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Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis
Series Editor: Alessandro Sarti
Roberto Ciccarelli
Labour
Power
Virtual and Actual in Digital Production
Translated by Emma Catherine Gainsforth
Series Editor
Alessandro Sarti, CAMS Center for Mathematics, CNRS-EHESS, Paris, France
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/11247
Roberto Ciccarelli
Labour Power
Virtual and Actual in Digital Production
Translated by Emma Catherine Gainsforth

Roberto Ciccarelli
Department of Education
Roma Tre University
Rome, Italy
Il Manifesto
Rome, Italy
ISSN 2195-1934 ISSN 2195-1942 (electronic)

ISBN 978-3-030-70861-0 ISBN 978-3-030-70862-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70862-7
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

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Labor is not the source of all wealth.
(Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha
Programme)
Fin du travail, vie magique
Rennes, graffito, 28 April 2016
Ain’t got no home, ain’t got no shoes
Ain’t got no money, ain’t got no class
Ain’t got no skirts, ain’t got no sweater
Ain’t got no perfume, ain’t got no beer
Ain’t got no man
Ain’t got no mother, ain’t got no culture
Ain’t got no friends, ain’t got no schooling
Ain’t got no love, ain’t got no name
Ain’t got no ticket, ain’t got no token
Ain’t got no God
Well what have I got?
I’ve got my life
And nobody’s gonna take it away
I’ve got my life.
(Nina Simone)
Contents
1 About Labour-Power. A Philosophical Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1.1 The Problem with “Power” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Spinoza and Marx and the Theory of Labour-Power . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2 The Theory of Labour-Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.1 The Dark Side of the Digital Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.2 Brand New Future or Golden Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.3 Human, Too Human: Capital . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.4 Genealogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.5 The Fifth Estate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.6 Intersection and Multipositionality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2.7 The Faculty of Faculties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.8 Actual and Virtual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
3 What Is Labour-Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
3.1 Labour-Power Does Not Grow on Trees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
3.2 Arbeitskraft/Labour-Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
3.3 Arbeitsvermögen/Capacity to Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
3.4 Living Personality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
3.5 Use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
3.6 Cooperation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
3.7 Reproduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
3.8 Against Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
3.9 Abstract Labour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
3.10 Living Labour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
3.11 The Hypothesis of Communism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
vii
viii Contents
4 (Dis)obedient . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
4.1 Untameable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
4.2 Gladiators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
4.3 Self-employment Has No Friends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
4.4 Freelance Workers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
4.5 Flâneur . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
5 The Dwarf of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
5.1 Amazon Mechanical Turk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
5.2 Californian Ideology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
5.3 The Myth of Automation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
5.4 Unmanned Cars and Other Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
5.5 Human Services in the Gig Economy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
5.6 Digital Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
5.7 The Role of Platforms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
5.8 Total Mobilisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
5.9 Work Has Not Ended, It Has Increased . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
5.10 Beyond Surveillance Capitalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
5.11 The Struggles for Rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
5.12 Right to Existence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
6 The Entrepreneurial Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
6.1 Becoming Startup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
6.2 Lifelong Managers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
6.3 Valuto Ergo Sum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
6.4 As You Wish, Master . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
6.5 Psychological Contract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
6.6 Human Capital . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
6.7 Liberation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
Conclusions: What Can Labour-Power Do? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
Chapter 1
About Labour-Power. A Philosophical
Approach
The theory of labour-power intertwines two different concepts: potency and power.
In the Western political and metaphysical tradition potency, with respect to act, has
been considered as the place of possibility, faculty and capacity, as well as that
which precedes the accomplished realisation. Power has been considered as the
realisation of potency and consists in reducing it to the mechanical chain of cause-
effect relations established by those who exercise power in the world. This book
will expose the groundbreaking Marxian insight on labour-power which considers
the contradictory relationship between potency and power on the same plane of
immanence. The potency of labour-power is immanent to the body and the mind of
everyone living and working in a capitalist society. Power is the actual realisation
of a virtual, collective and cooperative faculty which cannot be reduced only to its
transformation into an object, a good or a commodity. Labour-power is the common
potency exceeding its reduction to the capacity to do or create something, the will to
impose or to encourage action and the authority requiring obedience. Labour-power
as individual and collective potency is the power of those who sell their capacity to
work in order to survive in a capitalist society and the faculty to govern themselves
in a liberated society.
1.1 The Problem with “Power”
The way I will use the concept of labour-power in this book should be clarified
immediately. Labour-power is the English translation of Arbeitskraft, the concept
used by Karl Marx to refer to working women and men. However, this translation
is too reductive. Kraft can be translated with power, but it means at least six other
things: strength, in a physical sense; effort, in a biological sense; potency, in a meta-
physical sense; energy, both in a physical sense and as it is used in Aristotelian
metaphysics; power, in the political sense of the term; faculty, in the Kantian sense.
The English power does not convey the rich German polysemy of Kraft. However,
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 1

R. Ciccarelli, Labour Power, Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70862-7_1
2 1 About Labour-Power. A Philosophical Approach
it also is polysemic. It is force in a physical and political sense: it is the strength and
effort required to do something (work) or the political force necessary to impose or
legitimate power. Also, power contains the invisible concept of potency.
The difference between power and potency can be appreciated in the original
Latin which distinguishes potestas (power) from potentia (potency). In French these
terms are translated with pouvoir and puissance. In Italian, potere e potenza. The
difference is: potestas needs a subject to dominate or to be dominated to express itself;
potentia is the force to create all uses of the world and the capacity to strive and exist
in life. By labour-power (Arbeitskraft) I intend the multiple relation between the
power to conduct ourselves in an autonomous and collective way within and against
capitalist society and the potency (potentia, puissance, potenza) to create values,
relations, practices and ideas which feed the energy of labour-power and also exceed
the capitalist power to alienate the labour-power. Potentia and potestas are entrenched
in the same concept of labour-power within which I will differentiate labour-power
as a faculty or potency and labour-power as a capacity to work. As we will see in
the second chapter, those concepts correspond to the Marxian distinction between
labour-power as Arbeitskraft and labour-power as Arbeitsvermögen, “capacity to
work”, “capacity for labour” or “labour-capacity” in English.
The same polysemy of Kraft/Power characterises the concept of Arbeit/Labour
that can be translated, depending on its use and contexts, with work, job or gig.
In this case the German and English language allow to distinguish the movement
within the activity carried out by labour-power, while the Italian language does not
distinguish what is active and what is passive in the concept of work. In German
and English werk/work—the result of work—and arbeit/labour—the operation or
process it produces, the ability to carry out work—are distinct concepts. In Italian
they are reduced to a single word: lavoro (work). The difference between labour-
power and the capacity to work cannot be grasped in forza lavoro (labour-power).
Nor does this Italian expression have the complexity of the German Marxian concept
that distinguishes Arbeitskraft from Arbeitsvermöngen. As in English, the result is the
loss of the difference between the faculty or the potency to create use values and the
capacity for labour. This means that labour-power is conceived only as an alienated
capacity for work, that is to say commodified work. This problem actually occurs in
all languages and it is created by the original capitalistic operation, which defines
commodity as a subject and simultaneously reduces the subject to a commodity.
If we consider this process starting from work in itself we can say that work is
considered only as a result and not also as the process that produces a commodity.
This is how work loses the characteristics of a built object and is never considered
as a contingent manifestation of a much larger and always ongoing labour-power. Its
value is attributed by the utility that the recipients of work recognise in a commodity,
not by the worker who has materially conceived and realised it. The value of labour-
power is incorporated into the commodity and is used for purposes that are not those
determined by the worker. In this perspective, the owner who buys the work counts,
not the one who has created it.
The great mutability of all these concepts depends on the social and productive
relationship between capital and labour-power. This is the heart of what Marx called
1.1 The Problem with “Power” 3
capitalist alienation of labour. These are the main principles that have led me to
develop the theory of labour-power exposed in this book, the first of a trilogy.1 From
now on I will use the concept of labour-power and I will indicate, case by case, its
specific meaning.
1.2 Spinoza and Marx and the Theory of Labour-Power
I will extend the concept of power (potency) used by Marx in the Aristotelian sense to
Spinoza’s conception. The key to this reading lies in a reconsideration of materialism,
one that views Spinoza as precursor and Marx as successor.2 It should also be said
that the relationship between the German philosopher and the Dutch philosopher
is not a strong one, apart from some important early notes by Marx on Spinoza’s
Theological-Political Treatise.3 Rather than searching for continuity, or attempting an
academic comparison between different lines of thought, it is a matter of developing
a Spinozist critique of the Marxian concept of labour-power and a Marxian critique
of the Spinozist theory of power in a materialistic perspective on immanence in
which both thinkers occupy a prominent position.4 According to this definition it is
possible to go beyond the Aristotelian definition of motion understood as actuality
of a being in potency towards the articulation of becoming as being animated by
living forces. Already Leibniz went from a model where form disciplines matter
in potency to a conception according to which forms emerge from matter and are
shaped in ever-changing ways (modes).5 If capitalism hollows out power, forcing
it to be the actuality of commodities, a theory of labour-power views this model as
being invaded by the living and by the ways in which it can express itself in the single
act.
The potency of labour-power is not only possible, it is individual, collective and
cooperative, it expresses its essence at all times. In other words, it is historical. Its
power is neither an action of an individual moral consciousness nor the effect of an
abstract will separated from social and productive relationships. It is embodied into
the conatus which is the tendency “to endeavour to persist in its own being.”6 Conatus
is the active and living force of each thing, not the manifestation of will, the expression
of consciousness or a productive power extraneous to the life of the subject. Labour-
power is not potential being, rather, it is an eternally actual potency where the
principle is not separated from its effects and the substance from its modes. In this
process there is no Subject or Being, while individuals contribute to the creation of
capital (God or substance), of which they are also the product (creature or mode), with
1 See Ciccarelli [1, 2].

