as well as within the demands
of the global capitalist market – or they are even subordinate to all
these. Money and global governance are mutually embedded and

provide support for the legal structures of global capitalist society.
Third, in the process of this biopolitical transformation of society,
the figures of labour power and citizenship overlap with such inten-
sity that social, economic, and political conflicts resonate throughout
the structures of power and amplify one another. The immersion
of living labour in the constitution of political subjectivity creates a
proliferating series of antagonisms that traverse every institutional
reality.
Let us take a look at what happens in the struggles. The act of
snatching constituent power away from the autonomy of the political
in order to unify the critique of the political, economic, and social
can be clearly recognized in the strongest movements that have taken
action against inequality, privatization, and the power of finance.
There was magic in the air when activists built urban encampments
in Cairo and Istanbul, Madrid, New York, Oakland and Rio de
Janeiro; they created common urban spaces, spaces that were no
longer private or public but were characterized by free access and
by experimental mechanisms of democratic administration. Creating
common urban spaces has been experimented with as an antidote
to the poisons of neoliberal privatization – and these experiences
are symptomatic of an ever wider struggle, which pits the common
against the hegemony of private property and finance. In our days,
attacking private property and pursuing social cooperation and the
common as the engines of new constituent processes does not mean
abandoning the desire to have access to social goods and to consoli-
date the security of life. Much to the contrary, it means taking the
struggle from appropriation to the political. Much to the contrary,
too, this recognizes that private property is the fundamental obstacle
to human security and a blockage of access to the necessities of life
for the large majority. Furthermore, today, given the progressive,
cooperative, and social nature of production, the right of property
can no longer be the right to monopolize goods and to grant individu-
als decision-making powers; it can no longer be the right of a wolf
that jealously defends its booty from other wolves. Rather it must be
transformed into a right to the common, into an exit from solitude
through production and an entry into cooperation and social exist-
ence in equality and solidarity.
Finally, making constituent power into a continuous process has
deepened through immersion in the fabric of biopolitics: the content
of constitutional power tends to be life itself. Activists and militants
are not just asking for an increase in their incomes or for support for
welfare services; they seek to acknowledge that all life – all work of
production and reproduction – is subject to exploitation and to the
extraction of surplus value. In the continuity of these struggles lies
an expansion of social needs, desires, and demands. Constituent
power can become a composition of various constituent singulari-
ties, and hence conceiving of it as a multitudinous pluralism means
breaking with any fetishistic conception of political unity, and by the
same stroke also being done with the concepts of the people and the
nation, which are traditionally posited as a unity.
At this point, in the light of the struggles that have redefined con-
stituent power as an ongoing, radically plural and biopolitical process,
we are in a better position to recognize constituent power’s distance
from and incompatibility with representation and sovereignty. More
and more widely the democratic claims of political representation are
seen as cheap and empty, and it is not surprising that speaking in the
name of others has been outlawed in social movements. Cooperation
and aggregation emerge in place of representation, as mechanisms
through which a plurality of different political forces may act in
common. Correspondingly, leaving representation behind appears in
the economic field as well. When economic activity consists of large-
scale networks of social cooperation that produce and reproduce life
– or subjectify society – the representative mandate no longer makes
sense. In this context, any recourse to notions of general will seems
completely out of place and illegitimate. Everyone’s will is already
organized in cooperation.
The exclusion of sovereignty from constituent power becomes
increasingly clear. It is impossible today to find a form of constitu-
ent power thought of as transcendence or ‘exception’. The sovereign
requires unity – a unity that is irremediably broken by the radical
pluralism of the contemporary concept of constituent power. While
sovereign decisions are always empty, because the sovereign is sepa-
rate and above society and acts in the exception, constituent power
today invariably has a surfeit of social content. To redefine constituent
power, the exception of sovereign power must be replaced by an excess,
that is, by the excessive nature of social production and cooperation.
So then, what does it mean for the multitude to take power? Taking
power remains a central goal for us and, as I have tried to explain,
it cannot mean just overturning the relationship of domination and
ultimately maintaining the machine of sovereign power by changing
the person who sits in the driver’s seat. For a multitude, taking power
is basically to undertake a task – that of inventing new, non-sovereign
institutions.
But beware. When our eyes are fixed on the institutional political
and we assume that people (the electorate, etc.) have the necessary
skills to organize and support long-term programmes or administer
institutions collectively – in short, that they are capable of democracy
– this assumption often turns out to be an illusion. I would be
tempted to say, picking up on James Madison’s realism, or rather
cynicism, that, if populations were made up of angels, then and only
then would a true democracy be possible. The only real and effec-
tive way to answer these questions today is instead by shifting our
perspective from the political to the social field or, to put it better, by
combining the two. This is what the movements show us. Only then
shall we be able to recognize and promote, through the extended
circuits and capacities of cooperation and organization of the mul-
titude, new democratic political processes – understanding that the
human capacities for social cooperation are a solid basis of demo-
cratic organization.
It happened in Soviet society in the early 1920s – partially and
briefly – that there was a connection between the radically democratic
constituent activity of the Soviets and the institutional processes
of economic and social transformation. For a time, the revolution
became a veritable instituting machine [macchina istituente], or rather
a complex of constituent institutions. The formula proclaimed by
Lenin in 1920, ‘communism = soviet + electrification’, associates
a form of political organization with an economic development
programme. The Soviet industrial development project rapidly
encountered insurmountable obstacles, which were due in part to the
low level of Russian industrialization and to the lack of an industrial
base in terms of the social and cultural resources of the population
– not to mention the international isolation and encirclement by the
capitalist countries. We can nevertheless learn from Lenin’s formula
the necessity of forging a link between revolutionary political organi-
zation and the social project of transformation.
It would, of course, be anachronistic to re-propose plans for eco-
nomic modernization. We are moving today on a biopolitical terrain,
and the question is not simply about producing goods but about the
ontological expansion of social being.
Today’s task clearly takes shape when placed within the framework
of capitalist development. As Marx shows, between the eighteenth
and the nineteenth centuries the centre of gravity of capitalist pro-
duction and its dominant mode pass from manufacturing (which
essentially sustains increases in productivity through the division of
labour) to large-scale industry (which increases productivity by intro-
ducing complex machinery and new schemes of cooperation). If we

extend Marx’s periodization so as to encompass the twenty-first cen-
tury, we see the centre of gravity of capital shifting from large-scale
industry to the stage of general intellect – which is production based
on increasingly intense and widespread circuits of social cooperation,
set up by machinic algorithms as a basis for extracting value from the
production and reproduction of social life. In this phase the distinc-
tion between the economic and the social is progressively saturated.
This démarche is closely related to the analysis of the transforma-
tions of the capitalist mode of production from manufacturing (with
the formal subsumption of society and the extraction of absolute
surplus value) to the stage of large-scale industry (with the real sub-
sumption of society and the extraction of relative surplus value), and
finally to the phase of productive organization of the general intellect
(with the cognitive subsumption of society, through an incremental
cooperation and through extractive financial exploitation). Socialized
production and reproduction are biopolitical activities. Now, against
alienated work – that is, against isolated, individualized, exploited
labour – a common resistance arises. In the industrial regime it was
expressed in an extremely powerful way as ‘refusal of work’; today
it is expressed in new forms of antagonism that are active across
the entire social fabric. As a result, constituent power cannot yet be
conceived of in purely political terms; rather it must be connected
to social behaviours and new technologies of subsistence, resistance,
and transformation of life. The process of building new institutions
must be taken together with this new materiality.
The reply to my initial question is not yet a substantive proposal,
but rather a methodological guideline, and in any case one should
not expect an answer that offers a solution and lays the problem to
rest. My answer is that of the person who catches the ball and throws
it on, thus creating a dynamic, a movement. To find the foundations
of new democratic forms of political and institutional organization,
let us begin with an investigation into the cooperative networks that
animate the production and reproduction of social life.
4
Roberto Esposito in Dialogue with
Toni Negri*
In this talk, given at a festival organized by the Roman publisher

DeriveApprodi in 2016, published in the subsequent year in Effetto
Italian Thought, I sought to engage with Toni Negri’s positions on the
end of sovereignty.1 I began by briefly summarizing his basic thesis.
Today, for a number of reasons that take us into the realm of bio
politics, we find ourselves having gone beyond the sovereign paradigm.
These reasons are: (a) the transformation of law into an administra-
tive machine of governance in which the system of norms takes the
place of the order of law in the regulation of social conflicts; (b) the
transfer of juridical structures, articulated into autopoietic systems,
from the terrain of the state to a series of social dynamics endowed
with an increasing degree of autonomy; (c) the global interdepend-
ence between states and markets that destructures the sovereign
regime, finally overcoming the interstate model to the advantage of
new forms of infrastatal and ultrastatal coordination. I shall address
two questions related to this scenario, which Negri describes with an
undeniable talent for synthesis. First, can his perspective adequately
represent the current political sociocultural dynamics? And, second
but even more importantly, can it address their consequences effec-
tively and realistically?
Before attempting a problematizing response to these issues, I
would begin with an observation that might be taken for granted in
* This article was originally published under the title ‘In dialogo con Toni Negri’,
in Effetto Italian Thought, ed. Enrica Lisciani-Petrini and Giusi Strummiello,
Quodlibet: Macerata 2017, pp. 23–31. The endnotes (partially updated, as else-
where, for the benefit of the English reader) do not belong to Esposito but were
added by the editors of the Italian volume.
Roberto Esposito in Dialogue with Toni Negri 71
this context, but that I believe needs to be made explicit. Negri is

the only intellectual in Italy, and one of the few in Europe, to have
played a directly political role for the radical left – and therefore to
have had the ability to affect the real world through his ideas. This
objective fact is rooted not only in his life story, which is profoundly
steeped in the history of recent decades, and not only in the mobili-
zational force that his intellectual energy communicates. It is rooted
in something more, which is integral to his thinking and conceptual
language: an attitude or a tonality that has always kept him clear of
the retreat that has been experienced by left-wing culture, in Italy and
elsewhere – and this includes a large part of the workerist [operaista]
tradition. Unlike other intellectuals with the same experiences of the
1960s, Negri has never fallen back on theological and political posi-
tions; has never practised a policy of programmatic dualism between
despair and administration; did not theorize, with dubious realism,
the choices of a lesser evil; did not go looking for katechonta, be they
old or new. Instead he held firmly to an affirmative principle that
radically contrasts with those kinds of positions. In this respect, he is
an Italian intellectual who, more than any other, has given a positive
sign to what we call Italian thought.* If there is something that has
always characterized his perspective, it is this affirmative, constitu-
tive, vital stance, which offers an alternative to this negative turn, by
virtue of which the whole (and not only the Italian) political theology
is still caught up in katechontic, eschatological, or messianic forms.
To think in affirmative and constituent ways means not to infer the
meaning of one’s categories from the negation of their opposite – not
to seek freedom in the overthrow of necessity, history in the overthrow
of nature, the common in the overthrow of ownership. He does not
situate life in the extremity of death, as all Heidegger’s spiritual heirs
do. Rather he calls it out directly, as did Machiavelli, Spinoza, and
Marx, for whom action precedes the negation – it neither depends
on it nor presupposes it. In this way you can read the work of Negri
– from his earliest writings on Descartes and Spinoza – as an alterna-
tive to the modern political philosophy of Hobbes, Rousseau, and
Hegel. But his thinking also falls outside Schmitt’s ‘categories of the
political’, which are themselves governed by the negative figures of
the enemy and exclusion.
What Negri tells us in this latest piece on the end of sovereignty
should be viewed in this affirmative framework, too. As Foucault
* ‘Italian thought’ in English in the original.

argued, sovereignty is a negative category par excellence. Unlike gov-

ernment, which produces both rules and subjectivity, sovereignty acts
in a negative way, either through the law or through the exception that
suspends law, both imposing prohibitions and breaking them. To
this sovereign paradigm – to its negative power of exclusion – Negri
opposes the affirmative power [potenza] of a horizontal, multiple
subjectivity rooted in historical and natural life. While in Hobbes the
sovereign paradigm is born against nature, annihilating the natural
state, Negri incorporates history, nature, and life into a single texture
of production. Politics does not originate from the annihilation of
the state of nature but rather incorporates some of nature’s energetic
potential, channelling it into institutions that are constantly renewed
by the constitutional relationship with the source. As was the case
with Machiavelli, constituted power never completely emancipates
itself from constituent power, but returns to it to renew itself radically
every time it risks drying up. I share this basic antitheological–antipo-
litical starting point; I have been moving in the same direction for
some time.
What I find less convincing is his interpretation of the present situ-
ation. Already at the time of the publication of Empire2 there was a
gap between the analysis offered by Hardt and Negri and the reality
on the ground. It seems to me that since 2001 the gap has widened
so much that there is now a deep fracture, both at the international
and at the domestic level of individual states. Wherever we turn our
gaze today, we see a major return of the ‘negative’, in all the senses
that can be attributed to this word. To begin with, let’s take the ques-
tion of sovereignty. Has it really imploded, as Negri says, revisiting
and deepening what we find written in the trilogy Empire, Multitude,3
and Commonwealth,4 or is it being restructured into what one could
call Leviathan 2.0? Are we facing the completion of globalization or
its dramatic withdrawal? Again, has the machine of sovereignty really
been absorbed into an affirmative politics so as to incorporate every
outside into an inside, or does it continue, albeit in different ways,
to produce new structures of power? And has the deterritorialization
process really overcome all territorial borders, to produce a world
that no longer has a centre or limits? My impression is that the pro-
cesses triggered in America, Europe, and Asia in the early years of
the new century have been going in the opposite direction, as all the
latest events have shown most manifestly.
Globalization, which is still a powerful force at the economic and
technological level, falls back and breaks on the political. What we
are experiencing is indeed the first major political crisis of globaliza-
tion. Far from being just imperial provinces, sovereign states raise
their heads again, building new walls on their borders, and even
Islamic terrorism seeks to territorialize itself into a new sovereign
state. While the United States under Trump threatens an increas-
ingly hermetic sealing of its borders, the countries of Europe, with
the United Kingdom in the lead, claim other sovereign prerogatives
in addition to debt. Instead of cancelling itself out, in a generalized
deterritorialization, the line of opposition between inside and outside
deepens, cutting right to the heart of the West. The threatened vic-
tory of nationalist forces all around Europe requires re-establishing
sovereign control even over the economy. This is very difficult, but
not entirely impossible. After all, what was it that saved the financial
system of the banks, if not national governments? Not to mention
the progressive militarization of questions of migration. In various
parts of the world, war tends to become the new constituent princi-
ple, modifying the spheres of influence exercised by sovereign states
such as Russia, Turkey, India, and China. Their hegemonic clash
with the United States is no longer limited to economic matters but
also passes through politics, threatening to move to the military level
sooner or later, given that there never was a real sovereign power in
history that was not also military. Meanwhile there is a rebirth of neo-
colonial temptations in other guises: the big powers are once again
envisaging the conquest of territories destabilized by civil wars. What
is being globalized today is a form of nationalism that is very different
from the open and inclusive paradigm of ‘empire’. The constitution
of the European Union, which is currently in crisis, has already col-
lided with it, and a ‘sovereignist’ disarticulation is the outcome. The
nomos of the earth (to use Carl Schmitt’s formula), along with pro-
duction and distribution, goes back to being a kind of sharing out in
a new geopolitical order of the world.
The problem can be seen from another angle as well. Certainly
European states have lost several of their prerogatives – beginning
with the decisive one of being able to mint money independently
of decisions by the Union. This means that none of the individual
states – not even Germany, should it want to – is able to bring about
a real change of system on its own. When Greece tried to raise its
head, it was quickly forced into a humiliating surrender. But it is
also true that a few states saw the birth of the only forms of resist-
ance, immediately dismissed as ‘populist’, to the dominant neoliberal
model. What could or should be understood today by populism
remains largely an open book. But it is difficult to continue talk-
ing about democracy outside the reference to a sovereign people. If
neoliberalism has now been generalized across the globe, this means
that the liberal–democratic model, which was hegemonic in Europe
for several decades, has broken down; and, given this situation, a
residue of democracy seems to be possible only in individual nation
states. Only in them can political conflicts arise at the moment; and
only in them can a form of public law oppose the global primacy of
private law. Despite all its limitations and its exclusionary mecha-
nisms, the nation state remains for the time being the only subject of
constitutionalization of the private relations that currently regulate
the world’s financial market.
But the collapse of the imperial paradigm theorized by Hardt and
Negri has also weakened the two categories that accompanied it
dialectically, namely the multitude and the common. These were
conceived, within and against the horizon of empire, in order to
accompany the sunset of political sovereignty and the biopolitical turn
in matters regarding the nature of work. There is a close relationship
between these two phenomenologies, in the sense that the expansion
of immaterial labour is connected structurally to the dynamics of
deterritorialization. The assumption on which Negri has worked in
recent years is that cognitive capitalism, which is based on the spread
of general intellect, creates the conditions of its own overthrow, in
the same way in which the feudal world created the conditions for
the birth of bourgeois society. The optimistic presupposition of this
hypothesis is that the spread of immaterial production, once freed
from the chains of capital and from imperial constraints, will pro-
duce the conditions of a new socialization, which is embodied in the
multitude.
But this in turn presupposes another condition, which is far from
given – namely the neutrality of the instruments of production, which
are seen as capable of passing from the capitalist regime to a different
one, with a high rate of socialization. Now, as Carlo Formenti has
also pointed out, in a book entitled The Populist Alternative5 this neu-
trality is far from given. Technology, including digital, incorporates
codes and control devices that predetermine modalities and effects.
Technological development is inseparable from the capitalist com-
mand that directs it, taking it to its own ends. Nor do the new forms
of cognitive labour – which, incidentally, involve relatively limited
groups of workers – liberate potentialities ready to be introduced into
a different regime. On the contrary, intellectual labour, like material
labour, is increasingly conditioned by the constraints of the capital-
ist economy and of the financial market. It is true that new forms
of subjectivation are also generated through this channel. But they
are far from being free; they are rather forged by the mechanisms of
neoliberalism, in relation to human capital. This happens in the same
way in which skills are strictly parcelled and measured via evaluation
systems aimed at maximizing outputs and profits. On the other hand
the digital revolution has continuously reduced work, even before it
changed its nature, as is obvious from all the serious studies on the
subject. Therefore one has to ask: do labour and immaterial produc-
tion really free us from imperial constraints, from the constraints
of capitalist command, do they produce new forms of society and
socialization, and are these forms embodied in the multitude?
This has fairly problematic consequences for the very category of
multitude and raises an important political question. It regards in
the first place the composition of the multitude, which is made up
of segments too diverse to constitute a subjectivity that somehow is
homogeneous, or at least capable of being articulated into a unitary
whole. How is one to assemble pieces of highly specialized cognitive
labour and put them together with marginalized labour or illegal
immigrant labour? Are they part of one and the same subjectivity,
plural and singular, which can be defined as a multitude? And can
one unite, under the same romantic single category of exodus, the
migration of graduates, who change country in search of better paid
work, and the migration of those who are trying to escape famine
and war? But, even before that, how does such a multitude acquire a
political aspect, and how does it pass from the social and ontological
sphere to the political? What can push the singularities that comprise
it to unite in a single front? And against what opposing front do they
align? Where exactly is one to find the line of the conflict required
in any political dynamic? On this point I find myself in agreement
with Tronti: the political requires a clear distinction between friend
and enemy. Here again, the question of the negative returns. This
question is in some way excluded from Negri’s discourse, which is
so affirmative and places so much trust in the immanent power of
things that it seems at times to be without borders, without limits.
But without limits how does one build political alliances, and against
whom? Who are the friends – or at least the allies – and who is the
enemy? The international financial cartels? The ruling classes in indi-
vidual, national countries? The European institutions? As Negri says,
we need to restart political work. But resuming political work means
identifying possible allies and a common enemy. This is also Laclau’s
point: the definition of the adversary is decisive, because the adver-
sary in turn defines us. Without a clear adversary we cannot have a
political identity.6
My impression is that, if one takes the economic category of pro-

duction to be central, as Negri does, one has a problem with that
category’s acquiring a real political characterization and thus turn-
ing into a political category. As Dardot and Laval have argued, the
category on which we should concentrate our efforts is that of the
institution – which is more at home in the legal–political lexicon.7 It
is as if, from Negri’s perspective, the hyperpolitical and the unpoliti-
cal paradigms alternate or overlap, without ever fully getting hold of
the political plane. Does not his line of argument – which he sees as
a force for mobilization – run the risk of a quietistic outcome? If the
change is objectively already in place in the processes of transforming
labour, one may wonder why intervene politically. In Negri, the path
towards this conceptual translation from the economic into the politi-
cal passes though ontology. Here we feel the presence of the Spinozan
model, reworked through a strong reference to Deleuze’s plane of
immanence. Production is internal to an ‘existence’ that has both life
and nature as its referents. It is production of life in both the subjec-
tive and the objective sense: thing produced by life and productive of
life. But the transition from ontology to politics remains problematic
– as is the immediate reference to a nature that does not pass through
artifice, that is, through some instituting activity [per un’opera istitu-
ente]. This is because, while a radically affirmative ontology – such
as that of Deleuze – is conceivable, for politics the discourse is less
simple. One should not confuse one’s affirmative point of view – and
I say this also about myself and my own work – with a cancellation of
the reality of the negative. The negative exists. Indeed, in many ways,
it appears to dominate the contemporary scene. Of course, it must
be faced, managed, overturned. But not removed. Not even Spinoza
can do that – Spinoza, for whom omnis determinatio est negatio (‘every
determination is a negation’). Despite its undoubted distance from
Hobbes, or from Rousseau and Hegel, within whose horizon it some-
times aligns itself, determination remains linked to the reality of the
negative; and I do not even mention Machiavelli, on whose thought
Negri worked for a long time and who knew in all its intensity the
weight of the negative. Machiavelli’s lexicon is entirely tied to the
non-eliminable reality of clash and conflict, to the idea of limits – but
this is excluded from a totally affirmative discourse of pure imma-
nence, à la Deleuze.
On this point there is a difficulty, both practical and theoretical –
not only for Negri, but for all of us. It belongs to all the affirmative
kinds of biopolitics, to all the philosophies of immanence. There
is no point in trying to hide it. This difficulty pays heed to the
late Foucault’s uncertainties and to the friction, never overcome,

between his outlook and Deleuze’s, which Negri assimilates perhaps
too easily. Foucault knew well that desire, like love or happiness,
is not a political category, as Negri seems to believe – or at least
these categories are not enough to determine politics if they do not
reckon with power. This was the point of the disagreement between
Foucault and Deleuze in their final exchange. Because desire is not
enough to create a secondary meaning or a political perspective and
determination, what is required is an external determination and an
internal determination: the power or the resistance that calls into play
the question of the negative.
Of course, constituted power must always be supported or opposed
by constituent power, as Negri taught us in one of the decisive books
of the late twentieth century: Il potere costituente: saggio sulle alternative
del moderno,8 a book that constitutes one of the roots of contempo-
rary Italian thinking and is therefore among the general sources of
Italian thought. But the great political and theoretical problem that
this text contains is not solved: it is the problem of its articulation
on, distinction from, and opposition to the sovereign paradigm, with
which it shares the category of decision. How can we differentiate
a constituent decision from a sovereign decision? Can there be an
inclusive decision that is not at the same time an exclusion of some-
thing else? Is it possible to decide without crossing the line between
the inside and the outside? Is it possible to set up a constituent power
sidelining the question of the outside? And what would it be, a world
without an outside – like that of empire? An immanence without
internal and external thresholds? This problem – once again, that of
the relationship with the negative – is far from being resolved by all of
us. But I have the impression that the outside cannot be expunged,
also because the act of expunging would itself be, in the final analysis,
a negative category. Negri’s work has represented for a few decades,
and still represents, one of the most powerful philosophical, political,
and theoretical dispositifs that each one of us needs to address. It
measures his limitations, but above all our own. And for this, before
we start to discuss it, we should thank him.
5
Toni Negri in Reply to
Roberto Esposito*
Dear Roberto,
Thank you for your letter, which as usual was to the point. I shall not
summarize the questions you raise, and I shall refrain from pointing
out some inaccuracies in the assumptions you make. Rather, let us
get to the heart of the matter together: what does it mean to think
in an affirmative and constituent way? As I have never been a fan of
what they like to call ‘eternal philosophy’ and, important as the young
Hegel and the young Marx were to me, I have more often entrusted
the historical and social sciences with ascertaining the truth and class-
political action (on behalf of the exploited) with building my actions,
I have learned that social processes are always contingent and that
history is discontinuous and only possibly traversed by stable trends.
This means that reasoning in an affirmative and constituent way is to
put oneself in there and to dispose one’s thinking towards acting, in
any contingency, in relation to those eventualities and those tenden-
cies. To put it briefly, it means reasoning by dispositifs (affirmative
thinking), trying to identify tendencies favourable to liberation from
exploitation (constituent thinking). Having said that, it seems to me a
caricature to declare that affirmative thinking cannot problematically
assume the negative. The negative is always as present in our consid-
erations as the positive is. It would be equally a caricature to say that
the constitutive asserts itself in linear fashion without knowing the
negative. Rather, being inside the real means always being faced with
* This piece was originally published in Italian under the title ‘In risposta a
Roberto Esposito’, in Effetto Italian Thought, ed. Enrica Lisciani-Petrini and
Giusi Strummiello, Quodlibet: Macerata 2017, pp. 33–40.
Toni Negri in Reply to Roberto Esposito 79
alternatives, choosing between the positive and the negative, between

