Toscano Factory Territory Metropolis

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Factory, territory, metropolis, EmpireAlberto Toscano

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alberto toscano

FACTORY,TERRITORY,METROPOLIS, EMPIRE

A N G E L A K Ijournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 9 number 2 august 2004

New figures, or larval forms, of politicalorganization and often opaque redistribu-

tions of geopolitical power, coupled with a welterof communicative, technological, and economicmutations, have given rise lately to what someregard as a “spatial turn” in the social sciences.1

The unrelenting and often inconsistent prolifera-tion of discourses on so-called globalization, ac-companied by a host of descriptive enquiriesinto the changing patterns of contemporary life,display a marked obsession with all things spa-tial; a relentless, if often monotonous, usage oftopographic metaphors and topological concepts.We are swamped by diagrams, cartographies,networks, dwellings, frontiers, and so on. Thesources for this tendency are very heteroge-neous, but they do appear to derive, whethersociologically, philosophically or politically,from a mounting suspicion of models ofmodernity that couple the lucid rationality andimposing will of a sovereign ego with a resextensa reduced to an indifferent, objective do-main of coordination, calculation and control,itself directed by the temporal dimension of aproject. Whether we are dealing with debatesover the “global” or with the turn to Heidegger’snostalgic ontology of habitation, spatialspecificity is often enlisted to inhibit or under-mine the pretensions of the kind of universaltheory or politics that would smooth over thefolds of particularity.2

When a commitment to such a universal ac-count remains, spatial differentiation schema-tizes the general theory into a particularconjuncture.3 Whilst work of this kind maintainsa commendable balance of scientific ambitionand non-reductionist attention to the differentlogics, political and economic, at work in thespatial reality of politics, it arguably suffers from

a tendency to envelop spatial differentiationwithin systemic logics that elide the generativerole of political subjectivity, and social antago-nism. This is not at all to say that such ap-proaches need to be supplemented with a kind ofphenomenology of resistance or, worse still, withan anti-universalist discourse of spatio-culturalparticularity or difference. The point instead isthat the “spatial turn” is often marked by whatcould be termed a deficit of praxis, of thatexquisitely materialist concern with the effects ofcollective political action, subjectivity and orga-nization on the composition of the social and thefunctions of command.4 If the vast and multifar-ious interrogation of the multiple spaces of con-temporary social experience is not to turn into amore or less reactionary, anti-modernist nostal-

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factory, territory, metropolis, empire

gia, a parochial theory of cultural differences ora fatalistic logic of systemic transformation; if itis to enter into some sort of dialogue with theresurgence of interest, practical and philosophi-cal, for notions of militancy and organization,then it is imperative to begin formulating a trulypolitical topology, one that binds together thesubjective forms of political action and the shift-ing configurations of space. What is required isa thinking of the antagonistic, or, at the veryleast, agonistic production of space, not just anaccount of the heterotopias of resistance or thecreative destruction of space that accompaniescapitalist accumulation.

As a kind of prolegomenon to such an enter-prise, and for the sake of a coherent localizationof this political topology itself,5 I would likebriefly to interrogate, both theoretically and his-torically, a very definite political sequencewhich, I will argue, bears some important les-sons for a political thinking of space that is toeschew the many pitfalls of the spatial turn,from romantic nostalgia to systemic fatalism,from the naturalization of the social to an exoti-cist condescension to cultural difference. Thissequence is the one that goes by the somewhatimprecise name of Italian workerist or au-tonomist Marxism (operaismo), emerging inconjunction with the factory struggles of the1960s through the journal Quaderni rossi,branching into a number of political and intel-lectual projects, reaching its point of organiza-tional crisis in the late 1970s, and spreading itstheoretical influence to the present day in anumber of antagonistic movements (Tute bi-anche, Disobbedienti) and, most prominently, inthe theoretical production of one of its origina-tors, the philosopher Antonio Negri.6

The choice of workerism as the object of apreliminary enquiry into political topology ismotivated principally by two factors. First, thenexus of theoretical production and politicalmilitancy represented by this “tradition,” forwant of a better word,7 is particularly rich,spanning a period of considerable social tumultand transformation and intense political conflict.What is of particular interest is the manner inwhich theorists of workerism, whose aims wheremore often than not explicitly political, tried to

anticipate material transformations and spur pol-itical strategies – as well as the manner in whichthey were also forced to reckon with changes inthe political terrain they had not entirely fath-omed. Furthermore, its combination of criticalfidelity to Marxism as a theory of social trans-formation and political practice, coupled with itsemphasis on organizational experimentation,make of workerism a privileged instance fortrying to glean how we may begin to thinkspatiality or placement in terms of the two inter-linked dimensions of materialism: as a theory ofpraxis or subjectivation, on the one hand, and asa theory of historical change, on the other.Second, the prolongation of the workerist inspi-ration in the much disputed work of Negri andHardt – in the way they describe the productionof a smooth space of capital regulated by aplaceless imperial sovereignty as the product ofthe militancy and desires of the multitude –warrants renewed examination of its political andtheoretical sources, both to veer away from themost simplistic criticisms of Empire and to re-ally grasp the sources, the archaeology as it were,of a prominent contribution to the formulationof a contemporary political topology.

I would like to take my cue from a verysimple question, albeit one that has gained acertain urgency in the wake of the widespread, ifcontradictory, attempts to fashion new forms ofpolitical militancy adequate to current dynamicsof accumulation and command: how might thelocalization of political action, the kinds ofplaces in which it is anchored or dimensions ittraverses, affect its claims and its consequences?Or – to apply the key workerist thesis of theprimacy of labour over capital, of resistance overpower – how does political antagonism aroundthe loci of production and accumulation giverise, in the processes of conflict, negotiation, andcompromise, to different spatial configurations?Flashing forward, what is the effect of the dislo-cation of the intimate bearer of antagonismwithin the capitalist system, when any“proletariat” or “multitude” can no longer befound anchored and included in a specific locus,both material and symbolic, of society? Viceversa, does the differential localization of a frag-mented labour-power, in the absence of a real

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subjective unification, of a paradigmatic figure(the working class organized in the party) and aproper place (the factory, or the assembly) allowanything like the self-destitution that is the hall-mark of any theory of the proletariat as theinstance of a generic emancipation? More con-cretely: where does militancy take place, what, toborrow from Sylvain Lazarus,8 are the “places ofpolitics,” and in what sense do they overlap withthe places of the economy, the sites of capitalistexploitation and accumulation or those of spatio-temporal “fixes”; led by processes of what Har-vey has recently dubbed, with reference to theoccupation of Iraq, “accumulation by disposses-sion”?9 Should the conception of space be con-sidered to be in a dialectical relationship to thatof political antagonism? Indeed, one of the ques-tions that needs to be addressed by any politicaltopology that wishes to incorporate into itself adiscourse on subjectivity is whether politicalorganization is necessarily bound to some sort ofspatial composition, whether in the sense offollowing the configuration of social space or ofeliciting its transformation. In other words, whatis the precise nature of the correlation betweenthe objective political space of the factory andthe subjective form of the party or the union, orbetween the “delirious” metropolis and auton-omous instances of appropriation and occu-pation, or, more recently, between the politicalconstitution of Empire and the movement ofsocial forums? And, in all these cases, is econom-ics what “sutures” politics to place, in the guiseof the anchoring of a labouring subjectivity tothe material locus of a given mode of pro-duction? Or is our task instead, as authors suchas Lazarus and Badiou contend, to think theplaces of politics, the topologies of militancy andsubjectivity, without a reliance on their localiza-tion within a system of economic accumulation,circulation, reproduction?

