The original essay is part of the book 'The Idea of Communism' (2010), edited by Slavoj Zizek and Costas Douzinas. Published by Verso.
Early on in the essay, Negri appears to be making a rather astute observation. He claims that capitalism, or rather the resistance to it in the form of class struggle, is the only form in which history is cognizable to us. What may a possible objection to this be? This is usually the position where both religious and romantic objections enter the picture 'the permanent subsistence of a use-value - or rather a faith in this is how he identifies it; whether it be the value of labor power, nature, or whatever.
If orthodox Marxists once claimed that it is human labor that mediates relations with nature, a form of production suitable for life results, commonly termed the mode of production - which may include the organization of the economy, contractual relations etc.
Yet, Negri - at least in this essay begins by bypassing this argument as it were by asserting that the relation between the boss and the worker is invested by exploitation and that this exploitation is an investment by institutions that organize the production and circulation of profit. An interesting arrangement to be certain, yet one which divests the original relation between lord and bondsman from any agential role in the production of surplus-value, which becomes de facto imperialized, mediated and controlled by 'institutions' which here would mean companies, firms, and of course banks. A far cry from any investigation of primitive accumulation by any means. Indeed, if I may add - perhaps prematurely - this self-proclaimed communist here does appear to be more invested in specifying the correct form of capitalism; which let us call financial - than he is in willing to entertain the proposition of it being one among, indeed a historical continuum of modes of production - which is what class struggle today may appear as.
The following point is repeated and emphasized in this essay: the centrality of exchange value in the face of the impermanence of use. I think we should pause for a moment here to reflect on what kind of a social reality Negri may be trying to represent. This is indeed also the same essay where he asserts the conviction that there is no longer an outside. Our private echo chambers have melted as it were in the cauldron of the internet, fed by our very activities. When he thus says that the substance of subjects is now totally inside - I cannot but posit that such a totality, like Capital cannot abide by its own limits and hence has lost not merely the sense of an exteriority but even the possibility of its consideration.
A reason why Marxists indeed why sociologists bother studying the mode of production at all is the simple fact that even today, in the age of the internet, post the cellular revolution in communicational technologies - our relations, between a man, and his community - are not unmediated. Our relations to the mode of production for instance is not some umbilicalchord from which we may be plucked like the proverbial apple on the tree. And Negri, I am sure realizes this when he cites the ultimate mediating tool - money, as standing in for or fulfilling the role of the Community, and even here I would state that we would be in far saner harbors in entertaining the Simmelian proposition, however conservative - of money being a claim upon society.
Why am I trying to refurbish the category of use-value from its seeming subsumption into exchange? There may be several reasons, foremost however is the fact that our interdependence on exchanges - to put together even simple productive relations in society, and the commonality and transmissibility of money as a medium that may facilitate this cannot account for or dictate the use which we may put the product of these exchanges to. This remains ultimately the use of a commodity to me, you or anyone else. Negri seems trapped in the very logic he may have once sought to combat in insisting on exchange for the sake of further exchanging - losing sight perhaps of what the exchange was for.
This was the first point of difference I wanted to make clear in this response to the essay. The second point is more a question of approach. - "Philosophical imagination can give color to the real but cannot replace the effort of history-making: the event is always a result, never a starting point." This certainly may be read as a politics of prefiguration - an understanding which can be difficult to sustain among exigencies, however appreciable its efforts may be. It, the politics of prefiguration as it were, also marks the point where an ontologist such as Badiou for instance would differ strongly from Negri. For Badiou, for an event to truly constitute a break or rupture - there has to be no way it could have been deducible from the order in operation earlier, in other words, no way in which it could have been prefigured - or to put it plainly, determined.
There are positions posited here which I think are laudable. When for instance Negri clarifies what he means by what it means to be against the state he posits it would include expressing the desire and ability to 'manage the entire system of production, including the division of labor, and the accumulation and redistribution of wealth, in a radically democratic way...' This is of course a leap beyond petty or as Lenin once named them, infantile left-wing communists. Who would denounce the state without positing any mechanism via which it's regulatory and distributive mechanisms may be replaced or repurposed. I think in contemporary times we see a great example of such reasoning in operation when Scholarism - the movement against the implementation of national education in Hong Kong (2015) led by Joshua Wong was met by the Chinese Premier; a question was posed which no progressive party can take lightly. Simply put, the terms of the debate cannot merely be whether to include or exclude 'national education' in Hong Kong. If this issue is raised it will also have to include a valid alternative for national education were it to be discarded.
This example also allows us to introduce how Negri envisions the relations of a subject to institutions. Indeed, Negri defines the multitude as a totality made out of institutions, and here he seems to be offering us the possibility of a weak mediation, for he asserts that in our biopolitical capitalist societies, it is governance that is not merely generalized but placed in a state of flux, such as seen between a movement and an instituted response to it. His most interesting point which this argument leads to, entertaining the rather heterogenous proposition of the multitude being 'a totality of desires, and trajectories of resistance, struggle and constituent power.' Here, communism exists not as an end but as a condition in the 'development of singularities... as a tension, tendency and metamorphosis.' A few brief observations are to be made here. Negri entertains the hypothesis that the production of subjectivity is vital and instrumental to relation in the capitalist, or any other mode of production. Yet when confronting this subjectivity, instead of citing any institutional relations or responsibilities chooses the category of multitude to reflect the heterogeneity of any possible singularities that this may lead to. Here, his invocation of the institutions appears to be not much more than a placeholder, and perhaps no more progressive than the institution of custom.
Worth recounting is his position on ethics as that which seeks the common against privacy. Less well formed, I would say are his '3 elements of a communist ethics' - 1. revolt against the state, 2. common militancy 3. production of institutions. Here, however steadfast the resolve of the subject in question; it will be observed that resistance to the state via a common militancy rarely leads to the production of any institutions.
In following his argument, you would notice that the construction of a struggle depicted by him makes a rather neat dyad about the contesting parties. The multitude, as the expression of the proletariat on one hand, and on the other - the disciplinary arrogance of the bourgeosie which is coupled with the repressive vocation of the state. It will be observed that the bourgeoise and the state are not tidy bedfellows, though in these repressive times this may be changing. More importantly however, the proletariat's greatest weapon will remain its discipline - which is the form labour power takes when subjected to a will; that is purposeful effort. Indeed, several historians will observe the history of the labour movement as transitions in its discipline marked by changing understandings of the situation and the mode of production. And I believe even newer tendencies such as studies into the micropolitics of desire inspired by Deleuze and Guattari would have much to add regarding disciplinary practices from origami, architecture to the production of concepts themselves.
And here professor Negri does indeed re-introduce what he calls a practice of use value, but one which he would like to situate inside a history made by struggles, as apposed to outside perhaps in the market which you will notice is also a site of struggle - but one which does not lie within the ambit of Negri's interiority. The practice is however composed, in his words as: 'an expression, a language and a practice.' This use value, the common, is what Negri withdraws from capitalist alienation and state command.
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