being and not being. To be clear, from this point of view I am closer
to Foucault than to Deleuze, to historical discontinuity rather than
to deterritorialization. This is because historical depth, being inside
that complex materiality, is the only environment in which thought
and practice make sense. Doing politics is this choice – operated
collectively – and it is in this struggle for knowledge that a practice of
truth is expressed. For truth is not a fixity or a naked correspondence
to reality, but construction of the common.
Let us now address the three categories in which you suggest that
there has been a decline: empire, multitude, and the common.
1. Empire. When I speak of the crisis of sovereignty, I refer to the

crisis of modern sovereignty – that is, to the crisis of sovereignty of
the nation state, in the sense of European public law [diritto pub-
blico] of yesteryear. Now, it seems to me that globalization has taken
national sovereignty out of the way – in the sense that it has radically
weakened its ability to decide on monetary matters (i.e. the ability
to shape the economic order), its ability to decide on military mat-
ters (i.e. the ability to make war), and its ability to decide on cultural
matters (i.e. the ability to command communication). These findings
seem banal; the sovereign absoluteness of the nation state is elimi-
nated. At this point we must ask ourselves whether this crisis – the
declining sovereignty of nations – is an irreversible trend, whether it
is desirable, and whether our constituent capacity must be made to
facilitate it. On the first point, I believe that this crisis is irreversible.
This is because capitalist globalization is irreversible. Here a reading
of the third volume of Das Kapital is necessary for those who have
not had the time to study it. On the other hand, it is very true that
globalization does not mean empire – that is, a global political order
and the consequent transfer of national sovereignties to a suprana-
tional authority. But it is also true that the globalization of markets
– which amounts to a globalization of the production and reproduc-
tion of life, of financialization, and of the social extraction of value
– requires order. In the capitalist system, order means command;
therefore capitalist globalization requires empire. This logic is not
marked by a transcendental will but is imposed by the concreteness
of the struggles. On the other hand, the struggle around the exercise
of imperial power has continued uninterruptedly since the nineteenth
century and, even if Braudel has given it a few centuries before that,
it is only from the nineteenth that it has taken a path of exceptional
ferocity, especially in the short twentieth century. This struggle was
characterized by the failed US coup d’état on globalization in the years

after the end of the Cold War and, in the 1990s, by the first Iraqi
War, which extended until the Wall Street crisis in 2007. The strug-
gle for imperial hegemony has now opened up completely and seems
to be configured in a non-multipolar, oligo-plural perspective, which
involves the United States, China, perhaps the European Union,
perhaps Russia, and is utterly uncertain and dangerous. In fact, in the
struggle for imperial leadership, we find ourselves exposed to the pre-
sent reality and future eventuality of wars.1 The problem is therefore
not whether the trend towards globalization is irreversible; the prob-
lem is only that it is uncertain who will command. The struggle for
hegemony over globalization will certainly modify some determining
factors of the situation (essentially legal or governmental rules), but
will not modify its nature. In any case, such modifications do not
concern today’s nation states, which will eventually be subjected to
one global power or another, perhaps becoming administrative units
in their region, more likely simple geographical expressions redefined
by the global logistics of the markets. What we see re-emerging now,
in Europe and elsewhere, especially in the former Soviet countries
that are now integrated into the European Union, is the last rear-
guard action of an illusory national homogeneity – a conception of
the state that lingers as a leftover from modernity and gets adopted
from time to time, as if the historical process were reversible. Not
only is it not, but it would be naive to think that its irreversibility
can be construed as a simple succession of paradigmatic forms (after
sovereignty, empire; after empire, a return to sovereignty). Here, too,
Foucault teaches us: forms do not follow one another but overlap and
reformulate, and the sovereign residues are themselves produced and
qualified by the form of empire. Is this sovereign diminution of the
nation state desirable? I am more than convinced of it. In fact I think
that in contemporary civilization nations, peoples, homelands repre-
sent the negative, always capable of transforming itself into fascism.
I do not attribute to nations alone the tragedy of the European wars,
the atrocities of colonialism, the mystifications of socialism, the col-
lusion with the hierarchical systems of churches and employers, and
above all the construction of political and cultural classes unable to
adapt to globalization and to respond to the needs of the populations
from this perspective.
2. In view of this, how are we to deal with our constituent capacity?
It cannot be disposed of other than by building a multitude capable
of self-government. For you, the multitude is a category dialectically
linked to empire. Maybe so! For me, it is a category linked to the
development of the social worker [operaio sociale], to the subsequent

definition of the tendential hegemony of immaterial labour in the new
modes of production, to the discovery of the singularization of work
activity, and to the deepening of the analysis of cognitive labour – in
short, to the use and articulation of the Marxian indication of general
intellect through the empirical analysis of technological change and
through the sociological analysis of the transformation of forms of life
– or, in the terminology of workerism [operaismo], through analysis of
the ‘technical composition’ and ‘political composition’ of the working
class. Now, the study of this new labour power strengthens Marx’s
idea of the dual nature of workers’ labour power: there is labour
power subjected to capital and there is living labour producing capital
– labour power within capital and working class against capital.
What we have here is an elementary dual reality in the definition of
labour power and class struggle; it is, furthermore, a formula already
widespread among philosophers and it arises from a Kojèvian inter-
pretation of some passages in Hegel’s Phenomenology. But now you
remind me that ‘[t]echnological development is inseparable from the
capitalist command that directs it, taking it to its own ends’, and that
‘new forms of subjectivation are also generated through this channel’,
yet ‘are far from being free’ (ch. 4, p. 75). Provided that, in the face
of this deterministic finding, you do not want to drop the balaclava
[calare il passamontagna] (as others did in similar conditions), you
will have to admit that it is quite crude – and perhaps completely
ideological, as far as options go – to resort to technological deter-
minism in order to eliminate the productive potentiality of living
labour and its ability to bring about (constituent) resistance. The
fact is that, as I have tried to show during all these years, the present
mode of production, far from totalizing the production of subjec-
tivity, tells of a paradoxical implication of subjectivity: the more it
exploits labour power (immaterial, intellectual, social), puts its sub-
jectivity to work, and normalizes this form of exploitation, the more
it requires singularized performances. What is more, the productivity
of this labour power arises not only from its involvement in the mode
of production (technically defined as ‘work’) but also from the forms
of life in which it produces itself. It may well be the case that what
you call ‘the negative’ is increasingly embodied in biopolitics and
that the suffering of work may be greater for an IBM worker than
it was for a miner, although this is a bit hard to believe; but in any
case this negative cannot be inserted into the ontology of subjectiva-
tion. Subjectivation is given by the productive potentiality that living
labour carries in itself and by the cooperative social relationship in
which it expresses itself: if subjectivity were annulled in the process of

producing, there would be no productivity or increase in value, and
there would not even be capitalism! Is it possible that, when lament-
ing the colonization of labour and the suffering and fatigue that ensue
from it, one refuses to understand the productive potentiality of that
very labour? The negative is an obstacle and not a destiny; what is
negative is command, but it cannot exist without resistance. On the
other hand, I do not need to remind you that capital is a relationship.
Where there is command, there is resistance, and in this Foucault
is entirely Marxist.2 All determination is resistance. Nietzsche, as
a reader of Spinoza, understood this well. And it is resistance that
constructs being. So, even if we put these metaphysical statements in
parentheses, it seems to me that we can conclude here that it is only
in globalization that the struggles of labour and the struggles over
welfare and social reproduction can take place effectively, because it
is only at this level that they can grasp the whole negativity of organ-
ized capitalist command. Will the multitude organize itself to win the
battle against capital? Will it be able to build institutions, enterprises
[imprese] capable of fighting against social and global exploitation
and of governing a society liberated from exploitation, and therefore
from work?
3. We can begin to give answers about how to move to organize
the struggle against capitalist command over globalization only when
we analyse the common as the cement of the cooperation in which
singularities are organized for social production – and therefore not
only as the munus (‘duty’, function’, ‘gift’, ‘show’) element in com-
munitas, as you see it, but as the product of a common action. To
build institutions capable of moving towards this objective is possible
only when the multitude extends into the common, in other words
manages to weave organizational flows capable of breaking the chains
of power. There are a thousand examples: just by way of keeping up
with what has been in the news recently, one could cite the move-
ments that have developed since 2011 in Spain, the United States,
North Africa and the Middle East, Brazil, and other places; and then
all the people who, by helping migrants in recent years and months,
have tried to build spaces of common life; the workers’ great struggles
against liberal reforms of labour laws; the democratic assemblages
around Sanders and Corbyn; the flows of political demands that
push [in Italy] for citizenship income.* Is none of them winning? If
* Reddito di citaddinanza, which is in practice a form of guaranteed income.

you adopt legal or politicizing parameters (as do Dardot and Laval),3

then certainly not: the instituting demand [la richiesta istituente] that
insists on mediation as an instance external to the common removes
any possibility of qualifying the direct constituency of these events.
So, to come back: is nobody winning, then? Yes and no. This is
because a given struggle may not win at the local level, but it does
build up difficulties for the management of global command. Does
this mean that we should not fight at the local level? Could local
struggles be useless, doomed to defeat? On the contrary: every single
struggle is immediately meaningful at the global level. Incidentally,
this is a very important teaching of Leninism – of that Leninism that
is too often used today, and disastrously, to back up sovereignism
and nationalisms. It is a teaching that takes us back to an affirmative
and constituent ontology, to Machiavelli if you like, but also to all the
people who support an insurrection of the common when they act
on events that match the tendency. Nobody is winning, then? Think
about it: once again, it would be naive to think that the historical
order of powers registers only the seizure of a Winter Palace: every
resistance, even if apparently defeated, constitutively regenerates his-
torical development as a whole. And I am not saying this to console
us but as a bad omen for leadership!
You suggest that I have an ontological system that prevents
the transition to the political. I don’t see why. Ontology does not
anticipate anything; the real has to be built. There is no ontologi-
cal continuity between February and October 1917 – it is created
by risk and political decision. It is a movement through what you
call the negative, and one that concedes nothing to it. On the other
hand, it seems to me that admitting that there is an outside to the
field in which we develop the struggle removes the possibility of
doing politics. A transcendental figure of command (such as is neces-
sary for any expression of ordered and productive social life), or an
ineliminable negative, an essential block, a radical evil – all this can
only require a katechon. A thought of immanence, affirmative and
constituent, which is implanted in an ontology of the common (this
is what is lacking in you), is immediately political. To construct the
Prince of the multitude is to give voice to the common and strength
to cooperation: we have started to do this again in the streets for
some decades, with a proletariat that has cognitive hegemony after
having lived the experience of the crisis of the workers’ movement
in factories. Transforming the tendential hegemony of the cognitive
worker into a present transversal power of the entire working class
is of course the political project of today. I have two observations in
this regard. First, whatever today’s populists may say on the subject,
this task is not for limited segments of society; it concerns the whole
society that has been put to work, the entire social production, in
particular as organized on platforms, in which the extraction of value
includes and requalifies the nature of exploitation – the Taylorism
of the old industrial Taylorist exploitation and the new IT-based
exploitation. Second, the difficulty that you seem to have in thinking
through the possibility of this new composition of the different in the
multitude (qua new class composition) seems to me due to the fact
that you are still thinking of unity in Hobbesian terms, whereby the
principle of organization must give unity to the different; and here,
by underlining the criticism, I really see myself as a Deleuzian. How
does one do this? you ask. Only organized militancy can tell us; only
the programme for a universally guaranteed income can perhaps help
us to proceed in this direction, always keeping in mind (as I suggest
that you do) that difficulties are not impossibilities; the negative has
no dialectical consistency but is simply negative. The negative will
always be there because it is nothing, in other words it is what is not
constructed by humans.
In conclusion, you say that today there is a major return of the nega-
tive; that war tends to become the new constituent principle; that
the nomos of the earth is once again divided. And you conclude:
‘the nation state remains for the time being the only subject of con-
stitutionalization of the private relations that currently regulate the
world’s financial market’ (ch. 4, p. 74). It seems to me that you can
say this only if you forget the constituent point of view and give a
voice to the negative. The sequence you indicate is in fact the one
that the constituent principle abhors. In fact, if we assume that we are
moving towards a war designed to defend private property and that
this trend privileges the nation over globalization, it does not follow
that the negative is back in a big way; rather this simply explains the
urgency with which what you call ‘the negative’ and what I call private
property and the nation state that lead to war must be fought more
forcefully. The finding is never neutral – the truth is always partisan,
and here the side for us to take is that of the common. So we have
to fight against the return of the nation state. And this is not only
because globalization must be recognized as the terrain on which the
dubious notion of market freedom has at least permitted millions of
people to exercise the right of fleeing misery and has offered redemp-
tion from it to many third-world countries; not only because it has
allowed the new technologies, regardless of the forms of subjugation
they engender, to put humanity in communication; not only because

it has upset the relations of global domination by highlighting their
equal corruption and homogeneous crisis. It is because, as our time
ripens, the world revolution is finally conceivable – or, better, it is
possible to read the unique name of liberation in the language of
common. And on this we probably agree.
6
The State of the State*
When we discuss the state, the problem that arises today is to grasp
it as a reality in tension, in extreme tension. This tension cannot be
described only at the level of concrete daily relationships in which the
figures of the state present themselves, but must be defined much more
generally. For example, if we take the present situation in Europe, it
is evident that every single European sovereign state is, so to speak,
tugged at by external powers. A series of attributes that, in modern
theory and in the concrete historical functioning of the sovereign state,
were absolutely fundamental have been taken away from it.1 In foreign
policy it is NATO that determines what the basic choices are. From
a military point of view, then, the figure of the European nation state
is situated in a definitive tendency towards disappearance. The same
is true from a monetary point of view: the monetary constitution of a
European bank is played out among the great world currencies and
relies on a construction of money that surpasses the minting capacity
of individual states. Even more relevant is the tension that the sover-
eign state has undergone from the point of view of values, or rather
of culture, of language, of the definition of that entity that we take to
be a people and that constituted the very basis of the nation state. But
I have discussed all this elsewhere,2 and it can be seen even without
going into the current debates on the dimensions and hierarchies of
computer networks and metadata and on the possibility of controlling
them, issues that are now so important for a redefinition of the state.
* Originally published in Italian as A. Negri, ‘Lo stato dello stato’, in

F. Brancaccio and C. Giorgi (eds.), Al confino del diritto: Potere, istituzioni e sog-
gettività, DeriveApprodi: Rome 2018.
The State of the State 87
The problem becomes even more important if we consider the

difficulties of construing the state as an autonomous centre of impu-
tation in the face of the powers that live within it. From this point
of view, the state’s ability to mediate conflicts and the power rela-
tions within its own territoriality seems to have been brought into
severe crisis. For example, when the class struggle, in the many
forms it assumes in a biopolitical context, spills across the borders of
individual states, this relationship is especially difficult for the state
structures, which now show themselves unsuitable for any mediation
– so tugged are they from every direction. Hence a new, fundamental
effect is defined: the contradictory tension between the ‘internal’ and
‘external’ of the state, which affects the very nature of the object we
are considering (the state). Is this a tension that results in paralysis of
the state, and therefore leads to its being elided as a screen (or dia-
lectical link) between the inside and the outside? Alternatively, can
this situation open new, positive possibilities for structuring social
coexistence?
The machinic apparatus*
Answering these questions requires an effort of reorientation.

Between the post-war period and the 1960s, the constitutional state
became socialized. This means that, both politically and structur-
ally, it absorbed the workforce within it and tried to represent the
economic totality in its own movement. To say this, however, is to
acknowledge another side of the coin: if capital becomes state, then
constitutionalism becomes an articulation of capital; and if in this
way the state, as capital, is everywhere in society, it opens itself to
contestation and contradiction. By taking conflictuality on board,
democratic constitutionalism in the Glorious Thirties configured
itself as a planner state3 and presented itself as a social capitalist medi-
ation and as a class compromise with a reformist inclination. To put
it more clearly, one can add that the two reformisms that the operaisti
[workerists] talked about in the 1960s, capitalist (or development)
reformism and worker (or trade union) reformism, were combined
during that period.4 It should be noted that, from this point of view,
the invasive dynamics of the state left no room for a political and
analytical sociology of power. The concept of association and that
* Heading in French in the original: L’Appareil machinique.

of power – the Easton–Schmitt model, as Pierangelo Schiera and I

recalled it, in an old discussion5 – were amalgamated in those years,
and thus excluded in their partiality from the theory. In fact, associa-
tion and power formed a structural and simultaneous connection, as
did organization and exploitation. It was impossible to separate these
elements. The literature on which we worked extensively in those
years – from Offe to Aglietta, in the early days of regulation theory –
was extraordinarily aware of this transition.
Between the 1970s and 1980s we witnessed a deepening of the crisis
of the state. However, this does not change its sign; rather it points to
a deepening of the inherence of capitalism in the social. That element
of equivalence between state capital and state society that had estab-
lished itself in the form of the planner state – or rather in the political
development of Keynesianism – was now disappearing.6 This was a
period of hybrid stabilization, traversed by resistance and workers’
struggles that were difficult to contain and regulate in the articulations
of the planner state of the time, but that also hindered the possibility
of moving beyond. During the 1980s and 1990s we lived in a situation
of great instability – but it was a firm or closed instability.
It was only in the 1990s that the dynamic of capital reopened
and separated itself from that of the state. The processes that began
between 1971 and 1973 – the detachment of the dollar from gold,
the end of Bretton Woods, the beginning of neoliberalism – gained
critical mass only in the 1990s. During this period capitalism began
to move decisively beyond the domestic threshold of its relationship
with the state, and in the process of restructuring itself so as to take
a financial form moved well beyond the limits and horizons of sov-
ereignty exercised within the limits of the nation state. At the same
time working-class reformism collapsed, sunk as a result of the pitiful
social democratic direction taken by the parties of the labour move-
ment. Globalization had become – and this is a fundamental step
that needs to be borne in mind – the lever for the transformation of
the relationship between capital and the state on the one hand, and
of domestic relations within states on the other; and it displaced the
class struggle to the level of empire, although its protagonists seemed
unaware of the fact.
At this point, if we look at the figure of the state, we cannot fail to
notice that it has widespread elements of porosity and disintegration.
It is as if the machine had opened in a disordered fashion, releas-
ing from the old sovereign unity a kind of appareil mécanique or, if
you prefer, machinique,7 which in the course of its evolution seeks to
obtain validity and efficacy from elsewhere. Again, the state is tugged
between a transcendent terrain for determining the validity of norms

and an immanent terrain where the effectiveness of its actions must
confront multiple norms and clash with them. So this ‘elsewhere’ is
sought in a confused, generic way, by combining the use of resid-
ual sovereignty and other vertically assumed powers (NATO, the
European Community, the European Central Bank . . .). In any case,
each time the activity of these apparatuses [appareils] takes place and
becomes objective, it still remains fragile, appearing as the product
of a permanent revolution of factors. It is here that instruments of
governance (in the strict sense) begin to develop, in some confusion;
and these instruments are applied to administrative processes and to
public conflicts. This is not governance* in the Foucauldian sense
of the word8 – the practice of a diffuse governmentality, like at the
beginning of the liberal era; rather it is a social governance that oscil-
lates and sometimes enacts a restoration, sometimes drifts towards
forms of governmentality (i.e. state forms, government in the proper
sense). As an old fan of the class struggle, I believe that this new
governance is the result of the rigidities brought about by the class
struggle. In our historical condition the class struggle is always active
– in new forms, but often these are resistant rather than dynamic and
constituent. Thus I think that the transformations of governance that
we saw have been brought about by the class struggle – not simply
in the last resort, but here and now both in undergoing globalization
and in opening those windows of porosity that often break up the
administrative action. In any case, it is in this relationship that a new
figure of the state has been defined; and there is a radical modifica-
tion in its nature that is due to the validity and effectiveness of the
norms it produces. In this way a generalized instability is stabilized.
The diadochoi
The problem of the state of the state arises in the light of this instabil-
ity. Today we are indeed witnessing the capitalist attempt to bring
about an upward consolidation of a new form of legitimacy.9 By
‘upward’ I mean constituting itself in relation to new continental
compositions: the United States and Russia, Europe and China, in
short, those regional areas that are capable of building more or less
homogeneous power groupings. The European problem has to be
* ‘Governance’ in English in the original.