The Marxist and Leninist legacy that stillinfluences much radical politics, for good or ill,crucially depends on the postulation of a criticalpoint, a localization of antagonism within thesocial totality of capitalism, a “weakest link” inthe capitalist chain or, in its workerist guise,“the material lever of the dissolution of capitalplanted in the decisive point of its system”: can

any such point, or points, be identified today?10

Inasmuch as we recognize the debates that affec-ted the revolutionary left from the 1960s onwardas being accompanied by shifts in political topol-ogy, is it possible to understand the practicaland theoretical disputes over issues such as orga-nization and strategy as either the product or theinstigator of spatial displacements in the sites ofantagonism and militancy? Traversing thephases of development of the workerist traditionfrom the centrality of the factory to the non-place of contemporary capitalism in its imperialfigure is perhaps not the worst place to start togain some analytical purchase on the presenttasks of a political topology. For one, it allows usto bridge the gap between current debates overthe tactics and strategies of a “Global JusticeMovement” converging on “World Social Fo-rums,” and the long tradition of theoretical in-sights and organizational forms bequeathed bythe workers’ movement and the Marxist tra-dition from the nineteenth century onward. Ar-guably poised at the tumultuous twilight of whatwe might see as the “classical” form of thepolitical topology of antagonism, workerism,with its sensitivity to the crises that beset ortho-dox models of the relation between politics andspace, and with its concern with anticipating (inorder to deflect or transform) new regimes ofspatialization, accumulation and command, re-mains a rich source for a sustained interrogationof current spatial forms and practices.

Throughout the discontinuous and contested his-tory of workerism there is arguably a constanttension, perspicuously emphasized by SteveWright, between, on the one hand, the expla-nation of the tendencies guiding the transform-ation of capitalism and its state form, and, onthe other, the militant assumption and contesta-tion of these changes in political action. Thequestion turns out to be exquisitely spatial, andrelates to whether the extension of what Trontiinfluentially called the “social factory” (fabbrica-societa) – the consequence of the “real subsump-tion”11 of all labour and all social relation to therequirements of capitalist accumulation – stilldemands the identification of the factory and the

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wage as the key sites of struggle; or whether, onthe contrary, the increasing diffusion and decen-tralization of production and antagonism,marked by the explosive growth of the servicesector and diminution of manufacturing andmanned heavy industry, leads to acknowledgingthe necessity for different forms of struggle,different figures of organization and subjectivity– perhaps ones that evade the dialectical articula-tion that had been afforded by the centrality ofthe factory.

In the specific case of workerism, the analysisof the problem of the place of politics wasfiltered throughout by its signal conceptual con-tribution to the intellectual arsenal of Marxism:the notion of class composition. Like most of theconcepts gleaned by Tronti, Negri and othersfrom Marx (such as “social worker,” “generalintellect,” “tendency,” “real subsumption”),class composition was formulated on the basis ofthe urgent necessity to anticipate the transforma-tions and command strategies of capital, on theone hand, and contribute to the consolidation ofan organized proletarian subject, on the other.Negri defines class composition as

the combination of political and material char-acteristics – both historical and physical –which makes up: (a) on the one hand, thehistorically given structure of labour-power, inall its manifestations, as produced by a givenlevel of productive forces and relations; and (b)on the other hand, the working class as adeterminate level of solidification of needs anddesires, as a dynamic subject, an antagonisticforce, tending towards its own independentidentity in historical-political terms. All con-cepts that define the working class must beframed in terms of the historical trans-formability of the composition of class. Thisis to be understood in the general sense of itsever wider and more refined productive ca-pacity, the ever greater abstraction and social-isation of its nature, and the ever greaterintensity and weight of the political challengeit presents to capital. In other words, there-making of the working class!12

As I shall argue, the question that persistentlypreoccupied the various theories of workerism –how to combine the structural vicissitudes of

labour-power with the organized politicization ofthe needs and desires of the working class – wasalways spatially articulated or indexed, and in-evitably so, one might add, such that the crisisof the large factory as the privileged place ofpolitics was of momentous importance to boththe theory and the practice of workerism. Whatis more, with the diffusion of production and thedissemination of labour-power occurring in the1970s – diagnosed by workerists as a politicalresponse on the part of the state to the manifes-tations of workers’ autonomy – one might evenargue that the Leninist focus on the criticalpoint, the lever of revolution, lost its own index,left to float, diaphanous, over a highly differenti-ated, dishomogeneous social terrain, or forcedinto life via the violent confrontation with thestate, a confrontation which, having lost or aban-doned the centrality of the factory, was beyondthe dialectics of recuperation. Negri’s remakingof the working class here manifests all of itsproblematicity, since the subjective recomposi-tion of the class was, especially as the decade ofthe 1970s wore on, an explicit response to theeffects of capitalist restructuring, effects amongwhich the tendential disappearance of a place oflabour was first and foremost. In light of theinternal debates and destiny of workerism, wecould even hazard the hypothesis that in thearticulation of the two dimensions of class com-position highlighted by Negri – “technical” and“political” composition13 – the question of thespatial composition of class becomes ofparamount importance, dictating both the politi-cal strategies of workerism and its theoreticalvalence. In this regard, its experience of thecollapse of the factory as the site of the dialecti-cal articulation of the structural and militantdimension of class, and their overall placementwith a social totality, rendered it sensitive to thepotentially disjunctive character of social spaces,divided between production and politics with noa priori fit being provided.

It might be useful at this point to spare acouple of words about the question of method.Most, if not all, the authors working in the orbitof workerism share two broad theoretical com-mitments. The first is to the aforementionednotion of “class composition,” the gist of which

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is that any militant Marxism must concern itselfnot just with the objective analysis of the rela-tion of labour to the means of production andthe functions of command of capital but alsowith the dynamics of internal differentiation ofthe working class and their influence on itscapacities for organization and antagonism. Thesecond, which relies on this preoccupation withthe antagonistic motor of the process of capital-ist accumulation, is an interpretation of thetransformations in the political configuration ofcapitalism and its means of domination from theangle of its most advanced, and in a certainsense “revolutionary,” sectors: a method of ten-dency, as Negri referred to it, in which themovement toward an ever more intense socializa-tion of capital and “real subsumption” of societyby capital is taken as the analytical key throughwhich to grasp, anticipate and intervene in con-crete political conjunctures. The theory is thusitself shot through with a kind of insurgentsubjectivity, with an overt partisan hostility todetached contemplation (which it deems an-chored in the denial of division) and scientificdisinterest (whose systemic ties it finds easy toreveal, namely in the class composition of thefigure of the expert or technician), thereby fore-grounding its specific temporal regime: a parti-san theory that fuels a recomposition of classand a political strategy and organization by an-ticipating the future moves of capitalist com-mand, through an analysis of the tendencies atwork in the organization and localization of pro-duction.

The accelerated modernization undergone byItaly in the post-war period, with its massiveinternal migrations (from the agricultural Southto the industrial North) and rapid urbanizationhad a profound impact on the theoretical tenden-cies and political tactics of the dissident left ofthe Italian Communist Party (PCI) and ItalianSocialist Party (PSI) and in particular of extra-parliamentary groups that formed in the wake ofthe strikes and mobilization of the so-called “hotautumn” of 1969. The 1950s and 1960s wit-nessed a thorough rearrangement of the relationbetween class composition and the political car-

tography of production, consumption and circu-lation, such that the Italian cities that Sartre hadsingled out in Search for a Method for theirevasion of a classist topography, of the kindinstead visible in Paris, were now far more“striated” by the cycle of production.14 AsBalestrini and Moroni note, this was a period inwhich the streets “became the assembly chainsof the work force.”15 In this regard, the import-ance of migration and overwhelming transform-ation of Northern industrial cities under theguidance of capitalist planning cannot be under-estimated – especially for the manner in which itspurred the theoretical and political work ofItalian Marxists. This is not just in terms ofdislocation and the uprooting, if not obliteration,of spatially entrenched existential patterns, thecultural dispossession and destruction that hasnotoriously accompanied capitalism ever sinceits inception.16 It also entails a deeply ambivalentphenomenon: on the one hand, the radical dis-ruption of the political memory sedimented incertain experiences of social space (say, the ex-perience of the artisan or professional worker ascompared to that of the displaced and“disqualified” mass worker), on the other, theemancipation from political inhibitions and ir-rational allegiances that comes with the evacu-ation of cultural and territorial ties.