2 See Matheron [3, 353–382].
3 See Marx [4]. On Spinoza in the history of the labour movement see Tosel [5, 515–525].
4 See Ciccarelli [6].
5 See Deleuze [7].
6 Spinoza [8, 283].
their activity. This thesis is incomprehensible for the Cartesian-Kantian philosophical

rationality, although it can be traced to Aristotle, who thought of nature in terms of
immanence.7 However, the power of being to its fullest degree, the actuality of
power, is not to be found in the movement of nature but in God. With respect to this
version of immanence, it is a question of reversing the heights of transcendence and
reuniting the virtualities of an ontological power with the potential of the labour-
power: its right to existence. Power is actual when it is expressed in both the ontic
and the ontological. This is possible starting from the concept of immanent cause.
Substance is self-generating, as are its modes. Power is expressed both in singular
things, through the attributes that constitute the essence of the substance, and in the
substance that is self-produced in an open and unlimited way.8
To maintain, however, that substance, like capital, is the cause of itself means that
every affirmation of power reproduces the structure of capital, the Total Individual
that Spinoza speaks of. It is the same difficulty faced by Marx elsewhere, when
he demonstrates that labour-power is not capital, but that labour-power cannot but
generate capital in that it is destined to become a commodity. It is possible to react
to this difficulty by suggesting that the structure of this total order, both substance
and capital, is given by connections that change according to the relations they
determine. Each connection is a modality of the same power and is composed of
infinite multiplicities that are assembled together in becoming. At the centre of which
is not substance, but an anonymous force in which what counts is not only form, or
its functions, but the capacity to be affected or to affect another force. The system is
defined by the modes it acquires, and these modes are the expression of the conatus.
Capital searches constantly for this power, which it attempts to redirect towards
the system, but this does not mean it has always been in possession of all its manifes-
tations. For the same reason workers remain in possession of the faculty of labour-
power, regardless of its objectification in a commodity. This aspect emerges when
one considers the meaning of power as conatus. The principle of self-preservation
(conatus) is a fundamental principle of the law of nature generally attributed to the
stoic idea of hormē (óρμº), primary inclination, impulse or appetite. Present in
Roman and Christian philosophical anthropology, conatus and appetite are consid-
ered as being synonymous starting from Cicero.9 Spinoza uses conatus as a synonym
of force (vis)10 and establishes immanence between the physical and ontological
expression of potentia: when the power to act is expressed, then the power of a life
is expressed. His thesis is: life is the power to exist.11 This power is to be understood
in terms of physical force and energy, it is power that makes things persist in their
own being12 and power through which God perseveres in his being. When referred
to the mind, conatus is called will (voluntas); when referred to both body and mind it
7 See Chatelet [9, 45 ff].

8 See Bove [10], Del Lucchese [11], Negri [12].
9 See Wolfson [13].
10 B. Spinoza, The Ethics, II, 45, scholium, 270–271.
11 B. Spinoza, The Ethics, I, 11, dem., 222.
12 B. Spinoza, The Ethics, III, 6, 462.
1.2 Spinoza and Marx and the Theory of Labour-Power 5
is called appetite (appetitus). Conatus is called desire (cupiditas) when individuals

are conscious of their appetites and exercise them consciously.13
There are three distinct modes of power connected to a different capacity for
action and linked to the awareness of the use of the power to act. The use of power
is common to all individuals, who have the choice of which means to use to favour
self-preservation and the creation of a greater capacity for action than the initial
one. Conatus is not an act of free will, the will of an individual or of God, of a
physical or natural necessity. Divine power is identical to the existence of all things,
and vice versa. Both affirm the actual essence (essentia actualis)14 or the given
essence of something that is opposed to the ideal essence.15 All affections of body
and mind, as well as their activities, are considered on the same immanent plane
as other living forms, from the vegetable to the animal world. Thus the separation
between human and animal, as well as the separation between dianoetic (discursive
or pertaining to knowledge) and ethical (practical) virtues, are understood in a new
doctrine of parallelism based on the power of action in which the perseverance of
self-preservation of life is expressed.
The intersection between the Marxian definition of labour-power and Spinoza’s
definition of conatus allows us to explain the interpenetration of the physical principle
of energeia, the metaphysical principle of dynamis and the anthropological principle
of conatus in the definition of labour-power. Conatus is the affirmation of power
in finite life, while potentia is the affirmation of conatus in its modes of historical,
technical and ethical individuation. In contrast to capital, where the process is without
subject because it is an actually existing abstraction, labour-power is an actually
existing potency that affirms a right of every mode of its being: “(every man) always
endeavours as far as in him lies to preserve his own being (…) since every man has
right to the extent that he has power.”16 The actually existing abstraction and the
actually existing power should not be understood in a distinct way, but on the basis
of the immanence of labour-power, where subjectivity and its historical, productive
or political position are shaped. The constitutive duplicity of labour-power must be
understood in this dialectic between different and conflicting principles. This is all
the more true in the case of labour-power which has no other property than that of
selling its capacity for labour. Being without property does not mean being without
quality or power.
In capitalism a singular reversal takes place because what is not-yet is more
important than what is-already, and possibilities act both in actions and in an imminent
being-otherwise. Establishing a right over this power in a manner that is in line with
Spinoza’s conception means identifying the priority of “corporeity”—of the “living
personality” of labour-power—in a process that alienates these qualities from the
subject who possesses them. In the movement that always begins with the act of
13 B. Spinoza, The Ethics, III, 48, dem., 302.

14 B. Spinoza, The Ethics. I, 8, 219.
15 Spinoza [14].
16 B. Spinoza, Political Treatise, II, par. 8.
selling labour-power, what has priority is a labour-power imbued with virtualities

that move labour and capital.
The majority of ways in which labour-power is identified are absorbed by the
abstraction of capital. In this case—it is the norm of contemporary life—the Spinozist
definition of labour-power makes it possible to distinguish the abstraction lacking the
singularity of the labour-power from its differentiation with regard to the commodi-
fied totality of existence. Abstraction exists because of differentiation, not the other
way round. Both are the result of an immanent cause where the subsumption of
labour-power corresponds to the affirmation of a power that is individuated in a
different way. Labour-power, as faculty of a living personality, is one of the modes
of such power. Capital tends to conceal it, and to replace it with an abstraction, so
as to make it impossible to identify labour-power and power. Such an abstraction
cannot exist without the actually existing power that generates the system and its
modes.
Spinozism allows a theory of labour-power to recover the richness of an
autonomous and intelligent form of life in an experience marked by alienation,
violence and expropriation. The continuous search for the expression of the power to
act in these conditions makes it possible to clarify a decisive aspect of the Marxian
discourse: labour-power does not only pursue the reproduction of life—“its self-
preservation” which coincides with its being commodified. It is the expression of a
potency that depends on the exercise of a certain use of labour-power as a faculty
of the faculties available to life, independently of the idealistic morality of transcen-
dence, the reproduction of hierarchies and the glorification of the sacrificial morality
of labour.
References
1. Ciccarelli, R.: Capitale disumano. La vita in alternanza scuola-lavoro. Manifestolibri, Rome

(2018)
2. Ciccarelli, R.: La vita liberata. Inchiesta sulla catastrofe e la liberazione, forthcoming
3. Matheron, A.: Appendix 1: interview with Laurent Bove and Pierre-François Moreau. In:
Lucchese, F., Maruzzella, D., Morejón, G. (eds.) Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza.
Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh (2020)
4. Marx, K.: Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), IV Vierte Abteilung: Exzerpte Notizen
Marginalien Band 1. Dietz Verlag, Berlin (1976)
5. Tosel, A.: Des usages “marxistes” de Spinoza. Leçons de méthode. In: Bloch, O. (ed.) Spinoza
au XXe siècle. Puf, Paris (1993)
6. Ciccarelli, R.: Immanenza. Filosofia, diritto e politica della vita dal XIX al XX secolo. Il
Mulino, Bologna (2009)
7. Deleuze, G.: The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
(1993)
8. Spinoza, B.: Ethics, III, 7. In: Complete Works. Hackett Publishing Company (2002)
9. Chatelet, G.: Les Enjeux du mobile. Mathématiques, physique, philosophie. Seuil, Paris (1993)
10. Bove, L.: La stratégie du conatus: affirmation et résistance chez Spinoza. Vrin, Paris (1996)
11. Del Lucchese, F.: Conflict, Power and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza: Tumult and
Indignation. Continuum, London and New York (2009)
References 7
12. Negri, A.: Spinoza et nous. Galilée, Paris (2012)

13. Wolfson, H.A.: The Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Processes of His Reasoning.
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA (1934)
14. Spinoza, B.: Political treatise, II, par. 2. In: Complete Works. Hackett Publishing Company
(2002)
Chapter 2
The Theory of Labour-Power
Labour-power is the faculty that in-futures itself starting from the here and now
in every material and intellectual act, in the production and reproduction of goods,
relations and uses. The relationship between being like this (alienated) and otherwise
(liberated) of labour-power is to be understood in terms of a dialectic between actual
and virtual.
2.1 The Dark Side of the Digital Revolution
Editors of TV programs sometimes ask me to provide them with a human case.