seen in this context too, as it is reflected in the effort of individual

states to rediscover a more effective upward functioning of the gov-
ernmental machine. The proposition is radical: the intention here is
to establish an analogue of the old sovereignty. On the other hand we
witness, as a subordinate but equally relevant effect, an attempt to
achieve the downward consolidation of new administrative systems
and new figures of governmentality that aim at rebuilding measures,
rules, and legality. The attempt to control the dissolutive tenden-
cies has put the sovereign machine in enormous difficulty; at first it
almost disappeared, but later it reconfigured the structural elements
of sovereignty into another order – confusedly to begin with, then
with a certain homogeneity by the end. So today we are living a
fundamental moment in what could be described as the double con-
version, both upwards and downwards, of a vacillating and unstable
sovereignty – towards continental dimensions on one side, towards
new administrative systems and new figures of governmentality on
the other. Michael Hardt and I call this double movement – up and
down, but substantially in a space carved out within globalization
and adapted to existing in it – a movement for the establishment of
successions (diadochai) – as happened in the Wars of the Successors
(diadochoi) after the death of Alexander the Great, when his empire
was divided into four areas said to be homogenous. In part these suc-
cessions have already come about, except that they are still moving
on a globally unstable terrain. The spatial redefinition has not yet
been matched by a conclusive definition of the form of government.
Let us now try to define the modalities of these transitions in
order to understand, if possible, in what direction they are moving;
and let us aim to do it by Polanyi’s method,10 trying at every step to
determine the nature of the material, conflict, and class background
against which the legal crises and the institutional and structural
transformations have occurred.
It seems to me first of all that in all these processes one has to
examine the variables linked to temporality – that is, both to long-
term duration and to the presentness of the need for decision-making,
for immediate action in the short term. These are variables that have
to be borne in mind in a situation in which, increasingly, government
action and governance take place with different intensities, to be
sure, but still in a confused way. The same is true when we compare
the mechanisms of constitutional reform and the exercise of govern-
ance, which are often intertwined in current events – and not just in
the wretched case of Italy. If we look at the material basis of these
variables, at the difficulties and limitations they present, we have to
admit that we are looking at a sort of traffic jam in which the transfor-
mation always risks being overwhelmed. This immediately brings to
mind the historical crisis of Keynesianism, which marks the end of a
period in which the dynamics of government were planned and con-
trolled over periods of time: to put it briefly, we are in the throes of
the twentieth-century state and on the threshold of a phase in which
temporality is no longer predictable or measurable. In Marxist termi-
nology, we are witnessing a change in the forms of accumulation that
corresponds, in a contradictory way, to the new technical composi-
tion of labour power. The forms of accumulation that develop today
essentially on the cognitive terrain, on the terrain of the immateriality
of production, of general intellect (obviously by absorbing previous
forms of accumulation) lead to the creation of a mobile cognitive
workforce, which can be controlled in its dynamics only with diffi-
culty, and anyway will have to be controlled by new, different means.
Better still, it could perhaps be dominated but, I insist, it is certainly
uncontrollable: from discipline to control of labour, and beyond.
This means that every relationship of mediation either has failed or
is in serious crisis. If one does not grasp this transition, which is fun-
damental to understanding the nature of temporality in the exercise
of government, and therefore in its eventual transformation into gov-
ernance, any project of analysis becomes impossible.
Then (and this is the second variable) there are variables and dif-
ficulties that are related to spatiality. These difficulties arise when we
compare the parameters that govern the spatial diffusion of production
– its social totalization – and its administration – its governing – to the
need, sometimes the urgency, of a constitution of general and gener-
ally applicable rules, either with reference to a centre or inserted into
a hierarchy. Such was the true basic standard [Grundnorm] of bour-
geois and socialist legal science in the twentieth century. But now
there is a spatiality of social production that does indeed require cen-
tral rules (monetary, for example), yet at the same time reveals very
heavy contradictions in the face of these central rules. To understand
these difficulties, one only has to take the example of the contradic-
tory relationship between government and governance, or the crisis
of the relationship between the constitutional state of law and the
social state, which tends to be federal and plural, or conflicts between
state systems and multinational corporations. At any rate, the effect
of instability is central, even when one considers the spatial variables
studied in the global context.
All this is important, but it has to be said that it is secondary in rela-
tion to the origin of the problem that has always arisen here: the end
of measure – that measure that has been defined by the conjunction

of social exploitation and central sovereignty. The end of juridical
measure – the crisis of commutative justice and of any conception of
equity – is a key problem, around which we have wandered for years;
and it has become dramatic, because today exploitation no longer con-
tains a contractual model, not even one presented ideologically, but is
exercised socially, by extractive means: extractive, that is, of the value
of social cooperation, extractive of forms of cognitive labour, and so
on. The definition of measure at this level is granted only to financial
powers, which are completely centralized, of course, but at the same
time make no reference to and have no relationship with the reality of
the social dialectic and are radically asymmetrical when compared to
capital’s internal relationship with living labour. This trend concerns,
jointly, the composition of both the upper and the lower world.
The third variable or difficulty is linked to structure, in other words
to the obstacles that oppose the functioning of the sovereign machine
in the uncertain relationship between exceptionality and precarious-
ness. It is important to stress that exceptionality is not based on the
exception, understood as in ‘the right of exception’, and not even on
the state of necessity, but refers to the daily need for timely central
decisions amid the precariousness of the juridical fabric that has
been constituted into governance and into every series of phenomena
related to it. And this brings about the conditions for a structural
clash. Consider for example corruption and tax evasion. Inside this
machine, they have been completely normalized; they are as non-
eliminable as they are customary. One can easily press the button of
moral indignation to try to stop their spread, but it is quite evident
that, in the framework of governance, corruption and evasion have
become structural diseases, linked to the functioning or, more fre-
quently, malfunctioning of the old sovereign machine and its difficult
transformation – difficult or rather impossible, rebus sic stantibus.*
Thus we witness on the one hand a flight of sovereignty towards a
global horizon, which is difficult to reach (hence the tendency for
diadochai to form), and on the other hand the dissolution of every
criterion of measurement in the face of precariousness in the mode
of production.
At this point it is necessary to adopt a new point of observation and
to examine how a large part of the phenomena connected to what I
have identified as the structural level are fixed on new determinations
* Things being as they are.

and ontological categories; in other words, they are based on the new
‘being’ of the mode of production. The common – or enlarged social
cooperation – has become the hegemonic basis of the new mode of
production.11
We also need to examine a further series of determinations, which
have come to prominence in this last period. I should make two
critical points in particular. One concerns the new prominence of vio-
lence in the re-emergence of the primitive accumulation model. This
is an accumulation regime organized on the extraction of socially
produced labour value. Here the violence of the state, of disposses-
sion, is no longer linked, as in the initial structuring phases of the
capitalist world, to the expropriation of the primitive commons; it
is rather directed towards deconstructing the new productive com-
mons, through the suppression of every criterion of measurement
and through the exercise of mere domination. While it is true that
this violence is becoming more marked, we should nevertheless bear
in mind that it is accentuated in forms that do not fit well with
those of primitive accumulation in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Contemporary violence is not exercised in the pure exer-
cise of sovereignty, but by commingling with governance, through
the expansion of the financial means of extracting socially produced
wealth, and through a scandalous private accumulation of social
wealth. The second element to address is the form in which the rela-
tionship between real subsumption – the total absorption of society
into capital – and formal subsumption – the still incomplete form of
absorption of society and productive labour into capital – is being
overturned today. The landscape of formal subsumption is becoming
reconsolidated and its tendency to extinction weakens as a result of
the reappropriation of fixed capital by producers; this appropriation
enables them to develop, autonomously, experimental systems of
production especially organized as ‘in common’. However, if this
is true, we must avoid drawing, at the political level, simplistic con-
sequences from these two assumptions – the renewed centrality of
primitive accumulation and the reversal of the relationship between
formal subsumption and real subsumption – for example by attaching
excessive importance to plebeian mobilizations such as the strug-
gles of the forconi in Italy, typical of the old primitive accumulation
and of formal subsumption.* The only possibility of struggle on this
* The forconi movimento (Pitchforks Movement) was a movement of social

protest in Sicily in 2012–13.
complex and ambiguous terrain remains at the level of general intel-

lect, where there may be a ‘coalition’ of multitudinous forces and a
revolutionary process.
Power*
A further condition of crisis is linked to a term that has been in use

for some time: constitution, the act of constituting [costituenza]. This
term refers to the dynamic of power relations in biopolitics, where the
production of subjectivity is a central element in political processes.
Now, what is constitution in the scenario I have outlined? We feel
ourselves to be citizens insofar as we enter into codified social rela-
tionships. But today, as we have seen, these relations are eminently
contradictory. And so, when we speak of the action of constitution,
that is, of a subjective desire for changing things in a critical way, we
see that there is a difference between a performative and projectual
temporality – one that is, precisely, constituent and assumes growing
importance in the passage from the modern to the postmodern, from
the sovereign to the biopolitical order – and the ability to produce
concrete dispositifs within this reality.12
It is in this conflict, in this tension, that we can today reopen reflec-
tion on power [potere] and on the very possibility of a struggle for right
[lotta per il diritto]. First of all, the use – in critique and in the class
struggle – of a formula such as ‘the struggle for right’ is obviously play-
ful. But it is not disrespectfully playful, because in saying it we are not
looking down on, or undervaluing, the democratic struggles for the
conquest of new rights, for more and more power to the oppressed.
But there is right and right, just as there is power and power. In fact,
when we talk about potere (and we could say the same about ‘right’),
we should always bear in mind that we are talking about a ‘relation-
ship’. It is a relationship between those who command and those who
obey, or rather between those who command and those who resist.
It is not a relationship between equals: one is more powerful and has
more strength, the other resists. Nor is it a transitive relationship: the
desire of those who have power is not the same as the desire of those
who suffer and resist it. Now, immersed in this relationship as we
are, we must always establish which side we are on. If the law and the
struggle for right assume centrality and importance, it is because they
*
Heading in English in the original.
are eventually on the side of the oppressed, who have conquered the
possibility of using the right; and the same is true for power. I should
say immediately that it is always better to talk about power than
about domination. Domination is the name of power before the birth
of capitalism. Capitalism is also a political concept – it goes beyond
the reality of domination, for example by integrating slavery, which
means being subjected to domination, and by transforming it into
proletariat which means being subjected to power. Capital exercises
command over the worker; it does not dominate the worker, because
the worker resists. If the worker did not resist, there would be no
production of wealth. And when, in the postindustrial world, capital
extracts value and exercises command over society, society resists and
produces. The struggle for right is a struggle that posits this relation-
ship as an always open relationship, in which one nevertheless must
know which side one is on (it is worth repeating the point). It is only
this twoness that gives meaning to the word; and it is only conflict
that gives meaning to the struggle for right.
The problem that arises is therefore to define on what point, within
what dimensions this relationship is now fixed. When it is said that
state and law, government and governance are no longer in accord,
one assumes that capital has gone beyond the phase in which it was
organized into nation states and that the modern history of capital-
ism, although so important, is over. But what we identify in tendency
is not always given in reality. We need to make the effort to under-
stand whether the modern determination of legal development and
that reality of power have indeed been superseded. For, to restate the
point, this overcoming is not necessary, but derives from the fact that
through the struggle a new terrain has been effectively created, with
qualities that are fundamentally different from those established in
modernity.
Now I want to make a point that may seem strange. When I write
‘power’ in English (which is the only word they have to express potere)
– and I think of power as a relationship, it is not possible for me to
express the duality that I can express with potere–potenza in Italian, or
pouvoir–puissance in French, or Macht–Vermogen in German. I have
often had to deal with this problem in the course of my philosophical
activities, especially when studying Hobbes, who considers power in
univocal terms, as opposed to Spinoza, for whom power is articulated
in the dual. Even more than in Spinoza, we find this when studying
Marxism, where power and capital combine into a twofold reality.
But what is potenza, as distinct from potere? It is living labour, that
labour without which capital cannot exist. Capital is a relationship,
just like power, and it cannot exist without that thing, living labour,
from which it rips invention, creation, and surplus value. Now, it is
precisely acting on this relationship that has allowed the struggles of
the workers to undermine capital’s command, in various historical
periods, and this undermining has taken place in such a way as to
push capital to back-pedal during the immediate exercise of exploita-
tion, but also to shift the organization of its command upwards. The
problem we face today, in the new transition of capitalism, is one of
qualifying the balance of power on which capitalism is established
and that configures it. Now, to explain the word ‘strange’, which I
used earlier: when I write the word ‘power’ in English and I take it
in a univocal sense, I happen to have the option of doing it without
ambiguity. How so? Because I have the impression that today puis-
sance, potenza, and Vermogen qualify the word ‘power’ more than do
capitalist command, pouvoir, potere, or Macht. And for the first time
it seems to me that I can seriously ask myself what it means to ‘take
power’ – not in the sense of an old vanguard programme that opposes
and transcends the relationship of power and that, by ‘taking’ it,
simply wants to load it all onto one of the two sides (this would seem
to be the definition of dictatorship). On the contrary, one takes power
because today it becomes conceivable that the quality of our labour
power is placed with great force, and achieves hegemony, within the
capital relationship, without any extraneousness. If capital does not
function without the worker, in the same way the state, the ‘law’ of
the state [il ‘diritto’ dello stato], does not function without an active
citizen, without a worker-entrepreneur, without a singularity that
introduces not simply a break but liberation, democratic constitu-
tion in this system. The subversive question of power gets renewed
in this situation – and when I speak with comrades from Syriza and
Podemos, for example, or with comrades who push forward with
the neomunicipal hypothesis despite the terrible limits that these
experiences encounter, I feel that they, too, are acting on this under-
standing of ‘taking power’.
The next problem is how to make the tactical and strategic tran-
sition towards a full affirmation of potenza, of power.* It is evident
that a series of concepts that had been created for this purpose need
to be reworked today. Let us take two examples. First, the concept
of passive revolution: this one needs to be rethought because it is
very difficult to imagine that this silent transformation could happen
* ‘Power’ in English in the original.

today and take the same form as in the period described in Gramsci’s
analysis of Americanism – that is, of a capitalist initiative from above,
passively experienced in the productive activity of the masses. Unlike
in Gramsci’s analysis, today even passivity is alive: it is that which has
been snatched from fixed capital and organizes itself autonomously.
It is precarious, cognitive labour power waiting to organize itself
politically. The second example is the concept of constituent power.
If at other times we have characterized this power as event, today, in
the presence of those critical tensions that we have defined, it must
be grasped in the form of counterpower, in other words it must be
projected into becoming and organized as a process. It is in this con-
text that very vulgar discussions – like those on tax policy and taxes
– become central to the theme of the revolutionary project.
To conclude, let us return to the questions from which I began.
Does the tension to which the state is subjected today lead to paraly-
sis, or does it open new possibilities for the expression and structuring
of social coexistence – or, in more explicit terms, of democracy? I
believe that this second hypothesis can be assumed, but with caution.
Assuming is certainly not the same as taking it as a winning hypoth-
esis; rather it means affirming that the variables that allow us today
to see the state in tension and in a process of dissipation recognize
in the productive forces of the multitude greater capacity not only of
resistance but also of subversive expression. And if, in this situation,
right [diritto] is no longer state law [diritto statuale], what is it? It is an
alien machine that nonetheless reflects real ontological determina-
tions. Thus, when we emphasize the dissipation of state law, this is
not to say that we discount it as a field of struggle or as a place where
new institutions and new values are built. What has been surpassed
is the certainty and effectiveness of state law. Therefore, if we want
to create new law, we must create new machines and new values.
What is the common, if not precisely this new value? And what is its
machine? It is the material production of humanity and wealth. All
of it is stuff to be taken back – and we have to admit that, albeit cau-
tiously, this is what we are doing.
7
On the Concept of Nation State*
For a long time, the concept of ‘nation’ was difficult to define sepa-
rately from that other concept, the nation state. Today things are very
different.
But let us begin at the start, that is, precisely from the concept of
the nation state. It was shaped by two elements: the first, political and
juridical, was the state; the second, historical, ethnic, and cultural,
was the nation. However, it was from the concept of the nation state
that the nation became a reality, that sovereign power gave rise to the
nation. When speaking of nation, we should always bear this gen-
esis in mind. In any event, ‘nation’ is a concept for which a number
of definitional criteria have been proposed, stemming from various
ideological roots. Usually there are three ways of thinking about it.
First, one can think about it as a category that includes basic natural
facts, for example the ethnic element (the population) and the geo-
graphical element (the territory). The ethnic element has periodically
been linked with the idea of race, even if, according to theorists of
nation, the concept of race has only rarely inspired a biological appli-
cation. When this happened, though – a s it did, and not only in the
contemptible instance of N azism – it was a case of terroristic, destruc-
tive, and aggressive political operations with no scientific basis.
A second category for thinking about the nation includes cultural
factors such as language, culture, religion, and the continuity of the
state. In some instances there may be a close relationship between the
* Originally published in Italian under the title ‘A proposito del concetto di

stato-nazione’ in EuroNomade, 20 October 2014. http://www.euronomade.info/
?p=3459.
On the Concept of Nation State 99
first category and the second: for example the ethnic criterion and the
linguistic criterion could merge, and so could the political criterion
and the religious criterion.
A third category of defining elements contains subjective factors:
consciousness, will, the feeling of nationhood. Within this category
of criteria, the concept of nation is founded not on something prede-
fined but, on the contrary, on an act of will that can more or less be
determined by members of the population; and this is what consti-
tutes the nation itself. This is why Ernest Renan described the nation
as a ‘daily plebiscite’.
Other authors have established a classification based on the oppo-
sition between two fundamental criteria: a ‘naturalist’ mode and a
‘voluntarist’ mode. Naturalism is often attributed to German think-
ers, while voluntarism is seen in principle as a French cliché . . . But
obviously this distinction is only approximate; remember that Fichte,
in his Reden and Die Deutsche Nation, qualifies the nation as an act of
conscience and will, not of nature.
What can we say, then? If we stick to the old definition of the
nation state, it is absolutely clear that the concept of nation has a
complex and ambiguous character that is hard to define. The criteria
that are proposed not only oppose each other but often overlap; and,
even when the definition of the concept of nation is intended to be
complete and precise, it inevitably has to avoid or ignore the multi-
plicity of differences and historical conditions of which the nation is
still the result. One could add that the doctrines of nationhood have
never been able to determine precisely the concepts of national reality
and national behaviour.
We can get directly to the heart of the problem, namely the rela-
tionship between the state and the nation, only by starting from an
examination of the historical development of the concept of nation.
We can begin by recognizing that it was above all the great unifica-
tions of the nineteenth century (Germany, Italy, etc.) that instituted
a process that tried to make the nation coincide with the state. If
the nation has long been regarded as a central concept of political
doctrines, this is because of such an identification. Here I need only
mention the schools of historiography that have predominated in
all European countries. Furthermore, in the nineteenth century all
law, private and public alike, came to be seen as an emanation of
the nation state, and all antagonistic concepts, albeit many, were
silenced. Between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, das
Volk – the people – and the nation can be said to have imposed their
dictatorship on the biopolitical.
We can also note that merging the concepts of nation and state
would not have been sufficient for obtaining the adherence of citi-
zens and for legitimating the need for obedience, especially in states
of exception and necessity, if this fusion had not itself been infused
with the idea of fatherland [patria] – a concept with very ancient ori-
gins, with a long history behind it, and also with a heavy emotional
baggage. While the nation is the outcome of circumstances and the
institution of the state is conventional, patria is, on the contrary,
the result of a choice; and it was probably this choice, this value
judgment that produced, between the eighteenth and the nineteenth
centuries, the cultural connection between the other two concepts,
state and nation. The nation becomes a homeland and the state
becomes the apparatus, simultaneously of force and law, through
which the nation affirms and organizes itself, diverting onto itself
the love and devotion reserved for the homeland as the highest of
values. It is obvious that there are echoes of Rousseau in all this
and, even more, a degree of romanticism, as we shall see. But in
Hegel the characteristics of the unification of the concepts of state
and nation are far less poetic. According to him, the state is not an
abstract construction. It emerges through the recognition of an eco-
nomic and social given – civil society – and through the affirmation of
the principle of the nation, understood as an actor in history. Hegel
is the true theorist of the modern state because, going beyond the
views of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theorists of sovereignty
and eighteenth-century theorists of civil society, he sees the factor of
nationality as preponderant.
What I am saying here is clearly reductive with respect to the phe-
nomenon of the nation, and I apologize for that. But my reduction
is not intended to mystify things: the concept of nation is always
contradictory; the nation exalts the value it imposes, it conjoins des-
potism and love. And it grants the subject citizenship only if the
latter is accompanied by alienation and subjection. The contradic-
tions remain even where the patriotic dimension of the concept is
considered central; on this topic we have a formidable article by
Ernst Kantorowicz.1 In Kantorowicz’s view, there are two opposing
tensions that coexist in the concept of homeland and that have been
unified since the Middle Ages. On the one hand, there is the feeling
of living in the nation, politically, patriotically, as if one were in a
mystical body; and with it goes the idea that such adherence can and
must produce social behaviour and have consequences. ‘Those who
declare war on the Holy Kingdom of France declare war on King
Jesus.’2 On the other hand, when the secular state assumes its sover-
eignty and its power via the concept of patria, it also imposes on its
citizens an obedience that is a sacrifice, an identity that makes them
generously available to the state. Consequently the two dimensions
of the nation state are to be found in its genealogy and in the concept
of homeland.
So let us return to the main point. The nation state was the great
political reality produced by the nineteenth century. It was the
result of a complex and heterogeneous historical process, which was
accompanied by an equally complex and heterogeneous theoreti-
cal elaboration. The development of the main contending political
currents in Europe up to the beginning of the twentieth century was
strongly influenced by this overriding reality; and this conditioning
emerges through the general mediation that liberal and Christian
socialist political theories have built around the concept of nation.
From this point of view, it would be interesting to examine how equi-
poised the ideology and the political practice of socialism have been
between internationalism and patriotism, between cosmopolitanism
and nationalism.
Before tackling the current crisis and in fact the need to discuss the
present reawakening of the idea of nation, we have to define other
elements that the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries included in
their conception of the nation; these complete its original definition.
The reality of the nation state cannot be conceptually understood
without immersion in the history of modern capitalism. It is of course
the case that in some European states the constitution of the nation
preceded the birth of capitalism; but this construction of the nation,
as produced by the absolutist monarchies of Great Britain, France,
and Spain, changes radically in the presence of characteristics that
will later be fixed once and for all, on the basis of the ethnic and
cultural identity of the nation and in the context of capitalist develop-
ment. The nation state does not have a single soul, so to speak – one
that lies beyond any ambiguity and operates as an idea, being tied
to patriotism and to the passion for identity. In fact it possesses a
soul that we can call materialistic, in which identity and patriotism
often find their expression through egoism and through aggressive-
ness towards the other.
One must never forget that the modern nation state was born
out of romanticism, in a struggle against revolutionary Jacobinism
and Napoleonic expansionism, as well as against the revolutionary
Enlightenment and its derivatives. More precisely, it translates the
affirmation of national identity into a reactionary principle against
universalism, that is, into a principle of differentiation from, and
often of exclusion of, all those who are regarded as not being part of
the native soil of the homeland. Here we should recall the evolution
of the young Hegel (among many others, of course), who followed
the line of French revolutionary Jacobinism until he became aware
that Germany did not have a metaphysics – in other words it did
not have a unitary state sovereign. This idea developed in Hegel’s
thought in later years, through the construction of a dialectic between
the economic and the political, between the capitalist instance and
the sovereign instance; and this dialectic became decisive for the
construction of the German Reich and of German capitalist power.
This accounts for how closely the nation state is linked to the
development of capitalism. As I have mentioned, the great sovereign
states of modernity, Great Britain and France, had already given rise
to the primitive accumulation of capital; they had also overturned
the resistance of the commons and of precapitalist agrarian usages
by promoting the process of manufacturing accumulation. However,
beyond the expropriation of the commons and primitive accumula-
tion, it was only within the framework of the modern nation state
that the legal, administrative, and political forms adapted to the sta-
bilization of capitalist growth and to the formation of the bourgeois
state come to organize themselves. In summary, the spirit of counter-
revolution and anti-Enlightenment thought had been the foundation
of ideologies associated with the most recent formation of the nation
state; that soul, under the thrust of capitalist development, was thus
to embody figures that could not have been completely predictable at
the beginning, but were soon considered fundamental to the exercise
of state power and to the development of an economic variety of class
power. These figures were equally decisive in maintaining the unity
of the nation in the face of the difficulties of accumulation and the
explosions of the class struggle. It was in these circumstances that
the European nation state fully expressed its true vocation. By this
I mean the figures of colonial conquest, the practices of imperial-
ist aggression, and the ideological products of fascism – all the way
down to the production of monstrous war machines to which the very
existence of the nation was tied.
Love of one’s country [l’amor di patria] – probably an expression
that has never been more appropriate – prevents us from following
this thread to the end and from carefully describing the results of
this development, or rather its terrible derivations. The barbarism of
colonialism is well known, and the violence of imperialist conquests
and aggressions periodically rises and reappears in the background
of our present time. But it is on fascism and its imperialist deliriums
that our attention needs to focus: on the millions of deaths that the
wars of the twentieth century have left behind. Is this where the
concept of homeland and that of nation definitively take leave of
each other? Is this the point at which the passions linked to love for
one’s neighbourhood and for this kind of extended family that the
country represents for everyone stop being recognized in the adven-
tures and structures of the nation state? Maybe. What is certain is
that a new history of the concept begins here. Probably a new way
of looking at ourselves as citizens has arisen. Citizens of the world?
Once again, maybe. Some complain today that the concept of nation
has been upset and, so to speak, overthrown by the structures of the
globalized market. Yet the transition from a domestic international
economy, which is based on nation states and their interaction in the
world market, to a globalized economy, in which capital is capable
of functioning at the planetary level and which reduces nation states
to the role of simple articulations of global power, has been seen as
a happy turning point. And it is indeed fortunate, if we compare the
new conditions in which people live in the globalized context to their
conditions when the nations were massacring each other.
We are under no illusion that these new conditions have eliminated
disagreements between peoples and put an end to wars. We are well
aware that the violence caused by nationalisms is little by little being
replaced by an even more ferocious violence, rooted in religious
hatred and in sacral injunctions, and that we must register the return
of racism both inside and outside national communities, including
here in Europe. Of course, all this is terrible. But somewhere in our
consciousness we feel that, beyond these episodes, a world awaits
us in which such horrors will be impossible. Capitalism created glo-
balization; it is now a matter of building a democratic society at the
global level.
But let us return to our identification of the basic characteristics of
the nation state, which are once again in evidence. The nation state
was a centripetal concept: the nation effectively accorded to govern-
ments, to a centralized function of command, an absolute character
that guaranteed transition from the decision to the execution of gov-
ernmental acts. Kantorowicz is very clear: on this there are two bodies
of government. The first body is the real function, sovereignty, the
nation, which presides over the definition of the absolute character of
sovereign power; it is the monarchy. The second body lives and dies,
it is the contingency and discontinuity of government, of political
representation, the historical blocks and interruptions in the life of
states – but this ‘mortal’ character is traversed by the sovereign effect
that guarantees the body’s immunity and prevents its decline. Today,
in the contemporary world, these two bodies, these two functions of
power have withered and, at least in part, tend to dissolve.
However, the concept of nation state does not simply dissolve
as a result of the transition from a world economy to a globalized
economy, the latter being characterized by global financial intercon-
nectedness. The decline of the nation state was accompanied by
another transition: the latter resulted in the transition from govern-
ment to governance, which in turn signals the hybridization of the
public state and the private market and reveals, among other things,
the juridical nature of the market, the real dimension of global trade.
This transformation challenges the unity of the nation state’s systems
of legitimation, of private and public international law. It blunts the
capacity of government and places the figures and functions of capi-
talist regulatory bodies at the global level.
We may then ask ourselves, well beyond all the ideologies and
historiographies blessed by the nation itself, whether the genesis and
composition of nation states, their historical reality, should not be
restored – not to an origin that would be transformed into a telos and
thus realized, so much as to a sort of indefinite constituent potpourri:
to a knot of encounters or clashes between different populations,
groups, and forms of government; to the contradictory dynamics that
involve capitalist factions, aristocratic manipulations, and democratic
insurrections; to the discontinuous development of neomercantilist
strategies, fiscal and customs manipulations, and so on; again, for
some peripheral nation states, to the consequences and derivations
of colonial movements and imperialist strategies, and especially of
the population movements created by them; and finally, today, to
transport and means of communication, the porosity and plasticity
of borders, and so on. All the determinations of the nation state,
both nature- and culture-related, seem to dissolve in front of these
upheavals and transformations.
Don’t you have the impression that there is actually something
artificial and precarious in my fleeting sketch of the history of the
concept of the nation state, something that now belongs to a bygone
age? Something that, viewed in relation to its genesis, has an air of
chance, precariousness, and uncertainty? And, beyond this genesis,
when we talk about the decline of the modern nation state, about the
delusions of fascism and the millions of victims of wars, violence, and
hatred, don’t you have the impression that the concept has simply
become the symbol of a terrible history, almost a sign of radical
repression? And that the notion of homeland has perverse aspects
too? I don’t think any of us can give a placid answer to such ques-
tions. However, while we might refuse cum ira et studio* to recognize
ourselves in this identity, we would be able to recognize ourselves in
a different world. I shall try immediately to discuss the adventures
of this new postmodern existence. But, looking back for a moment,
we could say today of the nation state what Pliny said about large
estates in the first century of existence of the Roman Empire. Just as
latifundia perdidere Italiam† then, today the nation states have ruined
modern sovereignty.
Let us now consider the element of nationality (by this I mean
the pale and nostalgic reflection of national sentiment, as located
in ideology), which reappears today in the events that surround us,
and especially in conflicts between the protagonists of the globalized
order. In my view, we have here a return of the egoism that seeks to
acquire dignity through memory or, better, through some nostalgia
for national history. They find a propitious space in the crisis that
globalization is going through. At the end of the twentieth century,
after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the historical opposi-
tion between the East and the West, globalization was accompanied
by a great effort to rebuild new legal and political systems at a plan-
etary level. But the failure of the world’s elites to build a new order
was resounding. Today we measure the consequences: they mani-
fest themselves in the crisis of the market, in the decline of global
production, in monetary uncertainties, in difficulties to control the
movements of finance, and so on. Who could have predicted that the
consequences of the new order, which everyone greeted with such joy
when the Berlin Wall fell, would be anything like this?
This was followed by a dangerous lack of clarity in international
relations and a series of disagreements, conflicts, and misunder-
standings between actors. All this makes it difficult to feel one’s
way. The unity of the globalized order – commercial and financial
trade – then became subject to ruptures and attempts to reconfig-
ure the same globalized landscape through the relationship between
continental structures and no longer through the nation states
themselves. North America, China, Europe in the making, Latin
America, India – blocs that retain a certain geopolitical solidity –
meet with real political cataclysms in the crisis of the bases regulated
* ‘With anger and passion’, a reversal of Tacitus’ famous promise at the begin-
ning of the Annals to treat his subject sine ira et studio, without anger and passion
(partiality).
†
‘Large estates ruined Italy’ (Pliny the Elder, Natural History 18.11).
by American soft power. By now the movements of one part of the

