Matteo Mandarini

Antagonism, Contradiction, Time: Conflict and Organization in Antonio Negri

Antonio Negri’s militant conception of organization undergoes several shifts over almost half a century of commitment to the critique of capital and to the development of a communist politics. Notwithstanding these shifts, there persists, throughout his thinking, a forceful undercutting of all homologies, objectivisms and determinisms. Building upon the notion of ‘class composition’ in order to analyse the (re-)production of capitalist relations, Negri reveals how this notion shortcircuits the linear, deterministic understanding of ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’, ‘forces’ and ‘relations of production’ and – at the same time – breaks the homology between workers and capital that, all too often, has been characteristic of orthodox Marxism. Negri’s notion of organization affirms the discontinuities of development and the antagonism of the non-homologous because it comprehends how production is always in the service of reproduction and that elements of the latter are caught up in the former; and because capitalist organization supervenes upon a working class that is both within and against capital, i.e., is nonhomologous with capitalist logic. The working class progressively asserts itself and its forms of organization against those of capital, blocking any simple cyclicality between production and reproduction. According to Negri, capital posits the working class subject and organizes it technically (at the level of production) and politically (at the level of reproduction). Since it is posited only insofar as it can be exploited, the working class is immediately antagonistic. Thus, it refuses the capitalist form of organization and develops its own forms by way of a subversive re-appropriation of capitalist organization and the progressive development of a dialectic of separation that shatters the recuperative dialectic of capital. What we uncover in Negri is the passage from an understanding of the proletarian subject as determined by dialectical conflict with capitalism to one in which this subject is constituted in its autonomy from capitalist organization. It is impossible to discuss the question of organization in Negri’s work without providing a general outline of his political theory. I will also try to show that, for all the theoretical and practical fractures in the development of his

Critical Thoughts on the Politics of Immanence

This intervention aims to question the opposition between a ‘politics of immanence’ and a ‘politics of transcendence’ through a critical assessment of some contemporary philosophical approaches to politics and a reappraisal of Mario Tronti’s account of the autonomy of the political. I shall argue that the contrast between immanence and transcendence is ultimately politically disabling, as it fails to provide an adequate position from which to situate a political thinking and practice.