Some author has read about today’s “slaves” in the paper. The word is an idiomatic
expression used as a synonym of extreme poverty, lack of rights, poor work. And so a
reporter sets out in search of a “story”. In some cases he or she comes to me, because,
as a journalist, I deal with issues relating to labour. I refuse to name names, I say
I don’t know any slaves, I have no “human case”. Which is also how the people in
question answer. To be defined as slaves, subjects without freedom, things without a
will, is an offense. Especially when slavery is used as a metaphor that turns personal
vulnerability into social stigma. The ancients conceived of slaves as talking animals.
Contemporaries as personal human cases to be interviewed.
This representation of labour-power can be found in talk shows, newspapers and
in the publishing industry alike. Research on the titles of books that have come out in
recent years shows how recurrent the term “slaves” is. In second place we find the term
“temporary”, or “precarious”, always used with a victimising connotation. Avoiding
this is healthy. Once a journalist who was concerned about the increasing number
of self-employed and freelance workers being refused work explained her way of
reasoning: you have to strike below the belt and shock the viewers. It is best if the
human case resembles an unemployed son, father or mother. The problem will sound
familiar to the television audience. This approach, however, is questionable. It might
have shocked audiences years ago. Today we have an understanding of the situation,
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 9

R. Ciccarelli, Labour Power, Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70862-7_2
10 2 The Theory of the Labour-Power
we know who those responsible are. Repeating the same pattern means separating the
suffering caused by alienated work and reducing it to a biographical or generational
fact. Victimisation strengthens the perception of a widespread subalternity, it does
not increase the knowledge of the causes that produce it, nor does it reverse the
perspective.
The widespread discourse on the digital revolution causing a decline in human
work contributes to this outcome. This revolution was supposed to guarantee greater
autonomy, but it ended up extending the already existing dominion over bodies to
the brain, the psyche and affects. Despite this, there is no end of labour in sight, and
the replacement of humans with machines will be a distant prospect also in 2025 or
2050, when this transition is supposed to take place. Already today automation is
forcing the labour-power to work more with increasingly lower wages. The scarcity
of jobs and the incessant transformation of professions are not, however, caused by
robots, but by a series of social, economic and productive factors that bring about a
profound transformation of labour-power and its productivity, something that is still
very much overlooked. Workers are twice as powerless: not only have the “old” jobs
left them unemployed in a land where the dawn of a new beginning never occurs,
they will also be unable to determine the work of the future, when the prophecy
of the augurs of the techno-apocalypse will be fulfilled. The tale of the ongoing
digital revolution has an ancient origin: it is the illusion of unmanned work, a direct
emanation of Capital. Like the German ideology, which Marx and Engels wrote
about in 1846, also the Californian ideology of the Silicon Valley of the twenty-first
century removes the material conditions of life and the faculties of living individuals
in contact with machines and the digitalisation of the world. Today labour-force is
the dark side of the digital revolution.
This book proposes an alternative to futurology and to the compassionate narrative
of labour. It elaborates a philosophy that acknowledges a nameless centrality—that
of labour-power—and restores the conditions for a critique grounded in the history of
flesh and blood individuals engaged in a productive activity which involves wake and
sleep. This philosophy is neither apocalyptic nor Luddite, it affirms a philosophical
materialism and investigates the possibility of a Spinozist ethic. The question it poses
is not what is labour? Rather, it asks the more concrete and powerful question: what
can labour-power do today?
2.2 Brand New Future or Golden Age
Never before has the concept of labour been used in such a totalising way. Never
has the value of labour-power been so negligible. A shared meaning of labour has
been lost, the name of what we are has become obscure: labour-power. This situation
is reminiscent of the Baron of Münchhausen who manages to pull himself out of
a swamp by his own hair. In the same way it seems that labour produces itself,
commodities mysteriously appear in our homes, money is the embodiment of the
mathematical will of an algorithm. Workers, who despite this continue to work, are
2.2 Brand New Future or Golden Age 11
told that their activity has no meaning beyond mere execution. It is up to the masters
to find meaning, servants are denied the very sense of work that comes from working.
It is employers who decide what their labour-power is, and what it is not. Employers
exercise the power to give or deny a name, in addition to establishing tasks and salary.
This is the score being played everywhere: labour is deprived of its force, it has no
flesh and blood subjects. The only subject is the abstraction of work. This reversal
is subtle, like all metaphysics, and has imposed a specific order of discourse: today
we talk about labour without talking about the conditions that make it possible, i.e.
labour-power.
Labour-power is understood as a materially operational ghost.1 It has been
suggested to use the image of the “labour black box” to describe this condition.2 The
association is suggestive; however, it is only a metaphor. A black box records data or
conversations between pilots, it withstands shocks, fire and high pressure. Its “work”
allows to reconstruct the causes of a catastrophe and thanks to its objective memory
to retrospectively re-establish responsibilities. This is what labour will do once it has
disappeared: it will retain a memory of what has been. Labour-power, instead, is the
faculty that feeds circuits and automatisms in real time, it is the capacity that allows to
produce a commodity and its value. The association between a black box and labour-
power, however, remains valid at a time when the material conditions of production
and reproduction of this labour-power are removed, when it is comforting to imagine
that cars will one day, perhaps, drive themselves without the decisive contribution of
a human being. It seems we must inevitably admit that labour-power is the outcome
of the interaction between machines, while on the contrary it is the condition that
allows such interaction to take place.
Labour-power has evidently not disappeared in the automated and silent flows
governed by algorithms. Women and men continue to work, hours are increasingly
longer and conditions are increasingly worse. Also in the face of a structural excess
in the demand for employment, labour-power is never idle. Whether it is included or
discarded, banned, underestimated or persecuted, it is an always active faculty. This
forces the multitudes that live in the gray zone between work and non-work to move,
to cross borders and to become hostage to a cognitive trap: despite the aspiration
to paid and secure employment, this labour-power is perceived as a working mass,
as mere manpower to be employed, not as a social and collective individual. The
resurgence of unthinkable conditions, at least in capitalist countries, of material
deprivation and marginality, reinforces this perception and, in addition, subjects the
reproduction of labour-power to binding trajectories that severely impact its material
and ethical existence.
The disciplining, the transfiguration and removal of labour-power—its invisibil-
isation—are the result of a cultural hegemony so powerful that workers themselves
believe they are invisible. Despite being labour-power, these workers act as if they
were not seen. The reversal of perception, and the inability to give a name and a face
1 See Marvit [1].

2 See Irani [2], Scholz [3].
to this ghostly condition, is the effect of a violent backlash caused by the transfor-
mation, the downsizing, of the two main labour cultures of the twentieth century.
The Marxist culture, which considered labour-power as the primordial ground of
both antagonism and cooperation between individuals, conflict and solidarity. And
the liberal culture based on the employment contract, which has been replaced by
a continuous reformulation of paid work on the basis of the commercial needs of
companies.
What is left is, one the one hand, a series of prophets announcing a brand new
future, on the other those who are nostalgic for the golden age of labour, the function
of which was supposedly to allow workers to meet their needs and secure a dignified
life. These are two opposite idealisms: the first preaches about the shortcut that will
turn everyone into entrepreneurs, in the hope that capital will become newly incarnate
in individuals; the second delimits the struggles of mass labourers that took place at
a specific time in the twentieth century (1945–1973) viewing them as the moment of
truth in History. On this basis they preach about the return to angelic labour, thanks
to which people will regain their dignity, an ideal state far from exploitation, as if
labour itself were not exploitation. On the one hand, subjectivity is bound to the
Enterprise, the regulating idea of our existence; on the other hand, Abstract Work is
made to precede the women and men who labour concretely. In no case is labour-
power considered as a faculty, part of a life that is free to express itself beyond
capitalist rationality.
Labour-power is imprisoned by a paradox. There are those who want to free it
by evoking a subjective relationship with “creative” work, or by viewing profes-
sional activity as something sacred, a work of art. Yet the work of labour-power
is viewed as an archaeological residue, something it is impossible to identify with.
The condition of contemporary workers oscillates between a moral injunction to
subjectivity and the instrumental management of their labour-power. Their life is
paced by two symmetrical polarities: overwork and underemployment. Aside from
unemployment and absolute poverty, these are the centripetal and centrifugal forces
of an only process of subordination.
2.3 Human, Too Human: Capital
Education, labour and the art market, rights and politics are immersed in human
capital, the cornerstone of a hyper-market society. Labour-power is not recognised
as a faculty that produces wealth for those who own, sell or lease it—i.e. workers.
This faculty is identified with capital, to which a higher instance of being is attributed:
humanity. The humanisation of capital is the premise for loving the world. Aspiring
to profit means acting in the name of what is Good. This discourse implies the natural-
isation of the idea of enterprise and its transformation into a tale with a philosophical
background. Enterprise is both a hierarchical organisation and a moral imperative
guiding social and productive activities of the bourgeois and capitalist individual. The
performative morality and the spirit of neoliberal capitalism have combined the first
2.3 Human, Too Human: Capital 13
meaning with the second to induce labour-power to embody the enterprise understood
as a moral imperative, and manage all its activities as an enterprise understood in
hierarchical terms. This operation is based on an impossible psychological, social and
economical identification. Enterprises composed of multiple individuals, properties
and trade sectors cannot be identified with a single individual. Owning capital means
managing funds, organisations, infrastructure and coordinating people, not incor-
porating the abstraction of a humanised capital by impersonating its ideal features.
Workers are not business-(wo)men, nor owners of enterprises. They are obliged to
sell their labour-power to survive. On the contrary, in the neoliberal fiction of “human
capital” they are forced into wishing they possessed what they will never have. They
do not possess what they have— labour-power—but identify with the property of
others—capital—believing it is what most belongs to them, and furthermore that
it is human. To become subject-enterprise is today the paradoxical injunction that
has blocked all possible identification, fixing the subject in a process of mourning
by which it can fully realise itself (labour-power) only by means of what negates it
(capital).
Very few people in the world can enjoy identifying with their enterprises. They
are owners, and can say that they are their own human capital. Slightly more people
believe that one day they will become entrepreneurs, but today they manage their own
self-exploitation. All, however, must come to terms with one fact: it is only thanks to
the labour-power of women and men that companies exist, not the other way round.
Labour-power is the only faculty that enterprises cannot possess. Entrepreneurs can
buy it, fire it, discipline it, but they never possess the faculty of workers, not even
with theories on human capitalism.
The neoliberal spirit of capitalism is the effect of a reversal by which the character-
istics of contemporary labour-power are transformed into their opposite. Freedom is
affirmed formally, together with autonomy, cooperation, self-determination, desire.
These elements materially coincide with self-exploitation and self-subjugation. The
desire to be free and autonomous in leading one’s life translates into voluntary subor-
dination to an imperative that denies its power. The optimisation of human capital
should produce the happiness of the subject and the liberation from labour in the age
of automation. Instead, it leads to political, economic and affective misery.
In order to attempt to break free from the vicious circle that feeds this passive
revolution, it is necessary to restate a double distinction. Labour-power and work
are not the same thing, and neither are labour-power and human capital. Today these
words are used interchangeably. Labour-power (potency) is the faculty that belongs
to the individual regardless of the work actually carried out. It preserves, creates,
increases value and is produced by flesh and blood women and men. Labour-power,
as “capacity to work”, renders this faculty extrinsic to the labour-power itself in a
commodity that belongs to those who purchase it. In a capitalist society, the activity
of the “capacity to work” is aimed at the production of commodified work. However,
this is not the only possible way to employ labour-power as a faculty that can be
used to affirm life as a means for itself and not only as the object of a contract, as
instrument of work and human capital.
Labour-power is like a coffer containing power, it is the most important faculty of