planet determine – positively or negatively, depending on the case
– the movements of all the other elements of the globalized system.
In addition, the crisis of capitalist accumulation and of the develop-
ment of democratic institutions emerges with great violence in the
crisis of the global system. The macro dimension corresponds to
the micro dimension, and vice versa. Geopolitics and industrial and
financial crises, growing inequalities of social systems, and other
phenomena have a mutual cause-and-effect relationship. I could go
on at length with this description of the current crisis in its global
dimension, both within and outside individual states. But it seems
to me that the characteristics I have pointed out are sufficient for us
to understand why in many countries the need to return to national
politics and the attempts to make the nation state once again into
a point of imputation and responsibility for development forcefully
take centre stage.
Nostalgia for the nation state is useless, even dangerous. The global
dimension along which capitalism has organized itself is now a fixed
framework for the movement of all institutions, whatever they are –
state or political, industrial or financial. They all operate at the global
level and have enormous difficulties in returning into a national
framework. A turn backwards from globalization is impossible, even
if its form seems to be governed by chaos. What is more, whenever
national identities reappear, they do so with an intermixture of reli-
gious and fanatical ideologies and practices. Patriotism, which was
previously a secular religion, has changed into racial idolatry or reli-
gious fanaticism. Although in its history nationalism has had creative
moments and has given rise to the fusion of different peoples, and
although the concept of nation has in some cases mobilized generous
passions and a noble sense of freedom, today this concept presents
itself in another form. It is full of rancour, because a return to the past
is difficult, if not impossible, and because the resulting impotence is
redirected against fictitious and imaginary adversaries – enemies who
get saddled with causing the present difficulties. Populism is the form
in which these hard and pure feelings of hatred manifest themselves.
Obviously it threatens not only the national order but also the demo-
cratic form of government. Do you want to transform democracy and
rebuild it on the basis of a national rule considered as just? But how
can you forget the inequalities, the class divisions, the vicissitudes
of a national rule that has always been exposed to war? Today the
idea of nation simply exposes us to ridicule, because it renounces the
utopia of an international order under the banner of globalization
and the utopia of a democratic order under the banner of democratic

internationalism.
Now let us turn to one last problem. The crisis of mature and
globalized capitalism exists. There is no doubt about it. It has been
unfolding before our eyes for some years. Nor can we doubt its con-
sequences, which will be lasting. Can we therefore conclude that, if
globalization has represented the triumph of capitalism, it is also its
disease? And a lethal one at that? I don’t think that we can answer this
question definitively and assertively. What seems evident is that the
crisis took place precisely where capitalist power had asserted itself
with the greatest determination – that is, at such a level of abstraction
of power, of distance from the movements of citizens, that it seemed
to have made global capital definitively autonomous from their power
and to have put it out of the reach of any resistance that might
eventually oppose it. But the autonomy and consistency that charac-
terize global capital are poorer every day – low in value, incapable of
progress, blind to the deteriorating conditions of development, insen-
sitive to vital impulses and cooperative innovations. It is interesting
(and symbolically exciting) that the financial crisis, which is linked
to the effects of the organization of the order of financial capital,
develops essentially on the monetary terrain: yes, it involves the very
coinage that was so closely tied to the national imagination. But it is
undoubtedly even more interesting that the crisis of the currency in
question corresponds to a global mechanism. For this reason, at any
rate, one cannot protect oneself from the crisis by hiding behind one’s
national currency – one would risk catastrophe, plain and simple.
So my conclusion is that we cannot escape globalization and that
the only way of salvation that also allows us to be free will undoubt-
edly be a democratic exodus from the nation state. What does this
mean? It means that, if we care about the things we consider to be
positive and creative in the nation, if we care about its language and
literature (if it has them), or about its memory and imagination (if
these are worth the effort), or about its landscapes, the smell of its
earth, and its contours (which are sometimes the dearest things we
have), if we care about these and many other things, we will have to
give up making the nation into a state. How will this be possible? I
don’t know.
However, for the past few days, I have had in my hands a book
by the Yale University anthropologist James C. Scott: Zomia: The
Art of Not Being Governed. ‘Zomia’ is a term that Scott uses to des-
ignate territories located at an altitude above 300 metres across five
countries – Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Burma – and
five provinces of China; they range from the high valleys of Vietnam
to north-east India and contain about 100 million people, who belong
to ethnic and linguistic minorities of a truly bewildering variety. Now,
these populations are not some multitudes that have not yet become
peoples, as the segments of nation states that border them would like
to consider them. They are multitudes, yes, but multitudes that have
fled precisely from this possibility, from the various forms of oppres-
sion that have been proposed to them. The construction of the nation
state in the valleys below the territory of Zomia has meant slavery,
conscription (i.e. compulsory military service), taxes, epidemics, and
wars. These multitudes have fled from all of it. Does the crisis of
the nation state offer us, as the only way of salvation, the same flight
that such populations have chosen at the very moment of the birth
of the state? Of course, this is not a good solution, or at least not in
this form. But we are not responsible for the problems we are facing.
When such problems arise, it is good to proceed by trial and error
and attempt to invent something new. Not a return to the past but a
new experimentation.
20 October 2014
8
Hegemony
Gramsci, Togliatti, Laclau*
For me, the discourse of Ernesto Laclau represents a neo-Kantian

variant of what could be called post-Soviet socialism. Already at the
time of the Second International, neo-Kantianism was functioning
as a critical approach in relation to Marxism: Marxism was not seen
as the enemy, but this critical approach had attempted to subjugate
it and, in a sense, to neutralize it. The focus of the attack was politi-
cal realism and the ontology of the class struggle. Epistemological
mediation, then, consisted of this use and abuse of Kantian transcen-
dentalism. Mutatis mutandis, if we look at the post-Soviet era, this
also seems to me to be the line taken by Laclau in the course of the
development of his thought. Let me be clear: here I am not discuss-
ing revisionism in general, which is sometimes useful, sometimes
indigestible. I am discussing Laclau’s theoretical and political effort
in the post-Soviet era by comparison to the present day.
Let us begin with a first point. The multitude characterizes con-
temporary societies, Laclau tells us, but the multitude does not know
ontological determinations, let alone the rules that can govern their
own composition today. Only from the outside will it be possible to
recompose the multitude while respecting its nature. This operation
is the Kantian operation of the intellect confronted with the ‘thing in
itself’, which is unknowable other than with the seal of the ‘form’. It
is an operation of transcendental synthesis.
Is it possible and desirable that heterogeneous social subjectiv-
ities organize themselves spontaneously, or should they rather be
* Originally published in Italian under the title ‘Egemonia: Gramsci, Togliatti,

Laclau’, in EuroNomade, 15 June 2015. http://www.euronomade.info/?p=4956.
organized? The question is frequently encountered, and is grounds

for criticism [criticismo]. Laclau replies that today there is no social
actor per se, as a universal class (according to the Marxian definition
of the working class), and not even a subject simply produced by
social spontaneity, by a self-organization that could claim hegemony.
Now classical Marxism had simplified the social class struggle under
capitalism and had built a subject, a protagonist of emancipation in
whom autonomy and centrality coincided. But in our times precisely
this terrain has been eroded and another, made up of heterogeneity,
has imposed itself in its place. Only a political construction can now
move in this space of social non-homogeneity. (By ‘homogeneity’ I
mean here something that should be presupposed, or a situation in
which we limit ourselves to the observation of what exists; in any case
that kind of homogeneity has disappeared.) This is what Laclau’s
theory of hegemony sets out to address. It does not deny that there
are moments of self-organized autonomy, or strong subjectivities that
arise on the historical scene. He uncovers a ‘tension’ between these
subjective figures, and in any case he thinks that they must be ‘put
in tension’. He sees this tension as being ‘constitutive’; it is transcen-
dental imagination in action. Laclau, it seems to me, thinks that the
political context appears as a two-faced Janus, and he construes the
tension between its two faces as if this were a question of space and
place, and simultaneously of fabric and texture, that any construction
of power has to go through and transcend, resolve and determine.
This is how hegemony or power is born.
My second point is this. It must be clear that the immanence,
autonomy, and constitutive plurality of the multitude are not only
incapable of constructing power [potere]; they represent impediments
to the formation of any political scenario. Therefore, Laclau con-
tinues, if society were entirely heterogeneous, political action would
require singularities to be able to initiate a process of ‘articulation’ at
the level of immanence, in order to structure the tension that I have
briefly highlighted and to define political relations between the singu-
larities. But are they able to do this?
Laclau replies in the negative. This negation relates to a transcen-
dental engine. The articulation is therefore posited without possible
alternative, on a formal ground, while it is understood that in this case
‘form’ does not designate ‘something empty’ but rather a ‘constitutive
envelope’. Laclau stresses that, for an articulation of the multitude to
be possible, some hegemonic instance must emerge above the simple
plane of immanence – a hegemonic instance capable of directing the
process and of serving as a point of central identification for all the
Hegemony: Gramsci, Togliatti, Laclau 111
singularities. He tells us: ‘There is no hegemony without constructing

a popular identity out of a plurality of democratic demands.’1
If the social context is configured by a non-homogeneous multi-
tude, it is necessary to establish a force of articulation between the
different parts of this non-homogeneity in order to guarantee their
integration. The insistence on self-organization or the referral to pre-
established subjects should neither eliminate nor ignore the need to
create common themes and homogenizing languages for circulation
through the different local organizations. In any event, this articula-
tion or mediation cannot repeat the old model of traditional ‘strong’
organizations (parties, churches, corporations, and so on). Rather,
this articulation or mediation must be approached through the notion
of empty signifier. But I have just specified that here ‘empty signifier’
does not designate empty forms of unity tied dogmatically to some
precise meaning; rather it designates a constitutive envelope. We are
no longer on the Kantian terrain of aesthetics or analytics, but on that
of transcendental imagination.
In fact there is a moment in which Laclau, adopting a different
approach, almost like a new musical tempo, re-proposes the theme
of the floating and empty signifier in the face of the heterogeneity
of the social. And he does so in very powerful terms; I would say in
ontologically productive terms, were it not for the fact that he is forc-
ing things. Indeed, when he tackles the theme of the ‘articulation’ of
various social struggles, this moment represents a model of ‘consti-
tutive antagonism’, as it did already in 19852 – almost a dual ‘weak’
power that, arising through conflict and disintegration on a radical
frontier, constitutes a synthesis of old rights of sovereignty and demo-
cratic rights of self-government. Mezzadra and Neilson develop this
point.3 One has to admit that, in approaching the idea of a dialectic
of conflicting counterpowers, Laclau interpreted a first transition to
– or, better, a first appearance of – a common feeling among social-
ist militants who had been involved in the crisis of the left from the
1970s on: these were people who refused to see that the crisis was
unstoppable. In that condition, once the absence of dialectical tools
was identified, it was necessary to reconstruct ‘a people’, to produce
its unity; this was to be recognized by Laclau as the political act par
excellence. Thus in 1985 one was asking, with great force and across
a broad consensus, whether the opening of the social to the politi-
cal is, rather than a ‘discursive structure’, a ‘practice of articulation’
that constitutes and organizes social relations. But this point of view
was to be reversed soon: ‘We can thus talk of a growing complexity
and fragmentation of advanced Industrial societies [. . .] This is the
asymmetry existing between a growing proliferation of differences – a

surplus of meaning of “the social” – and the difficulties encountered
by any discourse attempting to fix those differences as moments of
a stable articulatory structure.’4 We therefore have to move away
from the very notion of society as a self-defined totality in which the
social fixes itself. We have to find rather ‘nodal points’ that produce
partial directions and allow any of various formations of the social to
take shape. Thus one will have increasingly to reject any dialectical
solution offered by concepts such as ‘mediation’ or ‘determination’.
Politics emerges as a problem of the transcendental conditions of the
game between articulations and equivalences that are constituted in
the social, in which the identity of the forces in struggle is submitted
to permanent changes and requires incessant redefinition.5
But the balance of this articulation is hard to determine. It is
exposed to two dangers. I would call the first one a demand drift
[deriva della domanda], or rather the drift of the inconclusiveness
of the meeting of equivalences. In On Populist Reason, which was
published twenty years after Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the
argument begins again with an immersion in the social and con-
structs itself around the stimuli, the multitudinous impulses [conatus]
that push towards the political. Now ‘the smallest unit from which
we will start corresponds to the category of “social demand”’.6
Naturally, if at one end this method pushes towards deepening the
logic of identity formation, at the other it opens up to antagonism.
The problem then becomes how to transform competition, which is
a displaced and continuously proliferating antagonism, into a visible
and dualistic antagonism. Doesn’t the ‘chain of equivalences’ result
here instead in a proliferation whose conclusion is not clear enough
to be understood? Laclau himself seems to be aware that the destruc-
tion of meaning through its own proliferation is the very specificity
of equivalence. This lack of definition of the powers of immanence
risks preventing – and in any case threatening – the transcendental
construction of the signifier.
The second danger relates directly to the definitive consolidation
of the equilibrium, as it appears in the concept of ‘hegemony’.
Let me open a small parenthesis on this pont. Laclau’s concept of
hegemony is construed in relation to Gramsci. But things are not that
simple. Peter Thomas notes that in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy
Laclau and Mouffe replaced the political dispositif of hegemony as it
was defined in the Leninist tradition with a discursive concept, which
is completely formal.7 We are, according to Thomas, in a phase of
theoretical reflection on Eurocommunism, which develops in the
form of a ‘soft’ Gramscianism and marks the transition to a radical

democratic post-Marxist politics. Whether or not one agrees with
Thomas on this point, it seems to me that we must bear in mind
that Gramsci’s thought takes as its starting point a Marxist–Leninist
position in which dictatorship is presented not as totalitarian com-
mand but as hegemony, in other words as an organic construction of
a revolutionary constituent power. It cannot be denied that Laclau’s
Gramscian reference is rather weak on this front – a rhetorical search
for a supposed inheritance rather than a true ontological affiliation.
The concept of hegemony in Gramsci, from the practice of the Turin
Councils to the theory of the modern Prince, is built on class struggle,
preserves a materialist solidity, and produces a dispositif of workers’
power in the communist sense. Under no circumstances can this
concept be reinterpreted in the ways theorized by Norberto Bobbio –
that is, as a superstructural product of civil society, where the concept
of civil society is taken in the Hegelian sense.
Further, it is strange here how, in Laclau, the concept of hegemony
– whose Gramscian force has now dissipated – can be linked to the
politics of the Communist Party under Togliatti. On this point, the
balance between the basic autonomy of the movements and the party
(as a sometimes floating but never empty signifier) could still incline
to the left, because the party was anchored in Soviet policies. In this
way the x-axis of hegemony–society and the y-axis of right–left could
be kept in balance as a result of the impossibility for the signifier to
become a state: Yalta prevented it. I repeat: in Togliatti, in Italian
communism, the national–popular could be interpreted as stand-
ing on the left – within the limits of an action opposed to the class
struggle that ensued – only because the Communist Party could not
gain access to power, and only until it changed so as to gain access to
power. Here, paradoxically, the concept of hegemony turns into one
of political centrality.
In short, the figure and the function of hegemony in Laclau seem
to me to be ambiguous. Rather than analysing how capitalism works,
they establish how we would like a political society that does not
know capitalism to function – or they confuse capitalism with a
necessity. I think the same could be said of the idea of a people. As
a breach in the hegemonic block that Laclau calls ‘empty signifier’,
the people represents occupation by a group capable of determining
a new universality – but this is not entirely clear. It seems rather that
the people is a derivation brought into being by the struggle of differ-
ent factions and ends up representing a new crystallization of political
identities.
Hence it follows that, in Laclau’s philosophy, the empty signifier

represents a structuralist abstraction that loses sight of an otherwise
central fact. The so-called void is the product of an exodus and not of
a structural modification – as was noted by Bruno Cava, a Brazilian
activist who has studied Laclau closely:
If there is one thing that is completely evident today, when we consider

the current forms of politics, it is the detachment of the ‘people’ from
the participation functions to which it has been entrusted by modern
public law. The empty signifier empties even more in the current
situation – it does not bite into the multitude but is swallowed up by
the strong powers that no longer have anything to do with the people,
the nation, and all the fine words of the politics of modernity. As for
the movements, they live in the consistency of a ‘concrete universality’
which has the function of suturing and articulating the signifiers: but
the power resides in the multitude, which is the concept of class.8
Another consequence is this. It is clear to me that Laclau’s thought

is situated in a sort of post-ideological era where the class struggle
cedes its central position to different and multiple identities (which
can affect it in various ways). But it seems to me that this thought
cannot lead to anything precise. Or rather it leads to a null result
when it is made to operate in the context of the coordinates to which
I have referred earlier: an x-axis of hegemony–society and a y-axis
of right–left. This change, which deontologizes the subjects in this
coordinate system, could very well be based on singularities that col-
laborate transversally and thus build, at the machinic level (to use
Deleuze and Guattari’s expression), variegated social war machines,
which would in no case be an effect of the urgency to consolidate
the contours of a ‘hegemony’ or a ‘nation’. Change can therefore be
represented here as an illusion. We must again ask whether the empty
signifier subjected to these tensions, in addition to being reduced to
a centrist figure of the organization of power, does not suffer another
drift, namely towards immobilizing the political process because
its dynamism, moved towards the centre, is now unable to pro-
duce power. In this case the transcendental synthesis is completely
deprived of movement.
This brings me to a final and crucial point: the historically deter-
mined concretization of the transcendental form.
The empty signifier operates on the national terrain. For Laclau,
a cosmopolitan discourse is unacceptable even as a horizon. After
eliminating all other fixed points, potere needs national identity if it
is to have real consistency. Even in globalization, when the power
of the nation state declines, the concept of the nation state cannot
be abandoned. Abandoning it means not only putting oneself in
an unrealistic and downright dangerous situation. Without national
unity, the horizontal expansion of social protest and the verticality of
a relation to the political system would be impossible. And, Laclau
insists, the experience of Latin America in the 1990s and in the
decade 2000–10 amply demonstrates this condition.
It seems to me that, on the contrary, the progressive movement
that shook Latin America in the twenty years that straddle the two
centuries was strongly promising to break out of the national frame-
work into which individual states had been one by one pressured
by North American rule and its imperialist values. In the same way,
the horizontality of the movements exhibited on a large scale Latin
America’s inward-looking tendencies, sometimes anticipating, other
times following a new continental spirit, which has animated some
popular governments and allowed them to overcome a reactionary
chauvinism – in fact as reactionary in the Latin American tradition as
in the European one. But Laclau’s nationalism, it must be acknowl-
edged, cannot be assuaged. It goes back to the beginning of his work.
Writing against Althusser in Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, he
argued even then, in 1977, that the working class has an irreducibly
national specificity, and exalted the success of Peronism in building,
at the national level, a democratic and popular language.
As if that were not enough, through this nationalist option Laclau’s
discursive position risks losing any reference to material practice and
to the historical conditions of the class struggle – according to Stuart
Hall. These are neutralized in their power [potenza], so to speak, by
the reference to a national context. Society cannot be considered a
totally open discursive field, in which political hegemony can be fixed
on a national–popular horizon. Such an operation can only lead to
an assault on Fort Apache being delivered by the other social forces
in play, as was the case in Argentina. In consequence, here again
Laclau’s schema shows that it can stand only as a centrist figure of
government. It inevitably has to offer itself – as in fact it does – to a
positivism of sovereignty exercised by a centrally effective authority.
It is still a formal transcendence, inasmuch as it effectively posits
power in material terms and justifies it.
It will be noted, however, that in Laclau’s most recent writings
the transcendence of command gradually ceases to represent itself
in a strictly national register and in the name of an overencumbering
state centralism. Here we can even glimpse something of a departure
from the originally Hobbesian conception that saw power forming the
people. And yet a paradox immediately arises. If the transcendence