Danilo Montaldi, a path-breaking and un-orthodox socialist thinker, one of the forebearsof workerism, made the following observationsabout the new visage of the industrial metrop-olis:

In Milan, “time” and “space” have differentmeanings than those of the humanism whosepassing is lamented in our universities. Neithertime nor space must remain “empty.” […] Theowner of a condominium had placed in sixapartments, of three rooms each, eighteenfamilies: one family per room, with sharedamenities. […] From the digs and galleries ofthe metro rise up all the dialects of Italy […].It is especially in common dives and commutertrains that one can still hear talk of politics interms of wages and work hours. The silencethat elsewhere dominates the mass constitutes,for the sake of the continuity of the City’srhythms, an even stronger armature than the

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newly restored buildings. […] The City, ex-panding the frontiers of the public until thefarthest moral peripheries, multiplies withinthe reaches of its horizons, the attacks onhabits and traditions.17

The effects of this massive dislocation of thesocial geography of Italy – aesthetically encapsu-lated by the passage from the neo-realist city ofthe immediate post-war period (The BicycleThief) to the alienated urban landscapes of An-tonioni (La Notte) – arguably lay the perilousfoundations for a later phase that saw the un-furling of Lotta Continua’s 1970 congress sloganPrendiamoci la citta (Let’s Take the City) andthe theorization by Potere Operaio of the appro-priation of autonomous spaces, or basi rosse (redbases),18 not to mention an extension of socialconflict outside of the factory gates and into themetropolitan arena.

The drastic transformation testified byBalestrini and Montaldi, with all its subjectiveand cultural effects, was openly promoted bywhat Negri would refer to as the “planner-state”and focused on the factory as both physical andsymbolic space. The theorists working inQuaderni rossi thus turned to enquiries into thechanged experience of class composition, to akind of militant sociology concerned, for in-stance, with the particular subjectivity of thenew workers from the South, but also to arenewal of Marxist theory on the basis of thisItalian phenomenon.19 It is thus that the theor-etical thrust of workerism, whilst elicited bysuch phenomena of modernization and disloca-tion, came to be fashioned, first of all, in aradical reflection on the antagonism betweenlabour and capital as localized in the factory –conceived as the critical point of articulation ofthe capitalist system of exploitation and thesubjective, organizational resources of the work-ing class.

In its inaugural formulation, as set forth inTronti’s seminal Operai e capitale, the factory isa strategically and “genetically” totalizing partic-ularity within the system of production, theprivileged site of a partisan comprehension ofthe whole from the part upon which the wholedepends. In Tronti’s early work this objective

and subjective centrality of the factory is charac-teristically dissimulated by the fetishistic logic ofcapital, it appears as a mere moment, at the verypoint where capitalism is moving toward realsubsumption and the factory is de facto thematerial and spatial schema of all social exist-ence. As he writes:

The more capitalist production penetrates indepth and invades in extension the totality ofsocial relations, the more society appears as atotality with respect to production and pro-duction as a particularity with respect tosociety. When the particular is generalised, isuniversalised, it appears as represented in thegeneral, the universal. In the capitalist socialrelation of production, the generalisation ofproduction is expressed as the hypostasis ofsociety. When specifically capitalist pro-duction has woven the entire net of socialrelations, it itself now appears as a genericsocial relation.20

The political use of the factory as a site forpolitical mobilization, organization and conflictthus depends on an organized subjective reversalwhich takes cognizance of the extension of thefactory as a political and economic reality ontothe whole social terrain. Focusing the antagon-istic efforts of the working class on using thefactory as a lever for attacking capital meansboth recognizing the tendency of the politicallogic of production to produce a social factoryand anticipating or counter-actualizing this ten-dency by turning the factory into the destructivepart at the centre of the social whole:

The more capitalist development advances,that is, the more it penetrates and extendsthe production of relative surplus value, themore the production–distribution–exchange–consumption cycle tightens, the more, that is,the relation between capitalist production andbourgeois society, factory and society, societyand State becomes organic.21

What must be avoided at all costs is acceptingthe appearance, arising from the boundless ex-tension of capitalist relations, that society is nolonger moved and riven by the antagonisticstructure of production. Beneath the organicsemblance that makes of the factory a mere

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moment, the militant task is, in the same ges-ture, to exacerbate the “anorganic” antagonismof the working class and to affirm the factory asthe matrix of this society, not just a mere mo-ment. As Luciano Ferrari Bravo perspicuouslynotes, the seeming pacification brought about bythe dissolution of the factory itself as a site ofantagonism, when viewed from the angle of thetheory of the social factory, reveals itself as builton an armature of command, a structure ofpower which extends domination further andfurther into the social fabric rather than dissipat-ing it in a set of local negotiations:

Social factory, capitalist social plan: within thefirst historical realisation of this movement isborn the optical that sees the “extinction” ofthe exponential agglomerate of social violence.One is not able immediately to see that thesocial diffusion domination, the apparent“appeasement” of “politics” and “economics”necessarily harbours within itself the concen-tration of factory despotism on the whole ofsociety.22

Needless to say, the question of revealing thefactory as a “critical” locus, a matricial particu-larity, is an eminently practical one, since itinvolves the organized affirmation of labour asthe exploited power which is cloaked by theseeming rationality of the social organization ofproduction.

This political reaffirmation of the centrality ofthe factory, however, cannot be simply deducedfrom the thesis of the social factory. In hisjudicious assessment of the various impasses, atonce political and theoretical, of workerism,Steve Wright directs our attention to the stra-tegic ambivalence arising from this thesis. If wedo not entirely endorse the dialectical matrix ofTronti’s argument, which identifies the factory,qua site of the immediate process of production,as the privileged site for forcing antagonism intothe apparent social peace planned by the state,then it becomes difficult to adjudicate theoreti-cally whether the notion of the social factory isto be read as a call to remain with the factoryand the political forms it has traditionally givenrise to, anchored as they are to particular formsof struggle (strike, sabotage, demonstration,

negotiation) and centred on the (Leninist orsocial-democratic) party, or, alternatively,whether the task is that of inventing new modesof political behaviour capable of assuming thequalitative jump generated by the spreading ofsocial factory – such that the anti-capitalist“lever” might lie elsewhere (or nowhere in par-ticular …).23 On one level, we could argue, infavour of Tronti, that the creeping generalizationof the factory, of “industrial production,” tocover the whole of “social production” (orrather, to make the social itself a matter ofproduction in the capitalist sense), does not perse obviate the privileged localization of the fac-tory – inasmuch as the latter is the one sitewhere the reality behind the seeming pacificationof the social factory can appear for what it is,and that the class struggle can be made explicit,organized and expanded. There is here also therealization, on Tronti’s part, that this is a mo-ment to be seized, a kairos for political actionwhich, once the conjuncture has been well andtruly worked over by capitalist socialization, maynever return. On another level, it is difficult toshake off the impression, corroborated byWright, of a tension between Tronti’s brilliantupdating of Marx to the Italian situation and themore rigid localization of his extremely antagon-istic dialectics in the factory. The latter suggeststhat his political topology might depend, if noton a teleology – of the kind that elsewhereheralded the onset of a dedifferentiated worldmarket – at least on a determinate law-liketendency, without which nothing would guaran-tee the role of this place, the factory. In Tronti’sseminal work this law is, of course, not theobjective law of transition between modes ofproduction, but the far more subjective “laws ofmotion” of the working class and its class com-position. At the heart of this whole debate is, ofcourse, the oscillation, elicited by the term“social factory,” between the actual factory (say,the Fiat Mirafiori plant novelized in Balestrini’sVogliamo Tutto) and the factory as a concep-tual, rather than material, site, a kind of capital-ist diagram.24

It was to be a few years until the contradictionthat Wright discerns in the political assumption

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of the thesis of the social factory was to be madepainfully urgent by the strategies of restructur-ing that invested the factory in reaction to thevirulent struggles of 1968–69 and were in turnmilitantly interpreted by groups such as PotereOperaio as a call to move beyond the factorygates. By any standard, the 1970s in Italy saw averitable spatial attack upon the social hege-mony of the working class, which had mani-fested itself, beyond the factory dialectic of theunions, in the political form of autonomy.25 Thisforced dislocation was not simply a creativedestruction, or dispossession, for the sake ofprofitability, but involved a truly political con-frontation over the control and experience ofspace. For Bologna, importantly, this was ac-companied by the incapacity on the part of theleft to make a durable political link between thefactory proper and the social factory (whichincluded the movements of the unemployed, ofwomen, of students) and by a peculiarly Italianco-opting of the independent organization of theworking class in the factories by the party sys-tem – via a corruption of what had been thesystem of delegates and the workers’ councils.Bologna thus deemed the “retreat from the fac-tories” (and from the thematics of class compo-sition) as “suicidal.” In his sights, among others,was the 1971 “turn” by the extra-parliamentarygrouping Potere Operaio, led, among others, byNegri.