active life. For capitalism it is the most valuable “commodity”. Its origin is not the
commodification of labour-power as capacity to work, but the potential being of a life
which is included in labour power. Labour-power as an expression of the individual
and collective body-mind is the assumption that provides the starting point to return
to question Karl Marx’s groundbreaking intuition.
2.4 Genealogy
Labour-power lives between and within the bastions of subordinate employment, of

self-employment and of enterprises. Long identified with paid work, it has acquired
plural, and even opposing modes that coexist asynchronously in the course of a
lifetime. The traits of bourgeois individualism alternate with those that have emerged
in the history of the working class, while we witness the revival of disturbing forms of
servitude, the “vagrancy” of the self-employed, poor and migrant workers. This book
carries out an in-depth analysis of the history of self-employed and subordinate labour
and attempts to trace a genealogy capable of shedding a light on the present condition.
It identifies conceptual characters such as freelancers, who are mercenaries, self-
entrepreneurs, on the one hand; gladiators, contractors, employees, on the other.
These figures belong to different stories: the first to self-employment, the second
to subordinate employment. Their paths show that the traditional distinction made
between subordinate employment and self-employment is not original; rather, it is
the result of a historical process in which the meaning of labour, and the judgment on
individual activities, have changed based on production, dominant morality, material
cultures.
This is all the more true today, at a time when the transformations underway
render the boundaries between the macro-categories of labour, recorded by Western
jurisprudence, uncertain. In the context of the fifth estate, a worker can play opposing
roles and develop attitudes that overlap in a contradictory way in the course of one
lifetime. Self-exploitation coexists with the desire for freedom, contracts alternate
with the VAT code of freelance workers, work with non-work. In the continuous tres-
passing of different identities, activities and temporalities, the common denominator
remains that of labour-power.
Genealogy allows to understand the contemporary nature of non-contemporary
conditions in a new system of relations. Its objective is not to reconstruct the global
history of labour, or the origin from which everything descends, but to identify the
premise for historical and political action in the present.3 Genealogy is a philosoph-
ical method that intersects traces of different temporalities into a single experience:
anachrony.4 It allows today’s freelancers and employees with a contract to see them-
selves in a history, to free themselves from the passivity of the resentful or reactionary
3 See Foucault [4].

4 See Loraux [5], Esposito [6, 13–24].
2.4 Genealogy 15
identities shaped by the dominant representation, construct alliances in a world that

views them as exiles or orphans. To experience anachrony also means breaking with
the temporal order of production and reproduction, thus opening up history to leaps
and connections from one temporality to another, in past or future directions.
Between the nineteenth and twentieth century, the exercise of this historical
perspectivism was materially achieved by labourers who interrupted the rhythm of
the industrial production cycle and identified a path of historical subjectification
open to new possibilities—not confined to corporate or State identities.5 Today the
same experience should be attempted with respect to the tendency to extract absolute
surplus value from the labour-power employed around the clock by free work, which
is carried out in locations other than those where physical production takes place.
Those who experience this anachrony, like the current labour-power, experience their
time not in a retrospective way, but as futur antérieur: life is projected towards that
which is other than itself by itself in a common horizon. To grasp this possibility,
casting aside the heavy armour of neoliberalism, is the ethical exercise I performed
while writing this book.
Anachrony is the temporality that characterises the lives of those who make up
labour-power: the coexistence of the actuality and non-actuality of power (potency)
is its generative mechanism. Karl Marx’s concept refers to an immanent duplicity:
on the one hand, it means force and faculty (Arbeitskraft); on the other hand, it
means capacity for labour that actualises power (potency) (Arbeitsvermögen). The
act of production (labour-commodity) never resembles the power it actualises. Its
actualisation in a commodity does not exhaust potency, but produces a difference
with respect to the temporality of production. The non-actualised potency of the
labour-power is a nebula that surrounds the capacity for labour, ready to actualise
itself in a way that cannot be determined in advance.6
Freelancers, employees with a contract and the other characters of contemporary
labour-power are the expression of a pattern that shifts continuously. They are taken
notice of only when they put up resistance against what prevents power from asserting
itself. The usefulness of resistance today is questioned by its own actors. However,
genealogy shows how effective it is, and shines a new light on labour-power, in a
system which claims it can do without it. The choice of this method discards the
debates that interpret it only as a contractual, economic problem, or one pertaining
to human capital management. Genealogy re-establishes the priority of labour-power
over alienated labour and affirms the possibility of a new beginning, which would
otherwise remain unknown in a present where no alternative seems to exist.
5 See Rancière [7].

6 See the third chapter of this book.
2.5 The Fifth Estate
This book explores the new condition of labour-power: the fifth estate.7 A reflec-
tion on labour-power allows to understand its link with the transformations that
have profoundly changed the social composition in the last quarter of a century. For
example, the crisis has greatly affected the classes of labourers and of the bourgeoisie.
The gray zone where the precarisation of the former and the proletarisation of the
latter intersect has involved self-employment, freelance and ordinary work equally.
Today it is not enough to be labourers to belong to the working class, just as it is
not enough to be employed, or to be employed in the service sector or the State, to
be “bourgeois”. Being unemployed does not allow to claim one is without work, the
same way employment is not enough to prove one is not in a precarious condition.
This permanent asymmetry between a class membership and a working condition is
part of an experience that cannot be described by constructing a taxonomy of social
classes, professional statuses, a list of old and new professions.
Only recently have official statistics begun to argue that the relation between
income, social belonging and professional status has become disconnected. There
has been an effort, which under many aspects makes sense, to understand a general
condition in relation to the representation of the social order. A philosophy of labour-
power is not interested in restoring this order. Rather, its aim is to understand the
potential of this new condition. Such potentiality is rooted in labour-power, under-
stood as a singular faculty that is common to all, viewed not only as the ability to
perform tasks in a productive organisation. Between the nineteenth and twentieth
century, the discovery of the centrality of the labour-power allowed to identify a
vector of subjectification that intersects capitalist production and the socio-political
organisation, which is also able to modify its structures and bring about a poten-
tially autonomous subjectivity. Due to the characteristics of the post-Fordist mode
of production, and of the neo-liberal organisation of society, labour-power occupies
a position that is even more central today than in the previous phase.
The most topical cultural representations hardly capture the particularity of this
condition and tend to separate it from subjectivity in a process that assimilates life
to human capital. In doing so, the main discovery of the theory of labour-power is
linked to a scenario of irreversible alienation, often articulated in terms of victimhood
and understood in generational terms, and to a renewed proprietary conception of the
world. The removal of the inalienable specificity of labour-power generates phantas-
matic identifications with archaic remnants, philosophical or statistical abstractions
such as the categories of “people” or “neet”, “inactive”. These are fanciful socio-
logical formulas used for generalised anomie (“generation X” or “Y”, for example)
that aim to hypostatise the disappearance of the previous order by means of elusive
transcendental categories, which make no attempt to convey the point of view of
those who experience this new condition.
The fifth estate does not refer to a predetermined subject, but to a condition brought
about by changes in labour-power that follow a pattern of inclusion and exclusion.
7 See Allegri and Ciccarelli [8].

2.5 The Fifth Estate 17
This pattern was already present in Marx’s definition: the class is a non-class. It is
not composed of owners, but of a labour-power that must sell itself to make a living.
The non expresses a durable statement: the class is this, but it is also that, both this
and that, this against that. The identification of the (non) class is a process that calls
into question what can be done, not what is owned or what is lacking. The affirmation
is the result of the combination and disjunction of heterogeneous elements (social,
professional, economic, cultural, racial, gender) that manifest themselves starting
from labour-power, that connect or clash with norms and institutions, the market and
society. “Class is a social and cultural formation which cannot be defined abstractly,
but only in relation to other classes (…) Class itself is not a thing, it is a happening.”8
Class is not a sociological subject, nor is it determined on the basis of income.
It is a political-social formation of the labour-power and is created by a disjunctive
synthesis shaped by historical, economic, moral and political elements. The process
restarts continuously. It includes negation when it opposes an externally imposed
purpose (class for itself); it expresses an affirmation when it establishes what the
heterogeneous has in common (class in itself). The definition of these categories is
affected also by the patriarchal culture that has influenced the workers’ movement.
This is visible where Marx makes the industrial proletariat fall under the category of
wage labour excluding women, as well as non-subordinate work. Today, inclusion
and exclusion have changed, starting from the role of women: work has become
“feminised”, in the sense that it now produces relations, not only commodities,
something that does not, however, prevent exclusion and violence. The frontier moves
between two poles: between those who circulate capital and those who are mobilised
by capital: migrants. In between there is an unclassifiable intermediate zone subject
to differential inclusion.9
Class does not undergo individuation, it is not constituted by singularities that are
fixed and organised in convergent series, it is not composed of individuals who are
determined once and for all. Rather, it is an “aleatory point” where possible processes
of composition converge, shaped by different practices.10 In this “aleatory point”
power is overturned, belongings are dislocated, alternative norms are invented, but it
is also where syntheses are disrupted and where their reactionary reterritorialisation
takes place. The determination of becoming by which the class is formed, and of the
synthesis that shapes the conditions of the fifth estate, is political.
The fifth estate has been defined as equivalent to temporary employment, that
of young people who lack guarantees, freelancers and immigrants. Together they
supposedly form a “social stratum” alongside the clergy, the bourgeoisie, labourers
and economic rent.11 However, temporary employment does not constitute a sepa-
rate class, because temporary workers are present both in the bourgeoisie and among
workers and immigrants. Moreover, the fifth estate is not a heterogeneous group
8 Thompson [9]. For an updated reflection on class and “precarious” labour refer to Standing [10],
Foti [11].
9 See Balibar [12, 371–381].
10 See Deleuze [13].
11 See Ferrera [14].
composed of the excluded who join the social pyramid. It is a socio-political condi-
tion, that of the labour-power, which cannot be reduced to the possession or lack
of an employment contract, or to nationality. The fifth estate is multidimensional:
it is transversal to all categories and groups, but cannot be identified with one of
their strata. It cannot be placed in a hierarchy, although it can be found among the
parts composing it. It brings together stateless citizens in their homeland, who are
deprived of social rights, and extraterritorial foreigners residing in a State who are
not allowed citizenship. Together these subjects form the community of those who
are without a community, a community that possesses only labour-power. For this
community to become a class these subjects must recognise and share this collective
faculty which can, if organised in a conscious way, around solidarity, set itself the
objective of socially producing its existence by cooperating with all the living beings
on the planet.
In order to understand the conditions of the contemporary labour-power in terms
of a fifth estate, it is no longer possible to give precedence to the critique of labour
exploitation over the critique of gender, sex or nature. Defining labour in the light
of gender and racialised relationships, interpreting sexism and racism as expres-
sions of social violence perpetrated by the same power means breaking the existing
hierarchies and combining conflicts in a “class” that is subjected to multiple forms
of oppression and capable of many forms of possible resistance. To consider these
dimensions in a common political horizon means to envisage a co-revolutionary
becoming between different subjects. The way they intersect and share the same
conditions characterising this class demonstrates that politics can extend and go from
protesting the private ownership of the means of production to contesting biopolitical
power relations, to fighting against the exploitation of the living. These ideas have
long oriented the trajectories of feminism,12 political ecology13 and Marxism.14 A
similar approach can also be found in the more than secular history of the concept of
fifth estate. Since the nineteenth century it indicates the women’s emancipation move-
ment,15 the search for freedom and equality by temporary, wage and autonomous
workers, the establishment of mutualism and cooperation that do not depend on the
State or on the market, alternative to productivist, patriarchal and anthropocentric
culture.
12 Crenshaw [15], Davis [16].