of command, the Hobbesian temptation, is lessened – because in
our time there will always be growing irregularities of power in social
relations – this impossible transcendence is rendered concrete once
again in Laclau’s work: not sought but found, not constructed but
imposed by the very mechanics of transcendentalism. Instead of the
synthesis of the multitude, the transcendental approach will see, in the
emergence of the people, the growing compaction of a full signifier
that provides a foundation for the political. Is this a transition from
‘criticism’ to a conception definitively dedicated to objective idealism?
While Laclau brilliantly shows that the people are not a spontaneous
or natural formation but are made up of representative mechanisms
that translate the plurality and heterogeneity of singularities into a
unity, and while this unity becomes a reality through identification
with a leader, a dominant group, and in some cases an ideal, we can
conclude that this vision seems tributary to an aristocratic rather
than a democratic idea, and the former repeats the deepest and
most continuous history of the state. Perhaps here there is indeed
confirmation of a transition from criticism to objective idealism. The
centrality, for Laclau, of the function of intellectuals and of commu-
nication in political organization is indicative of this deviation. Here
the Gramscian concept of an organic intellectual is completely super-
seded, and an assumption is made about the autonomous function of
the intellectual as an auxiliary force in the construction of hegemony
– or is it of leadership? This is exactly what Laclau refused to do in
his entire life, as a militant democrat and socialist; and this deserves
to be warmly acknowledged. So why this fusion of political autonomy
and intellectual leadership?
To conclude, my head-to-head with the thinking of Laclau has
been a regular occurrence over the past twenty years. I say frankly, as
I have told him directly, too, that I find his thinking, his very concep-
tion of populism, to be the product of a reflection not on power as
such, but on the concept of transition and on the concept of power
in the transition between different eras of its organization. Laclau’s
populism is the invention of a mobile form of mediation – of, and
within, the transitions of political regimes, especially those of South
America (but others too). It is a form that I continue to see as weak,
not conceptually but on account of the reality it registers, because
the ‘void’ that it assumes to be a problem is often not a void to be
filled but a chasm into which one risks falling. And this weakness is
accentuated in Laclau by the fact that, in refusing to open itself to an
ontological inquiry and thus to give meaning to the emergence of the
new while it admits that the governance of a transition can be only

constituent, this uncertain constituency [costituenza] paradoxically
ends up in a repetition of models of modernity. In particular, it rejects
any tendency towards emancipation. By agreeing to place himself in
the tension between spontaneity and organization while at the same
time he cancels the material dimensions of the class struggle, Laclau
ends up accepting some very problematic aspects of European public
law. For example, in attacking the theme of social movements, Carl
Schmitt defines their figure through the recognition that they consti-
tute the fabric of the popular composition of the state – a top-down
recognition that politicizes society in order to build a national identity.
Or take, on the other hand, Schmitt’s definition of the place of politi-
cal representation as ‘the presence of an absence’– an absence to be
filled if the state is to exist, a presence to be emptied if the state is to
be super partes, ‘above parties’. How closely does the empty signifier
repeat the Schmitt’s model of representation? But these are improper
interferences – certainly, for Laclau, simple tools recoverable from the
archive of European public law. Because – and here is finally my view
– the importance or, better, the greatness of Laclau’s thought does not
consist so much in its having resolved the question of the empty politi-
cal signifier or, on the contrary (when you look at it from the right),
in its refusal to rely on the class struggle and on social conflict to fill
it. It consists rather in its having lived that problem from the inside.
That floating thing he saw before him – that truc, that machine – was
not the old model of state – the state of modernity – but a new thing.
There is a constituent tension that extends and acts on the terrain of
the crisis of the democratic state of modernity. The question is not to
discover the state that we have had up to now, but to build another; to
invent a new signifier for a radically democratic transition. Here criti-
cism is exalted in its original meaning: not as an axis of transcendental
construction of the state, but as a problematic investment in its crisis.
If I may be permitted a kind of small appendix, I would conclude
on some crude distortions of Laclau’s teaching – as for example when
a cap is imposed on real movements, as if not the cap itself but only
its size were a problem, which often happens in the current Spanish
debate; or when, in order to purify the earth-dirty vitality of the
movements, people cite, in Laclau’s name, the image of the Italian
Communist Party as a model of listening to and directing the word of
the people, as happens increasingly today, almost everywhere on the
European and South American left. And there are thousands of other
examples that signify the extraordinary vitality of Ernesto’s thought,
despite the distortions imposed on it.
Part III
The Extinction of the State
9
On Revolution*
My contribution will revolve around four points, as follows.
First, the break between modernity and postmodernity: to speak of

postmodern politics today, in the postmodern condition, involves
creating a new political lexicon. The political lexicon of modernity
(sovereignty, national state, imperialism, colonialism, etc.) has lost
the ability to take on board new political subjectivities. Any concep-
tion that, while recognizing the originality of the age in which we live,
persists in arguing for a continuity of modernity and redefines this
continuity as hypermodernity, for example, is wrong and dangerous.
What has changed is the political subject. It has changed because
a new subject is being constructed through new knowledges and
through an activity of intellectual and cooperative labour; because it
operates on a temporality that has nothing more to do with the modes
of production of modernity and with the time allocations of the clas-
sical working day; and, finally, because it has to deal with an absolute
mobility in space. Starting from this condition, a new regime of
desires comes into being, and therefore a new constituent potential-
ity. Moving on from modernity, the themes of reform and revolution
have to be addressed entirely from scratch.
* Outline of a paper presented in Cambridge, at a conference organized by the

Faculty of Social and Political Science in King’s College, 1–2 April 2005.
When we speak of revolution, class, and modernity today, the funda-

mental categories are the multitude and the common.
The multitude is defined as a set of cooperating singularities. The
fact that the multitude can be defined as a cooperating singular
ensemble, that the network constituted by singularities can therefore
be defined as a constituent depends on the regime of immanence to
which the dispositifs of the multitude are subjected. The regimes of
immanence can in fact be various. I focus on the one that is based on
the common – on the common network of the conditions of desire
and productivity.
What is revolution and what is constituent power in postmodernity?

In modernity, constituent power is defined as an expression of the
power of those masses exploited by capitalism that try to impose their
dictatorship on bourgeois society and to reappropriate the capitalist
state. Thus constituent power is dialectically in opposition to consti-
tuted power, as totality against totality. In postmodernity things go
differently. Taking power makes little sense when the elite’s concept
of power remains homologous with the rebels’. If we analyse the
notion of multitude and the new concept of labour today, it appears
instead that the process of taking power passes through the manage-
ment of the common, an expression of the power of the multitude: to
the exercise of power by the ruling classes one must oppose the exer-
cise of the common by the exploited and dominated classes, which
is to say by the multitude. These affirmations, which usually have
efficacy through opposition and alternative at the level of ideas, are
obviously insufficient to map out a concrete terrain of political strug-
gle. But on this terrain there are no prefigured formulas. Nothing
is a repetition of what already exists. Constituent (and democratic)
political struggle has to be reconstructed on new, post-liberal and
post-socialist projects. Important here is to take up what was said in
Section 2: to remember that the growth of the revolutionary and con-
stituent process, of the management of the common, can be linked
only to the decision to create the multitude as a political body.
By way of conclusion on this point, it will perhaps be useful to
offer an example. Today it is evident that the structure of power is
On Revolution 123
established at a level that Marx would have called ‘the communism of

capital’. Collective, global capital is based on the financial power that
investors linked to speculative organizations determine – although
these organizations are also linked to the pension plans of entire
sectors of the productive classes of western countries. A perverse
redistribution of rent is the order of the day and renders the world
of investment cacophonous. How is it possible to envisage a redis-
tribution of wealth against the corporatism of capital, in the times
and spaces of the growth in common of the productive networks of
the multitude? Today constituent power is a common decision on
the common dispositif that regulates the common networks of redis-
tribution of wealth among all the subjects who are productive and
financially active on planet earth.
If this is the situation, if the problems are to be addressed at this level,

resistance cannot express itself save globally: the action of transfor-
mation is possible only within the dimensions of globalization. The
anti-globalization movement has indicated the terrain on which any
action of revolutionary transformation has to take place, but has
failed in the field of defining a programme. Now theory is as impor-
tant as practice, especially in the phase of postmodern reconstruction
of capitalist power that engages mass intellectuality as its subject
of exploitation. It is a fact that this intellectuality is immanent in
production and exploitation, in development and resistance. In a
synthesis that cannot be broken, the identification of the dispositifs
of antagonism must continually pass through this reality and through
the double function of mass intellectuality – simultaneously produc-
tive and revolutionary.
My final point is on violence and war: in the situation we find
ourselves in today on the matter of antagonism and revolutionary
transformation, violence and war are called upon to constitute the
moment of tactics.
I want to explain myself on this issue. Strategy is defined in Section
2 of this chapter and problematized in Section 3. It seems clear, when
one follows this logic, that no strategic proposal can be teleological, as
was constantly being put to us in the old socialism. The fact remains
that there is no strategy without telos; this telos will be constructed
(or not) through the motions and timings that the movements set for
themselves. However, strategy and tactics go hand in hand, all the
more as imperial domination relies exclusively on violence and war in

the absence of any rational prospect of development. Thus the ques-
tion of the violence of war becomes important to the development of
movements; strategy and tactics live the same adventure.
What does this mean, once the revolution has been imagined as an
exodus, as a management of the common, and as a reappropriation,
not so much of power [potere] as of common power [potenza]?
When we speak of exodus, we refer to a radical separation of the
wishes of the multitude from what capital has managed to colonize
and reduce to domination. The exodus is under way. But from capi-
tal’s side it is framed in terms of war. If there is one fundamental
problem that arises within the movement at this point, that is cer-
tainly the use of a violence that is resistant to the capitalist initiative.
In my opinion, here one should stress the point that, if the prob-
lem of the use of violence concerns the movement of opposition
and antagonism in its entirety, not even this total value manages to
go to the core of the problem. Tactically this is a question of resist-
ing the violence of power, but strategically it is about developing
an exodus from power, radically separating the constituent power
of the multitude from capitalist repression. (Already in Spinoza,
the argument that the violence used by power was total did not
reduce the problem: the core issue remains the ability to constitute
freedom and liberated desire by breaking from the enmeshment of
power.)
As for the concept of revolution as management of the common,
I can only repeat my earlier observations. And as for the problem of
revolution as a reappropriation of force, which today is consolidated
in capitalist power, I can only reiterate the same options: to leave
[andarsene], but if necessary to respond forcefully to the violence
of this power; to denounce its parasitic character; or to void it. Is it
possible today, and in what sense, to interpret the Leninist impera-
tive ‘convert the imperialist war into a revolutionary war’? A positive
answer is conceivable only if we substitute ‘constituent power’ for
‘revolutionary war’.
Today, within the problem of defining strategy and tactics (which
present themselves in increasingly unified terms), we have two alter-
native positions. The first position is traditional, perhaps a little
archaeological: it envisages the process of resistance as an immedi-
ate process of conquest and reappropriation of capitalist power. The
second position identifies in the action of the multitude a tendency,
by now irreversible, towards emptying out and occupying the capital-
ist spaces of potere through the expression of potenza.
On Revolution 125
From a theoretical point of view (which is not without effect on the

dimensions of political action), a new International is being formed
on this second line. For now it is not armed. But the problem of vio-
lence is not one that the multitude raises for itelf; when the multitude
is subjected to violence, the tactical solutions will be accompanied by
a strategy that matches its potenza.
10
Lenin
From Theory to Practice*
I would like to illustrate three slogans that are associated with Lenin.
The first is: ‘All power to the soviets.’ This one dates from April
1917, when the revolution had to choose between a path previously
mapped out by Lenin in the form of seizure of power by an organized
vanguard and the path marked by the uprising of the masses and their
self-organizing into councils or soviets.
The second slogan dates from 1919: ‘Socialism = soviets + elec-
tricity’. This one came into being at a moment when, the soviets
having won, it became necessary to specify the project that lay ahead
for production and the forms of life that the proletariat would seek to
build in socialism.
The third slogan dates from the beginning of 1917, when Lenin
was blocked in Switzerland by the imperialist war and started work
on State and Revolution (he completed it in August–September that
same year). Here he calls for the abolition of the state and puts for-
ward a communist programme for this dissolution.
So let us begin with the first one. ‘All power to the soviets’ is an
absolutely clear strategic indication; it encapsulates the project of
making revolution and building socialism through mass organs – the
soviets – taking power. According to Lenin, the imperialist war was
bound to turn into a civil war. ‘The imperialist war,’ says Lenin, ‘had
by objective necessity to turn into a civil war between the enemy
classes.’ The soviet is the spontaneous product of this situation, ‘an
* Paper delivered at the seminar ‘Lenin: Dalla teoria alla pratica’, held as
part of the conference Penser l’émancipation, Université de Paris 8, Saint-
Denis, 15 September 2017 and subsequently published in the same month
(23 September) in EuroNomade.
Lenin: From Theory to Practice 127
embryo of workers’ government representative of the interests of all

the poor masses of the population, that is, of the nine tenths of the
population: it aspires to peace, bread, freedom’.1 This indication, too,
is clear. Yet we, old twentieth-century veterans that we are, have too
often read it as an example of revolutionary opportunism, or alterna-
tively as an expression of the idea of insurrection as art; either way, we
take it as a decision of genius, sudden and magnificent, a reversal of
the line that Lenin had prescribed to the party. It is a fact that in April
1917 Lenin – a theorist for whom the vanguard was the leader of mass
movements and the party was to be built on the industrial model of
the modern factory – radically changed the political line of the party
with this slogan, delegitimizing from afar – as he was still outside
Russia – Moscow’s leadership, which was opposed to the transfer of
constituent power to the soviets. A brilliant contradiction, it was said,
a Machiavellian act of virtuous conversion of a political project. We
have heard it a thousand times from those who later turned out to be
the destroyers of the working-class left in the short twentieth century.
Well, this reading of the slogan is false. The political line set out by
Lenin is in fact summed up by the dispositif: strategy is assigned to
the class movement and the tactic – only the tactic – is assigned to the
institution, that is, to the party, to representation, to the vanguard.
The independence of the proletariat defines the location of a strategic
hegemony where insurrectional power and the revolutionary project
are formed. It is before this reality that the vanguard has to bend if it
wants to launch a tactical proposal. The radical transformation of rev-
olutionary tactics, dictated by Lenin as from April 1917, is therefore
not an artistic gesture but the political recognition of the hegemonic
maturity and strategic capacity of the proletarian masses – peasants,
workers, soldiers organized into the soviets – to take power. Lenin’s
gesture is an understanding of proletarian power, which has come
to recognize itself as a strategic project. The party, the vanguard, its
tactical expertise, must submit to that mass force and must faithfully
and coherently gather from it and carry out its strategy. To organize
the soviets in the revolution is to give organizational form to the con-
stituent power that they express: it represents continuity of action, the
capacity to produce institutions, the hegemonic project in the con-
struction of socialism. It goes from organs of insurrection to organs
of insurrection and of the power of the proletariat. In consequence,
this transformation of the function of the soviets derives from the real,
material development of the revolutionary objectives.
This brings me to the second slogan: ‘Socialism = soviets + elec-
tricity’. Here too the traditional interpretation is misleading. It reads
the slogan as meaning that the soviet and the project it set out for
production have to be subordinate and functional to the needs of
socialist accumulation. But this is true only in part. It is true when
you think of the enormous tasks of making revolution in a single
country, and one that has semi-feudal economic and social systems,
has an industrial structure completely inadequate for any project of
modernization, and is already subjected to concentric attacks from
the counter-revolutionary forces. These were the conditions in which
socialism was being created. But the slogan ‘soviets + electricity’
does not refer only to the need to increase the organic composition of
capital in its fixed, energy-related part as a precondition for industrial
expansion. Lenin’s formula cannot be reduced to that imperative.
Rather it points out a fundamental theme in Marx: there can be
no social revolution without an adequate material base to support
it. Consequently, any political proposal that seeks to subvert the
capitalist system, its political figure, and the existing way of life asso-
ciated with it without offering a project to achieve a corresponding
transformation in the mode of production is falsely revolutionary.
Revolutionary, on the other hand, is the act of joining the soviets
together directly – in other words, the political organization of the
proletariat, and electricity stands for an adequate form of the mode
of production: adequate form, necessary conditions of the mode of
production.
And, if we are to lift this proposal from its contingency and to
apply it universally, to any revolutionary work, as Lenin intended,
then ‘completing the revolution’ means carrying to fruition the rela-
tionship between what the labouring class is – in other words its
technical composition – and the political forms in which that com-
position is organized. The given social formation of the proletariat
and its technical skills, its ways of life, its desire for bread, peace, and
freedom – this is its ‘technical composition’; and the class struggle,
the transformation of the mode of production in the light of the dual-
ism of power, the counter-power of the soviets – this is its ‘political
composition’ of the proletariat. Socialism and communism are ways
of life built around ways of producing. For Lenin, this nexus lies
at the heart of the construction of socialism. So ‘soviets + electric-
ity’ does not mean just that the soviets establish command over the
technological structure that capital set up for the organization of its
production – in this instance, the structure that characterizes the
phase of industry configured by the use of electricity. Every structure
of production implies a social structure, and vice versa. Therefore,
to Lenin, putting together soviets and industrial (electric) machinery
means making changes in the technical structure of production: there

is no industrial production that is equally good for capitalism and
socialism; there is no such thing as a neutral use of machines. In
order to assert itself, socialism has to undermine the capitalist indus-
trial structure and to begin to implement a transformation in the
proletariat’s way of life through changes in its use of machines. It is
within the capital relation – namely the relationship between fixed
and variable capital, between the technical structures of production
and proletarian labour power – that Lenin’s slogan implants the revo-
lutionary dispositif of social transformation, just as Marx did. Here
the soviet is a structure of collective entrepreneurship, a figure of the
enterprise of the common [impresa del commune].
And with this we are already in the discussion of the third slogan:
‘Abolition of the state’. The hegemonic strategy whereby the soviet
takes political power and establishes new ways of producing and new
forms of using machines, both the ones that generate commodities
and the ones that generate subjectivation – this is what paves the way
for the abolition of the state, that is, for the transition from socialism
to communism. When Lenin elaborates the communist theory of the
extinction of the state, taking his cue from the apologetic descrip-
tion that Marx had made of the experience of the communards in
1871, he does not succeed in dissolving the utopian imprint it still
contained. On the other hand, Lenin’s description of the experience
of the Commune, like Marx’s, is explicit in denouncing the commu-
nards’ errors. Thus Lenin goes beyond that utopia and its capacity
for leadership, while the seizure of power is under way. In State and
Revolution he goes beyond the old canonical indications. The radi-
cality of the revolution on the social terrain (the abolition of private
property, the principle of planning, the proposal of new forms of life
lived in freedom) is the dynamic element on which the withering
and then the extinction of the capitalist state have to be organized.
This organizing had been foreseen as a theoretical task, and with the
revolution it finds not only confirmation but a practical terrain for
its realization. In fact the project summarized the statement that the
strategy of liberation belonged to the working class and that produc-
tive invention was the key to it; and above all it transmitted the idea
that the task of abolishing the state presupposed a huge development
in the workers’ consciousness and in their bodies. It constituted a
majoritarian enterprise and asserted itself through the irreducible
increase in the strength of proletarians.
Let us be clear. This is how Lenin managed to gather the will of the
Russian proletariat in that immense effort that, in twenty years, was
to transform the poetic ‘horse-riding armada’ of the Red Cossacks

of Budyonny into the armoured divisions that liberated Europe from
Nazism and fascism. And to my generation this victory was a good
start into the practice of emancipation. It was Lenin who spread the
idea of the destruction of the state along with those slogans about
equality and fraternity that upset the global political order for a
century: ‘Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals
and German police spies’.2 By directing the desire for emancipation
against the state – represented as the machine that transforms social
exploitation into a public and private law designed to control life and
to establish class domination – Lenin was to hand down to us the
problem of how to build a common enterprise [impresa commune]
that would give workers command over production and the strength
to exercise it, to build the freedom of all. ‘So long as the state exists
there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no state’,
he wrote.3 And, again, the strength of the programme invests and
transforms the needs of the working class, both their consciousness
and their bodies, and translates them into project.
The economic basis for the complete withering away of the state is
such a high state of development of communism at which the antithesis
between mental and physical labor disappears, at which there con-
sequently disappears one of the principal sources of modern social
inequality – a source, moreover, which cannot on any account be
removed immediately by the mere conversion of the means of produc-
tion into public property, by the mere expropriation of the capitalists.4
He continues:
This expropriation will make it possible for the productive forces to

develop to a tremendous extent. And when we see how incredibly
capitalism is already retarding this development, when we see how
much progress could be achieved on the basis of the level of technique
already attained, we are entitled to say with the fullest confidence that
the expropriation of the capitalists will inevitably result in an enormous
development of the productive forces of human society. But how rap-
idly this development will proceed, how soon it will reach the point
of breaking away from the division of labor, of doing away with the
antithesis between mental and physical labour, of transforming labor
into ‘life’s prime want’ – we do not and cannot know.5
The first basic condition for the extinction of the state is therefore
the elimination of the distinction between physical and intellectual
labour. The second condition is a huge development of the forces of
production. The third material condition, which is included in both

the first and the second propositions, is the anticipation of a qualita-
tive change in development that is implicit in the transformation of
the forces of production, in other words a change in the conscious-
ness and bodies of the workers. For Lenin, only on this basis does the
project of the extinction of the state become feasible.
Here, too, we need to break from the falsehood that Leninism is
the exaltation of the state over the development of society and for
the organization of the distribution of wealth. Lenin’s starting point
is counterpower, the ability to build from below, strength and intel-
ligence being joined in a single undertaking. It is the order of life. It
is the starting point that the proletarian subversion of the state has
always proposed, from Machiavelli through Spinoza to Marx.
Lenin: From Theory to Practice
What does ‘all power to the soviets’ mean today? It means creating
movement, joining forces in the situations where you find yourselves,
forming coalitions, programming material objectives to organize all
those who work and are exploited, to create strength, to express a
hegemonic strategy. What does ‘soviets + electricity’ mean today?
It means embarking on a process of inquiry, going down among the
masses who work, into the precariat, into the world of material and
immaterial labour, creating unity and building models of cooperation
and enterprise alternative to those of capitalism. It means appropriat-
ing the common that capital already exploits by extracting it from our
lives, which are associated in social productive labour.
And what does ‘abolition of the state’ mean today? It means doing
all this outside the structures of capitalist democracy, building social
organization and autonomous movements, and an independent polit-
ical force for liberation.
11
Who Are the Communists?*
The communists are those women and men who open the forms of
life to liberation from labour, develop the conditions for a continu-
ous revolutionary struggle that has this purpose, and thus invent and
build radically democratic institutions, which we can call institutions
of the common.
Or, to put it better, the communists are those who combine polit-
ical revolution with liberation from labour and the instituting of
the common with liberating the production of life from capitalist
command.
Before expanding on this definition, allow me to make a few obser-
vations on a number of positions that claim to refound a communist
discourse, when in my view they actually remove even the possibility
of talking about communism.
1. First come those positions that dehistoricize and dematerialize the