There is here a very complex knot of themes,many of which were vigorously, even violently,debated at the time: the question of mobility,both in the sense of migration into the factoriesand flight (whether forced or intentional) fromthem;26 the tactical and strategic role of thefactory; the relation between class composition,militancy and the shifting spaces of production.A Potere operaio pamphlet from 1971 gives asense of this debate:

The new task proposed by the crisis: a newstrategic level of the struggle. Some do notunderstand that in the crisis the following factmust be reckoned with: factory struggles assuch, the terrain of demands, no longer dig theowner’s grave […] if the task of revolutionariesin the phase of capitalist development is topromote autonomy, to organize struggles and

strikes, halts in production, grassroots commit-tees – today, of course, all of this needs to becarried out, it needs to be accomplishedwherever possible; but today, in the crisis, itis also a matter of setting out and realizing,within the time imposed by the crisis, a jumpin the level of the political struggle, of therevolutionary struggle.27

Not just workerist theory, but the fate of politi-cal action motivated by that theory, can thus beseen closely to relate to assessment of the factoryas the fulcrum of antagonism. The militant ex-pressions of the workerist tendency can beplaced on an arc that moves from the workwithin and against the factory, whether by work-ers themselves or by the strenuous mobilizationat the factory gates, to an attempt to invest theentire “productive fabric of the metropolis”28 –reformulating, in the industrial setting of North-ern Italy the theory of “red bases” (basi rosse),originating in Mao’s revolutionary agitation inthe 1920s of the red zones; promoting the directappropriation of commodities and auto-re-duction of services (transport, utilities) on thebasis of the needs and desires of the metropoli-tan proletariat. This move out of the factory thusentails a much greater emphasis being put uponthe subjective, or political, aspect of compo-sition. As we read in a Potere Operaio pamphletfrom 1972:

The new political composition of the class, theconnotation of the majority of employedlabour as proletariat, is not given in theobjectivity of the production process […]. No,the political figure of the reunified proletariatis given only as estrangement, as antagonism,as struggle against the capitalist system, as willof destruction and as Communist pro-gramme.29

Amid the oscillations between a revampedLeninism and a dissolution of militancy into aradical politics of the everyday what emergedfrom this turn was a key shift in emphasis fromthe dialectical, if extreme, antagonism situatedin the factory to an almost entirely unilateralpolitics of autonomy, founded on notions such asneed and desire (somewhat reductively treated asa politics of consumption by certain critics), and

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spread over the metropolis and the territory atlarge.30 At the level of the theory of class compo-sition this was signalled by the absolutely pivotalpassage from the mass worker that accompaniedthe centrality of the factory to the social workerof a higher state of socialization and diffusion ofproduction.31 The theoretical question, whicharguably still determines Negri’s recent work, isthe following: can need (or desire) be consideredas a form of localizing antagonism? If power isno longer indexed to the immediate process ofproduction, is the new site of antagonism to beidentified in the multiplicity of needs that try tocounter the mechanisms of accumulation andcommand? In this regard, while there remains afundamental conviction in the dualist matrix ofclass struggle, we can no longer speak of a site,be it in the sense of a matrix or paradigm, butrather must speak of sites, themselves generatedby subjective needs. As Negri and his comradeswrote in 1983:

The autonomous movement […] sought to gobeyond the previous “workerist factory” per-spective and to understand the changes in thelabour process which were taking place. Butabove all, it expressed the new subjectivity ofthe movement, the richness of its multipledifferences, its rejection of formal politics andthe mechanisms of representation. It did notseek a “political outlet” or “solution”. Itembodied an immediate exercise of powerwithin society. In this sense, localism andpluralism are a defining characteristic of theexperience of autonomy.32

These new subjectivities are therefore not prede-termined by a place that would already be givenas the site of an articulation of politics andproduction.33 What is more, they inflect therelation between space and power, force andplace. Retrospectively, the concept of power inclassic Marxism and earlier phases of workerismis criticized for obliterating the space of needs ina particular temporality, for being a “projectioninto the future, rather than a lived experiencewithin the liberated spaces of the present.”34

The problem of power over space, thus linkedto the subjectivity of need and political organiza-tion, is one of the key contributions of work-erism. As Harvey writes: “Whoever controls

space can always control the politics of placeeven if – and this is an important aspect – onemust first control some specific space.”35 Theshifts from the factory to the metropolis and tothe overall territory as a complex, differentiatedfabric of productive needs could also be con-sidered as a privileged prism for understandingthe problem of violence, namely the manner inwhich the latter is linked to determinate formsof spatial expression (think of the differencebetween the occupation of a neighbourhood andthe occupation of a factory, for instance). Thepassage from workerism proper to autonomy canthus be understood in terms of the drive toconquer and control one’s own spaces. But it isalso connected to the importance of the overallsphere of reproduction outside the immediateprocess of production, as emphasized by theinfluence of feminism. No longer intrinsicallytied to the capitalist regime of antagonism viathe factory, politics now emphasized the distanceof its insurgent power (potentia) from com-manding power (potestas). As Negri and hiscomrades remarked, what really defined themovement that peaked in 1977 was its being“asymmetrical in its relation to power”: an asym-metry which showed “the authentic basis of thesocial processes that underlay it” and evaded“frontal counterposition.”36 From within the pol-itical topology of this sequence of Italian politicswe can thus witness the division of antagonisminto the dialectical antagonism of the factorystruggle, on the one hand, and the capillary,self-organized antagonism of metropolitan needs,on the other.

A move toward the latter did not necessarilymean abandoning the question of political com-position, the “objective” side of political topol-ogy. Whence the attempt, which in a sensecontinues in the theoretical and sociological re-search of the heirs of workerism, to formulate atheory of the diffuse factory, linked to a figureof diffuse labour,37 which could take manyforms: the marginal or peripheral work of illegallabour, the invisible work of reproduction anddomestic labour, the sometimes creative, some-times auto-exploitative forms of autonomouslabour. This research also had a privileged locus,the Italian Northeast, what Bologna called “a

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prime laboratory of the new system of flexibleaccumulation.”38 The attempt to understand thepassage from waged factory workers to“autonomous workers” and formation of highlytechnological industrial districts in that region,thereto relatively poor and agriculturally driven,can thus be seen as the Italian counterpart to theanglophone debate over post-Fordism andflexible accumulation, for instance in the NewTimes theorists of Marxism Today – but acounterpart which is singularized by its focus onantagonism and class composition as the motorof the political and spatial transformation ofproduction.39

