请将“Taking as its focus first the struggles in the factories, the autonomist analyses show how all the organisational and technical innovations introduced by management can be understood as a response designed to overcome the force of insubordination on the part of the workers. Labour insubordination can thus be seen as the driving force of capital.

This provides a way of analysing the history of struggle. The workers develop a form of struggle; management introduce a new form of organisation or new machinery in order to reimpose order; this in turn gives rise to new forms of insubordination, new forms of struggle, and so on. One can speak of the struggle as having a certain composition. By analogy with Marx’s idea that capital at any point is characterised by a certain technical and value composition, depending on the relation between constant capital (that part of the capital represented by machinery and raw materials) and variable capital (that part of the capital which corresponds to wages), the autonomists developed the concept of class composition to denote the relation between labour and capital at any particular moment. The movement of struggle can thus be seen as a movement of class composition. The forms of struggle at any particular time are expressions of the composition of the working class; when management introduce changes to restore order, they aim to bring about a decomposition of the class; this de-composition gives rise in turn to the development of new forms of struggle, or a re-composition of the class. The history of struggle can thus be described in terms of the movement of composition, de-composition and re-composition.

The concept is developed not only in relation to struggles in particular factories or industries but as a way of understanding the dynamic of struggle in capitalism as a whole. Thus, it is argued, working-class struggle in the period up to the First World War was characterised by the particular place within production of the skilled worker. This gave to the working-class movement a specific form of organisation (skill-based trade unionism) and a particular ideology (based on the notion of the dignity of labour). The de-composing response by management was the introduction of Taylorism, designed to de-skill the skilled worker and deprive him5 of control of the labour process. This gives rise in turn to a re-composition of the working class as mass worker, with new forms of struggle, new forms of organisation (the general trade unions) and a new ideology (the rejection of work). The de-composing response by capital is seen by some autonomist theorists (Negri, in particular) as coming now not at the level of factory management but at the level of the state, with the development of Keynesianism and the Welfare State (Fordism, as it is often called) as a way of both recognising the growing strength of labour and at the same time integrating it into the maintenance of order (through social democracy) and into the dynamic of capitalism (through demand management). This gives rise, in Negri’s analysis, to a socialisation of capital, the transformation of society into a ‘social factory’ and the emergence of a new class composition, the ‘social worker’ (‘operaio sociale’). The strength of this new composition is expressed in the struggles of the late 1960s and 1970s which go far beyond the factory to contest all aspects of the capital’s management of society. It is the strength of these struggles which forces capital to abandon the Keynesian-Fordist form of management and develop new forms of attack (neo-Liberalism, or what Hardt and Negri now refer to as ‘empire’).6

Class composition thus takes us beyond the analysis of factory struggles to become the key concept for understanding capitalist development. Thus, Moulier characterises the notion in broad terms:

We must remember that the notion of ‘class composition’ is a concept which aims to replace the too static, academic and in general reactionary concept of ‘social classes’. Class composition comprises simultaneously the technical composition both of capital and of waged labour, which refers to the state of development of the productive forces, to the degree of social cooperation and division of labour. But this level of analysis is not separable from the political composition which is its ultima ratio. We can find in it all that characterises the collective subjectivity of needs, desires, the imaginary and their objective translation into the forms of political, cultural and community organisation. [1989, pp. 40–1, n. 47]7

The notion of class composition takes us significantly beyond the mere observation that resistance to capitalism is ubiquitous. It suggests a basis for speaking of the developing force of this resistance, a basis for trying to understand the specificity and the force of the current forms of struggle. It proposes a way in which we can see our scream not just as an ever-present feature of oppression, but as a scream that has a particular historical resonance.

There is, however, already a problem here that suggests a divergence between the autonomist approach described here and the approach developed in this book. Certainly the initial impulse is very much the same: the insistence by Tronti that the beginning is the struggle of the working class and the insistence here that the starting-point is the scream. There is, however, a distinction that becomes clear when the concept ‘class composition’ is used not just as a category for analysing the movement of struggle but as a way of characterising a period of capitalism.