idea of communism along with that of power. These are conceptions
that often cling to the past, to the ideology of ‘real socialism’, and do
not recognize how much the worlds of capital and liberation strug-
gles have changed today. Then there are those comrades who, while
recognizing the changes in the technical composition of living labour
today by comparison with the industrial era, nevertheless refuse to
translate them into an appropriate idea of political composition and
organization. These comrades claim that such a translation is impos-
sible. I concede that it is not easy – nothing is easy in this field. But
* Paper presented at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 26 April
2016. The video is edited by Ed Emery; visit https://youtu.be/rz9hdhGUuvI.
Who Are the Communists? 133
hic Rhodus, hic salta:* obstacles are not a matter of choice, they are
to be overcome. By avoiding this task, those comrades will never be
able to shift the class struggle from the terrain of social contradictions
to that of political organization. They persist in thinking of power as
a generic exercise of command and of terror; they see exploitation
as generalized slavery, improperly treating every productive condi-
tion as a subspecies of primitive accumulation, and therefore they
reduce exploitation to a mere exercise of violence. They act as if we
were not in the middle of a cycle of transformation of production and
technological development whose complexity makes any simplifica-
tion of command impossible. That command is now embedded in
life and is to be fought on that very terrain, by articulating the clash.
They forget the here and now [hic et nunc] of any critical analysis and
confuse every project of the future with the past. They end up carica-
turing the proletariat as a vague force, a crowd that needs a strategic
intelligence to come from the outside and guide it. The insurrection
is made by a naked proletariat; hegemony is established by the party
or the vanguard or the elite.
This is what results from dehistoricization and dematerialization
of analysis.
2. Again, people may call themselves communists but that is not
what they are, if they think that under neoliberalism capitalist aliena-
tion has reached the soul and brain of every worker and that no
production of subjectivity survives, apart from what capital constructs
through its organization of labour, periodically consolidated by the
action of the state. What, then, will be able to produce struggles, and
what will constitute resistance? What can resubjectify revolutionary
action? The gap that arises here between the force of subjugation of
neoliberal capital and the reactive power of the productive subject, of
the precariat, of the proletarian is so great that the rupture – the idea
of creating a revolt and constructing revolutionary action – seems to
these people impossible, unachievable. Or rather, according to them,
any possible rupture is crushed by an asymmetrical relationship that
is impossible to topple. In this situation, what can restore subjective
strength to rebellion? They reply: nothing that relates to exploited
life, to the body, which is beaten and wearied by labour, to the brain,
which is constrained by an algorithm. Only a radical reawakening, an
intellectual and moral event, they claim, will allow democracy to be
* ‘This is Rhodes: jump here’, a popular maxim that carries in Latin the moral
of Aesop’s fable about boasting versus doing.
rethought in a revolutionary manner. In short, imagination is what

will save us – a dematerialized and desubjectified desire, born out
of the void of the condition of subjugation. This is what they tell us.
But this psychological, immaterial (if not simply idealistic) concep-
tion of the rebirth of the communist struggle forgets one basic thing:
the power [potenza] of living labour as the protagonist of production.
Because living labour is indivisible, it produces and imagines at the
same time; it creates things and frees the brain in acting. It cannot be
separated into two things – a slave at one end, a person free to imag-
ine at the other. Subjectivation never ceases to occur, not even when
one works and suffers, in a state of subjection. Should we maybe go
elsewhere to rebel? But in what fantasized Greece will the imaginary
institution of society ever find its habitat? Is it not rather inside, in the
density of living labour, in life itself that rebellion takes place? Living
labour, subjected or subjectively active, is a hard reality of production
and simultaneously a virtuality of liberation. Desubjectivization is
not a determination applicable to living labour. In short, it is only on
living labour that communist being is founded, on living labour that
digs into the materiality of producing and living.
3. Third, they are not communists, those who think that there
is no resistance except by way of bringing down the present order.
When we say ‘bringing down’, we mean the resolve to reject cat-
egorically any relationship with power and to spark an exodus from
the very conditions of producing, as if power and production were
synonymous. It is clear that this project presents itself as an extreme
hypothesis – of detachment from the materiality of life and of abstract
separation from the slavery of capital. It involves virtue and decision:
a virtue that is sublime and a decision that is empty. But in this way
the will to deconstitute hands itself to the paradoxical device of a pure
and unconditional political gesture and of an accomplished and real-
ized exodus. There is no questioning of these people’s conditions of
reality, which are quite different from others’. A real ideological habi-
tus is formed here that arises from a late appreciation of the current
crisis of the dialectic of capital and from an awareness of the difficulty
of joining productive operation and revolutionary action, which is
given as desperate. In this sense, destitution is the opposite of con-
stitution and a destituent will is the opposite of constituent power.
However, the idea of deconstitution not only rejects the possibility
of constituent action but attributes to it the repetition of constituted
power and, in order to avoid it, proposes to shift the action to a place
where power is absent. Yet this appears as a gesture so dematerial-
ized that it imposes an abandonment of living itself; it is an individual
gesture that leads to a non-expressing and unproductive solitude, if

that is possible. But then does not the so-called negative dialectic
end up being resolved in the very suppression of producing? And
to suppress production means to suppress the reproduction of life –
two acts that can no longer be separated in biopolitics. Communism
signifies our taking nature and the production of life for ourselves,
commonly and creatively.
4. Finally, people cannot be regarded as communists when they
imagine that, in the twilight of the West, liberation can no longer
be expressed except through the exercise of violence, which they
characterize as a sacrificial and purifying event. Here the biopolitics
of crisis translates into a catastrophic and eschatological necro-
politics. Destitution and purification become the forms of liberation.
Despair is the inner thread of a so-called communist action that is
now miserably sectarian – an action that resembles the excesses of
religious extremism. There is no longer a transition from the strug-
gle over production and reproduction to the political struggle. This
transition is destroyed. Class struggle is conceived of as a war – a war
designed for self-sacrifice. In order for the person to be reborn? But
class war has always been something else, namely the highest point at
which a constituent power was imposed. Class war is the destruction
of the enemy in order to appropriate power, and at the same time it
is a collective constituent process of building new ethical and politi-
cal subjects, of defining new places of cooperative decision-making.
It is a source of new passions and new inventions. Class war is the
continuation of class struggle; it is the continuation of a politics of
humanity for humanity [una politica dell’uomo per l’uomo].
So let us return to the question of who the communists are.
(A) They are the people who recognize in labour and in social
cooperation the virtuality of a subversive praxis. They transform
this cooperation into counterpower. Here, in counterpower, there
is never just one single oppositional response to power; rather there
is the future of an excess. The name of this excess is the common.
To progress in this direction, communists know that, if today exploi-
tation takes place extractively, through productive cooperation it
creates a product built on the common. They therefore seek to reap-
propriate this common, in struggles both over production and over
reproduction. Communists resist exploitation; they coordinate their
workmates in strike action; they practise the refusal and sabotage of
command; they build counterpower in production and reproduction,
in work and in life. The weapon that organizes this confrontation and
this struggle today is the social strike. Out of social struggle is born
the political struggle.
(B) What does it mean to a communist to be in struggle [lot-
tare]? It means many things. First, it means taking the command
of social cooperation from the bosses’ hands and putting it in the
hands of social workers [lavoratori sociali]. But shifting command is
an ambiguous operation, because capital is mobile in the way it occu-
pies the space of production. And it is liquid when it imposes itself
on the space of social reproduction. In the second place, then, being
in struggle means to communists being capable of penetrating the
entanglements of command in order to break them and to appropri-
ate fixed capital to oneself. Let me explain: today labour is essentially
cognitive. It can act with relative autonomy within the mechanisms
of production, and it depends on fluid mediations in the clash that
opposes it to capital. It can therefore use this relative autonomy and
this fluidity of mediation to appropriate fixed capital – to make itself
a machine within and against the machinic structure of exploitation.
Today general intellect is the material on which capital builds value
creation. It is towards the brain, towards its reappropriation by the
collective worker, that the struggle is oriented today. Finally, as Marx
predicted, the human turned out to be the true fixed capital. Thus,
by becoming a machine, labour power subjectifies itself; when we say
‘human–machine’ we don’t mean that the machine has absorbed the
human being but that, on the contrary, human beings have enriched
themselves with machinic abilities. The bodies and the brains of
workers who have made the intelligence of the machine their own can
now turn it against the boss. This process of appropriation of fixed
capital has always existed in the history of the working class, since
the days when the worker was first formed in big industry: not even
the old factory could have functioned without the intelligence of the
worker. Today, in the postindustrial age, the body and the brain of
the worker are no longer docile to dressage, to training by the bosses;
on the contrary, they are now more autonomous in building coopera-
tion and more independent of organizational command. The bosses’
command has indeed left the factory, has gathered in financial capi-
tal, and certainly envelops us, but it no longer determines us from
within. It has spread everywhere, but precisely for this reason the
terrain of resistance and struggles has expanded. Its presence is para-
sitic because it is always secondary to social cooperative production.
Communist workers, as machines within and against the machine of
social production and reproduction, can thus act in a revolutionary
way. But even more important is that, in this condition, their every
movement within the machine of production is also an excedence: it
is theoretical invention, enrichment of life, and ontological approach
to a new way of producing. Each of their movements within capitalist
processes of extraction of the common is immediately a new mode of
institution of the common.
(C) The communists express constituent power. When they
affirm labour as the location of resistance and counterpower, they
transform cooperation in production into a common institution. The
history of the workers’ movement reminds us how the soviets were an
institution in which the communists found the organ of a revolution
that was both political and productive. To say ‘communist constitu-
ent power’ is to find the key to this twofold revolution. I have already
spoken about the need for a new mode of production and the pos-
sibility of building it; now I shall have to say what I mean by the other
aspect of the soviet in the revolution, namely the political aspect.
What does the soviet mean today? It means building institutions that
draw their strength and their legitimacy not from the will of a sover-
eign but from the will and intentions [volontà] of those who produced
them. The institutions of the common are non-sovereign institutions;
they know neither transcendence nor separateness; they know the
immanence of constituent power in its entirety. And this exercise of
constituent power must not be seen simply as an event. It does not
constitute an exception; rather it represents an excess that arises from
the long accumulation of struggles, wars, and forms of life of the
workers. It is a fullness of life. And taking power is always secondary,
because what comes first is always the appropriation of the common.
(D) It is on these foundations that the communists build the
enterprise of the multitude. Once we called it a party; now we prefer
to call it an enterprise. Can we steal this word from the lexicon of lib-
eralism? I think so. For enterprise refers to implementing something.
Therefore political enterprise refers to extracting and producing
hegemony from the thousands of movements that make up the social
and determining their tactical articulations: putting them into action.
This is not what the party wanted, namely for it to represent the
hegemony of a vanguard. The political enterprise of the multitude
gathers and coordinates the thousand souls of the movements and
constructs the tactics and the pragmatic management of the strug-
gles; it is a weapon born from the transversal body of the multitude,
from its strategic quality. The poor, the exploited, the dominated:
the enterprise of the multitude gathers them all together, not because
they are, each, some other person in need, but because they are
constitutive of a desiring ‘we’. Here no one can be said to be unpro-

ductive. Precisely for this reason, the idea of multitude demands to
be recognized in the form of an unconditional guaranteed income
[reddito incondizionale di esistenza]. The construction of this enterprise
or party is the communists’ fundamental task today. They build the
enterprise by moving across the networks of social insubordination
and by developing them autonomously. Where Lenin said ‘com-
munism = soviets + electrification’, we say ‘communism = soviets
+ social production’; and where Lenin said ‘all power to the soviets
through the party’, we say ‘all power to the enterprise of the “us”’.
(E) Finally, communists are internationalists. Globalization was
the effect of a century of struggle and represented a great proletarian
victory. Globalization has allowed millions and millions of people in
the third world to make their way out of hunger and has given them
the strength to cross the globe and come to countries of the first
world to live as equals. But, for the proletarians of the first world,
the global has also become a form of life that must break with any
barbarous national identity and allow them to live in the multitude
and to conquer and experience in it a new model of life – one that
is equal and collective, in other words common. Communists can
organize themselves only at the international level, because only at
this level can capital effectively be attacked and defeated. There is no
going back from globalization. Every look back means losing sight of
the goal of the struggle: the destruction of internationalized capital,
of its global private banks, and of its nationalized continental banks.
The struggle that can encompass all the others is the struggle against
the globalized command of capital. For communists, this is the main
concern.
15 January 2017
12
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?*
The question of organization has once again become crucial in

the autonomous and communist movements. We have reckoned
with the failure of the Bolshevik experience and of the Communist
International, with the corruption and slow demise of the social dem-
ocratic organizations, with the corporatist turn taken by the trade
union movement, and with the revelation of the dubious nature of
NGOs, so it is not surprising that the question of organization comes
to the fore. It is a difficult one to address and there are no easy solu-
tions; but this question is central. Even in the 1960s and 1970s, when
the debate was very lively, a theoretical solution was nonetheless not
reached, and there were few pointers to successful experiments on
this front. Here my intention is not to formulate some kind of answer
to ‘what is to be done?’ Rather I would like to address a point that
seems to me to be blocking the debate and to be worth resolving if
we want eventually to reopen the discussion on organization with
greater ease.
1. In the political debate on organization that has taken place within

the movements of the past fifty years, a fear has often surfaced that
the theoretical efforts to find a solution to this problem might end up
establishing models that cannot match the cyclical temporality of the
movements and cannot interpret the multiple figures, the interests
expressed, and the needs and desires they reveal, be those chang-
ing or constant: in short, that they might superimpose a one onto a
* Originally published in Italian under the title ‘Chi ha paura di Virginia

Woolf?’, in 2016, in EuroNomade (www.euronomade.info/?p=8183).
plurality and might accord an absolute, almost metaphysical validity

to that one, seeking to demonstrate and impose its necessity. There
has been talk of an ‘ontological drift’ of theory, where ‘ontology’ is
evidently glossed as the capacity to unify and immobilize the realities
of movement – almost a stigma. What do these political fears and this
theoretical timidity signify? They reveal a fact: in the transformation
of the models of the movements’ political organization, any attempt
to absolutize a subject or a movement and to cast it in a unifying
and permanent form was viewed with suspicion and denounced as
an attempt to ‘essentialize’. Party, soviet, council, trade union, and
so on: for each of these concepts a sort of drift was identified within
and beyond their original historical reality, which came to constitute
a fixation, an abstract unity, and with this a blockage of the move-
ment, a definitive inability to follow and interpret reality. To put it
briefly, any mishap, and in particular any attempt to give solidity
to the movements, was attributed to ontology, as was any attempt
to think of these movements as potentialities [potenze] that, in their
multiplicity, were also capable of conquering power. All this affected
the historical organizations of the labour movement; and certainly
there were many elements of truth in these denunciations, although
over time the latter became increasingly summary. But then, little by
little, in line with the dissolution of those historical organizations in
the regime of neoliberalism, accusations began to be levelled at the
autonomy of workers and proletarians – by which I mean the move-
ments in society that fought, and still fight, against capitalism and
liberalism and that, at least during and after the two great waves of
struggles in 2000 and 2011, have taken the form of people’s assem-
blies and have been widespread and continuous.
2. It seems to me (and others have argued) that Althusser is the
one at the bottom of this accusatory refrain, trivialized by its continu-
ity: he is the one who, in his polemic against the French Communist
Party (PCF), denounced the ‘ontological’ original sin that plagued
the communist organization. And he was absolutely right, because at
the time of his attack the PCF was effectively reified, both in theory
and in practice, ossified into a rigid bureaucracy and turned on itself,
intent on preserving the power that its elites enjoyed by cultivating
institutional political gardens; here and there those gardens flourished,
but generally they were moribund. The denunciation was paradoxi-
cal, because it was not reasonable to think of ontology as a fixation,
a blockage, a void of reality. If anything, the PCF was ‘deontologiz-
ing’: the orthodoxy had reached a point of no contact with everyday
life, history, real being. Althusser had run into an equivocal space;
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? 141
and he stayed there for a considerable time, increasing the dosage

and heightening the paradox to the point where he argued that the
development of the political struggle could be described as a ‘process
without a subject’. In this way communist action itself was emptied
of all subjective determination, of all historical subjectivation – all for
the sake of getting around the ontological illusion produced by the
PCF, which was itself totally emptied of being. As we know, later on,
during the tragic period of his life, Althusser changed his position. He
renewed his reflection on subjectivation in a questionable but at least
interesting way and resumed his focus on the random yet effective
pre-eminence of subjective action. However, that older Althusserian
position (which, as we have seen, had originally been the result of
polemical needs of the moment) did and does repeat itself tirelessly
within the movements. It was probably nourished by the succession
of bitter defeats of the ‘organized’ movements, by the presumption of
hegemony that ephemeral formations nurtured. I have often thought,
at a later stage, that, especially in Italian political debate, this critique
has re-emerged as a reaction to the workerist slogan that argued that
there was a kind of continuity of the communist movement in the
undefined dialectic between working-class composition and capital-
ist restructuring. These abstract axioms and these sad passions have
ended up introducing a kind of poison into all the discussions on the
organization of movements. (Note: the discussions introduced by
Laclau are the exception, but these do not concern the organization
of movements; rather they concern the techniques of subordinat-
ing the movements to an elite. In this case the poison has become a
deadly pathology for the movements.)
3. But we need ontology. Actually ontology means putting your
feet on the ground. One can discuss endlessly, as philosophers do,
what ontology means; I, for one, would say, echoing Marx’s Theses
on Feuerbach, that until now philosophers have only thought about
ontology, but today ontology has to be built. Over the centuries,
idealism has always moved against the possibility that philosophers
plant their feet on the ground and has produced that trick of replac-
ing being with logos (as well as replacing the people with sovereignty
and the multitude with leadership). It needed being, but could not
bear its materiality, which was made up of living labour and of strug-
gles designed to emancipate it, to liberate it. We have long settled
our accounts with idealism. New falsifications are now in circulation
and, while the logos can no longer get rid of the materiality of being,
this materiality will be read as empty being and subjectivity will be
sucked – and held back – into a dissipative, non-actionable drift, in
which action is reduced to a gesture and it is no longer clear whether

this gesture is Nazi or communist . . .
What is the ontology that, at this point, we claim to give meaning
and orientation to the struggles? It is neither more nor less than the
ontology of working-class history, in other words of that being that
is constructed – always, continuously – by the human being who
works, by ‘living labour’, by the multitudinous subjectivity that lives
and produces by composing itself and by cooperating. In this pic-
ture, the Marxian ontology of relations of production stands out: it
reads the world, recognizing in a materialist and historical ontology
not only the forms of its production but also the laws of a dumb and
unjust order that characterizes it and of a division of labour, wealth,
and happiness that is the result of subordination in the mode of pro-
duction and of hierarchy in the experience and exercise of power.
Marxian ontology is thus constituted and constantly renewed by
the class struggle, by the material antagonism that distributes the
consistencies of real being. Within these intertwinings and these con-
flicts, a landscape is formed in which productions of subjectivity and
figures of emancipation are developed, all matched to the material
forces that express them. How could one fight for a better life and a
more just order, if one did not maintain one’s grounding in a mate-
rial being that is inclusive of life (as it is given) and of the possibility,
capacity, and strength to transform it? Antagonism and class struggle
act in the materiality of being. They are not powers inscribed on a
surface whose foundation is immobile: they are powers and move-
ments of the everything that is, and they mark it on a surface that
is also a dynamic foundation – they are expressive powers of multi-
tudes of desire. Without this Machiavellian, Spinozan, and Marxian
image of ontology, it is not clear how class struggle can develop. In
the consciousness of every militant of class struggle lives this secular
religion of being, and this respect for material powers is expressed,
and emancipation is embodied. This secular religion of being is alive,
this respect for material powers is expressed, and this emancipation is
embodied, in the lives of all militants of class struggle. We are seeing
here the development of a materialist teleology in which the telos is
built by struggles.
4. At this point I may be permitted a moment of self-defence.
Scholars such as Irene Viparelli and Massimo Modonesi have writ-
ten that, while in Negri’s writings in the 1970s ‘antagonism and
autonomy appear simultaneously as a starting point, as a process
and as an end’, as a movement, in the following years autonomy has
become an ontological quality in itself, the producer and no longer
the product of social antagonism. On this view, some kind of ‘auton-

omist essentialism’ has developed in Negri whereby antagonism loses
its character as a process and contracts into a property, into a quality
of the subject, ‘instead of designating the incorporation of practices
and experiences of a process of subjectivation’. But not only Negri is
at fault here. In general, according to Viparelli, all the theorists of the
subaltern, all post-workerists, and all council communists have been
guilty of an ‘excess of essentialism’, ‘which leads them to absolutize
and confine the theoretical framework of reference around their own
key categories’. Thus the theorists of the subaltern ontologize colo-
nial subordination, contemporary post-workerist theorists ontologize
the precarious cognitive worker, and the autonomous councillors
and municipalists illustrate the myth of a self-valorizing emancipa-
tion.1 It is not for me to write about the falsity of these accusations
and to claim not only my insistence on militant subjectivity but also
the importance of the anticipations I made over time in describing
various class compositions and processes of production of subjec-
tivity. Rather my task is to speak up for what was alive within that
ontology of working-class and proletarian autonomy and to under-
line how little this autonomy yielded to metaphysical complacencies
and how attentive it was instead to the renewal of a multitude that is
always productive in its movements – individually, and in variegated
ways. The work done within autonomy was like something out of
A Thousand Plateaux. It is no coincidence that the methodology of
Deleuze and Guattari was able to contribute to the description of the
form of movements and that Foucault’s thinking on the production
of subjectivity could be translated and incorporated into the analysis
of the dynamics of the class struggle.
5. It is true, however, that in workerism [operaismo] some people
still sit and contemplate a fixed and immobile ontology – that of the
working class in the era of Fordism and Keynesianism – hankering
for the twin reformism, of capital and of the working class, that was
possible in that long gone era. For some, being stuck in that past
blocks the way to a future becoming whose strength was in having its
origin in the crisis of that era, but that they sought to keep fixed, with-
out admitting that it was in a process of development. The struggles
were declared dead: the only possibility was to take shelter, to move
into the autonomy of the political. Thus, for the Trontians, there
was an authentic, paradoxical, unconscious (and somewhat comical)
conversion to Althusserianism, and the historical process of the class
struggle was redefined as being without a subject. In their view the
subject had vanished; it was exhausted and finished. Why? Because
a subject – the working class – that was moving, changing, showing

itself in a new composition, and building new forms of class struggle
engendered fear. Above all, Trontians were anxious that this worker
subject would be more powerful once the new figure of living labour
(social, cognitive, mobile . . .) acquired reality and that it interpreted
the ‘inside–against’ of the anti-capitalist struggle as something that
was built from below, thus shedding any illusion that the struggle
could be represented from above. All this generated fear, and super-
stition took the place of critique.
And it was claimed that post-workerism – by which I mean the
ability to continue to carry out revolutionary inquiry and theory
beyond the high point, and then the defeat, of the mass worker –
was something of a passing trend, not commensurable with the
workerism of Tronti’s Workers and Capital. Those same authors
then wrote about ‘true’ workerism – which in their view ended in
1966 – claiming that it had become an outdated subject, fit only for
archaeology and that it was impossible to revive it as a resource for
class politics. It was very sad to see some of the proponents of the
original workerism supporting these notions and denying the ability
of something ‘post-’ (which still implied precedence) to be a force
in the ‘to come’ or future of the class struggle. It is not really the
case that there are two workerisms, one that went up until 1966 and
another that has lived for the subsequent fifty years and continues
to live; there is only one. And little changes if in the meantime a
fair number of the first workerists either went on vacation (claim-
ing that there was nothing more to be done) or went over to the
enemy (claiming that survival was possible only in the autonomy of
the political). When faced with the renewal of the struggles that the
class of living labour, old and new, was producing, these workerists
sometimes refused it, sometimes despised it, and in any case did
not see its power and telos. Shame on them! In that old guard, most
seemed to be orthodox popes refractory to the new. For others, it
was simply the demoralization of being the losers; and they climbed
on the bandwagon that led from the Italian Communist Party to the
Democratic Party, from illusion to nothingness. Reflecting on this
miserable story, it seems sometimes that one may have to agree with
those who see in workerism the essentialist exaltation of a subject.
In fact those theorists we were talking about wanted to ‘stop time’,
so to speak – unfortunately just not as much as was necessary to
bring down the walls of Jericho . . . On the other hand, let me repeat
clearly that the working class has no metaphysics. It knows only an
ontology of production. For the working class, for living labour in its
continuous transformation, there is no (metaphysical) possibility to