Negri himself, presenting his collective socio-logical work on new forms of “postfordist” pro-duction emerging in the 1980s and 1990s, asks:“Why has my research moved from the bigfactory to the territorial diffusion of pro-duction?”40 His own thinking started from anexperience of Fordist militancy, under the ban-ner of Potere Operaio, at Porto Marghera, themassive petrochemical plant near Venice. Afterthe relative collapse of factory work, Negri ex-perienced first hand the phenomenon of unem-ployed workers building forms of autonomy andcounter-power in the territory surrounding theplant, using their lay-off payments (Cassa Inte-grazione) as a basis for entrepreneurship,“operations of decentering,” departing from thedensity and localization of factory antagonismand its relation to the efficacy and productivityof capital. It is crucial to the maintenance of theworkerist thesis of the primacy of struggle thatthis phenomenon be thought not just a result ofthe unilateral impetus of capital but also a prod-uct of antagonistic subjectivity – of the desire tospread cooperation over the territory and fleefactory discipline. In this regard, Negri empha-sizes the role of the political entrepreneur, “theautonomous agent of an ever more cooperativesocial work on the territories of production,” theweaver of the objective, institutional and subjec-tive networks that made “industrial districts”possible, of the kind capitalized on by Benetton,“a multinational of the informal organization ofdiffuse production.”41

The various concepts and periodizations put

forth by workerism with respect to the questionof political spatialization – from the social fac-tory to the diffuse factory, from the productiveterritory to the insurgent, post-Fordist metrop-olis – present us with a rich resource for thedevelopment of a political topology for our time.What emerges from this materialist lineage,through its political initiatives and crises, andthe manner in which these latter inflected thedevelopment and construction of its theoreticalapparatus, is not a single transcendental aes-thetic for the phenomenology of labour-powerand antagonism, but a series of spatio-temporaldynamisms, dramatizations of class struggles indifferent sites, marked by different tactics.

Yet we may ask whether, with the full deploy-ment of real subsumption and its correlate ofnon-dialectical antagonism, as developed by Ne-gri from his writings on the social worker to hisresearch with Hardt, we have not just abandonedthe spatial anchoring of a social dialectics in thefactory, but any even theoretical localization ofpolitical analysis and project. Above all, the oneafforded by the part/whole relationship of work-ing-class to capitalist system of productionwhich, in the theory of Empire, is abandoned forthe sake of an unlocalizable, immeasurable inter-play between a parasitical regime of commandand accumulation, on the one hand, and asmooth space of cooperating subjectivities, onthe other.

From the vantage point of Empire, and itsassumption of the Deleuzo-Guattarian distinc-tion between smooth and striated space, it ispossible to retrospectively elucidate the strongspatial content of Negri’s reading of the Marxistnotion of real subsumption such that the latter,by extending the social factory beyond any poss-ible measure (of time and value) and beyond anyunivocal indexing of production, any privilegedpoint for the dialectical articulation of capital,labour, and insurgency, necessitates a renewedeffort to abandon the “transcendental aesthetic”of traditional radical politics and think bothproduction and subversion in terms of divergentconstructions of space (and time). Turned “rightside up” and viewed from the autonomous stand-point of a cooperative class of exploited produc-ers (proletariat, social worker, multitude)

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socialized within capital, the thematic of realsubsumption has led Negri, in his most recentspeculative venture, to a notion of space as“constitutive of the common,” whereby “co-op-eration is the space constituted by the commonand so is multiplied in its productivity.”42

Whilst globality and locality are not generatedor accounted for by a dialectical matrix, Negridoes maintain the line, which he regards asbeing of the utmost tactical importance, thatlocality is never given but is produced (whetheras discrete, commanded or common is a matterfor struggle). This line is based on a fundamen-tally antagonistic interpretation of the relationbetween smooth (or molar) and striated (or mol-ecular) space. Indeed, we could hazard the obser-vation that Negri’s most recent work in thisdirection, in collaboration with Hardt and on hisown, rests in great part on reading A ThousandPlateaus through the lenses of class struggle(and vice versa). When he writes that “the globalworld is a striated world,” this should thereforebe understood in the sense that the deterritorial-izing logic of capitalist accumulation and thecommon spaces of cooperation are crosscut by aterritorial logic of power. Conversely, if the terri-torial striations of the world system may lead usto acknowledge the endurance of the nation-state, “from a molecular perspective,” that is,from the standpoint of the productive and antag-onistic dynamics behind social transformation,for example, “we can see the period of the coldwar as one in which there was a transformationin the effective form of sovereignty,” whoseoutcome was “a sovereignty with no outside, orrather one that does not recognize the distinctionbetween inside and outside.”43 Crucially, thisabolition of the outside, whose Marxist analysis“classical” workerism had inaugurated via thenotions of the “social factory” and “real sub-sumption,” also rescinds the more or less dialec-tical articulation of (welfare or planner) state,bourgeoisie, and working class as principallymediated via the locus, both physical and for-mal, of the factory. This time reading antago-nism via Deleuze and Guattari’s onto-ethology ofdifference, Negri can thus state that “Molecularcivil war is characterized by overlapping struc-tures that fight one another in a common space,

along multiple variable fronts.”44 Notice theshift here from the frontal confrontation, which“classical” workerism endeavoured to intensify,between (the state of) capital and (the party of)labour, to a refracted and non-synthesizable mul-titude of struggles which, though they may betheoretically identified with the vestigial antago-nism of the exploiters and the exploited, never-theless do not converge on a site of antagonism,on a critical point that would be like the histori-cal a priori for any insurgency, any anti-systemicmovement. Notice, too, that instead of seekingout tactics for the recomposition of class as theprelude to a confrontation – whether this beorganizing at the factory gates or constructing“red bases” throughout the metropolis – theemphasis on the ontological notion of “a com-mon space” both makes any a priori placementof antagonism ineffective and, by the same to-ken, tends to make the struggle more virulent.After all, a molar, factory-centred class strugglecertainly seems more recuperable than a“molecular civil war”!

This is not to say, however, that the problemof localization has been simply passed over byNegri. Indeed, his account of the “crisis ofpolitical space” is closely wedded to the thinkingof non-dialectical forms of territorialization thatwould eschew the traditional relationships be-tween modes of accumulation and figures ofsovereignty, that “machine of authority whichtraverses and structures the territory.”45 In con-tradistinction to a dialectical schema that woulddeduce the site of antagonism and the criticalpoint, or lever, of insurrection, within a socialtotality oriented by a more or less irreversibletemporal motor, Negri’s recent work is verysensitive to the undecidability of the place ofpolitics. Whilst general regimes of spatial pro-duction may be identified, for instance in linewith the intuitions of Harvey’s Marxist geogra-phy, they do not as such amount to the deploy-ment of a veritable political topology. For thelatter, bereft of the transcendental aesthetic thatwould link the sovereign space of the nation, theproductive place of the factory and the time ofdevelopment and crisis, must now turn its atten-tion to the evental, non-totalizable nature ofantagonism and try to glean the spatio-temporal

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dynamisms that would permit such an event toindividuate itself in a body capable of struggleand antagonism, of exodus and separation. Hav-ing acknowledged “the difficulty of recognizingthe spatial dimension of a new Leninist project,”in this absence of an a priori spatio-temporaldetermination of politics, Negri’s neo-Leninism,very much unlike that of Tronti’s in Operai ecapitale, is predicated upon the reciprocaldetermination of the event and the place ofresistance, and the concomitant thesis that theproduction of subjectivity depends on a bodywhich is “always localized and is always in thattime.” In a certain respect, the dislocation of theindustrial link between the sites of productionand the places of politics, which workerism hadexperienced in practice ever since the setbacksin the factory struggles of 1971 and the conse-quent determination to “take over the city,”serves only to intensify the need to think thefugitive schemata and urgent tactics of localiza-tion.