13 Audier [17].
14 Harvey [18], Hardt and Negri [19].
15 Alesso [20].
2.6 Intersection and Multipositionality 19
2.6 Intersection and Multipositionality
Labour-power is the faculty that in-futures itself from the here and now of every
material and intellectual act, in the production and reproduction of commodities
and relationships, of their uses and contradictions. It stems from resistance to a
process of exploitation and it is the expression of a political mode in the context
of a capitalist economy and society. The main thesis of the theory of labour-power
is: what comes first is the faculty that drives a subjectivity and allows it to use the
world. The organisation that puts it to work, exploits it, and violates it follows. Faculty
and organisation, labour-power and relations of production necessarily imply each
other. Between them no agreement is possible. Conflict is permanent in a capitalist
society. The choice to give priority to the labour-power over capital depends on the
political point of view guiding one’s life, through which one interprets the process
of value production and its exploitation. This choice derives from a reversal and
reflects a political, ethical and economic priority. Without considering this priority
of labour-power, we risk representing exploitation as a totalising and unsurpassable
dimension and the subject as an individual completely identified with the oppressed,
the exploited, the repressed and the alienated.
Labour-power is the manifestation of the possibility of being different from what
is. This possibility is not a theoretical option, it is not will, or a norm. It is a difference
that manifests itself in a multiverse of power, class, race and gender relations. As a
political faculty of subjectivity, the labour-power is to be understood by looking at the
intersection of legal, economic and social norms that cause subjectivity to develop
in a subordinate form which is expressed in the multipositionality of subjects with
respect to themselves and the world.16
The difference between intersection and multiposition consists in the fact that
the former considers social relations as being isolated and fixed, while the latter
considers positions in historical and dynamic terms, in perpetual evolution, as objects
of continuous renegotiation. Subjectivity is the result of the relation between the
intersection of dominion and the multipositioning of liberation inside the conflicts
in which it is inserted, and of which it is the product. The contribution of the theory
of labour-power in this feminist political debate is potentially decisive: there is no
main contradiction, and no secondary contradiction, between class, race and gender.
Among the individual situations in which the labour-power finds itself there is a
disjunctive synthesis in which a contradiction is always the main contradiction when
it manifests itself in a specific situation of exploitation, violence or gender and racial
discrimination. However, exploitation and violence are the results of a multiplicity
of positions occupied by subjects in the relations they find themselves in, in which
they do not suffer, but in which they act.
Interpreting gender and race in terms of class, and defining class in the light of
gender and racialised relations, allows to evade the logic of pure dominion and to
address the issue of resistance and revolt. Labour-power, understood as a faculty, is
16 On the debate on intersectionality and its relationship with the theory of multipositionality in
feminist theory see Dorlin [21].

placed at the intersection of the positions that comprise the subjects and expresses
the possibility of its transformation in multiple directions which have not (yet) been
anticipated by the exploitation system.
Labour-power, as Arbeitskraft, can be defined in the following terms:
• it is a faculty that is removed and yet is present;
• it is an invisibilised faculty, yet it has an agency;
• it is an expropriated faculty, yet it generates other potential uses of the self together
with others.
The synthesis between these contradictions—each one applies in itself, but comes
to life in the disjunction and recomposition with the others—characterises the multi-
positional subjectivity of labour-power. On the one hand, this means that the domi-
nated can be the dominators of others—the woman exploited at work may well be
the exploiter of an immigrant woman working for her family; on the other hand,
the dominated are such with respect to a specific condition—the immigrant woman
can be exploited both as a woman and as a migrant. Multipositionality indicates
the possibility of overturning these relations of dominion, freeing the subject from
one or the other. Labour-power is an open field of struggle. It is always possible to
overturn a position, overcome the contradiction and reach the definition of a new
contradiction. This is indicative of the fact that life is transformed and is complicated
in the process of constituting itself differently from what it is at a given moment.
Difference is what gives birth anew to labour-power; it is what is affirmed in
the life of those who are subjected to an extraneous and binding power. When the
dominated, the subaltern and the exploited understand their difference,
• they break free from the identity dominating them and begin a process of
individuation by which they become other than themselves;
• they understand they are not only what they are now but can be something other;
• they understand themselves as other than what they are now, and can already be
other.
This rebirth—I am exploited and I am like this, but I am simultaneously other—can
be explained on the basis of the double character of labour-power:
• active subjects comprise a productive force at the disposal of capital;
• they also constitute that which can contrast exploitation.
This duplicity emerges when labour-power uses all its faculties and enters into
contact with the powerful agency it embodies—both physically and mentally. It is
an open process that frees its potential and thus becomes what cannot be anticipated
at the beginning. This process is not only individual, it is also collective. In fact,
labour-power, understood not only as the capacity for labour but also as a faculty, is
social and cooperative. This means that when it begins to act politically, it resonates,
and this manifests itself when actions are carried out in concert, regardless of whether
these actions are consonant or dissonant. In concert is collective and organised action.
Just like a concert, it can express itself in organised or unforeseeable forms. Thus
“political” means musically performing the power of being both this and other.
2.7 The Faculty of Faculties 21
2.7 The Faculty of Faculties
The absence of an investigation into labour-power continues to weigh on the philo-

sophical debate. The problem has always been understood in a partial and never
specific way. The critique of labour has been removed from a philosophical enquiry
based on transcendental norms according to which social justice derives from a fair
distribution of primary goods.17 What this approach ignores is the problem of the
production of these goods and its contradictory relationship with the subjectivity
being affirmed in a production which alienates its main faculty: labour-power. Little,
or nothing, has been said about the relationship between labour-power and contract
and obligation theories that have regulated subordinate or autonomous work agree-
ments since ancient times and that, through Roman law, became embedded in the
dispositif that still allows us to talk about work. The field of analysis has been largely
ignored also by the theory of democracy, which understands the division of labour,
and the power relations that underlie it, solely in terms of unequal distribution of
resources, thus excluding the latter from discussions on the polis.
The fact that the labour-power is invisible in the eyes of an influential philosophical
debate is a result of the lack of questions regarding the conditions for the emanci-
pation of labour and the liberation of subjects.18 The problematisation of concepts
such as “socialism” and “communism” has turned into a project for the adminis-
tration (governance, management) of residual social safeguards by which conflict
and social justice are understood merely as a problem of distribution of fewer and
fewer resources which are increasingly less available.19 This philosophy has failed
to analyse the creation of new forms of dominion over lives that are ruthlessly put
to work, nor does it explain how subjectivity can avoid being captured by taking
advantage of a faculty that cannot be reduced to its capitalist use.
In the work that inspired the analysis of biopolitics Michel Foucault did not look at
labour-power through his concept of life (bios).20 With some notable exceptions,21
the elaboration that followed did not grasp the relationship between the govern-
ment of labour-power and the neoliberal dispositif . This led to consider politics as a
dispositif that destroys life (thanatopolitics), while the specificity of labour-power
identified by Marx—a “special” commodity, in that it is a faculty that develops the
potentiality of a life—disappeared as this interpretation reduced the concept of life
to a biological fact. The different articulations of Foucault’s work, however, include
a theory of subjectivity that acknowledges the characteristics present in the theory
of labour-power. The non-linear relationship between Foucault and Marx, which
17 See Rawls [22].

18 See Stiegler’s observations on the absence of philosophers in the debate on labour, in Stiegler
[23, 31].
19 See Trentin [24], Honneth [25].
20 See Foucault [26].
21 For a different philosophy of labour see: Tronti et al. [22], Finelli [23], Macherey [24], Berardi
(Bifo) [27], Bologna [25, 26], Virno [10], Hardt and Negri [28, 29], Marazzi [12], Fumagalli [13],
Monnier and Vercellone [30, 117–120].
founds a critique of contemporary subjectivity, allows to rescue the labour-power