be absolute or to project absolutely.2
6. By taking the claim of a historical ontology as a starting point,
I can now begin to press two other points: (a) the intertwining of
the subject and the common; and (b) the articulation of horizontal
organizational processes and of the exercise of power [potere] (i.e.
of the verticalization of power [potenza]). I will do it very briefly,
because I have space only to outline some hypotheses and paths that
might be followed.
(a) Workers’ struggles have their own history. What a long way we
have come since Tronti was lamenting the lack of an ‘internal history’
of the working class and of the proletariat, fifty years ago! The mili-
tants of the autonomy movement, and many others, have taken on
this historical work and have repositioned it, moving it from the place
where the big shots of real socialism had left it. It has been laborious
work, done both by analysing class composition and by narrating
the political history of the movements; this kind of work needs to be
continued. But, although incomplete, it shows clearly the material,
dynamic, and common foundation – the ontology – to which organi-
zation has to respond. Organization has to reflect the forms of what
exists, anticipating them, perhaps, in the order of the dispositif. The
constitution of the common develops from the simple association of
workers, to the point where it establishes and stabilizes ‘the common
as mode of production’.3 Organization is the act of giving political
form to this development, and thus of setting up today ‘institutions
of the common’. The common has gradually accumulated in the
temporality of the production of capital and in that of the struggles
against capital: this accumulation sediments something that resem-
bles an iceberg, and it is on its uncovered part that organization can
be built.
So, if we take the intertwining of organizational subjectification and
the common in this way, ‘organizing’ will mean making movement,
and vice versa. In the first place, it will be obvious which realities are
bogus ones, which projects are failures, and which political direc-
tions are detached from movements and are professionalized outside
political projects that are based on social struggles (thanks to that irri-
tating insistence on the autonomy of the political). Strategy belongs
to the movements and cannot be taken from them, or represented.
Leadership is best not even whispered about anymore: it’s useful
only to the class enemy – a lure offered to the destructive mechanics
of enemy weapons, from the media to the prison. That manage-
ment structures must exist for the manifold movements of workers is
certain – the multitude, by its own multiple nature, demands it; but
these structures can be only bearers of tactics, temporary formations
in acute moments of movement. There is even less room for places
of command, of political representation, when the subjects of the
movement who appear on the scene are increasingly rich in knowl-
edge and productive capacity – as happens today, when the cognitive
proletariat is even more capable of appropriating fixed capital than
it was before. They are powerful singularities, those with whom the
organizational project and political programming of the movements
have to reckon today.
The organizational path – on the ontological basis that we have
grasped – aggregates experiences and knowledge and invests them in
productive forms, in figures of political entrepreneurship of the pro-
letariat. This is an essential step. Without productive capacity there
is no subjectivation, no resistance, no organization, no future – there
is no class of common, living labour. But, our interlocutors object, in
this way you sacrifice to ontology, to the materiality of the common,
the political decision to take power . . . That decisional process is still
something that enhances the freedom of movements and not – as you
claim – a subtle ontological claim. Certainly not. Let’s just remember
that power never comes first. First comes the common, and only after
people have put their feet on the ground and have sunk them into the
common is it possible for them to rise up, to initiate revolutionary
processes, to take power.
(b) On this point I could be even more succinct: how can one
articulate, on a vertical expression of power, the horizontal organiza-
tional processes that are customary today in insurgent movements,
which work with social media and operate in digital networks? Here
the theory leaves the answer to the practices of organization. No
theoretical anticipations are possible on this question – here prac-
tice, if it does not avoid theory, nevertheless refers it to experimental
research. Organizational invention is always a posteriori. However,
there are countless examples of organizational practices that can be
adopted in this regard. In the 1970s I worked extensively on what
the workers’ struggles said about organization at that time.4 Then
I returned to this discussion together with Michael Hardt, in rela-
tion to the struggles of 2011 and after;5 and in recent years I have
repeatedly expressed my rejection of Laclau’s populist illusion, which
worked on these themes, since I see those positions as simple refor-
mulations of the modern theory of sovereignty.6 These are just a few
references; a thousand others exist. What path should we take if we
are to raise the problem today? If we wish to respect the ontological
presuppositions that I have outlined, and thereby push to the limit

the ‘deontologization of power’, we shall say that, in order to produce
that articulation and to validate it in the name of the power strug-
gles of the movements, one has to invent non-sovereign institutions,
which are capable of producing the common in an ever open relation-
ship with the exercise of social counterpowers. The neo-municipalist
experiences that began in the first twenty years of the century, for
example, seem to have been built on the analysis of this form of gov-
ernance. They offer a possible path to follow.
7. As I said, in order to build organization, it is necessary to make
movement. But in order to make movement you have to carry out
investigation [inchiesta] and co-research [conricerca] – that is, you have
to proceed by asking questions and seeking answers. Investigating
is not simply developing research into the technical composition of
living labour; today it means in the first place analysing the forms of
life and the multiple links between the technical composition of living
labour, the political composition and the institutional impulses that
derive from it, and, finally, the movements engaged in the search
for the common. And I insist that opening up to the analysis of
institutions – of new institutions of living labour that are produc-
tive of the common – does not mean forgetting that every social
movement is characterized by antagonism with the power of capital.
Starting with Romano Alquati and his approach to inquiry and to ‘co-
research’ (which I would characterize as magisterial), many advances
have been made; however, they always reaffirm Alquati’s perspective,
which sees the institution itself as being moved, split, reshaped, and
possibly destroyed by the class struggle. Thus, when we develop,
through investigation, a model of non-sovereign institution and of
social counterpower, we work on a reality that is in motion; we define
its development and project transitively the models constructed in this
way onto the entire process of social transformation and class strug-
gle. We do exactly what we did when, mutatis mutandis, we carried out
investigation [as workers] in the factory: we follow the administrative
limits of production and their logistics until they reveal a weak link.
On this weak link we open the struggle and organize counterpower,
calling to the struggle multitudinous strata from inside and from out-
side the institution and strengthening the expression of counterpower.
If the class enemy directs from above a counterattack or an attempted
repression against this form of action (and often this is what hap-
pens), then it would be necessary to broaden the front of the conflict
(provided that one could do so). Without illusions, we advance and
innovate the investigation into this new extension of antagonism.
One last point brings us back to current events. I am under the

impression (and it is a sad one) that the institutional conquests of the
proletariat often exhibit absence – or rather weakening – of the thrust
of the very struggles that brought them about. Once power has been
achieved, or an institution won (and this is particularly true of the
neo-municipalist experiences), there is nothing more; the counter-
powers that gave rise to the movement seem to have vanished. The
counterpowers go into hiding. In the ontology of struggles, power
is always secondary, the common comes first; but when power has
been won, it seems that the common disappears. There are current
examples of these effects. Take the case of Podemos: having won a
large number of municipal elections in Spain, it has no longer been
able to accompany new and large movements of social struggle. But
something of this kind could also happen in the local and municipal
experiences, for instance in Corbyn’s Labour England. On the other
hand, in the United States Bernie Sanders’ supporters, out of power
as they are, raise with pride the same problems that we ourselves are
raising and they develop critiques against those who conceive of insti-
tutional struggles without the exercise of counterpower. Therefore we
have to proceed on the basis of a historically defined ontology, taking
it as a foundation on which experiences and constructions of revolu-
tionary organization are deposited and sedimented, through different
cycles and in different situations of struggle; and we have to do it
by perfecting and augmenting that store of experience, by continu-
ously reopening it to struggle. There has to be a counterpower that
is always present and effective in the framework of the institutional
confrontation on which we have focused. Ontology must always be
renewed, its power must always be expressed afresh. Difference has
to be affirmed. This is the task of communists when they speak of
organization.
In conclusion, ‘ontology’ does not involve fixing, repeating, or block-

ing. On the contrary, it involves setting your feet on the ground, on a
path to be travelled, in a landscape to be experienced, in a film to be
shot. Under these conditions, the horizontality of the movements can
cross with the verticality of the institutions. Who can still be afraid of
Virginia Woolf?
Paris, 15 October 2016
Notes
Notes to Introduction
1 [Enciclopedia Feltrinelli Fischer, vol. 27: Scienze politiche 1: Stato e politica,
ed. A. Negri. Milan: Feltrinelli 1970, pp. 9–11.]
2 [Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus, Minnesota
University Press: Minneapolis 1994, pp. 179–214.]
Notes to Chapter 1
1 The trade union and political movement outside Russia after the October
Revolution can be summed up as a homogeneous movement, essentially
based on self-management and generally expressed and led by working-
class aristocracies even in those instances in which it had the character
of a mass movement. S. Bologna, ‘Class Composition and the Theory of
the Party at the Origins of the Workers’ Council Movement’, Telos, 13
(1972), pp. 4–27 (also at http://zerowork.org/BolognaClassComposition
.html) is devoted to defining the movement’s homogeneity. For a general
introduction to questions arising from this matter, see also A. S. Ryder,
The German Revolution, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 1966;
A. Rosenberg, Histoire du Bolchevisme, Grasset: Paris 1967; B. Pribicevic,
The Shop Steward Movement in England, Oxford University Press: Oxford
1955; T. Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia, Viking Press:
New York 1960; G. de Caro, ‘L’esperienza torinese dei consigli operai’,
Classe Operaia, 1 (1964), n.p.
2 See e.g. the charges of ‘totalitarian fascism’ that some sectors of big busi-
ness levelled against the New Deal in the United States.
3 This is true of the working-class struggles in the United States. On
the homogeneity, during the years immediately after the First World
War, between forms of behaviour of the American and European work-
ing classes in struggle, see the essays by S. Bologna and G. Rawick in
150 Notes to pages 16–17
S. Bologna, ed., Operai e stato, Feltrinelli: Milan 1972. In particular, it

should be remembered that, between 1914 and 1920, the number of
members of the American Federation of Labor rose from 2 million to 4
million – a level of trade union membership unsurpassed until the 1930s.
For useful data, see also I. Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the
American Worker, 1920–1933, Houghton Mifflin: Boston 1960 and W.
Galenson, ‘Mouvements ouvriers et dépression économique de 1929
à 1939: Étude comparée’, in D. Fauvel-Rouif et al., eds, Mouvements
ouvriers et dépression économique de 1929 à 1939: Étude et rapports préparés
pour le VIIe Colloque international de la Commission internationale d’histoire
des mouvements sociaux et des structures sociales du Comité International des
Sciences Historiques, Van Gorcum: Assen 1966, pp. 124–43.
4 J. M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace [1919], vol. 2 of The
Collected Writings of J. M. Keynes, Macmillan: London 1971, p. 170.
5 Ibid., pp. 148–50. Keynes’ political objective in this phase was to reunify
the two lines of defence of the capitalist system – with the corollary that
this defence could be organized only around the fulcrum that Germany
represented. This perspective remained one of the fundamental elements
in Keynes’ political thinking. In 1922, in A Revision of the Treaty, Keynes
repeated to the point of boredom the idea that ‘Germany’s future is now
towards the East and all its resurgent hopes and ambitions will certainly
turn in that direction’ (J. M. Keynes, A Revision of the Treaty, vol. 3
of The Collected Writings of J. M. Keynes, Cambridge University Press:
Cambridge 2013, p. 128). Keynes’ alleged pro-Germanism, which
attracted much criticism on him even as late as 1946, when Étienne
Mantoux’s Carthaginian Peace, or the Economic Consequences of Mr Keynes
was published (posthumously) by Oxford University Press, thus has
a much deeper class significance than his critics were ever prepared
to see. His is an approach that offers a perfect parallel to the best of
bourgeois political thinking in Weimar Germany. It is not difficult to
find, during these years, identical intuitions in Max Weber, for example
(see W. J. Mommsen, Max Weber und die Deutsche Politik, 1890–1920,
Mohr: Tubingen 1959, pp. 280 ff.). Also, Keynes never concealed his
deep affinity with the Weimar intellectuals and their political formations.
In his essay ‘Dr Melchior: A Defeated Enemy’ (in Essays in Biography,
vol. 10 of The Collected Writings of J. M. Keynes, Cambridge University
Press: Cambridge 2014, pp. 389–429), he gives a picture of that circle
that comes close to apologetics.
6 For a good treatment of the problem, see the editor’s opening remarks
(pp. 1–10) in R. Lekachman, ed., Keynes’ General Theory: Reports of Three
Decades, St Martin’s Press: New York 1964.
Logically enough, Harrod’s hagiographic biography is in agreement
(R. F. Harrod, The Life of John Maynard Keynes, Macmillan: London
1951). According to P. A. Samuelson (‘The General Theory’, in
R. Lekachman, ed., Keynes’ General Theory: Reports of Three Decades, St
Notes to pages 17–22 151
Martin’s Press: New York 1964, p. 330), the road that leads to Keynes’
General Theory is a ‘road to Damascus’.
7 See particularly B. Ohlin, ‘Mr Keynes’ Views on the Transfer Problem’,
Economic Journal, 39 (1925), pp. 400–4; also B. Ohlin, ‘The Reparation
Problem: A Discussion’, Economic Journal, 39 (1925), pp. 179–82.
8 This is a remark by Keynes quoted in E. A. G. Robinson, ‘John Maynard
Keynes, 1883–1946’, in R. Lekachman, ed., Keynes’ General Theory:
Reports of Three Decades, St Martin’s Press: New York 1964, p. 34.
9 Keynes, A Revision of the Treaty, pp. 115–16.
10 D. H. Robertson, review of Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the
Peace, Economic Journal, 30: 117 (1920), pp. 77–84.
11 Times, 4 December 1919, as quoted by Robinson, ‘John Maynard
Keynes’, p. 35.
12 Keynes, A Revision of the Treaty, pp. 69–70, n1, quoting or recalling this
judgement of Clémenceau.
13 W. Churchill, The World Crisis, Macmillan: London 1929, vol. 5, p. 155.
Reviewing this volume, Keynes admits the correctness of Churchill’s
political line at the peace conference, but at the same time makes the
criticism, by no means light, that Churchill failed to grasp the central
importance of the Soviet revolution: he ‘does not manage to see the
magnitude of the events in their necessary correlation, nor to isolate
the essential from the episodic . . . For him, the Bolsheviks, despite the
tribute to Lenin’s greatness, remain nothing more than an imbecile folly’
(ibid.).
14 The biographers have rightly stressed the effect of the continuous stimu-
lus of English political events on Keynes’ development during the 1920s:
see Harrod, Life of John Maynard Keynes, pp. 331–2, and Robinson,
‘John Maynard Keynes’, pp. 41–2.
15 On how the problem appeared to Keynes, see Robinson, ‘John Maynard
Keynes’, and C. Napoleoni, Il pensiero economico del Novecento, Einaudi:
Turin 1963, pp. 79–80.
16 Apart from Pribicevic, Shop Steward Movement, see also M. Gobbini, ‘Lo
sciopero general inglese del ’26’, in Bologna, Operai e stato, pp. 55–68.
17 See the testimony in Harrod, Life of John Maynard Keynes, pp. 375–6.
18 J. M. Keynes, ‘Am I a Liberal?’ [1925], in Essays in Persuasion, vol. 9
Cambridge 2000, p. 305.
19 Ibid.
20 K. Marx, Capital (3 vols), Lawrence & Wishart: London 1963–1970,
vol. 1, p. 356.
21 ‘But if our central controls succeed in establishing an aggregate volume
of output corresponding to full employment as nearly as is practica-
ble, the classical theory comes into its own again from this point on.’
J. M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,
Macmillan: London 1970, p. 378.
22 See J. M. Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, vol. 9 of The Collected Writings of

J. M. Keynes, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 2000, pp. 299–
300.
23 Ibid., p. 429.
24 Ibid., p. xviii.
25 In ‘Newton the Man’ (in J. M. Keynes, Essays in Biography, vol. 10
Cambridge 2014, pp. 363–74), by identifying a magical and underground
moment, and by comparing it with the triumphant Enlightenment aspect
of the thinking of the great Cambridge physician and mathematician,
Keynes seems to wish to establish a model of scientific knowledge in
which the coexistence of the two aspects does not succeed in hiding the
greater authenticity of the former. Indeed, in Newton science exists only
insofar as human being and magician fertilize each other and creative
genius is sustained by irrational interests. This was the fascination of
Newton – that he still managed to view the universe as an enigma . . . It
is interesting to ask how far this image of Newton defines Keynes’ aware-
ness of his own scientific development.
26 Harrod, Life of John Maynard Keynes, pp. 338–9, gives a good summary
of this long polemic.
27 A good account of the political and cultural climate in which Keynes
arrived at these conclusions is to be found in P. M. Sweezy, ‘John
Maynard Keynes’, in R. Lekachman, ed., Keynes’ General Theory: Reports
of Three Decades, St Martin’s Press: New York 1964, pp. 297–8. For
a much broader treatment, see P. M. Sweezy, The Present as History,
Monthly Review Press: New York 1953, pp. 189–96.
28 In this connection, see Robinson, ‘John Maynard Keynes’.
29 In the essays of 1926, ‘Liberalism and Labour’ and ‘The End of Laissez-
Faire’ (both in Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, pp. 272–306 and 307–11),
this viewpoint receives special emphasis, especially in relation to the
political necessities that emerged after the General Strike.
30 In this and in many other aspects of the economic analysis of the 1930s,
I follow the investigations of H. W. Arndt, The Economic Lessons of the
Nineteen-Thirties, Oxford University Press: London 1944.
31 The importance of all this for American society, which was at the heart
of the economic crisis, is highlighted by A. M. Schlesinger Jr., The Age of
Roosevelt, vol. 1: The Crisis of the Old Order, Heinemann: London 1971;
also M. Einaudi, La rivoluzione di Roosevelt, Einaudi: Turin 1959, pp. 51
and 90. Significant data are also recorded by P. G. Filene, Americans and
the Soviet Experiment, 1917–1933, Harvard University Press: Cambridge,
MA 1967.
32 P. A. Samuelson, ‘The General Theory’, in R. Lekachman, ed., Keynes’
General Theory: Reports of Three Decades, St Martin’s Press: New York
1964, p. 329.
33 Keynes, General Theory, pp. 99–104, 218–20, 322–5 (also passim). Note
that Keynes warned of the gravity of the situation in an article for the
Nation, as early as 10 May 1930: ‘The fact is – a fact not yet recognized
by the great public – that we are now in the depths of a very severe inter-
national slump, a slump which will take its place in history amongst the
most acute ever experienced. It will require not merely passive move-
ments of bank-rates to lift us out of a depression of this order, but a very
active and determined policy’ (quoted in Harrod, Life of John Maynard
Keynes, p. 398).
34 P. M. Sweezy, ‘The First Quarter Century’ [1963], in R. Lekachman,
ed., Keynes’ General Theory: Reports of Three Decades, St Martin’s Press:
New York 1964, p. 307.
35 Keynes, General Theory, pp. 46–51 and 135–46.
36 Ibid., pp. 147–64.
37 In this connection, W. B. Reddaway, ‘Keynesian Analysis and the
Managed Economy’, in R. Lekachman, ed., Keynes’ General Theory:
Reports of Three Decades, St Martin’s Press: New York 1964, pp. 108–
200, makes an excellent analysis of the inclusion of the state in Keynes’
picture – excellent in particular because it stresses the internal and struc-
tural nature of state action. As we shall see in what follows, this is where
the Keynesian economic analysis starts to acquire special importance for
the definition of the new model of the state.
38 R. Lekachman, ed., Keynes’ General Theory: Reports of Three Decades, St
Martin’s Press: New York 1964. G. Bordeau, ‘Le plan comme mythe’,
in Georges Lavau, ed., La planification comme processus de décision, Colin:
Paris 1965 has offered perhaps the best analysis of how, within the per-
spective of economic planning, the future gets integrated into judgement.
He also clarifies important implications for the concept of constitutional
law.
39 Reddaway, ‘Keynesian Analysis’ rightly notes that the state’s internaliza-
tion within economic life takes place essentially around investment. At
the limit, its function is directly productive.
40 Keynes, General Theory, p. 164.
41 Marx, Capital, vol. 2, p. 57.
42 Of course, despite all the efforts of Keynes and his school to analyse this
situation, the best description remains Marx’s account of the formation
of ‘social capital’ (e.g. Capital, vol. 2, pp. 103–4).
43 Keynes, General Theory, pp. 52–65, 74–85.
44 On capital as a focus of ‘social imputation’, see once more Marx’s chap-
ter titled ‘The Three Formulas of the Circuit’, in Capital, vol. 2.
45 Keynes, General Theory, p. vi.
46 Sweezy’s two contributions in Lekachman, Keynes’ General Theory lay
due stress on this point.
47 The concept of effective demand is defined and developed in Keynes,
General Theory, pp. 23–32, 55, 89, 97–8, 245–54, 257–71, 280–91.
48 Ibid., pp. 91–2, 110.
49 The mutual interdependence of parts throughout the entire system is

evidenced by orthodox interpreters of Keynes’ thought. For a review,
see R. F. Harrod, ‘Mr Keynes and Traditional Theory’, in Lekachman,
Keynes’ General Theory, p. 135.
50 ‘Keynes’ analytic contribution consists largely in working out the impli-
cations of the assumption of wage rigidity. It is now almost generally
accepted that the Keynes’ true theoretical system . . . depends on the
assumption of wage rigidity. If that assumption is not made, the system
simply breaks down or, to put it differently, loses its distinctive and
differentiating quality, which sets it apart from what is loosely called
the ‘classical’ system (G. Haberler, ‘Sixteen Years Later’ [1962], in
Lekachman, Keynes’ General Theory, p. 291).
51 Keynes, General Theory, pp. 375–6.
52 The following definition will suffice as an example: ‘The aggregate
demand function relates various hypothetical quantities of employ-
ment to the proceeds which their outputs are expected to yield; and the
effective demand is the point on the aggregate demand function which
becomes effective because, taken in conjunction with the conditions of
supply, it corresponds to the level of employment which maximises the
entrepreneur’s expectation of profit’ (Keynes, General Theory, p. 55).
53 Ibid., pp. 375–6.
54 ‘For the importance of money essentially flows from its being a link
between the present and the future’ (ibid., p. 293).
55 ‘One of the aims of the foregoing chapters has been to . . . bring the
theory of prices as a whole back [in]to close contact with the theory of
value. The division of Economic Science between the Theory of Value
and Distribution on the one hand and the Theory of Money on the other
is, I think, a false division’ (ibid., p. 293); ‘I sympathise, therefore, with
the pre-classical doctrine that everything is produced by labour’ (ibid.,
p. 213). Sweezy, on the other hand, comes out against all hypotheses of
this kind. In ‘The First Quarter Century’ he claims: ‘Keynes could never
transcend the limitations of the neoclassical approach which conceives of
economic life in abstraction from its historical setting and hence is inher-
ently incapable of providing a scientific guide to social action’ (p. 299).
56 In this respect, the conclusions of The General Theory are exemplary: they
represent a full-blown eulogy of the system. ‘I see no reason to suppose
that the existing system seriously misemploys the factors of produc-
tion which are in use’ (Keynes, General Theory, p. 379). Here are some
recurrent slogans: ‘capitalism and individualism, purged’; ‘the euthana-
sia of the rentier’; ‘freedom and efficiency, united and conserved’; ‘the
strengthening of labour and freedom’. It would not be at all hard to put
together an aggregate image with a maximum of ideological content
– enough to cause indigestion among those orthodox Keynesian econo-
mists who claim that their method is value-free.
57 The two continuous chapters by D. G. Champerowne, ‘Unemployment,
Basic and Monetary: The Classical Analysis and the Keynesian’ and
‘Expectations and the Links between the Economic Future and the
Present’, in Lekachman, Keynes’ General Theory, pp. 153–202, are fun-
damental for a precise interpretation of Keynes’ analysis, especially
vis-à-vis the problem of the relationship between real and monetary
wage.
58 In his strange sympathy for the prophet and guru Silvio Gesell (and this
is the least one can say about it; see the space devoted to this figure in
the General Theory, pp. 353–8), Keynes went so far as to express not only
support for Gesell’s hypothesis of the elimination of the interest rate on
money but also sympathy for his proposal (or his faith-healing or witch-
craft remedy) of replacing money with ‘stamped’ notes. Leaving aside
such fantasies, Keynes’ statement of his theory of the reduction to zero of
the marginal efficiency of capital finds its most highly charged scientific
and ideological form in the General Theory, pp. 220–1.
59 Quoted and translated here from the Italian: K. Marx, Lettere, Edizioni
Rinascita: Rome 1950, p. 184.
60 Marx, Capital, vol. 3, pp. 154–5, 358–9.
61 In the General Theory Marx is mentioned only a couple of times (pp. 32,
355–6), and in such sweeping terms that they indicate perhaps inad-
equate knowledge on the part of the author. (In any case, in Essays in
Biography (vol. 10 of The Collected Writings of J. M. Keynes, Cambridge
University Press: Cambridge 2014), Keynes admits to not being
well acquainted with Marxism.) Keynes’ judgements on the October
Revolution and the Soviet proletarian state are also very superficial and
vulgar (ibid., pp. 63–7, and Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, pp. 253–71,
312–17). I would say that in such places it is Keynes the stock exchange
speculator rather than Keynes the scientist who is speaking. This angle
is as essential as any other for Keynes the man, whose abilities in stock
market speculation are praised in Harrod’s biography; and from this
angle the following statement is entirely plausible: ‘How can I adopt a
(communist and Marxist) creed which, preferring the mud to the fish,
exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligent-
sia who, whatever their faults, are the quality in life and surely carry
the seeds of all human advancement’ (Keynes, Essays in Persuasion,
p. 258).
62 The tradition of liberal and humanitarian radicalism, whose main
exponent in Cambridge was Thomas Green, seems to have exer-
cised a particularly strong influence on Keynes. For the often utopian
implications of Green’s political thought and the general tone of his
political theories, see the recent J. R. Redman, ed., The Political Theory of
T. H. Green, Appleton Century Crofts: New York 1964; and J. Puckle,
La nature et l’esprit dans la philosophie de T. H. Green, vol. 2: La politique,
la religion: Green et la tradition, Nauwelaerts: Louvain 1965.
63 In Capital, vol. 3, pp. 606–7, Marx demonstrates that precisely this
socialization of capital, expressed in the rejection of money and its