As an aside, we might here ask whether in thefinal analysis there isn’t an irreparable disjunc-tion between the conceptualization of molecularantagonism and the idea that such an antago-nism is localized in a body. How symptomatic ofa fundamental theoretical weakness is Negri’soscillation between the molecular and the incar-nate? Not only are the body and the flesh con-stantly attacked by Deleuze and Guattari fortheir incircumventable ties to phenomenologicalhumanism, but, as Alain Badiou has noted inThe Century, isn’t the most problematic andpotentially disastrous localization of politics theone that saw the call for revolution linked to thecreation of “passive bodies of subjectivation,”monumental reifications of subjectivity thatshifted the attention from the concrete and di-versified places of politics to its transcendentalplace and agency? Negri contends that the tacti-cal point and event of revolution depends on thestrength of the cooperative subject or multitude,but that the latter cannot be linked to a pre-given space or a “date with history”: “the themeof the space for the party is thus subordinated toa specific kairos, to the untimely power of anevent.”46 The real question here is whether thenon-dialectical articulation of subject and event

takes the common space as a product or as apresupposition and, more specifically, whethersuch a space is to be understood as the space offlows of real subsumption or in terms of the lociof insurgent political subjectivity.

The difficulty is compounded by the fact thatthe thinking of Empire, whilst hostile to Hege-lian dialectics or to cybernetically enhanced sys-temic logics a la Luhmann, does maintain apreoccupation with totality, with capitalism astotality, as a system which is both deprived of anoutside and endowed with a kind of parasiticaltranscendence (the sovereignty of Empire). Tounderstand the maintenance of a kind of totality(be it of an open or a virtual sort) in conjunctionwith the abandonment of a dialectical articula-tion of production and politics, of the two halvesof class composition, is perhaps the key to as-sessing Negri’s relation to the Marxist tradition.What must be kept in mind, in light of thenarrative we have outlined here, is the fact thatthe termination of the dialectical schema is forNegri a concrete and localized historical event,itself determined by the transformations in theregime of accumulation and political forms ofcapitalism – not a capricious metaphysical pref-erence. More specifically, it is the collapse of thefactory as the nexus of anti-capitalist struggle,not just as a concrete site with bodies, protests,machines, but as a paradigmatic function withinthe capitalist system, that makes the dialecticalcomprehension of politics anachronistic. Negri’sconcern with totality, and in particular with the“totalization” of space as a smooth space tra-versed by vectors of accumulation and subjec-tivity, or by molecular civil wars, is not,however, aimed at the identification of a point ofnegative critique or a consciousness that couldextricate itself from the nets of real subsump-tion. Rather, it promises a renewal of material-ism founded on the articulation of politicalsubjectivity, in its various states and figures ofcomposition and organization, on the one hand,and the concrete transformations in the formstaken by capitalist accumulation and command,on the other. It is in this respect that the workof Hardt and Negri remains tied by a red threadto the earlier “thought of class composition”which, Balestrini and Moroni argue:

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radically contests the possibility of groundingconsciousness in the “idealist nostalgia” of thehuman and formulates the conception accord-ing to which the revolutionary process is bornfrom the social and material dynamic (withouta presupposition of any originary ideality oralienated authenticity): the dynamic that findsits motor in the sphere of work, and moreprecisely in the workers’ refusal of work (inthe refusal to give one’s time to activity thatis expropriated and commanded by capital).[…] The reading of Grundrisse […] makespossible a new notion of totality, understoodas a totality in situation (from the point ofview of work and struggle) and at the sametime as the subsumption of the singularwithin the […] process of capital. […] Wemust therefore consider two distinct aspects:on the one hand, totalisation is a processindiscernible from subjectivity, from histori-cal, social and militant partiality (“the wholecan be understood only by the part”, writesMario Tronti); on the other, however, capital-ist subjectivity constitutes a process of totali-sation […] articulated as subsumption, as thedespotic assumption of real existences withinits functioning. This is Marx’s reign of ab-stract labour.47

Whilst Negri maintains his corrosive scepti-cism vis-a-vis any figure of “national” politics,something that has led to sometimes myopicdenunciations by more orthodox Marxist or pol-itical theorists, this does not mean that, as areading of Empire might plausibly suggest, hehas dissolved the problem of the politics of placein the non-place of imperial command. Themetaphysical focus on the construction of a com-mon space as constitutive of the antagonisticsubjectivity of the multitude has been ac-companied by a renewed interest in the theme ofthe metropolis as a potential site for the pro-duction of subjectivity and the confrontationwith the mechanism of command and accumula-tion dictated by the logic of capital. To dispelthe impression of a clear historical sequence thatmight have been elicited by our title, and to tryto problematize some of the more simplisticunderstanding of the legacy of workerism fos-tered by a combination of the popularizing in-tentions, and undeniable shortcomings, of

Empire and the righteous hostility of its critics,it might be of interest to conclude with some ofNegri’s recent reflections on the political topol-ogy of the metropolis.

Writing about architecture, Manfredo Tafurideclares: “The construction of a physical space iscertainly the site of a ‘battle’: a proper urbananalysis demonstrates this clearly. That such abattle is not totalizing, that it leaves borders,remains, residues, is also an indisputable fact.”48

It is precisely to this view of the metropolis as asite of contestation and counter-power that Negrihas turned, attempting to think of it as apossible localization of struggle in the epoch ofEmpire, which would not freeze the antagonisticsingularities that in his view comprise themultitude. Against the “industrialist” or“factoryist” bias that was the downfall of histori-cal communism and even some of the earlyformulations of workerism, Negri’s conviction,arising from the experiences of autonomy in themid-1970s, is that

the revolutionary decision today must baseitself on another constituent schema: it nolonger poses as preliminary to an industrialand/or developmental axis but, through thatmultitude in which mass intellectualityconfigures itself, it will forward the pro-gramme of a freed city in which industry willbe bent to the urgencies of life, society toscience, work to the multitude.49

Negri asks himself whether the metropolis playsthe same political-topological role for the multi-tude as the factory did for the working class.Can the social worker (here the earlier term isused as a synonym for multitude) overturn pro-ductive subordination and the violence of exploi-tation within metropolitan space? But what kindof political space is the metropolis? What Negricalled the crisis of the planner-state50 could alsobe linked to the crisis of the planned city, ofthose projects of organic rationalization thatwished to tie the urban fabric to the teleology ofproduction, to create an urban factory within thesocial factory. Even, or especially, in their social-democratic guise, these projects foundered whenconfronted with the irreducibility of the metrop-olis to a univocal organization. Writing about the

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failure of such architectural visions of themetropolis as a regulated space of productionand circulation, and even emancipation, Tafuriwrites:

Extending its manner of existence to the entireregion, the metropolis gave rise to the spiral-ling problem of development-disequilibrium.And indeed the planning theories based on thehypothesis of a reestablishment of equilibrium– and first among them, those of the SovietUnion – were destined to be revolutionizedafter the great crisis of 1929. Improbability,multifunctionality, multiplicity, and lack oforganic structure – in short, all the contradic-tory aspects assumed by the modern metrop-olis – are thus seen to have remained outsidethe attempts at a rationalization pursued bycentral European architecture.51

But what becomes of the metropolis in the era ofthe crisis-state and later of an imperial capitalismdriven by financial capital?