from “neoliberal governance”, which is treated as an expression of human capital.
This objective is shared by a broad range of contemporary philosophies, from critical
theory to the Spinozist critique of affections, to the various articulations of post-
operaism or Marxism of the abstract, from psychoanalysis to the psychodynamics
of labour.22
The absence of a theory of labour-power in the theoretical and critical debate
is even greater, if possible, in the political debate. Today we have gone back to
repeatedly speaking of “labour”. This rediscovery coincides with an alarming wors-
ening of inequalities and with the impoverishment caused by living a life that is
precarious, indebted and unprotected. “Labour” is thought of as the lever to boost
productivity, demand and consumption in a capitalist cycle that rendered it first
temporary, then invisible. Provided it is possible to re-establish the centrality that
waged labour acquired in the Fordist cycle, which cannot be taken by granted, this
narrative of labour loses sight of the freedom of subjects. The right to work, what-
ever the employment is, counts more than the right to choose an employment. From
the opposite ends of the spectrum, the neo-socialist and neo-liberal perspectives
converge at least on one point: human beings must be put to work because it is
thanks to productive activity the people are able to give meaning to their life and feel
they are economically useful. Only to discover that this same employment, viewed
as a means of redemption from a state of need, is an activity that determines the
proliferation of occasional occupations that are paid increasingly less. Digging holes
and covering them up again, or forcing a person to enrol in programmes put in place
by active labour policies in exchange for an income, are policies of dominion, not
liberation. This type of labour does not lead to redemption but to poverty, voluntary
servitude and frustration.
The very idea that labour-power is an exercise in freedom and self-determination
continues to thrive. This narrative stems from an ancient belief: labour, not the capi-
talist production of surplus value, is a “supernatural creative force” capable of gener-
ating all types of wealth. Today more than ever labour is an activity that denies
the source of labour-power. By not taking into account the political and conceptual
difference between labour-power as faculty or potency to create the use of the world
and labour-force as the alienated capacity to work means identifying individuals
with the labour that alienates them.
The starting point of a theory of labour-power is, on the contrary, the “living
personality” of women and men who work, or who do not work, not the conception of
labour, be it “commodity”, “people” or “human capital”. This philosophy addresses
the constitutive duplicity of labour-power—potency embodied by flesh and blood
subjects, and abstraction of the commodities being produced—and formulates the
thesis of a right to existence based on the fact that labour-power is inseparable from the
potential of human beings, that freedom and rights are inseparable from the power
22 Foran overview of the contemporary debate see: Cukier [14]. Among others see also: Dejours
[15], Berardi and Smith [16], Lordon [17], Vincent [18], Clot [31, 32], Renault [33], Deranty and
Smith [34], Henry [35, 36].
Another random document with
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opinion it is very considerable.
"Some of those employed in the library service have been

absent for long periods between the sessions of Congress,
although the House library is in a condition which demands
constant attention for years to come in order to bring it up
to a proper condition of efficiency. The pay roll of the
librarian, his assistants, and those detailed to the library
service, including deficiency appropriations, amounts to
$9,200 per annum. No one of the employees of the library, with
the exception of a $600 deficiency employee and Guy Underwood,
who in his freshman year at college was librarian part of one
session at the Ohio State University, has ever had any library
experience, although they all appear to be capable,
intelligent men. The House library is said to consist of
300,000 volumes, many of which are duplicates, and is
scattered from the Dome to the basement of the Capitol, in
some instances, until recently, books being piled in unused
rooms, like so much wood or coal. The present librarian
testified as follows:
'Q. It would be difficult to describe a worse condition than

existed?'
'A. It would, for the condition of books. It would be all

right for a barnyard, but for books it was terrible.' It is
just to say that under the present administration of the
library some attempt has been made at improvement, but the
effect of fifty years' neglect can not be remedied in a day.
We can not think that any absenteeism, beyond a reasonable
vacation, on the part of those employed in the library is
justifiable in view of the foregoing facts.
"The folders, taking the orders of members rather than those

of the Doorkeeper, are absent a great deal during the
vacation, and in some cases persons are employed by resolution
to do their work. The Doorkeeper testified as follows:
'I think Mr. Lyon told me where members requested they had
three months at home during this last Congress.'
'Q. Drawing their pay in the meantime?'
'A. Yes, sir; they had three months'.'
'Q. That is not in the interest of your service, is it?'
'A. No, sir.'
'Q. Have you been able to prevent it?'
'A. No, sir.'
'Q. Why?'
'A. They would go to the superintendent of the folding room
and say to him, "My man has got to go home."'
'Q. You mean the members would go?'
'A. Yes, sir. I do not like to criticise members, but that is
the situation. They go and say, "I have got to have my man
home, and he must go home; it is absolutely necessary;" and he
has been permitted to go.'
{150}
"We have been unable to inquire as much into specific

instances of absenteeism as we desired, but it may be said
generally that absenteeism on the folders' force is very
general. …
"Third, division of salaries.—According to the testimony of

Thomas H. McKee, the Journal clerk, the custom of dividing
salaries is an old one and has existed for at least twenty
years. We are satisfied that we are unable to report all the
instances of divisions of salaries which have occurred: but we
submit the following facts, which were clearly proved before
us: On the organization of the House in the Fifty-fourth
Congress it appears that more places, or places with higher
salaries, were promised than the officers of the House were
able to discover under the law. It does not appear by whom
these promises were made. There began at once a system whereby
the employees agreed to contribute greater or less portions of
the salaries they received for the purpose either of paying
persons not on the roll or of increasing the compensation of
persons who were on the roll. Of the latter class, the
increases were not proportioned to the character of the
services rendered or the merit of the employees, but to the
supposed rights of the States or Congressional districts from
which the recipients came. Some of these contributions were
made voluntarily and cheerfully; others we believe to have
been made under a species of moral duress."
Congressional Record,
February 28, 1901, page 3597.
CLERICAL PARTY: Austria.
See (in this volume)

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: A. D. 1897, and after.
CLERICAL PARTY: Belgium.

BELGIUM: A. D. 1899-1900.
CLEVELAND, Grover:
President of the United States.
See (in volume 5 and in this volume.)

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1893, to 1897.
CLEVELAND, Grover:
Extensions of Civil Service Rules.

CIVIL SERVICE REFORM: A. D. 1893-1896.
CLEVELAND, Grover:
Message to Congress on the Boundary Dispute between
Great Britain and Venezuela.

VENEZUELA: A. D. 1895 (DECEMBER).
CLEVELAND, Grover:
On Cuban affairs.

CUBA: A. D. 1896-1897.
CLEVELAND, OHIO: A. D. 1896.
The centennial anniversary of the founding of the city was

celebrated with appropriate ceremonies on the 22d of July,
1896, and made memorable by a gift to the city, by Mr. John D.
Rockefeller, of 276 acres of land for a public park.
COAL MINERS, Strikes among.

INDUSTRIAL DISTURBANCES.
COAMO, Engagement at.

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:
A. D. 1898 (JULY-AUGUST: PORTO RICO).
COLENSO, Battle of.

SOUTH AFRICA (THE FIELD OF WAR):
A. D. 1899 (OCTOBER-DECEMBER).
COLLEGES.
EDUCATION.
COLOMBIA: A. D. 1893-1900.
Resumption of work on the Panama Canal.
Revolutionary movements.
Prolonged Civil War.
Boundary dispute with Costa Rica.
Panama Canal concession twice extended.
In 1893 the receiver or liquidator of the affairs of the

bankrupt Panama Canal Company of De Lesseps (see, in volume 4,
PANAMA CANAL) obtained from the government of Colombia an
extension of the terms of the concession under which that
company had worked, provided that work on the canal should be
resumed before November 1, 1894. He succeeded in forming in
France a new company which actually made a beginning of work
on the canal before the limit of time expired. But this
attempted revival of the undertaking was quickly harassed,
like everything else in Colombia, by an outbreak of revolt
against the clerical control of government under President
Caro. The revolutionary movement was begun late in 1894,
receiving aid from exiles and sympathizers in Venezuela,
Ecuador and Central America. It had no substantial success,
the revolutionists being generally defeated in the pitched
battles that were fought; but after a few months they were
broken into guerilla bands and continued warfare in that
method throughout most of the year 1895. They were still
threatening in 1896, but the activity and energy of President
Caro prevented any serious outbreak. A boundary dispute
between Colombia and Costa Rica, which became considerably
embittered in 1896, was finally referred to the President of
the French Republic, whose decision was announced in
September, 1900.
Colombia began a fresh experience of civil war in the autumn

of 1899, when an obstinate movement for the overthrow of
President Saclemente (elected in 1898) was begun. General
Herrera was said, at the outset, to be in the lead, but, as
the struggle proceeded, General Rafael Uribe-Uribe seems to
have become its real chief. It went on with fierce fighting,
especially in the isthmus, and with varying fortunes, until
near the close of 1900, when the insurgents met with a defeat
which drove General Uribe-Uribe to flight. He made his escape
to Venezuela, and thence to the United States, arriving at New
York early in February, 1901. In conversation with
representatives of the Press he insisted that there was no
thought in his party or in his own mind of abandoning the
revolutionary attempt. The cause of the revolution, he said,
was due to the oppression of the government, which was in the
hands of the Conservative party. "They have not governed
according to the constitution," he said, "and while taxing the
Liberals, will not allow them to be adequately represented in
the government. For fifteen years the Liberal party has been
deprived of all its rights. I have been the only
representative of the party in Congress. We tried every
peaceable method to obtain our rights before going to war, but
could not get anything from the government. The government did
not want to change anything, because it did not want to lose
any of its power. I, as the only representative of the Liberal
party, made up my mind to fight, and will fight to the end."
By what is said to have been a forced resignation, some time

in the later part of the year 1900, President Saclemente, a
very old man, retired from the active duties of the office,
which were taken in hand by the Vice-President, Dr. Manoquin.
During the year 1900, the government signed a further

extension of the concession to the Panama Canal Company,
prolonging the period within which the canal must be completed
six years from April, 1904.
{151}
COLORADO: A. D. 1897.
Abolition of the death penalty.
By an Act of the Legislature of Colorado which became law in

March, 1897, the death penalty was abolished in that state.
COLORADOS.

URUGUAY: A. D. 1896-1899.
COLUMBUS, Christopher:
Removal of remains from Havana to Seville.

CUBA: A. D. 1898 (DECEMBER).
COMBINATIONS, Industrial.

TRUSTS.
COMMANDO.
Commandeering.

SOUTH AFRICA (THE TRANSVAAL): A. D. 1894.
COMMERCIAL CONGRESS, International.

INTERNATIONAL COMMERCIAL CONGRESS.
COMMERCIAL MUSEUM, Philadelphia.

PHILADELPHIA: A. D. 1897.
COMPULSORY INSURANCE:
The State System in Germany.

GERMANY: A. D. 1897-1900.
COMPULSORY VOTING.