‘replacement by various forms of circulating credit’, is possible.
64 ‘We have seen that the growing accumulation of capital implies its grow-
ing concentration. Thus grows the power of capital, the alienation of
the conditions of social production personified in the capitalist from
the real producers. Capital comes more and more to the fore as a social
power, whose agent is the capitalist. This social power no longer stands
in any possible relation to that which the labour of a single individual can
create. It becomes an alienated, independent social power, which stands
opposed to society as an object, and as an object. that is the capitalist’s
source of power’ (Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 264).
65 J. M. Keynes, ‘The United States and the Keynes Plan’, New Republic,
29 July 1940, as quoted by R. Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, Jonathan
Cape: London 1962, p. 307. [Translator’s note: For the totalitarian
extension of Keynes’ General Theory and his affinities with the policies of
Schacht, the Nazi minister of economics, see the Preface to the German
edition of 1936: ‘The theory of production as a whole, which is the goal
of this book, can much more easily be adapted to the conditions of a
total state . . . Although I have worked out the theory mainly with Anglo-
Saxon conditions in view, where laissez-faire remains in control in large
areas, my theory can equally be applied to situations in which state inter-
vention (guidance) is more extensive.’ (Quoted in F. Hayek, ‘Review
of Harrod’s Life of Keynes’, Journal of Modern History, June 1952, and
taken up by D. Winch, Economics and Policy, Fontana: London 1973,
p. 206.)]
66 See M. Einaudi, La rivoluzione di Roosevelt, p. 83; Harrod, Life of John
Maynard Keynes, pp. 445–50.
67 In their works cited here, Schlesinger, Hofstadter and Einaudi are aware
that the New Deal was not particularly faithful to Keynesianism, but at
the same time they observe the objective convergence of the political
configurations that underlay the two experiences. And this seems to be
the point that should be stressed.
68 The new trade-unionist component that Hofstadter, Age of Reform,
pp. 305–8 considers characteristic of this new phase in American reform-
ism in no way detracts from the radicality of capitalism’s experiment in
the New Deal; rather it accentuates its specific form. The social demo-
cratic tinge that Hofstadter recognizes in the experiment therefore has
nothing to do with the working-class viewpoint.
69 Apart from the passages quoted here from the minor works, consid-
eration should be given to the fact that the General Theory itself is shot
through with considerations on the philosophy of history that seem to
stem from a completely irrationalist and pessimistic stance (see espe-
cially the conclusions). In Keynes, particularly the attack on the specific
‘rationality’ of marginalist economics is a denunciation of rationality in
general – and this is not a paradox. As Robertson observed back in the
1920s, it is a readiness to accept the irrational results of contemporary

‘isms’.
70 On this whole question, see A. Emmanuel, ‘Le taux de profit et les
incompatibilités Marx–Keynes’, Annales ESC, 21 (1966), pp. 1189–211.
71 This interpretation of the American crisis of 1937 is offered by Arndt,
Economic Lessons, pp. 68–70. In general, on the rhythm and inflationary
trend of the economic crises of contemporary capitalism, see M. Dobb,
‘Tendenze economiche del capitalismo europeo’, in the symposium
Tendenze del capitalismo europeo, Editori Riuniti: Rome 1966, pp. 23–36.
Notes to Chapter 2
1 N. Bobbio, ‘Is There a Marxist Theory of the State?’, Telos, 35 (1978),
pp. 5–16; N. Bobbio, ‘Quali alternative alla democrazia rappresenta-
tiva?’, in Mondo operaio, 8–9 (1975). See also N. Bobbio, ‘Democrazia
socialista’, in Omaggio a Nenni: Quaderni di Mondo Operaio, 1973,
pp. 431–6.
2 See especially four articles by U. Cerroni, G. Boffa, V. Gerratana, and
A. Occhetto published respectively in four issues of Rinascita, in 1975
(11 November and 5 December) and 1976 (2 and 9 January). There
were also later rejoinders from P. Ingrao and L. Lombardo-Radice;
and two more articles, by F. Diaz and G. Vacca, which appeared in
Mondoperaio in January 1976. This is all I have been able to consult
before writing the present chapter. [The eight articles mentioned here
are reproduced in the volume Il marxismo e lo stato: Il dibattito aperto alla
sinistra italiana sulle tesi di Norberto Bobbio, Grafica Editrice Romana:
Rome 1976.]
3 See N. Bobbio, ‘Intorno all’analisi funzionale del diritto’, Sociologia del
diritto, 1 (1975), pp. 1–25. For a general discussion of ambiguities in
the analysis of law rendered by Marxists functionalists, see A. Negri,
‘Rileggendo Pashukanis: Note di discussione’, in Critica del diritto, 1
(1975), pp. 90–119.
4 [Negri refers here to Bobbio’s dispute with the Italian Communist Party
over the nature of democracy – more specifically, a dispute with the
philosopher G. della Volpe and the leader P. Togliatti, who used the
pseudonym Roderigo di Castiglia in the party magazine Rinascita. For
details, see R. Bellamy, Modern Italian Social Theory, Polity: Cambridge
1988, ch. 8.]
5 I feel that Bobbio’s famous book on Gramsci, now republished in
the series Opuscoli marxisti (Gramsci e la concezione della società civile,
Feltrinelli: Milan 1976), invites precisely this response. This weakness
in the basic interpretive approach is common to the entire Gramscian
school of Marxism: as proof, it is enough to read some of the recent
works by theorists of the Italian Communist Party, in particular those of
Badaloni and Luporini (to mention the more serious writers).
6 As is demonstrated, for example, by M. Cacciari in his introduction to

G. Lukács, Kommunismus, Marsilio: Padua 1972.
7 The most important texts to be cited in this context are: in Germany,
W. Müller and C. Neusüss, ‘Die Sozialstaatsillusion und der Widerspruch
von Lohnarbeit und Kapital’, Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialwissenschaft,
1.1 (1971), pp. 7–70, https://doi.org/10.32387/prokla.v1iSonderheft
.1117, and H. Reichelt, La struttura logica del concetto di capitale in Marx,
Laterza: Bari 1973 (orig. German edn 1970); in Italy, M. Tronti, Operai e
capitale, Einaudi: Turin 1966; in France, É. Balibar, Cinq études du maté-
rialisme historique, Maspéro: Paris 1974; in Anglo-Saxon countries, the
Kapitalistate group – e.g. D. A. Gold, C. Y. H. Lo, and E. Olin Wright,
‘Recent Developments in Marxist Theories of the Capitalist State’,
Monthly Review 27.5 and 27.6 (1975), https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-027-
05-1975-09_3 and https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-027-06-1975-10_4.
8 See the critical bibliography in two of my recent articles: A. Negri, ‘Su
alcune tendenze della più recente teoria dello Stato: Rassegna critica’,
and ‘Stato e spesa pubblica: Qualche osservazione per avviare il dibattito’,
both published in Critica del diritto, respectively 3 (1974) and 5–6 (1975).
9 See, in this context, the works of authors associated with the German
periodical Leviathan, first of all C. Offe, Strukturprobleme des kapitalis-
tischen Staates, Suhrkampf: Frankfurt am Main 1972.
10 [These are prominent Christian democrat and communist politicians
respectively.]
11 According to Stuart Hughes and Alvin W. Gouldner, these remarks
apply to the social sciences in general and especially to contemporary
economics, whose levels of mystification, obscurantism, and confusion
are difficult to reconcile with this discipline’s persistent claims to be sci-
entific.
12 Apart from C. Offe’s seminal text, other works worth consulting on
this topic are: J. Agnoli, La trasformazione della democrazia, Feltrinelli:
Milan 1969 [1967]; J. Agnoli, Uberlegungen zum bürgerlichen Staat,
Wagenbach: Berlin 1975; E. Altvater, ‘Zu einigen Problemen des
Staatsinterventionismus’, Probleme des Klassenkampfes 2.3 (1972),
pp. 1–54; and J. O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State, St Martin’s
Press: New York 1973.
13 A. Glucksmann, La cuisinière et le mangeur d’hommes, Éditions du Seuil:
Paris 1975.
14 [Title of a famous essay by Benedetto Croce, La Critica 40 (1942),
pp. 289–97; it was echoed in the title of an interview Bobbio gave to
Fausto De Luca from La Repubblica that appeared on 20 February 1976
under the title ‘Why We Cannot but Call Ourselves Marxists’. Bobbio
argued: ‘One could never put in question the fundamental nature of a
doctrine such as Marxism, the historical importance of which cannot be
doubted. But rather one must correct it, separating what is surpassed
from what is still living.’]
15 In the Marxist theory of capital there is a close relationship with the

way this topic is treated in the writings of Bukharin and Lenin on
imperialism, in those of the philosophical school of the twenties on the
theory of surplus value, and in those of Pashukanis and Preobrazhensky
on law and planning. A contemporary contribution to this school of
thought on the evolution of capital can be found in R. Rosdolsky’s
seminal Genesi e struttura del Capitale di Marx, Laterza: Bari 1971. See
also A. Negri, Crisi dello stato piano, Feltrinelli: Milan 1974. The basic
work by Marx to which this debate refers is Grundrisse; in this case
the essential continuity of Marxist thought can be reconstructed in its
entirety.
16 [Sergio Cotta (1920–2007) was a liberal historian of legal and political
thought, author of a book on Montesquieu and other works, and profes-
sor of the philosophy of law at the University La Sapienza, Rome.]
17 For the reconstruction of the various phases in the Marxist definition of
the state, see R. Finzi, ‘Lo stato del capitale, un problema aperto’, Studi
storici 11.3 (1970), pp. 488–508. There is also R. Guastini, Lessico giu-
riudico marxiano, 1842–185, Il Mulino: Bologna 1974 (but only for the
period indicated).
18 This is another reference to Rosdolsky’s Genesi e struttura del Capitale,
pp. 477–502. See also my ‘Partito operaio contro il lavoro’, in A. Negri
et al., Crisi e organizzazione operaia, Feltrinelli: Milan 1975.
19 This is the basic thesis of G. Deleuze, Spinoza et le problème de l’expression,
Éditions de Minuit: Paris 1968. It should be pointed out that in the case
of Spinoza (too frequently quoted recently, and one may well ask why,
after the confusion Althusser created on the subject), the quotations that
are introduced into the debate – almost always taken from his political
writings – rarely have any relevance and rarely give enough weight to the
fact that Spinoza’s political thought is of a speculative (and hence of a
general historical) nature.
20 If it is true that the monkey’s anatomy is to be explained in terms
of human anatomy and not vice versa, these are the basic texts to be
consulted on the mechanism by which praxis is being reversed and on
the current trend in the development of the class structure in Italy; see
K. H. Roth, Die ‘andere’ Arbeiterbewegung, Trikont: Munich 1974 and
the periodical Zerowork 1 of 1976.
21 The principal work on these themes is being carried out by the British
economists of the Conference of Social Economists. For further reading,
one could consult their bulletins (CSEB).
22 K. Marx, Carteggio, Editori Riuniti: Rome 1951, vol. 5.
23 On the political aspirations and the class structure governing the outlook
and specific institutional and political forms adopted by the various
workers’ ‘Soviet’ republics set up immediately after the First World War,
see the essays in S. Bologna, ed., Operai e stato, Feltrinelli: Milan 1972.
24 [Trasformismo (‘transformism’) is a term coined by Depretis to describe
the merging of the ‘historical’ left-wing and right-wing parties of the

post-Risorgimento era after 1876. It then came to denote the means by
which coalitions between different factions, often within the same party,
‘transformed’ erstwhile opponents into allies through the use or abuse of
government patronage.]
25 [Giolitti refined transformist politics by using discreet social reform to
disarm working-class opposition to the state.]
Note to Chapter 3
1 [Quotations and paraphrase from Wendy Brown, ‘Neoliberalism and
the End of Liberal Democracy’, in Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical
Works on Knowledge and Politics, Princeton University Press: Princeton,
NJ 2003, pp. 37–59, here 44–6.]
2 [Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Simple Courage of a Decision: A Leftist Tribute to
Thatcher’, New Statesman, 17 April 2003.]
3 [Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political
Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge
1997, p. 61.]
4 [McConnell. v. FEC, 540 US,93, 2003, at 297 (opinion of J. Kennedy).
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-205.ZO.html.]
5 [Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical” Foundation of
Authority’, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla
Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Grey Carlson, Routledge: London
1992, pp. 3–67, here 38. (Also at https://fswg.files.wordpress.com/20
18/02/derrida-force-of-law.pdf.)]
Notes to Chapter 4
1 [The festival, advertised as ‘Tre giorni di festival della casa editrice
DeriveApprodi’, was held in November 2016 in Rome, at Nuovo
Cinema Palazzo, San Lorenzo. The talk that Esposito refers to here was
entered in the programme thus: ‘ore 18.30, Conferenza di Toni Negri,
“Per farla finita con la sovranità”. Presenta e modera: Dario Gentili.
Leggi l’abstract dell’evento’ (‘6.30 p.m., Talk by Toni Negri, “To have
done with sovereignty”. Presenter and moderator: Dario Gentili. See the
abstract for the event’). That talk provided no doubt the original version
of chapter 3 in the present volume: the article published two years later
in EuroNomade.]
2 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press:
Cambridge, MA 2001.
3 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude, Penguin Books: London
2004.
4 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, Harvard University
Press: Cambridge, MA 2009.
5 Carlo Formenti, La variante populista: lotta di classe nel neoliberalismo,

DeriveApprodi: Rome 2016.
6 See especially Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, Verso: London 2018.
7 Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, La nuova ragione del mondo: critica
della razionalità neoliberista, DeriveApprodi: Rome 2013.
8 Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State,
trans. Maurizia Boscagli, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis
2009 [1992].
Notes to Chapter 5
1 On all this, however, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude,
Penguin Books: London 2004.
2 At this point allow me the liberty of advertising my own Marx and
Foucault, Polity: Cambridge 2017.
3 [See Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, La nuova ragione del mondo:
Critica della razionalità neoliberista, DeriveApprodi: Rome 2013.]
Notes to Chapter 6
1 See A. Negri, ‘Problems of the Historiography of the Modern State:
France, 1610–1650’, in A. Negri, Spinoza: Then and Now, Polity:
Cambridge 2020, pp. 154–93.
2 See Chapter 7 in this volume, ‘On the Concept of Nation State’.
3 A. Negri, ‘Crisis of the Planner-State: Communism and Revolutionary
Organization’ [1971], in A. Negri, Books for Burning: Between Civil War
and Democracy in 1970s Italy, ed. Timothy S. Murphy, Verso: London
2005, pp. 1–50.
4 M. Tronti, ‘Lenin in England’, in M. Tronti, Working Class Autonomy
and the Crisis: Italian Marxist Texts of the Theory and Practice of a Class
Movement, 1964–79, trans. Ed Emery, Red Notes and CSE Books:
London 1979.
5 P. Schiera, ‘Tra costituzione e storia costituzionale: La crisi dello stato’,
in P. Schiera, Immagini del politico: Catastrofe e nascita dell’identità, ed.
F. Jannetti, Savelli: Roma 1981, pp. 20–48; now in P. Schiera, Lo stato
moderno: Origini e degenerazioni, Clueb: Bologna 2004, pp. 131–58. The
controversy followed the publication of the Enciclopedia Feltrinelli Fischer,
whose Introduction argued that it was useless to include the word ‘state’
in the index since this was nothing more than the arithmetic apex of the
policies that were exercised in the state (Enciclopedia Feltrinelli Fischer,
vol. 27: Scienze politiche 1: Stato e politica, ed. A. Negri. Milan: Feltrinelli,
1970; see pp. 3–4 in the present volume).
6 S. Bologna, G. P. Rawick, M. Gobbini, A. Negri, L. Ferrari Bravo, and
F. Gambino, Operai e stato: Lotte operaie e riforma dello stato capitalistico
tra rivoluzione d’Ottobre e New Deal, Feltrinelli: Milan 1972.
7 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and

Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press: London 1987.
8 M. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France,
1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell, Picador: London 2008.
9 Ibid.
10 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins
of Our Age, Beacon Press: Boston, MA 1944.
11 See A. Negri, ‘Sovranità oggi: Vecchie frammentazioni, nuove
eccedenze’, in A. Negri, Dentro/contro il diritto sovrano: Dallo Stato dei
partiti ai movimenti della governance, ed. G. Allegri, Ombre Corte: Verona
2009, pp. 199–214; M. Hardt and A. Negri, Assembly, Oxford University
Press: Oxford 2017.
12 A. Negri and M. Hardt, Questo non è un manifesto, Feltrinelli: Rome
2012.
Notes to Chapter 7
1 [Ernst H. Kantorowicz, ‘Pro patria mori in Medieval Political Thought’,
American Historical Review 56: 3 (1951), pp. 472–92.]
2 [Jeanne d’Arc’s battle cry, as quoted from Kantorowicz in Fethi
Benslama, ‘The Agony of Justice’, in Israeli–Palestinian Conflict in the
Francophone World, ed. N. Debrauwere-Miller, Routledge: New York
2009, pp. 123–140, here p. 126.]
Notes to Chapter 8
1 [See Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism,
Fascism, Populism, Verso: London 2005, p. 95.]
2 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:
Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, Verso: London 1985.
3 Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Confini e frontiere, Il Mulino:
Bologna 2014.
4 [Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 96.]
5 [Ibid.]
6 [Laclau, Politics and Ideology, p. 73.]
7 [Peter D. Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and
Marxism, Haymarket: Chicago, IL 2010.]
8 [Bruno Cava, ‘O Podemos, entre multidão e hegemonia: Negri ou
Laclau?’, https://revistas.ufrj.br/index.php/lc/article/view/50095.]
Notes to Chapter 10
1 [V. I. Lenin, ‘Letters from Afar: First Letter’ [1917], https://www.marxi
sts.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/lfafar/first.htm#v23pp64h-297.]
2 [From the preamble to chapter 1 of K. Marx and F. Engels, The
Communist Manifesto [1848], https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/

works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf.]
3 [V. I. Lenin, State and Revolution, vol. 2 in Selected Works of Lenin,
International Publishers: New York 1967, p. 340.]
4 [Ibid.]
5 [Ibid.]
Notes to Chapter 12
1 Quotations here are from I. Viparelli, ‘L’ouvrier social: Entre “résidu
dialectique” et “constitution ontologique”’, Cahiers du GRM 9 (2016).
https://journals.openedition.org/grm/773. Modonesi proceeds much
more cautiously; see M. Modonesi, Subalternità, antagonismo, autono-
mia: Marxismi e soggettivazione politica, Editori Riuniti: Rome, 2015 and
M. Modonesi, The Antagonistic Principle: Marxism and Political Action,
Brill: Leiden 2018.
2 To take up a point made by M. Assennato in EuroNomade, 30 July 2013
(http://www.euronomade.info/?p=37) about a work by someone who is
dangerously attracted by that metaphysical illusion: P. V. Aureli, The
Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture within and against Capitalism,
Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture and
Princeton Architectural Press: New York 2012: ‘the autonomy of the
political is not the inevitable outcome of the first workerism but is rather
a corruption and a reversal of it’.
3 A. Negri, ‘Il comune come modo di produzione’, EuroNomade, 10 June
2016. http://www.euronomade.info/?p=7331.
4 A. Negri, Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s
Italy, ed. Timothy S. Murphy, Verso: London 2005.
5 M. Hardt and A. Negri, Questo non è un manifesto, Feltrinelli: Milan
2012.
6 See Chapter 8 in this volume, ‘Hegemony: Gramsci, Togliatti, Laclau’,
and more generally M. Hardt and A. Negri, Assembly, Oxford University
Press: Oxford 2017.

Antonio Negri The End of Sovereignty

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The End of Sovereignty

The End of Sovereignty

This English edition © Polity Press, 2022.

ISBN-­13 (hardback): 978-­1-5095-­4429-­5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930137

Typeset in 10.5 on 12pt Plantin

For further information on Polity, visit our website:

Introduction: On the State Form 1

Part I Once Upon a Time . . .

Part II Having Done with Sovereignty

Part III The Extinction of the State

be what it was. It became indistinguishable from the right, and criti-

These paragraphs were written between 1968 and 1970, during a

recovery and for the consolidation of capitalist development. That

triumph of Keynesianism. This text has in some way become a staple

1929 as a fundamental moment for a periodization of

* Originally published in Antonio Negri, Revolution Retrieved: Writings on Marx,

must go beyond banal descriptions of the process of industrialization;

in the phase of post-war reconversion certainly existed in the short

earlier attempts to avoid the problem, to ignore the effective reality of

of the capitalist system – socialization of the mode of production and

Keynes and the period 1917–1929:

How then can we trace the development of capitalist awareness

Russia; domestically, as a problem of repressing the powerful trade

If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, venge-

This was Keynes’ position in 1919. By tracing his thought from

And yet Keynes’ basic political intuition already contained a

Robertson goes on to point out that this implicitly goes against

Strong in economic argument, Mr Keynes . . . challenges without any

And here is Churchill:

With an indisputable common sense Keynes illustrated the monstrous-

qualified to speak of the economic aspects, one cannot doubt; but on

methodological conditions for a solution; he identified the problem

To create a new political equilibrium thus meant taking this new

One should not underestimate the depth and importance of this

which praises division of labour in the workshop, life-long annexation

The Keynesian critique of Say’s law was thus a radical destruction

constructed on the notion that these presuppositions were somehow

of the notions of effective demand and growing risk, or of the new

Keynes: The shift from politics to science (1929:

It would seem natural to suppose that the events of 1917 had no

In fact the crisis revealed the dialectical functioning of the indi-

accept that the massification of supply should be matched by an

interventionism: the state appears as the sole collective representative

in 1936 Keynes changes his mind and postulates a concept of a

support and incentive, of stabilization and innovation; it has become

as it turns into an attempt at conscious control of the movements of

Capitalist reconstruction and the social state

thus strengthened, in that it becomes more fully a product of the

thinking. Keynes himself noted something to this effect: ‘It seems

And, once again, this fundamental truth arises in Keynes only in

around a fixed point. The only option in such a situation is to place

‘Is there such a thing nowadays as a Marxist doctrine of the state?’,

* This chapter originally appeared in Italian in 1976, in the left-­wing liter-

(1) the definition of a method for the materialistic and dialectic

* ‘May these words be forgiven!’ (Lat.).

(3) the identification of the historical mission of the revolutionary

But if we do not want to pile truism on truism, we should at least

as a last resort of, capitalism as an economic system and refuses to

qualitative) imposed by capitalist development, and the self-evidence

Bobbio dedicates a large part of his article to an analysis of the

us cast the nets of democracy over this archipelago, if we have the

materialism. In this case Cerroni would deserve a chair of philosophy

ISBN-13 (hardback): 978-1-5095-4429-5

Introduction: On the State Form 1

* This chapter originally appeared in Italian in 1976, in the left-wing liter-

For me, the discourse of Ernesto Laclau represents a neo-Kantian