For an anticipation of the spatial phenomenol-ogy of this “imperial” metropolis, Negri choosesto turn to Rem Koolhas and his book DeliriousNew York. Beyond the more or less coherence ofvarious forms of planning, Koolhas, according toNegri, shows how the city nevertheless was tra-versed by “dynamics, conflicts and powerful su-perimpositions of cultural strata, forms andstyles of life, a multiplicity of ideas and projectsabout the future.” In other words, Koolhas al-lows us to grasp the passage from the frontalcounterposition of plan, on the one hand, andworking class, on the other, to the metropolis asa “molecular” space of antagonism which, mov-ing beyond the “prescriptions of power andutopias of opposition” revives the thinking ofpolitical spaces of autonomy that was the hall-mark of the autonomist movement in the 1970s.Beyond project and utopia, Koolhas’s work her-alded, for Negri, a microphysical analysis of themetropolis which, against the macrophysicalanalysis of urban planning, could reveal a“common world,” the metropolis as “the prod-uct of all – not general will but common aleatoryspace.”52

What is more, Negri’s working hypothesis isthat a renewed focus on the metropolis as aspace of subjectivation, in which antagonism is

inseparable from practices of construction andforms of life, permits the assumption of theunhinging of politics from the factory–(nation-)state axis. The metropolis is thus grasped notonly as a “hybrid and internally antagonisticaggregate,” a “beehive,”53 but, in its strategiclocation vis-a-vis financial and informationalflows, not to mention flows of people, it is,following the work of Saskia Sassen, “a ho-mologous figure of the general structure thatcapitalism has assumed in its imperial phase.”54

Does this mean that we have returned to theimplicit dialectic governing the relation betweenfactory and social factory, with metropolis andEmpire as the two poles of our political topol-ogy? Not really. Whilst such an analysis of themetropolis, by delineating the points of conflictbetween needs and commands, construction andexploitation, permits a localization of antagonismwhich the theory of Empire might seem toevade, that antagonism is not itself directly re-ducible to a single, “frontal” figure. Unlike thefactory, the metropolis is a hybrid space, whichin a sense demands a further emphasis on politi-cal over technical composition. And, showingthat the tools of workerism have not been aban-doned, Negri even explicitly revives the cate-gories of classical workerist analysis: “Thecapitalist recomposition of the metropolis con-structs traces of recomposition for the multi-tude.”55 Labour-power becomes multitude in themetropolis inasmuch as it weaves “internal” rela-tions of cooperation, which, whilst not directlymediated by the spatial organization of pro-duction (factory), are the object of the extractionof surplus value. It is in this respect that themultitude, and the metropolis with it, is alwaysa deeply ambivalent phenomenon, a multiplicitythat can be decomposed into a material func-tional to accumulation or recomposed into vari-ous foyers of antagonism. As always, theworkerist emphasis on anticipation and interven-tion asks how theory might work to identifydifferential and antagonistic tendencies, in thiscase within the fabric of the metropolis, forthe sake of the recomposition and constructionof common, but not homogeneous, spacesthat would not be subjected to the measure ofcapital.

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Finally, what sets these latest hypotheses at aremove from the sequence of dislocations wehave tracked up to this point is the fact that thesocialization of production is no longer simplythought in terms of a diffusion of the factory,but rather in terms of the increasing importanceof “immaterial labour,”56 of the subjective, affec-tive, volitional aspects of production and repro-duction which tend to become the main sourcesfor the extraction of surplus value. Inasmuch aswe exit the dialectic of the factory, this extrac-tion – relying on the autonomous existence of(metropolitan) cooperation between subjectivi-ties – becomes ever more parasitic, often engag-ing in a mere capture of creativity that does notcontribute anything by way of fixed capital, orreal investment, turning more and more intopure command (as in the “new enclosures” thatpermit drawing surplus value from such“parasitic” activities as patenting and copy-right). The spatial dislocation out of the factoryis thus accompanied by the formation of dis-tributed sites of immaterial cooperation (themetropolis), in which exploitation is no longeraccompanied by the dialectical measure oflabour-time, but rather extends over the entiretyof social existence – whence Negri’s insistentfocus on the theme of biopolitics. It is in thisrespect that, rather than defusing antagonism,the multiplicitous character of metropolitan lifeand production can be seen, in Negri’s schema,to exacerbate it. Inasmuch as in today’s“immaterial” society (and in the political topol-ogy that accompanies it) there is no longer anyobjective measure of productive value: “Thenew standard of measurement can only be astandard of power. […] Measure thus becomesthe measure of control, the measure of the capi-talist capacity to develop production in theabsence of any objective criterion of measure-ment and in the presence of relations of forcethat require domination.”57 On this basis, theresearch programme laid out by Negri isquite unique, in so far as it points us to adimension outside (or beside) the classical sitesof political topology, to spaces of conflict andsubjectivation that are no longer determinate, inthe manner of the factory, but lie in the border-land or no man’s land (Negri writes of terreni di

mezzo) between the immate-rial and ideal interactions ofwhat Marx called the generalintellect and the concreteplaces of material pro-duction.58

notes1 See, for instance, Kumar 146–48, where hecites Foucault’s characterization of the twentiethcentury as “the epoch of space.”

2 On all these debates see the superb insightsprovided by Marramao’s Il passaggio a occidente.Filosofia e globalizzazione.

3 This is the case, in some respects, in DavidHarvey’s historical geographical materialism, andits theorization of uneven development and the“spatial fixes” that capitalism produces in orderto tame its internal contradictions. See The Limitsto Capital 431–45.

4 Though methodologically Harvey maintains aclassical Marxist perspective somewhat at oddswith the theses of workerism, he has undertakensome very interesting studies of the constructionof spaces and places from below; see “BodyPolitics and the Struggle for a Living Wage” inSpaces of Hope 117–30. In “The Geography ofClass Power” in Spaces of Capital 381, he tellinglyspeaks of “the non-neutrality of spatial organiza-tion in the dynamics of class struggle.”

5 It almost goes without saying that such apolitical topology would require to be comple-mented by an account of the temporalizingcharacter of political subjectivity, coupling thedislocation of the place of production and the“biopolitical” extension of labour time. AsBologna writes in “La percezione dello spazio edel tempo nel lavoro indipendente”: “The labourtime of the waged worker is a regulated time,the time of the independent worker is a labourtime without rules, and therefore without limits.”

6 By far the most thorough and insightful treat-ment of workerism is to be found in Wright(2002); a bold attempt to update some of thetradition’s theses, accompanied by an impressiveCD-ROM archive of interviews with its politicaland theoretical protagonists, is available in theItalian volume by Borio et al.; aside from Negri’swork, much of which has been or will soon be

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translated, the anglophone reader can refer tothe excellent collection by Lotringer and Marazzior, for a more philosophical take, to Virno andHardt’s volume.

7 In his review of Wright’s Storming Heaven,Sergio Bologna pointedly asks:

Is it possible to apply the category of conti-nuity to this movement? Doesn’t continuitybelong to the traditional methods of writinghistory? Is it not proper to the histories ofdynasties and parties? Those who, from thebeginning, positioned themselves outside ofa party perspective, who regarded the rev-olution as a lifeblood rather than an event,do they have a right to continuity, do theyhave to be subject to it? (105)

As far as this essay is concerned, the only conti-nuity we have availed ourselves of is the conti-nuity of a problematic, with all the internalruptures and displacements that entails.

8 See Anthropologie du nom 166–76, where hediscusses the factory as a multiple and non-di-alectical place of politics.

9 The New Imperialism 137–82.

10 Tronti 39. Apropos of Lenin, Tronti proposesthe “neoleninist principle”: “the chain will breaknot where capitalism is weakest, but where theworking class is strongest.” In the introduction toOperai e capitale, Tronti makes this point veryforcefully: “We will never tire of repeating thatpredicting the development of capital does notmean subjecting ourselves to its iron laws: itmeans forcing it into a certain path, waiting for itwith weapons stronger than steel, and thereassaulting it and breaking it” (21). More recently,see Negri’s Guide 176.

11 On the concept of real subsumption seeNegri, Fabbriche del soggetto 9–25, 75–80. Theprincipal source is the unpublished Book VI ofchapter I of Das Kapital, “Results of the Immedi-ate Process of Production,” now in Capital, Vol-ume I: 1023–25 and 1034–38. A later formulationof real subsumption as socialization, but in theabsence of the centrality of the factory, is thefollowing: “production and living in society havebecome elements in one whole, and the conse-quent social productivity (generalized and with-out the factory) is captured by the company”(“Terreni di mezzo” 198).

12 “Archaeology and Project: From the Mass

Worker to the Social Worker” (1982) in Revol-ution Retrieved 209.