The first indication of the divergence is the reversal of signs. Starting from the scream, we have argued here that anti-capitalist theory must be understood as negative theory, that the movement of struggle is a movement of negation. Most autonomist theory, however, presents the movement of struggle as a positive movement. The reversal of the polarity undertaken by autonomist theory transfers the positive from the side of capital to the side of the struggle against capital. In orthodox Marxist theory, capital is the positive subject of capitalist development. In autonomist theory, the working class becomes the positive subject: that is why the positive concepts of class composition and class re-composition are on the side of the working class, while the negative concept of de-composition is placed on the side of capital. In the reversal of the polarity, identity is moved from the side of capital to the side of labour, but it is not exploded or even challenged. This is wrong. Subjectivity in capitalism is in the first place negative, the movement against the denial of subjectivity. A truly radical reversal of the polarity involves not just transferring subjectivity from capital to the working class but also understanding that subjectivity as negative instead of positive, as the negative subjectivity of the anti-working anti-class. In the beginning is the scream, not because the scream exhausts itself in negativity, but because the only way in which we can construct relations of dignity is through the negation of those relations which deny dignity. Our movement, then, is in the first place a negative movement, a movement against identity. It is we who de-compose, we are the wreckers. It is capital which constantly seeks to compose, to create identities, to create stability (always illusory, but essential to its existence), to contain and deny our negativity. We are the source of movement, we are the subject: in that, autonomist theory is right. But our movement is a negative one, one that defies classification. What unites the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas or the Movement of the Landless (MST) in Brazil with the struggle of Internet workers in Seattle, say, is not a positive common class composition but rather the community of their negative struggle against capitalism.

The conceptualisation of ‘class composition’ as positive provides the basis for a slide from seeing the concept as a means of understanding the movement of struggle to using it as a way of classifying periods of development, as a way of describing how capitalism ‘is’. Instead of analysing particular struggles in terms of the overall movement of capital’s dependence upon labour (not Lukács’s perspective of totality but certainly his aspiration towards totality), there is a tendency to project from particular struggles (the struggles in Fiat in the early 1970s, say) and see them as being typical of a certain stage of capitalist development. In these cases the concept of ‘class composition’ is used to construct an ideal type or paradigm, a heading under which all struggles are to be classified. The struggles in the Italian car factories then become a measure for other struggles, rather than being understood in terms of their place in the general movement of capital’s dependence upon labour. This procedure leads easily (though not necessarily) to crude generalisations, to the construction of categories as Procrustean beds into which struggles arising from very different conditions must be forced to fit.

The same point can be made in different terms. The great merit of the autonomist approach is that it insists on seeing the movement of capitalist rule as being driven by the force of working-class struggle, on seeing capital as a ‘function of the working class’. There are, however, two possible ways in which this affirmation can be understood. The weaker version would be to say that capital can be understood as a function of the working class because its history is a history of reaction to working-class struggle, in much the same manner as one might see, say, the movements of a defending army at war to be a function of the movements of the attacking army, or, possibly, the development of the police to be a function of the activities of criminals. The stronger version would be that capital is a function of the working class for the simple reason that capital is nothing other than the product of the working class and therefore depends, from one minute to another, upon the working class for its reproduction. In the first case, the relation between the working class and capital is seen as a relation of opposition, an external relation; in the second case, the relation is seen in terms of the generation of one pole of the opposition by the other pole, as an internal relation.

If the relation between the working class and capital is seen as an internal relation, then struggle is necessarily negative: it is a struggle against that which encloses us, a struggle in and therefore against, a struggle that also projects beyond, but from a position of negation. It is a struggle not just against an external enemy (capital) but also against ourselves, simply because our existence within capital means that capital is in us. If, however, the relation between working class and capital is seen as an external one, then our struggle will be seen as a positive one. If we stand outside capital, then the issue is how to increase our positive force, our autonomy. But that implies that the subject of struggle is also positive and that the enemy is an external one. Thus, although it appears to be a more radical position, this approach actually restricts the meaning of revolutionary struggle. The struggle is to transform that which is outside us, whereas in the negative approach, the struggle is to transform everything, ourselves included.

Both of these elements (the external and the internal interpretation) are present in the autonomist tradition. In many cases, however, it is the external, ‘reaction’ interpretation which predominates.8 Thus, the dynamic of capitalist development is understood as a reaction or response to the power of the working-class movement. The development of capital is then understood as the defensive reaction by capital to the strength of the working-class movement revealed in moments of open revolt. Keynesianism, for example, in Negri’s analysis (1988b) is a response to the revolution of 1917, which made clear that capital could survive only by recognising and integrating the working class movement. Such analyses are often immensely suggestive, but the point being made here is that capitalist development is understood as a process of reaction, that the relation between labour and capital is understood as an external relation.
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