BELGIUM: A. D. 1894-1895.
CONCERT OF EUROPE.
Concert of the Powers.
"We have heard of late so much about 'the Concert' that the
man in the street talks of it as if it were a fact of nature
like the Bosphorus or the Nile; and he assumes that he and all
his neighbours understand exactly what it means. Yet it may be
doubted whether even persons so omniscient as the politician
and the journalist could describe it with any approach to
truth or even to common sense. An energetic newspaper lately
described the Concert as 'Three Despots, two Vassals, and a
Coward.' This doubtless was a libel. An Olympian
Under-Secretary called it 'the Cabinet of Europe.' Lord
Salisbury himself, impatient of facile caricatures, insisted
that it was a 'Federation.' It has also, to Sir William
Harcourt's wrath, been spoken of as an 'Areopagus' having
'legislative' powers. All these phrases are mere nonsense; and
yet they have profoundly influenced the action of this country
and the course of recent history. The patent fact of the hour
is that six powerful States are pleased to interest themselves
in the Eastern Question—which is the question of the dissolution
of Turkey.
See, in this volume,

TURKEY: A. D. 1895, and after.
They base their claim to take exceptional steps in the matter
on the plea that there is imminent risk of a general European
war if they do not act. … What is the Concert of Europe? It is
not a treaty, still less a federation. If it is anything, it
is a tacit understanding between the 'six Powers' that they
will take common action, or abstain from 'isolated action,' in
the Eastern question. Whether it is even that, in any rational
sense of the word 'understanding,' is more than doubtful. For
there has been much and very grave 'isolated action,' even in
pending troubles."

TURKEY: A. D. 1897 (FEBRUARY-MARCH); and 1897-1899]
The Concert of Europe

(Contemporary Review, May, 1897).
The joint action of the leading European Powers in dealing

with Turkish affairs, between 1896 and 1899, which took the
name of "The Concert of Europe," was imitated in 1900, when
the more troublesome "Far Eastern Question" was suddenly
sprung upon the world by the "Boxer" rising in China. The
United States and Japan were then associated in action with
the European nations; and the "Concert of Europe" was
succeeded by a larger "Concert of the Powers."

CHINA: A. D. 1900, JANUARY-MARCH, and after.
CONCESSIONS, The battle of, in China.

CHINA: A. D. 1898 (FEBRUARY-DECEMBER).
CONDOMINIUM, Anglo-Egyptian, in the Sudan.

EGYPT: A. D. 1899 (JANUARY).
CONFEDERATE DISABILITIES, Removal of.

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1896 (MARCH).
CONGER, Edwin H.: United States Minister to China.
See (in this volume) CHINA.
CONGO FREE STATE: A. D. 1897.

Mutiny of troops of Baron Dhanis's expedition.

AFRICA: A. D. 1897 (CONGO FREE STATE).

Results of the King of Belgium's attempt to found
an African Empire.
Contradictory representations.
"The opening in the first few days of July [1898] of the

railway through the District of the Cataracts, from Matadi to
Stanley Pool, has turned public attention to Central Africa,
where the genius and courage of the King of the Belgians have
created a Black Empire within the short space of twelve years.
It is the special pride of its founder that the vast state of
the Congo has been formed without bloodshed, except at the
cost of the cruel Arab slave-hunters, and of the not less
cruel cannibals like Msiri or the Batetelas, that a thousand
treaties have been signed without a gunshot, and that from the
commencement the highest ideals of modern civilisation have
been aimed at, and, considering the stupendous difficulties of
the task, practically attained in the administration. The
standard of humanity and progress has been firmly planted in
the midst of a population of thirty millions, the decadence of
those millions has been arrested, peace exists where there was
only slaughter and savagery, and prosperity is coming in the
train of improved communications, and of the development of
the natural resources of a most promising region. In the
history of Empires that of the Congo State is unique. …
"The Berlin Conference did nothing for the Congo State beyond
giving it a being and a name.
See, in volume 1,
CONGO FREE STATE.
On the other hand it imposed upon it some onerous conditions.

There was to be freedom of trade—an excellent principle, but
not contributory to the State exchequer—it was to employ all
its strength in the suppression of the slave trade—'a
gigantic task, undertaken with the resources of pygmies,' as
some one has said—and the navigation of the Congo was to be
free to all the world without a single toll. The sufficiently
ample dimensions marked out for the State in the Conventional
limits attached to the Berlin General Act had to be defined
and regulated by subsequent negotiation with the neighbouring
Powers.
{152}
France attenuated the northern possessions of the State at
every possible opportunity, but at length, in February, 1895,
she was induced to waive in favour of Belgium the right of
pre-emption which the Congo Association had given her in
April, 1884, over its possessions, at the moment when the
Anglo-Portuguese Convention threatened that enterprise with
extinction. … Four years after the meeting at Berlin it was
found necessary to convene another conference of the Powers,
held on this occasion at Brussels, under the presidency of
Baron Lambermont, whose share in the success of the earlier
conference had been very marked and brilliant. The chief
object set before the new Conference was to devise means for
the abolition of the Slave Trade in Central Africa. … The
Conference lasted more than seven months, and it was not until
July, 1890, that the General Act bearing the signatures of the
Powers was agreed upon. It increased the obligations resting
on the State; its decisions, to which the Independent State
was itself a party, made the task more onerous, but at the
same time it sanctioned the necessary measures to give the
State the revenue needed for the execution of its new
programme. …
"Fresh from the Brussels Conference the Congo State threw

itself into the struggle with the Arabs. … Thanks to the skill
and energy with which the campaign was conducted the triumph
of the State was complete, and the downfall of the Arabs
sounded the knell of the slave trade, of which they were the
principal, and indeed the sole, promoters. The Arab campaign
did not conclude the military perils that beset the nascent
State. The Batetela contingent of the Public Force or native
army of the Congo mutinied in January, 1897, while on the
march to occupy the Lado district of the Upper Nile, and the
episode, ushered in in characters of blood by the
assassination of many Belgian officers, seemed to shake the
recently-constructed edifice to its base. But if the ordeal
was severe, the manner in which the authorities have triumphed
over their adversaries and surmounted their difficulties,
furnishes clear evidence of the stability of their power. The
Batetela mutineers have been overthrown in several signal
encounters, a mere handful of fugitives still survive, and
each mail brings news of their further dispersal. Even at the
moment of its occurrence the blow from the Batetela mutiny was
tempered by the success of the column under Commandant Chaltin in
overthrowing the Dervishes at Redjaf and in establishing the
State's authority on the part of the Nile assigned to it by
the Anglo-Congolese Convention of 1894. The triumphs of the
Congo State have, however, been those of peace and not of war.
With the exception of the operations named and the overthrow
of the despotism of the savage Msiri, the State's record is
one of unbroken tranquillity. These wars, little in magnitude
but great in their consequences, were necessary for the
suppression of the slave trade as well as for the legitimate
assertion of the authority of the Congo Government. But their
immediate consequence was the effective carrying out of the
clauses in the Penal Code making all participation in the
capture of slaves or in cannibalism a capital offence. That
was the primary task, the initial step, in the establishment
of civilisation in Central Africa, and of the credit for this
the Congo State cannot be deprived. When this was done there
remained the still more difficult task of saving the black
races from the evils which civilisation brings in its train
among an ignorant population incapable of self-control. The
import of firearms had to be checked in order to prevent an
untamed race indulging in internecine strife, or turning their
weapons upon the mere handful of Europeans engaged in the task
of regenerating the negroes. The necessary measures inspired
by the double motives of self-preservation and the welfare of
the blacks have been taken, and the State controls in the most
complete and effectual manner the importation of all weapons
and munitions of war. Nor has the success of the
administration been less clear or decisive in its control of
the liquor traffic."
Demetrius C. Boulger,
Twelve Years' Work on the Congo
(Fortnightly Review, October, 1898).
To a considerable extent this favorable view of the work of

the Belgians in the Congo State is sustained by the report
which a British Consul, Mr. Pickersgill, made to his
government in 1898. He wrote admiringly of the energy with
which the Belgians had overcome enormous difficulties in their
undertaking, and then asked: "Has this splendid invasion
justified itself by benefiting the aborigines? Equatorial
Africa is not a white man's country. He can never prove his
claim to sole possession of it by surviving as the fittest;
and without the black man's co-operation it can serve no
useful purpose to anybody. Has the welfare of the African,
then, whose prosperous existence is thus indispensable, been
duly cared for in the Congo State?" By way of answer to these
questions, his report sets forth, with apparently strict
fairness, the conditions produced in the country as he
carefully observed them. He found that much good had been done
to the natives by restrictions on the liquor trade, by an
extensive suppression of inter-tribal wars, and by a
diminution of cannibalism. Then comes a rehearsal of facts
which have a different look.
"The yoke of the notorious Arab slave-traders has been broken,

and traffic in human beings amongst the natives themselves has
been diminished to a considerable degree. Eulogy here begins
with a spurt and runs out thin at the end. But there is no
better way of recording the facts concisely. To hear, amidst
the story's wild surroundings, how Dhanis and Hinde, and their
intrepid comrades, threw themselves, time after time, upon the
strongholds of the banded men-stealers, until the Zone Arabe
was won in the name of freedom, is to thrill with admiration
of a gallant crusade. … But it is disappointing to see the
outcome of this lofty enterprise sink to a mere modification
of the evil that was so righteously attacked. Like the
Portuguese in Angola, the Belgians on the Congo have adopted
the system of requiring the slave to pay for his freedom by
serving a new master during a fixed term of years for wages
merely nominal. On this principle is based the 'serviçal'
system of the first-named possession, and the 'libéré' system
of the latter; the only difference between the two being that
the Portuguese Government permits limited re-enslavement for
the benefit of private individuals, but does not purchase on
its own account; while the Government of the Independent State
retains for itself an advantage which it taboos to everybody
else.
{153}
"The State supports this system because labour is more easily
obtainable thereby than by enforcing corvee amongst the free
people, and less expensively than by paying wages. The slave
so acquired, however, is supposed to have undergone a change
of status, and is baptized officially as a free man. After
seven years' service under the new name he is entitled to his
liberty complete. In Angola the limit is five years. The
natives are being drilled into the habit of regular work. …
The first Europeans who travelled inland of Matadi had to rely
entirely on porters from the coast, and it was not until the
missionaries had gained the confidence of the people, and
discovered individuals amongst them who could be trusted as
gangers, that the employment of local carriers became
feasible. The work was paid for, of course, and it is to the
credit of the State that the remuneration continued,
undiminished, after compulsion was applied. But how, it cannot
fail to be asked, did the necessity for compulsion arise? In
the same way that it has since arisen in connection with other
forms of labour: the State wished to get on faster than
circumstances would permit. Accordingly the Government
authorities prohibited the missionaries from recruiting where
porters were most easily obtained, and under the direction of
their military chief, the late Governor-General Wahis,
initiated a rigorous system of corvee. In spite of the
remuneration this was resisted, at first by the men liable to
serve absenting themselves from home, and afterwards, when the
State Officers began to seize their women and children as
hostages, by preparations for war. Deserting their villages,
the people of the caravan route took to the bush, and efforts
were made by the chiefs to bring about a general uprising of
the entire Cataract district. Things were in so critical a
condition that Colonel Wahis had to leave unpunished the
destruction of a Government station and the murder of the
officer in charge. Mainly through the influence of the
missionaries the general conflagration was prevented, but the
original outbreak continued to smoulder for months, and
transport work of all kinds had to be discontinued until means
were devised of equalising the burden of the corvee, and of
enlisting the co-operation of the chiefs in its management.
That was in 1894. Three years later the system appeared to be
working with remarkable smoothness. … Whatever views may be
held respecting the influence of the State at the present
stage of its schoolmaster task, there can be no doubt that the
condition, a year or two hence, of those sections of the
population about to be relieved from the transport service,
will afford conclusive evidence, one way or the other, of the
Government's civilising ability. … It needs no great knowledge
of coloured humanity to foresee that such pupils will quickly
relapse into good-for-nothingness more than aboriginal, unless
their education be continued. …
"One of the most obvious duties of an European Government