13 Storming Heaven 3.

14 Search for a Method 81.

15 Balestrini and Moroni 46.

16 The phenomenon of migration was, of course,twofold, both to the north of Italy and giantfactory complexes such as Fiat in Turin or thePetrolchimico in Marghera, near Venice, andspreading out to the burgeoning industrial cen-tres of Europe:

This new figure of the proletarian is the onethat, emigrating from southern Italy, hasmade capitalist development throughout Eu-rope: from Fiat to Volkswagen to Renault,from the mines of Belgium to the Ruhr.Who has made the great worker strugglesof the last few years. Who has smashedeverything, who has thrown Italy into crisis.Who determines today the desperate re-sponse of capital, at the level of both thefactory and the institutions. Who todayforces the owners to use the extremeweapon, the weapon of crisis. […] Thisenemy is the proletarian from the South:with a thousand trades because he hasnone, “uprooted, unemployed […] this mo-bile, disposable, interchangeable labour-power” […]. Who cannot find work in theSouth and therefore looks for it in Turin, inMilan, in Switzerland, in Germany, anywherein Europe. (Nanni Balestrini, Vogliamo tutto,quoted in Balestrini and Moroni 281–82)

17 “La migrazione” in Balestrini and Moroni48–49.

18 It is worth noting that in a recent article, “Lamoltitudine e la metropoli,” Negri says that these“often were not places, but urban spaces, sites ofpublic opinion.”

19 Whilst I shall not be able to do justice to thesociological (or historiographic) contributions ofworkerism, these are dealt with admirably byWright in Storming Heaven, chapters 2 and 8.

20 Tronti 49.

21 Ibid. 51.

22 “Il New Deal e il nuovo assetto delle politichecapitalistiche” (1971), Dal post-fordismo alla global-

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izzazione 66. “Appeasement” is in English in theoriginal.

23 Storming Heaven 40–41.

24 The question is whether the factory is to bedefined as a specific place, the industrial estab-lishment, or rather more generally as “the place(whether tangible or not) of the organisation ofthe process of production” (Futuro anteriore 19).See also Guido Borio’s comments in Dibattito su“Futuro Anteriore.”

25 “The Tribe of Moles” (1977) in Lotringer andMarazzi 40.

26 It is in these experiences, as well as in aprovocative reading of Marx’s writings, that au-thors from the workerist tradition draw theresources for a theory of “exodus.” See Hardtand Negri’s Empire, but especially Virno,“Dell’Esodo” in Esercizi di esodo 179–84.

27 As demonstrated by “Lotta sociale e organiz-zazione nella metropolis,” a text dated January1971, from the Collettivo Politico Metropolitano– a group that was shortly thereafter to givebirth to the Red Brigades – a particular take onthe collapse of the factory as the site of a spatialdialectic between, on the one hand, accumulationand command, and, on the other, workers’ needsand autonomy could also be at the source of aturn to clandestine violence and armed struggle,a direct confrontation with a supposedly mono-lithic state in the absence of any social dialectic.

28 Revolution Retrieved 210.

29 “Proletari, e guerra di classe,” Potere Operaio47–48, quoted in Storming Heaven 138.

30 On the variety of these post-factory practicesof autonomy, see the collective, retrospectivetext “Do You Remember Revolution?” (1983) inRevolution Retrieved 237–38, and Eddi Cherki andMichel Wievorka, “Autoreduction Movements inTurin” in Lotringer and Marazzi, Semiotext(e) 72–79.

31 See especially “Archaeology and Project: TheMass Worker and the Social Worker” in Revol-ution Retrieved 203–28.

32 “Do You Remember Revolution?” 236–37.This move out of the factory was also anexquisitely tactical question: “the extension ofthe struggles to the entire social sphere at aterritorial level and the building of forms of

counter-power were seen as necessary stepsagainst the blackmail of economic crisis” (232).

33 By subjectivities I am not simply referring toa dimension of militancy and political organiza-tion, but also to the more widespread effects ofthese spatial dislocations of production on the“phenomenology” of work and the worker. Weare dealing with

a historical phase in which the organisationof space moulded by Taylorism, both in thefactory and in offices, was being destruc-tured. The perception of space of the wagedworker was referred to clearly distinct“places,” two separate systems of cultureand rules, the house and the factory, the flatand the office, the place of private life, ofthe family, of affections, on the one hand,and the place of work, on the other. […]Whilst the “alienation” of waged work div-ided the individual into two socio-affectivecycles, the cycle of private life and the cycleof working life, the (apparent) non-alien-ation of independent work reduces exist-ence to a single socio-affective cycle, that ofprivate life. […] Whatever return to theTaylorist organisation of space we mightimagine, it will no longer be possible todelete the new mental disposition of auton-omous work, born of the superimpositionof the socio-affective domestic sphere andthe sphere of work. (See Sergio Bologna,“La percezione dello spazio e del tempo nellavoro indipendente”)

34 “The Tribe of Moles” 56.

35 Quoted in Krasivyj, “For the Recompositionof Social Labour.”

36 “Do You Remember Revolution?” 237.

37 Revolution Retrieved 208, 214.

38 Bologna, “Prefazione” in Luciano FerrariBravo, Dal post-fordismo alla globalizzazione 25.

39 An “industrial district” was defined at thebeginning of the century by Alfred Marshall, writ-ing about areas such as Manchester, as a “factorywithout walls.” This theory, whose moderncounterpart is the network intra muros – whichemerges once the reticular structure of the in-dustrial district is grasped as a model for theinternal space of the factory and the companyitself – was revived by those trying to think the

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social reality of the Italian Northeast after thedemise of the centrality of the large factory. In amore optimistic vein, the industrial district wasviewed as a more positive terrain of strugglethan the factory with its rigidity and its limits as asite for mobilization, especially to the extent itcould incorporate the role of extra-economicvariables in the functioning of networked“territorialized” industries, and brought aboutnew forms of class composition in networks ofinteraction combining competition, imitation andcooperation. See Maurizio Grassi, “Distretti in-dustriali” in Zanini and Fadini, Lessico postfordista94–100.

40 “Reti produttive” 67. The research Negri isreferring to is contained in the book Benetton etSentier. Des enterprises pas comme les autres.

41 “Reti produttive” 73. For Negri, this sequencedid peak around the years 1977–83, in thephenomenon of small to medium enterprises andwas swallowed up again, after 1983, by the re-turn of the large company hoarding informationand services with the aid of state policies.

42 Time for Revolution 212–13.

43 Guide 58–59.

44 Guide 63.

45 “La crisi dello spazio politico” in L’Europa el’Impero 20. This is a crucial essay for capturingthe role of political topology in the work ofNegri.

46 Guide 175–76.

47 Balestrini and Moroni 276–77.

48 Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth 8. Tafuricollaborated with Massimo Cacciari, Asor Rosa,and Negri (who would stay only for the firstissue) on Contropiano—a journal close to theworkerist tendency. It was in the first issue ofthis journal that he published his pioneeringstudy of the relation between architectural the-ory and the critique of ideology, “Per una criticadell’ideologia archittetonica,” later incorporatedin the book Progetto e utopia, translated intoEnglish as Architecture and Utopia.

49 Guide 175–76

50 “Crisis of the Planner-State: Communism andRevolutionary Organisation” in Revolution Re-trieved 97–148.

51 Architecture and Utopia 124.

52 “La moltitudine e la metropoli.”

53 In “Terreni di mezzo” 198, Negri speaks of analveare metropolitano to describe a formidablemobility of the spaces of production and a mixedsite in which “are combined new productiveplaces and new activities without place.”



56 See Maurizio Lazzarato’s key essay“Immaterial Labor” in Virno and Hardt, RadicalThought in Italy.

57 “Terreni di mezzo” 201. Whence Negri’sfocus on the increasing role within “imperial”capitalism of non-dialectical spatial strategies ofpolicing, exclusion, war. In this respect his refer-ence to the works of Mike Davis on the milita-rization of Los Angeles is instructive.

58 It is as an interface between immaterial coop-eration and material productivity that “theschool” as a locus of formation, that is, of subjec-tivation, receives special attention from Negri in“Terreni di mezzo.”

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Alberto ToscanoDepartment of SociologyGoldsmiths CollegeUniversity of LondonNew CrossLondon SE14 6NWUKE-mail: [email protected]


Toscano Factory Territory Metropolis

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