standing in 'loco parentis' to savage tribes, and exercising
'dominatio parentis' with an unspared rod, is to educate the
juvenile pagan. Since 1892 the Congo State has disbursed,
according to the published returns, taking one year with
another, about 6,000l. per annum, on this department of its
enterprise. It cannot be said, therefore, to have neglected
the duty entirely. A school for boys has been established at
Boma, and another at Nouvelle Anvers; while large numbers of
children of both sexes have been placed with the Roman
Catholic missionaries, in the same and other districts. Except
in one direction, however, the movement has not been very
successful. The young Africans thus blessed with a chance of
becoming loyal with intelligence are all waifs and strays, who
have been picked up by exploring parties and military
expeditions. Their homes are at the points of the compass, and
their speech is utter bewilderment. …
"A word must be said as to the employment of what are known as

'sentries.' A 'sentry' on the Congo is a dare-devil
aboriginal, chosen, from troops impressed outside the district
in which he serves, for his loyalty and force of character.
Armed with a rifle and a pouch of cartridges, he is located in
a native village to see that the labour for which its
inhabitants are responsible is duly attended to. If they are
India rubber collectors, his duty is to send the men into the
forest and take note of those who do not return with the
proper quantity. Where food is the tax demanded, his business
is to make sure that the women prepare and deliver it; and in
every other matter connected with the Government he is the
factotum, as far as that village is concerned, of the officer
of the district, his power being limited only by the amount of
zeal the latter may show in checking oppression. When
Governor-General Wahis returned from his tour of inspection he
seemed disposed to recommend the abolition of this system,
which is open to much abuse. But steps have not yet been taken
in that direction."
Great Britain, Parliamentary Publications

(Papers by Command: No. 459,
Miscellaneous Series, 1898, pages 7-12).
From this account of things it would seem that Mr. Boulger, in

the view quoted above from his article on the work of King
Leopold in the Congo country, had chosen to look only at what
is best in the results. On the other hand, the writer of the
following criticism in the "Spectator" of London may have
looked at nothing but the blacker side:
"King Leopold II., who, though he inherits some of the Coburg

kingcraft, is not a really able man, deceived by confidence in
his own great wealth and by the incurable Continental idea
that anybody can make money in the tropics if he is only hard
enough, undertook an enterprise wholly beyond his resources,
and by making revenue instead of good government his end,
spoiled the whole effect of his first successes. The Congo
Free State, covering a million square miles, that is, as large
as India, and containing a population supposed to exceed
forty-two millions, was committed by Europe to his charge in
absolute sovereignty, and at first there appeared to be no
resistance. Steamers and telegraphs and stations are trifles
to a millionaire, and there were any number of Belgian
engineers and young officers and clerks eager for employment.
The weak point of the undertaking, inadequate resources, soon,
however, became patent to the world. The King had the disposal
of a few white troops, but they were only Belgians, who suffer
greatly in tropical warfare, and his agents had to form an
acclimatised army 'on the cheap.' They engaged, therefore, the
fiercest blacks they could find, most of them cannibals, paid
them by tolerating license, and then endeavoured to maintain
their own authority by savage discipline.
{154}
The result was that the men, as events have proved, and as the
King seems in his apologia to admit, were always on the verge
of mutiny, and that the native tribes, with their advantages
of position, numbers, and knowledge of the forest and the
swamps, proved at least as good fighters as most of the forces
of the Congo State. So great, however, is the intellectual
superiority of white men, so immeasurable the advantage
involved in any tincture science, that the Belgians might
still have prevailed but for the absolute necessity of
obtaining money. They could not wait for the growth of
resources under scientific taxation such as will follow Mr.
Mitchell Innes's financial reforms in Siam, but attempted to
obtain them from direct taxation and monopolies, especially
that of rubber. Resistance was punished with a savage cruelty,
which we are quite ready to believe was not the original
intention of the Belgians, but which could not be avoided when
the only mode of punishing a village was to let loose black
cannibals on it to work their will, and which gradually
hardened even the Europeans, and the consequence was universal
disloyalty. The braver tribes fought with desperation, the
black troops were at once cowed and attracted by their
opponents, the black porters and agriculturists became secret
enemies, all were kept in order by terror alone, and we all
see the result. The Belgians are beaten; their chiefs, Baron
Dhanis and Major Lothaire, are believed to be prisoners; and
the vast territories of the far interior, whence alone rubber
can now be obtained, are already lost. … The administration on
the spot is tainted by the history of its cruelties and its
failures, and there are not the means in Brussels of replacing
it by competent officials, or of supplying them with the
considerable means required for what must now be a deliberate
reconquest."
Spectator (London),
February 4, 1899.

Expiration of the Belgian Convention of 1890.
King Leopold's will.
Three days after the close of the year 1900, the Convention of
1890, which regulated for a period of ten years the relations
between Belgium and the Congo State, expired by lapse of time,
but was likely to be renewed. The chief provisions of the
Convention were
(1) that Belgium should advance to the Congo State a loan of

25,000,000f. (£1,000,000), free of interest, of which
one-fifth was payable at sight and the balance in ten yearly
instalments of 2,000,000f. each;
(2) Belgium acquired within six months of the final payment

the option of annexing the Congo State with all the rights and
appurtenances of sovereignty attaching thereto; or
(3) if Belgium did not avail herself of this right the loan
was only redeemable after a further period of ten years, but
became subject to interest at the rate of 3, per cent. per
annum.
The will of King Leopold, executed in 1889, runs as follows:
"We bequeath and transmit to Belgium, after our death, all our
Sovereign rights to the Congo Free State, such as they have been
recognized by the declarations, conventions, and treaties,
drawn up since 1884, on the one hand between the International
Association of the Congo, and on the other hand the Free State,
as well as all the property, rights, and advantages, accruing
from such sovereignty. Until such time as the Legislature of

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Labour Power Virtual And Actual In

Digital Production Roberto Ciccarelli

The Sky Weaver 1st Edition Kristen Ciccarelli

The Digital Gaming Handbook 1st Edition Roberto Dillon

The Digital Gaming Handbook 1st Edition Dr. Roberto

One Origin of Digital Humanities Fr Roberto Busa in His

Living and Dying in a Virtual World: Digital Kinships,

Technology and Creativity: Production, Mediation and

Psychology 5th Edition Saundra K. Ciccarelli

Fear and Uncertainty in Europe Roberto Belloni

Translated by Emma Catherine Gainsforth

ISSN 2195-1934 ISSN 2195-1942 (electronic)

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

1 About Labour-Power. A Philosophical Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Conclusions: What Can Labour-Power Do? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167

1.1 The Problem with “Power”

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 1

1.2 Spinoza and Marx and the Theory of Labour-Power

1 See Ciccarelli [1, 2].

their activity. This thesis is incomprehensible for the Cartesian-Kantian philosophical

7 See Chatelet [9, 45 ff].

is called appetite (appetitus). Conatus is called desire (cupiditas) when individuals

13 B. Spinoza, The Ethics, III, 48, dem., 302.

selling labour-power, what has priority is a labour-power imbued with virtualities

1. Ciccarelli, R.: Capitale disumano. La vita in alternanza scuola-lavoro. Manifestolibri, Rome

12. Negri, A.: Spinoza et nous. Galilée, Paris (2012)

2.1 The Dark Side of the Digital Revolution

Editors of TV programs sometimes ask me to provide them with a human case.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 9

2.2 Brand New Future or Golden Age

1 See Marvit [1].

2.3 Human, Too Human: Capital

Labour-power is like a coffer containing power, it is the most important faculty of

Labour-power lives between and within the bastions of subordinate employment, of

3 See Foucault [4].

identities shaped by the dominant representation, construct alliances in a world that

5 See Rancière [7].

2.5 The Fifth Estate

7 See Allegri and Ciccarelli [8].

12 Crenshaw [15], Davis [16].

2.6 Intersection and Multipositionality

feminist theory see Dorlin [21].

2.7 The Faculty of Faculties

The absence of an investigation into labour-power continues to weigh on the philo-

17 See Rawls [22].

founds a critique of contemporary subjectivity, allows to rescue the labour-power

"Some of those employed in the library service have been

'Q. It would be difficult to describe a worse condition than

'A. It would, for the condition of books. It would be all

"The folders, taking the orders of members rather than those

"We have been unable to inquire as much into specific

"Third, division of salaries.—According to the testimony of

CLERICAL PARTY: Austria.

See (in this volume)

CLERICAL PARTY: Belgium.

See (in this volume)

See (in volume 5 and in this volume.)

See (in this volume)

See (in this volume)

See (in this volume)

CLEVELAND, OHIO: A. D. 1896.

The centennial anniversary of the founding of the city was

COAL MINERS, Strikes among.